Board of Supervisors — 2020-10-20

Good morning I'll call to order the October 20th 2020 meeting of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. Would the clerk please call the roll?

Mr. Adam?

That's me, yes.

Mr. Lavagnino?

I'm

here.

Mr Williams? Here. Ms Hartman? Here Chair Hartman.

The next item of business is approval of the minutes from October 13th, 2020. Is there any discussion? Could someone make a motion?

Move approval.

Thank you. Second. Motion's been made and seconded. Any more discussion? Madam Clerk could you please call the roll?

Mr. Adam?

Aye.

Mr. Lavinino?

Aye.

Mr Williams? Aye Ms Hartman? Aye Chair Hart?

Aye

Motion passes unanimously

CEO Miyasato, is there a CEO report today?

No report this morning, Chair.

Thank you. And Madam Clerk are there any announcements or changes to our agenda today?

Chair Hutt and members of the board I just have a couple quick announcements this morning. I would like to remind members of the public who are participating in today's meeting that although we are not allowing in-person participation we are allowing public comment by phone if you would like to make a comment by phone please call 805 I'd also like to remind members of the public who are participating by phone to please make every effort to be available and mute all streaming devices once it is your turn to speak.

My last announcement this morning is to inform the public and the board that we did receive a request to withdraw administrative item number 10 from the agenda today. This is from County Council, it is to consider recommendations regarding outside council contract with Nielsen, Merck-Sommer, Perrinello, Gross and Leone LLP there's a fourth this vote required on this item and we received to the request for withdrawal yesterday Monday October 19th and this information is available online and has been distributed to the board If we could just include that withdrawal with the balance of the administrative agenda today, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Thank you Madam Clerk. Next item is approval of the administrative agenda. Do any board members request to pull any items on the administrative agenda? I know about A6 and I think A18. Are there others?

Nothing up here.

Okay thank you very much. Madam Clerk, would you please read item A-6 into the record?

Yes. And Chair Hart and members of the Board we did just receive a late request from a member of the public to speak on Administrative Item Number 10.

Thank you. A- 6

Chair Hart, members of the board, administrative item number six is from community services. It is to consider recommendations regarding the approval of targeted outreach to homeless encampments in Santa Barbara County sub-recipient agreement using Emergency Solutions Grant CARES ESG-CV and CARES Act Funds Act of 2020 to include COVID-19 response.

Supervisor Williams? Well this is an important contract with CityNet An entity that has already been doing some outreach in the area. I'm sure in your districts, I know in some of your districts you have the same as I do which is increased homeless encampments both because of, I'm sure the economic conditions but also because The constraints on moving such camps, those have become more common.

And one of the tools that we have is outreach to those individuals to help get people off the streets. So I think this is really important. But the other part, of course it's only part of the puzzle, outreach. We need some place for them to get more And so this is why we need to continue the Project Room Keys South, which has been tremendously successful. Our staff has housed 43 individuals come off the streets and into the program.

you read A18 into

Chair Hart, members of the board. Administrative item number 18 is from public health. It is to consider recommendations regarding the conversion of purchase contract BL 05011 to a board contract with community health centers of the Central Coast for targeted outreach to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Supervisor Williams? I think this is just another example of the county's COVID strategy particularly towards populations where there's been a higher level of spread Specifically the recruitment of promotoras which are sort of lay people, health educators and in other healthcare fields. The use of promotoras has been very effective and we hope it will help on our strategy.

Thank you for highlighting the work of the Public Health Department. That concludes the administrative agenda all we need is a motion to approve it including Withdrawing item 810 could I get a motion?

so moved

Motion has been made Second and seconded multiple times. Thank you both Any discussion madam clerk, could you please call the roll

mr.. Adam

Hi,

mr. Lavagnino All

right,

mr.. Williams

I

miss Hartman chair motion passes unanimously.

Now's the time for members of the public to speak on items that are not on the board's agenda today. I'm clear. Are there any requests to speak on items that are not on today's agenda?

