All right, good evening, everyone.

Let's get underway.

Tonight's unincorporated services committee meeting for February 26th.

Clerk want to take the roll.

Supervisor Town.

Present.

Supervisor Miley Cabacorum.

All right, thank you.

Let's have um instructions for this evening's meeting.

Maria.

Yes, good evening.

I will give the instructions in English and then I will give them in Spanish.

Good evening in your meeting, webinar controls.

Click Interpretation once the language channels are activated.

Secondly, select the language that you would like to hear.

And optional if you would like uh to silence uh what's being interpreted, you can click um silence or mute the original audio.

Muy buenas noches.

Uh interpretación simultanea al español esta noche.

Una vez que se active los canales de interpretación in los controles de la reunión o el seminario web.

Aga click and interpretación.

Uh, verán el icono de el mundo y potran uh seleccionar interpretación.

Segundo, a click in the idioma que desea escuchar Espanyol in este caso, or Spanish.

Y luego es opcional para escuchar solo el idioma interpretado.

Aga click and silenciar el audio original.

Si está utilizando un teléfono Android or un teléfono intelligente, verá los tres puntitos y también sigue las mismas instructions de seleccionar interpretación, luego español, and numero three, silenciar el idioma de English si solamente quiere escuchar in Spaniel y verá donde dice M-U-T-E-Naudio.

Muchas gracias.

Okay.

All right, thank you.

So we have a pretty meaty agenda this evening, but before we get into the items on the agenda, we're gonna take public comment.

So if there's any public comment on non-agendized items, public comment on non-agendized items.

I was told that there might be public comment on non-agendized items.

Hello, thank you.

Um I'm addressing some county departments through our through our supervisors.

This is about protecting our health.

Uh our most flagrant local violator of county health protections is being allowed to break the law for five or six days a week in a very high profile location, a few feet off of Hesperian Boulevard on Paseo Grande for the last two or three years.

Thanks to the fact that there has been no substantial penalty for the repeated violations.

They've now been able to buy a nicer vehicle to tow their barbecue out to us.

Alameda County Environmental Health won't stop them.

Alameda County Code of Enforcement won't stop them.

The Alameda County Sheriff Department won't stop them.

Yesterday, around 10 a.m., they had some food and cooking tools confiscated and were given a cease and assist order.

Once again, they didn't leave, and they are back again today.

Show up with a van or a pickup truck with a trailer hitch.

Tell them if they don't disperse immediately, you will tow their barbecue.

I bet they will leave.

But if they don't, follow up with it.

It's not rocket science, and it would be a cost savings actually by eliminating so many future visits.

As long as this violator is allowed to continue, they will serve as the flagship for other scoff laws to come join them.

Every department passes the book or gives a reason they can't.

The hell they can't.

And I'd like to know who is standing in the way of this solution.

Thank you.

Any other speakers on non-agendized items?

Public comment.

Caller, you're on the line.

You have two minutes, Charles.

Hi, this is Charles Pisano of San Lorenzo.

I guess this will be primarily directed to you, Supervisor Miley.

I want to know what the county is doing to help the family whose house on Meekland suffered the gas explosion.

I got a request from a GoFundMe site for them a few weeks ago.

I would have thought that there was been some sort of services stepped in to help them out.

I hope there has been, and I haven't heard about it.

And I yeah, I don't know.

You don't need to answer that right now, but I'd maybe hear from your office on that.

Um you guys have my number.

I'd appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Ashley Tona will get back to you.

Any other speakers on public comment, non-agenda items?

I have no more speakers for public comment.

Right, very good.

Okay, so we'll go to our first item this evening.

It's the uh uh unincorporated area budget overview.

Hey, Melanie.

Good evening.

Good evening, supervisors, members of the public and staff.

Um, I'm gonna provide another overview of the unincorporated services um budget and hopefully a couple of updates that you haven't heard in uh previous presentations.

If you have heard uh those series of uh presentations that the county administrator's office has done.

Um so um we usually do start with background and economic context.

I'm actually gonna go a little bit out of order here and really start um by doing an overview of the updated county budget process, and then I'll go into our usual um economic context and uh just a very high-level state and federal updates.

Um, and then I'll uh wrap up by doing a recap of research that's underway, both um uh facilitated by Supervisor Miley's office, the county administrator's office also has a project that I'll be uh talking a little bit about and um also do a recap of other areas of opportunity that we worked uh uh to develop with the advocates.

Okay, so here's an updated schematic.

Uh it is there are a c a number of things that have uh changed slightly compared to what the graphic looks like in the current year approved budget document.

Um, the main thing that I'll point out that's been updated with respect to the timeline is the budget development process for a fiscal year 26-27 is um happening on an accelerated time frame.

So traditionally the county has uh the county administrator has presented a balanced proposed budget to the board of supervisors in early June.

We are doing it, we are um planning on presenting the proposed budget to the board a couple of weeks earlier than we typically do.

And so that compressed time frame is going to be challenging for um our partners and the departments and agencies that are doing quick work to uh that they're um currently in the process of submitting their maintenance of effort requests to the county administrator's office where we've also started our analysis.

Um that, but that's really the main difference.

Uh that the yellow wedge there that you see that in late May um is when we're uh planning on presenting the proposed balanced budget to the board.

So that basically shifts a number of the other uh discrete deadlines up in the process.

Um we are anticipating that the initial budget work group meeting.

Um we're hoping that it'll be scheduled for uh next month.

What uh the county minister is currently working with the budget chair to confirm that calendar.

Uh and the early budget work session is traditionally in April.

We anticipate that's going to continue.

It's usually in the middle of April, with additional budget workgroup sessions happening throughout April and May.

Um thing that might be uh an additional thing that might be challenging about the timeline this year is uh when we have presented the balance proposed budget to the board in June, we typically benefit from uh a little bit more in-depth analysis of the governor's May revise.

This timeline may not allow for um an in-depth analysis because the state's statutory deadline to present the May revision is May 14th.

Um, so we're not gonna have a whole lot of time to then turn around any potential impacts from the May revise, which um so far the state has projected those to potentially be negative impacts uh before we have to balance the budget and present it to the board.

So moving on to the economic context.

So moving on to the economic context, we always like to start with because the majority of the county's limited discretionary revenue is based on property tax.

We always keep an eye on the local housing market.

So the next couple of slides, the data is from the state association of realtors.

You can see that the median price in the county is at 1.12 million for the month of January.

That's about a 5% decrease from the previous month and down about 2.5% from the year prior.

Home sales are down nearly 40% compared to December and up about 2% from a year ago.

On the next slide, what you can see here is that the rate of unsold inventory is up.

It's more than doubled compared to December and down about 12.5% from a year ago.

Median time on the market was 17 days for the month of January.

That's compared to about 60 days for the state.

And it's down 10.5% from December and the same as a year prior.

So again, overall, the story continues.

Low inventory here in the region continues to keep prices high and out of reach for those that are trying to enter the housing market.

An additional point that I'll make is that nationally foreclosure filings are up about 32% in January of 2026.

So that's the 11th straight month of foreclosure activity rising, although overall levels nationally remain well below historic peaks.

And on the next slide, what we're really highlighting here is that artificial intelligence and automation really continue to reshape the tech industry.

In terms of what the Federal Reserve is doing, they they did leave their interest rates, the interest rates unchanged as of their latest meeting in January.

Inflation has really showed little progress over the last year.

Some officials in the Fed believe that's a result of the new tariffs, and job gains have been slow.

So AI and automation again continue to reshape the tech industry and drive cutbacks as well as job losses in that sector.

These are a few of the companies that you've probably seen in the most recent headlines.

Amazon confirmed plans to cut 16,000 jobs globally in 2026.

Over 750 of those jobs are local.

UPS, which is winding down its partnership with Amazon, had also announced plans for cutbacks.

So they are they had announced plans to cut 30,000 jobs after eliminating 48,000 jobs in 2025.

They also have plans to further deploy automation.

Workday is based in Pleasanton, and it recently sold one of its buildings to PG ⁇ E for 21.8 million.

With that change, it announced it'll be cutting roughly 150 East Bay jobs, moving resources away from human support and toward revenue generating sales as well as AI development.

Last year, Workday had already eliminated 617 Bay Area jobs.

So moving on to state and federal updates, again, these are very high level.

No new significant spending proposals.

The state is projecting a significant shortfall of nearly 3 billion, despite higher than projected general fund revenues.

And they're also projecting a 22 billion dollar deficit in the 27-28 fiscal year.

So I mentioned this earlier, but the you know, we're anticipating that the May revision will include plans to balance budgets in both 26-27 and 27-28.

So, you know, potentially bad news there.

Because the state of California is so highly reliant on high wage earners.

Any negative uh impact to the stock market can uh very significantly impact the state's budget.

Um, so the state is really worried about the volatility, potential volatility in the stock market and asset price declines, particularly in the tech sector on which we are so highly dependent.

Uh and then uh, you know, we're keeping an eye on uh the potential for uh proposing applying work requirements for Medi-Cal to individuals with unsatisfactory immigrant status as well as um uh you know, lamenting the fact that there's no additional funding for homelessness in the state's plan.

Um on the federal front, you know, really the the impacts of federal policy on the county's budget is is yet to be fully understood.

I've highlighted a few things that are really of chief concern with respect to our safety net.

So, in terms of MediCal, uh, we are anticipating that loss of coverage will increase utilization and reliance on emergency departments for care and uh increased costs for special specialty care services in terms of behavioral health, the loss of Medicaid eligibility and coverage for individuals with behavioral health conditions, and then new requirements impacting workload as well as operational responsibilities.

So moving on to the unincorporated services budget, uh the 25-26 unincorporated services budget included a number of enhancements that were really designed to be responsive to some of the concerns that were lifted up in the my Eat Invoice report.

Um I'll go over some of those enhancements.

Uh, we had previously presented this in detail in September.

Um, a colleague of mine had gone through those slides.

So I'm doing a little bit of a recap of what we had previously presented.

Um this slide, this is essentially a summary of uh seven different elements uh that uh summarize improvements that were made uh to the current year budget.

Um the the current year unincorporated uh services special budget.

Um what was new was the identific the identification of key investment by departments.

Uh this year's special budget has uh additional charts and graphs, so revenue by department is new, as well as net county costs over time, discretionary services and supplies by department, as well as additional detail by budget unit.

Uh there's also a demographic overview of the unincorporated area residence as well as selected additional expenditures in terms of capital investment as well as additional expenditures by programs, so school and community programs.

So that last section in particular is new.

We have not traditionally highlighted programs that are delivered by the departments that don't necessarily provide direct municipal services to the unincorporated area.

It's really just the beginning of us being able to develop that kind of content.

We're continuing to think about how we can better capture investments that are countywide in nature and the benefit that's that's taking place in the unincorporated areas.

So I'll just do a quick recap in terms of what we have traditionally focused on, which is the services that are provided by those departments that do provide direct municipal services to the unincorporated areas.

So as you can see, between public works, the fire department, the sheriff's office, community development agency, and the county library, it's a total of about 385 million.

This is in the current year budget, so fiscal year 25-26.

Uh, the next slide is a representation of uh spending authority or appropriations by major objects.

So the vast majority of that supports services and supplies, so it can be contracts, it can be you know any other expenditures that don't fall into the broader category, the other large category, which is staffing, salaries and employee benefits.

Um, and then there are the other smaller categories that support things like our fixed assets or capital improvements.

Um moving on to revenue by department, you can see that more than half of that is really comprised of the public works agency uh followed by fire, the sheriff's office, the uh the county library, community development, and community development.

Uh so this is one of the uh newer features.

I'm sorry, this is very small and hard to read, but um, we did try and highlight uh the capital investments that are reflected in the fiscal year 25-26 budget.

So you can see uh the list there, that's essentially by department, um, measure X capital projects and fire, measure A1 uh projects administered by CDA.

Um there are a couple of uh projects that are administered by probation that you can see there, followed by the library, general services agency, and uh the San Lorenzo Theater, which is also administered by CDA.

Um, so that's the total of capital projects that's represented in the current year budget.

Thanks, Tisa.

Um the unincorporated special budget also features selected additional expenditures.

Much of these contributions, well, all of the contributions as you can see are from um the health agency.

Um and so this is an area of the special budget that we were really hoping to expand upon for the next uh for the next budget document, really try and get a much more broad representation of the programs that are administered by not just health but social services, um, other agencies and departments that administer programs benefiting the unincorporated area residents.

Um and then this next slide I had presented maybe three or four meetings ago.

Um so this is sort of more a historical look back in addition to some you know current ongoing projects.

So tier one is significant to represent because uh the county invested the first 90 million that came back in redevelopment um dollars in tier one projects that really benefited districts three and four.

Um there are additional investments that were made and funded by ARPA, uh administered by CDA.

Um I already mentioned the Measure X projects for FIRE and the measure A1 projects for CDA.

GSA also has countywide solar and energy savings projects benefiting the unincorporated, as well as priority one projects.

So those are highlighted in the capital improvement plan.

Um and then more broadly, other budget document updates.

The county administrator's office has transitioned to the ClearGov Digital Budget Book platform.

It is a more dynamic interface, it has new search capabilities as well as a new language translation feature.

It is designed to be ADA optimized with read aloud capability.

And uh we did receive the government finance officers association or GFOA distinction for uh the budget presentation.

So uh that essentially means that the document has satisfied nationally recognized guidelines for effective budget presentation and also incorporates best practices to support transparency and stakeholder engagement.

Um the next slide, we're highlighting uh ongoing research projects.

So, as I had mentioned earlier, uh Supervisor Miley's office is routinely a consultant to uh engage the community and inform the community input budget process as well as the design of a potential office of unincorporated services within that scope of work.

There's coordination with agencies and departments as well as coordination with the district offices and municipal advisory councils.

Um the county administrators' office's last bullet is um in reference to a project that the county administrators office is working on.

So we are collaborating with a graduate student consultant from the Goldman School of Public Policy on a landscape analysis, really looking at other comparable urban counties and what their management model is with respect to unincorporated.

So on the next slide, just a recap.

Um, this is similar content to what I have presented previously in terms of areas of opportunities.

So we're we want to continue with budget document enhancements, particularly to the unincorporated services, special budget, support the ongoing research projects to develop recommendations and explore additional models of budget input to support resident and stakeholder engagement.

Um we are committed to discuss website enhancements as well as continue working on ongoing efforts with our partners in the agencies and departments to better capture county investment in the unincorporated area.

Um as always, we have to consider long list of pending factors as we develop the budget.

Um these items are board members have likely seen before and staff.

Um what's new that we're highlighting on here?

Well, what's returned, I should say, is is ballot initiatives.

So there are always ballot initiatives that may potentially have an impact on the county budget.

Uh there's one that was recently featured in the news that could impact uh billions of dollars in local property tax revenue that's coming to local agencies if there's an exemption uh for older adults.

So those are things that we're you know, we're always looking out for.

There could also be ballot initiatives to the good, of course.

Um, but you know, like these and other pending factors, um, these could have significant impacts on the development of our budget.

Um and that's that's pretty much it.

Um uh happy to take any questions.

Okay, thanks for that presentation.

Uh do you have a copy or copies of the PowerPoint?

Yes, I I can uh leave copies up front.

Okay, good.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

So uh Supervisor Jam, I'll let um call on her first and I'll ask some questions as well.

Um thank you for that status report and update from the last presentation.

You have provided to the unincorporated service committee.

Um it would also help if we could upload um your slides to the agenda for the unincorporated.

The question I had, um we've been getting a lot of questions about um measure W and how that's gonna fit into the budgeting process because uh measure W, unlike measure A1 or X that were shown um really goes into the general fund of the county.

And um can you help just kind of like outline sort of our process for uh looking at budgeting the allocations?

Um sure.

So what the board has I I apologize, this the deck is not there yet, but I I'll place it on the table.

Um what the um what the board has allocated by way of the budget is essentially just a representation of the first year.

Um so uh fiscal year 2526 was done as a mid-year adjustment.

Um, and we've established a separate fund to budget for the measure W commitments.

Um and so the hope is that there's uh an additional level of detail and transparency in that separate fund so that we can closely track both the commitments and the expenditures.

Oh, thank you.

Do you okay?

So going forward for um this budget cycle, uh, do you expect more work sessions with the board in discussing specifically some of the needs of the unincorporated within measure W.

Uh yes, I would say it's it's fair to anticipate um since it has come up previously, that's one of the potential areas that um we're looking at potentially dedicating Measure W funds for.

Um we have not um yet contemplated nor given direction to departments on how to represent um we're we're holding off on giving direction to the departments um until we get board direction on future year funding because we don't want to commit revenue that we don't have yet.

Thank you.

So with the um the budget process, when the budget is presented to the board in late May, but then the budget's not adopted until late June.

Uh so we are presenting uh we are planning on presenting the balance proposed budget to the board before the end of May.

Um, but we do technically have statutorily we have until June 30th to adopt the budget.

So in late May you'll present the budget, but we're not going to adopt until sometime in June.

Is that yes, that's my understanding that but the final budget hearings will take place in June.

Okay.

So there's a uh more time in between when the county administrator's office presents the balanced budget, proposed balance budget, and when your board will adopt it.

Okay.

Yeah.

Right.

And then I know I talked to the county administrator, and I don't know if um if Supervisor Tam has any input on this, but I also talked to the county administrator about maybe if it's part of the budget process, maybe for the unincorporated area, the it could go around to the max.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes, happy, happy to do that.

When when when when might that take place?

Um so the board the departments have really just initiated the maintenance of effort process.

I I would suggest that the best time um in terms of having substantive updates.

Um, so we establish our maintenance of effort recommendations and present that information to the board during the April early budget work sessions.

That is a public meeting.

It's there's an opportunity for public engagement, as there always has been at those meetings in mid April.

Typically we'll have more information once uh we have identified the funding gap and have some plan as to how we're going to close that gap.

So that's probably the best time for us to give the most updated information to the MACs.

So that'd be maybe in May.

Right.

The time will be tight, you know, if it's if it's possible to do it in late April, we could try for that.

But I would say, yeah, it's good, it's gonna be challenging.

Yeah.

And because the thing is um, you know, CDA is good with doing the roadshow, so you could talk to um Sandy about that and kind of get a sense of how much time that's gonna take, because you know, we've got uh Cash Valley Mac, the Fairview Mac, the Eden Mac, and the Snall Mac.

So minimally those four, uh potentially East County.

I don't know, you know, the East County Mac, I don't think is formed just yet, but they might want to do something out in East County.

