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Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[11:07] [Music] [Music] [Music] everybody ready we're gonna go ahead and call to order our City Council's study session of May 19th and we only have one

[12:03] issue on before us which is ballot items and gonna turn it over to city manager Jayne bottom Thank You mayor so one thing I'll note is that everyone has their own microphone all of the batteries are new and we have two new routers in the ceiling and one of the things that we learned as we were fixing things is that we only had one router before and it was misplaced so that's one of the things that was making it harder so um yeah we think we've started to fix a few issues but anyway so hopefully everyone can hear us tonight yeah yeah no we have to go on so tonight we do have pretty much a single item but with four different parts to it this is going to be starting to consider potential ballot measures that the council might wish to put on the ballot for November and we have this meeting

[13:00] every year usually at the end of April or beginning of May so that you can give the staff direction on which of the items that we've been thinking about that you want us to actually work on in the next several months in preparation for the council voting to actually put something on the ballot so tonight is the first opportunity for you to take things off the table or add things onto the table and we've got four items tonight the first will be municipal ization and Tom Carr will present that item then we'll be talking about the renewal of the point point three percent capital sales and use tax I'll be presenting that and also giving an update on the work of the community advisory committee then we have a broadband presentation and Karl Castile will be making that presentation and then finally your charter subcommittee has been working on looking at the Charter to see if there are items that we might change or add to the Charter and Tom will be banking that presentation so I'm going to turn it over to right now to talk about municipal

[14:00] ization ballot measures good evening as you all know there are several things that are coming to a head right now and as we're sort of dealing with a moving target to some extent because we're in the middle of litigation and there's things going forward but there are some things that you might want to consider for the ballot this year and I'll talk about them I've grouped them generally into four categories one renewal and extension of the current utility occupation tax to additional funding for short-term and long-term needs renewal and extension of executive sessions amendment of charter section 178 a and consideration about a ballot measure deleting charter section 189 which allowed for choice Radice of electric customers I'm going to go through each one of these individually you don't have to remember what I just said the utility occupation tax as you all know was originally passed in 2010 and the original portion of the utility occupation tax was to replace the franchise fee that we would no longer

[15:00] getting after the council decided not to renew the franchise in August of 2010 in 2011 the utility occupation tax was amended to add a privat to add additional taxation to pay for the cost of exploring municipal ization and that generates about 2.1 million dollars a year in 2015 the voters extended the portion of the tax that pays for the that is actually replaces the franchise fee that has been extended to 2022 and that's not before you tonight the portion of the tax that pays for the funding of the municipal ization effort that 2 point 1 million dollars expires on December 31st of this year so one of the questions that we have for council is whether or not to extend that we supplement that with a budget item of about $375,000 from the general fund

[16:00] that goes to pay ongoing costs although not all of that is spent or has been spent this year so one of the things we'd ask is the council consider increasing the tax slightly to pay so that the general fund isn't paying for this we don't recommend there's of course other support for the municipal ization project above and beyond that for example my salary Jane's salary we we spend a portion of our time doing this that's not allocated in this at all so in addition we have some additional immediate and future needs that I wanted to discuss with Council and at least put it on your money in your minds as we go forward we have a study session scheduled for July 11th of this year where we intend to flush these out some more but I wanted to give you a first look at these and some of them may require council consideration of a ballot measure this year so one thing that we've got the 2.1 million dollars

[17:00] and that's pretty much meeting our ongoing expenses we will have we have some extraordinary expenses that will be beyond that which will not be covered by that one of those is trial costs we have a trial coming up in the PUC the trial costs will push our expenses above and beyond what we can pay out of the utility occupation tax in addition if things go well at the PUC we expect to be in condemnation court next year and again that will push our expenses above and beyond one of the issues currently before the PUC is the question whether the city should have to do detailed engineering design before the PUC approves the separation plan and right now we've done what I believe is a very detailed design for the engineering separation however the other parties have pushed and want us to do the kind of plans that you can hand to someone to actually start construction the next day although a lot of our stuff is that is

[18:00] at the level where people would normally have to bid out a project nevertheless there is a push to have us do that our estimate is that the detailed design engineering cost would be about 6% of the total cost of separation now I say 6% that's our estimate based on what we've done our public works Fox folks who do this all the time say that it could be higher could be 10 to 15% we're talking about separation costs of about 73 million dollars 6% of that's about 4 million 10 percents of course about 7 million so again that wouldn't be the the current utility occupation tax wouldn't be sufficient to cover that and if the PUC orders us to do that the detailed design before approving the separation it's something we're gonna have to figure out how to fund Bob did you have a question you just a timing question on that detailed design if we do have to do that when would that come into play would it's not clear it depends on what the order would be the question we would prefer to push

[19:00] the detail design - after the go no-go decision which we're tentatively saying would be in mid 2019 the the the hit would be if the Commission says no you have to do that before we make a decision and we'd have to spend those dollars in 2018 the other wildcard out there is a FERC proceeding right now we're not estimating a lot of costs for presenting our current proposal has very little transmission level work it's just basically connecting the transformers at the substations to the excels transmission system so we we have an estimated large core that if we got hit with a stranded cost case however a full blown stranded cost case would be very expensive and we'd have to think about ways to fund that and then so on the bottom I have future needs these are not things that we would expect to to occur after the council was came back and had to make the go no-go decision in mid-2000 19 and those are transition costs and separation cost and when I say

[20:02] transition costs what I mean is the cost of standing up a utility and we have had some conversations with some private companies who are willing to front the costs of that and return for a longer term contract after separation costs of course are the costs of building the the actual separation what we're estimating at 73 million dollars there's some question about when the city would have to pay for that or our current view is that we've been pushed to a point where we're pushing the construction - after the condemnation but before the turnover so the Excel would do all the current proposal the proposal that's going in tomorrow Excel would do all the construction on its own system so it's our view that if excels building stuff on its own system it should pay for it and we should reimburse them when we acquire the system when it becomes ours Excel of course takes a contrary view so there may be if if the Commission says

[21:04] we have to pay as we go as they build then there would be a requirement to fund that seventy three million dollars or so would as an ongoing basis as Excel did the construction now our current projection is that would not be until after mid 2019 so the current proposal is for us to go through condemnation figure out what the cost of acquisition is going to be and then have counsel make a go/no-go decision once you know what it's going to cost and then we'd have to fund we might have to fund the transition costs and the separation cost so I'm going to move on to executive sessions the provision allowing for executive sessions as you know the Charter requires at all council meetings be public and the interpretation has been that that prohibits executive sessions the voters have voted down the executive session several times so it's a pretty strong interpretation our current the vote is the voters allowed for executive sessions for a limited to

[22:01] municipal ization legal strategy and negotiation strategy that authority expires on December 31st of this year so one of the things I would like council to consider is whether or not the those the ability to have those those sessions should continue we've had some feedback from at least one member of the community that the the negotiation strategy thing needs to be tweaked some we've gotten some complaints about the the fact that we negotiated without involving the public that's a question for council about whether or not you want to change that I've put the language up in really small tight to make it impossible for you to read but that's the full language of the session of this section and it as you can see it has you said you've all done it you're familiar with the constraints but it proved it prohibits it requires two-thirds vote to go into executive session it prohibits any decision in executive session and it has that limb it's scope for executive sessions so that one of the things I'd like you to consider is whether or not to extend this and or if NSO whether you want to

[23:00] modify it Tom can you and if you don't like happy to do it but Claire what I think the same individual you're referring to that raised questions has made the allegation that Excel and/or their attorneys actually participated in the executive sessions and that's false oh absolutely false no thank you the only people ever at executive sessions were city staff and council members a yes Jan since I wasn't here when you discuss this last time my question would be if we did not have executive sessions what would be the alternative would be to have a discussion in a full council meeting or do you have to have that conversation with two members at a time so we do both so as you know I do a lot of confidential memos so it's in writing and then we do the the two by two meetings and we did we did those before we had executive session of course the challenge with that is that I can't tell one group what another group said so you can't really have any discussion and it

[24:02] could be that you were in one group and Aaron was in a different one and Aaron said something that really responded to something your concerns but if I told you what he said then it would be a serial meaning and that would violate state law I mean I would take the position that would violate so we don't do that so we listen and talk but there's no ability to interchange which you have at the executive sessions I my own personal belief is I believe they're a very valuable tool for counsel and then so there are a couple of other charter changes section 178 of the Charter as you all know provides for certain metrics to be met in 2013 the council went through the process of meeting those metrics now all that does is allow for the creation of a municipal electric utility so just creating the entity it doesn't authorize operation operations authorizations are covered by a separate section of the Charter we have been tied up in litigation over

[25:00] this the over this decision for three years now and I maybe it's four almost four I see no end in sight although right now we're at the stage where we've petitioned for certiorari if the review by the Supreme Court of the state of Colorado if they deny the petition that litigation is done at least that litigation but what the the where we were from a procedural posture is that the court said that the decision wasn't final and that another decision would have to be made which would again be subject to challenge this is important because bonding bonding agencies want to know that the entity that you're bonding exists and this is a challenge to the existence of the utility itself the body that we created so it created puts a cloud on that I would like council to consider amending section 178 either to take the provisions out or to modify them in a way that they would be more immune to challenge and then the last thing is we

[26:02] took a look I'm sorry Aaron it can ask a question about that time was talking about it can you be a little bit more specific about what that language might look like what would we be amending or taking out specifically so one option that I would like is that the Charter metrics required that the council make a finding that those could be met and have that verified by a third party an independent third party counsel did all of that it was verified and they approved it by by ordinance we could amend to say that the council that the council has found that these had been met that would be one simple thing you could amend it in a way that didn't make it so much of a if a quasi-judicial approach where what counsel had to do was take a set of criteria and apply metrics to them and make it more of a legislative action to make it more immune to challenge or you could just take them out can you talk about the the

[27:03] timing on this one I understand it's currently in litigation but um the pros and cons of doing it now or doing it later well the sooner we can take the cloud over off the head of the utility the better it is for bonding purposes although we're probably not going to be bonding for several years probably until right now it's looking like 119 to 2019 and 2020 to so you could do this at a later time we still will have the litigations depending on what the Supreme Court does with the petition that we filed even if we pass this we still have the latest now if you pass this we could argue that the litigation it's mood so Tom I guess one of the criticisms of us going down this path is is that members the public would say the only reason you're doing that is because if you had to go back today and make that determination

[28:01] rightly or wrongly they would allege that you couldn't we couldn't no longer meet the metrics because of the cost or whatnot and so are we better off addressing this issue once we know what the cost is and perhaps at that point in time the voters have approved a different amount of money and in that way you sort of remove that in other words if we don't need to do this until bonding what's the rush especially if it's Hort of exposes the city to an argument that is trying to sort of slip something by well the the reason to do it earlier rather than later is to get the metrics met and have any challenge proceed before we have to get to bonding so if you change them and you met them and we got sued probably three years of litigation are going to ensue and I would like to get the litigation over before we have to face bonding for the issue debt for the utility but I mean just to follow up if we were to in

[29:00] essence re redo our Charter requirements because of funding issues then there's a hole and in doing that then you know with the approval of that we sort of say and by Fiat where we've we've met the requirements then then we sort of eliminate that political issue of of the argument that we're trying to do something based on the decision made years ago that some people say we couldn't do now and so I guess is there a downside to doing it the way I described which is if we're gonna redo the charter metrics at all doing it at that point in time the downside is the delay and the risk of even no matter what you do Excel will file lawsuit but but could again just to be clear but couldn't we at the time that we knew the cost do

[30:00] what you're saying right there which is next perhaps next year and say hey at this point in time we're done and we eliminate that requirement and the voters can't say we're trying to hide something because everybody knows the cost yep yes so hath you so wait a minute no I was I was following to learn last piece I mean your problem time I assume is when you want to go do the bonding but but you don't want to go do the bonding until after condemnation yeah now there's still this whole separation stuff but but presumably you have to do something after condemnation well I we don't know really know the timing of all of that but if you want if you want to be certain well and you can never be totally certain but if you want to be more or less certain you have to wait till all the costs are known you

[31:01] don't know what all the costs are until after the PC rolls after kind of nation after FERC does whatever FERC is or isn't going to do as the case may be and and after you really get a bill for all the separation which Excel is doing so the bill will no doubt rise over time and so you don't really know the cost which would mean you would be not able to at least if I'm hearing you're right Andrew you wouldn't be able to determine if you've met the requirement until kind of the very last minute and then the problem is Excel can sue and you have to sit until your thumbs for three years while it works its way through the courts is that it well I think I think when I'm what I'm saying here's Tom's have proposed a method that would eliminate litigation as an option for excel and so the question is granted we will know to the dollars and cents but will will have a