Chair her and members of the board, we have two requests to speak on general public comment today and we're going to begin with Judy Paulson to be followed by Rene O'Neill.

Thank you very much.

Good morning. I'm bringing you an update on our situation here in Santa Maria. I've said from the beginning that hemp and cannabis are the same problem, and this is becoming a reality for us. Here's some background. 16 lots in our community are incorrectly zoned as Ag 240, and this has been confirmed by European D staff. They call them legal non-conforming lots.

Most are under 20 acres all have designating building envelopes assigned by the county The EIR for these lots discusses them as a development with a water system, roads etc. We purchased our lot with this understanding. When we built we had to comply with this EIR and the designated home building envelope. The fire department required compliance with housing development standards.

I've got letters from the fire department calling this a development. Because the county designated this as a development we were required to bring in utilities for all 16 lots with this housing development idea. But now because these lots are incorrectly zoned as Ag 240, we are vulnerable to cannabis. And what has happened is the lot directly in front of our property previously growing hemp incorrectly zoned as Ag 240 has been sold to an individual from Los Angeles who was planning on planting cannabis. He apparently also had to grow in Lompoc. We got wind of this contacted him and surprised he is quite confident and arrogant that he will be successful in getting approval of this new growth. He's not from Santa Barbara County. He's coming here buying vulnerable land because he believes our county is cannabis friendly.

So once again, you know what? What's going on folks? We're hoping that once all the facts are known about this law in this community that this application for cannabis will be denied but how did we get here? You know I'd like to close with talking about my experience with hemp and cannabis nightmare that began five months ago And the first five days of my experience, which was about five months ago. I went on a search for answers with the county folks. I was dismissed and told some outrageous things so I began my own research and what I discovered was that I was being intentionally misled and outright lied to. So armed with facts, I again began making phone calls and the more I pushed back, the more intimidation tactics I received. I've been yelled at personally attacked And give an unsolicited advice to stop asking questions.

I've endured a disgusting blame game that continues to this day and asked to pay $8,000 to correct zoning mistakes made by the county that have made us vulnerable to cannabis. We've had sheriff incidents shots theft criminals on our property traffic noise safety issues overwhelming odor and now cannabis is coming. And by the way the hemp issue is far from being resolved So we are at our wits end, people. I am so completely disgusted with what the county has done and with what they have not done. At this point, we're in the fight for our lives. This permanent cannabis grow from an outsider from Santa Barbara County will have permanent consequences. So stand by. Thank you.

We will now go to Renee O'Neill, who is our final speaker.

Good morning Supervisors. Renee O'Neill speaking. I want to ditto everything Judy Paulson just spoke And I really hope that there's a news agency that's listening to this public comment because maybe people like John Palminteri, investigative reporter needs to put this out there to the public because the general public is completely unaware of what is going on behind closed doors with him.

Everyone who's listening Hemp is not regulated in this county. There are no regulations that the board has brought before the public, there are no buffer zones so you could have an empty field next to you or a school or any other sensitive receptor and have someone decide to grow a hemp farm right up to your boundary line. Hemp is very much like cannabis it has the same Issues many growers use it to camouflage growing cannabis in the middle of it because the plants are so similar.

I'm surprised I'm not even hearing things from the cannabis growers who that legitimately want to have a valuable crop that is not cross pollinated by hemp. I am surprised we're not hearing from them. So I really concerned what's going on here If I was a hemp, if I was a cannabis grower, I'd be very concerned about the fact that the county does not have any intention of regulating hemp. Which by the way folks and John Palmentieri or whoever news people are listening this is going to become a federally legal it is a federally legal crop but there there are no laws, no restrictions, no regulations in where it can be grown How close it can be grown to a school or another cannabis farm or a vineyard.

I'm very disappointed. I've been asking this board to please answer my question when are you going to put hemp on the agenda October 30th 31st is the deadline. I've been asking this for months and like Peter Adams said earlier I'm going to continue asking these questions. Are there any questions or comments or anything that the board can say why they have not answered my question as to why hemp is not being put on the agenda?