So potentially it could be four to five, you know, presentations uh and I I would rather it be part of a road show as opposed to having one giant Mac meeting or bringing it here to the unincorporated services, because I think if you take it on the roadshow, it's more convenient for people to attend in person and obviously uh um are the Mac meetings uh virtual too.

Oh okay.

Yeah, so they're it so people who tend not to you know can't attend would be able to participate virtually.

So I know that's been putting more of a burden on you, Melanie and the county ministry's office, but at least that'll give more transparency to the budget uh for the unincorporated area.

You know, people can get a context of the of the overall scope and magnitude of the county's budget and the challenges we're facing, but then drill down because I think what you've prepared here is I think um a very uh good step forward based on what I've seen and observed and heard from folks in terms of what they're looking for, but also what I've seen and observed since I've been on the board of supervisors.

This is much more um detail and is and it and it's iterative.

I don't think we'll resolve uh people's uh concerns uh overnight, but this is much better than what we've had in the past.

So I think going on the roadshow, I think would be helpful as well.

And I guess it's just gonna produce more work, but I do think that would be helpful around transparency, uh convenience, and then um the reason I like the MACs, it's because other governmental bodies, the MACs are official arms of the county.

So no one entity, you know, from the community, whether it's a business group or whether it's a CBO, whether it's an individual, uh, will have ownership over the budget process.

The budget props process belongs to the community, to the public, and eat and depending on where people choose to participate, they can go to any MAC meeting um and they can participate in multiple MAC meetings if they want, but they'll but they're all subject to the Brown Act, et cetera.

So I would really encourage that to happen.

Now I know Supervisor Dam is about ready to jump in.

So I don't know.

Have you given any further thought to the but to the public process?

Yes, uh I've had uh conversations with the county administrator, and and she has confirmed that we will be going on that road show with the Mac um with the budget presentation as Melanie had mentioned, and uh we are also uh trying to make sure that the feedback gets uh brought back in a concerted way so that it's reflected in our budgeting process.

And I think bringing that feedback to obviously incorporating that in, you would have to do that before the um the proposed budget presentation, I would think in late May.

Yes.

Yeah.

So it's it's a lot, but okay.

So I think that was the one thing I wanted to mention.

So I appreciate that.

And as I said, I think this is much more um uh constructive for the unincorporated area, uh, some of the information here.

But I would just also uh caution everyone that because of the the challenges, you know, just yesterday, Supervisor Tam chaired our board meeting.

Uh we had a balance in hearing, and that's where we look at reductions that are taking place in the county hospital system, Alameda Health Systems, because they're looking at laying off or reducing their force by about 200 or more in the impacts that that might have on services.

And so we had a what is it about a five-hour hearing on that?

Five and a half with over 100 speakers, and that's just one particular challenge.

So I've already mentioned to the county administrator.

Anything that's uh discretionary and not mandated, we need to know that.

So the board is very careful about what we are approving for expenditures, because if we approve and um budget a lot of things that are discretionary, not mandated that could take away from our ability to have resources for critical safety net services.

So we have to just, I'm not saying we we won't fund stuff that's not mandated, uh, but we just in discretionary, but we just have to be very mindful of what we're doing.

Um, because I do think uh we're gonna be in for some challenges over the next few years, and even if um the the administration changes in uh 2028, it we still won't see light through the tunnel instantaneously, and there's no guarantee, you know, people might think you get somebody else in office, let's say who's not a Republican as a Democrat that things might be different.

Who knows?

Things could be could be the same.

Maybe this will be the new norm.

Who knows?

You know, we can't predict the future, so we just have to be careful about that.

So those are only comments I have.

So but I appreciate what you have here today.

So if Summer Tam doesn't have any other questions, let's call on public speakers.

And you give the speakers two minutes.

Warren Cushman.

Hello, Supervisor Miley and Supervisor Tam.

This is Warren Cushman here.

I have several hats, I'm not gonna mention them.

Um I I want to first of all thank the county administrator's office for being more transparent.

I really do think that this is a good step uh towards cooperation between the advocates and the county administrator's office.

Um, you know, we the advocates, we really do uh want to engage and be involved, and we have hopes and dreams in the unincorporated areas, and you know, this is a step for us to actually uh work with county departments and you know drill down into the struggles that we all face.

Uh Supervisor Marley said we have tough times ahead, and uh we all need to work together and collaborate.

I am optimistic.

I think this is a good step of doing that.

I am for obvious reasons in favor of working with the MACs on on the budget process, and uh I'm bullish about this process.

I think we can act in terms of the cooperation and working together.

Thank you.

Thanks, Warren.

And I know I saw you twice yesterday in San Francisco at the Municipal, the um the Metro Transportation Commission meeting, and then I saw you last yesterday at the Valence and Hearings, and here you are tonight.

You're you're getting around.

Dave Thompson.

Good evening, supervisors.

Dave Thompson with uh my Eden Boyce.

Um definitely thank you to you two and to the CAO's office for all the efforts and really bringing um more detail to the unincorporated budget.

This has been a long um advocacy effort and joint advocacy effort with a bunch of groups.

So we appreciate all that work that you all have done and that the county that the CAO's office has done.

Um this is really critical as Warren said, to ensure that that residents have a say in how their funds are spent.

How the com how uh funds are invested in this community.

Um, unlike our neighboring cities, uh, a lot of that oversight really relies on citizens.

We know that you two can't do it all.

So it really uh does require cooperation with with residents to ensure that the needs of of our residents are met.

Thank you.

Hello, supervisors, uh thank you.

My name is Juliana Weiser Leon.

I work at Eden United Church of Christ in Cherryland.

For many years now, me and many of my colleagues have committed to elevating the voices of unincorporated residents.

We've convened meetings on surveys and heard time and time again that the unincorpor that unincorporated residents have big bold dreams and ideas for their lives and their futures.

And we know that the only way those ideas will turn into reality is by having clarity on the money that comes into these communities.

One of the many the main ways in which the unincorporated communities get missed in many conversations is because we continue to use countywide investments as the measure for many of our services.

The unincorporated communities deserved detail and transparency.

How much of those county wide investments are actually being spent in the unincorporated communities?

How does the county budget align with the community priorities?

We know that having more detailed measures and breaking this down is possible because we it is being done in other counties such as LA and Marin.

And we really we thank the CIO's office and your both of you for your leadership on this, because we know that progress is being done and our voices are being heard.

And we really ask that this work continues and that we really continue to push for a higher level of detail.

As an example, I want to talk about Mr.

W, your board directed a lot of money to food services, and we appreciate that.

But we don't really know what that means for the unincorporated area.

All of that money is not currently funding any type of services or admin for CBOs distributing food in the unincorporated community.

And this is how the unincorporated unincorporated communities get met missed because we don't we don't have detail or something to point towards too.

So we appreciate your leadership on that front.

Thank you.

Anna Raschizon.

Good evening.

I'm Anaras Kiza with the resources for community development.

Um, I wanted to just start this evening by thanking the county administrator's office along with the municipal departments for joining us this evening.

Um, and you know, a lot of this is what we've envisioned and advocated for is to be able to have these types of conversations and to bring them into the unincorporated community with a focus on the unincorporated community.

Um I wanted to celebrate what I see as a huge win.

I I think the CEO's office sees that as well, that the budget book this year has significantly more detail and content, um, data and context specific to the unincorporated communities.

Um it's something that we're really excited about and celebrating locally.

Um, and just really wanted to name that you know, like you mentioned with the Mac Road show and this evening, this is really this is part of the vision, right?

So we're celebrating this evening as a success.

Um, and I also want to name and recognize that we have more to do.

We have further to go together on this.

Um, I think ultimately the goal is that we're able to come together and share information that provides rich, clear detail that residents need in order to be able to be in dialogue with the county about the investments that the county is making in their community.

Um, as we know for the unincorporated communities, the county is their municipal government.

And so when we think about dialogues that communities have with their local government about investments, that's the type of rich conversation that we're looking to have and to resource with information in the unincorporated communities.

Um, so I do want to celebrate the idea and acknowledgement of the importance of doing a Mac Road show.

Um, that's something that we've been advocating for, and I think that that's ultimately something that we see as an important part of a meaningful process.

We have the MACs.

Like this is a great way to weave them into this conversation.

Um, I do um I think we have a shared sense um in the budget justice um coalition that bringing the max and the unincorporated services committee into the conversation earlier is uh more powerful way to use that space for genuine feedback and thought partnership, right?

We know that um in April and May, the the book is cooked, right?

And so um if we really want to be in dialogue about priorities from the community and use that information from the community that to form thank you.

Caller, you're on the line.

We're on item one, Charles.

Hi, Charles Passano again.

Uh I I do appreciate the effort that uh we are seeing out of the budget process.

I know this has been a long time coming.

I do remember as I know uh perfect Supervisor Miley will recognize I believe uh Ms.

Tam as well that we had county supervisors who used to uh basically just complain that oh the unincorporated area wants money, they need this, they need that.

Makes me think, you know, perhaps if there have been this investment in uh critical infrastructure 10, 20, 30 years ago, we might look like uh inner city Dublin does today, like a really well maybe you know it's totally overbuilt and people hate it, but they're thriving, they've got a huge surplus, things are going well there, and we're looking at hard tough times coming ahead.

We don't need more money, we need targeted money, we need smart investment.

I think to do that, we really need that seat at the table that we've been talking about, which is the uh unincorporated office.

I know people don't want to hear about another office, let alone for the unincorporated area.

There's so much talent around here, there's so many good minds, there's so many hard workers that are not being utilized that could be with with the right guidance.

So this is my my uh my complaint and my recommendation.

I appreciate your time.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes, yeah.

Um Sandra here.

I wanted to start off by really thanking everybody that took the time and effort from community members, members from CDA, supervisors, everybody that really made it happen to have more detail this year.

Um I feel like we have like good momentum moving forward.

That's definitely not where we want to be, but it's a huge improvement on um previous budget books.

And so um I just want to acknowledge that win for ourselves, for our community as a resident.

Um, and I also want to really advocate for an input process from the community because it's it's important that these um these roadshows happen in a time where residents can actually have an input, can really talk about what they need, especially right now when there's a lot of you know programs that are being cut, and um a lot of you know um of our community is going to feel those impacts, and so their priority should be reflected, especially in times like this.

And so um not where we want to be, but definitely better than we were, and so again, I am really just glad that we are moving forward in this process and that we you know do have some voice in this um in this book and it and it shows that so thank you.

Oscar, you're on the line.

You have two minutes.

Hello, can I be heard?

Yes.

Um, greetings.

My name is Oscar Gonzalez.

I'm a slam youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area.

I want to say that I really appreciate the detailed budget overview this year.

It shows progress, and I'm grateful for that.

However, it is necessary for youth voices to be included in shaping the budget.

You know, because while being transparent with the budget is important, it is paramount for decision making to be shared with youth.

You know, this can be easily done through surveys, forums, even listening sessions.

These methods ensure that our youth needs are being taken into account when looking at bunding priorities.

Thank you.

Delilah, you're on the line.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Hi.

Uh, my name is Delilah, and I work in the unincorporated area.

Thank you for providing a clear and more detailed budget presentation this year.

We truly appreciate the effort to be transparent with the community.

We believe it is important that spending decisions reflect what residents actually need.

Um, so creating a formal process for community input would help ensure that voices from the unincorporated area are heard and considered early in the budget planning process.

Uh, we as well appreciate the transparency and encourage you to continue improving ways for the community to stay involved.

So thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you.

Aidan, you're on the line.

Hello.

Yes.

Good evening.

My name is Aiden Amesco, and I am a SLAM youth leader who lives and works in the unincorporated area.

We want to acknowledge that this year's budget report felt more transparent.

It shows that the community feedback feedback made a difference.

But listening shouldn't happen only once a year.

And I believe that there should be an ongoing community engagement process that allows residents to help shape budget priorities before they are finalized.

We encourage the county to continue building on this progress.

Thank you.

Carlos, you're on the line.

Carlos Sandoval.

Uh can I be heard?

Yes.

Good evening, supervisors.

My name is Carlos Sandoval, and I am a youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area.

We appreciate the more transparent and detailed budget overview this year.

Now we're asking for input that is real and meaningful, not just symbolic.

Community members should have structured opportunities to share priorities that influence funding decisions.

We hope that the county will formalize a community input process so our voices are reflected in the budget.

Thank you.

Ashley, you're on the line.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yes.

My name is Ashley Acosta, and I am a SLAM youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area.

We appreciate the improvements made this year's to this year's budget presentation.

It was more detailed, more transparent, and easier for the public to understand.

That is a meaningful progress.

However, our work is not complete.

For the budget to truly reflect the needs and priorities of our community, there must be a clear, accessible and inclusive process that allows residents to share their input before final decisions are made.

We look forward to continued progress and stronger community engagement moving forward.

Thank you.

Unmute your microphone.

I understand the county need to focus in the most severe mental health and substance use cases.

But as a man, I worry deeply about what happened when prevention is pushed aside.

If we wait until a young person is in full crisis, we have already waited too long.

We need to reach our youth before they fall into addiction or to be our ill I miss.

I respectfully ask you to continue funding trusted local partners like SLAM.

They know our families, speak our languages, and are the backbone of our community.

Please don't forget the kids prevention is how we protect the next generation.

Use every available dollar widely, including opioid segment funds and Prop 64 grants for public awareness and how reduction now, not year, from now.

Our community hill is not just a budget line.

It's our families, it's our children.

Thank you for your time and for caring about the future of our community.

Caller, you're on the line.

We're on item one.

Unmute your microphone.

Matthias, you're on the line.

You have two minutes.

Do you hear me?

Yes.

Good evening, supervisors.

My name is Matias.

I am I am a SLAM youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area.

We want to thank the county for improving transparent transparency in this year's budget overview.

Clear information builds trust, but trust also grows when residents are invited into the process.

We encourage encourage the county to establish a clear and outgoing community input process.

So our needs are and priorities are reflected in the budget.

Thank you.

Caller, you're on the line.

You have two minutes.

Yes.

Uh good evening, unincorporated services committee.

My name is Tun Wynn, and I'm a youth leader for both for SLAM who lives and works in the unincorporated area.

I see the effort to make the budget more transparent this year, and I appreciate that.

But transparency without inconclusion is incomplete.

Residents need clear opportunities to participate and influence how resources are allocated.

I ask that county creates a structured and accessible community input process to ensure the budget budget reflects our real needs and priorities.

Thank you.

Raimundo, you're on the line.

Yes.

Um hello, supervisors.

I hope you're doing well.

And my name is Raimundo Archeleda, and I am a slam youth leader who lives and works in Castle Valley in the unincorporated area.

We're glad to see more detail and clarity in this year's in this year's budget overview.

That's a positive change.

But representation matters.

Residents in unincorporated areas should have mean meaningfully should have meaningful opportunities to express what matters most before decisions are finalized.

We're asking for a starter community engagement process so that the budget truly reflects our community's priorities.

Thank you.

Yes, Sania.

You hear me?

Yes, I can hear you.

Good evening.

My name is Santos, and I am a slam youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area.

I want to acknowledge that the county made improvements in how the budget was presented this year.

It felt more transparent.

But transparency also invites accountability.

If we can clearly see the budget, then we should also have a clear pathway to influence it.

We encourage the county to create a structured and accessible community imp input process so that our local needs and priorities are reflected in the budget.

Thank you.

David, you're on the line.

Yeah, hi.

Um I'd like to uh address the uh uh Alameda County table at the uh courthouse every I think it's Wednesday mornings till noon.

Can you hear me?

Yes, yes, is this dealing with item one, the budget?

Probably not.

Okay.

Well, you it's not dealing with that item, we'll have to take it when we have take a public comment.

Taylor, you're on the line.

Hi, thank you.

Taylor Aston Nielsen.

Um I think what we've heard here to one, it it's great to see that more time is being devoted to this really important cause.

I think the things that we've talked about tonight already, though, are reduced funds, which is really you know going to impact our community, but then also a limited timeline.

So I just want to stress and I hope that we're considering since we've heard the importance of public impact or input.

How is this input going to be integrated?

We're working off reduced timeline, reduced funds.

When will it be heard and integrated in?

We've heard some of it already, but how is that iteration going to happen?

It hasn't happened in the past, and I just hope that we're thinking about it now because previously it's just been almost ready to go at that point.

So I I strongly hope that we have that opportunity to really see the integration too.

Thank you.

May you're on the line.

You have two minutes.

May Villanueva Hi, my name is Mae Villanueva.

Thank you for um for uh giving me this opportunity to speak.

Um, Supervisor Tam and supervising Supervisor Miley.

I am the program director of rental mediation services.

We provide free dispute resolution to housing providers and renters in unincorporated Alameda.

Um our refer one of our referral partners is Alameda County Housing Provider Resource Center.

Is this your comment on item one, the budget?

Oh, sorry, no, I don't think so.

Sorry.

Okay.

Wade, we're gonna get to that item as soon as we can.

We're waiting for these the rest of the speakers on item one to conclude.

Hey, Suze Romero.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes.

Good evening, supervisors.

My name is Jesus Romero, and I'm a slam youth leader who lives in the unincorporated areas.

A budget reflects values.

We appreciate that this year's report was more detailed and transparent that shows progress.

And I want to see a process where community voices help shape those values before the budget is finalized.

A consistent and structured community input process would help ensure that local priorities are reflected in funding decisions.

Thank you.

Zoom user.

Hello.

Yes.

Um, good evening.

My name is Ashley, and I'm a slum youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area.

We noticed that the budget report this year was more transparent and easier to understand, and that matters.

But now the next step is participation.

If the budget is supposed to serve our community, then the community should have structured opportunities to help shape it.

We're asking for a stronger consistent community input process.

So our local priority priorities are reflected in how resources are allocated.

Thank you.

We have no more speakers for add one.

All right, thank you.

So let me see if um Supervisor Tam or Melanie have any um comments or responses to anything they've heard from the speakers.

Um thank you, Chair Miley.

And I think Melanie had mentioned that we are starting earlier this year, and that is because we are trying to build in opportunities for input, especially um as we do the road show with the MACs, and it's going to be funneled mainly through the staff and through uh the budget and finance committee and which I serve on.

The um the I guess the balance that we're going to have to deal with, and Melanie mentioned this is we're not going to have perfect information.

We're going to start the budget process even before we get uh finalization from the state on their May revise.

And so we're gonna have to make some guesses and projections on what that would look like.

