UnGovr Transcript
iHow this transcript is madeUnGovr transcribes the official recording with automated speech-to-text, separates speakers by voice, and matches voices to the seated roster. Names and attributions are AI estimates and may contain errors.Verify any quote yourself: click anywhere in the transcript and the official video jumps to that exact moment, so you can check any quote against the recording.0:00 – 0:032 turns
you
I'd like to call this session to order.
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You unruly bunch this morning. This is great. Let's call this session to order. Roll call please.
Ms. Hartman here Mr. Adam here Mr. Lavagnino here Ms. Wolfe here Mr. Williams
Can I get a motion on the minutes of June 19th? So moved. All those
in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? It's unanimous. There is no CEO's report this week. Then we will go
to our ceremonial items. Will you read?
Chair Williams, members of the board. If we could get a motion on items A46 through A51 and we go ahead and present the resolutions. So moved. Second.
All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? It's unanimous. Please read A46.
Okay. Chair Williams, members of the board, our first resolution this morning is sponsored by our chair, Supervisor Williams. This is a resolution of combination honoring Joe Ayala and Nick Lugo as the July 2018 Employees of the Month for Santa Barbara County. And if Joe and Nick could come on up to the podium. I will go ahead and read the resolution into the record.
Barney is here as well. Whereas, the computer aided dispatch system utilized within the Santa Barbara County Public Safety Dispatch Center is a crucial tool used by our dispatchers in handling emergency and non-emergency calls for service occurring throughout the county. And whereas historically performing system upgrades or windows operating system updates within the CAD system utilized within the public safety dispatch center required a complete shutdown of the CAD system for hours at a time.
And whereas in the mid-2015, the Sheriff's System and Technology EDP OAS2 Nick Lugo became aware of a technology solution that would dramatically improve our CAD systems redundancy and availability. However, the application of this technology within the CAD environment was uncharted and would require extensive research integration and testing. After receiving appropriate approvals, Nick Lugo the Sheriff's Communications Dispatch Supervisor joined all that teamed up and worked tirelessly over the next two years to implement this new technology in the first quarter of 2018 and did so while juggling many other projects.
And whereas, as a result of Nick and Joe's extraordinary work, updates to the system maintenance to our CAD systems can now be performed offline without interrupting the critical work of the dispatchers that they're performing. The CAD vendor now has multiple customers Demanding the redundant capabilities pioneered right here in Santa Barbara County Public Safety Dispatch Center by Joe and Nick. And both are actively assisting the CAD vendor in identifying and solving implementation problems that will ultimately benefit the public safety dispatch centers throughout California. Now, therefore be it hereby ordered and resolved that this Board of Supervisors recognizes Joe Ayala and Nick Lugo as our Santa Barbara County Employees of the Month for July 2018.
Passed and adopted today.
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Chair Williams and members of the board, on behalf of Sheriff Brown it's my privilege to join with you in acknowledging Joe and Nick and the work that they've done. It really is quite incredible and thank you for recognizing them. I'm not going to read their bios but they have both been on the sheriff's office for a significant amount of time And in addition to the language that was articulated in the resolution, the work that they have both done has been absolutely critical as we move forward in a new methodology for contract cities. Again on behalf of the Sheriff and myself and all the members of the Sheriff's Office I thank you both for what you've done.
Chair, members of the board, thank you very much. I really appreciate the honor. Just the one thing I'd like to say is that I'd like to thank my boss Nimi Holman. Without her this would have never happened. She's the one who gave us the green light on it and I'd like to thank my partner Joe here he puts up with me on a daily basis. Thank you very much we appreciate it
Chairman Williams, members of the board. Thank you very much we're both honored and humbled by this honor so we appreciate it and also thanks to our staff for finally giving us the go-ahead to say well if you're sure it'll work then okay so thank you.
A47
Chair Williams, members of the board. Item A47 also sponsored by Supervisor Williams. This is a resolution of commendation honoring Colonel Kirk E Gibbs for his service to our country and to the citizens of Santa Barbara County. And if Colonel Gibbs could come on up to the podium with our public works staff I'll read the resolution into the record. Whereas, Colonel Kirkey Gibbs has been the commander and district engineer for the Los Angeles District United States Army Corps of Engineers since July 2015. And whereas during Colonel Gibbs' tenure at the Los Angeles District he consistently advocated for projects in Santa Barbara County that would protect life and property and maintain the quality of life for county residents.
And whereas Colonel Gibbs has also distinguished himself in service in our country through many assignments including overseas deployments in Bosnia and Herzegovia, Kuwait and two tours of Afghanistan. And whereas Colonel Gibbs earned the Bronze Star in service to our country. Nor as Colonel Gibbs proved himself always responsive to Santa Barbara County, as shown in the days both before and after the July 9 debris flow. Providing outstanding leadership of the Corps of Engineers Los Angeles District in support of Santa Barbara County in our time of need.
And whereas Colonel Gibbs' support of Santa Barbara County is illustrated in his actions that prepared to have contractors hit the ground in Santa Barbara County immediately following the January 9 debris flow and was prepared to respond to our community. And whereas upon task by FEMA for debris removal, the Corps promptly initiated emergency response work critical to protect their communities of Montecito and Carpinteria from additional damage.
And whereas Colonel Gibbs will always be remembered as a true friend to Santa Barbara County through his leadership of the Los Angeles District over the past three years, and always answering calls on his cell phone. And whereas Colonel Gibbs' assignment as commander and district engineer at the Los Angeles District of the Corps of Engineers ends on July 19th, 2018. And he will now further serve our country by being the chief of staff of the headquarters in Washington DC.
Now, therefore be it hereby ordered and resolved that the Board of Supervisors of Santa Barbara County does hereby honor and extends its deepest thanks to Colonel Kirk E. Gibbs for his service to our country and to the citizens of Santa Barbara County and wishes him and his family the best in his future assignments passed and adopted today.
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Mr. Chair and Board Members, thank you so much for honoring Colonel Gibbs today a true leader in our field the civil engineering world here in Santa Barbara County and across our great nation and as you know we can't really do anything today without partnerships. We have a strong partnership with the LA District of the Corps of Engineers And that relationship when Colonel Gibbs arrived certainly was enhanced and we did see it certainly this winter in the 1-9 debris flow event. Colonel Gibbs actions, his team's actions, the contractors he brought in were heroic.
They got our basins cleared, they got our channels cleared in case we had more rain and everything they did was in the interest of Thank you.
Mr. Chair, members of the board I just wanted to also thank you for this resolution and thank Colonel Gibbs. The morning of January 9th I called his cell phone and he answered it and said Colonel we're gonna need help and he went right into action got us the help we needed so I'm so thankful for the colonel
Chairman, Supervisors. This is an amazing honor and I mean that sincerely. I joked around with Tom. I almost got emotional there when everybody was clapping. I appreciate it so much. It's been an absolute honor for me to get to know you all, to get to know Tom particularly such a close partner and now friend and to do all we can to support the County of Santa Barbara.
As I've thought back through my last three years and as I leave the district in two weeks, I think the big event, sometimes when a major event happens you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing. On the morning of 9 July it was about 555 in the morning. I usually get to the office about 6 AM and I was turning right getting ready to turn right on Flower Street in downtown LA and my cell phone rang and I saw it was Tom Farah. It was sprinkling in downtown LA And I picked it up immediately. Sometimes those calls at that hour in the morning, I don't. But with Tom Faverham and the immense respect that I have for him in this county, I knew that he needed something.
And that phone call and that relationship that he and I have had over three years enabled us to prepare all day before we had federal funding, before we had a plan. I think when I leave the district, I'm going to be known as kind of the relationships guy. And that is a shining example of what building a solid relationship results in. I thank everyone for the teamwork. We could not have done it without you in those three months from January to April. It was an honor to help you all and I just appreciate this county, and I mean this genuinely.
This county more than several sponsors that we work with holds us accountable. And that starts with Tom Farram and his relationships with us, with all of our leaders. He holds us accountable when something's not right He's very direct in how he communicates with us, and those are the best relationships. I appreciate you all very much again this is an honor thank you so much for having me down here today. And I'm going to be the chief staff at USACE so if you're ever visiting Washington DC for any reason stop by the headquarters Lieutenant General Semonite the Chief of Engineers my office is next to his so that may be as close as I can get you to his office but come on down thank you
Supervisor Lavenino. Colonel, I just want to make sure you get Tom your new cell phone. A48.
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Chair Williams, members of the board. Our next resolution is item A48 sponsored by our chair, Supervisor Williams. This is a resolution of accommodation honoring Miriam Mickey Flax for her service on the Board of Commissioners for the Housing Authority of Santa Barbara County and if Mickey can come on up to the podium and I'll read the resolution into the record.
Whereas Miriam Mickey Flax was appointed to the Board of Commissioners of the Housing Authority of the County of Santa Barbara on March 20, 2001 by then Supervisor Naomi Schwartz and has served in that role under three supervisors since. And whereas Mickey has been essential to the success of the housing authority since her arrival on the board participating in the hiring of two executive directors. And whereas during her tenure, the housing authorities constructed 12 new affordable housing developments Containing a total of 401 units, acquired seven developments containing a total of 259 housing units and rehabbed a total of 385 existing housing units being recognized as a high performer by HUD in its two major programs public housing and section 8.
And whereas Mickey's tireless advocacy for affordable rental housing and the needs of Santa Barbara County's lower income residents defines her to the housing authority in the entire county. Resulting in her being at the forefront of policy and regulatory reforms that attempt to reduce barriers to the creation of additional affordable rental housing. It has ensured that the right to quality, affordable rental housing remains at the forefront of every Santa Barbara County election official's mind.
And whereas her contributions to the community are too numerous to outline in a single resolution, but are detailed in her book Making History, Making Blitzes How Two Red Diaper Babies Found Each Other and Discovered America written by her and her husband Richard Flax. Now therefore be it hereby ordered and resolved that this Board of Supervisors honors Miriam Mickey Flax for her years of dedicated volunteer service on the Board of Commissioners of the Housing Authority of the County of Santa Barbara, and hopes that her tireless advocacy continues in her many other roles to the benefit of all members of our community past and adopted today.
Good morning Mr. Chair, members of the board. On behalf of the Housing Authority of the County of Santa Barbara I can't thank the First District and the Board of Supervisors enough for giving us Mickey some 20 years ago. Under her leadership and the leadership of the board we've created hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of affordable rental housing units throughout Santa Barbara County And we have another 80 units that we're about to break ground on up in Santa Maria, that will serve people with mental health issues as well as homeless vets. We couldn't be happier.
She has kept us on our toes and for those of you who know Mickey know that is something she does the best. And we really appreciate her insight, her support, her enthusiasm. And really she will be missed on the board and we hope and we know she'll still be an advocate for affordable housing. Lisa would like to say something on behalf of the Board.
Thank you, John. Good morning. Just a few words really from the heart. She's been my mentor all these years when I started working for the county in housing she was already a well-known housing advocate and she likes to say she's been on the County Housing Authority Board the 21st century and it's it's been 18 years indeed but really it's been a lifetime and she's always aligned herself with the goals of the state of California which is provide housing for all income segments of Thank you.
So while you're going up there, Mickey, I just want to say a couple things. It has been such an honor to work with you in four different capacities thus far and especially it's not just your passion for this subject of housing but it's that Most people in politics, they show a little bit of double standards sometimes. You do not. Meaning you subject both your enemies and your allies to the same standard of progress of the issue. Both your wrath and your love is very direct.
And I just think that has been such an asset for the causes that you have championed because you let people know where they stand and whether they're pushing hard enough or not. And that's been very gratifying and motivating to me in the past, and I thank you for that.
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I don't have a book to read at the moment, but yes. I'd like to say that I've been on the Housing Authority for all of this century. I was nominated by Naomi Schwartz who was a supervisor and is now a building and was very proud to serve. When I first came to the first meeting in Santa Maria, I'm sorry in Lompoc where the headquarters of the Housing Authority is.
As you walked in the door you were met by bulletproof glass. And a sign saying, anybody who threatens an employee of the Housing Authority is guilty of a federal crime punishable by many long years in jail. This was my welcome and this was unfortunately the welcome to applicants and residents of housing and so on. It isn't like that anymore. And it isn't like that because we have had since then a magnificent staff, director, assistant directors, staff who understand the people that they serve who have a passion for housing those who cannot manage to find housing in our ridiculous housing market without assistance.
And the years that I have spent on the Housing Authority, I came knowing very little. I knew about housing having lived in rent controlled rental housing in New York City but I didn't know anything really about building it and managing it and so on. And I've become something of what we call in New York a maven on housing. And that's a nice role to have because for the foreseeable future, I think it's going to be the number one issue not only in Santa Barbara but all of California and maybe all over country. We are way behind on building the housing that is needed.
You're not getting rid of me. I'll still be out there, I'll still be in front of the board and in front of the city council arguing. I will still participate. In Isla Vista, the housing authority built wonderful home apartments for the homeless of Isla Vista. And I was there for the groundbreaking, and I was there for the ribbon cutting. So that means I built it.
And I'm very proud to say so and I hope that's the beginning of many, many more projects for the homeless and for the people, lower income people of our community. And I thank you very much for this honor which I do appreciate. Thank you.
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A49.
Chair Williams, members of the board our next resolution is item a 49 sponsored by Supervisor Wolfe This is a resolution proclaiming the month of July 2018 as Parks and Recreation Month in Santa Barbara County And we have some friends from parks here I believe Jeff Lindgren Dan Peterson and George Chapman our director anybody else come on up? And I will read the resolution to the record Whereas parks and recreation programs are an integral part of communities throughout the country, including Santa Barbara County that foster human development providing a positive alternative for children and youth of all ages as they learn to participate in outdoor and other educational activities. They're a part of the foundation of a productive and active citizenry.
And whereas parks and recreation are vitally important to establishing and maintaining the quality of life in our communities, ensuring the health of our citizens, and contributing to the economic and environmental well-being of a community in the region. And whereas parks and natural recreation areas can improve water quality, protect groundwater, prevent flooding. Improve the quality of the air we breathe and providing vegetative buffers to development in produce habitat for wildlife.
And whereas our parks and natural recreation areas ensure the ecological beauty in our community and provide access to the serenity and inspiration of nature and outdoor spaces where children and adults can connect with nature and recreate outdoors. And whereas annually approximately 7.5 million visitors enjoy the county's almost 9,000 acres of facilities that include parks, beaches, trails, open spaces, campsites and day use areas.
And whereas the Parks and Recreation Facilities of Santa Barbara County are some of our most important assets that serve to improve the mental and physical health of all residents and preserve and protect historic natural and cultural resources in our community. And whereas the county of Santa Barbara urges all residents to recognize that parks and recreation enriches the lives of its residents, and encourages all of us to go visit a park.
Now therefore be it hereby ordered and resolved that the Board of Supervisors of Santa Barbara County does proclaim the month of July 2018 as Parks Make Life Better Month. And in doing so, urges all of its citizens to enjoy and use its parks, trails, open spaces, facilities, and recreational opportunities passed and adopted today.
Chair Williams and members of the board, thank you very much for this proclamation and for your support. You know we all know how important parks are to the county or to a community. I want to really thank the folks out on the field who really maintain the parks and are building relationships with communities. Sherman Henson, Sherman is responsible for South County.
Jill is responsible for all the capital projects. Jeff Lindgren, who is at Lake Kachuma and responsible for Lake Kachuma. And John, who is responsible for our lifeguards. And we're missing Dan Peters from North County so I really want to thank the staff and their staff who really maintain the parks and make them beautiful every day. And I think you're going to see more and more good things coming from Parks section.
Supervisor Wolf?
Thank you Mr. Chair I think I'll let thank you for letting me speak I'm gonna wait for the clerk to read the next item and I just have a few comments.
Great.
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Chair Wolf or Chair Williams members of the board, Item 850 is our next resolution this is a resolution of accommodation honoring Robert C Gaines MD upon his retirement from the Department of Veteran Affairs in the Veterans Health Administration and if Robert could come up to the podium
Mr. Chair, as Dr. Gaines is approaching the podium I just want to make a few comments about this man on a personal level because I've known Dr. Gaines for...I noticed that you've worked since 1981 and I think that's when I met Dr. Gaines and his family He is a most compassionate, smart, talented physician and friend to so many people. And there's a lot of folks in the audience who are here to share that.
You have set a high standard for our Veterans Center and Medical Center in Santa Barbara County. We hear so much nationally about veterans affairs and treatment of our veterans And I think you have and your staff, and we're going to be honoring Jane. You and your staff have indeed set a high bar for the care, your passionate care for veterans in our community. So I just want to thank you and we're very sorry to let you go but we know that you have a very strong legacy with Santa Barbara Vets so thank you for your service.
I'll go ahead and read the resolution to the record. Whereas Robert C Gaines, MD has diligently served as the Department of Veteran Affairs in the Veterans Health Administration for 36 years beginning his career in 1981 as a primary care provider then is the director of the VA Santa Barbara Community Based Outpatient Clinic furthering his selfless and dedicated commitment to the mission of the VA.
And whereas, Robert is recognized by the Veterans Health Administration as a respected leader and innovator in the delivery of patient-centered care. In his clinical practice is a longstanding benchmark for excellence piloting primary care dermatology and battlefield acupuncture to alleviate chronic pain. And he won the odd admiration of his team in the VA greater Los Angeles for making home visits for patients too frail to come in and for those needing end of life comfort and a warm lemon cake.
And whereas, Dr. Gaines led the charge from the ground up to develop and open the doors of the VA San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria community based outpatient clinics that has served the nation's veterans as the lead physician and primary care provider at the VA, San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria, Bakersfield, and Oxnard Clinics. And continues to serve as part of the Federal Employees National Emergency Response Team following the Katrina tragedy.
Dr. Gaines has spent 10 years in voluntary service to the community of Santa Barbara's Doctors Without Walls street medicine program, triaging and treating the city's homeless men and women, has provided volunteer first aid care during Isla Vista Halloween and Fiesta celebrations, has served as a volunteer physician with Ventura and Santa Maria veteran stand downs, has partnered with the Santa Barbara County Emergency Response Team and assisted in the development of critical local protocols. Now therefore, I hereby order and resolve that this Board of Supervisors congratulates and honors the 36 years of exemplary service of Dr. Robert C Gaines to our community of veterans. He is thanked for his distinguished service to our local heroes, the women and men who have served our nation past and adopted today.
Mr. Chair and Supervisors, thank you so much I feel very honored. In the beginning we were the only outpatient clinic between Santa Barbara and Palo Alto and now we have like many many other clinics so we've shrunk down but we were really the hub and as you know the VA has gone through many many changes but as I've always said Our number one goal is to take care of veterans. So we try not to get all that other stuff to deflect our attention and continue our focus, and I couldn't have done it without our other staff, Gina's here, to be honored as well.
And as for the homeless medicine people, it's been a honor taking care of our homeless medicine with Mimi Duhan starting the program. I'm like the old man out there now, and I just let you know that it's not just taking Homeless folk, but we've actually inspired a whole group of people who have become physicians and PAs and MPs and nurses out there that hopefully will come back to our community and be taking care of all of us in the future. So thank you very much.
0:33 – 0:366 turns
A51.
Chair Williams, members of the board our final resolution is item A51 this morning it's sponsored by Supervisor Wolfe. This is a resolution of accommodation honoring Jean Gibson upon her retirement from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Jean come up and I'll read the resolution into the record Whereas, Jean Gibson RN BSN has served at the Department of Veteran Affairs for 36 years beginning her meritorious career in 1981 as a staff nurse. Then promoted in 2002 to lead nurse of the VA Santa Barbara Clinic ushering her extraordinary team of nurses and providers to the highest health outcomes for the veterans under their care.
And whereas, Jean is recognized and respected as an expert in the delivery of patient-centered care Dedicated to continual performance improvement innovation, she set the highest standard for patient compassion and respect. And earned the undying loyalty of the clinic in the VA greater Los Angeles for her decades of unfaltering commitment to the veterans of Santa Barbara County.
Whereas, Jean because of her widely recognized superhuman skills while assigned full time in the VA Santa Barbara Clinic was also tasked to build out and launch the VA San Luis Obispo and VA Santa Maria clinics. And spend innumerable hours driving two and four in order to ensure a successful launch of the new clinics. She's demonstrated boundless energy and passion for the mission despite the great toll of rapidly changing VHA leadership priorities.
And whereas, Gene has never missed an opportunity to volunteer to provide medical services at the Veterans Stand Downs for Santa Barbara County and never failed to visit a veteran in their home with food supplies and care needed. This has left an indelible fingerprint on the health and hearts of our county's veterans. Now, therefore be it hereby ordered and resolved that this Board of Supervisors congratulates and honors the 36 years of extraordinary service of Jean Gibson to our community veterans. She is thanked and profoundly for unprecedented devotion to women and men that have served our nation past and adopted today.
Thank you for this wonderful recognition. And what I'd really like to say is that I couldn't have done it without Team Dr. Gaines, and I want to thank the board and all of you on the Board of Supervisors that it's been my honor to serve the veterans and I hope that in some small way I can continue to do that after my retirement. Thank you so much for this honor.
Do we have any items pulled by the public?
No request to speak.
We have several items pulled by Mr. Adam, A22, A23, A26. Between that I would like to pull A20 and any other requests to pull items? So let's start with the balance of the agenda. Can I get a motion on the balance of the agenda?
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So moved.
You mean besides all of those? Yeah, besides all of those so people can leave if they're... I don't need to vote on all of those. Okay you
just need a roll call on two of them? A22 and A23? I think there's only one but... Why don't
we vote on the balance and then we'll take each one
separately. My intention in doing that is so any staff that are out there waiting on those can get back to work. Motion and a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Thank you. A2.
Chair Williams, members of the board. Item A2 is for behavioral wellness. The request that the board consider recommendations regarding the third amendment to the agreement for services of independent contractor with Pathpoint.
Well, oh there she is. I was going to invite Alice down to tell her that I really love the format here, and I think it represents a significant step forward towards assessing the success that we're having with individual clients. And I thank you. That's all I really wanted to say.
Thank
you. But since I'll take you to task so many times, I'll also tell you you're doing a great job.
Well, I appreciate that. We've gone to a lot of efforts to make sure we've got solid performance objectives in all our contracts so
thank you. Yeah and I appreciate that more is being included on a monthly basis so we can really look at what's happening to individuals. I think that's really valuable. Thank you. Oh yeah and I'll move the item.
Is there a second?
Second.
All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? It's unanimous. Now, A20 and so the employee for A20 would like to recuse himself from the room. Is that your
0:38 – 0:4113 turns
intention? Mr. Chair maybe we could read in A20 and then I'll go to a couple of comments for my recusal.
