you you you is an education campaign designed to Ready was really built around the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready before an event, to move into the set posture when there's a red flag or a fire's near you, and then to go when it's time to go. Essentially, in its simplest form, it's a three-tiered community emergency preparedness plan. I have lived in this house, which we built by husband and I, 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the Hardy Plank, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fire is one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of state of California that said this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the ladder fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning, whether that be training, educating yourself, or accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and flammable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home, that first 100 feet, but also around the roadway too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home, and really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. That's going to be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's going to be using non combustible machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer, and that's used to disperse medication that I need to get myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries that have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained a pretty substantial battery from freed, and it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend it to anyone who might have medical needs that require power or really anything I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snow storm or a public safety power shot of you you you you you you you you you I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be I'm a doctor. I'm a doctor. I'm a doctor. I'm a doctor. I'm a doctor. I'm a doctor. I'm a doctor. I'm a doctor. I'm a doctor. I'm a doctor. I'm a obtained a pretty substantial battery from freed and it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend it to anyone who might have medical needs that require power or really anything. I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snow storm or a public safety power shot off, we really want folks to be thinking about, okay, what are the things I'll need on hand to whether the storm? Do I need to have candles? Do I need to have battery powered radio? Do I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So go back, could be anything. It could be a backpack. It could be a suitcase. It's going to be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets, if needed. That's going to have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go-back as the only resource you may have. Stores may be closed, the power may be out, so you may have to literally live out of this thing for a three day period as an evacuee. If you are someone with a disability, maybe you have a chronic health condition. For me, I have typhoon diabetes, I have an insulin pump, right? And so that's a critical piece that I need to plan for if I'm gonna ever evacuate or be away from my house, for any amount of time, right? What we find often is that if people don't evacuate with their CPAP machine, with their oxygen concentrator, with their wheelchair, walker, then it can be difficult on the other end. My name is Yelissie Spalencia. I work in the 211 call center. I'm just a resident of Grass Valley. I have two daughters, four-year-old and a one-year-old. In Nevada County 211 is available 24-7. So we provide for the community is information. That can be anything from directions to the resource centers. It can be letting them know where the fire is. You know, if they are themselves in an evacuation center, if it's a fire, if there's any information as to whether their power's coming back on during a PSPS, 2-1 gets the information that we provide directly from the county. So directly from the Office of Emergency Services. The whole team cares. We're all local community members. We all just want to help. So we were all sleeping in bed on Thursday, November 8th, and paradise. And first the house phone rang, picked up my phone. It was my sister who lived in a block or so away from us. We were welcomed by a telephone call from my daughter. She said that we were being evacuated. I left sooner than them. I had everything ready. They were on the way out the door. There was not time to think about what you're going to take, what you're not going to take. The night before the fire, I knew it was a red flag warning, and I knew that it was a high risk. So on my way home, I filled up the tank. Well, the way up, we didn't get too far from the house, and we're watching fire coming down the hill. There was a machine shop right to my right right there, and it had gas tanks and propane tanks. And I saw a lone ember kind of floating through, dancing through the air, and I watched it as it landed on the machine shop. In the time it took me to get my phone back into hand, and to take a picture it was engulfed in flames. And I knew that within moments, it would start exploding, and I would be dead. And just as I moved out of the range of the explosions, they started happening and I prayed for the people behind me. Ten minute drive, normally the Chico became almost four hours. So it was a long trip. We started to hear a pattern. People kept telling us their story of how they escaped. They camped fire. And they talked about how if it wasn't for my neighbor who came and knocked on my door to tell me there was a fire, I don't know that I would have gotten out alive. If it wasn't for my son who lives next door picking me up and putting me in their car and driving me out of there, I don't know how I would have survived. And so I started really thinking about this connection between isolation and how connected you are to your community, to your neighbors, to your friends, to your family, and how that can be really helpful in a time of a disaster. So we were actually the beneficiaries of someone making that plan in advance to have that group of people that they were going to call. And that she saved my life that day. So absolutely having that network really saved lives. Find your five, the ideas that, you know, find trusted allies that can be there and can be responsive and will check in with you if a disaster were to happen. So we recommend that you put people in your network that are down the street, that are maybe the next town over, they're outside the county, and maybe even outside the state. The final tier of the Ready Set go is that go piece and it's simply that it's go. Evacuation information comes in two types. The first type could be an evacuation warning. This is an essentially information that we're going to push out to the public, notifying them of a potential threat in their area where they may have to evacuate their home. An evacuation order is essentially that. We are telling people that it's time to go. There is an imminent threat to life and we do not believe that you have much time to leave the area. Code Red is a opt-in alerting system that will dial your number. It'll send you a phone call, a text message, and an email, notifying you of an emergency. That message is sent from our office, the Office of Emergency Services. It's going to be very targeted to your area and it'll be specific to you. At 513, the phone rang with the Code Red call. And so as I was going up 49, I could look over to the left and see the flames in the canyon. The next layer is for staff to actually be out driving in the areas with the high low siren. There's no other reason you'll hear that in an area unless we're putting out that evacuation order, not a warning, but an order. My day started, a routine patrol came in and I was notified by dispatch to respond out to the Jones Fire. Houses that had evacuation tags made it so we could just pass by. We knew that the residents had already been evacuated. Residences that did not have the tags, we would have to physically go in, knock on the door, look in the windows, make sure there were no occupants inside. Once you've been evacuated, as you're leaving, put this tag somewhere very clearly identifiable, whether it's a mailbox, a gate, your address marker, so that deputies and officers can quickly identify if your residence is already ben evacuated. I mean, you look out my back window here on the east side, and you see how close this fire came. It was certainly a shock, and at the same time, it was such an incredible relief to have the house as safe as it was. I mean, I think with personal preparedness and being ready, it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like a lot to do. And the most important piece is to just start with one little bite at a time. Just start the conversation, have some sort of plan. It can be as small as a meetup place, you know, a destination that everybody will get to, everybody in the household will get to if there's a disaster. Recognize you live in a community in a county that really does take the emergency response as a priority. We have worked diligently throughout the last few years on ensuring that not only our staff are trained and prepared, but we're also putting that out for our community. The more prepared you are in your own community, the better the outcome is going to be. The level of community awareness, they have to be part of the solution. They have to communicate with their neighbors. They have to be part of the discussion in communities. They have to support the response, the prevention, the education, and ultimately the collaboration and the engagement. People have to be engaged at all levels. The more you think about it now, the easier it will be when the time comes that you need to evacuate. We've created this network and we want you to make sure that you know that you can tap into So if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, not sure where to evacuate. We've created this network and we want you to make sure that you know that you can tap into that. So if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, not sure where to start, reach out to one of our offices, reach out to the Firesafe Council, or 2-1-1. We're here to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. you [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ The from the but here. From the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, a new hero will emerge. One who is ready. who make sure their friends and family are set. And has the power to go at a moment's notice. This fire season, you're the hero. We are Ready Nevada County. Nevada County has a new tool to make evacuations safer and more efficient in the event of emergency. This new tool is called zone haven and we need you to know your zone. In order to know your zone you need to go to community.zonehaven.com, type in your address. Once your address populates in the pop-up window, take that information and write down the zone that is given to you where you know you'll find it in case of emergency. Zone Haven and knowing your zone does not replace Nick's all and or code red. It actually supplements them and it makes those tools more powerful because you'll know what zones are being evacuated or which ones are being placed on advisory. And as a result, you won't have to do anything else other than listen to those messages and know if it's time to go. Even if you don't have internet, this could be done by word of mouth. It can be done by radio or it could be us driving down the street. So please know your zone. From trucky to lake of the pines, from Chicago Park to Spenceville, every single square mile of Nevada County has a zone. And having a zone that you know for your neighborhood is going to help you save time to be able to evacuate and keep you and your family safe. We're ready to have a county as an education campaign designed to help the public have successful outcomes during emergency events. We really focus on a whole host of disasters or emergency events. We want to have a broad spectrum. We want to be prepared for anything, but really we focus a lot on wildfire because we know that's one of the most likely events to happen in Nevada County. Ready set go is really built around the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready before an event To move into the set posture When there's a red flag or a fire is near you and then to go when it's time to go Essentially in its simplest form. It's a three-tiered community emergency preparedness plan I have lived in this house, which we built by husband and I, 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the Hardy Plank, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fire is one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of state of California that said, this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the ladder fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning, whether that be training, educating yourself, or accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and flammable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home, that first 100 feet, but also around the roadway too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home and really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. That's going to be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's going to be using non combustible materials on your deck and around your home. So when an embers storm comes through, it's not going to ignite your home itself. I currently live here in Grass Valley with my parents. All of us have a sleep apnea, so we all have CPAT machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer, and that's used to disperse medication that I need to give myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries that have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained pretty substantial battery from freed, and it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend to anyone who might have medical needs that require power or or really anything, I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snow storm or a public safety power shot off, we really want folks to be thinking about, okay, what are the things I'll need on hand to whether the storm? Do I need to have candles? Do I need to have battery-powered radio? Do I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So a go-back could be anything. It could be a backpack. It could be a suitcase. It's going to be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets, if needed. That's going to have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go bag as the only resource you may have. Stores may be closed, the power may be out, so you may have to literally live out of this thing for a three day period as an evacuee. If you are someone with a disability, maybe you have a chronic health condition. For me, I have type 1 diabetes, I have an insulin pump, right? And so that's a critical piece that I need to plan for if I'm gonna ever evacuate or be away from my house, frankly, for any amount of time, right? What we find often is that if people don't evacuate with their CPAP machine, with their oxygen concentrator with their wheelchair, walker, then it can be difficult on the other end. My name is Ulysses Palencia. I work in the 211 call center. I'm just a resident of Grass Valley. I have two daughters, four-year-old and a one-year-old. In Nevada County 211 is available 24-7. So we provide for the community is information. That could be anything from directions to the resource centers. It can be letting them know where the fire is. You know if they are themselves in an evacuation center if it's a fire, if there's any information as to whether power's coming back on during a PSPS. 211 gets the information that we provide directly from the county, so directly from the Office of Emergency Services. The whole the house phone rang, picked up my phone. It was my sister who lived, a block or so away from us. We were walking by a telephone call from my daughter. She said that we were being evacuated. I left sooner than them. I had everything ready. They were on the way out the door. There was not time to think about what you're going to take, what you're not going to take. The night before the fire, I knew it was a red flag warning, and I knew that it was a high risk. So on my way home, I filled up the tank. On the way out, we didn't get too far from the house, and we're watching fire coming down the hill. There was a machine shop right to my right right there, and it had gas tanks and propane tanks. And I saw a lone ember kind of floating through, dancing through the air. And I watched it as it landed on the machine shop. In the time it took me to get my phone back into hand and to take a picture it was engulfed in flames. And I knew that within moments it would start exploding and I would be dead. And just as I moved out of the range of the explosions, they started happening and I prayed for the people behind me. 10 minute drive normally the Chico became almost four hours. So it was a long trip. We started to hear a pattern. People kept telling us their story of how they escaped. They camped fire. And they talked about how if it wasn't for my neighbor who came and knocked on my door to tell me there was a fire, I don't know that I would have gotten out alive. If it wasn't for my son who lives next door picking me up and putting me in their car and driving me out of there, I don't know how I would have survived. And so I started really thinking about this connection between isolation and how connected you are to your community, to your neighbors, to your friends, to your family, and how that can be really helpful in a time of a disaster. So we were actually the beneficiaries of someone making that plan in advance to have that group of people that they were going to call and that she saved my life that day. So absolutely having that network really saved lives. Find your five, the ideas that, you know, find trusted allies that can be there and can be responsive and will check in with you if a disaster were to happen. So we recommend that you put people in your network that are down the street, that are maybe the next town over, they're outside the county and maybe even outside the state. The final tier of the Ready Set Go is that go piece and it's simply that it's go. Evacuation information comes in two types. The first type could be an evacuation warning. This is an essentially information that we're gonna push out to the public, notifying them of a potential threat in their area where they may have to evacuate their home. An evacuation order is essentially that. We are telling people that it's time to go. There is an imminent threat to life, and we do not believe that you have much time to leave the area. Code Red is an opt-in alerting system that will dial your number. It will send you a phone call, a text message and an email, notifying you of an emergency. That message is sent from our office, the office of emergency services. It's going to be very targeted to your area and it'll be specific to you. At 5.13 the phone rang with the code red call. And so as I was going up 49, I could look over to the left and see the flames in the canyon. The next layer is for staff to actually be out driving in the areas with the high low siren. There's no other reason you'll hear that in an area unless we're putting out that evacuation order, not a warning but an order. My day started, routine patrol came in and I was notified by dispatch to respond out to the Jones fire. Houses that had evacuation tags made it so we could just pass by. We knew that the residents had already been evacuated. Residences that did not have the tags, we would have to physically go in, knock on the door, look in the windows, make sure there were no occupants inside. Once you've been evacuated, as you're leaving, put this tag somewhere very, you know, clearly identifiable whether it's a mailbox, a gate, your address marker, so that deputies and officers can quickly identify if your residence is already been evacuated. I mean, you look out my back window here on the east side, and you see how close this This fire came. It was certainly a shock. And at the same time, it was such an incredible relief to have the house as safe as it was. I mean, I think with personal preparedness and being ready, it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like a lot to do. And the most important piece is to just start with one little bite at a time. Just start the conversation, have some sort of plan. It can be a small as a meet-up place. You know, a destination that everybody will get to, everybody in the household will get to if there's a disaster. Recognize you live in a community in a county that really does take the emergency response as a priority. We have worked diligently throughout the last few years on ensuring that not only our staff are trained and prepared, but we're also putting that out for our community. The more prepared you are in your own community, the better the outcome is gonna be. The level of community awareness, they have to be part of the solution. They have to communicate with their neighbors. They have to be part of the discussion in communities. They have to support the response, the prevention, the education, and ultimately the collaboration and the engagement. People have to be engaged at all levels. The more you think about it now, the easier it will be when the time comes that you need to evacuate. We've created this network and we want you to make sure that you know that you can tap into that. So if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, not sure where to start, reach out to one of our offices, reach out to the Firesafe Council, or 211. We're here to support you. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. you you From the pit hills of the Sierra Nevada, a new hero will emerge. who is ready. One who makes sure their friends and family are set. and has the power to go at a moment's notice. This fire season, you're the hero. We are Ready Nevada County. Nevada County has a new tool to make evacuations safer and more efficient in the event of an emergency. This new tool is called zone haven and we need you to know your zone. In order to know your zone you need to go to community.zonehaven.com, type in your address. Once your address populates in the pop-up window, take that information and write down the zone that is given to you where you know you'll find an incase of emergency. Zonehaven and knowing your zone does not replace, Nixel and or Code Red, it actually supplements them and it makes those tools more powerful because you'll know what zones are being evacuated or which ones are being placed on advisory and as a result you won't have to do anything else other than listen to those messages and know if it's time to go. Even if you don't have internet this could be done by word of mouth. It can be done by radio or it could be us driving down the street, so please know your zone. From trucky to lake of the pines, from Chicago Park to Spenceville, every single square mile of Nevada County has a zone. And having a zone that you know for your neighborhood is going to help you save time to be able to evacuate and keep you in your family safe. Ready Nevada County is an education go is really built around the wildfire most likely events to happen in Nevada County. Ready set go is really built around the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready before an event, to move into the set posture when there's a red flag or a fire is near you, and then to go when it's time to go. Essentially in its simplest form, it's a three-tiered community emergency preparedness plan. I have lived in this house, which we built by husband and I, 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the hardy plank, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fire is one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of the state of California that said this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the ladder fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning whether that be training, educating yourself or for accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and flammable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home that first 100 feet but also around the roadway too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home, and really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. That's gonna be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home, so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's gonna be using non combustible materials on your deck and around your home. So when an Emberstorm comes through, it's not going to ignite your home itself. I currently live here in Grass Valley with my parents. All of us have sleep apnea, so we all have CPAP machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer, and that's used to disperse medication that I need to give myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries that have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained a pretty substantial battery from freed, and it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend it to anyone who might have medical needs that require power or really anything. I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snow storm or a public safety power shot of, we really want folks to be thinking about, OK, what are the things I'll need on hand to whether the storm, do I need to have candles, do I need to have battery powered radio, do I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So go back, could be anything. It could be a backpack, it could be a suitcase. It's gonna be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets, if needed. That's gonna have food, you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets if needed. That's gonna have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go bag as the only resource you may have. Stores may be closed, the power may be out, so you may have to literally live out of this thing for a three day period as an evacuee. If you are someone with a disability, maybe you have a chronic health condition. For me, I have typhoon diabetes, I have an insulin pump, right? And so that's a critical piece that I need to plan for if I'm going to ever evacuate or be away from my house, frankly, for any amount of time, right? What we find often is that if people don't evacuate with their CPAP machine, with their oxygen concentrator, with their wheelchair, walker, then it can be difficult on the other end. My name is Ulysses Palencia. I work in the 211 call center. I'm just a resident of Grass Valley. I have two daughters, four-year-old and a one-year-old. In Nevada County 211 is available 24-7. So we provide for the community is information. That could be anything from directions to the resource centers. It can be letting them know where the fire is. If they are themselves in an evacuation center, if it's a fire, if there's any information as to whether their power is coming back on during a PSPS, 2-1-1 gets the information that we provide directly from the county, so directly from the Office of Emergency Services. The whole team cares. We're all local community members. We all just want to help. So we were all sleeping in bed on Thursday, November 8th, and paradise. And first the house phone rang, picked up my phone. It was my sister who lived in a block or so away from us. We were welcome by a telephone call from my daughter. She said that we were being evacuated. I left sooner than them. I had everything ready. They were on the way out the door. There was not time to think about what you're going to take, what you're not going to take. The night before the fire, I knew it was a red flag warning and I knew that it was a high risk. So on my way home, I filled up the tank. On the way out, we didn't get too far from the house, and we're watching fire coming down the hill. There was a machine shop right to my right right there, and it had gas tanks and propane tanks. And I saw a lone ember kind of floating through, dancing through the air. And I watched it as it landed on the machine shot. In the time it took me to get my phone back into hand and to take a picture it was engulfed in flames. And I knew that within moments, it would start exploding. And I would be dead. and just as I moved out of the range of the explosions, they started happening and I prayed for the people behind me. Ten minute drive normally the Chico became almost for a horse. So it was a long trip. We started here a pattern. People kept telling us their story of how they escaped. They camped fire. And they talked about how, if it wasn't for my neighbor, who came and knocked on my door to tell me there was a fire, I don't know that I would have gotten out alive. If it wasn't for my son who lives next door picking me up and putting me in their car and driving me out of there, I don't know how I would have survived. And so I started really thinking about this connection between isolation and how connected you are to your community, to your neighbors, to your friends, to your family, and how that can be really helpful in a time of a disaster. So we were actually the beneficiaries of someone making that plan in advance to have that group of people that they were going to call and that she she saved my life that day. So, absolutely, having that network really saved lives. Find your five, the ideas that, you know, find trusted allies that can be there and can be responsive and will check in with you if a disaster were to happen. So we recommend that you put people in your network that are down the street, that are maybe the next town over, they're outside the county, and maybe even outside the state. The final tier of the Ready Set Go is that go piece, and it's simply that, it's go. Evacuation information comes in two types. The first type could be an evacuation warning. This is an essentially information that we're gonna push out to the public, notifying them of a potential threat in their area where they may have to evacuate their home. An evacuation order is essentially that. We are telling people that it's time to go. There is an imminent threat to life, and we do not believe that you have much time to leave the area. Code Red is a opt-in alerting system that will dial your number. It'll send you a phone call, a text message, and an email, notifying you of an emergency. That message is sent from our office, the office of emergency services. It's going to be very targeted to your area and it'll be specific to you. At 513 the phone rang with the code red call and so as I was going up 49 I could look over to the left and see the flames in the canyon. The next layer is for staff to actually be out driving in the areas with the high low siren. There's no other reason you'll hear that in an area unless we're putting out that evacuation order, not a warning but an order. My day started, routine patrol came in, and I was notified by dispatch to respond out to the Jones fire. Houses that had evacuation tags made it so we could just pass by. We knew that the residents had already been evacuated. Residences that did not have the tags, we would have to physically go in, knock on the door, look in the windows, make sure there were no occupants inside. Once you've been evacuated, as you're leaving, put this tag somewhere very clearly identifiable, whether it's a mailbox, a gate, your address marker, so that deputies and officers can quickly identify if your residence has already been evacuated. I mean, you look out my back window here on the east side, and you see how close this fire came. It was certainly a shock, and at the same time, it was such an incredible relief to have the house as safe as it was. I mean, I think with personal preparedness and being ready, it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like a lot to do. And the most important piece is to just start with one little bite at a time. Just start the conversation, have some sort of plan. It can be a small is a meet-up place, you know, a destination that everybody will get to, everybody in the household will get to if there's a disaster. Recognize you live in a community in a county that really does take the emergency response as a priority. We have worked diligently throughout the last few years on ensuring that not only our staff are trained and prepared, but we're also putting that out for our community. The more prepared you are in your own community, the the outcome is going to be. The level of community awareness they have to be part of the solution. They have to communicate with their neighbors. They have to be part of the discussion in communities. They have to support the response, the prevention, the education, and ultimately the collaboration and the engagement. people have to be engaged at all levels. The more you think about it now, the easier it will be when the time comes that you need to evacuate. We've created this network and we want you to make sure that you know that you can tap into that. So if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, not sure where to start, reach out to one of our offices, reach out to the Firesafe Council or 2-1-1. We're here to support it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. you you From the pit hills of the Sierra Nevada, a new hero will emerge. One who is ready. who is ready. One who makes sure their friends and family are set. One who makes sure their friends and family are set. And has the power to go at a moment's notice. This fire season, you're the hero. We are Ready Nevada County. Nevada County has a new tool to make evacuations safer and more efficient in the event of emergency. This new tool is called Zone Haven and we need you to know your zone. In order to know your zone you need to go to community.zonehaven.com, type in your address. Once your address populates in the pop-up window take that information and write down the zone that is given to you where you know you'll find it in case of emergency. Zone Haven knowing your zone does not replace Nixel and or Code Red. Let me get my chair stuff together here. Okay. We're calling our meeting to order March 25th Board of Supervisors meeting and I'm going to ask our distinguished guest Pat Ward to lead us a robust pledge. Thank you. All right. Madam Clerk, are there any corrections or deletions to the agenda? Chair Hall, we do have one change. Agenda item number 20, which is SR 25-0126. Social Services, eligibility and employment week is being removed from consideration. It will be brought forward to a board meeting in April. Great, thank you very much. All right, then we are going to move straight into the consent calendar. Today, their items 1 through 18. These items are expected to be routine and non-controversial. So we'll act upon them at one time without any discussion. Do any board members have any items they want to remove? No. Okay. And they were going to open public comment on items 1 through 18. And if you want to call in with any comments on that, do so now. Any comments on items 1 through 18? I'm clerk any phone callers? No callers, chair. Okay, we'll close public comment on consent and I'll call for a motion. So moved. Second. All right, move a motion and a second. District five. Yes. District two? Yes. District four? Yes. District three? Yes. District one? Yes. Thank you. That's been passed. So we'll move on. I think we're going right into, wait a minute. We have a presentation first. Sorry about that. Okay. We're going to have us give a certificate of recognition, celebrating Rotary Club of Grass Valley for over 100 years of Rotary service above self to the citizens of Nevada County. And I'm gonna turn it over to my colleague, Lisa Swarthout, to introduce the item. So good morning. It gives me great pleasure to get to sit up here today as a Grass Valley Rotarian and award the certificate to my Rotary Club of Grass Valley. I think Jesse and Sean are you guys going to want to come down to the hot seats. Come on, Jesse, you've been there many times. I'm going to read the certificate because I think it really captures the essence of what this rotary club and rotary in general is all about. I joined the club, maybe three or four years ago, I can't remember 2021, I think. And while I have a difficult time making it to the meetings, I'm a very committed and it's been great to work with all of you and all the people. I really appreciate that. And then there's actually several members of our county staff who are part of this the club. So the County of Nevada Board of Supervisors takes great pleasure in recognizing the Rotary Club of Grass Valley, California on their Centennial celebration for over a hundred years of Rotary service above self to the citizens of Nevada County. In 1925, 25 local leaders in Grass Valley inspired by rotary international commitment to public service, ethical business practices, and fellowship started a rotary club dedicated to improving their community. Throughout the years, the club has prioritized addressing local community needs. Early projects include support for scouting with members, support for minors, and donating to charitable causes, especially those which helped with medical costs for residents in need. As the organization grew, projects remained focused on enhancing the quality of life for residents in the region, even during challenging economic periods. The club prioritized paying for surgeries, medical care, transportation, and related medical costs for deserving youngsters in the county. Additionally, ongoing financial support was provided to the Salvation Army, Boy Scouts, Red Cross, Minor Relief Funds, Christmas Children Funds, and the Infantile Parallel Assistance Fund. During World War II, the club supported the war effort through various initiatives, such as organizing blood drives, collecting scrap metal, helping military families, supporting troops that can't be all, scouting events and the development of an athletic field at the fairgrounds. I wonder what happened to that. Post-war, the club also became increasingly involved in rotary international's global initiatives, including efforts to combat polio through vaccination programs, international exchange programs for students and professionals, and disaster relief efforts around the world. Into the 21st century, the club has prioritized environmental sustainability such as projects promoting recycling, conservation, and renewable energy. Throughout its 100 years of service to the community, the members have remained committed to the values and principles that have guided the clubs and sits inception. Therefore, the Nevada County Board of Supervisors takes great pleasure in congratulating and celebrating the Rotary Club of Grass Valley for its many contributions to the citizens of Grass Valley and Nevada County. it's-year history of rotary service and wishes it well as it continues its long tradition of rotary service above self. So thank you for all the things that you, the club is doing in the community and some great events coming up. I believe the bike, the bike ride is in June, and then we just sit our casino night event in February and the club is very active in, you know, used activities and all the things that we've talked about in this certificate recognition. So I'd love to open it up if you guys have any comments. We have a grass Valley rotary like to thank Nevada County. It's been a long story to history here and we look forward to many more years of providing service above South. Thank you. Jessie. Yeah, I would also like to thank the board for recognizing this. I think it's important I would echo those comments by Sean and just only having been involved in rotary for the past few years, moving into Nevada County. It's just truly impressive. The amount of good work that people like Pat Ward and so many others in this rotary club and then rotary clubs across Nevada County I mean across America internationally. I didn't have much of a background in rotary so just the amount of work that they do on behalf of the community Self selfless work is truly impressive and to think that this has been going on for a hundred years in Nevada County Is certainly worth the recognition so so again, thank you to the Board at large. Yeah, thank you. I'll just turn to my colleagues for comments as well, but most communities need volunteer organizations like this, but we excel at that in Nevada County. So many great voluntary organizations, the Rotaries have been amazing how many projects you do locally and across the globe, and to have survived for a hundred years, everything is also really impressive. Cannot appreciate you more, you and all the folks who participate in the Rotaries and give a lot of their time. So I want to thank you as for that great achievement. And I'm gonna turn it over to my colleagues Sue. Do you wanna come in on this? No, just congratulations and thank you for the continued work. Art, you know, there's many of Rotaries that you guys that everyone's spun off from as our little communities. And just the work and the camaraderie that goes into that, I totally enjoy my time there. So thanks for doing what you do and continued wishes for good stuff in Nevada County and the world actually. So thank you. Hardy? Yeah, thank you. Congratulations. I have a funny rotary story in Grouse-Tolly rotary. I'm a Rotarian, a long time Rotarian, and I just wanted to thank all the Rotarians in the world that's incredible. You know it's fun because you go to a rotary meeting and it's like a club of black-minded individuals. It's fun, but you're also doing something to help somebody else, and I can't. I was marvel at how much time Rotarians put into that endeavor. I mean, there's people that will come between two, a meeting one week and then come back the next week and they've described all the things they've done and it's truly incredible. And giving away money, right? To our organizations and supporting the community. The very first, my first meeting to Grass Valley Rotary, I had won in the primary, but I wasn't seated yet. And so I reached out to Ed because we also run big brothers big sisters and He invited me to Rotary so our club has this tradition of never letting a guest by their own lunch So I can't bring you I couldn't bring Jesse as a guest Jesse can buy his lunch off to pay for his lunch So when I went into the breakfast meeting I looked at Ed which I didn't really know Ed and I said do you guys have a Tradition here of not what in guest by lunch and you looked at me and you just said, nope. And I thought it was great and we started laughing anyway. I told them waiter that we have a tradition so then when he came to my rotary in a trucky which everybody knows Ed, Scofield in trucky rotary. So it was really fun. Yeah, rotary is awesome. And in the long term, philanthropic endeavors of rotary to provide clean water and to solve polio are absolutely miraculous if you're not familiar with that story. Basically, the eradication of polio and many of its kind of ancillary effects were kind of taken on by rotary is this global piece and it's truly amazing. And so anyway, thanks to Rotary and thanks to Grasvali, I hope to come back and I'll pay for my lunch. And I'm not wearing my Rotary pin, so I owe you a fine. You can find me. I'm a terrible Rotarian. Hardy, if you come to Grasvali Rotary, I'll buy you lunch. Oh, nice. Thanks. I'll do the same in trucky, but yeah, I'm a terrible Rotarian. I go like every third meeting and when I'm there I owe a lot of money and So I just pay I stop making excuses now. I just pay for it. But congratulations to you in 200 years. Rob. Yeah, what a great organization. Thanks, Lisa, for bringing this. I've got fun memories. So my dad was a Rotarian for 20 plus years years alongside Ed in the 80s and 90s. And it's kind of telling, I looked back up my childhood and kind of the two constants where he was going to be offline every week as an airline, an Air Force pilot, and he was going to be at Rotary. And they were like, you know, very important to him. And beside the local community stuff, which is awesome, Hardy kind of mentioned the kind of global scale of it. And I know he really enjoyed he'd be out of town on a trip flying for United. And he was going to miss it here the meeting. So he would attend one in various other cities and towns. And I think he really felt that camaraderie. And so it's not just here, it's all over. So what a great organization and yeah, keep up the good work. Thanks, Sam. I'll have to add that I was supposed to join the Nevada city rotary and I tried so hard. They were so great. Like no, it's okay if you can't make all the meetings. And I would look at the calendar like the next six meetings I couldn't make. So I just said, I can't do it, but I really look forward someday to joining as well. Allison, did you want to make a comment on this too? No, I'm a member of the Nevada City Rotary and I really appreciate the work but you just like at this crowd and I just see the people are here representing Rotary are just providing leadership on so many levels professionally and then post and retirement. I mean, Marsha, Monti, and Pat, you just continue that sense of public service into your retirement and it's greatly appreciated. Thank you. All right. I'm going to open it up to public comment on this item. Anybody want to comment on the 100 year anniversary of Grass Valley Rotary? Any callers? No callers? Sure. Okay. We'll go ahead and close public comment. We don't have to take a vote, but we'd love to take a photo. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to do it. All right. That was excellent. I love it when we can start off with a positive. And see, now we're going to go into public comment. So members of public comment, of the public, she'll be allowed to dress the board on items not appearing on today's agenda. So if there's something on the agenda you want to talk about, you have to save your comment for that item, please. The speakers are encouraged, but not required to give their name and district of residents. Please direct your comments to the board, not the audience or staff, and you get one bite at the apple one time for three minutes. And if you want to call in to make comments, please start calling in now so we can put you in line. And let's open it up. Hi, my name is Zach and I'm here today to urge the county to take immediate and meaningful action to protect our community from the escalating threat of a tour of human and civil rights posed by the federal government. I'm aware that there's a plan to share information on immigration and deportation for the next board of supervisors meeting on the 8th. And I'm requesting that in addition, the county draft and share new policies of noncooperation and protection for our community. The federal government is illegally detaining and deporting citizens and non-citizens alike and some are being targeted directly for speaking in opposition. for our community. The federal government is illegally detaining and deporting citizens and non-citizens alike, and some are being targeted directly for speaking in opposition to the administration. This is extremely serious and dangerous. The conditions that people are being held in within the U.S. as well as in the Darian gap in Panama and in El Salvador's in Femis, C. C. Cot Prison are inhumantly brutal and deplorable. There's a lot of our community can and must do now to protect people here. The impact is already being felt in this community and residents are moving into the shadows out of fear. Some things that should be included in this policy are that county's resources will not be used for the enforcement of federal immigration law that no agreement under Section 287G of the INA to deputate local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws be approved. That a standard of non-cooperation with civil detention retainers be adopted and that anyone processed through our criminal justice system information be protected. That access to essential services and programs be guaranteed, and that no public employee may inquire about individuals' immigration status. And that no law enforcement officers may assist or cooperate with ICE investigations or actions. The recent CBP are actively working outside of the law in legal framework and this out overreach must be taken seriously and proactively. If civil rights aren't enough of a reason, a study in 2017 showed that cities and counties that adopted sanctuary policies had lower crime rates, higher medium household income, 2.3% lower poverty rates, 2.6% lower rates of dependence on public assistance, 2.5 higher labor force participation, 1.1% lower unemployment and 3.1% higher employment to population ratios. There's a lot of people in the community already working on this. I'm sure you know who they are. I hope you know who they are. Please reach out to them. It's extremely important that we act quickly and creatively and maybe a little outside of our comfort zone, because the threats are really dire and they are not going to get less dire. Thank you. Thank you, Zach. Surely I was good here from District 3. Yes, what Zach said. I'm there. On all of that, but I can't move on from the other issue that is burning in my heart. What did I do last week? I spent five hours trying to give my opinion about what our tax dollars are doing in Gaza to battle Palestinians to Kevin Kylie. I stood in line three and a half hours upstairs and I can't remember what the other hour was or hour and a half. I called them on the phone. I stood out on the street. I called our president. I called our senators. And nobody at that, any of those levels, seems to be concerned. I went to the indivisible meeting at the Miner's Foundry. And I missed the first few minutes, and I missed the last few minutes, but for the hour, over hour that I was there, I never heard anyone speak up for Gaza or Palestine. Yes, what's happening in our federal government is incredibly important, but I can't move on because I know that my tax money probably yours too and many people here paid for the killing last week of 270 children out of the 700 Palestinians that were killed. This is babies. We're talking babies being blown to smithereens with our tax money and our weapons. I can't move on from this. There have been over 50,000 Palestinians killed since October 7th. And mostly women, children, innocent civilians. This is only people that we can name, where body parts identifiable were brought into the hospitals. This doesn't include the children that were blown to smithereens, with no as we used to say during the non-days days which I don't know if any of your old enough to remember no remains. People with no remains they were blown to smithereens are there buried under the rubble. Why is it our business? We have a local air force base that is a Supreme ISR Base, which is supporting our allies around the globe, no doubt Israel. And perhaps some of you have heard of the term collective responsibility. When part of a group that you belong to is doing something that you know is not right, you need to collectively speak out. The United States of America is part of our group. Thank you. Thank you, Shirley. All right. My name is Don Fraser. I live in Nevada City. I've come up here and spoken a number of times asking for a ceasefire in arms and barger resolution. There was a so-called ceasefire in Gaza, but the Israelis broke it and have renewed the carnage. It was really a surprise attack in early morning hours. I have 16s and I have 35s attacking people sleeping in tents. I mean, this is equivalent to shooting fish in a rain barrel. These people have no air defense systems. They're civilians. They can't fight back. This is ridiculous that we support this. They cut off the electricity, they cut off the food supply, there's no tents coming in, there's no medical supplies coming in, and there's no water. To me and people, the aquifers contaminated, you're going to have thousands of people dying at dehydration. Maybe it's more humane to bomb them, I don't know. This situation is terrible. And then in the West Bank, the genocide just moved over there. Every single day settlers come into the villages and attack Palestinians. Now I don't know, maybe some of you have lost land to imminent domain. How would you like it if you lost land to somebody with a gun? Get out of your house. I saw a video not very long growth in Israeli settler taking over Palestinian home and when the Palestinians were protesting he said, if I don't do it, somebody else will. How can we support this? Our tax dollars are supporting this. And maybe our county government is supporting it too. We might be investing directly in Israel. I suggest you check that out and see. We have investments all over. I don't know what they are. But if government, county government money is investing directly in Israel, that's even worse. I ask that you, you write up a ceasefire resolution and arms and barger resolution and pass it. We need to morally be on the right side of this issue. There'll be people that say it doesn't matter, what does matter where we stand and what we stand for. Thank you. Thank you, Don. Good morning. My name is Jeffrey Gautisman. I'm here from Jewish Voice for Peace and the Peace and Justice Center of Nevada County. I'm a district one resident and I'm here because now that it's really clear that the Holocaust in Gaza has resumed after a ceasefire, which wasn't really a ceasefire. I just am here to say that unfortunately it looks like all of you are missing in action on this Holocaust. We need you to pass a resolution to join the hundreds of other local communities that are saying that this is not the way we want our tax dollars to be used. None of these atrocities can happen without the air power, the bombs, the planes that our tax dollars are providing. just this week, were almost a thousand casualties from bombing of refugee camps and hospitals and those casualties are going to be people who die because in Gaza there is no antiseptic, there is no antibiotics, there's no anesthesia, so you have children having their limbs amputated with no anesthesia. This is what we are doing with our tax dollars, and this is why you need to step out of the local idea of what your jobs are and why you need to say not in our name. We also have a First Amendment problem. I'm sure you're all familiar with the Mahmoud Khalil case where the green card holder was abducted and sent to ice prison for deportation for speaking out against Israeli policy. This is coming back to haunt us in our own communities. I already know of people who've been silenced by this. And citizens are next who paid for that to happen? Her name is Miriam Adelson. She's the largest donor to the Republican Party in the United States. She's the largest donor to the Trump campaigns. She's an Israeli citizen who operates an organization called the Maca-Bee Task Force. And their mission is to try to eliminate criticism of Israeli policy in the United States. And we need you to stand up. Thank you, Joe. Good morning, Michael Taylor District 1. Two weeks ago, I talked about payrolls. Two weeks ago, Heidi, you talked about transparent California as not accurately documenting payrolls on certain cases, whether it be salaries or benefits. And I just want to point out that transparent California simply publishes what municipal's issue to the state of California. It accurately reflected you had two full time jobs for your first two terms. It also is accurately demonstrating that there's 30 employees, they're getting paid more than the sheriff and the under sheriff. I highly recommend that you guys take a look at try to figure out how in the world there's 30 people that are making more than the sheriff or the under sheriff. Amy Ironi, it makes more than sheriff. Craig Grishbach, OES director, or used to be, makes a lot more than the Sheriff or the under Sheriff. These payrolls are out of control. I brought this up four years ago, three years ago when Ed's Go Field was the chair. I said Ed, we don't know. They've doubled in six years. Where are we going to be in six years? Mr. Taylor, we know where we'll be in six years. Nope. So right now you guys are negotiating senior county staff's payrolls here in the near future. I'd like to point out or suggest, right now in time. I'd like to point out and suggest. We're also looking at the budget right now. I'd like to suggest that the 8.0% that the budget was increased for full time county staff be pulled back out of the budget for this next school year. I'd like to suggest that the county freezes benefits and pay raises. I'd like to suggest that you guys offer county staff a six month paid if they choose to take or to quit the county to offset the shortages that are coming up. Anyone on probation employment right now be terminated because we can't afford this next year to have these out of control, total financial compensation for county staff. And I would like to suggest, and I have multiple times, there's a citizens committee that are part of the budget process from the beginning to the end, as well as citizens be part of committee negotiating senior county staffs total financial compensations These total financial compensations full-time staff are 50% of our budget Eight point. Okay. Thank you Thank you We we've addressed the accuracy and inaccuracy of some of those statistics multiple times. We're happy to keep doing that. And we always appreciate your opinion, Michael. Thank you. Any other comments? Hello. I'm Henry Benjamin Winkler of Grass Valley. I wanted to give a rebuttal to the idea of our county having a ceasefire resolution. The cities of Grass Valley and Nevada city adopted resolutions along these lines. And what is not included is very telling. Israel is condemned in these resolutions. Hamas has mentioned but not condemned. But what about the other participants in the war there? The El-Keson Brigades is not mentioned. The El-Kides Brigades is not mentioned. Abdu-Ala-Mustafa Brigades are not mentioned. G-Hod-Jibber Brigades are not mentioned. The National Resistance Brigades are not mentioned. Nassar Salah El-Den brigades are not mentioned. El Asquad brigades, Marders brigades are not mentioned. Holy Warriors, the Tenzin are not mentioned. El-Answer brigades are not mentioned. These are all participants in the attack on Israel, and Israel was forced to have a defensive action. Also not mentioned in those, in the proposed ceasefire resolution for Nevada County, for Nevada County, the city, pardon me, the countries of Lebanon. ceasefire resolution for Nevada County. The city, pardon me, the countries of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, all these attacked Israel following the invasion by Hamas, and these are not mentioned. So it seems like this is a very selective ceasefire resolution being proposed. So besides not having a jurisdiction for Nevada County to address this issue, You're being asked to have a one-sided resolution. It just seems a little anti-Semitic to me. Thank you, Benjamin. Do we have any colors? No colors, Chair. Okay, any more public comment? Coming to public comment? Nope. Okay. We're going to close public comment. Excuse me and bring it back to our agenda. Thank you, everyone, for participating. We're going to move into department head matters and we're going straight to item 21. The resolution proclaiming April 7th through 13th, 2025, as public health week in Nevada County. And we have our public health director, Kathy K. Hilt. Come on up everybody and Kathy, you'll introduce everybody. Yes, our representation. Thank you. Thank you, Board, for having us today. This is our opportunity to share with you some of the highlights of public health this last year. Public health week is a national week that really supports the idea of the future of public health and keeping it strong for everything we need for the future, as well as really showcasing the work that public health does. Which oftentimes is not always obvious, and I think our role in Nevada County has been really to work with our partners, our healthcare industry and the citizens here to really improve the overall wellness of our community overall. So today we want to highlight some of those. We're going to talk a little bit about our new community health assessment, which is our CHAW, which you will get copies of, which is our assessment we did earlier last year, which then moves into our CHIP, which is our Community Health Improvement Plan, which I'll talk a little bit about. And then, Tony Gavon, who's our Health and Wellness Director, will talk about youth-focused programs that the Health and Wellness team does. And then, Char Weissel-Winsel is our nursing director, and she's gonna talk about some of the work that we do in communicable diseases, infectious diseases, and other areas that are protecting our health. And last but not least, Kim Stein, our emergency preparedness director, who's going to showcase some of our work with our hospitals and health care providers in the county to get them ready for emergencies, whether they be fires or hazmat or other events that might threaten the infrastructure of our healthcare. So with that, let me move to our chart chip. Before I do that, I wanted to highlight a little bit. We, this year embarked on a new vision mission and values for the public health department. Why? We realized last year that we had over a third of our staff was news since about three years now that came in during COVID. Many people have retired obviously and are less the county over the last five to six years. So we had a fairly new staff and we really wanted to look at where we're going in public health now that post-COVID but also how do we provide more services in the community. So this is our vision and mission. I'll just highlight, I think what's really important here is that we're focused on trust and building trust with our community. We're focused on innovation and creativity because we can always do things better and more efficient. And most importantly, what's important is our well-being and making sure that we're providing our services in an equitable fashion to all the citizens of Nevada County. This is our cha and I said I'll give you the highlights in the booklet that will go out. But what happened is we did community assessments with a lot of our partners. We had a number of organizations contribute to the data and information. And we did public focus groups around the county. And these are the basic themes that came out, obviously continuing to make important the access and delivery of health care, our colleagues in behavioral health and all the work they're doing to improve the mental health and substance use in this county. And then the importance of community connections and social networks, and then our preparedness and maternal and child health. Out of that, we developed our community health improvement plan, and here are just three of the major areas we're focused on. On the right, you see all of the partners and many more that aren't here who are working with on our chips. So we have a coalition. The first coalition is really working on expanding access to health care and social services by meeting people where they are. And that means we're going out to communities. We're going to schools. We're using our mobile health fan. We're working with Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital, who is also looking at contributing with urgent care van this next year and coordinating services there. So we're really excited about some of the work that we're doing out in the community. And Toby and others can tell you more about that in a few minutes. And then second, we're working with the school district in a number of child care organizations, everything from head start to schools and others to improve early learning in child care in the county. And I don't need to tell you, but the importance of early development of a child is really critical to that child's future. And so we do have unfortunately not as many opportunities for parents to have a daycare in childcare. And we're working with the schools to hopefully increase pre-K enrollment so we can have more kids into pre-K. And this coalition is really focused on bringing advocacy and awareness to the importance of early childhood learning. And then lastly, we're trying to increase our childhood immunization vaccination rates. Many of you are aware of the current measles outbreaks going on around the county. We are taking a lot of action right now to not only improve our rates, but also work again with our schools and providers to increase their awareness and their detection of cases of measles or other diseases that come up. So we have, get on top of it before it gets going. Fortunately, California has a few cases of measles right now, but most of those have come from foreign travel and there's been none in our region as of today. Last let me just say a little bit about our new logo we care. We did this last year as a branding exercise and you'll see it on many of our materials. I want to thank Taylor and the PIO's office for working with us on this, but we really do care about the community and I will say this that the staff at Nevada County Public Health really believes this and shows it every day. So I'm really proud to get to work with a great team of people. Now I'm going to turn it over to Toby. Thanks, Kathy. Chair Hall, distinguished members of the board. My name is Toby gave on them the program manager for the Health and Wellness Division of Public board. My name is Toby Gave on them. The program manager for the Health and Wellness Division of Public Health. I have about three minutes to talk about our programs and how they serve youth. But if you ever want to chat for about three hours about those programs, feel free to stop by Crown Point. I'd be happy to chat with you. So we bucketed some of our programs into these categories and one thing in community health is we're really impacting so much of our program as family health, so much as school and community partnerships, but I'm going to highlight a few examples. Under family health, we have our WIC program, which serves over 1200 women, families, and children under five in the county with nutrition education, food benefits, and breastfeeding support to ensure our youngest children have a healthy start. Our maternal child and adolescent health program provides public health nurse home visits to new families, promoting positive parenting, child development, and early intervention for lifelong health benefits. Nutrition and food security, I mentioned the food benefits through WIC, but we also have our CalFresh Healthy Living program which provides nutrition education to youth in our schools and through community partnerships, including a really exciting food waste prevention education program that we have in partnership with Ruddy Springs. We support youth in over nine schools across the county through our primary prevention programs like Club Live and Friday Night Live, which provide education on alcohol and other drugs and teach life skills like positive coping strategies. And does that also create positive relationships between peers and caring adults at schools? We actually had some folks from some students from our Nevada Union, Friday Night Live chapter, who came to Grass Valley City Council to support efforts led by the Grass Valley Police Department, in partnership with our tobacco prevention program to limit access to nicotine products and nitrous oxide in the city of Grass Valley. Our public health nursing services for children, we provide immunizations in our California Children's Services program also provides case management and care to children with special medical needs. As the parent of a child with special medical needs who receives these services, including weekly occupational and physical therapy, I can attest to how profound and impact this program is having on our youth. For youth mental health and well-being, our suicide prevention program and partnership with behavioral health launched the mental health matters Nevada County campaign last year. We had that includes information about youth mental health and suicide prevention resources and then all of our work is really done with school and community partnerships. A great example of this is our oral health program which two years ago was providing screenings and supporting schools and reaching the kindergarten oral health assessment and has already expanded to a dental sealant program at school-based clinics in terms of meeting people where they're at and also is expanding into more preventative and intervention services later this year. Good morning, Chair Hall and board supervisors. I'm gonna be talking about our communicable disease and immunization team. So our approach to communicable disease protection is surveillance and investigation, public health nursing, strategic partnerships, and epidemiological data utilization. So two of our programs here in public health, our public health health department are a chemical disease, and prevention program, and our IZ team. We cannot talk about one without talking about the other. Both truly, it truly takes both to not only keep our community safe from infectious diseases, but also address, educate, and ent infectious diseases when the outbreak occurs. Our community disease team investigates and monitors infectious disease and works hard to prevent outbreaks in our community. We do this by working in close collaboration with our healthcare partners, congregate settings, and such a skill nursing facilities, our shelters and our schools. In 2024, there were 20,465 cases reported to our CD department, a very small and scrappy CD department. Specifically, we had 1582 suspected TB cases and though 25 were reported we had no active TB cases in 2024. Fortestas as we know we're seeing some cases rising 14 reports were investigated with seven Our GI, guess for intestinal diseases, we had 127 reports investigated with 78 cases. SDIs like Climidia, gonorrhea, and syphilis, I'm sure you've heard the reports of congenital syphilis, reyazine in our state nation. We have 382 reports, 202 were investigated, and 263 cases. Outbreaks investigated within Nevada County. We had seven COVID outbreaks in 2024, along with 16 non-COVID. Through surveillance, education and effective disease reporting, along with conducting clinics to administer immunizations, we're committed to protect, prevent, and promote the health and will be in our community. We know that it takes more than public health department to keep our community safe. We could not do it without our trusted partners. Our trusted relationships with our healthcare providers, our care facilities, school nurses, and family resource centers enable us to work together to address emergent health needs and threats. These relationships are what helped staff working through the pandemic reach a greater number of residents with information, the ability to isolate and receive much needed support, including food, protective equipment, and housing. Not all of our work is in response to disease monitoring and outbreak prevention. Republican nurses also promote awareness of new disease prevention programs and provide education to the community and our partners. Public health agencies rely on data from various sources to identify and control outbreaks. Monarcha disease trends and ultimately save lives, but face challenges with data,, timeliness, and completeness, especially since we are a very small community, very small county. Data collected as part of the public health surveillance system can be used to estimate the magnitude of a problem identified groups at higher risk of having poor outcomes, examine relationships between risk factors and outcomes, develop interventions, and with continued monitoring, assess the effectiveness of the interventions to modify the complications or outcomes. Numbatic and a public health department is committed to safeguard our community's health by preventing disease and promoting well-being. This is done through promotion and administration of vaccines, health education, and encouraging healthy lifestyles. Good morning, Chair Hall and members of the board. I'm Kim Stein and I know you are familiar with our amazing partners at the Office of Emergency Services. But this morning I'm excited to take a few minutes to highlight a much smaller program within public health that also focuses on emergency preparedness. The public health emergency preparedness program is a mighty team of three internally, but we are just one piece of the puzzle that makes up our emergency preparedness healthcare coalition, which is at over 100 members deep. Together, we work to build emergency and disaster resilience amongst our medical and healthcare community. This morning I want to highlight a couple of projects we worked on in the last year. But rest assured, this is just a glimpse of what we do, and I hope that I leave you this morning wanting to know more and curious about what we do in public health to bolster our community's disaster resilience. I want to begin by sharing an emergency drill we did in partnership with Tahoe Forest Hospital in the fall. I won't go into the granular details. Oh, that's okay. You can go back one. I won't go into the granular details of what we were drilling, but I will tell you that over 30 organizations participated representing local, regional, state, and neighboring state entities. We make an extra effort when working with our healthcare partners in Eastern County to be sure we engage our WASHO County neighbors. Their willingness to assist us in times of emergency can really tip the scales towards a positive outcome when our resources are drained in the Truckee Tahoe area. I can't accurately describe to you today the feeling that I had seeing our California Highway Patrol partners come together with Nevada State Patrol partners, our small Truckee Community Hospital come together with Renown Medical Center and our Fire and Law Enforcement Partners, combined with Reno fire and law enforcement partners to work together on one mission. And during this particular drill, the mission was to save lives by moving emergency pharmaceuticals from one state to another. A picture says a thousand words into the right here. You can see a picture of many of those participants outside the Tahoe Forest Emergency Department and we are celebrating when our two states successfully worked together to save many, many lives during this emergency drill. I will tell you this morning that this display of partnership, it was magic. Next slide please. Lastly, I want to highlight a project we did recently with the support of OES and Homeland Security Funds to upgrade our Western County Medical and Health Radio Infrastructure this last year. You may have seen, I hope you saw, our program analyst, Brett Fletcher, interviewed on CBS news about this project. But if you didn't see it, that's okay, because I'm here to tell you. It's the most publicity. This little program has gotten in a lifetime. So we are going to ride those 15 minutes until the wheels fall off. But truly, this project was also magic. This is because together with our partners at OES and the willingness of our hospital and health care partners, we were able to build up the resilience of our emergency communication systems, which, as you know, has a direct and positive impact on our disaster resilience. So maybe you get my justice morning. Our little program within public health, we are motivated to keep up the magic. Rest assured, our grantors asked us to do this work, but we are in it for more than just knocking out deliverables. We are committed to our community. We are committed to our partners and we are committed to bolstering healthcare resilience. So I hope this morning I have inspired you to learn more about our specific niche of emergency preparedness and how we continue to build and sustain a stronger Nevada County. Thank you. Thanks, Kim. Let me just say, I want to say thank you to Alison, Ryan, and the board for all the support that you give us every day, not just once a year. And also thank the great staff that I get the privilege to work with every day who are truly we care and truly committed. So I just want to say thank you to all of them too, and over to you for any questions. Thank you so much, Kathy, and staff, all of you. This is such an amazing department, and you do incredibly important work that as you say, doesn't really get highlighted except maybe one through twice a year here. So I want to express my deep appreciation for all of you. I'm really interested lately as I've learning more in my work with the state and the feds and how we get accurate information out to the public all the time on the threats, such as with measles or with emergency preparedness or any of these issues. So I'm hoping that you are working, have a robust process of working with trusted partners to get information out as needed. I know that's a huge part of your work, but I think that's gonna be coming more and more important. Yes, we agree. Two things we're doing on measles right now. We're having training sessions with health care providers and with school nurses in the next couple of weeks just to bring everybody up to speed on what's happening and also diagnosis and testing and what to do if a case happens, all those kinds of things. So it is an ongoing as Shara has pointed out. We never stop investigating cases that might be a threat to the community as well as preparing the overall infrastructure for a potential outbreak, whether it's measles or pertusses or anything else that comes along. So continuing to communicate is important. Thank you. Thank you. And I think I would like to ask that you keep us updated on how that's going. And don't forget that some of us have social media accounts, and we can help push out information from our own social. So thank you for everything you're doing. I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues for comments. Lisa. Thank you. Thanks for all the work that you do. I have two questions. One is when you mentioned GI outbreak, is that the technical term for food poisoning? Or does it encompass a lot of different? It encompasses more than a lot. Okay, good poisoning. But is food poisoning, is that something that public health deals with investigating, or is that environmental health? It, I would say in some ways, both. So environmental health are the ones that would be called in to do some investigation on it. However, if we were to see large numbers of people, we would put education out and try to promote it and work with the patients to make sure that they get what they need, the services they need, make sure that they have a provider that they have insurance. So we would be working with them on that. And then can you walk me through what a disease surveillance and investigation looks like? Like how do you actually, especially the surveillance component of it? What does that look like? You go to people's homes, do you go to their place of work, how does that work? So when we do an investigation, or we're doing surveillance on a disease, we depends on the disease, right? So say we had measles case, we did have measles, a case back in, I believe it was 2017 maybe March and then we had May so I called them the March and May measles. One thing we do is we look at all the people that this person may come in contact with you know be it they come in they fly into a into airport or if they go and stop along the way at a gas station or if they go into urgent care and then potentially if you set home and then maybe go back when things have not resolved. So as far as surveillance, we look at all the data that's coming into us for the California Department of Public Health. We look at the CDC. We look at what's going on in other counties, if they're having any outbreaks in other counties. So part of surveillance is just keeping our thumb on what's going on, keeping our ear to the ground, and investing, investigating all the cases that we get, which it takes a lot, even the ones that don't come out to be a true case, it takes still the same amount of investigation. Actually, sometimes it takes more because if it's a clear cut case, then we can go right into mitigating it. So I don't know if I answered your question, but when we do investigation, like I said, we're looking at where has the person been, how long have they been sick, what is the infectious period, how they've been immunized? How have the other people been immunized around them? So there's really a lot that goes into that surveillance and investigation. Thank you. Yeah, I think that that's, it's important to note that the surveillance covers doing the research on at a national, state, local level to figure out, you know, the trend in a particular disease. I think the word surveillance, especially if you work with people through this process who are uncooperative, which I'm going to guess that that occasionally will happen. It just, people are fearful of, you know, of government in general. So I just want people to know that there's no untoward behavior here, we're really trying to help with the health and safety of our community. And I give you a lot of credit. I didn't really know what public health did until I went through the Citizens Academy in 2019. And it's one of those departments in the county that if you don't need it, you really don't know about it. But boy, you know, the following year when COVID hit, we really needed it. So I really appreciate all the work that you do of educating the community, you know, from a scientific basis and, you know, working with the public to ensure their safety. So, and the breadth of things that you do from the youth things to the emergency preparedness, I think people don't realize when they're especially when there is an emergency. They don't realize that all these things play in together. And like I said, unless you need it, you don't really know about it. But when you need it, you usually really need it. So thanks for all the hard work that you guys do. Thank you. So no great presentation, thank you. And I know Surveillance is just a hard word, right? I think you have to take it in its context. And so that just so you know, that's just people like, oh, so but I love what you do. I just want to say thank you to Thinking out the box of things you do, right? You're working hard in my little area of North San Juan and you've made such headway Because trust comes into this. It's a huge trust factor and you guys show that and I love that you know You're you look through your lens of hearts. You're you're you're little I don't know what we call that, but hearts in the values, heart centered excellence. What all stands for, you guys, you just exhumate. And I think that's what's important. And for you to come into a little community that has such fear and make headway, just shows you how special you really are. I mean, not just they're all over pin valley, the work you're doing at Ready Spring Schools. There's just so many special places where I don't think people really how where the outreach just goes. You know, we just think of vaccinations, we just think of people being sick. And it's the work that's being done so we don't have those things happen, right? So I just like to thank you all, your staff, everybody is very special that works there you have to be, and how exciting to work with OES. That's incredible to bring two states together in an emergency situation like that. What a great experience for that. And I think that's something that we all work here. Every time we have something happens, we get a little bit better at what we do, right? And that's something that I you all have a part in. So thank you and what a great way to celebrate you this week. So thank you. Rob? you, right? And that's some that I you all have a pardon. So thank you. And what a great way to celebrate you this week. So thank you. Rob, no comments, questions? Hard to you any comments or questions? Yeah, thank you. I was looking back at the kind of the fun when the van got released. When the van first came out, we had the the deal out here in front. I learned a lot. I actually learned a lot today for hanging around here as long as I have, which isn't super long time, but I thought I kind of knew. But there's all kinds of new stuff in here that I didn't know, so thank you so much. Just a couple of quick questions. Toby, can you describe the interplay between your department and then mental behavioral health and how those kind of the two departments work together? Yeah, so we work really closely with behavioral health on a lot of the work that we're doing. So I mentioned the Mental Health Matters Nevada County campaign, which is MentalHealthMattersNC.com where you can get a variety of different resources. So we're the prevention arm, so we're out in the community, we're doing trainings on suicide prevention, on mental health, sharing resources, providing health education, working closely with schools, and then behavioral health. I mean, we partner with them on everything. They're oftentimes providing the direct care to folks and have this expertise that we also rely on in terms of how we're providing education and connecting with folks. So, yeah, I work every single day. My team's chat is filled with just communication about how to make things happen. And I think that's one of the key pieces is we talked a lot about community partnerships and collaborations that we have. But I think those collaborations with other departments within the county are just as valuable and it's just remarkable the work that behavioral health is doing. And we're just trying to make sure that the broader community knows about that, knows how to access it, and knows kind of some of the key health education information through the trainings or the materials that we develop. Yeah, thanks for mentioning that and I've participated with you on a couple of those calls which are really good to be and I would welcome inviting any of my colleagues to participate. It's really inspirational on the suicide awareness or suicide prevention training to be in some of those training exercises. But I think what I really respect about the work you do is it's kind of trying to avert these negative health outcomes if you let them kind of propagate. And so I think prevention is always like the key, right? And then Kim, thanks for pointing out your, I was familiar with that exercise that had occurred, but I didn't know it was so big. And with Nevada and in Truckee, we're closer to Reno than we are to Western County. So you forget that, but Incline and Stateline is just right there next to us. So thank you for making an effort to reach out to those partners because we need that cooperation. And the one thing I learned from COVID is that like a health emergency can turn your community inside out and upside down in so many different ways. And I know we've all, I have blocked it out. There's pieces I don't remember because it was so tough. But I think, you know, preparation is a key, right? And there's some saying, like, the battle plan doesn't mean anything until you're in battle, and then the plan was key or something. But, you know, it's really making those plans for the next piece that is going to, you know, challenge our community. So thanks for getting in there and doing it. And then one quick question I met with the What's Up Wellness Executive Coordinator, Mickey. And she was expressing some concerns about the funding around that program. And I was just wondering if in your travels you guys could work on talk to and think about how important that is, particularly in some of the underserved communities. Yeah, so What's Up Wellness is currently funded through the Mental Health Services Act, I believe, which is behavioral health, but I agree what's up wellness for folks who aren't familiar. They go into all the high schools across the county and provide screenings, mental health screenings, and then referral and case management to make sure that students in high school are able to get the care that they need and get that screening. So agree, it's an incredibly valuable program. One of our contractors is also a contractor with What's Up Wellness, Jen, Rewinders, who's a fantastic resource as well. So agree that it's an incredibly important service and we'll definitely make sure to talk about it and make sure people understand what it does in the community. Yeah, thanks. And if there's a threat to the funding or suspension of the program, can you just work with Allison to make sure the board understands their ramifications are? Absolutely. Thanks a lot. Great, great questions and comments. Thank you. We're going to open up public comment on this item. Anyone want to make any public comment on this topic and presentation? Any callers? No callers, Chair. Okay, we're going to close public comment. Thank you all so very much for everything you do. And knock on wood, we keep things under control this year. Thank you. Okay, give you a minute to move along. and then we're going to go to our next item. Everybody okay without a break? Anybody need a break? We need a break. That's what we got on this next. The MOU. To have an hour. I'll take a quick break. Okay, okay, we're going to move ahead. These guys have been waiting. So this is an item I'm bringing to the board for a resolution of proving an MOU between the County of Nevada and the City of Nevada City to support the continued legacy of the Miners Foundry Cultural Center and upon execution of this MOU, disclaiming county's interest an all all real and personal property granted under the Nevada County Cultural Trust, that was dated in 1989, and so on. So I want to welcome Jeffrey to give the presentation and our city managers and Nevada City Manager, Sean Grayson and city council member, Lou Cicie. Thanks so much for coming up here and I know you've been in the audience waiting. So we appreciate you. Go ahead, Jeffrey. Thank you so much, Chair. Honourable members of the Board. My name is Chef Knowsby, I am your Chief of Staff and I'm really pleased to be here with Council Member Cicie and... Can you hear me? City Council Member. Yeah, pardon me about that. So yeah, really pleased to be here. So yeah, bring forward to you today. As you mentioned, is a resolution approving a memorandum of understanding between the city of Nevada City to support the continued legacy of the Minors Foundry Cultural Center and executing that HMOU as well as disclaiming the county's position in part of the trust. So I'm just going to pry a brief background and turn it over to Sean to provide a little bit more in detail. So from a high level perspective, the minors foundryility in Nevada City is historic. It's actually in Nevada County Historical Landmark, NV21, that was back in 1974. And there's also the state registered in Landmark. It also has a lot of cultural significance for our local community. Including myself, I've spent a lot of time down in the Miners Foundry growing up here. And so I think a lot of people, it's really important to the community and to the city of Nevada City. Back in 1989, as you mentioned, Chair, the minus foundry was actually put into a trust. And this was the Nevada County Cultural Preservation Trust back in 1989 in the city of Nevada City and the county of Nevada where actually name is beneficiaries within that trust. The purpose of that trust was to foster and promote cultural and arts among the people of Nevada County, to preserve the county's historical heritage as relates to the cultural and arts and to the establishment fund, own and maintain and operate the facilities for arts and for related cultural, historical, and artistic nonprofit organizations in Nevada County. So that's what the Miners Foundry has been promoted and used for by the trust. Recently, the nonprofit organization, the Foundry is facing some challenges and has been working with the city. And I'll let Sean talk a little bit about that. But in recent negotiations, has offered to transfer that the minor's foundry in the property asset to the city. The proposal is the city would take ownership of the facility