Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the June, what's the 23rd Metro Board meeting? I'd like to call the meeting to order and ask for this to do the safety announcement, please. Good morning, everyone. Her discloses safety, security, and responding to director even there's an emergency. We have 2 means of egress for this building to my right. You will go out this door down the stairs and we'll meet in the parking lot. If this entrance is blocked, we have a second means of egress. I'll do the door to your left or my left. You'll go out down the hall and we'll meet in the rear parking lot where Donna and I will take take out everybody that's here today. In event of a medical emergency, I will take the lead on any situation and I am first aid certified and that concludes my safety contact today. Thank you so much. Okay, we'll move to item 3, which is roll call and I'm going to pass it to Julie Sherman to give us an explanation of how we're going to do it today. Thanks everyone and happy Friday. So this is the first time that this agency is going to take advantage of the new Brown Act teleconference rules that were enacted under AB 2449, which allows board members to participate in either a just cause or emergency circumstance. You have 2 members today who are going to join under the emergency circumstance exception. And so once the role is called for those members who are present. The law requires that both board members make a short announcement that they're joining for the emergency circumstance exception and request that the board approve their attendance via that exception. So the board would need to vote if you do it together for both members to approve their attendance and then both members assuming the board votes. Yes. Will be counted as present and able to go and be part of the forum. Okay, so Donna. Thank you. And while we're waiting, just so you know, if you qualify under the just cause exception, you do not have to ask for approval. Don't ask me why because it makes no sense. I don't know why an emergency wouldn't be a just cause but okay. Oh, we're required that they join both visually and under this law. All right. And nothing to deal with. I'm really. Sometimes I do have something that I know are in this. Would it be more sense if you had, I'm sure. Although, you know, we are working on some legislation for Metro. Even though we started out in a good place, boy. In Sacramento. I don't know what they wind up doing with it. It's nice. There they are. All right. Sorry for the delay. All right. But the director Brown. The director Danny. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. There. Okay. At this point, I'm just want to announce I'm attending pursuant to the emergency exception. Due to a medical issue. And I'm requesting the board to approve my attendance via teleconference. Yes. I'm here. And I'm attending pursuant to the emergency exception due to a Hi. Director Downey. Hi. Director Dutra. Hi. Director Pallentary Johnson. Hi. Director Coney. Hi. Director Lynn. Hi. Director Newsom. Hi. Director Pagler. Hi. Director P. Rose Carter. Hi. Executive Director Henderson. Oh, I'm sorry. Have you got those? That's him. That's him. That's him. That's him. That's him. That's him. That's him. And we do have one. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Just on this, you get a set of out of year or. Yes. 20%, for emergency circumstances, which is a propoly to meetings to. Yeah, forward, and then you can have two per committee as well. Okay. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Okay. Thank you for walking us through that and glad you are able to join us. You have. I'm glad you are able to join us virtually, Dr. McPherson and Arkin. Okay. Put my question. Yeah. So if you do have a public place, does that count? So like if you do- It does count, but you might as well just do the standard teleconference rules if you know three days in advance. Okay. So that doesn't count that towards your- Correct. Because you have two things now. You can do traditional rules. Okay. Or you can do this A, B, two, four, four, nine. So like, okay, if I didn't watch the city hall, I did three days before, that's not going to count towards my two. Correct. Perfect. Oh, we want you here in the- Yeah. Don't join us, Ruby. All right. Let's move on to item four, which is announcements. So today's meeting is being broadcast by Community Television of Santa Cruz County and language line services providing Spanish interpretation services, which will be available during oral communications and for any other agenda item for which these services are needed. And we do have interpretation services here. Hi, my name is Maria, I'm from language line solutions services and Spanish speaking translation. Thank you for being here, Ms. Elena. All right. Item five, board of director comments. Okay. Item six, I think it's reason- Oh, I'm sorry. We're about to look up at the virtual screen. Please, Director Rodgett. This is the time for a comment from board member. Yes, that's correct. Yes. I just like to make a comment that in the packet of materials that we get, the budget comes to us and it comes with the slides in the presentation sideways, which is fine if you're printing the budget out because then you can look at it and just turn it around, but it's really difficult when it's on your screen because you have to turn the laptop around or if you have a desktop, I don't know what you do. You turn the thing around to look at it. So I would hope that in next year's budget that there's a technical way to actually present these slides straight up and down rather than on their sides. That's the total comment. Thank you. Thank you, Director Rodgett. Excellent. You can click on the header and reverse the slides on your computer to view this. There is that, there is a, Donna explained, but there is a way to do that right now. And maybe Sean, since he will, it will be- Thanks. I'll learn how to do that then. Thank you. I could show you. I'm going to see them today presented by the staff. So it won't be an issue. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Any other Board of Directors comments? Okay. Moving on to oral and written communications. Any oral communications? Anyone here? Wish to speak? Anyone online, Donna? Okay. And I'll just note receipt of the letter from Santa Cruz County Commission on Disabilities via the bonus supervisors as in our packet. Okay. Labor Organization Community Pages. Good morning, Brandon Freeman, Senior Vice-Chair. Sorry that James could be going today. He's coming back from the home office in Cleveland. So he's currently on the plane. Want to talk a little bit about negotiations and I was on top of everyone's mind. As I'm sure most of you guys know, we do have tentative agreements for both of our properties, both characters in the next row. We will be voting those next Thursday. So we had to give all of our people 10 days notice so they can get all the information they need to review. So we'll have an answer for you then. We do not have a board meeting in July. So if those things both go through, then we'll be reaching out to you to hopefully can be in a special meeting to get those ratified. But I want to talk a little bit about the process of how we got to the tentative agreements this time as compared to how it was last time. Obviously, this time it was very quiet. We didn't have to drop any service. We didn't have to go to the media. We didn't have to be taking interviews. We didn't have to be doing any of these things. And that is hugely because of the way that we were treated internal. Under this current team with Don, with Michael, with the team that you guys put forward this time, we're treated with respect. We can disagree and not have a term person. And we're able to handle issues that matter to us, issues that have mattered to Metro, we were able to find the amount of money that is working for us and doesn't break the bank because obviously, that's always the big concern. But I just really wanted to stress that this time I didn't have to spend two and a half weeks negotiating language, turning the general manager title into a CEO title. There was a lot less of that personal kind of stuff that was happening this time around. And that's a direct reflection of the team that you guys brought this time. So I wanted to thank Metro's team for making it much easier. Don from May, Tenozeragosa, Chuck Farmer, the lawyer Pat and Jamel, and then Michael who decided to clear his schedule for almost two weeks and clear the tables and sit down with myself, with James and with Pat, and just really get this done. So the deal that you're going to be seeing in closed session is something that I think that we can live with but I think will pass. So I hope that you guys see it that way. Obviously, you know, I can take action until we do, I get it. But now that this was, this was a lot better. And when I stood up here before with a petition asking for you to remove your previous CEO, this is exactly what I was hoping to get. This is exactly what we were hoping to be able to do when we go into this negotiation and be able to treat each other professionally, not worry about personal issues that we have outside of the table, and have this go smoothly. I think that's extremely important not just to us, but also for our public and for our community who was not affected by having their bus not come. We didn't have to deal with a lot of the different things that we had to go through last time, because we had to break down those personal issues and barriers. So, you know, hopefully this will pass on both sides of the coming through. But even if not, I know that the team that is in place and the way that we work together, we will be able to find something that's going to work for us. I think it's very important that that is known and acknowledged that in only one year's time, we're in a completely different situation now than we were before. And I will, I am surprised that I'm able to sit here and say I just went through a negotiation, it wasn't hostile. So, thank you. Thank you for those comments and thank you for your role and James as well, everyone else who worked on this. I know it's a lot of work. Thank you. Okay. Item eight, additional documentation to support existing agenda. Moving on to consent. These are items 9.1 to 9.14. So, let me see if there are any items that there are questions, comments or need to be from board members. Let me see if there's any comment from the public on consent items 9.1 through 9.14. Okay. I've moved an option of the consent agenda. Thank you. I think I heard Director Connick. Okay, we'll do a roll call vote. Director Brown. Aye. Director Downey. Aye. Director Dutra. Aye. Director Connick. Harry Johnson. Aye. Director Connick. Aye. Director Lin. Aye. Director McPherson. Aye. Director Newsom. Aye. Director Feigler. Aye. Director Kerosperter. Aye. Director Raffin. Aye. And motion passes. All right. Thank you. We are now on our regular agenda. Item 10 is presentation of Employee Longevity Award or Jose Valterra for 10 years. Oh, on the consent item? Is it on the consent item? Is it a general item about our routes and services? I apologize. Okay. You were hoping to speak during our communication. That's okay. We can go back to that. Please step up for the podium. I see. That's okay. Hi. My name is Diana. And I'm here to discuss a matter of great importance to me and some of the colleagues that I work with that have mental disorders. And I myself have PTSD and bipolar issues. And there's a couple others coming from Watsonville to Santa Cruz also that have bipolar issues as well. It's taken a really big toll mentally on several of us taking the 90, 69A and W and the 71. And we're hoping that maybe we can talk you all in to please bring back the 91X back. I had a couple breakdowns while I've been taking the bus to get to my job and back. And we're just hoping that we urge you to please bring it back. And there's several of us in Watsonville to Santa Cruz. And unfortunately, we're not able to make it here today because we had to work. And so I'm here all by myself, which doesn't really look good. But I'm not alone in speaking about this matter. So if you could please consider bringing back the 91X. We really greatly appreciate it. We thank you for coming here and for your comments. Thank you. We are back at regular agenda item 10. And that is presentation of employee longevity awards. And I understand the two employees we recognize are not here. No, it's good. They are here. Yeah. Oh, good. Okay. All right. Wonderful. Sorry. It's like that. That's a slap. No, you just started one. I don't know if I do. It seems like that. Happy to hear. Yes. Absolutely. All right. This is kind of what I'm trying to say about theater. About theater. I was saying about theater for 10 years of service. Thank you so much for all of your work. Transit supervisor, would you like to say anything? I just want to thank the Metro for the opportunities. It makes the job easier when you have great leadership. Anna's been great. Daniel's been great. Mike's been great. My coworkers, the public, we wouldn't be here without them. And operators of their grinding every day. So thanks. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good to the chair. Okay. And we have another longevity award for Seraphine Ruiz for 25 years as bus operator. I think Seraphine is not here today. Correct. But we can do a round of applause for Seraphine Ruiz. Okay. Item 11 is retiree resolution of appreciation for Efren Hernandez. Is Mr. Hernandez here? We'll thank you Efren for all of your years of service here at the Metro. Round of applause for Efren. A document approving the appreciation for these. Let's take a big resolution. All right. Director Downing. All right. Director Dutra. All right. Director Coman. Eric Johnson. All right. Director Coman. All right. Director Lin. All right. Director Lee Pearson. All right. Director Newsom. All right. Director Pagler. All right. Director Peters Carter. All right. Director Rackin. All right. The motion passed. Thank you again for your service. All right. Moving on to item 12, which is the Metro Advisory Committee semi-annual oral update from Jessica DeWitt. Chair, please welcome. Good morning, board members. I'm Jessica DeWitt, the current MAC chair. The MAC committee is very appreciative of the opportunity to be with you today to provide the six-month MAC report. The members of the MAC committee represent a diverse range of ridership needs and interests. Over the last six months, MAC has been actively engaged on Metro information technology systems deployment of the clever devices system and the automated passenger counter system with discussion that's included on how to access the information. It provides riders as well as whether there would be future opportunities to add real-time data on whether accessibility seats are available, as well as potentials for any kind of bike rack available information. We really appreciate Director Isaac, how we've been communication with us with all of our questions and requests. For the COVID-19 updates, MAC is very happy to hear from Director Percival's that COVID cases have seen a major decrease with only one positive case in the last 60 days, as of the last MAC meeting in April. Also, at that April MAC meeting, MAC members received a very informative budget presentation from Finance Deputy Director Christina May-Halopa. Right, and she responded with all of MAC's questions and a very easy to understand way for a super complicated topic. Finally, Director John Ergo is reporting as a continually increasing ridership. As well as the news for the MAC, as that also means services increasing, like the newly added service tuned from San Jose State University. MAC also greatly appreciates that Director Ergo is working with our