Board of Supervisors - Regular Meeting

He was very intelligent, customer service-oriented, and had a great sense of humor. Arnie graduated from the University of Santa Clara with a degree in business administration and accounting at the age of 20. He was very bright. Arnie was my boss, and I had the privilege of working with him for over 24 years at the assessor's office. One thing I remember about Arnie is he was able to use his knowledge, his width, his sense of humor whenever we had an unhappy taxpayer or even an angry taxpayer. And at the end of the meeting, he was able to turn that situation. So most of the time, the actual taxpayer came out of the office smiling. So that was pretty remarkable. He was my mentor. I learned a lot from him throughout the years working with him. You know, he was just a great boss to work for. And that's one of the reasons why I stayed at the assessor's office. He was well respected throughout the community and throughout the state with all the fellow assessors. He was the president of the Assessor's Association. He served as the treasurer for that association for over 17 years. He was an avid golfer. He loved playing Ridgemark every day, and his wife and him, Terry, just loved to travel. His commitment to service went beyond the Assessor's Office. He served Rotary for over 32 years. He was a president of Rotary at one time, a Chamber of Congress for 35 years, a director for many years there as well. He was a treasurer for the Boy Scouts and the Community Foundation. I believe he was a member of the Hollister Elks for 62 years as well. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his wife, Terry, and his son, Jim, throughout this difficult time.

Next in chambers, Steve Umfleet.

Good morning, Chair, Supervisors. Election season is nearly over, finally. In a few short weeks, he will decide whether to certify another election. I hope you view this decision as a component of your oath of office as you serve the people of this county, rather than merely as a ceremonial opportunity. When I worked in PayPal's fraud detection and prevention unit, I was astonished by the level of effort and sophistication the fraudsters put into their exploits. When preparing a new release, PayPal rolled it out to a handful of servers to gauge how it worked in the wild. Within 20 minutes, the release team not only identified that fraudulent transactions were occurring, but they had a statistically significant number to determine the viability of a new release. Fraudulent transactions were effectively constant. Initially, I viewed the fraudsters' efforts as a waste of good engineering talent. But I later realized that they weren't after just a single exploit that netted $500. They wanted an income stream of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per month. An individual who casts a ballot to which they are not entitled doesn't think about an income stream or a power base. but a sophisticated criminal enterprise that's agnostic to political party will be quite interested, even in a county our size. What they want is a basket of politicians. I'm not pointing fingers because I have no information that anyone here has done this. They look for opportunities to develop money laundering or kickback schemes, such as we've seen in childcare centers in Minnesota or healthcare enterprises in Los Angeles. Then they expand and optimize those opportunities over many years. You've heard of Shakir Khan in San Joaquin County, convicted of election fraud and only recently sentenced. The county and state fraud prevention system failed. The county and state fraud detection system also failed. Not because San Joaquin County made a mistake. Also, not because Khan used highly sophisticated methods. He didn't. He was caught because of watchful citizens and a sheriff who was willing to investigate. Many similar situations have occurred across the country. Some attempts are caught. The question is not if any attempts succeed, but how many. We could have the best county elections office in the state, and I do believe we have one of the best, but that helps little when our state requires the use of a system that can be gamed. Nefarious technical innovation moves at light speed. Legislation to address such innovation moves at a snail's pace.

Thank you.

Thank you. Next in chambers, Tammy Aviles.

Good morning, Chair, Board of Supervisors. My name is Tammy Aviles, and I am with the Friends of the San Benito County Free Library. And I am here respectfully to let you know that I was here a year ago in June asking for the RFP for the design-build contract to go out. And here we are a year later, We have 15 months left on the current grant, and I just urge you, please, let's focus back on getting this RFQ out to get to the next steps on the design build for the current grant of 10 million. I know we did try for the CDBG, and we're looking at other grants, and we're all working at other sources of funding, but we've got this grant in hand and let's get it back on the road moving forward. I also want to remind everybody too that this coming Saturday is our used book sale behind the library on Saturday, June 13th from 9 to 1130. If you're a member of the Friends, please come and pick out a bag of books for $5. So that's a bargain, right? So thank you. Thank you for your continued support. As you know, the Friends are here to partner with the county with the efforts for the library. Thank you.

Next in chambers, Austin Curtis.

Good morning, Chair, members of the board, and the public. My name is Austin Curtis. I'm the county librarian. And I just wanted to provide some information on our summer reading program at the library, which started yesterday and will run until August 7th. People can sign up at the library or through the library's website to complete various challenges throughout the summer. And at the end of summer, they'll be entered to win prizes that will be provided by the Friends of the Library. Additionally, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., we will have our Lunch at the Library program, so children and families can come get meals, and then they can stay for enrichment programs. So some upcoming programs include a marionette performance on June 15th, and a music performance called Rhythm and Roots on June 17th. People can get more information about all of our programs throughout the summer at the library through our social media pages. Thank you.

Thank you. Next in chamber, Susan Logue.

Good morning, chair and board and administration public. My name is Susan Logue. I'm on the board of the Friends of the Library. I wanted to go through some of the programs the library has been providing since last July. And I do have some statistics on the numbers of attendees. Since last July, Austin and his staff have had adult creative writing. Free summer math classes are starting. Hollister summer reading program that Austin discussed. Cherry yoga has had 183 attendees. The free lunch program. Knitting has had 302 attendees. Storytime, English and Bilingual, and Streaming has had 3,482 attendees. Graduation Cap Decoration Time, Death and Donuts Book Club, Dance Club, June Scavenger Club, Beginners Dungeons and Dragons, Roblox Club, Legos, Adult Book Club has had 109 attendees. movie night there's going to be some new additions that austin's got through partnering and asking for grants it's going to be called a light table it's a table that the child will sit at and make art through a light that's provided underneath the table and that's part of the the steam program and he actually partnered with the southern california library cooperative They purchased a red tricycle for the storytime. Bike and Books is gonna be an outreach with bikes that's gonna have baskets on it and go into the neighborhoods to provide books. Classroom Visits, State Park Visits, partnering with Teen Kitchen Project. It's to help people who are on Medi-Cal and have sicknesses to get free food at home. Also, he's been partnering with the San Bernardino County Oral Health Program. We have a very interesting tech tutorial. A lot of older seniors are coming in to get help, including me, at the tech tutorial. and the tax bus was there this year. I would like to publicly acknowledge Austin, his dedication, leadership, and creativity for the library in our community. He's done wonderful work. So after sharing this exhaustive list of activities the library is managing to offer despite the budget cuts, I would like to respectfully request from the county administration and the Board of Supervisors to move speedily on the library expansion grant. We have waited since last year to have the RFQ go out and be bidded on as it was in review by the legal team. Can you please make a commitment today that there will be no more delays, waiting, postponing in order for the community who deserves a bigger facility to finally see the building of an expanded library and it become a reality.

Thank you. Next in chambers, Joe.

Morning, supervisors. It's been a long time. In January of this year, FPPC case number 2023-0006 was ruled by the FPPC. five to zero, four counts, and the fine was $18,000 for the involvement of county's, quote unquote, measure queue ad hoc. Their mailers, which they had spent $19,695 and some odd change. to Clifford Moss for mailers that the FPPC had ruled were, in fact, basically campaigning from behind the dais. We were fined an additional $18,000 for that. And this was five to zero. The vote was five to zero, it was unanimous. So this was clearly no accident. So the thing, my thing with that whole situation is we, we, the taxpayers and just those two transactions are, there are other transactions to Clifford Moss over the period for these, this quote unquote measure Q education, um, which added up to $45,500. And then you throw in the $18,000 fine on top of that. And we're looking at $63,000. of essentially campaigning from behind the dais and the resulting fines. That $63,000 comes out of the county, which comes out of the taxpayers' pockets. We the people paid for this. We paid $63,000. That was my money, that was your money, that was all of their money, that was our money. That's not okay. And that's why I've been advocating for things like the meeting schedule change and why I got involved with Measure A in the first place and why I was so damned upset when Measure Q lost. I'm still not over that. I'm still not over the defeat of Measure Q. That's why I got involved with Measure A. Measure A was by far a superior document and by far a superior initiative. However, I'm still not over Measure Q because of what our government did to our community It costed us a lot of money. So I just want you guys to know that these are the kinds of things that happens behind closed doors. And again, to reinforce my earlier commitment to seeing these doors open to the working class. So hopefully we the people can catch things like this while they're happening instead of after by almost what, three and a half years? It was a long time. It was a long time before the FPPC made their decision. Thank you.

Next in chambers, Ann Hall.

Good morning, I'm Anne Hall with San Benito Engineering. I've been here a few times over the last seven months in regard to CFDs, and there's been a lot of discussion at this board about CFDs, apparently confusion, desire to have change, a lot of talk about the CFDs, and most of those ended with saying we will have a special meeting to discuss CFDs. That meeting has been scheduled. It's been canceled more than once. And I, for one, have several projects that still have a condition to go through the CFD process. And until this was resolved, this is a burden on my clients. So I would like to stress that the meeting that you have all expressed an interest in be scheduled and be held so that we can resolve these questions about the CFD process. Thank you.

Thank you. And I have one on Zoom. Valerie, you've been unmuted and you have three minutes. You'll need to unmute on your end. We can't hear her. She is speaking. We can't hear you, Valerie. Well, I'm gonna have to mute her. I'm not sure what's going on, but we can't hear her, so we'll have to just move on. That concludes public comment. Thank you.

Can I ask in light of Tom Slavich's comments, if we could also do a moment of silence for Arnie Fonz at the end as well. Thank you. Yes.

Okay, thank you. Before we move on to consent, I believe we have an update from the clerk to see if someone had an update with some agenda changes potentially this morning. Is that correct? Yes.

Yes, good morning, board. Members of the public, for consent, item number 1.14 has been removed from the agenda and on regular number 3.5 as well. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Now we'll be moving to the consent agenda. Do any supervisors have any items of consent they'd like to pull? I'd like to pull 1.24. 1.24.

Just for the record, I was going to pull 1.14 and I'll follow up with staff after. Thank you.

I was going to pull it as well. So let's see. I would like to pull... um 1.7 please i'd like to pull 1.10 1.23 and 1.24 please

Okay, so that's 1.7, 1.10, 1.23, and 1.24. And 1.14 was pulled by staff. So do we have any public comment on items of the consent agenda that were not pulled?

I do have one. Tammy Avalis, she'll be speaking on 1.12. Okay.

Good morning, Chair, Board of Supervisors. My name is Tammy Aviles, and I am on the board of Seniors Council of Santa Cruz and San Benito counties. I just wanted to say thank you for your continued support of our ever-growing senior community here in San Benito and your attention and devotion to this section of the community. Thank you.

Thank you.

I have no further public comment.

Okay, great, thank you. Is there a motion to approve the consent items except for the ones that were pulled and the one that was removed? The agenda today. Move to approve. Is there a second? Second. If first and second, can we have roll call vote, please?

Supervisor Zenger?

Yes.

Supervisor Velazquez?

Yes.

Supervisor Kosmicki?

Yes.

Supervisor Sotelo? Yes. Supervisor Curl? Yes. Five-zero vote, motion passes.

Great, thank you. We'll just go through these in order. 1.7 was pulled by Supervisor Sotelo, I believe.

Yeah, I just pulled it. It's a proclamation declaring June, 2026 as elder abuse awareness month. And I don't know if anyone is here for it, but I just kind of wanted to pull it, give special recognition and acknowledgement of it.

Yeah, absolutely. Do we have any public comment on this item? I have no public comment. Okay, I don't know if anyone here then is to receive it, so.

I don't think so, but I will just share sitting on the AAA and participating in a lot of the Aging and Long-Term Care Commission. We do have an OMS-Budsman here in San Benito County. And I will tell you, I have heard you know, some great feedback from him. And he has said that, um, both of the, um, senior, um, they're not senior, the facilities at Hazel Hawkins hospital, both, um, North side and South side, maybe center, um, that, you know, he has given, as he goes and does his inspections, he has said that they're doing a great job and, um, and really highlighted them. And so anytime I hear positive things in our community, I'd like to highlight those. And I think it's really important that we highlight elder abuse awareness and do everything that we can to prevent it. So I will move to approve this proclamation, but I don't believe anybody is here to receive it. Okay.

Is there a second? I'll second. Okay, thank you. We have first and second. Can we have roll call vote, please?

Supervisor Zanger?

Yes.

Supervisor Velazquez?

Yes.

Supervisor Kosmicki?

Yes.

Supervisor Sotelo? Yes. Supervisor Curro? Yes. Five, zero, vote motion passes.

Great, thank you. Moving on to 1.10.

Thank you. I just kind of wanted to get some clarification on some of the changes that were requested in this travel policy. It seemed like we were, you know, There are additional layers that I'm not sure are necessary. So in the travel policy, one of the things that I noticed was department heads, their staff are still going through them to get the approval, but then we need an extra layer of not just the department head, but now the CEO as well. And I'm concerned that we are not prioritizing the things that are really priority. And our CEO already is very, very busy. And this is one more layer of additional things that she needs to do. And I just wasn't sure if that was necessary to have that extra layer of oversight.

Yeah, thank you. CEO, did you want to, this came from you, I believe.

So the additional travel review was a request from the board members for me to oversee due to the financial situation that we were facing to limit the travel or only required travel, meaning no conferences in which you just go and mingle and get to know the network, which I think is important to be honest. but it's not a requirement. In light of the financial situation that we were running into it, we have becoming more strict with the travel. But also there were some situations in which the attendance to some of the conferences at night in a hotel was like almost $400. And so our requirements are that they look into this, in the same location of where the conference is, to try to find another decent hotel that is $150, and we did our own research. It is a lot of work, to be honest. I'm overwhelmed with that work, and so is the staff. But I don't think we still have, the department has to understand that, yes, they have a budget approved for travel, but they need to make an effort to minimize the cost. And allowing several people going to the same conference is also not allowable. If you have six people going to a conference, I have an issue with that, rather than maybe having two so they can attend different meetings at the same time and bring that information to the staff. It is up to the board to decide what you want to do, but in reality, it's an effort to minimize the cost to the general fund. Now for the sub-ended agencies, we know what is coming our way with HR1. We have to minimize the amount of travel so that those funds, instead of being used for just attend conferences that are not necessarily mandatory to to set aside those funds to continue assisting our communities that we're not going to be facing more challenges with hr1 and i'm just going to give an example instead of making one individual eligible for one year Now that we have to do the eligibility twice a year, that is an increased staff. So how do we accomplish that without hiring more people and using more reserves under those agencies to accomplish what we need to accomplish? So this is all an effort to minimize the cost and to provide better services to the community. But again, we are overwhelmed for the work that we need to be done. but we take it very seriously. It is up to the board to decide whether you want us to continue doing it because I have several observations that it was somehow, and I don't wanna use this word, but I have to, it was kind of like abuse traveling expenses.

So last year we cut our budget travel in half. has that not been have we not been been adhering to the budget because see the way that i'm looking at it is okay we set that budget the department puts in their budget requests for travel as long as they're staying within what was approved by the board of supervisors that's where i'm struggling to understand why we need this extra layer of oversight on it, right? Like we've set that amount. If they're going over, then I could see needing that. I could see coordination with you and the department head, but it just, it's a little bit odd to me that we would need that extra layer. And I appreciate, you know, us trying to stay within our means and doing everything that we can. I did not see anything though, and please correct me if I'm wrong, any policy regarding a number of employees going to one thing. Is that in the travel policy? Because I know you just spoke to that, but I didn't see that in there.

We captured that. I'm not sure, to be honest, I need to talk to County Council about it before making the changes. But to your comments, my next comment to the board is throughout the year, we made several changes to the budget. to the reserves because we were catching up payments from 2022, 2023, and 2024 fiscal years that were not paid on time. We're talking about more than a million dollars and pulling funds from the general fund reserves. So when I see that, then I know that the next fiscal year is gonna be more challenging. So we started restricting more the travel. And I understand your point, But again, even with that limitation of the budget, we still having reservations for $400 hotel rooms, or staying overnight to a distance of three hours or two hours distance to come back from the training, we still have hotel reservations. And I have to say, I have issues when I see my own board members, and I'm talking about the two specific board members, traveling and using the least possible to travel expenses. And I have to acknowledge that, that if the board is making that effort to minimize the cost and the expenses, why can't the staff can do it? That's my point. So we all invested in this county to try to lower the amount of expenses. And like I said, you will see in this coming budget, we're struggling to make the budget this year because we have pay invoices from previous years that were not in the budget last year. And so that's why we feel that we need to push more to reduce the amount of expenses.

yeah and i i agree that we need to do everything that we can um to right side our budget right and stay within our means and i appreciate i also have an expectation that we up here lead by example and so i think we should be the ones that are cutting and doing everything absolutely necessary that we can to travel i also know we have cut tremendously our travel we're just not doing it which i don't know that benefits this county a whole lot i think there's a lot that we learn when we go to these trainings, these conferences, these different things. So again, I would hope that we have competent department heads that can manage their budget, can know what is within their means, knowing what their staff can and can't do. I have trust in our department heads that they can do that. I think that as we are going throughout a year, I think having a conversation with our department heads and letting them know that as you're seeing these different things that come up to me, that is a better way of us handling this than making a change like this that is going to really put a lot more work on you that I would like to see you working on the budget and some of the really important issues that we have in our county. And so I cannot support this right now as written. And for those reasons, thank you.

Thank you. Yes, Regent Carrell.

I was also going to pull this item. I feel like there is a past issue that is coming to a head now. And the past issue is lack of oversight, not just from prior staff members, but the board and abuses could have and may have happened. Where I'm struggling is I feel that you're taking on so much. I totally agree with Supervisor Sattel. You're taking on so much. Adding more onto your plate is very concerning to me. I'm struggling being able to even meet with you. So putting more on your plate is not where I want to go right now. But where I'm looking at this is kind of from the cost aspect. How much your time takes to review these items and how much expense that is on the county versus how much money are we actually saving versus how much are we losing in information from conferences? I agree, six people going to a conference, totally unacceptable. You need to have a few, you need to have them strategic, they need to be able to report back. It needs to be time used well. So where I'm looking at this is, in my opinion, this should be a budget process. The department heads, when they submit their budgets, they should be submitting their budgets with exactly what's in their travel, which conferences, how many people, what their estimated costs are, and having that be the conversation budget hearing as opposed to micromanaging at a after the fact level. Because once we approve it at the board level, I'm expecting department heads to adhere to those budget amounts. And if your 619 budget is only looking in that one group which is services and supplies which includes travel that's not right we need to get down to the line number we need to get down to how much are you spending on travel versus how much are you budgeting and what are we getting out of it i think that's a better use and a better process than having you be burdened with having to review every single one of these i agree completely we have bigger issues and i I don't feel it's a good use of your time for the dollars that we spend on you.

