Board of Supervisors - Regular Meeting

Okay. Good morning, everybody. I will call to order the 05/05/2026 regular meeting of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. Madam clerk, please call the roll this morning.

Supervisor Lee?

Here.

Supervisor Katz? Here. Supervisor Hartman? Supervisor Labanino?

Here.

And chair Nelson? Let the record reflect that supervisor Hartman and chair Nelson are absent today.

Okay. At this time, please join us in pledging allegiance to the flag. Ready to begin. Okay. Let's, get rolling here and approve the minutes from our last meeting.

Actually, there's quite a few meetings to approve as many of you were here with us. We have to approve the minutes from the meeting of the April budget workshops, as well as the April 21 regular meeting, the April 21 special meeting, the April 23 special meeting, and the April. Lots of meetings. May I have a motion, please?

So moved. Second.

All those in favor, please say

aye. Aye.

Motion carries. Okay. Madam CEO, please, if you have a report.

Good morning, supervisors. A couple of announcements. One is recognition of one of our departments. General Services Facilities Division has been recognized by the California County's Facilities Services Association with an award of excellence in maintaining in facilities management in 2025. This is for demonstrating strong performance in customer communication, data driven operations, and internal project execution.

So congratulations to the facilities team for this recognition, and their tireless efforts in maintaining our over 400 county facilities. And next, this morning I'm pleased to share another video from the county's video series, Your County, Your Services. The videos air on channel twenty throughout the week, and are featured in our monthly county newsletter, on CSBTV's YouTube page, and across county social media channels in both English and Spanish. This latest video focuses on how the county of Santa Barbara is advancing technology to better serve our community. So let's take a look.

Welcome to Santa Barbara County. Let's explore what the county does for you. Your county, your services. For this county services video, we are walking through advancements in county technology, highlighting three recent enhancements.

In July 2023, the board approved central IT becoming its own department. And so information technology department or ITD is now our name. And one of the reasons why we created own department is to really say to the rest of the county, technology is critically important. So we need to make sure that we are meeting the citizens where they expect us to. Right? And so technology can help us do a better job of serving our communities. We picked three different areas that are pretty significant in terms of the effort we're putting in and and the impacts to our community. So the first is the modernizing the public safety radio network.

The public safety radio network is crucial to the county Of Santa Barbara. It's what allows the dispatchers, both sheriff dispatch and fire dispatch, to communicate with the fire and sheriff deputies that are in the field. It allows them to relay crucial information they need before they arrive on scene and also provide crucial information for them while they're on scene. It was time for the county to upgrade to modern technology. We're moving away from old telephone based technology to IP Ethernet technology. By putting up new towers, putting up new equipment, it's gonna allow us to be able to respond quicker,

to have a much more effective system, and so that will benefit the entire community.

Overall, it'll help save lives.

Acela is the software that we use that allows us to do permitting and planning in certain areas that we serve our constituents.

With Acela and the the rollout of Citizens Access and our online portal to submit applications, now everything is digital from our application forms to plans, submittals, but also, we have an online portal where applicants can create an account and upload all of their materials online and go through a a a permit process completely digitally.

In the last couple years, we've gone from a 95 to 99% paper submittals now to online, almost a 100%. So no more bringing in copies of plans, no more waiting in line, no more making appointments. So it's very convenient for both the applicant and for our staff. And we've saved over a thousand hours of staff time

since then.

On demand permits are great because it allows an applicant to submit an application through our system for simple small projects where they can submit and they will get an automatically issued permit and you can get it right away.

GIS has become really prevalent in a lot of different areas. GIS stands for geographic information systems. Basically what it is, it's taking maps and digitizing maps.

GIS is essentially the science of where. It allows us to connect our data to a place and time and space and make better decisions for our constituents. GIS can be used to build maps, applications, and databases that allow us to see and analyze things like roads, parcels, zoning areas, hazards, utilities, wildfire risk, flood zones, and more.

Maps are so common in so many different departments now in regards to tracking data and being able to locate things. And so we've come a long way in terms of using that software to really create a overall and better solution when it comes to GIS and mapping and everything that goes with it.

It's all information that impacts our constituents in really significant ways, whether it's a life saving scenario, things like wildfire risk, flood zones, and life or death situations. It's all really important and really vital.

We picked these three initiatives just because they have such a wide ranging impact, but we probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60 initiatives that we're working on currently right now across all the departments. And so we're making significant progress. My vision within the next two to three years is to be really a leader when it comes to technology, how we're using it within the county environment. Environment.

So a big thank you to our chief information officer, Chris Sherguin, and his whole ITD staff for their continued work advancing technology. And, of course, thank you once again to Kelsey Bettita for putting these excellent videos together. Thank you, Kelsey. And that concludes my report here.

I I just wanna add my thanks. These videos are so helpful to really explain what government's doing, and I just really appreciate the work. And I know that it takes staff time, but, also, I always learn from them. So thank you very much. Okay. Madam Clerk, are there any announcements or changes to our agenda today?

Chair Kepps and members of the board, just one quick announcement this morning regarding public participation. For information on the Board of Supervisors' methods of public participation, and instructions on how to provide public comment on items listed on today's agenda, or during general public comment, please refer to page two of the agenda. Individuals who wish to provide verbal public comment may do so via Zoom by registering in advance using the link provided on page two. Please note that Zoom is available solely for the purpose of providing verbal public comment and is not intended for viewing the meeting. Alternative viewing options are listed on page two of the agenda.

If you have any questions, please contact the clerk of the board's office at area code (805) 568-2240. Again, that number is (805) 568-2240. That concludes my announcements for today.

Oops. Thank you. Next item in business is our administrative agenda. First to my fellow board members up here, would any board members like to pull any items from the admin agenda?

A 12 for me.

Okay. A 12. I think that's it. And, madam clerk, I see we have a couple from the public. Would you mind listing them?

Yes. Chair Kapsum, members of the board. We have requests to speak from the public on administrative item number two and nineteen. And I would also like to note administrative items number seventeen, twenty seven, and 28 require four fifths votes, so I will request those to be continued to the May 12 meeting.

Okay. Great. So now I will entertain a motion to approve the balance of the administrative agenda except for a two, a 12, a 17, a 19, a 27, and a 28 for the reasons stated.

So move. Second.

Okay. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Next up is our resolutions to be presented. So that would be resolution number one. Madam clerk, please read it into the record.

Chair Caps and members of the board, administrative item number one is sponsored by supervisor Caps. It is to adopt a resolution of accommodation honoring Sabina Baraja upon her retirement from the clerk recorder assessor department after over eleven years of faithful and distinguished service to the citizens of Santa Barbara County. And joining us in person today, we have Sabina Baraja and Michael Daley. Whereas Sabina Baraja has served the county of Santa Barbara clerk recorder assessor department for over eleven years, retiring from the position of senior software engineer. And whereas prior to joining the county, Sabina gained valuable experience working at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and throughout her career, has maintained a strong passion for software development and problem solving.

And whereas shortly after joining the county, Sabina was tasked with revamping the business property statement efiling web application, taking responsibility for correcting problems, and thoroughly retesting the system to ensure its successful release in early twenty sixteen. And whereas Sabina was a key contributor to the development and continued advancement of the new assessor property system, which became her primary responsibility and one of the most significant and complex projects undertaken by the department's technology team. And whereas the development and evolution of the new APS system proved to be one of the most challenging and rewarding projects of her career, requiring close collaboration with colleagues from diverse professional backgrounds and the ability to navigate the complexities of secured property tax systems. And whereas through her dedication and collaborative spirit, Sabina helped develop tools that support staff in managing the highly complex processes associated with property assessment, contributing to the efficiency and effectiveness of the assessor's office. And whereas Sabina's commitment to excellence, problem solving, and collaboration has left a meaningful impact on the department and the colleagues who had the privilege of working alongside her.

And now, therefore, be it hereby ordered and resolved that this board of supervisors of the county of Santa Barbara does hereby acknowledge Sabina Baraja for her years of dedicated service to the citizens of Santa Barbara County and congratulates her upon her retirement, passed, and adopted today.

Good morning. Chair and members of the board, Michael Daly, Chief Deputy Assessor's Office, and on behalf of Joe Holland and our entire department, I just want to congratulate Sabina. Sabina was, I have to say, past tense now, was a huge asset to our department. Instrumental in, as you heard in the commendation, the technological developments we've done over the last decade. And one other little thing I want to point out that I always remember election nights, Sabina was instrumental in doing the election reporting, so all the reports that the results that people rely upon at eight zero two, was a lot of that was Sabina's hard work.

She made sure that that got through accurately. So, she works well under pressure. And we just, we all have really fond memories of Sabina, and we're going to miss her and congratulate her on this commendation and her retirement. So, I'll let Sabina take the floor.

Alright. Thank you to everyone. Thanks to all the colleagues, all my former colleagues who showed up today. I really appreciate that. I was fortunate that, you know, as an introvert, could just, sit at my desk and program and not have to face the taxpayers that would come into the assessor's office.

And so I would really like to you know, commend them for being able to do that. I had no idea how complicated property tax is until I started working in the assessor's office and it is really amazing that they can explain it and, you know, in such a patient way, because nobody really wants to hear why they have to pay more property tax. Am really grateful to them for that, and to the programmers that I worked with on my team, when I announced that I was retiring, they all stepped up. Know, for months, we were going over all my projects and tasks, and they were tireless. And so by the time I left, I felt like I had nothing left.

You know? I had explained everything that I could possibly explain. And, yeah, I'm just really grateful. I learned a lot working for the county, and I appreciate that opportunity very much. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And I just wanted to Sabrina, I just I wanted to just add my Sabrina, just wanted to add my thanks to you. It's just nice to be able to look somebody in the eyes like you who has such detail oriented attributes to our county. So many people like you who have made sure that our taxes get assessed, but also the work that you did to make sure that elections after elections have gone well. We're gonna be talking about that later today.

So thank you for your diligence in making sure that things were done properly. It it matters so much. Thank you. Okay. Madam clerk, administrative item number two.

Chair Kaps and members of the board, administrative item number two is sponsored by supervisor Kaps and supervisor Nelson. It is to adopt a resolution of accommodation honoring United Way of Santa Barbara County for administering the emergency rental assistance program. And joining us today from the United Way of Santa Barbara County is Steve Ortiz, Raquel Sanchez, and Rose Levy. And if you can please make your way to the podium. Whereas the emergency rental assistance program, ERAP, was established by congress in response to the unprecedented economic impacts of the COVID nineteen pandemic, providing critical financial assistance to help low income families remain safely housed.

And whereas stable housing is foundational to the health, safety, and well-being of families and was especially vital during the public health and economic crisis brought on by the pandemic. And whereas United Way of Santa Barbara County played an essential and trusted role in administering ERAP funds locally, ensuring that assistance was delivered efficiently and with compassion to those most in need. And whereas through this partnership, nearly 5,000 low income households across Santa Barbara County received direct financial assistance with an average of 10,000 per household, helping residents remain housed and avoid displacement. And whereas the success of the program reflects the power of strong community partnerships and the dedication of organizations like United Way to serving vulnerable populations with dignity and care. Now, therefore, be it hereby ordered and resolved that this board of supervisors of the county of Santa Barbara does hereby commend and thank United Way for its leadership and unwavering commitment to helping thousands of families remain safely housed and in strengthening the resilience of the Santa Barbara County community, passed and adopted today.

Let me just offer public comment on that item. This is Carlos Jimenez, and I'm with CST. So the COVID nineteen pandemic required entities of all levels of the public and private sectors to adapt to rapidly changing social and economic conditions. In this context, the US Treasury established the emergency rental assistance program, otherwise known as ERAP. ERAP allocated funding to state and local governments for financial assistance to renters.

Partnerships between local government and networks of nonprofits were tasked with managing and administering and implementing effective programming and strategies to address this. United Way stepped up and agreed to take this on, doing so responsibly, thoughtfully, and with all due diligence. Its response to the pandemic under ERAP was commendable and especially appreciated in a time of great need and represented a shining example of how partnerships operate at their best in support of our communities. Thank you.

Madam chair and members of the board, just a quick thank you for the partnership. It's kind of incredible. It's been six years ago that we first launched this program that helped so many people around Santa Barbara County. More than 4,000, 5,000 households received support, but more than 7,000 applied for support. So was really a big undertaking by many in our community and our partners, including the Family Service Agency who partnered with us. But more than 12,000 in total in those households received support through the COVID-nineteen response effort. So thank you for the partnership. Thank you for the trust. We we don't look forward to doing this again, but we're ready here to support again in time of need. So thank you for

for your partnership.

And chair caps and members of the board, if we can please get a motion to adopt a two for today. Absolutely.

Let's get a motion.

I'll make a motion to approve a two.

I'll second.

Okay. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. And thank you. We'll move on to administrative item number three.

Chair Caps and members of the board, administrative item number three is sponsored by supervisor Caps. It is to adopt a resolution proclaiming 05/09/2026 as stronger starts day of action for children in Santa Barbara County. And joining us in person today, have Michelle Robertson, deputy director of First Five of Santa Barbara County. Whereas the early years from prenatal through age five are critical to a child's healthy development with approximately 90% of brain development occurring during this period and forming the foundation of lifelong health, learning, and success. And whereas adverse childhood experiences, ACEs, and toxic stress response can negatively impact a child's physical and mental health development and long term well-being, contributing to increased risk of chronic disease, developmental delays, and behavioral challenges.

And whereas nearly two million children in California have experienced ACEs underscoring the important importance of building upon family strengths and expanding access to early supports that promote resilience, health, and well-being. And whereas safe, stable, and nurturing relationships and environments are proven to prevent and mitigate the effects of ACEs and toxic stress, strengthening family resilience, and promoting positive outcomes for children and communities. And whereas First Santa Barbara County, in partnership with First Five California, works to advance initiatives such as Stronger Starts to raise awareness of ACEs and toxic stress, equip parents and caregivers with tools and resources, and support systems of care that promote the healthy development and well-being of young children and families across Santa Barbara County. Now, therefore, be it hereby ordered and resolved that this board of supervisors of Santa Barbara County does declare 05/09/2026 a stronger starts day of action for children and encourages residents and organizations and community partners to support efforts that promote early childhood development, strengthen families, and advance the health and well-being of young children throughout county, passed and adopted today. Thank you.

Good morning. I am Assistant Director Michelle Robertson with First Five Children and Families Commission, and today I have with me Brianna Dunn, who is our communication and policy manager, and Lexi Brunner, who is our community engagement specialist, both of which their behind the scenes work often goes unnoticed, except for all the great things like this that we do in the community. So I'd like to thank Supervisor Caps for sponsoring this resolution as we launch locally for the first time the Stronger Starts Day of Action, which recognizes and calls attention to the effects of adverse childhood experiences on brain development, school success, and health outcomes, which all support a child's ability to thrive and succeed. I also want to recognize and thank our two community partners who will be promoting our messaging, Children's Resource and Referral Discovery Museum in North County, and the Moxie Museum in South County. On Saturday, May 9, both organizations will be hosting events for children at their respective locations, educating families on the Stronger Starts initiative.

Research around the long term effects of ACEs has been public for a while. However, the list of adversities young children and their caregivers experience continues to grow. Now more than ever, it is imperative that we concentrate on the current and future conditions of young children. Recent statistics were just released that the federal investments in babies has seen a dramatic decrease, and as of today, only 1.6 of the 2025 federal budget supports our children aged birth to three. This is down roughly 20% from the 2021 investments, which was still remarkably low, even though children ages zero to three make up about 3.26% of The US population.

Excuse me. To put a number on that, for every $100 the federal government spent, only $1.6 went to supporting babies at the very moment in life when investments matter the most. Yet we spend more than 25% of government spending on incarceration, which the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports an average of $31,286 per inmate per year. Because our circle of influence is most powerful locally, today I challenge the county of Santa Barbara to lead the way on flipping that narrative. Let's invest early so as not to need re remediation later.

