Board of Supervisors — 2020-12-01

I'll call to order the December 1st, 2020 meeting of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. Would the clerk please call the roll?

Mr. Lavinino?

Here.

Mr. Williams? Here. Ms. Hartman? Here! Mr. Adams? Chair Hart?

CEO Miyasato, is there a CEO report today?

There's no report today chair.

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

Chair Hart and members of the board I just have one quick announcement today and that is to remind members of the public who are participating in our board meeting today if they'd like to make public comment they could do so by phone by calling 805-568-2240 and state your name, your phone number and which item you'd like to speak on. And we will call you at the appropriate time. Please make every effort to be available in mute all streaming devices once it is your turn to speak again that phone number is area code 805-568-2240. And then we'll also be streaming across your screen momentarily.

Those are all my announcements.

Thank you very much. Now's the time for members of the public to speak onto the board on items that are not on today's agenda. Madam Clerk, are there any requests to speak on items that are not on today's agenda?

Chair Hart and members of the board, we have no request to speak in general public comment today.

Thank you. The next item is departmental item number one. Madam Clerk would you 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 a coronavirus disease 2019 COVID-19 update.

Thank you Dr. Doronoso welcome.

Thank you good afternoon For today's briefing, the topics I'll be going over include are the latest on our local COVID vaccine planning. Also covering SBC COVID-19 data as well as the blueprint for a safer economy update and lastly, the school waivers. Regarding COVID-19 vaccine, as you may have heard in the news Pfizer and Moderna is expected. They're both expected to receive the FDA emergency use approval within the next few weeks And according to the CDC, as well as CDPH at the prioritization due to the initial limited vaccine supply will be carried out at Phase one a include health care workers and first responders as the eligible group to first receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

With phase 1B, that expands to older adults living in congregate or overcrowded settings followed by individuals at highest risk for developing severe illness. And I want Really reiterate that this is in draft form. We are awaiting final prioritization guidelines from CDPH and as soon as we have additional details on the prioritization, we will update your board.

The state has been in conversations with the local health departments, as well as standing up at least three work groups with the objectives of assuring that the vaccine will be safe and the vaccine will be distributed equitably to the most needed groups. It is also to ensure that the best, the brightest experts in the field can review FDA and clinical data as well as engaging community members in how does the state distribute equitably the supply of vaccines to the jurisdictions. You may also have heard Agencies and departments in our state and across the nation have received a vaccine. And so I want to briefly go over the vaccine distribution. Federal agencies will be receiving direct allocations And these agencies include Veteran Affairs, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Department of Defense as well as the State Department.

And facilities receiving direct allocations from CDPH will include state hospitals, state prisons as well as large health systems that meet multi-county entity criteria. And finally, the local health department will be coordinating the allocations to healthcare facilities in our areas which includes hospitals, clinics et cetera and non-multi county entity facilities and as well as jails.

The pharmacy partnership is in place for long term care program, which means long term care facilities can sign up for CVS and Walgreens to come on site during phase one vaccination of the residents and staff. And this will be free of charge to the long term care facilities. Here locally, we're building on the work groups that we have for our annual flu vaccine.

And we've repurposed the group to engage them in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccine. And the purpose of this work group is to implement a phased approach based on vaccine availability. Again, we want to make sure that we are equitable in our local vaccine distribution and our we are working off our plan will be based After the CDC COVID vaccination playbook, as well as guided by CDPH recommendations. And we have formed this work group, have been in discussion in meetings with them for at least the last two months and really ramping it up especially since we have finished our flu vaccination.

Our vaccine work group here locally includes, for now our core group includes the community health clinics of Central Coast. Our local hospitals, Sansum Clinic as well as Santa Barbara County Healthcare Centers at the neighborhood clinics various skilled nursing facility home health and assisted living representatives UCSB is at the table as well as Vandenberg And our various first responders and ambulance representatives, as well as our Office of Emergency Operations in particular the Joint Information Coordination. This is our core group right now and we anticipate that as a need arise, we will add more partners to our group.

So phase one of the vaccination, it includes our hospitals being engaged to distribute the vaccine to hospital staff as well as to outside agency staff if possible. And if not possible, then public health in phase one A will operate point of dispense units and we'll be distributing the vaccine to our first responders as well as long term care staff and others.

