Morning, I'll now call to order the regular meeting of the County of Santa Cruz Board of Supervisors. It's 9 a.m., August 23rd. Clerk, will you please call the roll? Supervisor Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. Caput. Here. McPherson. Here. And Koenig. Here. You have a call. Thank you. We'll now have a moment of silence and a pledge of allegiance. Is there any member of the board that wishes to dedicate this moment to anyone or anything? Mr. Chair, I'd like to recognize a longtime friend of my first life in the newspaper business, Mel Bowen. Very active in sports writing and very active community member who passed away. Really a really kind, considerate gentleman who did a lot for this area for youngsters and so forth. But Mel Bowen should be remembered. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to mention Ramon Ortiz who passed away, good friend of mine also and a longtime member of the Knights of Columbus in Watsonville raised a lot of money for charity. He passed away about two weeks ago. Okay, thank you. Thank you. We'll hold Mr. Bowen and Mr. Ortiz in our hearts during this moment of silence. Thank you. A allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. I'll like to say is foundation under God, indivisible with the United States of the world. CEO Palacios, do we have any additions or deletions to the consent or regular agenda today? Yes, we do. On the consent agenda, item number 23, packet page 413 is to be replaced to correct the contents in table one, County of Santa Cruz estimated FEMA public assistance claims. And then on item number 40, attachment E, replaced to correct the title of the resolution. The corrected title should read resolution of the Board of Supervisors of the County of Santa Cruz, authorizing the grant application acceptance and execution for the Santa Cruz water hauling and waterman gap water system improvement project. That concludes the corrections to the agenda. Thank you. Would any board member like to remove an item from the consent agenda to the regular agenda? Seeing none, we'll proceed with public comment. First, I would also like to make one note about an item on the consent agenda, which is item 29, pursuant to government code section 54953. I'm announcing that this consent agenda includes item number 29, which is an amendment to resolution number 279-75 to amend the salary schedule for the unrepresented group, which includes local agency executives. Stack recommendation is to set 3% cost of living increases over a three-year period annually, each September, as recommended by the personnel director and county administrative officer. And we'll now move on to public comment. And first up, we have Gail Pellerin, who's speaking on behalf of NAMI at the National Association for Mental Illness. She'd contact me ahead of time and Gail, you may have four minutes since you're representing a group. I'll talk fast. Good morning, Chair Koenig, and thank you board members for the opportunity to speak to you today. My name is Gail Pellerin, and I'm here as a member of NAMI to talk to you and members of the public on a topic that has profoundly impacted me and my children. Suicide was not a topic I spent much time thinking or talking about before November 19th, 2018, when my husband, Tom, the father of our two children, died by suicide. Never gets easier saying that.  Early in my grieving process, I went to talk on suicide and the speaker encouraged us to put our grief to work. That resonated with me. So I joined a suicide survivors group, did the overnight walk to raise money and awareness, started a Facebook group for suicide survivors and joined the local National Alliance on Mental Illness Board. NAMI is an incredible organization providing education support to families and people in need. I participated in their family to family program, which is a free educational program for those with a loved one with a mental health condition. If you are a loved one is having suicidal thoughts or experiencing a mental health condition, please reach out to NAMI. I know how difficult it is to talk about suicide and our mental health. In the beginning, it was very hard for me, but now as my friends and family will test, I do it often. The reality is each and every one of us has struggled, has felt hopeless, has been depressed, especially during the 29 months of living through a global pandemic. Yet many of us silently fight our own battles. The 988 Emergency Mental Health Hotline that launched in July is a great step forward in meeting the needs of those with a mental health crisis. It's an easy to remember number that you can call or text. The goal now is to provide 24-7 mobile mental health care response and provide the essential trained professionals in care facilities needed to treat those in a mental health crisis. I was happy to read the report on today's consent agenda about the incredible work Eric and his team at County Behavioral Health are doing to expand services in Santa Cruz County. I'm gonna skip all the statistics, but bottom line is suicides is second leading cause of death for people ages 10 to 14 and 25 to 34. There's one death by suicide in the US every 11 minutes. Suicide does not discriminate. It impacts all people of all ages, genders, race, ethnicity and comes in sexual orientations. But suicide numbers are higher for white males, veterans, people who live in rural areas, LGBTQ youth and transgender adults, middle-aged adults and tribal populations. Lots of factors are linked to suicide including drug use, financial job problems, relationship problems, health problems, children who are bullied or sexually violated have a high suicide rate. Depressions, the leading cause of suicide and depression can be treated. So what do I hope to accomplish by being here today? I want us all to recognize that suicides are public health crisis. I love the fact that the county has a suicide poster in their bathroom. I'd love to see it updated with the 988 number and have that in all public bathrooms. I want all workplaces to talk to their workers about suicide prevention. I love the fact that the County Superintendent of Schools for our Sabah is supporting wellness centers. We need more health counselors on campus. I want everyone who is listening to accept that we all have a role in preventing suicide. Learn the warning signs, ask the difficult questions and let family, friends and neighbors know they are not alone. Talk to them, listen, you don't have to be an expert and it might feel uncomfortable but let them know you're available and it helps available. Their decision is, their condition is temporary. Suicide is final. And one thing we need more in this world is kindness. Please be kind to one another. You don't know what's happening in someone's life so share a smile or a wave, be positive, be supportive, be encouraging, considerate of others and closing, I want everyone to know who's thinking about suicide that your life matters. Your family and friends will not be better off without you. Take it from someone who knows. Please reach out for help by calling or texting the hotline 988. And now Regina would like to say a few words. Thank you, Carol. Chair. Good morning, members of the board. My name is Regina Deal and I'm here to put a human face on the issue of youth mental health in our schools and communities. My son, Mateo, was a freshman at Scotts Valley High School when he took his own life in February. Here is a photo so you can see this is Mateo. He was a kind, generous and well-liked student. His teachers in middle school selected him as the most compassionate student in his class. Another student took their life a couple of years before in our little small community in Scotts Valley. The only support these young people had at school was an overworked counselor who focused primarily on the academic needs of students. I think our young people deserve better. Prior to COVID, one in five children had mental health challenges. The pandemic, of course, exacerbated the problem. In December, the US Surgeon General warned of a devastating mental health crisis and various doctor groups have called it a national emergency, citing the unprecedented increases in depression, anxiety, and, sadly, suicide. These problems are especially acute among our LGBTQ-plus population, students of color, and other marginalized groups. In Mateo's case, he was very badly bullied at school as a result of his race. Meanwhile, many families find it nearly impossible to even get an appointment with a therapist or a psychiatrist. Even if they can, the lack of financial resources leaves too many of our young people without help. I'm here with a very simple request to require that the life-saving 988 number be posted in all public bathrooms. Many young people who do not have access to any other resource may reach out for immediate help in the midst of a mental health crisis. It might have saved Mateo's life and so many others before it's too late. I ask for your support. Thank you. One more thing, September is the National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, and thank you for doing a proclamation in honor of that. So thank you for all the work that you do. Thank you, Ms. Pellerin and Ms. Deal. Chair, if I might interrupt, we become aware of a typo in the Zoom link online and we'd like to read the corrected link so people can participate fully. Okay, let's go ahead. The corrected Zoom link is H-T-T-P-S colon forward slash forward slash U-S zero six W-E-B dot zoom dot U-S slash J slash eight five one six three two one zero two zero zero. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Go ahead. Hello, good morning supervisors. And thank you, Gail. My family has also been touched by suicide and I really appreciate your efforts. My name is Carolyn Bliss-Eisberg and I'm a 34 year resident of a complex of roads called the Ellen Roads Community up in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Bruce McPherson's district. We're here. I'm here with four of my neighbors and we're representing our community which has 30 households on five to 10 acre parcels on a complex of three roads. We're urgently speaking for 23 of these residents who have been deprived of trash collection services since July 31st, even though they've been trying very hard for a month to get this resolved the entire month of July turned into something with subject title of trash talk. Determination of the service that we had used for about three decades was justified, I believe. But the way that the rollout happened was not justified. I've got it documented for you and if the county clerk or the clerk of the board could distribute these I'd appreciate it. The month of July was an entire month of confusion, chaos and inadequate information. We reached out and asked for some kind of resolution, some kind of community Zoom call and that was ignored. When we finally did get definitive information back from Public Works and from GreenWaste, we learned that for the service that had been ideal for us was gonna, our prices were gonna go from $20 to $77 a month and it was for a service that we virtually didn't need. In fact, you could use the Ellen Road community as a model to a zero waste universally serviced community. And we've pretty much gotten there by ourselves. I- Thank you. Good morning. Morning. My name is Rob Boyer. I'm the elected resident of the Ellen Road Association and the middle Ellen Road manager. Well, I'm sorry, pull up the mic. Our community consists of professionals and retirees who contributed substantial tax revenue to the county and who also maintain our private roads without any county assistance. In 2022, for example, owners of the 37 parcels were assessed $56,000 for road maintenance and repair. During emergencies, such as mudslides, special assessments are collected for repairs and rebuilding. Residents also routinely volunteer to clear the road of debris and vegetation to keep it safely passable. We are concerned about heavy trucks traversing our roads, especially during the wet season, when the underlying soils become soft and our roads are extremely susceptible to damage. Literally our lives depend on well-maintained roads, both for resident evacuation and emergency vehicle access. Anything that compromises road safety is a huge concern. Our Road Association maintenance agreement states that residents are responsible for any road damage they cause either directly or by services they hire. Greenways requires us to sign a waiver freeing them from any responsibility for road damage. This is unacceptable. Greenways plans to make two pickups per week once for trash and other for recycling. This will put more stress on our roads, generate more pollution and cost more for residents than the smaller sized trucks and flexible pickup schedules offered by Summit Waste. We do need a trash collection service. Halting trash pickup on the Allen roads is not the solution. Many residents are not physically capable of hauling trash bins more than one mile to the Zianti Road gate or 10 miles to the nearest transport station. However, green waste is clearly not the best solution for our community. Please allow us to use Summit Waste as our trash pickup service. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Boyer. Hello, supervisors. Thank you for letting us speak to you today. My name is Gloria Fulveri and I have been a resident of Middle Allen Road since 2012. My husband Fred died suddenly a year ago. Although it's a special challenge to live alone in Santa Cruz Mountains, I choose to remain here because I love where I live. I love the trees, birds, mountain lions, deer, rabbit bobcats and even the rats, lizards and snakes. I love the forest smells. I love Santa Cruz. To me, this is truly paradise. I only buy biodegradable packaged goods with the recycle symbol. My carbon footprint is as small as I can make it. I do my own composting. My cardboard glass and cans would be one kitchen tall trash per week. I am happy that Universal Service is a goal for the state and the county, but Universal shouldn't mean required three-car weekly service if not needed. That contributes to pollution. Physically, it has been a challenge to haul my 20 gallon can to the end of my driveway. I have several underlying health conditions and have sometimes been confined to my home. I discovered that summit waste occasionally picks up at the door for other mountain residents in similar situations. Green waste is much more than I need, want or can afford. I can't self haul and I believe summit is the only logical choice for me under these conditions. Santa Cruz County forcing people to use service companies that don't meet their needs is not the Santa Cruz way. I want to use summit. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Fullberry. Good morning, gentlemen. My name is Sharon Ilgis and I live on Upper Ellen Road. My husband and I built our three-story two-story four-bedroom bathroom 46 years ago. We raised our sons there. In the beginning, we were a mile and a half from the nearest paved road and we had a well dug, we installed a septic and we lived off the grid for almost five years. A handful of other folks in the same area had the same goals and at the same time, together we paid road dues, cleared culverts, dug ditches, hauled and spread gravel and eventually got our roads paved. It was a community effort then and it's a community effort still. It's always been a wonderful and close community with everyone working together to make it possible for us to live and raise our children in the mountains. New young families with children are moving in. Today, the Ellen Roads have evolved into a gated, high tax-paying community of homes with price tags well over a million dollars. We have a legally constituted road maintenance agreement governing all homeowners. Last year, our personal annual road dues amounted to close to $3,000. Over the 46 years I've lived up there, we have invested over $300,000 in our roads, including special assessments for bridges, washouts and defensible fire clearing. Keeping our roads in good condition is vital to our existence. We support local government and don't ask for much for our tax dollars. We do not resist regulations. We vote and we actively participate in causes promoting the common good. We know what works and what doesn't work. Only a nimble provider like Summit Waste that can provide and meet our unique needs and preserve our investments in our roads is a viable solution. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Hildges. Hi there. My name is Aaron Alhung-Zaden. Thanks for taking my time today. We moved to the Elans just over four years ago. And when I moved to the mountains, I knew services wouldn't ever be guaranteed. Things like septic, data connectivity, water, I wouldn't be easy and we accepted that. And further, I come from a family of public servants was a volunteer fireman myself. And I knew those services would be challenged as well. And unfortunately, I've now been the first unseen of several local emergencies on our roads. I've also spent a lot of time putting things back on the road that should be there, like an Uber driver back in June that fell off Zaini and putting things off the road that shouldn't be there, like a countless number of trees. And I'm okay with that because all the positives that my neighbors have mentioned about this, this mountain living, however, I'm not okay with dealing problems that haven't been problems that used to have solutions. And when addressing this trash problem, instead of consulting with us about a solution which keeps with the county goals of universal service and zero waste, we were forced to use an oversized company designed for high density urban usage. And now this hack job of a plan is gonna take my Monday. And so on Monday, I'll be voluntarily dragging a trailer from house to house, picking up their trash to haul to the transfer station. Where if history repeats itself, I'll get there. I won't be asked about myself haul or permit. I won't even be asked to separate recyclables from waste. We need a choice of a small business who can take this on. Somebody nimble, flexible and they can serve what we need. And we need your support to enable that. Thank you. Thank you, Aaron. Good morning. My name is Shirley Johnson. I'm here to speak about the county's request, the Planning Commission for KSCL radio station to tear out all the perimeter concrete they put in seven or eight years ago. My daughter was in architecture at Cal Poly in 08. And when I drove down for the pre-graduation several weeks before, it's about a three hour drive. And I listened to KSCL when that morning there was fire and coral lettuce and I could see it from my home. My brother called and I was up but I hadn't opened the curtains and he says, do you see the fire? And I said, what fire? Upon looking out the curtains, lo and behold, it was very red and didn't come down to our homes. But most people evacuated as I did, driving down a day early to Cal Poly for the show of their architecture plans. Anyway, to go on, I feel that it's not right for the county planning commission to request them to tear out all this stuff as a lifeline long wildlife biologist. I don't feel it's any great harm to the lagoon there to the wildlife, animal life, aquatic life, anything. It would probably be far more damaging to hack out all that concrete that had been in to secure the safety of the radio station.  And is the time correct on that? No, I don't think, anyway. It is, thank you, Ms. Johnson. It was that all the time. Thank you. Good morning. My name's Antoinette Bauer-Smidberg and we find ourselves all celebrating the Monterey Bay Sanctuary 30th anniversary this year. It took a lot of people, ordinary and prominent to make that happen. And while substantial as being one of the most pristine areas in the world and stellar in reversing environmental degradation, those efforts are paling in comparison to the deep ecological wisdom and protection of the First Nation people who stewarded this land for thousands of years. As the earliest foreigners described the coastal plains, skies and waterways were abundant with life. I wanna recognize that we are on a Waswas territory. The Waswas and Mutsun speaking people now call themselves the Alma Mutsun. They're dedicated to relearning the ancient knowledge of their ancestors and re-envisioning the commitment to protecting and storing this land. The land was always sacred to the Alma Mutsun and is sacred still. Uristak, their most sacred site, sits in the southern end of the Santa Cruz Mountains and is being threatened by a sand and gravel mine. It's your responsibility to protect us as county citizens and the environment. Please direct the qualified and professional staff in the county's departments and commissions to review and comment by September 26th, 2022. The Santa Clara County Sergeant Ranch DEIR. The mine threatens the tribe's indigenous rights, protection of endangered and threatened species, highly protected, highly critical wildlife corridor. It threatens the quality of air with micro-particle sand and it threatens the groundwater and the Pajaro River watershed from depletion, contamination and increased flooding. I also call upon- Thank you. Should I start? Hello, my name is Dora Rosen. I'm basically here to say ditto to what Antoinette Bauer just said. I'm very grateful and humbled to be volunteering with the Alma Mutsun Tribal Band who's stewarding this area on their native plant restoration project and also ask y'all to have comments made by your staff on the DEIR and to pass the resolution opposing mining on Uristak is not needed. In fact, there's sand and gravel quarries right here in Santa Cruz County. And this is just such an important thing. We really need to learn from the Alma Mutsun and the city of Santa Cruz passed a resolution recognizing as I'm sure you all do that this is part of an eco region. It's not, you can't really divide up the environment according to government jurisdictions. So I hope you will also pass the resolution and talk with the county supervisors and people you know in Santa Clara County. The Santa Clara County Humans' Right Commission also declared the mine, a violation of human rights for the Alma Mutsun. And it has been this part, Uristak, the sacred land of Uristak also is a transportation quarter. It's the only transportation quarter for animals. It's in the Santa Cruz mountain range and it connects to the Diablo mountain range and also to the Gavilan mountain range. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Ms. Rosen. Thank you, good morning. My name is Becky Steinbrenner. Ironically, I was listening to Valentin Lopez, leader of the Alma Mutsun tribe talking about this very issue on Radio KSCO this morning coming here. So I do want to also support your help. Supervisor Koenig, I know you are working with Mr. Zwirling at KSCO Radio. There are many reasons why that project could get a riparian exception. I have written your board with extensive information about county codes that support and justify your helping him with this 1947 structure that would be protected by the concrete slab that was poured in the back along Corcoran Lagoon. In the event of sea rise, it could help preserve that historic building and help preserve the emergency response communication that it provides and has historically provided for residents throughout the Monterey Bay and beyond. I personally saw during the CZU fire evacuations when I was volunteering at the Santa Cruz County fairgrounds. I saw people listening in their cars and on their phones to the daily cowfire updates on the fire because they were not at the fairgrounds. People were listening live on KSCO. We need to preserve this. So please work with staff to secure a riparian exception. You can meet all of the five findings that are necessary to do that. And I outlined that in my email to you last night. Finally, I just want to say on item 21, the Davenport recycled water. I'm happy that it's going to be at least used in further conversation with Mr. Hio. I found out that it produces 28 acre feet a year of recycled water that is not being used at all. That's a crime. And I just want to ask on number 40, the RFP. Why is the water for water haulers being limited to an amount that would be less than two people or a household for six weeks? And my last comment is, why is there no flag of the state of California flying outside the county building? It hasn't been there for weeks. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Steinbrenner. Seeing no one else here in board chambers, is there anyone online that wishes to comment? Yes, we do have speakers online. Call in user one, your microphone is now available. Good morning, Marilyn Garrett. Supervisors, please take the direction of the speakers this morning in your policymaking decisions. I am calling because I saw on top of the sheriff building, what I believe is a 5G antenna globe. And I right now am looking at a photo of what looks the same on an article. Let me tell you what this is. The evidence mount, this is cell phone task force.org from May 5th, 2020, a photograph of the diamond princess on February 5th, 2020, while it was quarantined in Yokohama, shows the five antenna globes on board. What you have looks the same to me. And it says this is a satellite company, SES, that both sets a satellite system. It's part of the Global 5G network. We offer the fastest wifi on the seas, and it goes on with movies, 7,000 sensors, 650 well-mounted touch screens, 1,700 wifi access points. This was massive microwave radiation on this princess ship. First thing that counties should always do is make sure that there is proof of no harm to people or the environment in their policy. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. Surge, your microphone is now available. Good morning. Board of Supervisors and Chair Koenig. My name's Surge Cagno. I'm the co-chair of the Mental Health Advisory Board. I'd like to thank Gail Pellerin and Regina Field for their courage and compassion. I and the Mental Health Advisory Board support their advocacy for suicide awareness. The Mental Health Advisory Board's 988 committee has had Andrea Tuleo of the Family Services Agency to give a presentation of their lifeline suicide prevention phone line, and now easily accessed through 988. We have also been working with her to get bilingual flyers and posters created and shared throughout the county's public bathrooms and hopefully the school's bathrooms as well. We support Gail's advocacy for more mobile mental health services to respond to the increased calls and have written a letter in recommendation of this to the Board of Supervisors previously. We also support the Crisis Hub program being created to help people access services. We would also like to thank Chair Koenig on the suicide awareness letter proclamation for the month of suicide. Thank you for your time. Stay safe. Thank you, Mr. Cogna. We have no further speakers, Chair. All right, then I will return it to the Board for action on the consent agenda. Does any member at the Board wish to make comments? Yes, Chair. First of all, I know it's not usual that we respond to public comments, but I want to thank Gail Peller and Regina for coming forward. I remember as a state legislator that I tried to get a psychologist at every school. They said no funding available. I said every district, no funding available. Every county, no funding available. We're going to face that problem on a statewide basis, but I think the best thing we can do is really promote the 988 number. We can prevent some of these things and we should really work harder at it and make sure that people have more knowledge that they can have that line. On the garbage service, believe me, as people know, I think that issue was poorly communicated and it took too long to respond. I think we are going to respond. That will be satisfactory. And I appreciate those remarks, but which I have received a lot of. But getting now to the consent agenda on item 26, I just, I think it should be noted that we have the results of that election, of the primary election, and there are 74,627 votes cast. Most of them were sent in votes by mail. But what the good news is we had the third highest percentage turnout in the state. The bad news is it was 47%. That is pathetic for the state of California. My congratulations to the Santa Cruz County voters, but let's get to 100% come November. It's unbelievable that with the intensity that we're seeing in our politics of this day and age, that we don't have a higher turnout. And I just, come on people, you can mail in your ballots, it's easy to do. Let's do better than that. Let's get in the 100% if we can. But congratulations on being third highest. On the mental health grant updates on item number 39, I wanna thank the behavioral health team for providing these regular updates and given the connectivity between the mental health needs, substance abuse disorder and homelessness. I think the public benefits from understanding how we're working to address these issues. During our last meeting, I expressed an interest for a study session for the board on the intersections that exist between the healing, the streets plan and the health services and our housing for health in our human services department and health services departments. We agreed to wait until after we know the outcome of the care courts discussion that's in the state level. But I just wanted to remind the board that I think we should benefit or we would benefit from having a more detailed look at all of these programs and funding streams. When we heard the percentage of people that are homeless either need behavioral health assistance or suffer from substance abuse, it's close. I thought it was a third and they said, no, it's certainly over half and maybe up to 75% shocking news and we need to, we're trying to do what we can but we need to get a better coordinated effort to address that issue. On number 40, which was mentioned also by somebody from the public, I wanna thank our environmental health team who worked on securing these grants to provide drought related support to the community. We have a number of private well owners and small water systems that are particularly vulnerable into drought in our rural areas in this day and age. And I do have a question that I'd like to have someone answer if they can. Do we know if there are any or if there are particular systems or portions throughout the county that will benefit from the most from these efforts, Mr. Ryan. Hi, good morning supervisors, Chair Koenig. I'm Sierra Ryan, I'm the water resources manager and environmental health. To answer your question, we have been undergoing a process over the past four months to identify the most vulnerable parts of the county based on a number of factors, including current groundwater elevations, historical water challenges and water quality concerns. There are a number of locations that we've identified that are more likely to suffer due to groundwater changes, especially due to long-term drought. So for example, portions of the summit area, portions of South County have water quality challenges. There are some examples in Bonnie Dune of groundwater elevations being lowered, but there are also opportunities in most of those places for either new wells to be dug or for interconnection with existing water systems. And we're hoping that we can step up our role in the county and start providing greater services to these areas. Okay, thank you. Go to the target areas though in general. Yes. Thank you. That's it. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Hi, I'm Mr. Charles. I'm Mr. Franklin speaking on one item, which is item 48, a great appreciation for public works on this Green Valley project that will benefit both Supervisor Caput and my constituents. I don't want to understate the size and scope of this project or really is a significant improvement for biking pedestrian safety as well as some of the metro improvements that'll be made along that two-mile length corridor. They're a very heavily used area in particularly by young families in that area, low-income young families. And so to have these improvements, to have public works be able to secure the state funding and to have the county contributing the final match is pretty significant. Today's action just moves us forward through the first steps of the planning stage, but to have that into construction next year is pretty significant. So there's a lot of appreciation for public works for continuing to improve areas in the South County that really advantage these, in particularly these young families throughout South County. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. All right, seeing no other comments or questions by the board, I'll just make a couple of notes. On item 19, I want to thank Katherine Lee for volunteering to serve as Parks and Rec Commissioner for the first district. And on item 24, the fourth quarter report on cannabis licensing office operations. You know, I started to read that 75% of our cannabis business remains illegal in the state and locally. That to me suggests that we continue to fail with our policy around this emerging industry. The report also shows that retail revenues were down 30% from last year and non-retail down two thirds. So I do think it's important that we continue to iterate on this policy. The board has done quite a bit of iteration since the emergence of this industry. And I think we need to keep doing that. About a year ago, the cannabis licensing officer presented a number of ideas that would help support local cannabis industry. And I'd like to see additional direction for the CLO to return to the board with an agenda item to again, present options that would help support the local legal cannabis industry operators and help to increase the tax base of local operations. Those are all my comments. I'll move the recommended action. One second. Okay, any further discussion and supervisor Cunardy, that's without any additional direction? Yeah, unless any of my colleagues want to add additional direction. I think Chair Koenig had some additional direction on the update, yeah. Sorry, sorry, with the additional direction. Okay, thank you. I'm sorry, and that was a motion by Supervisor Cunardy and a second by Supervisor Friend. Yes, that's correct. All right. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Cunardy. Aye. Caput. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. Consent agenda passes as amended. All right, thank you. Then we'll now proceed with item seven, which is to consider an update on the study session on development of the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan and direct the Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience to return on or before December 13th, 2022 with the 2022 Climate Action and Adaptation Plan as outlined in the memorandum with the Director of the Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience. And for our presentation on this item, we have Tatiana Brennan, Senior Admin Analyst and David Reed, our Director of the Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience. Take it away. Good morning, Chair, members of the board, members of the public and county staff. We'll get the presentation up here and we'll get started. So we're gonna start our presentation today with a land acknowledgement. It is with great respect, humility and accountability that I start today's presentation with a land acknowledgement. The land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Owaswa-speaking UP tribe. The Amamutza tribal band comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to Mission Santa Cruz and San Juan Batista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from this historic trauma. It is our intention that as we consider this climate action and adaptation plan today, adopt it later this year and implement in the years to come that we seek opportunities to partner with and take guidance from our indigenous community members who understand the dimensionality of what generational stewardship of this land and all its inhabitants means and that we acknowledge and understand the role of colonialism and that it has had on our current climate crisis. We are gathering here today with great responsibility. We have arrived at a pivotal and critical moment and our tasks with leading our community through a gateway of transformative change as we face this climate challenge, how we respond, adapt and mitigate the climate crisis will be a living process and will be woven from social, governmental, adaptive, technical and individual actions. Let's see, I can advance the slides for you. Thank you. So on today's agenda, we're gonna Tatiana and I are going to address the board, introduce you to our climate action and adaptation plan team, discuss the goals and strategies for our 2022 update. We're also gonna reflect on some of the lessons learned from our 2013 climate action plan. And then we're gonna give you an update on where we are in the process, present some of our draft greenhouse gas inventory information, discuss critical targets set forth by the state and next steps in the process before we come back to you in December. We wanted the cap to be a plan that our county staff could own and one in which they could see their contributions. Staff from 10 departments are participating and we also have, oh, thank you. And we also have a internship program where we have interns from Cabrillo, Monterey, Berkeley and UCSE. We also understand that we are stewards of the land for the next generation and that is why we have this internship program. We wanted to bring youth into the development of the cap and the youth that we have represent South County and North County. We also wanted this to be a plan representative of our entire county using similar methodology where possible. So we hired the same consultants used by Watsonville and Santa Cruz and those are the Rincon consultants and with us today, we have them on the line. We have Eric Feldman who is the principal for Rincon and then we also have Eric Vaughn who is the project manager and then senior environmental planner. And finally, we wanted to ensure that the goals and actions in this cap are feasible and that is why we have a steering committee comprised of department heads and deputies and they provide the visionary planning. This guy, oh nice. And here you can see the cap organizational chart. This provides you a visual of the scope of the involvement in the development of the cap. I also want to acknowledge one person that isn't on this chart and that's Kathleen McLaughlin. She's a grad student supporting the development of the regional collaborative. Next slide. Thank you. And here we have the cap goals and strategies. I want to take a moment to highlight what we are working towards. We're working towards alignment with state efforts and targets. We're also working towards a plan for implementation in 2023 but near-term actions that can be implemented as we develop. We're also focusing on goals and actions that address climate change impact on all in our county especially those with the least amount of resources and increased vulnerability. We're also working towards a plan development that has a collective county process. These are the questions that the work groups are asking of each measure. Thank you, Julia. They're asking, does the measure result in specific reduction actions? Does it have trackable and measurable metrics? Is it mandatory or voluntary? Is a lead defined? Is it supported by the community? Is it equitable? And what is the cost to implement? And what are the funding strategies or opportunities? Here you can see the process for designing the strategies in the cap. We start with the goal and then we develop a policy that has a long view towards a target. And then following that we develop an action that develops, that proposes an action or actions that will implement the steps to achieve the targets. Here I just want to take a moment to acknowledge Central Coast Community Energy because they have had a significant impact on decreasing our green house gas emissions and you'll see that in a following slide. And I also want to acknowledge the work of our general services department in completing a county solar installation project. And I want to highlight these things because they are major accomplishments that our county has done. And so they help pave the way and show us what we are capable of achieving. And here I want to briefly take a moment to reflect again on the positive work that has been done and is still occurring in a review of measures in the climate action strategy from 2013, 24% of the measures had been completed. I also want to draw your attention to the fact that we also saw a challenge in the area of land use. That was where we encountered the most barriers and were unable to achieve progress. Here's a slide where you can see the timeline of the plan of the CAP. Phase one and two are complete on target. We have the greenhouse gas inventory and the climate vulnerability assessment. And those have been informing the work groups in terms of what kind of actions and measures they're going to develop. As part of that process, the cities of Watsonville and Santa Cruz are meeting with the work groups to share their plans, their measures, lessons learned, and methodology. We also have assistant director from the community development CDI, community infrastructure. Stephanie Hansen is going to be sharing about the sustainability update and so ways that our county can align with existing code and existing plans. We also want to not only align, but we also want to find where there are gaps so that we can develop new strategies and opportunities. And here is our greenhouse gas inventory. I just want to take a moment to highlight a few things for you. You can see here that the majority of greenhouse gas emissions are coming from passenger vehicles. We also have 14.7% coming from residential natural gas and 12.9 coming from commercial vehicles. So those are three of our greatest contributors. We also have non-residential natural gas at 7.7 and then off-road equipment at 9.9. And to summarize this, what this means is that 61.4% of greenhouse gas emissions are coming from on-road transportation. And then gas usage in buildings is 22%. So what we want to talk about now is where we need to go given the state of our current inventory. And so what I want to do is that the next series of graphs is kind of describe where we're at and where we need to go and how we want to get there with the work of the working groups in the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan team. So this first graph shows you what business as usual, the forecast of our emissions would look like if we did nothing to address climate change and that growth that you see in that red line at the top of the graph represents the natural growth of our county from a population standpoint and the emissions from that addition over time out to 2045. What the adjusted forecast or that kind of purple downtrending line represents is the adjusted forecast and that represents the things that the state has control over and the things that the state is doing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions through their legislative resources and tools. So things like transportation legislation to improve fuel efficiency of vehicles, for us having 3CE, the California Renewable Portfolio Standard which addresses electricity is not as big a factor because as Tatiana mentioned, 3CE is doing an amazing job at converting our portfolio to renewable and then the California Building and Energy Code Title 24 standards are continuing to try and make our homes particularly new construction more energy efficient. The thing that I also want to highlight in this slide and it reiterates what Tatiana mentioned in the pie chart is that that red, orange and yellow areas are the significant contributors to our greenhouse gas emissions portfolio. And that again is the passenger vehicles in red, then the residential and non-residential gas in yellow and orange. And then we also have the commercial vehicles as well. So it's that transportation sector and our building natural gas which are the biggest areas that we can address our emissions. So where do we need to go is an important conversation in how we get there. We have two pieces of state action. One is state law SB 32 which says we need to reduce our emissions by 40% from our 1990 standards or our 1990 baseline. And in this graph you can see it's maybe a little bit small but our 1990 was just north of 800,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. So to reach that target, that green line, that trend line coming down, we need to reduce our emissions by just over 200,000 metric tons of carbon CO2 or CO2 equivalent which is all greenhouse gas emissions. That is the state law to reach that target. That is a statewide target. What we wanna recognize is that if we don't take immediate and an important action in the near term, we may lose the local control to dictate how we reduce our emissions. So we wanna begin that trajectory down towards meeting that 2030 target as quickly as we can so that we can show that progress and that we don't get impacted by future state legislation which mandates strategies that may not be as advantageous or supportive to our county's goals and strategies. The other target that's significant is executive order B5518 which talks about carbon neutrality by 2045. At present that is just an executive order but we certainly expect that in the coming years and decades that that will become a state law as well. So again, while that target is not a state law at this time, we again want to make our effort to move towards meeting these targets so that we are making the progress that needs to be made and that we don't get negatively impacted by future state actions. As a frame of reference, that 200,000 metric tons of carbon equivalent that we need to reduce by 2030. Most of the time, most of us myself included we don't talk in metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent very often. That represents essentially the entire emissions of the city of Watsonville with a population of over 50,000 people. So we as a county just as an unincorporated county need to reduce our emissions by that measure to meet our 2030 guidelines. So this takes a concerted effort and what I want to highlight are some of the areas that the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan team and the work groups that Tatiana articulated will be looking at a number of different strategies and evaluating those strategies on their effectiveness and timeliness to meet these targets. And so what I want to highlight are in the transportation sector to reduce vehicle miles traveled or VMT. We have a number of resources at our disposal. Obviously from a transportation policy and infrastructure standpoint, safe routes to schools, multimodal infrastructure and expanding public transportation options are key tenants to reducing vehicle miles traveled in our public work staff and our Metro and our regional transportation commission which you all sit on are making great strides to address those areas. The other most more important area is how we build. Where we build, is it vertical or is it horizontal development? And how quickly do we move to address our housing equity affordability and climate crisis? So it's really that land use policy and where we choose to build and how is an important part of that in terms of reducing vehicle miles traveled. The other place in terms of the transportation sector is obviously in terms of electric vehicle adoption. Our general services