very own Veronica on a special rail bus stop project. I sure has a lot of exciting projects and programs in the works, and we're very much excited to be a part of them moving forward. Thank you. So much. Are there any questions? All right, thank you for that update. There's no action on that. All right, so we are on item 13 we're opening up the public hearing for the final adoption of the Santa Cruz Metro's FY24 and FY25 budget. Mr. Farmer. All right, everybody. Back again. I wish I could say this last time I wanted to talk about the budget, but here I'm coming in to kind of go over the budget, the official budget to get it approved and move forward. Love Cooker. And we'll come back in August once we kind of settle on the unicontracts and update the budget at that point. But right now, going through, we're going to look to improve the budget, operating budget. I'm not going to go through each slide. Started in March, we talked again in April, talked again in May, and then May we presented the budget and then now we're doing it again in June after we open up the Period of Review public hearing. And as part of it, I'll kind of explain what we've changed since the last four months of May instead of going through the full budget and take details. So from 23, I think we built a responsible budget from bottoms up based off of what we see going forward from that aspect of it. Bottom line, when I look at the bottom line, it's not very zero, but it's actually what's operating surplus before transfers. We're slightly down about $1.3 million, but that's to be expected because we've had a lot of inflationary push, especially on fuel pricing that's been going up. It's not really coming down, CNG-wise, diesel, and so on. And like I said, there's a lot of costs as those here. This does not include any type of cost of living adjustments on people's pay. Like I said, that will come probably in August across the fingers or maybe I'll take the budget at that point. On to the next slide. So here's what's changed. So in many times of the board, we had an operating surplus for transfers of about $7.5 million. We made a couple of tweaks in here. We went back and we reviewed some of the open positions and did some salary adjustments based off of stuff we got back. That's about $30,000. And then we added in California Hydrogen. This is council membership, which is another $8,000 now that we're getting kind of new buses. So that's about $37,000. And then slightly offset, is that we had, we drew it up all the federal state grants. Puts and tapes and so forth. And that ended up being about $30,000 gain.  So now we're at $7.5 million. I wanted to show you this, but nothing changed. So since April till now, all the different positions that we put in has not changed. I've added positions, changed positions. We did some updates on the positions on salary pricing as well as the actual positions. So that's why 24 to 25, continuing with some of those salary adjustments, moving forward as well as some updates to the grants. For the most part, like I said, the total total and changes that we have right now year over year basically changed. I can tell you $45,000 from the last time we presented. So right now our FY 24 to 25, we had the increase basically in some ridership and contractual increases. So that's about the $232,000. Even though we don't have the cost of living adjustments every year, people's anniversary, you see potentially have a step adjustment. And then of course we have our benefits, which they seem to go up 8% a year. It's just naturally, it's an increase. So that's driving about $1.4 million. And then there's some puts and takes about $80 million. Down below, we actually in 25 run out of our COVID relief grants. So we've now pulled down all the money that's been given to Metro. And now we're going back and using our like $5307 to subsidize that difference. So that's why you're kind of seeing 9.9 drop in COVID offset by the federal state. That were about $4.1 million lower year over here in the changes. So we're right now about 3.4 million dollars different. Here's an income statement side by side. As you can see, you can see the different pieces kind of walk through the bottom line number and some of the different changes at the time. And then on the capital side, I'm only going to highlight the two. The only thing to change from our April board meeting were the first two months. We had initially had 27 hydrogen buses. We now have 29 hydrogen buses. That will probably be updated again come August. But at this point right now, that are two more hydrogen buses. That's why it's highlighted. And then we have our 10 CNG Arctic buses now officially coming in from San Diego. And that costs is to basically in months to wrap them, paint them on colors, change the seats out, so forth. So it's probably over, the number's probably too high, but at least we're safe right now. And until we get them on a lot and do everything, we're not quite sure. So that's the only change that's happened in capital. So right now we're about 83 million dollars in total spend, 21 of which is going to take place just in FY 24. And then from this slide right here funding sources, we did have one slight change. We've moved around and added in the USDOT 2022 multimodal projects discretionary grant. We do not have that anymore. That's the little blue one up in the top right hand corner. It's about 4.8 million dollars. And from there, we were able to kind of reallocate some of the costs to be lower within our operating capital reserve as well as our transfer major. First, it still stays the same, 37.9. And that may even change again. These are still talking about some other issues too, but ultimately this is where we stand today with budget. And then on the five-year plan, this is the one thing I want to kind of point out on the five-year plan. When you look at this, I know it's kind of more of a trend and it's more about kind of where we're projecting but when we start looking at items here, as you notice on the operating surplus and deficit for transfers by 2028 to go negative, that means any money that we spend on capital that comes out of our money, we don't have money to pay for. In fact, we're actually taking money out of our bank account in order to pay that $364,000. And then of course, if there's any capital that comes out of our money, that's just coming out of our bank account. The second thing is, and I want to take a look at there, if you look at under the transfer line, down to a very last line, it says transfers to and from COVID recovery fund. So this is money that we've put in our COVID recovery fund and then it's money that comes out. And in this case, it's money coming out, help subsidize our bottom line. And as you notice, it's getting bigger and bigger every year. We're running out of money. And then pretty much in 2028, 2029, we're out of money on the COVID line. So we said, there'll be more down the road. We'll start talking a little bit more details about the projections going forward. But I just kind of want to highlight those two. One, we go negative on our operating P&L. Then two, we're subsidizing a lot of that bottom line in that COVID recovery. Can I ask a question here? Sure, Chuck, this is before we take out the changes that are due, as you said, to the step increases and salary increases. I'm assuming that when that happens, that we'll run out of money sooner than 2028, something I don't know what you know what it is, but 2026 or something else earlier. Is that the case? Yeah, 2027, yeah. Okay, so we'll see that in August for where we really are at. Yeah. Thank you. I'll have to get into the weeds, but can you give me a quick rundown of what constitutes passenger fares and what constitutes special transit fares? Yeah, so passenger fares are like our IWI-17 based route and so forth.  Okay, that's what I thought. Okay, that's one of the clarifiers. Thank you. And then, now here we are. We're at the very bottom right, we're at the end of this cycle of the budget at this point in June, and now we're ready to vote on improving the budget. Thank you for the presentation, Chuck. I'll see if directors have questions. Last slide. We've seen these numbers so many times. Amazing. Let's talk about it. So, going from budget, year 23 to 24 passenger fare, basically about 26.4% increase from 2.4 million to 39. You know, mind me, what the subsequent drivers are in that? I mean, I think that's certain because it's based on some of our contracts in university and college, or is it a projection based on? So, the special transit fares is contraction. So, that's really primarily this driving piece. But the passenger fares is the evaluation that now we have buses and drivers and seats and driving around. And as COVID recovers, we are seeing more and more people coming into specifically, like Highway 17, getting into things as well as paratransit. I mean, they're already passing. So, Daniel will tell you, he's really picking up more people. And so, you're seeing, we're running 23, because all the way back in the summer of 22, we're still kind of coming out of that second round. And now it's building up. And then now we're leaping forward to 23 at a good level. And then moving that forward to 24. It's based on the steadily increasing returning driver. Yeah, that's it. And then with the expenses, and kind of get into that physical class in 2028, it's amazing how much the non-personnel went through some previous, right, from $1 million, because we were 23 to $21 million in this year, 2028. Is that insurance fuel? Some of this insurance mainly fuel. I mean, fuel is a big dollar around on there too. It was one of the things that was another one that's blank on it. We have a lot of expenditures that programs that we are launching that will go away. Big chunk of that is insurance. Insurance, it's very expensive. And unfortunately it's really challenging for us to even find insurance carriers because they're icing the market. But that translates into 30 and 4% increase in insurance. And that is not on property, not on the cyber, but it's also a liability for our vehicles and our people. So that's the problem going in place. One other thing too is our inventory, which we expense as we buy, apple eyes, or go onto the bus. All the parts and everything have gone dramatically. And they're almost 30 to 40% up in cost. Tires to fuel pumps, and then that was the other piece too. And right now we don't have kind of visibility to say, hey, in the future it's going to cut down. So we're not going to look down unless we know. Obviously it's not the increase if they're not certain. We can kind of make it something as great as how long we've seen so far. I mean, is that the worst case scenario? Is it all the road scenario? Middle of the road. Because like I said, I just don't know. I mean, at the same point in like fuel, their expense of hydrogen would come down. I think it's like all the way down to like a dollar per gallon of Cleveland by the time we hit 2030. But right now, they don't have a pathway to get there. And it's traded right now. It's somewhere around $13, $14 per gallon. So they have a long way to go and they got to get there quick. So like, so what are we assuming that this is for your 28th? So right now our missile average is right around about nine. Yeah, we're talking about that already. That's it. Thank you. Director McPherson. Yeah, thank you very much. First of all, I really want to thank Mr. Farmer and Mr. Tree for getting this a survivable budget, I guess you'd say, under the circumstances. I'm reading about state and federal agencies that are just really at the end of the rope and they don't know how they're going to survive. So thank you for doing this and your work with the labor organizations and understanding what we're up against. A lot of uncertainties in the variables with COVID. What you've presented is somewhat of a relief to me that we were in good shape at least until 2027, it looks like. And I just wanted to mention too, I participated in a Central Coast Community Energy meeting on Wednesday and electric buses request for them through that agency is there's a lot of them for these agency that's 35 governing agencies down to Santa Barbara County. But we can be in the mix and there's going to be some requests from us, I know, as well as electric bikes, which are very popular in this county. So there's a limited amount of resources, but I really appreciate the cooperative effort that we have been able to have with triple CE. I think it's going to work out and there's going to be some real benefits. But thank you for this budget presentation. Under the circumstances, I think we're doing a lot better than a lot of other transit agencies throughout California. Thank you. Thank you, Director Peterson. Others? Okay. I'll take it out to the public for public comment. I'll close the public hearing and bring it back to our board or our motion. Move approval of the budget recommended by staff. Okay. Dr. Rocking. Director Koday. Director Downey. Aye. Director Dutry. Aye. Director Kalman. Harry Johnson. Aye. Dr. Koday. Aye. Director Lynn. Aye. Director Peterson. Aye. Director Peterson. Aye. Director Daigler. Aye. Director Kieders-Herter. Aye. Director Rodgers. Aye. Thank you, Mr. Farmer, and thank you to the team for all your great work. All right. We are on agenda item 14. Reimagine Metro Project Oral Update. Mr. John Ergo. Sure. Good morning, directors. While we get Daniel Constantino-Cuda or Jared Walker and associates, I'll give a brief introduction to this item. So we last came to you in March when we were in the middle of our first round of outreach on this process. Since then, we've held dozens of stakeholder and public meetings to kind of get a general sense of what the public and current writers are looking for in our system. We held a design retreat in April. Labor with staff in cities and counties, cities in the county, to design a short-term network for implementation in December. So that's what we're bringing to you today. And then after this meeting, we're going to begin the outreach in July and August. On the short-term plan, we'll come back in August for approval for implementation in December. And again, the idea behind the short-term plan is to kind of get the House in order, incorporate everything we've heard in these first round, and we'll hear in the second round of outreach so that we can then build upon it in the long-range plan, which we'll also come back to in the fall. Another third round of outreach and for approval at the end of the year in December. So I'll turn it over to Daniel and I'll look here to answer any questions about it. Brian and Pust. Thank you. All right. Thank you, John. Can everyone hear me? Yes, you can. Okay. I am going to share screen. Is my presentation visible to you all as a full screen? Yes. Great. Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak here today. I last came to you all in person back in March in Scotts Valley and I'm here today to basically tell you where we're at now and where we're going. And largely to let you know that we're going to need some direction from you in August after this next public outreach process. So you should expect to hear from your constituents soon and hopefully think about the issues at hand and so that we are able to move forward with some changes in December. But let me get through the whole thing. So just a quick reminder about Reimagine Metro. So Reimagine Metro is a process where we are re-envisioning where and how often buses should run in Santa Cruz County with the goals being to increase the amount of service provided, make transit more reliable and relevant to the community's needs, adapt to today's travel patterns and really the overarching goal of creating a network that is useful and attractive for many more people's trips than it is today. So we are working in two time horizons. There is what we're calling the short term which is really the end of this year. We're trying to see what improvements can be made by the end of this year with current resources. And that's most of what I'll be talking about today. And then we are working in the long term next year and beyond. What improvements should we be planning for to create what I think we are all hoping will eventually be a world-class transit system? So we are working on this. We have Santa Cruz Metro staff planning on the front lines, but we've also worked with staff from operations operators and marketing staff assisted by the consultant team led by the firm I work for, Jared Walker and Associates. I'm the project manager on our end. We also have assistance from Amma Transit Planning, Monterey based paratransit and public outreach firm. So they're helping us with public outreach. And we've had the opportunity through this process to collaborate with a large number of local agencies and jurisdictions, including the cities, including the regional transportation commission including UCSC and others. So back in March I came to you and spoke to you about sort of a lot of the data analysis we had done to date to learn more about your community and how your bus network is functioning. At that time, we were also in the middle of a public outreach effort. And that outreach was really designed to hear prior to us developing too many ideas about what's going on, what the concerns of the public are. There had been a poll conducted in fall 2022 that helped us understand a lot of concerns from the general public. And then from about February to April, we held a bunch of different meetings with riders, with stakeholders, online and in person, and an online public meeting as well. And in April, we also held a network design workshop where we looked at what we could be doing in terms of drawing lines on maps. And that involved staff from planning, staff from operations, drivers, and all the jurisdictions that I mentioned previously. So in the course of our public outreach, there's really a few kind of overarching messages we've heard. We heard a lot of different things, but in terms of messages that it feels like we can act on in the course of this process, the most important things are probably that really with the current service right now, it takes people too long to get to the places they need to go. And that there's a lot of different factors that play into that. But one of the big ones are buses are infrequent and so there are long waits on some lines and for some kinds of trips, rides feel like they are far slower than they should be. And in some cases, it's perhaps more prominent in some parts of the network and at some times of day where there's peak demand, but there are occasional mistrips. And there's a lot of people have feelings about that regardless of what the actual objective percentage of those trips is. So there's that too long to get places. And then there's a real feeling that there isn't enough service. In fact, in the fall 2022 poll, we asked people what was extremely very somewhat important to them and people think all sorts of things are extremely or very important. But people think that regardless, without even talking about any purpose for the service, 70% of respondents from a statistically significant sample are telling you that it's very or extremely important for Metro to provide more service. And I think that that's really borne out by the reality on the ground as well. We know Metro is still, despite restoring some service, providing less service than you did in 2019 and significantly less service than you did 20 years ago. So in addition to that, we heard a broad range of other concerns, communications, fair structure, reliability, weekend and evening service levels, bike bus connections, various UCSC specifics and others. I won't go into them in detail at the moment, but just to let you know, we have kind of a broad range of things that we've heard and that we're trying to act on. A couple of important data points from that fall 2022 poll that I also wanted to give you to establish some context. We asked people specifically questions about frequency, the importance of frequency in places where lots of people travel versus coverage to as many places as possible. And broadly speaking, people in the county think you should be focusing probably more on frequency in those places. I wouldn't take this as an absolute, but it is a good indicator that people are not asking you to extend service down every canyon. They want service that is useful in the places where it can be useful. Broadly speaking, that's not to say that's what everyone thinks. The other important thing that we heard in that poll, one of the other important things, is that in thinking about whether there are any communities whose needs should be prioritized, there seems to be a relatively broad consensus that Metro should be focusing on the needs of communities where there are many people who have low incomes, or many people who don't have reliable access to a personal vehicle, and that that's more important than trying to provide kind of an equal amount of service per population, regardless of income or personal vehicle access. So that's what we heard in this first stage. If you can see my mouse, what we did in this first stage is these first two boxes, this orange and blue box here, analyzing the network, phase one of community input. Today we are at the stage where, in the next week at most two, we are releasing the alternatives report, which I'll present a summary to you of after this introduction. That alternatives report is going to form the basis for the next phase of public outreach that's going to start in early July and go through early mid-August. And in that phase, we're going to want to know what people think about these alternatives for the short term and about priorities for the future. And we're going to report back to you, the board, at your meeting at the end of August and say, here's what we heard. Here is what we think this means. Is this the correct direction? Are there any adjustments we should make? And based on that direction, we will then go ahead as a project team and finalize where we want to go for the end of 2023, leading to a service change in December. And based on this finalized alternative, work on designing the future service improvements in which we'll incorporate priorities for the future. So this is kind of the word version of the graphic I just showed you. We'll go to outreach in July-August. At the end of August, we'll ask for direction. And in the fall, we'll work on a draft future network plan. In December, implement short-term service changes. And in early 2024, we'll finalize the future network plan. I apologize. I need to plug my computer into a charger. I will be right back and play this. So as for the alternatives for change in 2023, so this is a plan for the very short term. And we are working on a plan for the very short term because we have heard pretty loud and clear that there are a number of issues and frustrations that feel urgent to the public to address. And we would like to address as many of these as quickly as possible. And in terms of making a major service change, three to six months is really the shortest that one can do it after a decision. And so basically we're trying to target December. So in that time, what we think can be achieved, in any case, is an increase in service, about 10% increase in service overall. That's based on the recruiting efforts that are going on right now for operators. We can achieve higher frequency by reorganizing service in areas with higher demand. We can get to simpler and more direct routes from A to B. And that is county-wide, but I think it's probably the biggest changes are in terms of making routes simpler are in Watsonville. And we can work on improving transfers, which we know are an issue right now. We know there are very long waits at transfers and we know that a lot of people have to pay a second fare to transfer and that's a big issue. We are, within this plan, we are assuming that it will be possible to achieve free transfers. That is something that you all, the board will need to explicitly approve. So I just want to flag that for you. But we have two alternatives. Both of them include all of these items. Now I'll show you kind of what actually in these alternatives in terms of lines on a map. So to start, to establish some context, here is a map of existing metro service in your core areas from between Santa Cruz and Watsonville. On this map, you'll see that there are lines and those lines have colors. Colors reflect frequency. Dark blue lines come about every 30 minutes on weekdays. Light blue or teal lines come about once an hour and other lines that are gold and kind of fading in the background come less than once an hour. So what this tells you is that, well, you are providing service to almost every place where you could reasonably operate service right now in Santa Cruz County or at least in this core area. But none of that service is very frequent. So there are long waits. So just to give you an idea of the scale of change that's going to be contemplated, I'm going to flip you to alternative A, which is the slightly more radical one. And then I'm going to flip back and forth a couple of times so you can see. So here is what we're calling alternative A, where we are leaning the most towards increased frequency. So this is a map of the same area and you'll notice that there are a couple new colors in this map. Red lines are areas where buses come every 15 minutes on weekdays in the daytime. And purple areas are where they come every 15 to 20 minutes on weekdays in the daytime. And so big thing to notice here is fewer light blue lines, fewer hourly lines, more service that is either every 30 minutes or better or every 15 minutes or better. So I'm going to flip back and forth a couple of times just so you can see that existing, alternative A, existing, alternative A, existing, and alternative A again. So I'm going to focus for a minute on alternative A just so you understand the big picture of what is being contemplated. And I'll kind of go from west to east. A couple of things to note. So you'll notice that on the west side of Santa Cruz, routes 18 and 19 are both doubled in frequency. They both go to every 15 minutes. And in alternative A that's made possible because we would no longer provide service on high street. And so that service would be reallocated back into service on the 18 and 19 in addition to the 10% added service. That makes it possible to double service on your two highest ridership, most productive routes, and to provide service that is truly every 15 minutes in both direction within UCSC and on all your most populated areas on the west side. Consequence being that there wouldn't be service on high street. Then you'll notice that we have made route 35 going up to the San Lorenzo Valley. All routes, all buses on that 35s and 35Es would now go straight up to Scotts Valley via Highway 17. Emeline and social services would be put back on route four where they used to be. Goal being to keep the same level of service at Emeline right now once an hour while increasing the directness of trips up to Scotts Valley in the San Lorenzo Valley. In the live oak where you currently have two routes, route 66 and 68, you can see them here. They do different things going through Twin Lake Pleasure Point, Brommer Road, and Seventh. In alternative A those are consolidated into one route which we are calling route three that would run every 30 minutes. By consolidating them we're able to make it run more frequently but we are requiring a few people to walk farther. Then you'll notice a significant change in what is today the 69 and 71. We have these placeholder route names for now. We're calling them the one and the two. Instead of having the various 69s and the various 71s, you have the one and the two, they all operate coming out of Santa Cruz on Water Avenue so that you have service every 15 minutes on Water Avenue out to Capitola Road, at which point some of them go via Capitola Road and others via Sekel Drive like the 69 and 71 today. They come back together at 41st as today but because their schedule is coordinated, they come back in almost still coordinated every 10 to 20 minutes on Sekel Drive past Cabrillo College where there'd now be a bus every 10 to 20 minutes instead of two buses every half hour. Then they go towards Watsonville and the really big change here is that one of these would still serve Aptos Village but both of them eventually get onto Highway 1. While these are both local service lines, they are both taking the fastest possible path to and from Watsonville or between Aptos and Watsonville. There would still be service on Freedom Boulevard but because Freedom Boulevard is a relatively low population and low demand area, that service would go from every 30 minutes to every 60 minutes and in alternative A, that would really be service between Watsonville and Aptos and Cabrillo College, this Route 73 that's here. So pretty significant changes to what's happening between Santa Cruz and Watsonville and then in Watsonville itself. So Watsonville right now has a very complicated pattern of service where there are three or four buses on every main street but none of them come very often, they all go different places and many of them go different places depending on which direction you're riding. So in Watsonville, we've tried to get as many of these routes as possible operating every 30 minutes instead of every 60 minutes. So again, doubling frequencies on most of these streets. We have both the two main corridors, Main Street and Freedom Boulevard, with service every 30 minutes to Santa Cruz via Highway 1. We've consolidated services on Green Valley Road but there's really a bus every 30 minutes into and out of town and we've added service out to the industrial areas on West Beach, out to neighborhoods on Elone Parkway, the new county health facilities and basically covering some of the areas that Circulator does now or a lot of the things that the Circulator does now, getting to destinations that are important for certain populations even if they're not necessarily high ridership generation destinations in themselves. So and another thing to note in Watsonville that's important and that's true in both alternatives is that the lines would be scheduled for timed transfers. So in Santa Cruz transfers would become faster because most buses would be more frequent in Watsonville transfers would be faster partly because of frequency but mostly because buses would be aligned so that they all arrive at more or less the same time and leave together five to 10 minutes later. So that's alternative A versus existing. Alternative B is a little bit different from alternative A but the big picture is pretty similar but here's A, B, A, B, A and B again. So in alternative B what we've tried to do is maintain as many as possible of the sort of frequency and travel time improvements in alternative A while softening the blow a little bit on coverage, maintaining service close to more of the places where it's available right now. So what that amounts to is about maybe three, four key differences. On the west side only route 18 would be upgraded to every 15 minutes. Service would be maintained on high street but that would mean that high street and base street services 10 and 19 would both be every 30 minutes. So you still have service every 15 minutes on campus. You wouldn't have frequent service on base street into the boardwalk. You would maintain service on high street. In the southern live oak, instead of having one route with service every 30 minutes that's sort of merged and requires a certain number