We are estimating in our county to have roughly 20,000 total healthcare workers. And these include hospitals, skilled nursing, long-term care congregate living centers, outpatient and home health and hospice. The first responders we estimate that to be roughly right under 2000. And this is the numbers really reflect the state's estimation of about 25,000 vaccine needed for our county for the first phase.

So in anticipation of the vaccine coming and intense, in anticipation of the guidance coming again, in summary phase 1A includes the population, the healthcare workers and the first responders. And we anticipate that to be arriving mid to late December. And again this is really pending the allocation and availability from CDPH to us. The vaccine in phase 1A will be distributed at hospitals, clinics and public health pods. And our role in public health will be to recruit providers and to approve the allocation and then to operate the point of dispensing.

In phase B one be at the target population will be older adults living in congregate or crowded settings and then individuals at the highest risk for severe illness. So with the older adults living in congregate or crowded setting, we anticipate again pending And for individuals at the highest risk for severe illness with allocation, we anticipate that sometime in January 2021. And the location for distribution of these, of the vaccine will be on site at the long-term care facility and at the public health pods.

Our role will be to operate the pods Uh as the core as the backbone with intense participation from our community health care partners. Phase two will be for the non healthcare essential workers, people in congregate settings and all other older adults, and we anticipate this availability again pending allocation sometime in mid-March or mid-April. And it will be the vaccine will be distributed via our community pods you may be familiar with during H1N1. We had mass vaccination clinics throughout our county. This will be very similar to that.

Our role will be to coordinate the pods And operation and operate these mass vaccination centers with our partners. Um, the Prague enclosure in closing like to talk about our progress and the next steps. We are engaging our public information officer and call center to support registration and to really answer all the questions and do public education around This is the first of its kind in the city's history to support logistical educational language and behavioral needs.

Initiate contracts with pod sites such as Earl Warren, Santa Maria Fair Park, Alan Hancock and SBCC and confirm And with that, I also would like to pause in my presentation to see if your board has any questions. And also available via Zoom is Dr. Ansork, our health officer and Ms. Jan Koechler, our emergency preparedness program manager.

Thank you, Dr. DiRenoso. Are there questions at this point? Supervisor Hartman.

Yes. I heard recently that 42% of people say they won't take a vaccine, and so I think we've got here the beginnings, the outlines of how to deal with this. Nationwide if not worldwide issues, so we're not in this alone. But I was so impressed by the work public health has done in outreach to the farm worker community and some of the disadvantaged communities and wonder if there are lessons learned from it.

And the university community and the schools, you've already created networks for communication and trust and how you're going to activate these for the next phase?

Yes, Supervisor through the chair. You bring up a really good point we will be building on the successful partnerships that we currently have in place one of these strategies in addressing vaccine hesitancy and there are a lot of unknowns and worries around the vaccine is to utilize our existing trusted leaders in partnership in providing that information, that accurate information. There's a lot of misinformation in social media on the news but we want to really start now and have that conversation. The vaccine is coming down the pike. These are the order in which they will be distributed and this is what it means to have it as a community. So we will be engaged with CDPH They are working on a media campaign, an education campaign. But what they are telling us is locals utilize your trusted partners in the community to be really engaged in the education campaign.

Supervisor Williams?

I just wanted to know if, or request if you haven't done already to update that graph. You brought us a breakdown by professions just so that we understand if we're continuing to get a higher amount of cases in certain sectors than what we had before. Do you have anecdotal information or anything this week? To update us on that.

Supervisor Williams through the chair it is included in my presentation

Great. Any other questions at this phase of the presentation? Dr. Dovernosi, you want to continue? Thank you. Yes.

May I pause and ask if Ms. Kogler or Dr. Ansorg have any comments before I move on?

Dr Ansorg or Ms. Kogler?

Yeah, this is Henning Anzorg. Just a little more update on the vaccine hesitancy. Currently the first vaccine by Pfizer is reviewed by the FDA so we do not have a lot of public information on this vaccine as yet. This is going to be provided by the CDC, the FDA and the ACIP from the CDC department And once we have that, we will make sure that we are very transparent about all the facts that are known on these very new vaccines. And we will work diligently on keeping the public abreast on new developments.

Thank you, Dr. Anzorg and I think at this point the estimates on the doses that we get and the ability to expand, you know, to even get all the phase one folks vaccinated are just guesstimates at this point. We don't really know precisely what was going to be available in what quantities and there might have to be adjustments to the plan when that comes out right? Is that right? That is correct. Okay thank you.