department is working hard to analyze our own county fleet with the goal of right sizing it, modernizing and electrifying the fleet as well as providing charging infrastructure for our own vehicles and the public. But that is just a small fraction of the need in terms of reducing the emissions from our transportation sector. So most of the incentives for moving in that direction to the public will still continue to be air board, state and federal incentives and rebates. On the building electrification side, there's a menu of electrification ordinance strategies out there from new construction only to all remodels to time of replacement. So when a piece of gas equipment is in need of replacement and they need a permit to do so, they would not be allowed to replace it with a gas appliance. They would have to replace it with an electric solution. All of these tools will be analyzed by the CAP team and we would expect some sort of phased approach to bringing these to the community because we know that from other jurisdictions, no single one of those strategies is sufficient to meet the need, but it likely is best achieved through a phased approach by implementing those in steps. On the solid waste side, obviously SB 1383, which is the Organics Waste Diversion State Law will play a big role, but also fleet electrification over time of our waste transportation infrastructure as well as the off-road equipment, both our own off-road equipment, but also in the ag industry. The other thing that's not shown on this graph is the role carbon sequestration will play. We expect that as we get and try to achieve that 2045 target of carbon neutrality that it will have a balance of sequestration strategies. Many of those candidly don't exist on an industrial scale, so we expect there to be some technological advances, but there are things that our local planning, Metropolitan Planning Organization, AMBAG, received a grant to study working lands and its carbon sequestration capacity and how the use of our working lands, our agricultural and forest lands impacts climate. Obviously making efforts to regrow and restore the forest that we lost during the fire and then also exploring different agricultural practices and crop portfolios that reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in that area could be considered as part of that sequestration equation. And lastly, there's an emerging market and an emerging science in the realm of Biochar, which is a byproduct of burning organic waste in a non-oxygenated environment and it concentrates that carbon and can be a soil amendment. So that's an emerging area of research that we in collaboration with the city of Watsonville are exploring and is certainly something that is peaking the interest of folks like in our community that have experienced a wildfire and we have a lot of standing dead carbon and dead trees. So sequestration will be part of that equation, but the key take home right now is that we are gonna be looking through these measures at these areas and more to reduce our carbon emissions to meet these trajectories and to meet these targets in 2030 and 2045. And on this side, you can see what Dave and I are talking about in terms of a phased approach with just the work on the cap. So we have the work that the cap work groups are doing to design a plan that can be implemented next year. But we also have county actions that are occurring right now. TSD, as Dave said, is working on fleet electrification and vehicle charging stations and then replacing hot water heaters with electric heat pumps. We're also looking at the inflation reduction act and what kind of funding opportunities are available for our county. We're also looking at build back better funding opportunities. And then we're also working on the regional climate collaborative, which is a consortium of cities and counties that are working towards regional electrification. And then I also wanna highlight the work of the Central Coast Community Energy initiatives in terms of electrification. And before I move on to our final slide, I would like to take a moment to see if there's anybody in the audience that is working on, that's on the work groups. And if there's anybody in the audience that's working on the work groups, would you please stand? And I just want, thank you, I just want you to see this is your staff and they've all dedicated a significant amount of time and continue to dedicate time towards this.  This is truly a county wide effort. So thank you. Thank you. And then, can you move to the next slide? And then finally, I'd like to close with our recommended actions versus to accept and file this status update of the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. And second is to please direct the Office of Response Recovery and Resilience to return on or before December 13th, 2022 with the proposed 2022 Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. So we're happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you, Ms. Brennan. Thank you, Director Reed. Are there questions or comments from members of the board? Yeah, Mr. Chair. Supervisor McPherson. I just want to thank everyone that is a part of this report. Congratulations on seeing where we are and not unusual for Santa Cruz County to be at the lead of the state of California as far as I know. In addressing climate change issues that we have, it's a daunting task that we have to address. And we've got a great start on it. And I just like, you've answered some of my questions about the timelines and benchmarks for implementation. So I do appreciate that. A great report that you have. And maybe you answered this one too, that what will be the priority adaptation initiatives for the new cap? I mean, I guess it's going to be vehicles and residential gas. Those be the targets, because they're the biggest. Yeah, so I mean, I think one of the things that we talked about is the distinction between mitigation and adaptation. And so the mitigation measures are the measures to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation strategies will include things like the hazardous fuel reduction strategies that we need to do to reduce the potential negative impacts of wildfires. We're going to need to look at adaptive strategies around sea level rise. The public works or community development and infrastructure and the RTC and OR3 were awarded a grant to look at the vulnerability of our transportation network and explore adaptation strategies to address those vulnerable areas of our transportation network as well. So those are a couple examples. Okay, thank you. And as we continue to electrify our transportation system, big question is going to be where will the funding come from? And I know the state is trying to push things on and that's understandable. We've got a great start here in this whole, this county and this whole region, but that's going to be a big question of the financing of it because it's going to be a very expensive operation that we have to fulfill. We're going to have to depend on state and federal sources, I'm sure. Yeah, Tatiana can share briefly the regional collaborative and the purpose of that, of gathering those folks. Sure. Yes, I do want to acknowledge first that in the Inflation Reduction Act, there's significant funding for purchasing electric vehicles, but also on a broader scale, the regional collaborative is coming together to apply for grants, large multi-million dollar grants that will fund. And we're in good position on that, I would assume, right? Yes, we are. Yes, we are. So that's really our angle towards doing that. The key to highlight there as well is that we are more competitive for these big federal grants and federal opportunities when we collaborate with the city of Santa Cruz, the city of Watsonville, the county of Monterey and the county of San Benito. We're just a small region, right? But if we work together collaboratively and we apply collaboratively, we believe we'll be more competitive for those funds. So that's one of the key strategies of building this regional collaborative. Thank you. Sure. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Supervisor Coonerty, you're next. Yeah, thank you. So it's a great report and I appreciate the collaborative nature of both the other jurisdictions and with students from UCSC and other institutions. It's great to have this multifaceted effort. I encourage you when the goals are developed that I like the questions that would be asked and I encourage you to focus on a few big ones for which every people are specifically accountable to reaching and agencies are accountable to reaching versus 30 or 40 smaller ones where the accountability is dispersed. One of my biggest questions though is it looks like we're working off the 2019 data and as we all know, the world has changed dramatically since then. And is there a way that we can get updated information because it feels like we're a business making decisions or an institution making decisions based on budgets from three years ago. And I'd like us to be more nimble in our and adjusting to the big macro trends. Great question, Supervisor. So the 2019 data is the most recent complete data set that we have on the emissions inventory. One of the things that Ms. Brennan mentioned is the consistency across jurisdictions in methodology and data available. One thing that was actually noted by the consultant is that preliminary initial data from 2020 actually has some anomalies that are unusual. Obviously we were in the middle of or starting our pandemic. So 2019 represents kind of the cleanest data. It does represent, we did achieve kind of the mid SB 32 milestone of being 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. So we achieved that by 2019. So that was a good kind of data point metric to track. But we just, the way the data is collected at a meta level, the 2019 is our best data to date. Is there an effort to update that? I mean, I'm just, what I'm thinking is, like 2020 and 2021 were anomalies, but they also spurred a remote work innovations that if we can target our policies around those macro driven events, we're gonna have much more success than trying to sort of swim against the tide. Yeah, one of the things about standardizing our methodology, and I do wanna acknowledge that the planning department and David Carlson did an amazing job in 2012 and 2013 and with our original climate action strategy. But they were working in an environment where the standardization of greenhouse gas emissions inventories hadn't been developed. So they created a system to account for our emissions. With this update, we're standardizing our methodology, which will make it much easier to integrate the new data as soon as it's available to be able to track our progress on a much more regular basis. And what we intend and hope to do is to integrate these initiatives and efforts into our operational plan on a two year cycle. So really begin to track and measure and recalibrate based on best available data on a much more frequent basis than every 10 years. Okay, great, thank you. Before we move on, I just wanna see if our consultants are on the line because what we've been learning is, or I had been learning, is the value in not having a greenhouse gas inventory every year, the value of having several years in between. So I wanna see, is Eric Feldman available to make a comment about this? Yes, I'm available, hello. Yeah, there's a pretty significant effort that's involved with collecting the data for inventories and the value of doing it when the data isn't granular to the level where it provides information on a regular basis just isn't justified. So we have been recommending that we develop a really concise methodology to calculate the emissions and then collect data on a every two to three year basis so that you're staying on track but you're not spinning wheels when there's a lot of other efforts that can be focused on during that time frame. Okay, great. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Other comments or questions from members of the board? Supervisor Caput. Yeah, I wanna thank you also for the report. I remember I lived down in the Los Angeles area for four years back in the 70s. Your microphone, if you could, Supervisor Caput, just turn the, hit the little gray button there. The what? Your microphone's off if you could just turn on your microphone. Yeah, is that better? No. I guess just lean closer to it. Yeah, okay. Yeah. I remember living back in the Los Angeles area back in the mid 70s and late 70s and the orange sky from the smog and everything like that. They had smog days and everything. I'm wondering, we've done a lot since then to make the air better. Is there a point of no return where we've damaged it so much that it can't really heal? It's almost like there are natural causes too like volcanoes or different things, fires and all that. So, I mean, we really have a lot of work to do for the next generation.  The climate has definitely changed as far as I'm concerned just by my own observation and not based on science. I would say, hey, what's going on? So, we do have a lot of work and hopefully we're not at that point where there's no return. I don't know, can, what is the science now on? Let's say there was no more manmade smog or anything like that. Would the atmosphere and everything somewhat heal or is it, are we at a breaking point? There's a lot to climate science for sure. Certainly the carbon cycle is, it naturally includes the growth of vegetation. So, green plants, photosynthesis takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, produces oxygen. So, in theory, over the history of our planet, we've had high carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and that's spurred large plant growth. But not to get too deep into the weeds there. I wanna take your comment and just highlight that there will be technological solutions to help us but really to achieve what we need to achieve there are gonna be adaptive challenges that our community will have to look different, live different, move from place to place in a different way to achieve those goals. So, we're not at the point of no return but we need to make important concerted efforts as a community, as a region, as a state, as a country and as a globe to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Those include things like the catastrophic failure of some of the ice sheets in Antarctica which could raise sea level by three to 10 feet and they are very worried that that is an accelerating process. So, a sea level rise of millimeters a year is what's been commonly discussed and everybody has a hard time conceptualizing that but I think it's easier for us to be, to recognize that three to 10 feet of sea level rise or more would be a very dramatic impact. So, we wanna take the efforts to stem that from happening for sure. Sure, and then there's other things. The city of Watsonville in the last couple of years has been giving away free trees to all the residents of Watsonville and then, of course, our office, we've given away 18,000 or more small redwood trees to plant throughout the county and part of them went to Monterey County. The problem with the tree part is if we're going through all these droughts, you gotta get the tree going for a couple of years before it'll catch on its own. So, that's where you're trying to help but at the same time, you plant the tree, if you can't water it through the first two summers, it probably won't survive. So, it's really tough, tough battle. Yeah, no, I wanna appreciate the work that your office and you've done in terms of tree planting. Certainly tree planting is part of that sequestration equation but also managed forestry is important as well. So, whenever a timber harvest plan is developed in our county, there's actually a carbon calculation done and generally speaking, I managed forest where there's selective harvesting of trees has a net carbon sink so the forest can grow more effectively. One of the things about our amazing redwood trees is that when we clear cut them in many parts of our county in the 1930s and 40s and before then, they grew back vibrantly, right? But they grew back at a density that was not a natural density of trees. So, the trees that burned in the CZU fire, that was forest that had been cut down in the early part of the 1900s, but grew back very densely. And so, we do need to look from an adaptation standpoint at how we manage our forests and how we manage our public lands to make them more resilient and ideally make them better carbon sinks. You bet. I've been a member of the Save the Redwoods Lake for 50 years since I was in college and everything and the Semper Virons Fund and League, they're starting to look at managing the forests that we do have so that in the future that they'll have older trees that'll survive. Like you said, about 100 years ago, they clear cut thousands of acres, probably about 80% of all the natural growth in California. It's hard to believe that that happened 100 years ago and we're still seeing the effects of that. So, yeah, that's what they're looking at now, protecting what we have, letting the 100 year old trees become 200 year old trees in the future. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Supervisor McPherson. In some context of this, I think the elevation of downtown Santa Cruz is 14 feet. So we're a target, so to speak. Thank you. Just a couple of questions for you. On the adaptation front, of course, we've all experienced the air quality when we have a huge wildfire. Are you looking at any strategies either to alert the public or some kind of clean air shelters during wildfires? And I think they were saying that breathing air on those days was like smoking a pack of cigarettes. Yeah, one of the exciting things that we're looking at is kind of moving away from the notion of just CRCs, which is the community resource center model that PG&E created to address their public safety power shutoffs to an all hazards resource center that would be available to the community during extreme heat events or air quality events. And one of the things that I'm really grateful for in the leadership of our library system is that our new library leadership recognizes the importance of the library system as serving in that function to some degree. So I look forward to working closely with them to build more of those types of resources through our existing library system and other targeted facilities around the county for air quality, but also look at grants for air purification systems because we know that climate change and air quality will disproportionately impact our lower income residents who can't necessarily may not have the money for an air conditioning system. And so they need good air quality in their homes during these circumstances because they may not be able to leave the window open. Okay, thank you. And then regarding methane production, I think that's typically mostly, are we measuring it? And I think mostly this comes from waste. Is the new composting rules going to attack with the majority of that? Is there anything else we can do regarding our landfills to reduce methane production? I'm not sure if Director Machado, that's not my area of expertise, but certainly methane from our landfills is a big contributor. We do a great job, I think, capturing and reusing that material, but I don't know if Director Machado or a member of CDI wants to comment on that specifically. Thank you and good morning, Board. Matt Machado, Director of CDI. If I could hear again the question or comment on methane production and the expanse of it. Yeah, the question is in regards to the point of vista landfill, obviously, my understanding would be that's the primary source of methane emissions in our county. Now, obviously we should see some improvement with the new composting rules and removing that from the waste stream. Is that pretty much our primary strategy or are there other things that we're doing to reduce methane production from the landfill? Sure, that's a good question. So it's a multi-fold effort and so currently we do collect the methane from our closed landfill and we co-generate that into electricity directly. And then in the future, as we build a new compost facility, we are keeping an eye on additional processes like anaerobic digestion, which is a really effective way to convert organic waste directly into electricity through a co-generation process. And then there's an additional process that we're watching very closely as we build our own compost facility as called a gasification. It's a similar process where you can take organic waste and even other trash and convert that directly into electricity either through methane production or even into a liquid fuel. So there's a lot of technologies that we're watching closely and we're trying to ready ourselves through our own collection and creation of a compost facility and even through our transportation production. So yes, we're watching that and we're hoping the future brings us those opportunities to where we can convert our trash directly into energy. So yes. Okay, thank you very much, Director Machado. Just a couple more questions. I mean, clearly the biggest challenge ahead of us is transportation, reducing emissions from transportation, electrifying the fleet that we do retain. Do we have any requirements today or is the state developing any requirements for electric charging stations or electric chargers and new multifamily or single-family residences? I don't have the ordinance information on the top of my head. I know Assistant Director Hansen might be in the audience that could talk about current or future state legislation around electrification charging requirements. Good morning, Chair Koenig, members of the board. There are in the building code and the upcoming building code, there are some newer requirements that are going to start to address electrification and EV charging stations. We've been in the sustainability update as we finalized some of the policies related to vehicle miles traveled and transportation demand management, which kind of work hand in hand, to improve our transportation situations. We stopped just a little bit short of requiring electrification because we think the state is actually going to be doing some of that work for us and we didn't want to have a conflict in there.  All right, thank you. Yeah, thank you. And then my final question is, I mean, my understanding is that both the city of Santa Cruz and Watsonville are now requiring building a new construction to be all electric, is that correct? That's my understanding, yes. Okay, I mean, this is a strategy that was outlined in the previous climate action plan, some kind of requirements around building electrification. I think it's really been clearly outlined of one of the two major things we can do, right? I mean, electrifying transportation and electrifying our homes. As you also mentioned, it's an incremental process. So I think that we should stop wasting time as clearly it's an emergency. And I would love to see, I guess, you work with the planning department to come back in December with the final plan, at least with an initial ordinance to require electrification of new homes, new construction of all types, ADUs, single family, multi-family, within the urban services line. I know we still have some kinks to work out as far as more rural homes and energy reliability, but I think that's a pretty clear place. We need to start and we should have those model ordinances from the other jurisdictions right here in our county and across the state. Okay, thanks. All right, any further comments from the board? Seeing none, I'll open it for public comment. Anyone who wishes to address the board on this item, please approach the podium. Thank you, that's a lot of information. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I'm happy to see that the county is working cooperatively with the cities within our county. That makes a lot of sense. And I'm happy that that's happening. I wanna see better preservation and protection for our established heritage trees. They take in a lot of carbon dioxide and there's virtually no protection for them during building developments. And that needs to change because the small trees that get planted in their place are nothing to what the large established trees absorb in carbon dioxide. So I'd like to see enforcement and better protection for our heritage trees. I would really like to see more micro grid projects within the dense infill projects coming along and with on-site battery storage. I have read that there is too much more than can handle solar electricity available with not enough battery storage capacity. The large bank of that that just went in an operational and moss landing is helping. But I think micro grid with solar and on-site battery storage is the better way to go. I'd like to see that happen here. I would like to see our county take a lead in using the rail that we have. We can make a pilot project right now using metro buses, electric metro buses with a rail conversion. They could be taking people on the rail now and they get them off highway one. I would finally like to see the raw data of RINCON. I'm pretty amazed that all of this is being built on 2019 data, which I agree with Supervisor Coonerty is not realistic. And I want to see the raw data. Hello, my name is Rowena Bush. I'm one of the interns for the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan project. I'm working with the Built Environment Work Group. And currently I'm doing some research for the Climate Action Plan on how we can have a successful implementation phase next year by studying what factors influence climate policy implementation. And recently in my research, I came across a study from 2011 that analyzed how effective Californian cities climate action plans were at actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The study found that while cities with climate action plans were more successful reducing their overall greenhouse gas emissions, this wasn't necessarily due to the climate action plan itself, but due to the public's environmental preferences and general political will around climate issues. And I think that shows that there's a real opportunity for us to increase public support for this project in order to make it more effective. Climate action plans also can and should do more than codify the public's environmental preferences. Our goal for the CAP should be to see a measurable impact on our community and our environment that would not have happened if the plan didn't exist. To do this, the plan must ambitiously, aggressively and comprehensively tackle the threat that the climate crisis poses to our community. And it cannot fall short when we start the implementation phase. Too often the best climate solutions such as building sustainable infrastructure with affordable housing, infill development and public transportation investments do not make it past the planning stages. And to close, there's a quote I'd like to share with you that's essential for us to remember while we are doing this plan. We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. We need to make sure that we are taking direct actions now to protect the future generation, which is here now. So thank you for your time. Thank you, Ms. Bush. Hello, everyone. I am Jennifer Hernandez, the natural environment intern working along with Tatiana on the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. This is an opportunity I am grateful for as I am passionate about climate action and being an advocate for my community. And this internship helps work with both as we're trying our best to list future climate actions but with an equity lens. I am from Watsonville, a town I feel is underrepresented and so I try my best to include my thoughts in this internship and provide feedback on how we can better include equity and or add a change in perspective. The routes in which policies are created for these caps are green or gray policies. Green policies encourage policy solutions that include open green space, addition of trees to streets and recycling. It follows its title by finding solutions to make the location greener. Gray policy actions in this category are more public transit with an emphasis on more affordable and or high density housing. I believe housing is needed in many areas as I have heard of many experiences of multiple families living in one home. Now affordable housing is greatly needed but I don't appreciate the idea of focusing on time only on dense housing. The action of creating housing opportunities is immense but this action should be done to an extent. Recommendations for the cap would be to have a combination of green and gray policies instead of focusing on one or the other such as the dense housing. We give this measure high value for its benefits but we need the greenery too. We need to consider both as beneficial and find a compromise and agreement to include both in measures as they will be beneficial for short and long-term goals. Both types of policies work at different speeds so they will complement each other and help bring change now and later. We'd also be needing to prioritize those who are more vulnerable and or require more resources as well as constantly checking in on the equity measures stated on the cap. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Ms. Hernandez. Hello, everyone. My name is Ian Nieves and I am an intern for the County Administrative Office. Together we are working on presenting a climate action and adaptation plan for the County of Santa Cruz that successfully addresses local pollution issues, address how we will adopt a changing climate and perhaps most importantly, includes equity for everyone in our community. As I'm sure everyone here understands, equity is one of the largest concerns that our government must consider when creating any policies, which leads into one of the most difficult questions to answer for our cap. How do we address equity in our community while effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions? To answer this question, we must first look at what shortcomings current action plans have and research what strategies yield the best results. In this case, one essential piece of writing is the article why climate action planning struggles with equity, which delves into a few of the most critical issues the climate action plans have and what the most effects of solution is. According to this article, two of the most vital issues that consistently show up to other communities climate action plans are failure to create sufficiently ambitious plans that do more than plant trees and the fact that counties failed to follow the plan with any execution. Current climate action plans around the state focus arduously in promoting green solutions that lack substance in combating climate change and promoting equity. The quote, in general, plans tend to focus on green aesthetically oriented solutions rather than those that address systemic inequalities at the local level. In other words, current climate action plans are more focused on having clear flamboyant results that are easy to execute and may seem effective at first glance. Sadly, these green solutions are not going to solve the fundamental issues that are contributing to climate change. As we delve into the final months of our climate action plan, we must consider these mistakes our predecessors have made and learned from them. How do we address equity in our community while effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions and avoid other climate action plans mistakes? Our most effective solution is to build affordable housing with access to transit corridors. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. Yavuz. Good morning, board. My name is Kathleen McLaughlin. I'm a second year graduate student at CSUMB and the Environmental Science Masters Program on the professional science masters track. And I'm really grateful for the opportunity to work on these climate issues with the County of Santa Cruz. It's really important work. It's urgent and I'm grateful for the opportunity as well as specifically the regional planning collaborative. Like we've talked about, it's very important to not just be zeroed in on one location, but to collaborate and work together to find solutions. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. McLaughlin. Seeing no one further, you're in the chambers. Is there anyone on Zoom or the telephone that wishes to address us? We do have a speaker online. Colin, user one, your microphone is now available. Well, I think the intentions of people are, you know, well-intended. Your question Supervisor Caput of, hey, what's going on in your sense of it's like too little, too late to get a factual insight on that. I recommend that everybody listen to geoengineeringwatch.org because climate engineering is the elephant in the room. Dane Wiggington has his program on KSEO Saturday morning. Thank you KSEO at 8 a.m. But you can go to the website and see the dimming. Just a few excerpts from notes I've taken on his program. Geoengineering is the biggest cause of fires and droughts and climate engineering is a covert weapon of war. Stratospheric aerosols, millions of tons of deadly nanoparticles are injected daily. The climate engineering traps the heat at night. Geoengineering does further fuels and incineration and geoengineering flights were directly over the paradise fire. Arctic sea ice is at record low.  Check out geoengineeringwatch.org. Everyone, this is a very scientific factual source of information. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. We have no further speakers here. Thank you, then I'll return it to the board for action. Mr. Chair, with a huge thank you to the climate action team that we critically need. And as I said, Santa Cruz County, I believe and this region is way out front in front. I do see that storing our energy is a critical factor in how we succeed in the future. But I would like to move the recommended actions. And I'll second the. All right, we have a motion by Supervisor McPherson, a second by Supervisor Caput. I'd like to ask if the mover would be amenable to addition to ask staff to return with a building electrification ordinance in December when we finally look at adoption of this plan. Sure, for new construction within the urban services. Yeah, I mean, the timeline, is that doable? I would like to do that. I have to defer to the community development and infrastructure department on the timeline on that. I would like to do that. I just wanna make sure it's realistic to accomplish that. Ms. Burke. Hi, good morning. Carolyn Burke, Assistant Director of CDI. We are planning on coming back to your board for adoption of the 2022 California Building Code in November is our target. So we'll include that in that adoption. And so it should meet the December timeline. Except the recommended action to addition. And Mr. Chair, I do have a point of clarification on this, a couple of things. I'm totally open to having an ordinance come back. I mean, normally when we're doing building code changes, though, I imagine this might, then the council can weigh in this may need to go to the planning commission as well. But are we specifically clarifying that this is for new residential construction and not all construction you didn't differentiate as far as the construction component was? Yeah, thank you for that. I do think we should start with residential constructions and particularly a new residential construction within the urban services line since there will be particular challenges for commercial kitchens and other things like that. And then if I have a quick question for council on process on it, if something came at the same time as the building code updates, would it still need to be reviewed by the planning commission if we were doing an ordinance on construction? I'd have to look further into that, supervisor. I appreciate that. And part of this is just to manage expectations that there may not be something adopted, right? I mean, obviously we can't adopt in a first reading anyway, but it did just an understanding that it may not, that if it comes back in November, it may still have to go through an additional process. But I'm in support of this in particular if it's just on the residential side within the USL. Thank you. All right, thank you, Supervisor Friend. So the additional direction was amenable to the new construction. All right, thank you, Supervisor McPherson and Supervisor Caput, you seconded it, was that amenable to you as well? All right, then we have a motion and a second. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk Roll call, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Coonerty, Ms. Asamended. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Brennan, thank you, Director Reed. Thank you to all the staff who came out today who are working on this, as well as all the interns. We will now proceed with an item that was scheduled for 10.30 a.m., we're running a little bit late today. It is item 11, a public hearing to consider proposed amendments to Santa Cruz County General Plan local coastal program, chapters five and seven, SEC code chapter 7.38, sewage disposal to bring county provisions into conformance with state policy and the county's local agency management program, the LAMP, for onsite wastewater treatment systems, OTS, as approved by state's central coast regional water quality control board with associated California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA notice of exemption, approve LAMP for OTS, approve in concept ordinance amending SEC chapter 7.38 to conform with state policy for OTS and Santa Cruz LAMP. And direct clerk of the board to schedule ordinance for final adoption, adopt resolution, approving proposed amendments to general plan LCP chapters five and seven and implementing ordinance relating to sewage disposal, direct staff to file CEQA notice of exemption with clerk of the board and direct staff to transmit amendments to general plan LCP and SEC chapter 7.38 to California coastal commission as part of the LCP update and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the director of health services. And for a presentation on this item, we have Monica Morales, our HSA director, Marilyn Underwood, our environmental health director, John Ricker, our consultant for HSA and more. So everyone wants to start, take it away. Good morning. Can you hear me? Yes. Great. Good morning, board. Thank you so much for having us here today. This has been, I know, a very long process for our staff to present to you guys as an update on our sewage disposal ordinance. Just a friendly reminder, this is a state mandate that we're trying to actually need. It's been months of work and I'm very grateful to our team for all their commitment and really persistence to move through this very important issue in our county. Just a friendly reminder, part of our goal here is obviously to bring up, to par this and meet the standards that we have at this state. But at the end of it all for us, it's just improving the water quality of our county, specifically as it pertains to on-site wastewater treatment systems. It's very important as we know in our county that these efforts move forward. We're also very grateful to everyone that has provided input on the process, our key stakeholders, our commissions, our community members, everyone really that has influenced the development of the ordinance and where we're at. And again, just coming back to our team and really wanted to introduce Richard, excuse me, John Riker and Heather Reynolds who have been instrumental in moving these processes forward. But I'm kicking out to our director of environmental health, Dr. Marilyn Underwood to give more details to where we are in the status. Thank you, Monica. Good morning. As she has said, it is a long process for us to get here and I'm gonna try to move quickly through because I know you have a big agenda for today. Let me just see if I make sure I hit the right button. No, went too fast. Okay, there we go. And I've been trying to train myself. I know for many years we've referred to these things as septic systems, but really because they're so much more fancy and have much more bells and whistles, they're really called on-site wastewater treatment systems. Now, odds, another acronym to remember. So I will try to refer them as odds. And I'm gonna refer to something called the local agency management program or plan, the LAMP. And again, we are the local agency, the Environmental Health Division within the Health Services Agency under the state requirements. So a little bit of background requirements about the state and also all the impacts we've seen from odds in our county. So this is a long time coming. The AB 885 was passed all the way back in 2000. It took the state quite a bit of time to get their regulations or their policy in place, a couple lawsuits and some lots of input from environmental health directors and others from the county, including John. But finally, they adopted the state odds policy in 2012. It was followed by the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. That's the board that oversees our area, this county. And they had to update their basin plan. They did so in 2017. We were supposed to have then done a LAMP, a local agency management program by about a year later. We did not get it done. And so they did take the ability for us to approve enhanced treatment systems away from us for a while and folks had to apply down in San Luis Obispo. The good news is last October, we did take a LAMP to the Regional Water Quality Control Board and it was approved. It was sent to them with your approval. And Appendix A of the LAMP is the ordinance. So effective October 14th, we were required to start implementing the parts of the LAMP and the ordinance that were required under state, the state policy. Today we'll be describing some of the things that will be changing or updating due to just part of the ordinance and not part of the state requirements. And John will be getting into that a little bit more. Now, since we've been implementing it, we have noticed that there were some inconsistencies in it where like in one part of the ordinance, we talk about something, but in the other part of the ordinance, it's actually not quite as clear. And so we spent some time and in a way, it's been really good that we've been able to find those sort of inconsistencies and clarifications. And so we have posted those. Those went to the planning commission that we submitted talked with on June 22nd. We also let our TAC know we have a group, a large group of folks that are mostly consultants, septic pumpers, onsite service providers that we notified about the planning commission meeting so that, and the changes that we had been made that had been made, we also had a July 11th TAC meeting. So we made sure that again, our group of people that work with us, including also real estate agents were notified of these slight changes, again, clarifications. And they have those same changes have been approved by the regional board, by the way, any changes like that because the ordinance is part of the lamp do have to be approved by the regional board staff. It does not have to go back to the full staff of full board. She'll help me along. Thank you. I will just say the planning commission, I'm not gonna go through this, but with slight clarifications again, send the ordinance to you as long with the lamp and the general plan changes. So just to be clear, in updating the ordinance, we also had to update two parts of the general plan. And again, we will talk about that further in this presentation. So why do we care? In addition to the state requiring us to do this, we care because obviously we drink the water that falls within this county. We don't import water from anywhere else. So we wanna make sure our surface water, our groundwater are kept from various impacts, but the one I'm talking about today are from odds. And again, odds are very great if they're planned, designed, maintained, installed and maintained correctly. But if they're too densely packed, also if they're not designed and installed and maintained correctly, then they can have impacts which are pathogens and nitrates. And this diagram just shows you a little bit about how a cesspool, which is actually not allowed anymore in our county, but it could be a trench or a safe beach pit, can impact groundwater by starting to fail and not treat the sewage properly before it hits groundwater. Similarly, our groundwater feeds into our surface water in many places in the county. So it can then affect our surface water. And obviously it eventually gets to the ocean. The other failure that's probably more common, people don't think of, they typically think of failures only at the surface. But again, this is not the only thing that we're concerned about. We're concerned about failures you don't see. But the more typical one we hear about from people saying they see a pooling of sewage in their trench area or something like that. Not again, during the winter months especially, we can see impacts to our surface water from surface water runoff from these kind of failing systems. As you know that we are very familiar with, we have three primary groundwater basins in our county that give drinking water to a lot of us. And that's the Santa Margarita, the mid-county in the Pajaro Valley. These are all been identified by the state as overdraft areas. And we've been working on it in the county obviously for years and before the state knew those were concerns. And that deals with water quantity, but we also obviously are concerned about water quality. And I'll talk a little bit more about that and why we wanna protect these. In addition to the groundwater basins, you can see there's actually a larger area and a slightly different area where we have groundwater recharge areas that are really important to protect. Again, looking at our odds and making sure that odds are protected and installed and maintained correctly there. And then last, this slide goes to our watershed areas. What is some of our very important watershed areas from the North Coast that you see in the light blue to the blue of the San Lorenzo River and then down even to the Coralitos area. All of these are really important areas. Also the karst area up on the coast north of Santa Cruz. Really important areas to protect because of the surface water and the watershed concerns. And this I'm gonna transition now into showing some of the impacts we've already seen. These are the highlighted area. There's a very busy slide, but I'll just tell you that you wanna focus in on the yellow that I've highlighted. And you can see that in Pental Lake, we've had the second most important impact to Pental Lake, the first being agriculture and manure fertilizer that's across the top, the columns at the top, headers. But the second most important contributed to Pental Lake is odds in the surrounding area. The two ones are San Lorenzo. Now, these are where odds are the primary, they're the number one source of impacts of pathogens and also nitrates to the San Lorenzo River. You can see others play a role as well, but the number one is are the odds in those systems in that area, those watersheds. It's a very busy slide, but I'm gonna take you through it a little bit because I think it's important to show. The top graph is nitrate concentrations in two locations that we monitor out of the Environmental Health Water Quality Lab at Big Trees and City of Santa Cruz, their intake. Also, the second one down is the fecal coliform. This is a marker for pathogens in the rivers, again, in