of people to walk farther we would largely maintain the current split between the 66 and the 68 by creating these A and B patterns one of which goes through Twin Lakes, the other through Seventh and Bromer then continuing to cover both of 38th and 41st but that also means by the same token those shorter walks mean longer waits. In terms of Santa Cruz to Watsonville there's two key differences. One is that the rural parts of Freedom Boulevard would remain on the long regional route here. It's not called 71 it's called 2A but it is largely similar in routing to the existing 71 in that it goes from Watsonville Transit Center through rural Freedom and then to Santa Cruz via Sekel Drive. The other thing is that as a consequence of this we are able to make it possible to bring back the 91X in the short term in alternative B. The 91X wouldn't be an all day service with the way we've been able to figure out the budget so far. It would be a peak only service but it would be a Watsonville to Santa Cruz Express that we would be available probably for about three hours in the morning three hours in the afternoon non-stop. The consequences for that in Watsonville are that you would only have that every 30 minute service to Santa Cruz consistently on the Freedom and Airport Boulevards you wouldn't have that service every 30 minutes on Main Street. Main Street would have hourly service to Santa Cruz except for whenever the 91X is running. So that's the main difference otherwise Watsonville similar idea to what's being proposed before higher frequencies, straighter lines, and time transfers at Watsonville Transit Center. So that is a lot of information to absorb. I don't expect everyone to have heard all of it now but this is what's being put on the table and when the report comes out I encourage you to read it and learn more about what's being proposed. But in terms of what the outcomes of this are the first thing I want to say is that as you've noticed this is a pretty big amount of change in either alternative in a small amount of time and that change amount of change is what's necessary in our opinion to meet the urgency of the need and the size of the size of the problem that's been presented to us. But the consequence of big changes is that there are a lot of people who will have opinions about them. There are a lot of people who will be positively impacted, more people will be positively impacted, but also some people will be negatively impacted or will feel that they might be. And so when we propose big changes in a small amount of time it's reasonable to expect a large, correspondingly large reaction from the part of the public and so you should be ready to start fielding questions from your constituents, concerns, all sorts of things that opinions that people might want to share and to think about those and how they might influence your direction in August. That's the first thing I want to make sure is clear. In terms of coverage there are some places where alternative A would make the bus farther away and there are fewer of those places in alternative B and so that's something to consider and it's going to matter to some people. Now overall we found that both alternatives serve a similar number of people within a half mile walk of a bus stop but that may not be how someone who has a bus stop in front of their house right now feels or they might not be satisfying to them but there is a generally similar level of coverage higher in B than in A. But the other thing and really the reason why we're doing this is that both of these alternatives would significantly increase the number of places people can reach in a reasonable amount of time and so we've calculated that as how many places can you get to within 45 minutes. We have and I'll show you the results of that but basically we're seeing that both alternatives increase access to destinations. Alternative A does a little more than alternative B. But just to know what I mean by access just quickly take you through this. So when we talk about access to destinations so here's an image to help you through this. You may have already seen this when Jared presented to you but I'll go through it quickly. So imagine a person. Imagine they're in a city or a place you know a community of some kind. In that community there's all sorts of places that they might want to go to or need to go to. But in the course of anyone's daily life you only have so much time. You only have so much and that time means that there are only so many of those places you can reach. We can map that area and it'll look sort of like a blob on most maps from most places. Maybe it'll have a shape kind of like this and that area can represent the number of places you can get to within a certain amount of time. So let's say 45 minutes in this case. Within that area there are going to be a certain number of interesting and useful places. And really it's those places within that area that structure most people's opportunities in life because if somewhere is farther than where you can get to in a reasonable amount of time it's almost as if it weren't there on most days. So what we are trying to do in a lot of this planning here is really trying to see how can we expand this area so that people can get to more places. So I'm going to show you how that looks like in these alternatives three different locations. So here we have the west side of Santa Cruz and you have maps on the right for where you could get to now and where you can get to in future. The point where someone would start their trip here is right around bay and mission. And this sort of purple area is where you can get to now in 45 minutes including walking, waiting and being on transit. And the blue area is where you would be able to get to in future from this location. You can see that the blue area is larger than the purple area and that is reflecting the fact that service is twice as frequent at that location and service out to the east side out to on Water Avenue and Soquel Drive is also twice as frequent. And as a result, you can get to more places in the same amount of time. So that's what that looks like from the west side of Santa Cruz. Here's what it looks like from Cabrillo College in Mid County. So at Cabrillo College we've replaced a situation where four buses come an hour but effectively they come two buses every half hour to there being there's a bus, there's another one in 10 minutes, then there's one in 20, then there's one in 10, then there's one in 20. So as a result of this people can typically get a little bit farther than they can now in most directions and particularly within 45 minutes the thing that's most interesting here is that in both alternatives you can reach large parts of Watsonville within 45 minutes even including a random amount of waiting time which is not possible today. You can get to more of Watsonville in alternative A than alternative B and that's because they're serviced every 30 minutes from Cabrillo College to both Main Street and Freedom Boulevard. In both cases because we've reduced the frequency to the rural parts of Freedom Boulevard it will take longer to get from Cabrillo College to those areas. So that's Cabrillo College and here is from downtown Watsonville and so from downtown Watsonville there's a couple things to note again that are so because most routes in Watsonville would be every 30 minutes you could now arriving at a random time at the transit center get to pretty much anywhere in Watsonville in less than 45 minutes and you could also get out to Cabrillo College within 45 minutes and in alternative A with the higher frequency of the one and two you could even get a little farther out almost as far as Sequel Village. A little bit less than alternative B again because of how the two would be split with hourly service on Freedom Boulevard. In both cases again because rural Freedom Boulevard has a cut in service you wouldn't get as far to there. So overall what does this mean? Here is a map that reflects kind of the what I've been showing you previously but calculated from every location in your service area. The dots on this map represent people so each dot is about 25 people based on where the census thinks people live. So it's not exact locations but they are not made up either they're relatively accurate locations of population densities so where there are a lot of dots there are a lot of people. The colors of the dots indicate whether we've made people able to reach more jobs or fewer jobs if they're green dots you can reach more jobs if they're brown dots you can reach fewer jobs in 45 minutes or less including walking, waiting, riding, transfers. So you can see just based on the coloring of this map that there are a lot more green dots than brown dots and that's reflected in the numbers that come out of the analysis where we're seeing that we've improved job access and this is calculated I should say weekdays, daytime, midday so we've improved access for almost 70% of the population of the county and we've made a pretty significant noticeable improvement to nearly half of residents. There are a couple small areas where that access would decrease as a result of decisions about exactly where the bus would turn and how it would go but that number 2% in alternative A is much lower than the number of people who benefit. However, you should expect that people who experience a negative impact are going to feel legitimately that they're being negatively impacted so you shouldn't expect necessarily just to hear a wave of love from this. We think that overall this is worth it but it does have a cost you should expect to hear about that. So this is alternative A. Here's the same map for alternative B. So here's access change in alternative A. Again and B again and so you can see that an alternative B again it is largely a net positive but it is not quite as much of a net positive in access and there are slightly more people who would be negatively impacted and I guess the reason why the access change is different in alternative B than an alternative A is really about making those choices that lean toward coverage rather than frequency. So if you can control when you travel having a bus that comes once an hour is okay because you'll just go and get it when it comes but if you might just need to travel any time which is the situation that most people are in you have to go and when's the bus coming now that lower frequency means that you wait a long time and so these lower access numbers reflect longer waits. So that's what's being put out there in the short term. We have not yet designed what should be happening in the long term. We made a first attempt at it in the workshop but we came to the realization that because there's different possibilities for what might happen in the short term it's not appropriate to show the public a long-term map that reflects some short-term choices. So instead what we are going to do now is gather the public's priorities for what are the things that matter most to you. There are a whole lot of different ideas that Metro is aware of and that the public has made us aware of for things that should happen. Maybe the 91x comes back all day. Maybe it becomes frequent. Maybe the 17 runs more often. Maybe there's better service on weekends. Maybe there's better service in the evenings. Whole lot of other things right. We know all these things are out there on the table. We also know that when we look at improvements in the future this fall we're not going to be able to do it with an infinite assumption about what kind of budget is available. We're going to have some kind of limit that we're going to have to work to and because of that we want to understand the public's priorities. So we're going to be asking the public and once we've asked the public we're going to be asking you what matters most. And so here are some of the ideas I was mentioning earlier. In addition to what I said, better East-West connections and Santa Cruz is a big one that we've heard a lot about. There may be others that we hear about through this process. We're going to ask them so if you have to pick which two or three of these are really the most important. And based on that we're going to have that and an assumption about what budget to work to and we're going to be able to show okay here's what we think should happen in 2024 and beyond. So we are now going out to public outreach in a couple weeks. As I mentioned we're going to be asking people about these two short-term alternatives which parts of the alternatives they prefer which parts they don't like anything that we've missed. And we're going to be asking them for the future which improvements which types of improvements are going to matter most to them. We're going to summarize everything we hear and then bring that to you on August 25 for direction. And so we're going to try to get out of that meeting with direction on what we should do in a preferred alternative that may involve mixing and matching certain parts of what's in A and B and also what we should be focusing on for future improvements. So this outreach process that's happening in July and August so we're starting in early July opening up an online survey that's going to be open to the general public from early July until mid-August. On Tuesday July 18th at 5 p.m. we'll have an online public meeting and there'll be information to you shortly about how to join that meeting that you should feel free to relay to any and all of your constituents as you see appropriate. In addition we know that online outreach isn't accessible necessarily to every community and in particular we know that we need to make special efforts in person in South County. So there'll be in-person outreach in Watsonville on July 21st targeting key locations where there are many people and many potentially interested people. So we're looking at the Watsonville Transit Center, the Freedom Center and the Farmers Market. I mentioned the online survey. We'll also follow up with the rider groups and stakeholder groups that we talked to in the last phase to focus groups showing them well we heard what you had to say here's what's on the table what do you think and then staff will be available during this period for any board members here who feel like you want to have your own meetings in your districts with your constituents. So just reiterating the process. July and August we'll do public outreach as I just spoke about. End of August we'll ask you for direction. In the fall we'll be working on what is the future network plan? How do we get to a world-class system? In December concurrent with the timeframe for the new for the temporary relocation of Pacific Station we'll be implementing more I won't be Metro staff Metro will be implementing short-term service changes and in early 2024 following a further board outreach and board direction we should have a final future network plan. Thanks for your attention today. I'm here for any questions and John as well and John may have things to add. There is a project website here where eventually we'll have links to the survey and the report expect the report there in about a week most likely. Thank you. Thanks Daniel there's a lot to take in there we hope you like maps as much as Daniel and I do. There's a report as you mentioned we'll be releasing next week for the week after and then we'll be in outreach for two months and again we encourage any board member interested to schedule outreach meetings with us we're looking for or suggest venues etc where we can talk to you. Thank you John and Daniel I'm going to bring it to the board for questions. What I'm hearing often is from here in Boulder Creek some groups probably as well students that that so I'm thinking about outreach to schools but I hear from parents that the kids can get to school in the morning but they