The recording stopped. Well, yeah. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the April 9th, 2024 meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. I'd like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Certainly. Supervisor Koenig. Here. Friend. Here. Hernandez. Here. McPherson. Here. And Cummings. Here. With that, I'd like to ask if there's any member of the board who would like to dedicate today's moment of silence. Nope. Seeing none. I will take a moment to have a moment of silence. Thank you. I'd like everyone to join us for the Pledge of Allegiance. The willingness to apply the United States of America to do the revolving for research in San Juan one nation under God, neither visible, liberty, and each other's survival. Thanks, everyone. Our agenda is consideration of late additions to the agenda, additions and deletions to consent and regular agenda. So I'd like to ask the CEO, Mr. Carlos Palacios, if there's any additions or deletions to the agenda today. Chair Cummings and members of the board, yes, there are a number of additional materials and corrections. On the regular agenda, item number seven, there's additional materials. There's a new attachment, budget and brief, which is inserted after packet page 24. On item number 10, there's additional materials. There's a revised memo, packet page 80 replaced. Executive summary sentence three should read. Valets have been mailed and must be received by the close of April 9th, 2024, public hearing. There's also a revised memo, packet page 81, replace discussion paragraph three, sentence three should read. Valets have been mailed and must be received by the close of the April 9th, 2024, public hearing. On item number 11, there's additional materials. Revised memo, packet page 83 is replaced. Executive summary sentence three should read. Valets have been mailed and must be received by the close of the April 9th, 2024, hearing. On the consent agenda, item number 13 is removed, asking the board to remove that item. It's not quite ready. And then item number 40 on the consent agenda, there's additional materials. There's a revised attachment, resolution confirming benefit assessment rates for CSA 53, FY 24, 25, packet pages 428 through 435 are replaced. Thank you. That concludes the corrections. Thank you very much. Are there any members of the board that would like to remove an item from the consent to the regular agenda? Seeing none, that will open up public comment. This is an opportunity for members of the public to speak to items that are not on the agenda. Or if they would like to speak to an item that's on the regular agenda, just note that you will not be able to speak on that item again when that item is presented. And so with that, we'll start with the first speaker here in person. Yeah, good morning. My name is James Ewing and it's February, April 9th. So some people in the room are going to be talking about the Mountain Charlie Road situation. You know, I've been doing professional business in this county for more than 25 years. I moved here in 1905. I was happy to be a road manager for a couple of years on Oak Ridge Road. Now dealing with the permit process with the county of Santa Cruz, where at one time it was at the largest building department in the state of California, even though it's the second smallest county. You know, you need to go in there with actually the answers. When I have a friend who lost his road on Mountain Lion Lane, initially their repair was 30,000. And then some bureaucracy was saying they needed to drill down 90 feet to bedrock. It became like 300,000. So I'm not sure what the state of that road is, but as a suggestion, you know, there are people that are still alive that have been doing road work for 40, 50, 60, 70 years that I personally know. And what seemed to work for a long time, you know, almost 100 years ago is going to work now. So sometimes you just have to fix things on your own. And, you know, it's not that I can recommend any lawyers for lawsuits, but there's just a lot of things going on that people aren't aware of. You know, what's going on with that deliberate explosion of the bridge, the Sir Francis Key. That was controlled demolition. It's my understanding that at the time, an average of 4,900 vehicles cross that bridge every day. That's commerce adding up to an average of $28 billion a day, which is over $10 trillion a year. We don't think that's going to trickle down to the West Coast. It really is. So just because you guys are pushing the Agenda 21 stuff doesn't mean people can, as lightly as possible, say no. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning, Chair Cummings, members of the board. Marcus Pimentel once said to me in a meeting, ISD are the heroes that no one knows about. And so today we are here to celebrate the retirement of one of those heroes, Eric Howe. And I'm going to turn it over to his manager, Stacey Lake. Hi, board members. I'm Stacey Lake, as Tammy mentioned, and this is Eric Howe. We've worked together in ISD. We started out in the basement, working with computers on the mainframes. And here we are today. Anyways, thank you for the proclamation. I'm going to read this out loud. Whereas it is a great pleasure that we acknowledge the outstanding contribution and commitment of Eric Howe, who has served the county of Santa Cruz for nearly 25 years. And whereas Eric joined the county in March of 2001 as a mainframe operator holding various system analyst positions before being promoted to ISD System Administration Analyst II in 2017 in the Information Services Department. And whereas Eric has served as a dedicated, loyal, and consistent employee, providing excellent IT service to over 3,000 county employees, backing up their data and then restoring it for them when needed, which was many times. And closing over 5,800 tickets. And that's while we've been keeping track of the ticket system. There were six years before that when we weren't. So he's closed a lot of tickets. He has displayed an unwavering commitment to excellence in each position he held in ISD. And his work ethic, professionalism, and attention to detail have earned him the respect and admiration of his colleagues. And whereas Eric officially retires on April 12th, 2024, from the Santa Cruz County, we will sure miss him. We are sure we will miss it. He will miss the county just as much as the county will miss him having them on their team. We know he will enjoy the new chapter, buying a house and moving to Michigan with his wife, Tracy. Now, therefore, I, Justin Cummings, chair of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors, hereby thank you honor and commend Eric Howe for his dedicated years to the service of the County of Santa Cruz. Thank you, everyone. I want to thank the Board of Supervisors, great people of the County of Santa Cruz, Tammy Weigel, Daisy Leig, and of course my wife, she's working me the whole time I've been here. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for your service and have fun in your retirement. Good morning. Good morning. I'm Katzman Sarto. I'm a COPA leader from Peace United Church on High Street. And I want to thank all of you, all of you for your work on preventing homelessness and working with COPA to come up with some measures that will help that. We are looking to develop useful tenant protections and measures to prevent homelessness at our COPA Canada Accountability Assembly in late January. COPA promised to get out the vote on the city and the county tax measures. We did that. We canvassed, we registered voters, we talked to families and friends and the both measures passed and we feel that this is a clear commitment from not only our side, but you know the COPA community which includes 30 congregations, unions, etc. across the two county area. But I'm here to ask you to make good on the promise to allocate a significant amount of the income from the county tax measure toward efforts that would protect tenants, prevent homelessness, and to work on helping people understand both tenants and landlords' rights and the laws that prevail there. Just one example of a parishioner of one of our COPA member institutions, she's facing eviction now. She has two children who have been stable in their home for 10 years, attending local schools, contributing to the community, and as always eviction, or not always, but very often eviction results in immediate homelessness. So we look forward to working with you and hoping that you guys will act now. Thank you. Yeah. Good morning. Good morning. Gloria Carroll, Child Welfare Director, and I just wanted to take a few moments to thank you all for adopting the proclamation to make April Child Abuse Prevention Awareness Month. Last fiscal year, we received over 2,300 calls for child abuse and neglect and served over 200 years out of home. We are really working hard to kind of shift this perception of abuse and lack of to prevent less system involvement. And it's really important a lot of our community providers are here because we want to strengthen our relationships with the community to help develop a shared responsibility so that we don't get so many calls for youth that are not abused and neglected. And I wanted to take a moment to introduce my colleague, Laura McLean, who is leading some of our prevention work in the community. So thank you so much. Really hopeful that you all will consider our flag raising ceremony at the end of the month. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you so much for your time today. My name is Stephanie Brown-Lew. I'm the executive director of the Positive Discipline Community Resources, a local nonprofit that supports parents and families. And I'm also the co-chair of the Children's Network for United Way of Santa Cruz County and a part of the Child and Youth Wellbeing Cabinet.   And I'm really grateful for the board for accepting this proclamation for Child Abuse Prevention Month and Awareness Month. The Children's Network is a convening body out of the United Way of Santa Cruz County that supports in providing greater access and awareness amongst us as service providers, educators, and decision makers to understand where are the gaps and where are the possibilities. I would like to read a couple of the whereas statements from the proclamation. Whereas every community has a stake in the safety, permanency, and well-being of its children and by promoting and supporting programs and services that provide resources for children and families, the community can be effective in preventing child abuse and neglect. Whereas the United Way of Santa Cruz County's Children's Networks partners with Family and Children Services who brings public education, government, and nonprofit agencies together to improve youth and well-being through improving school attendance and linking families to resources that support children and youth. And so I do invite you, as Gloria mentioned, to April 26, Children's Memorial Flag Raising. That will be an educational event complete with prevention tip sheet packets and an opportunity to have a moment of silence. Thank you. Thank you so much. Hello, supervisors. I am Lynn Petrovic, the executive director of Casa of Santa Cruz. And I'm Liz DePoyt. I'm the director of Safe Families for Children, a nonprofit in town that works to reduce child abuse and neglect and prevent foster care whenever possible. It's no surprise that we are both here in support of the Proclamation for Child Abuse Prevention Month. I am here. We are here also representing the family and child well-being cabinet. And we know the cabinet that's our driving mission is to strengthen families to prevent child abuse. We know that every case of child abuse is preventable when our families have the support that they need. And so we'd like to thank you on behalf of the cabinet for all of the resources that you put into our families in the county. So thank you for that. And we look forward to seeing you, hopefully at the end of the month at the flag raising ceremony. Thank you. I am Scott Dallow. I represent the Mountain Charlie Road community. The sign right here. I'd like to point out that today I just want to bring up awareness and later on in future meetings, I'd like to bring up solutions that we could do to work together to solve this problem. So back in February this year we had a catastrophic failure on Mountain Charlie Road and it blocked any access for people and also emergency vehicles. We understand that there's 600 plus miles of road that you guys have to maintain. And it's just one small piece here. We feel Mountain Charlie has a couple of different aspects about that deserve your attention. One is that we're parallel Highway 17 and it is an alternate route for emergency vehicles and critical situations to go through. So we'd like to highlight that point. The other three points I'd like to bring up is that if there's a fire, a CDU happened and we'd be naive to believe it won't happen again, there's no access for us to get out if a fire would happen on the south side. I mean, we could walk across but just the logistics of getting through are really challenging. So I'd like to highlight that. Also, we've had two incidents now with emergency vehicles getting access to the road to deal with an emergency situation. It's not that they couldn't make it up the road, it's that the traffic going down south though this narrow road has increased so much that actually there's been almost a collision with emergency vehicles trying to get access up to the road. So that's the point. The road is really not designed for that and I want to bring that up to your attention. And the fourth thing is that I'd like to bring up for your attention is that it's just the impact of the everybody's life especially the kids who have to commute to school. The 15-meg commute to Loma Prieta Elementary School has now a 45-meg commute and that's if Highway 17 has no traffic. So anyways, I want to bring up those points in a future meeting. I'd like to bring up solutions where we can work together and solve these problems. Thank you. Thank you so much. Hello, good morning, board. Thank you very much for listening the two minutes for myself and my neighbors. We're here today to show you that we are human and our lives matter that we're not just a piece of paper that you can continue to ignore. I have been shot at. I have had a gun held to me. A high-powered rifle has been shot through my front yard where my daughter used to park. I've had my dog stolen. My neighbor's dog's leg macheted. Another neighbor had his dog put in his drinking water and that is from a skinhead Nazi that the sheriff, Jim Hart, allows to continue to terrorize, vandalize, get away with felonies as compared to a 16-year-old in New York that stole a backpack and was in Rikers for three years. Richard Negobon had three felonies. The first one was cocaine possession and that one was dismissed. Again, he's white. He's not black. The second one he had was a shot gun and that one was a misdemeanor. If he had pled guilty to his third one, which was a stolen gun loaded in a vehicle on his person, the plea deal was we'll strike the on his person if you plead guilty to a felony. I'm asking that the board institute stat right now a red flag law against this person that continues to shoot us and the sheriff does nothing but support and write an argument in favor of him. Here are more victims of Richard Negobon, Jim Hart, and Bruce McBeerson for not doing his job Hello, my name is Dave Brindle and we own a property across from said person. Personally, I haven't had any problems with them, but I did have one of my friends go up camping on the property and they got into argument and exchanged whatever 30 rounds they shot back and forth at each other, which I don't think anyone should have to live with them. If you get an argument that you're going to have gunfire, people shooting at you.   