those two locations. The third one is the average daily flow of the river and then the fourth one down the bottom one is the rainfall. So what you see is, and I'll start with the top one, the black line going across is the level of concern, the target, we wanna be below that black line. And you can see in both locations, Big Trees and the City of Santa Cruz that we do have nitrate levels exceeding that in the groundwater, even in the surface water measurements. Similarly, in the fecal coliform in the second graph down, and this is even much more pattern that you see that's due to the rainfall. So as the peaks occur, those are the times when we're getting the rainfall during the winter. And again, in this case, the red line indicates the line at which we wanna stay below for health impact reasons. So you can see, we do know that San Lorenzo has been influenced by both nitrates and pathogens and the number one contributor again being odds. The nitrate concerns that I just described about, you can see in blue for the San Lorenzo, but there's other areas as well. You can see up around Bonny Dune and also in down and around in our South County and Mid County area as well. So these are ones where we have in the new ordinance, we will, well, even since the passing of the lamp, we have additional requirements that are needed for odds that are placed in these areas. The last slide I wanna show, talk about is that just that nitrate is a concern, not just in the San Lorenzo, but we've seen it at the Pajaro Basin odds as a contributor to the groundwater. San Margarita Basin, I've already talked about the water, the surface water, but we've also had water wells in the Quail Hollow area that have been taken out of service, been affected because of nitrates from odds. And then in the Mid County Basin, we had well taken out of service at La Selva Beach area because, again, of nitrate impacts. So these are not only, my point here is that our concerns are not only because the state required it, but because we saw them, we are seeing impacts. We've already taken steps even before the state required them, but these are additional steps that are required under the state to minimize odds impacts to our drinking water hours. And John will now describe further exactly what those are. Good morning board members. Excuse me, it's good to see you guys. Up, so it's not, I got it. Okay, good. It's good to see you guys again. Haven't seen you in a while. There are a number of changes to the ordinance, which we have already been implementing and some additional changes, which will go into effect after your board adopts the ordinance. Some of the big changes are the minimum groundwater separation for replacement systems. This affects existing development increases from one to three feet to five to eight feet, depending on what the soil types are and less enhanced treatments used. All new and replacement systems in those fast percolating soils in the sandy parts of the county with the nitrate concern areas that you just saw on that map will require enhanced treatment for nitrogen removal. In the past, we did not, we waived that requirement for repair of existing systems, but we found that the nitrate levels in the river have not trended downward as we had hoped they were. So we're tightening up that requirement to require that for all new and replacement systems. Enhanced treatment will be required for replacement of all seepage pits and in conjunction with remodels of existing homes that are served by seepage pits. Again, that will provide for both nitrogen removal and pathogen removal. The maximum trench depth for the upgraded systems decreases from 10 feet to four feet. In the old days, our standard trench was 10 feet, but now we are going to have to go much shallower. The shallower soils do provide better treatment and we're expecting that to again provide improvements in water quality. Sceptic system repairs, basic conventional repairs could be designed by a contractor, but anything very complex will now need to be done designed by a qualified professional. And the qualified professional must also conduct the soil and percolation testing that will be required. Some of the changes that we have not yet implemented, but we will be doing as soon as your board adopts or soon after as your board adopts the ordinance, the use of the site-specific assessment and mitigation of site constraints and lieu of the minimum lot sizes. Those minimum lot sizes have been both in the general plan and in the county code. We're removing those designations, those date back to the 1970s and we're really focusing more on better mapped information and on-site specific technologies on site to address those concerns. All existing enhanced treatments will be required to have a service contract with a qualified service provider. Up until now that's been optional, but we're really finding that those systems do need to have an ongoing contract to really ensure that they're working properly. We are going to have a provision for the local registration and conditional approval of all of our service providers, contractors, consultants, and the people that service the systems and it is conditional. And if there are problems, lack of compliance, we'll be able to suspend that approval until they correct their activities. And a big one that we've been pushing for or wanting to do for a while is the mandatory evaluation of the odds at the time of a property transfer. Looking at the system condition, what its permitted status, what it's how it's performing and likely requirements for future upgrades. We've seen too many instances where somebody has bought a home that did not, those odds did not support what they were hoping to do with that home without extensive upgrades. And we see this as a way to really inform the buyers and also to get systems upgraded similar to what the sanitation districts in the city is now require on sewer systems for evaluation of the sewer laterals. This package does include general plan amendments. There are a number of policies specific to odds in our current general plan in chapter five in the parks recreation and open space section and also the public facilities chapter. So we are recommending changes to those policies consistent with what we are also recommended in chapter 7.38. We've been working with planning staff to coordinate this with the sustainability update. But because the sustainability update has not been adopted yet, we do refer to the old policy numbers in our resolutions and our recommendations. We are deleting the policies, recommending deleting policies 5.515 and 1.6 to regarding the minimum lot sizes and constrained areas which I mentioned previously, 5.517 and 7.21.3. We believe are just too specific for the general plan they are covered in chapter 7.38. We're looking at combining 5.518 and 5.519 which deal with the use of easements for public facilities inside and outside the coastal zone and essentially just combine those into one policy. We're updating 5.7.2 to better define a seasonal waterway and to allow system upgrades within a hundred feet of seasonal waterways and streams if they're adequately mitigated through the use of enhanced treatment. And we're also updating policy 7.21.4 to rename alternative systems to enhanced treatment systems. We've really had a long history with what we used to call alternative systems but they've really become essentially state of the art and a regular tool to provide better water quality protection. So we were getting rid of the old term alternative and just calling them enhanced treatment systems and that stands throughout the ordinance chapter 7.38 as well. We have completed the environmental review of this process, a categorical exemption has been issued by the environmental coordinator and we also did notify the tribes as required under our policies and we've been in contact with coastal commission staff as well and have gotten some feedback from them. So we believe we're ready to move ahead and complete this whole program. Now I'll turn it back to Dr. Underwood. So at this point I was gonna read all the recommendations again. The recommended actions are to conduct a public hearing to consider the proposed amendments to Santa Cruz County general plan local coastal program chapters five and seven in Santa Cruz County chapter 7.38. To approve the local agency management program for on-site wastewater treatment systems in Santa Cruz to approve and concept the attached ordinance amending County code chapter 7.38 related to sewage disposal to conform with the state policy for on-site wastewater treatment systems and the Santa Cruz lamp and direct the clerk of the board to reschedule the ordinance for final adoption at the next board of supervisors meeting to adopt a resolution approving the proposed amendments to chapters five and seven of the general plan local coastal program and implementing the ordinance relating to sewage disposal to direct staff to file the sequel notice of exemption with the clerk of the board and to direct staff to transmit the amendments to the general plan local coastal program and Santa Cruz County code chapter 7.38 to the California coastal commission as part of the local coastal program update which shall be affected upon certification of the coastal commission. Thank you. Don't take any questions, we'll take any questions. All right, thank you all. Is there, are there comments or questions from members of the board? Yeah, Mr. Chair, welcome back, Mr. Ricker. I bet you thought this day would never come but it's been a long time and coming and I want to thank the environmental health team for that's been working on this issue for years and years. And it really disproportionately affects my district in the Santa Rosa Valley which I think was identified as the most concentrated area with septic systems west of the Mississippi. Now, I don't know if that's still true but there's a lot of them up there. So, and from an environmental perspective it's really important that we do this update but we know that we can come it's gonna come at a cost to the consumer and certainly affect a lot of building plans but can staff discuss the overlap in implementing these standards with fire recovery and how we might help property owners outside the proposed CSA 7 expansion which is up 236 and downtown Boulder Creek. They're comply with these new standards. That's one of the questions I had and are there grant funds that we can anticipate to meet these goals or recommendations that you've listed? Thank you for the questions. Yes, your area is particularly impacted by this and then of course the CZU as well. So for the CZU properties, two things. One is that do they do need to meet repair standards if they're going to build in kind and those have changed. So they are tougher and in some cases we think they will have a hard time building in kind without putting in enhanced treatment systems. For those along the 236, we think there's something like 260 properties along there. We hope that they might take part in a project as that you alluded to, which is to potentially bring a sewer system that would serve both downtown Boulder Creek and go up the 230, well, close to the 236 to the golf course. Now, they would also need something like that potentially not just in kind for upgrading. Obviously, if they wanna build something different than they had before the fire, they might come into issues as well. So this sewer project would definitely help them. I think there's some concerns about just to preempt this a little bit, some concerns about growth. The general plan does address growth issues. So that's not so much the issue that we'd have in trying to allow people at least rebuild from the CZU. As far as properties beyond that, again, I think there are is going to be impacts that they're going to find for building in kind. And at this point, we do not have a program to help support them. The state has not created any programs to help people as they implement lamps across the state. John can probably get some history. You apparently had a loan program years and years ago that we got some money from the state for. It wasn't a grant, it was a loan. And we might be able to pursue something like that, but at this point, that's not certainly in place. John, do you want to comment any further on that? Yes, that was a program where we received, the county received money through the state's Revolving Fund for sewer upgrades. And we were able to conduct a mini loan program where we made loans to property owners, but they were not grants. They were only low interest loans. I think the interest was around 2.6% at a time and the commercial interest rate was probably around five or 6%. So there was a little bit of help, but although the state gave us something over $2 million in funding, we were not able to use all that during the seven year period of that program. It was at a time when the real estate market was going up and down and people were leery of, first they were leery of coming to the county and then we were leery of loaning to them after the market crashed and a lot of the folks were under water. So we had to give a lot of that money back to the state, but there is the possibility of pursuing that again, probably not grants, but potentially low interest loans. Okay, so yeah, it's going to cost the consumer the property owner more and this has been an issue I know in the rebuilding process of fire recovery and but we just have to do this for the protection of our water system. As you said, we don't get our water from any federal or state sources and if the rivers and creeks become contaminated, we are in deep trouble. So thank you for this and it's been a long time coming, but it's welcome to have it here in Santa Cruz County. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Their comments or questions from board members. Seeing none, I got a few questions for you. The first is regarding separation of the leach field on the water table. My understanding is that a winter water test should be required in order to determine whether or not an advanced treatment system would be needed on some properties, is that true? Yes, typically we would need to see a winter water test. In some cases when there's a neighbor and we think there's a test was done there and we think that is a reflective probably of what is at the neighboring property, we could use that. We've also come up with some alternative approaches that we could fall back on, given the fact that this past year, we only had the winter water testing open for I think about three weeks because of the lack of rain. So obviously we did want to notice that there are not holdup development too much and people rebuilding, but the best thing is certainly we want to know how we need to know how high the water is during the winter time to really adequately design a good system that will protect the groundwater and make sure the soil is there to treat the pathogens and nitrates before it gets to the groundwater. Thank you. You hit it on the head there. My concern is that we require a certain amount of rain in order to get this test done and if we don't have that level of rain, then we can't do the test. So we could see an application essentially delayed for a year or more. I mean, I'm glad to hear that we'll take into account information from tests done on neighboring properties. I mean, what are some of the other alternatives that could be pursued to prevent that kind of delay till the next rainy season? I mean, who knows? Maybe that next season won't have enough water either, right? So what alternatives could be pursued besides a neighboring property? Some of the other things, and John might be on allude to this as well, is we are looking at soil profile and looking for modeling so you can kind of see from the coloration of where the high groundwater might have been. I believe we talked about some mapping as well. Yeah, we do have some mapping of winter water table areas. We don't require that winter water table testing across the board. There's a number of parts of the county where we're confident that the water table is deep enough that does not require the testing. So it is only required where we suspect that there is a water, excuse me, a water table that will be high enough that could impact the functioning of the system. I mean, one of our issues, we do get so much rain that the water table during the wintertime can fluctuate as much as 20 or 30 feet. So a system may work great for a couple of dry years and then we get one of our wet years and it may be underwater. So that's what we're concerned about. We generally do kind of hold the line for brand new development where we want to see that test, but if it's existing development, there's already a odds that's been functioning there. We will use various techniques, again, looking at neighboring properties, looking at soil characteristics, looking at the topography to make a best case estimate of where we think that water table would expect, we would expect it to be. And in a lot of cases where we don't know the fallback is an enhanced treatment system because there is a, with enhanced treatment, you can reduce the separation to two feet because the effluent is treated to a much higher quality so you don't need as much of the soil to absorb the effluent. Okay, and about what percentage of properties do you think would require a water test or alternative? I'm thinking about 40% at this point. Okay, so it's still pretty significant. Still pretty significant. And that does include the San Lorenzo Valley where there's a higher proportion in that area because it does rain so much up there and there's a lot of low-lying development in the valley bottoms. Okay, our second question is about the definition of a qualified professional. Currently it's a civil engineer, geologist or environmental health specialist. I've heard from some of the folks in the real estate industry that they'll try to call one of these folks, civil engineer, say, and it's three weeks, at least before they even hear back, right? I mean, let alone schedule the work. It could be six to nine months out. So I mean, I'm concerned as we add these additional requirements, we're gonna go from the hundred people who currently are looking at these advanced treatment systems to thousands, right? And the backup, we just won't have the technical knowledge or capacity under this definition within the county to actually meet these requirements. You know, why wouldn't a qualified professional include contractors who actually build these systems and how do you anticipate that we have? So first of all, the qualified professional is actually defined in the state odds policy and it's something we had to put into our own ordinance as well. There is the qualification that we can approve them and we are planning to allow, at least for conventional systems, allow contractors that we have come to us and we're gonna give them some training about the requirements and allow them to be installers as well of conventional systems. Again, if the concern is that they are doing things that are not meeting our code, which in some cases we've seen before, then they would be removed from our qualified professionalist and allowed to not allowed to design and they would still be allowed to install if somebody else would have to design it. And I would just say, I mean, I do think that is what the commercial capitalism is, as something is needed and more people get into it because it's a great place to help out people in our county to come here and do some of that work. So I do think that what we'll see is also as the demand people go over the hill and say, hey, I need somebody to come over here. I will see more and more folks hopefully come and help out with this situation.  And then finally that just with some clarification on the point of sale requirement, is this, is it meant to just be informational for the buyer to understand the current status of their hot or septic system and whether or not they might need to upgrade it to the future or is the requirement here actually that if the system needs to be upgraded that it be upgraded before the time of, before the transfer. So it is mostly informational. I will say if during the, it's the part of the point of sale will be looking at our records and making this is again going to be done by not by our county staff, this will be done by folks higher to do this for a buyer or for a seller. They would look through our records and put, look for things like, what was the permit and was it permitted the septic system, the odd system? What number of bedrooms was it permitted for? Was the one time allowance of up to 500 square feet already used so that people aren't thinking that they still have that to use the setbacks to streams separate from groundwater. All of these things will be laid out so that people kind of can help understand what is the system, what are they buying and what might influence their ability to make changes to something in the future. Now, there will be an inspection also part of it in addition to the records review. And during inspection, if we see that something is actually an obvious failing, then the seller will need to correct it or the buyer can choose to sign off and say that they will correct it within 90 days. But we do obviously in those situations we don't want failing systems. And when I say failing, that means the surface failing. But otherwise they will just know whether it's permitted or not permitted. And as they make changes to their property or make changes to their structure, they will have, they have that information to know what will be required of them or what their limitations are or constraints and what might cost them. And therefore it can also influence their property value for them, knowing that they might have to do some of these changes if they wanna improve it. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I'm talking about, I think you said in the report 19,000 systems. So could definitely impact a lot of transactions. And of course, we want people to be healthy, but we also won't properly be changed hands when there's a willing buyer and seller. I mean, I think it's certainly not important that people know what they're buying and the informational requirements are great. And it finally has, I'm hearing mixed reports on whether the onsite wastewater technical advisory committee has had a chance to review the final proposed ordinance here. I think that I know they've been generally involved in the process, but I've heard they haven't had a chance to actually look at the final ordinance. What's the status on this? So we again, sent them out an email, letting them know about the planning commission meeting almost, I'm trying to remember if any changes have been made since the planning commission. Oh yeah, cause the planning commission wanted a couple of changes, but most of these changes that were done since October 14th were part of that and posted on our website. And then we sent an email to the TAC, letting them know about the planning commission if they wanted to participate. Then we had a July 11th TAC meeting online through teams meeting and they were notified of that. Again, we had made those small changes that the planning commission wanted. At that point, we posted it also on our website and sent the links to them. So even if they couldn't participate in the meeting. And then lastly, we notified them last week of this particular meeting. Again, nothing really has changed since the meeting on July 11th, but we did notify them of this meeting today. Okay, thank you. That's all my questions. Any other comments or questions from board members? Seeing none, I'll officially open the public hearing. Any members of the public that wish to address us on this item, please approach the podium. Thank you. My name is Becky Steinbrenner. I'm a resident of rural Santa Cruz County. I'm on a septic system. I'm gonna call it a septic system. So I have a lot of concern, especially for the people in the CZU fire area that are already having a tough time trying to rebuild. And here is this expensive new system that they have to put in. It's gonna drive a lot of people out of our county. I don't think that this is CEQA exempt. I think it needs to have a CEQA evaluation because you're looking at the impact of growth, this case of not being able to rebuild one of them. And the impacts of on the rivers and streams really do have to be looked at from an environmental perspective. So I don't agree that this is CEQA exempt. I live in the Rio del Mar Lodge sites and I looked at the strike out and underlined version of the ordinance changes and noted that the Rio del Mar Lodge sites are now included in the special areas. And I assume that that is to address some of the nitrate concern areas that are listed in section 7.38.3030 number V is in Victor that lists the Valencia Creek watershed. The Rio del Mar Lodge sites are not part of the Valencia Creek watershed. Only if you count that it would affect possibly when trout gulch merges with Valencia but that happens down under the bridge on Spreckles where lots of homeless people live. And I don't think it's fair. I think that a lot of the nitrate and pathogens coliform in the San Lorenzo River and the city of Santa Cruz are coming from the homeless camps. I've helped clean up Sycamore Grove. I've seen what happens there. It's a mess. So I don't think it's fair and I think that there was some DNA sampling done that did not identify it as septic. It was more animal and linked to the homeless camps. And my final question is what about ADU? Thank you. Good morning. I'm Ryan Smith. I'm the wastewater division manager for the city of Watsonville. As a public servant, what keeps me up at night is thinking about the effects of natural disasters and water scarcity on wastewater systems. Anytime I give tours, I explain to people we're not just treating water. We're also treating the solids in the wastewater. The Water Board regulates treated wastewater and the EPA regulates the solid material, also known as biosolids. The goal of any sanitation system is to prevent human and environmental contact with human excreta and they fall into two categories. Systems that use water to transport our excreta and systems that do not. Waterless systems remove the water side of the equation completely and the solid material is typically composted to make it safe for reuse. This lamp is very good about adjusting systems that use water, but is silent on waterless systems. I'm told county staff estimate that septic permits requiring enhanced treatment will increase from 16 to upwards of 30%. And enhanced systems will be required for upwards of 1500 parcels. Septic and wastewater systems are increasingly costly to build and maintain. And there's no financial assistance that I'm aware of for disadvantaged communities and those affected by natural disasters. There are, however, American national and international standards for what we call non-sewered sanitation systems that can be incorporated into future iterations of the lamp and building codes. I believe we need to reframe our thinking around wastewater as the gold standard of sanitation. So I'll end with this. When it comes to climate change and disasters, there are a lot of things outside our control. What is inside our control is our own mindset. Here's a great example. Right now, state assembly bill 351 is on the Senate floor, which allows for natural organic reduction of human remains or the composting of human bodies. It's already legal in Washington, Oregon and Colorado. If we can change our minds about that, why can't we change our minds about how we manage our own excreta? I can talk all day about this topic, but I'm out of time and I got to go back to work. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Ryan. Seeing no one else here in chambers, is there anyone online or on the telephone or just a comment? We do have a speaker online. Call in user two, your microphone is now available. Marilyn Garrett, I can't help but thinking of that statement that corporations privatize the profit and they socialize the cost. Where do so many of these contaminants come from? Testicide corporations, the military, all kinds of chemical corporations so that the umbilical cords of babies now are tested for something like over 150 chemicals. And God didn't put those there. Nature didn't put those there. Why aren't these contaminants prohibited in the first place? And of course it's because they're profitable. This for the corporations, not for all of us. So while we're dealing with all this, these massive problems that you have put forward very clearly, why isn't there an effort to stop the pollution where it starts? Why are we the people having to pay for what various corporations have contaminated us with against our will and not being informed? It's just outrageous. I keep thinking of it's like a drop in the bucket of what we're trying to do to deal with what corporations have cost with their contaminants. Needs to stop at the source. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Carrot. Myrius, your microphone is now available. Hi, first off, thank you to the Department of Environmental Health for all the work that they've done here. My name is Myrish and I am actually an owner of a service provider company here, localing the Santa Cruz. Just a couple things in regards to the lamp that I have been reading over and over and over since I have to for my business. In regards, first off, in regards to the inspection of transfer property, this is something that I have seen over and over again. It is part of disclosure. It really does need to happen. I have seen so many failed systems, leech fields bleeding out. And as a service provider, I am the eyes and ears of the count. And there are things that I even believe that as a report should actually be filed with the county if we see a failed leech system. Also, with the sale of transfer property inspections, when there's enhanced system already installed and there's this inspection, maybe a authorized service provider should be required to do this inspection since many of the pumpers that do these inspections already have no idea about these enhanced systems. Another I thought regarding this lamp is I don't believe that the requirements for becoming an authorized service provider are actually stringent enough when there is a current need to be authorized by the manufacturer. But then an employee of a company doesn't have that same requirement where like in the automotive industry to be ASC certified, you need to be ASC certified and you need to be that specific inspector for like a smog inspection. You need to be certified for that, not just an employee. That's what I have to say. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mirish. We have no further speakers, Chair. All right, then I will close the public hearing and return to the board for deliberation and action. There's the chair, I am. If I may, I'm sorry. If I could just make some brief comments before we make a motion. This is a long time coming and I appreciate that a number of constituents within my district as well will have some clarity. I mean, I think that there are some unquestionable issues on the environmental side. There's also some historic land use decisions that previous boards had made 40 plus years ago that also helped put us into this situation. I mean, there were opportunities, for example, historically for sewer expansion that would have obviated the need for some of these issues. And I hope that moving forward, future boards will think about how their decisions can impact things down the road, both on the environmental and cost side. Because unquestionably, this is going to have an impact, a cost impact in some of the most affordable housing areas wit