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Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[8:07] [Music] [Music] [Music] the boulder city of Boulder City Council study session of April 24th 2018 we have a couple of items on the agenda and the first one has to do with all things about our budget and with that I'll turn it over to thanks and I'll very briefly say hi and thank you or anxious to make this presentation I think you'll be very interested in some of the data that we have let me turn it over to Cheryl patellae who is our chief financial officer so I'm gonna start off by giving

[9:01] a little background and also our give information on our national and Colorado economy then Cara is going to talk about our local revenue trends specifically related to sales and use tax and then finally Katie I'll talk about the budget impact and solutions that we are looking at with our flattening of sales tax revenue so I'll start I think by reamping that the city has a very strong financial position now and I thought a good way to show this would be talking about some of the comments that we received from Standard and Poor's and Moody's in our last geo debt rating review and those talked about first are sound financial management so this would be our financial policies and procedures that we have in place and are we following them and then our Reserve position so this is something katie is

[10:01] gonna talk about later in the presentation we've talked a lot about reserves the last few years because we really think it's important and certainly so do the rating agencies and then finally our very strong budget flexibility so this it really incorporates a few things first reserves so we have adequate reserves reserves are very important for times of uncertainty for emergency events and we saw that with the 2013 flood but another component of this budget flexibility relates to how proactive are we when things change so for instance six months ago we came to you and we thought revenues were going to look one way and now they're looking a little different so we've been very proactive in looking for reductions to ensure that we don't in the air in a budget deficit so how did we get to this strong financial position it really ten

[11:02] years ago I thought with the the Blue Ribbon Commission would be a good place to start and the Blue Ribbon Commission looked at both our revenues and our expenditures and at the time they were formed because we saw that we were going to have up to a hundred and thirty five million dollar gap in the general fund by 2030 and interestingly enough they also predicted in this year 2018 that our gap would be 50 million which luckily I'm here to say is we're nowhere near 50 million gap so we've really reduced and actually after our reductions now eliminated that gap by taking proactive steps the reasons for the gap are the same reasons that we have budgetary issues today's so decreasing productivity of sales tax and then above average inflation of what we're spending our money on so looking

[12:00] at the revenue steps that we've taken we've been very strategic when we look at our taxes so we've renewed a lot of our taxes our voters approved removing table limitations on our property tax we've had one tax increase for community culture and safety and we've limited the term of that tax and then I think probably most importantly brought up by the Blue Ribbon Commission is this concept of insuring that our one-time revenue is only used for one-time expenses and Katie you'll get more into that as well on the expenditure side we've implemented priority-based budgeting we've spent a lot of time and energy on the personnel side of things because certainly for the general fund makes up the majority of our budget and we've looked at different compensation policies and strategies as well as our performance management system we've

[13:00] proactively managed our assets the voters have approved a bond a new tax we also regularly perform asset assessments so we can find out the conditions of our assets and the dollar amount it would take to keep those assets in the same condition and I think probably me personally what I'm most proud about is our most recent edition of the three point six million dollars added to the general fund for capital and we are taking that capital expense out of our ongoing revenue to ensure that that program continues on moving forward and then finally on the expenditure sides we continue to explore our efficient delivery of services this is done both by our department assessments and our master plans as well as other other ways reserves we certainly are on target to meet our goal of 20% general fund

[14:00] reserves by 2020 so that's our strong position now I'm going to turn to the economic climate both domestically and here in Colorado so nationally we are in the ninth year of economic expansion and this is the second longest expansion since they've been keeping track of that sort of stuff GDP is rising at a moderate rate a little under 3% and a lot of that growth is led by consumer spending in business investment and certainly we've seen the business and investment spurred by the most recent tax cuts and job jobs act retail sales tax are up by our nationally up around 5% the housing market is solid and the global economy is doing better so for the last several years several countries we're struggling and we're starting to see those countries do better just

[15:02] a little bit on the moderate grows some cautionary things we're looking at is the demographic change this is similar to what Colorado is experienced where more of our population growth is slowing and more people are moving into the retirement age which of course the spending patterns change and then also household savings that are down in consumer debt continues to rise so we all know this was a big part of the Great Recession and things are starting to turn for the worse there again they got better after the recession the labor market nationally is very healthy at four point one percent unemployment similar to Colorado people are our businesses are having a really difficult time finding skilled workers so not only is it slowing the job growth but it's also putting pressure on wages there's a lot of uncertainties out there inflation

[16:01] is one of them that we quite frankly we haven't seen for a while the pressures mounting we've seen it in the price of oil other commodities and so what the Federal Reserve is doing to try to fight back inflation is increasing interest rates so we've had three rate hikes in seventeen twenty seventeen one already in 2018 and they're expecting two more so that's what's happening with interest rates we've seen stock market volatility in 2018 we didn't really see a lot in seventeen and throughout history if you look at the stock market volatility along with the interest rate hikes it generally shows a sign of a mature expansionary period so we're getting near the end of our expansion perhaps the US dollars weak there's several policies out there that are really big question marks such as the debt ceiling terrorist trade wars tax reform

[17:03] interestingly enough it is spurring business investment but many feel that longer term it may come at a cost to the overall economy and then finally global concerns North Korea and Russia most notably moving on to Colorado very similarly where we're experiencing moderate growth but our economic growth has been slowing the last few years we were kind of gangbusters back in 15 and 16 and it's starting to slow down much of the growth has been on the Front Range but more recently the rural areas have seen some growth and a lot of that has to do with the oil production it's at an all-time high right now in the state cautionary related to Colorado itself is we're seeing consumer prices that are rising faster or outpacing the national average we also the net migration into the state has slowed

[18:02] which many feel there's a lot of factors housing prices certainly can be one of those and similar to the nation the aging population we also have a lot of Millennials and the spending patterns are different our labor market is also very healthy at 3% unemployment and we're having the same difficulty finding skilled workers and the pressures on wages housing market remains strong a number of permits is outpacing the national average but on the cautionary side the inventory still low and finding construction workers has been difficult and with that retail sales were at about 5% and 17 for growth and expected to be a little less than 18 and this is where I'm gonna turn it over to Cara who's gonna dive into the sales and use tax

[19:02] numbers I think you some first my sales and use tax sales can use a little closer okay sales and use tax is the largest revenue source for the city citywide is it you'll see it's the blue piece of the pie in this chart and it's 42 percent of general fund revenues and it was 32 percent of all city revenues so it's a significant revenue source for the city and for the general fund in particular we also just wanted to remind that when people make retail purchases in the city that not all of it goes to the city of Boulder that for every retail tax dollar collected only 44 cents goes to the city the majority of that goes to the city general fund 19 cents but the rest go to these special revenue funds that have

[20:02] very designated purposes and then the balance of it goes to the state rtd in Boulder County some more facts about sales and use tax we just wanted to reiterate that there is this collection lag so the current report that will be released this week hopefully within the next day or two will be the February report and that's for February retail transactions paid at the register in February then those retailers remit that revenue to us in March and then we collect it and process it and put the report together and report on it in April so that will be out shortly this analysis is largely through 2017 year end results but the two months of results that we do have for 2018 really have not changed the overall picture so we still have great caution the the focus of this presentation will be on that biggest piece of that pie or donut

[21:00] chart and that's the retail sales tax because that portion of it makes up more than 80 percent there are the three other types of use taxes business use construction use and motor vehicle use tax we'll talk about two of those at the end of this part of the presentation so this chart shows both our retail sales so we you're showing retail sales as opposed to tax revenue because then this controls for the fact if you have tax rate changes so this is just retail sales transactions and you can see that it was steadily increasing in a nice rate until 2016 and then 2017 was basically flat and we have decided with that and looking deep into the data we think it's prudent to make a very flat projection for 2018 as well so we have two charts here that our month-over-month sales tax trends and when we say month

[22:01] over month we mean we're comparing January of one year to January of the previous year and that's because sales and use tax or particularly retail sales tax is very seasonal and so you always want to compare to the same month of the previous year and so this chart we're just showing 20 13 14 and 15 and what is interesting to note here is that month over a month it does move up and down so you know if we say the sales tax for a year was flat it's not that it was flat every single month it moves up and down when compared to the previous month or the same month of the previous year but in 2013 14 and 15 each of those years only had one month where the month-over-month trend was negative but then when we look at 16 and 17 16 had I think four months where there were actually negative results and then 17 had six months say can you actually

[23:00] negative results so that the rate of growth was negative sure yes exactly so February 2017 sales tax collections were more than 5% less than they were in 2016 so if you look at that February dark green bar that's going down and so you have 2018 on here and it's just the first two that's correct so we did put even though we haven't released that February report yet we did put the data that we do have for for February and then we also put the results for January and so January was a little bit less than 2% growth over the previous January February was about one point 3% growth over the previous February but again those results don't give us a lot of confidence particularly if you look back at 2017 January had more than 5%

[24:01] growth over the previous year but yet we ended the year flat so so I'm curious why do they show sales tax sales tax always by the rate of increase as opposed to here's how much we collected and it would be you know a sizable amount what's a little bit it shows you the variation relative to the whole why is it that we do it this way um I think it's just like are we growing or we contract you know is it is the sales tax revenue growing or not and so it's often reported in just that percentage change we do have some slides later when we're looking at the industry analysis and the geographic area analysis where we do tell you the dollar amount and we are actually looking to make some rather substantial changes to the revenue report because I do feel like that the format that the city's revenue report has been for years and years I don't think it's changed in a very long time

[25:00] it has really focused just on percentage changes but we should be reporting more on those actual dollars and so we we do plan to incorporate more dollar reporting and more month-over-month sales tax analysis also so it is interesting and again you want to do speak up sorry I wondered can you break it down into sectors and show which sectors are lagging the most yes we are gonna show that in total and then we're gonna speak to four specific industries and three specific geographic areas so this is the slide that has a lot of information so this slide was intended to just sort of at a glance see within all of the different industries what has been the trend over time and so I think the big

[26:03] picture what you can see and the color coding should hopefully be intuitive that bright green is strongly positive bright red is more strongly negative then in 2013-14 if you look at it there was a lot of green very little bright red and as we move to the right we're seeing more and more industries that are bright red are slightly red and very little of the bright green so it's just sort of in general over time we are seeing this softening across many industries and so we will look at a few of those industries in specific detail so the next four slides that we have are these specific industry slides there are three pieces of sort of information on each of these slides the top right-hand chart that PI shows you the blue sliver is what portion of all of retail sales

[27:00] is apparel so this isn't a significant piece of the pie but it is an industry that we've seen sort of steady decline the second piece of information is the bar chart and that relates to the left side axis and that is retail sales so this is showing the the dollars but again it's retail sales and then the line chart goes with axis on the right and then that shows you that growth so you'll see that 2014 we had strong positive growth 15 it started slipping to 2% and in 16 it was right around zero percent it was actually just slightly negative and then in 2017 it actually fell down to 6% so it just continued it was slowing growth and then it actually went to declining and so what we've seen with apparel is 90 percent of apparel sales are actually in three different areas of the city 29th Street Boulder

[28:00] Valley Regional Center and then the downtown Pearl Street area and all three of those areas saw year-over-year declines in apparel and some of them quite a bit and we also saw it at a number of those places but we'll speak to it more when we look at 29th Street that there have been more apparel store closings than openings so it's something to look at we will also see on a later slide that apparel stores have been sort of declining across the United States as well so this is actually sort of in line with what people might be seeing elsewhere so that is one industry of concern the next is consumer electronics and you can see here that there's some volatility in this industry again it's a very small piece of the pie but we did decide to speak to it in one

[29:00] reason we've had a lot of questions about it and I think possibly because of that significant decline in 2017 this industry does have some institutional sellers so there can be large sales in one year that that adds to that volatility and then there has been I think a lot of competition in this industry and possibly also some deflation in consumer electronics some products are actually cost less than they did in previous years so this is one that we'll continue to watch but there is just some volatility in this industry so the third is eating places and this is actually a bright spot it is a significant industry if you'll see the piece of the pie on the top right so this is we are very sort of reliant upon a sales tax revenue from eating places and you'll notice that the axis on the

[30:02] right now is all green so that's good that's a good sign so we have not had declining tax revenue from eating places it has just slowed so it's the slowing is something of a concern and will speak to some reasons why we think that might be later but it is a good news story if it weren't for this strength in this industry we would have seen sales tax more I think sales tax revenue retail sales tax revenue would have been negative in 2017 and it was just flat so this is part of the good news the other good news part of the report is general retail and again we in recent years I have still positive growth it did slow a little bit in 2017 this is a significant piece of the pie so again a very

[31:01] important industry for us to keep an eye on we did note some people might remark on the big decline from 2013 to 2014 and that is an anomaly that related to how recreational marijuana revenue was reported in the beginning in 2013 it was included in this category and then it became its own category so that's just sort of anomalous so if you took that data point out it would look more it would all be positive numbers but it did slow a little bit in 2017 the other thing that we will talk about a little bit when we get to one of the geographic areas is one of the reasons why we think it looked like 2017 slowed and that's really just because in 2016 some online retailers started

[32:02] voluntarily collecting sales tax so that sort of explained that big increase in 2016 and then you know if you look at the blue bars that's already in the base for 16 so the growth over that and 17 wouldn't be as significant but it was pretty well publicized in the paper that some major retailer started collecting for many municipalities and for the state in 2016 these last two illustrate to me why I think it's confusing to people because mapping the rate of growth makes it look like oh my god it's the our overall sales tax is declining at least in general retail and it's just increasing more slowly right anyhow I'm pretty certain that people do not catch that nuance but anyhow I'm glad that we're

[33:01] showing it both ways because I do think it ok and we will work to improve the way that that's communicated both in the monthly reports and then through the budget process so I appreciate that comment and add a separate question dude do you have broken out numbers on the those larger retailers that did start collecting the sales tax would be really interesting to get a report on those specific numbers well we do we can't report for specific retailers because that information is confidential we could probably report on growth from some of our some of our retailers that we could go through and sort of call what we think are strictly online retailers it would be a little bit of a manual process but we can do that and try to see what the growth has been for those and then we could also look some of our retailers that have a physical presence but then also have online sales

[34:00] and they remit sales tax for those online sales sometimes they have separate licenses for the online piece versus the brick-and-mortar piece so we can try to look at that and see what information we could provide it's fairly doable I think there's a great deal of interest in knowing how much sales tax we're getting from online retailers so to the extent that data can be mined I think could be very useful we will look at that thank you I can just riff on that I sent out something from CML about what the Supreme Court is looking at in terms of online sales and sort of the the nuance that direct sales versus third-party sales which kind of has a huge impact so any other the extent that we're unpacking that I do think that's another piece of that at least for the Amazons out there and I hope it's an issue that we're going to address I don't know it's only a piece of the puzzle but understanding that physical and online presence so if you don't feel like going downtown instead you're gonna buy from

