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Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[7:13] order we have a little bit of a complicated evening a special council meeting and then it will be followed by a study session so Lynette you want to call the roll councilmember Applebaum rocket here Burton Jones here where's Szell shoemaker Weaver Yates yeah young here we have a quorum excellent and I I assume that tape knows it's October 24th 2017 so tonight's special meeting agenda is several matters from our consent agenda from last week that we knew that people wanted to speak to as well as a

[8:01] matter on sheltering and so we're gonna go ahead and have open comment on those matters if folks can start with their name and address and you'll have two minutes and if you'll come up to the lectern over here we decided we keep it more informal since we're really having mostly a study session tonight so if you can come over to there that would be great and with that we'll go ahead and get started with Carl thank you madam mayor and greetings to the City Council this evening I would note that today is United Nations Day in the world as well as world polio Day that is not why I'm here my name is Carlton seaman my name is misspelled it's s T instead of T s I live in North Boulder I'm retired from the UN I'm a polio eradicated but what brings me here tonight is that I am a member of the board of directors of the

[9:00] Boulder Nablus sister City project and I am here at the direction of the board to deliver a message to the council and that message is simple it's two words it's thank you and we wanted to say this because some of the council members aren't going to be here a month from now and so we wanted to say it while it was still the council that approved our application almost a year ago the council has expressed its confidence in us and we believe that we have lived up to that confidence this past year and we will continue to do so we also want to thank the council for their political courage in improving us because there was significant and politically powerful opposition to our application and so it was a courageous decision that you took to approve us as the 8th sister city in Boulder the final thing I want to say is

[10:00] that we are we did do a delegation to novelist's earlier this year we're doing another one next year approximately October of next year and all City Council members are invited to join us to come to Nablus in October of 2018 and even ex city council members are invited to join us and I want to hand around these brochures on the project for you spread around and I'm out of time so thank you thank you Carl next up is ambrosia nectar ambrosia we have will hello I am ambrosia pardhu Lee I am a board member of the United Nations Association Boulder County I am also pursuing my masters in public

[11:00] policy at Denver and involved with the cities for CEDAW here in Colorado so I am working with the cities for CEDAW to help get Colorado on the map for being a progressive and committed to supporting equality for all as a woman I am passionate about closing the gaps that exist on so many levels as a board member of the UA I am passionate about providing human rights for all individuals and as a professional I am passionate about creating policies that change of status quo currently women account for half of the population but hold only 38% of management positions in all fields and only point zero for two percent of Fortune 500 companies are headed by women and as we all know women are paid less for the same work as men on average 20% less for absolutely no reason the pay gap is even worse for ethnic minorities fortunately

[12:01] here in Colorado the pay gaps a little bit better we have about a 14% pay gap between men and women so becoming the cities for CEO is important because it publicly vocalizes that we are all equal regardless of race gender religion class and others intersectionalities that make us unique I urge Boulder to join the list of Colorado cities who have signed resolutions and then to pass legislation to protect the rights of women and girls let's make a stand against injustice and provide a role model to the rest of Colorado the United States and the world thank you thank you will and after will if Nathan can be ready thank you my name is Wolf Soper I live in downtown Denver at attend school here in at the University of Colorado in Boulder as such I want to talk today about the importance of transportation connections

[13:01] and boulders role as a leader in ensuring a truly regional transportation system as the Front Range grows so will enter community travel and therefore congestion projects that leverage efficient use of regional facilities are critically important to accessibility and mobility the flat iron flyer bus route using us 36 HIV managed lands is an excellent example one that I see twice a day as some of you may know the Denver Regional Council of Governments or dr. cog is the federally mandated organization responsible for regional transportation planning in our area dr. cog also directly allocates about ninety million dollars a year in transportation funds dr. cogs project selection process is slated for a big change starting in 2020 instead of a truly regional process that advances collective and creates inner municipal commuting options dr. cog will be experimenting with the sub-regional process that allocates a pro rata share of the funds to each county the counties and their

[14:00] municipalities will then devise their own project selected selection methods I understand the appeal of local control over project selection but I harbored deep concerns that local priorities will subvert the types of regional transportation project which makes Boulder accessible for long-distance commuters like myself as the new process moves forward I urge the city of Boulder through its dr. cog representatives to take a strong leadership position require regional planning goals to be a component of the sub-regional process continue to work with communities outside of Boulder County to support a holistic view of transportation needs and remain an example of how a regional transportation system can benefit local governments finally I ask that the city and its representatives watch this new process critically and carefully and be willing to move away from it if it doesn't work thank you for giving you this opportunity Thanks wow I'm pretty sure nobody's come and talk to us about dr. cog funding priorities before so can I just yeah will thank you for your

[15:01] comments I'm the dr. cog representative and we're thinking along similar lines appreciate your thoughts feel free to email me directly we can have a conversation Nathan all right good evening as stated my name is Nathan Hunt I'm the director of economic justice for the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado and one of several co-founders of Colorado village collaborative this year our organization built the first tiny home community for people experiencing homelessness in the state it is this work I was asked to come speak to you about that homelessness is a crisis for Boulder should not need reinforcing it's a prime topic of your agenda tonight what I want to emphasize is our capacity to do more of what is needed with the resources we already have traditional shelter will not solve the disaster we're facing you and I both know that people experiencing homelessness are desperate to be treated with the dignity they deserve as human beings people without a house needs

[16:01] somewhere to store their belongings somewhere that is safe no matter their race gender or sexual orientation somewhere that can accommodate couples people with any disability any work schedule and people with pets and service animals somewhere that blends both privacy and a sense of ownership to eradicate the oppression of homelessness from our communities we must establish housing as a human right build communities of care and return power to the hands of those it's been taken from too often we may agree with those precepts and principle but self limit our capacity to deliver on them because we're convinced that we do not have the resources in Denver we've been told that creating one new unit of affordable housing costs on average two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and then it will take two to three years to move from conception to habitability our homes cost less than twenty thousand dollars per unit we submitted plans in March began construction in May and residents moved in exactly two months later we have been embraced by the surrounding neighborhood have had no complaints or

[17:00] calls to police none about 15 residents have dropped out or returned to the streets twelve of them now have jobs tiny home villages are cheap quick and environmentally sustainable they offer the dignity empowerment and community people deserve we've done this we have the knowledge base and human power to do it again in Boulder you have the power and resources to open the way let's work together to do this right thank you thank you Nathan Leslie thank you so much my name is Lustig lustrum I'm a boulder resident and I want to thank you for this opportunity I'm here for a number of reasons but most importantly I'm here because we have an important decision before us in the community with respect to our energy future and whether to vote

[18:00] YES on ballot measure 2l or whether to vote no there is a flyer that has been mailed to many Boulder residences and it's misleading in two very important ways I have a full PowerPoint it will be sent to City Council it allows to be available and empower our future but I want to make sure that the community understands that the flyer they are receiving in their mailbox has these two very misleading assertions in it the first one is that somehow if we vote no on ballot measure 2l there will 3 be 300 million dollars that we can spend on solar and other important ways that is flat wrong the 300 million is what we might decide to do a few years from now it would be bonded it can only be done if we have a source of revenue and if we decide to form a Municipal Utility that's the very first very important and frankly flat wrong and misleading assertion that's made in that flyer the second is what we have discussed before which is the effort to make a big deal out of the blue bars that's utility occupation tax that will be accommodated

[19:00] in ballot measure 2l it's a little bit it's a little scary because there's no we're gonna raise taxes by 4 million that comes out to about $2 per household I went as far as market to get some visual aids that's what we call small potatoes thank you farmers market happy city in the world love the small potatoes they are amazingly good the big red bars are the big potatoes those are the costs that will go up dramatically if we stay with Excel looking at 10 to 14 percent rate increase three dollars a month increase approved for October 1st bonds with over 600 million that were already largely responsible for these are all documented in the PowerPoint that will be available either through the City Council's email or Adam power at future org don't think so much about the little potatoes pay attention to the big potatoes don't be mislead and go yes thank you Thank You Leslie and next up is oh we need that shirt Veronica Oh

[20:03] Veronica pearl mayor Jones and Boulder City Council and staff i'm veronica rocky from boulder county and colorado cities for CEO task force c da stands for the convention elimination all forms discrimination against women the u.s. is the only industrial country yet to ratify this treaty in partnership with business professional women of colorado I am representing United Nations Association of Boulder County I would like those humbly ask those that are here in support of CEO to please stand thank you I also have letters of those that were struggling with communicating electronically and I will hand those in under the peace operations division division of the peacekeeping and stability operations Institute as the US Army lead for women's peace and security cities proceed all hits close

[21:03] to home for me the work I do here and within my own community echos exponentially in the work I do to enable soldiers laying component forces on the ground in the implementation of applying gender dynamics and military operations in conflict areas well being an example of seeing the value women bring to the peace table of interest last week nearly a newly formed US Women's Caucus representing non-government organizations to the United Nations had their first coming out and they're focusing on Sita and a national implementation just two weeks ago the president United States signed into law the Women's Peace and Security Act which requires Department of State US aid and Department of Defense to take action last month the International Association of office human rights agencies led by us and in partnership with Canada signed a CDR resolution urging its members to support immiscible country and statewide efforts to implement policies that advance

[22:01] gender equality and principles of seed off on top of all today is un day it's a 72nd anniversary sustainable don't thank you sorry about that but thank you Evan Evan rabbits downtown Boulder this is from one of 500 emails I got through the Colorado Open Records Act from City Council candidate at burn to Councilwoman Jan Burton March 31 I wouldn't vote for head but good for him quote I had the very unpleasant experience this morning of watching the city inspect a client's five flex for occupancy violations remember this inspection was not based on a complaint no now the city comes armed with online advertised floor plans and old burning building permits of Middle's looking for any discrepancies and literally counting beds we were able to get into a couple of the lock rooms

[23:01] because the property manager was able to open the doors with a driver's license when the inspection was over I wanted to take a shower the government has no substantial and compelling reason to do this if over occupancy is placing a burden on the reasonable on the neighborhood and a reasonable complaint is lodged make arrangements for an inspection get a warrant if the tenants don't let you in what if a rouse sleeping tenant had a gun what the f are the city's inspectors now doing in our name we are feeding mr. Carr that's the city attorney mr. cars pro enforcement beast he will not check his own instincts during this initiative unquote you the City Council also fed mr. cars pro enforcement beast with an extra three hundred thousand dollars to prosecute and imprison the homeless this summer now helped each homeless person with about $500 cleaned them up got them off the streets

[24:00] none of you objected to this anyone who believes a word of the city's propaganda about being kind and welcoming needs to Google D you Law School homeless report thank you thanks Evan Steve and then 35 17th Street I request that you asked the county clerk to not count the votes on ballot measure 2q I checked with them yesterday and they have a procedure for this I believe that 2q was put on the ballot without sufficient consideration of its implications the ballot title is completely inadequate given to Q's significance I cannot tell you how many people have contacted me to let me know that they were totally surprised to hear what's really in it 2q is like one of the Republican repeal and replace efforts it throws at a very clear and workable municipal initiative procedure and replaces it with total uncertainty the current timeline that's in the Charter works pretty well so why

[25:01] change it it's way more functional and state law which could force you went to holding a special election for a municipal initiative if the signatures are certified by early June or allow you no negotiating time if the signatures are certified in early September so why are you throwing something that works out when you don't have something better to replace it with by the way under state law charter amendments have a different schedule and municipal initiatives so there's no way to avoid that conflict no matter what you do finally 2q puts the city manager in an impossible position because of all a discretion that is granted to him or her no matter how the manager sets the rules he or she will be under enormous pressure from various groups to either make the rules easier or make them harder and for each initiative that pressure may change so citizens who want to do a missable initiative will get caught in the whiplash again please ask the county clerk not to not count the votes leave things as they are until you come up with something significantly

[26:00] better and next time include citizens have been through the process at least they can tell you if there's water in the pool before dive off the board thanks Stephen Kayla and then my comm hello my name is Caleb berry and I'm a boulder resident I'm an intern at the United Nations Association of Boulder County and specifically do work with Colorado cities for Sita I'm also a junior at cu-boulder studying anthropology political science and leadership regarding social and environmental justice I have grown up with many influential powerful women in my life who have inspired me to dedicate myself to encouraging all women to find their voices and stand for their rights and their place in this world being a female in college and preparing to enter into the professional workforce it was a key moment for me where I am personally experiencing a lot of the forms of

[27:01] discrimination that many women feel on a day-to-day basis right now I would like to list for you all of the organizations who are in support of cities for Sita and are ready to come to the table with you and work on addressing the principles of Sita our supporting organizations are the business and professional women of Colorado the women's collaborative of Colorado Valley Women's Health Center the League of Women Voters Denver Denver for Sita Colorado eco women he for she our the safe house Progressive Alliance for non-violence laboratory to combat human trafficking the voice of bird business radio safe shelter for st. Vrain Valley's pride sanitary pad we can international Colorado women's Education 00 00 Santa foothills club of builder County moving to end sexual assault the United Nations Association of the United States of America Boulder County chapter and Denver chapter and razing of America

[28:01] Builder County the legislators who have dedicated support to Colorado cities for Sita our senator Matt Jones and representative Joe Salazar who actually presented us with a testimony about the great influences mothers had on his life which can be found on our website thank you thank you mic mic omni North Boulder resident I want to thank the UN for being here and holding up the civil rights of everybody and I hope you guys think about the homeless when you're when you're thinking about that not only women but homeless women I want to follow up on Nathan about his talk about tiny homes we went to Portland and we went to Eugene we saw all these beautiful solutions and to date we have done zero absolutely zero that's sad on October

[29:03] 8th we had snow here we had an emergency opening in the numbers that were sent out they said it wasn't full but I was told differently not only through antidotal evidence but actually somebody came to me and told me that they were turned away at parsha Congregation Hashem for the path to home to get in that night when it was snowing so I want to make sure you guys know this we're gonna have people die because of what we have set up that's on your hands I will hold you accountable it looks like that we have more of a diversion than we have helping people do we have those 52 or so vouchers in hand yet well we still have 36 I'd like to know that and I sent you all an email and not one person responded back to me you are servants we put you there we would like to get head I let me take

[30:00] that word back servants you are representatives and I would like to see that you represent everybody in here not just the UN not just people that come up here and talk about different subjects but something that we come and we come and talk to you all the time about so thank you and have a good night thanks Mike we have Robert and then we have Frank Walter honorable mayor and members of the City Council my name is Robert McNown and I'm the president of the UN Association of Boulder County and a resident of the city of Boulder I'm here to speak in support of the petition for the adoption of resolution on CEDAW as some of my colleagues have already it's particularly timely that the City Council is considering this petition today which is United Nations Day the United Nations has adopted 17

