Area Council - Regular Meeting

Is it time? All right, let's call this meeting to order at 6.33. Could we get a roll call, please?

Jake Strickland.

Here.

Kathy McCarthy.

Here.

Chris Nettles. Here. Meg Delaney of Alvarama.

Out of town.

Joe Schneider.

She's excused.

That's it.

Okay, now let's all stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, please.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Apologies. Yeah, I know. Sorry. No, no, it's fine.

Okay. Can we get an approval for this week's or this month's agenda?

Move to approve the agenda for tonight's meeting.

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.

All opposed?

All right, we have an agenda.

Yeah.

And then, did everybody get a chance to look at last month's minutes? Any comments or questions? If not, can we get an approval for last month's minutes, please?

I'll make a motion to approve the minutes for last month. Second.

All in favor? Aye. All opposed? All right, last month's minutes are approved. Now's the time for short announcements.

Jump up. I guess that's why I'm here. Yeah, open. Is that on?

Yeah.

More line listening? Yep.

I don't miss those days.

Moke Simon, chairman of Middletown Rancheria. I was asked by District 5 supervisor to come on up and address the community here. As everybody knows probably by now, word flies fast in a small community. The Middletown Rancheria has purchased the Pine Grove Resort. We're calling it now Pine Grove Resort Inc. You gotta change a bunch of little names and stuff. So it was a great opportunity for us from a tribal standpoint. Housing is a need in every community. We were able to secure some funds that would allow us to get some transitional housing opportunities for our tribe and tribal members. It just makes sense if you have funds to do something, to come up with something that you can put something in, have a place that you can put your people at, and help the community too. So we purchased it. We were able to do that. We already do have one tribal member living over there. Our plan is to operate it. The same as it has been, but hopefully get all the units up and running slowly but surely and get things back. We just hired a manager. His name is Robert Summers. As a matter of fact, he started today. He's from Cobb. He's worked for us for years at the casino. He will be moving into the main house as soon as that is vacated. He'll be on site all the time. And we're, you know, kind of, we're learning as we go. It gives us an opportunity to not only bring some business acumen of ours up to the mountain here, but it also, man, it's going to be fun. So our goal and, you know, I've got a lot of emails and other things. We own it. We're going to do everything to take care of it. We also got to learn. So our plan is to have the pool area open by July 1st. So it gets the holiday and stuff. We're going to kind of operate it the same way it was done before. He's just getting his feet on the ground right there to get things going. But we've got the pool. It is all approved and everything. We've got no issues there. Next year we'll paint it, do some other stuff. We should start some good weed abatement stuff all through the 30 acres there, including the baseball field and some of that stuff that's overgrown right now. That should be gone in the next 10 days. We'll get all that cleared out and cleaned. Our guys are hitting down by our houses big time by area and they'll be up here real quick. So Robert's on site. Obviously we ain't going nowhere. That's always going to be a part of the tribe. And as we keep moving forward, uh we're just going to continue to try to grow back there are 53 lots on that property broken up into camping lots camping areas rv spots with sewer and water sewer water and power we're learning a bunch of that but there are there's a bunch of work that needs to be done too both inside there i think there's some tree trimming probably that needs to happen there's definitely some work on the grounds that have to happen. But I think there's about eight or nine units that really need to be worked on or decided if we're going to be able to bring them back or just replace them. So we're kind of putting a plan together. Our plan this year is kind of get through the season, really understand what's happening. We have the rentals that are going. We kind of held everything off. We had some in June, but we pushed it off because we weren't ready for it. So in July, we got a bunch of bookings. People are booking. They'll be coming up and staying for the weekends. We have people who have been here forever calling us, and we're like, all right, we're ready for you guys. And we're proud to be part of the Cobb Mountain community right now. And there's a big, big plan that they had that we bought with it, like a big expansion. We probably won't be going gangbusters, but we're going to work our butts off to bring some tourism dollars and other things from the tribal community that are available to us now, and then just continue to grow it. So hopefully we'll start to see some changes. We're limited. We have a manager right now. Some other people probably volunteering, helping with the pool. and trying to get things started. So I just came to say we're here forever, and we're just going to do everything we can to fit in the community. So I know this is announcement time. I don't know if anybody has any questions or want to say something. But maybe I'll get on the agenda down the road. My thought is, whether I'm here or the manager, as we go through things, if questions come up, we'll bring those questions up. And now we have a spot. It's beautiful in there. I personally have never stayed in that place. I played bingo and had a lot of fun as a high schooler out there on the streets and stuff. But actually seeing it and what that property comes with, you know me, I got a million different ideas. And to see someone catch trout out of there when we were buying the thing was really cool. We're at the headwaters, obviously, or close to the headwaters of Kelsey Creek. I got a million ideas of what I think this place could be to help Just bring more tourism opportunities and jobs to this area and the tribe is fully behind it. You know they're excited and. you know hopefully we met the whole proud you know the whole community proud and we're happy this was able to be done too i'll just always give the people credit that need credit is this is a long-term conversation with our senator senator maguire with the tribe and housing needs and other things like that not only thinking here small you know just thinking of lake county you know me i think from here to washington dc We need to make sure everybody knows who we are and the needs of this community. And I want to thank Senator McGuire's office for working with us on this appropriation to get some things. And I think we did a good job of stretching minimal amount of dollars a long ways and also getting a piece of history here. And you guys know us. We've been here forever. So we're excited. So that's what I had to say today. We've got the manager there, so everybody's got, oh, I've lived here forever and all those types of things. Sometimes I say, think about that when you're saying it to a tribal person. I've been here forever, my family's been here forever. We've been here for 18,000 years. Our bloodline comes from this area, so we've all been here forever. And we'll do everything to be a good, part of the community and just be patient with us as we learn and how to run an RV park, how to run a hotel and a casino and fueling stations, smoke shop, all these other things. But this is a new venture. But you know me, I like to I like to learn on the run and just kick the door down and keep going. So welcome to, you know, hopefully I'm welcome to the community, but wanted to come up here and answer these questions. Supervisor asked me to come and obviously I know at least 70% of the people in the room, so that's what I had to say. Thank you. Happy to have you. Welcome to Cobb.