for $1. Been in discussion with the city, the county would be looking at relinquishing its beneficiary status within the trust as the asset will not belong to the city. In addition, the city and county have looked at developing the MOU before you today. And I will review everything in it, but I think a couple of key provisions within the MOU include continuing the operations of the facility, including its existing bookings for the community, expanding public value in the use of the facility through community informed public programming to honor the history of the facility and to promote its historical preservation. And also to pursue the installation of the facility-wide air conditioning and heating system capable of using the facility year round, and bringing the building into best practices in terms of heartening for the wildfire alignment of the city's defensible space and vegetation management. So I'll go and stop there and actually turn it over to you, Sean. And go ahead and talk a little bit about your procure. Thank you, Jeffrey. Good morning, Chair Hall, members of the board, Sean Grayson, City Manager, here in Nevada City. Thank you to your incredible staff for having us here today. In early February, which is not that long ago, it became apparent that the miners found a real cultural center was not going to be able to sustain under its current configuration. We've been in discussions with them for quite a while. And you can't pinpoint any specific thing that happened, but they lasted a lot longer than many of their contemporaries in the region and the state and throughout the country. They did that because we're pretty amazing community that likes to support the arts and support cultural centers. But at the end of the day, the facility couldn't bring in enough money to cover its costs. And for a variety of reasons, that has happened to a lot of nonprofits. But uniquely, this one says the county and the city are the beneficiaries of that trust. So we have a couple hundred registered nonprofits. And Nevada City, I'm sure all of them would love the city to offer to do something with those nonprofits. And while I would love to do that, there's not enough hours in the day, but uniquely, where this is the beneficiary. So we couldn't let that asset fall to the wayside. Really, we're in a situation where they were going to shut her doors and we would lose those bands that would come to play. We're going to lose the Wednesday night drumming, we're going to lose the weddings that were both there. And really, it might be impossible to get that back if they actually close their doors. So with the council's support, we jumped into a short-term lease agreements with the Miner's Foundry Cultural Center, both the trust and the nonprofit entity, so that the city could maintain its operations while doing a deep dive into its finances. And really our express interest is to preserve everything that Jeffrey already said, really the mission of the managed foundry. And for those of you that have been around, and most of you have been around as long as I have or longer, it wasn't always the mine for Founder Culture Center, right? It was American Victoria Museum before that, and it was a working foundry before that. But it's always been important to, as a cultural asset to the community, but our intent really is to preserve that building honor, the mission of the foundry, including the existing music venue bookings that have been there, and then to add public value through things like recreation, youth, seniors, and unheard voices programming. Well, as Jeffrey said, we'll pursue air conditioning for that facility in a number of other improvements, including the honoring the vision of the Miner's Foundry for a cafe at the top in the outdoor dining area as a purchase spring street there. On February 13th, the Foundry Board and the City Council both approved that lease agreement that I spoke about and then fast-forward one month and the Foundry Board just approved purchase and sale agreement with the City for the Foundry. It is for $1, but we acquired both asset and all of its liabilities. So there's loans on the facility. There's bands that have to be paid. There's a variety of activities that have to occur so the city acquires both the assets and the liabilities and the transaction with your action tonight. And city council's approval of that agreement tomorrow night. We anticipate that the foundry will wind up its activities with its last payroll on March 31st. At that point, the city will absorb all of the employees that are there and they'll become city employees and they'll receive relatively small raise of 5% to stay on board with us. They've all expressed interest in that, but if for some reason they won the lot on one and move out of town, we're not going to force them to stay there. So the MOU before you as Jeffrey outlined, I think is important to recognizing the facility's historical perspective and giving you and the community comfort that the city more on our commitments to that facility and Do more with it one of the things that's listed in there that we will do in addition to their conditioning and other Improvements is that we'll seek to place the actual facility on the national register of historic places While it's registered in a number of different things and it's in this Nevada City historical district the actual facility on the National Register of Historic Places, while it's registered in a number of different things. And it's in the Nevada City Historical District, the actual facility is not on the National Registry. Thankfully, there's some amazing volunteers that have already done the huge lifts to make that happen, so we'll be able to capitalize on that. So with that, I'd like to thank our City council, our committee on the topic, Mary Gery. Mary Gery, Peterson, who couldn't be with us this morning. Council member Lucie C. Well, hand the microphone over to you in a second. The board, of course, for your support and the protection of the foundry. And most importantly, our shared community who have come out in very large numbers. have had a couple of public events where we've asked people what would you like us to protect in the facility, what would you like to see in the future of the facility? And they've been, as you would expect, very vocal with what they would like to see there. So, Council Member C. C. Chair Hall and supervisors, thank you for having us here today. What you have before you is a very simple nuts and bolts, a sort of thing very, very quickly. If you have a beneficiary, you have to give that up so that we can take over. And that is a simple process, and I think Jeffries outlined it. And Sean has given you you but which you haven't gotten before you is the heart and soul of the Foundry. And we were amazed when we had an open public hearing about what is it you want the Foundry to do, what is it not doing now that you want it to do in the future, what's the future of the frownedy? We packed the stone hall with people, and they came up with brilliant ideas, many ideas. We filled up sheets and sheets, and it's all because people love this institution. And the city feels obligated and honored to be able to take it over and to make sure that this continues to be a cultural center for not just the city but for the county. Thank you. Thank you so much all of you and I'll just start by comments and by saying thank you for stepping up the way you have. It is very sad to see that it was having trouble staying financially viable. I think there's a lot of sadness around the change that's happened there and people who are losing their ability to be part of that institution. But this is such a great solution to the problem. And I could not be more grateful to the city for being willing to dig in as deep as they have and become such a big part of maintaining this iconic institution. This is in my district obviously, so I care very much about also maintaining its cultural significance, as well as the historical significance of that building itself. And again, this is a unique situation, not like many of the other arts organizations that we are in this trust relationship with the city, the county is. So we both have this obligation to do everything we can to help maintain and sustain it. And there was not a lot that the county could do about it. So we are just incredibly, I am personally incredibly grateful for all the work that you did, Sean, on this and the community input and the city council standing behind it and really saving it. And I think this future is bright that we're having a new infusion of ideas and people in more creative ways to help sustain it. So I'm really proud of this solution and again, very thankful. But I will turn it over to my colleagues for any questions they might have. And let's start on that end, Rob. Thank you for that. I just have, it may be a question for staff, for some clarity. So I agree with everything that's been said and recognize the cultural value and what's like, or, I guess it was Jeff grew up going to and hearing about this venue. But from a standpoint of the county and maybe a financial stewardship, on one hand, we're talking about how great this is. So it seems like it's this great institution. I attribute a lot of value to that, but it sounds like the value more is kind of sentimental because it's not sustaining financially. But from a county's perspective, by transferring this or I guess rescinding the beneficiary, right? The financial, can you put a financial price on that? Not that I'm saying that that should rule the day, but I assume if it's being sold for $1 and you mentioned the liabilities. It's more of a liability than an asset from that standpoint. But I guess my question is the extreme circumstance would be that it's sold and the assets are distributed. I assume the county would be one of the beneficiaries. What are we talking about as far as the impact? Mr. Chairman. Mr. President, I would like to thank the question. I would like to ask Mr. Klerapai. talking about as far as the impact. Supervisor Tucker, thank you for that question. And so just to clarify the question is, as it been a fishery of the trust of the center, when we're giving up our beneficiary status of that, what is the financial decision? Yeah, there are financial costs to that in theory. And I'm not saying that outweighs all the things we've talked about. In fact, I support what we're doing, but I just, yeah, curious. Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think the, when I maybe, when I'm looking at the trust, I see that the county's name doesn't benefit sharing in terms of the, for the promotion of the purposes of the preservation of it. I don't believe that the county has received direct financial benefit from, as a beneficiary of the trust, to date, out of the non-council. I'm just being able to assist you. If I could jump in, please, Chair Hill. One of the things we did, this happened as the city manager stated very quickly in terms of analysis. We're looking at a document that was created back in the 80s. And I think the idea of knowing some of the people that did that was to make sure that this was preserved for both the city and the county. When this came here, one of the things, when we have any property interest as a county, we have to make an analysis in terms of the public benefit, and what that does more than our own financial benefit. And speaking with the city, it was very clear that the deaths that were involved in this was something they were willing to take on, and we were being relieved of those deaths. So the overall analysis was that this was in the public interest, and that we weren't giving really anything of real financial interest to the county, and that we are putting it in good hands with the city. I just want to make one other comment when I was interviewed originally for this job. The question was put to me, how did I get along with the city attorneys and working with the cities? And this is a prime example of being able to work with the cities in a very quick fashion, working with their council to get to true working with the city manager. And I just want to say how much I appreciate it. And I also appreciate Chair Hall's sort of stewarding this whole event and making sure that the county's interest was served by making sure we're saying to the city. These are the things we're asking you to do in shepherding this building basically. So thank you. Hardy. I do not have any questions. Yeah, it's, you know, long memory of all kinds of cool events at that place. And I'm glad you guys are stepping in to make it, you know, make it sustainable. I think Gary Peterson, air Peterson was described as in some meeting. I can't remember if he was talking about building bridges to the community and I count a strength in those and he had a really compelling description of why Nevada City is going to continue to do that this year so fits right in for me so good luck with it. Thank you. I would say that in my opinion this is city government at its best. There is a problem. The fact that your council and your staff understood the loss of the minors found recultural center to Nevada City and the importance of that and that you have stepped up is very impressive. I would say looking at that building, it actually unfortunately, an empty building like that is a huge liability. And trying, if there was a commercial component to this, like say, there was an authority to sell the building, I'm not sure that that would be possible based on what private industry has to do. So the city can do so much more with this. The benefits of the city owning this, not having to pay property taxes, having your insurance be under the banner of Nevada City versus the $50,000 a year that they've probably been paying on the fair plan. Is really advantageous to the success of the building. So I did, I was at that meeting on February 13th and It was a rainy, cold night, but I still expected the council chambers to be packed. And I think it's a true testament of all the pre-work that you did, that there was a very small group of people there and everybody that was there supported what you're doing, which these days in government, that's really difficult to do. So I really look forward to continuing working with you on this project. I'm involved with the Center for the Arts and Grass Valley, and I know we're talking about maybe doing some cross-collaboration and working together to strengthen all of the arts organizations in the community. So this is a great start. And I was very concerned when all of this started happening because my class reunion is booked there for October of this year and I was thinking wow we're never going to find another place but you are honoring all of the bookings that are there so that is much appreciated by the community. So keep up the good work, anything I can personally do to help feel free to reach out to me because I'm happy to do that. You don't have any extra ad but thank you. I mean, gosh, tons of memories. I've been to a lot of events there over my lifetime and I can't imagine it being anything else. So I'm looking forward to see what you guys do with it. So, kudos. I just want to mention the aquatic variety that occurs there so one when I was growing up, it was like a punk show one night. You know, like poetry the next night, food fair, farm festival. It's just an awesome representation of a community of diversity to me. And I think, I guess, please continue that tradition and something we stand for. Nevada City and Nevada and the district supervisor of Nevada City is proud to be eclectic. Okay. All right, open it for public comments. Any public comment at all? Yeah, go ahead, Charlie. Agree with all of you, but I wanted to bring up the Cultural Center's history. The minors found reconnection to Hirschman's pond and that KVMR, Victorian Museum, is embedded in KVMR. And I'd really like to see some graphic display that does those connections at the foundry so that that weaving in is apparent to all the visitors of the foundry. Thanks. Thanks, Charlie. There you go. Another great idea. All right. Any collars, team? No callers, Chair. Okay. We'll close public comment. And we'll bring it back to the board for a vote. So I move that we approve this resolution. And I'll second that. And Dean, can you call the district five? Yes. District two? Yes. District four? Yes. District three? Yes. District one? Yes. Fantastic. unanimous. Thank you so much for everything you're doing. All right. Thank you very much. All right. We are going to take a 10 minute break. You back at 10-42. you you you you you you you you We're really focused on a whole host of disasters or emergency events we want to have a broad spectrum. We want to be prepared for anything, really, we focus a lot on wildfire because we know that's one of the most likely events to happen in Nevada County. Ready set go is really built around the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready before an event. To move into the set posture when there's a red flag or a fire is near you and then to go when it's time to go. Essentially, in its simplest then to go when it's time to go. Essentially, in its simplest form, it's a three-tiered community emergency preparedness plan. I have lived in this house, which we built by husband and I, 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the Hardy Plank, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fires, one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of state of California that said this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the latter fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning, whether that be training, educating yourself or accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and flammable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home, that first 100 feet, but also around the roadway too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home. And really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. That's going to be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's going to be using non combustible materials on your deck and around your home so when an so we all have CPAP machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer, and that's used to disperse medication that I need to give myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries that have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained a pretty substantial battery from freed and it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend it to anyone who might have medical needs that require power or really anything. I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snowstorm or a public safety power shot off, we really want folks to be thinking about, okay, what are the things I'll need on hand to whether the storm? Do I need to have candles? Do I need to have battery powered radio? Do I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So go back, could be anything. It could be a backpack. It could be a suitcase. It's going to be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets, if needed. That's going to have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go-back as the only resource you may have. Stores may be closed, the power may be out. So you may have to literally live out of this thing for a three-day period as an evacuee. If you are someone with a disability, maybe you have a chronic health condition. For me, I have type 1 diabetes. I have an insulin pump, right? And so that's a critical piece that I need to plan for if I'm gonna ever evacuate or be away from my house, for any amount of time, right? What we find often is that if people don't evacuate with their CPAP machine, with their oxygen concentrator, with their wheelchair, walker, then it can be difficult on the other end. My name is Yelissie's Palencia. I work in the 211 call center. I'm just a resident of Grass Valley. I have two daughters, four-year-old and a one-year-old. In Nevada County 211 is available 24-7. So we provide for the community is information. That can be anything from directions to the resource centers. It can be letting them know where the fire is, you know, if they are. We're back and we're going to, let me see, let me get, let me get to the right place. Am I agenda? So, Brian, oh, Brian, thank you. Tyler and David Nicholas. David, okay, thank you. So this is going to be the acceptance of the 2024 Housing Element Annual Progress Report. And I'll turn it over to you, Brian, to introduce and... Sure. Thank you, Chair. I'll get a morning supervisor's. Tyler, Barronton and David Nicholas will be giving the presentation on the report report and I'll turn it over to Tyler to kick things off. Thank you, Brian, honorable Chair, Tyler Barrington, interim Director of Housing and Principal Planner, and then I have as Brian mentioned, David Nicholas, associate planner who prepared the report. So I was asked to provide a quick update on some housing items related to a work from the housing community service division as well as planning. And so some policy updates as your board is aware, the county did apply for the pro housing designation. With the California State Department of Housing and Community Development, we're still waiting on the award letter, hopefully from that. Last year your board adopted two ordinances related to alternative housing, including movable tiny homes, and then pedal 25, which is a limited density rural owner built housing. Regarding some projects that are going on, the ranch house is near complete, and there's a few things left in terms of connecting or installing landscaping and getting final occupancy before it can be occupied. I imagine there'll be a ribbon cutting associated with that. The Badger Lane Project, which is an extension of the Imperamine courtyards, it's an additional six units of Perments 4,000. We're currently going through the design phase. We have a permit application in the city of Grass Valley and are addressing some comments related to providing fire separation. The Commons Resource Center, which is a picture on the wall, is in progress. Work is being done on the interior primarily. There is some work to be done on the outside and we're shooting for a gene or July finish date on that particular project to create a resource center for homeless services in Grass Valley. That's between Hospitality House and the Brunswick Commons development. Civic West Commons, your board today, did adopt and approved the loan for $207,720 for my gap financing. And I also note that TCAQ, 4% tax credits, was awarded to that project and they're looking to write ground this year. Lone of two senior apartments, so they did receive a $6.8 million home award from the state of California, and are going to have applied for 9% tax credits during this cycle, and so that award will be pending. Regarding upcoming programs, the Housing and Community Services Division, well as Behavioral Health is working on the Home Key application and submitted an application for their scattered sites project, which includes three houses in the grass valley area. There's also a fourth house that's unknown at this point and we're exploring opportunities to find a fourth house to add to that application. We're also exploring a potential VETS project or veterans projects in the city of Grass Valley, and then working with the housing house on a potential expansion project that runs a common site. Some projects we're working on in the upcoming year include the more grant. This is a mobile home rehabilitation grant. We're looking to provide for new mobile homes and rehab 10 existing mobile homes in the county to assist the residents with that live in those types of units. We have a grant out for Milson Wheels which is to provide $300,000 to them to help provide services in the North San Juan area. and then we are continuing to work on the free Fixit program, which is essentially a rehabilitation program that freed runs. Recently we've approved a grant for a house bathroom remodel, as well as a re-roof for residents and meet the income qualifications. And then finally, as your board is aware, the share will be working on initiatives initiative set directly by the board and you'll probably more information on that later on this afternoon. That includes looking at alternative housing, kind of a spin off of the tiny homes on Wales ordinance, working on developing a workforce housing related down payment assistance program to assist the community land trust with finding new opportunities for them to develop new housing. It includes potentially providing grant resources to them for a project they're working on. And then looking at opportunity sites in the county using either surplus lands. And we also Brian and his team has been working on developing a website to highlight those two potential development opportunities or developers. And the way that we're going to approach this is to work with the Housing Ad hoc Committee. We all have monthly affordable and workforce housing team meetings that include representatives from CDA as well as HHSA and then through and community engagement. And with that, I'll pass it on to David who will give you a presentation on the housing element annual report. Hello, honorable Chair and Board of Supervisors. My name is David Nicholas, and I'm Associate Planner for Nevada County. These following slides are about the annual progress report of our housing element. California law requires the planning department to present this annual progress report to the local legislative body for review and acceptance prior to it being submitted to both the governor's office of land use and climate innovation, which was previously OPR, and also to the Department of Housing and Community Development. This APR is just a standardized form that's prepared by the Department of Housing and Community Development. It's basically just an Excel sheet. It summarizes activities that the county did through the calendar year of 2024 to progress our policies of the housing element. So a lot of the information in the following slides are just directly from the Excel sheet and that data came from our permitting software, Assella. There's also the table D, which talks more about the specific policies that we've made progress towards in 2024 and a lot of that is the work that Tyler discussed in those previous slides. And this is only for the unincorporated part of the county and these housing numbers aren't for trucky Nevada City or grass valley. So here you can see the table of the sixth cycle of our annual progress report. These are our regional housing allocation needs numbers. You can see that the numbers are fairly similar in 2024 to previous years, but a bit lower. And we're behind track on our progress towards reaching our regional housing needs allocation numbers or arena. These are also tables from that HCD workbook that shows the breakdown of the building permits issued in 2024, which resulted in 84. There is a distribution between very low, low, moderate and above moderate as shown on the table. And also during 2024 we issued 98 certificates of occupancy and those are distributed among single family detached units, accessory dwelling units, and manufactured homes. In 2024 we did not have any housing projects, so no like large multi-family apartment complexes or anything like that. So that's why on the housing application summary, all those numbers are zero. So therefore, due to this being simply an informational report, staff's recommended action is that after reviewing and considering the 2024 housing element annual report, except the report substantially in the form attached. And direct staff to submit the report to California Department of Housing and Community Development, and the Governor's Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation, as shown in Attachment 1 finding A, and we're finding A, says that this 2024 annual progress report is not a project pursuant to CEQA, section 15378B5 of the CEQA Environmental Quality Act guidelines. And that concludes my presentation. Thank you. Okay, that's the whole presentation. Thank you very much. So just for the board's purposes, this is part of a general plan update that we could have put in consent, but because housing is so important to us that we're doing everything we can to increase our housing stock. In the county, I wanted to make sure that we got to see these statistics, which are very interesting about how many permits and how many are getting built. I think it's very helpful for us to know and for the community as a whole to see what we're doing. So I'd like to ask my colleagues if they have any comments or questions. Lisa, I'll start with you. So thanks for the presentation. It's really good to, I don not worked up area with the arena number, so it was really good to see these. And I just think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what those numbers mean. And a lot of people think that when they see this, that the county has an obligation to build those homes. And that's not the case. Our obligation here is to provide property appropriately zoned for these types of projects. Is that correct statement? Correct. Okay. And so it is also very interesting. So when I look at the building today, those are all new builds, right? That's not remodels. That's brand new. And even though 115 doesn't seem like a lot, it actually is quite a robust building in a year for that many building permits in a year's time. So, and that's only in the incorporated areas that doesn't include the cities or the town of Trekkie. So, okay. So I think actually we've done fairly well for a small rural community without a lot of funding and a lot of outside investors to come into buildings. I think we've actually done really well. So, I look forward to continuing to work on this with the Housing Ad hoc Committee and I I really appreciate the way that this information has been presented, although Excel is always difficult for me because I never know how to get it on my screen appropriately. I figured it out last night, but thank you. Yeah, thank you. I just a couple questions. The rena numbers and been doing this as a planning commissioner for probably 15 years and I still the reigning numbers still are like they would. Sorry. The reigning numbers are all, they puzzled me a little bit. But indeed making a zoned land available is our responsibility. I think to Chair Hall's comment, I think we're trying to move past that with the ad hoc and all the work you're doing and the county is doing is really to try and foster an environment that is conducive to building more units at every kind of level. And so I just encourage the ad hoc to stick to it and do the heavy lifting, the tough work that it's probably going to take to get that done, because I don't, the numbers for me speak for themselves, the county is a whole, our community is a whole, including the cities and the towns, we need to do more, and we need to do more, everybody needs to do more, and it's going to be hard to do, but I think we're going to have to take concessions kind of every level. And I know at the strategic workshop we talked about the toolkit available to us, including tax breaks, land, public private partnerships, staff direction, board objectives, all of it. I think we're going to have to put a lot of horse tar end to getting it done. I think the landscape is probably going to be even more problematic in the coming year based on some of the federal activity, but all that said, you know, I'm trying to encourage you to do that. I know in Truckee, it's been one of the biggest pieces and it's a spoonful of time, right? Like there's no single solution that's going to get us there. We have to do all these little tiny steps. And so when you make tiny homes on wheel ordinance and all homes on wheel ordinance and the things that you've outlined in your presentation, if you add them all together then we slowly get there. And I think that encouraging us and staying focused to do absolutely everything we can on all those little pieces will ultimately reflect these numbers in the future. or keep up the good work. I think we're gonna have to be bold and do some things that are tough. Like, thank you. And keep up the good work. I know this is just kind of a lot of data and reporting this required by the state. I just have one specific question, partly due to my background. Where it lists the manufactured homes that have been built and shows here 13 permitted and 10 completed. Does that include not just here because maybe there weren't any, but homes that are placed in manufactured home communities? I thought I recall from past experience that the state, which is ironic, because it's HDD that's requiring this, didn't count those. So, for example, when the one we just owned added 62 new homes back, you know, five, seven years ago, that wouldn't count towards the way the state counts the data. So I'm just curious because I think there could be sort of an undercount in some sense, doesn't change reality on the ground that we need more. But. Yes, supervisor Tucker. So HCD does all the permitting inside an actual dedicated mobile home park. But these manufactured homes are permitted by the Nevada County Building Department and are alternative to stick built home. Do you know this? No. By the way, I have a little more background. I know a few weeks ago when we were doing the tiny homes on wheels, Brad Pessimer was here and doing great work in the community. I think he mentioned in his statement that more than half of the 80 something mobile homes that he's placed over the years have been within mobile home parks. I don't believe that we count those numbers. But supervisor, Ducker, we'll go ahead and we'll confirm and get back to you on that question. It's a good question. Yeah, that's an excellent question. Again, yeah, there's still a need, but if we are even counting those, that we may want to in the the future note that, so that we're aware of the bigger picture, whether or not it's something the state wants us to report on. So thank you for that. And like it says, it doesn't change reality on the ground and we need more, but I'm just thinking in the future, if we were to have some kind of consequences of not meeting these allocations, it'd be great to be able to count those. Excellent point. Sue? No, I think this all could put a good report as far as what we can do, right? I think what you could put a good report as far as what we can do, right? I think what you do is what the little we have is amazing. I mean, until we figure out fire insurance, how are we going to put on projects? I mean, I'm looking at some of my, well, looking at a couple projects we already have, that insurance is going to probably ruin where that break level is to get people to come in and build. So we have a lot of work still to do. And again, I think some of that should be taken into consideration when these numbers come when you live in a high fire danger area, where it slows down the process where we, people can afford to build. I love how we've been creative, though looking at the tiny homes on wheels, we'll see how that plays out. I think manufactured homes, we saw a lot of those go in during the cannabis era. When splitting property happened and you had to have, you had to have house on your parcel. So we saw some of that because it's a little less expensive. There were a couple projects like that I really would love to see one time. There were a Dubu one over on Wall Street where they were put in manufactured homes and keep it at that 300,000 level. And then of course that one way insurance again is another challenge. So I think they need to look at that too because the work is being done here. Boots on the ground and trying to make it feasible for people to build or projects to go forward. But we have some hurdles we still have to get through. And I think that's something that needs to be noted. It's not that it's not trained to happen. There's definitely hurdles. So but thanks for the report. And I just I know our building department would love it if more people came and built to that would be great. So I think I hope some folks, people look at the title 25 and some of those ways to come and come into compliance with owner built. So I think there's some good creativity that's coming from our your department. So and thank you for stepping up and working in housing too. Good job David, thank you. Yeah, again, I would just like to echo, and you know what, to note that the above moderate houses are the largest number being built, and obviously the need is with the moderate, even just moderate and not to mention low and very low. So I think it's true that we are doing everything we can. We're doing quite a bit and I encourage people, just as Sue said, to come in and look at the ways we've made it easier to do sort of non-conventional housing and we're going to continue to look at that. And it's also true that we need a lot more and so we're going to keep working on this issue. It's a priority for the board and we're going to keep on that. So thanks to everyone for what you're doing. And open a public comment. Here I go again. Moont Charlie Price, Zion Street in Nevada City. The Forest Service had a problem with wildfires, campers, creating wildfires. So they developed campgrounds, so all the fires could be in one place and they could be built in fire rings that were safe. Those campgrounds started to be vandalized, they started to charge Not to make money, but so that people would respect What they had there Which has got nothing to do with where you guys are at and I'm thinking about the homeless and the need for housing There are a lot of people who would put let somebody stay on their land in an RV or in a trailer, which wouldn't be legal. Those someone can live in their RV year round. A lot of retired folks do that, and that is legal. So there's a big disconnect there, and I think if there was an ordinance that allowed someone to live in their RV, a homeowner could allow someone to park on their property with the right fuel restraint. So there was defensible space. The RV had smoke and toxic fume detector and was hooked up to sewer and water and electric that people would on their own help alleviate the need for housing. Thanks, Charlie. And we are. The board is actually this year looking at several ordinance or ordinance revisions dealing with RV so that stay tuned on that. Matthew? Matthew, you call through Nevada County. I heard a disheartening thing on the radio this morning from the Nevada County Board of Realtors, which is real estate sales were at 15 year low. 15 year low. And I see what's going on in town. Yes, they're very wealthy. You can afford to come in and do whatever they want. And because we're so desperate for building and stuff, we're just turning a blind eye to the quick money that's available to the government with taxation. It's really sad, like just coming through Brunswick Basin, it was just so smoky and so putrid and trash and just the quality of life is just gone downhill to such a degree. The navigation center that's being built, there's been multiple OD deaths over there in the last few weeks. Some things really need to be looked at at basic health and safety for our community because those are being very overlooked and housing is part of that. There's a lot of people a very sad call that I posted on my concerned citizen page on Facebook was a fire department showed up to a house. They said, oh it's abandoned but we'll investigate and they did and they found a elder that was obviously abandoned there. He denied any need for medical, which is his right, but they called APS because I've never heard the fire department use the term horrendous with the big gap before horrendous and a big gap after horrendous. So they were even shocked with what they came across with their elders that are basically being sequestered in these houses all over the county that are way too big for them to manage, but they would. They need caregivers. We have the highest elder population per capita in California. We just ignore all these basic fundamental issues in our county. And we talk about evacuation. A lot of people don't even walk where they're going to evacuate they don't drive you know so we have a lot of issues and just like this fires in southern California I guess 60% of the folks that lived in those areas were over 60 years old it's even more magnified here with the terrain, lack of resources, narrow roads, vegetation. So I would say anything you can do when I hear the words, we're doing all we can, we're doing enough, we're, you know, 15 year low on sales. That's a reflection on you guys. That's not a reflection on the realtors. That climate for housing in Nevada County is putrid. Thank you. Any other public comment? Anybody on the line? No callers, Chair. Okay. All right, we'll close public comment. Bring it back to the board. Unless there are any other questions, I will call for a motion in a second to adopt the resolution. I will move to a doctor. Second. District five. Yes. District two. Yes. District four. Yes. District three. Yes. District one. Yes. All right. Thanks again. Brian and team. Thank you very much for your presentation and all the good work you're doing. Okay. We have extra time. So I think we want to move forward. I see David out there. The CIP presentation. Let's see. 27, thank you. David, are you, oh Patrick? That doesn't look like David. There you are, okay. All right, thank you. So we're moving item 26 forward for anybody following along online. This is a resolution advocating for the protection and sustainability of local county core services and local representation on applicable federal forum. Nope, that's not it. Yep, thank you. Resolution approving the capital improvement plan 2025 annual update and authorizing director of public works to proceed with the implementation of the plan. Thank you, Resolution Approving the Capital Improvement Plan 2025, annual update and authorizing Director of Public Works to proceed with the implementation of the plan. Okay, thank you, David. Thank you, Chair Hall, supervisors, David Garcia, your public works director. And today I'm very happy to introduce Pat Perkins, our principal civil engineer, and also our road commissioner, and also Michelle Garcia, our project project manager who will be going through our 2025 update for you. Thank you David. Good morning chair and board members. Again, my name is Pat Perkins and to my writers Michelle Garcia and we are going to be working our way through the 25 CIP which is our capital improvement program. Michelle and I will be tag teaming the report this year and bringing up to speed issues very involved and really instrumental in helping us get it done this year. The purpose of this presentation is just to discuss the various funding sources that we have within the Public Works Department, how we use those funds, what projects there are allotted to discuss some of our upcoming maintenance as well as our capital improvement projects and answer any questions you may have. And at the end we are looking for your approval of the 25 CIP at this point. I'm going to turn it back over to Michelle. Thank you Pat and David. Good morning Chair and Board of Supervisors. First I just want to touch on our three of our major funding sources, the first of the gas tax, which is also known as Huda funding. This second is our SB1 funding and third is grants, which come from a few various different agencies. And I'll break these down on the further our next upcoming slides. This graphic illustrates the breakdown of our revenue sources. There's two major types of funding sources, discretionary and restricted revenues. Restricted funds are typically allocated for specific projects and activities. Discretionary funds are more generally earmarked for a variety of road maintenance activities and as matching funds for our capital program. Gas tax also known as the highway user tax account or Huda and the general fund MOE, which is a vehicle licensing fee, make up the majority of our discretionary funds, while federal grants primarily for our bridge and safety projects and the SB1 funds, which is road maintenance and rehabilitation account, also known as RMRA, make up the majority of our restricted funds. And the RMRA funds do, excuse me, require the county to submit a list of proposed projects on an annual basis. Over the last six years, the public work department has received around $55 million in grant funds for road and safety projects. As I mentioned, most of our funding comes from gas tax revenue. So this graphic shows a breakdown of the cost per gallon of gas, currently around $4.53 of that $4.53 around $8.8 comes back to the program through grants, who to funds, and RMRA funds. And as you'll see in future slides, these funds are used for various projects and programs. Additionally, public works maintains a minimum fund balance of $3 million per year. This balance is used to pay month-month expenses as well as provide short term funding for our grant funded projects. These revenue reserves are also necessary in the event of emergencies or catastrophic events. One example of how we're using this funding reserve is for monthly cash flow for our three bridges that are currently in construction. And although gas tax funds have been steadily increasing in the recent years, future projections for gas tax are estimated to decline by about 64% due to the increase in electric vehicles. So this could have a significant impact on our fund balances if California does not reassess the gas tax mechanism. This chart shows both our restricted and discretionary revenue sources by fiscal year. SB1's shown here at the top in the kind of greenish brown color were adopted in 2017 and provide approximately $4 million to the county annually. This was created as a to compensate for shortfalls and huda funding and as you can see without those funds our revenue would be much lower than it is. These funds are used for both basic road maintenance activities including pavement preservation. However, keep in mind this chart does not