Welcome to our 7 PM session of the March 20th, 2018 public safety study session. I'd like to ask the clerk at this time to please call roll. Thank you, Mayor, Council Member, it's Crone. Present. Matthews? Sure. Chase? Here. Brown? Here. Naroyan? Here. Vice Mayor Watkins? Here. And Mayor Teresas? Here. Tonight, we only have one item on our agenda, which will be the public safety study session.  And so I'm really thankful for all those of you that are present. We'll have a staff presentation, followed by questions from the council. And we'll have been the opportunity for public comment and deliberation. So at this time, I'd like to turn it over to Police Chief Andy Mills to kick off the meeting. Well, good evening. Good evening, Mr. Mayor and Council Members. Thank you so much for taking the time to go through these 250 slides with me. Actually, it's only 40 some, so we want to make you feel better about how long this is going to last. This is a wonderful opportunity for us to be able to show you and discuss with you what direction we're headed, what challenges we see, and how do we get to the end game. And so we'll go through these slides with you. I would like to acknowledge that several of my senior staff members are here. And acknowledge them for their hard work. So we have Deputy Chief Martinez and Deputy Chief Filippo with us. Just can't say enough good things about the quality of work that they've been doing in helping with this whole process. And we also have three over four lieutenants. One lieutenant is currently at a meeting down in Los Angeles. But we have lieutenants Jose Garcia. Might help if I move my glasses. Lieutenant Warren Berry and then Lieutenant Christian LaMosse. And as well, several other staff members who have come to take part in this. So as you're aware, staff and staff. You got one more there, Arnold. Well, that's to teach him to sit down.  So as you're aware, in 2016 there was discussion amongst city council about a staffing study and what that might be able to do for the city in terms of understanding the problems and the difficulties with crime and disorder in our city. And prior to my arrival, a contract was agreed to with CPSM to conduct this analysis. And they did so, and that was completed in November of 2017. Just so you understand who they are, it's an experienced group and team of former command staff members, one former city manager and one former city chief of police. As well as technical advisors to come in and really scour a police department from top to bottom. And really take a good look at who we are, what we're doing. Literally they left no stone unturned. So the Center for Public Safety Management came in and under the auspices of the umbrella of the International City and County Management Association. And took a look at us and interviewed most of our staff. And did a good, thorough job. And as a result, they gave us some feedback that I'll go over in a few minutes. Just the background of the staffing study, if I might. So it was an analysis of the operational efficiencies of our department. And the configurations that might improve officer availability and productivity. I think that's the key element that we're trying to drive at is our effectiveness. And there were three phases of the study. The data collection occurred first, and they did a great job pouring over that data.  There's 103 recommendations to both the SCPD and Parks and Rec. Of those, there are 13 categories for police and seven different categories for rangers. And we'll again get into all of this. And the full report is posted online for anybody from the community to see as well. The executive summary states that in congratulations to SCPD, overall they've provided very high quality of law enforcement service to the city of Santa Cruz. And I think that's something to take a look at and appreciate and understand how hard the men and women of this department work on a daily basis, as well as the Parks and Rec staff. The staff is professional and dedicated, they're also well educated. The analysis was conducted to understand our strengths, but also the opportunities that we have to make it better. And we want to take a good, hard look at that. And then one thing that jumped out at me immediately was that many of the recommendations can be accomplished by realigning our workload. And when you take a look at that, I think that one phrase sums up much of this investment that we did. And then also, and I'm quoting here, recognize this process takes time. Not just weeks or months, but perhaps years. And I think that's an important caution. So the police department had 80 recommendations. I have to report that we've jumped on it with both the, and 37 are done. And then there's another 20 that are currently underway, and then 23 that we are going to have to take a little bit longer. Look at, study, and figure out whether or not we can do those in terms of cost and effort and time. But many of these, again, will take a long period of time to implement. Parks and Recs had 23 recommendations. Most of those centered around or were solved by movement to SCPD. And again, we'll get into that. So of the recommendations by assignment, 13 primary categories comprising the recommendations, administrative recommendations for the chief's office. Two are done, one is underway. And you can go into the front part of the report and see what each of these individual recommendations are. There are three done, one underway, and we're going to have to study one, and then downtown unit, one is done. And that team, two are done. Now, having said that, the downtown unit and the net team no longer exist. That's why they're done. They're now being merged into the neighborhood policing teams. And that's a significant movement for us. I can go through all these individually and report out two done, one done. But I think that you can read these for yourself. The point is that we've really taken this seriously. We've worked very hard to implement some of these recommendations. And took great care to study them. And again, you can see that there's some for the facilities, some for transportation and booking. There's a variety of things and recommendations they made. Some, to be frank, won't just work here. But we're going to look at them anyway and make sure that we study them to understand whether or not these would work and what reasons they may not work. On line from implementation, we're committed to implementing these as fast as possible, as long as they're operationally and fiscally reasonable. A five-year time frame is what they suggested is to have most of these done, which fits nicely with our leadership plan that we've already completed. And so we were happy about that. 16 of the recommendations are directly related to the records management system that is critical. And I'm happy to report that I met on that today with Netcom and the sheriff's office is strongly considering also jumping into this RFP with us. So that would put almost every major police agency in the county on the same system. That would be huge in terms of the ability to collect information, share it with one another, take a look at crime stats. I mean, we take a hard look at jurisdictions and location, crooks don't. They don't care about crossing over into Live Oak or past 7th Street, which the sheriff's area. So this will be good information, it would be a great way to do this. They will also shoulder some of the cost and the burden of that system, so that will be important as well. Some of these do include capital improvement project money, which we will again merge in to see what the city's priorities are and figure those out as we go. Develop a mission statement. Well, we were already underway and so we've got that completed and this is the mission statement. And just to remind council, the mission statement came from meeting with the communities, meeting individually with community members, taking all that data and then giving it to our sergeants to turn into a mission statement, which went to patrol who highlighted the words that they felt were really important to them. And then that went to the command staff, which penciled this out and made sure that it was something that everybody could understand and agree to, and it was very well received. I was very impressed by the amount of attention and detail and care that each of our employees took. I figured that 50% of our employees would stand back with their arms crossed saying why do I have to do this, I'd rather be out working. What I found was exactly the opposite, they were thirsty for it, they were hungry for it, and they all pitched in and I think the result is we have a great product. Secession planning was very important in the study as well as to the department that was identified ahead of time by many of our employees. And so we need to ensure that employees are trained and mentored to serve as future leaders. That was recommendation number two. Well, took that seriously. We already have a spot secured for the FBI National Academy in 2019, 2019 as quick as we could get it. And one of the purposes of us redistricting and doing this neighborhood policing is so that these lieutenants who are fairly young and will probably outlast many of us in the department will be the future leaders. And so they are acting as the chief of police for the section of the city. And allowing them to handle the crime control, handle the personnel, handle the complaints from community members and balance all of those things. And so I think that all of them are rising to that level and are just doing a fantastic job. And then we're also offered other schools for the mid-management and the senior management of our department to make sure that they can go and receive some of the best training in the country. And that's one of the reasons Bernie is down in Los Angeles right now. To develop a strategic plan, part of the strategic plan that was developed, and there's a copy of the front page for you. This was underway, but we agreed with everything they said about that. And so we called the leadership plan instead of a strategic plan, it's just a semantical thing. But for us, it's more of a direction of where are we going and how are we getting there. And we're the milestones we want to accomplish, and certainly anybody can avail themselves of that copy, which is also on the web. So, but what's the priority of policing? The priority of policing is to prevent and control crime, pure and simple. Unfortunately, you can look at these crime rates and see that it's an area that we need to do a lot better in. Even if you adjust our crime rates to include the university, us as a county, see the center of tourism, and all of that, we're still too high. And this is something we have to deal with, and we have to accept responsibility for as a police agency and as a city and as a county government. It's not just us, it's everybody. And really work on these numbers because each one of those numbers represent a citizen. And so we need to work on that. So our goal through this process is to be more effective in how we control crime. You look at the trend line, how we've done over the last several years. This is through 2015, and it's fairly close to that currently. The red line represents just the average of what you take all those numbers and divide it out. So it stays fairly consistent. And I asked a couple people who were here long before me what was the big dip in property crime in 2008, and we don't know. There could have been a variety of things that affected that, but that seems to be the aberration that goes outside of standard deviation. But for the most part, it stayed fairly consistent over that time frame. Violent crime as well, down in the green line at the bottom. But the point of this is, it's something that we have to work on. And we want to see us dipping below that imaginary red line rather than above it. This is a hotspot map of the city of where crime and calls for service occur, and you can see that clusters in five areas of the city. And so these are the areas that we need to spend the most time and effort and energy on working and reducing those calls so we can get at the crime that's associated with it. Obviously, the brighter red, the location, the more calls for service we have. This is typical of what a crime analysis report might look like. This came from the study itself. These are some of the locations where we have the highest calls for service and crime locations in the city. And you can see that it is, other than the police department, we don't have that much crime occurring there, but we have a lot of crime reported there. And so people come into the front counter and say, I've been a victim of crime, so we go and take the reports, obviously. So you can see that crime clusters in locations, and we'll get into a little bit more of that later. So one of the selected recommendations, I'm not going to go through all the recommendations, they should take forever in a day, but one of the selected recommendations is, they say, is to consider other strategies. And I think that that is important. So in the chart that you see here, here are some of the strategies. And if you could take that bar and scroll down, it's just a screenshot, so you won't be able to do that. But if you could take that bar and scroll down, you'd see a variety of strategies to reduce crime. On the right side is what happened with crime through neighborhood policing, a strategy that we have chosen as well as a Comstat model and departments throughout the nation. Now, these are obviously much larger cities. This is also coming on the end of the crack cocaine epidemic. So it's probably disproportionately a reduction. However, the point is there's two main strategies in policing that have been used. And one is this Comstat model, the other is neighborhood policing and problem solving. We have chosen for our department to move towards neighborhood policing and problem solving for a variety of reasons, which we'll get into. But our goal with this is to let our heroes, the guys and women in blue, to do their job. And right now they seem stymied and calls for service, crowding out the opportunity to police. And again, we'll get that further. Excuse me. So the focus of how we police is important. And if you look at the data, it would suggest that 61% of crime occurs in 10% of locations. So the theory then would be to police the problems that are the most problematic. The location is the most problematic. 