can't get home because of and there's any after-school activities so and I'm hearing that particularly I think more so in San Rosa Valley but also in Scotts Valley as well and I'm hearing now in Scotts Valley you're probably all hearing the one change on the bus stop that that people didn't know and obviously we we do all these things for outreach and people always complain that they weren't notified when a when a stop is removed and the one that all our council members were notified of this is route 35 and it was in front of Saint Philip's church and of course I said well but there's one block not even a block away on El Pueblo that has more employees and then they went through the food pantry and some of the things where people have less mobility. Outreach to schools I think might be a way to send something home to parents so one more step to get their participation so and possibly if our black and ours our Chamber of Commerce it has a huge out database that they can send out a notice that might be a way to help connect to reach more people. Thanks thank you director for those comments those are great suggestions I believe we have reached out to the Chamber of Commerce in the previous round we'll do so again outreach to schools another great idea a main change in the short-term alternative is more direct service to Santa Cruz and no longer have the MLM which we were kind of put in put in a position to do recently because of our operator count but given the heroic efforts and Don and HR and Margo to train we think we'll again add a 10 percent by the end of the year so we can undo that change so that'll improve access in San Lorenzo Valley as the map showed I can I can even see how to run the bus stop. I appreciate all the work and I every time I see a complaint one person would say well but this doesn't go but really you have to walk but you know so I thank you for all you're doing just I think that my biggest I see lots of good alternatives here and options of many of them don't affect my area as much as it will Santa Cruz live open once in a while but I do think that anything we can do to increase that outreach you know it'll be helpful I think all this on council we could you know as board members can share that with media our own contacts and help get that information. Yeah especially to the point since we've launched the free for for you we've seen almost a doubling of weekday student partnership and something like a 500 percent increase on weekends. Now I'm hearing really wonderful things from students from kids and in our area just the where I think there's still a gap in San Lorenzo Valley understandably so. As a sociologist I know that there's a propensity for people who don't like something to show up in much larger numbers than people who do like what's going on and I'm wondering whether you'll be providing us with any sort of guidelines to understand when we get a response before August or in August what it means I mean for example if you had 50 50 you know 50 percent look I don't know what the numbers will be but 50 percent love the new plan love a and 50 percent love D or 50 percent love the new plan and 50 percent like the like what's going on now how we would assess that and you can't give us an exact guideline but it would be helpful to know if we have a preponderance of people that are unhappy about the changes but they're only but it only affects two percent of the people out there how we should weigh that on some level. I don't know how to tell you how to do that or whatever but since you have people that are experts in this kind of survey research it would be helpful to us I think as a board. Sure there are two things that people think most change and the way things are. Well there's a 96 page report Director Reckon that's coming next week but we'll definitely tease out the highlights the name the main issue the increase in access I think between a and b a because it means more towards frequency provides more access more reachable destinations within that 45 minutes and be a little bit less so that's the name takeaway but we for sure will buy it. It was a really good presentation and I think it's really clear what the options mean I just worried about a situation where we show up at an August meeting and have a huge crowd of people you know the larger you know the preponderance people there hate the new plans but they represent two percent of the public. Yeah I think Director Reckon so there's a couple things first of all your point is very well taken and that's kind of what I was trying to get at by saying big change is going to lead to big reaction right you always hear more from people who are negatively impacted by a change than from all the people who are positively impacted they're more likely to be alerted and they're more likely to have big feelings and they're more likely to get in touch about them. It is not really possible for us to give you an exact number of like well we heard 50-50 so you should assume 70-30 we can't really do that in quantitative terms but I think you should be aware of that I think this is also why it's important for you as directors to to the extent possible take the time to absorb the material about it so you will understand it you know from an analytical point of view what's going on and what the big picture is and then you know ultimately there is a moral decision at play here and you know and this is why you all are in the position you're in why you're directors there's a moral choice about is it okay for the people who are going to be negatively impacted to be negatively impacted in service of the larger number of people who will be positively impacted. I as a consultant can in no way answer this question I don't think staff can answer this question but someone needs to answer because the alternative is to not make any change and we know that that's a deficient situation too. Thanks. Thanks for your response again that was a really excellent report. Thank you. Thanks for the report Daniel and John. I'll definitely take you up on the offer to come to all meetings on August 10th at Simpkins Swim Center so in the heart of LIVO be affected by you know alternative A versus alternative B so we'd love to have you guys come to that and get some direct feedback. I love the new number scheme proposed with the you know routes one two three I think it's a little easier at least for someone accessing the system for the first time than figuring out 69 AW 70. I'm just curious why it wasn't extended to the whole system is there like some justification why UCSC is still 18 19 or serving some of the numbers in other parts of Lake Watsonville and why not just keep going four five six. Sure Daniel can maybe add to this I think the main reason is we weren't changing everything in UCSC and Watsonville whereas the main inner city routes between Watsonville and Santa Cruz we were configuring all of those so there were still other routes in Watsonville that were changed we're changing or we're changing less so we kept that number scheme which is all the 70s and same thing on the west side but we would definitely be open to renumber everything I think these and these numbers now are placeholder but we do think one two three is is clearer than it's today so it's definitely something we can revisit. And then my last question is we see you know that we're talking about the two percent people that might be negatively impacted now versus 69 percent positively impacted just wondering what's the negative impact is that taken to account Paracruz riders because you know I know if we we remove some stops then that could also affect the distance that Paracruz go and who could pick up so just want to make sure we are taking into account that part of the service as well especially because Paracruz riders might rely greater extent on our service than maybe some of the more alternatives. Yeah so we wouldn't be changing Paracruz service area in either alternatives and the three-quarter mile would stay the same and it'd be the same network and same service area. Paracruz area would actually expand a little bit in Watsonville where there are a couple areas where service is added in both alternatives just as an added point to that. I think I wouldn't hang too hard on the exact number of two percent and four percent those are the exact number of people who would be impacted in terms of how you count that specific job access within a certain amount of time measure and that's intended to reflect that more people are positively impacted than negatively but different people will have different definitions of what it means to be negatively impacted. Some people will think that their negative impact is simply that the bus stop that used to be in front of their house isn't there anymore even if their actual ability to use the transit system is the same or improved more broadly because of where they could get to so yeah just want to add that. I hear you. Some people might see it as an any of impact but now if we walk five minutes you see the bus becoming more people. Thanks. Thank you Dr. Henderson and then I see Dr. McPherson and then yeah with with the timeline and this is looking far beyond this is what we have now on highway nine do you have any indication or guesswork of when we complete the bus on shoulder that's being planned on highway nine up to freedom boulevard for instance would that improve the time frame Santa Cruz to Watsonville? I doubt that you took this into account but what's your guesstimate would it improve that situation? I think you're referring to the highway one bus on shoulder not highway nine. Correct. Yeah so they we think it'll improve the travel time in two ways one the studies from RTC suggest a two to four minute travel time savings on the highway segment so not substantial but a dramatic increase in reliability because the bus will be able to stay out of traffic mostly and then we're going to reroute and provide a more direct service that operates on the entirety of highway one between Watsonville and Santa Cruz and that'll reduce the travel time about about 15 minutes over the current 91s. So in the alternative B I think that Daniel proposed that is the proposal that's in there it's not the old 91x that went to Cabrillo because we're providing an equal amount of service there between the one and two routes it's a direct route that's made Santa Cruz a possible but limited limited span period only and only once an hour which is what we can do with existing resources but the future plan and what we the improvements that were funded as part of our award in April are hinged on 15 minute peak period frequency by 2028 and that four doors and so that's that's the future direction of where we're trying to go and that for her but we don't have the resources to do that in December. Director Anderson. Two questions can actually deliver the proposal to the current resources or do they need to be staffed up do you need anything else or can they be delivered right now today with the current resources and then also in the board review we provide feedback from the draft survey before it goes out to the public in July. Sure. Survey yeah I'd be happy to provide the draft survey to the board. The alternatives are the assumption is a 10% increase over today and by all indications we'll be there within the next two months in terms of operators in terms of the operators we need to operate that service. So we might even get there by September, October but it's I think to that Michael. Yeah I mean the current class should get you your 10% increase and no mistake in their due to graduate and actually in service in September. Yeah. Well about three weeks and then we have an upcoming class of 17 so we're looking at a number of 160. Well that puts us over pre-COVID by the end of the year in terms of number of breaks. Their contingency if something were to happen and you give it that 10% mark would you push the short term launch until March or as it involved then? We'll see where we are in September and if we have to do that we'll do that. The reason we want to push it in December because that's when we're coming at the station part of the contingency is we'll be at 160. This change is budgeted at around 155 in terms of number of operators so there's some gifts there. I think we're in a really good place to deliver this in December. I don't really have any doubts about what's been happening here. My question is about outreach. I notice you had a lot of different options and they're all great thank you. I always have concerns about the people who are not heard from because they can't get to a new meeting or they're not a farmers market or they don't have a lot of online opportunities and they may not even know about it because they're so busy just trying to work take the bus or not. I mean if they could take the bus they may not even know they could take the bus because they live in an area where there isn't any service and so I don't know if you have anything additional that could be made available to people. I know mailing slow mail is hard but I just wondered if you had considered other options if there's things that the board members can do with our county supervisors, the second district and so anything you can do to help us reach those other people that don't necessarily because a lot of times people who go to zoom meetings and all those other things they have as you said some of these folks that are negatively impacted and other people are pretty clueless because they didn't know about it or they just don't have time and those are the folks that may be more impacted by some of these changes. So just looking for a comment. Okay we're looking for your help as well. So there's only one zoom meeting planned. Zoom is online is not the focus of outreach. The particular focus is going to be in Watsonville in person so the farmers markets the strawberry festival. As part of the first round of outreach the consultant team built a list of I think 33 community stakeholders social service organizations to push the message out as well and so that's going to be a big part of this outreach effort and besides just pushing the information out to invite it for in person or whatever venue is appropriate attend already scheduled meetings etc. What are we going to have in sunny buses to tell people? So we'll have we'll have car cards we'll have a survey link. We'll have surveyors on board at certain times not a huge presence planned right now because we're going to focus more on the in-person events in Watsonville but in the first round we actually had surveyors right at 71 69 because we know people don't take online surveys and often to get the response we have to be there in person filling out the survey responses for the for the person. So it's a very time consuming effort but it's the only way to get responses. I want to thank you for the presentation and it's very useful and I'm very much looking forward to the 96 page report and then we have a lot of other questions but one thing that does come to mind and I'm highlighting this for Danielle taking any significant changes in the middle of an academic year is a challenge for both Cabrillo College and UCSC. Already trustees are preparing orientation for incoming students who will arrive in September. They'll live with the system as as it is today for three months and then they'll be re-oriented to a new system. What we saw today it looks like that may be less significant for the UC area but Cabrillo College could have some significant changes. So keeping mindful of how to do the outreach and reorientation and information distribution to those big populations of riders will be a good task from December. Thank you Daniel. The timing is not ideal so there's a big disruption coming in December so we're sorry for that. I almost think it'll be a positive because