Area Council - Regular Meeting

all right thank you everyone for attending this evening we're going to go ahead and call it the meeting to order this is the East Region Town Hall meeting for June 3rd uh 2026 we're at the Moose Lodge in Clear Lake Oaks can you hear it now okay So our first item on the agenda we're going to roll call. Angela present, Lori Korea, Holly Harris here, Donna Makowitz is absent. Sterling woman here. Thank you. Next item on the agenda is going to be public input. Public input is up to three minutes per citizen to discuss any item that is within the committee's jurisdiction and that is not on the agenda for this evening. Do we have any public input?

Well, first of all, I would like to congratulate supervisor Crandall for re winning the election.

Thank you. Any other public input? All right, we'll move on to item number four, approval of the earth minutes from April 29th, 2026 and special meeting from May 6th, 2026. Any discussion on the meeting minutes? No. Do I have a motion for the meeting minutes? Yes, you have a motion. I have a motion. Do I have a second?

You have a second.

I have a motion and a second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? All right.

Okay, I got it. I hear you.

I see you. All right. We'll start this evening with our first guest speaker is going to be me.

Two minutes.

Two minutes what?

There was the 429 and the 5. I thought we did them both in one motion. Oh, we did? Okay. Did we do them both in one motion? No, you didn't.

Okay. That's how I understood it. Okay. All right. Moving on to item number five, our guest speaker is Megan Morgan, the community liaison for Lake County Behavioral Health Services. She's going to provide an overview of upcoming changes, the peer center closure, and what support and services will be available moving forward. Oh, you're Elise Jones, Director Jones.

Right here.

Do you want to move?

Okay, hello everybody. This is nice to see that community comes out in such strong support for these things. This is not my district, full disclosure, so that's why I've never attended one of these meetings before. I live in Lucerne. I am the director of Lake County Behavioral Health Services. We are coming here because there's been a lot of changes with regard to behavioral health services in the past year. Well, that's a lovely photo. Oh, Megan is getting married, by the way, in October, and she's engaged to a lovely man. Okay, and that was what I think of their engagement photos. Okay. It's a nice photo, I will say that. So, In an effort to bring our community along with these changes, we're here coming out to you. I know that staff from behavioral health has previously came to these meetings and expressed some things. And so this is an official position of Lake County Behavioral Health Services, as opposed to what you might've heard before from staff. All right, next slide. Okay, so as a background, how many people have heard of the Mental Health Services Act? Okay, so this is good. So the Mental Health Services Act was passed in 2004. It's a 1% tax on the wealthiest Californians, so those people earning over a million dollars a year. It's designed to expand mental health services above and beyond traditional supports. And a lot of the reason why this passed was resultant of the closure of the state hospitals in the 80s and 90s, recognizing that there was still not enough services and supports for people with behavioral health. This was a voter initiative. So the MHSA allowed us significant local flexibility with regard to how we could spend these funds. So thus we had programming such as the Big Oak Peer Support Center that many of you are already familiar with. as well as the other peer-run wellness centers across the lake. We also had a variety of other programming that was not captured in Medi-Cal reimbursable services. So if you didn't know, primarily what we do is have a contract with the state of California that designates to us to provide specialty mental health services as well as substance use disorder treatment services. And we bill the state, the state bills the feds, we get federal Medicaid dollars. So this is above and beyond what we can do with those traditional services and supports. So again, it created things like the wellness centers, prevention and early intervention programs that have admittedly been very beloved by our county for a long time.

Next slide.

Okay, so this is again some of the history. This is how MHSA used to be funded and how it used to be broken out. And again, this was determined by the state and the voter initiative, so we had a lot of funding in the category of prevention and early intervention. What that means is generally trying to get the word out about mental health and behavioral health. One of the number one reasons that people don't seek or receive timely treatment for behavioral health is because of stigma and simply also because they don't know that help exists. So MHSA had a big push of breaking down stigma around receiving services. Obviously there's still a lot of stigma today. It's a continuing battle. And we also had some focused outreach and prevention categories that were locally driven around older adults, postpartum, depression and screening, mental health first aid, and of course notably the peer run wellness centers. We have these other buckets of funding, community services and supports. And by the way, if anybody will just send this as a PDF to the group. So don't feel like you have to digest all of this tonight. It will be made accessible to you. I apologize. We did not have printed copies. That was an oversight on our part. But it also supported some of these peer run wellness centers and a variety of other programs. We also had some funding to support workforce development and education and training. which was really great. It actually allowed scholarships and stipends for people pursuing higher education, primarily trying to build a local workforce of licensed clinicians. We're not in a hotspot of professionals here. It's rural and we like it that way. However, it comes with the fact that we don't have a deep pool, a deep bench of workforce to pool with, so we have to grow our own. We also had innovation, which is a separate category, to develop innovative approaches to a variety of different things within mental health. And lastly, we also had capital facilities. What does that mean? Brick and mortar. Like, take care of your buildings, take care of your stuff. Obviously, running a healthcare system requires technology and a lot of infrastructure, so part of that funding allowed us to maintain and expand that.

All right.

What is the Behavioral Health Services Act? Anybody familiar with Proposition 1 that was voted on a couple of years ago? You would have hopefully voted or seen it on your ballot. So Proposition 1 passed by a very narrow margin. It actually did not pass in Lake County, which is interesting. And it turned the MHSA into the Behavioral Health Services Act. And it dramatically transformed not only the MHSA 1% millionaires tax funding, but also the entirety of behavioral health. So this was a very ambitious proposition run by the governor, who is outgoing now, as well as the Department of Health Care Services, who had very strong feelings about how behavioral health services should be funded and operate within the state of California. And so here we are, it's passed, and now our first plan for the Behavioral Health Services Act is due to the state in final form by the end of this month. So as part of this, they want to expand the focus to really focus on those with the most serious challenges and really move away from a generalist position of doing general outreach prevention and wellness to very specific focus on the people that they've identified in the plan. Also a big emphasis on housing, you may be aware that the governor, one of his central platforms was housing. So there is now a dedicated bucket of funding within the BHSA just for housing, just for behavioral health plans to implement housing, which is, we'll talk more about that, it's pretty fascinating. So again, focus on increasing permanent supportive housing, increasing access to substance use disorder treatment services, and increase transparency. This proposition didn't just change this, again, this specific pot of money, it changed the entire way that behavioral health plans are allowed and should operate, and we take our marching orders from the state, right? Next slide. so this is about as clean as we could make it the funding changes are complex it's hard to convey so this shows a comparison of the previous mental health services act allocations to the current behavioral health services act allocations we just went over what they used to be so essentially we're having to squeeze or alter or fit that funding into these new what i call buckets of funding There is, for example, no more prevention and early intervention category of funding. They've eliminated that. There is no more innovation category of funding. In fact, none of those old categories of funding exist in the new world order, if you will. Now, in the BHSA, we have a bucket just dedicated to full service partnership. If you didn't know, that's a service for some of our most needy and most ill individuals, and it's essentially a wraparound service, and the motto is whatever it takes to help people gain stability, engage in their community at the highest level, obviously have stable housing, but basically a place to go, a feeling of community, and access to high quality services. So now that has its own dedicated funding bucket, We also have housing. Now, here's the kicker is that our housing, what we spent in full service partnership on housing historically actually exceeds what the state has determined our housing allocation is. So we've already been spending millions of dollars on housing. We didn't need the state to tell us that people need to be housed if they're in our services. So actually, it's a slight reduction in what we have historically spent on housing, which is just fascinating. So we also have this new category of behavioral health services and supports. Of that, 9% can go to what's called early intervention for people under the age of 25. The goal is you catch people early, get them in services so they don't become sicker, right? And then there's everything else. And everything else, we had to fit all of those other MHSA categories into that very small everything else. All right, next slide. This is another way of looking at how we converted funding and changes from the MHSA to the BHSA. So this category of community services and supports, now Full-Service Partnership has its own dedicated category. So we no longer have the other category of community services and supports. All of our outreach and engagement and prevention services, again, we had to figure out where they fit in this new order. So those big categories essentially got condensed. And again, this will go out to you, and if you have any questions, obviously you can ask them now, or if they come up as you digest this information, please feel free to reach out, because it is a little bit complex. Next slide, please. So as you all are already aware, this has resulted and necessitated in significant changes. Those changes aren't just happening in Lake County. This has been, I will say, I would characterize it as a painful process because it has required every single county in California to essentially sunset a lot of programs that can't fit within what is a very small discretionary pot of funding. So the state has taken a much more active authority in telling us how we have to spend our money. We have much less local authority and determination under this new plan. So as a result, there was simply not enough funding and also no longer a mandate, thus the peer run wellness centers have sunsetted. That was a tough decision. However, we have to follow and comply with the funding. We are exploring some alternative models because we recognize our community really loved and depended on these peer run wellness centers. One of them includes something called the Clubhouse, but it is incredibly difficult to opt into this new benefit for such a small county with limited resources. So we're exploring alternatives basically for sustainability of this funding through a Medi-Cal revenue source, which we're gonna try our darndest, but there are no guarantees. So again, the centers are closing because of global changes made by the Department of Health Care Services with regard to how counties can spend these dollars. This was not a locally determined decision. We had a very narrow bucket to work within, and we had to figure out what our mandates are, because at the same time, Prop 1 established what's called behavioral health transformation, which requires counties to implement really rigorous what's called evidence-based practices. And they're very expensive in terms of a staffing perspective, in terms of every perspective from an operational lift. And so we determined it was the best thing to focus our energy on doing what is required of the state with these rigorous programs. And that left no financial room nor operational room to continue these centers in their present iteration. All right. We understand it feels like services are being taken away and we'll address what we are trying to do to mitigate that. We understand that there's a perception that the county independently made a decision to change this and shut these centers down. which hopefully you understand is not the case. That was not a locally made decision. No staff were laid off. We had a plan actually of integration of our peer support staff to come and join more of our traditional clinical teams. Some folks chose to do that, some folks didn't, but there was never a talk of layoff. We were reorganizing our structure to accommodate the new reality. So again, peer support services, however, still exist as a Medi-Cal reimbursable service within a clinical Medi-Cal reimbursable team. So we are still gearing up. In fact, in preparation from that, we had nearly all of our peer support specialists certified to provide. They got a certification with the state that they have to renew every year. I don't know if it's annually or every couple of years to be able to provide medical reimbursable peer support services. But we kind of saw this coming and we're hedging our bets. Right. And so the staff that were at the peer run wellness centers and who chose to migrate into our clinical teams will continue to exist and within a Medicaid reimbursable structure. All right. Next one. As I said, we have to transition to these evidence-based models as determined by the state of California and Proposition 1. As I said, we are looking at something called the Clubhouse Model, which is something like a peer-run wellness center, but it has a lot more, I would say, standards of evidence-based practices that the state will come in and audit you, and they check off, and if you meet fidelity, you get to bill, and if you don't, you can't. As it was, our peer-run wellness centers were not optimally positioned, it turns out, to opt into this clubhouse model, but because we understand that a wellness-type center is so vital to our communities, it is an option that we are continuing to explore. However, there's a lot of heavy lifts right now, and so we're focusing on what's required because we don't want to get dinged or have recruitments or sanctions for not doing the bare minimum of what they've asked us, which is a lot. The ceiling of the floor is very high right now. We are focusing on long-term recovery, stability, services that support that. We are required actually to implement a supportive employment program, which is a brand new program we haven't ever offered before, as well as something called assertive community treatment. And the state is very focused on measurable outcomes. They really want a lot of data from us to say that this funding is being used and it is actually moving the needle on recovery in our community which is something that kind of existed with MHSA but not like it does now. So the focus on accountability for behavioral health plans has increased dramatically from a state perspective and as well as the federal government who has now recently expressed a concern about fraud within California, and so the screws, so to say, are tightening on, and the eyes are on us to make sure that we are really tight with our services and our reporting. Okay, next slide. We understand that these changes are hugely impactful to the community. There's no doubt about it. We understand that people perceive this as a loss and objectively it is. In fact, I didn't state this earlier, but the transition from the MHSA to the BHSA, previously the state took 5% off the top of that in the MHSA and kept it for administration activities and whatnot. Now, they're keeping 10%. So it's objectively less funding to counties with more requirements. So the state has literally said you must do more with effectively less. We are committed, that's why we're here, to transparency, to talking with you all about why these changes occurred. We are continued to be dedicated to compassionate care of the most vulnerable individuals in our community. And we are doing our best to align our programming with these new guidelines while still doing as much as we can to honor the needs of this county, which has proven to be quite difficult.

