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[10:40] November 28th 2017 we have two items two wonderful media items I guess we're starting with the library Master Plan Update did you have anything to say or alright good evening mayor council I'm David Fernan the librarian arts director for the city of Boulder glad to be here

[11:02] tonight's I'm here tonight with Jennifer Ferris the library's deputy director and the project manager for our master plan and Jen Bray our communication specialist will be taking notes the Commission also has to be seated at the table tonight and I'm proud to have them here these are all amazing volunteers on the Library Commission the only one absent is our chair who is currently on maternity leave and expected back in January and I will let them introduce themselves oh we should pass oh if you want to be recorded on TV why not go my sister Joel Koenig Johnny Peter Tim O'Shea the library commission has been instrumental all along the way we have been about this process of master planning for about 17 months we

[12:01] anticipate bringing it back to Council in March but this is a study session because you wanted to get you a preview of some of the ideas that are coming down the pike and knowing that some of you are new council members we also wanted to fill you in on what the library is and does so I am gonna spend probably about the next ten minutes talking about some of those things and then we're gonna throw it open to questions and hopefully you guys will have some but we will not be ashamed if you do not it'll just mean that we end a lot earlier so [Music] the master planning process has been a really great one for us and you know we heard a bunch of great ideas from the community and through our research we've discovered a lot of really interesting aspects of our community and about how they use the library and in this respect our master plan is going to be the same as a lot of ones that you see in the sense in which we bring you back a lot of things that we say this is what the community desires of their library where ours is different I think

[13:02] in some ways is that we are also thinking about how about some options for the manner in which we could actually afford to do some of these things in a financially sustainable way and that's the meaty part really which is going to take a lot of direction from Council and we're hopefully that you'll give it serious consideration for how we can actually pull off a lot of the desires that's community has had so what is the public library we are a community gathering place and that's been true I think a boulder public library for really 110 years it has been it has been a good Library System for a long time in the last four years we have seen some pretty significant growth and that growth is really again the trivia Bowl I think a lot to the community's investment in ideas and information and enjoying a community place so we say in the memo that nearly a million visitors and that makes us one of the busiest public libraries in the state of Colorado what a million visitors it sounds a little bit like Austin Powers with is give me a

[14:01] million dollars it really is not very relevant until you see it in comparison or in relation to other places within the city of Boulder so for comparison that's five times the amount of visitors for Chautauqua it's three times the amount of visitors for all the combined rec centers it's three times the amount of visitors that the reservoir has it's twice the size of the combined of the Museum of Boulder the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art the dairy and Chautauqua combined it's twice that amount so this is clearly a community asset which the community values and so what do they value when they come there the story when you talk to community members there's a moment right there's a moment where they came to the library and something opened up for them and that's something isn't books right it's not about the books themselves and it's not merely about the ideas that are in the books the thing that they come back for I think is a sense of of rejuvenation of what they can become

[15:01] once they've digested this information and become a part of the social the social network really because the library is essentially a social network connecting people connecting people with ideas and disseminating a kind of social good within our community so libraries are also based on firm principles and this is the kind of thing which a community like Boulder truly truly believes in we are we are a place that offers free and open access now that sounds like again like it's a little Austin Powers free and open access but we truly are a free place that open is open to everyone no matter what your walk of life and in a sense it is both in the same way it's a social network where in the community can come together it's also a great individual tool for an individual who wants to come in and get their high school diploma or they want to figure out how to start a business we are the kind of ultimate picking yourself up by the bootstraps kind of place we are a user centered organization which is going to respond

[16:00] to that learners needs and take them to the next step whatever that step may be whether it's a degree whether it's learning to speak English whether it's learning to read or whether it's starting a corporation we can help you with all of those things libraries are also I mean if you read your resiliency report and your sustainability report that is truly the basis of what a library is all about so you bring a bunch of people together and you share things this is the definition really of a resilient and sustainable community and libraries exemplify that I think in the city of Boulder so in the last four years the public library has seen remarkable growth we have increased our hours by 11 percent we've seen a 20% increase in new users we send a hundred percent increase in program attendance and roughly a hundred and sixty percent increase in downloadable ebooks and all of that was done with a flat budget and a reduction in FTEs I think that's a remarkable

[17:00] accomplishment it happened not by will or not by one or two people's ideas the key element in that was investment in automation software for the return and checking out that was a critical kind of moment which enabled us to put more staff engage with the public to help them answer their questions and also to automate procedures which reduce the amount of touches that are required to move a book around because that truly is still one of the critical elements of how you run a public libraries you got to move those materials out to people's houses out to other locations and then back to the Shelf in the right place so somebody can find them the growth though that we've experienced is really just the beginning of something right so we started something here and I feel I feel very proud of that in the sense of which the community's response through the course of our master plan and community dialogue is they got it right so little things like building 61 which was started with grant funding and now two

[18:01] years later almost two years later has I think nine patent applications and something like twelve businesses started there and close to 20,000 visitors people recognize it they recognize the name which was a surprise to us because when we went out to do the survey we didn't anticipate that people were already going to be recognizing the name or the brand building 61 but it was top of mind for many of the citizens we spoke to in focus groups everyone wanted to get in and have a piece of that that's a great example of a kind of innovation that we did mostly grant funded with support from the city in terms of staffing which we repurposed from other areas that is in a sense a new way of experiencing literacy right so libraries went from book literacy in a in an era of scarcity of information you know it was difficult to find information when libraries began and that was their role now we live in a society where information is basically everywhere the idea of how to decipher it how to learn

[19:01] not only to decipher it but to create it is the new kind of role of a public library and building 61 really exemplifies that for us the example of the patent applications but it's also that same sense that any one of you may have had the first time you walked into the public library as I described and it wasn't the books it wasn't what was in the books but it was who you were going to become this is an exemplification of that again it's just a different kind of form the idea behind it is one of discovery of exploration and creation obviously so those are the those are the elements really of the library as we have it today so let's get to the master planning process and I want to describe a little bit about what the process has been we started as I said 17 months ago doing a lot of research reading a lot of other master plans from the city the comprehensive plan was obviously a history mental document for us in terms of the early stages of it we hired some consultants who came in and interviewed community leaders

[20:00] several of them in this room to talk about what the library of the future would be and that was the way really for us to begin to frame the questions for the survey for us to go out to the community we hosted a couple of thought leader discussions after the interviews and then put out a survey which we were surprised we had they had like 2600 responses to it not all of them were complete some of them are survey or thought the people completed it too quickly just to get the prize and so it's like it's a $50 gift card and so they were excluded and we wound up with seventeen hundred and fifty-two completed surveys and many of those people wrote individual responses about the library as well so there was a lot of information to decipher after that point we've done a number of check-ins with the community completed six or eight focus groups at various points in the city and I don't know how many sessions where we brought the community back together to gauge whether those ideas were warranted

[21:01] so as we went through we refined it down and you know so what did the community tell us right so what did we learn from this process you know no surprise they believe the library is a great place for kids truly that is one of our bread-and-butter as you saw in the memo probably 40% of our business is families with children they check out more books they come to more programs they hang out in the library more than any group and that's really truly a big part of our business the other part is they want more books again no surprise right so give us more books more materials more things because that's primarily what a library has done we share materials but some of the surprising things that we learn from the community and and we we struggled with even putting this in the survey but so we were hearing back from the community was that we were a trusted institution and so when we put that out in the survey in terms of asking the community to rank in values what are the most important things about the Public Library a trusted institution was the third highest ranked thing among a ton of things within that survey so we were

[22:01] a trusted institution and then fifth on the list was we were an inclusive environment so those are things that we we fully needed to unpack but in some ways it resonated with us because those are the basic principles again of Public Library we are a free and open place with open access to everyone so we are an inclusive environment and the community sees us in that way libraries have always stood up for the First Amendment even under sometimes under duress have sit up for the rights of individuals to know and learn what they want and they came back to us and said you are a trusted institution so you know the community was speaking back to us basically our 150 year history and those two remarks and I think we were very proud of it what were some of the key ideas that came out of the master plan there are a host of them and I want to I want to focus really on the ones that probably cost money because that's what ultimately you will be deciding in March so new buildings right no surprise

[23:01] congratulations to all of you who won in November of two M also won and we now have 5 million dollars towards building a new library in North Boulder which is huge and been in our planning for about 30 years so that was a huge step forward for us the community also mentioned you know thinking about new designs for libraries that may be a little bit outdated how we can make them more visible how we can make them more accessible for families the idea was that we should look at increased to staffing to uniform to provide uniform hours throughout the library system so right now no bows open 40 hours a week Reynolds and Meadows around 58 or 60 and the main library 466 the goal would be to have uniform hours across the place continuing to pursue creative partners partnerships has been one of our key elements I think in terms of our success we have a host of partners I've mentioned many of them in the in the

[24:01] memo several of our private partners who have contributed the industry partners and companies in Boulder have been instrumental in us getting programs off the ground bringing in the Small Business Development Center was a really big coup for us we we wanted to have them in the library it helped it enabled us to actually mitigate some need for staffing that we had and so we were able to repurpose those people into another area of service to the public building 61 to be specific specific but some of the other partners like sparkfun you know stepped up big in the beginning of some of our steam programs they just said you need 30 laptops here just take these 30 laptops for a loaner and you can do these programs for kids so the creative partnerships is one that we want to pursue and as is mentioned here we are looking to explore partnerships with for-profit industry so that is a something that the city has done certainly in the past but something we want to pursue further in our future spaces

[25:01] the development of work share space is building 61 and you know libraries I love to say this libraries are the you know we're the original co-working space we we did a ad in the CU papers you know co-working since 1907 which actually was is true in some ways people have used the libraries as a subsidiary for their office or their office or just something because of the access to free wireless computing a number of different things space things that you need to get a business running we heard a lot from the community they'd like to see us do increased marketing and promotions this is not something that I feel like we've ever been very good about we don't put much money into it they the community ask you know when they hear about all the things they do they were like oh my gosh I wanted to know more about that can you do more marketing and promotions that's not something we're equipped to do now but we will have in our master plan and we anticipate it will cost us money expanded outreach to underserved populations this is another kind of critical element I think we're doing

[26:00] very well here it's been in our plan since 2007 but we're not hitting on all cylinders and so much of it is dependent upon the staff that we have at present we we need to do a better job of reaching out to underserved populations primarily those in Boulder that we've identified although we need to fully unpack this are the Latino community the senior community and the unhoused so those three parts of our community are ones that we need to a better job of reaching out to them for services and creating opportunities does that mean off-site or is that just me more programming we are we do off-site programming now so yeah it would probably mean off-site and creating again through probably some strategic partnerships bringing in folks that can help us either build a bridge or break down barriers to bring the community in we certainly again we are the most visited library in Colorado lots of people are coming in but the fact is is that we have heard from both

[27:01] seniors that it's not always accessible we've heard from Latino community that the language barrier is oftentimes a challenge and we need to do more to break down those barriers [Music] the last thing that we have on the list really in terms of a cost center is the potential renovation of the North Building of the Civic area so the 1961 building that's just across the park the community ranked actually very highly higher than we anticipated the the renovation of the Canyon theater to make for more performance space and accessible to the public at a reasonable rate for that analysis we also looked at the Civic use pad and the studies that they were done there as well as the studies that were done by Duncan Webb for the use of theater space and performing groups in the city so all of those things are going to cost a significant amount of money one of the last things that I'll mention really before we get to financial sustainability is the issue of

[28:00] safety so the community did there were some members of the community who raised the issue of safety within the library that they didn't feel safe the Commission and staff have spent quite a lot of time trying to understand what it is that means we we have a low number of incidents at the library I mean uh I think a surprisingly low number of incidents and so really not that much is going on at the library which is behavioral or requiring people to be asked to leave and yet still some members of our community feel unsafe and primarily they point to the presence of the homeless population or people who they perceive to be homeless as an issue within the library we understand where they're coming from my and I we I think our response will be certainly that there are needs for the on housed population within the city of Boulder but that's likely not something that the library is going to

[29:00] be able to provide beyond what we are doing currently we can take some steps to evaluate the safety concerns that may overlap is that to the extent there's an overlap there and address some of those needs and to that end we will be hosting some conversations in the course of 2018 around those issues both with people who perceive that the homeless population is making the library unsafe and also bringing in some individuals within the homeless community to have a conversation so we can better understand where each of those were coming from so to wrap that all up right so the libraries really are about four things it's about people and that's the people the both that work there and the people that come there we are about place and place if you'd ask me 10 years ago about the importance of place with libraries I'd have been downplaying it a long ways but I my my idea that is shifted dramatically I think in the last five or six years and certainly since I've been

[30:01] in Boulder and seeing the volume of people who actually come to the Public Library the importance of place and making inviting spaces for everyone is a critical kind of component of public libraries going forward and we are a platform in the sense of which we are so user centered creating spaces really for the community to design both their own future and a social future with their community is an important thing and then the partners partners are obviously instrumental into getting us where we've gotten to I think and they will be even more instrumental probably in the future so that wraps up basically what we have learned from the plan and I would like to then just bring us to financial sustainability so yes please Joe just um with the one house population do you see any opportunity to create a like win-win or productive relationship like a ready to work program within the library and maybe utilize some of this

[31:01] population and for the good you know we have actually so we use bridge house ready to work in the area outside of the library we've contracted with them a couple of times with regard to cleaning and things like that when we have festivals we certainly asked them the last time our contract was up for a cleaning contract if they could we're in a position to put together a bid they were not at that time but I think it was an idea that had not really occurred to them that they should plan for the future for like having how could they actually bring something together like that we provide a lot of services for the currently for the under house population I think it is a win-win in some ways I I feel like we are providing quite a lot and that the benefits are quite a lot of I mean I I'm there every day I know that 90% of those people who are either perceived to be homeless who actually are homeless because I know them are not causing any

[32:00] issues within the library there's one gentleman there who's been in and out of homelessness for the four years that I've been in Boulder and he's basically in the library almost every day and he's probably read more books than any of us in that sense I do think there's a large win-win yeah it's sometimes just if people are already in a space where they feel safe and welcomed that could be a great opportunity to you know help transition into working arrangements or whatnot yeah and then on the engaging you know seniors and the Latina population have does the library have any kind of mobile library service where you would go to them we do homebound delivery so we have a volunteer program that delivers books to people's homes and we're always looking at ways to improve that the outreach program does go into several residential facilities and deliver books and we established libraries for a brief period of time in several of the residential facilities as well those

[33:01] were not as successful as we had hoped and we've since taken them down just last year but we still provide a lot of services much of what we hear from the the elderly community is they want opportunities if they're in a residential facility they want opportunities outside of that so they are heavily heavy users of our programs our musical programs our lunchtime concerts probably 80% of the audience is would be counted among the senior population there's more we can do there's certainly more we can do to design programs with them in mind although I would say they are heavy users currently of the library as it stands you know some of the things that have provided barriers for them are also there's a benefit to it as well so the parking solution that we came up with last year charging for parking and making the three hour time limit an hour and a half of free we've heard from some seniors you know individuals it's not by no means a landslide but that that's an impediment use