They won't even tell them you on to it. Hey, you can't go shooting at people. We don't pull out guns for this type of stuff. So that's about all I have to say is it's like no one's willing to go up there. If you're in the city of Santa Cruz and someone says, oh, I pulled out a gun and I was firing it, right? You'd expect there'd be a lot of police there and they would take care of it right away. But it's almost like I had one police officer say, I don't I don't have no names. But he said, unless a judge orders me to go up there and do something, there's absolutely nothing I could do. And it was left at that. Thank you. I'm a neighbor as well. Can you speak into the microphone, please? Can you pull down closer if I can? There you go. That was my husband, David Brindle. This is my neighbor. She has a permanent injunction order that can be enforced right now. And Patty is an expert in substance abuse. Excuse me, ma'am. If I can have you please speak to us and hear the podium. I'm sorry. She's done all the research. I've had my experiences in the past before Richard even moved in. We had a situation with a different neighbor who was very aggressive, very intimidating. When I called the sheriff, he straight up told me what makes you think we're going to do anything about it. It's just stressful. I'm here now. I have a child.  And the sheriff, we know, will not come to help us if anything happens. And now hearing our neighbor's experience who is newer to me, it's just stressful that she's even gotten even worse. Now, we have a skinhead that's trying to take over, intimidate all the neighbors. I mean, vandalizing the water that they're drinking to me, that is like attempt to kill. It's not right. Anything else? Thank you very much. I want the red flag law. It can be initiated now. Biden's written it. Thank you. You had two minutes. Thank you so much. Good morning, board. My name is Eli Holliday. I'm an organizer with COPA, Communities Organized for Relational Power and Action, a union of 30 churches, union schools and Santa Cruz and Monterey County. And I think you all had the pleasure, maybe the misplasure of meeting with us at some point over your tenure. I'm here today for two reasons. The first is to commend the board and supervisor Cummings for a resolution on the consent agenda, which supports AB 2493, common sense law at the state level, limits the practice of charging unscrupulous application fees for people that are applying for multiple units within the same property management holding company. Just as an example for this, I met with somebody yesterday whose family paid over $2,000 on application fees in their apartment search, which, if you live paycheck to paycheck, quickly becomes a huge barrier towards getting into a new apartment. And oftentimes those people end up on the street. So we want to commend the board of supervisors for that. The second thing is, as we get into the budget season, I just want to remind the board that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of care. And as we're looking towards practices which can limit and eliminate, hopefully, homelessness in our communities, we want to think about how can we keep the people that are currently housed in homes? How can we create more housing for those people? Thank you, board. Thank you. Yes, hello, Mila Boyka for First District. And I'm a good example being victimized for 12 years already. And it's extremely difficult to get help in this county. I don't understand why it is impossible to assign some person and keep track on that assignment if the person really helps, the person who works for county. Because it seems like it's a lot of people who works for county. They all get paid very high, high salary, but there is no accountability. I've never seen here one person who was kept accountable. What I saw, do you know my complaints? Do you know that I filed for 12 years? Do you know it's probably a thousand complaints? And all those, many of those people got retired. Do you know they got farewell letters from your board? So they're a great job. So they're a great job to victimize people. I do agree with everybody who talked to you before me because this is what really happened.  There is no way to get help from sheriff department. There is no way. And if you begin to complain, you're going to be victimized horribly. And especially they're using criminals on probation that they let out who will terrorize their enemies and enemies we are who was victimized by the county. And this is mental health department who is on top of every department and they lead everything in the county. So you really need to take care of mental health department. And there is like their claims that they need more workers is useless because they need first of all to take care of current workers. Thank you. Before we speak, is there any member of the public who would like to speak during world communications at this point in time? Seeing no more people, you'll be the last person in public and then we'll move on to our online participants. My name is Dan Crenshaw. I'm also one of the residents affected by the mountain Charlie situation and Scott that are really good job of spelling out the things that are going on. I need to emphasize this is not just an inconvenience for the residents. It's not adding an hour to your commute. It's not getting kids up 45 minutes before we get them to school because you got to go to Scott's by way to come back up the hill. This is human life we're talking about. The fires we talked about and you're the mudslides that there's other parts of mountain Charlie that are kind of pending to slide out that will trap residents up there. There's already five houses up there that are trapped. We've worked with the county. We've had meetings with the county and I would like for the county to step up a little bit more. The responses and kind of the dead pan looks that we're getting are ineffective. This is a major concern. Mountain Charlie has not been maintained adequately for years. We pay our property taxes. Other things in the county get fixed and now when we're in trouble, now when we need help, now when we're actually trying to get something accomplished, there's no funds. I think that the county needs to figure out where to get those funds and do it quickly. This road cannot be slid out like those were very long. The incidents with the emergency vehicles, anybody gets hurt. It's human life will be lost because of an action of the county. The county needs to take action that needs to take it now. Thank you. Director Michalo. Thank you, Chair and Supervisors. Matt Machado, Director CDI. I do want to provide a quick update on Mountain Charlie since we're here talking about it. The last two weeks, it's still moving quite a bit where it's moving about a foot a week. And so that's significant. So we really need the movement to slow down so that we could start engineering a solution. Yesterday, we did cut in a ramp on the south side so that we could get a drill rig down into the slide itself so that we could install an inclinometer so that we could start measuring the movement, the depth of it, and start engineering a solution. So I would tell you that the county is committed to a solution to solving this problem. It's a major problem, but we're at the we're just at the hands of Mother Nature. And so we're waiting for the appropriate time. We actually were going to cut in a ramp on both sides yesterday, but the north side is still just too wet. We couldn't get equipment in there. So we're trying. We're moving as quick as we can. So I just wanted to assure the board that we're moving. We're taking action and we're going to solve it. Just going to take Mother Nature's cooperation and in some time. So thank you. Thank you for that update. All right. We'll move on to our online participants. Are there any members of the public online who'd like to speak to us at this time? Yes, Chair. We have speakers. Call in user one. Your microphone is now available. Marilyn Garrett. With the COVID-19 planned benefit call is in pressing people to get vaccinations. We need to look at in some depth as to what's really going on. I'm referring to a book here and this is for everyone. Excellent facts. The contagion myth why viruses, including coronavirus, are not the cause of disease by Dr. Thomas S. Cowan and Sally Fallon Morrell. And he speaks and this is from an interview with him on the same topic. Talks about a lot of people being sick and how they've never isolated this virus for COVID-19. So quoting here. So there are a lot of sick people.   Now how do they get hypoxic? It has nothing to do with virus. Viruses don't make you hypoxic, but we do know from clear scientific research going back to the 70s the Naval Intelligence Research Institute did this. The Soviets did this. And there was a recent paper on it. Then if you explode, expose a place to millimeter-wide waves, otherwise known as 5G, these things. Mary, your microphone is now available. Mary, your microphone is now available. And as a reminder, you can either accept the unmute or you can use star six to unmute yourself. Moving on to the next speaker. Tim, your microphone is now available. Thank you so much. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Excellent. Yes, my name is Tim Delaney and I have spoken before all of you before. Thank you so much for allowing me to speak. I have an idea here. I have a lot of issues here trying to get toxic waste and e-waste and things like that out of my home. And things have evolved over the last 10 years where politicians and counties and whatnot and these transfer stations and garbage facilities here are clamping down and preventing homeowners like myself, whether I live in California or Nevada or anywhere, from bringing our stuff out of our homes and to these landfills.  That's not working. So what's happening here is a lot of homes. You have all these substances building up. And if you ever do get a fire, all that stuff is going to go into your aquifers. Okay. And into your creeks, rivers, ponds, oceans, everything. And I'm assuming that some of you surf and you don't want that. So what you can do is get right-wing politics and left-wing politics together and approach the university down there. And instead of people just getting a student loan payoff, maybe you can have these folks show up at the Ben-Lamone transfer station on a Saturday and you can give them a job and you can set up a new hazmat team here and let them earn it before you go ahead and just give them the money to pay off their student loan. That way a guy like me that's trying to clean house and whatnot, I come down there and yay, I have a garbage facility here that's receptive and can take all the things out of my home. Okay. That's good for everybody. And it helps our environment. It's wonderful. All right. So that's my idea. Thank you very much for allowing me to speak. Thank you. Bernie, your microphone's now available. Yeah, good morning. Buenos dias. Boardcomings and chaircomings. Sorry. And the rest of the board, Bernie Gomez here, district three, born and raised in district four, worked for Milpa. So there's a couple of things. And I think I know we have the budget presentations so I'll hold off on some of those comments for that time, right? But I do want to say, I think just I think it's critical that we find a way for this process for the budget to be accessible to the community, right? I know that in Monterey County, they have each supervisor has budget meetings, right? Where they get input, they get input from their constituents, and sometimes there are just general public meetings around the budget process that allows for dialogue, input from the community, right? Where the community actually is involved in this process, and some of those requests or concerns are actually brought up to the board and it's presented in the presentation. So hopefully we can get that going, right? So that's that. Also, I just really wanted to emphasize down in South County, right? I was driving through, I believe it's probably district two and standard road, right? Over by the back there. So just looking at the paved road, right? Those roads are just nice and paved, but then when you drive down West Beach, that road has always been just, yeah, it's still dilapidating. It's just a horrible road to drive and that's the only access we have to the beach. So thinking about getting this board to also take time to invest in West Beach road, right? Just like Senator's road. Thank you. Thank you so much. We have no further speakers, Chair. Okay. With that, I'll bring it back to the board to see if there's any questions, comments, on items on our consent agenda. I'll start with Supervisor Koenig. Thank you, Chair. On the consent agenda item 15, the second read of the ordinance relating to motorized bike scooters and e-bikes. I'd like to provide additional direction that we not go ahead and improve this just yet. I heard from Ecology Action as well as some other constituents that they have concerns, particularly about their section that relates to county parks. In particular, Ecology Action has concerns because they do a lot of bike education and outreach in our community and utilize county parks when doing so. Namely, they use county parks also or see county parks as an essential part of our often fragmented bike infrastructure. I think we may be able to address this with meeting with county parks and Ecology Action and others to ensure that there's clear designation of the bikeways as defined in the ordinance within these portions of our parks. But I just think we need a little bit more time to be certain and make sure we have plans in place to define those bikeways if needed. So I'd like to provide additional direction that we not approve this ordinance today. Direct staff to meet with Ecology Action and Health Services Agency, which also does outreach related to bike safety and return on May 14th for our first read. Supervisor, that would need to be pulled from the consent agenda and discussed to make the additional direction and to do the things that you're proposing be done. The item would need to be removed from the consent agenda and then comment it on and we would go through the whole procedure. So you need to take it off the consent agenda. Okay, but I guess I'd like to, I'm sorry for, I didn't realize the procedure really that that had to be done, but it's like the request that we remove item 15 to the regular agenda. Okay, so we'll pull item 15 from the consent and move that to the regular agenda and then if you have any further comments on the consent agenda. Okay, I just wanted to thank the chair for item 28, urging support for AB 2493, prohibiting landlords from charging application screening fees that are waiting lists when no rental unit is available within a reasonable period. We heard today from a number of folks in the community, particularly Ms. Catherine Sardo from COPA and Mr. Eli Holiday. We have of course had extensive conversations with COPA and a number of other members about some of the hardships that folks are experiencing when trying to find housing in our community. I think there's a number of things that the county can do, especially in partnership with our folks in the state legislature to try to address this. This seems like one very reasonable first step and I'm happy to support it. So we're out of time. Thank you. Just two brief comments, one on 5051 and 52, which are all storm related damages we heard today. Although these were from previous year storms, just appreciate the work that public works did throughout the county to bring some of these back in line, in particular on the culvert side in the second district. On 53, the Aptus Library completion has just been a beautiful sight to see. So many members of