Chair Williams, members of the board item A20 is from Human Resources is to consider recommendations regarding a performance-based salary adjustments for County Council
Chair Williams and Supervisors, Open Session Item A20 is the Board's consideration of a 3% performance-based salary increase to a salary of approximately $229,000. Under a recent change to the Brown Act I need to make that verbal summary before the Board takes action and although there is a general Political Reform Act exception for public salaries I am choosing to recuse from this item and will briefly leave the room next to me as Chief Assistant Rachel Van Malom if you have any legal questions?
Thank you so much. I think someone may have left their cell phone from a previous meeting here. Okay, A20 is there any comments or questions on A20? I move the item. Is there a second? All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Thank you so much. And we will get A22, and me and Mr. Adam will look through the drawers and see if we can find someone's cell phone that was left here from a previous day apparently. A22 is just a request
to have a separate vote.
Chair Williams, members of the board, item A22 is from Human Resources. This is regarding the Santa Barbara County Deputy Sheriff Association Successor Memorandum of Understanding
Mr. Adam. Yeah, I'm just going to say on this one that I was actually going to vote for it so I didn't need a separate vote. Okay you
don't need a separate
vote. And I want to explain why because a lot of times I vote against these raises and I really think that recruitment is a problem in this department and other units still have the problem with recruitment that the sheriff does and so there's two times Vote for pay raises. One is if you can't find people to fill those positions, and the other time is compaction because that never works.
So I think this is one of those recruitment issues and I'll support it.
Is there a motion? Supervisor Hartman.
Second.
All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? It's unanimous. A23, request for roll call.
Chair Williams, members of the board. Item 823 is also from Human Resources. The request is that the board consider recommendations regarding the Civil Attorneys Association and Deputy District Attorney's Association salary increases.
0:41 – 0:4622 turns
Supervisor Adam?
And if before we vote here I could just say that I don't think this rises to either of those challenges recruitment or compaction so I'm not going to be able to support that. Supervisor Hartman.
I will move the item.
Is there a second? Thank you all those in favor please say oh roll call please.
Ms. Hartman, Mr. Adam, Mr. Lavinino, Ms. Wolfe, Mr Williams. Aye. Passes 4-1. Chair Williams, members of the board. Item 826 is from Public Health. This is to consider recommendations regarding amendments to the Animal Services City Agreements for Goleta and Santa Barbara. This is for fiscal year 2018 through 2020
And I'm just wondering why we have a 1.5% year-over-year raise for these items, since we have 3%, seems to be the number everywhere else? I was wondering why we're going backwards in this.
Supervisor Adam through the Chair, this was a negotiated rate with the cities and that was actually an increase over last year which I believe was zero.
Well, that's definitely a step in the right direction. But I thought full cost recovery was one of our guiding principles, CEO Maesato?
Supervisors we've been working with the department to try to get them with the cities to get to full cost recovery. We're not always successful in all cases and again this is our negotiated contracts.
Correct And we've been working with the cities, each of the cities for the past few years with that intention.
Well apparently it's not been successful. I mean how short are we in terms of percent of the budget for this compared to 100%?
So if you're asking for a general fund contribution to the animal services?
No, I'm actually asking for cost versus recovery.
I would say that it's roughly around 37%. But I don't have the exact figures.
37% of unrecovered or recovered?
Subsidized by the county and with TSAC dollars.
And who's TSAC, remind me?
TSAC is the Tobacco Settlement Funds.
Okay well alright so I guess I'm not going to be able to support it. It's structured as a loss and I don't think that's a good idea and I think we should try a little harder to get those things up to full cost recovery. So thank you.
I would just note that while we should be striving for cost recovery, this is obviously a touchy issue with all of the cities. And moving there incrementally, I think should be progress. I think the danger in moving too fast would be for the whole system to unravel which would ultimately cost the constituent parts meaning both the cities and the counties we would lose some economies of scale.
And so I do think it is in the public interest to move towards cost recovery, but to do so incrementally. So that we don't have gaps in the service of animal services.
Supervisor Lavanino. Thank you Mr. Chair. I'll be able to...I'm going to support it this year but I think we see a A direction that might be given to staff. That if you could come back to us at some point, talk to us about how I'd like to get the exact numbers of how much we are subsidizing and how we get to full cost recovery with a plan maybe over two or three years so that we let the cities know. I think in the sheriff's proposal later for public safety, we've seen increases to cities that are pretty extravagant but He's made plans to get to that full cost recovery with the cities. And I think we need to follow that same sort of plan for animal services.
Supervisors, I think if the board would like to give us that direction for the next contracts, we can certainly take it as long as I've been here. We've never had this fully cost supported but if you want to move in that direction and have a harder line with the cities, we can certainly do that in the future.
0:47 – 0:5120 turns
That would not be my intention to go there overnight, because all that would create is five or more different systems in the county which would cost taxpayers more ultimately and have inferior services. Or they could end up like unfortunately my jurisdiction which doesn't even contract with the county People are supposed to drop off stray pets at a local veterinarian's office. I mean, it's kind of loosey-goosey in this kind of day and age and I don't think that's a good system to be moving towards.
Supervisor, we can bring you back different options as we look forward to the following year. I didn't mean to say it's an all or nothing so we can bring that back. And the fact that we do supply general fund to animal services whether they use T stack money Is an indication already that it's not fully cost recovered. So I think the director just working within what we've done in the past, but we can make that change in policy as we go forward after giving options to you.
Supervisor Hartman?
I would also be interested in what other counties do some of our benchmark counties how this is handled.
Supervisor Adam. At some point, everybody's got to smell the coffee and step up to the plate and pay their fair share. Otherwise you're getting subsidy from other parts of the county so I don't see how that's fair. You know, Orchid doesn't have a choice.
I'm not arguing that one area of the county should subsidize more than others. Well that's what's happening. I don't know. I think Lompoc in particular could lose out if we don't handle this incrementally. So the
costs for these seven contracts are spread so it's a shared commitment with the seven cities that we are in partnership with. So these are two year contracts, and I would be more than happy to bring back to the board when that two year contract renewal begins with some options about the full cost and options best practices from our neighboring cities and counties.
Okay, well I just think that it's no different than sheriff services. I think when we're providing a service to a community they've got to pay the full cost of doing that or they've got to explore their other potential costs. Maybe they can do it cheaper? Maybe they can provide an adequate service at a lower level. Maybe they've got to take a look at what we're doing and say there's a lot of value there because of the economies of scale, and we can't do it for less than you're proposing. And they're going to have to work that into their budgets. But we can't continue to subsidize whether it be animal services or sheriff. services or anything else. We can't continue to subsidize some of these cities that are deciding to, and that's an improper characterization and I take that back they're not deciding to do anything we're allowing ourselves to make a bad deal and not get full cost recovery and so that's on us.
I suppose that means a roll call in his order. Is there a motion to accept this?
I'll make the motion to accept is with that staff direction as well. Second. Roll call,
Supervisor Wolf.
No, just do the roll call.
Roll call
please. Ms. Hartman. Aye. Mr. Adam.
No.
Mr Lavinino.
Aye.
Ms Wolfe. Aye Mr Williams. Aye Passes 4-1 Thank you
That dispenses with the administrative items. Is there public comment on items not on the agenda?
Chair Williams, members of the board we have two requests to speak this morning. We're going to start with Dorothy Dent and then hear from Ed Kolaski.
0:51 – 0:588 turns
Good morning supervisors thank you so much for working tirelessly to protect us and keep us safe I'm happy to see that the board is working hard on improving the communication system. As we know, all of Santa Barbara and all of the counties have had a terrible time with this system, its uncoordination and difficulty in reaching its citizenry. And it's none too soon since there's unfortunately fires blazing that are Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the board. We are in a time of threatening life in our state right now in the northern area.
And the last time when I came or few times ago, I was talking about the harm that was done in the Northern California area and the difficulty in reaching its citizens and then I so sadly lost a really important employer and one of my best friends to This is a wonderful example for the rest of the county and it can all be coordinated. And maybe when we call the county, someone will answer the phone and help us with reaching the designated person that we wish.
There's also other ways to keep citizens safe, and they also need improving. In fact, a nation's greatness is measured by how it treats the weakest members. But we aren't unfortunately treating our vulnerable as well as we can. Isolation, separation and intimidation are used and they are actually abominations. I wish to call your attention to a recent study, a few recent studies if I have time.
Most importantly, there's a study by Human Rights Watch which talks about the harm that these dementia drugs are doing to our elderly. They are actually proven to have no therapeutic value whatsoever and they actually have incredibly debilitating and harmful side effects that end up harming these people. And then very often they don't even know what is wrong and that has got to stop and we've gotta coordinate our modern medical Individuals on the cutting edge to our court and to our public health.
And to our elected and appointed leaders as well, because if the time lapses then we're gonna have some terrible repercussions on the budget as well. There's a practice of forced drugging and using chemical restraints in the nursing homes. The Human Rights Study talks about this, and it directs municipalities to more closely supervise nursing homes. And also the courts and the other individuals who, attorneys and so forth who are actually forcing these horrific drugs onto these people. So I'm sure you're looking into that. I know Joan has met with some people and Janet, I've contacted your office and Doss as well when you were in the state assembly. And Salud Carbajal who's now had heard it from us and is now in the California area able to properly legislate that.
Thank you, Dorothy. And
maybe you could
send me the link on that Human Rights Watch report?
Absolutely and then just a couple more I'll wind it up we have- You're over time. Okay, just the two more studies there's one that UC Berkeley did on the juvenile justice system for Santa Barbara which suggests that we stop using the punitive and incarcerating methods and the one other method about fracking in the North County which had led to low birth weight babies. So those are the vulnerable people thank you so much for your time and your energy
Thank you.
I've been here now four and a half years, and I've been trying to remodel our house. The Board of Architectural Review stated that our second story is located solely over the garage. Therefore we cannot remodel our house because it would be against guideline 4.7. Clearly it is not solely over the garage. It's over the garage, the kitchen, the dining room, part of the living room, and the laundry room.
So I've been going through this, and it's fitting now that it's in honor The 4th of July and the Declaration of Independence. That we should truly celebrate that Janet Wolf will be leaving at the end of the year, and perhaps we can get this restored to a democracy. It's unfortunate that we have to work under a dictatorship. One should not have to worry about being kicked out of a meeting or fifth meeting.
I want to remind you that we paid for in 15 seconds. One should not have to worry about the Board of Architectural Review taking five and a half months to write a 64 page report and not include the overlay. 64 pages describing the overlay as being solely over the garage, and the one drawing that they left out is This is just unbelievable. As one person said, the system is broken and it truly is broken.
Talking here for four years in 44 talks, Janet apparently didn't understand why I'm here. I'm here because I'm objecting to the illegal actions that have taken place before the Board of Supervisors. I'm not here just to berate the SBAR, the Board of Architectural Review. I thought it was pretty clear to most anyone and I've listed the objections I had. Would you flip that Ken?
I put 14 of them down. You know, to be kicked out of a meeting you paid for? Do you know how disgusting that is? You pay. You're in your fifth meeting. You know you're going to get approved. You've done exactly what they requested. This has nothing to do with guidelines. We obeyed all the guidelines. We had a five-to-two vote after four meetings. We come in the fifth meeting. We want to get the other two on board. We did what they requested.
And Alex Peugeot didn't even let us show our drawings. He kicked us out of the meeting in 15 seconds. My architect stands up to ask a few questions, and they have one of their members jump up and start yelling at us. What a disgusting display of humanity! This is a democracy? This is the Fourth of July you were supposed to celebrate?! ! Thank goodness we'll move on at the end of the year and hopefully restore a democracy here. This is really, truly disgusting! Thank you.
That concludes public comment. Chair Williams, members of the Board. Item D1 is from Planning and Development. It's a hearing to consider recommendations regarding a proposed amendment to the Planning and Development Fee Ordinance for Cannabis Appeals. And the request from the Department is that we continue this matter to your meeting on July 10th. So can I get a motion for that?
0:58 – 1:226 turns
Can I get a motion on continuing this item to the 10th? Second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed?
Thank you. We will go to D2.
Chair Williams, members of the board, item D2 is from the Sheriff and the Probation Department. It's a hearing to consider recommendations regarding a California Forensic Medical Group annual report for healthcare services at probation in the sheriff's detention facilities.
Please proceed.
Good morning, Chair Williams and Board of Supervisors. My name's Lieutenant Shawn Lammer of the Sheriff's Office. Currently I oversee the custody division's contract management which includes jail health care services. With me today is probation manager Wendy Stanley from the Santa Barbara County Probation Department. Wendy oversees the Los Prietos Boys Camp and has oversight of the healthcare services for both juvenile facilities.
With Wendy and I today is California Forensic Medical Group's Chief Operating Officer, Cindy Watson. Ms. Watson will be providing you with a presentation on our annual report of CFMG Healthcare Services for Probation and the Sheriff. Also with us today are representatives from the probation department, behavioral wellness, public health, sheriff's office. And CFMG to help answer any questions you may have at the end of this presentation.
I'm now pleased to have COO Cindy Watson provide you with a presentation on our annual report, thank you.
Good morning, thank you Lieutenant Lammers. It's a pleasure to be here, and thank you for taking time with us this morning. I'd like to begin by giving you a little overview of California Forensic Medical Group. We are a California-based correctional health care company founded in 1983 in Monterey, California with the goal of providing quality healthcare to our patients.
Effective July 1, yesterday we became the largest provider of healthcare services to county jails in the state of California. Of the 34 counties in California that outsource their health care services, we provide service in 32 of those counties. We're passionate about serving our patients and our county partners, and we only work with county detention facilities. We do not do any work with state or federal prisons. This is important because we really do understand the challenges of serving this underserved population.
So I'd like to talk a little bit about when we began our relationship with Santa Barbara County and the Sheriff's Office at the detention facilities. It was April 1st of 2017, when we arrived on site and I can say that I was probably a part of the transition team that worked doing this transition in Santa Barbara County. We arrived and there were 1,600 unreviewed sick call slips at the transition. And just to provide a bit of clarity on that, sick call slips are the way inmate patients request healthcare services. So there were 1,600 of those that had not been reviewed nor responded to.
No health assessments had been completed in the prior six months. These healthcare assessments are essentially history and physical kinds of evaluations, and they're required to be done within 14 days of incarceration and then again on an annual basis for For any inmate that is incarcerated over 12 months. There were, in addition, misfiled medical records and piles of loose patient paperwork taller than me throughout the medical clinic. I know for a fact that we filed at least, we opened 2,500 medical records for people that had not had a medical record but their loose papers were everywhere.
That was really what we found when we started. And so in our first 24 hours, our approach to transitions is really quite different than most correctional health care providers. And so we began with a team of 36 transition members. These are people including myself. We had a number of nurses, administrative Assistants, as well as physicians and mid-level providers who were on site in the detention facilities at least through the month of April. And many, many of those people stayed through all of May and into June.
The purpose here of those transition members is to provide guidance, direction and support around the way that CFMG approaches patient care. So during our first 24 hours we were able to complete 100 sick call visits. And that was done through the providers that we had hired, as well as the transition team members. All of the chronic care patients were reviewed and times were identified to see those people. It's important that the chronically ill patients are very closely managed because there is an opportunity for them to become ill.
Pretty quickly and require outside services, so we wanted to address their needs as well. We also had a concerted effort to identify all the patients who needed the 14 day health appraisal, TB assessment screenings and PPD placement. All of the medications were also reviewed by our physician and our psychiatrist. So that was what we found when we got here. Over the course of the next several months, we did what CFMG does and what we have many years of experience doing. We began providing not only quality care inside the jail and in the detention facilities but also we began collaborating with agencies in the community We're really proud of that, we understand that community collaboration is essential in terms of the release of our incarcerated patients back into the community.
You do need to have those community based relationships to ensure a smooth transition. The agencies that we've communicated with and that we've collaborated with. I would like to point out a couple of successes at a recent mental health treatment court meeting, the judge spoke to the increased trust. That the court has in our mental health patient care and transition to the community upon discharge. Also, Dr. Lewis who is the forensic manager at Behavioral Wellness has talked to us about his improved communication in the collaboration of our staff and his program staff which he believes has benefited both the patients and the community.
In addition to that, one of the things that CFMG really does focus on is giving back to the community in ways that do not stop at the jail walls. And in December of 2017 our staff worked with the Sheriff's Office Custody Division to put together 100 holiday care packages for the homeless and delivered them within the community. We hope to be able to do that again this year and provide more than 100 care packages.
So now a little bit more about us, and the work that we've done with our staff inside the jail. So the first thing is, we invest in our people. We understand that this is a people-driven business. It begins and ends with people. And we believe that the foundation of clinical excellence is training. And in our first year, we provided just shy of 3400 hours of training to staff.
And we believe that that training has resulted in a reduction in ER visits, that I will speak to more specifically later. As well as in our first 12 months we had no successful suicides. We also provide training to probation, custody deputies and CIT participants. This is important because the work that we do, we collaborate every day with county staff in probation, custody and the CIT participants. And so being given the opportunity to provide additional training for them, we believe has also led to improved patient care.
In the area of off-site services, when medical needs exceed what care we provide within the jail, we're responsible for obtaining outside community consultations. Now oftentimes this is either Because the services needed are more than we can provide in the jail, or because they are of a preventative nature. And which is the case with the community appointments for youth, those are generally preventative in nature.
They also include optometry and dental services which are not contracted through CFMG. On the adult side, the 375 community appointments that were completed for the adult patients were really focused around five key areas and I'll share those with you. Dialysis, pregnant females, maxillofacial surgery for broken jaws generally, infectious disease and orthopedic care.
The next several slides are an indication of the kind of data that we collect and that we report back regularly to jail administration in our monthly MAC or quarterly QA meetings. So instead of going, unless you'd like to, but instead of reviewing every single individual metric I'd like to just basically talk a little bit about why we collect this data and how we use the data.
So we collect data across a variety of metrics. This is a sample of the kinds of data that we collect. The purpose here is really objective tracking of the work that we do, both the quality of work that we do and the quantity of work that we do. We use this data to really look for opportunities for training, opportunities for improvement and we also look for trends.
At a more corporate level, we also look for benchmarking data across counties of like size. And again that gives us an indication if there's a need for additional training or perhaps additional programs to be implemented. One of the things that you'll probably note, and we get asked this a fair amount is the variability of this data. Just sort of almost every indicator you will see variability in the data. This is really an indication of the nature of the patient population that we serve.
We never know who's going to show up in intake. And you would be surprised that you only need two or three very, very ill inmates. Someone who perhaps needs dialysis to really skew the data or to demonstrate variability in the statistics that we report. So what you have here, you have data for both adults and juveniles. I would like to spend a little bit of time talking about mental health, because I'm sure that you appreciate that mental health is a large and growing issue inside county detention facilities across the country. And we've done many things in terms of mental health in our first 12 months. Those include increasing the coverage, our mental health coverage, to seven days a week, 16 hours per day. So we provide mental health staff from 7 o'clock in the morning until 11pm at night.
In addition, we have used that staff in ways that we believe represent clinical best practice. And one of the patient populations that we focused on in the jail is the segregation population. This is a population that is at very high risk for suicide, and these are patients who prior to CFMG being the healthcare partner for the county, these patients were generally seen on a rounded kind of basis.
One to two times a week. We have tripled that, so these patients are now seen three times per week by mental health and three times per week by medical staff. We believe that is part of what has driven the outcome around no suicides in our first 12 months. We've had over 21,000 patient encounters in mental health. And we've had a reduction in mental health grievances by 26%.
The important thing to note here in terms of mental health is that this kind of segregation rounding that goes on not only allows our mental health professionals to develop therapeutic relationships with The patients that are in segregation, but also really does allow us to be very proactive in terms of identifying potential decompensation on the parts of those patients and our ability to interact more quickly.
So mental health, the kinds of treatment interventions that we use. We establish a collaborative plan of care with the patient and we employ a variety of psychotherapeutic techniques including cognitive behavioral therapy, psychoeducational interventions. We model and teach mindfulness and coping strategies. The mindfulness interventions provided include grounding techniques, breathing and meditation exercises. And increasing distress tolerance and acceptance of thoughts and feelings.
We also focus on patient education and mental health. There are a whole number of issues that we focus on, a few of them include relapse prevention, healthy living activities, self-soothing techniques, self care routines, safety plans and crisis prevention planning. As I mentioned earlier, we have in our first 12 months have had no successful suicides. And part of the reason why we talked earlier about training, we also talked about segregation rounding. In addition to that, one of the things that we know is that when someone comes off suicide watch they really do need a clinical safety net.
And that clinical safety net really does need to include some kind predictable, consistent cadence of monitoring. And so we've described for you what our monitoring processes are again these represent clinical best practice in the care of suicidal patients but they include after someone is cleared from suicide watch they are seen by mental health professionals 24 hours after clearance Three days after clearance, seven days after clearance. And then they're seen weekly for the first month and then monthly for 90 days after clearance. This really does ensure that the patient is progressing and that we can be proactive in identifying any other signs for decompensation.
We also consult with behavioral wellness to request 5150 evaluations when needed. I'm sure that you all know what those are, and coordinate transfer of patients qualifying for involuntary psychiatric care to the local psychiatric health facility. Further, every 12 hours a patient remains on suicide watch in a safety cell. Mental health professionals consult with behavioral wellness staff. So again there's that collaboration to ensure best practice for patient safety and treatment planning.
Now just a little bit about our successes. I mentioned earlier, we through the implementation of our protocols coupled with that extensive training that I talked about earlier, we realized a 50% reduction in ER visits, ER send outs. There were 282 ER visits in 2016 and there were 140 ER visits in CFMG's first year. We also implemented an electronic medical record, an EMR.
And this has streamlined the process specifically around probation. So I'm sure that you know that probation we do not provide 24-7 nursing services there and probation staff does the med pass on nights and weekends. And the implementation of our electronic medical record has allowed for improved documentation of medication administration for the probation staff. Decreased errors, so that was a real win for us.
During the Thomas fire and the Montecito debris flow not a single shift went uncovered. This was a Herculean effort on the part Amber Nunez, our HSA and her staff as well as collaboration with jail administration. Really, really amazing. We were fully staffed also during the one on one closures. The Boy's Camp evacuation to Juvenile Hall twice due to the Whittier fire prompted development of an air quality policy.
Now briefly to talk about some contract requirements. There is the requirement that we seek and receive NCCHC accreditation to prepare for that. We held a successful mass disaster drill in October of 2017, and that required a fair amount of coordination between medical and custody staff. We then brought in some of our own auditors to do an audit at the adult facility to identify the gaps related to the way that services were being provided now. And the way that they needed to be provided to obtain accreditation, we've created a timeline to address those gaps and believe that we are well on track to receive accreditation.
