you. Chair Caput, members of the board. So this item is an addendum to the cow, the continuing agreements list that we provided to the board in June. It has additional changes that are included with an underliner strikeout and those are provided. So we ask that you take any public comment on this item and then approve the continuing agreements list and take the related actions as included in the memo. Are there any questions from board members on this item? I don't hear any. And I will now open public comment on this item. Each person, well, we don't have a whole lot here. So can you do it in two minutes? Okay. Thank you. Becky Steinbruner, resident of Aftas. I'm not an accountant, but I do like looking over where the money goes. It isn't easy really to determine where it goes or why it's going where it's going. But what I'd like to point out to the board and to members of the public is there are vast amounts of money in this continuing agreements that is just labeled vendorless vendors. And I have reached out to Ms. Driscoll for an explanation and all she could say was that there are some contracts that must be filled by multiple vendors. Where is the transparency in this? And we're not talking a small amount of money. This is millions and millions of dollars that is only identified as vendorless vendors. That's not acceptable. That's not transparent. And I ask you to ask County Auditor Controller to improve that level of public transparency. We need to see where our money's going, especially now. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Okay. There any other members of the public who would like to comment either here or in the community room or on the web? There's nobody in the community room and there are no web comments. Chair. I move to approve. Second. Roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. We have the last day report starting with item number five. Consider last day report for 2020 and 2021 revised budget for the auditor, controller, tax, treasurer and tax collectors outlined to the memorandum of the auditor, controller, treasurer, tax collector. Yes, Chair Caput, members of the board, Christina Maui, your county budget manager. So I'll be reviewing each of these items. This particular item is a report back by the auditor, controller, and this item restores funding of about $59,982 for the part-time account clerk that was scheduled for elimination. And this is due to some increased investment charge revenue that's available. So we ask that the board approve the report as outlined, first take any public comment and then approve the item as recommended. Any questions or comments from board members? Glad to see that we were able to do this. Thanks for that work. I'll open it up for public comment on the item number five. Okay, can we see anybody? That concludes public comment on this item. I'll bring it back to the board for a motion and second. I move approval of the recommended action. Second. To the roll call vote, Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. It takes us to item number six. Considered last day report on financial supplemental for coronavirus relief fund, approved the CRF plan, corner virus relief fund, in the amount of $27,655,000. Adopt resolution authorizing the county administrative officer to select CRF sub recipients and to award and execute contracts and grant agreements to rec staff to return with regular updates to the board and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative officer. Okay, and this item begins on page 45 of your packet as you know we presented this item during the first day of budget hearings and gave you an overview and we discussed it and heard your feedback during the CO's budget presentation. So we asked that you adopt the resolution and prove the coronavirus relief fund plan. The details are provided in attachment A for the various programs and summarized in a financial report in attachment B. And then we've attached a financial supplemental for the budget details that need to be adopted and have that corresponding actions. And that's the supplemental is about 40.3 million dollars for the funding necessary for the emergency response July through December. The approval of the last day report for the coronavirus relief fund will allocate the 27.6 million to economic and disaster relief activities related to the COVID-19 pandemic. These funds will be used to reimburse 6.7 million for 1920 expenditures and fund 20.9 million in expenditures for 2021. These funds leverage support for eligible emergency response activities funded by the Office of Emergency Services for the state of California and FEMA for the federal emergency management association of 19.2 million and about 142,000 in park and recreation fees for the total budget of 40.3 million. Staff are working with the departments on implementing the CRF plan and adhere to the reporting requirements of the state and the US Treasury. A status report will be provided each regularly scheduled board meeting to provide an update on the budget to actuals and report back any contracts or modifications to the plan. Economic development and the workforce development board staff are getting details ready to quickly administer the grant relief program for small businesses and nonprofits. Details will be available this week on the grant applications and interested businesses and nonprofits can email at scccaresrecoveryatSantaCruiseCounty.us. For more information, the board requested that the great plates program continue even if FEMA support is no longer available through December and this has been noted on the plan on page 51 and we have resources available in the plan to address that if that should occur. So it's recommended that the board approve the report as outlined in the memo and take the related actions and staff are available to answer any questions. Okay, I'll open it up for the board. Any questions? Mr. Chair, Supervisor McPherson, just to be clear, do we need to spend the money by October or is the final deadline December and it appears we can obligate it into 2020, well to calendar year 2021, is that correct? So we have to, according to the initial guidance in the CARES Act, we're supposed to spend the money actually having spent it, not just having it obligated by December 30th of this year. However, since we are a sub recipient of the funds, we're not a direct recipient from the US Treasury, the state is and so they're allocating a share of their CARES Act funding to us. So they've added the additional restriction that they would like to see the majority of that spent by October and we will be providing reports to them in September, multiple times and then each quarter and they're anticipating that the majority of that money be spent by October. So we're trying to push to have the majority of it spent that they will recognize that if we've shown that we've spent the money, if it's a month to month program that they will honor the obligations that we've made through December. So we're just gonna have to kind of wait and see. Okay, very easily understandable as usual by my big government. Thank you. I have a quick question on the money is coming from the federal government and the state government or just one or both? So the CRF funds are being provided from the US Treasury to the state of California and the state of California is allocating a portion of that to the counties and the cities and we're receiving the 27.6 million of those funds. We're leveraging those funds as well because our shelter and care operations, a lot of that is FEMA eligible. So we're able to leverage the 20 some million for the current year through December and we'll be able to hopefully draw down an additional 19 million from the state for certain programs that they've offered to cover a portion of and then the remainder 75% of those eligible activities will come from FEMA. And like you said, the money is to go forward not pay bills from backwards, right? Yes. We've already allocated 6.7 million that was eligible for the costs from March through June of the 1920 fiscal year we just finished. Well, I'll open up for public comment. In the chambers, community rooms, web. There's nobody in the chambers and there are no web comments. Thank you. Chair, I would just say that we are, it is great that we have this money to be able to help meet the needs of the community. Even with close to 28 million dollars, it is not nearly enough to meet the needs of our community. And that's why it's critically important that the US Senate act as quickly as possible to pass another relief act that would actually specifically help local government. We've had that support from the House representatives. I know our two US senators support it, but it is distressing that they have gone on vacation for a month without addressing this really critical need. When I look at this list about the importance of public health, housing support for rental assistance to help our small businesses to address the recreational needs and assure that we have the adequate equipment to be able to meet this moment in terms of the needs of PPE. We're taking big steps here today. And so I'm really grateful for that. We're helping out our community-based partners who are on the front lines of being able to meet the most vulnerable during this time. But we have to continue our advocacy in Washington and make sure that they come through. With that, I would move the recommended actions for this. I'll second. Okay. I'll do the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. Takes us to item number seven. Consider the last day report for the 2020-2021 revised budget for the cannabis licensing office as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. Yes. This last day report is provided at the request of the board on August 11th. We were asked to restore 50% of the funding for the Cannabis Compliance Unit, which allows for the refunding of the two sheriff deputy positions at the value of $368,861. And the details are provided in the financial supplemental on schedule A1. In addition, your board also requested on August 12th to restore the eliminated code investigator for position which is at a value of $104,266. And that position is restored on schedule A2. So it's recommended that your board approve the report as outlined in the memo and take the related actions and staff are available if you have any questions and ask that you ask for public comment. Thank you. Do any board members have questions? On this item. Mr. Chairman, first again, I support the, I appreciate the support of my colleagues and during our budget hearings to restore this code enforcement officer position. As I was mentioned in our discussion, it's important to keep our word to the voters who voted to have us go forward with this program. And so we can maintain public safety as well as much as possible for implementing our cannabis regulations. This, in essence, is going to pay for itself as we was discussed previously. And I just appreciate that we're moving forward with this. Thank you. Welcome. Okay, I'll open it up for the public for comment. Good afternoon, Chair Caput, members of the board. Jim Heaney, Chief Steward for the General Representation Unit. Last week I came here a lot during the hearings and our theme was pretty much continuous about, we're losing a lot of quality workers here at the county. But we did manage to save a few positions and we wanted to take the time to let you know, we appreciate that. And as it's been said to me, sometimes you've got to spend money to make money and the salary of this code compliance officer, the salary of the sheriffs are more than going to be made up and the revenues that they bring to the general fund. So we appreciate your action on this item. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Becky Steinbruner, resident of rural Abtas. I would like to echo Mr. Heaney's gratitude for you restoring this code compliance position for the cannabis licensing. It not only helps catch the bad actors, but it really gives those who have in good faith done the right thing that it matters to the county that they did so. It also gives the public more confidence that there is someone out there watching over the public for public safety issues and that can enforce the rules. Thank you very much for restoring this position. You're welcome. Any other comments anywhere? There's nobody in the community room and there are no web comments. Yes. Concludes the public comment and I'm open for motion. Chair, I would second and just add that we're in the early stages of trying to turn an illegal industry into a legal industry. And so having the staff adequate staffing to make sure that we can do that well is in the interest of all. So I'm glad to support this motion. Can we have a motion and a second? I'll do the roll call. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Supervisor Friend. Which friend? Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. We go to item number eight, consider last day report for the 2020 and 2021 revised budget for county clerk and elections and approve a fixed asset purchase of a mobile voting trailer in the amount of 72,000 as outlined in the memorandum of the county clerk. Yes. And this last day report on number eight begins on page 80 of your packet and it increases the available funding for the November 2020 general election. The secretary of state has announced a COVID-19 funding allocation to our county of $518,967 for increased costs related to the pandemic for all aspects related to voting by mail, equipment needs, permanent and temporary staffing as well as cleaning and disinfection of personal protective equipment and polling locations and election facilities. So there's also an additional 95,000 allocated for communication and outreach. So this revised budget, the revised budget that you received as a part of the supplemental all had anticipated about 300,000 to be received from the state. So this last day report is needed to accept the additional funds of $313,991 that includes the purchase also of a mobile voter outreach trailer funded through those state funds. So it's recommended that your board approve the report as outlined in the memo and take related actions and staff are available if you have any questions. But we ask that you also take public comment. Thank you. Bring it back to the board. Any questions, comments? Well, I would just say, chair, that I'm glad to be part of a local government and a state government that actually cares about helping people vote instead of the other way around. Sure. Okay. I'll open it up for the public, a public comment. That too. Thank you. Becky Steinbruner. I had a lot of objection to the county spending $72,000 to buy a mobile voting trailer. I'd like assurances that this would be coming from COVID funding from state and federal governments. If it's coming out of the general fund, I really have a problem with that. Not that I don't support helping people vote. I do. And I've worked on polls and I've done a lot of door-to-door work but to spend a lot of money when we don't have it and people are losing their jobs, I think is not responsible. So I'd like some assurance that this $72,000 for a mobile voting trailer that we've never used before and never apparently needed before will be indeed coming from state and federal grant money for COVID. And I also would like to know how this trailer will be used if at all, if it can be repurposed when we are not in election because these are very short periods of time that occur infrequently. Thank you. You're welcome. Is there anyone else? There's nobody in the community room and there are no web comments. Okay. I would move the recommended actions. I'll second and I'd just like to add, Mr. Barrett, I think not the all room but this is, the mobile voting trailers are really essential right now and an absolutely important way to ensure that everybody has the right to vote. I think that this is very exciting. I think that this is something that the county should really be promoting and it's something I know that our elections clerk has wanted for quite some time and I'm glad that the ability to make it happen has finally been delivered. So thank you for that leadership and I'm happy to second the motion. And I'll do a roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. It takes us to item number nine. Consider last day report for 2020, 2021 revised budget for the general services department has outlined in the memorandum of the director of general services. Yes. And this last day report is sort of a companion to the previous report for a portion of it. The report is updating the operating transfers in in the amount of 56,000 from the sheriff's office for the removal of the funding for an additional transportation van and adds an operating transfer in from the clerk elections office for the mobile voting trailer that was just approved for a net increase in changes of $15,800. This is a fleet services budget within general services. It's not a general fund budget. It relies on funding to be transferred in and out in order to purchase the additional vehicles. So it's recommended that your board approve the report is outlined in the memo, take any public comment and take the related actions. Okay, thank you. Bring it back to the board for questions and comments. Okay, we'll open it up for public comments. Thank you, Becky Steinbruner. I'm not entirely sure this is the time for me to discuss the elimination of Rosemary Anderson's position full-time administrator of the office of emergency services. I know that she is in the general services department and please inform me, is this the time or would there be a more appropriate time to talk about that? Does anybody have an answer? Chair, the action on that item was taken at the last meeting. This item is regarding the general services fleet budget. All right, well, I'm going to go ahead and speak my mind then because Ms. Anderson is part of the general services department and I want to, again, implore that you reinstate a full-time position for the county office of emergency services, whether it's Rosemary Anderson or somebody equally capable as she is and has been and has served our county so well.  I do and I know that Rosemary Anderson has been busy planning for things like this when they happen in our county full-time. As a member of the public, I do not want to see her full-time position eliminated. I think it is folly and I think this county will be harmed in doing so. I refuse to believe that people in the county administrative office who are also doing other things can devote the amount of quality time building the relationships that Rosemary Anderson has done in this position and that a person in a full-time position watching over the county, planning ahead, making these evacuation plans for the San Lorenzo Valley, the communication centers for the public safety power shutoffs, she's got the mind for it, she's focused, a full-time position has that focus and we'll follow through. It's too easy for part-time people in the county administrative office to just let it slide and we will suffer. Please reinstate that position full-time. Anybody else from the public wish to comment? Either. So I'm Mary Lou Sam's wire leaf rural Watsonville area. I also concur that Rosemary Anderson's position should be reinstated. She has a wealth of knowledge and having it, her everything that she's done to be decimated amongst other people and stuff, you're gonna get little pieces and tidbits and shells under the cups moving around trying to take care of all this stuff. When you have someone that can do that succinctly and completely with the least amount of time, she is just a smart, intelligent person and you can't have that by having other people. Well, we used to this. Oh yeah, it's over here in this book. You need someone that can keep it concise and together and not rely on just looking up in a book or something on the internet. Thank you. Hey, do we have any other comments? Chair, there's nobody in the community room and we have no web comments. I would move the recommended actions on this item. We're lucky. And I'll do the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. We'll go to number 10. You're gonna have to help me out on this one. Mine just says consider last day report for the 2021 revised budget for, and then I'm happy to take that if you like. So item 10 is to consider the last day report for the 2021 revised budget for the general county revenues budget as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative officer and provides a last day financial supplemental for the general county revenues. This last day report is as requested from Supervisor Coonerty, which provides a contribution to the city of Santa Cruz towards the continued study of the community impacts of the growth of UCSC. Begins in your packet on page 88 and it's recommended that the board approve the report as outlined in the memo and take related actions. The board have any comments? What's the dollar amount? Oh, I'm sorry. The dollar amount is 20,000. We do have it, right? Yes. Open it up to the public. Good afternoon, Becky Steinbruner, resident of rural Aptos. Your question is very poignant, Chairman Caput. We do have it, right? She said, yes. The answer is no. You don't have it. You don't have $20,000 to study the community impacts of UCSC growth. Supervisor Coonerty put that on, it's his district. He's a paid lecture at UCSC. This is not right. The county already funds a special position, Ms. Morgan Bostick, paying her $60,000 a year. The city also pays her $60,000 a year. She's doing good work. I've seen her work going out into the community. Why spend $20,000 to study the community impacts of UCSC growth? This is waste. It is disgusting waste. When you're cutting people's jobs, like the people in the county clerk's office, the county board office, the parking attendant, you're cutting their job to do $20,000 worth of study on the impacts of UCSC growth on the community. That's disgusting. Do not pass this. If you've got $20,000 to throw out a window, give it to somebody who's gonna lose their job. That's a better way and help them keep their job. Thank you. Do not approve this. Any other comments either here in the chambers downstairs or on the web? Mr. Chair, just the Steinberg makes a lot of assertions without any knowledge of facts. So this is the county's share of Miss Bostick's contract and the related expenses. This is to fund the good work that she is doing because if UCSC grows by 10,000 students without mitigating their impact, it'll have tremendous impacts on not just my district, but across the county on housing, water and traffic. So it's a small investment to reduce significant impacts in our community and doing the very work that Ms. Steinbrenner just said was excellent. All right, move approve. Second. I'll close the public comment. Well, I already did, right? Okay. We have a motion and a second. I'll do the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Boonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. We go to item number 11 and you can fill me in. Yes. So item number 11 is to consider a last day report for the 2021 revised budget for animal control services as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative officer. It includes a financial supplemental from the animal control services budget. So this last day report reduces the contribution to animal control services by 163,743 dollars as a result of the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter Board of Directors approving their 2021 revised budget on August 10th with a 10% reduction in member contributions and updated population changes. So it's recommended that the board approve the report as outlined in the memo and take related actions. And we're available to answer any questions. Any board members comment? I'll open it up for public comment either here or downstairs or on the web. There's nobody downstairs and in the community room and we have no web comments. Thank you. I will approve all the recommended actions. Second. Roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Second. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. We go to now item number 12. Yes. And item number 12 is to consider a last day report back for the 2021 revised budget for the sheriff corner and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the sheriff corner. So this particular report is a series of report backs that your board directed. So on August 11th, the board directed staff to report back on the potential for reinstating the focused intervention team or FIT program. Also the cost related to the de-escalation training for all deputy sheriffs and sergeants and whether there were alternative options for funding that and a synopsis of the progression of the food services transition meeting with SEIU that was held. So just briefly and we can answer any additional questions that you may have. The fit as it relates to the FIT program, this program requires the use of a housing unit in the jail where programming and treatment can be delivered. And due to the COVID-19 restrictions, this unit is currently no longer available. We believe when a vaccine for the virus is released, we will have the ability to open the housing unit for the FIT clients again. And so we're recommending that a report come back to you in January to look at a status on that. As it relates to the de-escalation training, the sheriff had eliminated all non-mandated training and the de-escalation training is non-mandated. It's estimated to cost about $66,000, include mostly overtime for staff to attend the training. So we've been instructed to explore the concept of using risk management funds to pay for those training costs. At this time, no decision has been made. We're going to be having a meeting with risk management to discuss the option and then we'll report back to your board once that information is known. And then as it relates to the update on the food services program. So staff did meet on August 13th, the sheriff's office personnel and SEI you met to discuss the plan contracting out of the food services program. They discussed the financial challenges the sheriff office had been presented with and they made the necessary reductions in the budget up to $3.8 million. And this was one of those reductions. Sheriff Hart expressed that he was very happy with our food services employees and the quality of food that is produced and explained that the decision to contract out was very difficult, but was necessary due to the need to reduce the sheriff office budget. And as a result of the financial impacts of COVID-19. SEIU opposes the plan to contract out. They've agreed to continue to meet with regarding the issue to explore alternate ways to achieve the county's objectives as required under article 3.6 E of the general representation unit memorandum of understanding. So there's some additional actions and we ask that you your board take any public comment and approve the report as outlined and take the related actions. Oh, and I say, I'm sorry, let me add one thing. I skipped a piece. So the next item includes a financial supplemental, but we are extending the elimination of the cooks until the end of this calendar year while we continue talks and look at the alternatives. Chair, I just had a question from Ms. Bowery or someone else. Given this extra time that we have, if we were to identify another source of funding or we received other funding, let's say from the federal government, we could actually stop the RFP process and choose to maintain our program. Is that correct? Yes, that is correct. That is correct. Yeah. Well, it's very, this is some of the hardest parts of the budget this year. And I appreciate that we found money to provide extra time to see if we could come up with a better solution because this seems like a particularly bad choice that we'd be making. So for the food service part, the new date is December 31st. The new date for the food service workers is December 31st. That's correct. Okay. A quick question, let's say we go January 1st with the outside contractor. We have to go with them maybe six months, maybe even a year. But can we just go back? Can we rehire those people or it's now an empty spot? We have to go with the outside source year after year. So I believe Ajita maybe on the call can address that, but anytime we eliminate a staff person, they have two years for a right to have their position reinstated. So in the event we found funding and reinstated any positions that have been eliminated, those staff that were eliminated from those positions have the right for reinstatement. Chair, good morning. Good afternoon, Chair Caput. Chair Caput. Sure. Good morning, good afternoon. So Christina did actually clarify that correctly. If your board were to take action to put those positions back under the civil service rules, anybody who was laid off would have a right of re-employment in the order of seniority. So those folks would have a right to come back. Okay, thank you for clearing that up. You're welcome. Okay, thank you both of you. Okay. Mr. Chair. Yes. So I just want to, I appreciate the report back from the sales office for Ms. Mowry. So I just want to confirm for Fit that in the event that it's operationally possible that there is money in the budget to restart the program and that if it doesn't, if it's not operationally possible, then it goes, it stays in the contingencies. Yes. In the event, we'll come back in January, we'll revisit the issue. And in the event your board desires to refund the Fit program at that time, the money would come from contingencies. Okay. But it says not the money isn't allocated right now. It takes an additional board action. That's correct. Okay. So at the concerning thing for me is because it takes time for, that wasn't my direction. It was to actually include a line item for February through June because it does take time for us to approve and then to get the program back up and going. So I'd like to have the money available allocated and then if it's not able to be used then it will be a salary savings. But I think to be consistent with the action that should be the direction. Anyway, thank you. With the other board comments. Mr. Chair, I'm a supervisor in person. I'm very able to hold the SEIU positions until the end of December while the sheriff and the bargaining unit work out our next steps. I know there's a proposal being circulated to fund the positions until next June. I think what is being proposed by the staff is nearly a three month timetable to look the matter further. I think it's reasonable given our general fund deficit that we're facing. And I don't agree with spending down our reserve. I know we're trying to protect that because I think people need to realize we need to protect that because the road ahead is very unpredictable for this county and everybody else in the state of California. So I do approve of the motion that's been made. Okay. I think he meant the recommended actions. The recommended action. We already have, right up, okay. Public comments now. Now's the time for public comment. Go ahead. I was just waiting to be invited. Jim Heaney, Chief Steward for the general representation unit. Who came to you last week. Discuss this contracting out issue. It should not be a surprise to anyone that we're absolutely opposed to it. We've talked about the issues of quality of service that we believe will be dramatically affected. We do appreciate the sheriff working to extend these folks through December. That's very much not lost on us. It gives us a chance to work with the sheriff through the meat and confer process to find other alternatives. We will be looking very closely at any company who responds to the RFP. We've already done some preliminary research where some of the top and common contractors that provide this kind of work.  And our concern is that we could actually go to a contract situation, have that contract situation not work out because we could end up in lawsuits that cost you more than the million dollars you're trying to save per fiscal year. So we'll be working actively on this. We didn't want to lose the opportunity to other sheriff. We do appreciate him working with us in this process. And I also wasn't sure, is this the time for the comment or the next item has this information again. So maybe you'll see me on item 13 too. Thank you for your time. Thanks. Thank you.  I will, don't worry. Thank you. Becky Steinbrunner, resident of Aptas. I concur with Mr. Heaney's comments. And I really questioned the wisdom of laying off. I think I saw it somewhere between eight and nine, maybe more cooks and people. These are families, these are local people. And whenever you contract out food service with an outside agency, you not only lose the local support that you're giving to these families in our county, but you also lose control over the quality of the food that you bring into the facility. Why would you want to do either? I am really happy that somehow you were able to come up with money. It sounds like it's out of the reserves to keep these people on. I would like to see you do that with the other positions you're eliminating as well. But this one in particular has great concern because you would be losing control of the quality of the food, the source of the food, and you would be eliminating livelihoods for many families. I also would like to speak about the FIT funding that was brought about by Measure G, the half-cent sales tax. So if it's not going to FIT, where is the Measure G money going? It should be going to FIRE, just like you sold that bill for. Thank you. There's nobody in the community room and there are no web comments. Okay, I'll bring it back to the board. Thank you. I'd like to move the recommended actions with the addition of including funding, if operationally possible, for the FIT program from February to June, and funding for the de-escalation training, whether from risk management or from general funds. Oh, we got a motion with the change though. I'll second. Okay. Any other comments from the board? Okay, if we can read it back with the change, I'd appreciate that. So the motion was for the recommended actions, plus additional directing for if operationally possible, funding for the FIT program and for de-escalation. And if you could fill in the blanks for me, that'd be great. Sure. Yeah, so it's funding for the FIT program from February to June, if operationally possible, and funding for de-escalation training, either from risk management or from general funds. Yes. Yes, I could go for that. That's what I said. Okay, we have a motion and a second. I'll do the roll call. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend? Aye. Coonerty? Aye. McPherson? Aye. Chairman Caput? Aye. The motion passes unanimously. It takes us to item number 13. Yes, item 13 is to consider a last day report with the financial supplemental for the 2021 revised budget for the Sheriff Corner as outlined in the memorandum of the Sheriff Corner. So the last day report provides for the following budget adjustments. In July, the Paro Valley Unified School District informed the Sheriff's office that they will not be renewing their contract for services. This is a reduction in revenue in the amount of 143,000, which the Sheriff has offset with some reductions in services and supplies and that you can see in schedule A-1. Also in schedule A-2 is the extension of the food services program through December that includes the nine positions that now have their positions extended through December. And as we mentioned before, we'll come back. And then the, and that's in the amount of 261,020 dollars. And then the third item in schedule A-3 is at the request of the board on August 11th. This is the financial supplemental on the Sheriff's side to restore the 50% funding for the Cannabis Compliance Unit, allowing for the refunding of the two Sheriff deputy positions. And this is an increase in expenses of $368,861 offset by revenues from the Cannabis Licensing Office. So it's recommended that your board approve the report as outlined in the memo and take the related actions and we're available to answer any questions. Okay, any questions? Well, let me just say that I'm really glad that we're moving forward with the funding of the sexual assault response team program coordinator. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm trying not to yell at the speaker, but I'm glad that we are gonna be funding this program. I think it's critically important for our community to have and I appreciate that the board supported it unanimously. Okay. Any other comments? Open up the public, public comments. If there's nobody down in the community room and there are no web comments. I would move the recommended actions. Okay. We have a first from Supervisor Leopold. Oh, a second. Second. Okay. I'll do the roll call. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend? Aye. Coonerty? Aye. McPherson? Aye. Chairman Caput? Aye. The motion passes unanimously. We go to number 14. Item number 14 on our agenda today. Yes, item 14 is to consider a last day report for the 2021 revised budget for the health services agency as outlined in the memorandum of the director of health services. There's also a last day financial supplemental. So this last day report provides some minor financial adjustments to the health services budget for the savings related to the retirement and incentive program for the employees that opted and they will be reducing and I should say unfunding those positions as a result. So it's just some minor adjustments and it begins on page 109. But it's recommended that the board approve the report as outlined in the memo and take the related actions. Bring it to the board for questions or comments. Open it up for the public, for public comment. Has anybody done so? There's nobody in the community room and we have no web comments. Okay. I would move the recommended actions. Okay. Second. To the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend? Aye. Pee? Aye. McPherson? Aye. Chairman Caput? Aye. The motion passes unanimously. We go to item number 15, consider concluding reports and final budget action. And this item number 15 is to consider a last day report for the 2021 revised budget for the human services department as outlined in the memorandum of the director of human services. And it includes a financial supplemental. So this last day report provides funding for the new housing for health division of the human services department as approved by the board in May. Schedule one increases the staffing from the transfer of two full-time equivalent positions from the homeless services coordination office and the addition of two positions in the new housing for health division. There's no change in financing for the existing staff and the financing for the two new positions will be leveraged from state and federal funding. The increase in the general fund contribution of $152,236 helps fund the new director for the housing for health division. Schedule A2 decreases the staffing from the, effectuates the transfer of the two staff from the homeless services coordination office to the new housing for health division. And the associated funding is being transferred. So there's no change in the general fund contribution there for the transfer and the transfers effective approximately November 1st once the new director has been hired. So it's recommended that the board approve the report as outlined in the memo and take the related actions and staff are available and willing to answer any questions. Glad to see this homeless program within human services starting. Thank you. Any other comments from the board? Open it up to the public for public comment. Thank you, Becky Steinbruner, the resident of Aptos. It concerns me. I know Supervisor Leopold, you're happy about a new department being created, but I think it's not a wise thing to do at this time when there isn't enough money to fund the departments that we've already got and people are being laid off. I understand that our county is getting a lot of money currently for housing the homeless and taking care of them and that is important, but we have to look in the longterm, is this the right thing to be doing now with that money, establishing a new person, hiring a new person for $152,000 when we're laying other people off? It doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem responsible to those who have been working here for a very long time, serving the public, serving you in your job here. And I really question the wisdom of this. I do wanna say that I'm really glad hearing earlier that the Great Plates Delivered program will be extended, funded by the county, even if the state and federal does not, because I think that serves the people who need the help and it also is a real hand up for the restaurants who are struggling. They provide the food and deliver it to these people. And I would like to ask that that program be revisited and expanded with new food service providers, giving people who might not have known about that opportunity to have a boost to their business to be considered now. Thank you. There's nobody in the community room and we have no web comments. Open it up to the board, I'll close the public comment and open it up to the board for a motion. I would move the recommended actions. New the roll call, Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Captain Caput. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. It takes us to item number 16. Yes. Item 16 is the concluding report for the 2021 revised budget. Consider the 2021 County of Santa Cruz revised budget concluding actions, authorize the Auditor-Controller-Treasure Tax Collector with the concurrence of the County Administrative Officer to make necessary adjustments to the 2021 budget due to the increases and decreases in available financing and approve the 2021 County of Santa Cruz revised budget, including concluding report items and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. It includes a financial supplemental which is attachment A which includes exhibits one which is a summary of all the last day reports with the exception of any of the changes you made today which we will add to that before the adopted budget is finalized. And then also exhibit two is the summary of all the concluding actions and it also includes an attachment B which is the salary schedule effective September 19th which requires your approval. So this item is a standard item. It's always provided to you with the conclusion of budget hearings and it is a summary of all the actions the board has taken up to this date as it provides authorization for the Auditor and the CO to make the adjustments needed to create the adopted budget. As mentioned, the exhibit one reflects all the last day changes that your board has made with the exceptions of the additions you've made today and exhibit two includes all the concluding actions the concluding changes which is sort of the accounting details and the realignments for the various charges that impact the general fund contingencies. Before the changes you made today this left $5.1 million and a general contingency which represented about 90% of a 1% of general fund expenditures as a general contingency to address any unforeseen adjustments to expenditures and revenue estimates. The closing actions item one through 13 are provided in the letter and authorize the auditor and the CAO to prepare and report back to the board with the adopted 2021 budget incorporating all the changes through what the actions you've taken today. I just wanna highlight the summary is there and I'm happy to go into any details. I do wanna point out because we did have a question. The furlough savings is summarized in the concluding report and exhibit two H. So it shows the various furlough savings for each of the departments and any offsetting revenue that's lost. And we've included some minor adjustments for data processing, fleet and the realignment revenue losses of 7.5 million are transferred from the general revenues budget to the various departments. So that's all included in your concluding report. And then overall the change from the last day actions although we will have to update that for the additional actions you took today ended up with the 5.1 million and then we do have the restricted contingencies for the mid-year adjustments and also for any emergency repairs. We have very meager and minor amounts included in the restricted contingencies. And then we also have a million and a half in there for the state realignment trigger cuts which we discussed before at the beginning of budget hearings. In the event the state does not receive additional federal money they will, we will see a reduction of 1.5 million in the realignment revenue that the health and human services departments rely on. So we have that as a placeholder to offset that. Let's see, I don't think there's anything else I wanna go over there but I'll address any questions that you have. But before I do that I would like to thank the department heads and their budget staff for all their hard work on the budget especially the county administrative office staff under the leadership of Carlos Palacios and the board of supervisors. As we have mentioned during budget hearings we are in unprecedented times and there's still a great deal of uncertainty related to the financial impacts of COVID-19 and the related recession. Difficult decisions had to be made to address the estimated revenue losses through fiscal year 2021 of almost $36 million since March. We are fortunate that we have healthy reserves which we can rely on one time to reduce the impacts and we are grateful for the cooperation of all the bargaining units on accepting a furlough of anywhere between five and 10% which has allowed us to limit the number of position eliminations and reductions within the departments and limit the impacts on services to the community. It is anticipated that many of the eliminated positions will have placement opportunities elsewhere in the county. We will continue to monitor budget to actuals and provide periodic updates to the board. The 2021 revised budget is a prudent financial plan given our financial constraints. So it's recommended that the board approve the 2021 concluding report and approve all the related actions as presented and we are available to answer any questions. You're built, anybody from the board? Yes, chair. I appreciate all the work that's done. Mrs. Mallory has had a lot of work to do this year and although she's in her safe and secure location that we can see her in and she can make presentations from, I know that she's been working very hard. I believe that we've got this as best as we could. I would like to suggest one more change. I believe that the staff made an honest effort to represent what we talked about at the budget hearings when it came to the sanitation department but I believe the entire unit should be covered or outside the furlough than just the