Board of Supervisors - Regular Meeting

Let us start.

Welcome to the meeting. Tuesday, July 7th, 2026. We're a few minutes behind schedule, but we'll catch right up. This is a meeting of the Board of Supervisors for Humboldt County, and we are ready for a roll call.

Thank you, Chair. Supervisor Arroyo? Here. Supervisor Bone?

Here.

Supervisor Bushnell? Good morning. Chair Wilson?

Present.

Supervisor Madrone? Absent.

All right, so next thing to do is the saluting of the flag. And so, Meredith, will you lead us today? This is to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with no regime of justice for all. Excellent. and post happy 4th of July. All right, so next on the agenda here is the virtual attendance instructions. So Kaylee, can you do that for us?

Thank you, Chair. This meeting is being conducted in accordance with the Brown Act and applicable state and local requirements. Members of the public may participate in person and or remotely as noticed on the agenda. For those participating remotely, public comment is welcomed and encouraged. To help ensure your voice is heard, it is recommended that you raise your hand at the start of the item you wish to comment on. If you are joining by computer or mobile device, please use the raise hand feature to indicate your desire to speak. When it is your turn, you will be unmuted by staff. If you're joining by telephone, please press star nine to raise your hand. When recognized, you may press star six to unmute yourself and begin speaking. Please state your name for the record before making your comment. The board asks that all participants conduct themselves with respect and courtesy. Comments should be directed to the board as a whole and limited to the time allowed. Thank you, Chair.

Thank you. All right. Next, I'm going to see if there's any changes to the agenda today. CAO?

Good morning, Chair Wilson. There are no modifications this morning.

All right. Great. No agenda. Okay, so just to let people know, we do have a closed session starting at 12, so at noon. That's good. And so now we're gonna move into the consent calendar. And we have a couple items on the consent calendar, the first of which is a retirement resolution for Mike Hendricks. Where are you?

Hi, Mike. I hear you're sitting in the back. Come on up. We're going to talk about you a little bit.

We're going to celebrate you now.

Welcome. All right. Whereas Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services Eligibility Specialist 3, Mike Hendricks is retiring after 21 years with the department. Whereas Mike started as an Eligibility Worker 1 in 2005, promoting a year later to Eligibility Worker 2, and the following year to Eligibility Specialist 3, and has served as the department's Disability Determination Service Division Liaison since 2008. And whereas during his tenure with DHHS, Mike's work has been focused on the CalFresh and medical eligibility units where he has assisted in training more than 400 new eligibility specialists, imparting his knowledge and stressing the importance of reviewing even the smallest details in every case. Whereas for 19 of his 21 years with the department, Mike has had the distinction as the guy who regularly brings donuts for his co-workers to enjoy, as well as being a former fan favorite on the DHHS social services branch softball team, the Swamp Dogs. I want to go see the Swamp Dogs incidentally. Whereas Mike's co-workers say they feel fortunate to have worked and learned from him and are happy to see him race off into the sunset. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors hereby recognizes, honors, and expresses our gratitude for Mike Hendricks' years of dedication to the county and community and wish him a long and happy retirement.

Thank you.

We're going to take a quick photo.

Oh, boy. Does anyone else want to really be in the photo? I'll wash my hair and I can't do a thing with it. did I get it on straight congratulations

This is your moment.

Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity, but no.

All right. Any cohorts or other folks need to say something about Mike? This is your big chance. Yes. Where he won't, someone will.

Good morning, y'all. I'm Monique Smith. Social Services Branch, Deputy Branch Director. I've had the pleasure of working with Mike for 19 of those 21 years and enjoyed all the donuts that he's brought in. I've learned a lot from you over the years, Mike, and I just appreciate everything that you bring to the workplace, like the humor, the fun. the fact, checking the facts and being our DDSD liaison for so long and having to pass that knowledge on, I appreciate you working on that ahead of time. We don't miss you. We don't miss seeing you and your black widow baby, because Mike like cars. In the parking lot, I'm lightweight jealous. What you say, you gotta wake up three more days on an alarm. We gonna miss you, Mike, and we just wish you well in your retirement and can't wait to see you come back as extra help.

Comments from the board.

Well, it was a pleasure reading that. And just cool to hear how many people you've trained. And it's a rare person who is both very detail-oriented and really fun. So it sounds like you've been an incredible asset to your team and just wish you all the best in your retirement.

Supervisor Bushnell.

Congratulations on your retirement and not happen to wake up to that alarm clock.

All right. All right, over two decades of feeding people not just donuts but healthy food through CalFresh, really appreciate that. Really, it's a grand benefit to the entire community. We need people to have food, it's very important. And farmers also on the other side of that as well. So I really just wanna say thank you. It takes all of us to mend that fabric of society, and I really appreciate the work that you've done on that and that commitment. All right, moving on to the next item, which is the adjournment in memory of, and I know you wanna say some comments now, and then we can also save them for the end of the meeting as well.

So I brought an item that we will be journeying in memory of April Wilson who was an educator in the Casterland Bloxburg area for 45 years but really all of her life she was a public servant. She touched hundreds if not thousands of children. Her and her husband, Mark, just really embodied that area with so much love and care for the students there. She taught my children. She taught so many children. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on June 1st and passed very quickly in very little pain. Her husband is very thankful, and it's really an honor to be able to remember her here.

Another contributing member. We have no items pulled from consent, but I'm gonna open up to public comment online. So if we can bring in anybody who's got their hands up online, this is the time to do that.

There is no one online.

All right, seeing none, we're bringing it back to the room. So again, public comment for things on consent.

Ken Sawatsky, four weeks into knee replacement and it's great. I did wish to make comment on item D8. You're reappointing Michael Fields to the Headwaters there. I consider Michael a friend and I think he's quite an asset on the Headwaters board. We want to thank all the people who participate on these boards. Supervisor Madrone is not here. Item D7, he had one of the lowest submittals for supervisor expenses at $255.22. That's a number that I frequently see from Supervisor Arroyo, but not frequently from the outer districts like that. So it's always appreciated when we're not spending when we don't have to on these different things. Item D15, we have a drug-free workplace policy coming forward on this. And this is gonna be an interesting one. As far as I'm concerned, unfortunately, we don't seem to get an unbiased things coming out of HR all the time. There's major things that I asked to be investigated, they just decided not to because it wasn't something they wanted to do, their job. And so I'm a little bit leery about how this drug enforcement will be actually enforced in a non-biased way. We shall see. D11, we're adopting the budget today. I think that's a big, big thing going on there. D16, we are hiring Liebert, Cassidy, and Whitmore again, and as far as I can tell, their job is to just say no to your county employees regarding contractual things, which I do have a problem with, instead of moving things forward. D17, I strongly support the planning and building high resolution thing they have there where they can check and not have to send people out into the world out there to do things. $207,000 a year saves us a lot of time and these are the kind of things as far as technology that we really need to be working on to save money. I think that's a good share of what we had here. Let me check here again. Yep, that covers my comments on the consent items for today. Thank you for my opportunity to speak.

Thank you. Is there anyone else that has comment on non, excuse me, on consent calendar items?

Through the chair.

Yes?

We had someone raise their hand right after you went to interest.

All right, have them jump in. That would be great.

Thank you. Caller 9-2-9-9, I will unmute you and you will have three minutes.

Hello, this is Barbara Schultz, Lost Coast Humane Society. I'm following up on.

Hold on one second, hold on one second. This is on consent items. Are you speaking to anything that's on the consent calendar today? And if not, we're gonna come to things that are not on the agenda next. So you wanna hold on a minute? I'll just take that as an affirmative and I'll bring it back to the board for a motion to move consent items forward.

I'll make a motion to accept the consent calendar and I also have a comment chair after the second.

I'll second.

I just want to thank Gary Rainerson who was on the forestry committee review for I don't know how many years but was very instrumental there and just a really knowledgeable forester and did a really great job. So thanks for all of his service.

All right, I think I could add to that a little bit. Gary has, he and I, and many people, we disagree on some items here and there, but I will say that he shows up, he is intellectually honest about his opinions, and I appreciate his his community efforts, but I also want to highlight he really brought forward opportunities for the public to access Green Diamond Lands through some of those programs with the mountain biking club and then also now horse riders as well. And so I just wanna say that those models have been used in other places and I just wanna thank him for his efforts in bringing those things forward for our community and really creating a huge amount of access. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, Gary, I talked to him last week, and Gary said if he could find somebody else to serve that would be great. He would serve if nobody stepped up, but some people have stepped up, some very good people. I met Gary back in high school. He was at Hoopa High. I was at St. Bernard's and created a friendship back then, but you're exactly right. He worked with Craig Compton, who's retiring this month, I believe, with Green Diamond, working with us for the McKay Forest. And like you said, the bike trails, the new bike park is almost completely built out there at the McKay. Gary's been a great ally, helped us through the general plan, all through that. He's been a contributor to the county all along, both of his times at Simpson and Green Diamond, and our resource management. Good guy, will be missed. I don't think he'll be completely out. I'm sure he'll have a thing or two to say and disagreements to be made.

All right. Seeing no more comments from the board, is there any objection to unanimous consent? Seeing none, consent items pass. If you can't, why not? All right, well then, roll call please.

Thank you, Chair. Supervisor Bone? Sure. Supervisor Arroyo? Yes. Supervisor Bushnell? Yes. Chair Wilson?

Yep.

Supervisor Madrone absent, motion carries 4-0.

All right, moving forward. Next item on the thing is public comment on non-agenda items. This is your time to speak to things that are not on the agenda. Do we still have a hand up from the public online? Great, can you bring them back into the meeting and?

Yes, Chair.

You can comment, thank you.

Caller 9-2-9-9, I will unmute you and you will have three minutes.

Hello, this is Barbara Schultz again with the Las Cosas Humane Society. I'm calling to comment on the horrific issues going on in Fortuna, Miranda's rescue. First of all, I want to clarify something that he has put on his website and he has falsely alleged that he received a certificate of recognition for being the best Northern California sanctuary for abused animals. That's absolutely Incorrect. Those certificates were facilitated by myself and by Patty Bird's office back in 2007. Lieutenant Steve Knight received a certificate for Best Show and many of the other organizations as well, and we had a special dinner. The certificate said just the best Northern California, best sanctuary. It had nothing to do, no abuse, no nothing. And I really, really, really regret giving him that certificate. Steve Knight warned me, was trying to tell me, and I was so new to the county that I was oblivious to his conduct. Also, I want everybody to focus on the buried dogs, the thousands. It's not just 900, it's thousands of buried dogs that were shot in the head with a .22 caliber bullet. and that was not a guarantee that they were dead when they were buried that they laid there smelling all the other carcasses horrific experience for any animal to to experience it wasn't euthanasia all this bull crap out there that i read that this is justified and sheriff hansel's reinforcement of that idea it was not euthanasia it is not standard in the animal welfare community something i've been with for decades to put a bullet in an animal's head to euthanize them, and especially in this fashion. This is a serial killer. This is a sociopathic, narcissistic grifter, and that's what he is. Law enforcement across the U.S., and you can see this on the YouTubes, have been totally responsive to animal cruelty, and you can see it's a response to Humboldt County, seeing that this has gone worldwide. The media attention to Humboldt has been absolutely negative, harming, and it certainly will hurt the economy now when hansel stood up there at the meeting uh the press release meeting he had here a week ago um this whole thing that all of a sudden he's an animal advocate that he's going to talk about pet overpopulation and this and that well you know what he didn't do anything for southern humble living there for over 20 years he had all those little coffee meetings with the groups on the And he's oblivious. The fact that I've been on the air, and this has been my life, and I've been very involved, including chiming in on AB 631 with the Animal Rescues for Change and approximately 3,000 other nonprofits. This was not a horribly written bill. He doesn't know anything. Go up there and talk about if this passed. He's oblivious.

You have used all of your time. You have used all of your allotted time. That is all online, Chair.

All right, thank you. We're gonna bring it back to the room.

Good morning, Supervisors. My name's Joanne McGarry. I'm gonna do my three things. But first, when you were not here, Supervisor Wilson, Chair Wilson, we were able in the room to be the first speakers and it allowed those who wanted to speak online to raise their hand in a timely manner so that we weren't getting confused. And it was actually, I found, much more efficient. So I kinda suggest we maybe look at trying that. Again, so the three things I wanna talk about, and you're gonna hear similar themes, fireworks, animal welfare, and climate change. So as you know, I'm not a big fan or advocate for our continuing the tradition of fireworks in our community. And because I'm so interested in seeing change, I did some informal communicating with people with their dogs during this past weekend and also contacted Humboldt Paws Cause, which is an online animal... alert for lost and found dogs in the community. And so I got a report from the person who runs that online service, Humboldt Paws Cause, about the animals that were lost or found or affected apparently by the fireworks in our community. And 83 dogs were on the list are 83 missing or lost or found animals and some of them are actually impaired. So that's not an exact number. But the exact number is true that four dogs were killed this weekend. hit by cars and so it's really important that we Keep looking at those numbers and that's just dogs and we're not talking about people if they impacted wildlife impacted The environment impacted you may have seen pictures of firework debris in the reflecting pool in Washington DC You know again I really, really want us to seriously reconsider how we entertain ourselves on these holidays. So that's fireworks. Animal welfare, link to that. Of course, I gave you the information. But I really do think we need to Consider an Animal Control and Welfare Commission look to San Francisco It has one and I think this oversight is really important and necessary and long overdue so That's just the beginning of this whole animal welfare issue. And finally, I'm gonna grumble about the rumble Climate change is real It's happening, the heat waves in Europe are just the beginning of what we're experiencing in the western world, but it's been happening for a long time. And that we continue again to entertain ourselves with inappropriate sky entertainment, rumble in the redwoods, let it not happen again.

Thank you, next.

Hello, supervisors. I am Tina Freeland. I'm a resident here in Humboldt. And I'm one of the organizers for the petition to reduce the warehouse square footage in the coastal zone. We are a small group of individuals who formed in response to the community meeting on April the 29th. We were appalled by the behaviors of those who were at the meeting and our desire was to move forward in a way that was less contentious by giving everyone a voice in the polls rather than at public meetings. Interested people cannot always attend meetings, they cannot always attend Zoom, but they can vote. I personally distributed and collected petitions that focused on putting this issue on the ballot. We have approximately 150 volunteers from various community groups, but also from individuals who stepped forward wanting to volunteer. I think it's important for you to know that these volunteers and the people who signed the petitions come from both sides of the issue. There are people who would like to see the square footage remain what it is now, and there are people who would like to reduce it. Their point in being involved in this is that they want it to be voted on by the larger public so that people on both sides of the issue can express themselves. We were able to collect, at this point we have counted over 4,200 signatures, and that was done in a 10-day period. And during that 10-day period, we had rain and very high winds. So we actually, I think, did very well. And we have collected these signatures for this petition from throughout the county. So it's not just local, Eureka, Arcata. Our signatures range from Oreck all the way down to Garberville. And I would like to introduce to you now Debbie Harrison Rumberger, who is a certified planner and who wrote and saw this petition from its inception to publication. She is hearing impaired, and so I will be standing next to her as she talks to you, speaks with you, and also takes any questions that you may have.

Thank you. For the record, my name is Debbie Harrison Rumberger, and I live here in Humboldt County. I am a certified planner. I'm a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. I served as a member of the South Florida Regional Planning Council, where we oversaw development in Dade, Broward, and Monroe Counties. I not only... wanted to get the entire ballot package prepared so that our staff could use that as they go through. If, if in fact you choose to move this forward to a ballot, the staff would already have the information needed to be able to prepare this for the ballot and to bring back to you. Um, this, Having been in the Florida Keys during a very contentious time with limiting growth, putting in place the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, those kinds of things, We were well accustomed as planners to the kind of intense hostility that we saw on April 29th. My assessment is that we need to give the people a voice and that's why we went ahead and prepared this in hopes that it would move forward. We had started our petition drive We're supposed to have, we're supposed to spend six months collecting petitions, that's what we're allowed legally, because of the time constraints of getting this to you and the fact that Once the changes are made, they will be effective as of the date that that happens. This ballot initiative would come back to the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors. It would not automatically be put in place, even with a vote. The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors would have the final discussion on that and decision and then it would go to the California Coastal Commission where their general counsel has reviewed this and given us information that there are no red flags that they find on this. We don't want more April 29th. We want to take the pressure off and allow the public and the planning department to continue in their roles in a peaceful, but effective manner, and we believe that if we can move this to the ballot, that we can do that. So I would sincerely ask if we could have a motion to move this to the July 14th agenda and have the discussion.

Okay, so just so you know, this is, it's not on our agenda today, so we're not gonna be talking about it today. So and this isn't a back and forth, I'm just letting you know your time is done. And so if this is discussed at this board, what you're asking for, it would have to be brought back at that time and we're not.

You're not taking any action today. We're not taking any action today.

Please stop talking, please, okay. That's not your role here in this moment. So just wanna, okay, I hear you, yeah. Yeah, so yeah, just so we're clear, there is no discussion about this. You're just giving us comment on items not on the agenda, and I thank you for that. And that's all we have for you right now.

Okay. She said that's all that she has for us right now. Okay, so I leave? Yes. Okay, thank you very much.

All right, thank you. All right, next.

Hello and good morning, Board of Supervisors. My name is Jared Vauden. I am the area director for the Boys and Girls Club of the Redwoods. I am here to advocate for our Smart Moves contract. The Boys and Girls Club of the Redwoods Smart Moves contract.

Hey, sorry to, I got. Folks coming at me from all sides here, just want to let you know that you've already been approved, so you don't have to talk about it.

Okay, I didn't see it on the agenda. My supervisor wanted me to make sure I spoke if it wasn't.

It was on consent. You did such a good job that it was done before you even got here.

All right, well then thank you so much for your time. Have a wonderful day.

All right, thank you. There you go.

He's obviously really good at the Jedi mind tricks. Kent Sawatsky, I'll speak a little bit about the Amazon thing, and I really appreciate the acknowledgement of how nonproductive the meeting was, the way staff was treated regarding the Amazon project. I have no problem with it going on the ballot. I don't think it's going to come up sequentially where it will be on the November ballot, but maybe another time. This is a project that I'm trying to educate myself about. And I think it could be a very beneficial project in many ways. A lot of it comes down to the devils in the details, in other words. what kind of community package will we get to benefit us? Will they be putting in trails? Maybe they won't have any imprint on the use of our grid by having total solar. They might even contribute to the particular thing with a large solar project. One of the biggest things that I'm working on and trying to communicate with the representatives from Amazon and anybody else who's willing to listen is we need as many of the local jobs as we can to go to our local people. It doesn't matter whether there's a union, non-union. But I think it's something that we need to really lean on these people for to get our local people to be able to do the working, the building of it, the large project part, instead of having somebody come in from outside with all their own crews. So I think we all can agree that, uh, local jobs are an important thing here. Uh, after the fact, after it's built, a lot of people say, well, these aren't top paying jobs, but as far as I can tell, the jobs are pay it as well as you guys pay your employees at the County here. So I, um, that's my comment on that one. I did wish to comment on the, um, Shannon Miranda topic again. There's a public perception, a lot of what is going on here, somebody who has been, had a very bad habit for many years. Cocaine and other drugs seem to be prevalent. And this is what tends to give people the lack of a moral compass, in my opinion. And I know people that have known this individual for quite a while, and just something they brought to me is pretty well a public perception. It's something we need to work at within our county to eliminate these drugs. I don't think we're doing anywhere near the effort we can to get rid of cocaine. fentanyl and all these other things that have such a negative impact on our people here. It's been alleged, there's all kinds of rumors out there that some of these dogs were just shot for sport and those kind of things and I don't know, I guess the truth will come out about that. Some people, a lot of people know what actually happened at these things and hopefully they will all come forward and we will get past this. Right now it's making our county look pretty pathetic as far as our moral compass. Thank you for my opportunity to speak today.

Thank you. Is there anyone else who wants to speak on items not on the agenda? All right, well, we're gonna move forward then to departmental reports. And the first thing we have is a resolution for an exception to the 180-day wait period for temporary employment of retired annuitant as operations manager with Humboldt County Department of Aviation.

Thank you, Chair Wilson. I can jump in on this one as this is really just a procedural requirement of CalPERS. Kurt Eicherman comes with a great amount of aviation experience and the new operations manager has started this week and the intent with this resolution is to bring Kurt back to help onboard her for the next couple weeks and will be utilized in short with that I seek your board's approval.

All right, I'm gonna open it up to public comment first. Is there any comment online?

There's not.

All right, is there any comment in the room?

This is a very, very important position we're working on here. Unfortunately, I thought we were gonna get an upgrade on our airport. Maybe this new person can work toward that as far as the technology. We're supposed to have the same capabilities as SFO and LAX, if I remember it. I don't believe that's happened. The major problem this person is going to have to address is what happened to a family member of mine where they ended up having to take their person down to SFO and they had to go ahead and pick, the person had to partner up with people and rent a car to come back. In other words, their flights are getting canceled on a regular basis this time of year. Possibly even the airport person would be someone to work with the county on an alternative to this where the airport would sponsor and maybe supervisor or royal could help get an electronic bus to go down to SFO. It's a perfect thing. You leave it red-eye to get down there, and that could be part of the airport operation. for times when we can't get people down there, they would have the option of getting on a bus, leaving at six in the evening and being down there later. So this new person and having this transfer, which you're doing here, is very important to give those extra time to somebody so that you can bring your new person up to speed. And we do have some major problems, I feel, that we really need to address regarding our airport. I think that it's always good to have someone take that extra time when someone's leaving rather than just here's the ball and you don't get any help. So strongly support that effort you're making today. Thank you.

Thank you for those comments. Is there anyone on the board that wants to?

I'll make a motion for staff recommendations.

Excellent. Is there a second?

I'll second.

All right. Seeing no more comments, can we have a roll call please?

Supervisor Bushnell. Yes. Supervisor Arroyo. Yes. Supervisor Bone.

OK.

Chair Wilson.

Yep.

Supervisor Madron absent. Motion carries 4 0.

Great. Moving on to considering the appointments for at large members to the Humboldt County forestry review committee.

