Board of Supervisors - Regular Meeting

Good morning everybody. I'll call to order the April 17th, 2026 meeting of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors and the third and final day of our county budget workshops for fiscal year 2026 2027. Madame Clerk, can you please call the role? Supervisor Lee here. Supervisor Caps here, Supervisor Hartman here, Supervisor Lavanino, and Chair Nelson here. Uh, would you all please stand and join me in pledging allegiance to our flag? Ready, begin.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Our next item in business is our county um executive officer report. Do we have anything this morning? No report this morning, chair. All right, madame clerk, do we have any announcements or changes to our agenda today?

Chair Nelson and members of the board, I just have a few quick announcements this morning regarding public participation. Members of the public wishing to address the board will have an opportunity to provide comments at the conclusion of each functional group presentation or excuse me, for at the end of the special issue presentation this morning. If you would like to speak more broadly on the county budget, there will be an opportunity to do so during the budget workshop summary public comment period at the end of the meeting today. For those joining via Zoom, please indicate the specific special issue would like to comment on when registering to speak. Lastly, for more information on the board of supervisors methods of public participation and instructions on how to provide public comment on items listed on today's agenda or during the general public comment period, please refer to page two of the agenda. Individuals that would like to provide verbal public comment may do so via Zoom by registering in advance via the link available on page two. If you have any questions, please contact the clerk of the board's office at area code 805-568-2240. Again, that number is 805-568-2240. That concludes my announcements for this morning.

All right. Thank you very much. Now is the time for members of the public to speak on items that are not on the agenda. Madame clerk, uh are there any requests to speak on general public comment? Tren Nelson and members of the board. We did have one request to speak from the public on general public comment, Julia Barbosa, but I do not see her currently on Zoom. Okay. So, we have no uh further request to speak on general public comment.

All right. Um thank you. Um we'll go ahead and proceed. Uh we'll start the budget workshop. Uh this brings up the third and final day of our budget workshop for fiscal year 2627. Um I will now actually before I do this um we're going to have some final uh presentation by our CEO and budget director and then we're going to get into our special uh issues items. Um just when we complete those special issue items and for the record that's the I AI update that we're trailing from Wednesday's meeting. We'll hold that first and then we will have a pension fund outlook. Um we have Mr. Greg Livven from um SB SERS here. Um, and then we'll be doing our jail systems housing options, which I know a lot of people are here. They're very interested in. Right now, we're well over 30 speakers, and that's growing. So, typically it's 3 minutes of public comment. Um, if it continues to grow much further, it we may potentially reduce that down to 2 minutes. So, I just want to let public commenters know that in advance so they can just look over their notes. I'll try to be graceful on the time as as we do that, but if it gets too large, we need to, you know, keep this meeting moving along. So I may go down to two minutes if if there's too many public speakers. I just want to make sure those who are wishing to speak on these items know that in advance so you can prepare your comments accordingly. So with that, let's come back to RCO and bud director um on any updates.

Chair Nelson, members of the board, we did release a handful of board inquiry uh responses yesterday afternoon. Um they were related to balancing measures um just kind of proportionality between departments and sizes of budgets. uh deferred maintenance backlog, the sheriff's office calls for service, uh a little more detail on cannabis education funding, where that goes, um community services department discretionary programs funded by GFC and um social services priority contracts recommended u by the CEO to be funded.

All right. Thank you, Mr. McCclinty. So, at this time, we'll be turning over to our special issues items. And the first one is our AI update artificial intelligence. And I believe that we have Chris Cherwin um our ITD director of um here via uh um remotely. Yes. Good morning. Can you hear me? Okay. Yes.

All right. Well, good morning, Chair Nelson and members of the board. I'm Chris Churwin, the countyy's chief information officer, and I will be presenting on our AI journey so far here with the county. Uh, so the county began this journey a couple of years ago, and our focus really for the first year or so was all around AI governance. This morning, I'm going to talk about what we've done from a governance standpoint. I'll talk about uh the education and training that we've been offering and will be offering. And then we will uh I will cover the implementation. So what have we done so far and where are we going um with AI tools and solutions. So to start with on the governance side of things about a year and a half ago we formed a countywide AI steering committee. This committee is currently made up of 12 different county departments with 15 members uh to provide the oversight of our AI decisions uh at the county. Uh we the first thing we did was we published the countywide AI guidelines. That was about a year and a half ago that we published that and that document was mostly around education and awareness of AI. And then as you as you know the AI policy was approved by the board in January of uh this year. Uh we are working very closely with the EITC uh as well and we have created a centralized intake system using our service now solution that allows departments to go in and submit requests for AI tools that they might be interested in. And that intake process includes about two dozen different questions where the AI steering committee will review those questions.

We look at things like cyber security. We look at things um you know around AI ethics and we have a whole list of uh different uh focal areas on each proposal that's coming into us. And so we really are comprehensive in regards to how we look how we review any AI solution that departments are bringing. Go ahead and move to the next slide. Thank you. Um, I also am remiss because I did not introduce uh Matt Murray and Chris Bowser who are sitting at the table there. Matt Murray is our director of service delivery and Chris Bowser is the county's AI uh transformation coordinator. They've both been instrumental in AI efforts around the county. So, I want to thank them for for their work and they're also available at the end to answer any questions. So in regards to the AI training, uh the first thing we did was we formed an AI working group that was back in 2024 and that group was designed to um really promote AI learning education. We've brought in several guest speakers. We brought in several AI vendors and it's all around just education and awareness. Um we also have led several in-person and virtual AI courses. uh HR and ITD work together on those. Um we have virtual training now available as well that we will be offering um all county staff and that's training around uh our countywide AI policy that's training around uh Microsoft co-pilot chat and then just you know how to do prompt engineering uh and AI in general and so a variety of different virtual training self-paced training that is uh is and will be offered to all county staff

So, working very closely with HR and I do want to recognize Lilis Smith who was not able to be there in person, but Lilis Smith is the talent development manager for county HR and she is co-chair of the countywide uh of the county's AI steering committee and has also been very instrumental in um working with us on the AI training. So, where are we at today? Um, we currently have seven seven different AI applications that are uh have been approved by the countywide AI steering committee and these solutions are in various stages of being implemented today. So, we've got uh solutions from behavioral wellness, from sheriff, from public defender, uh a couple countywide applications, clerk, recorder, assessor, um that have gone through the process and uh are like I said in various stages of being deployed today. And then we have two other use cases uh that we are uh currently uh reviewing and looking likely that those will be approved as well. And then there's some that are some other solutions that are just at the beginning stages of the vetting process and they're not on this slide today. So we are making real progress in um you know carefully and methodically um beginning to implement AI tools um you know throughout different departments at the county. One of the larger initiatives that we have been working on now for quite some time is a countywide launch of Microsoft Copilot Chat. And so if you're not familiar with Microsoft Copilot Chat, it's similar to uh Chat GPT. It's

similar to Gemini. It's a uh it's a tool that will allow staff to be able to leverage Gen AI uh and and and to help them just in their day-to-day tasks. And so we are actually planning to uh launch this countywide uh in in about 2 weeks uh late April is when we plan to roll this out. Uh there is no budget impact uh on the county for this tool. This tool is included in the current Microsoft licensing that we already have. And so we're really excited about this. We've been doing a lot of change management. We've been doing a lot of training and education on uh what this tool is, how to use this tool. And I do believe it will definitely uh be helpful for for many of the staff of the county um to be able to have a tool like this to help them uh in their day-to-day tasks. So, where are we going uh in the future? Um, we've spent a lot of time uh looking at uh other AI solutions that we really feel will not only benefit county staff but will also benefit Santa Barbara residents. Um, so we've looked at various solutions for uh permitting. We've looked at constituent engagement tools, 311 service type tools, uh along with many others. Um and so we're really doing our due diligence to see what platforms are out there and what might be able to benefit um our our county. And so uh looking towards the future, I think we will continue to be reviewing and ultimately implementing uh many new tools. Um the full version of Microsoft C-Pilot um which does cost uh additional uh money uh is another tool that we have been doing uh a lot of research with and

is a tool that we are hoping to roll out towards the end of this calendar year. Uh that would be more of an opt-in. Uh departments can choose how many licenses they want u and who you know within their departments would receive those licenses. And that's just a a a much more um integrated tool. It integrates with Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, that type of thing. And so it's a bit more robust than the uh than the uh the version that we'll be releasing here at the end of April. Um we've been looking at uh Agentic AI, which is a which is in a nutshell is um artificial intelligence that helps us automate workflows. And so that's something that we've begun to do some research and do doing some pilots with that as well. Uh at the end of the day, we really see that AI is going to allow us to um really leverage it to make uh county staff um you know more more efficient uh higher productivity um you know that type of thing. It really is a force multiplier and it also can definitely elevate the resident's experience. um through you know more transparency through improved service delivery quality of services that type of a thing. So very bullish on what it can do but as as with any new technology we need to be very methodical and very uh careful about how uh we implement this type of technology. I want to close by just saying that uh just recently our county was recognized by uh an organization called public sector AI summit and we were recognized in the top 50 most forward AI counties in the nation for the work we've done with our AI governance and so uh that was a a very nice recognition uh we have

put a lot of work into governance which is the foundation of I believe of of you know a success uccessful uh launch of AI solutions and so wanted to share that. So that's the end of my presentation. I am happy to answer any questions that you may have. Questions from the board. Supervisor Hartman.

Uh not really a question but just um I hadn't fully appreciated how much you have to build a foundation. Go slow to go fast. uh ultimately and so I'm really excited about your award that that um not only have you persuaded this board but you've made it clear even nationally how significant that is. Uh organizations can invest a whole lot in these systems and then if you don't build that foundation it can be money for not. So just wanted to appreciate you. Thank you.

Thank you supervisor Hartman. Supervisor Caps. Yeah, thank you. And I appreciate the chair and others that put this item with our budget conversation be and building on what supervisor Hartman said. I'm just excited to get to the phase where we we do start to see some real monetary benefits from from AI. I know I've started to see that in my in the economy of my personal time and I just you know I don't I I'm not going to lead you and make you give predictions that you can't do at this point but I would like to get us there sooner than later of when we can start to see departments you know sort of predicting what it will mean for us um you know to reduce costs etc etc because I do see that in other industries where they're really reducing um costs and so um again just appreciate the juxtaposition of this conversation as we look at having to make some real tough uh budget decisions.

Yes. Thank you, Supervisor Caps. Uh I was sitting here getting your presentation. Of course, I used AI to find out how many counties there are in the US, which is 3,143, which also makes us in the top 50 in the top 1.59% according to uh AI. So, um I think that's something to be proud of. And I, you know, I'm one of those people that have been fairly impatient, but I do see the value in all the hard work that went into kind of building that foundation, the team together. Um, you know, I'm I'm somebody that wants to jump sometimes before I look. And um that's uh um can be scary especially you know I think we had a public commenter on the first day talk about you know their personal information and the government you know especially with health records and other information that we have there's a lot that we are responsible for and um you know what I that public commenter probably doesn't know or didn't understand is that um you know all this work that we've done in advance that none of these things are going to be done without proper vetting without going through these types of committees going through all the um channels that I think everybody expects from the public when we're going to go through that. And I and that might lead to maybe less innovation, but um I think ultimately I think that protects the general public and their privacy and their information, which is is hugely valuable. Um but also I think you guys are still forwardleaning and I think we're we're obviously identifying areas of improvement and I think this is something that um the message is to county employees, to county departments is this is somewhere that this is not a fad. this is the future. Um to the unions too that also are are struggling on finding what this means for their employees and you know what does that mean for retraining so make them more effective to get more work done. And so it's it's an area that I think we're all cautiously moving forward in and it's you know I think there's going to be some big changes in the future and hopefully at the end of the day um how do we deliver services to um our constituents to taxpayers to members of our community um hopefully we're going

to be able to do that um in a better way and more efficient way um those that are afraid that somehow it's going to take away jobs you know I I really focus them on looking at is there ever not enough work to do right there's always more work to do and so it's so we're going to be able to get more done. I don't think it's you know there's always another task to be completed and so um I'm really looking forward to delivering higher level service for the value of our tax dollars um through the use of AI into the future. So

thank you supervisor Hartman. I did have a a question and that is the the use of AI uh within the county organization. Will that largely be a decision department by department working with ITD or will there be a priority of things that might come back to the board? How do you anticipate um the kinds of things we'll be using and how uh decisions will be made about that? Yes, great question. So, the process as it stands today is departments can submit through the vetting portal that we've created. They can submit a their AI solution that they're interested in. So, the countywide AI steering committee reviews that very very carefully. We look at it from all different perspectives including, as I mentioned earlier, cyber security and things like that. Um, if the countywide AI steering committee approves it and it's and that solution is under a certain dollar thresh threshold, which is uh if it's under $50,000 uh for the contractor for the year, um the that that department does get the green light if it gets approved by the countywide as steering committee. However, if it's over 50,000, it also gets reviewed by the EITC committee, which has uh been an existing committee at the county for many years. And that committee is made up of many department heads uh including um uh members of the county executive office. And so that group also then reviews and vets those AI solutions. So I I believe that there are, you know, uh I believe we have a solid process in place to ensure that we're carefully reviewing any AI solution before it gets approved. Um today it wouldn't come to the board

uh for approval. Um but if that is something that you feel um is important, we can certainly uh look into that. I think it would be nice not we we don't have the expertise and you've put the the systems in place but I I think getting reports back and just speaking for myself um I know you've talked about uh making our uh website more user friendly easier for people wanting to use it to uh have AI find things because it it's very difficult especially historically. So I I think that's a really important use and I think the extent we can use it for report writing and get people actually you know social workers with clients, doctors with patients, uh law enforcement um you know actually preventing crime um rather than having to sit and write reports. So I'm those are you know things I hope we'll see in the future.

Agreed. and and some of those uh uh solutions are already either in place or are going through the process right now. And so I think, you know, if we look over the next year or two, we're going to see many of those solutions that will benefit um both residents and our staff uh be implemented. So, I'm confident that um we're well on our way and and we'll see a lot of um uh just overall improvements in services uh through these tools.

Thank you. Uh, thank you, Supervisor Hartman. And just to speak to, you know, board approval, I I think that we would probably be an impediment to progress in this. Um, you know, and so, you know, I I want to again continue to uh lean on our department heads and our our executives that are um know their departments the best and then an ITD department that is, you know, second to none in county government. Um, all this type of stuff. I do think reporting back with some semiannual reports might be nice just so that we know what's going on. Um I think also department heads I think this is something that when we do evaluations I think this is something we should be also looking at on you know how are you using AI in your department to you know improve workflow or or our delivery of services is something that we as a board should be looking at when we do our our annual look at county departments. So, um, those are just, you know, again, I think the message on these budget workshops is we're often sending signals to departments on on the values of this board, and I think this is something that we want to continue to to lean into. So, Supervisor Caps,

my uh my caffeine's kicking in. So, I'm going to ask one more question. Uh, Director Terwin, because you're you so just to be pedantic. So, if a manager is listening to this and, you know, has an area of their work that they think, oh, this it's very cumbersome. What what do you suggest? you know, how do they explore with your department? You know, this area of our work really takes a long time. I bet AI might be able to help reduce our workload. What What's the steps? Because I still I just I just I'm still always curious how your team, you know, really does affect such a massive county of 4,700 employees.

Yes, another a great question. Um, so our department has a division within it called the business relationship management division and Matt Murray who's sitting at the table leads that division. Great.

Um, they meet with every department on a monthly basis and the purpose of those meetings are to help departments um, you know, an or we're there to answer their questions. We're helped there to provide strategic guidance. um if a department has uh let's say an AI solution that they want to um discuss with us, we're there to discuss that with them. And so yes, we meet monthly uh with each department and that's been very beneficial for both the departments and ITD because it improves the the communication that's happening and also gives a lot more visibility into the needs of the departments so that we can uh help them craft better solutions and strategies um you know for AI and just for their overall technology. So u Matt is there anything else you'd want to add to that? I would say you departments um as as we meet with with each one with the BRM team, you know, we we talk about a lot of different topics. Um AI is is something that comes up. You know, mostly the conversations lately have been around co-pilot chat. Microsoft's rebranded it to copilot chat basic. So, we can always count on Microsoft to throw us curveballs. Um but as we ease in I think to AI I think more use cases will become apparent and what what can we use with the tools we already have that don't require further investment and then what would require further investment and and those are the use cases that that uh Chris presented earlier um as departments see niche needs and areas of expansion you know we're happy to work with departments on on all levels of AI use

but are we using them for contracts yet are we using AI for contracts I mean, I know this is a very big question, but I mean, I know how much how many contracts we approve every board meeting and I I know from from uh friends that that's a area that's been taken over by AI by and large. I'm looking at Kirk Lagger request who's over purchasing and he's shaking his head. No, but that's a ripe area to be evaluated. Great. All right, supervisor.

Uh, ju just prompted by supervisor caps's question. You know, sometimes when you're in the organization, it's hard to get your ideas surfaced. I visited Fleer uh which is a highly innovative company and they just have suggestion boxes around for people and if if the suggestion is actually implemented uh people get rewards or their whole department get rewards. It's a way that they um try to cultivate a culture of innovation. So maybe something worth trying. Excellent. All right. Well, thank you, uh, ITD. Thank you, Mr. Sherwin. I I I apologize for having to move it so you couldn't be here in person, but you did an excellent job remotely.

Thank you. And now we will shift to our second of three special issues today, which will be the pension fund outlook. And we have Mr. Greg Lean here to present.

Oh, you're there. You go. Uh, thank you, chair. I'm ready to proceed if you're okay. Uh, uh, thank you for having me. My name is Greg Leven through members of the public. I'm the chief executive officer of the Santa Barbara County Employees Retirement System. It's been several years since we've been before the board of supervisors and we're pleased to come here and talk to you today about the financial results of the system and uh because this present this discussion today is focused on budget. We've tailored this presentation to really focus on those issues for you. I would be remiss if I didn't say there's a whole wealth of information about the Santa Barbara County employees retirement system that I would love to share. Uh and so just letting everybody know in the public that um you can find a lot more information on our website and we do meet in public work meetings once a month on the fourth Wednesday of every month if you're interested in learning about more about the system. I would encourage you to uh check in to those meetings and also look at our website.

Greg, can can you move it a little closer? It's it's having a hard time picking you up a little bit. Is that better? It is. Thank you.

Thank you. Um so just a couple of things about this. Uh we go through an annual process uh of creating an actual evaluation report and going through annual audits to develop this information. I'm going to jump around a little bit because I'm trying to give you the latest information. Uh a lot of the information I'm presenting today is dated as of June 30, 2025. And then I'll give you an update about where we are in the markets today as well. Uh and then just wanted to mention that SB service is a legally separate agency from the county uh that's governed by an 11 member board of retirement. Um so we'll head into we'll get to it and head into our fiscal year 2025 results. Uh we closed the fiscal year of 2025 with a $5.4 billion actuary or liability that was offset by about $4.8 billion in assets. That remainder left a almost $600 million unfunded liability. Uh that unfunded liability represents past service costs, not future service costs, but past service costs, benefits that have already been accured but not yet funded. Uh that resulted in an 89% funding ratio. Moving over to the other side, we have 4700 approximately 4,700 active members, 2,000 deferred members. Those are members that once worked for the county or another participating agency and have left to gone on on to other employment opportunities around the state, other parts of the country, but have left their time and their service, their money in the system and are entitled to take a benefit in the future. And then finally, we have 5,400 retired members, many of whom live in the Tri County area, the vast majority of who live in Santa Barbara County proper. Um, and so we're sending this money back into our community. It's something that we're

proud of. Uh, at the bottom of that table, I wanted to draw your attention to the retired to active ratio. Uh, that's an important metric in KPI in the pension world. It is what we're looking at there is the ratio of active members. So those who contribute to those who receive benefits from the system and what you should take from that is that as that number grows is that the that increases the sensitivity of the plan to investment losses and in turn the sensitivity of the county to contribution rate changes that result from investment losses. SB service is considered a mature retirement plan with a ratio of 1.15 retirees to every active member. Um, and so that means that we need to act accordingly. And I'll talk to you a lot about the strategies that we're using to mitigate some of that risk um, as we look forward into the future. Uh, before we get there, I thought we'd spend a little bit of time talking about our plan demographics and membership data. Um, I'm not going to go through all the numbers on this chart, but what what I wanted to point out to you is that in 2013, Governor Brown passed a a landmark uh pension reform. It's called the public employees pension reform act. And that um reduced benefits for new employees at the county. Uh it also delayed the um time at which you can retire. So employees are retiring later. That actually contributed greatly to savings for the county over time because these benefit plans are much less expensive than the legacy benefit plans. And over the past 13 years, you've gone from having no employees in these pepper plants to having almost 70% of your general membership in these pepper fillets and almost 60% of your safety membership in these pepper plants. Uh it is worth noting that in Sacramento right now there's legislation that's being considered by the state senate that

would repeal some of these pension reforms um and put in place um pension benefit formulas that are similar to what existed prior to the great financial crisis. I I share that with you as that's one of a future factor that can affect pension funding down the road and I think you should just be aware of that. On the retired side, about 75% of our retirees are general members. 25% of our retirees are safety members. The other thing that you should draw from this slide is that the average annual pay of a general member is now close to $100,000. But a safety member is about 30% more than that or almost $130,000 on average. Now uh and if you look at how that translates into retirement benefits, safety members generally get a richer retirement formula. So their benefits levels are substantially higher than general member benefit levels. Uh but when you're evaluating that in the context of your overall plan, understand that your general membership is much larger than your safety membership. So we presented this information for people who'd like to do their own analysis. Um, but that is the demographic data of our plan. Now, I'm going to flash forward to February 28th, 2026. This is a large investment portfolio that takes time to price. And so, we typically receive receive performance results about a month after the markets close is when we're getting up-to-date um information on what's happening with portfolio performance. Uh so as I was writing this, we turned these reports in about two weeks in advance. Uh so I was writing this, we were just at the end of March and the best data I had at that time was on February 28th, 2026. Um so we'll start there and then I'll talk to you a little bit about what's happened since then. The first chart on the left shows diversification. Um and what I'm

trying to show you here is that the investment portfolio for this plan is well diversified. It's designed with intention to avoid catastrophic results from the failure of one any one specific area of the market. It's allocated across several different types of investments that have different macroeconomic factors that drive their return. From a liquidity perspective, that's the middle chart. uh we are invested in 37% of the funds are invested in what we would call a liquid assets and then 63% of the fund is invested in what we would call liquid publicly traded daily priced assets. Why that's important for consumers of this information to know is that one of the industry trends that occurred over the last couple of decades was to increase allocations into private markets. Private markets tend to return generate a higher return The downside of that is that they are less liquid and they can't be sold readily on open markets. You once you invest, you tend to have to ride those investments out. And so that's a risk that we monitor quite closely at the system. And it's something that we keep an eye on. And as we achieve full funding, one of our goals is to reduce that risk of illquidity in the portfolio and transition into other types of asset classes that might generate more yield and more liquidity through the system over time. I just wanted to point that out to you because that speaks to what's going to happen in the retirement system over the next 20 years. And I think you'll connect with it a little bit more when we talk about some of the later slides in the presentation. Uh but as of the end of February, we had about $5.2 billion in the portfolio and we were trending towards a 9.41% fiscal year to date. That was what it was as at the end of February. So we were looking to uh have a nice premium over our assumed rate of return for the

end of the fiscal year. Since then, uh you I'm sure you all watch the news. There's been a conflict in the Middle East. The Iran war started. there's been a lot of volatility in the investment markets. Um I do have some preliminary data for the end of March. Now at the end of March the portfolio u the annual return fiscal year-to- date return on the portfolio had dropped to 5.8%. Um so you can see we lost about 4% uh in response to the Iran war. However, since then, the last two weeks, we've seen a tremendous recovery in financial markets. Um, broad US equity indexes are actually above where they were at the end of February. Uh, the same is not cannot be said of fixed income markets. Um, yields are still about 40 basis points above where they were when the war started. However, they've been stable. So that relates to about a 2% decline in the Barclays a which is a broad investable index of corporate and government um bonds. Um so it's been mixed but we we expect that come to the end of April if the trend continues that the portfolio will balance out and there will be some recovery from those March numbers. So that's where we are today and where we stand today. Um looking back over the last 20 years, this uh slide shows our historical investment performance and you can see that over the the 1, five, and 10 year periods, the system has exceeded its assumed rate of return of 7%. Uh over the 20-year period, it's below the assumed rate of return for 6.46%. But it's important to remember that, you know, it all depends on the period of time that you're looking at. in 2008 2009 which the great financial crisis those numbers are still in that 20-year number. So when I come