And that's very um risk because two-thirds of our budget at the county comes from funding from the state, and we're still also trying to wrestle with uh the impacts on our safety net programs, which are mandated programs on health care and food security at the county level.

And so those are type of things that we're trying to balance.

But what I am expecting uh as part of this roadshow is is also a two-way um opportunity to help inform the community and how the county's budget works, because um it's uh it's slightly different from municipal government because municipal government tend not to provide a lot of the social services uh like food security, like a health care um uh that that the counties do, and we provide that for the cities as well.

So I just wanted to um make sure that people understand that this is going to be a a two-way communication and opportunity for us to understand what the needs are in the unincorporated, but also for the unincorporated areas to uh have a good understanding of how our budgets are structured and uh to the degree that my schedule allows, because I know Supervisor Miley has the bulk of the unincorporated area, but his schedule is extremely impacted, as is mine.

But uh I will try to attend some of the the MAC meetings when the budget is being presented as a member of the budget and finance committee.

Thank you, supervisors.

I think what I would add is that um you know, we do have a compressed time frame that's in part in response to demands to move up the time frame um from which we present the proposed budget, allow for more time between the presentation of the balance proposed budget and uh budget adoption.

So that's in part what the demand that we're trying to meet um by working along that accelerated time frame.

Um what I'll say is it is still valuable to uh receive feedback and input on the budget at any point before it's adopted.

Reason being that one, we have a maintenance of effort uh budget process.

And so what the departments are submitting is what represents uh the cost of maintaining the existing level of services, but within their budget authority, there is still plenty of opportunity to discuss how we can improve upon service delivery.

So I I do I do want to you know note that there's still a lot of um opportunity for valuable feedback, um, even if it's further downstream in the budget development process, we do the county does have um uh and always have maintained that we've had uh an open process.

Um our our process is also quite extended compared to some other jurisdictions.

So there are some jurisdictions that uh analyze their revenue on the front end, and then they assign targets to their agencies and departments, and they say cut your budgets by five, 10% in January.

So they're issued those types of instructions.

Um our process is not like that.

We try and take into account whatever um information we can and integrate that into the development of the budget before it is adopted.

Um, but like Supervisor Tim noted, um, we we are going to have to operate off of a lot of imperfect and incomplete information and do our best to um create a spending plan based on what information we do have before the board has to adopt.

Okay, and before I um conclude this with some remarks, I want to see since we have the fire chief here, and we have the head of the community development agency here, and we have the librarian here.

I want to see if any one of the three of you would like to come and make some comments in terms of the budget.

We don't have public works here and we don't have the sheriffs, but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna ask you, I'm gonna say I'd like you to come and say something.

The head of the community development agency, the head of the fire department, and the head of the library, just any comments, remarks relative to the budget.

No, but I don't want behavioral health because they're not in charge of the agency.

That's just a department.

Yes.

Uh Sandy Rivera, community development agency director.

Good evening, supervisors, uh, and the community.

Uh, very brief, I want to reiterate and uh really echo what Melanie said that even though this may be further down the stream, at any time it's it the communication and hearing where the priorities are from the community helps us design our programs as well.

We have uh limited areas that we have discretion, we have mandates that we have to uh uh have annually, as well as you know, general plan updates or specific plan updates, our permitting, as well as our grant requirements.

So those are mandated uh and we have a little room for discretionary projects, but there is some.

So if there are some priorities in which the community expresses, it'll help us design our budgets better.

So supervisors Willie McDonald, Alameda County Fire Chief.

Um, I really appreciate the opportunity to be here tonight to be able to hear the comments from the community and to be able to move forward with hearing input uh from the community as we're developing our budgets for this process coming up.

Um I think that there is opportunity for us to uh take some of that feedback because we're we're looking to provide um greater enhancements in the unincorporated areas, and we want to make sure that we are doing that with uh an understanding of the desired services that the community would have.

And so the input that we'll receive uh as we go forward, I think will help us uh really make sure that our priorities are the same as the priorities that the communities have, but if there's some differences that we'll be able to incorporate those into our budget.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Good evening, all I'm Deb Sica.

I'm the county librarian, and I'm really glad to see you all here and thank you for the opportunity to come speak tonight.

Um, glad you're here in this beautiful library.

This is one of the uh direct impacts of unincorporated budget, but also to know that I value the feedback, a library unto itself as something that's community-based, community-driven, and community-centered.

And so it's the very essence of what we are and what we do.

So please feel free to reach out to me.

Feel free to talk to any of my staff at any of the unincorporated libraries.

Also, um, just to know we're going to be staffing Cherryland um with a Spanish designated librarian as well.

So that's one of the very investments that we're directly making into this area too.

And and um we very much feel like um it's a part of what we do is to represent the unincorporated areas in the way we do.

So my doors open.

Love to have more conversations.

Okay, thank you, Deb.

So just a few things.

So in terms of the engagement and community input process, um, constantly uh struggling with ideas around that.

So uh can the county administrator's office continue to think about how we can because somebody's mentioned surveys, um, there might be other tools you can use on social media, et cetera.

Um to get feedback to get engagement, et cetera.

So I would just ask you to continue to think about that.

Because I know um the the budget window is what it is, and the state deficit, what's it about 20 20 some 27 billion?

The governor estimates 2.9 billion uh this year and then uh 22 billion 2728.

22 billion for 2728 in this this fiscal year it's about two billion for the state.

That's what the governor put out, and I'll note that that's despite record revenues received.

So yeah.

So since counties are arms of the state, it's always important for the county to understand what the state budget's like.

So if the state budget, if they have a deficit, then and they balance their budget.

Sometimes the way they balance their budget is requiring more mandates and with counties to do more services since we're arms of the state, but the state might not give us money to do those services.

So that's why it's always important for the counties, the 58 counties to know what is the state's budget gonna look like.

And normally the governor doesn't see that until January.

Then we talk about the May revise.

Why don't you explain what the May revise is?

Because we're this is inside baseball, and we're gonna make sure, but everyone understands it's not until we know the May revise that we really know what the state budget's gonna be.

Go ahead, Melly.

Uh so and in the governor's May revise, he's basically providing updates compared against what he has proposed in January.

So typically the updates are based on newly available information.

So there have been some years, for example, where um the collection of um income tax has been delayed, and so the the level of information or change that we see in the May revise is actually quite dramatic.

Um so it's their attempt to incorporate the latest available information um that they didn't have at the time that they put out their January projections.

So that's so that's why in January we have a sense, but then we have a better sense in May, and since counties are arms of the state, what the state does will impact the county's budget.

So that's why we want to receive input all the time, but it really gets down to the to the crunch time around May, and then in June, we have to adopt a budget for the fiscal year.

So um, and then Melanie, she's been here before, and she's constantly hammered.

Counties are different than than cities.

Cities have a lot of taxing authority, cities um corporate area, we don't have a lot of uh hotel taxes.

We don't have a lot of um real estate uh transfer taxes, we don't have a lot of parking meters, we don't have a lot of car dealerships, so cities have a lot more revenue discretion than counties have.

Now, had the county not allowed for the um Bayfair to be annexed, we would have all that tax revenue coming in.

But that happened before Supervisor Tam was a supervisor, and before I was a supervisor, that's why, since I've been a supervisor, it's been hard and fast.

The cities don't annex anything that's gonna take away the revenue from the county.

And if they do want to annex, they're not just gonna cherry pick and annex the best stuff and leave the county with all the tough stuff, they're gonna take it all.

So, for instance, when when Hayward was looking to annex um portions of Cherry Land, I said to Hayward, you got to take it all.

Um, you're just not gonna take a portion and leave us with all of the social and safety net services, and you take all their tax base.

Um so that's something to keep in mind.

Counties we're mandated to do things, cities have more discretion.

So I just want to constantly hammer that home.

And then on the county's budget uh committee of which Supervisor Sam serves on.

Will you be putting not you supervised Sam?

But Mali, will the county ministry's office be putting on a schedule when those meetings will occur so that people because I know we have a representative, I think Supervisor Champ has appointed a representative from that incorporate area.

What's her name?

Tracy?

Taylor.

Taylor.

Taylor.

Now, and that's one point of contact.

We don't expect Taylor to represent the Tyranno Cobra area, but that's one point of contact to represent down in a corporate area on the budget committee along with Supervisor TA.

But the point is if those meetings are scheduled, then maybe people possibly could attend or listen in.

I don't know if they're gonna be virtual or not, but can you explain that?

Uh yes, we we have in the uh years, I think since COVID done most of the budget work group meetings virtually.

Um we are the county administrator is working with uh the budget chair supervisor Howbert to um confirm the schedule of budget work group meetings or some years where um the budget work group has met up to four times.

Uh last year, I believe the work group, the budget work group only met twice.

Um so we do have multiple stakeholders um as part of that budget work group, um, including supervisors, uh uh agency and department heads, uh rep representatives of community, um, including the unincorporated area.

There are also um North County and South County CBOs, regional representatives.

So we have a number of community representatives that have participated in that space.

Those are all public meetings, so other you know, potential touch points, opportunities for engagement in addition to the early budget work session in April.

Um so there really are um uh I would say a lot of opportunities for these conversations to take place in addition to the MAC road show.

Um we yeah, we welcome that feedback.

And I think it would be good if um you'll be coming back here at a future time.

Maybe we could outline and bullet all of the touch points for the community to engage.

Um some are more obvious than others.

Um obviously they can always engage through my office and through Supervisor Tam's office and and then the rural area supervisor Halbert's office.

Um and then I think Mellie pointed out the budget uh booklets gonna have um more um detail uh on budget units so people can go down granular and look at things for the unincorporated area, right?

Okay, and let's see.

And then I think in addition, what she said is uh they're gonna be looking at the other county agencies that are not direct municipal agencies to the unincorporated area to begin to get information from them, the health care agency, which is a billion dollar agency of which um behavioral health is part of that, and I'm gonna be calling them up uh for item two in a minute.

Um, the social services agency, which is a billion dollar agency.

So they're gonna begin looking at those two billion dollar agencies out of a six billion dollar county budget to see what services they're providing directly to the uncorporate area.

So we recognize this isn't perfect.

We need to recognize that it's iterative, but there are a lot of touch points that are exist that are going to exist and that we're looking to uh create in addition uh in the future.

Um and then mentioned in her presentation research projects.

So I think it I just don't want to lose sight of this that she mentioned that there'll be a landscape analysis survey of management models used by comparable urban counties.

So once again, can you uh talk a little bit more about that?

What that means?

Sure.

So as part as part of the county's partnership with the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Policy, our staff, uh Goldman School of Public Policy, our staff had prepared a proposal um to work with uh graduate a graduate student consultant, um, which is essentially part of their capstone project, their second year project.

And um, so that in this instance, the county administrator's office is this student's client, and this client has been asked to focus on a landscape analysis.

Um, I believe he has started meeting with some of the representatives of uh the county agencies and departments um to frame his project.

Um, but we are specifically asking him to look at um our colleagues in other urban counties and get a better understanding of how they're structured from a management standpoint to support unincorporated area services.

Um there are a lot of differences um just from some of the preliminary information CAO staff has looked at, and so we'd like him to do a deeper dive and uh write a report on that.

And will this just be restricted to California or will it be national a national review?

We're uh we'd like them to initially focus on um comparable urban counties in California.

California, okay.

Right.

Okay, so I think all of that is a result of uh the community um advocating for more information, more transparency, more um say in governance and things of that nature.

So I think that's another positive step.

All right.

So thank you.

So that took a while.

So now what I'd like to do is good item two.

And this evening, we have Dr.

Trible, who's the head of the county's behavioral health department.

I see Stephanie over there, and um, I forgot your name.

Kathy over there.

Dr.

Trivil's brought a couple of her uh key staff with her.

And you know, her department is in the the health care services agency.

Uh there's environmental health, public health, behavioral health, and the office of the um agency uh administrator or uh director, and also within that office is housing and homelessness, and it's a huge agency, but Dr.

Tribble's department is the biggest department.

It's an 800 plus million dollar department.

832 million million dollar department.

And she knows her stuff, and she is responsible for behavioral health, which includes mental health and um substance abuse.

So the question is, Dr.

Treville, are you here this evening in lieu of coming to the health committee on this?

Uh if you are that I just I just need to know because I think Supervisor Danman has a report at the health committee.

So this is going to be the report tonight to the unincorporated area.

Um I believe I will defer to you all whether you'd like uh this is in response to uh my my union voice and some updates that you all wanted to hear from us.

Okay.

Well, thank you for being here this evening, uh, because I'm happy you found your way down in the corporate area.

So you should have a lot of slides here.

So the floor is now yours.

Thank you, sir.

And as as the supervisor, thank you, Chair Um Mile and Supervisor Tam, I appreciate being here.

And as was said, my name is Dr.

Karen Tribble.

Uh I am the county behavioral health director overseeing it's an integrated system.

Uh essentially, it is an HMO for the county of Alameda that administers all of the behavioral health services in terms of uh county governmental requirement as far as substance use.

Uh, and so about of our $832 million budget, approximately 540 uh of those million dollars are administered and go back to the community.

So we have contracted providers, 100% of the county's providers providing substance use are part of or are administered completely uh through the uh community behavioral health system, and approximately uh between 75 and 80, depending on the year, are uh these community behavioral health providers are representing our mental health system.

Uh so as uh the supervisor mentioned, I'm only going to set the stage and give context, and then I'll provide more detail.

You did hear from the speakers a goal and a desire to have a very comprehensive upscale and upstream intervention, and I think our behavioral health department absolutely agrees with that.

Uh, besides mental health and substance use services, our our department also funds hospitals, emergency departments, federally qualified health centers.

It's incredibly diverse, as well as um multiple millions of dollars in housing and other infrastructure, including some of our department and partner agencies across the county.

So we do of our 1.3 billion dollar agency budget, 832 million really does go right back to the county, including the incorporated areas.

Um, the context that I wanted to say, I'm going to zip ahead uh figuratively, and then I will introduce our uh health equity director, Stephanie uh Montgomery, as well as uh Miss Kathy Powell.

She's our early childhood mental health coordinator.

So any one of us can provide some additional information if it's interesting or of interest to you.

Uh the context that I'm going to zip ahead conceptually again, really highlighting the feedback from the community around uh integrating feedback, transparency plus feedback.

And so I I'm very proud we have brought in a community relations coordinator.

We have other folks who are part of a health equity division and others, and we hope to get incredibly uh well-versed and fluent in some of their work that's been done.

You'll see on the latter slides, there is a response to my Eden voice.

So I want to uh slightly give a spoiler alert.

We think it's a wonderful idea.

It is fantastic, and we are also impacted by some changes at the state, which we hope to provide you with information and the state budget.

So it would I would be remiss to not acknowledge where we are in this landscape, and I appreciate the supervisors and the CAO's office for sharing that.

And we are at a critical point.

So our goal for this presentation is to talk about opportunities, despite whether or not the state will allow us or i.e.

So while prevention is no longer an allowable expense because of Prop One, and our department is undergoing a immense change, which I'll speak to a little later.

We definitely want to affirm again the ideas because it really represents our goals as well as a department.

So with that, I we will get through brief.

There are lots of slides.

We will not spend an inordinate of time on them.

They are for reference as well.

But I'll first start by handing it off to my colleague for the first few slides, Director Montgomery.

Thank you, Dr.

Tribble.

Thank you to the unincorporated community, and thank you to Supervisor Miley and Supervisor Tam.

So right now we're going to talk a little bit about our ongoing collaboration and service programs.

So some of you may know who we are and what we do and how we're structured, but some of you may not.

So this is just an overview of our structure.

So and our systems of care.

We have five systems of care.

We have the adult and older adult system of care, the child and young adult system of care, the substance use continuum of care, forensics diversion and diversion and re-entry system of care, and our crisis system care runs across all of our four systems of care up top.

We also have service coordination.

So we have the health equity division, we have client access, employment services, housing and homelessness services, psychiatry and nurses' services, integrated primary care services and pharmacy services, as well as our planet administration, so finance and contracting.

And so again, we're a large department and we do a lot of things.

So we'll go to the next slide, please.

So here's some updates on some of our unincorporated supports.

So again, we have been in uh very close communication and heard a lot of what was missing and what folks hoped to have and see moving forward.

So here are some of the things that we've done over the last three to four years.

We've done some peer-to-peer training and support groups in the unincorporated area, some navigation and services and language access.

We've done mental health first aid, some restorative justice training and workforce training, psychoeducational workshops and trainings, and we had our first care fair ever for the Alameda County Behavioral Health Department that's what happened at uh reach and uh community engagement and cultural activities that we've been doing and are ongoing.

So our Office of Family Empowerment is doing parent cafes.

Uh we're providing again opportunities for people to opt into our peer certification if they'd like to become certified peers and actually support and help the community here in the unincorporated area.

Next slide, please.

So here are some system updates.

So critical initiatives and county um programs, what's happening?

So uh again, as Dr.

Tribble stated, and many of you know, there's a lot going on.

So we have California Advancing Innovative Medical, so Cal AIM.

So there's a big initiative to change how we uh do medical billing and how we work with the community.

So we are working on Calaum.

We have a mandate from the state and care court planning and system coordination, which is underway.

We're almost at our first year of operations and we're doing very well.

What I want to say about some of these uh initiatives, some of them are funded and some of them are unfunded mandates.

However, we're carrying them all out to uh the best of our ability while we continue to do our other services.

So we have community services planning and capital expansion, we call it B chip.

So we have an infusion of capital projects that will be able to have uh more beds to um support our community.

Um again, that's an effusion of money.

We need 170 million.

We're we're happy about that.

We again seeing that again, there's two steps forward and a step to the side because we also have to figure out how to bring in the service to be in those buildings.

We have the LPS legislative training, so there's uh Senate Bill 43, which expands the um uh idea of who can be conserved and what that looks like.

Um we have the opioid settlement implementation, which Dr.

Tribble will talk more about in detail.

We have proposition one.

So the Mental Health Services Act, which we're in currently, the last stages of the Mental Health Services Act will soon become the Behavioral Health Services Act.

Now, with that, there's some um infusion of great ideas around more housing um support, uh, looking at more of uh working towards folks with more severely mentally uh mental uh illness.

But again, we are now losing all of our prevention dollars.

So we're no longer able to do provincial services by the mandate of Prop One.

So next slide, please.

Oh, Dr.

Shribble will come and talk about the uh uh other initiative.

Thank you.

Um, as uh Dr.

