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
Yeah,
I got it. you I will now call to order the March 24th, 2020 meeting of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. Will the clerk please call the roll?
0:03 – 0:0519 turns
Ms Hartman? Here. Mr Adam? Here. Mr Lavinino?
Here
Mr Williams?
Here
Chair Hart?
The next item of business is approval of the minutes in March 24th 2020 Is there any discussion. Can I please get a motion to approve. Oh excuse me but we have to have a roll call vote for that. We'll get there OK. Does anyone want to make a motion for the minutes?
So moved.
Motion has been made by Director Supervisor Hartman and seconded by you can seconded by Supervisor Adam and the clerk please read the role.
Ms. Hartman? Aye. Mr. Adam? Aye Mr. Lavinino?
Aye
Mr. Williams?
Aye
Chair Hart?
Aye
Let the record reflect that Supervisor Adam is abstaining.
Because I wasn't here.
That's right, thank you. CEO Miyasato, is there a CEO report today?
No report this morning
Thank you At this time I would like to show a brief video that was produced by the Food Bank of Santa Barbara County We had been previously sharing community organizations that are doing important disaster preparedness work. And this fits into that category very well because in addition to being prepared for natural disaster, the Food Bank of Santa Barbara County is engaged fully in the current pandemic that we are trying to handle. They are stepping up their efforts to deliver food to our community, to people who are shut-in, families and seniors and anyone else who is food insecure.
And Mr. Talkin, who's the executive director of the Food Bank of Santa Barbara County met with me last week to talk about their efforts. They still have a large number of volunteers who are working diligently to prepare food to deliver to individuals and they're practicing social distancing while they're doing it and doing a really incredible job. We are very fortunate to have their community organization helping us in this moment. So without any further ado if you'd please roll the video, thank you.
0:05 – 0:126 turns
My name is Eric Talkin, I'm CEO of the Food Bank of Santa Barbara County. I want to thank Greg Hart for inviting us and all the other supervisors for letting us have the opportunity to let you know what we're doing in response to the COVID-19 crisis So let's go inside and find out. We have launched our Safe Safety Net program, which sets up 50 safe food distribution points across the county including remote areas such as Guadalupe and Nuki'ama. At these distributions we will be providing nutritious food that has been packed in a safe environment with COVID-19 appropriate cleanliness and social distancing This food is then distributed in a similarly safe fashion, utilizing social distancing and at many places drive-through pantries which allow people to have the food put in the back of their vehicles by a volunteer and then drive on.
We continue to provide daily food and COVID-19 safety training to our network of 300 plus member agencies To make possible this expanded food provision, we are setting up two entirely new warehouses. One in Goleta and one in Santa Maria that utilize tens of thousands of donated warehouse space to store food we are sourcing from all over the United States. This week alone we spent $100,000 on food purchased that is hard to get donated.
We need funds to fill these empty warehouses and we also need help. Many of our volunteers are over 60 and have a pre-existing medical condition, so we need more help especially from the National Guard which we have not yet been able to secure. We will be developing a major direct-to-door food distribution initiative for the thousands of isolated low income seniors in our community While we run senior grocery programs and have some home deliveries, Santa Barbara County has always lacked a robust delivery system with no large-scale Meals on Wheels program.
This is an enormous undertaking involving new technology and staffing and many volunteers. We have activated our disaster feeding plan which brings together key agencies to help with large scale food needs.
Unfortunately, Mr. Talkin and his wonderful team are not able to be here today to answer questions but as the video demonstrates this is an enormous undertaking that they are beginning there. The community is stepping up to help but anyone who is interested in helping their mission and making their ability to help people that much more effective should contact them directly at their website.
The food bank of Santa Barbara County. And I just want to express my strong support for what they're doing and kudos and thanks for everything that they have already done and will do. Would anyone like any comments? Supervisor Hartman?
So is the new warehouse space permanent or are they still looking for South County Warehouse Space?
I believe that the space that they're utilizing in Goleta has been offered by the City of Goleta It is the future site of the expansion of the Goleta Amtrak station, so it doesn't have a long-term. That site won't be able to be used in the long term, so they are continuing to look for a site in South County. All right well thank you very much for that and
the next item is announcements about changes to our agenda. Madam Clerk are there any changes to our agenda today?
Chair Hart, members of the board. Yes we have a couple of additions to our agenda today and first I will announce that we posted an addendum on Friday March 20th amending today's agenda to include an additional closed session agenda item under conference with legal counsel existing litigation this is Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors sitting as the Board of Supervisors and as the Board of Directors of the Santa Barbara County Flood Control and Water Conservation District Southern California Fire Cases Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding Case Number 4965, Los Angeles County Superior Court Case Number BC699216.
We also have an additional change to the agenda withdrawing Administrative Item A-21 from the Treasurer Tax Collector. This is to consider recommendations regarding a request for approval to sell tax defaulted property at public auction via internet from June 19th 2020 to June 22nd 2020. In addition, we added a departmental agenda item number four from Supervisor Williams and Supervisor Hart. It is a hearing to consider recommendations regarding an urgency ordinance to temporarily prohibit evictions. There is a forfeits vote required on that item.
In addition to those announcements, we also posted an additional addendum regarding our public participation today And based on guidance from the California Department of Public Health and the California Governor's Stay at Home Executive Order N3320 issued on March 20th, 2020 to protect the health and well-being of all Californians. And to establish consistency across the state in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors meetings will no longer provide in person participation We have established alternative methods of participation in the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors meetings pursuant to the California Governor's Executive Order N-2920.
In addition to our previously established methods, to email public comment if the public wishes to make a general public comment or to comment on a specific agenda item by phone please call 805-568-7000. 2240 as you will also see a scrolling on the TV live as we speak and state your name, your phone number and which item you would like to speak on in the clerk will call you at the appropriate time. Please make every effort to be available and mute all streaming devices once it is your turn to speak.
And last I would like to announce that we received requests by the Department To continue departmental item number 4 to our April 21st 2020 meeting this is from planning and development. And it is a hearing excuse me. To consider recommendations regarding the appeal case number 19 APL 36 filed by Scott Rudolph. Applicant appellate of the County Planning Commission's December 4th, 2019 denial of the Santa Barbara West Coast Farms Cannabis Cultivation Project. Case number 19 LUP64. This is in the third district and unless there are any questions I would now ask that the board make a motion to approve all changes made to today's agenda which includes both posted addendums and their requests to continue departmental item number two.
0:12 – 0:1313 turns
Thank you Madam Clerk. Is there a motion? So moved Mr.
Chair.
Motion has been made by Supervisor Hartman and seconded by Supervisor Adam Any discussion? Roll call, please.
Ms. Hartman?
Aye
Mr. Adams? Aye Mr. Lavagnino?
Aye
Mr. Williams?
Aye
Chair Hart?
Aye
Motion passes unanimous
Next item is approval of the administrative agenda do any board members request to pull any items on the administrative agenda
Agenda Discussionitems moved / continued / pulled, click to expand
Seeing none, are there any members of the public who request to pull items from the administrative agenda? Since there's no one here.
Chair Hart and Members of the Board I do have two requests on Administrative Item Number 12 and they are two letters to be read into the record. And Administrative Item Number 12 is from the County Executive Office it is to consider recommendations regarding an update on cannabis compliance enforcement and taxation second quarter fiscal year Approval of the Memorandum of Understanding with the California Department of Food and Agriculture, CDFA for participation in a track and trace pilot program. And I will begin with Dave Cleary to be followed by Lillian Cleary We are concerned about the failure of the system to deal with illegal expansion. The ordinance prohibiting the expansion of non-conforming uses is not part of Title X, but is part of the basic LUDC and applicable to all land use entitlements unless specifically accepted therein.
It's obvious that it was in full force and effect as of January 19th 2016 and before despite what has been represented By an attorney for one of the applicants, the part of the LUDC that deals with this issue is sections 35.101.010, .020, .050, 060 and 070. As a whole it is a forceful document with the purpose of putting an end to non-conforming status as soon as possible and by all means prohibiting expansion beyond the date that expansion became non-conforming. Our position is that instead of being rewarded like Busy Bee Organics was, those applicants who have expanded extensively should not be granted any land use entitlement or business license and should be permanently barred as individuals or participants in any other entity from obtaining such permits or licenses.
Thank you. And now we will go to Lillian Clary's letter. Since April 2017, we have been presenting our issues to the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors. It is obvious to those of us who reside In Endron's, or whose only access to our parcels is through an Endron, is EDRN. That the best way to deal with this issue is a complete prohibited of all cannabis cultivation and other commercial cannabis activities in any of the EDRNs in Santa Barbara County. The EDRNS were established many years ago to protect agriculture by preventing expansion of residential use beyond the boundaries of the EDRM.
A glory of this would be that within the EDRN, priority should be given to the residents rather than industrial scale commercial agriculture. To hold otherwise would give priority to commercial agriculture both within and outside the EDRN. This seems even more relevant when we are speaking of a plant that because of its nature as a drug does not even have right to farm status. Why should it be given the privilege of overwhelming small residential communities? Thank you.
Thank you very much for the queries for expressing their views. Is there an additional item to be pulled off the administrative agenda or is that it?
Chair Hart, members of the board. That was the only request I received. Okay.
Can I please get a motion to approve the balance of the administrative agenda? Motion's been made by Supervisor Adam and seconded by Supervisor Hartman. Any discussion? Roll call please.
Ms. Hartman? Aye. Mr. Adam? Aye. Mr Lavinino?
Aye
Mr Williams?
Aye
Chair Hart. Aye. Motion passes unanimous.
And now is the time for members of the public to speak on items that are not on our agenda, do we have any written requests to speak? On items not on our agenda?
Chair Hart and members of the board yes we have three requests to speak on today's public comment I have two letters to be read into the record and we will also call Andy Caldwell. Our first letter to be read into the record is from Ed Kolaski to be followed by an anonymous letter. We are people treated worse than a dog at SBAR, and why is Alex Peugeot still at the Santa Barbara Board of Architectural Review? A month ago some idiot in Arroyo Grande taped a dog's head so the dog could not hear or see and turned it loose in the streets.
In analogy this is the same actions of Alex Peugeot at the Board of Architectural Review performed when he effectively taped mouths closed so we cannot speak by having Dylan. Chapel jumped up and shout at us every time my architect stood up to ask, what is going on? Alex blindsided us by ordering us out of the meeting in 15 seconds. We were not allowed to show our design drawings to the other six members at the meeting who were present. This is liberty and justice for all those that make a payment under the table to Alex Peugeot which is apparently the only requirement to get your project passed. We were treated just like that idiot treated that dog by Alex Peugeot. Why is Alex Peugeot still at the Board of Architectural Review? Call Supervisor Greg Hart, 568-2191 and ask why is Alex Rougeau still at the Board of Architectural Review?
And to be followed by an anonymous letter. To be read to the entire board. We are devoted, oh. Supervisor Parker. Point
of order. Do we allow anonymous?
Chair and supervisors under the Brown Act the Board may request the name but that is not a requirement of the Brown Act and so someone whether live or electronically may provide comment without stating their name.
I'll just chime in. This would be an enormously negative precedent. If we wanted to send our discourse down to the level of blogging and Facebook and next door, that would be a real step backward for the future of democracy. And so I think anonymous posts on public meetings is very negative precedent. Supervisor Adam?
I would agree that that has never been our practice. I don't recall that having been done in my tenure here and I wouldn't recommend starting that now either because if we start reading stuff into the record, it's anonymous will get a 1000 of them so much will start our meetings on Monday.
I would make the motion that we do not accept anonymous comments.
Second.
Motion's been made and seconded, any discussion? All those in favor say or excuse me roll call.
I would like discussion. I mean, we do have resolutions and rules by which we operate and if this isn't one, I would like it to be incorporated into it. I don't know if we need to agendize that for some future point but I would like to do that.
Okay. Direction of staff to consider that as a future agenda item to operating rules for the board? Any other discussion on. The anonymous comment. All right with the clerk please read the road read the role.
Miss Hartman I Mister Adam Mister Lavagnino. Mister Williams
I
chair heart motion passes unanimous. Chair Hart members of the board, I will now go to our last public speaker and that is on the phone with Andy Caldwell
Chairman Hart, members of the board. Andy Caldwell representing COLAB. I don't object to the lack of public participation in person there because I understand that the circumstances that we're under but I think that you need to take a second look at your agendas and my concern is that you're hearing items that are not of any urgent matter, including for instance on today's agenda the long-range plan for P&D. You still have various appeals coming up in the future and I think that it would behoove the board to exercise some constraint and put off these nonessential items into the future when people can fully participate because you know for instance on appeals or things like that Clients have to be able to talk to their attorney and they have to be able to converse, and this that the other.
Be pretty darn hard for them to do that in isolation from one another and or while practicing social distancing. And then today you know like I said there's there's other items like P and D is long range plan. There's no need for you to have that when the public's ability to participate is either limited and via isolation from one another And or just the other circumstances involving all of these things. And finally, I asked last week or maybe it was the week before that I think a hearing that you do need to have sooner rather than later is on the status of county finances.
It's our anticipation that you may have lost
0:23 – 0:287 turns
anywhere from 30% to 50% on the County Pension Fund You're going to lose almost all your TOT tax dollars, much of your sales tax dollars. You're going to get slammed in welfare and social services plus a lot of other departments. And I don't understand why you're not having an emergency hearing because I think you're going to need to start laying off people sooner rather than later especially with the stock market declines being as steep as they have been So thank you for your time.
Thank you Mr. Caldwell, the complexity of our agenda is related in part to the fact that the governor has not provided local governments with any relief from the Permit Streamlining Act so until that occurs we are governed by that direction from the state and in regards to the long-range planning item we need that information or the department needs that information to prepare their budget for the upcoming fiscal year We are constrained by the realities of having to continue to operate county government in this difficult time.
Mr. Chair, I would also just chime in. Mr Caldwell, I appreciate your comments often. But I do think this one is in direct contradiction to your one of last week, which is your comment of last week was. In preparation for the economic fallout of this disaster and I really agree that we need to be worried about the economic fallout of the disaster. Long-term planning is one of the biggest bottlenecks for any form of economic development that we can do.
And if we do not address the bottlenecks in the workflow of long-term planning, it constrains what type of economic activity and what type of revenue activity can be done by the county. So I think very much it's a vital thing to look at as part The dealing with the effects of this disaster supervisor Adam.
Yeah, and I agree in part and disagree in part. I think that doing this long range should probably be postponed. I understand the fact that I'm I'm informed that we can't allow things to accumulate, that we'll have to address in a lump later. And that's, I get that part of it. But I also think that we should wait maybe my prediction is two to three weeks. We're gonna know so much more than we know now. The problem with what we know now is it's almost nothing.
And if we allow this event, this cosmic visitation of chaos on us to develop and evolve for two weeks or three weeks. We will be in such a better decision making position than we are today. I just spent last Saturday afternoon. I spent an hour with my daughter who's in law school Talking her off the ledge You know as it were and The everybody on this planet's Plans have been dashed Nobody is unaffected.