back to you in four or five years and I show you the 20-year number it's going to go up a lot because those losses will not be in that time period anymore. But what I'm really hoping that you'll take away from this slide is the orange bar that cuts across all of those um blue columns. That orange bar is the systems assumed rate of return. So when you're looking at the systems investment performance, what you want to look at is how we do relative to that orange bar. Uh so we can for example on a year like 2016, we gained 1.3%. So we had a positive return in the portfolio, but from an actuarial perspective, that's actually a loss of 5.7% because it's below the 7% assumed rate of return. So that's what we're trying to communicate with this chart. Moving on, talking about your historical contribution rates, you can see that in 2008, contribution rates were in the low 2020s for the employer. Uh because of the market losses, those contribution rates um increased significantly over the next three years after that. Uh what also came out of the great financial crisis was the need to reconcile the actuarial or the assumption risk of these plans. And the assumption risk of these plans is the risk that the things we assume may not happen. So we may not earn that 7% that we're assuming. People may uh live longer than we're assuming. Um the work force the work the county workforce may shrink or grow more than we assume it will. Those are all factors that um affect contribution rates. The other thing that affects contribution rates is amortization of losses. And so over the last 17 years with those elevated contribution rates, what you've seen is the county has actually been repaying its investment losses from the 2007208 2009 time period. And that's really important to take in because that's

going to be a key factor in some of the information that I'm about to show you. Before I go though, I just wanted to show you um that in addition to right sizing our actuarial assumptions and removing plan risk and making this a more safe sustainable pension plan, the county's also done a lot of hard work uh at the negotiating table and it increased the share of the contributions that the employees pay and that's shown by that orange line in this chart. So, our legacy members, members that are not in Pepro plans, have been paying a greater share of contributions towards their pension benefits since 2016. Uh, what you should see over time, if I were to stretch this chart out into the future, is you'll see those gray and those orange lines converge. But bottom line, you can see from 2008, employees went to contributing less than 5% of pay to the pension plan. And now when we get to about 2031 and and today they're contributing close to 10% of the plan. So that's a big achievement for plan sponsors and shows your part in helping sustainably fund the pension system and the employees contributions to their own retirement benefits which should not go un unrecognized. So, we're going to get a little technical here with this chart and and it's important for you to understand the components of the uh county's contribution rate so you understand the next chart that I'm about to show you. This chart shows the two major components of the county's contributions. The first component is that blue column at the bottom of the chart on the left. That's the normal cost. That is the cost of the pension benefits that are being earned today. So that the pension benefits that are being earned by the people sitting in this room today for the work that they're doing today. The orange bar on top of that is the amortization cost. That is the cost of past pension benefits that

have not been paid for for a variety of reasons. One perhaps because our assumptions were bad, perhaps because we've had investment losses and we didn't earn the return that we thought we were going to earn. Those generate costs and that's the twothirds of your current contribution rate. Now the chart on the right decomposes that orange bar on the left. So this is your various components of your amortization cost. Last year this year you were paying about $111 million in amortization costs. And of that $111 million, $96 million relates to one single amortization level. So coming out of the general financial crisis, the board of retirement determined to put the county on a plan to repay these investment losses and pay for all of the changes that were happening coming out of pension reform. That that charge is $96 million a year and it is we are in year 12 of 17 years of amortization of that. So we have five years left of that payment. That $96 million I can tell you with a certainty is going to go away in five years. The thing we don't know is what will we replace it and I'll talk to you a little bit more about that. But before I get there, I just want to point out that if you look at that investments, that orange bar in the chart at the right, you will see that that actually lowered your amortization um cost. And and the reason for that is it should surprise no one that when you lower the assumed rate of return, you're more likely to exceed the assumed rate of return. And so what we we're showing you there is that these decisions, while painful when they were first made, they pay benefits over time. They reduce the aggressiveness of the pension plan and they make it more likely that you're going to achieve your goals. And then finally offsetting that that 31 million on the right that's the cost of all of

the assumption changes that have been put in place over 10 years. So that includes the um the change in mortality of recognizing that people live longer, the lower assumed rate of return, the past cost of the lower assumed rate of return and so forth. So where does this bring us? This brings us to a 20-year projection. I think this is the thing that excites everybody when you look at this data. What you can see is that $96 million amortization layers is going to persist until 2030 and then it'll be f fully amortized and then what we're left is the performance of the years since 2013 forward and it shows that the county's composite contribution rate is projected and I want to say projected this is an estimate we can't guarantee that this is going to happen but it is projected to fall from the high 30% all the way down to the below 20%. And if things go well and we achieve all of our assumptions, we project that the county's contribution rate will fall below 15% over time. Uh what you're seeing in the out years with those borrowers at 10% assumes that there's no amortization cost that the county is fully funded at that point and that the county is just paying the normal cost of these pension benefits every year. So when you're out in the public and people ask you what are pension benefits cost, the answer to that is today the pension benefits being earned today in the room cost about 10% of payroll. But we're still paying for the excesses of our fathers, if you will, of the past. This is another way of looking at this plan projection. And that brown bar shows the same trend that I showed on the on the prior slide. But what I want to draw your attention to on this slide is the colorful bars that overlay the

brown line. Uh this is a stochcastic projection. We create this using thousands of simulations and I should say actually our our consulting actuary produces this for us using thousands of progression of of projections. Um and using our actuarial assumptions and our assumptions of investment volatility. we look at what the range of probable outcomes is going to be. And what you can see is that that brown line is the mean projection. So that's the average of all of those thousands of scenarios that we've run. But what you should notice from this slide is that the farther out you go in time, and this is true of any projection, the less reliable that projection is going to be. And so that's what those colorful bars in the background show. Uh in so the yellow bars reflect what we think is going to happen between 40 and 60% of the outcomes and then the orange bars is that 60th to 80th percentile of bad outcomes and the red bar is that 20% of the worst possible outcomes that could happen. So what you should take from the slide and looking at this information is that your because of the recognition and the rolling off of that $96 million amortization layer in 80% of our projected scenarios that we ran. You will have pension costs that are lower than they are today. However, there's a 20% chance that you're going to have pension costs that are higher than they are today. That's the risk of the investment portfolio. That's the risk of markets. And some of this is just we can't control. And so it's important to understand that these projections I I'm saying this for the public. I know all of you know this, but these projections are just estimates and they're not guaranteed. In this slide, we disagregate it between general and safety. I know this is a budget discussion. Um, and we just

wanted to show you the differences and the contributions uh between these two categories of members. Uh I'll let Paul speak for this, but it's also important to note that the source of revenue that's funding uh the pension cost is also an important thing to consider in large parts of your organization, they're funded by federal and state revenues. And so if your pension costs go down, your revenues are also going to go down. Uh that tends to be less the case with your safety employees. And so that's why I wanted to disagregate and show you um this this information here. And finally, I think it's worth noting here, um, this slide is pretty simple, but we just want to show you the projection for portfolio growth. We believe that will be a 7 billion pension plan by 2033. Uh, and why that's important is one, uh, we do project a lot of growth in the plan, growth in assets. When I took this job back in 2014, we were below $2 billion and 2033 is about when I think about retirement. So, it'll be kind of a neat thing to see that we've almost tripled the value of the portfolio, if not more over that time. Uh, but what you should also be paying attention to is the size of that investment portfolio, that $7 billion relative to your peril and relative to your active membership. Because the larger the portfolio gets, the the larger your risk from major market movements become. So when we have a $7 billion portfolio, if that portfolio is a 10% loss, that's a $700 million loss, that's bigger than your current unfunded actuarial liability is today. And that can happen. We've seen just in the last month's markets went down 7.5% and then came back 7 and a half%. So

awaren your light went off. There you go.

Yep. Got it. So finally uh I wanted to close we are aligned with accounting 99% of the time but as we look at this contribution rate change in our future uh our view changes a little bit. So right now we have a $200 million benefit payment load and we collect just under $200 million in contributions every year and so we've structured our operations around being relatively cash neutral. When this amortization charge goes away, that's going to change substantially. And if you look out into the future, in 2031, we'll have to source $86 million from the investment portfolio to pay for pension benefits. But in 2032, USB staff will have to support over $200 million in in order to pay benefit payments. Um, that's not cause for concern. This is something that we've planned for, but it certainly changes the way we view risk in the portfolio, the way we select investments in the portfolio. It directs our focus towards investments that are potentially lower return investments and higher yield. They throw off more income and it certainly directs our focus towards that liquidity metric that I showed you earlier on in the presentation. So, these are the things that we're thinking about at SB Service as we kind of navigate this contribution change from the county as well. Um, finally, I just wanted to show you this is um, and I want to make it clear, this is Greg Leven's opinion here, but I try and make my information um, accessible to the public and digestible for people who aren't CPAs and haven't spent their whole life in finance. Um, so we created the set of risky gauges to share with you where we see our plan risks. And so if you look at our assumed rate of return, it's okay. 7%'s achievable. We've achieved it over the last 10 years. But I would be remiss if

I didn't tell you we're higher than the average pension system in the state of California. The means assumed rate of return now is 6.8%. And it's declining. uh from amortization, we think we've done a lot of work over the over the last 20 years there and we're in a good space. Mortality as well, we're using the calipers table, so we're using statewide data, not just county specific data. So, we like that. Wage growth is one that we're watching. Uh there's several factors that affect that. There's been a lot of inflation. You just heard a presentation on AI that could change things for your county um payroll as well. inflation is sort of in that same measure where our assumption for inflation is actually a little bit high relative to what inflation has been. Liquidity is another area I've explained to you why we're managing that, why we're looking to make changes in the portfolio over time to meet that. And then again, equity risk um is also something that we're looking at because equities traditionally are much more volatile than fixed income investments. And so as we get to full funding, our goal really is to avoid being the tail that wags the dog. We want to lower the volatility in the portfolio and focus our investments to support that $200 million in cash flow that we need to raise every year to pay pension benefits. That concludes my presentation and I'd be pleased to answer any questions.

All right. Thank you, Mr. Leven. And um I see the first slide is from Supervisor Lavanino. But before he asked this question, I just wanted to um just highlight that super lavendino is our member on the SB service board and and um there's a lot of good news here. um a lot of reasons to be cautious, but um the reason why we're in where the place that we are is because of the forward thinking of the SB service board and and then also this board uh continuing to invest um not just us five but you know supervisors back to when that was uh system was really you know when we decided to pay that off you know 12 years ago and up here was uh supervis one but there was Janet Wolf and Dorene Far and Congressman Carver Hall and Peter at him um you know making that tough choice to close it up and start to make those payments. So we're not we're I like to say that I used to harass Greg and told him that there was no way it was going to ever get paid off. I'd actually email him monthly to harass him about the rate of return and I'm just want to just congratulations on keeping the course and it's it's a lot of good news here but also reason to be cautious. Supervisor Labanino.

Thank you Mr. Chair. Yeah I also want to put the employees in that mix too. people are picking up uh a more significant portion of their own retirement now. So, um, Pepper obviously, uh, was a game changer, and I'm not here to, you know, I I I'm leaving soon, so I don't want to rain on anybody's parade, but I would just caution that any change to PEPA, while it might help you, um, you think it might help you in uh, a better retirement. Um, there's only so much money to go around and it probably is either going to go into pay or into retirement. Um so I would just caution not to kill the golden goose. Things are um the fact that people are involved in this system. The system is healthy. Um you know changing things back to the way they were when I didn't feel things were sustainable at that time that uh I I just think that would be poor judgment. But so and Greg I want to congratulate you as uh been there 12 years now. I think we hired you when you were 20 something. Yeah. Yeah. 32. You were very young at the time and so put a lot of faith in you and you've really come through. Uh you've built a great team around you. Uh I think when we do when the county does its um we do a a kind of sampling of kind of testing the temperature of each department. Greg's team came back with the most highly satisfied employees uh out out of a department. So that's a lot to be proud of. Um, can you just talk for a second about when you showed the asset allocation? I just want folks to know because a lot of times what I get from people that are um, uh, kind of doomsayers, it's always like, well, the market might go down. Yeah. And the market and I I think these last three months were a really good example of what can happen. Our our system is not built on what's happening today or tomorrow or next week or a month from

now, but we've got a 20 30 year outlook. So, when the market goes down like it did in March and we take that hit, it generally over a 20-year period is going to come back. But what I'd like you to just touch on is asset allocation. How do we differ from other counties that might be not as highly funded us and might be more aggressive in trying to receive a different return as opposed to the higher we get in our percentage of being fully funded? How does that change the asset allocation and us being more conservative and less um I guess less volat you know we're not so dependent on what the market's doing right we have a portfolio approach that's really a a focus on what we call risk adjusted return and so that's the question that we ask ourselves every month is are we earning the maximum amount of money we can for the amount of risk that we're taking uh and when you compare us to other pension plans, that's a metric that we've done very well over time. And and the way we've gotten there over the past 20 years is that this board was an early adopter of private assets. um they're actually in the news quite a bit today, but they um and and markets are changing and we're changing with those markets, but they've done a very good job of helping us meet our assumed rate of return while also providing us with a very smooth not volatile return and accounting stream which has helped us manage contribution volatility uh within that private asset portfolio. Just using the analogy the uh events of the last month about 10 years ago, we started investing quite a bit in uh an asset class called private uh real return. And in that asset class are infrastructure investments and natural resources investments that are designed to be very they're designed to generate a lot of yield and they're designed to

be very inflation sensitive. And so when you have an oil shock, lo and behold, it's a good thing to own oil refineries and oil pipelines. Now there's I I want to give an acknowledgement to ESG considerations. We're very mindful of that. We consider the environmental impact of those investments, but again, our primary duty is to safeguard the the money for our beneficiaries and ensure that we can deliver the pension benefits. And that's that's what we're doing. So using diversification as an approach there that allocation of real assets and commodities has been very beneficial to the portfolio over the last 2 months. That's performed well at a time that public equities have not been performing well at a time that interest rates have been rising and fixed income investments have been struggling. So that's just one simpler example of the types of techniques that we're using to mitigate risk and ensure a consistent reliable return.

Awesome. Well, uh, I always say when I leave, I'm leaving. I'm not coming back. But I will be here for public comment in 2031 when this pays off. And and I'm going to congratulate everybody, especially all those that were on the retirement board and the board of supervisors back when a very tough decisions been made. And a lot of employees have sacrificed and a lot of the public has had to sacrifice. Less service. We're putting way too much money into the pension system right now. And when we get back to normal cost, um, whatever that is, whatever that frees up, it'll be more right sized inside of our budget and provide us with the opportunities to spend money elsewhere. It will put what's good for the county is not always great for the retirement system, right? It's going to put a lot more pressure on uh less cash flow. Mhm. But I think, you know, we've got bright minds over there that's working the asset allocation to make it so that it works for everybody. And so the promises that have been made will be promises kept for people. So right.

Well, again, thank you, Supervisor Lavinino. And I just also want to point out uh another long uh standing member, Harry Hagen, who's been on the pitching board as well. And so when Supervisor Lavino leaves, we'll also be losing losing the great talent of of Harry as well. So some big shoes to fill. Supervisor Hartman.

Well, first of all, thank you for an excellent presentation for for those of us who aren't in financial management. Uh it was understandable and and shows the complexity of what you're dealing with. When when I first uh 10 years ago was running for supervisor, I got a lot of criticism about the pension plan and where we were uh and and I don't hear that anymore. But what I do hear is other jurisdictions in our county who are invested in other systems and uh they're they're in much worse shape. So, I I really appreciate the work that everyone has done to get us to this point and I guess I'm still trying to understand and I think you put it out there, but what are the risks or you know what are the vulnerabilities still going forward and and at least my takeaway is um the Pepro repeal is is a really key one and and at least uh between the lines you talked about our discount rate being a little bit higher than elsewhere and I I'd like you to talk more about that because that assumption is key and and do you think that that is stable or would you be recommending that that assumption be reduced over time or help us understand?

Yeah, I to be candid I have and I will continue to recommend to the board of retirement that they lower the discount rate. Um that has been consistent. Uh we would be dealing it gradually though. Um, and I can tell you the magnitude of a gradual reduction in the discount rate would not eviscerate all of the savings that I've shown you. Um, and we would be dealing that with care to go slow and we definitely are our primary fiduciary duty is to our members and our beneficiaries. However, we do have a secondary duty to ensure that we're not causing undue harm on the citizens of Santa Barbara County by making it so that they can't receive government services. So, we do um consider that. I do recommend to the board that they consider lowering the discount rate to 7% from 7% to 6.75%. That's a gradual change that would put us back in the mean. Um there are arguments for not doing that. Um it's not a clear-cut yes or no black and white answer. But the other thing that we should consider is that over time as we become more fully funded, lowering the discount rate becomes advantageous to you as a plan sponsor because what that translates and means is that we as an investment team don't need to reach for return as much.

And so it allows us to take money out of private equity and shift it to boring old traditional corporate bonds and treasury securities that pay a nice yield. the market climate right now and the changes with the rising interest rates have also made that more palatable because you are actually getting more money in for holding bonds right now. Um so it's a policy recommendation. It definitely reduces the risk of the plan, but it also ties into that idea that we need to start generating more liquid cash flow to meet benefit payments and not um and and that'll make it easier to draw funds from the portfolio with more predictable cash flows. So, they all kind of work together to suggest that that's the right thing to do over time. But I want to assure this board that the board of retirement is very cognizant of the risks that that creates and and the hardship that creates amongst our community. We intend to do it slowly and in a very um calm and orderly fashion with a lot of predictability for the policy makers over here.

And then I should say that that is a recommendation. The board of retirement does not do everything that I ask them to do. Uh and I I guess the final question is uh you're you're mindful of the ratio of retirees to active employees. That's and um I guess we've held pretty stable over time. Right. But could you just elaborate a little bit more on that?

Certainly. Uh the county has been remarkably stable over time. I think there were 4,000 employees plus or minus a few hundred maybe when I started 12 years ago and we still haven't gone over 5,000 employees at Santa Barbber County. Uh that is driven a lot by our county. We're a low growth county. We're not expanding populationwise where you see a lot of employee growth in Monks California counties places like the inland empire places like that that have put in hundreds of thousands of housing units over the last 20 years. the counties are growing along with the size of their population. Um so we don't uh project and anticipate a lot of payroll growth that the county our projections are that the county will grow two 2 and a half% a year in terms of payroll growth. Um and then wage growth is another factor that we look at. Um that's driven a a lot by inflation. Um so we predict that the county will continue to grow slowly. We don't expect a a dramatic expansion in your workforce. Um, what we are closely watching is how AI changes the world. You just heard a presentation on AI. I don't think that that's going to result in a in a shrinking of the county workforce. I think what that's likely to do is change the type of work that county employees are doing. It's going to really draw on skills like empathy and human connection where jobs where those things are important are going to be a focus. um as AI tends to take over some of the manual work, but it'll change the composition of your workforce, I suspect that it may end up in you the average pay of a county employee actually going up over time because those skills are harder to develop and require a larger barrier to entry. So,

well, I I know you you mentioned that we're 89% funded. Uh that's really great. Uh, Kalpers is only 79, I think. So, good work. Thank you.

Thank you, Supervisor Hartman. I just wanted to add on to that point that Supervisor Labanino brought about, you know, the consequence has been, you know, less services for, you know, county residents by paying off that that amount. you know, that's, you know, we have a $600 million deferred maintenance backlog and it's growing and that's partly because we've been having to make those extra payments towards the pension system. You know, also, as we deal with this budget this year, we're looking at realignment funding and we only have so much realignment funding to pay for certain amount of employees to for services. I would anticipate in the future and and maybe the budget staff could, you know, once that goes down, our cost of employee goes down, we we have an opportunity maybe to even grow some of those departments. And if if we have a employees that technically cost less then we can have more. Is that is that how that would work as well?

Super chair Nelson. I I think for some of the sources it probably would work like that where the department receives things like if I'm thinking social services 91 realignment that isn't I don't think specifically tied to cost. It's a allocation they get from the state and so it is possible that should their cost per employee go down they could use their existing allocations and add more employees.

Yeah. So, you know, so our our actual capital and our human capital has been impacted by this in the county. So, I think that that's an area that we should be looking towards. And I think I've talked to some of the labor groups about that what that looks like as well is, you know, able to potentially restore some of these positions in the future that we're potentially losing right now in these tough budget years. That that's a that's an opportunity there without, you know, significant impact on the budget once we have that take place. Um, also AB 1383 that you guys are talking about that that's the PEPA reformation. Um, I was the uh actually only person from local government speaking on that at the assembly um pitching committee last year. And so um there's definitely getting some momentum on that. So it's something that we I think we all need to keep an eye on. I think it is a bad idea especially in the form that's being proposed now. I think there's potential compromises that, you know, that some of the public safety uh unions have brought up about just how long should somebody, you know, wait till retirement in public safety. You know, they have some careers that are um difficult to uh do at age 55 and 60, you know, after doing it for 30 years. So, that probably needs to be looked at, but I think that they're they're jumping a little bit too far on this and asking for too many clawbacks. So, I think there's a compromise to be had that would not threaten our pension system. So, I'm I'm looking forward to those conversations with the state and I think we should stay stay engaged on that and maybe add that to our our LED platform at some point if we haven't already. So, um with that, any other questions? Seeing none, thank you Mr. Leven for your presentation and for your hard work. And again, thank you Lavanino and and Treasure Hagen for your um service on that board.

Thank you. You're good. You're good. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. All right. So, we're um let's just take a quick fivem minute break. Actually, it's a good time for a break before we get started with our our third special item, which is the jail system housing options.

Welcome back. Welcome back to the April 17th meeting of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. Uh we're returning from break. This is our third and final day of our budget workshops for the uh year 2026 through 2027 and we are going to be moving on to our third special issue item which is jail system housing options. Um just for the general public um I just want to let you know that we're going to have a public comment at the conclusion of the presentation by um the the county team as well as from the sheriff. We'll be asking questions from the board at that time. We will not be starting deliberations on any decision-m until we actually hear from public comment first. So, I just want to make sure you guys know that our questions will be just um focused on um getting clarification. We may have additional questions after public comment. Um and at this point um we do have quite a bit of interest in uh this. So, we're going to actually have public comment at 2 minutes. Um so, those of you um while we're doing this presentation, you guys can look at your comments and see if you might be able to to shave it down a little bit from the normal 3 minutes. We want to make sure we accommodate everybody and um make sure we make some good decisions up here as well. So, just to give everybody a preparation for that so you're not surprised. Um public comment period will remain open until the first public commenter begins to speak and then we'll close public comment at that time. So, if you have not put in your slip for a public comment, I encourage you to go into the back and um and make sure you get your slip in or if you're watching at home and want to comment, make sure you contact the clerk of the board's office so that you can provide public comment on on this item. So with that, I'll turn over to assistant CEO Wade Horton um for our gel systems housing options. Mr. Horton.

Thank you, Chair.