Thank you,

Ms.

O'Neill. I'd like an

answer

today

right now

please. Thank you Ms.O'Neill appreciate your comments.

Well, Mr. Chair, I want to just help remind Renee that public comment is not meant to be the provision of public comment for items not to be on the agenda is not supposed to be a dialogue. That's that's the point it's supposed to be you giving us some information, not us responding You know, I will repeat that. I have concerns about him. I think the majority of the board shares different levels of concerns and I do not think that the situation will last that it is unregulated.

It is while it is correct that it has unregulated. It is also correct to say it is not permitted by the county and so there is a sort of gray area that we have attempted to assert Our rights already on in terms of not having hemp in an unpermitted state.

Thank you, Supervisor Williams that concludes our public comment and

Chair Hart and members of the board, departmental item number one is from community services. It is a hearing to consider recommendations regarding the Central Coast Community Energy 3CE member agency annual update.

Welcome Ms Watkins.

Good morning Chair Hart, members of the Board. As you're aware last year we joined Monterey Bay Community Energy, a community choice energy provider. They have since changed their name to reflect their expanded territory and are now known as Central Coast Community Energy. Today, J.R. Killigrew, Director of Communications and Outreach for Central Coast Community Energy or 3CE is here to provide a member update and he'll give us a little bit more information on 3CE's energy procurement, an update on energy programs, and provide a bit more detail on the coming enrollment of customers in Santa Barbara County.

J.R.?

Thank you, Mr. Killegrew and welcome digitally and virtually.

Yes it's thank you Chair Hart and honorable supervisors and Miss Watkins. Thank you again for the opportunity to port in virtually to engage with you all I'm up here in Monterey and I'm sorry can't make the trip down south just yet but we do appreciate all the effort both regionally and statewide just help flatten the curve related to COVID-19 So yes, today is going to be about how we can remind you about the great journey that the County of Santa Barbara took to join at the time Monterey Bay Community Power but now Central Coast Community Energy. But also most importantly about this upcoming enrollment that's gonna start in January 2021. What we like to do set the stage and just reminding the audience and the Board of Supervisors about how does CCA or community choice aggregation work?

It was put into place by Assembly Bill 117 back in 2002, that allowed cities and counties to either create their own agency individually or create a consortium of cities and counties that would ultimately go out to the wholesale market and procure energy on behalf of the needs of their residents and businesses and agricultural customers. So that's where the big kind of shift in the energy market had taken place. We'll fast forward to 2020 there were actually 21 agencies like us serving the Central Coast. Sorry, if you could go back to the first slide please.

There we go, perfect. Serving over 10 million customers statewide and actually it's forecasted by 2025 that 85% of the electrical load will be served by this great network of CCAs but the great thing about this model is you're still able to leverage the infrastructure from the investor-owned utility, the billing service And ultimately, we like to just think about it. You get the same great service but only at more competitive and more valuable prices.

Next slide. So as Miss Watkins alluded to I think the County of Santa Barbara and all the effort that happened last year really kind of laid the foundation for us to go ahead and change our name. We are now Central Coast Community Energy as of September 4th this isn't a doing business as we actually went filed with Secretary of State We amended our joint powers authority agreement, so we are now our formally Central Coast Community Energy to really represent the fact that we serve communities across the entire central coast. And while we did start with Humble Roots up in the Monterey Bay region, now serving 33 communities across five counties, the Central Coast really is that synonymous name that everyone is familiar with. So especially with such a significant enrollment, we wanted to kind of set the tone right away and make sure that customers can connect with us on a better way with this name.

So we have our new website is 3cenergy.org and our tagline is clean energy, local control. Next slide. So who we are as you learned late last year when we were engaging with you folks, as well as the stakeholders across the Santa Barbara County region, we started with the six sorry, the 16 cities within the Monterey region, as well as the three counties back in 2018 But if you recall, the cities of Morro Bay and San Luis Obispo did request membership back in late 2018. That's actually what jumpstarted our efforts to start engaging with the other communities in San Luis Obispo County as well as the county of Santa Barbara and the communities there within the county.