[32:00] sense of order of magnitude in a you know presumably as we're getting close to come in among by the time we get a condemnation ruling the time of the no go no decision for example we'll certainly know cuz we have to go no go right and so around that time whether it's the year before or will know how we've done at the PUC will know some other facts we you know then we can essentially eliminate the litigation option for excel without the public saying oh you're just doing that because you can't meet your metrics yeah I kind of get that um if you can really eliminate the litigation option that certainly gives you a little more flexibility I mean I gotta say that and I don't have super strong feelings about this but as I thought about this you know the requirement that we have yeah it talks about reliability and stuff obviously first of all the PUC is going to demand that in the end but but the

[33:02] one the working piece that most people look at is that you have to have competitive rates or comparable rates on day one which is frankly a weird metric it's always been kind of a weird metric and I since I was on counsel when we put it in I'll take part of the blame for that it doesn't really say a lot because that's that's day one I think what frankly what any counsel would be interested in with not the only day one it would be I think the better metric we've seen which maybe is a little harder to explain to people which is the net present value calculation in other words in the longer run is this a good thing to do or not and the hard part with that calculation of course is by definition you are looking you're making estimations of future energy cost how else can you make that type of judgment

[34:01] right I mean you're looking at your energy costs and you're looking at excels energies cause nobody knows that definitively but that's still a to me a much better way to look at it is to say well counsel is going to look at whether this actually makes sense for the city over time which is kind of the net present value metric and it's not that it has to be exact but you'd kind of prefer it not be negative two hundred million that's for sure you know which the buyout option that Excel gave us that was hundreds of million negative so you look at that and say well okay that's not a great deal I mean all of us looked at that and said that's not a great deal okay that's pretty good metric then we weren't worried about day one cost we were worried about the long-term costs I don't know how you word that but it just this struck me that that seems like a better approach and no we don't want litigation not because some council is going to cheat

[35:01] but because it just opens up this avenue for Excel to as they will always do delay it for three they don't really care if they're going to win or not it doesn't matter to them whether they win they just delay it for three years and that's a victory so you don't really want to open that door so you put what are you proposing so I would like something that I guess is legislative in nature that can't theoretically be litigated but where we would in fact replace the current requirement which I don't think works very well and also i think the litigation that it's currently subject to is you know at the time potentially could be pretty time-consuming for no great outcome um we can't change the Charter legislatively no but this is a charter change but you mean to put it on the ballot yeah and and amend section 178 but put

[36:02] some wording in that I think is a little bit more apropos about what the council would actually the then council would consider in terms of do you proceed or do you not proceed and and for me it's really that net present value calculation but I charted would have to be darn clear that this isn't an exact calculation it's kind of the best based on best estimates because what else can you do look that's why originally we said day one because I remember all these conversations we said they won even though I think several of us weren't thrilled with it because how could you guarantee that on day 647 the rates would be comparable we you can't I mean you could have blips up and down one year it could be a liar when you're it could be a little lower you don't know because you don't know energy costs but a net present value calculation kind of smoothes that out averages it out over time that's a little bit more

[37:01] rational to me at least so just ask a process question should we have the discussion about how to proceed with this now or we can move on and come back why I have a question slide into slides all right well hold okay so this is one of the two slides so the last thing I wanted to raise is the question of this section 189 back when we the city's original plan was to have nine interconnection points and serve the area outside the city that plan has been disregarded by the PUC says we can't do it so we're no longer planning to serve out of City customers section 189 was put in a charter to allow for out of city customers to have a choice of the city or Excel would be the first community choice aggregation provision in the state of Colorado it's not necessary anymore so you could consider deleted it doesn't hurt to have it in the Charter because it doesn't affect anybody since we won't be serving them but we could also take it out there was

[38:01] a question about the governing board there there is a provision that allows out of city individuals to serve on the governing board but it doesn't require them and it is i recommend that it stay because it allows for businesses who may who might want to representative who doesn't live in the city - but who business serves the city to serve on the advisory board of the governing board so these are my questions I did want to add one thing about the tax like you to consider the the when the the funding municipal ization portion of the utility occupation tax was passed it was passed for five years and that gave Excel a target as a lawyer if you tell me I all I have to do is delay for five years that's a whole lot easier than telling me I have to win and so I would ask as you think about this to think about what the appropriate time if you decide to extend the tax would be at you know as your lawyer I would prefer to be forever so that they have no issue that I know that that might not be as a policy matter somewhere you want to go but I would ask you to think about it in

[39:01] that context so these are the five questions that we have as you can see you can read them they relate to the five subjects that I've just discussed and so let's clarify um the question before us is is whether we want to direct staff to prepare them as options not we're not saying that we'd want to adopt them but whether we want to have them on the menu and go ahead and get them as time allows for them to prepare them even though we wouldn't be choosing till after much later in the summer so we don't have to agonize or whether we support them it's whether we want to be able to have them around so on that note I think we can go through some of these pretty quickly right number one does anybody what I have a few more questions yeah questions okay good questions Aaron do you want it all right well I just have a question on number two if we did not go forward with number two um what

[40:03] do we think that the amounts that we might need in say 17 and 18 would be I know they're dependent on certain outcomes but let's say the PUC gives us a path forward what do we need to incur in the near term so at 18 and 19 in order to meet that Sam I do not have an answer for you about that yet we're that's what we're going to discuss on July 11th our team is working on firming up those numbers and I don't really want to put a number out there yet until they've done they're worth your work on that that's fine thank you okay why don't we go one at a time if people have questions we'll ask them at the time does anybody disagree with having an option for extending the utility occupation tax have staff prepare that in other words do we support having staffing for that okay and I think we can decide dates later yeah okay good enough okay number

[41:04] two additional funding I guess I have a question which is well just that since we don't know the number if it's appropriate to if we said go ahead and prepare something that we don't know the number for so I think what my preference would be is just let's leave that on the table for July 11th unless council members feel strongly that we shouldn't consider it at all then we would cancel the July 11 study session but if you're okay with us at least preceding that we won't actually prepare a ballot measure but we will bring forward all the information July 11th and on that date you could give us direction on whether or not to bring forward a ballot measure there's still time then to get it on the ballot if you if we need to sue and I'm unclear why we would cancel the study

[42:01] session if we decide we wouldn't be doing about wouldn't we still want to get the update and learn more about what the next steps are yes I would guess that's true okay so what we'll start a study session yeah I realize we don't know the the amounts time and we may not know on July 11th but with respect to number 2 this could either be in increase in the utility occupation tax or it could be a completely separate ballot measure is that correct yes okay thank you wait this is an either/or one or two no no could people I just wanted to understand whether the whether to two is possibly a standalone ballot measure or it could be just an increase in the utility occupation tax and I think Tom said it could be either one we'll talk about that July okay and I guess the other thing I'd like to know it's just a little bit of financial analysis I suppose is the way you put it there could inside things turn out but there could be some fairly near-term

[43:00] expenses for the UC hearing and then condemnation but then later on down the line maybe some of those expenses go away so if you for instance if you ask people can you will need to re-up the utility occupation tax for six years the question is well if that actually raises enough money but it's just kind of the timing is wrong is there something you can do about that we could bond against it well bonding or borrowing from the city and repaying the city or something all right I hate that it's not so much I'm worried about losing the issue it's really just a practical matter of hate the bump up the tax when really the total amount you're going to collect would be enough it's just that the ebb and flow of when you need it doesn't exactly match the ebb and flow of when you get it and the question is can our finance people kind of smooth that out and make a work op is

[44:00] nodding his head yes but very Saba's if bob is nodding yes then that's all you need to know okay so you had more to say on this one yeah well just that there I wouldn't want to try to fund this year long term needs but I'm certainly open to learning more about where we are in July and thinking about short-term needs so I'm happy with leaving this open but just I'll say I don't think this is the year to pass things to fund us through 2022 or something so I'm sort of inclined that direction as well but yeah let's talk in July looks good okay okay executive sessions okay I'll just say they have been very helpful and we have followed the rules so if unless we find out something that leads us to think we are no longer going to be litigating I would recommend having that option yes

[45:02] I agree and I just wanted to see one small thing added that specifies that there will be no teleconferencing in on these meetings so I also support going forward with them they've been extremely helpful to me as well and I would be open to discussing whether there are any further restrictions that we want to have I don't have a strongly formed opinion about that but I think it is something that some members of the community will bring forward so we should be willing to to learn and talk with them yeah yeah well I'm not gonna be here and I don't really trust the rest of you so I don't know what I feel about this um I there's no question it was it was helpful I mean tom is absolutely right I've been through enough other issues where you do the two on two and it's kind of crazy making because you can't hear from each

[46:04] other and that makes it really difficult I mean you always feel like boy I'm missing some really good questions and I can't find out what they are and I'm can't tell me because that would be cheating so I never will know what those good questions were unfortunately which is a little bizarre you try to make a decision you don't even know what the good questions were that your colleagues asked so I I would certainly like us to look at it I think the thing that annoyed me be annoyed people the most was the negotiations with Excel as opposed to the legal strategy and I'll just say two things about that real quickly first of all I think it was essential we had had it at the time because I don't think we would have had any negotiations with Excel if we hadn't had the executive sessions because we just but just to be clarified he did not negotiate with Excel and executive session no needs to be said we didn't

[47:02] but we we talked about strategy which is what we're allowed to do and that would have been really hard to do to unto cuz that really would have been a place where I would have been thinking well what is Sam think what is Aaron think I'm never going to know what they think and I think that was really important frankly because we got Excel to give us offers that were really bad and I think that was actually extremely helpful in the grand scheme of things however I don't know that that approach makes any sense moving forward I think that's just very unlikely that to be more of that moving it's not impossible it just seems highly unlikely so if you're going to look at anything I guess I would look at that legal strategy of course I mean though the strategy is legal strategy that means working with the PC it means they're in condemnation hearings it's all the stuff that is kind of really if there are choices what type

[48:02] of choices do you make how do you pursue it and I think the council should have a role in that and even though I would dearly love that to be out in the public it's a little tricky when you're creating strategy and you go it into some court or the PUC and you just had this public conversation about it that's very difficult so I look at it but there could be some changes that might help it well I want to re-emphasize there were no negotiations in the executive sessions it is absolutely impossible to separate legal strategy from negotiation strategy they are one in the same and and so that line-drawing would be a nightmare and I don't think anyone would

[49:00] want I mean rule number one it for a young trial lawyer is you never ever foreclose the possibility that you might engage in a negotiation or that you might or that your litigation strategy might be to drive the other side to negotiate with you and so if if what you're saying is that a that we could sort that out or be that we should say that it is absolutely impossible that we could ever reach an off-ramp with Excel I I think that's irresponsible but that's just yeah okay I didn't say it was that possible was questioned about whether you discuss it at an executive session and I don't ever preclude anything but you did say one thing as a young lawyer here oh that is relevant and it may make it hard to word it and that is yeah defining terms here is tough

[50:01] just one example popped into my mind as you speaking which is even if for instance the city is not going to be quote negotiating and no negotiation doesn't happen at the meetings but strategy talking about it was happening at the meetings even if you're not going to negotiate with Excel about some alternative the municipal ization doesn't mean you wouldn't and this is where you're absolutely right potentially negotiate with Excel about some points that are at issue before the PUC or before the kind of nation court where the two sides might amazingly agree on something after all it's happened before you could call that legal strategy you could call that negotiation that's kind of a fine line as to what to call it I think that's his point one other one other comment just as we talked to sue is if we create it so that discussion even any discussions of potential

[51:00] resolution have to be can only be talked about amongst council members with their counsel in open sessions which we don't want because also judges then see what your discussions are about settlement and and all of a sudden you create a situation where Excel would have a legal advantage against us by making an offer and trying to make us look unreasonable as we have these open discussions you'd rather want to be able to have that conversation with your lawyer in private and remove the sort of politicization of the legal issues into a private session a grand we could do about two by twos but again we're then we're getting back to where we were before so Aaron so I certainly understand how useful the executive sessions have been in this process I have to say that I found it very challenging to exercise my role as

[52:00] an elected official without being able to talk to members of the community about something that so many people care so much about we had a long time where we had to maintain radio silence and you want to you want to get feedback from people you want to talk to your constituents and hear their thoughts so I found that I found that challenging I'm willing to move executive sessions on to the next step here but if we do put them on the ballot and they get passed I'd really like to have a good discussion about how we might blend talking in public with talking an executive session on these matters in next year and going forward couple of council members have pointed out that we did not negotiate with Excel or any of the representatives during the executive session there was just council members and staff that's all all it was I want to point out that one of the reasons that I was comfortable with us discussing strategy around the discussions that occurred with Excel was because we insisted on preserving a city

