g in the city. And I think the reason why I'm here really, and that I want the empty home tax to succeed is because it is a ready-made solution. It is, as Bode mentioned it, on a silver platter for all of you. You know, the group behind this has already done the research. If you haven't seen the report, please go to the website. You can just look up empty home tax. We sent you emails. It's a great thing to pass. Please support it and help voters vote for this. Thank you, Rose. I think your time is up. We'll go to our next speaker, which is Erin and you're permitted to speak. You can either press star nine on your phone or the raise hand feature in the webinar setting. Good evening, council members. My name's Erin Toomey. I've lived here in Santa Cruz for 23 years and I'm a homeowner. I'm also a clinical social worker who works for the VA supported housing program here in Santa Cruz. Over the years I've observed, you know, my neighbors, people I work with who have lost their homes, have either left or ended up without a home here. Since I've been in Santa Cruz, the number one thing elected officials talk about is increasing low income housing. And yet mostly what has happened has been increasing market rate housing. Most often the reason for not building low income housing is that it doesn't pencil out. The money raised by the empty home tax could help to fill that gap. Even the lowest estimated annual review, 2.5 to four millions by your own report by the staff's report could go a long way to fill that gap in funding for low income housing. The empty home tax is a very reasonable ballot measure. The threshold is very low. A home has to be empty more than eight months to pay the tax. If someone can afford to leave their home empty for more than eight months a year, I believe they can afford to help support building more housing for our lowest income residents. You all have talked constantly about supporting the creation of low income housing and we are handing you part of the solution. I hope you will do your part and publicly support the empty home tax today. Thank you for your time. Comments, our next speaker is Joe Thompson. And Joe, you can go ahead and either press star nine or unmute yourself. Great, thank you, council members. And this has been a long meeting, especially for y'all. But thank you again for taking the time to talk about these important issues for the city. My name is Joe Thompson. I am a UCSC student heading into my sophomore year. I'm a member of YDSA and the Student Housing Coalition. And I'm here today to talk to you as about the empty home tax and why I think you and most community members here are supporting it. It's a great ballot measure that is community driven. Not only was students a large process in part of collecting signatures and supporting this measure, but when I was talking to community members doing some door-to-door canvassing, we actually were knocking on someone's door while they were getting evicted and they immediately signed the petition because they know that the city is facing an affordable housing crisis. And when we were talking to them about the issues that were facing the city, it's very clear that the city is not doing enough to address the affordable housing crisis. And it's affecting renters, it's affecting homeowners, and it's affecting students. And it's an issue that we can all agree upon that we need to build more affordable housing. This is the question is, how do we do that? And that's why we have the empty home tax. This tax is a very small tax in large of it that is going to be placed on homeowners who aren't in their home for more than eight months out of a year. So it's a very, very modest tax on the people who have second homes, vacation homes, investment properties that actually help not only alleviate the affordable housing crisis in Santa Cruz, but throughout the region. And that's why we need to adopt the empty home tax is because it will actually help pointing out that these issues are affecting everyone. It's not only just going to be affecting renters, but it's going to affect long-time owners across the entire city. And not only did we get people who were homeowners assigned the position, but essentially everyone we talked to about it wanted to sign because they believe that the city is not doing enough to actually address the concerns for low income affordable housing. In my hometown of Lincoln, California, me and my mom live in a low income apartment housing complex that was built a few years ago. And as someone who has dealt with housing and security for most of their entire life, I think that most council members can agree that this is an issue that really impacts everyone. And Santa Cruz having the highest homeless rate per capita in the entire country is something that we really need to start addressing. This is a crisis. And when we say crisis, it has to be an emergency crisis. This empty home tax is just the first step in alleviating this crisis and actually going to address all these problems. I couldn't hear the buzzer in it. And I think your time is up. Thank you for your comments. Thank you. Okay. And our next speaker has phone number ending in 6959. And Renshaw with Santa Cruz together regarding this item, we understand that the council has the option to assign a person or committee to submit the argument against the empty homes tax DHT initiative. As an experienced and organized campaign committee, we respectfully request the council designate Santa Cruz together as the authorized group to file the arguments against the ballot measure. We submitted a letter making this request. And that's all. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor Watkins. Our next caller is phone number ending in 1705. Hello. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, welcome. Hello? Okay, great. Thank you for taking my call. I support affordable housing as all the callers have previously do. And if Santa Cruz had a large vacancy rate, I think in some sort of empty home tax would be appropriate to consider. Anyone who has any ounces of intellectual honesty knows that there's nowhere near nine or 10% vacant homes in Santa Cruz. The issue proponents are completely dishonest. We can start with the Stockings opening statement where she claims that 6,000 voters signed her petition. Well, in fact, over 2,000 of those were invalid signatures, but she repeats that lie. As far as her 9% vacancy figure, she's not, they used to claim the census. Now they're claiming the Department of Finance. The Department of Finance gets its numbers from the census. And the census number, that's a point in time count. That's very different from the empty home tax, which is a year-round vacancy. Completely apples to oranges. When you're talking about a point in time count, that's any given unit at that point in time that has nothing to do with whether that unit is vacant for eight months or more. So they're using bad metrics. The city has an ordinance that prohibits condominium conversions if the vacancy rate is less than 5%. That estimates the current vacancy rate of multi-residential properties is 1% to 2%. And once again, that's a rolling vacancy rate. That's not a year-round vacancy rate. So the empty home tax, it's not going to raise significant amounts of money for affordable housing. What this is, is a play by the proponents to deflect attention from their own culpability in the housing crisis, because they're the same folks who vote against every single affordable housing and market rate housing program. And to point it at a tiny minority, it's a scapegoat measure. They're trying to blame this non-economic population that doesn't live in Santa Cruz for housing problems they have nothing to do with. They're very, very few. Your time is up, the buzzer rang. Thank you. Our next speaker is Spencer Holmes. Welcome. Hi. Can you all hear me? Yes, thank you. Hi, my name is Spencer Holmes. I am a graduate student at UCSC, and I'm calling to support the empty home tax as the majority of people have called in to support. As other people have stated, this tax is only going to affect a very wealthy minority in the community. These aren't just homeowners in a notoriously very expensive housing market, but these are people who own multiple homes who don't even live here. So I'm assuming that they can afford a tax to create housing that will be used for people who will live here. And I guess an additional point I want to pose is that if they're, and as other people have noted, this is a crisis. This is a overwhelming crisis for the working class people who live here. And if it continues like this, something has to break eventually. There's going to be a moment where the working class people who run the stores or who are teachers or child care workers cannot afford to live here anymore. And then what is going to happen then if we just still have these empty homes that aren't being used and not being taxed? This is just one step in creating a more equitable Santa Cruz where people can live and actually thrive. And yeah, I mean, I've just seen firsthand what this struggle is like just for students that try to live here. It's a constant struggle of every quarter or for some people they have to find a new living situation. And this just isn't conducive for people to thrive and live here in a comfortable sense. And instead it's catering towards a wealthy minority of people where instead we can put the funds to create something that will ultimately be more equitable and for Santa Cruz in the long run. I don't really have anything more sophisticated to say about the tax other than that I support it. But I hope you urge the council to consider it and enact it as soon as they can. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Our next speaker is Pablo Velazquez. Can you hear me? Yes. Hello. Hi, my name is Pablo Velazquez. I've spoken here before. I used to be a UCSC student. Now I'm just a regular renter in the city of Santa Cruz. I'm here to speak on behalf of the empty home sacks in support of the measure and to ask the city council to at least endorse the measure itself even if you can adopt it today. I think it just makes logical sense to not defend the wealthy minority who don't spend the whole year in Santa Cruz, like myself included with many other students and many people who work here in Santa Cruz and provide to the economy of Santa Cruz. It just makes sense to actually not only have the wealthy minority to pay their fair share for houses that they don't even occupy throughout the year, but as well it makes sense to help support the working class within Santa Cruz. As well, I asked the city council to re-examine the starting cost that seems to be grossly overestimated. It doesn't seem really logical that that would be the starting cost for a city of our size. And I also am not understanding why there's some callers defending people who don't even live in Santa Cruz. It doesn't really make sense to me. And even with this tax, it wouldn't really affect them personally. So I would just ask the city council to at least show support if you do care for the working class of Santa Cruz and to really, if you actually support ending this housing crisis, even though this may not be the permanent solution, it is a start in the right direction. Thank you. Thank you for your input. Our next member of the public is Whitney Ramos. Hi, I'm Whitney Ramos, policy manager with the Santa Cruz County Business Council. I'm here to express our support for the downtown library and affordable housing project. Specifically tonight, we support and respectfully request your aye vote on item 41's motion part 3 to amend the May 24th council direction related to a report on the impacts of the DOF initiatives. We believe extending the deadline benefits the community by giving the study appropriate time to evaluate the potential impacts of the measure, including and beyond stopping the downtown library and affordable housing project to immediately prevent at least 100 units of affordable housing from being built. Santa Cruz faces a housing shortage that affects workers at every level of the economy. Santa Cruz County Business Council member Fortress and Flourish is an HR strategist company. They shared a story with me that highlights one of the economic impacts of our housing shortage. A Fortress and Flourish client went through their whole interview hiring process to find their best fake candidate. When they did, the company and the new employee were both so excited to move forward. But when the new hire tried to find a place to live for this new job opportunity, they were completely unable to find somewhere to live due to the high demand and low amount of housing here. The new hire had to rescind their acceptance of the offer, putting the company behind on filling the position and losing out on that talent. And it affects more than businesses when they're hiring. It affects companies able to retain the talent they already have, high school graduates deciding to stay local or move away, and our college graduates taking local positions or using their degrees somewhere else. More housing, both affordable like the downtown library and affordable housing project and market rate helps make Santa Cruz a better place to live and work with more vibrant communities and businesses. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your input. Our next member of the public is Zenin Oliate-Crow. Hi council, thank you very much. My name is Zenin Oliate-Crow. I'm president of the Student Housing Coalition and a strong supporter of the empty homes tax. A few calls back, someone was talking about how, you know, the empty homes tax is being used as some sort of herring for the actual issues. And I actually disagree with that. I think that the empty homes tax is a serious part, the whole host of things that we need to be doing to combat the housing crisis, because we only have a crisis when everything goes wrong. In order to solve a crisis, everything needs to go right. And I think that the empty homes tax is a huge part of that, just as is building more affordable housing, building more market rate housing, things like rent control. These are all part of the bigger picture. And I really implore the council to view the empty homes tax and personally as council members, endorse this initiative as it is a bigger part of that puzzle and really represents an issue that we can work forward on together as something we can all collaborate around, especially going into the November election. So again, I really want to reiterate my support for the empty homes tax and ask you all to personally endorse it. Thank you. Thank you for your input. Our next member of the public is Kyle Kelly.  