the community using that space. It was a long project and a challenging project, but it's a gift to the community moving forward. So just a lot of appreciation for the teams that work behind the scenes on all those issues. So thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. First of all, on item number 20, I want to acknowledge and thank the work of our county clerk, Tricia Weber, and her elections department for doing a great job in the March 5th election cycle. I'm glad to see that Santa Cruz County continues to surpass the state average. It was just below 50%, but that being a concern of its own, it's better than most every other county in the state. So thank you for those who did vote. And I think it's a couple of points needed to be made. I think about 90% of the people who voted did by mail. Interesting. They're not going to the polls. This is not a complete surprise, but 90% of them voting by mail is quite significant, I think. And I think we need to, those voters, especially who didn't vote, every vote counts. And it was never more recognizable than the election to replace Anna Eshu in Congress. There was a number of people who ran for that office. And Sam Liccardo, the former mayor of San Jose, was the top vote getter. But second were former state senator, now county supervisor, Joe Summation, and Mr. Low, who ended up second with the exact same number of votes. Exactly. Never been happened. Never happened before. So now in the runoff in November, there's going to be three people on the ballot because the top two run. And there's one that was the top, and there's two that were two. So there's three people that are going to run. This has never happened before. I mean, it was the exact same number of votes that they got. So every vote counts, and don't forget it, and those 53% who are registered and didn't vote, please get out to the polls come November. And I wanted to thank also, or thanks, congratulate my colleague, Supervisor Koenig and his reelection, and I want to thank the voters in the unincorporated area and the cities for their support of Measure K, the county sales tax measure that passed, both inside and outside the unincorporated area. On number 36, the state grant for MECOs, or home kitchen operations, and Supervisor Friend and I've been working on this for some time. I want to thank the staff in the Environmental Health Department for pursuing this grant to help offset the costs of starting up our pilot program for the Micro-Enterprise Home Kitchen Operations. Some people have really wanted this for some time. I know we have some folks who are eager to get licensed and get underway, and so I'm looking forward to the ordinance coming back to us in the first part of September. On items, some of those have been mentioned by Supervisor Friend, but 47 to 52 of the emergency road repair projects. These six items all represent the hard work of our Public Works Department, or CDI, Community Development and Infrastructure Department. It continues to, despite all of the funding challenges we're having related to our disaster response, which will be discussed in our budget item that's coming up. I want to again acknowledge our director, CDI director, Matt Bichauder, who just spoke. Our assistant director, Steve Wiesner, who's in charge of roads for the county, and the staff for managing these projects with a sense of urgency and keeping the board well informed. And I want to acknowledge also that we're well aware of Mount Charlie. We've had two town hall meetings online. It's really an unusual disaster that keeps moving, and it needs to be settled before you can do the repair work. And I know it's frustrating for the CDI staff and others, but we've got our eye on the ball, and it's a mess. But we're going to get at it as soon as we can when some things are stabilized up in Mount Charlie Road. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Hernandez. I don't have much. Just for item number 22, you know, I'm glad we're doing the emergency repairs at the detention center. It's important that we keep our employees and people that are housed there safe as well. It seems to be like a recurring issue. I think we're going to have to modernize or something, but and then the other thing is, I just want to thank all the public for their thoughtful public comment today. Thank you. I just have a few comments and a couple questions. Item number 17, this is a proven master service agreement with BMI Imaging, incorporated in the amount of 213,380 to meet the mandates of Assembly Bill 1466 and for document conversion. This item is in response to state legislation, which requires all California counties to redact from deeds and other properties, documents, any language that is discriminatory or racially restrictive. And I think the intent of this is really good, but I do want to understand a little bit more about will there be some kind of historical, will it be historically recorded what those kind of racially indiscriminatory language was within these documents?  If you were African American, if you were Jewish, if you were Asian of a certain racial class, you couldn't actually purchase the properties. And I think it's really important that we understand our history and we document our history. And while it's really important that everyone has opportunity to purchase property, it is important for us to remember that these legacies of racism and how it actually led to our community's destruction. So I'm just wondering if anyone could comment on that. I don't see anybody here from the assessor recorder's office. And I can't speak to how they're going to operationalize this. I wouldn't want to speak to it without their insight. Well, if it's okay with the board, I think it would be good for us to get a report on the number of herdactions and deletions at the end of this project. So we actually know how many properties within our community actually have these historic racial discriminatory restrictions in place. The next item, item number 38, this is a proven amendment to agreement with Housing Matters for the Harvey West Studios Capital Development Project to use a different type of construction, extend the agreement term, and take related actions. I was just wondering if there's any sense of, has Housing Matters expressed when they anticipate the project's going to begin? Because I know we've been waiting for a while. And I'm just curious if there's any sense of when construction plan for this project. Good morning, Chair Cummings and board members. Randy Morris, Human Service Director of the Housing for Health Division is our department. So I'm standing up to speak to it. I do not have an exact timeline. I can certainly report back to you with an update. As you know, our Director of Housing for Health, Robert Ratners and Meetings with the City and with that non-profit every single month. And just for context, this is in front of your board because this is a state earmark that was directed directly to this non-profit but required local government to hold it and pass the money through.  We needed to change the scope of work, but I can get back to you about the specific date. That'd be great. Thank you. And I guess that concludes all my comments today. And so I'll bring it back to the board for action items. I just want to remind us that item 13 has been removed from consent for today. And it will be 11.1? It will be 11.1. No, this is 13. It was the one that staff removed. Right. That was the minutes. Sorry. So thank you. That's a pleasure. Right. That's what has been removed. The one, totally, but the one that has been removed from the consent agenda to the regular agenda is item 15. Correct. And that will be 11.1, yes. Correct. Okay. And then the additional direction on the report from item number 17. And so with that, there's a motion. I'll move consent with the additional direction on item 17. Okay. 15. 15. I'm sorry. I wasn't. The additional direction was for 17. I don't know. 15 to move to the regular agenda. Second. Okay. The motion from Supervisor Friend, second from Supervisor Koenig. With that, I'll ask the clerk to please follow roll call vote. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Hernandez. Yes. McPherson. Aye. And Cummings. Aye. That passes unanimously. So with that, we'll move on to our regular agenda. The next item on our agenda is hold a public hearing to consider and accept and file the county's fiscal year 2024-25, propose budget and continue the budget public hearing to May 21st, 2024. And I'd like to welcome up Marcus Pimentel and Carlos Palacios to lead us on this presentation. Thank you, Chair Cummings and members of the board. I'm very honored today to present to you with the 2024-25 Santa Cruz County budget and want to congratulate Marcus Pimentel on his leadership as well as Nicole Coburn, who led the process as well as all of our analysts and department staff. Also today, I wanted to acknowledge that we did receive an 2022 challenge award from the county association, a state association of counties for our online interactive budget website. And Mr. Pimentel will be walking through that so that people are again familiarized with how to navigate through that. Today's presentation, I'm going to start off by presenting a bit of context about the county's financial situation that makes us a little bit unique among other counties. Then talk about some of the challenges we're facing. In particular, we are facing a major issue with climate change and the impact it is having on our community and on our county budget. The response to the natural disasters we have faced since 2017 has become one of the major, in fact, I would say it is the major issue this county now faces and how we will address that in the future is very critical for this board. Also talk about some of the challenges having to do with state mandates regarding behavioral health and the intersection of behavioral health with the homelessness crisis. There's a number of different initiatives and state legislation that have been approved that are going to impact us in the years to come that will also have another big impact on the county's budget and on our operations. And then after that, talk about some of the major achievements and positive things that the county's doing in addressing many of the issues we're facing. There's a lot of good news in this budget, and I want to talk to that as well. So one of the things that is unique about our county that many counties do not face is that half of our population in our county of our county population is about 273,000 people. We are considered a suburban mid-sized county by population, but we are unique in that half of our population lives in the unincorporated area, 131,000 people. In effect, look to the county for municipal services. And so we have a dual role in that we present, we are charged with providing state mandated county-wide services for the entire population of 273,000 people, but then we are providing city-like municipal services with 132,000 people. So basically we are the biggest city in our county. We're double the size of the city of Santa Cruz and considering who we're providing municipal services. The only city in the region in our entire Tri-County region that is bigger than us is the city of Salinas, which has about 176,000 people. And so that is unique in that most counties actually have a much less proportion of their population in the unincorporated area. Santa Clara County, to give you an example, has only 5% of their population in the unincorporated area. 95% are in cities, so they have the same resources or actually more resources than we do and yet only provide municipal services for 5% of their population. We get those same categories of resources but are charged not only with providing county-wide services, but with municipal services for 50% of our population. So that is somewhat unique and it provides challenges to our budget. When you look at how we are funded on a per capita basis, this considers our property tax, sales tax, utility users tax, as well as other funds that we are able to provide services with. You'll see that on the very right side of this chart, we are among the lowest per capita funded county in the state. And also we are providing many, many more, many services to much greater proportion of the population. So our per capita amount is less, which is less than $2,000 per person. And then if you look at the other access, we're providing those services to 50% of our population. If you look at Santa Clara County just as one example, they're providing, they get almost $11,000 per capita versus our less than $2,000, and yet they're providing services only 5% of their population for municipal services. So anyway, that's another context setting thing to understand about our budget. If you look at this chart, which is considering the amount of property tax that we receive, the percentage of the dollar that people spend on their property tax, you will see this is actually using property tax rates, taking out the redevelopment pass through. That's why it's a little lower than we normally talk about. It's 11%. These are percentages of the total dollar that somebody would spend. So in our county, if somebody spends a dollar of property tax, the county gets 11 cents of that. And you can see that we're one of the lowest per amount of percentages of property tax. And property tax is by far the most important revenue source that counties receive. And then you look at the other side, San Luis Obispo, as an example, gets 23% of the dollar. It's 23 cents. We own more than double less. If you look at just to check out the other county, San Luis Obispo, Merced gets 22 cents, Los Angeles 20 cents, Sonoma 19 cents, San Joaquin 19 cents. So you can see that just the percentage of property tax that we receive is much lower, we're among the lowest in the entire state. This is a legacy of Prop 13 adopted in 1978. What it did at that point was basically froze the rates that were in that place at that time, whatever the rate, if you remember, way back in those days, local jurisdictions used to set the rate for their property tax. So boards of supervisors and city councils actually each year set the property tax rate. We happened to be a very low property tax rate at that time, and that's why we were frozen. Other counties were much higher. So anyway, that also is a very important context setting act. If you look at the average property tax allocation, now this you can see on the other side, it was 11 percent. This considers 13.4 percent because this does include the proper redevelopment pass through. In any event, we receive 13.4 cents on the dollar. The average for all California counties is 19 cents. If we were to receive just the average, the 19 cents, we would receive $36 million more annually of general revenue. And you can imagine that's just to give you context, that's much bigger than the entire parks budget or just an example. Many, many times more than the parks budget just to give you an example of that. So in any event, $36 million would certainly come in very useful in terms of doing our budget. If you look at sales tax, this is just a comparison for our local cities, given that we are, in effect, the biggest city in our county. If you look at the per capita sales tax, we receive much less $180 per residence versus $427 in the city of Santa Cruz. So the city of Santa Cruz just in sales tax receives more than double our per capita revenue. If you look at the city of Santa Cruz, motel tax, they're $198 per capita, we're $135 per capita. So in other words, even when you look at other taxes and compare us to other cities, relatively we're somewhat underfunded because of the fact that counties typically don't develop as much commercial properties as cities do. Another thing that we're keeping a watch on is the state budget. Deficit counties are very dependent on the state budget. The state budget increased from earlier estimates of $58 billion to $73 billion. This is an estimate by the Literary Analysts Office. The May revise this year will likely be very consequential. This is typically May 12th, the state issues. There may revise when the governor revises the budget based on the latest state income tax information. This will be very consequential for us and for our budget. So let's get into some of the challenges we're facing. Global climate change is happening right now and it is impacting local governments and state governments and federal governments across the country. We for years, decades have been talking about global climate change coming. Well, it has arrived and we are filling the force of it. Just in the last seven years, six years since 2017 to 2023, we had seven nationally federally declared disasters. In many decades prior to this, we would have one federally declared disaster and yet we had seven in six years and you can see that we have spent $250 million in the last six years on various natural disasters. In 2017, storms, we spent almost $90 million doing road repairs. 