All right.

I guess that concludes the presentation. Thank you. Excuse me, Elise, can you tell us I'm right here. Can you tell us what services you are continuing to offer here?

Yes, and I'm going to ask my deputy director of clinical services, Ms. April Gambra, to come up. So it's a lot of services that are available to the community. Are you prepared to speak on that, my dear?

I am. It's what I live and breathe. So my name is April Gambra. I am a current resident in District 3. So I do reside here and this is my town hall and community. So with that in mind, a little background. I've been with the department 13 years. I was a client within our services and so I know what it means to walk from that front door all the way through the entire service kind of menu, if you will, from our substance use to our specialty mental health. So currently, we provide, like there's a very long list. We provide therapy, case management, prevention services, mental health support, medication management, peer support specialists, transportation to court, assistance in finding housing, assistance in finding jobs, assistance in getting food, basic resources, access to services. We link individuals with getting Medi-Cal. We provide that warm hand, safe place, comfort. We help with family systems, family therapy. We help place individuals into residential substance use treatment. We help put individuals into detox. Manage discharge from psychiatric hospitals. We also place 5150 holds, which is conserving individuals who are a danger to themselves or others. Once they're out of placement, return to the county. We facilitate with discharge planning. And then, I mean, from beginning to end. From beginning to end. We also do provide.

So how do people get to it? I mean, if the peer center is no longer here, how do people get access to this?

That's a great question. I wanted to say that I know we haven't publicly announced this, but right next door to where the Big Oak Center was at, we have our mobile crisis services. It's called the Living Room. And in concept, it's a 23-hour center where people can go kind of stay from the element, get additional support, access crisis services, or be linked directly into any of those services that I was referencing. We are going to keep that open Monday through Friday, 830 to 430. The shower trailers will continue and the food distribution will continue. This is an interim plan until hopefully we can partner or another community provider kind of helps us lift up. We heard all of the statements that Elise made. We understand. I went and met with our community consumers who visited the Big Oak Center and I heard a lot of their concerns. One of which was the heat, right? We're doing this, all these changes are coming right about the time it's about ready to be 105 degrees out there. And so we did kind of shift, move everybody up in the building and provide a smaller but supportive service. So you can go there as stated Monday through Friday. So we have several toll-free numbers for mental health and substance use and our mobile crisis services. Elise is sporting one of our fancy gray and green shirts. For those of you that do not know, we do offer 24-7, 365 support for both mental health and substance use. When I say mental health and substance use, I really mean behavioral health. We've had calls from people unhappy with elections. We've had calls from people who didn't get their income this month. We've had calls with people who are in complete crisis and who needed to be hospitalized. But a team of two trained professionals will respond any hour of the day, 365 days, a year we have mental health and substance use trained staff who will go out into the community they don't have to have an address they don't have to have medical they don't have to have any of those things and support that individual so so I guess and I understand how difficult everything is that you're going through but also for the clients too

I guess as a suggestion I would make, I went by on Thursday. I understood you were going to be closed on June 1st, and I went by on Thursday just to check on the center, and it was totally shut down. Totally shut down, no signs. There was a thing saying you can call this phone number, but as a suggestion, it would be really great if you... I went by on Monday and I saw it said that the showers and the food drop offs will still continue but it didn't say when or where or anything like that. It didn't say anything about the mobile crisis. So if I'm coming in and I'm in crisis or something and I see this, I don't know what's going on. And it would be great if something could be posted on those doors.

Yes. As many of you know, I watched your last public recording and viewing of the meeting. We didn't have a plan. So all of this kind of came at the last minute, and we found an opportunity to do this. Unfortunately, we did not have proper time to really set up or strategize or advertise that the center would be moving next door. But note taken, 100%. There will be something.

We're definitely happy to do outreach on this, et cetera. But we need...

need the microphone Kathy okay Sterling Sterling move your mic this way your other mic

I was going to say because that one wasn't even on.

Kathy Garner residents with their showers do you provide clean clothes and food?

Not at this time, no. We're looking for community partners to take that on because providing that is not within our wheelhouse. We have no funding source for that anymore.

Well, they didn't have funding either, but all of us residents donated food. We donated clothes. So they have to leave with a clean, nice shower and funky clothes.

yeah so okay so we're back on so unfortunately the area that we went to is limited in space like I said we move seven staff up to a front part of the building so we don't have storage what we do have is I did meet with one of the consumers who also expressed that concern and we are going to offer at minimum a t-shirt a clean change for men or women and no more than like five if someone should need it. So there are gonna be some options. I just don't wanna kind of advertise that we have those same services that were previously made available. Also, from what I understand, there were hot lunches that were being served there. That is not something that we are permitted to do by our health department. So we cannot do that and should not be doing that. We are aware that it is important to give an opportunity to help those who may not have a meal. And we are working with some of the consumers to bring in cold lunches and other supplies as we can in that moment on those days that they are there.

So what I will also say is with some of the individuals that have came post closure of the center, we have worked really hard to connect them to existing community resources, right? And so for example, that shower trailer is operated by Adventist Health. We have a variety of community partners that we're working with because in our absence, there are resources for those community partners to step up and play a bigger role, which again, I'm not saying this is easy, but we are working diligently to try to patch those gaps with our community, the nonprofit sector, as best as we can. And some of those individuals we've already been able to link successfully to ongoing services. So that's really our goal is individuals come in and we do more than just give them a meal. We actually link them to services so that they don't require that level of assistance ongoing.

And I don't want to take away from the work that had been done previously through the peer centers. The teams that worked there did a lot of work, a lot of work, linking individuals to services and doing the same things that we're describing here today. So this is not to take away from everything that they have done so wonderfully throughout the years. I will say that I returned on Tuesday, and today is Thursday, okay. Wednesday. Wednesday? Okay, Wednesday. So we successfully put two people into our housing, linked them into housing resources and are getting them kind of prepared for when we're able to help fund the transitional rent benefit and place them. In addition, we also were able to link one person into services who did frequent the showers yesterday and who requested that additional support. The center where we're at now does have TV, a couch, coffee, a bathroom, a sink, a fridge, so some resources there. It's just not quite as big and as much as previously offered, so. people do want to donate is there a place they can drop off in lakeport and it's just not there where you guys can hold it and bring it down when you do do those no what i can promise or at least promise to make effort to is to help identify as people continue to partner where we can share those resources but unfortunately that location itself does not it doesn't have that capacity. That doesn't mean that we can't find another agency or entity to partner with. Oh, I'm sorry. I apologize. So what she asked was, what I promised is we will link with other partners and communities to potentially identify a place where donations can be made. We understand that it is important to have those donations accessible. We just do not have the facilities to be able to do that where we're at.

I have a question. First of all, I want to thank you for doing what you guys do. It's a tremendous service to the community. It's stressing to see that you're having to deal with these cuts. I also want to apologize because you guys do so many things. I might have the wrong department when I talk about this. I believe it's the Mobile Crisis Center. The question is, one of your departments interfaces with law enforcement when there's like a behavioral health or mental health issue. And my question is, is any of that impacted by these cuts? And the reason I bring it up is because about seven, eight months ago, Sheriff Bingham mentioned in a another town hall that since that center the mobile crisis unit or whatever it's called was put in a place it's reduced their need to use force by 85 percent that would be our mobile crisis benefit and that's independent and separate from the centers themselves thank you

I will say, since you asked about it, that the state's budget, so first of all, let's backtrack. Mobile crisis, again, is this 24-7, 365 day a year service, and it did result in a dramatic reduction in use of force by all law enforcement agencies across the county. It's been a wildly successful benefit I think we have a fire chief back there who may be able to attest a little bit to the effectiveness of the, because we would respond with all of our first responders to try to divert that, recognizing that these law enforcement personnel and fire services personnel they could be better used elsewhere than supporting behavioral health crisis. So it allowed us to go into the community and support that need. So that was required of us. The Department of Health Care Service said, effective January 1st, 2023, all counties must have a mobile crisis program. We said, okay. And we actually had the first approved mobile crisis implementation plan in the state of California because we were very eager. We immediately saw how much this could benefit our community. Fast forward to this current state budget proposal, the governor's budget eliminated mobile crisis as a benefit. So we took two years to scale up what is admittedly a very costly program, like it takes a lot of staff, it's 24-7 guys, and said, you know what, it's actually optional, we're not gonna support that anymore, but if you wanna do it, basically if you can afford it, then you can have it. Unfortunately, we're not a wealthy county. We're not in a position to afford such a service as that. So, as a part of that, I've done an incredible amount of advocacy. There is some promising movement, I would say, at the Senate, the State Senate and the State Assembly, who were also expressing a lot of vocal opposition towards this change in the budget. The budget is not done. I still don't know where it's going to land. My hope is that that does not come to pass. But again that's a separate issue from the Behavioral Health Services Act.

Hi. Lisa Marie Benavides I'm the president of the Bachelor Valley Grange. as well as the North Shore chapter administrator for Simple Gesture. And I just wanted to offer the Bachelor Valley Grange as a partner for some of the work you're doing. The other thing around collecting donations and things like that. We do have a hall, and we do have a pretty decent amount of space that we could store stuff. We are in Upper Lake, but we are not based, like we're not residentially bound, so we could help serve Clear Lake too. And the other thing with that is I just had a conversation with Josh Brown. He works with the Solana Women in Medicine, and we were specifically talking about how can we find a donation center in Clear Lake Oaks for food donations. So I just wanted to say, because I'm a firm believer in we don't all need to be spinning our wheels in opposite directions when we could get the same place faster together. So I just wanted to say we're having those conversations and I would love to invite behavioral health to that table so that we can have them together.

Yes, thank you. I will go ahead and exchange our contact information and follow up on that. I do appreciate that. Mobile crisis can also be deployed. You don't have to know the person's name. You just have to know their location and express a concern. Like that's all it takes. Anybody walking on the street, you have a concern, you may call and we will respond. That being said, we can also go into the community, go back to the Grange, pick up supplies, take them where need. We can also do those types of things. As a matter of fact, the press Democrat recently did a paper and that's what we were doing was taking donations from other entities and taking them out into the community. We just do not have the facilities to store. So thank you very much for that offer. I will be in touch.

All right. I have one question for you.

Is this working? Turn it all down. So there was two buildings at the Pierce Center, right, in the Oaks. They were right next door to each other, so you're moving into one. So my question is, is the lease on the one that you're vacating, is that lease expired or are we ending the lease?

At this time, I don't want to release information about that because it's still a big management discussion. And so I would love to have information for you and maybe come back with that once we have our head better wrapped around that particular building.

I just don't want the county losing money if they have a lease contract for that area.