[53:02] utility as part of this and so the whole point of executive sessions was to discuss legal strategy negotiation strategy around the formation of a city utility and so that was something that remained key I think to to counsel and I think it's key to the community and so just as we're kind of discussing it here that would be something that I would think we would absolutely want to carry forward the only kinds of discussions that we could have in executive session would be around a municipal electric utility of something okay so maybe just sum up where I think we are well I'll just give my opinion which is I I found them very helpful I also agree with what Erin said which was it was hard to not be engaging with the public during the time as we do go forward it may be useful to think about ways to engage folks on certain aspects

[54:02] of the issue that we have to chew on that maybe aren't don't need to be confidential so I would also support that okay but for now go ahead and include that and of course the public is more than it will be happy to entertain amendments to that if that needs to happen BAM meanwhile well go ahead and have staff prepare it's already prepared but I am okay number four third-party verification the people want to take that on this year or I am NOT inclined the are what other people say I like the injury's points about tackling it another year with maybe more certainty and more numbers well that's okay I mean I'm getting worried about putting too many things on the ballot along these lines but I do wonder about

[55:00] the court case a little bit I mean if if well time I mean speak to speak to where that might go and what it might cost us to defend the court case that might turn out to be totally irrelevant well right now as I said we've got a petition for certiorari we've been doing most of the work on this case in a house although we did use some outside expertise to help their draft this Supreme Court petition and we might so all that's left right now would be briefing an argument in the Supreme Court so not a huge expense if the Supreme Court were to reverse and send it back to the district court for some reason that could add additional expenses if the Supreme Court denies cert then we have to redo the certification or go to the voters to change it we could whatever happens at the Supreme Court whether they deny cert and we go back or it's remanded presumably we could or let me ask you a

[56:02] week would effectively could we stay the litigation set to save money pending a ballot measure on the subject I mean well you know Andrew that's up to the court where they granted a right a lot of judges don't like to reach decisions if if something's gonna be mooted yep yeah so so the end remember the district court ruled in our favor and dismissed the litigation and the it was the Court of Appeals that decided that they could change that and say that it wasn't it wasn't ripe without giving us a chance to discuss it so that's what's before the Supreme Court there's a chance the Supreme Court will take cert which as you know is a it's a it's a long shot anytime you'd petitioning for shorts they just don't take very many cases and they could reinstate the district court's decision which I believe was correctly decided so it in which case if they did grant a cert there'd be a briefing and that could be the end of it yes okay Sam yeah I'm going to wait on

[57:03] this one as well Bob I ultimately find a mate wait and this is well - but I mean remember tonight we're only deciding whether we have staff present us options Matt made some what I thought were some pretty persuasive points I'd like to at least keep the option open until July and hear what staff comes up with because it sounds like it's not fully baked yeah that may sounds like there's three or four different ways we could do this we may decide that none of them makes sense you because the ballots are overloaded or because we don't like any of the choices or we want to wait to the court does but I think Matt made some good points about at least keeping our options open and I guess I'd kind of like to see in July with the staff what our options might be we may kick those down the road until 2018 or 2019 I get that but if it's not a whole lot of work I guess I kind of like to see those that's where I'm at yeah colloquy um is that something that you're intending to bring back in July as well because I understood that we were going to be talking about the number to write additional funding needs that may come is it also going to

[58:00] involve well the way we normally do ballot measures is you know Sam is we bring first reading ordinances to council so we and on many occasions we've brought multiple versions of a first reading ordinance we don't really have time to do before the break so when we talk about July we're really talking about bringing back first reading ordinances sometime after the break in July we could probably we might want to talk about it depending on where we are at the July 11 study session to get further guidance because the first council meeting is until after that so we could we could do that or we could do what Norma Doyle was just bringing back things and you can decide which way you might want to go can I ask about so one of the one of the things or several other things that were talked about with respect to this item for one was sort of effectively a you know a ballot item this is where we're done we don't have to meet it or we've met it one of the things something like that the other thing that Matt talked about was the idea of actually altering the metrics

[59:00] like for example taking rate parity out is that is that what's talked what you're talking about somebody drafting up as well yeah it could be any number of things I think Tom had a couple of other options as well I guess I just sounds like we've have a handful of options and they're not fully baked and I guess I'd kind of be curious as to what those are it's work that's gonna vention have to be done anyway so it's we either do the work now or we do the work next year and we do the work now and we decide we don't like him any of them we want to wait it seems to me we just put it on the shelf and we've got we're ready for next year how much work is this because it does think if we get far reaching kicking it's not it's not something we do in a few hours but it's it's something we're used to doing and it's it's something we've kind of got budgeted we expect June June and July to be drafting ballot measures so it's something where we're ready and prepared to do so if Council wants to consider

[60:01] something we're happy to do it and it's not going to delay any other work items on our agenda okay i am i guess i doubt it i will want to go forward so i guess it's not a high priority for me so but if every way i'm curious at the depth of our curiosity on this one so i guess it's not a top priority if you run out of time for me go ahead Mary I'm kinda with Suzanne I just don't see the point of drafting things if we're unlikely to go with them it just seems like not the best use of time I like one more shot at this I mean I actually think it would be helpful and I think voters might feel like the the metric is is more relevant than what was previously there because again that the

[61:00] previous metric which was the day one I mean a lot of people had some concern over that about well yes day one's nice but doesn't tell you much and it doesn't really tell you much again we put it in because that was the only thing we thought we could really measure with any certainty but I think something that changes that and is a little more comprehensive like a net present value I mean frankly I think that could give some people a little more confidence that council isn't going to go ahead with this unless it makes sense makes monetary sense but then but then how would you address the court's decision which is you haven't met it yet would you well know that that was that was specified that was that was Tom's thing about make it a legislative decision that is not you can't really be sued over and you know you wouldn't do it

[62:00] until if the condemnation when you had essentially all or most of the cost though you would just you would propose me to come up with new crowd chatter criteria and that we just decide at that time yep but at least the already third party certification yeah I think so because frankly you're gonna know I mean a lot of a third party certification the last time around was because we didn't really know there were lots of moving parts let's face it which is why they did all of these you know statistical and out probabilistic analysis when you get after condemnation I mean the only thing you don't know for certain is really energy costs but you're the net present value as the ones we saw whatever that was a couple of months ago you're making some assumptions about your energy cost you're making some assumptions about excels energy cause as long as you're

[63:01] using the same basis for the assumptions you know if they both are a little higher or both are a little low all you care about is the relative nature of them so and I think you can get a pretty good shot at it and and so you don't necessarily your world your probabilistic world is really just excessive that way you're proposing well Matt let me just say that I agree with your abstract point about those being better metrics I just feel like this is not the year for it so I wouldn't want to tackle that on a ballot issue this year so not to disagree with the points you were just making but for me it's a timing question about this year and I get that and I don't actually disagree with it I'm just kind of thinking aloud I suppose about whether in fact people in the community who are thinking about municipal ization or not might actually not be assured a little bit by having that metric in there and saying okay now

[64:00] we get what the decisions going to be based on because it was never very clear before what the decision was going to be based on and we were asking people whether to go ahead with municipal ization it's kind of a yes/no question in November at least question one is kind of a yes/no question okay reasonable people might say I'm still nervous about this what can you how can you help me be a little less nervous and that's where I think amending number four could help so I think it's a positive okay Sam so I mean I agree Matt 100% net present value is really the only thing I've ever looked at but that can also translate into future rates right so it's a question of what people care about I think we want to regulate based on what the community cares most about I think the reason the community years of that net present value is it translates into rates at the end of the day and so I'm where Aaron is I don't think I'm ready to go forward right now

[65:00] but I think is we have this discussion with the community about do we want to proceed with this we should be communicating everything net present value carbon reductions rate impacts those are all important and so I think there's a role for it I just think that's not as accessible to most people as races okay we're gonna wrap this up Jen yeah I would just agree that we you should go ahead and my personal opinion is that would be good to go ahead and write something up so we can just look at it and continue to keep our options open okay well it's serious to forge um all right well do you wanna I'm just gonna point out that Lisa uh also had commented on this on March she didn't really did she she just said don't do 189 but she didn't uh I didn't see her I'm looking at she said I don't think now is the time to delete section 189 seems like we have plenty of time to do

[66:01] that once we wait so she did five she just didn't do before um I'm not sure how she thinks right now I think we're four four four four four on number four good I thought maybe I miscounted so how do you divide up the four again Bob gin Matt oh I think I put you in that category you don't want to do you want to know I'm the one that raised to the point right kicking it down the road kicking it down the road sorry okay all right we're we're being muddy and we're not making decisions tonight anyhow um I'd say we're pretty mixed about how much time we want you to spend on this but okay so why don't we we just sort of work we try to flesh it out a little bit more and bring it back July 11th and see where council wants to go we won't do a lot of work on it we won't actually draft ordinances but we we can come up with a with a better description of what we're talking about and council can tell us whether or not

[67:01] to draft an ordinance then is that okay okay there's a compromise for you does that work okay five I say not the time to do this does anybody disagree okay and so does okay so does Lisa - yeah so nobody is interested in pursuing five okay thank you a great feedback folks so onto the next one so thanks for driving Tom my part we'll be talking a little bit about the potential renewal of the point three percent sales and use tax for capital investments so on to the next one the yeah the staff has already started meeting with our citizen committee and we have presented to them 34 projects that represent 10 departments having different ideas and 180 million dollars in unfunded needs you may recall that we've come in front of the council

[68:01] before showing unfunded needs on the city in terms of capital as far in excess of this what we did though before going to our residence committee is that we tried to narrow it down to projects that were a little bit more near-term ones that we think the community's talked about a little bit so we really wanted it to narrow it down for the committee so they wouldn't be confronted with five hundred million dollars worth of projects in addition we have solicited the community to see what projects they might be interested in particularly nonprofits in the community and they have so far submitted 13 projects and it has closed so this is the number that we've gotten 12 organizations have made submissions and it's around 33 million in unfunded requests so going on just as a reminder about what the point 3 percent sales tax has produced so far it was passed by the voters in November of 2014 and it ends

[69:01] at the end of this year we've called it community culture and safety because we've had projects in this from all different areas on the screen is a lovely rendering of the Civic area improvements I think that you're starting to see those come to life right now we also made substantial real improvements to the dairy arts center and we've had a number of meetings there including the council retreat and hopefully you've seen the the great improvements that have occurred in that facility and how much it's being used now that some of those improvements have been made we also one of our first projects was improving eben fine Edmund G fine Park this had a lot of damage in the flood and we were able to use these dollars to really restore it and make it even better than it was before and then the University Hill pedestrian lighting was something that the students up on the hill as well as neighbors and ncu all we're very appreciative that we included all so if you've been to Chautauqua lately you've seen the new

[70:01] sidewalk improvements along baseline that are looking really good so we've done a lot of good with these tax dollars but as they begin to expire and our projects are completed we're hopefully ready to move forward with possibly renewing the tax again so I think that the council talked about earlier in January or February I'm forgetting when we brought this for you is the idea of instead of having a three year tax having a five or seven year tax one of the reasons for doing this is that we encountered difficulties of trying what we wanted to do is have an immediate impact on the community with this tax so that they would see that their tax dollars have really done something and so that constrained us a bit in trying to find projects that were shovel ready right away and a lot of project work needed to be done upfront if we have a little bit longer time to do it and we think we've proven ourselves in this three years we'll be

[71:00] able to have more projects and some of them can be in the out years so that we can grade it out a little bit so the point three percent sales tax if four five years would produce around fifty five million dollars in sales and use tax revenues seven years seventy eight million dollars one thing that we want to remind you about as we are reminding the committee as well is that we could change the way we are doing it a little bit so with the 0.3% we've had for three years we've been doing what we call pay-as-you-go so we don't do the project until we have the dollars with this length of tax we could do some tax anticipation notes and float a debt that would give us some flexibility what that would allow is if it was five years we could get fifty five million upfront or we could get say 40 million up front and do the rest as pay-as-you-go so we're talking a little bit about flexibility we don't know where the committee will end up and if you have any guidance for us this

[72:00] evening or for the committee we'd love to hear about it so then let me tell you just a little bit about the committee and what they're up to we have a lot of applications and we have a really great group of folks they are gender-balanced they're from all over the community different ages represent lots of different walks of life if you will in our community and they're really doing a great job so far they've had three meetings the first meeting was drinking from the fire hose and learning everything that they possibly could about city capital funding and tax revenues and it was a tough meeting for them but they did a great job the second two meetings have been the city staff presenting the city focused projects and at the end of each of the meetings they've had some clicker voting to see which projects they're most interested in the next meeting is coming up this Thursday and the the community projects will be presented so the community groups are coming to the meeting they