Here we go. Okay. Sorry, I had to pull up the side of the road. I'm on a bike. Yeah, so I just wanted to state my own support for the empty homes tax. I do want to point out to folks, I think it's important that people recognize that really there's two outcomes for somebody who's going to pay for effectively a vacancy tax or, you know, whether it's on their second home or whatever, or if they've been land banking, is that it'll cause either them to pay the tax or to put other homes back in the market. So it'll cause turnover for market rate homes. Admittedly, I think that's great. It's going to provide some more options that we wouldn't have otherwise. I think we've seen good amounts of success in Oakland. And I do applaud the signature gatherers, those that have proposed this initiative because it actually went after really where most of our empty second homes really are, which is a lot of the single family homes closer to the beach. I know for my community, for other people that they feel like their communities have actually been hollowed out, right? That there's not families nearby. There's not people living nearby because they're living with a bunch of really homes that get used as vacation homes. I understand that for a beach community, but I think it does really make things tough if there's not enough housing for everyone and if some are left this way. And I think especially when you look at the, how we do property taxes within this state of California, the only way to get back some of that revenue is to have a house get transferred to someone else. They purchase it or whatever else. And so doing this helps claw back some of that money that we're not getting otherwise that somebody can hold in perpetuity. So I just wanna kind of point out some other things. I don't know if everybody's looked at this for their own analysis, but I do want people to kind of have a reasonable policy debate about this and think about it. Thank you. Thank you. Our next member of the public is Reggie Meisler. Go ahead and press star six to unmute. Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Hi, so, you know, of course you probably know me at this point, I support the empty home tax. I just wanna be very clear though about this whole city staff impact report issue. I feel like it's not minor and it shouldn't be glossed over. I called in several weeks ago when this impact report was first being requested and I said I had concerns about city staff being biased and how they did their impact report. And the reason for that is cause in 2019 I worked with council member Cummings and others to develop a very detailed request for a rental increase and notice to quit tracking ordinance. And so this is something we kind of came up with after the failure of rent control to hopefully give us some more information about how to move forward. But then what staff came back with was a voluntary data collection program which obviously ruins the policy by introducing significant selection bias into the data collected. And so here we are today, staff has given us an impact report for empty home tax that includes estimates like $100,000 for a single meeting. And the notion that this would require its own dedicated web portal. And I mean, as someone who's a professional software developer, I just think this is outrageous and honestly embarrassing. I mean, this is an executive branch who's supposed to be unbiased, who are supposed to trust, to like give us real data to like implement things in a like honest way. And this is just so shamelessly, just not accurate bias like bloated. I mean, it's just sadly more evidence that we can't trust city staff to treat progressive public policy fairly. And it's absolutely council's responsibility to correct this bias before this impact report goes into the record. Thank you. Thank you for your input. Our next member of the public is phone number ending in 0249. Good evening. Thank you for taking my call. This is Carol Paul Hamer. How are you? I oppose the empty home tax for a variety of reasons and I won't repeat the ones that have already been stated but I would like to make a few points. The data, first of all, I think the staff report did was a pretty reasonable job considering all the moving parts. And I appreciate that they took a stab in what they thought was possible. I actually thought their vacancy estimates were very high. I've conducted my own research over the last six months and I've talked to the housing authority. I've gone through the HUD figures. I've looked at the census data. I've looked at the rental data that somebody posted a few weeks back. And I've looked at the short-term vacation rental data. My estimate is that there may be 1.7% vacancy rate which boils down to about a hundred homes. So that's my own personal vacancy rate data. A lot of people mentioned empty homes on West Cliff. Except that short-term vacation rentals which is what most of those homes are are specifically excluded from the empty home tax. I'm concerned about the bureaucracy. I feel like even the staff report didn't highlight this enough. Only 15% of the costs of running this program can come from the proceeds. The rest will come from the general fund. And as we heard earlier when talking about the core situation our general fund is in trouble. Our sales tax didn't pass. And we're, we don't art in a position to pay $600,000 for the first year of running this program which is what the staff estimate is. On top of it personally, I have concerns about privacy. I'm not into a big brother situation where I have to report to the city every year how many days I was home. That's a nobody's business. This will be hard to change. It'll require another election. And lastly, my cousin lives in Vancouver. Thank you. That's your time. Our next caller. Thank you for your input is phone number ending in zero or seven zero zero three. Good evening, Darius Mosnian here again. Look, I'm a landlord. A lot of folks know that I'm also a tenant as well. And I see both sides. Okay. And also, I'm just an average citizen who knows how to, knows his way around Excel. And you've seen my work. I hope you read my last recent letter. I took accessor database. I did pretty much what the city did. Accessor data, the assessor database looking for the F&T parcels. Cross-correlated that with the city's own rental inspection database. And limited those cross-correlated it with the SDR, short-term rental database. Remove those 308 that were there. Cross-correlated it with the ADUs as reported by the assessor database. I think there's 80 or 100 of those. I ended up with 583 potential parcels that have advocacy owners not in any previous categories. Well, and one thing, and the city came up with, their report came up with like 487. So we're in the same ballpark with our methodology. One thing they did though, is they made an estimate of those homes that are rented. Well, it turns out the majority of those 583 homes are actually rented because they don't have to solve reports of the rental inspection database. I know of many homes that have active renters that are never inspected because A, the rental inspection program aren't, vigilante is going and looking for them. Now, on another note, I spent a month ago, this database, to all of the supporters of the empty home tag, saying, help us out. Let's all work on this together. Let's go, here's a walking map organized by streets of these empty homes I have found, these parcels I have found. Let's work together. Let's go and take your 140 volunteers that gather signatures, send them out and have them look for instance-like homes. I went through mail boxes even, looking for evidence of emptiness. Thank you for your input. Our next caller has phone number ending in 3485. Caitlin Gasey, and I'm a 23-year resident of the city of Santa Cruz. I'm also a homeowner and a parent of two teenage children. And I know that my children and their friends will never have the opportunity to live in Santa Cruz, or own a home in Santa Cruz at least, as my husband and I have been fortunate to do. The crisis in housing affordability is facing California and Santa Cruz in particular can feel very, very overwhelming and disempowering. But this is one specific practical step that we can take in the right direction. I urge you to support the empty home tax and put it on the ballot so the voters of Santa Cruz can decide. Thank you. Thank you for your input. Our next member of the public is Joe Thompson. Our next member of the public is Portia Lewis.  Thank you so much for taking my comment and for sitting through all of our comments. We appreciate your time. I just wanna say I'm a supporter of the Student Housing Coalition. Community member and an employer whose job is actually funded through families in transition. So I just wanna make a comment that you just defunded my employer for the next year. So I know, but also I do support the empty home tax and I would strongly like to see that on the ballot in November. It did not go past me that in the same conversation where we're looking for funding to fund programs to build affordable housing, we're discussing whether or not we should be creating those funding sources. And I just wanna highlight that and strongly support that. We do create those funding sources to fund the programs that our city needs but to also fund the affordable housing that our city desperately also needs for our community and for the people that live here. And including myself. So thank you so much and thank you for your time. Thank you for calling in. Our next member of the public is Lisa. This city has failed time and time again to make this a place where its workers who fuel this city's economy can actually afford to live. We as a community have declared that by taxing the people who are rich enough to have an empty million plus dollar home in this town, we can start to actually build the affordable housing that our working class needs. This is something that cities across the state and even within our own county have also realized that we need. We just listened to all during the previous agenda items struggling to find out how to find the funds to support the community. This is doing that work for you. Even looking at the conservative numbers that the city's reports have measured, this will create two and a half to $4 million in revenue every year versus the 400,000 estimated costs. This is going to fund building affordable housing. Even the staff said that if this comes out with a positive revenue, that this will be a good thing for this city. There are families, coworkers, children, our neighbors that are being forced out of this city. Clearly this provides a positive revenue to affordable housing. And if folks don't want to pay the tax, they can just rent it out and help alleviate the housing crisis that way. But any way that you look at this, empty homes are hurting our city and we need this tax to help our community.  Though honestly, who are we kidding? Santa Cruz together is bankrolling most of your campaigns so we know exactly how you're gonna come out on this no matter what. Thank you. Our next member of the public is Sabrina. Hi everybody. Excuse me, good afternoon. I would just like to say that of course, like much else of the public, I am in support of the empty homes tax. But really what I wanna talk to y'all about is like your stance and your position, right? We've heard the city for years and years and years say that houselessness is like the number one issue of Santa Cruz. And yet every year it gets worse and worse and worse. What are y'all doing about me? You know, you say the money's not there. We just gave you money. We just said, hey, here's a great possible solution. And it's interesting to me that the funds can't be found when things like the police budget get increased. It's real interesting to me. So what I think we should all implore, think about is if this comes out and y'all do not support the empty homes tax, which is a very simple, easy way to essentially tax the rich so that less and less people are getting shoved out of their homes, shoved onto the streets, shoved into houselessness, which is what's happening. I hate to break it to you. It is happening every single day. If y'all still don't support it, can you just say it with your chest? Can you just be honest to the public that you do not care about the working class? You do not care about people in poverty. You know? Like can we just be honest in how we represent ourselves on the city council because it's really a no-brainer. And the fact that this estimate came out it was like so grossly inaccurate. And it just seems insidious. Like it seems insidious. It seems biased. It seems gross, especially because like we're supposed to trust you, you know? People vote you in. Like you have constituency. You are responsible for it. Thank you for your input. Thank you. Have a good one. Thank you. Our next member of the public, it looks like Hunter Gizaman. Hi, can you guys hear me? Yes, hello. Okay. Yeah. We lost you. Try again. Oh, can you hear me now? Yes. Hello. Okay, thank you. Yeah, it's always nice to see a lot of turnout from the community and just so many people passionate about this beautiful place they call Santa Cruz. So I don't have much to say. I'm gonna keep it short and sweet, but I would like the city council to consider supporting the empty homes tax, at least putting it forward to voters because this is an issue that a lot of people are really passionate about. And I'd love to see the community continue to have dialogue on this issue, especially with like the potential changes in the environmental impact report and everything. I just really wanna see this go forward to voters and also some support from the city council. So thank