Mr. Chair. Yeah. Personally, I don't think it takes that long for somebody to take a look and notice there's a $400 hotel bill or multiple people going. It's very minimal amount of time. And then secondly, please note that the change does add or include a CEO or their designee. Thank you.

Mr. Velazquez. Thank you. I came into this my first year trying to understand how in the world this county was approving $40 million deficit budgets. I've never seen that. Never could be part of that. We made a big change, hard change last year to be accountable to the taxpayers, making sure we're identifying how we're spending money and making sure it's efficient as possible. The travel budget was out of control. And when the public understands that one night at a conference is $400 per room per person, that's not fair to the taxpayers. And some of these conferences, I get it, we do learn some things there, but it's easily abused and we need to take control. We were fortunate as a board to work together last year to really rein in the problems we're having. We're ahead of the curve. There's communities all over the state, all over this country that are going into big financial trouble because they didn't take the steps that needed to be taken. Because we did this, we're not seeing the heavy impacts, although we are seeing the impact, but we're not seeing the heavy impacts other communities are gonna have to go through. This is gonna take several years of changing the ways of thinking policies throughout. It's gonna take a set of eyes to keep watching over it because, again, it doesn't take long to fall back to the old pattern of, well, I like this conference, so four of us will go out here and it's well worth it. unfortunately we can't keep doing that we have to change our ways we're still going to have a difficult year this year with our budget and probably going into next year until we clearly understand how much revenue and how much has been going on when we don't have those answers to us defined and clear, we have to take extra precaution to not spend the dollar. So I don't see it as a big time issue. I see it, my concern really is why are we still going through this? It's not your fault. It's just, again, I think habits through the years that have to be changed. I personally haven't gone to any conferences, partly because I was sick last year, but I understand the cost. It's tremendous. So when there is a conference in Sacramento, I will make sure to be at the hotel then. I always do this, stay at a hotel down the street that's half the price. And if possible, I'll go for the day and come right back. If it's with two hours, I'm driving back that night. And we're not even including, we're not even talking about airfare yet. And then dinners and breakfast and lunch and so on. So I think we need to be extra cautious. We're not that year financially. We're not at that point where we were as bad as last year, but I want to get us to the point where we're seeing positive because even when we started going positive, there's so much more we need to take care of as a community, our roads, our infrastructure, so on. Those things have to be taken care of because when they're ignored, we find ourselves in bigger financial trouble. So I'm fully supportive of this.

Okay, let's go to public comment right now.

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raised hand icon. And I have no public comment. Great, thank you. Yes.

Can I just ask a quick question? How much time is it taking for staff to review these requests?

Well, I have, depending on how they submit the request, we receive, we have one member that takes care of all the staffing. We move that to another person, which is Cassandra, my assistant now. She's reviewing the travel request. And once they review it, I just ask general questions and I approve them or disapprove them. It's really like they're getting the information. They do most of the work and then I do the final revision. So it's like I said before, this was done at the direction of the board of supervisors. And I've been mentioning to the department heads, if you have an issue with the review, please contact the board members because I cannot, it's a lot of work, but it's not like I'm after them, micromanage them. I have to follow the board's direction. And that's exactly what I did. So let me know what would you like me to proceed. I'm okay with whatever decision you wanna make, but I can tell you that we have denied several travel or several people going to the same conference. I have advocated for lower the cost on hotels as well. and looking for other options. And the other issue that I have is some of the departments, not only the director is on the board or the associations or directors, I have staff that are hardly in the office because they're traveling to attend conferences for the associations because they become a member of an association. And by default, but they have to attend the meeting. They feel that it's mandatory for them to attend the meeting. It's not really mandatory. Being part of an association is for the department heads. And I've been stressing that, that only the department heads can belong to associations, not their staff. Because now you have the department heads and two deputies at the same time traveling during that week. So who is overseeing the department? I have issues with that. I do have an issue with that. So the department heads for now are the ones that are attending the associations representing the county. But it can't go beyond that because otherwise you're gonna have a lot of deputies. So now you have a lower level management overseeing the departments. That's the other issue. So we can sit together, we can do a workshop. We can show you what we see. And so you make that determination.

Thank you. Thank you. I'll make a motion to approve. I'll second. Okay. Supervisor Crowe, you had.

My biggest concern is the fact that we don't have enough staff that has the knowledge and the experience to not be going to these conferences. It takes so much time to understand new legislation that's coming down, how much it's gonna cost a staff member to learn and read and interpret and understand. When you send someone to a conference for a couple of thousand dollars is way better than having to have a staff member that does nothing but read legislation all day and do the interpretation. I respectfully disagree that if there's a problem with abuse, the department heads are responsible. And if we're not holding them responsible for the taxpayer dollars, we can't do it by ourselves. So if this is the way the board wants I hope we are not hurting ourselves by losing knowledge and valuable information that we don't have in this county because of our rural community and the small staff we have.

Thank you. Okay, we have a first and a second. For the comments clerk, can we have a vote please, roll call vote.

Supervisor Zenger?

Yes.

Supervisor Velazquez?

Yes.

Supervisor Kosmicki? Yes. Supervisor Sotelo? No. Supervisor Curro? No. 3-2 vote. Motion passes.

Thank you. Moving on to 1.23. Supervisor Sotelo, you pulled this, correct?

Thank you. I pulled this item. This is, we are accepting a presentation on activities of the Monterey Bay Area Regional Climate Project Working Group. And because it was a presentation, I would like to hear the presentation from staff.

I can't download it, sorry.

Good morning, Chair, members of the board. Excited to present this project to you and we'll just dive in. The Regional Climate Project Working Group is a regional collaboration made up of various public agencies, including San Benito County. And it is part of the Monterey Bay Area, three counties and several cities within that region. And the goal is to advance regionally beneficial climate mitigation and adaptation projects. The primary objectives are to collaborate with members and partners of the RCPWG as well as CBOs to secure funding for regional grants to effectively and equitably allocate that funding to the partners and to the organizations within the Tri-County region and establish more effective collaborative mechanisms to align policies and projects to best address our region's most pressing climate challenges. Lastly, to activate working groups to support deeper coordination amongst RCPWG members and non-member agencies, foundations, and nonprofits to advance specific project priorities. You might be asking, why is Integrated Waste presenting today? And so one of the working groups is a waste subcommittee that was formed. And so we are exploring potential funding opportunities for compliance with state mandates like SB 1383. and uh there's an energy subcommittee among others to date and i i think i uh at the last meeting where we were a public hearing for the climate roadmap supervisor kuro you asked me to provide a dollar number for how much money has been awarded to the region to date i gave you a 3 million it's actually 33 million so we're very happy with the progress that's been made The RCPWG truly demonstrates how transformative climate solutions are possible when we collaborate as a region. And this is a list of the various grants. I'm not going to go through each one, but if there are questions, happy to answer any. Most of these grants focus have been on electric vehicle charging stations, electric vehicles, the county was awarded a portion of the CARB grant that 15.745 electric vehicles that 14.3 million grant that you see listed there through the Department of Transportation. That was for nine, nine sites that would have brought 52 EV charging stations and we were awarded that grant. Unfortunately, the changes that happened at the federal The funding has been paused. It's unclear if this funding is coming back to the region, but there is opportunities to use this application for future applications, and we do see an opportunity coming very soon. Another important point about these grants, a lot of this funding has supported the development of the MOU that you see before you today and the regional discussion. So that included grant support, technical writing support, and there will be some portion of funding available for grant applications that may help, excuse me, for allocations, not grant applications, but some allocation from the funding that can support stormwater mitigation efforts in the county here in San Benito. This is just a list of the members. You'll see City of Cupertino, the City of Santa Cruz, Watsonville, Salinas, Ambag would be our, if this MOU is adopted and once it's brought to their board, they would be our fiscal sponsor, the County of Monterey, San Benito County, and the County of Santa Cruz. The City of Marina and the City of Monterey just adopted resolutions most recently this year to join as well. This provides a little bit of a timeline on how this organization evolved. Several of the sustainability staff throughout the region were meeting through coffee chats. I wish I could say I was a part of those meetings, but I was not. And there was early investments. I see we've got a 3CE representative here, but 3CE provided funding to support some of these initial projects. governing discussions. And we created a good enough governance to move forward. It was a charter document between the member agencies. And now we're working towards this more formal MOU governance document. and we'll continue to explore long-term governance options but this mou would serve as the um the next step for that and and again the whole purpose and goal is to secure regional transformative climate grant applications and funding to bring to the region and that concludes my presentation i'm happy to answer any questions thank you go to public comment first

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raised hand icon. And I have no public comment.

Thank you. Comments from the board, questions?

Thank you. Selena, who is sitting on this working group from San Benito County? Is it yourself?

myself, and then we had Ariel Goodspeed from the planning department, as well as Stephanie Reck were serving as support. However, since they left, Stephanie has since come back. The planning department is extremely busy as I'm sure you know, so I've continued to serve as the lead. And Gracie Thalman, who is here in the audience too with our CPI team, they continue to support meetings and the CEO, Ms. Cuglio, has been very, keeps her door open to meet to discuss projects as they come up. So I sit in the meetings, there's strategy meetings, there's subcommittee meetings, and then When there are opportunities that arise, I bring those forward to applicable staff for discussion.

Okay, thank you. We don't need to have any additional seats then. I mean, are we supposed to have three seats from San Benito County or?

No, there's no seat requirement. I do think additional staff support would be helpful. And perhaps as we start to fill more, I would love to hear Ms. Coolio's thoughts on this too. But as we continue to fill roles within the RMA, you know, it would be great to have more consistent RMA support and maybe someone from admin.

Okay, thank you. We're having that pending discussion depending on how we close the fiscal year to be able to address the issue. Our intent to the interim budget is just to go minimum. But once we get the results somewhere in August, we can come back with that conversation to add additional position if needed.

Thank you. Is the city of Hollister, do they participate in this as well? I mean, I'm looking at the slide that has all the different members and the logos of the cities and counties that are there. It appears that the city of Hollister is missing. Have they been invited to participate?

Yeah, and there have been significant staff changes at the City of Hollister over the years. The RCPWG consultants continue to attempt to engage the City of Hollister, City of San Juan Bautista, and the City of Hollister has attended some of their meetings. These meetings are open to any member within, you know, any jurisdiction can attend and listen and determine if they would like to join. So Hollister has been present in some of these meetings, and we will surely keep them included as more opportunities move forward, especially the grant applications. Regardless of being a member, we will meet with staff to see if there's interest in their involvement. And we did have that one application. I'll just go to the slide. 14.3 million us department of transportation uh that where we applied for several ev charging sites some of those were at a benefit to the city of hollister parking parking lots that parts that they owned okay great thank you so much i thought those are all my questions thank you

Thank you, anything else from the board? All right, well, thank you very much. There was just a presentation, so I think that's- No, we actually, I think we do need action as well. You accept, right?

Or is it- No, it's the MOU authorizing to enter into the memorandum of understanding as a voting member of the Regional Climate Project Working Group.

And if I may, there's quite a few actions. One is to adopt the resolution affirming the board's prior commitment to fund RCPWG. This is at a $15,000 amount per year. Authorize the chair to execute the agreement with City of Santa Cruz so they can receive our, they would be acting as an interim fund, fiscal sponsor to receive that 15 000 for this fiscal year that we've not yet paid and then lastly authorize the ceo or their designee to enter into the mou as a voting member of the rcpwg thank you there a motion i move to approve as recommended sir second i second thank you can we have roll call vote please

Supervisor Zenger?

Yes.

Supervisor Velazquez?

Yes.

Supervisor Kosmicki?

Yes.

Supervisor Sotelo? Yes. Supervisor Curl? Yes. Five, zero vote, motion passes.

Thank you. Moving on to 1.24.

Thank you, sorry. I just wanted to be very clear on what, I mean, obviously I can read what is all there, but in light of our budget and the challenges that we have with funding, Do we need to do all of these things right now? Yes, I realize that several years ago we approved this. At that time, we didn't understand what financial kind of mess that we were in. So I am wholeheartedly supportive of all of the audio and visual upgrades that we're doing so that the community can participate and listen to the meetings better, et cetera. But I'm questioning how, is this the time right now for us to put in new seats and paint, et cetera. Is that a necessity? And so that is the reason that I'm pulling 1.24.

Supervisors, to tell those, if you may allow me to, Vanessa has the funding sources. It's not a general fund sources.

I read all about where the funding is coming from, but I still question whether the funding that we're using, it seemed to me like it can be used for a lot of different things. We're taking and choosing to spend it on our chamber. And I'm just questioning if that is the best usage of funding right now.

all right good morning so um thank you for your question uh regarding the project um as you read already the project is originally approved in fiscal year 23 24 with the funding of 190 from general funds and the contribution of non-general fund source in fiscal year 24 25 and 25 26 26 it expanded to add additional scope as well as the funding source was to LATCF and some of the security funding. To answer your question, during fiscal year 24-25 and 25-26, we made a good progress in the project. We already completed the programming, procurement for the furniture and paid deposit for the material to not have any price increase as we have challenged budget during the fiscal year 25-26, beginning of fiscal year 25-26. So we made that progress on the project to avoid any additional cost on the project. So as of now, we already paid about $109,000 to the vendors, to the contractors for the procurement of the furniture. And time was um since we are already proceeding with the audio video scope and we already paid the vendors a good amount of money for the project we do recommend highly recommend we can proceed with the project with the overall scope of work not only because we paid the vendors but also it will complete at the same time the furniture the carpet replacements which would be necessary since we will be replacing the seats and this will also be taken place so yeah we do recommend this is a good time and also the schedule we are currently looking during the month of July to start the construction and to complete the construction by end of July when the board will be off during the month

Good morning board. I just wanted to add real quick to since this does include the AV part upgrade of the project, part of it is to move all the like wiring and everything here in the chambers. So we're going to be doing that together. So if we do it, if we only do the AV part, any work afterwards will also have to include like moving all of that and having to pay to redo all that. So we wanted to just do it all together. So it's just one time.

Can you please clarify when was this project approved before? And what is the status on the contract that you have with this project?

So it was originally approved in fiscal year 23-24. And over time, as Selma mentioned, that it was partially general fund, some non-general fund, but in 24-25, it was changed to this one non-general fund. They're federal funds that need to be used for just one-time expenditures. And so I wanted to emphasize that it's just one-time expenditures, not for ongoing things, but that's where the funding came from. Oh, and I also wanted to include that the amount, the 280,000 is not the complete amount of that grant. So there are still other funds available too.

Mr. Chair, I just want to point out, this actually came to the board when I first came on the board in 2021, and I was against it for a lot of the same reasons that there are other needs. What I've come to learn in the last five and a half years is First of all, these changes, they're not to benefit the Board of Supervisors. We have nice, fine desks and everything up here. This is to benefit the public. It's to allow for our meetings to be a more modern environment, frankly. We are essentially, it feels like we're talking into Campbell's soup cans at times. We have meetings where almost on a regular basis now, our meetings are having to be delayed. because we have these issues that we're dealing with that we're addressing. So this is a transparency issue. This is an issue to benefit the public and we have to do it at some point. We have the funding to do it. It makes sense to get it done. Thank you.

Yeah, go ahead, Supervisor Velazquez. Thank you. I had the same questions and I'm glad to hear more history. The funding source, federal, not our general funds, our company's costs. And my concerns were exactly the same as why are we changing seats? But I caught the audio visual part that, as was pointed out, Almost every meeting, we're having problems, major problems. And the public deserves to hear us clearly, see what we're doing. That's the part I wanna make sure we're getting done. And hearing a little bit more today, I'm going from questioning this to agreeing to go along with it. So thank you for the- The audio video scope is included in the- Yes, thank you for the update.

So this is an example of projects that are not done timely. We know that we've had a cost increase on this, and this was something that was funded some time ago. When it comes to the project being approved, I don't recall ever seeing a project. I remember approving funding. I don't know what this project looks like besides what's been presented today. I would request in the future that if these type of projects are coming forward, we actually get to kind of see what we're buying. Because besides what was presented in the agenda from Friday, I haven't seen anything. And does the audio visual actually include the request, which was to bring bilingual translations to this county for the public, with over so many of our residents being Spanish only.

Be sure to your question so I can have Vanessa respond to you regarding the audio video scope. However, regarding the seats and other upgrades that includes painting and carpet replacement, RMA and administration staff has been coordinating regarding the submittals, the approval, the drawings and all that. And it was coordinated with the staff.

Thank you for that question. So the current RFP for the AV is just equipment. But at the next board meeting, actually, there is there has been some legislation, it's SB 707, where we will be discussing this, the board will give their input on how the better outreach for the public to participate, and that can be one aspect that we review. There are a couple options for bilingual, so we can discuss that at the next meeting. Thank you.

Thank you. Let's go to public comment.

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raised hand icon. And I have no public comment.

Great. Thank you.

through a motion from any board members any further comments before them yes yes absolutely um in regards to vanessa the comments right now regarding the bilingual is there potentially anything that needs to be added to this to make the bilingual kind of accessible like add to the the accessibility, or is there anything that we need to do that potentially, you know, we're gonna approve this, but this is coming next. Should there be a delay on this to include that part for us to make a decision on what we're going to do, or none of that is going to matter with equipment or anything that we need to do to make sure that we have more bilingual accessibility?

right no it doesn't uh it won't change anything the the equipment that we uh will be getting will work with um the method that we choose so there are options that will work with what we're getting okay yeah okay great thank you very much great thank you there a motion to approve as recommended is there a second a second we have a first and a second can we have a roll call vote please supervisor zenger yes

Supervisor Velazquez?

Yes.

Supervisor Kosmicki?

Yes.

Supervisor Sotelo? Yes. Supervisor Curro? Yes. Five-zero vote, motion passes.

Great, thank you. That concludes the consent agenda. We would go to public hearing at this time. Do we need a break at all? Should we move to public hearing? We're good, we'll keep going to public. Yes, CEO? Five-minute break, we'll take a five-minute break, thank you. And this is from the assessor's office.