Montgomery said there's a lot happening, and I think I appreciate Chair Um Miley for reminding that these are uh responsibility, quote quote, from the state, delegated authority goes to the state, and they are uh mandates that we are uh abiding by.

And so uh one acknowledgement that I will say that is for the implementation of care court, for example, is our community uh and all the others did advocate to the state, so there now is a path forward for community members and others to refer loved ones to a program that is court ordered treatment.

And so Alameda County, I've been asked to speak at many senate senate hearings and such because it actually is doing a phenomenal job.

Uh there is certainly a political implication for forced treatment, but there's also some wonderful outcomes that Alameda counties have had to share.

So I I say that in the context of that because at least this is an opportunity, the opioid settlement.

And as you can see, um, for those of us that remember when the smoking settlement came out, where money was placed back into the communities given the addiction and the the uh provocative advertising that encouraged people to use cigarettes, though there was evidence that it hurts and harms.

The same thing happened for opioids and drugs, and that was targeting distributors of opioids.

And so there was a settlement, a class action settlement, Alameda County Behavior Health.

We did opt in to do that federal, and in late 21 and 22, there was a settlement reached between different uh uh pharmacies and distributors of opioids because of the strong propensity for addiction or death, essentially uh it was settled.

So the positive is that the funds will be paid over time from six to eighteen years, depending on the settlement.

The complexity is that 85% of those funds must be used for opioid abatement.

And so it does mean it's a categorical funding line item.

So we do have to uh flexibly administer, but we have to attend to what the guidelines are for that.

The other piece that I wanted to acknowledge, if you look at the uh next slide, please.

Um, it did also, the state of California received initially those funds from the state, it comes to our county and then it administered and distributed to our department to administer.

The California said we have a fund, a priority.

We would like you to create substance use disorder treatment infrastructure.

We want you to grow.

We also want uh the behavior health folks to match funds.

So, although the federal provided this uh opportunity, the state did also say you need to leverage your own dollars to do this work.

They really also highlighted addressing the needs in communities of color, vulnerable populations, including sheltered and unsheltered homeless populations.

And as Director Montgomery mentioned, as you can see, we have five consumers of care.

Um department funds approximately at this point 25 to 30 million dollars each year of housing that is supported through our agency, uh health and human uh H in terms of that.

And so we're looking to provide more uh of that funding and support for housing eligible services once again those allocations are available.

But the state also focused on uh those who have substance use disorder from criminal justice system or the justice involved, whether that is training and and resources, but also to support first and early responders.

And I'm pleased to have seen our our colleagues here.

There's a few who would qualify in terms of something that we can support.

And at the end of the day, uh again, I believe a speaker mentioned this.

There were target interventions to be looking at prevention, addiction, and vulnerable use.

So that was the framework that the state developed.

Next slide, please.

In terms of what that looked like in Alameda County, as I mentioned, uh, this could be positive, but I want to be very clear on what the administration looks like.

There's always complexities with uh a settlement or even dollars.

Um, in terms of what this meant is that 80 million dollars is coming back to Alameda County, and that includes the unincorporated areas.

Now, to date, we've received about 31.7 million, and abatement allocation simply means it has to attend to the opioid uh goals to eliminate abate overuse and substance use in terms of opioids.

So that's essentially what that means.

We also uh, those who opted in have to pay the state and others in our at the federal level for legal fees.

So that's essentially a very concrete breakdown, what that looks like.

Um we are projected thus far to expend by the uh year year in about 18.7 million dollars, and we have a revenue balance of 13 million.

So we are actually ironically swiftly moving forward because we receive these dollars, have to create programs, have to get it back to the community.

If you haven't already seen it, we do hope.

We've posted bill billboards accessing on bus, buses, or bus stops.

If you see that, you can attribute that to the county's uh investment in the federal, excuse me, the opioid settlement, and it's by it by design.

Our goal is to target and see as many people, and we are also tracking metrics to see whether this engenders new service delivery and where, so that we can also target our efforts and accordingly.

Next slide.

Um, these are some of the, and I should say I'll back up one side.

We've had the opportunity to present at health committee, and it shows uh a very complicated map that shows a spike in payments and then a huge dip.

And essentially, I want to acknowledge is that the responsibility of the department as I we look at our budget is to plan for as many projects that can be sustained over 18 month years.

So, for example, multiple million dollars may have come in from one particular pharmacy.

I'll mention it's public information, so I'll mention, for example, Walmart and other pharmacies decided to pay all at once, others decided to spread it out.

So it does also mean critically looking at the kind of programs that are launched to make sure that the county can sustain it.

Uh, these are examples and really appreciate all the community feedback about uh listening sessions.

That was the absolute way that uh we direct I directed my team to do that.

Stakeholder feedback.

We use the models that we had been doing to ask the community, listening sections, uh, feedback, surveys, we sent much.

Now that we are having much more of a formalized way in the unincorporated, we do hope that you all also will be equal engaged and give us feedback.

But on the left side, I won't each read each uh line, but it talked about what stakeholders said the county needed to do.

Talked about increasing medication assisted treatment for particular population, expanding substance use disorder, system of care, media campaigns.

I just mentioned those billboards.

And if you look to the right, it shows the actual activity that our department heard you say and implemented.

And so some feedback did come from the incorporated areas as well.

Um, and so we're very, very proud of that.

I want to talk a little bit about besides looking at the mini grants, which I'll briefly speak to.

If you look, uh, we also partnered with uh previous slide, please.

We looked at Alameda Health System, who is one of our partners, of course, and it and as was stated earlier on, all of our system partners in the safety net are really having some complexities.

And so we looked at targeting how could we pay for certain services, and even if the opioid settlement didn't pay for it, as Director Montgomery mentioned, we did get the behavioral health continuum infrastructure program, BCHIP.

It doesn't actually mean B chip for my brain breaks, it actually is BASIP, but it people say B chip, and that's part of that $170 million in capital infrastructure to build.

So again, even if we couldn't fund it through sufficient funding through opioid settlement, we did uh fund it in some way.

If you look at the bottom, we just opened up and have two projects, really proud about La Familia's uh St.

Regis were they are actually buildings and facilities that are designed to treat people with conditions that are intersectional here.

And of course, if you have not seen it, please feel free to let us know.

But we we have distributed, we took uh immediately our funds and distributed free naloxone stands.

So if you ever drive around in the street, they may become part of the tapestry.

But if you see a a yellow purple box just randomly sitting, it's part of our behavioral health department's intention to get out of the community free of charge, and we continue to distribute.

Um, if you look at the next slide, part of our goal, as I mentioned, and I spoke to the mini grants, and I always my my staff always say, Why do you call it mini?

These are big.

So it could be anywhere from 20 to 30 million thousand to 200 or nearing 300,000 dollars in grants.

So that is really significant for us, the notion of mini, meaning we wanted to get it out quickly.

The community kept telling the county that funds need to be available, services need to be available quickly, and so we actually contracted with another organization through a competitive bid process, and we asked them we have $5.5 million that we want to set aside, and we want the community direct it.

We would like innovative projects, we like them to target many different communities and different ways to help us abate the opioid issue in Alameda County.

And we've been doing that for the past few years, and we're watching the metrics in terms of the impact, and we'll be able to look at specific populations and programs to see which ones are very successful.

These are just examples of some of those projects and overviews of the programs.

And if you look at the next slide, it actually shows a distribution of where some of those projects lay.

And if you is as you can see, many of them often and will support and serve the unincorporated areas of the county.

So we're incredibly proud about that because again, our strategy was community, you tell us what it is, you compete for this grant, we will give you the money, and we want you to do it, and then show the outcome so that we, if we can, we can replicate it and sustain it long term.

So that's essentially what that is.

Next slide, please.

So besides that, um, prop one, and that has been something that uh the supervisors have mentioned.

This is complicated.

I remember when it passed, uh walking into an event, and a community member ran and hugged me and said, Congratulations, all the new money.

And I you didn't read the fine print, did you?

And I use levity now because what can one do?

It's a complicated world.

But it in a positive way, what it did was it uh enabled counties to really focus on housing.

It really highlighted that.

Now, Alameda County was in a precarious position.

We'd already been doing that.

Our department, as they mentioned, had invested many, many years.

We had a division of housing.

It's now you know operated in an overseen and works and is well integrated with an H, but that was something not new for Alameda County.

The challenge was, as the supervisor mentioned, they were not funded.

So it meant you have your money and you have to then decrease other services to meet requirements in certain areas.

So that is very complicated.

The left side talks about some of those the grants, which was fantastic, the set aside, and that is how we applied for and got to 170 million dollars of capital funding.

We did it swiftly and in partnership with organizations.

That's how we're going to build it.

On the right side, it also helped to redesign the services.

The complexity, and again, as I mentioned before, it shifts in our budget, it's about 206 million at this point, and it shifted those funds from having upstream all the way to severe.

Now we have to focus on the most severe.

That's essentially what that legislation meant.

So it precluded us now from funding really innovative prevention strategies, but it just means we have to be very uh creative and think of how we can still support people at the earliest point of their mental health journey because we do believe that early intervention and prevention solves a lot in the long run.

If you look at the next slide, this is just a pictorial representation of what I meant.

And as I uh respectfully corrected uh Supervisor Miley, is you can see it says population-based to mild to moderate severe.

So, what that meant is we actually funded hospitals, and these are things that we have been launching, and I myself we launched great programs, federally qualified health centers that actually are health care.

We found that in Alameda County community and in this community, the stigma of accessing behavioral health was far too great.

People didn't want to go.

So we thought that by partnering with a health care provider and embedding supports or treatment or opportunities, people would come, and we did see that utilization rise, which was a very positive thing.

So, as you can see, this is the transition.

The effective date is July 1st, and it will, as I mentioned before, target individuals with severe mental illness.

There is a positive.

We can also treat people with substance use issues with this particular funding source.

Uh again, some funding sources can be very restrictive, they're categorical.

And you can provide housing.

The challenge is it's not new money and it's less money.

And I'll I'll be very clear and hope that this is helpful to really understand the county's budget overall picture.

Next slide, please.

So this is what that meant essentially, that we were taking about 26 million dollar portion of our budget.

Again, our budget was 831, transitioning to 127 million dollar budget.

As you can see, those don't math.

There is less money to be used.

Context is a as we've talked about, and you've heard from our CAO's office, the change at the federal landscape makes a difference.

Uh, Prop $1 come from taxing 1% of millionaires.

If millionaires have more opportunities to save money and invest in tax shelters, and there are capital gains tax, they will probably save money and contribute less.

So that is a very short way to say.

So some the current administration passed a few years ago because these are two years backwards in the rears, some things that begin to materialize.

And so when people are filing their taxes, you see a drop from 206 million dollars in revenue just to Alameda County.

Every single county has their own allocation, just depending on the percentage, to 127.5 million.

That is very significant.

We were just notified a few weeks ago that it's even six million dollars more of a shortfall.

And again, our I if no offense to anyone in the room, if you're a millionaire, see pueda.

If you're not, uh this is the impact, unfortunately.

So and as you can see, the allocation shifted as well.

Housing, a particular type of wrap around program, full service partnership, and everything else bucket.

And then now we essentially, and I hope no offense, I'm a person of faith, but now we tithe to the state, the top of the 10%, and then the rest go back to the community.

So this is a significant reduction technically on our budget in terms of what services can drive some system change.

Next slide.

50%, 51% has to be used for early intervention for youth.

That is a positive, and they must be for children and youth aged 25 years or age or older.

But it does mean, and as my colleague is overseeing some of those services, Ms.

Kathy, uh, that they will it since it's early intervention, they typically have to be part of the system.

A diagnosis, or they had to have already maybe a first episode, maybe they have a psychotic break.

So really it is downstream support, but this is very positive, at least with the legislation, it it has us to target, but it also limits the amount of money remaining.

Next slide.

So as I I wrap up, this is not the fun part, but this is the reality that we hope to we are been providing a transparent factor analysis of what this meant.

Um it meant that to fit into those three components based on how Alameda County had been doing and many other counties, we are not the only one.

It meant a budget shortfall of 3.2 million for that full service partnership wrap around program and 75 million dollars.

Um since it was shared in October, as I mentioned, that went up six million, so the delta increased.

But if you look at the next slide, this is how we are approaching those activities.

Oh, that was just for emphasis, if you didn't know to look there.

I want to look away, it's it's very complex.

Next slide, please.

So we developed strategies to obviously meet uh as a county the requirements of this new legislation.

It meant $52.8 million seven million dollars worth of I hate to say that, but cuts.

Or it meant programs had to shrink that the county administered for this particular uh program.

Uh, we will be doing analyses on the impact of this shift.

We will be looking at by focusing on mostly housing types of programs, the particular uh uh program that I mentioned before, and behavioral services supports what that actually does.

So there is a remaining delta of 22 million dollars, again, plus six million now.

If you turn these slide, and so we our county will be uh trying to absorb that.

We will be uh using vacant positions, we will be looking at them a revise and other revenue sources to try to close that gap.

And thankfully, our board has approved already four million dollars.

So, again, this is the budget landscape and the behavior health space that serves hospitals and though and things like that.

And unfortunately, those types of services are no longer eligible under this funding source.

So it will impact referrals and how every county jurisdiction follows up.

Next slide.

Um, so again, this is just a summary of what you saw.

I won't stay here, it's not a very promising, but it is something that our uh department is looking at.

We've incorporated feedback and are working on a behavioral health services plan based on the state guidance, based on community feedback that we have received.

I think close to 10 to 12,000 types of feedback, uh, listening sessions, emails, contacts, surveys.

Uh, and we will be posting that in hope that unincorporated also gives us feedback.

Next slide.

This is just a slide for reference the types of programs that are impacted.

Please do take a look, and we're always available to provide more information.

But it is a wide, wide net of impacted services.

And so partnerships are going to be credibly important.

And so if you look at the next slide, as I said before, we did believe that the My Invoice had a fantastic opportunity for collaboration.

And so what we're proposing at some point is to really look at the existing programs that I mentioned, the new projects to see how we can align those needs with the current legislation, which you see here, because they all are now focusing on higher need in general for the community.

So I am going to, as we finish up our presentation, I'm going to pass it to Ms.

Kathy.

How?

Thank you, Dr.

Thank you, Dr.

Trivel, Supervisor Tam, Supervisor Miley, and community members.

I'll cover what our partner might invoice submitted a proposal.

Next slide, please.

In August, oh, thank you.

I know I'm the short one here.

In August of this year, our My Eden Voice Community Wellness Committee submitted a proposal to Alameda County Behavioral Health based on their survey of 100 respondents that indicate these service needs.

That is the community feedback and their request is to increase culture Pacific and Culturally linguistically supportive services, strengthen local partnerships in collaboration, creating neighborhood-based, what is called third space resource to staff staffing healing practices and connection and educating about mental health services and also to establish the Eden Mental Health Task Force with the requests, the funding requests of $60,000.

Their analysis was based on the funding source of MHSA, specifically under the prevention component.

Next slide, please.

Miley noted as well, with the impact of the passage of proposition one, which uh shift um the Mental Health Service Act to the Behavioral Health Service Act.

And one component is that the prevention component is going up to the state.

It's no longer with the county.

So therefore, the requests under the prevention, we are unable to do that because now our focus will be shifting to early intervention.

Again, more treatment focus.

So the challenge is that again, with the transition of the behavior mental health service act to the behavioral health service act.

Um but there are opportunities, as Dr.

Trible had noted, you know.

Um, even though the shift uh with the requests for increasing language capacity, uh, the county does have a language access line that we can partner with our MyE Invoice and to see how we can maximize that and so they can utilize the existing um service that we already have available.

Another is um the opportunity to um utilize the space that we have for co-location of services, you know, that those spaces can be um access for community engagement or the activities that my eat invoice is envisioning of having.

Um through the opioid resettlement grants, there's opportunity to increase engagement and feedback from the community itself.

Um, also, as my colleague uh director Montgomery had noted, um, the health equity division is open to increased collaboration, partnership, um, and having more inputs, and also to continue to offer those um engagement activities such as the uh family cafes, um, uh resource fairs, and um, and and definitely incorporat more um feedback from uh my invoice and also really um amplifying the the opportunity of peer certification and it's a component that my invoice has noted that having elevate peers to peers and peers um capacity um to provide services or engage the community.

Uh next slide, please.

So with so we're looking ahead.

Next slide, please.

So with just a sum up what we've discussed, and that is again to re-emphasize the significant change that's happening to our system with the legislative um and uh mandates that's impacting our system again with the passage of MHSA to Behavioral Health Service Act.

Again, with the passage MHSA to Behavioral Health Service Act.

Now we're shifting our focus is really focusing on the severe mentally ill and also the substance use disorder needs.

However, that also encouraged us that we have potential to increase our collaboration across our partners, including schools and the states.

Again, as noted, language access and partnership and coordination really really support us to be able to hopefully sustain some of the program that's already available in the incorporate area and also what we have so far in our system.

And finally, we do encourage uh stakeholders to really explore the opportunity of integration of services or are working collaboratively with existing program, especially those programs that was previously prevention early intervention and now shifting to early intervention.

Um these are opportunities that's really to work off of how we can best support uh the communities and and the changes going forward.

Uh with that said, um, that concludes our presentation.

And I don't know, we have time to take questions.

Great, thank you.

Very thorough presentation from behavioral health.

And we're gonna have a pop quiz at the end of this.

So all of you get ready.

So yeah, they'll get a gift card, yeah.

Supervisor Dam, you have any questions or comments.

Um thank you for that presentation.

Uh obviously, because Supervisor Miley and I serve in the health committee, we've seen uh a lot of the information about Prop One.

In fact, um, this past Monday, we had a number of the community-based organizations that behavioral health and our Alameda County Health contracts with coming explaining some of the challenges they're facing with the Prop One shift in funding.

Um, and we are going to have a concerted conversation about that and look looking at ways in which we can prioritize.

But I want to zero in mainly on the My Eaten Voice Community Wellness Committee proposals and the needs of the unincorporated area, because I mean they did a community survey, and this is the feedback that uh is more uh focused on the unincorporated area.

So what what you're proposing sounds like uh because of the existing programs that we have, some of them can be aligned and help um with support.

And the one thing um that I am trying to think through is are there like physical spaces that you think uh can be involved in this alignment as well?

Because I I know we have a lot of programs where we try very hard in working with our contractors to serve different localities, like La Familia also provide support at the Wilma Chan Family Resource Center, which my office will be helping to fund and Measure W going forward will help uh fund and try to keep it sustainable.