Yeah, welcome. Do you have a website or a phone number in case people wanted to get in touch?

My phone number should be in everybody's. They're already calling me.

So you personally, so they should call.

In fact, I got a call the other night about it.

Call them.

I did not memorize the manager's number right now. He just started today. I handed him the cell phone at 9.30 this morning, so I didn't memorize it. We'll get the information. I'm not sure what anybody would be calling for, but there is a website. There's all that. We're starting to work that out. When we bought the property, we couldn't get the website, so I'm always honest. I have no idea how to work a website or any of that stuff. We got the manager. We're hoping to have communication there. I'm not elected official in the county. I'm not going to say my number on this, but I will write it on that paper over there. And everybody has it anyway. So yeah, we're excited. It's good stuff.

All right. Thank you, Moak. Thank you, Moak.

Any other short announcements?

Hi, Cobbites. Margo Kambara. I have three short announcements. First, in chronological order, this Saturday, the Harbor on Main, Lake County Behavioral Health Services, Redwood Community Service, and somebody in small print, I can't read, I think it's State of California something or other, Pride Prom, this Saturday, 5 p.m., to 9 p.m. for LGBTQ plus youth and allies ages 14 to 25. The location is Lake County Fairgrounds. And then this is for people in Zoom land and on Peg TV if you want to take a closer look. And then the next event in chronological order is this Tuesday, June 23rd at 11 a.m. The Board of Supervisors will hear the cannabis ordinance amendments of interest to neighbors are two things one is setbacks as a cannabis odor mitigation and two the cannabis permits will no longer expire that's proposed and expiration dates of permits is one of the few ways to ensure compliance with the ordinance and then finally Next Sunday at Austin Park, this is Sunday, June 28th, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Again, we have the County of Lake Health Services. Sorry, different department, but same county. And this is going to be a celebration with a pride march through the park. Parade is at 1230. Thank you. Thank you.

Any other short announcements? Okay, let's move on to public and board comment on non-agenda items.