And so I think that we just have to remember that it's not Nobody's doing anything to us and we're going to have to just bear the pressure, bear the strain. And at some point it's gonna pass and I think that even if it doesn't completely pass in a couple of weeks we'd know a lot more and be able to make better decisions in a more rational frame And so that's where I agree with Mr. Caldwell, is I think we should perhaps pause or maybe in compromise do some kind of a minimal job with this just to keep people going but I do think that the The economic fallout of this thing is the fact that there will be economic fallout is obvious.
And I think that the county should be really in the next 2 to 4 weeks starting to think because it's budget season and we should be thinking about hoarding cash, because that's going to become a short commodity. Maybe
you could
hold
your comments for the next item since
0:28 – 0:3612 turns
Okay, well I was just responding to Mr. Caldwell's comments and I'm sure we'll continue to go on through that.
Thank you. That concludes public comment unless there is...
Chair Hart?
Yes, Supervisor Lavinino.
Thank you. I just, as your representative on the Santa Barbara County Retirement Board, I just kind of wanted to chime in a little bit. We did have a meeting last week and while this is a fluid situation, of course the market's gone down some since last Wednesday but also it's up another You know, 8-9% today. But just to give you a, I don't want to freak everybody out and say it was 50% loss.
It was more in the 13 to 15% range at that point. And it will have an effect on this year's budget but This will actually significantly affect next year's budget, the one after this fiscal year. And we'll have a lot of conversations about that but I just didn't want people to be out there with some information that was a little more dire than it is. It's extremely dire and it's obviously something we need to deal with but we don't need to make it even worse than it is.
Thank you Supervisor Lavenia, that's very helpful to know.
The next item is department item 1. Will the clerk please read that item into the record?
Chair Hart and members of the board, departmental item number one is from the county executive office. It is a hearing to consider recommendations regarding an update from the county executive office regarding coronavirus disease 2019.
Dr. De Reynoso will you be leading this presentation or Ms. Miyasato?
Chair and board members, we have several members who've been actively working on the response here today to present to you. And so we have Dr. Dovrinoso, we have Kelly Hubbard our Director of Emergency Management and Jeff Rappel our Budget Director. So they'll go over some slides and we hope to have some time for you to ask questions The board letter that accompanies this report also allows the board to provide direction. We've given you status updates on the prior weeks and I know there have been instances where the board wanted to discuss more and give us directions, so we provided that opportunity this morning.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. I wanted to start off our conversation or update with a situational status, just how have we gotten here? So we began at the end of January with the US Health and Human Services Secretary announcing or rather declaring COVID as a public health emergency for the US. Quickly after that, significant was at the end of February to prepare for possible additional person-to-person spread of COVID-19 in the U.S., CDC began recommending that clinicians, state and local health departments consider COVID-19 in patients with severe respiratory illness Even in the absence of travel history to affected areas, or known exposure to another case. And this is significant because then we can really gauge and monitor the community.
Then on 311 World Health Organization declared COVID as a pandemic due to the rapid increase in the number of cases outside of China over the past previous two weeks And the fear of it spreading worldwide at an unprecedented level. Here locally, we declared a local health emergency through county health officer order and we ordered our community members to social distance. And then we had our first case in Santa Barbara County on March 15th quickly following that few days later. The governor issued the stay at home order.
So on the screen, you see that there are 18 cases in Santa Barbara County. I'd like to give you an update that as of this morning it is 19 cases in Santa Barbara County. In comparison Ventura as of last night has 35 and SLO has 33. The numbers for California I checked this morning before I came and At 1733, but I believe that is because of the sinking all the local health jurisdictions numbers up to Sacramento. So that number is definitely higher and I have heard in recent days concerns and worries from cities and community members really desiring Where the cases are so would like to update your board that we are really close to. a decision. We really want to be thoughtful about the level of detail in the cases that we share with the public and this will be a conversation with our internal experts as well as consulting with our partners in County Council, but I can tell you that of the 19 cases For now, nine is in the South County and ten as in the North.
So we're in a position where it has been our practice and our value that the lover is five. So we have two cities that have exceeded that five cases lover and so we will be more free to share that information. So we really need to, as a community, flatten the curve. Be really good partnership to reduce the spread of infection and illness in our community. The power is with us. And so with that, I want to really remind everyone to practice social distancing over the weekend we saw that because of the beautiful weather and the beautiful community that we live in that not everyone was adhering to social distancing and so I want to make an appeal to every member of our community to do so if you are If you're sick, please stay home.
Wash your hands religiously. Don't touch anything such as your face. Keep your distance again. Stay at home if you're sick because through all these behavior changes we can see a difference in our own community so thank you.
0:36 – 0:4322 turns
Supervisor Hartman?
I had a question about masks. One of the best things I've heard is that each of us should assume that we're a carrier, we may be healthy but if we assume we're a carrier then we'll be more protective of others and I've seen differing opinions then about masks if they're in short supply and we need to save them for medical professionals That makes sense. If we have masks left over from the fires, maybe perhaps we should wear them. So I'd like your advice about that.
So this is a topic that's constantly being discussed in our department per CDC's guideline that face masks should really only be used By people who have COVID-19 and are showing symptoms, and this is to protect others from the risk of getting infected. You mentioned that we are in short supply? Yes we are. And so as such, we really want to be mindful And reserve the availability of those masks for health care workers, either working in a healthcare setting or at home taking care of someone who is vulnerable.
And yes I have heard that there are supplies personal supplies of masks from previous natural disasters and to that we Can't take what's impersonal because we can't assure of that. But if you have masks, we encourage people to use it just not to demand it from the healthcare system because we want to safeguard it for the health care workers and those who are ill.
Supervisor Adam had a question.
Well, I'm just wondering you know, I've been asked and I'm sure you've been asked if excuse me we've got some numbers for those hospitalized and even as distinct from ICU and numbers for positive tests who were sent home and numbers for negative tests
So yes, on our website on a daily basis we post the number of tests that are pending. The number of tests that we have received results back and so the positives as of this morning is 19. With your question about hospitalization you know it's...
Hang on one second. So that's the positives How about the negatives? Can you tell us, is it on your website how many total tests we've done? Yes. It does. Okay. And what is that number if you know?
I have it in my other binder so I'll get it really quickly hold on.
Sure. Almost
500. Sorry? Almost 500 492 or something like that. Ballpark.
Because while you're coming back to the mic, I think the point is we need to provide some context for what the severity of the infection is when it happens. You know because if there's a whole bunch of positive tests who were sent home and there's a whole bunch of negative tests and we have 19 people that are confirmed and of them how many are in the hospital or ICU?
Sure, so I have the data and this is available on our website. We have about 493 tests and of that 229 negative results and 245 pending results with one inconclusive. That's interesting how does that happen?
Maybe they didn't get an adequate sample or
something? Perhaps. And I'm sorry, I wasn't tracking on your questions when I walked away so could you repeat that please?
Sure. Just wondering about negative tests which you answered We're going to go ahead and roll back to the slide. The slide previous to this has all
When we test or when we receive negative tests, or when our healthcare partners receive negative tests the recommendation to the patient is go home. and monitor for symptoms. And it is a conversation that we have been pushing out to both our community as well as our healthcare partners, that you need to monitor for symptoms and symptoms to watch for include fever of 100.4 or more if there's a new cough, there's shortness of breath in those cases connect with your healthcare provider and seek that care.
Right, but then there needs to be kind of some discussion for contextual purpose of how did these people come into contact with you to get tested?
Right. So we have in previous updates I shared that as a community the public health department as well as our healthcare providers created a joint triage tool by which the community providers will make that decision on which patient merits or needs a test. And so essentially because there is We wanna, there is a limited number of available tests. We are really reserving them for the highly vulnerable cases, the patients. So I know that there are community members who would like to be tested on demand. We're not in that position yet and the public health as well Health care partners are using that triage to make sure that the most vulnerable, the most critical patients are getting the tests. And so the providers can send the tests out to commercial labs or they can connect with Public health department.
We have a specific number of tests available as well The difference is the quicker turnaround time if you go through the public health department
Okay, so we're not out there testing in the Population randomly no, we're testing people who are presenting with symptoms
correct?
Okay,
sorry who are vulnerable and critical
0:43 – 0:4812 turns
That have extenuating circumstances, okay so the thing is To contextualize this more a little bit more We're only testing 494 people out of our county who present with symptoms So and and only 18 of them have been shown to be negative. I'm sorry. Sorry it 18 positive So around half of them are showing negative. Or so they have symptoms, they're presenting with symptoms and so they have the flu?
Right.
Okay.
Or other respiratory infections.
But that's a tenth of a percent if I'm doing my math right roughly of our population? Yes. That's even presenting the total is a tenth of a percent
So these, I agree. And the nuance to this is that this is the number of tests are we believe underrepresented. We are still waiting for data from two more partners. So once we get that data, we'll have a higher number of tests and as well as the results but we always get the public health department, we always get the confirmed cases, the positive cases
Okay. Yeah, so I love your final take home down at the bottom high transmission rate low mortality and hospitalization. That's some calming should be some calming effect for our community. I like it.
Thank you
Supervisor Williams. Well one of the things that one of the numbers that you presented that gives you some I think more hope or a brighter spot is there seems to be a lower death rate in the percentage of cases that pass away in the United States. Is that a function just of time, or is it because we believe that for some reason the number of patients in the United States versus the number of patients in say China will have a lower death rate?
I think it's both. I think that as we are receiving data from the hospitals, especially those that are in ICU, that's a function of time. It's lagged And I think that the U.S. healthcare system is vastly different from that of China and Italy, as well as the environment. And I think that it's always important to take what's happening in the world, what's happening in the U S What's happening in California and really reserve a space for what's happening in Santa Barbara. We, in the public health department were always mindful about the unique nature of our local community and taking the data that we're seeing everywhere else. Yes, we are putting into practice the successes. But the results need to be nuanced or even the messaging needs to be nuanced because every county, every jurisdiction is a little bit different.
Thank you and then on the masks issue I have been in communication with some county staff that indicate That these are really neat in high demand for healthcare professionals. We need a good supply of them, so I just wanted to take the opportunity for you to tell us how people could donate supplies of N95 masks or other materials to public health To the EOC because of the anticipated need for these supplies.
And so in terms of donations, we have a donations management group that's working on putting together those outreach materials today. They met yesterday. As Vaughn mentioned, we got to be careful about individuals wanting to donate an open box of masks that we can't verify the cleanliness or use of those and so we're putting Kelly, when we get to your part of the presentation. Can you just reiterate what the email boxes or the phone number?
0:48 – 0:587 turns
The other thing I want to make a comment about that. You know, this is my third year in Santa Barbara County and I am so astounded by the outpouring of community support It's closer to home because it's public health. And so I want to thank all of our community members and all of our partners for wishing to donate. donations of needed PPEs. We are managing our supplies through a very rational and methodical manner, and Supervisor Hart was able to participate with us and got a taste of how We allocate scarce medical resource through partnership with the community, through a very rigorous process. And really making those difficult decisions about what is needed? Who needs to get it first and foremost? And how can we acquire additional supplies from our state?
Thank
you.
And then the last point is I don't think you answered supervisor I was going to wrap back around to
Is affecting the outcome. You know, you look at China and the demographics and the fact that there's a lot of smokers And I've been to those wet markets and I'm telling you if you're steeped in that kind of environment Many I mean talk about the Naked City, holy mackerel. It's it's a it's an interesting environment But you know and even Italy 28% of their populations over 60 heavy smokers well And I probably shouldn't even say this because it's probably internet lore, but it's entirely possible that there could be another strain of this virus that is a little more virulent and they got the perfect storm over there where we just don't. So we've got a different strain of the virus which Working well with our healthier population to keep the death rate and the hospitalizations down, and it just turns into a flu for us so Keep eating those fresh fruits and vegetables people because it makes you healthy and you can fight off the Infections and stave off Darwin another day
All right. Are there any more questions? I think it'd be helpful if we let the staff get to the presentation, if there aren't any questions right now. Okay.
Okay so Kelly Hubbard, Director of Office of Emergency Management. Just briefly and forgive me for looking over to this screen here since I'm not at the computer there. So our objectives that we've set for the emergency operations and our overall response Mona and Barney and others have laid out our policy group for us. One is to flatten the curve, reduce the spread of infection and deaths. And so again those social distancing measures and various measures that were already in place that the health officer has put in place. Two, reduce the overload to the healthcare system. Again a very prime objective of the public health department and our EOC in supporting them.
Protect health care workers and our frontline responders. Four, protect other essential personnel. Five, assist the most vulnerable populations and are affected. Assist with economic mitigation and recovery. And seven, inform the public with accurate and timely information. And I'll just briefly point out some of the EOC structure that helps to meet those objectives.
So in our emergency operations structure, where we're incorporating Public Health Department and their DOC and activities they have going so that we are supporting that main objective of public health. Some of the task forces just to give you an example of some of the focuses this is not all of them. We have an economic and community recovery group that's working on outreach to the business and individuals in the community impacted. Nancy Anderson is leading that effort.
Homeless Sheltering Task Force, focusing in on how we help those homeless and working on our sheltering. Vulnerable populations, there is a big senior focus there but also recognition of other vulnerable populations in the community. That task force has largely been looking at things like our food programs and how are we doing meal delivery to the seniors who are at home?
Logistics, donations and volunteer management as noted earlier. Working a lot on how do we utilize the staff of our other partner agencies such as our cities who have staff who may not be working right now and are willing and able to work? And that they can come and provide mutual aid, as well as the donations management component that we mentioned earlier of having those individuals who want to provide goods.
Scarce medical resource team, Vaughn mentioned that briefly and that's how we look at allocation of those scarce resources to ensure that they are being allocated to those highest priorities. And then we have the multi-government workforce coordination and that's what I just mentioned is the fact that we have cities special districts and other government agencies who have a lot of staff who would like to work and contribute to the effort and may not be able to do their normal day-to-day job We're working with those agencies to be able to coordinate their staffing and use them as mutual aid support.
In fact, I believe it went live on our website that there's a form now that those government agencies and their staff can fill out to submit the staff available what are their skills abilities? And then we have a program on the back end to match them to what are the needed positions in support. And that really does include also, it says multi-government but all of our partner agencies such as our nonprofits, food bank, our VOAD group, volunteer organizations active in disaster. All of those entities have been active and engaged in our phone calls and our task force meetings mostly virtually.
And so we are really engaging those groups as much as we can. And then as of yesterday, we integrated the incident management assistance team. So you might be more familiar with the IMT 3 team which is the Incident Management Team that you often see with big fires. The Incident Management Assistance Team Is using some of those same individuals, but really as a support function to the Emergency Operations Center. So they're coming in and providing additional support and strength to our EOC and providing us some additional Some of the skills that they've learned over the years for instance setting up camps for the fires Helping us with some of those skills and resources and such that they've learned over time. And they can contribute that to the Emergency Operations Center, so that's been a wonderful help as well.