[34:00] you know we did have an issue when we reopened after the innovation with the shells being too low we heard from a lot of people and we change that like that because that was one of those things where getting down on your knees to have to look for books is not a and then final question I'm sorry yes please did you didn't we at one time talk about I thought you guys had a mobile book wagon or something oh yeah we do have a book bike right yes so we take the book bike out primarily to schools it's a bike it has the electronic the the motorized control if if you need to get up to North Boulder but yeah I can haul 500 pounds we go to the rec centers we go to schools yeah I I think this might be the first year we're not in the parade since we've had it well cool we were trying to check that if you're in the parade or not so we it gets out to a lot of different places other libraries have barded to be in parades it's a great book book we that for about three years I think well that may answer the last one was just around schools you know my son went to Columbine so many of

[35:01] our latina families are both parents work multiple jobs and the kids are home alone or their after school programs and maybe we could capture their imagination and and you know attention through going to them so we do have a partnership and Boulder housing partners and that's a contractual relationship for the North Boulder library and through that relationship we have had the ability to share information with their list and then we are also doing programming in all of the I think almost all of the Boulder housing locations which is great wanted attended several of the focus groups and things that we did there as well it's been it's that's been a great relationship for us and certainly one that begins to break down barriers we brought in the Latino Chamber last year which again is on the business side of things has been beneficial and they've used the library for a number of different things intercom Bo we do Spanish language courses we use Spanish conversation conversations in English which is

[36:01] primarily what Spanish so there's a there's a large influx of people we can talk more about it I because I I think the one of the main things is precisely we were talking about is about children and the gap the educate the education gap within which you've probably seen the trends report between Anglo children and Latino children in Boulder County but some of the financial sustainability we are we're asking you tonight really for input for all kinds of questions around this model it's by no means would be an easy decision the Library Commission even though he's spoken about it for over a year we've not arrived at a point where we would decide to recommend one of these solutions to you we're looking for your direction on what direction we should take in terms of being financially sustainable so the options are laid out in detail we're happy to answer questions they are simple simply put simply you know we stay with the city but that is a roughly adoption of the plan within

[37:01] the next two next five to ten years means approximately a two to three million dollar annual operating investment to achieve all these goals so that's you know not quite a 20 25 28 30 percent increase somewhere in there between for what our current operating budget is the other option another option that's available to us is to create a Regional Library Authority put simply that has never been done in the state of Colorado but if you think about a Regional Transportation Authority or there are a number of regional authorities which join either several cities together to contractually obligated to put in resources to run a library system or a city and another district that can be any kind of district it could be a school district can be a general Improvement District it could be a county anything that's a governmental entity and then the third is to become an independent library district so a library district is a subset of the

[38:02] state it requires the vote of the public requires a lot of hearing and it requires that people's property taxes are used to pay for a library system the manner in which we've described that here comes back again to how popular both our public library is and the fact that we are a regional hub so we have fully a hundred and thirty two thousand plus users the appendix that we show here shows 96 thousand of those users are Boulder but that's actually Boulder address that's not necessarily the city of Boulder so that's a that's a number that we would have to unpack as well because it includes areas of gunvarrel Cherryvale ponderosa pine or whatever it's called there's a number of areas yeah that pay low park that are that are Boulder addresses but not city of Boulder so they are not paying the point zero three mill levy on their property tax to support the library

[39:01] different broken down by me yes yes they can and I believe in the notes the 75% of those are primarily within North Boulder and Gunbarrel the remaining 25% are mostly small mountain towns yeah so that's the Boulder County no City but the ones that show Boulder on that same appendix 92176 users that also shows that shows what page its appendix B so yeah some of those 92,000 are actually not city of Boulder its Boulder by their address so if you live in

[40:00] Gunbarrel your address is Boulder whether you were within the city or outside of the city so if it says Boulder and that's the same as with cherryvale those that area is also listed as a boulder address yeah that's correct that's correct wait before we jump in are you done yeah because we have questions okay I'm good I'm ready right those are other than this so the state of Colorado has a cooperative library card it's a it is not a contractual obligation every library honors it so you can be you can live anywhere in the state of Colorado and come into our library and get a card

[41:09] well so by contract some of our some of our downloadable programs streaming programs are limited to Boulder residents so that's not true of everything some of the databases when you pay for so interesting right so when you pay for a database you are contractually obligated to limit those resources to whatever defined area you're paying for so in the case of most of the downloadables we are limiting that to Boulder residents only for some of them for overdrive we have formed a consortium with a bunch of libraries and they can share those resources across most of Boulder County and let's overdrive overdrive is a downloadable service that you can download books and materials so it's you know we have I can't even tell you I didn't anticipate this question we

[42:00] probably have 70 or so databases and or downloadable services so you can go on and download movies books all kinds of audiobooks you can find information there are data information databases like reference USA which is an expensive product but it's also a cost per use basis is our most highly used product it's a it's something that you can do market research for so if you were gonna open up a dentist office you could figure out where would be the best place to do so and who might be your mailing list so it's a remarkable resource heavily used so but that's again it's a license agreement you license how people will have access to it [Music] you noted that nobody in the state of

[43:01] Colorado has enlisted that or using that are there other states or other places that have Regional Library authorities and how do they work I mean I think you did a really great job at breaking out you know how these districts are funded or authorities are funded but why haven't they tried it out in Colorado is it that they're already so many districts that the authority is a preferred method I mean the district is a preferred method I mean I you know it's just on summary glance right so it's a it is a it certainly was written with the intent of either a city and a county going in together on providing library service to an area or two cities so that's that was a feasibility thing wrote into the law a long time ago I think was the same idea around regional transportation authorities where cities need to join together to provide service so could there be like an authority that

[44:02] would be and I'm making this up so it's not real so you have bold city of Boulder city of Lafayette Longmont Boulder County all coming together to form a an authority that would be pretty much restricted to the county but people are sharing their resources it is certainly an option within the Colorado library law that was discussed actually in the 90s and early 2000s we write back and read through all the notes from those meetings there was not much will to do it right certainly not know will among the part of the municipalities well I was there during those discussions and part of the problem or concern I should say is losing our autonomy over our resources

[45:00] and the district you kind of lose some of that autonomy it seems and with the authority it seems like you are better situated to keep your maybe I didn't know you're right you're absolutely right so with the library district it becomes an independent governing entity even as a subdivision of the state and you would appoint the Board of Commissioners but that would be a governing board right so you are relinquishing your relinquishing governance right you are also not obligated for finance and what do you do with your your asset so we have a lot of assets so the regional library authority would be a contractual relationship where you would contribute you would guarantee a contribution of funds to support a library system and that would have to be something you would negotiate contractually with one or more entities

[46:01] mm-hmm so in your example Lafayette in the county in Louisville do they need to participate so you would still have some level of authority but it is also a governing board what you have basically committed is you have committed an ongoing commitment of whether sales tax or property tax to that authority that authority would have a governing board and decide what to do with those monies you would not that would not be your decision and there would be several parties involved but would you I guess the thing that really and I need to be walked through it is what do you do with your asset and have some kind of degree of confidence that you still have some I guess you don't have any say as the city anymore you get you relinquish that and leased the library to the district well there are many options right so that would be obviously negotiated and something probably the attorneys would work out the the most common options are

[47:03] that municipalities and/or districts they would lease them back for ninety nine years or something like that on the guarantee that it would main remain alive other manners of doing it would be a transfer of assets in order to surrender having to insure them and clean and maintain them so that's you you you need the assets for a price so that you no longer obligated to paid either the insurance or the upkeep so we got some other folks we can have a free father there and Mary and then Sam it's fair to say that there'd be a lot of details to be worked out and there aren't definitive answers probably to how you would handle exactly transfers of assets or say who maintain facilities or you know say I imagine one option would be that

[48:01] the city could still run the personnel Human Resources Department for a library district for example but there'd be a lot of possibilities that would have to be worked out a lot of options that affair that's absolutely fair to say yes great and could you just explain a little bit for the benefit of people watching or what kind of expansion opportunities you're hoping to achieve and that might be enabled by the formation of a district well the formation of a district and/or a significant increase in the commitment from the CM so obviously Gunbarrel was a community we heard from heavily in the course of our community engagement we've been hearing from them before we started the master plan and we just kept on the way to the master plan so they did and they are desirous of library services you know ultimately what's in our master plan we anticipate recommending points east so that's a vague term but if you look at

[49:02] the comp plan the places of largest growth within the city are in that area around Valmont and xxx so that is you know probably an ideal location for a library in 10 to 15 years if the comp plan is correct in its predictions and the density actually occurs there the other options are a lot of grocers in southeast Boulder and so we right now our Meadows library is in us in a shopping mall on the back side of shopping mall and certainly that is one of the highest populations of any one of our branches that they serve I think it's somewhere around 25,000 and expected to grow it also has a high level of diversity of the population both in age and in terms of ethnicity so that's something that we're gonna have to address at some point in the future we would we may do it depending upon the availability of resources we may do it sooner

[50:04] just from a commision standpoint I just wanted to emphasize that our concern is not just for expansion its current operating because there is a deficiency in our view in the operating budget it was identified in the 2007 master plan has not been addressed since then so it's both trying to maintain what we have today and looking forward in the expansion and that's something that the Commission has been really strong about thanks Jenny that's healthy just a request for the next step I assume after we ask questions we'll get to a few comments yeah just in terms of a request for next steps that like those the numbers on the card holders he said you know there's that need for some additional unpacking I definitely reinforced that that you know to really break down exactly who's a boulder resident and who isn't and you know some I think some amount of you know shading

[51:01] or a heat map or something of the areas around the city and where people do live who have cards it would be really really excuse me really really helpful and I know that Fort Collins formed a district to ten odd years ago so as we if we proceed with analyzing this that is a case study would probably be very informative about what worked what didn't are people happier people not happy that's sort of a thing we have Mary and then Sam so David um when you look at that back at that table on page 21 it was you look at all you look at Longmont Lafayette in Louisville and together they comprise about 8% of the the users of the Boulder library and I'm wondering what extent we already collaborate among the libraries

[52:01] within the municipalities in the county and to what extent each other's efforts are leveraged and where I'm going with that is how might that be affected by a district versus an authority that the collaboration that might already be occurring yeah so we've formed the eff the finance library consortium has been around for about 30 years it was not a legal entity was a Memorandum of Understanding between three cities boulder broomfield and lafayette louisville we formed a legal entity two years ago and opened it up to new partners and doubled in size so that that's been critical it's running of the library system which is basically the database that holds all of the records for all of the books that is a uniform system and frankly as a user if you walk into any of those places it recognizes you no matter what the rules are it recognizes

[53:00] you as a member of this larger consortium so that is a way that we've done to both we're now the second largest consortium of libraries in the state that has given us our customers a great benefit in the sense which we've doubled the amount of resources they have access to over night the next day you can get a book it's also increased our leverage as a negotiator so we we find that vendors are much more likely to listen to us now as a large consortium when we want to negotiate for price so those things would not go away no matter what our governance was you know Longmont if you look at one of the other tables you'll see that it is one of the more poorly funded libraries in the state I don't know they're it's a great Library System they're doing great work I don't know if the lack of resources for that library has meant that some people who maybe live in Longmont and work in Boulder would rather use our library or if they're just totally

[54:01] secular about and they use both I don't really know we what this list does not show you is that we honor any cards that come from an FLC library so if you were from Longmont Loveland Louisville Lafayette or Broomfield you don't have to get a boulder library card you can just come into our library and use it so these people who have chosen that live in these areas and have chosen to get a boulder library card are represented here does that make sense so those we honor anybody in the consortium because the system does it would we have to build barriers to keep them out and that the system recognizes them all is a member of the same consortium and that same just a great deal of money and again increased our leverage how how that would be that kind of collaboration and cooperation would be hindered or promote it with one versus

[55:02] the other we Authority versus a district you know the investigation of whether or not anyone of those municipalities would want to belong to a regional authority would have to be something to start again and I'm assuming that's a role of council they have not expressed an interest they are all aware that we're here tonight and they've all said they have no interest whatsoever in joining us as a district or a regional authority they you know we each cooperate a great deal and we've tried to put together similar policies each municipality has a role in deciding what the policies are for their libraries so I don't know that it would change they wouldn't change the relationship that we have currently I at a political level I don't know what support there would be for any one of these ideas among multiple municipalities in the past there has

[56:01] been none and I have been told by library the libraries that there is still none and joining us in a an actual authority and or district okay well just gonna keep jumping in with more questions soon so it seemed to me like a key question and the packet here was should be PL users we're property outside the city limits be asked to contribute to library funding on a more equitable basis could you talk about what some of the options for that would be I mean is there way to charge by zip code or I mean is there way to actually have a charge for the library people who come from outside that the city what are some thoughts there we would not charge for use the charge would be associated in all likelihood with property tax outside of the city city of Boulder residents currently pay a point zero three percent prop milray property tax to the library that amounts to about I think in 2018 it's one point two six million dollars everyone outside of those City Limits

[57:00] may shop here they may do all kinds of things so it contributes to sales tax and general fund which is the other eighty percent of our budget the idea would be is it possible to capture property tax from them so that would be informing a district so by forming a district you would eliminate sales tax because of district cannot rely on sales tax it would all be based on property tax within a map drawn by essentially you so that map the only one that we've looked at that makes sense is the comp plan map so those people within the comp plan would pay a percentage of property tax roughly eleven to two hundred dollars a year is probably the amount roughly two hundred ollars a year so it's the mill rates around the library would probably be I mean so for the average valued home in Boulder six hundred and seventy eight thousand dollars the assessed value depending is

[58:01] somewhere between 150 and 200 and some dollars so they're basically the price of your smartphone for two months would pay for a library district well I'm sorry but what is a point the the mill we're paying now is what's that equivalent to it generates about point I know put 18 100 pearls per household hmm I'm an equivalent or think about what's that what would be the mill rate because right now it's point O 3 what would be a probably somewhere between 3.2 and 3.8 substantially here okay I'd you are you done no the regional authority would also there's a there is the option and a regional authority to just identify areas outside of the city of Boulder and then negotiate either with the county or some other district that then they would guarantee some subsidy of property tax that they collect and the city of Boulder would continue to contribute the sales tax that they contribute and the

[59:00] city of Boulder residents that point zero three mill rate so then that combined would have a regional there so philosophically is it just an epimer for libraries to want to charge for you even if it's people outside of the library tax taxing area because it seems to me like the real challenge here you know the two alternate governance structures are going to be complicated and difficult but it certainly seems like charging for use for people who are not otherwise paying for the library services should be something that we at least talk about I don't know we've on the land there but it's another model anyway so what are your thoughts on that I'm unaware of any library in the United States that does it but if that's something we want to look at then I think we should i I don't know how it would work I mean your yeah so I don't know how it work I think it would you'd be talking about probably what is the