ones listed here. And when it comes time to make a recommendation I'll be asking to put them back in. Do we need a second on that or anything? We're not time for a motion, it was just a comment. Okay. Public comment. So now it'd be a time for public comment. Yes, I'll do that. I'll make a quick comment and then I'll be done. I want to thank everybody also. And for the few out there that have asked me, have you, the Board of Supervisors really taken a cut? Have the department heads taken a cut? Yes, we have and it started about a month ago and it's a 10% cut in pay. You can call it a furlough, you can call it whatever you want, but it is the 10% cut in pay. And that goes for the department heads also. I really appreciate that. It shows leadership by example. And I want to just commend all of you. Thank you. And I know it's the 7.5% furlough is tough for everybody else. And normally when it comes to voting on a budget, if anybody is going to lose their job in the past, I've always voted no. We are doing everything we can to get somebody a job that looks like their job is going to be eliminated somewhere in the department. We know the people and we know that they're struggling. And I appreciate how the staff is trying to find a place for them. I don't know the exact numbers, but everybody and our staff is important to us. And we take their loss very seriously. And we are going to keep trying to find you some kind of a position. Okay, thank you. Go ahead. Mr. Chair, this is Supervisor McPherson. I just want to thank Miss Mallory and the whole budget team and department heads throughout the county. This has been the toughest year of certainly the eight that I have been associated with the County Board of Supervisors. And we have an uncertain future, even though we've done a lot of things to strike a balance of our eliminated positions and furlough. So everyone contributes to our closing our gap while also tapping our reserves significantly. Again, I wanted to thank all of our employees for their contributions. What really stands out to me is how much we really need additional state and federal support to help us address our revenue losses. Local governments are, we're really on the front lines of this pandemic in terms of coordinating our public health response, which has been phenomenal, and should be some of the early costs to manage it. Now is the time that we really can ensure that we can keep doing that work. I think we have put ourselves in place to continue in it, but we may need additional help. We are gonna need additional help if this pandemic continues. This is not a fun budget, but it could have been so much worse if we hadn't had the reserves, we hadn't had taken the actions we had previously. So I want to thank my colleagues and everybody who has put together this budget. It hasn't been a fun budget, but it's one that I think we can say we did the best we could under the circumstances. So thank you, Mr. Chair. You're welcome. Okay, I'll open up the public. Sorry to have you stand up, sit down, and then stand up again. I could use some more calisthenics, so it's okay. So thank you again, Chair Caput, members of the board, Jim Heaney, Chief Steward for General Representation Unit. Couple of things I wanted to talk about was kind of the process in this budget hearing. One is that we, as taking action today, you do create layoffs. And what that does trigger in our contract is our AVTO program. It's a voluntary time off program. It actually technically says in the agreement that the board needs to authorize that. So I don't know if the board's willing to address that today, but we need that authorized person. I would like to start that tomorrow where folks in the affected departments can actually put their hand up for more time off and possibly save a coworker. Additionally, on the process, we received this revised budget about two weeks ago. We being SEIU, the marketing unit for the vast majority of the employees. And so it's a mad scramble for the last two weeks. And I think in the bad years, we find that this process is somewhat broken. The good years you don't really notice because things are sailing along, we're funding things we want to fund. But in these bad years, we quickly find out that we have to scramble and try to figure out a solution when we really should have been involved from June until the end of July with the departments that we're gonna have issues. All the bargaining units should be involved. And the fact that, you know, we go through this budget process, every single department head sits up here and sings the praise of their workers, but we're not involved in the important decision-making. So I think we need to do this better. The other thing is bargaining units are allowed to come up during public comment. And my friend here, the clock today, I get two minutes last week, I got three, is sometimes a bit of an insult. We try not to waste your time. We feel like we have a lot of things that are germane to the process. And if we are your partners, we want to be treated like partners. And I think that in forward meeting and meetings going forward, could we, thank you. Thank you, Chair. And meetings going forward, we should maybe look at this in a different way. Maybe there should be an opportunity for comments from the bargaining units. And I see units plural. We're not the only bargaining unit. There are others who have interests here also. So actually, I think that pretty much concludes my comments. I appreciate the additional time. And, you know, we are disappointed that we possibly will be losing workers here. We do want to sing the praise. You don't hear this from me very often. Listen up, Ajita. We want to sing the praise of person. Now, when it comes to this process, I've been through it many times, unfortunately, and they work really hard to help place people. There's no guarantee, but at least they will, you know, do the best they can to help us and work together. And that process starts for us tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you. She will definitely keep that on her repeat loop tape. Thank you, Mr. Heaney. I appreciate your hard work on behalf of the people and your candid comments before the public and the board and the CAO. I echo your sentiments and it was appalling to me to learn that Rosemary Anderson, the director of our office of emergency services only found out two weeks ago that her job was being cut. That's pretty amazing. And as he said, you should have been involving these people who are gonna be affected a long time ago when you knew the cuts were coming. I wanna say that, first of all, Ms. Mallory, I wanna thank you for answering my questions in regarding the 10% verification of about board of supervisors pay. I didn't quite understand the answer that it was through furlough savings in exhibit 2H that the same number of furlough days could be a 7.5% reduction in pay for most people, but it equaled a 10% reduction in pay for the board of supervisors 19 days is 19 days. How can it be 7.5% for some and 10% for others? I also wanna bring to the forefront here the elephant in the room and that's the unfunded CalPERS pension that's coming due. And we've got people like Susan Mariello that are collecting huge pensions. She's making now probably about as much as Mr. Palacio is now. Are those people being reduced at all? I'd like some information on that. We've all got to suffer together, right? So they should also be suffering. I also wanna say that another one or 2% cut in your pay and Mr. Palacio's pay, which is upward of almost $400,000 a year, that would put enough money together to save these people's jobs. I'm heartened that fellow workers are willing to take a cut in their own pay to save their coworkers jobs. It could come from you, the leaders. And from Mr. Palacio, the highest paid person in the county. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? Any other comments? We have nobody in the community room but we do have one web comment. This comes from Sean Mathis. Closing actions, line 10 in regards to sanitation furlough. I request that this board not settle on a carve out of sanitation staff that exempt some and not others. Sanitation furloughs does not save jobs and not only should SEIU staff be exempt but all staff including mid managers in these budgeted and fully funded positions. If not, please explain why these furlough savings, where these furlough savings would be spent. Please don't tell me on projects or other parts of the department. The idea of an employee wage savings going to fund anything other than workers is just disingenuous. And that is all for public comment. Chair, I have a question. There was a question about the voluntary time off program and the need to take some action today if you could bring some clarification about that. Sure. Good afternoon, Chair Caput, Caput members of the board, Ajita Patel, personal director. The action that Mr. Heaney was referencing is actually included in number eight in your concluding day report. So by your actions today, you'll initiate and activate the program. That's what I thought. I didn't realize it was something else. Yeah. I really appreciate what you're doing. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Chair, you know, the end of budgets is always a time to reflect on what it is we've done. There's a lot of good that's in our budget and there's obviously some very tough choices that we've had to make this year. I appreciate the work of everyone to try to find ways to reduce their costs instead of reduce their staffing to the greatest extent possible. Some of those were outside of our control, such as the state budget cut and the child support services. I'm hopeful that our personnel department can meet the praise that it received here today to try to work to find employment for as many people as possible with the vacancies that we have here in the county family. I also know that every department has had to make some very difficult choices about what they can do or what they can't do in the coming year. It is hard with a dedicated group of people to have to choose to do less when you want to be serving the public. And so I recognize there's lots of hard choices, some of which are very clear and in front of us and some of this will be just the things that we miss and that the community counts on in different ways. I do believe that in an enterprise fund like the sanitation department that we should treat them differently. And I want to also heed the call from our largest employee unit. And I'm persuaded that we should not have the furlough affect that enterprise department. And so I would move the recommended actions with the exception of action 10, which is to exempt the entire general representation unit in the public works, sanitation section. Okay, anybody else? We need a motion and a second right in the vote. Do you have a motion and a second? Supervisor Friend seconded. I'll do the roll call. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Chair Kee. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. Wow. The next meeting will be September 1st at 9 a.m. And that's it for today, right? Okay, thank you, everybody. Thank you.