All right please continue.

Next, I'd like to cover Santa Barbara County COVID-19 by the numbers. And just really to preface so that your board is not shocked, Santa Barbara County is experiencing a significant increase in cases testing positivity and hospitalization for the last two weeks since our last presentation. From November 16th through November 30th, we see a 10% increase in our cumulative case count moving from 10,577 to 11,602.

Also from during the same period from November 16th through November 30th, we saw a 61% increase in our active cases. So going from 255 to 410, we saw a 154% increase In our hospitalization numbers, going from 13 to 33. And we saw a 2% increase in our cumulative deaths going from 133 to 136. By geographic areas, we continue to see an increase in Santa Barbara of 61%, going from 61 cases to 98 cases. The other noteworthy is in Lompoc increasing of 47%, going from 38 cases to 56 cases.

The latter part of the graph where we see a decrease in on November 25th and November 26, these may be artificial plateauing or decreasing in cases and maybe due to decreasing testing over the holiday period. Our hospitalization and ICU, as I mentioned earlier increase of 154%, so going from 13 to 33 cases. And our ICU cases from going from five to seven cases.

This is a graph that I thought I would show you because it captures hospitalization since April. So in the last week alone, from 1124 to 1130 hospitalizations have increased by 57%. So we went from 21 to 33 patients hospitalized. The increase in hospitalization can occur quite rapidly and while bed capacity may be available there may not be sufficient staffing available to support the increase in cases.

SBC data, our county data indicate that hospitalization does increase approximately two to three weeks after an increase in cases. So for example, cases by episode date peaked on July 16th at 149 cases and we saw a corresponding peak in hospitalization on July 30th at 89. Occupation graph, this is the occupation identified by cases reported by episode date in week 47. So this data covers the period of November 15th through November 21st. It should be noted here that about half of the cases are missing occupation and so the denominators used do not include the missing cases We will update the data for this week 47 in our next presentation to the board.

The clerical management continues to exceed pandemic percentage of cases this week at 21.7 versus the pandemic percentage out of 12.6%. So, clerical management includes clerical office sales workers as well as managers officials and proprietors Under 18 also continues to exceed the pandemic percentage of cases at 21.7% versus the pandemic at 13.2%. We are still seeing the retired slightly higher in representation as well.

The two areas that shows a decrease in proportion as related to the pandemic percentage is the laborers unskilled, the first and the second being among the agricultural sector.

Supervisor Williams?

So I guess the extension of my previous question is if this trend has continued with clerical workers and office workers what What are we doing about it? What can we do about it? Do you feel like you've been able to explore all the optional outreach options in the last two weeks, or do we give that a little bit more time and just say we may have to take other options if the The education doesn't permeate,

right? So

and I mean my editorial comment is to me. It's obvious that people are telecommuting less it's probably not by choice. It's more an employer choice or employer encouragement because This has taken place at the same time that driving and traffic is up during peak hours. So, that to me tells me something.

Supervisor Williams through the chair, just a couple of points. So these are the occupation of cases. It doesn't really necessarily mean that the exposure occurred in the workplace. So that's one. So since we have discovered or since we've are aware of the higher, the disproportionate number of cases in the clerical management Thank you, Mr. President. As we are seeing in the nation and the state, although these are the occupation it is widespread transmission so this could be anywhere. So I think that the point taking home is one what can we do to reduce the exposure? Telecommuting is definitely a great option and also adherence Mask wearing while at work, observing the social distance while at work as well as practicing hand sanitation and workplace disinfection.

Those are really good strategies to maintain or to mitigate the transmission.

Forgive me because I haven't made this request before, but could we look at the same data for Ventura County since you know we have such a large amount of our workers live in Ventura County and may be showing up on Ventura County stats instead of our county stats. So if Ventura was experiencing the same issue with office and clerical workers it might mean that there is transmission happening at work Because we have a significant number of our workers that live in Ventura County.

I'm unaware whether my colleagues in Ventura are capturing this same specific information, but I'm more than happy to reach out to my colleagues.

That'd be great. Thank you for the question. Dr. Duranoso please continue.