And that is a multi-agency, multi-discipline team. So that includes individuals from various agencies including City of Santa Barbara just to give an example County Fire, City of Santa Barbara Fire. The sheriff's department, Vandenberg Air Force Base has a fire individual on the team. And so just a variety of agencies represented there. And then just to reiterate all of our points and information for the public we have our website, the publichealthsbc.org and you can click on the COVID-19 response. You can also get to that from our main county website page.
Our community call center is 833 688-5551. Again, that's for a lot of community members. Business members have been calling that as well. We have our Community Wellness Call Center for emotional support and that is a wonderful team from Be Well and others who are supporting that and taking phone calls from those individuals who may be struggling with this incident on emotionally and mentally. And so that's 888 868-1649.
We have engaged 211 as another partner and so individuals in the community, 211 does have the same information that our call center call takers have and so we ensure to make sure that they are receiving the same updates and points of information and can help to answer your questions as well. And then as always, our partners the CDC and the California Department of Public Health are great partners who have a lot of information on their websites as well.
0:58 – 1:0420 turns
Thank you. Supervisor Adam.
One final question. I'm informed that you had 1700 test kits at one time. What's the inventory and what might be the expectation of getting more?
So I don't have a track on that 1700 but why can tell you is what public health is doing so as we committed to your board. We are in aggressive pursuit of Modules for our current machines. So our public health lab has the capacity, we have the machines so we've added modules to that machine and we are partnering up with PDL to be able to be within I want to say 7-10 days do that testing So it's a rapid testing and so we're hoping to be able to get the kids to be able to do that. And therefore, increasing our communities access to testing for the tier one.
Okay, so how accurate is that test?
It is accurate.
Okay, like 99.9?
I don't know. I didn't read the clinical trial but it's FDA approved.
Okay all right so it should be reliable because sometimes when you go to the you know the faster the turnaround time sometimes the accuracy degrades a little bit. Right okay so what's your plan in terms of moving into a broader testing if people wanted to get tested
We had that conversation with our community partners yesterday and all the community health care partners, none of us are at that space yet. Just because whatever the result is your healthcare provider would just give you that same message go home self quarantine take care of yourself monitor Save the tests for those who are really critical. It's not just the test, but the process of collecting the sample that really will you burn through PPEs fairly quickly. So collectively as a community we're not in this space to go beyond the tiered one which is the high risk vulnerable populations that we've identified.
Okay so but how much does a test cost once you get those the testing in our machine. What's the test cost
and we're still penciling the costs per tests as we speak
Well, can you give me an order of magnitude? Is it 10 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000?
Per test. And please don't hold me to this. I want to say that I'm guesstimating it to be around anywhere from 50 to 75 just in the supply. So I haven't calculated the salaries and benefits or the machine, just the test kits and all. The test kit and the reagents needed
Okay, so
if that's an interest I can bring that back next week. Yeah,
I think you know the more information that we have and the more we can because I think there's a lot of people out there that would like to go in and get tested just to make sure they don't have it because you know some people might feel a little sick and You know, I know that this I know this there is psychosomatic symptoms right? So So the other thing is, if you had a population such as Isla Vista that you were concerned about because of the dense conditions.
If you offered to test people because they can be positive and not show symptoms especially in a young strong population like Isla Vista if people wanted to come in and get tested in Isla Vista even if they weren't showing symptoms You could isolate some people that were testing positive and not really showing symptoms.
Right, you bring up two really good points I like what Supervisor Hartman said earlier which is assume that you are positive and Self isolate, observe the governor's executive order. Stay home and it's really not about yourself. It's about protecting your neighbor, protecting your loved ones, protecting the community members who are vulnerable and may not be able to respond as well.
Well, yeah. But then you have the decimation of our economy that's causing if we could go out there and find the positives and isolate them then you don't have to decimate the economy to stop this thing.
So what I heard the governor said in his previous press conference was that still it's not mass testing is not recommended. However, the state CDPH has gone into certain communities and has done surveillance so we have an idea about the rate of infection
Yeah and if you had the capacity to do so, and you could go out in the community and request volunteers. You could maybe do a sample and see what the level of background positives are and then maybe make a strategy based on the information that you gather from that.
1:04 – 1:2021 turns
Miss.
I just wanted to go back to one of the Kelly slides about volunteers and just a follow up about just let people know it's been in the paper that cottage is doing a drive-thru collection center starting today at 10 o'clock to 5 PM at the Goleta Valley Cottage Hospital 351 South Patterson, and they're asking for supplies including face shields other single use or non disposable items And Kelly had one more thing about food distribution.
And then I'd also wanted to trigger my memory, Food Bank's video. We are working, I know they mentioned on needing more support. We are working with the state on bringing in California Conservation Corps volunteers and putting that request together today. It's been indicated to us that they are potentially available. We're just waiting for Thank you both for that additional information. Supervisor Hartman, you had a question?
Thank you. I have several questions. The first is based on Washington State, New York now the Bay Area and Los Angeles we have a sense of how this at least in certain areas can progress and there are projections. Have we done a best case worst case and medium case projection? And do we have a sense of when we might expect the height of infections here in Santa Barbara County?
So we are in the middle of that. Our epi team have gotten tools, and we are in the middle of doing that analysis. So one piece of that is doing the data gathering around our hospital beds, around our medical supplies, and now we're moving into projecting our risks as a population. So we're in the middle of doing that.
Thank you. Second question, with vulnerable populations or mostly seniors were working on homeless I don't know if this is exactly the vulnerable population but there's home health care workers that's come up on the phone call Supervisor Williams had mentioned that as well as Assemblymember Lamone, grocery workers. And then I'm worried about Spanish speakers and Supervisor Adam of course mentioned Isla Vista. So we have various populations who are in many ways dealing with the public or going about their daily business and How they're being accommodated and whether we have special public outreach to them about what how to conduct their business in these trying times.
So I can address a couple of those, and then maybe Vaughn can address a couple of those. So for the grocery workers, Senator Lamone's office offered us some contacts and we're following up and doing an outreach campaign that the Joint Information Center has started on today. Doing some outreach and communication with them both on protection of their staff as well as social distancing measures that they can put in place within the stores and markets.
And might I ask is it three feet or six feet? It's 6 feet. Yeah, so that's tricky with the cashier
for example we've heard I think it's a safe way is installing plexiglass in their stores between the check the cashiers and the visitor so various efforts like that. So we're going to do some campaign outreach campaign and communication starting today to the grocers I know we're looking to increase our Spanish population outreach through some community groups. And there's already been some of that outreach, but enhancing and seeing what else we can do within those groups. And then health home care workers.
I actually was going to talk a little bit more about the Spanish communities. So we reached out and are partnering up with UCSB and our community organizations, the public health department for the past two years have been partnering up with UCSV in connecting In doing culturally relevant and linguistically relevant and appropriate messaging. And so actually, this afternoon we have a meeting with four organizations just to see what are the needs and how can we help?
Good so
maybe next week you could give us an update on that because I think that's really important. And my final question is just, I know all of us are getting calls different categories for information. I didn't know if there's any place that you're cataloging the various types of calls?
The call center does keep a log every day as well as we're asking be well the new community line and So we're keeping a catalog of that and those are in this situation Summaries, you can provide some additional information on the types of calls
Okay And all of us supervisors are also getting emails and calls I didn't know how you might want to capture those or how we best funnel those to you We're starting to ask people to To call the call center, but in you know a lot of people email us and we're getting quite a range of ideas.
You know, to that point it might be helpful for you to share some of that with board members so we have a sense of what the public is asking about. Maybe just broad categories of the call-in center information.
Absolutely.
Thank you. Next on the presentation is Mr. Frepple.
Mr. Chair, Members of the Board, thank you. We're going to turn our attention now to the inward impact of this pandemic within county operations In summary, the departments have largely implemented their coup plans as it relates to this. Which essentially means they've identified those services which are essential and must continue to be provided to the public.
And in doing that they're looking at ways of how do we accomplish that while overall trying to protect our and keep our employees healthy? And so they're doing that in a variety of ways. So what you'll see is, a lot of county employees to the extent their jobs lend themselves to this have been able to telework. So to the extent that we have the technology, to the extent their job duties are conducive for that, they are trying to telework to the extent possible. Within the workplace, we are adhering and implementing social distancing With respect to the types of meetings we have, the number of people in meetings.
The distance as again all aimed at keeping our workforce healthy. The majority of our public counters are closed within county departments and they have departments have been creative in finding alternative methods to interfacing with the public making sure that those things that must continue do continue. That interface that we have and for services we provide continue to go on.
There is a list and we keep that updated on our website with respect to the impact of services and how the public can interface with our county departments, and make sure that permits can be applied for, plans can be dropped off for review, services can continue as much as possible. So on our website there is a list broken down by department of how the public can interface with our county departments.
We are mindful that there are some county employees who may be unable to work because of COVID. At the federal level, there has been legislation which addresses this specifically and sets out criteria of the types of employees and how they might be impacted. Whether they themselves are sick or presenting symptoms, or if they're caring for those family members within their household It could also be, obviously there's a huge impact with respect to child care and the availability of childcare in this time. And schools being closed means our employees with school age children or below younger than that for daycare are impacted having to take care of their children. So all that is contemplated we have put in place some measures to help our employees adapt and cope with the situation that we find ourselves in.
Thank you. It's a little difficult being remote from the clicker, but okay. So let me talk a little bit about the county budget and I will tell you that this is absolutely preliminary with a capital P and that this is rapidly evolving and we are on top of it and sober about impacts that this event will have on the county's fiscal resources. As we look at fiscal resource and budgetary impacts, we're really looking in two categories We're looking at the cost increased to be able to respond to and react to, uh, and protect and provide services to our community.
Um, obviously it's been discussed previously in this conversation that means a sheltering, it means response, it means the EOC, it means all those costs associated with responding to this appropriately. And the other component of the budgetary impact is really the loss of revenues And these are revenues that are either, as we look at it just for the general fund, the county's general fund discretionary revenues. There are a few revenues that are economically sensitive.
If there is any silver lining for the county is that the percentage of our revenue is coming from economically sensitive sources makes up a much smaller percentage of our total county budget than for let's say a city. So cities are much more vulnerable and A little bit of a benefit in that regard. But nonetheless, key discretionary revenues that are discretionary for your board within the general fund that we're watching closely is the impact on sales tax And that's local sales tax for the county.
Also mindful of the sales tax that we get through Prop 172, the public safety sales tax that comes based on a statewide sales. We're monitoring carefully our TOT. All you have to do is read the papers. We know that the Billmore has temporarily closed as well as Miramar effective yesterday. And those being two of the largest TOT generators for the county, an unincorporated area.
And so obviously that will have an impact. We're also interest to a smaller extent off the Treasurer's investment pool with the market the way it is we expect that to come in lower than what we budgeted. So these are all things that were monitoring and keeping on top of. And we've asked departments For their impact, those responses to that request are starting to come in.
We'll be compiling these over the next two weeks and keeping a running track, probably update those on a biweekly basis as this continues to evolve. So if I'm looking at just the impact on the general fund discretionary revenues, those things that I mentioned a moment ago, that number roughly is $3 million. And just to be mindful, that number will increase. So I'm not draconian about it but I want to make sure that I'm setting the right expectation that what we see today as of yesterday is a potential loss of current year revenues of $3 million in the general fund. This does not include the impacts in the other operating funds.
I'm sure Mr. McGoldman could elaborate and we have his information, we'll incorporate that into a future board presentation but the impacts on sales tax and gas tax et cetera will have a major impact within his operations as well. So these are all things we're monitoring. These are things that we are staying on top of that will shape our discussion as we go into next fiscal year.
With that, I'd be happy to answer
any questions on that component. Thank you Mr. Farapol and thank you to all the staff for this information. Supervisor Adam has a question.
Do you see any potential for property tax adjustment? And probably not in this year but in the following year?
Supervisor Adam to the Chair. So I think I can safely say there will be impact I don't think there's going to be significant impact unless this event is really prolonged. The bulk of the assessed valuation on properties, most property that has been owned for any length of time is probably already under its Prop 13 limit. You recall Prop 13 limits increase in assessed valuation by property to grow no more than 2% a year.
Markets grown more than that so You'd really have to have a pretty significant adjustment for a longer period of time to see a major impact on property taxes. I want to say the one caveat to that, there are some properties that are based on income as an income-based appraisal and an income-based appraisal again if this event has belonged you really that's I think our properties their most potential be impacted so and drive down.
I don't see it is a big number though
Okay, well you know I'm always looking for the hook. You know I think it depends a lot on how leveraged our population is and how long this goes on and who loses because they're talking about massive number of bankruptcies even now. I mean the longer it goes on the more you get so as people contract For lack of a nicer term, their personal finances are impacted and then down the road there's forced sales and those affect the comps. And once the comps go down then Mr.
Holland has to adjust everybody's Deal down, you know the value valuation down and then. Your revenue. Could could be impacted pretty dramatically so. You know towards that end even though it's not this year I mean we know that is not going to be this year because the money is already here. But next year I would recommend that we start hoarding some cash in order to make it through something that could be worse. And if you end up with a pile of cash, how bad could that be?
You know, if worst case doesn't come around then you're in better shape. But if you don't then it could get ugly and I won't be here so you guys will sort it out.
1:20 – 1:3029 turns
Supervisor Hartman?
Thank you a couple of questions I see Mister Hagan is here and we've had a lot of questions about property tax relief and so hear it from you.
Thank you Mister Hagan for being
here. Chair Hart, members of the board thank you for having me. Is there a specific question or do what would
Well, what the state constraints are and what your practice will be. Oh
sure. So currently a lot of the questions that I'm getting in my office and I'm sure all of you were getting also pertains to the delinquency date for the second installment of property taxes. In other words, the April 10th delinquency date and Neither I nor you can actually significantly move that date. We don't have the legal authority, only the state does. That's embedded in the R&T code for the Revenue and Taxation Code when I say R& T.
The only thing that I can do and I'm prepared to do that on a pretty wide basis and pretty broad interpretation of the law is to provide penalty waivers So that people can pay their taxes without incurring a penalty if they're affected adversely by COVID-19 by the virus. What I would say the only bullet in your gun would be to close my office officially, similar to what you do with the holiday closure. When you close my office officially but with a resolution and maybe Mr. Guzzone may want to weigh in after I say this to make sure it's legal what I'm saying is that It essentially moves the delinquency date to the next business day. So when we close during that holiday closure and we come back after the first of the year, that becomes my next business day.
And so there is some small wiggle room that your board actually has but absent the state doing anything I'm prepared to assist our taxpayers to be able to pay.
And if I might follow on. So you have full discretion to delay the penalties, if need be?
I have some pretty broad authority. If someone is affected adversely because of COVID-19 and so it's out of their control obviously then I'm prepared to cancel the penalty.
And how would people make that showing to you?