[31:00] sustainable development goals to be reached by 2030 one of these goals number five is to achieve gender equality and empower women and girls the vulnerability of women and girls to violence the prevalence of sexual assault and even power relationships in the workplace demeaning treatment of women and pay inequities facing female workers are problems that have become particularly prominent recently these are not specifically women's issues the problems of society that all of us men and women alike must combat many look to the city of Boulder as an example in advancing human rights and combating discrimination and we should join with other cities that are supporting CEDAW two resolutions pronouncements and ordinances on behalf of the Boulder County chapter of the United Nations Association I urge you to sign a seat

[32:01] our resolution taking an important step towards the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women thank you thank you Frank and then Peggy leach member City Council my name is Frank Walter I'm a proponent of renewable energy and climate solutions I'm also a taxpayer resident of Boulder and a user of open space I'm here today to ask the city of Boulder to reconsider its aggressive energy and climate goals I ask not for reversal but for a balanced approach to setting benchmarks for example the city's goal of a harbor sign clean electricity by 2030 will prove very costly why not consider 80 or even 90% the marginal cost of that last 10 or 20% of the 100 percent goal will be much

[33:01] more costly than any initial creases in renewable energy production the benefit of consuming 100% renewable energy rather than 90% may not outweigh the cost to Boulder why not wait to pick the highest hanging fruit until it is more economically viable to do so for example when battery storage is more cost effective some may respond that Aspen did it why can't we that's been largely achieved it's one hard percent clean energy by purchasing renewable energy credits from distant far away generators that means it largely draws electricity from grids connected to coal-fired power plants and relies on them for its electric service citizens of Boulder should not suffer increase costs for a misleading 100% renewable label that is why I applaud boulders gold to me new supplies and generate 50% of its electricity but I also share caution about that first the public does not want vast areas of open space plastered with solar panels and

[34:01] wind turbines in addition a grid so dependent on local Sun and wind will not be reliable without reliance on fossil fuels to mitigate those harms if tea new civilization occurs the city of Boulder should integrate a limited amount of natural gas consider buying non-renewable baseload electricity and strongly incentivize distributed generation through programs such as net metering without a generation cap in conclusion please balance the goal of greenhouse gas reductions with affordability reliability transparency and preservation of open space thank you thanks Frank Peggy and then Kay Mayer good evening my name is Peggy Leach and I'm the president of the League of Women Voters of Boulder County 19 and part of the United Nations Convention on the elimination of all forms of

[35:00] discrimination against women called Sita in 1920 women gained the right to vote in the US after decades of struggle as you can imagine our organization has a strong record of support for equal rights for women and on a national level the league has supported sita over the years many women are still subject to pay discrimination harassment and domestic violence about a year ago our Board of Directors voted to support the cities for Sita campaign we are pleased that Louisville and Lafayette have passed resolutions already we were pleased to work with City Council on the living wage ordinance which benefited low-wage workers especially single-parent households which are disproportionately women we also appreciate other city ordinances that encourage equity within the community we feel that city council can take another positive step by a supporting revolution 12:19 tonight thank you Thank You Peggy

[36:04] okay and then Fred Greene honorable mayor Jones and fellow councilmen council members my name is Kay Mayer I'm here on behalf of Zonta foothills and speaking in support of the CETA resolution co city's proceed our resolution nearly ten years ago the Colorado Legislature joined about 16 other states and passed House Joint Resolution oh eight 100 nine concerning support for Sita also called the treaty for the rights of women in this our state legislature urged the US Senate to ratify this treaty however as of now it has been vetted by various US administrations and awaited Senate passage for over 37 years so as with

[37:02] other sensible ideas that are stalled with the US Congress u.s. cities are taking this up with cities for Saddam the goals are to adopt and implement the CEDAW principles at the grassroots level with the hope and intent that some day the US Senate will also come around the city of C Boulder needs to be a part of this please endorse this resolution thank you thank you Kay red NAND Zuza thank you for taking the time I'm glad to be here again to share a thought with you about these emergency warming centers in shelters when I ever I come I always go back to religious school again so at the end of Deuteronomy there's this message and it says that my father was a fugitive aramean and it talks about how these ancient Israelites go

[38:00] into Egypt and are oppressed and beat up and it's terrible and somehow with God's help is able to be redeemed and the thing that I want to share with you about that is that part of the reason why the Jewish community in Boulder is so involved in the homelessness issue is because of that memory a spiritual memory of being fugitives of being landless of not having a safe place and that is something that's still a concern for us so when you speak about the emergency warming centers I want to encourage you and advocate frankly to go to the higher level for more consistent nights for the higher temperatures the faith community isn't fatigued I think that we are anxious for there to be responses for people who are the most vulnerable who that are out there and want them to be treated kindly and with dignity but this particular version of the emergency warming centers it can't be the long-term solution either I know that there's efforts to have this

[39:01] coordinated approach and I hope that it works and I think it's important in fact it's really significant and it's I personally believe it is going down the right path but the emergency sheltering is also a critical critical component and I think more needs to be done so when I think about my father is a fugitive our man that's in real life too and I'm taking the fact that there's a part of my ancestry that was homeless not just talking about Egypt that seems so far in to us but all throughout history Jews have been Wanderers not by our own choice and here I'm here to ask you to think about folks that are the most vulnerable among us and I appreciate that thank you rabbi I have a question for you okay well I'm just curious one of the tradeoffs is to not create a parallel system to actually make the most of the investment in helping people to get up

[40:00] and out yeah and I so I think that's one of the things we're wrestling with this how do you make sure nobody dies on the street yeah but don't create a parallel system which kind of just perpetuates agreed I don't want a parallel system I don't want something else that's not connected to the holistic solution but we can not for me I can't ignore the fact that we have to bring people together to get them to find those solutions and to provide the resources as whether it's elective officials or faith leaders or anybody else to try and figure out how to find that balance now you have the power of the purse I just get to advocate so I'm not jealous of where you sit nevertheless I can't believe that it has to be an either/or I just can't it has to be a both end and that's hard for you nevertheless I think

[41:01] that's what needs to take place I don't want a separate parallel system and I don't think it has to be inconsistent with a holistic approach to getting people out of the state of homelessness yeah okay no that's all and no matter what we're doing something the question is the a B or C and so or a B and C thank you thank you I appreciate the question Souza good evening City Council my name is Susie boule I'm a boulder resident I live at 32 37 right Avenue in Northeast Boulder tonight I would like to encourage you to be local leaders for global goals which today is very significant on UN day the celebration of

[42:02] the Human Rights adoption by a hundred and ninety three countries in the world the United States signed as well and there are many little many facets to becoming a local leader and embracing sustainable development goals without equal rights for women for example how can we create sustainability today this evening I'm also hearing about more about our homeless crisis or issue here in town and that plays into the role as well and unless we have everybody at the table it becomes very complicated to create a sustainable system but basically my request for you as to adopt

[43:00] resolution for the cities for Cedar for Boulder County and keep in mind that you are elected to be our local leaders for global goals thank you thank you Susie Nikhil and then we have April Simmons well I'm Nikhil Mankato I'm from Boulder the Deputy Chair of the city of Board of Human Relations Commission speaking tonight on my own behalf I just want to speak in support of resolution 12 19 the cities who seed our project and I will agree with the sentiments expressed by everyone else who spoken and I'll just give a little bit of background that's something that came to the City Council through the Human Relations Commission it began the city's we see dog people came to us all the way back in fall of 2016 and I'm really happy that we have a chance to pass this project tonight that

[44:01] the council will because they they came to us and they stuck with it we had a city general equity pay study going on at the same time that gave an opportunity to to come back with the cities with CEDAW project see how it matched up with the city and you know sticking with something when when you had activists and and you want the city to do something it isn't just coming with a good idea sometimes I think initially it was actually rejected by the Human Relations Commission and they came back and it's sticking with it and seeing it through to the end and getting to a moment like tonight that I think is special and I want to commend everyone who was involved in that was sticking with it additionally I just will say you know you can speak to a lot of things happening nationally but also the question of women and this kind of push back against progressive values that I think we all stand for in the

[45:00] city is so strong on a national level now and if we don't push back and act locally whether it's changing voting districts losing the Voting Rights Act and things like that all of the the anti women sentiment that's happening I think as a city we can take a stand and do something locally that will affect things globally so thank you thank you Nikhil April and then we have Rosana no my name is April Simmons I grew up in Boulder I own grass roots landscape my sister Sharon Simmons wanted to be here tonight because she's put an amazing amount of heart and soul into this but she you know when it got changed she's in Egypt so she told me to take her place so I better get it right in 2014 the US Conference of Mayors representing

[46:02] over 1,400 mayor's from across the country adopted a resolution in support of cities for CEDAW initiative at its annual meeting in addition to presidential support for the ratification of seed on the past as well as support of almost 200 diverse national organizations early on as part of the national CEO task force in 2008 during the 66th General Assembly of the state of Colorado the house joint resolution was signed regarding the support of the continuing goals of the United Nations Convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and strongly urged the United States Senate to ratify the Convention they impress that although women have made major gains in honorable oops in the struggle for equality and social business political legal educational and other fields during the past century there's much yet to be accomplished this still stands relevant today I know that you know I've had some of my customers my

[47:01] friends many people in Boulder have said to me do you think there's any chance it won't pass and and I have to say I've lived in Boulder all my life it's gonna pass that's that's oh and thank you thank you City Council it's a pleasure for me to be here my name is Rosanna Longo better I live in 46 84 southampton circle and i'm here to speak about sida why is this touches my heart because I'm an immigrant first so you know personally I know that for us immigrants is even doable it's harder in the city of Boulder I have been serving the Latino

[48:00] community for the last almost four years developing spanish-language Broadcasting Service we read Spanish publications right now I'm doing masters in Boulder I mean the University of Boulder is a master's in media and public engagement and I was lucky that contain you and the League of Women Voters accepted me to get an internship there and my obsession to tell you the truth is I am obsessed about equality and I cannot understand why in Boulder we don't have it and I cannot think about any other magnificent day today to really move this forward not only for you know those that ya don't have the same you know the same rights because the either they don't have the papers to

[49:03] work or you know the language to speak and I will personally would like to request to you that you pass on this ordinance that you become you know besides the happy City Board the happiest city in in the nation the strongest the equal City thank you thank you Roseanna so with that we are closing open comment we turn to staff did you have any comments I just wanted to point out that I can't respond to mr. Palmer ances assertions regarding to queue because I cannot support a ballot measure so I'm not gonna say anything that I will say however that it was a product of the council Charter Committee which held public meetings it was first discussed at a May 9th 2017 study session it was and the the memo

[50:01] describing it was published and made available publicly on our website it was introduced on consent at first reading on August 1st there was another there was a public hearing on August 15th it was put it was passed finally on consent and September 15th in each one of those times a memo and the ordinance itself was published so it wasn't something that was done in secret so we're about ready to talk about all of these things on consent is there anything not on consent that people wanted every spawn - okay your consent agenda is items a through C okay other than to thank everybody for coming so our concern agenda we have three three items all of which merit a brief mention you look like you want to mention one of those Erin how could you tell I just start with a motion to approve the

[51:01] consent agenda um I think anybody want a second thank you so I'll just I'll speak to a couple of these four so thanks to everyone for coming out tonight and supporting the CETA resolution I'm excited that we have this in front of us I'm appalled that our country hasn't ratified this this treaty but at least we can do our part here on the local level and just want to share a personal thing here it reminds me of the the battle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment back it's been many years ago now but this was something my mother was very active in that effort in passing the e ra and I would go as a kid with her to rallies and I was the whole family was very disappointed when that was never passed so anyway it's great to do our partners municipality to support moving this forward so I will second Erin's comments except for going with his mother to nakiya's comment about how

[52:11] acting locally matters so much and it indeed it does and I remember that the Human Relations Commission spoke about doing a gender equity study and at the January 2016 retreat we spoke about it and indeed the gender equity study was carried out and found that mostly we're doing pretty well but there's always things that can be improved and so the city continues to work on that improvement but I just wanted to point that out that acting global I mean locally does make a difference and I thank you all for bringing it forward and I'll just I'll just echo that I had the I guess honor of going down to speak

[53:00] in Denver at their gender equity summit and present the results of our gender equity study and yeah the good news is welders doing pretty well we're one of the best cities in the country I think we're at 84% sorry eighty four cents on the dollar what women make but the sad thing is we're not on par I mean we're not men and women still don't get paid equally here so yes there's work to be done and I hope you unleash all your good energy on our Senate they need to do their jobs I also just mention though also in the consent agenda is the regional housing strategy and a lot of folks my colleagues in particular participated in its development and I think it's worth noting that it's a big deal that we are moving forward collaboratively with all the communities in our county and setting and taking some concrete steps towards our affordable housing goals together and I

[54:01] think that that is very notable and will give us good benchmarks from which to measure progress on both as local communities and then as a county so I think that that's good work yeah so I'll leave it at that I can just turn on that on that to a number of us were there there was a lot of really good energy in the room on working on our affordable housing issues and it's clearly a problem we can't solve by ourselves so I was really excited to see so many other the local communities being willing to to work on it really hard as well so this and this this new resolution I think establishes a twelve percent goal for the entire county which is an ambitious one and I look forward to working with our regional partners on accomplishing that goal anybody else so I was there as well and I think one of the there were two things that I remember that were pretty significant they came out of that that summit was one was that we would develop a common

[55:02] language among all of the municipalities within the county and the other one was that we needed to recognize our strengths and work on our housing goals based on each community strengths and finally none of the goals can happen without actually coming up with a funding stream and that will be the challenge to develop that funding stream and I think we have the beginnings of that here in the city of Boulder but we can do more okay we have a motion a second anybody else want to speak okay yeah we begin with mayor Jones yes councilmember Yates yes young yes Appelbaum Brockett we seem to be

[56:01] guessing tonight so yes Burton yes the motion passes unanimously all right thank you all thanks everybody your next item is recommendations for severe weather sheltering and our Human Services Director Karen Ron will be making a presentation good evening I'm Karen round I'm Human Services director and I'm here to present on severe weather sheltering for

[57:03] council consideration so the agenda we're going to cover tonight is to just to do a very high-level recap of the homeless strategy recommendations just for level setting talk about some past weather dependent shelter standards some options for council to consider and to present a staff recommendation so the homelessness strategy of the city's homelessness strategy was approved by council in June of 2017 and it really changed the approach to the adult homeless services system with the goal of really making this the system more effective for for clients to enter long term housing more quickly and to get the more unique and individualized services

[58:01] and programs that they need to be able to exit housing so the two primary ways that the new system is doing this is through Boulder shelter for the homeless which will be providing our housing focused shelter once their management plan is through the process and that has a hundred and sixty would have a hundred and sixty long-term year-round shelter beds for our higher needs clients and then the bridge has path to home navigation services would be providing an additional 50 beds short-term beds for those clients who have lower needs and in addition new navigation services to help people who don't need shelter or only need shelter for a few days to be able to be able to get back on their feet severe weather shelter was intended to supplement the sheltering system for those days where there was significant inclement weather