In addition, we have a very active CQI program, continuous quality improvement. The one example that we've identified here is our discharge planning process. We understand the importance of smooth transitions to back into the community from a community re-entry perspective. Prior to CFMG, it appeared that a minority of the patients received discharge planning and discharge medications.
We are now providing discharge planning and medication prescriptions to all chronic care and mental health patients at the adult facility. In terms of service level agreements identified in the contract, we had 100% compliance with staffing. We had no staffing vacancies for more than 60 days. Our public health audit of the adult facility, our public health audit of the juvenile facility and our behavioral wellness audit at the adult facility You can see the levels of compliance there and there is further detail in the back of the information that you've been provided.
So we have also through collaboration with the Sheriff's Department and custody staff, we've identified some new service level agreements. Through CQI, we have identified some areas of improvement and by identifying them as service level agreements, we will ensure focus and monitoring on those areas. And we've done that for both the adults and the juveniles. And those are detailed here.
And that's all I have.
1:22 – 1:3214 turns
Questions from the board? Requests for public comment?
No request to speak.
Supervisor Wolf.
Thank you Mr. Chair and I just want to thank all of you for being here. I think for anyone who's been watching our board meetings for over 12 years, our county has gone through some changes with mental health and health services in the jail. And I was early on very much opposed We did have those services with another provider. And I'm very, you know on the face of everything that you've presented. I'm exceptionally pleased with the services that CFMG has been providing but I think it's also because this board has also allocated additional funds for employees working with you to provide those services.
So that being said, there's just a few things I wanted to go through. Just some comments really and maybe some questions. First of all, on page six of your report. I don't know if we're going to hear from probation today but I think one of the points that I wanted to draw out was Dr. Carrick-Adam who continues to work in probation and as it states here that the healthcare of the youth is exemplary And it has been that way and I think she deserves a lot of credit for the work that she does. And continuing to work with CFMG, so that transition appears to have been seamless and I'm really pleased for that.
Thank you and thank you for pointing that out in your report. On page seven there is a notation about the electronic records that you've implemented, and my question is are they compatible with our county electronic records from public health and mental health? And also let's say for instance with Cottage Hospital where Supervisor Wolf, through the Chair.
I am not aware of the level of compatibility that we have. I can certainly work with local management, Amber and her team to identify that. I do know that our electronic medical record is called Core EMR. And it has been certified. So that would indicate to me that we can at least interface with any health information exchange, which is I believe what you're speaking to?
Yeah maybe I see Dr. Greg Horn in the back because if we don't have that compatibility Supervisor Wolf, through the chair.
What CFMG is talking about is a health information exchange, which we have not been able to establish countywide. On the physical health side, Cottage Health is working and Dr. Dobrino says here as well to have a sharing of information but because CFMG has their own system it's It's not necessarily able to be part of a larger health information exchange, but that's not uncommon. I believe CFMG has had look-up capacity for our system, but it's not the same as full interoperability and would be very difficult to achieve.
Okay, so I guess it's what we're calling the lookup capacity because I think that's really what I'm thinking about as being really important. That there is some continuity between when patients come into the jail that you have an opportunity to see or if they've been in our system. Is that the look up capability?
Yeah, it's limited on our side because of other protections but they can look up, I believe, the mental health that are in our system.
Well I guess to the extent that could be improved, that might be something to work toward in the future. And I also was impressed on page 10 and you showed it in your slides Almost half of ER visits. I think that's substantial and I would like to believe that the reason is, is that the healthcare that they are getting is being treated before they're at a point that they have to go to the ER. Is that?
That's accurate. So it's important to note that a decrease in ER visits is usually the result of multiple factors, including the number of provider hours we have available on site, so mid-levels and physicians as well as the number of nursing hours and the training provided to those people. And so all of those things together drive that result. So you're right.
Okay, thank you. On page 12 it says and you talked about that we haven't had any I don't know if you know it's like successful suicides doesn't they the two don't go together in my mind but it's that there were 38 suicide attempts in the jail. How does that compare to other years?
I'm not aware, I don't know that we had access to the data around suicide attempts prior. Okay. I'm not aware that we did.
Okay it would maybe in your next when you come back and you can do another slide on that because I think that's also information that's important to note how many were attempted and then unsuccessful? And then you talk about the increased therapeutic contact. Again, I think having more people providing more services we will see a benefit to the inmates. You also talked about improvement working with jail staff. I want to compliment custody staff. I think that cooperation working together.
At least what I see on paper is exceptional and there was a notation about improvement in inmate transfer. So, I think whatever improvements you make and that cooperation between your staff and custody staff is vitally important. In sections C and D, one of the things that we had as you mentioned, we had behavioral wellness and public health do a review of certain benchmarks.
And I would just suggest, and maybe through CEO Miyasato that when this comes back to the board that we have a more. This one page report, I don't think is really sufficient for us to understand what our own staff is stating. There's no date, it's not signed. And so I think for public health and behavioral wellness, if we could get more extensive information about what their findings are.
You mentioned something in your slides about behavioral wellness. The numbers were about 83% compliant with certain aspects. But it's difficult to see exactly what that is. So from behavioral wellness and mental health, just a more extensive review. In section E there are actually it all has to do with the medication so Section EFG, and what I noticed in all of these about medications was the high number of missed medication.
In all three of the jail, Los Prados and Juvenile Hall. And that is concerning to me, and so I'd like you to explain why there are, why the numbers of missed medication is so high?
1:32 – 1:389 turns
Sue, if I-
Supervisor Wolf, through the chair. For specifically the Los Piertos Boys Camp, mismedications happen for a variety of reasons. If a youth is on a home visit for the weekend and is prescribed medication and has to take it three times a day, every day he's not there is a missed medication. It doesn't mean that he didn't take it. We sent it home with them but we cannot verify that they took it So in the system it shows as a missed medication.
Well that's really
interesting, you should fix that because I think you should make the assumption that if the parents have the medication that they're providing it but that's I guess your internal system but it doesn't look, it's not reflected in what we see here so I appreciate you explaining that.
And we have been working on a better way to represent those that it was a refusal to take their medication also comes up as a missed medication. So, we have been looking at a different way of addressing that in the statistics that will say we had a certain number of missed medications And of those, this many were refusals. This many were because they were not at the facility at the time they were to take their medication. So that information as we come forward to you next year, you will see that is broken out in greater detail.
Okay, that would be great. Thank you Wendy.
Supervisor Wolfe through the chair, for the Sheriff's Office, these medications are also similar to probation. If someone is out to court or out to another appointment that will show up as a mismedication as well. Or when the LVN goes past medication and the person has been released already that will show up as mismedication as well. And like probation we're working with CFMG to better report that out.
Okay, but if I could and thank you for that. I'll just say that in March the number was 2,000 over 2,00 missed medications. February was 1,600 January was almost 3,000. So on the face of it when I look at this, it just seems really high. But again, I'm just looking at statistics and I don't know the story behind this so I think to the extent that they're taking their medications that needs to be followed up.
That's really, in looking at all of these statistics that just really jumped out at me. So I just wanted to bring it up and then if I could Mr. Chair, I want to just touch on the contract and I'm trying to see it was in the report about negotiations. It was on page 10, sorry page 11 that you're in contract negotiations for the Northern Branch Jail and then in the conclusion in the report there's it says that you're going to be coming back I'm here today on the board of supervisors meeting 60 days after July 1st 2019 to talk about the NCCHC accreditation and also the negotiated contract on the north branch jail.
Well as Mr. Kolaski nicely pointed out, I won't be here but I do think it's important that Be advised early on the contract negotiations. We've been told that the jail is scheduled to open in April of 2019, so I don't know how these dates don't really correspond to what we're hearing on the ground. So you can't come back, I don' believe you can come back to us after July 1st when the jail is supposed You know, four months before that. So I think if we could and I'm just going to direct this to CEO Miyasato that we maybe get a memo back to the board about the timeline for returning to the board on negotiations for the contract extension with CFMG.
Supervisor Wolf, through the chair thank you for that comment. I know that I had just talked to Mr Pontes and some of the team there are they're currently working with CFMG I believe on them getting a lot of head shakes yes on what additions may have to be made for the Northern Branch Jail so that's currently going on we can bring an item back to you as soon as we talk to the jail team but I agree we should come back to you
It just needs to be. However, it is a memo or a board item but definitely not after July. Correct. And also the NCCHC accreditation information that's also in our packet and there's a lot of really good measurements that are in there and things I think should be done in the next few months so it would also be good to get an update again maybe That concludes my comments Mr. Chair
1:38 – 1:408 turns
Chair Williams, if there's no other questions. Public Health and Mental Health did do in their short write-up some recommendations on improvements for measurements and reporting and other information and so I think it's important that that information and those requests for those recommendations from our departments be followed. So if you could include that in your motion we'd appreciate that.
Then I will entertain a motion for those amendments to recommendations A and B.
I'll make a motion that we approve item A and B with the addition that CFMG and staff will return to the board as soon as possible with information on contract negotiations. That's one. The other is that CFMG returned to the board in six months with an A agenda item on an update to their NCCHC, a follow up to that that's noted in here and then Ms. Miyasato if you could add the language that you just specified for mental health
That CFMG comply with our recommended request from public health and behavioral wellness on additional actions for them to take in performance compliance. For the
recommendations that we have? Correct. Okay, there you have it.
Is there a second? Second. There's motion and second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye.
Opposed?
It's unanimous. We will take D3.
1:40 – 1:503 turns
Chair Williams, members of the board. Item D3 is from the Sheriff. It's a hearing to consider recommendations regarding the sheriff's office agreements for law enforcement services with Buellton, Carpentry, Gleda and Solvang.
Please proceed. Chair Williams and members of the board, thank you for listening to us today. I'm here with retired Lieutenant Brad McVeigh who deserves an incredible amount of credit for what we're about to present to you along with Kyle Slattery from the auditor's office. We would not be sitting where we are today if it were not for those two folks. A brief history of sheriffs contracting for law enforcement services.
This really began with L.A. County Sheriffs in the late 1950s and the so-called Lakewood Plan, when the City of Lakewood was incorporated and rather than create their own police department chose to contract with the Sheriff's Office, identifying the level of service that they wanted and progressed from there. Currently in Los Angeles County for example 44 of the 88 cities are under contract.
In our county four of the eight incorporated cities have elected Contract with the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Office. The oldest of these contracts is over 25 years old. Three of the cities incorporated and opted to contract with the sheriff from the beginning. One city, Carpinteria had its own police department and chose to make a transition to service with the sheriff's office.
Each of those contracts was arrived at differently, at different times, different discussions. There was no standardization of how they were arrived at or how costs were determined and from the time that I came on board three and a half years ago, I have received inquiries from each of the city managers inquiring about different rates And about why they were being charged what appeared to be different amounts for different services. And I have heard the concerns of the board about cost recovery and cost identification.
To that end, I asked Lieutenant McVay if he would come out of retirement and help with this process. And he has done an extraordinary job. We have been negotiating with each of the cities for close to 18 months. One of the things that we chose to do is to develop a new model of how we were going to approach this and in 2016, we began a systematic review of our contracting system and we became involved in the Southern California Association of Contracting Counties which essentially are the standard for how this service is delivered.
We also began working with the auditor's office. We felt that it was important that there be an independent determination of costs, how they were determined and what they might be. So that there was no confusion as to the source of the costs that were being brought forward. We also brought the auditor's office in to review our practices, I believe that is an attachment that is included with your board letter and they determined that there were a number of changes that we needed to make. One of the biggest changes that we made in terms of, to assist us in determining staffing levels was a transition from what's called the FTE model, that is the assignment of a specific number of people to each contract city as opposed to a time delivery model which is the standard throughout Southern California.
As we come forward to you today, you're going to notice that for two of the cities, Solvang and Buellton, we are asking to phase in our cost recovery aspect. Both of those cities were looking at substantial increases 27% and 29%, respectively, to their budget. We have approached this entire contracting process as a mutually beneficial partnership and striving to create a win-win out of it.
We believe that phasing in these cost increases is equitable. It will also, one of the aspects of this model is that each year cities will be advised what their costs are based on actual experience rather than an estimate. And at the moment, we are estimating we've gone simply on past history. So starting next year, we will have actual costs, actual experience in terms of time of service et cetera and we'll be able to tell the cities in the latter portion of the year what they can expect. We certainly anticipate that Ideally, hopefully by next year and certainly in no more than two years that both Solvang and Buellton will be paying full cost recovery.
In checking with other counties we determined that a phased-in approach was how they approached significant cost increases. The threshold for that varies but we selected 10% as kind of the threshold to discuss phasing. Lastly, your board letter includes a listing of services that the sheriff provides and one of the items that the auditor's office identified was In order for the sheriff to provide, to identify those services that are provided throughout the county we have to bring it to the Board of Supervisors and the board has to acknowledge those services. So for example things like the SWAT team, the dive team, the bomb team Those are services that, and there's a listing of them in the board letter. Those are services that we provide throughout the county both to our contract cities as well as incorporated cities with their own police departments should they request it.
None of those services are unique to a contract city unless The city were to request it under what's called a menu item. That's attachment E in the model contract. Each city can specify additional services beyond basic patrol services that they want. It occurs to me that the one item I did not mention I should come back to is that the core model that we're transitioning to is the Deputy Sheriff Service Unit. So it identifies that a deputy sheriff will be on patrol 24 hours a day, 7 days a week But what support services, what office staff, what detective support. What is involved in basically placing that deputy sheriff on the street?
The level of deputy sheriff service units has been determined this year on historical practice but going forward we will look at how much time we actually spend in the city And should we find that it is excessive, we will then sit down with the cities and talk with them about increasing their service levels. The Deputy Sheriff's Service Unit is separate from the menu item. The menu item can be something like a school resource deputy, a community resource deputy, some additional service that the city wishes to have.
And with that, I'm open for any questions and I don't know if Lieutenant McVeigh would like to add anything.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and the board, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. One other thing we wanted to bring to your attention as we went through this process, we realized that our contracts and agreements were spread out throughout the county. They were geographic in nature so whatever area commander or lieutenant it affected was the person that managed that contract.
We discovered a flaw in that as every time someone retired or changed position, some of those contracts were overlooked. They weren't monitored as to when they expired. The succession of services should stop or continue and that wasn't applied unilaterally. So what we've done is created a contract services unit that will be funded primarily by those contracts. So the people that manage those services, not only to our cities but all of our augmented services throughout the year will help fund that unit or actually will fund that unit.
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Thank you. Questions from the board?
You also provide services in Isla Vista negotiating with UCSB and the Chumash. Are some of these principles going to be applied in those cases as well?
Supervisor Hartman to the chair, yes they will. The Chumash contract was so new that we did not include it as part of our process but we will going forward in fact all sheriff's contracts going forward will be absorbed into the contract lobby or using this model Isla Vista, we're actually having discussions with the university to see if this model is applicable to Isla Vista and I suspect that it's going to be.
Request to speak?
No request to speak.
We have a dive team. Don't be alarmed that that's the only thing I got out of this staff report. I am looking at the City of Carpinteria cost breakdown sheet, but we have a scuba dive team? We do. I'm just thinking maybe I chose the wrong path of county service.
Having been a scuba diver for a number of years, I will tell you that the dive team goes into places you would not want to go.
That also is fascinating in and of itself but we will... So I guess if you need a backup member, I'm adept at diving in confined spaces with no visibility so yeah. I just
have to go back to what we were
talking about with Public Health and Animal Services earlier today.
So you know how much are we subsidizing and now you've told us exactly how much you're subsidizing 29 and 27 percent in those two cases. And if we continue to subsidize the service then, you know, we're taking it from Somebody in my district's mouth and given it to somebody else. And so, you know I'm opposed to that and we've had this conversation before with the sheriff about having to provide services because somebody contracted. And I know that Supervisor Wolf was aghast as was I because all of our Board of Supervisors A city, you know they've got a choice to make. You need to just tell them how much it's going to cost and then they can do their own police department if it's cheaper or not.
I mean I don't understand what this...I mean I understand the empathy for a situation that is going to cause some discomfort but at the same time I don't know why nobody has empathy for the people of Orchid where we're taking service hours out of Orchid or Eastern Goleta Valley and sticking it in one of the cities.
Supervisor Adams, through the chair your point is well taken and it's actually what drove this entire discussion. This entire project to begin with is the recognition that we were in fact subsidizing cities throughout the county that we were not identifying costs and services that we're providing. Because this is a new method, and again for this year's contract and it's the reason that each of the contracts for the next couple of years will be one-year contracts so we can look at our actual experience.
But I can assure you that we are going to do, we are on track to do full cost recovery with the two cities. And the only subsidy if you will is simply a recognition that because we have changed methodologies from what we have done for the last 25 years that their costs were going to jump dramatically in one year And we felt that given the experience, that we could move forward on this in a phased-in process. But we will be achieving full cost recovery. Well and
I'll just say this. As much as I appreciate that, I mean that's a nice step in the right direction. However, you know the people of Santa Maria and the people of Lompoc and the people of Santa Barbara I don't know where else. Guadalupe has its own, even little Guadalupe has its own police department and they're not you know to have us subsidize these two organizations I mean they just need to wake up and smell the coffee again and recognize the true cost You know, make accommodations because you know again and the people who really suck it up are my 4th district people and her 2nd district people who were the largest populations in the county that are not represented by another entity, a law enforcement entity.
So to the extent that you give away some of the budget to these other guys, and the other organizations as I said who have their own police departments they don't get a break. So I just don't understand how I can explain that to my constituents, that I'm gonna sit here and say well we're gonna suck it up for a couple more years and we'll get it organized in a couple of years. But you just keep sucking it up in the meantime.
That seems... Yeah I know, we've already sucked it up for 30 years. Yeah exactly. Supervisor Wolf?
Thank you Mr. Chair, well you know I really couldn't agree more with Supervisor Adam but I also feel that we are moving in the right direction and I really do appreciate that. You know just so my constituents out there who might be listening right now, I just want to assure them that while this discussion is going on that there is There is coverage in the Eastern Goleta Valley. And I think one of the benefits that we have being a neighbor to the city of Goleta who contracts with the sheriff, and this is you know, I've talked to the sheriff about this and deputies Is that there is this mutual aid? Maybe that's the wrong word but we're in such close proximity to each other that if there is a call into Eastern Goleta Valley, you will have deputies that are contracted with I'm appreciative of the city of Goleta for what they are putting forth as far as staffing for their city because it does enhance the services for eastern Goleta Valley.
Now, I wish other cities would step up and do Again, I think for where we are right now in Eastern Glade Valley and looking at response times, we're doing okay. And I think your deputies are on top of the things that are occurring in that unincorporated area. But just for a sense of fairness it's not fair but you're working on it and that's what I think is important and we will get there. Thank you Mr. Chair.
Supervisor Hartman?
Thank you Mr. Chair, I just wanted to make an observation and then ask a question. The observation is we found ourselves on the other side of this net in talking about libraries when the City of Santa Barbara raised their administrative fees for libraries and we asked them to smooth it over time because it was a big jump all at once so I think that Smoothing this over time does give an opportunity for cities to adjust to the change. I had a question about the actual costs and how much, how do you do that? What kind of administrative burden does it take? I think that's very important in giving real information about the service demand in the different cities and gives them a basis for explaining the services that they're actually getting but I just wonder if you could elaborate on
2:00 – 2:0516 turns
Supervisor Hartman to the chair. The Deputy Sheriff's Service Unit, and I have to give a tremendous amount of gratitude to Kyle Slattery from the auditor's office. It's broken down by all of the services that code towards our law branch. So anybody that provides law enforcement and all the support behind that it breaks it down so Every sergeant that a deputy touches, every administrative professional that a deputy touches, every detective that a deputy touches. All of those costs are rolled into one single cost and that's laid out for the cities as you'll see in your attachment E1.
That what those costs are and how it impacts each city and what the total costs of a deputy sheriff service unit is. Does that answer your question?
So it's not like an attorney where every six minutes you're having to say what you're doing. And what you're billing it, which account you're billing it to.
Correct and again the number of Deputy Sheriff's Service Units this year is based on historical experience. As we go forward one of the things that we've been tracking for the last 18 months is what Supervisor Wolf referenced. Which is the number of times that city cars leave to go into the county and the number of times that county cars come into the city. We believe ultimately that this model is going to be very helpful for determining appropriate staffing levels in the unincorporated areas, both Isla Vista, Orchid and the Eastern Goleta Valley.
Supervisor Adam? I wonder if Supervisor Wolf was trying to help me think that this was better for me, but your comments have made me even more incredulous because it's only my unincorporated areas that are subsidizing this whole damn thing. There's a lot of people
that might
disagree with
you.
Your folks that are on patrol in Goleta can answer a call out there. We don't have such a thing necessarily with Orchid and Santa Maria PD or something where we get covered. in the event that there's a call and nobody there to
handle it? It's obviously not directly related to this discussion, but there are planning efforts going underway that will be implemented over the next 30-60 days. In terms of schedule changes as part of the whole overtime reduction and staffing Staffing by time and activity. And the area, you've heard me reference before the so-called Santa Maria experiment which for nine of the last 12 months that area was actually optimally staffed compared to the rest of the county simply to demonstrate that if we can determine the adequate levels of staffing, that we can actually do cost control. Again not directly related to this discussion but sure.
And that may be... But you know the fact remains there's a tremendous amount of money that should be available county wide Which we'd get our share of, our pro rata share of which were not because it's going out the door in specific other places.
I think what the undersheriff may have been alluding to you is that if you computate the numbers in the last year because of the Santa Maria experiment, that you got subsidized and that ORCUT got subsidized not the other way around. Now your point stands for other years but... The 29 years before that? If your station's the only one that's adequately staffed it may be the other way. I just think you have a hard time winning.
You're winning, man! We're going to get there!
Well, I wish you wouldn't help me define winning because I can do that for myself. You know, I think maybe what I'd like to see is winning would be defined as if we could get it to full speed next year. Maybe this year you've already made a deal and that's fine but let's get it up to full speed next year.
And Supervisor Adam to the Chair, that is our goal. And again this year we will have actual experience and time to look at and we believe that smoothing will occur. I don't want to say definitively that's gonna happen next year but I will tell you that that's our objective.
Okay well I will probably not consider it winning if we don't have it full speed next year.
Mr. Gazzani?
Chair and Supervisors, just to help you with the framework you're operating in, the determination of these costs is a quasi-legislative act and the one case that has looked at that underscores your pretty broad discretion in determining what's reasonable in this area so everything you've been talking about is inside that box.