Good morning, chair of board. Wade Horton, the CEO's office. With me are ACO Tanya Heightman, deputy CEO Rana Warren, chief deputy Ryan Sullivan, budget director Paul Clemeni, general services director Kirk Ladderquist, project manager Tully Wyatt, and Project Development Lead Jeff Frewell. Today's discussion on jail housing options is in response to your prior direction. Specifically, you asked staff to evaluate the viability of the Northwest unit at the main jail, alternative housing unit configurations at the Northern Branch Jail, and the updated operational and financial impacts associated with those options. The purpose of today is to bring you to a decision point. We're at a stage in the project where clear direction is required to maintain schedule and proceed with design, procurement, and financing. This project is driven by both legal obligations and operational need. In 2020, the county entered a stipulated judgment requiring improvements to jail conditions. A key component of that court order is transitioning away from aging and non-compliant housing areas of the main jail and constructing new areas at the Northern Branch Jail. Since that time, your board has taken several actions to move toward compliance. In 2025, April 2025, you directed staff to move forward with one and a half housing units at the Northern Branch Jail. You later directed staff to evaluate the potential continued use of Northwest unit at the main jail and most recently you requested a comparative analysis of alternative housing configurations. The options before you today reflect that direction and incorporate updated cost estimates, operational analysis, and system considerations. The project is well underway. Over the past year, staff has developed bridging documents defining scope and performance

standards, completed the request for qualifications process and selected a construction management firm to provide independent oversight. We are currently conducting the competitive process to select a design build team with contract award targeted for June. Following that, community input will continue and final design and construction will proceed over 36 months with completion anticipated in 2029. Maintaining schedule at this stage helps manage both cost escalation and project continuity. Today's direction will allow staff proceed with the next steps in a coordinated manner. Timeline of major milestones is shown here. As previously mentioned, a word of the design bill contract is anticipated in June and financing is scheduled for December. To frame the decision, our population was 7556 individuals as of April 8th. The current system has 1,127 total beds, but operational capacity is lower due to classification needs, meaning not all beds are available at the same time. and a 2025 study of jail population growth to a 2025 study projects jail population growth to approximately 800 by 2035. In addition, diversion programs will continue though the level of impact remains uncertain and the county was awarded state funds to construct a 32 bed crisis residential treatment facility adjacent to the Northern Branch jail which may influence system demand over time. The key consideration is that the system must function not only for current conditions but across a range of potential future scenarios which require consideration of both capac capacity and flexibility over time.

At its core, this is a risk decision with three primary risks to consider. First, underbuilding. If we build too small, we risk overcrowding, legal exposure, and continued reliance on the main jail or costly future expansion. Second, overbuilding. If we build too large, we risk higher ongoing costs and reducing urgency for diversion. And third, uncertainty over time. Construction costs are rising and policies and laws may change. Today's decision will shape the system for 50 years or more. Each option you'll see is a different balance between these risks. Your board asks us to evaluate whether the Northwest unit, the main jail, could serve as part of the long-term system. To orientate you, here's a layout of the main jail. And the Northwest unit is located near the center left of the complex highlighted in yellow with the inmate reception center or IRC located near the bottom right. While Maintain Northwest is technically viable, several factors limit its effectiveness as a long-term solution. It would require approximately $5 million annually in additional operating costs. It introduces operational inefficiencies due to its physical separation from intake and core services. It requires additional staffing to maintain appropriate supervision, and it limits future flexibility for repurposing the main jail site. In addition, retaining the unit would continue a more fragmented system configuration rather than moving toward consolidation at Northern Branch Jail. Based on these considerations, staff does not recommend maintaining the Northwest unit as part of the long-term housing strategy. The one housing unit option is the smallest system and includes

construction of one housing unit at the northern branch jail while retaining the IRC at the main jail and provides 752 beds systemwide. This option represents the lowest construction cost at 132.3 million and ongoing annual cost of 4.5 million. However, it relies on alignment of criminal justice leaders expanding diversion much of which is beyond county's control. Furthermore, it carries the highest risk of overcrowding and future expansion needs. There are not enough bed for the current beds for the current population, which could lead us to using the main jail. If the main jail continues operations, savings would be reduced. This option prioritizes lower costs, but relies heavily on future alignment of criminal justice leaders regarding diversion. The one and a half housing unit option includes construction of one and a half housing units in the northern branch jail with the IRC retained at the main jail. This option was previously directed by your board provides 880 system beds with a capital cost of 176 million and an annual cost of 11.7 million. It provides additional capacity compared to option one, moderates overcrowding risk as there is likely enough beds to avoid use of the main jail and aligns with the county's current financial planning. However, it continues to rely on effective effective system management and diversion efforts and does not fully eliminate long-term capacity risk. This option represents a balanced approach providing additional capacity while maintaining a moderate level of ongoing cost. The two housing unit option includes construction of two housing units northern branch jail with either a booking only facility or full IRC at the main jail. Two units plus a smaller South County booking only facility provides 948 system beds while two units

plus the South County IRC would provide 1,08 beds systemwide. Both options cost $212 million, but annual cost would increase by $2.5 million operating a full IRC versus a smaller booking facility. These options provide the greatest long-term capacity, minimizing overcrowding risk, offers increased flexibility to respond to variability in population classification needs and future policy or program changes, and reduces likelihood of continue reliance on the main jail. However, it requires a higher level of ongoing financial commitment and is not currently included in the county's financial plan and larger capacity could reduce pressure to pursue diversion strategies. This option reflects an approach that places greater emphasis on long-term capacity and flexibility while accepting a higher level of cost. Let me spend a moment on this slide because this is where the financial implications across all options come into full view. What you're seeing here is not just a comparison of project costs. It's a comparison of long-term structural commitments and differing approaches to managing system risk over time. Each option includes four primary cost components. First, staffing costs. As capacity increases, staffing requirements increase as well to ensure safe and effective operations. This ranges from nine additional positions in the one housing unit option to more than 30 in the two housing unit options. These are ongoing costs at scale with the size of the system. Second, operating costs. These include medical care, food service, maintenance, and utilities. While consolidation at the Northern Branch Jail creates efficiencies, these those efficiencies are particularly offset by the larger

foot physical footprint and expanded operations and higher capacity options. Third, debt service. This reflects the cost of financing construction over time. As expected, larger projects result in a higher annual debt service, representing a longerterm investment in expanded system capacity. Fourth, offsetting costs. As operations are consolidated and portions of the main jail are closed, the county realizes meaningful savings in administration, maintenance, and utilities. When combined, total annual costs range from 4.5 million for the one housing unit option to 11.7 million for the 1.5 housing unit option and up to roughly 15 to 18 million for the two housing unit options. It's also important to recognize the future conditions remain uncertain, whether related to population trends, policy changes, or construction costs. So, this slide is not just about cost. It's about how each option positions the county to respond to that uncertainty. Ultimately, the decision comes down to how the board wishes to balance near-term fiscal impact, long-term flexibility, and tolerance for operational capacity risk over time. Staff also developed an alternative approach for your consideration which would construct two housing units but initially operate only 1.5. This approach secures long-term capacity at today's construction costs, provides the ability to phase in operations over time, reduces likelihood of continue reliance on the main jail, and allows time to evaluate how population trends, diversion efforts, and the new crisis residential treatment facility influence system needs. It also avoids the need for future expansion projects, which can involve additional costs and operational disruption. At the same time, it carries higher

upfront and ongoing costs in the one or one and a half unit options and requires clear policy direction to ensure that additional capacity is activated only when needed. This option can be views of balancing near-term operational alignment with longerterm flexibility. This table provides a side-by-side comparison of the additional alternative with the previously presented options. It highlights differences in system capacity, staffing, and costs. With the new alternative included, you can see it aligns operationally with the one and a half housing unit option initially while incorporating additional built capacity for future use, but reflects higher cost due to the full construction of two housing units. So again, the trade-off is build now for flexibility later or limit upfront investment except future uncertainty. Each option represents a different balance of cost, capacity, and flexibility over time. Following your direction on the preferred housing option, staff will proceed with developing a comprehensive transition plan to close sections of the main jail, identifying opportunities to optimize and repurpose the site for future county needs, and advanced transportation planning to support access between facilities. These steps are intended to support both operational efficiency and broader county objectives as a system evolves. To conclude, all the options presented today are feasible. The decision before the board is not about feasibility but but about how to balance near-term and long-term cost, risk and legal compliance, system capacity and operational margin, and flexibility in responding to future uncertainty. Staff is requesting direction on which option to proceed to select the design

build team and to develop depths issuance and transition plans. That concludes our presentation and we are available for questions. All right, questions from the board for staff. We can we can get to questions later but um as well if you'd like but um there absolutely be time for that. But supervisor caps just a quick clarifying question. Uh thank you so much. it really laid out uh very simply but um are operating costs built in? Uh I know we built in for 1.5 but are operating costs also built in as well?

Our current financial plan is based on 1.5 pods. If the board was to move forward with a more expensive operating cost option, then the CEO's office would work on forecasting that need and working that into a future financial plan. So, the operating cost for 1.5 is built into the budget currently. Supervisor caps through the chair. our five-year forecast uh over the five-year period assume the 1.5 option. The debt service piece we do have set aside next year's budget. The operating costs are really um

going to hit kind of later in the forecast period. We have built the assumption of the 1.5 operating costs into that forecast. But we do have deficits in that year. So, you know, it the assumption is there the deficits would get larger if we went with a higher option. and they'd get smaller if we went with a, you know, least less costly option, but the one and a half is what we've assumed. I wouldn't say it's it's built in and covered. We would have to plan for whatever option we go with. Okay. Thanks. All right. Thank you, Super Caps. All right. Um, also want to let the sheriff have an opportunity. So, Sheriff Brown.

Thank you, Chair Nelson and members of the board. As you close out the budget workshops today and are about to deliberate and make the critical decision of how to decide on the jail system reconfiguration, I ask that you consider a few points. We once again acknowledge the difficult situation that you are faced with and uh relative to the current and future budget and the reality that building jails while necessary is not popular. However, we nonetheless find ourselves in this situation due to a failure of previous boards to prioritize investment in one of the most essential elements of public safety, our county jail system. As we mentioned in our budget presentation on Wednesday, we recently obtained dismissal of a nearly 45year-old court case on jail overcrowding. When I came into office in January of 2007, Santa Barbara's main jail was outdated, extremely overcrowded, and incredibly staff intensive with an average daily population of well over 1,000. And that was just at the main jail. I commissioned the Blue Ribbon Commission on Jail overcrowding soon after assuming office and they determined that the county needed to replace the antiquated main jail. A few years later, I lobbyed the state to modify the grant match requirements under Assembly Bill 900 to allow counties such as ours to reasonably qualify for funding to replace outdated jails. A previous board took full advantage of that opportunity and invested millions to support the construction and the operation of the Northern Branch Jail, a

state-of-the-art facility, not because they wanted to, but because they realized they needed to. Subsequent to that, however, the board relinquished funding for the STAR complex, which had been additionally ch obtained and would have added 228 jail beds to replace beds at the main jail. It should be noted that supervisor Lavagnino was the sole denter on this vote and supported moving forward with the star complex and funding plan which would have provided nearly $40 million and that was when construction costs were much lower than they are today. Secondly, please remember also that people who break the law must be held accountable for their actions. There are some genuinely evil people in this world who need to be locked away from society. Some of them permanently, but also understand that most people in our jails are not inherently bad people. They are men and women who for the most part have had troublesome lives, who may have been victimized themselves, and who have often made bad choices that have landed them in jail, often as a direct result of alcoholism, drug addiction, and or mental illness. Most of them will not change until they have hit rock bottom. when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of changing the course of their lives. For many, that revelation comes only when they find themselves in jail. When that happens, we need to take advantage of their receptivity to treatment and programming by providing it in an appropriately designed and built jail facility.

I know that each of you understands the value of reducing recidivism. It's like compound interest paid forward to the community and to the next generation. We also need to seek improvement in how we deal with mentally ill criminal offenders. But we need to have balance and the fact remains that we still have to and we will continue to have to house a large number of people. many of them very dangerous people in our jail system. We must do so in facilities that are safe and humane, not overcrowded, and which are designed to support evidence-based programming, rehabilitative counseling and training, and re-entry training and preparation. Our Northern Branch Jail was specifically designed for all of these things, as well as for expansion. It includes a medical and mental health wing and programming space that is built into every housing module, meaning that our custody deputies do not have to move persons incarcerated to classrooms and they can be monitored by the existing staff in the housing areas. A less costly way to do it than what must now occur in the main jail. Those same essential and efficiency producing amenities will be incorporated into the new housing that you are deciding upon today. To achieve the correctly sized jail reconfiguration, we need your help. And it won't be easy. You're going to hear today from some people who feel very strongly that no more than one pod should be built. They are good, well-intentioned people who believe that very genuinely. But building only one pod would not even

allow us to house the jail population that we have in the jail today, let alone the population of the future. This past Monday, our jail population was 769 with 86% being incarcerated for felonies. Only one added pod would not allow for the proper classification and proper housing of incarcerated persons so that they can be appropriately housed for their safety, for the safety of other inmates, and for the safety of the jail staff. We believe building only one pod would end up being a huge mistake that the county will come to regret. Even one and a half bods really only gives us proper housing capacity for today's needs and does not take into account any future significant growth. More than 24,000 housing units are currently listed on the housing elements of the county and its cities at an average of 2.83 occupants per housing unit. That would be a population increase of more than 68,000 county residents in the next 10 to 15 years if those units are built. According to our calculations, that equates to a future need for 117 additional jail beds. With two new pods added to the Northern Branch Jail, we can handle that. The county and the sheriff's office do not have discretion to release the vast majority of incarcerated people within our jails as they have been remanded or sentenced to jail custody by the courts. Reconfiguring our Northern Branch jail into a facility of proper size and capacity will have other significant benefits as well.

It will help us avoid future litigation, costly legal settlements, and/or courtordered compliances that are likely to result with an inadequate add-on to our Northern Branch jail. Proper capacity and housing design will allow us to correctly house those who are mentally ill and provide needed accessible housing for those who are physically disabled. Furthermore, the overcrowded and dilapidated conditions in our existing jail are unsafe and detrimental to our custody staff. The men and women who work in our jail system deserve a better working environment. How will we be able to effectively recruit sufficient numbers of new staff in the future if all we can offer them is an overcrowded and dangerous facility to work in? Properly completing this reconfiguration project will put us in a much better position to recruit, hire, and retain highly competent custody staff. An economy of scale can also be achieved by building two pods now. Any alternative plans to build new pods in the future would be far, far more expensive. The current opportunity is almost certainly the best we'll ever have to build these two new and muchneeded housing units at the lowest possible price. When the county embarked on building the Northern Branch Jail, they did so with a responsible multi-year plan to pay for the future operational costs of the new jail, gradually carving out a portion of general fund growth with each year to get to a targeted annual amount. I encourage you and the CEO's office to continue to look for creative solutions and pathways forward to figure out ways

to bridge the financing of the jail reconfiguration construction for several years perhaps until 2030 when as you heard this morning the county's pension debt has been paid off and there's a much stronger likelihood of more revenue to be available. In closing, let me say that building these additional housing units will help bring hope to many who are hopeless, safety to those who are threatened, and better working conditions for some of your most dedicated and faithful employees, the men and women who put their lives on the line working in our correctional facilities 24 hours a day, each and every day of the year. I also ask you to send a powerful message today to your constituents. One that tells them that of all reasons government exists, the one that is the most important is to bri to provide for their protection and their safety while at the same time ensuring the secure and humane custody and the pathway to rehabilitation of those who are housed in our jails. You have the opportunity to act strategically and leave a great legacy by reconfiguring the Santa Barbara County jail system in such a way that no other board of supervisors will have to worry about building any other correctional facilities for the next 50 years or longer. I ask you today for your unanimous approval of one of the two pod options for this extraordinarily important project. And thank you. Myself and my staff is available to you if you have any questions.

Thank you, Sheriff Brown. Any questions at this point for the sheriff? I'm sure we will after after public comment. All right. So, I think we're going to go ahead and move to public comment. We want to make sure we hear from many of the of our residents that are very eager to uh make sure that we understand their position on this issue. So, Madam Clerk, um how many public commenters do we have at this point? Chair Nelson and members of the board, we have 37 requests to speak from the public on all three special issues today.

Okay. So, we're going to make it again two minutes per speaker on this and we're going to go ahead and close uh public comment on um these three special items. Um I assume most of it is here on the jail, but there may be some public speakers that are speaking on one of the other two or there might be a combination of all three. So, just for those that are watching, that's kind of what's going on here as we discuss these three special uh issue topics. Let's go ahead and get started with the first speaker.

Chair Nelson and members of the board. We're going to begin here in Santa Barbara with Larry Barren to be followed by Lawrence Severance. Larry Chair Nelson, supervisors, I'm Larry Barrett representing Indivisible Santa Barbara. If you need to make a decision today on jail expansion, limit this expansion to 1.0 units. When you approved uh consultants contract for jail construction two months ago, you assured us this approval in no way locked you into a 1.5 unit expansion and that alternatives would be duly considered and presented to the public. So imagine my surprise hearing the county slideshow learning they've already considered all options. We're supporting a 1.5 or larger unit construction and stating decisions are needed now to meet deadlines. It's not right to reach a decision today on jail expansion because no such decision is referred to in the agenda. The practice of open government requires this matter be given prominent and explicit notice particularly to the many groups that have been focused on this question for years. Indivisible being one of more than two dozen organizations that have signed a petition calling for expansion to be limited to one unit. Now, as the county's presentation um focuses on the risk of legal liability, review what council to the Murray plaintiffs have told you in their most recent correspondence. The stipulated judgment does not require the county to build a certain number of additional beds. It specifically requires jail population reduction measures.

The only danger of legal exposure, it sites, comes precisely with maintenance or increase of the jail's operational bed capacity. Now, against the reality of count layoffs and cuts in vital services, utilize this one means open to you to divert money away from a wasteful jail expansion to reduce cuts to essential services needed by a community that is already reeling from federal and state budget cuts. Thank you. Limit the expansion to one unit. Thank you so much. We will now go to Lawrence Severance to be followed by Marine Earls. Lawrence.

Good morning, Chair Nelson and supervisors. Um, I'm here on behalf of Clue Santa Barbara. Uh, we're part of a work group with the League of Women Voters. This is a momentous decision. It's a 50-year decision. Um, I've presented a chart with jail math. The sheriff's presentation doesn't really talk about ways to reduce the jail population. The jail math shows you how it can be done. We could get down to a level in the low 600s with putting resources into expanding the ready program with building the Prop 1 um funded 32 bed resource uh for folks that have mental health challenges who are currently in jail. and by increasing the public defender staffing to help move the case load along faster and reduce the backlog of 70% of folks in jail who are waiting for their cases to be decided. The jail data analysis that the that you ordered showed um 306 of the 744 folks in a snapshot are high-risisk. Those are folks that should be jailed as the sheriff says. 111 of those people in the jail at that time were low risk. They were not a threat to public safety, but they were still in jail because their cases hadn't been heard. And the case load pressures from the public defenders office results in repeat continuences for just cause that leave them sitting there. Those people cost us $394 a day under current funding. So, um, the next thing I want to mention to you is to look at the public support. We've presented a petition that's been signed by 487 of your Santa Barbara County residents asking you to limit the the the increase

to one jail pod. There are 27 organizations that include labor unions, faith communities, and nonprofits who take the time to understand issues before they take a position. They're all asking you to limit this and look to alternatives for how to handle the jail population. You can do it by reducing the population and sticking with one unit. Thank you. We will now go to Moren Earles to be followed by Cheryl Smith. Moren,

good morning supervisors. I'm with Clue League of Women Voters. Also, this dealsized decision today is not just about beds. It's also about who we are as a community and how we care for people. You are choosing between a 1.0 jail, 256 beds, and a 1.5 jail, 384 beds. The data is clear. We do not need the extra 128 beds. It would cost 191.7 million more overall and 7 million more annually, forcing deeper cuts to critical programs. Our current population is about 756 near the 1.0 capacity of 752 and well below the 1.5 option of 880. Our Clue League of Women Voters letter shared evidence data on five safe population reductions. First, up to 35 people daily are waiting in jail for treatment. With 32 mental health beds and 35 substance use placements coming online, we can reduce the population to about 730. Second, expansion of early legal representation is projection projected to reduce it by 28 more to about 700. Third, with 70% waiting jail and uh waiting trial, increased public defender staffing can potentially lower the

population by another 50 to 60 or more to around a 6 to 150 size jail. And fourth, even with projected 10-year jail growth of 60, which is Wilson's projection, reductions keep us within the 1.0 capacity of 752. Thank you, Maria. Thank you. Thank you. We will now go to Cheryl Smith to be followed by Maria Valencia. Cheryl. Can you hear me? We can.

Okay. Thank you. Uh, good morning, Supervisor Nelson and the rest of the board. Please choose the one bed option. Last year, the options presented were approximately 748 total beds for one pod, 876 for one and a half pods, and 1,04 for two pods. The county's own jail consultant also reported that the average jail population was about 750 in 2024 with projected growth of only about 60 additional beds over 10 years if nothing changes. The same consultant identified policy and practice changes capable of reducing the long-term jail population by more than 200 beds. Those numbers suggest this is not simply a beds problem. It is also a systems problem. Your own county departments have acknowledged that Santa Barbara County is low on treatment bed capacity and that some people ordered to treatment remain in jail because placements are unavailable. This is personal for me. My adult son has schizophrenia with anesignsia, meaning he cannot recognize that he is ill. He has had roughly 160 court appearances, around 20 criminal cases, and has spent over 300 days in jail, often tied to petty thefts involving items worth less than $20. That is not public safety success. That is untreated illness cycling through the most expensive and least therapeutic setting we have. He does not need repeated incarceration. He needs secure, sustained psychiatric treatment capable of stabilizing serious mental illness and ending the cycle. If the county builds beyond one pound pod now, it risks committing taxpayers to decades of

added operating costs while underinvesting in treatment and diversion. Please do not overbuild for failures we still have the power to fix. Choose one pod. Thank you.

Thank you, Miss Smith. We'll now go to Maria Valencia to be followed by Nancy Aosce. Maria, good morning. Excuse me. Good morning, Chair Nelson and honorable supervisors. Thank you for taking the time to prioritize space for this special issue on jail expansion. We as members of NAMI feel confident the number of jail residents with mental health conditions could be reduced by making a collective community commitment if the focus is on enhancing community-based resources treatment to community linkage linkages instead of arresting and jailing people with mental health conditions. The success of jail diversion is dependent upon the resources to which those leaving the jail are directed into community-based services. Here are some are several recommendations for reducing the mentally ill jail population. Sustainably fund and staff the county's co-response team program that avoids criminalization before arrest. ensure adequate staffing and growth for the county by bewwell's full service partnership outpatient programs that serve those with the most acute mental health needs. Continue to support the county forensic assertive community treatment about to be implemented by BWell. Let's increase utilization of the county sobering centers and crisis stabilization unit which are underutilized by law enforcement agencies like you. I'm very blessed to live in Santa Barbara. I believe what makes this place so special is the county government resources that are seemingly seemingly are starting to work together rather than in silos. This will be critically important during these

challenging budgetary times when government will need to pull resources from pri from the private public sector and nonprofit agencies to continue to serve our most vulnerable populations. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Valencia. We will now go to Nancy Aosce to be followed by Andrew Wyman. Nancy.

Good morning, supervisors. My name is Nancy Aos and I am the assistant director for the Santa Barbara County Action Network, SPAN. First and foremost, I want to thank you all for your hard work on the budget for the 2026 2027 fiscal year. We understand that you had to make extremely tough choices to respond to projected budget deficits. However, we have one large concern. Especan strongly opposes the building of 1.5 jail pods. We believe the most sustainable way to move forward is to invest in lowering the jail population and lowering the rate of recidivism. The more you compromise funding for social services, the higher the guarantee that the jail population will grow. Poverty and absence of adequate services is directly linked to crime and incarceration. Why invest in a revolving door problem? Let's focus on root causes of these issues. The public defenders office is underfunded and underresourced. We urge you to use the difference between 1 and 1.5 jail pods to fund the ready program and to support additional staffing for the public defenders office. We urge you to consider the members of the jail population who await their trials, contributing to thousands of dollars in losses for this county. Fix the systems problem. Take county staff's recommendations on reducing the jail population and follow the community's direction to reduce the jail population. Choose only one jail pod. Thank you.

Thank you. We will now go to Andrew Wyman to be followed by Lynn Gibbs. Andrew.