[59:00] for all members of the community who are not engaged in services coordinated entry isn't was not a requirement to be able to do walk-up sheltering for severe weather shelter it was really intended for a safe place for everyone to be able to get out of the the weather so the goals within the new homelessness strategy related to severe weather shelter was to align of our emergency response and resources with but our long-term goals were around housing and service solutions to align the strategy with best practice and to avoid developing a parallel system not aligned with the new system goals but also to be able to provide additional sheltering and safety for those people who are not part of our system of services so here's

[60:00] a here's a chart that shows in the past what those severe weather triggers have have been in the past just and this is before of course the new system of services so boho provided shelter every night overflow shelter every night walk up on a walk-up basis between November 15th and March 15th regardless of the weather conditions in addition they had additional weather triggers which you can see on the right during other days outside of the November 15th to March 15th time hoping long months you can see their weather triggers on the right now Longmont is also starting a navigation Center very similar to the city of

[61:00] boulders they will be offering up to 50 additional shelter beds with navigation services they have not decided at this point whether that there community will be offering any additional severe weather sheltering then the severe weather shelter network in the metro Denver area they also provide additional severe weather sheltering and the New Genesis cold weather shelter in Denver so you can see what these kinds of range of triggers are Karen can you just clarify again what long months doing I got a little bit confused there so is also starting a navigation Center like Boulder with very similar services and programs like the bridge house path the home it's the bridge house path to home navigation Center which will be in Longmont a similar program in Longmont not provided

[62:00] by bridge house however so be very similar with up to 50 additional short-term shelter beds they have not decided whether they will be offering any additional severe weather shelter well then what are those weather conditions on there for this is this is the old weather conditions in Longmont yeah this is what their old weather triggers were thank you so just just as an example here October 8th and 9th we did have some some winter weather that came in a path to home which is rich houses navigation Center 50 additional 50 spaces 39 of theirs their spaces were utilized so they had additional capacity that was unused Boulder shelter for the homeless 151 of

[63:03] their 160 beds were used now during this time also packed home we were anticipating a higher level of demand and Umbridge house path the home program was prepared for an additional 50 spaces beyond the 50 that they usually have but they were not you just quick clarification sure the Boulder shelter those 160 beds are those the still based on the previous emergency shelter he had its total beds okay it's not they're not programmed beds yet correct they're not programmed beds okay all right thank you total of 160 beds there yes so there was unused capacity during this period of time this October eighth the ninth I'm not sure I know Mike had said that there were people who might have been turned away from path to home I'm not sure what that

[64:01] circumstance was but but Bridge House has said they had unused a significant unused capacity now there could be a number of reasons for that you know for really optimistic we would say you know some initial news service system programs and the way it's operating might be help helping with that but it's probably also likely that in the early season this winter weather it was bookended by much warmer weather so I suspect this we'd get more deeper into the colder season this would not be the case but it was the case with these two days Karen all those numbers in the moment I thought that was really interesting it was very helpful to put in perspective how difficult would it be for your team obviously in collaboration with Bridge house and the shelter to periodically publish that not only to council but to the community so we can see December's on a regular basis definitely do that okay not too much

[65:01] more work maybe you know once a week or twice a month or something like that just we can add snapshots see how you know romantic usage okay we can definitely do that now one thing also to note as this is related to some of the recommendations October 8th and 9th I think we in general the lows were in the low 30s with several inches of snow accumulation but there was also a National Weather Service advisory which would have triggered opening severe weather shelter under any of the three scenarios that are identified so just to give you that back comparison but just to clarify there was no faith-based shuttering that we can yes because bridge has packed the

[66:00] home right now currently temporarily is providing the path to home navigation services at three faith-based sites so until our new site at 30th and Bluff is up and running that will continue so faith-based sites yes we're engaged in providing the regular path to home beds but also the additional 50 spaces that we thought we might need and didn't those were faith-based sites yes is that making sense you're saying bridge house right now is operating out of these based sites so no matter what the faith community is so part of this so you can see here these three different options one which was is based just on National Weather Service the variety of National Weather Service advisories warnings and

[67:01] watches there was about 20 additional shelter days a year council September 19th when we were in front of council wired us to go back and and come up with a couple of other options so there's a couple of other options here National Weather Service warnings watches advisories but that variety or temperatures at or below 20 degrees so either one could trigger opening an additional shelter that would be about 50 to 60 days additional during the sheltering season which is October to May or another option is one and two but also temperatures at or below 32 with snow predicted that would be about 60 to 80 days so what the what these options show here is that for those very very basic days

[68:00] of additional shelter those 20 and number one coordinated entry would not be required at any time you could just walk up to the shelter each day that there's additional shelter that's needed and there would be no requirement either that day or the next day to go through coordinated entry options two and three highlights that coordinated entry after the first day would be required so that after the first day of shelter people could go to coordinated entry they could be assessed for what their needs are and their programs they would be referred to and have a plan developed for them Karen can I ask you a question about that sure so with that coordinated entry required that would be to get someone in the system yes but if I mean regardless of the outcome of their assessment would

[69:01] they still be allowed back in overnight emergency weather based sheltering yes the goal here with these number of days is not to to be expanding that parallel system so we want to make sure that there's plenty of days for you know basic safety and everybody having that shelter regardless of whether they want services or not but people will be using the system ongoing many days we'd like to get them into the system of services so that we're not developing that parallel system of having a lot of ongoing shelter without engaging people in hell absolutely which is great thank you because you're not you're not being explicit you're just saying we'd like to very different than it will happen and so I mean the question is people frankly

[70:04] typically transients in Boulder want to do this is fine they do it for a night and that's that's perfectly reasonable the question is can they continue doing it throughout the winter and choose not to enter the system we've set up because you haven't said they can't you've just said we'd like them to well no no what no that they they can't continue to get additional sheltering without entering coordinated entry so the recommendation is coordinated entry required yes for numbers 2 & 3 so after somebody uses this for one time two times whatever I don't really care whether it's one time or two times or even three times for that matter we would say no you can't do it anymore unless you enter the coordinated entry system which has the navigation path and

[71:00] that's right the other path and so on okay things not for clarifying and it just to follow up to pin it down even further so so we require them to participate with coordinated entry and then let's say there's a set of recommendations that comes from that and and they say well actually I'm not so interested in path to home or transition better or whatever so they go off on on their own way if they come back a week later for emergency shelter and would they be letting you know I don't know I don't know that we have it that carefully figured out the goal the overall goal is to get people into the system of services and not have people coming back over and over even through the severe weather sheltering path that's not what the goal is we don't want people doing that we want them to get them into the system of services and we want to minimize what the circumstances are that people can do

[72:01] that there are probably going to be instances of people who who are residents of our community who are going to need help and they may come back a week or two weeks later I'm not sure what the hard and fast rules are going to be around that but we would like to engage them get them into services without allowing everyone who's coming into the system to the through severe weather sheltering to not be engaged in getting into coordinated entry I'm sure there's going to be some exceptions to that I'm depending on the individuals need and circumstances are so to say no nobody would be able to come back after a week if they haven't gone into coordinated entry I think that's probably not the case but it's not the goal Thanks um I have a question but have you finished before we you're still well you tell me if I should wait till the end and that's

[73:00] simply there's the National Weather Service winter watch or warnings how does that relate to an inch of snow two inches of snow three when do those usually kick in at what level of precipitation let me put it that way so just trying to figure out how these overlap yeah so I'm not sure I'm gonna ask Wendy to come up she's the one who's done some research on what those specifics are we can have an advisory you can have in a warning you can have a watch that involves a little bit of snow a lot of snow really cold temperatures or higher temperatures I'm trying to figure out we've talked about certainty and so I'm just trying to figure out what we get but yeah at the end if you want I just wanted to clarify what we're talking about at some point okay why don't you clarify that now Wendy Wendy Schwartz homeless services program

[74:02] manager so there's not a direct correlation suzanne between inches of precipitation or inches of snow and the winter watches or warnings our conversations with the National Weather Service and NOAA essentially what meteorologists do is look at a combination of factors that roll into severe conditions and so there could be three inches of snow for instance at one point and there's not a severe weather watch or a warning of any kind and another day with a different set of combination of conditions there there may be but there's there's not a there's not a direct line you can draw between a certain number of inches of

[75:01] snow and a warning or watch determination because you can watch in the weather five six days out and I'm concerned about the faith communities and their ability to plan you know their resources so the question is are you determining the time line and for that I'm going to ask our human services planner Lindsay part Lindsay who did the more detailed so I think I can answer that question so as soon as an advisory is issued we would be talking with our

[76:00] service providers to to stand up additional severe weather sheltering but is it and by talking to them that's different than saying go yeah we would be talking with them about there's a severe weather advisory warning watch and we need to stand up some additional sheltering okay so the decision point is made would yes is when the weather forecast is indicating we're hitting these triggers right because we usually see this come in two or three days in advance well so just be more specific but if somebody wanted to know what they know by ten o'clock in the morning would they know by noon would I mean there's a protocol here right there's there's a waterfall but is that the day before well it depends on when the weather forecast when we're hitting those triggers so as soon as we're but why no but you can look on your phone and it may say it's gonna be 20 degrees on Saturday but at what time do you decide they mean it I'm

[77:00] just trying to figure out the predictability that's what you're after is 24 or 48 hours out he's usually about 48 hours out and sometimes it's a little longer from a realistic standpoint you'd want to make the call you know definitely buy the night before historically when boho operated they would decide very early in the morning so that they could make the announcement relatively early in the day but generally when they were working with faith communities there was that you know that discussion beforehand but obviously that this was probably going to happen this is a good chance that this might happen but in our communications with boho we usually tried to communicate by late that night before and let's interesting point we

[78:28] should let you finish yes and thank you and we'll get back to recommendations ok yeah that's definitely something that could be implemented so this is just another way of looking at this this is the estimated percentage of additional total shelter days that would be added to the system based on these three different scenarios and then on the right you can see system impacts and provider and client impacts so the more days that we're adding on an

[79:00] unpredictable on an unpredictable basis then the harder it is for our service providers to staff and identify sites to stand up so I think to get to your point Jan and Suzanne having a hard and fast cut off whether it's 48 hours or 36 hours or whatever that is would help with that and so then regardless of the weather conditions how it pans out we would be standing up those additional that additional shelter so this is just showing you as we add days the the more significant impact there is on the faith-based sites or whatever other sites that would be providing shelter there is two locating staff and having staff and insights all ready to go yeah sure so once you decide that this the

[80:04] emergency sheltering is going to happen what does that set in motion what does that look like there's communication that needs to happen and also I would imagine there's transportation related efforts what does that look like so we are in contact with the service provider who's going to be providing it and then they have to contact their staff and get staff scheduled get those sites scheduled with the faith-based sites get the communications out through the networks and communication networks and get everything together a very short short notice to be able to put things in place so the service providers who are providing the service and the faith-based sites are the ones who are really coordinating everything and putting it together and does that I'm sorry looks like my battery is low so we may is that a

[81:03] commentary on the energy here today just one more thing just and does that include food preparation as well yes so that would be include the meal at the faith-based site through community table of bridge houses doing this through navigation Center and expanding those beds for severe weather shelter or if the shelter is providing severe weather shelter we don't know who would be providing it then that those meals would be with the service provider and they would be organizing that because we don't know yet who will be providing the service yep okay I think they're looking for cord but you better hurry okay well we're we can't you have to you can just click on it all right let's see if we

[82:04] can keep going here up there we go so staff recommendation is option two that increases the number of days up to sixty or about sixty from the twenty that was the previous recommendation it provides clear weather conditions and criteria for implementation it does help restrain the creation of a parallel shelter system and those associated costs it is it helps maintain the integrity of our new system of services and we would also suggest that as we as the new system of services unfolds this season that we evaluate those outcomes and what the demand and the need is for severe weather shelter in the future so we're recommending staff is recommending option number two so depending on what council decides we would immediately

[83:02] release a scope of service group of services to select a provider to provide the service we would expedite a contract so that we have this in place for this season so our council motion staff requests consideration of this matter in action in the form of the following motion motion to approve staff recommendation for severe weather sheltering so we can take additional questions so I have a quick one um you're gonna before proceed with those next steps but with a different trigger so like you say you hope to get it set up you were already planning on setting this up we're gonna set up severe weather shelter but the implementation I know I'm just saying it's we're talking about we're not anything that wasn't are needlessly launched so I just would you said we hope to have it set up and it's

[84:00] like well you're gonna have it set up right because you've been planning to do that all along right that's right yes that's correct other questions Oh Matt it being so subtle with them yeah so a couple of things one is the the number of people served and I guess I'm still a little unclear about this but whatever the outcome of the number of days is there is there is there not some implicit or explicit limit on the number of people who get served in this system for severe weather shelter you know there's no limit no okay the question I have is kind of back to the how how serious are we gonna be about getting people into the system we hope to get them into and how will this not be a parallel system if you have unlimited

[85:02] numbers lots of days and no absolute requirement that they get into the system if they choose not to it sure sounds like a parallel system to me well I think the key would absolutely be the requirement after the first night of sheltering to go through coordinated entering assessment and then to have really clear criteria and for how many times you can come back or if you can come back at all if you don't participate in coordinated entry before the shelter was open for four months wasn't it and I know we had before changing to a new system it's still gonna be hard to live outside if we only do the other good no no make a comment that the album but if you don't want a parallel system you need something to break the mode of the parallel system and this doesn't do it unless you have some additional mechanism to make that

[86:01] happen and I'm still hearing you is saying yes we should have it but it's not clear we will and we haven't set the parameters yet and was still working on it and who knows how it will turn out and that's a little disappointing doesn't help me kind of make a decision here tonight developing a parallel sheltering system so I think your point is that if there isn't a requirement to enter coordinated entry on the second day the second day or the third day but pretty close to the the first time someone is in shelter then we are developing a parallel shelter system that is why on the recommendations that we say coordinate or a coordinated entry would be required for options two or three exactly you know what that would

[87:04] look like hasn't been developed yet we would have to develop it but that's the goal well I'll just put it out there I think that that is laudable and it makes sense to try not to create a parallel system and really focus efforts on getting people up and out but we also don't want people to die on the streets and so we just have to acknowledge that those things on every now and then they'll be in conflict and we still don't want people to die on the streets and so it'll be a little muddy and that's the way it is I think and that's what it's gonna have to be so I'll make my quick comment no I mean I get that but it doesn't work we've proven it doesn't work that is an unsustainable system what happens is Boulder attracts enormous numbers of people from the region from the state from everywhere and it doesn't work doesn't work for both it doesn't work for any community it can't work in the long run they can't even work in the short run I mean the reason I voted for the previous