Uh but they there they don't just serve the unincorporated, they also serve other jurisdictions.

So is there like some space that um might be useful?

One of the suggestions they even had was maybe use the library or some sort of a safe uh community space to have those kind of peer-to-peer type conversations.

Absolutely.

And I I want to reiterate um in some of the prior slides, that's why we really want to be creative.

Um, thankfully, it wasn't copyrighted, but some of these my eat and voice ideas are fantastic.

Our health equity division is looking at different locations and ways to engage even more.

And so we do have existing contractors, certainly we know we will go through some transition with Prop One, but it doesn't preclude us from our health equity divisions perspective.

That's their job to really look at where's the distribution of services, who's accessing who can't access.

So this feedback can help us co-locate potentially across the site, because again, as I mentioned, uh, you know, $540 million worth of services are huge, and there's nothing that would preclude our department from directing an organization to really pick up additional supports in the Eden, and again, using these as an example.

But I think for um the third spaces and some of the other uh lived experience and partnership voices, we really potentially do have some existing infrastructure, and again, we can look at some creative ways to see if we can sustain it as long as we are again uh attending to the new legislation.

Um so that's what we were thinking of.

Um I'll be honest, if this had come to us, it feels as a day shape, you know, me saying it, but I want to be saying on the record.

If this had come to us two years ago, fantastic.

It would have been an easy opportunity to reach more people.

Um, and it just came at us.

So we really at least wanted to honor the propos the proposal that came through in its form, it has a lot of potential, but we can also look at opioid uh opportunities and what is to prevent us from doing some of this work in that way.

So that's my short answer, but we can do some pivots with our health equity division, use some of that feedback if they're willing to continue to talk with us.

We would love that.

Appreciate that.

Um the establishment of like an Eden mental health task force.

Do you know whether or not um something like this exists either in other jurisdictions or like part of the Eden Healthcare uh center area?

Good question, and I I have to acknowledge we have uh current board members as well from our behavioral health board and and former as well.

Um so there are two parts I would answer.

Uh and on a long term, it is the responsibility of the behavioral health advisory board to s to meet and address the needs of the entire community, including the incorporated areas.

That's pursuant to the welfare decision codes, that's that.

Uh, could a task force uh exist to with a specialized focus to do some uh uh make recommendations on particular strategies that potentially could could go up to our mental health board or department, that is possible too.

Um, I would recommend enabling the work to happen both for our department as well as our behavioral board to have that responsibility to make sure it happens in perpetuity, and we certainly can uh leverage some of our leaders to help strategize with the task force to identify some recommendations.

So that is absolutely pop possible.

I think Swift Riser as well has been through lots of different iterations of different task force for different things that would, but I I think that a task force job is to really uh finalize uplift and have the opportunity.

And so my job as a department director uh for this particular uh uh area would also be to work with our behavioral health board.

Is there a need for an incorporated uh services committee?

Do we have enough voices?

I I know we have certainly here representation, so I would respectfully work with them to make some recommendations to have permanent infrastructure and engagement uh on a very formalized way.

So who's the current um representative representative of the mental health care advisory uh you go to our mental health care and you represent the unincorporated at that meeting?

Have have these issues been brought up at the mental health care advisory board?

Oh, okay.

Yes, yes, okay, thank you.

That's my so before I call the speakers.

Okay.

All right, thank you.

Okay, so what I wanted to just emphasize was was Prop one.

So as the director pointed out, the mental health uh services act was about a 206 million dollar budget.

Then it went down to 127, 128 million.

So that was a reduction with Prop One in terms of uh that one slide with systems change.

Then she mentioned how some services, full service partnership and some of the behavioral health services and supports are no longer um available or can be funded.

And that was like another uh 75 million or 75 million of that 75 million um the reduction because they were able to basically try to mitigate mitigate um 22, maybe 23 million of that.

Um so that's why when she said if if this hadn't occurred in maybe two years ago, they'd gotten the request from Eden voice.

Um it would have been a basically a no-brainer to do.

But we're under different constraints now, and I tried to point that out when this came up at a past meeting here.

The other thing to keep in mind with Prop One, I supported Prop One because putting money into housing, we needed to do, but we did not anticipate with Prop One, we'd also have an administration that would pass HR one, and that's complicated the whole um terrain in terms of the challenges we're facing because my feeling was even with Prop One, if we lost money through Prop One for prevention, we can make it up with measure W.

But once again, we didn't anticipate HR one and the complications and challenges associated with that.

So that's and that has been tremendous because for instance with Prop One, we've had providers who have talked about 15, it's about 15,000 clients, are gonna be without services, and those clients are gonna be without services.

The folks who are providing the services to them are gonna be without jobs.

So we're looking to try to see both how we're gonna deal with the services as well as how we're gonna deal with the nonprofits, the CBOs who have the staff that are providing jobs, how there we're gonna you know keep them employed.

So we're struggling with all of that through you know, Dr.

Tribble's department and through the broader agency, and then potentially outside of the agency in terms of how we can address that.

That's been some of the difficulty.

And then, furthermore, even with Prop One, it was good to do, but it was an unfunded mandate, basically.

The governor could have said, we're not gonna touch Mental Health Services Act.

You can keep all that money, you can continue to spend it.

It's been done, you've been doing it well.

The CBOs are doing a great job.

We don't have to cut that at all, but we want to put more money into housing, mental health housing, etc.

So we're gonna mandate that that be done.

We're gonna have a proposition that that be done, but not only are we gonna have a proposition that's gonna be done, we're gonna provide money for it too.

They didn't he didn't do that either.

So that's what complicates all of this when counties are looked at as you know the the um arms of the state.

Just a little bit.

I just have to vent about that a little bit.

It makes me feel better when I get to vent.

Um, because sometimes you know, Sacramento just they I don't think they get it up in Sacramento.

But anyway, let's let's have the speakers call the speakers, TISA.

It's good therapy for me.

You are in the right place.

We support you, and I have to apologize.

I did interrupt interrupt the speaker, so warren Cushman.

Yes, the mic is great.

There, thank you.

Hello, supervisors and Dr.

Tribble, Warren Cushman and from Krill.

I want to start by saying that I come at this issue from a personal place.

I have bipolar disorder.

So I come at this from our personal realm.

And I also feel like in addition to the personal space, I need to be practical as well.

Because as Supervisor Miley said, we're facing very difficult challenges, not only with behavioral health, but also with other departments and other agencies and the and throughout the county.

So we have to balance those two things.

Now, with regard to my Eden Voice and what what was been proposed, I want to work with my Eden Voice and with Dr.

Trible to try to make as much happen that can happen.

I want to work with all involved and including the community to try to uh get as much supports in for into the community to try to get as many CBOs and as many players as we can to get as many needs met as possible.

I think we should consider patients.

I think we should consider that it's not going to be easy, but uh a lot can be done.

And I think there's enough talent in this room to start the process in a strong way.

Thank you.

Juliana Thank you again.

Thank you again.

Uh Juliana from Eden Church.

And I'm grateful to serve on the behavior now behavioral health board with Dr.

Tribble and so many other community members.

Um I've it's it's been a year uh of me being on the board, and I've learned so much about the behavioral health department and really just the immensity of the work and how difficult these conversations can be for community to even understand.

I couldn't understand it, and I still don't understand it, but I you know, I have like just a little bit of more insight into everything that the department does and how difficult it is to integrate these services in the communities.

Uh one of the things that I often think about, and I talk about the unincorporated area all the time, but one of the things I think about is that our communities already suffer from a lack of infrastructure.

So I I don't church, we run a peer-to-peer program that's 100% philanthropy funded.

And we've tried to figure out how do we balance this and how do we build medical for these services that are that are telling uh and they can be billable.

And it's been so complicated.

We have to go through a third-party biller that takes 20% of the benefit.

And we've estimated that roughly if we were able to bill for all the things that we would that we do, we could make up about 50% of an FTE for a peer specialist for a promoter, a community health worker, which would help a lot.

And we still need a 50% match.

And I so I think it's like such a complicated conversation because it does require like how our CHW workers that have lived experience but don't know technology.

How can they build Medi-Cal?

You know, which is the CBO that's holding these services that are very close to the community, but are not, you know, so many of our healthcare services cannot that that's not the best revenue for them is like the peer-to-peer specialist services.

So it's important to stay in the conversation, but to see it as a strategy for the unincorporated areas that include all of these different pieces of infrastructure that are not there and that we need to build as much as we are we're expecting for behavioral health to do, and they should.

There's infrastructure that needs to be built that's not there, and it's important to build.

Raymondo, you're on the line.

We're on item two.

Uh, can you hear me?

Yes.

Um good evening.

My name is Raymundo Archeleta, and I'm a slam youth leader who lives and works in the unincorporated area uh unincorporated area.

A lot of decisions get made about youth without you know youth in the room.

And slam changes that we work on cannabis, tobacco, and alcohol prevent uh prevention from a um sort of youth perspective.

We collect data from youth and we create safe events where youth can gather without substances.

Yes, behavioral health funding is shifting.

Youth prevention still needs to be part of that plan.

Please open with slam prevention, preserve prevention efforts and ensure that funding opportunities are issued through open through open RFPs.

So youth-led and community-rooted coalitions can complete or can be fairly.

Thank you.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes.

Hi, my name's Sandra.

Um, I guess for today, and in this item, I am a prevention specialist.

I work with a lot of youth leaders.

Um you're gonna hear a lot of them around here.

Um, I have a lot of um coworkers that do prevention and mental health services, and so this hit and this cut from Prop One has hit really close to home for us.

Um, but I'm here to offer support.

Um we in SLAN, that's San Lorenzo Hayward Acres Mobilized, are a drug federally funded drug-free communities organ uh coalition.

Um, so we receive uh prevention funding from the federal government for um our work.

We also are recipients of Prop 64 cannabis uh tax prevention dollars, and um we do a lot of work in the unincorporated area around prevention.

We've closed, I want to say maybe like six tobacco retailers, we have stopped liquor stores from opening, we provide community spaces for community use in our partnership with hard.

We have created those protective factors that um we have this monthly art social that sees anywhere between 50 to 100 people per month, depending on the month.

We have created those protective factors that um we have this monthly art social that sees anywhere between 50 to 100 people per month, depending on the month, and um that is one of the great uh protective factors that we have been able to advocate and create for our youth because what we hear from our youth is that they don't have stuff to do, and so there are creative ways where we can do prevention.

Um, and like you know, you'll hear from some of our youth leaders.

We are currently doing a needs assessment in the unincorporated area around youth um use, and so I'm just opening the partnership and hope that you will consider SLAM as a partner because we do have funding to do this work, and I think right now it's about leveraging where we can.

And so I am really hoping that we can work together and really push through this rough patch.

Thank you.

Maria Hello, can you hear me?

Yes.

Good afternoon.

Well, good evening.

Um, my name is Maria Miranda.

I am with my Eden Voice, and I'm here representing uh unincorporated residents that have been working the last two years to do yearly surveys and bring these issues forth, uh, people all of these issues around mental health gaps in services um to supervisors as well as uh behavioral health department.

And I think we've been very grateful to have had uh really great reception and collaboration so far with uh behavioral health department and trying to find ways to see how to fill in these gaps.

Uh, I do want to just highlight that uh this month of February we were doing a family cafe, one of the first for the unincorporated area with behavioral health and trying to uh see really like engage the interest of these third spaces um that would be closer to you know residents within their neighborhoods uh to support their mental health needs, and um it was very successful.

We had more people come in every week.

Uh it was a three-week session.

I think we ended up going almost to 30 participants, perhaps.

Um, and it was predominantly Spanish speaking, but it was a uh English and Spanish predominantly speaking community and very directly impacted.

Some of these residents have experienced uh housing instability, uh, have had, you know, their children, you know, have had uh severe mental health issues or uh you know needs for their children who have disability needs.

So this has been a really great way to meet people where they are and creating safety and security in places that they don't necessarily see every day.

I think we are looking forward to continue to work with partners like Eden Church and La Familia and Krill to make this happen as well as with the advisory board.

And um, yeah, thank you for your time.

Oscar.

Hello, my name is Oscar.

I'm a slam youth leader, I live in the unincorporated area.

I just want to say thank you for the presentation, really appreciate everything that was covered.

And I just want to say that prevention is cheaper than crisis.

Um struggling youth are at a breaking point, you know.

Many uh fall into addiction and severe mental health challenges at that breaking point.

So letting our youth stop like this is expensive, it's emotionally devastating, it's just negative all around.

And you know, I know SLAM and you know, SLAM builds protective factors through policy work, youth leadership, and just positive community programming.

And I just want to say that I acknowledge that this presentation has recognized how important prevention is and how the budget cuts have affected it.

But because of that, I ask that you partner with SLAM.

You know, if there are any behavioral health funds available, I ask that you please release them through open RFPs so that the organizations putting in the work can have a fair chance to continue vital work, which is facing um jeopardy in this budget cut.

Thank you.

Hey, Seuss.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes.

Good evening.

My name is Sisters Romero, and I'm a slam youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area.

Prevention isn't just education, it's policy through proposition 64 funding.

SLAM works on systems and policy changes that reduce youth access to substances.

That means looking at local conditions and improving them.

We're federally funded through drug-free communities and the stop act.

We address cannabis tobacco and alcohol misuse through environmental strategies, not just awareness campaigns.

Please make sure prevention stays funded, partner with SLAM and release any behavioral health funding through open RFPs so experienced organizations can apply.

Thank you.

Delilah.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yes.

Yeah, so good evening, supervisors.

My name is Delilah, and I work in the unincorporated area.

Uh recently, some of us attended the California State Budget Conference, and one message that stood out to us is that if you care about your community, speak up and ask leaders to protect what matters.

That is why I'm here today.

So SLAM works to prevent cannabis, tobacco, and alcohol misuse.

We also promote suicide prevention, collect youth data, and help create safe spaces for young people in our community.

This work makes um a real difference.

I respectfully ask that you preserve funding for prevention efforts, work with directly with um SLAM and ensure that funding is distributed through open and competitive RFP processes.

So thank you for your time and consideration.

Have a good night.

Matias Matias.

Hello, do you hear me?

Yes.

Um, my name is Matias.

I mean, good evening, supervisors.

My name is Matthias, and I'm a slam youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area.

Sometimes unincorporated communities feel invisible.

We don't always get the same investment as incorporated cities.

Slam makes sure youths here are seen and heard.

We focus on preventing cannabis, tobacco, and alcohol use and strengthening mental health supports.

If funding is limited, we cut, we understand tough decisions have to be made, but prevention in unincorporated areas should not be cut.

Please consider with SLAM and ensure funding opportunities are open.

RPF, so our community has a fair chance.

Thank you.

And I'm a SLAM youth leader who lives and works in the unincorporated area.

Right now, SLAM is conducting a youth substance use needs assessment within the middle school to high school demographic or age demographic.

We're not guessing what the problem is because we already know what the problem is.

We're collecting actual data from the youth, the future of our community.

We address cannabis, tobacco, and alcohol prevention based on evidence and youth voice.

Substance use is seen almost everywhere if you think about it, even in schools, a safe environment where you learn and be sociable.

If the county is thinking about how to align behavioral health efforts, the San Leandro Hayward Anchor's members, aka SLAM, should be part of that conversation.

Please preserve prevention fundings.

Formally connect with SLAM and ensure all grant opportunities are open RFP.

Thank you.

Hello.

Yes.

Good evening, supervisors.

My name is Santos, and I am a SLAM youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area.

Sometimes prevention isn't complicated.

Sometimes it's as simple as giving youth a safe place to go.

Our monthly art social at the Cherry Land Community Center is free.

Substance-free and open to everyone.

It promotes connection, creativity, and belonging, which are protective factors against substance use.

Prevention funding.

Work with SLAM as a partner and make sure all available grants are released as open RFPs.

Thank you.

Ashley.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yes.

Good evening, supervisors.

My name is Ashley Akasna, and I am a SLAM youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area.

Young people are not just the statistics in a report.

We are leaders, organizers, and active partners in creating solutions.

We see the challenges in our schools and neighborhoods every day, and we are committed to being part of a meaningful lasting change.

SLAM is a federally funded drug-free community coalition.

A stop at calling focus on substance use and suicide prevention, a recipient, uh recipient of propos proposition 64 funding dedicated to policy change, currently conducting our youth substance use need assessment, hosting monthly substance-free art social events to create safe healthy spaces for youth.

Our work is grounded in prevention collaboration and young leadership.

We are already doing the work and we want to do it with the county, not around it.

We respectfully ask that you prefer preserve prevention funding, formally collaborate with SLAM as partners, ensure all behavioral health funding opportunities are open and transparent through RFP.

When youth are included at the table, policies are stronger, solutions are more effective, and communities are healthier.

Work with us, invest invest in prevention, trust youth leadership.

Thank you.

Carlos.

Yes.

Good evening, supervisors.

My name is Carlos Sandova, and I am a slam youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area.

Substance uses prevention and mental health go together.

When you feel isolated, stressed, or disconnected, substance use increases.

SLAM addresses cannabis, tobacco, and alcohol prevention while also promoting suicide prevention and positive mental health.

Our program builds protective factors, connection, leadership, and belonging.

Please don't separate prevention from behavior health planning.

Partner with SLAM and make sure funding opportunities are transparent and open RFPs.

Thank you.

Aidan.

Sorry.

Good afternoon.

My name is Aiden Nesqua, and I am a SLAM youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area.

Sometimes new initiatives are announced, but community coalitions have already been doing this work for years.

We build youth leadership.

We host substance free events and we work on system change.

We're not asking to start something new.

We're asking you to support what's already happening.

Please preserve prevention efforts, partner with SLAM and ensure open RFP processes for any available funding.

Thank you.

Caller, you're on the line.

We're on item two.

Madam Clerk, can you hear me?

Yes.

Thank you.

Good evening, Supervisor.

It's Derek Barnes with uh East Bay Rental Housing Association.

Sorry I couldn't be with you tonight.

I'm traveling and we're getting to the witching hour.

Um Dr.

Trouble, I want to thank you for the comprehensive report.

Really appreciate that.

Uh lots of things in there to consider.

And um, Supervisor Miley, uh, sorry I couldn't be there for your therapy session.

Um, but we are really gonna miss you with the institutional institutional knowledge.

Um, some of the stuff that you uh talk about and bring us back to is uh super critical in terms of you know how we find ourselves um where we are today.

Uh I want to bring up a few things as I also serve on the board of or serve the boards of Home Rise and Home Bridge, um providing wraparound supportive um housing uh to a big huge uh community.