So we begin. When we're building websites, we would love to use tools. I use something to watch my files. I use frameworks. I just use this mountain of tools. And the thing about tools is that typically they're like so far in front of the platform that we're building on. So I use a library to select DOM nodes, and that gets around the fact that different browsers have different implementations of how to get elements by IDs and classes. And I use things to compile other things, and it's great. But if you imagine your tools as a boat. Yeah, but you've got cars on the screen, right? Yeah. Just go to the next slide for me. If we imagine our tools as a boat. Oh, that's beautiful artwork there. Well done. OK, and the platform is this slow boat that's sort of behind. And this fast boat has an anchor, and it's kind of like just full throttle going ahead. OK, this analogy I don't like. You drop an anchor to stop the boat from moving, right? No, no, it's a sea anchor, you know? The sea anchor. Anyone know what a sea anchor is? Obviously a sea anchor, because everyone knows. We'll just tell them that. It's when there's a storm, you put the sea anchor in. It keeps you pointed towards the wave, so you don't tip over. Sea anchor. But you can still move the boat with the anchor down. Yeah, sea anchor. Right, OK. Tooling is the boat. Platform is the anchor that pushed your moving, got you? OK, all right. So in this analogy, which is really solid, if you ask me. Speedboat. OK, these tools are racing ahead. But the cool thing is this anchor, sea anchor, as we know, hashtag sea anchor, it's good. It eventually catches up where the boat was at one point. So the platform catches up to where the tools were at some point, and that's good. Yeah, and it can happen super quick as well. So we all know ES 2015, right? Yes? Yes. So a year ago, we would have been looking at something like this. So this is the feature set list across a whole range of browsers. I think the top one is about 68%, 69% of feature completeness in Edge and Firefox. So realistically, if you wanted to use this stuff in 2015, you needed something to compile it. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of red. Yeah, it's not good. I'm a fan of the color red, but it seems like if I wanted to use arrow functions, ray destructuring, et cetera, insert, feature, feature, feature, feature, I would have had to use a tool that would turn that into ES5 or lower. Yeah, you wouldn't need a bay ball to just. All right, I got it. I'm in 2015. OK, that's the state of things. Now it's really nice. It's green. So now you're looking at well over 90% across all the browsers. So you don't actually need that tool that you had before. You can just run it in the browser now. Yeah, right, I can open up the DevTools console and type arrow function and be like, it just works. It just magically works inside of DevTools. I don't have to pre-compile. I use ES2015 or ES6 as it was known in 2015, which is weird. The issue was ES6. But I don't have to use a tool to compile. Yeah, that's the point. In the space of a year, we had one tool we had to use. We needed to rely on it, and now it's not needed. So my name's Matt Gaunt. I work on the developer relations team for the web. Can we do that again? I feel like I did not get to know you in that introduction. You didn't get to know my soul. Very boring. Can you do it again? OK, my name's Matt Gaunt. I'm from Britain. I like my tea in the morning with a little bit of milk, no sugar. Wait, milk? Builders' tea. Yeah, a little bit of milk. You put milk in your tea. But that's how you do it, Sam. Seems a little strange. Oh, strange. My name is Sam, and I like my tea in the morning just with nothing, just a tea bag.  So that's how I like my tea. I don't want to use the word masochist, but it feels right. No, you're just really jealous of my life hack. Super jelly. So this talk was something that Sam kind of concocted in his head to a certain degree. I'm here to balance it out, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So I can relate to this reality of web development. See, I don't think you can, but you're going to say you do anyway. So we're in this world with the reality of web development, and we use a ton of tools. You have your watch process, your compile process, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And things are fine. And this is how things have always been, just more and more tools. And so you're working on your project, and it might look something like this.  And every time we add a tool, we get further and further away from the platform.  I'm playing a video game. I can't see what's in front of me. It's just this huge call stack error. And I'm like, where's my code? Where did this error come from? And that's the thing. Like we add tools, you get further and further away. There's more abstractions between you and what you're actually trying to compile to, which is the platform. So it seems like a bad thing. Yeah. So the point you're trying to make is the fact that we have all these tools, and it's kind of abstracting away from the platform. That is the point that I said. But I'm glad you repeated it. Thank you. So the reason I'm skeptical of this talk was sound. And I use the word skeptical to be polite to him. You said something a lot nastier the first time, but that's fine. Skeptical. I like that. That's better. Skeptical of my ideas. Yes. Because I looked at the past couple of projects I've been making, probably for the past year or so. And when I look at that, the first thing I do is even take a Gold Bill process or something that I'm used to using in the previous project and moving it over into the new one. That's what I do. Or I'll take something like Web Starter Kit, which comes with a pre-built process. Yeah, you have the tools in there like to compile your JavaScript, to compile your SAS or something, and the responsive break points. But this is like the Web Starter Kit. So can I order this from a catalog and then I can build the web? You know what? If you send me a check, I will send you it in the post. Yes. So I can build the full web with this? Yeah, the whole web. I promise it'll be the web in a box. That sounds like an awesome kit. A little LED that blinks on top and everything. But this is how I start it. Wait, Matt, you have commits in this too, right? So are you just bragging right now? No. You're like, I'm selling yourself.  I see. I see what's happening. That's a beautiful impression of me. Thanks, Sam. I worked on it. But the point I was getting to was, this is how I start it. I end up using these tools. I come to know these tools, and I come to love these tools. So this is just how I create projects. And to go back to the previous point of like Babel, you don't actually need it if you want to run something in the browsers today. And it kind of comes with this weird side effect, right? If you're going to pull in all these tools from the first thing and you run npm install. Well, that seems really fast, though. So that seems fine. Oh, this is gif time, by the way. This is about a minute and a half. And I've sped it up because I figured you didn't want to watch paint dry, right? Is that another module, gif time? Can I install that to speed up my npm install? I wouldn't be surprised if Cinder has a module out by the end of today. Gif time. Gif time. I like that. That's good. But this is the weirdest thing, right? We start our projects by installing half of the internet before we even do anything. And yet, you think of when we start the web, this is probably what we all know and love, right? Yeah, I mean, I remember this. I remember I think I got a book or something and I was like, I'm going to make a website. And so I saw that I had to open these tags or something's words. And then I said, OK. And then I had to look on the keyboard. I was like, OK, where's the hungry alligator and the not-so-hungry alligator? I genuinely hope you write a children's programming book. And that's how you explain it. Seriously, that's a good idea. So once I figured that, and then there was a slash that was the opposite, forward, backslash. But it looked forward. I didn't understand it. But I found it. So OK, I pressed that. I saved it. And then I went to my browser and I reloaded the page. And I saw my website. And then I could go back and type in some more alligators and then reload. And then I had this awesome developer workflow when I was like eight. Live reload, no tools. I didn't have to install anything. It just worked. And this was awesome. But as you pointed out, we're in a really bad state in comparison to this. That's a nice way to put that, bad. Yeah, sure. Terrible, maybe. It's a different way. Different. There we go. Sure. So that's the premise of Sam's talk. Yeah, he wants to get back to the eight-year-old Sam. So let's suspend reality for a moment, as I think any of my ideas require you to do. Yeah, you don't really live in the same world as us, do you? No. So we're in the suspended reality state, and we are going to go all in on the platform. All in. We're going to not use tools. We're going to just use these platform primitives, these really powerful things. Well, we don't even need to suspend reality to do this. Like, we've seen this kind of stuff happen in the past, right? Yeah, time and time again. And I think everyone can relate to, I know you want to be your favorite things, rounded corners. Yeah. Like, I had a sweet way of doing this. So it's 2004, and we are in the state of suspended reality, and I am your client, and you are going to make a button for my website. Obviously, Sketch existed in 2004, right? Well, obviously, vectors were so hot in 2004.  They're sweet. Then you cut it up, and you only need one corner, and then you've got the reproducible bit. Seems good. You do the right thing, and you create a sprite from it, because you want to be efficient with the reproducible. How many slices do you have in that? Like, nine slices, right? Oh, I don't do nine slices. That's too new school for me right now. But you've got to drop it on your page. Obviously, I'm using tables. 2004, yeah, that's what you've got to do. You've got your CSS sprite sheet. You pick out the bits you want, and it's awesome. It scales, and oh, look at it. All right, so you delivered your button. I'm not so happy, though, because I don't like that color blue. Can we change that to red? I really like red. That's fine, but I've got to start again. OK, while you're in there, I was looking at this on my phone, and it looked kind of blurry. So I think that my phone screen is better than my computer screen or something. So can I? Maybe your phone's broken. No, I think it's just more pixels. No? No, it works fine. That's fine. We've got pixel ratio. We can do some JavaScript fun, and then maybe make a second sprite sheet, and then we've got one for the one X. OK, and while you're in there, you know, like my users have been complaining they don't really know that they can touch on these buttons, so can we make it? So when you hover, I get a drop shadow, but then when there's a drop shadow, I'm going to use a bunch of different backgrounds. And so that background needs to blend in correctly with all these different colors. Can we make that work? No. How about no? How about your designer just doesn't force me to cry at night? Well, I am a great client. All right. Well, as the web platform sort of identified, people wanted these rounded corners. Yeah, and obviously, spec authors came and saw this, and it was a regular pattern, and it was painful. So they came up with a solution, right? It's CSS rounded corners. To go with the angry, the alligators. CSS rounded corners. That's what it was called? Border radius, but yeah, fine. It's not CSS rounded corners. You use CSS to run. Equals border radius. Border radius, right. So border radius kind of emerged. There was this desire from the community to be like, hey, we want to do these rounded corners. And then how do we as a community respond to that? Well, we said, oh, like flat UI is way in, so rounded corners are totally lame. Thanks for the present of the super awesome thing that's a little bit too late. But the point we're trying to make here is ultimately, there was a gap in the platform. Matt, did you draw that? Oh, yeah. OK, I'm picturing myself standing at the precipice of that gap. Yeah. And all I can hear in my mind is, please mind the gap when aligning from the station. I've been teaching him how to say that over and over again. I watched the videos. I got a lot of those. They don't have those in the New York subway.  