Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[6:45] okay we're gonna call to order a special council meeting for the Boulder City Council on what day is it November 14th 2017 Lynette will you do the rule councilmember Applebaum rocket here Burton Jones here Marcel shoemaker here

[7:04] Weaver Yates I'm here young still here we have a quorum excellent so we were gonna start out with something not on the agenda will still start out with it even though mr. Applebaum is in here so because so many of our outgoing members aren't going to be here next week we were gonna stop start by honoring them tonight and this is bittersweet say goodbye to people that we've spent many many hours with over the last few years but also joyous and envious that they will now have free Tuesday evenings from here forth so with that why don't we start out with mr. Yates there's a microphone up there and

[8:08] [Music] you this is really long make yourself comfortable I'm gonna read a declaration in honor of John Burton's service on the Boulder City Council their contributions to the community this is dated November 14 2017 Jen Burton was first elected to the Boulder City Council in 2015 and will continue to serve until her term is completed next week on November 21 2017 Jen made this transition to local government after living all over the world for her work as an executive in the high-tech industry and with that background she has introduced a unique and important perspective to city efforts to further economic vitality interests and maintain fiscal responsibility jen has served as

[9:03] a member of the city's Housing Strategy process committees the sister city committee the boards and commissions committee and as a representative to the University of Colorado City Oversight Committee the boulder convention Visitors Bureau the Bullitt County consortium of cities commuting solutions and the Yaga young Yamagata Sister Cities committee GN through her votes and actions on city council has helped increase the amount of affordable housing available to boulders low and middle income residents and workers jen has fought tirelessly to ensure that those whose homes were flooded by broken city water mains were reimbursed for damage caused by the water jen has been a champion of the city's arts and culture community and has served on the boards of several music nonprofits including e town Colorado Music Festival and Center for musical arts and serves on the music advisory board at the Cu College of Music Jan has volunteered as a raptor monitor for the city helping to protect raptors in their mating season

[10:01] an important offer to effort to ensure their populations thrive and Jan has vowed to visit each and every National Park in the United States and while we will miss Jen terribly on the City Council we are happy that she will have the time to continue her tour of the parks and we only ask her to send us photos from time to time we the members of the City Council and the city of Boulder recognize appreciate and honor the service on city council of Jan Burton and as a hearse if account contribution to the city and community really prepared to say anything I did try to represent voices of people I thought we're not being heard and I worked as hard as I could the last two years it is not an easy job but it's been an honor to represent both the city as well as our citizens so thank you very much and thank you for

[11:01] this Thank You Janice Lisa welcome Andrew Andrew shoemaker was first elected to the Boulder City Council in 2013 and will continue to serve until his term is completed on November 21st 2017 during the last of his four years on council andrew has served as mayor pro-tem distinguishing himself for his leadership and especially his ability to bring about shorter council meetings sometimes but thank you served as a dedicated member of the city's audit and

[12:00] management compensation committees the Board of Commissioners for the Boulder Housing cart partners the Uni hill reinvestment group the cities excels negotiating team the Housing Strategy subcommittee and as the city's representative to the Lhasa city sister city throughout his time on council andrew has continued to practice law and to maintain his reputation as a top litigator in the region while simultaneously earning the respect from all his council colleagues for his razor-sharp intellect and succinct comments none of such traits reflected in here andrew has been a tireless champion of enhancing the quality of life for his University Hill resident and business neighbors and through persistence wisdom and ability to build consensus has crass crafted strategic and tactical approaches to achieving sustainable

[13:01] changes that have won him the first ever LAN through pused philanthropist and the admiration of all except maybe his beer pong playing constituents but I'm sure I'm sure they appreciate you everybody does substantial contributions to city policy including through his leadership in advocating for the effective enforcement of city laws especially unfortunate a pragmatic approach to developing a co-op ordinance addressing the challenges associated with homelessness and ensuring both the protection and enjoyment of open space lanes now and for future generations Andrews substantials talents go far beyond the council chambers or the court room and will and include being a skilled musician and a devoted husband and father of children who undoubtedly

[14:00] will relish having him released from city indenture ship we the members of the City Council of the city of Boulder we all recognize appreciate and honor the service on city council and the many significant contributions to the city and community made by you Andrew and I just want to say one last thing and that is I spoke with Sam Weaver today and he wanted to say thank you for such a great partnership that you guys had right thank you very much it's been it's been a pleasure working with all of you you know I consider all of you some of my closest friends and it's just been a wonderful experience working with each of you and and welcome to the new council members as well and finally just I want to express my respect and gratitude to the staff for all the hard work over the past I feel

[15:02] like it's been ten years because with with the five years on planning board the year the pro challenge and then four years of this I've been working with yeah I've been working with a staff non-stop and it is truly just an exemplary staff and wonderful people so it's been a pleasure so Matt is on his way from the airport so we could honor him put in absentia but that'd be silly so we won't we all hold that for later okay so to the agenda we have a couple things we just need to change about the agenda they are two things one is we reordered the agenda in terms of the public hearings so assuming council agrees we will have the liquor occupation tax discussion first followed by a discussion of

[16:03] sexually violent predators followed by Boulder Valley comp plan map changes for Nold in Spring Valley and then we've added one item which is a request for not of five to direct staff to investigate the possibility of having the city join a lawsuit against leading oil companies for cost incurred because of climate change and I have a motion to that effect so move any discussion all those in favor it is unanimous okay so with that we're gonna turn this mic over to Andrew so this is the time of the meeting where we talk about that we have the mayor and Mayor Pro Tem speeches of interest and I've taken the microphone here because I suspect mayor Jones may express interest in something and in the process here and correct me if I'm wrong Tom is that that it doesn't matter

[17:01] whether you're expressing interest in the mayor mayor mayor or mayor pro-tem there's no specific order just indicate whether you have an interest in addressing one of those and you have a maximum of five minutes to do so is that fair that's correct okay good thank you invite oh oh oh and so we should invite up the future council members to sit up here I think is it at the dice yeah okay so I think just right here welcome sure

[18:02] can I say something first so I'm not going to throw my hat in for mayor mayor pro-tem but I do want to just speak two seconds about the role of CAC and I want to reiterate the role of CAC is to sket council agenda committee and agenda setting committee and the council agenda setting committee meets every Monday from eight to nine and it's composed of the mayor the mayor pro-tem in a third council member that rotates I just want to speak to the scheduling and how important it is that in this next term I really really really ask CAC to stick to Tuesday nights to make the schedules predictable to make sure that our 30 as in our pact our council rules that changing

[19:03] agendas at the last minute is not acceptable and to not have Tuesday's and I think it's important for the City Council's so that we can do a good job and detail job and thorough job on the agendas that come up to us I think it's important for our staff in terms of them being able to work the next day at a reasonable hour and I'm saying that for you Tom no I'm saying it for all this that and more most importantly it's really important for our public to be able to watch our deliberations and our discussions and be able to know when things are set so with that that's all I have to say sounds like a pitch to be mayor to me but carry on your dish all right all right so I guess just a show of hand so we know who is going to

[20:00] speak about who has interested expressing interest in in any one of these positions and then maybe we'll just go down the line okay yeah Mary Erin and zan and so Mary we'll start with you right so first of all I'd just like to say that well I'll start by saying that I'm I am interested in playing the role of mayor and I wanted to start by letting everyone know that Suzanne and I did speak this afternoon and we agreed that no matter how with the outcome I think we would either be happy either of us both of us would be happy with the results so I wanted to state that up front and I also was just wanting to give a few reasons as to why I'm interested and one of the reasons is as Lisa just stated the council agenda committee which the mayor attends on a

[21:00] weekly basis and is responsible for actually leading that meeting the council agenda committee as well as the weekly or device monthly meetings up here so I have had experience in managing meetings I was chair of the city's Planning Board and I managed to lead us through whether that one of the most difficult meetings I think ever in the history of the city of Boulder Planning Board which was a 17-hour hearing on who contain cost and did so efficiently as well I was also twice the top vote-getter and the second time as an incumbent which is highly unusual for an incumbent to receive the highest number of votes I also think that it

[22:01] would be very significant to serve as mayor because I am latina and because as we speak about being welcoming and inclusive it would be very significant and I believe important to that segment of our community to see someone that looks like them up here in that kind of leadership position and that's really my main rationale thanks Aaron so I'm interested in the mayor pro-tem position I would not bring any great or strong agenda to that role my desire would be to serve the community and to do the work necessary to represent the council when called upon in the community and probably upon occasion to lead a meeting and as we've been talking about the council agenda committee that's kind of a hidden function but it's one of the main or probably the

[23:01] main thing that the mayor pro-tem does and I would pledge to be there weekly and do my best to kind of keep our agenda on an even keel and consistent and work closely with the mayor whoever the council chooses that to be to keep things in good shape and on the right track and I would be a resource and available to all councilmembers if you had something that you want to discussed at the CAC meeting I would be available you know all weekend give me a call or send me an email text what have you my goal would be to try to serve the wishes at the whole council great thank you very soon oh I think I might be a little longer so I want to echo what Mary just said about whatever we end up deciding is gonna be fine but I would say it's been a huge honor to serve as mayor of the city um it is not a well I've taken lightly and I

[24:00] would ask you guys can consider me for one more only one more term in that role and I I think it's important to talk a little bit about the role mayor in in Boulder it's a two week mayor it's an equal among peers and I think that's exactly the way it should be I think of it sort of as maybe a team captain you're not the star player you're not supposed to take all the shots you're just supposed to help trying to bring out the best in other people or the collective and I think that that's important in general what I have found is two years is pretty short the first year you're trying to figure out the expectations that roll around mayorship second year you feel like maybe you got it and then it's over I do think four years is probably two plenty and I am remembering you know Matt served four years and then it was time it was time for change and we sort of I think gently move them over the whole idea is being not to get too attached to the role it's not about you it's about the role of mayor and I think

[25:00] that should be so regardless of number of years though I think get the look get the leadership you want and as you think I'm doing a great job or a good job having hanging around and if you want change that's absolutely fine - and one of the I think there's there's two big roles for the mayor one of them is sort of the internal to the city role which is leading the meetings and one of the big issues when I became mayor with shorter meetings and that has been a collective end endeavor we have remember when they were always to midnight at 30 and we've made great progress and I don't take I just take a little bit of credit for that in trying to nudge us along and to find that right balance there are times I've been too impatient you'll have let me know when that was and I've adjusted accordingly but I just would say it's an art form to herd the cats and half the council's like hurry up and the other half is like wait I have more to say and just finding that right balance and I

[26:01] think it's important but the other role is external and out there the role of mayor is means a lot of different things and the mayor serves on a lot of important bodies representing Boulder and only the mayor gets to do that like the Metro mayor's caucus with 41 other mayor's from around the region and us 36 mayors and commissions and it takes a little while to develop the relationship figure out your sea legs and start to make a difference and the one thing I would say is I'm not sure that it's good for Boulder to start over from scratch every two years there's subtraction we get from having some continuity there and so there's a trade-off there and then we should just think about it I feel like after six years on CML and finally getting some of the good old boys to listen to me but a lot of that has to do is because I got mayor behind my name a lot of what we're trying to do is craft solutions here and then ripple them out and be a leader within our regions and to others who

[27:01] other progressive cities trying to do the right thing so I think that bully pulpit of the mayor is important and we should figure out how to use that as well as we can the other thing I guess I would say about diversity I am thrilled that you're the top vote-getter I think it speaks volumes about you it speaks volumes about our city I'm also thrilled that this council is saying a lot we just elected the first openly LGBTQ we elected one of the youngest people I believe in 47 years we perhaps have elected the oldest person in the history of council we are now six women strong we are making a lot of statements and I think no matter who we choose as mayor we can be confident in in that I would also note that in this era of Trump rollbacks and pulling out of the Paris Accords and rolling back a lot of the environmental protections having a climate activists

[28:01] and environmental advocate as mayor is also a statement and anyhow so whoever we choose we're saying a lot and we should figure out a way to magnify that externally and also work to embrace and engage everybody in our community so everybody should look up here and feel like they can they see somebody that they can relate to that they can call that they can get engaged with I guess the final thing I would just say just in terms of leadership qualities I think it's really important to be collaborative even in while being passionate and try to bring people together and I think that's one of the things that is very important to me I am a twin after all my favorite pronoun is we not I this was my comfort zone don't ya um thank you for considering me again and again however we decide we'll be fine thank you no hand the mic back over do you know Oh me you won't want to

[29:00] mention to people you vote next week yes we will vote on the 21st okay so the 21st is a big day for the new council we meet in the morning we get sworn in we get our photos taken and then we adjourn we do have a lunch in there although usually it's with the outgoing members I'm not sure you need the outgoing members maybe Matt will be there I'm not sure but that's a good time to bring people together and then in the evening we will have a regular council meeting and you'll get sworn in and then BAM you have to vote for mayor so it's kind of a rude awakening but and then we we tried to set it up with some reasonable not too controversial matters on your first meeting but there'll be plenty of reading so welcome and thank you for coming tonight

[30:01] okay so with that because this is a special council meeting we're not doing open comment we're diving right in to the consent agenda and then we have three public hearings your consent agenda is 11 items approving minutes of meetings that were heard by this council are you properly here okay what this is perfect good area come forward now [Laughter] yep it's time I don't think you've ever been embarrassed but you missed our earlier acknowledgments because sorry so we want to fit you in well people are still watching on TV quick while you're still waiting no this is long because

[31:00] everything that has to do with you is a little long-winded okay this is complicated okay Matthew Applebaum was first elected to the Boulder City Council in 1987 served until 1995 rejoining the council in 2007 and will continue to serve until his term is over on November 21st 2017 we call that a retread that's 18 years ago recycle no that's 18 years of dedicated service on council as well as its willingness during that time to take on hundreds of related council assignments epitomizes the finest qualities expected of a public servant during a summon council met serve four years as deputy mayor one year is inner mayor and four years as mayor the city of Boulder the city declared January 5th 2016 Matthew Applebaum day to celebrate his extensive contributions as mayor and related services on the regional national and international level accolades which will