And recently we put together um an annual housing collaborative.

Um and thank you, Supervisor Cham for stopping by and some of our other legislators for popping in.

The point and the reason why we we did that, bringing 30 organizations together under one roof because um we know that um parts of our community are disconnected, and we need to find ways to bring the community and the CBOs and the organizations that provide services uh together so that they know of each other and that they can begin the conversations to help to collaborate.

I don't know a lot of things, but what I do know for sure from my you know uh merger acquisition experiences is that in order to provide an elastic ecosystem, which is kind of what we're talking about.

Um, we're gonna need to find ways to help these organizations collaborate and build partnerships and even mergers, and in some cases, even winding down.

And there's got to be an education part um to all of this that effectively does that.

And then also, too.

And then also, too, I like what the uh uh speaker said before concentrating on the infrastructure is super super important, data sharing systems, all that stuff, so that we can bring together a fractured uh array of tapestry of organizations so that we can uh find what works and uh amplify what works and kind of discontinue the exact.

Thank you.

Ashley, Ashley G.

Hello.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Good evening, supervisors.

My name is Ashley, and I'm a slam youth leader who lives in the unincorporated area recently.

Some of us attended the California State Budget Conference, and we are and we were told something very clear protect the programs that are already working.

SLAM is working.

We prevent cannabis, tobacco, and alcohol use.

We reduce suicide risk, we conduct community assessments, we activate safe spaces, we are federally funded and accountable.

We're asking you to preserve prevention investments for collaborate with LAM and ensure that any funding opportunities are open and transparent RFPs.

Please protect that.

Please protect what's already helping youth in our community.

Thank you.

Caller, you're on the line.

We're on item two.

Hello.

Um, my name, good evening.

My name is Isabel.

Uh I am a SLAM youth leader.

I live and will work in the uh corporated slam works per sense.

Yeah.

Substances use the that's and claims like that's and claims to BACA and alcohol.

We also worked on subjects at presence.

Right now we are doing a youth survey.

We are just we are asking youth people what they need.

We also host a free art such as city every month.

As it's it's a it's separates free.

It gives it gives youth a safer place to connect.

Matters, it keeps youth healthy.

Please protect the presence of funding, please work with Slim, and please make sure funding options are open to the community groups like ours.

Thank you.

I have no more speakers for item two.

Okay, thank the speakers.

I don't know if Dr.

Travell or Supervisor Tam have any other responses or comments.

No, again, I just on behalf of the department, we just thank you for the opportunity.

And you you heard obviously passion and uh real uh um compelling need from the community.

So our charge is to look at that and continue to work at a department of leaders to see how we can weather this lack of funding storm and the changing landscape.

So we're still committed in our our teams are so if people want to um who should they contact to wonderful question.

So um they absolutely can contact uh the office of the director because we have team members that can triage and um a lot of these voices are obviously geared toward our youth, so we already we know uh Miss Kathy will be outreaching, so I can provide that um BHCS BHCS uh director at ACGov.org.

And that is a way to reach us.

Okay, all right.

Thank you.

All righty, thank you.

So let's go to item three update on tenant protection and programs in the unincorporated county.

Good evening, supervisors.

Thank you so much for taking our item.

Um, I'm gonna bring Jennifer up and she's gonna do the majority of the presentation tonight, but I just wanted to give you uh sort of a brief lay of the land uh regarding the programs that we've been working on.

As you know, we started working on these programs back in 2018, and we were able to get a grant that helped to fund a lot of research, and then during the COVID pandemic, you know, a lot of the stuff that we were working on really got sort of stalled.

So at this point, we're bringing back a um an update on just cause, an update on mediation, and um, you know, what our process is going to be for the other ordinances that we're still considering.

Thank you very much, Supervisor Miley.

We did talk to public protections this morning about fair chance, and I think that that ordinance is further pretty far along, and we're hoping to bring that sooner rather than later.

Jennifer.

Thanks, Michelle.

I'm going to be providing a brief tenant protection update.

I have nine slides, so we will not be here that long.

The purpose of the update, as you might recall, is that an update for just cause was codified in last year's Just Cause ordinance to bring it back to the Board of Supervisors within 12 months of passage.

In addition, the board requested an update, excuse me, overall with regard to tenant protections on September 30th, an overview of adopted tenant protection ordinances, status of pending ordinances, as well as program implementation updates.

So just as a refresher, the just cause ordinance that we have was adopted February 4th that pretty closely follows state law, requires a just cause for eviction.

There's enumerated at fault and no fault evictions.

It requires relocation payments for no fault evictions, and critically, for purposes of this presentation, it requires eviction notices be filed with CDA.

Just cause excludes most single family homes, as you might recall.

Corporate owned single family homes are covered, but there's no required ownership disclosure.

Tenants might not know if protections apply.

It's really complex to figure out if your home is corporate owned.

And there's limited enforcement on informal evictions.

Through the last year with just cause, we've identified a need for maybe some broader coverage as well as a rental registry infrastructure.

So here are some data.

We received 153 eviction notices.

Most of them are for non-payment of rent.

I will note that more than 60 of them were from two multifamily properties.

It turns out that when they serve an eviction notice and somebody pays a little bit of rent, they need to then send out another eviction notice.

So this is skewing the numbers a little bit.

But this is from March to November of 2025.

Next slide.

So we also get data from the court quarterly with regard to eviction notices countywide.

And so between the date, the dates of March and November 2025, we received 62 unlawful detainer actions that were filed with the court.

Between those dates, we also received 108 unlawful detainer notices received by the county.

So this is sort of good news, bad news.

The good news is that the word is getting out there, and we're not only receiving eviction notices that were filed with the court, we're also receiving eviction notices that were sent to the tenant, but not filed with the court.

It didn't get that far.

Someone paid a little bit of rent, something like that.

So that's the good news.

The bad news is that according to the American Community Survey, informal evictions occur five and a half times more than court evictions.

So we would have expected, based on this statistic, to see closer to 300 notices.

Although I will say that we've been working closely with my invoice and Ebra, and they've been doing a great job notifying their constituencies with regard to this just cause requirement.

It could be units not subject to the ordinance.

You know, it could be single family homes that are making up some of that delta.

You know, either way, I think this demonstrates a need for a rental registry in the future.

I'm going to move over to the mediation ordinance briefly.

You will recall that we adopted a mediation ordinance in November of 2024.

It requires a good faith mediation upon request, and the county covers the costs.

We have a contract with the Center for Community Dispute Settlement.

Since November of 2024, well, early 2025, by the time we got up and running, there have been 21 cases initiated for mediation.

Eight of those are resolved, two were partially resolved, and the rest are either ongoing or resolved in other ways or not resolved.

The most common issues were habitability and non-payment of rent.

So I'm going to move over to a brief overview of upcoming ordinances.

As we talked about this morning at the public protection committee, fair chance housing ordinance is on deck.

The first reading was December of 2022 as a reminder, fair chance reduces housing discrimination against individuals with criminal records.

There was a pause in the process after the first reading due to YEM v City of Seattle, which was a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which had its final ruling in August of 2025.

So we're currently working with county council to revise our ordinance in order to be compliant with YEM.

Then we'll have some stakeholder meetings.

We're hoping to get back to this committee in the summer of 2026.

And as the slide knows notices, earlier today we presented to the public protection committee on Fair Chance as well.

The rental registry is also something that we're working on.

The purpose is to track ownership and contact information, support code enforcement, and enable the AB 1482 rent monitoring and improve the data we have on rental markets.

In September 30th, we received uh board direction to move forward with a standalone registry ordinance.

So we're working on that as well with county council, and we anticipate next to have some stakeholder engagement, and we're hoping to get that back to this committee in the spring.

Proactive rental inspection pilot is also on deck.

This is going to be a three and a half year pilot program for Ashland Cheryland and Hayward Acres.

The purpose is to support code enforcement and better the living conditions in those areas.

We're currently drafting this pilot and anticipate coming back to this committee in the spring or possibly the summer.

And then finally, what we're calling a landlord tenant relations ordinance.

We've received a 400,000 MTC grant for staff time for this work as well as assistance with facilitation of stakeholder meetings.

This ordinance is anticipated to include anti-harassment and anti-retaliation provisions.

It's going to be clarifying the rights and responsibilities of both tenants and landlords.

And in general, it'll be a forum for landlord and tenant concerns.

This is a little for less far along.

So we're anticipating stakeholder engagement to begin in the summer and possibly come back to this committee in the fall.

As you know, Echo Housing does our fair housing work between October and December 2025.

They served almost 200 onduplicated clients, 58 for fair housing, 140 for landlord, tenant landlord counseling, and they conducted 20 fair housing investigations.

AC Housing Secure, I know you're familiar with.

Since 2018, they served almost 5200 tenants.

And in addition, they piloted a mediation program for a year in the courthouse, which differed from our mediation program.

So it was somewhat an independent mediator that was in the courthouse, and the judge would say, hey, there's a mediator here if anyone is interested in engaging in mediation when they're there for their unlawful detainer action.

And that mediation program actually is recording a 99% success rate.

So we're looking into that mediation program and continuing to fund that because currently it's unfunded.

One of the reasons that might be more successful is sort of the pressure of time because you're already at the courthouse.

And so you're incentivized at that point to really engage in mediation where the other mediation program, because there's not that kind of pressure, there's less incentive.

You know, just like anything else that has publicly funded attorneys, you know, there is still a gap for the number of attorneys that we can fund with AC Housing Secure and the number of attorneys needed.

We've had great success with the EBRA program.

I know Derek is online.

Hopefully, he will say the same.

We have been funding them for about a year.

They have fielded about 300 inquiries.

They've held over 70 events.

We are currently working on another contract with them with 150,000 of unincorporated measure W.

And in addition, we're going to have them do a minor home repair program for the unincorporated county, funded by 200,000 of Measure W.

And then finally, my Eden Voice.

We funded them in the past.

We're anticipating funding them with another 150,000 dollars in the Measure W unincorporated.

They've had a leadership academy, which has graduated 54 participants, and they've had ongoing outreach and education as well.

That is the end of my presentation.

I'm happy to take any questions.

Whoops.

Thank you.

Supervisor Cham, one of the questions that you had was whether or not we could get data from the assessor.

I have had that conversation.

There is some updates going on to their database and their system.

He anticipates being able to add a checkbox to that form.

We voluntarily disclose this information to other county departments in next year's assessments.

And if that happens, we can then collect landlord tenant data and use the information and pull it into a database that we then are able to manage at the same time as trying to update a rental registry.

So the two things would work hand in hand.

That would actually be countywide data.

And right now we're really focused on just unincorporated county data.

It would be data that was available to us to understand the market, understand valuation and operating costs because they provide that information to the assessor.

So I just wanted you to know I'd followed up on that.

Thank you.

So Supervisor Dam, questions, comments.

Thank you for that update.

I'm just trying to figure out if in terms of melding the two database information.

Is that part of the standalone rent registry ordinance that we talked about in September?

Yeah, so a rental registration system is an online system in which landlords come in, look at their record, confirm that the information is correct, and that the code enforcement department can access and utilize that data.

We as HCD can access and utilize that data.

Tenants can then look up their landlords and figure out who owns their property.

Oftentimes all they know is the property manager.

They have no idea who the actual landlord is because the lease is in the property management company's name.

So a rental registration system is one thing.

It is a database.

Information that goes into the database is something else.

So what the assessor phone law can give us is information, data that could go into the system.

And so we would design our system to capture that should we be able to start getting it.

It is voluntary, and I'm no idea how many landlords would voluntarily agree to share that information, but I think it would be a good step in the right direction.

Okay, thank you.

Just refresh my memory on the measured W funding.

I know that when we looked at the essential services fund, we had allocated some measure W funds for the unincorporated area.

But the home together plan also has a number of prevention production and funding that uh is part of that program.

So the measure W that we're talking about for continuation of the housing provider resource center and also to help support my invoice outreach effort.

Which bucket of measure W funding is that coming from?

So in September, your board made um some allocation from the Essential County Services Funds.

And within that was 1.2 million dollars for unincorporated county tenant landlord programs and specifically to help meet some of the TOC requirements that MTC had, as well as some capital affordable housing projects.

So 1.2 million.

Um, what we're planning to spend it on, some of that is right there.

There are other things that we're looking at supporting as well.

Um, and each of those contracts will be coming to your board for authorization this spring.

Okay.

Uh my concern is the duration of these funds, as you know, um, Measure W will be sunsetting in five years, and we need to show the community the results uh from the taxpayers' funds.

And um is this program going to continue in perpetuity?

So each of these programs, you know, our proposal would be that they run for the five years, and the things that we're proposing will be part of the request from CDA for unincorporated county measure W funding.

Um, but there are things beyond just that that those small programs that we were funded to do this year that we'll be requesting as part of that budget ask it separate.

The home together fund does not have a set aside for the unincorporated county.

It does have prevention housing, which is really tenant-based or um it's it's really the operating funding to help support people in housing.

So that housing category.

There's also a shelter category.

Um, an RFP has already been done to select three shelter sites throughout the county in a leasing model.

Uh, and I believe that those have either come very recently to your board or about to come.

And then this summer, they're going to be doing an RFP to look at uh bednight rates under the shelter program.

Uh there's also access and coordination, which is really about not just infrastructure within H, like HMIS staff, um coordinated entry staff, like those, even when those things were in our department, they were woefully undefend underfunded and really desperately needed support.

So now is the moment to beef that up and actually staff it the way it should be.

We actually had an outside consultant come in and evaluate HCD's HMIS program.

And for an HMI HMIS system of our size, we should have had 12 to 15 staff, and we only had four.

So Jonathan's doing his best to try and bring on the staff to support systems so that we can actually do the homeless work.

He can he can actually do the homeless work.

That stuff's not in our office anymore, but um it's important to support the effort.

Um, and then the final uh pot was capital.

And within the capital funding, there's about 150 million, 30 of that's gonna go towards health uh clinics.

Um there's one plan for mid-county, there's one plan for South County.

It will be like the trust clinic in downtown Oakland with the goal of of really serving homeless individuals for their health care needs.

And then there's 120 million that will go for affordable homeless housing.

And we've uh will be coming to your board on Tuesday with a request to authorize the resolutions for the first 11 uh 10 projects.

So the 150 million we had authorized in contracts with a flexible with abode, was that also to help with um that's the those are the housing operating dollars.

Yeah.

But I thought that included uh rental assistance as well.

Um it would probably help with rental flexible rental assistance for people who are homeless.

Okay.

Yeah, like first and last month's rent.

Um, but it's really focused really on the cost of putting people in housing and covering their rent.

Right.

Okay, thank you.

Okay.

A few questions.

So with the um what's what's an informal eviction?

An informal eviction is when a landlord goes to a tenant, threatens to evict them, says, You're not abiding by the way I want.

If you don't move out, I'm going to give you an eviction notice.

I'm gonna call ICE, I'm gonna call the sheriff.

And the tenant who is afraid and doesn't understand their rights, leaves without going through a formal process because they really don't understand the process or what rights they have under the laws, the state law as well as our local laws.

Okay, and then also it says uh lower notice volume suggest possible noncompliance.

Uh so what do you mean by possible non-compliance?

Well, if we use the American community survey data to extrapolate how many evictions actually occurred, it would be around 300, and we certainly didn't receive 300 notices.

And as Jennifer mentioned, you know, that difference could be a bunch of things.

One, not enough outreach and engagement.

Okay.

So we got to double our efforts and really continue to do outreach and engagement.

Uh a rental registry would give us the name of the landlord so we can start mailing them materials and reminding them what the rules are, um, which is a best practice.

Um, but the other opportunity, the other option or problem is that um just cause does not apply to single-family homes.

And as you know, we have over 6,000 single-family homes in the unincorporated county that are rental properties.

So 6,000 tenants don't have just cause protection, and therefore those landlords are not required to submit.

So it could be that the difference, the delta, the 200 notices we did not receive, or approximately 200, um, were single family homes.

Um it's meant by possible non-compliance.

That's what we mean by possible non-compliance.

They wouldn't have to comply, it doesn't apply to them.

Yeah, it could be that they it could be that they're that they don't need to, or it could be that they are multifamily property owners that should have complied and didn't.

We don't know because yeah.

Okay.

And let's see here.

Then with the rental um the um resolution.

Uh Natalie was telling me just the other day, and I think um I've heard from others too, that we need to include a housing counselor.

So are are we gonna get that funded?

A housing counselor under the mediation program.

Yes, yeah.

Yeah, my invoice has been indicating that they really want to see more assistance, that the mediation program is a high barrier and that it's requiring a lot of staff time for their staff to support residents.

Which wasn't the shouldn't have been the case.

Right.

So we're trying to figure out the budget.

We're offering them 150,000.

How they spend those dollars is, you know, uh up to them.

If they want to fund a counseling unit, they can.

If they want more money than that, we'd have to go back to our budget and look.

I will say that, you know, we were originally intending to use those funds for capital in the unincorporated county, but that is probably not gonna work out.

And so I'm looking at food security programs.

Um, we could look at increasing my eat invoices allocation.

Those are things that we can look at.

I have about 300,000 to spend that is a little bit different.

So we're going to give additional monies to my eaten voice so they could potentially provide the counseling counseling services.

Correct.

But we but we're looking, we're working with them on their budget to identify how they're spending the 150 we are giving them before we offer any more.

Okay.

Okay.

And this is a continuation of an ARPA program.

It's not a new program.

It's it's a program, both the landlord resource center and the My Eden Voice, those are both ARPA funded programs that ended um in December.

And so we are picking up and continuing those exact same programs.

Because with my invoice, would they be because I didn't uh speak with them uh nor drilled down on this?

With are they qualified to provide the level of housing counseling that they've been?

Yeah, and they've been growing their capacity over the last several years.

And so working with um uh the uh AC housing secure coalition, the legal uh the legal attorneys, they've they've been a subcontractor to them and they've been providing services through AC Housing Secure for the unincorporated county for a while.

Because that's my concern.

I want to make sure that's funded because that was always um my intention to see that funded.

And I just want to make sure we have um qualified folks who can offer that counseling.

Okay, let's see here, rural registry.

They'll be happy when we get that underway.

And then proactive rental inspection.

Um there's gonna be um a we'll get a draft this spring.

We have a draft that's with county council now, and we're expecting edits very shortly.

It's based on the version that the uh transportation and planning commission heard in May of 2022.