They would have to come into our office. We're trying to figure out a way to streamline it. We had a process for the debris flow, which is this is probably a wider amount of affected people but we will come up with something in our office to kind of streamline that process for the penalty waiver application. Basically they have to just prove to us that they were affected and signing on a penalty of perjury is one method We'll try to make it as easy and painless. And assist people that may have been affected either because of health or financial, or the whole litany of things that probably more than I can even think of right now but there will be a thousand different reasons that people are affected.
Thank you. Mr. Ghazani?
Chair and supervisors, we had received a question on this and we would work with both the budget director and the treasurer on a provision under Revenue and Tax Code 2619 which is pretty long but at the end includes that if the Board of Supervisors by adopting an ordinance or resolution closes the county's offices for business prior to the time of delinquency That essentially extends out the period. It's considered, treated as a legal holiday and it will work more with both the CEO's office and the treasurer on that provision which would provide some certainty for everyone.
Thank you very much. Appreciate y'all being on top of that.
Mr Chair?
Yes, Supervisor Levine, no.
Just a question, so if I'm understanding that right. So that's only moving it a couple of days? It goes from Friday to Monday? Is that what we're talking about on the closure?
Chair and Supervisors, this provision which normally is for things like weekends or a legal holiday if the county building was closed. For example from the start of whichever emergency declaration we use and continue through the end of that declaration it would run, it could run for weeks not days. Okay
thank you. I had a question, Supervisor Hartman?
Oh, I just had a question for Mr. Fropwell. So the $3 million that you reference is that the loss to date or is that projected over a certain period?
Supervisor Hartman to the Chair, that is what we believe currently it's our current estimate based on what we know today of where our loss will be through June 30th So in other words, as we look at those broad categories of losses of discretionary revenue. Prop 172, sales, TOT and interest. I will just tell you, so right now we think in the 172 range where we could lose as much as $1.4 million from what we had expected to receive just at our last Q2 report to your board.
So within sales, we'll probably lose at least $400,000 in sales tax between now and June at this rate. Again, all these numbers preliminary, all of them subject to change, all upward I suspect. Within TOT our best estimate is that we'll probably be shy just under a million dollars of what we'd otherwise had expected to receive and interest probably down about a quarter of a million dollars. So those are the four things we're looking at. Those are our estimates through June 30, subject to revision. I will tell you that I do plan to have a more robust Conversation about this when we present our q3 report that will be in April But well, I'm sure we'll have Other updates for your board before that as well
Thank You. Mr. Prep all I had a couple questions It could somebody help me with the current status of the effort to stand up the new emergency shelters around the county
We have. Thank you, we have the one shelter in Santa Maria High School that has stood up. I'm sorry, I'm losing track of my days. I think it's been two three nights now. I apologize and we are working on still identifying our sites for South and Mid County. We have been continuing to work on that. We're trying to find some maybe school sites that might have multiple locations within one site We do have authority to use Oral Warn, but we're trying to reserve that for the potential use for other needs that we may need later.
And so it's still continuing to identify those other sites. The other big need is volunteers within those shelters and So we're working with our nonprofits through our VOAD, the Volunteer Organizations Active in Disaster and the outreach that we have to our outside government agencies in the county
Can I just mention on that? I just want to say thank you to the city of Santa Maria and Mr. Labanino who's there we sent out the call to our other cities in the city of Santa Maria Jason still responded immediately and said what do you need We said we needed some workers for the shelter, and I just got some responses today from his staff So thank you very much
Yes,
thank you very much. And just so you know I didn't get this morning's count but the last couple of days prior we were running between 20 to 30 individuals in the shelter.
It's very important so anybody that can help us we appreciate it And to that point, I was very excited about your reference to the multi-governmental workforce coordination system that I know took a lot of work to get together and it'll help us leverage our local agency partners in their efforts of mutual aid. And I wonder is there any thought or discussion or interest Ability to expand that to the community, to the private sector. There are many very talented people that are at home that could potentially help remotely. I know there are IT people and things like that.
Have you been able? I know you're going through a triage of crisis things but an idea.
Definitely one that we will take back. Currently, our biggest need is for in-person bodies unfortunately but continuing to do additional outreach to those community members and definitely looking at I mentioned we have the donation and volunteer management work group that's working right now And so, first they wanted to tackle that donation component and using our non-profits currently for the volunteers. But then we're going to be reaching out to the larger community for volunteer efforts.
Thank you. Any other questions? Supervisor Hartman.
I have one more Mr. Hart, more of a comment or question. First from Mr. Frapwell. Could you just give us an idea where our strategic reserve balance is right now?
1:30 – 1:3911 turns
Supervisor Lavender for the chair, you've put me on a spot. I believe we're at about $34 million so we are at the 8%. We are at the 8% target that's set by your board by policy.
Okay, so I just wanted to thank my other board members and our CEO and Mr. Frapwell for there's been many times during board hearings especially during budget times when obviously there is a huge litany of needs in this county. And many times we had to unfortunately tell somebody that we weren't able to fund their particular project or program because we had to fund our strategic reserve.
And this is the day, okay? This is why we were doing it. So although we're going to have a lot of negative impacts coming forward I think we're well positioned because of some of the sacrifices that were made. And like I said, I just want to thank everybody for making that a priority because there is a day that has come that the revenue will dry up and the needs are going to explode. So thank you.
Thank you Supervisor Leveneau. That's very well put. I think Supervisor Hartman was first then Supervisor Adam.
So I had two things yet. As you need volunteers, please let us know each of the supervisors has newsletters and outreach so we can add that to our list that we regularly are in contact with. The second thing I have is just a request for our next presentation. I know that I'm hearing a lot about other areas where they're changing policies for the jail so that fewer people are exposed. So whether we're thinking about that, what that might look like for a future presentation. Also yesterday's press conference I heard DA Dudley give a very fine presentation about price gouging.
But I wonder, are there other kinds of scams? Most people are really eager to step up and help in amazing ways. But are there scams and things that people really need to be alert to other than price gouging?
The, I think it's the California Cybersecurity Task Force has been providing some additional information about cybersecurity and telephone scams. They haven't reported anything of significance simply warnings to the community. And so we'll continue to share that messaging as we receive it.
Supervisor Adam?
Well, I was just going to tell Supervisor Labanino you're welcome Right on.
We also have a number of public comment speakers and at this time I'll close public comments since we have quite a few already, I think Madam Clerk so with that will go to public comment
Chair Hart members of the board. We do have six requests to speak on this item and four are going to be emails read into the record Go to two callers. We're going to begin with Corey Heyman, to be followed by Miriam Limbeck and Leslie Weinstock. Dear members of the Board of Supervisors, attached to this comment please find a policy recommendation prepared by Brian Gobel and sent to various elected officials for sustainable approach to managing the COVID-19 outbreak. There are grave concerns that the well intentions policies established during the past several weeks to protect public health are creating potentially catastrophic consequences for the county and the state of California. In addition, please require county health and other pertinent agencies to provide as part of the regular county updates to the public and in your agenda items including this agenda relative to COVID-19 the following.
Number one, the number of COVID- 19 patients requiring hospitalization and daily hospital capacity Two, the rate of increase rather than just the amount of increase with respect to all COVID-19 statistics. Number of tested, number of infected, number hospitalized and three establishment of criteria for the county to present to the governor's office to lift the statewide stay at home order as to the county and to replace it with more carefully tailored public health measures. Thank you for your consideration Corey Heyman.
Now we will go to Miriam Limbeck and Leslie Weinstock to be followed by Katie Mickey. We understand that the COVID-19 pandemic creates difficult decisions for all. 5G Free Santa Barbara has been meeting with public officials and working with city attorney on a draft protection ordinance regarding small and large wireless facilities. Which includes cell antennas and cell towers. Recently, the city council voted for a 90 day pause on approval of a Verizon deregulation ordinance allowing installation of cell antennas on city streetlights. Over 25,000 peer reviewed studies show biological harm in impaired immunity caused by radio frequency microwave radiation from 2, 3 and 4G. Children and people with weakened immune systems are especially vulnerable to radio frequency microwave radiation.
On March 19th, Governor Newsom announced his intention to expand the deployment of wireless infrastructure in schools during the COVID-19 quarantine. This deployment leads to foreseeable and preventable harm and a violation of the right to know and is not in accord with keeping open essential services. We urge you to take action to mitigate the foreseeable harm of RF radiation and stop the installation of wireless facilities in our schools immediately. Miriam Lindbeck and Leslie Weinstock thank you Our next speaker is Katie Mickey, Director of Santa Barbara Body Therapy Institute to be followed by William Rayling.
Dear Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, As a member of 5G Free Santa Barbara, I am requesting transparency and clarity regarding the potential installation of small and large cell facilities on our school campuses during this interim of school closure. On March 19th, Governor Newsom announced his intention to expand the deployment of wireless infrastructure in schools during the COVID-19 quarantine.
On my afternoon walk, I stopped by Santa Barbara High School. During my brief visit, I observed a large white truck entering the campus driven by a non-English speaking driver. It had the words insulate written on it. The driver was unable to inform me what he was transporting to campus. 2G, 3G and 4G small cell and large cell antennas have incurred well documented biological harms to our firemen demonstrated by brain spec scans. A fireman who worked in proximity to small cell and large cell facilities at a time when our immune systems and nervous systems are most vulnerable due to our current worldwide pandemic please assure 5G free SB that our campuses will not be subject to increased Desensitization of radiofrequency radiation when our students return to campus.
Katie Mickey, Director Santa Barbara Body Therapy Institute. And our final public comment via email is from William Rayling and then we will go to call Elizabeth Witt. On behalf of accessible Santa Barbara I'm writing to question why An ASL interpreter for the deaf has not been provided for this meeting. The board is receiving important public health information and we feel that like the other county meetings on the crisis which have been televised, that this presentation should have had an ASL interpreter on screen.
And I would also like to note Chair Hart and members of the board, I would like to note for the record that both on our agenda and on the Clerk of the Board website we provide instructions for disability access which states in summary American Sign Language interpreters Spanish sign language interpreter. and sound enhancement equipment may be arranged by contacting the Clerk of the Board of Supervisors by 4 p.m. on the Friday before the board meeting for information about these services please contact the Clerk of the Board at 805-568 And I would also like to note that the county executive office does provide ASL interpreters during all press conferences as noted by the speaker.
Thank you, Madam Clerk.
And now we will go to call Elizabeth Witt to be followed by Andy Caldwell. Unfortunately, I did not get an answer from Elizabeth Witt so I will go to Andy Caldwell.
1:40 – 1:4715 turns
This is Andy Caldwell representing COLAB. Thank you for allowing me to speak to you. I've been writing and doing a lot of shows on this over the last couple of weeks and doing a lot of research, and I've never wanted to be misunderstood that we've told anybody to underestimate the threat or mortality of this disease However, at the same time we've wanted to make sure we don't go from an abundance of caution to overkill. And one of the things that I wish your board would do today is to ask your public health department to put numbers on the curve. They keep showing you this status of a curve and telling us we need to flatten the curve. And in reality, the reason they shut down our economy was to flatten the curve but they never put numbers on it.
The original curve is a geometric or exponential explosion of infection rates, is what they anticipated. And they said to avoid that we should not do social distancing no handshakes and things like that which is fine but they didn't allow that to have an effect they went too overkill in our opinion of shutting down the economy so we have to ask ourselves how do you know if If and when we were successful in flattening the curve.
If, in fact a month or so after this infection rates or your doctor's one of the doctors from cottage thinks this disease has been here for two months now if we've had one hospitalization out of 440,000 residents could we not call our effort to flatten the curve successful? This is the most legitimate question that needs to be addressed right now. How do we know if we've flattened the curve?
And let me tell you about the double messages coming out of your public health department and the state as a whole. On the one hand, they tell only the positive people should wear a mask But everybody's supposed to assume they're positive, but we're not going to test to see if you're positive unless you have dire, you're in dire emergency conditions. Can you make sense out of that? Everybody assume your positive don't wear a mask if you're positive but we're not going to test you to see if you're positive.
Dignity Health last week gave you a very subtle complaint Why was San Luis Obispo and Ventura County's public health department up for testing and ours not? And it seems like ours is still not up to par with these other counties in terms of testing. Finally, your health doctor had it right originally we should have targeted seniors with underlying health conditions to stay home And let everybody else go about their daily business because upwards of 95 to 99% of this population is going to have no consequences from this flu at least this year.
Next year is another issue, but the bottom line is we have created self inflicted blows for our economy when one out of 440,000 residents in this county needed hospitalization. Please address this issue of flattening the curve by putting numbers on that chart. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Caldwell. Are there any other questions of staff or comments at this point? CEO Miyasato
I just want to say thank you again to our public health department, our Department of Emergency Management Services and everyone else who's in the EOC in the field. There's a lot Questions frustration I think anxiety in our community and they keep moving forward to protect us all. I just want to say thank you, and I know the board shares my gratitude to them all so thank you
yes Thank you can't be said enough that The work that is going on daily basis from all the staff their commitment The dedication, the professionalism, the resolve. The very long hours that you're putting in shows in the product that we're delivering to the public and we're really very, very grateful and want all their employees to know that we appreciate their work tremendously.
Supervisor Harmon? And if I might add to our CEO and our chair because this is a huge big
burden on both of you. And our county council as well everybody thank you. With that let's Supervisor Adams, I
want to thank some people too.
Please go right ahead
It's not usually what I do but I want to recognize that there's a whole bunch of people that are out there still buying meals at restaurants where they can pick up from and and we even I mean This probably won't be universally loved, but we can even do drive-by liquor pickup now. You can order a cocktail as long as you order food. That's pretty, that's a step towards Florida. I love it. So anyway everybody that's still making the wheels go around in our economy thank you very much because we need you to keep patronizing our businesses and hopefully those businesses don't call it quits too early.
Thank you for that.
Mr.
Chair?
Supervisor Lavenino
Yeah, I just want to put a little. There's so many industries that we need to think right now but I just want to tell you an example that's going on in my family is that got a son that works at the hospital when he's got two little kids at home and when he comes home at night now, he has to change out in the garage area shower Put on different clothes, immediately wash those.
And there's so many people making sacrifices like that right now that at least in the healthcare industry you're kind of prepared for that your chosen field. But the grocery workers, the truck drivers, all those guys. Everybody's really stepped up and I've noticed some change in our community. I feel that more people are connected. It's strange, the more we detach from each other, the more connected we tend to be right now so I'm seeing some positives in it.
And it's just an interesting time to be an American, that's for sure.
I appreciate the quote that's up on the PowerPoint presentation as the final word in today's presentation. Thank you all for being here and thank you for your work. We'll take a 10-minute break.
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you Thank you. Hello.
1:55 – 2:001 turns
Yeah. Yeah. you We'll reconvene the Board of Supervisors meeting and just to finish off the last item, can we get a motion? Supervisor Adam.
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To receive and file as presented.
Second. Motion's been made and seconded. Any discussion? Roll call please.