[32:02] not be reiterated here excellent however there's plenty of others Matt's contributions to City policymaking are too numerous to name but include his involvement in adopting the most aggressive commercial energy code for new construction in the country a building performance ordinance for existing commercial buildings a new Civic area master plan a 2014 transformation transportation master plan and leadership in implementing the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Commission which was a major step in putting the city on a stable financial path councilmember Matt Applebaum has served as boulders tireless representatives to countless regional state national and international initiatives which is where he was just now and organizations Japanese everything from sustainable transportation and open space to climate change mitigation and resilience and a one such trip to the Vatican City was the person who was wearing sneakers during the Pope's reading of the encyclical on the environment it's the same ones he's

[33:01] wearing now Matt never known to sugarcoat his views on anything once said at a council retreat there should be a section in the on the webpage called root canal and it should have the annexation guidelines and floodplain regulations on it Matthew's unique ability to communicate and consider multiple views on contentious policy topics ranging from budget and transportation and affordable housing to bolder's full-contact sport of planning and to convincingly arguing all sides of those issues often in one breath has ensured that all aspects of policy issues before the council were fully considered and often told quite late in the night on the one hand the boulder city council will not be the same without matt but on the other hand he will nonetheless continue to do great stuff in the community in the community so okay fine that is also a map ISM we the members of

[34:00] the City Council of the city of Boulder recognized and appreciate and honor the service on city council and significant contributions to the city and community made by Matthew Matthew and you were allowed to say a few words to say the reason I'm so tired as I was in Frankfort this morning I was one of two representatives of the city actually at the UN climate conference in Bonn the cop 23 Sam Weaver was there he has since gone on to a conference an important conference on smart cities in Barcelona and I did run into Sam a couple of times and and that's actually an example of you know Bo there really being out there and the international scene which is more important than you might think especially given the state of the u.s. at the moment at least at the national level let's just say it was very much

[35:00] appreciated that folks from cities big and small in the u.s. were attending this conference and speaking out Sam was on a panel I was on a panel actually with with Al Gore after the showing of his latest film which you should see if you haven't had a chance I did no I didn't actually he wore his anyway thanks so much I don't need to say much other than when I first got elected to Council I was the youngest person on the council and now I'm the oldest and that means it must be time to leave somehow the years went by it's been a huge amount of fun it's been an incredible honor it's been great working with people it is really a fabulous City Council I know the next one will be two and it is a fabulous staff I need to point out especially this latest go-around Tom and Jane have been just remarkable and leading their respective departments and endeavors without them

[36:01] we wouldn't get a whole lot done frankly anyway thanks so much I don't know if everybody should do this in their lifetime I never expected to but it's really been an incredible honor and learned a huge amount and you don't often get an opportunity like this to really do so much for your city and do so many of the national and international things that I got the the opportunity to do so thanks thanks to everybody thanks Suzanne I appreciate it [Applause] yay back to that consent agenda do we have a motion it's mostly meeting minutes I move the consent agenda okay any discussion all those in favor unanimous your first public hearing is

[37:04] the liquor occupation tax discussion so coming up to the Dyess here we have Cara Skinner I don't know if Cara's presented before you before Cara is the Assistant Director of Finance and of course Cheryl patellae our Director of Finance as they get ready for this I do want to make one clarification I heard earlier this week from Andre Amanda Gill of the boulder chamber to clarify that the staff recommendation that you have recently received in your packet is one with which the chamber does fully agree and as you know the staff recommendation is now that we eliminate the manufacturers and wholesalers tax in the city code Cara will carry on and make this presentation but I wanted to make it clear from the beginning that the chamber supports this recommendation [Applause]

[38:09] okay first time thank you nice to be here we are going to go through a very quick presentation as we know we have a packed agenda so first some just general information with regard to the liquor occupation tax as you know liquor is regulated by the state because it's a statewide concern and state liquor code establishes liquor license classifications as well as liquor license fees municipalities can't charge different fees or in some cases it's an up to amount so then cities do have the discretion to implement liquor occupation taxes to recover additional costs identified with industry cities then set the liquor occupation tax amounts for each liquor

[39:01] classification and an occupation tax is by definition of flat tax so all of the businesses within a classification would pay the same amount regardless of the size of their business the liquor occupation tax has been a part of bolder tax policy for more than 50 years and the revenue that it generates is a little more than six hundred and twenty thousand dollars and that goes to the general fund to compensate the city for costs associated with the industry specifically with regard to the manufacturers and wholesalers as I think you all are aware during 2016 staff was doing an internal review of the BRC title 3 chapter 7 the liquor occupation tax code and discovered that they were to be assessing an occupation tax for the manufacturers and wholesalers classes of licenses in an amount a little under three thousand dollars per year so with that discovery

[40:00] a letter was sent to those license holders indicating that the city would begin to invoice them for that occupation tax beginning January of 2017 Oh after however after receiving those letters there was some concern from the industry as well as the Boulder chamber so the city agreed not to assess the tax for 2017 and to conduct a review we wanted to give you a table of the license types that have been assessed the liquor occupation tax and our currently assessed you'll see that the amounts range from two hundred and seventy five dollars for a three-two beer off-premise to a hotel and restaurant license of three thousand two hundred fifty three dollars so we did take the year to do quite a bit of analysis and here are the factors that we considered as we looked at the issue and had conversations with the boulder chamber and industry and we did

[41:01] particularly look at benchmarks and this next slide does present those benchmark results and we draw your attention to the line highlighted in light blue and you'll note that for the cities that do have a liquor occupation tax as part of their tax policy we did not find any bit charged that to the manufacturers and wholesalers license classifications so staff did consider a number of options and these options are presented in your agenda memo and there's quite a bit of analysis and text with regard to these options we did consider whether we should assess the tax as currently in BRC or to assess the tax that is currently in BRC but to phase it in over three years to give the industry time to adjust we also considered reducing it somewhat to recognize the fact that the city does not separately license these classifications only the state licenses them so there is some reduced costs of

[42:01] licensing and enforcement it was suggested at a time that we consider the amount of Amand dollars and eighty-five thousand eighty-five which is what the beer and wine license classifications pay or some other reduced amount based upon considering those factors and lastly we considered eliminating the tax and that is the staff recommendation right now and we did present pros and cons with respect to these various options in your agenda memo so the staff recommendation to eliminate the liquor occupation tax for the manufacturers and wholesalers we considered that the pros to this approach is that we did not find any other municipality that collects this tax we are concerned that if we did begin to assess the tax it could put the city in a competitive disadvantage and we may lose these businesses or fail to attract them there is no budget

[43:01] act as there was no revenue included in the 2018 budget with respect to assessing this tax for these classes the cons are that it does not acknowledge the characteristics of the industry and the impact to municipal services this industry is in the liquor industry and there is a retail component to most of their businesses it would treat this class of license differently from the other liquor license classes that do have that retail element but with that we do have these two questions for City Council's consideration does City Council support the staff recommendation to eliminate the liquor occupation tax for manufacturers and wholesalers and if not what would be the appropriate amount thank you so much questions from Council okay it's all Bob berry Lisa I know many questions all the way to statements hey

[44:00] thanks so much for the presentation in the on that slide where you had the highlighted blue line where you know other wholesalers are assessed the liquor occupation tax did you were there wholesalers in those municipalities I spoke with some of it was a joint effort the benchmarking so we did some research as far as going to their websites and looking what the liquor occupation tax was listed on their websites and then some we actually spoke with the city clerks in most instances and there were definitely some that I spoke with that they said they did have businesses in their jurisdiction but they did not have the liquor occupation tax and did those wholesalers have also like small retail outlets such as the ones here so could

[45:01] you turn to so that we can see which cities those were because I think that will be very instructive this actually applies mostly to craft breweries or small distilleries so an example would be for Owens Fort Collins has many craft breweries and I believe they also have some small distilleries as well I don't know if Longmont is up there but Longmont does I know that Loveland has small distilleries that have the same aspect to them that that we do so I think that we are very similar to the Fort Collins Loveland kind of cities and what they have with regard to these kinds of businesses and in those cases did those manufacturers and wholesalers have the state license or they're required to have the state license is that correct that's correct okay and just one more question there the memorable mentioned that one of the

[46:01] reasons that such a tax was assessed as to cover the cost of any kind of impacts that the city has to incur so with those would we then assume that there are a minimal amount of impacts that it's not necessary to assess the tax and is that the same kind of logic perhaps that the other municipalities make so it's honestly hard to speculate about this I have sort of my personal theory about how this all came to be and I and I will spin it out for you right now this particular tax was adopted by the city at least three decades ago a long time ago at a time when we had none of these businesses in our city I believe that the council at that time must have been thinking as they were thinking of manufacturers and wholesalers of places

[47:01] like golden which has Coors Brewing or Fort Collins which has mud wiser and the thought was that those large manufacturing facilities that serve essentially the region or the nation would be able to afford paying the almost $3,000 but we had none of them and so over time we never collected this tax and we had no reason to and then slowly quietly the craft brewing industry in Colorado really became an important thing and actually a very important aspect to the economic vitality of our own community as well as Fort Collins and Longman and Loveland and many many places in Colorado we discovered by accident that we were not collecting this particular charge and then realized that we should be doing that in the intervening time we have not been able to identify impacts if counsel wanted us

[48:01] to do that we could hire a consultant and do a very expensive study to figure out the impacts of each one of these different types of licenses but we we don't think that that's spending that kind of dollars would justify the small amount of money that we would get to support the general fund and enforcement we already have a robust enforcement and these other licenses that we know absolutely do have an impact the beer licenses the beer and wine the retail liquor stores we know that they have an impact and we receive sufficient dollars to support our enforcement efforts so I am the one I guess that have said I believe that no charge for this would be appropriate in order to keep the economic vitality of our community and this really robust an important business alive in the city of Boulder thank you

[49:00] you're welcome Jane thinks that was a great answer and explanation I had a question about your presentation and you said six hundred and twenty thousand that's per year and is that all of the occupation taxes or is that we I thought what was the anticipate it was much smaller it was like less than eighty thousand if you applied this tab that's right we currently from all of our liquor license or liquor licenses that we collect this tax get around six hundred thousand dollars which supports our enforcement efforts if we added this tax we would get around $80,000 in addition right okay I just wanted to make sure I had that brightness and then my last question has to do with you know somewhere in the memo it's it's not really clear I mean this presentation is very clear what the staff recommendation is but it I was

[50:02] wondering do do you plan on coming back in several years after we consider this tonight no okay that's all I need thank you I just had one question which is I'm just kind of curious when a short answer our taxes are higher across the board except for in the first few in most anybody I would think we would be sort of analogous to Fort Collins is there a logical reason why that is I don't know the answer to that but I will tell you that all of these fees were established in the early 90s by the city interesting okay yes yeah and how are they adjusted over time they have not been so they were actually introduced well before that right before Tabor passed they raised them all and because of Tabor they haven't been adjusted

[51:00] since that's why because you'd need a vote to change them to increase them oh thank you okay any other questions before public comment okay do we have folks signed up your six folks okay when you come up if you give your name and address that would be great you'll have three minutes each and we'll start with wait all right Adam Kindle Adam Kindle then it'll be Matt Matt Cutler okay I hope to not take up all my time here and it's my third City Council meeting and they've all been great and I've rode my ridden my bike to each one the first time was in the snow about a year ago you just you and candle 25:10 47th Street Vision Quest Brewing Company trippin Group LLC we also operate the home brew shop order

[52:00] fermentation supply we cater to a lot of the bigger industrial breweries who are looking for a little spot goods here and there through our brew shop but we also brew our own beer as a manufacturer it was just common knowledge getting into the beer industry about the different license classes before we ever started our business before we filed our LLC with the state and thank you city staff were providing all that that presentation in the insight onto how you found accidentally the tax and the code I was really curious about how that came to be it was really encouraging to hear what I had suspected and look I'm ignorant on a lot of things right but I'm not very ignorant on beer I'm in the beer industry so to me this came across as just really confusing and confused people who were who were confused about what was bar and what was industry standard or accepted I don't know in a

[53:00] governmental atmosphere what you would call industry standards since government isn't an industry but government has standards and in the state of Colorado the government standard the municipal government standard has been to not assess these taxes to manufacturers and wholesalers because we are schlepping around hot stuff in it's it's hard work where we're working our butts off to make this stuff by hand it is an artisanal good which is like a whittled craft wooden object or you know some kind of sculpture that that someone makes these are on par our creations are liquid and they're consumed and they're recreated and and consumed and you know we try to respectfully be present with the community and an in Boulder we're trying to operate a business that is you know focused on quality rather than quantities so when you talk about the Budweiser's and these big things you know that that makes a lot of sense but yeah we're really trying to

[54:02] make ends meet this would be a large sum of money to have to fork over every year and I'm so thankful that I think that we're all on the same page now and that we can get this you know water under the bridge and move forward with more important issues so thank you everybody for your time in consideration okay thanks thank you Adam Matt Cody and after Matt and Andres could be ready hi my name is Matt cutter I'm the founder of sovereign company we have two 01 Lee Hill unit 20 in our main product production facility at 1898 South Flatiron court in Flatiron Park and I would just wanted to ask the well first of all start with the City Council and thanking them for their support of breweries over the years that

[55:02] has definitely been the general theme with the City Council especially I would say in recognition of small businesses and the the tourism dollars that that breweries bring to the city of Boulder so I was I was also surprised a year ago to find out about the liquor occupation tax had never heard of that and all of a sudden of it being enforced having started a very bootstrap business back in 2008 $3,000 is a really big deal we are very capital-intensive we are taxed more than well probably any other businesses out there because we produced alcohol in addition to all the regular taxes that other businesses pay we pay