you for your time and yeah. Thank you. Our next member of the public is Sabina Holber. Welcome. Can you hear me? Yes. Hello, good evening, city council. My name's Sabina Holber. I'm calling in support of the empty home tax. I think that it's common sense. I think that if you're looking for funding, this is where you get funding. It's not a lot of money for people that own such expensive houses that they're leaving empty. Also, I wanna address talking about the general fund. You guys aren't great at spending money, like out of the $14 million that you got for homelessness issues, you're giving a half a million dollars to consultants instead of to people that really need it. For instance, 41 seniors were just evicted on Friday and were given backpacks and told to go to the bench once. So you're not helping people, like literally, sorry, I'm out of breath. I was watering my garden. I ran inside so I could talk to you guys. The other thing I wanna say is I implore you not to give that space to Santa Cruz together. As other callers have mentioned, they're bankrolling a lot of campaigns here, specifically, Chevrolet Cowan-Harrie Johnson who voted for OVO, who voted for CSSO. The people that run Santa Cruz together have so much money. They back you guys, they wanna keep that money. And you know how they made that money? They profited off of the housing crisis. They are folks that are realtors. They are folks that are property managers. They have terrible reviews when you go look to see how they maintain their properties. No wonder they don't want to have to pay any taxes for empty homes. They want there to be a housing crisis so they can continue to jack up the rents. So giving a gift to Santa Cruz together to have this on the ballot, it's straight from your campaigns. It should be considered a campaign contribution. Thanks for your time. Please vote for the empty home tax. Thank you for your input. Are there any other members of the public that would like to speak? Okay, we have an in-person. Please step to the podium and make sure the mic is at your mouth. Hi there, I'm Cynthia Mathews and I'm speaking this evening representing a recently formed campaign committee known as Santa Cruz for Real Library and Housing Solutions. We've been formed specifically to support the onward progress of the proposed new library and affordable housing project for downtown Santa Cruz and to oppose the ODOLF initiative. Contrary to what a previous spoker said, ODOLF is far from straightforward. We believe that many of those signatures were gathered with incomplete misleading or inaccurate sound bites, but the fact remains they got their signatures, they qualified and your job tonight is to set that for election. We understand that. We think their proposal is based largely on conjectures, ideas, without substance or stakeholder consultation and if passed ODOLF will be truly damaging to the future of Santa Cruz. It will put back any progress on a downtown library for several years and result ultimately if passed on a library that's smaller and inferior. It will kill a project currently in development with trusted community partners for 125 units, permanently affordable housing for low income residents. It will kill other investments in the project that benefit the surrounding downtown area that contribute to our community for current and future needs, including I should say, other affordable housing projects in the immediate downtown area that depend on this project for support, including replacement parking for parking currently being lost to other development and street parklets and a childcare center. For all these reasons, we think ODOLF is damaging to the future of Santa Cruz and our campaign will be fighting it. Relative to your proposal, we ask that you designate our committee to be the official signer for arguments against the ODOLF measure and we support your extension of the deadline for your report. Thank you. Just take a breath. Thank you for everyone's public comment and input. It looks like that concludes our virtual and in-person public comment on agenda item number 41. I will now bring it back to our city council and I'm looking for emotion, action, discussion, questions. I have many questions. Great. When I have another. Great, council member Brown and did you have your hand council member Cummings? Okay, thank you mayor. Yeah, first I want to appreciate, I'm going to speak primarily about the empty home tax, fiscal analysis and I want to appreciate Marisol for taking on this task. I know it's not easy to try to come up with something that projects an unknown process and not a lot of experience from other communities to draw from. I'm sorry to hear that you didn't get more information from some of the other jurisdictions that have adopted these about their costs because I think that it would have been really helpful in for you and for all of us to see an analysis that was based, I think less on, well, it's a real, it's a Cadillac budget. I'll just say that. So, but I understand that it was probably not easy to come up with the various pieces of this and so I appreciate the effort and I appreciate the transparency. I do have, because this is now a public document and I am quite sure it will be used by opponents of the measure to, you know, to as a deterrent, you know, as a message to voters that it's going to cost millions of dollars and, you know, we can't afford it. And so I just, I don't feel comfortable even receiving this report without better understanding some of these items. And so it's going to be a little tedious, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to, I have to ask these questions. I think that this needs to go into the record as well. So the, and I have many questions about some of the little items I'll try to not, I don't want to be, keep us here forever, but I do want to try to get an understanding here. I mean, I'm seeing for, so in the startup costs, I'm seeing some things that are, I guess I just, I'm just wondering how, you know, what the basis is for this. I mean, so for example, revisions to the website at almost $40,000. Where, how did you get the number of hours for that, that's a lot of money to revise the city's website, which is quite extensive. So I'm just wondering how, where that came from. I can ask them all if there's somebody who can answer them or try to take a stab at answering them. I can, is that, would that be, would you prefer that Marisol that I just go through and ask them all? And then. Maybe one by one might be better. Your brother, do you have a preference? That's fine, thank you. So yeah, website 40, you know, we've got quite a, quite a large budget for revising our website for the empty home tax. So $40 plus thousand dollars. Yes, so the hours were estimated based on talks with some consultants who have done ordinance implementation before. So I base those estimates on there and discussing. So it's not just the physical, okay, we're changing this. It's all the discussion that goes into what needs to be changed, what pages, what links. But the hours were based on consultation with external parties. Okay, and so I guess I'm just gonna guess that that's what I'll hear when I ask about many of these other items. Yes. So I won't go through them all, but I guess I'm, well, okay, so then I have a, I'll just go on to some of my other questions and try to reformulate on the others. But I, so in terms of the estimated cost for the ongoing committee, this $126,000 for one meeting per year, that is coupled with some narrative earlier on in the report talking about how this could be 1,000 hours. This could be many, many meetings. However, the language in the ballot initiative says that the committee would meet once per year, more than once per year, would require council approval. So I guess I'm just wondering, are you, you're assuming that the council would just allow for whatever this committee wanted to do? So there is some estimates made there on the committee. So I don't assume the council will approve anything the committee wants. I assume there will be a discussion. But also as part of the proposed measure, there are also community meetings that were discussed and it's not really clear whether that, those community meetings are part of that one meeting that would need to be added to additional meetings per council. So if there was some assumption that we'd have more meetings than just the one. Okay. Like, may I ask, did you happen to consult with the Regional Transportation Commission about their Measure D Taxpayer Oversight Committee? That is what this was modeled upon and it's a very different structure than standing ongoing commissions. And so I guess I'm just wondering if we did provide that information to potentially to ask them what their costs are. I didn't do that because I thought that would probably happen through staff and it doesn't appear to have happened. But so I just want to clarify, did you talk with the RTC about their? No. Okay.  I'm going to go back to the litigation item. I heard you say that ordinances generally have to go through legal review and that a reasonable estimate is $100,000. And so I just want to try to understand that because I've never heard that. I've been here and voted yes and voted no on many inordinates. We've never been told that costs $100,000 for legal, potential legal risk. So I'd just like to hear more about that. Do you want me to comment on that? Sure, thank you. I wasn't part of being that estimate, but I think I can step in here. So yeah, so the estimate was $100,000. I can tell you that if there actually was litigation, it would probably be more than that. $100,000 is a pretty low estimate for any litigation. So I think that estimate was taking was estimating that there might not be litigation, there might $100,000 might be a reasonable estimate. And I would also just point out the fact that this is a tax. And so we could also have tax payers challenge. And that has happened before in our office, for example, challenging the TOT. And so that might not even be a full blown attack to the ordinance, but it might be a legal challenge that's put in the way of, well, this is unlawful as applied to me. And those can also get to be expensive. And so it's litigations notoriously hard to estimate how much it's gonna be. I think if there is litigation, it's gonna be more than $100,000. But I think $100,000 is a reasonable number to estimate. So, okay, thank you. I guess I'll follow up on that question with another question related to legal. On what basis were you determining the likelihood of lawsuit, I guess I'm just still having a hard time wrapping my mind around factoring that in. We never do that. We get sued on ordinances all the time. We've got, well, we know. And we don't talk about that as a cost related to that work. And so I'm still just trying to wrap my mind around that. And I just disagree, I guess. But I would like to hear what work went into evaluating the potential for a legal challenge given that, like, did you find other jurisdictions who were saying, well, we're being told we're gonna get sued. What evidence is there that there's a legal challenge in the making here? I mean, the attorneys who reviewed this were our experts at what they do and worked very hard to craft an ordinance that would pass legal muster. And so I'm just not, I guess I'm a little more sanguine about the potential for a legal challenge. But mostly I just wanna understand why we would build that in when it's, you know, what's the likelihood and what was a methodology for determining that likelihood? Thank you. So I did a consult with our legal team as well as outside counsel just to talk about a new measure in general. And they mentioned some of the potential litigation for that. But not only that, that this is something that we are, you know, there's not a lot of cities doing this, a lot of California cities yet. And that was more of the basis as to, and I think you're right, Sandy, that these types of things are not dispensed and within the discussions with the budget and listening in on the budget team and just having, just knowing where we are, we thought it would be best to have that potential cost listed here. And whether or not counsel wants to accept the report or amend the report with, you know, for that item, I think it definitely differed to you guys. But I did wanna present what we felt would be a potential cost. Thank you. I have more questions, so I'm just gonna keep going. But if you have, go for it. If I may just chime in real quick, Council Member Brown, and I appreciate the questions. So as Marisol was mentioning, this is still a relatively novel program. There's only a couple other cities that have them in place. And even in those jurisdictions are relatively new and not in full swing because of delays related to the pandemic and challenges that we've all been facing. So I think these are numbers that reasonable people can debate on either side and, you know, Marisol's efforts to try to put some best guesses as to what the numbers may look like. We really, the truth is, won't have a full understanding until we get to a place where we have the program in full swing and we get a better handle on what properties really do qualify as empty. And then of those, the percentage that were really successful in being able to collect the taxes contemplated in the initiative. So what was brought forward is our best attempt at that. The committee time that's devoted and reflected in that cost table is also a guess based on the number of responsibilities that are contemplated in the initiative beyond just having the annual meeting. That includes community outreach meetings, subcommittees, reports and analyses that could be ordered throughout that process, the annual report. So trying to take all of them into account and look at other examples, you know, my time in Watsonville, we had an oversight committee that for a time was meeting more than four times a year and that can ebb and flow. So without really knowing, we had to assume that some of that additional work would take place beyond just an annual meeting. That's in totality what's reflected in what is still a relatively new idea and some best guesses based on those