2:05 – 2:2612 turns
Thank you And when it's not, please interrupt us instead of allowing us to talk about it. So thank you. Is there a motion on A, B, C and D? We have not had any requests to speak.
So moved.
Is there a second?
Second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye.
Opposed? It's unanimous. So time management today has been a little bit interesting because we are trying to get done in time for our 4 p.m. Ad Hoc Committee workshop, so we are going to take item 8 if staff is ready for it.
Chair Williams, members of the board, Item 8 is brought to the board by Supervisor Wolf and the Child Care Planning Council. It's a hearing to receive and file a child needs assessment presentation report.
Mr. Gazzani? Chair, just on the time management is it the board's plan to take number eight and then go to closed session or just so I can preview so we could have people available on deck for closed session?
Yes, it would be my intention to get certain items that have a high degree of public interest in it as close to 1 o'clock as possible so that we allow people to participate in the highest number possible. So that will probably be taking this item and then going into closed session.
Thank you. That's helpful. Supervisor
Wolf.
Thank you Mr. Chair, I would just like to introduce Joy Stone she is the program coordinator for Santa Barbara County Child Care Planning Council and she's going to be making the presentation today as you know I was appointed by this board to serve on that council which I happily did for maybe a year and a half and then it conflicted with a Operations committee assignment that I had on the retirement board. So my staff person, Hilda Lopez, Hilda can you just raise your hand? Has been taking my place and has I know been an excellent addition to the council. And just before Joyce gets started she has passed out The final Child Care Planning Council report, which if you go through this report there's extensive documentation and statistical information about issues that relate to not just child care but poverty levels.
Housing issues, so many things. Higher education and of course the issue that's before us which is child care and the childcare needs in our county. So I think this if you get a chance to look at it please do because it's exceptional. And I know Joyce will be going through her slide presentation to give us a quick update. And I so appreciate your work Joyce and the entire council. Being there has been a privilege. So thank you for everything that you do. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Chair, Supervisors and especially thanks to Supervisor Wolff for her commitment to serving on the council and her willingness to send staff in her absence so we really appreciate having Having them involved in the council, and I ask the indulgence of Supervisor Hartman who has seen this presentation in another form at the first five commission. But I hope you will enjoy it again. So the slides are based on the full report.
I hope you're aware that the Child Care Planning Council as in every county in California is under It serves under the joint authority of the Board of Supervisors and the Superintendent of Schools. So we like to take any opportunity we can to help inform you of the needs of children and families in the county, so again I really appreciate your time this morning.
I'm happy to be here. So one of the mandates that's laid out in the California Education Code for the Local Child Care Planning Council is to conduct an assessment of child care needs every five years so this report that you see has been Quite a long term project, it's almost time to start gathering new data again but this is what we have. There are a number of identified data points that we are compelled to use according to our mandate in the education code so I'll go through those quickly.
This needs assessment also informs the development of a five year strategic plan for child care so We have just had printed a summary document and I'm going to be sending that to you. I didn't have it in time to bring today, but it talks about some of the goals that we haven't identified for children and families in the county. So this is just a quick look at the Planning Council members as of last year. We meet up at Lake Kachuma, so that was the council attending that day.
Again I will go over these quickly. These are all the data points that are mandated by the education code that we look at. You can see there's a couple of slides that identify those and As Supervisor Wolf mentioned, we don't look just at childcare because families have many needs. They need assistance in other areas if they are of low income or have other identified needs so we try to look holistically at the children and the families and identify what their needs are and then identify how we can work to fill those needs.
So the report starts out, as you'll see chapter one. We focus on child care quality. High quality early care and education services are critical to young children. A lot of research showing how those benefits accrue to the children, the families and the community. But Santa Barbara has a long history of investing in high quality. We have the highest rate of national accreditation for both center-based programs and family child care programs in the country. So in fact our Children's Resource and Referrals staff who oversee the accreditation for family child care homes We're just honored in Chicago at a national conference of the National Association of Family Child Care Homes. So we're really proud of that, we've also invested in the outdoor classroom project.
It's important that children have opportunities to be outside and anything they can learn inside they can learn outside and more so we're happy to support that. Inclusive child care means that children that have special needs are included with other typically developing children and programs, which is a benefit to all of them not just the children with special needs. We have a number of workforce incentives We administer a program called AB 212 that started through legislation in the year 2000, and that provides stipends for teachers to undertake professional development activities or higher education courses.
We have a leadership development program that is funded by the Santa Barbara Foundation. Prior to that, the Orfalea Foundation and that's to increase quality for the leaders of our child development programs. So the directors, site supervisors and so forth. And then we participate in Quality Counts which is the quality rating and improvement system started in 2012 with a federal race to the top early learning challenge grant.
Santa Barbara County was one of 16 counties selected to participate in this program. Once the federal grant ran out, it is now funded by First 5 California and there's a couple of block grants that come from the Department of Education. So we have about 140 programs both family child care and center based participating in this system so Resources to improve quality in many different areas, so we're really glad to be participating in that as well.
So high quality early care and education is really critical, first and foremost to children. I think you're probably aware that children's brain development is at its most rapid and significant in the first three to five years of life so it's really important that children get those high quality early experiences to prepare them for school and for life in general.
Quality childcare enables parents to be able to work, and to earn a living for their families and to contribute to the community. It helps provide a stable workforce for the community, and it is also a critical investment. So most economists will tell you including Nobel Laureate Dr James Heckman that This is the best investment we can make. There's a return of at least $7 for every dollar invested in ECE and that comes from increased taxation down the road, lower costs for incarceration, social services etc.
So it's very important and these children are our future. So this is a slide, this picture was taken in a local Head Start program and it was shortly after the Thomas fire. The children were as we all were so in awe of the work done by the local firefighters well and others from all over the state and the country. So they built their own fire engine and they were ready to roll there.
So back to the actual needs assessment, we know from our findings that our capacity is not meeting our need. We have about 50% of the capacity that we estimate is needed by children of working families that really need care so this is something that we all need to be concerned about as a community and find ways to help increase So since this needs assessment was undertaken, our population has increased. But our capacity for various reasons has not begun to keep pace with that need.
Part of it's the high cost of facilities in Santa Barbara County and It's just one of the needs that we need to think about meeting in terms of land use policy and that sort of thing. So, we need to pay attention to how we can help increase this capacity. So the next slide shows you need and capacity by age group. So we group children by age infants and toddlers, so that's birth to about three. Preschool age is three to five, and then school age is six and up.
We are sorely in need of infant care. We only meet about 14% of the need for infants and toddlers. We're doing better in preschool, we're meeting about 75% of that need overall and about 50% of school age so for all age groups you know we don't have enough capacity but particularly for infants and toddlers. The next slide and this is on page 29 in your report.
This shows the need and capacity by region, so you can see roughly where your districts fall on this chart. We don't have it broken down specifically by supervisorial district but that's a look overall. And as we mentioned before, families don't need only childcare. They have other needs particularly low income families so the next slides have to do with the need for subsidized care. So this comes from the chart on page 28 and we've broken it down into three regions here for you by zip code and city.
So there's the South County, Mid-County, And then North County, which does have the highest need of the biggest population. So the next slide shows you need and capacity. So as I mentioned earlier we're only meeting about 50% of the need in terms of the capacity of licensed child care so that includes center based It includes family child care homes, and it also includes license-exempt school based afterschool care.
So this slide just talks a little bit about some of the overall needs. Just to summarize, we don't have enough subsidized spaces for low income families. Many families work multiple jobs to make ends meet. The cost of housing as we know is high. The cost of child care is the second highest cost for many families. It can be about a third of their income or more.
And so we recognize that the needs are great and that we need to pay attention to them. Families' parents really want the best care they can find for their children, and if they can't find that then that puts added stress on these families. So this next slide talks about the cost of care. This is on page 26 of your report, and this is from data from a couple of years ago.
And it shows what the monthly cost is for different age groups and different areas of the county. So as I mentioned, the cost of care for a family with even one or two children can result in about one-third of their income. So the report also talks about Meeting other needs of families, so in chapter five we talk about the needs of migrant families, homeless families.
Families that have children with special needs, so they might have a medical need. A lot of the special needs now are behavioral, so that is an area where our teachers are sometimes struggling to meet some of those behavioral challenges. And also adequately care for all of the other children in their classrooms. So, some of the needs we've identified are the children with disabilities or other special needs and then children that are In cases of child abuse or at risk for abuse is another area of special need, and those children need some special help. Many of them entered foster care.
We had over 9,000 children estimated to be homeless. And more than 4,000 children had parents who are migrant farm workers. This figure is from 2013, and these were teen mothers ages 15 to 17. So if you look at the public health data that goes up to age 19 but We were looking at the younger teen parents, so I'm happy to say that the trend had decreased from 2009-2013 and the rate of teen parent pregnancies continues to decrease in the county which is really good news.
And then we have over 30,000 children that are dual language learners. And that means that they need help with becoming literate in their home languages but also in English. So again, that's another challenge for teachers to be able to teach these dual language learners not just Spanish speakers but Many other languages, for example at UCSB the Child Development Center there has families that speak 22 different languages. So that's another area to pay attention to So a few of the critical findings, and you'll see each chapter calls out some critical findings. But we have summarized them at the end of the report and a few of them are that high quality has a big impact on children's well-being, on their ability to thrive, to do well in school, and to do well beyond that in the workforce and in life in general.
We look at the importance of retaining a well-educated and well compensated workforce. A lot of our teachers are very well educated and trained, they go through a lot of training on an annual basis. Many of them have higher degrees, BAs, MAs but the wages are very low and we're actually working right now I hope to be able to bring you some of those findings in the future.
As we noted, there's a critical need for licensed childcare spaces all over the county but particularly in North County. And because of the lack of licensed spaces, many children are placed in unregulated care which can be a family friend or neighbor and not to cast any aspersions on that type of care. But we don't know what the quality is because those providers are not licensed.
And then, as I mentioned before the greatest need is for infant care. There's an overall need for all ages but that is the most critical in part because it costs a lot more. The ratios of children to teacher are higher so it takes more staffing etc., so that is really a big need to pay attention to. So that concludes the presentation and of course there's a lot more information contained within the larger report so I'd be happy to entertain any questions that you might have right now.
2:26 – 2:348 turns
Questions from the board? Supervisor Wolf
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I don't have a question. I again want to thank you for your presentation and I think the one slide where you talk about some families need additional help talking about foster care, children who are homeless, children who are from migrant farm workers or teen mothers that touches a lot on the social services and public health services at the county provides So I think it's relevant to, and we obviously don't provide child care services. Although that might be something that we look into for our employees.
But at this point in time, I think it just highlights the importance of us investing in our social services and public health services to ensure that these kids have a, to the extent that they can. have food, a stable home environment, a safe home environment so that when they go to school they're ready to learn. So I just wanted to thank you again because this is such an important topic and I know Supervisor Lavagnino and Supervisor Hartman both I know for myself infant care when I started working 38 years ago was a challenge. And to see that it's still Maybe it is where we as a nation, as a community really start to put our money. And that's in training professionals to work in infant care and early childhood education and pay them a salary that's commensurate with the importance of the work that they do.
So again thank you for coming and bringing this to us. Well thank you very much I appreciate your time. Thank you.
Hold on we've got a couple more. Supervisor Hartman?
Thank you, Mr. Chair and I thank you very much for this presentation. I really have a comment more than a question and the comment has to do with the county is going to be or has aspirations of looking at economic vitality and how we can increase that for the county. When I was looking at other counties I'm intrigued in that Ventura County has early childhood education as one of their top strategies for economic development. They recognize that, you know, in 15 or 18 years this is the workforce and good jobs locate where there are well-educated capable workforce and I think we really need to work on that particularly in North County where the income levels are lower than elsewhere I know that the North County Econ Alliance and United Way are focused very much on childcare.
I think of my colleague, Supervisor Lavinino who noted that we do spend a great deal on social services and he asked Daniel Nielsen if we spent $1 billion, I think it was in three to five years what would we get? And we already do but And Mr. Nielsen responded, if he had the choice it would be directed to early childhood care and social well-being health welfare.
So I just can't emphasize how important, I think the data you have compiled is as we think about where we want to be as a county going forward. It's just absolutely critical and I share Supervisor Wolf's. There's nothing as difficult as trying to go to work, do your job and you've got a child or a sick child and you're torn in how difficult that is for families that other cultures do this much better than we do. And I think it hurts us even the bottom line, the pocketbook in many other ways as well so thank you.
Thank you for your comments, I
appreciate them.
Just briefly wanted to explore two elements of the report. One, obviously is the death of slots particularly in infant care. It's about to get worse in Carpinteria as the county education office program is closing, as is the Carpinteria Children's Project Infant Care. So there will be an additional new hotspot of lack of availability. Is that one of the fundamental reasons why the price is so high? I mean, you look at the average price in the South County it exceeds the cost of a UC education.
And it's definitely not going to the workers, right? You think some of these programs $1400 a month tuition six to one ratio for toddlers. So you're talking 8500 bucks in revenue per teacher and the teachers are getting paid barely above minimum wage in some cases where is all the money going, right?
Well, in Santa Barbara for one I think a lot of it is going to the cost of purchasing land and opening a facility. So there are other areas of overhead, I guess. I mean, I'd have to probably do a little more research on On how those costs break down, but you're right. I mean the teachers aren't getting the kind of compensation that we think they deserve. But it's kind of the, I did a masters thesis on this and it's kind of a conundrum that the cost is so high and yet the benefits don't accrue to the teachers themselves.
There is a lot of research on the market failure of this industry. And so that's why we like to advocate for more subsidized care, which is mainly financed by the State Department of Education but a lot of it comes through the Federal Child Care and Development Block Grant as well and there's also a quality set aside. Some of the funding that we get to enhance quality comes from that.
So there's a couple of different issues, one is the issue of the spaces and the other is the issue of quality so we don't want one without the other but yes I don't know. I'd have to do a little more research and get back
to you on that. Love your thoughts. One of the other things that I've noticed is just a large swing in terms of the tuition meaning Is that commensurate with as large of a swing in terms of the pay of teachers or in terms of rents, or in terms of other things? But just the variation from about 750 to about 1500 a month in the South.
2:34 – 4:0112 turns
Some of that depends on the age group being served, some of it depends on the area. So these rates can be based on what's called the regional market rate which is set by the state and for those providers receiving say vouchers from CalWorks Child Care for example there's a cap on that so you know that's what kind of drives these numbers but They do vary from region to region and from age group to age group, that's for sure.
So,
but- Supervisor Adam?
I'm just going to point out that I think there is probably a pretty hefty component of cost in liability and E&O type insurance in this deal because if anything should happen to one of the children, I'm sure there's a lawsuit pending.
That could be. The safety of these facilities is regulated by the Department of Social Services Community Care Licensing, so we always hope that safety will be the first consideration and that children don't get hurt but it does happen sometimes.
Thank you for the report. Any other questions or comments from the supervisors? Do we have any requests to speak?
No request to speak.
Can
we get
a motion to receive and file? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? It's unanimous. We will break for closed session. We will return between 1245 and 1.
Chair Williams and supervisors, today the board has agendized to consider seven items in closed session. The first is Wiffen versus County of Santa Barbara existing litigation. We also have two matters of anticipated litigation for significant exposure. As well as two matters of deciding whether to initiate litigation. One matter was agendized, which was conference with labor negotiators and that was withdrawn for time management. And you're also agendized for public employee performance evaluation for the county executive officer and if that does not occur it will be scheduled for next week. My estimate is about one hour.
Thank you So tentatively we'll reconvene shortly after 1245, but we'll give you an update.
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4:02 – 4:063 turns
Yeah. ♪
♪ ♪ We'll
call this meeting back to order and take up D4. Report from closed session.
4:06 – 4:234 turns
Chair and supervisors, today in closed session the board considered a litigation matter of Wiffen versus County of Santa Barbara as well as two matters of anticipated litigation for significant exposure to litigation as well as two other anticipated litigation matters for deciding whether to initiate civil litigation As mentioned before lunch, the item for labor relations was withdrawn and the board also considered public employee performance evaluation for the county executive officer. There are no reportable actions.
D4?
Chair Williams, members of the board, Item 4 sponsored by Supervisor Williams is a hearing to consider recommendations regarding an ordinance to create a County of Santa Barbara Citizens Independent Redistricting and Voting Rights Protection Commission.
Hello Board and members of the public. I'm Darcelle Elliott, Chief of Staff for Chair Williams and this is Emily Elzain who will be assisting me with the presentation. Before I begin my presentation I just want to inform the board that state statute identifies two separate methods for voters to create laws. One method is through a voter initiative, through a petition and gathering of signatures. And the other is a board referendum through adoption of an ordinance referral to voters through a resolution and approval by the voters. And I will be talking about the latter today.
It's that you draw the lines public independent redistricting commission. So just a little background on redistricting commissions. Proposition 77 went before the voters in the statewide election, special statewide election in 2005 and failed. It received 40% of the yes votes statewide but 45% of Santa Barbara County's voters voted yes. The same initiative, essentially the same initiative came back in the form of Proposition 11 in 2008 and passed with 50.9% of the voters statewide voting yes but 53% of Santa Barbara County voters voting yes And then in 2010, Proposition 20 came before the voters and that added congressional districts to the state redistricting commission. And that passed with 61% of the vote statewide and 64% in Santa Barbara County.
Since those commissions have taken, since the California Commission was formed in 2010 there's been a nationwide push for redistricting commissions In his last State of the Union, President Obama stated his support for redistricting reform. And after leaving office he partnered with former Attorney General Eric Holder to create the National Democratic Redistricting Committee to support initiatives to create independent redistricting commissions in every state.
The platform of the National League of Women Voters states, the League of Women Voters believes responsibility for redistricting preferably should be vested in an independent special commission with membership that reflects the diversity of the unit of government. Including citizens at large, representatives of public interest groups and members of minority groups. And lastly, a nationwide poll was done in 2017 by Lake Research Partners and WPA Intelligence. And shows that 71% of likely 2018 general election voters nationwide support the Supreme Court setting new clear rules for determining when partisan gerrymandering violates the Constitution.
So those are covering the state and congressional redistricting. So obviously we are a county board of supervisors, and there have been some new county independent redistricting commissions that have been formed. In the last couple of years, that includes Los Angeles and San Diego counties. Both of them were formed by state legislation because they are charter counties. Santa Barbara County is a general law county so we are able to place our own referendum on the ballot.
And those are formed by Senate Bill 958 for Los Angeles and Assembly Bill 801 for San Diego County. Their commissions are comprised of 14 members, with at least one member being from each supervisorial district. It requires voting in at least one of the last three statewide elections as a qualification to serve on the commission. It also requires applicants to possess analytical skills relevant to the redistricting process and voting rights. The ability to be impartial and demonstrate an appreciation of the diverse demographics and geography of the county.
It also requires the commission to be as proportional as possible to the total number of voters who are registered with each political party, and reflect the county's diversity including racial, ethnic, geographic, and gender diversity. It also requires the county elections official to create a pool of the 60 most qualified applicants and the clerk of the county to conduct a random drawing to select the first eight commissioners with one coming from each district.
Those eight commissioners select their remaining six members based on the qualifications listed. It requires nine votes for any official action, which is slightly less than a two-thirds supermajority. Requires seven public hearings before the commission draws a map and two public hearings following the drafting of the map. Requires live translation to be offered at the public hearings of the commission, lays out the steps to encourage public participation in the commission process, and defines an immediate family member as spouse, child, in-law, parent or sibling.
So now we come to the you draw the lines ordinance. So this is something that our office drafted based off of the models that are currently being used in Los Angeles and San Diego County, As part of the public process as possible. See, the thing with the state legislator and congressional districts is there's not really a super big public process for drawing those lines. They're done by legislators and Congress. And the public's not really a part of that process. In our county we do have a public process for including the public in our redistricting.
So this ordinance is trying to keep that part of the board's former redistricting policies in place. And so it's comprised of 11 members with at least two members coming from each supervisorial district and one member being at large. It requires voting in Santa Barbara County in at least one of the last three statewide elections, and also requires applicants to possess analytical skills relevant to the redistricting process and voting rights, the ability to be impartial and demonstrate an appreciation for the diverse demographics and geography of the county.
It adds having a significant financial interest in any company, corporation or other business entity that has donated $500 or more in one year to any candidate or political committee as a disqualification. That's something unique to our ordinance that doesn't exist in the LA and San Diego County versions. Requires the commission to be as proportional as possible to the total number of voters who are registered with each political party and reflect the county's diversity including racial, ethnic, geographic age and gender diversity.
It requires the county elections official to create a pool of 45 of the most qualified applicants. So LA and San Diego have 60, but we are a smaller county so we went with a smaller number. Also, so the LA and San Diego versions they had the county elections official creating the pool and then the clerk of the county drawing the names because in those counties there are two separate positions. In our county, it's the same position. So we went with a district attorney to conduct a random drawing to select one commissioner from each district.
The five selected commissioners shall appoint their remaining six applicants with five coming from each district and one at large based on the qualifications listed. And that's something else that's unique for ours in LA and San Diego they only require one commissioner And then it also includes a process to remove a commissioner from the commission for certain violations. That's mirrored off of Prop 11 for the State Commission.
LA and San Diego don't have that, but But we just wanted to make it clear so that if we ever come across that situation, we don't have to figure out under state law how to go through that process. It requires seven votes for any official action which is also slightly less than two-thirds of supermajority. It requires seven public hearings before the commission drafts a map and seven public hearings after the maps have been drafted.
It requires live translation to be offered at the public hearings and also lays out the steps for public participation and defines immediate family member the same as state law. So, the recommended actions which is changed slightly so you should have a new copy of the presentation and members of the public can grab the new presentation in the back along with new drafts of the ordinance and resolution.
So the recommended actions are you receive and file this report on the UDraw the Lines County Ordinance to create a County of Santa Barbara Public Independent Redistricting Commission. And consider the introduction or first reading of an ordinance of the Board of Supervisors adding section 2-10.9-A, to the Santa Barbara County Code to create the County of Santa Barbara Public Independent Redistricting Commission including the changes shown on slides 10 through 15.
And retitle ordinance of the Board of Supervisors adding section 2-10.9-A to the Santa Barbara County Code to create the County of Santa Barbara Public Independent Redistricting Commission. So, Mike I see you have your hand do you want to say something about that? No, okay. Because we changed the title which you'll see later on in the slide to the Citizens Independent Redistricting Commission but I didn't get a chance to change that on the slide before.