This is no longer anticipated because it's public knowledge. For this tier assignment, our adjusted case rate is 10 and that was adjusted from 14.1 due to our exceedance of the state median number of tests per day. Our positivity rate is at 4.4, the health equity metric is not calculated by CDPH for these past few tier assignments and this map that is displayed is from a tier assignment that was made on Saturday I believe and so as you can see most of our state is in the purple tier Our case rate trend, so we went from 4.3 on October 31st to 10 for this current tier assignment. So that's roughly a 133% increase.

There is evidence that transmission is rising. Our testing positively, let me start over, our testing positivity increase by 144%, going from 1.8% on October 31st to the current 4.4% in our current tier assignment. With regards to. School waivers, we currently have one school waiver. We did reach out to the school as of this morning and encourage the school to pursue the cohort option rather than the school waiver option given that our rising case rate may not get approved by the state. So we are in conversation with Agave School of Christian Education for the cohort route. And it is unlikely if our case rate continues to rise that CDPH would approve any other local school waiver forms, so we will be having that conversation with our school partners as well.

And that concludes my presentation.

Thank you again for the excellent report Dr. Doronoso. Are there other questions? Are there any members of the public who'd like to speak on this item?

Chair Hart and members of the board, yes we have two requests to speak on this item. And we will be going to Lisa Sloan to be followed by Peggy Wilson.

Hello, this is Lisa Sloan and I am a citizen of Goleta. Good afternoon Chairman Hart and Board of Supervisors. Thank you for your kind... Oops, sorry, I thought I put it on mute. I'm sorry about that. Well, I thank you for your kind concern about the health of the citizens of Santa Barbara County I just listened to Dr. Donoso saying a 31% increase in cases of COVID, but there are other concerns affecting the health of the citizens of Santa Barbara County.

The severe health officer orders have caused a number of small businesses to close permanently while incidents of domestic violence, drug abuse and suicide are on the rise Students have fallen behind significantly in their studies due to remote learning, which is ridiculous because only two people under the age of 18 have died in a state of 40 million people. Furthermore, remote learning has had a worse impact upon children from lower income families.

Advisor to the president Dr. Scott Atlas recently stated that the administration identified and illuminated early on the harms of prolonged lockdown including that they create massive physical health losses and psychological stress, destroy families and damage our children. Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is there a provision that the Bill of Rights become void in time of national or even global emergencies.

Governor Newsom has violated the constitution in more than Just because he recommends a lockdown doesn't make it legal, nor should our health officer recommend one, nor should the Board of Supervisors approve it. If Newsom believed that a lockdown would work then why did he himself violate it as he had acknowledged with a simple apology? The citizens of Santa Barbara don't want apologies, nor handouts, nor unscientific lockdowns.

It's time to open up the county and let the people get back to work. Let them take pride in their work, however unessential the government might find it to be. After all if it feeds clothes and shelters a family, it is an essential business because shelter clothing and nutritious food protect families from many kinds of diseases COVID being only one of them. Thank you.

Thank you very much Ms. Sloan

We will now go to Peggy Wilson, and we had an additional request to speak by Linda Cole.

Hello? Hello?

Yes, we can hear you.

Go ahead. Oh, you can hear me? I'm sorry. Can you hear me? Thank you, board members and Dr. Reynoso. I would like to ask Dr. Reynoso in her comments if we see there is a lot more test positive and there's many conflicting data. There are many other doctors besides Dr. Reynoso that say to test, to use the barometer of positive cases It's a false premise. All of the stuff we would be talking about if we were using just hospitalizations and just deaths would be a lot different, but now we're in the purple tier and I will say we will never get out of the purple tier because as you test more people there will be more positive tests. Now Dr. Reynoso I would like you to say how many false positives come forward? You also mentioned that hospitals, more people were in hospitals but you said there's still availability.

So if you could say how much was available in the hospitals? That would be helpful. The next thing I heard was we went from 133 deaths to 136 which is still for our county very small considering the amount of people that we have. Deaths are down, hospitalizations are still down. Cases aren't valid unless there's something nefarious going on here telling us how we're supposed to live, how we're supposed to think, how we'r esupposed to work. I want to say never in the history of mankind again do you take a healthy population and quarantine them. You take the sick. There is more harm engaged in quarantining the healthy people Poverty is going to kill more people and have lasting damage than this virus. Again, depression, hopelessness, poverty, isolation okay?