[60:01] number chain 70 percent of the city's staff would be paying for library services if they want to use library okay so I have a few questions on that and there's no way to charge Mills on folks that live in the Boulder Valley comp plan without a vote I mean they can't we there's no way to make them join the rest of Boulder know it requires a legal action by the city of Boulder it requires public hearings and then it requires a vote the other question it's just another argument for annexation but but even if everybody that was in the boulder older Valley was paying the mill how would that affect our financial sustainability would it no that would major we'd have to we'd have to obviously do that research but it's what it's

[61:01] 52,000 households within the Boulder valley complan district 52 seven what's in the city of Boulder is about 46,000 that would that would certainly get us there that's that is that difference really in terms of the funding levels that would put us at the average level and it would actually probably whoever asked for the heatmap we do have heat map so that would pick up the densest areas of users of Boulder Public Library who are not citizens of not residents of the city one thing I want to say is that the Boulder Valley the area outside the city of Boulder is unincorporated and it has been designed to not be a commercial area because we want the commercial inside the city of Boulder that's the comp plan philosophy a lot of the property taxes that we receive a significant portion comes from commercial and so adding another 10,000

[62:00] homes outside of the city limits that are in the Boulder Valley will add income but it won't add it at the same rate that it would have in the city because there's not commercial property in that area wouldn't that be further diminished by the Gallacher amendment the way that for me the works I mean because of the ratio that has to be maintained yeah but the ratio adding more households to our area doesn't change the Gallagher amendment for us has continually reduced the percentage that we get from residential property that's right so in a library district would you be subject also to Gallagher so just a couple of questions that because because this makes a question about gun barrel it's like totally sympathetic they need a library but their house in the county and if you

[63:00] don't want to annex then you don't get the benefits of a city which is libraries so there's a little bit of a tension there in between the desire to stay out of the city but to want some of the city services right I'll just put up how do we bring them into the payment system here okay just two other questions about that church so that chart of card holders those are active card users yeah I mean okay yeah and so they're so this is the rub right so a percentage of these are people who have fines who may not have used their card and they're still in the system so that's probably about 18% we think that probably is mitigated by the fact that we also use we also open the library system to anyone who wants to come in so many people who are using the library are not represented in this list either because if you would live in Broomfield and have a Broomfield card you can use our library without getting a card so

[64:01] there's a there's a difference there but yeah there's this is a total ember of card olds and we hold onto cards if they have an amount of fines even if they've not used their card so that those are still in the system okay I was just wondering since we're a university town whether you know we have a lot of extra voters on our rolls too because people have come through and then move on and I just curious whether this is similarly and we have a lot of people that don't we clean the database every two years for people who have not used their card in three so okay that but I don't disagree with you saying I think we need to scrub the numbers further we've been scrubbing these numbers for a year because I just seems improbable there's not another library like this of ours of a city our size there's no wood if you look at little and wood they have a lot of rights with their cards I mean the fact that we have 8% from the Elle towns with bolder cards is that yes so Louisville

[65:01] requires that a Boulder resident would get a Louisville card Lafayette does not so this is again that consortium okay some of us honor the spirit of the consortium and don't require the city of Louisville does require okay last question for me if I'm remembering correctly when we are looking at impact fees development impact fees there's a certain amount of money that comes in from that for expansion purposes and I think maybe you mentioned it but I'm just trying to when we tease apart the money we need to maintain a robust system and the money we need to expand how do the development impact fees what percentage of that is helped by those impact fees we are you know that that will certainly assist us in expansion we could we could easily I don't want to say this too much but we could easily open a storefront location in Gunbarrel within six months the issue is the cost of operation which we cannot use development in next taxes for and

[66:01] the cost for opening up a location ultimately the cost for operation outstrip that initial investment you know relatively rapidly you know we don't have a solid estimate again because it comes down to cost of utilities but if we were to get a free rent probably the cost of staffing is around $300,000 a year the cost of a storefront first to our front roughly 250 to 300 thousand dollars a year a hundred thousand dollars for materials and then factored in cleaning and electricity and those kind of costs Fama's given us a number for new construction of eighteen dollars a square foot that's that's way in excess of what we're currently paying for our facilities now that's the number that we provided you in conjunction with the to M ballot was an $18 square foot maintenance cost Magnusson utility cost weight maintenance and and utility cost so that's that roughly is a little more than a little more than a third of the cost of opening up a operation okay Lisa you had another question yeah

[67:03] it it seems to me that you know going a district route isn't gonna work for us just because well for a couple reasons I think increasing our property taxes right now is not something anybody in our community would really appreciate given that our taxes have gone up substantially in the last year or two and people are still reeling over over that so it seems and nobody wants to like do anything beyond doesn't sound like it you know an authority or a real district so then the question comes we need additional funds in order to keep the momentum of the library going you just went through what the cost of opening a storefront was I remember when we did that for the North Boulder one and and trying to fit that into our

[68:02] budget and I think originally Jane did we have like 20 hours of staff planned and and that was a real stretch that first year and then trying to get you know it more fully staffed so I guess I'm interested in looking at what tax would be a library tax and in your survey you asked people what they if they would be open to some kind of a library tax and I think it's written somewhere in there that 72% were at least open to having that discussion so I guess I would like to know what what would that be how much would that be and for how many years because it seems like needs to be kept I think we have a real problem with a part of the community that says they are bolder

[69:01] but they're not the city of Boulder residents and I don't know how we get them to the only way I can figure that we get them to step up to the plate is a annexing and I know that's not so something people are open to okay so let's finish up with questions so do you have a thought on what attacks the attacks classy and a legal issue it would have to be again a ballot measure I believe the city of Boulder did that in the eighties with the the point zero three mill levy is a what's referred to at that time as a library tax that's what kind of tax you would want so the two that we usually do a property tax which we do rarely and increase the sales and use tax which we do not frequently but we have done what I think you're talking about is a dedicated stream exactly and probably sales and use tax the thing to keep that's a perfectly good way right the thing to keep in mind is that we are

[70:03] not the highest sales and use tax it e in the area but we are near the top and we've been talking at Council about reserving some of that capacity for possibly other matters like affordable housing is a topic that we've talked about or additional human services dollars or broadband so we've got many uses for additional tax dollars and we'd want to be careful as we thought about it to be strategic about how extra dollars would be used and whether or not we're coming up to our carrying capacity so to speak for sales and use taxes so just keep that in mind as we talk about right yeah I guess at some point in time and I would hope before the budget and maybe part of this whole discussion that we look at all of our taxes we do that almost every year and we look at what's

[71:00] been a sunset and maybe we could have a conversation that it might be prudent to let some of these taxes sunset III don't have one in mind right now but yeah I don't either and we a couple of years ago took care of a lot of the sunsetting taxes and made them permanent or extended them out so that the Sun setting was more like twenty twenty-nine or twenty thirty five so we we don't have easily Sun setting taxes I don't believe right I mean I guess I will just take it back to you given that you know we want to be careful with our carrying capacity of our tax how much we're going to ask our property taxes we have to be careful with we have a large population that isn't residents of the city that are using our our services without paying for those you know what what are the options I mean what are the options it seems like Authority district

[72:02] tax annexation I don't know so you had an answer and then we're gonna see if any of the new people have questions yes on properties next to and again this is not my area of expertise but I believe by charter there's a cap that the city is and I think we're close to that milray so if the city were to decide to do it on property tax alone within the city I'm not sure we get there and I just wanted to remind you out on sales tax if you are not in the city of Boulder you don't necessarily pay the same sales tax because large and kind of anything that is delivered to your home things like automobiles those kinds of things you're charged based on where you live not so sales tax doesn't necessarily get at this equity issue just make sure you're almost in them so Aaron has you had a follow-up and then I want to see if you needed the plate new

[73:01] people if you have any questions and then we'll jump into comments this is just a follow-up question on that the taxing issue suit I'm Jane that some of our property taxes that we assess are go to the general fund correct so would it be conceivable if if we went the district drought that was funded by property taxes I mean to Lisa's point about you know that they're high and have gone up recently not the mill rate but the total amount would it be possible to reduce some of the sales taxes that had gone to the general fund and say well that was amount say that was an amount that went to the library reduced some of those and then replaced them with a property tax for the library district I think the answer to that is yes we have to determine what that looks like and I need Cheryl patellae and Bob I come to help me with that one the point O three that they get is around you said a million or a million

[74:01] to a year and I think that the library in total is funded with around seven million a year eight point two eight point two million so that puts us at seven million from the sales and use taxes so we'd have to sort of re figure out how how many points on our sales tax could be reduced to make up for that seven million well I was thinking right now it's they're allocated from sales tax money but you could instead potentially leave the sales tax where it is but reduce the property taxes that feed the general fund we we could do that yes so it would be an option okay thanks announcer you said so I think also we did run all the numbers for that kind of trade-off in within the city of Boulder but we haven't done it in a in imaginary district because we don't know what map you guys would have in mind but it's a

[75:00] it's approximately a five and a half to six percent reduction in sales tax and a three percent increase in property tax so that's the trade-off between those values being a new person you know Lisa you just sort of started after the last commentary saying I don't think regional Regional District to work and one nor the other option do you find that to be true do you see the same kind of limitations that at least as pointing out do you feel like one of these two is more feasible and I know you're looking for guidance from us but do you for preference between the two you know I feel like we've just gotten started right so I I feel the need for the library to really achieve the goals that we've set out and those are those are significant goals it's not just people coming through the door it's about it's about economic and social

[76:01] sustainability of our community I truly believe that I think the library is the is the last great promise of a Democratic Society so that's so I think we need to figure out a way to do this right do I have a preference you know the Regional Library Authority is the least clean because it hasn't been done mmm the district is certainly the trend within the state of Colorado and I think to answer an earlier question that yes put a river in Fort Collins is very happy and you tell us what they did they went from a municipal library to a district library including a broader area and that was six years ago we have it on a map I just looked up a map it's almost all of Larimer County excepting southern the southern part of the county and like Wellington yeah so like way up into the mountains so that never very very pleased so of that with that result so you know I I want to get

[77:01] to the point where we can actually say that we're financially sustainable and we can plan for the future right so that's that's really what I'm looking for how we get there I think is gonna require a lot of you know it's gonna require some political capital and it's gonna require getting out in the community I mean the property thing tax is not a non-issue it is it is a real issue and I understand the but it is also just my personal opinion having moved here from elsewhere that my property taxes are significantly lower than what I paid in most of the other communities I've lived taxes here are significantly lower than residential it's not commercial and you know it's important I think as we talk about this to note that of course those payments it scales with the price of the property so just saying it's a $200 increase you know an average that's obviously not for you know learn properties and in sales taxes can have an undue burden on lower income individuals as compared to

[78:00] property taxes so that would be the route that I'd prefer to look at but all right thank you any other questions thank you my question was basically the same as Jill's I wondered you said that you didn't have an option amongst the Library Commission but obviously you've studied this much more than we and and so basically I hear what you're saying and would like some follow-up as Erin asked for the Fort Collins model how that works and how and what the negatives may be you said they're pretty happy with it as far as you know but as far as I know well okay between the district and the authority obviously a lot of people done a district nobody's done an authority would you take an authority off the table you have to say this no I know what I mean you're in your expertise yes is there a reason why nobody's done it I actually thought there were two in

[79:00] Colorado we did some research and it turns out there were not but there were agreements there were contractual agreements between multiple entities that that didn't work out let's just put it that way they were not actually a regional authority but they had formed contractual relationships between a city in a county that you know over the course of 20 years deteriorating okay so I would rather not code that route I just because I and also partly because it's not been done I mean and that would mean a more research for us okay okay well that's helpful so I mean we can we can begin the narrowing process yeah okay so we should dive in with input I did you want to start now you can okay so I'll just some initial thoughts which are yes let's figure out a dead Shadid funding source that achieves our goals I agree with you especially in this error that libraries are a great pillar of

[80:00] democracy and so yes let's let's figure out the mechanism I think it seems like figuring out a how to increase our existing taxes in a way that would be more sustainable there's one approach that we should explore I wish there was a way to get at the equity issue I also think we need to explore a district in some reform just as I think it's worth looking at both of those and comparing the two there's trade-offs there don't I guess those are my initial thoughts is we need to look at make our best case for both and we talked about parsing that data better doing the heat map really getting a sense of that in the equity trade-offs and I think we should do that as part of this so that's my initial thoughts who's whose game view let me just say that I'm extremely impressed with what you've done with flat resources that you've had to

[81:00] support the library system the amount that you've accomplished is really really impressive so thank you for all the hard work for you and the staff and library commission that supported you it really would very much like to support the expansion ideas and plans that you have I'm really looking forward to North Boulder library branch which is my part of the city I also think that Gunbarrel really desperately needs some services in this area so you know if we could do storefront libraries sometime soon and a you know a branch library in the future I think that would be a really valuable thing for that community and I think it's definitely worth exploring the idea of a district as a way to accomplish that it would be a really big move it would be a big change for our city changing the governance model creating new entity it's not something that we would want to do lightly but it seems to me worth the exploration and it would require a real outreach you know this is not something that we would want to do unilaterally it's something we want to reach out to the residents of unincorporated Boulder County who would

[82:01] be included in the district if it were to have but we might find that if we said to them hey you're going to have real library services near where you live how do you feel about joining a district in order to accomplish that they might love the idea or they might not but so there's a lot to look into there's a lot to explore we should absolutely not predetermine the outcome looking at other funding models would be important as well but I would agree with what Jill said I'm I'm wary of continuing to increase our sales taxes it is a regressive tax and well property tax can hit people on fixed incomes very hard it is a less regressive tax than a sales tax so I would probably focus efforts in that direction and I am interested in the idea of if we added more to a property tax either on its own or as part of the formation of a district well I guess this would be if we formed

[83:02] a district and so added a larger property tax dedicated to the district looking at at the same time reducing existing property taxes within the city of Boulder so that it would not just be an increase for everyone in the city I think that would be one of the things worth looking at so the idea of property taxes raising property taxes is seems like a sort of politically infeasible direction one of the things just haven't gotten off the campaign trail that was something that actually took the time to learn about how property taxes work in the state of Colorado because that was something that came up all the time my property taxes are going up what can you do to lower them and there's not a whole lot that

[84:03] that the city can do to lower property taxes or for that matter the way that the property taxes work there's not a whole lot that we can do period so that seems infeasible and that would sounds like the way that that readdress district would be funded and then with Russo so I I don't I don't have an answer but I guess to continue to explore the different options including like Lisa said annexation and because the the truth of the matter is part of what you hear when you go out to gun barrel as well is they not only want libraries they want parks they want rec centers they want streets so it's you know it's it's a need that encompasses a whole lot more than just a library and how can the