So on May 9, the official day of action, let's actively commit to identifying how we can reduce the number of adverse childhood experiences that children in this community accumulate, and at the very least, support those positive childhood experiences that are proven to offset the negative toxic stress responses that lead to a continuous cycle of barriers and challenges later on. I ask everyone listening to me today to advocate for our youngest children so that they have the best possible start in life. Thank you again for all you do for Santa Barbara County and those of us that live here. We really appreciate you stepping up. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Well, now we'll move on to item a four. I see the sheriff has joined us for an important resolution. Madam clerk.

Chair Caps and members of the board, administrative item number four is sponsored by supervisor Caps. It is to adopt a resolution proclaiming the week of 05/03/2026 through 05/09/2026 as National Correctional Officers Week in Santa Barbara County. And joining us in person today, we have sheriff Brown, chief custody deputy Sullivan under sheriff Brad Welch, commander Marking, commander Kalmeda, and commander Callahan. And I'll go ahead and read the resolution. Whereas the week of 05/03/2026 through 05/09/2026 represents a period where correctional officers across The United States are recognized for their dedication and heroism to their local communities.

And whereas the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office custody branch consisting of the South County Mail main jail operations, Northern Branch jail operations, Resources Bureau, Health Services Bureau, Transportation Bureau, inmate programs, classification unit, and the special operations response team, sort, are highly regarded professionals working in conjunction with other local criminal justice and public safety entities. And whereas fifty three years ago, the sheriff's office and this board identified the need to establish structure for sheriff's correction officers who later become custody deputies. The structure aims to effectively support the responsibilities of custody deputies who are specifically trained to address the unique needs of detention facilities. These facilities are tasked with the housing, security, and transportation of all inmates incarcerated in Santa Barbara County. And whereas custody staff serving in a twenty four seven facility encounter the challenges posed by a complex jail system, coupled with the heightened demands resulting from medical and mental health concerns.

They work tirelessly to uphold order, deliver essential resources and education, and ensure security while safeguarding the care, custody, and dignity of the individuals entrusted to their supervision. And whereas the citizens of Santa Barbara County can be confident that these men and women are committed to their service, they perform their duties with professionalism and ethics, demonstrating integrity, courage, and fairness. This dedication ensures the safety of the community, their fellow officers, and incarcerated individuals. Now, therefore, be it hereby ordered and resolved that this board of supervisors of the county of Santa Barbara does hereby acknowledge the week of 05/03/2026 through 05/09/2026 as National Correctional Officers Week. We take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the men and women of Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office who have chosen a career in corrections and dedicated their service to our community, passed and adopted today.

Well, thank you, Chair Caps and members of the board. It is a pleasure to be with you this, day as we honor National Correctional Officers Week, that time of year that we thank all of our hardworking custody deputies and the support staff that guide them and help them as they do their dangerous and incredibly important work. They walk the toughest beat in the county, and the men and women who support them are always there for them as well. Corrections is a difficult profession. Our custody staff deal with some rough customers who, at times, can be dishonest, defiant, disrespectful, and on some occasions, even physically aggressive.

I am proud to say that this behaviour is consistently met with self discipline, compassion, patience, understanding and courage on the part of our custody staff. They continue to give those who are incarcerated the opportunity to change their lives for the better, and many of them do. During their incarceration, inmates will spend more time with custody staff than they spend with their friends, educators, counselors, therapists, lawyers, even their families. The professional demeanor and the behavior that our custody staff members consistently model to inmates often has a profoundly positive and even inspirational impact on them. Our county and our society are better off as a result of this remarkable care and service.

In addition to our custody staff, let's not forget about the correctional counselors, the sheriff's service technicians, the records and administrative staff, the cooks, the utility workers and our WellPath contracted medical and mental health care providers. All of them deserve to be recognized and thanked for the important work that they do in our jails, and this is the week that we do that. On behalf of all of the Sheriff's Office, I want to thank you for this distinct honor and for recognizing our custody staff members for their consistent professionalism and dedication to duty. Thank you for showing them that you appreciate all that they do to help make Santa Barbara County a safer and a better place. Thank you.

Thank you, sheriff. I just wanted to say thanks. I do enjoy this honor every year, especially when you all can join us, or some of you can. And as the sheriff said, it is the toughest beat. And I know how much this board acknowledges that, and the hard work that goes into keeping our whole community safe. So thank you for being here, and thank you for choosing this tough job that you do every day. Thank you. Okay. We will move on to the next administrative item. Thank you, madam clerk.

Chair Capps and members of the board, administrative item number five is sponsored by supervisor Lavinino. It is to adopt a resolution proclaiming the week of 05/03/2026 through 05/09/2026 as compost awareness week in Santa Barbara County. And joining us in person today, we have Bob Engel. And as he's making his way to the podium, I'll go ahead and read the resolution. Whereas compost improves soil structure, reduces runoff, and enables amended soils to use less water, and whereas using sustainable soil enriching compost helps prevent erosion of topsoil without depleting valuable wildlife habitats, And whereas, excuse me, and whereas returning composted organic resources to the soil is a method of decreasing dependence on chemical fertilizers and nonpoint pollution.

And whereas community sustainability is enhanced by composting green waste, biosolids, and other organic materials, and whereas organic materials suitable for composting represents up to 70% of materials that could be landfilled each year, and whereas the county of Santa Barbara has initiated green waste collection programs with their franchise haulers to aid in the efforts of environmental sustainability. And whereas Engel and Gray's regional composting facility in Santa Maria has been successfully composting organic material for sustainable agricultural practices since 1993. Now therefore be it hereby ordered and resolved that this board of supervisors proclaims the week of May 3 through 05/09/2026 as compost awareness week in Santa Barbara County, passed and adopted today.

Supervisors in public, very much thank you for recognizing International Compost Awareness Week. This year we have a lot of different milestones. We've been composting Inglen Grays Regional facility for thirty three years in North County. We've been recognizing international compost awareness week since 2020, so over the last twenty six years Since the year 2000, I should say, not 2020, the year 2000. Ingle and Gray, ourselves, are celebrating our eightieth year in business this year.

And so I gave you our Harvest Plain compost hats with the patch on the back that recognizes our eightieth year in business. We have such a strong history in the Santa Maria Valley. Steve's dad used to come over to watch the World Series because we were the only place in town that had the games on in the nineteen fifties. I wasn't even born yet. I'm so young.

But International Compost Awareness Week is recognized all over the world, and it's trying to give the benefits of what compost brings with erosion control, better retention of water in the soils, making soils healthy for plants to grow. Keltrans is one of our biggest customers because they realize that by improving their roadsides with compost, they can get plants to grow, they control water pollution, and everything thrives in it. We are also on Saturday. This Saturday, we're having an event at our yard on Vedaravia Road in Santa Maria, where we will have a garden and compost fair. We give out complimentary compost to anybody that comes.

You can get up to a yard of free compost. We're gonna give out transplants. Excuse me. We're gonna give out transplants that kids can put in a potting soil. We teach kids how to make a potting soil by utilizing different scoops of compost, soil, and sand. And it's just a real fun time. So anybody, 10:00 to 01:00 on Saturday. If you're out and about in Santa Maria, come on by and bring the whole family because it's a it's a real good time. Anyway, thank you very much for recognizing the benefits of compost and thank you.

Excellent. Thank you. Thanks for the plants. Okay.

Administrative item number six. Chair Caps and members of the board, administrative item number six is sponsored by supervisor Caps and supervisor Nelson. It is to adopt a resolution proclaiming the month of May 2026 as mental health month in Santa Barbara County. And joining us in person today, we have Suzanne Grimacey and Maria Valencia, and anyone else you'd like to join with you. Whereas May 2026 is recognized as mental health month in Santa Barbara County and across the nation, enhancing public awareness and working to dispel the stigma surrounding mental health.

And whereas the twenty twenty six mental health month theme, more good days together, reflects our mission to support people in having more good days by meeting them where they are, honoring that good is defined by individual experiences and goals, and affirming that while paths differ, everyone deserves more good days together. And whereas having more good days isn't a solo mission, checking in with others and offering support helps lighten the load. We're not meant to do this alone. And whereas when communities prioritize mental health, we expand access to care, strengthen connection, and make more good days possible for everyone. And whereas mental health is personal, what works for one person may not work for another, but everyone deserves the support they need to have more good days.

Now therefore be it hereby ordered and resolved that the board of supervisors of the county of Santa Santa Barbara does hereby acknowledge May is Mental Health Month, passed and adopted today.

Chair caps, members of the board, thank you so much for recognizing May as Mental Health Awareness Month. We have come an extremely long way in combating mental health stigma or stigma surrounding mental health, but we still have a long ways to go. We all have an important role in making this happen through conversations, through raising awareness, through providing and paying attention to others who might need it, even if it is just a moment's time or waiting in a grocery store line. Together, we can raise awareness and help to connect people to the right resources at the right time and create more good days together. A good example of this was on May 1, when we launched this month, and we had a ribbon cutting of our new behavioral wellness child and family service centre on Haley Street.

And huge thanks to supervisors Lee and Capps for making that a really important and a really special day for everyone. Lastly, one of our big campaigns for May as mental health month is our Light Up Green campaign. There are 200 buildings throughout the nation that are lighting up green, and 150 of those buildings, actually way more than that, registered, are here in Santa Barbara County. So, really encourage you and everyone here to get out in the evening time when they are illuminated green and see those buildings. We also are seeing them by day all over the place in banks and businesses as recent as this morning.

Got an update from Hollister Hollister store, is what it's called on State Street, all wearing their green ribbons. So, we all have a lot of things to do in our days. We get to spend those extra moments to create more good days together. So thank you so much, and I will turn it over to Maria.

Good morning. Good morning, Honorable Supervisors. My name is Maria Valencia. I am chair of the Behavioral Wellness Commission. I'm honoured to be here to recognize the twenty twenty six Mental Health Month and the theme, More Good Days Together.

But we really should strive to increase our awareness and advocacy on mental health every day. The Behavioural Wellness Commission helps turn the idea that we all have a role into action. It brings together communities, workplaces, and organizations to make sure people can get the support they need. By improving access to care and creating supportive environments, the commission helps more people have more good days. The goal of more good days together is what this work is all about.

When the commission supports collaboration and invests in mental health services, it helps build a system where people feel supported in their everyday lives, not just during a crisis. This makes well-being more possible for everyone. Having more good days isn't a solo mission. Communities thrive when they prioritize mental health. When we take action together, such as the Behavioral Wellness Commission, we can expand access to the care, community and connection that make more good days possible for everyone in our community.

Prioritizing mental health encourages talking about mental health, which reduces stigma and allows more to get the help they need. The role of the Santa Barbara County Behavioral Wellness Commission advises the Board of Supervisors and the Department of Behavioral Wellness on matters related to mental health and substance use treatment services. In part, we review behavioral health policies, programs and outcomes by conducting annual site reviews at county mental health care programs to learn about what is being done countywide, and looking at how mental health and substance use services are provided at a continuum of care perspective. We invite community partners and stakeholders to conduct presentations, and we hold monthly meetings where there is opportunity for public input. To encourage connection and trusting environments, and have more good days for people, we support transparency and accountability in behavioral wellness systems that seeks to be fair and equitable.

Thank you for this opportunity to shine a light on such an important topic.

Thank you for being here. And again, it was an incredible groundbreaking, or ribbon cutting I should say, and just such a good family center right in the heart of everything on Haley Street so that we can bring services to where people are already at. That's the whole goal. So thank you so much. Okay. Madam Clerk, we'll move on to the next resolution.

Chair Caps and members of the board, administrative item number seven is sponsored by Super visor Hartman and will be presented today by Chair Capps. It is to adopt a resolution proclaiming the month of May 2026 as National Stroke Awareness Month in Santa Barbara County. And joining us in person today, we have Katie Gort, vice president and director of nursing from Santa Ana Valley Cottage Hospital. If you can please make your way to the podium, I'll go ahead and read the resolution. Whereas the month of May is recognized nationally as Stroke Awareness Month dedicated to increasing public understanding of stroke prevention, recognition, and treatment.

And whereas stroke is a time sensitive medical emergency in which rapid identification, diagnosis, and treatment by qualified health care professionals can significantly improve survival and reduce long term disability. And organized systems of care help ensure patients receive the right treatment at the right time and at the right facility. And whereas every forty seconds someone in The United States experiences a stroke. And stroke remains a leading cause of serious long term disability and the fifth leading cause of death in the nation, resulting in more than a hundred and sixty thousand deaths each year. While nearly one half of adults in The United States have high blood pressure, one of the most significant and control able risk factors for stroke.

And whereas public awareness of the BEFAST warning signs of stroke, balance, loss, eyesight changes, face drooping, arm weakness, speech difficulty, and time to call 911 can help save lives by encouraging immediate emergency response. And whereas the San Inez Valley Cottage Hospital Foundation Board raised private funds to provide San Inez Valley Cottage Hospital with a modern CT scanner and rapid AI perfusion technology, enhancing the hospital's ability to quickly diagnose stroke and transient ischemic attacks and improving emergency care for residents of Santa Ana's Valley. Now therefore, be it hereby ordered and resolved that this board of supervisors of the county of Santa Barbara does hereby proclaim the month of May as stroke awareness month in Santa Barbara County, encourages all residents to learn the warning signs of stroke and take preventative measures to reduce risk, recognizes the importance of coordinated systems of care in improving outcomes, and expresses its appreciation to the San Inez Valley Cottage Hospital Foundation Board for its leadership and generosity in strengthening emergency stroke care in San Inez Valley community. Passed and adopted today.

Good morning, chair and supervisors. On behalf of San Yenes Valley Cottage Hospital, I want to sincerely thank you for this resolution and for your recognition of the work our foundation and hospital teams have done to strengthen stroke care in our community. Stroke is one of those conditions where minutes truly matter. The difference between recovery and lifelong disability can come down to how quickly a patient receives the right care. For a rural community like ours, that reality carries even more weight.

Access, readiness and coordination are not luxuries, they are necessities. This recognition reflects a collective effort. Our foundation's commitment has allowed us to invest in the tools, training and technology required to build and sustain a strong stroke ready programme. But just as important, it represents the dedication of our physicians, nurses, our EMS partners and staff who show up every day prepared to act with urgency and precision when it matters most. We are proud of the progress we've made, but we also know this work is ongoing.

Maintaining a high quality stroke program requires continuous education, collaboration, and investment. Your support and acknowledgment today reinforce that this effort matters, not just to our hospital, but to the entire community we serve. On a personal note, as a nurse and as a leader, I've seen firsthand how impactful it is when a community comes together around patient care. This resolution is more than recognition. It's a shared commitment to ensuring that when someone in the Santa Ynez Valley experiences a stroke, they receive timely, high quality care close to home.

Thank you again for your partnership, your support and your belief in the importance of accessible, life saving care in our region. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay. I think we're at the end of these resolutions. Oh, yeah. I know. But a eight, the final one. Madam Clerk.

Chair Caps and members of the board, administrative item number eight is sponsored by supervisor Hartman and will be presented by chair Capps today. It is to adopt a resolution proclaiming the month of May 2026 as wildfire community preparedness month in Santa Barbara County. And joining us in person today, we have Fred Tan, division chief and our fire marshal. Go ahead and read the resolution. Whereas May has been declared wildfire community preparedness month in Santa Barbara County, and whereas Santa Barbara County has a well documented history of wildfire risk and the threat of wildfire continues to grow increasingly prevalent and dangerous and currently poses a year round risk to both people and property locally and statewide.