Okay, good morning, Mr. Chair, members of the board again. We have some Williamson Act applications. These are all compatible use requests. I'll go through each one. The staff report is in your packet, detailed. I'll just go over the highlights. And then at the end, you can ask any questions you might have. The first compatible use request is Bumgarner Pass. This preserve is 911 acres. It's down in South County. It's under contract 17.6. It's about 47 miles south of Hollister and Old Hernandez Road. The applicant is asking basically for outdoor cannabis cultivation in two phases. The first phase would be roughly 20 acres and the second phase would consist of 35 acres. Under our government codes and so forth, 512201A and Senate Bill 527, as an example, cultivation of industrial hemp is allowable in the Williamson Act. And under Code Section 51231B, the rules provide that commercial cultivation may constitute a compatible use on Williamson Act land and non Williamson Act land. The Ag Preserve will continue to meet the income and acreage requirements of the Williamson Act. In this situation, the cannabis cultivation will encompass a total of 55 acres, which represents roughly 6% of the total of 911 acres. The remaining ground will be used for cattle grazing. Your committee, LCA committee, reviewed everything and recommended approval of this compatible use request. If you have any questions,

Thank you very much. I'm wondering if we should just, can we just do them all and then open the public hearing and then?

I think we have to do them one at a time. One at a time, great.

Okay, thank you. We'll open the public hearing. Is there any comments from public?

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raise hand icon.

And I have no public comment on this one.

Thank you very much. Yes, Supervisor Caruso. Okay. Comments, questions from the board? I'll move to approve as recommended. Is there a second? Okay. Supervisor Caruso. I'll second for conversation.

So I'm trying to understand from, am I looking at this right, the maps that are attached? I'm trying to get my bearing on it. And when I look at the aerial, am I, I'm on, so each one of these, right now we're doing resolution number 20, we're just doing 2026-77.

The resolution, actually. it would probably be in that in that order if you looked at the contract number the the contract number on top will pertain to the applicant and on this particular one the uh contract number is 17.6 so that one would pertain to bum gardener pass so this expansion how does this map out with our our cannabis ordinance all of that was taken into account um where you can and can't grow you know we we yeah we didn't really go into that aspect of it we just went basically if it qualifies under the williamson act only

so if i can ask legal is that something that at this point we need to compare to our cannabis ordinance and ensure that we're not that we're complying with our our current ordinance not regardless of the fee structure from measure d i'm just talking about the original adopted cannabis ordinance

Are you referring to like the exclusion zones and the amount that we can grow and make sure that, okay.

That we're in compliance with the existing ordinance that was adopted by the board, by the voters. I just, I don't see it and I don't know it. It's not my area of expertise.

yeah that was not brought up at the the committee meeting it's strictly whether it qualifies under the williamson act and that's what the committee looked at but if there's exclusion areas then that would be up to the board because the lca committee is just basically a recommendation in regards to if it qualifies under the williamson act so in this situation if you want to talk about the exclusion area that would be up in your area and then you would need to look at it and you can make a decision either approving it or denying it.

So are these like two separate questions? One, right now we're only looking at the Williamson Act and that it meets Williamson Act requirements, but we do need to be looking at in the future how it impacts our ordinance or should we table this?

and continue it. I believe you've raised an important question and I believe we should review the outdoor cultivation ordinance to ensure that they do not conflict.

So I- I would greatly appreciate that because what I understand from, and I wanna thank Supervisor Sotelo, what I understood from The original ordinance that was adopted is that there are zoned areas protecting our wine industry.

Yes, I believe you're correct that we should either continue the public hearing or table it. We can certainly continue it, for example, to the 23rd, at which time we can then confer with the assessor and be able to answer that specific question for the board.

Does anyone have a preference? Can we continue it?

Mr. Chair, continues probably more seamless.

To continue this to the 23rd, assuming there's no timing issue.

I don't know if the applicants have a timing issue with the planning department. I think there's a certain time requirement where they're going to miss their growth season, I believe. But I believe there's only one application that would apply. I think the second application would apply to any exclusions. I think the other two are far enough away that they probably wouldn't. have an issue with, but I'll leave it up to you. If you want to continue it, that's fine with me.

It's not my area of expertise. That's why I'm kind of hesitating here.

I think we have, I thought we had a comment from legal here. Thank you.

Good morning. Yes. So I confirmed with planning. So there is a separate application. So this is just for permitting the use under the Land Conservation Act. The application meeting the threshold requirement for the permitted acreage of cannabis in the county is reviewed under the separate actual application for the project. There is an application submitted and that's still underway. This is separate requirement that their land be permitted for this use. Does that answer your question?

So there's two separate paths, and this is just one thing they need to go through. Then they'll go through the separate, or they're simultaneously going through the separate path of planning.

Correct. So there's the permitted uses under the Land Conservation Act, and separately there's their project application for the cannabis use of the cultivation.

And Mr. Chair, I just really want to make sure that that is very clear. This does not approve it unless it meets...

the cannabis ordinance requirement that is correct mr chair members the board i would suggest that we continue this matter to the 23rd i think that's an important question and i think that should be spelled out in any resolution that's adopted and it's obviously not contained within the resolutions that are presented to you today i think we want to make sure that we are absolutely accurate in what's being presented to the board

So I would make a motion to, unless there's other comment, I'd like to make a motion to continue this June 23rd.

And that is for all, sorry. Thank you. And that would be for all three of these resolutions on this item, right?

They're all cannabis. So I would say for all three. Yes. That would be my recommendation.

Okay. Okay, we have a first and a second on the motion to continue this to the 23rd. We have roll call vote, please. Oh, we did do public comment, we did, yes. Roll call vote, please. Supervisor Zenger? Yes.

Supervisor Velazquez?

Yes.

Supervisor Kosmicki?

Yes.

Supervisor September? Yes. Supervisor Curl? Yes. Five-zero vote, motion passes.

the 23rd okay i want you to come back yeah we like seeing you thank you uh we'll move on to 2.2 uh this is uh from public works regarding the uh water allotments stone gate

Good morning Chair, good morning Board, and good morning members of the public. My name is Linda Young and I am the CSA Coordinator with the Public Works Department. I am here today to hold a public hearing to adopt a resolution and a and propose an ordinance making CEQA findings and finding adoption of the proposed ordinance, establishing water allowments for the county service area 31, which is known as Stonegate for the current water year, 2026 and 2027. accept introduction and wait for the reading of the proposed ordinance adopt an ordinance establishing the water allotment and retroactively approve the publication of one fourth page display ad that was published prior to today's hearing and authorized publication of a display ad after the publication in lieu of publication of the ordinance itself So just to provide a quick summary of Stone Gates Water. In 2024, the board adopted an ordinance number 927, establishing a water conservation program for the CSA 31. And every year since then, we present it to the board. um the ordinance and the resolution is to ensure adequate water is available to all the residents within stone gate so they do have a well water source that provides domestic water to them and then in addition to that they purchase annual annually they purchase water from the san benito county water district for ag water. And that is what the ordinance establishes, an annual water allowment to ensure that they have sufficient water for all the residents.

Thank you. Thank you. We'll open the public hearing. And do we have any comments in public?

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raised hand icon. And I have no public comment.

Thank you. I'll bring it back to the board. Supervisor Curro.

So with the small water consolidation project, how does this... change in the future. So Stonegate is part of the water consolidation project with Sunny Slope Water District. This is only happening until that happens, or I'm trying to understand what's next, because this comes every year to us. We have to renew this resolution every year. I'm just trying to understand what's happening in the future.

So that is generally only going to be for their domestic water. They will still have to purchase water for ag services and for the fire suppression. It may not be as much as they purchase now. However, the well only produces so much. So they are going to keep their well, and then they're going to supplement with the additional purchase of ag water.

So to understand, because Stonegate had agreed, I wasn't part of any of those meetings, so I'm trying to wrap my head around this. So Stonegate is going to be on... but then they're also gonna continue to be using the blue valve purchased water through their well, which means the CSA is still going to be very much alive and well. Correct.

Okay, thank you. Thank you. Any other comments, questions from the board? Is there a motion? I move to approve. Second. Okay, we have a first and a second. We have roll call vote, please.

Supervisor Zanger?

Yes.

Supervisor Velazquez?

Yes.

Supervisor Kosmicki?

Yes.

Supervisor Sotelo? Yes. Supervisor Curro? Yes. Five, zero vote, motion passes. Thank you.

Great, thank you. On to 2.3, it's from RMA Public Works regarding the rate schedule, John Smith Road landfill.

Good morning, Board of Supervisors. Today's public hearing is regarding adjustments to the rate schedule of the John Smith Road landfill. The landfill operator submitted its annual calculation for a compensation adjustment prior to March 1st. Per section 6.2 of the landfill operating agreement, calculating a COLA of $141,804 or 2.83%. Staff and our consultant Sangita Lewis with Lewis Engineering conducted a review of the operators cola calculation and concur with the mat mathematical accuracy and proper use of the indices outlined in the operating agreement section 6.2 and exhibit h as a result of staff adjust staff as a result staff adjusted the current lampo rates to reflect a two point 83% increase across all rates and the increased rates were reflected in the public hearing notices that were published on May 22nd and May 29th in the freelance. And they are also attached to your staff report. Please note that the landfill operator per section 6.2 of the operating agreement is entitled to a minimum of a 2% rate increase, but cannot exceed 6%. It is staff's recommendation that the board approve the landfill operator's cost of living adjustment and the resolution adopting the revised rate schedule. And we're here to answer any questions that you may have on this item.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Open the public hearing. Do we have any comment?

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raised hand icon. And I have no public comment.

Thank you. Any comments from the board? If not, I'll take a motion.

Move to approve as recommended.

Is there a second?

Second.

Okay, we have a first and a second. Can we have roll call vote, please?

Supervisor Zenger?

Yes.

Supervisor Velasquez?

Yes.

Supervisor Kosmicki?

Yes.

Supervisor Sotelo? Yes. Supervisor Curl? Yes. 5-0 vote. Motion passes.

Thank you. Thank you. 2.4, here, Abraham Prado regarding the battery energy storage systems.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, members of the board. Good morning. Since the board adopted the moratorium on the battery energy storage systems or BES applications on March 10th, and again on April 28th, for 45 days, staff has continued to do its research and ordinance development efforts. In addition to consulting with the battery energy storage specialist, excuse me, staff has also coordinated with several jurisdictions throughout the state of California, including Santa Cruz County, Ventura County, Solano County, and San Diego County, amongst others. Staff has reviewed adopted ordinances, draft regulations, technical studies, and emerging best practices from across California. The draft best ordinance that staff has been developing includes several major components. For example, the ordinance establishes definitions for key technical and regulatory terms that are not currently defined in our current San Miguel County code. Such definitions include, for example, battery energy storage systems, thermal runaway, sensitive receptors, front of the meter and behind the meter systems, commissioning, decommissioning, and references to applicable industry standards, such as the National Fire Protection Agency, the NFPA, the Underwriters Laboratories, the UL, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the IEEE, amongst others. Also, the ordinance establishes land use standards where best facilities may be permitted within the county and what permit requirements will apply. That did an analysis of all the different zoning districts of the county of San Benito. And the ordinance will also address fire hazard severity zones and flood hazard areas as well. A significant area of focus within the ordinance has been battery chemistry and thermal runaway risks. Thermal runaway occurs when battery cells experience an uncontrolled increase in heat and temperature that can lead to fires, the release of hazardous gases, and propagation or the spread to adjacent battery cells. Recent incidents, such as the Moss Landing Battery Fire, facility fire in Monterey County, in January of 2025 and the OT Mesa facility fire in San Diego County in May of 2024 have emphasized the unique challenges associated with lithium ion batteries, fires and emergency response. And as you know, there is a summary of each there, a brief summary in the staff report. As a result, the San Bernardino County Best Ordinance is being developed with a strong emphasis on facility design, safety systems, monitoring requirements, emergency response planning, and operator accountability. staff is evaluating requirements that would hold facility owners and operators responsible for costs associated with emergency response, environmental assessment, monitoring, remediation, and other activities resulting from facility related incidents. The ordinance also includes impact mitigation provisions, which means that applicants may be required to fund or to provide fire response equipment, provide specialized responder training, emergency communication improvements, and other measures necessary to address project-specific impacts. In addition, comprehensive safety requirements are under consideration with the BESS ordinance. This includes the requirements that each applicant prepare an emergency response plan prepared in coordination with local emergency response agencies, for a fire risk assessment, fire suppression analysis, gas detection systems, water supply evaluations, maintenance plans, emergency vehicle access roads, noise standards and other technical studies prepared by qualified professionals. To ensure ongoing oversight, the draft ordinance is considering operators to be required to submit annual reports documenting security incidents, hazardous events, fires, law enforcement responses, air quality monitoring results, and other information deemed necessary by the County of San Benito. And finally, the ordinance includes decommission requirements to restore sites following succession of operations and financial assurance would be required to ensure adequate funding is available to complete the commissioning activities if an operator unfortunately fails to do so. So just looking ahead and subject to the board direction, staff intends to present the draft best ordinance to the planning commission at its regular meeting of June 17th, 2026 for recommendation to the board of supervisors and subsequently to the board of supervisors on June 23rd, 2026 for consideration and adoption. So with that said, staff recommends either one, the Board of Supervisors adopt the ordinance before you pursuant to California Government Code 65858, establishing an additional temporary moratorium extension of 10 months and 15 days on the acceptance, processing, and approval of battery energy storage systems. uh applications within the unincorporated area of the county important to know that if this option is what the board decides if the best ordinance is adopted on the june 23rd board meeting by the board then the temporary moratorium if approved today by your board would be rescinded upon the best ordinance taking effect Or number two, alternatively, the board may direct staff to proceed with development standards for best without extending the moratorium. Or number three, alternatively, the board may adopt the extension of the moratorium and give more time for staff to continue refining the draft ordinance in coordination with the fire department, environmental health, the office of emergency services, incorporating evolving best practices and technical studies being prepared statewide and come back to the board to provide periodic updates during the proposed moratorium extension period. I would like to note that many counties throughout California continue to study the battery energy storage systems while developing their ordinance. For example, San Bernardino County has been working on the best ordinance since March 10th of 2026. Tomorrow will be three months in comparison to San Diego County, who has been engaged in best ordinance development since prior to 2024. And in my communication with the County of San Diego, they are anticipated to conduct public hearings on their best ordinance later this year, or even in 2027. And so that's approximately three years that they've been working on it. So with that, thank you for your time. I would be happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Abraham.

You're welcome. Let's go to, let's open the public hearing and hear from the public on this issue.

Vanessa to step out, sorry.

Yes, if you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card. On Zoom, please press star nine or the raised hand icon. And in chambers, we'll start with Leslie Austin.

Thank you. Good morning, Chair Zanger and members of the board, Leslie Austin, a 38 year Aromas resident and co-director of the CCA Workforce and Environmental Justice Alliance, fiscally sponsored by the Climate Center, a nonprofit public policy organization in Sonoma, California. Our April, actually our March, April and June letters and attachments A and B are in your record and I'll make one point. A good permanent ordinance takes years. Santa Cruz County has staff and funding, San Benito County doesn't, and there's still years into theirs. With one planner carrying this in a hard budget year, and Abraham has done tremendous work in the last three months, yours will take time too. You have a public that needs it too. It should, and I'm not asking you to rush it. But here's the problem, with a 10 and a half month pause, a moratorium does not stop a developer from going to the state. Your county council informed you of that. So during the pause, an applicant can withdraw, go to the California Energy Commission and get approved there. And because a moratorium adopts no standards of its own, you would have nothing on the books to attach to that project. The decision moves to the state and your local conditions become advisory. That is how a long pause loses local control, not how it protects it. So I'm asking you to sit with this You may also hear an option today to drop the moratorium and just process the projects under existing rules, but that does not fix the problem. Existing rules are the state baseline. Without your own adopted standards, the county's conditions still aren't locked in. Same loss of control, just faster. There is an option that actually keeps control. Adopt your own interim standards. Your county council explained why. Once your standards are on the books, they follow the project even to the state. Standards are the leverage. A pause is not. Processing with no standards is not. And you don't have to build those standards from scratch. The state's GO-Biz model ordinance is ready to adopt. So is the safety stack, NFPA, UL, Senate Bill 283, fire code, et cetera. And your own RMA conservation plan has already mapped this county's vernal pools and wildlife corridors. Using that map isn't new work. It's work you've already paid for. three things belong in the interim standards because they're not actually in the current draft. One is qualified workers. Thank you.

Next in chambers, Sophia.

Good morning, Chair and members of the board. My name is Sophia Schwartzke and I'm here on behalf of Central Coast Community Energy, or 3CE, the public agency that procures energy for 1.2 million Central Coast residents, including those in the County of San Benito. 3CE is responsible for delivering reliable, affordable power to the communities we serve and energy storage is a critical tool to do so. Energy stored and discharged locally serves the nearest demand first. A project in San Benito strengthens local reliability, improves resilience during wildfire season, and reduces reliance on fossil fuel peaker plants. This means that 3CE does not have to be the off-taker for San Benito County customers to benefit, though we do hold power purchase agreements with projects like this one, which helps keep rates affordable for San Benito County customers. there is a real risk to local control in continuing the moratorium. Communities that have blocked energy storage have seen developers turn to the state's AB 205 permitting pathway through the California Energy Commission. Because that process is administered at the state level, it removes local control and eliminates the very community input this board is working to protect. We saw this play out in April when the commission approved the soda mountain project in San Bernardino County, which includes 300 megawatts of battery storage. That approval was made entirely at the state level in a matter that had previously been before the county's own board of supervisors. It was the third project approved through this pathway. The commission expects to decide three more of these projects this year. All of them are major battery storage facilities. 3CE encourages the board to continue to move forward with the development of a thoughtful local framework that includes appropriate review of storage projects without extending the moratorium. Thank you so much for your time this morning.

Thank you. I have Ron Cheshire.

Good morning, Chair Zanger, Supervisors, staff members. Ron Cheshire with IBW Local 234 in the Tri-County area. I'm their Government Affairs Director. I think what the two ladies have already said before is quite significant. At the electricians, we would like to see you move forward basically with what staff has worked on already. They have quite a bit of information. And the thing is, is that even though this technology just came about five, six years ago, It's still new technology and there's always gonna be changes and you can always amend things over time. But again, what's really important is having your local control here for your community, your citizens, and that's your decision. There are some things that we would like to see added and we will present it to staff and also at the planning commission meeting, and if it moves forward from there to you. But the city of Escondido in San Diego County added some workforce and safety standards. Number one is they were very concerned that just a C-10 contractor does the work, not some solar panel installation crew, okay? A C-10 qualified contractor. does the work and it calls out what the specific work is the electrical work and then they call out the work besides that who can do that they also have basically set a threshold they have a 70 kilowatt hour threshold and they break it up into residential and commercial and so the thing is is we would like to add that also And then there's what's called an ESAMTAC certification rules. And those are basically the energy storage and microgrid training and certification credentials. And they've added that 15% of the crew that's working on any project like that, doing the electrical work, have that certification. that your lead people, your foreman, your people that are running the crews and crew leaders are certified in that for safety reasons because of the nature of the work. It's new and it's different. And so that's my two cents at this time and uh you know politics is heck you guys is uh they who hesitate are lost uh and uh you know you're here to make the decisions and move forward with this so you can maintain that local control thank you

Okay, next I have on Zoom, hopefully this works, Scott, you've been unmuted and you have three minutes. And it looks like we're not hearing him, so give me one second. Scott, give us one second. Scott, can you go ahead and speak again? I have you on my phone. Hold on one second. Okay, go ahead. I'm going to put you on. Yes. Hello? Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay.