illustrate inflation or other increased costs. So while revenue may be increasing inflation and overall construction costs have increased significantly in the past several years, this hinders our ability to keep pace with needed improvements and regular maintenance. So in a nutshell, our MRE funds have resulted in improved stability and cost certainty in road maintenance. However, we struggle with competing core activities and limited available funding. And as I mentioned previously with the added electric vehicles, there is concern over gas tax funding. Next, I'm going to move on to the direct road maintenance expenditures. You can see that our general maintenance expenditures shown here in the lower portion of the graph, which is essentially our road's crew operations had a sharp increase between 2020 and 2023. This is primarily due to increased operating costs driven by increased salaries and benefits, inflation, increased liability costs, equipment replacement needs, which we will discuss further on in the presentation, and increased overhead costs. Additionally, the payment, preservation, and vegetation management projects are high priorities for us, but these programs vary annually in terms of funding. And So we have broken these out to illustrate that further. And although the previous slide did show revenues increasing, you can see our program costs also have been increasing on about the same level. And this is just showing your tax dollars at work, all of those revenues and expenditures I talked about previously. This was our 2024 road rehabilitation project which included microsurfacing on empress road. Micro surfacing will extend the life of that road for about years. And I'll move on to our upcoming maintenance and capital improvement projects. This chart provides a more detailed breakdown of the expenditures I was talking about previously. Expenditures fall into two basic classifications. Capital projects shown on the right and road maintenance activities shown on the left. You can see that almost half of all the expenditures this year will be from our federally-funded bridge projects. This is largely due to the three bridge projects that are now in construction. Our second largest is our General Maintenance Category, which includes snow removal, minor pavement repairs, our equipment replacement program, road striping and signage, and some other large expenditures are from our equipment replacement program, the vegetation control projects, and our drainage and shoulder maintenance. And now we'll pass it on to Pat to highlight some of our expenditures. Thank you. Throughout the preparation of this capital improvement plan, there's some various things that we really wanted to highlight, where we've had some success in some other areas, or we still are working with some of the challenges that we've got. But three of the big things that I really wanted to try to focus on. One has been our bridge program over the past three years. We've done quite honestly, we've had a very exceptional run on our bridges. We've replaced seven bridges in the last eight years and we've got three more going right now. And for county of our size, that's really pretty much unheard of for us to try to accomplish that kind of work and that level of work. So just want to kind of let you know that's one of the really bright stars that we've got within the public works area. Additionally, one of the other areas I wanted to mention is our equipment replacement program. And in the past we've struggled with a balance of how much money to put into road maintenance versus road overlays versus equipment. It's always a balancing act because we never quite have enough funds to do everything that we would like to do. But over the past couple years we've been able to set aside some money, purchase some equipment. And that's really been a shining star for us that we're finally getting the road for some of the equipment that they need in order to do the job that we'd like them to be able to do. In addition to that, another area that I really wanted to highlight is our vegetation maintenance. And we've spent a lot of effort trying to get a lot of the vegetation pulled back from the edges of the road that increases the ability for emergency ingress, egress, things like that. We've been extremely successful in working with not only cal fire grants, we've had CDBG grants for currently working with FEMA and grants. So, putting a lot of effort into that and trying to get the vegetation pulled back from the road. So, I just kind of want to highlight several of those important things to us. As I mentioned, we are setting aside funds right now and have been for the last couple of years for our equipment replacement program. As an example, some of the equipment that we've been able to purchase over the last couple of years, we've purchased rollers or A-rollers. We've had a new paver, we've had several trucks that we've purchased, 10 wheelers, a new grater. And all this really goes into the road cruise ability to go out and take care of the roads, which is something that's, is really the county's asset that we have. It's not necessarily the bright, shiny star. It is our most valuable asset that the county has. So taking care of it is very important. Road crew goes out each year and as I mentioned in addition to the vegetation that we're removing with grants, they go out and they do a separate program for the vegetation removal that consistently out with shoulder maintenance, they're pulling gutters, pulling material out of the shoulder drainage areas, pavement maintenance with the new pavre we've been able to spend a lot more time in going out and patching roads, putting in a little bit effort into some higher quality patches that we've been doing, snow removal and drainage maintenance. One area that we continue to try to work on is a challenge and our balance is what we call our pavement condition index. And throughout the entire state of California, everybody's roads are rated on a scale of 1 to 100. They call this a pavement condition index. The county has set a goal of 62 as the bottom number that we want to have for our overall pavement rating. Right now we are teetering between 24 and 25 between a 62, which is the goal of the board. And it looks like it's probably going to drop down to a 25 here within the next couple of months, which is kind of right on that border. And as I mentioned, there are competing interests. If we put a lot of money into the road pavement, then we don't have the equipment. If we put too much money into equipment, then we don't have enough money for some of our other programs. So part of our thought here is that by spending a little bit more money on road equipment, that we can get the road crew out to try to bring this PC up or at least slow the decay that we have of our roads. Currently, we're losing about one point a year in order to move forward and have our roads stay at a stable, consistent number. We really would need to put in an extra million dollars a year into road improvements. Right now, we haven't identified that funding, but as I mentioned, we're trying to slow that decay down by putting money into our equipment into our asphalt budget. Thought there is that if road crew can go out and try to take care of some of our local roads, engineering on our park and do some of our bigger roads, our materials and collectors and things like that. So that's the way that we anticipate moving forward. And this point, I'll kick it back to Michelle. This table illustrates just another breakout of our capital expenditure projects by type, bridges, safety projects, and then other include some projects that we're working on with transit. And then this table shows the higher level projects for the next four years, which include a rehab or replacement of an additional seven bridges, including an addition to the seven pat mentioned earlier, some high friction and road safety projects, road rehabilitation projects, and intersection projects, and a couple of projects with transit transit including the bus wash and some chargers. And with that our presentation is concluded and we're available to take any questions from the members of the board or the public. Thank you. Great presentation. I'm going to turn over to my colleagues and I'll start with Sue for any questions or comments. What we do with a little bit of money, that's the challenge. First I want to appreciate both that we went over this and the things are gonna happen in my district. And I'm always challenged with the amount of miles that we have to manage with and timing and how we get everything done. So I think that one of those questions was interesting to the gas tax. I think that's going to be a real challenge as we move forward until they figure out what they're going to do with that. I actually see there's people still doing studies and we really haven't come across the real answers for that. You know, when we look at vehicles and miles traveled and those are challenging at a small area, the truck answers for that. When we look at vehicles and miles traveled, and those are challenging at a small area. The trucking, for example, just all the trucks that come down highway 20 now, and some of those issues where we go into our unaccomprate areas too, like North San Juan and Pimballi, and some of those areas that are still going to be challenged. In vegetation, you know me, that's my one and I want to appreciate the work that's being done and how we're looking to actually make that happen a little better with the program for spraying possibly. I think that's going to be a big benefit. And then again, we got to put this out to the public a little bit too. Vegetation management is something that we all can do and work on on our roads, on our private roads. I got kudos from North Sam Juan, that group gets together and they spend a good deal of dollars. They're self managing the roads especially on misages, the work that that Firesafe community is doing up there. Our Firesafe communities are doing some great job on their private roads because we're not even talking private roads in this conversation This is just the county maintain roads so Yeah, where do we find more money for it? so I I don't know what the answer is to that either we're looking money for all over the state for all kinds of things right now right but gas tax is our Main stay and so we really do need to get some stabilization there. And so what you guys are doing now, we're gonna still get complaints from our people. And we're gonna have to keep explaining where we are. I don't think the money's being spent unwisely. Again, we have to have a little reserve. Equipments, another thing, right? Got your resources, equipment, times out, You can't use it anymore, so we have to invest. We have to invest in an expensive bus charging station because that's where we headed in this direction. So I feel like there's a lot going on and we're trying to keep up with the times. So being a rural community is going to still continue to be a challenge. So thank you for doing the work you do. Thanks for taking those phone calls when people are upset about what's not being done. Thanks for taking my calls when I say where I see potholes. And I want to say with that, the crews are so responsive. And I think that's really helpful in that. Because we are trying to keep our roads safe, and I could tell you there's other roads around that are not. is good as shape as ours. So, and I think that's really helpful in that, because we are trying to keep our roads safe and I could tell you there's other roads around that are not as good as shape as ours. So, and I think that shows how we're managing down the line. So, without any, I don't really have any other questions, was there a thorough conversation as far as what we're gonna do in our districts and I'll stay in contact when I have questions. Thank you, Thanks for the presentation. I have one little tiny change in the project list. It lists the Reffen Ready intersection. Can we change that to the Reffen Ready Highway intersection? Because I don't want to mention people calling Sue going, what intersection are you fixing in Reffen Ready? Because that's actually in my district. It's the round about it where Ridge Road comes in. Or yeah, so just a little clarification. Maybe they're getting a crosswalk. I think you're wrong, what you're saying. So I too am really concerned about how the state's looking at backfilling on the gas tax. I know that there's numerous organizations that are trying to figure out an equitable share here. But my fear is that with the state, everything has always a one size fits all. And rural counties are going to be penalized the most when they change the system. So I'm hoping that either through our work with RCRC or with some of the organizations that we are in there trying to make sure that the state is very aware that rural counties are different. miles traveled are different, vehicles used, you know, you probably have per capita, much more big trucks and SUVs because of the terrain here and the weather. So hopefully, we're working on that. I met somebody the other day who works for CalCog, which is the California Council of Governments, and this is one of their major projects that they're undertaking this year as a study on this. And they have like two rural counties who are represented at one's Placer County, which in my opinion, is that's not a comparison to Nevada County or some of the smaller, less populated places. So you look at what the gas, how much the gas tax is in California, which is probably the highest in the country. But I think people who don't drive electric cars, if we're forced to have to pay some sort of a miles driven fee, as well as the gas tax, which they're not going to get rid of the gas tax. So, you know, you're penalized for not driving an electric car, and then you are penalized for driving an electric car because I know many people who own electric cars because of the cost of gas. So there's not going to be any sort of financial benefit to them anymore for driving one. So I'm really concerned that we are involved in what happens moving forward. I've seen so many things at the state level that don't have any caveats for either small but really small businesses or rural communities. And I hope this is not one of them. So keep up the good work. I don't get as many calls. I think the vegetation management in my district, some of my colleagues do, but I'm really appreciative when I do get a call to turn it over to you and you explaining to our constituency how it works and when you're going to get to them, people really appreciate the communication factor in that. So keep up the good work. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I was just a couple questions. Could you pull up the bar chart on the actuals that had the actual one that it kind of shifted. So the actual expenditure in the white green and then the brown current year that makes sense to me and then project expenditures. So the brown and the project are just replacement for actual. They're the same thing that you just use a different color. Correct, yeah. So the Chair Bullock, the light green shows actuals that have occurred in previous years. And then Brown is just what we're projecting for current year and Orange's projections for future years. There's a variation cost. Okay, so that's aggregate. Okay, get that answer my question. I just wasn't sure if I read that right. I think it's been covered on the gas talks. Couldn't agree more. There's some sort of solution. I think we all remember. CalTrans came here and presented. CalTrans came and presented to us. And I wasn't super stoked on how we kind of peppered this state and poised with a lot of really tough questions, which is what we do. But at the same time, their grasp in it straw is trying to make this really complicated tax-based equation to understand the implication of their decisions, right? And so CalTrans came here and presented that to us, and I think we had a lot of questions and even probably more now, just wondering and asking my colleagues on the board if we want to make a legend-red priority or staff to maybe look into some of of that because as far as my awareness we don't have anything directly hitting that. So that may be a question if we want to look at the pledge platform to talk more about that. I'd throw that out there. And then I will mention, I agree with everything that's been said here. On the local level, John has been outstanding with my constituents. I have a very small amount of paved county roads, but I have a tremendous amount of un-maintained and partially maintained dirt roads in District 5. And they require a lot of maintenance and a lot of, they get a lot of calls on it. People that live, you know, a ways down. So thank you to John for really interfacing and buffering the people and letting them understand what we can and can't do. Serious civic industries has a huge operation at the back side of some of our roads. So I would just ask that you pay close attention to the people that are monetizing the use of the road with their industry to get recouped and re-innerate the cost of that maintenance back to us. And I know you have agreements and discussions with these people all the time, but just making sure we're getting our fair share is important to me. And the other piece I'll mention is there's a movement to try and change the legislation related to the weight of trucks that can go down the road. Yeah, and so I really think we need to think about that. I've written a letter of opposition because I don't want to see those trucks on the 80s section in Nevada County. I think it's already a huge problem on highway 80 and I talked to Paster County Supervisor Guffsson as well and met with CalTrans and told them directly that I opposed that legislation. So we may want to talk a little bit more of staff has a chance to research that because I think that would have a pretty negative effect on our county road system. But thank you for all you do, and I know you guys work really hard like supervisor, Hook was saying to balance the money, and there's just such a huge and just a small pot. So thanks for doing your best on that. Yeah, thank you. And I know David and Patrick we met and went over the 58 page document and that was very helpful. So thank you for that. And then kind of piggybacking on what Sue and Lisa said, the vegetation management is a, I think the thing we probably hear the most in the world districts and you guys have been very helpful and receptive to explaining that or the timelines. And I assume this is public record and people can come in and look at it and I would just ask and I and I think you're doing it, as with all these funding uncertainties, as these projects kind of change, and some get pushed back. I guess there's not like a clearing house where somebody from the public could go and look at how the time frame has changed, much like I think Cal trans has for some of their projects. And I wouldn't expect that we'd have that, but I guess my one and only question would be, as these are updated going forward, would, if there's not a place for people to look, it would be, I guess, at the board meetings in the continual updates like this, where people would be able to, I guess, be aware of the time frames if they change. Yeah, if I'm understanding your question correctly, we do post the CIP each year. So somebody can come back and look at our 24, 23, 22, etc. Back and see what projects there were, what the timelines are, and how those were laid out. But we do make this available on our website. Additionally, on our website, we do try to update that fairly regularly. So the projects are as current as they possibly can be. So some of our road projects, bridge projects, spraying projects, all those kinds of things are updated probably every couple of months. So people can always go back and take a look at that as well. Okay, thank you, everyone. Yeah, I will just add on to the legislation on the trucks that came across my desk and it's not in our ledge platform. So we're gonna be bringing a letter back to the whole board to have that discussion in the near future and we can talk about whether we wanna do a board letter on that. I will say with regard to my district, we're all talking about sort of what's happening and my district, I get very few complaints about roads except for on evacuation roads. That seems to be the singular focus on my district right now is Vege Management and Road Maintenance on evacuation roads. And I know you're working closely with OES and others on that issue. So I just want to make that public make that statement that the board staff is coordinating on highlighting where we need work on those evacuation routes. Obviously an overlapping issue between departments. And then I would echo the issue of gas text not knowing what's going to happen there is concerning. And we did have a great presentation. I don't remember where I saw that actually it was probably one of my association meetings from the state on what they're looking at and maybe we can reach out and ask someone the state to come and give us some a presentation and take our questions on it because I think that's really key to what we're going to be moving forward. Last question would be on the federal grants piece, which is mostly what we're bringing down for veg management. So if you can go back to that slide, because I think that's the other place where there's uncertainty, and I just want to check on that. Where do you have the Fed? No, the further, when you're at the end, like one of the last slides, were you meant, keep going, near the end. There, there we go, right there, bridges, federal grants, and development fee, all of these have federal grants except for the last one. So I'm assuming we're good with all the grants that we've received to date, and that money's been pulled down and available. Is that correct? Excellent. And do we know anything? Are we seeing anything like weird frozen funds for future projects? Yeah. Right now what we're seeing is that all of our projects that have been funded by the feds are still active and everything seems to be going just the way that it's supposed to. So the feds have not pulled any funding on any of our major projects or even on any of our smaller projects at this point. What we anticipate going forward if we can anticipate what's going to happen. Most of the infrastructure type projects have really been left unscathed at this point. It's some of the other things that might, such as electric vehicles and things are going to be a little bit more difficult to try to get funding for in the future. But most of the infrastructure stuff we do anticipate moving forward. Okay, that's good. That's great to know. And please, on that, keep us up to date too. If you start hearing about any of that funding getting frozen, please let us know. But it's really good news that it's been untouched state. And then I think those are all the questions I have. So let's open up for public comment. One more time. So the intersection, you need to say the name of the other road. Rough and ready, highway and such and such intersection. The gas tax needs to be renamed as a road tax, so the public's perception of what you're talking about changes and makes it more palatable for funds to come from other areas to pay for the road's besides gas. The evacuation routes are a lot of dead end roads that end at large parcels. and the large parcel owner, maybe amenable to having a gated road through their parcel leading to another road if they were given liability protection and it was only available during a fire or an eminent disaster. And for veg clearance, you know what the cost you have for doing the veg clearance. If say half of that cost, you know, you offered to the private landowner a tax break for half of what it would cost you to do that Vitch management, offering that to the private landowner may incentivize them to do the work for you. Thanks you guys. Thanks. Did we want to come on any of that? I guess I would just want to clarify that at the Reffen Ready Highway intersection, the roads that we're looking at for that roundabout is Ridge Road, Adams Avenue and Reffen Ready Highway. All three of those roads will come together at one intersection and there will be a roundabout there. Currently we're working our way through the design on that and we've got that funded at least from a design standpoint but we have not yet secured funds for construction. Okay, thank you. Matthew. Matthew, Walter and Nevada County. I just want to know why a bus wash station costs $5 million. Can somebody answer that? Yeah, go ahead, Patrick. When we went through the design process for that, there is a lot of mechanical equipment, whether it's the washers, the sedimentation basins that go with that particular project, we're still looking for funding for that. I can certainly make those documents available to anybody who wants to come and see and we can give them the cost estimate. I don't have the specifics of the tip of my fingers right now, but I'm certainly willing to post that and or give it to anybody and they can see exactly whether our anticipated cost breakout is for that. Thank you. Thank you. Let after this. Thank you. Yeah. Pat, the bus washing piece, I had some more question. I had the privilege of being in cap facilities committee, so I've seen that progress over time. But like all the tech sand oil separators and environmental protection pieces, I mean, there's a, you're talking about a huge project there. I just wanted to make note of that, because I kind of asked myself the same thing, but there's a lot there. It is a significant process to go through that project. So it's not just a matter of driving a car through there and somebody holds a wand and washes it off. That's not really what we're talking about. We're talking about a drive-through bay that has not only ability with the ones, hand wands, but it also has some of the rollers and things like that. The facility has to be large enough to bring a backhoe on the back of a flatbed, whether it's on a trailer or a low-boy, bringing it through the facility. So it's a fairly large facility. Then again, once you get all that mud and gunk, it's not like a typical car because if we're running heavy equipment through there in the weather, it's you begin back hose things like that. They're caked in mud, having to have the different settling basins, if you will, they're much smaller than a settling basin. But within the facility itself, and then the processing of all those things just takes time, we are going to be running all that clean water back through and into our septic field or leach field system. So making sure that everything size right, it is definitely a significant effort. And we didn't want to just do something that was just for cars only because then our equipment would be, then what do we do with the equipment? So when we sized it, we sized it. So it's large enough to handle all the county equipment, buses, et cetera. The great point, thanks for summarizing that. I think some of it is like noxious weeds, like weed seeds when you mo one area, you don't want to move those seeds to some other place. And in fact, so I mean, you guys have a lot on your plate there. Thank you for summarizing. Yeah, that's a good point. I think we need to do a better job of explaining to the public what that is in that case, it doesn't sound like it's that and I can see why there would be questions. So let's let's look at how we're explaining that to people so that when we get questions, they know what we're doing. We could certainly add that to our website and detail out a project description as far as what it is and what it's supposed to do. I think that would be very helpful. Yeah, thank you. Any other questions? So just a quick comment in regard to the intersection that we're talking about on Reference Ready Highway. Once the staff kind of finishes the design for that, it's my intention to work with staff to potentially do a community meeting, to explain to people what we're doing, what it's gonna look like,, and I would probably want to do it in conjunction with Supervisor Hook, because while it's in my district, most of the people who use that are driving to Penn Valley are rough and ready for work or for, or they live out there. So I really want to make sure that the public understands what we're doing there, because it is going to be a big, I think it's going to be a pretty significant change to sleepy little highway 20 that's been like that since as long as I can remember and you should drive it a lot before new highway 20 went in which isn't new anymore But it's still for all for if you've lived her for a long time. It's still new a highway 20 So I do want to make sure that the public understands we will be doing some outreach on that one to explain it to people and I appreciate your patience with explaining it to me. Because it's been complicated. Yeah, and let me just take one second. Were there calls I never closed out public comment? Were there any calls to- No, callers, chairman. Okay, I'm going to close public comment and come back to the board. Go ahead, Sue. No, thanks. I just think, again, I want to thank you. I think there's, and I want to give a shout out for the advocacy that goes through this, right? We have transportation commission that works with a lot of stuff with CalTrans. You guys, there's so much interaction and all of you do such a great job because finding for rural communities for funding is huge. So I just want to give a shout out for the advocacy that goes on here so that we actually try to get the dollars that need to come back to Nevada County. So that's a big thing. It really is. I mean, we have to hear our voice and you guys do a great job of that. So I wanted to give you a shout out. Thanks. All right, unless there are any more questions, I'm going to call for motion in a second to adopt the resolution. So moved. Second. District five. Yes. District two. Yes. District four. Yes. District three. Yes. District one. Yes. Great. Thank you very much. I'll do the whole thing. Chair Hall, I just want to confirm that we'll open a board order to bring back a presentation on California gas tax. Is that correct? You can please. Yes. Okay. Thank you. All right. So to my colleagues, can we get through announcements maybe before closed session and lunch? Can we do that? Okay. Then let's go ahead. We're going to go to announcements and then we're going to go to closed session and then lunch. So who would like to start? Make me call on someone. Okay, go already. Pretty quick this time. I will start with the fun stuff. I volunteered after being asked twice. I finally turned it well. This is the third time to do dancing with the stars So I get to dance with the star You oh my gosh, seriously Okay, let me let me find that and I'll send it out. It's like April 20th Wait, it's soon. It's like a couple weekends. Anyway, I and they picked the theme music. I'm 80s Which is awesome because I grew up with 80s music, so I'm going to dance with a professional dancer in front of 600 people. I would encourage you to video it and put it up online because it's going to be that bad and you can tease me for the rest of my life. But it is a charitable event. It is one of the primary fundraisers for Inter rhythms, which is an entirely nonprofit-based dance that takes dance to underprivileged communities. So that's awesome. And yeah, it's in Turkey. Yeah, so they teach people the dance, and I'll send the data out so you can all watch it. It should be fun and really scary for me, but we'll give you a shot. Yesterday, we had our air quality management district meeting, which was a pretty quick meeting. Nothing super significant except the comments related to air quality in Nevada County or skyrocketing. And I think it's a double edged sword. It's related primarily to increased burning. People trying to get rid of green waste. So we're trying to figure out how to fund the response because the fire departments have to go out and respond on behalf of the AQMD district. But we're doing good over there. Everything is good at this point and we did our allocation for Nevada County and Nevada County is the largest contributor for submission on the DMV fees back to AQMD so so we are looking at the number, the way we calculate that. And then doing some constituent issues in SOTO Springs and the two big issues are the T-HAC, Truckee Tahoe, Truckee Tahoe Homeless Advisory Committee report is out, the sport has it. The town of Truckee is doing a big community outreach function in five days, which I'll be a member of the panel trying to talk about that. They're probably going to ask what the county's involvement is. And so on the heels of Hope Ridge, there's going to be some discussion about that. And I hope to return back to my colleagues on the board and describe what the constituents there in the town think and feel about it and how the town is going to respond to that so I can bring some good information. And then we have a lot of activity related to the pending library project. Going to the town council, we thought it was going to be tonight, but it's indeed in two weeks at their other town council meeting. Those are the polling results. Initially they were pretty difficult, but they've since kind of parsed out the data and worked through some of the strategy and a bond measure. And it looks a little bit better than it did before, so we'll have to see how that goes. But those were essentially where I'm spending my time on and then work in also with the CIP who is noted in the project. You'll see it in the project charter for the old Highway 40 Snorremobile project, kind of how we handle that, how that road is treated within our road system. In combination with Sugarball, doing a huge capital facility work if they're skewers or which changes the dynamic. And it's interesting because I kind of raised my hand and said, oh, this is a county piece, but really it becomes a town piece because the town boundaries right at the bottom of our road. So all the work we do to enhance coverage or transportation really is kind of lands on Donor Lake, which is a big residential neighborhood. So working with our staff on that. Right. Rob, do you want to go, Dex? Yeah, after I recovered from my illness, I had a busy week and one of the highlights I want to give a shout out to Alex and Allison. and I attended theracology Forum, community forum on a lot of OES stuff and evacuation routes and they did a great job and that was well attended. I also attended my first solid waste meeting and that was great and And I have been hearing a lot about some of the new waste management stuff. I think we're starting to get the word out on that. And I also visited the transfer station, which I don't know if you guys go as frequently as I, but it's been awesome as far as the weights for me, my experience. And I think I closed it down on Sunday, but did some of that. And then a couple of few weeks ago now got to tour the new storage facility. I think I saw Lisa there too in passing. And that was great to see that completed. And then afterwards, when over and took a little tour of the airport, and there'll be some stuff I think going forward later this year on the airport that'll be excited to find more about. It's about it for now. So I have attended a couple of short budget subcommittee meetings as a precursor is we're getting ready for the full on budget subcommittees, which are going to start I think in the first part of May. I also toured the storage facility that it's an impressive building for what it is. The interior is designed very well. I think the county is going to make good use of the space up there. I'm impressed with that. I went to the bites of insight. I'm not sure who came up with that name, but it's mouthful. Last week with Allison and the CDA department, and it's just an hour long lunch to hear, you know, what's going on with their department and for them to ask questions. It was great. I love interacting with our employees. Trishie, you have a really fun group of people that you get to work with. So I also attended the Power of the Purse last week, which is an event that the right futures for Youth puts on to explain about their programs. It's the biggest crowd I've ever seen for that event. There were over 350 people there. It was really impressive. They did a great job explaining all the wonderful work that they're doing in the community right now. I also attended their community forum. That, I've tried to go to most of those. The attendance on those has increased significantly since I started going, which is a testament to the group that they're doing things that people are interested in, and I'm going to give a little plug. I'm actually speaking at the next one in April about the arts myself. I'm representing the center for the arts with Gary Peterson, who's going to represent the Miners Foundry and Ken Harden, who's to represent in Concert Sierra. So if you're interested in the arts community, I think it's the 25th of April at 1030 at Sierra College. I attended the Sierra Harvest Soup Night on Friday night, a sold out event 450 people came in eight soup to support all the great work that Sierra Harvest is doing. I attended my first capital projects meeting a couple weeks ago. We had a housing ad hoc which we're really getting into the weeds now of what work we can actually do with the limited resources that we have. I think, I'm sure. Oh, yes. The highlight, I think of last week, was the event that we elected women leaders of Nevada County have put on. This was our second annual event. There were four women who were honored in our community by myself and my colleagues. And it is so impressive. I mean, my recipient is a young woman who started with the Friendship Club when she was in fifth grade and today she ends her retail business on Milk Street in downtown Grass Valley and she's really worked her way up from kind of a disadvantaged background to building something that is really amazing. I believe it's a testament of the work of the Friendship Club and Bright Futures for Youth and what they've done for young women. But equally impressed with our youth and I'm going to let Sue and Heidi talk about their recipients, but it was a really wonderful event. Thank you to everybody who helps put that on. And I see it growing and lots of people who came this year for the first time. Want to come back, want to bring friends, want to do more awards. It was really a special day, so thanks to everybody who put that on. Yeah, I would echo that. It was a great afternoon. And thank you to all my colleagues that made the investment to bring all those women together. I think that was the fun part. It just was, and just a way to show appreciation for what they do in this community. It was a very energizing room to be full of that many women that have a passion for Nevada County. So yeah, again, thank you. That was a great afternoon and my little gal Pamela that got my word. She just is still ecstatic and she wrote the greatest post about it. And I loved how she brought in how that group works together. You know, she's very humble that way. She's great. She's got a lot of fire, but it just shows you what you do when you pull together to community and how many different things that could get done. And I thought that was really special. And so I went from women's tea to we're from a defied apartment. And again, that place was packed, you know, for a little community that really had kind of had this moment in time where they're feared of not having a fire department. And I mean, there's still struggles, we know that. But it brought community back together. That place was packed. There was parking was full everywhere. The seats were all full and they were doing out go bags, which I thought was a great idea. They had that being done. And I think it could stay there very long, but again, it was exciting to see a community engaging because that's how we get things done together. And so that was fun. And then off I went to with the Pimbelly Mac and had a good presentation from the Community foundation on their project that's getting ready to be submitted for application. And I want to say Kimberly and she did a presentation on the research idea of having a business license. It was really interesting conversation that went a lot of different directions, but I wanna say they did a really good job. I think it's one of the first ones they've done, and they actually hit my chamber meeting as well, but so the outreach is just starting. So don't panic people, just go and listen and bring your opinions. I think they're gonna go to South County Mac. So they'll be all around the community sharing that idea. will probably go more sem one. So just that's all happening. Western gate. go to South County Mac. So they'll be all around the community sharing that idea. We'll probably go to more semuan. So just that's all happening. Western Gateway Park. We went there and they're just very appreciative of the loan from the county as they move forward. Lots going on. They're waiting for some engineering for the crossing, making arrangements. The kids are playing baseball in different areas around the town the seniors are up in town I think it would be very excited to get back to the park We have a new board member the boards full there. So it was a really good meeting and I would tell you the interesting thing was that Conversation over pickleball I like pickleball is the thing of the, it's just, I mean, and yeah, so it kind of is the craziest thing all over the country. And then the noise, I guess it makes a whop noise or something. And so there was conversation about the noise. It was the most interesting thing I've ever experienced. But anyway, so things are moving at the park good. There's a lot of activities coming up. Power of the purse was, it was amazing. I was a little late getting there from my transportation meeting, but that place was packed. And the stories are always so inspirational. Thank you to the Hospital Foundation. They were there. There were just so many people. It was all the speakers were great. Had a transportation committee meeting. I see RC RC. I'm on the cooler ad hoc. That was really interesting. Meeting tomorrow is RC RC meeting. I'm going to have a meeting with AT&T to go over some of those. I'm really excited about the interaction we're going to have there. We had you the cohort meeting and it was good to kind of stand up what we're going to do, kind of looking at where we're headed, talking about this year will be interesting. As we move, there's going to be probably extra water releases because of where we are with PG&E and Spalding and how we're going to get that message you now. And of course the other part was it'll be our last meeting with Pat Sullivan from consolidated. And so that was so we had a little bit of a celebration for that because he's been on that committee for a while and he promises to hand it off to somebody that will be as engaged with working with the cohort. Again, met the new solid waste. Remember that's going to join our board and just a little update of what was happening there. Our solid waste committee meetings coming up pretty soon. Worked on the Lafko budget committee. We'll be bringing that to Lafko at the next meeting. I had a climate ad hoc meeting which was, it was good. I'm talking about our summit and working with putting together the Western collaborative. So more to come on that. I went to my aged scary foreign aging. Area for an aging. I went to the new member training. It was really interesting. It was online and I got to do that. And then I just had a Mount County Water meeting. And we just kind of talked about the many bills that are coming through that we need to be paying attention to. And especially 4.69. I think it is with some of the electric stuff coming down the pipe where there will be some holdoffs on some of that. So that's all I have. Okay, great. Thank you. I will start from my outside stuff to the inside stuff. So I did attend a civic well conference, the annual conference policy makers conference. I'm still on the board of civic well, but I stepped down from being vice president. Thank goodness they passed that on. But this year under our new executive director, it's really grown and expanded. We had both Tony Atkins and Betty Yee come and speak as well as Wade Crowfoot come and speak that conference is about climate action, but it covers housing, it covers transportation. A lot of the same things we're dealing with and brings in the experts in those fields to help us figure out how we're moving forwards. It's always very helpful. I attended also very quickly, a bute county CSEC regional meeting where we toured the paradise aftermath of the paradise fire. We had a short conversation here and turnily about some of that when I came back. But really one of the key messages to take away is, this is the second place I've toured. I've toured the coffee fire and Sonoma a couple months ago. The key thing I think we need to be really educating people on is how big a lift it is to rebuild, that they have to replace infrastructure. They had to replace infrastructure, sewers and water lines that were contaminated. They had to replace roads because of all the equipment that comes in to clear the debris out. And then you have to replace your home and there's all these new standards. And whether you have insurance or don't have insurance and you're using FEMA money, it takes a very long time. So when people think maybe they can rebuild in a year or two, it's more like five to 10 years, both with the county and state and federal investments, as well as your own investment. So another reason to emphasize prevention, that how much we can do on prevention is, we can't do too much to prevent the losses that we would have from wildfires. It was a very helpful learning experience to see that. I also attended Power of the Person that is, yeah, I also met separately with bright futures for youth again, update on some