[85:01] needs and wants of the residents out in gumbo incorporated and unincorporated be met that's that's a question and so we need to look at all the options I think and I guess the other the other thing is it sounds like we've created such a wonderful place in our library I love the library it makes me happy every time I walk in there it's just a beautiful place and we've created such a wonderful place that it's something that people from all around want to come to and where I was going with my questioning about how we collaborate with other municipal libraries is how can we work together to promote or encourage the development of that kind of a destination feeling in

[86:02] other communities so that the the impact of a wonderful place is shared among the existing libraries so you know it's kind of like how we're working with housing or attempting to work with housing regionally I think we have to attempt to work on libraries regionally and I think that that should be an Shanna's how can we just work together the way we're looking at working on affordable housing so that's all I have so Mary pretty much to my first point about property taxes and I will say just getting off the campaign trail that um I think we would upset a lot of citizens or residents of Boulder if we could find a way of reallocating possibly taking away some and then putting it towards the library that might be something

[87:00] worth talking about but I can just say that that many many people I heard from that was probably one of the biggest issues as for Gunbarrel being a resident there myself and a portion of the city I can just say again having been on a on the campaign trail gun barrel is going to fight you tooth-and-nail for annexation so I I'm just I'm letting you know just having to voice their concerns and I'm not saying you know I understand the whole cake and eat it too issue here but I'm just I'm just giving you guys a heads up but regardless regardless of how this goes it's it's gonna be a really big issue for many people out there so just a heads up and I would actually also then agree with Mary I think it'd be a fantastic idea to start working with our surrounding cities and communities like we are with housing

[88:01] because if Boulder is creating this amazing model let's let's share it and share the wealth so so I'll agree with much of what's been said I loved what you had in our in our book or in our packet tonight that the library is a core service in a Democratic Society so for me it's not a plus and I feel like for many years that's how we've treated library as an option it's not an option it's a basic requirement of our society and I think I am very concerned about raising taxes I liked where Aaron was going where maybe we could look at some of the funding already within our general fund and so I would encourage

[89:00] you to look at that and see if there's some how we can squeeze the terminator' 'nope because and I don't think anybody's surprised by my saying that you know I think I used to say if you don't have a library you're going to have a dead canary in your coal mine so yes that's not the best way to say it but libraries are fundamental to our existence I'm concerned with and I agree with Joe sales tax is not a good thing to do and property tax also is something so I would like to look internally see how can we do this I'm very keep an open mind but I'm I'm reticent about going into a district because I'm reticent about losing control of all the assets that we have and I feel like and I went into second what Aaron said to you my word where did you come from you have done an amazing

[90:02] job with our library system basically squeezing turnips and making you know wonderful things so I really appreciate that and I think it's been very difficult for years you know because I know you've worried so much and wanted to do so many wonderful things which you have accomplished I don't have an answer I will keep my mind open but I will say I have real can I liked Aaron's stuff the best of what's been put out here tonight I am concerned about losing control and with respect to annexation I agree gun barrel will argue but at some point we need to have that conversation we need to have that conversation there's a there's a an issue of fair we're the people in the city of Boulder pay for all of these other things and then we have people who

[91:01] live on our periphery and they're wonderful people and they contribute but they're not paying the same as everybody else and for me fundamentally that is wrong and so and I've said this before I'm happy to have that conversation about annexation and I'm not up for election and I think I think it's something that it doesn't matter what the issue is we always come up against this annexation issue and we either need to deal with it suck it up and do it or just just say okay we're going to be a charity to all of these enclaves around the city and they don't have to pay and that's not fair so I guess I would like annexation to be looked at I would like the method or an approach that Aaron looked at and I'm very concerned about losing our autonomy on our this wonderful wonderful resource and I agree

[92:02] with with Mary and nearby let let our model become other communities models as well so and and one last thing and this just has to do with libraries I would be very reticent about ever asking people who are coming to the library to pay for those services just because it's it's the core of our fundamental democratic kind of spirit in America and and it's something I just feel as a given and and we need to have libraries so Sam and then Jill so thank you David for all you've done for our libraries in fact I wanted to call out one program in particular in response to what Jim had mentioned which is we have this tree debris to Opportunity Program which I think deserves to be highlighted because it's a 12-week program for people who are

[93:02] unsheltered to learn a woodworking technique and to acquire useful skills so I think that is another in which the library has collaborated with annouce community so thank you for that this is a sticky problem to me and it's really a funding problem I reflected more I'm charging for services and that's probably not the right way to go but if we're not going to be able to do property taxes and annexation is politically untenable and sales taxes are progressive we have to be able to either think outside the box or live within the current budget so we could talk about general fund dollars and how those allocations are done but we could also potentially take a look at you know sorting people who apply for library cards either well geographically first of all because everyone in Boulder should never pay anything because we're already paying through our taxes but if there are people who are coming in from outside the system to regularly use the

[94:01] system you could means-test them and charge for a card right and so it's not charging for use it's just charging to qualify to be allowed to use the facility I mean I don't really love this either but if you go down the list of very tough you know options it's certainly something that I think should be on the table as a way to think about how we take people from outside the system and get them to pay their way both for the operations and for the capital needs that being said I also agree with getting something out to the city section of Gunbarrel as soon as possible so getting a storefront library so as we get the North Boulder facility to come online then maybe we can use some of that operational funding source to support Gunbarrel I don't think there's any way to avoid the difficult conversation here right it's either gonna be taxed I mean if we need the money it's either gonna be taxes of one kind or another or it's gonna have to be some kind of Yousefi and if we can come

[95:01] up with a way to make an equitable use fee which means that everyone in Boulder never has to pay for using the library but people who are coming in from the outside especially frequently I think Oh something to the upkeep of those facilities that they're using so I would I'm not really that into the authority and sounds like you aren't either so that's easy the district I really only be interested in if we were able to come up with the funding source somewhat similar to what Aaron brought up where it's not going to create additional burden on city of Boulder residents who are already essentially paying their own way but would bring something additional and from the outside tax base so thanks for all your hard work I'll just weigh in and say I would also love to see us continue to explore a district I am not advocating that we raise property taxes I in an ideal world obviously we find funding from mixing

[96:01] things around the way that Aaron suggested though we're looking for a large amount of money and I would push back a little having also been on the campaign trail people responded to that thirty to forty percent increase in their assessed value not necessarily the mill rate that's what we heard that came after years of the highest appreciation we've seen those are only assessed every two years if it's in a non assessment year what we're talking about is the mill rate and the difference of point zero three and point zero six is not you know a million and a half dollars for you so I don't know that it would be as abrasive to the community as we're making it sound that said it maybe who knows in an ideal world we find you know funding mechanisms elsewhere but it sounds like a sticky problem anyway Thanks I won't add anything to the conversation

[97:02] except to say that I'm not in favor of user fees of any kind I think it's just against the philosophy of what a library stands for and the more they frequent it the better it is those who aren't necessarily property texts or paying for it through sales tax I wanted to thank you David I didn't say that during my comments but it really has been a transformative time the last four years for the library and I want to thank the commissioners as well it's just been just it's beyond words really thank you I also want to thank commissioners I know this is a lot of hard work and a lot of extra hours over and above what you normally have to do to serve on the Library Commission we have a very high

[98:00] functioning Library Commission and I think we're very lucky to have the five of you serving I just went in I mean we've been talking about lots of ways to grow the pie you know whether it's user fees or sales tax or property tax or annexation or district or whatever I think you know those are all just different flavors of the same the same solution which is growing the pie the alternative obviously a mere buy touched on this is is reallocating the pie right in other words keep the pie the same size and talk about priorities within our general fund so if david says hey listen for an extra million or two or five or whatever your number is these are all the wonderful things we could do well that's really helpful to know that and then we look across the rest of the budget and say what what would we give up in exchange for those wonderful things would we do less road repair would we open spaces a bad example cuz that's you've dedicated we do less for parks we do lust for recreation facilities would we degrade our fire service I mean what would we trade off and and I think it's it's fine to have discussions about how to grow the pie and maybe there's

[99:01] something there that our community would support but I think we need to look at the other alternate at the other obvious alternative which is priorities within our existing budget without raising taxes or the sales taxes or use taxes or annexations or any of these other things we've been talking about tonight what do you need and what will we good for that and then when we do our budgets and I know that's less sustainable but every department has to deal with that every department has to arm wrestle with all the other departments every year to come up with a budget that they feel is appropriate and this is all about community values and priorities and so I want us to focus on that alternative that non tax raising alternative how much do you need what you do with it and then we can compare that to everything else we have to spend our money on so in closing since you asked us a question about funding we didn't all gush like we would have that few asked do you got anything to say about the library system so I think on behalf of all of us we're gonna echo what a few folks said which is

[100:01] things have really turned around in the last few years and it's because of you guys and it's really a thrill to walk into our library especially the NE all of them but I think about how the downtown one has been renovated and it's it's just something else and the makerspace is I think opened all our eyes so that's really cool I think in terms of direction what you see is we are of mixed mind and I don't think there's a magic answer here I think we want you to look at a variety of options and know that none of them are gonna be perfect well it sounds looking within our existing budget looking at some combination of existing taxes and and exploring a district further or on the table you can knock off the authority ask for a clarification to the PI because that's basically the analysis that we've done internally yeah but we are not here to question the city's priorities right so I mean you you can trace those priorities over the course of the last 15 years and that's research that's

[101:00] available is that what you're hoping for us to put together because it's quite evident when you do that research that's a library is not a priority so is that what you're hoping that we bring back to you and split over the last 15 years that's the data I'd like to see I mean if the library has become less of a priority relative to other parts of the budget that's interesting information for us to know whether that decision was intentional or not I don't know but it does kind of doesn't matter I liked it I'd like to know where we are and where you'd like to take us in other words one at one set of assumptions I think I'd like to see the Commission and the staff operator is assume for sake of discussion there's no new dollars coming from outside sources what what do you need what would you spend it on and then let us work with the city manager to figure out where those dollars can come from internally and where we would have to take them away from and if therefore budget if your budget has shrunk the library's budget has shrunk relative the overall city budget that would be interesting to know because maybe that was intentional

[102:01] and maybe that's not maybe we need to restore the library to the funding level relative to the other departments that we had before well I also think that there's degrees of ambition there's all the wonderful things we could do there's some things that we must do there's maintaining what we have and I think as as we look at these different options to look at the trade-offs of different amounts that we could within existing although not knowing us we're not going to stay with any existing but Betty how what the trade-offs are if we say okay we're gonna increase it some but not as much what's that trade-off gonna look like yep just one less comment as David Sowell pointed out you know libraries are a lot more than just books and we're very excited to have the funds for a North Boulder library but I think also one of the visions of this North Boulder

[103:00] library is that it can extend out to many in the community who right now do not have internet or who do not have those kinds of services and so I wouldn't want to I want to make sure what we're asking you know and that when we're asking like for the North Boulder library that you don't and I in our conversations I think you said it would cost maybe up to a million dollars or something some to some amount of funds to be able to you know shoot into or or project into Boulder Meadows and project into Ponderosa which I think would be great when you think there's 640 households at Boulder Meadows and less than 15 percent something like that have internet that's a huge huge thing and so I like Bob's suggestion let's you know see what we

[104:01] have and I unfortunately I don't think the library has been a priority of the cities it just hasn't and or else I wouldn't have been coming to get a library for 30 years in North Boulder priority perhaps is certainly been away from here thinking no but it hasn't been the priority that it should be and so I would like to be able to look at our budgets and see you know what would we be happy with less and because I think we need more libraries so I just wanted to make really one quick request if I could and this is partly in response to two Bob's comment thank you for letting us have this early preview of the master plan the Commission actually asked for this because we wanted to make sure this was part of the

[105:00] city's next two-year work plan to do the kind of analysis Bob is talking about is not library staff they can't do that so I would really request from you guys that when you go into your retreat in January you have this on the agenda and think about the staffing that would be required from outside the library to do this kind of analysis because our staff is is strapped and frankly doesn't have those some those resources available to them so so that was a primary reason for being here tonight and I just wanted to make sure we emphasize that just one additional thought just as you think about in analyzing the possibility of a district and you think about what boundaries that might have I'm the Builder valley comp plan area is a good starting place but it really doesn't go to the West much at all including into some of the really close Mountain subdivisions that I think are probably heavy users of the library so don't know I wouldn't say don't stick to that as the only thing you might consider and thanks again it might be worth reaching out to the

[106:01] county to see if there are county staff that would be interested in helping develop like what the boundaries of a district might be and might look like because the county would probably be the main partner with the city in any kind of district that we would make so our memo defines that in some to some extent as a responsibility of City Council and the Library Commission so I hope you will assist us in that reaching out to the county we know the staff members but it's not just a staff effort and they're not gonna have the time to work on it without some direction from that part is in fact true and we can do our part in that but I think that the staff will ultimately be the ones that do the work with you guys in the Commission to define what the best configuration might be okay well in and on that maybe also the school district though - I mean they have their school libraries they know the funding of those the county doesn't

[107:02] have a library they have staff but anyway thank you thank you

[108:29] [Music]

[109:24] [Music] [Music] can I look at that letter do you mind I was curious about the Guadalajara thing I was thinking this is what we need and

[110:01] just after flake okay let's get started again [Laughter] okay so I can kind of run my life maybe okay where we get started on the second half of our study session and my ending it over to Heather to talk about all things climate and energy well

[111:00] it's gonna be a joint show and I was gonna see if we needed to bring up the presentation okay thank you well welcome thank you so much for giving us the time and the opportunity to update you all on both our climate commitment activities as well as municipal ization this is an exciting time and I also want to welcome our new council members councilmember Nagle Carlyle and grant oh very nice to see you and we look forward to working with you all on this stuff as we go forward so I'm going to start off with a brief introduction of what they're what we're gonna cover tonight we have a brief introduction we're gonna talk about what we've learned how we're working towards our goals where we are today and where we're going so our next steps for climate commitment and

[112:01] municipal ization and this is all in terms of the climate commitment and municipal ization and at the end we'll open it up for discussion i'm heather bailey executive director of energy strategy and electric utility development kendra pepper is our chief sustainability officer and she will be talking about climate commitment programs and what we've achieved we have Jonathan Cohen our regional sustainability coordinator and Jonathan is the person who's sort of the go-to person on our legislative and partnership activities with a lot of the things that we're doing and so he will talk about that Matt Lehrman who I don't believe you all have met is our energy strategy coordinator and he is the person that works on our PUC stuff he also is working on our electric vehicle strategy and does all the really complicated bottling and analysis that you'll see that you see from time to time I'm also

[113:01] really excited in that we have two guests Frank Bruno who's the executive director of via mobility services and david kang the vice chancellor of infrastructure and safety for see you we're both going to talk about two of our really very cool projects and partnerships that we are working on now and so they're going to give a little bit more about that and and why these partnerships are so important you all are very familiar with this and i want to just mention that it's been a journey for the city and i say say that because it is a mix of the community becoming very active and asking the city and council to be more aggressive in addressing climate change and reducing emissions as well as staff and council working together over the last 15 years to do some really great things i'm gonna focus on the portion of the goals related to renewable electricity and 100