Hi, Kaubites. In assembly, Margo Kambara, Lake County General Plan Advisory Committee representative speaking for myself. The General Plan Advisory Committee recommended that a comprehensive energy policy be developed as part of the General Plan update. Community Development Department did not accept this recommendation. Meanwhile, others also recommend the addition of a comprehensive energy policy as part of our General Plan update. Months ago, the Board of Supervisors formed an ad hoc committee to develop an energy policy. That effort seems to focus on geothermal energy. Lake County needs a comprehensive energy policy that covers various types of energy. A comprehensive energy policy should protect the county's resources and set terms of resource development. Terms should cover permitting, safety requirements, siting, financial and environmental protections. If done right, a comprehensive energy policy can lead to energy sovereignty for Lake County. This can mean lower energy costs. This can mean Lake County generates energy and income from its energy resources. This energy income can be like Alaska's sovereign wealth fund. Earth, Eastern Region Town Hall authorized its land use committee to draft a letter to the Board of Supervisors on including a comprehensive energy policy to the general plan. Scotts Valley Advisory Council authorized an ad hoc committee to draft a letter to the Board of Supervisors on energy policy recommendations. What about COG? You as a body and the Assembly as individuals can let the Board of Supervisors know your thoughts about a comprehensive energy policy. At minimum, the updated General Plan can have text added pointing to a comprehensive energy policy to be developed after the acceptance of the General Plan by the Board of Supervisors. Why does this matter? Developers have contacted the county about geothermal development projects. Without a comprehensive energy policy, Lake County can be caught flat-footed. Assembly Bill 531 allows geothermal developers to seek permitting approval from the state by passing a local permitting authority. A comprehensive energy policy with an AB 531 response strategy is needed to protect the county's interests. Let's put Lake County's best foot forward and prepare for the future now. Let's get a comprehensive energy policy developed, ideally as part of our general plan. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other public and board comment on agenda items? Okay, we will roll into our supervisor report. Supervisor Paizka.

Well, I really appreciate your patience, because I've been traveling so much. I've missed a lot of meetings. I'm going to miss the July meeting, too. That is the National Association of Counties annual meeting, which is in New Orleans. So I have to be there for that. And we will be wrapping up our work with FEMA reform and the FEMA Act. But I have really exciting news. Yesterday, the Fire Smart Act was introduced by Senator Padilla, and this was something that one of my colleagues in Inyo County was working on. We started working together on it, and then we recognized the work that Chief Cepeda was doing on trying to develop infrastructure for water systems for fire suppression, because every single one of our water systems is very small, not adequate, really, to provide water flows. And it's not unique in rural communities. It's actually really common. So we've all been kind of working on this idea of how do we get funding to develop the infrastructure. There's not a lot of avenues for funding. It's not allowed through FEMA. So hitting these walls. I had a really lively conversation with Senator Padilla's staff last fall on my trip to D.C. And then they wrote a bill. And so the bill got introduced yesterday, and I'm really excited. So this is what collaboration looks like, working with my colleagues, working with our lobbyists, our county lobbyists, with the Inyo County lobbyists, worked with the National Association of County Lobbyists. And we got this bill introduced, and I can't even believe it. I'm so excited. Fantastic. When I make all these trips, there's always a really good reason. I'm really careful with my travel. I actually don't love being away from my family. But it's important and it matters. And just as our past supervisor said, going to DC and showing up and being there really, really matters. And our voice is being heard in a lot of places because of this travel and going to where the decisions are being made.

Look up the bill if you want, support it if you want.