[88:00] go-around is because I thought it was a package that we go to this other system it's not perfect there is no perfect system but it's pretty good when you add it to our other efforts on affordable housing and stuff like that this to me just undoes what we've done to a very large extent even understanding what you said suzanne it's still undoes it and I think we just end up back where we were having two parallel systems spending more money accomplishing something with the good system to be sure but undoing a lot of it with the parallel system and I think you know in another year or two people will realize that didn't work either and we have to find a way to basically put the message out that we definitely want to deal with people who are homeless who really are living in our community absolutely and I think we do a pretty good job of that not perfect

[89:01] but pretty good but we can't do that job for everybody in the region in the state in the country who comes here because we provide services that very few other communities provide and that's my problem and I think this will be a parallel system it'll be more days it'll be you know I'm not holding my breath I'm really forcing people to go through the navigation system or even what we're going to do with them after they go through the navigation system and they choose to stay here and not be part of the system so that's my concern and I would just like to see that happen faster it's not about money I'd be more than willing to put more money into the system that works and certainly into housing and certainly into transitional housing it's about making it work and I think this undermines the effort so that's my concern other thoughts whoever wants to go

[90:01] I just fault do you have any recommendations now you're expecting me to be way too smart and I'm not I for me the recommendation is go with the new system make it work you know were you invested we're investing a lot of money into it get people to go through the evaluations the navigation system and so on if you want to have at least for this year some limited amount of severe weather sheltering I think that's not unreasonable I would limit it to some number of days and I don't have a super strong preference but I certainly make sure that people are required to enter the system after a couple of uses let's say and that also we are serious about what we mean by navigation systems it's a polite word but if you're not serious about it you just stay in the same you know the same unending mess that you're in and I don't think you're really

[91:01] helping people okay so did he answer your question for you okay so yeah I appreciate those thoughts I mean I think we do want to be careful that this is a supplement to prevent people from dying on the streets as n says but not replacing the system that we've carefully set up with checks and balances and with the new homeless strategy so the in terms of some service like this being an attractant I thought that the comparison with other sheltering facilities in the region was instructive because the actually I believe the standards in option 3 are very similar to the stamps that are used in other shelters in the regions such as the severe weather shelter network in the metro Denver and the suburbs and in less permissive than than the Hope Center in Longmont so I don't given that there are other options in the area that

[92:00] that are you know as open as much or more I don't see it playing such a big attractant role so but I think the you know the imperative here is is to not have people dying on the streets when it's preventable so I do support the the option number three that the staff put together because the the I think it's important to have a precipitation factor to it because if it's 23 degrees but there's you know five inches of snow but it doesn't quite hit the threshold for weather service warning that's that's a really brutal night so there's only a few a you know there's a modest number of additional nights for number three but I think it would be worth going down that route but I wanted to support what Jen said before about strong standards so that we can give the maximum amount of predictability to our faith-based partners and so and I'd

[93:01] encourage us to get those in you know written down and something reliable that that folks can depend on so whatever both at that's 24 hours in advance or I'm not sure exactly what it is I'll let I would let you know people figure those details out but that there is some predictability I think is important so and and also the the entry in the coordinate entry the ties to court and entry I think are important to to get people into the system so Karen I really appreciate the points you're making about making sure that this ties into the existing system that we've set up and what I heard you saying that there you're still figuring out how that would interact and the requests that I would make is if we go down this route is to as you work to put that together maybe we could get an information packet in a few weeks once those details were hammered out so that we had a sense of where you were going so those are my thoughts I'm gonna join Erin and supporting option number three I'm incremental II it's not a lot more money

[94:00] and it does provide greater protection and I agree with Erin's the comparison of option 3 to some of the other services up and down the front of range you know I get your point Matt about the parallel system and the risk of that but the nice thing about this is this is this is the safety net outside of the outside of the core system and we can dial all this up and dial it down so this this can be an experimental if we find that we're providing too much service tours unnecessary we can always Ratchet it back it was perfect we quite frankly staff the ratcheted back during the middle of the winter if they wanted to we're not making the nothing's can be cast and stone here and so I'd I'd err on the side of providing more services here seeing what works and then reconsidering it hopefully a little bit before this time next year but maybe next summer to do a post-op on how the winter of 2006 1718 went and whether we want to continue option three or we want to dial it back so okay so the option number

[95:04] three that that sixty to eighty days is an estimate so it could very well end up being much much less is that it could those estimates are based on a three year average it is a three year so on any in any year depending on the weather it could be more it could be less so I'm inclined to give ourselves a little more room to operate in and you know I agree with both Bob and Aaron about how we should go forward with us and and and and see how it all works out I also share Matt's concern about not creating a parallel system so that we do have to be firm as well on when we have people enter into the navigation services but I would rather give us our cell give ourselves a little bit of a safety margin with the number of days rather

[96:01] than I suspect that if we chose option number two and we were at day 61 we'd be scrambling anyway so that's kinda how I'm looking at it okay I'll jump in I think we're headed the right place I think going from having four months of overflow shelter to weather dependent will be a big step towards not creating a parallel system I think if you do coordinated entry I think you're saying by the second or third night somewhere in there that also makes sense I know Matt wants it soon would I think the deal is to be firm but compassionate that's what we're after right so I guess the other thing is a like we're saying about think of this as adaptive management right we are trying this new program out we're going to you know collect data we're gonna learn from it

[97:00] we're gonna adapt accordingly it makes sense to me that we have a study session on this and I don't know end of January and see how things are going if there's tweaks that need to be made for the rest of the season I would also say I would encourage Longmont to adopt similar measures I think we should maybe see if that's a conversation that would make it make sense to have Metro ride so that everybody's come on the same page on that whether then people are running around trying to figure out which city is the best option they stay in the city where they're at so I guess that's why I'm at I know you should know that I think this council is very supportive of setting up this other system and really investing in and making it work and yet we want to make sure nobody dies on the streets and so I'm with you and this to me is a decent compromise so anything

[98:03] else dead okay did you want to make that motion I'll move that we approve option number three for the weather dependent sheltering second okay because we made a motion we need to see if anybody in the public wants to speak to this who hasn't already spoken to us about this topic does anybody want to speak that hasn't already spoken we invite you to come on up there and then and then you just have to wait why are we doing that and then we'll just need you to give her name your official name to the list maker will do better thank you for considering this you know I wanted to make introduce yourself oh sorry Maria Krantz this is my big

[99:03] concern I did want to say that it won't be as difficult food will not the community table will continue anyway so it won't be as hard on congregations I am sure that we can get congregations to just take one day a week so they know that they will be on call one day a week and that will make it work my concern is a 20 in 20 degrees 21 degrees people will die so I would love to see that temperature raised at boho we stayed at 32 degrees and and that worked very well and so that's my only concern otherwise I just want to thank you for doing considering number three wait thank you

[100:00] yes and if you can give your name to the clerk that would be great just so she has you come on up I'm a little nervous this don't be nervous we're friendly microphone my name is Nancy Jordan I used to live in Boulder I was at one time homeless in Boulder I worked for boho years ago and I'm not homeless anymore happy to say what I want to say is that I'm glad that you all are considering the number three option and that you've considered it all very carefully I want to express that I'm in favor of you know like case management and then you know going through resources it's important to me that you know based on what I know of the homeless community what I've observed over the years and what I know of the people is that there are very broad very broad of needs and there will probably be a

[101:01] very broad spectrum of goals and limitations and personalities that you'll be deep that we'll be dealing with and not to go easy on people but to give to to consider the individual they're dealing with when they do that and to consider rather than having a cookie cutter okay now we want you to do this now we want you to do that to consider all the diversity of the people that we're talking about because because there are many I've seen people be incredibly impressively productive and you know go sleep on the floor get up and go to work in the morning something I don't know if I could pull that off I mean that's that's really hard you know for so many reasons but there are people that are so unaccustomed to sleeping indoors that it's a very hard thing to wrap their mind around or sleeping inside of a

[102:01] confined area paying rent and things like that that the the degree of casework would have to be I think tailored to each individual person considered carefully by the people doing it so I just want to just - I want us to be sensitive to that I think it's really important to consider each individual very carefully and and try to help each one according to who they are and where they're at and they're in their life and in their journey okay okay that's what I wanted to say thank you and thank you so much you betcha and if you don't mind giving your name to Lynette that would be great okay are we good all right we're gonna close the public comment we have a motion in a second any more discussion okay all those in favor all those opposed okay great so I think with that we are joining the

[103:03] special meeting and we're going into a study session so I'm officially a journeying this special meeting and staff who are doing the study session I want to come on up we'll get started by the way hold it up

[104:10] if we could get this transition to happen quickly I ain't gonna happen quickly okay hey thanks everybody who came if you're gonna leave if you could leave now that would be awesome I love how nobody listens to me I know

[105:09] well okay we're gonna go ahead and start the study session right okay we have two items tonight and the first one is Chautauqua take it away good evening members of City Council my name is Bill Cowen i'm the city's principal traffic engineer and i'm here with Susan Connelly who's the deputy director of community vitality and a host of other staff in the audience as well as our consultant all of whom have been working for the last two years on the development of the Chautauqua access management plan now you may recall when we briefed you on this project in April we described this as a wicked problem yes it's a good term a problem which is

[106:05] going to be very difficult to solve a problem for which many of the solutions are probably going to have negative impacts of their own this this area has a tremendous demand for access it is not an easy place to access by many modes of transportation and has very little parking supply and it also happens to be a landmark so all of these things contribute to make this very challenging project so I am extremely pleased we are extremely pleased to be here tonight and share with you the results of our pilot program we hope that you will be equally pleased so just a little reminder of how we got here this two-year process started back in 2016 issues surrounding access have existed

[107:01] out there for a very long time decades there were concerns from the Colorado taco Association which leases the property from us concerns from neighbors who live to the north about the impacts to them all of this led to a process that included data collection over lasts over the summer of 2016 a very robust robust public input process including a community working group that helped advise us advise us on the layout of a pilot program which we then implemented this past summer evaluated and now we're here tonight to discuss those results the camp has a vision statement essentially it is to manage demand for access minimize impacts to surrounding neighbors visitors cultural resources again this is all of these things make it the the wicked problem that it is

[108:00] just a reminder of the components this operated for 13 weekends June 3rd to August 27th there was free park-to-park shuttle with free satellite parking managed paid parking in the Chautauqua area that was at a fee of 2 dollars and 50 cents per hour which is about twice what you would pay in the downtown it included a neighborhood permit parking zone to the knit with a in a neighborhood to the north as well as permit only parking in the leasehold area a robust transportation demand management program that was put together by the Colorado taco Association and our goal Boulder staff subsidized transportation network company rides which we arranged with lyft on site and on shuttle Ambassador Program which was very popular and very helpful and a focused marketing and communications plan which helped get the message out early and assisted the project in being

[109:00] successful this map shows the layout of the park to Park shuttle it's an l-shaped that ran from the downtown to the Chautauqua Area to the new Vista lot to see you Regent and then back again this 00 to 7:00 Saturday and Sunday and was free Mars to ask you a question while you're on that map the regular route of the hop which sections of this route are not on the regular hop route so I'm gonna need to call up staff right off the bat I'm Natalie Stifler transportation plan earth go builder the hop route doesn't go south of college and then yeah thanks very much we should go to fun yeah all right you can stay up here this graphic

[110:00] shows the different zones that we studied again there were six different zones including a North neighborhood which we studied to measure where parking might disperse this shows the the original npp pilot proposal and the area which was not included because residents living on those streets specifically asked not to be included and then again a very robust TDM program that are one of our goal bold or staff Chris Hagelin worked on with the Colorado taco Association primarily a carrot based approach so the program had several goals we're going to reduce automobile and pedestrian conflicts we wanted to reduce automobile mode share consistent with our transportation master plan goals and we wanted to reduce parking demand in adjacent neighborhoods we also had some secondary goals we wanted to minimize the hop to Chautauqua impacts to the people living

[111:02] near the auditorium and we wanted to make sure that we did not negatively impact the use of open space and we had a series of metrics and we'll go through each of these metrics but these this is all the data that we collected and of you waited through the pilot so what were the results so - in terms of reducing automobile mode share we looked at transit shuttle ridership the TDM program and the network company subsidy the Proctor Park transit ridership was amazing an average of almost 900 daily boardings almost 23,000 riders through the summer on Saturday August 8th there were almost 1500 people riding the shuttle that's a third of the people who were trying to get to Chautauqua this

[112:00] this was a definitely a crown jewel in the pilot maybe it's in the next slide my question so I'll wait okay this slide shows the boarding breakdown as you can see of course the majority of the boardings and a Lighting's took place at Chautauqua at baseline in 10th with the next highest being at new Vista that points out how important that parking lot is to the program and then another 14% from downtown and 10% from the C Regent law baseline in 10th what's what's there that's that's the Kings gate Kings gate so basic leave that's where the shuttle stopped at Chautauqua at Kings gate and then this is what the profile looks like through the day and

[113:01] blue is the inbound trips yellow is the outbound trips as you can see in the morning of course everybody's arriving but by noon the the bus is full both coming and going and then again typical bell curve the TDM program very effective again this was work with the Colorado taco Association the dining hall and the Colorado music festival based on the surveys a 14% decrease in occupancy vehicle on those weekends 10% of the people using the shuttle regularly this is were strong results the transportation network company this subsidy was a dollar 25 per ride in the first half of the pilot to try and increase use of this effort we we increased the subsidy to $2 and 50 cent

[114:00] for the second half through the entire summer we saw 66 total lift rides if the increased subsidy or maybe it's in the next slide it's not in the next slide the increase the majority of the rides did take place after we increase the subsidy weight so people would rather ride the bus just saying that out loud well we certainly got a lot of people riding the bus so in terms of reducing parking demand on the adjacent neighborhood and leasehold streets without the parking utilization the paid parking numbers and parking enforcement and again this is those the zones and the parking utilization was certainly the most time intensive data intensive component of the program we had twelve hundred and sixty-two parking spaces

[115:01] that we were studying multiple days through the summer in each of these zones and here are the results on an average of almost 50 fewer cars per hour per day in the area I mean that's hundreds of fewer cars that are parking in that Chautauqua area the majority of that being in the areas where we were hoping that parking would decrease in the leasehold area and in the npp zone people still locked up the green the ranger lot and baseline and unpaid to do so you will see that there was increased parking in the north neighborhood and surprisingly there was a sort of a tertiary benefit that people parked less frequently on weekdays even though the parking restrictions were in effect there that might have been maybe some confusion they thought it was in effect but less