[56:03] excise taxes seven dollars a barrel to the feds and two dollars and 48 cents a barrel to the state so let's just round that up was called $10 a barrel of sobering company produced and sold thirty-one thousand barrels last year so that hurts we can't we can't then afford more capital equipment for growth we do provide good benefits to our employees but at a big cost and and we'd love to give the more raises but there's really not that much that that's leftover in the end so having gone through those early years when we started out at Lee Hill $3,000 might have done us in it was that's about all we had in the bank in February 2009 and almost and and squeaked by

[57:03] there anyway so I guess I'm speaking on behalf can can we whether this add up soap yeah yeah we can but I guess I'm speaking on behalf of my fellow Brewers vintners and distillers many that are small scrappy startups and of what we used to be a top sobering company back in 2008 thank you thank you Matt Andres and then Allah oh yeah thank you so much my name is Andres kill Saldana my address is 2882 sundown Lane apartment 304 well thank you very much obviously for the time that you're considering on this issue I'm the executive director of the Colorado Brewers Guild we are the state trade association for all Colorado craft beer represent about 200 craft

[58:00] breweries throughout the state in Boulder we represent about 30 I think I just want to reiterate a lot of the points that you've heard today in particular the fact that the tax that's being considered you know in particular after staff looking at it and basically deciding that it should be abolished is the right to to make particularly on the fact that the matter is that the competitive disadvantage that that would actually put Boulder in we did send the letter to City Council and I hope you all had a chance to take a look at it kind of highlighting the really unique community that you all have fostered here for create for boulder breweries in particular the number of GA BF Great American Beer Festival wins that recently came if you see them you'll see that breweries of all sizes really one you know ones that opened up just a few years ago to ones that have been here for decades and really the reason that you're able to do that is because Colorado fosters a community of craft beer and as Matt just mentioned a second ago it's very it's a scrappy industry it's ones where people are often using

[59:00] sources of income that include loans from family members that basically or the quest the D basically quintessential example small business so with that being said the three thousand dollars it's a significant amount of some to actually ask of our breweries but in particular I do want to point out the fact that it's a competitive disadvantage to Boulder to move forward with that type of tax particularly because it's the only jurisdiction that we're aware of that actually love levees it on the basis of either holding a manufacturer or wholesaler license we've not been able to find a single other jurisdiction that would do that so we understand obviously this is something that was found but it's rather unique and it does you know if imposed who will dissuade a lot of new breweries from kind of entering the market and considering it so I do strongly urge you to kind of consider that as you're considering the different options are there I also want to say that obviously one of the big unique pieces of craft breweries in particular is that they're big parts of the community they often raise money for nonprofits they

[60:00] contribute back to charitable causes and as we highlighted in our letter obviously they're giving to charitable causes would never end as a result of an occupancy tax it is strongly believed in that but it's gonna be a lot harder it's gonna be much more difficult for them to do that so I urge you stronger than we have to Colorado Brewers Guild to adopt staffs recommendation in to abolish the tax and that way support the crappier community here in Colorado thank you thank you Lulla then Andrea good evening my name is sue lamotte's I'm one of the co-owners of Bach lived in youit's call the car Valley Winery I am also located at 1501 legal Road we moved in about three months after upslope moved into that location and really helped vitalize that area first I want to thank city council members for initiating the fact-finding on the

[61:01] background of the tax without you probing and asking the questions we wouldn't have found out what the reason for the tax is and then cheryl patellae and her staff went out and collected the information that revealed that no other community or jurisdiction actually charges attacks for manufacturers of alcoholic beverages so and I also very much appreciate that actually received a public hearing on that it first looked like this would be decided behind closed doors so I very much appreciate hearing us on this subject today you have the opportunity to adopt the recommendations from staff to eliminate this tax I encourage you to do so and I just wanted to bring this proshare it is from the Bulger visitors and convention be able to be a trail wineries into salaries - and I think we all agree you want to keep that around and so just a quick

[62:02] note on manufacturers the reason they may not get taxed they're considered primary industries who bring money into the city because actually even the small booklet vineyard sells more wine outside of Boulder than within the city of Boulder so we bring tax dollars in and so they are not taxed for their capital assets outside the city of Boulder taxes but the state of Colorado doesn't so I think that's why no taxes were adopted so again I thank you very much for listening and I hope you vote to abolish the occupational tax thank you the drill then Lisa hello Andrea Amanda gal here to speak on behalf of the Boulder Chamber 2440 Pearl Street and I'd like to thank console for bringing this up to a public hearing tonight but I really

[63:00] like to thank staff Jayne Sherrill patellae and her team they really did a lot of work to try to dig into this issue to do the analysis to provide the information that gave us a look at what other communities are doing and how he compared what we found is here in Boulder were lucky to have this industry here I can't say things better than what some of the folks who spoke before me did we have a innovative industry here that was created on their own here in Boulder because we created the landscape for for them to exist other communities would die to have this they would love to have this they'd love to create it but we have something that evolved here the Brewers came the wineries and then the distillers and we have a small scrappy industry like these folks have have stated that have created jobs for our residents that have created sales tax revenue to pay for city services and that really have put boulders identity on the map not only here within the Front Range but nationally and so with

[64:00] that you know in looking at the other communities that don't have something like this we do express that concern that this does put Boulder at a disadvantage to retain these folks with the other high cost of doing business in the community so that being said we really encourage you as a council to stand up for this industry for these small businesses and to take the staff recommendation of eliminating the implementation of this tax thank you very much Thank You Andrea Lisa Lisa Spaulding 1135 J as a former member of the beverage licensing authority familiar with the issue of Tap Room's I urge you to reject staff surprising recommendation to eliminate the liquor occupation tax for manufacturers and wholesalers the analysis in your information packet presents a well-reasoned recommendation to reduce the tax to 2257 dollars based on the

[65:02] current proliferation of breweries distilleries and wineries with Tap Room's and the costs resulting from the increased need for city services Boulder currently has about 25 manufacturers with Tap Room's the basically function as unregulated bars the boulder Police Department does not currently conduct compliance checks at Tap Room's 4-over service or service to minors because they are licensed only by the state Boulder requires our liquor license holders to train employees through state sanctioned responsible beverage service classes we also hold licensees to strict standards for over service and service to minors because we believe that health and safety are extremely important the proliferation of Tap Room's has created a gray market that competes with our bars restaurants and off-premise stores they advertise themselves as places for a casual drink as a social meeting place often with live music and as venues for private

[66:00] parties I'm not arguing that Tap Room's are bad but rather that they are able to exploit a loophole and state law that gives them an advantage over establishments that the city licenses while placing the same economic demand on the city services our municipal licensees help to cover the cost of these city services by paying the liquor occupation tax when the chamber of commerce recommended reducing the liquor occupation tax for manufacturers and wholesalers from two thousand nine hundred and fifty seven dollars and fifty cents to one thousand eighty five dollars businesses with other types of liquor licenses ask that their occupation taxes be reduced as well if you eliminate the occupation tax from manufacturers and wholesalers expect other life businesses to request the same the proliferation of Tap Room's that function as bars greatly increases the city's need for the revenue it would collect under the liquor occupancy tax the argument the occupation tax on manufacturers and wholesalers will put

[67:01] Boulder a disadvantage for attracting these businesses privileges breweries distilleries and wineries above all other businesses that are competing for space in industrial and commercial properties in Boulder which are tight I urge you to support option 3 in your matrix by directing staff to revise the liquor occupation tax for manufacturers and wholesalers down to two thousand two hundred and fifty seven dollars and fifty cents if necessary it can be phased in over three years if you support eliminating the tax you will directly charge the citizens of Boulder for services these that should be paid by these businesses thank you thank you Lisa so I guess that's all the folks that signed up so we'll close the public hearing I will turn to Council I see Lisa and Bob then Erin I have a question for chief testa my good evening Council

[68:12] Greg testa thank you for coming up I have a question about the number of tap rooms that we have in in Boulder and the question is have how many times or do you have records and I assume you do of calls that maybe have been made from tap rooms to the police to ask for assistance and the second question is have you had complaints of over serving at these Tap Room's to answer your first question I don't have that information with me but that's certainly information that we can obtain and provide to Council not aware of anything that's come to my attention in terms of calls are over service at Tap Room's thank you and I

[69:03] guess this will be coming back if you could just find out if you guys have that information that would be helpful in the following packet just if we have if that is a problem sure thank you sure well thank you if there's no other questions I was going to start answering the expression that's okay first of all I just want to relate I remember very clearly the day that this first came to my attention because it was almost exactly a year ago it was Mertz called me up and she told me about this text I couldn't believe it I had never heard of it before I remember the day very distinctly because it was the day after Donald Trump was elected you remember that bula and I was already kind of bummed out and then hula brought me down even further so thanks for that hula but I also think and and the chamber and the and the industry for their persistence and and what I really want to do is think Sheryl and the rest of the staff for gathering the information necessary I think we just can stumble across this and you guys did a great job of answering our questions and in providing what I think is a

[70:01] really solid recommendation you know we've gotten by with out this tax for three decades apparently we didn't even know we had it on the books and I think we can probably continue to get by without the $80,000 that it would theoretically bring in as a matter of fact I suspect that we'd probably spend a decent amount of that a thousand simply collecting the 80,000 so I'm at that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me I know that some people have raised concern that somehow we're differentiating between manufacturers and bars and that may be unfair I don't think that's the case our bars and restaurants to serve liquor do have an impact in our community we collect $600,000 from them and we spend that back in enforcement as the chief just indicated he hasn't heard and we'll gather more information of a particular problem with respect to these tasting room as many of which are only open a few hours a week I don't think people go to tasting rooms to over-consume I think that tends to happen in other places so I think it is her to differentiate between these craft distillers and Brewers inventors and our standard bars

[71:03] and restaurants there's about two dozen as I understand of folks in this class and most and they're very very very small some of them only have two or three or four employees so why three thousand dollars doesn't sound like a whole lot of money for some of these organizations that's literally their profit margin that's the difference between breaking even and losing money so I'm I want the final thing I'll say I'm really proud of the fact that the National headquarter we heard from the Colorado Brewers Association the national headquarters for the Brewers Association the United States is here in Boulder Colorado wouldn't be I kind of ironic if we were the only place that actually taxed the Brewers that we're supporting here so I think it's really really cool that this this nascent industry has grown up here in the last couple decades and I'm not proud of it and I think we need to do everything we can to encourage it so I would be supportive the staff recommendation and I think by wiping this dormant tax off our books it sends a signal that we value our small craft distillers vintners and Brewers Aaron

[72:03] and then Jim well I'll agree with everything that Bob said just add a little bit more I lived just a few blocks away from both the upslope breweries first location and from book cliff wineries location and have been going to both of those establishments full disclosure since since they opened and they and they lend a liveliness to our neighborhood and make it more of a kind of walkable fifteen-minute neighborhood where you can meet your various needs including that for hoisting a pint within a short walk of your house and there now another one is popped up seller West Brewing a little bit further away still within walking distance we just have a really vibrant culture around these small manufacturers which I would like to encourage and not suppress and and the point being that when you're just getting off the ground you know I started a small business in mind many years ago gosh three thousand dollars there's a lot of money when you're just trying to get started so I'd hate to squelch our local scene so I certainly support the

[73:01] staff recommendation Thank You staff for all of your hard work are you looking for a motion from us tonight or simply feedback so what we were looking for is a motion directing us to prepare an ordinance to change the code in accordance with whatever the council would recommend so I'll go ahead and make a motion then that I move that we direct staff to prepare an ordinance implementing their recommendation to eliminate the tax well second okay June I would support that as well and I agree with everything that Bob and Aaron said thank you very much for doing the work on this I mean it's very clear we're not eliminating a tax because we've never assessed it so in my view to do this to one of our special industries we haven't done it for 30 years no one else does it as a ludicrous idea I have still some guilt to what we did that kombucha manufacturers through the cigarette tax I don't think that was

[74:02] originally intended for them and they are our small businesses here and they're being impacted by that so I very much support the recommendation that you guys have made and thank you so much for doing the research on it I'll just jump in and I'll agree I have spent some time it up so now I find staffs argument compelling I think especially since there's no adjusting it's all or nothing it doesn't make sense to me and the fact that nobody else applies this I think he's also very compelling so I am fine I guess I second did it so anyhow so I'm fine with staffs recommendation very and to that I'll just add that and I just lost my train of thought but this afternoon I was at a meeting with folks down in Denver and one of the people had a sticker from one of the local breweries and even folks from Denver are

[75:00] coming up to Boulder to take a tour of each and every brewery in town so I think that that kind of activity that you promote makes more than makes up for whatever we may not collect either at the level of the current tax or or some other level so and then the other convincing thing for me is that on Jane's theory that it kind of was placed on the books when Coors and bud were the only wholesalers in the region it's compelling to me that Fort Collins doesn't have the text and I presume that at the time but was already there so for those reasons I will be voting in support of the staff recommendation okay do we all agree okay yeah I'll just ditto everything and that's been said

[76:02] and I also frequent use bookends winery it's a good line okay well we have motion we have vote is that enough discussion we have a motion we have a second shall we vote all those in favor it's unanimous all right thank you so much your next public hearing is the regulation of sexually violent predators

[77:19] yes oh hi I'm gonna do the presentation on sexually violent predators as you can see Police Chief Greg testa has joined me and Karen Ron is sitting in the front row there we're here to answer any questions I will have a brief presentation to talk about some of the options that you have with respect to regulating a sexually violent predators in Boulder this I just want to go over where Council is in June in response to community interest raised council gave an out of five to have staff work on this issue on August 29th Council held a public hearing after hearing from some experts and tonight there's another public hearing scheduled with a request

[78:00] for council direction on where to go staff recommendations are kind of twofold one the staffs recommendation is that no ordinance be adopted the council forward working group and implement the recommendations that we've made with respect to cooperating with parole and limiting the impact through communication and some restrictions if council decides to pass an ordinance we've provided three different options in the packet we the direction will be to ask council agenda committee to schedule first and second reading of an ordinance so background on sex offender registration as you know this started in 1994 after the rape and murder of a young woman named Megan Kanka that was a federal law that required individuals convicted of certain sex offenses to register with local authorities depending on the nature of the offense the registration is for five ten twenty years or life sexually violent predators is a much newer law it's 18 years old they are required to register for life