54% of crime approximately is committed by 10% of criminals. Rather than focusing on everybody, you focus on those who are most problematic. I just got this, the next bullet down here, 3.4 miles of the streets of Santa Cruz account for most of our fatal and serious injury collisions. And that came from Vision Zero, and it's being done through the county, and as well as her Smart Streets program. So rather than randomly running traffic on streets that we don't have problems, it makes a lot more sense to focus on where the problems are. And you do that through either finding the right handler to control the offender, bringing the right manager to control the place, or their guardian to protect the victims. So overall, I know it's a pretty small font. But CompStat model versus Neighborhood Policing model, I think down at the bottom is the most salient point. CompStat model is kind of viewed as an occupational force where a stop and frisk and zero tolerance policing was the cry, and it wound up in federal lawsuits. Whereas the other side, it was Neighborhood Policing is more of a relational responsibility between the police and the community, working together to solve community problems. We cannot solve these problems without the community, it's as simple as that. And so our choice has been to move forward with this, in a problem or in a policing model where we look at crime, we analyze why it's occurring at a specific location and solve those problems. It's like when you have a neighborhood and you get a dope house in that neighborhood. What starts happening in the neighborhood, that cancer metastasizes throughout the community. And then you start getting car burglaries, and then you get noise complaints, and you get all these other things. So if you can take out that cancer, that node, it can bring that community back to normalcy, and that's the purpose of problem-oriented policing. We get a lot of people who are addicted to alcohol hanging out at front and SoCal, where we have a lot of calls for service. So we're working with that business on making sure that they secure the alcohol there so that they can't get it and steal it. That just makes a little bit of sense. And you watch, if we're able to successfully do that, the calls for service, the crime in that neighborhood will drop significantly. That diffusion of benefit is what we want to get in each of these neighborhoods. And it's going to be addressing those problems one by one. What we've asked our lieutenants to do is to be thoughtful about prioritizing the calls, prioritizing the problems, excuse me, in each neighborhood, be responsible for that and figure out how to drive those crimes down in that neighborhood. And so when they focus and prioritize those, the bigger problems first, we can stay on top of those and start having that benefit of other crimes being addressed just because we dealt with that one cancer cell, if you will. Neighborhood policing is decentralized. We also have redeployed every staff member to the field that we could possibly redeploy. There's a couple of people that we didn't. One is a staff sergeant to help the lieutenants and the sergeants run the organization. The other is our school resource officer, which right now we think is really important. And then the third person is our gang officer who is just doing a stellar job and keeping on top of the gang problems as part of the countywide gang task force, which is Watsonville, CHP, Capitol and ourselves. And then we want to make sure that we're doing two other things that are important to me. One is that we're accountable for our crime control. Is crime going up or down in the neighborhood and how does the community know? We want to make sure that we're posting that in a location where every community member can come on and see what's going on in their neighborhood, more than just dots, but looking at heat maps, looking at crime percentage totals, looking at the incidents of crime before the application of our response. And then the last one is community engagement. We want to make sure that we're getting feedback from the community as well as building that relationship with the public where we can employ their help to deal with many of these problems. For instance, we're having a car brokely problem in the Upper West neighborhood. Community members can help us by walking in the neighborhood with flashlights at a certain time at night if we can analyze that deep into the data. I know of one city, for instance, that got flashing collars for all their dogs. I read in blue flashing collars. And they took the dogs out for a walk at nighttime when they were most likely to have car brokely problems in the neighborhood. Didn't confront people. It's just that visual presence of a community that cared and people outside. So there's many things and innovative ideas that we can do. So what gets in our way? Why can't the police do this? And if you look to the left side of the screen here, this came directly from CPSM. Departments averaged between 400 and 1,000 calls per 1,000 residents. The lower the number suggests a better policy on triaging non-emergency calls for service. On the top of the page, you can see what Santa Cruz is. We're above the highest they've ever seen. So we're averaging almost 1,100 calls per 1,000 residents. And in my opinion, coming in from the outside and just taking a look at this, it's far too much. And we can get into the specifics of that. But the question is, then how do we triage better? And that becomes a discussion point in a policy matter. So this is kind of tongue-in-cheek. But if you remember seeing this Lucy episode where the chocolate's going down the conveyor belt, and at first it's, oh, that's fine. She eats one, and then packages two. And then the conveyor belt gets going faster and faster and faster.  And then the lady comes in and yells, speed it up. That's what our officers feel like right now, that the chocolate is on the calls for service around a high-speed conveyor belt. And then somebody yells, speed it up. And it's to the point where many of them feel like they're at the water level. And so this is something that my responsibility is to help them fix. So our mantra has been, for many years, no call too small. You call us will come. And according to CPSM, that this is characteristic of a small-town mentality, of a small-town thought process. Now, Santa Cruz is not a San Francisco, but we are an urban area, and certainly an area with urban problems. And so somehow we have to take a look at this and figure out what can we do to provide them the opportunity to actually police. Because in that margin between proactivity and reactivity is where we can find the greatest crime control. And I think that's what's important. Some quotes from the thing. It's an enormous misuse of emergency personnel is what these experts were telling us. And here's just some of the areas that they took a look at and the frequency of calls. So we can't certainly not avoid taking reports on 1,500 crashes every year. But there are some that we shouldn't go to. Ordnance violations takes us, on average, 130 minutes to get there. And the reason for that is there's so many calls stacked up of those kind. So rather than just saying, we're not going to go to them, the question becomes, well, how do we manage them and how do we deal with them in a thoughtful way? And then you can see the other ones for yourself. So we respond physically to about 68,000 calls a year. And a couple of you had asked me, well, wait a second. I thought the number was over 100,000. And we took a good hard look at the data. And what we found out is that a lot of those calls are information-only calls. In other words, fires running code 3-2 through town. There's a person who's wanted from San Jose, might be in the area, Abolo, be on the lookout. So the calls we're actually responding to are 68,000. CPSM estimates that we could reduce up to 22,000 of those calls. I don't think we can reduce that many from looking at the information. But if we can reduce several calls a day, that gives our officers that margin, that time to be proactive. So calls for service are kind of a domino effect. The average wait time for non-emergency calls for service, the benchmark that CPSM says is acceptable is 15 minutes. We're at 25 minutes on average. And then dispatch hold times are 16 minutes in and of themselves. So the dispatchers are sitting on that call for 16 minutes. The reason they're sitting on that call is there's no units available. So what I hear frequently is the dispatcher telling the officers or the sergeant, we just sent you to a burglary of progress by also holding a camping call, a disturbance at such and such location, this location and that location.  And it's just so overwhelming that sometimes you just give up. And I don't want to put our officers in that position. And we're dealing with them broadcasting too much at once. However, these numbers, the more backed up it gets is that domino effect of it continues to elongate. And then people just get, again, fatigued listening to that. Priority calls for service, the benchmark is five minutes. We're at almost seven minutes. And dispatch hold time is 2.3 minutes. So if we can get rid of that hold time, because we're more efficient, we can get pretty close to those numbers without really making too much of a stretch. And I think that's something we certainly want to head towards. Columns management. So it slows response times and stacks more calls. It shortens the benchmark time of calls when officers are there. What this means is when officers is on scene in most departments, they're there for almost 30 minutes, 28.7 minutes. Here, we're there for 25 minutes. Because you're constantly thinking, I got to get to the next call. The next call, citizens waiting, the next call is holding. And so we want them to do a slow down a little bit, take their time to actually talk to people and do a little bit more thorough investigations when you have the opportunity. It's also a little bit dangerous. Because on average, the average city sends 1.7 officers to a call, we send 1.6. Which means that often we're not sending enough officers to these calls. And that's more dangerous for the citizens. It's also more dangerous for our officers. So they came up with a policy many cities use called the rule of 60. And that is 60% of your officers should be in patrol. And that 60% of their day should be consumed by calls for service. In other words, 40% of the day should be available for proactive policing, for handle administrative duties, for having lunch, for if this isn't a take a break thing. Right now, most of our officers don't take lunch during the day, and they certainly don't get breaks. So this is called the saturation index. And you can see the numbers as it speaks here. And very frequently, we're well above those numbers. Again, this is what we need to fix. When officers experience a workload of greater than 60%, as that middle box says, they become increasingly reactive, waiting for the next call. And through much of the day, our SI surpassed the threshold. So 60% of our officers should be designated to patrol. So here's our current numbers. We have 94 funded positions. However, the city manager has approved us to look to 99 positions if we could fulfill these numbers, and we're not there right now. Right now, we have seven vacancies. This has been tough to hang on to people. And when we're interviewing people, I'll get into that in a second. But one of the things we're hearing is that, why do I want to do this here for the same or less money than somewhere else? I can work literally half as hard and understand that. But I'm thankful for the ones who want to be here because they want to work hard. And that's what most of our department is. We have five currently in training. We have five unable to work because of injuries. That's actually risen in the last couple days to seven, so we can take away from that. But they'll be back shortly, we hope. 47 in patrol, that includes sergeants and lieutenants. And then if we have 14 in neighborhood policing teams, that can augment patrol if the need be. And then five administrative assignments, such as the chiefs, IA sergeant and a staff sergeant. We have 10 investigators and nine CSOs. One officer there is not correct. So that's where our current staffing is. We also have a lot of civilian, not a lot of civilian staff. We have, I think, 15 additional civilian staff working at different functions in the department, such as records and property and so forth. We've also extended three job offers in the last week to new people who are going to go to the academy. But we're also trying to find people who are lateral transfers because they can hit the ground running. And I think that's kind of important. This is a spattle representation of officer-initiated calls for service. You can see where the officers spend their time being proactive in the city and where they're calling out that they're contacting people. Almost mirrors exactly what you saw in the Crimes for Service. And this is where they're at. The central question becomes, the levels of service in Santa Cruz desires. Do you desire greater crime control by allowing officers time to be proactive? Then how do we do it? We can do it one of a couple ways. Add officers or first try to reconfigure the staffing that we have in the current calls for service to meet those numbers. And I think that's as we're going to push forward here. So this is, again, a look at the current budget as it stands right now. And then as we move forward. Now, one of the things that staffing comparison that we need to take a look at is over the last decade, we've added about 9,000 residents to the city. We've not added more officers. That'd be like taking a city the size of Scotts Valley and not having any officers to patrol it. So we're currently at 1.46 officers per 1,000 residents with council approval and the over hire if we could fill those positions, we'd be at 1.52. That would be a huge blessing if we could get up to that level and get all those positions filled.  Available for duty because of injuries, we're down in the 1.3 area. The national target, which CPSM talks about is 2.0 officers per 1,000. But I want to be honest with that. California is normally much lower. Most cities in California are not at the 2 per 1,000 level. But that doesn't mean that that's not a goal to achieve someday. So what are our staffing concerns? About three out of 100 are hired. For every 100 people that take the test, we wind up going through the funnel and hiring three. It's tough. And then attrition is high. Burnout is a substantial risk for injury rates. I think that's one of the reasons we have several people on light duty. So here's the tough part. Of the last nine hired, Dan Filippo has been doing a great job getting people through the door. And he's really worked in a marketing campaign and we've been finding the bodies. But of the last nine we've hired, two failed the academy, one quit during the academy, three quit during training. And the X interviews where this is too busy, I can't keep up with the workload. And then for now the other three are doing well. So there's three wronged approach. One is reduce the demand, eliminate some of the calls for service through differential response. That doesn't mean we won't respond to them. We have to find different ways to respond to them. Increase patrol resources by reconfiguring the patrol schedule, which we're currently working on or hire more police officers to get fully staffed. And all three of those are underway. So we've impaneled a committee inside the department to look at calls for service and how to reduce those unnecessary calls to be more in line with what other police agencies are doing around the country and around the state. I can go into a lot of examples of this, but for the sake of time I think we'll hold off on that. Consider different staffing configurations such as 12-hour shifts or 10-hour shifts with more squads. And so Arnold Vasquez under the direction of Deputy Chief Martinez has been working on that diligently. This, it's important for us to take a look at these and we're heading down that road. Deputy Chief Filippo has been doing the calls for service. They've already met with members of the department. Now the next step is to meet with members of the community to make sure that we're in line with what the community expects. And then leverage all department resources to address these hotspots and these hotspot locations as they come up, including the hot people. One of the things we've implemented as a program, we're using one of our CSOs as a crime analyst to discuss some of the most people who are most problematic in the city. So we've identified top people, 10 top people who are getting arrested the most or causing the most problems, focusing on them and really working with the DA's office, the sheriff and the chief of probation to solve the problems with those people. I met with them, had lunch with them, we all discussed it, we agreed. And then the very next week, I just wanna give credit to the DA, sends me an email, hey, this is one of your guys, I want you to know we're taking this to the mat. And so one individual has been arrested over 200 times, is on probation multiple times.  