Fast forward to now we have 33 member agencies spanning those five counties. And I'd just like to acknowledge that the city of Builton is the most recent inductee into our joint powers authority agency. So it's great to see that all the communities in Santa Barbara County are now involved on our agency outside of the city of Santa Barbara, which has started its own program and then the city of Lompoc is a municipal utility. So we've really done a phenomenal job in partnership with stakeholders and business leaders in Santa Barbara County to provide this option to customers across the county.

Next slide. What separates us apart from the vertically integrated investor-owned utility model is the access to the public and our governance structure. So what, the way we are governed is by our boards or policy boards as of elected officials. And we're greatly appreciated to have Supervisor Daswillian serving as the seat for County of Santa Barbara. I did also want to mention that Mayor Alice Patino from Santa Maria sits on the policy board for the City of Santa Maria And then Mayor Julian from Guadalupe actually represents the city of Guadalupe, Solvang and Buelton. So it's really great to see the representation from Santa Barbara already on our boards actively participating in decision-making and really getting a good sense of how this agency works well before the enrollment in January 2021.

On our operations board, it's wonderful to have the Chief Executive Officer Ona Miyasato as our representative there City Manager Jason Stilwell sits on the seat for Santa Maria, as well as city manager Todd Bodum sits on the seat representing Guadalupe, Solvang and Gilton. And actually I did want to mention that our Community Advisory Council is another great opportunity for us to engage in the community. We actually have brought on four new Community Advisory Council members and three of the four represent Santa Barbara County. So John Hughes from Santa Maria, Katie Davis from Goleta And Heather Allen from Carpinteria are our new community advisory council members. So, you know, from the point when County of Santa Barbara was bought on board last December to now we've really seen a lot of great representation from Santa Barbara at all levels of our governance structure.

Next slide. In terms of the accomplishments, we like to categorize these about providing folks with choice where they didn't have choice before the economic vitality of reinvesting through cost savings through programs as well as additional opportunities, the local support of the economy in terms of having a going at least trying to have a local vendor first approach to make sure that any contracts are available. And then also clean energy that's really our moniker how are we going to develop and deploy and aggressively pursue reduction of greenhouse gas emissions through the energy supply?

But I did want to highlight that it's brand new news but it's probably some of the most exciting news that I've heard today 3CE actually just received the first A rating from S&P from any CCA in the state of California. We actually got that rating later on last week and I did want to share with you folks today that it really is a testament to our financial stability, our operational sustainability and just the whole direction of where this agency is moving forward to get the first A rating of any CCA in the state of California so it's really big news We just appreciate everyone who's been a part of that to make that happen.

Next slide. COVID is on everyone's mind, we know there's a tremendous amount of work that's being done across all community groups across all regions not only in California but nationwide. But we did want to just highlight to the Board of Supervisors what 3CE did a couple months ago in response to COVID-19 We actually cut all of our electric generation rates by 50% for all customers for two months. That actually equated to about $24 million of financial relief, and this really was an impactful unanimous decision that all board members were supportive of in terms of what can we do to be an active participant in addressing the pandemic a few months ago that continues to move on? So this is just another innovative and creative solution that a public agency can bring forth like 3CE.

Next slide. And moving on to procurement, we are aggressively pursuing some incredible opportunities for us to help reshape the grid in California and deploy clean electrons onto it. Right now today, we've contracted for I believe it's eight contracts and that's a mixture of geothermal which is a baseline resource so that runs 24-7 As well as solar plus storage, but also did want to mention that we did sign a contract for a utility scale battery storage project. That's in South Monterey County that's actually being attached to it a pretty significant solar array. So that is going to be our first local project that we're really excited about that should be coming online sometime mid next year.

It's a great opportunity for us to be able to pair existing solar with a utility scale battery project. These projects actually account for 35% of our current energy demand. But as you know, we're expanding down into Santa Barbara County as well as San Luis Obispo and that's really what gave us an opportunity to reevaluate the next stage in this agency in terms of our energy procurement. So next slide please.