We are presently figuring that out, yes.

All right, thank you.

Sorry, I just have a, someone just asked a quick question. Can you share the mobile crisis phone number as well as the Facebook page if you have one?

I'll just say 800-900-2075 and we can pass out, do we have any materials to pass out? Do we have cards? Yeah, it's 800-900-2075. Again, that's 800-900-2075. That's 24-7, 365 days a year.

And then also one more thing, Elise. We have a flyer that we put up that has all the QR codes for different county departments. Do you guys have a QR code?

We're going to make one.

Okay, thank you. That is exciting. Because we have one, it's one sheet with everybody.

We'll come into the new millennium. Yeah. I don't do that.

Thank you. All right. Is there any other further questions for Director Jones in behavioral health?

Seeing none.

All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we'll move on to our next guest speaker. It's going to be Cindy Jassar with Clark to speak about chipping services and landowner resources. But I think you have somebody else doing your presentation. Tracy Klein is with Cindy. Cindy, you could grab the microphone right there.

I'll grab it.

We need the microphone because we're on Zoom. Yes, whoever's going to talk.

Stand on the blue. Okay.

Hi, everybody. I'm very happy to be here. My name is Tracy Klein. I'm the stewardship director for the Clear Lake Environmental Research Center. We are a local nonprofit that has done substantial investments into our local community wildfire resilience and forest health initiatives. And I'm just going to give you a summary of our programs and what we've been doing and highlight a few opportunities for the community to participate in some of our upcoming projects. And to my left is Cindy Jessar. She's one of our program managers. She's our wild wildfire resilience program manager. So basically my left hand. So before we get going, I'm just going to kind of tell you a little bit about what we're talking about today. I want to kind of give you an introduction to our organization and what we do and talk about the various programs that we have. We will highlight our community programs and our stewardship programs and also just give a brief introduction into the Mediterranean oak borer issues that we're seeing in the community. And so, yeah, go ahead, Cindy. So let me start by telling you a little bit about CLRC. CLRC stands for Clear Lake Environmental Research Center. We are a local 501c3 nonprofit and we were founded in 2014. In 2015, does anybody remember what happened in 2015 that completely changed the trajectory of our community? the Valley Fire and our founder and myself are actually ex-county employees and I've worked for the government most of my career and it's a challenge living in a rural community that is so under-resourced that the local governments really have a lot of challenges to overcome and so we really felt like it was a good time to try to leverage our nonprofit status to try and get funding to bring it into Lake County to help support all of the recovery efforts that needed to happen so that we could get back to some sense of normalcy. We're not quite there yet and that's okay. We have, we're located in Lakeport down there by Library Park and so you'll see our office out there. We also have, we occupy the Carnegie Library if you guys are familiar with that building and on the bottom floor of that building we have a water lab. It's the only certified water lab in lake county having at one point in the past i worked for special districts and so one thing i knew was that a lot of the water sampling that takes place with many of our numerous water systems throughout lake county all of the samples were being sent out of county so all of the money that you guys pay for your rates was being pumped out of the county so we decided to make sure that we were able to support those needs here locally and that was one of the first initiatives of our organization. And that is going strong. Upstairs in the second floor of the Carnegie Library, if you come down to the concert in the park this summer, we'll be having some open houses but ultimately that will be a discovery center, science discovery center focused entirely on Lake County and the ecosystems and the needs here within the community. And we're working with the Department of Education and the various other entities to help develop the curriculum for that space. And then our more nuts and bolts of what we do day in and day out is our wildfire resilience and forest health programs. And from that, we've also grown and built our stewardship programs, which are, they go hand in hand, but one is easier to get money for than the other. So we're working hard to get some additional funding to support our stewardship programs. But I'll tell you a little bit more about those as we get further into the presentation. but I'm gonna go ahead and start with our fire and forestry projects. So what you'll see up here on the screen, I know it's text heavy, my apologies, but what I really wanted to highlight here is that since, I think we got our first grant in 2018, so since 2018, our little non-profit of more like 11 people, We've been able to leverage over $40 million that have been awarded here in Lake County to support post-fire recovery, forest health, community resilience, and our projects, cover over 11,000 acres. So that's 11,000 acres that have had some form of fuel treatment to ensure that the community is safer, not for if the next fire comes through, but when, and to make sure that we have safe evacuation routes. We have invested a lot of time and energy into making sure that all of the routes that people need to take to get out are open and safe and there isn't any threat of dead trees falling across the path or the vegetation catching on fire, creating its own weather and storm of embers to make the evacuation process very treacherous. That was one of the lessons learned in the Valley Fire. was that getting out was difficult. The other piece of it, is we also launched a community-wide chipping program. We know we work very closely with a lot of the fire districts, Cal Fire agencies, and the fire safe councils, many of them that are well-established, they already had chipping programs. So we invested money into supporting those programs. And then for anybody outside of those jurisdictions, we launched it county-wide. So anybody in the county, can sign up for free chipping on their property. Somebody has to do the cutting, but if you need somebody to get rid of that material and dispose of it, you can call us and sign up for our chipping program. So the no cost county wide shipping program is one of our flagship programs. Our roadside evacuation route clearing, we also maintain strategic fuel breaks within the community. We work closely with Cal Fire, they call us and say we need this fuel break open, we want to maintain it and we write grants to get money to be able to hire local contractors to do that work. Part of our mission is to capture as much of this money here as possible because it is a driving need for our community and ultimately we want to be able to create jobs, we want to support our local contractors as they grow and are able to increase the pace and scale at which this work is getting done. We also do post-fire research, recovery, and restoration. Our biggest restoration project right now is up on the Mendocino National Forest on the North Shore. They call it the North Shore Project Area. It's a 40,000 acre planning area. And it's perched right above Nice in Lucerne. And it's the largest wildland urban interface on the Mendocino National Forest, which is huge. It spans several counties. So we saw a real need to not only help the forest recover from the ranch fire, the 2018 ranch fire, and the devastating losses that we saw up there in the forest, but also to protect the community at large downslope and vice versa. We also have very active forest health and wildfire resilience programs throughout the county, and I'm gonna highlight some of those. And then my passion project is the Mediterranean oak borer. Raise your hand if you guys have seen these big valley oaks and blue oaks dying quite suddenly across the landscape. Yeah, we have a pest, a new pest to our region. Our oaks have not evolved with this pest, so they are really struggling. They're getting hit really hard. It's the Mediterranean oak borer. We believe it came in through wine barrel staves into Napa County and through the... movement of oak for firewood it is spread all over the regional the region all of our local counties have it i happen to live in a hot spot in my neighborhood and i just counted four more dead trees on my way here and it's really wreaking havoc on the whole system in addition to the loss of these beautiful ancient trees, they also, a lot of the oaks are following the riparian corridors, and so we now are gonna have excess fuel loading, loss of shade and cover, lots of material in the streams, and this is going to create even greater fish passage issues for the Clear Lake Hitch. So we're really trying to find some funding to be able to support management of these trees. It is not cheap to take down a pest infested, you know, valley oak that is probably you know, I don't know, 40 inch or greater DBH, diameter at breast height. So big trees are dying and it's often the large decadent trees that are the most susceptible to these pests. So up here on this map, this is just a snapshot of what you can see on our website. Every project that's been funded by grant dollars is available on our website for you to look at to see where is it, what's planned, what grant funded it, So full transparency. So the different colors up here, you can see that conglomeration of color up in the top of that square, that's our North Shore project. So you can see there's been a heavy investment of money up in that region. And those are in different phases. It's either in planning, in environmental review, or it's been funded, it's completed, or it's in progress. You'll also see that we have a tremendous number of projects from our community wildfire protection plan that have been funded through a grant from the US Forest Service Washington office. And that's what we use to do most of our roadside clearing. We do a vegetation management on private lands. We basically the funding sources, CAL FIRE pays for the work on the federal lands and the Forest Service pays for work on the private lands. So they have come into agreements. They have memorandums of understandings with each other. and both agencies are represented on the state wildfire task force. So at the highest levels of the agencies, they're finding ways to work together, which in my career historically was not really possible. So it's very exciting to see that they're recognizing what the needs are and finding ways to get us to solutions. So on top of that, so I mentioned we work closely with CAL FIRE, Forest Service, BLM, fire districts, RCDs, tribes, fire safe councils, local governments, nonprofits, partners, and landowners. They come to us when they have projects as well. But I do want to give a special recognition to the Hogback Ridge Crew. Hogback Fuels Crew is, they're from the North Shore Fire Protection District, and that crew was launched to help increase the pace and scale of community fuel treatments here in Lake County, and their time was almost exclusively covered by that federal grant. Here is our dashboard. You can zoom in and out on this map and actually see, this is just a snapshot of the ones that were sort of concentrated, but if you go out, there's projects all the way to the county lines. And I'll point out that on this number tracker up here, that says 11,170 acres that are funded for treatment here in Lake County by our organization. And there are many partners participating in these grant programs as well. So that is just our piece of the pie and the acres that we are hoping to treat, but all the other partners in the community are working hard on these issues as well. So our community-wide chipping program, I put this in here because I just wanted to emphasize again, if you're within one of the jurisdictions that already has a chipping program, whether you're in one of the HOAs or you are in South Lake Fire Protection District or South Lake Fire Safe Council's jurisdiction, you can sign up, anybody can get this work done. But you do have to cut the material, stack it, and have it readily available so when the crews come through, they go from house to house and they just chip it all into the back of their truck or they leave the chips for you if you want them. depending on whether or not we're looking at a Mediterranean oak borer infestation. Then we have special protocols for that. But anyway, so to date, we have 1,500 piles that have been chipped. 522 properties have signed up for this service, and 18-plus communities are safer because of it. We have brochures at the back table over here if anybody wants to take the chipping brochure. It tells you exactly how to sign up. And yeah, I hope you will. Our other projects that we're really proud of are our roadside evacuation route projects. These typically end up being shaded fuel breaks, but the goal is to limb things up and remove dense understory vegetation so that if a fire is in the region, it's not going to have continuous fuel all the way across the road. I mean, sometimes, you're driving around, you can see the interlocking canopies of the trees that you're driving under, we want to minimize that from a practical safety point of view. So we use hand crews, we use mechanical equipment when it's appropriate to do so, and we ultimately are in a continuous maintenance cycle on these roadside projects now. We also work on strategic community fuel breaks. Does anybody recognize where these homes are? This is in the Rivieras and you can see it from the lake if you're driving by in a boat, you can see the fuel break. That fuel break was originally put in by CAL FIRE and we've repeatedly gotten grant funding to continue to maintain it so that the responsibility isn't on any one landowner and that the whole community is safer because of it. Oh yes, this is also one of the Hogback Ridge Crew's main projects that they're doing for us. And we do landscape, we do like to look at things from a landscape level anyway. The North Shore project is more of a landscape view for restoration and forest health project. But when we're looking at strategic fuel breaks and ridge lines and connectivity of habitat unique ecosystems that we would like to have protected, we're often thinking of like, how do we connect these so that everything is safer? If one person in your neighborhood does their vegetation management but no one else does, the whole community is not safer. So we're looking for opportunities to make sure that we're doing the work that we think is gonna provide the greatest good to everybody. This project right here, you can see the burned trees. This is one example of what the North Shore project looked like after the fire. It's worse now because everything is still standing dead and winds snap and it's fuel everywhere, just big dead trees everywhere. So we hired some local, well we hired a contractor called Props. They work exclusively with the Forest Service so they kind of put us in touch with them since we're partnered with the Forest Service and it's federal land. But PROPS stands for Patriot Restoration Ops. It's another nonprofit that focuses primarily, their mission is restoration-type work post-fire, but their mission is also to provide job training to veterans who are transitioning from military life back to civilian life. and they learn a tremendous amount of skill in operations of heavy equipment in the military, and so I've just been blown away by what I've seen these contractors do. They move fast, they have the best equipment, and they get things done quickly. So when we're dealing with the situation that we have here in Lake County, that economy of scale really matters, because if we could hire a hand crew with five guys, or we can hire this organization that has a limitless number of contractors at their disposal and they will get hundreds of acres treated in like less than two weeks. They move very quickly. So that's been really fruitful to see how that has played out on the National Forest. But we do still make sure that we have units and areas within that project where we can hire local contractors as well to make sure that we are meeting everybody where they're at and want to make sure that they are still getting an opportunity to develop those skills. It's a little different on the forest because it is more of traditional timber management up there as far as these are big trees that we're dealing with. A lot of the stuff that we're doing in the community is primarily small diameter brush and small diameter saplings and smaller trees that are growing in between the big trees. So up there, it's like a sea of dead big trees. And so you really have to have some specialized skills, especially what are we, eight years post fire. A lot of that material still standing is very dangerous to fell and work with. yes hog bag we hog bag has been really wonderful because they just kind of plug into whatever the need is one of the caveats about working on the national forest is that only forest service staff or people that have the forest service credentials can burn piles up there and so hogback ridge has worked closely with the national forest staff to get the qualifications, make sure they have all the qualifications, and then train with them. So when we had 172,000 trees coming in March, we had to burn some piles before we could plant them, and it was all hands on deck. So all the Forest Service, Cal Fire, Hogback, anybody who was cleared to burn on the National Forest was up there burning those piles. And keep in mind, these are not like small vegetation piles. These are big piles of decked logs that are punky, dried out and falling apart. So a little bit more technical, much larger scale fire and management of it. So really great learning experience for everybody involved. These are some of the pictures of our team working with our partners at the Forest Service. I think this was one of the first times that they had really worked with outside partners to such an extent. One of our first grants was to come in and do the hazard tree mitigation along the forest roads because if you guys remember after the ranch fire, I don't know how many of you like to travel up, onto the Mendocino National Forest, but you couldn't go out there without a chainsaw because you didn't know if you would be able to get back because there were so many trees coming down on the road. So we went in with our first fire prevention grant and actually cleared 100 feet up to 200 feet from the road's edge take took out all of the dead hazardous trees so that we could ultimately make it safe to get in there and to do some of the other work that we wanted to to move forward with there's another one you can just see the dead trees in the landscape there and then this is how close we are to the lake up there so on that right you can see where we are And then I just wanted to, while I have you all here today, I wanted to let you know that working with the Forest Service and our partners at PROPS, we will be having a public meeting on July 8th at Robinson Rancheria where all of the partners that have done work on that project are gonna present and share a little bit about what we've accomplished in the last few years. So we hope that you will come. And in summary, I just wanted to give you these numbers because some people care about the numbers. I think it's important to know how the money is being spent. But ultimately, I mentioned we've leveraged $40 million, $27 million of it. is being awarded for work either on the Forest Service or by Forest Service dollars that are being deployed in the community. So 27.2 million and if you actually count staff time and in contracting and money that was allocated from the Forest Service that number would be much higher. There's our Smokey the Bear and our North Shore Fire and some of the crew from the Forest Service. I know we're a little short on time, so I'm just gonna gloss over these real quick, but I mentioned that we also have some stewardship programs. My background, I'm a wildlife biologist, and I know from a career, 30 years of doing this kind of work on the landscape, that it's important for me to know if we're having an impact on the wildlife or the species that we're trying to protect. And so we have a wildlife camera trap program. And this is a mama bear with three cubs on one of our projects up off of Western Mine Road. And we also have a herb monitoring program. We try to monitor the newts and turtles and toads that are crossing the road near Boggs Lake because we have a big project that we want to do out there to improve the forest health and essentially the ecosystem health. But we want to know where these guys are and where they're crossing the road so we can minimize impacts to them. And then, of course, the Mediterranean oak borer, which I've already spoken about. There's a mountain lion in one of our project areas. And so basically what I want you guys to leave here knowing is that with all the 11,000 acres or more that we're doing, we have biologists on our team, we do extensive surveys, we look for wildlife, we look for plants, we do nesting bird surveys if any work is happening during the nesting season. So while you're gonna start seeing a lot of our crews out and about, Nobody's doing any work until our team of biologists have cleared it to make sure that we've protected any nest that we find. And then, and our goal is basically to minimize the impacts by avoiding nest dens and overwintering sites. And I put this up here just because I want you guys to know that we do have a whole page on our website about Mediterranean oak borer. We do have a mapping app where you can actually report them, and we're keeping track of that data locally because we're trying to leverage it for funding. In the traditional means of reporting a pest, you typically have to send an email to some entity or individual at a state program, at a state email somewhere, but you don't usually get, you don't hear back, and you don't know what else has been reported. So this is our way of, we share this data with any agencies that want it. We work closely with our pest advisors and our CAL FIRE entomologists, They're conducting research and utilizing our staff to do trapping to find out what the extent of the species is. But ultimately, we want to capture that data as much as we can locally. So if you do see the Mediterranean oak borer die off happening in your neighborhood, please go to our website and look at that map and you will see it's a heat map. Nobody's personal information is available. But if you take a picture, you can upload it into that site. And if you don't know if it's Mediterranean oak borer, you can either report it online or call our office and our biologists will go out and take a look at it to try and confirm it, if possible, with the caveat being that we are not entomologists. We don't claim to be. We're biologists. We are familiar enough with the symptoms to know what to look for. And so if it's beyond our ability, we will make sure that you know that and we will put you in touch with the correct people. We also help to train our local contractors on this. And they get continuing education credits for participating in our trainings so that we can come up with a plan that is actually gonna benefit the community long term and we're not gonna lose all of our oaks, hopefully, is the goal. I just put this in here because I wanted you guys to know these are our active and upcoming projects. We do have, in partnership with the South Lake Fire Protection District, we do have mastication happening on the roadside in Double Eagle Ranch. We have contractors doing handwork in Point Lakeview. We have Panorama. Clear Lake Avs is just launching. High Valley Road is about to launch. We're the the private lands on High Valley Road are actually intermixed with the North Shore restoration units. So again, looking at that contiguous protection, we want to make sure that the private lands that also burned in the 2018 ranch fire have an opportunity to be cleaned up and replanted if if possible. And we have Bottle Rock, Blue Lakes, Meadowood Senior Nursing Facility. We do a lot of work around the hospitals and other critical infrastructure. And then the Kinocti Interface Fuel Breaks is the one you saw the picture of. So please visit our website if you want to learn more. and then we also have these brochures. If any of these areas are close to your home or you know somebody that lives over there, you can scan this QR code and find out which projects are being planned and you can sign a right of entry form online, easy peasy, mac and cheesy and ultimately we have a team of admin staff that are managing all that in the office and then Cindy is usually the one that'll be reaching out and going out to look at those projects and talk to the landowners, find out, see the property and develop the scope of work for the contractors. And with that, I just wanna say thank you for your time and we hope that you'll visit our website and yeah, thank you.