And whereas in 2025, including the Gifford Fire in Northern Santa Barbara County and the Madre fire in our neighboring San Luis Obispo County, California experienced 8,036 fires that burned approximately 525,223 acres, destroyed over 18,000 homes, injured an undetermined number of firefighters, and resulted in approximately thirty one civilian deaths or injuries. And whereas residents in wildfire prone areas can take proactive measures to reduce the risk of injury and property loss by maintaining defensible space, implementing home hardening strategies, and participating in collaborative efforts, including firewise communities, which contribute to a safer, more resilient fire adaptive county. And whereas the Santa Barbara County fire department works in close collaboration with operational area partners to respond to wildfires, mitigate associated hazards, and reduce overall wild wildfire risk. And whereas it is important for residents, visitors, and travelers to take personal responsibility to prevent unintentional ignition ignitions, such as ensuring trailer safety chains are not dragging, fully extinguishing campfires, and avoiding high risk activities that can spark fires in dry conditions. Now, therefore, be it hereby ordered and resolved that this board of supervisors proclaims May 2026 as wildfire community preparedness month and encourages everyone to participate in fire prevention and preparedness activities at home, work, school, and all locations, marking the beginning of a year long effort to improve wildfire awareness and safety, passed and adopted today.

Thank you chair caps and members of the board. This morning, we have a collateral event next to Cabrillo High School. Chief Huff is meeting with CAL FIRE and the Forest Service. They are celebrating wildfire prevention week, preparedness week, and doing a tour of one of our grant funded projects in the Lompoc Valley. And as I say that, I'm looking at your new plants and checking to make sure you guys have defensible space around your your your spots.

Sure. Yeah. Lots of water.

Yeah. So

May, as a wildfire community preparedness month, it comes as no coincidence. I have I've always said in my community meetings, Santa Barbara's County citizens have a very high IQs when it comes to wildfire wildfires. Next month marks the thirty six year anniversary of the Painted Cape Fire, a fire that burned 660 homes and traveled two miles in two hours. Very destructive to the the the Front Country community. Later this year, we're gonna sell not celebrate, but recognize a ten year anniversary of the Thomas Fire.

And shortly thereafter, the debris flow, which took 23 lives from county citizens. Those are just a few of the fires that I've experienced here in twenty one years. This this county is littered with fires throughout its history. We have 813,000 acres that that the county fire department protects with CAL FIRE. We have 16 fire stations, hand crews, fire crews, field crews, construction, an ASU unit that that go and battle wildfires, and we're successful at keeping our 80 fires a year under 10 acres or less.

95% of those attain 10 acres or less. With that being said, as a community, we still need to continue to learn to live with wildfire. And we're doing that well as a county, but we need to keep improving. We cannot get complacent, and And community preparedness is a team effort. The County Fire Department, part of my staff, we develop and we develop and build homes in conjunction with planning and development in the built environment, and we're building resilient communities in that way from an individual homes up to new communities that are getting built in the county.

In the North and the central and the South counties, our fire and fuels crews and construction sections, we are working daily to make sure that roads roadside maintenance is done, reducing fuels around communities, creating fuel breaks, and then later in the year, we have prescribed fire projects. We continue to be a leader in the state with our fuel reduction efforts and are really successful obtaining grants to help us with these efforts. To date, we have $15,100,000 in grants the County Fire Department has received from CAL FIRE and the California Climate Investment Initiative to ensure that we staff stations as we're conducting all of these fuel reduction efforts. We work in conjunction with other local fire agencies with fuel reduction efforts with the US Forest Service, CAL FIRE's resources in Ventura County, Public Works, and the Fire Safe Council, who's also been a major recipient from these CAL FIRE grants and been an equal partner in education and reducing fuels in the counties. I urge everyone to continue to work on their defensible space and over time to harden their homes.

Also sign up for readysbc.org so we can communicate with the county as soon as fires happen. Also to visit sbcfire.com and the Santa Barbara County Fire Safe Council's website for more information on home hardening and defensible space. Thank you.

Thank you to our fire marshal. I really enjoyed being at the fire graduation promotion ceremony and to see everybody moving up in the ranks and just to honor the hard work that goes into being part of the the team. I know we have such a high fire hazard in this in this county. Think FEMA ranks us at number one in the state number two nationally. I mean, it's just such a important part of the work that we all have to do. So thank you for being here, and thank you for this resolution. I really appreciate the work. Okay. That wraps up our resolutions for this week. All very good topics, wide ranging. So we will move now to the items in our administrative agenda that have been pulled.

Madam Clerk. Chair Capsa, members of the board, we will begin with administrative item number 12 from the auditor controller's office. It is to consider recommendations regarding single audit reports for fiscal year ended 06/30/2025.

Thank you. So I pulled this item. So single audits, I I know we do different auditing functions on federal and state programs. This one's a little bit different than one I was anticipating. So I'm just kinda curious. Somebody gets credit, and I'm trying to find out, Betsy, who it is. Like, we got a bunch of clean Right. Decisions here, which is great, but I'm trying to figure out where the where the credit goes here.

Yeah. Thank you, supervisor Lavinino, chair Capps. Basically it's a county award. All of the county departments that receive federal funding get reported in this report. And Brown Armstrong, who is our external auditors, they audit all of the disbursements and make sure that they are in conformance with the grant requirements such as FEMA and other federal programs.

I want to say that our team does a good job at sort of compiling all of that and really preparing for the audit. If you would let me, I'd like to introduce our team here. This is Danny Forner again. He was at Budget Workshops. He's our division chief over there. And then Arielle Beltrum, she's our accountant auditor, who works closely with the departments to gather that information.

So but also the departments that are listed in here, for example, social services, think

Yeah.

Public works is identified as well. So these are you're going in preparing them for the audit. Brown Armstrong comes in, make sure that the controls are in place, that we're meeting the requirements of the federal grants that we have. Correct. And all these different departments are also struggling to come up and make sure that they're Right. That they're following the rules.

There's a little bit of you know, how the single audit came into play. It used to be that all these federal programs had to have individual audits that were done. And so they created this omnibus act that said, okay, let's do one big audit and to save taxpayer money, and just make sure that controls at an entity level are good.

Well congratulations to your team, the different departments. I know just from dealing with County Council and the requirements of a lot of these federal grants are very onerous, and so for folks to be able to make sure that we're following all the rules, and in each different department and on each different grant, we got unmodified positions, which is a clean opinion.

Exactly.

Good job.

And thank you so much for presenting that, and it really is the department's doing that Great work.

Thank you

very much.

Services, be well, public works. Yeah.

Alright. Appreciate it.

I'm sure I'm missing. We have 20 departments.

Yes. Most of

them get federal grants.

So Yes.

Okay. That's

great. Alright. Thanks.

Thank you, supervisor Labanino. Okay. Let's take a motion on this one.

I'll move a 12. Second.

All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Okay. We will move to a 19 since we already took took care of a two.

Am I correct? Yes. I believe so unless you wanna clarify. Madam clerk, the floor is yours.

Chair Cabson, members of the board, we are now going to administrative item number 17. Administrative item number 17 is from the county executive office. It is to approve budget revision requests, numbers 11,048, and budget revision requests 11,029, 11,030, 11,033, 11/1943, 11/1950, and 11/1951. And we are requesting to continue this item to the May 12 board meeting.

I'll make a motion to continue those items until May 12. Second.

All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Motion carries. And we'll get we'll get to a 19 in one minute.

Chair caps and members of the board, administrative admin number 19 is from the fire department. It is to consider recommendations regarding revisions to the rules and regulations of the Santa Barbara County Fire Department Board of Appeals and appointment of candidates onto the Board of Appeals. And we have two requests to speak from the public on this item. We are going to remain here in Santa Barbara and begin with Yana Zimmer to be followed by Richard Solomon. Yana?

Good morning, supervisors. Thank you for hearing me. Irony is the word that comes to mind because it was forty years ago this month that I came to work for the county as a deputy county council advising the Planning Commission and the board of supervisors on land use items. And here I am, forty years later, pleading for my own case in terms of my desire to build a house so that I can be cared for, and end my life at home, if at all possible. The reason I'm here today is that the rules that are being proposed to you for changes of the fire board operation are extremely problematic, especially when conflicts with housing policy come up.

The existing rules, and I think they actually should be rules for all your Planning Commission items for housing, to make sure that the housing proposals get considered. I've done this little chart that explains to you how these rules effectively eliminate due process, and eliminate proper consideration of housing goals in the individual case. So if I may, I'll just quickly go through those. The first issue is that even under the revised rules, there's no mention of same practical effect. Same practical effect is a standard or concept that the planning and the fire departments have used when you can't meet a specific rule to the letter, and they will take into account other considerations, maybe do a substitute measure.

This concept was not in the old rules, and it's not in the new rules either, except that now this board is going to be effectively the only board that considers whether you met same practical effect or not. It affects my case. Under the existing rules, and this is extremely important to me, well, shouldn't be just to me, there is an appeal to the Board of Supervisors, and that's the premise on which I've been going through this process that ultimately I would finally get to plead my case to this board after three years in the process. No appeal to the Board of Supervisors going forward. I think that when you're dealing with potential conflicts between needing to build housing and needing to fulfill the technical requirements of a fire rule, you need to have an appeal.

You you, the board of supervisors, need to have the final say so you can consider it. That's not a consideration. It's not something that's being granted to me in my case. There are other due process protections in the existing rules that are going to be eliminated. The Fire Department and the Board of Supervisors have separate legal counsel. That's really important because you've been hearing only the views of the fire marshal in this case in prior. I've never had an appeal to you, but you've discussed it in closed session.

So I don't have that answer

to the appeal. Pre hearing conferences on issues of law. In my case, there are a couple of very important issues of law.

Thank you, Yana. That is your time.

You can finish your point, but that is your time. If you want to just finish your final May

I please? He's going to be very short. Mister Sullivan

very If you mind. Sorry? If you could just finish your final point, that would be great.

I'm gonna just go through a couple other It's final point. Okay. This is my final point.

Okay. Thank

you. The rules that are in front of you represent a complete denial of due process, and they will prejudice your consideration of housing projects if you approve them.

Thank you very much. Thank you so much.

We will now go to our final speaker, Richard Solomon.

Oh, may I ask a question? I had a video that was gonna be in public comment. Could we show it when he concludes and then we can get out of here and not bother you anymore?

I mean, public comment is is next, so that would be

We'll we'll wait here. Thank you.

Or

If it's associated with this item, it should be shown. I think Leah has

I'm sorry?

Oh, it's the video association with this item.

It's just the photo.

Yeah. It's a it's a photograph. It's a photo image.

Photo image. Just a She knows.

Yes. It relates to this item. Yes.

Okay. Please proceed.

Okay. Good morning.

Good morning.

The proposal before you has serious due process problems. It folds together two different issues, which should be separated. The first issue is fire enforcement orders. It's perfectly appropriate to have a board to hear an appeal of fire enforcement orders, which are technical. You want firefighters with fire prevention, firefighting expertise to resolve the appropriateness of a fire enforcement order.

That part of the proposal is really to me not controversial and is perfectly okay going forward. It folds into that however, and this is its fatal flaw. It folds into that however, same practical effect appeals. I'm going to focus just on one due process problem. You are constant Let let me just imagine Zimmer's case before a board, this board if you approve it, of other fire marshals from sister jurisdictions in the county.

There are five members, four of them were proposed to be fire marshals. They work closely with mister Tan on a regular basis as they have to. You're we're going to have to convince them, these colleagues of mister Tan that Tan abused his discretion in denying us the same practical effect finding, namely that fire trucks eight feet wide could safely come down a road that's 12 feet wide. And we have an image that'll show, there it is, the truck is leaving, that's the fire truck last Saturday, leaving our lane having come there to rescue a cat of all things by just happenstance. That truck can get by there.

Mister Tan found that there's no say, can't make a same practical effect finding. We're gonna have to convince, again, a majority of those fire marshals that he's wrong in concluding that in denying a same practical effect finding. What are the odds of us being able to do that under these rules? I would say there's zero. Because you are obligated to ask yourself a simple, basic human question in deciding whether we have an impartial panel, whether this proposed panel can be impartial, which of course they constitutionally must be.

And that is whether considering normal psycho Norman human psychology and normal human biases, there's a risk of actual bias. Not actual bias, a risk of actual bias. And if there is, it's not a fair hearing. So, to me, the risk is so glaring of having these trying to the impossibility of convincing these colleagues of mister Tan's that he's wrong, dead wrong on not finding same practical effect. It renders this process as applied to same practical effect fatally flawed.

So, if you want, now the simple solution here is simply carve out Zimmer's case. We have, you have a set of rules now in effect.

Thank you Richard.

We can live with that, Send this case to the existing rules and then just go forward with whatever you decide is best for the county. Thank you very much.

Thanks to you both.

And that concludes public comment on administrative item number 19.

Okay. Any other comments on a 19? Did you have a question, supervisor Lavigno, or comment?

So is this four fifths, or is this not? No? So we can we're voting on this one today. Okay.

Chair Capsule, members of the board, there is not a four fifths vote on this item today.

Well, I'm gonna move staff recommendation. And and just in response to the comment is, I mean, using that logic for me, it would be any Planning Commission decision that was made that would come before our Board of Supervisors before an appeal. I appointed that person to hear that case. So it seems like under that argument, every case that I would hear, you know, I think you would feel that there would be a bias. The the person that I appointed to make that decision, now you're appealing it to me.

I think it's kind of in the same case. So I I have no problem having the professionals hear this, and I'd be willing to move a 19.

Thank you. Representative Lee?

I just wanna say I'm supportive of your motion. The people that we appoint, we trust them because they are the experts and that I believe they will be impartial and fair to all parties. So I'm gonna second your motion.

Okay.

And can I just say also that that the photo, I think, also demonstrated the difficulty? I mean, in looking at that, just that was the evidence that it's easy to do and we I I saw that as very problematic for that fire engine. I mean, it's super tight. And I I I know that there's a lot of rules and regulations that I'm sure our fire department could go through about turnarounds and such. But, yeah, I didn't I didn't think that that was a very compelling picture. I've in fact, I thought it made it seem very difficult. So

Well, yeah. And I I just wanna know we're not Yep. Discussing this case here. I know that's been a challenging one, a challenging situation, and I hear the frustration. And but this is about a board, and so I'm happy to move support staff recommendation as well. Okay. So all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Okay. With that, we have Oops. We have excuse me. Madam Clerk.

Chair Caps and members of the board, thank you. I just wanted further clarification on our final two items to continue to the May 12 item. A, administrative item number twenty seventh is from the Public Works Department. It is to consider recommendations regarding a Public Works Director's report on emergency response actions from impacts on flooding and storms and continuation of emergency actions for the transportation division. And I did have a conversation with county council on this item.

And we would actually like to trail this item to right before the closed session agenda, if possible, as supervisor Nelson will be joining us remotely for closed session. So perhaps we can trail that item to right before closed session, and we will take that in the open session. And so we will not need to continue that item to May 12. And then administrative item number 28 is from the sheriff coroner's office. It is to consider recommendations regarding a first amendment to the agreement with California Health and Recovery Solutions, PCCHRS, for early access stabilization services, EASS. And this item can be continued to May 12.

Okay. Can you just repeat which one we are not trailing?

We will we will trail a 27. Okay.

So I just need a motion to trail to act we do

not need a motion to trail a '27, but a motion to continue a '28 to May 12.

Motion to move a '28 to May 12.

Great. Second. Got that. Okay. All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Excellent. Okay. So now it is time we've concluded this portion of the administrative agenda, and now it's time for members of the public to speak on items that are not on the agenda today, even though we've covered quite a range of topics. What isn't? Madam clerk, are there any requests to speak from the public?

Chair Kapsom, members of the board, yes. We have four requests to speak from the public. We are going to remain here in Santa Barbara to begin with Yana Zimmert, to be followed by Sean Sullivan. Yana?

And with that, I'm going to close public comment and also just give a little heads up that we'll take a quick break after public comment.

Appears Yana might have left, so we will go to Sean Sullivan, then we will go to Zoom with Alex Castro. Sean?

Good morning. I'm Sean Sullivan. I am with Above All Aviation, one of the flight schools at Santa Barbara Airport. For the past ten years or so, we have been trying to get non permitted operators to comply with the rules and regulations, and this applies to Santa Ana's Airport. So you guys have a chapter four code of the county, Santa Barbara expressly prohibits any person from engaging in any business or commercial activity of any nature whatsoever on the airport unless that person has obtained a written lease from the board of supervisors or has obtained a commercial use license from the airport manager.