Andrew Wyman. uh want to just me mention I'm a retired psychiatrist who has worked with and in the criminal justice system in the past in other locations. Uh I was particularly impressed by Sheriff Brown's comments and uh a number of the comments he makes are powerful and correct but there are a few uh things I need to add to them. Probably the first one is this. Predicting the future is a fool's errand. It's quite difficult to do that and many many of the um stipulations that have been made in these predictions are hypothetical and hypothetical only and it's particularly true when it comes to the social environment. What we're going to look like in 10 20 and 30 years is nobody's guess really. So we have to take that into consideration. The next thing I I want to talk about uh for just a moment is uh it's clear that over the last 50 years or so uh the erosion of the public sector and of the needs of our most vulnerable have been less attended to than those of us who have accomplished something and gotten on in our lives. And that's created a terrible dilemma for our country and around the world. Another part of this presentation has to do with who's in jail. That has as much to do with politics as it does with public safety. We are all aware I see a a frown on somebody's face. But I don't agree that we are uh in a world where politics doesn't matter. From my perspective, if you look at the powerful interests that influence the size of the jail population and who goes to jail, you

have a different picture than you would if you're just thinking about quote public safety. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Wyman. We will now go to Lynn Gibbs to be followed by Robert Ornstein. Lynn, is Lynn here? Did she leave? Lyn's here. Oh, yes. Thank you, Lynn. I'm sorry.

Please. Thank you, supervisors, uh, for your renewed consideration of the size of the jail expansion. Given the sizable population of persons in the jail whose crimes are the consequence of their behavioral health disorders, NAMI National has had an initiative entitled divert to what? Recognizing that the success of diversion for this population depends upon the services and treatment they can secure on the outside. Our recent jail data reports that 70ome percent of persons in the jail with serious mental illness have been there one or more times with a whopping 49% having been there 10 times or more. The sheriff's department has told the community corrections input committee that 44% of the jail population in South County um are on serious psychotropic medications with 39% on them uh in North County. Um we believe mental health diversion needs a deeper dive. The good news is that we're just beginning to address this issue with the CALAM justice involved initiative pilot. Um and and one example of how that can help is that um at Wednesday with DE's Be Well commission meeting, we discussed that Callain can at last address the systemic problem we've experienced for years, the medication gap when people leave the jail with 30 days of medication and can't see a prescriber at Bwell for up to three months. NAMI scrambles each time we hear from individual family members and and Calaine can uh help to address that problem. Um if we do this right, this is just one example of the improvements on the horizon that can reduce this jail population. We know it. We believe we need to let let this program work as well as the forensic assertive community

treatment program or fact about to be implemented by be well prior to committing to an excessive jail buildout. So many of those in the jail with behavioral health disorders belong in treatment on the outside instead. Thank you. Getting and keeping them out should be our priority. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Gibbs. We will now go to Robert Orstein to be followed by Pam Flint Tambo. Robert,

I'm with the criminal justice work group. Um the overriding bold-faced question is jail capacity. What it is now and what is going to need to be in the future. And with this regard, in this regard, there's a very important question that needs to be addressed and needs to be answered. Um data shows that compared to St. Louis, Episcopal County, and Ventura County. Santa Barbara County has a 33% higher arrest rate per thousand of adult population. Sheriff Brown stated earlier this week that crime is down and that's a positive obviously. So why are our statistics why is this county arresting 33% more of adult population than our adjoining counties? Why is this the case? This is a key question that must be addressed and answered. And another question is does this factor artificially inflate the adult daily population? Um obviously the projections are of key importance as is the future growth of the adult daily population. But if these 33% goes away because of policies policy decisions that are changed, there may not be a need for the kind of expansion that involves 1.2 or two pods. Thank you for your consideration and hopefully this question will be addressed and answered.

We will now go to Pam Flint Tambode to be followed by Jeffrey Schuman. Pam. Good morning, supervisors. The I'm with the League of Women Voters and also with the uh clue work, criminal justice work group. The decisions before the county supervisors are difficult and many of us citizens in Santa Barbara County have wrestled with the pros and cons of various possible outcomes. It is clear, however, that our county is one of the poorest in the state for adults and our children are the poorest. So, how does the lack of adequate housing, food, and medical care affect a kid's ability to grow up and become a responsible, capable, and law-abiding adult? And it's not just folks without adequate financial support who struggle to become fully functioning adults. But when needs aren't met, people often fall into illegal or self-destructive activities and slide into the legal system, ending up meeting law enforcement and various unfortunate outcomes. Building a big new jail does not really help this. That's at the end of the line when the community has failed to meet the needs of individuals. What we provide to our citizens early in their lives and how quickly our county intervenes when problems surface says more about our county's values than all the jail build jail beds we can build. This spring, you supervisors are building a budget reflecting our county's values. And we've learned that early interventions in health, education, and behavioral wellness prevent further deterioration of an individual's character and abilities to live responsibly in our communities. Adding more beds in a jail suggests failures rather than successes in

creating a healthy, progressive society. I urge you to build just one pod in the north county and use any additional available funds in positive, creative, and healthy ways to support folks in our communities going forward. It really comes down to seeking morality and humanity over punishment. Thank you. We will now go to Jeffrey Schumman to be followed by Rory Moore. Jeffrey.

Good morning, supervisors. My name is Jeff Schum. I'm here today not just to oppose jail expansion, but offer you a proven alternative. Whether is one and a half pods or scaled down to one pod, the reality is the same. We do not need more jail cells. We need treatment beds. Right now in Santa Barbara, approximately 40% of the jail population is on psychotropic medication. With a total incarceration population of 750 individuals, that means roughly 300 people are dealing with serious mental health conditions. Those are not people who primarily need incarceration. They need treatment. If we build the right system and even a portion of those individuals are diverted into an effective care, we significantly reduce the need for jail space altogether. That's how you lower the population. Not by building more capacity, but reducing demand. Our judicial systems like Ko County and Chicago are already doing this. They've implemented programs that contain mental health treatment, substance use care, and court supervision for young adults aged 18 to 25, connecting individuals to psychiatric therapist, medication, and structural support instead of jail. And it works. These programs have shown to reduce jail population as much as 30% while dramatically lowering recidivism about 10% in some of the cases. Here in Santa Barbara County, we have a critical gap. There's virtually nothing for

individuals with dual diagnosis. Those struggling both mental illness and substance use. These are the very individuals feeling our jail. Instead, we arrest them, release them, arrest them again, creating revolving door that drives up cost for law enforcement, courts, and incarceration. Thank you, Jeff. We're spending roughly $120,000 per year to house in. Thank you, Mr. Schuman. That is your time. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. We will now go to Rory Moore to be followed by Suzanne Warden. Rory, Chairman Nelson, members of the board, I'm here actually in two capacities. Number one, I'm a retiree from the county and I support Greg Lavine's uh presentation earlier, but primarily I'm on the board of families act and I'm here to oppose the jail expansion. Um on Wednesday, one of you asked us to if we could applaud the public defenders presentation. Public defender Makuga spoke of her holistic approach to public defense, support of early intervention, CRT, CIT, and the need to save Dr. Lee's position. We all agree on several things here. There's a mental health crisis here in Santa Barbara County. There's not nearly enough mental health beds. Jail is not a mental health facility. And yet 50% maybe more of the people in jail have mental health issues. We spend uh we send mental health patients out of the county for treatment and housing. What's wrong with the picture? We need to be putting money into mental health treatment early on before they get to Sheriff uh Brown's facilities. They should not be in jail. There should be beds, not cells. Uh and

perhaps that's the repurposing of the main jail here in Santa Barbara County. raise it, build a state-of-the-art mental health facility, and the problem will be a long way to being resolved. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Moore. We will now go to Suzanne Warden to be followed by Ted Rhodess. Suzanne,

I second Rory Moore's injunction. built a state-of-the-art mental health system in our county and we are far far far from that reality. Supervisor Lavano, I appreciate your honesty and your moral character. However, in this hearing room last Wednesday, I believe I heard you say that you were going to vote for the most expanded jail option. And I think you said the word too despite the fact that you hadn't heard from any constituents who were supporting this option and you'd heard from many many who were not.

Well then you might be surprised at my vote today.

Happy to hear that. I'm very happy and I can't wait I can't wait to see what it is. As the uh director of families act for the last 20 years, I have witnessed and been very personally involved in the cases of hundreds and hundreds of people with mental health and substance use issues that have spent time in our jail. And I can tell you it did not help them. There is a place there is a place for a pod. I will agree with that. Families Act will agree that we need a little bit of an expansion, but that's it. What we really need is the money to fund all of the services that we've been lacking. And the tragedies, I think I sent you a letter earlier this week just shining light on a handful of the tragedies that we've seen in the last 20 years. young, typically young men with mental health issues that have perished or been tremendously demoralized and diminished by having to sit in this jail. People sitting in the jail are not getting treatment. What we need is treatment. So, it's very, very simple. The equation is so simple. Let's put the money where it has been lacking. I've been standing here for 20 years telling you that we are going in the wrong direction. The sheriff himself has said the crime rate is down and has been going down. So why in the world would we want to expand the jail beyond the need? Thank you so much. I hope that you can face the reality that this county needs something different.

Thank you, Mr. Ruden.

We will now go to Ted Rhodess to be followed by Gail Oeno. Ted. Good morning. Um, first of all, I just want to thank you for taking the time to really thoughtfully study the details of this budget. I don't envy any of you having done this with some nonprofits where the money is even scarcer. U, but thank you. Uh I too am am asking you to consider just uh voting for one uh housing unit, one housing pod. Uh this will save, I am told, some $147 million, maybe more than that, and allow the county to redirect funds to mental health counseling, addiction treatment, and other community services uh that could actually reduce future jail populations. Um, I believe prevention is the key to public safety and I just encourage you to reach a consensus to do the right thing here and the most physically responsible thing and just uh approve of one housing unit. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Rhodess.

We will now go to Gail Ouro who's our final speaker here in Santa Barbara. Then we will go to Zoom with Suzanne Clucker. Gail. We're still not at noon. Thank Kevin. Thank you for the opportunity for all of us to address you on this difficult issue. Um, as you know, keeping the community safe um does not and will not require more than 750 beds. And as Larry Seance explained, this can easily come down to 630. We did it during CO and we're doing a lot more now. You're going to be voting on things on Tuesday that are going to help us lower that population. Um, but you do need to commit to preventing incarceration by meeting the needs of children, youth, and families, providing effective care for the mentally ill, and creating affordable housing. You need to do other things. You do need to beef up the public defender's office. Um, I just wanted to speak to the North Branch jail. It is way better than the main jail which is unsafe, decrepit in the sheriff's words and very expensive to run. Um we need to look however at the Scandinavian models. NBJ is not state-of-the-art. It it is built for uh ve it is overbuilt and we have a lot of people in there who could benefit by the kind of jails that Scandinavia has. So I would not overbuild now. I would stick with one and and go over and take a look at what the rest of the world

does. In any case, whatever motion you pass today and whatever addition you make, be sure that you also move to close down all of the main jail except for the IRC. Um, it is really not a suitable place for people with mental illness or problems. So, make that airtight. We don't want to see it again after the new jail is opened. Thank you. We will now go to Randy Ever or my apologies. We will now go to Zoom with Suzanne Clucker to be followed by Randy Ever. Suzanne Suzanne, we have unmuted you on our end. If you can please unmute on your end to provide your comments.

I'm sorry. I'm Susan Cluker and we're not ain't no chickens. It's easy to uh say clucker and um I've already submitted a letter so I'm going to be brief about um just the fact that uh mental health is a brain disease and it's the only organ that needs to decide for itself if it's compromised. And there's a huge stigma and we know it's part of the problem of homelessness and we know it's part of the cycle. Uh my son stole a can of spray paint and ended up in uh a jail. Um uh it's very poignant to me right now uh that we don't consider other brain diseases like Alzheimer's, stroke, PTSD as um with a stigma. We provide care for them and um non-judgment. there is a proven genetic component for many psychiatric diseases and um when they are in the jail um if they get medication it takes at least 3 weeks for a medication to even begin to work and on the outside um people don't have the patience for that and I'm sure the psychiatrist would agree with the fact that it takes a while to get on the right medication. Um I um have um had the opportunity of working with Bob Nelson and Sheriff Brown for initiating electronic monitoring which could reduce the

population of people in the jail that are not a flight risk. Um, uh, my son was in jail during CO. Thank you, Susan. That is your time. All of this happened, but he got a face tattoo. Thank you, Susan. This is your That is your time. I'm sorry. Okay. Thank you. We will now go to Randy Ever to be followed by Julysa Pena. Randy,

Randy, we have unmuted you on our end. If you can please unmute on your end to provide your comments. Hello. Hi, we can hear you. Please proceed.

Okay, good. Uh my name is Randy and I'm recovering and have uh improved a lot uh from uh cannabis induced uh psychosis which is basically schizophrenia in a lot of words. Uh and I want to say that I'm a victim of the Santa Barbara County jail. Um, and thankfully I got bailed out and thankfully I accepted medicine and I improved and you know so I got bailed out and not many people get bailed out and I switched from criminal to uh criminal court to uh mental health court and I I attend meetings and uh take my medicine because I need it and uh and that's okay and I don't use weed. I don't use weed anymore. Thank God. Um, yeah. And I want to say I'm for uh an alternate style like the was it Scandinavian or Nordic? Uh, an alternate style of uh treating uh you know mental health and um dual diagnosis and uh I be interested in hearing what Tuesday has to say. Thank you. That's all I got. We will now go to Julysa Pena to be followed by Leslie Jones. Julysa.

Good morning, County Board of Supervisors. First of all, thank you for your time. My name is Julisa Pñena, and I'm speaking on behalf of the Immigrant Legal Defense Center. We urge you to limit the North County Jail expansion to no more than one housing unit. Every day we work with families in this county who are already living with fear, instability, and uncertainty. Families and children struggling to access health care, housing, and basic support. Our community is facing a mental health crisis. And in moments like this, budgets are not just numbers. They are values in action. Incarceration is not a solution and it is not an investment. We have heard the argument that more space is needed. But if the county is in a position where it needs to build more space, then we must ask, are we truly addressing the root causes that lead to incarceration? Because expanding capacity does not solve the problem. It manages the outcome. The real solution lies in investing in mental health services, housing, prevention, and community-based care. When we expand jails, we are choosing to invest in systems that respond after harm has occurred instead of addressing the root causes. Every dollar spent on incarcer incarceration is a dollar taken away from the services that actually keep families stable and communities safe. And the community has been clear again and again asking you to prioritize well-being over incarceration. So the question before you today is not just about housing units. It is about what kind of community you are choosing to invest in. Budgets reflect values and today we are asking you to make the responsible choice. Invi invest in our community not in its incarceration. Thank you.

We will now go to Leslie Jones to be followed by Claire Monigan. Leslie.

Hello. This is Leslie Jones. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Please proceed.

Okay. I I must have filled out the form wrong. I didn't know that I was supposed to speak, but I am in favor of not expanding and using the alternatives that have present been presented to you already. Thank you very much. We will now go to Claire Monigan to be followed by Gina Corez. Claire. Oh, hello. Good morning, board of supervisors and all. My name is Claire and I'm here to oppose expanding jails. I'm the mother of a dual diagnosed daughter who suffers severe mental illness and substance abuse. She's been jailed countless times and I feel I've learned a bit through her journeys. Our criminal system is not working. Our efforts are misplaced. Our resources are wasted. It took a near fatal car accident to finally conserve my mentally ill daughter, excuse me, at Crestwood Champion in Lomboke. I'm not an accountant, but it doesn't make sense to dump more money into expanding an already failing system. It only makes sense to change. Ultimately, expanding facilities like Crestwood Champion is the solution for now and for long term. Thank you all for listening.

We will now go to Gina Chorus to be followed by Connie Alexander. Gina.

Good morning, Chair Nelson and members of the board. My name is Gina Curos. Um, and I want to acknowledge you all. I know you guys have some tough decisions to make today um with having to cut other departments. Um, right now our jail is often being used to manage homelessness, mental illness, and court process failures. and jail is one of the most expensive tools that we're using and it's not effective for those problems. So, if we can possibly not go with the more expensive route, um that's what I am hoping that you guys can do. I know you have tough decisions. Um but the evidence I mean there's so many people that have worked on reducing um the jail population. Um and I would like to see the investments made in uh the people who deserve treatment and housing. It's the foundation uh for all good things that you know for everyone. So thank you very much for your consideration and um happy Friday.

We will now go to Connie Alexander to be followed by Anna Campbell. Connie.

Ah, can you hear me? I hope you can. Yes, we can.

Thank you, Chair Nelson and members of the board. I really want to speak to how leaders make decisions because a lot of people are giving you those great facts and here's these pieces but I think about the future and as president of the NAACP what I think about is what is the trajectory what is the relationship this county wants to have with communities of color to stay on this trajectory of build it and fill it is a trajectory that is deeply deeply flawed and pessimistic. stick towards youth of future. I was with a group of junior hires the other day and hearing those little boys of color tell me that their expectation is that they need to run from law enforcement and I mean they were just seventh and eighth graders and already in that mindset and also the language when you say you're housing people you're not housing people you're incarcerating people. When you talk about poverty there's reasons that people are here that have to do with poverty. So, I really want you to be thinking about that we don't make decisions just out of budgetary fear numbers, but we make decisions based on true hope. It was very sad for me to hear the sheriff try and like utilize language around hope and things because there is nothing in jail that will feel hopeful. You do not heal in jail. It doesn't have that capacity. It wasn't built for that and there's no reason that you would ever think that that would happen there. So as leaders, I am urging you to be thinking about as a leader, how am I traing into the future and how am I trajecting into the future of communities of color, of youth of color? And by the way, I think that Supervisor Lavanino a few years ago, if he had to make that hard decision, he was probably making that decision out of a sense of this very thing that I'm

talking about that it's about building a future, not incarcerating our future. Thank you. We will now go to Anna Campbell to be followed by Michael Lynch. Anna,

hello. We can hear you. Please proceed.

Okay. Thank you. Uh we can see with the straightforward moves that a choke point in a system can affect the integrity of the whole system in addition to the individuals who are directly involved. Our system of justice in Santa Barbara County has a choke point and that choke point is an underfunding of the public defenders office. We need to hire more public defenders and investigators so that people can their cases can be heard in a timely manner, which is an important part of a justice system. And uh back in the mid 1990s as a member of NAMI, there were some of us who looked at this problem. The disparity in resources between the the public defenders office and the district attorney's office. Both are important and both should have enough resources to handle their case loads. I believe that this is an important consideration. Also, I was surprised to hear the the sheriff who I respect, but I was surprised to hear him say that it helps people if they hit rock bottom. That might be true perhaps in the case of alcoholism or in case of drug use. It is completely untrue in the case of mental illness. No one chooses whether or not they're going to have a serious mental illness. It

happens to them and they have to live with it. And hitting rock bottom is more likely to lead to their deaths than to their than to help them. Um, thank you Anna. That is your time. Okay. Thank you. We will now go to um Michael Lynch to be followed by Mike Glick. Michael,

good morning. Thank you for taking our comments. Um I'm Michael Lynch. I live in Santa Barbara County. Um, first I want to refer back to uh what uh the first speaker said, Larry, that not sufficient notice was was had by the people who might want to say something. Um, this was being rushed through and I think inappropriately. Not that you don't not that there is no reason to be rushing it, but that not enough people will be able to let you know what they think and what they really want. Um, in addition to that, I wanted to point out I I am opposed to expanding. I I want to request the 1.0 solution. Look at who's in the in the jail and how the incarceration is impacting not just them but our entire system. People being held in jail when they don't need to be using that facility. Please do not save money by not expanding the jail, but use the money that we would have spent, at least a significant portion of it, to increase services, so that people do not need to be incarcerated for as long or at all because so many people don't need to be there. And we know that as many people have pointed out to you. But not only do these people not need to be there, they are not contributing to our society and they are losing a great deal. People lose jobs because they are kept in jail. They can't support themselves. They lose their homes. They become homeless. This

is the reality of what happens because people are jailed and kept there. We need to be getting them out quickly if they don't need to be there and so many of them don't. Thank you so much for hearing my comments.

We will now go to Mike Lick to be followed by Lwanda Lions. Mike. And Mike, we have unmuted you on our end. If you can please unmute on your end to provide your comments. Mike, if you can please unmute on your end to provide your comments. All righty. We will return to Mike Glick momentarily. We will now go to Lwanda Lions Puit to be followed by Anna Garcia. Lwanda, good morning. Chair Nelson and members of the board. Lwanda Lions Puit representing Santa Maria Lump branch of the NAACP and the League of Women Voters of North Santa Barbara County. In addition to the calls, we are concerned on who will be in the Super Jail. We know from the data that it will be a high number of black and browns in the jail. We believe the money would be better spent on preventative like the youth coalition and rehabilitative services. We are already on board for two crisis residential treatment centers next to the north branch jail. So who is the.5 or one pod really for? Our jails are not designed as treatment facilities. Expanding jail capacity instead of community rehabilitation services will not improve public safety. The bill 1.5 or two pods is regressive

and not progressive. I ask you to take a look at LA County Central Jail, which is closing. We're asking you to maintain essential public health and social services and not over build our jail. The time is now, not 50 years from now. Thank you. We will now go to Anna Garcia to be followed by Jeannie Sparks. Anna,

hello. Uh, I am calling in and I have been struggling to figure out how I want to communicate my comments today. I had a vet emergency this morning, so I was unable to tune in and so I missed the presentations. But I really just want to emphasize what I've heard in the last several comments about a not needing an expansion of the jail. I do not even support the one pod uh expansion. Um I would support doing some rehab in the current jail because that standard in there is unacceptable. Um I'm speaking as an individual, but I have work experience that has brought me into the jail where I have worked with people that are trying to better themselves. They can't even get support for taking classes online. um they won't get Wi-Fi for them. I have also served students who have struggled with addiction and mental health issues, were incarcerated, and are now on track to be contributing members of our society, have self-worth. And all of that came not because they went into the jail, but because people like me and others, took care of them, cared for them, loved them as the people that they are didn't throw them away. A jail is a place where people go and lose hope. There's no rehabilitation in sight. I don't know why we keep doing this. We know the money is not well spent here. I do not approve of any expansion of the jail and I want all of that money to be given to organizations and groups that are already doing this work while devastatingly underfunded. Um, and see what happens.

People rebounded from COVID because they had the opportunity to have their basic needs met. That's why crime went down. Take that lesson and apply it. Don't let the fear mongers tell you that we need more space in the jail. Bill Brown can't even manage it anyway as it is. Thank you. That is your time.

We will now go to Jeannie Sparks to be followed by Caroline Owens. Jeanie, good morning supervisors. I'm Jeannie Sparks, co-executive director of Santa Barbara County Action Network and a resident of Orchet. I'm here to urge you not to overexpand our North County Jail and to build only one jail unit. As you all know, our country has a terrible record of incarcerating individuals. It's time to do what we can here at the local level. Although the sheriff has good intentions, his budget has exploded over the years. Creating more jail capacity just means more individuals will be jailed and fewer resources will be available to get at the root causes of justice involvement. Instead, we should put resources into supporting families, improving justice system efficiency, and utilizing alternatives to jail. You can hire more public defenders, expand probation, and increase mental health and substance abuse treatment. 25 years ago when I worked for the county, a mental health professional told me that if his department was called public safety, it would get adequate funding. It's long past time mental health gets the needed funding. It helps people be healthy and stable. The county should utilize every possible way to decrease the need for locking people up. Don't just throw up your hands and think nothing can be done. Once you sink millions of dollars into new jail beds, you can't get it back and you're just perpetuating the system. All because you fear the beds will be needed. Fear. Don't operate from fear. Instead, you could choose not to build those beds. And unless until they are needed, it could cost more later, but not if the beds are needed. And those dollars would be used instead for creating a fairer and more humane system, decreasing the need for more

beds. Spending the money now and not needing more beds would be a waste of of money. Our community deserves better. Rather than overinccreasing capacity for locking people up, let's expand capacity for caring and keeping people out of jail. Be leaders, be caring, choose to create a more just justice system. Thank you for your consideration and your service. We will now go to Carolyn Owens to be followed by Craig Woodman. Carolyn and Carolyn, I do see you are using a touchstone. Good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Please proceed.