And set a hearing on July 10, 2018 to consider the adoption. A second reading of an ordinance of the Board of Supervisors adding section 2-10.9-A to the Santa Barbara County Code to create the County of Santa Barbara Public Independent Redistricting Commission and consider the adoption of a resolution submitting the proposed ordinance I move that the board of Supervisors approve amendment 10.9-A to the Santa Barbara County Code to create the county of Santa Barbara Public Independent Redistricting Commission to the electorate for approval and requesting an ordering consolidation with the November 6, 2018 consolidated general election including And then the other two are the same. So part of that hearing will also be to consider appointing members of the Board of Supervisors to author, sign and submit on behalf of the board a direct argument in favor of the proposed ordinance and any possible rebuttal.
And then to determine that the above actions are organization administrative activities of government that will not result in direct or indirect physical changes in the environment and are not a project under CEQA. So the changes that have been made are, the title has been changed to County of Santa Barbara Citizens Independent Redistricting Commission. And those changes were made in the title in section one and section 2-10.9A, section 2- 10.98.010, Section 2-10.9A.020B, section 2- 10.9a.030 and then the other recommended actions include changing in Part I, little i is to include the additional words shown below which are supposed to clarify that someone would not be disqualified if they owned a small percentage of stock in a company as part of like retirement or something like that.
It's listed later on in the ordinance it was our intention to not include those people and people who would be disqualified but we added it into this part of the language for clarification It also changes section 2-10.9A.040E to include the additional words shown below, so it just clarifies that the county elections official when they receive the application that they should post them online for public review We also added section 2-10.9A.040E1D to state the words shown below in italics and so if you have the copy of the track changes, these are listed out and underlined and crossed out so that you can follow along It changes it from having to be five applicants for each existing supervisorial district and makes it nine. So the county elections official is creating a pool of 45 applicants, and this would just make it even so that there's nine from each supervisorial district to be considered, assuming that there are nine applicants in each district.
Then it also, we changed 2-10.9A.040F to include that just to clarify that the sub pools that would be created of each Supervisorial District are to be comprised of qualified applicants residing in that district corresponding to the sub pool which they have been assigned In section 2-10.9A.040H1, it includes the additional words below that in order for... It just clarifies the process for selecting the applicants if they're... The first five are selected randomly and those five select the other six that it would take a vote of at least four of It changes section 2-10.9A.040H3 to include the additional word shown below in italics after the third sentence in the paragraph.
This is about the political party preferences of the commission and it states however, the political party preferences Section 2-10.9A.040H4 That the five initial commissioners shall interview finalists for appointment, allow public comment and make the appointments during a public hearing. So that part in the ordinance still needs to be changed in the ordinance version that you have But that will be changed.
Edit section 2-10.9A.060G to read as shown below, that each of the public meetings of the commission shall be video recorded and available to the public for review. And then that part was added so then it just renumbers the letters below. And then the new resolution, which would be considered at the July 10th hearing if the board were to set the hearing today.
Changes the title of the ordinance to the County of Santa Barbara Citizens Independent Redistricting Commission and it also changes the ballot question That shall the ordinance of the Board of Supervisors to create an 11 member independent redistricting commission to adjust the boundaries of the county supervisorial districts by adding section 2 dash 10.9 a to the Santa Barbara County Code be adopted.
So that is all in my presentation.
4:23 – 4:3532 turns
And I'll also give a little piece This has been a little bit rapid of a process, precipitated by the submission for the ballot of the RIG initiative. I have historically been supporter of redistricting commissions even when it was a relatively unpopular idea in the statewide Democratic Party I and some of the folks here championed the local party taking a position in support of the redistricting commissions. And the local party took a lot of flack from the statewide party back in 2008 for supporting citizens' redistricting. So while it has definitely been precipitated by this submission Thank you. Mr. Chair and members my support for this concept goes far back I would say what we got in the last week was a lot of objections from the community about some aspects of the rigs initiative at the same time it' s not necessarily a bad idea to have a citizens redistricting Try to take the good and get rid of the bad of the idea of a Citizens Redistricting Commission.
With that, any questions? First question, Supervisor Adam.
Well, the first thing I wanted to ask is there a chance that we could get a strikeout underlined copy Thank you very much. And the other thing that I would ask
as we
go I don't think it's too cumbersome to be able to say Reasoning Government instead of RIG. I think there was an article in a local tabloid that castigated the organization, and I don' t think that's really very respectful thing
to do. Okay. I will use Reasoning Government, though one has to think they thought
I wasn't there when they created that, but I think that that wasn't part of their thought process at the time they named it. So if we could just treat them with a little bit of respect, that would be good.
I would gladly do so. Thank you. Supervisor Lavanino?
Thank you Mr. Chair. So I just have some questions about this. And I'm going to start with just saying that, hey, to me anything is better than the status quo. The status quo is...I think if we're gonna talk rigged, that's rigged when we're drawing our own lines doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense. So I appreciate both parties that have brought something to the table and I just have a few questions about this one.
First off, is there any... Okay so what happens? What I'm really curious about is what happens because we're going to require a supermajority instead of a simple majority. What happens if you can't get seven members to agree on a map?
So our ordinance follows state law which is that if a supermajority of the State Commission cannot reach And so if we have a consensus then it goes to the, oh sorry. It goes to the county elections official and assessor which in our situation is the same position and also I believe the district attorney is on there. So I assume that the assessor can't be on
Yeah, so it was kind of buried in state elections code. Go ahead.
Supervisory, I was going to ask for Mike to ask the same
question.
Existing laws stand and that existing law is a little unusual.
So I have in front of me Elections Code 21502. So in the 21500 series of the election's code, it is essentially the default for adjusting or considering adjustment of boundaries for supervisorial districts Following a federal census, and it's really the context that we're talking about. And at elections code section 21502, it provides that this supervisorial redistricting commission shall be composed of the district attorney as chair. And then gets a little cumbersome as breaking out both a county assessor and a county elections official who in our county are one person.
If elected by the qualified electors and then defaults to the county superintendent of schools after that, and then ultimately the sheriff. But we don't get there because we have so many people in front of that. And that's addressed in the proposed ordinance If these seven members don't agree, then the plan shall be completed by the redistricting commission in accordance with 21501 and 21502. And that's what I'm just reading from is 21502. 21501 is the time for doing that and it's all contained within the election code so essentially default to state law. Right.
So my concern is, and I appreciate the fact that it's asking for a super majority but It makes it a lot more cumbersome. I could really see a situation where you don't reach a supermajority and then this whole thing kind of defaults to two or three individuals, one of them being the superintendent of public instruction that Absolutely sure doesn't want anything to do with this.
So is there a way just to make it a simple majority where you would just have a majority of the? Is that is that a possibility or not? Because if somebody really wanted to and what I'm always worried about is who you get on this commission, and I'm not saying that this would happen. But you might have a vested interest in creating a hung jury where you can't agree on anything Two or three people that draw the lines again.
So as opposed to getting a majority of the Independent Citizens Commission.
So one of the beautiful things about us bringing ordinance to the board is the board can make any changes they want to it. So if that's something the majority and the board wants then...
Unless it's prescribed by state law, we could change that to six vote.
Okay I'm just curious about that so go ahead if you wanna comment on that one.
Well I was just gonna say before we start I
have questions of staff. That's what I was asking. I wasn't negotiating anything at this time, so I just want to know what happened if we get to that part? The other thing is there any the other serious question I have is about ex parte how much interaction these independent commissioners are going Members of the Board of Supervisors with any outside consultants, how independent are they really going to be and how much of that can we make public so that we make this as Crystal clear as we could, could we add an ex parte in a...
I'd almost like to wall them off if possible but at least make everything discoverable that they're discussing with elected officials or parties or whatever
else. Is there such a provision in state law already? I think is the operative question on... On ex-party prohibitions or ex-party declarations in elections code, I think is a question. Maybe you could give staff some time to pore over
the elections code? And most of the time I would have liked to have prepared these questions ahead of time and given them to him but... This was so, you know we got this so late that we're kind of on the fly. Understood. We're all... I know, we're all running here. One last thing for me is and I just need to know the rationale behind why don't we just pick all? Why don't we just have the same system that goes for the initial five commissioners?
Why aren't we doing that same thing for all 11? Why are the first five commissioners getting to pick the other six?
Well, so where we got that idea was from all the other redistricting committees. Yeah
I just don't
understand why we do that. But also I think it's our office's preference not to have 11 randomly selected. Part of the ordinance is that it has to mirror the political party makeup of the county and also the demographic makeup of the county. So if you have the first five people selected randomly that. That's an appoint, an applicant. And they wouldn't have been selected randomly but the commission could for the five commissioners could decide we want a lawyer on our commission and you know that's why we also added reason in government actually suggested adding the four of the five commissioners vote to appoint someone and we thought that was a great suggestion because that's a pretty high threshold to reach and...
Oh
so there you have to have a supermajority to appoint the next member?
Yeah
Man, we're gonna have a huge applicant pool. I can see, I have a hard time getting women to find three women to serve on the Women's Commission so I'm gonna be struggling to get good qualified people on this. So I can see a huge applicant pool gonna be needed. The call is out there folks at this point regardless which one we go with, we're gonna need some good people. And I think that
to reiterate the need, I think imperatives of a redistricting commission is that it reflect the party makeup in the county so that nobody can basically make the accusation that its rigging the system. And that it reflects the ethnic and demographic makeup. And you can't get that purely by random selection. I'd also argue from a political science perspective, that our democracy and the concept of democracy is a mix of random selection which worked a little bit.
But generally in Athens it didn't work so well when you were picking generals by random selection. And qualifications.
Okay, so what I'm worried about is you're going to have five members that are now going to be saying kind of like, I need a Hispanic Democrat from the 5th District. It's going to be interesting how they're going to have to fill those slots. It will get tasty. None of this is going to be easy.
Do we have anybody with a nut allergy?
That is not one of the criterias. Okay, I think we're ready for public comment unless there's other questions.
4:35 – 4:409 turns
Chair Williams, members of the board, we have 13 requests to speak. We're going to start in Santa Maria with Pamela Bazook followed by Joe Armendariz. Pamela?
Good afternoon. Thank you for your powerful consideration of this issue and for the time to comment. Upon review of the two proposals for the redistricting commission, it seems only clear that residents of Santa Barbara County would want a commission comprised of applicants who represent the total diverse population, people who have been vetted for experience, skills and ability, The ability to analyze the abundance of data involved are best suited to draw the boundaries of East District.
Furthermore, it is desirable they do not have significant financial interests which may influence their recommendations. The initiative known as You Draw the Lines has provided for 11 commissioners who will be selected from an extensive review by the county elections official and public based on their qualifications. It specifically includes those with significant financial interests.
By contrast, the initiative known as Reasoning Government proposes to select only five commissioners from applicants chosen by random with only emphasis on political affiliation. This proposal would give just three persons a simple majority who have chosen without extensive consideration of their qualifications to determine the boundaries of our district for ten years.
You Draw the Lines has provisions for extensive public input, including data and maps to be presented by the populace during seven initial public hearings and seven more after the maps have been drawn. Reason in government seems to be focused on speed, and the timeline does not seem sufficient to give the public enough time to review. I urge the board to adopt the proposal known as you draw the line so that the boundaries of our district are carefully and optimally drawn to reflect the interests of all residents of the county. Thank you.
Joe Armendariz, then we're going to come back to Santa Barbara for Lindsey
Baker. I thought maybe I had an extra minute there on the clock. I'm Joe Armendariz representing Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association. On happy 4th of July, seems appropriate we'd be discussing this on the eve of the nation's birthday when we declared our independence from King George III. I would submit that Supervisor Williams is much more benevolent than King George III and I'm very pleased to point that out. But I have to
ask, frankly. Favorably compare me to an insane dictator. So that's good. I'm good, I pass
that
bar.
But of course I do without your respect. Right Peter? So but look, I mean, I have to just say as a matter of good government, I think that it's hard to be opposed to anything that would take this out of the hands of the elected officials. But I also have to say as an advocate of good government, this process has been, let's just say rather abbreviated to say the least.
It appears as though you're kind of making it up as you go along, even in this particular hearing. Striking out and replacing and rewriting and reinventing. I don't think that's the definition of good government so I'm a little concerned about that. I am very pleased however that there is an inherent admission which is that elected officials should not be drawing their own districts. The voters should be selecting The You have to be pretty impressed with yourself as a county supervisor, to think that the only eligible person to serve on such commission is almost the second coming of King Solomon. I think that the convoluted process and the definition of who's eligible and how much they've given and what they've done and who they're going to vote for or whether they're going to run or if they didn't run or they might run.
I mean, I find this just unnecessarily complicated. Keep it simple. Keep it as simple as possible and let the voters decide. And that's, I think, the definition of small d democracy. Thank you.
Back to Senator Barbara for Lindsey Baker be followed by Colin Stewart
4:40 – 4:485 turns
Good afternoon Supervisors and Chair Williams. I'm Lindsay Baker, Co-President of the League of Women Voters for Program and Advocacy. Yesterday I returned from Chicago from the National Convention for the League of Women Voters and we had a whole day workshop on gerrymandering and many other workshops about voting so hopefully we'll be able to help the community in the upcoming period of time.
I will expand, we're pleased to see that you referenced the League of Women Voters. And I will expand on our position. The League of Women Voters believes responsibility for redistricting preferably should be vested in an independent special commission with membership that reflects the diversity of the unit of government including citizens at large, representatives of public interest groups and members of minority groups. Every redistricting process should include specific timelines for the steps leading to a redistricting plan, full disclosure throughout the process and public hearings on the plan proposed for adoption. Redistricting at all levels of government must be accomplished in an open unbiased manner with citizen participation and access at all levels and steps of the process and should be subject to open meeting laws.
A provision that any redistricting plan should be adopted by the redistricting authority with more than a simple majority vote. Remedial provisions established in the event that the redistricting authority fails to enact a plan. Specific provisions should be made for court review of redistricting measures and for courts to require the redistricting authority to act on a specific schedule. Time limits be set for initiating court action for review.
Should promptly review and rule on any challenge to a redistricting plan and require adjustments if the standards have not been met. The standards on which the redistricting plan is based, and on which any plans should be judged must be enforceable in court. Require substantially equal population of geographic contiguity, effective representation of racial and linguistic minorities. Provide for to the extent possible promotion of partisan fairness preservation and protection of communities of interest in respect for boundaries of municipalities and counties compactness and competitiveness.
May also be considered as criteria so long as they do not conflict with the above criteria. Explicitly reject protection of incumbents through such devices as considering an incumbent's address, preferential treatment for a political party through such devices as considering party affiliation, voting history and candidate residence. This position was adopted on June 2016. I also served on the City of Santa Barbara District Commission, and we studied districts for nine months before reaching a position for the Santa Barbara City districts when they set them up. Thank you for attention. Here's a copy of our position.
Colin Stewart to be followed by Robert Collector.
Hello, my name is Colin Stewart. I am a Santa Barbara County resident. I think with recent decisions by the Supreme Court it's clear that there will not be federal leadership on the issue of gerrymandering anytime soon and that we in California have the ability to lead by example in creating a democratic and fair process for redistricting. So today I'm here in support of the You Draw The Lines initiative, which will create a transparent and robust method of selecting a redistricting committee that reflects the unique demographics of our county. With respect to some of the comments by the board earlier regarding the need to find a broad applicant pool, I am empathetic to that need with respect to some of their earlier comments from the public regarding the method in which this committee is selected.
I think that thinking through these issues ahead of time with diligence in terms of how we select these committee members to prevent potential undue influence ahead of time will be very valuable to this fair and democratic process. So, I kindly ask that you support this You Draw the Lines initiative. Thank you.
Robert Collector to be followed by Mickey Flax.
Supervisors, I'm in the unique situation of having speaker slips in both. So I'm not going to bore everybody because I am as for anybody who doesn't know a board member of Reason and Government. And Supervisor Williams, as my colleagues and I put together our non-profit, Supervisor Adams was correct. We didn't really think about any ugly epithets. We actually thought about the value we could bring to the community by combining our skill sets.
My nonprofit board who sponsored the initiative so first I just want to say for clarification For the audience and everyone else. Yes, this was a tremendous amount of work you guys accomplished in a couple of days For the public record reason government has spent a year and a half on this everything that we've done has we've done with Attorneys we've done polling And also Supervisor Williams, I'd love to know all those people who were so disturbed. I hope you share that with me by our initiative.
One thing we do have is 17,000 signatures of citizens who weren't so appalled by our language. So we never heard anybody except for one so-called journalist say what you said, but I hope you share it with us. We have entered a letter with the board with comments about your initiative and the final thing that I want to say before I talk about mine is this for the audience. There are a number of jurisdictions that have done this in California. You guys chose to choose There are certain aspects of what fit your determination about what works best. There are other ways to go about this, yours is ten pages long and ours I think is an elegant three and three quarter pages. The most important thing to us The purpose of this meeting is that an initiative achieve its stated goal of independence, impartiality and fairness.
We want this to be Caesar's wife above reproach and there be no way, no wormhole, no backdoor, no added complication that allows anybody but the public to draw these lines. Thank you.
4:48 – 4:534 turns
Now it's afternoon, good afternoon. You heard about me this morning but I just want to tell you that I have in the past participated in the last redistricting as a member of the public which was very much you draw the lines. Members of the public were invited to participate with staff and learning how to deal with the computer programs that actually drew the lines. We moved the line a little bit And the computer told you what the ethnic composition of the new district that you had drawn would be and things like that. It was, I would say a very exciting experiment in public participation in the democratic process and it should be continued.
I agree that kind of process is what we need. Also, it was in accordance with the California Voting Rights Act which I understand the Riggs proposal does not have. That is crucial. In the Riggs proposal, Signatures for petitions that make laws I think have been problematic in the recent past. Furthermore, they are far from an expression of the public will. Signatures today are bought and paid for very specifically up to $2 sometimes $5 a signature.
So anybody who has the ability to make that kind of expenditure can get anything they want on the ballot short of legitimization of murder, I suppose. And this is an example, I think, of that a very complex issue that people signed because the petition was thrown in front of them. They were told something about well this will make it more fair okay and they signed it knowing very little about what its about.
The entire proposal of the Riggs Proposal narrows decision making, allowing the final decision to be made by three people out of the five on the commission. I don't get it. Three electeds as has been in the past is supposed to be problematic. But three people whose names were originally drawn at random seems to be what is being proposed. It doesn't make much sense to me.
Furthermore, even the pool from which these people are drawn is specifically limited to those who are political partisans because they have to say whether a Democrat or Republican. The least politically active or knowledgeable because they can't have participated in anything short of voting for the past n number of years. They do not contribute financially to the election of local officials, not a very good sign of citizenship.
And for eight following years, they are to be barred from participation in any local commission. I, for instance, were on the Redistricting Commission could not be on the County Housing Authority Commission. Makes no sense. Even after my service on one, I could not for eight years be on any other. And furthermore the only positive, so in summary the only positive qualifications in the RIG proposal are a requirement that they be in political party not to be actively engaged in county affairs and have the luck to be randomly chosen.
The substitute proposal that is being discussed is larger and would require seven or even six votes out of 11. It doesn't exclude the most knowledgeable and active, in fact it requires that people have some history of activity and concern for the political process.
I need you to wrap up.
Okay, it makes the partisan representation in accordance with partisanship in the county rather than two from column A and two from column B. And here is the most important. Section 2-10 9A.040 E.1 requires that people whose names are in the pool, the requirements are that they have the requisite skills to deal with this. That two, they have a demonstrated record of being able to be impartial and C, that they appreciate the diversity of the community. Those are critical and should be part of any commission. Thank you.
I appreciate that folks are trying to handle public comment on both items at once, but if need be you can hold. If you need to go past three minutes you can put in a speaker slip for the next item so please try to keep to the three minutes.
4:53 – 4:5912 turns
I just want to register my displeasure. You know, it's our practice in the past to stop people from continuing to public comment after their time is significantly up and that was a minute and a half which is
significant.
I asked her
to wrap up at 30 seconds so... Well,
I understand that but then she went for another minute and a half. So you know, I think it's prejudicial a little bit
It's only prejudicial if I cut off somebody else that's on the other side. Spencer?
Thank you, board. I'll try to be brief. I do want to echo some of the comments made by the previous speaker about signatures as someone who was approached to sign the reasoning government ballot petition. I ended up declining. They end up coming up to you saying sign this for children's health care make sure that children don't starve and once you sign that one they flip the page and they say okay redistricting Santa Barbara County.
My friends and I said what? I don't think so. I want to just say, as a resident of Isla Vista is someone who sort of sits on one of these boundaries that could end up being shifted when redistricting occurs. I think it's super important that we have an alternative for the voters to consider for the makeup of the commission that ends up redrawing these lines.
I'm very supportive of the proposal being put forward by the first district office. Most importantly to me, because it includes the provision that prevents special interests from hijacking this process by making sure that those who have a significant financial interest in corporations are prohibited from serving on the commission. I hope that you will forward this to the ballot and give the voters an alternative. Thank you.
Ethan Bertrand and then we'll hear from Dr. Lee Heller
Thank you, good afternoon Mr. Chair and honorable supervisors. For a long time there has been a desire by special interests in the county of Santa Barbara to split up Isla Vista and UC Santa Barbara into two different supervisorial districts. Breaking up the strong voice of young people who are willing to be actively involved in how our county is governed. Such a move would be an attack on our community and such a proposal as the reasoning government has put forward could allow that to happen. When looking at the background of the reasoning government proposal, I'm concerned that their proposed redistricting commission would enable a small group of people with no relevant experience to decide the future of decision making in our county. Additionally, their proposal does not ensure that membership Is proportional and representative of political party affiliation of Santa Barbara County voters.
For those reasons, I urge you all to support Supervisor Williams' You Draw the Lines proposal as well as to request a full analysis be made public of the reasoning government proposal. Supervisor Williams' proposal ensures that a thorough public process will take place, one that has more than just five hearings. If there were only five public hearings to be included with the redistricting commission, that could just be one per supervisorial district.
That could allow communities like Isla Vista, communities that have a lot of stake in this decision to be left out. So it's really important that we have more than five hearings which Supervisor Williams' proposal will ensure. Also, Supervisor Williams' proposal really places an emphasis on capturing the diversity of Santa Barbara County in this process. I applaud the board for taking steps to hear this as it's great to get it out of the hands of the Board of Supervisors and give it to the people. And I'm confident that the You Draw the Lines proposal is the best option here. Thank you very much.
Dr. Lee Heller to be followed by Peggy Sudar.
Chair Williams, members of the board good to see you. It is a little known fact that I'm a fan also of independent redistricting commissions and voted for both of the propositions that were described earlier, that created the California Redistricting Commission. I'm also a lawyer who has been involved in writing both local and state law. And while I really appreciate the effort that the reason in governing individuals put into their effort It's lacking in a lot of provisions that end up being necessary in order to make good law.