The chapter of the county code also provides violations of any vision of chapter four is a misdemeanor. In addition, San Yenas Valley thirty December twentieth lease and management agreement with the county expressly expressly obligates the airport authority to comply with chapter four of the county code and with the FAA order fifty one ninety six b, which expressly limits commercial activities using flying club aircraft. On 03/13/2025, our lawyer submitted a public records request to San Yenas Valley Airport. Within that request, we sought the airport's records relating to leases, permits, permissions, or licenses granted by the San Yenas Valley Authority to flying clubs independent operators and persons providing or seeking to provide flight training or specialized sorry, specialized commercial services at KIZA. We also sought copies of correspondence with various certified flight structures and information relating to KIZA's compliance with chapter four of the county.

The authority did not provide and still has not provided despite four requests for those. And however, we're certain the commercial activity in the form of commercial flight instruction and specialized flight training is happening routinely at KIZA. So I'm going back. The the their argument is that they're not a private a public entity. Well, they took $455,000 last year in FAA monies.

So under the California Public Records Act, anomaly private nonprofit entity is treated as a public agency subject to the closure disclosure per CPRA and thus a proper defendant under California code seventy nine twenty three. When its relationship with government just demonstrates functional equivalence to a public body. Airport lease and management agreement makes clear that the airport authority is functionally equivalent to a public body because the county has delegated government functions to the airport authority while maintaining oversight authority and imposing accountability obligations. In addition, KIZA, Santa or Santa Ana's airport, has received federal funding, which expressly obligates it to comply with the FAA orders. So last Friday, we put in yet another one for them to give us a PREA request, and they still have not complied with us.

So we're coming to you in hopes that that can finally happen. Thank you.

Thank you. And our two public members who are joining us via Zoom have logged off, so that concludes general public comment for today.

Okay. Madam clerk, we will just take a quick break before we head into the departmental items. Let's say ten minutes. K. Thank you.

Okay. We are back, and we are ready for departmental item number one. Madam clerk, will you please read it into the record? Chair Caps

and members of the board, departmental item number one is from the county executive office. It is a hearing to consider recommendations regarding a report on elections information.

Supervisors, you requested that staff return to the board. We facilitated the board letter, but I and the report was was included in your packet, and I believe, staff from elections are online to answer any of your questions.

Okay. Great. So we're not we're are we having presentation, or we're just going straight into conversation? Okay. Well, I will kick things off. As having cosponsored this item with Supervisor Lee, and pleased that it was unanimously supported by this Board, just really wanted to raise a ton of awareness around the fact that our elections are run by our county, and we've done so very well internally and just really wanted to shine a light on the elections division. And I believe they're here. Is that they're on the line. Is that what you said? Great.

Oh,

he's here by Zoom. Okay.

Yes.

Well, I'd love to give you the opportunity to speak about how elections work. I appreciated your board presentation or your letter rather. And then I think we'll leave it to the board to ask some questions. But again, I'll just restate our goal. My goal is that there's been a lot of questions from the community, especially this year in particular, about the fact that will their ballots be safe? Will their ballots be counted? Is it safe to put their ballots in the mail? Is it safe to go to a polling place? Will federal agents be at a polling place? These are the questions, legitimate questions that have been posed to me in my office in the last several months.

And that's really the genesis of why we wanted to have this conversation. Because I believe as local elected officials, we have the responsibility to not just do the work correctly, but use our voice, our office, to reassure that the work is being done correctly. And so with that, if you could just summarize the information that was provided to the board, I'd appreciate it.

Certainly, chair Katz. I'm Martin Cobos. I'm the chief deputy registrar for the county of Santa Barbara. And I'd like to thank thank you all for the opportunity to be able to discuss what discuss what we do here at elections. I wanna start off by making a couple of very important points just to be aware of is that, yesterday, we're we sent out over 250,000 ballots to each and every registered voter in the county.

Within that, hopefully, everybody prior to that received every registered voter received their sample ballot. The sample ballot was was sent out in the last couple weeks. In that, it has all the information voters may need to cast their ballot. We also have 18 drop boxes located throughout the county that are available for voters when they decide to cast their ballot to make it very convenient. They can drop it in any one of those 18 that are located throughout the county.

In addition, and I'll get into the the United States Postal Service in a minute. But in addition, you can also drop your ballot off in any mailbox. We are gonna have 61 polling places available for the public on election day, and any any member of the public can vote at those any member registered voter can vote at those polling places. Now the thing that makes this this election unique is there are 61 candidates for governor. 61, obviously, is a lot of candidates.

In addition, we have 16 candidates for lieutenant governor. So what we're urging voters to do is once they make up their mind on who they're gonna vote, vote early, whether it's putting in the United States post office, whether it's dropping it in one of our 18 drop boxes, or whether it's going to a poll on election day. Please decide who you're gonna vote for and vote early or as early as possible. Now I wanna get to the concerns with the United States Postal Service and where we stand as a division. The rules have not changed at this point.

As long as your ballot is postmarked by election day and received by the elections division within seven days of election day, your ballot will count. It's very important, though, that because of the postal processing changes, if you're going to vote on election day by using The US mail, we strongly urge you to go into the post office and ask that your ballot be hand stamped, hand postmarked. A lot of the system that used to be in place where people were used to their ballots being postmarked on the day they dropped them in to the to the mailbox has changed. So if you're gonna wait that long, please get it postmarked and make sure your ballot counts. Additionally, if you wait until election day, because of the number of items on the ballot, the number of choices for governor, lieutenant governor, which take up the entire front portion of the ballot, Do not be surprised if you have to wait, and that's the value in making up your mind early.

If you get into a polling place and you have not decided on which one of those 61 candidates to vote for, it may take some time. Those are things that you should be aware of as voters. We directly interface with all 250,000 registered voters with our voter information guide, which we should have been received in the last week, and the ballots that you're gonna receive in the coming days. Within each one of those is valuable information about polling places, about drop boxes, and about the rules with the United States Postal Service in addition to clearly information about candidates. I'd like to touch on something very briefly also, and I know that supervisor Lavinino's, time at the board of supervisors is coming to a close.

I just wanna illustrate at the time that he was first elected in 2010, I believe, and and correct me if I'm wrong.

Nope. Alright.

We had estimated about 65% of our ballots were received through vote by mail. Currently, in this time, we're receiving over 90%. In 2010 when supervisor was elected, we had approximately a 192,000 registered voters. We now have 250,000 registered voters. So you can see that that's a 30% growth from 2010.

Something that we do here at the elections division is we evolve. As legislation changes, as cut as voters change their preferences in the way they want to vote, we continually adapt to that. And and supervisor Capps mentioned something earlier about her concerns with federal agents and things of that nature. Those are also things that we adapt to. We're very fortunate that sheriff Brown coordinates extremely well and has been doing so, his office, quite frankly, for decades.

We're very, very proud of that partnership that we have with our local sheriff's department. We also regularly speak with, other agencies such as the FBI, Department of Justice, Secretary of State. So we are aware of all the things that may change and continue to change, and that's why we think it's important that voters understand the facts.

Thank you, doctor Kobos. I had a couple questions, but would you like to Sure. Okay. Well, I thank you for being here. It's really, important to hear directly from from those who are administering our elections. Because, again, there's been so much in the news that is different this year than in previous years. So I'm gonna ask you about fraud because the current White House is amplifying claims that elections are riddled with fraud. You oversee it, and I've been there. I've seen the voting machines. I've seen how hard your staff works.

I've seen how airtight it is, but not everybody has seen it, although they're able to see it. Could you please speak to the the steps that go into make making sure that fraud does not exist in our system and also the opportunities that exist for people should they have questions?

Absolutely. I'm I'm glad you asked that question. It's it's become a talking point recently, and I'll start off a little bit with my experience as an election official. In the almost twenty years that I've administered elections and the over 50 elections that I have been a part of and sometimes responsible for, I have not seen an instance of voter fraud. There have been several that have been investigated in by various agencies, but I have not seen an instance that I can say there was voter fraud.

And and a lot of this is due for a lot of reasons. As I've said, most of our ballots are received by vote by mail now. Each one of those ballots is scanned through a high speed, scanning system that literally takes a photograph of the signature of the voter. That signature is compared to the records that we have on file from secretary of state through voter registration, through the Department of Motor Vehicles, through various agencies to ensure that that is the the person who signed that the registered voter is the person that signed that ballot. If for some reason that does not match, and we train staff, I I don't want it I don't want it seem as if we just we just give them to anybody.

We train staff in protocols for checking signatures, and we look at every single signature that comes into this office. And you can see that when you have over a 100,000 voters, that is that's a tall order. But it's something we do, and it's something we're very proud of. If for some reason that signature does not exactly match, we will contact the voter multiple times. We will contact them via via a letter, via email, and oftentimes call on the telephone.

That is something we do to ensure that every vote counts. Now that process that where we get to that point where we compare those signatures, we ensure that they're registered voters. We we work with a state database to ensure that a voter in LA County doesn't decide to take a a trip to Santa Barbara and vote in Santa Barbara County. The state of California has given us very robust tools in our Vocal system where it's real time. Once a voter votes, it is triggered throughout the state of California, and we're able to see that, John Doe voted in Santa Barbara County.

Therefore, he's not gonna be allowed to vote in any other county. That is something we do. We clean the voter rolls regularly in terms of receiving information on when somebody moves, when somebody, you know, passes away, when somebody reaches the age of 18. Department of our vehicles has been a great partner in assuring that our roles are as clean as they can possibly be in terms of accuracy. And that also aids our ability to fight voter fraud.

So it's not a chief concern, and that's that's partially due to the community too. Our community in Santa Barbara takes elections very seriously, and we're very proud of what the interaction that we have them. And it's a good community. We don't see any fraud here. I'm not saying someday it may not happen, but in all my years, I haven't seen any indication. And that's that's due in no small part to our efforts.

I agree. Do you have a question on fraud? Because I Yeah.

Oh, keep going, though.

Yeah. Well, if you wanna

Okay.

Well, I yeah. I I wanted to know. I I've heard people that have said, okay. I voted by mail, but now I mean, are these are not folks that are saying they're gonna do that, but they're saying, how do you stop this from happening? Somebody votes by mail, sends in a ballot, but then shows up at a polling place. How do you deal with that?

Well, that that system that I just mentioned is a real time system. And if we get a competing ballot and and this happens from time to time in a perfectly innocent way, but it could also happen in a way that was, nefarious. Oftentimes, we get voters who say, I think I I think I voted. I think it was in the mail, or I think my somebody who lives in my household put it in the mail. But I can't be sure because they're away.

They're in Hawaii or something. So in order to be really sure, I go to the polling place and try to vote there. And, again, this could go to the voter fraud scenario or it can go just to, you know, an innocent mistake. That real time system allows us to see whether that voter has voted already. If they insist they have voted, they have not voted, we allow them to vote provisionally, and then we do some research into whether that vote counted or not.

Now the state of California allows for us to vote in. So if a mistake was made and they actually their spouse or or somebody else put that ballot in the mail, that ballot will count, and any other subsequent ballot will not count. It's a very robust system that we have in terms of being able to defend that.

Right. Thank you. One other question on that too is, so you talked about voting provisionally, and and I'm sure that when people come to a a polling place and their name's not listed, they're not in that. Can you just kind of explain that process? Because I think some people don't understand that we still allow that person to vote provisionally and then do your homework after. Can you just kinda explain how that process works? Sure.

I'm I'm glad you asked that question because recently and I'm gonna date myself. When I say recently, it's probably been within the past five to seven years. But, California now allows same day voter registration. So, for example, if you, if you move to Santa Barbara County from Ventura County or San Luis Obispo County, and you just quite you know, let's let's say it was within days, and you need to register in the County Of Santa Barbara, it is allowed that you go into that polling place and say, you're not gonna see me on those rules, but I now live at an address within the county of Santa Barbara, and I'm entitled to vote. At that point, we will same day register you and get you the ballot.

If for some reason there is a disruption and we don't have you on the roles and you choose to vote provisionally, we always allow voters to vote provisionally, which means that they will get a different envelope, with a lot of information, and we will process that not as a regular vote by mail ballot or not as a regular ballot, but a ballot that must be researched to verify they are indeed eligible to vote. That's something very, very important for the voters to realize is you will never be turned away from a polling place and not allowed to vote. Every voter has an opportunity to vote as to whether for for the elections division it's an easy vote to process or not. That's irrelevant. You will be able to vote.

And I thank you for asking that question.

Right. So I just wanna clarify that too, though. You'll be able to vote, but a research is gonna be done on that ballot. Your vote may not count at that point because you could have voted illegally or by mistake in some other

That's correct. And that's one of the safeguards that we do have in place for that. It's there for a very specific reason.

Great. Thank you, Mark.

So if I could I'm just gonna ask about again, a lot has been swirling from the federal government, from the White House about unfortunately, about folks in your position being partisan, being not neutral. Can you please speak to your role? And as a result, poll workers, hopefully not in this county, have been targets of harassment. Can you please just assure us about neutrality, what goes into the work that you all do?

Well, thank you, supervisor Katz, for an opportunity to address that. First and foremost, the elections division and the registrar of voters is not a political, post. We we're objective. If you ask anybody who works in this division, even up to, at any level, we are not partisan. We count the votes.

We report the vote. If somebody were to say, wanna be a poll worker, but I'm very strongly partisan for one candidate or another, They are they are told that despite and everybody has feelings about how they lean politically, that that has no place in the elections division. I can assure the voters of Santa Barbara County that every vote counts, and there is absolutely, unequivocally no partisanship. We count the votes as we get them. With respect to the issues swirling around the federal government, we obey the law.

At this point, we don't have anything of of any seismic change for this election. But as we go, we continue to address those things. Poll workers are also trained very well on the nonpartisanship, on being objective, and that we serve every one of those 250,000 voters we get equally.

Thank you. And I know, there's a lot of concern out there, which might translate in people wanting to be poll workers this year. I've heard a lot of interest. How does somebody become a poll worker?

If you

could give even a website, that would be helpful.

Yeah. Certainly. Santa Barbara Vote Dot Org is the opportunity to get information from our website, and it is it is filled with information. We've we've been very fortunate this year and in past couple elections in that we have got and it's through the partnership with the community. We have got a a large pool of poll workers, and we're very happy with that. And that's why you may not we still encourage people to participate as being a poll worker, but we're fortunate right now that at this point, we have we have each poll stocked up with staff, but we can always use more.

Well, that's great. And I hope that that we keep things as peaceful as possible as they have been in the past. And so you said that that I just wanna hear you say it to assure people who you know, when we hear talk of federal takeover, etcetera, that that you're not hearing anything like that. You have your your ear to the ground, that that our elections are county elections and count only county elections.

Yeah. They they are. We're in contact with the other 57 counties throughout the state. And I I have to say, although we're prepared for for any eventuality, that is not a a concern that any other of the counties, including county of Santa Barbara have. If something were to happen, that disrupt us as the polls, law enforcement, including sheriff's browns sheriff Brown's office as well as those other agencies are there, to assist and to give us information.

To that end, we've also told our poll workers on things to be aware of as far as any kind of disruption, possible disruption. But that is not unique to this election. That is something we do in every election.

Yep.

So by saying we're prepared for it, I I feel very confident.

Well, I wanna get into that. I know it's it's against the law for federal agents to be at polling places. But, supervisor Lee, do you have a question first?

I do. So in your messaging, do you plan do you have a plan to let people know whether it's in newspapers or social media about your plans in addition to today?

We we try to we feel sometimes we have something a little better than social media. And as I mentioned, these books go out to every registered voter, voter information guide, which is chock full of information, including election observer rights, polling place information. And not to be overly redundant about it, but folks will be getting their ballots in the mail that also contains valuable information. When they go to a polling place, they're going to see voter bill of rights, things of that nature that pertain to the vote. We have a strong presence as far as our website.

We will discuss in a post election meeting, as we always do, opportunities to engage with the public in in a different way. But we feel very strongly that that our our direct mailings to them, hopefully take care of some of that.