Um, and uh we are you know, the direction from that committee at that point in time was to separate out rental registration from the proactive rental inspection program.

And so that's why we have two standalone ordinance.

You know, we're moving ahead with two standalone ordinances based on um that direction, but but the version is based on that version, which the TNP has already heard, and which the unincorporated services committee has already heard.

Um, but the updated version will be available shortly for review.

Okay.

And then yeah, it and then the summer we'll get all of these other landlord tenant um relations, as you call them, ordinances, anti-harassment, clear clarify clarity on rights and responsibilities, and a forum for landlord and tenant concerns.

We've actually published um the no it's sort of rights and responsibilities document.

And um we we took information that we found from several other cities that had published that information and we consolidated it into one page and we we added it to an earlier version of the proactive rental inspection ordinance because we wanted to make sure landlords and tenants knew what their responsibilities were with regards to property maintenance and um and and management of the properties.

So that has been added to that ordinance, but we also think it should be added to the landlord tenant relations ordinance.

Okay, but we have it as a one-pager flyer that it can also be downloaded from the website.

Okay, and then with all of the tenant protection efforts that are underway and that will be underway.

Do we have any way of determining uh progress if things are getting better, getting worse, if they're staying the same, uh, because I think that's gonna be important for us to know just what's happening, and then if it's if it's staying the same, that's one thing.

But if it's getting worse, then what corrective action additional action we need to take.

Um the proposal that I will be putting forth in the landlord tenant relations uh ordinance is that our fair housing provider, Echo Housing, um, actually act as the intake for all complaints in the unincorporated county tenant landlord complaints, and um be the referral agency to um mediation and then help us make reports to the HCDAC on a bi-monthly basis.

So they would then be the staffing entity to the landlord tenant relations um ordinance and um manage the mediation program, and they wouldn't act as the mediator, but they would be the active intake um and track what's going on with each case.

And they wouldn't act as the mediator, but they would be the active intake and track what's going on with each case.

We feel like that is a lot of synergy.

It will streamline the process.

It will also reduce workload for our own staff, which you know we're not looking to hire new staff.

So it's, you know, it we're trying to figure out how to staff these things, and we feel like outside contracting with the fair housing provider who who is already doing a lot of that work is the best course of action.

And then they would report to the HCDAC, which both of you have appointees too.

And as do the other board members, it's a board-appointed committee, and they are the housing committee, and they hear all of our housing items other than the Measure A1 Oversight Committee.

Yeah.

Because my interest, um I don't want to necessarily speak for supervisor TM, but I think our interest would probably over the course of time want to know what kind of progress we're making.

Uh and if we can either because we're getting that um anecdotally, or we have actual metrics that are helping us know we're getting progress.

Yeah, and then we would want them to make actual reports and retract the data and make reports to us as well as to you.

Okay.

Yeah, well, I want to thank you, Michelle and Jennifer and your department for all the work you're doing on this.

Okay.

So let's see if we have speakers.

Warren Cushman.

All right.

Good evening, Board of Supervisors.

Warren Cushman again on a corporate services committee.

I want to start out with a proposal.

I do not want another five years of back and forth, back and forth the way we had for the past five years when we tried to when we tried to draft the finally the just cause and the mediation ordinance.

We need to make sure that we have Ebra and Mind Boyce and Krill and whoever else is deemed necessary in the room to work out the details.

Because I'm, you know, when we've got four or five ordinances that are out there, um, sooner or later something's gonna get snagged.

So I really want to make sure that the stakeholders are talking and working things out and exchanging information.

It's vital.

And I think we absolutely need to do that because I I want to get these ordinances through, and I and you know, there's a deliberative process.

I respect that, uh, and the supervisors are very good at that.

But if the stakeholders are involved and engaging and you know, exchanging information and essentially trying to work things out with each other, uh, we're gonna go a long way to solving problems.

And I do want to see these ordinances pass.

Thank you.

Jennifer Rizo.

Hi, good evening, supervisors.

I'm Jennifer Rizzo, and I'm with the California Apartment Association.

I want to thank the staff for their update on the just cause and the mediation ordinances.

And the data shows several important and interesting trends.

Um, according to the data, the no fault terminations are rare in unincorporated Alameda County.

And rather than evictions, rather, evictions have been used narrowly and primarily in response to non-payment of rent.

Of the 153 notices that received, 143, which is 93%, were for non-payment, and only four were for material lease breaches, and and just four total were for no fault reasons, such as withdrawal, demolition, or substance to uh substantial remodel.

Um, second, most issues are being resolved before reaching litigation.

In fact, over 60 notices were repeated updates reflecting partial payments being made, ongoing ongoing engagement rather than immediate eviction.

Uh the just cause for eviction ordinance is about a year old, and participation appears to be off to a strong start, and continue continued education and outreach will be essential to ensure both housing providers and tenants are aware of their rights and responsibilities.

The data also shows positive trends in mediation and in response to the rental housing dispute resolution ordinance.

Alameda County provided mediation services to residents and housing providers.

And over the year, there were only 21 cases, and that's fewer than two a month, primarily related to non-payment and habitability.

So nearly all were resolved, partially resolved, or addressed through intake and education.

As staff noted, many of the mediation seekers ultimately needed education rather than formal dispute resolution and reinforcing the value of the know your rights training.

So overall, the data suggests that many disputes stem from confusion rather than conflict.

And that underscores the importance of continued education and outreach for both tenants and housing providers.

Thanks.

David, you're on the line.

We're on item three.

Good evening.

I'm David Stark, representing the Bay East Association Realtors.

And my comments about the tenant protection ordinance actually going to start with some observations about the budget overview from earlier this evening.

First, I want to thank your staff for acknowledging that both home sales and prices are trending down.

And perhaps a future presentation could include information about the resulting impact on county revenue of those real estate trends.

Next, there were three of the pending economic factors from that presentation that are relevant to the tenant protection ordinances that you're talking about tonight.

First, litigation and settlements.

It's unfortunate that the county has to budget for anticipated litigation.

That said, given that fair chance ordinances have been the subject of litigation, and I understand some of the outcomes have been positive for the supporters.

Regardless, why pursue a policy that may be the subject of litigation here in Alameda County?

Next, employee cost.

Why adopt ordinances that will require adding staff who won't actually increase the supply of rental housing?

And third, economic downturn.

Rather than add staff to implement redundant rental housing policies, if we really want to hire more workers, they should be in the economic development department, helping to attract and retain revenue generators.

Now shifting very quickly to the staff proposals.

Going forward, please assess each of these proposals with two questions.

How many existing rental housing units will be preserved?

And how many new rental housing units will be created?

Appreciate the opportunity to share our perspective, and we look forward to working with you and your staff.

Have a good night.

Kristen Uh Hi, good evening.

My name is Kristen Hackett.

I'm a community organizer with My Eden Voice and Eden Renters United.

First, it's great to be talking about policies that are on the books tonight.

That's a big shift from the this time last year.

So thank you for your part in making that happen.

And I hope you will continue to expand and strengthen tenant protections to create more fair and equitable playing field where tenants feel safe and secure in their homes.

So first, we haven't been having too much success in using the mediation program.

We sent an advocacy letter last fall detailing our concerns, mostly under the heading of the inaccessibility of the program and requesting that a housing counselor be hired.

Not sure that that would be under the umbrella of Might Invoice.

It might be better to attach that to the program.

But I think maybe the program needs to be reconsidered more broadly.

From what I've seen in supporting two tenants or trying to the peel, uh the playing field in mediation continues to be uneven.

Tenants are negotiating with management, who is consulting with lawyers with the blessing but not the attention of the landlord.

And landlord is the only person that really should be at the table.

And in the space, tenants are often being asked to compromise on things that are legally and morally owed owed to them.

And tenants are not uh and tenants' rights are not being upheld uh without real advocacy.

So we think there are some better solutions, maybe for that money if it's movable.

Some of the policies that staff mentioned this evening, especially the rental registry, which would plug that big hole in just cause.

Um, but my invoice has also been thinking about other shorter and longer term programs such as deep rental subsidies as well as a fund for community-owned land, which would help address um some of the immediate needs of people, like uh we're seeing a lot of evictions for non-payment.

So uh yeah, we'd like to see those uh alternative options considered alongside the policies we're talking about now.

Thanks.

Caller, you're on the line.

We're on item three.

Thanks, Madam Clerk, it's uh Dirk Barnes with East State Rental Housing Association.

Um thanks uh uh Jennifer and Michelle for the report.

Um, and thank you for pushing um the alternative to establish a rent database using these other uh alternative paths to build that.

Uh so really appreciate that.

So we're trying to uh do more with less.

Um the blinding flash of the obvious, I think in some of the reports is that we still have an issue with the majority of filings being for non-payment of rent is Jennifer earlier stated.

So um I think you know we've been clear about what we see as a remedy for that, which are tapping into measure W dollars to effectively come up with emergency rental assistance um to address that problem.

And um through the housing provider resource center, we are actually at the courts almost every Wednesday, um, fielding questions from owners and renters who come to our table.

And what is what we are aware of is that many of these cases um don't and should not be uh in the court.

In other words, they're being pursued because I think um individuals don't really know their rights or or even before that, they're just very confused about the process.

And so having a presence down there to really kind of help with questions, I think really, really helps divert um some of these cases from uh going further, but mostly to resolve them before they um get in front of a judge.

And brings me to my final point, just our presence down there, open up an opportunity to work with judges recently to start looking at an eviction diversion program because they are just inundated and slammed with backlog, and we have to figure out a way to get some of those cases out, get them resolved with alternative dispute resolution tactics.

Thank you.

Rove, Lynn Antonio.

Good evening, Supervisor Miley and TM.

Rove Antonio with the CAA.

Quick reminder: under AB 1482 in your local just cause ordinance, terminations are required to have a legal reason.

Arbitrary reasons are no longer allowed.

Examples of informal evictions that were given to you, Supervisor Miley, are already illegal.

With that, we caution the county against using theoretical modeling to characterize eviction trends.

Any estimates suggesting a higher number should be clearly identified as an assumption-based projection, not an absurd fact.

Additionally, even when using hypothetical estimates of non-court evictions, which staff say is 300.

That does not change the underlying reality reflected in the staff report that 93% of tenancy terminations are due to non-payment of rent.

Omitting this context presents an incomplete picture.

A public discussion should be grounded in transparent, verified information rather than extrapolated figures.

We want to congratulate the county on the results of the mediation program.

Thank you to Supervisor Miley for your leadership in developing this and including CAA and the stakeholder workshops.

It is demonstrating what you had hoped it would do.

Identify the causes of rental disputes in the county, which the top reasons are again, non-payment of rent and habitability concerns.

The county should celebrate the program's effectiveness because disputes are getting resolved.

Without counting the ongoing cases, the program is at an impressive 94% full or partial resolution rate.

Both mediation and in-court programs have proven that disputes are resolved when parties are talking, learning, and working with each other.

To continue this progress, CAA is re-emplo-emphasizing our commitment to continue promoting the mediation program and investing in the education of housing providers on state and local laws.

We welcome your partnership at no cost to the county or to taxpayers because CAA values our partnership with you, one that is grounded on collaboration.

Thank you.

Lindsay.

Thank you.

Um today I am asking that the just cause protections be strengthened and expanded to cover more rental families.

All renters deserve protection regardless of what type of housing they live in or what type of landlord they have.

Rental assistance is good, but a rental registry of landlords is a good step towards creating a safer environment for for rental families.

It would inform them on the environment they would be moving into.

All renters deserve the opportunity to return to the homes they were renting and pay the same amount of rent they were if they are evicted through no fault of their own.

This is important.

So communities aren't being displaced and shifted away from their jobs, schools, and medical needs.

It is good that households with children, seniors, and the disabled are given a 90-day notice to pay or quit, that those protections should be afforded to all renters, and those protected classes should have an additional month on top of the 90 days.

Relocation assistance could be strengthened.

A three-month course of relocation assistance with an additional month for protected classes could provide families with a better chance to thrive after being relocated.

Furthermore, all of these should apply to all renters from day one rather than a confusing 12 to 24 month process.

Providing additional support to renters helps communities stay in place and prevents them from being uprooted.

These communities are essential for supporting the places they live.

Without people, there's no opportunity for a place to thrive.

Thank you for your time, and I appreciate the commitment that you both make for the unincorporated community.

Thank you.

No additional speakers for item three.

Thank you.

I have no further uh questions or comments.

Are there any from staff in terms of the public comment?

Just that we're planning to start the stakeholder engagement this you know late spring for the additional ordinances that we've been talking about.

Okay.

Thank you.

Um I have I'm sorry.

I have one more speaker.

You do have one more speaker.

David, David Garges.

Are you speaking on item three?

David.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay.

On item three.

Yes.

Okay.

Yes.

I am a small property owner, landlord of four properties.

And uh I think what you guys are doing um with the uh advocacy for for people like me.

Um I forget what it's called.

It's a table down there by the courthouse on four hours in the morning.

Um Ja is the lady that runs it down there.

You know who I'm talking about.

It's called the landlord, uh, the rental housing provider resource center.

Yeah, yeah.

I thought I thought that was really brilliant, and I hope you fund it uh some more.

Um, I was gonna sell four of my properties that would go to homeowners, and you would you, meaning the unincorporated county, would lose four nice homes that were rentals.

So that's that's um important that to know that that's really working that table down there.

The other thing is um that would reduce your rental just by one landlord by four.

So I've had 40 years of renting these houses.

I've only evicted uh three people, and I started with two pieces of papers.

You had to serve 30-day notice, and now it's getting pretty crazy, folks.

Uh, you gotta repeal some of this stuff.

You're gonna lose me eventually.

Because I don't want the headaches.

My uh friend who rents just one condo.

Her tenant ruined their um condo, and she asked the folks to move out so she could fix uh the plumbing and everything, and they could move back in.

Well, they went to an attorney, she got a lawsuit for 400,000.

And that's not the way to run this if you want rental houses.

The the place uh some tenants go echo housing, whoever they talk to down there.

I don't know if they're just people at the front desk.

They get like wrong information.

They say to the tenant, look, we'll we know how to have you stayed up.

We have no speaking additional speakers for item three.

Okay.

Uh speaker's time was up.

I want to thank all the speakers for their comments this evening.

Uh, we'll bring it back to see if there's any further comments or questions from uh uh Supervisor Tam uh staff and I have a few comments and questions myself.

I I already went through that part.

Um and staff said this stakeholder engagement process will be starting this spring.

Okay.

So yeah, I I just want to cover a few things.

So non-payment of rent.

You know, I'd like to know if we have more data on that in terms of non-payment of rent.

Do we know why people haven't paid rent?

Because, you know, for instance, it could be legitimate or it might not be legitimate.

And I'll just say, you know, I've had I've had at least a few people call my office, and one person said to my staff, why should I even pay rent?

It's like a person feel entitled not to even pay rent.

So I'm trying to understand.

Do we know the the any data behind the non-payment of rent?

No, all we have are eviction notices.

We have anecdotal data from my invoice and Evera, but that is that is the data that we have, or just the eviction notice.

Is it is any way of getting that data?

I'm just wondering.

That's a good question.

We can certainly look into it.

Yeah, because I found it very interesting that there's some people, because of you know the eviction moratorium that think they're entitled not to pay rent.

I will say that I think if we have a more robust mediation program, we can get some more data from that as well.

Right.

And I was gonna go to that next, because 21 cases over um since the adoption of the dispute resolution mediation.

Do we to me that seems like a small number of cases?

Yeah, we agree with that assessment.

And even uh Derek was saying, you know, the courts are overwhelmed, and we all we're hoping that the mediation program would you know would prevent unlawful details and they go to the eviction.

And I know you said the other uh mediation program that was in the court was working successfully, and we're gonna look at maybe trying to fund that, which I think is great.

But I really would like to uh kind of get a sense of why we think our numbers are so low.

Okay.

And we can certainly dig more into that.

I know that we have done uh pretty robust outreach for that program along with Ebrah and the contractor that actually administers the mediation program.

Um, but we can look into figuring out why people aren't using it as much as they might.

That'd be interesting.

Who's the who's the contractor?

Um it's CCDS, the I can't remember what it stands for, uh, community center for dispute resolution.

Okay, okay.

Because I know that the other 21 cases and what we have here, it's interesting to see what's happened.

But I just think 21 cases is a very small number, and we do need to get that housing counselor, and I think he was even talked about it, might not make sense for it to be connected with my invoice, might need to be a part of, you know, yeah, right.

Um, really quickly, the other important thing is you know, with the measure W unincorporated essentials county services funds, we are looking to establish an emergency rental assistance program.

Because while non-payment of rent is a large reason, sometimes it's just I don't have money right this minute, and one or two months' worth of assistance can get people over the finish line, and then they can continue to pay rent and be good tenants.

So having those resources available is really a critical part of the programming that we're gonna be asking for.

Oh yes, and I definitely support emergency rental assistance, definitely, definitely, definitely.

I just want to get a sense of you know, when people aren't paying rent, if we can drill down and find out what's happening there, yeah.

Is it based on a legitimate reason or is it just based on because they feel entitled?

Yeah, yeah.

Um let me see here.

And you know, I think uh it was mentioned we're looking for collaboration.

I think um, I think Jennifer mentioned it, Rovey mentioned it.

You know, we are looking for collaboration.

We don't want to have landlord tenant disputes.

We we want people to be housed, and we want rental property owners to provide housing.

If we screw rental housing providers, they're not gonna provide housing.

And if rental housing providers who are unscrupulous screw tenants, then that's not gonna work either.

So we need to have that level of collaboration.

Uh and I think more importantly now too to kind of address this ongoing um controversy and dispute.

Uh, if I had a magic wand, I would just deal with it with a magic wand, because I think a lot of times people uh um demonize rental housing providers, but if you don't have them, then you won't have the housing for people to live in.

To me, it does.

I mean, so I'm adamantly at this point still opposed to just cause applying to single family residents because single family residents and duplexes, I think are the um the properties that a lot of the mom, small land uh property owners, folks who are looking for generational wealth, is that any other rely upon.

Now, if we establish rural registry and we begin to get data, we see there's abuses there that I could be persuaded otherwise.

But at the moment, I'm never going to change my mind when it comes to protecting small minority retirees who are ma and pa property owners because they need protection just as much as tenants need protection.

And my job is to look at for both sides.

So I just want to be clear on that.

Um, don't get me excited on that.

But if you bring me data, because we established the rental registry, I could, you know, I could be persuaded otherwise, but I just want to make sure it's clear.