Thank you so much, Supervisor, and chair. Um, I am calling to voice my strong opposition to expanding the jail and I'm actually really inspired by everything that I've heard today from the other commenters. I think that the sheriff presented a vision for the future and in executing the budget, you all are going to decide what the vision for our county's future is. and his vision was a county where our jail population continues to increase and increase and we need to continue building capacity to incarcerate our neighbors. But there have been countless people and organizations commenting with their own visions that are reducing jail population, that are actually taking care of each other, that are supporting our community, and that are investing in the kind of society that I think we all want, where we have less jail needs because our people are taken care of. And it's my understanding that the proposed budget includes a loss of 262 staff members in health and social services. I really don't feel that we should be funding more incarceration while firing the social workers and the healthcare staff who are providing those essential services that keep people out of jail and keep people safe and happy and able to look out for each other and for themselves. So, I really echo everything I've heard today to fund the public defenders, fund health and social services, fund community care, and not to lock ourselves into a long-term budget and long-term financial commitment that further supports over incarceration and over over daily of our of our community. Thank you. We will now go to Craig Woodman be to be followed by Anna A. Craig

and Craig we have unmuted you on our end. If you can please unmute on your end to provide your comments. We will return to Craig uh moment. Good morning, supervisors. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Please proceed.

Thank you. Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to speak. I do not approve either the 1.5 or 2.0 expansion options, but I do approve the more fiscally responsible one pod option that can help address current and future budget deficits. And more importantly, I think make more investments to reduce incarceration and improve justice and fairness, especially for those with mental health issues. I support previous speakers who have effectively argued for building no more than one housing unit. Thank you.

We will now go to Anna A to be followed by Katie Sanders. Anna. Yes. Hello. Okay. Yes. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Please proceed.

Okay. This is a choice about community. Do we continue to invest in incarceration or do we invest in our community? Choosing to expand jail will cost our county an additional 191.7 million overall and 7 million more every year. This means deeper cuts to critical programs our community needs and higher jail costs and harmful outcomes. It will deepen collaboration with systems that are already causing fear and harm in our community, including ongoing ICE collaborations by the sheriff's department by allowing ICE presence at our jail. Right now, about 70% of people in jail are awaiting trial. Every day, up to 35 people sit in custody simply waiting for treatment. These are system failures, not public safety necessities. We should be reducing um reliance on incarceration, not expanding it. That means funding for the public defenders ready program, treatment and community-based solutions that actually improve safety and well-being. Stop expanding the jail, reinvest in our community. Your decision today will reflect a clear choice if you support either community or continue to fund um Sheriff Bill Brown's unlimited personal bank account.

We will now go to Katie Sanders to be followed by Eder Goen uh Meda. Katie, hello. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Hello. Oh, hold on, Katie. Pardon? Can you please mute any devices you have on your end? We have a bit of an echo going on in here. Okay. Uh, I think that's better now. Thank you. Please proceed.

Okay. Um, what I want to say is I am against the expansion of the jail. Um, basically I feel like our budget is a moral document. It reflects our values. And if our values are saying that we need to spend more money to lock people up and less money on community services and health, mental health, I think there's something wrong with our society. Um, and I'm going back to Bill Brown's comments where he's saying it's basically urgent that we expand this jail. You know, they tell us when you get an email or a call telling you it's urgent, it's usually a scam. They're trying to use fear and this urgency to, you know, manipulate you and tell you that you have to act immediately. This is a huge decision. I don't know why we would rush something like this. And all the comments I'm hearing are against the expansion of the jail. You know, we are locking people up instead of helping them. There is no rehabilitation if we're choosing punishment over rehabilitation. Basically, the needs for beds in the jail are not going to decline over time if we don't invest in our community. It's only going to increase. And 5 years from now, 3 years from now, we're going to be saying we need to expand this jail even more. That's wrong. We should be investing in our community and using the money for helping people instead of locking people up where there's no rehabilitation. We are spending money for beds in a jail and that needs not going to decline if we don't put the money into our community. So, we're basically saying let's spend the money on locking people up instead of helping people. We want to expand or Bill Brown wants to expand capacity instead of community rehabilitation services. That's not

going to improve public safety. And one other thing, ICE is using our jail as a easy way to get people to deport. They yesterday they blocked our access to the public lobby at the Santa Barbara County Jail and they in there. Thank you, Katie. That is your time. Thank you. We will now go to Edergo and uh Mada Medo to be followed by Ken Westall. Eder. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Please proceed.

Hi, my name is Ed Raana, resident of district 5. Steve, I can't wait to hear what you have to say. I want to ask a more question at the center of this proposal, one that rarely gets named directly. What relationship does the county want to have with its most residents, vulnerable residents? This county's own probation data answers part of that question. Black and Latino residents are more likely to be jailed. 63% of our county's juvenile population is black or Latino. These are not national statistics. This is Santa Barbara. This is our home. So when we talk about expanding this jail, we're talking about expanding a system that disproportionately imprisons people of color. What you are telling my children, our children, is that you're already investing in their jailb. And we know now that that people also die in the system. The most recent being Jonathan Lundal earlier this year. We're now being asked to build more of this nonsense. We're also being asked to to expand a department that cannot man manage its own resources. A county audit found that the sheriff's overtime nearly doubled the past seven years. There is a different choice to make. Studies have shown that the best way to prevent crime is to invest in children and the young and young people and in their community. Programs like child care, health workers, etc. are cheaper than any jailb. These programs don't lead to death. I'm asking you, supervisors, fund our children's future and not a jailbed. This county can choose a different relationship with black and brown residents. One that's grounded in dignity and investment, nonexpans, not in expansion or neglect. I urge you to I urge you to turn down any proposal of expansion. Thank you.

We will now go to Ken Westall and then we will return to Mike Glick for our final speaker. Ken, can you hear me now? Oh, thank you, Ken. Yes.

Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I'm going to speak uh I'm going to dovetail a couple things together here on criminal justice. I am all for dealing with violent repeat criminals in a very hard manner and there's no harder person out there on that. Having said that, we do as a society have a problem. We tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We don't seem to differentiate those people with mental illness problems from murderers, rapists, um, and people committing all sorts of violent crimes. Uh, people who have mental illness problems need to be dealt with differently. And those people committing minor offenses also need to be dealt with differently. Whatever decision you make, whether it's a a one, a 1.5, a 0.5, or a two, I have no, you know, I'm not going to make a statement on that, but there needs to be a segregating of those people going into the criminal justice system. There's also another piece of this. I was trying to get on to speak earlier. public health can be a much greater um asset with people with mental illness problems. And I really ask you today to make sure you don't cut public health, particularly the part that deals with people with mental illness problems. That's the root of a piece of this. And um I echo the comments Mike Stoker made on Monday. uh he made it very clear that um public health needs to keep going and I know several of the supervisors are out there looking at public health seeing how public health can work in the most effective manner and in my opinion that most effective manner is to include

uh all the public um all the mental health issues that are out there in the county. Thank you. And we will now return to Zoom with Mike Glick, who is our final speaker on this item. And for those members of the public that did sign up after the chair closed public comment at 11:03, we have uh notified you via phone or email. Mike, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Please proceed.

Oh, yay. It worked. Okay. Um, didn't the board just vote for 200 million for the North County jail expansion like a few months ago? We don't we don't need any more jail expansion. We didn't need that expansion. What we need is mental health facilities. The speakers have said that like something like 40% of the jail population is severely mentally ill with uh psychotropic drug treatment. That doesn't even include the the mentally ill that are not on psychotropic drugs. I think we can agree though that illegal drugs and the associated crime and destruction of our youth is a big problem. How is it then that people are dying of drug overdoses in Santa Barbara County jail? Can't Bill Brown manage the jail so that there are not illegal drugs in the jail? How is that even a thing? Okay, so if we can't even keep drugs out of our jail, how do we expect that the sheriff is supposed to handle mentally ill people and people with substance use disorder or both? Who's who's getting the drugs in the jail? It's not visitors. I've been to the jail. You have no contact with the inmates. You're behind steel and glass and concrete. It's people that work in the jail. Obviously, mental illness is not a crime. It's a medical condition and and I the the jail psychiatrists that I've um spoken to seem extremely competent. They don't overcribed psychotropic drugs, but also as mentioned before substance use disorder and particularly uh cannabis causes much mental health especially in our our youth 18 to 25 year olds.

There's a vulnerable period. Illegal drugs in the jail makes this worse. How does Santa Barbara County system for treating mentally ill inmates work? It doesn't work. Okay. Much sud is caused was caused originally by oxycottton and and um and uh cannabis use disorder. Oxycontton thanks Purdue Pharma for which nobody went to jail. Thank you, Mike. That is your time. And that concludes public comment on the special issues.

All right. Thank you all of you that um participated in public comment and thank you. Um at this point um it is uh 12:15. We're actually going to take our half an hour break for for lunch and then we'll come back for questions and deliberations on um this special item as well as um deliberations and board direction on today or this week's uh budget discussions.

All right, welcome back everybody. We're reconvening the April 17th meeting of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. This is this is the third day of our budget workshops and we're coming back after a short lunch break. Um we are still on our special um items on in the and specifically on the uh jail item. And at this point we're going to open up to my colleagues for questions of staff. We'll ask some questions and then we'll get into some deliberations on the board item. Um for those that are um worried about um noticing, we are notice for discussion and direction today. Um the final the ultimate final decision will will be when we award the contract. Um but today is really important for our staff to know which direction of the board moving forward on this item. So um those that were worried about the noticing um it is clear on what what we're doing here today. will be making direction along with direction for this year's um overall budget that we'll discuss at our budget hearings in June. So, with that, I open up to my colleagues for questions of either our county staff or our sheriff's department or any of our um staff members that are here. Supervisor Lee,

I'll start. Um so, the last time we spoke about this, there was direction given to maximize the mental health beds. Could staff respond with how that is going with the 1.5 option supervisor through the chair. You're referring to the mental health beds.

Correct. At the county at the jail. So, we've continued to um explore options and discussion with uh uh general services, the sheriff's office, as well as um some of the experts that are involved in oversight of our our system. And our plan is to have the um replacement behavioral health units placed in the existing jail uh in Northern Branch Jail. And we would use um portion of the new um housing for what we refer to as step down uh beds. So individuals that are coming out of some of the more uh acute units that are have stabilized but are not ready to return to the general population would go into what we call step down beds. So in total, it would um allow us more flexibility around the use of mental health beds while continuing to provide uh replacement beds for existing um BHU unit beds.

Good. And is there a way to increase and decrease the mental health beds as needed? That's correct, supervisor. Um we have a lot of flexibility in um how we use beds um in the new facil newer facilities. So we will have increased uh uh flexibility regardless of which option you choose. Good. And any programs and additional programs that you can talk about?

Absolutely. the um the Northern Branch Jail design and with the current Northern Branch Jail as well as any replacement there continues to support space for individual treatment options, more confidential spaces as well as group rooms that we can run larger um programming in. Uh so it's much more flexible than our current um main jail is. Good. That's my questions for now. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Lee. Supervisor Caps and Supervisor Hartman.

Thank you. Yes. When we last addressed this as well as the mental health aspect of it, we we talked with some hope that perhaps um revamping the it's confusing terminology, but the Northwest Wing of the U primary jail, South Coast Jail could provide us with some increased capacity without the dramatic costs. But it's clear with your report that that's that's not panning out. Can you just I you spent time on it in the in the presentation, but could you give that some more air time so that we can have that sink in specifically uh how that would then bind us to the future of an outmoded jail.

There's a couple components to it, supervisor. One is operational flexibility. the ability to consolidate at Northwest provides more efficiency um uh in oversight um for those that are in jail. Um it also there's trade-offs associated with consolidation in one site. So there's efficiency gained with not only on staffing but also in utilities spending um and a number of other issues. But what consolidation does it also allows is additional flexibility for reusing Northwest um or reusing that uh the main jail campus. If Northwest had to be maintained, it would constrain our ability to reuse that footprint.

Um and then I mentioned also the cost component. If we maintain Northwest, it would be an additional $5 million a year in operational cost. Okay. And that's I know. So what what kind of process went into this evaluation? Uh I mean you did it rather quickly so but if you could just elaborate a bit. Sure. Um there was a pretty thorough study um involving general services. Okay.

Um we looked at um what utility costs would be over time from a square footage component. um as far as how many FTE would be required um to maintain um not just utility costs but also the maintain uh footprint of Northwest. Um we looked at again the consolidation from uh the sheriff's component and um the sheriff's service technicians, the number of of individuals it would take to provide oversight and one of the components of the main jail. Um, when you look at the IRC in relation to Northwest, the amount of supervision that is required because those two locations are separate. So, if we were to continue to use the IRC, Northwest and the IRC, there'd be greater supervision um greater operational requirements, particularly in in um moving folks from Northwest back and forth to the IRC.

Okay. Um we also looked at u what it would cost if we had to maintain um the kitchen uh at the main jail and versus cost savings that we could have from outsourcing. So there there are a number of discrete um inputs that went into that evaluation as far as um what it would take uh to continue to use that footprint.

Okay. I mean, as someone who's voted for one pod uh in the past, there was a some hope that this um utilizing this would provide a little more flexibility without the big price tag. But I see even just by the underlining of it's not being recommended that you feel you all feel from a variety of different standpoints firm in that recommendation. supervisor through the chair. I would add in terms of a programming and just quality of care for the incarcerated individuals, although Northwest is um you know in comparison to some portions of the main jail is let's say better

it does not compare to the um the environment that we can create at Northern Branch Jail. Okay, we would have always been constrained in programa space. Um, flexibility of movement opportunities for the incarcerated population would have been much more limited if we continued to use Northwest. Well, thank you and thanks to the board for adding that to the direction. Uh, I know that wasn't um, you know, that added more time and and perhaps a little bit of staff money, etc. But I I I feel better at least even though it's not the outcome that we were I was hoping for, we were hoping for at least we we know that that's um something an option that has um no longer there, but we looked at it. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caps. Supervisor Hartman.

Um so I just want to understand the mental health beds a little bit more. So, what are we anticipating for mental health beds in the Northern Branch Jail? And how what is different about a mental health bed in terms of its design from other beds? And how do the 32 new beds that are coming affect that? And while I'm adding to it, um is there any uh cost savings? Could could the jail expansion and the 32 new beds, is there any way that that those could be um combined in such a way as to save money? So, supervisor through the chair, I'll try to um get through each of those, but if I miss something, please um uh note where I might have lost uh one of the questions along the way. The primary difference when we talk about the behavioral health units as compared to other units is the size of the unit and the ability to have what we call fall protection if there is um you know two uh stories in that unit. Um because of the nature of the population, we really would prefer to have fall protection anytime we have uh mental health uh individuals housed in that area in order to meet their uh needs and uh create as uh therapeutic as environment as possible. We really would like to keep those numbers. 24 is probably the the highest that we would want for behavioral health unit and even that is pushing it. So 24 units

individual um individuals in the unit regardless of whether they're double bunked or single bunked which often times for the mental health units you really have to have single um cell occupancy. So having 24 individuals or less in the in the unit. Um ideally it would be 16. It can go as low as 8 to 10 um depending on their behavioral issues and acuity levels. So the um uh opportunity with the the new build is when we are looking at units that have 32, they're larger than what what we would want for a behavioral health unit, but they are ideal for what we call the step down units where somebody that has been stabilized, has been doing really well in a behavioral health unit, is ready to move into a little bit of a a freer, larger environment, but isn't ready to go into um you know full uh open unit that may have significantly more individuals in it. So the 32 is an ideal option for those step down and as we make more step down beds available. It allows us to ensure that there's a flow between a high acuity unit and another unit. That as an incarcerated individual is I think what you would prefer because once you have stabilized you you probably don't want to remain housed with individuals that are not yet stabilized. Um, so it allows them an opportunity to move on to an environment that it's appropriate for them. So the combination of different acuity levels and step down is the kind of the sweet spot that we would be hoping for that we feel like we can achieve through this.

And this is just an additional question, but how does the puff then fit into this?

So the the the puff would continue to need to be available. Um, the PUFF has some ability to use medications um for individuals that may not be cooperative uh in ways that the jail is not uh suited to do. They also have the ability to use other types of safe restraints as necessary or other behavioral approaches uh to address uh behaviors of concern. individuals, regardless of whether the the jail has a behavioral health unit bed available or not, if they qualify under 5150 um uh of the welfare institutions code, they should still be moved, they must be moved to an appropriate psychiatric setting. The jail is not considered a LPS facility and an LPS facility is required when somebody meets the criteria under 5150.

Thank you. So, so that's the system and the flow. Absolutely. And I would just add the CRT beds that um we're planning for at the Northern Branch Trail through our Prop One application is yet another level of care. So, we're we're really beefing up our continuum um that would be specifically available for our criminally uh justice population. And then I guess the other question is to Mr. Loggerquist. I is there any option? I mean since we're doing a lot of construction out there I is there any way that we would reduce the cost of the somehow by conjoining the two? Not really.

Supervisor Hartman through the chair. Um we have not considered that. I think we're too far along in our northern branch design process uh with the design build entities. I mean, we've already met with them three times uh each um to then tack on the uh the crisis residential treatment facility. So, we're looking at a another design build option for that. Um but I think keeping them separate um is our best bet right now. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Hartman.

I just want to make sure I understand our options today. Um, all the proposed options are less beds than we have today, right? Even if we went up to two pods, that's still less beds than we have in the county as of today. Is that correct? That's correct, uh, chair. Uh, currently we have 1,127 beds in the system. Every alternative in front of your board today reduces that bed count. Okay. And in in fact, the highest option would reduce the bed count to 1,08 beds. And that's a 119 bed reduction or 11% of the system. Okay. Just want to make sure I was clear on that math.

So that's that's actually my my main question. I may have a few others as we we get into further deliberations on this.

I think we are ready to start on deliberations. Anybody want to kick it off first? Supervisor Hartman. Uh let's see a couple general observations. Um I think we've been working on this for four years. It it's been a long time and uh and we've considered every option that we can think of and we really value the the advocates who've been here who've really gotten into the details of this and I've learned a lot from interacting with you. Uh it it's commendable to have community members so invested and I remember the special workshop that we had at direct relief and you know so we I I just want to say we've taken this very seriously and altered our our usual processes and timelines to to agonize over this decision. I remember when I first went to the the I I we can't call it the main jail anymore. Supervisor Caps was kind of alluding. I the the the South jail. Um I came out in tears. It was horrendous to think that we are incarcerating people under those conditions. and and for the people who have to work there day in day out, it was just so depressing and it was absolutely clear that that is untenable. We we absolutely couldn't continue that way uh and and legal issues uh overlaid but just moral issues. So, um, we thought, could we renovate that jail? And that's part of this delayed timeline because we were thinking, what what can

we do there to make that better? But it became very clear that that it was going to be more money and and probably never really um be as good. It would just continue to be a a a black hole for money. So we we made the decision that we wanted to expand in North County and and then the question is well how big do we want that to be? But in my mind it's it's not that we're expanding a jail. We are replacing something that was horrendous for something that uh it may not be Scandinavian but it's it's far better than anything we had. And and I was going to make the same point that I think uh Chair Nelson was getting at that if we go to the 1.5 um which is where I am. I I'll just come right out there with it. We um we still have fewer beds than what we used to have. So, um funding jails isn't why I came here. Probably not why any of us came here. And it's really not aligned with my personal values. And so this is an agonizing decision for me. Um, but being part uh being on this board, you have to kind of hold multiple truths at the same time. And we have a legal and a moral obligation to improve the jail conditions and and better facilities, which will mean better access to programming and better me mental health care and and we have to do that. Um, we also have to be honest about our limits as a board. We have worked really really hard. I mean, when Sheriff Brown first started, we had about a thousand people in the jail and that was

overcrowded. But our our daily population has come down um by two or 300 people. And this despite realignment, despite the state sending us their people uh people who've been in state prison who are our people but um are finishing out their sentences here. That that's a new obligation. So despite that, we have reduced and and we don't have the same people with misdemeanors um in in the jails, but we do have people still awaiting to stand trial and and these things aren't all within our control. And and we have to balance the risk here. And I'm I'm really pleased about the direction that we're going. But to be really honest, we've had more alignment across our departments around this issue than we've ever had in the past. And we want to continue that. But a lot of it depends on trust. And our CEO is leaving, our ACEO is leaving, our public defender is leaving. So, it's going to take a little while for new people to build those relationships and to build that trust and to make sure that we're aligned. And I I believe I speak for every member of the board up here. We want to continue in this direction. Uh but we can't guarantee the speed at which we can do it and much of it is is outside our control. myself originally uh several years ago when we had more money uh we invested it in this and we said at least I said in my mind if we can show that diversion works within this period of time to bring it down that much then I'd be willing to do this but but that was the hypothesis but I

I've come to understand this is a complex problem and it takes time to build the systems to make this happen and and we are doing it and we are going to continue to do it, but I I believe that we we really um we're going to have to invest in a jail as much as we have to hold our nose to do it. And and so um I'm supporting the 1.5 housing units. And I I think that that is it's not perfect, but it's balanced. And up here as a board member, um, I'm paid to make hard decisions and this is one of the hardest I've had to make.

Thank you, Supervisor Harmon. We feel and hear that with you, Supervisor Leanino.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Well, I think some people think now I'm going to move to three pods because I but I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. So, first off, for those that think that we're rushing through this, and I know may maybe you came late to the the party or whatever, but we've been grappling with this for three years. You know, it's it's it's been a while. So, and also, we can do two things at once here at the county. We're pretty good at handling multip We have 23 different departments. Just because we're investing in jail beds doesn't mean we're not interested in in mental health. Um, I went back and I've been doing a lot of this lately is looking at what a department was when I got here compared to what it is now. When I got here, alcohol, drug, and mental health services was a $70 million dollar department and now it's 220 232 million. We had um, you know, 268 people. Now we have 479. Um, so every four years we're spending a billion dollars in mental health services and uh I don't know if people think the system's getting better or if it's getting worse spending a billion a billion every four years but that's kind of where we're at. So, the other thing I'm looking at is after all these years of discussion and kind of battling out, we're really a half a pot away from each other. You know, I mean, uh, from where some people would most people, there are some that don't want anything, but uh, you know, I I don't think that's a bad place to begin our negotiations at. Also want to make it clear that I have and I know Supervisor Nelson does too that I know a lot of people because we talk about public safety a lot as does everybody on this board. Neither one of us have ever voted against a diversion program. Supported every single one of

them. So the optimistic inner me um hopes that we make uh significant progress in this uh in reducing the amount of people that do need to be incarcerated. And as we've kind of dealt with this issue, it has made me think, and I've asked this of just about everybody I know, is why do why does this country incarcerate such a high percentage of individuals? Why do we do that? Because if you look everywhere else, I mean, we when I looked, we're in the top five in the world percentage- wise, we are right in there with Rwanda, Turk Menistan, and El Salvador. Not exactly the place that you want to want to slot in. But then, as I've done a couple of times, I've asked the sheriff's department for give me a breakdown of who's in jail and what crime that they have committed. And as you run through that report, these and and I know there are folks in there with mental illness, but for the charge that folks are in there with right now, I would not want to be the person that's going through that list and saying, "Okay, this person should be out, this one should not, this person." Because when you go through the list, I think it's 90% of the people are in there now for a felony. You know, it's there's a lot of crimes against a lot of violence against children, a lot of domestic violence. There are people unfortunately that need to be locked up. So, was trying to figure out exactly why, you know, that trying to work that out in my mind of why we are the way that we are. And the only and I can't remember who who kind of lit the lamp for me, but

the idea in this country that there's so much economic disparity that if you're living a life of poverty that you're way more susceptible to be caught in caught up in the spiderweb that then is very difficult to get out of of getting incarcerated and then repeated um you know incarcerations. that is way above my pay grade, right? I can't fix. We're working on, you know, poverty issues. I can't wave a m magic wand and make, you know, centuries of disparities go away. So, I got to deal with what I have. If I look at this from a construction perspective, as I was doing originally, it's obvious you build the biggest facility you can because this is the cheapest time you're ever going to be able to build it. Um, you know, looking back at decisions that were made in the past, we could have done things a lot cheaper than we have to do them today. So, looking at it from construction wise and budget-wise, that's kind of where I landed. And that's why I thought we should build the biggest facility we should build, we could build. But you know there's a really smart guy in this um county named Harry Hagen and I was talking to him about the pension system and in discussing that with him he brought up the idea of generational equity and as we heard from Greg Leven today you know a lot of the employees and taxpayers of today are paying for problems that happened 15 20 years ago we're still br we're still carrying that weight with us and so while I would like to build the jail for looking out 30 years because I think that's um managing our money wisely. I also want to be faithful to that generational equity so that I know for a fact if we build this at

one and a half pods, you're going to be back here in maybe 10 years and you're gonna have to build another pod or another one and a half pods. But I'm also aware of the fact that maybe that next generation of people needs to bear that brunt of that cost because maybe as Supervisor Hartman said, I'm still holding out hope that if we don't build build it as big as I think we should build it, maybe that allows time for these long range diversion programs to actually bear fruit and we do see kind of a change in society. Yeah, somebody somebody brought that up today that trying to predict what's going to happen in society I think Mr. Weinman 10 or 15 20 years from now is pretty much impossible. So I don't know what it's going to look like. So I'm willing to roll the dice and not build what I think we should build with hope and fingers crossed the diversion kicks in. And even if it doesn't, maybe at that point it's time for that next generation of taxpayers to bear the brunt of what that problem is going to be. I've got to deal with what I have to do right now. And right now for me, I think um the minimum we can do is one and a half. And again, that does put us at less beds than what we have right now. The idea that that means that we're abandoning or we're not addressing the issue that everybody's talking about today, I don't think holds a lot of water. We're investing as much money, I mean, as as we we're investing way more money than we used to. Diversion, talking about going out and getting grants, the 32 beds that are now going to be on the North County um jail site for mental health beds. Uh that's going to be a huge step forward. So, I know it's not where everybody wants it to be, but again, we're a half we're a half a pot

away from where everybody's at. We're doing our best to create more diversion and invest more there. And again, for me, I look at this as this is a societal issue. And maybe I'm throwing gas on that fire. I hope not. But the other thing I want people to understand too is nobody in the jail, the sheriff's deputies aren't, nobody's advocated that, hey, we want more people in jail. I don't hear that from anybody. No one's they they'd like to have the smallest, easiest jail to manage as well. So, I wish we could change uh human behavior and maybe that's in investing in early diversion. That's why I always support a program, any program that comes forward that's moving us in that direction. But for right now, I got to deal with what I got to deal with. And for me, it's going to land on one and a half pods. So, um, I appreciate staff to all the work that's gone into this. This is we've we've asked you to try to scramble this egg a million different ways so that it wouldn't end up, you know, with us doing more than what we felt needed to be done. And so, um, I don't think there's any other way we can slice and dice the data that's going to have us come back, um, with anything else. So, that's where I'm at.