[116:00] less parking on weekdays as well so while you're on this slide sorry to keep interrupting you but I just had to say how great this data collection is I mean these are real numbers right when you measured last year and then you measure this year that's a real quantitative analysis numbers thank you for the good data and there's a minute and it's there's little for many of these numbers we actually have photos as well so I mean it's hard to dispute nice so you may remember this graphic this shows this is something we showed you back in April this is what the the streets look like these red dotted areas are the streets that would meet the NTP criteria they had over 75 percent utilization for four hours on it on a particular day that's really really parked up if you look in 2017 that's what it looks like so we'll do that one more time this is

[117:00] what it looks like before this is what it looks like afterwards again you can see baseline road the green the ranger lot McClintock trailhead these places are still parked up the neighborhood roadways not so much the big outline of course being 10th Street because they chose because they chose not to be in the NPP and you can see that graphic you can see that point here as well this and what I would ask you to look at here is grant place north of Baseline Road and the streets that surround it that's the 79% that's grant directly opposite the entrance to Chautauqua and then the streets that surround it that red is not good red is highly parked up this is the average peak utilization during the 00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. so that's what it looked like in 2016 this is what it looks like in 2017 and again is that for hours that was

[118:02] 00 a.m. 00 p.m. that's the average so I'm gonna go back and again look at grant place and ninth Street one block north where it says 47 percent and 41 percent you can see that certainly some of the traffic moved up there and again if you look over on 10th Street it was 58 percent now it is 91 percent so that Street certainly saw a lot of parking utilization is there a magic number I mean you've got red is so 75 and above is the problem and below that ain't not so it's not a big deal so 75 percent and above meets the npp threshold when a street has 75 percent parking utilization it feels pretty full 60 percents not great which is why it's light red and then it's yeah my

[119:01] apologies hey Bill can I just ask I want to make sure that we know what we're looking at here so what this is saying 00 and 2:00 there was 62 percent utilization at any one point in time was the average of that 5 hour average to the 5 hour yeah and those five hours would be are pretty consistent those are the worst hours of the day and then at the bottom you can see the the numbers first the CCA leasehold previously across the entire leasehold that was a 63% parking utilization afterwards 42% parking utilization so enforcement was an important component of course we averaged almost 50 violations per day the majority of it being in the two neighborhood areas North npp and in the leasehold they were almost 1300 parking

[120:01] citations issued 84% of them were for lack of payment lack of permit the others would have been for your more typical violations parking too close to a driveway not having appropriate license plate so forth and less than 20% of them are made unpaid as of October ninth and that was an important statistic because we were concerned that with so many people coming from out of town it might just not pay they might just crinkle it up and throw it away that was not the case these numbers are very consistent with parking violation pay rates across the rest of the city though most visitors are from within the county did I see that correctly somewhere there's there's a very I think our prior what our prior data had said was that about a third of the people came from Boulder another third came from Boulder County Front Range and then another third came from even more remote than that so quite a

[121:02] few people coming and maybe thinking they might not have to worry about parking enforcement but still they paid so in terms of reducing the automobile and pedestrian conflict we looked at crosswalk yielding compliance and speed and volume on baseline so the crosswalk where the bus stopped at at Kings gate we saw a forty five percent increase in the pedestrian crossing volume and thirty percent of those pedestrians were that transit users as you would expect that's the main reason why there was so much additional crossing their compliance at that crosswalk increased from seventy four percent to ninety five percent 95 percent compliance is really good we do not see 95 percent compliance at a lot of crosswalks in the city of Boulder so we were very pleased to see

[122:00] that number the crosswalk up at the main entrance also increased it was a more it was a smaller increase but it was already up in the ninety percent category so at both of these main crosswalks entering the city we've got over ninety percent compliance traffic volume and speed data here was a little less compelling traffic volumes stayed in the 9,000 vehicles per day range speeds actually look like they are higher in the after condition that is important to note that after this was completed after the data collection was completed and based on an entirely different speed limit evaluation that we had performed we changed the speed limit on that roadway from 30 to 25 and so these are certainly things that we're going to be monitoring going forward and especially the speed on that roadway and and trying to make sure that people are

[123:02] not speeding in this area that has such a high pedestrian hey say the last part again so as a result of this he lowered the the speed limit not as a result of this is a part of a separate speed limit evaluation but at the end the entire baseline corridor from city limits East to Broadway we lowered the speed limit from 30 miles an hour to 25 well okay but that wouldn't have affected this state missed would not have affected this data that happened after we collected this data explain this because I thought we had a major decrease in the number of single occupancy vehicles yeah so so that data certainly does not correlate well with the conclusions that we would draw from all of the rest of that data and I expect that that is probably because this is a snapshot of data and the the variability in that data is probably within what we would

[124:02] expect to see in terms of a reduction we will certainly want to collect more data and and continue to monitor that going forward it's also possible that and this is certainly something that we heard from some people that that number is real and that what we saw is that or what people may have been doing is driving up to the Chautauqua site realizing that they need to pay for parking and then turning around and driving back and catching the shuttle and if that were happening we would expect over time that as the message got out that would stop sooner or later we expect to see that number go down um is this where is it measured I mean is it this particular piece of data was measured between ninth and grant okay so what we don't know though is if people going up like step-mom or whether they were going to talk about right correct we just measured it at that one point I swear this time on you as a cyclist it

[125:02] feels like there's more traffic going up the mountain which we'd have nothing to do with Chautauqua but just more people coming anyhow yeah just curious so of course we were also interested in trail visitation how it was not our goal to negatively impact trail usage we and there was some concern that by providing a shuttle we might make it a lot easier and that and that there would be a lot more people using the trails there was concern that by charging for parking we would chase people away and there would be a lot fewer people using the trails this is the data that open space mount the preliminary data that open space in mountain parks was able to provide to us from a survey that they did on their trail heads these are very modest reductions in usage and it's also important to note that that the trail

[126:00] had the main trailhead was actually under construction proportion of the summer so we would expect that some portion of that reduction is actually from that rather than from the pilot program so we look at that and say we don't think we had any significant impact upon trailhead usage okay you got a stop there so it says minus 11 percent yes and you said that's modest modest yes okay okay yeah okay and again in part because the trailhead was under construction okay and we feel like that was as much of a factor as anything that the pilot program did this slide just basically says visitation into the city was the same this was not an unusually people came and visited Boulder just as much in 2017 as they did else alone in other years we definitely heard you when

[127:03] we were discussing the budget for this project to try and be as fiscally prudent as possible and we were able to keep our expenses down and spend approximately $60,000 less than we had budgeted we also had $40,000 of additional revenue more than we had anticipated so the financial picture for this program was about a hundred thousand dollars better than we had thought it would be so we look at all of those factors especially as they pertain to our goals and we think that this has been an extremely successful pilot but there there certainly were concerns that were raised and and you've seen some of them in emails that have been provided to you this week residents on 9th Street

[128:01] concerned about the transit service and the impacts from that from a noise perspective particularly there were visitors who were had understandable concerns about accessible access and the handicapped parking spots couldn't be located near the the pay kiosks and how challenging that was they were concerned from visitors about signage clarity around license plates people would park walk to a kiosk realized that they needed a license plate and go and then have to turn around and go back and get their license plate so we we definitely feel like we can improve upon that but they're gonna go hike through mouth yes I would have done the same thing so there were definitely issues with visitors downloading the the park mobile

[129:00] smartphone app and again we were very reliant upon that application because we could only put pay key in certain locations and so having that not perform as well as we hoped was this challenges with two questions on that bill one is why didn't it perform and because it works really well downtown the second is do you have a rough estimate of how many people use the kiosk versus part mobile share I I don't have the numbers in front of me it's probably in the memo yeah sorry I and I don't know if anybody else has quick access to the numbers we're going to get that for you 64% yes do we know why the part mobile app people had difficulty with him as far as we know a variety of reasons sometimes it was the phone age of the phone what was on it its ability

[130:00] to to download apps for some people or we also are told as we reached out each week to the provider a lot of usage in certain physical space at the same time was stressing the system so we have a number of ways we think it could be improved for next summer knowing that result and just I guess to give credit where credit is due another thing that worked very well was that Susan after the first week of the program went to the landmarks board and got permission to put up a kiosk in the Ranger lot and that helped a lot Thank You landmarks board DRC and then of course you know there were concerns from people about having to pay at a park I mean with this this project was not without people expressing that concern again you may remember that I that when

[131:00] we briefed you on this before I said this could be really contentious and you should go into it with your eyes wide open we were really surprised at how how many people were supportive of this versus how few came out to complain about it couldn't have been happier to be wrong what could you know was it Boulder residents who were concerned or was it everyone you know we heard before that Boulder people said they've you know we've paid the tax so we shouldn't have to pay was there any difference there anecdotally from the ambassador's on site it sounded like residents express more concern visitors we're just happy to go with the flow so as we completed our evaluate the pilot and our evaluation we've started to contemplate what preliminary recommendations we might

[132:00] want to make going forward and of course we relied heavily on the data collection and analysis we also had a community questionnaire which the results are in your your packet but uh again a major finding of that questionnaire was just how much support there was for the pilot program this summer we had did stakeholder debrief with Chautauqua and with the neighborhood to the north and got very positive feedback from them there were people who had opted into a public email group and were receiving notifications and we got a lot of feedback from from them and then of course we did a Charette with the Colorado Chautauqua Association because as we sit here tonight we wanted to be absolutely on the same page with them and we developed our recommendations in concert and we believe we are and then of course we took advantage of the fantastic what's a boulder open house that occurred recently and had a booth

[133:01] there and and got feedback there as well which brings us to our preliminary recommendations we are thinking that it would be advantageous to expand the program dates somewhat to include the two holiday weekends on either side that's a pretty modest increase you know from 26 days to 33 days we and of course one of the things we're going to need to work out is so when do we have access to these parking lots and which weekends which weekends will we have access to these parking lots and do we want to run a program that maybe only has access to C Regent lot for a couple of weekends and then has access to new Vista for the rest of it I mean these are all details that we're going to need to work out but at this point that's our preliminary recommendation changing the transit hours from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. this is in

[134:00] part a response to concerns about noise we starting later hopefully allows a little bit less noise impact in that earlier morning time another consideration there is that we are confident that we can incorporate into the contract for service going forward a cleaner less noisy bus service and we hope that that will also help mitigate some of the concerns that are being raised there from a TNC standpoint I'm sorry bill - can you drill into that Q what might that look like the cleaner less noisy calling Natalie so via recently if if the award to be awarded the contract they recently received three clean diesel vehicles and they've

[135:01] retired the three 2004 vehicles that were used quite a bit on this route and they were the oldest buses in their fleet and so if they were to be the operator we think that would alleviate a lot of the noise concerns the Clean Diesel buses are much quieter and obviously emit less than than the current fleet had over the summer so I think if we would we would be able to guarantee that and they would make a good effort to put those newer vehicles on the route because we have the flexibility to do that in the summers with the lower peak vehicle requirements for the hop during the summers and then we also would in the contract for the RFP prioritize any vendor that would propose on the service that that would be prioritizing cleaner vehicles and and less noisy vehicles

[136:00] great thanks very much and are we gonna get any electric op buses anytime soon what's hurt yes we have secured funding for two electric buses the way that just the procurement works we will be able to place the order at the beginning of next year and then we actually won't receive them to put into operation for a minimum of 18 months a question about routing you know when you put up the slide up there the the amount of views from downtown and ninth and college was a lot lower than from new vistas so I'm wondering if you've considered looking at the hop route and perhaps adjusting it a little bit I don't know what you could do but to consider the fact that there's a lot less traffic from downtown coming up or a lot fewer users from

[137:02] downtown coming up to Chautauqua and how that might affect your decisions in the future yes so I think so part of we saw about 15% of ridership from downtown and that definitely is significantly less than what we saw from noobist and Saturday Lots I think part of a reason for that was because we heavily marketed new Vista and Cu that was really where our effort was and I think kind of selling that connection to downtown and the free parking available downtown and just have having more marketing around to visit downtown I think we would have seen more ridership and so that was something that we were hoping that we could do this coming summer and and I think you know we're considering how we could modify the route to continue to serve downtown and get to Chautauqua and get to our satellite what's and it just it's not

[138:01] possible to serve downtown and turn around there so that's kind of what we're struggling with I think I have a follow up here on the numbers so the 15 percent of the total boardings were downtown but that includes people going back right correct so if you if you're thinking about what percentage of the total origination trips we're downtown to be closer to 30% if I understand them correctly that's almost a third of the people going to show taco we're warning downtown yeah in terms of inbound and then corresponding outbound that would be basically a third coming from the downtown two-thirds coming from either Regent or new Vista yes so definitely

[139:02] less but still substantial right we would not want to lose a third of our ridership and you're sure all those people have gone on downtown and went all the way up the hill to cheat Agra we're certainly not sure that all of them did but we're fairly confident that most of them did okay cuz I've heard that a lot of people kind of used it is downtown you know hopping from one place to another and you know that the noise of the diesels is a big concern and I've always wondered when I see them empty if it if you couldn't try to figure something out like a big van on the ninth Street round that could go more often and if that wouldn't provide you with enough ridership and that would certainly take a lot of cost out it's something that you considered at all yeah I think you know all options if we can in a cost-effective way

[140:00] have a mix of fleet and then we'll look at that but it just gets complicated and may not be that cost-effective when it comes to scheduling drivers and and meeting all of the requirements I mean that another consideration is that I mean there were times of the day especially coming up from new Vista that that bus was full so and you got to use the same vehicle or you get into the turnaround issues that that Natalie was mentioning so if we were to transition to smaller vehicles we'd have to run it more frequently and if you were to run it more frequently than well there would be issues with not having the larger bus available at the times when when you had the highest ridership got a related question did you I know you said the average ridership was 882 per day um did you segment those by our seven eight eight to nine so on and so forth because I know that one of the complaints that

[141:00] some of the neighbors were they lot of the 75 buses were pretty empty you know I see you've given up to 7 o'clock hour which probably makes sense but you have the stats on that yeah it's just gonna go back real quick to this graphic right here okay they're there and that would show you basically the in remind me again what time is the paid parking 00 a.m. 8:00 8:00 to 5:00 5:00 so so those 26 people were writing in the morning in the 75 hour we're basically telling them drive and then start paying for 00 or yeah well let me yeah let me just go back to this graphic here because I was almost about to get to the thing that answered your question the transportation network companies the lift subsidy we're thinking that this can be a bridge for the shuttle service

[142:00] and so what we're thinking we're gonna propose is that there would be free rides in the hours before and in the hours after the shuttle service specifically from the region parking lot which is the least used parking lot up to the site so if for instance your Colorado dining all employee and you'd love to use the shuttle so that you could take advantage of the TDM benefits but you have to be your shift starts before the shuttle is going to start this would be an option for you to lift up work your shift and then take the shuttle back and we think cool that's 00 a.m. is that ring who's that the memo it's exam and then at night timing runs to it love it thanks likewise it would be an opportunity for climbers in the evening who maybe or people were late hikers who were gonna come back after the shuttle