[79:01] of a competition to BD registers one of the important things to remember that you all learn the last time we had some experts here is that especially for sexually violent predators the registration period can far exceed the supervision by parole a lot of the things that was were discussed were things such as ankle monitors or staying in halfway houses and those things are only really effective if they're under parole supervision parole ends and the registration requirement goes on for most of these folks for life so we in and in fact none of the sexually violent predators currently resident in the city of Boulder are on parole none of them are under supervision by the state at all so the ability for the state to restrict their Liberty is quite limited so this summarizes the definition of sexually violent predators when the this the state legislature adopted the law they required starting

[80:02] in 2007 which was ten years after the law was adopted that the state produce an annual report this produces a sort of oddity that we have really good data for the period between the last ten years but no data at all for the first ten years so I had to kind of make some estimates based on what I got but my best estimate is that there are approximately 800 sexually violent predators who've been designated in the state of Colorado and of those 542 are incarcerated seven of whom are on life sentences with no chance of parole the average sentence for the the incarcerated one is 35 points six years since we're talking about an 18 year old statute you will see a steady stream of individuals coming out and so some people have asked why is this become such a problem you remember Greg harms said that he had very rarely had one SVP in the shelter and two was unusual and at one point this summer he had four and

[81:00] my own theory on that is that with the law now aging eighteen years old we're going to see more and more of these designated individuals returning to the community over the over the coming years so it's important that council addressed this in a meaningful way so this is a summary of where we are in the city of Boulder we currently have 122 sex offenders registered 45 are registered 45 are registered with no fixed address state law requires the the the city to accept the police department to accept registrations at no fixed address there's an exception if the if the person is registering in a way that includes a residence location that would violate state or local law we haven't been able to figure out what that would mean since registering at no address generally Kent doesn't violate any law three of the 122 are sexually violent predators a 10 of the 122 lists the

[82:00] homeless shelter as their registration address including three sexually violent all three sexually violent predators so after the last year August public hearing chief tester wrote to the division of parole and asked for a meeting Melissa Roberts the director immediately responded and met with Greg and I summarized what paroles position is they're committed to communicating with the city regarding SVP svt place in Boulder they listen to the city's input on placement of registration well it's tempt to limit placement 2's VPS with ties to Boulder which is kind of one of the challenges we face in that this is a shared responsibility throughout the state and many communities are concerned about exporting their problems to other communities limiting them to limit trying attempting to limit placement to folks who have some tie to the city would be an improvement over the current situation and their attempt to place anybody who's on parole into a structured and managed environment so

[83:03] legal issues you've gotten some emails and I generally tried not to give legal advice in public but I'm gonna sort of summarize right now you've gotten some emails about whether or not residency restrictions are legal right now in the state of Colorado residency restrictions have not been struck down by the state there is one case that once the Colorado Supreme Court the in that case it was a federal case the federal district court said that the the stat the the that the the the residency restriction was a preempted by state law the appealed to the Tenth Circuit the Tenth Circuit said well this is an issue of state law and they sent it to the Colorado Supreme Court the Colorado Supreme Court issued an opinion that said it was not preempted but one of the basis for that opinion one of the elements that court looks at one that looks at preemption is what does this have an impact on the state statewide and the court said since there are only seven jurisdictions at that time that

[84:00] had residency restrictions it did not have a material effect on the placement of SBC's in the communities statewide because there was such a small number obviously that's something that can change yes sorry to interrupt um but you said s vp's but these are not SVP restrictions in those jurisdictions aren't they general sex offender restrictions they're both but the case involved an SVP restriction we did my take thank you so the the the the the Supreme Court said it wasn't preempted but they're it's it's kind of on a ground that could change if more and more if more cities adopt these one of the other challenges was that it was unconstitutional that is that there there is an argument that it impairs the right to travel the right to Liberty and the California Supreme Court has found California state law restricting sex offender locations to be unconstitutional and struck it down the federal courts in Colorado that the district court decided not to address it because he found that was preempted and then it went up to the the court as

[85:00] things work in the courts Tenth Circuit the the Supreme Court when it got back to the Tenth Circuit the point in that if in that in that case had petitioned to be deregistered Headey registered and so they found the case to be mood so the court never got a chance to address the constitutional issue so the constitutional issues are still unaddressed in the state of Colorado yes can you explain the registering please sorry so there there is a provision in the law that allows an a sexually violent predator to petition for a D registration after a certain period of time the the plaintiff in that case did so and so he was no longer subject to the register D restrictions in order criteria which they state how they are D registering I don't know Lisa it's not an area that I'm yeah I know I'm just I can get that information it's yes Mary so I have another question is the Tenth Circuit does California belong to the Tenth Circuit no California's in the

[86:00] Ninth Circuit okay great thank you and lawyers are really happy here that we're in the 10th but only lawyers would get that joke that's very kind of you so and also I've informed you previously a judge may chon the the the federal district court has held that publication of information about sex offenders is unconstitutional as it was applied to the particular sex offenders in that case it was a very sympathetic case where people who had committed crimes long ago who were having trouble getting jobs or being embarrassed by things but because of the publication of their their faces on the internet he found that that was a violation of the Constitution that the state is appealing that to the Tenth Circuit the city of Boulder has responded to that by taking down our web page that lists the sexually the sex offenders in the city of Boulder because that's what judge made focused on it did not strike down the law generally it was just the

[87:01] publication the embarrassment factor that the effect that has on their on their ability to travel and get jobs and does that include sexually violent predators so we still provide notification on sexually violent predators we just don't post it on the Internet the state has their website up so if you go to our web site there is a link to the state website where you can put in Boulder and get the list of sexually sex offenders and including sexually violent predators does it include photographs yes the state the state website includes photographs thank you we left a page on our website for sexually violent predators so the folks that are registered as s VP's in Boulder are still listed and there's a pay an information page on our website we've just taken down the pages for sex offenders in general we thought it was tracking but so we took ours down because of this but the state didn't yes is that confusing or is that just me the

[88:01] state's willing to take the risk and we our view was that we weren't providing any less information of the communities since the state is still providing that information we just reduced the risk of liability to the city of Boulder and I thought I was tracking to business so now I'm confused about who's up on our website and who's not the S VPS were just sex offenders so right now the if you go to our website you can link to you can see the s list of the s VPS with their pictures you can also link to the state site where you can get a list of the sex offenders okay so those are two different category of crimes yeah sexually violent predators are a category of sex offenders right sex offenders a much broader category okay and it's the sexual sexual offenders that are on the state site but not on our site that's correct and I apologize

[89:00] for the Confessor I just so as I said that the state has appealed that the the the haven't gotten very far on that appeal yet before it'll be in the Tenth Circuit so there are some risks to adopting residency restrictions the the limitation of housing choices in in some of the studies they reduced it almost completely and I'll give you some dive some data later in this slide deck that show what its different effect what effect it would have here in Boulder housing instability has been shown to raise the risk of her citizen ISM socialization is the best tool to reduce crime d socialization increases crime in my own experience I ran a court in Seattle where we we dealt with offenders by instead of putting them in jail we had them do community service with community groups and it was amazing to me to see people who had been completely D socialized because that's what jail is we put them in jail and we put them with

[90:00] people who stealing and things are okay and putting them out in the community where they were working side by side with people who had different values actually the changed folks and I was at a presentation once where someone talked about cigarette smoking any of us who were old enough will recall that 2025 years ago if you went to a party people put out ashtrays because everybody was assumed to accept smoking in their home now if you lit up a cigarette in someone's home you have actually be more radical if you do let's rather leave it above your pants you would just not do that anywhere and that change wasn't driven [Music] actually in my house if you live up a cigarette that change wasn't wasn't and the result of any law its socialization it's not socially acceptable to smoke in people's homes anymore and the power of that is amazing and the the power of

[91:00] having people in a community and changing their behavior is really important forcing people out and on the street down to the committee community I believe increases recidivism and crime and that that could be an effect of residency restrictions I'm not gonna read through all of this this is in your packet I went through and found all the studies I could of the effectiveness it does it's not conclusive but there is there's there's no study that shows that residency restrictions reduce recidivism or crime in any way and ask a question time sure if interruption are there studies that show that residency restrictions increase recidivism the opposite of that Evan yes and cited some of those mostly it's Mazzone lis one I saw that actually recruit suggests that increased recidivism and I wasn't really sure that that was true there are several that show that it increases violations so less likelihood to report that sort of thing and that's all summarized in the packet violations of

[92:02] the residency restriction reporting and other crimes okay but not repeating the crime they were not the sex crime the numbers so the vast majority of sex offenders don't reoffended abysm rate than or than most of other crimes so the the the the and there there are a category of offenders who are not likely to Rio so someone who's a shoplifter has a much higher recidivism rate than a sex offender of course it's a much more serious crime so the community is legitimately more concerned about recidivism for sex offenders because one offense is awful two is even more awful but is sex offenders versus sexually violent predators there's no data on those difference okay I wasn't able to find any studies that discusses and is sexually sexually violent predators a subset of sex offenders yes we've heard

[93:02] from in previous testimony that that they they are within the group of sex offenders sexually violent predators or at least from have a proclivity to reoffended a sexually violent predators is that correct you're correct Bob the part of the definition is the the the board has to make a determination that they are likely to Rhea fend you know sexually violent predators are maybe less likely to offend on a percentage basis than shoplifters using your comparison within the groups of sexually violent predators whether it's a ten percent or fifty percent or three percent within that category nationwide comparing the nationwide receive ISM rates to those jurisdictions that have residency restrictions is the are there any studies that you've seen out there that CheY say that the recidivism rate of sex offenses among sexually violent predators is greater in places that have residency restricted as compared to the national average no okay remember Bob s

[94:00] VPS are a Colorado designation I've never seen it anywhere else it's and it may be they may be other places that have things like that so it would be very difficult to study that so but there there is there I've not seen any data than just that so just sorry one one more clarification so s VPS are only a classification in the state of color that I'm only aware of it behavior I mean I so again not an area of my expertise I have not looked at every state law but I've not seen any other designations and I know this is a product there may be think they may be there may be a higher level of sex offender reporting in other states that are called different things that I'm not aware of so but when you talk about sv PS that is a colorado law as opposed to sex offenders which started in on the federal level in 1994 I'm looking 22 states have sexually violent predator designations okay okay

[95:05] so 22 states I stand corrected Lisa thank you potential ordinances we've we've included three in your packet one would restrict a sexually violent predators from living within 500 feet of a school and staffs recommendation is if you're going to do in an ordinance that's the one and I can chief do you want to speak to the 500 foot restrictions for schools not really I mean I think it's a matter of councils preference to 500 feet to a thousand feet and looking at saturation maps and just trying to determine areas of travel or you know major thoroughfares through or I just think it's it's up to staff so we have a bunch

[96:07] of questions one of would you give us your opinion on whether we should establish restrictions we thought this was coming from you so that your opinion that we that it would be helpful it would be useful to know if you think they would be open or not I think establishing restrictions is fine and I think that it could be helpful I don't think that it is necessarily detrimental I think we're talking about a limited of sexually violent predators in our community but we know that that can change on a daily basis could go up or down certainly a 500-foot rule or distance lessons areas where other words reduces areas where people could live and the

[97:02] advantage there is that there's more potential housing availability than there is if you increase the distance I am not in favor of banning SPPs from the shelter for obvious reasons because if they're not in a in an environment like that where we can find them and there is some regulation in other words there's some management over them they have to be there for a certain period of time there's a roof over their head there are programs available then if they're not in another environment they're going to be on the street so so the three folks that are there now were originally homeless and are now I mean the coordinated entry system and staying at the shelter so if we if council passes an ordinance that restricts that then those three individuals will either

[98:00] have to try and find some type of living situation hopefully with an address attached or they're going to be out on the street ok we have a list we had Lisa Andrew Mary excuse me all of these ordinances address the living situation of the individual and this morning Sam Weber called me from I don't know Barcelona and he he wanted to just ask this question or make the suggestion and he he doesn't know if housing is the thing that should be restricted but he was wondering more about where they might be during the daytime as they're going about their business and he was very much interested and maybe establishing a

[99:03] bubble some kind of a diameter bubble around schools and I guess I'm curious as to what your reaction to that kind of a proposal would be and and he also thought just one last thing that that might be a tool that the police could use so so as you know I'm not an expert in this in this area so I'm just going to give you my personal opinions I think it's much easier to try and enforce and regulate living restrictions in other words passing over mints where we say somebody can't live or reside then it is traveling through an area and I don't even know whether that's constitutional to pass an ordinance that regulates somebody traveling through an area I

[100:00] asked him about the traveling through and and he said no but when they're hanging out and looking into a schoolyard or something like that that's what he meant like hanging out there not moving right so it's difficult because there's the intent and we understand what all that is but then there's the practicality of enforcement you know so how do we how do we regulate that that you can't be there for a certain period of time certainly there's behavior if there's looter if there's illegal behavior then that's enforceable but if somebody is on a school property and they can come up with a variety of reasons why it's the practicality of trying to enforce that there's obviously transit route concerns in our community we have many transit routes and you know a lot of these offenders may or may not

[101:00] have perpetrated on children so I'm just throwing out things to consider it may be maybe adult offenders or offenders with their victims were adults can I add I get reluctant to give legal advice on television but the most cities in the country had entry loitering laws for many years and the courts have struck all of them down and I would fear that there might be some responsibilities and then you also have the question of notice we generally require first for someone to have criminal culpability that they are aware that their behavior is violating if you said that someone would remain for more than five minutes within 500 feet for school we'd have to figure some way to provide notice of where the 500-foot line was I mean we could do that by sending maps we in in Seattle we had soap and soda areas which