we'll have students already on campus during that first semester. We'll have the ability to talk to people directly. I have a few questions and I have some comments so I'm wondering if we have any non-profit partners that would be willing to help us do the serving because looking at a lot of the populations that we're looking for are certified some non-profits so we're just wondering if there's any partnership there. As I mentioned there's this list of 30 or so stakeholders. I'd be happy to share it with you to review if you're missing any and we are working with Ecology Action on the in-person outreach to provide Spanish language assistance and less. And there will be those focus groups with those organizations where the team will be able to have a more in-depth conversation with those non-profits and you know see what it is that they need in terms of being able to push out the outreach to the populations they serve. I'm wondering about the fall pool so I saw that it was 1,000 individuals and I'm wondering if there is numbers for how many people on Watsonville surveyed. I saw that there was a survey in person so I'm just wondering kind of that 1,000. It was a telephone pool of 1,000 residents okay so that was evenly distributed throughout the county. That wasn't an online no no it was a telephone survey. So I'm hoping that we can get an online survey because I'm hearing a lot of assumptions about Watsonville that are really frankly insulting and we have internet people know how to use the internet there's certain populations of course that don't but online surveys work really well in Watsonville. We just keep sharing them on social media so I would really push for that especially for our part of the county and I have to say that I'm really disappointed in what I saw today. I'm wondering why there's not a frequency of 15 minutes in Watsonville. We simply don't have the resources to deliver today but there it is a it is in the future plan which we're not showing yet which we're building on this summer but basically those two lines one and two would move to 15 minutes in the future. Okay I'm I'm really glad to hear that because that what I saw is not equitable and it's unacceptable. So I have been part of a bus stop and from my bus stop if I were just meeting with us it would take me 45 minutes to get anywhere that I needed to go assuming that's the best I could do it but I can walk anywhere within 25 minutes and that's shameful that's embarrassing. I'm on this board to represent people who actually use the service and I don't think it's rocket science that people don't use the service because it's not there and that's not to say I'm not trying to disparage I'm just really frustrated because I see people outside my house every single day waiting to use the bus the bus doesn't come they got to get somewhere and they walk. I see you know people with disabilities I see mothers with children I see students and those are the people that we need to serve. Again I was just hearing some kind of disturbing assumptions about Watsonville and really really challenged you to think about Watsonville we don't just exist in Watsonville and come to Santa Cruz to live our lives we live our lives in our city in our community and we need to be served we need that we need to be able to hop on a bus and to get to the grocery store or to go to the city building or to go to the post office and that's not happening so I would just really challenge you to think about equity and think about who you're serving and think about you know people that really need the service that don't use it because it doesn't exist and that's why and we you know we are a really engaged community so I really don't like those assumptions that I heard so I just wanted to make those comments. Thank you for those comments and in both alternatives we are looking to double the frequency on most of the local service within Watsonville so currently as Dan just showed in the map there's basically only hourly routes except for the 71 essentially all of the routes 79 we're going for an hour and maybe 30 minutes 72 and 75 would be scheduled to be every 30 minutes on Green Valley and then there'd be two 30 minute routes freedom and on name so and it it is a pretty significant we spent a lot of time in Watsonville and if we miss the point if we miss the priorities there's there's absolutely time to revisit that and revisit our approach towards outreach the assumption that we need to be in person that online doesn't work quite as well was our experience in the first round and our experience with other what we've heard from other organizations this was the 33 that overwhelmingly we heard online is working to be there in person we're going to have both options the online service is going to watch next week and those are assumptions and I'm telling you as a person who lives in Watsonville represents Watsonville I constantly get worried the surveys work why is it online is there a link can I share it that's what I hear yeah so it'll absolutely be online we just based on what we heard in the first round and maybe making a bigger effort to try to be there in person we're doing our general treatment right now and we're going to survey in Watsonville okay so thank you I have comments and then some questions and then I guess a final comment I first want to say I appreciate the writer that came today to speak from Watsonville I mean my journey was 40 minutes in a car that I drove with you know and I can only imagine how long it took her to get here to come and speak and so I want to say thank you and those are the writers that we need to be prioritizing as we move forward as a board you know and she was speaking you know on behalf of a part of our community that has disabilities and that should be important to us um as I say I repeat this all the time the 91x is very important to me I feel that we went to the students at Caprio and we promised them if they you know put some sort of fee on themselves we would secure the 91x I remember our bus drivers were out there everyone was was out there advocating for this and then they stripped the 91x and that really as you saw today not only affects students but it also affects other people as well who and quite frankly more people are trying to get from Watsonville to Santa Cruz because they've worked there the people working going from Santa Cruz to Watsonville you know so we have to keep that in mind as well you know that we're the group of people are coming from to travel um I may have read this incorrectly but I think in plan B it looks like one of the routes was cut um people that beat the back up on the highway one and two it looks like I think one was removed give me a second to the right um slide here so we can make sure we are talking about the same thing um so let's see so yes one and two see how you have on highway one one and two they're both at a frequency of 30 minutes looks like yeah and then you go to the next slide two is now goes down to 60 minutes yeah so the reason is wrong no that's correct so the reason for that is A is leaning towards frequency so there's two one and two operate every 30 minutes between Santa Cruz and Watsonville what B does is it brings back a period 91x and a rural freedom basically the 71 Watsonville the Santa Cruz returns whereas in a rural freedom is Cabrillo Cabrillo college to down so those lines don't mean northbound southbound that they're just thrown up there to fine see how there's two my eyes are bad but I still see two there's two 30 minute routes on highway one in A and in B there's one 30 minute route and it's and one peak period 91x and one hourly route so I guess my you know I I read I saw that you were doing you're holding the operating does three hours in the morning three hours of the evening I mean that doesn't do I mean that doesn't do a community that we're supposed to serve during us the best service you know to get us up and down up and down the county so I mean I really think that we should really focus how we can improve this I mean this has been something this is the route post and so I hope that when you go back and you can you know it's a priority um I know that we're having our national night out coming up there's hundreds of people go to there's two locations there's going to be one off a free valley road we call Mesa village so that's coming up I already got the um flyer for it August that's the first Tuesday of August and then I think city of Watsonville just we do ours oh our artists also not dispersed they do a big one downtown and so you'll get a lot more people than at the the farmers market and I think those that's a target group that you're gonna want to you're gonna want to make sure you you address and I just in one of my guess a comment to make about that you know over the last 20 years we decreased service by 30 I mean if we're trying to really reduce our carbon footprint here in this community that we're going the wrong way and we want to make sure that we're keeping people um you know wanting to use our service we're doing the wrong thing so um I'm not surprised that people moved away from writing our service to other alternative methods of getting to where they need to be because we've cut our service by 30 percent that is crazy like when I saw that today I was really really astonished um and I and and I and I don't know other parts of the county um you know kind of address or or experience the same that we do but I was just you know when I drive by like on College Road there's a bus stop that's on literally the side of a hill and there was a woman standing there with all her bags I was like oh my god is this what we treat our people we have to make her stand on the side of a dirt hill like I don't know if that happens in any other part of the community but like I love to put all the bus stops and see people sit on my porch like we need to address that with more you know bus stops for in Watsonville a lot of times it's just a hole um you know and these are sometimes with elderly people who are having to stand there as we're saying 30 60 minutes to wait for a bus to get to them so I think we really need to you know kind of as we um my colleague was saying you know talk about equity throughout the whole county I pray for the city to step up to and get some bus stops that are great bus stops on their roads when they do their complete streets with you guys how does they should be participating in creating bus stops in search streets yeah but we're the I mean we're the metro service I mean so we're the ones that we should initiate here I mean the city is not the one buying bus stops if this is I mean I've never heard that a city is the city of Santa Cruz buy bus stops put them in I'm going to throw up my corner cities and put in bus stops and developers have to maybe in different locations where you were but do they do it here in Santa Cruz County I don't know but I know you got a massive fiscal deficit coming up you have a lot of problems and so you guys really need prioritized and I agree with you Director Deutre the biggest problem with this agency is between 2002 and even pre-covid numbers not even including all the declines in pre-covid you reduce the service hours in this system 50,000 service hours over that time period so it's time to start talking to the public it's time to start talking to our member agencies about supporting the agency as they do that development and I think for the most part they do we put in conditions of criminals all the time for bus stops that then cities work with the developer to get in the place well all I was asking was for equity across the board and you get a pushback saying that it's upon the city to do it and that needs to be a conversation that needs to come to the board because this is something that's new so I don't think it's only the city but the city has it's their streets and they have the ability to go out to brands they have the ability to talk to the developers they have a lot of tools in their tool bag to assist the agency I'm not saying it's all their problem but I'm saying if that's a big emphasis of yours and I think it should be that you should be talking to the city manager well these people are writing our service why is that not that's not priority priority for us to make sure that we're taking care of them okay but we to put a bus stop in so we have bus stops I know we're upgrading our bus stops I've had this conversation I give them a place to set and put in the area improvements and give them a place of shade that's a $50,000 well we just built a Freedom Boulevard and we've had this conversation you and I gave brand new bus stop which I'm sure they did not pay for right so that that should have the bus stop coming in to make sure that people are being taken care of as we move forward when we put developments in Watsonville we require this you know so your biggest problem here in Metro is you've reduced the service hours 50,000 service hours over 20 years that's what your public is saying what's the service yeah and that's one I've also talked about service but I'm also you know talking about across the board if we're putting in bus stops Santa Cruz they should also go to Watsonville and I know they're putting in Santa Cruz so that's all I'm saying thank you um Dr. Jason I want to thank uh Dan John for the presentation really great presentation I had a just a quick question I noticed on alternative B that um route 18 was changed to every 15 minutes in that 1910 when Dr. 30 else was wearing what I went into like that decision I think I know yeah it's just to again the trade-off between meeting towards frequency and meeting towards coverage in any way uh eliminate service on high street around the time and add that service in 1819 to bring it both up to 15 minutes and it'd be we keep service on the time for that high street but not only at nameless institutes in one route 18 it was in 15 minutes right that's 18 which is okay that's what my question was 18 to 17 because the 18 is the has the highest demand in any metro route system okay so yeah okay thank you Dr. Koenig and then um I also have some questions to comments if all directors are very good just one quick follow-up question um looking at the one and the two going from Watsonville north first of all that I assume that those are two separate routes they're both from north and south right um to because of about 30 minute services could they be overlapping the way to effectively create a 15 minute route at least between Watsonville and I mean Cabrillo yeah yeah I'm sorry so they will depart every 15 minutes from Watsonville to Santa Cruz so from the Watsonville traffic center it's every 15 minutes at two points north same thing point south Santa Cruz down because of the different routes they take one freedom airport at one main uh it's going to look at a little off by the time they get to Cabrillo so that's why Daniel was showing a purple line instead of a red every 10 to 20 minutes which you could extend that purple line all the way through highway one it's there's no stops there so it's not really useful to show that um but through that stretch from 41st state park there's pretty close to 15 minute service we just didn't want to say it's exactly 15 minute service because of the different routes that the different streets that they take in Watsonville so it's 10 20 minutes I think plus every god I mean I'm going to come to you director uh here's Garner's comment like there's no red lines in Watsonville but this you know the double blue double dark blue is functionally getting close yeah can I add something to that it's much closer functionally to that in alternative a than an alternative b from the perspective of Watsonville transit center because the one and the two stay together for long and the two doesn't branch it means that at