You guys I want to say to the board members you guys govern by the consent of the governed and that's us. And using the guise of COVID to lock down you are complicit and I want to say this, this is huge in the largest transfer of wealth from small businesses to large conglomerates. Just think about that, think about what's happened. This is in the history of the United States and then I want to end with this. You guys took an oath and this was your oath. I do solemnly swear or affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same that I will take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of invasion. Look, you are invading on people's constitutional rights.

We know this is COVID. We know how to handle ourselves. We know that it affects the elderly and it affects people with core morbidities. Open up the state look at the other doctors and other people how they're treating not just in California we will never open up guys with this purple Tear, it's never going to happen. It will never happen. You are causing poverty and lastly our Constitution says this that we hold the truth to be self-evident that all men are created equal and goes on and says deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed and whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and throw it off I am sorry, but you guys are stepping and continue to step on a line that you should not be crossing.

And board members please your right is not to protect our health it's to protect our guaranteed constitutional rights thank you.

Thank You Ms. Wilson.

And we will now go to our final speaker who is Linda Cole Alrighty, Linda. Go ahead.

Hi there. How are you all today? I have a concern because I have routinely found on after the weekend on Monday on the key white team news online website that Monday's COVID case count is only including Monday's new cases. It does not have an accounting of the case, the new cases that have been diagnosed on Saturday and Sunday. The problem I have with that is that there is not an accounting of a total how many new cases we have. As an example this weekend which I understand was a longer than usual weekend and the fact that we're in a surge but on Monday the case count report was 52 new And I understand they were doing that just for Sunday. I'm sorry, just for Monday but there was no accounting of the cases for Thursday or Friday or Saturday or Sunday which were not reported in the news during the weekend because that's not released being that it was weekend and holiday.

But those cases were a total of 397 new cases in our community And my concern is that Santa Barbara is getting the news, many people online these days. And that the numbers look not accurate, not complete and so people are not getting a true sense of how large of a problem there is in our community. My other concern is how many active cases are being reported in the news each Monday.

Being last Wednesday on November 25th, we had 392 active cases, currently active and contagious cases reported in this website of San Barbara KUYT's News. And then we went to five days with no reporting. And on Monday, we had a total of 397 new cases since Wednesday the 25th which gives us a total of 785 cases that I would imagine would be active. What is in Monday's report is 402, I'm sorry 410 reported active cases on Monday, which means only 13 cases from the original cases on Wednesday of the 392 were still contagious.

I'm concerned about our community not understanding that there are more cases than what we're seeing or I'm not understanding what is the definition of an active case So I would love to know what that is.

Yes, Supervisor Hart. On our website I want to encourage our public to get accurate information directly from our website so that would be PublicHealthSBC.org There is on the right-hand side, there is the daily status report which will detail it by the daily. So coming from the weekend on Monday, there will be these stats for Monday new cases, recovered cases, active cases, hospitalized cases deaths and the preceding days, the Sunday, the Saturday, Friday All of that is categorized on a daily basis, so you need to go down to the next page to see that date. I also want to encourage members of the public to check out our community dashboard. There is a data dictionary that defines what is an active case, what is considered a recovered case, hospitalization and it has not only daily data but cumulative data as well.

Thank you, Dr. Dermann. Are there any other questions or comments from board members on departmental item number one? One thing I would just like to add is a little perspective on the case count for Santa Barbara County. You showed, I think it's on slide 14 has the map of the state of California and I'm not 100% sure that my information is accurate because it changes every day but I had heard that the state average of cases is 36 per hundred thousand. Does that sound right to you?

And Okay, and that San Bernardino County was one of the highest in the state at 56. And so we're at 10 are neighboring counties in San Luis Obispo and Ventura County are significantly higher than we are. So there are there are gradations. of community spread on this map, even though it represents purple across the state of California. There are wide variations within those counties as to the amount of cases that are being discovered through testing and I think it is encouraging even though overall you know this is sobering and difficult that our cases are less than neighboring jurisdictions. And that is clearly a reflection of our community trying very, very hard to do the right thing and to resist the spread of the virus. That's important and will serve us well in regards to future hospitalizations and progress in the future.

So I'm not agreeing with Ms. Wilson who said we're never gonna get back to a lower caseload. We can and we will. We just gotta be diligent about it. Is there, would anybody like to make a motion on this item?

Move staff recommendation.