[114:03] megawatts of local energy by 2030 because that's a big part of what the municipal ization is looking to do Kendra is really going to focus on all of it but she's going to talk about the other pieces as well a little bit of background back in about 2011 the city established some energy future goals and the reason the city did this work was a couple of things you're gonna hear more about it is we in a regulated environment and we are served by regulated utility that limits the things we can do and and Matt and others will talk more about that and so it's it's a very different picture from other places cities that own their own utilities or places like California where people have choice as to where their power comes from and so the reason we are doing all the things we're doing is because of the limitations and

[115:00] barriers we face today but as we have looked at establishing our energy future we said okay how do we want to do this and what is the right way to do it and as you look at it the first three items the safe reliable energy the competitive rates and reducing carbon and emissions are items that we see in our charter metrics and are obviously top priorities for this community the other piece providing energy customers with a say about their power supply is this whole concept of democratization in which a lot of the muni was based on and is not something we have the ability to do today and one of the things that we always talk about is if we're going to create while we need to control the power supply to achieve our emissions goals if we're going to create something that looks like what we have today then we probably shouldn't do it and one of the key components of that is having community input our community drove us to where we

[116:01] are today they helped us do the things we're doing and we need to continue to remember that the other two things from a local economic vitality and social environmental justice are also somewhat unique goals that the city has embedded in that how we achieve it economic vitality can take different forms but we have over 30 energy based companies in Boulder and these are the companies that are creating the really innovative things the new technologies the things that will change the way we use electricity and enhance our quality of life our vision of the future is how we can partner with those entities to provide services to our community as well as enhance their visibility and showcase the the thing that are happening here social environmental justice in the energy sector this has this is a topic that's really risen over the last few years across the country solar panels and energy efficiency

[117:00] measures there is a segment of the population that can't afford to do that and so some of those folks probably need those things more than anybody they need the ability to reduce their costs and to save money but they don't have the resources to do that as we move forward and looking at any of our programs Muni and otherwise being able to serve all aspects of the community and having equal access to these services is very important so again our energy future goals are how we do it and the goals of the targets that we're trying to reach maybe it's easier if I do all right so with that setup here are the questions we have for y'all do you have any questions related to me to civilization is the work plan provide the information that you need are there any other County is there anything else the council would like to see at the April 28th teen station and Kendra is going to give a presentation and after that she's

[118:01] going to list the things that are gonna be presented at the April session and does counsel agree with staffs part ization of additional strategies so as we go through the presentation if you could keep these questions in mind we will ask for feedback at the end also we're going to go through sections of the presentation and pause I think somewhat in the middle and ask for any questions up to that point and then we're going to finish with that so we hope to move through this efficiently and with that I'm gonna turn it over to sorry what happened Thanks so as Heather already mentioned the city is committed to some really aggressive climate and energy go energy goals and overall our climate commitment goal is to reduce emissions 80% by 2050 and that's relative to a 2005 baseline and this is in line with what climate

[119:02] scientists have agreed is necessary to limit temperature rise to somewhat sustainable levels we also have a number of interim 2030 goals including 100% renewables and 100 megawatts by 2030 we also have set a goal for the city organization internally to try and lead by example and reduce our operational emissions by 80 percent by 2030 important as Heather mentioned is not just the targets themselves but how we achieve them so for instance going out and buying renewable energy certificates or recs wouldn't be sufficient to meet these goals if they didn't contribute to safe reliable resilient energy systems economic vitality and social equity and so we're focusing on energy tonight but there are three other areas of focus or three areas of focus for the climate commitment and that's energy resources and ecosystems we're gonna talk about all three of these in a study session in 2018 but just for context the objective

[120:02] for energy is really to rapidly transition from fossil fuels to clean renewables with resources we're hoping to reduce water use and solid waste and overall minimize the environmental impact of our material and food consumption and with ecosystems the goal is to restore and enhance our natural ecosystems as well as their ability to sequester carbon so the community and council members can read a lot more about all these efforts by downloading the city's climate commitment document we have a couple copies here which is available on our web site so when we talk about that energy goal the transition from fossil fuels to renewables it can be difficult for people to envision exactly what that means and exactly how they can contribute to that transition and so we try to break it down into three really simple objectives the first being that number one priority of achieving a 100% renewable electricity supply this

[121:01] is kind of what everything is based on because the other key factor that we have to achieve is electrifying our vehicles and buildings so that gets that transitioning our vehicles and our buildings off of petroleum and natural gas and on to electric alternatives so electric heat pumps instead of natural gas furnaces electric vehicles instead of gasoline and then then those buildings and vehicles will be able to be powered by the 100% renewable electricity supply and then the third piece is to maximize building and vehicle efficiency and this is really to reduce the demand that that hundred percent renewable electricity supply has to provide so those are three pretty easy concepts to understand but achieving them is quite difficult so this chart represents the modeling that the staff has done out to 2050 where we were testing out a variety of scenarios and future programs to see if we actually could achieve that 80% reduction target by 2050 and so it shows

[122:01] here how critical it is to have a 100% renewable electricity supply but that still only reduces our emissions by 43 percent and so the other half of the reductions have to come from the transportation sector and from building efficiency and electrification and then even projecting out savings for future programs that haven't been designed yet we only got to a 75% savings so we're confident that there will be future technology or program innovations that will occur between now and 2050 to bridge that gap it's also helpful to know where we are today relative to those end targets and so the important takeaway here is that we've made real progress towards these goals even though we have a long way to go especially with reducing our community-wide greenhouse gas emissions 13% since 2005 even as our economy grew significantly so during that time period our gross domestic product actually went up by 49 percent and so with on my

[123:03] I'm gonna turn it over to Matt now who's going to talk about some of the strategies that were analyzing to help bridge the gaps from where we are today thanks Kendra I'm Matt Lehrman I'm the energy strategy coordinator so as part of evaluating the options to achieve our climate commend the goals we looked at a number of different power supply scenarios that could be in play in Boulder what you see here is four different scenarios that we looked at that we looked at two related to the Muni and two in Excel and what you're seeing is each bar shows the cumulative emissions reductions that would take place under each of those scenarios so in this case the lower is the better that's more reduction but scenario D on the left is a scenario in which we hit we achieve the 100% renewable electricity goal in 2030 under the Muni

[124:00] scenario C is a scenario in which we achieve 80% emissions reduction I'm sorry 80 percent renewable is compared in 2030 scenario B is the most aggressive plan that Xcel put forward in their electric resource plan that's currently underway at the Public Utilities Commission and that's about 45 to 50 percent renewable and then scenario a is kind of the midline projection from the ERP so it essentially assumes that Xcel achieves the renewable energy standard requirements in 2020 which is 30 percent renewable and then going forward they just maintain that level and only add renewables as older resources fall off the difference between the two scenarios is you know it's 29 million metric tons that's about 16 years worth of boulders emissions were about 1.8 million metric tons a year so I think the key takeaway

[125:01] here is that the faster we can get to our goals the better because the cumulative emissions really add up quickly so one takeaway from this slide faster is is certainly better and once we figure that out we also figured a few other things that we learned we learned a few things as we were evaluating different options and what became really clear is that there are significant barriers three of which I'll talk about for a few minutes one is legislative one is operational and one is regulatory and essentially these barriers make it very difficult to achieve our climate commitment targets without addressing them on the legislative side there are ideas like Community Choice aggregation that if we were not gonna form a Muni and we wanted to by our own power supply we simply can't do that today and in a non Muni scenario that would be an essential component to to achieving our

[126:01] climate commitment goals but that requires legislative change at the operational level there's simple things like if we wanted to build a community solar garden we can't do that except for one Excel offers an RFP for community solar gardens we can't just call them tomorrow and say we're building a garden you know connect us to the grid we also can't do things that are really important to the community like investing in our infrastructure we can't build a micro grid in a neighborhood to enhance resilience we can't choose when and where various parts of the distribution system are under grounded that's entirely up to excel so we're kind of at the whims of their of their policy goals at this point and then finally on the regulatory side there are things like on-bill financing that are simply you know just not possible in the regulatory environment so if you wanted to finance something on your bill for energy efficiency or for distributed solar today and in this environment it's it's not possible we can that's not to

[127:00] say we can make progress we can make some progress under the current environment but it's won't go fast enough and won't go far enough to to achieve our client commitment goals I will turn it back to Kendra to tell us how we're gonna get there thanks Matt so I'm gonna talk about our efforts across a number of areas and just wanted to make the point that although the city has dedicated a lot of effort to pursuing municipal that hasn't been at the expense of other climate and energy efforts and so in the interest of time Jonathan and I are gonna try to go through these five other areas voluntary programs local policy pilots policy reform and partnerships and hit on some of the accomplishments that our work groups have made over the years and a lot of this is due to the folks in the second row behind me here so thank you all for being here in your Tuesday night so I'm going to start with our our programs are voluntary programs and so

[128:01] in partnership with Boulder County pace or partners for a clean environment has been providing sustainability advising services and financial rebates for businesses for many years now and this program covers not only energy but wastewater and transportation and energy smart the energy program within pace has assisted with nearly 1100 efficiency upgrades over the years that have saved annually 16 million kilowatt hours which is equivalent to taking about 2,400 cars off the road at the other end of the spectrum we have the Boulder Energy Challenge which is an innovative grant program that aims to fun creative solutions in support of boulders climate goals it was launched in 2014 and has since funded ten projects over two rounds ranging from everything from new hybrid technology pilot projects behavior change programs with Boulder housing partners and a community engagement platform called Boulder dot earth thus far the most successful projects have gone on to

[129:01] secure millions of dollars of outside investment after these initial pilots and the city staff is currently working to apply for grant funding to try to spin this program off into a regional program that could be run by a community partner that's in the clean tech innovation space over the years the cities work in solar has led to the installation of about 20 megawatts of local rooftop solar our programs include providing grants for low-income residents and nonprofits through the solar grant program as well as solar rebates and a solar bulk purchasing program in partnership with the county and these efforts along with changes to permitting process these which produce soft cast and then updating our codes to require new buildings to be solar ready have led to builder certification as a platinum solar friendly and gold Sol smart community and staff is now working on a comprehensive strategy to meet our long-term local solar goals

[130:00] likewise the city has a long history of encouraging alternative modes of transportation through pedestrian walkways bike lanes ride share and public transportation and so these efforts have led to a 14 percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled per resident since 2005 and then separately staff from transportation energy future and climate and sustainability have been working collaboratively to try and accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles throughout the city by the end of 2017 the city will operate 48 publicly available charging stations and that represents a 16% or 600 percent increase since the year 2015 and finally Matt is leading an effort to develop a local long term electric vehicle strategy as well in terms of our city owned facilities and our efforts to reduce our organizational wide emissions this is a collaborative effort across the number of departments working towards that 80%

[131:01] goal and currently we've reduced emissions 34% and in addition to efficiency retrofits on existing facilities the city's working to redesign the new Alpine balsam site to be consistent with our long-term climate goals and the brenton building which is currently undergoing a renovation post renovation expects to use 90 percent less energy than it did when we purchased it there's currently about two megawatts of solar installed on city-owned facilities and we expect to add about a half a megawatt next year and in 2017 the wastewater treatment plant received the partner of the Year award from the Colorado industrial Energy Challenge for their energy and emissions reductions that they've achieved moving into local policy the city updates our energy codes every three years and we do this to make to ensure that we stay on the lead of having some of the most progressive and innovative codes in the country and so in the last

[132:00] few years we've developed a long term strategy to get our codes to NetZero by 2031 for all building types and sizes and also recently updated our codes to have increasing levels of energy performance and to require new buildings to have evey charging and be solar ready City Council adopted the building performance ordinance in 2015 and this ordinance moves beyond just our voluntary programs and requires all large commercial and industrial buildings to rate and report their energy use eventually publicly disclose it after a two-year grace period and to perform cost-effective energy efficiency actions over time the program has achieved 100% compliance thus far and by 2020 nearly 450 buildings will be phased in and affected by this requirement generating long-term emissions and economic benefits for the community adopted in 2010 the smart recs policy

[133:01] was really our first policy that that targeted existing buildings and it requires all of our licensed rental properties which is about 20,000 units to be inspected and then meet a basic level of energy efficiency by the end of the year 2018 which has come faster than we thought you have to meet these requirements in order to receive your rental license so the city was able to leverage the existing residential energy smart program that we already had in place to provide advising services and also financial rebates to property owners so currently 82 percent of the units are in compliance and have reduced energy significantly the city has been enforcing a requirement since 2012 for all marijuana facilities to offset 100 percent of their electricity use with renewable energy the options have always been you could do that through rooftop solar PV community solar gardens or an offset of

[134:00] some kind in 2017 the city created a new energy impact offset fund that businesses can now pay into this requirement so previously the businesses were we're buying into excels win source program or third-party racks to comply with the offset requirement and that resulted in about a half a million dollars a year leaving the community and in those payments so now that we have the the new fund set up we're about to invoice them for the first time so starting in 2018 the city will begin to collect money into this new fund which we can then use in the future to develop local renewable projects within the community moving into pilots I mentioned earlier how important it was to electrify our buildings and Boulder has initiated a collaborative effort with 20 cities and major heat pump manufacturers to accelerate the transition in the residential market specifically from natural gas furnaces and heat pumps to

[135:00] electric counterparts powered by renewables so we've gotten hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside grant funding towards this effort and the four leading cities which are New York Burlington Boulder and DC are going to receive dedicated funding and 2018 to do some pilot projects and so boulders pilot project will be focused on providing homeowners with a comprehensive roadmap to renewable living that looks at financing strategies and ways to bundle energy efficiency electrification rooftop solar and driving an electric vehicle all in one so it's sort of the 80 by 2050 plan for an individual homeowner and I'm gonna turn it over to Jonathan now to talk about policy reform excuse me cooking for me right there no no not done mayor members of council I'm Jonathan come on the regional sustainability coordinator I'm gonna take just a couple minutes and talk a little bit about our policy strategy and

[136:02] also some of the partnerships and in that spirit of collaboration while there are four people sitting up here just as Kendra said I really want to acknowledge the amazing work of the staff sitting behind and also the community members both here and at home because really we would not be where we are without the extraordinary work I'd also like to call out Breck and Karen who's sitting behind me I believe who somewhere behind whose role is to really roll out the strategies and the climate commitment has done an extraordinary job so starting with policy for over a decade we've really been focused on how we can influence policy at the local state and federal level it's really been part of our work plan for some time to be clear when I talk about policy I'm talking about both the rulemaking that occurs at the Public Utilities Commission and also legislation that occurs of course at the State Capitol and so on the screen you see pictures of our current public utilities commission or PUC commissioners and I would say