Hi, good morning, Tracy D'Amico, clerk of the board. So as you can see before you, you have a consideration for appointment to the forestry review at large. One of this is due to the vacancy from Gary Reinerson, which we acknowledged earlier today, his term did expire. The other two term expirations are for Yonah who is the representative from UC Davis extension and then Alicia Goldsworthy who filled the remainder of the last term when we had a vacancy. So the vacancy notice was published and posted and we received three applications Elisa and Yana both would like to be reappointed. And then the third application is from Russell Durval. Both Elisa and Russell were going to be out in the field today. They were notified if they would like to attend. So they send their regards and their wish to be reappointed. And Yana may be online if she has something to say, but there is three vacancies, there's three applications.

Excellent, I'm gonna take it for comments from the board first and then we're then we'll go public comment So if someone's online, this is the time to raise their hand. So Super as a Bush. No, you have anything.

I'm just ready to make a motion after public comment.

Okay

I appreciate those wanting to serve and Russell will be a great addition also. It's so important on these commissions that we actually put people in place that are out there doing the job and have a full understanding.

Okay. Do we have any one online that wants to comment on this?

We do not.

All right. Do we have anyone in the room that wants to comment on this? Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the board for a motion.

I'll make a motion to appoint Russell Dorval, Alicia Goldsworthy, and Yana Valachovic, and all three are very worthy folks.

I'll second that. We have a motion and a second. Can we have a roll call, please?

Supervisor Bone? Yeah. Supervisor Arroyo? Yes. Supervisor Bushnell? Yes. Chair Wilson?

Yes.

Supervisor Madron absent. Motion carries 4-0.

All right, moving through. Here we go. Next on the agenda, we're doing County Administrative Office stuff. And so.

Thank you, Chair Wilson. Today, before your board, is a discussion item related to Measure Z funding and recommendations that have come forth through the Citizens Advisory Committee. Shawn Quincy, Deputy County Administrative Officer, is here to present to your board.

Thank you, CAO Hayes. Good morning, Chair Wilson, members of the board. Today I am bringing you forward the Citizens Advisory Committee's work on the next three-year Measures E Spending Plan, which spans from fiscal year 27-28 through 29-30. The current plan ends after this fiscal year, so this sets the direction for what comes next. I have a presentation that we can go through, but I'll walk you through where we are today, what full funding for county departments would actually cost, and then several options for your consideration. FIRST, SOME BACKGROUND. THIS IS THE PLAN THAT WE ARE OPERATING UNDER TODAY. MEASURE Z GUARANTEES BASE FUNDING TO COMMUNITY PARTNERS, CAMAL MEDICAL CENTER, FORTUNA POLICE DEPARTMENT, FIRE CHIEF'S ASSOCIATION, AND STAR AMBULANCE. AND IT ALSO GUARANTEES FUNDING TO COUNTY DEPARTMENTS LIKE THE SHERIFF, DA, PROBATION, PUBLIC DEFENDER, HUMAN RESOURCES, AND DHHS. WHATEVER REMAINS FUNDS THE ANNUAL APPLICATION PROCESS. I want to echo something that the committee chair emphasized in her letter to you back in April when we presented the Measure Z recommendations for fiscal year 26-27. Over the last 11 years, the programs in this spending plan have consistently ranked as the highest scoring applications that the committee sees. The chair described the spending plan as a cornerstone of Measure Z. something that protects our most essential public services from rising costs and from the year-to-year volatility of sales tax revenue. Two things to keep in mind as we go. One, revenue from Measure Z is essentially flat. We're using a conservative $13 million a year estimate with no growth expected. Secondly, with the passage of Measure O, the brush cutting project is now funded by Public Works through that funding source as opposed to Measure Z. That freed up an ongoing $400,000 and deciding how to repurpose that is a central part of the committee's task. BEFORE WE DISCUSS THE OPTIONS, THIS SLIDE IS FOUNDATIONAL TO THE WORK THAT THE COMMITTEE DID, SO I WANT TO SPEND A MOMENT HERE. THIS IS WHAT IT WOULD ACTUALLY COST TO FULLY FUND OUR MEASURE Z COUNTY DEPARTMENTS. NOT WHAT WE'VE BUDGETED BUT THEIR TRUE PROJECTED NEED BASED ON SALARY AND BENEFIT INCREASES PLUS FIXED COSTS LIKE INTERNAL SERVICE FUND AND COST ALLOCATION CHARGES. These six departments account for 70 full-time positions. To fully fund all of them in year one, fiscal year 27-28, would take just over $11.1 million. By the third year, that climbs to nearly $11.9 million. And there's the tension is that we have only about $13 million total and it has to cover both county departments and community partners. If county need alone starts at 11.1 million and grows every year while revenue stays flat, something has to give. Either departments absorb the shortfall, which they've historically done through vacancies or trimming their services. OR REDUCE WHAT'S AVAILABLE TO COMMUNITY PARTNERS FOR APPLICATIONS. THE GAP BETWEEN GROWING NEED AND FLAT REVENUE IS THE PROBLEM THAT THE MEASURE Z COMMITTEE SET OUT TO RESOLVE. EVERY OPTION YOU'RE ABOUT TO SEE IS A DIFFERENT ANSWER TO ONE QUESTION. HOW DO WE DIVIDE A FLAT PIE AGAINST A GROWING NEED? OPTION NUMBER ONE IS THE COMMITTEE'S RECOMMENDED PLAN, AND IT DOES FOUR THINGS PRIMARILY. FIRST, IT FUNDS LARGE COUNTY DEPARTMENTS AT ABOUT 5% BELOW THEIR PROJECTED NEED IN YEAR ONE, AND THEN IT HOLDS THOSE ALLOCATIONS FLAT IN A SIMILAR WAY THAT WE DID IN THE CURRENT MEASURES EAST SPENDING PLAN. IT'S A DELIBERATE MIDDLE GROUND, AND IT ADDRESSES RISING COSTS WITHOUT OVERCOMMITTING A FLAT REVENUE SOURCE. IN PRACTICAL TERMS, THAT MEANS INCREASED ALLOCATIONS FOR THE SHERIFF, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, AND PROBATION. THE PLACES ON THE SLIDE THAT ARE HIGHLIGHTED BLUE ARE THE PLACES THAT ARE CHANGED FROM THE CURRENT MEASURES EASE SPENDING PLAN. IT DOES ADJUST ONE DEPARTMENT DOWNWARD. THE ALLOCATION TO HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES IS REDUCED. AND THAT REFLECTS A POSITION THAT'S BEEN DEALLOCATED SINCE THE LAST PLAN. AND I WANT TO NAME THAT OUT DIRECTLY SO IT'S NOT A SURPRISE. IT'S A RIGHT SIZING TO ACTUAL STAFFING AND NOT A SERVICE CUT. Second, it raises the fire chief's base allocation to a million dollars and also prioritizes getting the fire chiefs up to $1.5 million before we open up the application process. And as the chair noted in her letter, our 40 plus fire departments have averaged $1.9 million a year from Measure Z. So this protects a critical rural service. Third, it gives Fortuna a $200,000 ongoing allocation for its school resources officer, a position that's been funded eight of the last nine years. And fourth, it repurposes the freed up brush cutting money to make these increases possible. THE HONEST TRADE-OFF IS THAT THE MONEY THAT'S AVAILABLE FOR APPLICATIONS WOULD BE REDUCED. BACK TO THE NAPKIN PROJECTIONS ARE THAT WE WOULD PROBABLY HAVE A LITTLE BIT LESS THAN A MILLION DOLLARS EACH YEAR AND WE WOULD GET THAT FUNDING FROM SAVINGS FROM THE PRIOR YEAR AND REVENUE OVER ESTIMATES IN PRIOR YEARS. Option number two stays closer to the current plan on the county side. It gives Fortuna the $200,000 for the SRO position and adds $200,000 to FIRE, bringing FIRE to roughly $1.2 million guaranteed, and it holds $500,000 for applications. The key difference is that county departments aren't brought close to their projected need, and their applications remain flat to the current spending plan. You can see the projected shortfall grows to about 12% by year three, meaning county departments would need to absorb that gap themselves through vacancies and reduced spending. And option number three is status quo, keeping the current methodology unchanged. Fires allocation grows to more than 1.3 million and applications stay at $500,000. The pressure here lands on the county side. Departments would have to absorb cost increases of more than $700,000, roughly 6.67% in the first year alone, with the shortfall again reaching about 12% by year three. It's the simplest option to explain, but it puts the most strain on county departments over time. And option number four is an additional scenario that we developed so the board would have a fuller range to weigh. It adds $200,000 to FHIR and funds the large county departments about 5.2% below projected need. Again, prioritizing FHIR reaching $1.5 million before applications open. On the county side, this lands close to option number one. Share FDA and probation sees similar support, but it routes the fortuna and fire dollars a little differently and holds fire at its current $200,000 rather than adding the school resources allocation increase. You'll see the projected shortfall start at 5% year one, similar to the recommended plan. I'm happy to go over in further detail about any of these questions if you want. To close, I want to return to a point from the chair's letter. Beyond the dollars, the committee believes this plan does something else. It gives a sense of certainty to agencies that are funded nearly every year, and it gives them back the many hours they would otherwise spend preparing applications and attending meetings. It also eases the competition, the sense of pitting our own public agencies against each other for the same limited funds. So to summarize, revenue is flat, the county need is growing, and each option strikes a different balance between departments, partners, and applications. The committee recommends option number one as the most sustainable path, and it continues moving us toward the committee's longstanding goal of a roughly 70-30 split between county departments and community partners. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions.

Okay, thank you very much. I think the first thing we're gonna do, is there any questions from the board for any details, and then I'll remind folks online to get their hands up. So, questions from the board on this? Supervisor Arroyo?

Could you highlight some of the differences between this and, so we have the pot of funds that are for annual allocations and then this is the three year spending plan and can you, I know FIRE applies, Fortuna has applied for the annual expenditure through that separate pot of funds or through the annual allocation process. Is there anything else in here that? was in the annual or can you say more about what was in the annual and how you're envisioning and why you're envisioning moving some into the three-year plan?

Yeah. So currently, we're operating under a three-year spending plan now. We took $12.5 million, and we dedicated that to certain services, the services that were listed on there. And we reserved $500,000, getting us up to $13 million, $500,000 as a base for the application process. With that $12.5 million, we fund the fire chiefs get about $1 million. Fortuna gets $200,000 for their drug task force agent. COME OUT MEDICAL CENTER GETS $325,000 FOR PROVIDING AMBULANCE SERVICE ON 299. STAR AMBULANCE GETS $137,500 FOR SERVICE ON THE 36 CORRIDOR. AND THEN WE SUPPLEMENT THAT $500,000 IN APPLICATIONS. WE SUPPLEMENT THAT WITH SAVINGS AND ADDITIONAL REVENUE FROM PRIOR YEARS. So this spending plan is taking the base, the core of that, but it's adding, or at least the recommended option, it's adding an additional $200,000 to Fortuna for their school resource officer. And it's saying, before we even open up the application pool, let's take the money from the application pool and divert it to FIRE until they get up to $1.5 million. And then we'll open up a competitive process if there's money available after that.

Thank you.

Supervisor Bowen.

Yeah, and over the years as this has evolved, and I was very involved with the drug task force officer in Fortuna because we used to have a drug task officer and then we wouldn't have one because they'd have budget constraints, officer constraints, staffing constraints, everything else, and we decided to make sure. And if you look back historically over the last eight years, seven, eight years, our white drug, as mentioned earlier, our white drug CONFISCATIONS HAVE GONE UP LIKE EIGHT, NINE HUNDRED PERCENT, IF NOT MORE. I MEAN, WE WERE GETTING TWO, THREE, FOUR POUNDS. I THINK WE WENT OVER 40 POUNDS. I DIDN'T GET THE NUMBERS. BUT IT'S ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. AND A LOT OF THOSE ARE TAKING PLACE. with our drug task force officers back in the day, following people all the way to San Francisco, and then picking them up at the county line, in Michelle's district, or coming into mine, or in Fortuna, a lot was based out of, and Fortuna working with their drug task officer has made great, it's been a great, um, correspondence between the officer, the officers of Fortuna and then the school resource officer. And I don't want to take Michelle's thunder or anything else is all her thunder, but anything else, school resource officer, we say Fortuna, but it covers Scotia. It covers Ria Dale. It goes into Ferndale. It's the Eel River Valley gets covered. So I, I think, um, I think that those two things have been set and are, and pretty good. I, I really liked the plan. Um, Actually, you did a good job on this, and I appreciate it. I like the, I know which measure I like, but I mean, we've had to make, from the year of inception of Measure Z, or Z and what is it now, or whatever we changed it to, changed the background. No, it's still Z, but we had to call it something else. But FIRE has worked bent over backwards with us to make this work, especially the volunteer departments. Some of them are based, they do have a tax base. Some don't. They're still working on barbecues and bake sale departments and stuff like that. So we've been able to outfit them and put those guys that are volunteers pretty much in a safe issue and not to downplay any department but i think patrol you got to work out this weekend with everything in the car wrecks and the horrendous car wreck on on july 4th night at two o'clock in the morning so we get we get our money's worth out of those guys so sean i appreciate this report and um And again, you'll hear this claim all day, but the biggest thing we can tell everybody is shop local. Spend it local, shop local, those are the tax dollars that make all of this work, so.

Supervisor Bushnell.

Thank you. I want to thank the ad hoc that worked hard on this spending allocation. Previous to them it was two members from our board and the ad hoc and so I know this is a difficult decision. I am leaning towards option two. I think what I want to say about the drug task force officer and the school resource officer is it not it's not for Fortuna it's for the River Valley for both and it covers a wide extensive area like Supervisor Bone said. A drug task force officer is part of a task force that's more than one that benefits all of Humboldt County. Likewise, the school resource officer services that are in District 2, also in District 1, and is available widely, and it's been a great asset for that community. I also like the increase because we tend to push more money to fire anyhow, and so I like the increase that is here for them. Also, I wanted to talk to you about, or have you talk about, with the spending plan, what it means for folks that they can apply for grants, because this is assured money, for three years and that's one reason we talked about the spending plan so that they could really say we get a million dollars every year so we can talk, we can apply for grants. Can you talk about that?

YEAH AND I KNOW THAT THIS HAS BEEN PARTICULARLY BENEFICIAL FOR FIRE BUT ALSO FOR OTHER AGENCIES BECAUSE WHEN YOU'RE APPLYING FOR GRANTS YOU HAVE TO SOME GRANTS REQUIRE LOCAL MATCHES BUT ALSO REQUIRES A DEDICATION TO PROVIDING SERVICE FOR A CERTAIN NUMBER OF YEARS SO IF YOU CAN SAY THAT YOU HAVE A RELIABLE FUNDING SOURCE FOR service then the the grant can be more competitive because it'll supplement that service that you already have in play it just it just adds a competitive advantage for the agencies that are receiving funding thank you and lastly through the chair if are you gonna I'd like for the chief for trying to chief to come up if he wishes to I'm gonna open up to public comment

You're going to let him do it through public comment, or I can call him up and ask him questions.

Either way, but I'm going to do public comment first, and then we'll, if people have more specific things they want to get into.

And then also the measures the ad hoc is here, are they going to have an opportunity?

Yeah, but I'm going to open up to public comment first, and then we'll get there.

Thanks, and then I'll finish.

Okay, anybody else? All right, sounds good. I just have, again, going back to the discussion from before in terms of the school resource officer and then the other position, the camera was called, in terms of Arcata's request from before, And we had this discussion about the parody of that. And so can you remind me of the request that Arcata made and then also the request that is already being funded by us for Fortuna?

Yeah and so for the twenty six twenty seven one year cycle the Arcata Police Department put in for a juvenile diversion counselor I think that application was one hundred ninety eight thousand it would They have one existing juvenile diversion counselor funded by their Measure H, and this would add a second to expand the reach to serve beyond the city limits, because right now it's funded with just city dollars, and so I think there's some constraints on what their council will allow them to do in terms of the geographic reach. And so by getting a Measure Z funded, it'll allow them to expand beyond just city boundaries.

And then going back to what we're already funding for Fortuna under this, we already have a budget on this, right?

Correct, the current spending plan funds a DTF agent, 200,000, and then this year we awarded a one-time grant, which we have done in the last eight of nine years, one-time grant for the school resource officer. which is a fully sworn position in the Fortuna Police Department.

So right now we both fund both the DTF and the SRO in the current funding cycle for the city of Fortuna, but not any dollars for the, I would call it, the Mad River area. That's correct. I appreciate that and I think part of the argument of that was that it's because Arcata taxes itself. The citizens have decided that these things are of value and they tax themselves and I just want to point out that it has a higher tax rate in terms of its, in terms of its sales tax to do that, and Fortuna has asked its citizens for a higher tax, sales tax, and it was rejected by the citizens. And now, I just wanna say, so now the request is coming to fund these, it's, you know, oftentimes when we're as a county and cities are making requests to the state for funding, oftentimes one of the requirements or the request is elevated in terms of your eligibility if you are considered self-funding, meaning that you have some ability to sustain those programs in the future and then you're supplemented by those folks. And I just wanna, this kind of, it's a little bit hard for me from that perspective because I think, you know, the ability to reach out to Blue Lake and McKinleyville and other places up in those areas would be really helpful, and yet we're not talking about that today. So I just wanna reference that in terms of a parity issue. Supervisor Roy, did you have something to say?

Thank you, yeah, I'm really sticking to questions for now, but I'll share my other thoughts after public comment. I do wanna inquire, so when I look at option three, some of the significant differences I see are quite a bit more money in the annual allocation for FHIR, but also more funding for Department of Health and Human Services, and I know we do have access to the kind of backlog of information about this, but just to be more expeditious, could you tell me or perhaps Director Beck could tell us a little bit more about what those differences are and what that would fund? Because I know DHHS has had some significant funding impacts from recent events.

So I'm just want to interrupt because if we're going to allow Director Beck to come up and talk about it then I also chair would like to have the other folks come up and talk the questions that I have.

I hear you. We're going to wait to have Director Beck come up until after.

That's OK. Sure. Can I. I think Sean was prepared to answer but I am.

And I would defer to Director Beck on the specific services that are going to be provided. Just in terms of the numbers that are on the sheet, the $886,000 is the projected need based on the number of FTEs that are in that budget unit. The $937,000, that is the current spending plan. BETWEEN THE CURRENT SPENDING PLAN, DURING THIS CURRENT SPENDING PLAN, THEY HAVE THE ALLOCATED DEPOSITION, SO THEIR PROJECTED NEED HAS GONE DOWN. THEIR PROJECTED NEED, WHICH INFORMED THE LAST SPENDING PLAN, WAS $937,500, I BELIEVE. BUT THAT WAS BASED ON HAVING, I THINK IT WAS EIGHT FTEs, AND NOW THEY'RE DOWN TO ONE FEWER. SO THE NEED GOES DOWN.

Okay. I'll wait to ask a little bit more about that. Okay.

I appreciate that. So what I'm going to do is bring into public comment. One of the reasons I'm doing it this way is so that the public has questions or bring up concerns that when we're asking our subject matter experts that they can address those if needed. So do we have any online public comment?

We do.

All right.

Caller 7421, I will unmute you and you'll have three minutes.

Hello, can everyone hear me? Yes. Wonderful. Hello, my name is Kelsey Reedy. I live in Willow Creek and I work in Fortuna. I have over a decade working with at-risk, injustice-impacted young people in Humboldt County with over seven years of that being at PHHS. I also have been a commissioner of the Juvenile Justice and Diligency Prevention Commission for over a decade and been the chair for the last five years. saying that because I do have a lot of experience around juvenile justice in this county and doing advocacy prevention. So I'm here as a concerned youth organizer and mentor urging you guys not to move forward with allocating emergency funds to the Fortuna SRO. specifically not approving them for the next three years. I'm not sure if you are required to choose one of these A, B, or C options, but I would propose a B. But for some of the facts, school research officers actually, for research, increased the delinquency and juvenile justice referral rates through what's called the School to Prison Pipeline. I'm sure everyone has heard of it. They are associated with higher risks of arrest and exclusionary discipline and higher rates of violence in schools. And in Humboldt County, this specifically looks like the disproportionate amount of native youth being arrested. And as someone who monitors the juvenile hall population locally every month, we have had a disproportionate amount of native youth since I have become a commissioner over 10 years. And sometimes that rate is up to 80% of our population. And so I really feel like people need to consider that when understanding the impact of SROs on campuses, especially in Fortuna, that tends to arrest students pretty high rate of folks in the county and if folks are wanting sros for like a feeling of safety for research it also has shown that it doesn't impact student feeling of safety even if the contact with the officers can be associated with more positive views of the sros it doesn't make the youth feel more safe on campus So outside of these statistics that are showing the negative impact of SROs, this is also really an equity issue for our county. It doesn't really make sense to fund the SRO for the Eel River Valley, even if it's for more than just Fortuna, when other SROs in our county are not funded by Measure Z. So I'm not sure what the difference is. I feel like all of our cities are struggling with funding, and so I'm not sure why Fortuna would be able to get funding for an SRO, especially for three years. So I just encourage you guys to look into using the funds for other things. There's many, many things our county needs. DHHS definitely is one of them. So is fire department living in Willow Creek. That is always a need. Thank you guys for listening. And I encourage you guys to really think of a plan outside of A, B or C for this funding. Thank you.

That is all on Zoom chair.

Okay, we're bringing it to the room. These are again public comments. If you believe yourself to be a subject matter expert that is probably gonna be called up, you might wanna hold off for a minute. Proceed.

I don't believe I'm a subject matter expert on anything, but I do dabble. The recs agree, obviously. So I do consider myself somewhat a subject matter of the necessity of your drug task force in being done in the Fortuna area. We have problems all over the county but it seems to be a hub, people bringing me names of people. I'm not gonna mention any names here who are out there openly dealing and you'd be surprised of some of the families and people that are engaged in this particular topic by name. So we're not gonna go by name on these because that reflects on the other family members who are not engaged in this illegal thing. Strongly support you, considering trying to work with either the fire districts of Willow Creek and Blue Lake and combining and covering these areas. And then on the ambulance thing, again, I think that we should set up these districts and curtail that particular thing. I did wish to bring, everybody should be aware that every time you pass a sales tax like Measure ZO or whatever we want to call it, the cities themselves are giving up the ability to take that tax. So where are we at? We're 1%, and it was very generous of them to go ahead, in my opinion, allow their Measure O because there's only so much money and so much money that the taxpayers are willing to spend. My understanding is that Fortuna does have a sales tax on the ballot in November. I do approve of people who decide to self-tax. That's very important. Strongly support our continuing support for the sheriff and for our firefighters, which we've all acknowledged is a great group of people. A lot of volunteerism goes, and it serves as a secondary, very important thing as far as a liaison with the individuals out there. So strongly support that. I'm not sure that... that when you pass these things, the three year guaranteed is all that. I guess the question would be if you go one year down the road and you wanna change that three year and change things, hopefully you're not set in stone, you're committed to that. Because you need the ability to move as things change and i think things will be changing lastly here my understanding is that the federal law enforcement because of our issues going on in the fortuna area down there which we talked about earlier is going to be paying quite a bit more attention to what's going on in humboldt county and you may find even the uh The Sinaloa cartel and other ones are not gonna be wanting to send their illegal drugs up here because these things then get tracked back to them. So hopefully that will have a very positive effect on everything in Humboldt County. Thank you for the opportunity to speak.