[35:00] them online versus I'm gonna buy in another state I don't know I think we would learn a lot from understanding how consumer habits have changed here we will definitely look it into that and see what we can provide so this table is similar to that previous one but I'm sorry just because like this construction news tax do you have what percentage of the pie that is Oh in the first yes and so that we can flip back to that chart was at 8% I think you did did you show that oh I missed it not here back line here so construction used

[36:00] to have like 8 percent okay perfect and then when we go to the go to the industry to a ball just like this construction use tax here is it's actually construction sales and use tax and since right here we're only reporting on the retail sales this is not reflective of the use text I see so I should have taken that use tax label off okay as a slide this is construction sales tax because we do collect like on lumber crimes perfect thank you or plumbing fixtures that type of thing like if you have a clump plumber come out to your house and install the toilet and you buy the toilet from that plumber it would probably be sales tax on that so this again similar slide we're moving a lot from a lot of green to much more red and

[37:01] sort of light red or pinkish colors so overall trending in seeing sort of flattening or decline in a number of industries I I will say I did not say this on the previous slide that looked like this is that the coloring is takes into account both the percent change and sort of the piece of the pie so we did use coloring based upon how important is it in terms of total dollars and what was the percent change so we picked three areas to focus on for this in the first is 29th Street and there's there's an additional piece of information on these slides and that's the map of what the area is in the city so you will see 29th Street it's a decent piece of the pie there's a lot of retail there 29th Street has seen sort of it was sort of

[38:01] steady then it increased and then it's been actually decreasing the last two years and the areas that sort of appear to be having trouble at 29th Street are apparel and general retail those stores there's been more store closings than openings in those categories and even the stores that remain there are a few that have had real strong year-over-year growth but the good news story for 29th Street has been eating clay particularly fast-casual has been doing well at 29th Street we did here recently that they are a hundred percent leased so I think there's been some turn in the last year and so maybe that's an opportunity maybe there'll be some changes there but that is an area that we've seen some weakness the next area is based Mar and again there's a map

[39:02] right there so you can see that it's on either side of 36 right near baseline and this area it was growing the growth was slowing but then we did you see this precipitous sort of drop in 2017 and that is largely I think responsible or because of three closings one particularly the Whole Foods and then also Bo Joe's closed and Denny's closed so those are very visible closings that we all saw in citizens and residents all saw so there are some vacancies there so that may be an opportunity but we definitely saw sales tax decline from that area of the city in 2017 in the next area we thought we'd focus on is really if you can see that map on the right it's really a Sioux mouth map it is that light green bordered by the red

[40:02] excluding those other colors in the middle so it's nearly all of the city except for these very specific zones that are named a large part of that area of course is residential but there is there are pockets of retail in those all other areas of the city when in this category in the monthly revenue report it is just all other within the city but we combined the numbers for this presentation to include metro Denver all other in Colorado and out-of-state which would be retail sales so this sort of combines what's happening outside of the name two Geographic zones in the city and so you'll see again that 2016 sharp increase was both online sales and we are seeing some strength from up in

[41:04] these other pockets of Boulder and then also some metro Denver sales into Boulder that we were collecting sales tax on but then again to the mayor's point that sharp decline makes it look like it fell in 2017 but it didn't fall it just is growing at a slower rate so again the right axis is still all positive so we have had positive growth in this region or regions but it did slow from 16 to 17 and again I think that's because a lot of that online sales got into the base in 2016 and then the growth over that is just not so significant so question for you that so I understand when you say that all other includes online sales right so that and that's a lot of that big bump there in 2016 you mentioned metro Denver and I don't know what you're referring to there when

[42:00] you say that so we do collect sales tax from some businesses that do not have a presence in the city but they do have a presence in metro Denver and there are some stores that are emitting sales tax to us on those purchases for deliveries to the city furniture store in Denver delivered into the city and they are collecting the sales tax for us I'm reading your times thank you so looking at Colorado this was presented at the January economic update and it Cheryl mentioned it in her part of the presentation that for Colorado in total the growth has been closer to five percent and they are projecting 4.6 percent growth for 2018 so again what we're seeing here in Boulder is not really reflective of what we are expecting them for this date in total so

[43:04] that leads to the question of why are Boulder retail sales flattening so there has been a lot of conjecture about this and people are hypothesizing as are we and we looked at a lot of different data sets to try to help us explain what might be happening here in Boulder and we decided based upon that analysis to focus on and talk about these four explanations competition from surrounding communities again online retail sales some of which we are not collecting sales tax shifts in demographics cheryl spoke to that a little bit and then also just sort of looking at the retail choices here in Boulder so this map shows comparisons of the increase again in sales tax revenue for different cities across the Front Range the blue dots are growth Boulder is shown in gray and we have a point three nine percent figure there that

[44:01] figure actually is sales tax revenue increase if you exclude audit revenue and you exclude the additional sales text that we have for recreational marijuana because that's not that only goes to the general fund and it's not part of our base sales tax if you include those two things that's actually flattered it's point one eight percent and then the yellow dots are cities that had declines so while you do see if you look at the blue dots mostly the great the growth is quite strong three five eight point seven more than nine percent so many of the cities across the Front Range enjoyed quite strong sales tax revenue growth in 2017 Lake had this pretty significant decline of - 2.4 percent that was largely due to the hailstorm that had the mall out of service for much of the year and then Broomfield has a slight decline and so I think

[45:05] probably that's largely due to Flatirons and unfortunately I think retail preferences change and there's been a lot of sort of press about those traditional style malls are falling out of favor with shoppers they like more easy in-and-out retail choice some of the shopping areas around the mall those retail pad sites have vacancies some anchor vacancies so I think they're having some analysis to do there also with regard to shifting preferences ok go ahead Sam I was just gonna ask one factor that seems to me could affect this is growth in other words if there's closed and the number of places people can shop because I know long months been adding commercial retail space Fredrik brighten those are

[46:02] places that are growing have you looked at kind of growth rates and commercial space versus retail we have in fact on our next two slides we have at least one representation and that certainly is an old adage in the development world is that retail follows rooftops and of course that's not the only consideration when retailers make choices about where to locate but it certainly proves true that if the more rooftops are built then they get to a certain tipping point and then all the retail follows and so I think that that definitely has been happening in our neighboring communities so I think that is a significant that was exactly my question you know in the retail world a lot of times they'll do the same store sales comparisons right in other word you have a store and you compare that store to itself year-over-year as opposed to the universal stores because as Sam pointed out you know long odds a good example long must have been growing

[47:00] don't lay it residential Eva commercially right in so we don't know if that 8.7% is the fact that they have a point seven percent more stores as opposed to the same stores are selling more stuff and they've just opened or recently their new shopping center right and flat irons has is having subside in this issues so they have just scraped whole areas out there they used to have stores and safe bulldozing yeah so we do have long mountain here and this is a chart of their residential building permit so you'll see there was a lot of growth in the late 90s to the early 2000 everything stopped during the Great Recession but then there was a lot of building again in the last few years so with all those rooftops then in these last few years yes even more commercial has been built you know that was pretty slow through the Great Recession as well but these last three years have been quite significant so yes we definitely

[48:02] think there is a phenomena of retail following rooftop and greater competition in those neighboring communities so people that used to shop here are now possibly shopping in Longmont and Louisville so it doesn't necessarily mean they're doing better it just means they're doing more okay I mean that's a lot of that's over a million square feet incremental million a half square feet in the last three years right of commercial can you imagine if we did that in Boulder okay is there any way for you guys to unbundle that on a per square to normalize it on a per square foot basis we can look at that we did have that question also from the downtown Commission so there is interest in learning more about retail dollars per square foot and so we look into because I mean we know how many square feet commercial we have we know what our revenues are same thing for Longmont interesting to see are we actually selling or we actually losing sales to llama or are they just selling more stuff to to whatever their catchment

[49:02] areas and I think probably both I think this interesting question and the ramifications are what because in the end they have more money but maybe you just trying to figure out for capital well I mean I think that dictates our solution in other words if we're concerned about retail sales flattening you know the first question is why and if if long-lost magic solution is we'll just build more stores we have to ask ourselves do we want to build more stores the instrument that maybe no but at least we will make an intentional decision knowing that it's not that our stores are bad it's just that we don't have as many stores as they do in other words that I think that dictates our solution if we care about this we have to decide is it a quality issue or a quantity issue well it's it's also a what issue right I mean what is being sold and at what cost to the consumer that drives a lot of it it's like I don't know with this retail

[50:01] analysis that's supposedly happening I wasn't in on the beginning of that so I don't know quite what it is but saturation for example how much apparel saturation is there in Boulder of a particularly high-end type that isn't going to bring people in so they're there questions like that as well that I would think would be included in because if we see and not we can't control we as a government can't control the type of stores that come into play we might have a little influence over that but if if we see a certain industry that's failing we shouldn't push that string we shouldn't keep pushing you know apparel if if people are buying all their clothes online then let's just stop opening apparel stores and let's obviously restaurants seem to be doing gangbusters but maybe that's the thing in other words I think it's really important for us to know what people want and provide provide response to those needs and those desires well and it was interesting hearing the fast casual food part in 29th Street whereas the general retail and and apparel

[51:01] stores are going down there again but did that segment of it is up so again looking at what's happening in Boulder versus these other communities we did pull a few of the industries this is not all of them clearly but one thing to note is Boulder is bigger but if you do add Longmont and Louisville together the population is about the same so you can see Boulder had weakness in apparel and building materials and while we had strength and eating places it was more moderate than it had been and then we did have weakness in grocery longmont reports eating places in grocery together but that is probably one of the more notable things is that Longmont had really strong growth in both eating places and groceries and the dollar

[52:00] amount is even significant and also Louisville had strength and eating places in grocery as well so it's sort of interesting to look at yes I I think that there is it is very likely we are losing some sales to people that previously maybe came in to Boulder or they come in to Boulder and work and they used to work and eat here and now maybe they're doing that outside of Boulder more than they had so it is interesting they did they did have quite strong growth in a number of industry categories it's interesting that your mother is growing fairly slowly and a half percentage range so our numbers year-over-year are gonna look very similar if we see the increased or decreased it's gonna be not because population change but because the trend changed but we look at Longmont and Louisville and other places like that I mean it seems to me like we should be normalizing somehow whether it's you

[53:01] know subtracting the percentage growth and either commercial square footage or in number of people right so that grew at a 3% in one of those places you just back that out because it's hard to compare for me to look at these numbers and compare and say how we're doing relative to some place that's growing and it there are other factors as Cindy pointed out but I think that would be one that would be easier than some of the more esoteric factors to just pull out to normalize somehow and if we're gonna do a retail study I think that's something the consultant can help us take a look at absolutely Thank You sweet ale I mean is Louisville growing I thought they were more lucky I don't know about rates growing but I don't think they're growing not like that at that pace no no so then again another possible reason is competition from online retail so online retail sales

[54:04] definitely have been increasing they've been growing about a 1% a year for this data source and it looks like it's accelerating slightly but it still is not a significant portion of all retail sales so it is growing - in 2018 they think about 10% of total retail sales which is significant but still 90 percent of retail sales are not online I think what has been interesting in the last year particularly maybe last year or two is shifting into new markets not so much just the consumer good but rather groceries and then these you know services that provide you apparel in the box and you just automatically get sent your monthly addition to your wardrobe either for work or play and so those those types of business models are generating more online sales and and

[55:04] they're not some of the bigger retailers they're more niche companies so I think the other thing to think about when we think about online retail sales as well isn't this happening everywhere so why would Boulder be different you know why are we maybe more impacted by the competition from online retail sales than other communities and it may be related to our demographics which is on the next slide this slide was and actually I wanted to ask question about the previous version or up to you but on the the previous one the the left axis is the percent of total retail sales is that correct I'm so the so it's not that retail sales are growing one percent a year their share is growing that's shouldn't and so like if you look at from 2016 to 2018 is going from 8% to 10% it's actually a 25% increase in the share but

[56:00] probably the base sales of the whole economy are also growing so actually I think those are some pretty substantial increases in there and and so that I'll be interesting this next demographic slide because I would speculate that our community might order at higher rates from online retailers before you move on the next slide do you know what can you estimate I know that we collect online sales from some retailers do we have an idea what percentage of all online sales that we collect tax on is it a half a third attend 10% 90% I would say I don't think we have a very good handle on that and I would i we can look into that more but one of the reasons why I think we don't have a very good idea about that is when I will say Amazon started making agreements with cities and with the state the estimates of the impact were

[57:01] not very close so even just with that one retailer it's it is people have not done a very good job estimating the impact but I think I think Amazon reports that about 50% of its all the sales are from third-party vendors and I think they generally don't collect sales tax from third-party vendors so right there we can just use just using Amazon as a base we can say all right everything in the Amazon sells itself we collect and everything it was on most things that Amazon sells on behalf of third parties they don't collect so this 50% right there right and so could you extrapolate that to other other vendors that sell online we can definitely look at that okay and what efforts do we take I know there's some legal issues here but what efforts do we take to to try to collect sales on the sales tax from online sellers who we are legally entitled to because of our presence here in other words do we chase people on you do audit

[58:00] them yes I mean we definitely part of our audit program is to look at retailers that have a physical presence and an online presence and they would audit both elements of the business Thanks so just one more thought on trying to figure out some of that days that if we know which vendors are permitting online sales tax to us it's probably publicly available if they're bigger ones you know like like Amazon or Walmart or whatever it's probably publicly available a rough percentage of their share of online sales in total so we might be able to make some guesses from that from those kinds of numbers we were looking for that so yes we thought also possibly Boulder may be ordering online at a higher rate is one of the things that we think the demographics are impacting we have it we are moving it this slide shows how we are moving from

[59:00] blue to red to green over time so the under 27 age group demographic group is growing certainly they are more likely to purchase online they also don't have a lot of buying power but if whatever buying power they do have they're shifting more of it to online purchases than local purchases that would have an effect so this age is definitely possibility the other phenomena that we're seeing is that we're aging so we're growing more into the over 45 and certainly over time into the more than 65 age group now it is interesting that apparently from some data that we have seen that those groups do significantly buy online the middle-age and the elderly the other

[60:00] or the people over 65 they purchased them less frequently but they do purchase online so that we don't know what effect that will have in the long run but we do think absent the online piece this demographic shift of moving more into the over 45 and over 65 would be impacting sales tax revenue and because they are spending less money on taxable goods and probably more on services they're sort of past their prime stage in their life where they're acquiring goods and in fact some of them are downsizing and reducing so they're not purchasing as many taxable goods and in fact they're - they're purchasing more services which are not taxable so that could be this demographic shift of aging in Boulder and in Boulder County could be impacting our sales tax revenue