I think it's going to be a big deal for rural counties because it's sort of a pilot. We'll be able to access the state revolving fund dollars, which can be loans or grants for water infrastructure, but it's for communities under 50,000. any community in our county, any water system would qualify. And so Chief Cepeda has done a ton of work, intertwining districts and trying to find alternate water sources and freshwater hydrants, all kinds of things. So this is another part of the strategy to make sure that our water infrastructure can support an incident, but also it doesn't destroy a small water system, too, if we do have an incident. So that's really exciting. Um. It's a Firesmart Act by Senator Padilla. It's bipartisan. He works really closely with several other Republican senators in Montana, Senator Sheehy. So they've been working on this together. They actually have several bills together. So it has a lot of support. I think it's going to be great. Then the next step is making sure that California gets a good share of the state revolving fund, because that has also been an issue where we haven't really gotten a lot of that funding. We'll just do one step at a time for now. We got the $1.4 million for the park, so that's so exciting. I know Lars was telling us it was possibly coming for months and months and months, and we got approval, we got notice from the grant administrator the end of April, so it's $1.4 million, but now that does require NEPA review, so as we talked about, we get more money, but we have to wait longer. So we probably won't see construction this year. Maybe, hopefully next year. But he's also looking, or his team is looking for another grant to cover the local share so that our dollars go a lot farther. But the good news is it looks like we have enough money to complete all phases of construction, hopefully You know, prices are going up every day, but that's really good news, because we only had enough funding for phase one. And phase two, if you remember from the plans, kind of vague plans, is crossing the creek and developing a trail system. So hopefully we'll be able to move forward with the bulk of the work. So just continue to be patient. I know everybody keeps asking about the park, and that's the news, and it's great. I have another trip planned at the end of this month where I am going to Illinois because there is a, Margo was talking about the energy policy committee that we have. I'm on that committee. I think we will be bringing something to the board next month, a small update, but there's so much happening in this space that there's a couple opportunities for me to go and do some learning. And so I was accepted into this learning academy. It's in Illinois. That's what I'm going to go do. I'm going to tour a nuclear plant. And this is a chance for peer-to-peer learning with other supervisors and commissioners across the country to talk about best practices. There's another one that's really similar, but it's in Texas in September. So I'm going to do that one too. But I think it's important that we get as much experience and understanding, because a lot is changing in the energy sector right now, and I wanna make sure that we're as prepared as possible. This week, we had three days of budget hearings. My good friend, I don't have to sit through them. So what that means is in June, by the end of June, we have to approve our recommended budget. And then in September we come and we approve the the actual budget. And so this year, we had about $440 million in appropriations, but only about a quarter of that, about $100 million, $105 million, I think, is general fund. And that's kind of our discretionary. That's what comes to us through property taxes, sales taxes, some other revenue sources. And so if you think about a dollar bill, Every dollar that you pay in property taxes, about 23% comes back to our county, and that supports our general fund. About 1% is for roads. And so that's, our roads are, that's non-discretionary funding, but that goes to our roads. And then there's another small percentage that goes to the libraries. So if you think about that revenue that comes back to us, It seems small, but it's actually high compared to a lot of other counties. It has to do with calculations that happen when Prop 13 passed. My colleagues in San Benito County, they get 10%. We actually are higher in the percentage, so we get more of our property tax back, but we don't have a lot of the other industries that other counties have that would also contribute to revenue. So and then our other departments like behavioral health and social services, those are all funded through the state and federal government. So it's not out of that property tax. And that's why our budget is so big. It's $440 million, but only about $100 million is really general fund. And of that $105 million, About 60% goes towards public safety, law enforcement, the jail, public defender, district attorney, all those things. So we end up with a pretty small amount for funding everything else, which is how we do provide services. We have been working really hard to bring our salaries up over the past many years because they were very low. There was deferred increases for way too long and we had very low morale. We had a really hard time hiring people, high caliber people, financial outlooks. So we have things that are happening in the world that are making it more expensive that are We have a war, we have oil and gas prices, we have inflation, stagnation, we have all of these things that are happening. So as our revenues continue to climb, our expenses are going up faster too, if you think about the cost of insurance. Well, every insurance that we have throughout the county is going up dramatically. So there's a lot of expenses that we really need to tighten up. And also our revenues, we had a lot of, we had large influxes of cash coming in during the COVID years. And so we're, adjusting, we're course correcting, we're implementing hiring freezes, we'll do attrition of positions as people leave because we need to contract now. We had a period of expansion with higher revenues and now it's time to contract. So we have some forecasts for the next several years. These changes, stopping extraordinary expenses, just things like that that we need to really be aware of so that we stay on target and in the positive. So that's what the last three days were about. So I just wanted to share that with you. We're gonna have to say no to a lot of things. In the last few years, we've been able to say yes to things, and we've been able to provide services because we had the revenue. And so now it's going to be a different period. So I just want to let you all know that we're in good shape. We have a very conservative financial team. We made some good decisions along those lines. My last thing, the reason I missed last May's meeting was because I was at the California Association of Counties legislation conference in Sacramento, and if you're following what's been happening with the state budget, the state has a deficit, the governor's budget, really pushed a lot onto counties that were part of the safety net and the HR1 cuts, the big beautiful bill from last year. And there really was no way for counties to cover those costs. And the big pieces of that are Medi-Cal and CalFresh. And those two hit Lake County really, really hard. So the governor's budget kind of just said, counties, that's your problem. we did a whole heck of a lot of advocacy around that and the counties pushed back really really hard and we leaned really hard into our legislators and we met with them a whole lot in that week in sacramento and the legislators budget is a lot different and it supports counties in a much better way so they closed they finished their budget this week kicked it back to the governor and now we're gonna see what happens. So we feel much better about the legislator's budget. The governor's budget was terrifying, but also probably was a place to begin negotiations. So we're, We're gonna keep pushing, but we have really great lobbyists that are on our side, and so do all of our departments, like behavioral health and social services, because everyone's pushing at the same time to make sure that we can provide for the people that live in Lake County that really need that safety net, because it will be catastrophic if we have to deal with those cuts. And that's it.