Thank you, next.

I understand that I may be called up as a subject matter expert later and I just wanna talk as a parent. as an adult, as a community member here. And I'll cover the rest later if I get that opportunity. But Matt Eberhardt, I live in this county. I live in Fortuna. I had two kids that are adults now. My son just graduated from the Fortuna High. My daughter graduated a few years back. As a parent, I've got to see the benefits of the school resource officer. I've got to attend the school events. I've got to see those interactions. and i think they're worthwhile and i would rather have somebody there that is fully equipped ready to handle the emergencies and the things that we have going on today not just in the school but outside the school the school resource officer is a sworn officer and they interact with my kids, other kids in the community, not just during school hours but outside school hours at the community events. I just watched Fortuna Fireworks Festival and the number of problems we had there with youth and having the school resource officer be there and be able to interact and have people know who they are to help mitigate things, that's important. Yes, counselors are great. They do great things. worked with school counselors that really helped my kids through some hard times, but I would love to see a school as a parent, a school resource officer, stay there. Someone who was equipped to handle situations to when a threat comes in the middle of the night for that officer to work with others and mitigate that so that school can start when it's supposed to the next day and help deal with the fear I've had. as a parent had my kids be sitting there on lockdowns in situations. And I'd rather have a cop dealing with that situation to resolve it than a counselor. Thank you for your time.

All right. If you are here from an agency and you want to advocate beyond just information, beyond what you might be called back up, so this is the time to do that. So you'll get a second bite at the apple if someone asks you questions, but if you want to advocate for your agency now, this is a good time to do that. Does anyone want to do that? All right, we're going to bring, oh, here you go. Well, wait, wait, I don't mean, you spoke, you're good. So we're gonna, I appreciate your tenacity. All right, if there's not, we're gonna bring it back to the board and we'll have the board ask questions and bring up folks as needed. So I'm gonna start with Supervisor Bushnell and then Supervisor Arroyo and then Supervisor Bone. We'll kind of go in that order, thanks.

Thank you. So I'd like to hear from the Fortuna police chief about the effectiveness of the school resource officer and the drug task force and what areas they cover and anything you would have to say to add to that for those two positions.

Thank you, Chair and Supervisor Bush-Talon, members of the board. Chief of Police Matt Everhart, Fortuna. And related to the school resource officer, I'll start with that one. The school resource officer works with 15 schools. You look at Fortuna, and Fortuna is the residential hub of Southern Humboldt. We have high schools down there, we have elementary schools, but there's a number of communities in the Eel River Valley that are impacted by the school resource officer and the resources that they provide. and that's 15 of them, and across that, I mean, if you look at 14 of highs, you know, somewhere around 800 students, you know, you're looking thousands of students, not to count just the staff and the parents and everybody that is interact with and they're available for. The SRO is a mentor, educator, problem solver, emergency planner, and a trusted adult. The position serves as a resource for teachers and school staff, administrators and parents, I sat down with the school resource officer this last week, and I had talked to them a little bit, and it was interesting. I said, yes, they interact with the students, but they said they really help the school staff and the counselors on a regular basis help mitigate situations. And I remember that as I served as a school resource officer for three years myself. And that's true is not just in the schools, but in the community, law enforcement has become the problem solvers. And having one of those working with people in the schools that has experience dealing with situations across the broad spectrum of things that we deal with, they're able to help mitigate those. Just a couple examples, social media conflicts that spill over into campus, mental health crises, drugs and vaping. This last year the school resource officer went around with us and we inspected all of the smoke shops, we dealt with all of the nitrous oxide and other things that we're seeing in the vaping and they were right there, right in it, helping myself and our detective do inspections and make sure to stop that from being available to our youth. Threats of violence, family instability, bullying online, crimes against children, truancy, chronic absenteeism, crimes against children. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't get put out there into the media for good reason. It's not appropriate to, but it's not that those things don't occur. And that officer works diligently to make sure that those things get addressed. You know, and I look at this as everything that is prevented is saving money. All of the things, you know, if somebody becomes a criminal, makes poor choices later in life, if an emergency happens, those things all stack up and cost money here. We made a commitment in Fortuna with this position. Yeah, we did have a year where we pulled back and we just provided services where we didn't have the funding within our community. And that was sad to see. My career within this three year window is gonna come to an end. but I made sure I have, Fortinet is making this commitment. I brought Lieutenant Jason Cato here with me. I want to make sure that the people in our department know that they also take on this commitment. We have Mayor Pro Tem Trent here. This is something we take really seriously. We're down five sworn officers and we don't pull back the drug task force officer. We don't pull the school resource officer. We make do those are a priority. We are grateful for the support that we have. It does make an impact in the county. It does make an impact in Fortuna. You know, we're a part of the county, the drug task force position. Uh, I am the chair of the board there, um, executive board as well this year. And, our agent that works out there has a canine and that canine has been instrumental and that's not covered under measure Z that's covered under $400. Um, and it's been, it's made a huge impact, um, throughout the county. And I've made a commitment to, you know, that I know the rest of the department and the city has to, that this is truly a partnership. We would really appreciate the opportunity to continue this partnership. We're grateful for the consideration of the three-year plan. We understand that you have difficult decisions to make, but that does free us up as administrators to focus more on making sure that things are done instead of every year coming back up here and fighting for this.

position we're able to we're able to do greater things when we have more time so I don't know if that answered your questions at all yeah it did thank you I appreciate that I also does anybody else have questions of him I was wondering if does fire want to talk thank you

Thank you, Supervisor Bushnell. I'm Russ Brown. I am the president of the Fire Chiefs Association and the Fire Chief in Fortuna, so I support our resource officer as well. Interacted on a regular basis with them. But on a side note, I want to say thank you to all you guys for your support of fire over the years. Like I said to you guys before, that touches every corner of this county. As Supervisor Bowen was talking about the accident, Just recently, excuse me, there's, in my opinion, and I'm biased, there's not a better way to spend your Measure Z money than with fire because it does touch every community. The smaller the community gets, the larger role the fire department serves in that community. You know, I come from a small town in Oregon that has 160 people. You have the church and you have the fire department. That's where every function happened at one of those two places. So I just want to say thank you. And obviously I like option one because that gets us more money. But I'm grateful for what you guys have done for us. You've made a tremendous impact in the fire service in Humboldt County I hope that continues.

Thank you Hi, my name is Timothy Citroen the fire chief for Humboldt Bay Fire I represent one of the very few career departments in this county and Measure Z has done wonders for the fire service in all of Humboldt County, myself included. And the reason being is we all help each other. We're all sworn to protect the citizens that were within our fire districts. But as the county fire chiefs, we take that forward by doing that. We pass that on to each other and we help each other. I've had some significant incidents where I rely on mutual aid from these volunteer fire departments to support the incidents that we have. Arcata is a great example. I've had several here. And through Measure Z, it's enabled that help to be county-wide now to where we have well-trained, well-equipped firefighters throughout the county to handle anything within the county, whether you're a career or you're a volunteer now. That's the improvement I've seen. I've been in the fire service in Humboldt County since 1993. And back then that didn't exist and now it does and I think Measure Z is a huge driver of that for the ability for all of us to work together to support each other and to handle anything within the county that we need to. So again, thank you for your support and thank you.

Okay, thanks. I'm hoping that, I just wanna say, in general, we all understand sort of the broader construct of Measure Z and its benefits to Humboldt County through fire and public safety. So if we can, if we can keep our discussion specific to the proposals at hand. Supervisor Arroyo, I know you had some questions.

Thank you. I'll just cut to the chase and say that I would strongly support option three. It's not to say that any of the applications, all of the applications for Measure Z, whether they're part of the three-year spending plan or the annual requests, all have immense value. There's no question that all of them have great value. And so that's what makes this process, you know... very difficult I'll just say I appreciate that the continuing what we essentially have been doing does fund fire at a greater fixed amount although that still leaves the open applications as a way for a fire to get additional funds I appreciate that option one has this caveat where the first $500,000 of the open application dollars would go to FHIR, but I think that continuing the way we're currently doing it allows there to be a fairly fixed amount for applications that is understandable to the community when they're applying for some of the very small pot of additional funds that can be distributed. And I appreciate that it funds county, necessary county functions, although it makes some changes just because those costs are growing over time. But I appreciate the greater kind of fixed amount for fire that can always be supplemented by application to the annual funds. And I think I'll just leave it at that. I think, well, I'll just say there are Again, always applications of value, and I'm not saying that any of the applicants are not worthy. I just am hesitant to make additional fixed commitments to agencies outside of the county and fire. In our three-year spending plan, that doesn't mean that I'm not open to whatever community applications come forward for the one-year annual allocation process. So that's all I want to add at this point.

Supervisor Bowen. Yeah, and I'd like to ask Dylan Furbin and Tammy to come up here. I mean, they're the committee. And I'm going to tell you, we sit up here. and make these decisions. We got our agenda on Thursday and we've spent hours and hours over Fourth of July, hundreds of hours over Fourth of July reading it and everything else. These guys have had numerous meetings. These guys, this is a committee of, is there nine?

Seven.

Seven. Committee of seven, all appointed by different people. A pretty distinct committee. And these guys have all come and talked to them and everything else. And then we get a committee recommendation. Then we come to us and we're going to make all the decisions. And I understand some are very, they're all valid. Your decisions are valid. But I sometimes, you guys get paid a lot for being on that committee, I know, but we ask them to drive in here, sit for three hours, hash everything out, and then we decide to, and so I'm really big on going with committee recommendations, and I'd like to hear why the committee came up with their recommendations, and over your voluminous hours of what you did to do that.

Yeah, good morning. Dylan Fearbin, Vice Chair of the Measure Z Committee. When we did the ad hoc committee, it was myself, Chair Trent, Shawn, and Kelsey, and the big thing that we were trying to do with the three year spending plan was for one, the major change we made was how to allocate the 400,000 from Public Works that no longer is needed due to Measure O. So the big thing, we're not actually, we're not upsetting the apple cart of the actual money available for applications, we're just reallocating that 400,000 to another entity which happens to be fire and Fortuna Police Department. our reasoning behind option one and why we presented that as option one and ultimately voted and passed seven to mind you the vote was of the committee or five to excuse me right seven voting members yep yep nine yeah so seven two so was that we were trying to simplify the application process. Being that Fortuna School Resource Officer was funded eight of the last nine years, it's been pretty apparent and pretty clear the committee believes that that is a high value. It's always ranked, I think, one or two, when we do our rankings. So instead of having the two officers that are here today from Fortuna have to come in multiple times throughout the application process for something that has largely been a given, not gonna say guaranteed, but virtually, right, very close, to come have them take time out of their day, time away from their district and their post to ask for something that they have been getting. So based on the committee recommendations, based on the fact that the board has approved those funds in the last nine years. So we're trying to simplify that. Additionally, Chair Arroyo, to your point of trying to clarify the money available, that is also kind of what we were trying to do. Because fire traditionally gets a million dollar base, and then has gotten roughly the up to two million total after the application process, that money is available, but not necessarily, right? In reality, it hasn't been. That money has gone to fire, that money has gone to a school resource officer for the Eel River Valley, yes, out of Fortuna. So that way, we were trying to give actually a more accurate depiction of what is available because those funds have gone to those entities traditionally and historically. So trying to make that number more accurate and more, I guess, true to the people that are applying. Also with this, they can still apply just like we had in conversation when Kamau applied for more funds, they get a base value. Even if they don't get approved here, they still can apply for those funds based on the current, views of the committee, they're most likely going to get those funds again, or at least be recommended. Of course that decision falls with you. But so given that history, we were trying to simplify it and make it easier for folks to understand what actually truly is available and not waste people's time that have traditionally been funded. Additionally, too, looking at what Measure Z is about, I'm just gonna read you one thing. The very first question, if you go to the Measure Z website, it says what is Measure Z? The very last sentence on that thing here, I'll read it to you. It says, this local revenue source is also providing funding for rural ambulance, drug task force services, brush cutting along roadways to prevent wildfires, and school resource officers in local public schools. So it's on our own website that those are things that we value Measure Z to be for. So I think if that's something that is shifting, we need to make sure we take a look at that as well. And also I think to not consider funding them going forward for three years. Mind you, it's not a, it's not a lifetime. It signals an unwillingness or potential that that position may go away. Um, as someone that has a young child, most of us probably do to not have that protection available, I think is, um, is concerning. Uh, I actually, so I know I got my sub credential because I want to just pop in once in a while and be a sub. One major concern for most teachers is, a school shooting. Nationally, what's the biggest outcry that we see? Generally, a school shooting. So if we remove that officer and that happens, I think it'd be all tough for us to put our head on the pillow at night knowing that we had something in place that possibly could have prevented something. And Lord willing, it never does. But that's just kind of how I view it.

Can I interrupt really quick? Sean, when you're and I'm, Dylan, I'm looking at the option one, which According to this does not increase fire. I see the footnote, but it doesn't represent it in your chart.

Correct, so, right.

But option two does represent a growth. So can you straighten this out for me?

Yeah, and this was a, before you do that, we have the Fortuna folks up here talking about their thing, and I'm just kind of wondering, is this just a sidebar of that?

I'm trying to figure out in my head because they're referencing, the committee is talking about option one and why, and it doesn't match what they're saying.

Okay, I understand. Thanks for clarifying your question.

And this was a conversation that we had at committee also. So we were estimating $13 million a year in revenue. As we know, that revenue goes up and down. Measure Z in particular has been really volatile. So the actual expenditures in this plan are set against 12 and a half million. That 500,000, 527,000 gets us up to 13 million. So it's a bit of buffer that we're building into the budget. And we're saying if we actually get 13 million dollars in revenue or that year we estimate 13 million dollars in revenue, then fire will get up to 1.5 million. But as a base, as part of the 12.5 million, they're gonna get a million dollars.

But why does, okay, fine. Then why does option two say their base is gonna be 1.22 million and Fortuna would be 400,000 consecutive for three years? And Dylan is.

The lack of increase to county, correct? Yes, so trying to make the county more whole with all the department's deficits, that number does not improve.

Okay, so it's not very clear in your chart.

Thank you. So yeah, option one tries to get that deficit for all county departments smaller. Option two does not.

Sean, it doesn't guarantee then a growth in money to fire only if there's more money revenue coming in.

Correct, if the money's available.

Okay, thank you, and I'm sorry for interrupting. I just couldn't, you were referencing the option one, and I couldn't figure it out.

Okay, I appreciate that, and I wanna make sure that in representing Z, the committee, we're not blending our opinions about the schools in Fortuna specifically because we have lots of schools in Humboldt County. And not all of them have these resource officers. And so I want to make sure that we're equitable in how we talk about protection of kids across the entire county and not just kind of calling out one district over another in that regard. you're being called up in representing the entire committee and thus the entire county. Supervisor Bone, you have a, and actually Supervisor Arroyo was next and then we'll get to Supervisor Bone.

Sorry to be, co-chairing the meeting with you, but I do wonder if we want to have, is it Vice Chair or Chair Trent of the Measure Z Committee, since she's already up, and I'll hold my questions. I just want to make sure that we can.

I appreciate that.

Supervisor Bone called them up.

Well, Dylan pretty much said everything.

Yeah.

He likes to public speak more than I do. So he explained everything very well. If you have any more questions, that's what we're here for. I think that's pretty clear. And I do strongly believe in school resource officers. And if every school in the county could have one, that would be great. Other states, actually, the state pays for school resource officers. school resource officers because they feel they're so important. I wish our state could do the same thing, but unfortunately we can't.

Appreciate that. Supervisor Bone.

I know we talked about, and I look back at the chief when I say this, their school resource officer covers 15 schools. 15 schools, which a lot lie in my district, a lot lie in Michelle's district, but it's 15 schools. It's not Fortuna, it's not one district. I think they cover six districts. I think six districts, I don't know how many districts there are in, but their footprint is a lot wider. When you say Fortuna, Fortuna has taken the burden of handling the administration of having an extra employee that's a school resource officer in places outside of Fortuna. That means sick leave, comp, all this other things which hopefully gets covered with our $200,000 and retirement. So I think when we say Fortuna, We're funneling the money to them, but that's not where it's being siloed. It's getting spread out pretty wide. So, kind of like Arcata, hopefully, I know you said that Arcata keeps all there because it's money spent in Arcata. but it's money spent from all over the Med River Valley in Arcata, because that's where the retail is, but with that being said, when we keep saying Fortuna, I think we have to be more precise in how many schools are being affected. I appreciate that.

I don't have any questions, so unless, hold on, through the chair, I want to, Supervisor Arroyo.

I don't have any further questions for the committee members, but I appreciate your time.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

I wanted to echo Tammy's statement on the fact that if we had one in every school district, I think that would be excellent. But given our lack of funds and ability to do so, and also the committee's situation of not adding another position, another liability to the balance sheet, I think it plays a part in the decision from the committee, not their desire to have one.

Appreciate that. I have a question for, not for you, but for Mr. Quincy. Currently, the position is funded now. Or is it not funded now, this one that we're talking about?

The school resource officer is funded now for one year due to the application process.

So what this is really proposing is is sort of a forward funding of three years beyond the existing funding, which would, under normal circumstances, come back to us with another application under the same sort of auspices and process that we've had before, right?

That's correct. This is proposing a spending plan that begins in fiscal year 27-28 and runs through 29-30.

Okay, I appreciate that. I guess for me, I'm just having, I would, if there is a, Especially now that what I'm hearing is that there is a tax measure being proposed for the ballot for Fortuna coming up. And so there's potential for some self-funding in relation to this, although I know that there would be some issues around spending outside of Fortuna should they choose to fund themselves, just like the city of Arcata has that same constraint. In my mind, I would like to wait and see how that ballot measure works and if there's the capacity for the city to at least partially self-fund so that we can, in my mind, share those burdens through the various communities and not kind of focus on one. And I know that's sort of regional, but again, uh in the north part of the county they were looking at doing something regional but just didn't have the budget for it and uh and and so i think from my perspective that's that's where i sit uh and again it's not we're not removing anyone's funding if if we were to not move forward with that it would just just reapply just like we've done before Option four, which could you describe the difference between option three and option four here for me, or just really kind of focus on what it is?

Certainly. Yeah. So option three is just status quo. It's continuing the spending plan as it is and extending it out for another three years. Option four is essentially option one, where county departments get a small bump, we guarantee fire a million dollars, and we also say, hey, you're gonna get up to a million five, but it returns the $200,000 from the SRO position, goes down into the application pool, and because of our methodology, it actually goes up into fire, so fire gets a small bump, so it'd be around 1.2 million, I believe, fire would be guaranteed.

So, okay, so what you're saying is that the request or the 200,000 that would ordinarily go to Fortuna for those three years would go to FIRE in option four? So do we have an option that's just without that bump? And which one is that? How would you describe that one?

Yeah, we could just modify option four. OK. I mean, it would still be essentially the same thing because we are making sure that fire gets up to 1.5. That's a cornerstone of both of these options.

So is there an option that it moves up to 1.5 and then that the county departments get that bump that you're talking about and then it just ends there? Or is that a modified one of these options? That would be modifying number four. Modifying number four. To include counties, basically. But no, actually it would be removing the $200,000 for the fire. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Hold on, Supervisor Arroyo was next and then Supervisor Bushnell, so Supervisor Arroyo. I'll bring it back to Supervisor Boehme.

Thank you. Do you have the option four and three that you could pull up, or are they what's in the packet? I didn't see the option four laid out. Okay, okay. I know we talked about it though.

Yeah, it's in the presentation if we're able to pull it up.

Okay. Great, thank you. Okay. So that would, just bear with me for a second. I just, all right. So both option four and option one, and to, both option four and option one essentially eliminate the work of the Measure Z Committee. I just want to make sure we're talking about that and saying it honestly, because if option one is exercised, the remainder after 500,000 automatically goes to fire is 27,000 in the first year, $14,000 in the next year, and $251 in the third year. That is negligible, and I don't think it's worth the committee convening over that. At that point, I would just say all that money should just go into FHIR so that we're not wasting everyone's time arguing about applications for $27,000 or $251 for that matter. We kind of always knew we'd get to this point because the... The expenses agreed to that are fixed long-term costs are important, but they're significant under Measure Z, and there's only so much money to go around, and sales tax doesn't seem to be increasing at the rate we would like. So I think it's, One of the reasons after really considering this and weighing and looking at the language of measures E and O again, that I really feel strongly about something that increases a commitment to fire above the one million, but also keeps money in the application pool is that we did tell people that we would have a committee deciding how to meet community requests with this funding that are one time requests. And, we're simply not able to do that anymore I think we have to be very clear about that but otherwise I think there should be enough in that pot say $500,000 a year to make it worth the committee convening and applicants applying and to make it really a meaningful process that's not a lot of money to distribute but it's it's to small organizations that have one-time costs that they could really use help with that's meaningful. So I think we're at the point now with this discussion where we have to decide whether we're going to keep the committee meeting and having a role or whether they are an ad hoc committee that after the end of this three years, by then we'll have appointed new people, they get to help inform us on another three-year spending plan or something like that. They're not really going to have a meaningful role with options one or four because it's already decided how those funds will be allocated. And I'm not saying I don't want to fund FIRE more. If we want to just make a decision that puts all the funding into FIRE, I would say a modified option three would be fine with me. That would give FIRE the most amount of reliable funding. But I... I want to raise that because I think we have to have that, because deciding on a three-year plan is going to, in essence, decide whether we continue to have a functioning committee or not that actually makes decisions about the funding.