assumptions. You'll notice that I'm not asking questions about your analysis of the potential revenues. I'm not even gonna go there because I get it that there's a lot of unknown and people can, people have done their own studies but have different ideas about what that might look like. I'm not even gonna go there. I'm gonna keep asking about costs. So and I'm gonna make a recommendation that the staff return to us to give us updated information about the potential costs for an oversight committee after speaking with the Regional Transportation Commission about their measure D oversight committee. I just think that we'll have a very different picture if we can actually get a picture of what the likely level of activity will be for that committee. I see multiple line items related to vetting and developing a process for a set of principles. I can't remember what the term was for vetting the, how the money will be spent. And so I guess I'm wondering how you see that in relation to, I mean the funding will go to affordable housing. It'll go into the affordable housing trust fund. And so the cost seems very high to develop a system, monitor a system that is essentially going to be putting money into the affordable housing trust fund for the city council to determine how it will be used. So if I could just hear a little bit more about that. There's like three, there's multiple line items and because we don't have this in spreadsheet form, I can't tell you what rows they are, but I can try to find the titles. But just in general, I see, and I'm sorry because I really need a magnifying glass for this, but develop process for vetting use of funds. And I see for that one, vetting the use of funds, I think that's like seven, 18,000. And then ongoing every year, there's one other place I can't find, but another one was- Council member- I'm sorry, yeah, I'm sorry, this is really challenging, but I'm very serious about this because this is on the record now. And if this council is gonna accept this report, that is the number that's gonna be used throughout this campaign. We will not be involved in that, but I'm serious about this. So the motion, the recommended motion is to receive the report and to certify the signatures and put them on the ballot tonight. So receiving- I'll move the recommendation. I can, I still have the floor and I'd like to- Does that mean that- I can stop asking the questions and I'll just make the motion. And based upon my assertion that this is a wild overestimate, but I think I should be able to ask the questions about how these costs were, how it was decided by staff that this is potential cost. I think I have the right to ask that. Yes, you do. And I have a clarifying question. I just want to clarify receiving the report, does that mean that it codifies the report as accurate? I mean, I almost think that you know, there's a lot based on public input and based on council member Brown's questions, some of the emails we received, some of the questions I asked earlier, there are a lot of questions on these estimates in the report. And so the feeling of receiving it, does that mean it's accepting that those numbers are accurate? Because there's clearly still a lot of refinement and unknowns and so I just want to clarify what that means to receive the report. Count, City Court? For the elections code, when I drafted the agenda report, per the elections code, it is you guys provide a direction for staff to present to you the fiscal impact report and that is what the code specifies, that they are presenting it to you. It is not a matter of you accepting it, you approving it, you authorizing it, none of that. That was the direction of them to present it to you. So does that help clarify? Does that... I mean, it clarifies the technical aspect of this, but it doesn't change the fact that the staff report says things like it will cost, this will cost $600,000. It doesn't say it might cost that much. This is an outside estimate. It doesn't say that. It says it will cost. Right. Is that something we can work on to refine as we move forward? And for... I have a motion in that vein. Oh, great. Are there... I'd love to have you make your motion then and we can move forward with discussion. Okay. So my motion is to... For number one, to replace, receive the fiscal impact report, ordered per elections code 9212 for the empty home tax initiative petition, to replace that with direct staff, to return to the council at the earliest possible meeting with a revised fiscal impact report based upon gathering additional information about potential costs, to administer the program. And I have... I'd like that to be a general thing, but in particular, in the following areas. Ongoing committee administration for distributing tax funds and startup costs... Sorry, startup costs related to the online... The web portal? The system, yeah, the web portal. Thank you. I couldn't remember the... Yes, the online web portal. Okay, our items two, three, and four. There, great. So we have a motion by council member Brown. I'll second that. Can I... Sorry, I hate to interrupt. I think there was one thing we didn't do during our staff presentation because of the timing issues, which was talk about amended language around the empty home tax issue. And I really wanna make sure we sort of address that before we're moving deep into motions, if that's okay. Yes. So Bonnie's bringing up the language. So the empty home tax folks gave me a call and there was an inaccuracy in the proposed measure language. So it's super important that we correct all inaccuracies. And so I went back and forth with them and they suggested some changes and some of them were more stylistic, some of them were more factual, but this is what we came up with or what I came up with, listening to their concerns. So to just go through some of the changes here as compared to what was in your agenda materials. So most important thing to change was, well, first of all, I'll go through it in order. So we changed it to empty home tax because that's the exact language used in the ballot proposal. So singular, so not empty homes. And then it's on residences that are in use less than 100 days per calendar year. And so there was a mistake in the proposed ballot language. We had that they were vacant 120 days or more, that's not accurate per the language. So in the amount of $6,000 per single family residence, $6,000 per parcel with six or fewer units and $3,000 per year on condominiums and residential units that didn't like the word apartment. So we changed it to residential units with seven or more units with revenue allocated toward affordable housing projects, 15% for administration and 5% for homeless sanitation services. And they wanted a clarification that is sanitation services, which we can do that, overseen by a community oversight committee. So that's what we've got there. It can be a challenge to fit everything within the word limits and have proper English, but that is what I would propose. Is the maker of the motion amenable to that proposed? Yes, and thank you for jumping in on that because I in my zeal to ask the questions kind of forgot about that piece. So thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Okay. Mayor, I'm not sure how to do this with our downtown or our future, but I was hoping to offer some language change to that ballot. I just not quite sure how we're doing it if we're taking those as individuals or not, but I was contacted about the description is there is a incorrect description in what the project is apparently now being called. Under which item? One. In the ordinance with the ballot language. Three. It's the other ballot thing on this item. It's within the resolution. So it'd be under number four. And so. Thank you. Okay, I'll wait till then. Thank you. Well, are we taking it all once or are we? Can you do, is it maybe a friendly amendment because the motion is all includes all four? That's fine. So it's on. No. We can also separate it if the maker of the motion. Okay, so the maker of the motion would like to separate out number four in agenda item 41. And so your motion that's currently on the floor is items one through three with the direction of staff to return to council with a revised fiscal report based on additional gathering of info in particular in the following areas. Admin costs for distribution of admin costs, costs for distribution of tax funds and startup costs related to online web portal. And then also the revised language from the city attorney's office. So those are items one through three. Council member Cummings. I have a friendly amendment to that language. So as it relates to bringing back the revised report, have it say including but not limited to before the ongoing communication costs or ongoing committee admin costs, et cetera, just because if there's anything else that needs to be incorporated, it's not limited to those four items. Does that make sense? Yes, you're suggesting to add in in particular the following areas instead of in particular, including but not including. But not limited to. But not limited to. That makes sense. Thank you. And another friendly amendment would also be to include methodology, because that was something that members of the public brought up, they were curious about, you know, how is this done? Like where did this come from? And so having some kind of methodology about who was consulted, how this was brought forward, I think really helps. Yes, thank you. So what is that friendly amendment on methodology or where does that fit in for city clerk to be accurate on that? You got it? Great. Yeah. And that can go like at the end of that whole sentence around including but not limited to. Can we pull up that motion and then go to a roll call vote unless there's further discussion on items one through three before we move on to four. Vice Mayor Watkins, are you speaking, you're muted. I am speaking. I'd like to hear what the staff has to say about this because I heard from them that it was very general and these were estimates and I'm not quite sure the level of accuracy they anticipate having given sort of the content and information they have. So before I take the vote, I'd like to hear perspective personally. And then I'd like ideally a break because we've been going for like a long, long time. After this item, yes. Sure, so I appreciate the question. I guess, again, I would just say that these are best estimates based on the data we have on hand. So Marisol and our finance team in consultation with all of our departments as well as some outside consultants did their best to estimate as well as based on our own local experience of supporting committees, commissions, oversight committees of what time would be involved. I certainly understand Council Member Brown's concerns and the spirit behind those questions raised. I would describe it as going back to sharpener pencils on the costs associated with those. I don't know whether or not that will yield reductions in what's currently contemplated in the report. I think both on the revenue side and the administration side, this being basically a brand new program in the state, there's going to be a lot of unknowns and we'll continue to be regardless of additional work that we do to refine those numbers. But, you know, we defer to the will of the council if there's interest in wanting us to continue to fine tune those numbers, we could certainly do so. Thank you. Does that answer your question, Vice Mayor Watkins? Yeah, I mean, to a certain extent, yes, I think, you know, I understand that we have before us is sort of just to receive the report. So I'm not sure what that's gonna move substantially but yeah. I think the motion language includes based on gathering of additional information that was suggested. There might be some updates or refinements. Can I just ask for a point of clarification? Are we, is the motion to move items one with your proposed revisions, two and three and to wait on number four? Okay. Yes, okay. Council Member Calentari-Johnson. We have the motion language again. Sorry. Yes, City Clerk will pull that up. Council Member Calentari-Johnson. Yeah, I was actually gonna also ask for the motion language because what I'm hearing City Manager Matt Huffinger relay is that these are assumptions in general, general analysis. We don't have a whole lot of information. It doesn't seem like there's gonna be much more new information. So we're asking to put this back on a future agenda. But what we were tasked with tonight is to vote to put it on the ballot or not and let the voters decide. So I'm just, I'm unclear about what additional information we are looking for. Are we just asking staff to do another analysis because we didn't like what we're seeing or what I'm hearing from city staff is that there's not much more information out there. So we're just gonna bring it back to City Council for us to contemplate when it's, if we vote on it tonight, it goes on the ballot and the city voters will vote on it. So. I think. And I wonder if, yeah, if Matt Huffinger or somebody, what else will we, I guess it's the same question as Vice Mayor Watkins. What else will we will be highlighted? How else will we be enlightened? And how will it change us putting this on the ballot or not? Cause that's what we are tasked with tonight is to put this and our downtown or futures on the ballot. And also just to remind my colleagues that we have all been asked and requested to send our very detailed questions ahead of time. I understand that we wanna ask some of those for the public to hear, but pages and pages of questions, which I also have, I send to staff ahead of time. So I'd like to encourage us all to do that. Thank you. I think my understanding based on the motion language was the information and based on City Manager's comment the impact report is based on information today and that there was a direction to, upon additional gathering of information. For example, the RTC Measure D oversight committee was one example of information, additional information that could be looked at to help inform some of the fiscal impacts. So I think my understanding is rather than just receiving it as is, knowing yes that these are estimates and that just a