I'm getting a lot of feedback.

Yes. I'm not going to work this way either.

I don't know what we want to do. Can you give us one second?

Yes. One more month of this. It's a good question. Two.

Can you speak again, Scott, please? No, nothing. Hold on one second.

Thank you.

We are allowed to,

Take a five minute break for our technical difficulties.

Scott, can you unmute yourself and try to speak now? Vanessa, he's speaking. Can you keep just saying testing, testing?

No, there's no, you can proceed.

okay give us one more second there's no actual zero requirement expected you know

It's all going to be fixed up next month, though, right? A lot of peace. Yes, sir.

Scott, can I get you to unmute again and say testing or say hello, please? Can you hear me at all?

so give us one second we're gonna restart all the meetings hold on

Okay, Scott, go ahead. Okay, Scott, go ahead. Okay, Scott, go ahead.

Testing. Is that working?

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

then uh good morning uh supervisors and uh thanks for your patience hopefully what i have to say will be informative and inspiring enough that will have been worth the wait um i'm scott murch i'm the executive director of the california energy storage alliance we're a trade association that represents the energy storage industry in california we've been around since 2009 so we've been here from the beginning of the industry and in fact we played an instrumental role in asking the national fire protection association to develop safety standards for the industry several years ago. So we take safety very seriously. We would encourage you to develop permitting ordinances even on an interim basis as expeditiously as possible. As the gentleman who presented the item noted, other jurisdictions around the state are working on standards or have produced standards to date. District. They put out a set of guidelines that we think are quite good in the middle of last year and the Orange County Board of Supervisors ended up adopting an ordinance that act very closely to the guidance that was produced by the San Diego County Fire District. So you don't have to reinvent the wheel. As another speaker also mentioned, the Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development also has a set of draft ordinances, and a lot of very helpful information about the state of the technology that we think would be useful. So if you were to adopt something on an interim basis, you can always refine the ordinance requirements in the future as you and your staff have more time to consider it. I will point out the State Fire Marshal did adopt new standards in the middle of last year and every city and county in California as of January 1 has up-to-date standards that govern the construction and operation of energy storage systems. And these systems do play a critical role in maintaining the reliability of the grid. In 2020, as you know, we had a couple of blackouts. We had only a few hundred megawatts of energy storage on the system at the time. And by 2022, when our peak load was much higher than it was in 2020, we got through that because we had added about 4,000 megawatts of storage. We now have about 20,000 statewide. across 300 large-scale systems and hundreds of thousands of residential and commercial systems on people's homes and businesses. I would just encourage you not to slow down the adoption of energy storage at this time to do what you can to expedite a proper ordinance. And as speakers have said, the Energy Commission has now considered three energy storage projects and has approved all three of them. So to the extent that you do want to have some influence on their deliberations, having an ordinance in place would be helpful. That's all I have. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We have one other. We have one other. Lauren, you've been unmuted and we're gonna give you three minutes, but give us one quick second. Go ahead and speak, Lauren.

Yes. Good morning, supervisors and staff. I'm Lauren Cyphers, developer for the Alley Animal Project. I'm here to help the board to allow the processing of . Can I start over? No? Okay. Allium is different from the Pinoch project in a way that the county will feel directly in tax revenue. It's my understanding that San Benito received zero dollars from sales tax from that project against early projections of more than five million dollars. That's completely unacceptable and absolutely not how the industry does things today. The standard now is to structure equipment procurement so that the host county is the point of sale. For Allium, that means the local share of sales tax on tens of millions of dollars of solar panels and battery storage equipment is paid directly to this county at the point of construction. Pinoch came online under California's solar property tax exclusion, which greatly reduced the assessed value of those projects for property taxes. That exclusion ended this year. Projects built in the years ahead will now pay significant property taxes to the counties they are built in. So the picture for San Benito is tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue paid to the county's general fund over the life of the Allium project. And this project does not create long-term traffic. It does not increase demand on county schools, police, parks, or utilities, nor does it compete with agricultural water needs. You're looking at a rare combination of very substantial revenue with very little marginal demand on county services. I want to note that we submitted our CUP application for Allium in August 2025. In the 10 months since, the county planning staff was not able to process our application. For the first seven months of that timeline, I'm not sure why nothing happened. For the last 90 days, we've had the moratorium. And now the county is asking us to wait an additional 10 and a half months on top of that. Having to wait almost two years for anything to happen is an unfair ask of any applicant. San Benito is starting today with a wealth of publicly available templates for best safety standards. Needing 13 months to adapt work other agencies and counties have already done does not make sense. And we can't wait another 10 and a half months for something to happen. Via the state permitting pathway, the decisions about Allium move from this board to an unelected state agency in Sacramento. The public hearings move from this room to a state hearing room. Your constituents go from speaking directly to their elected supervisors to filing written comments with a body that does not represent them. the county becomes a commenter on its own land use decisions not the decision maker and you lose control of where the community benefit dollars go we don't want that we've been working in this county for five years meeting with stakeholders chatting with community members we own and operate the projects we build we don't flip projects and walk away from our commitments we want to be a good neighbor and a long-term partner if you'll allow us to be Processing applications cost San Benito nothing. You keep all your authority, you keep the tax revenue, and you keep your constituents speaking to you in this room. We pay for county staff time and county consultants. You bear no financial risk. The only way the county loses is by- Okay, that concludes public comment.

Thank you. If you have a public comment, I'll bring it back to the board now. Any board members have questions, comments at this time? You wanna start, Mr. President Velazquez?

Thank you. Appreciate you coming up and giving us the update on it. I personally am surprised to hear that we were gonna be voted on an item today. I just thought, How could San Diego County pull that off so quickly? I was glad to read that you still need, really, you need more time to do this right. I know you guys are working hard on this. Question I wanna ask about, have we already looked at distance from schools, for example, blood zones? Are we looking at generation, fees for generation? Because a lot of times, and one speaker talked about laws are changing now, so property tax is gonna be included on some of these things in the future. It's how the county got, than the previous venture. I wanna make sure we're covering everything. And again, this issue of it being so close to many residents, and the experience we've all experienced through the fire and lost landing. And we could smell it, smell the odor here. It's strong. What happens when it's in our own backyard? What happens to all the farmlands being used up for this? Where are we going as a community? Is this the direction we go? Are we moving again? All these other technologies are coming at us that we really need to make sure we're, I don't want it to be a situation where the state decides, even though the state has now basically taking over cities and counties, forcing them to do everything. So I wanna make sure we do have something in our own books to make sure we get it right as we did with the housing element. Good job, by the way, on that again. But I don't see it being realistic to make a decision today or within the next month. I think you probably need a little more time to do this right. I wanna make sure we're including those conversations. And then more importantly, I wanna make sure the public is involved in this conversation. I know it's easy to say we're having meetings now, but we really need to have town hall meetings, get the public very involved in this to hear from them, things that we haven't even talked about amongst ourselves. of different issues out there. So if we could do that, I'd be happy. I'm more in favor of giving you more time to do it right. And I don't even know if it's a good idea to really be presenting it to the Planning Commission if you don't feel 100% that you've covered all these areas. Thank you.

So thank you for all of the updated information and I want to thank all of the comments I've received from the public and from constituents and their concerns. My number one concern is about local control and it was brought up last time about how do we make sure that we don't lose local control. And in my research in council, please, if I'm stating something incorrect, correct me. If we extend this, we are opening the door to applicants being approved through the state. Is that correct? If we continue a moratorium, the applicants will have the ability to go to the state.

Mr. Chair, members of the Board of Supervisors, I think it's important to note that the applicant can go to the state at any time, whether or not there's a moratorium in place. And I think the board has made it very clear to staff that local control is a critical import to this board. And so what we have done here is we have solicited information from throughout the state from the experts from all the other public agencies that have gone through this analysis and what they have produced as far as guidelines or ordinances we've also of course reviewed state law and our intent here and it will be reflected in the document that proceeds to the planning commission next week and will then appear before this board on June 23rd is an effort to address and to include all safety standards, required proper certification of those who will be constructing these facilities, looking at our local conditions, looking at sensitive uses and utilizing each and every tool that's available to us to ensure that these battery energy storage systems are not going to provide any threat to public health and safety but can produce the storage as designed and so we have made a concerted effort to tailor all of these standards to San Benito County and its local conditions. And so, I believe that there's a misunderstanding among several of the individuals who spoke that we are simply delaying this for another 10 months. No, that is not the case. We are very close to a final draft and it will be presented next week to the planning commission and it will be presented to the board on the 23rd. So today's action simply gives us some additional time to get this right and to then bring it forward to the planning commission and to this board, and most importantly, to obtain public input, this board's direction, and either proceed with introduction and adoption or to bring it back with some additional changes. And so this has been a very thorough and thoughtful process, just as the board had directed to us. And I would just further note that if we don't adopt There is nothing for the California Energy Commission staff to look to as it relates to San Benito County. They simply are gonna apply state law. If we adopt this ordinance, what we do know is that the local ordinance will be considered by California Energy Commission staff. It is possible that they may condition some or all of the compliance with our ordinance if an applicant were to proceed to the state for approval. However, we have one applicant and I believe they have now publicly stated their intent is to work with San Benito County in cooperation and to be able to proceed with county approval of their project. Our intent, and speaking for the County Council's Office and the Planning Department, our intent here is not to stop the project. Our intent is to make this project successful But in doing so, we wanna make sure that we protect the public health and safety of all of your constituents. And so that is our intent. That is what I believe we will do. And I believe that the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors will be pleased with the result. And I believe we will be able to work cooperatively with any and all applicants that come forward with a similar project. So those would be my comments. I'm happy to answer any questions or certainly if our planning director would like to add to my comments.

No ads.

No, I think that was- Okay, okay.

I thank council for that. My areas of concern are like the majority of all my colleagues. One, I don't want us to lose local control. So moving forward with the planning commission on June 17th and bring it to the board on June 23rd, I'm very much in support of. but also ensuring that revenue is of our forefront of our minds. I'm sorry, we all know we have a budget crisis. So I'm just gonna say that's my number one is what is the benefit and the financial gain for the community? um my other items are community engagement and making sure that whatever we do moving forward whether it's an interim that we are engaging with the community and ensuring the community's voices are being heard and that they're being heard and brought back to us not just you go to a committee meeting you hear things i really need to hear i'm going to be reaching out to my residents they all have called me about questions on this so making sure that fire and environmental health are very much on board with what this ordinance would be. Local benefits, the local benefits isn't just financial, it's how is it benefiting our community? that includes in construction. I learned a lot this election cycle that I hadn't engaged as much with labor unions and understanding some of the standards that are so different in union versus non-union. I've really learned a lot there. It's an area I still want to learn more, but making sure that they have proper not just qualifications but certifications this c10 licensing i don't know enough about it but i do know if we're building something in this community i want the strictest construction requirements and certification because there we we do not want to go with the cheapest installer Sorry, I'm just gonna say it. Going with the cheapest is not gonna be the best and the safest. So we need to make sure that any installation that's being done is at the highest standard possible. So those are pretty much my comments. I wanna make sure that we retain local control. So if an interim is needed to be able to do that, or if we just move forward with, Because I mean, the options that are listed here are the 10 month, 15 day moratorium, direct staff to prepare a development of the best standards. All of this with Senator Laird's bill and everything, the state fire marshal, all of that has to be considered. I really want this to move forward so that the state is recognizing that we have a local ordinance. It may not be perfect, but they are going to have to coordinate with us and so are the applicants. So those are my comments and I thank you so much for your presentation today.

Thank you. Your comments? Yeah, real brief. Well, my number one is safety. I want to make that clear. So I've said it before, distance from population centers. I'm, you know, hopeful that that's a priority in this. Safety standards, obviously. Revenue as far as risk mitigation. I don't know what, you know, whatever we can legally do as far as collecting fees to mitigate risk and then loss of prime farmland. Those are my four big ones and I'm Certainly supportive of extending this so we get it right. Thanks. Thank you.

Thank you. Can you, I'm having a hard time understanding and I hope that you'll help me understand this a little bit better. Okay. So we're putting, it's being suggested staff is recommending a 10 month and 15 day moratorium. Okay. However, I'm also hearing and reading that it'll be going to the planning commission in the next couple of weeks and back to the board of supervisors by the end of this month. So being that you've got something that is, it sounds like ready. I mean, if you're taking it to the planning commission and then the board of supervisors, it sounds like you've got a great start. So why are we... asking for an additional 10 and a half month moratorium when it sounds like there's something coming to us very very soon because i am really concerned about the local control piece right and so i'm just wondering you know are we putting the cart before the horse if we're going to do this moratorium or should we really listen to the feedback that you give us and the suggestions that you're going to come forward with a little later this month then make that determination if a moratorium is needed or not. I'm a little confused right now, trying to understand why we need a moratorium for 10 more months when it sounds like, you know, in some of the presentations today, you're well on your way. So hoping you can help me understand that.

Certainly, thank you, Supervisor Sotelo. Thank you for that question. Yes, we... to go too much into detail in regards to what we have in our ordinance because it's not it's not agendized it's just like like our county council indicated regarding the extension of the moratorium but i i did in consulting with county council was able to provide feedback in regards to what we are working on and i'm and i'm glad that it sounds like it gives a good impression in regards to what the level of efforts and the research that that is going into this draft ordinance that we're hoping to put the final touches on and just know that planning commission does require all the items beforehand. And so we pretty much have today to finalize any last touches before we send it. I mean, per law there's 72. hours before we provided to them, but they've been requesting it ahead of time. I mean, we wanna do our best to address them. But to try to answer your question, Supervisor Centello, and I'm sure others have the same question, on April 28th, when your board provided the extension of 45 days, the 45 days moratorium ends on Thursday the 11th. And so therefore, if the board does not adopt the moratorium extension per government code as cited, essentially on Thursday, it would end. And so therefore, at that time, any new applications or the existing application that we have in the Allium application, we will then, you know, we are then required to continue to process And so the reason for bringing it is essentially to address that, that the current 45 days is gonna be expiring. And as you know, it's been a three month process only, and we're doing our best to have a good draft ordinance, but it could be that when it's taken and presented to the planning commission, they have the right to not recommend it to the board. They have the right to maybe say that they want to continue this item and have additional information be brought back to them as they have in other projects. And it may be that, that if they do recommend it on the 23rd, it may be that the board may have some concerns and may want to continue, have direction for us to continue working with members of the public, which is why I provided the third recommendation today. If the board wants, we can have those discussions with the fire department, environmental health, and come back from time to time during that moratorium, if you do extend it to provide these updates. In comparison, It was brought up the County of San Diego. The County of San Diego actually has entrusted a big portion of their best ordinance to the fire department. They have a specific name to their fire department, the County's fire department, but they actually allowed a consultant to be hired and provide best practices to combat PES or to be able to address PES and bring it back to the board. And so those are documents that have been established. Honestly, we haven't had all the time to review all of those and to coordinate a lot with the fire department. We've been in communication with them, but right now, they are in review of the draft ordinance. They haven't even, like environmental health, fire department, OES have not had enough time to provide comments. And we're hoping that they provide them by the end of the day today, so that we can rush and conclude them all for tomorrow to try to have that draft ordinance tomorrow for the planning commission next, the following Wednesday. So I hope that at least help answer that question.

It does, a little bit, a little bit. I guess the question would, I mean, it's kind of so specific, 10 months and 15 days, like what is at the end of that 10 months and 15 days?

Okay, thank you for that, Supervisor Sotelo. So 10 months, 15 days, is essentially what the government code allows prior to the 45 day expiration. So right now we're under the 45 days. And so the government code allows them for an agency to extend it if needed for an additional 10 months and 15 days per government code. That's what it indicates. County council can let me know if the board can actually reduce that a specific number, but that's what the government code indicates. There is an option for it to essentially, like if all goes well, if you decide let's just proceed with it, let's do the presentation on the 17th for the planning commission, bring it back to the board and the board adopts it, at that point in the ordinance, we will put a stipulation indicating that Once the ordinance takes effect, then we will rescind the moratorium. And the ordinance usually takes effect 30 days after adoption. So we will do that.

So I just want to understand this correctly. So the 10 months and 15 days is kind of state law.

So yes, Mr. Chair, members of the board of supervisors, the statute that was referenced by Mr. Prado allows an extension up to 10 months, 15 days. So that's the maximum period that the county is allowed to extend their moratorium. That's why it says 10 months, 15 days. So rather than try to extend identify should this be three months six months nine months what we normally do with respect to any moratorium is if it's going to be extended it is automatically we automatically recommend to the board that it be extended for the full 10 months 15 days with the expectation that we will never need that time but we're nonetheless going to do it because the state law permits us to do it now In this case, what we've identified is the shortest possible timeline for adoption of this ordinance. That would be that we take it to the planning commission next week and then to the board the following week. That of course assumes that there are no questions, there's no revisions, and there's no further delay. But as Mr. Prado indicated, it is conceivable the Planning Commission could have additional questions, want additional information. They could request additional revisions. That will take additional time. How much time? I can't tell you. Once... we get to a point where it's we're able to move it from the planning commission to the board the same thing is quite conceivable the board may have questions board may want additional information and the board could direct staff to include additional revisions so all of that is quite conceivable how long that would take at its maximum, we know it's gonna have to take no less or no more than 10 months, 15 days. So you have our commitment. We have moved this forward as quickly as possible, but being as thoughtful and being reflective of the board's directives and your concerns.

Can I just, so are you allowed like three extensions? So you're allowed a 45, a 45, and then a 10 month and 15 day, or I'm just, I'm a little bit like, why did we do 45, 45? If really we had no intention of completing it within the 45 days.

Right. So your first moratorium is 45 days under state law. If you do not extend it within the first 45 days, then the moratorium ceases. So within that 45 day period, if you need additional time, then the board may extend the moratorium for an additional 10 months, 15 days. So that's what we are asking from you. Initially, and I think this is where the confusion comes in, is the board adopted a 45 day moratorium. However, the period for the moratorium expired without extension. Staff, it was then necessary because of the additional information that we were considering and had gathered and additional concerns that were brought to our attention. We then needed to bring forward a new 45 day moratorium. We're in that 45 days.