And through the chair, I'm going to have Mr. Quincy respond. Yeah. Through myself. Here we go.

I appreciate that, Chair Wilson. And valid, absolutely valid point, Supervisor Arroyo. And this is also a discussion that we had at the committee level. And we were pretty frank about the amount of funding that would be available for one-time applications if option one were chosen, because it is dedicating virtually all of the ongoing funding per year. A couple points that we raised during our discussion was that when Measure Z was originally proposed and when it was originally adopted, the definition of public safety was expansive at best, vague in a lot of ways. There was a ton of services that were described in the resolution in the ballot language, And it was the job of the committee to help define that, what public safety means in our community. And we posited that over the last decade that we have defined that for the most part in this current era of Humboldt County. And so that was a lot of the reasoning for developing this spending plan is that this is our definition of public safety in Humboldt County right now. And this is enshrining it for the next short period of time. To the point about funding available for one-time applications, that's correct. The ongoing funding is dedicated. But where we would rely on getting the majority of the funding would be from savings from prior years and revenue over expenditures. And again, back to the napkin math is that would probably be less than $1 million a year that would be available above and beyond this.

And I'm going to take the privilege of the chair to comment on that, which one of the big selling points when we went through that process was the transparency of how we would do the spending, and that there would be an annual review, and it's not necessarily that the committee makes the ultimate decision, but there's definitely an algorithm they go through, there's a process they go through in order to vet these applications. And the public has the opportunity to comment and be a part of that process and has definitely made it much more robust than almost any other tax measure in the state of California. I will say that that is true. And in many ways it's a model for transparency and in some ways it has its inherent inefficiencies associated with that. What I want to do now is I want to try and get our board to coalesce on a decision. We have other things to discuss today and I'm not trying to hurry us along necessarily but I think we've been pretty robust here and so I think I actually have to say that I am leaning towards Supervisor Arroyo's interpretation of this, which is I appreciate the efficiencies that were being discussed here, but I appreciate more the transparencies of the process of having the Measure C Committee actually do the work. So that's where I lean, and I'm happy to hear some more from Supervisor Bushnell and then Supervisor Boehme if that's where we wanna go.

Thank you. So also, we also have $800,000 that we are holding in savings for Measure Z, which we have never talked about. I don't think community partners think we should sit on $800,000 every year. So that's something we could talk about. Also, for option one, the increase to fire, which I'm all about increase to fire, but it is very dependent on sales tax being efficient, right? That the sales tax is coming in. And if it doesn't, then the fire is just at one million, where option two says that they would get 1.223 continuously, it would grow. And then also, I just had a question. We've heard over the years two things. I think the reason the committee suggested the SRO officer is because it's been funded every year. for nine years, eight years, except for the one year that there was no money to fund, and so that got cut. So this board chose them every single year, and I think that that was why they considered that. But we also have heard to not, you know, this option one increases county funding, which is jobs, which I'm grateful for, but we do hear from constituents saying that is not what they thought Measure Z was gonna go for. Although I know people are services, and that is very important, And so I'm torn between one and two. I think the consistency for two for me is what pulls me there. But can you answer that question about the SRO officer and that's why they probably went there is because it has been funded every single year by this board?

I think this also touches on the point about reserves that you mentioned, Supervisor Bushnell. If we would have had reserves in place when revenues dip below our projections, then in theory we would have been able to preserve that funding for a year. And same thing with the fire piece. If our revenues don't hit projections of $13 million, we have a safety net of $800,000 currently to provide a one year buffer for those services.

But that $800,000 probably if we, because we haven't been hitting that 13 million, it would go pretty quickly. So if we put into place a spending plan, I guess one would guarantee the million dollars to fire and if there was a growth then they would get more.

We've been hitting 13 million.

Every year?

Pretty much exactly. Okay. Yeah, just a bit over 13 million every year.

So what in the discussions about the 800,000 reserves, just ongoing going to keep it there?

That is the intention. And the committee even took a stance to build that reserve. So it's 16% of ongoing revenue, which would be just under $2 million, I believe.

And then the last thing I just want to ask about, and then this always gets dicey, but I have continued to ask about the $325,000 to come on ambulance. And the parity with that is not really great. And I asked a lot of questions around that, and we had said at the last meeting, and I understand the ambulance service, I understand how important it is. We pay for a lot for them, though. And that is not something we brought up. So if we wanted to reduce some allocations, we could do that here today, correct?

Absolutely. And this also touches on the discussion that we had back in April about pursuing some kind of a revenue measure, and those discussions are ongoing. And it appears that Hoopa would be a willing partner in that process. What form that's going to take for an eventual ballot measure, we haven't determined yet.

Do you know, since we're having this discussion and we're talking about this three-year spending and we ask them and challenge them with trying to fund some of their own ambulance services, do you know if they have moved forward with that or if there's been any movement on that? Because we told them this discussion was going to come up.

Yeah, and I believe Mr. Zumalt may be here from Comal Medical Center. And I know that they have also expressed in the past that the cost for this service far exceeds what we allocate.

But everywhere, including Star Ambulance, who just does a spaghetti feed 500 times a year. So I understand that. And the ambulance services are very important. But it's been a question every year since I've been here.

Is that person here to talk about this? And I just want to ask the board right now, is there appetite for diving into this particular question about Kamau? Well, we actually talk about this a few times a year. So I just wanna make sure, because I wanna get us to where we're going. I also wanna acknowledge we only have four board members here today. If we can't come to any consensus at all, it is essentially option three, right? I mean, if there is no consensus, affirmative action today then option three which is keep everything the same unless unless unless there's a request to bring this back to the board again so I just want to be really clear about and have everyone's expectations be realistic about how we walk out of this conversation so if you want to have the ambulance service by all means please come forward and talk about that

And through the chair, I mean, this is the time and we've talked about come on ambulance, every measure Z meeting and how they're going to help fund themselves. Hi, nice to see you.

All right. I want to start off and say thank you for the board of supervisors for the help that we have received through the year and especially for the last year and helping get us closer to being, um, being viable, um, or staying at Bible. Um, the proposals, uh, from, Year before last, we reduced by $100,000 on there, where every department stayed the same or got their allocations back. With the ambulance, as I said, we are working more aggressively with the third-party revenue. We're also working with Trinity County and the other two tribes up in the area, the Yurok and the Karuk, for potential adding some amount of funding into there. to help support the ambulance as we go off of the Hoopa Reservation into the Yurok and down past Orleans at times on there. For spending up into the area, if we take a reduction above and beyond the 325 that's there, we'll have to look at our resources and where we look to cut to be able to stay viable in the area. And that won't mean we don't show up and we don't respond to any of the calls or anything like that. We'll just have to look at how do we still be able to manage within our budget as such. And as you talk about for Star Ambulance, yes, the Hoopa tribe supplements the ambulance service up there pretty substantially to be able to hold two paramedics or a paramedic and an EMT and that ambulance within the Willow Creek area. and that's i mean we have a small portion of members up there most of our members are down on the reservation so we actually give quite a bit into the hoopla area we're also working with mr quincy right now we have a meeting coming up with the tribal council to start to discuss what was asked of us as a proposal for either a potential tax or some type of a revenue to be able to help support some of those funds and there. Grant-wise, we do, we are chasing grants. We chase them where we can. Most grants go after equipment to help support some of the equipment when it does come around. I have meetings with IHS as we're looking even into our ambulances for the ongoing maintenance of those. Because our ambulances, unlike some of the local ambulances, they do 15 miles back and forth. we're putting on over 100,000 miles a year on each ambulance, which the wear and tear, the tires, the maintenance, it decreases life expectancy of them, so our maintenance costs are quite substantial in that fact. So we do look for some help in there. Those are not always guaranteed. They come through now and again as grants come available. We have some that we're waiting on closer to that October realm that can potentially help some of the equipment-wise, but it doesn't help with labor, rent, those fixed assets within that ambulance crew.

Okay. Does that answer your question?

I mean, kind of. It doesn't look like you're any closer to getting funding than in April when we had the discussion is what it sounds like. And are you saying that you won't be able to operate if you don't get the $325,000 from Measure Z?

we'll still be able to operate, we'll just have to look at where we cut back on that. We'll still respond.

Well, I wouldn't imagine that, you know, I would know that this board and the Measure Z committee would fund you guys, but we have continually asked about the large amount that you guys get comparatively to other ambulance services. So I do want to thank you for the explanation. I think my colleague has a question, but thank you.

All right, Supervisor Bone.

Well I keep, in 2013-14 when we did Measure Z, I donated to it, we helped with the committee and all that. Ryan Sundberg sat up here and I think our first grant to you was $265,000 and there was a very, what's the word you use, robust conversation about putting a tax measure up there, because this covers so much. Now you mentioned that you're talking to the UROCs. A big part of your area is downriver in UROC territory, right? That's when you put those long miles on and everything else. Do the UROCs give any money towards your ambulance service now?

Not at this point. We are in negotiations with them.

And this is what I'm coming into as parity because we're talking about Star. Now, you guys make a lot more calls than Star, but that doesn't mean Star isn't. But we also have another shadow hanging overhead. We have another ambulance service that services Garberville and Southern Humboldt that is not profitable. So what do we do if they come knocking on the door? Would that be considered a new application and it takes longer? Because I, and I'm gonna have to look at county council, ambulance service is one of the prescribed services through the state constitution that we have to provide. not police, not sheriff. So keep that in mind that this is our regulated, you know, and now I was fully supportive, still am supportive today, spent too much time in Orleans, which back in that area not to have it because those cliffs are, you know, and I actually, you know, stayed up there quite a bit in earlier life, understand the importance of it. But I, and as Supervisor Bushnell said, I've had, 12 years, 13 years, we're gonna see what we can do. And to this day, to realize that the Yuroks, the largest tribe in California that is buying up a majority, a lot of the area out there for their carbon credits and stuff, and congratulations to them for getting on there, for doing what they're doing. It's a big idea that we probably, they're building a big medical center, I think, right there in Wichita, I believe, as we speak. but they don't donate to the ambulance. It's just a parity level. It's nothing against them or anything else, but I don't think it's up to us to go after them. I think it's up to you to fund your operation and go after that. I don't have a problem with you being funded this year. I don't wanna pull your funding. I don't wanna put you in a lurch like that, but for all this time, all this time we've been saying we're gonna do something, And we're not doing anything. I would like to see some action on it, or at least an attempt at action. I don't know. They were talking about road tax. They were talking about, you know, we have a lot of people this time of year that recreate up there. So we want them to make sure that they have every option. And then you've been prone to forest fires. On the eastern Humboldt, there's probably our most area with southern Humboldt, but eastern Humboldt has been hit with that, and that can create a situation. So I think that's a request and a... I come to Jesus meeting that says, we really need to do this. And we really need to go to the chiefs and just say, hey, you guys, you need to help us out on this, on the ones we can't get our funding on them. I mean, it's easy to, I don't wanna say it's easy, because it's tax dollars, it's your money, it's their money. But the idea of not having them involved with it but them being a big part, how many calls does come on? How many calls do you guys do a year?

900 roughly in total. Um, I can't speak to too many years before me, but I can say that my time up here, I have reached out to the rocks. This is probably the first time that I'm aware of us going down river and actually looking at a depot station down there and planting that. And that was just a little before April. I met with Chief James and some of his staff. We started looking at how do we partner and how do we get a depot down there. With the group, we've reached out.

I don't want to interrupt too much here, but I want to speak to the board for a second in that are we proposing budget changes to this based on this conversation? Is that what's going to happen? Okay.

No, but we are proposing direction because I've had 14 years of saying we're going to do something and we haven't done it. All right. So, and I, and I was here, I keep hearing back when I started, I mean, I was the only board member sitting here. We started, that's not saying anything, but I need to know a commitment that we are going to do something about the tax dollars.

And so what I'm asking is, is, is the information being provided right now, going to give you what you need to give or to request direction. And so what is that direction that you're looking for right now? Can we articulate what direction you would like to have as part of this conversation?

I think the word you like is transparency. So I think the public that is watching would like to know if we're giving $325,000 of public monies to, and then they have their other funding and they do 900 calls, we're looking at probably, and Hoopaw gives, and I'm just guessing, we're funding up to $1,000 to $1,200 a call, I mean, tax-wise, citizens and everything else, and that's just my math, but I mean, when you start doing that, when you start doing that, we need to know how much are we giving out. And then how much of this, you gotta remember, there's Medicare, there's private insurance that subsidizes, and I would imagine you probably get 35, 40% is insurance or refunded. I know there's a lot that is not funded. So that's all I'm doing. I think people need to be aware. People can see public safety. People can see a lot of the stuff we do. They just see this, $325,000 coming out of their tax dollars. And I wanted them, because nobody, go out there and ask 20 people in the hall what chem was, and they're going to go, isn't that that rice they grow down in Nevada? They're not going to know. I mean, in all honesty. So that's the only reason I want to. Great.

Good to know. Supervisor Arroyo?

So to... To get to what you're requesting, I think what I'm hearing is that you want more information about whether, when other funds are secure, how that's meeting budgetary needs, and then for us to have that information, so moving forward, if we need to make adjustments to that allocation, we can. Is that what you're suggesting?

Not at all. I'm asking them to fulfill an obligation that they've said they would do for the last 13, 14 years, look at other funding sources which are available to them, and next year, I don't want to rock the apple cart, I don't want a refund, I don't want rebates, I don't want anything else. Next year when this is presented to us, We're all gonna be sitting up here, and I wanna say, what we've done is the UROCs, since they're a big portion of our services, are going to pay this part, and not them, the Karuks. I don't know if the Karuks give anything.

Sounded like Hoopa was being approached.

Okay. Hoopa's picking up the tab, and a big portion of the tab, and has, and the medical center is, Right, dead center in Hoopa. And so these are all things that are great. But it affects Hoopa's budget in the long run too. I mean, the tribal budget.

Agreed, I'm just trying to understand what you're asking for.

I'm asking for it to see results next year.

Okay, so next year, even though this is a fixed three-year spending plan, you would want to modify it next year should there be additional information about funding from other sources. Is that correct?

This is, and clarify if I'm wrong, Sean, if we pick option one, two, three, four, whatever option we pick, it's not written in stone, you're guaranteed to get that money. We're gonna take a three year option in case they come back and says, we tried everything and we can't do anything. Okay, then we'll say, you know, and I don't, but the thing is, is sitting up here every year for 13 years and hearing the same thing, You know, and fire, fire's taken a cut. Sheriff has worked with, everybody has worked with us, and that's all I'm asking is, and they have worked with us too, I'm not saying they wanted 450, we're getting close to, you know, in the 400s, they've come back down. I am just asking, and this isn't a guaranteed spending plan, this is just our direction.

okay okay i think i understand sorry may i um yes you may but i do want to get to a place where we have a motion to move forward with something okay uh i think i think we've had a really good conversation here um and again we we need to

I'm prepared to make a motion. I did just want to make one more comment about the ambulance services. My understanding has always been that we are continuing to fund this in part because of the requirement that counties support ambulance services. And we haven't, to my knowledge, been approached by another ambulance service provider to apply for Measure Z funds. So should that happen, then we could consider it at that time. It's not true? Okay, well I didn't know that. Anyway, we're talking about the three year plan. I think given the conversation we've had here today and taking to heart the county's fiscal situation, I know it is not always popular for the county to make determinations that we should receive money first from general fund tax measures. And I'm certainly not advocating for us to scoop up all the remaining funding. But I do think we also have an obligation to our own organization and our constituents to continue to fund the county services. out of this, so I appreciate that the measure three, or excuse me, option three does provide some increases. I think it kind of makes everybody a little tiny bit unhappy, which is perhaps the sign of a good divvying up of funds, and preserves the function of the Measure Z committee, which is something that I am very interested in seeing continue. So I appreciate that and know that there hopefully will be additional funds that go into that pot for allocation. But since we can't know for sure, I'll make a motion for option three to continue for the next three years.

I'm gonna take the opportunity to second that motion only because we need to have a discussion. So option three is sort of like the do nothing plan in terms of keeping things the same for more or less. Are there, Are there requests for modifications or, and you can sit down. Are there requests for modifications or amendments that anyone would like to make to option three?

For Ferndale, Lolita, Scotiab, the schools that the school resource officer, the $200,000 for taking Fortuna, And it's just, Fortuna, I don't have a problem saying this because I'm not campaigning for anything. But the thing is, those are proven results. And we've heard testimony, I've heard from school administrators and everything else. These are proven results. And public safety for children, And the biggest complaint is the problems on the street, which are 80% mental health and drug related, and we have a drug task force officer. And earlier it was mentioned, you know, we need to have the committee, we need to have these resources, we need to have all these discussions and everything else. Did we ask the committee if they really wanna meet over 300, $400,000? I mean, and try to decipher that, I mean, When this initially started, we wanted to fund, and you go through the whole thing, but I'm just saying I want to see Fortuna made whole, and since I don't, well, I guess I represent a tiny bit of Fortuna, which drove Estelle nuts and drives Michelle nuts. But when we look at this, I still like option one better because that's what the committee liked, and I just respect, the committees and all their time they spent, but we sit up here and pontificate all the other reasons we shouldn't have this.

Okay, is there any more discussion on this? And then what we need to do is figure out, and then through council, if we can't, because there are four of us, and if we can't find a common space, what are our options here?

The options would be to continue the item and direct staff to come back at a later date. The other option would be to stick with the status quo, which would be option three at this point.

But we do have a motion on the floor, so we need to vote on that. Is that correct? Yes. Before we make another motion.

And again, if this fails, which I feel like it probably will, if there is a modification to this that we can get three people to adjust to, then we can maybe move forward with something without having to bring this back. That's all I'm getting at. So I will... entertain that and we'll go with a roll call vote unless someone wants to offer an amendment that they think that will get their vote on this. Okay, there's no amendments at all. No one can make an amendment that they're, except for Supervisor Bone made an offer of an amendment to do the three year plan for Fortuna is what I think is what I heard him say.

I'm supportive of option one or two, which is.

And no modifications to those?

No.

Okay.

And I would say, too, that if Kamau is a private business and they can bill, which is different from City Ambulance, I think they can bill. But also, if we did a reduction to them, I think they would have to go find the funding somewhere. And that's what we've been talking about since I was elected in 21 with them every year. So, I mean, I'm supportive of the committee's option one as well, even though I think option two for fire and it is a bigger commitment, but I am supportive of the committee's work, which is option one. So I think you're right, you're not gonna probably get a vote here, but.

Right, so if we're not gonna get a vote today, then I think we're gonna have to modify the the motion to bring it back. I don't really know what else to do. I don't have another way to do that because I think we've got four people with very different opinions about this and there is a need to use the restroom by many people. So I think what we'll do is we'll take a five minute break and we'll come back in five minutes and we'll see how it goes from there. All right, we have a full counting here, and I'm gonna let, hold on a second, we'll make sure everything's on board. Mr. Black, how are we rolling good? Kaylee, we're on line there? Great. Okay, as you can see, we've had a, Supervisor Madrone has returned, and so, I think he's been listening in for this time, but I'll let him speak to whether or not he's, what his participation moving forward in this conversation will be.

Excuse me, mouth full of food. My apologies for being late. I had an unexpected emergency I had to deal with. All's well there, but I have been listening in to the conversation, but because I wasn't here, I think it's appropriate for me not to engage in the voting on this measure. Look forward to further discussion down the road with the rest of the board. Very much appreciate the work of the Measure Z Committee.

Thank you. Thank you. Just in reviewing the trajectory of this conversation and this discussion, I would say it's unlikely that we're gonna get to a vote of three three yeses on anything today. My suggestion is and maybe my request to the motion maker is to modify the motion to bring this back at the end of the year or sometime near the end of the year. And it will be in what portion of our budgetary discussion will that be?

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER IS OBVIOUSLY THE BEGINNING OF NOVEMBER. I'M NOT SURE IF WE'RE GOING TO DO A FIRST QUARTER REPORT THIS YEAR. WE WON'T BE DOING A FIRST QUARTER REPORT. SO THAT WOULD BE BEFORE MIDYEAR IF WE BROUGHT THIS BACK AFTER THE ELECTION RESULTS SOMETIME IN NOVEMBER OR DECEMBER.

And it also just give time to get more information and also to see where the the services and the discussions In terms of the in terms of the ambulance services that we were hearing about as well So that we can get more information and and back from from that discussion as well and I think that I will say the pressure is on and and I think all the entities have got to understand that This is this is this pot of resources or this is not as, it's not as reliable as we might imagine. It has its limits. So if the motion maker is willing to modify the motion, then I would be happy to second.

I'm willing to modify the motion, but I want to understand the question that Supervisor Bohn had. Yep, sounds good.

We'll have a discussion based on the motion. So I'll second that motion, which is to continue this item to somewhere near the end of the year, and we'll have better information and more understanding of the budgetary constraints of our partner agencies. And to Supervisor Bohn.

I will, we talk about transparency, we talk about efficiency, and then we're kicking this down the road. We've got how many people out there that have spoken to this? We've had numerous meetings, the committee's brought us something. We have three options, well four if you want to take four of the options. The liquid amount of money we're talking, and I don't care what the votes are in the future. Votes are in the future, if somebody gets a little bit more money, I mean, none of them have as much money as some of the other municipalities. That is fine. We can change that if they're able and fortunate. And I don't want to, I'm not against you guys having the money at all. I just want everybody, I think we talked about parity. I heard parity. Parity means everybody's got to pick up a little part of the tab if they're involved with the tab. So you buy a round for the house, you open somebody out at the end of the bar buys one too. That's the whole idea behind it. But we're sitting here with these things. We're not talking about changing that much. Committee has brought something forward on an efficiency level that allows us to move forward seamlessly without having all these discussions. But you wanna have another discussion in four or five months of the same stuff. And do you want to know why people hate government? Because of crap like this. We can't make a decision. And the amount of money we're talking about is very minimal. But I want to see public safety. I want to see ambulance. Everybody is funded in this. I believe the committee and everybody involved would be happy with one or two. But the whole idea is, I'm gonna defer to the committee because it's like everything that's appealed to us and everything else, there should be something said. It was a 7-2 vote, wasn't a majority, but I imagine one of those two probably liked Measure 2. I don't know, I'm just guessing. But I would make a motion for Measure 2 And if the world ends sometime in the next eight months, we can come back and change any of this. But to kick it down the road for somebody to come with more ammunition or somebody to bring a proposal forward or anything else, I just think it's a tremendous waste of time of our staff, of the committee, ourselves when we could be doing other things. This money is basically all spoken for. How much liquid money are we talking about up here to have another meeting and kick this down the road? I'm just, things never cease to amaze me.

you're welcome to put forward a motion you think you can get three votes for if that's what you want to do. And we could do that.