So simplicity is lovely, but it leaves you missing the enforcement and descriptive components that you need to do a good job. One of the things I think is a great strength of the Citizens Independent Redistricting Commission is that there are more specific exclusions where there would be conflict of interest especially financial conflicts of interest. Although the majority might be simple versus a supermajority is, good point you brought up Supervisor Levin. At least we'd have six rather than three out of five which does broaden the number of people that are involved in the decision making process.
Much more detail about the requirements and qualifications that people need in order to be a commissioner. As someone who was a former English teacher I think having analytical skills and knowing how to work with material is really important. And there's no provision for that in the other ballot measure, but there is in this one which I think is very important.
There's also critically provisions for removal. So if you have a problem with someone who has been placed on a task force or commission and you don't have any provision for removing that individual, then you have to create that at the moment or you have no mechanism for dealing with that person. We've seen this in previous task forces this board has dealt with.
And I would also add that there is much greater opportunity for public participation. I sat in at the last round of redistricting back in 2010 and 11. And I think public participation is crucial, so people do feel that there's a fair process. There's a good deal more of that in this provision. So I would encourage the board to vote to place this on the ballot. I think that the electors of this county are ready for an independent redistricting approach. We're all tired of gerrymandering but we need to have the best possible commission to do that work. Thank you.
Peggy and Suter to be held by Frank Rodriguez.
4:59 – 5:055 turns
Thank you so much, Supervisor Williams, member of the boards. I appreciate this chance to speak to you today. I do hope that you move forward with creating a Citizens Redistricting Commission. I like that the applicants will be vetted by the county elections for the analytical skills necessary for understanding and applying the redistricting rules for impartiality and that thought will be given to the representation reflecting the diversity of the county population and Proportional to the political party affiliation is also taken into account.
I also appreciate that there'll be two members from each district, I believe on this commission and most important is that there will be seven public hearings prior to the drawing of the map and seven public hearings after the drawing of the map. It's really important that we are able to, it's complicated and it'll be good to have a lot of public discussions about this. And so I urge you to move forward with You Draw The Lines. Thank you so much.
Frank Rodriguez is our next speaker to be followed by our final speaker, Lynn Carlisle.
Hello, buenas tardes. My name is Frank Rodriguez with the CAUSE, the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy and we're here also in support of Draw Your Lines. We just had a beautiful camp over at Camp Whittier where we led leadership training with our leaders especially from Santa Maria, Guadalupe and Santa Barbara and the whole session was in Spanish. And this reason was because a lot of times in our community here in the 805 A lot of our community members who are monolingual Spanish speakers are left out of the process of really engaging. And growing up in Old Town Goleta, I really saw that with my parents in ways that I know they wanted to engage within civil society, really engage in these processes but it's really hard for them to do that.
And so that's why we really support this, because we do not want to streamline a process. We want to make sure that we have a way that we're ensuring that we're involving all members of our community, the diversity and the geographic diversity of our county is immense and we need to make sure we cover all those grounds. My phone just closed. The other points we really want to make sure that are included was, that we didn't see, was one a complete transparency on all applicants on the online posting of all requirements and materials. Second an organized process for public comment on all applicants. And third kind of having a stream so people can view this especially as the finalists are being interviewed And also in terms of the creation of the map, we want people to be involved in that process before a draft is created and after a draft is created.
So I know there's some people don't like the state process but I think we really wanna model that because we wanna see that we have a way that people can provide their input and we need that diversity of input in this process cause it's just gonna make it better. Cool? Thanks everybody.
Lynn Carlisle, and then we are going to go back to Santa Maria for Seth Steiner who will be our final speaker on item four.
Good afternoon board members, Chairman Williams. My name is Lynn Carlisle I'm with the Quiama Valley Family Resource Center and I'm speaking in support of the board placing the You Draw The Lines ordinance on the ballot to create the Santa Barbara Citizens Independent Redistricting and Voting Rights Protection Commission. The Cuyamma Valley has benefited in recent years from several decisions by this board. We're very grateful for the support. We are also hopeful that whatever redistricting decisions are made in the coming years will be done so in a fair and equal representation in mind.
From what I understand from the recent government proposal, longstanding residency and voter history in Santa Barbara County would not be assured. There is no vetting process to ensure the qualified candidates are selected. With a smaller commission, fewer voices are heard and special interests may have more influence. From what I understand of the You Draw the Lines ordinance, more members would ensure greater community representation and greater opportunity for balanced input and less opportunity for special interest to dominate the process.
Applicants would need to apply and present qualifications as it's extremely important to help with the process that affects so many issues in this county. The composition of the commission would have to reflect the demographics of our county. This is a very important issue for Quiama as we are at least 50% Hispanic, and reiterating the comments of the prior speaker, we take great deal of effort to make sure that all members of the community are able to participate in public process.
And the voting structure requiring seven out of 11 votes, even though the comment about supermajority to adopt a new map will ensure that the final decision is not dominated by a few influential voices. I also appreciate the assurance of having public comment on any of the maps and also transparency as much as possible. We have the technology to do this and those people who are interested would have the opportunity to make their comments heard.
I believe that a larger redistricting commission and one that includes more voices with more experience, and more history as county residents will ensure better representation and a fairer process. Thank you.
5:05 – 5:1011 turns
We're going to go back to Santa Maria for Seth Steiner.
Good afternoon. Many of the previous speakers have spoken Goodbye, Mr. Adam, has spoken more eloquently and thoughtfully than I will about the great advantages of Supervisor Williams' proposal particularly in relation to the severe drawbacks of the Reasoning Government Proposal. Now to what I had prepared to say By whatever name they choose to call their initiative, it does not try to achieve...
I'm on the second page when there's a first page. Excuse me. The fairest possible drawing of our supervisorial district lines is an objective we should all welcome. Regrettably that aim is not at the heart of the plan backed by Mr. Adam. and others who appear to live by the lights of Elbridge Cherry. The extreme gerrymandering that could well result, and may be sought by the 4th District Supervisor and other in- and out-of-state interests would principally serve to deprive the majority of Santa Barbara County voters of the full constitutional measure of their vote By whatever name they choose to call their initiative, it does not try to achieve equitable ends.
It seeks to deny the majority of their rights. Its many things but not reason as its been cleverly named. As the wise porcine proverb goes, you can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig. In our fair county we ought not contribute to the nationally corrosive and corrupting effects of Citizens United and sinister voter suppression schemes. Don't allow a plan here that has as its primary goal the disenfranchisement of voters.
I ask our supervisors to do the right thing in the name of integrity and fairness. Ignore the approach of Mr. Adam and others who wish to reduce our rights, but you draw the lines ordinance on the ballot. It has it just right. Thank you.
That concludes public comment.
Supervisor Wolf?
Thank you Mr. Chair, I have a question first of all Ms. Elliott and Mr. Williams you did an outstanding job in bringing this to us and I appreciate the changes that you made it's as one of the speakers said simple is not always good and I think as we're looking at something so important is this I think you've really done a really good job And it's been really easy, well it hasn't been easy but it was a little challenging. But you know, it all made sense in going through it. The only thing that I thought maybe was missing and it's on page three is that I just don't know, it says here about an interested person meeting the qualifications may submit an application and then it goes on to the elections official.
The one thing I'm wondering is how will the public know? In other words, and I didn't see it in like I think it was a San Diego or Los Angeles. They didn't mention it either but Who is the responsible party? Would it be the Clerk of the Board who's responsible for getting an announcement out as they do for other openings that we have because there is nothing in here that I could find that talks about that piece. So, I was just wondering what your thinking was on that.
Mr. Gazzone, do you have any reference? Because if it's not specified in our ordinance it would default to state law and there is state law on how to do independent redistricting commissions for counties.
Okay
Chair and Supervisors, I was just talking with the Clerk of the Board that generally under the Maddie Act we provide notice of positions that are open whether this would technically qualify for that or not. The board could certainly make that subject to the standard Maddie Act notification so there's posting on the website, there's posting at the county building.
Okay well that's good to know. So does it need to be specified in this ordinance? Or is it just assumed?
It does not need to be specified here. I think you could certainly receive a verbal back from Clerk of the Board, your CEO that there would be a procedure that they would follow if this was enacted by the board?
Is that a procedure you would follow? Yes it is. Thank you.
5:10 – 5:1711 turns
Yes that is and or any other specified actions you'd like us to pursue?
Thank you, Supervisor Adam. Thank you. Well first of all I just want everybody to know that I had absolutely nothing to do with this document. Nothing. So I know what you wrote in the paper but it's not true. It does not come from my office and so they can say what they want but that is truth. I really don't have that many problems with this. It's a pretty good document actually, Mr. Williams' hat tip.
A couple things that I'm not wild about. Taking out people with conflict, because that's really the bottom and heart of this whole thing is to get the people with the conflict out of drawing the lines. And so what we want is people who are interested but not conflicted. And so I would like to see that broadened. And I think one of the things that the reasoning government copy wanted to do is take all the people who were politically conflicted out, and I don't mind including the people who are economically conflicted. That's fine.
Not that I'm... I'm admitting that anybody's economically conflicted, but I understand that it's what certain people think and that's fine. Let's make the process transparent and make everybody as happy as they can possibly be with the outcome however it comes out. And so what I would ask is that we go back into these things in the and incorporate those politically, those identified as politically conflicted and add those to the people who may have, what do we call that? A substantial interest or significant financial interest as people who can't serve on that board either.
And just in general, I think that if you took any number of people and I'm not particular about the number of people probably Arguably as good to have 11 as it is 5. It's all fine with me. If you took those people out of the phone book at random, you'd probably solve all of your problems in terms of gender and race and everything else. And I would be content to do it by telephone book or dart board or marbles with everybody's name on them.
I'd do it anyway, it doesn't make any difference to me how we do that but we have to make sure that we can take out those people who are All people who are conflicted. So if we can do that, that'd be great. And then the other substantive issue that gives me a little bit of heartburn is this specific sentence on page three under E, capital C, experience that demonstrates an appreciation of the diverse demographics and geography Yada, yada.
So how is that going to be determined without being subjective?
Under this ordinance it's the elections official that determines the qualifications and so some of these are subjective but the intention is to have room for Say if you were lucky enough to have an applicant that had a degree or was a professor in statistics modeling, or something like that. That would be probably a great thing to have on our redistricting commission and that provision is just one of the qualifications but the subjectivity of the qualifications is left to the determination of the county elections official.
Well, that sentence right there gives me a little bit of heartburn. Actually quite a bit of heartburn because that level of subjectivity in the term experience and the term appreciation is really extreme and I don't even know if that's going to be defensible ultimately.
It's in state law.
That's in the state law, that quote? Really. All right well I still don't know if it's going to be defensible. Has it been litigated? No, okay.
Mr. Gazzone is shaking his head no.
Right. So anyway...
Mr. Gazzone would not have let me include any language that was not defensive.
We all know that! Yeah I don't know if he as fast as it went by I don' t know if you could see at all but anyway that is my problem and if we can fix that great because I don''t mind supporting this the rest of the documents good there's not You know, I'm okay. Can you help me fix those two things? And then I have a couple clerical things that we...
Chair, I think I can answer the first concern Supervisor Adam brought up that having any political affiliation so in capital C under six of It states, no commissioner or immediate family member may within the last eight years preceding appointment to the commission have been a board member, officer, paid or volunteer staff of or had any significant influence on the actions or decisions of a political committee required to register with the California Secretary of State which expended funds in excess of $500 in support or opposition to a candidate of any elective office of the County of Santa Barbara including member communications.
5:17 – 5:228 turns
So let me translate that into English. That means no one can be an officer of a union is what you're thinking, I think if your first concern is what I'm thinking it is. It could be a union member. And I guess my difference of opinion with the reasoning government folks is that if you're going to exclude everybody who's employed by the county, and it also doesn't just exclude people who are employed by the county but it looks like it excludes people who are in a union that has employees employed So I would first of all wonder if that would survive legal challenge, right to free association and all those things.
But I would compare it with look they have no more financial interest than the employees of an oil company that are seeking an application before the county. And we're not excluding the employees of an oil company why would we exclude the employees
Are we excluding people who make contracts with the county?
If they have a significant financial interest.
Okay.
And your concern under C, I'm open. The nice thing about this, the initiative process in its time was revolutionary but the flaw in You can't fix anything if you notice errors. You've noticed something that seems loosey-goosey to you, then let's fix it. It is loosey goosey in state law maybe but if you prefer some language that puts a belt on those suspenders then I'm
open to it. No, no, I'm okay with that. I just want to stop for a second and say that I think everybody in the room, there is a lot of people in this society that have an interest in getting everybody all hysterical and hyperbolic. And I think what we saw in the paper was exactly that. This actually kind of restores my faith in society a little bit here, which is coming from a shocking place.
Because I think both of these copies represent a really good faith effort to do the right thing and I know these guys spent a lot of money and a lot of time trying to put that thing together and maybe they sacrificed some, the longer form and the more detail for something. I don't think there's any evil intent and I don't believe there's any evil intent in yours either. It's kind of cool when even though it's coming at us really fast and because of the time frames you kinda have to do something It's pretty neat that all sides seem to be trying to...
Can I piggyback on something on that? Yeah, go ahead. Just real quick. I hope everybody here understands whether you like Mr. Collector's work or you disagreed with it, I promise you we would never have been discussing this without that effort. Everybody talks about that they want redistricting done by independent commission, but nobody was really interested in it before it got forced on us. And that's the only way, in my opinion, this would have ever happened.
I didn't have anything to do with the process, but I really appreciate the fact that it has been kind of forced on us and we're dealing with it. And I'm sure we'll come up with the best way that we can to deal with it. But like I said, whether you agree with what their product was, it did put us in a position where we have to confront this so that much I'm excited about.
So back to my problem with that experience, the demonstrate. Okay so that's state law. That's already state law. Okay all right, probably gonna let go of that one. All right so I'm down to two clerical items basically which is page 5I3CD. What page? Page five. 5I3C, I don't know why if we can't take the word non-competitively bid out and receive a contract with the county. Can we do that?
5:23 – 5:2814 turns
I guess the question is to Mr. Ghisoni, that would extend to the principal of a company that does a contract with the county but not to their employees correct under those circumstances? I'm just trying to be uniform here in treatment.
Chair and Supervisors, I guess the only unknown is by removing non-competitively how large is the universe of people who have contracts with the county. So if you disqualify anyone who has a contract what numbers are you dealing with? That's some of the uncertainty that you're going to have here but it's something That again, the board's action in this area is going to be analyzed generally under rational basis. Do you have a rational basis to exclude some financial connection to the county? Yes, so you could do that and I just don't know how broadly that would cut.
And how, in your opinion, how would it be interpreted just as the principle of say a either for-profit company or a nonprofit or anybody associated with the company?
Well that would be an opportunity to At the beginning of that, there could be some words which we would be glad to sketch together while you're deliberating on this. To at the beginning make clear that's a personally bound by that contract and how many of those you might want to have. For example it begins with a member of the commission shall not themselves do any of the following? I mean that would take care of I think many of those too.
If that's acceptable, that works for me. And then the other one is register as a lobbyist for the county. Do we have lobbyists for the county?
We do. We have several lobbyists for the county. One set in Sacramento, one in D.C., they're not registered voters in the county so therefore they wouldn't qualify anyway. I suppose it is conceivable Since there is at least one example of someone in a statewide lobbying group that lives in this county, so it's conceivable that there would be a scenario where we would
contract. All right well then we'll just leave that one there. So yeah, that's 100% of my objections.
I saw like Supervisor Hartman? No. Supervisor Wolf.
I just want to be clear about what just happened with the conversation between the two of you. The only thing that I heard that is changing is adding the word themselves, shall not themselves do any of the following. Is that the only thing?
That and Mr. Adam requested we strike noncompetitively so Any bidded contract with the county? Supervisor Hartman.
I'm not prepared to go there because I don't really know what it means. I think of all the behavioral wellness contracts with nonprofits or public health, or...I mean, I just have no idea how much that would limit our pool.
Supervisor Adam. I think that it's very little if
it's themselves That was my concern. If it was any employee of a non-profit, then I thought that was clearly not needed but the question is if it's the principal meaning an executive director or the head of a company, I could see the argument for that but I guess I'm in the rare situation of being Switzerland on this one trying to please you all. That never happens. Supervisor Wolf?
Well this is my quandary right now is we still haven't heard the next item and it's nice to have this conversation with Mr. Adam but I would like to hear from Mr. Adam that when we get to the next item that he says he doesn't agree with Yeah, I know but it has to do with support. He just said he made a point of saying that you know he didn't have anything to do with it. So what I am worried about is Mr. Williams at this point without some concurrence when we get to the next item that we will hear a statement that folks believe number 4 is superior.
That' s all and it doesn't sound like you made any substantive changes but I
5:28 – 5:3612 turns
I know these words are strange coming out of my mouth. In defense of Supervisor Adam, there is some merit for us all or most going forward if four of us or five of us go forward with this. So I guess I'm arguing that we would accept Supervisor Adams' suggested change. Supervisor Adams?
Do you think that I engage in bad faith right here, is that what you think?
No, Mr. Adam but I know I can give you the whole history and what I've seen in the development of the other proposal and that was shocking to me to see that came to us so late and then to also look up and see who have been the backers of that proposal And statements made in the press about the purpose of this redistricting exercise, which where it says here I think the folks who have one party control believe that if the people have the ability to draw the lines as they should, the power structure would change.
No, it's not that I am looking to you. I'm looking at this entire process and the process concerns me. It's all been very last minute. It's been very stealth and I think Mr. Williams and his staff have done an exemplary job of providing us with an alternative. I think it's great that you like, it seems like you like this alternative better than the first one. But I just, I'm being cautious and it has nothing to do with you personally.
I take you at face value with what you're saying but we haven't gone to the next level. We haven't even heard the other initiative and I would like to hear You or someone say that this one is better and this is the one you're going to support if we're making changes. Thank you.
Well, I'm going to say that this has not been stealth. Reasoning government's been out there for what three years Bob? About maybe four. And thank you. You know, this is something that they've been thinking about and working on the whole time as my understanding. And you know I'm not in the Reasoning Government management and I've been to one Reasoning Government meeting You know, I'm not involved in this thing but I know that it's something that has not been stealth. It's just not been on anybody's radar and they've been out there gathering signatures for a long time and you know, because it came to us and it did, it got jumped on us really because... And then we got the second And that came really fast, too. So it feels like we're kind of this isn't the way we normally do business and it's
necessitated by the public. Normally we take eons doing things and this is a rare
thing. Maybe we should do it faster because it actually seems like we're able to make a better product under pressure so maybe we should continue to do that more often Mr. Gazzone? Mr.
Gazzani.
Senior Deputy Ryerson and I have been exchanging notes that within the default state law provision at Elections Code 23003, that has the disqualifier of receive a non-competitively bid contract with the local jurisdiction. So the board has some discretion in this area but the language in the proposed ordinance appears to be cut and paste out of that section 23003. We know that works.
So our thought would be you could still add themselves at the beginning to make sure, to make clear it's an individual prohibition and not coming back from a corporate entity. Okay well
my problem with that is, and I'm trying to tighten it up a little bit to get to people who are conflicted for obvious reasons. If you're making a non-competitive bid, maybe you're not any more conflicted than you are if you're making a competitive bid. I don't know so I'm just trying to tighten it up a little bit and if you guys don't object we can have that. I guess if somebody wants to sue us then they can but I'm not seeing the lawsuit here And I'm seeing, I think both sides of this discussion regardless of some hyperbolic statements. I think both sides in this discussion are gonna benefit in the end because they're all gonna have more confidence in the transparency of the process and the fairness of the outcome.
That's what we all want. I think everybody here wants that, and I think that's what's gonna come out of this. And at this point, Supervisor Wolf, if I came out against this after doing what I've done, I think I'm gonna look like a jerk. So you know, that's gonna be pretty difficult for me to live down, don't you think? No, you can nod your head up and down.
No answer there. Mr.
Ghazani?
So Chair and Supervisors, again going back to the default of the Elections Code at 23003, there is a discussion that the local jurisdiction may impose additional qualifications and restrictions so you have some maneuvering room on that. We had two other I think outstanding questions First, there was a question about noticing and whether essentially the Maddie Act applied or just the spirit of the Maddie Act. Since these appointments are not being made directly by the legislative body, the Maddie Act itself does not apply but the noticing provisions at Government Code 54974 describe how we generally notice unscheduled vacancies.
And then Supervisor Lavenino had a question about ex parte disclosures. And while we're here, look quickly and confirm that the process we're talking about is a legislative matter so ex parte disclosures are not required but the board could if it wanted to have an insertion here something along the lines that at each public meeting each commission member shall clearly disclose the sources and summaries of any ex parte communications concerning the redistricting process. That's an option that's available to you?
5:36 – 5:4219 turns
Supervisor Labadino, is that what you're looking for? Yeah I think that would be very helpful. It'd be very nice to know if commission members that are independent are going and meeting with individual groups. I'm not saying that you couldn't do that but it would be everybody should know about it. You'd have to disclose it.
And so I think what we have in front of us is this proposal as amended. We have two suggested amendments, Mr. Adams' suggested amendment on changing the exclusion for contract holder to include competitively bid contracts but specifying at my request that it's only the principal so that we do not reduce the applicant pool unduly. And that we have ex parte disclosure as requested by Mr. Lavagnino.
Any discussion on those changes? Supervisor
Adler. Are we changing, taking out the non-competitively bid?
We're talking about it right now. I guess the question is to Supervisor Hartman if you still have heartburn about that, clarifying that it's only the principal so we do not reduce the applicant pool?
Chair and Supervisors, what we talked about before was potentially at .040H1 just adding the word themselves in there to make clear that we're talking about the principal. At some level it may be surplusage. It goes beyond the elections code 23003 which has similar wording but it provides some clarification.
Chair Williams and Supervisors, I think maybe the issue that Supervisor Hartman is bringing up is it the principals meaning the heads of those non-profits or do we mean independent contractors with whom the county does business with? And looking at Mr. Gazzone because we do have a lot of nonprofits, we do have a lot of organizations. Does it mean the principals of those nonprofits or does it mean individuals with whom we have contracts?
You mean like a psychologist that Behavioral Wellness has a contract for services? And what is your intention to cover, Mr.
Adams? Well you know I mean if somebody has a contract with the county they could potentially be you know conflicted so I think that if somebody has a conflict with the county it's just as legitimate to filter them out as somebody who has an economic gain. And they in fact do, I mean we pay those people big money so they do have an economic gain.