[61:01] could it also be our our historical mix of products in other words I see that our two weakest areas are biggest drops are in consumer electronics and apparels which are two items that are really really easy to buy online we're really really strong on pot which you can buy on a buy online and you can't go online to buy your out to up to dinner experience right so could it be that our retail mix has been skewed is unintentionally skewed towards those things that are easiest to buy online in other words are we going through a bit of a shift here as as online stuff is cannibalizing bricks and mortar and we just happen to be more heavily invested in those types of things that are easily sold online as opposed to surrounding communities yes I think thankfui definitely yeah the next slide sort of sort of speaks to this retail mix a little bit also this is a slide we found

[62:00] online by this site they characterized it as the retail apocalypse but the message often online is that it's not brick-and-mortar stores are not declining in total it's just the mix is shifting and so this slide shows what stores have been increasing in number across the country and what types of stores have been decreasing in number across the country and the types of stores that have been increasing in number and then therefore the sales we don't have a lot of in Ville in Boulder the dollar store the the you know big pet centers super centers sporting goods stores Sports Authority closed a while ago we don't have warehouse clubs so some of these that are seeing the growth across the country we're not seeing those stores here in Boulder so people in Boulder may be going other places to shop at these stars and then this does sort of align with what we're seeing in

[63:01] Boulder as you noted that apparel declining and consumer electronics declining those are being purchased online and so stores are closing but yes I definitely think the retail mix is impacting I mean the other thing that we might think about is you know this is probably the average cross-country right where our land costs are way higher and so another thing that might be interesting to do is look at peer cities that are like that like Palo Alto Mountain View maybe la places that have really had land prices and see what's going on they're relatively affluent populations and and educated because it might be interesting to see if we're tracking because I think some of those on the top would be more difficult to pencil out here new anyway just look at the cities with commercial linkies fees of $30 or more per square foot

[64:04] [Laughter] so that was the end of sort of the discussion of retail sales tax but we did also just want to briefly show the chart of business use tax and then construction use tax and again business use text is the companion to the sales tax and what we did for 2018 is look at this and it is sort of volatile because there can be large purchases by some businesses in certain years that that add some volatility so we decided for ongoing budget purposes we should reset the base at a lower amount and then in those years where we see you know a little spike in business use tax then that revenue should be used for one-time purchases but the base should be can you tell us the vote the largest and the

[65:01] most volatile types of business use taxes that you know the ones we talked about what are we talking that would spike software or could be large manufacturers in town doing when they purchase products for use in their facility as opposed to buying I'm just trying to see what we use in the retail like what they do a major renovation of their facility or something and they get all new because if they renovate doesn't that sure in retail construction construction use tax but some of the goods that they then put in would be business use tax so so you get taxed on the equipment that you buy right and so say you order from out of state specialty or something of that nature and it's designed and built custom for you and shipped in there was no sales tax collected at the point of sale you have to report that to the city and pay

[66:01] tax on it and the city patrols business is a lot more closely than residents right because residents ordered a lot of stuff online a lot of that doesn't get taxed but the business gives you something that you can go in and hawed it and look at and so it's anything that a business does that increases its capabilities will probably generate the business use tax so you could see that varying you know if large couple large businesses make a change in their operation get rid of some old equipment and bring in some new equipment that's going to all end up in this bucket yeah what we call FF&E furniture fixtures equipment is largely so it's often from bigger companies and it will be sort of lumpy some company might buy thirty new computers and ten new printers things like that and so similarly for construction use text we can sometimes get very large projects

[67:00] that then bump the revenue up but then we might not get those large projects or we might get a few large projects in one year but then not in the next and so again for 2018 and for ongoing we thought it was a good idea to sort of reset the base and then when we see these spikes we could use that revenue for one-time expenditures of which there are plenty of need so key takeaways regarding sales and use tax again there haven't been signs of recession you know that might be a risk of going forward but we've seen this flattening at a time where there has not been signed of recession there are signs of shifting spending patterns we don't know you know is shifting still happening so I think it's just good to be caution cautious and prudent to assume that flattening retail sales tax revenue could be a long-term trend or at least a medium-term trend and then to reset to a lower baseline for ongoing business use tax and construction use tax in to the

[68:00] extent we see revenues above you can budget those at the time and again need to adjust ongoing expenditures to match projections for ongoing revenue so really this focus on what what is a good assumption for ongoing revenue for budgeting purposes and again we will continue to examine the trends we appreciate all of your insights and ideas for further analysis and we definitely will pursue those and report back and then we will have a study even later this year Thank You Cara um that's a lot of data coming your way so what does it all mean um at the end of 2017 we always take the opportunity to look at what our revenues did which you just get a large context of how we ended the year and why we might consider revising down our initial revenue projections and so largely we're going to be talking about the general fund and then briefly talk about other funds but because the general fund sales and use tax is 42

[69:01] percent we figured we wanted to address any issues that arose so back in February a few short months ago when we looked at our revenue projections and Takara's Point realigned some of our ongoing assumptions we noticed a gap that isn't good our ongoing expenditures were outpacing our ongoing revenues for 2018 and by not doing anything immediately it would exponentially grow in that out years come because of a compounding effect and so you received email and there's been a lot of discussions about addressing this gap immediately so Department directors went to work and immediately closed the gap which is what you're seeing in this chart April right now we were able to identify and we'll go into the solutions of how we found it by able to identify some cuts largely one-time giving just the you know it was February now it's April kind of a short time frame we want to be thoughtful and what we propose

[70:01] ongoing so in the 2019 budget you'll see a lot more of these discussions that talk about our ongoing strategies largely 2018 you won't see very much with regards to service level impacts so kind of good question yeah okay go back to the previous line yeah so the so the ongoing expenditures shows a steady increase and is that purely inflationary increase X that assume that like we froze headcount we froze programs and then that's just how many you pay 3% more a year it presumes that we don't freeze well yes that we freeze had cat we had the same amount so it presumes you know personnel increase along with healthcare is the largest piece of 70% is personnel expenditures in the general fund and so just by the natural increase in salaries and benefits that's largely what makes up the increase year-over-year okay so it doesn't assume any increases in programs or mmm-hmm it's just just the point in time 2018 budget if we were to maintain

[71:02] everything that we've committed to today right is there do you know offhand a percent factor they used to anticipate increases yeah I do three percent for personnel five percent for healthcare and then we project about a 1% for just ongoing npe or supplies which is fairly low but okay it's what we've been using thank you yeah so we addressed the gap like I said 2019 is gonna require a lot more work so the one-time fix doesn't help us it helps us in a team but we need to make these financially solvable so the 2019 target will look more closely aligned with this by having ongoing reductions and there's still more work to do to always ensure again revenue projections they change constantly it's point in time but this is what we understand especially given that we think that the revenue trend is more of a long term here to stay at a slower growth rate so falling on Aaron's

[72:01] question that the yellow line which is our ongoing expenditures between your first slide in this third slide that slope is the same it's just you've moved it down to the act to the to the right because we would need to reduce services we're still assuming a three percent growth rate and whatever our headcount is in five percent of healthcare we're just moving that down you get about to tell us what that means right yes as far as actual services yeah not quite yet sorry so in addition to both the kind of ongoing pressures that we have in our increasing cost both in personnel and in healthcare this is a chart that we always try to keep updated just to provide perspective we call it our buying power so what it shows on line is what our sales tax has been so yeah we've seen a lot of growth in our sales tax over the past gosh 10 15 years a little bit of the flattening as we saw

[73:00] between 2017 but when you adjust our sales tax revenues for inflation our buying power meaning that things are getting more expensive in the revenue that we're receiving is remained fairly flat you know some increases but certainly not at the rate of increase that we've seen for sales tax so this is something we always want to keep in mind and again this is inflation only construction cost certainly in the past few years have been a way above even our inflation projection so it's just a constant reminder that we need to be cautious as we program ongoing expenditures and now I'm going to talk about our proactive approach so like I said in 2018 a lot of our reductions both given the short time frame and what we knew we had on board for 2018 have been largely one-time reductions focusing heavily on personnel savings so there's been kind of a small portion from this related to staffing reductions

[74:01] or holds of positions through the entire year but rather more of a calculation on what our normal vacancy and kind of churn of staffing in the hiring process you know it takes several months and that in turn accumulates saving so what we've asked departments to do is calculate those savings so that we could capture them for 2018 alone so 70% of our reduction strategies in 2018 relate to personal savings not a coincidence that 70% of our expenditures are personnel so moving forward we'll likely see that a lot of the savings will need to come from some sort of mix of personnel and operations there are also non personnel expenditures what this means is that perhaps we're using in source resources instead of contracting out different types of services or consulting firms a small portion of it and then re-evaluating process and processes and programs so an example of this would be in channel 8 we've had a

[75:00] lot of technology upgrades in the past few years that led to operational savings which is great so kind of giving back those savings that we previously had budgeted or looking at different partnerships both within the county or outside the city so that's an example of what it will be again I do not anticipate that there will be many service level reductions or changes that the community will see in 2080 to load and just given that a large portion is just from our typical vacancy savings we want to highlight what other funds are doing because general fund not alone you saw in Cara's chart that showed where our retail sales or sales and use tax goes also largely it goes to transportation open space and they're actually much more reliant on this and if you'll recall in the 2018 budget process during the CIP discussions we actually highlighted some of the changes that they needed to make last year because there's so much more reliant on sales

[76:00] and use tax so transportations doing focused reductions in line with their master plan and reductions around their system enhancements and some ongoing operating reductions related to temporary staff and contracted services and similarly in open space following our operating budget guidelines they're expiring positions through attrition this is a multi-year process where they've identified various positions that once that employee retires or is no longer with the city they would no longer need it they've done this through a lot of cross-training and process improvements and then evaluating their carryover for both capital and then incorporating new technologies to improve efficiencies they recently developed or received a project management system that's really helps increase their efficiency yes good a question here that the Transportation says CIP reductions prioritized do we have a specific list of how it's been reprioritized

[77:07] sure the chance to be oh that's good yeah we'll just wait for Mike until next yes next time alright so not only have we looked at what reductions we want to make but it's critically important in maintaining some of our existing commitments as well and we wanted to highlight two things that were really important to us as Cheryl mentioned our reserves are absolutely critical reserves are not being recommended as a short-term or a long-term strategy they're really meant to be in times of emergencies and given that we don't think that this is a blip or recession it's not wise to use those fundings because they're really considered one time you know the the most recent example or the one that's most prominent is the flood right we had 28 million dollars in damage and because at the time we had strong reserves we were able

[78:00] to not discontinue services and not have to stop you know paying employees that was never a concern of ours is that we want to be able to make payroll where it was in some other community so I think it's really important that we maintain our reserves for 2018 at 18% and then as Cheryl also highlighted one of the things that I know is a huge goal and something that we are personally very happy with is this capital improvement program it's a small dollar amount compared to the number of assets that we have in the general fund and it's our intention to grow it using all long going money and we think that just given you know the conversations that we had around the community culture and safety extension and kind of what the questioning of why some of these things weren't funded just in our annual budget process this is the reason why is now that we have it we certainly want to maintain it and keep it going and we'll get into there's a different section of the general fund capital projects recommended as a second piece but those

[79:00] are existing commitments that we are going to carry on forward with and I'm sorry to keep interrupting you but the real question here on the reserves so it's great that we're maintaining it we shouldn't be using those to plug one-time gaps I know we've had a reserve increase program or we still think about adding to the reserves who are keeping them the same level their parent Lee our goal is still twenty by twenty twenty twenty percent so despite the declining revenues we're still thinking about upping our reserve levels that's a point for discussion yeah I do want to discuss that how that decision was made and whether we've bought into it but I had another question about that um when we were looking at whether the impact would be if we passed the muni reauthorization and continuing authorization in 2017 s election it passed and we had been shown analysis that showed that the reserves would fall because of the way the money would get

[80:00] spent at first in that effort so will we be increasing above eighteen percent in the short term no and what we found so that was a point in time right where the energy team had presumed that they would be needing more dollars this year than the revenue would bring in now that they've done some analysis and seen just kind of how slow and long everything takes that they're not anticipating on using any more dollars above what the revenue is coming in at for the reelection effort hey so that's a change then there's that reflected in some information packet somewhere or how would we have learned that change business I'm not sure so it's not in an information packet yet because we're still working on our contracts with Xcel Energy those contracts will be provided to the council on May 22nd as you know

[81:04] and at that time I think we can probably talk a little bit more about when our anticipations are around the expenses for the rest of the year right now we don't have it all settled and actually Cheryl reminded me and that supplemental appropriation that was verbals on the sugar sweetened beverage back in February CCS and energy we did highlight that there would likely not be a need to have to dip into it so that was also her thank you reminding me I just wasn't sure I didn't make the connection between that and the reserves thank you okay we're gonna pause with a lot of information thrown at you and ask questions related to just this information our strategies or any other sales and use tax kind of projection questions that you may have before we move on to what capital programs were recommending for 2018 I hope we've mostly been asking them as we

[82:00] go cuz how much I'm gonna need we have one more slide oh that's it all the bonding issues just one more oh okay ask away who's got questions on I just have one clarification if I remember correctly during the council retreat Jane we were gonna hire some new staff members correct I think in planning yeah so does that mean we're not hiring those staff members now do you are hiring them yes and in fact when the first adjustment to base comes through for first reading on May 1st you'll see that those are included as new positions so the reductions that we're making in 2018 take us to a point where we still can add those positions as counsel requested and still make our budget balance and more than balance great Thanks I just

[83:03] have a catch-up question and that is what were the revenue projections for 2018 so 2018 was going to be 2% off of our 2017 budget and so what we revised back downwards was basically flat and a little bit less than what our 2017 budget was just because we didn't make our 2017 budget actually come to fruition right we had to revise that downward last year - uh-huh were you anticipating having growth though that was more in keeping with our neighbors no not necessarily keeping with our neighbors it was just typically what you see even in flat years is that your growth rate will at least catch up to what the inflation rate is and so even in slow growth you have this natural increase of cost of services or cost of

[84:01] goods related to inflation so we thought it at minimum I would at least catch up to that and what we're seeing is that it's still kind of tracking downwards from even an inflationary increase thank you sorry for construction news and business shoes we actually put that into the original budget that we balanced we accounted for the fact that we were going to reset the base for both of those revenue sources so as more of the sales tax where we were off thank you given the volatility of sales tax in our dependence on sales taxes there been some discussions among staff about possibly shifting our reliance away from sales tax and toward other sources like property tax which tends to be more stable there's not not increasing the overall revenue pie but but shifting from a less reliable or more more volatile source like sales tax to a less

[85:03] volatile source like property tax we've talked about a lot of things and also in addition to that trying to diversify our revenues even more because if you take sales and property tax that's almost 75 percent of our budget and in times of bad economic times even property tax stagnate sir goes down so we are looking at that one of the other things we want look at in the next year or two is the fees that were charging and are we charging the right amount to recover the cost of the service a lot of our fees we've not really looked at in a while so we want to go beyond just sales tax and property tax if possible so when you come back to us I'd be really curious to see some benchmarking you know what other cities comparable cities with $30 linkage fees but always in just our