of their programs. And I think I feel like why I wanna look at this nexus that we're looking at in terms of a small group of youth that they're working with, which are basically homeless youth or youth that are couch surfing and then are aging out of the system and then are left kind of on their own but without housing. And so wanting to make sure that we're in doing that intersection in our housing and homeless work along with what they're doing to make sure that there is a transition for those youth into a place to live. So that was a very enlightening and helpful conversation. Went to, again, also part of the budget subcommittee, the housing subcommittee, and the air quality board, and I agree, thank you for summarizing that hearty, that the issue of burning and air complaints is a big one, and somebody needs to do more outreach on that. I think we talked about that a little bit. Did go to a Mayors and Managers meeting this month that was at the Minors Foundry. It was fun to be there with no one in it, which is rare, and got to tour the back of it and look at what kind of infrastructure improvements are going to need to make. And again, we heard that this morning is a sad thing, but also has a lot of possibilities for the future. I met with Yvonne from Verizon. We asked her to give us more updates ahead of time in terms of what towers are coming. And I did encourage her to meet with the specific supervisors early where the towers are coming in to make sure we're getting all the information and including the community input as best we can. And then I'll end. Oh, I just want to say, Sue, please bring your feisty self to the AT&T meeting with RCRC. I'm really glad you're engaged in that. We need to stay on top of that. And then the Women's T also was very, very heartening to hear the stories, great, great people that were selected to be awardees. In my case, I awarded, I did a co-award of two young women from trucky high school in their senior year who were going on to do big things in public health and focusing in particular on the Latino community and building bridges and integrating and both so well spoken. It just was very gave us hope for the future, I think, which is, you know, we're depending on our young people to lead us into the future. So they were great. They were amazing. So thank you to Lisa for spear helping to spearhead this and Alison and to Lynn for all the work she did to make this happen. I think that was well worth having. So that's all for me. I just want to make one really quick pitch. Mende the 31st in the board chambers here, we are doing a community form on cell phone towers, which was something that I had talked about at the board workshop. So I won't invite anybody. I think it's at 6530 to 7, I think is our time frame, and it will be facilitated and our staff will be making a presentation and really it's to gain input from the public before this issue goes to the planning commission to write the new ordinance. So hopefully people who showed up to our board workshop will come and ask their questions and help us provide some input into a positive new ordinance for this. Thank you, Lisa, for mentioning that. Yeah, Sue. Real quick, I'm going to be fast. I just remind people, if you are having struggles with AT&T, if they are not helping you with your phone lines, please call me. I'm happy to do that and do make your complaints to the CPUC. I just want to keep reminding that because they, they, they, they're not being great and transparent. They're kind of being deceptive when they speak with you. So please take that extra time and make your complaint. Make sure you get your case number and then I'm happy. Just call me, leave me a number. If I'm not at my office, leave me a message because we have a lot coming down. I'm going to be on a panel that's coming up. We're not going to let them take away our phones even though they like it. There's a lot of deceptive information coming out and advertising right now about switching over. But it doesn't tell you that it's always going to work. So I just wanted to point that out. Sorry. No, and maybe we can do some social media outreach at the county both on the AT&T thing and on the cell phone cell tower. Yeah, that's good points. Thank you. Allison, did you want to provide? I'm sure just a few things that haven't been mentioned. I did attend many of the same events that all of you attended on this last month. Really proud of our community for coming out and supporting bright futures and Sierra Harvest and hearing updates from those organizations really doing important work. I think it just really demonstrates the value of our nonprofits and our community and the important work that they're doing. Had a call with the executive director of KidsZoam, which is a children's museum up in trucking. Actually our first five provided seed funding. I want to say in 2006, they have a building that they are going to be moving out of and expanding their operations in Truckee Community Park, which would really complement the future library. They are looking for partnerships for the new building, as well as programming. They do have a farm day in trucky little did I know. And so we connected them with the Christenize our ad commissioner to see where we could provide some lift to that event. Bites of Insights is basically a lunch and learn that we have with staff and all of you are going to be invited to attend throughout the year. It is our goal to provide an opportunity for two-way conversations with our employees to share what's happening at a board level, but then also really hearing what's happening on the ground. As supervisors were without stated, it was great. It was really informal, lots of good conversations, and staff really appreciated having you there. So thank you. Matt with Tom Lass, who's the executive director of the Contractors Association. I meet with him monthly to really get feedback on county services to see where we can improve. Also, he's super helpful in terms of giving us industry perspective. As we know, or what I heard that a lot of his members currently have work. But it's the 6-9 one year out where there's a lot of uncertainty. And that actually reflects on our building permits that we've seen decline as well. With the Women's Recognition event, our youth commissioners really did an exceptional job in specifically Sofia, which is a student up in Trekkie. And so we're going to take an opportunity to reprint her speech as another voice is in the newspaper. It really talked about in certain times and whether it could be division, what can we do as a community to work together, respect together, and really focus on what we all agree on. So just very inspirational. And then lastly, the Sarah Harvest fundraiser, how an opportunity to do, they gave updates on their programs. And one thing that I think is important for the board to recognize they did formalize their GPA for school lunches. So that is moving forward. They're moving into joint operations with Grass Valley School District this summer. And will be operational between two sites, the high school kitchen and then the new Grass Valley kitchen to provide healthy meals for kids with all our school districts starting in the fall. So kudos to them for that work. The fire forum was a good turnout over 100 people and the takeaways that I'd be important for the board to hear is that one lots of questions about evacuations. So the board's policy direction to bring focus on that, dedicate funding is really on polls of what we heard with the questions. Also support for our firewise communities. I would say over half the people there were involved in a firewise community and we really need to continue about how do we support their efforts because it's all going to take a whole community approach to to be effective. And then also I just wanna share appreciation that they provided to the Board of Supervisors for providing gap funding for keeping Ruff and Reddy Fire Station open. So I wanted to make sure that you heard that as well. Thank you. Thanks, Tufri. Thank you, yeah, I don't have too much. Sorry, Last time before you actually it was out sick for a few days, so I could be back. The couple things, a lot of different internal meetings with staff kind of working through the budget process. I just want to give Kudos to Allison and her team and the support that they provide for departments on the budget process. I think it's phenomenal. Also had a meeting on behalf of Supervisor Bullock with Sugar Bull. We also had public works there as well and they kind of provided an update on some of the infrastructure development that they're planning to do up and Sugar Bull and talking about also in the plowing pieces that they operate in. So that was actually a really good meeting. I think we did some good takeaways. Of course, staff also participated and attended the Municipal Advisory Council meeting with Supervisor Hook. I had a great call with some folks that see SAC, specifically also Catherine Freeman, who leads the Agricultural and Natural Resources Committee and talked about a little bit of the strategy associated with wildfire insurance at the state and the federal level and had a number of calls on different federal pieces as well, pre-providing you and updated this afternoon. And then also had an initial early planning meeting with some of the folks who are around the sustainability summit and thinking through and providing a little bit of feedback to staff on the development of the program that ultimately would go to the ad hoc for consideration. And that's about it. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Okay. We're going to go to close session. So if you would read us out, please. Yes, thank you. Okay, we're going to go to closed session, so if Kit, you would read us out, please. Yes, thank you. So we have a closed session as listed on the agenda requesting determine whether litigation should be initiated by the county in two matters. And then we have an agenda and as listed there, county council is requesting a closed session with board to discuss one matter in which there are significant threats of litigation. So thank you and we do take public comment on that. Is there public comment on our closed session? Yes, Matthew Kultner in about a county. I counted odd on the closed session thing that it didn't list what it's about. So it's just a closed session. You guys are going to go talk about something, but the public's not able to know what it is, even a hint. That's kind of back room dealing basically. I understand you can do it. And Heidi, she really consider your constituents, all your constituents, not just the ones that agree with you. Thank you. I'm not sure what that was about. Do you want to just explain what closed session is? Can I respond? So, do you respond to me? I know I'm asking for an answer to your question. So the reason why closed session exists and so that we can do things without announcing what we've done is for the protection of the county, especially in initiation of litigation, the ideas that you're not giving advanced notice to persons that you're going to be serving or moving forward on with regard to threat of litigation. Again, that's an internal process. Once the decision is actually made or we go forward in any of these matters, those are all public documents once we make a decision. So thank you. And it's common practice throughout the state for counties to have closed sessions for those reasons. Where's the information available for the conclusion of the different closed sessions, including the lawsuits? So, Chair Hall, I'm happy to follow up with you, Matthew. Make sure that you get information on this item as it progresses. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so we're going to go out and then lunch and then we'll be back at 1.30. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so we're going to go out and then lunch and campaign designed to help the public have successful outcomes during emergency events. We really focus on a whole host of disasters or emergency events we want to have a broad spectrum. We want to be prepared for anything, but really we focus a lot on wildfire because we know that's one of the most likely events to happen in Nevada County. Ready set go is really built around the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready before an event, to move into the set posture when there's a red flag or a fire's near you, and then to go when it's time to go. Essentially, in its simplest form, it's a three-tiered community emergency preparedness plan. I have lived in this house which we built by husband and I, 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the hardy plate, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fire is one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of state of California that said this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council, and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the ladder fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning whether that be training, educating yourself or accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and flammable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home, that first 100 feet, but also around the roadway too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home, and really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. that's gonna be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's going to be using non combustible machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer and that's used to disperse medication that I need to give myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries that have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained a pretty substantial battery from freed. And it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend it to anyone who might have medical needs that require power or really anything. I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snow storm or a public safety power shutoff, we really want folks to be thinking about, OK, what are the things I'll need on hand to whether the storm? Do I need to have candles? Do I need to have battery-powered radio? Do I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So a go-back could be anything. It could be a backpack. It could be a suitcase. It's going to be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets if needed. That's going to have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go-back as the only resource you may have. Stores may be closed, the power may be out, so you may have to literally live out of this thing for a three-day period as an evacuee. If you are someone with a disability, maybe you have a chronic health condition. For me, I have type 1 diabetes, I have an insulin pump, right? And so that's a critical piece that I need to plan for if I'm gonna ever evacuate or be away from my house, frankly, for any amount of time, right? What we find often is that if people don't evacuate with their CPAP machine, with their oxygen concentrator, with their wheelchair, walker, then it can be difficult on the other end. My name's Ulysses Palencia. I work in the 211 call center. I'm just a resident of Grass Valley. I have two daughters, four year old and a one year old. In Nevada County 211 is available 24-7. So we provide for the community as information. That could be anything from directions to the resource centers. It can be letting them know where the fire is. You know if they are themselves in an evacuation center if it's a fire, if there's any information as to whether power is coming back on during a PSPS. Two-on-one gets the information that we provide directly from the county. So directly from the Office of Emergency Services. The whole team cares. We're all local community members. We all just want to help. So we were all sleeping in bed on Thursday, November 8th, and paradise. And first the house phone rang, picked up my phone. It was my sister who lived in A block or so away from us. We were welcome by a telephone call from my daughter. She said that we were being evacuated. I left sooner than them. I had everything ready. They were on the way out the door. There was not time to think about what you're going to take, what you're not going to take. The night before the fire, I knew it was a red flag warning, and I knew that it was a high risk. So on my way home, I filled up the tank. Well, the way up, we didn't get too far from the house. And we're watching fire coming down the hill. There was a machine shop right to my right right there. And had gas tanks and propane tanks. And I saw a lone ember kind of floating through, dancing through the air. And I watched it as it landed on the machine shop. In the time it took me to get my phone back into hand and to take a picture it was engulfed in flames. And I knew that within moments it would start exploding, and I would be dead. And just as I moved out of the range of the explosions, they started happening, and I prayed for the people behind me. 10 minute drive normally the Chico became almost for a horse. So it was a long trip. MUSIC We started here a pattern. People kept telling us their story of how they escaped. They camped fire. And they talked about how if it wasn't for my neighbor who came and knocked on my door to tell me there was a fire, I don't know that I would have gotten out alive. If it wasn't for my son who lives next door picking me up and putting me in their car and driving me out of there, I don't know how I would have survived. And so I started really thinking about this connection between isolation and how connected you are to your community, to your neighbors, to your friends, to your family, and how that can be really helpful in a time of a disaster. So we were actually the beneficiaries of someone making that plan in advance to have that group of people that they were going to call. And that she saved my life that day. So absolutely having that network really saved lives. Find your five, the ideas that you know find trusted allies that can be there and can be responsive and we'll check in with you if a disaster were to happen. So we recommend that you put people in your network that are down the street, that are maybe the next town over, they're outside the county and maybe even outside the state. The final tier of the race that go is that go piece, and it's simply that it's go. Evacuation information comes in two types. The first type could be an evacuation warning. This is an essentially information that we're going gonna push out to the public, notifying them of a potential threat in their area where they may have to evacuate their home. An evacuation order is essentially that. We are telling people that it's time to go. There is an imminent threat to life, and we do not believe that you have much time to leave the area. Code Red is an opt-in alerting system that will dial your number. It'll send you a phone call, a text message, and an email, notifying you of an emergency. That message is sent from our office, the Office of Emergency Services. It's going to be very targeted to your area and it'll be specific to you. At 513, the phone rang with the code red call. And so as I was going up 49, I could look over to the left and see the flames in the canyon. The next layer is for staff to actually be out driving in the areas with the high low siren. There's no other reason you'll hear that in an area unless we're putting out that evacuation order, not a warning, but an order. My day started, routine patrol came in, and I was notified by dispatch to respond out to the Jones fire. Houses that had evacuation tags made it so we could just pass by. We knew that the residents had already been evacuated. Residences that did not have the tags, we would have to physically go in, knock on the door, look in the windows, make sure there were no occupants inside. Once you've been evacuated, as you're leaving, put this tag somewhere very, you know, clearly identifiable whether it's a mailbox, a gate, your address marker, so that deputies and officers can quickly identify east side, and you see how close this fire came. It was certainly a shock. And at the same time, it was such an incredible relief to have the house as safe as it was. I mean, I think with personal preparedness and being ready, it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like a lot to do. And the most important piece is to just start with one little bite at a time. Just start the conversation, have some sort of plan. It can be a small is a meet-up place, you know, a destination that everybody will get to, everybody in the household will get to if there's a disaster. Recognize you live in a community in a county that really does take the emergency response as a priority. We have worked diligently throughout the last few years on ensuring that not only our staff are trained and prepared, but we're also putting that out for our community. The more prepared you are in your own community, the better the outcome is going to be. The level of community awareness, they have to be part of the solution. They have to communicate with their neighbors. They have to be part of the discussion in communities. They have to support the response, the prevention, the education, and ultimately the collaboration and the engagement. People have to be engaged at all levels. The more you think about it now, the easier it will be when the time comes that you need to evacuate. We've created this network and we want you to make sure that you know that you can tap into that. So if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, not sure where to start, reach out to one of our offices, reach out to the Firesafe Council or 211. We're here to support you. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. you you From the pit hills of the Sierra Nevada, a new hero will emerge. What is ready? What is ready? One who makes sure their friends and family are set. And has the power to go at a moment's notice. And has the power to go at a moment's notice. And has the power to go at a moment's notice. and has the power to go at a moment's notice. This fire season, you're the hero. This fire season, you're the hero. We are Ready Nevada County. Nevada County has a new tool to make evacuations safer and more efficient in the event of emergency. This new tool is called zone haven and we need you to know your zone. In order to know your zone you need to go to community.zonehaven.com, type in your address. Once your address populates in the pop-up window Take that information and write down the zone that is given to you Where you know you'll find it in case of emergency Zonehaven and knowing your zone does not replace Nixel and or code red It actually supplements them And it makes those tools more powerful Because you will know what zones are being evacuated or which ones are being placed on advisory and As a result you won't have to do anything else other than listen to those messages and know if it's time to go Even if you don't have internet this could be done by word of mouth It can be done by radio or it could be us driving down the street. So please know your zone. From trucky to lake of the pines, from Chicago Park to Spenceville. Every single square mile of Nevada County has a zone and having a zone that you know for your neighborhood is going to help you save time to be able to evacuate and keep you and your family safe. The University of California University of California University of California University of California University of California University of California University of California University of California University of California University of California University of California University of California Reading Nevada County is an Education campaign designed to help the public have successful outcomes during emergency events. The University of California University of California University of California University of California University of California University of California University of California Ready Nevada County is an education campaign designed to help the public have successful outcomes during emergency events. We really focus on a whole host of disasters or emergency events we want to have a broad spectrum. We want to be prepared for anything. But really we focus a lot on wildfire because we know that's one of the most likely events to happen in Nevada County. Ready set go is really built around the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready before an event, to move into the set posture when there's a red flag or a fire is near you, and then to go when it's time to go. Essentially in its simplest form, it's a three-tiered community emergency preparedness plan. I have lived in this house, which we built by husband and I, 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the hardy plate, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fire is one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of state of California that said, this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the ladder fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning whether that be training, educating yourself, or accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and flammable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home that first 100 feet, but also around the roadway too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home. And really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. That's going to be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's going to be using non combustible materials on your deck and around your home. So when an embersstorm comes through, it's not going to ignite your home itself. I currently live here in Grass Valley with my parents. All of us have sleep apnea, so we all have CPAT machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer, and that's used to disperse medication that I need to give myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries to have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained a pretty substantial battery from freed. And it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend to anyone who might have medical needs that require power. Or really anything, I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snow storm or a public safety power shot, we really want folks to be thinking about, OK, what are the things I'll need on hand to whether the storm? Do I need to have candles? Do I need to have battery-powered radio? Do I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So go back, could be anything. It could be a backpack. It could be a suitcase. It's going to be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets, if needed. that's gonna have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go bag as the only resource you may have. Stores may be closed, the power may be out, so you may have to literally live out of this thing for a three day period as an evacuee. If you are someone with a disability, maybe you have a chronic health condition. For me, I have type 1 diabetes. I have an insulin pump, right? And so that's a critical piece that I need to plan for if I'm gonna ever evacuate or be away from my house, frankly, for any amount of time, right? What we find often is that if people don't evacuate with their CPAP machine, with their oxygen concentrator, with their wheelchair, walker, then it can be difficult on the other end. My name's Ulysses Palencia. I work in the 211 call center. I'm just a resident of Grass Valley. I have two daughters, four-year-old and a one-year-old. In Nevada County, 211 is available 24-7. So we provide for the community is information. That can be anything from directions to the resource centers. It can be letting them know where the fire is. If they are themselves in an evacuation center, if it's a fire, if there's any information as to whether their power is coming back on during a PSPS. Two-on-one gets the information that we provide directly from the county, so directly from the Office of Emergency Services. The whole team cares. We're all local community members. We all just want to help. So we were all sleeping in bed on Thursday, November 8th, and paradise. And first the house phone rang, picked up my phone. It was my sister who lived in a block or so away from us. We were walking by a telephone call from my daughter. She said that we were being evacuated. I left sooner than them. I had everything ready. They were on the way out the door. There was not time to think about what you're going to take, what you're not going to take. The night before the fire, I knew it was a red flag warning and I knew that it was a high risk. So on my way home, I filled up the tank. On the way out, we didn't get too far from the house. And we're watching fire coming down the hill. There was a machine shop right to my right right there. And it had gas tanks and propane tanks. And I saw a lone ember kind of floating through, dancing through the air. And I watched it as it landed on the machine shop. In the time it took me to get my phone back into hand and to take a picture it was engulfed in flames. And I knew that within moments it would start exploding and I would be dead. And just as I moved out of the range of the explosions, they started happening and I prayed for the people behind me. Ten minute drive normally the Chico became almost for a horse. Someone was a long trip. We started to hear a pattern. People kept telling us their story of how they escaped. They camped fire. And they talked about how if it wasn't for my neighbor who came and knocked on my door to tell me there was a fire, I don't know that I would have gotten out alive. If it wasn't for my son who lives next door picking me up and putting me in their car and driving me out of there, I don't know how I would have survived. And so I started really thinking about this connection between isolation and how connected you are to your community, to your neighbors, to your friends, to your family, and how that can be really helpful in a time of a disaster. So we were actually the beneficiaries of someone making that plan in advance to have that group of people that they were going to call. And that she saved my life that day. So absolutely having that network really saved lives. Find your five, the idea is that, you know, find trusted allies that can be there and can be responsive and will check in with you if a disaster were to happen. So we recommend that you put people in your network that are down the street, that are maybe the next town over, that are outside the county, and maybe even outside the state. The final tier of the Ready Set Go is that go piece, and it's simply that, it's gouation information comes in two types. The first type could be an evacuation warning. This is an essentially information that we're gonna push out to the public, notifying them of a potential threat in their area where they may have to evacuate their home. An evacuation order is essentially that. We are telling people that it's time to go. There is an imminent threat to life, and we do not believe that you have much time to leave the area. Code Red is an opt-in alerting system that will dial your number. It'll send you a phone call, a text message, and an email, notifying you of an emergency. That message is sent from our office, the office of emergency services. It's going to be very targeted to your area and it'll be specific to you. At 513, the phone rang with the code red call. And so as I was going up 49, I could look over to the left and see the flames in the canyon. The next layer is for staff to actually be out driving in the areas with the high low siren. There's no other reason you'll hear that in an area unless we're putting out that evacuation order, not a warning but an order. My day started, routine patrol, came in and I was notified by dispatch to respond out to the Jones fire. Houses that had evacuation tags made it so we could just pass by. We knew that the residents had already been evacuated. Residences that did not have the tags, we would have to physically go in, knock on the door, look in the windows, make sure there were no occupants inside. Once you've been evacuated, as you're leaving, put this tag somewhere very, you know, clearly identifiable whether it's a mailbox, a gate, your address marker, so that deputies and officers can quickly identify if your residence has already been evacuated. I mean you look out my back window here on the east side, and you see how close this fire came. It was certainly a shock, and at the same time, it was such an incredible relief to have the house as safe as it was. I mean, I think with personal preparedness and being ready, it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like a lot to do. And the most important piece is to just start with one little bite at a time. Just start the conversation, have some sort of plan. It can be a small as a meet-up place, you know, a destination that everybody will get to, everybody in the household will get to if there's a disaster. Recognize you live in a community in a county that really does take the emergency response as a priority. We have worked diligently throughout the last few years on ensuring that not only our staff are trained and prepared, but we're also putting that out for our community. The more prepared you are in your own community, the better the outcome is going to be. The level of community awareness, they have to be part of the solution. They have to communicate with their neighbors. They have to be part of the discussion in communities. They have to support the response, the prevention, the education, and ultimately the collaboration and the engagement. People have to be engaged at all levels. The more you think about it now, the easier it will be when the time comes that you need to evacuate. We've created this network and we want you to make sure that you know that you can tap into that. So if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, not sure where to start, reach out to one of our offices, reach out to the Firesafe Council or 211. We're here to support you. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. you you From the pit hills of the Sierra Nevada. A new hero will emerge. What who is ready. One who makes sure their friends and family are set. And has the power to go at a moment's notice. This fire season, you're the hero. We are Ready Nevada County. Nevada County has a new tool to make evacuations safer and more efficient in the event of emergency. This new tool is called zone haven and we need you to know your zone. In order to know your zone, need to go to community.zonehaven.com, type in your address. Once your address populates in the pop-up window, take that information and write down the zone that is given to you where you know you'll find it in case of emergency. Zonehaven and knowing your zone does not replace, Nixel and or Code Red. It actually supplements them and it makes those tools more powerful because you will know what zones are being evacuated or which ones are being placed on advisory. And as a result, you won't have to do anything else other than listen to those messages and know if it's time to go. Even if you don't have internet, this could be done by word of mouth, it can be done by radio or it could be us driving down the street so please know your zone. From trucky to lake of the pines, from Chicago Park to Spenceville. Every single square mile of Nevada County has a zone and having a zone that you know for your neighborhood is going to help you save time to be able to evacuate and keep you and your family safe. We're really focused on a whole host of disasters or emergency events we want to have a broad spectrum. We want to be prepared for anything, But really we focus a lot on wildfire because we know that's one of the most likely events to happen in Nevada County Ready set go is really built around the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready before an event To move into the set posture When there's a red flag or a fires near you and then and then to go when it's time to go. Essentially, in its simplest form, it's a three-tiered community emergency preparedness plan. I have lived in this house, which we built by husband and I, 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the hardy plank, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fire is one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of the state of California that said this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the ladder fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning whether that be training, educating yourself or accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and flammable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home, that first 100 feet, but also around the roadway too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home, and really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. That's going to be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home, so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's going to be using non-combustible materials on your deck and around your home. So when an embers storm comes through, it's not going to ignite your home itself. I currently live here in Grass Valley with my parents. All of us have sleep apnea, so we all have CPAT machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer, and that's used to disperse medication that I need to give myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries that have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained a pretty substantial battery from freed, and it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend it to anyone who might have medical needs that require power or really anything. I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snowstorm or a public safety power shot of we we really want folks to be thinking about, okay, what are the things I'll need on hand to whether the storm? Do I need to have candles? Do I need to have battery powered radio? Do I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So go back, could be anything. It could be a backpack. It could be a suitcase. It's going to be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets if needed. That's going to have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go-back as the only resource you may have. Stores may be closed. The power may be out. So you may have to literally live out of this thing for a three day period as an evacuee. If you are someone with a disability, maybe you have a chronic health condition. For me, I have type 1 diabetes, I have an insulin pump, right? And so that's a critical piece that I need to plan for if I'm gonna ever evacuate or be away from my house, for any amount of time, right? What we find often is that if people don't evacuate with their CPAP machine, with their oxygen concentrator with their wheelchair, walker, then it can be difficult on the other end. My name is Ulysses Palencia. I work in the 211 call center. I'm just a resident of Grass Valley. I have two daughters, four-year-old and a one-year-old. In Nevada County 211 is available 24-7. So we provide for the community is information. That could be anything from directions to the resource centers. It can be letting them know where the fire is. You know, if they are themselves in an evacuation center, if it's a fire, if there's any information as to whether power's coming back on during a PSPS. Two-on-one gets the information that we provide directly from the county. So directly from the Office of Emergency Services. The whole team cares. We're all local community members. We all just want to help. So we were all sleeping in bed on Thursday, November 8th, and paradise. And first the house phone rang, picked up my phone. It was my sister who lived in a block or so away from us. We were welcome by a telephone call from my daughter. She said that we were being evacuated. I left sooner than them. I had everything ready. They were on the way out the door. There was not time to think about what you're going to take, what you're not going to take. The night before the fire, I knew it was a red flag warning, and I knew that it was a high risk. So on my way home, I filled up the tank. Well, the way up, we didn't get too far from the house, and we're watching fire come down the hill. There was a machine shop right to my right right there, and it had gas tanks and propane tanks. And I saw a lone ember kind of floating through, dancing through the air, and I watched it as it landed on the machine shop. In the time it took me to get my phone back into hand and to take a picture it was engulfed in flames. And I knew that within moments, it would start exploding, and I would be dead. And just as I moved out of the range of the explosions, they started happening, and I prayed for the people behind me. 10 minute drive, normally the Chico became almost for a horse. So it was a long trip. We started here a pattern. People kept telling us their story of how they escaped. They camped fire. And they talked about how, if it wasn't for my neighbor who came and knocked on my door to tell me there was a fire, I don't know that I would have gotten out alive. If it wasn't for my son who lives next door picking me up and putting me in their car and driving me out of there, I don't know how I would have survived. And so I started really thinking about this connection between isolation and how connected you are to your community, to your neighbors, to your friends, to your family, and how that can be really helpful in a time of a disaster. So we were actually the beneficiaries of someone making that plan in advance to have that group of people that they were going to call. And that she saved my life that day. So absolutely having that network really saved lives. Find your five, the idea is that, you know, find trusted allies that can be there and can be responsive and will check in with you if a disaster were to happen. So we recommend that you put people in your network that are down the street, that are maybe the next town over, they're outside the county and maybe even outside the state. The final tier of the race at Go is that Go piece. The final tear of the race at Go is that Go piece. And it's simply that it's go. Evacuation information comes in two types. The first type could be an evacuation warning. This is an essentially information that we're going to push out to the public, notifying them of a potential threat in their area where they may have to evacuate their home. An evacuation order is essentially that. We are telling people that it's time to go. There is an imminent threat to life and we do not believe that you have much time to leave the area. Code Red is an opt-in alerting system that will dial your number. It'll send you a phone call, a text message, and an email, notifying you of an emergency. That message is sent from our office, the Office of Emergency Services. It's going to be very targeted to your area and it'll be specific to you. At 513, the phone rang with the Code Red call. And so as I was going up 49, I could look over to the left and see the flames in the canyon. The next layer is for staff to actually be out driving in the areas with the high low siren. There's no other reason you'll hear that in an area unless we're putting out that evacuation order, not a warning but an order. My day started, a routine patrol came in and I was notified by dispatch to respond out to the Jones fire. Houses that had evacuation tags made it so we could just pass by. We knew that the residents had already been evacuated. Residences that did not have the tags, we would have to physically go in, knock on the door, look in the windows, make sure there were no occupants inside. Once you've been evacuated, as you're leaving, put this tag somewhere very clearly identifiable, whether it's a mailbox, a gate, your address marker, so that deputies and officers can quickly identify if your residence is already been evacuated. I'm going to go back to the place where I'm going to go. I'm going to go back to the place where I'm going to go. I'm going to go back to the place where I'm going to go. I'm going to go back to the place where I'm going to go. I'm going to go back to the place where I'm going to go. I'm going to go back to the place where I'm going to go. I'm going to go back to the the house as safe as it was. I mean, I think with personal preparedness and being ready, it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like a lot to do, and the most important piece is to just start with one little bite at a time. Just start the conversation, have some sort of plan. It can be a small as a meetup place, you know, a destination that everybody will get to, everybody in the household will get to if there's a disaster. Recognize you live in a community in a county that really does take the emergency response as a priority. We have worked diligently throughout the last few years on ensuring that not only our staff are trained and prepared, but we're also putting that out for our community. The more prepared you are in your own community, the better the outcome is going to be. The level of community awareness, they have to be part of the solution. They have to communicate with their neighbors. They have to be part of the discussion in communities. They have to support the response, the prevention, the education, and ultimately the collaboration and the engagement. People have to be engaged at all levels. The more you think about it now, the easier it will be when the time comes that you need to evacuate. We've created this network and we want you to make sure that you know that you can tap into that. So if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, not sure where to start. Reach out to one of our offices. Reach out to the Firesafe Council or 211. We're here to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. you you The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The hills of the Sierra Nevada, a new hero will emerge. One who is ready. who make sure their friends and family are set. And