We need both.

We need the the rental property providers, and we need the um those who need the housing to be housed.

So I think I think that's all I want to say.

And I just want to once again thank thank you for this work.

Um, continue the good work and hopefully uh take into consideration what you've heard this evening from all of us.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah, and I think as soon as we can get the rest of this passed and implemented, I think we'll be able to see maybe where we're going and if we're making some good progress.

Yeah.

Thank you very much, Supervisors.

All right.

So let's go to our last item this evening.

Sorry, it's taken us a while to get there.

Uh it's on um inclusionary zoning and minister review for affordable housing.

Good evening, supervisors and community members.

My name is Angelica Gonzalez, and joining me this evening is Olivia Ortiz, and we work with the CDA planning department, who are the project managers for this item.

So today we'll be providing an informational overview to introduce inclusionary zoning and ministerial review for affordable housing, known as our affordable housing production policies initiative, also known as AHP policies.

So I'd like to get started with just letting you know that we're in the initial phase of developing the AHP policies, and we've been uh going through this roadshow and providing an introductory presentations.

And so these presentations have been listed on this slide.

Um we've made presentations to the municipal advisory councils in December and also in January, and also to the Planning Commission in December.

So we're nearing the end of this first round of presentations as part of our roadshow, and moving forward, we'll continue to engage with stakeholders and we'll provide further presentations as the work progresses.

So taking a step back, I'd like to provide the why.

The project we're here to talk about is part of a larger effort, the transit-oriented communities policy.

I won't go too much into this since we've presented on this on uh um during previous meetings.

So overall, the TOC policy has four components, and that's listed in this table here.

So the first three are applicable to the areas half mile from the TOC station areas.

This includes residential and commercial office densities for new development, transit station access and circulation, parking management.

So for today's presentation, we'll be focusing primarily on the fourth component, which is applicable to all unincorporated areas.

So this is the affordable housing production, preservation, and protection policy.

So just to add a little bit of background, a year ago, CDA staff applied for a grant to develop and have the board consider ordinances that comply with the affordable housing component of the TOC policy, and to implement the housing element program to develop and consider adoption of inclusionary zoning policy.

And so back in March, MTC awarded CDA planning agency to do so.

And in September, the Board of Supervisors accepted this 400,000 grant.

So as you've heard from County HCD, planning and sharing that grant, and um they're using a portion of that funding on the tenant anti-harassment ordinance, and the planning department is using that grant award to develop an inclusionary zoning ordinance with a ministerial approval policy component.

So with that, I'd like to start with inclusionary zoning, then move on to ministerial approval component, and then finally provide you with the timeline of the project.

So, what is inclusionary zoning?

So inclusionary zoning is a tool and a way of incorporating affordable housing into new market rate residential development.

It does not change the density of a development.

It typically includes a set percentage of affordable housing units.

It also contributes, excuse me, to affordable housing production through alternative means.

And so I'll talk about that a little bit in a subsequent slide.

And this again applies to new ownership and rental developments.

So these are the basic components of inclusionary zoning.

So the first is requiring a minimum percentage of affordable housing.

So as an example, we have here in the city of San Leandro, 9% of rental units in the new development must be affordable to households with at most 50 area median income.

And also 6% of those rental units in a new development must be affordable to household households with 60% area median income.

It also includes number of years for deed restricted affordability.

So for example, in Dublin, units for purchase developed through inclusionary zoning must stay affordable for a minimum of 55 years.

And then finally, there is a component of alternative means of compliance, which is required under Assembly Bill 1505.

So in this case, should a developer not build the affordable housing unit, for example, there would be some sort of alternative compliance, such as an inloof fee.

So Alameda has considered inclusionary zoning before.

And then subsequently, CDA studied possible affordable housing housing fees, excuse me, and the recommendations were not pursued.

And so back in December 2024, the board adopted the sixth housing element with a commitment to consider inclusionary zoning and also to pursue TOC compliance.

And then finally in July 2025, the board adopted the 10-year housing plan prepared by the housing and community development department, which includes inclusionary zoning as a possible source of funding for affordable housing in the unincorporated communities.

So this slide here demonstrates how common inclusionary zoning is in the Bay Area.

So there are 109 cities and counties in the Bay Areas.

You all know 82 of them or 75% have inclusionary zoning policy in place.

And 5%, or excuse me, five jurisdiction collect fees for market projects to fund affordable housing.

And there are 12 jurisdictions in the Bay Area that have committed to developing a policy.

And so unincorporated Alameda County is in this group.

And then 10 jurisdictions have no policy in place.

However, there is policy development underway or committed to for 12 additional jurisdictions.

And this slide here is just an illustration of the data shared in the previous slide.

You can see that jurisdictions with inclusionary zoning policies are highlighted in the darkest blue.

A handful of jurisdictions with only affordable housing fees are in the mid-tone blue, and so that includes Oakland and Newark.

And then there's jurisdictions with the lightest blue have committed to considering inclusionary zoning.

So that includes Alameda County, and then jurisdictions without a policy at all or intention to develop an inclusionary zoning policy in gray.

So again, you can see that the majority of jurisdictions have either a policy in place or underway.

So the affordable housing policy work is an opportunity for Alameda County to consider and implement as a tool to support affordable housing production.

So many of these policies have been in place for years.

For example, from our neighboring jurisdictions, this includes the City of San Leandro and Hayward, who've had inclusionary policies since 2004.

And Pleasanton and Livermore, for example, since 2000.

And so we have a full list in attachment C if you're interested in looking at that list.

So now I'd like to cover ministerial approval piece as part of our inclusionary zoning work, which is also known as ministerial review, which we'll be exploring to potentially incentivize property owners or developers should their proposal include a specific percentage of affordable housing.

So this is part of the work that we'll be looking at is what that percentage looks like.

So what is ministerial approval or review?

It's a way to refer to a shortened entitlement review and approval process.

It relies on our existing vetted standards that have been publicly reviewed and adopted by the Board of Supervisors.

So this includes the county code, our general and specific plans, residential design guidelines, and standards.

Next slide.

So in addition, TOC compliant ministerial approval policy would apply to new residential projects or new residential mixed-use projects that would potentially exceed the affordability requirements set by the inclusionary zoning policy.

So again, that's something that we'll be looking at what the percentage of inclusionary zoning that we'll be asking for residential developers or property owners and MTC's minimum as outlined in their compliance administrative guidelines is 15% to be met as the minimum.

So the intention again of this policy is to incentivize the production of affordable housing that is inclusive of housing for families for all incomes.

So there are a number of state laws that allow for ministerial approval.

Let's see here.

Next slide, please.

So we're really excited to begin working with our consultant known as Street Level Advisors.

They are a small local emerging local business.

So we're really excited about that.

And they'll be providing support to help us develop this policy.

So they're a local consulting agency with deep experience in housing policy across the Bay Area and also in the country, and they've worked with a number of jurisdictions in the Bay Area and nationally and nationally as well, excuse me.

And so this includes the city of Berkeley, the City of San Jose, the City of Alameda.

So we're really excited that they'll be able to work with us based on their experience.

So as I mentioned, we're still in the beginning stages of this work, and we are in the initial steps here.

So here's a list of the project timeline.

And so starting from the top during the end of 2025 and early 2026, we are providing informational presentations to the MAX, PC, Board of Supervisors, Subcommittee, and Community Groups.

And so we also have a website that just went live back in December, I believe.

So that includes a lot of resources, more information about what inclusionary zoning and ministerial approval means, and also frequently asked questions sections.

So we're really excited to have that.

In addition, we'll be doing individual developer interviews about development trends and project level economics in the unincorporated Alameda County.

So in addition, in early 2026, which is now, we'll be conducting focus groups with developers, advocates, and service providers.

So we actually are really excited to have our first one, which is next week on Wednesday evening with various developers, advocates, and service providers.

And then we're also planning a community meeting and subsequent informational MAC updates.

We're excited to let you know that we finally have determined a date for this community meeting, which is April 29th.

So really excited to share that.

And then finally, um an ad hoc MAC subcommittee meeting.

So it's part of the scope of work.

One of the things that uh we've incorporated is to form an ad hoc advisory uh subcommittee group.

And so this consists of seven MAC members who will be providing um guidance and also advisory as far as developing the policy for inclusionary zoning and ministerial review.

So in um late 2026, uh we'll have additional ad hoc subcommittee meetings.

We're aiming to have about four of them.

And additionally, we're also um hoping that our studies are completed by that time.

So this includes an economic feasibility study, as you could imagine.

Um market trends are important, so we want to make sure that we consider that as part of the work.

And then in early mid-2027, we're aiming to have a preliminary ordinance available for comments, and then subsequently a second draft of ordinance to be published.

And then in spring 2027, uh, we'll have various presentations for recommendations prior to adoption is the goal.

Um, and then finally, before July 1st, our goal is also for um adoption, some sort of inclusionary zoning and ministerial review ordinance policy.

So before we wrap up, uh we'd like to provide you with a summary of public meeting feedback we received so far from the MACs, the planning commission, and also the the community.

So uh we've heard general support uh from majority of those about the inclusionary zoning um proposal that we have, although we have received um some reservations about inclusionary zoning, because there's um concerns about the reduction of development should there be this specific requirement for new residential development.

Another one is inclusionary zoning technical questions.

So, as you can imagine, we're in the beginning stages.

So we're looking at everything right now.

Um we'll be conducting studies.

We don't know what the policy looks like yet, uh, but we're in the beginning stages of conducting studies that will help us determine um how to develop these policies.

And then we've also received ministerial approval concerns, um concerns by the community and also the MACs.

And what they've mentioned is the limited involvement due to ministerial approval is really a big concern.

So just wanted to highlight that.

And then in addition to TOC policy and compliance clarification was requested on how TOC policies policy compliance would impact future funding.

So this is a moving target, and and we are keeping an eye out from MTC ABAG on how they'll be reviewing compliance when it comes to when it comes to reviewing the county's work.

So there's that.

And then finally, um, we did receive a lot of support to create an ad hoc subcommittee so that the MACs can be involved throughout the process in the development phase of the policy.

And so, like I mentioned, we have seven members who have been selected, including uh council member Warren Cushman who's here this evening.

And um, that's about it.

If you want to read all of the comments, we do have them in the staff report.

And then uh we'd like to end with just staff's um request, which is to take public testimony, and also um if you could provide your initial comments on this affordable housing production policy initiative and engagement efforts.

So, with that, uh Olivia Ortiz and I are available for any questions that you may have.

Thank you.

Thanks for the presentation.

Um, why don't we get uh public comment and supervisor Dam and I will just questions andor comments.

Warren Cushman.

Thank you.

All right, members of the Board of Supervisors on a Corporate Rated Services Committee.

Uh, you know, this is the last time, so I'm getting a little tired.

Um anyway, um, I'm glad that this process is at the beginning because it certainly allows us to work the kinks out.

Um we've got you know quite a bit of time to deliberate, and I'm glad the MACs are baked into this process.

I look forward to being a part of that process.

I do think we need to have the stakeholders, um, all the principal stakeholders.

Hopefully, they'll come to the MACs uh and and dialogue with us at the MAX, and uh whatever other meetings and other stakeholder spaces there'll be, there'll be change, there'll be a chance for Frank dialogue because I would much rather have that dialogue at the beginning of the process than wait till the end where we have to hear everybody's anger.

So with that, uh I'm looking forward to this process, and I think this is a chance to move forward and uh hopefully we'll we'll bring a successful ordinance for you.

Thank you.

I have no additional speakers for this item.

No other speakers, we warned the public out.

So Supervisor Tim, you have any comments or questions.

Thank you, Chair Miley.

I appreciate the staff report and the update on where we are at since we had included this in our six-cycle um housing element, which I was part of the vote that adopted.

And I wanted to just get a sense um from the prior work.

Um you said that there was a case back in 2008 that basically um created some major obstacles to implementing and developing a policy, and then CDA staff did look at uh some of the possibilities of the affordable housing fees, but they weren't pursued.

And earlier this evening in the budget report, we had heard that um uh housing, the housing market in particular, the real estate market has seen a decline.

Houses are more on the market more days than than in the past.

So I was just trying to understand like what's different now that makes this policy uh more likely to succeed.

I I know nine cities in our county have it, and and has um like Bay East or the California Rental Association or uh real estate association update also weighed in on the impacts of these fees on the housing market.

Good evening, supervisors.

Uh I'm Olivia Ortiz.

Um very excellent point put um that the real estate market and our development are down right now, perhaps not unlike during the recession.

We are very aware of that.

We were speaking about that just earlier this week with our consultants.

Um, and it's likely that what we put forward when we have the feasibility report completed will um be taking into account the the very delicate balance of trying to gain affordable units or affordable funding without um impeding development or potentially impeding development on certain sites to hold out for rental properties at a later date.

That's part of the policy conversation we want to be having with you all in the public when we finally have that data.

Um I don't believe we've specifically um spoken to real estate entities.

We fully expect to hear from them as this process continues.

We have tried as hard as we can to work with the um folks who've run development projects of a certain size, more than five units and unincorporated in the past past five years.

Um we'll be talking about this next year.

If we get board planning when I tell you about our annual progress report, but we don't have many of those developers.

So it's a very small number of people to be reaching out to our consultants have pointed out to us that their lack of involvement um may mean that they're not too concerned with this or that it wouldn't actually impact um their decision making yet.

We we hope to hear from them at a um throughout the process.

Um I feel like I've missed part of your question, Angelica.

Yeah.

To answer your question about the the case that impacted inclusionary zoning, um so what occurred back, I believe it was 2008 was that um jurisdictions were not allowed to limit um affordability of rental units for new rental development.

And so uh the court cited and supported this.

And so unfortunately that dampened um inclusion or inclusionary zoning in that way.

And it wasn't until 20, I believe 17 when there was a subsequent bill that gave jurisdictions back that right to allow inclusionary zoning uh below market rate.

So that's what occurred.

And so unfortunately, during that time, um there were a couple variables in addition to that case, plus the the recession that occurred during that time, um, inclusionary zoning was was not successful.

However, we are very optimistic.

Um while we do understand that the market isn't as great as it could be, uh, which is also similar to other jurisdictions and and states, right?

And so uh one of the things that we're looking at is the process of phasing the sin, for example.

Um again, that's something that we we are thinking about.

Um, in addition to um we're not expecting this to be a perfect policy when it's adopted.

I mean, our goal is to make it perfect, but we do recognize that um there is some relationship with the market.

So um we've also um thought about potentially considering future amendments, considering that market trends and analysis typically occur every five years uh to inform these policies.

So we're thinking about a lot of things.

There's a lot to think about.

Um, and so we uh do have a very beefy team, so we're really excited about that.

And um, as we mentioned, we have our first focus group uh next week, and Olivia could provide the list of folks that will be attending, but this will include the affordable housing developers, uh service providers, uh neighborhood organizations.

So we're hoping to get their input as part of this process so that when we are developing the policy, it is as informed as possible and incorporates as much feedback as possible because we know that um we have a lot of work to do for this.

Thank you.

When I look at the uh list of cities um that are uh part of attachment C to your staff report, um at least nowadays it seems like it costs a million dollars a unit for an affordable housing unit, right?

And so how has the inclusionary zoning policy work in these cities that already have this in terms of their ability to actually uh raise enough capital from the affordable housing fees to um to develop uh more affordable units um the short answer is that we believe that it does work because they continue to have these policies and up to date them.

Um the longer answer is that we still need to kind of look into our neighbors to bring that um the specific data forward.

That was something that some of our Mac members asked for, and so we we do want to compile that because that's an important part of the story to help us understand what's going on.

Thank you.

I I do want to bring the the national perspective in because I do have experience in working in the DC metro region.

So for example, um in DC, Maryland and Virginia, inclusionary zoning is required, period.

There's no negotiation about it, and so because of that, it's so common that developers don't bat an eye, they know that they're gonna lose revenue for this affordable housing um unit.

And so because it's it's been normalized, which is the opposite of where we are now in in the county, um, there is hope.

So um just wanted to bring that perspective in as well.

That's an interesting perspective.

Basically, developers are paying into a fund to get competition for their units, which would drive down potentially their profits, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, thanks for the the report.

I can't wait to get this done because I've been a fan of inclusionary zoning back in 2004 when the board initially adopted the housing element and wanted to consider inclusionary zoning, but for that you know, that um legal situation that occurred, I think we would have done this then or you know, sooner than than now.

So I'm I'm hopeful I'm you know, I'm um around us coming up with an inclusionary zoning ordinance.

And I'm glad you said what you said.

It it's pretty much normalized.

And the and the fact is I I appreciate what the other uh staffers said too, but all these other jurisdictions, 75% of the jurisdictions um have inclusionary zoning.

See, where is it?

Uh yeah, 70 75% of the jurisdictions out of 109, 82 have inclusionary zoning uh out of 109.

pretty much normalized and the and the fact is I I appreciate what the other uh staff person said too that all these other jurisdictions 75 percent of the jurisdictions um have inclusionary zoning see where is that uh yeah 70 75 percent of their jurisdictions out of 109 82 have inclusionary zoning uh out of a hundred and nine so that's 75 percent which if it wasn't working they would have repealed it uh and if you look at some of the jurisdictions I don't think it's stifled development there either so I do think this is something that um basically I think ultimately uh should become the the norm as opposed to um something that folks are um opposed to the other piece I wanted to just ask about uh I just hope we can move this along because it just seems that's a long time to wait until July of 2027 to have the ordinance so if I you know if we can I don't want to say expedite it but if there are ways of moving that along that would you know that would be my desire as well and once again it only applied to the unincorporated area the inclusionary zoning it's not going to apply outside the unincorporated area um that's correct yeah and then the other piece is and I and I guess you'll uh have that data as a result of the study and the consultant I'd be very curious to know of the 82 jurisdictions which ones have ministerial review which ones have other types of review so we can kind of see and then I would suspect you'll uh make a recommendation I know right now you say ministerial review and maybe that would be the recommendation but I would like to know what the other jurisdictions are using and what their experience has been with that because that might be another um I don't want to say stumbling block but that could be another uh concern yeah we can certainly look at that and and reach out to also um mtc and a back to see if they have that information but we'll look into that yeah but thanks I've been I want to I want to see this happen because I I think it it's a good thing.

All right okay if there's no other questions comments this evening it's about seven after 10 we're we are this meeting is now adjourned don't blame me for the agenda I don't know who set this agenda up but yeah that's right we didn't meet last month did we yeah that's the reason yes