[86:03] cities what is their reliance on property sales other taxes I'd be curious about that the second is I'd be curious you know we hear a lot from the community about you know comparing us to other cities on expenditures I'd be curious that what our revenue comparison is in on a per capita basis or we bring in X million a hundred million dollar hundreds of millions of dollars in property tax sales tax all of our sources revenue on a per capita basis how do we compare to other cities because I'd be really curious to see not only the mix but the dollars per person we can definitely get that information yeah thanks I guess we're doing this retail study and we're going to talk about it later but I'm just curious are we setting it up to address all the things that we are learning from this I mean what's the synergy the answer is we

[87:01] haven't set it up yet okay so we've been waiting to present you the downtown retail study and that is now going to be on July 10th part of that discussion we'll be talking about the how did craft if you will the request for proposal to our consultant what are the kinds of things that we are wanting to find out about so a thing that you might not recall is that when this discussion started in the budget last year the thought was that perhaps we needed to understand what kind goods and services we need to have a sustainable community that provides goods and services to all economic strata of the city noticing that Walmart had left and that for example we don't have any dollar stores in the city of Boulder we are losing some of our used car dealers so the retail study as

[88:00] originally imagined was that it was going to really try to take a broad look at are we providing the right kinds of goods and services in our community that can reach everyone the discussion that we've been having tonight related to the retail sales adds another dimension to it and that dimension is given what we've got in terms of retail sales are there are other things that we should be going after that would increase our revenues or how do we compare with others so you've added and that's great a number of other points of information that you'd like to receive and so as we prepare for the July 10 study session we'll be thinking more broadly about what that study actually looks like I think it's food for thought for all of us if we have additional thoughts that are spurred by this conversation I am curious about the bond thing cuz that

[89:01] was a big part of them you can talk about that next no launchers as part of our background for tonight we talked a lot about our bonding capacity and maybe we're just gonna talk about that when we have a conversation about broadband or other things that we is that how this is set up yeah the presentation itself didn't reference any of our bonding capacity it was a included in the packet as a reference to set the context of some of the things that we have on the radar that could affect our expenses moving forward okay well maybe we'll just save that for I guess we'll come up in broadband look like what whether we can afford something like yeah I think it will come as we have our conversations on May 8th around ballot measures because we'll be talking about broadband earlier that night and then you'll be thinking about what do you want to put on the ballot so the background material had a list of

[90:02] many Capitol items and there were a few other items like affordable housing funds that we if we had enough money we would love to be able to address those issues you've heard from the Library Commission about the needs that the library feels like they've got in their master plan coming up and so we were trying to have that background material to set you up for future discussions really not tonight but May 8th when we bring the library master plan back about how would we address those needs and interestingly when Bob asked the question about should we become less reliant on sales taxes one of the things that we've talked about is those other needs could be addressed through property tax perhaps but that was different than your question which was oh if we switched our our source of revenues but kept the amount the same by like maybe reducing sales tax have we

[91:01] talked about that so we haven't actually talked about that or at least I haven't talked about it so there's lots of different things to be thinking about and we wanted you to be well aware of the fact that there are many needs in our community and to be thinking about that as we start talking about what might be on the ballot what the future holds in all those different realms I don't remember if it was in this packet but did was there I know there was discussion of property tax mill levy etc but was it in there whether or not property tax was specifically diverted to some expenditure we're not I don't remember they just go into the general fund well the so the property tax if we just passed like another increment of property tax let's say in general that would go into the

[92:00] general fund but you can also dedicate it if you chose to do that and so that is the way the wording of the ballot question would be so if the council said oh we would like to have a mill of property tax dedicated to affordable housing so the attorney would write that ballot question and then the voters would vote on it and then it could be dedicated I see thank you some of the challenges we have our lid to the fact that we've dedicated a lot of our taxes in other words we have less I'm not being critical but we have less flexibility because we're only talking about our general fund which is like a third of our budget right the other 2/3 I mean one you know big chunk of its utility I get that but we got a big chunk of our budget that's dedicated so we have piles of money sitting over here and then we have deficits we don't have the ability to move it from one place to another because of that dedication it was we're moving in the right direction the question is whether we want to continue move that direction and it's not necessarily piles of money either

[93:02] some maybe okay so this is related to the general fund capital we wanted to remind council the easte dollars were already appropriated so we're not asking for an additional appropriation but we did say because this was a brand-new kind of type of expenditure we would come back and update council with what we think are the top priorities for this first year of funding and we can briefly go through the list and answer any questions you may have about the specific projects but most of them should be familiar the rescue vehicle is a public safety vehicle that was part of the original project suggested for the community culture safety tax again this is one where the committee kind of thought maybe that the the city should already have funds for these types of expenses it's way past its lifespan and

[94:01] we can answer any questions about it as well but we think that this is a prudent investment in our community given that it's the university town as well the hogan Pancoast land purchase has already been committed and when we did go before you we said that it would largely come from the general fund capital there's a small portion that we may loan to the general fund pending kind of the revenue projections and then the boulder rose for social enhancements is a project that's going on in parks and recreation they already had dedicated funds for this but due to the public outreach and the increased kind of both in scope and the land use requirements they require additional funding above what they have capacity for and their funds and then a data center redundancy again the descriptions are in your packet but this is to improve redundancy and reliability of our data centers so that we don't have a complete crash of the system's

[95:00] when any given sector goes out and then we are recommending that the gender neutral restrooms which is another high priority especially for the library be funded they have a dedicated reserve that's mainly for capital because it's one-time dollars be funded out of that dedication to get that project moving forward and then again there's a couple projects that are recommended not this year for funding but I certainly anticipate that as we move into the 2019 budget process these are the next top on the list I was I'll say a little surprised to find out our library restrooms are not up to code so it seems like we need to address it so just to make sure I understand is this how we are going to allocate these funds for the first year grade so fire breathing apparatus and the rescue vehicle those are it's interesting which one is funded and which one is not

[96:00] is this 115,000 for a few surplus so this year we already updated a million vehicles or a million dollars worth of upgraded fire breathing apparatus for our firefighters and this would have been just surplus extra units that we actually use for training so we'll be thinking about that next year so I have a few things so I was apologize for continuing to talk here just one thing on the data center redundancies this isn't area that I have some professional expertise in and this is an outsourced Abul thing and so I just to wonder to what extent we've evaluated the cost-benefit of sending that to I know Julia Richmond is here and I'll wait for her to come down the stairs since she is definitely much more the expert than I am so for this project

[97:05] the first phase is really studying what options we have with regard to the technologies systems that that we have already in our data centers so understanding what we can move where we can move it to and how we move it and then using that strategy will actually execute and implement that hopefully in the next year so yes we can outsource it but the first phase is understanding what to do with each thing and we will expect to use external help to make those decisions great so in other words a final decision hasn't been made about the future of where the servers go is that no right okay yeah well I just encourage you to look carefully because you get all the redundancy and such that the professional data centers have already done you don't necessarily have to build a building that has this exactly Thanks great thank you for that the next question was about whether can we get itemized the budget decisions that have

[98:02] been made like for example we've got some emails today about a position that was dropped so which I don't have an issue with but if it's possible to hear the decisions that have already been made I think they have a useful information for us to know as counsel yeah we can do that great thank you and then so this is not a feedback night right it's an information night right if there's both we're happy to take both okay especially as we prepare for 2019 I mean this is all setting the stage for discussions to come in how we direct departments to help develop their budget okay because we could offer a fair amount of feedback on this topic but we're out of time I know um I just I guess the the the this seems like it's a big area and it's worth some discussion on so I mean maybe there's there's an opportunity to have a little bit more talk about it adjustment to base but I guess the one the one thing that I would bring up

[99:01] tonight would be the question of growing the reserves at a time of flattening revenues so I'm interested to see the scale of the cuts that we're looking at and I think that would help determine the best path forward for our community but I you know if we can make those adjust these adjustments relatively painlessly that's one thing but if we are cutting in things that are really a benefit to our community that mean this may not be the time to also be growing the reserves yes for 2018 we believe that the the changes that we're making to the budget will not be apparent to the community we can make those without impacting when we comes to 2019 I think that will be a fruitful time to have the conversation about the reserves so we can definitely talk about it then again we are going to recommend 19% for 2019 and try to show you a balanced and we

[100:01] will show you a balanced budget that includes that but you may decide that some of the recommendations that we're making for reductions are not ones you'd want to take and then talking about the reserve in that context would be helpful yeah that's where I think maybe the itemized list may not help you inform any of the reserve conversations quite yet but more in the context of the 2019 budget those were different requests I mean I think it's the first one is about the itemization is more just to have an understanding with what's happening with the organization sounds good and then just as a reminder to exam on the same page with Jay and it will be 19% recommended any addition is one-time dollars as well and we're really focused on the ongoing so just making that clear to everyone to about what the impact is on some of our decisions we're wrapping up but I have just two things one is that I'm sure one of your recommendations is that everyone by Boulder go out and spend some money

[101:00] right and but I'm wondering what you do with this 37 year old rescue vehicle what happens to that does it go to resource so carry working past its lifetime carry one our deputy chief of police up frankly our rescue vehicle has seen the back of a wrecker more than it's seen scenes at incidents that's how decrepit it is it there been many times it has not even started when we've needed it so it'll be it'll be probably sold for scrap so nice to another community it's not even right usable I doubt I would hate to strap another community in that can hold for money yeah you short ones away

[102:03] I just appreciate Aaron's comment but I do think our community's at significant risk for more disasters than Denver say you know with flood and fire risk so it'd be interesting if we are gonna have that talk to look at you know what what those risks present in some of the costs we have the flood data I would think we would need a lot more reserves than the average community will provide that context great alright well I think this is the beginning this is a nice introduction to the budget season which you can consider yeah officially begin so thank you for that thank you thank you for all your thoughtful insight really appreciate it and those were some amazing charts and it was really well done [Laughter]

[103:26] they just reminded to the tab folks in the audience you can come up and join us you know any get in there with staff Mike how many staff are you gonna have up here okay next topic transportation

[104:50] and we have all the tab members that are present up here looks like it yeah well thank you for joining us tonight and I

[105:01] just turn it right over to Mike all right so Aaron did you want me to talk about the budget before we get off on subjects for tonight or it did seem a little bit different I was just curious what changes you are considering it so probably describing the transportation budget and how it differs from the general fund and that the transportation budget is over two-thirds sales tax as opposed to the general fund which is more around the 40% and so our overall goals are different in that the reduction of the flattening and the sales taxes impacted the transportation plan more than it has a general fund so we're looking at reductions in the neighborhood of 8% so around a million and a half to two million dollars annually against the Transportation Fund transportation fund being approximately

[106:00] twenty four million dollars a year and so the what we use is our guiding principles are the transportation master plan guiding principles in our reduction strategies and so what we a tap priority is safety and maintenance of the existing infrastructure and then beneath that is investing in enhancements to the system and so what our reductions are primarily focused on are things that are going to slow the pace of our ability to invest in enhancements to the infrastructure so ability to leverage grant funding and those types of things what we're not doing is sacrificing any grant monies that we already have and so then for instance oh we get a lot of money federal money through the Denver Regional Council of Governments transportation improvements program and so the projects that we've gotten

[107:00] previously those require local match and we are maintaining the funding to assure that we'll be able to leverage those federal dollars one of the things that we'll talk about a little bit later is that the picture related to the federal grants is actually going to likely be 1/2 to 1/4 of what we've received previously just based upon some of the rules of engagement that is coming out of the Denver Regional Council of government changes and so our reductions are primarily in the enhancement category we maintain the funding for the maintenance of the existing infrastructure and then we did have some strategic reductions that relate to things such as level of service around aesthetics so for instance changing in long cycles or weeding cycles those types of things that won't impact the actual the

[108:02] viability of the asset but will change the aesthetics of the of the land landscape strips or the medians and those types of things and then another thing that we'll talk a bit about in our third section tonight is also our by ups of transit service with RTD that's another area which we've reduced and we'll talk a little bit about that later partly there's some dynamics there around whether or not RTD can actually accept our money for bi ops based upon their ability to get drivers and in buses and so that's another portion of the reductions and we'll talk about that a little bit more later when when Natalie comes up to talk about transit so I was wondering if there are any specific projects that were affected in terms of being cancelled or delayed so

[109:00] the way that the CIP is programmed right now is is it's positioned to really give us a lot of flexibility around whether we get grant funding and so the dollars that are identified or more generic right now for enhancement awaiting for the next doctor cog tip cycle and so it really is not identified currently in for a specific project knowing that we're gonna be submitting for grants in the fall and then figuring out what grants we get in what local match we require and then the remainder would be then dedicated to local projects so nothing specific as at this point in time the things that would logically be in that category would be things like implementing these quarter studies that we're currently underway so 33 colorado east arapahoe in canyon those

[110:00] would be the candidate projects most likely that would have to be slowed down but it sounds like the answer is just know that no current projects have been to later correct yeah that was what I think you know thank you took the long road I apologize so you bet so thanks very much for the opportunity to spend some time with you tonight we are going to cover three subjects this evening of the initial scoping around our transportation master plan update then our safety initiatives around vision zero and the third one around our transit studies and we hope to take about a half an hour for each one of those subjects and after each one we'll get into discussion on that particular subject is the intention and that's the way that the presentation is organized and tab has joined us and so there are three tab members here and we

[111:00] have a an area in the presentation right after my comments where they'll share their thoughts on these same subjects one of the things that I wanted to emphasize is that while we're here tonight talking about three elements we are also working on a bunch of different things that we'll be visiting with you fairly quickly so some of those are the vision plan for east arapahoe which we hope to come back in the second quarter and get your feedback on and then we do have a study session May 22nd on our 30th in Colorado quarter studies and then just to mention a couple of cool things that are also going on at the same time so some of our innovations so in the Bloomberg challenge around low income mobility programs or some exciting things that we're doing right now so with that I'll turn it over to the tab to share their thoughts on the

[112:01] subjects we're going to cover tonight hi there I'm Jennifer Nicole I'm the new chair of the transportation advisory board and I've got the bill regular and Tila do Jaime Jane I should have known that here with me tonight um since this is the first time tab has actually been up before this new City Council we just wanted to kind of refresh who we are and why we exist and so tab is tasked with advising the city manager City Council and the Planning Board on matters concerning boulders transportation transportation systems and detract the transportation master plan specifically among other things so the two members that are not with this tonight are Johnny draws deck and Mark McIntyre every year after the new board and commissions appointees are made we meet for our tab retreat which is going to be held next week so the current priorities that we're referencing here are actually the priorities that the board identified almost exactly a year ago I don't