[102:04] is a similar concept stay out of areas of prostitution and state of drug areas so convicted people convicted of prostitution or drug offenses were restricted from returning to certain areas of the city and we what we did was we provided them with maps of where they couldn't go and the the concept being that both drugs and prostitution are marketplace offenses and if you can keep an offender out of the marketplace they may not reoffended it do they did they apply that or and did it work or what was I thought it was fairly successful constitutional they were they were never challenged beyond the district court level in the municipal court level but they we reinforced it but how did you enforce him it I mean did were there pictures of these people I mean was it a complaint based how how would Joe Schmoe on the street no bad person walking down

[103:01] the street is a bad person so the court would would enter the soda or order as part of the sentence we would we did a big computer project to integrate the systems we would have that into the police data system so police officer contacting the individual would know that the individual had a soap or soda order and what--what's owns it applied to when the police officers all had the maps but how would how would the police stop I mean how would when the policeman's were woman is what is driving by or walking by I mean there must be a lot of people and how would they know that or was it a complaint base based on I was talking to Mary earlier today could it be would we see maybe racially or ethnically based complaints just because a person was walking through an area and looked

[104:01] different it's always a risk Lisa I mean but in our areas there were officers who were beat officers who knew the community and generally knew people they had arrested previously and so they could just run their name and see if they had a soap or a soda order the distinguishing factor of course was in that case the order was entered by a judge after due process this would be taking a designation that's been imposed by state law and trying to leverage there and I'd have to think about that this is the first I've heard of this proposal so I'm kind of answering on-the-fly okay thank you so Andrew then Mary the met so just as a practical matter as I understand it that for example I think it was mr. lawyer at the time when he was when he did wear the ankle bracelet he was prohibited from going certain locations is that correct I believe that yes so but but to your point Tom that wasn't adjudicated that wasn't a probe

[105:02] was that can probation issue those without Judy without the judge entering a specific order or is it in other words can probation alone decide to apply those or is it a judge it gets parole does it and I don't know that the judge gives generally in the the judge will issue conditions of parole yeah and a condition of parole could be don't go within 500 feet of a school and that's enforceable sure how they do it is generally up to parole and so ankle monitor rings and that's a little thing I think is their discretion there's two issues as I sense here that one is just sort of the legality of creating a bubble add a time bubble as opposed to a residence bubble around a location and it sounds like it's gray enough and there's well there's the potential that it would that could be done and the other is just sort of the practical effect of could you identify the person during the most likely my

[106:01] sense and correct me if I'm wrong is where this comes the value is there's some deterrent factor for the person who knows that they can't go within five hundred or thousand feet of a school and the other issue is if they are caught doing something else then this is an additional thing to tack on that that may increase their sentence or put them away a little bit longer so Andrew that's true if somebody is on is currently on parole and regulated but if you if you take the example of r3s vp's currently there's they're they're not monitored the only regulation they have is under state law that they have to because there as for UPS they have to register with us quarterly but there's no restrictions on where they go or what they do they can travel anyplace the United States you know out of the country any of that so if they were in violation say of an ordinance that council passed they would get a misdemeanor ticket or possibly arrested whatever the case is and that would be

[107:00] the sum total in other words they're not going to be revoked and and sent back to prison because they're not on parole it would just be something for example if they were caught selling drugs within 500 feet of a school and then on top of that they had this violation that would be something additional but you mentioned the fact that it would just be a misdemeanor and is that is that the key whatever we're talking about doing would only have that additional effect we couldn't create a felony kind of that's correct okay well the city Boulder cannot create a felony okay that's all I had thanks Mary I just pulled the Lisa I think these bubbles here are just for where they can't live is that correct in proximity to a school so to clarify for the community you're looking at a

[108:01] map that I've provided I provided two maps which I can put up on the screen one not really very visible up there either but what one shows the this is the one for five hundred and a thousand feet of schools and then this one shows all of the parks schools daycare centers swimming pools so my question is this is just restricting where they could live but not where they can work well this just these are just mat GIS maps showing circles 500 feet from a school or any of the other things okay so you could use this for either purpose but this is

[109:00] demonstrative thank you that was just the same question about living somewhere versus being somewhere we're traveling through somewhere that's already been disguised and where we ended up was we can do residency loitering or whatever gets a lot harder that true yes most likely and then there may be a difference between somebody who's on parole and somebody who isn't the Supreme Court has said that somebody on parole has fewer Liberty interests than somebody not that so the state has an interest in restricting their behavior that's greater than somebody who's not under supervision so the there's a there's kind of a sliding scale of what you could do and what you can't do and I think there's probably a difference between somebody who's currently under supervision and someone whose off all of supervision having served their full sentence or whatever they were if you're on parole there's

[110:00] some restrictions on you based on the parole board in here exactly and so the courts have upheld those based on the society's interest in restricting people who are on parole and generally parole is something you get as a reduction of your time in jail or prison so you basically you're released part of your sentence so you're still under some court compulsion or as a result of your conviction well I've a different question met on this topic so I don't know if we're done on this particular okay so my next slide no you weren't done sorry

[111:03] so this is a list of dwelling units that would be affected by the the two different ordinances the ordinance with all of those things parks schools daycare centers swimming pools and then one was with schools only so if you had a 500 foot restriction that would eliminate fourteen thousand six hundred and sixty one dwelling units from the possibility of SPPs living there it would relieve it would leave thirty thousand seven hundred and ten dwelling units as available for them and you can see similar numbers are actually it's kind of a reverse ratio if you had all the buffers at 500 feet you would have thirty three thousand seven hundred and fifty three dwelling units they prohibited from living in and only eleven thousand six hundred and eighteen remaining and the bottom line was it would be if you extended the residency restriction to a thousand feet you'd

[112:00] have forty-four thousand nine hundred and thirty two units affected it for all buffers and only four hundred and thirty nine available for residency by us VPS and then you see the numbers for schools only okay so there was the CAC asked if we could provide some information on the shelter management plan and karen is here to help with this so we have been going back and forth with the shelter on this as you know the shelter held a neighborhood meeting and they've made some changes to the shelter management plan the staff reviewed it and the Planning Department and sent it back with some comments on Monday we received a version back from the shelter that incorporated most of the city's comments the planners are still reviewing that they will once they finish reviewing and accept it from the the shelter they will

[113:00] send it to Jane for her final review it will come back to the council for consideration on December 5th which means it has to be finalized by November 28th which because that's when we submit the packet I looked at it today it looked like they had made most of the changes as you've heard with respect to sexually violent predators the management plan well the shelter will say that s VPS can only reside in the shelter if there is no other option for their residency other than the shelter determined that that's not clear I would assume it would be the shelter isn't that everybody that lives in the shelter is there because they don't have a place to live yes okay so I'm not sure what we're getting for that not to be sarcastic but I mean well I I thrown is that the allegation has been that the shelter provides parole beds and and there's actually an option for the parole board and for s VPS to go as an opportunity this would make it a last chance opportunity okay and is that for

[114:01] the no other option in the city of Boulder or just no other option I don't think it says the city of Boulder the county of Boulder in the county we will not you know in my discussions with the director of adult parole I've been assured that a sexually violent predator who is on parole so is regulated and managed by parole will never live on the streets or homeless in the city of Boulder but really I think it's in the state of Colorado in other words those individuals like Christopher lawyer will always be in what I call a structured monitored and managed environment so if Christopher lawyer was to have to use him as an example was to have been removed from or no longer able

[115:00] to stay at the shelter we would not endure him living on the streets parole would have stepped in and made some arrangements even if it would have been staying at a hotel trying to find him some of the type of living arrangement and they were aware that his state of the shelter was was limited and so so as we all know the arrangements were made and he ended up leaving the state it's the unregulated folks that are the concern because there's no regulation again they're free to come and go and do what they they please and there was I said Lisa it's my name didn't you have your hand up I did oh I'm sorry so I didn't hear you say Lisa sorry so um never lost my train of thought uh matt

[116:03] has a question while you think of yours how about that oh I know what it is so it's it's is there a way if they are on parole to ask or require them to stay at the halfway house rather than the homeless shelter there's a way to always ask and parole has committed to me that they would seek and allow us to provide input in these matters but we have no authority to direct them to make decisions thank you and we did get a call from somebody who's like hey I live right next to that there's a park right across the street why would you do that so just just know that it makes me mad and then okay so to me this is the key

[117:00] question so just to get this straight if they're on parole the parole board has the ability the authority to place them somewhere so that's one category and that's where you're presumably working with them not so much to find a place to house them but it's really the first step which is which ones are sent to Boulder and our it's hard to say this any other way are we getting our fair share in a sense in other words are we getting people sent here because they have some connection to the city of Boulder either they have family here or I suppose it's where they committed their crime in the first place because they were living here I mean that we have any sense that that's not what's happening over the years in fact that we are getting more than our fair share however on earth you define that so I think that has happened

[118:01] as a matter of fact I know that's happened with that with the hundred and in 20 some sex offenders now I'm not talking about s VPS there are people here who who have no ties or connection to Boulder I I don't know why he just is the way it is Christopher lawyer obviously had connections to Boulder County I'm not sure about the specifics on the other three who are currently living here whether they originally whether they had ties or not but again it really didn't matter because they were free to move into our community and just register as I want to live in Boulder so that's the second question I mean so you have this smaller category of people who are on parole that the parole board actually has some authority over it places them and let's assume for the moment they're doing that fairly just passaic conversation then you have a much bigger group who are not on parole

[119:01] who apparently can go where they choose to go and we don't really have any nobody seems to have any control over that so if they choose to go to Boulder they choose to go to Boulder yes okay yeah and it's not just to clarify it's not it's the division it's the Department of Corrections Division of parole okay so Matt just two things one Boulder is probably more expensive than most cities in the state so we have fewer housing opportunities for folks so that would mitigate against folks coming here and but we have more services correct than other folks but in average be probably balance it off right i we have not looked at the whole state it seemed like Longmont may have more than we do and because long launch cheaper they also provide services very so it's it's hard to generalize I did rough math based on the population of the state and

[120:01] the our percentage and it seemed like we had about two percent there three percent whatever they are population is so but it's really hard to say yeah no I just wanted to make sure we all understood and I understood this there are these kind of two classes and the bigger class is really the people who are not on parole any longer who can choose to go where they want to and yes I agree with you time I think that's the right analysis but without asking people it'd be hard to know exactly why they're choosing because yeah we provide a lot of services especially if somebody is or might be homeless we provide more services than most but we're also a really expensive place to find housing so that would tend to make it harder for somebody who is actually trying to find housing as opposed to being in a homeless shelter or something well I yeah okay I mean I think it's just important to understand there are the two categories and presumably there's way more who are not on parole at any

[121:02] given moment then who are on parole in any given moment right you know and to make the comparison tom had mentioned long month I read in the daily camera they ran an article several months ago and I believe Longmont it was a city of smaller population had I believe it was 250 registered sex offenders compared are twenty to one of the recommendations of staff is the formation of a working group to come back with further recommendations can you elaborate a little bit more on what topics they'll focus on who's going to participate in that working group and then what the timeframe is for those further recommendations so the who is I thought it was very important that we bring members of the community in with experts in the field and have a discussion I've really been a fan of the map process

[122:00] where you have people from the industry working with people from the community to sort of provide a kind of balanced representation to the council so that that was just my general view I I don't have I've come up with the best answers I think I can for you Bob but I don't really know that I have them all and I think that one of the things we've learned through our working groups and community committees is that there's a lot of wisdom out there that they could bring back things that I have never even thought of so I've come up with some suggestions that I think might work here but I think that a working group bringing it back and say six months or so to the new council could be really helpful to inform and further elaborate based both on the community's concerns and on what really might work I'd also I think there are a lot of academics to study this it would be great to have somebody who's actually spent some time doing the social science work giving us contributions so in terms

[123:01] of your presentation are you done I am done okay isn't there final story asking us for something no I'm sorry I should you want me to type one nope but what you okay we're gonna go to the public hearing them but um so to give you direction yeah direction on either the basically no ordinance for now approach or one of the three options or ordinances or a different option like the one Sam has suggested remotely from Europe okay any other questions for now should we go to the public hearing okay we have two people I'll just read the names okay Laurie Waldo and when you read them both and Craig ruff okay if you want to come up and you'll have three minutes each if you give us your name and address that would be great

[124:01] good evening I'm Lola no need to pray there you go there we go I'm Lola Waldo hey good to see you um thank you for giving me three minutes to give you some I feel like it's factual information because I lived within the homeless community for a good four years here amongst many predators that are not from Boulder they have no connections and ties here but I know of four and they're not classified as sexually violent predators but if you go on the list for city of Boulder right now there's 40 pages which amounts to over 120 registered sex offenders most of these offenders to me are the highest level offenders I think that when you offend against a child and you're not classified as violent I think that there is some sort of we're not connecting the dots here I think that people that abuse and victimized children are likely to do it again it's

[125:01] probably that one time that they got caught they're not monitored here and it seems like priority is given and within the homeless community where you can get your coordinated entry and your service and access to services I would say the statistics for most homeless men and women out there living trying to get housed trying to do the right thing I would say 95% of them have been victimized in their childhood or in their adulthood whether it was once or a thousand times it's hard to maneuver through this system where you come in contact with them every day are you required to come in contact with them on a daily basis now I've heard a lot of discussion and I'm even hearing about a working group or we're going to throw more money at this situation where clearly there is no resolution to it I'd like to see a statistic or a report ever on one human being that's ever been rehabilitated especially a pedophile now

[126:01] you can go and look at the link yourself and you'll see conviction after conviction after conviction of child sex assault person of trust child exploitation there are a few sprinkled in there that have committed adults but it's a high level of that so when we don't change their policy and continue to house these men up because there's one woman but there's you know mostly men is that we exclude women we exclude children we exclude anybody that's been victimized by it and it's it seems very unfair that we keep funding it because there is no direct correlation that if you have a house that you're all fixed up here and here and in your soul and that you're never going to put your hands on a child again there is no study that I've ever seen or any proof or evidence that we can ever change any kind of sexual orientation in in the in