[73:01] will be talking about their project answering questions that the committee might have so they're doing a really great job among the things that they are looking at is the duration of the tax five or seven years and what the different funding packages would be they've made no decisions because they haven't seen all the projects yet but that's going to be one of their main tasks as they move forward so on to the next slide yeah so another task that they've been engaged in recently is trying to decide how are they going to make their decisions and so they have come up with some draft guiding principles these have not been adopted by the group yet because they're still talking about it but they want to guide themselves on how will they select the projects so the things that they're looking at is that project should have a wide community benefit they should promote or enhance public safety show a direct benefit to the taxpayers possibly achieve multiple

[74:01] goals be easy for the community to visualize and enhance livability of the community I think they'll be making some decisions in the next couple of weeks about finalizing these guiding principles and again if council has any recommendations in this regard they'd be very interested in in your input so another thing that the committee cares about is the community and community input so at the beginning of each meeting they are allowing members of the public to speak to them and they also are talking about in their own circles of influence talking to friends neighbors maybe underrepresented groups people that they know to try to just get as much input as they can about what the community cares about and then a major question that I'll be asking you later is this the the committee is beginning to believe and is recommending to to us and to you that we do a community survey a statistically valid phone poll on the

[75:01] proposed projects and the packages when they're developed they think that that will be helpful to the community and helpful to the council in making decisions about what to place on the ballot staff has done an informal bid process and has possibly selected a vendor that would conduct the poll if the council wants to move forward with it we believe the cost of it would be approximately twenty thousand dollars to do that kind of a phone survey and in talking with the vendor and it's Bob Drake so just so you know he is recommending that if we do a phone poll that include any other tax measures that we might put on the ballot so that you have a good sense of if there's too many tax measures on maybe they would all fail but just sort of trying to weigh them all against one another so that's a big question that I'll be asking tonight about whether or not you want us to move forward with that because we will need to do

[76:00] in the June timeframe and then the committee is also talking about what their role will be once the measures go on the ballot so in the event that you do put this on the ballot some of them are thinking we'd like to be advocates for it and have they've been asking questions about the city staffs role in them so we've been very clear that the the campaign finance read does not allow us to advocate for or against ballot measures and so they understand that and they're just thinking about what their own personal role might be so then where we are right now is that the community group presentations are coming up later this week they will be developing the packages in their next two meetings in late May and early June and they will develop those packages by the middle of June hopefully I'm hoping by maybe June 10th ish they're suggesting that we conduct the phone poll in late June and

[77:02] early July and then staff will analyze that and bring the committee recommendation to the City Council and the council will have the opportunity to pass ballot measure if you choose to do so put something on the ballot in August so that's kind of the timing that we've got going here so the questions that we have for council is do you have any specific feedback for the committee so some of the things that we talked about is perhaps council thinks oh five years is what we really should go for let's forget seven years or we'd really like a particular project to be highly considered or guiding principles so any feedback that you might have for them they would very much welcome and then finally we are interested in knowing if you will support us performing a telephone survey to gauge the likelihood of voting for this or not and that's my presentation okay and I guess we have a lot of questions cuz I know I have

[78:00] several yeah um let's ask questions I guess one of the last ones just on this poll yes it Bob Drake says on all measures so if we said yes we'd be pulling on muni we'd be pulling on broadband we'd be pulling on all of them what his suggestion would be is that we pull on items that would raise taxes just that just that okay interesting oh did you want to just got a colloquy raise taxes or maintain taxes well I anything can't do it taxes anything having to do with dollars so that could be utility occupation yes yes it could be the broadband so it could be broadband it could be yeah okay then the other thing is you mentioned packages so are they preparing scenarios different types of packages of projects or they haven't gotten to that point yet but

[79:00] what I can imagine that they would do is they may say we want to have a set of projects if there was a five-year renewal or if there were a seven year renewal and they might they would choose different things because there would be more in the seven year renewal or they might say we want to figure out how much you what kind of package we'd have if it was five-year pay-as-you-go versus forty million up front and the rest of it pay as you go so they might choose different scenarios that way so they haven't talked about it yet but that's what you're thinking that's what I want my packages right okay I want them to have the flexibility to be creative about the things that our community wants and that we could fund it in this tax renewal okay and my last question is simply can you just say a little bit more maybe Bob or whoever about the payment options and if you you do debt financing obviously

[80:03] that costs a little bit more but on the other hand then everything has to be shovel ready or not or I just want to understand right so um so debt financing does cost something however if we have a project that we need to save up for through pay-as-you-go if we have to gave up for six years what we're finding is that construction costs go up around ten percent a year and so it's actually cheaper to do pay for the debt financing upfront than to just have to save the money over that period of time because the cost of the project will have gone up a lot okay all right so we have Sam Jin Bob sorry were you up oh you don't have questions okay who's got any more questions yep so um phone poll what was the thinking behind that because there's some question about how many people you get on phone poles

[81:02] people with cell phones that are harder to reach out to versus written one like we just did for the you know we were advised to do a written one by the folks who did the survey for the comp plan a written one takes longer to do and the latest technology I guess around phone poles that we've heard people talk about does get people with cell phones and so we're hearing from our consultants that phone poles are as accurate as written ones okay that said it for you Jan my question Jane was about the committee and the 13 projects that have been submitted will the committee narrow those down that yes the the committee will take a look at all of them and then

[82:01] they'll make a decision to include some all or none of them in in the packet in the package as I say okay forward so it's not a foregone conclusion that there will be community projects or that there won't be we don't know what there will be and what about the city projects how does that enter the process both with the committee and with the council and then how do they you know how do they judge the community projects visa vie the city projects so that's why they're coming up with guiding principles to make sure that that n projects that they pick will be impactful to the community I'll just say it as quickly as that and and so they will just judge it based on their view of how impactful a project might be so a project that's not very sexy is the

[83:00] radio infrastructure that we need for our public safety so they may say well that doesn't sound on first blush like a compelling project it's really needed for public safety and so that may rise to the top for them and then that they may say well but we want a package that is a little bit more compelling a little bit more interesting so let's add in something related to one of the parks or the reservoir and then we we really want to garner community support and we think that a lot of people care about this nonprofit organization so we'll add that in so it's really just sort of in a way ballot calculus voter calculus about what projects the community will find impactful it'll increase livability here and ones that they think that the community will want to vote for and so they'll create the packages for you but you what I will want to make sure of is that you see how they've ranked them so

[84:00] if they have a project that didn't quite make the cut you'll see that it didn't quite make the cut and council will be the one ultimately to put them on the ballot or not and so you can say you know that didn't make the cut but one of them they put on we don't like that much or it's not as good as this one so so you will make the final decision it's just that we are trying to get as much community input as we can so that we get the sense of what the community cares the most about and if I can just summarize what you said the committee will be looking at both the city proposed projects as well as the nonprofit they'll be creating some recommendations for council to consider at perhaps both price levels or cost levels and so then we'll review what they've already narrowed down on both sides right okay right thank you so much yeah yeah so Jane let me you your your last

[85:00] statement there actually it's it's it's partly some feedback but it's really a question - in terms of the committee work because what you said was the committee is going to this the way you explained it try to balance everything and say well we need a project here because maybe it'll attract some voters but you're also going to provide us and this is the question with kind of in a way they're there their raw judgment which is what I'd like to see I mean I got to tell you I don't think it's the committee's role necessarily to decide which projects are sexy and which ones are going to garner votes that kind of sounds like councils role I'd like the committee to say you're really the best projects yeah Council I mean we're a political body we might say okay we got to put one of these in because of my garnish some votes I get it but I first like to see you know really what is most important in a way at least the committee's judgment about what's most important to

[86:00] the community so that's the question are we really going to see that or is that going to kind of get jumbled up with these other considerations so you never get a clearly now that you said that like that's the kind of feedback I'm looking for right okay so that's what we will be communicating to the committee is that council wants your straight up judgment about which are the best projects for our community all right I'm not sure what can I try I would have thought of that if the question hadn't been asked but since Italy but also they say this is almost meritorious but we want to see a mix of and this is my question about the public safety thing we want to see a mixture of culturally inviting and public safety so that's the guy that could be guidance they give us as well right that could be and that's fine cuz they're rational they're thinking right what we want right so okay and then we'll have them that point yeah right or I get some more questions but if you want to follow up in its bellies I'd sent in terms of your feedback on that I mean I agree that we need to look at what's a most impactful for the community but I think part of

[87:01] the benefit from this would be having a balanced set of measures and so that's not so much about well what what are people going to vote for but it's more of we probably don't want all of one kind of project we want to you know create a balance of different kinds of things that we're funding so I would say in addition to thinking about what's most impactful there should be a balance of the kinds of things we're funding but as long as they include their rationale I think that's useful they're thinking on these matters so we know if we disagree about the particular project but they think it should be balanced we you know now that's what I think it's useful okay few other questions operating costs I mean the committee is looking at capital cost is anybody looking at operating costs and that's not just for the city projects it could also be for the other projects where inevitably the city ends up footing the bill for things yeah the answer to that is yes as we have had staff present a project we also provide

[88:03] the committee with information about how much it's going to cost to operate a particular capital facility and some of them have been very interested in that and so that they will weigh that before they put a project forward well I need to say I'm interested right well I mean as I've said many times you know we can usually find money to do capital I mean not 800 million dollars worth but the hard part's spending X million a year running them where that's just difficult so you know that's really important and it's not the committee's role of course I've been looking at the numbers to figure out where the money comes from and what doesn't get spent I suppose that's your role about giving us some advice about whether well you know this department would just they wouldn't be spending money here anymore they'd move it to here or no they'd really need an extra budgetary allotment because

[89:02] that's what it would take cuz I don't know I'll just make this up it's a new park so it's just going to cost more money to operate a new park which is fine but the money has to come from somewhere yeah think they're aware of it and will present that information to and then in terms of the so called community projects insofar as some of them are using city land are we calculating the value of the land or more importantly the value of replacing the land or whatever on it um I don't know the answer to that but we totally can do that well it seems to me you need to do it okay so I'm gonna ask Joel Wagner to come up so Joel Wagner who you know full well from the finance department and Jean gotta have been to working on it and Darren Wagner from open space has been facilitating so Joel is a little bit more knowledgeable than I am and can answer your question good evening thanks Jane uh yeah I think the

[90:02] short answer is yes they're starting to look at it we've just started to get reviewing questions from the community group and I have to say I'm really impressed at the level of detail that a lot of these are going into and they've already really have cut to the quick on a lot of these including some of these projects would require relocation of staff and they're asking about what kind of conversations these groups have had with staff what plan and they are and then coming back to us as well as as what stages we are on that I'm not suggesting it precludes anything it doesn't it's just you need to get a full it's all well and good to say this is going to cost two million dollars to build it but if it's thinking across the city three million dollars to relocate what's there well then it's five million dollars it's not two million any more and somebody has to come up with that money so that's important to me all right thanks unless the last question I have is so this tax if it were passed would go into effect January 2018

[91:01] essentially so two years late after that the general fund gets I believe an extra point one point one one because one of the other taxes this was the deal we made a long time ago very complicated ballot issue in 2013 not suggesting that the general fund couldn't use that money but I'm just wondering whether there wouldn't be a way that maybe roll some of that into a capital tax as well and then get a little more money for capital and be able to do some more projects because this is going to be I mean this is once in five or seven years seven years perhaps it's gonna be a long time before we come back to this so you're right to remember that a possibility for that if it were not capital would be to help operate some of the new facilities that might be created

[92:01] we we have a lot to talk about this year with regard to the budget and I know you've been getting some emails about people concerned about property taxes they are going up and that might be another source of capital funding for the future yeah that was that was kind of the next question although just for the record folks the actual even though people's assessments went up by 25% mine did too taxes are only going to go up by half of that because the insanity of the gallery or amendment so we need to it's not like it's a small increase but it's not a 25% increase and it's almost impossible to explain to anybody why that's the case but it is nonetheless the case and we're working on a response to some of these those emails and it will go out later yeah that would be helpful but no that was another question about those right so I all right all in all rolls together you need to know what the operating costs are and then you can maybe have a sense of is there some other money that could help roll into this because again

[93:03] I think it's once every seven years or so and you know you want to do as many projects as you can the odds are there won't be anything else during that seven year period right all right thanks up I'm not in any questions I was disconcerted like we're ready to move forward right okay good I have three things to say Jane um one with respect to the five years versus seven years you kind of maybe signal that you would be interested hearing on that I've always had a bit of a bias towards the shorter time just because it takes us out of the market I mean as we look at the other taxes that are coming up for renewal with exception the one that Matt mentioned I don't we have a whole lot coming up in the next decade or so and I worry a little bit about you know needs change you know five years from now seven years none who knows what our needs are going to be and so I have a bias towards a shorter tax I leave it entirely to the finance department about what part gets bonded in what part of this pay-as-you-go that I leave to you guys but but what it would be really