Okay, thank you, that helps me understand it. No, thank you very much. So what I'm hearing is you're asking for this moratorium, but you have no intention of it hopefully taking that long, that we are eager to get our standards in place and our ordinance in place and as timely a fashion as possible. I agree with some of my colleagues talking about the public participation. I don't think we've done enough of that to date. Yes, we have these public hearings and yes, it's on our agenda. But as we've heard from people, it is sometimes not convenient to come to our meeting at 9 a.m. Sometimes they just don't know about it. And so I would love to see us do a little bit more outreach. I think that there are a lot of questions in the community. There are a lot of concerns, and I think people wanna have some of those questions answered, right? There's been some fear that people have, and I would like to kind of do everything that we can to really listen to the community. because I agree, I mean, we've gotta protect the health and safety of this community. So I would like to see some outreach done on that prior to us getting the ordinance kind of done, but really working with the community on that. I'm curious, are we working with any type of a professional expert in this arena at all that is helping us as a consultant come up with this ordinance or anything?

Thank you for that question, Supervisor Sotelo. We are not. We have been referred to experts and I've had one conversation with a battery energy storage systems expert. I have done research listening to some experts like I've quoted in the staff report as well. very helpful information and then collaboration with the fire department as well. That's part of what we've been doing. And then the online information, NFPA information that was alluded to earlier as well. All of that is all research that we've been gathering and incorporating in this draft ordinance.

Is that something, Abraham, that you need? Do you feel that you need a professional kind of expert consultant to help you with this process?

That would be really, really helpful to do. Like I mentioned, San Diego County did allow for that in collaboration with the fire department and Cal Fire to be able to provide this because they did have a fire very similar to ours here in Monterey County. It's called the Otey Mesa. And there was a lot of concerns out there. And that happened in 2024. I think it was like in December of 2024 that the county allocated funds for a professional to be able to provide these recommendations. And in my conversations this last week with the County of San Diego, their public hearings are not gonna be, they don't anticipate them until either later this year in 2026 or even into 2027. So that would be helpful. What I have here is a lot of the research as alluded to the great comments that we received from the members of the public. essentially other counties, the different research that has been done, and we've tried our best to be able to connect it to the needs of the County of San Benito. I can tell you, for example, Solano County, they do have one of the only counties that has an actual drafted, approved, best ordinance. A lot of the other counties are work in progress. And like, for example, Solano County, they have a big ag, they have a big ag, you know, importance, significance to their infrastructure, to their economy. And they essentially do not allow BEZ and AG. They do allow it in a certain section that is kind of encompassed between their industrial zoning districts, because what I've noticed is that mostly it's allowed in the industrial zoning districts. um and in certain areas in regards to to ag um not in awe i can tell you right now that this county does have a renewable energy um ordinance we we do allow for renewable energy such as what we have out there in panoach um and and renewable energy is allowed uh for like in agricultural districts with the you know conditional use permit so All of that, you know, is what we're trying to kind of, you know, be able to finalize in our draft. It's not final yet. We're trying to just kind of, you know, put the finishing touches. But we are addressing things like, you know, flood zones, as Supervisor Velazquez indicated, fire hazard severity zones as well. And we're doing our best. but I do agree with you that it would be good to have more of that community input and be able to provide updates to the board as Supervisor Sotelo indicated from time to time, as Supervisor Crowe indicated from time to time. But I leave that totally up to the will of the board.

Thank you, Abraham. And that was Solano County that you said has the, is that the one you're mentioning?

Solano County has an ordinance that's been adopted and they're very similar to San Miguel County in regards to agriculture. Okay, thank you.

I'll take a look at that. I would love to see us set some interim standards. Having this moratorium scares me a little bit in that we don't have any local control potentially. And I wanna make sure that we don't lose that local control, particularly when this is important to the health and safety of our community, right? And so I would feel a lot more comfortable with some interim standards. I would feel a lot more comfortable if we hired a, expert professional consultant. And it would make me feel much better if we planned some public outreach, town halls or whatever it is, discussions, and really started to listen and answer some of the questions that the community has as we're coming up with this. So, thank you. I appreciate it.

Just for clarification, you asking for workshops, which I totally agree, I'm a big person in community engagement. One thing that we need to consider is that we are in vacation recess for school, and most likely a lot of people are traveling. So one of my recommendations will be to have meetings, if a schedule meetings somewhere in September, around September, October, to have more reception being in the afternoon as well. being advertised at the newspaper, but also I would like clarification about the consultant services. Did you want a consultant services or monitoring the workshops or for the entire moratorium?

I'm thinking more like an expert and professional consultant that helps us come up with this ordinance and that we don't leave anything out, right? Making sure that we have absolutely considered everything, and that we have a really good plan that fits the needs of our community, that is specific to us. So I would love to see, I mean, we use consultants all the time for everything else. This is a big issue. We have an opportunity to get this right, right? And so I just think this isn't one of the areas for us to, nah, we probably don't need it, but really make sure that we are really, really doing a good job in putting this together. I commend you. You are doing a good job. I'm not saying that you're not, but I know how short staffed you are. I know all of the demands. I know that this is an important hot topic issue really for this community right now. And so I would just love to have another set of eyes that has experience with this, that is an expert and can really help us get this right for the community. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Any other comments at this time? There's a crow.

I just want to understand, because I've been trying to wrap my head around If there's an applicant right now that we have an application for, and we don't have any standards in place, even interim standards, they have the right to go to the state and bypass us completely. Do I have that correct? So if we don't adopt at least an interim standard, they could go around us. I'm just trying to bring it down to the reality of where we're at. So a moratorium does not stop from going to the state. A moratorium only stops the application here locally, which forces that applicant to go to the state. Am I not understanding that? got okay okay because that's my concern I feel we really need something to be able when it if for some reason this applicant goes to the state that they that we have something in place that the state is looking at that we're working on and having something as an interim I think would be beneficial but And I think an expert, yes, but as we know, this is gonna take time. And a moratorium is not gonna solve the problem. It's just going to force this to go to the state, if I understand that.

I think there's some misunderstanding about the idea that going through the state is going to be an easier path trust me it's not they have a whole process i work with the california energy commission before they have their own parameters they require sqa they require a number of procedures before they approve or consider one application it's not an easy thing to do so The idea that extending this moratorium is gonna alleviate the issue for them not to go to the state, that's not necessarily true.

But even if there is a moratorium, they still get to go to the state. They're still to go to the state.

Yeah, so the moratorium's not stopping this applicant. It's stopping us and future applicants.

Yes.

Okay, I'm just making sure I understand that correctly. Thank you.

Real quick, go ahead.

Yeah, when you hear the, we'll go to the state if you don't do this, that tells me everything about... what this is really about. We know how this works. We need to do it right. I think it was correct. The community is concerned, we're concerned. We don't need to make a mistake here. We just don't, but we do need to get it done. I liked you pointing out Solano County has it, one of the first ones that has it, very similar to what we are. From what you mentioned about how they treat Agland. I think it's important that we look at what they're doing, what they felt they maybe missed in theirs. That might help us get there sooner. And some information from some of the other surrounding counties. I know Santa Cruz was going through theirs and the applicant believe in Santa Cruz, pulled out and said, well, we're going to the state. That tells you their mentality already. They're looking for the way that's easiest for them or something that's not gonna hold them accountable. And we need to make sure we don't make that mistake. And if we do bring an expert in, probably an expert that also has background experience for data centers, This is a wave coming at us and we need to make sure we're in front of this. So we're not making the mistakes and let them get through this with promises. And it's always, you know, it's, every time somebody says this is millions of dollars for you, that's how you know it's gonna cost us millions of dollars. It's a sure thing. It's gonna cause us problems when they're claiming it's gonna make us millions. It's not gonna make us millions. And we need to make sure we protect our community first.

Thank you. And I just want to be clear, there's nothing forcing the applicant to go through the state. If we have a moratorium, that's up to them. That's their choice whether or not they want to proceed that way. So it's not like there's something that triggers an automatic state approval process. Just for the record, I want to make sure that that's clear. There's some information about that. Okay, if there's no more questions, comments, yes, super is a girl.

your comment there's nothing that stops them from going to the state but if we had an interim or a draft or some sort of uh ordinance in play wouldn't the state have to be looking at what we have so i i this is not my area of expertise i'm really trying to wrap my head around it advisor cure you you raised an excellent point and

Local control comes from the adoption of the ordinance so that when and if the applicant proceeds to the state, there is something that the California Energy Commission staff must consider. If we have not adopted anything, there's nothing for them to consider. So that is why given this board's concern over local control, staff has advised that in order to obtain some measure of local control, the ordinance is absolutely necessary. So with that being said, obviously the sooner that the ordinance is adopted and becomes effective, the sooner we will be in a position for any applicant to go to the state and we have that ordinance in place that must be considered. There is an option here, given all the concerns that have been expressed, and that is to continue to proceed on the track that we have presented We retain the expert, although I will note, I believe that's an excellent idea. I will note though, we have learned so much from what everyone else has done. And those ordinances, guidelines, the state fire marshals guidelines, Ventura County is another county who has adopted the ordinance and is currently in effect that we have also considered. but your concerns have been expressed are reflected within what we have learned up to this point there may be something more to learn by retaining an expert And if that is the case, then we need to learn it. And we need to then look to, do we need to amend an ordinance which has already been adopted? So it is possible for these processes to proceed concurrently. such that we would proceed as laid out in staff report. We could also retain an expert. It's going to take time to retain them. We can continue to work with them. They'd be able to assist us hopefully in the short term, as well as in the long term. And if any amendments are required, we could bring those back to this board that would allow an ordinance to be put in place and local control to be obtained earlier rather than later that is merely an option that i'm presenting to this board is obviously a policy decision for you to make thank you yes not to harp on this but i want to be clear i understand this

In order for us to have any, for the state to pay attention and to listen to what we have to say and our standards, the ordinance has to be in place. You do not get the same effect with interim standards.

I wanna make sure the interim standards, I'm not sure what, how we would term that or how that would affect us here. What I'm saying is whether the ordinance reflects the final decision here or not, it's the fact that we have the ordinance.

So we need to have the full ordinance until for it to be viewed by the state?

In order for San Benito County to have any measure of local control, we have to have an ordinance in place, which is effective. The fact that we may be studying it further and may amend it in the future as we would with any other ordinance that you would adopt. based upon additional information that we've identified. It's the ordinance that's been adopted and is in place.

Okay, thank you. And I would just say, I agree with you. I think sooner than later, we wanna get this ordinance in place. However, I really appreciate being able to amend and continue working through it. When we talk about public workshops, I believe September is too far out. I would like to get this ASAP just because I think that we need that public participation. We need to be working with the public. It's never gonna be a perfect time for everybody. I mean, there's always gonna be challenges around that. So I would like for us to get on that as soon as possible. I mean, if we have it coming to the planning commission, this month and then the Board of Supervisors again later this month, I would like a meeting as soon as possible so that we have some of that feedback prior to making a final decision on that ordinance. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, there's no more questions or comments. How does the board want to proceed? Does anyone have a motion? I'll make a motion.

We go with the introduce and adopt the urgency ordinance establishing new temporary 10 month, 15 day moratorium on the acceptance, processing and approval of battery energy storage systems. Facility application within the unincorporated area of the county based on new and additional facts and circumstances. Thank you. Is there a second?

First and second. All right, we have first and second. as far as accrual.

Can I just make sure that the area of concerns is with safety, that the best standards are part of this moving forward? Because we're directing staff where we wanna go. I think we need to be clear that we need town halls immediately. We need those standards to be included because I think we aren't solving any of the problems right now today. And it's like we're between a rock and a hard spot because we haven't done this sooner. And when it comes to battery storage, you do know right away data centers are right behind that. So data centers are going to have to be something that we start talking about. I wholeheartedly agree with my colleague on that. So I don't feel that... It's going to be very interesting to see what the Planning Commission does and how that moves forward. So I will let the motion continue.

Thank you. Can we have a roll call vote from Claire, please?

Supervisor Zenger?

Yes.

Supervisor Velazquez? Yes. Supervisor Kosnicki?

Yes.

Supervisor Sotelo? Yes. Supervisor Curro? Yes. Five-zero vote, motion passes.

Thank you. Okay, thank you. That concludes the public hearings for today. We'll move on to the regular agenda, item 3.1. This is RMA Public Works regarding the Integrated Waste Management Local Task Force. Go ahead.

Hello again, Chair Zinger and members of the board. for you today is a recommendation from the integrated waste management local task force to establish an ad hoc committee to review the integrated waste management regional agencies governance documents including the joint powers agreement adopted in 1996 the cautioning agreement executed in 2006 and to appoint a representative to participate in the ad hoc committee The regional agency is comprised of the County of San Benito, the City of Hollister, and the City of San Juan Bautista. The local task force, or LTF, is comprised of an elected representative from each jurisdiction, with Supervisor Curro sitting as our county representative. Since the regional agencies governing documents were adopted, California has enacted substantial legislation affecting solid waste management, most notably Senate Bill 1383. Additionally, based on the 2025 aerial survey conducted by Lewis Engineering, John Smith Road landfill has approximately 10 years of remaining capacity. As the regional agency begins planning for future of solid waste management in San Benito County, excuse me, as a regional agency begins planning for the future of waste management in San Benito County, increased coordination and collaboration among its three member agencies will be essential. accordingly it's important to ensure that the regional agency's governance structure decision making processes and cost sharing mechanisms mechanisms remain aligned with the needs and priorities of the member agencies the proposed ad hoc committee would provide an opportunity for the regional agency members to to collaboratively review the governing documents evaluate whether updates are warranted and ensure the regional agency remains well positioned to address future regulatory requirements, infrastructure planning needs, and long-term waste management challenges while minimizing costs to residents and businesses to the greatest extent practicable. Integrated Waste Management staff concurs that this is an appropriate and timely effort and recommends that the board support the formation of the ad hoc committee and appoint either a board member or a staff representative to serve on the committee And I would just like to bring to the board's attention, we were anticipating coming back to the board regarding the transfer station analysis this month. And we are going to postpone that to August so that the local task force has an opportunity to hear that presentation first and bring to the board their recommendations and feedback. But thank you for the consideration and I am available to answer any questions.

Thank you, let's go to public comment.

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raised hand icon. And I have no public comment.

Great, thank you. Any comments, questions, any supervisors that sit on this?

Yeah, I'm on the lat and I will tell you, I'm sure County Council and the CEO might wanna chime in on this. I am not fully understanding how the JPA was formed and there's a lack of authority on the lat. So we sit there, we hear the budget, And then we don't have authority to actually deal with this. We have to go to each jurisdiction. The history of the joint powers is a little bit of a mystery. Like we didn't finish it. Like we started it and we never finished it. because it's not like COG where you actually have a whole different board that approves budgets and approves fees and rates and all the things. So I'm struggling right now because when this item came forward to the LAT, the three jurisdictions, one from each, we have two cities and me, we were like, what do we have the authority to do? And we were basically told, you have no authority. We have to go to each of the governing bodies. So no matter what our recommendations may be, even if we recommend, we're seeing that there's a little bit of a, if we're not a conducive, community with our two cities and the county we're going to be playing tug-of-war because what if the questions came up what if we decide as the Board of Supervisors yes we will move forward with an ad hoc and the other two say no we won't or the other two say they will and we won't I think the that ad hoc needs to happen, and there needs to be real negotiations, not, I specifically said, not from a board member, but from an administrative and staff level. We need representation that actually clarifies what our roles and brings back real recommendations that all three jurisdictions can adopt to make sure that we have clarity with the LAT. And this is, I wanna thank Celina and the staff. They've been bringing all this information forward, all this kind of history, and we just started to realize that it's just not complete and we need the ad hoc to be able to negotiate where the LAT is moving forward. Did I summarize that kind of with what the LAT group was saying?

Yeah, I would say so. And just so the board is aware, LTF is a requirement under AB 939. They review the integrated waste planning documents for the region. It does vary significantly from county... to county. The county is obligated to staff and administer the ad hoc, or excuse me, the local task force. But some LTFs are comprised of staff, not elected members. It is confusing might be the right word. We have a joint powers agreement, but this is not a joint powers authority. uh and so there is a lot of areas to consider um ultimately this is an ad hoc they would be bringing back a recommendation to the board into the cities us as staff will be supporting the appointed ad hoc members to um have these discussions and i think we'll have we were hoping to come back to the the ltf our next meeting is sept um June 24th. We were hoping to come back with some results from the ad hoc meeting. Unfortunately, I think these discussions are going to, they warrant time and thoughtfulness and exploration of other jurisdictions and what is working. So yes.

Did the cities already determine who they're appointing?

the city of san juan batista the city manager is appointed to this ad hoc and for the hollister appointee the ltf recommended the appointment of city council member dolores morales who sits on the local task force so further discussion is needed with the city of hollister to understand their approval process does um Do they have to go back to the city for approval? Yes.

I just wanna intervene a little bit of what I have seen so far. I attended the meetings at the invitation of Supervisor Kerr because there was a lot of confusion. And that's why I find out that this is a joint powers agreement and not a joint powers authority, which limits the capacity of the board at the joint power agreement to make decisions on behalf of the cities and the county. And so number one, I think it's important to create a joint powers authority that has its own attorney and his own staff to manage this facility, separate this from the county. Number two, I think that before we do negotiations, to be honest, and I shared this with Supervisor Caruso, I don't feel that I'm an expert to go into a negotiation. How do you negotiate something that you're not an expert on the field? I think it's important for us to be educated or to bring a third party negotiator that understands exactly what we're negotiating. Because I don't want to jeopardize the county's position by sending me as a negotiator. I'll be honest with you, I'm not an expert in landfills or waste management. I think it's important to identify those individuals that will be able to negotiate fairly well on behalf of the county. Those are my biggest concerns. I think we need to be educated, but I also feel like the board, we need to have a workshop that Celina maybe can coordinate and which all the board members are completely educated about The current situation, if you create a joint powers authority, but more important too, what kind of liabilities you're gonna have in the future with that landfills, gets the commission. Because that property is in the county's properties, And we'll have certain liabilities. One, the landfill is decommissioned. I just want to be very upfront and blunt about the situation. I don't feel I'm the person to be able to negotiate that because I'm not an expert. And so I think it's important for the board to understand that before you make a decision today.

Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions, comments?