[127:01] the form of a proclivity to children so these are the people that are sitting in your city and I would say a shoe that fits one man pinches another and there is no one recipe that suits all life so let's give some people a chance to get housed and start rewarding sanity and sobriety here thank you thank you Lola my name is Craig ruff and I live in an unincorporated County in Colorado I am a registered sex offender and I'm not willing to give my address for safety reasons the subject at hand is what you're gonna do with sexually violent predators of which I am NOT but I know some I heard most of the discussion was about allowing sex offenders in the neighborhood you got way off topic you

[128:02] guys are in way over your heads and I mean that respectfully I would strongly encourage you to have an advisory council or a working group take your time this is a very serious issue very serious subject that impacts human lives sexually violent predators are not just let out of prison willy-nilly we saw some of the statistics from the city attorney but the average length of sentence for a sex offender and I don't know if that was applying to sex sexually violent predators was 35 years of which he'll do approximately three-quarters of your time if we don't believe that the prison systems are areas of Correction then maybe we need to re-examine that after doing time especially for sex offenders you have learned your lesson and the

[129:01] recidivism rates for sex offenders proves that it is a national statistic and that's a Colorado statistic with all due respect mr. City Attorney I'm not sure that you're the gentleman to be giving advice on this subject because you've cited two things that were completely wrong SVP is not a determination exclusive to Colorado as a quick Google search showed you there were 22 cities are 22 states in the country that had espied SVP status while I was sitting back here listening to the city attorney mentioned that they don't post pictures for the city of Boulder sex offenders I jumped on Google and went to the city of Boulder website for sex offender and there they are with their pictures so he decided to pieces of informations right off the bat are not correct I'm not disparaging he was a human being I'm just saying perhaps we should not be taking advice from this gentleman and that you shouldn't Ed instead turn your direction to a working group calling in

[130:01] professionals there's no reason to reinvent the wheel here in Boulder County every municipality in this state has discussed this six have determined that there should be residency restrictions for sex offenders your focus today is on sex offenders residency restrictions for sexually violent predators statistics show that if you are not housed and you're not allowed to get get jobs your stress level goes up and you're most likely to reoffending you don't want so I think it's it would behoove you to find a way to get City supported housing permanent housing for these guys when they get out they would be my solution thank you thank you okay sir I just a sister could I just ask you a question so your last comment about

[131:02] city providing housing for recently released sexual offenders my question is recently I read that I think it's in Pueblo that they're starting a in the prison there they're starting a program for veterans where they house all of the veterans together and they think that that's a very productive and constructive way to help rehabilitate people because the various vets have been through similar experiences similar paroles and that they have found that they help each other what do you think about that if for sex offenders in putting them all together you know when they get released so that maybe they can help each other to come back you know as as as contributing

[132:00] individuals in the sex offender world that's called a shared living arrangement hmm they already have those in some groups some treatment providers already provided fair living arrangement mm-hmm I can't comment on one I've never I've never had treatment on the streets mm-hmm I had treatment on the streets but it was it was a joke again I think if we keep this conversation towards sexually violent predators my comment was made in the direction of if you want to keep your systems community safe if you are afraid of these this label these human beings who have been given this label based on whatever and you don't want them randomly living somewhere under a bridge don't even consider residency restrictions I am a registered sex offender do you know how hard it is to find someone willing to open their home to me I get mean I know of you would let me live with you based on my label maybe after you got to know me and

[133:02] you heard of my crime perhaps a sexually violent predator forget it so what I'm saying is it's already challenging enough and if you want to take up one segment of the society and say you can't live in our community or 500 feet from a school and let me explain 500 feet from the school that's where you can sleep at night that's where you put your head on your pillow that's all that is it's not where you go during the day and there's no piece of paper and there's no law that's going to keep someone safe if someone if anybody wants to reoffending violence meth lab producer shoplifter no piece of paper that they've signed no law is going to keep them from reoffending all that does is keep someone from sleeping 500 feet from a school when they get up they can go wherever they want and you can't limit that you can't restrict that thank you thanks okay so that's all that signed up

[134:01] we will close the public hearing turn to council for discussion yep that's it another question for you Tom um I know we'll be looking at the shelter's management plan here in a few weeks ultimately I know it's the city manager's discretion but I think she's gonna at least solicit some input from us if you had your druthers tom just focusing on the shelter just for a second between adopting an ordinance that preclude effectively precluded sexually violent predators from living in the shelter whether it's a 500-foot radius but effectively did that by ordinance as opposed contractually in a management plan where the city and the shelter if they were to agree to this agreed that the that the shelter would have few or maybe no sexually violent predators within the shelter do you have a preference between the contractual arrangement and passing an ordinance to that effect I'm not sure I if your

[135:01] question is which is easier to enforce or would be more effective the ordinance would be more effective if I think in terms of the things the chief has said with respect to knowing where they are if they have no other choice the the restriction the management plan is better okay thank you and then could I explain the we have taken down the list from the website I did google it while the gentleman was speaking there is a cached version from September 5th that's still out there that was the one I was able to find and I think that's the one he it is our policy that it's not there it's really hard to get something off the internet once it's up there it's an old PDF that's up there ok the one thing that I will offer is because I don't see an easy way forward is that I did talk to one of our homeless providers who also agrees with some of what's being said that the being homeless and jobless is correlated with facilities recidivism

[136:00] and that I don't like this gentleman just said if it if we're worried about that we should figure out you know doctor says there's some way to house those folks regardless of where that is joining out me that's an it you know we're investing a lot in homeless services already and to have people jump ahead because they have the labels seems kind of crazy on the other hand I think anyhow I just want to put it out there that another one of our trusted providers also sort of corroborated that finding that we are not better off having folks if they end up in our community homeless and jobless but if we can prevent them from our community maybe that's part of it but anyhow I just throw that out there as fodder i I don't anyhow the people have thoughts about where we should head with this because this is a conundrum Oh Matt

[137:01] does and then Jan people leaving here how about you saw this before you guys are gonna solve this I haven't really changed my mind on this from the first of the four times we've heard this which is I don't think we should do anything because well the science would certainly seem to indicate that restricting resident location at very best does nothing and more likely does bad things and you know I think we do pride ourselves on listening to scientific evidence whether we like it or agree with it or not I don't necessarily like it but that doesn't mean I shouldn't listen to it the concept of providing housing for everybody whether they be SPPs or not well first they really Suzanne that does seem a little crazy to let folks jump the queue and secondly not only don't we have the resources for

[138:02] it but you can be certain if we said gee if you're a sexual predator will provide housing for you we get all the sexual predators in Colorado I mean that's exactly the point you provide the services you get the people to be clear I've met with the efforts to prevent that I know so it's not I mean I don't have a solution to his problem anything anybody has a solution to this problem and that's why I was there I mean to me the key question was the ones on parole where the state has some authority yes I do think we need to make sure we are not getting more than our fair share however you wanted to find that that to me sounds eminently reasonable but that requires working with the state as the chief is doing that's great we should pursue that absolutely but for the much bigger number who are not on parole and that's why I asked the question they have the right to go anywhere they want to we can't stop them and just limiting their housing options

[139:01] sure doesn't seem to me like it's gonna do any good I suppose maybe slightly few of them would come here but that seems pretty unlikely so I don't think that's the approach I'm not convinced the working group would do much either it might make some people feel a little better I mean I suppose if it could be done it pretty low cost that might be worth doing just because another investigation is maybe useful but you know there's six communities or seven that have done something about this in Colorado and all the rest they apparently have decided that there isn't much you can do and I think that's the position we're into it's been an interesting conversation we've learned a lot but I then the SVP issue well not the SVP the parole issue but not all SVT's other than the parole issue which is absolutely worth pursuing

[140:01] I'm not sure what else is actually going to get us anywhere at this point so I agree with the staff recommendation least insofar as the ordinance committee I don't know I you know I I can see that's what people will go just because it frankly it makes us feel like we're doing something but and you never know you might get a really clever outcome and somebody comes up with a really good idea I don't want to suggest that might not happen but you know what else is going given the other the situation and the rest of Colorado it seems unlikely somebody would have already come up with a really good idea if there were one to be had so that's that's my if it's not a great situation but it's not one of our making or fixing so I have a question for you Matt so with respect to this working group and who might be involved in it you've read the emails just like we have

[141:00] and and there's a lot of people that are really concerned do you think a working group might help if you get some experts as well as some residents on there so that you could increase understanding and increase understanding of the problem in the science and the data that that we have so that would be the hope and if that were the outcome that would be a good outcome and it may be worth trying but I think when I think an issues like this and we've seen it under a couple of others where people really have just kind of a strong emotional view it's they're a little less open to they're blaming people that's my hope you could come in full of emotion but that may be by sitting on this working group in and reading some of the documentation and stuff that emotion

[142:01] could be replaced with a little more logic or so again if if that could be an outcome if it was structured to help create that outcome that that in itself could be worthwhile I know exactly what you're going I agree with you thanks Jan yeah I don't disagree with Matt I'm gonna make one very small recommendation and that is given what the parole board has said I think we have to be concerned with the success of the management plan at the homeless shelter so one thing decision I think we could make would be to put it in the management plan the homeless shelter to agree with us that we would not they would not accept parolee s vp's that to me is a no-brainer so that is at least one decision that we come to tonight that

[143:00] would help perhaps the buy in a neighborhood with a management plan well thanks for saying that Jen cuz I was going to say the same thing I think that's a great idea first I want to start by thanking both the chief and Tom chief I know we kind of or at least I kind of beat up on you a little bit and some of us did at the last minute we have because we didn't feel there was adequate coordination between our local authorities and the states thank you very much for reaching out to the state and being very proactive on that and thanks Tom for bringing us as much information as you could I know no one no one you're at least up here feels like they're experts of this and we're all struggling with that my biggest concern I mean we all know that SPPs have to live someplace and it sounds like you're gonna be working with with youth or the state authorities to ensure that leave our fair share I'll call it our people at least have connections here so that's a good first step but even with that we're gonna have some SPPs living here because that's just the way the demographics

[144:01] work out what really troubles me is the concentration the fact that we've had you know as many as four this summer three right now living at the shelter and in Tom I think your prediction may be right that you know in the next decade or two we're gonna have we statewide because of way that the timing works out and the pearls are gonna work out we're all going to have more SVP s living in our neighborhoods and I think if we concentrate them whether it's four or you know maybe five years it'll be ten I'm all in one place I think that's a that's a bad thing we don't want to live in under bridges but but that really puts an undue burden on a neighborhood and this neighborhood has really felt a lot of pain the neighborhood around the shelter by virtue of that concentration they feel they feel unsafe they're very concerned about that so I join you Jan I'd like to see the SPPs out of the shelter and whether we do that for the management plan or throw an ordinance I'm fine with I'd actually prefer it in the management plan I understand from an enforcement standpoint it's easier for the cops if there's an ordinance but but I also respect the shelter and I

[145:01] know that they'll fulfill whatever commitments that we whatever arrangement we make with them and so I think GN starting with with no parolee s VPS and the shelter is a good start I like to take a step further and say no SV pees in the shelter at all I don't feel that the as I understand the proposal on the table that says no SV piece of the shelter unless they have no place to live I with all due respect I think that's a bit of a hollow offer because I think that everybody who's at the shelter has no other place to live otherwise they wouldn't be in the shelter so I'm not sure that that qualifier is much of a qualifier so my first choice would be no s VPS in the shelter at all we have to find a place for them to be but at least they'll be dispersed in neighborhoods and that's less unfair than what we have right now may not be fair but it can be less unfair but at a minimum agree with you GN that we should be getting the parole keeping the parolees out of the shelter no longer have pearl beds for 4s VPS and then again we are the gentleman was absolutely right we are blind leading

[146:02] the blind up here common chief he both said you don't know much about this none of us up here know much about this and so I actually do as much as it feels like it's kicking the can down the road a little bit I'd like to take an action tonight I'd like to us to pass an ordinance but I don't think there's the vote sir to do that but at a minimum I do like the idea of a working group allow the marijuana advisory panel that was a very highly functioning group we had experts but we also have residents and and I'd like to happen to have that happen as quickly as possible Jane if if you're I assume that you'd be the appointing person so that they get together under Tom's guidance under the Chiefs guidance and come up with recommendations as quickly as possible because then the neighborhoods nuttin you know we're gonna be doing the management plan in peril but the neighborhood does not going to be very patient with us I think we should if we're gonna do that we should do it quickly and have an output to the council very very quickly so Bob I think that was all very well put so thank you for that I think I found myself in a very similar place and Jim thank you for

[147:01] raising that idea of the at a minimum saying no parolee beds for SPPs at the shelter because I think as we've heard the parole board or whatever the offices would make every effort to get an SVP on parole in some kind of semi stable housing situation so it's that would be one case where there would be an alternative right so to the shelter so that's that's a good good rule to start with but but agree with the the issues of fairness and concentration and at the shelter and so I'd like to see us continue to push the shelter to minimize reduce or eliminate the presence of SPPs there we are developing said this a few times at other meetings we are developing the wide variety of other housing options for homeless folks in our community whether that's dispersed housing first beds vouchers I know that our housing department is working on the hard we have the you know the path to home temporary shelter we do have some new

[148:02] emergency sheltering options anyways ooh there are more it used to be that homeless shelter was really your only option so there are other options so that but it's hard it would be hard as with if the management plan were to be as it's currently proposed to say there were only if there were no other option to verify that so I'd like to see that codified in their management plan more firmly side I'd merge city staff to work with the shelter on implementing this changes okay others want to win Mary so I like Ken's idea of starting with the parolees and I'm not so sure I'm kind of where Matt is with respect to those that have basically served their time and now are free to live wherever they would like