[113:01] anticipate that you'll see a whole lot of change in them so what we're gonna do is talk really quickly about kind of just what we've prioritized and the kind of lens that we look at transportation projects through when we're evaluating from them from a tab perspective so in terms of transportation safety and vision zero we're gonna discuss that more on the next slide so I'm gonna let that one stand for now but meaningful parking reform really we're talking about adopting accelerating the adoption of the access management parking strategy that's what amps is the recommendations for parking that they be consistent with some principles which are shared unbundled managed and paid so when we talk about parking reform and parking in Boulder those are the things that we're looking for and how that relates to transportation demand management which is the TDM you see there we spent a lot of time last year specifically a focused on improving a proactive community engagement and you may have seen from tab more op-eds in

[114:02] the daily camera more postings on next door more social media activity and kind of spearheaded by bill really challenging staff every time they gave us a proposal to really think through the communication strategy and what that meant in terms community engagement and in terms of the community feedback process as tab we really regard ourselves as the liaison between the community and city council and we really hope to facilitate the community being able to express their opinions and us being able to you know present that to you we've done that through a lot more public hearings at our transportation advisory board meetings on the Left I think they have I mean we've had full House's at our public hearings and we've we've done we've tried to really partner with community organizations to publicize those events in terms of transportation equity what we're really talking about there is promoting first and last mile

[115:01] solutions enhancing accessibility to transportation considering the financial costs associated with the various transportation modes and promoting Complete Streets so next slide please in terms of what we're going to talk about tonight and the transportation master plan update as members of tab we understand that this is a major comprehensive work efforts that we will be highly involved with from a public engagement process we anticipate to approach this with the process that are - that were articulated by the public participation working group and we employed these same processes during the NSM P the neighborhood's speed mitigation no management speed minton sorry it's so gotten so many different names the neighborhood speed management program we anticipate using that as a template for how we engage the public around the transportation master plan including in-person meetings email next door social media and then outreach

[116:00] to various local media outlets so I know our presentation tonight is a little bit bundled and you're gonna get it from staff a little unbundled but that's kind of where tab is coming from when we talk about the transportation Master Plan Update know if either of you guys want to add anything on that before we move on division zero sorry alright next slide okay okay so in terms of tabs thoughts on vision zero we believe that we need to have a continued focus on transportation safety for all modes and all users and that we need a continued emphasis on sustaining the public engagement of round vision zero and this comes from a deep acknowledgement that the importance of public by end for any culture change to happen we also encourage staff to increase focus on engineering and enforcement that reduces speeding you'll hear more from staff tonight about the four es vision zero so far has we at least from a top perspective is really focused on

[117:01] education which is fantastic we'd like to see my stepped-up focus on engineering and enforcement as well so the final topic for tonight which is um renewed vision for transit tab is very concerned about our funding for transit and our partnership with RTD we don't have a lot of solutions we have a lot of questions as I think everybody does but we do think that it might be worthwhile first to explore regional partnership opportunities to form sustainable funding solutions that support the infrastructure and services along our key community or total corridors and that may mean just engaging more proactively our neighboring communities and figuring out solutions potentially outside of RTD yeah sure thanks Jennifer that was really very concise well done I I just wanted to raise the idea that because because vision zero is sort of new and newly adopted in the city we tend to be raising it separately but I

[118:02] just want to emphasize that it is sort of a new way of thinking Jennifer mentioned culture change and why you know your support is so important for culture change and what we're talking about is rethinking about how everyone gets around and it affects all kinds of things like how we view a good trip from one side of town to the next how we think everyone should be able to move around and who we priorities and how we prioritize them but it means realizing how we've prioritized motor vehicle transit and motor vehicle trips in the past and need to shift away from that to people moving and so there's a lot of things in the TMP for instance that we'll we'll be really looking at will be rethinking about you know the level of service you'll hear about that that's about how congested a vehicle how much congestion a vehicle and a driver and a vehicle encounters but if we focus more on reducing our single occupancy vehicle trips even if cars are

[119:01] going slower to accommodate vision zero to accommodate safer travel speeds will achieve the level of service that we need and so I just want to pull back and say that for a number of reasons vision zero is a very good way for us to reach a number of other goals safety and mobility transit equity a lot of people who are not in Motor Vehicles are there because they choose not to there they're using a safer slower less congestive mode of transit walking biking public transit or they can't afford to write and these are or they're too old or they're too young to drive or they're disabled these are the people that we ought to be paying more attention to and giving accommodations to that we haven't in the past and vision zero can if we sort of rethink everything through a lens of vision zero of protecting those more vulnerable users the very young the very old the disabled the slower we will probably find our way toward better modes of transit and better and more

[120:01] democratic uses of our public roadway that prioritizes those people and helps us achieve our other goals like reducing greenhouse gas emissions increasing transit use that kind of stuff so vision zero should not in our as we continue to go forward be a separate thing that we're gauging separately it helps us guide our more humanitarian more democratic more all-encompassing planning for roadways that we really hadn't thought about in the previously and so I really applaud the city for adopting vision zero but I don't want it to be a separate thing it's something that should be affecting every way we look at our use of our public roadway in public spaces thank you and I just want to acknowledge mark McIntyre the newest tab member who's joined I'm bill reg'lar another vice-chair of tab two things the first is that I want to say this before mike has the opportunity but we'd be happy to partner with a fired some fire breathing apparatus on top of

[121:00] our buses or something similar oh sorry must be late don't think it's hilarious the other thing I wanna mention is that we would really appreciate Tabs encouragement of increased collaboration between tab and planning board there are a lot of activities whether that's in on their east arapahoe corridor Colorado and and xxx where the stronger collaboration makes sense and we would deeply appreciate your efforts to help bring us together in that way so far it's been very challenging to organize those and with the exception of the large large board and Commission events that we do but it just seems that for us to be no longer working in silos on so many areas that really affect issues of housing and transportation and and and this nexus is really important so we'd be grateful for your consideration and support do you talk to or consult with

[122:05] Planning Board at all and things like transportation demand management I mean those conversations haven't really happened it's it's the efforts have been made but so far just the collaboration hasn't been there in the way that I think that we would find to be helpful question about vision zero on page 51 of the packet because I also think it's extremely important and should be at the top of kind of all of our lists of discussions around transportation because injuries and death are you know kind of our first charge for Public Health and Safety so I see that there were 53 serious injury and fatal crashes in 2009 there were 66 serious injury and fatal crashes in 2016 but that is in a yellow category where I would put that in a red category because our vision is zero of those and we're moving in the

[123:02] wrong direction so I guess have that question to tab but also a comment of council members that I think if we are going to make that a top line headline that we should assess it as seriously deficient at this time so I love feedback on that absolutely agree we will be going into a portion of the presentation where we'll go into that a bit more so so from a process perspective maybe we should suspend but we're all gonna sit here and have this conversation together so maybe we should let them jump in and we'll all dialogue together on these three big topics at least that sound a good way to proceed sure I think this you know we're doing a lot of stuff on a visualization of data and and so on and so I found this graphic to be extremely helpful it

[124:00] brings kind of everything together in one place I just want to make sure that we have time to discuss it because there's several things on here that I don't need to be highlighting okay and you're gonna pause that for each one yes all right okay go ahead and jump in I'm good evening thank you so much for the opportunity to be here I'm Kathleen Brockie I'm the NGO Boulder manager with the city's transportation group and really appreciate the opportunity to have a conversation this evening around scoping the 2018-19 transportation master plan update and as we get started I just think it's real important to have the reminder about why we need to update the TMP and why now it's a very important time in transportation and the trends and the technologies and the community changes that we're facing and the TMP plays a very important role in supporting our broad range of sustainability goals it certainly supports accessible and connected

[125:01] community but it has a role to play in all of these different areas in terms of bringing people together and neighborhood livability and economic vitality so it's a it's a very important piece that supports all of the other work that we do in the city and then we also just as a reminder in terms of what the TMP is there's why we do it and what it really sets the vision the community's vision for a multimodal transportation system it identifies our strategic actions our investment policies and priorities and then identifies those key measurable objectives that we'll talk more about in terms of how do we guide and measure our progress toward these important goals and then it's also important to talk about kind of how we do the TMP and we really emphasized that the TMP is a living document we updated approximately every five years and the idea is that with the community and with council and have we set that course for the next decades to come for and the

[126:01] transportation improvements and then we include an action plan we go to work on that that's what sets our annual work program and our budgeting priorities and then we check in every two years with the transportation report on progress and see how are we doing and where are we making progress and where are we continuing to struggle and and each of the TMP then that information kind of cycles back and helps with the next TMP update so each transportation master plan builds on the one that came before and so it's kind of a building blocks approach with again with the community in service of those broader community goals and then this is just a real high-level timeline of this particular TMP update item we're in kind of the later stages of this assessment and scoping component on the front end the idea is to check in with with you all the tab with the community to make sure we're getting off on this journey on the right foot and how then that will influence the work that we go to do in

[127:00] more detailed areas over the next year and then bringing forward for council consideration next year the updated transportation master plan and what's pretty exciting about 2019 it's actually will be the 30th anniversary of the transportation master plan and so I think it's a real commitment to council to the community this long history of creating a vision implementing it over time adjusting the course as needed and then continuing to move forward in this thoughtful approach so as part of the assessment phase in the scoping and we've done a variety of different sort of qualitative and quantitative approaches we've hosted a variety of events recently and then again completed the 2018 report on progress in January these events have been very valuable in providing input from the community in terms of scoping the TMP update as well as helping us to hear from national practitioners and thought leaders and

[128:01] transportation to help us kind of take a step back and take that broader view and say what are the areas that we should be focusing on what are the trends that are happening around the country and locally and how can we apply those in the work that we'll be doing this is just a quick summary of some of the key messages or the feedback that we received from the national panelists that we're here and really it comes back to focusing on the community and having a conversation with the community and focusing on people equity access and thinking about how these new types of technologies that are coming forward will help us achieve our goals it's not about the technology itself it's how do we use that technology and those trends in service of our community goals for our environmental stewardship our economic vitality and neighborhood livability we we chose these two pictures to show I think it's pretty clever and that the idea of autonomous vehicles actually isn't new it's been around since the

[129:00] fifties this was put together and shared with us by a Jeffrey tumblin from Nelson Nygaard and it's interesting is the picture from before is about how autonomous vehicles would help bring people together so it's a group of people playing a board game in the car and then when you look at what the images are coming out today about autonomous vehicles it's really more about individuals and they're in the car but they're not really interacting it's a very almost isolated experience and so as we're thinking about these things how do we bring forward policies and strategies that are bringing people together in creating a connected community and not the isolation that's a interrupt I'll just say that panel on the launch was one of the more provocative interesting pounding panels I've seen on transportation maybe ever and I think you found it can't sleep [Laughter]

[130:01] yeah it was it was very provocative yeah can you tell us where we can find that video yes it's on the city web website for the transportation master plan update and people can also access it through be heard Boulder which is our new online engagement platform so you can kind of get there two ways either through the TMP web page or through be heard Boulder and then these are some of the concerns and questions and hopes that the community shared with us that evening which was again we had a lot of interactive activities that people were getting involved in it was really a great event and and we heard again the interest and for the community-wide eco past interest and continued commitment for safety offering additional regional options for travel and supporting the electric vehicles and we also heard the continued concerns around traffic and noise and how are we maintaining the system so that people can have access year-round the other event that we held

[131:01] was last fall and this event is actually also taped and available online and this was the advanced mobility the event that was held as part of the city's the future is here series and it was actually very again thought-provoking not from the standpoint of all the different bells and whistles that are going to be out in the in the public realm but how do we use those technologies to work toward more of the positive or utopian aspects or outcomes that we could be desired in terms of more shared travel more information systems reducing vehicle miles traveled and air quality emissions versus more of the dystopian which could actually go the other way and increase the amount of traffic and lead to safe more safety concerns and other things so again we're at a very interesting time at a very interesting crossroads and how do we get in front of this to develop those policies and strategies so we can leverage the benefits of the new technology without the negative consequences and then

[132:02] here's the report card we were talking about a minute ago and this is a summary piece from the transportation report on progress and the idea is it's at a glance it's kind of looking at those nine measures that we've been tracking over many years and identifying how are we doing and we recognize that we are making progress in many areas I would say really the community's making a lot of good progress particularly Boulder residents that are choosing to walk bike and take transit for a lot of the local trips but we are continuing to struggle and we have a lot more work to do in these areas including regional travel and also the safety goals and our vision zero goals so we recognize that and appreciate the feedback on this in addition it identifies we have more work to do on vehicle miles traveled and this is kind of a image around how Boulder has done a great job you know holding steady on vehicle miles

[133:01] traveled over the last several decades and this was a goal of their some of the early transportation master plans was that basically traffic wouldn't get any worse we would hold vehicle miles traveled at 1994 levels and we've done a good job with that but what we're seeing the last several years is that that number is starting to creep up and it's creeping up not only regionally but also locally and so through this TMP update what are we doing to help influence that slope of the line and make more significant progress so we can be reducing vehicle miles traveled and accomplish our transportation goals as well as our climate commitment goals and so that leads all of that assessment piece leads to the focus areas that we've identified to go to work on as part of this particular TMP update there's more details about this that is provided in your attachment C and we have large copies of those up here too just for easier reference but each of

[134:00] these are important they're all interconnected and I'd like to start with the Complete Streets focus area there's a lot to go to work on in this particular area and again the ideas that our streets are for people therefore people using all modes of transportation at all ages and stages of life and how are we continuing to advance our Complete Streets policies and performance measures so that we're making sure that we are creating that future transportation system that is safe and connected and accessible for all the next focus area is our regional travel focus area we need to continue to work with our agency partners and our neighboring communities really appreciate all of the work by council and Mayor Jones for the work on behalf of the mayors and commissioners coalition each of these corridors are challenging in and of themselves and we're bringing this forward as a network of mobility and to connect folder with our surrounding communities and use the

[135:00] u.s. 36th corridor as a model so that it includes all of those elements the bus rapid transit the commuter bike way and the manage lanes a very important focus area for this particular TMP update is our transportation demand management area and it's been mentioned earlier this evening last year we created the access management and parking strategy document which was very helpful in multiple years of work kind of coming together we need to keep that momentum going and use the guiding principles that came out of amps and the action items to move forward with this parking reform and again it's an integrated piece of providing more options and more choice for the community and also this particular focus area will be where we're kind of the umbrella for the advanced mobility policy discussions so the new technology the trends mobility as a service that's really it's something that's already here people are already doing that

[136:00] through transportation network companies but we're just seeing that that's going to continue to grow and be a more and more popular choice and so what are the policy implications from that and then transportation funding we've you've talked a lot about that this evening with the transport with all of the funding conversations and you know locally again we we are struggling with our projected sales tax revenue and the other piece of that is not just the the amount of funding and the purchasing power but it's also the realization that more and more of the budget is needed to maintain the base system so as Mike said that ongoing operations and maintenance is a you know approaching 80% of the budget which then creates less amount of funding available to do the enhancements and you know Boulder is not alone in this my RTD is facing significant financial challenges and not able to deliver the existing