If not. Mr. Chair, members of the board of supervisors, I just want to also add that, The arrangement here is unusual. It's a joint powers agency, but not a joint powers authority. And under the Joint Exercise of Powers Act under state law, you can do either. However, in most instances, a joint powers authority is created, which then is a separate entity from the member agencies. And each agency that becomes a member, each local jurisdiction that becomes a member of the joint powers agency, they then appoint members to this separate legal entity. That separate legal entity then has powers to manage a specific public service. And this is something that I know that the board has expressed concern previously. Just wanted to let you know that we are looking at this issue, we are researching it, and we will be bringing back options for the board to consider. Here, it's a very unusual scenario where we have a joint powers agency. We have three member agencies. I believe that there is some misunderstanding and division of opinion as to who has the authority to do what. For example, that the city manager has the authority to appoint themselves without city council approval to this. There is a real difference of opinion among the lawyers, among the parties, and those are starting to now come forward. So I think it is something that the board rightfully should look at, and that is the creation of a separate and distinct legal entity that would take on its own responsibilities, its own liabilities and would be separate and distinct from San Benito County. I think that's definitely something that should be considered. I don't know what the history was and why the choices were made at the time they were made. I don't think anybody does at this point. However, I do think that is something that we will be bringing back to you and will merit the board's consideration. Thank you.

I would just say my recommendation would be that we do have a subject matter expert that's appointed for this ad hoc. I don't, I would defer to staff and their recommendations. I know this is going to be a hard conversation that has a lot of ups and downs, but we need a subject matter expert to represent us, in my opinion.

Thank you. Sounds good to me. Are you there, President Kosmicki?

I agree with getting somebody who's an expert based on all the recommendations I've heard. And I know we have had consultants in the past for landfill expansion. Maybe there's some crossover there that may be appropriate. I think, yeah, I don't want to go into names to get too specific, but yeah, that might be something to look into.

Mr. Chair and members of the Board of Supervisors, in my prior life as the Riverside County Council, that was one thing that when we entered into these types of negotiations, we did have consultants that were able to assist us throughout the entire negotiating process, and it did serve the county well. And you're absolutely right in suggesting that we proceed down that course otherwise i believe that we will not be in a position to properly represent the interests of san benito county so would we appoint one of um one of the board of supervisors and or are we looking at appointing just the experts

Right? We would have a supervisor that sits on there and then we would hire this expert to help us with this.

Am I understanding that correctly? You need to have an ad hoc committee first to review all the matters and then do the process to hire a consultant, an expert in the matter. Okay.

If I can just some information that may be of value to everyone in this discussion is that we are currently undergoing an RFP for solid waste consulting services. It was originally intended for the regional agency. consulting support however there could be the possibility and we did add some language we did an addendum to the the scope where they could support the county separately from their regional agency support so i don't know if it is possible to appoint the selected consultant today but that is coming down the road so just so i understand this correctly

Would the consultant also provide assistance to the joint powers agency with respect to its negotiations that are upcoming? Or is this something separate and distinct?

It could be. It's one RFP, but we have the ability to select multiple consultants. So if it is recommended that we have a separate consultant that is different from the regional agency consultant, that could be the direction that you provide staff today.

Although ideally, I believe that the agency would like to speak with one voice. With each member agency having their own expert, that is very likely to create a scenario where the agency cannot speak with one voice and cannot negotiate in the best possible position given that we may have dissension among the members. My recommendation would be that if we're going to proceed with a consultant to assist in the negotiations, that should be a consultant that is selected by, let's say, an ad hoc of the agency, its three members, that would make a recommendation to the whole agency, and that this expert represents the agency and its three members in the negotiations.

Thank you. So I think we should just appoint a member of the board of supervisors to this ad hoc, and then they can work with the rest of the group. Correct.

And then obviously staff, will then support that board member as we move forward into these negotiations. So not only should there be an agency consultant, we are the lead agency. And so let's not forget that we are that lead agency and that we will then provide assistance as the lead agency as we proceed with these negotiations. Thank you.

Do any supervisors have any lofty dreams of sitting on the ad hoc for this? I think it probably should be one of the supervisors that's involved currently.

I'm the only one involved currently, and I don't mind being on our county ad hoc with the understanding that the JPA negotiations are done by the recommendations of the expert. I don't mind being on that. I just, I definitely have real concerns about being involved in the negotiations directly. That's where I want the board to understand my concerns.

Mr. Chair, yeah, I think it does make the most sense instead of having somebody to get up to speed to have Supervisor Curro. And I agree with her assessment that she would act in an advisory role leading up to the negotiation done by the outside consultant. Seems like the most. Great, do we need a formal motion then on this? anyone want to move to approve as stated uh by supervisor current county council myself to um move forward with an ad hoc comprised of supervisor curro um while working with staff to bring out a consultant to work on the actual negotiation thank you is there a second second okay we have a first and a second uh roll call vote please

Supervisor Zenger?

Yes.

Supervisor Velazquez?

Yes.

Supervisor Kosmicki?

Yes.

Supervisor Sotelo? Yes. Supervisor Curro? Yes. Five-zero vote, motion passes. Thank you.

Thank you. Does the board want to proceed with another item before we close session? Okay, move to 3.2. This is receive an informational presentation on animal shelter services through the county and an update from the animal control ad hoc. Supervisor Sotelo and Curro.

I think we'll have staff do the presentation. Yes, let's start with a small presentation that Dulce has prepared, and then we can take over the presentation regarding the animal control.

Bringing it up now.

Thank you.

Good afternoon board and chair. My name is Luz Alonso, I'm principal administrative analyst in the executive's office. Today, I'm providing a brief update on animal control services in the county. And the presentation will cover the county's legal obligations, summarize our current agreement that we have in place with the city of Hollister, discuss some trends that we've seen over the past few years and provide an overview of some of the work that Ad Hoc, which includes Supervisor Sotelo and Supervisor Kuro have done and conducted and evaluated options over the past few months. There's an echo. So the presentation has five sections. We'll review the legal requirements, the current contract, expenditure, historical costs and trends. And then we'll summarize the work completed by the animal control ad hoc. Is that me? Okay, sorry, there's an echo. And then finally, we'll explain why part of one of the options we explored includes two new positions to consider a potential hybrid model.

I don't know what's...

Okay, so under the current state law, the county has several statutory responsibilities and under the California Rabies Control Act, counties are required to maintain an animal shelter service. Is it too loud? Okay. Animal rabies service, including quarantine rabies prevention activities. The food and agriculture code also requires us to regulate and control dog throughout licensing program in pounding of stray dog and enforcements of dangerous dog laws. In addition, there's a penal code that requires the county to investigate and enforce any animal cruelty laws when appropriate. So these responsibilities exist regardless of how the county chooses to deliver the programs. And we have the ability to maintain them in-house or through contracted services. So currently we contract with the city of Hollister for the majority of animal control services. Under this agreement, the city maintains and operates a shelter facility. They provide services during normal business hours, Monday through Friday. As you see here, it doesn't include weekends. Also after hours, the contractor includes an established priorities of what they will respond to, and that's included on this slide. And this arrangement has allowed the county to meet its legal obligations while we leverage a partnership with the city and their existing infrastructure. So in addition to shelter operations, the city performs a wide range of enforcement and administrative duties. And these include enforcing animal control laws, regulation. They do issue dog licenses and collect associated fees. They maintain citations and enforcement actions. They do track the revenue and expenditures associated with providing services and And part of their contract does include to provide quarterly service reports to the county. And if we request, they would offer animal handling training services to any county staff. Also under this agreement, the county is responsible for providing some services and this includes The county provides legal services for hearing officers for dangerous dog cases. The county also has a separate contract for rabies programs with the local veterinarian here in town. And we also work with health and human services, environmental health for the rabies program and investigation. So that's a program we maintain separately aside from the city of Hollister. In certain situations, law enforcement assist may be requested by the city when there's public safety concerns that require the involvement of a sworn officer. The county may also assist with animal related complaints or low priority calls when the city requests and their city staff is limited. So overall, this summarizes our responsibilities through this contract. And I just wanna highlight a few services that are not included and not covered in our current structured. So any large dead animal removal are contracted through a third party vendor and then the county is billed in our quarterly invoices for those. Additionally, major cruelty investigation or significant emergency incidents may require additional resources or coordination for that. It doesn't include larger livestock shelter as well. So depending on the situation, there would be collaboration on how to proceed if it wasn't covered in the contract. So looking back through 21, 22, and some of the last four years on our contract trends, as you can see here, our contract has increased. I've included the percentages they've dumped year over year. It's not consistent, but it has increased. um the second column I mean the third column the second column from the end includes our veterinary services we contract in a three-year span with a local veterinarian and currently we have San Benito Veterinary Center provide our rabies program and they've been pretty consistent on their pricing with us So the Animal Control Ad Hoc Committee has been evaluating a few opportunities to improve service delivery efficiency and long-term sustainability for the San Benito County residents. Several option includes a regional partnership with neighboring jurisdictions. We evaluated our fully contracted service model that we're currently under. And then we explored a hybrid model that combines county staffing with contracted services. And by using this model, it opens the opportunity for further discussions with the city of San Juan Bautista to explore any regional partnerships and develop a hybrid approach that would provide a greater local control while maintaining operational flexibility. At the same time, we do know the city of Hollister has indicated it's evaluating its own animal control structure, making it an appropriate time for the county to assess future options. And I just wanted to expand on why the additional positions would be needed. So as part of the hybrid model discuss, two positions would be considered to straighten the local animal control services and the positions would help the county enforce rabies vaccination requirements, respond to animal related complaints and services requested in the unincorporated San Benito County. They would support with coordination with contracted shelter services, support with administering of our dog license program and collect revenue, which is required by statute. Also maintaining a presence a local presence for our local residents and really looking at improving response time for non-emergency issues. So these positions would provide the county a greater flexibility while ensuring continued compliance with legal requirements. And I'll tie it to both of our ad hoc members if there's anything they would like to add. This is an informational presentation and just to provide the board an update on where the ad hocs is.

Thank you. Does ad hoc have anything to add before or comment?

Well, first of all, thank you Dulce. Thank you for putting that together. think the majority of it is in the con or is in the presentation um however you know i think that um when we started out on this ad hoc it's kind of interesting to see where we started to where we've kind of ended up um and i think in some of the conversations that we've had with multiple people in the city of holster it's just not working it's not working for them it's not working for us And so I think we're kind of at a crossroads here. I don't know what the best path forward is. I mean, we've looked at some different options. I don't know where the city of Hollister is going to go as they consider their next moves. But I think that we really have to consider what is best for kind of the unincorporated area. I am incredibly grateful to the city of Hollister for their partnership over the years and helping and dealing with this. But I think that we're kind of at a crossroads and it's time to explore some other options and to see what we might have available that we can provide the best service that we can to the unincorporated residents. um when we in the presentation it mentioned that the office hours for the shelter are eight to five and while that is somewhat correct um they are there from eight to five because of their staffing levels and all of that it actually is not open to the public until much later in the day um usually noon one o'clock is actually the time that um that hopefully there will be somebody there but they are cleaning out stalls they're doing different things um they are not able to accommodate any large animal i don't believe that um i don't believe that the that the um after hours um what are they, kennels are even available anymore. And so there's been a lot of, we're just, we're not getting what we used to get for the dollars. We did go to San Martin and look at Santa Clara County's facility. It was beautiful. We think that in some of our conversations and with looking at the numbers that we think that we could possibly partner with them, at a much reduced rate. But that doesn't mean that there's going to be a reduced rate overall, because ultimately we're going to have to hire some community service officers within the Sheriff's Department to help because we're going to have to take animals to San Martin. There will be a lot more work on our end. And so, there's a lot to talk about and a lot to consider. And we've done the best that we can do, I think to the point that we're at, but we need to hear now from the board where you guys would like to see us go. But we really just wanna kind of come up with an option that is humane, that is helpful, that we can accommodate the larger animals in San Martin. They do have stalls for, Horses, goats, they even had chickens. They kind of have everything. The other thing that San Martin had that we don't currently have is there are in-house, staffed veterinarians and they are doing surgeries on their animals kind of all the time, which is something we don't have here. And I think that there is a huge burden on some of the local vets. I don't know that that's going to change. I think, you know, I am grateful that they are here. I still think that there will be a need, but hopefully we can help a little bit with that. So happy to answer any questions that you all might have, but we kind of just wanted to bring this back. It had been, I don't know, six months or so. And so we just wanted to give you an update of what we have been working on. We wanna hear what are some of the questions and ideas that you all have. And I do wanna make sure that we give proper, partnership and conversation with the city of Hollister as well. Like I said, we've heard that it's not working for them, but I definitely don't wanna do anything where we're pulling the rug out from the city of Hollister. We've been good partners in all of this. And so I'd like to make sure that we continue having those conversations in whatever direction we are moving towards. So I think that's it. Thank you.

I think Supervisor Citillo really summed it up. I think the biggest eye-opening thing out of all of this is the amount we're paying and the number of unincorporated area complaints that we have seen and heard. I've met with some of the nonprofits. The nonprofits really, really want to work and are very interested in what they can do to support, especially in the large animal area. I agree, we need to make sure that we're looking at both cities when we're doing this conversation, but right now with the dollars that we're putting in, I think we could do much better in maybe a hybrid type model with support from a more, funded animal shelter, so. Thank you.

Go to public comment.

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raised hand icon. And I have no public comment.

Thank you. Supervisor Cosmecchi, you were about to speak.

Yeah, a couple of things. So my understanding is we actually pay more for animal shelter services than the city of Hollister itself.

So the way our contract is set is we cover 55% of their expenditures. So that's how we're billed 55% total. Once they add in those extra fees that aren't covered in the, like removing the dead animals and other costs that aren't associated, we end up paying a significant, a little bit higher than 55%.

Why do we pay more than the city of Hollister, just in general?

It's the agreed to contracted amount. So the contract includes 55%.

Do we know what that's based on though? Like what logic is behind that?

That, I was actually part of the original negotiations, but it was, it included- That's why you need outside negotiators, by the way. I agree, yes, highly recommend it. But part of the discussions were that it takes additional staffing time and it takes them more time to respond to residents in the unincorporated area than it does to city residents and that's part of there.

So our services keep getting worse, we keep paying more, this obviously isn't working. I agree with looking at the hybrid model, without being at the level of scrutiny that both of you have been, my general thoughts right now are we have pet friends in town and I'm very interested to know what level of interest there may be in not just some distant partnership, but a real partnership. And maybe there's something with, you know, if we're putting, Half a million dollars, $600,000 toward this. The city's putting half a million dollars toward this. That's a lot of money. And I happen to know that pet friends who use it has a large volunteer base as well. that they're very passionate and they're very good at what they do. And we could find a way to fill the gaps if we had some sort of partnership with, for instance, a pet friends organization, figured out what base services could be covered by the nonprofit, and then filled the gaps with the hybrid model through the sheriffs, through the police department to cover those areas that are legally required from the law enforcement side of things. So that's something that I would request to have a serious conversation with pet friends uh because they are local right down the street i appreciate the san martin but there would be inconveniences with using per se if there's an option locally i would prefer that over going outside of the county and i'd be very interested to know what level of interest pet friends would have in having a robust partnership with the county and or city thank you thank you i i agree i think the answer to this is

we have to be working with a group that loves what they're doing. I'm sure you guys saw that right away with those that are passionate about it. Using, and I've had this complaint about the city side of this for quite a while. it's just not gonna work through a governmental bureaucracy. That's what happens. You need people that care and are willing to respond when those needs are there. I agree, I don't think going out of town is gonna be the answer either because your pets are your children. And if they're far out of town, That wouldn't work for me, I can say that. But I think there's partners here that we can find a way to do something. And I think the city of Hollister really wants to change the way they're doing it too. We just need to get enough people involved and committed to it that we can make that change. I think in the past, that was a problem. Everybody wanted to have something different, but nobody wanted to help. Maybe we reach out again and try to, as you've recommended, pet friends. There has to be a different way. The partnership with San Juan, I don't know what that really means. As a partnership with Hollister, it's kind of, how do we always just work with a group that can help us together? So this is a tough, tough topic. So let's keep working at it. I mean, I wish you guys brought some good ideas already.

Yeah, thank you. So what would next steps look like in terms of the Ad Hoc's work, just to pursue these different ideas that were brought up?

Well, I think in listening to some of the feedback today, it sounds like, you know, kind of continue working on this. Reach out to pet friends, see if maybe there is an interest and a desire. You know, really, we've got to talk with the city of Hollister, though, because ultimately we don't have an animal shelter. Right. So like we are going to have to. um you know maybe they're they're looking at that as an opportunity too so i think there's an opportunity for us to go back to the city of hollister and have a conversation about okay this isn't working for us and then we know it's not working for you um could we explore what does maybe some of these um partnerships with the pet friends or um cat crew or i don't know there's a bunch of different ones that are here locally and and what could we do and so i you know for me, it would be setting up a meeting of, you know, maybe ad hoc with the city of Hollister, ad hoc with the county and inviting some of these different animal groups to participate and maybe just having a discussion of what that could look like and continue to kind of fine tune it, bring it back to the board, get a little more direction and kind of keep working through these issues. If I'm hearing you correctly right now, um you know you don't want to explore the san martin option and i and believe me we had the same kind of conversations like gosh how would that work it's out of town i don't know if people would be okay with that um but we really didn't know where else to turn and so it was an option that we wanted to bring to the table but we're happy to take it back continue conversations with the city of hollister and and invite the non-profits to participate council

So just so you know, when the original ad hoc of the city happened, I was invited before we even had an ad hoc for this. And we did meet with the nonprofits. I will tell you, they had a lot to say. It's an understatement. They were very, very vocal. And it was a lot to take in just as a first meeting. there's some real concerns about where animal control resides and what is the department that manages it. So I think that conversation has to be included in any conversation we have with the city. When I'm saying hybrid, I think we don't even have adequate for large animals to the level and extent that we need in this county. And so I think we need to be looking at a hybrid that's not just a hybrid, it's this and this. It may be, we have the pet friends that does all of this, but then when there's large animals involved, we then partner with this group. We have to look at it in a very kind of diverse manner because it's not gonna be a one size fits all. We don't have the money for all of that. So I totally agree with the pet friends because they have some incredible ideas and incredible qualified individuals that could really, if we had an agreement with them, we could really try and solve some of our major problems, especially with the feral cat issue.

Mr. Chair, members of the board, in my prior life, representing a very large county with large areas of unincorporated territory, including large rural areas, One model that was successfully used was to create a joint powers authority, a separate legal entity with the cities and the county, and then to contract with a nonprofit that would then operate the shelter and provide the services. And that was a very cost-effective manner in which to conduct business. And it provided greater responsiveness to the residents, but it also gave the county and then the cities joint control and joint say, San Benito County is at a disadvantage under this agreement. with respect to your control over how and in what manner the services are provided. So that might be a model to consider whether it is the entirety of the services are provided by one nonprofit or multiple, but you have the advantage of having a shelter already built within the county. So that's one other model that you may wanna consider. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. I agree with that as well. That's one supervisor looking at the JPA.