And it was a real threat. So long story short, the DA took that seriously, we're working together, focusing on those things. And I think that we can hopefully have some impact on that. Examining staffing levels, I think we've covered this, this whole idea of no call too small, but the point is we gotta think a little bit differently. So I think it becomes a choice, a political choice to be very honest. Do we continue to provide police services as they are now or take steps to restructure how to respond to the demand? And this is gonna be a tough thing to walk through. But I think it's important for us to understand what CPSM said, what their ideas are, what others are doing so that we can push forward in this vein. The re-engineering process, we went through the talk with our staff, the community, the city leadership, and then boiled it down to get our mission statement. And that was what was reflected earlier. The mission statement went for our sergeants, the officers, and then ultimately the command staff to come up with this document. I would again encourage any community member to read it so they know what we're about. And this all came from them at those meetings that we did initially for the first several months. And then look for the diffusion of benefit as we march through these problems and make sure that we're solving them. We're examining the staffing formulas, as I mentioned earlier. I think this is an important point. For every 1,700 calls we manage better, it's the equivalent of adding one additional police officer. And this is a cost savings measure as much as a better way to police. Especially when you take a look at the cost of a fully benefited officer is 183,000 and a fully benefited sergeant is 208,000. So if you're adding a dozen officers, you're talking an enormous amount of money. And then lastly, this is what our new neighborhood map looks like. This is the community and each lieutenant is noted up in the upper left corner in the proper color coded part of the map. And any community member can click on the map on our website and find out who the lieutenant is and shoot them an email or get them information about what's happening in their neighborhood. And Lieutenant will respond pretty quickly. So I submit to you this report and I certainly answer any questions that you might have at your leisure. Well, at this point, is there any council member would like to ask any questions regarding the report? I'll ask one before we go to public comment. And that she mentioned that their external forces that hinder the police from doing their job. You know, it looks like when I saw that statistic over the last eight years that our crime rate has been relatively constant. So what are those things other than the fact that the council has directed overfilling police staffing and resources? What are those external factors that we as a council can help address to help influence that aside from the recommendations today? I think there are several things that council can take a look at and help us with. One is that for many years, we have sold to the community to pick up the phone and dial 911 on everything. So unfortunately, the expectation of the community becomes, I pick up the phone, I call 911, I want to cop right now. Well, it may not be an emergency call for service and we're not going to be there for two hours. Well, all that does is set us up for failure, that the city up for failure and the community member up for failure. So we've got to retrain and rethink that of using the non-emergency number when it's not an emergency. The second thing is we certainly understand the dynamic of the court system, the justice system here in Santa Cruz as well as California. And for crime control to be effective, it has to be certain, swift and fair. I don't think we can reach those two numbers, the certain and swift. And the reason for that is when we put people on probation for five times over, they didn't learn the first time. I doubt they're going to learn the second or third time. So this really has to become a public policy matter for our entire community of how do we deal with that? And this lays, you know, the courts have to help us and understand, and I think the courts are willing to understand if the community lets them know what the desire of this community is, is to, whether it's to be a little bit tougher on sentencing, when we arrest a gang member or a felon with a firearm multiple times, that person at some point needs to go to prison to learn the lesson, to be rehabilitated because of that. The third thing I think is important is much of the homeless thing has been thrust on the shoulders of the police department as a solution. I think we've really come to the realization this is not a solution and that we need to work and we are working in concert with the rest of city government to really work on solving these problems and I couldn't be more proud of the other department has the manager's office of how we've all taken this task on together but this also has to come from the county. This is a county responsibility. They have the budget and the funding for it. They also have the legislative mandate and we could really use their assistance in helping drive the policy forward on how we collectively deal with these problems as a city. So those are just some really quick things that might be able to be done from a legislative perspective. Thank you. Council Member Brown and then Council Member Cron. Thank you for being here this evening and for all the work you do and I appreciate the report. It's helpful to, and I read through the report in detail so many of the things that you have been talking about resonate with the statistics that I have seen. I am wondering about a couple of things. One, in terms of the recommendations that are coming to us, just a little, if you could talk a little bit about the community service officer model versus the role of the Rangers and just to help us and others in the room have a better understanding of why we've increased our, and again, some of you have been involved in these discussions over the years that I haven't been on the council previously but just a little bit about that and then a second question is, I really appreciate the direction to move into neighborhood policing and setting up the regions and teams and I've been to a couple of the events where lieutenants have spoken to very energetic audiences and so I think it's great to be moving in this direction. I do wonder if you've considered a model that includes some kind of satellite. I'm just thinking about places in different parts of the city that people can go to either be part, just communicate their concerns, maybe having some satellite offices might reduce some of the calls that go in through central dispatch. I don't know, but I just would be interested to hear if you can thought about that at all. Sure, first of all, the community service officer model, that has been done in many police departments to relieve the workload that is experienced by officers taking reports, some accident reports, some minor theft reports and so forth. It's been used effectively here and I think it's an important model. We also have them in positions in the, inside the department where we don't want to have sworn officers doing that because a person who's sworn and fully trained, post certified, all that kind of thing really can only do things that nobody else can do. And so we really want to save them for the stuff they need to be used for. So it has been effective in doing that. I think also some of the city's thinking in the past has been it's pretty difficult to hire and find police officers and this is a little bit less expensive model, the CSO. So they're hardworking employees so maybe we've gone towards that. And I think that was, in my opinion, a very proper thing to do. The Rangers, I think fulfill a fantastic role and done a great job in this city. And I think that we can't speak highly enough of the people that have done that. Again, they can't do the full scope of things. And so part of the problem becomes if they tell somebody, hey, you gotta leave the park, no, I'm not, there's nobody to stand behind them. Part of the idea to bring them over to the police department is they have somebody, a team of officers standing behind them now in each area of the city. And working with that team and being embedded in that team allows them to do their jobs, will be a little bit more effective. And then as you saw from the report, there's a lot of back story information stuff that has to take place with people who are 832 PC certified, which would mean that the police department is really in the best position to do that. And so we think that the Rangers can continue to do a stellar job, providing a great high level of service throughout the city, but mostly focused on the parks. I wanna ask, just in the second question on satellite offices or some kind of place? Well, yes. Outside of the downtown. Yeah, one of the things we have discussed is having maybe some of the libraries, for instance, have a spot where the officers can go and write reports. And so we have discussed that. We've also discussed fire stations. I know they've tried that in the past, but we've also, the lieutenants have been pretty committed to making sure that they're meeting with community members on a regular basis so that they can have face to face contact in each neighborhood with community members. And I know that they've been responsive. I've already been to several meetings with several lieutenants, meeting with community groups. And so they've been doing a fantastic job. And I know that I'm hearing from community members, had I spoke with Lieutenant Lamasse and he did a fantastic job. Thank you so much. So I know that they're doing it on their own as well. And so that's, I think that's the step in the right direction. Council Member Crown, then Council Member Chase. Yeah, I wanted to follow up on Council Member Brown's question, because it's still not clear to me. When a CSO tells somebody to leave the park, are they gonna leave the park or do they also need backup? Well, CSOs normally aren't in that position. They can write some citations like rangers, but CSOs are also embedded on those teams. So I was looking at this, the differences. There's a little bit more for CSOs, it seems like as far as pay goes. So I was looking at city manager, but different pay ranges. And I'm just wondering, do you see a future at all of going, say we had 30 or 40 CSOs and would that cut down on the number of sworn officers? I don't see us being able to go that direction because you still have a lot of crimes that need to be responded to. We do see a path, however, for rangers, should they choose to go into the CSO or sworn side or a staff position inside the department that this is a career path that they could take should they want to. I don't see us changing the ratio a whole lot because again, it takes a sworn officer to do much of the workload that we're tasked with. Could you talk a little bit about the use of force? And I'm looking at page seven of the recommendations, but also page 77. And then there's also some recommendations on use of force for park rangers on page 105. And I'm just wondering, one is begin tracking all uses of force by officers as defined by department policy, begin tracking use of force proactive data by individual officer and not only by incident. I was just wondering, have we been doing this already or is this all new, these recommendations from 57 to 61? Yeah, most of what we've been doing already. And we were kind of puzzled when we saw this because we actually do report this out as you know on our website as well as to the Public Safety Committee. I think what they were looking for is a review process of a use of force expert on all of these cases. Well, most of our sergeants are use of force experts and every sergeant reads every single use, not every sergeant reads everyone, but a sergeant reads every single use of force that we do in the city. What they suggested is that go into IEPRO where we can track that use of force. We certainly can do that. My thought process on that is there's been some recent research that would suggest that the EIS system, early warning systems are not that effective that we should look more at trauma that the officers experience rather than the number of citations or that kind of thing that the officers are involved in. So the greater chance of a complaint or a systemic problem with the officer is more related to the trauma that they've experienced as part of their duties. As far as the rangers are concerned, if you're 832PC certified, which they are, you have to report that out to the state every year. And so we have to report out every use of force that results in injury to the state. And there is no mechanism in place to do those kinds of things currently for the rangers. And that will take place under us because that's something we understand that we just do regularly. Thanks. And also just the use of force for the rangers, it says that there's been three incidences in the past 18 months. Is that what you know of to be true as well? And I was under the impression that maybe park rangers don't get into use of force issues that they're calling for backup. I know of, I know one for sure, but if they say three, then I would suggest that that probably is the case. Actually, I know of two. One was a ranger did a stellar job, officer was fighting a guy, the same guy that went into the school with the machete. As we're fighting him downtown, the officer was in a tough fight and the ranger helped our officer out and had a use force in the process. Another one that I'm aware of a ranger was punched in the face and in the rangers foot pursuit and tackle the guy. So those are considered uses of force. I don't know what the other one is because it might have happened before I got here, but so they can use force. They have been trained to do arrest and control to use. But now at the police department are, what we want to make sure is that we use the minimal amounts of force possible to overcome the resistance that they're facing. And that is in house training that we will provide on an ongoing basis to the rangers to make sure that they're in line with what's common throughout policing. Last question is about complaints on page six of the recommendations, professional standards. Or have these been implemented too because they develop a protocol for at least monthly contact with complainants to advise them of the status of the investigation of their complaint. This would come as great news to many people who have filed complaints and then it sort of falls into a black hole and they never heard, even when they ask a year later, there is no response. And how are we doing now? We are going to be notifying people every month. We'll have a, make sure that a letter is written to them that they will have some type of documentation in their hand. I think some of the issue is sometimes people want more information than we can give them by law, but we'll still make contact with them and make sure that they're informed of what's, whether they're a complaint lies. Yeah, a lot of times people just want to know that somebody cares and taken seriously. Yeah, and I can tell you these are taken seriously. One of the other suggestions with the IA Sergeant meets with the Chief regularly. Well, his office is about 20 feet from mine. So he walks in there literally three times a week. So we're working on those suggestions. Thank you. And I'll just say as someone who's a member and been on the public safety committee for the, I think since the time I've been on the council, I can guarantee you that these complaints are taken with the utmost of seriousness and investigated thoroughly. There's reports to take place annually and the officers that are in charge and assigned to investigate those through internal affairs, they are available to take calls and will respond upon request by any constituent, any member of the public that submits a concern or even wants to follow up. So, I mean, on that point, I would say, maybe it's a matter of having some information if someone's sent, made a comment to you, that information is available and I think those people can readily follow up. So I'm not sure if you were speaking to something in particular. Yeah, it hasn't happened in several cases, but we can follow up.  