has the power to go at a moment's notice. and has the power to go at a moment's notice. This fire season, you're the hero. We are Ready Nevada County. Nevada County has a new tool to make evacuations safer and more efficient in the event of emergency. This new tool is called zone haven and we need you to know your zone. In order to know your zone you need to go to community.zonehaven.com type in your address. Once your address populates in the pop-up window, take that information and write down the zone that is given to you where you know you'll find an incase of emergency. Zone Haven and knowing your zone does not replace, Nixel and or Code Red. It actually supplements them and it makes those tools more powerful because you will know what zones are being evacuated or which ones are being placed on advisory. And as a result, you won't have to do anything else other than listen to those messages, and know if it's time to go. Even if you don't have internet, this could be done by word of mouth. It can be done by radio, or it could be us driving down the street. So please know your zone. From trucky to lake of the pines, from Chicago Park to Spenceville, every single square mile of Nevada County has a zone. And having a zone that you know for your neighborhood is going to help you save time to be able to evacuate and keep you and your family safe. Reading Nevada County is an education campaign designed to help the public have successful outcomes during emergency events. We really focus on a whole host of disasters or emergency events. We want to have a broad spectrum. We want to be prepared for anything. But really we focus a lot on wildfire because we know that's one of the most likely events to happen in Nevada County. Ready, set, go is really built around the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready for an event, to move into the set posture when there's a red flag or a fire's near you, and then to go when it's time to go. Essentially, in its simplest form, it's a three-tiered community emergency preparedness plan. I have lived in this house, which we built by husband and I, 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the hardy plate, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fire is one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of the state of California that said, this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council, and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the ladder fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning whether that be training, educating yourself, or accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and flammable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home that first 100 feet but also around the roadway too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home and really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. That's going to be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's going to be using non combustible materials on your deck and around your home. So when an embers storm comes through, it's not going to ignite your home itself. I currently live here in Grass Valley with my parents. All of us have sleep apnea, so we all have CPAT machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer and that's used to disperse medication that I need to give myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries that have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained pretty substantial battery from freed, and it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend it to anyone who might have medical needs that require power or really anything. I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snow storm or a public safety power shot, we really want folks to be thinking about, okay, what are the things I'll need on hand to weather the storm? Do I need to have candles? Do I need to have battery-powered radio? Do I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So a go-back could be anything. It could be a backpack. It could be a suitcase. It's going to be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets, if needed. That's going to have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go bag as the only resource you may have. Stores may be closed. medication, clothing, toiletries to get you by for 72 hours. You need to think of your go bag as the only resource you may have. Stores may be closed, the power may be out, so you may have to literally live out of this thing for a three day period as an evacuee. If you are someone with a disability, maybe you have a chronic health condition. For me, I have type 1 diabetes, I have an insulin pump, right? And so that's a critical piece that I need to plan for if I'm going to ever evacuate or be away from my house, frankly, for any amount of time, right? What we find often is that if people don't evacuate with their CPAP machine, with their oxygen concentrator with their wheelchair, walker, then it can be difficult on the other end. My name is Ulysses Palencia. I work in the 211 call center. I'm just a resident of Grass Valley. I have two daughters, four-year-old and a one-year-old. In Nevada County 211 is available 24-7. So we provide for the community is information. That could be anything from directions to the resource centers. It can be letting them know where the fire is. You know, if they are themselves in an evacuation center, if it's a fire, if there's any information as to whether their power is coming back on during a PSPS, 21 one gets the information that we provide directly from the county, so directly from the Office of Emergency Services. The whole team cares. We're all local community members. We all just want to help. So we were all sleeping in bed on Thursday, November 8th, and paradise. And first the house phone rang, picked up my phone. It was my sister who lived. A block or so away from us. We were welcome by a telephone call from my daughter. She said that we were being evacuated. I left sooner than them. I had everything ready. They were on the way out the door. There was not time to think about what you're going to take. What you're not going to take. The night before the fire, I knew it was a red flag warning, and I knew that it was a high risk. So on my way home, I filled up the tank. On the way out, we didn't get too far from the house, and we're watching fire come down the hill. There was a machine shop right to my right right there, and it had gas tanks and propane tanks. And I saw a lone ember kind of floating through, dancing through the air. And I watched it as it landed on the machine shop. In the time it took me to get my phone back into hand and to take a picture it was engulfed in flames. And I knew that within moments it would start exploding and I would be dead. And just as I moved out of the range of the explosions they started happening and I prayed for the people behind me. Ten minute drive normally the Chico became almost for a horse. So it was a long trip. We started here a pattern. People kept telling us their story of how they escaped. They camped fire. And they talked about how if it wasn't for my neighbor who came and knocked on my door to tell me there was a fire, I don't know that I would have gotten out alive. If it wasn't for my son who lives next door picking me up and putting me in their car and driving me out of there, I don't know how I would have survived. And so I started really thinking about this connection between isolation and how connected you are to your community, to your neighbors, to your friends, to your family, and how that can be really helpful in a time of a disaster. So we were actually the beneficiaries of someone making that plan in advance to have that group of people that they were going to call. And that she saved my life that day. So absolutely having that network really saved lives. Find your five, the idea is that, you know, find trusted allies that can be there and can be responsive and will check in with you if a disaster were to happen. So we recommend that you put people in your network that are down the street, that are maybe the next town over, that are outside the county, and maybe even outside the state. The final tier of the race that go is that go piece and it's simply that it's go. Evacuation information comes in two types. The first type could be an evacuation warning. This is an essentially information that we're going to push out to the public, notifying them of a potential threat in their area where they may have to evacuate their home. An evacuation order is essentially that. We are telling people that it's time to go. There is an imminent threat to life and we do not believe that you have much time to leave the area. Code Red is an opt-in alerting system that will dial your number. It will send you a phone call, a text message, and an email notifying you of an emergency. That message is sent from our office, the Office of Emergency Services. It's going to be very targeted to your area and it'll be specific to you. At 513, the phone rang with the code red call. And so as I was going up 49, I could look over to the left and see the flames in the canyon. The next layer is for staff to actually be out driving in the areas with the high low siren. There's no other reason you'll hear that in an area unless we're putting out that evacuation order, not a warning but an order. My day started, a routine patrol came in and I was notified by dispatch to respond out to the Jones fire. Houses that had evacuation tags made it so we could just pass by. We knew that the residents had already been evacuated. Residences that did not have the tags, we would have to physically go in, knock on the door, look in the windows, make sure there were no occupants inside. Once you've been evacuated, as you're leaving, put this tag somewhere very clearly identifiable, whether it's a mailbox, a gate, your address marker, so that deputies and officers can quickly identify if your residence is already been evacuated. I mean, you look out my back window here on the east side, and you see how close this It was certainly a shock, and at the same time, it was such an incredible relief to have the house as safe as it was. I mean, I think with personal preparedness and being ready, it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like a lot to do, and the most important piece is to just start with one little bite at a time. Just start the conversation, have some sort of plan. It can be a small is a meetup place, a destination that everybody will get to, everybody in the household will get to if there's a disaster. Recognize you live in a community in a county that really does take the emergency response as a priority. We have worked diligently throughout the last few years on ensuring that not only our staff are trained and prepared, but we're also putting that out for our community. The more prepared you are in your own community, the better the outcome is going to be. The level of community awareness, they have to be part of the solution. They have to communicate with their neighbors. They have to be part of the discussion in communities. They have to support the response, the prevention, the education, and ultimately the collaboration and the engagement. People have to be engaged at all levels. The more you think about it now, the easier it will be when the time comes that you need to evacuate. We've created this network and we want you to make sure that you know that you can tap into that. So if you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, not sure where to start, reach out to one of our offices, reach out to the Firesafe Council or 211. We're here to support you. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. you Music From the pit hills of the Sierra Nevada, a new hero will emerge. who is ready. One who makes sure their friends and family are set. And has the power to go at a moment's notice. This fire season, you're the hero. This fire season, you're the hero. We are Ready Nevada County. Nevada County has a new tool to make evacuations safer and more efficient in the event of emergency. This new tool is called zone haven and we need you to know your zone. In order to know your zone you need to go to community.zonehaven.com, type in your address. Once your address populates in the pop up window, take that information and write down the zone that is given to you where you know you'll find it in case of emergency. Zonehaven and knowing your zone does not replace Nixel and or Code Red. It actually supplements them and it makes those tools more powerful because you will know what zones are being evacuated or which ones are being placed on advisory. And as a result, you won't have to do anything else other than listen to those messages and know if it's time to go. [♪ music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music be done by radio or it could be us driving down the street. So please know your zone. From trucky to lake of the pines, from Chicago Park to Spenceville, every single square mile of Nevada County has a zone. And having a zone that you know for your neighborhood is going to help you save time to be able to evacuate and keep you and your family safe. Ready Nevada County is an education campaign designed to help the public have successful outcomes during emergency events. We really focus on a whole host of disasters or emergency events we want to have a broad spectrum. We want to be prepared for anything, but really we focus a lot on wildfire because we know that's one of the most likely events to happen in Nevada County. Ready set go is really built around the wildfire premise to prepare residents to be ready before an event, to move into the set posture when there's a red flag or a fire is near you, and then to go when it's time to go. Essentially in its simplest form it's a three-tiered community emergency preparedness plan. I have lived in this house, which we built by husband and I, 26 years ago now, actually. We selected the hardy-plight, the concrete siding, and also the metal roof. Then when we moved up here and heard about the 49er fire, that's when we started to say, wow, this really is even more important than we first realized. So the 49er fire is one of the most historic fires in Nevada County's history. They figured it changed the laws of state of California that said this is how you have to protect your home. That came out in Nevada County. Steve Ubex came from the Firesafe Council and the main thing we needed to pay attention to was the ladder fuels. Planting has been removed from the edges of the house so that it does not touch the house. It was an incredible service from the Firesafe Council to come out and spend a couple of hours going through this property. So the ready phase is when there's no immediate threat to you and your family. This is the time when you should be doing education and planning, whether that be training, educating yourself, or accumulating equipment, hardening your home, creating defensible space. Defensible space is really all about creating a buffer zone between your house and planable vegetation. We really focus on defensible space around the home, that first 100 feet, but also around the roadway too. Another aspect of the ready phase is hardening the home, and really what that means is making your home more resilient to wildfire. That's going to be putting the fine grain mesh around the vents of your home, so that embers won't get into under your house or into the eaves of your house. That's going to be using non combustible materials on your deck and around your home. So when an ember storm comes through, it's not going to ignite your home itself. I currently live here in Grass Valley with my parents. All of us have a sleep apnea, so we all have CPAT machines that require power in order to run. I also use a nebulizer, and that's used to disperse medication that I need to give myself breathing again. When we have safety shutoffs, we have to hook up our equipment to batteries that have inverters. We have a generator that powers some of the things around the house, but then I obtained a pretty substantial battery from freed. And it was so easy to go through the process to obtain a battery that I would recommend it to anyone who might have medical needs that require power or really anything. I would highly recommend contacting freed. So whether it's a snow storm or a public safety power shot of we really want folks to be thinking about okay what are the things I'll need on hand to whether the storm, do I need to have candles, do I need to have battery powered radio, do I need to have flashlights? So what are the things that you'll need to shelter in place or address the disaster at hand? So go back, could be anything, could be a backpack, could be a suitcase, it's gonna be something that you put together to sustain yourself, your family, your pets if needed. That's gonna have food, water, medication, clothing, toiletries to get you back. Okay, good afternoon. We're back. First, could you please read us out of session. Yes, thank you with regard to all matters listed on the Agendas. Direction was given to staff. All right, thank you. And we are going into our 2025 priority objective charters and a resource allocation discussion. So we have a lot of items to get through on this. What did we agree to take questions charter by charter? Let's see how it goes. Yeah, so to my colleagues, this is going to be a long discussion. There's a lot of charters. Hopefully you were able to read through them before today. Why don't we try to take clarifying questions after each charter but not get into a discussion until we've seen them all? Is that all right? Okay, all right. So I'm handing it over to Erin. Thank you. Yes, good afternoon Chair, members of the Board. Erin Matler, your Deputy County Executive Officer and Chief Physical Officer. Here with my fellow agency directors today, Trisha Tillerson, with Community Development Agency, Ryan Gruber, with Health and Human Services Agency, and Craig Greasebock, your newest agency director for information general services agency. So we're here before you to present on the Nevada County Priority Objectives for 2526. And just a quick agenda, I'm going to set the stage for you and talk through where we are in the process as well as where we're going. Each of the agency directors and myself will go over the eight priority objectives and talk about the activities on a very high level and then go through a bit of a fiscal picture for each of those objectives as well. In addition, we'll be available to answer questions, and then we'll look to the board for some priority setting policy direction and go through next steps. So with that, I'm gonna start off with our budget development process flow chart. Again, our budget process in Nevada County is a dynamic year round process. We start in January at your board workshop. I gave a presentation at that time looking at last fiscal year, how we ended that fiscal year on June 30th of 24th. Also what we're doing for the current fiscal year as of our quarter two and then a bit of a forecast if you will for upcoming 2526. And if you recall in that presentation, I showed a series of graphs representing our economically sensitive revenues and really talked about how our revenue picture is changing, not dramatically, but enough that it's going to, and it has caused some struggles with preparing our expenditure budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year. And so what that means is we're going into the year with less revenue than anticipated and less revenue than we've had in the past. And there's a variety of reasons for that. Namely, our COVID funding has expired and been exhausted. We've used it really well. And we've enjoyed a host of different levels of service during the pandemic as appropriate. And so now it's our opportunity to write size, our services as we move forward, and recognizing that things cost more to get done. That sales tax revenue isn't as strong as it has been in the past few years. The property tax is in a similar situation where it's not growing as much as it has in the past several years. And so as we struggle to right size our budget proposal, we're right in the thick of it right now. So in February and March, your fiscal staff across the whole county is working tirelessly trying to put together their best budget proposal for the July 1st start the new fiscal year. And right now that that is a struggle for all of us. And so really what we're asking staff to do is meet expenditures, meet revenue. And then for anything that does not or that exceeds the revenue available, we're having robust discussions about, is this the right opportunity and the right time to move forward with that particular item or not? Are there other funding sources available or not? And so those discussions are occurring right now and they will continue to occur in your fiscal staff's purview for the next month, month and a half before we bring a proposed budget to before the budget subcommittee in May. These priority objectives are part of that discussion in that the board has directed that staff focus in eight different areas throughout the year, one of them being fiscal stability and core services. So we spend a lot of time with our budget preparation figuring out how we arrive at a balanced budget proposal to the board and also making sure that when we are increasing budget requests that we're doing it in a sustainable and physically responsible way. So in April and May, we'll review those budgets myself and my staff and then bring it to the budget subcommittee. As I mentioned, the next time that you're a board we'll see these project Trudders will be incorporated into our full budget proposal at a June public hearing. And that will be our opportunity to present a full budget picture to include these project areas as well. These are the eight priority objectives going into 2526. They have not changed from 2425, other than they got new pretty icons as a result of our things to our public information office team. And how we're going to work the presentation today, we have just under an hour for discussion, for presentation, for questions and answers. And really we want to look walk through each of these priority objectives, talk about what our plan is for the upcoming year, and note that these objectives, because they're not new, we built upon last year's charters and some of them the prior year before that. Some of these objectives have been around for a while. And so each year, when we refresh the charter document, which is our plan for what we're going to do and the activities that we're going to employ to further the goal of that objective, each year we're building upon what has come before. And so some have slight adjustments, some have major changes, and we'll try to capture that in our presentation. The purpose of providing a plan for each of these objectives is really to be aspirational. If we had all the resources available, what could our current staff capacity support in a given year? And so from that perspective, we wanna show you what our proposal is for each of the objectives in terms of activities, if only we had the resources available. What you're going to find is that we're presenting activities that are beyond the resources available for the objectives. And so we're also going to work through what it could look like for a reduced picture for each of these objectives. And then staff does have a proposal for you in terms of a balanced plan moving forward. But I want to touch a little bit upon the reason for having an aspirational plan and the reason for identifying activities and expenditures above what we may have available is that we've noticed in the last five years as we've been more competitive in the grant world that grant applications are competitive when they're supported by plans. When they're supported by a document that dictates in details a long-term picture, I'll use economic development for an example. We have an economic development plan. It has several different activities identified. And if only for funds to go behind those activities, we could actually accomplish the goal. Getting that funding in terms of a grant request or an application requires partnership. It requires planning. It requires a lot of thought put into that ask of that funding agency. And so while we're showing you all the different things that we could do and it's really exciting, we're also taking kind of a measured approach and being able to put a realistic lens on what we're able to do given staff capacity as well as fiscal resources in the upcoming fiscal year. And so that is nuanced and I apologize in advance. It's going to get a little complicated today, but we are here to answer your questions, and we are here to help guide the conversation as needed towards a final recommendation. So what we're asking for the board today to support us on and provide policy direction for is approving the charters as presented, the plans as presented, and then giving us some direction for how we come at the resource allocation requests going into the fiscal year budget process. You'll see as we go through the objectives and at the end, I'll be summarizing the total requested amount. The total requested amount is about $1.76 million, and I'm suggesting that we keep the resource allocation to about a million dollars even, so a reduction of $766,000. And there's a couple of reasons for that, mostly have to do with our fiscal picture and wanting to take that measured approach, but also keep the door open for the opportunity to leverage funds during the year. As grant opportunities materialize, as partnerships come to the table, we want to be flexible and an imble with those charters and those activities. And we want to be able to be ready to capture those opportunities when they arrive. With that, I will get into the first objective. So, fiscal stability and core services is the first objective we'll go through today. And this is traditionally the CFO's objective because it starts with fiscal stability. And so that's my responsibility as your CFO to make sure that we are sustainable and strong in a fiscal way. And really what we want to talk about in terms of the charter objective is a couple different policy directives provided by the board at your January workshop. They're listed here on the screen and I won't go into all of them in detail as you've heard presentations previously to this. But the one requesting resource allocation is actually the very bottom bullet point, the Community Spain Newter Program. This is a new proposal to provide a Community Spain Newter Program for Nevada County residents who can otherwise not afford to stay and neuter their pets. And this is a proposal requesting $100,000 to pilot a program like this. In addition, and I apologize, there was another bullet point with Monday attached. The litter abatement in Western County $50,000 is also part of this charter objective and that is to expand our current litter abatement services specific to Western County and you'll see Eastern County in a different objective. The funding is a little bit wonky, and so that's why they're split. But this objective, again, talks about a lot of different opportunities that we have coming forward, capital project financing. I've kept out of a resource request because it is nuanced, and it is different. That will come back to you and through the Capital Projects Committee as those capital outlays are ready for financing. So it's a little bit of a different discussion, although the staff support for it is still in this objective. Any questions before we move on to the next objective? Okay. I will hand it off to Craig Gregg stock. All right. Thanks, Aaron. Good afternoon, Chair, hall members of the board. Craig Greasebox, director of information and general services. As I mentioned to you in the past, through your board's leadership, an over-decade of investment in the emergency preparedness objective, we continue to lead the region overall in this effort. In addition to leaning into the continuation of this objective that we've invested in over a decade, we have three specific initiatives that are woven into it. The first one is led by the Department of Public Works and in partnership with the OES team and an enhancement to the roadside vegetation treatment efforts to improve evacuation route safety along or publicly maintain roadways. This includes a proposal for resource enhancements to our roadside spray program and our roadside vegetation treatment program. Second, investment in our local biomass solutions that removes wildfire fuels from our forest and supports multiple objectives simultaneously. This includes emergency preparedness, climate resiliency, and economic development. This includes investments in biomass infrastructure, material processing, and material transportation. And lastly, the incorporation of a protection of natural resources related to mines in Nevada County. This is a collaborative effort with staff and OES, CDA, CEO's office, and a partnership with Chair Hall and Superfusures Tucker, including the formation of a formal ad hoc committee. This effort will include an assessment of proposed solutions for the team to review, consider and return to your board for consideration of some recommendations. In order to accomplish these initiatives, additional resources are needed. This includes $60,000 for contract spray services and $160,000 for contract roadside vegetation removal. This is anticipated to increase treatment of approximately 40 additional publicly maintained road miles of roadside vegetation treatment per year. These additional resources would be matched by $260,000 from a funding sources allocated in the Department of Public Works budget with a goal of getting on a five year treatment cycle on our publicly maintained roadways. The current budget to continue support for biomass solutions on our low bar Meadows property is $664,400. Again, this will support required biomass infrastructure, material processing and material transportation. This effort would be complemented by our many fuel mitigation projects that we have and serve as really a feedstock in resulting millions of dollars in efforts to improve wildfire resilience throughout our neighborhoods. An alternative proposal will be shown towards the end of this presentation, as mentioned by Aaron earlier. If your Chief Board chooses to pivot from the continuation of this specific biomass solution. This option would lean into a traditional green waste resources that we've been so successful with the last several years, allowing them to continue to be available to the community over this next year, meaning the intent of what we're trying to achieve with biomass with also having a less of an impact to our overall costs. There's no additional resource request at this time for the Mines and Nevada County Initiative. That is the only one on this specific charter that does not have another resource request. So with that, I will hand it off to Trisha unless you have any specific questions for me. Thank you. I do have one question on the biomass pilot. What is the, is this 664, one year or for a number of years and how many years? This is intended to increase it for one more year for the pilot project that we have, but it also invests an infrastructure for us to have long term regardless of the biomass solution or what we decide to do on that site. So it does a little bit of both and helps support the longevity of what we're trying to achieve, but it also supports another year of an actual program. Thank you. Yeah, they're clarifying questions. Just clarifying. Okay. Okay. Sue first and then. Spain that again. Okay, so understand the biomes. How is that, what is that going to do if we don't have biolus? But I mean, we are D.R.s correct. The property is already ours, but there are conditions associated to this type of activity from our regulatory entitlements. Do we have to put infrastructure on the site if we want biomass on the site long term? So, underground water lines and other infrastructure we would be investing in along with funding another year of the program. That makes sense. Yeah, that does. Thank you. I have the same question. I wonder, is there a figure inside 664,400 that would only, could we kick the can down the road as what I'm asking? Could we only do operational and we could defer the capital improvement cost if we're short on money this year? There are certain improvements that we don't necessarily have to do and our OAS team has been doing a good job talking to grass-fired department and their planning department to figure out what we need to do but there are some we're going to have to do. So we could get a more refined number for your board on that if they choose to retool this a little bit and try to reduce those costs. Okay, so we'll come back to that. Did you have a quick one? Yeah, just following up. So I think what we're looking for is out of that 664,000. What even roughly makes that up? Is it the renting of the carbonizer is 300,000 a year as opposed to the Zinstructure Cost that you mentioned? Yeah, if your board references the charter that's in your board packet, so example is large diameter wood removal. So grapple truck services to get the wood from our neighborhoods to the site $176,000. If we're looking at the specific site improvements for infrastructure enhancements. That's $260,000. And there's construction management, additional regulatory permitting requirements, processing. So it's broken out in your charter, this specific to it. Okay, so I'm going to refer the board back to the charters and we can take up this discussion at the end further. Thank you. Okay, go ahead, Aaron. All right, I'll jump in here. Trisha Tultzen, your Community Development Agency Director. Next slide. So in economic development, we have several initiatives outlined here. Some are implementing the action plan, which includes the California Job First Grants. Contracts for business assistance, art, and also go Nevada County. We also do funding and advocacy, which means we're assisting and applying for grants. For infrastructure projects, we're working on the Norse N1 Fire Suppression Project, as well as working with the airport and then working on the future use of the courthouse. For business attraction, retention, growth, and development, we're working with our partners to provide ongoing support to entrepreneurs and small businesses. This includes coming back to the board on April 8th, for example, with information about finance incentives for developers. And meanwhile, we're also starting communication regarding outreach to gauge interest in business licenses, and that will be coming back to the board in the near future. And then for a high growth sector development, our areas of focus include tourism, business executive, leadership meetings, regional marketing, ag and cannabis. Next slide. So as far as requests, we're looking at action plan initiatives here requesting $125,000 if funding allows to continue to implement action plan initiatives. And then not on this slide, it seems like we have our North San Juan Fire Suppression Project that is included in the charter where we were requesting $175,000 if funding allows to continue to work on the project and get it ready for construction pending grant funds. So a reduction in these two requests could still result in the North and One Fire project proceeding. Just less the acquisition of needed easements, those could come at a later day and be grant funded potentially. And then the action plan initiatives could still move forward, but it just wouldn't be at the same degree or level. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions. Okay. Okay. Let's go ahead. Okay, I'll pass it to Craig. Our organization continues to lean it hard into supporting and advocating enhanced broadband access throughout our rural community that we all know is a challenge. Knowing that we still have a long way to go to enhancing access to our residents, we are planning to continue these efforts throughout this next year. We will focus on continuing to enhance our community engagement to improve digital equity across the county, getting community feedback and updating our tower ordinance through the leadership of Brian Foss and his team in the planning department. I continue to support last mile broadband efforts, supporting stakeholders, including Internet service providers, and overall broadband advocacy at the local, state, and federal level. And this specific charter and objective does not have a resource request. Unless you have any questions, I will hand that off to Ryan Grover. Chair Hall, members of the board, Ryan Grover, your Health and Human Services Agency Director here to talk to you about the housing objectives for this year. So at the board workshop, first of all I want to provide a shout out to our housing ad hoc from last year Supervisor Swarthout and Bullock who met with us to really try to live up to the board's priority to start addressing workforce housing. We've done a lot of work in recent years around affordable housing and supporting projects that support sort of a low income Treatment housing spectrum and deferred a lot in clear from the board in terms of the need for more focus on workforce housing And so in the work with the ad hoc and through the Through the policy workshop this year We have the direction to restructure the housing division to include a stand-alone department director rather than shared with child support services as well as a reclassed position to bring a broader array of skills and to the recruitment to backfill one of the vacancies that we have. And so I want to thank and recognize that work and the charter dovetails off of that. So and the policy direction from the workshop included in the charter, there are initiatives shown up on the screen. One related to workforce home buyer incentives includes looking for grants that can support incentives for home buyers and potentially a down payment assistance program. Researching models that exist for down payment assistance programs. We have some experience with down payment assistance in housing in HHSA, but that's been more focused on affordable housing with a lot of restrictions and barriers to how those funds can flow. And so looking at a more fluid model that can support the workforce end of the spectrum and developing a work plan to bring to the board in order to achieve that down payment assistance Program we are not requesting funds from the board for that initiative We instead have roll over funds from previous allocations made by the board for workforce housing including trucky and western Nevada County That we're proposing to be the seed funding for this there would potentially be a resource request in future years If that program is able to be stood up and successful in order for us to keep that going. But the initial first year request is to use those existing previously allocated funds for that piece. Another component of this initiative and that comes out to just over $600,000. You'll see that in the charter. Another component of this is housing opportunities sites. So this morning there was the discussion about the arena numbers who provided this worth out called out that the county's obligation there is to zone and permit for a certain level of housing. So this initiative incorporates taking a step beyond that and making sure that we're partnering with and recruiting developers because the ideal case is not that it's the public sector developing everything. But that we're setting the stage for that to happen. So creating a website to highlight those developable properties, removing barriers to the development of those properties and really getting better at attracting people outside the public sector to help with that development as well as continuing to keep our foot on the gas for projects that go after tax credits using the regional housing authority. We will also be looking at alternative housing options, particularly the RV discussions that have been coming to the board. We have some estimates in the charter in terms of the staff time associated with some of those things, but no resource request associated with it for this year. And then community land trust and exciting opportunity to look at new models to quickly and affordably develop housing in the workforce space. We have $15,000 that's budgeted and already for grant writing assistance, which we're proposing to utilize to support the CLT in pursuing grant opportunities for some of their projects. So there's zero resource requests for new general fund this year for these housing initiatives. There are all over funds and staff that I'm associated and again, likely to be a need for funding on the down payment assistance front going forward. Any questions on housing? Well, I will turn it over to myself to talk about homelessness. And so first thing I'll note on the homeless front is that we have a mature plan to address homelessness in Nevada County that's shared with the continuum of care. Many years ago we developed the first iteration of that plan. And so this is not duplicative of that plan. We work closely with the COC and our partners, the board has already reviewed that plan. Funding comes from the state to address the initiatives that are associated with that plan tied to specific measures with the state. What's incorporated in this charter are the things where our community and our board wants to go beyond those services, particularly winter sheltering. So you have a resource request for $150,000 to continue the direction from last year to particularly winter sheltering. And so you have a resource request for $150,000 to continue the direction from last year to provide winter shelter in Trucky, North San Juan and Western Nevada County. The model that we brought last year was to go after other partners to identify additional funding to amplify that. We were successful in doing that as well as to revise our criteria so that the county wasn't the sort of bottleneck in opening that the partners that we work with can open whenever necessary with the funding that we provide. And so that was successful. I felt this year in Western County in North San Juan. We know about trucky issues and we'll discuss them, I believe, at a later date. So basically we're proposing to continue that. There is an option to roll over funds because we had a relatively light winter where identifying approximately $40,000 of potential savings this year. And so an alternative if the board isn't able to fund that full 150,000 as we could use those residual funds next year to reduce that amount to 130,000. And then the 130,000 also includes encampment cleanup, which we discuss at the workshop. We have grant funds for encampment cleanup in the Brunswick Basin. So that 150,000 of the board funds the full amount or the 130,000 includes 20,000 of match to that so that we can go beyond the Brunswick Basin and do clean ups in public and county public properties. No, and they're right up there. Those resource requests. Sorry about that. And so I'm going to turn it over to Trisha to talk about recreation if there are no questions on homelessness. Okay, diving into a recreation. So for recreation, we have three initiatives listed here. The first one is recreation and resiliency master plan implementation. So this work includes working with the park districts, creating recreation outposts and hubs, improving trails, river access management, working on the Donner Summit area improvements that have been identified, and then communication plans. We also talked about the South Uber River Shuttle, and so if direction and funding is provided for this initiative, for example, feasibility in operations plan study would be completed so that we could seek grant funds to implement it. And then lastly, vacant land acquisitions. So as vacant lands become available in recreation hotspots, there are grants that might assist with acquisition and also help us look at providing long term maintenance and operations as we work with recreational partners to take a deeper dive on those. Next slide. So for resource requests, we had two. The first was $150,000 to implement recreation and resiliency master plan projects. And the second was $50,000 for vacant land acquisition. So reduction in these resource requests could still result in master plan initiative work moving forward, but maybe not to the same degree or level that we were proposing initially. And then we could also look for grants to work on any vacant land acquisition, for example. I'd take any questions before we dive into the next one. Okay, so on to climate. So for climate, we have a couple initiatives here. We have the climate action and adaptation plan development. So work has begun on this plan with the consultant. And please expect to see several community input opportunities and the formation of a collaborative in Western County. And we appreciate the ad hoc assistance on that. Second, we have a climate resilience activities. And so this work includes looking at pioneer community energy, for example, the drought resiliency plan is required for Senate Bill 552. Zero emission vehicle implementation, Senate Bill 1383, that's the food waste collection programs programs, and those are just a couple examples. Work also includes hosting the Sustainability Summit and Community Engagement and Education opportunities. So looking at resource requests, we were proposing $11,590. What that would do is that would help us continue the collaborative, past the end of year. It would help us with the sustainability summit. It would help us bring on another civic spark fellow. It would help with litter abatement in Eastern County, also education and advocacy and communication outreach and engagement. So we could look at a reduction in these requests and it would still result in the development of the action plan and we would still include public education and outreach too but would probably limit conference attendance by staff. We could reduce some miscellaneous costs and we could also not go