I've heard four times that you're not going to get a motion, we're not going to agree. I'm pretty sure we're not going to agree. I don't think we're going to agree. Coming from our chair, who's supposed to be directing the meeting.

I will make a motion if you would like. Sure. But we already have a motion on the floor. What I'm getting at is, and I'm being really clear about this, is that We don't have a motion that's gonna pass that relates to the funding options. Option four I thought was a pretty reasonable option. If you're willing to go there, I think we can get three votes to get there. I think it was a good compromise. But there doesn't seem to be willingness to compromise between the two and two votes here. Unless there's some willingness to move in one direction or another on those, then that's where we're at. And I apologize to you and everyone here and the public to have to endure that conversation. I think it was good, it was good information, but I don't see us moving forward today on this, the way it's set up. So we do need to get an affirmative vote to move past this. So someone's gotta budge on that or the board's just gonna sit here all day. Supervisor Arroyo.

Thank you. On the proposed modified motion, I just wanna understand what that would do in the interim and what your timeframe is for entering into contracts and what the kind of nuts and bolts of that option would mean for staff.

Yes. So, um, we would come back after the election results in November. So, um, I know we have a break in November and early December because of CSAC and Thanksgiving. So we would look to come back to your board probably mid December sometime. Um, and depending on the new spending plan, we would enter into contracts right at that point. We would have a few months to do that, which is I think absolutely doable.

And what would that mean budgetarily between now and then? Would our partners receive, be waiting to receive funds or they would continue receiving funds per our existing kind of status quo?

Yeah, so right now we are in the last year of our current spending plan. So spending is dedicated for 26, 27. Everybody has their allocations. All of our contracts are executed. And so everybody is operating with funding for 26, 27. Right now we're just looking at 27, 28 and beyond.

Okay, so in the spirit of moving forward, doing that would allow us to understand whether or not a ballot measure passed to know what the funding picture looks like for all the different agencies and would allow for, come out to address the question of whether there's additional funds through some of these upcoming meetings that we heard about. So that information would help answer some questions that have been posed here today. I think that sounds reasonable. I realize it pushes this conversation to another date, but I'm feeling ready to vote.

Okay. Again, this is just to postpone, or actually continue this item to sometime after November. And that's what's on the table right now. If we don't vote for that, I don't know what we're gonna do. So with that, can we have a roll call, please?

Yes, Chair. Supervisor Bone?

No.

Supervisor Arroyo? Yes. Supervisor Bushnell? No. Chair Wilson?

Yes.

Supervisor Madrone has abstained.

Okay. So what do you say we do?

There needs to be an affirmative action of some kind. So there would be a compromise to get three votes to one of the options or to come up with further direction to staff from this meeting with regard to a three-year spending plan.

OK.

one option would be not to have a three year spending plan. And that would be the effect of not, if there was not any affirmative action, the effect would be that there would not currently be a three year plan for 2728 through 2930 that has been approved by the board.

Okay, and so can that be the outcome without a vote? And then we can just move on and accept that as being what happens?

There could be a vote to come to that conclusion or to that effect. So there could be a motion to receive and file and basically then the effect would be to not have a three-year plan, approved three-year plan for 2728 through 2930. Okay, excuse me, CAO.

just add on to that if the board were to do that then we would revert back without a three-year plan to the old the prior mechanisms of allocating measure Z funds annually through the typical application process whereas all of these agencies who have been part of the three-year spending plan would go back into the larger pool along with everyone else.

I hear you. For the purposes of compromise and parity, I would propose and that is that what was the request for the diversion officer, or excuse me, not officer, the diversion counselor for Arcata's, for the Mad River area. What was that? Do you remember what that number was? 198,000. 198,000. So I would propose as an alternative or as a compromise that 100,000 to the diversion officer for the regional, the region of the Mad River, and 100,000 to the SRO for the region of the Eel River Basin, or Eel River area. And in that way, we move forward with, I guess it would be, option one with those two, with that change. Yep, that would be what I would offer as an amendment to get a third vote so we can move forward.

You're just making a new motion?

I'm just gonna make that as a motion, and we'll see where we go from here. Can I amend that? You can make, there's no second to amend yet, but sure, I mean, is there a second on that?

Can we just make it a 200 to Fortuna, 200 to Arcata, take it out of the $800,000, and just have it be where you're trying to get it anyway, and then we can just vote on, with the option, go option two with those options, making sure Fortuna's whole, and we'll give you your Arcata. Is anybody from here from Arcata? Sure.

And it's not a diversion officer, it's a counselor, right? I got it.

It's a counselor. It's a school position.

It's an unarmed, not sworn officer position.

I'm going to second Rex's motion. 200 to Arcata, 200 to Fortuna, and move forward status quo.

with option two then, right?

You couldn't do option two though because you couldn't increase.

Then I'll do option two with $200,000 coming out of the reserve, the $800,000 reserve for Arcata. Yes, I'll second that. For the Mad River Valley area and I want to make sure that Arcata is fully aware that they're going to Blue Lake, they're going to the charter school out in Samoa, everybody, so.

I want to bring this back to Supervisor Arroyo because this goes totally in the opposite direction of where she was moving to start this process. So I want to see if there's any requests for modification to that because I'm not sure I'm also totally on board.

I think despite the fact that all cities provide services outside of city limits, whether it's all the different very meaningful applications that have come from cities over the years, either for one-time funds or the desire to have three-year funding commitments, it starts to get into this equity issue of aren't we gonna fund cities, and I think we've brought up needs before around, you know, where we kind of just go to bat for the cities in our district. However, this has been a very protracted process. I'm willing to just say I'll vote how I'm going to vote, but that's... That's fine, I appreciate the desire to achieve a compromise. I do wanna point out that this funds Department of Health and Human Services a bit less than the option that I was pushing for. But it does make funds available for the applications. It does have a bit more than, It actually has the least of all the options for FIRE, but again, that would still mean that FIRE could apply for the additional funds. It just has the least fixed amount for FIRE between options one, two, and three. I can't now remember what option four was unless we brought it up again, but if we're talking about amending option two, I hear where you're going with it and I'll vote with my right.

Through the chair. Hold on one second. No. I want to respond to that as well because When we had this conversation back before, Arcata was willing to cut its request in half in order to self-subsidize that request, which is why I was going to those numbers that I was offering, that I was putting out there. And so that was a compromise that we, that again, the city of Fortuna said they were unable to do because they said they had no money to subsidize anything. They said zero dollars. And so that's why I was trying to be budgetarily conscious of trying to move those things forward and from our perspective, but also give some resources that the respective jurisdictions can use to supplement their own funding for these positions. So from my perspective, I do think it's just budgetarily better and a good motivator to pay for half of those positions for those respective agencies. But if this is where we're at, this is where we're at. I'm happy, not happy, but satisfied to kind of move this forward in what has been proposed. And so is there, I wanna hear from the CAO because this is a budgetary issue. We're gonna now, where is that 200,000 gonna come from? It's being proposed. I don't wanna be clear. I'm not jazzed about increasing this by $200,000. I was hoping that we could get to a place where it would be net neutral on that.

Yes, so your board has allocated $800,000 that is sitting in reserves. Those are one-time funds. And so if you add $200,000 to Arcata for option two, because Fortuna already has the extra $200,000 in that, you will be drawing your reserves down to $200,000 at the end of the three-year spending plan. And should any of our revenues come in short, then that only leaves 200,000 to cover that gap, which is why we created the reserves. Should it go beyond that, then it will cut into other programming, either internally within the organization, which has been your board's direction in the past, or... to external agencies, that'll be a conversation we'll have to cross when we get there.

Okay I appreciate that and Supervisor Bushnell has something to say and then I think we'll be ready to vote assuming there's a motion in the second that's clear on this.

There's so correct me if I'm wrong but we do do applications that exceed that two hundred thousand dollars and so the amount that we would be would be available for application processes would be reduced again that could not it wouldn't necessarily have to be taken out of the reserve because we have Been able to fund some applications.

The option two does have $500,000 held for applications, so.

Yeah, so it would be reduced to 300,000 instead of two. Jessica's shaking her head at me, so.

That's correct, that would maintain the 500,000 for applications if you're proposing to take that 200,000 from reserves annually.

And not touch the 800,000.

no so if we were to say to reduce that amount application to 300 not take from reserves then we could status quo our reserves so can you amend that motion supervisor bone oh i was going to steal from 200 from somewhere and then the other thing is if

realizing what the officer is in arcada if supervisor wilson wants to drop it a hundred thousand dollars he's more than welcome to for the school counselor position because um the because the sro and fortuna is public safety so i didn't know if you want to do that so i will change my amendment to take it out of the $500,000 to $300,000 for the applications. And again, I wanna thank the committee for bringing these forward, because what they're trying to do is streamline it. I appreciate public safety all across the board, all of you. ones that run into the burning buildings, the ones that chase the bad guys, everything else. So just thank you and everybody else that's involved. Kim Wah, we're not trying to beat you to death here and everything else, but I think there's options out there I think you need to exercise and I think you realize that too and I appreciate it.

The seconder is okay with that amendment. So to be clear, it is option two, additionally add 200,000 to go to Arcata for the Mad River Valley, taking out of the 500,000 of application funding and leaving the reserves alone.

Thank you. And before we close, I do want to raise the, the comments of Kelsey Reedy who called in before and really questioned and talked about the actual data on SROs and their impacts on criminality within schools. I think people should look at that and investigate it and really see if, because I don't have that data in front of me, but she brought up some very good, I think, concerns around arrest rates and what that does versus diversion and what that does. And I also wanna emphasize that when a jurisdiction hires somebody with a badge and a gun, they pay and we pay for that added expertise, I guess you'd call it, or whatever that is. and that impacts long-term retirement funds and all those other things. So we really do have to think about what's the bang for your buck in terms of helping kids and whether or not those things, those items and those technologies and those processes in our schools actually are doing the diversionary work that we're trying to get to per dollar. I think Kelsey brought that up and I wanna make sure that as a community we really are looking at that. Is that really the best way to spend money with kids? And so I'll vote for this, but I do want folks to really do their homework and take a look at that data. I think it's very, very important. Supervisor, oh.

Thank you. I just feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't say this. This feels like the final effort to get some fixed allocations into Measure Z to the extent possible, and I can understand the desire. Everyone's having budget challenges. Everybody needs the scarce resources just as much as one another. the cities of Trinidad and Blue Lake and Eureka, which is the county seat and taxes itself at the highest rate in the county and experiences a lot of impacts because of being the county seat and some things that are outside of the city's control has MOSTLY STOPPED APPLYING FOR THESE FUNDS BECAUSE THEIR APPLICATIONS HAVEN'T BEEN RANKED VERY HIGH IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, LAST FEW TIMES, AND SO I GUESS, YOU KNOW, THE REWARD GOES TO THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST PERSISTENT HERE, BUT I ALSO SEE THE INEQUITY IN THAT AND THE GREAT IMPACT THAT My district feels from being at the heart of Humboldt County when it comes to goods and services and businesses and a lot of other things, both the pros and the cons of that, and how much the public safety impact is felt. So I'm I'm preaching to the choir probably, or saying things we all already know, but every time we have this conversation, it's painfully obvious that while all the county is served by this, and I appreciate that, and my district gets some of that benefit for sure, that the district I represent is pretty minimally represented other than the things that serve everybody. So I think it's time to just go ahead and move along.

Yeah, and again, I hope that this isn't a message to the citizens of the city of Fortuna not to vote themselves. a tax increase to help their services. If you want an SRO, please fund it. With that, we'll take a roll call vote, please.

Thank you, Chair. Supervisor Arroyo? No. Supervisor Bushnell? Yes. Supervisor Bone?

Yes.

Chair Wilson?

Yes.

Supervisor Madrone? Abstain. Motion carries 3-1-1. All right, we have a time set.

And I'm going to ask our board if there is a consideration. And I'm going to ask our council, can we start the time set and then vote to continue that at say one o'clock or 1.30 or something like that, is that possible?

We actually have outside counsel that may not be available at that time. Okay. Because they were told 12 o'clock.

Okay, so when do you think we will be back here if we,

I think we could finish closed session within 30 minutes.

Okay, we are gonna do our very, very best to be here at 12.30. Okay, go ahead and read us in, please.

We actually have to wait three minutes.

We have to wait three minutes. We'll be back at 1.30. I will do my very best to make sure we are back. I mean, excuse me, 12.30, 12.30.

12, we need to be here at 12 to read it in. No, no, I mean after the closed session.

I'm just giving people a heads up. So we'll do our very best to be here at 12.30 after closed session.

Supervisor are present Council Thank You chair Wilson It is the intention of the board to meet in closed session pursuant to California government code section five four nine five six point nine D one in order to discuss existing litigation in the cases of JF versus Humboldt County at all case number five colon two six dash CV dash zero three three three one dash SVK and Connie Sue Jock versus Humboldt County Sheriff's Department, Humboldt County Superior Court case number CV2601343.

Great, any comments online?

There is not.

Any comments in the room? Seeing none, we are moving into closed session. Are you ready to roll, Kaylee? In the zone. Can you start this item, please?

Right after we get a report out from closed session?

Oh, that's right, report out from closed session.

Thank you, Chair Wilson. With regards to item K-1, the board voted unanimously to authorize the risk manager to enter into agreements with Gordon, Creed, Kelly, Hole, and Sugarman, LLP, and other outside counsel as needed for defense of the case of J.F. versus Humboldt County et al., case number 5-26-CV, With regard to item K-2, the board voted unanimously to authorize the Humboldt County Counsel's Office to defend the County of Humboldt in the case of Connie Sue Jock versus Humboldt County Sheriff's Department, Humboldt County Superior Court case number CV2601343.

Excellent, thank you. All right, so we are now moving into our next item. So CAO, can you? Give it a start and then I have just a quick comment before we move into that.

Sure, today before your board is the annual report from the Humboldt County Lodging Alliance and additional direction sought through staff. Peggy Murphy, your economic development director is here before you today to present this matter.

How long do you think your presentation will be?

My intro will be very short and then we do have our partners with HLA here for a five to 10 minute presentation.

So are you going to be five or ten minutes? I will not be. Okay.

I will be, hopefully, too.

I'm going to have you do your thing first. I have a plane I have to catch, so I will not be able to stick around for the whole thing. So I'll have a few comments right after you're done, and then we can kind of move from there. And I'll be listening as I move through, and I actually may even produce a follow-up memo at some point, which will be public record. Thank you.

All right, so this item is before your board today for you to receive the annual report from the Humboldt Lodging Alliance as well as provide staff with the direction regarding updates to the Tourism Business Improvement District governance documents. As your board knows, the Humboldt Lodging Alliance serves as the official owner's association for the Humboldt County Tourism Business Improvement District. That district includes the incorporated cities of Arcata, Eureka, Fortuna, Ferndale, Rio Del, and Trinidad, as well as the unincorporated areas of Humboldt County. As the designated owner's association, HLAA is responsible for administrating assessment revenues and implementing programs in accordance with the management district plan and providing an annual report for your board. The management district plan was renewed for a 10-year period covering July 1, 2017 through June 30, 2027. At the same time, the contract was renewed with an expiration date of June 30, 2028. Due to the upcoming renewal deadlines, staff is also asking your board to direct us to commence negotiations with the Humboldt Lodging Alliance regarding matters REGARDING AMENDMENTS TO THE MANAGEMENT DISTRICT PLAN AND THE AGREEMENT FOR SERVICES, INCLUDING A LIST OF CLARIFICATIONS FOUND IN THE RECOMMENDATION. AND THEN BECAUSE OF THE NUANCES IN ALL OF THOSE ITEMS, WE ARE ALSO ASKING THAT YOUR BOARD DIRECT STAFF TO ENGAGE AND RETAIN OR CONSULT A NATIONALLY RECOGNIZED TOURISM BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT CONSULTANT EXPERIENCED IN CALIFORNIA TBID GOVERNANCE.

SO BEFORE I INTRODUCE OUR

Our presenter, I think back to you, Chair.

Thank you. I'm gonna leave here in a little bit, but there was a couple things because we were gonna be giving requests for staff in terms of what we want for information. First, I wanna say that as... I've not been shy about my concerns and criticisms of sort of the HLA broader efforts, I do want to say I do appreciate the aggregation and collection of funds and the construct of spending those in ways that benefit the community. I think that is very, very a good thing. I will say that I have reviewed the foundational documents as well as the estate sections of code related to that and What I observed in the meetings that I've seen have not lived up to those provisions, specifically around the Brown Act and transparency. I've seen not just in the meeting and the conduct of the meeting, but also within the documentation that's presented for the public's review. And I know there are some discussion around is this private, is it public, but the code section really says clearly that while they are private entities, they serve a government function. That's why the Brown Act applies and I think it's very, very important that the public be made aware of that. And then I really encourage the public to view these meetings, go to these meetings and check them out. Because one of the things I did observe, and I'm hoping we don't see more of that, was I really felt that the applicants that I saw come to these meetings be treated very poorly. And I'm not going to go into the details of that. I think people can speak for themselves in that. But it was something I'm hoping that is reformed. The question I want to ask really specifically, I want answered moving forward in your analysis of this organization and how things move forward. I want added to that, the analysis of whether or how we might actually do a ballot measure that does a TOT to replace this HLA construct entirely. At least to review it because what's happening now is the collection of funds from visitors that come to Humboldt County that's then put into this pool and in my observation, not very well It's not very transparent in what it's supposed to be doing and not meeting certain things. But if it's replaced directly through a TOT, it would be no more tax. It would be one for one. And we could put it into a construct that is much more publicly monitored. and in a way that has more transparency. And so that's my request on the list of questions we may have moving forward. I just needed to get that out because I do have to get out of here in a few minutes, and I just wanted to make sure I was on the record as we move forward. And with that, thanks for, I'm just taking that prerogative as the chair, and with that, I'm happy to continue this item with the presentations. Appreciate that.

I would like to ask the chair a question, though. Are you directing staff to do something without the full board's acknowledgement, or what are you doing?

What I just said, what I was doing, which was making the request that on the list of questions to be analyzed by the staff moving forward, that a ballot measure is considered. If you so choose not to have that on the list today, I will probably bring it back for consideration at a later date. So with that, please move forward, thanks.

I think I hear the chair asking us to make that request as we proceed before departing, so it'll be up to us, but thank you for comments. I'll take over if you're departing.

I'll be departing in about 10 minutes. Perfect.

All right, thank you. With that, I would like to start by welcoming Meredith Matthews, Executive Director of the Humboldt Lodging Alliance, to present HLAA's annual report. She is joined online as well by Matt from Misfit.

Hi, everybody. So good morning, Chair Wilson and the rest of the Board of Supervisors. Again, I'm Meredith Matthews. I'm the executive director for the Humboldt Lodging Alliance. Supervisor Wilson, thank you so much for your comments and your concerns. As you'll hear in my report, I have been the executive director for about eight months now. And I know that changes are incremental and coming. And we are all doing our best. So for my part of the presentation, which I'll try to be quick because I know you have to go, I'll be focusing on our community investments, event funding, and the partnerships we've built over the past two years to support the visitor economy across Humboldt County. And then my colleague, Matt, will go over our outside marketing plan. So again, as a reminder, the Humboldt Lodging Alliance is a self-assessment tax. paid by lodging property owners with very specific purpose. The TBID calls for a 2% assessment to be collected by local hotels, campgrounds, and RV parks with five or more units for three main funding priorities in Humboldt County. Marketing outside Humboldt, funding for events that can draw visitors from out of the county, especially during shoulder and winter seasons, and capital projects that have the ability to draw visitors from outside the county, like the Redwood Skywalk. Oh, thank you. This way? All right. It is also important to note that the HLAA bylaws and our management district plan offers stringent guidelines on how these funds can be used. In short, HLAA funds are required to support mainly the activities that generate overnight stays to the HLAA member properties. the past two fiscal years, and so you do have our two previous annual reports in front of you, so go ahead and please reference them. The Humboldt Lodging Alliance has invested more than $3 million in destination marketing to areas outside Humboldt County. In a few moments, you'll see some examples of the commercials we air outside Humboldt, and we also maintain robust social media accounts with growing engagements. So approximately 756,000 was invested in festivals, events, and visitor-generating activities supporting signature experience, such as Rumble Over the Redwoods, Magic in the Redwoods, the Redwood Coast Music Festival, Humboldt Marble Weekend, Reggae on the River, the Arcata Bay Oyster Festival, and numerous community celebrations that attract visitors from outside the region. These events not only generate overnight stays, but also drive spending at local restaurants, retailers, attractions, and service businesses. Additionally, over $1 million was invested in tourism infrastructure and destination enhancing projects, including support for the Redwood Skywalk, the largest living lighted Christmas tree, Eureka beautification efforts, and other projects designed to improve the visitor experience and strengthen Humboldt County's long-term tourism assets. These investments help create lasting community benefits while enhancing the experiences that encourage visitors to choose Humboldt County as a destination. The Humboldt Lodging Alliance, also invested more than one and a half million dollars in destination marketing, promotional campaigns, and visitor outreach efforts. These funds supported regional marketing initiatives, social media campaigns, visitor information programs, and local chambers of commerce and tourist organizations working to increase awareness of Humboldt County and drive visitation during peak and shoulder seasons. My colleague will speak to that next. These investments are funded entirely through assessments paid by local lodging businesses and are strategically directed to activities that increase overnight visitation, generate economic activity, and strengthen Humboldt County's tourism economy. As visitor spending continues to grow, these investments support local jobs, generates tax revenue, and help sustain the small businesses, attractions, and community organizations that contribute to Humboldt County's unique character and quality of life. And what we're most proud of is that these investments aren't concentrated in one community. They're spread throughout Humboldt County, ensuring that tourism dollars support local economies from Shelter Cove to Oreck and everywhere in between. And as I've said, I've been in this role for about nine months now. So what I've done coming in is really focused heavily on strengthening partnerships and increasing coordination across the country. So that includes working closely with the county on initiatives like the Outdoor Economy Summit, the Economic Summit, the Choose Humboldt Campaign, supporting community response efforts, and actively participating in chambers and resource organizations throughout Humboldt County. So in short, I just really try to be in rooms where tourism decisions are being made and be a willing partner. I also have the opportunity and the honor to serve on the North Coast Tourism Tourism Council, where I'm working to better align regional tourism efforts and ensure Humboldt is well represented in broader conversations. So in addition, I've attended industry events throughout California to help amplify Humboldt County as a destination, spoken with legislators and key stakeholders about the importance of tourism in our local economy, and worked with neighboring counties to provide our rural region more collaboratively. There's Phil. A big part of my role has been showing up both locally and beyond Humboldt County to build relationships, advocate for our regions, and make sure that we're not just part of the conversation but helping shape it. I want to stress that my role is so much more than funding events. It's being in rooms. and having conversations both locally and statewide to represent Humboldt County lodging and tourism. Because ultimately, the more aligned we are across agencies, organizations, and jurisdictions, the more effective we can be in driving visitation and supporting our local economy. Tourism continues to be a major economic driver in Humboldt County, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in visitor spending and supporting thousands of local jobs, not just in lodging, but in restaurants, retail, recreation, and transportation. And we are always looking for ways to drive overnight stays, including now working with influencers. And even in two weeks, we're bringing up a television crew from Fox 40 to do a whole segment on Eureka. which is going to be really exciting. So our role at HLA is to bring these visitors here and just as important to support the events, experiences and partnerships that make them want to stay longer and come back. I'm really proud of the work that I have done, that we have done in the past almost a year. I think I've really moved the needle with the HLA and I really would love the opportunity to continue to do that, providing whatever. And some of the things that we've already funded this year, we've been able to give $15,000 to the McKinleyville Chamber of Commerce for their Music in the Plaza series, the 4th of July fireworks, Rumble Over the Redwoods, the Trinidad to Clam Beach Run, the Ork Rodeo, and we're looking forward to doing more. So I am going to now turn it over to Matt from Misfit, and then I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you so much.

Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. I really am grateful for the opportunity to present. Am I able to share my screen here? Let's see. I think I am. Yes. It looks like I am. Perfect. I will do my best to move through this quickly. I know you guys have had a very full agenda today, but I am excited to share with you a few updates to kind of piggyback on some of the things Meredith shared, but I'll go through this quickly. First of all, we've had, my team has had the privilege of spearheading the marketing and advertising on behalf of the Humboldt Lodging Alliance for the past 10 years, and our primary focus really is bringing outside visitors from outside the county into the county, and not just to put heads in beds, but to help outside the county visitors spend money in restaurants and in museums and art galleries and all sorts of things. You've seen versions of this campaign over the years, but our primary fundamental thing that's never changed is we want to position Humboldt County as a magical place, because it is a magical place. It's not like any other county. And over the years, throughout all the different campaigns, we are making a promise to our visitors outside the county that only Humboldt can own. um you know candidly you can go other places to see redwoods you can go other places to see beautiful coastline you can go other places to to have really good food but you can only go one place to have it in a magical environment the promise of magic has been the brand promise that we've built this whole campaign on for years and it's and it's really worked i could spend a ton of time talking about how we target our audiences Needless to say, we focus primarily on residents and potential visitors within a six-hour drivable radius of Humboldt County in all directions. And that's families, it's empty nesters, it's outdoor enthusiasts, it's food lovers, art lovers, and we have different campaign strategies to target each and every audience segment within that geographic radius. We engage our audiences through a variety of marketing tactics. There's broad reaching television. There's highly, highly targeted display banners and digital video and paid search and social media. And I could talk all day long about strategies, but it's probably more fun to show you some of the work. So I'm gonna do my best to share just one 30 second video spot. Hopefully it plays well enough over Zoom here.

¶¶

So this latest iteration of the campaign is still under the follow the magic brand that we've built. But now this iteration is you stay with us and we stay with you. And it's this idea that the magic follows you back. These are some digital banner ad examples, which I won't. make everyone sit through the hundreds of different examples of ads whether it's digital or social one of the things i would always just remind the board is that one of the things that i know we offer in every single reporting session with the public and with hla members is we track everything in this campaign We have a decade worth of data that we would always be welcome to share with a larger group and have a data meeting with anyone who's interested. We've offered that over the years and haven't been taken up on it yet. I'm hopeful that at one point we will. But in the interest of time, just a couple of quick highlights from the campaign over last year alone. Last year alone, there were over 500 paid and added value television commercials that ran across Northern California. Over 25 million impressions through our digital campaign. And impression is just another word for how many times the campaign was seen through our digital banner ads and digital video. Over 300,000 unique visitors to the campaign website through our digital campaign. And again, as we're being good stewards of the dollars, for every dollar spent on paid media, we've delivered over $3 worth of media exposure. And I want to stress this point really, really quickly. As I mentioned, we track everything, every digital banner ad, every target audience, every social post, every search. All campaign assets are monitored daily, and our team optimizes them to ensure that our performance are always above travel industry benchmarks at every turn so that everything works. Just really quickly, I wanna share some data with you. This is not my data or Meredith's data. This is data from an independent third party through Visit California. Their latest dollar numbers stress that the tourism impact in Humboldt County, of which the HLA campaign plays a major role, In the last year alone, food service, tourism spend generated over $138 million in Humboldt County in food service. By the way, over two years, that's up 24%. For local transportation and fuel businesses, $79 million. That's up 72% over the last two years alone. Arts, entertainment, recreation, over a $60 million impact. That over two years is up 25%. And for our retail stores in Humboldt County, it's up to over $48 million, and that's up 13%. So what we're doing is working and having an impact far beyond just the hotels. But I do want to share with you one more data slide, because I love data. Over the years, travel spending by visitors in Humboldt County has grown. In fact, it's up to the highest that it's ever been in 2025 at $560.7 million. That's up 14% from just two years ago. And I want to just caveat, I don't want you to think that everyone is up. 14%. Our neighbors, for example, just next door in Mendocino County over that same two-year period, they're only up about 1.5%. And so the investments that the HLA and others are making into marketing is making a real difference. And I would love the opportunity to talk more about that, but I don't want to monopolize the time here today.

All right, as you can see, Supervisor Wilson had to depart, so I am chairing now, and is there more that you wanted to add, Peggy?

Not at this time.

Okay, can you reiterate the recommendation here, please?

Absolutely. The first recommendation is that your board receive the annual report from the Humboldt Lodging Alliance, and then direct staff to commence negotiations with the Humboldt Lodging Alliance regarding amendments to the management district plan and the agreement for services, including clarification of governance responsibilities, fiscal oversight, allocation authority, reporting requirements, amendment procedures, and other provisions necessary to ensure consistency between the governing GOVERNING DOCUMENTS AND CURRENT INDUSTRY BEST PRACTICES. AND THE FINAL RECOMMENDATION IS THAT YOUR BOARD DIRECT STAFF TO RETAIN OR OTHERWISE CONSULT WITH A NATIONALLY RECOGNIZED TOURISM BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT CONSULTANT EXPERIENCING CALIFORNIA T-BID GOVERNANCE. ADMINISTRATION RENEWALS TO ASSIST THE COUNTY DURING NEGOTIATIONS AND PROVIDE RECOMMENDATIONS REGARDING GOVERNANCE BEST PRACTICES. CONSISTENCY WITH THE PROPERTY BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT LAW OF 1994 AND ALIGNMENT BETWEEN THE MANAGEMENT DISTRICT PLAN AND THE AGREEM

Okay. Thank you. All right. So before we get to questions, I just want to ask one of our attorney, given that Supervisor Wilson requested that we consider something that is In my reading, not one of the options here. I don't construe these as very broad beyond what's described here. Is that item even, can that item even be part of the discussion today?

Now the board can provide direction for staff to come back on certain things. And now was Chair Wilson stating that he wanted the issues that he raised today to be considered by staff as a part of the recommendations if the board were to direct staff to retain an outside consultant and work with HLA?

Okay, thank you. All right. Are there questions for HLA or our staff? And we'll start with Supervisor Bushnell.

Thank you. So I'm curious about the outside entity that you're talking about. And I'm looking for a cost to that.

Currently we do not have a cost in here. We would have to discuss with the potential agencies to get a cost. I do believe there is a line in the financial section that we would come back to your board if there is a cost associated with it.

I mean, there's going to be a cost associated with that, I would assume. I would assume. Yeah. And do you anticipate that you don't know where that funding source would come from? Yeah, that's the problem. Okay. Additionally, okay, those are my, I'm going to keep reading it and then I'll have more questions.

Okay. All right. Supervisor Madron, do you have anything? Just go down the line. Thank you.

Thank you, Acting Chair. Well, thank you, Peggy, for being here and for staff's work to bring this forward. And thank you, Meredith, for your report. There you are, behind the podium. I absolutely appreciate what you said, that it's a work in progress, right? That you've been on board, gosh, I mean, eight months, come on. So, you know, things change over time. And I think, as you know, the board has an interest in really wanting to engage HLLA more and help the process be more transparent for the community and all those good things. So I understand that these things happen incrementally. So I appreciate you being here and I appreciate the hotelers for their support for this program and I look forward to us continuing to work together to improve it. I think there's absolutely some room to do that but without the process here we wouldn't have the funds even considered doing a lot of these things. So look forward to those improvements and very much patient in terms of what it will take to be making those incremental changes. So thanks for being here today.

Thank you. Supervisor Boehme.

Kind of wish Supervisor Wilson was still here. I've got a kind of different impression. I've never worked with Meredith on anything, so I don't know nothing about that. I have worked with the executive board from the HGLA since inception and have been to numerous meetings and had nothing, and you're right, are they a little lax? Yeah, because we're dealing with appointed people. We're dealing with principals, people that own the projects and that are going to be affected by the heads and beds. They are the principals. So they're going to have strong opinions. They brought this to us because they had different ideas because they weren't sure all the TOT money was going to the best of their interest. So in turn, they come back and they said, we're going to tax ourselves, our customers, they paid us to tax it, and then came back and have created kind of a great thing. And I'm gonna tell you, I mean, and I always tell this story and I love it, is about eight years ago, nine years ago, I went to him and I says, hey, we need to change our display in the Capitol. It had been the same for 35 years, 40 years. LP had paid for it. It was a lot of cardboard cutouts and ugly. Everybody, the other 57 counties, we were the ugliest out of 58 counties. And the HLAA agreed with their group to, I think, fund $40,000, redid it, everything else. and that's when we had a budget surplus and they decided to spend a billion and a half dollars on the capital and took all the displays out. So we have a beautiful finished video display in an old growth redwood, absolutely amazing, ready to go in when the day comes. They have funded, You can look at these things that they have funded. They came to me a year ago or eight months ago about a baseball tournament because we send a lot of kids out of the area to play baseball. Well, we happened to bring out in Eureka seven teams, and I think they had 345 room nights in that one-week tournament. Didn't get any money from anybody. We just did it. And I appreciate, you know, and then they donated to the rumble. and everybody can scream and yell all they want. 60% of all the Rumble tickets are sold 50 miles or more away from this area. 50 miles, which means they're either traveling or they're staying. And you can't get a motel, it's pretty full. They rent 180 rooms themselves, I believe, for all their participants and everything. And that two-day event brings 11, 12,000 people, 1,000 volunteers. It's a great event. Scream like you want, but it is a good event. But I've had a great relationship with the HLA. I'm glad to say that I've been here since 2012 when they first brought this forward. John Porter, Chris, Shaleesh, the whole bunch. And they are still moving forward to do what's best. They just want to spend, they just want to let do a little bit for themselves. And the other thing is, I'm always amazed sometimes what they do fund. And I know they don't fund everything. Somebody's gonna get their feelings hurt and then they're gonna come to the supervisor and go, they're spending their money wrong. Well, I think they have a pretty good transparent, you know, and I think if we clean up the meetings, I guess. I mean, it's hard to do with the bunch you're, you know, but again, we're dealing with people whose money is directly affected, not a paycheck, it's their paycheck in the end, but a whole bunch of other people's paychecks. So I appreciate the HLA. I don't have any negative feelings at all and look forward to going forward in the years ahead, so thanks.

Great. It sounds like the negotiation here will very clearly include governance oversight. how all of this is tracked, improve transparency between the agencies. So I appreciate that. I have also heard some of the concerns and complaints that Supervisor Wilson brought up, and I don't think we need to retread old ground. It does sound like there's willingness and receptivity to negotiate something new. or revised, I should say, and be responsive to community feedback, which is what we're here to do. Supervisor Bushnell, do you have anything else?

I do. About a year and a half ago, probably two now, there was an ad hoc that was formed for HLA, and we've never had a meeting on that, and we've been waiting for this to come forward, and I would like for that ad hoc to be involved, and I would like for that ad hoc to meet with HLA, And Chris has called several times inquiring about that. And this board challenged that ad hoc with helping through some of this process. And so I want to make sure that that happens. if the ad hoc is still valid because we haven't done the work yet.

Yes, thank you. That is on our radar and it will absolutely be included in the conversation.

Secondly, I wanted to ask CAO, I think she has some ideas about financial for the consulting or maybe a broad statement.

Yeah, I would say, just to respond to your question, Supervisor Bushnell, around the expense that might be associated with this, rough estimate, I would say less than $50,000, and likely that would be a recommendation to come from contingencies.

Well, if, okay, I mean, I would put a thought out there that if this is gonna be a work to help get HLA going, I would ask that they share that cost, so. To get HLA more aligned I guess. So just a thought. And then secondly or thirdly I guess Peggy talks about their contracts and board members and all of that is to come. Is that in the following discussions or is there a specific I can ask around that.

I apologize. Can you clarify.

Like HLA board makeup. I'm curious about some things.

I do believe in the annual report you're welcome to ask questions about makeup. But typically if there was a change to board makeup they would have brought it forward in the item. I don't think that without them bringing forward any changes that there's any modification the board can do.

I guess I'll ask Meredith then my question. If you can come to the podium. Thank you. So board members need to be active members and own hotels? Correct. Okay. And you have made sure that is happening? Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

And it's people owners or their representatives, correct? Yes. Okay. And we have a couple of them here today. I think I'll just, Chris Ambrosini, you're still the chair, right? Would you be interested in coming up and saying anything? Okay, all right, just wanted to open the floor to you as the chairman of the board. I know Meredith is your ED, but just wanted to see if there was anything else you wanted to add.

Well, I mean, I appreciate the relationship that we've had for the last 15 years. I mean, we've been doing this for 15 years now. So, you know, we concentrate on a lot of times, Mr. Wilson is not here right now, but he focuses on events that we haven't funded. And so we don't fund every event. I mean, we get a lot of requests. And we have an application process. Just like you are deciding what to do with Measure Z funding, there's tough decisions that we have to make. And some of it is objective. And a lot of it, to be honest with you, is very subjective. I mean, our board is made up, like Supervisor Bushnell has stated, that you have to be a member of the HLA and also have five or more units at one location and then be an owner or a manager of that location. So with that being said, we feel that we, you know, a lot of us has been in the industry for many years and so the process that we have when we make decisions on funding. I mean, it is subjective at some times, you know, and so we do say no to, you know, and it's very hard. Believe me, our whole goal is to bring overnight visitors to Humboldt County. You know, I have a hotel in Eureka, but I want people to come to Humboldt and spend the night because when they come here, they're going to spend, you know, a shitload of money, you know, really. Excuse me on that. But, you know, there, you know, you have to bleep that out for access. That's a scratch that. But anyway, I think where the negativity comes with HLA is when we have to say no to applicants when they're applying for funding. Other than that, you've seen our marketing that we do outside of the county. A lot of people don't realize how much money we actually spend on outside marketing. We're really the... the only agency that spends a significant amount of money uh outside of the county a lot of our local residents don't see that because you know all of our money is spent outside the county but anyway i can go on and on and on we are up for renewal we're in our final year of our uh of our contract and so we were also evaluating everything, you know, everything that we're doing also. So it's a two-way street. I mean, the county may or may not wanna renew with us and HLA may or may not wanna renew with the county. I mean, so we're looking at all that now. And we hope, you know, my my goal is to to renew and with the county and carry on the relationship. I know we had a few years that, you know, there were some disagreements and everything pertaining to the Brown Act. But I think we've straightened all that out, especially coming out of COVID. I don't think anyone during COVID was following the Brown Act because it was always changing. I don't think government agencies were following it correctly too at that point. But anyway, I'm here to answer any questions if you have any. Again, I can go on and on, but we look forward to working together and moving on.

Okay. Supervisor Bond has a question. Please go ahead.

Well, an awareness is a big thing and at the end of the day, a lot of your decisions are based on did we get the heads and beds, you know, the second year or something or the first, you know. But what was your – I always liked the story because I grew up next to it. Sequoia Park, when they did the skywalk – you were instrumental in giving more money if it went 50 feet higher? What was the breakdown? Which has made that probably one of the most popular destinations in the county, and that's great, but you guys had a big input and put over $2 million into that from one little agency with none of our money's involved, and that was, you know, Eureka-centric, but it has worked out great, and I've got a great love for Sequoia Park, because I grew up there, so.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think everyone can, even though it's located in Eureka, I think it's definitely a regional attraction. I mean, people, you know, John Porter from the Bembo Inn, he'll tell me that people come here specifically to see the Redwood, but then specifically also to see the Redwood Skywalk, and that happens from all the hoteliers throughout the county. And just so you know, we concentrate on three avenues of our expenditures. One is marketing outside of the county. Number two is events, you know, and so we help fund events. And number three is capital expenditures. And so we're always looking for that next Redwood Skywalk, you know, so if you or anyone has any ideas on what we can do, I mean we have money to help fund a major attraction for our county. And it's a county-wide, when we spend money like that, it's a county-wide project that we can all be proud of. So we're always looking to see. So anyway, yeah.

Great. Well heard. I imagine it's always good to let folks know that, and especially the capital improvements may not be on people's radar. All right. Are there other... burning questions right now if not we'll go to public comment and then come back for some discussion yes steve go ahead

I'm going to be unabashed and say Vista Point up at McKinneyville is a sleeping giant of an opportunity in terms of a million dollar view there of the Trinidad coastline. First place to see the ocean since you've left the Golden Gate Bridge. And you can't even pull into it when you're going north. It's dysfunctional. So there's a plan we're working on that we're going to be bringing to you. I've been working on it with Economic Development and others. I think it's one of those sleeping giants that's out there that could absolutely pull people off the highway and really get people to want to stay the night, plan a week vacation, all that kind of stuff, like the Skywalk has become. As you said, in addition to people coming to visit the Redwoods, adding that Skywalk tour to their agenda has been It's been a real blessing, and it is really one of those great, great experiences.

Yeah, it's one of those experiences that helps people stay another night. That's what we want, T-O-T, people to stay another night and spend more money.

Yeah, and that airport business park is looking at a number of new motels coming in as well. You may have heard about some of that, but changes afoot up in McKinleyville.

Yeah. I mean, we're, you know, again, we're always, uh, we have open ears and I, I don't know. I, uh, I, I'm still kind of confused about the, uh, transparency because I, all of our meetings are a Brown act and we were open to the public. We publicize them like much like the County does. We've gotten a lot of help from, from the County a couple of years ago. And so, uh, you know, we're transparent, but if people don't show up to our meetings, they don't know what's going on. And then they complain, well, show up to our meetings and you'll see what's going on. I'm not saying that to you, I'm just saying that to people that say that we're not transparent. I'm not, again, so. What was that? No, definitely, I'd be more than happy to have you guys attend.

Thank you. Yeah, and thankfully, you have an ED who's very familiar with the Brown Act, so yeah.

Are you sure there's nothing else you want me to talk about?

I don't think so at this time, unless anyone has questions, but let's go ahead and move to public comment. I only see one person in Zoom, and they do not have their hand up. Is that correct, Kaylee? That is correct. Okay. So with that, we will move to public comment in the room on this item. Please go ahead.

Hi, Cassandra Heseltine, film commissioner. I just want to say thank you to Homeboat Lodging Alliance for the funding of 10 plus years that they've done for our office. They're our second biggest funder, and we've been very grateful to have them, not only for our annual expenses, but also for the Forest Moon Festival.

Hi, Yvonne Hendricks, Executive Director for the Southern Humboldt Chamber of Commerce. I just want to give my thanks and gratitude for HLA South. They've done a lot good for our community down in the southern part of the county. Since their founding in 2014 to 2026, they have invested $1,120,000 plus in events and promotions for us, and so we're very grateful for them, and we want to thank them and thank you, the Board of Supervisors.

Hi, I'm executive director for Humboldt Made, Rosa Dixon, and I'm here to kind of talk about the bigger picture with HLA because I do think that they tended, everybody seems to focus on certain projects that they fund and don't fund, and definitely there's a lot of egos involved. I personally, since I've been the executive director of Humboldt Made, have not been funded, but it really does not matter. The point is that they are giving funding back to our community in big ways, and I feel like that's the part that sometimes gets lost, because we focus on what they haven't done, and I really think we need to focus on every dollar that they give to support the tourism for our county, supports our businesses, which supports our economy, which supports our place to live. So that's really what I would like to say. So it's not always about getting funded, your own project or not. So thank you, each of you.

Thank you. Please come forward. And if anyone else is interested in commenting, now is the time to get in line.

Hey everyone, Calder Johnson, Arts, Culture and Tourism Sector Investment Coordinator for Redwood Region RISE. Just wanna say first off, Chris, I just wanted to thank you for your words earlier. I think really speaking to the importance of everyone pulling together and working together right now at this moment strategically is incredibly important. Some of the figures from Dean Runyon that I believe Misfits shared earlier, I wanna share some other figures too from that same report. California in 2025 saw 1.7% in revenue growth in tourism. In Humboldt County though, it was 3.4%. We doubled the state's revenue growth. And this was an environment where we all kind of also acknowledge we're going through a transformational period in how we manage tourism here. We're still figuring out how to work together strategically. I personally believe that if we can really all come together, and really make this happen as a team, imagine what we could do. If 3.4% is what we're doing right now. And I think that's also really important to note that like with measure Z that we were looking at earlier those discussions, Dean Runyon also mentioned in their report that 13.6 of sales tax revenue is generated through tourism in Humboldt County. So, I mean, yeah, there's absolutely a really vested interest in all of us coming together to work on this together. And I also say that too, because while I do think absolutely, yes, there is a lot of improvements that can be made, a lot of things we can all be doing better, I think that it would be very dangerous with this kind of momentum to completely dismantle a system and say, okay, we're gonna rebuild it from the ground up. I get that that can be tempting sometimes, but boy, you can really, really kill your momentum with that kind of approach. So that's what I have to offer. Thank you all.