I actually have a question for you. Um, so my question for you, um, cause you're talking about, you know, fire, I can go by the microphone now. Okay. So about the evacuations and the sides of the road, um, I noticed that we got double Eagle bottle rock, but what about new long Valley and spring Valley? That's literally our only way in and only way out. It hasn't been masticated and I don't know how many years on the side of the road now. Um, ranch fire came through. in 2018, burned down homes, the Pawnee fire. So is there a way that we can get on that for the sides of New Long Valley Road to where we can masticate it? Because it goes white line and then you just have tall fuel that's ready just anybody throws a cigarette out or bottle, glass bottle can catch it on fire.

Yeah, I was actually out there two weeks ago scouting New Long Valley. It is a project. We didn't include it up here because we haven't fully scouted it and decided exactly how far we're going to be able to go, but are reaching out to larger property owners along that corridor. We also do a lot of chipping out in Spring Valley with the Firewise community out there. So we try to help as much as we can out there. But we will be doing the roadside. So that is on our community wildfire defense grant, the first phase. So it should be happening within this next year.

Okay. All right. Thank you.

It should be on our dashboard too.

If anybody...

If anybody has a road they're curious about, if they know if it's been funded or if it's in the queue to be treated, look at the dashboard and all the ridgelines and the roads that are included that were identified in our community wildfire protection plan. If it's in there, then we took as many high priority projects out of that as possible to get funding for.

Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you, Tracy. And thank you, Cindy. Can we get a copy of the slide presentation so we can put it up on our website? Absolutely. And do you have a copy of the chipping brochure on like a PDF as well?

Yes.

Okay, so if we can get that, we'll put it on our website. And the right of entry, yes. And I just want to say thank you for the roadside evacuation that you guys are doing right now out in Double Eagle. It's a big project. The residents are very appreciative. As people see it go along, then they're signing up. But it looks like we're going to have a couple areas that can serve as TRAs when we're done. So thank you. And will you be sticking around until the end if anybody has questions? Okay. Thank you very much. All right, so we're gonna move one item up, Supervisor Crandall's update, because Supervisor Crandall needs to leave a little early, so we're gonna let him do his update now.

I have to go to a graduation. Well, first I want to say something pretty cool. Tracy, I always want to give her credit for something, and that's the Lucerne Harbor Dredging Project. She really was instrumental in ensuring that we went to start the whole project with CEQA again, because it was a categorical exemption. Had she not done that, inevitably they would have found something because they found a jawbone, and the tribe would have been able to sue the county for that whole situation. So it was her foresight and thought to try it again, and we did it, and we ended up getting that thing done. And I just always like to commend you for that. Yeah, so a couple things. Recently, I think it was last week, Thursday maybe? No, Friday, actually. I went to Pueblo Trail in Spring Valley. They have the water tank up there, and they actually have a new pumping system that has filtration and all of that. And so what that proposes or what it does is it pulls – It actually filters the water so that you don't have to pump so much from the original station. So that's going to help the community immensely. They're not going to have to pay as much or, if anything, to Yolo County. And so yeah, we did a ribbon cutting type of thing. The gentleman that worked there did a video. And it was pretty cool. I didn't really do anything but do the video. So I like to give credit to what it's due. And it's special districts and the community for speaking out about what they need there. Let's see. So there was going to be a road, because roads are a big deal. There was going to be a road transportation plan yesterday, but it got postponed. So it'll probably be next week on the Board of Supervisors agenda. So be ready for that. So if you want to talk about things like Spring Valley, the road, the bridge, those type of things, that's important. That's where that can come up. So just wanted to highlight that. I don't know why I have SV pump. I don't know what that means. Oh, that's public trail. Okay, budget hearings are coming up in two weeks, and so that'll be Tuesday and Wednesday, and that's where you can come and talk about anything. So like when we just had that presentation here by Elise in Behavioral Health, when it comes to their budget item, you can come in and comment about these things. That's another place where you can talk about this on the agenda. A lot of times people come in public input, say things, no one can talk. That's frustrating, but this item will be specifically for whatever department you're having an issue with, and it can tie to something, because there's so many different budget items in the purview of a director and their department. So if it's animal control, if it's vector control, it could be anything. So we go through each and every item, and each director gives a presentation. So just want to highlight that for you so you know. It's a long deal, but if you tune in on Zoom or whatever, you can do it through that way as well. So yeah, be looking out for those to come forward. Potter Valley Project, I don't know if anyone's seen. I think they're going to have some actual meetings coming up in, I want to say July. And so we'll be looking towards those and seeing if we can get in some of those meetings. Have you noticed it's still been on the closed session portion of our agenda at the Board of Supervisors? And so that's really the only update that I have for that as of now.