Chair Hart, members of the board. Does that also include the sequel that is included on this item as well? Of course. The recommendation A, B and C.
What would it be without CEQA? My goodness.
Thank you. Ms. Hartman? Aye. Mr. Adam? Aye. Mr. Lavinino?
Aye!
Mr. Williams?
Aye
Chair Hart? Aye Motion passes unanimous.
The next item is departmental item three will a clerk please read the item into the record
Chair Hart and members of the board, departmental item number three is from planning and development. It is a hearing to consider recommendations regarding the long range planning division fiscal year 2020-2023 work program. Ms. Plowman?
Good morning Mr. Chair, members of the board. As Ms. Alexander read into the record we're here today to present the Long Range Work Program for long range planning. This obviously has to be taken into context with the current circumstances that we're in, and the budgetary constraints that we may be facing. But we're prepared to make the presentation today and then talk about what the options are for the board with respect to the requests that are included in the board letter. So with that I'm going to have Mr. Clemon make the presentation.
Good morning Chair Hart, members of the board. For the record my name is Dan Clemon I am the Deputy Director of the Long Range Planning Division and I will be presenting the 2020-23 recommended work program to your board Very briefly, the presentation today is going to consist of just a recap of what we achieved in the current fiscal year. Followed by just a summary of the considerations that went into the development of the three-year work program and then finally what our recommended projects are with the caveat with what Ms. Plowman just provided to you.
So taking the recap of the current fiscal year, our goal for this year was to complete as many of the existing projects in the work program and begin the new ones as resources became available. Listed here on the slide are the projects that we completed within this fiscal year. You can see that we completed the first package of ordinance amendments and also of the cannabis land use ordinance amendments. And then also we prepared our annual general package of ordinance amendments And we also complete the hoop structures ordinance amendments project. And finally, we prepared a build out analysis which is it was requested by the county executive office in the public works department and that was requested in order to inform a an update analysis of the transportation improvement plan fee program.
So we also made substantial progress, but we're not entirely complete with the projects listed here on this slide. What I will say is that a lot of these projects will be mostly completed by the end of this fiscal year. There will be a small amount of remaining work for the next fiscal year depending on our progress for the remainder of this year. So you can see on there the projects which We also got the coastal development permits for the Santa Claus Lane streetscapes project approved by We are also very close to finalizing SoCalGas's proposed ordinance amendments and prepare for hearings on those ordinance amendments.
We also are working on updates to our GHGs, excuse me Greenhouse Gas Emissions Thresholds. When your board received the report regarding the emissions inventory that was conducted in 2017 and you saw the results of the ECAP, you learned that the ECAP was not achieving its objectives so we can no longer rely upon the ECAP for our CEQA analysis of projects with regard to climate change. So what we must develop while Update the cap our interim thresholds in our staff is already working on that with consultants from a sense he worked on that emissions inventory and we will have something to present here very soon.
We're also making good progress on the Orcutt community plan amendments. We are close to publishing the negative declaration for that project and will be gearing up for hearings towards the end of this fiscal year. And as your board knows from your vote on the A agenda this morning, we are very close to completing agricultural employee dwellings local coastal program amendments that We received the modifications from the Coastal Commission staff and we'll be presenting those to you next month. And after that, we will then return to the Coastal Commission provided that you approve of those modifications to get their final approval on the LCPA. And then finally, we're in the final stages of the Coastal Resiliency Project LCPA. We just received the comments from Coastal Commission staff about three weeks ago The deadline to complete this project is in May.
So we're currently in negotiations with Coastal Commission staff, we're still shooting at least as of now to schedule this for a Coastal Commission hearing in either April or May but we have to wait and see whether or not those hearings will in fact occur and then second how much progress we make with the Coastal Commission staff on those.
Supervisor Adam has a question
Is there any way we can get a price tag for, you know how much to complete these things so we could kind of maybe order them in the event that we wanted to pick and choose some low-hanging fruit and leave some of it back if it was kind of more of a larger project?
Sure. Chair Hart, Supervisor Adam, you could do that I think that would probably be best done in the context of the P&D budget but you can do a rough calculation based upon FTEs it's about direct costs are roughly $130,000 per FTE so if you do the math you can see roughly how much each one these projects will cost based on the FTEs presented in the board letter. But Ms. Mountain Plowman may have more to provide.
Mr. Chair, Supervisor Adams I think what we want to do is maybe get through the presentation and you can see sort of where we are with these things our current budget will pay for all of those items To be completed for the most part so We do have things to be we're asking the board to make choices on For next fiscal year but we can certainly give you more information about the cost of these things It's at some point in the in the near future
Supervisor Hartman,
excuse me. Do you have more?
Well, I wasn't exactly finished Yeah, and and maybe I could just take the temperature of the rest of the board and see if you get any Appetite for cutting some of this down And and you know leaving some cash back if it's and it may not be important I mean if we're talking 100 grand for the whole thing, you know what are we gonna do? You know that's budget dust but If you've got an item in there that's really expensive and then something that's really cheap because you're on like Orca Community Plan Union Valley Parkway thing that probably already done functionally.
It may take another 5,000 bucks or something and you know you want to get something done that's close and easy but maybe something else that's a larger item. You might want to think about suspending that. But maybe there's no appetite for that in which case roll roll on
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Supervisor Hartman and then supervisor Williams.
Thanks, so Let's see first I'll comment on supervisor Adams thought we already have substantial progress on these sometimes if you're working and then you just leave it then it takes a lot more investment later to get back up to speed so If there has been substantial progress and we're expecting that this will be done by the end of the fiscal year, my sense would be that we finish this out. My question just is, will all of these come back to the board?
The CEQA thresholds for example, do we have an opportunity to weigh in on these further?
Chair Hart, Supervisor Hartman. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions. The first one is most of these will come to the Santa Claus Lane streetscape and beach access project. The only components that might come back to your board just the funding for implementation of those projects, but there's no other approvals required for that when the planning Commission approved the coastal development permit. That was the authorization
Supervisor Williams.
Well, I want to voice my strong agreement with supervisor Hartman that we should not be delaying these projects. The majority of them have economic development aspects of them. Many of the ones that could be delayed were put forward as part of a package in our last budget. That balanced the needs in our different districts, so for example utility scale solar was put forward together with the ordinance amendments for the Orchid Community Plan, the Rodeo Drive and to me they're packaged. They're both partway in progress to do one and delay one when we've already I think it's fair to say that the fact that we put money towards both and we all voted together to do them. All would not be right. And I think just go down the list of the things that could be delayed.
The first thing on the staff report is Santa Claus Lane, which we've already spent a bunch The agriculture to your permitting which I guess I'd be OK with with delaying but probably other supervisors would not be and it's at its sat the entire time I've been here on the board and probably a lot longer. So this is a project that's been going for 5 years. The cannabis land use ordinance amendments kind of The first amendment speaks for itself farmstays that sat for 2 and a half years.
When we told the public oh, yeah, we're going to allow farmstays when we did the did the homestays ordinance and until these amendments are worked out. It's a de facto ban on farmstays even though Short-term rentals, coastal zone amendments. You know I don't have strong feeling on that but state housing bill you know it's kind of important and for me the biggest one on the list of ones that could be delayed is the utility grade solar ordinance amendments how many years are we going to allow solar to be illegal in the birthplace of the environmental movement?
That's been on the docket for most of the time that I've been a supervisor. It's one of the things clearly that the public cares about because the public is aghast when they discover that solar is illegal, unpermittable in our county when we talk about it so much and advocate for it so much and it is an economic development one. So I would just argue that An age when we are going to face significant economic problems for the community because of the virus outbreak and because of the shelter in place order that we need to pursue economic development. And long term planning is the biggest bottleneck to economic development in the county, and so we need to fix that bottleneck.
Supervisors I was going to ask if planning could continue their presentation Because when they get to the end, we'll give you certain choices that can prompt those discussions
Mr. Clement Thanks
Mr. Chair, one more comment just to address a question by Supervisor Adam is that I think the projects that were on the last page are probably maybe a few hundred thousand dollars, maybe two to finish up, not much. We could run those numbers but I think we can get that done pretty quickly and not at great expense.
Okay, Mr. Chair if I might just complete my thought here and I take Supervisor Hartman's point about efficiency and once you get going doing something you should definitely complete it that's always the most efficient way to do something. But you know, we heard about these things. Why would we need to address all these things in the budget hearings if they're going to be completed by the end of the fiscal year?
Mr. Chair, Supervisor Adam, we're just giving you a picture of what it is we're completing in this fiscal year so that because that affects what we plan for in the next fiscal year. So we're just giving you some background information right now.
Okay, so have have our estimates been tracked in the past and and are they have they been proven to be accurate?
Mr. Chair, Supervisor Adam, we have just did an analysis of the last five years and it varies. In some cases we've spent less in some cases we've spent more. It hasn't been at the bottom line has been pretty steady but it depends on the number of hearings that are it takes to get through the process and the number of public meetings it takes to get through the process and sometimes those things change midstream So we do have more information on that, but we work on tracking that to try and make sure that we come in on budget where we can.
We're going to have a robust debate discussion about this item, but we're on slide 6 of 23 I'd really like to have staff have a chance to make their full presentation without any more questions till the end Mr. Clements All
right, Chair Hart. Thank you. So now we'll move on to some of the challenges which prevented us from completing what we intended to complete within the current fiscal year and there's a few items that contributed to that. First off, there were a handful of items that were added to the work program. These are entirely new projects that weren't considered or integrated into the original work program and there weren't corresponding resources allocated such that we could add the work and not delay the other projects that were already in our existing work program So you can see those listed here, the four blue bullet points. We've been requested to do two packages of cannabis ordinance amendments within this fiscal year. The first one's completed.
We are currently going through the second package with the planning commission. The next hearing is actually tomorrow. I already mentioned that tip fee build out analysis that was added and also as many of you are aware state law changed with regard to accessory dwelling units or ADUs Which rendered our existing ordinance on 80 years, which we completed pursuant to the previous iteration of state law has now become null and void. So we have planners working on 2 things right now one was coming up with a number of interim procedures for what we do as we work on the ordinance amendments and then the second phase is actually drafting ordinance amendments consistent with state law.
And then finally we were also requested to prepare guidance document for implementation of the hoops ordinance amendments So in addition to entirely new projects being added to the work program, we also had additional tasks added to some of the projects that were included in the work program. So for example, the hoops ordinance amendments as well as the agricultural employee dwelling ordinance amendments both took roughly double the number of hearings that we had anticipated and budgeted for which caused a cascading delay effect on not only that project but the other projects that are in the work program.
We also assisted with the cannabis permitting activities which took away work from the work program items. And then finally we're feeling both the effects of 4 vacancies from the 2018 2019 fiscal year, which delayed the start of work that we intended to start this fiscal year and then we have we do have a vacancy that were trying to fill currently with human resources department. So all those have Contributed to slowing down of some of the projects in the work program, which caused the substantial progress but not complete completion of the items that we just reviewed in the previous slide.
So also when once again, we when there's work added to our program. Our budget doesn't really get affected what really occurs is that projects are already in the work program just get delayed. So when considering that additional work and was added I discussed a previous slide. We had to identify existing projects be placed on hold and you can see those here on slide 7 as you'll see in a moment. We are we have a plan to kickstart these projects and getting going here So what considerations go into the development work program for this particular work program as you read in the board letter we're changing from a one to a three year planning horizon for the work We're looking at a 3 year planning time frame. That's also important to you because as I'll get into in a minute, we are starting up our update or housing element and that needs So we also listen to obviously the request from your board, the planning commissions, the public interest group requests and we try to integrate those into the work program given the resources that are available.
And as I mentioned earlier, we want to keep those multi-year projects going there's that continued support so that we can complete them As Miss Plowman indicated, and obviously what goes into every consideration of the work program are the budgetary constraints. And then we also look at state mandates and other types of legal mandates that are placed on what we do and try to prioritize those as well. And then finally, as I explained earlier, what we're trying to do is focus on this county-wide projects.
Impacts on focus interest groups are small impacts to more broader updates because, for example, our general plan elements are pretty dated at this point and they need some updates. So based on those considerations, we developed the work program and it has three basic components. The first being our required services and operations. Second being the ongoing projects from the current fiscal year that will have carryover work to the next. And then finally recommended new projects for any capacity that's available.
So just taking the first getting back to question about estimates versus actuals. We do look at that in fact, we adjusted the budget or the estimated work effort for both required services and another item I'll get to in a second about 2 years ago. We started made that change because he found that the actual work effort ends up being about if you add up all of these services that the long-range planning division provides it as a mean roughly one and a half FT ease per year Any one of these services will vary from year to year, depending on the activities that are going on.
So once again overall it's about 1.5 worth of FTEs and worth a word. We also have our business operations. These are typical to any business, be it public or private and these are what I call your basic administrivia items and we did increase the amount of FTEs for the operations starting roughly two fiscal years ago and that was mainly due to changes in how we're coding our time and how specifically I was coding my time.
Not much to say here but roughly it does end up being about three FTEs worth of work every year. Now for the projects with remaining work from the next fiscal year. You can see on the screen here, the comprehensive planning community plan related projects in this really gives you an idea of the remaining work effort at least for the next fiscal year so some of these projects for example, the coastal resiliency project, the Hollister Avenue State Street streetscapes project or cut Community Plan Project and The S B 7.43 VMT sequent thresholds. They'll have a small amount of remaining work for the next fiscal year. It's between about a 10th and 3 tenths of an FTE.
The projects that are going to require more effort next year and following years are the circulation elements update. We're asking about seven-tenths of an FTE plus consultant work on that as well as the safety element update, which is about 9 tenths of an FTE with consultant work as well. The last thing I'll share about these projects for the ECAP amendments and GHG thresholds amendments, most of you are probably aware that the Community Services Department Sustainability Division is taking the lead on the update to the ECAP. We in P&D are playing a supportive role to them. We're going to be advising them particularly on the measures that related to CEQA analysis It's going to take about a half an F T.
We're going to start with our excuse me with regard to our ordinance amendments similar sort of story as as with the community plan and general plan amendments. Some of the projects have a small amount Our hope is to get consultants on board to help us with some of the tasks related to the farmstays ordinance amendments and short term rentals within this fiscal year because we do have consultant funds available that we could use. Depending on how much work we get done, that will have remaining work for the next fiscal year.
A couple other highlights for the cannabis land use ordinance amendments. Right now, we're estimating about 7 tenths of an FTE but please keep in mind that we don't know where the planning commission is going to land on some of their specific recommendations. There's a hearing tomorrow depending on where they land that could expand or shrink the estimated work effort so we'll see about that.
And the last thing I'll say about this slide, what you really can see here is the amount of effort now that will be spent on state housing bill implementation. We're estimating about one and a half FTEs next year. That's both to try to address the 17 state housing and density bonus laws that have been passed within the last three legislative sessions plus the initiation of the housing element update in the work on Reno with SB CAG.