little more refinement would be appreciated. I just don't understand why we need to be debating this again when this is gonna go before the voters. All right, Council Member Brown. So, well, thank you, Mayor. You kind of shared one example of additional information that could be gathered. The reason that I am asking for this now is because it is information that is going to be used in a public electoral campaign to the voters. And if the city says this is the cost and people out in the public, we know there's gonna be a group that is gonna oppose this and they will use that number as the city's numbers and it is based on incomplete and I would say overestimated projections. I understand that it's necessarily incomplete because there's not a lot of experience here, but there is more information we can get. We can find out how much it costs to the taxpayers for oversight of measure D one. We can ask the Economic Development Director if these line items in here that are all, the multiple line items that are dedicated to multiple departments being involved in making decisions about how this money will be spent, how that interfaces with decision making around the use of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund and why it would be that it's gonna cost this much more for this particular chunk of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Just two examples. I have more and I can go on, but the point is that I would like to get if we're gonna have a report that lays out the potential cost that it should be as accurate as possible and it should be based upon the best information we can get. Thank you, Council Member Brown. And I think at this point, we'll never have a perfect fiscal impact report. However, it sounds like there are some examples of more information that could help inform the fiscal impact report before it's, received. I did have a follow up comment on that too, which is that our job is to do the public's work in public. And through public comment today, we heard a number of issues and concerns that were brought up by members of the public and it's our job to acknowledge those concerns and raise those concerns in a meeting in public. So I understand that we should have as many of our questions answered before the meeting, but there were some questions that came up that I didn't have, that came up by members of the public this evening and I'm trying to help get their concerns addressed since that's who we're here to represent. In addition to that, I thought I heard some folks say that there are cities in the Bay that have empty home taxes already and so would be interested to understand based on their impact reports because they brought up Oakland and all that and I think they brought up a couple other cities. So there are other examples out there where we're not gonna be the first city in California to do this. And so being able to have references, if we talk about data and scientific method, just references for where does this information come from? What is it based off of? That helps people understand so they can go back and look up that information well and see how they can make their comparison. And I didn't wanna belabor this, but at some point I do have a question that is related to this but not necessarily to this exact topic, but also the motion was, my understanding is within one, two and three. It's also to include the amended language, is that correct? Yes, it is. And I think I just wanted to be clear for members of the public. We're not delaying this. Like we are deciding on this right now to put this on the ballot. We can't delay it. So those are all the comments I have on one through three and yeah. Okay, we have a motion that is on the floor and I think we've had our discussion. May we have a roll call vote? Council member is Calentary Johnson. Aye. Boulder? Absent. Cummings? Aye. Brown? Aye. Aye. Vice Mayor Watkins? And Mayor Burner? Aye. That motion passes six ayes and one absent. Council member Golder absent. Moving on to item number four and that was council member Myers. You had a motion? I'd be happy to do the motion. I'd like to look at the one change in the our downtown, our future. Which is on page 41.5. The, let's see. It looks like the ballot language is, so the ballot language for the art downtown, our future references for hippie construction of the proposed downtown mixed use library project. And as far as I understand, based on the current designs and also the beginning of receiving public funds that that project is now called the downtown library and affordable housing project. So I would respectfully request that the ballot language reflect the actual project name. And so I'd be happy to move that the motion to adopt a resolution or an election to be held on November 8th, 2022 and consolidating the election for the purpose of attaching two measures to the ballot, empty home tax and our downtown, our future with the proposed change to the ballot language for the empty, for the our downtown, our future. I'd also like to add to this motion. I'm not sure if this is the place to do it. So please correct me, Cassie. I believe I see in the staff report, there is mentioned in the last paragraph that the council may provide guidance and appoint signers for and against the measures if desired. I did hear a request this evening from the group who is a campaign team, I think the our downtown, our future folks obviously are for their measure and I believe they will be doing their written arguments unless the city council member is going to represent that or do that work. But I would like to make a motion that the group, I believe the name is Santa Cruz for real housing and library solutions, be able to prepare the argument against the our downtown, our future. And similarly, I believe we received a request from Santa Cruz together, whether folks regarding being able to file and the argument statements for the empty homes tax. So I would add that to the motion as well. Can I have the city attorney's office comment on this? Sure, those all sound fine to me. I think that changing the measure language is fine to make it consistent with what it's being referred to currently. And I think it's within the council's jurisdiction to appoint this group to provide the opposition arguments. I would, just one thing, and I think this is why I asked the question earlier. So number four talks about adopting a resolution and there's, so there's one resolution in your materials that's for both the empty home tax and our downtown, our future. So I know the intent was to include the revised empty home tax language on numbers one through three, but I would ask that you include the revised empty home tax language on number four because it's within the resolution. So hopefully that makes sense. So I will do that, yeah. So within the motion, Bonnie would be to to basically adopt the resolution ordering an election, solving the election. And then the next part would be and with the addition of new language for the two, for both the empty home tax measure text and our downtown, our future measure text. Does that work? Okay. Cassie. I have a clarifying question because the motion before was to change the ballot question for empty home tax, which is on the resolution. So my understanding was we were adopting the resolution with the last motion in order to make that edit. Sorry, but the resolution is number four on the agenda. But the last motion that they just made with the edit to the empty home tax I took it as being for the resolution. Yeah, you did. Yeah, regardless of regardless of the number on the agenda item. Okay, but the resolution isn't addressed in items one through three. So if you're, I would like to have it on both if possible just because number four is the resolution. So I want to make it clear that we're changing the resolution, which is where the ballot question is. Is that okay? Does that make sense, Bonnie? Okay. My question is the fact that the motion before was changed in the ballot question on the resolution. Right? For the empty home tax, it was you edited it. That's the thing I showed. So if I make it my motion that it would reflect that the language in the previous motion for the empty home tax would be reflected in the resolution. Does that work? That's great. Thank you. Okay. 10 hours in, my brain is somewhat working. And I would just like to make sure that the group that you mentioned, I believe their name is Santa Cruz for real library and housing solutions as the organization names. And I believe we received a letter from them. Yeah, I was just looking at that letter. Yes. And then I believe we received both a written and a verbal rec. Actually, I think both groups came today and I've both shown up and talked and requested this at the council. And I have not heard from other folks that wish to do this. And so I'd like to honor those two groups so that they can present those arguments. Great. I was just going to ask for a second. So council member Myers has the motion with a second by vice mayor Watkins and council member Cummings. Yeah, I just wanted to ask a question related to process just cause I'm, this is something I'm unaware of, but when groups submit or collect signatures to put items on ballot, is that general the process that they can, a group can come to city council and ask to be designated as the people who will sign either supporting or opposing arguments or how does that usually work? Typically groups would submit arguments. They would submit, nobody needs to have a designation. If that's what you're asking, are you talking about the request? Yeah. Groups can submit an argument for or typically the argument for are the proponents. They could do an argument against what we did at the last election was we did like a first come first serve if there were multiple arguments submitted. Gotcha. For one measure. Okay. I just wanted to be clear cause I think with the direct elect mayor item there was multiple groups in the community kind of, you know, talking about who was supposed to. That's the one we did the first come first serve. Yes. Right. Okay. So I just wanted to make sure that I understand the process correctly and also the members of the public. So I guess for this item, just for clarification and maybe I don't know if there's a need for any kind of amendment, friendly amendment, but my understanding would be that Santa Cruz together and the empty home tax would be the proponent, well empty home tax for Santa Cruz together against for the empty home tax measure and then the hour downtown our future and the, I can't remember the name of the other group but the hour downtown our future will be for. Santa Cruz for real. Santa Cruz for real library and housing solutions. Right. That would be designated as the opposition. And so is that captured in the motion? I guess I only designated the two groups that spoke for us tonight. Bonnie, I don't know if I need to design. There was no communication from the other groups and the way that I read this last sentence here in the staff report was that under the elections code, the proponents of an initiative measure may file a written argument for. So I just assumed they would and the city council or a person or person designated by the city council may submit an argument against. So I, if the council chooses not to file an argument that any interested person may do so. So I am acting on the two requests that we did get received where there was two groups who approached us and both asked for that involvement in submitting an argument against. So I'm happy to, I don't know if the other groups are going to do the argument for. So I don't want to speak for them because, but it does say that. So I don't know. I'm happy to, I mean, I'd be happy to add them if that's what needs to happen, but. I think you're going off of the requests received and so just adding someone, I think is. For clarification, I would stick with. I'm going to stick with that motion. So then I just, I guess the question, the last question I have then is for those two groups, is there like, there's a timeline. I guess for all the groups, there's a clock for them to submit those arguments, whether they're for or against. And what's that timeline? The calendar is on our website, the deadline for the arguments for or against is August 19th. And if you get an argument for or against, for and against, you can also file a rebuttal. And that's another deadline and I don't know enough to top of my head, but it is on our website. But the 19th is the deadline. Great, and then I guess before we end this item, I just have one last question that's related, but tangentially. I know that there has been talk about us putting a TOT on the November ballot. And I'm just curious about when the deadline is for us to have that language come to council so we can vote on it and move it forward. Cause it seemed to me that we were moving forward rapidly with this because we have to do it before the break. I don't know. Yeah, thanks for the question council member comments. It is our intent to bring that to the council first meeting in August to meet the deadline that's required. All right, we have a motion by council member Meyers, seconded by vice mayor Watkins. May I have a roll call vote? Council member Callentary Johnson. Aye. Boulder, Cummings. Aye. Brown. Aye. Meyers. Aye. Vice mayor Watkins. Aye. Mayor Brunner. Aye. That motion passes six ayes one absent. Council member Golder. Thank you everyone for that item and discussion and information and input. At this point, we have one more item on the agenda, but I would like to call a break. We've been going for almost 12 hours now. So we will return at nine o'clock. That's a good question. Is there any, I mean, is there any way we could, well, nevermind, I was going to ask if we could postpone this, but we're not going to meet again until August. So, but yeah, I was going to ask that question because yeah, we have been going really long. That is an option for the council to entertain. Does it affect? Is there a time sensitive matter with this item? I'd like to ask Tony Elliott. You're waiting so patiently, thank you. Hi everyone, no time sensitivity to it necessarily. He was talking with Matt earlier today. I know that August will be a busy agenda. We do have our consultants waiting in the wings tonight as well as staff from homeless garden projects. So we're ready and willing to go tonight, but defer to the council on direction. All right. If, okay, I see some hands raised. Council member Myers. Oh, sorry, mine was, mine was, I forgot to put mine down. Council member Calentari Johnson. I appreciate the break, but I think we should hear this agenda item given that we have folks who have been waiting and wanting to present. So skip the break and move right into the item. I'm sorry, no, have the break, have a 20 minute break and come back and hear the agenda item. Okay, great. All right. So let's say 905. We will return. Thank you so much for hanging in with us, everybody, and to staff. Thank you. We are near the finish line here with today's meeting. Thank you so much to our city staff and guests who have been waiting. We also have Peter Bejeer, our Spanish translator who is also here and available. I believe there may have been a request for Spanish translation. Peter, are you with us? I am mayor. Great, thank you. How did you want to proceed with this? I assume the Spanish speaker can ask his question in Spanish and I will translate the question for the council and answer and translate his answer afterwards. Thank you. Or her question. Their question, yes. Okay, let me pull up my agenda. And we are now at agenda item number 42 on our Santa Cruz city council agenda. This is Pogonip open space, Pogonip master plan amendment process for homeless garden projects farm and garden and upper main meadow and contamination and cleanup feasibility update and lower main meadow. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you wish to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff, followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to council for deliberation and action. In addition to the public comment, we will be hearing on this item. There was one email sent to city council at cityofsantacruise.com on this agenda item. And with that, I would like to welcome director Tony Elliott and Noah Downing. Right, thank you very much, Mayor Brunner and city council members. Thanks for this opportunity here late on a Tuesday to present this update regarding Pogonip and homeless garden project. So just as far as the project team here this evening from Parks and Recreation, we have park superintendent Travis Beck. We've got our parks planner Noah Downing that will run us through the presentation here momentarily. From RMD Consulting, our consultant on this project, we have Doug Wichard, Ivy Inouye and John Alexander. And then from the homeless garden project, executive director, Dary Ganshorn and board member, Danette Shoemaker. So tonight we'll give a relatively short and efficient but also detailed presentation just on an update on the contamination in the lower meadow in Pogonip and the process with the homeless garden project and the Pogonip farm. So we'll provide a background and summary of a lot of the work over the past six months and more. We'll hear some detail from RMD. We'll hear an update from the homeless garden project and then we'll discuss the proposed plan to continue our steps and process forward. So with that, again, I appreciate your time. I appreciate Peter on the call as well. But at this time I'd like to hand it over to Noah Downing to run us through our presentation. Thank you. And can I just confirm that the presentation is showing? No. Nope, it's not. There it is. Now it is. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good evening, Mayor Brunner and city council members. On September 28th, 2021, the city council directed staff to undertake a planning process to amend the Pogonip master plan to allow for the homeless garden project to relocate their farm to the upper main meadow. The council also directed staff to evaluate the feasibility of cleaning up the lower main meadow to allow for farming to occur. This meeting is an opportunity for staff to report back to you on the progress made and receive direction on the next steps forward. The planning process for the farm's relocation to the upper meadow has been placed on hold. In February, 2022, the homeless garden project requested that the city refocus planning efforts back to the lower meadow for the farm site. In turn, staff did not move forward with the scheduled consulting services and notified the public about the change. Staff intends to discontinue the master plan amendment process unless further direction is received tonight. Leading up to the September 28th meeting, a public concern arose that the proposed farming garden use was inconsistent with the 1988 CalPaw initiative. The initiative provided the city funding to purchase Pogonip and contain specific provision that the land be preserved for parks in open space. Parks and Rec worked with city attorney's office, staff to research the concern. Staff sent a letter to the Department of Parks and Recreation to review the proposed land use. The state confirmed that the farm is an appropriate use under the agreement. Before I turn it over to RMD to present the cleanup feasibility study, I do wanna emphasize that a lot of work has gone into studying the contamination of Pogonip. One major undertaking was a preliminary endangerment assessment which was provided through a grant award by the California Department of Toxic Substances Control. They provided in-kind services to evaluate the lower main meadow to determine if any areas are safe to farm. Through that process, they hired RMD as a primary consultant. DTSC's toxicologists helped in the work plan's development. The process evaluated the screening levels for recreation of farming uses. The methodologies and screening levels have also been reviewed by the County of Santa Cruz Environmental Health Division including their consulting toxicologists. Staff was excited that RMD was able to continue work on the project with the city after the grant was complete. From their initial efforts which were focused on the main meadow areas, we have expanded the sampling to outline areas and we now know the location extent of contamination. So I'd like to now turn it over to Doug from RMD who will present more on the cleanup feasibility study. All right, thanks Noah. And thank you council members for letting us present this evening. I think Noah you'll be controlling the slides for me. You can move on to the next one. Just a quick background here. The homeless garden project conducted an initial agriculture soil testing back in 2018 and 2019 once it became known that a historic shooting range was operated in the lower meadow of the Pogonib site. From there between 2019 and 2021 additional soil sampling was conducted throughout the lower main meadow with the primary goals to further evaluate the extent both lateral and vertical of the primary concerns being lead and what's called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs in the shallow soil as a result of the historical shooting range operation. So from there earlier this year based on the information that had been collected to date RMD working with the city and the homeless garden project prepared a feasibility study to evaluate both a recreational and unrestricted or farming use in the lower main meadow and to look at what remediation steps or efforts would be needed to clean up the site. Move on to the next slide please. So a brief overview of what we're talking about here. This is an aerial view with some overlays on it of the lower main meadow of the Pogonib site. As you can see north on this figure is up into the left. The Pogonib clubhouse still sits up there on the top of the hill there and then the current access into the site by the road is down on the bottom right of this image which is the golf club drive entrance as a trail access there. So historical background to kind of orient where we're talking about on the site here. There are two shooting pad arcs that Noah is showing there. There are concrete pads that still exist. So based on locating those shooting pads we're able to orient where an approximate or hypothetical range of the lead shot and the clay targets would have been. So that's the yellow and red kind of fan shaped shading that's overlaid on this diagram where we have the east meadow and ravine indicated. So based on knowing kind of the orientation of where the shooting range was allowed us to expand that the sampling investigation that we did in the last few years and also knowing as you can see in the pink outlines that are indicated that are labeled east meadow, west meadow and north orchard those are the proposed planting and farming areas of the homeless garden project and indicated. It gave us an idea of where we needed to really focus our investigation and to move forward with this. And along the way we also realized that the ravine that we're referring to the tree covered area in the center there the ravine it's a heavily sloped there's an intermittent stream that runs through there. We're able to also collect some soil samples in that area to further our investigation. And it's also a note there's a seasonal wetland that is in the west meadow there is indicated by that kind of blue blob with a buffer around it where either no planting would occur or only native plants would be planted. So I think we can move on to the next slide. So lead exposure again one of the primary concerns out on this site is lead in the shallow soil. So lead exposure is greater is a greater concern for children than it is adults like many compounds. And the pathway into the body for lead is generally through ingestion for children. So you can think about kids out playing in the dirt.  So that's the common pathway for children is to ingest soil that's contaminated with lead. And for adults it's gonna be more inhalation, breathing in dust. And it's also important to note that lead does not pass directly into the body through the skin. It's gonna be either ingestion, inhalation or another pathway. And lead exposure affects all organs and internal systems in our body. And as a kind of background comparison to think about many of the urban soils in, across the country now have lead concentrations that are greater than what would be considered the naturally occurring background levels due to the widespread historical use of leaded paints on the side of houses or industrial buildings or leaded gasoline use and exhaust pipes. So as a point of comparison or something to think about here in urban soil it's not uncommon to see lead concentrations between approximately 150 and 10,000 micrograms per kilogram. It's kind of to give you something to think about as we move forward. So go on to the next slide there Noah. And as we evaluate the dataset that we have there are things called risk-based soil screening levels. These are thresholds that have been established to be protective of either current or future what are called receptors. So you can think about it as either in our case here what's referred to as either residential or unrestricted use. So for a potential farming use there are certain screening levels that we would be comparing our dataset to. There's also site-specific recreational trail user screening level that was developed as Noah mentioned earlier during that preliminary endangerment assessment. And that screening level was approved by the DTSC for both lead and the PAHs that we see on the site. So we can go on to the next slide and actually take a look at some of what these numbers are. So for lead the background level that's been established and is an accepted number is 43 milligrams per kilogram. For that unrestricted screening level for lead which would be the farming scenario, concentrations of lead would need to be below that number that's 80 milligrams per kilogram. And then for what we're calling our recreational trail user the hiking and biking screening levels that site-specific number for lead is 540 milligrams per kilogram. And for the PAHs since they're not naturally occurring substances there is no background level that's been established for those both the unrestricted and the recreational screening levels. Those numbers are gonna vary because when we're looking at PAHs those polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are gonna be deposited through the clay targets on the site you're looking at 15 to 20 individual compounds. So the screening levels in that situation are gonna vary. And we can look at some of the a summary of the lead samples that were the soil samples that were collected and analyzed for lead. Again, these were samples collected based on expected shop fall range and other field observations. Samples were collected throughout the site. As you can see there, a total of 206 samples were collected after the homeless garden projects initial testing. And of those samples, 85 had concentrations above that background level for lead. 62 samples had concentrations above that unrestricted screening level for lead and 17 samples had concentrations above the recreational screening level for lead. We move on to the next slide, thank you. So for the PAHs it's a slightly smaller data set again, based on the expected clay target range and field observations. Samples were collected throughout that West Meadow area and then portions of the East Meadow and the North Portrait. So of the 58 total samples that were collected and analyzed for PAHs, only 11 had concentrations above the unrestricted screening levels for at least one of those PAH compounds and four samples came back with concentrations above the recreational screening levels. So what does this look like when we put it onto a map and overlay it onto the site? So you can see here, again, if you really just try to focus on the yellow dash lines and the orange lines, those are indicating where we have those concentrations of soil above our recreational screening level. So you can see it's pretty much isolated for lead in that area between the ravine and the East Meadow and then also in the Northern portion of the ravine near the North Portrait. So that generally follows that hypothetical range that we thought for lead that we showed earlier. And then for the PAHs, you see there