Please mind the gap when alighting the trains. Anyway, there's a gap in the platform. We wanted rounded corners. It was insanely painful to do. So we, as the web developer community, do what we do best, and we made a tool that we found a way of doing it. That is a nice rubric. Did you draw that? I've got to say, my Photoshop skills, the day I made this, was top. OK, so we have this rope bridge, and the rope bridge in this case was Photoshop or some image editing program to do the slices. So as a community, we hear these tools and these methodologies how to do this. OK, I'm with you. Cool. And then we got board of radius. So the platform is providing us a nice road. Another bridge. That's a good bridge. Like multiple four structures. Platform. OK, the platform is like border radius. Great. Here's the solution. The platform came in. We didn't need tools. Things were awesome.  No, I'm joking. I'm joking. But this is the point we're trying to make. And we keep on seeing this pattern over and over again. So let's say something else. Oh, SAS. Pre-processors. Yeah, because we're better to be a programmer than in your CSS files. Dude, with clients like you that want to make changes every five minutes, you can't blame us. So love you. So obviously, I still use SAS. I still love SAS for the fact that CSS variables and mixins and stuff, I need variables and mixins. And this is literally the penultimate reason of why you SAS, this bit of the top, background color green. It would help if this worked. Seems like you have a syntax error in your style sheet. Sorry. That's a terrible demo. There we go. It's good. I can't even do simple codes. But the point is, this is basically all I want it for, is a variable at the top that's just background colors. Whenever I want to change it, I can do. And then we've also got mixins, which again, I still love. That include rounded and then boom. That's just a mixin, so I can reuse it everywhere. OK, so you have variables and you have this idea of mixins, which lets you reuse chunks in multiple places. Seems like a good thing. So is this a gap in the platform? And there's a tooling solution. Wow. OK, I'm with you. So now we have CSS variables. The platform is caught up. So a variable just starts with dash dash, got background color red. And then at the bottom, we've got background. And we're just using the variable name. And the cool thing about this is we have JavaScript access to these variables, so we can change them on the fly, right? Yeah, and then it'll just change all of the references as you're going along. That seems pretty useful. And this is spec. This is in browsers now. Like, there's nothing going on here. It's just working. And there is also an early spec for mixins as well. So here we've got the rounded mixin. Super obvious what it's doing. But at the bottom, we can do atapply. And it's this atapply draft spec that's basically saying this is a kind of solution to mixins that we've been seeing from other CSS preprocessors. OK, but this is even better than what SAS was doing, because instead of inlining that code everywhere I use to extend, what this does is it just points a reference to that mixin, right? Yeah. So I can actually ship less bytes to my user, which seems like a OK thing to do. And PS, I just want to applaud you for your use of a pink color, because it's better than blue. I think there's something more to applaud here of the fact that I haven't enabled the web platform flag in this instance. It's on your machine that does it. Sorry, folks. This is actually in Chrome, believe it or not, but it's behind a flag, because it's a draft spec. But it's going to work. I still like it. It's nice. But again, the point we're trying to make is, it was a gap in the platform. We had these tooling. There's an off-ramp here, where we don't need to use it anymore. So I think people are sort of getting where we're driving at. Yeah, but OK, so I saw that I have some CSS things, but I'm a programmer, and I want to see some JavaScript things. You want to see some JavaScript? Yeah. OK, well, how about XHR? Can you write an XHR off the top of your head right now? Yeah, totally, I'm a programmer.  Yeah, let's just do it. It's fine. I get it. You're challenging me. I understand the reality of web development, so XHR. OK, so let me just get into the headspace. OK, I see it. So we start with XML, all capital, because XML is capital. And then there's a capital H, then TTP. Capital H, the rest of the case. Request, OK, XML should be request got it. And then we pass the URL in. We need to open the socket. Open, you've got to pass in the get post, the URL. Then you need listeners. I don't remember what the listeners are. OK, I can't do it. I'm sorry, I forgot. OK, well, how would you do it? Well, I just use jQuery, like dollar sign.get, right? Of course you would, because, yeah.  Well, it's actually a retrospective one. What I'm saying is jQuery, the number one answer on Stack Overflow. I just quoted myself. But wait, you didn't say the dash or the pound symbol or the asterisk?  But the point is, the Sam's Getting app is jQuery is super nice, because you can just do something like this. It's all awesome and happy. Yeah, so the community created these libraries that got around the craziness of that XML HTTP request thing. And they were great things like .get, .post. And then if you were really hardcore, you'd just use dollar sign.ajax. Drop down right to the bare metal. Dollar sign.ajax. I love that. The other side of this as well, and the main reason I say jQuery is the number one answer on Stack Overflow, is the fact that it's got tons of extra functionality as well. We can't knock it. Things like .map.each. Things that the JavaScript spec world didn't have until 2015. Well, but with each and each and map, they flip the iterator, the i, and the value. So you had to remember to flip it back when you were going in between them, right? But yeah, sure, sure.  I'm just pointing out, like, you're saying wrong things. But anyway, jQuery solved a gap in the platform. It was a great tool. All right, so when does the platform come in? On the nice road? On the drive my car over? Let me drive it. Do you drive? Who here has heard of fetch, the fetch API? So the fetch is basically super similar to jQuery. So fetch, this is it. You're going to make a get request. Returns of promise, which means you can do some happy promising. And jQuery returned a promise, like a deferred thing. But it was like a promise. So OK, this feels very similar to what the community had come up with. We have a dollar sign.get.  And then you get some value. OK, great. That's a lot better, because I can type fetch. I can't really type XMLHTTP request. Seems better. That's how I typed, just saying it. OK, this is great. But one of the main things to point out here is that with jQuery, you're kind of tied to jQuery, right? You rely on the dollar sign, if the dollar sign isn't there, everything goes, well, it just doesn't work. It doesn't go anywhere. So it's kind of this weird thing. We use jQuery, and we should, because it made our lives easier. But when the platform catches up and gives you something comparable, it should really be the preferable thing so your code just runs wherever you want. And since fetch is a JavaScript thing and fetch isn't a reserved word, we can just polyfill that and it should just work. But since we're talking about retro things, we're talking about jQuery, and I haven't used that in such a long time, I want to go further back in time. I want to go to the year 1997. Think, Sam, you would have been eight? Eight, good eight years old. I would have been about nine. I think I would have just got my Nintendo 64. I had it for a year. I was really getting good at GoldenEye by then. It was nice. You used to race me and Mario Kart on whim because you cheated by playing so much more before I got mine. Yeah, OK, so 1997, I'm there. I'm in that headspace. Awesome. And this was a time where everything was much simpler. JavaScript was used for sparkles on your cursor. Well, Brendan and Ike was like, oh, I'm glad you guys finally figured it out. JavaScript's true purpose was to add sparkles behind your cursor. I don't know how Brendan and Ike would feel about that, but sure. He's fine with it. But it was a peak for JavaScript at this point. Yeah, definitely the peak moment for me, at least. But some other people that were building websites were like, hey, these sparkles are really awesome. You know, it'd be even better if we fixed up, like, our forms so we don't have a gigantic table of input fields that I have to fill out and then hit submit. And then hopefully we don't get like 500 from the server because I filled the date format out wrong. Maybe we could give some feedback to users. There and then in the page, rather than just use it as a document. So what did we see the community sort of do? There was this desire from developers to have these kind of rich widget primitives.  I'm going to make Dojo. I'm going to make YUI. And I'm going to create these primitives, these JavaScript primitives, but still, like, these really powerful widgets and knobs and dials that make the web awesome. It was ultimately something that every developer wanted. They wanted to be able to make these rich components because there was no alternative on the platform. I don't know about you, but I pulled in that date picker, I think, on every single project. I was like, well, I guess I'll pull in all of jQuery UI and the whole theme files and everything. And just I have a date picker, though, so it's worth it. It's awesome. It was a really good date picker. I'm pretty convinced this is still the number one thing that I'll see everywhere on the web is the date picker. But you love the accordion. You're like, I have an awesome website. That's actually the only memory I have of jQuery UI. It's just like, I wanted it for that accordion. That's sweet accordion. Your whole website wasn't accordion, actually. It was that good. But let's take an example of a Dojo component. OK, Dojo. So this was like, you could create a little counter widget with this. But what I find fascinating about this markup is that if you squint just a tiny bit, you can turn that into a web component. Done. All right, web components are this new thing, relatively new. And they're basically the platform's answer for these primitives, these awesome little components that give you lifecycle events like when I'm attached, when I'm detached, when an attribute changes, which is basically all you need to create something awesome. So we have created our fancy counter web component, which what I love about this is Dojo had this idea with attributes. And we would basically use the DOM and then progressively enhance the DOM into a component. And web components come in and says, OK, well, let's just make that standard. So you can define your own tag types. And you can just put in your DOM. And things are instantiated. And that's really good. Yeah, because ultimately it means if you wanted to share that component, you just share it. By someone taking on that component, they aren't suddenly taking on all of your tooling or whatever other decisions that you've made along with it. So the platform came in and standardized and created this new primitive for us. Yeah. So we're kind of in this scenario really for a lot of these tools. We have a tooling bridge because that was the first way we did it. It's how we showed we had a desire or need for something. And we have this platform bridge right next to it. The interesting thing is everyone's still kind of using the tooling