And I just want to add, I just want to add too on the public safety committee. We do get a list of, you know, accounting of use as a force too. So it is taken, you know, taken seriously. There is a tally and those of us on that committee do see those detailed reports. Is there any manager? The other layer of oversight that we have just to point out is the independent police auditor who also reviews the complaints and provides recommendations to the police department and to the public safety committee related to those complaints as well and also is available to the public as well. Chris, are you done? Don't go. Just if I can just finish. And if you have somebody that has not heard from us, if you can give me their name, I'll make sure when they hear from us. Okay, thanks. Appreciate it. Is that it? Council Member Chase. Yeah, I wanted to thank you for the report which is data driven. And I really appreciate that. And I think what's interesting about that is that 16 of the recommendations mentioned the RMS system and the records management system, which is what provides a lot of the data and is incredibly problematic. So I know that that is a big budget request. And so I think it would be helpful to let Council knows what we can anticipate in terms of what you think that would be, what your requests would be and the timeline of that so that we can consider that. Cause I think it's incredibly important if we want to continue to see this type of analysis and these types of improvements. Sure. Please take this with a grain of salt because we haven't done the RFP. So we can't really know for sure what it's going to cost. The systems will range about a million dollars. But again, we're dividing that between multiple agencies. And if you stretch it out over a multi-year period, it becomes very reasonable. And so what we heard today was that our annual costs for running the system, the maintenance, upkeep and all that kind of thing, including servers in the future and so forth should be around $70,000, maybe a little bit more. And then the actual cost of the system is about $200,000 for everybody per year. So we should be able to do this for around $100, $150,000 a year. I appreciate that. That actually isn't very much considering the improvement and what we would get for it. And to be connected with the other law enforcement agencies or at least one of them, I think is critical as well. Yeah, all four are in. Yeah, that's great. And just correct me if I'm wrong, but it's been in our Capital Improvement Program budget for some time now, right? Yes. Okay, Council Member. I just had one last comment. I just wanted to also thank you for just mentioning in response to Council Member Cron's question, the impact of trauma and how that impacts, well, really everybody involved in public safety. So I'm interested to hear more about that. One of the recommendations just to go on to that is officer wellness. And so one of our strategies in our leadership plan is really working on officer wellness and employee improvement. And so including the succession planning and all that. And I just really, again, Dan Filippo, well before I got here, had already started a mentoring program. And so we're really trying to mentor our people, keep an eye on things like abuses of substances because there's so much trauma in the job. So I just want to, you know, we want to have that direction, but it had even more so there. Council Member Narayan and then Council Member Mathews. Oh, I can't help but, you know, be just completely stunned about the level of crime that really jumped out at me at the report. You know, we've all had numbers, we see different numbers in terms of where Santa Cruz is in comparison. And it doesn't really matter what scale, whether it's the FBI or somebody else collecting data, we are always end up being on the top in an area that I'd rather like to be average. And so, you know, you look at those numbers and you know, you're doing these different plans, but are there plans to go after specific types of crimes? Like when I look at property crime, it's so high. Is there a strategy aside from looking at it, you know, piecemeal through the city, but to have an overall, I guess, strategy in how to lower that number? Well, that's very important. Just let me throw a word of caution in when you look at crime data. One is you have to take a look at our city, the reality of our city. Again, as a county seat, the center of this region, a tourist attraction, I mean, three to four million people a year go through the boardwalk. All that really affects the amount of people and the amount of crime in a city, including the jail being here and all these things. So you can't compare this to, for instance, Lincoln, California, you know, it's a bedroom community. It's completely different. Now, having said that, it's still too high and we need to figure out how to get that down. So if you took a look at this and actually figured this was a city of 100,000, probably be a little bit more realistic in terms of the crime rate. However, it's not what we have, so we're gonna fix that. So the strategy is this. Each community told us what their priorities were, theft, theft and theft in many of these communities. And so each lieutenant has set their priorities for their communities. And their job is to figure out, based on the micro problem solving side, how to fix each of those problems. So I'm studying an overall department-wide philosophy of policing, which is neighborhood policing and problem solving. Now, their job is to drill down for each of those communities and figure out what specific tactic are they gonna use to reduce those problems. So for instance, just go back to CVS, 189 thefts or crimes at that location in one year. That's unacceptable. And so what we need to do is we can drive the crime down there, it frees up officers to be more proactive. So what he did is he looked at the environmental conditions that are allowing that crime to take place at that location, talked to the owners or the managers, worked with them. They're gonna go through a stage of, and Carter Jones is here, Carter was with him doing this, going through the stage of locking up the alcohol first, if that doesn't work, putting a security guard at the front door, demanding backpacks be left at the front.  So the more they do that, the more that impacts that crime and drops it down. And that's the goal that we're after. So I can't give you the specific overall strategy other than we're focusing on the constant criminals that we're dealing with and really trying to, if we have to give them 365 days in jail one day at a time then we're gonna do it with those 10. But 10 is a pretty small number. And when you take a look at the amount of thieving that we have in the city, but we have to start someplace. And the first 10 we put out, I asked my crime analysts today, all 10 were contacted, all 10 were arrested. And then the first group. So we wanna make sure that we're gonna hold them accountable at some level. If probation can't do it, because they're overwhelmed, then we'll do it as best we can. And so taking this, employing these strategies, do you have an estimate on when you think we might see a difference? I might see crime drop or these figures improve. I understand we're an outlier as a city and it's hard to compare ourselves to anybody else. We're a town of 65,000 that has a university and a major tourist attraction. There aren't a lot of other cities to be able to look at that and compare. But I still do think it's important, and you point that out, to acknowledge at our crime rate is pretty high. And so I'm glad you do acknowledge that. But if these things we're putting in place and we're successful, how long does it take to see a difference? Well, it's gonna take some time. I would hope that as we get our teams in place and I was just looking at the statistics of what they were doing already and they've just been nailing it. I mean, they've been all over it. They've made a lot of arrests, taken a lot of guns off the street already. Those things are going to have an effect. And I can't give you a percentage of decrease. Can't prognosticate that. However, I can tell you that if they continue to do their jobs, focused on the major problems first and take care of those problems, you will see a reduction at some point city-wide and that people can look at. Now, I think what we wanted to be able to do is say, okay, look, we took care of this problem. Therefore, this problem, we can know for sure that this problem was taken care of. This was 100 crimes. And then the community can look at that. There are so many things that influence the actual crime rate. If the economy takes a left-hand turn, we could see more problems at the heroin addiction level. More thefts. These are all things that influence the crime rate that we may or may not have control over. But we can take a look at these problems and say, we solved this problem. Here's how we know that. And here's what we did to do that. And then be accountable to the public for that. And you mentioned several ways we could address improving staffing. You were saying that possibly hiring more officers. Do you have an actual number of officers that you think we should hire? Like when you look at those rates of like the average of California cities, how many more would that mean? Well, I would like to just get up to what the city manager's already approved. And my thinking on that council member is once we manage the resources that we've already been given well and it's not working, then I don't have any problem coming back to council and saying I need more officers and figuring that piece out. But I want to get up to full staffing first and then use those extra five bodies that we've been graciously given. Get those folks running on all cylinders and then we can take a look at that, reduce the attrition levels and get people healthy, which is another significant issue for us. There's two officers I've never met. They've been off that long. And it's your workman's comp issues. I mean, there's all kinds of things boiled into this that are very complex. So once we get that done and finish up to that 99 level that we've already been authorized, then I have no problem coming back to council and saying I need more. Okay, and then can you give examples of the types of calls for service that we can handle differently? I know you've mentioned a few in some of the community meetings. I heard one time someone call from a restaurant demanding the police show up to make the restaurant, give them their food for free because they had bad service. So I was at a table, I'm like, oh my dear God, they're calling 911 for this. So what types of calls do you think?  But how would you take some of the more common calls that are coming and redirect them? So I think, yeah. So there's a lot of, I'd rather look at bigger categories. I mean, I can go into a lot of antidotal stories that I have in the past and you've all heard those. But we do follow up phone calls. Somebody calls and then we'll call them back and the people are sometimes like, why are you calling me? I've just handled the problem. Well, that takes time. A lot of information stuff, let's have an officer go to this location just to provide information. Non-injury collisions, that's really a civil matter. It's not a police matter. It's between two insurance companies.  And sometimes we'll send two officers. So these are, and frequently when we write those reports, the insurance companies will now call us back and say, I don't like how you wrote this report. I want it changed to have this person be responsible and try to put us in the middle of it. We do, there's a lot of those types of calls. Again, I don't want to say we're just gonna not respond to them, but somebody, we can manage it better how it's responded to. Like for instance, maybe it's gonna have to wait for the neighborhood policing team when they come in on their Monday rather than having patrol respond to it if it's not an emergency. So let's let patrol do the emergency stuff. Let's let neighborhood policing and the teams or other city members handle the other things that maybe don't need to be handled by a police officer. Just before I came, I talked to Chief Raleigh about medical responses. So if a person's laying on the front yard someplace, they may be having a seizure. They may be high. They could be a variety of things. And we send two police officers to handle that a thousand times a year. And so why isn't paramedics doing that? Because what we're gonna do is look at them and say, yep, they need paramedics. So those are the kind of things I think that we can be a little bit more thoughtful about. And Jim agreed completely, Chief Raleigh did. And but now the devil's in the details. How do you work that out? We don't want to send an engine of four, you know, four firefighters to do that. So this becomes a conversation. Great, I do have other questions, but I, this is fascinating. Right. Yeah, there'll be time afterwards also. So maybe council member Matthews will be the final question before we open it up for public comment. And it may be covered later, but you had these kind of broad sections here. And kind of those are pulled from the big report. Your priority. You're talking to Mike. Oh, the priority tasks you set before you. Those seem to be some of them internal operation changes, but some of them are either, some of them involve significant changes in the way we operate with our partners, whether it's the courts or the county or whatever. And some of them are capital. And what triggered this question was your referral to the records management and technology. So at what point will you be telling us, aside from the internal stuff, where you need maybe some more assistance from us, whether it's budget or engagement? Sure. I think that's an ongoing dialogue to have with each of you and into the council in general. My way of trying to handle these things is to try to do it myself and sit down, for instance, and work things out with the chief of probation, the DA, the sheriff, and have those conversations. If I reach a wall that I can't overcome, I have no problem going to the city manager and working with council to say, I really need your help on this. Now it's time to throw it down. If I could just respond to that as this evolves, and I always consider this a process of evolution, but it's helpful for us to know where you are, because those are a lot of the complaints we get. Why, we did a little email exchange today on this. What's going on? Why is this happening? And to the extent we know progress is being made or not, that just helps us respond to the public. Sure, I appreciate that. And we can certainly do better in that area, making sure council's fully informed of what we're doing and why. Just like that conversation we had this morning about the gun thing. Those are the things that really need to be focused on here locally. At what point, we're gonna allow certain people who are dangerous to society continue to walk around. And that does become a pinch point. Part of this is education, because I get a lot of complaints