Okay. I do, I do have some questions. You you touched on sheriff Brown, and I appreciate that he is here. Because there is a lot of concerns that came directly from the community and particularly the immigrant community. Of course, you have to be a US citizen to vote, and and we we all understand that.

But a lot of immigrants who are US citizens are fearful of potentially going to the vote polling place. We've heard that directly. And we've, again, then matched with questions or confusion about voting by mail this year, given the Supreme Court case and other, confusion about the timing of voting by mail. Can you just speak to what might happen in the unforeseen circumstance of ICE or federal agents at a polling place or any kind of intimidation. If you could really walk us through.

Because, again, I know and that it is illegal to intimidate folks at the polling place. But what would that look like if you could please walk us through? What should somebody do if there appears to be somebody who shouldn't be there, either plainclothes or in a uniform that is potentially a federal agent. What's the first thing they should do? If you could sort of walk through the scenario.

Sure. And at some point if it makes sense for the sheriff to weigh in with a response. But it's really important, and it's not a theoretical question, just again, given that there is the presence of federal agents in places that we would never deem imaginable previously in our life here.

Well, supervisor Capps, I I want to I wanna make it clear that although there may be some concern amongst the immigrant community as to if there's an issue with the polling place, I have to say that here at the elections division, I I can't recall us receiving one one bit of a a concern or inquiry regarding that. However, I understand it. It's it's quite possible that it may be out there. Once again, our poll workers are trained to watch for anything that looks unusual or out of place. Now having said that, you mentioned plainclothes.

I also have to make everybody aware of it and clear that everybody is allowed to observe an election, a polling place, ballot counting. And there are folks who regularly, and that's part of our partnership with the community, stand and watch the process. It it's part of what makes it really great. So the first action out of anybody who's concerned, including our poll workers, is to contact our division, and the phone number is it's available on our website. It's available from our voter information guide.

It's available from the ballots. So we are easy to contact. You can ask any one of those members of the polling place to contact our office. Once our office is contacted, that's when we partner with with our tremendous law enforcement families, first off, in the sheriff's department and allow them to do what they're good at. Our job is to count ballots. Our job is to ensure transparency in the process and to have integrity in the system. In terms of a law enforcement perspective, I would have to I would have to refer to sheriff Brown.

Thank you. We have printed out know your rights information that does, again, make it very clear that federal officers, it is illegal for them to be at polling places. It is illegal to carry an open to carry a firearm at polling sites, and, again, walks through sort of what intimidation looks like. But perhaps sheriff Brown would like to speak to if, in fact, things were to get rowdy, if in fact there were to be federal agents conducting immigration enforcement.

Thank you chair Kaps and members of the board. The Assistant Registrar was correct in what he said. I just want to lay the groundwork here. First of all, for the last several weeks, members of my office have been working very closely with members of the elections office as we do every year before the elections to coordinate and to synchronize our efforts as to how we are going to ensure the safety and the security of the process of voting. We have met, I have talked several times with Joe Holland, myself.

We've had commander, a lieutenant, a sergeant that have been very instrumental in speaking with members of the election staff to assure that this election will, like past elections, be very smooth and very fluid and that safety will be there. I think it needs clarification that there is a federal law which does prohibit any kind of intimidation, does prohibit any kind of, with some very limited exceptions, even the presence of federal law enforcement or the U. S. Military at polling places. Some of the exceptions to that would be obviously federal agents themselves have a right to vote.

So if they want to come to the polling place and vote, they are allowed to do that. In terms of if there was to be some absolute calamity or emergency and they were called for mutual aid, then they would be allowed to come and do that. That is something that we don't anticipate will happen at all. It's not only the law, it's also the policy of the federal agencies to make sure that they are not at the polling place identifiable to anyone because they're being told you have to adhere to the law and our policy is you're not going to be there. We have been assured by members of several federal law enforcement agencies that that has been discussed and refreshed this year as it will.

I think everybody can, although I know that some people are talking about the possible presence of ICE, and I know that there have been some rash statements that have been made by some people in the past about that's what should happen. The reality is we don't anticipate that that is going to happen. We will have a lieutenant that will be in the elections command center with the elections officials throughout the day. We have a number of deputies who are specifically assigned to provide escort for the ballots once the polls close. They will escort those ballots and make sure that they arrive at the central elections office for counting.

If there's any disturbance of any kind, we will respond to that. We will address it as quickly as possible and then we will be gone. But again, we have really not had any significant problems or issues in the past and we really don't anticipate that we will this time as well.

Well, that's good to hear. So can I interpret that? Given where we are in our community and the last year and a half roughly, I would imagine that even just the mere presence would be deemed as intimidation. Would that be your interpretation as well?

I I think that that is probably a fair assessment. Yeah. And I think that we have been assured that that will not happen.

And so then you all would

Well, know that step we've been assured that that won't happen, and I don't think it will happen.

Okay. So people should report that is is what you're seeing, particularly if it's causing disruption?

Any any disruption. If there's any electioneering or any kind of intimidation or what have you there, there's a process to deal with that. The local officials at the site would attempt probably to resolve it first. If that couldn't be done, then they would notify the command center. The command center would figure out what the best way to resolve it was. And if it required an intermediary or a response from the sheriff's office, we would respond, we would handle that, and then we would depart.

Thank you, sheriff. I appreciate that we're having this conversation again. I appreciate that the board unanimously supported this item for this conversation because we do support free and fair elections. It's almost so basic that it's odd to even have to state it. But that's what this county stands for. That's what this board of supervisors stands for. And that's why we were having this conversation. And and mister Koblos, for you to explain all of this stuff again, it's probably very rote to you, but it is very reassuring to hear it, and to hear it in detail. And for you to be here and to participate really does help us. So I do have some more questions more about outreach, but do do either of you have any questions about enforcement? Okay.

I don't

want enforcement.

Or anything you can go next.

Oh, not not from not from

the sheriff's department. Thank you.

Grow okay for now, sheriff. Thank you very much. Very much.

Yeah. For Martin, first off, I just wanna thank you and and and Joe and and the team for reinstating the Guadalupe drop box. I think it's very important that we have that out there. And I just wanted to note that the dropbox slide, you know, thank you, Supervisor Caps. Doctor.

Shall we put it

up? Doctor.

Yeah, that would be cool.

So I know folks in North County are gonna say, hey, we're not getting fair representation. We don't have as many drop boxes. We'll get out and vote. Okay? Because that's what's driving this. There's not an we're voting at a much lower rate than South County. So there's plenty of drop boxes to be able to do this. So I just wanna thank the department for putting that one in Guadalupe again. Martin, what I'd like you to do is one of the questions I always get is people see on election night. If you could just kinda run through election night, the logistics of it.

Because see a lot of time, people see returns come in, and they don't understand how all of a sudden it could flip a completely different way. Can you just kinda talk about how geography votes show up from different areas at different times?

Sure. I appreciate the question, supervisor. On on election night, there is a report that's put up on our website, and it's the first count of votes. And that occurs usually right after 08:00, generally by 08:15. Those that first tally of votes is all the vote by mail ballots that have been received up until 08:00 that election night.

And when I'm when I've mentioned before about voting early, That gives you an opportunity be part of that number. Throughout the night, after that number is presented, returns come in from the polls. And those are the people who elected to vote at the polls, which is perfectly, reasonable. Those ballots are brought in and processed as we receive them geographically. And we have one location, one secure location, as sheriff Brown mentioned, here at the command center where we count ballots exclusively.

So it's it's just a matter of geography sometimes. If we get ballots in from South County, which is closer to our office, those are reported in real time. The North County ballots, just because of the geography, take time to get here. So you may see some contests that that kinda don't make sense to you or don't really give you a true representation of of what the electorate is doing until the end of the night. And that's when we receive all the ballots from all 61 polling places, and we do a final tally on election night.

Those ballots that are received and and we post that. Those ballots that are received post election night are processed as quickly as possible. And I have to tell you, we're making great efforts in ensuring that we do it quick. Weekends, holidays, we're we're here to do our job so that the voters can can get a sense towards the end of the election as to what the outcome is. It's, yeah, it's the geography of it. Right. And that's why you might see something. I thank you for pointing that.

Okay. And then I just wanna clarify when you said, and then ballots that show up after election day, I just want to remind you, the the the people out there, that these are ones that have been stamped by the post office by election day.

Correct. That's very good.

Okay. So, yeah, I wanna let folks know too. Don't delay in sending in your ballot and then complain that the election results are taking too long. So if you know who you're voting for, like Martin said, get in there because I know, and I think we pay attention to elections a little bit more than most people, but the quicker the results come in, the better. And then the last question, concern I get, as a lot of people always are asking me, why is the election department calling the election, or why is the county calling the election? Can you just kinda go through that of how we you know, who does that and whose responsibility or not responsibility it is, but how does that happen?

Well, I wanna correct, any kind of misconception there may be. The elections department does not call elections. We report on the status of the election and the vote. We, in no way, prognosticate who's gonna win. Yep. We don't say when it's gonna be over. That is not our job. We report the numbers. We report the facts. It's it's for others to to make that, and we don't do that.

Great.

It's not over till it's over.

Yeah. That is so true. And, those are all my questions and concerns. I just from somebody that's been involved in it for the last thirty years, I've always felt very confident that the elections division is providing us with accurate information. I know just when you're on the ballot, you're overly concerned about possible fraud and those types of things.

And if I saw any of that, I'd be the first one to be raising my hand and saying that we have a problem. And I've never seen anything that even got close to questionable. The questions I get from the public are, 99% of the time are driven out of kind of ignorance of the process. It's kind of opaque to us. And so I think the more that we talk about it, you know, just simple things of saying that each ballot has a has a code on it that is dictated just for that person.

I think a lot of people get confused about that, or or they think they know a way around the system where somebody could vote by mail and then go vote at the polls. Really appreciate all the kind of clarification you've given because still going to be people out there that firmly believe that it's all fixed. But I appreciate you shedding some light on some of the of crazier things that we hear. So thanks.

No. I agree. And I'm thank you. Mister Kokobos, I'm gonna double down on the vote by mail questions because I have two examples of folks in senior homes that are really worried about it. They vote by mail every time, and they are worried about it. They read in NewsHawk that in 2025, 2,600 ballots that vote by mail weren't counted. Can you please clear that up? And second, can you just tell people plainly, if they're voting by mail, when does it need to be dropped off in the mail?

Okay. Happy to do that, supervisor. With respect to the ballots that weren't counted, because they arrived too late. It's not a matter of somehow they weren't counted because of any other reason. They were not postmarked by election day.

There is there is no rhyme or reason to it. We found that through up and down the state of California. The the special election was somewhat of an anomaly in terms of what time the voters showed up to vote or what time they mailed their ballots in. Those of you that observed election day in 2,025 probably noticed as we did in the elections division and up and down the state, for some reason and it's really difficult to explain voter behavior. That's why we don't predict.

We don't predict what the the turnout's gonna be because you never know. It's driven by by voters. They chose to vote close to 08:00 that night, and that's why up and down the state, there were lines of people, which, quite honestly, when there are lines of people, that means people care. They're there to vote, and and we do our best to support that. I don't know why we received so many without a postmark or that were mail plate.

It it's it was up and down the state, and it's hard to explain. And that's why we're urging voters to get their ballots out early. The sooner you mail it in, the sooner we receive it, and the sooner it goes out in the results. Now with respect to, nursing homes, anything like that, jails, or wherever people are unable to leave their situation, we send packets out routinely on voting to nursing homes, to jails, to to anywhere people are unable to vote. And, again, that's the same thing.

The sooner they can vote, the better. We have staff, and and most nursing homes have staff that provides ballots to those that wish to vote. And they're certainly counted.

Thank you. What do you I this is new information. What do you mean you send packets out? Does that mean somebody takes them back? Or

Yeah. They're informational packets that go out to each to each facility, convalescent home, whatever it may be.

Okay. But in that situation, they still need to mail them or have some have some can you have somebody drop it off for you at at a Dropbox?

You you can. Absolutely.

Okay. So if we could put that Dropbox screen back up, I'm, we we did this little graphic based off your information. Because to me, not every county has Dropboxes. We've your division has invested in these Dropboxes. I know they're not everywhere, but they are really helpful. Rather than dropping it off in a mailbox, this is like dropping it off at an elections office. It's the equivalent. So there's 18 of them. We could list some of them, supervisor Lee. One is at the Carpinteria City Hall.

One is at the Galitic Valley Community Center. One is right outside here at our Administration Building. So, these are very centrally located, and there's no delay. You can do that up until 8PM. Is that correct, Mr. Kobos?

That's that's correct. Up until election day at 8PM. Now, you know, somebody had mentioned the logistics that go into that. When you have 18 drop boxes and we have a a secure system, Each one of those drop boxes is manned by staff from the elections division, and not just one. It's at least two, at 8PM, solid 8PM, not 08:05 and not 07:55 at 8PM to lock that box and collect the ballots. Voters have up until that time to deposit it.

Okay. Well, again, just to report. So I just wanna finish here with our our questions, and then we'll go to public comment. Because outreach is so important. I know we touched on it a bit, and your office does some. But as we've discussed, I think we can be doing a lot more. And I think our offices can be a part of it. I know that our county's Public Information Officer, Kelsey Buttigieg, has done a ton in the last little bit. If you could just speak, I wanted to find out what you've done in the last week or so, two weeks, to really amp up the game to make sure people understand. Again, given the heightened concerns that exist uniquely to 2026, what have you been up to?

Good morning, members. Mister Koblos, I'm just asking this of of Kelsey at this point.

Good morning, members of the board. So since that we got the board direction two weeks ago, we had a comprehensive outreach campaign. So two press releases have gone out. The first press release that went out really summarized and gave that plainspeak of the board's direction, and it introduced the voting rights flyer to the media as well as to the public. So that went out to the media as well as was posted on our website.

Now in addition to those two press releases, we did a text campaign. So that text introduced 54,449 households to our voting rights flyer. And that really goes through the components that were put together by district two's office of voting rights and what you should know. And again that went out to 54,449 households. We also put county social media post out that's been posted on CSB TV.

You saw some of those slides running this morning. And then we have printed flyers. Those printed flyers are posted in offices throughout the county. So the social services offices, they're out in those offices. They also, social services has been a great partner in this. They have it posted on their welcome TVs as well. But in addition to that, we're trying to really reach as many communicators throughout the county as possible. So for our County Public Information Officers, they all received an email and were encouraged to amplify this Know Your Voting Rights flyer. And then it was sent out to our Emergency Public Information Communicators group. And that goes by short for EPIC.

And that group consists of County Information Officers, but City Information Officers, nonprofits all throughout the County Of Santa Barbara. And that was sent out to those 120 members, and they were encouraged to really amplify this messaging and share this flyer, the Know Your Voting Rights flyer. And this is really just the beginning of this outreach campaign. We're two weeks into it. So it's going to be continuing all the way as we go into the June primary election, and then again as we get into November.

So looking ahead, we're going to be having more press opportunities, more press releases, more social media. We're going to continue pushing this flyer out and really asking our County departments to put it out in those touch points, send it out to those community based organizations that they work with, share it with their clients. And then one of the big things that we see gets a lot of attention is putting together those multimedia videos. So putting together a video component. So it'd be my goal to partner with the County Elections Division to put together one of our Your County Your Services videos, really focusing on elections.

And giving the public that may not be able to get in there and be an observer and sign up for that, giving them that behind the scenes look. What it looks like to actually have those ballots come in and that verification process. And really provides that transparency that I think a good amount of the public is looking for right now. Well, thank you. You do

I mean, a ton of work has happened in the last two weeks. Mister Kobos, anything you'd like to add? And and what do you think about a video similar to what, Kelsey has done on so many other, good aspects of our work?

Well, first of all, I think Kelsey has been a great partner as as most of the media in the county of Santa Barbara have been to, and we really appreciate her efforts. I recently just discussed that possibility with mister Holland, and and we're open to it. We would we would love to get a little bit more information out to the public, in terms of what happens to your ballot in very in a very easy to understand process so that sometimes, it becomes a little bit more available. We would be certainly open to doing that for November. We continue to discuss that.