Okay. Yeah.

Great idea.

Anything else? If not, yes, we'll proceed then. So thank you for the update. Thank you staff for the presentation. Thank you so much for the work you guys are doing.

Can I just give, Dulce, I just want to really thank you for all of your work on this and you've been incredibly helpful. And I think today is, or tomorrow is your last day, right? And so I just want to tell you, thank you very, very much for all of your help with this item, but with everything else as well.

And I want to thank you guys and the board for serving my community for the last eight years. This is my last official presentation and it's a... bittersweet. There's a lot of great things that this board has done in the community. So thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. great thank you um i believe now we have to head to closed session um we'll finish these other two items when we get back um it should be a pretty short closed session i was told half an hour probably so um i think if we the public can expect us back in an hour and grab lunch come back to closed session so be back in one hour um is there any public comment on closed session items before we go in

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raised hand icon. And I have no public comment. Great, thank you.

We're gone for an hour.

Okay, thank you. We are back from closed session. County Council, is there any reportable action?

Mr. Chair, members of the Board of Supervisors, there is no reportable action. Thank you.

Thank you. Moving on to regular agenda item 3.3. This is behavioral health.

Sorry, you had this. Thank you for allowing me to come and speak on behalf of our behavioral health department and the Esperanza Wellness Center. I just wanted to do a brief presentation about what the Esperanza Wellness Center is, what we do, and some changes we're going to have to make for the upcoming fiscal year and beyond. So this is kind of what this presentation will be discussing, will be about. So, as you know, this is our vision and mission statement for our department. We believe in the strength and resiliency of our community to heal and to recover from mental health and substance use challenges. We envision a community where taking care of our mental and physical health is part of how we live, work, play, and learn. Where everyone feels welcomed and supported in accessing mental health and substance use treatment services. In collaboration with our community partners, we strive to provide exceptional, inclusive, in-person centered behavioral health services and to serve our diverse community with understanding, empathy, humility, and compassion. And so to achieve that, We have our Esperanza Center. So Esperanza has been in effect and has been operational here in our county since 2007, so close to 20 years we've been operational. It's been funded for the past 20 years, almost 20 years, by the Mental Health Services Act, which was to provide strength-based, consumer-driven kind of services and supports at a safe location where the community could access. It was to provide services for adults, our transitional age youth, those who are involved with behavioral health services and those that are seeking and are interested in learning about behavioral health. We provide anything from support groups, art groups, wellness and recovery groups, and we also have access to the services there. We also have partnerships with the San Bernardino County Food Bank, where we have food from the food bank that's located there as well as a computer center. And we have staff that could offer one-on-one support when needed. Due to the passage of Proposition 1, which is now the Behavioral Health Services Act, The way that we fund the mental health of the Spenanza Center has to change. We can no longer use our behavioral health services dollars to fund a standalone facility. The only way we could do that is by utilizing putting programming in there, and then billing the center to the program as kind of rent, as you will. We put our Behavioral Health Services Act was presented to the Department of Health Care Services. It was approved. It will be coming to board for its final sign off here. And then we'll be submitting that to the state. It goes live July 1. But with that, we have to figure out how we're going to support the center. As you can see here, the total for the center is about $84,000 a year. That's just the rent, not including utilities and such. When we add in utilities and such, the total cost per year is about $100,000 and $203,000 to have the center run and operational. So now that we can't just fund that straight out with MHSA dollars, but we have to add programming in there, we're gonna have to figure out how to strategize and change how we do services. So what we're planning to do is we're gonna switch the usage of how we do and operate our Esperanza Wellness Center. One of the things that we did was we did a community program planning process. We met with the community as a total and whole to discuss what it is they want with behavioral health, what they want with the Behavioral Health Services Act. In that process, what the community said over and over again is they wanted treatment, but they wanted more treatment and they wanted it in a more accessible area. As you know, we're outside of town, outskirts of town, sidewalks end, rainy days come, it gets dark early, and it kind of is a dangerous place to walk or to go. So Esperanza is located, again, around the corner, not far from here, walking distance from this location. So what we are going to do is we want to expand services there. One of the current things we do is we offer behavioral health screening. That could be for substance use disorder or mental health disorder. And you could go in there to Esperanza and be screened to see if you determine if you qualify as part of the special mental health services program. or you need to go to a non-specialty mental health services program which is a little bit mild to moderate kind of services so we do those monday through friday from 8 30 to 4 30 We also are going to utilize the Wellness Center to provide additional outpatient treatment, such as therapy, group sessions, and any other outpatient services that the community feels that they need. We also are going to be housing our two new units that we're producing and have to produce due to the mandates that are coming from the state to the Behavioral Health Department. We have a forensic team that will be housed out there. Forensics team basically runs our collaborative court. which are our mental health court, our substance use disorder or drug court, our Proposition 36 clients, and as well as our CARE Act. And then also they will be housing our housing team. Part of the Behavioral Health Services Act is a housing initiative now we have to implement. In order to implement it, we have to create basically housing. And we have a housing program that will include housing navigators, rental support to finding permanent ongoing housing for those with severe mental illness or substance use disorder. So we have a housing team that will be housed and located at our Esperanza Center. along with those we also are looking to continue some we're going to continue with our current adult programming which is monday wednesday fridays from 8 8 10 a.m to 3 p.m and we're going to actually look at expanding the services and do kind of deeper hours for after school in a drop-in center so we just recently completed a transitional age and a youth survey. It got completed at the end of May. The results are in, we'll be posting those to the public. But just generally people are looking like the young people were talking about what they're looking for a youth center. So we will also share that with everybody here at the board about what that looks like. And we'll be posting it to our website. But our hopes are that in the upcoming fiscal year, we will be able to expand services and offer some more deeper end hours and services for our youth and transitional With that, again, this is our Esperanza Center right now. That's what it looks like. So if you're ever at Heavenly Bakery or at Wells Fargo Bank, look across the street and that's where our center will be located. And so that is basically what the Esperanza Center is about. And some of the changes that we have to make to accommodate the needs that are coming from the, in regards to legislation and rules changes.

Great, thank you.

Please provide a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raised hand icon. And I have no public comment.

Thank you.

Can I ask a question just based on, because I didn't see it in the report. You mentioned about housing. I know it's a new requirement for behavioral health. But when you're talking about having those services at the Esperanza Center, are you referring to making referrals, having a staff to referring people to housing or having an actual housing in the Esperanza Center? I just want a clarification. Thank you.

It'll be the referral. So it'll be a team. We'll have two navigators and a manager. So it will be the community could go there who qualify for the housing initiative or housing plans through BHSA and get the staff support to find housing out within the community and other programming.

So I've been to the center a couple of times and I'm curious, how does this impact the actual facility and the, what are you seeing people-wise? How much is this putting in that one center and does the facility cover the space? Is your space adequate basically for the services? That's a lot of services coming out of that one area. Is there concerns?

I don't believe there are because on average, on a daily basis, because I have the team do a status of how many people come in a given week. Or daily when there is program. On average, there's about 10 to 12 people that show up on a daily basis. So the number of people utilizing the center is very low. So to offer these services is to just really promote that wellness center is here. It exists. It's a huge amount of funding that we do provide for it, but very little turnout of people to utilize it. So I don't know if it's our advertising. I don't know if the staff, the community is not aware or the staff's not aware to refer, but that's one of the things that are concerned that it's a low number, a turnout of people utilizing the center, but a high amount of money to budget, it's budget to pay for it.

And this is the only way we could balance it. Yeah, balance that out. So do you have an anticipated amount of people that will be coming into the center now? Cause I know that was something that was a challenge. It was very low.

um well i to be honest i know for our bridges to housing program we right now have 23 people enrolled in that so at least 23 people who are enrolled that i could see being in meeting with staff there at the center for the housing initiative programming in regards to our substance use in our drug court in our mental health court i believe we have about 20 people utilizing that service So I could see them using and doing that center as a drop-in center for them. So you may see an increase of about 50 to 60 people a week coming into the center to use the services there.

And how is that affecting your staffing? Are you shifting staffing from your existing location to this location? Yes, we're going to do that.

Okay. And we're going to have to shift. So that's why the two units that we will have will have staff housed there at Esperanza, eight to five. That'll be their new location of operations. Not to say that they can't ever use our main clinic, which is over there off of San Felipe, but this is where they're going to be their main housed here at our Esperanza Center for ongoing care.

And is part of, I don't know, because I haven't used the transit system, is part of that route system with local transit, does it go from downtown Esperanza to your facility? Is there a route that's already in place?

Yes, there should be a route and there's bus stops along the way. And if anything, we could also do the dial the ride to help people to get there. And then the staff there at Esperanza could help those clients get connected back to our main site.

Okay, okay. It'll be interesting to see some of the stats. I'll look forward to seeing that when we have our next committee meeting, seeing what that does shifting and maybe improving some of the outreach efforts. So thank you so much for the presentation.

Thank you. Any other comments, questions? Yes, Mr. Stello.

thank you um how is the parking and all of that down there do you guys have any issues with i mean being you are in the heart of downtown which is great right one of the challenges around that is parking etc and do you have any issues with we i would say like

Because when the summer months hit, there's usually some kind of festival or some kind of Wednesdays are the market that does pose a problem, does pose an issue. And so we are trying to figure out a workaround to make that happen. At this present time, parking is either the public parking that is behind the center. or on the street kind of parking. I think the majority of this is for those that are walking or need to walk to get to services. And they're the ones I would strongly encourage to go to Esperanza since it's closer to Hollister. basically where the majority of the population lives.

Okay, fantastic. So just because it was on this agenda too, this might be completely inappropriate, but I'm going to ask it anyways. Back in consent, we had a... for Health and Human Services, we approved a lease today with Canis for the public health clinic site. And I don't know how often they open their clinic site, but not very often, I don't believe, because every time I go by, it's always dark, for just over $60,000. Is there ever an opportunity for us to kind of collaborate and share space so that, I mean, I don't know, maybe this 80, well, let's just say 100,000, because I think you said with all of the utilities. could that potentially be $100,000 that we could put into programs and to really helping people that we're having to put towards overhead instead? Or is it coming from completely different pots? And so that's not really for consideration. You're gonna have to pay the overhead no matter, you know what I mean? Or can that overhead be used to provide services for people? Because I wanna see us really working and providing the programs and doing all we can to help people really, have success. And so I just wondered, because I saw it on here, is there ever opportunities for collaboration? If they're only using it several times a year to do vaccination clinics, et cetera, could it be, and I don't know, that's a question for you and the CEO, and Health and Human Services, But just because I saw it, it just makes me wonder sometimes. And I'm sure if I'm wondering it, the community has definitely got to be wondering, right? We're spending $100,000 on this building, $60,000 over here. So we spend a lot of money in rents, et cetera. So just, I don't know if it's possible or not, but thought I'd ask the question.

No, and to be honest, as a department, we are interested in... not becoming leasers of owners of property but like a collaborative ownership where multiple services comes out of it because it's much more fiscally feasible for us because we're at right now we are leasers and we lease months to months so we're at the mercy kind of of the owner of the property so if we could come collaborate and braid the funding and figure out how we're going to braid it then i can't see why we can't partner with our other departments within the county that has and that's something that we could have um departments department had kind of conversations and what that would look like because um more of us in one place because we all use the same most of the community uses the same service the better and it's in the one-stop shop for the community okay well thank you i appreciate it

Thank you. Anything else? I'll just say thank you. I think this is a good direction. It's the central location. We're getting better use out of the building, so I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. We will move on to item 3.4, our last regular item today. This is... 3.5 was removed, right? Oh, whoops.

Good afternoon, Chair and members of the Board of Supervisors. My name is Dean Scatata, Interim Public Works Administrator. So under Senate Bill 1, or ISB 1, cities and counties are required to annually adopt a resolution and submit to the California Transportation Commission a proposed list of projects to be funded with ISB 1 revenues. This resolution must be submitted to the CTC no later than July 1 of each year. So for fiscal year 2026-2027, San Benito County is projected to receive approximately $3,143,387 in SB1 funding from the state of California. So before you today are three project list options for considerations. Can you pull up option one? Sorry. So in the attachments, there's option one, which is to road segments totaling approximately 3.56 miles with an estimated project cost of 3,415,000 So as you can see the screen, so that's option one. So if you notice, the projects are Wright Road Maintenance and Rehabilitation Project from San Felipe all the way to Buena Vista Road. And the second project is the Furby Road Maintenance and Rehabilitation Project from San Felipe Road in Granville to Lourdes Lane. And so we'll go to options. So option two is three road segments totaling approximately 3.09 miles with an estimated project cost of $3,090,000. And those are McCloskey Road, from Furby Road all the way to San Felipe Road. about 1,000 feet from San Felipe Road. That's the boundary between the city and the county. And then another, the second project is Highland Drive, which is in Sunny Slope Road, off of Sunny Slope Road. And the third is still the Fairview Road maintenance and rehabilitation project from San Felipe Road to Lourdes Lane. and then we have option three it's still a three road segments totaling approximately 3.03 miles with an estimated project cost of 2 million 990 000 which is sorry which is the Fallon Road from Fallon Road Bridge, which is the city-county limit, and all the way to Fairview Road. And the Highland Drive off of Sunny Slope. And the third project is Fairview Road from San Felipe to Lourdes Lane. So staff recommends that the board select and approve one of the three proposed project lists and adopt the corresponding resolution, which will incorporate the selected ESP1 funded projects into the fiscal year 2026-2027 budget. So this concludes my presentation and I am available to answer any questions.

I have one comment before moving forward. on April 28th, the board approved Fairview Fallon Road all the way to Equestria Beach. And then that road, we realized that we don't have enough SB1 funding available and we'll be using part of the general fund until we recover, we'll pay back the general fund from SB1. So I'm wondering if that amount is included in the projected revenue that is coming. I just wanna make sure that we're not approving something that is beyond our capacity because we already approved that one in April.

Alfredo, show the screen again, the computer.

Yeah, so if you notice in the screen, Exhibit B, that's where the Fairview Road that we approved in previous ECB-1 projects. But since we don't have enough funds or at least i i don't have a i don't have a confirmation that we have enough funds so uh we always list it as the previously proposed projects to utilize funds from the sb1 road repair accountability act of 2017 for the fiscal year 26 27. i'm sorry

i think there's some confusion here because because this is this is from san felipe to ludus lane but i think ceo's talking about from fallon to comstock they had you had to take a little extra so is that already accounted for i think is what she's asking

no that is so there is an additional funding that was requested from the previous years the previous year wrote approves sp1 you have an amount that it was approved by the board we came to the board on april the 28th requesting to augment that portion above what was approved before, there's an additional resolution for the additional work and using SB1. So my question is, big picture, if we having SB1 funds every year, if we already took a portion of the last year, that means that this year we might have less. That's what I'm worried about, not doubling that request. I wanna make sure that we have enough funding for the projects that they gonna approve.

In other words, that additional section we had to approve, what was the cost to deduct from the 3 million that we know? We need to pay it back. We need to pay that back. How much was that portion, do you remember? Yeah. Additional? No.

Because we have different information from different organizations. We're not sure about the amount of money. So we're supposed to come back to do an analysis of the SB1, the actual numbers. So I want to be careful and not... approving beyond what you have authority to approve based on that project i believe the issue was with the previous project if i'm not mistaken and i'm just trying to figure out yes uh that was an ad alternate to this ongoing project right now in fairview road about 200 000 um okay so we so then we just removed the highland drive we removed that and that would cover the gap then on all of these recover

I understand.

I was going to ask about Highland Drive. Anyhow, I don't, I've never seen Highland Drive on any priority list of any kind. And I was just curious why. Mr. Chair, I was going to ask about Highland Drive as well anyway. I just was wondering, and it says city slash county limits. I know that road has city and county jurisdiction, but I've never heard a single peep about Highland Drive and that being on any kind of priority list. Is there a reason why that's included?

Yeah, Highland Drive is one of the county maintained mileage. And I also don't know how it was created this county maintained, but it's been in the list of like the city. I mean, county pockets within the city. And we receive a lot of, you know, complaints about path holes in there and so that that's how it came with with the list well although it's it's your decision yeah no i hear you i think we receive a lot of pothole complaints on just about every road in the country what section exactly is that uh it's from sunny slope road and then uh it It just ends in the city county limit.

But Sunnyslope, Highland Drive we're talking about, right? Yes. And Sunnyslope, it's city on both sides, on the south side and the northern side, isn't it? I think there's a little strip.

No, it's off of Sunnyslope Road. If you are on Sunnyslope Road, then you go inside. There's a Highland Drive. I don't know what subdivision name was that, but it's called Highland Drive. It also connects to the city limits.

It's a packet of- Either way, though, the point is we need to subtract about $200,000 from these options to pay back what we took last year or earlier this year. Okay.

Or we could, well, we could choose a different option without the Highland Drive.

But we need... Yeah, yeah, or... Yeah, go ahead.

I don't mean to, you know, be the dead horse, but unfortunately we have a major problem. And to you guys, it may not be a major problem, but I get calls like on a daily basis. New Idria was destroyed after we spent all that money restoring it by the federal government with reclamation of the mining, the New Idria mine. And now it's to a point that when it rains, it's almost impassable. I know it's not a big populated area, but we have to understand life safety is a thing. And I'm just trying to get some sort of a temporary fix just to make it safe enough, even if it was gravel, even if just gravel could be put out there because it totally destroyed because we didn't do the two layers of gypsum seal, which was the recommendation, but we only did one. And we have a claim going in with the federal government on restoring it, but it's gonna take years for them to ever approve that. I'm curious how these roads got chosen. I think that's where the priorities came from.

To answer the question of how this is chosen was some of this had been on the list like a long time ago. It's been on and off the list and it just kind of carried on. And again, some is based on the complaints and that's why it will be brought to your board so that you can decide on.

So basically, I need to tell people to start filling out a complaint form because I'm sorry, my phone rings off the hook. Trace Pinos was promised all their roads to be with the funding previously, and that was all unbudgeted. So now Tres Pinos doesn't even get potholes filled. So I'm just frustrated right now with Rhodes, and I know Deems, you're not, it's not you. It's how do we make sure that when we fund these projects, we actually fulfill these projects? And I do have a concern because I'm looking at the minutes from that meeting, and it was very vague how much money was coming out of SB1. It basically said, to use SB1 funds in the amount not to exceed 1.365 million, including 10% contingency. So we don't even know how much came out of the general fund for that additional. It doesn't state.