Watsonville transit center you have arrivals and departures not almost every 50 minutes not quite it's actually probably closer to 10 and 20 in alternative a in alternative b because the two branches out and some of it goes on freedom boulevard and others on highway one there's a big difference in time and so actually you're getting closer to that 20 or 30 minute time interval between departures going eastward or northward however you want to do that and you see this in the access analysis for a person standing at the Rio College under alternative a there's much more access improvement on airport freedom and main street than the reason alternative b and that's due to the branching of the routes and alternative and alternative b so even though alternative b brings back the 91 x a actually provides more access to residents of Watsonville or from this map at the jobs the residents in Watsonville from you see the blue it's more blue on yeah check so this is at Watson if you keep this up I mean it's I would love to see a map where we can you know basically say that's from Watsonville to downtown Santa Cruz in 45 minutes so for that is that going to be like longer planning more resources kind of a thing that we can factory that so this the travel time assumptions here include wait time and then you show up randomly to the transit center and and try to catch a bus so in a 30 when the routes every 30 minutes the average rate time is 15 minutes and routes every 60 minutes like on the 91 x don't turn to be it's every 30 minutes so that's fact driven to the coverage here if you're a person that knows when you're going to catch that bus exactly and you reduce 15 30 minutes from this map so you're going apart I mean the travel time is about a little over an hour still on both routes about an hour I think yeah so but part of what you're seeing here is walking waiting transit right it's not just the time on the bus so I think it's going to feel a little bit longer to a transit rider to someone that says oh I know when to catch a bus and then I'm just thinking about my on bus trip time but that's not the way that typical person experiences the system or a new person that's just wants to leave not tie their life in a day to the bus schedule essentially um if I might add just for that if to give you a goalpost for that um that goal of like could you get from Watsonville Transit Center to downtown Santa Cruz in say 45 minutes including waiting to make that possible you'd really need an all day service running at least every 30 minutes non stop on highway one between the two maybe even not even stopping on main street on the way there like you need you really need higher frequency all day um and skipping as much as possible the stops on the way if that's if that's the priority thank you you um I have just a couple of questions and then we'll take it to public comment and then close this agenda item um thank you for the presentation and the work so far and this was clear and thorough and clearly we have more work to do and and I see the plan for the work that's coming um I know I didn't hear this but I wanted to ask specifically are our surveyors bilingual okay and then um I didn't see this on the map because we weren't covering the whole county but are there any all recommendations for north coast or body do a little of those routes be affected I'm in the short term plan on the short term resources okay this is a little bit outside of what you're pushing to think but do we have the capacity to put e-bikes on our buses right now and will be future I have an e-bike it's 80 pounds I do try to put on the bus in times it's exceedingly challenging um so they fit it's just it's okay yeah all right so so we do have the capacity it's whether we the person has the strength um and then just to reiterate um director Lynn's comments around um outreaching to youth and young adults they will be an important voice and as we see they're um taking advantage of the youth cruise free program and they will be our future ridership so just to reiterate that we should reach out to them and I know john you met with a copa youth as we did so that's that's a great group as well as the schools and then also to say that I would be happy to and probably a lot of other directors to do the outreach through social media newsletters for what's coming um and then just the last comment that I learning what I've learned I'm going to take this to the work that I'm doing with my city council on the housing element because I think all of our jurisdictions are revising our housing element and it's a good opportunity for us a big big picture of what transit's going to look like in the future um how we want our communities to say the word grow um in the next five 10 15 20 years but there is an intersectionality there of housing and transit and as each of us go back to our jurisdictions let's think about that I mean your comments around bus stops that made me think about that how are we thinking about transit borders where are they where are they not where is our housing so just a reminder for myself and an invitation to others to um to look at housing element and other opportunities that that we have before us as big policy decisions I think that's that's the end of my comments any last comments from directors before I take it out I know there have been no upgrades and here and I'm thinking the same thing you are we've had no upgrades to our bus stops in 20 years or more most of them are not covered most don't have a bench but we do have housing coming in and it can be tied developer to fund those things as all part of that project so this but it's all the housing that we're having to deal with overwhelming but this is the time to be looking at transit and there's new state laws around parking parking so there's a lot of opportunity for us to to push and our little restrictions development that they're building the bus stops or they have to pay a fee so we already do that so I think every condition so they should do that yeah absolutely we just haven't had projects along those runs right yeah the corridors to that they're coming with our name we're sorry all right so with that I'll see if there's anyone in the public who'd like to comment on this presentation may I add a couple comments regarding equity yeah just a moment just a moment we have some one from the public I just wanted to make sure that there wasn't an impression that we hadn't been looking at equity in the course of this work I think that equity is obviously a really broad topic that incorporates a lot of issues in people's lives and I don't want to pretend like just changing where the lines go on a map addresses everything but I want to tell you at least what we've done um there was a quick there was a question earlier about the Spanish language surveying I also want to point out that all the surveying materials online uh will be available in Spanish as well the public meeting is happening in English and simultaneously in Spanish with a native Spanish speaker who is also a transit expert who I work with every day so just want to put that out there also in the analysis and this will be shown in the report I only had so many so much time so much of your time I wanted to take today we've also looked at how this impacts differentially between the average resident versus residents of color low income low income residents Latino residents specifically and so we are able to show based on all of those measures that the positive impacts are generally felt more strongly among all of those marginalized populations um than among the average residents so that's not a complete answer it doesn't it doesn't have to satisfy you there you have it's perfectly within your remit to feel that more should be done um but I just want you to know that this has is an inherent part of the process and that we are looking at it that's all thank you thank you Daniel okay over to you all right here we go so first of all man you guys are slamming my boy you gotta calm down a little bit with that John has a lot of things he has to deal with right we have politicians you come in you're worried about your constituents you have to deal with that you've got to deal with me and probably the most restrictive labor contractor is when it comes to scheduling stuff he doesn't always get to make the decisions that you want him to make because I won't let him in addition to that there's also the database stuff right so when we're talking about equity and we're talking about the future of the transit when we look at it from a purely numbers standpoint it is nobody's fault that the university is a massive amount of our ridership that's why it's getting 15 minutes service first it's not because we don't want to do it it's because we have to do certain things based on what we have the overall biggest thing for me and I pulled these numbers up so that we can actually get exact numbers in 2002 fixed drought serves 6,270,000 rats at 2012 we were down to 5.5 million in 2022 we were down to 2.775 okay we're dropping massive amounts of ridership in a 20-year period our bus stops haven't changed they're exactly how they were 20 years ago and that's a problem it is but the bigger problem that we have is that our system is not serving the community no one here is able to just stand up and say this is exactly what's going to work for us so it is extremely important that we do get feedback from every area that we possibly can we had a week long event where we came up with this plan and everyone was invited and I'm sorry to say it but only one representative from Watsonville showed up in the three days and what they told us was you need to go in person because Watsonville doesn't like to do things online they don't like to call it they don't like to do so these were not assumptions that we made these were things that we're doing based on what our experience was and what we were told by your own representatives representatives that work here and have access to these meetings on a monthly basis and decide not to attack so we're not trying to make assumptions for you we're not trying to be inequitable but I don't think that it's fair for John to take the heat for all of these problems when we've offered multiple as I myself has stand here and I invited every single one of each of these meetings Rebecca shows up Larry shows up Schubber likes to have an email I haven't heard anything from anyone else not a single thing we are not keeping you up you are allowed to come you are allowed to voice for your constituents but it is not fair for you to come up here and burn the staff when we're working our asses off trying to get the best deal possible and you won't show up to help us so I would like you to think about that before we move any further thank you thank you and close that agenda item and we will move to agenda item 15 that's a adopt the resolution time that title two of the administrative code procurement policy to increase the CEO general manager's procurement authority thank you yeah so I'm going to be taking this on behalf of staff hello your purchasing manager Joe Jeffries is in the audience if you have any questions so at this time the CEO's procurement authority is 50,000 or less that's been in place for almost a decade and it's been on our wish list our I mean staff primarily to increase that threshold so that lower value projects don't need to be brought to the board you know staff has to wait for the board cycle which is only once a month in order to move forward with lower value projects and then of course secondarily prepare board materials which takes time and so staff was thinking about asking for more authority for the CEO originally we were thinking 100,000 we've been keeping this around for a few years but then last month the board approved 200,000 or less for public works contracts under the Kafka process and so we all thought wouldn't it be nice to have just one number that staff would have to keep track of so they wouldn't have to keep track of when does it go to the board when does it not if there's just 200,000 or less it does not need to go to the board regardless of the type of contract it is and if it's more it does go to the board obviously you all have the ability to choose that number because it's your authority that's being delegated but that's the thing behind it and then staff included a table to show you you know where similarly situated agencies are and you can see you know there's really no one almost sorry scott's valley is still at 50,000 but other than scott's valley everybody is at a minimum 100 and then you know goes up to a million obviously which that's a huge agency but you know in the 200 100 to 200 range is pretty common and other than that there's there were some revisions that were made to the protest policy in 2021 that actually didn't wind up getting put into the administrative code so that's why it depends on the protest policy you are approved those several years ago we just caught that issue when we were doing these updates and with that I can answer questions or Joan can answer your questions thank you Julie directors I have a question um if you were you have any thoughts advantages versus disadvantages making this policy yeah I think like from you know from my point of view and I don't care whatever just matter to me but from staff's point of view administratively having one number to keep track of I think we'd be really helpful and you could always ask for you know quarterly reports or something to keep an eye on like what what is going on if you wind up thinking like things are out of control you can always pull it back um yeah all the contracts are still run through legal you know we have eyes on everything um you know and if there was ever a time where there was a project that was controversial for example you know you could say like we really want this one to come before the board because we want to have a substantive conversation about it but if I were staff I would love that one number would um would it be for me I would I'm fine with the number but I want to know that maybe a certain amount or a hundred good number just so that we're aware of it I mean that's in the check register and all that but but I think maybe maybe a notification of a certain amount just so that you know we're keeping tabs on it I don't know if that's monthly I think that would be useful yeah I'm going to say that was part of the plan is that Michael would be keeping a list of anything above that you say a hundred yeah I think that's a great idea anything above that threshold that he has awarded on his own authority he would bring that to you guys in CEO report on a basis so we would definitely be keeping track of it um so what's the annual budget 60 and um that's similar to I guess the cities so we're going to give an extra hundred thousand above what the the cities in our Kimball separate scott's valley for automatic approval by the CEO we're going to be I mean should we not be consistent with the rest of Santa Cruz County or I mean that's well no I mean I think that I mean I think projects over a thousand should be brought to us to make the decision that's that's pretty big now I just just a reminder you are you have already approved construction projects 200 000 and above or and what we're already authorized to the CPL and just just to remind you of that so this is like services and stuff and stuff supplies materials and equipment oh Dr. Rodkin yeah when I first wait my unmute yes when I first got on the transit board I was you know deeply concerned that the board see everything and you know we not sort of trust everything to take care of itself I read the entire budget carefully including 20 to check register every every meeting and I have to say we we should just recognize that the cost of doing things has just gone up dramatically