Thank you, Supervisor Lavinino. Supervisor Caps.

Yes. Thank you, Supervisor Lavinino. Uh, looks fairly clear where we might be headed here. Uh, and you did you started off by speaking about um many things that there's consensus about and I want to continue that that theme because we started off Wednesday speaking about um our public safety divisions and departments and there is so much consensus around diversion as as you stated there's so much support from the board. We talk about it so much we hear from the advocates. We learn from the advocates uh at the CCP level. It's the focus. There's so much passion. I continually hear as a fairly new supervisor just how much uh the criminal justice partners have come together around diversion in the last uh few years and how exciting that is, the gains that have been made. And so I just want to point to the fact that this excellent staff presentation is about as clear as that we guidance that we get. Staff is very um lets us make our decisions here. But just to to point out the references to diversion on two pods, the line that's that's written two pod says may lead to undermining diversion incentives. Okay, that stands out for me and that is from coming from staff on one pod relies heavily on future alignment of criminal justice leaders to implement and sustain change towards diversion beyond county's control. That's an important point and as much as I am a nonprofit person at heart, that puts a lot of pressure on nonprofits that are already on under a lot of pressure and the future that's that's a bit

tenuous for me as a supervisor. Whereas at 1.5 housing units, it's require the quote the the language from staff from a very capable staff here require quote requires continued commitment to existing and expanded diversion efforts. And I think that that just aptly summarizes where we are and where we've been and yet still pushes us to do more. And you all, the advocates I'm looking at, you you remind us so poignantly, constantly of the moral need for diversion with your personal stories, with your experiences. We know that. We feel it. We experience it. I don't think there's anyone, as Supervisor Lavanino stated, that doesn't support that, that that understands that we need to be doing more to keep people out of jail, particularly those with mental illness. We also know that there is an economic requirement to diversion. Uh that report from Mike Wilson that we when we voted on one and a half pods last year um with that vote came at a a report that said um that the operating cost for people in jail is about $332 a day whereas in a shelter it's $80 a day. Certainly in a locked facility it's way more. It's probably about 2,000, but there's generally reimbursements that come along with that. So, there's economics at play beyond that's what I was trying to get at with the question about operating beyond the building of it. There's economics here that we're we're feeling it and um you know, we're feeling it and this is a very serious decision because of all of the reasons. We don't want to we don't want to lose grip of the diversion efforts. We want to be able to fund them. We want to be able to support it. And I remain that we should hold firm at

where we've been uh so that we can we can continue to do that and we can um hold firm to our commitment and not rely on nonprofits to continue those efforts. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caps. Supervisor Lee,

first I want to say thank you to the speakers who spent most of today being here being patient and making your comments. I agree with you and I so much want to do exactly what you say, but looking out all the data that's before me. I have to agree with my colleagues that 1.5 is the way that we have to go because it also allows us to close Northwest jail in the future. Something that's that building needs to go and that gives us the opportunity to do so. So, I agree with all the comments. I'm going to repeat him, but I'm at 1.52.

All right. Thank you, Supervisor Lee. You know, I'm I've got an interesting upbringing. Uh the discussion around the dinner table when I was growing up was often about actually the Santa Barbara County Jail. My mom had been the secretary for Sheriff Thomas and then Sheriff Anderson. Um, you know, this is something that has been a discussion most my life, 45 years that that we've been in an overcrowding lawsuit. So, this is something that has um haunted the county for most of my lifetime. Um, and so it's actually I'm pretty proud that that that lawsuit has now been put aside and that we're moving forward. Um, it was an honor as chief of staff when um for Supervisor Adam when we broke ground on on the North Branch jail, something that people said would never happen. I was proud as my first year as a supervisor um and chairman to be able to to be there when we opened it up and um you know here again I'm a chair again to and we're looking at breaking ground potentially this year on expansion there. So this has been something that's been over my career and my my lifetime for quite some time and it brings me actually no pleasure that this is something that's been a part of my life because I mean it's just like homeless shelters. I mean, none of us get into this to open up homeless shelters or or jails. You know, I'm a former teacher. You know, I'm a parent. I I I don't want this, but I do know that we have a responsibility and it has an impact on our community. Andrew Wyman um was here all week in public comment and I think he left. Um but he he said in his comment today that predicting the future is a fool's errand, but I immediately wrote it wrote down but preparing for the future is responsible leadership. And I think that's what we're doing here today is we're trying to prepare for the future. You know, it's my preference that we we do build the two pods and staff it for one and a half. Um actually that's where I was three years ago. I was saying maybe we should build a shell, you know, maybe not put the beds in there. Um and that way we prevent the sheriff from

filling it up necessarily, but we be prepared for the future. I think that that option is here today, but I know that we're not there as a board, so I'm I'm not going to belabor that point. Um but I do think that it's we've gone through a good process as a county to get to where we are today. I think it's going to be unanimous support for one and a half pods. Um up here on on this dis um you have a diversity of thought of geographic representation of political representation of generations here but yet we're all coming to the same conclusion based on the facts at hand. And I think that's really powerful. Um, you know, some of us would rather go in different directions for different reasons, but this is how we we we we we govern. And this is what this board's been doing really well for the last few years. And I and as hard as this decision is, you know, I'll take criticism from some of my supporters that I didn't ask for more. And I know some of you guys will take criticism from your supporters that you gave too much. But I think that this is actually where we're leading to a better decision here. So, I'm I'm going to join all of you guys in supporting the one and a half pods. Um, that does include closing down the um the Northwestern um section. I think that's absolutely something that needs to happen. I think we all um need to see the cost savings there. Um it also does mean that we're going to keep the IRC open in the South Coast. That's absolutely necessary as as well. Um I'm afraid while I'm sitting on this dice in the future, I may be looking at trying to expand that as as our population grows. If we see the housing that we expect in this in this county for the next 10 or 20 years, we likely will be back up here as Supervisor Labanino um addressed. But maybe that's that hopefully times are better financially. Um, maybe we figured out the silver bullet of incarceration by then and mental health. Uh, I pray at night that that we will. You know, this is something that impacts all of our lives, all of our families, and mine's no different. And so, I just wanted to make sure you guys know where I'm coming from on this, but again, I I'll support the direction that we're going to give today because we're not actually making the final decision. We'll do that when the uh we get the bids back from um and we sign the contract. But um I think this gives some greater clarity from staff. So, I don't think we need to take a

specific vote, but um I think because I think you're hearing from all of us, but also Supervisor Hartman before I hear from Sio Miato. Um well, you can Okay. S Mado, where where you at based on what you've heard from the five of us on the direction. Is that clear? Oh. Oh, maybe I should. Okay, maybe.

Um there are two points I want to make. Um, the first one is as as I started doing my own research about how do you size a jail, what I learned is you do not look at the size of the community and and make a projection you need so many beds per thousand. That's old. That's that's discredited. Um, neither do you look at crime level because that's going up and down. what what what you have to do is look at polic policies and diversion and what you can put in place and and we really tried but that's an a harder thing to to nail down but I I just think it's really important that we don't assume because our population is growing that necessarily our jail population will grow. that that link is is pretty much discredited in the way that you you try to size jail population. Um the other point I want to make is in our board letter there's some information about a transition plan. And for me again how I got to supporting the new jail and the new pods is because I think the old one is so horrible. Um, and and I think we need to start transition planning sooner rather than later. And in the board letter, it says maybe it could be housing, maybe it could be um uh integrated with the Cay Royale master plan. Maybe there's more in mental health. But but I would like to see us start as soon as possible planning for the transition because what I don't want to see is come back here and say we should do something with that facility. I think it should be dead and

gone and made into something else. So, yeah, I I I disagree with that as well is um I know that's a a huge project, but to start the thinking of transitioning the so-called main jail, um what the future of that is, uh while we have some leadership here that has a lot of history uh with it and with this with this these discussions, before that goes, whatever that looks like, whatever format that looks like, I would feel much more assured as a board member um if if that can begin and that's part of the direction that we take today.

I think that there's there's with the there's um when we begin construction I believe of of the new jail there's there's some requirements of us shutting down certain sections is a court part of the court order. I don't know if that county council could speak to that.

It's just a supervisor through the chair. Yes. that once we um get the new um facility built and people can be transferred, the the settlement um says that we need to close down other parts that we could keep Northwest open for some time being, but our plan would be once it's new, once it's built to move everyone. Um Supervisor Hartman talked about what we have on the slides as a transition plan. There's two things we mentioned and that would be to establish milestones for the closure of all the main jail. That's one or sections of it or the whole thing. So we could um we can start looking at outlining what that transition plan would be. But the other one is site optimization and that is how do you reduce the footprint of the main jail figure out what the boundaries are for the IRC and then how do you actually look at um free up the that campus for future needs. And so there's time to do that but we can start developing and looking at how those two things could be accomplished. And that can be part of your direction. And regarding your first part, chair, um we would just say as part of your direction and your discussion today, it's status quo from your earlier discussion with us, which is to continue with 1.5.

Okay. All right. Well, I think we're prepared to to do that in our final deliberations today. We'll make our final motion. Um yes, go ahead, Super Hartman. So So do you need further direction about the sooner rather than later on the transition plan? I think we hear you sooner rather than later on the transition plan and the site optimization ideas.

Okay. Thank you, Supervisor Hartman. All right, that actually now concludes this portion of the special issues that for today. Um I believe we're actually going to take a about a fivem minute break so that staff can get together a final presentation on our wrap-up for the whole budget workshop week. Um at that point the board will um uh actually take public comment and then do our deliberations on the um on the workshop for the

All right, welcome welcome back to the April 17th, 2026 meeting of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors and the third and final day of our Burke budget workshops for the the fiscal year 2026 20227. Um we are returning back from a small break where we're going to have a final uh presentation wrapup from the CEO's office and budget team. Um when they're done with their presentation, we will go to public comment on the general uh workshop. These would be the um for the for the week and then um that it would be public public comment of two minutes for public speaker and then we'll come back to the board for final deliberations um and then conclusion of of our meeting today. CEO CEO Mias.

Thank you, Chair Nelson and board members. So, thank you. It's been a long week and I appreciate everyone hanging in there. I appreciate again all the commitment by our public and our departments um and particularly my staff. Uh and we just want to do a quick summary of what we've heard and kind of remind the board of where we started uh at the beginning of this week on Monday. But first, I just want to set some context as an overall reminder of what's driving our budget gap this year. It's really been driven by three forces at the same time. The first are the federal policy changes under HR1 which is known as the big beautiful bill which makes significant changes to medical and calresh and leaves a huge hole in our safety net and shifts burdens to the state and the counties. Number two is that the state's fiscal and programmatic response to these changes um has yet to be clearly seen. It's continued its requirement that counties be the payer of last resort, which is fine. except that we can't do so without new funding. The governor's January budget offers no relief and we're hoping through the legislature that we'll we will get some relief um as they struggle with whether they can absorb some of these costs. And number three, we already had a stressed budget. Uh some areas as you saw have expenses exceeding revenues and our expenses are driven by labor costs, insurance, technology, inflation and that has already been a problem for many of our departments. But this has led to a larger and more immediate gap um over the next several years. So in short, while Washington has made the problem much worse, Sacramento can't fully absorb it and the county is where the bill finally arrives. So we've developed a strategy at your board's direction to do look at two years and we've accumulated general fund to offset reductions to our safety net departments which led unfortunately to budget reductions in most of our general fund departments. And that's what we've been talking about this year, this uh week, as well as reductions to the departments

most impacted, specifically social services and county health. So, with that, I'm going to hand it over to Director Paul Clemeni to kind of summarize in detail uh this the key elements of this past week.

Thank you, CEO Mias. So, as we talked about on Monday and Mona just reiterated, the overall um budget here is it's reduced from the prior years and we held general fund contribution flat uh to generate capacity for backfilling where we knew some of the most significant issues were going to be in the uh health and human safety departments. $70.9 million in total reductions, most of those in those HHS departments to balance this year's budget. Restoration requests were totaling $12.1 million. Um, as we've talked about, we have about $7.4 million in ongoing general fund contribution to put towards restorations. I'll touch more on the CEO's recommended restorations again on the next slide. No expansions were requested by any of the departments this year. Um, and as Mona reiterated, the state and federal budgets remain very uncertain. Um, four things we were looking for from your board coming into workshops this week were to affirm affirm our recommended restorations and the $9.5 million set aside for 2728. Uh, discuss some uses of one-time funding as well as the unallocated cannabis tax revenue and receive direction which we just heard on the jail system housing options. To reiterate our uh recommended restorations, we do have $7.4 $4 million as well as preserving $9.5 million for the projected 2728 deficits. Those restorations are recommended in Department of Social Services, restoring 47 FTE in child welfare services and 78 FTE in their uh eligibility food assistance services as well as $400,000 to retain two essential service contracts. Uh in the child welfare side, uh county health department uh 16 recommended restoring 16 FTE in the health clinic services as well as 2.5 FTE in animal shelters and then recommending uh CSD uh be approved to to

swap their 18% maintenance funding of 523,000 to retain for parks maintenance workers. We did mention we have $12.5 million of um one-time funding available. We're recommending 10 million of that go to um capital improvement projects. They uh brought uh the CIP was brought to your board in March. Um but no funding had been identified at that point. Um now that we feel we have about $10 million to allocate. These are the um kind of first pass recommendations here. But the one on top is about $5 million as you heard from uh the probation department towards a juvenile justice center um remodel and and that that's necessary work and that bid is came in quite quite a bit higher than they anticipated. The rest of the items here um are from the from the CIP in March and the three departments it's really CSD, general services and public works met and recommend these top items here. That leaves $2.5 million um for other needs. The CEO's office has identified about $842,000 um over in social services. This is one-time funding, but to preserve a few more contracts that they had to cut um in the child welfare um towards case management, therapy, parenting classes, child abuse prevention, and interpretation as well as the Quyama Family Resource Center um contract that uh this would restore for one more year. Uh and then the area agency on aging 56,000 that we heard about this week that allows them to leverage uh quite a bit of uh external funding. This would leave $1.66 million towards other board priorities, staffing, uh contingency for staffing issues next year, indigent health care, um or pending any anything we find out from the state uh budget may revise.

I'm going to pause the summary here and I think we can um before we get into board discussion and deliberation, take take public comment, but um when we come back, we'll be discussing or hearing from your board on that 1.66 66 as well as the 780,000 we have available in cannabis revenue. Mr. Clemen, also you looking for concurrence on the CIP list and the restorations, right? I want to make sure that's the other feedback you're looking for. If we hear that from the board, that would be ideal. Yes. Okay.

You guys understand what we're going to be asked to Okay, great. All right. So, we're gonna, like I said, we're going to pause here and we're going to go ahead and unless there's any questions of the board before we go to public comment. Okay, we're going to go ahead and go to public comment on um general public comment on this piece of the wrap-up. Um, this is an opportunity for members of the public to speak to the final deliberations on this and I'm going to provide two minutes for public speakers. Madam Clerk, do we have any public commenters on this section of our agenda? Chair Nelson and members of the board, we currently have 10 requests to speak from the public on the budget workshop summary.

Okay. Thank you. And I'm going to go ahead and close public comment this time. And if you could get started with our first public commenter, we will begin here in Santa Barbara with Sicilia Harris to be followed by Romano winner. Cecilia,

Chair Nelson, and board members, my name is Cecilia Harris. I serve on the Santa Barbara Library Advisory Board. My comments are for your consideration and provided in appreciation of your support for our libraries across the county, but I really want to emphasize today the value that our public libraries bring to your constituents. A recent analysis was done of a multitude of library services from books, media, free internet, hotspots, programs for early uh learners and adults and and so much more. uh all performed in the trusted space of our libraries. The analysis indicated that for every $1 invested in library services, there's a return of approximately $4. It may not sound much, but do the multiplication. And there's additional return that's even more difficult to measure. And that's community value on an individual and social level. Continued support for our libraries is essential because libraries function as more than discrete locations. They are interconnected within each city, each of your cities, large or small, to local schools, nonprofits, businesses, and so on. This role that our libraries play cannot be easily replaced. And just think how costly it would be to try. Our libraries in Santa Barbara County share a unique ecosystem. Of course, each city has its own library and contributes to its own community, but they also connect indirectly and contribute with other county libraries through shared books, shared learning, and best practices. The county's investment helps sustain this ecosystem of libraries, making it possible for all of our cities, whether large or small, unincorporated areas, and neighboring communities can all benefit. Finally, our libraries are working as well as they do with a very tight budget to provide pro provide the services that our people need. A reduction in funding doesn't just affect one service or one city. It would weaken

the entire network, limiting access to those services that we need the most. People depend on their library systems and they're depending on you. Thank you. We will now we will now go to Romano Winner to be followed by Rory Duggar. Romano, is Romano gone? All righty. We will now go to Roy Duggar to be followed by Margaret Croco. Roy,

Supervisor Nelson, the board. Uh, my name is Roy Duggar. Many of you know me already. I'm the emergency services specialist for the city of Santa Maria. I've been in emergency management for over 30 years. 20 years with the American Red Cross, 15 with the city of Santa Maria. Uh I am here though as an emergency management professional and not as an official representative of the city. So what I say does not represent the official policy of the city of Santa Maria. I'm here to support the office of emergency management. That's uh was in my mind um ill- advised moved into the fire service. It needs to be its own separate unit. Uh it is one of the most highly effective and best trained units I have worked with 30 years in emergency management. Uh I would like to see them move back under the CEO's office. The emergency manager is the emergency manager for the entire operational area. The fire chief is the fire operational area coordinator. The sheriff is the law enforcement operational area coordinator. The MOA under public health is the medical and health operational area coordinator. Uh Kelly's division is the emergency management coordinator. Their job is to coordinate all of county resources, all government agencies, all special districts, all schools, and whole community involvement, including nonprofits and the public in the overall whole community, whole of government disaster preparedness, response, and recovery cycle. uh the laws that are being passed by the state and the feds to move more and more of that responsibility and the things that need to be covered is getting higher and more. It is not getting less and having people that have the years of training, certification and experience necessary to do this effectively uh is something that needs to be maintained not lessened. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Duggar. We will now go to Margaret Koko. Then we will go to Zoom with Rose Levy. Margaret,

thank you. My name is Margaret Kroco. I'm chair of the Santa Barbara Library Advisory Board. We acknowledge the budget challenges you're facing this year. That said, we take issue with a proposal made here on Monday to address these challenges by cutting funding to the city libraries such as that of Santa Barbara. We believe that such a move would be ill advised. First, please recognize that more than one in five Santa Barbara Public Library card holders live outside the city with a significant number from Carperia, Galita, and unincorporated areas. And an individual does not even need to be a card holder to use the library services. In short, city library programs and services are available to anyone who walks in the door. The approximately 4 million in county funding is distributed across multiple cities. Libraries essentially serving a highly collaborative and interdependent system of libraries that jointly meet the needs of all county residents, especially when it comes to programs such as those aimed at both adult and youth literacy, workforce development, and ESL services. This creates a shared regional ecosystem where each city contributes capacity and specialization. The county's investment helped sustain that city system, making it possible for city libraries to offer some of the programs and services not available at other libraries. Second, the point I'd like to make is that on the day in which you focus on funding for the county jail, please recognize the strong association between literacy and incarceration. Research shows that 85% of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally low literate. 70% of all incarcerated adults cannot read at a fourth grade level. Data indicates that the lack of reading skills undermines the ability to gain meaningful employment, which can lead, of course, to criminal behavior. Thus, reducing funding for libraries like Santa Barbara that offer robust adult and youth literacy programs undermines the very

tools needed to keep individuals out of jail. Thank you.

Thank you. We will now go to Zoom with Rose Levy to be followed by Matthew Wilkins. Rose and Rose, we have unmuted you on our end. If you can please unmute on your end to provide your comments. Rose, we have unmuted you on our end. If you can please unmute on your end. All righty. We'll return to Rose momentarily. We will now go to Matthew Wilkins to be followed by Anthony Rodriguez. Matthew, unfortunately, it appears Matthew is not hooked up to a microphone. Matthew, I don't have the ability to unmute you. So, if you can

Can you hear me now? Yes.