And that leads us to this. This is probably one of the most exciting efforts that this agency has laid out with support from our board So actually, we have set a new pathway or strategy to be 60% renewable from renewable bucket one RPS eligible resources by 2025. And 100% of our energy supply will be sourced from renewable energy by 2030 and that will be based on a monthly basis. We are moving away from annual accounting where you basically can just produce a whole lot of stuff in one month and then say it kind of aggregates across the year But no, we want to make sure we balance how much our consumers consume on a monthly basis with the amount of renewable energy we're putting on the grid. So this is actually 15 years ahead of the state's goals and we actually can do it more affordably than if we continued with our kind of carbon free slash renewable energy, uh, renewable portfolio standard model, which was leveraging large hydro attributes from the Pacific Northwest and renewable energy credits from California in the surrounding areas.

The fact that we're breaking free of that and moving forward with this innovative and affordable policy and strategy, it's really exciting that I know a lot of advocates and business leaders are getting behind moving forward. Next slide. Now, moving towards programs. So there are two ways that we like to affect change in the Central Coast and in the greater California area. One is about really accelerating clean and renewable resources on the grid Then how do we address the local greenhouse gas emissions and the local energy challenges that the Central Coast has? Well, we do that through our energy program. So we set aside 3% of our gross revenue. That's usually somewhere around about $12 to $15 million a year where we work with the community kind of develop priorities design criteria program concepts and then lead with a collective suite of programs that we present to our policy board each year at our annual meetings So here are some of the highlights that you can see here, but I did want to mention two programs that we are really excited about.

One is a electrification grant program for new residential housing. So whether it's single family homes or multifamily homes, if it's affordable housing or market rate housing, we're providing incentives so you don't have to build any gas lines and we actually help drive down the cost of that so it could be even more affordable. We actually had About $1.2 million worth of grants available to housing developers last year, and I'm not kidding when I say this, all of that money was gobbled up in four hours.

So the idea that there's an opportunity for us to electrify new housing stock, we know there's a huge market, but we're excited to be a part of this process moving forward to now expand this opportunity down into Santa Barbara as well. Alternatively, we actually have been working with our local air district to provide no cost school buses that are electric to six school districts in the Monterey Bay region. We're actually going to expand that down to San Luis Obispo communities, as well as Santa Barbara County community. So if there are school busses at a school districts that are looking to electrify their fleet, we'd love to hear about it. We'd love to support that next slide.

I did want to mention the last program is technically a fund but Our board did set up about $25 million that was set aside to provide resiliency. So this is very quickly a backup supply program that allows for the public sector, whether it's member agencies like the County of Santa Barbara, the City of Santa Maria, the City of Guadalupe, the City of Solvang, to get access to low-cost financing to build a backup power supply for their critical loads, whether if you think about it's your jail, your police station, your fire station, your libraries or even school districts or public hospitals. So this is just another innovative way we're trying to provide solutions, low cost solutions to ensure that folks can have the energy that they need in case of public facing power shutoffs or as you know some of the rolling power outages that we had a few months ago.

Next slide. So now we get to pivot into the really, the meat of this discussion which is about the statistics within the County of Santa Barbara. What's really dynamic about your county is you actually are served by two investor-owned utilities. You know I think it's kind of Vanderburg Air Force Base as the dividing line so south of that we have Southern California, Edison has your investor-owned utility and then north of that you have PG&E. So you have about 52,500 total accounts that are eligible to enroll across the two areas. The majority are residential, about 45,000 customers in residential and then between commercial and agricultural you got a little over 8,000 but yes you have a lot of residential customers but I believe about 70% of the load so the incoming demand that we have to go and procure for comes from those 8200 commercial and agricultural customers.

So it's really important for us to keep an eye on the prize in terms of engaging with important and significant agricultural customers as well as commercial customers. And just to give you a snapshot in terms of how much consumption or energy that the County of Santa Barbara consumes each year, it's about 1.1 billion kilowatt hours per year and that is actually a little over 20% of our total load that we're going to serve moving forward. So Santa Barbara County is definitely a pretty significant player in terms of our overall power mix and what we have to do to serve our customers there. Next slide.

In terms of community outreach, we have developed a very comprehensive community enrollment plan. We've shared that with County of Santa Barbara staff and be certainly happy to share that with the Board of Supervisors so you can see all of the different strategies and tactics that we're going to deploy to make sure that this enrollment is successful but we did want to highlight some of the top bullet points just so that you are aware So we are doing direct outreach with the top customers by load individually, one-on-one reaching out to them to help them understand what their consumption is going to look like, what their bill is going to look like and how this enrollment's gonna benefit them. We have staff working tirelessly to connect with community based organizations.

I know our group has already had a couple of good conversations with the Santa Barbara County Farm Bureau to name the least We also have a pretty robust advertising effort that's going to go underway in terms of digital radio, as well as doing some digital videos that are going to help share the story about us. And then of course the required mailers we have to send out and then additionally our call center here in Monterey is equipped with highly professional educated staff members to handle any other kind of NEM or residential questions And then we have set aside three distinct months to enroll the net energy metering customers that mostly aligns with their true ups. We're really excited to collaborate with our city and county staff to distribute information about the enrollment through newsletters, social media platforms.

We've set up a SharePoint folder or a shared file folder for our city and county staff to give them all the tools and resources for them to be empowered to get the information out to your constituents. Next slide. Very quickly, the service offerings. All customers will be enrolled in 3C Choice. That's our primary service offering at competitive rates. So that rate will come at a 2% discount after we add in all the fees that PG&E puts in. The customer is going to be saving some money. We also do offer 100% renewable energy offering 3C Prime should folks want to enroll in that voluntary service offering. Next slide.

In terms of the enrollment, I did want to, this slide's a little busy but I did want to acknowledge that within Santa Barbara County there will be two enrollments. The first enrollment will be for customers that are within the PG&E service territory so the first notice will go out in November. We'd be more than happy to share that notice with the Board of Supervisors as well as staff so they're aware in case folks ask like, I didn't get my mailer what does it look like? And then we have another mailer that goes out in December And then the virtual transition happens in January of 2021. So I think there are about 20 to 22 different meter read dates for every customer, um, across the service area. So everybody's going to be basically enrolled at on their meter read date and then they will get their bill about a 20 to 30 days after that meter redate, which we'll have the central coast community energy electric generation charges.

But by law, we still have to send another bit another notice in February of 2021 and then March of 2021. And the same model will follow when we enroll the southern Santa Barbara customers, so Goleta Carpentaria and the remaining unincorporated Santa Barbara County. So the first notice will go out August of 2021, second September of 2021, virtual transition happens in October, and then the last two mailers going out in November and December. But again rest assured customers can opt out at any time during the enrollment period.

We like to think that Having 150 days to make a decision from the point where you get your first mailer to the last one should be enough significant amount of time. But if not, and just miss everything and you want to opt out at another time, just realize that there is a small administrative fee for each account so $5 for residential 25 for commercial customers. Next slide.

And again I did want to highlight because there are I think about 7000 net energy metering customers that we're going to be enrolling So we've actually looked at the data and a lot of the true ups actually seem to align over the span of three months. So we're looking at April of 2021, July of 2021 and October of 2021. So basically for folks who have certain true ups, we're going to be sliding them into those three months but that will actually help minimize the true up impacts that happen because as a customer when you become a CCA customer PG&E or SCE has to do an automatic true up So if you owe a balance, you actually have to pay PG&E that. But if you have credits those credits end up getting wiped away so we're really trying to make this an easy seamless transition for net energy metering customers but we still will follow the same enrollment schedule of sending the notices but we'll also send some custom emails and custom letters to them set up some custom webinars to make sure that folks really get a sense of what's going on in terms of being a NEM customer with us But you still will get all the billing from PG&E.