2020, CZ Wildfire, $25 million. 2023, we had two federally declared disasters. We've spent $74 million on road repairs primarily and then of course we had COVID in there as well. Out of the $250 million we have spent since 2017, we've only collected about $115 million from the federal government reimburse. So we still have outstanding $143 million that we have not collected from the federal government in reimbursements for these emergencies. And so that will be a continuing challenge for us in our budget as we are struggling with two issues. How do we maintain our cash flow as we are doing these repairs and waiting on FEMA and other federal agencies to reimburse us? We are still collecting 2017. As you can see, since 2017 we still have $69 million outstanding money we've already spent. We've already done repairs that we have not yet collected. So that is a big issue. It's just the cash flow issue. And then the other thing is that the federal government does not reimburse us 100%. They typically reimburse us on average 70 to 80%. So that local match has been an issue. And so what's happened is that we've been using almost all of our SB1 allocations from the state. You remember SB1 was passed many years. It was an increase to the gas tax and the vehicle license fees meant for road repair. We have been using almost all of that money not on road repair in our urbanized areas, but on the match for many of these natural disasters that have taken place. So those are two big issues. The other big issue that we face is that even after we have spent all of this money, $250 million, which by the way is a lot of money compared to our budget, we still have 96 sites of 2023 storms that we have not repaired yet. There are still 96 sites outstanding that we have not yet begun repairs on. The estimate is that's equivalent to $64 million. These are 23 storm damage. In 2017 we still have $40 million of sites that we have not yet repaired yet. So the roads, ridges, damages that we have been done due to winter rainstorms. Since 2017 we still have $40 million outstanding. So just considering 2023 and 2017 projects that we have not yet done, we have over $100 million outstanding in repairs we need to do. 2024 initial estimates that we have another $10 million. So just this year we think it's at least $10 million in 2024. So you can see that is going to be a significant challenge and this is global climate change. We are dealing with it just like other counties are and other cities are across the country, right? This is a big issue nationwide, worldwide. In terms of the money that we have spent $250 million since 2017, you can see that exceeds the total amount of our annual general tax revenue in one year. So that is a significant amount of money in terms of maintaining our cash flow and then again the issue with matching that with local funds is a big issue. This is just an example of some of the projects that have yet to be completed. This is 2023. We also have again there's 96 sites of these that have not yet been done from 2023. We also have many from 2017. This is one on Glen Canyon Road. It's a slip out. You can see that the estimated cost is $430,000. Again this is a project very typical of the ones that we've already completed in 2017 and 2023. But this one in fact is just an example of one that still we're waiting to replete and trying to figure out how we're going to pay for that. This is another example. Hazeldale Road. Another slip out of a road. The estimated cost $460,000. There are literally hundreds of these all over the county and to keep face with projects that have not yet be completed and again hundreds of them across the county. There are hundreds that we've already completed. There are hundreds we have still yet to complete and these are just two examples. Ovid has been an issue statewide and the biggest issue is project room key reimbursements. During COVID we were assured by the state government and by federal government that we'd be reimbursed. This is when we took many vulnerable unhoused people and put them in hotels. We had 11 hotels that we contracted with. The county did over a thousand people. We were told that we would be reimbursed for the cost and keeping these folks safe. Now the federal government has gone back and said that they will only reimburse us for 20 days for many of these costs even though we had many people for six months to a year and during the time we were reassured many times that we had been reimbursed for all of these costs. Now FEMA has said they will not reimburse us for most of these costs leaving us with an $11 million general fund hit on having to cover these costs. Statewide it's a $300 million hit for other counties as well. This is an example of CZU fire. This is debris removal. This is right after the fire took place and we had contractors go in removing all of the burned and fallen trees and power lines and all that other stuff. You can see that the cost was $8.7 million. We spent that and recently we had an appeal. We're appealing this right because we were denied the recovery by FEMA and again we spent that money. We will have to be reimbursed. If not it will be a general fund cost. We are appealing it right now and hopeful but another example of just the issues we're having with all the natural disaster reimbursements we're facing. Again we're not the only one. I would say that we're among the hardest hit mostly because of the geographic location of our county and our geographic characteristics. The fact that many of our communities are in vulnerable mountains and on beach low-lying areas but other counties and cities are being impacted. This is the city of San Diego. The city of San Diego this winter had major storm floods. They are having the same issues we are that in terms of flash flow, in terms of local match, in terms of timing of reimbursements. You can see the quote there it says city officials are hopeful for federal reimbursement but they know it's not a fast process. Again we're still waiting from 2017 to get reimbursed by many costs and they're spending is hitting their budget hard. This is the city of San Diego. So you're going to hear in our budget and we're going to be presenting to you in the coming month a plan to actually issue up to $85 million in debt just to maintain our cash flow for costs that we have already spent a natural disaster response. So this is again money we've already spent 2017-2023 a CZU. This is not for new projects. This is money that we are waiting to get reimbursed for. We're going to issue a debt of $85 million. This is going to be the largest debt issue capital debt issue we've ever made in this county and it's just to maintain our cash flow. Now the good news is that we will be reimbursed for most of this money over the next few years and so we hope to draw down fairly quickly but it's going to be outstanding for anywhere from three to five years potentially and we're going to have to pay for that debt service on the $85 million which is going to be in the neighborhood of $7 to $9 million and that's going to there's no funding source for that. That's not reimbursable. So again another another big challenge facing the county and dealing with climate change and then we've you've talked today the board has and members of the community about Mountain Charlie and the challenges that we're facing again. This is one of a very significant problem but there are many others facing the county countywide as I said there's over there's hundreds of them that we're still waiting from 2017-2023 to repair and it's going to be a challenge trying to figure out how do we allocate any funding we do have in the budget which we do very limited amounts of money for new responses and how do we prioritize projects. Now let's go on to the state mandates that the has given to counties. Most of these are behavioral health and health but mainly behavioral health and they have to do mainly with the intersection of behavioral health and our unhoused population. This has been there certainly is the biggest issue with our unhoused population of course is the lack of affordable housing that is the main issue but there's also an intersection with behavioral health and our unhoused population and so the state has put forward a number of pieces of legislation and mandates on counties to try and address this issue of the intersection of behavioral health and the unhoused population across the state. One issue that affects both health and behavioral health is the Cal AIM reforms that are basically changing the way that California's MediCal program works making it much broader with more traditional social service programs but also changing the way that funds are reimbursed so it's very complex in terms of our ability to get reimbursement from the state but the good part is that it also expands MediCal significantly in terms of what programs and social service programs are allowed to be reimbursed from MediCal basically acknowledging that many social services are directly related to health and so there are new programs enhanced care management community sports which includes housing supports short term recovery independent living there are funds for individuals who are incarcerated in their pre-release care and then there's numerous behavioral health reforms as well so you're going to hear about this in the budget especially when health services agency and the human services department represent their budgets this is a very very big deal it's very complex on the other hand there's a lot of opportunities a lot of good things that could be could happen out of this if we take advantage of it incompetent to stand trial cap growth cap this is a mandate from the state that is unfunded it is basically the issue is somebody who is charged with the felony arrested but then ruled incompetent to stand trial in the past those individuals referred to the department of state hospitals where they were restored to competency returned back to the county and then were stand trial they have been explosive growth in the number of people who have been referred to the department of state health department of state hospitals for incompetent to stand trial to the point where the state does not have any more capacity they're at their limits so what they've done is they set a cap on the number of people we can refer to the department of state hospitals and once we reach that cop cap we are supposed to either keep them locally in our jail and restore them to competency ourselves in the county jail or if we do refer them to the department of state hospitals if there is capacity and they accept them we will be charged fees and penalties and so this is something a new law that we're monitoring very closely the sheriff is working with my office department of health services agency as well very closely about this because this could be a very significant issue in the future the chair court is coming in um this december it's a framework to deliver mental health and substance use disorder services to the most severely impaired californians there's a number of different steps that take place but it basically allows numerous people who are not currently allowed but will be allowed to refer people to the court for treatment this could be a family member behavioral health provider first responder or other um a social service worker they can refer the person to the court there's then required a clinical evaluation by our behavioral health staff if there's a care plan that's developed it's ordered by the court which is provided by our behavioral health staff and county hsa and then there's a continuing support for that individual so this will impact many departments in the county including health services agency the human services department um public defender and county council um and again the it started last year but with a few counties it's going to be expanding greatly this december and that's going to take effect in our county sp 43 is another big change in the law it updates california's conservatorship laws for the first time in more than 50 years californians experiencing serious mental illness or severe substance use disorder and are also at risk of to harm themselves can have a conservator appointed to direct direct their care um sp 43 changes the definition of grave disability in two ways the the first and most significant is it adds severe substance use disorder as a reason someone could be placed on an involuntary hold that's brand new in the past has to be severe mental health issue it has now been expanded to be severe substance use disorder this will go into effect in january 2024 in two counties other counties almost every other county in the state has deferred it to 2026 and with us as our county but it'll have a great impact especially on our human services department again public defender health services agency county council all of the all of those departments are involved in these involuntary holds and it's significant expansion to include those with severe substance use disorder opposition one was approved in this last ballot this is funds that are derived from the 1% tax on income above one million dollars we receive more than 20 million dollars i think it was actually 26 or 27 million last year um there's going to be the most significant part to us is that proposition one requires that 30 percent of part of the behavioral health services fund from the mental health services act to be reallocated redirected from existing programs to housing intervention with uh what it means to us is initially we think it's going to be about six million dollars of our mhsa funds are going to now be directed from their existing uses which has been mainly used on preventive services for mental health and counseling services and then redirected to housing programs so that is coming we're still looking at the timing and how this is going to be implemented but that is going to be very challenging for our county as well the one one good thing that proposition one is that it's going to issue bonds over 6.3 billion 6.4 billion dollars in new housing for a permanent supportive housing so we think that is a good thing but the part about reallocating 30 percent of part of our budget is going to be very challenging to our county now i'd like to look at some of the good things and new good news that we're we have in our budget we're about to open 500 westridge which is going to be the new south county government center this is actually going to house many departments as you can see those listed this is the former west marine building over 116 000 square feet we're not only going to consolidate five different leases so this is not only make sense