Thank you. Would anyone else like to comment on this item? All right, seeing none, we'll bring it back to the board. So we have already received the annual report, thank you. And so the next step would be first off to commence negotiations and potentially if we choose to hire a consultant And as I'm reading this, it is to assist the county during negotiations, so I think they would be acting on our behalf, is the proposal from staff. Is that correct? Okay. All right. Yes, please.

I know it's been asked, and we're voting on something. Do you have any idea what a consultant will cost? I mean, it's just...

My estimate was roughly $50,000. Okay.

And I'm just going to take a shot in the dark that if we wanted to split that with the Lodging Alliance, that'll lift his head up, they would probably agree to that. So, and I think we discussed that already too, but I'm just saying, I don't think that's an issue because at the end of the day, they want to see, you just heard all these, myriad of executive directors out there saying what a great job they're doing for them and working with them. So I'm going to go with that.

Would I need to make that into a motion? Because you're going to have to come back before we can spend any money and figure out where the money's going to come from. So I would make a motion for staff recommendation. However, I would include the ad hoc in the discussions and set up a meeting with HLA in the ad hoc. and then to return to this board once these items are figured out to move forward.

I would second the motion. And who's on the ad hoc?

Myself and Mike Wilson.

There you go. Thank you.

Maybe that's not right. It might be you, Steve.

My memory's a little fuzzy on it as well.

Yes. Sorry the ad hoc is Supervisor Madrone and Supervisor Bushnell.

So the other one with chambers was Mike and I. That's why I had that mixed up. So you and I.

Well now I really second the motion.

All right, and I heard an idea bounced around about splitting the cost. I think.

I would leave that up to the ad hoc to discuss it with the lodging lines, because they're gonna agree. I don't think it's something we need to vote on up here. I think they can work it out amongst themselves.

Sure, it'd have to be a board decision for them, but I also want to make sure that it serves the interests of what the staff are asking for. There's no shame in saying we don't have this particular expertise and so we're trying to get a consultant that works for us as a party in this. It's not adversarial to say that, that we might want that expertise on our team. I would say it's up to you all to figure out what the right approach is there and what we may request from our member agency.

I appreciate that.

So it sounds like we're leaving that to staff discretion. All right. All right. Any further comment on the motion? Yes, Steve.

I just would like to say that, yes, it would be the county hiring, but us includes the HLA, as was mentioned by a couple of the speakers, that when we all work together to figure out how to make this the best it possibly can be, then we succeed. And I think that's what you meant as well.

Thank you. And to the comment that Supervisor Wilson made beforehand, so I've been in my little Brown Act silo with him on this one. So I did get a chance to hear just a little bit more about what he was looking for. And my understanding of that was that he was looking for a ballot measure that should negotiations not be aligned with sort of what we were hoping they would be, that it would be a replacement of that 2%. However, I have to admit that despite having talked with him about it, I don't understand the mechanisms that he's asking for exactly. So I think it would make more sense for him to do what he said which was write a memo to staff and bring that if he should wish to a subsequent meeting. I think that I'm gonna just leave that ball in his court unless there's another member of the board who would like to follow up with that line of discussion. I don't, yeah, he wouldn't have because of the Brown Act. So he only talked to me about it. So I don't feel that I'm totally equipped to advance his idea any further than that, but he can do that. All right, we have a motion and a second. Can we please get a roll call vote?

Yes. Supervisor Madrone?

Yes.

Supervisor Bone? Yeah. Supervisor Arroyo? Yes. Supervisor Bushnell? Yes. Chair Wilson is absent. Motion carries 4-0. All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.

I look forward to working with you. Awesome. All right. Great. We will move to our next item. Give me just a minute to get recombobulated here. We have our annual reports from travel, tourism, and arts partners. And I see many of y'all in the room. Excited to see you. And who will we start with?

We will be starting with Ink People Center for the Arts and welcoming Leslie Castellano.

Any of the slides ready? Great. Hi there. Good afternoon. My name is Leslie Castellano here representing the Ink People Center for Art and Culture. And the Ink People is proud to work in partnership on this funding along as members of the Humboldt Creative Alliance along with Centro Del Pueblo and Playhouse Arts. And so you're going to get in kind of the spirit of community collaboration partnership a few of us all talking about the various initiatives that we've been working on. So the funds we receive support outdoor events, public art, cultural celebrations, performing arts and tourism throughout the county. And really our focus is on supporting a vibrant Humboldt County. And thank you to the presentation earlier. We do recognize that tourism brings money into the county, but often artists and culture keepers do not directly benefit from that opportunity, though they provide the kind of substance that tourists experience when they come to the county. And so one of our primary goals for this is making sure that those benefits reach artists and culture keepers. Those are core metrics with how we disperse the funding is making sure that the people who live here, especially those who often are involved with the gig economy and we do PRETTY SUBSTANTIAL SURVEYS WITH THE FOLKS WHO RECEIVE GRANTS AND FUNDING TO KIND OF FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEIR ECONOMIC SITUATION. SO MANY OF THOSE FOLKS ARE LIVING IN KIND OF THE MOST RURAL PLACES IN HUMBLE COUNTY AND ALSO ARE EITHER GIG WORKERS OR EXPERIENCE ECONOMIC SCARCITY OR JOB INSECURITY. AND I'M GOING TO HAND IT OVER TO MY COLLEAGUE SAGE JUAREZ WHO'S GOING TO SPEAK A LITTLE BIT MORE ABOUT INK PEOPLE PROGRAMS AND WE'RE GOING TO pass it on to Brenda Perez and Neroli Devaney to speak about their programs.

Thank you. So through the established event grant program, the Inc. People awarded 22 events which supported paid work opportunities for more than 166 artists and culture bearers. So this included festivals, performances, community celebrations, And the goal with that is to support existing events that have a strong presence. And each of the 22 were awarded an average of $2,386 to support their programming. This also included two, sorry, my slide is not looking great, but there should be a map on the right side showing you the distribution. But I can tell you that two of them are county-wide events that benefit the whole county. And we also received an increase in applications from Southern Humboldt and also an increase in events being awarded based in Southern Humboldt. Another component of this programming is professional development and collaboration. So awardees were gathered to learn about one another's events as well as share strategies, successes, and challenges. And then moving on to Lost Humboldt. The Lost Humboldt campaign encourages tourism through the lens of art, culture, and outdoor recreation. So stickers, postcards, and coasters featuring designs by 12 local artists who were compensated for licensing their work are being sent to high traffic, creative community spaces across the West Coast and beyond. Our social media and website uplift artistic activities, community events, and land features that draw in visitors, with engagements surpassing 7,000 events in the last 60 days.

Thank you.

I will pass it on to Brenda.

Hello. How's it going? This is a very happy visit for me, because I'm representing here part of the program underserved communities fund. I don't know if we have slides for that, but I want to leave it here.

I think we can just pause for a moment. I think you have them, right? Is there another? It's the second one in the list, apparently. You're doing great, Kaylee.

Thank you. Well, thank you so much. I'm going to highlight three important points. The first of them is the active land acknowledgement that we are doing through this fund. For this round, we had strengthened relationships with the Weyart-Jurok Hupa tribes, so they receive part of this fund to empower youth programming, aquatic activities, and also cultural activities that are inherited to their own programming. Agencies that are emerging as well, such as the collective dances that represent either Mexica's practices from the south of the continent or other I'm gonna show you here the distribution of funds. These are the three main pillars strengthening with the land acknowledgements. Then we have the emerging groups, as I noticed, the BIPOC DULAS event that intertwined health cultural practices from DULAS around the globe. either doulas from Palestine, Yemen, or Mexico City are represented into this collective. The Folkloricos and Aztec Fest are other groups. We have six groups in the county. They are being flourishing into a great practice. Some other funding was disbursed to well-established organizations and events. We're going to mention Happy Black Humboldt as an example, as well as the Dia de Muertos that is becoming a county-wide attraction for tourists in the county. we are acknowledging that these well-established organizations are inviting more and more visitors here and are more and more presence into the tribal activities. So this is a way to acknowledging this land, but also emerging organizations. So I wanna thank you so much for doing these conversations about how this could improve our mental health is going on, conversations about how this improve our physical and spiritual health is going on. So here I'm gonna pass to Neroli.

Hi, everyone. I'm Naralee, and I am here from Playhouse Arts. Thank you guys for the funds. We were able to do a lot of really important work, and so I'm gonna go over some of the events that we helped make possible with Playhouse Arts, starting with the Salmon Festival. So we helped make these, our installation for the Salmon Festival with the Yurok Tribal Court. It celebrated the undamming of the Klamath, and the art installations were also part of the All Species Parade, which happened at the North Country Fair in Arcata. The Zero to Fierce Festival, we celebrated our 10th year this year. It brought more than 30 performances, both local and out of town. We had a partnership for the first time this year with the Hollywood Fringe Festival, where folks could apply for the Zero to Fierce Award, and if they won, they were brought to the Zero to Fierce Festival. We had over 60 folks apply to that with the award being just that they got to come here and be a part of the festival. And as you can see, we were looking at website traffic during the Zero to Fierce Festival. We had nearly 5,000 unique visitors to the page, and the majority of those visitors were from Central and Southern California. We believe that the Hollywood Fringe Partnership was a big part of that this year. Additionally, we have the Kichari Nair Corporation promoting wellness and cultural values through shadow puppets. We had the Humboldt Juggling Festival, which I know brought a lot of folks from the university involved and all sorts of different circus juggling associated type things. We helped with the Kinetic Labs relocation and cleanup. They moved into a new space, and that was a big undertaking. And then Recycled Youth, which is the only free performing arts expressive program for teens in southern Humboldt. We helped them put on some productions in their workshops. So that's what Playhouse Arts was doing with this. Thank you.

And I'll just close to say that we appreciate the opportunity and we continue to be dedicated to really seeding these funds throughout the community and benefiting as many people as possible. And really making Humboldt County the place that we all, and supporting the ongoingness of Humboldt County being the place that we all love to live and play and invite our friends to come visit to. And when people come to visit a place, one of the things they look at is, are the people here happy, are there things happening, and that's why they plan those return visits, why they extend their trips, is because they want to participate in more of what's going on. So any of us are happy to answer questions, and we know you have other presentations to hear as well.

Great, Supervisor Bone, go ahead.

Leslie, I've got a quick, and you guys sell art somewhere in there, right?

We do what?

You sell the art too, right?

We sell art. Many of the festivals have vendors, not entirely. For instance, the Kinetic Sculpture Race, not much for sale. They do sell merch.

But like the ink people, you have a gallery, don't you? We do.

That's not funded through this opportunity. We're not funding the ink people's gallery through the county. Okay.

Yeah, I just want to be clear. Fully aware.

No, it's a fair question.

I was just wondering, to give people perspective, what kind of tax dollars does the arts generate? I mean, I get people in the beds and everything else, but I mean, you see these galleries. I mean, I was just wondering what kind of generation they do. Sure.

I mean, you know, none of these funds did support galleries. So, you know, we can have a more nuanced conversation about that. But generally speaking, the galleries around here are all heavily subsidized and few of them, you know, you know, I wouldn't say the galleries themselves are huge economic drivers. They do support artists selling work. Often the visibility that comes from galleries helps artists in their careers and then they sell more work outside of that space. For instance, when someone sells work at the Morris Graves Museum, they may sell some work there, but it becomes part of elevating their work as artists and a more national space.

Thank you.

I think that's a really interesting question, and I would love to know more about it. I feel like it's not necessarily pertaining to this, but I think the economic impacts of the arts, I had thought about the sustainability of artists living in a community and being able to just meet their basic needs by producing art, but not really the sales tax impact. So maybe that's something we can... learn more about in the future.

For sure, there's, we would definitely be, you know, there's a number of us in the art and culture sector here who would be more than happy to come back and give a larger presentation around the economic impact of the arts and culture sector.

Great, thank you. All right, Supervisor Madrone or Supervisor Bushnell, do you have any questions? Or comments, I guess?

Just thank you for the report and the information in the packet.

Sorry to make you keep jumping back up here, but can I ask you a quick question? So these are small grants, $1,500 to $5,000. A lot of times, I'm in spaces where people are asking for more money than that. Can you say anything about the grant amount? Sure.

I will say that artists and culture keepers maybe are too scrappy for their own good sometimes and are There's so many dedicated people to this community who offer numerous volunteer hours. Again, the Kinetic Sculpture Race is a great example of, you know, a volunteer-run organization of people who you couldn't monetize the amount. You know, I mean, it would be an interesting study. You know, that being said, you know, we do, those of us here, we're in... significant communication with the different organizations that we are supporting. And they're all in agreement that they would rather the money go to more people. They really, people really understand that they want to see the whole sector supported as well as, you know, both geographically and culturally. And so, you know, we do outreach around the grant making and kind of solicit responses. And people would love to receive more money because they could make a bigger impact. But, you know, they're also understanding of wanting to support the community as a whole.

Thank you, yeah, that's great to hear. Okay, I think we're, process-wise, we're gonna go through all of our presentations and then take public comment, given that these are all annual reports under one item. So let's move to our next partner. Who do we have?

That would be Redwood Region Entertainment and Education Liaisons, more commonly known as the Humboldt Del Norte Film Commission, with Cassandra Heseltine.

All right, I'm Cassandra Heseltine. I'm the film commissioner for Humboldt and Del Norte counties. And I believe you have a presentation. So this has been quite the year for us as this is our 15 year anniversary being a nonprofit as well as my actual anniversary of being the executive director of the Film Commission. And with that came a whole bunch of other great things that happened. One battle did come out in October and then in March went on to win six Oscars including Best Picture, which we're really excited about. And I hear from Murphy's Market that They still have people keep looking for the payphone, which is not there. It's a water dispenser. So that's pretty amazing. And out-of-town people looking for the payphone, so that's pretty amazing. And that movie alone has brought us a lot of attention within the industry, as well as with film tourism. One of the things it did do also is it It helped Assembly Member Rogers recognize us as somebody who makes an impact, and so we did receive Nonprofit of the Year, as you probably already know, for California for District 2. Then we are now, we're a finalist for the Global Productions in Cannes, and now we are a finalist for the Location Managers Guild International, for most outstanding film commissioner internationally. So we're up against London, Albuquerque, New Jersey, places like that, and we'll find out in August whether we win for that. And that particular nomination came from the location manager of One Battle, and that is all being judged by location managers around the world. So we're pretty excited about that. The kind of marketing that does alone is tremendous. And currently, as you might recall, we're part of Film Liaisons of California statewide. That is over 40 film commissioners throughout California. And I was this last fiscal year vice president. I'm now, as of July 1st, president for the second time. I believe I'm the only film commissioner to be president twice in California. And this is like free marketing for us. We end up being very front and center of this organization. Some of the things we do is help with the film tax incentive program. There was one that did just pass last July. And we were a big part of that because there was three votes that mattered and one of them was our senator. And so I had everyone from Netflix to the Director's Guild of America calling us. And when that did get passed, I was sent to go down and to the governor's press conference. I think it was the only film commissioner out of the area that they brought down for that. Then we also throw the California on Locations Award. This last location award show, I gave out the location manager and team of the year. for studio feature film, and this is in front of 800 location professionals, so again, it's free marketing every time we do anything like this, so that I got to go out there with the location manager of Top Gun 2 and give out these awards, and our name, Humboldt, has splashed across the stage, as you can see. We had a lot of press this year as well, out of the area press, New York Times, SF Gate, the location magazine Compass, which is international, and then we did help also with Eureka, asked us for help with Good Morning America. So those are just some of the highlights of the press that we had. Most of those were on the one battle after another coming out, and so a lot of touring, like the New York Times piece was taking a tour through California and going to all the film sites. And when we did get to go to Cannes for the award show, we also ended up on a panel. There was two different California days that we got to do. One was film or US, and then one was just straight California day. And so I ended up on a panel at the award show being able to promote Humboldt County and that we were able to have a studio feature film of that big of a studio feature film. Michael Glazer, who's the location manager, he has brought back a couple different films, and he has told me himself, I never go back to the same place twice, and when I do, I don't go back this soon. But him and one of the producers already have come back scouting, and we're trying to bring back two different projects this year. Chris Baugh, who had brought a huge project that ended up getting shelved during the pandemic, also tried to bring Jumanji 4 in January. We were approved. All our entities here were gonna approve it, but unfortunately the studio did not end up coming here with the project, but he is on a mission and he only does huge movies. So these are really good testimonies to have both of these location managers who do huge work, which means big crew, a lot of money that would come into the area from out of the area. You might recall last year was the slowdown in California. I found when I went to France actually and talked to a lot of international film commissions, it was a slowdown worldwide. There was a whole bunch of parts that led up to that. Some of it was the writer strikes, some of it was AI, and some of it is all the streaming platforms. Now it seems like productions are picking up regardless also of incentive packages, though California now has their better incentive package. So you can see last year we did about $170,000 total in Hubbell County. We're up to 761 direct spending and that's with a plus symbol, which means I haven't gotten in all my numbers. And when you add the multiplier, it's more like 2.2 million throughout the year for the 13 shoots and the eight scouting trips that came into the area. So other ways that we receive money is film tourism. These ones are a little harder for us to be able to figure out how much money was spent during that timeframe. You can see the impact. I started adding these to the slides now so that you can see the impact of how it helps drive year round film tourism. This takes you to multiple communities. It does go outside of city limits so you are in different parts of an incorporated county, and it's preserving our film history and locations. So there's a lot, and community pride in that we've had all these different movies and productions that have filmed in our area. The map now has either been viewed, printed, or downloaded over 400,000 times. I know that I've had everybody from like you know chris with best westerns say that people have stayed extra days and the parks have also said that that's their number one uh brochure that's that's been even stolen off their desk which i'm sure i've told you that story before And I know Supervisor Wilson or Chair Wilson couldn't be here in person, but he is in my slide, and yes, he did approve this. He did stop by the museum. We do have the Redwood Coast Museum of Cinema, which also now is starting to bring in dollars on our second year, completion of our second year, the impact, again, preserving our Filmon cultural heritage. It provides educational components. It connects youth with economic development and cultural tourism. strengths to your community pride all the different things there on the impact but some of the important uh facts here are that our attendees have doubled uh in the past two years so our first year was around two uh three hundred three thousand and now we've gone over five thousand i think we're at five thousand five hundred at the end of june um and then our spending went up eight thousand dollars as far as the donation spending including the sales from all our forest moon festival garb. The second year really trended well. We did double than what we had done, so we're really excited and we're actually expanding the exhibit now, so it will have two. We did have a smaller one, which the ink people actually did help fund. Forgive me for not putting the logo on there. And now we'll actually be expanding to have our permanent installation for the Forest Moon Festival, which celebrates that we have the film sites for Endor, and then a smaller one, which will be the rotating one. We've done tours for the junior highs and high schools, OLLI Extended Education, Humboldt Senior Resource Center, the Scouts, Both Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, college classes. So we've done a lot of tours. I think we did about 17 tours this last year. And those are the states and countries that have come in to our museum from out of town guests. And the Forest Moon Festival also did extremely well this year. This was our fourth year. Again, there's all kinds of impacts there that I'll let you read about. This year was the year that we really noticed a lot of out of town guests besides our costumers and their handlers and any kind of like local just surrounding. We had people from, a couple from Wisconsin, actually that couple that's in both those photos, flew from Wisconsin just to come to the Forest Moon Festival. We had a father and son from Rhode Island that came for the week, and they came on a Tuesday to visit the museum, but the festival didn't start till Thursday, and they said they were just in town for that. Same with Canada, Washington, the state of Washington. We had three people from Seattle, We had people from Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Arizona. We did a lot of targeting of straight-through flights, and so we had a lot of those come in town, so that was pretty amazing. The LA, Seattle, Arizona. We had people in Utah. So it really worked this year, and a lot of that is attributed to our out-of-area marketing that we did, including with Rebel Force Radio, the number one Star Wars podcast, as well as NBC LA, who picked up the story. So there was a lot of traffic this year that came into town just for the festival. So that was pretty exciting. And in regards to that, Measure J, forgive me also for not putting that on here, Measure J and HLA did help fund a lot of the Forest Moon Festival. Eureka did do some cell phone data, and they found that the Forest Moon Festival, or the Forest Fest that we did at the zoo, 15% of that was out-of-towners. And if you did some generic numbers, some conservative numbers, that would be about $125,000 that those visitors spent in our area. And if you add the multiplier, that's $175,000. If you add some dollars in there for all those that locals that went out of the area, that could be anywhere from another 100 to 140,000. So we're looking at around 300,000 in that weekend that happened, that came from with either our locals or our out of towners that happened with that. And we spent less than a third of that to create the festival. I have some amazing news for next year that I can't tell you yet, but it's really exciting. And so I can't wait to tell you. Like, I want to blab so bad, but I can't. But it'll be year five, and I'm really excited about that. It'll coincide with Star Wars' 50th anniversary, so it's a pretty big deal. and i wanted to also say that we had um for for the event sales here some also numbers showing you some of our trends of that it is doing better you know each year um for our event sales in 2024 we didn't have any in 2025 the orange you could see some of the sales that we did there and then in 2026 you could see it more than doubled and same for the merch well the merch kind of did about the same in 24 and 25, but it doubled in 26. So we are trying to create other ways of bringing in the dollars besides our sponsors and besides the funding that you give us. The three months leading up to the Forest Moon Festival, we had 7,000 organic searches and 3,600 direct searches on our website. We had over 200,000 views online. on our Instagram and 96,000 views, unique views. And our increase in our followers went up over 700 times in that three months leading up to it. And you can see the Facebook numbers did very similar in that regard, over 700,000 views just for our Facebook posts. And I think a lot of it had to do with the talent that we brought up this year. We did bring back Kyle, who's a director, and Kevin, who played over 20 Ewoks. But we also had a local talent here who was amazing. And then we brought in Matt, who actually works for Lucasfilm. And he's written over 10 of the Star Wars animated shows. And so that was actually a big connection that we made because it's the first time they sent an employee. And they didn't even charge us for that. We actually can't pay an employee to come. So that was... pretty exciting just show you a little bit of our work plan I mean it's super rude and simple you know we do way more than this but just kind of shows you quarterly like where our focuses are on so you can read that that's in the report that we gave you and last but not least I'm excited to announce that we have Amy Lemish on our board of directors she was previously the California film commissioner, and she is now retired from that and is the advisor to Netflix and Film LA. So she's an amazing advisor. I worked with her back when I was president of Flix the first time, and she knows the Hollywood world. So it's pretty amazing to have her on our board of directors here in Humboldt. That's it that I wanted to share with you. I am excited that next week we do have a reporter coming into town. SF Gate is gonna come and do a little story, so we've got some of that. Some other things down the pipe that are gonna be pretty exciting.