[143:02] service has stopped this is just a detail but you know sometimes there's concerts obviously a weekend that's how you can avoid people using the shuttle 30 11 o'clock at night to come over concerts because I would the lifts here recycling senior transportation planner so there are a variety of ways in which we can prevent that through the use of codes so employees could have specific codes so but we definitely want to offer the TNC rides is kind of that guaranteed ride home before and after the shuttle operations but then during the shuttle operations there still we would subsidize TNC rights for those that want that door-to-door service we know that some people go to the dining hall and they don't have the physical ability to walk distances so we

[144:01] can provide that door-to-door service with the TNCs but at Chautauqua at night concerts it may be difficult to police the the use of the lift um just a couple of other preliminary recommendations the neighborhood permit parking that was free during the pilot we would expect that moving forward as we transitioned into a program that that would be a paid permit along the lines of whatever permits are ultimately going to be determined the right rate to charge the payment system you know previously five kiosks were thinking that we would add to and that we would pursue one of them being closer to the dining hall also that we would install cradle points which are technology a

[145:01] device which greatly expands the the capability of making that connection for for the park mobile app so I said are you talking Wireless boosters so phone okay okay is that on the cell network or would that be a wireless Wi-Fi I think it's Wi-Fi it's a cell network price okay for a variety of carriers yeah great and then of course we want to make sure we're adequately serving accessible spaces and so installing accessible smart meters near the disabled parking to ensure that they have easy access to to a payment option in terms of next steps after we depart here with your feedback we'll finalize our recommendations and then we will

[146:01] start our tour of the boards and we'll start with open space board of trustees on November 8th and we anticipate being back before you in the first quarter of 2018 with our final recommendations and we will of course need to there are a number of ordinances that will have to be either permanently modified or modified with some sort of Suns at that time they'll need to come before both tab open space Board of Trustees and yourselves and then I think a key part of our recommendation again at this point is that we would like to transition from a pilot program to a program and we think that we could implement a set of recommendations and just let that program run for a series of years we're recommending five at the moment that would allow us to that would

[147:00] allow the city to complete its neighborhood permit parking evaluation which in turn could influence the development of the final plan would also allow the open space Board of Trustees or the open space in mountain parks department to complete their master plan and then subsequently complete their their site specific plan for the Chautauqua area we think that both of those projects could influence the final which is a coax management plan and so we would wait we would propose that we do this for the next say five years until those projects are complete and then revisit the development of the final plan at that time so you're expecting the open space plan to take five years well no okay but we think that the development of their master plan and then subsequently after that the development of their site-specific

[148:00] Chautauqua plan should span about that time so can you contrast that it might be four years but hey you know we don't so contrast that recommendation with doing this pilot for another year well one of the primary considerations with doing a pilot is what you study I mean we've we've spent over $200,000 studying this to date we feel like we're at a point where we could stop doing that and we could operate the pilot report some fairly basic metrics back to you on an annual basis perhaps through an IP or or similar notification process that would be the primary difference between continuing to pilot and having it just be a program so that's very important the the question of what metrics you

[149:01] would continue to track yeah I think it's pretty relevant cuz it well and I'm sorry were you done yes okay so one of the reasons why this is very impressive is you guys really studied and tracked and provided good data I understand counting every car that's parked in this neighborhood over to you know like we don't have to I could totally see scaling back on the level of data or the intensity of data gathered but you're gonna want to track some metrics so speak to that which if even if we said hey consider it a pilot for another year but these are the important metrics to keep tracking I'm just curious yep so so the most time intensive financially intensive component is

[150:01] evaluating parking utilization and there isn't really a elegant way to step back from that I mean the the the value in collecting that data is that you get enough for it to be relevant and we we actually scaled back in the amount of data that we collected in 2017 compared to the amount we collected in 2016 I don't think we would choose to recommend scaling back any further than that and that was a lot of money to do that all credit to our excellent consulting firm Fox tolerant and as for for helping us with that project but we did made them a lot of money to do that so I guess in the positive the things that you would easily be able to continue to track and report on would be you just went through like 12 yeah so we we certainly could we certainly would plan to track we would do to traffic counts and speed data collection we would count ridership on the shuttles let me just go back to the I guess I'd

[151:08] have to go pretty far back the paid parking transactions have paid parking and then and of course the response from the public right continuing to interact with our stakeholders in the area and continuing to get feedback from them on whether that is it's still working is there a way to scale back on the amount of money being paid to study this and still call it a pilot I mean to me the thing about putting something in place for five years is you're kind of saying yeah this probably be permanent versus saying hey this was a really good first year well let's keep going with it but let's not spend as much money tracking every day in car that gets parked so I'm just contrasting those two approaches and maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way no I mean I think you could you could do

[152:01] that I mean we've we really feel like we think we're ready to transition from pilot to program but I think the key consideration here would be just how much staff time and how much City dollars wind up getting a loved 8 and allocated to the evaluation and piloting of this because it's it's been pretty intensive so far and we'd like it to be a lot we think we're ready to be a lot less than that okay yeah can I just for one on that I'm the same path as her so you're saying that if we continue as a pilot it's going to cost a lot more than if we actually put it into well the reason you would the reason you would call it a pilot is that you are continuing to study in a pretty robust fashion so so by definition that's what you mean yeah and there's no I breed where we say

[153:00] study less and call it a pilot but and yes certainly is yeah okay because to me I would want hang out I don't want to I'm monopolizing but yeah just trying to figure out how I'm not sure I mean we're setting a precedent here with regard to open space that I don't know that we're ready to set but it's been successful here and it feels like we want to continue but I'm fine with us not counting to the degree we've been counting so I don't know that's where my head's at at the moment we have two people that want to ask questions on this yeah we have a policy in the city that any new program requires new revenue so I'm wondering what you're thinking in terms of that new revenue revenue to cover the new program that we're proposing taking on for at least five years there is of

[154:00] course the parking revenue that paid parking transactions depending on the rate the per hour rate you can increase or decrease the revenue to the point where it could possibly cover shuttle service and the related needs of the program we also have a great financial partner contributed financially and staffed on on shuttle ambassadors and at the Ranger cottage and at the new Vista or excuse me the Regent parking lot throughout the program the pilot and is planning to do so again next summer okay so for any gap there would have to be some sort of revenue to make up that gap short of raising the parking fees to twice as much or whatever yes I have another question about the neighborhood

[155:02] parking program update and Susan and I had a brief conversation regarding a new policy perhaps to be added that adds trail heads as one of the criteria for putting a new neighborhood parking programs is that part of what still needs to be studied or do we know enough about that to be able to add that to the parking program policy oh yeah that still needs to be studied okay so my other question has to do with I spoke with I forgot his name he's in transportation staff he had mentioned to me that there there was a new Vista couldn't provide the asphalt parking and that there was going to need to be some grassy area that was applied to the

[156:01] parking area and that that was an I didn't know if that was a what ended up happening or not but if it did happen there was a receiving as in re ceed ing for the grassy area that they were going to require and I was just curious to know if that had been necessary or not so I think our pilot program showed how important it is to have access to the new Vista parking lot for at least a portion of the summer we have heard we have requested from the school district to have access to their parking lot and we have heard back from them that they are will integrate to allow us to lease that parking lot for next summer they're understandably not committing to multiple years they only lease a year at a time so our access to that would would obviously be a year-to-year consideration and I think at some point

[157:02] we would want to consider you know is there a way to secure more permanent access at that point if we think this is going to be a long-term program perhaps some cooperative agreement with the school district and/or see you to have some some parking at that location but we have at least for this coming summer access to their parking lot we would not have to build a separate temporary parking lot and then recede it last summer when it looked like we were not going to have access to it that was an alternative that we were considering that would have been in a very expensive alternative and we're very glad that we did not have to do that yeah that's good to hear because it was gonna be really expensive yes um and then you know finally I just wanted to make a comment about one of the things that hasn't really been talked about here which is how unbelievably pleasant it was to be in the leasehold area it was so much

[158:02] quieter and just generally just a really wonderful place to be in so I think that was a very well kept secret or result of this whole process so thank you for that just real quick I know we can get on to comments I was gonna give comments I don't have okay does anybody have any more questions are we good okay and then we'll go to come good it's real question which is do you have any idea I mean it relates to a comment I'll make but this is a real question do you have any idea of the people who use the bus and the people who paid for parking these are really kind of two different questions how many of them are residents of the city versus how many of them were not I mean you'd have to literally ask people

[159:00] so I'm just curious if we did any of that just to get a sense of of the answer we have a couple of answers I mean again anecdotally from ambassadors on the buses they thought 50 to 60 percent of the riders were visitors so we from the questionnaire in the in the memo we we just asked people who if they parked or if they rode basically and then we also asked them where they currently reside and so of the people who responded to whether they park to read the shuttle it was about this pretty split and then when we asked them where they currently reside about half of the respondents reside in Boulder a little over in half and then the the other half was kind of split pretty evenly between Boulder County and the wider denver

[160:02] metro area so if that helps it'll okay Jana and then Erin with the comments about it and I got the entire range really most were I would say most very supportive saying it worked very very well and saying they will find my things [Music] mentioned trash I don't know if you guys had a lot of trash cans or if that's considered a security risk my feedback was you guys did a great job I'm going to say one thing here which is that

[161:01] diesel that's a nightmare you know that diesel bus going up 9th Street it's just loud and it's noisy and you know I'm not going to get off that one so I really think we need to push hard on non diesel I still think cute trolley something like that would be good but I think the painting of the hop is good but really that the noise level of the of that diesel is a major concern I think for everyone in the pollution to say nothing about the pollution my feedback is you guys really pulled it together because I think it was a little rushed at the last minute I think he did a great job and hats off to CVB for having their people there those fantastic one idea I had was you know we have B cycles all around the place I wonder if they do ebikes and if she could put Esai khals down there and let people write up

[162:00] because I don't need it I it's impossible on a regular package but it might be possible on an electric bike and that might be you know just one way to take some pressure off with the shuttle system and then one guy said I asked him he said well you know if you pay for the shuttle with the parking that's a good thing which made me start thinking kind of along the path that Mary and Suzanne run about the budget so I think it looks like you were about you covered about a third of the expenses with revenue if we're gonna do this for five more years I'd really like to see you ratchet that down or ratchet it up with it every year so that'd be a metric that you're on obviously you had to spend a lot of money with the metrics and the tracking and the marketing to educate people and all that stuff but that stuff ought to go down over time right so if you bring us a five-year plan there ought to be a plan that says by year five you're getting closer to break even that's what

[163:02] I'd like you to focus on as one of the items that you would take to the boards and have that discussion and then again with the you know something with the diesel buses and and I always think as I see the hop riding around kind of empty a lot of the time why we don't look at smaller pet footprints that can go more often so I would just encourage you to open in your mind to creative thinking around that one but great super job I think a very very successful pilot clearly you met so many metrics that were so great and I think it really made a difference to all of the communities so thank you very much to the whole team for that yeah I'll just echo those sentiments I was a great success I'm just really impressed thanks to everyone for your hard work and your creativity and also for the flexibility in the development of the program because we went through a couple iterations last year I feel like it I've got better at every iteration

[164:01] and clearly it went really well I mean and and the the data that you tracked really gives us the ability to see exactly what happened on the ground so it's not just the emails that we get but we really know what was going on so I very supportive of the continuation of the project whether we maybe pay a little more attention to it for another year and call it a pilot fine but I'm also supportive of saying this is the right direction let's plan on doing this for several years I mean I can given how well it's gone I'd be hard to see doing another year where we tracked a little more than and then stopping it seems like it's been very successful so the in terms of the the complaints the the highlight that we have gotten is the the noise complaint and so whatever we can do on that front we should work hard on I know buses are expensive but you know the noise of the hop it's not just about this program it's also about the hop

[165:01] noise downtown in general you know I'm and I'll be walking along talking to somebody downtown on a weekday and then suddenly hop goes by and you have to pause for a few seconds so that you know we have a lot of demands for our funds so it's not like it will be an electric autonomous vehicle alright just in the day and a half right with it's coming around the corner so maybe we have a lot of demands for our funds but we would get a double benefit if we were able to improve that fleet so that would be great so anyway but thanks thanks so much two things first I want to admit that I was wrong because I was extremely skeptical about this pilot when you brought it to us of the beginning of summer and it obviously me too exceeded our wildest expectations so thanks for being persistent and this is a great success I do want to echo well Susan Susan kindly and I have a long history which to talk about at CCA and Susan knows that for many many years I've been advocating for a cute little trolley as

[166:00] Jen said and so when I put in another plug for a cute little trolley but this time a cute little electric trolley I just looked online there's tons of electric trolley so for sale they're used not that expensive would solve the noise problem plus I think it would give you like a branding opportunity could even paint it pretty cool you can open up the windows during the summertime because this is a summer thing so I just say you know if it doesn't cost a lot of incremental money I would I would really encourage you to create a trolley we're gonna go back to the I'm gonna go back to the future right here because they used to be a cute little trolley that went up and down the hill back up a hundred years ago and mimicked that but make it electric so we can we can address the noise problem as well if it's usually expensive don't do it but I just like I'd like to explore it I just wants to actually drive the trolley and do it for council rates so you could save a lot of money doing this

[167:01] I think it's a terrific we tell jokes too well that'll discourage people from using it right that's a problem alright I do have a couple of concerns it shouldn't be a surprise I mean I don't want to read anybody's parade here there were certainly some successes but looking ahead I definitely have some concerns which I just get out of here because my last shot at it one and it's the reason I asked about Boulder residents when we talked about this before the summer and I suspect this is no longer the case because you wouldn't be able to afford it we did talk about not charging both the residents and to me that's still a huge equity issue or inequity issue as the case may be and it will get even worse if you up parking meter rates which are already the highest in Boulder it's higher than downtown which is rather remarkable if you think about our real traffic problems in Boulder which are not weekend's of aqua their every day in this every weekday in the city of

[168:00] Boulder so it's pretty remarkable already if you really took that what I think is equitable step you would have a big impact on revenues and usage of the of the bus I mean people would still take the bus certainly because still hard to park up there but you'd lose a lot of parking revenues so that's that's one concern I would still wish we did it because of the equity issue I suspect we never will because we can't afford to do it but does it make it fair or right the second thing is as successful as it was I kind of go back to is the money really being used effectively relative to other mobility issues we have and my calculations which could be wrong you look at the number of boardings you divide by two because everybody goes and comes at least anecdotally because I bike by there lots of weekends in the summer usually the