to the Sierra day for example at the capital. With that I'd ask if there are any questions. Okay, and back to Erin. All right, so that concludes our eight priority objectives overview. And now we're going to move on to the resource allocation conversation. Hold on one moment. They're asking about the cannabis charter. Is that part of? Yeah, so maybe can you give us an overview of which charters are coming forward, which have been subsumed into others and which potentially are coming later? Sure. Because I think folks here are referring to what they saw in terms of the backup documents in our agenda packet. There were more items than what you're bringing forward. Yeah, especially kind of dress how we incorporating cannabis. Yeah, so cannabis is a separate charter, but it's really underneath economic development priority objective. And we weren't requesting specific funds necessarily, although we're continuing with the retail access grant work and that's all funded so we're not really asking for any new resources that's why I didn't specifically highlight but happy to answer questions. That was rough. Okay, any other items? You feel like you need clarification on from the board? Okay. Thank you. Go ahead. All right. So in terms of funding, I just want to call your attention to this slide from January, which is your general fund balance assignment slide. and the second line down board priority continuation, that $3.2 million all the way to the right, is what we're estimating remains available at the end of the current fiscal year from prior board allocations to priority projects in this vein. So you've heard a lot today of, we don't have any resource requests because we already have funding, we're using existing funding, we're rolling it forward. This $3.2 million is that roll forward allocation as well as in the special project continuation category. That is formally ARPA money that we are using to continue certain projects such as in the housing area. So just wanted to orient you that the funds that we're talking about not requesting more for for in your general fund assignment fund balance. Those do come to the board specifically with requests to release the assignment for a specific project. So you'll see that language coming forward as those projects materialize and are ready for contract allocation. So here's your summary of resource requests. you can see here the eight objectives on the left, the total general fund request again for fiscal 2526 is 1.765 million. We do have other grants or other funds not in the general fund that leverage this request at about just under $6 million, $5.8 million. We also have about $4.3 million and identified unfunded costs. And really, those are future grant opportunity costs. So we're recognizing the full value of the project and we're also recognizing that there are portions of each objective that lend themselves really well to grant application and leveraged funding. So you'll see a total summary of resource requests really looking at $11.7 million of which 1.7 is the request for the new fiscal year. As I mentioned at the start, I'm recommending approximately $1 million be available for priority objective projects going into the budget and recognize as well that that million dollars could change up or down as the full budget proposal develops. Again, we're looking for a ballpark figure right now and then through the budget subcommittee process we will refine the asks and the numbers for the objectives and then bring forward a full proposal as part of the larger county budget. We're seeking recommendation today for the requests as presented. We do recognize that there could be grants or other non-general fund dollars identified throughout the next several months as well as the upcoming fiscal year that could contribute to achieving these goals as presented. And also there's an opportunity for potentially a mid-year adjustment if our current fiscal year ends more positively than we anticipate. And the board would like to allocate additional funds for a specific objective identified here. That is of course up to you for future policy discussion. So again, summary of resource requests as presented is here, and then we're happy to entertain any questions that you might have, and also we have a balanced option to present when you're ready for that. Excellent. Thank you. I think so for the board, I think the discussion in a moment will be about where might we be able to delay some things or reduce some things or take some projects off for this year or do a like equal cut across all of them. Or we could send items back to staff for more information if we need that. So I think that's the conversation. do a equal cut across all of them, or we could send items back to staff for more information if we need that. So I think that's the conversation we need to be having here. My thought is to go to public comment first and then come back and have that conversation. Are we okay with that? Okay, so let's go to public comment and then we'll bring it back to the board for discussion. Any public comment and team, let me know if you get any calls please. Wow, that's amazing. A three day workshop in a matter of minutes with only the ability for community input for three minutes. There's a tremendous amount of public input that should be involved in all these decisions. I'd like to point out the one thing that I did see in the end is that it's worth $11,000. I think, or $11 million short or we're looking at about a surplus or a deficit of $11 million. I want to point out that just in the last budget, you guys increased total financial compensation for senior staff, full time staff of 8.0 something percent, which is just about $15 million. Seems to me we need to tighten the belt on total financial compensations so that we can afford these basic objectives that you guys have decided only a month and a half ago or two months ago at the that the that the workshop. This seems crazy to me that we are at this point two weeks, two months later, trying to reevaluate our shortages. Clearly, at the workshop, you guys identified that we were going to be short in our budget for the years to come. And yet, you gave total financial compensations for a full-time staff and eight percent increase, knowing that everything else was going the other direction, from pensions coverage down to 62 or 63% from just the previous couple of years, it was 72%. This is, I can't believe that we're looking at $50,000, $20,000, a million, and somehow you guys are paying out over 50% of our budget is going to full-time staff. $150 million, plus or minus, is full-time staff. Why don't we bring full-time staff's compensations down to what's fair, a fair, hmm, how's the word I'm not sure what I want. A living wage pay, a living wage pay that might be one times two times median income. No, you guys are four, five times median income for the average employee making $160,000 a year. This is crazy. A story. It's watching Fox News the other day, talking about the pilots that just came back from this, the, the, this is ISS or SIS, whatever the thing in the sky is. They're getting back. Those people are making $160,000 a year. They are scientists, they are astronauts, they're have PhDs and they're making $160,000 a year. Thank you. I'm going to try to answer a little bit of that and then turn it over to staff if they have anything else to add. And we appreciate your comments. The staffing budget is separate from this and that's a budget that's being discussed with cuts and all of that being part of the conversation and addition to our negotiations with the unions. That's a separate item but your point is taken. In terms of the projects, let me just try to finish, let me just try to answer your, as best I can for okay. And then in terms of the projects that were presented today, as it is complicated and looks very, a truncated in this presentation, it's a very high level presentation. If you looked at the packet, you could see there was lots of documentation behind each of these items with a lot more specific detail. It was a lot to take in, but to also note that many of these projects, so these forward priority projects start, and then they go 18 months or longer. So these aren't all new things. These are sort of continuation and where we see the need to make some cuts potentially. So the public has had multiple, and we individually have had lots of conversations with constituents. As we say, you can call us and talk about these things were all available. I'm going to see if Aaron has anything more to say about the budget process or the project process. If you want to add anything to that to answer. I think you captured it while the full budget proposal for the new fiscal year will be coming to a public hearing in June. I believe June 10th and that will be the opportunity to see the full picture as well as receive public comment. Thanks, and I'll just add that that is still a lot to digest in that one public hearing, but we do recommend that if you have specific questions that you call us or call staff and we can sit down and work with you on those questions. I would like a citizen committee to be part of that. Okay, I'm sorry, Michael, we respond. Thank you for your comments. We appreciate them. I tried to respond. Please follow up with us after. Okay, Matthew. Matthew, Walter, Nevada County, I concur with Michael. What he was saying there. What is the product that we're using to spray our road sites with? Can you tell me that? And why are we spraying our road sites? I know that Amigo Bob had it stopped from the South Uber River in North San Juan to that section of the county. And there didn't seem to be any ill effect on the roadside. Do you want me to, I'll let you finish and then we'll try to answer. Yeah, I got a couple of them. So yeah, the roadside spraying, the camp cleanup is there a priority list on the camp cleanup. because we've had in the last few weeks we have multiple OD deaths behind CVS in the Brunswick Basin. That's unfortunate that people are living in holes literally right there behind the navigation center. The legal dumping, I know that's not on the list, but it probably should be because I'm seeing more and more of it as I walk our roadways and ride our roadways over any edge behind railings. For example, I was taking pictures there yesterday and it's just amazing the amount of stuff that people drive behind railings and throw off the edge and call it good. Outdoor recreation, I'm sure you've heard that Tahoe is implementing a Carpool situation because the lake is unusable because of the traffic So because of their restrictions up there we will probably get more usage here on the river and such and I just am baffled why we don't have a paid a park system at the river in some way like they do an Auburn it's like eight bucks and they make a lot of money to hire rangers and pick up trash and monitor the fire danger and things like that. I know it's a plaster recreation district or something and I know that we intermix with the state parks but some way there has to be a way to correct this parking issue because it's going to be 49 will be unusable this year for emergency vehicles due to the parking. So in the outdoor recreation plan, I hope we can constitute something that will let people enjoy our area, but not let them take advantage of it. Thank you. Thank you. Let's see if I can maybe a Craig on the spring. And then Trisha, sorry. And then can't clean up status, because do we have any status update on that? Okay, and then I think we address that, he made comments on the litter clean up which is an item in here and then same with paying in parks. That's part of our recreation master plan, so we take those comments. Thank you. All right, let's see if we can answer those other questions. Would you like me to jump in? Okay. So on the spring, we spray a pre-emergent and a low percentage herbicide. We also offer a nose spray program option and we definitely encourage that. We have found spring to be one of the most effective ways to help prevent vegetation from encroaching on the roadways. We are very mindful though and we follow all state requirements as far as you avoid waterways, you avoid other sensitive areas and that includes those areas that have no spray programs. So just to reiterate, we spray for a veg management which is part of our fire mitigation efforts and people can individually call and ask that they not spray in front of their roadside. That correct? Correct. And we're happy to provide additional information. Just reach out to myself or public works and we're happy to provide. Okay. Let me finish his questions first, Hardy. Okay. And then to the camp, clean ups. Supervisor Hall, the in-camera resolution funds grant is the source of the grant funds for the 20,000 of incoming cleanup and its geographically specific. The program is required to have a geographical focus area and it's the Brunswick Basin. So specifically within that we would work closely with our partners in Grass Valley as well as our service providers like Hospitality House and our own outreach teams to identify within the Brunswick Basin, where the priority areas are, where the encamments are, that can be a dynamic situation that can be complicated by who owns that property, how willing is the property owner. But we've seen Hospitality House and others have success for coordinating community events and leveraging additional partners supports to be able to amplify that funding further and then with the county general fund addition we would be able to go beyond the Brunswick Basin as identified but we haven't identified specific priority areas to do that. Okay thank you let's finish the public comment and okay sorry all right All right, any additional public comments? Good afternoon, Supervisors. My name is Diana Gamzon. I'm the executive director of the Nevada County Cannabis Alliance. And I just want to thank you for continuing to prioritize our cannabis industry as a high growth sector with opportunities of for development, alongside-signed tourism and agriculture. Nevada County is known for a region, a county that produces organic, environmentally-farmed, sustainable cannabis on small cannabis farms. Just this upcoming Friday, I'll be traveling the long side of county staff up to Humboldt to a cannabis and environmental, sustainable symposium at Cal Poly Humboldt. And I'll be speaking on a panel around policy and environmental stewardship at a local level. And then the key note is actually going be one of our ag advisory commissioners, Seth Rosemary, who is going to be giving a keynote about Amigo Bob and his legacy of organic farming, how he's impacted farming, and how that in turn has impacted organic cannabis farming. So thank you for continuing to prioritize cannabis as one of our industries. Thank you. Thank you. Any other public comment in the room? Any colors? No colors, Chair. Okay, and anyone out there who has additional questions and comments, please come talk to us after the board meeting or give us a call. All right. Then I'm going to close public comment and bring it back to the board. So this is your chance to ask all your detailed questions or make proposals for how we're going to handle this funding issue. Go ahead. Just a quick general question. I think Erin will probably, she's going going to keep on me asking this question. But the fund reserve balances for each individual budget unit within the budget, which are reallocated and re-apportioned based on actuals every year. Two part question. One, if we took fund reserve balances out of the appropriate area to cover these, are there enough fund reserve balances in the correct proportion to do that? Question A, and then question B, when we do have budget occurrences that are better than forecasted? I know you're waiting for the detail to answer that question, but in my experience many times at the end of the budget year you come back and it's like, great, we did better than we thought where the rate of growth was better than anticipated in the budget process on the negative outlook picture. So I just, does that make sense? I believe I can figure that out one out. Okay. So our current budget policy that we adhere to during the year is that general funds do not, in principle, carry forward from one year to the next. It is a single year allocation and whatever is not spent returns to fund balance to be reallocated or reappropriated in the following year. So where we have exceptions to that policy are with these board objectives, where if the board allocates specific funding towards a priority objective in that funding for whatever reason and there's plenty of them is not spent within the fiscal year, it does stay within a general fund assignment for those priority objectives and carry forward with that same project. Your board can change those fund balances and those assignments at any time really because it was board directed and it can be board redirected if you will. So we do have that $3.2 million in the fund balance dedicated to these eight areas and two specific allocations within those eight areas. And so we do look there first at opportunities for things not moving forward. Can they be repurposed or reallocated in the broader budget for the county, the non-general fund sources generally do either remain in their funds at the balance and be reallocated or can be reappropriated within the confines of those specific funds. And so this is where it gets a little bit more technical and complicated because you're talking about re-alignment funding, you're talking about gas tax funding, you're talking about specific funds for specific purposes and there's limited in what they can be used on. So, in the grand scheme of the bigger budget picture, we evaluate every dollar in the bank every year, and we try to allocate as best we can based on the needs. In terms of your second question, when the fund balance or the fiscal year ends in a more positive light then we anticipated, or we have excess revenue as compared to our expenditures. We do look at that as an option for specific dedicated funding. If you recall on the general fund balance slide, there is an unassigned category and that really does kind of reflect our previous year fiscal year balance. My direction right right now with a budget proposal for 2526 is to make our revenues match our expenditures. And so that's the direction that I'm headed down with our department fiscal staff and how do we present a balanced budget. There still is fun balance available and can be allocated within some parameters. And that's certainly up to the board if you would like to direct me to look at fund balance assignment for these priority projects. That's something that we can evaluate and take back through the budget. Some committee is part of the overall proposal. Okay. Yeah, you answer my question very well. Your answer was more clear than my question, so thank you. So just into clarify, so the 3.2 million is it carries a cross. And then there was a little piece in there about the at the close of the budget year. And I'm not advocating that some just for simplicity sake. If we want to close a budget gap, we could take and simply remove from that 3.2. And that would be the that would make up the difference. You could essentially fund the 1.7 in full and you you'd be left with the difference. That is an option in the board, but need to direct which projects would no longer receive funding out of that 3.2 to then be reallocated to meet this current proposal. I see. Okay, so that's not necessarily a budget unit set aside. That's already. They're allocated by a priority project. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the free money. Okay. And it would be helpful maybe to give examples of those projects. It's the Penn Valley Community Center. It's the key ask on the summit. They are projects that have been delayed due to timing and funding with partners because the board has really emphasized the need for public private partnerships or partnering with nonprofits or community and leveraging those funds. Yeah, I understand that. I'm sorry, Miss Red. The use of that. Thank you. Yeah, I have a few comments, but I'm wondering, is it worthwhile because I think it'll answer some of mine? Was Aaron going to present maybe an alternative? Should we have, is it possible to see that first? Does that make sense? And then I think it'll save some of my questions. Okay, I'm seeing agreement, so let's do that. All right. so this slide is the same one from before with an extra column in blue. So you'll see the original general fund request of 1.765. And then this is staff's recommendation for an alternative level of funding for each of the priority areas. It gets us at that million dollars that still accomplishes a large degree of the proposed activities and we're happy to make adjustments within this column as the board directs. That's not an armoured trails right I think from I think from the presentations, the emergency preparedness, the bulk of that would be the biomass project. It removes the biomass project and in its place is enhanced green waste removal community green waste. Okay. And then the economic development that was at 189,000. What was that? So that's gonna reduce some of the initiatives that we had in the action plan, funding that we had for incentives, for example. It doesn't mean that we can't seek grants for those. It just might slow it down or push it to next year potentially. So on the, is it okay to ask question? Okay. So on the emergency preparedness when you're talking about just cutting out the biobass. So the permitting for that is in the city of Grass Valley. Did they give you a use permit with provisions that some of those things had to be done in a certain time frame? Are you operating under a use permit there? Was that the process? Supervisor Swarthout, that's correct. We do, we did receive a use permit for that project and it is largely dependent on the activities occurring on the site. So this proposal that you have as an alternate up there before you retains the roadside veg resource request. So that keeps the vegetation treatment and the spray program intact based on the original request. And we would recommend pivot to continue our green waste resources similar to what we're're offering this year and to next year because there isn't any funding for it. So what we would do is we continue to sink grant dollars, partnerships and other opportunities to continue biomass on that site. It's not that we would stop and not go after it. We would just seek additional funds. So an example, Cal Fire has a wood innovation grant that's available and posted right now. We could potentially seek that grant in place of asking for additional general fund resources. So I just wanna make sure that if your use permit is tied to timing, so sometimes they give you, 12 to 24 months to put the infrastructure in that's necessary. So, was that part of the use permit conditions of approval that you had to have like the water lines in and or certain? Because I know there was an issue with the city in regard to fire danger out there with a lot of materials that are stacked up and I think that the water lines were something you guys negotiated to do at a later date. I guess my question is, did they give you a date specific that that needed to be done by? Supervisor Swarthath, it's contingent on the operations occurring on the site. So if it's a vacant parcel and we're not operating biomass operations, the conditions we would not have to meet because we weren't meeting that. There are some conditions in there. For example, restrooms within two years, we need to install those on site if we have a full time bomb mass operation on that site. So the original proposal of the amount of the ass, that's part of the reason why it was so large because it had those large improvements on there based on those conditions. Long those lines. So the whole amount for biomass was 664. You're obviously taking out about 400,000 and some. So you're proposing to continue the operations for 200,000 and just not do the infrastructure at this point. Gerald, no. We are proposing to pivot to existing green race resources that we know we've invested in and will work. So for example, we're not proposing the biomass project, but we would propose to do green waste similar to what we have this year. So bins for firewires communities, trucking green waste, supportive programming, partnership with the transfer station for free days. So we would pivot to meet the same intent with lesser impact. So then the facility would not be running at all next year? Correct, we would be seeking other resources to implement another round. Wow, okay, I'm not sure I love that. Yeah. I couldn't visit the site but I've been following the process and there's a big pile with there and a really small carbonizer. Is it, how's it going? I mean, I essentially, if we're making a qualitative decision on whether we fund it going forward, is it, you know, can you just tell us a little bit about how successful it's been? Yes, so we process over 5,000 tons of material. The carbonizers are no longer on site. The site is vacant because we stored material on that site over a period of several months. And then we processed that material as well. And as soon as we were done, they pulled those carbonizers off. And that was through a public-private partnership with several folks, including Grass Valley, consolidated via PG&E Mount amount enterprises. And so we would seek something similar. Staff's recommendation based on the bank for the bulk of the dollars, we feel that the recommendation to pivot to greenery's resources for next year that is proven to be a force multiplier in the community, we think that's better served. And that's why our recommendation is a little bit different. Additional question going back to housing, your would be reducing, or sorry, homelessness, 40,000. Where would that come from, Ryan? So that's the estimated savings from this year because we had a light winter, so we would roll over that funding to offset the cost for this one. Okay, got it. So yeah, just one. I want to go back to the biomass thing. So by doing that, that's going to reduce our price. So that's going to make our vegetation roadside management more expensive than at some point two because this is not where ours is going to. So we took that some of ours was going to the plant as well as PG&E and really not much on the roadside our roadside vegetation is primarily still going to the Lincoln facility for the most part. Okay, thanks. I mean, it's been a grant project funded product work that's been going to the the biomass. Yeah, and Supervisor Hark, the material that was county owned, timber was a lot of that was from the storms that we had from year to ago. So if, let's say we approve this option to handle the resource, the need to reduce the resources going into these projects. If more funding becomes available or the budget, again, the way you're saying things turn out to be better than we think, would you come back to the board to ask us where we want to reinvest those funds? Yes, I'm happy to receive direction from the board. How frequently you want me to update you or if they're spending available and you want to prioritize one project over the other, you could provide that direction to me as well. It's really up to the board. Again, you'll be hearing the full presentation in June with the budget, but understand that that's captured in $387 million of other money. Right. So there's certainly opportunity for me to keep you informed. Also, it's your budget subcommittee. Obviously you could do that. Okay. Sure. Do you have additional questions? Can you go back to what, can you just show me the list of course services in the beginning of that project where we're going to cut that? Sorry. Trying not to make you dizzy so I'm going fast. No, you're not making me busy. Okay, so I guess when I'm asking there, so we're going to cut that back. So the spade and neuter program is in there and that's you're going to cut that part out. We're cutting that down to $75,000 in consultation with staff because this is a pilot project. We're pretty confident that we could get it off the ground for $75,000 for the first year. And also, there's partnerships that we have yet to tap into to leverage that opportunity. Yeah, I mean, when I was looking at that, when I proposed that, that $100,000 was based on discussion with some of the local animal rescue organizations and what would be a significant help. But I'm pretty confident that we can try and make up that additional $25,000 through some fundraising efforts with a guy that I'm meeting tomorrow with animal-safe people. I've had a lot of people reach out to me who want to volunteer and help with this, not just financially, but also sort of like retired veterinarians and services. So this is, in my opinion, this is a pretty popular program with our constituencies that I think they're willing to help contribute and make happen if the county is willing to stand up the program. We've already done Craig Laurie and you guys have done a tremendous job of putting something together and that's going to come back to the full board but I think we can we can live with them. The one that breaks my heart is $189,000 out of the economic development fund and maybe you can talk about what those cuts are. Sure, I'll expand on that a bit. So in the, bringing up the charter here in the economic development charter and specifically in the action plan, we had projects where like finance and incentives, for example, what we're going to be bringing back to the board is the first priority recommendations that really won't cost us anything other than our one staff person. But if we wanted to go forward with the second priority recommendations where there's some financial contribution or we need to put in for a grant and hire a grant writer, that's the kind of work that could be delayed as an example. In addition, we're working on a plan to do an executive leadership meeting in conference, so that could be not as large as we had in the past. In addition, we're working on a plan to do an executive leadership meeting in conference. So that could be not as large as we had anticipated or we're proposing. We were also looking at directing funds to support coordinated regional marketing efforts. That's through Visit California and Gold Country Visitor Association. So that would probably be either shrunk significantly or eliminated for this next fiscal year. And those are the primary areas where we would be reducing most of the funding that we're talking about here. We also looked at miscellaneous costs like limiting the number of conferences that our one person goes to and so forth. Okay. Well, you're let's this is this is it because otherwise I'm going to ask for a motion on this balancing option. So if you have comments now at your time. I would ask the board to consider, while I agree with the cuts here and I think you've done a great job at parsing out which ones are... Making a value proposed a lot of it, figuring out what's really important and getting it done. That is the basis to your budgeting and I really appreciate and respect that. I think that we could use some general fund money out of the budget reserves for each area that correspond to these services and split it. Instead of 1.7 to 1, you could go 1.765 to 1.4 and you could pull a little bit. The reason I'm proposing that is this is our community building activity. This is what the board does. These are our community building activities that we've worked for. This Chair Hall was mentioning earlier, some of these span multiple years. Many of them precede me and even getting on the board. So I don't want to see these take a step backward. I don't want to see them paused. I know none of us do, but I would just make that. I don't have the budget in front of me, so I don't know what budget units have fun balances, and I don't need, you know, what's restricted and unrestricted assets inside there. I don't know that. I know there is stuff there because I obviously saw the budget last year. That's an option for us if we want to consider that. I would be in support of something like that. It's a middle ground. So I'm looking for comments on that, where's the reactions? So when you use the term Fend Balance, is that award for reserves? I was always learned the term, so it means the same thing. So in reserves are to be used in times of when there's things we want to do or we don't necessarily have the money from our revenue, the revenue that's going to be generated in that fiscal year. So or cash flow. But we have a very healthy, well I believe to be a very healthy reserve. And I think especially if you talk to some other counties that are similar in size and function of ours, we have a very healthy reserve. So I would agree with Hardy if we can keep the things that are community building. I think that's really important. We spend a lot of money at the county on programs that our average citizen doesn't understand or know anything about. So we can do things like green waste or spay and neuter or the river cohort or the snow removal or the things that mean a lot to people. If there's a way that we can figure out how to keep those, I would be in support of that as well. But I would be willing to give up the $25,000 and they spend new to because I think I can help raise the 25 to get us there. So that's my concession. Sue Rob? I agree with Hardy on a lot of it. Then the other side says we need to be conservative. That's the only other thing, because we have something else that comes up in the middle of the year. So, I mean, things are made to have amendments as we go, so I just want to be a little careful, just because we don't know where we're headed, and we don't know if we're going to have a disaster or a fire, I mean, we're coming into fire season. So I just want to be a little conservative, I think, for myself. I love it. I didn't want to see any of this go away either. It was kind of hard, but there were things that I could see that we can still build from and still have good community awareness of what's happening on. Housing was one, I really like that, but we have some roll over, so that's going to still continue that median housing, you know what I'm trying to say yeah. So there's some things in there that I think are important and that was make a huge difference in our community but since we can use that money there and then maybe that's something that we'll see when we need a little extra later. So I just like to leave a cushion and just might, what you're saying already. I agree. But that too, Rob. I tend to agree with Sue. I when you talk about the revenue equivalent expenses, I think that's the way it should be. I think going forward, knowing that these are long-term projects, that's not to say that if revenues increase next year, and we're pleasantly surprised that we can be in the same spot next year and adjusting. But I think as a whole, I'm not inclined to support taking from the reserves. And part of the reasoning being, you know, I look at like the recreation number, I'm sure that $50,000 is the $50,000 that we had allocated for acquiring lands in the bear-over corridor. And I think somebody may have even mentioned it, but I know we've discussed it before. That's something that we can look to other areas to finance it or public private partnerships. So when I look at that $50,000 reduction, I hope my hope is that's not going to go away. And I think that's how I look at most of those that we're not really taking a lot away. We're living with our means. The two that really are taking the hit are the economic development and the emergency preparedness. And I was out there for the biomass tour. It's a great project, but I think there's consensus that it's lower on the list of core services, urgency and hopefully find ways to continue that in the future. And then the fact that the idea behind it is still going forward, We're just pivoting like you said. So that makes sense to me. I would prefer to approve that but I understand what what Hardy saying and I would also say on a grander scale. I think this is going to be an issue this can have going forward. We're going to have to grapple with more and more and you know, I think I think Carole pointed out that we're focusing on how to get to that $1 million mark. I mean, in a whole other outside the box, some of these programs would be reduced and that money would be going to, I don't know, pay down, whatever. I'm not proposing that. I'm just saying that that may have to be part of the discussion if things go bad. So I tend to take the more conservative approach. If we're looking to revenues to equal expenses that gets us there, I don't support taking from the reserves. And I would hope that these that have been multi year priorities of the board, the sport and passport would ultimately be able to progress. And this isn't the end of them, but I think we got to deal with where we're at at this point. Thank you. This is a great discussion. I'm going to share my opinion. I'm going to base that on the fact that I've seen us go through this now eight years, more or less, if we change the process a little bit as we've gone along. And it's amazing how often we have managed to find money or find ways to fund the things that we may not think we can fund in the beginning. I have a lot of faith in this organization and staff and the funding programs that are out there to make that, to fill that back in. I am also most sad about the Biomass project because I think that's our future and we should be investing in our future. But it's great that we can substitute our regular Greenways programs that people love for one more year. And I am very concerned about what's happening this year, what might be happening. I think we have no idea yet what the economy is going to do. And so I agree with Sue and Rob that I'd prefer to be more conservative on our fun balances and not dig into them at this time. So I think that, unless there's another proposal, I think that asks that suggests that we might want a motion on the existing budget and see where we go from there unless there's further discussion. So moved. Do I have a second for the balancing option resource request budget proposed here? A second. Seconded. Hey, thank you, team. District five. Yes. District two. Yes. District four. Yes. District three. Yes. District one. Yes. Thank you so much for all the hard work and sorry to my colleagues. I appreciated you. All right. Thank you very much everyone. I know this is a lot of work but hopefully this gives you what you need to move forward and we will still find the funding hopefully for all of these projects. Thank you. All right. Well done people. We stayed in our agenda. Can we keep going without a break or do we need a quick break? Okay, very good. Then we're going to move on to the resolution advocating for the protection and sustainability of local county course services and local representation, unapplicable federal forums, committees and commissions and Jeffrey will walk us through that before we do that. Number, we're on number 26. Yeah, before we get to that, I wanna respond. So Michael, you send in a comment on this issue that made me think that there might be other people out there who have questions or concerns. And so I wanted to lay out just a little bit of the background on this. And again, I can refer people back to our board meeting. We had a couple ways back where we spent a good hour on our federal advocacy efforts and explained what we do and why and how, so that information is out there. But just to reiterate, when we do federal advocacy, and this is not directly rated to this resolution, but it's a question you raised, Michael, and I think others may have that question. When we do federal advocacy, when we're going to Sacramento, we're going especially to Washington, D.C., we are going for conferences that are already scheduled that we attend, and when we can, we tack on a day or two to do additional lobbying on the issues that are most important to us. Number one, number two, this year, because of my leadership roles in CSAC and NACO, all of my travel to these conferences is being paid for. So that's freed up the resource for someone else on our staff. Number three, when we advocate on issues at this level, we advocate for what the board has agreed on our priorities, that a majority of the board so far it's been unanimous. But it's what the board as a majority agrees on. So we're going to advocate for core services that we all feel the need to ensure are going to be filled. If we have individual items that other people on the board may not agree with, we are free to go advocate on those as individuals. And we made this clear, we actually documented this in our, made one change in our code and decorum, which states clearly, when we're out advocating, so at RCRC, CSAC, NACO, or a lobbying, we're advocating for items only that we all agree on. And so number five, and that goes to those issues, we advocate where we need to. So number one, our California delegation, that includes Republicans and Democrats. Number two, our committees and agencies that could affect change like the Forest Service or in the case of insurance, those committees that deal with insurance. So that includes minority and majority members. So again, Republicans are Democrats. Partisanship does not come into anything that we do as a unified board. So I just want to make that clear. And we can take on other questions if we need to during public comment, but I'll hand it over to you, Jeffrey. Thank you so much, Chair All. Members of the board, Jeff, there was your chief of staff and well, but I really appreciate you outlining that, Chair All. It's exactly correct. So thank you for that. The so good afternoon. I'm pleased to be with you today. I'm bringing forward back to you a follow-up action as was directed by your board last two weeks ago on March 11th at your last meeting. When we provided a federal legislative update. So I'd like to do today's just provide a very high level background, just as a reminder of the public and to yourselves of kind of what was presented and what kind of coral spawns directly to the resolution before you as directed by you. And I do just want to give a thank you to supervisor Bullock and supervisor Hook who provided input on your board. You directed me to go and work with both those supervisors, which we did in developing this resolution this before you. And hopefully it's reflective of what the board articulated to staff. So just as a quick, brief background, the federal legislative update that was provided to you was in large part reflective of our trip past in Washington DC and also different executive and congressional activities that we kind of walk through. Some of those pieces also just want to also include an overview of some of the NACO that's the the National Association of Counties, who we remember of, that's our affiliate association at the federal level, also outlined the short-term priorities. They're outlined at the NACO legislative annual conference that we attended. An overview was also provided the recent meetings and the direct advocacy and capital help. This includes advocacy regarding the crisis on the availability and the affordability of residential commercial insurance, US Forest Service issues, really concerns. And they also just mean with our direct congressional delegates. So notably, high level overview is also provided the recent federal activities as they relate to county governments both at the executive and congressional branches. This included a no review of the various executive and congressional actions that included federal funding freezes as well related to the inspection of different policies. Also impacts on staffing and workforce reductions that cause across federal agencies. And then looking at the impacts on county and regional projects, that would include looking at the staffing levels of the US Forest Service, Veterans Affairs, also provided an update on impacts related to private forestry contractors. And I also discussed with board congressional proposals related to the process of budget reconciliation that could have impacts on county court services. Just as a reminder, the public reconciliation is a special legislative process used to expedite the passage of budget-related bills. It allows for certain legislation to be passed with a simple majority in the Senate by passing the filibuster. That does not include policy-related bills, only budget-specific bills. Congress is considering cutting mandatory spending to entitlement programs. This would include programs to Medicaid, which is Medi-Cal and California. Supplemental nutritional assistance program also referred to as SNAP, or CalFresh in California, and temporary assistance for needy families. Additionally, also discussed that Congress is also looking at potentially removing tax exempt, tax exemption status, immune I'm municipal bonds, so that was all so articulated. One thing that do just want to highlight just as a reminder, when we looked at some of the proposals that Congress is looking at related to those county court services, that's about 29% of Nevada County residents do receive some type of assistance. That's about one in four residents within the county do receive some type of assistance and Medicaid. 