So when you add up all of the estimated work, it comes out to about five FTEs total. So consistent with past work programs what we are recommending be prioritized is the completion of the existing projects and then as we complete those we would like to start integrating new projects into our work program. We've done so here by identifying the general plan elements that we believe should be updated in the near future.
And just very quickly, why were the reasons were recommending these are as follows with regard to There are sections of the energy element that deal with things like VMTs and GHG emissions. And so, with our work on the circulation element update along with our work on the ECAP we're anticipating that there will be needed corresponding amendments to the energy element.
And taking the second item, the government code says now that when we amend two or more general plan elements concurrently, we must adopt an environmental justice element. So we're anticipating that will in fact occur with some of these projects and therefore we're anticipating the work effort associated with developing an environmental justice element. I've already mentioned the housing element update that must be completed in 2023.
And then as a part of the update to the housing elements, their safety element and the circulation element we're anticipating at least surgical amendments to the land use elements to make sure that it does actualize or achieves the goals and objectives stated in those other And then finally, what we want to do is try to the degree possible consolidate these updates. There's a lot of duplication in our codes and policies. We hear that from not only the planners but professionals, the public, and it can be very confusing trying to navigate these rules. So as we go through these updates, we're going to be trying to identify those areas where we can shrink down the repetition and get more to the point and try to make these documents much more manageable and user friendly.
So as you read in the board letter, this work program is based upon an estimated amount of work that would take approximately 13 FTEs. We are currently staffed at 11 FTEs and we use consultant services and we want to continue that into the next fiscal year. If the expansion of 2 additional fees is not granted and we're going to be looking at projects to delay have been discussed today.
We recommend that you focus on those projects that you avoid delaying those projects which involve mandated work that is there either a state or legal mandate that's driving the need for them. Also avoid grant funded work such that we do not compromise the grant funding for those projects. And then finally, we want to focus on the projects that still have much more work to do and we would like to complete the projects are mostly complete at this point in time.
So in the board letter we gave you a few options. Of course, this is kind of like a buffet of options here. You could pick out which projects you believe are good candidates to be delayed if you're shooting to maintain current staffing levels, you'd want to reduce what we're proposing by about 2 FTE. So he gave you a couple options here to consider and then finally you could come up with a third option if it's more desirable for you. We're going to talk a little bit about the housing related items. But as you can see, just really quickly at the 2 options. The big difference between the 2 of them is mainly an option one. It includes ag tear permitting ordinance amendments and then in the option to in lieu
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Just to add one thing, I think this list follows the recommendations that Mr. Clemon outlined so these are items that are not currently underway or they're not grant funded or they're not mandated by the state of the federal government
Okay, I made a similar presentation to this one to the Planning Commission about a month ago and the Planning Commission in general supported staff's recommendations. But since that time as you're probably aware the Planning Commission has been considering the cannabis ordinance amendments that you requested them to consider and provide recommendations to your board regarding And as part of the last hearing after much discussion about the various types of amendments they're considering and I should clarify that they have not come to a firm vote. There has been no resolution adopter anything like that. That's got your board, but what they did The last year was that they do want to prioritize amendments related to odor control.
To the point where they believe that that should be prioritized and processed separately from the other types of amendments there considering. As I stated earlier in the presentation, we don't know where the Planning Commission is going to land with regard to those other amendments. So I can't give you a precise cost estimate or scope of work until I see that. We are currently estimating about 7 tenths of an FTE worth of work in the next fiscal year. A back-of-the-envelope calculation about if we were to pull out just the odor control related cannabis ordinance amendments and assuming that these would also be imposed for example within the coastal zone It adds about a half of an FTE worth of labor because they're just steps that you cannot, that you have to duplicate if you pull something out.
So there's no real time or cost savings with those. So it would add additional tasks and that is one request that I think would benefit the Planning Commission's deliberations tomorrow at their hearing where we're hoping they're gonna wrap up Their considerations of the amendments and give us the direction about what they believe we should be doing with regard to cannabis ordinance amendments based upon your board's direction.
Thank
you. Mister chairman to the board. I think what we would like clear direction as to whether or not the board is supportive of separating out the odor related ordinance amendment from the other package that the Planning Commission is developing so
We had scheduled a presentation to the Montecito Planning Commission on March 18th, but it was canceled due to the COVID response. So I attended the Agriculture Advisory Committee meeting this month, at which the AAC considered the work program and they generally provided comments whereby they stated that your board should prioritize various cannabis ordinance amendments.
And then you received as part of your information for today's hearing, the comments from We Watch in Environmental Defense Center. I won't go over those but if you have any questions about those, I'll be more than happy to address that. The next steps will be the budget workshops. P&D is currently scheduled to make the presentation on April 13th, and then that will be followed by the budget adoption workshops in June at which the final decisions on the work program priorities will be made with the budgeting decisions that your board will make in June.
So I'm going to summarize the recommended actions from the board letter, but effectively they are to receive the report that I just provided to you. Allocate the funding either for the full 13 FTEs or to maintain current staffing levels to complete the work for the projects and existing work program and as those are completed move on to the new projects that we're recommending.
Third, we are recommending that you provide direction to the county executive office regarding any increase in funding for the authorized positions. And then finally find that this presentation discussion amongst your board today is not a project pursuant to CEQA and CEQA guidelines section 15378B5. That said I'd be more than happy to answer any other questions you might have. Thank you very much Mr. Clement, appreciate that Ms. Plowman as well. Did you have any
concluding remarks?
Mister chairman of the board. I just wanted to say again that we understand that this is all being viewed in the context of the covid crisis and we understand that there's impacts to the county's budget and serious impact so there's a range of options that that the board can consider today on Mister frapp well as here you can talk I think we have a range of things you can
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And then perhaps identify some middle ground. So at one end of the spectrum really is to approve the plan that incorporates just the current FTE. In other words, in your board letter they request the dollar value of the two additional FTEs about $260,000. And that doesn't consider the half FTE that the Planning Commission is recommending with respect to the other worker in cannabis.
So, that's about $260,000. On one end of the spectrum is given our current situation hold current staffing. The other end, of course, is to approve up to I suppose the 2.5 FTE. So those are your bookends for that. With respect to middle ground And I would recommend considering is not only the number of FTEs that you might consider, but also the timing of that. You know, I think what we don't know is the full impact of COVID both in current year and next fiscal year.
I gave you a little flavor of current fiscal year and how that will continue to evolve The long term, depending on how long this event lasts has much more impact. So I guess my suggestion is that if when you're looking at this, if there's some desire your board wanted to augment above current funding the current FTE authorized positions that we do that in a phased approach that may mean consideration for January 21.
That gives us more time to really know with greater certainty the impact, long-term impact of the COVID pandemic on your finances.
Mr. Chair? Yes, Supervisor Williams. What of the 2.5 could be substituted with consulting contracts I know generally consulting contracts are more expensive, but obviously if we are worried about staffing considerations or if we're worried about having to reduce staffing, a consultant contract is a one-time expense instead of an ongoing expense. So how much of that 2.5 could be converted into a consultant contract?
Mr. Chair, Supervisor Williams, hold on a second. Dan if you could bring up the list of the table that we provided. So yeah, that's, Supervisor Williams can you confirm that's the list of projects you were referring to?
The two or the 2.2 or the 2.5 that you would need to do additionally, that you would need to do to complete all of the projects on your
program. You're asking how much of that could be converted to consultant dollars which would be one time dollars? That's right. Well, I think we could convert a portion of the agricultural tiered permitting. We already have funding for the short term rentals is that correct Dan? And we have funding for the utility grade solar consultant dollars for that. So these FTEs are the amount of staff that we need to actually administer the contract and move the project forward so Not a lot could be converted to consultant dollars at this point in time.
And out of this list, and with respect to zoning ordinance amendments that's really something that's internal to the department I don't think that's advisable to try and farm that out because it will move along a lot more efficiently with our staff managing that process and drafting those changes. Because of our knowledge of the code and the changes that need to be made so I don't see a lot of options here to provide one-time funding to make them move more quickly.
Understood. Supervisor Hartman?
Thank you. I have two things, the first is on slide 7 where you talk about the Farmstay Ordinance Amendments. I thought we did provide consultant dollars and I know there's probably a good narrative about why but could I hear it so that I can explain to people?
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Yeah, Supervisor Hartman through the chair. So a few things. So yes those were there was one time funding allocated for consultant services to do that work. A couple of things. One is that we just now got contracts executed very recently I should say. We just execute contracts with consultants to possibly do that work and I say possibly because for the remainder of the fiscal year we have to figure out Of those remaining projects that have consultant funds, which ones are we going to prioritize? And as I mentioned earlier, we do believe that farm stays and short term rentals.
Should be prioritized and we could start some of that work this year. And it's also a matter of, you also need the staff to manage the consultants on these projects. We didn't have that staff available to cover the time to kickstart the contracts and go through all the preparation that's needed to execute the contracts again working on that. So we're going to be looking at that as well. Also, what's going on too is that it seems as if a desire to expand the scope of work for this project include more than just agri tourism. So we've been following that particularly the efforts by commissioner Park and some of the threats he's sponsored.
So are taking a look at that That could be getting further direction from you. You can provide that direction now, you can provide it as part of the budget hearings but we would like to hear from you with regard to what you believe that should be if it still should be just farm stays which is something much narrower or something bigger so that's all
Mr. Chair, Supervisor Hartman and I think part of your question was why haven't we initiated work on that? And that is because of the additional work that was added to our work program so the two ordinance amendments for cannabis The additional work that we did on berry hoops and the additional work that we had to do on state law For the new housing bills have been coming out So there's just a number of things That came mid-cycle in the work program that resulted in delays of getting some of these other things initiated.
So thank you for that. I guess I want to go back to what Mr. Frabwell set out for us, that the conservative option would be just to hold current staffing. The more optimistic option would be to go with your proposal and then the middle ground would be to wait till January not our budget discussions but until January
Supervisor Hartman through the chair, let me see if I can elaborate. What a possibility is recognizing that we will continue to have better information as we move forward. That essentially during hearings we could as an option should your board so desire to fund those two FDEs starting midpoint in the year. And we would have time as a checkpoint to make sure that revenues were coming in on track. And if they were, then authorize the filling of those positions.
So that would be a middle ground for you. The advantage is that we'll have a lot more information to know what we're going to be able to afford. It also could be that we manage the start of some of the new projects that Long Range Plan is working on until that point. They have a fair amount of work, I think as Dan presented today, that is in progress so that continues allow all those things to continue to progress And perhaps I don't want to put words in the department's mouth about, perhaps there is a way to trigger those new projects should those funding be available. Should those positions be filled effective midpoint of the year? Does that help?
Yes, thank you. So that would be a decision we could make today or in the budget discussions for myself I don't know how bad it's going to be and I feel like I need to reserve judgment until I have more information. I tend to be economically conservative I also realize that long-range planning is a big part of our economic development options and it really is the bottleneck in how we can better fund it.
I like the three year planning, but how we do this over the long run in a more stable budget situation? I strongly feel like we need to consider this in light of the larger budget priorities and budget information that we'll have about the impacts.
Supervisor Adam and then supervisor Williams.
Well, I know we have public comment to go and there's no motion on the floor but I Think I'm with mr. For up well We should just kind of maintain status quo until we figure out what's going on And coincidentally will have much more information as we go into budget and It could be a much better time to do something than right now Supervisor Williams.
Well, I think this exercise is mathematically challenged and we are using fiscal arguments to destroy the potential of revenue that far outweighs $260,000 worth of expense. The farmstay ordinance alone Would produce more much more than that. And so, I think that it is If To get through hard economic times, government has to take actions of economic development and has to take fiscally courageous actions not just fiscally conservative actions in order to make sure that we as a society can move through it.
And if we're not only We're not going to be able to do that. That's possible from farmstay or possible from the Santa Claus Lane improvements or Possible from the utility scale solar ordinance amendments There's some of those things on this list that I could I could wait on but I mean, I particularly think that This board has made commitments and that's why we funded it to begin on the utility scale solar ordinance. And we voted for it as part of a package that included the Rodeo Drive amendments and some other things, and I changed my position on the Rodeo Drive because we were doing it together as one package of economic development And I believe Supervisor Hartman did as well.
I just think it blows up something that we decided to do together two years ago, to take a piece of what we decided to put forward together and derail it.
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You know, I'm tempted to go to public comment. It seems like we're far past- Well,
we're having a discussion here so we might as well just keep going because- All right, Supervisor Adam. I don't know why we're talking about Rodeo Drive. First of all it's like a one inch line on the map. It's not that hard. It should have been done by now. I don't what the hell we're still talking about this for frankly. And you know, if we were gonna... stand aside and do some real change in the way that we permit things and get economic activity going, I'd be right with you. But if we're gonna do more vexatious normal and customary then I'm out. And I think that's exactly what we're doing here. We're not changing anything fundamentally to make it easier for people to do things. We're just going to permit things after we get all the places where people can get caught on the axle as it turns and then they get flipped around until they get tired of it, and they let go so you know this is kind of more of the same instead of the fundamental change that I've been looking for for the last eight years.
Supervisor Lavinino, do you have any questions for staff?
I'm going to wait for public comment and then I've got some comments myself.
Okay, thank you. Let's go to public comment now.
Chair Hart, members of the board we have five requests to speak on this item. We have three emails to be read into the record and then we have two callers. We're going to begin with Joe Armaderez to be followed by Joe Nahama. Good morning members of the board. The Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association SVCTA welcomes this opportunity opportunity to address your board during this unprecedented time in the history of our nation and country. While we recognize there are significantly more pressing and timely issues that your board is dealing with today, still we feel compelled to add our group's voice to the issue of planning and development's long-range planning divisions work program.
With respect to the Environmental Defense Center's EDC letter to Lisa Plowman, Director of P&D dated March 20th, SBCTA joins the EDC in their acknowledgment That Santa Barbara County's oil and gas industry should be a major part of the Long Range Planning Division's focus. Indeed, we welcome the opportunity to debate the particulars of the EDC's recommendations and we endorse the need as well as the importance of concentrating significant staff resources on how Santa Barbara County can make our local energy industry not only a key player in driving our economic forward but also a key player in improving the overall quality of life for Santa Barbara County families.
Based on the industry's operational safety record over these past many years, there should be little debate over the fact that Santa Barbara County's oil and gas sector is committed to running their operations safely and responsibly. In other words, ethically. And while there are clearly some areas where the industry believes county rules and regulations We believe this is especially important in the North County where according to nearly every economic metric.
Our families in the North County are lagging behind families in the South County. SBCTA welcomes the county's long-range planning division to join this vital and urgent discussion, in hopes that an economic strategy can finally be developed to not only create new high paying jobs for our families who need them most but also just to generate higher levels of discretionary revenues for the county to fund so many of our essential programs and services including public safety, public works and public health. Sincerely Joe Armaderez, Executive Director of SBCTA We will now go to Joe Nahama to be followed by Chad Walker.