make sense from a service point of view this can be more convenient to people they only have to go to one place as opposed to five different least spaces in watsonville this is also going to save us money long term we're actually buying a building as opposed to renting in the long term we are actually going to save money so this is not going to cost us money long term in the long term this is going to save the county money we're going to go from renters to owners and we're going to pay less long term so this is a good thing financially and it's a good thing from a service point of view because not only are we going to have consolidation of where our service is provided but we're also going to add more services to south county from here in north county so there's going to be additional services from our auto controller our assessor elections ad commissioner other new services that are going to be there provided more convenience to residents of that part of our county and that will be that's happening right now the move is actually taking place as i speak supervisor hernandez and i were there yesterday and watching the final touch-up paint being added departments are moving in we're going to have a preliminary grand opening in early june we're going to have a ribbon cutting official but departments are actually starting to move in right now as we are ending our leases with other five other buildings this is just an example of the in the layout of 500 west ridge or the south county government center there's also a community room in this building that will be able to be used for public meetings and will be a great service to the county and other governments freedom campus we are we've done a master plan and this is a property in Watsonville is 10 acres we occupy the front five acres mostly with health services agency although the ad commissioner will be moving from here to 500 west ridge and you can see the back parcel is actually vacant at this point we have done a master plan for this and the thought is is that we are going to build at least one new building might be 15 000 square feet we've actually looked at a bigger building as well that will provide our main thing which will be a brand new health clinic our existing health clinic is has been remodeled it's very small it's cramped and it's just very old and this would give us a brand new building as well as new office space for our public health staff in Watsonville we also have talked to other jurisdictions other public agencies about partnering with us so we're preliminary discussions with that and then the idea is that on the back parcel we would actually do an affordable housing workforce slash workforce housing project it's five acres in the back medicine occupied that's just basically a parking lot at this point and we are looking at possibly doing an affordable housing project so we are progressing now on this project we finished the master planning we're getting ready to issue a request for qualifications for developers to help us come up with a master plan come up with the actual plan to implement this project the crisis children's crisis stabilization program at 5300 Soquel Avenue is being developed it'll be ready in approximately a year it'll provide eight new beds for children's crisis stabilization and then 16 beds for crisis residential program this is very significant program for the whole region not only our county and it is now under development and will be developed will be opening we think in about a year from now we're also making significant progress and many of our programs for the unhoused population we have three low barrier navigation centers in development right now the idea is that these are going to trend folks are going to be helped to transition into permanent housing following our housing first principles entry will be through referral and assessment they will be very service rich environments a safe staff 24 7 and will help reduce population bridge housing site at 2202 Soquel Avenue is 34 units funded by 10.2 million state grant uh we hope to open it in late 2024 uh the Curacao de Fuerza 118 First Street Watsonville we're doing this in partner with the city partnership with the county of Monterey and the city of Watsonville it's a great joint project 34 units funded from an encampment resolution fund grant we hope to open it late 2024 as well and then we are working with the city of Santa Cruz and Housing Matters on Coral Street navigation centers at 125 Coral Street looking at 100 plus units in partnership again with those entities hoping to get a grant to fund it in this next year we also have a number of permanent supportive housing projects veterans village and Ben Lohman's 20 units for veterans at risk of homelessness we're hoping to working with veterans organization to hopefully open that in 2026 Casa Azul 801 River Street worked with Housing Matters on that that has opened seven units in city of Santa Cruz and Park Haven Plaza in Soquel 35 units for very low income veterans and youth exiting foster care hopefully opening that in 2025 so with that I'm going to present it turn it over to budget manager Marcus Pimentel for their presentation on more detail on the actual budget presentation thank you very much good morning chair coming in board members after that profound moment I want to just reflect on the what's included in the proposed budget so before I step into navigating the budgets just want to roll back again at the at the big level included in our proposed budget is a summary of Carlos Blascus's presentation he just finished it summarized in his in his own budget message we have sections on our economic outlook sections on our financials summarizing our current finances as the county we have information about county services within each department's budget page there's information about the status and progress they're making on their operational plan objectives as well as the detailed discussions of all their services within their divisions within their departments and the changes that are happening within the budget uh by their services and included in our budget is this digitized version is our interactive transparency portal that allows any member of the public to have access to 96 saved reports and public members can create as many other views that they want modify the reports change it from a general fund all funds change it from one department to another department a drill down into departments line items so it gives a lot of rich access with 96 saved reports that somebody can start with and then go from there and save url urls under their own browser and have a whole section of their favorite budget pages that they can navigate through um today's opening of our budget hearing will continue the hearings to may 21st and 22nd when we conclude today's hearing and ultimately concluding the the budget hearing cycle on june 4th for the may 21st and 22nd hearings you'll you may receive some supplemental budget updates typically things that that we hear about coming out of the state budgets that was informed about it may revise you'll see those and supplemental budget actions or other federal or state funding changes you might see those as supplemental budget actions that will be discussed by departments in their reports on may 21st and 22nd so I want to jump into a little bit about how to navigate our our digital budget version this year we we spent some time thinking about the views and the accessing of the page and we've looked to simplify and clean up some of the the noise and have a little bit more cleaner elegant look of the budget site and this is our third year of having a digital budget in addition to the digital budget we have a you know work on the naming of budget in brief as 271 pages and it will grow so eventually we want to have a printable version of all the elements for a budget available in a hard copy format navigating the budget site it starts with our proposed 2024 25 budget there's two ways to start your navigation journey you can hover your mouse or finger if you're on your phone over your the budget and it'll automatically open up sub menus that you can filter down and access different levels of information down to department pages or you can use a new navigation bar that's on the on the left of every budget page that has quick links to allow users to click down and see different information if it's a department page you can go down into their services at this introduction level you can click to get information about our economic outlook and more information about our summary drilling down a little bit deeper into department pages some new features that users will see is the ability to switch between budget years so if somebody's on you know particular the assessors page they can toggle back between this year's budget and last year's budget seamlessly to see what was in the proposed budget and the adopted budget from last year and see what the changes and when discussion items that were last year as compared to this year in addition to be able to scroll down and access all the information of a department's page or use navigation bars for quick links to jump to their different sections within each department's pages drilling down further if you scroll down a little bit further drill down into the department services and objectives there's really rich content that breaks up the department down into their divisions in this case of using sample of health services to behavior health divisions clinic services environmental health and if you click on any one of those it'll open up all the services that are within those divisions and then clicking a particular service will drill down further into more information about the services and the changes that are happening within the services again this level of information is available in our budget brief document as well this wanted to touch a little bit about our transparency portal this is the open gov solution that was brought forward a couple years ago this allows us to members of the public to have a visual view of the budget as well as classic financial tables if you scroll down it starts with the visual view of bar chart and if you scroll down you'll see the actual bar the table of the financial numbers by sections all these reports are interactive the user can click on a particular bar or click on the expenses or revenues on the side and it'll open up and drill down into more information on the right side of the screen are examples of the various views 96 different saved reports that anybody in their community can click on any one of those and it'll take them right to a particular section typically information about departments but also information on the county's discretionary general fund revenue or you know right now we have this in this current budget we have 222 million we're projecting available and discretionary revenue that is our general fund counting counting contribution that's available for departments so there's a report that details that as an example and then finally within the budget site there's a lot more content rich information there's information about the county's funding structure budget our budgeting principles are found fund balance policy as well as a lot of more supplemental information documents and schedules including our budget and brief but also including information about the one page summary of the county budget process when it begins and when it ends and describing each of those phases a discussion or review of the county's org chart and a listing of our current department heads a schedule law all the core investments to schedule or risk management funds and this list will continue to grow and we have also on this list is our schedule of personnel so that one it starts with a one page summary of the county's personnel by department and then it drills down into every position within those departments that information is available in the digital budget but it's also available here as a pdf as a supplemental information let me take you into what we're proposing into the proposed 24 25 budget again that will continue with the budget hearings that will have richer deeper dives on May 21st and 22nd this year's budget as you just heard is really impacted by the severity and the frequency of the the natural disasters we're all facing seven in effectively seven years and the order of magnitude that we of the projects we can't get to is humbling and concerning in addition the projects we have funded and paid for that we have to wait for reimbursement for years and years and years so we're we'll also in addition to the budget hearings on May 14th the kind of backstory a lot of this is we'll have a deep dive conversation about the need to finance an issued debt for $85 million of capital debt and as Carlos Blasio has mentioned we're issuing capital debt at a historic level to finance things that have already happened in the past because of cash flow issues and the delays in reimbursement um this will severely limit our abilities our county's ability to issue debt just to try to solve for some of the projects from 2017 some of the projects of 2023 storm disasters and to try to finance the remaining elements of our 2020 CZU fires so that's a profound thing to think about that will be discussing on May 14th in addition to all the budget hearings that are coming forward the notable items that you'll hear about in the changes in this proposed budget include implementing strategies related to the Cal AIM and the care program and all the elements of the mandated services that we now must continue to adapt to that we're being driven to we're supporting the opening and the staffing of the South County Government Center and going live with that including you'll see some some references to the transition of 10 position from the community development department of general services department to have to help and plan for all those moves we're reducing the county staffing by 34.1 the full-time equivalent positions reducing county staffing by 35 34 positions largely related to reduce funding largely related to the reductions and covid related funding um and most of that is in our health services department they're facing 55 position reductions they're adding 12.75 um but we'll talk about that a little bit more and you'll have a deeper conversation about that in in the May 21st budget hearing for health services um we've reduced the general fund contingency so typically we've proposed budgets that have a funded one percent contingency for the general fund just to address unexpected issues and disasters because of what we've already experienced in unexpected disasters we have to reduce that funding level down down to only 1.5 million which really limits our ability to be adaptive and responsive to needs that will come up and throughout the entirety of next fiscal year um we've unfunded all general fund cap for projects because we must prioritize and figure out how to finance the ongoing debt service for projects that we will be discussing on May 14th for projects that have already happened that we must finance for cash flow purposes um and what this doesn't include is anything out of the measure k march 5th ballot measure that this you know at the time of proposing this budget the results weren't certified so that is not yet included in any of our proposals you'll see us in our cash flow modeling when we're projecting our cash flow in the out years we're including that from a cash flow modeling perspective but it's not in our budget it's not in our proposed budget okay on the whole we are proposed 24 25 budget is a reduction of 161 million from the adopted budget from last year uh typically we've been seeing incremental growth in our budget this year for a lot of different reasons um that growth isn't there largely out of cap projects