[137:02] that our role and our objective around policy reform is to try to address the barriers and the challenges that Matt talked about a little bit ago so we really try to identify those and figure out how we can either work around or through some of those challenges attachment a in your packet gives a sampling of some of those challenges that we hear from our community on a regular basis things that they would like to do and we try to understand really where those pinch points occur and then we try to build that into our policy agenda moving forward so when going back to the PUC I think council is familiar with the PUC in the context of our municipal ization effort and of course but what you may not know is that we have spent quite a bit of time over the past 10 years or so advocating for certain issues at the PUC attachment F is a sampling or actually a pretty good list of 30 proceedings that we've been involved in since 2009 and 5 I believe

[138:00] that we're current in right now it's a challenging place to do work no doubt we're one voice we have to do a lot of work Deb Kalish in the city's attorneys the City Attorney's Office is an extraordinary attorney at the PUC and we're incredibly fortunate to have her on the team yet we are just one voice in trying to shape some of the policy that happens there we have been doing a lot of work to build some coalitions with other cities particularly the City and County of Denver trying to work with them to have more of a presence at the PUC and working in that direction so I think we're making some good progress you go ahead and flip so shifting to our legislative efforts you know I think that the point of this is that we know that the best way for local governments to really achieve change at the state and federal level is to build coalitions to really think about how we can partner with other entities that have similar goals Council just reviewed your legislative agenda last week and you'll have noticed that there was a strong emphasis on climate

[139:00] and sustainability in our legislative agenda in terms of our partnerships the CC for CA or Colorado communities for climate action is a coalition that was really helped to be brought about by the city of Boulder in the attempt of how do we build this coalition of other cities that have similar goals because we can then have a stronger presence at the state capital CC for CA has been around for about a year right now we represent about one eighth of all Coloradans that's 15 communities we develop a legislative agenda each year with right now about 15 policy priorities last session we took positions and testified on 14 different bills and we also have been establishing a strong relationship with the governor's office on July 19th of this year we initiated a letter to governor Hickenlooper signed by 75 local elected officials and that was really intended to signify to the governor that we support the executive order that he created and we like to find ways for

[140:01] local jurisdictions to work with him in the implementation of the executive order as he going switch what I also say you can click again in terms of kind of now going a little bit wider the work that we do in terms of coalitions and partnerships is pretty extraordinary in terms of the reach that we have we are part of a countless number of climate-related coalition's nationally and internationally and I'll point out two on this slide that I think are really important and they're in the bottom left-hand corner us DNR the urban sustainability directors Network and the one right above which is a carbon-neutral Cities alliance those are two coalition's that we've been able to leverage a significant amount of funding to come to various projects and in-kind contributions to the city and our partner communities and those who are going so being able to leverage each of these we actually get quite a bit of value out of our participation in these coalition's I've already mentioned CC for CA there in the middle and at your

[141:02] last council meeting there was a resolution that council adopted for our participation in the compact of Colorado Communities in the top right hand corner and that is to try to kind of complement the work on policy with really doing best practice sharing and trying to work amongst various communities across Colorado to really kind of elevate the literacy around climate action let me go to the next slide so very quickly one of the learnings that we've had over our work over the past decade or so is that any effective climate commitment really has to include all sectors of the community meaning we all need to see ourselves in that process Kendra mentioned Boulder dot earth which is a web portal that was funded by the city for this very purpose it's truly a grassroots effort created by the community for the community and the purpose of the portal is to really identify specific actions that individuals can take it has a great

[142:02] community calendar of events and a directory of organizations that are working on climate issues here in Boulder now why the city plays a facilitating role the portal is really becoming an extraordinary community space for the working in climate action and finally we need to acknowledge the amazing work that's taking place here locally particularly by the private sector businesses doing amazing things which brings me to kind of our next piece of this discussion we're really incredibly fortunate to have our two guests to talk briefly about the partnerships that we've forged with their organizations before I do that though this is a natural opportunity to pause and ask if there's any clarifying questions that counsel might have or any part of the presentation up to this point we can forge on or we can pause now and take some of those questions whatever you'd like thanks Jonathan question in this slide that you showed

[143:00] he talked about the CNC a the carbon-neutral city's alliance and and the urban sustainability directors Network and how you've been able through those memberships obtain some funding for various projects and I was curious to know where the funding where the money comes from for yep delivering that funding yes so there's a number of funding partners for those organizations um everything from the energy foundation Kresge Summit Foundation Bloomberg and so they have a number of funders in their network and they do regular innovation grant funding rounds both through us TN and CN CA where you partner with other cities and propose ideas and can receive funding that way I tried a question from back early in your presentation I really liked how you laid out the three simple objectives it was

[144:00] very clear and coherent but I had a specific question about the last last one was maximizing maximizing building and vehicle efficiency do we have any levers at the city level for about the vehicle efficiency not really but there's to be honest when we projected out our emissions reductions out to 2050 the pathway to get there we were assuming significant reductions coming from federal cafe standards and so the lever that we have really is sort of with this legislative agenda and lobbying for things that the federal level that are that important to not be taken away and to not be degraded and Matt did some work recently on that we did file comments with the EPA about six weeks ago opposing their effort to reopen the rulemaking that created the cafe standards it was a mouthful so we are active great that's that's good to hear so then it would be this would be partly a legislative approach not just about local access we're not gonna redesign

[145:01] cars anytime soon unfortunately I'm just just in Boulder so so we're trying to maintain the vehicle efficiency standards that exist at the federal level there's also some discussions about having Colorado move towards adopting clean car standards here that you guys are a part of well which might bear fruit even under this governor right yeah which would be great yes so that would be a when you when whatever document you put together that puts in little explanatory text we could to be clear about that yeah we're not gonna pass our own rules but I really like that thank you and just one less piece on this topic you know a lot of that work we can activate through some local coalition's that we participate in we have a great partnership of local jurisdictions colluding the City and County of Denver and Front Range communities that we tend to activate when these issues come up and so whether it's supporting a particular initiative at the state or at

[146:01] the federal level it's been an extraordinary opportunity so I'm gonna ask Frank to come on up I don't think Frank Bruno needs a whole lot of introduction he has provided so much to this community during his time here and I'm just so pleased to have him sitting next to me to talk about some of the partnerships that we have with via mobility Thank You Jonathan and then mayor Jones members of council state management program it's a pleasure to be here tonight yes I've spent some hours in this room but it's always truly a delight to be back and I welcome that so I want to thank Jonathan and Brett and Bob Harburg for really working with us over the past year to envision a project that would result in Via mobility services over on the east side of the community are just about six year old facility that the city was also instrumental in helping us build but really envisioning our facility as one of the very first truly resilient

[147:01] facilities in the in the city and I think the fact that we're so deeply ingrained and community transit both through the via mobility the paratransit side the hop late-night hop accessor I'd call and ride all these elements that via mobility services is involved in on the community transit network level makes it a natural to take another step and I think that's what Jonathan and Brett have been envisioning where our facility where we install in addition to our current solar array we install additional solar power we installed battery backup or battery support and backup generation on-site generation two to make our to begin the transition of a rather routine facility in making beginning to make it much more sustainable and resilient we are a second responder in the community and I think the fact that we operate in that

[148:01] community transit networks piece as well as that second responder piece we can get to the point where we can operate our vehicles for evacuations and maybe even Jonathan was talking about an idea he has for maybe on-site power support in times of a crisis where via can be involved in that but the first steps are to get there are additional solar again in addition to our current array and we're excited about that we'd like to you know looking at the policies that that the city has adopted we'd love to see via really become completely renewable within say 10 15 years obviously we have to be very vigilant to get there but then we would see a renewable facility that is now that would be then powering renewable vehicles because we're moving our fleet we will be taking the steps very shortly here to move our fleet to electric vehicles and obviously that's going to

[149:00] take some time the hot buses would be the first goal and then obviously body on chassis the white via buses that you see all over the community those are not being constructed with in an electric mode yet we're gonna do everything we can to help advocate for that transition as well we think that would be great so you know it's a big picture it's a it's a package but the work begins I think it's next week on our first expenditure of dollars to make this happen and it's partnership with the city of Boulder with Boulder County with department of energy with via it's really a very wonderful project I been excited to sit on the on the our team on at V aside with Bill Patterson our CFO who's been leading the effort with Jonathan and and Brett and it's been really a great model but I think because of the involvement of the city staff it's become an even better project over the last several weeks month and I'm really excited about that so the

[150:02] ability Eltham Utley to operate off-grid in times of crisis and also in times when we are completely renewable will be very exciting so why don't I pause there and see if you have questions I got the brag about this project in in back in New York City a year ago was it a year ago already with the Clinton Global Initiative and it's good that it's finally happening we're very excited that it is yes indeed and thank you guys you guys have made it possible thank you for being here well he doesn't thing I would say is I actually like soon we went and talked to the chamber about the stuff we're doing and a lot of people don't know all the great stuff we're doing and so I think giving updates on progress towards projects like this I think would be really inspiring to people and also useful to know how's it going is it working how do we you know support it

[151:02] it's something we need to do a lot more of so welcome your thoughts on how we can get the word out about it well actually to that end mayor Jones next Wednesday evening the 6th we're hosting the Boulder Chamber of Commerce for a business after-hours and my thought was well you know yes we can do that in the conference room at via everyone's seen a conference room right but instead we're hosting it down in the garage and frankly that's where the action happens for via mobility that's where we roll from and we're also going to be describing the resiliency project showing them we're showing them the solar array that's currently on the building where the next array is going to be installed I think that's going to start next week as well so it'd be great if we could show some of that in progress I think that's the beginning of really trying to start getting business people that might not normally be thinking about this and especially in the context of via and seeing us with a

[152:01] different role in a partnership with the city and frankly we have a partnership very much with CEO as well with late-night hop and some of the other things we're doing so we're gonna be talking about this stuff a lot I was just - glad to have you here I was going to ask you I mean you've taken via to a whole new notch and it's exciting and I was gonna ask you about what kind of partnership are you do you have with Cu and students and late-night type of operations that's a great question councillor more so we we I think many people are aware that via has operated the late-night hop for several years and I really do you know when I would talk to students I would really hone in on that service because it's not it really is so much about community

[153:01] transit but it's also about safety and I'm really excited about that that we're doing that work and doing that work with with the student government this summer we met with the student government leaders because I believe there's so much more that we can be doing together around community transit I think part of that starts with students really getting a better sense of what's available to them and when it's available to them and the fact that I'm willing to see us craft very customized transit approaches with smaller vehicles for the students and I think that starts with the student leaders tell us what are the students thinking where where would they like to be going how do they want to get there we would do some branding with the students as well we just got three vehicles the mve the little boxy vehicles that you see and we we got them in black this time and we did a reverse color scheme just so we might be able to

[154:00] brand some of those vehicles with see you as well so I think it's again opening up many eyes to what we're doing together already and getting their thoughts as to what may be possible going into the future because I think there's a lot more we can be doing no I think so too and I think maybe you could expand even farther because I think there's many who aren't so happy with our other trance [Laughter] or in the city's respect I mean I think you have it I know you have it but not only do you provide a great service but now you're going a hundred percent or your that's your goal renewables so that's very exciting so things and we're doing it together so thank you yeah and just one more thing on the frame thanks for coming and tell us about this just if it were possible to get like a fact sheet on the resilience project if he is doing

[155:00] I think that'd be very helpful for me and the rest of Council then we could spread the information about it more into the community that's great there's that the biz article that may not be as current though but yes we can okay thanks very much yep thanks for you thank you Thanks so it's a good segue to our next speaker David kang who is coming up and i should say that our relationship with see you runs pretty deep in a lot of different ways since david has been with the university I will say the possibilities and the partnership opportunities have have really exploded and I think you'll see why here in just a moment so David Kang is the vice chancellor for infrastructure and safety and the chief facilities officer and the chief brain on all of all things resilient and energy Jonathan good evening and thank you for allowing me to come here speak to you about my favorite topic sustainability and resiliency again my name is Dave Kang I'm the vice chancellor for infrastructure and safety at cu-boulder

[156:01] I'd be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to brag a little bit about Cu our campus has grown from one building in 1876 to a world-class research and education facility or engineering space physics geography and climate programs are nationally recognized we have five Nobel laureates currently on our faculty and we've created 92 companies from all the technologies that we've developed locally the quality and diversity of the students increase year over year and if I could just say in one word the state of cu-boulder I'd say it's outstanding the state of the relationship between Cu and the city I think has never been better either and I'm really here to reaffirm our commitment to continuing to work with the city on areas that overlap specifically in energy sustainability and resiliency I think we've made a lot of good progress

[157:00] and I think there's a lot of room actually to move as well now my goal for CU Boulder is absolutely to be recognized as a world leader in sustainability and resiliency I'm not gonna accept anything less this means that we need to set a high bar for ourselves we need to set the example we need to lead by example optimize how we use our spaces how we use energy how we use water how we consume things we need to promote sustainability and procurement we need to explore alternative transportation options all the things that Kendra mentioned I mean it was like I could have written that myself and I have waste reduction among many other things and in case you didn't know we recently created and hired a chief sustainability officer position as well Heidi van Gendron you may know who's a Colorado native I stole her from the Department of Energy yeah she's been phenomenal

[158:01] sustainability to me also means that our solutions have to be cost effective to be replicable this has been a focus for our team here at CU we were focused on becoming smarter and more sustainable so that we can become more resilient so we've been really dynamic and sometimes in an unforgiving environment impacts from Hurricane Katrina and Sandy and more recently Harvey Irma Maria don't wake us up what will closer to home back in 2013 we had some devastating floods as well my number one priority is to make sure that I can keep our faculty staff and students safe equally important we need to ensure that we can keep our campus functioning because we have a mission of education and research and if we have to stop what we're doing every time there's a disruption whether it's snow or power or water or fire we're not going to be able to get our job done I think you have similar things that you think about

[159:01] too as a community more specifically energy in the modern age is a necessity it costs a lot of money to procure to use to operate and maintain and as evidenced by the extreme weather and events in Puerto Rico without energy our technologies don't function our commodities don't move our communities essentially shut down it's our responsibility they say as leaders and community members to be prepared to meet these issues head-on and we need to be prepared for disruptions we need to invest in capabilities that help weather these storms we need to work together as a community not as individuals or pockets to identify and mitigate some of these vulnerabilities or at a minimum we need to be able to keep our people safe and then be able to quickly recover and return to normal operations but I firmly believe we can't do this in a vacuum

[160:01] we live in the community of Boulder and so we all need to work together to achieve this goals we need to establish nurture and expand research innovation partnerships and collaboration so the crown jewel project that I want to talk about with funding from from do eath that was provided by the city of Boulder working with Jonathan and Brett we are creating the process of creating what we call our living sustainability laboratory on East Campus where we plant create a micro grid within our existing micro grid where we can test integration of renewable energy and other clean energy technologies electric vehicles we've already installed seven electric charging stations we're in the process of applying for a grant for 24 more on campus and it's not just the technologies we're also working on what are the policy implications the privacy implications appropriations fund I mean there's a lot