One of the things that we do in the elections division is after each election, we hold a meeting, a post election meeting, and we discuss better ways of doing things. And I know that certainly is on tap for our post election meeting. We certainly appreciate that. Now I I can say that our message to the voters is please vote. As as you've all pointed out, vote.

That is the most important thing that you can do. You wanna be your vote to count early and make sure that it counts, please make your choice. And I keep referring to the governor's race. But there are other races on the back of that ballot, local races. There are local measures. There are things that voters need to pay attention to. Get those materials. We mailed one out to we mailed a voter information guide to each one of the 250,000 registered voters. Ballots will begin going out at the end of this week. They're already in the mail chain.

Please don't leave it on the kitchen counter as sometimes we're all guilty of. Sit down. Make your choice. Place that ballot either in one of our 18 drop boxes, any of The US postal, mailboxes, or simply at any polling place on election day. But the most important message is to vote. Your voice counts, and I can assure you that your ballot will be safe, secure, and counted if it if it's a valid ballot. And I appreciate it.

Yeah. I agree. The proactive message is good, and we're all hearing it in here for, almost an hour here. But I think, allowing Kelsey to do a video for this election would be great. So, hopefully, mister Holland will agree to that. And also too, I just want to I know other counties actually pay media. LA County, they actually do paid ads. That would be something in the future I think it would be great to look into in different languages to actually explain voting rights in ways that reach people. So I hope we can get creative in the future. To flip it around, I know these proactive messages are vitally important.

But maybe, Kelsey, don't go away yet. Because I know how active you are, and our emergency response is. Because I really see this in the same vein, that that democracy is under threat here, the same way that we activate when we have an emergency here in our county, that we need to be thinking along the same lines right now. We're sort of preparing for a storm, if you might. And so similarly, if something goes wrong, are we prepared to, or could we be prepared to activate Twitter, activate our social media channels the way that, you know, if a road is closed, people are sharing information.

I know that in previous elections when there's been long lines in Isla Vista, my texts start blowing up. And I don't really know what to do with that information very quickly or effectively. Yet, to use the comparison with the fire department, I sure know what to do when there is an emergency. I absolutely know who to get in touch with because those lines of communication have been solidified. So can we be thinking that way, both Director Kobos and you as well? What do people do? Where do

they go if there is an incident? If something unforeseen does happen and people need to share information and have their confusion explained? So the know your voting rights flyer that went out and is still being sent out, that has a list of numbers and information on there. So there are several numbers. One of the best resources is calling our County Elections Office so that that messaging can be clear.

And they're able to communicate with myself. And then we will be updating our social media with information as well as the night goes on. And we're, you know, about a month exactly out from election day, but we're being really proactive to really encourage our registered voters, or if you're not a registered voter, to register to vote now so that you can get your ballot taken care of so you're not encountering maybe that last minute line. But, of course, if there is an emergency or anything like that, we are constantly monitoring our social media channels. And then we have those direct numbers on the voting rights flyer, and they're posted throughout the county.

Okay. So that would be our main county our main county social media channels.

Correct. Which is at County Of SB, our main county social media channels. You can find it, you know, on X, as well as Instagram and Facebook. And in addition to that, we have a county newsletter that goes out to about 50,000 of our residents. Please sign up for that. All that information is proactively going out to the community. But at County Of SB is our social media channels.

Okay. That's great. Okay. Well, I certainly have asked a ton of questions. Let's go to the public now and see if the public comment, and then we'll circle it back to the board if there's any remaining comments or questions. Thank you so much.

Chair Capsa, members of the board, yes. We have three requests to speak from the public on this item. We are going to remain here in Santa Barbara to begin with Larry Barrett. Then we will go to Santa Maria with Ken Westall. Larry?

Good morning, chair caps, members of the board. I am Larry Barrett with Indivisible Santa Barbara. And I approached the podium more concerned about election security than I was when I entered the room two hours ago. Director Kobo says he's heard no concern from the public about the possible presence of ICE at polling places. I can assure him there's tremendous concern on that very issue.

We have a poll last year showing that two thirds of Latino voters in California are concerned about this. So that was last year. In response to what I've heard that the elections office intends to conduct this election as they've conducted elections in the past, I recommend to you a recent report by the Brennan Center in finding that election officials around the country are worried about election security, attacks on the elect on the integrity of elections, threats to election workers, and political interference with the process. Our county clerk does not appear to be among these election officials, which is unfortunate. In response to your direction to describe his plan to meet the threat to this year's elections, he simply described prior year practices without any assessment that these practices are adequate to meet the current threat.

So the report before you falls well short of what we have a right to expect. Yesterday's Orange County Register reported on how other county election offices recognize the threat and are responding to it without being prodded to do so by their supervisors, and I recommend this article to you. But probably most disturbing is the county clerk's repeated assertion, and let me find it in the report. Looking at the wrong report here. That he will do nothing in the face of law enforcement activity at the polling place.

This flies in the face of last month's guidance from the state attorney general, which makes it clear, as you have made it clear today, that even law enforcement is constrained by state and federal law on voter intimidation. So we ask that you would sir that you instruct the county clerk to strictly follow the guidance from the attorney general, which is a lot better than the report that he laid before you. So over the coming weeks, our group at Indivisible will be acting with other community groups to educate voters, assess threats, and work to make certain that all votes count and election reports election results are protected and respected. Based on the clerk's report, we don't expect a lot of help from him, but we do hope to do this work in partnership with this board. Thank you so much.

Thank you. We will now go to Santa Maria with Ken Westall. And that will be our final speaker as our member on Zoom is no longer with us.

And I'll close public comment.

Can you hear me?

Yes. We can. Please proceed.

Thank you for the time. This issue of election integrity, I I think, really, you have to go to the root of the problem. The root of the problem is this. When I was a kid, my elementary school, the voter rolls for that precinct were all in the walls in the cafeteria. I remember this very, very clearly.

And in recent years, about half the states will not make voter rolls open to the public. Okay? I went to look on the Utah voter site. Every registered voter is on that voter roll. I don't know how you can hold a democratic election unless these voter rolls are open for inspection. My mom died in 1994. She remained up till 2020 on the voter rolls in Santa Clara County. And I got all the documentation. There was an election that was held several years ago in Compton. It was a close election.

It came down to less than 10 votes. One of candidates was able to get the data, found out that four of the voters had moved out of the precinct or out of the state. The candidates had to switch seats. So, again, if there's nothing to hide, if there's if there's no problem, just make the voter rolls open. The rest of this debate and discussion will go away.

That's that's clearly, clearly the root of this problem is there's no other country where there aren't open voter rolls and you can't see where where things are. When I was on the city council in Guadalupe, we would get a list of all the voters in town and we'd go door to door. I went with Tom Rubansky. We'd ask people to vote. I I asked people to vote for me, and Tom, I remember going with him. He got people to vote for him going door to door. We need to go back to that system. And that would solve the problem. You might ask your election official why we're not doing that. Thank you for the time.

And that concludes public comment on this item.

Thank you. I just had one additional comment on outreach to Mr. Kobos, if he's still with us. I know in the report you said that you do outreach, I think you said a handful of different groups. Have you all worked, done outreach with immigrant groups or anyone's particularly with the Latino community?

I would have to check with our our polling place and, check with their outreach. We don't necessarily target a specific community. We have within those groups, I can say that there are members from all aspects of the community. As to whether we go out and seek out one section of the community, I'd have to check.

Okay. Okay. Well, we've had a really good conversation here. Any other questions or comments? Well, I again, I really this is what I was hoping to just have almost kind of a workshop here, and that's somewhat what it came to be amongst the board here.

And I would say that this is something we shouldn't do because there's almost an emergency upon us with so much in the national dialogue, but rather more regularly. I do think we learned a lot. I hope that this has translated somewhat, and hopefully has relayed some concerns. I just I do want to express some disappointment that the election division was fairly reluctant to even participate in this conversation. It shouldn't be that.

This should be a division that wants to meet the moment, and not have their head in the sand about the fact that there is even a moment in which the electorate, the people that we all serve, are really concerned. Polling was expressed about fears that people have. But we also just know it being out and about. And we serve the people. And this is a time in our history when a huge portion of our community is afraid to go to the grocery store, afraid to go to church, afraid to go to school.

And we cannot just do business as usual if people are afraid to vote. It's so fundamental to who we are as a country. And those of us who are charged with civic life need to be doing as much as we can. I don't have all the answers. That is for certain.

But I just feel a strong urgency that we need to be doing as much as we possibly can in June, in November, again in our next election, to up our game, to find the tools, to be creative, to meet people where they are, to find the resources, to assure them, to adopt creative ideas from different counties who are figuring out ways in which we can reach people to assure them that it is safe to vote. Because it is it is literally it's not hyperbolic to say that our democracy hangs in the balance. And if people are confused, they don't vote. We know that. And so I appreciate, mister Kobos, I appreciate all the answers that you provided.

And I just hope that going forward, we can really partner together, all of us, to make sure that people understand that our county, and only our county, is in charge of our elections. And that this dialogue continues. It's that important to me. So with that, I will entertain a motion to receive and file this report. It just is recommended actions a and b.

I'll make that motion.

Thank you, Supervisor Lavinino.

I'll second.

Okay. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you.

Okay. Are we ready for departmental item number two?

Chair Kapsum, members of the board, departmental item number two is from the public works Department. It is a hearing to consider recommendations regarding the introduction, first reading of an ordinance, amending speed limits specified in county code sections 20 three-fifteen 0.4, 20 three-fifteen 0.5, 23 dash 15.6, and twenty three fifteen point nine. And this is in the 1st And 4th Districts.

Okay.

Good morning, Chartcabs and members of the board. My name is Mostafa Seji, and I'm the deputy director for Transportation Division Public Works. And I'm joined by Gary Smart, our traffic engineer, and director Sneaden here for any questions that you might have. Today, we are going to present some speed limit changes and updates across the county on a few locations. And with that, I will pass it over to our traffic engineer, Keri.

Thank you. Chair Caps, members of the board, we're presenting the speed limit update for you today. I'll give you a little background on the process for setting speed limits. Speed limits expire every seven years or fourteen years if nothing's changed. And we need to review the speed zones for the ETSs.

We perform that in the field collecting data. I have another slide that will go over what an ETS is. We'll bring those changes to the board for changes to the county code. And then documentations presented to the CHP and the courts with any kind of updates. And the appropriate signage will be installed in the fields thirty days after the approval from your board.

And then the zones would be enforceable at the new speed limits. An ETS is the engineering traffic survey that's performed. We look at the speeds on the roadways, the characteristics of the roads. We look at daily volumes, collision history, and we use all this to follow the state procedures for setting speed zones in the county. All counties and cities have to follow this procedure by the state to establish speed zones.

And, it's basically based on the eighty fifth percentile speeds of the actual traffic on the roadways. And we have very little discretion on these speed zones setting it. But there has been some changes that have proved that for the local counties, give us a little more discretion. These we're presenting today, a couple of them are because of those changes. The first zone we're looking at is in the Carpinteria areas, Santa Claus Lane. And currently the speed limit in front of the south portion is a business district, 25 miles per hour. It doesn't need an ETS. It's a prima facie speed limit. But the northern part does need a speed zone. It has no fronting residents.

It's pretty much beach access right there. And we have a project currently going on. Phase one has been completed of the Santa Claus Lane improvements, establishing parking. And we have two additional phases coming in later, but we've come in with a speed survey to see what kind of speeds we can get a speed limit for out there. And we're proposing a 30 mile per hour speed zone.

The eighty fifth percentile was 35 miles per hour. So we did reduce it because of the pedestrian activity and the increased bicycle activity. Another parallel project to this is a multiuse path that has been established from Carpenteria over to Santa Claus Lane. We've seen a lot of additional bicycle traffic going through this area. So we are proposing to reduce it down to 30 miles per hour, which would be the lowest speed limit that we can legally set.

Our next zone is San Antonio Creek. This is in the parallel to 154 area and then kind of the Nolita section between Goleta and Santa Barbara cities. It was set at 40 miles per hour. We've been working with the community out there, making some changes, adding some markings to the roadway, edge line striping, some additional signage warning people of conditions not really apparent, and requesting them to slow down. We do have a lot of pedestrian activity out here.

There's no sidewalks. So a lot of times the pedestrians are are required to walk in the roadway. And we've done a recent ETS for this section, and we found the eighty fifth percentile was lowered down to 40 miles an hour, which allows us to lower the additional five miles per hour because of the pedestrian, the bicycle activity out here, the hidden driveways, and other characteristics that aren't readily apparent to the motorists. So we're proposing a 35 miles per hour zone for this section of roadway. And our last one is California.

This is in the Orcutt area. And this is one that came to the board a couple years ago. We created a safety zone for it. And now we're coming back, we're just going to classify it as a residential meets the residential density. Assembly Bill 43 changed the laws that allow us not to consider if it's a local road or not, establishing residential density and residential districts.

And so this now qualifies for a 25 mile per hour prima facie. So we're asking to remove it from the county code, and then we'll post it 25 miles per hour, and we won't have to come back to the board with any other changes to this road in the future. It'll it'll be permanently 25. And here's a summary of those recommendations. And then here's the recommendations, which I can read to you if you if you wish. Otherwise, I can answer any other questions for you.

Good. I think we're good. Any questions from the board?

Thank you.

You you covered it. Any madam clerk, any any public comment?

Chair Capsa, members of the board, we have no request to speak from the public on this item.

I guess everyone is good with speed limits.

I'm not, but that's okay. I will drive a lot slower along there. I didn't even know that was 30 on California. It's like 40 just to keep up with everybody, but I'll do 25.

Was 35 a few years ago.

I'm happy with with Yes.

Slow everybody down.

Yes.

Alright. I will I'll make a motion to approve items a, b, c, including aye and little I. I'll second it.

Okay. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you, gentlemen. And with that, we are going to oh, Madam Clerk. What did I forget?

Chair Kaps and members of the Board, I believe Supervisor Nelson has just joined us, and we were going to return back to administrative item number 27 to be approved from the Public Works Department. It is to consider recommendations regarding a public works director's report on emergency response actions from impacts on flooding and storms and continuation of emergency actions from the transportation division since there is a four fifth vote required on this item. And this item is required to be approved by your board every two weeks, So cannot wait till next week. So if we can take that item up and get approval by your board.

Great. And director Snell is still here. If there's any questions, are we we good? Any questions from the board? Welcome, chair Nelson. Is he on the I'm We're good?

I'm on. I have a quick I have a quick announcement I need to make before before

I get started.

Supervisor Nelson?

Yes. Thank you. I'm participating remotely under the just cause exemption because I am traveling on official business of our legislative body or another state or local agency. There are no individuals over the age of 18 in the room with me, and that's all I got to announce for transparency purposes.

Sounds good.

That seemed a little weird, but We believe you, Bob.

Alright. Yeah. It's required by state law. I didn't make it up.

Alright. We we believe you. Yes. You look it's nice to see you.

I'll move, items a through d.

I'll take it.

Okay. All those in favor, please

oh. A roll

call vote. Call vote because we have one who's oh, do we need public comment on this?

Ask. Chair caps and members of the board, thank you for asking, and we have no request to speak from the public on this item.

Okay. Now we are ready for a roll call vote. Supervisor Lee?

Aye.

Supervisor Lavinino? Aye. Supervisor Nelson?

Aye.

And for purposes for today, chair caps? Aye.

Okay. Motion carries. Thank you so much. With that, county council, please read us out for closed session.

Thank you, madam chair, members of the board. In closed session today, the board is scheduled for two items, conference with labor negotiators, which for County Executive Officer candidate with the agency designated representative as Board Chair Nelson and public employee appointment for County Executive Officer.

And, what is our estimate time?

Probably between thirty and forty five minutes.

Okay. Let's say forty five minutes. So we'll come back, if that clock is accurate, around 12:45. Thanks. Okay.

We are back from closed session. County council, will you please give us a report?

