Governor Newsom has announced a modified
county variance framework while in Napa County to allow
many medium and some large counties to accelerate within Stage 2
of the California Resilience
Roadmap. Counties may submit plans and attestations for the
new modified variance immediately. But, like the first variance
process, any county variance only allows a county to reopen
specified sectors within Stage 2 of the state’s roadmap.
The modified variance provides more flexibility in some of the
readiness criteria and eliminates the number of COVID-19 deaths
as a factor. To see the new metrics, visit the state’s
county
variance page and click on the boxes below the title
“County Criteria to move further into Stage 2” labeled county
case metrics, county preparedness, and county response.
Should property taxes be refunded to landlords because of state
regulations related to COVID-19? That’s the question at the heart
of SB
1431, by Senator Steve Glazer.
Even though counties and other local agencies in California are
the ones who are directly responding to COVID-19 crisis, burning
through reserves to directly treat both the health emergency
directly as well as the economic effects on individuals and
businesses that have been affected indirectly, Senator Glazer
stated in committee that his bill is about fairness. The bill
would require property taxes to be refunded mid-year to landlords
due to the Executive Order putting a moratorium on evictions.
The Employee Relations policy area falls under the jurisdiction
of the Government Finance and Operations (GFO) Policy Committee
and is responsible for all issues related to public employment
and retirement. Specific issues areas are pension benefits and
pension system administration; labor relations; issues regarding
county negotiations with employees; workers’ compensation; and
other risk management issues facing public employers.
In 2019, the CSAC Support Hub for Criminal Justice
Programming developed and piloted an analytics tool for
juvenile hall facilities utilization with Santa Cruz and Santa
Barbara Counties. Using this analytics tool, Santa Cruz County is
now examining how COVID-19 has impacted juvenile hall bookings,
lengths of stay, and alternatives to detention to improve
community intervention programs in the future.
With juvenile hall bookings down 60 percent since the start of
the COVID-19 pandemic, Santa Cruz County is using the analytics
tool to determine what community supports are influencing the
change in order to sustain this declining rate as the County and
the state recover. The County is combining citation data from its
intake unit with data from the juvenile hall analytics tool to
pinpoint those communities where county services like probation
have helped support at-risk kids and their families, as evidenced
by declining rates of juvenile hall facility utilization.
“Santa Cruz County is coming together to support its families,
and the CSAC Support Hub juvenile facilities analytics tool
provides powerful insight into the collective impacts of our
efforts,” said Rob Doty, Juvenile Services Division Director for
Probation. “The data will allow us to lift up those communities
where we have seen success and apply those proven strategies in
more areas of the county and share them with the wider criminal
justice community.”