bridge. Still, everyone is using the tooling bridge. When I started a project, I have a gigantic NPM script that I run and watches everything and compiles it and moves all my files around and runs Lint and reloads my browser. I have this huge tooling bridge. And I just sort of ignore the platform bridge because forever it never existed. So there's kind of this interesting dichotomy. Because if you take something like border radius, we had that tooling. It was so painful that we basically burnt it, right? I don't think anyone in this room would ever go to Photoshop just to get that effect. So we should be doing this for every single project that we start is going, do I actually need this tool or has the platform given me something equivalent? But since we're in this state of suspended reality, we're just going to take the platform bridge. Yeah. But there also comes another point of we're not in suspended reality, right? I have to ship stuff to people. All right. So if you're saying, I work on a real project, though, Sam, and what you're saying doesn't make any sense. I like how you're making me sound unreasonable for that. Well, yeah. That's the right way to do it. It's kind of a trick. I hear you. So let's take something like border radius. We all know that we've burned that bridge because, hey, guess what? Support's really amazing and it doesn't matter. But if we take some of the other things we talked about, so CSS variables, oddly enough, it actually has pretty good support in all the browsers. I think it's just IE and Edge that would probably be the one that would put me off. So now I need to worry about how do I support those browsers? Because if CSS variables don't work and I'm relying on them, that's not going to work too nicely for them. And then if you take something like Fetch, it's even worse. Like it's Firefox and Chrome that has it, none of the other ones. So I still need a solution for this stuff. And normally, this is the reason why we go for tools. We want that wide support, but at the same time, we don't need it in the browser we're developing on. But what I've noticed about these charts that I think that's interesting to take away is that Chrome and Firefox and these newer browsers have support for these features today, which means that as a developer working on my website in my developer workflow of 2016, title drop. That's good. See what you did. We can use these things. So in development mode, I'm just using these primitives, and I don't have any tools running. You don't need to compile anything. It's back to the notepad days. So what I think you're trying to say is this. Wow, that's nice. So a developer workflow should always prioritize speed. And what I mean by that is I want the experience that I had when I was eight of editing a text file, reloading my browser. It works. It doesn't get any faster than that. And when I ship to my users, I should prioritize correctness. But what is correctness really? What is correctness? Correct. And I would argue that your user doesn't care what framework you're using. Your user doesn't care what the underlying APIs and how they're working they care is, can I order my falafel on the website and get it delivered to my house? Does that work? Or does it not work? Yeah. The thing that I really liked about this slide was Sam was able to do the upside down question mark without actually glimpsing. He just kind of did it from muscle memory. Well, it's kind of my favorite symbol, because it's like the non-committal question mark. You don't know if the person is going to talk back to you, and you're like, how are you doing upside down question mark? So if they don't reply, you're totally OK. But if they do, it's like, oh, it was provocative. You gave me the weirdest look when you said that. I didn't like that. But luckily, we have tools for this stuff. So the idea of rather than jump through these tools the minute we're developing, we can actually just do it as a production step to give us this correctness that Sam likes to put it. So CSS variables. You can use something like CSS Next. And this is a super nice tool. What it'll do is it'll inline the CSS variable value that you've predefined. Or you can even make it do a fallback where it'll define first the value in just the normal hex color value, or whatever you want, followed by the CSS variable one. So when the browsers don't support it, it will just use the first one and ignore whatever else. So that way, you can still do the JavaScript thing. There's even a post-CSS transformer that you can layer on to give us that mix and support. Yeah, if you want to. Yeah, I mean, it's still experimental, but it's cool that it exists. Yeah, just as a thing, if you desperately need it. So that's kind of cool. So then we move on to JavaScript. So we've got Babel, which is basically going to take. Babel. Babel. No, no, it's Babel. It's Babel. Like, seriously, I've had discussions with Addy on totally tooling tips. It's Babel. No, no, no. No, it is. It's definitely Babel. It's Babel. But what are you going to do? You're going to call the creator of Babel? Yeah. What's that? Seriously, you doing this right now? Yeah. Only Castle Bastion. You know what you're saying? No, you're humble-breaking about Webstar kit. You're doing the same right now. Oh, I love Sebastian. See if I'll pick up. See, this is what happens when you try and call someone in London. They just don't like you. Well, I just need to switch my SIM card over to work. It's going to work. It's not. You're ready. Let's see. There we go. There we go. What are you doing? You actually doing it? Yeah, hey, Sebastian. Hey, what's up? OK, yeah, he's on the phone. So my friend Matt and I were having this debate. Is it Babel or Babel? Yeah, yeah. All right, here, just, I promise. No, it's not. Yeah. OK. It is actually him on the phone, sadly. I thought you were making it up. No, no, it's really him. OK, so Babel. Babel, right, sorry. Side track. I just needed to. Babel. Fine. You have problems with Babel, Babel, anyway. Don't you, Sam? I do. Oh, this is good. You took a picture of my tweet? Yeah, I did. OK. It was a Sage tweet. You even replied, so Sage. So Sage. I like that. OK, this is my issue with Babel today. We use these ES2015 transformers, and it takes all your code that's written using error functions, whatever, and it compiles it to ES5, regardless of what you're shipping to your users.  And we're still compiling everything, even though Chrome, you don't need it. And so what I like about tools like Auto Prefixer is that you can specify a range that you want to support for your CSS prefixes. And then slowly, there are less and less prefixes because all the browsers kind of standardize and things get better. So I want the same thing for Babel. Yeah, so prefixes, you'd go, like, I want Firefox, and I want to support minus two versions before the current stable one. So then it looks at the spec tables and goes, oh, we've really got feature support for that, and then it's all about fiddling with it. So yeah, if we could get this on Babel, that'd be pretty cool. Yeah, and I was talking to one of the guys that works on Babel, and he said he's working on it now, so. Awesome. That's great. So then things like fetch, JavaScript. It's a polyfill because it's JavaScript. OK, so that means that I can pull in this polyfill and I can use fetch in my browser and all my websites today. Yeah, so this one's from GitHub. It's super awesome. We've done a ton of different projects. There's also someone who's wrapped this for a Node module as well, so I'm pretty much using it everywhere now. It's really nice. And then web components. Yeah, just like we just talked about, this idea of web components, these primitives on the web that I can create that have life cycles and know when they've been attached and detached and I can run JavaScript and it's all isolated and beautiful, there's a polyfill and I can use them today. Yeah, just to check whether it works and then load it. Oh, well, that sounds really good. So ultimately, where in this scenario where we've got this massive tool chain and there's a certain degree of tooling fatigue where it's just like, great, the first thing I have to do is install all the stuff and then it kind of works and then if it doesn't work, then I need to go change something and then the configuration is broken or something else has happened. We want to change that, so... Well, right, instead of building with tools and using all of these tools to build our website and we ship all the tools to our user essentially, what if we would write using the primitives on the web and then what the users get is just a slightly augmented version of that, depending on what their browser supports. So it's like our tools become part of our deploy process but not part of our development process and there's this really interesting win that happens when you do this. If we write things using vanilla JavaScript, using web components and things that the platform has support for, that means that when I say, hey, Matt, I have written the best DatePicker ever and you're like, oh, cool, totally rad. I'd love to use that on my project. I don't know why you became Luigi, but... Yeah, you went really... I wanted you to be Luigi. But you can just pull it right in. You don't have to pull in my tool chain for building this DatePicker, like with Material Design Light. There we go. Yeah, so Material Design Light is... Well, it's Material Design built with SAS. So the thing is, if you wanted to take just the ripples from the button, that's cool, but certainly you have to take all the SAS with that to just use that one thing, which means if you're using less or stylus or something else, you've got two preprocessors rather than one. Whereas if it was in CSS variables, you could just take it as is, drop it in your web page, and you're done. Okay, so we build with the primitives on the web. Your code becomes portable across projects, which is awesome. You don't have to pull in extra libraries. And so then when we ship to our users, we add a slight tooling tweak to polyfill support, and that means everything works. So in a kind of roundabout way, you're saying, embrace the platform. I'm saying embrace the platform. Exactly. So when we embrace the platform, I think everyone wins. The developers win because the developers no longer have to worry about their tool chains during their development workflow. And the users actually eventually will get the most optimal solution because they're getting these primitives which are optimized at a browser level, not in a tooling level. And so the users walk away with a working website and a website that probably takes less bytes to function because you're not morphing everything just for the sake of it. Exactly. So thank you, everyone, for listening. Thanks.


I mean one of the most urgent things to do is to you know for people who are concerned around the world about this situation is to press their own governments to you know challenge China over these policies and we were very encouraged when a few weeks ago a group of 24 governments submitted a letter expressing concern about Xinjiang and asking for access to the region for international observers like the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights that letter was submitted to the president of the Human Rights Council and China quickly countered by organizing a letter that had 50 signatories including disturbingly a number of governments you know that themselves represent large numbers of Muslims and I think it's it's especially painful to see a lack of solidarity and so to the extent that you know civic groups or faith-based groups are willing to press their own governments to join a positive rights-oriented critique of China I think that's an incredibly important step