[94:00] helpful I think for us is if the committee came back to us and said if it was five years if we had fifty five million dollars to spend here's the projects both community in the city that we would do and if we had 78 million here's the extra other projects we would do because then we can look at that second list and say gosh there's some really important things here and maybe we should just bite the bullet and go for seven years or maybe you say hey listen this stuff is kind of discretionary let's talk about those in five years none of them seem to be of great urgency so that's I guess the kind of guidance that I'd like to have from the committee is five your tax and a seven-year tax and what the difference is between the two sampling just can we just cliff on that the the phone if we decide to do a phone poll that could be one of their questions about five versus seven yes it could be okay cuz that might be useful too so second point is I'm going to slightly disagree with Matt a Jane could you go back to the slide that talks about the criteria that they're considering that one I actually would like I would appreciate the input of the committee because they're 12 as

[95:00] you say change very representative members of our community but what they think they're their fellow voters would support because at the end of this process they're going to be the subject matter experts they're going to know more about these projects as a whole than any of the rest certainly than us and most members of the community and while yes they could give us the raw data yeah this is a more worthy project than that and we could then exercise our political discretion to say well yeah but that's but we think this one's more likely to get the voters approval I actually would would would appreciate them taking both the raw data or the information they've gathered and their their judgment I'd like to hear their judgment on what they think would be and they can express that any way they could say hey listen if we didn't if there's only the 12 of us voting here's what we do but you know what we live in a real world and there's gonna be 30,000 people voting here's what we think we should you should do i'd really would value the judgment is my friend i'd go a step further and i they add another criteria which is project should is kind of implied here

[96:03] through all these but I would actually be explicit about and say that will draw community support or will draw voter support be even more direct about it because I would really value their judgment on that and I you know having served on one of these committees in 2011 I think we did exercise that judgment I think we even used the word sexy repeatedly you know is this project sexy enough to draw because you know what we can talk all we want about needs but you know what if the voters voted down none of the projects are going to get done so I think their judgment on what is sexy and what the voters will support is really going to be important to me and then finally with respect to the phone poll I'm kind of ambivalent about it and this kind of ties to my last point I'd rather hear from the twelve of them then do a phone poll and I know it can be statistically valid and so and so forth I'm just not sure what we do with that information because either gonna be too early or too late so you're gonna be so early in the process that our questions of the voters are going to be inarticulate and we're

[97:02] gonna say yeah there's gonna be some stuff but we're not really too sure what its going to be and if it's too late I'm not sure like what do we do at that point in time I mean maybe that's a forecast to us that the measures gonna pass or fail or that we have to work harder to get it to pass but I'm just I'm not super thrilled about these types of polls I think we should just put our best foot forward and let the poll is in November thank you that's all Mary so I actually think that these guiding principles are great as they are and I would like the committee has these to work with and to look at the projects based on these in light of these guiding principles and what I would like to see is their evaluation of the projects before them based on these guiding principles what are the best regardless of whether it's balanced on sexy or cultural or safety what do they think

[98:02] are the best most based on these guiding principles what are the best ones and then we can make the other decisions I think until you've gone through an election you don't have a sense for what voters may or may not want and so I just I just don't think that that they are that shouldn't be there their mission damn we'll just go down there in an errand so just speaking on the guiding principles I like everything that's up there I would add one about increasing inclusivity or increasing welcoming nature's a city because I think that's an important one that were focused on right now given the political environment that we're living in nationally if you go back to the questions that would help me out um oops

[99:00] one past the you know I'd like the advisory committee to advise which means to me that they make recommendations you know so they they order projects and I like the idea of a five-year cluster and a seven-year cluster so what they would do depending on what the duration of the tax was but I also would appreciate their advice on we think this package is useful now Council will do what Council will do with that advice and I'm sure that they'll understand that but I would appreciate them talking about a rationale for how they grouped the packages in the five year of the seven year I don't think there's any harm in that and there's probably a lot of benefit and then as far as the poll goes I mean I hear what Bob saying the same time what I would think it would be best done if it were put out there would be something for the working group to use to inform their decision making so I

[100:00] would prefer to err on the side of earlier and what we would be talking about is things like five years or seven years do you generally support this extension here are some of the types of projects that were done previously do you personally new open-ended questions where the public can then contribute project ideas I think sometimes there's good value in that but you could try and cluster you know is one of these types safety or culture or oops missing the third one or is that the are any of these more important to you or any of these principles more important to you I just think you could get good guidance for the working group and that would be probably hazard one let me interject and I'm sorry to interrupt you but that the timing that we have is actually not going to support our doing a poll to inform the group this group will be done with its work in the June 8th to 10th timeframe is that right Oh Joel sorry we

[101:05] have started to just float the idea of maybe pushing a meeting out or having an additional meeting if they want to incorporate that idea yet but nothing's on the schedule right so they they would have to extend their term if you will into July in order for this to happen and we don't know if they are willing to do that or not so I just want to be realistic here that we might not be able to get that to happen so I mean to the extent I agree with Bob is that I'm not sure what we do with the results of the poll if they indicate that there's not a lot of support I think we should put the choice to the voters in any case I would think the value would be if there's any way it can inform the group's discussion so maybe you can ask the group if they agree with that or disagree with it um were you thinking of this with staff thinking of this mostly as a pre-election poll or more of a poll do you dis council walk to in light of this knowledge put this on the ballot so I

[102:02] will give you my views then I actually don't think that we should do a poll but the group thinks that it would be helpful information for council about making the decision about what to include in the package that council would put before the voters okay well I'm more inclined not to do it if it's going to be an election tool or something that is going to inform us about what to put forward I think hearing from them is going to be the most important thing for me about that because I think they'll have a really probably solid package so if if we're going to help them make their decision or decisions and they have asked for it or suggested it and I'm willing to support it to do that but not if it's after they've essentially put the packages together so I liked what

[103:01] Bob said about timing I'm interested in getting the hearing about the different baskets or clusters or whatever we might call them so to give us some options but there I think it's a good point about app read by estores a shorter term so that future community needs can be addressed a few years down the road but I'm interested in what the options are um in terms of the the poll I mean it could be interesting to hear what people in the community or most most value but at the same time if we if we're if we're working on packages that we think complement each other which is my which was my comment before I don't know that we want to go out and then say well this gum one got four percent more support so well but this one in this one we've got three percent less we'll take it out yeah I'm I'm less offended so I guess I'm a little agnostic on the on the question of the poll and one one thing I had let's see on the guiding principles there's a bit of an implication in the

[104:01] way that they were laid up their put up there that every project should meet every guiding principle and that would not be possible right so no yeah so we won't just make that clear that here's a bunch of goals and satisfy as many of them as we can I thought Sam's point was an interesting one about adding a principle about being welcoming inclusive or maybe another way to think about that is you know how does the project help members of underrepresented communities you know something like that so I'm I'm not sure about exactly how you word that but I'd be interested in seeing a criteria that looked at those issues met yeah mostly agree that so one other I just that I guess step back for a second one other question I God is in so far as some of these potential projects relate to specific departments Oh library North Branch or a

[105:03] transportation project those are things popped in my mind I mean are we going to go back and ask those boards whether those are really the top priorities for them if this really is a once in every five or seven year deal I don't want to just make a transportation project randomly I kisses a bunch on the list I don't particularly want to pluck one out that the committee thinks is cool and then tab and the Transportation Department says you know that would not be what we really would want to do in the next seven years we get some other things that are way more important than that so all of the projects that we've presented to them have gone to the affected boards already is my understanding Joel am i right on that so that all of the board liaisons have been presenting information and they've presented the full project list of the boards asked for their input and

[106:02] thoughts on the renewal not specific ranking of the projects but what I would say is all of the department projects that are here are essentially plucked off of their unfunded needs lists and have gone through an extensive prioritization through the department's themselves and without them look at alignment with master plans and things like that so well I know the arc I know the library master plan is being redone so it's a little out of sequence but okay it'd be nice to kind of and maybe none of the projects will be relevant but it'd be nice to kind of run it past some of these folks in the end and just make sure that everybody's good with it again I'm you know if it really is seven years that's a long time and you don't want to you know how to do a project where the Department of the board is sitting there scratching their heads thinking you know that's just not the one we would have picked right so the

[107:00] timing might allow us to accomplish this so if the group says we aren't going to extend our term into July but they end in June then we would have the opportunity before we come to you in August to go back to probably all of the boards I mean it would have to be a short item on their agendas but we probably could make it back to the boards to just check in with them right well it's just just an abstraction if it works that's great if not so be it I mean they have the boards of other ways of communicating with us if they choose to so that's okay I'm fine with the guiding principles they seem reasonable Bob I really didn't disagree with you about the committee putting together a package or two based on a variety of things I just also thought it'd be useful to see the kind of prepackaged conversation as it were

[108:03] because we might have a slightly different take on the packaging I mean there however many people were however many people nobody knows exactly what is the best packaging strategy they don't we don't but you know I'd like to see there we've been calling it the raw data it's not maybe it's a little bit of an overstatement but at least kind of a before we packaged it all together what they really thought were the important things I think that'd be really helpful on the polling yeah I just don't know what it will tell us I don't see the polling I mean there was it some discussion about well the polling could tell us how to put together the package but it sounds like the polling would be already a package and anyway you could ask people what types of things they wanted is if you gave him the whole laundry list again and said well do you like this one do you like this one deal like this one that we know is really

[109:00] hard because just as the committee I'm sure found out you have to know a lot to answer those questions have to be told a lot about the projects you know even the package you have to know something and again just to use a trivial example I most people I think will fund fire stations but if you don't know that the real issue is it's in the floodplain it's ancient and doesn't serve our purposes anymore is in the wrong place you might not think it's quite as high a priority oh it's just a fire station why do they need one well that's why we need one but who knows that well we do but you know who else knows it so I'm a little nervous about that I mean Sam you kind of said it you know this is just an election poll is it really useful I'm not sure it's really useful until it's kind of out and about and people are focusing on it and and and the other concept of the poll that that by Drake

[110:02] brought up that really doesn't make much sense to me I mean I get the theory of there could be multiple taxes on the ballot and they play one off against another I believe me I get that but boy the other ones people aren't going to know anything about them at the time the poll is being done and it's just going to be this cold call essentially gee do you like this broadband tax well that's why you're saying to compare them and what and if they're if five taxes were on the ballot but I don't think they're gonna know enough I mean and that if this is done in June we won't we won't have deals with people we won't know outcomes of things that we'll know by the time November comes along um it'll be a really hard question to ask anybody so I mean Bob's right in general but I just think the timing doesn't allow for it again I think he's thinking more of an election poll than of a yeah helping you fashion something and and they're really two different concepts Jen thanks

[111:06] I thought you were doing around Robin there um I love this this committee and um I think it's fantastic that you've got them together and they've come from different backgrounds I think I would really like to see at least two options on the 55 million and then I think Bob suggested then if they would then add projects to the next level maybe maybe make that an additional option so there aren't too many but they may even have a great way to structure that so I'm really excited about having them involved and I think one thing that we need to maybe talk to them about because I really since the community is is going to be upset about their property taxes and I don't know what our options are and when we'll actually discuss them in terms of if we have an opportunity to lower the mill love a mill levy but I

[112:00] think giving them some purview to that because I think it is going to be a factor in getting this passed and how people feel about their overall taxation and then in question - I'm not going to respond to that because since you mentioned Bob's name he was my finance chairman and I think I shouldn't have any comment on that whatsoever okay I'll just jump in real quick um I'll just note that shockers Lisa Moore Zell would like a North Boulder Library okay as would Erin okay that was her input I guess two things the criteria it it helps that you said not every project has to do everything but the previous tax was community culture and safety and the one that's called out is safety and I thought that was a little odd because one could argue that cultural arts only indirectly helps with safety dynam I just think it's

[113:00] worth noting that and there are some community projects that are environmental but if you think of them as contributing community anyhow to me it's not really clear they could be clear about if they're also talking about other things and maybe one way to get at community the inclusivity and underrepresented is in the context of a criteria that talks about building community so now I think they could maybe be a little clearer about what it if it really is a community culture safety tax or not so the last time we did this we named it community culture and safety as as part of the shorthand to discuss the projects and what we told the committee at the first meeting is that we weren't going to name it upfront we weren't going to presume that it would be the same thing but that as they selected the projects we would and as the council ultimately made the decision that a name would

[114:02] arise from that and it might end up being community culture and safety part two but we want to see what the what projects rise to the surface and and so I I personally believe that the public safety was put on there because they want to have some public safety projects but that it's not exclusive to that and they're very open to the community projects to parks projects that you know they they're open to all things so they're guiding principles are not have to meet all of them and we can ask them to be more explicit on them only if you're going to grade it against either they mean something and you're grading it against them which case you should be clear and yeah I'm glad they know what they mean if somebody else is going to look and see if they went by their criteria it might be misleading okay but the other thing is you mentioned a little bit about whether groups are going to help whether some of the groups are going to help with the tax to me right I wasn't sure where we ended up