Thank you. Second. Motion has been made and seconded. I have

a question, I'm sorry

Chair Hart.

I'm sorry this just kind of popped up in my head when you brought that up. So when the vaccine and I guess this is down the road but when the vaccine is readily available maybe in the spring of next year This question for Dr. Reynoso, has the state talked anything at all about tiering programs or are we still going to be talking about active cases versus that? Or is it going to be your percentage of vaccination or has anybody even talked about what that would look like yet?

Supervisor let me know through the chair no that topic hasn't come up yet, but I will put it on my radar to introduce that if you'd like.

Well might be premature, but I think you know I don't have a kind of somewhere in between the public speaker and the chair as far as yeah, I think the virus is what it is and. As much as we do that the parameters are so small of We may not get back to normal, whatever that is until there's widespread vaccination. And so obviously I'm pulling for that sooner rather than later but that led me to start thinking what kind of guidelines are gonna be in place even after we have a vaccination? But yeah just something to kick around I guess.

You know, and I think you're on to something Supervisor Levin because the governor has talked yesterday believe about possibility of a regional rollout of the stay at home order based on hospital capacity. I don't think that's been defined as to what a region would be but it is encouraging for us to be in a better situation and continue better than our neighbors, if we can sustain that. And then the prescription for doing that is the same as it's been and people are doing that and that's why our numbers are better so...

All right, so we have a motion and a second. Is there any discussion? Madam Clerk could you please call the roll?

Mr. Lavagnino?

Aye.

Mr. Williams? Aye. Ms. Hartman? Aye Chair Hart?

Aye

Motion passes unanimously.

The next item is departmental item, excuse me, CEO Miyasato?

Chair we thought it was a good opportunity and Dr. Ansorg is online and Dr. De Ranoso just to acknowledge both of them. Dr. Ansorg was selected as Physician of the Year for 2020 and as you know Dr. De Ranoso is considered a local hero in the Santa Barbara Independent so we just wanted to acknowledge them for all the work they've put in Over a year, I remember being in the EOC with Dr. De Reynoso when this first happened and she had a chart that she had this going out to November-December and I said come on! That can't be right. And here we are but we want to just say thank you for all your work for both of you.

Thank you so much for the acknowledgement. And it is really, I've been an honor working with you and you and Dr. Ansberg putting in incredible hours and time and your dedication and performance are outstanding. And so thank you on behalf of the whole community for all the things you've been doing and continue to do. All right that brings us to departmental item number D2. Madam Clerk would you please read that item into the record?

Chair Hart and members of the board, departmental item number two is from the county executive office. It is a hearing to consider recommendations regarding an update on criminal justice system changes in advancing racial equity and inclusion in Santa Barbara County.

This is our third hearing on racial equity and criminal justice reform since spring, when thousands of people in our community and millions of Americans demanded change in the aftermath of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. We're here to have an honest policy discussion about addressing the impacts of systemic racism on our black, Latino, indigenous, and Asian-American community members Advancing racial equity is critical for the health, wellness and safety of our community.

The impacts of systemic racism can have dramatic consequences in our county. This looks like black and Latino residents being arrested and incarcerated at higher rates, Latino residents and other people of color testing positive for COVID-19 at higher rates and generational inequities fueling achievement gaps that exist in many of our local schools. We have a lot of work to do, but I'm very encouraged by the efforts that are underway so far. I'd like to acknowledge all the community advocates who've been doing the hard work of organizing community members to advocate for change, especially leaders from our black community. I would also like to thank our County Executive Officer Mona Miyasato, Assistant CEO Barney Melekian, Human Resources Director Maria Elena de Guevara, First five, Director Wendy Sims-Moten and many of our county department directors who are working to shape our county's renewed commitment to promoting racial justice.

Today we'll have a comprehensive update on the county's efforts to advance racial equity in our criminal justice system, the county workforce, our sustainability programs, arts and cultural work and more. CEO Miyasato would you like to introduce this item?

Thank you Chair Hart. Today we're here, as you said, to talk about some of the changes in the criminal justice system and advancing racial equity and inclusion in our county. And today we're gonna have two components of this report. The first is an update and a follow-up from the July 16th hearing your board had which was actually a follow up to a June hearing.

And Assistant County Executive Officer Dr. Malikian will talk about action steps to reduce the jail population and talk about progress by each of our criminal justice department heads. They are, their staff are online or available to answer any questions and just to let you know we Had some typos, it wasn't 13 action steps but 15 and there have been some amendments and corrections that were posted.