[149:02] and I'm sort of persuaded by not sort of but very persuaded by the the quote that's in the memo by Professor Richard G right it is a hundred and fourteen page 114 and professor Wright wrote a book called sex offender laws failed policies and then a reference is made later on in that section on another book by a couple of other authors which is titled sex offender residence restriction restrictions residency restrictions the law of unintended consequences and the quote is that perhaps the most popular and empirically ineffective sex offender

[150:01] policy is residency restrictions the empirical evidence demonstrates that residency laws do not reduce recidivism and may increase risk to the community it's our responsibility to watch out for the safety of the community and while restricting where people can live sounds good and I said this at the last meeting it may make you feel safer but you're really not I I would hesitate to put residency restrictions and and to say that we can't allow people at the shelter well then what happens if we can't place them somewhere else they might be out on the streets and then it does exactly as what these scientists have found is that it increases the risk to the community so I am excuse me I am

[151:01] [Music] that's the one that's something I don't want to do is increase increase risk to the community and and I think that that statement Bob about if they have nowhere else to go I think could be narrowed to the sexually violent predators and if I mean but then but then there are people that are basically can come here and are free to do to live where they want so I would be open to convening a task force but I wonder you know this science has already found this I wonder what different findings they would have okay so we have a little bit of Q but can I just stop and see if if

[152:00] we have agreement on certain things one is what the chief was talking about working with the Department of Corrections to do everything we can to minimize folks are not coming here that don't have connections we all agreement in that was okay starting here what sounds like critical mass for a working group is that where we're headed okay I'd like that working group to be composed of residents and experts so something like that probably our sign up yeah there's a list in there does that also ringing true okay Mary just mentioned the quotes and the memo about how resident residency restrictions are popular but ineffective and maybe dangerous does anybody want to go there at this point okay adopting an ordinance adopting residency restrictions I would but I don't think

[153:03] there's the votes so I'm not gonna push him okay I suspect Sam would if he was here but that's okay well or we can also have the working group okay chew on that one but give knowing and I just want to speak for Sam in my conversation with him this morning he doesn't want housing restrictions so he know he was that was my question earlier he was more interested in during the daytime where they might go and he wanted to look into a bubble zone around schools parts and I think pools so schools parks playgrounds and schools so he wanted okay and that ring the days restriction moving a little complicated yep okay so then the last issue that maybe is there is the shelter so we've heard a few opinions is that the

[154:00] remaining issue to clarify here so matt has his hand up who else wants to weigh in on this yeah that was the issue because it kind of came up at first said anything I I think I'm okay with its worth the kind of no sexual violent predator parolees in the shelter with a caveat which is yeah I mean if the if they all get put in a halfway house will be back to where we started from and and are we fixing the problem we're just shifting the problem and of course we don't know yet so I guess I would say yeah for now but I think you really want to work with the state about what that would mean in practice and if the easiest place for them to put them then would be in the halfway house you're back to having concentration in a perfectly nice residential neighborhood that's next to a park and not very far from the school and on and on and on and have you really solved anything

[155:01] so I think I think it's kind of okay but subject to a little better understanding of what it really means but I would limit it to the people on parole at the moment and before you did anything else fine let this working group figure out what the implications might be of any additional at just question would you do that through the management plan yeah I would do it through the management plan because then at least it's more easy to modify it depending on what the results of talking to the state are changing ordinance is a pain and it's slow whereas tweaking a management plan to reflect the realities of the situation fine I mean coming to ask council message isten council the public shouldn't be part of it but at least it you can react a lot more quickly just to clarify parole parolees

[156:02] but not the folk not to SP pees off the room correct this would be parolees I've just like trying to understand what he's proposing it's just well parolees versus people s VP's offer all right I mean Jam started it and I think it was a good point that in theory if when they're on parole it's the state's response I'm using the state in kind of a generic sense here the state's responsibility to find some place for these people to live well okay let them do that instead of making it our responsibility but I do think we need to understand what the practical implications of that would be and I sitting here tonight we don't understand that Andrew I guess I just want to take issue with the idea that it's easier to do the management plan change then an ordinance I think if if there was a management plan changed it sounds he could probably come from councils direction anyway and I think it's

[157:03] whatever how many years that the management plan comes up all three and then it's an issue of convincing the shelter that they should do it and then get a senior manager to approve whereas we can pass an ordinance like that a mailer emergency so I guess I would think it's probably easier for us to do it and have greater control on her own you know that's really did the next council but I I just find it hard to believe that the shelter would not listen rather intently to the council's goals in terms of what a management plan should be I just don't think that that's there well I think the question is I mean we can give direction they can choose to put it in their plan the city manager can choose to approve the plan but if in six months we wish them to tweak it that's another matter right what's the amendment procedures for the plan I guess we could ask so I

[158:04] believe that they would have to have another good neighbor meeting and then consider the input from the good neighbor meeting and come up with possibly a change to the management plan that they would submit to city staff for review that's not a bad thing it sounds like a good thing actually for them to have another meeting with the neighborhood about the changes which we would have if we held a public hearing and changed yeah again I don't know that it's massively different one way or another I the problem with an ordinance right now feels to me at least is we don't really understand what the implications are making the change that's all and I think we need to understand that better and maybe the timing will be that we will in the next council will understand the time maybe not but sitting here tonight without talking to the state we would we're just guessing what the implications would be and just so I'm clear the proposal again

[159:02] is to prohibit SVP parolees from staying at the shelter folks that are off parole the justification is they can be anywhere they want to be is the problem in a sense we don't have control over what community they choose to live in and the state is not going to do anything to find them housing because they're not on parole anymore I mean I think the point was and Jen made the point well was that all there on parole the state has some responsibility these people's so great let the state have some responsibility once they're off parole right so I have a question about that I mean would you allow those people who are previous or registered or whatever s VPS that are no longer on parole but trying to get their lives

[160:00] back what do you think about them being at the shelter I mean if they have nowhere else to go or do you put them out on the streets which all the data says that it's going to increase recidivism so I'm it's a question well it sounds like that's not what he's proposing No I know that's not what Matt's proposing I'm asking Jan the working group so I think that's what the working group would tackle that's okay element there okay okay are we coalescing are we good Andrew disagreed about the management plan are you I guess you're both why are we taking your advice what do you guys think to go by advising the shelter or management plan do it that way I guess I disagree with that because earlier Chief Justice

[161:02] said that an ordinance can be enforced [Music] or I forget who said it people confuse us whenever you tell one of us one of us here whatever you said it so that's okay okay get a keeping in mind that what we're doing is is we don't control the management panel advising can you answer that question if if the shelter management plan says they can't take parolees then they can't take all these right in that unfortunally it's not in an ordinance that's that's a that's a rule but I'm like we could sue them and enforce it in court right we could we could get an injunction and say you can't do that cause you're violating the contract we've always had a good relationship with the shelters so they wouldn't have it in the first place yeah and we're a funder so they're also they

[162:00] want to have a good relationship with us if there was something in the management plan that said that I don't know that you need to sue just get it in force I mean it seems to me that we have it's kind of a linear type of steps that we have to take that first you know I think we need to see this working group with residents and experts and people that expressed a year out what their recommendations are going to be work with the homeless shelter and gray in terms of the management plan that's coming back and I don't know the timing so it's coming to us December 5th so that so your timeline is correct except for the last thing is the first thing which is the shelter management comes first - so I think we are close Mary well Mary and we would do an opening with Andrew actually okay so you the two of you want to in an ordinance I guess

[163:01] given that what's before us immediately given that we're trying to help the shelter plan get launched we have neighborhood concerns is to advise them to recommend that they put that in the plan we can always come back later if we need an ordinance but in terms of the timing factor by December 5th I guess like I would go with the plan just because that's the vehicle that is moving now yep Green does that work okay I feel like we have guidance did you want this in a motion no okay that's good guidance we good no anything else needs to be said and I guess I'm aware that this [ __ ] the head of the shelter is sitting out there and thank you for being here did you have did you want to speak to us on this okay okay with that then I think we are done with that with that topic yes anything else okay Thank You staff Thank You chief

[164:02] appreciate we have one more public hearing you have two complan motions regarding Knollwood in Spring Valley Estates thank you so let me start out by introducing Christmas Chuck assistant city manager and he will introduce our presenter thank you good evening council members I'm here really just to introduce Beth Chamberlain from the

[165:00] comprehensive planning division this is a project that Beth has taken the leadership on she's gonna give the presentation and then both of us will be here available to answer any questions so with that I'll turn it over to Beth great thanks Chris so tonight well first of all good evening mayor and city council tonight I'll be giving a short presentation on the proposed changes to the BB C P planning areas map for Knollwood and Spring Valley the motions you'll be voting on tonight include one for the Norwood neighborhood located here and one for the Spring Valley Estates neighborhood located here both neighborhoods are requesting to change their planning area designation to area two and as a point of clarification both the neighborhood's are currently located in the county and changing the neighborhoods designation to area two would not annex them into the city at this time but would make them eligible for future annexation so here you can

[166:04] see the specific changes being requested for each neighborhood Knollwood is requesting a map change from area 3 rural preservation to area 2 and Spring Valley Estates is requesting a map change from outside the planning area boundary to area 2 and because Spring Valley is currently located outside the planning area boundary it doesn't have a land use designation and so if the neighborhood is moved inside the planning area it will be assigned a land use designation of a low density residential so these requests are a final step in the 2015 Comprehensive Plan Update process and they're being considered now for two reasons the first is that the changes would alleviate any health and safety concerns such as having to manually connect the neighborhood's private water systems to city water during emergency situations like wildfires and the second

[167:01] reason would be the proposed changes would bring the neighborhoods into alignment with the changes that were made to the blue line in November 2016 so to talk a little bit more about the blue line changes the city's blue line which you can see in this map identify a boundary above which the city will not provide water service so the new alignment of the blue line is shown in the dark blue with the previous alignment shown in the light blue both neighborhoods were moved below the blue line in November 2016 and based on the policy 1.1 6b of the comprehensive plan the city encourages them to actively pursue annexation of properties below the blue line so both Knollwood and Spring Valley fit this description and changing their designation to area two would bring the neighborhood's into alignment with this policy so the staff has reached out to

[168:04] residents about the proposed changes through a couple different methods through mailings to all the residents affected by this have they've posted information on the city's website and we've had open office hours city staff has also met with residents from both of the neighborhoods to discuss potential annexation costs we met with several representatives from Knollwood and a representatives from Spring Valley attended those meetings even though the subject of the meeting was focused on Knollwood and the subject matter of the meetings was the cost associated with future annexation so based on the new IgA amendment procedures the approval process for each neighborhood is a little bit different the map change for Knollwood will be a two-body decision by Planning Board and City Council and this request was reviewed by Planning Board on October 19th and was unanimously approved it was

[169:01] sent to the county for recommendation as a referral and they took it to the board of county commissioners who also Union unanimously recommended approval and because Spring Valley's request is slightly different it requires four body review and again this request has been reviewed by Planning Board and was unanimously approved and following City Council deliberation tonight it would be taken to the Board of County Commissioners and the Planning Commission in the next two days so there has been limited feedback from residents but it did include three emails of support and one opposed and then you also received an email tonight which we can discuss as well all of these emails were included in your packet and then you received that other email tonight the next few slides will provide some information about the existing and proposed conditions for each neighborhood individually as you can see

[170:02] here Knollwood is an enclave located near the city's western edge just north of Pearl Street and we've already gone through the request and the approval required for this so I'll skip to the existing conditions it is a 28 acre site with 51 parcels 48 of which are already developed with single-family homes and the current land use is very low-density residential so the neighborhood is connected to the city's sewer system however they aren't connected to the city's water system and instead provide water service through their own metropolitan district and here you can just see the existing and proposed map changes the neighborhood is mostly surrounded by area one properties which you can see in that yellow to the east Spring Valley Estates is also located along the city's western edge just north of Linden Avenue again we've gone

[171:02] through the request and approval process required for this so the existing conditions of this site or that it's 41 acres and includes 36 parcels 35 which are already developed with single-family homes it's outside the planning area boundary as I mentioned so Spring Valley doesn't currently have a land use designation and it will be designated very low density residential if approved and this land use designation matches the existing existing intensity on the site and is the lowest land use designation that we have however we do have once it if it is annexed into the city we can zone it with a lower density designation so similar to know what Spring Valley also receives city sewer services but does not receive city water services and again here is the existing condition and the proposed area to designation so with that staff

[172:03] recommends approval of the proposed area changes for both Knollwood and Spring Valley based on the criteria outlined in the BB C amendment procedures and which were listed in your packet and in addition staff recommends the Planning Board or sorry the City Council approve these map changes using the following motion language with that I'd be happy to answer any follow-up questions Erin and Lisa sorry you wrapped up quickly I was still having a bite so thank you for that presentation so we're looking at land use designations a very low density residential correct right and so what would be the zoning designations that might go along with that so potential zoning would be rural residential one or two or rural estate and that would allow for 31 dwelling unit per 30,000 or one dwelling unit for 15,000 acres square

[173:01] feet square feet so so one either 30,000 or 15,000 so that that's like a little over a unit an acre like the 30,000 one would be if my math is correct then in looking at the densities that those developments are already at there's a little bit lower density than that you know so would there be any possibility for any of the parcels to be subdivided under the like the rural residential designation so for instance in Spring Valley and let me bring up a map the better I like this so in in Spring Valley you can see here that the larger parcels are located on the west side the north west side and the blue line does run through those so if they were to subdivide you wouldn't be able to get water service to that west side of those parcels so really you can't subdivide

[174:01] those and still have a second development that would be connected to city water additionally I believe that those zoning designations they're about half as much as the land use designation allows so it would only allow that one unit per acre rather than the two units per acre allowed by the land use designation you're saying that well the rural residential unless like one point for something dwelling units per acre if I think is no the rural residential is one dwelling unit per 30,000 square root of 30,000 square feet more in a court or something like that you know it's so okay so it seems like probably not would we consider writing into an annexation agreement an eventual annexation agreement that there would be no subdivision allowed we could also do that that's another route we could take as part of the annex annexation process we could write that

[175:00] into the agreement great things I'll have some comments when we get to that point so we're and I had very similar questions my first question is just just based on what you know right now how many of these properties do you anticipate annexing I mean and and in conjunction with that question would you if there were requests with the city encourage the enclave to come in as one or would you do it piecemeal and that has significant cost to it so the intent behind both of these is to annex the neighborhood as a whole because they are on a private water system we would want to do them all or nothing and one of the emails that came in about Spring Valley Estates was actually a request for that exact thing because they don't want people piecemealing off of their water system because I would be really difficult for them to maintain so this would end up going to an annexation vote where the whole neighborhood would have to vote

[176:01] one way or the other so 50% or more of the neighborhood voted to annex than the entire neighborhood would annex no that's great and then I had the same question as as Aaron about potential development on these Lots and as you're probably well aware Spring Creek is on a moving alluvial fan even though it's moving very slowly it is moving and so I think there with the 2013 floods I would hope we would be very cognizant of the land movement that happened during the 2013 floods and but the potential risks the hazards that are there so I would be very much in favor of making sure additional development couldn't happen basically from where it's located and because the risk factor

[177:00] and and that's our intent is while there's no motivation here for increased development potential this is more motivated by that access to annuity and that's great I would want real city water the issue of whether this very issue would be brought up again at annexation for further discussion or underscoring right so we're not deciding that here although people are stating their intentions right for what was that future her yes feature development yeah well in that the count were some of us at least are talking about no additional no no I know that but I meant we don't have to decide that night tonight no that's something that couldn't be addressed through the annex a okay I just want to do not saying we there seems to be a movement in one direction I got that I just met same with the people that haven't studied it don't have to worry they're gonna see it again okay do there any more questions

[178:01] oh look hearing no one signed up anybody want to speak to this okay we're gonna close the public hearing yep yeah so I'm gonna move to approve Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan planning area one two three map change from area three rural preservation to area two from Norwood as shown and described in attachment a second and then can I just go to the next one sure I'd like to move to approve a Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan planning area one two three map change from outside the planning area boundary to area two and assign a land use designation a very low density for Spring Valley as states as shown and described in attachment B second and I think I've already made my comments so I'm done okay so yeah I agree I mean it

[179:01] seems like a good idea incremental change we can get people safer by bringing them on city water and we've already changed the blue line I just like I think you'd be good to have the minutes reflect that I think it would be a good idea when and if the time comes to annex these properties too right into the annexation agreement of prohibition against subdividing just to provide that safety backdrop that even if it seems like well gosh you really can't do it because of various rules just get it in the annexation agreement so that we can be a hundred percent clear yet that there'd be no additional development potential brought about by the annexation yep okay we good okay let us vote all those in favor it is unanimous okay thank you thank you so much thank you your next item is a request for an out of five to direct staff to investigate

[180:01] the possibility of joining a lawsuit against the leading oil companies so before Tom's we make a presentation but before he does Thomas already shared with me who the potential defendants and in such a lawsuit would be and I would need to recuse myself because I own stock in some of those companies and so it wouldn't be not not be appropriate for me to vote on litigation that would involve an investment that I have in addition to that I have a plane to catch because I'm going to National League of Cities and regrettably I have a red-eye that leaves in a couple hours so I'm going to take my leave Matt and Jan and Andrew it's been my pleasure serving with you I look forward to toasting your departures and you've rest your life over some beers in the coming weeks I'll see you tomorrow I'll see you in Charlotte I'm going to say good night okay thank you Bob okay let's do this quickly were you

[181:01] doing a reservation I can if you'd like okay I thought I was going to have to would um if you want to well I'll just I'll just teed up to say I'm bringing this forward as a potential lawsuit not a five for staff to further look into this and we could vote on it hopefully rather relatively soon to me this is the kind of sort of forward-thinking climate litigation that we'd want to be a part of on that being explained it but if you want to go ahead okay so the in California 33 coastal cities have sued many major contributors to carbon in the atmosphere under theories similar to that brought against the tobacco industry that is the industry knowingly produced and advertised and sold and profited from products that they knew or should have known we're contributing to

[182:01] climate change in addition San Francisco and Oakland have both filed lawsuits there's are lawsuits are limited to the five largest oil companies so they've got a more narrow focus we have been approached by doing more of more like something like the latter that is suing under a nuisance or negligence theory in state court which is what they've done in California not in the federal court to to client to recover the damages the city has suffered and potentially will suffer as a result of climate change from the intentional sale of the products that these companies knew or should have known were contributing to climate change as a as I think I said the theory is similar to that that was used against the tobacco industry that is various jurisdictions suit for the cost that were imposed basically through their health care systems on their citizens for damages that incurred through the use of tobacco that tobacco companies profited from it and Neuer

[183:00] should have known what we're going to cause those injuries obviously California is a coastal community we are not and so the people have approached us are interested in branching out to other communities in the country who have different kinds of climate effects than those that are affecting the global no coastal communities this not a five would be to basically direct me to work with this group that has contacted Suzanne and find out the details about what they're planning to I understand the county is also interested and from what Suzanne has told me they're not expecting us to pay for the litigation they would be doing it themselves we would be a named party we would have some potential risk if it was deemed frivolous for attorneys fees but we I would want to work and examine how to limit that potential risk so that the city didn't have any exposure if you nod to do this I will try to get back to you as soon as possible maybe even by the December 5th meeting with an answer on whether or not we a recommendation on

[184:01] whether we - and more information now this because I didn't get the Suzanne's email it didn't get I think didn't come up til yesterday so you that's why there's no memo on this and I apologize for that that's my fault yeah matt has one and then you just a quick question you you partially answered it which is since this would be filed in state court and I get that this organization would really be doing the lawsuit suit do we know if they're rather maybe this question for you Suzanne are there other communities in Colorado that are interested in this since it's in state court it's got to be places in the state of Colorado right so far they they have just that would be the plan and that's the whole issue is the the early part of it would be jurisdictional doesn't stay in state court or just go with federal court the tobacco suite of lawsuits played out in the state courts right now it's just

[185:00] city of Boulder in Bullitt County have we asked well well I'm not sure that they want a ton the whole idea is to bring claims what is to work out the one can give a few well I don't know how complicated they want to make it but that's it that's it we can certainly expect something you should look at whether that's helpful or not helpful to have additional parties name what if the cities or counties or whatever I mean there are obviously some other partners of ours and similar issues that we might want to ask them if they're interested or not and this is a part of a legal strategy to obviously propel change ultimately a price on carbon so this is kind of in that context is it so can people nod yeah okay so I got five I see

[186:12] well that's true and that's so the knot of five is to have our attorneys spend some time I'm just trying to go through the procedure so just is to have him look into it mostly it would be the Lord well other lawyers being paid by other people to do this there would be some amount of work which is I think what we want to find out okay okay all right I'm something that do you think anybody wants anything else sure thank you Tom okay anything else you said we're not allowed to change the agenda and you added something I'm just well it's just because it happened today and I asked for Mary to just give a five

[187:02] minute yeah and there was a lot of community interest in this was just razzing me it's fine no we did make it no I just want to say that we did receive a lot of emails to the group email of the four representatives from Boulder County on the past working group or RTD and just kind of to recap real quickly what the mission of the working group is and that is to review and make recommendations to the RT board on all the past programs ranging from the ten book ten right ticket books all the way to the Eco passes and so the working group has been meeting since April of this year and we've been revisiting and refining the goals and refining the price of the pricing and administration of each pass program so the guiding

[188:03] principles of the working group have been to create cost-effectiveness and equitable access convenience increased ridership meet the striated strategic budget plans brand loyalty I will pause there and revenue certainty and simplifying writer operation operator and interactions so the members are John tire of the chamber David Cook at CU and Scot McCarey Boulder County and myself so there was a lot of concern that was expressed by the community and that was because I believe go Boulder put out an a listserv email to all of the eco nico pass

[189:02] coordinators and so they were all really concerned that the eco pest was going to go away that wasn't the case today we were actually just getting an update on the modeling of three options that are on the table and so we had three options and I'll go over and real quickly option B and their options B C and E a and D went away so the option B is a stored value card which is my ride card which is known as today and what you do is you load it with some amount of fare and you effectively get 10% more you get what 10% more than what you load so if

[190:00] you load $100 you get a hundred and ten dollars loaded and that's effectively the discount it would have a 50% discount it passed for low income up to 200% of the federal poverty level the Eco pass in this case would be eliminated the college pass program would be eliminated and the neighborhood eco pass program would be eliminated and there would be no youth program so that's terrible option B okay well so you can see why the community was very yeah turn so and see for perhaps so story the option C is the same kind of concept with the stored value card except you get 25 cents out the full fare discount and again it would be 50%

[191:03] discount it for 200% of the federal poverty level it would hold on to the day pass of the current day pass which is priced at two times the single fare the monthly pass and the business eco pass would be replaced with a pricing utilization pricing which means that businesses would buy up these passes and then they would pay according to how many people used it for how many rides so it would basically be you pay for each ride - the 25 cents discount and that would be the discount 25 cents 25 cents which right now you yeah so it is so the the college pass would be replaced by similar approach with the

[192:01] utilization pricing the nikko pass would be eliminated and there would be no Youth pass option ii is as John Terry likes to call it is that don't throw the baby out with the bathwater approach which is improve what we have the Eco passed the business Eco passed the college pass the nikko pass with a youth program added and a low income option at what about youth the youth would right now what's on the table is it's kind of almost like an eco passed model but they're adding an option so that you can't quite call it that because they don't like the insurance model but anyway it would be a 70% discount for 18 and under and that would be the youth discount and it would be available to counties municipalities

[193:02] school districts you know sort of an affiliation sort of approach and it would retain the the business Eco pass but would add a $5 fee to each pass that's available and that $5 fee would go to support the low-income pass the college passed $5 so $5 or some amount that would cover the gap to provide that low-income pass program so mile high connects has been doing a lot of work on a low income base fare and I believe that the gap is at like seven million dollars so whatever that fee would be for as an example would be to raise that's seven million dollars to cover the low-income pass gap so and it is as low as five bucks a pass that would just

[194:01] be the fee it's like an it's like an added yeah but five bucks per actually five bucks is what was thrown out there okay a whole analysis needs to happen okay so we don't know exactly what that fee would be the college Pass would remain the same the Neko Pass would remain the same and then the new Youth pass would be added so what we saw saw today were just some very initial modeling results very very very high-level basically it had two columns one for ridership and one for revenue our td's revenue and all it had was like an up or down arrow and most of the arrows were down so essentially what that was saying today in today's initial presentation was none of these programs will work so that's there's a lot of work to do

[195:00] between now and and the first quarter of next year but you know there were some questionable assumptions in those modeling options and one of them is that if you remove a business Eco pass for example you would still retain two-thirds of the employees that were previously using it everything that we know about any past program is that if you take away that kind of discount people are gonna go back to yeah driving or seven times yeah right so so we believe that the tooth that two-thirds of the employees would be retained is a faulty assumption so we need to work on you have any good news four's yeah well the good news is is

[196:01] that we're not done yet the other piece of good news is that the all of the modeling in these three options did not contain the regular probably the regular pricing for options without any passes so that those options would kind of float up and down to make these options work or not so that piece of it was still missing [Music] so like I said the we're still a long way and what we're trying to do is get get across to our TV and I think that the working group generally agrees that doing away with the Eco pass in any of its form would increase vehicle trips and traffic congestion parking demand

[197:00] greenhouse gas emissions and a recruitment and retention retention of employees so there's a lot of downsides to doing away with it and that is all not to mention the estimated forty million dollars annually that eco passes contribute to our TD revenue that's so we're working on it it's a work in progress and and I I think that like I said most of the working group members see that doing away with the Eco pass would be catastrophic and does the working group actually carry any clout they're just making recommendations or is this a box checking so the working group will make recommendations to the RTD board and at the initial meetings there was there were about three of the working group meetings at which the director of RTD Dave de Nova was at these meetings and

[198:00] myself and others pressed him and said are we just checking a box here are we just going through the motions and every single time he was there we asked him and he said no this is going to be taken very seriously by the board so that's what we know well let me just say Mary really appreciate you going to all these meetings out of this a lot of them it's a lot of time but thank you for fighting the good fight on behalf of the city and said please let us know if we as a council can help out you know encouraging past programs that support our community goals Thank You Erin and one of the things I would like to stress to the community is so a lot of of the organizers of the nico passes showed up today and spoke there's public comment at the beginning of all the meetings and I would encourage business leaders to show up and speak up as well because

[199:01] it's a Chamber asking them so we kind of had a meeting on the way home today we were talking about this and yeah if John with me this also if this goes through in an adverse way to our community and other communities the also affects some basic infrastructure because we've had these eco passes now for a while 25 years yeah and and I think some of our planning has been set with how you know our parking unbundling the parking reducing the amount of parking because people now use there are seven times more likely to use their eco pass than if they don't have it and what I don't understand is the revenues from the eco paths are very close to the cashbox revenues and and and could if we continue on the current path they will exceed Creed yeah so this really didn't

[200:02] make sense but it I would say we should every time we see Chuck Sisk David you know we should all be echoing our concerns I think it I think that's a good plan although I did meet with Chuck Sisk about this and he said we've been told to stay out of it that is the RTD board but if you see Dave Jennifer police and bothered Chuck Sisk and yeah I'm Judy Lubo when you do see him okay we will all right well that's really helpful well and thank you for allowing you to allowing Mary to do that I just thought it was very timely and I've we've all gotten the emails from the communities yeah no no it's good thank you Mary yeah okay is there anything else just thank you again to our departing council members Matt and Andrew it's been an honor and a privilege and have fun yeah really yeah

[201:03] don't text us though during Tuesday all right Tony with that we're gonna go 18 name is your pen [Music]