For me that's far too broad. I think there are too many people who work in too many organizations, non-profits even heading them up and we just don't know at this point how broad that could be interpreted so I think it's safer to track existing state language and leave it as it is.
Do that or clarify that it's only for a non-profit or company, not an independent contract. I'm trying to bring you guys together here because I just think the message it sends to the community if we can actually be on the same page on this is significant. I guess I'm asking both of you, would you be okay with covering the exclusion for a principal for a company or non-profit that has a contract with the county but allow an independent contractor say a doctor that we have a contract with because remember we needed.
There's so few of those, I mean my God. Can't you just say that anybody that's a doctor that's going to work with us can't do it?
That's fine with me.
Okay well that's exactly what I'm saying.
No no the issue is what about the non-profit organizations with whom the county contracts And are all those executive directors and board members say precluded? To me that doesn't make sense.
Under our language it would only be their executive director, but... What is your intention Supervisor Adam?
Well you know I want a reciprocal You know, this is the thing. You're going out into the business world and saying okay well everybody who's gonna make more than a hundred thousand bucks is suspect and then we're gonna come to the county and go okay well everybody here appears to be wind-driven snow so you know it's there's no No prohibitions. Mr.
Gazzani has a
suggestion.
Chair and Supervisor, so before we had suggested maybe themselves at the beginning, member of the commission shall not themselves. Another way to do that would be since all of the things that we're talking about are member issues, maybe just on the non-competitively bid item begin with In their personal capacity, receive a non-competitively bid contract. And I mean, I'm giving you either you're going to like that or not like it but if you want to filter out only individuals that would do that, it would still leave the entity itself available to contract.
5:42 – 5:4521 turns
That would do it for me. Make it so.
And to add to your comfort, I would cite on page two subparagraph Roman numeral three at the very top of the page. The exclusion of holding the position of director or CEO or management position with a salary in excess of $100,000 per year for any for-profit company corporation or other business entity doing business in the county of Santa Barbara. So together that has pretty solid protections against conflict of interest.
Okay well how about any company, corporation or other business instead of for profit? Well but
Mr. Gazzone's suggested one has that too. I'm just saying together it's belt and suspenders you've got double the protection there buddy. Mr. Gazzone's suggested amendment to Mr. Adams' suggested amendment and is everyone okay with that? I've never governed by consensus before,
this is new. I'm throwing it up on the slide right now. Okay
great. And I think just for housekeeping as the board gets close on this it might, I realize we're watching a clock but it might be good to pause from so we could just look offline and make sure that these all track.
Sure and then let's not forget Mr. Lavino's request for ex-party disclosure.
Yeah I love that too. And if the board wanted to do that one place to house that would be at .050H, a new section.
What
page? Wait, what did he say?
Bear with me for one
second. My suggestion so that we get the show on the road-
Mr. Gazzone I added it to Section 2-10.9A.060H.
I'm going to make the suggestion to get this show on the road that you guys huddle. We trail this item briefly, we take up the next item and come right back. Is that good? Okay.
Are there any other suggestions from the Board before we do that?
You're going to ask that? No,
I think we're stopping right
there, Darcelle! We're cutting them off.
I don't want to have to come back and go all the
way again. We're trailing that item and we will take up the next item.
Chair Williams, members of the board. Item 5 is to the Board from the County Executive Office and the Clerk, Recorder, Assessor as a hearing to consider recommendations regarding an initiative to create a County of Santa Barbara Independent Registering Commission
5:45 – 5:5214 turns
Chair Williams, members of the board I believe the elections official has just walked into the room. So give him a moment for us to get settled.
No time pressure Joe but we got an hour and 15 minutes to do this and the 101 so...
So really my role in this as a county elections official for this board item is, as the county elections official we received the petition. We did a random sample. We determined through the random sample that there were enough Signatures to qualify for the ballot in November. And the board letter lists three alternatives for your board today, one of which is to have that petition go to the November ballot or you can adopt it as an ordinance.
Or you can commission a report. And so I'm going to try and keep it short, Chairman Williams, members of the board, and let it be at that.
Any question or comment from the board? Request to speak.
Supervisor Wolf.
Thank you Mr. Chair so if we have questions about this initiative or if we need clarification do we ask you or Mr. Collector?
Or could we ask it in an impartial analysis that would come back
yeah I just yes tell me how to how do we do this
Chair and Supervisors, my recommendation here would starting at the elections code itself is that the board may adopt the ordinance submit the ordinance without alteration of the voters or order a report and then do one of the first two things I mentioned. The elections officials role is very ministerial at this and I think that if you had any questions about the ordinance itself it would be from a proponent. You could certainly hear that in public comment from a proponent but again the board is constrained by these three options of adopt verbatim Submit verbatim to the voters or order a report and then do one of the first two. You can receive, anything that goes on the ballot will receive an analysis but it will not be today.
Okay then so I can ask the proponent?
Right, the proponent has the option in public comment of responding to questions from the board.
Do you want to come forward or would you prefer not to? I have a couple of questions. Family member is defined in your ordinance to include spouse, former spouse, registered domestic partner, parent, sibling, child or in-law. And it's interesting that you have included former spouse and I noted that the one, the initiative we just saw did not include that and I don't think that's in code.
And I suspect that we could include it. I'm just wondering why you folks decided to include that?
I'm going to make a general statement in answer to this and I'm actually, I'm pleased that I was here for the first item so I could hear public comment. I think it will enrich my comment here. Reasoning government, thank you Supervisor Labadino for what you said. Let me just say in preamble the issue of independent commissions has been out in the political zeitgeist for years My group, my small group who represent no one but ourselves never saw any inclination on the board to take this up which was our motivation.
It was nothing other than that it was to I'd say spiritually join comrades throughout the country who feel that jurisdictions The decay of jurisdictions, the malfeasance of jurisdiction, the gaming of jurisdictions in our country has caused people to feel that maybe decisions about districting can be made as well by citizens as by elected officials. That's our rationale we represent no one when it came This provision, all we were trying to do was this. There was nobody, no person specific.
If you look at our language it's I think simple. All we were trying to do is to find ways that this can't be gained period by anybody. I think it would be naive of us to believe that people in our community by virtue of our experience Haven't seen or likewise experienced folks, kin, business associates etc who do the bidding of other people. What we wanted was to try to find a secular definition as possible So that each member would be above reproach and that was really it.
I myself know plenty of ex-wives and ex-husbands who maintain relationships so what we did, and I'll take the lead in this maybe I was a bit overzealous all I was trying to do was to find simple language whereupon no members of any organization that have shown themselves to be active and persuasive in the political commonwealth Would be active and persuasive in this. And maybe we would be, maybe it was too much but that was the only there was nobody in particular and what we also thought was as follows that talk about blindsided.
We were unbelievably blindsided by suddenly the board taking this up I was, I learned this getting on a plane to go visit my son. I mean, I wasn't even around but I just want all of you to understand something if we, my group, my language anything can help make this better for the county that's what we want.
Thank You Mr. Collector well as we've been told by council this will go on the ballot is that correct?
5:52 – 5:5910 turns
Chair and Supervisors, the board has the option of either adopting this as its own ordinance verbatim or sending it to the ballot. Or having a report first and then one of those two options.
Right, so we don't really have a choice of not moving forward on this. That's why I'm asking these questions because this will either be adopted by us or it will be on the ballot. So you've put forward something in good faith and so now I'm just wanting to ask some questions about why you did certain things? Sure So that was the first one. The other one is that you have a requirement for individuals to be a resident of Santa Barbara County, but there is no term or length of how long that person has to be
I think in all honesty, we would admit that there are superior aspects to yours than ours.
I think Mr Adams agrees with you
Well listen, at least we got the ball rolling.
Yes you did.
And we weren't perfect and my two colleagues have expressed to me to convey to you that if we can work together so that there is an initiative that we all agree with then we might stand down. What we want is the best for the county. Thank you. We think that we have some language in this that perhaps could make yours stronger
Okay, let me... This was an interesting statement in here and it says the resulting supervisorial districts shall be geographically contiguous and compact. Now The word compact is not defined. It's a little troubling, it's very subjective I think if you look on the map one would say the second district is pretty compact but all the other districts So if that's a requirement, that is a little concerning to me.
Well I think that that's sort of a literal definition because it's undoable the way you've articulated it. We have working with us a PhD in Geography at UCSB and another professor and a PhD candidate and there is a science to this And what we've tried to do, rather than the three of us in Reason and Government and some Sacramento lawyers. Trying to nail this along with state president. We do have some scientists and what we have, uh, what we try to do in this language as it is to set forth the fairest way to do this. It's a, it's a scientific way. I don't quite understand the definition that's that definition, but trust me.
There is nothing in our language that I know of and I go back to the beginning of this, that tries to manipulate this. So for instance, the second district is penalized because of this. What we try to do was to make this as absolutely ecumenical as possible.
Yeah, I understand it's just that you have that word in there and let's just assume that as I said this goes to the voters and this is the one that the voters choose. That seems very problematic to me But thank you for your response. I appreciate that. Other than the questions I just asked, I don't have any specific report that I need to have come back. I won't be in favor of adopting it now. I think it should go to the voters as its written unless, I guess it can't even be changed but I don't know if anyone else has any comments about this? And if I could just say, just so you know Mr. Collector that I was involved and I think Mr. Lavagnino too when we did the census and the redistricting And there was a lot of input, we had a lot of public input.
We heard from Mickey Flax about the work that was done and getting people to be able to make their maps. We had a lot of engagement. Mr. Bazonich was heavily involved in that. There was a lof of public engagement. In the end, the vote was 3-2. We didn't agree on the map. You know, that was one way to do it. You have presented another way to do it and if we're going to go down this path then I just want to make sure it is as transparent as I know that you want and as inclusive as I know that you want. And so that's why for me personally I think the initiative Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think this bill is far superior and I'm glad it sounds like maybe you like a lot of the things that are in here too. And I appreciate Mr. Adams for his willingness to look at this.
You know he and I don't always agree and I am sorry if I offended Mr. Adams in my comments. They weren't meant Right? And so I am always very cautious in something like this. Thank you, yeah. So this is a good conversation and hopefully we can move forward and hopefully the voters will see the difference in these two initiatives. And now I have a question for Mr. Gazzone.
If both initiatives fail do we keep the status quo?
5:59 – 6:059 turns
Chair and Supervisor, yes. So basically if we fail, if both of these are not passed then you default back to state law on redistricting. There's still a requirement to study the census and take some action but you would devolve back to the 23,000 series of elections code.
Thank you. And thank you, Mr. Collector.
May I say one final thing about the study? We had heard that there was a possibility of a study. Our only concern is this. A decision has to be rendered by, I'm told, August 10th and a study could go past that and hence this would never end up on the ballot. So we would like to say that hopefully that won't happen. No, that's not even possible. OK. All right. So it was misadvised. Yeah.
And by the way Supervisor Wolf, he has as much to do with this as you.
That's my exculpatory testimony.
The last thing I just want to say about this, and Supervisor Wolf talked about this that we were both here for the last time. For me in all the time I've been on the board it was the worst week of my life. I had relationships with all board members that kind of went in a state of a frozen state for a week because It's just not a good idea for this board to be drawing our own lines and so I just really want to thank the, I think it's better for all of us. It's out of our hands. I've actually got a picture up in my office and it's Salud and I.
He's looking one way with a not very happy face and I'm looking the other way with a not very happy face It's just not a good situation for us to be drawing our own line. So I'm glad we're not going to have to go through that again and I hope the people just come up with the fairest, whatever that is. Looking forward to outside
input. Just Supervisor Hartman but just to note we do still have two public speakers. We started getting into questions with Mr. Collector, and that's how we got over here. Mr. Gazzani?
Chair, I just wanted to follow up on my answer to Supervisor Wolf. Just for anybody who is tracking that, the elections code really defaults into two sections of 21,500 sections are the board's duty after each decennial federal census to take some action on the boundaries And then at the 23,000 is the opportunity but not the requirement to establish an independent commission or an advisory commission. So state laws in two different sections of that.
Supervisor Hartman.
Thank you, I very much favor an impartial analysis whatever the proponents of the initiative may say I think it's better to get an outside disinterested party looking at what some of these things mean We have another meeting on the 10th and the 17th, so although we should've been given the full 30 days I think we could work within that period. I'd like to list some of the questions and I hope public commenters if they have other questions would list them as well during their comment but I'll just read these down, some of them.
Does this initiative proposed by Reason and Government have any positive qualifications for service on the commission? Analytical skills, knowledge of voting rights, requirements to be impartial or relevant experience. Do other counties or other jurisdictions have such commissions and how do they compare in terms of specifying qualifications of the commissioners?
Are there any disqualifying factors, such as conflicts of interest or moral turpitude? And are there any ways of challenging members of the commission or alternates once they're appointed. Is there any rational basis for eliminating people from the pool of applicants for the redistricting commission because they have contributed to state or federal candidates just because their districts overlap?
Or would this apply to those contributing to candidates for other local offices in Santa Barbara County? And this is a really important one to me. Does the focus on political party as a selection criterion, no more than two members registered to vote within the same political party and an alternate to be registered with the same political party as the member Violate or compromise the non-partisan nature of local government offices and elections. Local elections in California at the county level, as well as for city council school boards and judgeships are officially non-partisan and political party affiliations are not included on local election ballots. So does introducing partisanship into the redistricting process violate this principle?
What if with the luck of the draw, one or more of the five members is registered with a minor party? Would that party have disproportionate influence? What if the party distribution of voters changed over time? With just five members wouldn't the partisan requirement mean that the composition of the redistricting commission risks not representing the composition of the county at large.
And the next, does this initiative provide for any public hearings after several proposed maps have been drawn to get public input on alternative maps or does it only provide for public hearings before the new boundaries are adopted? And I'd like to go back to something that Supervisor Wolf said about the ranking of criteria for drawing the districts. If I look at their language, it looks like compact Is something contiguity and compactness shall or required? And then below that are a number of other features that can be considered. So it seems to me a hierarchy there, and I would like an interpretation of whether that reading is correct. So those are just some of my questions for the impartial analysis.
6:06 – 6:1314 turns
We can certainly go back and listen to the tape and go back through those questions. The actual, in quotations, impartial analysis is a creature of the elections code that has about a 500 word limit. And that's something that the elections official, when matters are qualified and about to go on the ballot will actually task me with providing that impartial analysis. That shows the effect of the measure on existing law and the operation of the measure. The impartial analysis in quotes under the elections code 9160 is a pretty brief document but we can certainly work with CEO's office on the rest of the comparison items that you've discussed.
Just Supervisor Hartman, just for clarification through the chair. When you're talking about Mr. Gazzone was talking about the impartial analysis that spelled out my law. The questions you were posing, is that for that or for a report?
For the
report.
Mr. Lavanieux. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I know you raised some great questions there that I think could be addressed in the analysis. I just know that we're getting crunched on time and I would prefer that those just get answered in the analysis. They're going to have to do it at least they have a little more time to do All great questions, but I just don't want to task the staff with more than what's required.
From what I'm hearing today it looks like we have a consensus on here that people support together and I think it's something that the voters could use When they're making their decision between the two, which they will have in their booklet. But I'm not sure it would do us up here what you're wanting to get done out of it. So all I'm worried about is staff time and just want to see if you could go along with having an analysis for the actual voter.
I'm sorry, I think we need these questions answered at some point in some form because otherwise we would vote today to go forward with this measure and we have no way of knowing what kind of issues and campaigns are going to evolve. Even if we say oh we all like Supervisor Williams' measure that doesn't necessarily predict what's going to happen, what will unfold.
Correct, but this first off this isn't going to be done. We're in 2018 the census isn't even until 2020 but instead of making them do the report now in the next 10 days we would have two years to be able to come up with an analysis. It's gonna go on the ballot any of the voters aren't gonna be voting on this tomorrow or next week it's gonna be November so we could get this done between now and I'm just asking if
staff has the time to do what you would like to get done. My understanding is that to get this on the ballot we would have to approve it at one of the next couple meetings So that gives a very abbreviated time for the report. But it does not stop us from attempting to do the report and so I think there may be of what you want to accomplish. I think what we want to do is make sure that the people who have gathered the signatures understand that we are not going to try to monkey with this and shift it to another ballot year or something like that, we are going to put it on the November ballot but That we do want to have a report prepared that answers as many of those questions as possible. And I would definitely support that the report be prepared.
Can we go to public comment before we resolve this? We have a couple more requests to speak.
Chair Williams, members of the board, we have two requests. Lindsey Baker and Joni Jones.
I'm deferring to my co-president Joni Jones.
Joni, we unlike other jurisdictions don't have a provision in our rules and procedures for transferring time so just do your best to rip through.
Whatever that means. It
means you have three minutes.
Good afternoon Chair Williams and Supervisors. I'm speaking against reason in government initiative. The League of Women Voters is concerned about the initiative proposed by Reason in Government and requests that the Board of Supervisors order a report of impacts of the initiative as called for in the election code section 9111, possible action number 3. Specifically, the League of Women Voters would like to understand how this initiative differs from prior redistricting efforts in our county which had extensive outreach components where this has only five required hearings.
And we would like to see a comparison of this proposed measure and other independent commissions in the state Just as we heard, there were independent commissions in San Diego and Los Angeles counties which are comprised and selected to ensure all voices are considered. We are concerned about the small size of the commission and the fact that only three members, a majority of the five can make very significant decisions with very little public input.
The league is also concerned that certain members of the public may be improperly or illegally barred from service based on their employment or prior employment in the last eight years working for the county. or even working as a subcontractor for a former contractor, you eliminate a large pool of people and recent retirees who may have great knowledge skills and ability. Again the league urges you to request more information and to make the information available to the public for review before you take action on this initiative thank you so much
6:13 – 6:189 turns
Any other requests to speak?
That concludes public testimony.
So it's back to the board. I mean, my... I guess my question for the for the report would be if we go there, would be to understand that the attempt to eliminate conflicts to me was so broad that one wonders if it violates basic constitutional protection for right of free association. The way I read it, and I could be wrong. It would not only prohibit county employees but I'm a member of the same union that has employees in the county.
And so to me, okay, that means you eliminate folks who work for the city of Santa Barbara, you eliminate people who work for the city of Santa Maria and it starts getting I think excessive but I guess my question Is does that raise basic constitutionality questions of right or free association? Any other comments or questions from the board, Mr. Gazzone.
Chair and Supervisors, just as we're talking about this report at the risk of complicating your afternoon. The report at Elections Code 9111 is one that has a time clock on it. That report must be done not later than 30 days after election officials certifies the sufficiency. Under the California Supreme Court's case law though you could still direct a factual analysis of the impacts And bring that back at a later date, but you would not be actually directing a 911 report in that framework.
It's a small detail, but I'm noting you can bring back a report, but it would not be the 911 report after a certain amount of time.
So let me then return that question to the board. It sounds like there is some interest here in either an analysis, as Mr. Gazzone has cited or the report. Is there a decided preference of one of those routes? Supervisor Wolf.
Thank you Mr. Chair. You know I think Supervisor Hartman brought up some very important issues and you also had some concerns and given that, given the timeline, I'm not...I would prefer to give staff more time to answer those questions so that that information is available to us and the voters. So it doesn't preclude us getting that information, we could say six weeks or I think six weeks would probably give you enough time And then we go forward with what we have to do today. Now, if you don't want to do that, if Supervisor Hartman doesn't want to do that, then we'll just go through and get the questions answered. I just don't know if staff has enough time to give us or to really evaluate the questions that you have.
So it's up to you.
Supervisor Hartman, you seem to want a report. Just let me know and while you're doing that I'm paying attention. I'm just looking at the schedule of the next couple meetings to make sure we could put it in there.
A question for Mr. Ghisoni, if we do not ask for a 9-1-1 report today we then have to put the initiative forward to the ballot today or can we hold off on that?
Chair, if you would give me one moment on this I want to go back to the statute before answering that question. Chair and Supervisor, so the choice on adopting it is adopting it without alteration at the regular meeting which is occurring right now or within 10 days after its presented. So you have a time limit on that. Interestingly the time limit doesn't carry forward on submitting the ordinance without alteration to the voters but the courts have been very strict on moving these along expeditiously
6:18 – 6:2315 turns
So we'd either have to approve it today or next Tuesday. And what
is our second reading on your measure? I
prefer not just think of it as my measure because we tried to take a lot of suggestions, but I appreciate that. But I guess the question is... If it is either this week or next week, one week isn't enough to do the report. We could do the report maybe by the 17th but we're not going to be able to turn that around in one week. I guess I would advocate that we essentially approve both option 2 and 3, and order a report and order that the proposed ordinance be submitted to the voters.
Chair and Supervisors, this is an interesting arcane area where submitting the ordinance without alteration of the voters doesn't state a clock. But my recommendation would be that since it's been presented today that you think of your choice as either adopting it or submitting it to the voters and probably the safest box procedurally would if you're considering submitting it to voters, is to direct that and then order this report that is outside of 9-1-1 at whatever meeting that would be appropriate.
Supervisor Adam? My vision here is that we don't have any choice. We've got to put this one on the ballot and the choice is are you going to put the other one on the ballot So, you know if I have a commitment that. We're going to put the other one on the ballot because what I just heard and maybe I heard all wrong, but are we thinking about just adopting the other one straight up? We're going to put it on the ballot.
No, we put it on the ballot.
Okay.
All right. But the question is does next week give us ... We could just ... We're going to have to talk about this again next week no matter what.
Yeah, let's get the language squared away on the D4 because I don't want to call it the DAS measure. Don't do it? Okay. And then put them both on the ballot.
The timing doesn't work, excuse me. May I go? Sure. We need a second reading on the Citizens Redistricting Commission so it can't go forward until it has a second reading. We could today if we don't order an analysis or report that the Reason and Government Initiative would go today I would like to have more information about that and be able to compare the two a little bit more before deciding on the citizens redistricting initiative.
My suggestion, and you know what I'm going to make a motion is for us to go with option 3 for today. And talk about this again next week along with the second reading of I would like to make a motion on behalf of the citizens proposal. The proposal that my staff worked on. And so, that way we would comply with both Mr. Collector's timeline and we won't monkey with this and try to shift it to another ballot but that we also comply with Supervisor Hartman's wish I
would second that.
Motion and a second. Remember we have to do 101 in 35 minutes, so can you just
repeat the motion?
The motion would be under the agenda option three order report from appropriate staff agencies concerning the fiscal impacts consistency with county plans We would consider the ordinance for submission to the ballot at next week's meeting.
6:24 – 6:2819 turns
Chair Williams, just to clarify, so you are looking at number A3 except you're saying to be heard on July 10th?