Supervisor Crandall, the meeting is, the scoping meeting's June 23rd and 24th. Oh, okay, I thought it was July.

I don't know why. Okay, so scoping meetings are June 23rd, just like she said.

And 24th.

and 24th, okay. And so that's where that is going. Actually, Secretary Rollins put out another letter, actually, or a statement, and that was really auspicious towards our plight when it comes to what we want with the dam. So it was really good that she came out and stated what she did. Rent stabilization ordinance, so we are at that point where I want to say if it's not this week, it'll be the week after. I know for sure when we come back in July, it should have been dealt with. be looking for that here. I don't do the agenda, Brad does, so I'm hoping that they get that in front of us. That way we can have a solution for you all who live at Lake Village Estates and anyone else that lives in these places. We need to get one of those on the books and see what we can do when it comes to I know that there's a discussion about a moratorium. There might be other ways to address those types of fees and when you look at the retroactive type of solution for that, I know that that's gonna be some topics of discussion when it comes to us. So just wanted to highlight that as well. We did push back another commercial cannabis. We had that yesterday as well on the agenda. We talked about the all of the work that the the committee, what was it, the ad hoc committee?

The task force, the Canvas task force.

Yeah, so the task force, yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, so they put all that forward and it looks like we'll be coming back on the 23rd for that. That's when that will come back. And so if there's any other last additions or things you want to address, I accentuated what I felt. I still would like to see a major use permit on the actual dispensaries and all of that. And I would like to see some water being controlled or prevented from people saying hey i'm only using this and then they end up using an absorbent amount of water and then no one's held accountable for it so we want to make sure that when people are doing their projects they do what they say they're going to do you know i have a couple projects in the district where there's a housing initiative and it's there's a specific percentage that it needs to to have when it comes to the measurements and it's at like 51 so They want it to be 40% so they're not gonna let it happen. I'm like, okay, well these folks now spent all this money to do this project and now they're not gonna be able to. But here you got these cannabis projects where they're doing all this type of stuff and they're not being held to that same standard, if you will. They're verbal sometimes, they're verbal agreements. When I actually heard that about this project today and it really upset me, made me think about cannabis and how a lot of this is happening. It's a double standard and we need to make sure those are taken care of. I'm sorry to go off on that tangent. I just wanted to kind of give you an analogy of to why we want things to be held to a different standard. So as of right now, that's what I have on this list. I will take a couple questions because I don't have a robust list that would serve you better.

I really don't have a question but I do want to say thank you for the proclamation of Lyme disease I didn't have the time to tell you thank you but I also have probably about four people that live in this district that couldn't make it because of their disease and they want to thank you also so I want to personally make sure that you can hear that before you leave so thank you very much it means a lot to a lot of people well you're welcome and thank you for bringing it you know you're the one that inspired it so I want to let you know that other people thank you a lot.

That's important. It's important to to, you know, acknowledge what we're dealing with in Lake County because, you know, we're a small county and like there's been a couple of other proclamations that really, really touched people's hearts. You know, and I don't know how to say the name of the one. There was a young lady, apparently the I'm not going to chop it up, but there's another proclamation that it's a physical situation.

I want to say thank you.

You're welcome. Thank you. Yes.

Can we get you with a microphone?

Here.

Okay. I'm Maria Kahn. I don't know if you're aware of what the public is experiencing with the Code Enforcement Department and the OpenGov system. We've put in requests and sometimes they're duplicate or triplicate. Other people are putting in the same requests about something. And the Code Enforcement Department is closing your request saying, oh, we got multiple ones, so we're just going to address the one. And then they just shut your request off, or they close it, without following up and giving you any information about what the end result was. So I don't know if you're aware that that's going on, but that is going on and it's not good practice. So I wanted to make you aware of that. Thank you.

I will add that to my list with Community Development Director, who I'll be talking with tomorrow. Thank you.

All right. Well, since you're going to be talking with her tomorrow, also they said that OpenGov, they had taken it off so it was confidential and the person's name would not be shown. But I think it's still happening. say that again so when you put in a code enforcement complaint it's supposed to when marcus was here he said that the person the reporting person's information would be confidential but it's not it's still showing on open the last time i checked i haven't checked in the last week see and that's the type of thing that gets us into long public input

statements because we just don't address things like that. And I'm not upset at anyone giving public input statements, but if we can address these types of things, some people wouldn't be so disgruntled. You know what I mean? I just, I don't know, I just like highlighting that stuff. But yeah, I agree. I'm going to talk to her about that too.

Along the code enforcement thing, Earth put in a code enforcement complaint on one project because the person who was making the complaint didn't feel comfortable because they had gotten retaliation at one point. And I got a lot of pushback from code enforcement because they wanted to talk to the person specifically and they said they couldn't do a good job. And then another person put in the same complaint and they said to them, well, we're just going to shut down this duplicate complaint instead of talking to them.

You would think it would enhance the complaint. Exactly. Exactly.

Okay.

Wow. All right. And I signed up for this for another four years.

Okay.

I will get on it. Congratulations. Thank you. All right. Thank you, everybody. You have a good day.

Thank you. All right. Back on track. We'll go ahead and move on to Earth Business. Different, Mike. Update in consideration, we're going to do the land use committee and CDD project update?

Yeah. So in terms of the land use committee, so Earth received a letter from Clout Advocacy, and they do project outreach for Coloma, which is a hydrogen exploration company. They're doing surveying operations right now. I dropped into their public outreach meeting in Lakeport on the 12th, to find out more about it. Right now all they're doing is they're getting property owners to put boxes on their property so they can collect information. I started asking them, and it's apparent they didn't really understand the county. They are really only looking at the Geysers area, specifically Middletown and Cobb, even though they did outreach to us. I guess they didn't know where we were. I asked if there were any, so they're just getting information now. I asked if there were any viable natural hydrogen projects. There's only one right now in Mali, Africa. This was found when drilling a water well and it now powers a town of 1,500 people. So to me it seemed like this is more of a fishing expedition. They've been blanketing the whole county with requests, so I just wanted to say,

they do not seem to be interested in this area and i'm not concerned about them at the moment and if we hear of anything we will let all of you know okay yeah with that regard i think the only place that i heard of them having testing monitors so far is out by the highland springs area So that's the only place I've heard.

Maybe the only place that allowed them. I don't know. Okay. So there's a new planning application out for Lucky Ridge MX, which is a community motocross and camping facility proposed at the Old Oasis. Their plans are to reopen and operate a family-oriented motocross and recreational riding for a safe, controlled environment. The project emphasizes family participation, youth recreation and community engagement and they've been working on restoring the property. That's all we know about it because they just put in the application so if we hear out more we'll let you know about it. Then EGX Energy has a pre-planning application in for a geothermal well pad at 2060 Sulphur Bank Drive. I took a look. This is located just over the ridge line. So it's basically, if you were to look at, and I have a map here where you can see it, but it's over the ridge line just to the west of the sewer spill plant. and just north of Clear Lake. Basically, they've just put this in. There's been no discussion, no talk, no anything at the moment. So we will keep up on this and we will let you know if anything's going on. And then the Durna Cell Tower appeal at Double Eagle, there's no changes at the moment.

That was it. Okay, thank you. We'll go ahead and move on to the GPAC, LAPAC status.

Okay, CDD notes from each of the recent geothermal and local area plan meetings have been uploaded to the lakecounty2050.org website. You can find them under documents, past meetings and materials, local area plan meetings, March-April meetings, and East Lake area plan meeting. These notes are going to be used to create a final draft that's going to be redlined versions that will be posted when they become available, likely around the end of June, beginning of July, and we'll let you know when they come out so that you can all take a look at them and see what's going on with it.

Because you will have one more opportunity when it goes to the Board of Supervisors for approval.

And planning.

And planning, and the Planning Commission, yes. Okay, next one is food donations. Simple gesture. Simple gesture. Lisa.

Hello, thank you. So I spoke last month, I think, and shared what Simple Gesture is, but as a quick reminder, it is a local food donation program that was created because they realized, the founder realized that a lot of the food that was donated in Lake County went to Sonoma County and then was distributed across all of Northern California. And he was like, that's not right. Why is the food in our county not staying in our county? So what it is, is that each we're one of the only counties that has all of our county representative represented It's been a long couple of weeks and I represent North Shore. I'm the administrator for North Shore, which is pretty much all of District three. And so we collect on the first Saturday of the month, which is this Saturday. We have drivers that drive around to anyone who has signed up as donors houses and the donors leave on their porch. They do not have to be home. They just put it on their porch. Your first donation is in whatever you have. And then we leave a green bag that you will put future donations in. And you put non-perishable items that you could drop off or you would drop off typically at a food bank or food donation. Then our volunteer drivers, when they pick it up, they drop it off at a local food pantry. So in the North Shore right now, we have two food pantries. We have the Nice Community Baptist Church and we have the Lucerne Methodist Church. we are looking for, I mentioned earlier in the meeting, we are looking for a Clear Lake Oaks location. And I did get confirmation from the person above me that said, if we can find a church or a food pantry that is permitted to run as a food pantry, then we can happily sign them up in the Oaks. And then that would have the donations that are given from folks on this side of the district would stay in the side of the district because right now it goes to lucerne um we are for the the ask that we have right now is north shore has the one of the lower numbers of donors and it is super super super super simple to donate you sign up at joinsg.org if you're not a techie person you're like bump that i'm not signing up online you can give me your information and i will sign you up And then you get either a text message or an email about a week out that says, hey, do you want to donate this month? And you just say yes or no. No issues if you say no. If you say no, we just skip you that month. And then the next month, we'll reach back out and say, hey, do you want to donate this month? Et cetera, et cetera. and then um we will pick pick up starting on saturday at 9 00 a.m so that's the big thing i don't know one fun fact is since we started in october we've collected over 10 000 pounds of food in North Shore, or in Lake County, that stayed in Lake County. So it's very, very impactful. We're only growing. We're only getting better and bigger. So if you have any questions, if you want to sign up, we will be at the summer days this Saturday. We'll also be at the Nice Night Out at tables. And I have flyers. Everyone can follow me on Facebook. I post everything on there. And otherwise, if you don't have any questions for me,

Do you have a North Shore simple gesture Facebook page? Or is there just one website?

Let's just say I'm working on it. We're still in a period of transition.

Thank you. And I'm sure you've already given Holly, we can put it all up on the website. So send us everything that you have.

Yes, and now, so it will be on the Worth website. That's my job. I've got to do that. And then I'll send it to you guys. And now SIRF has one, so I'll ask for SIRF. Yeah, we posted it. Oh, you're better than me. Thanks.

Any other questions? Does anybody have any questions about the program? And if anybody wants to sign up, Lisa will be around till the end of the meeting so you can give her your information and she'll sign you up. All right. Thank you, Lisa. The logo, logo contest, and Donna is not here to give us an update.

No, but yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, oh. I don't know where my phone is.

Yeah, why don't you tell me.

This is an announcement for, let's see, there's a boil water notice just issued by the State Water Resources Control Board for Blue Heron, Island Circle, and Lakeland Street. So a boil water notice by the State Water Resources Control Board for the streets of Blue Heron, Island Circle, and Lakeland Streets. so everybody knows thank you thank you and then i'll have an announcement at the end of the meeting as well all right and thank you donna for sending that in

So yeah, Donna was gonna talk about the logo contest, but she's sick. We do have flyers on each of the page, but what we're trying to do is we've done, she's done outreach to the East Lake School. I think Sterling also did outreach to the school out in Spring Valley. And anybody that wants to submit a logo, please go ahead and do it. And it's, I think the deadline's July 15th, and then we will pick somebody. We're gonna have the community pick. the logos, et cetera. Take a look at the flyer.