All right, thank you Supervisor Paizka. Let's go to our fire season update with Chief Duncan.

Yes, fire season's here. If you haven't noticed by looking around outside. The warmer, drier weather's here. The department is fully staffed, so in our unit, which encompasses six counties, we have 31 engines, six dozers, eight crews, we have three helicopters, three fixed-wing aircraft, and then lots of overhead to transport. do lots of work when we get incidents. So that is our staffing level that will continue all the way through our peak, into winter, basically. On the South Lake side, we're very excited. Today we took delivery of two brand new fire engines. Those replace two 35-year-old frontline engines. One will be stationed here in Cobb. One will be stationed at Hidden Valley. As soon as those engines get outfitted, we will be putting a request out to the community, which includes outfitted and radios program stuff. They have been very busy doing fuels work on Highway 175. If you've been by this Cobb school area, you'll see that they did a bunch of 500 feet clearance back in that kind of a shaded fuel break in there. around all the planted pine trees, so very cool. Richie Booker was instrumental in that. Also on the Southlake side, we did take a delivery of a new masticator. It's called a CEPI machine. It's a remote-controlled masticator.

With the BHSA, they keep 10%. So we are being asked to do similar services with categorically less money. And this is also clear as mud, I feel like, but this is our way of trying to showcase how some of these changes went into the funding components with the BHSA. On the outside, we have MHSA programs and where they fit into the new BHSA model in the middle. So some of them were really clear. Full service partnership had its home and had its place to go. Our housing coordinator, housing interventions, that all had a place to go. But then at the very bottom here, these other behavioral health services and supports, that's where we had to squeeze everything else in, including our peer-run wellness centers. So what does that actually mean for us here in Lake County? So some programs have had to change. The most notable and the most impactful is we were forced to sunset our peer-run wellness centers. So we had the Big Oak Peer Support Center in Clear Lake Oaks, the Circle of Native Minds in Lakeport, and La Voz de la Esperanza in Clear Lake. And unfortunately, as of June 1st, those have closed. This is a loss for our community. We are not going to deny that. We're not going to walk around that or act like that's not the reality. But it is. And that sucks. But that's not the end of peer-run services. We have a lot more coming. We are exploring other community-based programming that we can hope we can lift up in the future, such as the clubhouse model. The clubhouse model, I've heard some people, when they see it, they actually see it similar to our peer-run wellness centers. It does have a lot more requirement to be involved in it. So it's not gonna be a drop-in center. It's something that we're hopefully exploring that we can lift up that can still provide those services to our community. But the biggest difference is that with the clubhouse model, we would be able to draw down Medi-Cal dollars. So why are these centers closing? BHSA funding is a lot more restrictive than it was previously. Some services are no longer funded in the same way, and we really had to make these difficult decisions to stay compliant with state requirements and to preserve the critical mandated services that we are required to abide by. So we want to kind of address some things that we've heard straight on. First, it's that services are being taken away. and we're not gonna lie and pretend that things aren't changing. Like I said, appreciated, they are consistently called out as a great service to our community, but that doesn't mean that peer support services are ending even though the peer wellness centers are closed. So all of our peers have been integrated into clinical teams that align with their professional interests, so they can kind of focus on what it is that they would like to focus on. We worked individually with everyone, so nobody was laid off. We were able to integrate every peer that wanted to be integrated. Of course, there were some who retired, but we were able to integrate them into teams within our department. I also wanna kind of address the idea that we just arbitrarily decided to close these centers. That was not the case. There were meetings, many, many meetings, and I would say, having watched our leadership team, they really fought tooth and nail to try and find ways that they could keep these centers open, but they had to abide by these new funding policies. Yeah. So what support will look like moving forward? One thing we have an emphasis on with the BHSA is us coming out to the community. So instead of people having to come to us to seek services, we're gonna come directly to them. We're still building this program and trying to figure out what this looks like in practice, but we are, same as Jessica said, she's been learning from other people and their best practices. We are doing the same with other counties in California. We're very actively involved with other counties and learning from them because you don't need to reinvent the wheel, we know. But we also recognize that Lake County has some really distinct challenges that other counties may not have as well. So we are gonna be transitioning to evidence-based models. Like I said, we're gonna be exploring the clubhouse model. We're gonna continue access to peer support, care coordination, and behavioral health services overall. Next slide. So I know you guys didn't have one of the peer-run wellness centers up on Cobb, but you may be familiar with them. We know that these centers were hugely impactful to our community. These decisions were not made lightly, they were not made arbitrarily, and our department remains committed to transparency, which is why we're here today, compassionate care, and meeting the needs of our community within the new guidelines that we have to abide by. And I'm not sure, I do have April Gambra here. Did you wanna say something, April? Okay. So we can take any questions.