[137:01] service today nor be able to deliver the service of the future so again we'll be talking more about the details on that but see that is facing challenges at the state level and then certainly a lot of uncertainly uncertainty at the federal level and things are changing and we really need to use this particular TMP update to identify new potential funding mechanisms diversify the funding sources that we have and look at potential user fees so that we can be again kind of connecting the economics of transportation and looking at how do we incentivize or disincentivize options and choices so that the user experience is tied to the revenue I want to keep going in the interest of time one of our our last focus areas is very important it's really where we bring together our transportation policies and connect them with across the organization with land use with urban design with our climate

[138:00] commitment goals and it's about placemaking and really coming together in these collaborative ways and we've been very successful over the last several years and our Chautauqua access management plan all of the great things that are happening at Boulder junction and so this TMP update will be the opportunity to identify what that next generation looks like and where we can go to work together on those issues for the future these are the measurable objectives again that then they inform our report on progress I included this information because this was the list that came out of the 2014 TM and the new the green objectives were actually added as part of that process that's when we added the vision zero safety goal we added the 15-minute neighborhood walkability goal and the vehicle miles traveled so the opportunity that's in front of us is how do we look at this list today and say are there things there that should be changed or added or done differently in

[139:00] the future so that's another part of the plan update process and certainly the foundation of all of this work is a community engagement process it's very extensive again it takes to heart the advice and suggestions from tab from the community so that there's a combination of ways that people can get involved hands on the picture on the left is from the launch event and we have a large aerial map and people are putting stickies down they're writing on it saying these are the places I love to you know walk or bike or get around town and then these are the places that are hard for me and how do we go to work on making those better and it's a great conversation starter for all ages and then obviously tying these all of these strategies to the city's new Community Engagement framework and the recommendations from the public participation working group and it's a combination of in-person and online opportunities so that it's easy for people to get involved and to stay involved throughout the process and so

[140:01] in terms of next steps this again there's much to go to work on here and we appreciate the feedback from this evening and we will refine our work and move forward and continue the check-ins with tab on a monthly basis and then with council at the key milestones we'll be back to see you again in the fall and an important thing I wanted to mention here is that fortunately the city is not the only one updating their transportation master plan at this time Boulder County is cu-boulder is updating theirs and the city of Louisville and the city of Longmont just recently updated theirs so it's a great way where we're all doing this work together and being able to identify those opportunities for we can collaborate with our regional neighbors so some of the key takeaways there's again there's a lot here each of these focus areas are very important and and most of all they're all interconnected they're not independent slices they're all they all weave together to create that transportation system vision and then the foundation again is the community engagement as we

[141:02] go forward and that our intent is that each phase of the TMP update will have a customized or tailored approach to the community engagement so that it can be very specific to the particular topic areas so with that for this section we're very interested in counsels feedback on the proposed focus areas for the TMP and specific suggestions you may have for the community engagement process and just as a cheat sheet the attachment that's in your packet is really the staff proposal with that we'll turn it over do you have one this is really minor I know vision zero is included in complete streets but given how everybody is focused on it I don't know that you might want to not call that out and it's part of the focus area name completes

[142:02] streets tests you know slash vision zero just put it in the title idea okay I know that's very minor but I think we're really trying to make sure it remains front and center and I think everybody's gonna be looking for it and it's I think that important great can I just peek and yeah I don't know exactly what the wording is but I mean you can for example you could build a complete Street that was focused on throughput and not on safety right so I think it's important to have in that title the visions here was really part of that absolutely so I mean I want to start at their goal level I mean I view these as kind of the work plan to get to the goals right and then the first question is are the goals right and I have a couple of thoughts I understand why you have the VMT in red and highlighted as a

[143:01] real problem and I agree with that because we're trying to make it I'm sorry page 51 it's the report card and I think the reason that we care about the report card is not necessarily to go on tonight about how we're doing or not doing but are the goals right and are you know are the assessments right of what's going on and so VMT we're trying to reduce and we're not and so that obviously red is appropriate for that and I think that's a good goal and most of these goals are really appropriate and vision zero however we think about it should be at the top I mean to the extent that these things matter and people look first at things at the top I think we want that one as a lead personally and I think it should be read I mean I really do think that that's an important thing because as these guys just said about putting it in kind of a headline of Complete Streets I also think in this case if this is going to be what the communities can engage on and how they're gonna see goals in a really concise place and I think that I

[144:00] would move vision zero up and make it read and the one that bring up how little control I am afraid that tab has on the goal for increased the share of residents living in complete walkable neighborhoods to 80% I mean there is a component of interconnectivity and so on but that is largely implicated by planning and land use right and zoning and and the decisions in many cases are made by Planning Board as to whether and in council as to whether there will be the components of a walkable neighborhood in place that you could interconnect to so I would question how that one is going to really be greatly affected I think it's more effective the goals fine I mean I actually appreciate the goal I'm just not sure that one is so heavily weighted by planning and and land use that I'm not sure if it belongs

[145:00] at the same level as the rest of these where I think transportation and tab really on almost all of these is kind of the lead so that's just a comment can I ask a follow-up question about that and the and measuring the school do you purely look at say services near residence or do you also look at the transportation network in between those things so for example if we improve connectivity and add more multi-use paths does that get more people near walkable neighborhoods yes it's both it's the destination and the facility so so we have influence on part of it I guess this is the one where I think transportation has the least control of the outcome that's why I wanted to flag that and to some extent it's going in the wrong direction as well it's moving in the wrong direction and it's nowhere near the goal so I wouldn't necessarily color it red but it get it's one of those where we have an ambitious goal and we're moving in the

[146:00] wrong direction whatever we want to do with that from a Tad's perspective then and then I'm back to Bill's point about collaboration with Planning Board do we know if Planning Board has a comparable goal and should they are the only ones that can accomplish it so maybe to help clarify so this goal had been identified in the 2014 TMP and it's measured through GIS mapping and then as part of the Boulder Valley comprehensive plan it's one of the goals that got rolled up from the new TMP into the comp plan so it's an it's an example of how the TMP and the comp plan worked together kind of an iterative areas and so but you're right it does get at the point it's measuring both of those things and they need to policy that just says we shall strive something like we shall strive for more don't think it's specific as 80% is it how specific is the reference

[147:05] because so the idea was that this informed that it there's the policy list for the integration of transportation and we can land juice but we'll find out for you well I mean this gets right back to the point of the in creation between transportation and planning which bill brought up and I think that's right I'm the planning side of the house I think you see more mixed-use you know and lots of support for mixed-use in order to get to this goal but I don't know that there's a number of goal that's in mind and zoning has a lot to do with this right and so that doesn't come about all the time a lot of times that's on a project-by-project basis and similarly during the transportation demand management is often on a project-by-project basis brought forward by planning and transportation staff but

[148:01] to the planning board on a project-by-project basis so when you talk about collaboration with planning board I think one way would be a goal like this but another would be that that perhaps tab look at what transportations recommending on the project basis for TDM right because I'm sure wouldn't hurt planning's feelings to have tab say here's what we think on the TDM plan and then have that be part of what their input is for the site plan review so you have just a couple thoughts on that just if I may I think that's exactly right I think that process would be facilitated with councils imprimatur though so what do you need from us that would be more I think that could be done almost at the staff level if Planning Board agreed with you I'm not sure that we would have to weigh in if you work for planning

[149:01] board and said yet we want to do this staff can you do it you know how much trouble would it be to run the TDM part of a proposed site plan past tab for comment that would then go as part of the application to Planning Board so these projects of a certain size my plan review kind of makes them of a certain size in one of the items on the in the amps work plan is to is to actually develop a from a more robust TDM program that's actually more defined instead of the negotiated process that currently occurs during site review so that's one of the things that will be coming forward this year is to better define those TDM requirements so yeah I think that's an idea really worth exploring and I would just say I think the size threshold is also important because it's not just size the kitchen's site review so you can have small site review projects to just one other the goals so the I know

[150:01] last time you added some additional ones and I'd encourage you this time around to consider adding maybe some additional goals around the vision 0 program so right now the the goal is about how many injuries and deaths are and of course that's the most important thing right but we could also have goals about how our engineering and our street systems are moving forward in ways that can help us accomplish that goal so it might be handy to have a goal or two as well about how we're implementing techniques that then accomplish reducing those yeah.well injuries so I will one that like a leading pedestrian interval at stoplights for example which we don't have very many of you know so somewhere my favorite thing I'll talk a little bit more about later is bike boulevards you know to where you have a continuous corridor of with engineering treatments then not just a sign but engineering treatments that give you a good place to

[151:00] bike so I think partly would depend on some of the initiatives that you come up with as part of this TMP so I don't want to predetermine that but but as you move through this to think about additional measurable goals that you could add to the team view spur this process and I want to take onto that because I think that's great point if you put goals in you could measure in miles of you know whatever engineer bike lane you could measure a number of stoplights that have the leading walk sign you could measure it in number of under passes a number of you know pedestrian walkways that are added because I think those you know you set goals based on that and then see if you get there because I I like these because they're so measurable and they're dashboard like and you there are moving in the right direction or not there is also the aspect though you did talk about it being a culture change and that's at the start of the vision zero

[152:01] and there was a time when bicycles weren't that popular in the Netherlands that was that was a culture change and I'm wondering how if in the study session that's coming up you'll be also looking at in terms of transportation demand management about fees and costs for parking and parking spaces structures etc all of that and that you'll be getting into that so we'll be able to see some of the sticks as well as maybe some of the carrots right for sure and of course one of the interesting challenges that the accelerated changes around how we get around really also points out that some of our traditional tools might have to change and so if the future looks like we don't own cars and we don't drive them and we don't put them we just dial

[153:01] them up and they come to our door and then they take us to where we want to go the parking tool would be basically rendered useless and so and so there therein lies some of the challenges about how we would get around managing demand in the future where we're not parking cars anymore just another interesting challenge going forward one of the one of the carrots in that as well in one of Bob's favorite places Palo Alto is actually being yeah thank you is that people are actually paid not to drive and not to park and that given the options that one of the carrots that they will take that and leave the car at home with some of these SOPs in terms of being commuting yep and that's a great example and we are doing that on a smaller scale visas currently in the downtown and civic area but that could

[154:01] be one of the again the policy areas going forward for TDM and how could that be expanded in other areas I should have mentioned as part of the next steps that we would be bringing will be bringing forward an information packet for you in May on all of these different amps topics so you'll get a chance to kind of see those as a package - and they're all obviously connected and if I could just make one more comment on that there was recently I can't remember the numbers but it was the cost of the subsidy for the parking places if I'm gonna say this hotel goes through up on the corner of Broadway and University is something like the city's going to be paying a subsidy of something like seventy eight thousand dollars per space subsidy that's overlying what the cost will be so in places like that as well it'd be interesting to hear tab weigh in these are policy areas again yeah yeah and if I may just respond to that I feel like this is another area of collaboration between tab with the DMC and other

[155:02] groups especially as we look at declining retail sales tax you know the the downtown retail initiative that's about to be launched with $75,000 funds so as we look at parking fees and structures I think that again this is another area where we want to break out of our silos and kind of look at the whole chessboard to see what's going to work what's going to benefit the businesses what's going to achieve our our transportation priorities and again that raises the idea of folding in a lot of land use in planning about how how these these areas are going to be used in the future how they're used now how we think that's going to change and it's an opportunity on the corridor studies to be a little bit broader than they are like right now we're gonna hear about the corridor studies they're really about the roadway it's a little unfortunate on east arapahoe I think that there is some thought early on in the process to looking at changing land-use patterns and you know land management in east

[156:00] arapahoe and it just got too hairy and too scary and so we divorced it from what is the road we're going to look like and I think that with better direction from Council and sort of political will to to have those hard discussions about why the vehicles and the people are going to be moving around and what they're going to be doing in terms of what that land-use is going to look like it's going to really help us in places planning North Broadway planning a whole bunch of parts of the city that are really parts of the city now but are going to be changing in ways that we should be really thinking about land land use in connection with transportation to look towards sub community planning use in the queue and there's someone being hired member being hired to focus specifically on that I think the reason that the east arapahoe thing kind of ran into a buzzsaw is partly because it was not engaging as roughly around and so again we're gonna try and see all right good evening Bill

[157:11] Cowher and I'm the city's principal traffic engineer and I'll be speaking this evening to you about our vision zero goal theoretically we're going to start with a vision zero video in 2016 our community was shaken by over 3,000 collisions resulting in 59 serious injuries and seven fatalities those seriously injured 427 cyclists 12 pedestrians and 20 motorists in the fatal crashes Boulder lost a daughter a father a wife and a grandma we are more than just numbers we are individuals we are a community we need to look out for one another and make our streets safer

[158:01] inspired by the belief that a single traffic related fatality is one too many the city of Boulder joined the ranks of leading edge cities committed to safer streets and adopted vision zero vision zero programs across the United States operate under the principle that traffic deaths and severe injuries are both preventable and unacceptable and that all of us should be able to get around safely on our streets there are many factors that contribute to safe mobility including roadway design these enforcement behaviors technology and policies with vision zero our city is committed to addressing all these factors in order to achieve the bold vision of Bureau traffic related fatalities and severe injuries all of us have a role to play in vision zero whether we're driving biking or walking we all need to avoid distractions be mindful stay sober and look out for

[159:03] one another together we can make our streets safer so that is a video that can be found on our vision 0 website as part of our educational campaign in 2014 the city adopted the vision zero goal and we in doing so we joined a growing number of communities that have adopted this goal and are working to achieve it together and we appreciate being a part of that community because it certainly will take efforts from all the different communities working on this to ultimately achieve vision zero in our country one thing you know about solving or eliminating serious injury and fatal crashes is that we will need to know

[160:00] where they are occurring and why they are occurring currently and to do this our staff evaluates crash trends determines what type of mitigation might be appropriate to just mitigate those trends implements that and that information is codified in our transportation safe streets Boulder report and this information is just some of the findings that were included in that key to vision zero is that bicycle and pedestrians are represent only 8% of total collisions but represents 60% of the severe crashes that we're trying to eliminate with vision zero also that impairment and impaired people again represent only 3% of the total collisions but represent 38% of the fatalities this is key vision zero

[161:00] information and basically drives our work program going forward and to try and mitigate this as previously has been discussed we use a 4e approach engineering education enforcement and evaluation and I'll talk about the role that each of these play these graphics describe top collision locations in the city from the last safe streets Boulder report these of course in the report they include the top locations for motor vehicle collisions as well as the top locations involving bicycles and pedestrians these are locations where a large amount of crashes have been occurring and where if we did not take action we would expect large numbers of crashes to continue to occur in each of these locations we've identified mitigation in the safe streets to build rapport in that mitigation has been implemented now as I talk about the different key strategies I'll start with

[162:01] engineering because engineering is a very important strategy how we design operate and maintain our streets is certainly key to being able to move people safely upon them some of the strategies that we have been using to try and mitigate crashes include the way that we operate our traffic signals specifically left turn phasing leading pedestrian intervals and restrictions of right turns on red also green pavement markings specifically at places where there would be conflict between bikes and turning traffic and then of pavement markings and signs that are there to remind people of their responsibilities at certain conflict points here are some examples oh I'm sorry let me go back I should note that we have installed 97 distinct engineering improvements in the past two

[163:01] years at 73 specific locations I think that this speaks to the role that engineering has played in our vision zero that includes traffic signal modifications at 23 different intersections green pavement markings at 34 different locations these are some of the signs and pavement markings that we will be using and if you you know look carefully at them you can see that they target all modes of transportation basically depending upon what the type of behavior is that we're trying to influence we certainly have identified that we need to take a look at our traffic signal practices for years that we have operated our traffic signals to provide what we thought was a combination of safe and efficient travel and again using national standards for determining those criteria in the vision zero environment those standards are not

[164:03] going to be satisfactory and so we need to look critically at the way we operate our traffic signal practices we've done so hopefully you've seen the link in the memo that speaks to the work that we've done on that to date the areas that we're specifically targeting our left turn phasing the way that we determine left turn phasing leading pedestrian avoid use and restrictions of right turn on red and we've looked at the traffic signal practices or lack thereof in numerous pure cities around the country and are using that to inform the development of our traffic signal practices it's our intention to complete that work this year and be operating under those new practices at that time ma'am can I ask you a question about the blinking is this he best practice a new practice I still think there's a lot of confusion

[165:02] for people or what it means the other Lane is doing yeah and so I guess I'm still confused whether what are our intentions are around that and can you just talk about that absolutely and actually our traffic signal operations engineers here and I'm gonna let him address that question good evening I'm Joe Paulson the transportation engineer for signals and lighting and so the the flashing yellow arrow display is basically a better mousetrap as determined by years of research by the Federal Highway Administration both in a lot of you know test lab environment and then ultimately in deployments in several states across the United States and what they found in comparing the experience of left turn crashes under the traditional circular green display for what we call a

[166:01] permissive left turn where you're allowed to turn left but you have to yield to any conflicting traffic what they found is simply by changing the display from the circular green which everybody has had an experience for decades to the flashing yellow arrow that the number of crashes was reduced and that was very consistent finding over again multiple years in multiple states and the the extent of the reduction was significant enough that the federal government changed the national standard in the manual and uniform traffic control devices to using the flashing yellow arrow display and so it is now the adopted national standard it's no longer an experiment and like it was when we started using them in 2004 um it is going forward the national standard so you will see them in more and more communities throughout the metropolitan area going forward any new construction that we do we use the yellow arrow and we're retrofitting them on a prioritized basis

[167:01] there is certainly some confusion as with any new and changed vice what the research found is that I enlarge the confusion that exists results in mistakes that they would categorize as safe mistakes so if you look at the flashing yellow arrow and you're not sure what it means if you decide well maybe that means I can't go that's a mistake but it's a safe mistake nobody gets hurt what the research found is the circular green ball after decades of use people would look at it save as' see green they would see it's over the left turn lane and they would say oh it's green green means go I think that means I'm allowed to turn left now and that's a mistake and it's a dangerous mistake because you put yourself and others in harm's way I just wanted to point out I forget if his last meeting in the meeting before tab reviewed a sort of a draft video there's a number of videos like what you saw that are shorter and targeted on particular behaviors but there is one that they're that they're

[168:00] working on right now to explain what every road user is supposed to interpret the flashing yellow pass because there is a lot of confusion out there you're right but that is something they've already thought about they're working on and hopefully you'll see that quite soon yeah I was with it because the first time I saw it it confused me pretty you know I was like I've never seen this indication before so what does that mean and there was no signage there was no instruction you know it and so it took a while to kind of figure it out and we've received I don't know if you get the emails but we've been getting pretty consistent emails as they're being more widely adopted at intersections where people just don't know what to do and they you know I'm just in the theory of the safe mistake but there have been others who have interpreted it to mean I can go now you know because what's that yeah hurry up right right because they're thinking of it as they typically seen the yellow and the transition from the green and they think okay cool I can do the last left turn before the

[169:02] light goes red so I think education is gonna be critical if this is actually to roll out everywhere because yeah decades people have been used to a particular way and I don't know if there's signage that you can do or if what other cities have done right there is signage when the the FHWA came out with the revised practice and the requirement that this this display be used they did not recommend the use of instructional signing but they did leave it as optional and some communities including Longmont if you spend any time there they chose to use instructional signing look at research to see if there is a measurable benefit from the use of the signing because it's not without cost and the biggest cost isn't for the fabrication and installation it's the load on the master and it's the space that's taken up that could be used for something else and it's the visual

[170:00] clutter in the environment that we're concerned about that we don't want to use something unnecessarily but if there is value that we can identify with use of the sign we're considering using it it could be temporary it could be something that lasted for a few years until people really kind of got into the the know and the habit I could worry as much about bicyclists misinterpreting that who are making a left turn as I do about cars because the you know t-bone is not a good accident for automobile that it's really bad for cyclists so yeah I appreciate what you're saying I still think the community isn't well I guess there's a culture change that needs to happen but it hasn't happened yet duh I'm not sure who this is for but just while we're talking about signalization just a question about a bike signal we just have one or two that

[171:01] I know of in the city but is we where we've implemented leading pedestrian intervals those are for bikes as well right I mean aren't you about or not to seems like you should be as a bike to go before the cars do as well and can we represent that with a bike signal alright great question so where you see a leading pedestrian interval it is provided by the pedestrian indication and that controls the entry into the crosswalk area of an intersection by pedestrians or by cyclists acting as pedestrians using the bad facility and entering the crosswalk so certainly a cyclist and a multi-use path that's entering a crosswalk they get the benefit and in the advantage of that leading pedestrian interval as well the bicycle display as currently identified and allowed for use in the manual on uniform traffic control devices is specifically targeted for the situations where there is a separate distinct

[172:02] movement that cyclists can make that the other vehicular traffic cannot make and they specifically by the language preclude the use of the bicycle indication for providing what we would call a leading bicycle interval so at this time that's not an available tool in our toolkit as as defined by the federal government there is a discussion in the in the engineering community about whether that limitation is appropriate and whether it should be expanded to be able to be used for things like a leading bicycle interval and if that comes to k'i to pass then we would consider that as another tool in our toolbox are those requirements that wouldn't you talk about those in the manual there is that requirement or it's a shell yeah it's a shell and it's a yeah and it's an adopted national standard okay so there's no there's no flex my demo sort of thing right so I'll drop this and say but how do you if the if you get a leading pedestrian interval

[173:01] with the walk sign how do you as a cyclist know that you're allowed to proceed so if you are a cyclist against where you might encounter on a crosswalk on a multi-use path if you're riding along the display that is available to you as you come up to an intersection at the crosswalk is the pedestrian indication that is across the street pointed at you and so cyclists have learned through experience that that's the message that's being conveyed to you so when you're writing on a multi-use path you're looking at the pedestrian dedication when you're riding in the street in a bike lane or otherwise on the street you're looking at the vehicular indication so it's different rules of engagement for targeting different audiences thank you and just quickly very what is the speed limit for bicycles entering those crosswalks 8 miles per hour thank you thank you do we have specific goals around pedestrian leading intervals so

[174:00] we're developing as we as we document refine and update our practices we are working right now on defining in what areas and situations we think they're an appropriate tool and also the specifics of how will they be deployed currently we have them in a half a dozen locations and currently we all use it all of them a three second leading interval you have a three-second head start before any other vehicular display goes green practices around the country very most studies are recommending an interval from 3 to 7 seconds others are recommending in certain cases they'd be longer there's a lot of different practices being used for where they should be used and so we're like taking a look at those other practices to determine what makes sense for us ok it just seems to me you know especially at the most dangerous intersections that sooner rather than later would be good especially you know high pedestrian

[175:02] volume like you know trying to cross Canyon near the whatever that is near MacGuffins you know those kind of things where there's a lot going on and it feels really dangerous yeah I guess I would just encourage us to get on with deploying those all right and I would say that we have been as we've been developing the updated signal practices we have been continuing to look at the lessons learned from the last safe streets bold report and current conditions and so we've actually been adding a few when freezing all you know engineering activity around signal operation while we conduct the the practice update we've been deploying them in new locations okay signals I really like the leading pedestrian indicator I mean I think it is it's just a reprogramming it's very effective you know as I've seen some of them come in I've been like hey cool you

[176:02] know that it's very clear that you shouldn't be thinking that you're gonna make a right turn or anything like that when they get the walk you know early that really helps you know let a motorist know what is appropriate at a time the other comment I'll make is like the light that's at Colorado and Folsom that has the red arrow for the right turn you know that is a really appropriate way I think to block or signage because changing people's practice who have gotten very used to making right turns on red may be hard but when you see the light or the signage that says no right turn on red that's super clear and it's like even if we did that a lot of places I would still think it would be useful for folks coming in to Boulder from out of town to be able to be super clear on what they need to do at that right Ken thank you thank you just a couple of clarifying

[177:01] points that I want to be clear that when we're talking about left turn phasing that's not a question of whether we use or don't use flashing yellow arrow so it's really more a question of do we operate permissively with left turn with flashing yellow arrows or do we operate in this protected fashion with red arrows that's really more the what we think will move the bar on vision zero is that distinction and then as far as your question about the bike indicators the the other thing I would offer is that we do I mean well obviously we're understand the MUTCD constraints around that but we do think that there may be some ways that we can accomplish something quite similar using green pavement marking where we can extend the place where a bike would rest and wait for their light ahead of the crosswalk and at a place where a vehicle could see them a little bit like a bike

[178:00] box but instead projecting them past the crosswalk so traffic signal practices I think we got that covered this is a story map that you would find on our vision 0 website this is this shows all of the different engineering treatments that we've implemented pertaining to vision 0 in the past 2 years there is a story map like this for each of the other key strategies as well education and enforcement enforcement is important and one of the things that we collaborate with the police department on one of our premiere collaborations is our heads up campaign that is a crosswalk safety program it's a combination of an education and enforcement it's grant funded through the states and it's something that we pursue and have received grant funding for each year it targets of course the

[179:04] drivers who are not yielding to bikes and pedestrians in the crosswalk but it also focuses on bikes and pedestrians and they're used to the crosswalk again with a goal of everybody understanding how this both safely and legally use a crosswalk photo enforcement is also a very important enforcement component we've got eight red-light camera locations to photo radar vans and that program has been in operation for twenty years we're one of the first communities to be doing that in Colorado and then we track and support safety legislation alongside the police department examples of that include things pertaining to distracted driving laws pertaining to distracted driving which of course we would support being more severe and and with stiffer penalties or legislation that is seems to come up every year that

[180:00] is trying to dismantle the opportunity to do photo enforcement which of course we opposed I mean that's an important one we cover that the legislative subcommittee a lot every year they're trying to roll that back and lucky that they can looper vetoed a bill a couple of years ago on that but I don't know why because the the numbers are so clear that that is a very helpful tool in the toolbox so the comment the council's so you know that that program is always under attack and we do have pretty strong numbers as it pertains to crash reduction yeah education is also an important tool and and I say that in the context of there are a lot of behaviors that result in serious injury and fatal crashes that that are not going to be mitigated by engineering treatments and for which there's going to need to be a change in behavior and education is one of the key tools to

[181:02] cause that to occur again one of our key programs is this heads-up Boulder campaign and through that program through social media we have connected with 80,000 more than 80,000 people made personal contact in the field with 2,500 people and have issued over 200 citations and warnings associated with the that program lighten up Boulder is a program in which the city county and see you have distributed over 13,000 bike lights obviously to keep people well lit at night and then our newest education program has to do with the dangers of impaired and distracted travel for all modes and this is obviously an issue that has plagued our country for decades but has certainly been made more of an imperative with the introduction of new ways in which people can be distracted

[182:01] on the roadways and it will be something that is say not that will have to be cracked if we are to succeed at vision zero Denver Denver has a great program where there's signs that are lighted more fatalities message boards I think yeah it seems like in some of these key areas there's a sign saying watch for cyclists could go a long way for an OK price I saw one of those the other day it was pretty slick I definitely find myself being more aware after seeing a sign like that great point although without the work toward I mean are some examples of the

[183:06] educational outreach material that we use for different educational programs I'm just gonna go through this quickly here is some outreach materials associated with our new distracted driving campaign here is an example of where we collaborate with RTD to use the back of their buses to outreach an around crosswalk safety again we think that this is a pretty good venue for connecting with people but we are always looking for better venues like you mentioned the variable message boards some of you had other ideas that we're exploring our using movie theater advertising and seeing if we can get some of our videos maybe that video that we that we showed at the beginning played at CU sporting events in fact

[184:02] we're gonna be meeting with people from see you tomorrow to have that conversation can I just say I really like the back of the bus because it's while you're driving yes it was very topical I died I didn't put one of those the other day I saw one of those the other day and it was I was like oh yeah I need to be watching what I'm doing it was very effective [Laughter] so last year that we created our vision zero Community Partnership and this is a group of people that meet periodically and discuss topics associated with vision zero and co-create and collaborate on the messages associated with our visions our outreach and and the implementation of those messages includes our transportation advisory board staff from multiple departments at the city the county the state the school district see you and and community

[185:01] organizations who are interested in this topic as well that has been very helpful in generating some ideas and then of course evaluation is important as well this is how we know where to implement things it's how we know whether the things we implement are being effective or not it is being responsive to residents when they contact us and say that they have encountered something that's unsafe and it is also being proactive in terms of the generation of our the evaluation and generation of our safe streets report and with that in mind just be aware that our 2018 safe streets report is currently underway we intend to complete that by the end of this year and that report will include a complete vision zero action plan the sorry you look like you were gonna ask a question but I'm gonna wait to you did okay this is some information about the

[186:01] scoping of the 2018 safe streets Boulder report it builds on the 2016 report looking at all the material or information that we included in there for comparison purposes specifically evaluating crash data from 2015 to 2017 it will involve deeper analysis on certain topics that we identified that you know we didn't get everything we needed the first time around it will also include some new topics and probably the most important being evaluation of the effectiveness of our mitigation devices to date so if you take anything away from this presentation what I hope it would be is that our approach to implementing vision zero is data-driven an action-oriented we're using data to determine where the crash trends are we're using data to determine what mitigation to use whether that mitigation is effective we're also using data to determine if there are locations that have crash trends are there other locations in the community

[187:00] that have similar characteristics that would then allow us to adopt a safe systems approach and implement mitigation at those locations before crashes occurred and actually be proactive because only by being proactive or we have removed the bar towards vision zero comprehensive for each strategies are important we need to be using all of these is not absolutely not the case of using only one or two and that this is a extremely challenging task and it will take all of us working together individually as a group multiple communities working together in order to create the change we need and ultimately see the path division zero and again just a reminder again the most comprehensive evaluation of our safety to date will be forthcoming in the 2018 safe streets Boulder report to be completed by the end of this year and

[188:00] with that we have this question for City Council oh okay so I have to sing something you just that we know that there's roads coming into Boulder well we have some sketchy we have some fatalities happening like on J road which is not maybe strictly I mean technically right outside our city limits but our city of Boulder but it's close yeah close enough that I think that we need to take them on in terms of partnering to County to make that a priority given just that by commuters are trying to use it and it's a really scary place so I'll just throw that out there is to me that if it's right outside town and it's relevant to people into town but that should be close enough for us to make it a priority we have an extremely close relationship with Boulder County staff they we collaborate with them all the time they give us their opinions on what we should

[189:01] be doing in the city we give them our opinions about what they should be doing in the county as well and we certainly have had conversations about J Roden excellent it's just it should be a priority and then everybody wants to weigh in on this one I don't want to piggyback in on that just real quickly to say that if it's used as a commuting place between gun barrel and the city it's definitely ours as well as the counties yeah my opinion so there's anything we can do to help support telling them what to do and then my understanding is design construction standards that kind of get at the system change you're talking about our system improvement is that underway that we're using the most updated ones are you referencing the city's design and construction standards yeah I suppose yes I think works director sent out an email about that earlier today some changes that are anticipated to be

[190:01] worked on this year there's also a fair amount of flexibility in the way that those design and construction standards can be applied so there I think that it's well I'll just say that there's a fair amount of flexibility a song I'm not sure that the issue so much is that we have the wrong standards is that we just need to be having dialogues about where they that flexibility should be applied okay fair enough I do think looking at things systemically is great okay real quick we have a queue we're gonna go quick we Bob you up bill who else is in the queue and Aaron well I know a lot of lot of the seeds that have vision zero programs have found that the most effective tool reducing injuries and fatalities is speed speed limit reductions I think they found that that's the most effective tool and that kind of falls both in your engineering and your enforcement area and that of course increases response time but also decreases the

[191:01] the likelihood of fatality or serious injury where are we on speed reductions as part of this program yeah so I I guess I would question what you just said I'm not sure that there is communities that are saying that they have reduced speeds speed limits and then consequently have reduced speeds and then consequently have decreased serious injury and they all send you a really powerful report from New York City game yeah i mean i think i think was 2016-2017 reduction of fatality they the load all speed limits to 25 miles an hour throughout the city the fatality is reduced from 184 to 101 so one of the things that points out is that from our perspective changing the speed limit does not change the operational speed of the vehicles as a matter of fact there's

[192:00] a great deal of evidence that indicates that how fast people travel is primarily influenced by the environment that they're driving through so is it constrained is and so just the mere act of changing the speed limit if that's what I said there's not much there was to ease yeah engineer and there's an enforcement right and the cities that have done this and have realized tremendous benefits have stepped up their enforcement so it's not just simply posting a sign as posting a sign and then changing behavior in four instances we've have on the street experiment in that we lowered the speed limit on baselines and we've actually been very aggressively enforcing that lower speed limit and interestingly even though we've issued many many tickets the overall operational speeds at least today after how many six months or so still

[193:00] remain at the same level and so I guess that that points out one of the significant challenges that we have and one of the things that we have been really successful at his for instance many many years ago we changed our residential street standards and so streets that used to be 36 feet wide now are generally 30 or 32 feet wide and when you see those types of environments you really do see a significant change in the operational speeds so when you go to neighborhoods like Dakota or holiday you'll see very different profiles and so I think that does point out that one of the key tools is build it right in the first place and you really do start to generate the types of speeds that you're in search of that do generate greater degree this engineering but I guess I'd like to understand than white cities have been why other cities have been successful in reducing their speed

[194:00] limits both by law but in practice and and we're not able to I guess I'd like to understand why we can't I think what we're saying is our ultimate objective is to slow the cars down and so what we think it takes is more than just changing the number and I think you pointed that out too so you know the only other thing I would say is that again too with it with a goal of reducing serious injury and fatal crashes specific vision zero goal we would need to be looking at where those crashes are occurring and predominantly they're not occurring on our residential streets not occurring on our our 25 mile an hour streets they're occurring on our arterial roadways and again I don't discount what you're saying about speed speed kills and I mean that's just physics but but we would need to be able to slow people down on our arterial roadways and our and our heavy collected roadways in order to be making advances in the vision zero false injury on

[195:00] Queens Boulevard which is and I took a road way was the speed limit was 50 50 miles an hour so it's it's like a rapaho you and they've gone from my camera where the number was seven or two all the year to zero a year play reducing so it's in the speed on that roadway I played receipts on that roadway yeah so there are examples that are comparable to what we have yes so we've held several hearings both public and informal on just the the spate of injuries that have occurred to Boulder Bay cyclists on Jay proton diagonal and also on 36 between Boulder and Lyons and we know from the somewhat outdated or sorry older data we've had difficulty getting up-to-date data from cidade just based on their collection methodologies but also anecdotally that people are terrified and it's not simply a matter of speed it's also matter of texting while driving impaired driving I think you all remember Bill Davis the Google employee who was killed by a drunk driver on Jay Road in 2016 so all of

[196:02] these things collectively point point toward both a need for greater enforcement as well as for speed speed control measures I did want to point out just just to elaborate further on one of the slides that bill gave earlier was that we worked a lot with community partners on tab and community cycles has been fantastic but there's also a group called cyclists for community which not only several years ago did they raise a quarter of a million dollars for jamestown flood recovery efforts that was collected from cyclists and the community but in the face of what we perceived to be some resistance on the part of cidade and others to actually helping to inform motorists about measures that they can take they took it upon themselves to privately fundraise for a variable message board and so it's good an indication and a good example of what a true public-private partnership could look like but we need more of it and so anything that we can we can ask this council to help be more supportive of those efforts and also frankly help

[197:01] us get the word out to see dot you know these are boulder residents who are being seriously injured and killed and we've sent a resolution to cidade calling for stronger enforcement for non-automated enforcement for productions and speed limits across those corridors and we'd really really appreciate your support and help in making sure that that those measures are vague are viewed and weighed we'll just a couple thoughts thank you for all of that we bring up bike boulevards I guess I mentioned that with the just is because part a part of making our intersections safer is giving people safe alternatives and you know Mike you talked about how a lot of our older streets are wider and granted most of the fatality is not happening on the residential streets but if there's opportunities to make those to give those pinch points you know so that speeds are slowed and you get good bike

[198:00] alternatives I think that can really help us accomplish these goals I'd like to see that include as part I know it's in the Complete Streets program but and I know it's one of your focuses but I'm looking forward to seeing more about that and I just before I mentioned that goals potential new goals around the vision service and and and so that it may be below the level of goals in the TMP we can just also see some additional metrics on these so in terms of what what are our what are metrics on these various techniques that were implementing in terms of the you know the leading pedestrian intervals or safe bike ways for setter etcetera so there could be more that we have as metrics than we have as official goals in the TMP and then there are other places doing some really good work on this like Denver you know you mentioned the message boards that they have every time I go to Denver these days I see some new treatment you know whether it's a protected bike lane or protected bus lane or they had a right turn block for cars in downtown die so recently that

[199:00] that was an intriguing treatment so I'd love to see us maybe learn from some of our peers around the region I know that the Denver Regional Council of Governments is working on convening a vision zero kind of collaborative across the area so I don't know if they've gotten that off the ground yet but that's a potential alternative to learn from that and just because I think we could do some more with engineering then we have I think some of the paint stuff that we've done is great signs I think only going to get us so far and I think sometimes when you're able to put concrete on the ground to steer exactly where people can go that can be more effective so I'd love to just see us focus on that as well so thank you thank you I timed it just for the length of your snack round nose good evening I'm Natalie Stifler I'm a senior transportation planner with go

[200:00] builder I'm going to try to embody my favorite motto tonight be brief so I will try to move quickly through this update on the transit service delivery study so you will notice there are a few other items and you're in your packet tonight related to the hop study the downtown Boulder station study and the RTD Pass program working group I'm not going to hit on those tonight but if you have any questions feel free to let us know so I'm gonna be providing an update on the service delivery study and some of this might be a bit of a repeat for for folks that have been here longer but I'll be trying to get everyone up to speed and then presenting some new information so just a little bit of background as you know our current service delivery model relies heavily on RTD they operate the majority of service within Boulder we also supplement that service through by ups on the jump in the bound operating the hop service and other local partnerships and then our

[201:02] existing model really serves as a multi-faceted approach to delivering transit service but this current service model as I mentioned relies heavily on RTD and that's becoming more of a challenge for us RVT has limited resources and competing priorities in 2017 they started drawing down from base bus service funds to pay for fast-track fast-tracks projects and those are obviously largely Denver centric projects and additionally Boulder continues to see on an annual basis service cuts related to our based bus service and just overall transit infrastructure investments declining related to stops and station and facilities the confluence of these factors in the continuing need to provide a high capacity way of moving people in Boulder means that the city needs to find new service delivery models if we're going to meet our TMP goals so this study looks at two things

[202:01] we look at our current service delivery structure and challenges with delivery and builders vision for transit and then we're looking at potential alternative funding operating and governance structures that can help us meet our renewed vision for transit goals so this the first phase of work that some of you have already heard about we looked at our renewed vision for transit costs we looked at our existing transit service which is costing about fifty point four million dollars a year and we compare that to our 2035 2035 transit service vision which is about 117 point seven million dollars so that's about a 133 percent increase in transit service in the long term and obviously we would need to come up with a mix of local regional state and state and federal funding sources to deliver that service the second part of the phase one work that we looked at was our return on investment here I'm just providing a quick snapshot of how that 1% sales tax

[203:01] works with RTD so we pay 0.6 percent of that 1% for a base bus system service and then 0.4% for fast tracks and as I mentioned RTD is drawing down on that base bus system funding to to pay for fast tracks so this is relevant to the return on investment because we looked at - we looked at our return on investment for base service funding non fast tracks and then we looked at ik looking at just fast track so our base service return on investment is not so bad we're getting basically 94 where we're covering about 94% of the cost of service that we're getting back from RTD our fast tracks picture is a little bit different so in 2015 we contributed 9.3 million dollars invested fast-tracks and we got about two million dollars back in service also worth recognizing that we we are TV contributed about two

[204:00] hundred million dollars to us thirty-six infrastructure improvements and the purchase of flat iron flyer buses and we receive a portion of that benefit and then in addition to that phase one return on investment work we looked at some pure situation so we looked at pure agencies across the country the four agencies - from le métro one each from seattle washington DC these are all just examples of local agencies that operate in a bigger regional context so we were looking at you know what can we learn from them with the way that they govern and fund their transit service so building on this peer research we've developed this of governance models I'm going to go through this is where we'll spend the bulk of the time I'm gonna go through each of these models and try to give you a brief explanation of what we mean by each of these models so this first one is pretty straightforward it's our status quo maintenance of current service model the one thing to note here

[205:02] is just that we're gonna continue to see a degradation and service if we keep things going the way that they're going with option two this is the expansion of our current hot model and our Byatt model so for example the city could provide the bound and Stampede and fund it as a partnership like the hawk with RTD and Cu students and we could continue to look for opportunities to buy up additional service from RTD as Mike mentioned that also is a bit of a challenge because RCD is facing some driver hiring issues and until that issue is resolved it will be difficult for us to continue to buy up service at the rate that we've been buying it up in the past question for those I've heard about those driver hiring issues do you feel like those are specific to RTD or if we wanted to hire a whole bunch of drivers would we have a different success rate yeah so I think that there's there's potential that we could face some issues - it's definitely transit industry-wide but we've seen in smaller agency models

[206:04] there's they don't have as big of an issue because there there's more flexibility in in kind of the compensation and benefits package that you can provide where RTD is just operating in a bigger context where there's less flexibility to do so we could just another wrinkle in in all of that is that Tavis commercial driver's license is actually quite an asset to have these days and that you can drive a lot of different vehicles for a lot of different services and so we're seeing that same CDL issues or cross service areas and so as we try and hire maintenance people that operate similar vehicles we're having that same issue in that the Colorado economy is going along quite well and so that there's a high demand for people with CDL licenses and so that's affecting RTD that's affecting

[207:00] the city as we try and hire maintenance staff those types of vehicles there's a lot of work out there service within County so including the jump and the - and possibly rapid transit service and then option so this would also have to be approved

[208:48] so there's two pieces to what the

[209:15] funding mechanism would be for each of these models and what are the potential models that can help us deliver local service and also get us to deliver a regional service and Happiness RTP course what is the feasibility of implementing legislative and legal perspective as well as just the funding piece of it and then of course we're considering a variety of other criteria such as

[210:01] services that's been the range of potential options for further study and we'll be back late in 2018 to update you on progress related to that so headed into this question dis councils support

[211:01] the proposed government's options and evaluation criteria for the service study maybe you want to go back to the criteria so this is all rather complicated late getting late at night I will say that there's a couple of us that serve on this committee and I'll just say a lot of thought went into the governance models that are worth checking out and there are significant trade-offs amongst all the choices I wouldn't say there's an obvious best choice just given all the trade-offs we with funding levels and control and to set up an RTA is really complicated yeah really bright people are looking into this so I'll just say a lot of thought went into honing down those six options the people have their own

[212:00] thoughts on the criteria I mean they're good I mean yeah this is incredibly complicated those look like the right criteria I guess the one thing I'm missing is the the interest of partners right so if we're gonna do an RTA that's countywide or much the county we have to first make sure that those other municipalities are interested right sounds like the county is definitely worth exploring these things with us but whether we'd go to an RTA whether we'd consider that seriously would be based in a large part on whether you know Louisville Longmont etc would be interested in working together I imagine so it's the only thing I'm seeing missing here yeah and we have definitely discussed that as a group and and we're just trying to figure out the right timing we didn't want to bring them in too early so once we I think we refine our options we'll start to have those broader conversations yep sorry the I was just

[213:07] asking if the University has been part of this being part of these discussions as well discussion as the statewide transportation funding conversation happens the Metro mayor's caucus and then subsets we're all looking at RTA's to see is that a better way to just fund

[214:01] everybody's stretch from the station needs on the front range or not but it's such a complicated model but you know a lot of people are having these conversations it's complicated but it it seems like we're just giving so much money for depreciating service or lessening service whatever the word wouldn't be so it's to establish well thank you all for your time and appreciate you sticking around for an extra half an hour if you guys want more jokes let me know [Laughter]

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