We probably need to figure that out then before we can even make a decision here, I would assume. But... I do have a quick question I was trying to get to. Just additionally, when we're looking at these roads, before I forget, the Fallon Road option, does it make sense at this point to do Fallon before the road's gonna be realigned for the intersection there with Fairview? Is that gonna interfere at all or?

Maybe I can jump in because, been involved with these conversations these roads let's just go back to fairview the section i was missing i think you said you thought it was a 200 i believe it was two to three hundred thousand additional i quit the base to get it to that point that section it was 800 900 feet i recall do you remember that deems I think it's at 800 feet. I think that additional part was between two to 300. So let's be safe, conservative, call it 300. Now we fix Fairview from Fallon to, we'll call it Comstock. So it's clear. So everybody is clear on that. Okay. So now we have this other pot of money for Fallon Road that would go from the city line the bridge, all the way to Fairview. That's 2.2 million estimate. Is that about right? Yes. The question I'm going to have now is how reliable is that estimate? Was that an old estimate? Because prices have definitely gone up.

It says October 26. Estimated start date, or is that... Yeah, estimated start date. Oh, estimated start date. So I'm thinking it's probably...

upwards of 2.5 we

Yeah, to answer about the costs of these ones that is in the, as part of the options, we take it against the current cost of our ongoing projects and it's still okay. Okay, you think you're right there. Okay, perfect.

Now here's the important part because the chair just mentioned the alignment of Fallon at Fairview and we have the issue of that stoplight there that's costing us now over 5 million. I think last time I heard the cost with the realignment And for me, I wanna make sure, I think Fallon, it's a really important road. It does get a lot of traffic. I've been out there in the mornings and seen the traffic try to cross Fairview and Fallon. And a lot of people use that to get all the way back to San Felipe. So how are we gonna accomplish this? The, The time the conversation was realign it, which now has taken us to 5 million, which is just not realistic and we're not gonna get it done. And this is, I think, what's making so many people frustrated because it's a dangerous section. What other ways, now that you're here, can we look at this? I mean, can we do a four-way stop there? Can we do something that improves safety for a while until we get a better plan that can make this thing happen. And that way we can complete Fallon from Fairview all the way to the city line and get a better, safer answer to this issue of Fairview and Fallon. Because we don't have the $5 million and we're gonna just be straight up honest with the public. The current proposal, it's close to $5 million for a stoplight. So what other things can we do and have a conversation about to get something done here?

Yeah. Okay, I will answer that question indirectly. I know we explored initially just to do signalization of that without realigning. and then now i believe we already spent uh design uh expenses to do the realignment and of course with the signalization and that's that's when it jumped to like five million that's what you're saying so if you You know, if the direction of the board is, say, go back to just signalization without realignment, then we can probably ask the designers to reconsider back again to where it should be that is just the signalization without realignment. And maybe we can explore that option.

Can I ask, do we know why it was decided that we were going to realign the road instead of just putting the stoplight in? I feel like that makes sense.

Because it's a skewed intersection. It's not safe to be just like skewed. So the purpose of realignment is to have a better intersection, which is on a 90 degrees. It will approach the intersection, all angles at 90 degrees and not skewed.

I that makes sense. I would just I would argue that putting it put in a light there now even with the skew versus waiting till we have $5 million How many more accidents are gonna happen there in the meantime, I feel like it doesn't I feel like the stoplight there would solve most of the issues. I think the road needs to be redirected. But I don't know. I don't know. You said that if it's too late to go back on that, or this you said they could re engineer, redraw the plans. It's not like we've made a lot of headway. I don't think yet.

We can definitely go back to that. Or if you want, we can discuss it further. Or maybe the ad hoc will discuss it further on how we're going to... know of move forward on all of our ongoing projects and future projects because that's actually also one of my let me um ask this way so just so the public understands the realignment is

Again, Fairview and Fallon to make it like the perfect condition, 90 degree angles. That option is about $5 million for that stoplight. The original was just placing stoplights as it exists now. What was the estimated cost on that? I don't have that number right now. And then I'm going to ask the third, because we're talking dollars here, we're talking lives, because it is a very dangerous intersection. Every time I pass through there, I'm watching all over the place. But what... Has anybody ever looked at just the option of a four-way stop there in the meantime to slow the traffic down? Because I think the biggest problem is every time I come through there, people come through there at such a high rate of speed is where they're dangerous. Has anybody looked at that and how you could slow the traffic before you got there? Has that been a conversation at all?

We can take a look at that. But we have to be very careful because, as you know, Ferryview Road is kind of the main road. And if you put all of a sudden a stop there, and then people are not used to driving and stopping, then it might even create an issue.

I understand that, but we have the same issue with the stoplight, right? So people aren't going to be used to it. I guess the point I'm making is this is a problem section of our town that we all know about. And I think if we're gonna focus some energy this year and some dollars, we need an answer to solve this thing once and for all, because I don't want another life to be lost there because we went too extreme, 5 million we couldn't afford, and we don't wanna go the other way. But what's the answer? I would ask the entire board, let's get an answer here. And this should be one of our highest priorities for this year's.

uh yeah mr chair um question can we use sb1 money on um signal projects no sb1 projects are for maintenance maintenance only and the most that we can do for maintenance is uh full depth reclamation reconstruction gonna use base b1

And I know Supervisor Crow wants to chime in. It was just, because if we didn't do the reconfiguration, I agree, it's never gonna happen. So maybe we can just get that off the table now. I don't think the board ever actually formally approved a $5 million project. So we shouldn't even, nope.

Again, I know it's just you, but... Just for clarification, also for what we are trying to do right now, is just the Fairview Road. And if the question is how this proposed Fairview Road rehabilitation affect that intersection project, we can actually cut that you know the the the limit of the the proposed is to be one to the limits of that project too so is that really going all the way to fairview we have we will cut it somewhere but we don't know where we cut it if we don't know what we're doing there

far as realizing well and again i'm gonna i'm gonna see the floor here in two seconds i just if there was a way to just use the money on a signal and to not is there any if we can find out you're saying no but i just i want to really make sure here because we know this is a pressing need it doesn't matter whose district it is or whatever like this is constantly coming up if we can do a signal for a million two million within that budget that would make more sense to me than um any of these other options so i know i know you said we can't i'd like to double check on that okay and can we just please once and for all get it

like supervisor velasquez said can we come up with some alternative options ideally a signal without a reconfiguration that's more affordable than five million what is the location of the signal i'm sorry i'm done thank you okay so go ahead i just want to know because we we're trying to be creative with funding and making sure that we can use it as as best possible but we we have sb one funding that can only be used for certain things but we also had that U.S. Department of Transportation safe streets for, and roads for all, which was safety improvements. Could that money, and is there any, because I know we talked about what our priorities were, could SB1 be swapped for one of those and let this be a safety improvement area, because that funding is specifically for safety, and that might give us a little more flexibility of what we could do there.

We can review what was submitted and see if we can change it because that went with the list, I believe. And also keep in mind the following. We had to come out with $1.9 million. as a matching funds for that particular grant. So that's what I'm working with Nadine, who is helping us to clarify all the funding that we have available. Once we clear that, we'll be able to come back to the board and say, this is what we're gonna get the funding from.

Okay, I'm just trying to find ways that we can try and get this project, because I agree, this project has been discussed since before I was ever on the board. I remember being a county employee when this was being discussed. So, I mean, this is kind of like government at its worst. We say we're gonna get it done and we just keep having these problems and getting it done. So I totally support making a safety improvement there and what that looks like and how much can we spend. But at the same time, I hope we can be creative with how we can make existing roads that are not passable.

Yes, the one thing that I wanna clarify, going back to my original question, on April 28, right before Fairview was approved, we requested a resolution from the board increasing the SB1 allocation adopted that year in the amount of $315,485. The reason why we did it is because you cannot approve something that you, more funding when you already have a resolution that is limiting you the amount of funding that you can use. So we increased it $350,000. My question is, If the board increased that amount into the SB1 last year, that's an impact of the upcoming years, I would imagine, or how does that work? So previous year, just for the sake of the conversation, they approved $5 million. We increased it to $5,315,000. My assumption, because I'm an ignorant person in this case, is that we taking it from the next fiscal year, the upcoming fiscal year. Is that a right statement or am I wrong and this is totally they're separate? How did that works?

That answer will depend on our actual numbers. This time, I don't know how much really we have on SB1. So if we have enough SB1 to cover that cost, then what we are proposing here right now is totally for the next fiscal year. Now, if we don't have enough funds, then I guess, yes, we can take that one project back and put it here.

So what I would recommend just for the sake of being safe and the funding that you are approving, just approve the total amount that is proposed minus $315,000. I think it's the safest way to do it. So that way you don't compromise yourself for additional funding that we may not have. And that's just conservative.

go ahead mr chair i agree with that we obviously can't spend more than we have i just would personally my recommendation would be to get do is this urgent we don't have to get this done today right can we get it done at the next meeting i know you're maybe i'm uh i think you should be gone but we have a deadline to submit this at the end of june so um my recommendation we got to stop We gotta stop messing around with this Fairview and Fallon thing, okay? And we gotta get it done. And so my recommendation would be to get full clarity Supervisor Zenger, you were trying to look up, did you find anything on?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, the CTC, I mean, I haven't read through the entire thing, but it does say that you can use SP1 funds for traffic signals for safety reasons.

I think it would make sense to bring back... To take a look, clarify this issue with whether we can use this on traffic signals, new traffic signals. And if we can bring that back as part of an alternative for us to consider at the next meeting, take out the $315,000, obviously, so the math works out. but essentially to bring back more alternatives or at least that one alternative taking into account the $315,000 and to really just, let's just get this thing done. Let's just get the signal done. If we can use the money on it, let's get it done. If we can't use the money on it, we need to have a more firm, we're gonna have to take something off the table, probably the Highland. project and move forward with one of those other options I would be open to what supervisor curl mentioned which is shifting around the money to make it work because we have potentially fingers crossed the funding for the safety improvements we could then use that on the Fallon and Fairview and shift some of that money toward perhaps another project yeah I agree

So Deems will not be here next week because he will be out, but I will be presenting along with Eddie. I think it's Eddie Diaz might be able to come. If it's not available, I'll present the item along with the attorney. Thank you.

that we verify that balance that came out of the general fund. Because in looking at the approval of it, it said not to exceed 1.36 million. So I don't see in any of the meeting minutes or notes where the final number landed.

Real quick, I just want to say thank you, Deems. Don't take any of this as you're jumping into this massive quagmire of challenges. You're doing a great job. So I appreciate everything you're doing. I just want to say that. Yeah, thank you.

I'd say the same thing. I think it's been a pleasure working with you. You've given us really good information. We're getting projects done. So thank you.

Okay. Enough direction then. So thank you.

You're gonna table this item for the next meeting, to continue the item for the next meeting, right?

Yes, we're gonna continue with that, the clarity that we need. Do we need a motion or are we okay with direction? No, we just continue, thank you. Okay, thank you. Oh, I'm sorry, we didn't do public comment on this. Let's do public comment before we continue it.

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card on Zoom, please press star nine or the raised hand icon. And I have no public comment.

Perfect. Okay, now it's continued. Okay, thank you. That concludes regular agenda. We have audit committee this time, I believe, right? Let's take five minutes to get the audit committee set up.

presentation there because i don't have it up here

Hmm.

Okay, thank you. So the board is adjourned as the board of supervisors and is reconvened as the audit committee. Is there a motion to acknowledge the certificate of posting? So moved. Is there a second? Second. All in favor, aye. Aye. Thank you. Is there any public comment of items not on the agenda?

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please submit a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raise hand icon.

And I have no public comment. Thank you. Moving on to 4.2. This is to approve the action minutes of the May 12th to 2026 audit committee meeting. Is there a motion to approve the minutes? Or is there a public comment on the minutes? Excuse me.

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raised hand icon.

And I have no public comment. Thank you. No public comment. Is there a second? All in favor, say aye. Aye. Thank you. Moving to item 4.3, receive monthly auditor-controller informational update.

Good afternoon, Chair, Board of Supervisors, Joe Paul-Gonzalez, auditor-controller. This is the monthly update as required by resolution. The update is pretty much a short update concerning the fiscal year 2020, 25, 26 training. We've had two fiscal Q&A sessions, one on April 22nd and one on May 15th. And we've had... a training on revenue collections and miscellaneous billing on May 28th. What's interesting about these Q&A sessions is that we've had quite a bit of participation. We invited 81 employees, including department heads, because we think it's important that the department heads who do not have assistant assistants that are involved in the fiscal aspect of their departments, that they should know these items associated with accounts payable, purchase orders, vendor processing. So in April of the 20 of the 81 employees and department heads that were invited, 47 employees attended. So that was about 58%. We handed out surveys and those surveys are questions related to the content of the Q and A's. Basically, did this Q&A answer all the questions that you have concerning accounts payable, purchase orders, those kinds of things. So on May 15th, we had a Q&A session where 82 employees and department heads were invited and about half attended. And that physical Q&A related to the year-end schedule and what all they must be prepared to get done for the year end. The May 28th session was a live session of where we have training on revenue collections and miscellaneous billings. We had, again, 82 employees and department heads were included in those 82. 28 employees attended. It was only a 34% participation. And we handed out surveys. Not everybody turns in those surveys, so we had to, You know, there wasn't many that were provided. But those training sessions or this specific one has been added to SharePoint. And so employees and department heads are able to go back to the SharePoint and actually review the training in case they missed something. And then of course they can always email the auditor's office if they have any questions. associated with, you know, with the training. The surveys are really important because they provide an opportunity for employees to give feedback to how we're doing as far as the training. Are we meeting everything, you know, their expectations associated with the subject matter? And, you know, one I read in one survey was it would be very helpful if we had the PowerPoints ahead of the trainings so that they can use the PowerPoints and follow the training as it's being performed. And I think we're gonna be doing that. Again, the video recording of these trainings are on the SharePoint for employees to access as well as the PowerPoint presentation. The next item to report is the fiscal year 2025-26 audit. The county's independent auditor, Brown and Armstrong, will be conducting their interim audit field work the week of June 22nd through the 26th. The audit firm has requested several documents associated with their test samples for receipts, journal entries, property taxes, payroll and disbursements. And so our priority in our office is to shift their focus into providing everything that they have asked for, all that documentation. We have to get that all done before June 22nd. The audit firm will, of course, after they receive all this documentation, they'll be auditing and looking at that information that we provided and asking follow-up questions during the audit week. The firm has, the tentative date for the final audit field work is supposed to have been October 2026, but we just confirmed, I think here today, that November 16th through November 20th, the auditors will be onsite, will be performing the field audit field work, the final audit field work on that week. I don't have anything else to report unless the audit committee has questions for me. Thank you. Let's get a public comment first.

If you'd like to make a comment in chambers, please provide a speaker card on Zoom. Please press star nine or the raised hand icon.

And I have no public comment. I do want to add, too, that the audit controller staff is here. Traditionally, they always attended the audit committee meetings. And we have a new member of our staff, Brendan Martinez. He just came over from actually a promotion from Behavioral Health. He's, we have very high expectations for Brendan. He's a very sharp guy. And, you know, we're, you know, we're glad to have him. Thank you.

That concludes my report. Thank you. Any questions for Zachary? It looks like you have something.

Thank you for the update, Joe Paul. We really appreciate it. The SharePoint, is that something that we as supervisors have access to it?

I'm sorry, you have to have the second check in your phone. I will add- A two point authentication. Identification, so I'll ask IT department if you have access to it.

Okay, and then of your surveys, what kind of feedback besides the one about providing the PowerPoint in advance? Have you been getting good feedback? Do you feel like you're hitting the right spots with some of these people?

Those are really the questions that we ask is, did this training provide all the answers that you had concerning this subject matter? And those people that responded, for the most part, they said, yes, it did. What part... It's one of the other things is that because of the subject matter, we get on several surveys that they'd like to have additional training on the same subject matter because it does take time for it to soak in and to understand it.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It's not something that just happens overnight. Okay, that's great. When it comes to the audit, the outside independent audit, you noted the test sample. So the firm makes requests of documents for your test sample. How do they select what they're sampling? How does that work?

well they they're taking statistical samples of what they you know they draw a statistical sample of the population and from that sample they say hey we want to have uh these these specific transactions we want to see we want to uh review these transactions

So they look at the whole ERP and all the transactions and then they do a sampling in certain areas? I'm just trying to understand where does the sample come from? And let me tell you why I'm asking, because I know you're gonna know right where I'm asking is, if we don't even have a handle of all the contracts in the system, how can we be sampling if it's not in one database to be able to have them do the sample? Does that make sense?

I understand your question, but they're sampling transactions. And do these transactions, do they have authorization associated with a PO, with a contract?

are are they you know were these contracts uh supported by a board authorization or depending upon so it's kind of a backdoor kind of way so you're looking at transactions which is an activity that happened and then you're back peddling to a purchase order a contract and an authorization to be able to say that that transaction had approval

well they're you know it's it's actually best if we have our external auditor here to to answer that question okay because they they will provide you with uh with a you know what their their i would love if there's if you have time if there's a way we could do maybe just a real quick maybe a zoom or something i would appreciate it we can have the uh we can try to get the external auditor to be here

They don't have to be here in person. If it's a Zoom or a phone call, that'd be great. Thank you. And Brandon, welcome aboard and good team.

Okay.

Thank you. Anything else? Any other questions, comments to the board? Okay, well then that would conclude your report, right? So- That concludes my report. Thank you very much. We will now reconvene as the Board of Supervisors. We've concluded the audit committee. We have just left future agenda items. We have no requests at this time. Is there any public comment on the future agenda item list?

If you'd like to make a comment on Zoom, please press star nine or the raised hand icon. And I have no public comment.

Yes, Supervisor Stella.

Thank you. I just, I was reviewing the future agenda items and I do feel like there are some that have been really outstanding. And I know that it's not on our agenda this time, but I really would like an update from staff on when we can expect some of these items to be cleared and brought back. Cause I feel like they're kind of going into the abyss and we're not getting them back. Some things we are, but there's some things that have been sitting on some of those sheets for years now. And I think we need to either, either we're not committed to it and let it go, or we're serious about getting it done and let's get it going.

Agreed. I'm sure we can have that at an upcoming meeting. Right. Um, okay, that would include the meeting. We do want to have, um, we're going to take a moment of silence for, um, the toddler that was killed recently, as well as for, um, Arnie Fonse. We'll have a moment of silence. Thank you. Thank you for that. And if there's nothing else we are adjourned.