Any? Awesome, thank you so much. Any questions or comments for Cassandra? Let's start over here.

Just thank you for your report and continued work. And congratulations. I know it was exciting for you with the nomination. Thank you. Appreciate that.

You're president again. Wow. You just love to promote film in Humboldt and Del Norte. And statewide, of course. But, you know. Supervisor Maduro?

You know, we were trying to bring the Star Trek kids to the thing. We couldn't work it out in time, but that would have been really funny. We were trying to bring them to the panel at the park, and that would have been amazing. Yeah, maybe next year.

Supervisor Madrone, or I mean Bone, do you have anything? Sorry. I'm a Trekkie, and I love Star Wars. It's fine. We don't need to fight about it. But if you ever do have a Trekkie event, I mean, I'm like, I've already got my Vulcan haircut and everything. So just let me know if we do a Trekkie Star Wars little ha-ha. I think it could be very fun.

I would like to do that next year. We tried this year, and it didn't work out. So next year, let's have a talk.

Hit me up. All right. Sounds good. Yep. You've never seen Star Trek or Star Wars. I think we've established that. Okay. Supervisor Brown needs some sci-fi education. All right. Oh, my gosh. Okay. Neither of them have. All right. So we have seven more presentations. So we will move to our next one. That was wonderful, though. Thank you. So Southern Humble Business and Visitors Bureau, please come on up.

Hello, good afternoon Chair and Supervisors. My name is Laura Lassiter with the Southern Humboldt Business and Visitor Bureau and I will do my best to keep this in the five minute allotted time. Over the past year, our digital reach continued to expand. Across our five active social media platforms, we maintain a combined audience of nearly 8,500 followers. The Visit Southern Humboldt website generated more than 170,000 visits and reached nearly 7,800 unique visitors throughout California and across the country. Our YouTube channel generated more than 58,000 views and nearly 1,000 hours of watch time. Together, our website, social media, and videos generated more than 237 annual digital engagement touchpoints, creating a significant communications network for Southern Humboldt. Beyond destination marketing, we help tell Southern Humboldt's story through business sense columns, published community articles, photography, media, storytelling, and event coverage. We showcase businesses, community initiatives, events, and projects that are shaping our region. This year we covered the Wildland Readiness Training Drill, the Summer Arts Music Festival, the Garberville Rodeo, participated in Department of Cannabis Control meetings, and spoke with journalism students at Cal Poly Humboldt, helping translate important conversations around tourism, stewardship, and economic development for both residents and visitors. One of our most meaningful accomplishments this year has been our partnership with the new Chautauqua Kitchen and Market. Chautauqua Kitchen and Market has become an extension of our mission and successful visitor engagement platform. Over the past year, we have assisted more than 1800 visitors through this downtown Garberville location. Visitors and residents can watch SHBVB produce hospitality videos, access visitor information, community announcements, and educational materials while experiencing an authentic story of Southern Humboldt. A unique part of that experience is how we intentionally weave our Meet the Farmer and Humboldt Cannabis brand awareness videos alongside our hospitality content featuring state parks, rivers, arts, recreation communities, and local businesses. Rather than presenting cannabis as a separate attraction, we integrate it into the broader visitor experience as an authentic part of the Southern Humboldt's history, culture, economy, and a sense of place. We hosted our second annual Sohum Classic Car Show and Cruise, bringing more than 60 vehicles and over 200 participants and spectators in downtown Garberville. The event supported local businesses, created fundraising opportunities for community organizations, highlighting Sohum health and strengthening community pride. SHBVB board member opened their Shelter Cove home for Southern Humboldt Hospice Garden Tour, welcoming more than 100 guests while helping raise funds to support essential hospice service in our community. The SHBVB serves as ambassadors and welcome media, engaging legislators, facilitating educational farm tours, and representing Southern Humboldt in a regional and statewide conversations. We also facilitate community conversations by bringing regional leaders and organizations to Southern Humboldt, including Humboldt Made, to highlight local products, strengthen partnerships, and increase awareness of our region's business and brands. This year we represented Southern Humboldt at regional and statewide conferences, including the California Jobs First Recreation and Tourism Symposium, Cal Travel Tourism Advocacy Day, the CalMatters Idea Festival, the Redwood Region Rise Conference, and the Redwood Region Economic Summit, while also serving on regional panels through Redwood Region Rise and Leadership Redwood Coast. We support and advocate for collaborative initiatives, including AB 518. Our work also takes us throughout Humboldt County. We regularly travel to Eureka and beyond to collaborate with partners, including the Director of Workforce Development, the Humboldt County Tourism Advisory Council, the Outdoor Summit, and numerous countywide committees and initiatives. These relationships help ensure Southern Humboldt's priorities are represented in countywide conversations and regional planning. In addition, we continue to work with legislators and community partners on the Garberville Complete Streets Project and the proposed Southern Humboldt Business Improvement District, both focused on strengthening long-term economic vitality. Our work has increasingly embraced destination stewardship and community resilience. In an unincorporated rural community, welcoming visitors also means helping ensure our communities are informed, connected, and prepared. SHBVB board members also serve in leadership roles with organizations dedicated to land stewardship, watershed restoration, wildlife resilience, emergency preparedness, community well-being, including Humboldt COAD, the White Thorn Fire Protection District, the White Thorn Fire Safe Council, Sanctuary Forest, and CERT. Tourism is about more than attracting visitors. It is about strengthening our communities through economic opportunity, infrastructure, stewardship and a strong sense of place. Thank you for your partnership and support.

Great, thank you Laura. Are there any questions or comments? Go ahead, Professor Bischel.

I think you're just probably going around the horn so I'll just say thank you for the report and I am happy always to coordinate with you and the chamber concerning around things in Southern Humboldt as well as it's really great to update the board.

Great, thank you. That's a lot that you packed into that short time. I didn't realize everyone had been given five minutes, sorry. And Supervisor Madron, do you have anything else? Just thank you. Okay, and Supervisor Bone? Okay, and next time we'll go the other way just for fun. All right, thank you so much. Really appreciate the update. A lot of coordination involved. All right, yes, yes. Okay, let's do a five, I don't, that's a great idea. Let's do a five minute bathroom break and we will come back at 2.07. All right, and we do have a couple 230 little changes or pauses that we'll need to make, and we will navigate those. All right, so we will go ahead with our presentation from the ORIC Chamber.

Good afternoon, Supervisors. Thank you for your time. I'm Justin Legge, here representing the ORIC Chamber of Commerce today. Maybe my slideshow didn't come through. That is a-okay. Ah, wonderful. Oreck is one of our gems here in Humboldt County, y'all. Before I get into the activities and how great of a return on investment I feel the Oreck Chamber of Commerce provides for the county, I want to mention a quick little fact about Redwood National Park and its significance for our community. A lot of folks are unaware that this was actually America's first ever proposed national park in 1852. That's 20 years before the establishment of Yellowstone National Park. This has been a strong public desire for the entire nation, again, since 1852. So it's an amazing asset that we have. I won't go into more about how important National Park Gateway communities are and significant they are across America. And again, Redwood National Park being one of the top tier national parks in our entire country. The Oreck Chamber of Commerce has been providing tourism promotion, visitor services, and direct visitor contact at our primary gateway, Redwood National and State Parks, since the 1970s. The Oreck Chamber of Commerce has an extremely special relationship with the National Park Service and the Thomas Keckel Visitor Center here, right outside of Oreck, which is we actually have a desk in the visitor center. The reason this is so significant is if you were unaware of certain national park guidelines, their staff, their park rangers are not allowed to specifically suggest nor promote any type of business in the community. if that is not a permitted concessionaire within the park that means any tourists the thousands and thousands and thousands of tourists going through the thomas kutchell visitor center every single day during the peak season here without the auric chamber of commerce offering that business information the federal employees would actually barred from giving any of that information As mentioned in some other presentations, tourism visitation only seems to be significantly increasing, and according to the Park Service data, 2026, they saw roughly an 11% increase. Speaking with their employees and staff, it is recognized that this is underreported. They have significant challenges actually fully capturing the amount of visitation into the parks here. Even underreported though, again, this data is from the National Park Service, Redwood National Park. Visitor spending generated $30.9 million locally, supporting 406 jobs. The amount that the Oreck Chamber of Commerce is able to get done on such a small budget, we are very respectful and understanding in our rural county here how tight budgets are. So we are by no means complaining. We are just trying to show off a bit that with the small investment, there is a significant return on that investment in visitor spending. The funding that the OREC Chamber of Commerce does receive, we do our best to keep those dollars spent locally, local staff, local employees. When we make purchases, such as you see our visit OREC map to encourage visitor spending in our community, we use local artists, local printers. We do our best to keep this funding within the community. Y'all might be aware that OREC is a beautiful place it's one of the gems of our county it is paradise to me but we don't have a lot of things for visitors ourselves in our community that is again why we feel the auric chamber provides such a great return on investment we have now three places you can stop to eat in Oreck, the Snack Shack, Lady Bird Grove Garden, as well as Mojo's Pizza, all of which are amazing local businesses. And we have a little coffee stop now, which is brand spanking new. that is still very little to offer to our visitors. So most of the information we're giving to these guests is Trinidad, Eureka, McKinleyville, Arcata. We are not trying to force them to stay in Oreck. We are trying to encourage them to slow down and spend more money in Humboldt County. I wanna say that a little bit differently. We're not trying to necessarily get tons more visitors, we already have these visitors. We're doing our best to encourage them to slow down and spend their dollars with local businesses. I appreciate your time once again. We appreciate the county's continued partnership and investment in tourism promotion and look forward to continuing our work to support visitors, local businesses, and the overall economic vitality of Humboldt County.

Awesome. Thank you so much. And will you remind us of your name?

Justin Legg.

Justin. OK, great. Awesome. All right. Supervisor Bell, do you have anything?

I miss Donna, but you did a good job.

Donna wishes she could be here. She is with her husband, Joe, in the hospital.

Well, thank you, Justin, for being here today. OREC is really the gem in the rough, and with the soon completion of its sewage treatment plan, that is gonna open up, as you well know, and Donna, a lot of opportunity and or being a gateway to the National Park. Also, the restoration work going around going on down there with the ranchers, the community, the tribes up there at Oral at the foot of Bald Hills Road. Tremendous project that may very well be the place where the moved visitor center ends up at because the existing one's in the tsunami zone. So there's plans on that. Also pulling back 1,000 feet or more of the levees on either side of Redwood Creek to restore the estuary and bring back the fisheries. People always ask me, when is that Prairie Creek fish hatchery coming back? And I point out to them that what we're doing with the restoration at the mouth of the river is gonna provide natural habitat for young fish to survive and have a chance to hang out for a year and get big before they head to the ocean and all that. So appreciate what the chamber does there. Donna, you and the team are small but mighty, frankly, and really glad to have your presentation today. Thank you.

Thank you.

I concur. I really appreciate the amplification of local businesses and places to stay and how you're partnering with others to say, look, we've got this in Oreck, but we've also got this regional attraction and all these other things. So thank you so much for doing that. Saw the event on your website about, I know this isn't something you're organizing, but helping promote. This coming Saturday, this event where an all-terrain track chair fleet will be available for folks with mobility limitations to experience the beauty of the Redwoods. So definitely something to highlight and make sure to share. It's very cool.

Yes, thank you so much for mentioning that, Supervisor. It is known as David's chair. I'm sure a lot of people respect the challenges of getting those with limited mobility into nature and our parks. They often don't even look into it because it is so challenging. Redwood National and State Parks has had one of these wonderful devices. It has been in high demand and has been difficult to reserve. So this weekend is a wonderful opportunity for those with limited mobility. They can get one of these chairs that can go for miles and miles and miles. It is essentially, for those that are unaware, a specialized electric wheelchair with along the lines of tank treads on the side instead of normal wheels. So they are, it's an amazing organization and opportunity for folks to see some trails that they would normally be unable to visit.

That's awesome. Thank you. And if folks want to look, they can go to the org chambers website and look under local events and activities. All right.

I just want to say thank you. And hi, Justin. Nice to see you again. And we wish Donna's husband a speedy recovery. And I think Oreck is a great little place. I love going through there and the quaint of the town is just amazing. I'm glad there's three eateries there now. Thanks again.

One to three, yep. Thank you.

And a coffee cart, all right. Thank you, wonderful. All right, we will move to our next presentation and we have the Willow Creek Chamber of Commerce.

Thank you so much, and Justin, the org chamber is very lucky to have you. You did a great job, and you're awesome. I just had to say that. Well, thanks for presenting. I'm relieved to know that I don't have to race through my presentation. I did make it for five minutes, so I won't keep you. I do have a presentation on, great, awesome. All right, so we're here again, one year later. This is the 2025-2026 report. So the Willow Creek Chamber of Commerce has been developing a brand rooted in recreation, community, rural charm, and of course, Bigfoot. The funding that we've received from the unincorporated TOT tax revenue has been spent in the following ways. The majority of it has been spent with, it's all contract services, for Zena Bardellis, who is our community programs engagement and marketing coordinator. You can see that she has, we've spent the lion's share on her services. Zena has been integral into the consistent presence we have maintained on social media, newsletters, website updates, and our upcoming new website, explorewillowcreek.com, and an accompanying map and brochure. Also, our collaboration with the Willow Creek China Flat Museum has also been a crucial step in developing a welcoming visitor center and tourist experience. We spent a little over $6,000 in our contributions to the museum, and that is in exchange for a portion of the gift shop for our Bigfoot Capital of the World merchandise, as well as other brochures and materials that are for all of Humboldt County. So we have everybody represented in our visitor center. We also paid a little over $2,400 for our accounting and bookkeeping services. So you can see that's where it all got used up and we also invested an extra $2,799 to cover those expenses. So what are we seeing with our brand building? So River Fun in the Mountain Sun, that's been Willow Creek's slogan for a long time, but I will say that Willow Creek is about a lot more, when it comes to recreation, Willow Creek is about a lot more than just the river. We're actively partnering with different types of recreation businesses. We're showcasing outdoor photography and river recreation, and we're also doing a lot of promotion of hiking, packing, rafting, and kayaking, fishing, rock climbing, skateboarding, mountain biking, and all the other local attractions. There are a few projects that have been completed recently, which are really expanding our ability to reach out to people outside of the area. I regularly hear about people making the trip out to Willow Creek just for the skate park. And at Bigfoot Days this year, it was the grand unveiling of the new bike track. And let me tell you, it is awesome. So if you haven't checked it out, it's well worth it. The rest of the park will be renovated this year and next spring, and then we will have a pickleball court, tennis court, and full NBA-sized basketball court, amongst other upgrades to the park in general. Willow Creek is also known as the Bigfoot capital of the world. So we are really thrilled that we have the official visitor center established at the museum. The museum has also done a lot in partnership with the chamber to improve things there. So there was just a brand new installation of the native room and we partnered with the local tribes, Sanongwe and Hoopa, to have a special display and we're gonna be rotating that out and hope to work with other tribes and people in the region. We have surpassed our goals already of the number of people that have come into the museum. There is now paid staff. The museum has hired two people to run the gift shop, and they are actually doing the little clicker thing to count heads, and we are already over 6,000 visitors just in the first two months, which is really, really exciting for all of us. We are actively trying to market Willow Creek as an international Bigfoot destination. We get emails from people all over the world regularly. So the other part of our brand that we're leaning into is this come find your people, come find your fun, search for Bigfoot, find Willow Creek. Because we just really have a lot more to offer than just Bigfoot. We really are building community. Not that it really needs a lot of help being built. The community is really resilient and really Tighten it. Um, so we are working on, of course we do Bigfoot days, which was a huge success this year, but we are also working on other signature events. So we are starting an annual music festival. We had our first one this year. We're still continuing our downtown mixer series and where we're going to be working on some more signature events relating to Bigfoot with the museum. We are, um, Partnering with, oh yeah, so yeah, partnering with local businesses and other organizations as well. So that is what we're doing with the museum, Studio 299, we're working with the community services district, all the different mountain biking associations and the rafting businesses to try to come up with more events that could bring people to the area. We're also focusing on community driven experiences which strengthen Willow Creek's identity. All right, so the results we're getting, we have seen a really big increase in followership on our social media and our newsletter. You can see we're just increased 92% on our followers, 109% in engagement, and over a million views, actually, on our social media. Those are the meta statistics. And the website actually has increased, and we expect that to increase even more once we branch out and launch explorewillowcreek.com, which will be much more tourism-focused, and we will be focusing on Willow Creek as the gateway to the Redwoods. So it's just somewhere else to visit while you're visiting Humboldt County. The Willow Creek Chamber of Commerce has been able to operate on a small budget solely due to the volunteers who donate their time and resources to the organization. Our membership dues bring in approximately $3,000 annually due to a less than robust business climate and the decline of the cannabis industry, obviously. The chamber also generates a modest amount of revenue from the Bigfoot Capital of the World merchandise. So last year we grossed about $7,000. These sources of revenue help us close the gap in funding versus expenditures, but are not enough to operate a thriving organization with dedicated paid staff, hence the volunteers. However, the volunteers at the Willow Creek Chamber are resilient and are committed to continuing the work in order to highlight our region as a gem within Humboldt County, outside of the Fog Belt, which offers a variety of experiences to visitors of all ages. This is what we are working on. There are other things coming down. I don't have time to go into all of it, but one of the things I'm really excited about is the dark sky certification. I have a campground, and the thing that people talk about is the stars, and so I feel really excited to add that to the list. It'll take a little bit of work. We're also really trying to search for grants, and we keep applying for a beautification project, which will install seven murals around town, and we'll try to fundraise for that either way, whether we obtain those grants or not. So there's a lot more going on. I don't have time to get into it. So in closing, the Willow Creek Chamber of Commerce really looks forward to true collaboration within the county and all of the regions and will continue to focus on tourism marketing as a main focus of the organization. Willow Creek has many tourism assets which contribute to the overall appeal of Humboldt County and with the county's help, we can further develop a cohesive brand that will draw visitors to enjoy the variety of experiences that Humboldt County has to offer. Thank you guys.

Thank you. All right. Rex, anything?

Well, great love for Willow Creek. Used to have a place in Bluff Creek before the 64 flood. Oh, man. It had two grocery stores.

Crazy.

Great friend with Billy Pearson. Anyway, Pritch delivered groceries up there for about seven years. Wow. I have a pretty good relationship out of Willow Creek, and what's been going on, and I mean, the downtown corridor, the upgrades, and everybody donated to that, and I really like that they followed out a couple of the businesses out, followed, 96 followed it, you know, so it's looking good.

And we've got broadband coming, thanks to the Hoopa Public Utility District.

You got broadband coming, so thanks. That's a good thing, too. So anyway, good stuff.

Thanks.

Yeah, thank you. And I know you and so many people do a lot of volunteering to help make all this happen. So you take that money and you really use it in a big way to leverage. Yeah, like Supervisor Bone said, that corridor project from 20 years ago, I think that's about 2025.

Yeah.

It's just been amazing. You know, when you stop in downtown Willow Creek now, it's shady, it's cool compared to out in the sun.

Yeah.

And it really adds a lot of ambiance to that downtown area to want to stop. go to the cafe or whatever it might be, but really applaud you for all the hard work you're doing. I know some of your board members and your board have been really active at taking Veterans Park and making it all it can be for the children, the youth, with the bike park, the BMX track, all the things going on.

Thank you, Riley Morrison.

Yeah, thank you, Riley Morrison, no kidding, and others. So it's just neat to see, you know, the change, the youth in Willow Creek getting involved and rolling up their sleeves and getting involved and bringing in projects and doing things. So kudos to you for all your hard work. Thank you.

Thanks. We're going to keep at it.

Yeah. Yeah. DreamQuest is amazing as well.

Oh, it's amazing. There's honestly too much to even get into. Yeah. So exciting. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you.

The skate park and bike park are so cool. Oh my gosh. What a big draw.

And so we're doing a skate camp CSD. I'm also on the board for the CSD. So there's also a skate camp that's been going on. It's been full. So that's been something that I'm really excited about. And we hope to offer more sports camps of different varieties as these elements of the park are finished.

It's really cool to see small communities like yours really emphasizing, leaning into what you have to offer, and that's a thread I've seen through all of these presentations. It's so cool. Not to brag, but I personally know Sassy Sasquatch who won the Bigfoot contest this year. Oh, yeah.

So very cool. The crowd spoke. It was very clear that she was the winner.

All right, Michelle.

Thank you for your presentation and all the hard work you do. Thanks, Michelle. It's 89 degrees today in Willow Creek, according to your...

It's pretty nice out there, but I will say we were very happy to have it in the mid-70s for Bigfoot days.

I bet.

Nice website as well. Oh, thank you. And the next one will be way better. Thank you. Oh, I know. They wouldn't have lasted.

Thank you. All right, we are going to move to the Southern Humboldt Chamber of Commerce.

Hi, good afternoon. I'm Yvonne Hendricks, I'm the Executive Director for the Southern Humboldt Chamber of Commerce and we do have a presentation So we believe in connecting communities, supporting businesses, and inspiring travel. For over 80 years, the Chamber has served as a trusted resource advocate and connector for Southern Humboldt. For decades, our visitor center has been a cornerstone of that mission, welcoming travelers, sharing information, supporting local businesses, and connecting people to the communities and experiences that makes Humboldt County special. So at a glance, this past year, we assisted more than 5,600 visitors through in-person visits, phone calls, and emails, while our marketing efforts reached more than 4.5 million potential visitors. Those connections encourage visitors to stay longer, explore more, support businesses throughout Humboldt County. Oops, sorry. Oh, somehow I got... How do I get back up to the top?

Just give us a minute, we'll figure it out.