[115:02] with that I do think that last time for example to a benefited the dairy and museums museum so they helped lead the tax which to me makes sense but there's also any odd so so where that comes from is that at the very first meeting the some of the committee members were very passionate about wanting to care about the ballot measure and they were asking from the very beginning what's our role after it gets on the ballot should be should we be out there advocating for it and what does staff going to do so we reminded them that staff certainly can't do anything that's violating the law and that we can't advocate for or against but we said as individuals you certainly are welcome to do that and so that's where that is is coming from we just wanted you to know that there eager and anxious to care about this

[116:00] okay great and then I'm agreeing with what's been said about yeah give us a couple packages give us your rationale so if it's raw data if it's your judgement about what the voters want just explain to us your reasoning so we can follow the breadcrumbs and disagree or not with different rationales and then the other thing I would say is I guess I'm with Sam on the poll if it's going to be useful to putting it together let's do it or I'm open to doing it I don't feel strongly that that's it's it's utility okay thanks okay who else wants to weigh in anything else yep I didn't weigh in on the poll but um I do think that it also is Sam that it would be most useful if it gave some guidance to the committee okay thank you yeah okay good enough you know that's helpful thank you very much okay so our next presenter is Karl

[117:03] Castillo um Karl is our legislative policy advisor in the city manager's office and he will be talking to us about the broadband project good evening great time to take a break I'll just wait the TV's on it yeah okay thanks for the reminder so um I think this is going to be fairly short you'll let me know as the Jana Thicke mentioned Don is not able to join us today he's at a colored association of IT professionals conference thank you so in April April 18th council did authorized staff to narrow the focus of a broadband effort to to to not include a full financing of

[118:02] the network and since then we've been moving forward with evaluating options that fill that direction so next slide we've been in active negotiations with the finalists and I would include Zao and that list the finalists as you all may recall we've had ting we've had a low and they had axia I just spoke to Don and he believes that in communications with our own local companies AO that they should be elevated to that same level of finalists that they've expressed sufficient interest at this point and they were sufficiently serious that they would be in that same level in terms of things that would be negotiating just this is by way of a reminder council did express interest in exploring the partial city funding of a network and that would have us that would bring us two things one is perhaps lower rates in terms of what our

[119:00] consumers would actually have to pay for broadband but also the additional control that would come would by having naked maiden in partial investment in the infrastructure that we would have a little more control in the things that you see right below that bullet so in other words by making it an investment we're more likely to get a ubiquitous build-out more likely to get a digital equity package that really is something that is both affordable and meaningful for or for those who can't otherwise afford it open access that's probably the holy grail of this project has been able to not only bring in a new competitor and to have this high-speed infrastructure but to make it available to multiple internet service providers so that we have lots more competition an ability to contribute to our smart city objectives so this is everything from traffic lights Public Safety could be connected in autonomous

[120:00] vehicles the broadband is a foundational element of that and finally it's adding to the competitive environment of course that is merely by bringing in a new partner that would be adding to competition but more so having a deal that is structures hosted to diminish the possibility that that new partner somehow gets bought out by one of the incumbents and turns us to the current state of affairs which is less than ideal rather than summarize the negotiations I will just mention that one of the partners that we've been very interested in has has had some new information that is unfortunate Axia which is based in Calgary has told us that they will no longer be following through with their expressed interest in Fort Collins or in Bloomington Indiana and that is due to their apparent partner who has decided that their open access model is something that they're not quite

[121:00] comfortable continuing to fund so this is obviously very concerning and how this affects our willingness continue to consider them as a partner is to be determined they have said they are still interested in working with us probably what distinguishes us from Bloomington and Fort Collins is that we have in fact put on the table the idea of a partial investment but to be frank this is obviously a very serious blow to our ability to consider him you know one of the finalists but for now they're still on there so so Bloomington in Fort Collins we're going to have them pay have them pay for and do it all yeah the deal that was being was it was really close to being finalized in fact I think they were just I was thinking that Donnie was saying it's they were about to start building was that the Axia would have done the entire investment so it was on that side of the

[122:01] spectrum so Boulder would be different in that we're willing to consider at least a partial investment so the proposal is that we would come back to you I think we mentioned before on July 25th with some information actually not just some information but with the information that you would need to make a decision about whether to go to the voters this November so the next slide the the question for council tonight is quite limited fairly straightforward which is this council want staff to continue to do the research to continue to meet and negotiate with these these finalists to bring the information back to you that will allow you to then decide whether it's appropriate the referral measure to the voters this November and that would be a measure that would actually increase tax and allow a debt authorization I want to clarify what is not being asked to be

[123:01] today because I know there's been a lot of emails that have been sent and there's been communications that we've heard as recently as last Thursday's broadband event if I know at least two of you were able to make and some of you may have heard some information by providing staff so if you were to say yes staff continue nothing strange since April you know you've got so many developments but we have a lot of work to do it's ambitious as Don says you know let's give the college tried see if we can get you the information that you need to feel comfortable what is not it so if you go forward with that what that doesn't preclude the possibility that come July 25th and when you get the information that we provide you that you say I got four different options here you could say well thank you but we wanted the way the ballot measure until 2018 for whatever reason that maybe you can say you know we want to what you're bringing to us does not require a city investment does not

[124:00] require a city broadband tax but we still want to put the measure on the ballot or a measure on a ballot because we want to get a confirmation that our voters are comfortable with this with this partner so I know at least one person has suggested that this is an important enough decision that every spectrum of attacks it should be it should go to the voters you would still retain that right it could also include a franchise so one of our at least one of our partners that we're looking at is looking to bring a cable package along with the internet so it could be that in addition to a tax measure it could be a franchise agreement measure so all those things would still be available to you you could also decide that after hearing what we would report back that you know a private partnership isn't really what we thought it was going to be it's not in perhaps it's not as encouraging as you thought and you could then say let's resurface the idea of a full public build full public finance so that option would still be available to you and or you could even say let's delay

[125:01] this or let's abandon it all together for whatever reason you know maybe municipal ization should be completely flushed out how many years in the future whatever it may be so all those options which basically have been suggested to you by people who have emailed to you I just want to make clear that they are still on the table they will be available to you you will just have more information to make that decision clearly counsel our staff is is as hopeful that we will be able to provide you with information that allows you to go forward with a tax measure this November but we recognize that's a heavy lift so just want to make that that clear so with that I'll end it and take any questions that you may have questions did thanks Carl if there were a tax what type of tax would it be it would be a property tax and beyond that I'd have got to ask Bob akin would you like more information on that because I don't have it excuse me

[126:13] Thank You Carl I'm Bob I come I work in the finance area and working on this project it could either be a sales tax or it could be a property tax with partial the first time we did it we said if you want to do the whole thing with the city it can be a good 0.2 or point 3 sales tax or between 2 to 3 mils if we do the partial would like we talked last time on the 18th of April maybe between 1 to 2% point excuse me point one or point to mean one tenth or two tenths or one or two mils but it depends which one would be looking at which one we be doing it could be a property or sales tax and just to clarify so when he says a partial or full so what we're currently exploring

[127:00] is this partial City investment not the full in for financing the infrastructure and can you talk about the process of and the current assessments have gone up quite a lot and so unless we adjust the mill levy then everyone's taxes will be going up anyway so would this be incremental to that or would they get that value is that something they would get based on the fact that their house just went up skyrocketed by 25 percent and what is the timing of all that analysis you know the kind of assessment of mill levies versus this the it could be either it could you could look at that as a part of the increase or it could be standalone separately so voters could work on the city hasn't hasn't in the past before the Tabor restrictions were removed by the voters in 2007 we use a

[128:04] melody credit we don't reduce the mill levy itself because you can never raise it again without a vote if you do that with the credit you can did you can go back up but we've had years where the valuations were total so we can move it up so it could be either and it could it doesn't have to be a property tax you can be a sales tax but we would look at all options and when that would be analyzed is through the budget process now if you want to put it on the ballot though we will accelerate that process so we can bring those numbers back to you did you hey Bob as long as you're here can you just back up and do a little 101 on tax assess this the process with regard to property tax just in terms of who does what and what if we're going to just no levy just I think there's a lot of confusions out there but who's in charge and how does this work and it might be useful there's not

[129:00] simple to explain but I will try my okay give us the when you hear the property valuations grow about 35% that does not mean your property tax bill is going up 35% the Gallagher amendment which was passed in 1982 says that there will be a relationship a racial relationship between commercial and residential and because commercial is set what happens then over time is if you your house let's make this real easy on me is a million dollars the property fair market value of your house is a million dollars right now for assessment purposes it's roughly about eight percent that is taken okay so eighty thousand dollars and then the mill levies applied to that whereas if you're a commercial a business that's million dollars worth of your value its assessed at twenty eight percent or two hundred eighty thousand dollars times the mill

[130:00] levy that's that relationship between Gallagher that causes the money so there are other restrictions some statutory restrictions of the counties and the school districts that the city does not have and those are where you get into the Tabor and what was voted out but also how much it can go up for a year Council always has the final say on how much the property tax can go up that would be discussed during the budget process and can you speak to the Gallagher amendment change the changes coming this year because of the Gallagher amendment I'm sorry sir I didn't hear you can you speak to the changes coming this year because of the Gallagher amendment requirements yeah they keep changing the numbers um if they originally thought that the relationship that twenty eight percent was you know stay for commercial but it stays at that so that means the residential is got to be pressed down and the more they were talking closer to I think it was like six and a half percent I don't know that that's been

[131:00] finalized yet they think the final numbers about 7.2 the last number I saw and that's about a ten percent drop from what it currently is so you got to do the math but yes assessments went up but the valuation of residential you gotta be careful the residential properties went down by about 10 percent commercial properties Chris then go down at all so then out paying about four times as much as residential it's about of its exactly a four to one ratio so I have a question as well is the county D Bruce so the city is D Bruce so we managed our small slice of the property tax revenues relative to the county who collects them I believe what is the it is the school district D Bruce or do they still have to abide by Tabor I believe they are on the local level because they receive our what funding per individually Bruce in

[132:01] other words they do no longer have to comply with Taylor I just didn't know what she said when you said they are I just didn't know so they're at the local level I believe at the local level they are out from under that but a lot of their funding comes from the state level depending on how much you get per student and that can come from many different sources the county I believe is also alpha under the table restrictions who would be remiss in saying the portion of the amount of property tax that you pay on your bill roughly about 13% of that comes to the city the greatest portion of it goes to the school district into the county right and so because the school district and the county at least the portions that are funded off of property tax bills from within the city if they are D Bruce that they no longer have to comply with Tabor then all they're doing is complying with the Gallagher amendment because one other there's one other restriction on statutory entities and

[133:02] I'm sure it applies to the counties but not I'm not sure of the school district is they can only go up so much each year the amount of revenue they can collect I think that's five point five I'd I'm not sure that that's where that tors going with this because if as long as we're trying to untie all the engine a little bit here how so you say that's a statutory limit on the school district but it's not Tabor which has the toy limit on the county it's on the county I don't know if it's on the school district either but it is on the county so if it's on the county then what that means is there's yet another layer of complexity here because not only is it that you have to keep the ratios between the commercial and residential properties the same but this limit that is applied to how fast the revenues can go up relative to previous years means that there's what I used to call when I was thinking about fire department funding was a fudge factor and what the

[134:01] fudge factor does is takes and says that all will come down by a certain amount so in other words when you look at your property tax bill and you see the mill levy being applied to a number that's much smaller than the value of your house that some combination of the Gallagher amendment Plus this countywide fudge factor plus whatever the school boards do plus what we do so it is indeed very complicated but what it almost always means is that sticker shock of your home assessment going way up is going to be a lot greater than the sticker shock you'll see when you get your building so somebody needs to do the math and somebody will obviously I don't think they know all the numbers yet but so if in Boulder the average residential property went up 25% of 26 percent if you factor all of this stuff in this kind of incomprehensible stuff in yep probably and assuming in the middle every stay the same you probably

[135:02] wind up with a tax increase and I'm just guessing now of something like 11 or 12 percent but some smart person is going to have to do the math at some point so and Jane did you mention that the city staff is putting together a response to concerns about property tax increases so and can all of all these pieces of information that we're talking about be incorporated into that I think they can however as Matt and Sam are pointing out these other minor adjustments are ones that we don't know about because other taxing entities own if you will their decisions in that regard and so we don't know what they will decide but we can provide I think a an overarching statement that will help people understand how works and what small percentage of their total tax bill goes to the city of