Dear supervisors, thank you for taking my email to read into the record in response to the March 20th 2020 letter from the EDC to the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors excuse me. The state of California currently mandates that onshore oil and gas operates retain liability upon a transfer of assets. The State of California approved AB 1057 to ensure that operators comply with financial obligations. Climate change is a global issue. Does Santa Barbara County want to constrict innovative GHG solutions by utilizing only local mitigation and not global innovation? Thank you for your time, Joe Nahama, President of Petro Rock LLC.
We will now go to Chad Walker and then we will go to Renee O'Neill on the phone. Dear Board of Supervisors, thank you for allowing me to submit my testimony into the record. Requiring a company to pay for local GHG mitigation programs is not cost effective and essentially diminishes the importance of addressing GHG on a global scale. If the goal of local GHG mitigation is to improve community and public health benefits, allow these industries that are willing to participate in GHG mitigation to allocate funds towards established innovative cost-effective projects.
With quantifiable and verifiable emissions mitigations. All requested measures in the March 20, 2020 letter from the EDC to the Board of Supervisors are duplicative and do not have a rational basis. Thank you Chad Walker, Environmental Manager of Vaquero Energy. And now we will go to Renee O'Neill on the phone to be followed by Mark Shatillo.
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Thank you. First, I want to thank the county for again for providing the opportunity to attend these meetings online takes a little getting used to but I'm working through those glitches. Second, I want to let Dad does know that his adorable honorary board person participant is a welcome distraction and incredibly well behaved. I'm very impressed with her last but most important in the reason I'm commenting is I would like to encourage the county to move forward with progress on the cannabis ordinances and we encourage the board to follow Staff's recommendations, the Planning Commission and their planning and development staff. Specifically we ask that the board discontinue setting precedents for legal non-conforming operations as evidenced on their ruling for the Busy Bee Appeal a week or so ago.
And with that said I would just like to Thank everyone in the county for doing the outstanding job they're doing. The medical providers are public health people and CDC, and our supervisors and Supervisor Labanino for your amazing work in Santa Maria on getting shelters in place and people that are willing and able to volunteer for those shelters. Thank you very much.
Bye.
And we will now go to Mark Shatillo on the phone.
Good morning, members of the board. Mark Shutillo want to also join our appreciation for the accommodation to allow public testimony to the proceedings here today on the work plan you have many important projects before you and I certainly understand and appreciate the uncertainties associated with the COVID virus issues. I'm going to focus on cannabis there's a lot of important projects that I think The county should continue to proceed with it is a long range planning process and I think it's important that we keep our eye on the ball in that way.
But looking specifically at cannabis, as you know, I've been engaged at the Planning Commission and the series of hearings that we've had over the last few months tomorrow we're hoping to see final action by the board or by the commission And a specific focus on a short-term solution, administrative change in procedure that will obviate the need for the bifurcation that's referenced in the staff report. That involves worrisome increase in the amount of resources required to address the cannabis ordinance issues. So we do very much support the 710th's of an FTE on the substantive revisions and agree with the AAC that that should be held as a high priority, and should not be allowed to be further delayed.
I do find agreement with Supervisor Williams' point that there are economic benefits to many other projects. While they may not be the wholesale changes that some are looking for, that's the kind of sustainable economic growth and environmental Protection that our community is founded on and I think that those projects do offer economic benefits. It should be taken into consideration as you prioritize and try to allocate scarce resources going ahead.
In closing, we're talking about advanced planning and that's just critical to keeping our county's progress forward both economically and environmentally so we appreciate your stewardship on these issues and trust that you folks will Ensure that the critical environmental and land use planning issues will continue to see a priority as we go forward. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr still.
And chair heart members of the board. We did have one additional request to speak and that is Linda crop and we will call her now. Hi. This
2:58 – 3:045 turns
is Linda Kropp, Chief Counsel of the Environmental Defense Center and we submitted a written letter last week Some testimony as well, which I will read. And we also understand that we're looking at this in the lens of COVID-19. But as Supervisor Williams said some of the projects will actually increase revenue to the county and local businesses and some of our suggestions will also alleviate risks to the county and avoid costs down the road. That would be helpful as well.
With that in mind, we support several of the projects identified in the work plan including updating the Energy and Climate Action Plan, developing a utility-grade solar ordinance, updating the conservation element and developing an environmental justice element. Additionally, we suggest two projects that would involve some P&D time but also county council time to address some issues that have faced the county and actually increased costs for the county with respect to oil and gas development. So one idea would be to ensure that oil and gas operators retain liability upon a transfer of assets, and we're not talking about the downfall state mandated liability requirements but the land use liabilities at the facilities that are constructed on land And that would actually save the taxpayers money in the long run for not having to ensure the adequate remediation and decommissioning of those assets.
And related to that, we think the county should expand its existing ordinance that requires approval when there's a change of owner or operator. Right now, the ordinance only applies to onshore facilities that primarily serve offshore oil and gas development, and that should apply onshore as well. And again, that will save taxpayers money in the long run if facilities are abandoned.
And then finally we request that the county updated CEQA environmental thresholds and guidelines to require local litigation for GHG emissions. This is done in San Diego County. It would definitely provide a boost to the economy as well by providing local jobs and expenditures. So thank you for all you're doing during this challenging time and happy to work with the county on any of these efforts.
Thank you, Ms. Krupp. Is that our last public comment?
Chair Hart, members of the board, that was our final speaker.
Thank you. Matters to the board.
Mr. Chair. Supervisor Lavanino. Thank you. This is always just a really difficult exercise for me because everything's important and then when you try to figure out how many FTEs, it's just difficult to get everybody's priorities taken care of. What would be really helpful for It's going to be difficult to do it today, obviously. But what I'd like to see is okay which ones does staff think that they could handle?
Which ones would make the most sense to send outside a timeline for each of those so we say okay if we went outside it would cost x but we have it complete by y because some of these you know I don't really want to be spending any money right now either But if we don't, we're really hamstringing ourselves into the future. And so I'd like to get all of these things done.
Some of these have been languishing since I've been here and others are really Necessary to create the atmosphere of revenue generation. Most importantly, thinking about farm stays and I'd also like to see short term rentals come back on here as a possibility. But I'm willing to spend what needs to be spent to free up space Inside the long range planning department, if that's increased employees.
Or if it's what I think a combination of figuring out what we could do inside. And also what we can do outside. But I kind of need to see a spreadsheet of where our staff thinks items that they feel best about, which projects they could send out and when they would get done with the dollar value next to that? That would be helpful to me but I also think, of course from what I'm hearing from the planning commission and from constituents and from AAC is that the cannabis ordinance needs to be prioritized. I agree with that. My priority would be the cannabis ordinance, farm stays, STRs those things that create paths to revenue. I know there's going to be pressure to not spend anything but at some point You have to step over the penny to pick up the dollar, so I think we really need to be prudent.
But we also shouldn't just be hoarding is not a good thing and we gotta spend a little bit to make some, so. I'm open to hearing what other board members are prioritizing but one for me, I just think I need a better visual of what we can do accomplish in-house and by when can it be accomplished as well as What can we do outside and when that can be done?
3:05 – 3:117 turns
Thank You supervisor Lavinia Supervisor Adam.
Well, you know The the rodeo drive Was approved in the 1819 budget, which is the only budget I ever voted yes on. In my tenure here. You got one more chance by the way. I just feel like Charlie Brown with Lucy pulling the football up you know how could we have approved that project? You know and it's kind of a smallish project too it's not like it's a major deal right We do bigger stuff than that, right?
Okay. So you know I just don't and a lot of this stuff's been on the books for a long time. I mean we got to tighten this up or something. I don't know what the answer is. I just don't know what the answer is. I'm kind of frustrated and I'm out of ideas. So, you know I'm just. I'm down to. You know if we've got to discuss this stuff over and over and over again.
Well, let me hear here we are it's like freaking Groundhog Day. So. I guess the only thing I can do is maintain status quo.
Chair Hart and supervisors. I don't know if this helps or not, but a couple of things one is I think we have the staff have not been doing as good enough job when things come up to inform you that this will change the long-range planning division program We had the study by KPMG That's almost finalized for P&D in the middle of all this COVID and a couple of recommendations they made regarding the long-range planning division program Is that we come back to the board? Are we tell the board Before you do something, we're going to let you know this is going to cost more FTE and time. And this is gonna change the program. What we've been doing just bring it to now after you believe you've already made commitments or are already ongoing and that's in the situation we are in.
As you know no department comes to you and says now I'm at a deficit of two point FTE. After you've given me direction, right? It's most apartments. I'm coming for an enhancement of new and so that's one issue they said but it's also difficult for planning to always Project that because it depends on the number of hearings at the Planning Commission the Republic meetings, etc And Supervisor Adam just brought up the radio drive. And you're right, that was two years ago. But in that two years I was thinking we had the cannabis ordinance. And so it was how many hearings, how much workload put on the long range planning staff as well as the planning staff? So these things coming up before we were in the situation we are, I talked to the Planning Director and I said, I support getting two more FTE because there's all these things that have to get done.
In addition to the state mandates that are placed on planning. We're in a different situation. I think everyone wants more information as Supervisor Lavanino said, I think Director Plowman said the things are showing that FTEs they needed for staff not consultants there is consultant money that had been given to them for various projects but for staff but I think it's a worthwhile exercise to say when can they be done etc what's the timeline And give you more complete information. We can do that in April, we can do that in June but my recommendation is for us to bring back more information to you so you have a full picture and as Supervisor Williams said there are things on here that are going to be investments into the future that we would want to start on or continue.
It's important for us to hear your discussion today, but I think that we would like to come back with more information. I don't know if we're going to have better information in April, but we should have better information by June.
Thank you, Supervisor Williams and then Supervisor Hartman.
Well, I feel like the direction that Supervisor Lavinio and CEO Miyasato seem to be pointing in is a good direction for us. But I want to pause to express my empathy and also my kindred feelings towards Supervisor Adams' frustration. It feels like the list doesn't change much here and even though we have asked in the last couple years kept on asking okay what resources are necessary to get the job done. And so I don't think it's that the department isn't working, the department is obviously working but there is mission creep both seem to come from us but even more so from other folks It's this weird, we have a weird situation where our sovereignty is continuously derailed by. I mean it seems like the planning commission can add things to this list but we have a hard time adding things to this list right?
And that seems like a weird way of doing business so you know I would just Advocate that we determine the price tag to complete this scope of work, but ask the CEO and the budget director to work with the department on really whether some of this can be performed by consultants. I just don't believe that none of this can be done by consulting contracts. And I think that would meet some of our CEO staff interests and concerns about ongoing staffing costs.
But at the same time meet the board's concern about getting the job done. So that's what I would just advocate and whether we do that as a motion or do that as a general direction to both parse out these costs but look at how to do this, as much of this work plan with One-time revenue as opposed to ongoing revenue, which is more of the fiscal concern of our budget director and
CEO. Supervisor Hartman then supervisor Adam
Let's see so my first question is that this work plan isn't really any new projects It's just how we prioritize what we've already put on your list. Is that correct? I
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Mr. Chair, Supervisor Hartman, for year one there are new projects in years two and three.
And today or before us is year one? Is that correct? That's correct. Okay. So when would we see the three-year program? How do you envision that?
So, Mr. Chair, Supervisor Hartman, we've attached the three-year plan that identifies what we're looking at in the future two years but each year as we come to that year we'll be coming back to say okay this is what we're going to be working on. Okay, that's the
process. Well, let's see. I think Supervisor Lavinino does raise a good point about how you tee this up. I almost feel like I need to be able to vote on priorities rather than we all just say what they are maybe like we do in the final budget stage that we can actually set out what our priorities are and trade those off. I strongly agree with Supervisor Williams that this is the bottleneck and this is where a lot of our creativity comes in the county.
We need to see this in the context of the budget as a whole. And I'm not prepared to, I just think it would look terrible if we say we're adding new people and we don't really understand yet what the bigger picture is. So I'm very eager to invest in revenue generating opportunities for the future but again, I just don't know what the tradeoffs are at this point so In April workshops or if it came back in June where we had a better sense, I would feel more comfortable. If it did come back with more information especially what we could farm out but also then what that adds to our administrative load as we see with the farm stay just giving money for consultant didn't work.
I also wanted to say something just about the Planning Commission. I think we did give them a job to do and we also, a lot of the public focus has been on them and they've borne the brunt of it so I don't really view them as you know Derailing our plan. I think they are doing heroic service trying to sort through some of these things On the ground in a way that we were unable to fully appreciate in the abstract so Wanted to add that? I'm also, I guess I'll end with this is that I am very interested in some of the things that the EDC raised in their letter, and I'm not sure how much is county council and how much would be planning. So if that could come back to us, I would be interested in knowing what it takes to look at how a seller retains liability as we see As many predict in the future, we're going to be making a sharp transition to renewable energy.
And what that means, we've already seen a huge drop in oil prices and if companies are declaring bankruptcy, what does that mean for the public treasury? So I think whatever we can do to protect ourselves would be important and I think Mr. Gazzone you look like you might want to add something
Chair, just to, and Supervisors, as you're considering where to go with this. I'd offer that our county history has been when you receive something from the Planning Commission, you're receiving a very complete kit of drafted ordinance ready-to-go and then you make revisions which might be substantial course changes on that. So as you're considering what work plan items to push forward and what staffing is appropriate? I offer that the Minimum provided by planning and zoning law by the state planning and zoning laws that the Planning Commission considers matters and provides you with a written recommendation Which can be fairly lite light in terms of what they're recommending versus going through the FTE and Planning Commission time to draft an ordinance and have you change course on that ordinance.
So if I think there is some potential savings in the process along the way that would allow you to not have to choose between what do you want to do and how many people do you need, but what process lightening might allow you to move a little quicker with that with the same number of people.
And that brings me to my final question. In the review of the department are there cost savings that might be significant in terms of process and how we handle long range in particular?
Well one of the things they do, I'm looking at one of the draft recommendations was just having a better set of complexity categorizations and having some kind of thresholds that working with planning my office in your board about how much you expect the staff to do public engagement and different types of levels of meetings etc. Because that's, as Supervisor Williams said, we have scope creep a lot. And so it's if we say this is our expectation and everyone knows that then we can get our work done within that box.
Supervisor Adam I think you're about ready to get the close to final word
You know, I just want to make the observation and in response to Supervisor Williams That that at least the PC is our neighbors and they're part of the sausage making you know Meilu, you know, they're there. They're in in the deal and and their I view it as a much more legitimate part. The part that drives me nuts is the Coastal Commission. How much have we spent and how much mission creep did we get from the Coastal Commission's interference in many of our ordinances that we've passed here? And, I mean, I can't imagine how many pages I've seen that have come out Planning in response to all this stuff and it just generates just scads and scads of work all the time, and then it invariably has something in it that Detracts from the business environment makes it more difficult to do things.
So There's there's your problem
Well, thank you, I think there's a conversation excuse me supervisor Labadino I
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I didn't know if you had any comments or if you're ready for a motion?