from people that, why'd you let this guy out of jail? And I'm like, well, I don't control the jail. And the sheriff, if he had a choice, he wouldn't let him out either. So those are the things. Education can be a hugely important matter that the council could help us with. Okay, do you have a follow-up? Yeah, to that, I was just going to ask, are you going to be sharing this report with your colleagues at the county level? Will the city manager, I guess, be showing this report as well to your colleagues? I think that, you know, they're a community partner. We really need their help in this. And so I hope that there'll be meetings about this report with our county officials. Yeah, certainly we could do that. I know you've already shared it with the sheriff at least, because there's some recommendations related to the sheriff's in here as it relates to the processing of prisoners and that sort of thing. So, yes. Okay, and that's an area where city council members could help too. We could go talk to our elected colleagues at the county level as well. Sure. I'll just say before we open up to public comment, I thought those neighborhood meetings were outstanding in terms of like bringing out a category had one of the West Side residents, Nathaniel, told me that he said it was the best public meeting he'd ever attended in terms of having the number of folks that were engaged in participating in the process. So I thought it was a good rollout and it's nice to see this more kind of more robust discussion about how we're moving forward. So before we have any further questions from council, I'd like to make this opportunity to open it up to the public for comment. And the first speaker is a representative of Huff who wanted to take some additional time. So you have four minutes, Mr. Norse. And then anyone else who wishes to speak on this matter, please line up to my left and we'll allow it to begin. So Mr. Norse, you have the floor. Members of the community, mayor, city council. First of all, David Silva, I'm sure if he could be here today would like to maybe join in some of my comments, maybe make some different ones. As most of you may know, he died about a week and a half ago in Maputo Mozambique, probably of pneumonia and he was buried there a few days ago. The problem with this report for me is that is what it doesn't say. Although I'll talk a bit about what it does say and my concerns about that. I mean, I'm really speaking to people who want to see some fundamental changes in how the priorities of mass incarceration, policing, the drug war, treatment of the homeless take place, not sort of shifting around the deck chairs or even making substantive changes in a focus which is not necessarily bad. But if you have criminalization of the homeless as a priority, this is the group I'm concerned about, then no matter how you change it, you don't really change it at all. Folks outside who were forced away from the San Lorenzo campground by its closing on February 28th who had no real place to go, the River Street campground, that is to say the barbed wire locked boneyard campground with fewer spaces that are where tents are shoved cheek by jowl with each other and you can't leave freely is not in any way equivalent to even replacing what the San Lorenzo campground provided. So if you're then gonna go after people with increased citations masquerading as a census or doing this more intensely than before, you're simply reverting to the old policies. I asked Andy who has been occasionally responsive to my questions, not always and not recently really, but a number of questions. We had a dialogue, huge amounts of money have become from this council and prior councils and have gone into harassing the poor to the ordinances that you have created. Will the money you save by cutting back on massive infraction enforcement of sleeping ban and nighttime park bans go into real social services? Or we hear more, oh, I wonder why the county isn't helping us with this kind of stuff as we usually do. Drug war money, the asset seizure money is being used by the police department, Andy writes me. Why is that? I thought we're beyond this asset seizure stuff. You can use all kinds of rhetoric. This is a lawful byproduct of criminal activity. There's nothing about that in this report. How much money has been seized from folks accused of what crimes? What are the records here? Now, as of use of force, which was discussed here, and it's good to hear that people are interested in knowing when are the police doing the chokeholds, the tasers, the drawing of the baton, the drawing of the weapon. These are important issues, but the public doesn't really get to know about this. I asked Andy for stats on this. He didn't give me specifics about when these things were done. And this is discretionary. The police department decides to keep these stats under wraps. So I don't see any of this changing either. What about the issues of, well, quality of life downtown? That means, of course, don't sit next to my business even if it's closed. If you're sitting outside a closed store, like Alpha Graphics and three individuals were doing in the rain about a week ago, you'll get forced out into the rain by police officers from Andy's police force. Or at least that was their account. And I don't necessarily discount it. We have the unconstitutional stay-away laws. Will they continue to be enforced? And I see that I'm out of time already. Do you want to finish your sentence? I need to finish more than that. You can just hand it out and we'll be happy to take a look at it. Next speaker. I may send it in to you. Hello, my name is Jane Becker. I have lived and worked in Santa Cruz for 35 years. What has struck me about what is going on with the Public Safety Committee and City Council is that no one seems to really be addressing what is the elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room is the fact that we have over 1,000 homeless people in Santa Cruz, people that come with no money, no savings, no place to live, no job. And they come here to live on the streets. Many of them are doing drugs. And as much as I feel for these people, the reality is that many of these people are stealing to support habits. They're breaking into cars. They're stealing bikes and chopping the parts. They are committing home burglaries. They are walking into businesses. I see this downtown quite a bit and taking what they want to take and leading. What I'm going to suggest is that the city make a shift from anybody that wants to come here can come here to, if you come here with no money, no job, no place to live, we will give you immediate food, attention to any immediate medical condition. And the next question is, how do we get you home? How do we get you bus fare? How do we get you airfare? There is no housing here for you, not realistically. There are very few jobs here.  We need to have, and a shift says, this is where we stop as a town. And then perhaps we will see the lessening of service calls to the police because we've eliminated a source, a causation of crime. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker please. Hi, thank you for the presentation. I was very informative and I appreciate all the work that was put into it. I have, I think maybe four questions and maybe one observation. And I don't, you know, much more than I do and maybe most of you do, but I know in some communities there's non-emergency number is a 411 number that people can call, which seems like a very simple way. And that may not be possible here. I don't know, but that seems like that could be a possible easy fix to the police department getting or 9-1-1 getting, having to field a lot more calls than they are. So I guess I just have a question regarding that. I don't know if there's been any consideration. Again, just cost and expense reduction and increased community policing in terms of having more police on bicycles. Santa Cruz I've been here since the late 70s and it, you know, probably like 15 years ago it seemed like we did have a number of police on bikes, but that has, doesn't seem like that's happening much. And I see police on ATVs and that type of thing, but that's not, you know, it's hard to talk to somebody when their ATV is running and they've got the helmet on and that's the whole nine yards. So that's just another question of mine. I know you were, you said in your presentation that I think you, I don't know how many community forums we had in different parts of Santa Cruz. I was curious if there was any community forum in beach flats, whether there was, did you have, I feel like I guess, because you said as part of that you said that each community sort of forum told you what the issue was, which is theft, theft, theft. I guess my concern is that isn't the whole community. Those are people who feel comfortable coming to a community forum with the police. There are people who don't feel comfortable with that. You know, that's, it's just, it's a problem. You know that. But I feel like if the only people you're speaking, responding to are the people that, they come to the forum, that's not the entire community. Thanks, Grant. Okay, I have one last thing to say.  Okay, well, thank you. And I noticed, and this is just a broader question, but I noticed that often when we have these things there's like at the moment there's seven uniformed officers here. I never know when that's going on. Are those officers on pay right now? They're in uniform. So there's, and there's ununiformed officers and staff here from the police department. So that's another question. Thank you. Thank you, Grant. Thank you. Okay, is there any member of the public that would like to speak on this after the report prior to bringing it back to council? Okay, sir, you're up next. Hi guys. My name is Gary Taylor. I've been living in Sanctuary County for 30 years. You speaking to the Mike, please. My name is Gary Taylor. I've been living in the county for about 30 years. I got into an automobile accident about two years ago. And I'm just gonna tell you a little bit about the background. I was homeless in this city for about a year. Almost a year and a half. So I know what it's like out there. I know exactly what it's like. Also without any help, no one got out of it. Work took a lot of hard work. I have some suggestions that you guys might be interested in. I don't really know. I'm not familiar with the system works. You might see me in the future here. I hope that you do. Anyone that has any advice, you'll have to talk to me. You can speak directly to Mike and face us, please. Anyone that wants to help me out or give me advice, the procedures and policies, how things work. Totally open to that. Please do let me know. Now in the streets, there's a lot of violence going around people stealing people's things. I think that anyone, hold on nervous, excuse me. Anyone that has the motivation to get up and get a job and get themselves out of the situation, I think we should provide some resources so they can do that. The easiest way is the, and I look at the homeless population is all the same, but see the ones that got put there by a situation that are working to get out of it, and the ones that's just kind of idling, stealing and drug use. I know that one issue I had, I lost multiple jobs over this, was a place to put my things when I got up to go to work where there would be when I got to come back to have clothing, to have shelter, to have warmth, to have hygiene things. These are the things you have to have succeed other than that unique communication you must have. There's challenges there. Businesses don't want you in their business, not spending any money in charging your phone. You can't even get your phone on.  But there are people too, where are they gonna charge a phone at, where are they? You know, that's not a huge deal.  I'm not very organized. You could just wrap it up, you say last sentence please. Yeah, the two ideas that they basically have is one of them is a day storage. People that are motivated can come to store the things for the day so they can progress and get out of there and not be homeless anymore. The other is an outdoor low budget structure where qualified homeless can enter to live. And yeah. Thank you, sir. Thank you for your comments. I appreciate you being here. And if you wanna put your name and write down. Okay, thank you, sir. Next speaker. Thanks, Greg, for speaking. And I'm sure you don't need to hear this, but many of the people living on the street were born and raised here or lived here for decades. And it's not actually statistically according to a point in time survey magnet for people living on the streets. And whenever I offer a free bus ticket out of here, the response is usually I was born here. I don't need a free bus to get home. The thing that I found most interesting in the presentation was the unusual drop in property crimes in 2008. And I think that highlights our definition of property crimes because we know that that was the year of the most property crimes. But those property crimes were actually committed by Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America, where they stole literally dozens and dozens of people that I personally knows their homes. And so there is a direct correlation between the lack of enforcement against the theft of our community by bankers and outside interests that come here and steal people's property and the amount of people living on the streets.  And you know many of those people too. You probably are your friends. So I think the definition of crime is one of the issues that we could face as a community. And there's a well-respected professor named Alex Vitale who is just, I just saw he gave a presentation about his book in Wales about three days ago. And his book is called The End of Policing and he has done decades of research in changing the policing ideas and how it impacts the community. And I certainly encourage you to invite him to come here and speak. Thank you. Thank you. This is the final speaker unless someone else steps up. So final speaker and we'll bring it back to council. Thank you mayor and council members and chief mills. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the ongoing work that you and your department have been doing to meet with a variety of community members and kind of I see it as sort of coming out of some sort of a shell. So I'm wondering and hoping that this is gonna bring a lot of reassurance to the community that you're accessible, that you're easy to talk to. It felt in my experience that maybe the prior police department was meeting with a couple of community groups and not a wide variety of people. So, and something that you said sort of setting your department up to fail it sort of resonated with me is I'm wondering if referring to your officers as heroes and I have a love for the Santa Cruz Police Department. My uncle was a police officer a hundred years ago but I think that that could possibly set up the community for disappointment because maybe they're also expecting that and I personally like to have coffee with a real person. I wanna have a beer with a police officer. I wanna really relate to them on a one-on-one level and I don't want to have you feel like you have to be my rescuer, my hero. And I'm just wondering if that's sort of a cultural misunderstanding that could be addressed. I really appreciate your addressing some of the complex issues that feed crime like the economic disparity that we're experiencing, public health crises, climate weather, freeway interchanges, it's all very complex. It's not as simple as we sometimes like to think and lifting a variety of people up in the community that aren't in this room would do us all a lot better and I really appreciate you mentioning that. And just in closing, I'd like to say that the website is amazing. There's so much more information for people that can't meet with you or can't come to a meeting. I look forward to seeing stop data. I look forward to seeing more information from the Rangers. I look forward to seeing that the Rangers are getting some de-escalation training because they're dealing with a troubled population that needs assistance and I just wanna thank you and I wanna thank all the officers here in this room that I find very accessible and easy to talk to and let's continue to build relationships in the community and hopefully ease some of the balloon that you feel is sort of- Thank you. Thank you. Okay, this will be the final speaker unless the person in the back of the room standing wants to speak. This is the final speaker of the evening before it goes back to council. Good evening, I'm Damon Bruder, a concerned citizen. Thank you, Chief Mills for being here. I have heard through the grapevine, the rumblings underground that your officers are upsetting people because your officers are starting to do their job. These are law-abiding people or generally law-abiding people that have gotten tickets for various things. Yay, I'm glad. If I deserve a ticket, write one to me. If anybody deserves a ticket, write one. Catch and release, I know that's the situation right now, your hands are tied. Please keep catching. As far as the release part, well, that's up to the laws that govern the judges. There is an initiative going around right now, the Keep California Safe Initiative. It closes the loopholes in Prop 47 and 57 to help you do your job. If you want to sign that petition or hear about it, see my wife after the meeting. And I do want to applaud the Rangers and the SCPD for the way that they handle situations that could quickly escalate. I saw a situation on Pacific Avenue last week where a ranger talked to a gentleman and actually ended up getting him at that moment a bus ticket home to San Francisco to get out here because that's what he wanted. Even though the person was on to deal with the Rangers, they handled it very professionally and very patiently. And that's what I see when I see the Rangers and I see the SCPD when they deal with people like that. They deal with them compassionately, professionally and patiently. And I thank you for that. Thank you. Okay, I'll bring it back to council. I know there was someone who mentioned the issue of the charging and storage and he's left. And so those of you either Cynthia or Rochelle who are on the homeless coordinating committee can email him and talk about what that work's done. I'd appreciate it. And I think I'd just like to say, this is an opportunity for comments but also questions if there are still that come after the public speakers. I want to say that this is the first time we've ever had a comprehensive report since I've been on council that went into the staff and organizational issues that I feel are just essential to say how we can move forward. I mean, we have what I feel is a public safety kind of crisis when you look at the statistics that we've seen over the past 10 years. The report that you've showed us goes up through 2015 but it looks like we've had just a consistently high level of crime that's existed in this town. And we cannot just continue to tolerate the way things have been, it's got to change. And so by having a restructured department that looks at how we manage those, I think is essential for our city's future. One of the things that I really want to speak to is the fact that how we're measuring what constitutes safety in this town also has to change. If we're taking information that comes through where we're treating all crimes the same way, everything becomes an urgency. And I know you're speaking to that in your comments but when this consolidation of all the 911 non-emergency and emergency calls took place, it was about in 2007 and it was a means to track that. And the number you shared as the one that's kind of more of the emergency level is kind of consistent what it was at the time that they merged them then. And so when we look at whether or not officers are responding at this time, it seems as though we're kind of at that same place and there's been kind of a static. So I want to just make sure that one, when we look forward that we're measuring how we are going to be making improvements. If it's by neighborhood then I think we should be looking at the types of reporting that comes back to us, not the reports that we've seen recently but what are the types of crimes that are taking place in the beach flats area or the downtown or in the Upper West side or East side so that we're seeing where we can go from there because they're not, right now, I don't know how we as a city can say to invest more, will we get that result? If it's not a monetary thing in my mind, I think there's some other policy issues at play that we need to really focus on. And I read the report thoroughly and I thought that their comments that they had about having the police department advocate with the electeds on where those are was for me like a critical thing. And I don't think we hear enough as far as, what are those barriers that we have that go beyond our staffing levels that we need to focus on as a city? Those are just some initial comments but I'd love to hear from the council as far as how we can better prioritize these safety issues that are outlined in the report as well as kind of the ultimate staffing recommendations that are included. Council Member Cronin. Yeah, I'd like to first run through really quickly and I know you're a big guy as we've talked about these questions. I noticed five questions came up from the public. Police on bikes? We have them. And in fact, Brandon Lima, you're still here. How many miles you put it in a week? Ah, come on. No. Reaching out to Beach Flats residents, there was no forum. I know one of them I guess was included in the, was it Bayview? No, it was Galt School, both of them. But how do we reach out to Beach Flats residents? Well, we frequently are down there on foot talking with residents. Leo, we have several Spanish speakers who go door to door down there on a regular basis and work with people. We did not break it down to every single small neighborhood in the city. That had just been way too many meetings. It was a push as it was. So they were included in several of those meeting areas. Seven uniformed officers here tonight. Are they all on duty? I'm open mark because I've asked my deputy chiefs and my lieutenants to be here as managers who are representing their service areas in case you had questions for them. So yeah, they're most of them are on duty. And just to respond to the hero's comment. They are heroes. Okay, we'll leave it at that. And but they can't drink beer on duty. And maybe this is, I know that the city manager and I talked about this. Two questions came up, a non-emergency number and the bus ticket home and how do we get people home? With respect to the non-emergency number, there is one that the Netcom has in place. And I think part of the change might be to, I think before the rationale was it goes to the same place. But however, the distinction here though is the response needs to be different. So it does matter. So I think we'll start work with Netcom to make that change. The other thing that I've mentioned to you too that we're working on is we are looking at implementing a 311 system, an app where people can, with their phones, submit complaints. And so that's gearing up here to get going pretty soon. So hopefully by the fall, we should have that up and running to make it easier for people to report crimes. And related to that too is as we look at this data and we look at alternatives to responding to calls, I think working with all the other city staff, we can, for example, there are areas where it makes more sense to have public works, for example, respond to certain calls of a certain variety will make that change as appropriate. So we'll be looking at all of that. And the bus ticket home? Oh, we do have a homeward bound program that an individual alluded to that is offered to individuals. And actually, we do make quite a use of that. We actually expanded the budget for that. So people do regularly choose to go home through that program. And the last question for chief is the ticketing of homeless campers. Is that continuing? Is it any different than before the bench lands took place? No, my policy still stands from a nine at night to six in the morning. If people are sleeping, we don't issue a ticket when there's not a complaint. And if there is a complaint, then we take care of business. But during the daytime, it's still legal to camp. Thank you, mayor. Council member Chase. Yeah, I just really appreciated the approach that the report took basically talking about realigning resources. And I think that's really smart looking at what we have and utilizing it better. The way I describe it to people often is putting the right response to the right situation at the right time. And I think referencing actually the conversation with chief Frawley is really important too is how much time officers are going out to respond to public health issues when it's really a public health response that's needed. And I think that's a huge part of what we see in this community and was referenced many times tonight whether it be really relating to homelessness or substance abuse or behavioral health. Those are really public health issues. And so I just appreciate the approach you're taking and I'm looking forward to see what it does to realign the resources that you have now and continue to encourage every possible creative way to get more staff and know that I think council has consistently been behind that doing whatever we can to support that. Absolutely, you have it. Thank you. Vice Mayor Watkins. Thank you for your presentation tonight and for all the folks that are here in the audience. I just wanna say how much respect I have for the work that you do in our community and having worked alongside a number of the officers in my other capacity in education. I know how dedicated you are to our community and we feel that and we know it. I really wanna say how much I appreciate that this report is data-driven and is looking at how our systems are functioning and how they can improve. And I think systems change is challenging and it takes time, but I believe it's necessary. And I think law enforcement and criminalization and there's a place for that and also a bigger sort of picture of the health and well-being of our community and the health and well-being of your officers are tied to that. I think, bless you. One of the components that I just really appreciate you bringing up and what I feel really passionate about is prevention. I think we foster what we feed and if we feed more preventative activities and preventative strategies, then we will see results. And so I'm really all for that and supportive of that. I believe that this is a bigger community conversation and I really look forward to more partnerships and collaborations, communities, strategies, diversions, neighborhood accountability boards, whatever it may be to start saying how can we as a community rise up to be supportive of the health and well-being of all of our community and that and then results in less criminal activity often. I am interested in workforce development and I know I've mentioned that too also. I think we can build our own and I think there's a lot of beauty in that and the connections and ties to the local community and then also just the sort of logistics of how expensive it is to live in this community and so if we can work on workforce development and trying to recruit and engage and create that pipeline, that would be fantastic in a consideration for succession planning. And then just really the alignment of resources I think is a really incredible takeaway. I think when we know information, we have to do something about that and the takeaway in terms of how to more proactively look at what we have and how to best utilize that is incredibly important. So I have a number of observations as somebody who really appreciates criminal justice and public safety and health and well-being of our community but I'll leave it at that and just really thank you for the work and I look forward to periodically hearing updates on where we are so we can measure our success and sort of check in and see where we can go in the right direction from there. Council Member Naroyan. I know in your goal of getting more officers out on patrol that you're looking at some changes and when Vice Mayor Watkins mentioned the prevention side of things which I believe we're all very passionate about. I know that you do, you know, we have the Citizens Police Academy which is an education component of the community and something I went through several years ago I just find invaluable in terms of bringing that here to Council Member and also the Pride Program which gets involved with at-risk youth that are at the mission or junior high, oh, junior high just dated myself, middle school age level. So I'm wondering, will those programs still exist and if so, how, if most of the officers are gonna be out in the field? Well the person running those programs was Leo Gomez who everybody just raves about and I rave about him as well. I've redeployed him to the field. However, today I met with a group of volunteers and to try to transfer much of the responsibility to a cadre of volunteers who can run these same programs with the help and the assistance of sworn personnel. Now that's a huge lift to ask of volunteers. This is a very robust program, a lot of time commitment. So what we're probably going to do is continue these programs as much as we can, tailoring them back just a little bit so that we can continue with the programs, however, move it forward. Council Vice Mayor Watkins gave me a grant the other day to deal with tobacco and so we see this as a way to work with the Pride Program and so I've got a person writing that grant, it's due I think at the end of this week so we're pushing a deadline and we think we might be able to bring that person on as should we be successful in that grant application to run the program completely. So we're trying to find ways to push forward, continue these programs. We see them as hugely beneficial to the department, to the city. I'm not interested in backing away from those. We just have to figure out what's a reasonable balance because I need every boot on the ground right now to deal with the crime issues. All right and I know what's great and I know what the Pride Program because I'm involved with my other hat on. Our interns wanna continue, our UC Santa Cruz interns who work with Pride definitely wanna continue helping so look to that as a resource as well and maybe there's an opportunity to step it up from that end as well. Great, thank you. That's one brown. I would just echo the comments from my colleagues about the tremendous respect that I also have for the work that you all do. Understanding it's very difficult. I mean, I guess I would just highlight my appreciation for a couple of the ways that you've talked this evening and have been engaging with the public around this question of one, police officers being kind of tasked with the job of social services within our city and the challenges and the frustrations that I imagine officers face. I really appreciate the data-driven, the report but it doesn't necessarily give you the picture of what people experience on the ground and so I think it's really important for all of us to stay in touch with that and I'll be talking with you about ride-alongs in the very near future. I haven't done one in quite a while but I think just really being mindful of that and I appreciate that you are and that you really are supporting a team of officers and