[169:02] people who drive up there it's multiple people to a car because it's families and stuff so you do another division and you basically get that over the summer the bus probably took the place of five thousand cars at two to two hundred and fifty thousand dollar cost so it's forty to fifty dollars per car right that's the math then it doesn't sound so terrific sounds kind of expensive in fact and particularly when you think about what two to two hundred fifty thousand dollars would buy again on weekdays which are really our problems in the city in terms of mobility and in terms of congestion yeah Chautauqua's not great I'm not arguing it is there are impacts those impacts are just not at the same level to me as what goes on every day in town and 250 grand would

[170:01] buy a lot of bus service or eco passes or whatever would really be an effective thing to spend it on so those are two of my concerns and the third concern which i think is a little bit of a mixed thing 80 is certainly true that the leasehold area as we call it is a lot calmer and that's a good thing but it's also a public space and I was actually surprised maybe I should notice before one of the arguments for not allowing parking up there essentially on the weekend is well you need to know other people who live there and use it to park it's unfair if it's all parked up except our statistics were even before we started this program in the worst period it was only on average 62% full and now it's 42 percent full and I think that's true because I biked up through there a couple of times late morning during the summer and what I saw anecdotally was a

[171:02] third to a half of the spots in use so obviously it isn't a problem of being parked up that's just simply not true it is calmer but the question is could you make it calmer but also use that really valuable resource which remember is owned by the city of Boulder and could provide a lot of parking to a lot of people who are accessing that or going to the dining hall for a meal too it's not just people are hiking it's people who are doing things and so I think that is an opportunity that should be looked at as well and I I can imagine ways you could accomplish both of those goals simultaneously actually I thought about this a bunch anyway those are my concerns it's like I stopped anybody from continuing this but I do hope you kind of work on some of those it it's a start it could be improved I really am concerned though about the

[172:00] effective cost for the for the benefit when you look at the way I look at it which maybe isn't the right way to look at it but boy that's what the numbers tell you that is really expensive per car relative to our other transportation needs in Boulder which I've worried about for a long long time and it there was just so much money out there you know so anyway I mean it was a good job you did a great job on data collection incredibly helpful but some more thought on this would I think be appropriate so I guess the only thing I would add is well I'll say it again yeah I'm impressed by this and I don't know if I was a skeptic old Bob but I'm still weighing it it has exceeded my expectations by far and the ridership on the transits it's who would have thought people a bus to go hiking so I'm pretty fine

[173:01] with where the recommendations are heading I guess the one thing I guess I would see I would want to see but presumably the boards will ask and you will provide is this is the budget like what would it look like going forward and and it gets that some of this use Matt raised of you know what does it costs over time does it ramp down is it worth it give another trade offs so to me that's that's a relevant question because there is a lot of other cool groovy things we could do this is one of them clearly so I guess to me that's that's a live question and then I am sort of interested in saying I think we should continue doing this I don't know if I'm ready to commit to five years but only because I think we need to look at the sustainability of this given budgets and all this so I just I'm happy if all the boards think about that question and I'm

[174:01] not I think we could have a hybrid that says yes this is worth continuing and we're gonna commit to doing it for another two or three years and then we'll decide whether to make it permanent or something something that doesn't lock us into spending a ton of money monitoring to the same level so to me I'm kind of open to that I five years is a long time in politics or local governments and so to me that's a tonight oh yeah five years I don't know about that but yeah this is very cool so I guess that's my feedback and I look forward to hearing what the other boards have to say when they aren't wrestling with those questions right well thank you very much for your time oh oh wait oh we have final final comment Justice you thought you were gonna go just a couple follow up just to speak to the budget I agree with Mao and what you're saying and Jim just about drilling into that what that five-year plan looks like cuz it has been expensive but I think a lot of that has been startup costs so

[175:00] yeah let's see what that looks like on the longer term and to Jen's point how we can get that you know maybe potentially better and better just echo Matt's comment about the leasehold area the the calmer is perfect but maybe it could be a little more utilized and still be just as calm so if there's a way to tweak that a little bit it's worth considering wait you get what you need thank you very much because after they really really

[176:19] [Music] [Music]

[178:08] I think a lot of people have a perception of the tree in their yard as more of a liability than an asset and in all reality you know a large mature tree in your yard as valuable as it is as a tree can be just as valuable as lumber and can be even more valuable as a piece of furniture but the opportunity to take something like this and make an heirloom product out of it is very real [Music]

[179:05] [Music] during tria interning to community challenges into positive opportunities more information at SRI org [Music] so good evening Council Yvette Bowden I'm director of Parks and Recreation it's nice to see everybody again we are very pleased to be visiting with you again since last September when you sent us a way to think a little bit about both the emerald ash borer response and a long-term forestry management plan for the community we've been doing lots of

[180:01] homework and reaching out to the community so tonight we'll update both of those issues I'm here this evening with Kathleen Alexander our city forester and jeff Haley in parks and recreation planning will first go to Kathleen who will update us on emerald ash borer and our response well good evening and thank you for having us tonight before diving right into emerald ash borer though I wanted to take just a minute to talk about boulders urban tree canopy you know in the memo we explained what tree canopy is but basically if you take a bird's-eye view a boulder and just look at the layer of leaves and twigs and branches from that make up all the trees and shrubs that's pretty much going to be the UTC of the urban tree canopy and it's expressed as a percent of the total land area within city limits here in Boulder we just recently completed our urban tree canopy assessment which showed that our urban

[181:01] tree canopy is approximately 16% that's an average though across the city if you think about it though that range is greatly from a low of about 3% up in Gunbarrel to a high of about 30% 30% plus down on University Hill and you can see how we compared to some of the other communities there although some of those other communities do have very different climates some are more conducive to growing trees some are less so it's just sort of used as you know a baseline of sort of how we're doing overall but one of the key points that came out of this analysis that I wanted to bring up tonight was the fact that only 25% of the urban tree canopy is actually under public jurisdiction or management and that includes the city Boulder Valley School District see you the federal properties here but the remaining 75% is private property so that means you can see that to be

[182:00] determined under goal from the city of Boulder through the strategic plan process that is one of the outcomes for this will be to sort of set a goal for our city and I think those numbers are pretty important to point out that whatever goal we set it has to be a collaborative effort between both public and private property owners here in town unfortunately though you know as I had mentioned a couple years ago when we were here our canopy does face some pretty big threats you know invasive pests we're here tonight to give you an update on emerald ash borer unfortunately a bee is not the only one out there we do have other invasive pests climate change certainly trees can help mitigate the impacts of climate change but trees are also very vulnerable to climate change and that includes some of those severe weather events if you think back to November of 2014 we had that severe temperature fluctuation that killed a lot of Siberian Elms here across Boulder that

[183:00] bottom photo is just a row of them that were killed in that and then just those two big spring snowstorms that we had last year - another example and then clearly development can also impact our tree canopy but again that loss is going to vary greatly among neighborhoods just taking emerald ash borer you know for example those neighborhoods that have a higher percent of ash like for example the Whittier neighborhood would be much more impacted than say Mapleton Hill where the the percent of green ash is much lower now emerald ash borer has been really called the worst case scenario in terms of invasive pests and why is that it's populations expand exponentially it kills trees very quickly detection is so hard when we found it here and we found it relatively early in that sort of progression it was estimated that it had been here at least three to four years prior to when we had found it in 2013

[184:00] and unfortunately all of the ash will eventually die without the use of pesticides and if you think of it in terms again going back to the urban tree canopy ash or large maturing trees they have very big tree canopies and they have a lot of leaf area so even though 12% of our public trees are ash when you look at it on a number basis and we're assuming that same percent for private property that equates to about 24 percent of our urban tree canopy overall so emerald ash borer is becoming a lot more obvious than Boulder I mean that upper photo is Boulder reservoir the other three photos are taken down around baseline one of them is just out the baseline on fifty-fifth the other two around baseline and Broadway now one of the things I had mentioned was that emerald ash borer does kill trees very quickly this photo is taken of a row of ash trees at University Hill Elementary

[185:00] along 16th Street back in September of 2016 this is that same row of trees taken a photo in September of this year so you can see just in a one year period of time the progression of symptoms from emerald ash borer and then that area after those trees was removed earlier this month and unfortunately what happens is once the trees die from emerald ash borer they dry out very quickly and then they start to fail and what happens then is it's they're posing a threat to public safety to both people and property so as a city we really need to be more proactive in removing trees before they reach that stage on the lower left we really should be removing these trees the upper right photo when there's still green when they're just starting to show symptoms can we pause there for a second so I mean that that

[186:00] trees become dangerous within a year can I push back on that a little bit I mean there's lots of dead trees around and it's not like their branches go falling off the first year Rae so does it really anyhow say more about that I mean our ask more different than other dead freeze is that really within a year is it more like within three years they have done research in the Midwest that has shown that yes ash are different from other species a lot of it has to do with just the wood itself when you look at Siberian Elms we had a lot of Siberian Elms died back after that 1991 Halloween deep freeze that we had and we had dead standing Siberian Elms nine ten years after that event on private property that had yet to fail but with ash the research has shown that within a year after the trees have died the moisture content is down below 20

[187:00] percent in the wood and so the trees are just so brittle a lot of tree care companies for example once the tree is more than 50 percent symptomatic for emerald ash borer they'll no longer send climbers up in the tree because it's no longer safe for the arborist as well so kind of follow up on that so you showed us the picture down in the lower right is public trees these are right-of-way trees so we handled ash trees on private property we will be talking about that yes so to date we have removed just over thirteen hundred and fifty public ash trees and unfortunately emerald ash borer is now impacting our older more historic neighborhoods where we have a lot more public ash that are much larger in diameter we're also seeing a lot more

[188:00] ash decline and died along creek corridors including Boulder Creek path we're seeing symptomatic trees all the way from really behind boldest Boulder justice center all the way out through Folsom along the creek path so what are we doing to mitigate for emerald ash borer clearly tree planting has to be the top of our priority list we have to get new trees in to replace those we know but that we've already lost or that we know we're going to be losing if you want to try and put a positive spin on emerald ash borer you could say that 20 or 30 years from now our forests would be more resilient because we're trying to plant at least 35 different tree species a year and diversity and tree species really is the key to resiliency when you're talking about urban forests so you have a question about that how the tree species that you select how are you selecting them strategically based on climate change

[189:01] predictions we are that's a very good question a lot of the trees that we chew I've been working here for about 20 years and when I first started we were choosing trees primarily in a cold hardiness zone for at that time because that's what Boulder was listed as I think we were like a 4b now we've actually moved more into the range of like a 5 a because of our temperatures they just don't get as cold so there are in some ways that I don't want to say by any means that it's a good thing but it opens up the palate of species that we may be able to plant here so every year when I say that we're planting 35 different species we have those species that historically have done well here but we're also experimenting with some other tree species sweet gums tulip poplars species like that that typically

[190:01] you would find in a more sort of southerly range but we are hoping that maybe long term they would work here so yeah so should we is this the place to talk about diversity or should we is that come up later later as well okay because I'm I am curious about this a lot I I wonder at our choices and I know there's a method to the to it so I don't understand it like we live in a ponderosa pine zone we don't apply ponderosa pines in public waise why is that a lot of that has to do with matching the trees to the individual site conditions and the site conditions that we have down here in the urban part of Boulder are not really where ponderosa pine is used to growing you know it's for example surrounded by

[191:00] concrete our soils down here are actually different than they are up in the foothills where ponderosa pine is native our soils down here you know if you think of you know a project a lot of the native soil is sort of taken away and replaced or scraped away and so this the soils that remain are not as good as some of the native soils and ponderosa pine is one of those species that just not just does not do as well in poor soils so and as we go to the part about the long term canopy diversification and health we're happy to kind of also talk a little bit about availability of trees and the fact that 75% of the canopy actually exists and much of this replacement opportunity will exist on private residential and commercial okay well when they were plenty trees out in front of my house and then we were offered six varieties mm-hmm yeah I'm sorry I was like I hope to heck there's more anyhow again I'm sure that there's

[192:01] a big plan but when I think about the fact that 25% of our canopy is going to go because one species is getting nailed by an invasive pest well I hope we're but anyhow I just hope for diversifying a lot because we can just expect more and more of this I think as things slowly unravel in terms of invasive that's now you guys are the expert I know just enough to be I mean I have taken forestry and stuff but that was an undergrad I'm sure things have changed but I do wonder if we aren't I mean in flows like places like Mapleton right there's a ton of maples being replanted there because it's Mapleton a free and it looks damn nice and people like maples but that doesn't mean that that's a good strategy but I wonder that we're just gonna have Kotoko's everywhere which are lovely trees you know okay yeah actually well this this chart is also in your memo but this

[193:02] is a chart looking at the number of trees planted and the number of trees removed and this is just public in I suppose ideally you should plant more than a one to one ratio just to try and keep on top and at least maintain because you're really removing trees this size you're planting little trees back but we have we're doing a pretty good job of maintaining at least a one to one ratio up until we found them roll - for and for a year or so after that and then the trend sort of started downward and a lot of that is just not only because of emerald ash borer but also because of that 2014 freeze that we had since that time we've had to remove about 500 dead Siberian Elms so again that trend we do continue we do expect it to continue downward with emerald ash

[194:00] borer it is going to be hard to keep up with tree planting until we sort of see the end when emerald ash borer is sort of plays out here in Boulder now as a vet had mentioned you know again going back to that 2575 ratio there is a lot of opportunity to get more trees planted on private property and so we've been trying to help private property owners with that in 2016 and then again this year and next year we were giving out the seedlings as part of the water festival to Boulder Valley School District fifth graders this year we also started a partnership with the National Arbor Day Foundation where they have corporate sponsors that donate money that we then use to purchase little seedlings to give out to the public and then next year we're also going to start a tree sale similar to what Longmont had done this year where they actually the city will sell trees larger trees these will be like 15

[195:01] gallon trees containerized but there'll be at a greatly reduced cost to the public now pesticide treatment as I mentioned earlier all ash unfortunately here in Boulder will die from emerald ash borer unless they're treated with pesticides our plan was to treat around 25 percent we're treating about 22 percent of our ash on a three-year rotation with the chemical MMX and benzoate the triage one of the questions we get asked most commonly is if the pesticide is effective the one that we're using you can see in that photo down at the bottom the untreated versus the treated tree we are seeing this play out across town that in some parts of town the only trees the only ash left remaining are those that have been treated it's cute question about the ash trees will die if is there a certain point at which the epidemic will run its course and they're kind of gone

[196:00] because they have nothing else to eat and if we've treated and maybe this is 20 or 30 years from now but if we keep treating these trees is there some point of which we don't have to treat them anymore because the EAB has moved on well we have a bee has been in the Midwest for about 20 years now so we can sort of look at what the experience has been from some of the cities across the Midwest and what they found is you know I mentioned earlier EAB the populations expand exponentially so what they've found is without the use of pesticides in a very short period of time in some cases maybe 10 to 12 years all of the ash trees would be beyond treatment at that point because of emerald ash borer but after that point you know after EAB sort of sweeps through a community and takes out all of those trees that are not being treated its populations yes will decline because it has sort of eaten itself out of house and home so to speak but it will not go away it will