Okay. Sorry. Good afternoon, chair, members of the board. Cutting emergency management staffing now is one of the worst places to cut. These individuals sole duty is to create plans and manage incidents to save lives. And at a time when disasters are becoming more frequent and more destructive, we should be increasing capacity, not reducing it. My name is Matthew Wilkins. I'm the emergency management and environmental health and safety manager for a local regional nonprofit based in Santa Barbara serving three counties and individuals with intellectual developmental disabilities. I also hold both my bachelor's and master's degrees in emergency management and homeland security. Prior to this role, I worked for the Ventura County Fire Department as a 911 dispatcher for about seven years. So, I've seen firsthand how these incidents unfold and how quickly they can escalate. When I began my tenure in July 2023, I reached out to the Office of Emergency Management and was welcomed as a collaborating partner. Since then, we've worked closely together and I have seen the impact of the two recent positions that were added to the office. Since those positions were introduced, I've seen a significant increase in capacity. Operational area meetings have become more collaborative with stronger networking across public, private, and nonprofit partners. We've also seen events like the 2025 earthquake symposium, which would not have been possible without those added positions. Individuals with access and functional needs are more vulnerable to disasters, and we've seen in past events that a significant percentage of those who died, had some form of access or functional need. The Office of Emergency Management leads an access and functional needs work group that is actively addressing these issues. This work is critical and depends on having the staffing to support it. Looking ahead, Santa Barbara County is preparing to host World Cup teams. And in 2028, Los Angeles, just two counties away, will host the Olympics. With the influx of people these events will bring, planning will be more important than ever. With everything coming down the pipeline, including changes at the federal level, now more than ever, we need more people, not fewer. Of all the areas to cut, emergency management is the worst place to do it. It is your role as government officials to ensure the safety of the citizens who elected you. I urge you to reject the proposal to eliminate any positions from the office of emergency management. Thank

you. We will now we will remain on Zoom and go to Anthony Rodriguez to be followed by Anna Garcia. Anthony,

good afternoon everyone, members of the board. My name is Anthony Rodriguez and I serve as the operations and disaster services specialist for the Food Bank of Santa Barbara County. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today and to urge you to reject the proposed budget cuts and the elimination of the critical position within the Office of Emergency Management. The OEM serves as the backbone of our community's resilience, particularly when crisis strike. The current staffing levels allow the department to build strong and effective partnerships with the food bank and numerous nonprofit organizations. Because of the dedicated personnel they currently have in place, OEM has significantly improved operational efficiency. We now see faster response times during emergencies and much broader proactive community outreach. The team coordinates uh resources swiftly, ensuring that food, shelter, and vital services reach our community members exactly when they need it the most. Reducing this program and eliminating the position will have immediate negative consequences as a reduction in the staff directly limits the capacity to the management of local emergencies. We we risk severely weakening the partnerships with nonprofits who rely on OEM for guidance and logistical support during disasters. Most importantly, budget cuts will result in decreased support for our most vulnerable populations. The food bank and our safety net providers will face delays and reduce coordination, leaving families without critical aid during the hard times. A fully staffed OEM does much more than plan for the worst. It actively builds a safer, more connected community every single day. Stripping stripping these resources away from this office will weaken our front line of defense and support. Thank you. We will now go to Anna Garcia to be followed by Bradley Kirkman. Anna,

hello. Um, I am finishing my public comments with profound disappointment regarding the direction this budget workshop is taking, specifically related to the commitment of funding 1.5 jail pods. It sounds like a history lesson is in order. We've tried to educate folks on this over and over and over. Policing systems are rooted in slave catching history. They are meant to protect property. They were never meant to protect people or to help people. Secondly, they are now a reiteration of slavery. We need more people in jails and in prisons because we need to use them for slave labor to keep our capitalistic exploit exploitative and extractive systems in place. Y'all voting to continue funding jail building over all of these other things that people are saying are desperately necessary. I can't even fathom how y'all are going to justify cutting emergency management positions, cutting library funds, cutting health services funds, living in the time that we do with the emergency situations that arise. We're scheduled to have a ridiculous El Nino this year. Don't be shortsighted. Stop aligning yourselves with the slave capitalism that runs this country and do what people you serve are wanting. You have heard unlimited comments from people about how we do not support this decision and it's making it really hard to believe that any of this can be resolved or re reformed. and y'all are making it clear that the people's voices

don't matter. So, moving forward, we will take that and act accordingly. We will now go to Bradley Kirkman to be followed by Spencer Brat. Bradley,

hello. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Please proceed.

Excellent. Good morning, uh, Chair Nelson and members of the board. My name is Bradley Kirkman. I'm an emergency manager for Access Center Coast, nonprofit for, uh, people with disabilities and aging adults. We have a long-standing critical partnership with the county of office of emerging management, which is why I'm calling today to address the current budget recommendations. I strongly urge the board to reject the recommendations to eliminate the emergency manager position within the OEM. While we understand the fiscal challenges, the success of our disaster response network depends on the county's ability to lead and coordinate. And eliminating this role significantly weakens the capacity, especially for our most vulnerable populations. We need full staff to ensure that inclusive planning happens so that our AFN populations are not overlooked and are planned for before disaster strikes. Over over 50% of people that die in a disaster have a disability or are a senior. We've seen how quickly emergencies scale here. So on behalf of ACC, I respectfully ask to prioritize regional resilience. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. We will now go to Spencer Brandt. Then we will return to Rose Levy, who is our final speaker. Spencer,

Chair Nelson and Supervisors, Spencer Brandt with the Isa Vista Community Services District. Speaking on behalf of myself today, after the sheriff's Wednesday presentation, I came away with a couple of questions. Under Sheriff Welsh, she clarified that the Isa Vista foot patrol is currently fully staffed. The 11 vacancies he referenced are carried countywide, not in Isa Vista. So, the sheriff is actually proposing two decisions at once. The first is a budget decision on whether to fund these 11 vacant positions. The second is an operational decision, whether to redeploy currently staffed deputies from Vista to South County Patrol. Those are different decisions. Why is any rearrangement of personnel necessary at all? How does eliminating positions that are already vacant impact current operations? According to the recent auditor controllers report, the department ended last fiscal year with a vacancy rate of over 14%. As it has been for a number of years, that's more than 100 positions by my count. So, if these positions won't realistically be filled, why is the board being asked to fund them? I have no interest in being caught in the middle of a fight between the sheriff's unfilled positions and filled positions supporting CalFresh social services and our libraries. These cuts represent immediate and measurable harm to real people. And as CEO Miasado said on Monday, a strong safety net supports public safety. If the sheriff's decision is to redeploy deputies out of Vista, to some extent, I understand that's what happens when you cut crime in half. We will continue to work with them to continue the incredible generational turnaround in public safety in Isa Vista. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Brandt. We will now go to Rose Levy. And I just got received word that we had a request to speak on general public comment that was meant for this uh public comment period from Julia Barbosa. And so Julia will be our final speaker. Rose,

good afternoon. Um, I speak um as the director of strategic partnerships and advancement with United Way of Santa Barbara County, and I want to give my overwhelming support for the operations, staffing level, and necessary budget for the Office of Emergency Management. OEM is a critical department in keeping our community safe and strong. What's particularly compelling is the productive partnerships with community- based organizations that OEM has forged. Something that I think is truly unique to our community as it relates to emergency preparedness and response. The partnership that United Way and OEM have made has proven that we can do more together than alone. And it's this partnership that has allowed United Way and countless other organizations across our county to become strong members in support of our community being prepared and resilient for when disasters strike. When OEM has been fully staffed, the results speak for themselves. There's coordinated disaster preparedness, rapid response capabilities, and a coordinated and trained community that leverages resources and skills from various sectors. And I have to say on a personal level that working alongside the staff at OEM has been a true joy. They're professional, prepared, they're knowledgeable, and they really help to get work done. And when we reduce staff, we don't just cut positions. We cut the capacity to plan, train, and to respond for our community. And our community here in Santa Barbara faces unique challenges. We have the second highest poverty rate in the state, which means our residents are disproportionately vulnerable when disasters strike, and they have fewer resources and are hit the hardest. So whether it's floods, fires, or earthquakes, um these emergencies don't wait and they don't spare people in our community, our neighbors who are vulnerable. So I urge you to preserve the current staffing levels and budget for the Office of Emergency Management. So when the next disaster hits, our community deserves a county government that is ready to protect them. Thank you.

And we will now go to Julia Barbosa, who is our final speaker on the budget summary work uh excuse me, the budget workshop summary public comment. Julia.

Good afternoon, Chair Nelson and members of the board. I would like to urge you not to dissolve the Vista foot patrol. I Vista is being disproportionately impacted by the sheriff's proposed cuts. On paper, reported crime may be down, but a major reason for that decline is the combination of local ordinances and consistent visible enforcement. You've seen it during Halloween and recently during Deltopia. Proactive patrol presence doesn't just address minor infractions. They sharply reduce medical emergencies and prevent crime. That is true of major events and is true of daily life in IA Vista. When we dismiss citations as just alcohol violations, we overlook what consistent patrolling prevents. A highly intoxicated person on the street can quickly become a fight, an assault, or a cliffall. The presence and even the expectation that a foot patrol can respond quickly deters that progression before it starts. Prevention isn't clearly measurable by statistics, but as someone who lives near the main party area, I can tell you we see the difference. When the foot patrol was temporarily closed during the pandemic, the sense of lawlessness in I Vista was palpable. We saw an increase in prowling, casing, and home invasions. Illegal for-profit party organizers took over Vista, resulting in more overdoses, stabbing incidents, illegal firearm apprehensions. We had to do a lot of work to create yet another ordinance amendment to end that destructive trend. Vista is the most densely populated area in the county. It generates the largest number of calls for service and is highly volatile. We also have a uniquely vulner vulnerable population with a large number of young women that attract predators and cliffs that attract tragedies. Even a barebones foot patrol, which is what we have now, has a meaningful impact. Removing it risks setting idol on a path that will cost far more to correct both financially and in terms of public safety. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Nowhere is is that more true than in Isa Vista. Please keep funding the Vista foot patrol. Thank you.

And that concludes public comment on this budget workshop summary group. All right. Thank you, Madame Clerk. Okay, let's um co you guys good or do you want me to lead where we're going here? Let's put up the slide again. Uh Mr. Clement.

Okay, I'm I'm going to go a couple slides before that. I'm going to go to slide four first. I think you it'd be a good idea to get concurrence. So, the first decision I think we need to make is um CO's recommended restorations. So, these are the after the uh budget balancing tools. These are the initial recommendations by the CEO's office and so I'm trying to get uh con consensus on whether the board is ready to move forward with these. Seeing yes from supervisor and Hartman. Um, service lead, do you want to make a comment on on this slide right here?

Yeah, just a question about the animal services. Um, just want to make sure, can we keep those two control um animal control officers unfunded but still in place so that if they have the funding, they can get it back. So, I think we can bring that up in deliberations. Okay. I just want to ask a question. Is Yeah. Do you want to answer that question? Supervisor Lee through the chair. That's that's possible. Yes. The department can unfund a position and keep the authorized position in the salary resolution that your board adopts in June and and they stay on the books as a ghost position. Good. That that's what Okay, cool. Uh do you have any comments on this slide, Supervisor Caps? This is the

No, I'm I'm supportive fully supportive of the CEO's recommendation to to restore these.

Okay. My only uh comment I have was on the CSD um $500,000 of the 18% um deferred maintenance. So, I've talked to the CSD director about um maybe taking a similar strategy general services is doing with their um maintenance being done on um so general general services is spinning that on staff who are focusing on deferred maintenance projects and I've asked Mr. Armis to maybe take a similar strategy. I I think it's fine if I'm I'm looking maybe in June to fully flesh that out a little bit more for me for its supports, but I'm fine moving forward with it right now. But I really do want to hear from the department in June about how that staff is going to help um arrest the deferred maintenance and and continue to hopefully drive that down as those dollars are intended. So um understanding that a little bit better will earn my support on that. Um but if right now I'm I'm I'm good there. So unanimous moving forward with these which is good news because I just wrote down that's 143 and a half positions of people who are now going to keep their job in the county. So that's a pretty big deal. So I think that's something to celebrate before we go to the next one. So just want to acknowledge that for a moment, 143 families. All right. So the next uh issue for us is number two, which is a CIP um allocation, the $10 million. This is the recommendation from the CEO and staff. Are we generally okay with moving forward with this? Um Supervisor Hartman, do you want to make a comment on that?

Yeah, it it's just a question. So, if I understand, if the jail estimate comes in higher, we've got to divert this to the jail. But if it's what we expected, then this is our list. And is this in priority order,

Supervisor Hartman through the chair? Um, yes, we are recommending I I we'll have to see about the juvenile justice center one. I believe that decision needs to be made pretty quickly because of the bids and the timing on those bids. But the rest of these we probably would want to hold until we have a good idea on the actual bids on the Northern Branch Jail and if we need to put more one time towards that. Um as far as priority order, I know the three involved departments, public works, general services, and CSD um met together and discussed and all agreed that these are their collective priorities and there is some from each department in here. So I believe there's consensus on that. And just a point of information, um, uh, Congressman Carbajal for the Lamppoke Animal Shelter did get 850,000. So I think if there were a way to fund that with this CIP money, it it's already in motion so you could plan a bigger, more um, I think efficient project. So just put that out there.

We understand that. Thank you, Supervisor, through the chair. We understand that. And again, it's not necessarily bid. I see uh director L request, he's had to school us all on on design build, design build, but we we just want to make sure that when he comes back with the actual um contracts that we're within the scope that he's projected, and if we are, that's great. Um if we're not, we're off a little, we would ask to look at this. But he's going to come back this summer, I believe. In Yeah, in June. So, we'll know pretty quickly,

right? Otherwise, are we good with this list for now? Okay, obviously things can change between now and June, but we're just prelimin preliminary direction from the board. All right, the next one is actually slide number six. Um, there was originally two and a half million there. We've we've identified $842,000 for additional recommendations by the CEO to be taken from that. So, it leaves us with 1.6. Everybody's good with the additional $842,000 the CEO is recommending that's for the Quyama. Um it also is additional um services on child welfare services as well as on that small portion for area agency on aging board. Okay with that you go with that supervisor caps.

Yeah especially learning what the uh area agency on area agency on aging yields what is it how many thanks for pointing that out. How many millions of dollars? Four million. Yeah. Okay. Smart.

Great. Okay. Now get now we get to that next slide here. So, make sure you you make sure that the uh staff knows you have unanimous support on the other other items moving to where we are today. Um that leaves us to with the 1.6 uh million of onetime funding as well as $780,000 of cannabis uh tax revenue. Um so I was thinking maybe we take the cannabis the one time first if you guys are okay to talk about that and then we can maybe uh um eventually talk about the 1.6 six because and the reason why I want to do that is the 780 is very fixed of what we're at Luke right now. The 1.6 is bas is our best guess right now where things are at. Um I anticipate things maybe changing when the state budget um comes out or other you know people stepping up between now and June. Um so I think that we're all going to have uh wants that are more than the 1.6. So, I think I think my idea is that we we rep prioritize for each of us and see where we have consensus, but also to alert staff where we'd like to see additional funds if they do come in um in June. So, let's start with the cannabis. Um

super Hartman.

Well, I I just had one additional point. the the fulfillment fund in CSD, the 190,000 that goes to chambers and visitors bureaus and things. Um I'm open to reallocating that to more essential needs. Um if we want to stay in economic development, maybe that's where a film thing could come from. Um I'm not wedded to that, but I just think that should be on the table. So I I think you know once we get to our priorities and if they exceed what we have funds for we will have to look for cuts other other places right so I think at some point once we spend all of the the excess ongoing revenue we will be looking to other places for potential cuts and I know I I hear that you that is that is a potential cut um that you might like to see reallocated somewhere else. Um, but getting back to cannabis uh revenue super resino.

Sure. But I need to know uh I just quick question about making sure some of these other ones because I kind of want to take it out of cannabis but if it's already being funded somewhere else. So I just want to make sure can you clarify for uh racial equity fund? Where are we funding that at the same level? Supervisor Lavino through the chair. Yes. That's 275,000 ongoing GFC that goes to the CSD department and that nothing has touched that so far. So the question was who was going to distribute it? I think was that done? That's a a conversation.

That's a conversation. So did I read something? I thought I read something that said the fund matches that 275. Chair Nelson. Uh, Supervisor Lean, you know, the the fund does not match it. I think what you read was a one of the public comments that was posted on the website in which the fund indicated that it would match it, but we've not had any confirmation to that effect. Okay, thank you. Um, let me just go through these real quick. So, it's it's already built in the budget as of now.

Okay. Okay. So, that's that's what I'm trying to figure We could always determine later on to change who distributes it and that might free up some some of the funds, but as of now it's it's status quo. Okay. Well, you you did ask for an opportunity to have that discussion. So, it would be helpful for us from a CSD planning perspective to get some guidance as to whether that'll be administered by our staff or through the funds at whatever point you're comfortable giving that direction. That would be helpful. Okay. When do you want to do you want to do that now or no? I guess I guess already I guess we're already talking about it, so might as well. Well, I'm trying to figure out what I want to say in cannabis, but I got to figure out if these other things are funded or not.

So, it's it's on the table. So, it's one of the areas that I thought that potentially should be distributed by our human services commission. Um, you know, the the the fund has done a a good job trying to communicate and work through some things. I think that there's some inherent challenges with the fund and um but I mean I think they've really worked hard to try to be um as equitable in distributing those funds and also trying to keep them from being political which is always my concern with the fund because it's both a political organization as well as a nonprofit. Um so that's where I kind of get that's where I get heartburn. Um but uh they've done a good job so far but I just thought that that might be an area for savings.

Okay. I'm and I'm kind of looking at it the other way is human services commission. I we appoint the human services commissioner. So then it could figuratively it could be a political wing too. So I I like the way it's working. I feel distanced from it. I think they're doing a good job. I know they've reached out when we've asked questions. They do great. They they've done a really good job. So I I'm cool with leaving that alone. So I don't know where everybody else is. But you want to quick read? Yeah. Everybody find where it's at? Okay. Okay.

It would only save us, I think, $40,000 if they're willing to match, then that's a no-brainer. Um, but they really do a great job. I served on the grant making committee there. And they they uh you don't have to be a 501c3 and you don't have to go through a lot of administrative um headaches and writing grants. It's it's a much simpler process for community uh groups. And and so I I really support it for that reason. Well, maybe we threaten with taking it away so they will match. You know, that would be a good No, just a joke. Just a joke. No, we appreciate it. Okay. So, the other So, I guess if it gets to cannabis,

then the ones I I'd like like to continue with the warrant officer. think that is a um I think for $300,000 or whatever it is that's been a problem that's been pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl pl plaguing us for a decade or so and just the fact that we're cleaning up and and making our way through that and also it has resulted in some, you know, high-profile arrests. I think that's something we need to do. Um and then I'm interested in the youth fund. Um, I know it's not all fleshed out yet and there was talk about maybe we do it by district or maybe there's a larger allocation and then we all kind of split it up for our individual districts. I'm not sure what it would look like and I think between now and June we can kind of figure out what it does look like but I'd be interested in setting aside and I I don't want to put a number on it but um because I really don't have anything else coming out of cannabis that I am um the the other items I have I don't think should come out of cannabis. So um the only other two that so I don't know how you want to do this is that is that it for me and then I come back and tell you what other priorities I have other priorities. Yeah, for me it's just the warrant officer and the youth fund.

Okay. So, and that's it's an allocation of funds towards youth. Whether it's with a singular nonprofit or some other kind of form if you're interested in either one of those models. Yeah. I'm just trying to figure out what the model would look like. I don't really know. And you know, we had the kids from Future Leaders. Uh, you know, and my direction to them had been to come up with something that was a lot more concrete and and and they've committed to do that. So, uh, I don't know how quick they can turn that around, but I think, you know, I'd like to have some sort of placeholder in there, whether it's not it's them or it's different organizations or we get them to meld with other organizations, but I think it is the spirit of Prop 64 that we direct more funding to youth programs out of cannabis.

And we don't need to spend all these funds, correct? It's probably a good practice for us not to, especially that means that there'll be potentially funds to roll over into next year as well. Um, not interested in next year. Okay. We're interested. Short timer. Um, yeah. Uh, Supervisor Lee. So, my only ask is $150,000 for the K film commission in my office has asked for back later in May and June. My staff will come back with different options. So, I'm just asking upwards of 150,000. It may be less, but that's my only ask for the cannabis money.

Okay. So, Supervisor Lee has up to $150,000 for the film one year allocation the film commission. Okay. Other Supervisor Caps.

Uh I support Supervisor Lee's request uh for two reasons. I think it's I think the film commissioner will bring in a lot of revenue to the county. Uh and I think it's sort of an upfront cost. I imagine it will pay for itself in fees eventually. I also think that his district bears the brunt of of cannabis and so just giving him a little little say in in some of these funds I I think is uh fair. Um and it's a it's a it's a good proposal. Uh I also support the future leaders. Uh I do recall that they do get some funds from from be well. Apologies if this was already discussed but um about uh cannabis education. So if that number could be recited that would be helpful. Pop

supervisor caps through the chair. Um yeah they receive the $119,000 that be well receives towards cannabis education goes out to three groups in including future leaders of America and it's about $39,000 each. Oh so they just get 39,000. So I mean at least there's a program and maybe so I'm open to expanding it. I'm not sure the dollar amount, but they certainly have proven their commitment over and over to doing this. And I think it's very extremely logical that cannabis funds would go towards prevention and youth awareness and they're a good group to do that. Sue Riser Hartman, do you have some thoughts on cannabis?

I I do. I have a couple of thoughts, but first a question. So, we have funded 200,000 for North County youth violence prevention from the cannabis fund. Um, and we we have funded through other funding south county. So, as we think about youth, um, I guess I'd like to have the whole picture of what money we're we're sending. I I like the idea of um, somehow by district. I think to fund one organization I I I'm supportive of funding a collaboration but maybe a a collaboration that's well established. Um so so I I'm I'm I think it's a great idea. I think it hasn't been fleshed out yet. Uh the second thing is um again I think we might be able to use the fulfillment fund to do the film. Um, and I I that would be my preference. Um, and then um I'm I'm really interested in another rural crime officer and and that possibly could come from this source of money and we're still waiting to hear about an IG proposal and what that might look like. So, those are some of the things I have in mind.

Great. Uh, so and I'll just add that I support the warrant uh detective. Um, I think one of the issues was last year, um, we funded it and it took some time to get going and I think we've had some success and I think, um, showing support for it now allows us to count on it continuing past, um, June because if they're not, they need to wind that down, that program. So, um, I prefer to see that be something that we support um, for another year. It's a onetime um, expense. So, if it doesn't yield the results that we want, then I think it's something that in in the future we could wind down and get us onetime funds. And I also think that, you know, dealing with uh warrants is good for public safety, but it's also good for the people that the warrants exist. I mean, they're getting rid of warrants out there and bringing that number down. So, people that might be living in the shadows are no longer living in the shadows. You know, there's there's a greater program going on here um on the warrant detective site. I I want to be committed to trying to drive that number down. So, I support that as well. Um,

Supervisor Nelson, I'd make that three.

Okay. So, um, and then I'm also a big fan of of a district youth fund. Um, I think, you know, the needs are so diverse throughout our county. You know, the needs in a the city are different than sometimes in a corporate areas. And so I think by u maybe spreading that out across all five districts in in some form or fashion um that we could be able to do that. You know, Supervisor Lavendino might and I might share funds and support FLA together or you know because that's more of a north county operation um you know or you know we might spread out somewhere else. So I'm interested in something along those lines. I'm very interested in the film commission. I want to see the numbers a little bit more. Um but I'm interested in in trying to support you there um Roy. Um, and I and I understand what Sue reser Caps is mentioning that you know you you have a big brunt of the impacts. So it does make sense that that might be something that you might be able to deliver for your constituents that we could we could hopefully support you.

Super 11. Yeah, I want to piggy back on I think you've you've earned uh a spot. Uh so yeah, I'm definitely uh I'll I'll support that. I I would like to know more about it, but I don't mind putting money aside for that. And I also support the rural crime an additional rural crime officer. I don't know where it would be funded from, but if this is the only spot where it would come from, then then that's good. I was definitely pl on bringing that up during our

Okay. And then last for me is that I'm not sure where it's funded from or to what extent is where are we on the fourth co-response team? Where are we totally where are we on all of co-response? So, if I understand right, we have three funded teams going into next year. We still have a fourth team that's unfunded. U my understanding is that there would be funding for the clinician if if if it was funded on the deputy side. So, um I was going to bring that up in my ongoing number, but um glad to hear that other people were talking about it as well. Yeah, that's it for me. Okay. Cannabis. Is that good for cannabis on on some some general direction,

Chair Nelson? Um yeah, I believe what we've heard is the is consensus on film commission, uh a film commissioner, consensus on a warrant officer, one more year at least of the sheriff's warrant officer. Um and then consensus around youth youth fund that was discussed on Wednesday uh to some extent. And I thought I heard also consensus on the rural crime. Yeah, I think we're all interested in that. I I want to bring it up during the uh the ongoing Yeah. discussion.

Okay. Because you've already expended what's available in cannabis. So, right uh if you So, you know, obviously, as Chair Nelson said, these aren't final decisions, but we would be putting these in our recommended budget. So, um you've said the warrant officer, uh the film commission, some kind of youth model fund, and then the rural crime came up as well. and we don't have enough fund for all those, but if you'd like to hold off the rural crime for the ongoing that that was I was going to bring it up in the ongoing um I think that that's I think we can discuss that a little bit more that go ahead.