Thank you, madam chair and members of the board. The board met in closed session on two items, conference with labor negotiators for county executive officer candidate and public employee appointment for county executive officer, and the board took no reportable action.

Okay. We are pretty much on schedule here for anyone who's tracking, and we'll move to item number, three.

Chair Capsa, members of the board, departmental item number three is from the human resources department. It is a hearing to consider recommendations regarding annual county workforce vacancies, recruitment, and retention report, and public hearing.

Thank you. Good afternoon chair caps and the board. We are before you here today to present our annual vacancy hearing required by AB 2561. The hearing will review the county's vacancies and positions across the county, focusing on calendar year 2025. I have with me today to assist me Natalie Alvarado, who is our talent acquisition and development division chief.

And will be assisted by Raquel Martinez, who is our talent acquisition manager. As we discuss vacancies, I do like to set the stage for the discussion a little bit. The premise behind AB 2,561, which passed in 2024 and was championed by state level employee unions, is that vacancies are a problem. And specifically, that vacancies are a problem that should be solved with pay and benefit increases. And while that can sometimes be the case, it isn't necessarily so.

First, some turnover is normal and expected due to changing family situations, promotional opportunities, retirements, performance issues, etcetera. In fact, most of our departments actually budget and build in vacancy assumptions in those budgets. Many of our vacancies are in active recruitment because we're going through those normal cycles. In addition, vacancies are sometimes held vacant for a period of time as a management tool to balance budgets and address unanticipated priorities that may occur throughout the year in our departments. Some vacancies are in new positions where we just haven't had a chance to fill them.

We may be recruiting for the first time for those. For departments that hire in a cohort or an academy training structure, we may carry vacancies on the books until the next cohort or academy begins, we can put those folks through training together. Examples of that would be in the auditor controller office, the sheriff and fire. Other factors that can create recruitment challenges include an overall tight labor market, education shortages in certain professions, public perceptions in certain professions, perceived workloads, preferences toward contract employees, and trends of valuing salary over benefits more common in the public sector like retirement. So those are not salary related, but they can affect our ability attract and retain.

Though the bulk of today's presentation will follow AB2561 format focusing on last year, at the end I'll share a slide showing our current vacancies by department. These are of course a big focus, as these present opportunities to work with employees who would otherwise be facing layoff or displacement in June due to budget cuts to help them find other employment within the county. So with that, I will turn the presentation over to Natalie Alvarado, our talent acquisition and development division chief. And I will come back at the end and wrap it up.

Thank you Director Schmidt, Chair Caps, and members of the Board. As part of our efforts to meet the obligations of AB 2,561, today we will be covering the county wide information for calendar year 2025. So what we'll be looking at is data as of 12/31/2025. This will cover recruitment retention and vacancy efforts. As director Schmidt mentioned, at the end of my review of calendar year 2025 information, we will go over or she will cover the current fiscal constraints specifically what our current vacancies are and maybe how that's driven a little bit by current fiscal constraints.

Once we've reviewed the County's information we will turn it over to our unions who have notified us that they will be presenting today as part of the hearing. Thank you. So just a quick recap on what the requirements are of AB2561. This went into effect on 01/01/2025. And it requires public agencies to hold at least one public hearing per fiscal year prior to the adoption of our budget.

We are required to present information on our overall vacancies and funded positions in our recruitment and retention efforts for the past year. Any organized employee organization from a bargaining unit, or a union in this case, is entitled to make a presentation to the board addressing their units vacancies and recruitment and retention efforts. And then if the vacancy rate in that bargaining unit exceeds 20%, the union can request that the county prevent certain additional information at the hearing, such as the number of vacancies in that bargaining unit, the amount of applications we received, average hiring times, and so on. We did get a request from the bargaining unit ten, and I will go into a little bit further detail further on in my report, that they have requested that we provide additional information on their vacancy rate that exceeded 20%. So just a recap of the workforce information our total budgeted authorized full time positions as of December 31 was 4,732.45 FTE.

And this number takes into account positions that were added throughout the fiscal year, outside of the annual budgeting cycle, along with positions that were unfunded in social services in November 2025 as part of an effort to mitigate layoffs. So we've done work to reconcile our data so that it only includes budgeted funded positions as of the end of calendar year 2025. Our county provides services to the public through 23 different departments that support, as you can see up above, our administrative and civic services, public safety and legal services, health and human services, housing, community, and environmental services. So this is a snapshot of our recruitment lifecycle. We have a process that we are required to follow because we are a merit based civil service agency.

Vacancies at the county are created for a variety of reasons, whether that be through internal movements, such as promotions, demotions, transfers. It could also be that we have newly positions being added to the budget. And so when a vacancy occurs, the department will submit a requisition for the position to be filled in our applicant tracking system. We will then begin the process of working to fill that vacancy. We'll look to see if there's already an existing eligible list of qualified candidates that we can provide to the department to consider for interviews.

If there are, they can consider they can continue their hiring process. If there is no qualified eligible list, we will then work with the hiring managers to develop the job posting, screen for minimum qualifications, take someone through the testing process before we place them on the list, and then provide that to the hiring department. The department then receives the top 10 names to review and invite to interviews, and they'll continue the hiring process of their interviews, conditional offer, a background check, reference checks, etc. So as you can imagine, this takes some time and can be can make it a little bit challenging for us to compete with the private sector hiring timelines just because we do want to follow a merit based process when we are selecting our candidates. So this chart up above outlines our vacancy information for calendar year 2025.

As you can see, there's vacancy information for each month, and what were the vacancies at the end of that month. Vacancy percentages that are at the bottom line of that chart were calculated by taking the number of remaining vacancies for that month and dividing it by the total funded FTE at the end of that month. As I mentioned previously, vacancies at the end of each month were created through internal movement, promotions, demotions, maybe an employee leaving the county or retiring, in newly budgeted positions. Our average vacancy rate across the year for the entire county was 9%, and this reflects a 2.51 decrease in the average vacancy rate from the previous year. That's in part due to more accurate tracking of our vacant unfunded positions, along with in November and December seeing a drop in funded vacancies because of board direction to unfunded positions in social services that were slated to be unfunded for cost reduction efforts in lieu of layoffs.

Our highest vacancy rate was 9.6% in January, and then our lowest vacancy rate was 8.1% in November. And you'll just see that there's some trends of dips and spikes throughout the year of vacancies. In February we had a spike in vacancies filled. That was the highest. We filled 92 vacancies that month.

And then you'll see kind of March through May that we had a higher range of vacancies and that's typically just because we see retirements start to take effect in March and go through the following months until we start looking at hiring those positions. So this slide is intended to satisfy our obligations to talk about our recruitment efforts for the past year. As you can see, we filled six fifty vacancies over calendar year 2025 and had over 15,400 applications in that year. While those are great efforts and we had different types of recruitments, those varied from continuous recruitments where we filled 185 vacancies. And continuous recruitments are typically run for hard to fill positions that will be open for a long time.

So the hiring timeline for continuous recruitments can look a little extended. We then also had new external recruitments, and we filled three seventy two positions through new external recruitments. Just the difference between external recruitments and internal recruitments are that external recruitments are open to the public, but current county employees can also apply to those recruitments and be hired through those. And then internal only recruitments are for promotional opportunities such as a departmental promo or Countywide promo. So while we have done a great job filling some of these vacancies, I will talk a little bit about how it has been challenging to fill some of our hard to fill positions, and what might be driving some of those factors.

And this is a recap of our retention efforts. You'll see that we have employees leaving positions for a variety of reasons from retirements to voluntary separations to involuntary separations and internal movement that's captured through promotions, transfers, and demotions. Our annual turnover rates, it's at about 8.88%, which is fairly standard, and it's captured through the total number of separations. And that's including retirements and voluntary separations and voluntary separations divided by the number of budgeted FTE. Okay.

So what are our actual vacancies as of December 31? The chart outlines the vacancy rate for each bargaining unit. And you can see that as of 12/31/2025, our vacancy rate for each bargaining unit was under 20%, with the exception of Bargaining Unit ten, which is Physicians and Psychiatrists Non Supervisory. They had a vacancy rate of 38.23%, and I will present more data on what's driving that. All of the unions were notified if they had any bargaining units with a 20% or higher vacancy rate, and their right to request additional information at this hearing.

County HR did receive a request from Bargaining Unit ten to go into more detail on what's driving their vacancy rates. So I will go into that in a couple slides. So here are additional represented bargaining units and their associated vacancy rates. You can see that none of these bargaining units have been over 20% vacancy rate as of December 31. And I'm not gonna go into each specific bargaining unit, that's and then we have our unrepresented group.

We have grouped together all of our unrepresented managers attorneys confidential employees department heads assistant department heads to show you that the vacancy rate for those groups are 9.46% and as they have no union representation there will be no one speaking on that behalf. So the statute does require us to identify what are necessary changes to the policies, procedures, and recruitment activities that have led to hiring obstacles? And what are those hiring processes? Or what are those obstacles? So one of the things that we did want to just mention, it's the first bullet point up there, was this past year one of the challenges or just realities is that departments have been holding vacancies vacant for a bit.

And that's just because of the anticipation for budget reductions. Departments have been intentional in not wanting to hire someone, and then have to potentially cut that position later. So that has been driving some of our vacancy rates for a longer period of time. Additional challenges that continue to be challenges from previous years are just the cost of living and housing in Santa Barbara. It can be hard to attract qualified applicants to this area, given the cost of living and housing.

As I mentioned earlier, and kind of walked you through the process, our civil service recruitment requirements and the recruiting process can be time intensive, and make it challenging to compete with the private sector. Additionally, just finding a qualified applicant pool in this area, while we use different avenues for advertising such as NeoGov, our website, social media, LinkedIn, Indeed, we still have challenges in certain positions in finding qualified applicant pools. And then we do have class specifications that are outdated and I know we're working diligently to start to update some of those and come to you with a classification plan, but that still poses a challenge. And then the last thing is just family health benefits that continues to be something I think that the board has made major progress on. But we do hear from time to time, family health benefits can make it challenging for us to be competitive.

So what are our opportunities? We've been exploring the following opportunities to address these applicants or these obstacles. One is how do we expand the employee referral program? We know that there are departments who are interested in trying to expand that employee referral program. Right now we have it for the custody deputy positions, and it has been fairly successful in increasing our custody deputy referrals, and then also filling those vacancies.

Additionally working with departments to look at profession specific marketing strategies. How do we look at hiring or placing ads on specific medical boards or or specific areas where we know qualified applicants are. County HR is also currently working on creating a classification specification update plan and we're hoping to bring that to the board I think in the future just what's our process for managing our classifications. Then we also have a committee that's been working to revise our civil service recruitment rules. There's been a lot of work done on that this past year to try and streamline our hiring process and maybe cut some of the the tape that can delay our recruiting processes.

And then lastly, identifying and developing an internal talent pool. Given that we anticipate layoffs, one of the things we are doing is we will be working to do some internal job matching. So when we know that an employee might be scheduled to change a position or potentially be laid off, our goal is to offer career counseling and see where there's opportunities to have that employee land in another department in lieu of a layoff. So that is something that we will be focused on in this upcoming in these upcoming months. As I mentioned earlier, bargaining unit ten did ask for a further breakdown of what's driving their high vacancy rate.

So as you can see above, one of the challenges is that the psychiatrist classification has been particularly challenging to fill vacancies. We have eight filled positions as of December 31, and 10.9 vacancies. So that's driving the overall bargaining units high vacancy rate. We do still have challenges though with hiring staff physicians. One of the things that we do offer for these positions is a $90,000 new hire incentive to try and increase applicant pools.

But as you'll see in my next slide, we have challenges finding qualified applicants. So what's been the recruitment information for the past year? Both of these positions have been posted. These positions we recruit continuous. So they're open year round, because we know how challenging it is to fill these positions.

For the psychiatrists, in calendar year 2025, we just received seven applications. Of those, six were qualified, and then two were hired off of the qualified list. And then for staff position, we received 16 qualified applications, and we hired seven. So our applicant pool is fairly our qualified applicant pool is fairly small for the calendar year. One of the oh no, you're okay.

One of the things that we are required to talk about is just our average number of days to complete the hiring process from when the position is posted to when there's an offer response. So total, because these are run continuous, it is two thirty six days from when we first opened it to when we actually get an offer. One of the things we did want to distinguish though, is that from when we actually receive an application, so when someone submits an application online, to when we get them a response, an offer response, it's seventy one days. And those seventy one days include us reviewing the application, taking someone through the testing process, interviewing them, doing reference checks, and then getting an offer. So we are trying to be very responsive from when we receive the application to when we make an offer.

However, we have a very small applicant pool, so that has been one of the challenges. So one of the things that we were asked to do is just what are some opportunities for improvement for Bargaining Unit ten. We would like to look at evaluating the compensation structure for these classifications, assess the base salary and total compensation against existing public sector market. One of the challenges is potentially competing with the private sector, but we are a public sector agency. And so we are looking or wanting to look at what's the base salary and total compensation?

How does that stack against other relative public sector agencies? Also looking at increasing or exploring the possibility for flexibility in some of the offers or types of positions, whether that's a part time role, or alternative work schedules to improve recruitment and retention efforts. And then just some other things that we're looking to do on the recruitment side of things is strengthen our recruitment pipeline and retention efforts, looking at how do we create training programs, or evaluate our long term reliance on locum tenants, and specifically marketing. How can we make sure that we're posting ads in specialty journals, and then highlighting some of the benefits from working in public sector, which is really our pension and other public sector benefits, and how that might draw someone who is working in the private sector but wants a long term pension and and the value of that so those are things that we'll be looking to explore more with bargaining unit ten With that I'm going to turn it over to director Schmidt to give an update on our current vacancies.

Great so we did want to show you sort of this is by department a snapshot of our current vacancies. And as you can see at the bottom, after controlling for 106 positions that are slated for elimination next fiscal year, and holding 61 vacant positions for us to absorb some of the folks coming out of those eliminated positions. We end up with three sixty six current vacancies Countywide. Beginning next week, when employees will receive notices if their position is being eliminated, we'll start working aggressively to help employees apply for vacancies they may be qualified for and interested in throughout the county. Now, not all employees are going to be qualified for all of those vacancies or interested in them, but we will be attempting to work with those folks individually to find the ones that do fit.

We have two job fairs planned for these employees in the next two months, and have invited not only our internal recruiters, but also recruiters from external employers who have the types of jobs our displaced employees may be interested in to come to those job fairs. I've got a really great support package that we've prepared for anybody who is facing a displacement. Right in there, we've got the employee job fairs listed, as well as a QR code where they can really quickly find out how to participate in those internal and external recruitment efforts that we'll be offering displaced employees. I know that that's a focus of all of us, including our departments. I want to thank B Well has been particularly good about thinking about their vacancies and who from other departments might be qualified to take over some of those vacancies.

And we're really appreciative of their kind of focus on that as we move over in the next couple of months.

Okay so that concludes our portion of the presentation. We are going to turn it over to the unions who have requested to present today. We're going to start with the Union of American Physicians and Dentists which represents bargaining unit ten. Believe Are they online maybe?

Do

we know? I believe it was Glenys. Okay. We're gonna move forward to the local seven twenty one, SEIU seven twenty one, and Carson I believe, is here to present. And give us one second to get their presentation up.

Thank you. Oh, perfect.

Thank you supervisors. My name is Carson Acosta, regional director for SEIU Local seven two one. Today, we'll be presenting on our vacancies for our bargaining units, twenty one and twenty two. So I think this is probably the most important slide to review. Looking at our first bargaining unit, bargaining unit twenty one, non supervisory, both social work and eligibility, we're down to 10% in vacancies, rate of 2.2%.

And supervisors, we have no vacant positions. But I think that really only tells half the story. Last fall, we came together, and through the collective action of both our our members and the county took extraordinary steps to reduce every vacant funded position in an attempt to eliminate the the need for layoffs that would have devastated the Department of Social Services. This year, we're again facing another budget crisis, admittedly not of the county's making, but that the county is forced to deal with. As the county decides how to move forward, our members cannot afford even one more cut, particularly our social workers.