typically we might be funding a lot of new projects especially road projects special district projects but this year's funding is you know out years funding of projects are really going to shifting to to finance and fund existing projects that are already happening now um so that's a large explanation of our big reduction in in our budget at a county wide level um when drilling down from the all funds budget of looking at our budget by funds looking grouping it by type so salaries and employee benefits we are seeing an increase of 23 million that's the ongoing cost to maintain staffing across the entire county a lot of this is special district um county service area enterprise funded staff but also some general fund staffing so you'll see a smaller number when we get to the general fund um coming up in a few slides again we have not yet factored in measure case revenue into this amount nor have we factored in an increase in debt service yet that would come out of the actions on may 14th so these budget numbers will still change based on what's happening at the state with supplemental revenue with our supplemental budget changes and additional action on may 14th that will then drive what the final budget might look like look at our total so you've seen our elastic side shoulder total budget by fund and our total budget by service type by uh category type now looking at our budget based on governmental categories general government health and human services you can see the allocation that most of our budget is being directed towards health and human services and public safety and justice um on the right side are our proposed staffing changes so we we generally are seeing a reduction of 34.1 positions across the entire county and i'll summarize that in this schedule um beginning from the top this is a schedule of all positions across the county our proposed budget would end up with 277 2774.56 positions so top right and that yellow column is the proposed budget changes we're reducing our county staffing by 34.1 within general government it's a increase of 12 positions but that's reflecting more of a transfer end of 10 positions from land use and community services into general government um we are also adding an assessor to the assessor recorder and adding a service uh fiscal officer to general services within health and human services the big change is the health services agency net reduction of 42.35 positions again they'll discuss that in a deeper dive on May 21st in the budget hearings and we're unfunding one position and child support services within cannabis or within land use and community services we're reducing one position in cannabis i think we've talked about over the last several years the reduced expectations in cannabis revenue and the flat lining of our annual cannabis revenue coming in the program is being decreased a little bit in its scope and that allows us to reduce one position so we can keep it the county financially solvent within community development and infrastructure it's a big department now it's both planning and department of public works and within public works are our road project type activities as well as a lot of special district activities there's a net reduction of 7.75 positions that reflects moving 10 positions from department of public works into general services but also adding 2.25 positions for solid waste and sanitation district funds parks and open services we're adding proposing to add one position that would be funded in the future through the rgc's funding stream for the further wealth wealth program and then in public safety and justice there's three positions being converted for the public defender from contracted positions to in-house staffing being funded through medical uh medicare administrative health reimbursements the ma program as well as the sheriff corner is adding two positions for the dna lab that are funded externally so what the storyline in all this is you're seeing a reduction in workforce because of reduction in revenues as well as the only changes we're able to add staffing or whether it's funding sources to support the adding of those staff we were unable to absorb any new general fund resources to current staff to new staffing so all these position ads are already externally funded and things we're moving towards but we've been very limited in our ability to respond to all the different service demands that departments have asked for and asked to meet moving from the all funds down into the general fund you most of our time and efforts are spent in a general fund budget a 754 million dollar general fund budget this chart shows on the line our expenditures from the actuals for 2223 compared to the adopted budget compared to our estimate actuals as compared to the proposed budget ending up at 754.2 million as compared to the bar chart of revenues we often find and and continue to see the need to keep talking about our systematically unfunded status of our county and the fact that our entire general fund relies on total tax revenue 183 million so it's we're really relying on other federal and state in charges for services to maintain our funded operations across the entire general fund within those 183 million dollars in total taxes there's a there's about another 40 million dollars of other charges for service of interest earnings of our investment portfolios is seeing an increase in our investment portfolio and there are other things that are driving our up to 222 million dollar total discretionary general fund that's the amount that we calculate based on general tax revenue and general other revenue sources that again are interest earnings and charges for services for the general fund that were available to to finance changes in the general fund budget we're very limited in our ability to adapt to the increased cost pressures if i'm looking at the general fund by its different types of costs salary and benefits are going up 9.8 million and you saw a larger number across entire county of about 23 million within their general fund 9.8 million largely through contract contractual obligations for salary and healthcare benefits but across all the other categories we're seeing reductions in costs largely related to the elimination of capital funding largely related to reductions in services due to reduced funding sources or general fund budget is actually decreasing this year by 12 million dollars where stood last year and the adopted budget is 766 million unfunded all capital projects last year we had 5 million of funding for for new capital projects this year we have zero we produced our general fund contingency down to 1.5 million last year we had about 7 million so we're just having to make continued reductions to try to accommodate our reduced funding level and despite that we're still relying on about 6.3 million of current this year's current general fund carryover that will flow into next year to help help solve for the budget and the all funds or the expenditure budget assumes total budget authority we expect that at the end of the year we will have spent less than 754 million by the end of next year but right now that is our current projection for our budget of 754 million it's financed through revenues of 747 million again there's a delta of about 6.3 million that would be carried over from this year within the county's revenues our top four general purpose tax revenues are our property tax at 83 million dollars vehicle license fees at 44.8 million sales tax at 25.9 million in transit occupancy tax at 14.2 million again the 25.9 million in sales tax does not include anything from measure k at this point in time on the whole across entire tax category we're seeing about 3.5 million dollar projected increase largely driven through an increase in property tax growth of 2.3 million or 3.5 million and a vehicle license growth of 2.3 million we do have a reduction in some of our other tax categories so we're we're we're still projecting about a 3.6 million dollar net increase until tax revenues within our use of money and property that is going up by 8.26 million almost all of it is attributed to an increased performance in our county's investment portfolio that is seeing an increase with investment rate earnings and we're thankful for that that's helped us solve for some of the gap that we would have had in our budget this is a similar chart to what you saw February 13th when we presented the major report this is a revised cash flow forecast again not necessary budget but what we expect to actually happen in the out years with salary savings with new revenue sources that might be might be plausible so in this cash flow model I have included the 10 million dollars and 2526 from measure k the out year that we're talking about I have included that in this cash flow model and we're still facing a projected deficit of about 8.9 million in our out year 2526 this current proposed budget is balanced per out year but still have a gap of about 9 million dollars that grows to 22.8 million dollars and then starts to narrow down and some of that is a natural cost increase that we've been projecting out for the for the late 2020s ending with about a 2.8 million dollar projected structural gap by 2030-2031 this is based on what we believe to be credible credible cash flow credible savings and total operations but is being driven by our need to finance we're projecting about a five and a half million dollar annualized new debt service that we're going to have to absorb that will come out of our May 14th budget hearings the total if we had added up in one year the total debt service it'll probably be closer to 78 million but what we expect is the annualized carrying amount of 5.5 million with the ability of some federal reimbursements coming in to reduce that those out year service gaps we've also had to increase for some of the service change and and diversions of revenue in the state mandates of the discussion that RCO Palacios talked about so again work cash flow is still projecting some work that we need to work towards to solving out your gaps but the good news is it's shrinking in our structural gaps so hopefully by 2032 we'll be here talking about some better news and better times this is a slide we talked a little bit about so different from the systematic underfunding is there are other changes happening that are eroding some of our revenue within sales tax the modernization the digitization of purchasing things converting tangible personages to services there's a lot happening and what used to be sales tax base is now converting to services or that traditional sales tax base is shrinking because of state changes in how online sales tax is allocated so things are the consumers buying if they live in LIBO or if they live in Felton or they live in Corleitas those consumers are buying things online and typically that sales tax is not coming back to the county it's going either to other cities or to other counties where distribution centers are located so that's an unfortunate outcome of the change and of the consumer's behavior of buying a lot more online and where the importance of having brick and mortar local brick and mortar is still very valuable because anything purchased at brick and mortar stays in this county but a lot of the online purchases where we're projecting about five million a year that the general fund is losing in sales tax is going to other places when it's purchased online the good news is on the locally voter-approved special district taxes that's what measure K is referred to legally as the special district tax those solve for some of this problem those those special districts have a different allocation formula by the state so when it's a special add-on tax much of that revenue will stay here so it's interesting nuance with the base sales tax and any locally approved taxes the locally approved taxes keep about 80 percent of that revenue will stay here so we're only losing a small fraction on on locally approved sales taxes but still accounting to about five million a year of general fund revenues that would have been here let's say 10 years ago that we don't see now from our reserves perspective our reserve as a percent of our general fund has increased slightly to 10 and a half percent 79.4 million but it still relies on 40 million dollars of health care funding that otherwise could be used for things like the freedom campus project that you talked about and maybe need to be used for that and even at a 79 million dollar 10 percent funded level that's that's that wouldn't be enough to finance the 85 million that we may be needing in our discussions on May 14 so our reserves are good and strong and it's what's led to some of our AAA bond rating but it is not sufficient for a lot of reasons and especially in the state of our current recurring natural disasters we're just finishing in conclusion getting to where we're at in our budget cycle today's April 9th our budget was released and published online on April 2nd a press release went out last week and today kicks off our budget hearing season May 21st and 22nd are the next budget hearings two days of full budget hearings you'll have Carlos Placios the CIO and myself opening up the hearings on May 21st and then you'll have each major department presenting a summary of their budget and there'll be a lot more content available within the within the agenda reports all leading to actions on June 4th to approve the proposed budget to include last day actions as well as concluding actions the other controller to close out this current year and any budget changes that required to leading towards the adoption of the budget on September 24th two more slides we're almost there just there's a lot more imminent challenges that we're facing and and certainly a lot of successes and achievements that we've had as a county but it's worth repeating the 73 billion budget deficit that we're monitoring closely trying to understand what proposals the state may add on to that will impact our county operations we're here to learn about those and understand what that impact is again May 14th we've talked a lot about that it's it's really coloring a lot of our outlook how we can come up to cash flowing prior disasters that we have to wait years for February in person we're projecting about 85 million will be required and we're talking about we'll be talking about on May 14th how do we adapt to the new normal recurring natural disasters and the financing of projects and and and working with our federal partners about they've been many of our federal partners understand the challenges with the current system we appreciate the effort of this board and their leadership as well as the state of california and their leadership are working with us of how they we might partner together to to solve for some of these issues in addition to many of our mandated services and that keep rolling down to our county again our county has mandated services we must provide in addition to all the municipal services to over half the population and then that just leads to how do we deal with the continual systematic underfunding of our of our unique county and our inability to address all of our aging infrastructure all the aging facilities and ongoing damages to our infrastructures again we have good reserves but they're just not sufficient enough to allow us to tap into to help with with the disaster funding we're facing so with that that concludes my report we're certainly available for conversations discussions and those conversations I should say we'll continue more Richard deeper dives on May 21st and 22nd great thank you so much for that in that presentation I'm going to go ahead and open it up to the community to see if there's any member of the public who'd like to comment on the budget presentation that we just