The second part of today's hearing is to talk about what we're doing to advance racial equity and inclusion in the community and in our organization. It's proposing a statement of commitment for your board. Maria Elena de Guevara, our Human Resources Director will talk about the JOIN initiative or framework for the county's organization Director George Chapchin is here today from community services and he'll be talking about different proposals to hear more from our community.

I'll be asking for your approval of uses of the equity fund and then approval to create a process for allocating the remainder, and of course to receive any board input. As we said, this is the third hearing the board has had on this topic. And again, we listened carefully to the first two hearings where there was many community voices expressing concern mostly about the criminal justice system and policing efforts.

And again, this is to remind the public that there's no one entity that is completely in charge of the criminal justice system. Again it's a system of different actors, departments, judges, different players The way to make progress is to ensure collaboration among the agencies, to ensure there's justice and transparency. We the county as evident by the reports you're seeing today, as well as many organizations nationwide are taking the time to self-reflect and evaluate our own programs to look at our systems and our intended outcomes And define what progress means and for whom.

And this is in line with Renew 22, which has been our effort to transform county government and revision how we do our work. And with that I'm going to hand it to Dr. Markey.

Thank you Ms. Miyasato and Chair Hart members of the board thank you for the opportunity to again provide an update to you since the hearing of July 16th. Just as a bit of a reminder that the county's efforts to actually change and remap the criminal justice system has been underway for a number of years. A national effort that the board approved several years ago designed to divert mentally ill people out of the jail. The criminal justice mapping project, which began about two years ago with this specific idea of how can we in effect create what came to be known as off ramps out of the system to avoid incarceration?

And then a number of grants which I'll touch on for just a minute all of which are focused on diversion. The four grants in particular related to diversion, one is called the DSH Diversion Grant, formerly known as AB 1810. It is designed to divert felony suspects who are either have been found incompetent to stand trial or are in danger of being found incompetent to stand trial to get treatment in the community Rather than have to sit in jail, very often getting worse while they wait for transportation to the state hospital.

Credo 47 which is formally known as Proposition 47 grant is designed to identify those people who rather than going through trial can be diverted to some form of alternative either care or treatment or restorative justice programs. The BJA co-response grant funds a pairing of behavioral wellness specialists and sheriff's deputies to respond to calls involving persons suffering from mental illness.

And as I believe we mentioned before, it's now underway the city of Santa Barbara has a co-response team and the city of Santa Maria is in the process of developing a co response team. So between that and Prop 47, we are on track to have five such teams available throughout the county. And then lastly is a Sixth Amendment grant which focused on access of attorneys to their clients while they're in custody as well as looking at the processes for the court system and it is our... I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute but our hope is to come back early part of next year with a more detailed report on that That grant is overseen by the Center for Court Innovation and our contact with them is looking forward to making a presentation to the board.

As the previous slide noted, the jail population in our county has been declining since about 2015. I would note when I first came to work for the county in January of 2015, the average daily population in the jail hovered right around 1130 inmates In April of last year, April 1st of last year it was at 932. In April 1st of this year which is about two weeks after the declaration of the pandemic emergency and the beginning of processes to empty the jail out it dropped to 692 and currently it's at 529 The 122 number that you see on the graph refers to those inmates who are sentenced to state prison, but because of state protocols have not been eligible for transport up to this point and are being held in our jail until they can be.

I was advised about three days ago that the process of moving those inmates has begun this week. The two primary forms of incarceration in the county jail system involve physical incarceration and then what's referred to as alternative sentencing. The two primary methods of alternative sentencing, one is electronic monitoring and the other is a sheriff's work program where people report to the facility and do work around around the jail or around the process, whatever they're assigned to do. You'll notice that those numbers have dropped. That drop is due primarily to the fact that the inmates who would normally be eligible for such programs are no longer in jail to begin with.

As I'll talk about in a couple of minutes one of the Sheriff's proposed performance measures for the next budget year is to double the capacity for putting people on electronic monitoring. and to increase that program. Overall, in terms of trends with regards to the custody there's been a 37% decline in the inmate population since the beginning of the pandemic. That number has held constant since April and I already discussed the fact that the state only recently began taking those inmates that were sentenced to state prison.