and it really does tie up our staff when they have to come to us and in all of my experience we have never challenged one of those decisions literally and in my 30 plus year 32 years on the board or something and I have a lot of confidence in our staff I do like the idea that we would hear about the ones that are over that number you know I'm over over a hundred okay in the CEO's report but I really don't think that honestly that it's really necessary for us to look through those things I don't think the board really will do that in any serious way and the price of doing things has just gone up really really dramatically including not just the capital projects that we've already approved but the contract for someone to do some work that we want to have done quickly and it takes two months to do it when it can be done in a month if we didn't do this kind of thing so I support this but you know pending hearing from the public about it I think this is reasonable and I have I don't have any fear that somehow we're going to have money the money being spent that we wouldn't approve it obviously still has to be spent consistent with our budget it's not like you can just you know come up with a brand new idea on us the CEO cannot just come up with the idea was only go out and spend two hundred thousand dollars that's to be something that we're in general I've approved the sort of activity but the specific contract coming to us because it's only a you know it goes over a hundred thousand I think it's it's past time to move it to the higher number that's my thoughts thank you any questions or comments anyone from the public bring it back to the board I'll move that we approve for staff recommendation Director Brown aye Director Downey aye Director Dutra aye Director Colin Perry Johnson aye Director Coney aye Director Lynn aye Director McPherson aye Director Neeson aye Director Paikler Director Keros Carter aye and Director Ruffin aye thank you thank you Julie we are moving on to item 16 and that is our CEO oral report right your treat all right well um you know I uh I just want to back up just a little bit and I'm not sure we ended on a real great note with the planning stuff but I gotta tell you it's what it's an excited about being here because I just envisioned building a much better metro and having lots of people be able to enjoy that 15-minute service that is kind of the sweet spot that you want on these key corridors and uh so you know I'm full steam ahead with that these things that you looked at today were meant to be really minor adjustments and what really was meant as the sweet spot of Jared Walker and associates in our planning department is a world-class system that we're bringing to you in September and that's when things get really exciting because we're not only going to bring you into world-class system but probably a couple different ways you can get there so you know that's what keeps me up at night is the thought that you know in the near future not like the long-distance future but in the near future we can go out and talk to the public about you know some of these world-class changes that we want to bring in and I uh I think they'll be well received um I think you know the economy and what's happened uh you know at the fed level in other places you know has just taken you 50 000 service hours in the wrong direction over the last 20 years and I want to get back to where do you feel like and people will make the comment of man metro is a bitch in place to uh you know to get great transportation so uh I'm hopeful that that's your goal I know it's going to be a little tough to get there at times there'll be bumps along the road and you know I'll be quite honest with you I've filled a couple of auditoriums full of people that are mad about changes and I just keep reminding the board it's they're here because they love the service they're here because they love what you provide and this is good times to be able just to talk about this with the public um but I think there's a much better system out there for Watsonville a much better system out there for the entire service area and that's my goal is in September when we bring to you what we feel like is a great world-class system you get a vision and an excitement on trying to get there um had just a couple of things and then I know we've got a closed session so I'll be brief but we did take delivery of five new battery electric buses they're your first five battery electric buses manufactured by Kele and man they are awesome I mean I don't think they put a governor on them yet but these things take off like a Ferrari and they're just beautiful and they're quiet and they're everything that you only visual things or with the battery and they are the latest uh the uh the uh range on them is significantly better than anything you've seen in the market so far so we're excited about them we've got some bus wraps coming up we had to either paint them or put our bus wrap on them so we decided to do them in one right at a time to basically get these wraps on at that cost neutral to the agency but I don't know uh do we have a a slide on it no just keep going oh there we go so these are the five that'll be on the the Gehlich buses you've got a gorgeous that's a falcon a peregrine falcon you've got the poppy bus that we've wrapped and is sitting in the back got some gorgeous sea otters and you've got a butterfly collection there and you've got some scenery from uh from the Monterey Bay so we're pretty excited we're going to use these are our first five gehlicks and their world class and battery capability that they have and they're beautiful we're going to do a special event and make sure that we get the public involved in uh you know inaugurating the service so look for some notes from Danielle at some point in the near future she's trying to get something out perhaps uh in september uh to get folks a chance to come back from their vacations in july and august and be part of just celebrating uh you know a really nice milestone um yep what was the lead time on these and are they are they for all the routes are they for 17 express or some of them are for 17 express they just have one door and half the upgraded seating uh it's probably uh two i don't know john what are how many of those are express buses four out of the five so um yeah and i think the lead time to be totally honest with you would pull a lot of strings to get them and i think uh i ordered them when i first came on four and so like 15 months more came on and you did a rfb or to select building or how did you select uh john remind me how did we go back to our charts yes let's take yeah we went off of somebody's we piggyback right i can provide two more information thanks so uh in addition chuck mentioned 29 buses that are fully funded ready for you to execute in the fall the hydrogen buses and then we have another 10 buses on top of that that i think will bring me at the same time for a total purchase of 39 hydrogen buses so you'll have one of the biggest hydrogen fleets in the nation and um you know if there's ever some magic that has been played one the moon is an expert at uh raining in the money i think it's somewhere around 20 million dollars in vouchers brought in to be able to get us to 39 on the hydrogen buses so you know it's how to uh work sacraments really well um i will tell you you know chuck talked a little bit about hydrogen pricing and that is the risk component of the hydrogen technology it's projected to go down which is why we felt it was better by for metro but just to give an idea of how it currently works and why we're comfortable with what we're doing is hydrogen has a current price tag as chuck mentioned of about 14 dollars a gallon equivalent so uh from there you get a bunch of rebates that the state provides and you land on what is it per gallon equivalent price of about nine dollars so just imagine a gallon equivalent of diesel uh being nine dollars which is pretty pricey but i think the thing that you do remember is that with hydrogen you get twice the efficiency so you will go twice as far on a gallon equivalent of hydrogen than you will on a gallon equivalent of diesel so in actuality you're paying more than 50 cents for a gallon equivalent of your uh that's a comparable product so and it's trending downward and uh as i mentioned the last uh month we uh we were one of the founding partners in arches which is the uh it's really an alliance of a bunch of transit agencies and a bunch of other industries that will realize that you need hydrogen vehicles the whole goal of arches is to land one of the uh and hydrogen hubs that the federal government is hoping to position within the united states land one of those in california and significantly drive down the price as uh uh director coney had mentioned let's get into uh creating our own hydrogen plant and that's exactly what transit agencies and others are doing there'll be over a thousand buses in the alliance and it looks really good i mean if you're ever talking to senator lair or your assembly members uh this is a good topic to talk about because they'll have a lot to say about this arches grant and complimenting federal money the state money and it looks like it's on a really good trajectory to get done right i didn't want to leave today without telling you there's some excitement around the corner uh with your with buying new buses they don't have tailpipes they don't mean that goal we mentioned last time about a nad hoc midi that had formed uh their uh commentary johnson or the napot and we also complimented it with a working group of uh opinion leaders in the community to take a look at our deficit in 27 and take a look at the potential of maybe doing a ballot measure perhaps in november 24 and so that uh that group met and uh i think the going out of the meeting the comment thought was uh staff get with senator lair and see if he can run some legislation if it allow us to be on a ballot uh not necessarily answering all the questions that would need to be answered by the board as to whether you you want to be on a ballot you can't get to a second base without going through the legislature to get to that first base so with that in mind uh staff has worked uh with uh senator lair your legislation that is currently uh been introduced this week is sp872 and it was double referred meaning it's going to go to two committees and in the senate and two committees in the assembly um and your first up is uh on lens uh with the senate governments and finance committee we've briefed the staff members and all four of the committees they like what they see because it's very it's similar to what they used in the past and our committees have been amenable to the language so they don't foresee issues and the language does not uh in any way uh take away from the capacity that currently exists for the member agencies with potential sales taxes on their end so basically all it did it was creating an exemption for sanikers metro beyond a ballot within the next 10 years and it does not affect the capacity of the member agencies so uh i'll ship you the final language it literally was being sawed and that's for this which is that you minor tweaks didn't change any of the intent uh but uh should be out and then i'll send you the letter of support that you sent in for that the legislation so and i'll keep you posted on it i just wanted to make mention that it is moving it will at least give you the opportunity to further explore if and when you'd like to do something on the ballot and with that said it's been said a couple of times um and your staff has been like amazing you have 13 operators in a class that will send the release into service and you have an additional 20 coming in right behind them who have been hired and that will take you uh to holy staff and so we're hoping in the fall you're holy staff and that's an issue that's in the rearview mirror and there's not a lot of transit agencies in california let alone nations that have done what you know margo and anemone trainers have done but don and our hr staff have done i mean it just they have uh knocked it out of the park 72 applications at this last goal around uh that they have to work through ready for that class appointment so i think that you know knock on the wood but to hire this many people get them trained to get them into revenue service driving those huge buses with all the things going on because i think you're not seeing a lot more incidents with your buses as a testament that you're trying to work around the flock to make sure nobody gets released you know until they're ready to go till they're competent so a lot of good things going on in metro and so i'm pretty excited to be here and uh if you haven't taken any questions did you meet some of you new drivers at the barbeque and ask hear their energy and excitement yeah yeah july 22nd if you can make it to the rodeo with the company picnic that'd be a great chance i'll just flag for some of us who've been around for a while but the last coa we did was all about reduction and hearing the ridership numbers that grandin said that the change in service hours over a 20-year span it seems much of that occurred around 2016 and to be doing another coa and see plans for improvements whether it's from 60 to 30 or 30 to 15-minute service i think that's uh going around the bend in a good way and i think all of us i mean you know i i hear at scotswally about services you know all what we had to do to make ends meet during the great reset you know almost you know i mean almost bankrupt that's mine and i know in our city we we cut tremendously and we're still willing we're still hearing and pandemic it we're still hearing about the services that have been cut and we're having to face the same things you were saying that you know people are just going to wind up in an apartment program now how come these streets aren't fixed why is our parking lot repaired so we're all struggling to recover and you know i appreciate the work that's been done they're all struggling to get back to the standards that we once had i forget the percentage our staffing i believe we're only 50 some percent of what we had in the 90s so i just added you know people understand it was a 30 percent cut that we took on our budget and we only reduced i said only but we only reduced the service by 12 and a half percent so the district made a really strong attempt to find ways to meet that budget deficit that wasn't taking or taking service away but it's just you know when you have a 30 cut in your budget you have no choice but to cut something it's just the reality of it report um first question is about the elected buses so the delivery of these five is that kind of all the elected buses that we have on order or are there additional five that's all you have all right okay just making sure i'm just trying to keep track of all these error emission buses that we need to find around okay great uh next question is as far as the urchins uh effort grant um we talked to central coast community energy at all about i mean uh because it's the one public entity that seems to be managing to make money uh of course the mission is um producing missions for our region and it seems like potentially there couldn't be some aligned individuals there um yeah i didn't expect to do with them yet about any kind of collaboration on this project no i don't think so i think our collaboration as far as been they wanted to get a demonstration project set up with metro on an additional elected bus and they wanted to do something that could be charging as opposed to plugging it in uh so that's kind of where their interest has lied so far in the conversations but that's a great point i mean i uh i'll reach out to them and make sure they know where we're at with the hydrogen we get propose