842 individuals receive TANF benefits. That's the temporary assistance to needy families. And then various different other programs potentially could be looking at risk, including your women, infants and children, maternal child health programs, and other pieces. Additionally, we also, I've just briefly discussed about some of the actions related to the NAICA, and that includes the disaster reform. So just as a reminder, the Trump administration is put together a FEMA reform review council. And NACO is advocating for a county seat on that reform council. And Supervisor Hall is a part of the NACO disaster reform task force, intergovernmental reform task force, my apologies. And so they are advocating on that piece since we wanted to highlight that too. Some of the other NACO priorities that were discussed were also funding for Secure Rural Schools Act. And then also looking at those course services and the different potential impacts that I've already just highlighted. So just a couple quick updates and then I'll just kind of do an overview of the resolution and I'll turn it back over to your board. Couple things. Since we last met in your chambers here, Congress did approve a six-month stop-cat spending measure. Let's refer to as a continuing resolution. So they'll keep the federal government funded through September 30th of this year. So what that means is with the fiscal year of 2025, appropriation process now essentially mute, the focus in Congress will begin to shift back to the process of reconciliation. And formal negotiations have now begun. We know that the House Speaker Mike Johnson is proposed a timeline. The Senate would take up a final package by the end of April, setting the stage for swift action on the President's legislative agenda. And I'm sorry, I'm at the House. And then I'm Senate Majority Leader, John Thun, Republican, has acknowledged that while he aims to move a budget resolution before April recess, final passage of the reconciliation would probably be delayed till July, and maybe even September, depending on negotiations go. So we're looking at probably about a summertime line to see how reconciliation goes. That would be in said, we receive, we're still monitoring and working with our stakeholders to understand what type of impacts they're seeing regarding the advocacy piece. I'm happy to kind of answer some questions about that. That being said, I do just want to give a quick highlight. So in retrospect, looking at the resolutions before you today, really try to be really clear concise and really just articulated exactly the points that we went through in your federal legislative update and then kind of articulate advocacy based on those fronts. So I'll just walk through those. Those are essentially nine pieces. The first one was really to provide timely feedback as quickly as possible to our federal delegates. Going in, talking to our folks, it is clear that they need information to know what's happening on the ground so that they can move forward as they see. Second, to advocate for the expediency approval implementation of any force management wildfire mitigation projects, that seemed a high priority. Additionally, number three to advocate for the reinstabilment and the increase of any workforce on key administrative positions necessary to ensure the implementation of projects like our Good Neighbor Agreement or other projects in the Tahoe National Forest. I will say I was encouraged three days after I provided a presentation to you. Congressman Kelly on the floor of Congress day articulate in name of Nevada County about the importance of making sure that those types of projects are not impacted by the administration's actions. So that was encouraging me to hear that. Number four, also to advocate the expediency reinstatement and the increase of workforce related to veterans affairs. As a reminder, about 30% of that department is all veterans. And so a lot of veterans were impacted by the reduction of force in that department. And also, I think we're just as important is also the concern of the impacts that could happen to Nevada County Veterans in those services. Number five, to inform the congressional delegation on any impacts with efforts to cut or reduce the county court services related to the reconciliation process, ensure that our rational delegates understand the implications they would have on Nevada County residents on any provision changes of those services. Number six to inform the federal delegates on the importance of the tax exempt municipal bonds for the county to oppose efforts to eliminate or limit tax exemption in municipal bonds. Number seven to advocate for county local representation on the federal emergency management agency inter-review council. Number eight to support the county's representatives to NACO C-SAC and RCRCC, so that includes currently supervisor Hall, supervisor Polo, and supervisor Hook. And their advocacy I have referred to related to the state of the ability of course services. And then last but not least, as directed by your board to provide a copy of this resolution, should you adopt it directly to our congressional delegates. So I will go ahead and stop there. Just brief overview and we'll all put into take your questions. Thank you. Thank you. Hardee, you and Sue looked at this, so why don't we start with you too? Thanks, Jeff, for your work on this and thanks for doing it so quickly and getting it right back to us because it is obviously time sensitive as a federal Promigation of different policies both in the executive and then also, you know with our Legislative branch how they do or do not react to that is key for our county. I don't have any questions I like how it's written. I had some things that I proposed to the group that were taken out few were added I really like the balance of work and the supervisor hook on it, so I think I like where it's at. Yeah, thanks, Hardy. It was great. Thank you, and Jeff, great job. I think this is, says what we really want to, when we get to get our message out and be able to talk and be effective. So, and that's what this was about. So, I think we did a good job. So either. Yeah, thanks Jeffrey. You do a great job if I haven't told you before, you and all your staff. So one kind of multi-part question. So you mentioned NACO, CSAC, RCRC, that in theory, this is kind of their, what they do is they lobby for rural or for counties. I think supervisor Hall, Penda Letter, to our representatives on a lot of these items. Both the supervisors and you visited DC, where it sounds you had an opportunity to visit with some of our reps and other reps. To share, I assume a lot of this stuff. And then I know last week we had the office hours with 400 people with the congressional reps to and- Change. Yep. And I had an opportunity to meet with him afterwards and I know a lot of these issues were shared repeatedly. And then I know Congressman, I had a town hall with 25,000, I think people were able to get on some nut. And a lot of these issues were brought up and I know he spoke to those. I personally spoke to our Congressman in person one-on-one last week, last Tuesday, and shared some of these things and got some of his feedback. So all that to say, this resolution is just kind of an addition to all that. Oh, wait, wait, I forgot. We also have, and that should have been one of my list, Paragon, who is our lobbying firm that we pay. I don't know how much. That this really is their job to take these critical county issues and Nevada County issues because we're paying them and communicate that to our representatives. So again, back to my question, in addition to all that, this resolution is just kind of to reinforce that, I guess, to the public. Yeah, my thank so much, Mr. Revisor Tucker. My understanding is that the Zip Board wanted, you know, a lot of times when we do advocacy, we'll work and get your board to authorize the chair to submit a letter. And that would be a letter of advocacy. That's what we do for a host of different bills or issues. I think in this case we received direction, wanted a little bit of a firmer kind of policy stamp, if you will. And I think you're correct. This is just in addition to those efforts. And I will say looking at those kind of highlighted key pieces, staff really tried to think about what is going to be most advantageous for folks on the Hill versus just a resolution, say we don't like this. We wanted to make sure we had a list that would be helpful for congressional staff, helpful for Congressman Kylie, helpful for the Senate offices. So that you are correct, this is in addition to that, and this isn't necessary anything that new, I would say, except for it's just a firmer position as a resolution from your board. Okay. And then I assume, I mean, I guess that's part of my, and this filters in the comments, part of my, I guess hesitation in some respect is that this is set on stone and things have already changed. I think I could look at this. I think some of the four service stuff I've heard, there's already been some hiring back. So it's kind of a fluid, I guess, issue and issues, whereas all these organizations, and I guess the personal contact, we can sort of pivot and then address those here. Some of the information may be already outdated, maybe not. So my comments and I'm, you know, I, on a like grander scale, I hesitate for us to go into like federal issues. At the extreme, I look at the city of Grass Valley, Nevada City, passing resolutions on all these foreign policy issues that I think divides the community. I know people feel strongly. So that's, I think, some of the underlying hesitation. As far as the text of this, I don't see any issue with it. I think there is a bit of underlying, I don't wanna call it agenda, but I think reasonable people can disagree. So yeah, like I said, I did a good job of writing it in a way that I think people can get on board with. I just have some hesitation. And we could talk for hours. These are not even those nine federal issues. I mean, that's what our federal government does and our representatives. We can talk for literally hours and days on this, which is why I think it may not be appropriate for a resolution. But I will just say each of these on their face, I mean, of course when we talk about Medicaid and these essential services, nobody, a reasonable person would say we want that cut or not funded. I think maybe we're missing and I just want to put my two cents worth in that some of these things and really this whole federal government push is to maybe create more efficiency. And so the idea of, I guess in an ideal world and people can disagree all the waste in fraud, which we know exists, is gonna get cut out to allow for those every dollar that's being spent on these critical services, which I acknowledge are critical, the Medicaid is gonna be going to the people it should. And I think Medicaid, I've just read an article in the Wall Street Journal, you know, the amount And really, the disservice is being done to the people who originally, the program was designed for. It's a travesty and it needs to be reformed. I think that's something a non-partisan issue. So I guess in a grand sense, I want to say that, just because this is an evolving thing and it's kind of like I guess to sum it up if you'll take anything from this. I feel like we're kind of attacking the chemotherapy instead of the cancer. And the cancer is our $37 trillion debt in this country, our $3 billion a day in interest interest payments and I think Sean said it earlier referring to the to the Minors Foundry it wasn't sustainable in its current form I think is what he said and that's what I feel like a lot of these federal programs are that doesn't mean we don't want them you know ultimately but I think we need to make them more efficient. So, I get it. It sounded like I'm bringing a federal issue into our local jurisdiction, but I feel like that's what this does. So yeah, but as far as the text of it, I mean, it makes sense to me, who wouldn't want to see, but I would say in each of these areas, I I think we even referenced the veterans' administration rescinded telework. I don't know that that's a bad thing. In fact, I think it might be a good thing. But so, anyways, I think you did a good job for what you were asked to do, bringing in five different people. But I would, yeah, I just would hope, I guess, that we continue to focus on maybe the direct impacts, recognizing that some of these initial negative impacts may be solved and these programs may come out better. And I know people are going to disagree with me. But yeah, thanks for your work putting that together, because I know that's hard with five plus different people. I thank you. Sue, or Lisa, additional comment. I'm good. Hardy. Yeah. Rob, thank you for your perspective. I appreciate that, and I appreciate your articulating of that kind of. I'm going to move this right up next to me, right here, because you're going to hear it loud and clear. Thank you for articulating that. And I think one of the things you highlighted is something I've struggled with before on other decisions. I think it was Prop 36, it was mine, it's the decorum policy applied to the board. So it does take some interpretation. I think your interpretation mine, each board member has their own interpretation. The reason why I wanted to, I think the word you're looking for Jeff, or at least the one I use is formalized. Formized the consensus of the board related to these federal actions. The reason I wanted to formalize it is because they have a, in my opinion, a direct local impact. And so that was where I found that the decorum properly applied to the decisions in the resolution. And some of them were so actionable and direct. You know, for example, the 25 people out of the Tahoe and 11 in the UBER of a Ranger District. Those are campgrounds that potentially won't open in my backyard, which is changing the kind of the landscape. And then the good neighbor policy with the force fuels mitigation, the Alpine Gossamil timber project. Some of these are just highly localized and in broad support, have found favor with our board and it's done a lot of work to get there. What's under our preview and what's not under our preview again is up to interpretation. So I respect and appreciate your perspective, but I do think that when it comes to the things that are in here, the bulk of them are related to the activity that affects us locally, not necessarily just the federal policy. Because there's a whole bunch of things in today's political climate that are occurring that I disagree with. Some of them I do agree with, but many of them, actually most of them are not in here because they don't have a spot here based on our decorum policy. And it is a balance of taking all five members and articulating that and getting into the resolution and getting it out there. So I just wanted to have the feedback on that. But I do appreciate your perspective and I really appreciate you meeting with member Congressman Kylie because I think your voice and the voices of each board member are really important to articulate to him. There was one piece in here and I'll just say it publicly because I believe in I and I talked to Congressman Kyley about this directly. I really wanted to advocate for direct local in person representation because I believe that if the foundation of government is accessibility, good government is accessible and understandable. And when we can't reach people, whether it's Congressman Kylie, Senator Padilla, Senator Schiff, or a town council member, those constituents fall back to the people they can't get over the hold of, which is me. I answer my phone, I respond to emails, and I know all of my colleagues do. So when I ask for direct representation, that's my push to get either the Congressman or officials from the Congressman's office in district to answer those questions. Congressman Kylie has been excellent, outstanding representative in the time he's taken to be here and so I just would like to publicly thank him for that as well. But right now we're in kind of a dire situation. A lot of the actions taken really directly affect us locally means more advocacy, more activity being here locally, and more availability and transparency and being here to answer those local constituent questions. Just to follow up on that, I appreciate the comments from everybody. And I look at this a little bit differently, having also spoken with Congressman Kylie and you know, worked closely with him in the last couple of years, as well as I met with his representatives when they were here. I think one of the things that this potentially does is it gives him a little backup with his colleagues to say, hey, this is what I'm hearing from my constituents about the effects. So hopefully they're using this not just as a lobbying, you know, like you need to do this, but as an educational tool, it's like here's the real impact for my constituents in my district, because in listening to him, I mean, I don't get a sense that he wants to cut veteran services. You know, I don't get a sense that he's interested in cutting snap or Medicaid. So he was at least in my discussions very clear about that. So if we can give him something that helps back up our position and have him argue in our favor because it's going to affect all of our people, I also like the fact that it looks like all four of our jurisdictions said the town of Trekkie, Grass Valley, Nevada City and the county are somewhat unified. Although I think our messaging might be a little bit different, we're somewhat unified in our fear of what potentially could happen. So again, that goes back to he has one whole county with all the jurisdictions in his congressional district that's speaking with a unified voice saying the same thing. That doesn't happen very often in my experience, very rarely does that happen. So I guess from my perspective, I hope that we can use this as a tool to educate people on what's important to our constituency. And I see both sides of this, people are very fearful right now. And everything is changing on a day-to-day basis and how things are being communicated from the federal government to the public is not helpful in these situations. So people don't know what to do. And like Hardy says, we are the people that they can get on the phone. And not only are they asking us to look at the issues, they're asking us to help them with things that we have zero control over. And it's very, very frustrating. So keeping a good relationship with the Congressman is really important to me, because we need him to take our message back to Washington, DC. Just one more thing too. So I think a lot of work went into this to make it very open as not attacking. I really believe this is a sending a message about our core services. Not about we don't want to balance the budget, but we want to focus on the things that are priority and important. And I think that was really the important intent. When we did this, was not to, it gave us that voice. Those core services that we need, whether it snap or Medicaid or Medi-Cal, all those things, right? Those were the key components. It wasn't saying don't find out where the fraud is going. That's not what we're talking about. the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the state or the job in putting this together. So that's what it says. It says, these are what we need in Nevada County. How do we keep working, how do we work with you to fit these into the budget? So. As I was just mentioning, Sue, on that, this is a document that Congressman Kiway can articulate to another member. I mean, you could sit in front of him and he would be describing our local community with this document. I think we, thanks for pointing that out. Okay, thank you. And I will, I'll just add some comments too. Yeah, I think the focus has always been on county impacts, county effects, county services. But I think it's important to be honest, and I have to respond to some of the federal points you made. I just, I feel like I need to do as a former federal employee and state employee. Every federal agency has an Office of Inspector General embedded. They're very accessible and their job is to weed out fraud-waste and abuse. And those offices were some of the first to be decimated. And so I think we need to be clear about the fact that we don't know where the savings is going and that the cuts that are being made are pretty drastic and will be affecting their federal ability, agency's ability to carry out their programs. And so to that, that's why I think we're wanting to do this. It does feel a little bit like overkill, a little bit like after the fact. But frankly, things are happening very fast. They're very drastic. And so far, all of our advocacy, all of our letters, all of our individual meetings, have not changed this. We just yesterday, we understand that Trump administration is now requesting a rush on the phone calls, reducing the phone calls to on Veterans' administration, SSA. So things are happening every single day. We just need to keep our people safe. We need to keep Medicaid available for our hospitals and for our services. The SSA for our folks who are surviving on that, our fire project so that they can go forward and we can be safe in this community. And they can call it whatever it is and say they're going to do whatever they want with that money. But the bottom line is our job is to protect our people and we've never seen cuts this drastic and this unsophisticated. They're just so bold that we know services are being impacted. I asked Jeffrey to update me today on if any of those funds are being released because we keep being told, maybe some will be released. And in one case, I think you said the funds have been released, but the NEPA staff has not been released, and so we still can't move forward. So these cuts are affecting us in ways we aren't even fully aware of yet. And I just feel like it's one more thing. It's one more tool to ask that we, that our federal representatives and agencies at all levels of both parties understand what this means for us on the ground level and try to protect us. So that's my only comment on this. Did you want to say something, Jeffrey? I just want to say I really appreciate all this discussion. I think I just wanted to articulate to you that again, the focus was to stay focused on the actual impacts of the county. And did not get off course when to stay on our lane And I will say as the as corners begins to go through the reconciliation process and potentially looking at different Changes to save some of the course services of Medicaid and those pieces You know the process then will be the state will then have to think about what they want to do and how they respond. So our advocacy at that point will probably shift to, because our call will be to help protect general fund dollars. Because ultimately we would be mindful of those programs of how they could be impacting residents and also your general fund. So thinking about those pieces and those conversations are beginning to happen in Sacramento as well. So, but I really appreciate this and of course if there's any changes or anything the board would wish and all yours. Okay, I think what I'm looking for is a motion and a second. I will move to it, Dr. Resolution. I'll second. Oh, sorry, public comment. I'm so sorry. Okay, let's open public comment. There we go. My concern with this resolution is that it is partisan and not bipartisan. And I think just with your comments that you just made, it kind of made it partisan. And it's also redundant. And I'm kind of concerned that it's redundant. And I'm questioning myself why we have an resolution that's redundant with everything we're already doing in the county. And my concern was that I'm missing something. In other words, we're creating the resolution and these are the items that we were agreeing on that they were going to advocate or lobby towards. I'm concerned that we're going to be bringing in staff to lobby. I understand, Jeffrey, you're working in your guys' office being that advocate, but my concern is that each department is going to be involved in advocating for their own individual needs. And I just wanted to really raise concern that I hope that this is being advocated at the Board of Supervisors Office. And these are the items that you guys could agree on, that need be advocated for, but it doesn't go into OES or into health with Ryan or that our staff becomes advocates for this agenda. So it seemed redundant and I was concerned why are we putting a resolution together that is actually all the stuff that was already happening. So I was just cautious. I appreciate the fact that you guys can agree on the nine items. I would just highly recommend that we are, that this is not a bipartisan resolution. There's a majority of you guys are Democrats. There's one conservative, maybe two. And I don't even think the board of directors should be involved in partisan or bipartisan bipartisan because the Board itself is supposed to be nonpartisan. I'm just just red flags to me. This resolution is happening when all of this stuff is already, can happen and is happening. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for your comments, Michael. And I would just say, you know, we each have our own partisan opinions on things, but the focus on this resolution was, and we may have made comments to that, but the resolution, and I'm not engaging in a conversation. I'm just giving you my opinion in response. This resolution, we worked hard on it, and that's why we had Hardy and Sue on it to really focus just on the county impacts regardless of partisan issues. That's the point of it. So, thank you. Any, no, we're not in a conversation, sorry. In public comment and anybody on the line? No callers, chair. Okay. All right, then we're going to close public comment. We had a first and we had a motion and a second. Okay, District five. Yes. District two. I'm going to abstain. District four. Yes. District three. Yes. District one. Yes. All right, thank you everybody. It was a really good conversation on the board. I appreciate everybody being clear about their opinions and thoughts. It's important that we do that. Thanks, Jeffrey, for working on this. We will move on to our final item of the day. Hopefully a really nice upbeat one, Eliza. And this will be, and Jeffrey, I think you're opening this. This will be a presentation from the Arts Collaborative of Nevada County, the Nevada County Arts Council. On the five year Arts and Cultural Action Plan called Culture Forward. I look forward to hearing and seeing the images I know will get in this presentation. We could I put this in presentation mode? Would that be possible? Yes, no, that's absolutely fine. Great. Good afternoon. We're here expressly to cheer everybody up and we bring glad tidings from the Arts Council. I am a Liza Tudor, Executive Director at Nevada County Arts Council, and sitting to my left is a brand new staff member with the Arts Council, Gianna Arbex, who has joined us fresh from Wild and Scenic Film Festival as their operations manager and is now our grass-felling of Articity Cultural District Programme Manager working closely with Kelly Cutler in Truckee Cultural District, so I'm delighted to welcome her to. So, so you're looking at a gorgeous picture taken late last year at the opening of artists at work, the culmination of a two-year project called Upstate California Creative Core led by us. Through the Creative Core, artists worked with units of government and social service agencies, tribal governments, environmental agencies and local communities across 19 counties. The picture itself is a fantastic symbol of art in service to civic life and civic engagement, and a perfect place to launch into a conversation about culture forward. Culture forward will manifest as a five-year arts and culture action plan for our entire county. Centering our two-state designated California cultural districts, but ensuring the participation of and support for communities in every corner of Nevada County in every supervisorial district. Our planning partners are our California cultural district partners East and West. They are the city of Nevada City, the city of Graz Valley, the town of Truckee. Trucky Arts Alliance, Graz Valley Chamber and Nevada City Chamber, Trucky Chamber, Graz Valley, the town of Truckee, Truckee Arts Alliance, Graz Valley Chamber and Nevada City Chamber, Truckee Chamber, Graz Valley Downtown Association and Truckee Downtown Merchants Association. When the California Arts Council acted on recommendations in 2017 that there be two tracks, urban and rural, within the California Cultural District certification process. A culturally sensitive path was laid relating to the nature of cultural assets in their distribution. Elejability requirements relating to geographic boundaries were set, which stated that while urban cultural districts should be contiguous areas that are walkable, rural districts should not need to be walkable or even contiguous. Instead, they should make the case for how participating areas and and or entities are complementary and synergistic. Over 50 miles apart and separated by a mountain pass of over 7,000 feet, trucky cultural district and grass valley Nevada city cultural district abound by county lines and have unique identities. Yet river systems, highways, railroads and histories connect them, along with over 300,000 acres of national forest and communities with scarce resources. We have long understood the reality of our hub and spoke model, which recognises that residents either eager to get back to the land and connecting with nature in more isolated areas, as well as those escaping our endemic affordable housing crisis, nevertheless rely upon incorporated townships. For gigs, recreation, education, supplies, services and community. That's where we join other rural California cultural districts in becoming hubs of artistic creation, innovation, production, presentation and belonging, despite the seemingly dense world in its areas that surround us. So I'm going to skip one of these because we all know what a cultural district is by now. But why does state designation matter? Being a cultural district gives us a competitive edge for grant funding and fundraising. It gives us a vehicle for better acknowledgement of our vibrant arts and cultural scene. It provides an umbrella brand to promote arts and culture and strengthen sustainable thoughtful tourism. And it creates access and promotes equitable practices within our sector. So back to the example of our programme, Upstate California Creative Core, in shining a light on the role of artists as essential workers. In Nevada County alone, we invested close to $500,000 to support awareness for some of our most critical issues. Here are a few pictures taken at the opening of artists'' work, which celebrated the work of our Nevada County artists in areas such as public health access, youth access to the arts. Indigenous knowledge and language recovery, hunger relief, housing solutions, climate mitigation, disaster preparedness and emergency response, and in eastern Nevada County the immigrant experience. $60 million from the 2021-22 state budget was invested in the creative core with Nevada County Arts Council leading the upstate region, responsible for regranting funds across 19 counties. But let's look at some of our foundational work for culture forward. In 2024, we led an RFP process resulting in the contracting of scum, a human-centered design consultancy. We chaired a cross-sector leadership round table. We supported scansion's deep dive into key studies and reports, including the county's new economic development action plan. Its community wildfire protection plan, its recreation and resilience, the Sierra economic development district's comprehensive economic development strategy that said, as you know, and our own recently published arts and economic prosperity report. We supported interviews with key experts in all these areas, and we created arts and culture action plan framing report. Our most recent economic impact study showed a $66 million of economic activity in the arts and cultural sector during 2023, supporting almost 1,500 jobs and providing 39.4 in personal income to residents and generating 13.2 million in tax revenue to local, state and federal governments. But this comes with a caveat. COVID era recovery funds now fully spent had boosted revenues even as audience behaviors have shifted. and enthusiasm for in-person events post COVID has quickly waned. And I'll start. had boosted revenues, even as audience behaviors have shifted. Enthusiasm for in-person events, post-COVID has quickly waned and are struggling venues now report fluctuating attendance and smaller group events. We know all this. The industry is driving growth and fostering community yet is now navigating a completely different world. So we kicked off Culture Forward at our leadership roundtable last summer. A full-daisy agenda, so I'll include a panel on tourism, since one of the deliverables of our Culture Forward plan will be a regional marketing plan for the arts. And our panel included the VP of Global Tourism and Destination Advisory at JLL Consulting, their leading visit California's regional strategic tourism plan for Gold Country. The VP of Research and Policy at Merckett for the Arts, the CEO of Visit Tracquitao and the Deputy Director of Creative West. The discussions span the philosophy of destination development, the big picture of Visakalaphthonias work and the economic and social impacts of cultural tourism locally. Now on to some fun stuff with some maps. With support from the county's incredible GIS department. Thank you, Ellison. We recently analyzed our cultural district impacts through the lens of their transportation sheds. That is how many people have access to us within an hour's drive. As you can see from this map both districts command a regional population transportation shed of over 1,500,000 people. And for Graz Valley Nevada City Cultural District alone, we're looking at close to a million people within an hour's drive with us. This map shows Graz Valley Nevada City Cultural District in relation just as an example, not only to the cultural assets that drive our local economy, but access to affordable housing for artists. How can we protect the very workforce that so drives their economy and creates the sense of home we know and love while simultaneously making it a welcoming place for visitors? Oops, I skipped that slide. There you are. The pink dots are affordable housing. And then we'll move on. And panning out again, one can see the enormous potential. Not only for unique approaches in planning that acknowledge distinct communities, such as Graves Valley, Nevada City, and Truckee, but regional approaches that can be leveraged through proximity. Finally, our culture forwards deliverables are to identify avenues of funding and opportunities for partnership to stabilize our sector, to align local government investments in arts and culture with city and county goals and priorities in areas such as affordable housing, public safety, economic development, climate mitigation, emergency preparedness and disaster response, recreation and mobility. Put us to work to help you communicate your priorities, partner with us. We want to identify career pathways and workforce development opportunities in the arts and cultural sector to identify strategies to advance and integrate cultural equity for all Nevada County residents and to recognise the importance of arts advocacy and inspire cultural leaders, creatives, volunteers and audiences to flex their individual and collective power to protect and advance the arts for all of us. And importantly, to include a regional marketing plan that promotes sustainable cultural tourism, acknowledging the value of local participation. So, there are many ways for us to get involved. I think the county has already been very generous and shared the survey that we're asking all community members across all sectors and residents to take part in. At the end of April, we were well. So last week, we were up in Trucky with our consultants. We held, I think, five listening sessions, Gianna, as our Grazfalli Nevada City Cultural District Programme Manager, attended all of them. We had a fantastic conversation with Tahoe Trucky Community Foundation and had a couple of other funders up in Truckee. And we worked to bring all our community leaders together up in Truckee to make sure that their voices are part of this planning. And we'll be doing the same in grass valley, Nevada City Cultural District, and also up in the ridge and in Penn Valley and in South County. a robby, you've got to answer my email at the end of April and beginning of May. So lots of ways to participate, you'll be hearing from us, but we wanted to give you an update and make sure that you've felt fully included as a partner. Thank you. Oh, I was waiting for the last two slides. Are you finished? That's fine. I think it's fine. Okay. How did I do with time? Yeah, just making it. All right. Comments from the board. Questions? Thank you. Oh, why is it thank you so much. I am familiar with all of that. Yeah, as the board chair I spent a lot of time attending those events and it was always a kind of a highlight for me. So thank you for everything you've done. It's it's incredible. I and I followed your journey because you and I met When you're pretty small, you know much smaller and more contained in your mission. And so you've done such great work. I just wanted to congratulate you. And I'm a data guy, so I love seeing the data that you've presented. Just when I was getting into the maps, you changed the slide. But I do appreciate you bringing forward the data points associated with, it sounds like there are two different things, but to me that's how you quantify the success. And I know our economy is changing and I know that I'm artist's struggle and when grant funding changes and the landscape financially changes, you have to pivot. We're here to help if we can, definitely through promotion and through partnerships where we can join forces with you. So thank you. Keep up the good work. Thank you. Rob. I guess I should first apologize for not getting back to you, but I will plan on the community engagement phase for the end of April beginning of May and we will get together leading up to that. But thanks for all your work on this. You mentioned the Wild and Scenic Film Festival and I had a group stay at my place we have up here and I attended some of the events and you know it's events like those and countless others that you realize we have a real jewel up here and it's off the beaten path so getting the word out is a challenge, but I love all the work you're doing and keep up the good work. When we were first designated California Arts Council, paid us a visit along with some state legislators. And among the feedback, the very positive feedback, we're also a few little sort of flags. One of the flags was Graz Valley, Nevada City and Truckee and Nevada County as a whole, have too many cultural assets. How sustainable is it? This is so amazing, just how are we looking after them? So it'll be great to connect with South County. When we look at our cultural asset map, the Board of Supervisors knows this well. There's a little bit of an absence of those cultural asset points in South County and I'm really looking forward to working with you to make sure that we're in there with you advancing the arts for those community members there. Yeah, and I just, when I add, Rob, thank you for being a lodging host. I know what that means for the Wild and Sineg, how the community comes together for that event, and hosts, hosts, filmmakers that are flying to our town across the globe. And just a piece of information from the Wild and Sineg, This was the best-attended film festival yet since COVID and it really shows, you know, how the arts have such a vital role in difficult times and it was, it really did me the town so vibrant and the vibe was so good. So yeah, just wanted to add that. And of course, Trucke has its own Wild and Scenic. It goes on tour to Trucke every year. Okay, we're going to keep on track your suit. No, but Leiza, I always enjoy listening to your, I mean, it's kind of, when I look back four years from now or five years when we started this, really started to move again. It's really escalated into some wonderful areas. I mean, even right here in our own building where you guys come and we share, that's so different than when we were five years ago. And so you're just making headway all over the place. I love that. All the way from Turkey, I hadn't even gone to Turkey very much before we did the fire. That was the first big one up there. Far as a fire. Yeah, that was huge. Yeah. And so I look at some of the projects that were really big right off the bat that really made huge impressions. And right down to the last one when I couldn't come because I was unavailable. But I got to enjoy the after effects because it's here. So I do appreciate that. And I know the work like Lisa does, you know, working with our art centers and all the things that we do, all the way to the foundry and the art culture that it brings here. So I am ever impressed with the work that you all do and how you're bringing people together. I still think of my favorite moment is sitting in my front yard with you and Ruth. Me too, that's one of my favorite moments. It really was, because probably art wasn't really my main focus. I mean, that I even knew how to look into it so more definitely. So I always appreciate that. And that will always be a very special moment. So thank you for being here. And thank you for the great presentation. Thank you. Sure. Thanks. Come a long way. I can remember, I don't know how many years ago, before we got cultural district designation, the budget of $35,000 in scraping every penny together. So to see where you were and where you've come is very impressive. And I'm really happy that we've been able to maintain our cultural districts, because I know that there's a re-designation in different years. And I think that speaks to the work that we've done that say that this is an important focus in West Valley Nevada City and Trekkie and the fact that all three of our incorporated areas have cultural districts is a very strong testament to the work that has been done up here. The year consultants who are coming up to do the stakeholder meetings, were they reaching out individually? Because I had gotten a request from, I think, one of your, from somebody from the consulting team for a meeting, and I responded, but I never heard back. I guess I can assume that they are just going to be here those days and they are going to be meeting with people, or how is that going to work? No, I think our consultants would very much like to meet with you. In fact, I specifically asked that they did, because of your connection with the arts, I felt your voice was very important. last I heard was that there was an appointment in the calendar. So I think it might have been a little communication glitch, and I'll follow up with that. If there was an appointment, I don't have it on my calendar. So if you talk with them, if you could ask them to reach out to me directly, and I will definitely get it onto my calendar. But yeah, I just appreciate all the work that you've done. You know, oftentimes use the cultural districts as a selling point to people. You know, we're the only rural county that has all three of our incorporated areas. You know, not just the cultural districts as a selling point to people. We're the only rural county that has all three of our incorporated areas. Not just one, but three, and most rural communities have none. So I'm just going to keep up the good work. And if you haven't seen the magazine that they just put out, I went to the, yeah, I went to the Muse opening a couple weeks ago, and made the presentation on it and it's a really beautiful publication and I hope that people are picking it up and you're getting it delivered outside the community. Absolutely. We're investing $10,000 of our operating budget to ensure the distribution along the IAT corridor between Reno and San Francisco, up to Chico, down Highway 20. So yes, it's very, very important. And it'll be on an ongoing thing throughout the year. Thank you for your presentation. Always, it's always fun to see what's going on. I'm also thrilled that we have the cultural districts and so supportive of any way we can support our artists in this community. We know they contribute to our economic viability here as well as just providing joy and beauty. So that's, you know, really we'll continue to support anything we can do there. I do you raise the issue of sustainability. We're seeing what's happened to the minor foundry and the issues with the Center for the Arts and sustainability, the ability to sustain all our arts organizations and projects is an issue. And I know I owe you a meeting. I had to cancel our last one. So I'm concerned about that going forward, the sustainability of your organization as well as the other arts and how we're going to keep our artists uplifted and supported. So I look forward to conversation with you about that too and what your group is going to be doing and how we're all going to be trying to keep moving together forward. consultants will be looking very closely at the state and potential for the venues, our venues here. So we'll be having a special focus group as well as public listening sessions on venues. We've already had those conversations up in Truckee. It's an endemic issue. So it's time to just rethink how we model those venues and support of the venues themselves and the communities that they serve. I'm glad you're looking at that. That's great. Okay. Thank you. Public comment. I don't see any anyone on the phone. No callers. Okay. Closing public comment. I am looking for a motion and a second to adopt to accept the presentation. So moved. So moved. Second. Okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you so much, Eliza. Thank you. Hi, Dean. Board members, don't leave yet. We have to come back really quickly to item 21. We apparently didn't vote on it and none of us caught that. Starting with me. That was the public health. We didn't, I know, so on my apologies. So I need a motion and a second to accept the resolution for claiming April 7th through 13th, 2025 is public health week in Nevada County. So moved. Second. Okay, let's take a vote. District five. Yes. District two. Yes. District four. Yes. District three. Yes. District one. Yes. Thank you so much. And this meeting is adjourned. Thanks everybody. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you