Thank you, Megan and April, for bringing this information to the community. Megan, can you comment on the mobile crisis units and their going away at the end of the fiscal, no, calendar year and how that's gonna affect us?

Yeah, so let me do some level setting really quick. In 2023, we rolled out the mobile crisis response team. That is a 24 hours a day, seven days a week mobile benefit where if somebody is in crisis, whether that is a mental health crisis or substance use related crisis, we will come directly to that individual in need anywhere in the county. 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This has been a really great benefit. We work with first responders. We work directly with dispatch. So if somebody calls 911, they have a checklist to identify, hey, maybe this is a mental or a mobile crisis call. So they will actually dispatch directly to us to kind of take that, I don't want to call it a burden, but that extra weight off of the first responder system. So I see April kind of itching. Do you want to?

that she did that well didn't she thank you again so like supervisor Paisko we've been advocating very strongly and securing additional funding but you are correct the governor's budget did state that effective so the state was carrying the federal share portion within our County That is set to end in December. My director will probably get me for saying this, but I really am gonna fight tooth and nail any way I possibly can to make sure that that happens or doesn't happen. But there was changes made to the governor's proposal through legislature and we're hopeful that it's going to sustain we do serve about 1300 calls a year that that's mobile crisis response we get over 4000 5000 calls like we're pretty busy. And. It's not just for those who are experiencing a crisis. It is a behavioral health crisis. So I am a clinician. I'm also in a doctoral program and I make myself available 24 hours a day to help support our staff when they're out there. But one of the primary focuses of mobile crisis is to divert from law enforcement. So it is actually to get away from pulling on our systems who could otherwise be serving those who are critically in need or hospital EDs having to serve people or house people who we could better serve in the community. So it has been very successful. And the estimated or anticipated cost to our county should it end is 1.2 million dollars and we could not uh we could not absorb that um but i don't i'm it's not going to happen it's not going to happen yeah okay we also have data that we can provide if anybody is interested in the calls throughout the year for your specific community the types of calls the response times the The type of calls, the response times, the number of calls, all of those things can be geographically routed to this community for this purpose.

Because we didn't have a peer support center in District 5, we've relied heavily on the mobile crisis.

that and i'll just speak to the efficiency of the program it is uh amazing and to lose it it would be a key component of our health system in the county so um 28 years as a paramedic and i've seen this program succeed wonderfully where we don't hardly restrain anybody we we're limited on the tools we have on the emergency response side and really having someone show up in a law enforcement uniform or a fire uniform is not necessary in these cases then it's really killing ants with a sledgehammer instead of targeted care that is provided at the local level and not overloading the hospital and like you said emergency responders because we have eight ambulances in the whole county so you start taking those out with those crisis and it really affects our numbers for ambulances available for other calls so thank you for what you do

Thank you very much. A little self-disclosure. That was the first implementation plan I'd ever written in my career. And we were the first in the state of California. We even outpaced LA with having the first 24-hour 365 mobile crisis team who met the Medi-Cal beneficiaries. So we really took an opportunity and made it the best model. We've been pulled into UCLA, up and down California to do presentations on it. We've even invited Chief Stobie and other participants to come and share. So it's been widely successful. One of the benefits coming in 2029 is the chance for our center to become a 988 call center for our geographic area. So there is movement with Department of Health Care Services for counties that already had the programs lifted up to become part of that in 2029. and we are already poised to do that. So we're hopeful that either way, we'll make it work.