I actually do have a couple of comments. I think this has been a really helpful discussion. I think we've got to a consensus that we need a little bit more information. It's a really difficult time to be committing two additional staff but as everyone has said very convincingly these are things we need to get to. So having some of the tools that Ms. Miyasato talked about and Mr. Gazzone mentioned maybe a little tightening of the process tomorrow, the Planning Commission is going to reconsider the cannabis issue and maybe there's different direction that comes from that too. But there are a lot of moving parts and keeping progress going on these long range planning items is really important.
And we have a lot of different ways to do that I think we're gonna find the right way so Supervisor Lavinino
Thank you Mr. Chair, well I think CEO Miyasato made a good point that we can do these things but we probably should also have the context of the budget and even though it's hard to say April when April is ten days away so I'd like to see something coming back as soon as possible but as part of the June budget Personally, I would like to see what I had stated is what's the timeline on each one of these? How long is it going to take?
Who's better to deal with that staff or outside and what the total cost would be. And then I think I agree with Supervisor Hartman. I think at that point we all kind of just need to raise our hands and say which priority gets done first. And move along at that point. So I don't know how to really craft a motion out of that, but that's kind of where I'm at. So if somebody wants to handle that on your end it's probably going to be a little cleaner.
Mr Chair?
Yes Ms Plowman?
Before you make a motion I have just a question. I want to make sure I understand which projects you're asking us to bring back. Is it the projects that were in our list? Can you bring that back up Dan? So it's page four of the board letter, but the list of projects there. The ones that we are suggesting have flexibility in being delayed. I presume that's the list you would like us to bring back with some analysis about consultant
work? I don't think we should limit it to that because there may be some other things that we can't delay that we could pay for with a consultant as opposed to staffing.
I think staff has said pretty clearly that they think they have the consultant resources, but that the constraining limitation is the staff resources to manage the consultants. Maybe I'm wrong and missed that, but I thought that they said that.
So nothing on the current work plan can be handled with consultants?
I think there are consultants that are working on the current work plan, but there's no additional consultant services that can replace the staff services that have to be done administer the consultant services.
Mister chair, I'm happy to expand our list and explain where we have consultants on them. And where we could use them so I don't think that's a problem if that gives the board a fuller picture of exactly what we're doing. So I hearing that we would bring back a spreadsheet and that we would have a discussion in June at some point we're going to have to have a discussion also about whether or not were bifurcating the odor ordinance amendments So I think that's a question that can we And I just wanted to say one other thing is, I realize at the end of the year when all of this work has happened but things have been delayed and it's hard to remember perhaps the additional work that's been assigned to the department.
We are doing the best we can to move things forward as quickly as possible, but in light of what KPMG acknowledged and it's something we've known for a long time. I think we will be taking a different approach throughout the year where when things happen where new projects get inserted into We will come back to the board and explain to them the impact that's going to have on the total program So they there's an understanding at that moment in time what it means for the other projects. They're in the queue That are a priority for the board, so it's just so you're Better informed as you're making the decisions
if we're gonna add I If we're going to add things to your workload, we have to take things off your workload because there's only so much capacity in the system. And that is a very adult point. I appreciate
that. That's an ironic choice of words. I still need to hear that there is nothing on the current work plan. I understand that we have consultants, but you're saying there's not a single thing on the current work plan that could be substituted with consultants?
Mr. Chair, Supervisor Williams, I was referring to the list that is here.
Yeah, and what I'm referring to is all of the projects because if we could use consultants on one of the things that cannot be delayed then we could use our current staffing on some of these projects.
Mr. Chair, Supervisor Williams, I understand that request and we're willing to expand our list.
Thank you. That additional information will help and give people confidence that every stone has been turned and we are doing everything we can So with that, would somebody like to make a motion? Supervisor Hartman.
Oh I just wanted to echo again what Mr. Gazzone said about process improvements and I think that's extremely significant and I do think we can find some savings there and I'd like to know more how that might work. So what do we need?
Well we need a I don't know that we're going to do B and We have been giving C And could do D.
I believe you're just receiving and filing the report at this time Who wants to make that motion
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I'll make a motion to receive and file the report and the sequel.
Thank you, Supervisor Adam. A and D. Is there a second for the motion? Second. Motion's been made and seconded. Any discussion? Roll call vote please.
Ms. Hartman? Aye. Mr. Adams? Aye. Mr Lavinino?
Aye
Mr Williams?
Aye
Chair Hart?
Aye
Motion passes unanimous
Next item is department item number four will the clerk please read the item into the record
Chair Hart, members of the board. Departmental item number four is sponsored by Supervisor Williams and Supervisor Hart. It is a hearing to consider recommendations regarding an urgency ordinance to temporarily prohibit evictions. And there is a forfeit vote required on this item.
I believe Ms. Valencia Sherrod is ready to make the presentation or getting ready to make the presentation? Whenever you're ready, Lisa. Waiting for the PowerPoint? Okay. All right. We'll wait Thank you. Whenever you're ready. Is that microphone on? I'm not sure. There we go.
Hello. All right, Chair Hart, members of the board, thank you for hearing this item today. We're reviewing the urgency ordinance to temporarily prohibit evictions And so first, why does Santa Barbara County need to prevent evictions at this time? As we've heard today, we don't need to go over more detail. But basically first for public health and safety concerns, for much needed economic relief, to prevent homelessness and to comply with the governor's executive stay-at-home order of March 19th 2020.
So this ordinance protects residential and commercial renters in unincorporated areas from being evicted during the local health emergency proclamation. And this will last until May 31st, 2020 or until the Santa Barbara County Local Health Emergency Proclamation is terminated whichever is earlier This ordinance provides protection for renters impacted by the coronavirus and includes terms about that.
And it also includes that landlords must be repaid, meaning that tenants must pay back the rent that is due. This urgency ordinance also shows support in writing oops sorry 4. Show support for the Governor's request in Executive Order March 16, 2020 for public housing authorities to extend deadlines for housing assistance recipients or applicants to deliver records or documents related to their eligibility for programs To the extent that those deadlines are within the discretion of the housing authority. So obviously with closures and different types of impacts, it has been difficult for people to get into offices to comply.
It's also would show support for The governor's order to request financial institutions holding home or commercial mortgages, including banks, credit unions, government-sponsored enterprises and institutional investors to implement an immediate moratorium on foreclosures and related evictions when related to the coronavirus. So also, we added in just a last minute update as of March 18th.
Just to note that HUD has enacted a foreclosure eviction moratorium and that applies to all FHA insured single family mortgages for a period of 60 days. So what this ordinance does not do, it does not excuse renters from paying deferred and or current rent within the duration of the ordinance. And so we have been in coordination with county council who can fill us in a little bit more about the legal implications of this ordinance.
Thank you Ms. Valencia-Sherratt. Mr. Gazzone?
Chair and supervisors. So this ordinance is a pretty focused protection for renters during this extraordinary time. When we think about evictions, the legal term that normally is used is unlawful detainer. And unlawful detainer is a summary remedy meaning one that by civil litigation standards Normally moves very quickly. It includes a three-day notice to the tenant to either pay rent or quit Only a five day period for the tenant to answer The the notice and then trial is supposed to occur within 20 days of the process starting so Without some protection, it's an extremely fast moving Process it's also one of the bundle of straws that a landlord has to enforce payment of rent So this particular urgency ordinance as drafted in coordination with the two supervisor offices.
Is of a limited time that is it's tied expressly to the local health emergency which by definition is something of short duration, a temporary emergency. It's limited as to who it applies to which are not all tenants but tenants who can demonstrate that they have or facing eviction because of loss of income or expenses due to the 2020 novel coronavirus And then it is, as I mentioned before a limited restriction. It is a restriction against eviction through unlawful detainer or ejectment which are similar terms in this area but it is not a prohibition against the landlord otherwise pursuing payment of rent through any of the other causes of action that they have so Again, this is an ordinance in response to this emergency. It's limited in duration, it's limited as to who it protects and it's limited as to what remedies it protects against.
Thank you Mr. Ghazani. Are there questions of
staff?
Yes.
So just to continue, thank you Council. Where do our county employees live? And why would this be an important thing to consider with this item? Number one, care of our own county employees who have families and so many of them who are also residents in our county. Many of them are likely renters. Also, as we know county employees are disaster workers. So preventing any evictions temporarily during this time within our ranks would be important for our own coronavirus response and recovery efforts. So we just have a list here which is very interesting. Thank you to HCD and HR for pulling these numbers together just so we can see where our county employees live spread out there And of course, some in Ventura County and also in San Luis Obispo County.
Next, neighboring jurisdictions with similar ordinances. So far San Luis Obispo has a very similar ordinance in place and cities within the county of Santa Barbara are Goleta. Santa Barbara City Council is hearing this item today. And in Ventura County the cities of Ojai, Thousand Oaks, Oxnard, Camarillo, Moorpark and Simi Valley have this in place. Recommended actions.
Let's see recommended actions today are do I read this? No, I don't think so. You know what the recommended
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Thank you very much for the presentation.
Although it is discussed in the ordinance, I'll also say another limitation on this in addition to the time which tenants are protected and what's the nature of the restriction is that it applies in the unincorporated area of the county.
Questions for staff? Supervisor Adam.
Well, I will just say that I think the optics of focusing on county employees is bad optics. It would help everybody that falls under those conditions and if it were me, I would have left those slides out but anyway.
My apologies. It's been quick timing.
Supervisor Williams? Well, maybe let me try to integrate Mr. Adam and Ms. Valencia's points in that there are several reasons of compassion to embrace this. One is that this disease and our public health response to it are creating economic displacement. Already many people are out of work Many people are in danger of losing their businesses. There will be a real difficulty out there, and that difficulty of course would be exacerbated if there was a spate of foreclosures. But I also think there's enlightened self-interest as a reason even if you are not a renter, even if you are not in danger of eviction yourself.
If there were a large number of evictions, we would either have more people congregating as homeless or more people congregating in the homes of friends and family. That is not a good thing for limiting the spread of coronavirus. This is the reason why we have been encouraged by the state to take these actions, and this is the reason why we should take this action.
Yeah, I agree. This is an unprecedented moment economically for many of our local residents in the county and taking this step to provide some measure of relief from the pressure of rent payments fits in with what's happening by banks making the decisions to defer mortgage payments for certain customers. Bank of America and Wells Fargo is doing the same thing.
The federal government is urging pause on evictions. There's a lot of levels of government trying to lessen the impact financially on people who are going to be struggling and are struggling right now because their businesses are closing and They're being laid off from their jobs. So I think this is a Step to help in that regard and I'm supportive supervisor Adam
Yeah, I just want to remove any thought that anybody needs to talk me into it because I'm I'm there I just was pointing out that the optics are a little bit Strange if it's all about us and not about everybody else
Somebody want to make a motion Supervisor. Oh, excuse me public comment. Yep. Excuse me
Chair Hart, members of the board. Yes we have three requests to speak from public comment via the phone so I will go to Eli Hemovitz now to be followed by Renee O'Neill I believe we had a misconnection with Eli. We'll try him in a little bit. We'll go to Renee O'Neill, to be followed by Corina. Unfortunately, I was not able to reach Renee. We're going to try Karina.
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I have a question while that's going on.
Supervisor Lavenino?
I'm just curious, Doss, what's the name of that teddy bear that's behind you?
I believe that is a dog, and I think we'd have to ask Yash what the name is. What is the name?
Okay.
But I will tell you the names of several of her teddy bears, one of which is a legacy one from me as Chief of Security Growley, and then the other one is a polar bear named Al Gore.
And we will go to Karina on the line. Karina, go
ahead. Hi. So I would like to first express my support of this ordinance and I'm really grateful that you are working on putting that in place. I am myself affected as a server in a local restaurant called The Black Sheep. We now are only doing deliveries And we're one of the lucky people that have at least a little bit of work left. But with all that, yes it's still absolutely needed and I'd like further consideration of a couple things. Number one is how are you... How is the board thinking about the people that are affected by the thousands really? on how they will be able to pay back once we're going back to regular business and expecting a slowdown of business in the beginning, um, to pay back the rent out. Um, so I would like a further consideration on perhaps having some way for us to get rent waived entirely for the months needed because we are not out of work out of our own will.
So that is the biggest point. And yes, also some clarification on and some security that once things go back to normal landlords cannot come and evict people afterwards for causes that seem unrelated
Thank you, Karina. Appreciate your comments. Mr Hart? Yes, Supervisor Lavendino?
Yeah and I know nothing's set in stone right now but I was just catching up on headlines and it looks like the federal stimulus package is talking about four months worth of Actual pay for folks that are affected. So I think that's a little bit over our pay grade at the county level, but keep your eyes on that federal stimulus package for folks.
Thank you Supervisor Lavenino. I think that is critical to the Federal Government act to protect people's ability to continue to survive so. Is there any more discussion on this item? Or is there a motion? Supervisor Williams. I'll move the moratorium on evictions. Okay, motion's been made. Is there a second?
And I will second and just commend my colleagues for bringing it forward.
Thank you Supervisor Hartman. Any other discussion? All those, well let's do a roll call.
Ms. Hartman? Aye. Mr. Adam?
Aye.
Mr Lavinino?
Aye
Mr. Williams?
Aye.
Chair Hart?
Aye.
Motion passes unanimous.
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We'll now recess to closed session. County Council, could you please read the items for consideration?
Chair and Supervisors yes and going back to the other item for a moment. You normally get to see who did the work on these from my office because they're sitting next to me in this case that was Chief Assistant Rachel Van Mullum who is not here today because we were observing social extreme social distancing but I thank her for her work on this also For closed session today the board is agendized for five items. The first is existing litigation Murray versus County of Santa Barbara the second Another matter of existing litigation the Southern California fire cases third is one matter of deciding whether to initiate civil litigation and And then conference with real property negotiators considering three different parcels, one at 14730 Cayo Real Goleta.
Another in the open space area of the Orchid Hills, parcel number 101-010-008 and the third is property adjacent and south of 1950 California 1 in Santa Maria area. Then finally you have conference with labor negotiators Service Employees International, Union Local 620. And my estimate for closed session is about an hour and a half.
Thank you Mr. Gazzani we'll recess to close session you the board.
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you the board.
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Reconvene the Board of Supervisors meeting. Would County Council please report out from closed session?
Chair and Supervisors, today in closed session the board considered first two matters of existing litigation Murray versus County of Santa Barbara. Second matter of existing litigation Southern California fire cases one matter of anticipated litigation deciding whether to initiate civil litigation real property negotiations concerning properties at 14730 Cayo Real in Goleta open space land in the Orcutt Hills near Oak Hill Drive Orcut And then properties adjacent to and south of 1950 California one in Santa Maria as well conference with labor negotiators. Concerning service employees international union local 620 concerning the decision whether to initiate civil litigation, the board decided through a unanimous vote and directed county council to pursue a tolling agreement or if not obtained.
We are adjourned to March
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