personnel who have the best interests of our city at heart and also your position on enforcement of our camping ordinance or sleeping ban and I hope that that has taken some of the pressure off of officers but I don't really know so if you want to say anything about that now that would be great but otherwise we can talk about that in the future so thank you for everything you're doing and I'm really excited. I think a lot of people in the community are excited. I know at my neighborhood meeting at Galt School I saw people who live on my street who were really inspired and want to get involved in community policing in a way and feel really, they feel that the police department is becoming more accessible and so I just appreciate that and thank you to our deputy chiefs who are here as well. I know you're committed to that too. Thanks. You know, I just would follow up on something that was included in the report. There was a recommendation that the consultants made about considering the establishment of a dedicated team that dealt with the social services issues that are really being handled by the police department. I know we've seen in the city of San Jose where they have groups that are assembled to deal with some of the issues that come up so they're signed directly and they're budgeted. We as part of our work plan have set up a group that's one tasked with issues of homelessness and others. Have you thought about why that wasn't in their recommendation, the final recommendation to have that type of group assigned to deal this so that we are kind of furthering that realignment to have maybe non-officers handle those types of tasks? Well, I think that is an important issue to look at and one of the things I'm really proud of of the city is that our neighborhood services team and the entire city is kind of unified in dealing with these problems together. And it's one group of people all pushing the same direction and that's so important for us to be successful that way. We have, as you know, mental health liaisons who ride with their officers in the cars and from the county and they do a great job dealing with some of these bigger mental health issues. But I would be very in favor of a team that is a county-wide team that assesses this that works with city employees as well as county employees, mostly county employees. This is the responsibility. I just don't think that should be a police responsibility. We got to dig ourselves out of this problem rather than get further entrenched. And now having said that, we're the only game in town right now and that becomes kind of tough until, let's say we, the city is the only game in town. Well, I mean, I'll just say we have funded programs to kind of address that in a comprehensive way. And we do have some council members on various committees that kind of are looking at those. I would like maybe our public safety committee to look at that very issue about how we can kind of continue to shift some of those responsibilities to non-PD assignments so that they can be freed up even further. Sure. We did that earlier in the year with some of the public works and doing traffic enforcement. I don't know if that's still continuing, like in terms of the parking in different parts of the city. And I think there's opportunities for other areas to deal with that and other kind of programs that maybe could be peeled off to further free up officers. And I'd like to hear from the PD and city manager's office on where those might be. The other thing is I feel like there should be realignment with results. That's important that we say that, hey, we are doing this and there's a reason why we're moving forward is to see a positive change. And you outlined a five year kind of period of time that you see these results taking place, I think it would be good to at least indicate what kind of expectations the community would be seeing in each of those periods over time. So we know exactly the direction we're going and we can have the opportunity to comment on it. But the realignments with results, I think is a strategy to make our community safer. And I like the idea of making sure that we're identifying where in our neighborhoods we're able to prioritize to make our city safer. Agreed, one of the things that I'm having my lieutenants do is meet with the deputy chiefs and myself monthly to give us an update on what they're doing, what their priorities are in their neighbor policing areas and how we're doing in terms of the data associated with that. Now creating that data at this point is a little bit rough. I have to be honest because of the RMS system. However, we're going to do the best we can and move forward. I would hope that community members would start to see relief. And it shouldn't take five years to see that kind of relief. We need to, as I said before, listening time is over. Now it's time to get at it and we're getting at it. Just one final comment and that is, I know Carol Scourge from Parks and Recs is here. We, it would be good if the Parks and Rec Commission were able to hear the recommendations on the ranger issues that came up. We've got an email on that. I'd like to make sure that's rolled out. I haven't heard any feedback from the parks, but I think the program's been very successful in terms of prioritizing some of the park safety issues and keeping them well maintained in parts of the city. And I think having something that's reorganized might even kind of expand it to new parks and other areas. So it'd be good to get their feedback on what this proposal means to the parks department from one of our subcommittees as well. So I hope you'll plan to do that. Sure. Council Member Cron. Three quick issues that are kind of leftovers that have been part of our community discussions and then a couple of comments, but HSI, they have a desk no longer at the police department and what's our relationship there? Homeland security investigations. Yeah, no, I know who is. Okay, for the public. They do not have a desk in the police department. They are completing that large case where you would hopefully we'll see indictments in the near future, but there's no activity in terms of immigration enforcement period. Okay. And exclamation point from the Santa Cruz Police Department. Thank you. And ICE, what's our relationship right now with them? Well, it's kind of ICE's division of HSI. And there's the relationship as if you have information that we need intelligence on terrorism or something, we'll take it, but we're not working with them. And crisis intervention training. There was a goal to get all the officers trained. Has that been realized? It has. We gave a de-escalation training to our entire department. Had members of the community come and watch it to make sure that it was something that was in line with what they were thinking was and it was successful. And I think we can chalk up a save from the other day just with that. Okay, I just want to say that I really appreciate all of your efforts that what you've been doing reaching out the first day when I met you going to Cafe Pergolese for a coffee, and just your jumping in my leaf and taking a tour of places around Santa Cruz. I want to say thank you to the deputy chiefs too. I saw those, though I was at three of those meetings recently. I thought you, Lieutenant Garcia as well. I thought you guys did a stellar job reaching out to people. And I think that's what it really is about. It's that contact people want of voice. We don't have all the answers and we're looking into the public for some answers, but I really thought you all did just a bang up job at those meetings. You stayed for a while for every question to be answered as people left and stuff. This report, I read a lot of reports and this is a better report and it's much more professional, but it's also sort of in your face. It's pointing out the warts as well as what you do well. So a lot of reports are written for people who pay for the report to be written and there's a little bit of that in here, but there's also some criticism and some like, hey, this is how to do better. And I really appreciate seeing that in print as well. Lastly, just to underline what Councilman Joaquin said about public health issues, really important that we pursue that line of with the public and everything's not a police intervention, there's a lot of public health interventions going on and we need to make that happen and I really appreciate teaming up with Chief Frawley and anybody at the county too who wants to be part of that to address those issues. So thanks a lot, appreciate it. Okay, do you have any comments? No, okay, there's action that's on the floor that we need, so can I get a motion? I'll move that we accept the recommendation as written in the report. Second. Councilor vice mayor. Vice Mayor Joaquin, I'll do the chair of the public safety committee, Councilmember Norrion. So that's a motion and a second. And also I hope that we have a referral kind of to the public safety committee to go into more detail in terms of some of the discussion points that we had today and also kind of continue to follow up on this. I appreciate that not only the format of the presentation but the reporting as Councilmember Cron mentioned that was provided and I could see how this would be beneficial in other parts of the city to see stuff like this to know, hey, how we can move the needle on our public safety needs in the city. So thank you. Okay, there's a motion, a second on the floor. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Those opposed, say no. That passes unanimously. Have a good evening. The meeting is adjourned. Bonnie, by looking over at you, the external, okay, we're gonna have the audio broadcast out here under the eaves. So if someone wanted to be out there, it's not too bad enough to stand under the eaves where you can listen to this and watch through the window. We also have areas outside in the front there that you could wait until we get to the point of public comment where you could speak. Again, I appreciate everyone's presence here today and also the ability to be patient as we wade through this item. I haven't opened up the meeting, but I will do so. I wanted just to make sure everybody had that information that there is available space across at the Civic Auditorium, Tony Hill Room, and those of you that are willing to go over there, you'll have much more room to spread out and make yourself comfortable. So with that being said, good evening and welcome to our 7 p.m. session of the November 27th, 2018 meeting of the city council. I'd now like to ask the clerk to please say the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council member, it's Cron. Present. Matthews. Here. Chase is absent. Brown. Here. Narayan is currently absent. Vice Mayor Watkins. Here. Mayor Tarazzo. Here. Again, reiterating from the script, we have available space at the Tony Hill Room across the street. It's televised and we also have access to the clerk for those of you who want to speak that when it gets up to the item of your interest. We have two items on tonight's agenda. There's the first item is a item in regards to the relocation assistance for displaced tenants and ordinance amendment and update. This is an item that came before the council in June and then came back again in September. It was something that had been reviewed by our housing committee. There was a public meeting that took place earlier in the year. So some of the information that's included in there is not new, but it is one what we're still going to have the presentation and then allow public comment to come forward. So I'd like at this point to turn it over to planning director Lee Butler to open up this item. Thank you and good evening, Mayor and council members. Lee Butler, I'm planning director and thanks for that introduction of the item before you this evening. Everyone is aware that housing is a very significant issue here in Santa Cruz and in the region and in the state. And here locally, we've been doing a lot of things to address the housing challenges that we have. Late last year, led by then mayor Chase, there was a significant community outreach effort and that effort resulted in a housing voices report where 99 recommendations were set forth in three different categories, housing production, housing protection and community vitality. And this evening, later this evening with the accessory dwelling unit considerations we'll be focusing more on production with the relocation assistance item before you now were focused on the housing protection. And as the mayor mentioned on June 12th, the council provided direction related to the recommendations from that, the subcommittee. Hold on one second, Mr. Well, if you would please, Mr. Norse, you could ask Bonnie. Okay, so what I would like to do is first check and I guess what the the audios and being broadcast outside. If you just put his face a little closer to the mic it'd be fine. Okay, well I won't put him, but if you'd actually speak a little closer to the mic, I appreciate that. And so based on the recommendations, thank you Bonnie. Based on the recommendations from the housing blueprint subcommittee, the council provided direction on June 12th to bring back a relocation assistance ordinance that would provide some measures of protections for renters should measure him the rent control and just cause eviction measure fail. And so staff brought that back on September the 11th of this year and we had a significant amount of community interest in it. The community and the council all weighed in and the council asked that we do that. The council asked that we delay the consideration of this item until after the election. This particular ordinance would only be in effect should measure him fail and should the council adopt it. And it does appear that measure him is not going to pass and therefore we have brought this item back before the council for your consideration this evening. The ordinance is almost identical to what was presented to you on September 11th with a couple of minor exceptions in terms of clarification on the timing of when relocation payments would be due as well as some allowances for the city council to change certain aspects of the ordinance through resolution, just making it easier for the council in the future to change certain components. And with that, I will turn it over to our team, Scott Harriman and Sarah Fleming can provide some details on the ordinance itself and we're available for any questions following this brief presentation from Scott. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good evening Mayor Tarasas and members of the city council. My name is Scott Harriman. The item before you this evening is proposed amendments to chapter 2103, relocation assistance for displaced tenants by way of some history, chapter 2103 as it currently exists in the Muni Code requires relocation assistance for tenants who are required to vacate a unit due to unsafe, hazardous living conditions or illegal use of a structure as a residence. The ordinance amendments before you expands 2103 to add additional tenant protections requiring the landlord to pay relocation assistance if a tenant relocates due to a large rent increase. The amendment defines a large rent increase and establishes the payment amount and the timeline for a landlord to pay the relocation assistance to the tenant or tenants. This ordinance amendment is not rent control. It does not include just cause eviction because it is not rent control. The provisions of this would apply to all rental units in the city of Santa Cruz and is not subject to limitations contained in the state law that cost the Hawkins law. This ordinance amendment is a tenant protection measure that was identified in the housing blueprint subcommittee report that was adopted earlier this year. As well as this evening and throughout this process, staff has met with and reached out to various community groups prior to the September council meeting and prior to this meeting. A community workshop was held on this item July 17th which included this topic in the workshop session. Staff and city council have and continued to receive public comments on the item. The item was previously heard at the September 11th council meeting at which time extensive public comments were received. The item was continued pending the results of the election although the vote is not certified tabulations as Mr. Butler indicated indicate that the measure will not pass. At the September hearing city council provided direction to consider comments that were provided by the city excuse me that were provided through the public process including defining authorized tenants, clarify the timeline for paying relocation assistance and to consider language from the Los Gatos municipal code which prohibited evictions to avoid the payment of relocation assistance. The city council at that time also requested that the city attorney look into the possibility of having tenant protections apply retroactively to prevent a time gap from this ordinance adoption and certifying the results of the election. This slide provides a summary of the key components that the ordinance amendments contain. Other revisions have been made since the September hearing. They include comments received by the public and recommendations from the city council. The ordinance amendment specifies that relocation assistance would be required from a landlord to tenants to leave a unit due to a large rent increase. A large rent increase as it's proposed now is defined as more than 10% in one year or 15.5% in any two consecutive years. The city attorney has recommended language that allows the city council to modify this percentage or amount by resolution. The ordinance before you this evening includes that language and that provision. Landlords must pay relocation assistance equal the two months of the actual rent pre-increase. The city attorney has also included language that allows the city council to modify this amount by resolution. The ordinance before you this evening includes that provision. Payments must be made within 21 days of the tenant giving notice of their intent to vacate. This timeline for paying relocation assistance has been revised from the September council meeting. There was an anomaly that was pointed out by a citizen. We've corrected it through that public input and we appreciate the input. Tenants have 60 days following the start of the large rent increase to state their intent to vacate. As requested by the city council, the city attorney has provided language that obligates a landlord to pay relocation assistance retroactively for a large rent increase that has an effective date on or after the council certifies that election. The provision, this provision has been added in response to the council concern regarding the time gap and it is in the ordinance before you this evening. Other suggestions that were received in the September meeting include to define authorized tenant. However, when we looked at chapter 2103, the term tenant is used throughout the ordinance and it's specified and it requires protections for those who are forced to relocate due to unsafe, unhealthy living conditions or illegal use of a structure as a residence. These unsafe, unhealthy conditions are different circumstances than those that involve large rent increase. And so as an alternative to that, so the Los Gatos ordinance doesn't necessarily apply. As an alternative to that staff is included text in the draft ordinance that clarifies that relocation assistance is paid in the same manner and to the same individual from whom the payment is received. Staff believes that this revision responds appropriately to the intent of the comment that was received. We also received a request to consider a public comment to review the Los Gatos language. And now as I previously said, the Los Gatos rent has a rent control ordinance and the language from the Los Gatos rent control ordinance doesn't directly apply to the city of Santa Cruz. We don't have a rent control ordinance. Los Gatos does, their ordinance limits the amount a rent can be raised, our ordinance does not do that. So therefore they don't reply. It doesn't comply or doesn't relate to our city. Staff has prepared draft language as a potential option for city council to review as an option this evening. So the options for city council consideration tonight is to adopt the amendment as proposed before you. You may take no action on the item. You may modify the ordinance and for example, you can revise this evening the 10 to 15.5% thresholds and you can also revise the relocation assistant amount which currently shows us two months. I will point out that those two provisions, the council may modify at any time into the future by resolution. So you may do it this evening or you may do it at any time in the future. The alternate language that we have come up with which prohibits evictions as a means of avoiding paying the relocation, for example, would read, if an eviction is found to be or has been predominantly motivated by a landlord's desire to raise rents above the thresholds established herein, then the tenants are entitled to relocation assistant payments as well as associated attorney's fees. With that, the staff recommends that the city council approve amendments to the municipal code relocation assistance for displaced tenants as they're presented this evening. That concludes my staff report and I am happy to take questions. Thank you. What do you think? We'll go to the public first or do you have initial questions you wanna ask? I'd like to hear from Mr. Herman. Why does the staff support this? And is it just a staff inspired initiative recommendation or have council members worked with you on putting this together? Maybe I could say this before we go into it. I mean, the agenda report was pretty clear. This was something that had been referred to the housing subcommittee after council direction. There was a unanimous council vote that referred it to the housing subcommittee for review. There was also a public meeting that took place sometime in June where we invited members of the public to review the proposal before it came back and then a staff just reported this was brought forward September 11th of this year for review by the council and there was a determination made by the council that it wouldn't be acted upon until after the election. I'd like anybody from the housing subcommittee wanna weigh in on that? Well, I can say that in the subcommittee we did have conversations about wanting to have something that we could potentially put in place should measure M not pass. And the idea of relocation assistance came up. It was discussed, my recollection is it was discussed in relatively general terms. So this was not something that we as a committee crafted this language, but we did say that we were interested as a group in ensuring that we wouldn't leave people hanging should measure M not pass. So the discussion was pretty open-ended, I'd say. That's my recollection. No percentages put on it, like a large increase is not 15.5%. At the time we didn't discuss numbers, no. No? Okay, I just have one quick question. I know it was something that came up afterwards but the idea that something could be changed by resolution. How is the public notified when something like that happens if you're not doing the readings and publicizing what the changes are? Sure, so that would be through the public hearing process. So it would be noticed as any other public hearing would be, just like this meeting was noticed today, we had a legal ad in the paper and notifying people that a city-wide ordinance change would be happening or via resolution. But is there a different requirement? Because I don't recall that we do postings for resolutions. We wouldn't have to, but I think as a matter of practice, we would. Okay. Okay, so that was my initial question. Any other members? Council, we wish to ask anything at this time because if not, I think what I'd do is like to just open it up for public comment first so that we can hear from the public before we deliberate and take action. There were four members of the public that requested additional time. They were Cynthia Berger, formerly Santa Cruz Tennis Association, now Power Surge Tenants Rights. Jessica Chiduyen, excuse me, and Rachela might ask you to. That's a terrible pronunciation. Tell me, how would you say that? Do I have it in front of me? Maybe not. What is it? Chiduyen, thank you. Ingersoll, students united with renters and Lynn Renshaw with Santa Cruz together. And then we also had, I believe, Mr. Norse from Huff, is that right? Yes. So those are the four, so we'll take them in order. Oh, excuse me, before we begin, I'd like to also ask the city attorney to provide an update to not only the council, but to the public on an email that he sent out that described what action we're taking today and also what deliberations will happen in regards to this agenda item that's posted. So city attorney Tony Condati. Yes. Thank you. I'm leaning into the mic. I want to clarify one point first. And that is that while I did provide the language regarding the retroactive application of the ordinance, the portion or the modification that allows the council to adjust the different percentages and whatnot, by resolution is not a recommendation of my office. I reviewed that language, but that's purely a policy decision for the council to make. And I don't have a recommendation on that. Second thing is that under the Brown Act, each agenda item that the council is going to consider in a public meeting for each, there has to be a brief general description of the business to be transacted or the item to be considered on the agenda. And there's been a fair bit of public discussion already about the idea of the council taking action this evening on an extension of the rent-freeze ordinance that was adopted by the council last February. The Brown Act would not allow the council to take that action at this evening's meeting because that is not the subject matter of this agenda item. The council could direct that an item be considered or direct that an item be agendized for consideration at a future meeting, but you will not be able tonight to take action on an extension of the rent-freeze ordinance. Should that be the council's inclination to do so? Thank you. Okay. Well, what I'd like to do then is open it up and ask for those that request for organizational time to speak first. The first up is Cynthia Berger from Power Surge Tenants Rights. Power Surge, but my PowerPoint doesn't work. Oh, we're on. So good evening, council members. I'm Cynthia and thank you for the opportunity to speak on this proposed relocation law amendments. As I understand, it's an amendment to the already law. And so there's an amendment Yeah, I didn't get in on the planning discussion for this law, but the problem with the relocation laws already is that there's really no way to enforce them without the will to do so. And they're also just tricky to enforce. So you can make relocation laws up the hall and back, but that doesn't mean they're going to be enforced. In fact, I just got off the phone with one of the six UCSE students who was evicted last year from an illegal dwelling and they never got their full relocation payments, even with the assistance of the Code Compliance Department. So that's just a caveat about relocation laws. So the other issue with this law that I think is pretty terrible is that it gives the message that a 9% rent raise is not a real high rent raise. When a 3% rent raise in Santa Cruz is the same as the average median wage raise, which is 3% annually. But of course we know in Santa Cruz that we have very low wages. So there already is a disparity between what a 3% rent raise is compared to what people's actual 3% wage raise is in Santa Cruz. For example, the average wage in Santa Cruz is $970 a week. And the average wage in Santa Clara County is $2,570 a week. Now, what I see happening is that you're going for those people. You're not going to help the people here who are making in our local economy $970 a week. What you'd like to really do in the Economic Development Department or somebody who keeps approving all these market rate apartments is get rid of all these people who can't afford that. That is the effect of what's going on. And when you build these market rate apartments, that doesn't bring down any of the rents. So as the Federal Reserve recently showed that if you build 5% more housing, the housing at the very top end of the rentals might go down 0.05%. So that's not going to be the full answer. And as far as relocation, well, the relocation is out of line with the actual prices today. So there are a lot of different indexes of prices, but on Zillow, the actual prices are well-recorded and the relocation that you're offering is going to cause people, we don't want them to move, if they're relocated, we don't want them to move to Fresno. We want them to move and stay in our community. They're our friends. So they need to have higher amount of money for relocation in Santa Cruz, much higher because of that wage disparity that's been going on for so many years, and you're well aware that we can't be aiming, housing for Santa Clara County salaries here, and that's what's happening. And also like people on social security and disability, they didn't get any cost of living adjustment in 2016-0. Thank you. Okay. Thanks. Okay, and Jessica with the Students United with Renters, you're up and again, forgive me what police, your last name is? My name's Jessica Chouidian-Ingersal. Chouidian-Ingersal, thank you. Key of four minutes. Okay, great. So yeah, I'm an organizer with Students United with Renters. We are an autonomous group of student and non-student renters, which spent nearly a year organizing for rent control and counseling tenants about their rights under the rent freeze that we have. A rent freeze which has protected and untold thousands of renters from excessive rent increases and no-fall evictions. A rent freeze which the media publicized several times when veterans were protected from no-fall evictions on California Street. When enforced, we know that the rent freeze works. So now is not the time for rushed compromises. The proposed ordinance from September falls short in several ways. Let's address this 10% a year trigger and apply it to actual rents that people are paying. One landlord that I know charges $1,326 a month for one room and another landlord charges a similar rate for a garage. 10% on that is $132 more a month. Would the employer of that renter then give 30-day notice of a wage increase? Unlikely. Two people that I know personally currently pay $2,800 for a two-bedroom apartment. A 10% increase on that is $280 more a month. How does one suddenly acquire almost $300 more a month, especially if you're already working full-time with an average renter wage of $14 an hour? 10% cap wouldn't even be enough. In addition, this new proposal's provision that the rent caps be unbinding and on the backs of tenants to prove is too excessive is a slap in the face to those who would rather struggle to stay in their home than take a check and leave.  This new proposal says that you're okay with that. And worse, perhaps the biggest loophole of them all is that this new proposal doesn't have just cause. We include a just cause in the rent freeze because without it, a landlord only has to evict a tenant to get around the rent stabilization protections. This is a matter of upholding a tenant's right to stability in a time of crisis. A landlord should have to prove that the reason they're displ