Could we talk about the fulfillment fund and whether that 190,000 is best used there could be used to expand our pot here. So we could talk about the fulfillment fund. Um so that's to all of our chambers. Is that what you're talking about? It's Do we have the BIF on that or do we have the

Um yeah, Mr. Alas can talk about it. We can pull up that BIFF as well. the uh chair Nelson supervisors as um we provided in response to the question that supervisor Hartman posed the uh the county has been allocating in the range of 190,000 for a number of years to the extent that most people that are currently uh processing those payments have limited history with it uh it has been allocated uh for largely for the chambers of commerce as well as the visit Santa Barbara and uh we provided an account of those numbers. the the largest allocation has been directed toward visit Santa Barbara at approximately $75,000 and then to the various chambers both south and north entirely discretionary and uh we'd seek some guidance as to whether we should bring forward a reduction in our budget uh submitt for the June action but we did uh offer the detailed break breakdown and as you can see on screen. The funds are distributed in the manner shown there.

So, Supervisor Harbin, you're you're proposing us maybe repurpose these funds. Uh, and I'm I'm I'm definitely open to that. Um, I'm a little curious on whether all those organizations, you know, knew that their their funding was on the chopping block today, you know, and so I'm a little concerned about that. Um, but I mean I'm willing to talk about I'm definitely open to reprogramming some of these funds, but I also maybe want to hear from some of them on what that pays for. Some of them are very small allocations for and that might, you know, uh, the money for Los Levivos might be a lot different than it is for visit Santa Barbara on that portion. I don't know how that's it's distributed, but um,

yeah, I I don't think we know what equity factor was used here. Um, but uh I I do think, you know, I'd rather fund a rural officer or a social worker or I mean I I just think there are higher and better uses in this very difficult budget time. Um, and this would be another source again for the film. Um, and and would make sense because this is economic and that's economic. So anyway, I I just think it's worth considering. I I think it's worth considering too and and I there's a lot of places I would love to cut and throw out there because I think there's a lot of things that we're paying for that I rather have child welfare services instead of those things. Um but I think we don't have what I'm worried about is we're going to we're trying to squeeze and find these dollars right now to to fully bake our budget. And I know we're I know our staff wants as much help as possible. Um maybe I'm being naive, but I I am still holding out hope that we're going to find some solutions on incident care at the state level as well as some of the other um programs that were have some statewide asks. So, you know, we cut this and all a sudden we come back and we find out that the state's going to cover engine care for ne, you know, the next two years, then it's a different conversation. And so, um I'm interested in potentially cutting this in June. Um, but I I think we're, for me at least, I think we're kind of premature on that conversation until we really have a clearer picture. If if we're we're negotiating down the last 1.6 million today, absolutely we should put this on the table. But I think other things could open up or or get smaller between now and and and June.

Yeah. Um, I I don't I'll go along with it. I think it's much easier to put stuff back in June than to take stuff out. Well, I'm open to that. Um, and I'm and I love to be the hatchet guy. So, but uh I was just trying to suggest that as one of the ways forward, but we can keep talking about it here. So, Supervisor Lee, what did you have some comments here? I do. For the cannabis funding for B1 and public health, is that something that we are looking into and considering whether we want to keep that going to to reprogram our cannabis funding that's already in those two agencies? Yeah. $219,000.

So, right now it's going into cannabis education from those two. Do you want to? So, right now it stays under the proposed budget. Are you interested in seeing that potentially be reprogrammed as something else? I just want to see what information about what that is what what the money goes towards. Okay. So, can we get a maybe a board inquiry form between now and June on Oh, there is. Okay. Chair Nelson, one of the ones posted uh last yesterday afternoon um responded to that. Okay. Okay. So, we have we we have that in the record and we'll be able it is we'd be able to pull it up if you want to go through it right now, but it is on the record. It's on the website. Yes, I I'll look through it.

Okay. Let's go through our priorities maybe and then see where we're at because I mean we have some some commonality there. There might be some things that have one or two votes and maybe these are things that CO's office can look at between now and and June. So, maybe for the ongoing things uh that we still want to see funded. Um let's maybe kind of go through our list. um and see where we go from there, the things that were priorities for us. And so I'll start off with Supervisor Lavanino.

Thank you. So um if rural crime isn't somehow into the um cannabis fund, I obviously uh I support adding that person maintaining to me I only have two and that is uh the BSU manager and um making sure that co-response is fully funded. Those are my only two. Okay. All right. Thank you, Supervisor Lavendino. Uh, Supervisor Hartman.

Yeah. I I want to talk a little bit about co-response and then consolidation. Um, in co- response, we have two teams funded for South County and Santa Barbara City has two teams. So, that gives you four teams in in South County. the way it's currently structured is one team in North County. Um, and so I think it's really important to have and and as I understand it, there are no city teams in North County. Uh, so I think it's really really important to get that second team um in North County. Uh and I believe that um having if Bwell is able to fund that position of oversight I without having to tap general fund then I would be very supportive of that because I think that um I'd rather use the money for the fourth team and then have be well fund that position. So um so that's where I am on co-response. I I also, you know, we're we're thinking about um how do we get efficiencies and I don't know where else to put that uh discussion in. So, I'll take this

Yeah, please take it

take this time now. Um the the first thing is um I I would like to get to a point where we could come back with um a report about combining or putting LEMs into the fire department. Uh and I think that um we have a system that's operationally integrated um in in the field though um it's it's fragmented. I mean it's it's operationally integrated at the field level but it's it's fragmented in different places at at the administrative level. And I I think that there perhaps may be ways to reduce administrative fragmentation, improve coordination and oversight and field operations, streamline training, communications and planning functions and and ultimately enhance the efficiency of the system. um they both now maintain program management, fiscal contracts, procurement, data, reporting, training, coordination, planning staff, and and so I I would like um I would like staff to come back at some point looking at that transfer. So I just want to put that out there because I don't know where else um to mention it. And then in our board letter, it already talks about the administrative consolidation with Be Well and the county health department. And I I just think that um we should continue to further uh develop that proposal. I I think that's the way that um health is going statewide, nationwide, is to integrate that. And I think that's an important thing to do.

All right. Thank you, Supervisor Hartman. Uh, Supervisor Lee, can I ask the fire chief a question about the OEM position? That's Yeah, you absolutely can. Thank you. Thanks for being patient, Chief. I just want to give you opportunity to talk about that position that's being cut within OEM and just if you can describe it and yeah, briefly. Yeah.

Uh, Supervisor Lee through the chair. So we haven't identified which position it is yet. There's four emergency managers. Each of them have um an area of specialty and then many of them share duties like the duty officer coverage. So we have not identified which person or which role. But I will tell you that we will not cut any mandated programs and we'll look for efficiencies in the fire side for any discretionary um things that could be lost as the result of that that cut. Good. And you're confident that you and your department can cover any necessary emergencies and positions. The the with the strength of the fire department behind it, we we we won't we won't let it fail.

Okay. I just want to bring that up because there's a lot of comments about that position and I just want to give you a chance to talk about it. So, thank you. Thank you. All right. Uh, Supervisor Caps. So, just point of clarification, are we just talking priorities? Yeah. Priorities that we'd have for potential ongoing funding like other additional restorations and ongoing funding beyond. So we have we have 1.6 million right now that could either be held back for sure that's true. It's one time and so I know you're talking about ongoing and you're kind of mixing ongoing and one time. It's just that's why we got a little confused on you. You can always talk about your priorities

and I'm just reminding the board and looking out the department is of course I'm not going to be here when you have this conversation next year but we are trying to save as much what we have Mr. Clementy's uh discussion about setting aside that ongoing for the following year's deficit. So if your board wants to do ongoing restorations, it would have to either ask departments to cut more between now and June or dip into that fund that's being held for the the bigger deficit in the second year. All right. I apologize. I framed it as ongoing 1.6. It is onetime 1.6. So um so anything we're funding with this would potentially only be for a year. Okay. The 1 additional 1.6 six that's not cannabis funds but is general fund that might be available for us.

Sorry. Oh, I do support the warrant officer, the act deputy, but to me the film commissioner is the real opportunity that I see within my district that can really bring revenue back to us. Okay. So, those three. Yeah. And I I think we're sort of melding the cannabis. I um Yeah.

If this was addressed in the the board inquiry form, uh I apologize. Um, but if if it seems like BW Well is the one department that there's some funds if there's a potential to alleviate those cannabis taxes and for cannabis education elsewhere rather than our taxes. Um, that would be great news that two I think you said it was 240. Um, just putting that out there. Uh, if if that's at all a possibility through these other pots of funds and grants, etc., etc. Um, potentially not. I uh as stated, I support the film commissioner coming from cannabis funds, but I do think it's worthy of maybe doing some political conversations of of the fulfillment funds. Just reading again what the purpose of it is. It does it's to promote tourism, etc., etc. It is roughly the same amount. It's 190 and and you're requesting 150. So, there's an alignment there. I see it's going to be potentially very tricky uh to get, but maybe there's time to explore that between now and and when this needs to be decided. So that's where I fall on that. That ideally that would be from the fulfillment fund. That's a wishful thinking though. Uh you know,

maybe not. Maybe not. That certainly would be a logical place for it. And then again, and I'm support the rural uh officer as well. All right. Could I see Supervisor Hartman? Oh. Um in terms of the rural officer, I think um clearly um rural crime. I I also think um homelessness in the rivers if that could be part of the duty as well.

I think um obviously that I'm seeing the sheriff nod his head that that would could be something that that that officer could potentially be used to help address. Um so my priorities uh you know that start with something that some of the things that already were said um is the um behavioral science unit manager uh the co-response and the additional uh rural crime um detective you know um Santa Barbara County our number one industry is agriculture and that's typically what the rule crime detective is often helping with with rural crime and agricultural crime and to have just a single officer and and an AOP for the entire uh county for a $2 billion industry to protect. It's it's amazing what they get done there. But I I' I've heard every time I bring up another officer, I always hear there's plenty of work. And so I think that that's a place that um you know would send a message of our valuing agriculture in the county as well as supporting public safety. So I I see that um it's not really an expansion but just one a restoration of one of the deputies um that the sheriff has because we're looking at you know reducing by 11 deputies in this you know obviously that's coming from the Vista foot patrol but I see that as a restoration. I think the BSU manager um well before I get to that I think the co-response there's a real equity issue that I think that supervisor um Hartman highlighted. I think that even though it may not have the same amount of cases as we have in the south coast, I think uh you know it's one of those things where making sure it's available because we don't know when that crisis is going to hit in the north county and making sure that there's a team available for a family in need I think is is hugely important. So I I I support that. Um I know we had a conversation on the BSU manager and how that could be paid for. Um, and you know, I think I I heard that there might be MHSA dollars that might be able to be programmed there. And so, uh, I am

interested in maybe potentially funding it with MHSA dollars. Um, I don't want to see it necessarily move to Bwell, but I if those dollars can be used as a inner fund transfer between uh, Bwell and um, and the sheriff's department, I'm interested in finding an option there. Chair Nelson will definitely look at that. I I do believe I heard from the behavioral wellness director on Wednesday afternoon that if it is using their BHSA funding, she did not think that was that that would it would have to be a position funded in the be well department. But yeah, I'm going to want to see that further. Yes. Yeah.

So, um and getting to the MHSA dollars, you know, um you know, we it's one of the departments that a little bit more funded this year is behavioral wellness. um they they take advantage of general fund realignment dollars and um I would like staff, this is a recommendation, looking at are any of those dollars potentially something that could be reprogrammed potentially over to department of social uh social services for child welfare services. So um I don't want to punish behavior wellness for doing well, but at the same time we need to make sure that those realignment dollars go to where the needs at. Um, you know, I think we heard a really disturbing uh information about what's going to happen with child welfare services. Even if we we make the restorations, it's still very bare. And um so that's my final comments are is if we do have additional funds, um the two areas that I like to see restored is child welfare services. Um you know, I think for every million dollars, you know, they're about $3 million to getting back to where we are today. And I that's something that I would like to see happen if we end up having additional revenue based on uh the state's decision. Um these are some of our most vulnerable people in our community. These are the people that can't protect themselves and I think we have an obligation to protect our children in our county. So that's an area of uh of big support for me if those dollars do appear. And so I'm just kind of throwing that out there. Another area that I'd be looking at is um I am concerned about IA Vista. You know I you know losing those 11 positions. I just don't know what that world looks like. I don't know how that impacts the rest of the unincorporated area. And so that's an area that I I'm also interested in in potential restorations when we have a better look at our budget come June.

Supervisor Caps.

Yeah, I can tell you where I um where I am on that and potentially. So uh I think that I would like to propose restoring or uh half of it um now or at least exploring that now. A lot is in flux uh with the university as we've discussed here in this boardroom previously. Uh there's anou that hasn't been fulfilled on both sides uh that needs to be addressed with a new chancellor. Uh crime is down as we had a lengthy discussion about. Uh I think that this is a good opportunity. We just had Soultopia where crime was dramatically down. All of these things I think are an opportunity to really look at uh what it could look like. Um I don't want to make it out of you know starting from from a a place of scarcity uh as we do that but I think if we are able to support uh you know a a reduction that the sheriff has put forward already but uh restore half of that it's aligned with the crime reduction at half u either in one-time funds because of that uh exploration that's going and and onetime funds are 1.6 right now. So there it could be from there. I would challenge the sheriff's department to find the the rest elsewhere. It is a massive budget of 20 $223 million. I would hope that there could be uh savings in other places, contracts, etc. That would be my hope. Um it's been done before. So that is where I am and hope this the board could support that approach again with some time to work out a new arrangement with ISA Vista that shares more of the burden. Um a new arrangement with uh UCSB and again also

with Vista Community Service District really at the forefront of um reimagining or looking at how community policing could be. And so I just want to make sure I'm framing this correctly. We we know we don't have enough money for this at in in in April, but these are some aspirational things I think for the board for June if additional revenue is made available because the budget picture is better because right now we know we don't have enough money for additional child welfare services or Vista in this budget right now as presented. Am I reading you correct? Um CO

I mean that's correct. you're asking there's there's several things I would have said and if the board wanted to um we would basically say to restore with onetime money and and look for it look for the money but we you know it's you're right a lot of these things are aspirational uh we're just trying to figure out what would the recommended budget say right because right now we would be basically doing what we did with the preliminary budget with all those reductions and the restorations that you have affirmed right as the recommended budget and then a lot of these discussions will have to be probably pushed to June

and we may have to at cuts than other places to do this. I mean, that's kind of what I think Supervisor Hartman's getting to is like if we need to do that, we may have to look at a cut somewhere to be able to fund that. And so whether that's in the sheriff's budget or somewhere else that we have something discretionary, um I just don't want to one of the reasons why I was trying to lay that because I don't want to go say I want to cut this program libraries like our our library ladies that are here. Meanwhile, something could evolve, you know, and and I I know that I did the library thing as an illustrative issue on funding, you know, and that that's, you know, whether you believe it or not, we may be subsidizing cities or cities might be subsidizing us, but I was just throwing that out there is these are things that we don't necessarily have to do that we do do. And so, I think it's one of the things we have to compare those things. Is that more important than I Vista? We these are the decisions we have to make up here on this board. And um that's kind of the difficult sausage making. And so, but we don't know the clear picture yet. We still have more information that we need to know between now and June. And so, I don't want to get too far down the road on cuts to fund these things without that information at hand.

Yeah. And Mr. chair. I Yeah, I would also caution a little bit on that of of I I I think it's okay for us to come up with an aspirational list and say these are the things we want, but for us to look into the budget and try to identify areas that we think should be cut. Um, I think that's going to get problematic because these department heads have already gone through and identified what they wanted. Then it went to the CEO's office. They figured what they could sign off on and what they were okay with. And I know it's final arbiters, final judgment call, but I think we just really open it up again to, you know, a dog fight again. I think what we just say is, okay, these are our aspirational ones. If somehow it gets better between now and June, then they know which ones that we want to fund first. But I would hesitate. I already got in trouble for identifying something I want to cut, you know, and so I've had to live with that. So yeah, you know, identifying something you want to cut if we're not going to cut it, not a good place to be. So, you know,

serious Lee and we'll get some mean stairs when we go to our libraries. So, but I just want to say I'm supportive of Supervisor Cap's proposal for IV. I think that's a good just want to put that there and I I think we all understand what's going on there and but we again we don't have those those dollars yet and so we got to either try to find areas to cut between now and June or um potentially look at additional revenue sources between now and now now and June there. And if I may had, and the sheriff probably won't be surprised that I'll say this, my my wish would be that the sheriff's department would come up with that because I mean, he put forward these these positions.

Yeah. And I I think that's not necessarily the best idea to uh take out a division or, you know, and staff it differently. We've heard from, you know, at least one member of of Vista today. Um, do we need it all fully restored? I think that's a question mark. I don't think so necessarily. Let's explore it a little bit. Let's get UCSB back to the table. But I would hope that um that additional 1.3 million could be found found elsewhere within the department. So it's it's so is the the total cut to Vistafa patrol is that what's 2.6? Is that what that Yeah. So 1.3 is what you're looking for? Yeah. To try to find some restorations there from the sheriff's department.

The sheriff's department. So you're looking for the sheriff to identify additional cuts within his department. other programs that you would defund to to fund the foot patrol is what you're asking. Yes. Okay. As a representative of Isa Vista. Yes. I'm just making sure I'm clear on what what's what's being asked. Yep. I know that. So, help me with that budget process because especially with the sheriff, you know, he has a lot of independence on his budget and I know that we um have the power of the purse strings, but at the same time, I just want to know the kind of the function of that. Um,

Chair Nelson, if I can clarify, so how would the sheriff go about finding or if

I guess what's what's our ability to force additional cuts in the sheriff's department and identify those. I guess I'm I'm struggling with that and I I understand what Supervisor Caps wants. I'm sympathetic, but at the same time, process-wise, I'm not sure exactly how how we get that accomplished or or if we even if we do. Um I think the sheriff, like other departments, put up his cuts and um you know, I want to see them restored, but I don't know if I if I'm the guy to pick the spots and I don't know if I don't know if any of us are. And so we're I guess that's the thing that we're struggling that that's a high priority to us and I think that's what the sheriff is needs to hear from us is that's a high priority area and um you know he's got high his high priorities as well. Um so I mean I think it it would be our our department if we have this direction today to go work with the sheriff. We would go back and work with the sheriff and and work with him to identify areas that that could be proposed. Um, in the end it'll be a discussion point. Either we put something new in the recommended budget or it's brought back as a decision point in June um for your board ultimately to make.

Okay. So, I think we're I think Supervisor Cass is asking for additional discussion. Is that right? With budget staff and this and the sheriff's office. So, supervisors um

to the chair. Yeah. I think our what we're hearing you say is there's interest in restoring at least six of the positions at $1.3 million and asking the sheriff could he uh is there anywhere in his budget that he could find $1.3 million for that either ongoing or one time. So we would between now and June work with the sheriff and see um any ideas that we can both come up with and then there may not be agreement and we would bring that to the board about potential reductions or not. Okay. um or ask you know like we said if there's other pots of revenue that come to be between now and June. All right. I think that's that's the safe place to land today at with that without

I mean I that sound good. That's yeah abs I I I think a discussion is always healthy and I think you know options are always good for this board and um within whatever you know we have a certain amount of leverage but we don't have complete leverage and so I think that's got to be that we vetted out between staff and and the sheriff's department and I'll just again repeat one element of this is that uh conversations need to be reset with UCSB which will add hopefully maybe not uh capacity again maybe not But or maybe funds. Yeah, potentially. So, uh but right now we those need as we've identified um those are something the sheriff intends to do. So, okay.

Which is a good thing. Is that good enough direction for the staff? All right. So, what more direction do you guys Okay, Supervisor Hartman, do you have further on further No, no direction. I just have some closing comments when we're there. All right. Um, I want to make sure I figure out what our motion is. How about that? And then we can make some closing comments. Is that all right for you? Yeah. Do we need a motion?

We We do. We will need to make a a motion here. We have a recommended actions A through E, which is receive and file the information about uh the fiscal year 2627 preliminary budget. Confirm the recommended uses of the funds, which we did unanimously. uh provide direction if any regarding other items to be addressed or included in the executive or the CEO's recommended budget, which we have for June 16 and 18, and provide direction, if any, regarding special issues or other items, and we've done that here. Um do you feel like you have clear direction from these conversations? I I know it gets a little murky, but we've been trying to we've been trying to dial it in a little bit.

We do. We appreciate um we appreciate all the hard work that all the departments do and your board has. It's been a long week. I think we have enough direction and again it's to prepare a recommended budget for your decisions in June. Okay. And that also includes the uh recommendation on the jail housing of one and a half pods um and uh the um IRC. I second that motion. Okay. And then also it's not a project under SQA. It's number E. So that's that's my motion seconded by my vice chair supervisor Hartman. further discussion or closing uh comments. Supervisor Hartman.

Well, um this is a tough year and it's been really really tough for department heads and and budget staff in the departments and uh our CEO ACCEOs, our budget director. I think I think you've done an extraordinary job. Uh this could have been so much worse and what you have here is pretty much unonymity. uh and and I had no idea when we first realized the extent of what we're facing how we would ever get to this point. And I think it really goes to the quality of the work and the leadership. And it it I just had to say that because um I I thought we might be tearing each other's hair out out here. And it's

touche. Somebody got to Roy first. So anyway, heartfelt gratitude. All right. Thank you, Supervisor Hartman for those comments. Supervisor Lavanino.

Thank you. I you know, as as well as we think it turned out, there are still going to be significant amount of people that unfortunately, you know, due to circumstances really beyond our control that are higher than us are are we're going to be putting some employees in a really difficult place. So my um my direction would also be to um make sure that as we get closer to finalizing this budget that folks are identified as soon as possible and we you know work through that system as as humanely as possible and try to do our best to find people landing spots somewhere else inside the county to the greatest extent that we can.

Supervisor Caps. Well, we're um we've all been in this room together for about 24 25 hours this week. So, I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend full of outdoor light. No, you started out. No, nature, outdoor light, uh as much as possible. But, uh yeah, this is this is tough stuff and we're doing our best. We're all I think every single person is doing their best. Thanks. Thanks, Supervisor Cap. Supervisor Lee,

I I hear stories previously about previous boards fighting over money, but I didn't see that here. I see adults in the room figuring things out, respecting and working each other. So, I appreciate that and I appreciate everybody for the hard work and comments cuz this is not easy. This is affecting so many lives, but we are doing our best. So, thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Supervisor Lee. And um yeah, I came into it thinking I'm there's a good chance I wasn't going to support this budget, but I'm actually understanding it better. I think that's what this last week has done is helped me understand the challenges that we're all we're all facing as a board and I think that this is the most prudent budget possible where we're both trying to protect the the safety net and public safety. I mean those are big huge challenges and and I also we're making huge strides um on you know big projects in the same budget as well. And again, I want to remind us that, you know, this tough as this is for us, I'm I'm hearing from counties throughout the state, it is way way way worse for those counties. And it's part because they have not um been preparing for these days, these rainy days like our county has. And um so that's much more volatile. And I'm just really happy that we've been able to keep um you know, working towards conservative budgets with a uh with an excellent um second to none uh budget team. I think it's really important for all us to continue to advocate at the state level between now and June. Anybody that we know up there that um about the SEESAC ask that all the counties are asking for the state to come through with additional funding for some of the commitments that are really their commitments that are falling on counties. And so we're asking for them to step up because if they step up, this is a different picture in June. And so that's a that's a big um thing that we all can be doing that can have real impacts on this ne on this year's budget and on on the people of our county. So, just want to kind of leave with that final remark. Supervisor Hartman.

Oh, well, I I appreciate the board letter, you know, reminding us that even in these difficult times, we're making continued progress on a number of our long-term initiatives. uh and those include um you know the homeless, it includes criminal justice, it includes sustainability, um uh it and so I we all have to keep motivated that we're sort of still on the cutting edge in some ways and I I think we are and uh and um I I glad Supervisor Lavanino brought us back to the people whose lives this affects and I I have a lot of confidence in our HR are professionals. I think that they are um really humane and can help in this transition and help people get into different jobs that stay with the county to the extent we can.

All right. Thank you, Supervisor Hartman. So, with that, I think we need to take actually a motion on that. Um actually, we don't need to do a roll call. So, um we have a recommended action um that there's a motion by Nelson and a second by Hartman. All in favor signify by saying I. I. I. oppose. Motion passes unanimously. All right. Well, thank you everybody for a long week. We appreciate you guys' presence and input. Um, we are now adjourned. What? We we are journ uh April 21st in Santa Maria.