Okay, well, thank you so much for having us again. I really appreciate, oh.

No, I'll take a, I was just muscling for the, yes.

Megan, April, thank you guys for coming and presenting, and I hope everything moves forward in a good way. Okay, we will move on to our committee reports. Is there anybody in Firewise here tonight?

So Magdalena is out of town on family business, so she's not here to give a report, and none of the other Firewise leaders are here either. I know you guys came to hear and learn more about it, and I can give you Magdalena's email address. She's our regional Guru I'm gonna use the word guru for fire wise I can also give you the names of some other fire wise group leaders that you know, Lori Lincoln and rich Cortola is well That's Cindy's group so I'll check in with you guys Let's move on to our communications committee is anybody ever report from Mel I Let me check. The weekly check-ins continue. Fire season is upon us, so get those radios on and participate every Wednesday. Early check-ins start at 6. And those would be on the neighborhood channels usually. And at 6.30 is check-ins on the main channel.

Do you have Elliott's? Elliott's? Yeah, 15.

Next, we'll move on to our Forest Health Committee, and I know Elliot's out this week, but let's see if we have anything from him. Give us a moment, please.

Talk amongst yourselves. I didn't look.

He mentioned there's quite a bit going on. and he will try to send a note to read at the meeting, but I don't know if any of us received that.

I didn't receive it.

That was SSCRA. That was a watershed education. Yeah, a little bit different. I'm sorry. Yeah, they've got quite a few programs going, so they're doing a lot of work.

Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot moving, and I know the grants are still out there and progressing forward, so all good news for our local community, and I'm sure Elliott will have a lot to say next month.

One thing is, I think they're having something on the second Saturday.

It's July 11th. Yes, it's the Forest Summit meeting that they're having, second annual Forest Summit meeting. I believe there's a flyer out on it. but if you haven't seen it on Facebook, I'm sure it'll be up somewhere. It'll turn up. Yeah, I saw the flyer for it. It's July 11th. I'm not sure what time it starts, but keep your eyes open for the second annual Forest Summit, July 11th.

Perfect.

Okay, let's move on to the Economic Development Committee.

We haven't met since our last Cobb Area Council meeting, so there's no report.

we're just moving right do this right everyone's on summer break go home early then the blackberry cobbler fest steady as she goes committee is meeting we've moved to from every four weeks to every three weeks and

stay tuned and you can email us at BB cobbler volunteers at gmail.com if and we've had people reaching out about helping to mow the golf course and

So we're forming a work party for that. Early in the morning.

Thank you. Or we'll come visit.

You're free to come and visit and hang out anyway. Actually, that'd make me happier.

Vendor-wise, do we have an approximate, like, how many are left to, spots to fill?

We're completely full in terms of vendors, yeah. All spots have been filled, and I think there's a waiting list. That's great.

it's bigger and bigger every year exactly and if anyone besides Jennifer Gaeta at bottle rock candle studio tries to get you a spot you ignore them because she's our only person who was coordinating spots I might contact you if I'm gonna give you a refund but it's one thing if we're giving them money it's another thing if somebody's taking your money

okay I think that about does it for tonight's meeting next meeting is the third Thursday in July July 16th 630 here and we thank the Lions Club for hosting us thank you monthly and one thing I will say is there does seem to be some there's some stuff going up on the mountain the Lions Club hosts the bingo every Saturday and open grill, yeah, I suggest and really hope that everybody can come down and be a part of it and be part of the community and also support, you know, Adam Springs has music often and Pine Grove, so there's some stuff moving on the mountain and it's a good time to get out and enjoy summer. Yeah, I think the pool's open. I heard the store was gonna open in August again, but yeah. it's a great time to be on cob during the summer so get out and support our local businesses and be part of the community and at that 6 37 we'll end the meeting or 7 37 sorry we'll end the meeting that was a quick one all right thanks all