All right. Next, we'll move on to the Energy Committee proposal. And this was brought by Sterling.

Maybe.

Yeah. Well, do you want me to talk about it?

Yeah. All right. Let me pull it up. So obviously, with EGX coming into our neighborhood, and it's right there within a half mile of the Sulphur Bank mine, I think our district and here, we should put together an energy policy and geothermal committee. So we actually have a say that's going on in ours because most likely geothermal is coming no matter what. We have to make sure that we can protect us, our resources, our water, our land I don't want to say it in a dramatic way, but potentially even lives at this point, because it's 100 milliwatts is what they're proposing, right? Megawatts. Megawatts. So it's going to be the biggest in the whole county, and I think that's bigger, I think the biggest in the whole, maybe potentially the world, but I don't know. sure but I would like to put together to where we can discuss it we can send stuff to the board we can be heard instead of just one person going in and saying hey we need to make sure that we have an energy policy for 2050 general plan which we still don't have I feel it would be super important for the whole community okay and

So the copy of the proposal was with the agenda. So if anybody hasn't seen it, is there copies on the table? There were copies on the back table. There's copies on the back table. I went through the proposal, and here's where I'm a little concerned is, okay, so there is a general geothermal, well, it's an energy use, they have an energy use ad hoc committee at the county level. but you listed potential areas of focus and then like the general plan 2050, I think that would fall under our general plan, local area plan update. I guess what I'm trying to say is I find a lot of these things fall under, like either the land use committee or the road safety? Because you put in here wildfire mitigation and resilience, and then there was talking about ingress and egress or fire evacuation. And that, to me, feels more like road safety committee. I mean if you want to take that off and put it there you can but geothermal is going to affect every single one of those right and any geothermal project would come to the land use committee right because so do we want to start separating certain projects out I mean because like we already know about EGX we've already know about the the pre-application right and so

It's titled Proposal for the Formation of an Energy and Infrastructure Committee. And it's also posted on the website. Yes. Yeah, it's on the, okay, the thing.

We're not talking about the specific project yet.

Yeah, there is no project.

There is no project. Yeah. We're talking about creating a subcommittee that would review any of these projects.

But not yet. Yeah. It's just rumor right now. Rumor and talk, yeah.

So I don't know. I guess that's where I struggle with it because do we foresee a lot of geothermal projects? I don't want to... I don't know. We...

I'm just trying to protect the community that I live in. So I mean, if you guys don't want to go with it, I mean, we do a vote. And if it doesn't go through, then it don't go through. But for me, and the whole reason why I'm on the committee is because I want to make sure that what's going on in our area, that we're all informed. And I feel like if we don't put something together, it's just like we're coming up to the 2050 general plan. The ad hoc energy committee still hasn't brought anything out. And I just... truly do feel that this is something that's super important for this because I have studied the geothermal. I have gone through there. I know exactly where this whole entire geothermal is going to be going. And if something serious was to happen and we don't put something together, there's a potential that it could do some major damage.

And I feel like we need to protect ourselves. And Holly knows all about it. She was there when they created the geothermal setback, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, but Thomas, you have a hand raised on Zoom?

Yes, we have Betsy Kahn. Betsy Kahn, go ahead.

Thank you. Can you guys hear me?

Yes, Betsy, we can hear you. Thank you.

Great. So the issue that Sterling is trying to address is a need for an energy policy prior to the implementation of state legislation, which she can explain, that we need to move rapidly to get something included in the general plan. Currently, CDD has no interest in insert an energy policy of any kind. But the timeliness of this proposed state legislation and the ability of the state to grant permits without local permit review means that we would be what we would be stuck with a state permit before went to the for a discussion in other words we need a policy group and and this county ad hoc committee that they formed is not participating, not allowing public participation. So I think it's of greater urgency and a higher level than just a project review process. Does that make sense, Sterling?

Yes, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Betsy. Margo? Margo?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Margo Kambara. To piggyback on Betsy's comments and to expand on what Sterling's proposal is, I think being proactive is to the benefit of Earth. the entire county and it's rather than waiting for a project that's half baked or maybe fully baked coming down the pike for your approval and the board's approval why not set the parameters now what's acceptable what is a profile of that project what is allowable in terms of okay how big is this plant where are you going to allow it to be Are you going to allow it to occupy how much space? How tall? So this is your opportunity as a community to say this is what we find acceptable for a geothermal or any energy project. So it's easier now to set these, set the criteria before a developer is breathing down your neck to say, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to bring millions of dollars into your community. Sign on the dotted line. So right now, you have time to think and set to paper what your criteria is. Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, I'll weigh in a little bit on this. I do agree with what Angela said, that some of this is, it's wider than geothermal and energy, et cetera. It's pretty wide. I do agree with the, where is it, talking about emergency, being emergency ready, et cetera. But I don't personally think we have a lot of control over what we can say can happen or not happen. That's something that comes from the county. So I think it's a bit beyond us. And I guess I would tend to suggest that now that people have seen this and they know that this is online, maybe they take a look at it. But at this point, I feel any project that comes in goes through the land use and the ingress and egress goes through the road committee, et cetera. And some of the other stuff, like we don't have any control of... This also brings in infrastructure, water, you know, and things on the grid, et cetera. We don't have a lot of control over water unless it's special districts because the county has control. So, for instance, water, our water company is not part of the county. So some of it I just don't think is in our purview or we have control over it. I'm not saying it's not important.

Well, I think another thing that needs to be pointed out, too, is... We have less control as a town hall than the county, and the county has less control than the state. So if you look at, there's a county, it's either Shasta or Siskiyou County, and they had projects up there for, it was solar farms, right? And the county denied it at their planning commission. The state came in and overrode the county. So I'm nervous about putting time and effort into trying to create a policy that isn't gonna carry a lot of weight. If the state can come in and override us, as they did in, it was either Shasta or Siskiyou, but they went in and overrode it, because it's green energy. So I think we more so need to push the county to do something.

And that's why I'm asking for us to put together an energy policy, because us that sit here and we approve these things, it gets sent to our, our supervisor and our supervisor can push for it to be put there. That's the whole reason. I can go and say as much public comment as I want as one person. It's obviously not getting us anywhere because I'm on there every Tuesday pushing for this. And it's very important because if we do this, we are the voices for this community. We can put that there. We can send these letters off just like the road committee does. The land use committee, we can put letters together. We approve it for you guys. You guys send them off. It puts it there, and it puts it in their mind that, hey, look, the whole community is actually wanting something like this. And we got less than, what, three months before the 2050 general plan is passed. And I suggest everybody really look up AB 531 because if we do not put an energy policy into our 2050 general plan, the state will supersede anything that we say no to, because that's the constitution of our county. And if it's already in there and the state sees it, they see that the county doesn't want it and they're going to ultimately listen to what our 2050 general plan is. And I think in this county, if you may want to look up their general plan and see if they had something in there, it could have been that there was a law that was passed that a lot of people don't know about. And that might be why the state was able to go in there and supersede it because they didn't have it in their general plan. and I can make this as blunt as I can for you guys, but I would seriously start commenting with the Board of Supervisors and start demanding an energy policy or energy plan because if we don't, we are gonna be completely screwed. They're gonna be taking money from us, our pockets. They're gonna come in and say they're non-profit or whatever. GEX is here, GEX is working with the county. a Public Work Records Act. I have gotten the information. They are still here. They're still working with the county.

We know that's true, but there is no project at the moment. You know, I am OK. We've talked to Maria about adding an energy policy to the general plan. I agree with that. I totally agree with that. She says that there's no money and there's no time right now, but maybe it could be done down the road. Unfortunately, that's not you know, possibly soon enough, et cetera. I don't know that we need a committee for this. I would be perfectly fine in writing, sending in a letter saying that we want to have an energy policy and we think that it's very, very important.

It's super important and anyway.

yeah so we have stuff in our we have stuff in our local area plan right now sterling that addresses like specific things for okay example the cell phone tower right outside here right so there's in our local area plan it has specifics of what a cell phone tower in shoreline area plan should look like they don't follow it so if they're already deviating from the plan that we have right now

So basically, you're basically saying there's no hope, and if they want to come, we're just going to be screwed.

No, I think we'll get overridden by a higher up agency. is my concern, and this is why I've been having the discussion, I did talk to Maria about where the Energy Ad Hoc Committee is. They're supposed to be meeting, I think it was this week again, but it is an issue that needs to be addressed and they need to start moving it forward. I just don't know how quickly we can do something to make, I guess the letter like Holly suggested would be,

encouraging them to move forward I think what I would like is since this is okay but since this is something that so now I forgot my train of thought sorry go ahead hi I'm Maria Khan I have to agree with Sterling I think that it's very important to get ahead of this and I

I hate the thought of us just saying, oh, well, we're gonna get overridden. We are the public. This is our government. We are the ones that are supposed to be saying this is what we wanna do, this is how it should be, and pushing the agenda. We should not be afraid to just get overridden. We have to speak up at every possible moment because otherwise we will just get overridden. push aside and so I do agree with Sterling I think that we should put something together to get a plan to get ahead of this and to not just say well nothing can be done there's no money for it because that's just that's just a fetus right off the bat that's just saying it's not going to happen we can't do it so we should actually push to have an energy policy and I think Sterling is in the

in the correct here so i just wanted to make that statement and i think you should go ahead and put a little committee together for that so thank you good evening tom lasik or still good afternoon i also would strongly suggest you consider sterling's proposal also in alignment with what maria khan i think eloquently explained how the process works Right now, we don't have an energy policy. And the feedback that I've received on what's going on the Ad Hoc Committee is that they're not really coming up with an energy policy. And in their last update to the board, they didn't seem to even understand what an energy policy is. So I think it is important, particularly since there seems to be a lot of attention to this region for geothermal that not to turn turtle and just say that, you know, this is our community and it's your community and you need to, this is what we'd like to see in a policy. And we want to see the policy wherever it is, in your local area plan, in the 2050 plan, what have you, whether you do it through a letter and have a committee that comes up with the letter or have a standing committee, I think that's your call, but I think to say do nothing or to bifurcate it and put it and mix it in with other existing subcommittees probably isn't the strongest way to do that. Anyways, I would respectfully suggest you consider what Sterling has mentioned and what Maria has elaborated on. Thank you.

Thank you. I think where I get hung up is to me it's land use. It's ultimately land use in the end of where it's going.

So then why don't I just change the letter? And I could put just energy policy. And in that energy policy, it will go to the environmental insurance. So if something catastrophic was to happen, there is an insurance that this company can get, any company that comes in. So something catastrophic is to happen, they have the insurance to pay for what they blow up, first of all. And then we also need to make sure that if they are going to end up, let's just put it this way. GEX that is coming in has and was and still is talking to Sonoma Clean Power. The people we did not want here, it is what they're planning on doing is they're going to build it. They'll run it for a couple of years. They can turn around and sell this plant to anybody they want.

OK, Sterling, we're talking about a committee. We're not talking about.