[136:01] Boulder because you could frame the overall situation and the overall numbers and then say now other bodies have decision-making juries over there's bigger pieces 13% of it is from us here's and and here's you know how that plays out right so that's helpful now if we really apply it to this question now Bob you said we could be adding an increment on top of that or we could include it in this until we run the not those may be possibilities but until as matt said until we run the numbers know what it means we're not be able to give you that information but we will do our best to lay that out if you want us to come back on the 25th we could try to do that for the when I say 0.1 or 0.2 it it can be lower than the point 1 it just depends how that partnership would be structured because we looked at one it could be 15 to 20 million another it could be 40 to 50 million if we owned it it's one

[137:01] hundred one hundred and forty million depending on we do all the drops and things and how much is underground so there's a wide range of what could be done and it could be property tax or sales tax and we could try to bring that back on the property tax aspect if you wanted to go ahead the one thing I'll add is so he brought it all the way up to 140 million you want one thing you will not get from us on 25th is a recommendation to spend hundred forty million a raise hundred forty million for a full financing if that is a recommendation that would be something that would be for another another year because that's not the direction that we've received me you at this point okay so now we're ready to jump in Aaron and then Mary terms of answering this question right and so yes absolutely please to continue researching the possibility and bring it back to us um thank you for coming here tonight doing the presentation and I do feel pretty strongly that the funding mechanism that we should look at should be a property tax mechanism because it's less

[138:00] regressive and that's tied to the value of the property to people owned I think these infrastructure improvements it makes sense to do it that way but with these big increase in assess big increases in assessed values had really like if we can to get as much information about how the property tax finances are going to play out over the next couple of years and use that incorporate that in our thinking about how we might fund this and and whether there's an additional mill levy or if it's say well we've got enough incremental revenue from assessed values that we could ask the voters to dedicate it to this I think we we want to look at different options here but I think we definitely want to look at it in the context of the rising assessed values and see how much of difference that makes okay I would normally say hey does everybody agree with that but maybe that's too simple but do people agree with Aaron just said generally speaking okay so now we'll do a denim to Mary's neck so unless you just want to say you agree another

[139:00] question yeah to what its extent does a broadband utility or can a broadband utility leverage a municipal utility electric utility and where I'm going with that is based on that would it makes sense to wait and see where the municipal electric utility is going sure for governance in in the memo we make the statement that this would not if it was a utility it would not qualify as a Tabor utility Tabor said and because teh bird classifies it as an enterprise it has to be an enterprise and roughly not the legal determination but roughly if you receive 90% of your expense your revenues from fees then you can be a Tabor enterprise and issue revenue bonds without a vote if however you violate

[140:02] that 10% say it was a transfer from the general fund or it was a property tax or it was the sales tax and you go over that 10% breaking you're not making it 90 then you're not going be an enterprise fund and every revenue bond issued will have to go to a vote so now where that is if you want to join it with the electric utility if we have been in existence like Loveland or Collins Longmont for decades it would be much easier to do but we're going to go out with Electric Municipal Utility it has to qualify as an enterprise fund under Tabor so that we can issue revenue bonds if we would be now doing a full build-out DEP hundred to one hundred and forty million dollars we talked to a little while ago if you're trying to leverage that by including it with the electric utility we've just now added

[141:02] one hundred two hundred and forty million dollars of debt to that electric utility and it may not qualify because electric utility we can get one hundred percent of the customers within the city limits we're not going to get that with broadband if you get 35 to 40 and feeling very good at the start so those are the those are the concerns Longmont definitely it's a benefit to them they could leverage that they went to the voters they said can we include this broadband in our utility enterprise voters said yes but they also didn't have a lot of debt with their electric utility that it's leveraged another type of leverage its debt leverage how much do you have so those are the things we're looking at and any way that we've looked at it if we build the utility ourselves when you issue that amount of debt you will not qualify as a tabor enterprise because you the expenses will be so great the revenue Beach why we

[142:02] need to have that with it for a while we'd have to have revenue from property tax or a sales tax of some kind we could give you much more information on it but that's why we haven't been looking at as an enterprise fund and the other one is the time Tom you said earlier we may not have a utility for X number of years where we have to be playing with the same ground rules at that time can I just add I think that explanation would be very helpful to write down and 7:8 because we're starting to hear that question and I think it's a it's a compelling idea that has a good response did you need to add anything you're good okay we have Sam and then Matt I just wanted to ask about the Longmont comparison because I think that's what people here are very familiar with obviously they've had their utility since 1912 so for much much longer time but their build-out cost they estimate

[143:02] if you believe what's on the website for the next light program at forty million dollars for all in build-out cost so I'm just curious you know they're not quite as big as Boulder but they're getting close Longmont is and so I was just curious if there are other advantages to the electric utility like can they use the poles for two things you know are there other things we should be thinking about I'd just like to understand better when you do the explanation that Suzanne suggested it would also if there are other points of leverage that allowed them to come in at an estimate of 40 where we're looking at a hundred one hundred and forty I'd love to hear about that to spend some time with folks in Longmont and actually their 40s now with 256 million dollars so just for whatever it's worth Carl can speak to some of the geology issues and I think they kind of acknowledges some cross subsidization between their electric utility and their

[144:03] and their um their fiber Co so I think there's a combination of factors with some geology Carl could speak to that there's some cross subsidization there certainly is the is the economies of scale using the same building platform customer care poles and so on and so forth so in other words their costs of providing service is lower plus I'm suspicious about whether 56 even is the all-in number because I think there's some substation going on there but that's just my observation having spent some time with them if I could I would just also say yes customer service it's more advantageous because you're already providing that Patrick utility service Pole axis rights away access generally advantageous I think I think what you're hearing from a lot of pool too is there is a philosophical alignment I think what people are saying is to the extent that we're considering a municipal municipal ization or electric utility and all the control that comes with it

[145:00] it would be inconsistent to do anything less than that per minute or per broadband that's that's probably what I've been hearing so that's more of a philosophical argument perhaps the one other connection point between broadband and electric and having your own electric utility is of course the ability to have reliable high-speed Internet could certainly support the smart type of the features that we'd want to add to any electrical grid but it has more about I mean that's a perspective in other words that's just one of many examples that broad Bank it helps a broadband could help an electric utility whether we own it or someone else we would probably take more advantage of that for one or whatever demand side management that the applications we'd want to add but bought back to a councilmember Yates point I think that the the dollar difference that you hear it from Walmart is less because of their there right away and and more because of the the fact that it's very expensive to the dig in West

[146:00] Broadway especially because of all the hard rock that we have here ok wait a minute yeah I just have one other that I wanted to put out there I've just a comment yeah I think we should go forward and continue studying this but my strong desire is that we really focus on how we're going to get the kinds of input that we want into the both the operation and the architecture of the grid so we've talked about two basic different ideas one is where Boulder may be owned some are all of the backbone of the network and the other is where we own the drops and I thought from what I heard that the drops was a pretty interesting way because easier to get to ubiquity you touched the customer and the private partner is doing the backhaul and I think another point if you do a summary for people to really understand is that only 30 to 40 percent would be the adoption rate of what we expect for people to address service so

[147:01] I would really like to be more clear as we get to July on what the pros and cons of the backbone versus the drops are in which we think would be most economical so that'd be my request all right broadband east of Broadway this solves the problem yeah all right so so yes but let me Sam it's just the right question and then I got one comment on property taxes but so the point of our having partial ownership besides it could be that whoever we do a deal would just insist that we have some partial ownership or partial investment that's one possibility and the other reason is to have partial ownership as we've talked about before pretty openly is to preclude somebody from going off and something happened that we don't have any control over so it gives us some amount of control but

[148:00] Sam's question is exactly right I've never been clear about this is what is it that we might want to own partially both from a cost perspective since that's one of the issues but also from a control perspective you know I am still nervous about I know everybody loves the toning the drops I'm still nervous that in five years those would be obsolete and laboum place by a wireless system and then you've got all these wonderful drops that you paid for so that you can control things and guess what you control nothing nothing whatsoever whereas the the fundamental infrastructure yeah that isn't going to go away you need you need the fundamental fiber backbone to make anything work and so I don't know but it seems to me that's a pretty important question both from a cost and also from a you know explaining to people why you might want to go do this

[149:00] so that's part one part two which we've been asked many times is if we go this this rude which is some partnership is does it in any way preclude us should we ever get a Muni from deciding well now we got a Muni now we want to do something on our own which could still be some sort of partnership but it would clearly lean more towards the boulder controlling it and I mean the only answer I've gotten I'm not trying to knock the answer is well legally we could but well I'd like a practical answer legally we might be able to but if we cost you a fortune to do it it might not be practical in the end so be nice to have a little bit more understanding of that and then that's one other thing well in terms of the taxes people have asked some really good questions and and and Bob I'm just going

[150:03] to totally make up some numbers now but it's it's this is why you need to help us out I mean if the city gets and if the general fund gets twenty five million dollars a year from property tax I'm kind of making that up and if our property tax state goes up by about 20 percent now making that up to but half of its commercial half of its residential and the commercial side is going to go up more than the residential side the commercial people really get to eat this a lot more than the residential people do big time because of Gallagher you know that could be five million dollars a year and the question is as I think Mary asked or somebody is well could that kind of pay for this and I think that's a fair question or how much of it could it pay for so you know you know the numbers better once you see all the final results from the reassessments

[151:00] and the final number on Gallagher but I think the state legislature decides that so either they have already or they're going to buy tomorrow because they're done tomorrow and that's a state legislature let its legislative decision so I think that number is actually known and that's the number that we care about is the the Gallagher ratio so I think yeah those are really good questions it's not that we couldn't use it for other things but this would certainly be something of great community interest that you could point to and say yep your taxes what up but it's going to this really cool thing and I just make one other quick comment which is on waiting for a muni not like I don't want us to have a Muni electric as you know but I think the timing is such that that just makes no sense I mean if we made a deal with somebody this year I'm assuming it's a year or two to build out if you wait for the Muni that means it's six to eight plus

[152:01] years for build-out and I don't think people want to wait so I don't want to wait six to eight years that's crazy in this world I mean we're living with second world broadband and I don't think we want second rural broadband for another six to eight years so it's something we really need to do something about and then see if it is precluding us in some way if we ever want it to switch and if it is well so what do we do about that it sold perfectly good questions and I think I think even though the tax part of this is easy I think those questions need to be answered for voters to comfortably vote on it okay that was going to be my point is I think all the questions we've been asking and that the write-ups we asked you to do are going to be essential to the public conversation as people just we just people just started waking up to thinking about this and that'll be part of the discussion but it's the short

[153:00] answer is still yes okay we have Aaron and then Mary and then hopefully we're done yeah well first of all just totally agree with Matt on the timing question so yes just one point I wanted to raise the wheat I don't remember us talking about before that I want us to bring into the negotiations which is about privacy policies because you know in the last couple of months Congress overturned the law that prevented ISPs from selling your browser history I think we want to make sure that we strike a deal that does not allow a utility or broadband utility to sell people's private information about browsing history so just I'd like that to get that into the negotiations as least hear their thoughts on that so for me it's okay to continue on the path that we've been on but I did want to find out what Karl brought up with the fact that it's philosophically inconsistent that we're trying to create

[154:00] a Municipal Utility to get out from under the clause of corporate control and here we are putting ourselves under corporate control in another arena so just want to point that out well and I think that gets at the question presumably if we're going to do this and this is a question we kept answering again and again when you said it okay with not doing the full build-out is yes if we retain control and that's the kicker and so that's I think the premise of this whole thing is can we control enough of what we need to control our fate but not have to pay for the whole thing and that is the crux so if we can't do that then we are failing to complicate are we precluding future options that's the other difference tell the two really key things right in those little crux issues I think as we go forward I mean I think it's more about the goals in a way then you know the goal for me is a corporation or not

[155:00] corporation that's actually getting 2bic wa t it's getting to high speed it's getting to low price it's getting to you know all of that control is just a way of us exerting influence to get there and I think if we you know we've heard a bunch of different interesting ideas from staff about how we might get to having a first right of refusal for example right that's not direct control but it's you being first in line if they want to do something that you've agreed upfront is not part of your package of goals so I think we have to be very careful about getting there I agree with that completely I think we should focus on the outcomes that were after not who the partner is per se I could also another distinguisher I guess a counter-argument to that philosophical argument be the electrical utility we have a monopoly in it when and so it's a very different situation here we're looking to break a duopoly and add more competition so it's fundamentally different and that it's if we were

[156:02] looking to identify one partner to take care of all our broadband needs then I think it would be similar to electric the electric utility but it's not we're not going to do just hops we're trying to find more competition Carl maybe you could speak I mean so so adding the next ISP takes us from to providers to three providers but maybe you say a few words also about open access which might provide a fourth in the fifth through six provider sure just a reminder that's a minimum goal would be to bring a third provider so in addition to CenturyLink and Comcast we'd have you know let's say it's a ting with open access ting would also be providing their network that they financed or that they jointly financed with the city and make it available to several other internet service providers so the scenario would be we have you have a choice as a consumer or as a business person who owns a business to go with CenturyLink comcast ting or Internet service