[161:00] of issues that need to be resolved as we start scaling electric vehicles it's not just let's just put it there and and it'll happen but we have the bandwidth in the smarts to actually help address some of these issues and discussions vehicle-to-grid I think it's another great opportunity energy storage electrification of our transportation fleet these are just some of the things that we're talking about right now and we're just getting started we're also I'm also extremely excited to be working with not only our faculty and our staff but our students are intimately involved in this you know you may all be aware we have the Environmental Center where we have students that are very active in this space and they're very passionate and excited about some of the things that are coming up and I think some of the things that we're focusing on may be on the facility side because efficiency I think plays a key role in this the best data analytics I think and as

[162:01] we move toward a machine learning and cloud computing data and analytics and artificial intelligence I think that could play a key role in helping all of us achieve our clean energy goals some of the highlights with our partnership in January we signed the electric services agreement with the city of Boulder where we committed formalized and committed to a clean energy future together as well as protect some of our interests as a city in the event that the city becomes a municipal utility we're working very closely with NREL Sandia National Labs the Department of Energy on potential energy projects microgrids renewables control systems in the community and with industry we've had discussions obviously with the city of Boulder the Rockefeller Foundation 100 resilient cities IBM Google we have some real powerhouses here locally within a stone's throw that are passionate about this and we should

[163:00] be working with them and we are we're having discussions we're also in the early stages of a transportation master plan that will provide hopefully enhance sustainable multimodal transportation options that's not based on a POV that every student brings and every staff member and faculty brings we just formed our transportation working group and we've had two meetings including one we've at the city of Boulder as well and NREL to talk about what are the opportunities and as we planned this out you know one of the things that we want to integrate into our transportation master plan I think it aligns very well because you guys are doing the same thing on your side so we need to coordinate really well on that and transportation isn't a local issue it's not a Cu issue it's not a boulder issue it's a regional issue and so we need to work together with the entire community to figure out how we do this we pursue sustainability and resiliency efforts because they're right for the

[164:01] University and the world for so many reasons we work with the city of Boulder because together I think we can make a bigger difference and if we work alone especially some of the regulatory barriers and things like that you know we need to be aligned as we do that so with that I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak and I really look forward to working with all of you moving into the future well we can't thank you enough for coming to be a part of this and for the work that's happening I agree that I don't think relationships will see you've ever been better and that's did I say that right anyhow things have never been better with you and it's it's really exciting all the things that are going on and I was just thinking about you know that the city held an autonomous vehicle sort of the future of mobility forum and how he came I hadn't met with her and I'm like you don't know about it oh you guys gotta come anyhow and

[165:00] we people were talking about hey what about a ton of a shuttle and Cu and yeah there's just so many possibilities and it's really great that you guys are so willing to meet us I don't know more than halfway probably and really looking forward to you know the future I wondered if I'd heard a rumor that one of the aspects of the transportation master plan was going to be that you would freeze freshmen from having automobiles bringing automobiles to campus that's definitely something that we are looking at as a policy we actually put on holds a construction of a new parking garage because we want to and also you know these plans that were made 10 or 15 years ago you know we need to have one-and-a-half parking spaces for every bed I mean but those are outdated with some of the options that are available now so we're doing a pause on additional parking I'm happy to hear that

[166:03] so thank you David for your presentation and all the mentioning all the numerous projects that are going on between or among the various partnerships I wanted to mention one that originated as a partnership between the city and and the university which continues to to be based at the University which is that just transition collaborative is also something that's going on at the University which is really fantastic [Music] thank you so we're gonna jump back into the monday and powerpoint and try to wrap this up so we have time for four questions you've just heard a lot about all the

[167:00] efforts that we have across these five areas and you're gonna hear from heather shortly on municipal ization and there's many many other efforts that we could pursue if we had unlimited timon resources and a number of those suggestions have come from the community our advisory boards past counsel and staff will continue to seek feedback and suggestions from the community but this slide summarizes some of the efforts that have been most commonly suggested and with the exception of purchasing recs all of these ideas support our climate and energy future goals by giving current resources realistically we can only pursue one or two of these additional strategies within our work plan moving forward and given that staff is prioritizing the pursuit of cap tax alternatives and ramping up our efforts related to solar and electric vehicles and all of these additional strategies are explained in more detail in the memo so I won't go into all of them here

[168:02] keeping in mind that full implementation of our solar and electric vehicle strategies would require millions of dollars a year we're prioritizing ramping up those efforts in the near term and with regard to the climate action plan tax which taxes each kilowatt hour of electricity that's used in our community there's two reasons why we're starting to explore alternatives the first is that revenues have been declining as electricity use goes down which is good electricity use is going down but fixed costs have increased over time and so this has caused difficult trade-off decisions to be made related to the budget like I spoke about earlier looking for alternative ways and private partnership opportunities to keep programs like Boulder energy challenge going so the second reason is that the cap tax doesn't actually align anymore with our objective of encouraging electrification of buildings and vehicles so we talked about how we want to incentivize our community to transition off of natural

[169:01] gas and petroleum and onto electricity but currently the only fuel that we tax is electricity and so there's just an automatic disincentive or misalignment when cap text was passed in 2006 our grid our electricity grid was much much dirtier and it actually made sense to tax electricity and natural reasons why it's a lot easier to tax electricity in this community because it's regulated and there's a single provider but even with all of those barriers we want to start exploring more long-term sustainable revenue options to fund these efforts moving forward and so with that we have two more check-ins planned with council in 2018 coming up around climate commitment so the first is in April of next year and we're again going to focus on energy for that one and do a more in-depth review of our programs and work plan efforts

[170:00] and outline our high-level strategy for these energy goals we're also going to present our 2016 greenhouse gas inventory results and dive into those in a little bit more detail and we want to have time to have a pretty robust discussion around racks or renewable energy certificates and how that relates to the city's ability to reach our climate goals and also our citywide policy for ownership of recs related to our city facilities we're gonna come back in q4 of 2018 for an in-depth review of progress on all three of the areas of the climate commitment energy resources and ecosystems so when the climate commitment was adopted in December of 2016 one of the things that was agreed upon was every two years there would be this in-depth review that happened with council and also the environmental advisory board and so this will be the first of the two year in-depth review sessions for late 2018 and with that I'm going to turn it over to Heather to talk about munis you should just explain the rec conversation

[171:01] what is prompt I mean we've kind of been like Rex don't worry that's not what we're doing right so are we reopening that discussion intricacies in terms of the ownership of racks and therefore what shows up in our greenhouse gas inventory by following international protocols for doing our inventory and that actually impacts the savings that were allowed to claim and take credit for and so it reopens the discussion of how much do we care about racks it impacts our ability to clean greenhouse gas savings against our main target in other words selling RX correct and similarly as we're starting to acquire Alpine balsam sights and new sights in the city and doing major renovations and looking to make them extremely energy efficient and even Net Zero we can't actually claim that the Brunton building for instance is Net Zero if we sell the Rex we can't

[172:01] legally make that statement and so I think things have progressed the city's doing much more aggressive things with our city owned facilities now that we want to revisit that conversation and the rec prices have gone down a lot now too and so it's it used to be that the solar project simply couldn't pan out financially if you didn't sell the recs and that's not necessarily the case anymore so we want to revisit our overall policy on how we treat rax both within our inventory and then also on city-owned facilities so it's less about do we buy a whole bunch of recs and call it good more about do we sell our recs yeah and how do we do that in terms of counting firown' thank you we're not even entertaining the idea of we're gonna go buy a bunch of third-party yes so this is related to First Solar that we own for hydropower that we own do we want to retain the recs and then even within our greenhouse gas inventory

[173:00] if our local community members own solar in their roof but they sell the recs does that show are we allowed to claim that as solar we allowed to claim that as community-wide emissions reductions so I had a question for you about the the April study session you're bringing in detailed greenhouse gas emissions inventory right just will you be including per capita numbers as well as the gross numbers in that yes so Kim Rankine who's here is just wrapping up our 2016 inventory we don't we get the community energy report from Xcel about mid year 2017 for 2016 so she's just wrapping it up now and we're looking to review it with environmental advisory board will likely release it as an IP to Council in advance of that study session and then be able to dive in more deeply lots of per capita lots of metrics right in it I look forward to it thank you okay the last part of our presentation municipal ization what an exciting time

[174:00] right we're off to our next phase and I'm going to talk about that let's start off with thanks I almost stepped back and talked about our vision of the utility of the future and when we started on this journey we started thinking about as I said what what would we do different and a few years ago Sam Weaver Jonathan Paul comer from C and some buddies met with a group of folks at RMIT to do sort of strawman of what is a vision of the utility of the future what would we do different and I like to use this because it's kind of an easy piece to understand we okay I know there's probably several people that has have never had a rotary dial phone probably back behind me but this is what we all started with when we first phones today we've transformed into what we call the smart phone and really what the smart phone is is a platform it's a device with a network that allows different types of

[175:00] services and the apps are the services that lay on top of that platform and we have and private inventors innovators create all the apps and place it on the central network and we get to choose which services make our lives better well as we start thinking about our energy future we start thinking well really that's kind of what we envision with the electric system and that the poles and wires and the base power supply are the operating system but as you've heard with all of the innovative ideas the partnerships we can look to those in the future to create the services that can make people's lives better and as we move into that future that's the type of vision that we have created for the utility of the future now it's not going to happen overnight because as we know some of these things take change but I think that is a great opportunity to look at how can empower people provide the unique services they

[176:00] require and employ innovation to reach our climate goals so I like to use this as my vision of the utility future and we're going to work with the community as we go forward to begin to crystallize that and looking at tailoring that what I call the people's utility that picture of how it's going to work and operate in the future and so we'll be doing a lot of work in the community [Music] these are just some examples of you know ideas that we got from the community and what they'd like to see in their utility of the future one of my favorites are if I have solar on my rooftop and I'm not home all day I have all this excess power what if I wanted to donate it to my child's school wouldn't it be a cool opportunity we can't do that today things like finding what is the right rate that meets my needs because I may use electricity different from Kendra I have three 20-somethings in my house I definitely know I use electricity different so is there a plan that meets

[177:00] my needs and so there's lots of new things that we can really think about in an unregulated environment and it would be driven by our community again so our work plan over the next couple of years and thank you to the community and everybody for supporting in this number one is to obtain the actual costs for the system that means acquisition of the system and construction the separation plan to provide some certainty and to show that the Charter metrics can or can't be met and to actually kind of know what this we have great estimates but as we all know their estimates and we want to provide better certainty not only for you the council but if the council decides that we can meet the metrics based on the actual cost that it also informs the community on another public vote before we spend significant money the other thing that we'd like to accomplish and Jonathan is helping to

[178:02] lead that effort is identifying the resources to provide the path to achieving our emissions reductions ago emission reduction and what I mean with resources it's the resources that the utility will use to provide or reduce the use of electricity and that's where we incorporate not only power supply contracts for wind and solar but energy efficiency programs as we've heard about demand side management local generation and how do we bring that together into a strategy that gets us to that hundred percent and how do they fit together and so we will be working on that over the next couple of years and issuing an RFP s and doing a lot of things around formalizing that strategy and getting a clear idea of what that path is and last our goal and we've had lots of feedback on that and I want to thank the community for reminding us that we need to communicate communicate communicate and communicate

[179:01] and engage the community we had in 2012 13 14 made great working groups that advised us and we're very active and we are going to reignite those groups and advising us how the utility should look what the utility the future vision is what our resources should be so there are going to be some great opportunities going forward near-term as you probably have heard we need to finalize three agreements by order the PC and there's a report that is due to the PC on December 13th and the status of those agreements and we will be developing a communications and outreach strategy do you think with help from folks in our community but that's again a priority the other thing is that we will be providing council with regular updates how often I don't know could be quarterly it could be semi-annually but it will work with you all to determine what's what's your preference from a

[180:01] task work plan of course y'all know we've got the PUC decision we've got major categories of work the condemnation process and I need to make a correction it actually won't start until the first quarter of 2018 and when I talk about condemnation it's all the analysis it's the valuation of the assets that we've identified the negotiation over the the price and it's the actual legal proceeding so there's a lot involved in that and it's anywhere from 18 to 24 months the second piece is really the the heavy duty engineering ahead of us we are in the process of preparing a loader interconnection requests to interconnect as a wholesale customer on the Excel transmission system and so that's a pretty detailed engineering process that along with the separation engineering that we committed to do will form the basis on which we will need to go out for bids and once all that engineering

[181:01] is complete and we have an engineered plan that Excel is is happy with them we're happy with we will go out for bids and that will determine the separation cost right now we've estimated that to be one hundred and ten million but we want to have some certainty about what that's going to look like I've already talked about the power supply and resource strategy and how we're going to bring those together the transition plan the transition plan is the work that we do to stand up the utility and that I've committed in the past to council nuts just not spending significant amount of money on this such as we're not going to be hiring people or investing in infrastructure but there's a lot of work like what are going to be our standards for safety what are going to be our guidelines on tree trimming what our engineering standards customer service policies there are a whole host of things what is our staffing plan look like how are we going to incorporate outsourcing versus in sourcing how do we set up all the different systems so this

[182:02] is going to be the thing that draws the actual picture of what we look like as an operating utility and so at the point in time if we decide to go forward with a vote we are ready to then immediately start that process because standing up utility doesn't happen overnight and we want to be ready for it and informed that's also an opportunity of where we'll engage the community but that that will look like and then ultimately either in between 19 or 2020 we will come to council with our information and there'll be a go/no-go decision I also just want to mention that we'll post these slides on the website if you click on transition plan you'll see our very detailed work plan that we prepared some time ago that has about 700 different work steps on it if anyone's interested in delving into that so with that that's where we are that's

[183:00] where we're going and here are the questions that we posed initially any any other questions of us and feedback is definitely welcome oh I do want to say one thing before we go on I want to also want to thank everybody back here we simplified in about an hour and 15 minutes a whole lot of work the work that's we I'm talking about all of these people do the real work and I'm just very fortunate to it to be part of that so I do want to give them and the community a lot of credit we as I've said before in other meetings we get a lot of free consulting from some of the smartest minds in this country because they live in Boulder and it's no joke I value the the community input and efforts tremendously and hopefully we can continue to hopefully they're going to continue to give us their free free time so again thank you to everyone that's here

[184:02] a couple of questions probably for you Tom um drilling a little bit more or helped me understand what remains I understand that we've got these agreements to work out with with Excel and we got a report due to the PUC December 13th I get that part of it what happens next or what final things final maybe is not the right word what next things happen in the PUC and what is the the thing that the PUC needs to do to allow us to file condemnation proceeding and then final part of this question is and when do you predict that will happen when do you think the combination proceeding will initiate so Deb's here and she can correct me if I'm wrong I don't think the PUC has to do anything more that's our position they told us to go to two there they tentatively approved the transfer of the assets outside the substations and said to go through the network integration system to design the substations my impression was they didn't want to see us again