I'm saying okay but what I'm trying to explain to you guys I sit here and I let you guys explain your stuff so please let me finish what I'm trying to explain is that in these policy what I'm trying to say is that we need to make sure these are bullet points in there that if they're gonna end up turning around and selling it they're gonna sell it to us the county and then we're gonna start making money off of the energy that's coming out from underneath our feet These are the suggestions in the letter. If we don't want to do the committee, I'm fine with that. But let's put a letter together and send it to the Board of Supervisors saying, hey, September's coming up fast. You have put together an ad hoc committee. Let's get this on the agenda. Let's start pushing and let's get this policy on 2050. Because if we don't, we are going to be screwing ourselves. I mean, it's just it's the bottom line of what it is.

And I don't think we need to stay silent. So what do you think about us putting a draft letter together? That's what I was just saying. Yeah. OK, so we'll do it with the land use subcommittee, because Holly's familiar with geothermal. She's been fighting it for years. So we'll write a letter to send to the Board of Supervisors and the ad hoc committee and the general plan. We'll include them all. Let's start there. We'll write a draft and send it out. Write a draft letter. We'll send it out to the committee. We can look at it and vote on it and get it out next month.

You have a comment from one of your council members?

From Donna?

Go ahead, Donna.

Donna? Yeah, Donna. I agree this letter might be helpful, but as it is right now, I don't think we need to have a separate committee. I agree with Holly and Angela that the Land Use Committee would take this on. Thank you.

I have one thing to ask. And if this gets me in trouble, then it gets me in trouble. It is what it is. But aren't the ones that are sitting here saying that they should be on the land use committee is on the land use committee? It's a simple yes or no. I'm just asking a question. It's land use.

Yeah, if you want to reread what the land use is that we voted on, that we put down, that's exactly what it is. And that's also on the website, too.

Okay.

You know, we're just, so basically are we agreeing that we'll put together a letter to send in a draft?

That's what I thought we discussed, yeah. Lori, you have any input?

I'm just a bit confused on this. Microphone. I'm just still a bit confused being new on Earth. But I do have a question.

You've got to speak into the microphone.

I do have a question. Sterling is very passionate about this and wants to share her input with the Land Use Committee. How does she do that without us?

Could you bring your microphone just a lot more closer?

I'm just curious with how Sterling could get that

to the land okay so does it have to be the land use committee that writes the draft yeah okay so basically maybe i can write a draft with you it doesn't have to be the land use committee that writes the letter okay i just thought we weren't supposed to talk to each other well i can talk to you okay you and holly can write the draft together and we won't yeah that's what you were asking yeah and we have a comment from betsy kahn from zoom land there you go betsy

Thank you, Thomas. Thank everybody. I think. So you're sitting there saying they put together a letter. I heard Sterling try to list some of the things that need to be included. But I did not hear because of the conversation. The issue, which is crucial, having to do with this assembly bill. and the timeliness of preventing the state from excluding the county input on future permits so what i'm concerned about is that you make sure you have a list that is including all the issues i am concerned about fracking the potential use of injection of into our water table that could be impactful to our groundwater basins, significant number of points. Margo and Tom probably have a lot more input that they can provide as well. So my concern is that what you're talking about is putting together a letter. Could we make sure it has all the significant points in it? And I'd leave that up to Sterling and Holly. Thank you.

Thank you, Betsy. Okay. Where do you want to go? So are we taking them?

No, we don't have to. We'll just, you know.

Oh, just do a letter. Okay. All right.

And then it comes back, yeah.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Moving on to our next slide. One question.

I was just wondering, okay, I think we do need a policy. We need to have something out there so when these folks, and I take it they're already trying to get in here. Now, I'm not sure exactly what they're gonna do, but I have read a little bit about that. And how is that gonna affect our homes? And someone mentioned something about our water. We need to have something out there that's going to protect us and the citizens here that live here, you know, next to this. So, you know, hopefully I'll start reading a whole lot more about this, but it scares me.

Yolanda, it scared us too when we went through Clearwood Geothermal back in 2003. It scared the entire community, and our entire community came together. We would have 100 people that would go up to the Board of Supervisors meeting. So believe you me, if we ever need to rally, you all come together with us and we rally.

All right. OK, so go ahead and move on. Are you doing CD project? Oh, you're ready to go. Road Safety Committee, general activities. We're going to move to do this kind of quickly. So the Road Safety Committee, we are working through our list. We got the stop sign for Eastlake School. We're meeting with the principal at the school to present it this week. We have one that works. It's not defective. Why don't you be defective right now when I kind of turn it off?

But it does work.

It does have both sides. And an extending core. Can you make it flash? Huh? Can you make it flash?

It's flash. Oh.

So they came to do flash, solid. So that's the salt cellar we're going to be presenting to Eastlake. Do we want flash?

Yeah.

and then we will post pictures of it in use. We will get pictures of it in use at that crosswalk during crossing times with the crossing guard. And then we are in contact with Lars and working towards a meeting to sit down with him to discuss issues in the Earth region. I did receive an email from him that they are looking for some road studies. They are having to go into their, they call it the dungeon, where it's all in paper. It's not on a computer, so they have to physically go and look through boxes, and that's what they're doing right now. Once he knows when the road studies were done, then we can move on to the next step. And, Laura, do you have anything else? She's... Uh, and then we also do, I forgot to announce it last week. We do have two members of the public on our road safety committee. Thank you. Chuck lamb, Mike Herman, who is not with us this evening, but, um, they have been very helpful in putting the list together and prioritizing where we're going to go. Um, the, the mountain view road gates, um, I don't know if that should be in road committee. It doesn't really matter.

I can just talk about what basically I've been working on the Mountain View Road gates for years now. So I'm just kind of continuing on the whole thing. And we have had discussions with county council. There are a couple of different routes or avenues that we can go on possibly to get gates. They're still researching it more. And as soon as we find out, we'll let you know.

all right and then last month sterling you had a spring valley second access letter and so we had discussed about putting that letter sending it separately so i want to know how the committee feels about that oh but we did get did you see the updates for the bridge for wolf creek

Yeah, I got my updates here.

Okay, so do you want to talk about that in Spring Valley then?

I don't really care.

Okay, because I reached out to Lars because I was hearing about it, and so for the road safety committee, I reached out to him. When I saw it got closed down, I reached out to him and I was like, what's the plan? So it looks like it's slated for next year. Yes. Yeah. Okay.

So the first Wolf Creek Bridge is, I believe, this year, and then next year is going to be the second one.

Okay. But for the Spring Valley second access letter, and that's for the other bridge. Now, did... Supervisor Crandall mentioned that they're coming up next week with Lars, and then Lars just didn't update. So did you still want the letter separate, or does anything change in it?

I want to send the letter.

Okay.

Yeah, so I'm just going to be honest. It's been a long time and we always get told, oh, we're doing this, we're doing that. I went through the CIP stuff and it's only allocated $10,000 for five years for the CIP for the bridge over Old Long Valley.

Over Old Long Valley.

Yeah. Can a Bailey Bridge be put there? I'm trying to get any way I can get there. I think a Bailey Bridge for right now might be the best bet. I mean, we're going into a major, obviously it's gonna be a major fire season. The wind's already going, grass is tall. North Shore fire's not doing too good with the finances. So I think it would be absolutely smart to do that. I mean, why people are evacuating, go out that way. Fire trucks can go on one way.

I'm going to ask Chief Donnelly. Sterling, in here they have down $2 million for the upper Wolf and $2.7 million for the lower. That's Wolf Creek. This is Old Long Valley.

That has nothing to do with the existing bridges. It's for the secondary.

That's only for the design phase.

Chief Donnelly, can a Bailey Bridge support your equipment?

And if not...

Okay, thank you. He said it's a good question.

Can I answer that? We had a Bailey Bridge. We had a Bailey Bridge on New Long Valley when the New Long Valley blew out from a mudslide. It took the whole entire road out. With the Bailey Bridge? I was just going to say, I know your equipment can get over the Bailey Bridge because it was there for months. Okay.

Okay. Oh sorry.

Mm hmm. State responsibility area. So those are one of those things. I'm a no. We learned from previous incidents, but sometimes we have to think about the situation. And I'm personally more I would like to get people in first to start fighting the fire. And then as maybe we get the first people in, then we tactfully lose, use the law enforcement to get citizens out. So those are some of those things I'd like to talk about in the future. So you gotta remember I've only been in the seat for two weeks officially. So all things we're gonna add and talk about in the future.

Thank you.

Just real quick on Bailey Bridges. The fun fact is they were designed in World War II to haul tanks across rivers. So they're modular and as long as it's configured properly, it should be more than adequate to support 75,000 pound fire apparatus. So they're meant for military artillery and tank transport. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay, so in terms of the Spring Valley second access letter, I don't know if any, we didn't discuss this. Does anybody have any problem with the content? The Spring Valley Second Access Letter.

Was just one, there was one sentence at the end, because it was, you sent it last month, so there was one sentence at the end that, I forget what it said.

The only thing I would like is, we have a template that we use when we put things together, which it just says what Earth is and where we talk about it. It's just, if it's a new organization, then they understand where we are. If it's an old organization, they've already had 10 letters from us, they just ignore that part. But maybe we could just reformat it so that that could be in there. So it just follows that same format?

Oh, at the bottom it said this matter will be presented to the committee for a vote to formally submit a request action. Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to put that down there. Okay. So, yeah.

So, you know, how do you feel about sending the letter? I don't know. That's it. Yeah.

I mean, I didn't hear you. So...

You know I'm good with it because I'm the one that wrote it.

Yeah, I don't have any problems if we can just reformat that. And I can work on that with you. Okay.

So you guys will work on that one and, okay. And bring it back. Okay. Okay. District 3 MAC update.

Basically, there's not a whole lot since that huge meeting we had. We just launched the SIRTH website at lakecountysirth.com. We now have a QR code for SIRTH, so we reprinted the QR code page to put that in, and we'll be scheduling a meeting to discuss next projects.

Did you run to cannabis?

Oh, cannabis, there's not a whole lot. Supervisor Crandall already said the ordinance is coming back to the council. The Planning Commission approved Global Industries Cannabis on Highway 53. Lamparity II on Sulphur Bank Road is on hold because revisions are needed. Catholic Church Grow off Highway 20 is having a tribal consultation on the 10th, and then it will move towards public review on Sequinette. and there's no change for Lemon Glow or the Lake County Investment Group at the moment. All right.

Thank you. County and agency projects update. Kindred Spirits? Did you want to talk? Oh. Dave will speak on Kindred Spirits.

Hi, I'm David Abels. I will be the person in charge of Kindred Spirits, which is a new 501 that we're working on right now. Progress on that is we're taking some steps, getting the paper pushed. I've retired from Lake County Behavioral Health, and now I can focus on this project 100%. So far, though, I have... I apologize for that sign not being there Thursday. It should have been. I was at a very enlightening event that gave me quite a bit of hope towards the funding and stuff. So at that event, I networked with a few people, and they seemed to think, well, there is a grant that's going to probably assist us in purchasing the buildings over there at the church. And... possibly that lot over there for, say, parking. So we're chipping away. We are making some progress. And now that I've retired, I can dedicate a lot more time to this. So baby steps, but we are moving forward.

Let us know how it keeps going.

I certainly will.

Thank you, Dave. Does anybody have any questions for Dave? I have some questions. Thank you for taking this on. We appreciate you. All right, Lake County Capital Improvement Projects in the Earth Region.

We just talked about some of those, which is the Wolf Creek Bridge, etc. But some of the facility improvements that are coming up is Clarks Island Bridge Repair, improved picnic tables and barbecues, landscaping, and a playground over in Clarks Island. Klaus Park, they're working on right-of-way access for the entryway and design engineering. And then infrastructure improvements also include the Sulphur Bank landslide repair.

Thank you. Clear Lake Oaks County Water Company proposed rate increase. Okay.