Our social workers are caring for the most vulnerable members of our community and are a key component of the public safety system within this county. Eliminating even one more social worker will result in children falling through the cracks and more children not having a social worker assigned to their case. As we approach final budget adoption, we're again asking you to fully fund Department of Social Services so that we can again have a zero layoff budget. Looking at the remainder of the slides, our positions, again, mostly in the Department of Social Services, the overwhelming majority, very low vacancy rate because of the action that we took collectively last fall to eliminate the vacant positions. But again, the work did not stop.

The caseloads have not gone down, and our our members are being asked to do more with less. Looking at the vacancy rate by classification, again, telling the same story. Very low vacancy rates, again, but not reflective of the amount of work that our members are being asked to do. And when we're looking at why members are leaving, members are retiring, members are, leaving voluntarily more than anything else, and I think that also speaks to the, the feeling of uncertainty within the department. Will the position be here tomorrow or the next fiscal year?

And is this a place a a county that I can work for long term and and plan my life and my career around? So as we continue to look into the future, the budget, the budget cycle that we're coming to in June, again, you for to look consider that as part of a a zero layoff budget and to protect our our social services. That concludes our presentation. We're happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

Thank you.

We're gonna move forward to Local six twenty's presentation. I believe Laura Robinson will be presenting. We're just going to get her presentation set up.

Sounds good.

Oh, I think over here.

Leo's gonna run a computer.

Good afternoon, Chair Caps and members of the Board. Thank you for the opportunity to present today. I'm excited to have more than three minutes. My name is Laura Robinson, Executive Director of SEIU Local six twenty, representing Bargaining Units twenty, twenty three, 24, 25, 26 and 27. And with me today, I have County Field Representative Leo DeCassos and members, Sheriff's Civilian Criminal Records, Christina Rubio.

At County Health, we have Veronica Pulido, who is a pharmacy technician. And at Social Services, we have Francisco Hernandez, who is IT support. So this vacancy report is not just a procedural requirement. It is a reflection of the county's operational health and a warning about the consequences of continued staffing vacancies and reductions, including the eliminations and layoffs currently being proposed. Today, I wanna connect the data in this report to the real world impacts on county services, employees, and the public.

So who is Local six twenty? Local six twenty represents employees in every single department at the county, the workers who make this county function every day and who are the first line of contact for your constituents. They include public health professionals, behavioral wellness staff, sheriff's non sworn personnel, administrative and fiscal staff, road crews, election workers, public defenders, animal control, planners, and many others who keep the county safe, accessible, and accountable. The highest vacancies and deepest proposed cuts fall in social services, public health, and the sheriff's office, the departments that provide the most essential, high impact services to our most vulnerable residents. These employees support children, seniors, people with disabilities, survivors of violence, individuals experiencing homelessness, and families in crisis.

Their work is not optional, and the service they provide cannot be delayed or absorbed without real harm to real people. That is why today's vacancy report matters. It shows a workforce already stretched thin and now facing the possibility of losing even more of the people who hold the safety net together. The vacancy numbers provided by HR, reflect a single point in time, vacancies as 12/31/2025. Now though that snapshot is useful, it does not reflect what employees experience throughout the year.

Our numbers here represent the average vacancy rate across the entire 2025 calendar year, a far more accurate picture of sustained understaffing. Departments have been operating below minimum staffing levels, relying on overtime, and stretching employees to cover multiple roles. Employees have raised concerns, the union has raised concerns, and the public has felt the consequences. The vacancy report confirms that workers have been what what workers have been saying. The system is strained and is nearing a breaking point.

So Local six twenty members are the frontline employees, the people who answer the calls, process the cases, respond to crisis, and keep the system moving. And we all know that when positions are eliminated but the workload stays the same or increases as department heads heads have indicated will be the case this time, the work does not fall up. It falls down, down to the lowest paid workers with the least control over staffing decisions and the greatest responsibility for keeping services running. Eliminating positions compounds the burden of long standing vacancies. It increases stress, burnout, and the risk of service failures, not because employees aren't dedicated, but because they are being asked to do the to do the impossible with fewer and fewer resources.

The county is now proposing to eliminate additional positions and conduct layoffs on top of the long standing vacancies. This means fewer people doing more work, higher burnout, longer delays for the public, and greater risk of service failures. And here's the key point for this hearing. When the county eliminates a position, the vacancy disappears on paper only, but the workload does not. The public need does not disappear. The risk does not disappear. Next year's vacancy report will show fewer vacancies not because the county solved the problem, but because it removed the positions entirely. That creates the illusion of progress while the workforce shrinks. This is why vacancies and layoffs cannot be separated. The vacancy report is directly shaped by the county's decision to eliminate these positions.

In addition, for years, the county has increasingly relied on Extra Help employees, a cost saving strategy that fills ongoing work with temporary labor who receive no retirement, no health insurance, and no paid leave, and no job security. Vacancies are also being used as justification to contract out bargaining unit work. The logic goes, well, we can't fill the position, so we need to outsource the work. But the reality is the work still exists, the needs still exist, and the public still depends on these services. Instead of investing in recruitment, retention, and competitive compensation for permanent staff, the county is shifting essential public services to temporary workers or private contractors, both of which cost the workforce stability, institutional knowledge, and long term service quality.

This is not a staffing strategy. It is the slow erosion of the permanent workforce. And now with proposed layoffs layered on top of long standing vacancies and increased extra help use usage, the county is moving even further away from a stable, experienced permanent workforce and toward a model that relies on the lowest paid, least protector protected workers to carry the load. Our members are already carrying the workload of vacant positions, covering caseloads once shared by two or three people, training new hires, and absorbing absorbing duties from positions that have quietly disappeared. If layoffs proceed, these these same employees will be asked to absorb even more.

Employees report increased stress, exhaustion, difficulty maintaining service levels, fear about safety and liability, and deep concern for the public they serve. This is not sustainable, it is not responsible, and it is not aligned with the county's stated values. So three principles should guide the county's decisions. First, fund positions don't eliminate them. Eliminating positions may balance a spreadsheet, but it does not balance the workload or the needs of the community.

Second, report vacancies accurately. A single end of your snapshot hides the sustained understaffing employees face. The vacancy report underscores the contradiction at the heart of the proposed layoffs. The county is simultaneously acknowledging chronic understaffing while proposing to further reduce the workforce that keeps essential services functioning. Finally, protect employee well-being.

Stable staffing leads to better outcomes, fewer errors, lower turnover, and stronger public trust. These principles are are the foundation of the workforce that can meet the needs of this community, and they are entirely within the board's control. And in true county fashion, I wanna end with a quote by a former US, secretary of labor, Robert Reich, when public institutions are weakened, inequality widens. This is not just a quote, it is a diagnostic a diagnosis of the moment we in. When vacancies persist, when positions are eliminated, when layoffs are proposed, it is not the well resourced or the well connected who feel it first.

It is the communities who rely most heavily on county services, and it is the workers with the lowest wages, the least job security, and the highest exposure to risk who bear the brunt of these decisions. These workers stand to lose health care, income stability, retirement security, and the ability to support their families, and the people they serve stand to lose even more. This is the moment before you today, a choice between weakening the public institutions that hold the this community together or strengthening them by protecting the workforce that makes these those institutions real. That is my presentation. However, I do wanna hand it off to my members who are feeling the impacts and to speak to them directly, starting with Christina.

Hello. I have worked as an AOP with the sheriff's office since 2018. And in that time, I have worked shifts at several of our stations, including both jails. I share this because I am hoping you will understand that what I'm about to say comes from experience and years of seeing how our civilian staff interacts with the communities that we support. Vacancies in civilian positions have a deeper impact than many people realize.

At Ivy Foot Patrol, when a sexual assault victim is not ready to speak to a deputy and is not ready to talk with UCSB resources, they may walk into the foot patrol station where she can talk to a civilian employee, most likely a criminal records AOP. This is someone who does not know her name and someone who is not in a position of authority, but it is somebody who can provide her reliable information and reassurance. At our Lompoc station, a student can come to us because his ride did not show up to pick him up from school, and his phone is dead. It is a criminal records AOP who will call his mom, charge his phone, and provide him with a safe place to wait. In Builtin, a senior citizen might arrive frantic because they've just received a phone call from their nephew saying that he has been arrested in Northern California, and he needs bail money.

Again, it is a criminal records AOP who will calm her, verify the situation, and ultimately save her from losing $10,000 in a scam. These are just a few examples, but they highlight one thing clearly. Civilian staff are not just support. We are continuity, stability, and often the first point of contact for the public. When civilian positions are defunded, those quiet but critical services disappear, and it is the community that will feel that impact immediately. Thank you.

Good afternoon to all. My name is Veronica Paleto. I've worked for the public health pharmacy for over twenty five years now. And thank you for taking the time and listening to us. I have a couple of questions.

One of the questions I have is, do you want a county program that generates revenue, year to date, the pharmacy as of yesterday, the pharmacy program has generated over $1,400,000 Yet the pharmacies are still in the chopping block. The proposal is to cut the one in Santa Maria and Santa Barbara. If we are already staffed minimal with 11 employees, two unfilled positions, and with two thirds of the staff being cut, that will leave us with only four employees. Meaning that we have to absorb all of the extra work from the other two pharmacies. And that will leave overwork, stress, burnout, not to mention increase in potential pharmacy errors for medications, which will put our patients at risk, and not to mention the burnout.

We do patient assistance programs for the uninsured and the underinsured. I'll give you a brief example. We had a patient in ICU at Cottage Hospital for over two weeks after he was discharged. He was giving a prescription for Trulicity, which is very expensive, with multiple other prescriptions. He went to an outside pharmacy, even with a GoodRx coupon that Trulicity would have cost over $1,100 He was referred to our pharmacy.

He qualified for a patient assistance program, and he got it for free for the whole year. And the other prescriptions, he got a ninety day prescriptions with a sliding fee discount that we offer. He was able to get them very, very affordable. Outside pharmacies do not do any of this service to them. Even if they go to Walgreens, which we have a contract with, they don't help the underinsured or the uninsured. So when you make that consideration, think about all those uninsured patients. They have nowhere to go. Thank you for your time.

Good afternoon chair and members of the board. My name is Francisco Hernandez and I work in IT within the Department of Social Services. I'm here today because many of us on the technical side feel that I've been, that we've been overlooked during this process. And while we may not always be visible, we are responsible for maintaining the systems that staff depend on to do their jobs, and that the public relies on to access essential services. From case management systems to internal infrastructure, our work supports the entire operations, and without it, those systems can't function effectively.

Despite that, our positions now feel especially vulnerable, with the vacancies causing some of us to do the work of multiple people. There's a growing sense among the IT staff that we've been left behind in those discussions, and that uncertainty has created a lot of stress, not just professionally, but personally as well. On a professional level, the situation has been difficult. Sorry. On a personal level, this situation has been difficult.

I relocated here from another city hours away just to work for the county because I believe in the stability and the purpose of public service. I made that decision with the long term commitment in mind, and since then I've put down roots here in this community. I purchased a home, and my family just welcomed a new baby. This is where we plan to build our future. Now with the risks of layoffs, I'm facing the very real possibility of losing that stability, and it's hard not to feel like I've been penalized for making the responsible decision for committing to this job, and this community, and my family's future.

And I know I'm not alone. There are others in similar positions who are quietly dealing with the same uncertainty and fear. I respectfully ask the board to ensure all all staff and IT staff are fully considered in protecting our decisions moving forward because the systems we maintain are essential to serving the community, and we're already running on fumes. Investing in and supporting the people behind those systems is critical critical to maintaining the services our residents depend on. Thank you for your time and consideration.

That is our presentation. And we're happy to answer any questions if you have any.

Thank you. Any questions at this time? Actually, Ms. Robinson, I had a question just on your slide. Point number two of the recommendations. You don't have to you can raise it if you'd like. But the request was for more transparency in the data. And I just want to make sure I understand. I understand that it was a snapshot from December. But what exactly are you hoping for for better transparency and more data? I have

the transparency. HR provided me with the information. I'm saying what's being presented publicly. It's a snapshot in time that doesn't reflect the reality of the the year, of what employees experience throughout the year. With one with one of the units, we had over 20% vacancy on on average for the year. I

see. Mhmm.

And that's not reflected in the snapshot in time.

I see. So your the point is that that that times have been very tough, and I I appreciate the experiences and the stories, and thank you for being here. But it so to see a vacancy rate, it might not reflect the experiences of the department because things might have been better on that that point in time. Is that is that what you're conveying?

Right. And also, you know, with the eliminated positions is actually the reality of most of the year, it was even worse than that because the last few months those numbers weren't even included. It was probably even more than 20%.

Okay. Okay. Well, thanks for explaining that. Appreciate it.

I have

a question.

Yep.

And this is probably a loaded one you just can't wait for. This is like a softball floating over the middle. So I think only one person mentioned that this is in response to federal and state cuts and funding. Correct. K. So I'll laid out a scenario that we just dealt with and tried to tackle during the budget, And I know that we restored over $5000000.5.3 into social services, which has never been done before. So question is, we all know what we're dealing with. How do you get there? Like, how what's your scenario where we would just say, okay. There are no cuts.

How how do we get to what you're saying? I mean, decision am I making that could help you outside of I know one of them is you want me to raise taxes, but what's what's the other one? What what else is there that I could say, okay. This this at the county level is something we shouldn't be doing. We should get rid of it. We should move it over here.

Well, I've been saying throughout this process that immediate funds for immediate needs. We have a large pot of money that we're setting aside for a project that won't be starting for two to three years. And, yes, it will save long term interest costs, but we are also experience plan to experience a windfall of retirement funds, immediate funds for immediate needs. That is my stance, and I I I think we have the capacity to do that. We also have a, voluntary employee separation incentive program that we could be utilizing to help some individuals that, may be looking to retire but aren't quite there, opening up some positions for employees who are currently slated to be laid off.

I I have lots of suggestions that I will likely be talking to you guys individually about in the very near future, but I think those are the two immediate funds for immediate needs and look at the BSIP program.

I think one of the reasons why that we've not had people walk out the door in the fifteen years that I've been here is because we have looked at immediate resources for long term needs, where we say, okay, there's a five year forecast that's not looking too good, so we may have a little bit of money right now, but year two, three, and four are looking really bad. And while that's not always been my favorite thing to do, I think it served the county and its employees well in that we haven't had layoffs. The only thing that's actually causing layoffs isn't because anything that was done at the budget level or the county level or the Board of Supervisors level, it's the fact that we're getting hit by the federal and state government. So I appreciate the employees. You guys have always been really good about coming and being open and honest.

But I think the message has to get I mean, I think everybody up here is super sympathetic in trying to do trying to make chicken salad out of something else we've been given. And I appreciate what you're saying about immediate, but those things aren't always sustainable either. I know a lot of people look at our strategic reserve and say, man, it would be really nice just to go in there and take care of this problem that we have today. But the problem's going be here next and then you don't have the reserves for next year and the year after. So it's a balancing act.

It's not any anything that I would wish trying to make these decisions on anybody else. But I also understand that they have real, real, real world consequences. And I don't want the employees to think for a second that the people up here making these decisions aren't thinking about you and the impact it's going to have on somebody's life. That's why I think we've made some tough decisions this year of trying to backfill areas that we haven't normally done it because we see the bloodbath that's going to happen to our safety net. So appreciate all the input and let's keep an open dialogue as we move forward. And because you guys always have really good ideas. So appreciate it.

Thank you. Actually I'm going to keep going. I just I'm going to get to the vacancy questions for HR. But it does bother me to see the numbers, I appreciate that our HR Director has given some rationales for them. Those are ones I need to understand a little bit more.

But from an employee perspective, if there's a vacancy in your department in your area, I can only understand. That must be really frustrating. If it's impacting your work, is there a clear line of who do you go to? Is that your manager to If you could just give me a real life examples so that I can have a better sense of what it's like if there's an immediate vacancy right in your workplace. I appreciate what you said that it flows down, the work flows down. That certainly sounds true. Any good examples?