are a couple of different areas in the West Meadow kind of on either side of the wetland. And if we go to the next slide, you can really see the increase in just area where the unrestricted screening levels have been exceeded. This is a map showing again the yellow dash line being the lead concentrations above our unrestricted screening level and the orange lines being the PAH area above our unrestricted screening level where farming would not be allowed to occur within that yellow or orange area based on the concentrations that we have seen. So I know this is where we get into that feasibility study evaluation. We know if we wanna be farming out on the site, we have a significant area that's gonna need to be remediated, whether that's either just reducing the exposure risk or actually actively remediating and cleaning up those concentrations. So if we go on to the next slide there, we can start getting into looking at the various remedial technologies that we could potentially use for a site like this. This is a condensed version of what we included in our full feasibility study report, looking at a handful of different possible remedial technologies and their approximate effectiveness and cost. So running through them quickly, the options that we looked at and evaluated were phyto remediation. So that's essentially planting specific species of trees that will extract contaminates up through their root structure and remove the contaminates from the soil. Another option we looked at were institutional and engineering controls. This is, you can think of a deed restriction or a land use covenant as an institutional control mixed with fencing or notification signs as an engineering control. We also looked at capping. So instructing a low permeability cap or cover on top of the site to prevent exposure essentially. So that would be asphalt, concrete, or you can even do a thicker layer of soil. We looked at soil flipping. So removing the top layer of contaminated soil, setting it aside, removing a clean layer of soil beneath that, setting it aside, and then backfilling them in reverse. So you put the contaminated soil, you essentially bury it underneath a clean layer of soil. And the last option we looked at was excavation and offsite disposal. So that's where similar to flipping, but we removed that top layer of contaminated soil, we truck it offsite to a disposal facility and we bring in entirely new clean soil to put back on top. So as you can see, the red boxes on the two options that we highlighted, they're institutional and engineering controls and excavation offsite disposal based on the short-term and long-term effectiveness, the implementability, overall protection of human health and the environment and the ability to reach our remedial action cleanup goals and the relative cost. We weighed all of these things and came up with those two as institutional and engineering controls and the excavation and offsite disposal as the two best approaches for this site. Again, looking at in the short-term, let's get this site back to recreational use in as much of an area as we can. And the long-term goal of allowing farming to occur throughout as much of a site as possible. And another aspect of this is regulatory acceptance. So we don't wanna propose something that we don't think the regulatory agency, so currently in this case, the County of Santa Cruz Environmental Health, we don't wanna propose something that we don't think that they're gonna approve and accept. And we can go on to the next slide there please Noah. So what does this look like in action? So our proposed plan for recreational use, this would probably be more of a short-term use, would be the institutional and engineering control. So the purpleish color lines that you see here outlining the, what we're calling the exceedance areas, those yellow and orange lines where we have the contamination above our recreational screening levels, that purple line would be a fence that we would fence off access to those areas to essentially reduce the risk exposure to community members that are out there hiking and biking and using the trail system. That's not gonna clean up the site necessarily, but it's gonna reduce your exposure and allow for those uses to continue. In addition to doing or installing the fencing, we would prepare a site management plan which would essentially provide a guide to the city park and rec staff on how to safely go about conducting their routine vegetation control, site maintenance activities and being protective of themselves. So the project timeline for this scenario would be approximately a year, maybe a little bit over a year. And the factors that go into that are securing funding for the project, preparing a work plan and getting that approved by the regulatory agency. There would likely be some permitting included, whether it's for the fence installation or working near the wetland. We obviously, we would need to install the fencing and we would prepare and record either a land use covenant or a deed restriction, something that says, you know, this site land use cannot be changed unless additional measures are conducted. So that land use covenant would not allow for, you know, the farming used to happen until additional work was done. And a project of this scale, our estimate is somewhere in the ballpark, the neighborhood of two to $300,000. And if we go to the next slide, we can look at, if we wanna go to full unrestricted land use to get to the ideal farming throughout the lower Meadow in areas that the homeless garden project has proposed, we would need to add the excavation and off site disposal component. So as you see here, the green hatched areas that kind of encircle the ravine area and Noah's showing there, those are all areas that are accessible there within the proposed farming garden area and their soil concentrations in those areas are above those unrestricted streaming levels. So that comes out to approximately 10,000 cubic yards covering approximately six acres of land that would need to have a soil removal action and backfilling with clean soil. So there's that piece that would be done. The fencing would stay, it would be modified based on, you know, bringing it in in certain areas to allow for farming whereas soil removal was conducted. And the project timeline for something like this is gonna be pushed out to three plus years, three or four years likely in a best case scenario. And factors that go into that timeline include, again, securing the funding. This would include a more lengthy and involved CEQA and EIR process. Again, based on the wetlands, fish and wildlife would probably be involved and, you know, other stakeholders there. We would prepare the work plan and get approval for that from the regulatory agency. There would be significant permitting that would be involved. And then that would allow us to do the actual soil remediation, removing the contaminated soil, bringing in clean soil, that fencing modification, and then we would, you know, prepare a revised land use covenant and site management plan for the new use. So for the full unrestricted farming land use, we're looking at an estimated cost of somewhere in the ballpark of $5 to $6 million based on today's dollars.  And we can go to the next slide and start looking at, you know, what all is gonna go into that excavation and disposal component. So what is included in those proposed soil removal activities would be constructing a temporary access road onto the site, because as the current infrastructure just would not allow for the heavy equipment and trucks and the volume of equipment that would need to be brought into the site to conduct that soil removal. We would remove approximately the top foot of soil based on the data set we have. The contamination in most areas goes down to between six inches and one foot. So we would scrape that soil away. We temporarily stockpile it on a portion of the site that's not gonna be touched while we collect confirmation samples to make sure that the contaminated soil has been removed to the extent that is necessary, both laterally and vertically. We would collect waste characterization samples, which is required anytime that you, you know, removes soil from a site and bring it to a disposal facility to make sure that that soil is characterized properly. And then that last piece of the soil removal is actually loading the soil into dump trucks. So 20 cubic yards at a time, we're talking 10,000 cubic yards of soil, 500 dump trucks approximately, we need to be driven onto that site, loaded with soil and then brought back off the site to a disposal facility. Once the soil removal is completed, we would then kind of do the reverse. We would start backfilling with clean soil. So again, it would be approximately 20 cubic yards at a time. We would backfill into the areas that were, where the soil removal occurred, compact the soil to the project specifications and repair the topography, the slopes to approximately what they were pre-remediation. We go on to the next slide and look at what is not included in our proposed soil remediation activities, restoring areas that are beyond the farming garden. That's the coastal shrub or the oak woodland areas we would need to further evaluate what's going to be done in those areas. An erosion control plan and a stormwater pollution prevention plan would likely need to be prepared. And utility line installation over to that East Meadow area, we're talking water lines, probably electrical line. Those types of things would need to be planned out by an engineer that focuses on that type of work. And then what's also not included the perimeter fencing that would go around the proposed farming garden areas would be something that the homeless garden project, my understanding, they would, they would take care of that portion. And what is to be determined? The County Environmental Health Department has requested additional soil investigation based or in addition to what we have already collected in a few, in a couple of areas, just to make sure that the investigation has fully delineated areas to the extent necessary. So that additional investigation will likely occur later this year or next year. We're hopeful that the numbers that we provided today will not change drastically, but there are potential cost implications based on that additional investigation. That temporary access road that I mentioned, we really don't have a lot of detail on that other than it's something that's been brought up and realized that we would need to, again, bring in an engineer that does that type of work to look at how we would go about preparing that access road and getting the site ready for staging heavy equipment. Sourcing the clean backfill material can be a big challenge on this project. It's not easy to find 10,000 cubic yards of clean soil that can be used for a farming situation. Ideally, that is organic virgin soil. So whatever those specifications end up being, that will be a significant challenge. And then the last piece there is, we need to get regulatory agency approval. We have had initial discussions with the County of Santa Cruz about the overall plan. They have initially provided positive feedback, but there will need to be more conversation and approvals through the regulatory agency. So with all that said, I have one last quick summary slide. Again, we looked at both of what it would take to get the site back to recreational use and the unrestricted or farming use. We talked about the institutional engineering controls in addition to the excavation and offsite disposal for the unrestricted use. For recreational, we're looking at one plus years for the unrestricted, the farming use best case scenarios probably at least three years. Estimated costs can range from two to 300,000 for installing the fencing for the recreational use or upwards of $5 to $6 million for the full site remediation back to or to allow for a farming scenario and then potential delays that could come up. You can see there funding and regulatory oversight review are gonna be potential delays for either option. And then for the full site remediation, that CEQA and EIR process could cause delays and then also sourcing of that backfill material, like I mentioned, that could pose a challenge later on in the project. So sorry, I tried to go through this rather quickly because I know it's been a long day for a lot of you and we're getting late in the evening. So hopefully I made some sort of sense and I will hand it back over to Noah to take it from there and we'll stick around for questions. Thank you Doug. And then in terms of next steps, as I mentioned earlier and I'll just reiterate now, the planning for Parks and Rec staff, we're not intending to perform any more work on the master plan amendment process for the upper meadow. Any unused funds will be returned to the general fund. We're still working with Weber Hayes. There was one sampling point when we sampled the upper meadow did have some little bit of contamination. So we're gonna work with the county to assess that. This month we received a notice that we did receive in another grant award from the department of toxic substances control. And so this would be more than 300,000 to complete a site characterization. The remaining steps of the site characterization, develop a remediation plan, site management plan and construction drawings. We'll need to perform secret review on the project. And then we'll, with all that information, apply for and receive permits from various state agencies by June 2024. And this is kind of exciting that we received the grant because it kind of shows a progression working with DTSC. There was an initial assessment. Now they're funding another investigation, which will get us to a shovel ready state. And then this grant round of funding through their program, you could apply for as much as $6 million for cleanup funding. So it's really great that they're working with us and hopefully that continues. And once we have a shovel ready state, we will apply for grant funding and to perform future cleanups. And moving along, so the staff's recommendation of the night is to motion to acknowledge staff's update and direct staff to