So as we said at the last meeting, we have no control over the rate increases. This is not a county agency. The water company is not a county agency.

Even though it has county in the name.

Yeah, even though it has county in the name. So let's call it the Clear Lake Oaks Community Water District. So anyway, there are copies of the rate increases on the table if you haven't received them. Per Prop 218, the water company can request increased rates based on the costs of providing service. They did finally get back the water service, cost of water service thing, which is on their website. They do have a wastewater financial plan which is posted. They're currently requesting a 25.6% increase to the combined water sewer bill effective July 1st. We did attempt, Sterling and I did attempt to set up a meeting with the water company, with Diana Mann and the public so they could ask questions. According to Diana and Olivia, that's not something they can do without notifying the entire public. So as far as they were concerned, the public hearing is scheduled for June 18th, where you can go in and ask questions. She did say, this is at 10 a.m. at the water company. She did say you can feel free to contact the water company with questions and they will answer them. You may submit a written protest prior to 10 AM of that day. It must be mailed or dropped off at the company. It must include your name, your address, a statement indicating opposition, and your signature. If 50% plus one oppose, it will not pass. But mind you, that is a very high bar. That's about 1,000 people. Oral comments at the meeting do not qualify unless accompanied by a written protest. I tend to suggest that maybe, you know, we also ask if there's any way to push out the 25.6% increase so it's more palatable as opposed to having it start in four weeks, you know, et cetera. So that's...

So I thought it was 60% over several years. Yes. Okay.

Yes.

It's just not clear how CLO Water District arrived at a 60% rate increase. I mean, it didn't happen overnight. You know, what are the, you know, how are existing and current revenues allocated which resulted in a 60% water rate deficit? I don't know. It's, I mean, shouldn't they be negotiating with us and stuff?

Yeah, I think that's something that you need to ask them, because we don't have, I don't know. I don't necessarily know that. I do know that when I did talk to the water company, there are some things that we as people maybe could control, one of which is 25%, I was told 25% of all the rate payers do not pay their bill every month. And that ends up costing us, other rate payers, a whole lot of money, because they have to send out things, follow up on people. things like that. Obviously, if the rate increases, I think it's gonna be higher than 25%, but those aren't any questions I can answer for you because I'm not part of the water company. I would definitely say to ask her and to go to the meeting.

Yeah, yeah, and hopefully they have financial records, because I haven't seen anything.

Well, the cost of service is online, and the wastewater financial thing is on their website, because I have seen that. And actually, I have handouts that came from them, and I think it should have the links on there. It may be on this other table here, yeah.

All right. PG&E updates. I was about to say I don't have any, but she just sent me an email. And I'm just trying to go through it really quickly. I'll just give you a couple of them and then we'll post it on the website. But it looks like large residential grid updates in Clear Lake Oaks across Highway 20 from Narrows. I have to ask her. I hope that's not Upper Lake. That's Connecticut. Okay. Oh, okay. That's what she's talking about. They're It's in the planning phases right now, 2.86 miles of undergrounding project in Spring Valley along Wolf Creek Road, Spring Valley Road and Quail Trail. Traffic control will be active, minor delays, and that's scheduled to start in late 2027. They're doing... East of Spring Valley, they're doing a lot of, they're doing undergrounding, oh no, I'm sorry. They're removing old infrastructure with helicopters, removing of idle facilities in Benmore Canyon, out through Double Eagle. They're also gonna be working on 2.6, this is gonna start early 2027, 2.6 miles of undergrounding work along Highway 20 before Cache Creek Winery and traffic control will be required with single lane closures. And there was one other one, system upgrades off Highway 20 across from Clear Lake Lava. And does anybody know where Black Eye Canyon is? No, okay, I think she has it wrong. System upgrades in Black Eye Canyon, but I'll confirm her with that, but that's what I have right now for PG&E update.

move on to spring valley update i'll go through it really quick okay um so the staffs were putting the board on the spillways they just finished today unfortunately they didn't put them up soon enough and our lake is now a pond there's pretty much no water left so the staff is still monitoring the water loss they're replacing a lot of old meters okay we don't need that one because we already talked about that we talked about wolf creek So an updated engineering report has been submitted to the state for the pressurized zone projects, including replacing water mains, road rehabilitation for roads impacted by the main replacement, another water tank backup power for the well site, and a pressure zone upgrade, including valves. Are we right about that? AJ talked about the ribbon cutting. Staff reported that the lake recovery project design is near completed and is expected to move towards the bidding phase next. And that's what I have for the update.

All right. Thank you. North Shore Fire Protection, T. Donnelly.

Take the microphone off and run around with it.

Anyway, and then nobody else can turn around.

First of all, we wanna welcome you. We wanna welcome you to the North Shore.

Yes, so Chief Donnelly is our newest fire chief. He took over from Chief Banks, who resigned, and he wasn't here last month, but he was at our D3 MAC Alliance meeting, for those of you that attended there.

I noticed some familiar faces from the MAC and other meetings down in Lucerne. Chief Banks is still with us. He's a battalion chief now. Him and I just switched. We've been working together for over a year now. So interim chief for about three weeks, official for the last two weeks. Thanks for having me here. I'm humbled to serve this district since I've been here. I've been in community service, what? Just like... OK, well I couldn't hear anybody all day so I'm going to be a little louder because I saw everybody else acting like they couldn't hear. So including myself. Anyway, just a little bit about myself. I've been in the fire service since I was 18. I've been sharing with my guys. I think it's super important for we serve the community that we're here to work for. Even though it's a job, it's more than that. And. There's been a lot of talk around the community, Facebook, back and forth. Our guys are here every day doing the same job, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days. Everybody else home with their family, friends, birthdays, holidays, they're at work. Still running calls, still taking care of you guys. So we're fully staffed right now. We've got a couple people leaving, but I just, like today, had a great call. One of our guys that took a leave of absence went to medic school. He wants to come back to work next week. He's not quite a paramedic yet, but he graduated today. There's a lot of steps. So we have the most paramedics we've had probably here in the last four to five years. We staffed the two stations, one at the Oaks, one in Neese. You guys, we're trying to provide the same service level for everybody down here on the east side of the district as we do on the west side of the district. We always have paramedics, so that's advanced life support. They have the ambulance that they primarily go out on medical calls, but we cross-staff apparatus based on the call. So we have water tenders, pickup trucks with water. They're called Type 6 engines, if we know We have a little tighter road or somewhere inaccessible. We'll take the smaller rig. We have the bigger Type 3 wildland engines. We have Type 1 structure engines. So those are all those things that our guys every day are kind of just bouncing back and forth to provide the best service we can to you. We work hand-in-hand with all of our neighbors, Forest Service, CAL FIRE, neighboring districts, Lake County, Lakeport, Kelseyville, South Lake. It's continuous. We have auto aid. So they know where our units are all the time. So if there happened to be a unit that transports to Sutter from Nice, they're close to the call, they're going to go to the call. We also have brotherly things. Lakeport guys are still going to come and help out. But we're always going to go to the call. Same thing when medic 7511s down in Clear Lake transporting. If there's a critical call, they're going to get dispatched to it faster when they're coming back home to those. So there's all sorts of things that are going on behind the scenes that maybe the community doesn't know. So whenever you see the guys, you see me, if you have questions, ask us. We're here to serve you. We're doing the best we can under the circumstances. We're learning from our past, but we can't dwell in it. So we're going to keep on, as I try to say, we're going to be a little defensive at times right now, but we got to stay offensive. So anybody have any questions for me? Thank you, Chief Donnelly. We have a lot of volunteers. We kind of talk about volunteer firefighters. We don't have many of those, but we have a dive team. So the dive team is instrumental in the county and neighboring counties. The support team comes out and helps us out. And their station, they live all the way from Upper Lake. all the way down through Spring Valley, and they come out and help all of us on the bigger incidents. And we have the Hogback Fuel Crew, you heard about that. We work closely with Clerk constantly on that, and hopefully we want to give a little birth to them and add to their capabilities, and that seems like that's in our near future. And then we have the North Shore Fire Fund that helps us out quite a bit.

Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you. All right, moving on to new business. Any new business? I mean, I did want to bring up one thing.

I'm not sure if everybody knows, but they do have all those AI data centers going around. And I think that maybe we should be talking about maybe put a moratorium in Lake County. I mean, what better place for a data center than a place that has an abundance of energy and an abundance of water? You need both of that for a data center. So there's a lot of Northern California counties, I did look into this, that have banned data data centers, and I think that this is something that I, as a whole county, should be talking about, not just in this region. So just for some new news and maybe for you guys to think about that, but our county is looking at some serious stuff.

Thank you. Oh, he's telling me we got a handle on mine.

Oh, I'm sorry, I'm done.

He's just getting my attention.

Go ahead, Betsy. Thank you, Thomas. Thank you, everybody. I would just like to suggest that that's yet another item that should be addressed in the energy policy proposal. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Betsy. So you want me to post this? Is that it?

Oh. Is that something that... Well, we can't talk about it. It's probably for people to read. Oh, okay. It's probably for everybody to read. Sorry, go ahead. Well, I can post it so people can read it. Okay. Okay.

Sterling, I just wanted to comment on that really quick. I would love to connect with you on your thoughts on that because that is absolutely something that I think the District 3 MAC might want to tackle. I did hear murmurings that a data center is looking at Ukiah. and not just our water and energy resources we need to be thinking about but we also need to be thinking about our quality of life and the cost of living and the housing that we already don't have and how all of that will be impacted if we have a huge data center and then they come And I work for, in the workforce development system, let me not say where I work, but I worked for, just last week, Facebook laid off 2,212 people in San Jose because of AI. So this is something that we definitely need to have on our radars and that we're talking about, and I just wanna volunteer to work with you on however we can make it something we focus on. Thank you.

I'll give you my number for at least. Thank you. Any other new business?

This is Tom. Just to reiterate, back when I used to have a job, I used to install data centers. There are huge facilities. They use a lot of energy.

Okay, so hold on, Tom. We're not talking about the actual, it's new business, so are you supporting it, but we're not going to get into the needs of it.

I'm just going to say I support doing that because it does use quite a bit of energy, and it does use quite a bit of water. I just had some news feed today that the amount of water that data centers like Google and such are using, it exceeds like the water usage of Denmark. Yeah. half the water uses of England so it is something I think you should take a look at especially because we have the largest you know natural lake completely within the state it is important and I think it's timely thank you and it should be part of the energy policy thank you all right

Oh, Lisa, she, okay. And moving on to announcements, are there any announcements? You have a hand raised?

I have an announcement.

You have an announcement.

I have an announcement. The Moose Lodge has so graciously decided to make dinner for everyone. So every Wednesday night, moving forward, there will be a dinner. Tonight, it's lasagna, $10. So those of you who are hungry, you know, want to stick around, $10. If you want to be a guest in the lodge, you're more than welcome to do that as well. We can sign you in. I'm a moose member myself, so I encourage people to get involved with your local moose lodge. So lasagna tonight, $10. I know some of you might still be hungry or whatever.

Are you going to tell us next time what's going to be available so we can put it on the agenda we send out?

You know what? We can probably work with the administrator and see if we can do that. Okay.

Wonderful. Thank you. I think one announcement that Lisa was going to make, too, is that there is, what's it called, Summer Days this weekend. Is that what it's called? It's in Upper Lake. It's going to be at the Upper Lake Grange. I don't know the exact time. I'll find out and get it posted on the website or our Facebook page. Okay. with that uh our next earth meeting will be wednesday july 1st right here at the moose lodge from 4 to 5 30 and we will adjourn this meeting thank you all for attending