[157:02] provider one through ten that's very much theoretical at this point because we don't have any examples to point to other cities that have been successful at open access that's what I called it the holy grail where you know I think everybody agrees that only would competition do you have a sure bet that you'll have the best customer service the best the lowest prices and so on that is what we're aiming for us we listed the goals that that's one of the goals that we've aimed and with and and and to the extent that we can't get anything close to open access that's going to make a finalist much less attractive to us okay I think it's important you're gonna have to remind people of these he sinks so we good okay one more topic the Charter Committee referrals there are three that I'd like to describe very briefly and get your feedback on the first one is cleaning up obsolete matters in the Charter the Charter Committee has identified 13

[158:00] areas where they recommend cleaning up some of the issues in the Charter they arrange from some ones that are that have causes trouble in the recent past we have charter provisions that have time deadlines for things like election filings and petition filings that aren't the same as state law and so the recommendation would be we take the the dates out of the Charter so you can either do it by ordinance so that you can change them in state law changes will you just let it default the state law as you know we've had some protests in the last couple of years where it wasn't clear which set of rules applied and we had some confusion about which set of rules applied so there's things like that that that the Charter Committee would like you to consider putting on the ballot and as I said there's 13 them there also some that just should be taken out for example there's a provision in the Charter that's that provides for who serves as Director of Finance when the Charter was adopted in 1918 no longer necessary because the Charter has now been in effect for a much long time so there's also a requirement that the city manager

[159:00] post a bond which is kind of archaic it's not really done in the city usually posted anyway so they're there a bunch of things like that so the question is do you want to go forward with those the second one is the Charter committee recommended adding four more commissions to the Charter it's not really clear exactly why as you know there we have to I believe 22 boards and commissions we have four in the Charter now we have the Planning Board the open space board of trustees the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board and the Arts Commission there are specific reasons for each one of those didn't I say what is arts I'm sorry Library Commission the both the Library Commission the parks and Parks get a little bit of funds so they get that so the other ones all have some special duties that they're in the Charter so that the council can't take them away so the Planning Board obviously has authority over the for body review they also have authority over changes to title 9 the the Parks

[160:03] and Rec advisory board and the open space board of trustees have a veto power over disposals of property than their relative areas of authority the Library Commission used to actually have authority to run the library that was changed two years ago but they still get a small mill levy so that they get to administer so there's reasons it's not clear why you'd want to add additional ones adding additional ones makes it harder for council to change in the future so one of the reasons that the Planning Board and parks are in there is that they have different numbers of members that are required by the Charter the Charter says that all charter all Commission shall have five members Planning Board and Parks have seven and those are those were as a result of charter changes so those are changes you can make but the Commission the committee recommended adding more boards and commissions to the Charter and then the last one was has to do with the people's ordinance we have a people's ordinance on campaign finance the feeling of the Charter Commission

[161:01] was that it does not go far enough in requiring discloses particularly the area of corporate disclosures so they wanted staff to explore ways to expand the authority to require disclosures of campaign contributions from corporations to the extent that it would be consistent with the citizens or not a decision of the Supreme Court so the recommendation would be since it was AB it's not a charter provision it's a people's ordinance and as a people's ordinance it should be changed by the people that's my presentation okay question yeah um we met with Youth Opportunity Advisory Board they indicated that they were gonna try to bring forward a charter amendment as well as far as youth voting at 16 and 17 and city wide elections I guess I'm asking this of the Charter committee have you heard where they're at on that and where they live this is the youth Opportunity Advisory Board our our board has been working for a couple of years on a proposed charter then which would

[162:00] allow people at the age of 16 and 17 to vote in city elections apparently like they mentioned to us yeah and apparently that's allowed if the people within the Charter but I'm not gonna ask I'm not asking your opinion on that time I'm just telling you what they said so I guess I'm asking the Charter committee whether you've heard about that and whether that's something that might come to us a haven't brought anything forward to us that I'm aware of um so you may I didn't make it to the you have dinner so you may have heard more from them about where they are on that then we have but they haven't made a request of us are we doing something with your web shortly Thursday okay okay well look can we just go through these one by one I think we have in Duke questions as we go on number one does anybody care if we clean up the Charter you'll find these to be helpful I think these there's a lot of mentorship it's got a lot to do with voting deadlines and it in every way I think we make it more liberal for the clerk to be able to get her

[163:00] responses lined up so is that right Thomas as a fair way of saying that yes and there are some that are almost necessary for example or or scheduled an election actually conflict with state and federal laws some years so we'd want to fix that so to speak could this be one ballot issue you go glom together yes okay okay so that sounds good okay that's fine on the second one can somebody on the Charter Committee explain a little bit more like which committees and why like EAP I saw on there why EAB okay well I mean we've been hearing some feedback I think the boards and commissions committee has passed along and we've heard directly from just as individual council people about some frustration that certain of the board members have and some of the boards that exist right now and there's some thought that you know they're seen

[164:01] as strictly advisory they don't have any of these kinds of oversight duties that Tom named for the ones that are in the Charter committee so it's just something that I think we wanted to talk with council about and see would a possible path to making them feel more empowered and actually giving them a little bit higher responsibilities be to have them be in the Charter there was the question say with the transportation advisory board which we would I guess rename the mobility board of being able to interface more tightly with planning we've heard a lot about that and so trying to create that in the Charter there's nothing that says we couldn't do just legislatively but there was also that point that if they get voted in by the people they're more likely to have more durability over time just because I think counsel would be less inclined to mess around with the definitions or the numbers or anything so I think that was pretty much the full thinking so one

[165:02] thing that I did want to add in terms of the the transportation advisory board the tab is that there's a real nexus between planning and transportation and our governance doesn't tend to reflect that as well as it could and so with some sort of authority given by being in the Charter that could be it could be expressed better that way one one final thing is we've talked about a housing board in the past on council and thought with the housing board specifically is taking that to the people to see if they want to vote on that boards existence and essentially a reason for existence of it it seemed like maybe when you're creating a new one you should hear from the people all right it won't surprise you I don't like this idea I have been

[166:02] trying to get a ballot issue on for 30 years to allow us to have more than five people on the boards but I've never succeeded but but this one yeah the only reason for having boards in the Charter or if they have some either some funding source and frankly some of the funding sources are pretty out of date right now you know Parks gets a little bit of mill levy and library does but they get such a massive amount more from the general fund that the mill levy is kind of ancient history and we wouldn't do it that way now it probably made sense in 1950 but doesn't make a whole lot of sense now or they have a special power now there is a not just purely advisory but those are really limited I mean except with the exception of the Planning Board which is its own magical special case open space and parks have only one to power and that's disposal of land everything else their advisory on and

[167:01] that's it and library has really no special power anymore so I just can't imagine why you'd give I don't even know what it is you'd give to these boards and whatever you gave them it would really hard to change it later if you got it wrong it could be too much or it could be two little frankly could be either way and you wouldn't really know I mean I think they are advisory boards and I love the boards I've served on boards I think they're fabulous but they should be advisory and I just I and II abies per view is pretty hand wavy and that's okay actually but I just don't know what it is you would say what you have transportation board as veto power over what I thought about this I just don't know what it would be that you'd give them veto power over everything else can be done legislatively easily if we want somebody on transportation board to be

[168:01] ex-officio the other way around probably somebody on planning board to be ex-officio on on transportation board we can do that absolutely nothing stops us justjust for what it's worth we weren't proposing any special powers training of it well then there's just no point in putting it in the Charter I mean if you worried that and I just frankly don't have this worry I know some council members do about oh my god some rogue council is going to do away with EAB Sunday boy that's the least of your worries that I just wouldn't fixate on that particular problem but their advisory well so the bill on this so the the idea that we might want to go through a process of legislatively clarifying for boards their roles and some of the cross fertilisation or however you want to refer to it that might be useful and I would certainly you would have to go through a process

[169:00] anyhow even if you were going to do a charter so it seems to me that we could accomplish intent which is to clarify because I served on the a B it was very frustrating because he kind of wondered what is a row here and you really had to scream loud and in order to be heard and feel relevant and so any I think we could accomplish that legislatively and we would need to do so anyhow to go through that a lot they're all in the code and I'm not saying they're definitions are great believe me about suggesting that the council's that invented these boards got it right the first time in fact I agree with you Suzanne now that the boards have been running for a while it's very much worth a look at hmm have some of the roles changed a little bit have says their purview may be gotten bigger gotten smaller did we just get it wrong that some new things come along when a a B was created maybe some things didn't even exist back then that now they should be looking at well

[170:00] that's fine you can change it in the in the code and you know what the other way you change things I'm sorry this is much simpler is you direct the city manager to basically you know have boards work with each other have departments work with each other you don't have to certainly go to the extreme of a charter change so I do think it's worth looking at again absolutely for some of the boards big-time because some of them were a little bit squishy when they were created but with not the Charter with years of experience I think we can fix up some of the squishiness so other thoughts on this is there interest in maybe doing a code review or maybe even getting input from the committee's about they looked at their charters and and gave him put to us on it yes are you are you trying to anyhow you guys are doing this oh yeah I was just agreeing I was look at things that the two of you said great okay and Jen I agree too and one

[171:01] of the things we talked about the retreat to was that the some of the boards I think would like to have the ear of the council a bit more and maybe that is on me and remember it was we were going to come up with some sort of an idea about how council might have responsibility for visiting a board once every six months or something like that and I think that would enable them to feel like they're being heard on a more regular basis than just Matt and I going out once a year so if if that was my action then I am very willing to write up a suggestion and and take it to Matt and we'll talk about it and then come forward with something okay and and it sounds like a little bit of a review of okay the code and what's written up okay so that good enough for pet I thought the idea of if we do review the code to get put it on the agenda of the boards and have them discuss it over a period of time to come

[172:01] up with some concrete suggestions of what we could do and then we put it on the work plan and it might be a good thing to start the process of now and so the boards and commissions committee will come back to us that work for everybody that was on the Charter committee yeah this was mostly an attempt to elevate that invisibility and to at least have a concrete proposal to put out there and we picked the boards we did because we felt like they were the ones that had the most to gain from something like that so there you go okay so you'll come back this was a suggestion that will also involve the boards and commissions in this discussion yeah I mean it's partly our fault I guess we we start down this road and then we get sidetracked and we don't go pick it up again I I'll take part of the blame for that believe me but I think we've got time to do one more round of outreach to the boards I mean it takes us three months

[173:01] to get to them all but we've got time to do that and we should do it one more time okay excellent and then on the last one the proposed changes to people's ordinances we Shh yeah I'll try and represent lease on this I mean she was particularly um a you know there there are some entities that can donate that don't have the same disclosure requirements that individuals do to council candidates and so I think there was a significant concern on Lisa spark that we try and learn more about where that money is coming from so I'll just represent it there I I feel like you know we got some creative ideas from the City Attorney's Office because we're seriously limited by citizens united and I would personally like to hear more about this because this is all more about transparency basically and

[174:01] it's all more about figuring out what the motivations are behind the people who give to candidates I believe Lisa also wanted to try and extend that even more to ordinances right because there's are charter changes ordinances you know to what extent can we get more transparency behind entities that contribute to that so she wanted to raise this it was a really big issue with her I think it's worthy of discussion because Kathy gave us some ideas that I thought were worth thinking about and so I would just say I'd like to pursue it more to learn more about what our options are but it's not to say that we're at the point where we where I know if I can support something going forward you know corporations of people too and we'll just say that more transparency about campaign contributions is a good thing I think so let's explore yeah I'm fine with exploring it is anybody not me too I I mean really honestly for us exploring it to me means having our legal staff tell us how far you can go

[175:02] under the current rules but I'm happy to push as far as we can go okay all right so that's a yes okay and then I guess I'm do you have any comments on that by the way no I agree I think good it'll be interesting to look at and we'll come back with some options all right thanks okay is there anything else that people wanted to consider for the ballot I do know that well we may or may not have anything on transfer statewide transportation funding maybe we have a deal um I think the legislature might have a deal but the independent private group might still put something they might petition something on I don't think any of us have a good sensitive how many state ballot issues there will be although it doesn't feel like there's going to be a boatload like there was last time which is nice I don't know on the county level we're

[176:00] likely to see worthy cause and they're considering adding yet another term to the sheriff's Oh huh because people write carry every year yeah yeah see there should be an easier way to do that you know but um is the school district doing anything and do we know I have Noah okay no all right well it that's good that sounds like a lighter year than last time okay anything Oh next steps shall we read which one Oh Oh great concepts

[177:07] okay sound good okay adjourned [Music]

[178:05] you [Music]