received if you would like to comment and you're in the audience please step up to the podium thank you good morning back Steinbrenner thank you for this preview of what is coming it's not not all that good news but I appreciate the heads up I noticed that there is no discussion at all about the county's unfunded CalPERS liability in past discussions like this in in previous years that was a big piece of the discussion and a very dire warning about huge unfunded CalPERS liability for the county it's not even discussed here so that concerns me it comports with what was presented by mr placios in those reports discussing the unfunded CalPERS it comports with the dates years that the debt 26 27 will be especially high 22.8 million is what I saw on that graph in mr pimentel's discussion so please talk about this it is a big piece I did I request that the county invest in infrastructure that repairs and maintains what we have rather than spending millions of dollars on new projects the the westridge project is going to be very nice but I don't think we could we really can't afford that and I'm I'm I'm sorry that it happened it's actually it will be nice but a lot of things are nice but if you can't afford them you shouldn't do them and and I think that's one case in point there are many others so I did look at the database website and it is much more user friendly thank you for those improvements I look forward to the opportunities see more detailed information as those documents are added thank you thank you anybody here in person who'd like to speak to us on this item please come up to the podium yeah hello again and I think it's my imagination that it was a report from mr palacios like unsuccessful report that he cannot get as much money as this county needed and I'm going to talk about the illegals you know in this county that became priority for this county not citizens not permanent residents but undocumented aliens excuse me how does this relate to the budget because the money goes from who to support undocumented aliens I think the money coming from budget and it is a lot of work put into the immigration project and when I came again to get assistance to my daughter who's a permanent resident we live here almost in United States almost 30 years and what that office does just does everything that my daughter will not get the citizenship so this is just unbelievable what is going on what kind of intrigues and whatever how they concentrate on one person that was made sick because my daughter was not sick you know she had just traumatic brain injury but she became sick mentally sick as soon as the mental health department stole my daughter from me and now they're trying to make me sick because I cannot get assistance I cannot get help every day is a like a crisis you know every single day so I have to lose my appetite my sleep everything just to take care of my daughter who was destroyed by this county and this should be priority of this county to take care of negativity you know people who complain against the negative practices is really care about this county and not the people who hide it thank you so much is there any other member of the public here in person who'd like to speak to us on this item he's saying not is anyone online who'd like to speak to us on the budget yes chair we do have speakers call an user one your microphone is now available I'm Garrett thanks for the extensive the dire report on the budget and where the heck is our tax money going um and over half of it goes to all these wars and right away money for Ukraine and slaughtering people with genocide and Palestine that's our tax money being siphoned out of the counties and cities that could be used for needed services I think of that bumper sticker I used to have when I was teaching it will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the air force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber and we could say it'll be a great day when we have money for homes and parks and employment etc and I have a quote here from Martin Luther King jr a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on war than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual depth and then I've referred a number of times and I want you to check geoengineeringwatch.org and the dimming film they have on that website you talk just now about natural disasters how much of this is natural and how much of it is from geoengineering by uh Raytheon and Lockheed Martin etc uh anyway and the last point is Kathy your microphone is now available hello thank you um thank you for the presentation today my name is Kathy Lass I live in Aftos and I was um curious about understanding more about the process for the public input so I've heard today that there'll be a May 14th meeting I'm not sure if that's a supervisors meeting I've heard about the May 21st and 22nd hearings I was wondering where if there was opportunity for having town hall meetings or conversations locally or other opportunities to have conversations and to get questions answered so that the public can have more input if there is some documentation on the website um I couldn't find it so if that could be highlighted that would be great too thank you very much thank you Bernie your microphone's now available yeah once again thank you uh and I do want to thank uh Mr Palacios of Pimentel for presentation and also acknowledge the friendly user uh portal right for the budget um and I now understand why it's uh it's been recognized you know as a top notch right uh so my comment is going to be around the amount we're spending right on corrections right I know um hopefully we'll get more detailed information when the 21st 22nd budget hearings come across but I do want to flag that currently we are spending 45 million dollars on corrections right um to house to incarcerate a daily average population of 355 individuals right men and women um 21 million dollars alone in the jail that is about you know that has a lot of empty beds right um so what I really want this board to start thinking about is like how do we decommission some of these empty beds right some of these uh the uh yeah some of these beds that are that are basically uh taking money from the county right how can we uh restructure right and reinvest some of this uh some of this money into things that we actually need you know um there is round tree right there is uh it has a new facility but it has a lot of empty beds so I'm really thinking about how much money can uh the county save and how much more cost-effective can we provide uh um services to the community right that actually uh will target resemblance and stuff so looking forward to these uh conversations and uh thank you thank you so much Reggie your microphone's now available hi uh can you hear me yes we can thank you um yeah I just want to echo what uh Bernie just said and sort of uh when I look at the budget um on the website which again yeah was a very nice website laid it out very clearly even in relative detail the things that pop up to me are the lack of equity right our district attorney hires more lawyers and staff than the public defenders um I see that our uh jail uh spends an awful lot of money and when you calculate per person cost of incarcerating someone it's about 106,000 a year but if we paid the median rent for a one bedroom market rate apartment and paid for someone's tuition to cabrillo and all of their food and gas that is 30 thousand dollars a year less than putting them in main jail right now so what are we doing right we're we're so punitive and it's so ineffective with the 60 percent recidivism rate in main jail right now um I would just like us to like think about and we're making we're making efforts like I think the neighborhood court program is good I think we're making roundtree is good though again it's not really used so I think and uh the reduction in population in the juvenile hall is very good but I think we need to lean more into that because it saves money it's good for people it'll reduce our ongoing costs and it'll just make our community just a healthier safer place because a lot of these crimes are just crimes of poverty they're not something you can just punish people out of doing thank you thank you so much Tim your microphone is now available thank you for allowing me to speak again uh sadly I mean the crimes of poverty stuff I don't totally agree with no way when I was a young man I had a personal friend of mine that was about 19 years of age murder another friend of mine that was 15 and it was brutal what the guy did to him uh remind you that these these comments should be directed to the budget so so anyways in regards to the budget uh I'm not really for the concepts of defund police and all that sort of stuff and you know so that's a concern um one thing that could be done to help out the budget though a little bit is when you hear this concept of President Biden paying off everyone's student loans or you know a lot of folks that have these huge student loans and whatnot folks did not do that for me okay I had a program this Mr. Richard could you please direct it to the county's budget my name is what we're discussing okay so the way you can save money is by having these students that are taking this federal money and just having their student loans paid off they can do things for the community just like I mentioned to you about making the pen limone or the demiolane garbage facility available during the weekends so homeowners couldn't remove their things and so people could pick up trash on their roads and whatnot that might be able to reduce costs to the county and just think about the concepts you could be driving on a road here without seeing all this trash and horrible stuff flow into your rivers and into your ocean and everything it creates a gooey toxic mess and it destroys our county and it's quite depressing to look like to look at okay so um and in regards to the war stuff sorry folks you know there's no cost too high for freedom i'm sorry on that one all right we can't let russia walk all over us and bring on additional costs to you to our county okay so those are my comments thank you very much thank you ham your microphone is now available hi yeah i want to thank you um as others have for for the presentation um i i got pulled away and i'm gonna watch it again because um because i missed pieces of it but um but i think it's this is so important this conversation and the budget really reflects our priorities our values and i i really appreciate the time that's gone into making it accessible and um and understandable and um it was mentioned the neighborhood courts program which for the past nine months ten months i've been a volunteer in and um my experience has highlighted this need to shift to um from the punitive and carceral to um restorative justice to healing programs um i'm i'm really impressed with with this program and i know there's a lot of other ones that the public defender's office is is um carrying out and i i'll say about the presentation that you made i was i was horrified by the incredible um cuts to health and human services and and then we're increasing the sheriff's office um we have the average 30 percent of our jails right now are empty beds so we can reduce in that department and it's it's an opportunity to invest where where we know we can we can make changes so that people stay out of jail and and don't keep cycling through and equity equity equity thank you thank you we have no further speakers chair thank you very much i'll bring it back to the board to see if there's any questions comments and if any action needs to be taken and i'll start with supervisor prime thank you chair thank you for the presentation i had a just a brief question and the general fund contingencies are uh alarmingly low uh with a hope that it's temporary but can you just maybe for the board's understanding briefly mr pennant tell us explain what that reduction in contingencies could potentially do or what risks we might be facing as a result of that um and as an example in last year's budget early on we last year mid-year we we appropriated about 1.6 million from contingencies for then the the new year's even night storm disaster that we experienced so that's greater than the 1.5 million we're at now so that would be problematic you know should we have another event in the past people also had um other other things that pop up during the year's claims lawsuits bigger than we expected that we've we've had to address what contingencies okay i mean the picture is is bleak and that is separate from the great work that staff continues to do with i mean if you look back from 2008 to now i mean planning department and public works are about half the staff that they had then parks is about a third i think less from what they had uh then but there has been you know a number of improvements that the county's made in in general services to the broader community i think that future boards in particular if you what the way that the budget looks now for for the next say five to ten years it relies on expectations that the situation remain relatively constant and i think the one thing we know isn't going to happen is is that so it's bleak under the current circumstance if we face the additional climate disasters if the state continues additional unfunded mandates or realignments through things like prop one if the state's budget and half of what the county functionally does or state and federal pass-throughs continues to require additional responsibilities without additional funding i think the future boards are going to be faced with some very uh challenging decisions in ways that they really haven't in the last 15 years so the question i'd have at least maybe for you mr posiust kind of briefly would be what three actions would you like to see their future boards this or future boards take and or what are the sort of the three key things that you think that needs to happen to break us out of the cycle because everything that was talked about today from debt servicing etc that's just these are band-aids are a greater more systemic issue so in order to break out of the cycle and start looking at where there's future presentations that are more hopeful what would you suggest would be the three kind of key drivers thank you uh supervisor friend um first and foremost there needs to be reform nationwide and statewide over how we are responding to help local jurisdictions respond to natural disasters um fema has been a great partner over the years in many ways but they have an outdated formula for how they respond to natural disasters they're taking anywhere from three to seven years to reimburse us they don't have enough money they don't have enough staffing they are working on a pre-climate change kind of model and yet you look across the country and you see all the disasters that have happened and continue to happen from tornadoes hurricanes um who would have thought we would have had the devastating fires in Maui uh what we need is reform at the fema level to make them uh reimbursed more quickly and more efficiently that's very significant and then at the state level I think there are advances that Cal OES could make to help local jurisdictions like ours to advance funds so that when we spend money responding to emergencies they advance us and then they get the reimbursement we're not asking for a grant from Cal OES asking for advances so I think local jurisdictions across the state are going to need that kind of cash flow assistance and I think if we had those two things a big chunk of our problem would go away right now so but they're not there yet because again we're working off outdated models from prior to the great severity and frequency of natural disasters we are currently experiencing the second thing is that counties and cities