No, if you can get the report done by next week sure. But I'm saying as written 5A3 as written and we will discuss submitting the reasoning government proposal to the ballot at next week's meeting because that's the only way that it's compliant with the law.
I have a question for Mr. Gazzone, based on that motion. You can't do 2 and 3 of A? Why aren't we just ordering the proposed ordinance to be submitted and then ordering the report?
So this matter going to the voters is complete. It would just be submitted, it's not a second reading item so it could be transmitted to the voters today or you could order this report and I made the point earlier that the report in option A3 is the statutory 9-1-1 report But if you wanted a report later than that, it could be done outside of 911 under the Vargas Supreme Court case. You can have informational briefing on these measures that come back to you. That's an allowed action.
And I guess my argument is if you get your language and Mr. Adams gets his language, if Joan wants them to be adopted together then we should adopt them together.
Okay. I mean, I'm fine. I don't understand the football... What's the strategy of adopting them together? But that's fine. Kumbaya maybe?
And if I might, what we could do for the official report is maybe a compare and contrast and then have additional information later if that seems... But they're
not going to have the report done before we adopt it.
They can have something done.
Chair and supervisors, part of this we're inside this very tight framework and that's why you're not enjoying the afternoon. But you have the option of adopting it without alteration, sending it to the voters today or ordering this report. I think the law is not clear on taking some other path If you order the measure to be submitted without alteration to the voters, I had suggested that an option is to then separately or direct a separate report to come back at your convenience. To compare X and Y, the item at D4 and the item at D5 which would be proper under the Vargas case.
I'm not coupling them. I'm just saying that as it's written, we would be preparing a report but we would also bring it within the 10 day time frame correct? Next Tuesday is within the 10 day time frame?
So I think that if you order the report, then you have ruled out for now doing either adopting it without alteration or submitting
it. Oh until the report is done? Right. Okay. Then I would change my...I withdraw my motion and submit a new motion that we order an impartial analysis To be heard on the 17th. And that we would discuss next week item 5A2, which is the order of the proposed ordinance to be submitted without alteration to the voters.
Chair and Supervisors, my recommendation just for clarity would be I think that as written prong A3 ordering the report per 9111 is an option for you. And then that just cascades you into coming back at that follow-on meeting then either adopting without alteration
That's why my motion is for an impartial analysis as opposed to a 9-1-1, 1-1.
I think what Mr. Ghazani is saying is that if you're asking for a report, you have to get the report before you make a decision on the ordinance.
But
not if we're explicitly saying it's outside of the 9-11-1 process?
Whatever we call it, it's not an impartial analysis. It's a statutory duty that I perform outside of this hearing room. Right now what I'm telling you is that of these three options, if you don't want to adopt the ordinance without alteration and don't want to order it submitted today to the voters then that would leave you with ordering the report per 9111 and coming back on the 17th for that report. Which is going to be, you may wanna hear from CEO on what a squeeze that is.
6:29 – 6:3429 turns
And my point is that takes us outside of the statutory 10 days right?
So no, you may... You would still be able to order this report and you would be okay bringing it back on the 17th as long as you qualify to put it onto this upcoming ballot. And it's after that that you have the 10 days although you will, as a practical matter when you hear from the elections official you're not gonna have 10 days anymore? No
we'd
have to
adopt it then. Okay then
I'll move option 5A3
As written. We gotta do something fast.
We got to do something right,
OK?
Not not fast,
right?
Gotta do something right and the only reason I mean, I'm starting to get real weird here because the only reason I can see that you would put this off is is it somehow you're trying to manipulate it and tell me that I'm wrong. I'm trying to manipulate so the clock runs out and you don't end up putting this one on
We could always do that. I could believe that the exclusions that Mr. Adam wanted was a Trojan horse for constitutionality to make sure my initiative gets challenged at a later date. I'm preferring not to be paranoid.
That's how I've been trying to be the whole time but it just, I can't figure out why this last second thing is so difficult and it just seems weird to me, that's all. It's too many years of trying to figure out what's wrong. Supervisor Wolf.
Oh sorry, okay so we want a report on July 17th And then on the same agenda but subsequent to getting the report, then we make the decision about either accepting the ordinance or putting it on the ballot. Those are only two choices. So that could be on July 17th right?
So my but on that is if you order the report, direct the report today and when it comes back the board at that time shall either adopt the ordinance within 10 days or order an election for the verbatim ordinance.
Right, and that's what I'm saying but let's not go the tent. Let's try to do it all on July 17th. Let's get the report and let's make a decision but have it in order on the agenda so we get the report first then we make the decision.
And I think that one thing that may help is to just hear from the elections official, because I know you're constraining yourself to the 17th but I think that actually matches the elections officials calendar for the election. It might be helpful to hear what's the last possible date to take action on this?
Okay but let me just ask one more thing. So that takes care of the reason and government one and then we have the You Draw The Lines initiative. What are we doing with that one? Are we bringing that one back on the 17th as well?
Right now it would be scheduled on the 10th because it would be second reading.
Okay, so we want to bring it back on the 10th.
In the spirit of kumbaya let's do that. So everything is going to happen on the 17th so we're going to bring back the revised you draw the lines ordinance I'm
going to do a motion you draw the lines ordinance On July 17th for the board to either adopt or put on
the ballot. And just so we have some separation between item D4 and item D5, I mean I understand the concept but I would just ask that if you're going to act on D4 that we bring that item back in when we're done with this one and just keep the records straight. Could
we just vote on this motion and then we'll do the...
Okay so someone can make a motion on D5.
A motion has already been made and seconded I know we discussed it a lot, it is for recommendation 3 for the report comes back on the 17th because we would only have 10 days afterwards and we don't have a meeting the next week that means we will have to adopt it on the 17th You can quote me Mr. Collector, we will have to adopt it on the 17th or put it forward to the voters.
And could I also just confirm that the CEQA prong of that recommendation C is included in the motion?
Yes, the CEQA determination that it does not constitute a project under CEQA is in the motion. And we did have a second? We did have a second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay back to D4 are you ready? So for the audience, this is a testament to it's sometimes hard enough for us to get three votes on something. It's a little harder for us to get five votes all on something but it does sometimes be, it is sometimes worth the effort
6:35 – 6:4022 turns
Chair and as the board is contemplating what action you want to take with D4, I'll just make the distinction between completing the first reading and then for just continuing the item.
Okay so you all should have received the revised ordinance with the recommended changes. I'm not going to read through all these changes again, that was painful. But I will draw attention to the ones we suggested. So you can see on this slide at the bottom, we added changing section 2-10.9A.040I to include the additional words shown below in italics. A member of the commission shall not themselves do any of the following.
And that is on page... At the very bottom there you see change section 2-10.9A.040I C to include the additional words shown below in italics, in their personal capacity receive a noncompetitively bid contract with the county.
I think the intention of Mr. Adam there was to strike non-competitive bid, just a contract is that correct Mr. Adam? So you struck non-competitively bid but then you added it back in and the change in the track changes?
I worked on this with
Council. So we're just looking at that on the slide where it is referring to 1C, it's actually I believe 13C in their personal capacity receive a non-competitively bid contract with the county and was my understanding from Supervisor Adam earlier on that he was okay with that because that mirrors state law? Okay all right great. Everybody's trying to be reasonable today. It's great. And then since we are doing a first reading here, just the housekeeping item is that on that slide where it refers to lowercase i c for Charlie, it's I 3 C. Okay
and then your change on page 7?
Yes on page seven. That's
the change you
requested,
Mr.
Labaniga? There you see the I3C so that's been corrected and then on the next one it says add section 2-10.9A.050H to read as shown below in italics at each public meeting of the Commission each commission member shall clearly disclose the sources and summaries of NAX Partay communications they have had concerning Okay. That is all the changes. Perfect.
Is there a desire to make a motion? Mr. Gazzani?
Chair and Supervisors, I'd just like to go back and say that again if the Board is taking the first reading, is that the intention is to take the first reading today? Yes. Then we've already had the reading of the title which has occurred and then also within the actions that the board is scheduled to take is number excuse me G here bear with me one second Excuse me, you've got within the actions is appointing a member to author sign and submit on behalf. That would be at the set hearing later but I'm just flagging for you that that's a future item for you. I don't know if you want to discuss it today or not?
I think we're done discussing, I think. But my wish is that whoever makes the motion would keep E in the motion But we could determine that at the second reading. Is there a maker of the motion?
And again, clerk of the board and I are just making sure our record is straight. The idea would be to set a hearing to bring it back on July 10th or July 17th.
It would be the 17th We are keeping the strategy of keeping them together. Supervisor Wolk
Thank you Mr. Chair, I'll make a motion that we move forward with the recommended actions for item D4 with the modifications provided today on your Draw the Lines ordinance and changing item D for the set hearing to occur on July 17th 2018
And Chair Wolf, I understand your motion to be with the changes that were made in the slides that have been distributed to the public and shown on the board behind you.
That's exactly what I meant.
Second. All right.
Supervisor Hartman?
Supervisor Adam? Okay everybody is talked out. We have a motion and a second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? It is unanimous.
6:40 – 6:4317 turns
Supervisors also, just for the 17th some housekeeping. We do have a five and half hour meeting that day so we'll be working with the chair on moving items. I'm giving you a heads up because that means some items at departments or you have asked to be in that meeting will reshuffle.
We will try to prevail upon some of them to consider the 10th? Okay. We are considering this. Staff has said it is possible with the agreement of Supervisor Wolf to move item D7. Is that agreeable?
Staff is okay moving
that? Mr. Chair and Supervisor Wolf, I don't think there's much choice We have 20 minutes to do two items and I'm fearful we're going to have... So, we have two. We have the Summerland and this
one which
is there
any? Either one or 101 so 101 is more important.
I wouldn't say 101 is more important. I would say the timing of it is a bit more important. Okay then
sorry to everyone who was here for the other item. So when is that going to be rescheduled and when it's rescheduled let's have it in Santa Barbara and one of the first items
Thank you. Mr. Chair given the next hearing is the 17th in Santa Barbara and it' s already quite full I would recommend we move it to August 14th.
That' s okay with staff? The timing is okay? Yes. All right.
This is D7. Can I get a motion to continue the item sometime in the future? It would be August 14th unless we have a better date. So moved.
Let's be certain.
I was going to say the 14th unless something opens up beforehand.
Chair Williams, I would recommend a date certain just to keep the noticing straight on this.
And then if we could also put it early on in the agenda. Thank you.
Is there a motion to continuing item D7 to the 14th of August? So moved. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? 101. Can you do it in 20 minutes?
6:43 – 6:505 turns
Chair, Williams, members of the board, item 6 is from planning and development. It's a hearing to consider recommendations regarding the Highway 101 Carpentry to Santa Barbara Local Coastal Program amendment and the recommendations of the County Planning Commission to approve case number 17GPA3-18ORD4 which would amend the county certified local coastal program.
So Mr. Chair, Tess Harris will give the fastest presentation she can on this item.
Good afternoon Chair Williams, members of the board I'm Tess Harris with County Planning and Development and Matt Daubertine is also with me here today from County Public Works if you have questions on some of the projects that are associated with this package so the item before you today is the local coastal program amendment It's being proposed by Caltrans because of wetland policy conflicts that are associated with the Highway 101 project.
And the LCP amendment would result in a text amendment to the Coastal Land Use Plan and an ordinance amendment to Article 2, the Coastal Zoning Ordinance. So really quickly these are the phases that Caltrans is currently looking at. Phases 4b, c, and d are in the county and Caltrans' priorities are 4b and 4c from the City of Carpinteria Wetland encroachment would occur for the Highway 101 project. That project is the expansion of the freeway to add an HOV lane in both directions, resulting in a six-lane freeway.
And wetland encroachment would occur between Post Mile 4.59 to about 7.3 from the City of Carpinteria up to just north of Padaro Lane. This slide shows you the impacted wetland areas for the Highway 101 project. Then this is the Coastal Land Use Plan Policy 9-9 that the Local Coastal Program Amendment is amending because the policy says that development shall not be closer than 100 feet to wetlands or wetland buffer strips.
These are the public resource code sections that the project looks at. The LCP amendment is consistent with the Public Resources Code because the balancing of social, economic and environmental effects do not adversely affect the public welfare and there's not an alternative way to meet the need for coastal access including connection of the Coastal Trail. The LCP amendment results in a revised policy that on balance is the most protective of coastal resources.
So I'll now get into the actual amendment to the Coastal Land Use Plan. The proposed language consists of a new paragraph to Coastal Land Use Plan Policy 9-9, to add a section that would allow development to occur in wetlands or wetland buffer strips for projects associated with the Highway 101 project including the balancing projects and the coastal development permit projects that we identify.
And then in addition, we're also proposing an additional policy that encourages development of new pedestrian or bicycle-friendly paths along the highway corridor. And that's in a coastal access and recreation section of the Coastal Land Use Plan. And then on the lower portion of this slide is a list of the balancing projects that, on balance, would provide the most protection of coastal resources for the Highway 101 project. And of note, the first two projects are considered self-balancing projects so they do also have wetland impacts, the Bikeway Project and the Beach Access and Streetscape Improvements Project but their benefits outweigh those impacts. Then they also are balancing projects for the Highway 101 project.
The balancing projects include bike trails, public access across the railroad tracks at Santa Claus Lane to the beach, coastal trail signage, sidewalk extension along North Padaro and restroom facilities at Loon Point. In addition, policy 7-32 was added to include coastal development permit projects. And these projects were reviewed and agreed upon by Caltrans and the Coastal Commission staff, county, SBCAG.
These projects consist of enhancements to existing under crossings, interchange improvements, coastal access and park enhancements, coastal access parking, sidewalk extensions, and roundabouts. Then in addition, in order to facilitate the projects that are proposed to be allowed to encroach into wetlands, staff is proposing a transportation corridor wetland overlay district in Article 2 of the Coastal Zoning Ordinance which is similar to what was done in the City of Carpinteria for Phase 4A.
And this overlay district establishes standards for the projects in the vicinity of coastal wetlands. It also includes definitions for wetland enhancement, establishment and restoration. It includes development standards that discuss when fill can be approved in a wetland or a wetland buffer strip and coastal water quality standards that are required to be met for those projects.
Staff took this project to the County Planning Commission on May 30th. The item was continued to June 6, and in between that time staff met with the Summerland Citizens Association on May 30. On June 6, the County Planning Commission recommended that your board take staff's recommended actions as proposed. So with that, staff recommends that you make the findings for approval for the local coastal program amendment including the CEQA findings. Determine that the local coastal program amendment is exempt from CEQAs.
Adopt a resolution amending the Coastal Land Use Plan which is case 17 GPA 3 by adding and modifying wetland protection and recreation policies. And adopt an ordinance 18 ORD 4 amending article 2 of Chapter 35 to establish a transportation corridor or wetland overlay district. So with that, Matt and I are available for any questions.
Questions from the board? Requests to speak?
Chair Williams, members of the Board, we have two requests. Dolores Pollack to be followed by Steve Ferry.
6:50 – 6:5610 turns
Good afternoon My name is Dolores Pollack. I'm the president of Santa Barbara Audubon Society. We're very concerned about the loss of the wetlands or any incursion into the wetlands. As you may be aware, over the last century about 95% of wetlands in the state of California have disappeared. We are fighting for the last 5%. It's very hard for us to hear that more of this incursion would take place.
We object to encroachments into delineated wetlands or wetland buffer strips. We support the 100 foot setback between new development and wetlands. Further, we support existing environmental protections for public works projects. Proposed mitigations such as are mentioned of public access and recreation projects do not compensate for the loss of sensitive habitat buffers.
We ask you to take this into consideration in this important project. And now I'll defer to another member of the Audubon Society, Steve Ferry.
And following Mr. Ferry we'll hear from Dr. Lee Heller.
Good afternoon Chair Williams and Supervisors. My name is Steve Ferry former co-president of Santa Barbara Audubon and currently a member of the Conservation Committee of the SAME. You are being asked to determine that the Santa Barbara County Local Coastal Program Amendment is exempt from CEQA. I object to this exemption in principle. Santa Barbara County, of all places should adhere rigorously to CEQAs.
The quality of life in our county has been greatly enhanced over the decades compared to other jurisdictions because you and your predecessors have adhered well to CEQUA in most cases. Don't backslide now. With all the threats to the environment from North County oil extraction to weakening of environmental protections at the federal level, now is not the time for Santa Barbara County to exempt itself from CEQA.
The proposed exemption is another attempt to erode environmental protections for public works projects which results in damage to sensitive habitats and species. You're being asked to consider the Highway 101 Carpentaria to Santa Barbara Local Coastal Program Plan Amendment. This project would encroach into delineated wetlands or wetland and buffer strips in certain areas.
The LCP amendment would result in conflicts with coastal land use policy 9-9, which requires a new development be set back a minimum of 100 feet from wetlands The county should adhere to the setback. For this project, the amendment would allow permitting for those projects by providing a package of public access and recreation projects that report to offset wetland and buffer strip impacts. I say that this proposed offset is bogus.
Bikeway and signage projects do not compensate in any way for the loss of sensitive habitat buffers. These buffers are few and far between, even in Santa Barbara County. These buffers are important for the protection of wildlife and their habitat. Please preserve them by requiring adherence to the 100 foot setbacks. Thank you.
Dr. Heller?
Chair Williams, members of the board. Hi again. I'm here to speak on behalf of the Summerlin residents who are struggling with our inability to participate in the process of what's going to happen with these mitigations. So staff have done a great job of reaching out to the Summerlin Citizens Association. We're really appreciative of that. The Summerland Citizens Association is not so good at reaching out to most of the community.
So a lot of people don't know what's going on and they don't feel they've had an opportunity to participate. So my request would be that you give staff direction to make sure that when there are opportunities for public input into the design components of these mitigations, that the broader Summerland community is notified and not just rely on the SCA to do the outreach because they don' actually do it. So that would just be my request. Thank you.
That concludes public comment.
It looks like we have one more.
We have a late breaking news.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Good afternoon, Chair Williams and members of the board. My name is Allison Thompson and I'm from Heal the Ocean. We've been involved in Summerland issues for years such as the capping of the oil wells like Becker Well and the planning for the soon-to-be capping of the three remaining wells but we are also involved by way of background as Heal the Oceans Executive Director Hillary Hauser has lived and owned Property in Summerland for 20 years and attended many Summerland Citizens Association meetings, hereby referred to as SCA.
Today, as for the past 20 years, SCA meetings are dominated by a very vocal few and citizens tend to fall away without having their voices heard. Meetings occur without resident's knowledge or even notice. The Highway 101 Carpentaria to Santa Barbara Local Coastal Program amendment with its list of possible projects is a gift to Summerland, and we ask the board to approve the amendment today.
To move it forward along with the list of possible projects identified by your staff We thank staff, particularly Matt Daubergine for their hard work on this list of projects. We know the citizens of Summerlin want to be involved in decision making for these projects. So we ask the board today if it will give direction to staff to notify all Summerlin residents of decision making meetings for this list of projects At this time, it is extremely important that the whole community is notified of meetings so all may attend. We ask the staff to make sure that all citizens are on an interested parties list and properly notified.
Heal the Ocean feels that the subcommittee format will pervert the democratic process. And without organizational help from county staff, it is very likely factions and discord can develop which would not be in the best interest of this wonderful opportunity you are voting on today. We thank you and ask for all participation in this process especially by Summerlin residents. Heal The Ocean thanks you for your help with this. Thank you.
That concludes public comment.
6:56 – 7:0112 turns
Well it sounds like factions have already developed. To the Board, Supervisor Hartman.
Thank you Mr. Chair. A question. How many wetland acres are impacted and how many are proposed for mitigation or is the mitigation just other public benefits?
Supervisor Hartman through the chair. I believe for the highway 101 project it's 0.084 acres of wetland And let me just look up the wetland buffers and then the ones for the bikeway and streetscape improvements It's .33 acres of wetland buffer strips for Highway 101. For the Santa Claus Lane Bikeway, it's 0.57 acres of wetland and 0.93 acres of wetland buffer strips impacted.
And then for the Santa Claus Lane Beach Access and Streetscape Improvements, it's 0 .4 acres of wetland and 0.5 acres of mitigation impact. And then the mitigation ranges. So there's a mitigation range of one-to-one for restoration, and then if a wetland is impacted directly... There's a few different types so you can do wetland creation, wetland enhancement or wetland restoration. And depending on the degree that you impact a wetland depends on the ratio.
Direct impacts created to lower functioning wetlands would be at a ratio of three to one. Direct impacts to natural wetlands would be at, at a ratio of four to one through creation or wetland restoration. And then temporary direct and indirect impacts to wetlands would be mitigated at a ratio of one to one.
So that is there will be, in addition to these balancing projects, there will be wetlands restoration at those ratios?
Chair Williams, that's correct. Part of the Transportation Corridor Wetland Overlay District lays out those ratios as well as the requirements for reporting on how mitigation is going.
Supervisor Hartman.
Just a follow-on, thank you Mr. Chair. So have we decided where this will occur? Either the enhancement or the restoration and has it been done prior to the project or will it be done afterwards?
Supervisor Hartman through the chair that would be done through the permitting process for the Highway 101 project So they would come in for their conditional use permit development plan and coastal development permit. And at that time, they would need to also submit the mitigation.
So Caltrans and SB CAG would have to submit us an area of wetlands restoration and those ratios to balance for that take?
Chair Williams yes, that's correct.
Well that helps me a lot. I appreciate it because I do, I think Audubon's point that these balancing projects are probably needed in their own right but don't address the ecological cost of loss of wetlands and I would also echo I think the Sunland Citizens Association is great, but I also think that it's important to cast a wide net for any public process out there.
And so my hope would be that when these Both list of projects, particularly the second list which is in less solid form than the first that we would go out and get neighborhood impact. I think it's impossible to one speaker's request to notify everyone you're never going to do that because there's You can't find everybody but I think an attempt should be made to cast a wider net for public notice if staff feel like there is a path for doing that.
Supervisor Hartman?
Thank you Mr. Chair, I just wanted to follow up because we've had some reports about some of these projects through SBCAG and the outreach there has it seems to me been stellar so I'm puzzled at what has happened here
7:02 – 7:031 turns
We'll give you all the background when you have enough time. Okay, is there any further comment from the board? Is there a motion? I guess you guys are letting me make the motion. I'll move item six A, B, C and D. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? It's unanimous. What a day of kumbayas. Rough kumbayas. It's like tough love. We are adjourning for next week the 10th in Santa Maria and then we're going to take a short five-minute break and do our workshop on the Gaviota plan which will be chaired by Supervisor Hartman.
you