continue the next steps towards remedying the lower meadow. And with that, I would like to just pass it over to the homeless garden project for a couple of words. And so Derry, you're available. Thank you. Thank you very much, Noah. My name is Danette Shoemaker. I am the vice president of the homeless garden board. And I'm here with Derry Ganshorn tonight, our executive director. Just very briefly, I wanted to thank Parks and Recreation staff for their work and the informative staff report and this presentation. The information is there. Some of it is staggering, but it shows the amount of work that has gone into the project to this state and also paints a picture where we could be going in the future. We're also very grateful to the city council members for supporting our permanent site at Pogonette. Remediation of the lower meadow will benefit the entire community. And that's what we're hoping for. So since January 2019, when we stopped construction on the lower meadow, the homeless garden project has been presented with two additional permanent site possibilities. And our board of directors is carefully evaluating potential sites, all of which contain a level of uncertainty. And the work of the homeless garden project is inextricably linked to land. So we don't have the luxury of abandoning any possibilities until we have more information. We hope the council will support moving forward with the feasibility analysis for cleaning up the contamination to allow for farming to occur in the lower main meadow. And Danette and I are available to answer any questions from council members. Thanks. Thank you. And that concludes the presentation for tonight and staff and the homeless garden project and the solar available for questions. Thank you so much. Thank you to our Parks and Rec staff and to RMD. Doug, thank you for laying out all of that information. It was actually quite interesting to learn about all the soil and remediation methods. I had no idea. And the recommendations were very clear and laid out and the costs associated. So thank you for that information. Danette and Derry, thank you for your input. And I'd like to bring it out to council members for any questions before we move to public comment and then deliberation and action. I see council member Myers, you have your hand. Just have two quick questions. One is it sounds like the grant that you're just awarded gets you basically all the way through permitting. Is that correct? Yes. Including the CEQA analysis as well. We applied for CEQA. We're still in discussions about that. I do not think they will fund the CEQA component. They mentioned that typically they'll fund up to a mitigated negative declaration but it still is a substantial amount of funding and will help progress the project. And then I know the department of toxic substances they're a department for a reason. And typically they do have fairly good resources because of the public health benefit, obviously that's kind of their work. Do you guys, I know when I've cleaned up a few sites in the last 20 years, there's usually pretty good support there. Are you fairly confident that once you get through permitting that you would be competitive? So I guess my question is, do you feel like the public funding is pretty secure, short of a massive financial issue with the state? But do you feel like you'd be in good shape to continue to receive those grants? I guess it's my question. Not committing anything, but just curious. Yeah, council member Myers, I think we'll be really competitive for that funding. I think it feels like we're on that track already. With DTSC, which is good, so I think we'll be very competitive for that moving forward. And our hope, again, as Noah talked about with an opportunity to get up to around 6 million through that program, our hope would be recognizing that the city has limited resources, that homeless garden project has limited resources for this monumental project. Our goal would be to leverage 100% or as close to 100% grant funding to remediate the project. So that's our hope moving forward. That was my other question was, so I'm hoping that the homeless garden project wouldn't have to continue to raise funds to get back on the land, but that hopefully we could be competitive enough to finally get everything ready and done. Okay, and then I just want to acknowledge Dary and Danette, good to see you guys here tonight. And thank you so much for hanging in. I think the homeless garden project is a really important thing to have happen at Pogonip. I think you're a part of the community that is helping us with a lot of the difficult issues that we're facing in Santa Cruz and a lot of the folks who are struggling here, many of them have found their way back in life and to success through your programs. So I think I know I would be proud to have you guys as a neighbor there. And as people wander around and hike and do the things they love to do there. And it sounds like you are sort of tracking on all opportunities still just because that's what you need to do as an organization in terms of making sure you get a home soon. So that sounds kind of what I got out of your statements. So I just want to thank you for being here tonight and I'm hoping we'll get a home run soon. And I'm hoping three more years maybe goes by in a flash. We'll see. But thank you for hanging in there. It's my comments, man. Council member Cummings. Well, thanks for that presentation. And it'll be interesting to watch how things go from here. I had a question related to the homeless garden project and kind of ongoing operations. I know that when this came to us back in 2021, there was a sense of urgency that was expressed by the homeless garden project because it sounded like the current site was gonna be developed on within a short time period. And I'm just wondering, given that this can take multiple years, do you all have a space to operate between now and potentially when this can be finished? Or what is the future currently homeless garden project look like? We are in conversation with our landlord and we believe that we can stay there or we believe that our state is secure there for the time being at least. Great. I was just kind of wanting to understand that so that if there was a need for help on our end to find a temporary spot for you all to continue your operations that you're happy to try to partner with you all as well. I know the community really appreciates your services. And yeah, with that, I don't really have more questions. It sounds like staff is gonna be working on trying to find funding. And given what we know now about that site, the potential to be eligible for some of these EPA and other kind of environmental remediation grants seems like it's pretty high. And just given the new knowledge that we have on the past use of that site. So just hoping that we're able to secure that funding so we can clean that site regardless of its future use. It seems like cleaning that site is a priority and if the homeless garden project can have their permanent home there, then that would be a great addition as well. So thank you. Thank you. Council Member Meyers, did you have another question? Oh, no, I forgot to take my hand down, but there we go. Thank you. Are there any other questions? I will, no more clarifying questions. I will bring it out to public comment then. Okay, so if you are a member of, what was that? It sounded like someone said something. If you are a member of the public and interested in commenting on item number 42, Pogonit Open Space Pogonit Master Plan Amendment process, raise your hand either by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand in the webinar controls on your computer. When it's your turn to speak, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will then be set to two minutes. Any members of the public who are joining us here in chambers and want to comment, please line up to the right of the dais. You will have two minutes to speak. We request that you sign in to ensure correct spelling of your name in the meeting minutes. However, it's not required. All right, let's go out to our virtual attendees. I'm not seeing anyone in person. And our first hand raised is phone number ending in 3485.  My name is Caitlin Gaffney and I'm a 23 year resident of Santa Cruz and a regular user of the Pogonit Open Space. I've testified before you in the past about my strong opposition to the proposed relocation of the homeless garden project to the main meadow of Pogonit, which would be in conflict with multiple city plans and policies. Tonight, I wanted to express my appreciation for the city's efforts related to remediation of the lead contamination at the lower meadow site. And also was happy to hear the homeless garden project staff and I mentioned that their board is exploring alternative locations for the project. I continue to believe that an off Pogonit location would be the best option, but I just wanted to appreciate the efforts that the homeless garden project and the staff have put into really extensively exploring alternatives to the main meadow. Thank you. Thank you for your input. Our next member of the public is the name I am watching you. Yeah, hi. I always had basic problems with the city giving away land to benefit a small number of so-called residents. I see no calculation of cost-benefit analysis as in how much land value and proven costs relates to the actual number of residents that might improve their status in life by how much. It's a big per person and no number at the moment, but a casual look at land prices not even in the pricey city proper suitable for farming would value nine acres at about $7 million easily. That would be a pretty nice minimum giveaway, huh? It's a lie, it benefits the entire community. It's a feel good project, but anyone reading even the summary of this knows it has become a bad but mucho red tape, very expensive idea a while ago. It's time to cut losses and forget about it. There are other ways to help homeless people as if that is really the city purpose anyway. The very idea of the giveaway runs counter to protected open space, something the public was supposed to be. I doubt the public will be enjoying any of these nine acres unless HPG, HGP has a volunteer workday where the virtue seeking public among us has to do the work HGP is supposed to be doing farming. I would note that there are multiple landlots that look suitable for farming for sale in Santa Cruz County that currently sell for $750,000 an acre. Maybe HGP should buy four acres and expand their way with their $3 million they claimed they had last time they revealed their balance. For the money thrown at this, I suggest there are other options.  It's time for this entire idea to go bye bye, feel good or not. The idea of other public uses for money and that land belongs to the public trust. At least get paid for it if you can violate its purpose. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public who would like to comment on this agenda item number 42? Okay, I'm bringing it back to council for action and deliberation. Council member Myers. Yeah, I was gonna move basically, it sounded like the staff recommendation which was to direct continued work on the cleaning up of the contamination for to allow for farming to occur in the lower meadow and including pursuing the next set of work with the grant and then additional funding to finalize and remove all the contamination. And I believe, I don't know if there's a motion that needs to be made to, it sounds like, I don't know if you need direction, Noah on that reprogramming of the upper meadow of funding that was gonna be used for that planning work to back to the general fund and them for use in this project. Is do you need a motion on that? You know, if you would like to make a motion, but it's my understanding that it could be returned back to the general fund. The general fund, okay. So I'm pretty sure I covered what was in your one line I put into a rambling like three and a half lines. Council member Myers, I'm happy to second that motion. I just wanna clarify the motion that was pulled on the screen was a little different than yours. So if we can get clarification on what exactly the motion is. So the motion was to accept the report and staffs update and then to direct staff to continue next step remediating the lower main meadow and to utilizing the existing funding and to continue to pursue additional funding to complete the floor of mediation. Okay, city clerk, did you receive that information? And council member Brown. I just wanted to make a quick comment and say express my sincere appreciation for our parks and rec staff and our consultants and to everybody at the homeless garden project for all of the work that you have been doing to try to make a permanent home a reality for you in the Pogo Nip, which I absolutely support and hope we can keep moving in this direction. I wanna comment on the staff report for this item was particularly excellent. It was so clearly articulated. I felt like I could really understand what the steps you went through. So Noah, kudos to you. It was really a joy to read except for the part about potentially $6 million for the cleanup. But it really was clear how much work has gone into this and you just laid it out really clearly for us and gave us a really good sense of what we're looking at. And so I just so much appreciate that. I don't have questions because it was really clear. And once I realized I don't need to understand particulars of borehole seepage, I was fine with the rest of it. So thank you. Just really, really thank you. Thank you. All right, we have a motion by Council Member Myers seconded by Brunner. And it's like there's no further discussion. So I'd like to ask for a roll call vote. Member Callentary-Johnson. Aye. Golder absent Cummings. Aye. Brown aye. Meyers. Aye. Vice Mayor Watkins. Aye. Mayor Brunner. Aye. That motion passes with six ayes and one absent. Council Member Golder. Thank you very much to our Noah Johnning Park Planner Director Tony Elliott for all the time into this and RMD, Ivy John and Doug. Thank you so much. And with that, this meeting is adjourned. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor.