Board of Supervisors — 2020-11-10

I will call to order the November 10, 2020 meeting of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. Will the clerk please call the roll?

Ms. Hartman? Here. Mr. Adams?

Here.

Mr Lavinino?

Here!

Mr Williams?

Here

Chair Hart?

Our

Move approval.

Thank you. Is there a second? Second. Motion's been made and seconded. Any discussion? Madam Clerk, would you please call the roll?

Ms. Hartman? Aye. Mr. Adams?

Aye.

Mr Lavinino?

Aye

Mr. Williams? Aye. Chair Hart?

Aye.

Motion passes unanimously.

CEO Miyasato, is there a CEO report today?

Chair Hart, there is a short report this morning and that was just to let us let the board and public know that last week we were notified that the county was recognized with three 2020 Challenge Awards from the California State Association of Counties and will be I'm for their Barone Ranch restoration project in which Public Works purchased more than 1,000 acres known as Barone Ranch along the Gaviota Coast to secure a buffer zone adjacent to our landfill.

Human Resources was recognized also with a challenge award for their matching program during the disaster and that was the county established an employee job match program to temporarily reassign county And local mutual aid employees to specialized positions. And the third one was the district attorney's arson task force was recognized with a merit award, and the task force has successfully educated, prevented, investigated arson cases. So we'll be providing more information in the weeks to come but that's kudos to our county staff to be recognized of all those entries.

Congratulations to Public Works and Human Resources and the District Attorney's Office on that well-deserved recognition. Madam Clerk, are there any... Mr. Chair? Yes.

I'd like a...I can go before or after the clerk but I've got a short announcement about Veterans Day.

Yes, Supervisor Lavinino please.

Okay, thank you. So tomorrow is as we all know Veterans Day and we're going to be celebrating here outside the Joe Centeno Government Building here at 511 East Lakeside Parkway from 11 to 2 tomorrow. We'll have a drive-through. We're not able to do stand down this year so we're gonna have a drive through event where we're going to be handing out bags of goodies they'll have gift cards essentials They'll also have a contact list for services with housing, mental health and other benefits that will be available. So I also want to give a big shout out to Coast Hills. They dropped off a donation of $5,000 Sunday while we were putting together the bags.

So tomorrow from 11 to 2 outside the Joe Centeno building it's open to all veterans. There will be walk up available and drive through and it's all going to be COVID safe. Thanks to our county team here that came and gave us instructions on how to do it properly. So I want to just give a big shout out to our veterans, and also I want to thank Supervisor Hartman who posted this on her Facebook page and getting the word out for me so thank you very much.

Thank You supervisor 11 you know thank you for always representing the county well with that event and pivoting as you needed to this year in light of the COVID pandemic so thank you next item is the Clerk, or do you have any announcements or changings to our agenda today?

Chair Hart and members of the board. Yes I have three quick announcements this morning. I would like to start off by reminding members of the public who are participating in our board meeting today if you would like to make public comment on any item on today's agenda or on general public comment you could do so by phone please call 805-568-2240 And state your name, your phone number and which item you would like to speak on. And we will call you at the appropriate time that number will also be scrolling on top of your screen.

I'd also like to remind the public to please make every effort to be available and mute all streaming devices once it is your turn to speak. My second announcement is on administrative item number 24. We received a continuance request from the department. This item is from Public Health. It is to consider recommendations regarding a request to ratify execution of emergency occupancy agreement with Best Western

Supervisor Lavinino I believe you wanted this item?

Thank you Mr. Chair, yeah I just wanted to get clarity and I've since spoken with Mr. Frapwell and I got that clarity but I did have one additional question and that is we're talking about the cannabis tax revenue That I think in our budget we estimated about $10.6 million in revenue this fiscal year, but it looks like now we've increased that to 14 million.

And my question is so those additional funds at an extra 3.3 or 3.4 million, that will be available to disperse at next budget cycle during next budget hearings?

Mr. Valparaiso? Supervisor Lavarino for the chair, so yes the absent boards action mid-year to appropriate those dollars that do sit in fund balance become available as a financing source for the next fiscal year's budget.

Okay all right thank you very much and I don't know if well okay I'm good thank you

Thank you, Supervisor Lavinino. You don't need a separate vote on this I assume and so we will go... No sir. We thank you. We'll then go to item A34. Madam Clerk could you please read that item into the record?

Yes Chair Hart and members of the board and before I move on to administrative item number 34 I just wanted to clarify for the record we did not receive any requests to speak from the public on the administrative agenda.

Thank you for that clarity

Administrative item number 34 is from the County Executive Office. This is to consider recommendations regarding an ordinance to adopt remedies including administrative fines for violations of county health officer orders pertaining to COVID-19.

Supervisor Adam, I believe you wanted to speak on this item?

Well, I just want a roll call vote.

Okay, very simple. Let's take a motion on this particular item. Would somebody like to make a motion please?

Move approval.

Thank you, Supervisor Hartman. Is there a second? Second and motion is made by or seconded by Supervisor Williams. Any discussion? Madam Clerk, could you please call the roll

Miss Hartman I Mr Adam?

No,

Mr Lavinino.

No,

Mister Williams

I

chair heart motion passes 3 to 2.

And since we have no other public comment or request to pull items from the agenda, can I please get a motion to approve the balance of the administrative

agenda? So I move the balance of the administrative agenda and we would continue A24 till November 17th.

Thank you very much. Second. Supervisor Williams seconded the matter is there any discussion? Madam Clerk could you please call the roll?

Ms. Hartman? Aye. Mr. Adam?

Aye

Aye.

Mr. Williams?

Aye.

Chair Hart?

Aye.

Motion passes unanimously.

Now is the time for members of the public to speak on items that are not on today's agenda. Madam Clerk, are there requests to speak on items that are not on today's agenda?

Chair Hart and Members of the Board we have two requests to speak on general public comment today. We're going to begin with Paul Bradford to be followed by Isabel Nava.

Chair Harden, members of the board. I'm Paul Bradford representing Patterson Neighborhoods, a coalition of 356 neighbors who've expressed concern about the impacts of urban high-density projects. As you know, Sacramento's SB35 legislation has the laudable goal of increasing the supply of housing yet it's heavy handed and one size fits all approach strips local decision makers of traditional discretionary local control taking away your ability as a board to decide what's best for our community. It's loss of autonomy It's certainly felt at the Board and Planning Commission levels, yet its potential impacts of these high-density projects will be foisted on neighborhoods for near perpetuity. At the heart of SB 35's compliance is staffs' application of quote unquote objective standards when evaluating whether or not a proposed SB 35 project should be approved.

Clearly defining up front what specific guidelines constitute objective standards and whether or not to apply the standards contained in local community plans This is especially important because SG35 strips away the public's right to a traditional discretionary review process. On behalf of 356 neighbors in the North Patterson area, I have expressed concern about the impacts of these high-density projects and am asking that your board immediately direct staff to prepare a list of these objective standards and recommendations for incorporating potential standards set forth in local community plans.

And I thank you for your time.

Thank you, Mr. Bradford and this seems like a really good idea to bring some transparency to the process and explain to the public how we will be implementing state law so I will follow up on your email. Thank you. Next is Ms. Nava.

Yes our next and final speaker is Isabel Nava

Good morning my name is Isabel Nava I'm involved with a Family Act organization in Santa Barbara. I've been a member for seven years. I'm reaching out to you, the County Board of Supervisors. I've heard that you are the people that can help me make some changes in Santa Barbara County. I am the voice for Anthony Padilla. He is my grandson. Anthony was admitted at the ER in Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital five times and he was sent home with medication.

My grandson was suicidal, he had anxiety attacks. On October 14th of 2020 my grandson took his life. I lost my grandson. I will never be able to hold him in my arms and let them know how much I love them. I lost them because the county does not have funds to have psychiatric health facilities. How many people do you guys need that are going to be dead before you guys take action to the matter?

The community needs psychiatric bids for our loved ones. We don't want to lose our family. You the board that has the power, please help us and get some money in so we can get the help for our families. That's all I need to do.

Thank you very much, Ms. Nava for sharing your family story and we have great sympathy for your tragic loss. I think that concludes public comments. Supervisor Williams? Ms. Nava, we normally don't give responses but I thought it would be appropriate considering the level of your tragedy and loss to just point out that This has been years in coming, but are creating a number of beds in a continuum of care.

Which wouldn't exactly do what you're asking, but would accomplish the same thing. Because right now a lot of folks occupy psych beds that shouldn't be there because there just is no other place to put them and so we're expanding our bed system with other kinds of beds so that there would be the psych beds Would be essentially more often to be able to be used just for the folks who really qualify for them. So it's not exactly what you're asking for, but it would have the same result which is that people would have a better access to care that is appropriate for them.

Thank you for that additional information Supervisor Williams. It's very helpful

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 a coronavirus disease 2019 COVID-19 update.

Dr. Doronoso and Ms. Mosnisch, welcome. Thank you both for being here today.

Good morning. Briefing topics this morning, I'd like to brief your board on our local data as well as a our local data within context of what's happening throughout the state as well as the country and the world. I will give you the anticipated tier assignment from the Blueprint for a Safer Economy, and then I will transition it to Assistant CEO Terry Mosnisch for the new Community Data Dashboard.

This familiar graph describes our cumulative case counts in the county. As of date, we have 10,230 cumulative case count with 164 active cases and so for this period from October 26th through 11-9, the active cases demonstrates a 39% increase. We have 131 cumulative deaths. This graph describes our seven-day rolling sum of new cases by area, by episode date. I'd like to point out there's a lot of just movement throughout the different areas but I'd like to point out too the purple which is IV started During this period at pretty high of 78 and then ending in 25. So that demonstrates a 68% decrease.

The other is Santa Barbara, which is this orange line started out at 12. So the orange line is right here and then ending up in 34 so that denotes a 183% increase. Our hospitalization is at 12 So those are the numbers for Santa Barbara County. I'd like to show you a graph from Johns Hopkins University that describes our cumulative cases in California. So this graph shows daily confirmed new cases.

As of November 8th, we in California have 971,851 cases with 17,977 total deaths. So on the far right, this bar If it is red, it denotes that the trend in new cases is increasing. And if it is green, which it is not, denotes that it is decreasing. The number 9,561 on July 21st denotes that's when we had a peak in new cases in our state. This is the graph that describes COVID in the US.

The first case of COVID-19 in the US was reported exactly 290 days ago on January 21st. Since then, we have reported 9,860,558 cases with reporting 237,566 deaths due to COVID-19. And this graph describes a world perspective. This graph describes daily confirmed new cases, seven-day moving average. And this analysis uses a seven-day moving average so that we can visualize the number of new COVID-19 cases for the current 10 most affected countries and the green line This grant going up is the US.

So worldwide, the virus is spreading more rapidly than at any other point. The U.S. and Europe are both setting records for new confirmed cases while South America, North Africa, India and other regions are coping with serious outbreaks. So that sets the stage for what we are doing locally. This is the blueprint for a safer economy update as you recall, we are currently in the Red tier, which is considered the substantial with where adjusted case rate is from four to seven and positivity rate for county must be between five and eight percent. And the health equity metric must be between 5.3 and 8 percent.

And what we desired of course is to move into the less restrictive tier, the moderate tier. And we can do that when our adjusted case rate falls between one and 3.9 daily new cases per 100,000 and our overall county positivity rate falls to two between 2 and 4.9% and health equity metric fall between 2.2 and 5.2 percent. So based upon the numbers that we have, we anticipate that today at 12 that we will have an adjusted case rate of 4.3 and this is an adjustment from 4.6 Due to our exceeding the state median in the number of tests performed in our county.

Our positivity rate for I believe the first time falls to 1.8%. And that is within the yellow tier and our health equity metric is at 2.8% To give you a A reminder about where we've been for the last four weeks. We started at 4.3 and then moved up to a 4.4 inch up last week to 4.6, and now we are at 4 point 3. And this is our average adjusted case rate. With regards to testing positivity, we again are at 1.8% and that is a decrease from last week of 2.2%. And our health equity metric is at 2.8%, which is a decrease from last week of 3.2% And with that, I transition to Assistant CEO Terry Mocenich.

Thank you Dr. Doroniso. Are there any questions at this stage for Dr. Doroniso? Supervisor Williams? Well there's obviously something going on nationwide and internationally and we must be prepared but I also want to put it in Some context and maybe you could put it in the context locally because sometimes the number of new cases isn't a very good metric compared with looking in the summer or looking at the spring when we had much less testing resources right so.

We know a certain number of these are due to the fact we're just testing a lot more people So should we be more looking at the blueprint metrics for looking at how, what our really current state of affairs is or the hospitalizations and our hospitalizations are basically flat. Right? Is that but nationwide hospitalizations are up so we know that in other parts of the country even with new, even with more testing. Even when you compensate by going okay maybe we need to use another metric other than new cases a metric like hospitalizations that there are parts of the country that are in serious trouble and do we have any theories why that's happening elsewhere and not here?

So, according to the state hospitalization is inching up statewide. And that is a concern and it follows it lags behind the increase in cases. I know that other jurisdictions have brought the concept of the availability of hospital beds as a nuance of the blueprint metric, just like the volume of testing is nuanced. So you get adjusted downwards that concept has been brought up to CDPH for consideration. What if you are a jurisdiction with Increasing cases, but yet your hospitalization is stagnant or stable.

Can we be can we get adjustment? That is something that's in discussion with regards to why are. Hospitalization is stable, whereas in other jurisdictions it is not. I want to say that perhaps it is due to a good proportion of our new cases is in the younger crowd and as well as we have somewhat of a stable landscape with regards to outbreaks in skilled nursing facilities as well as in our older population.

Thank you, Supervisor Williams. Ms. Mosnes, thanks for being here and introducing the Community Dashboard.

Thank you, good morning Chair Hart and members of the board. Today along with our partners who will be joining us momentarily via Zoom we are very pleased to launch our new Community Data Dashboard. The dashboard is a result of a county-wide public private partnership with multiple county departments and community organizations and agencies involved. It's important to note that the development of the dashboard was funded through philanthropic efforts In service of to our community and we are very grateful and appreciative to the individuals for providing this tremendous resource that we will use collectively to provide additional information, build community capacity and continue to navigate through COVID-19.

The new dashboard does build upon our current dashboard that the board and many of our community are very familiar with. It builds upon our surveillance metrics, our status reports and other existing data currently provided at publichealthsbc.org It does and will continue to reflect the state metrics as just referred to by Dr. DiMarinoso, and it will continue to reflect our progress through the various tiers.

In addition there are new interactive data charts which will allow our viewers to further explore some of the critical data that we speak about very frequently including testing rates, case rates, healthcare capacity You will now be able to view this type of information over time, by place and with enhanced look at demography. The charts and graphs really do help tell the local story of COVID-19 and will help provide our residents with an opportunity to view the data so that they can make the best informed decisions about their personal health and welfare decisions.

With over 5.3 million views since its launch in March, our public health data portal at publichealthsbc.org is a primary method of communicating with our public regarding COVID-19. Our existing dashboard and status reports have received over 2 million views since their launch. We want to continue to engage our community along this platform and make sure that our visitors have critical access to the information presented. The dashboard, the new dashboard will be available on the existing Public Health SBC website at publichealthsbc.org, once again. We've reformatted the site so that the new dashboard is very easy to find and utilize. In addition, the dashboard will also be embedded among various partner sites as they may wish.

As I noted, this effort truly is the result of a very robust public-private partnership facilitated by Legacy Works and Carl Palmer who you will meet in just a moment. It is guided by a steering committee made up of public health experts and community leaders The steering committee's work, however, was also informed by a larger advisory group as shown here with broad expertise and perspective that really brought quite a bit to the overall design and formatting and how all the data should be presented. And we're very grateful and appreciative to them for their work.

This next slide, right before I turn it over to Carl Palmer reflects all of the contributing partners that have been involved in this effort. And I do want to thank all for their expertise and time to make our vision of a community dashboard a reality. With that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Mr. Palmer. He's going to give us a little view of the dashboard itself and then Dr. Lynn Fitzgibbons and Mr. Steve DeLera of the Family Service Agency will also make a few comments. So I'll go ahead and turn it over.

Thank you, Terry. Thank you Chairman Hart and members of the Board of Supervisors for the invitation to share the dashboard here today. I'd just like to start by saying what a privilege it's been to work with everyone who's made this project possible. I'm here as just one representative of a very large group of people that Terry just described. I would like to thank them all for their remarkable commitment to this project.

I also just want to thank the county leadership and county employees, the teams that we've been working with My hat's really off to everyone. I've been impressed the whole way through with everybody's efficiency and effectiveness, and first and foremost among them the public health department and in particular the epi team who have been the bedrock for this Um, our goal has been to build a user friendly data dashboard that gives you all community members and decision makers alike the information needed to make decisions.

To reign in the coven 19 pandemic here in the county and to navigate recovery efforts. I'm going to introduce you now to the dashboard. And we're really quite proud of what we've built together, what we have thus far. And I just want to also underline the fact that this is an ongoing effort and we're looking forward to working with all of you to continue to improve the dashboard and what it is able to do for the community.

The dashboards organized by topic with these tabs across the top. Here, we're on the introductory page where you can switch between versions. Your browser should recognize if you're coming from a computer or a smaller device and automatically directs you to the right one. But if you'd like to switch, you can do so here. You can also toggle between English and Spanish versions.

Using these tabs and also up here in the upper right, you can always switch languages. There's a video that will introduce you to how the dashboard works some critical data here on the front page right now it's focused on our current status and what we need to do to shift downward in the reopening process and what we need to watch to make sure that we don't go the other direction. And there's a little bit of information here about the dashboard itself That we would love to hear.

Navigating through the dashboard here with you, the status tab really focuses in on our current status as. So it's just sharing this gets updated every Tuesday when we get new information from the state. You can see actually, each of the tabs has a has a date field up here to show when it was last updated and when it's updated on an ongoing basis. The state metrics themselves are updated each Tuesday.

Data on the dashboard and this particular tab is updated on a daily basis during the weeks, not holidays. Dashboards are made up of widgets we call them these little panels. They can have a single data point like this one that shows our current status or they can be stacked and if they're stacked you can navigate using these tabs along the bottom. To see additional data, for instance here the full trend of the case rate history.

If you hover over the data, you'll see what the data point is underneath and you'll also notice that on some of the tabs, you'll see these dots along the bottom. And if you hover over those, you'll see some key dates in the epidemic. Each widget also can be expanded using this toggle here in the corner. which just gives you a much broader view if you're on a small screen, that's quite helpful.

And you'll note too that there's a bar across the top that allows you to change the time sequence that you see. So you can zoom in if you just wanna see the most recent data for instance here on this chart. I'd also just like to point out that many of the datasets have an information tab where folks in the epi team at the public health department Partners like Dr. Lynn Fitzgibbons, our nonprofit partners have contributed to the interpretive information here so you can learn more about the data and what's being represented and why it's important.

You'll note that this bottom here in the bottom left, we have a whole stack about cases. Here you'll see there's a whole stack about positivity testing. I'm just going to show you 1 or 2 of these charts as we go through. I recommend you explore and learn about the dashboard on your own. But I just wanted to show you a couple of charts. This 1 in particular, I think will be important to pay attention to as we have. We're showing 2 things here new cases by episode date which is the standard the state requires us to report by.

The current environment includes a seven-day lag, so we're not showing cases by episode date for the most recent days. We can however show cases by reporting date. You'll notice that this reporting data is much more volatile. It goes up and down a lot. It varies a lot. That depends on a lot of factors depending on when the cases, the tests are actually reported to public health rather than when they actually occurred.

You'll see that volatility here, but it's interesting to see what's happening in the most recent days. It's a bit of an early indicator for where things are or where things may be trending. Navigating through, I only have about 10 minutes total so I'm not going to be able to hit on every data point here and every chart. But I do want to show you a few highlights from each tab.

We have a cases tab here that shows the critical new data across the top. These first four are new, the next two are cumulative. That same data is then shown here but look with a long-term trend. New cases, active cases, weekly deaths cumulative cases and case status. Note here that almost all the cases are recovered, so it's difficult to make much of the data that you're looking at but using the legend, you can turn on and off different data layers. So we can see here that there's quite a lot of active cases. We can turn that layer on and off if we'd like. And now we can just look at current hospitalizations and deaths. We can turn the desks off and just look at the hospitalizations data. So you're able to manipulate the data depending on what you want to see.

Same is true here with transmission method, if you do you want to seek community close contact is the largest obviously if you want to zoom in you can click on the others. Here on the geography tab as I'm navigating over to it you'll see that we're presenting data in the form of maps here with new cases shown each circle is scaled to the number of new cases for that area. I can click on a circle and it'll both it'll do two things the geographic boundary for an area. This is the unincorporated area of North County. It'll also pop up a data table here that shows the data for that area.