[197:02] still be there back in the Midwest they have native ash forests so there's sort of that source there until those trees die for the emerald ash borer to come back in here we have a lot of natural eyes - - along our Cree and corridors but it's it's not native ash it's not native no we have 25% over a canopy of a non-native species gastly most everything is non-native right so but the hope is that long term for example now if we're treating trees every two years over three years that because the populations would decline naturally and because of the bio controls that was a perfect sort of segue into the bio controls that we'd be able to stretch out those pesticide applications so maybe we can do them every four years five years or longer you steppe doing them essentially permanently yes yes yes if you want to

[198:03] save those individual trees yeah what we had mentioned here a couple years ago was that really when it comes to the pesticides what our hope is long long term is to sort of use this two-stage removals out over a long period of time and get more trees planted in the meantime and trees take time to grow especially here in our climate so over that period of time that would allow us to then you know sort of stage that tree canopy out to so stage that loss of tree canopy I suppose you could say out over a longer period of time yeah now the bio controls we are still releasing the wasps you can see there in the lower right that photo how tiny they are they are non stinging the takeaway message here is that we are finding them overwintering and when we peel branches we are actually finding them parasitizing the EAB larvae which is

[199:01] very good news now the city does have a duty to enforce for private trees that threaten public property in our code though you can see it says remedy the condition within 15 days from the date of the notice are such shorter time as a manager finds appropriate what we're finding though in this photo is actually a photo of a couple of large dead ash trees that we didn't force on this year because they were overhanging a sidewalk and street what we're finding though is tree care companies here are so incredibly busy and overwhelmed but they can't even get out there in 15 days to give a quote for the work and then if they're pushed on it the prices are just astronomical so mm-hmm excuse me Oh thousands yes sure especially to respond that quickly yes so just like I was saying earlier that we have to be more proactive in removing our public trees we need to give the

[200:02] private property owners a much longer period of time to get those private trees removed so moving forward rather than sending notices when the tree is at this point we want to send more I'm not sure what we'd call them almost courtesy type notices to say hey you have a symptomatic ash tree on your property you are going to save a lot of money if you remove this tree now if you're not planning to treat it rather than waiting until it's dead because once it once it's dead then it not only would become an enforcement issue but the removal costs will go up significantly at that point in the danger yeah if you think about a dead ash tree in a backyard as I mentioned earlier once ash trees pass like that 50% symptomatic point you can't send climbers up in the tree anymore and if it's a tree in the backyard you can't access it with a bucket truck which means it becomes a crane removal which then yes the prices go up quite a

[201:01] bit at that point so now sustainability and the wood utilization one of the lessons we've learned is that there is no one solution to the wood utilization issue we will have a lot more wood debris moving forward because of emerald ash borer but I think that's also opened up a lot of opportunities and created some really good partnerships tree op is just one of those and just to put in a shameless plug on December 8th tree up will be hosting an exhibition in the library to sell products so we do invite you all to come out right before Christmas perfect timing so and then education outreach for emerald ash borer we have tried multiple different avenues I mean websites channel 8 updates open houses we've been at farmers markets the summer festivals we've done extensive workshops and tours for industry professionals and we've

[202:01] also received great support both from the Play Foundation and from several local businesses MacGuffins for example hosted our tree giveaway this year we've also had tables that MacGuffins several times and then resource as well going back to the wid issue resource actually we've milled some of our logs had them kiln dried and then resources actually sold those sold the lumber so it's been a great partnership there now now when I was here in 2015 one of the things that we had talked about as part of our I suppose you could say as part of our emerald ash borer strategy we had found that several of the issues surrounding emerald ash borer like pesticide use the wood utilization piece wasn't just specific to emerald ash borer so rather than just doing an emerald ash borer management plan we actually wanted to

[203:00] take sort of a bigger approach and do an urban forest strategic plan so for that I will turn it over to Jeff hey Lee yeah and as Kathleen mentioned earlier our main goal this evening is just to bring you up to date on this EAB response and where we're at with the community but as several of you Ari mentioned it does require planning to ensure the long-term forest trees as you know and as you can see by now our critical infrastructure to the community just like roads and bridges and transportation network the trees provide a value and a benefit to the boulder that we must take care of in fact some of the original research we've done with our planning efforts basically shows about 5.2 million dollars annually is the benefit we receive from our urban forests here in Boulder so we want to make sure we take care of that in the long term we've kicked off the planning process of the past year with basically four steps just looking at inventory and analysis

[204:01] of what do we have determining goals and priorities in terms of what what do we want what do we want the force to be how do we get there what are the actions and the implementation strategies we have and then how can we measure that annually to make sure we're meeting those goals so the process has really kicked off well over the past several months you plug in there we go like I said there's basically four phases we're at the action plan stage right now where we're starting to overlap into drafting that that planned is that's why I wanted to come to you all this evening we actually have the benefit last night working with our Parks and Rec Advisory Board sharing similar information get a lot of gradient but from them as well basically early next year first quarter of 2018 we hope to get a final plan developed and then we'll be sharing the how it comes of that with Council we've done a lot of

[205:03] outreach to the community in fact we've developed a whole initiative called branching out and to really yeah so there's all kinds of quotes and things we can do so we've worked with a lot of neighborhoods you mentioned neighborhoods a moment ago specifically the children and youth in the community you know our next generation basically and then a lot of the professionals are arborist our peers and Cu and also probably most importantly our advocacy groups those who really care about the forest and can work together with us on the solutions so there's just a few key themes we want to just provide your your memo packet provides a lot more information in fact we have a whole attachment on the summary of community input but you I won't go through these in great detail but basically one of the key themes is planning we need to develop better drought response plans a lot of the items Kathleen mentioned

[206:00] about emergency response how do we plan for those types of events integrating our forestry components into other city processes also how do we manage more effectively realigning our forestry stewardship and management to be more comprehensive throughout the community like you heard there's a lot of trees on private property how can we better facilitate working with our private property owners in that same realm we have to two themes both connect and engage how do we engage our volunteers how do we engage partners in terms of funding and leveraging private funds with our public funds and probably most importantly how do we connect with folks we want to make sure people are aware of EA be aware of the long term strategies for our forests and how do we communicate that effectively so that basically concludes our presentation we do have just a couple questions that we posed in the memo and this evening that you can respond to

[207:00] we've broken into the two different topics related to EAB the strategy and what we're really curious of on the strategy is do you feel Boulder understands the immoral ash borer situation are we doing a good job of reaching out and educating the community or how could we do more and be better in that outreach and then finally on the strategic plan any questions we can answer or comments you have about our process some of the key themes and then one of the things we've highlighted in the memo we didn't talk much this evening but we're working with our Parks and Rec advisory board to really consider this plan as we move forward and any thoughts and ideas about that so I had a question about the emerald ash borer has been around now for a while are you still finding that there's a large portion of the community that is unaware yes despite the extensive

[208:01] outreach that we've done and there's a myriad of reasons for this although we've tried a lot of different avenues I think until it actually starts to evidence on someone's property they don't necessarily know what kind of tree they have and they may not really be aware that this is a problem so this is why we wanted to that more proactive stance and door hangers and being out with people earlier to say this is how this is what it looks like and this is what you'll see we can always get better at letting people know that was one of the pieces of feedback we got from Prem last night to never stop trying to tell this story you don't want to scare people but at the same time you want to let them know why this is happening where this is happening and what they can do both to be a part of the solution but also that we can all be part of we need to Shepherd this urban forestry system together I would the last thing I would say to that is emerald ash borer is just one impact there are different species with different impacts and certainly the

[209:00] canopy in order to sustain over time is gonna need the love of everybody one of the big challenges that came up last night and certainly that we're aware of is a large portion of the property occupiers are renters so they don't own the property where the tree you know we're sending notices to the property owner and the property owner is not here seeing what's happening and so one of the things we're thinking about that came up in the feedback sessions with the community is we need toolkits so that people can talk to their landlords and to their neighbors in a more constructive way about handling this together well I also owe the rental Association we are my rental associations yeah and I I guess the other thing I would hope that we begin to emphasize is the safety issue and that that seems to be something that could really get people's attention is if you don't take care of this it could

[210:01] do personal harm and property harm so that's I think that's an important thing to emphasize without stirring fear in people but um and the other piece of it is the whole pocketbook piece of it the longer you wait the more it's going to cost you so if there's a you know a good way to communicate that through an info graph on a door hanger or something that would be I think really helpful and I think we're shooting our next Channel eight segments within a week so we'll make sure we mention those thing as well well I think it's been in it's been in the newsletter right but I mean the deal is to make it clear what what I can do both if I have an ash tree that looks like well if I have an ash tree period if I either treat it or you're gonna have to get rid of it so prepare yourself but then also if you want to be part of the solution and grow more trees in on your property to the especially if there's a cost-effectiveness component

[211:01] to engaging people I say let's figure that one out and I'm glad that we're looking to partner with you know some foundations and how to help make help it make it easy for people to do the right thing I guess I also was glad to see you saying in the slide before you talked about the one right before it Munich recommendations and tree requirements during drought periods I feel like we like right now right it's pretty warm out and yeah figuring out ways to help people be good stewards because this is part of the climate solution right trees sequester carbon we want to have a robust tree canopy so we want people to go and get it in their head that they're part of the solution here and involves taking care of trees so I think that that is all very positive I'm pretty certain other than the hill that most people are not paying attention right but that's because there's a high turnover there and there's a lot of

[212:01] rental but everybody else oh the homeowner should be and should get the landlords and landlady's too we got their attention with smart regs let's get their attention on the other parts of being good citizens just my two other thoughts are I do care a lot about the species diversification piece I think because we're going to keep getting these waves hitting us of invasive species and I also think there's a whole aesthetic to to that as well that I think because trees are so important to what our city looks like that thinking that through as well I mean I look at what's going on down at the Pro Street Mall and they've had to take out some trees and guess what it changes the nature of that in a big time and what we replant down there it matters so I hope smart people are thinking all that through and making

[213:00] good choices that will service for the next 50 years and then the last thing I would say and how do I says I think this problem will take care of itself but I have fought on behalf of certain trees that to keep them from being cut down because they were old and they were starting to be in decline in the city right away and it seems to me that if there's a public safety issue I get it but I also think that from an ecological perspective old-growth trees have more about they have a lot of value and I don't know I complain once about a big old cottonwood that had just started to decline so they just took it down it wasn't nearly now it was going to be a source of great joy and beauty for another I don't know several years but anyhow we decided as the city came and

[214:01] just took it down and bam it was like wow and now there's nothing it's just barren this is no my point is prioritizing what trees were taken down and the ones we have to absolutely a sh t like it's compelling but I questions sometimes some of the other big old trees that are taking down cuz they're gonna die that's me seems kind of a strange way of looking at it so yeah I just throw that out there as an experience I've had we got Matt and Aaron I just wanted to piggyback on that I mean they're there times to be really proactive and cutting down really healthy trees that are going to die before too long is maybe not the place to be really proactive so I trust your expertise on making sure that we keep our community safe I just want to echo the sentiments that same guy you know I think you're doing a great job but I this is a tough one because I do have to explain it to people but it's

[215:00] really expensive and that's a lot of things we explain to people you know they have to meet code they have to do this they have to do that that's fine but this is really expensive the one thing you might do is slightly maybe you're doing this and we've treated two of our trees we took one out and it's yeah this is pricey is that as expensive it is to treat them and it is expensive to treat them I think at least anecdotally and from what I've seen in our neighborhood you could treat a tree for at least ten maybe twelve fourteen years for the cost of taking it out and I don't know if people know that because it sounds awfully expensive to treat it and it sounds awfully expensive to keep doing that every two or three years when you compare it to the cost of taking a tree out especially if it isn't easily accessible it's rather astounding what that cost you so you know if somebody

[216:01] can get 12 plus years if they catch it early enough and if they know to look for it and if I know what an ash tree looks like and it's old stuff you can help people with you might be able to sell them I'm at and I'm just not sure people get that and understandably they put it off because it's expensive this is really expensive stuff I don't know what we do with all the rental units both in both ways the landlords are usually not fond of investing a lot of money although eventually they're gonna have to deal with it and then secondly they're not there all the time some of them are never there they're out of state how do you get them to really understand what's going on I mean I would think Givens given that there's a pretty hefty percentage of rentals and boulders they're owned by you know several big companies that you really want to work with them and get them off

[217:01] the dime and get them to really do it sure there's lots of you know individually owned rentals too but there's a massive number of units in Boulder that are owned or at least managed by a relatively small number of companies so it's kind of a cup frankly a combination of informing and a little bit of beating on them as to why it's worth their while on the end and you know why we will enforce at some point we will enforce our rules and you know they've also got liability even if it's a internal tree if it hurts somebody it's going to be their liability eventually so that's about all I can think of I mean I don't know how you do it in our neighborhood which is not very much rental people have been reasonably active in treating trees but I could easily see we're in a neighborhood that is more rentals it's going to be a lot tougher to get that

[218:00] word around well yeah I mean that's kind of like a homeowner's association I mean that's another big owner of a lot of trees or homeowners the trees will factor in yeah that's a thing to try to get ahead of I think yeah the I mean I'm sure you're talking to the big HOAs because they own big common areas and lots of trees and almost sociation has to pay for it because they do common you know landscape and you got to get in there too and tell them it's more expensive if you wait plus you can save I mean even if you only save a third of the trees that's a lot that would be spectacular if we could save a third of the trees worth saving obviously not a third of every ash tree in Boulder but a third of the trees worth saving would be pretty spectacular if we could do it and I think it's cost-effective you just got to explain that to people so that's it's a tough it's a tough thing to do how do you get the word out to everybody I

[219:00] don't know I think you're doing a great job but we just kind of kind of try every possible Avenue if we've got you know I the paper has certainly run some articles on it if we can get some more in there that would be - so just real quickly the mobile home ordinance does mandate that the park owner take care of the trees as I recall and the utilization part and the creativity going into that is really cool and both on the on the knight foundation project but also the resource project where they're actually milling it and selling it that's cool and the fact that we're really trying to prioritize not putting it in a landfill ding ding ding that's good because that creates methane like that's that's the anti solution so kudos to the city for

[220:00] being creative anything else yeah yeah and I for one you know keeping us updated do ip's about how it's going or I think this is important I think people are gonna wake up and start carrying a lot more about what they can do about it so okay thank you thank you so much and with that we are adjourned so do we really not have a meeting until the 14th yes because next Tuesday is Halloween and then there's this election thing [Music] [Music]