[185:01] my hope is that we can get the the condemnation filed but sometime next year or earlier rather than later it's going to take 9 to 18 months and so we're pressing it if we don't get it filed soon we have to get through the network integration process and figure out what what we're taking in the substations before we can file condemnation so that's the little correction heather made there so I don't have a firm date we are all geared up and ready to go as soon as we know what assets we're requiring let's go follow up so in terms of condemnation or would we be able to make the no go go no-go decision put it to the voters before all appeals were exhausted in condemnation or we have to wait till kind of it that every possible step of that had been finished and Cathy Haddix here but Cathy I will try to answer the question of the answer is our plan is to go go no-go

[186:01] based as soon as we get a judgment and condemnation and know the total amount before any appeals are exhausted okay thank you I had a couple of questions I think we're coming - I think you you're commented about innovation and moving forward on innovation in our community we have all of these high-tech innovative type people and so I think it's even though maybe some of them didn't support these efforts I think we want to engage them seriously get them engaged and make them part of this decision they have the brains they have the experience they should be involved and so we we need to reach out to the people who may not have won at this but have a very bright mind and are very innovative and

[187:02] are in cutting-edge technology so I'd like to see that my second question has to do and it's not really in here but one of the things that really is irritating to me is that we we are we pay the same fees to excel as other communities do but one of the benefits we don't get that other communities do and that's because they're in a franchise fourth excel despite the fact that we paid the same is that they underground and we are not getting that benefit and I'm wondering what we could do to be much more aggressive and maybe starting with a talk to Excel and then if they can't come to some reason I don't know proceed farther because we're

[188:04] we're not getting what we should be getting with the rates that we're paying and we should be getting some benefit of undergrounding or something so that's a question for time okay I can answer the excels position is that the undergrounding fund is a benefit a contractual benefit that that flows from the franchise one of the things that's never discussed is folks who do not have a franchise like the people who live in Boulder County outside of the city also never got the benefit of the undergrounding fund we have repeatedly asserted that we have a right to that they have disagreed our current view is that we have enough litigation going with excel that we don't want to litigate over this just now but it's something that we are aware of and will and have always pushed with them we have not gotten anywhere it's a lot of money

[189:01] is I think it's about a million dollars a year in terms of the total cost that we're talking it's relatively small so we're working for much bigger figures so it's on our list of things but we have other priorities that we're pushing right now that to get to the goal which is creating the municipal electric utility yeah I just thought I'd bring it up but thank you it is um it is something that is irritating and I appreciate you continuing to bring it up but we should always continue to bring it up and I understand the scale of priorities and then my last thing I'm trying to find my packet but it had to do with communication and keeping the community more engaged and and up to speed with where we are in our progress and I think if we could be I don't know what but I think right now we have

[190:03] one newspaper that puts stuff out however at once whether it's a fax or not and I guess I would like to see us and I know our communications department is is very limited in what they can do but I am wondering if we could do more on the engagement and communication part where we are on a regular basis communicating very clearly just in facts what what has happened and where we are with our litigation with where we are in our progress it's going to be very complicated this next two years and I think it's very important that we keep the community up to speed with the rest of us and I think maybe and I guess people made mention in the past that maybe some of those efforts weren't as robust as they could

[191:03] be and and I I guess since we can't have just fact-based paper it would be really nice to be able to put out the facts as they are and with that I just have one one last comment and it has to do with at the beginning of the presentation you you said something to the effect that the people in Boulder believe in and believe in and moving forward with municipal ization and what you basically said was the community is united in the belief that we need to address climate change and I just want to make a comment that I was told by my graduate advisor a long time ago and he was a scientist and in

[192:01] science we don't ever use the word belief because it's more of a faith based kind of a something that isn't necessarily it's based on opinion based on faith it's not based on fact and everything we're doing here is based on fact and aspirations but so I just want to make that last pitch with respect to communication engaging the community very robustly and keeping people up to speed and I think pictures do a lot and the more graphics you can include the better for the public to understand what's going on okay Tom wanted to jump in there so at least I want to take a lot of the responsibility for the radio silence over the last year or so and I want to explain that while we were in litigation before the PUC I was very nervous about any statements the city might make that might push the commissioners one way or the other so

[193:01] Heather and her team worked very hard and I think I frustrated them a lot by saying no a lot two things that they wanted to do to outreach to the community because I was afraid of the effect it would have on the commissioners we're out from under that now and so I know her team is working really hard on engaging with the community and thinking about how we're going to do that one of the most interesting things we've done recently was Leslie Guster and brought into the city three of the three or four of the people who had worked on the campaign and sat down with Jane Heather and me just to talk and sort of Hollis help us appreciate how hard they'd worked on the campaign and they asked us a bunch of questions and we had a conversation and it was really enlightening for us how hard it was than that for them to understand what we were doing and how simple it was for us to answer the questions that they had so we all discussed ways that we can get into that kind of forum where we can just have a conversation with the community and provide answers because as you as you know there's a lot of false information out there we hear it all the time we

[194:01] tend to be noses down get the work done I mean certainly the people in my office that's kind of what we do and lawyers you know like to keep secrets because that's our job so that is going to change and to the extent that it's it is my fault I take full responsibility for it it had to do with litigation those constraints are off we will do better going forward let some other people myself included absolutely I just wanted to echo I'm glad to hear you say communicate communicate communicate I'm glad you take responsibility for shouldn't say that for explaining why there hasn't been enough I think that that would be very well received I don't know how many people have said we need to explain more and absent no a lot of plenty of engaged people in town who are still a little baffled because it wasn't really clear so

[195:00] on that I did have a question which is you mentioned the working group so which I thought were very valuable mechanism and a lot of free wonderful labor you said re-engage can you be more specific like is there a plan or when that's going to happen now as we are laying out I mean we've got a solar working group currently that's working with us on the solar strategy and we've had a resource group that we've tapped into off and on so that group will we'll bring that together we've we're looking at again the vision of that utility the future I think getting impact getting input can impact how that we move forward with that as well as the types of services we've been talking about I know Kendra is looking at getting some public engagement on their work plan so we're gonna try to to coordinate those and tie it all together there'll be things there are a lot of folks that are very technical in this community and so some of the technical areas as we look at how we configure the

[196:03] way we do things from a technical research reliability was a big working group it was amazing those guys we had to make them go home because they loved to talk about statistics and how you make the system more reliable so we're gonna sit down and look at the work packets and what we had the capacity to do but priorities and then begin to to engage those okay I think it would be useful to as that gets flushed out and and related to that I know that we have a dashboard I think it would be really useful the graphic that you showed earlier that showed progress on goals I think that I think that's the first time I've seen that like that and I think that that is very useful and somebody else emailed us about you know progress towards the solar goal progress and oh by the way you want to be a part of this click here that sort of ability for folks to tap into how we doing and how do I fit in as an

[197:01] individual to helping us reach the goal I think it's part of helping people relate to our energy feature because this is all very exciting stuff okay I have Marian and Sam in Cuba so my question was along the lines of what you just asked Suzanne and in reading through Lesley gloom streams email that she sent out this afternoon about creating a communications working group I think that's a fantastic idea and there are some pretty amazing communications specialists within the community who like the statistics people like to figure out how to communicate things so I think we can leverage those kinds of minds in the community as well so as well mediums within the community that are out there you know KD and you and just this afternoon I learned about a new podcast that a Fairview High School is

[198:02] putting out regularly so there's you know to tap into those various mediums in the community that span the entire community and not just you know those that are very much interested in this particular topic so thank you for everything sure oh and that's great and and I just want to say any ideas that you all have on communication please we're in the process of forming the plan now and so send them our way and the working group is one of the first communications working groups one of the first things we're going to ignite yeah so this is very helpful things of this type are very very useful handouts and leave-behinds that have simple graphics on them I agree with saying that that you know progress towards goals slide is really important that's super helpful and to the extent that you can amplify that fantastic if

[199:00] tom is right and we're out from under the lawyers from cone of silence we really need to take this opportunity to engage our community I really believe that there's a few things about the way that we think inside the city that it just doesn't sound right to other people like the term municipal ization for instance one of the things Mary and I came up with when we were doing a bunch of meetings with neighborhoods was community power works really well for people to understand what the goal is that we're trying to get to here so as you go through that working group for communications be thinking about branding be thinking about communication and how we can make this as accessible as possible to the people who aren't policy monks so that would be one focus I think another thing that I felt on the campaign trail this year was Mary and I did a few meetings with like

[200:01] 20 to 25 people at a time we would sit and we would just talk and we would hear their questions and answer back and there would be an hour and a half to two hour conversation which we did have scripted necessarily even though many of them ended up in the same place and so I think if there could be plans to have like quarterly meetings that are outreach meetings to the community that are in that scale however many people want to comment 20 to 50 I think there's an opportunity for a good conversation that may bring a lot of people's literacy up on this as well as the familiarity with the goals I think a key thing that I heard as I was talking about this is people don't understand the regulatory impediments and that's where a longer conversation can be helpful and the other thing that I felt from this campaign cycle is that there's huge leverage there might be 20 people there at a meeting but they all go talk

[201:00] to other people and so it's not just the 20 folks at the meeting or at the 30 folks at the meeting it's all the people that they explained what they learned - we'd like to know those groups that you all met with see if we can connect up with them okay yeah they're neighborhood groups largely um the other thing I will say is you know to the extent that we're gonna be moving more through the puc process and in the condemnation the more that we can update the community about what's happened there because one of the things I heard over and over again was we feel like we've completely lost track of what's going on with the Muny process so to the extent that it doesn't put us in legal jeopardy I really do think that that being is open about the legal processes the busey remainder the condemnation and the FERC will be really important to people as far as what they want I'm gonna come back to what Lisa said I know that it's not the most important thing we can be thinking about

[202:00] but we're being completely ripped off on our undergrounding fee I mean the way that money is held at by the by Excel there's no rational relationship with the franchise agreement I mean with an urban environment yes but with the franchise agreement I know what they say Tom but I think it's BS and so to the extent that we have an opportunity to to take that on I'd like to see what our options are either through the PUC or through the court system so that's it for me thank you it's for all the work okay Cindy I just like to add one more piece on the communication piece I think Leslie's questrom letter was very good in nudging us in I thought it was addressed to all the council but she also mentioned budget costs which was something that came up a lot during the campaign people not knowing what they were getting for the money that was that they were paying into

[203:01] the kitty for so I think anything helping along those lines would be helpful as well I just want to say thanks and Godspeed nippy okay are we good this has been wonderful and um I guess a bit overdue with all the reasons we couldn't do it sooner so that's great thank you all thank you and I do want to extend an invitation especially to the new council members if there's anything we didn't cover that you want to know we'll be glad to meet with you so give us a holler and to our guests from the end see you so thanks to all and we are adjourned talk about 23 I'll try and keep this short I recently traveled for the city to Bonn Germany and to Barcelona Spain and the reason

[204:02] that we went to we sent a representative to bond is there was the local leaders summit at the conference of parties 23 the conference of parties is where it's what the climate negotiations are and so this was the first time one of the organizations we belong to called Italy was able to get the local leaders summit as part of the actual proceedings of cop 23 and so this is the first time that local leaders governor's mayors and so on have been able to participate as part of the summit itself and so the night before so that the summit itself was on Sunday and so the night before another group that we belong to called under two had an organizational meeting that Jonathan and was kind enough to get me into and so it was fascinating it's about 40 electeds from around the country under two is the commitment to trying to cut carbon fast enough to keep

[205:01] the temperature rise under two degrees Celsius that we would experience and so this under two coalition for my notes here it has about forty percent of the global economy has already signed on to this so the population of the cities that have signed on to this represent almost half of the global population already so the thing I want to communicate back to the people of Boulder and to you guys is this is part of a much bigger movement so it is not just us out here on the front lines doing this these forty people were talking about what each of their communities were doing Jerry Brown was there and gave quite a hell of a speech at the under two meeting and then the next day at the cop 23 meeting he gave an even stronger speech there were about 300 leaders at the cop 23 meeting and so it started with Jerry Brown giving a speech early then we had a whole bunch of people come through who represented

[206:01] different organizations at the sub regional level Scotland was there as this you know Scottish government and they have a really advanced just transition program that's going on they have 85 million euros that they're giving the local communities for climate action from the central government they're creating things in their cities called low emissions zones that will only be able to have say electric cars and electric vehicles go in them and yeah they say in some cities they're gonna ban petrol and diesel by 2032 in Scotland Copenhagen commits to being carbon neutral by get this 2025 Stockholm has to in the same pledge by 2040 Amsterdam is doing a similar thing they have what's called a circular economy program where they're really trying to go through carbon emissions reduction but really focus on local food and local economies Germany has an initiative that's across

[207:00] the whole country about the transformative urban mobility initiative there's a group of islands that are getting together the global island partnership they're focused of course on resilience on how they're going to respond to this interestingly this cop 23 was presided over by the prime minister of Fiji so Fiji it was called the bulla conference which is a way of greeting in fission and so that was really interesting and I have to say that was even more inspiring and I want to bring back you know from that even larger group that this is a worldwide movement of people at the city and state level to really take control because the nations know that they can't do it without these changes at the city and state level so from there I went to Barcelona for the smart cities World Expo sorry Expo and world conference and you know we heard a lot more about people and cities trying to do carbon emissions reduction and what

[208:03] they focus on at the smart cities conference is giving cities networks and one of the things I definitely took away from this is that you know the exchange of ideas between cities can be very productive we're not going to invent everything here in Boulder so they give some examples of this Portland has a new green bond program and they copied that from your haniss berg and so you know they gave some other another thing that they emphasized was that 50% of city emissions reductions are going to have to come from businesses so businesses are going to have to be actively involved if this is going to be successful and other you know this is a different conference now but I'm hearing at this conference about zero emission zones within cities as well and you know we talked a little more what's going on in London London already has congestion pricing for their transportation they're starting to do toxicity pricing on Diesel's so Diesel's

[209:03] which have you know they're older that have higher emissions London's actually making them pay more for their congestion pricing fee for coming into the city as a dirty vehicle so there's a lot going on I don't want to take up too much time but I just want everyone to feel that what I came back with was this is a worldwide movement we're part of it we are I felt proud to be able to talk about you know some of our climate programs I gave two talks I gave a talk at the Japan Embassy it caught 2013 imc Japan pavilion at cop 23 and then I gave a talk at at buildings forum that was held at smart cities so I was able to use the presentation that staff gave me to be able to give these talks so anyway it was a great trip I want to thank the city for letting me do it and I want to say it was fantastic Sam thank you for being there and representing the city thanks for on the force

[210:02] lots of pictures from Barcelona that interestingly there's a corner that has the Gaudi house on it which is an apartment building that Gaudi did and then there's four other corners four parts to that corner right and so you've got an older building there that was really cool you have a modern building which has done a nice job of respecting the older building style there and then on one corner you've got just this terrible ugly skyscraper thing so I thought on one corner you could get all these different urban form realizations kind of cool all right thanks for watching now we're adjourned here I'll hand this to Lynette