especially counties but cities too are going to have to get more aggressive again at making claims under state mandate law for under Jerry Brown Brown many state mandates went away or they were funded and so we got complacent we actually did pretty well under Governor Brown and locally and if you remember we used to get SB 90 money for our state mandates and it would be you know two few million dollars that was extra revenue for us those mandates have not been funded for many years and there's new mandates being added by the current administration so counties and cities have fallen asleep because they're just staff lack of institutional memory lack of practice we haven't been going to state mandate commission we need to get much more assertive of doing that and so I think that is going to happen and I think we're part of Seesax in fact Mr. Payment tells on the statewide committee I know Supervisor Friend you've been at the state advocating that for Seesax at the statewide level so we need to keep pushing for that because that would help us with all of these unfunded mandates we have and then third thing I think that we're going to have to do and it is actually difficult right now because we're in a bridge period we there was a discussion about CalPERS and the unfunded liability and actually it is difficult still we're still in a bit difficult position in some ways but in the other hand we've made significant progress in reducing our unfunded liability first of all this board many years ago passed a second tier 2 percent at 60 that reduced our unfunded liability significantly then there was statewide pension reform in which a big significant portion of our county employees are under the statewide pension reform right now and so if you look at the models our costs are going to continue to increase somewhat for the next 10 years we issued this board authorized us to issue pension obligation bonds which also reduced that unfunded liability that we have but the good news is that after about 10 years costs stabilized and then they actually start dropping very dramatically within the 10 to 15 year period so it is going to be somewhat difficult for the next few years in terms of getting through that but in a future board a decade for now it's going to have a huge windfall actually in those those funds that we're now dedicating to PERS and so I think that is a good news thing and it's going to be very important for this board as we get closer to those days is still a way it's going to start planning how do you spend that money in terms of you know the most critical services we can provide to our community that you must chart is I appreciate it to my three colleagues that have the honor of continuing on in this role is going to be a real challenge I mean this when supervisor McPherson and I got on we were coming still out of the 2008 great recession and there was still cuts and we didn't even have a parks department at the time and it's and there isn't that knowledge of there haven't really been a lot of electives when you look at the city councils and you look at the board that have been through the level of cuts or if not cuts the inability to make investments that I think that the the next two boards are going to face and so you know that but it's going to be in your in your hands to really find ways to still provide the essential services while recognizing that you don't want to destabilize the county moving forward it's going to be a very large challenge but thank you Mr. Chair for the opportunity to ask the questions. Thank you Supervisor Hernandez. Any questions or comments? First I have to say that I agree with some of the public comments about you know viewing this budget through the lens of equity and really lean in on that equity and of course the public defender's office and is needs to be funded of course and more restorative justice programs but I think both of you guys mentioned it but didn't kind of talk too much about it but how's that $70 billion state deficit going to affect us to sort of a overview or bird's eye view of how it's going to affect our general fund and county services. So far it's been modest not to say that the impacts are not important in severe CalWorks program that I think you've already heard about from the public and from our Health's Human Services Department you'll hear more about that May 21st for our Health and Human Services Day the budget hearings saw about a $300,000 hit to the public defender that fortunately they were able to balance through some offsetting revenues through increased revenues but that was an unfortunate discontinuation of funding for the public defender. There are a lot of proposals excuse me that are still out there the governor largely is proposing solutions that are one-time fixes that would may not impact us the severely but that's still there's still a lot happening at the committee level across all committees the state of California so we're so trying to understand and be ready to respond to any new threats that emerge in the coming weeks. One thing I would mention and is that counties have been entities have been united and asking for stable adequate funding for our homeless services programs. There's a lot of one-time grants you'll hear about this during the presentation of the Human Services Department and Housing for Health Department and there's so many different grants all with different requirements and all are one-time and what we really need is stable ongoing funding to fund these programs for example we have three low barrier navigation centers that are funded would each be funded for about two years and after that there's no guarantee now there is some CalAIM funding that could be used to offset some of those costs but a long term that is another big need that's a huge issue for us as our community the the unhoused population and providing service for them so to the extent that we could get ongoing stable funding for our homeless services programs that would be a big priority unfortunately the state budget is making that very difficult right now so that's another thing that is something we need that's unlikely to happen right now and it's it's going to really depend on what happens a few years from now when the funding runs out for these navigation centers and what the economy is like at that time. Does that conclude your comments? Supervisor McPherson do you have any comments? Yeah thank you I'm I have some extensive comments and I just appreciate Supervisors Friends for warning of what's coming and what needs to be done to correct the situation that that we're in from getting worse basically through no fault of county itself we are in a world of disaster related budgetary hurt in Santa Cruz County others are too but I do appreciate and I think it can be overstated about the award winning online budget presentation that you've made at this point it really gives a good picture and understand how government works and what we need to do and I really thank you for the online budgeting practice that you've put in place let more people in our community better understand what a budgetary crisis we're in in Santa Cruz County but this year the budget story is grim the money owed to the county by the federal agencies in disaster response which has been addressed by CAO Carlos Palacios for future concerns is just compromising our ability to make needed repairs and provide the services that we really want to do in Santa Cruz County we shouldn't be put in this position and the federal disaster support is something that we should be able to count on but there's been disasters throughout the nation and I know that that has created a national crisis itself but as we learned this problem is one that many local governments are facing because of the climate change disasters that have escalated across the country and I'm glad to see our general fund reserves maintain it slightly above 10 percent that's something that certainly I and other members of the board 12 years ago when I came on to sit let's get it at 12 percent or 10 10 percent and thank heavens we did but it should be noted too that without health specific reserves we are really closer to 5 percent I guess there's a way I think and we that is it's only two and a half payroll sites that's really concerning and that's we need to see how we can increase that as best to our ability but borrowing 85 million dollars to keep the county service to stabilize would not be feasible without that strong fiscal management that we have been following for the past several 10 years for more than a decade and thanks to all those who got us in as good a position as possible under the circumstances that we're facing today and this is going to be a budget cycle the last one of my tenure on the board and I want to thank our you Mr Palacios and you Mr Pimentel for all the staff that have contributed to this plan and of course the action we've taken we've we're doing some good things I would are you know let's do some things that need to be done and I think it really does address the equity issue in particular and I think we should and I'm glad we have gone ahead and purchased the westward building to that we're going to have five departments to serve the public better that's going to be needed it's needed today and it's going to be needed in the future and we had the opportunity to do it and we did it and I think it's a good thing that we've done the same thing with the health clinic on the freedom boulevard the children's stabilization center on Soquel Avenue the navigation centers in Watsonville mid county and Santa Cruz these are crises of their own that we need to address and I think we're doing it to the best of our ability that we can and I think it's forward looking we have a we have a financial crisis but I think we need to address what we're going to need and what we can afford now to address the problems that are upon us today and certainly are unfortunately going to be in the in the future but the what the state is doing I've been crying this concern for a long time these unfunded mandates and the one when Governor Brown turned around it was great and I wish we could stick with that and if there's no message that we should give to CSAC is that let's and they are addressing this let's state people you legislators I know you want to do better by anybody but if you want to do it for the counties find out a way to pay for it because we're we can't do it at this point and we're not the only county in this situation there we got 57 others that are facing a similar crisis so I don't like to excuse upon ask the buck to the state and federal governments but don't put more financial burden on the counties for programs that are needed that are identified but we cannot afford at this time on the other hand I'm really happy that we have gone ahead and had the forward looking uh been looking forward to the programs that we've implemented especially in the South County that's going to serve the citizens of Santa Cruz County better thank you Mr. Chair thank you Supervisor Koenig thank you Chair I'll start with a few questions and I'm sure we'll get into more detail with the budget hearings in May but the first question is is there any do you have any specificity on what capital projects in particular were unfunding in this budget year that were funded or that we're anticipating doing in previous years yeah I mean on May I think 22nd is cap for project presentation day so we'll have a discussion about more detail about those projects an example that stands out to me is our ad commissioner have a property just off Capitol Avenue in Soquel that a portion of the warehouse is being eroded from a slide that's happening in the creek and so there's a risk of losing our portion of our county building there there's also some damages on the roof leaks in the roof that we can't get to that we know about and we're trying to do band-aids to fix it those are examples we have a lot of the board of aging facilities aging carries a lot of weight in that in those two words we really have a problem with our aging facilities across entire county and we've been unable like most counties most cities over the last 20 years following the Great Recession have had to limit our ability to fund local facility projects because there's more important service needs that are out there so I think we'll have a richer conversation coming on April 22nd on that got it and then to follow that up a little bit which is point of investing in our infrastructure so in the general fund out your forecast the 26-27 budget there's a 12 million dollar deficit which is that's sort of the gray part of the bar and I think that's mostly because we're going to have to invest in county infrastructure and then the next year has an 8.1 million dollar deficit are those like particularly urgent projects that need to be addressed in those budget years I'm just wondering why they fall then and presumably we're going to have to figure out how to pay for them in those years right right now those are not we're not projecting specific projects we're just noting that I'm going probably over the last five years we've averaged about two million a year in facility investments that that's got to change so we're trying to figure out how we can program in the need to maintain our facilities that current conditions because we all know this when a facility fell as we start seeing degradation like it bag commissioners the cost of fix a leaking roof is exponentially greater than just doing a maintenance on the roof to allow it so it doesn't leak so we're just those forecasters including presumptions that we need to start increasing our investment capacity but there's not projects yet identified in those out years got it got it well I guess I'll build off of Supervisor Friend's comments a little bit it does seem like we are facing unprecedented challenges here and what's being presented to us as a status quo budget I do question if we can really maintain the status quo at this point I mean what what and I feel like to some extent you know I appreciate your your responses CAO plus you know it's about you know things that need to change the way the state and federal governments fund disasters the unfunded mandates you know ultimately sort of waiting out this pension reform issue but I mean the question I think still hangs what can this board do in this budget cycle to improve our position and I think fundamentally we have to lean into the revenue side a little bit more I mean things that I would like to see funded in this year's budget included GIS tech a new senior plans examiner I mean the folks who are going to assess property help us get new APNs that help us to build and get us out of the housing crisis because that's ultimately going to support the bottom line of more property taxes for this community which will support more social services as well you know then there is this question of of infrastructure and principally roads I mean roads are the one county service that every single one of us uses every day and I think that it really is the bottom line for a lot of people as we heard during public comments earlier in this meeting and I can tell you just getting through an election cycle it's it's what people care most about is roads and you know arguably roads are emergency facilities right I mean if you don't have road access that's that's definitely an emergency so I know we you know we're paying now for the poor state of our roads but we're not what I don't see here is any proactive investment in our roads I mean particularly for example culverts you know our culverts are in horrible condition all over the place you know if you don't if you don't control water management I mean as you just explained in your roof example budget manager pin and tell if we don't control the water then we're