September 11, 2018 — City Council Study Session

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[5:11] but apparently Channel II won't be able to get the slides great if you're ready to go thanks for being here tonight this is great night I guess for the city staff in the city of Boulder you can see that there are many folks in the audience and I just want to give a huge shout out to all of our staff members for the great work that they did on this budget it was a challenging year and everyone stepped up and you'll see it as we go through the budget the great work that's been done I will say that this is a little bit different than the normal budget presentation that you receive partly because we're it's a study session but we're sitting in the regular format and we're doing that because there's a long presentation there'll be plenty of opportunities for you to ask questions and when you do that if you ask questions of staff members in the audience it will be easier for you and

[6:01] for them if they're able to walk up to the podium with that oh I do want to say one more thing the other thing that's a little bit different is that in past years we have the Capital Improvement Program presentation usually the first study session in August you're scheduled in August as you may recall was pretty busy and so we postponed it to tonight which actually is a good thing because you're able to see the whole budget both the capital and the operating in a single presentation and I think that puts a good perspective on the entire budget that we have for our community so let me now turn it over to Katie Dolan who is our Budget Officer and she will begin Katie thanks Jen good evening Council today we're going to present the budget in four distinct sections with an opportunity to ask questions after each section the first part is going to be the background and it's going to help really set the stage for what we discussed in April of 2018 and how it

[7:01] affected a overall 2018 budget then we're going to move on and go into the capital budget which Chris ringless from planning is going to largely lead there'll also be an opportunity to see really exciting video that we put together every year surrounding a capital improvement program next we're going to talk about I'm a financial update Cara Skinner assistant director of finance and I will be tag-teaming that presentation and then we're going to be moving on to the 2019 operating budget so again opportunity to ask questions after the CIP the financial update and the operating budget so largely to set the stage it's important to remind ourselves that we maintain a strong financial picture even in times of budget reductions we have several things to be proud of we showed this slide back in April surrounding work we've done after the blue-ribbon Commission's both one and two over the last decade or so and because of the

[8:01] steps that we've taken we have a strong bond rating we've taken concrete steps that to ensure that we're nimble to respond to changing economic climates and there's just some specific examples listed on the slide of revenue steps we've been including extending or approving taxes and then on the expenditure side mainly what we're going to be talking about largely through this presentation is ensuring that our one-time revenues are going to one-time expenditures and ongoing expenditures are matching with our ongoing revenues which is a huge part of tonight's presentation I also wanted to provide in context and in pictures what we saw coming April 2018 and that is at the end of the year which is typically around February for us we notice that sales tax and use tax are coming in less than projected which is our highlighted orange so that's what we had originally projected as far as sales tax by February we thought that perhaps the attacks would remain flat based upon 28 teams year-end estimates which is the

[9:01] red line and what we've seen through July is that we do have a slight increase over 2017 and it's in the green dotted line so we have revised those projections up but they are so down about a percentage from what we thought this time last year so again we showed these slides briefly but wanted to set the context sales and use tax for the general fund specifically is over 40 percent you can see that in the upper right hand corner in the kind of turquoise ash color it's 40% and so in analyzing those urine numbers in February we noticed that four million gap that we've talked about for the past several months of ongoing expenditures not meeting ongoing revenues we came to you in April and May during the first adjustment to base after departments went to work and closed that gap for 2018 again as a reminder this was largely due to one-time dollars being postponed or eliminated in 2018 so we

[10:01] knew that we had work to do in 2019 quit stantly the 2019 gap was also four million dollars needed to reduce an ongoing expenditures so the budget that you see before you actually reduces that by five point six million dollars so slightly more than what we need and we'll get into more detail later on with that number and we are also able to get to that number because departments really chipped in and we're asked to not only present what it would take to eliminate four million dollars but above and beyond that so that we wouldn't have to take a universal approach and everyone evenly we were able to proportionately look at all of the reductions and measure them against each other the 2019 budget also maintains reserve commitments it was critically important that we maintained our reserve goal of 20% by 2020 which I'll get into you in the next slide and then also the decision to in making the reductions that we proposed were in a framework that we'll share with you a little bit

[11:00] later on so the reserves again we've talked about this over the past several years and during the budget discussion but we just want to remind that the best practice there are corner of financial sustainability the best practice is at least sixteen point seven percent and it's adjusted specifically for risk so what I mean by risk is you know it is protecting taxpayers against revenue shortfalls unattended expenditures and then it also is specific for jurist jurisdictions risks such as flutter fires which Boulder is certainly prone to you and that has been adjusted over the years is that that's correct following the 2019 flood or 2013 flood we really analyzed our reserves at that point in time and have made a conscious effort to increase them one person every year up until 20 20 percent which we've maintained and it's a policy direction that Council is implemented right I understand it's a policy direction but okay so these are the guidelines that we

[12:03] made and not going to read all of them to you but really emphasizing one city one Boulder again all the departments submitted really robust budgets first to consider we also were focusing on core services as you'll see and then it's also critical that when we talk about the reductions that we are focusing on personal expenditures as well because they do make up a large part of our ongoing budget so what we'll present to you tonight closes the gap for 2019 and the line below also gives some perspective around what our ending fund balance is after reserves and the dollars that we have available there as well so the dollars that we saved went into that ending fund balance reserve line item so finally just really briefly number-wise you know the operating budget and the CIP make up our total annual budget which is why we're excited to present this as one combined budget for this year our operating budget increased slightly over 2018 and our CIP

[13:02] has decreased significantly on this kind of a combination of two things both large one-time projects that were planned in 2018 but as you'll see when we go into the CIP there was concerted efforts by sales tax funds to shift expenditures as they were seeing flattening sales tax as well in their CIP as well as their operating so the overall budget this year is 9% less than 2018 so now we're going to jump into the CIP video and lens going to help us set up for the video each year the city revisits its capital improvement program or CIP to plan for the city's future capital investments guided by the community's sustainability framework the CIP lays out a plan for

[14:00] maintaining enhancing and at times expanding the city's capital infrastructure in fact over three-quarters of our CIP funding over the next year will be for maintenance and enhancements to existing assets this approach of taking care of what we have saves the city money over time several high priority safety recreation and mobility improvements include my name is Jeff hailey I'm the planning design and Community Engagement Manager for Boulder Parks and Rec and we're here at the Boulder reservoir Swim Beach so this year in our CIP starting in 2019 and beyond we will be building a new visitor center or bath house for the community to use it'll be a really attractive building that has staff offices for our administration as well as a cafe and concessions area to serve the users and then most importantly changing areas restrooms locker rooms for the swimmers to use this year and 2018 we've been

[15:00] doing all the final design and permitting to get the project ready for construction we hope to start construction later this year in 2018 or early 2019 so the project cost right now is about four to five million dollars again that provides new a brand new building demolition of the existing building and several improvements to the beach including a boardwalk a small children's play area and several other when you think about the boulder reservoir it's been here for generations we have a lot of folks in town that remember coming here as children and now that are coming here with their families or their grandchildren so just to see the beach evolve over time and to really refresh the reservoir and provide a new face and a new facility for people to enjoy and a really make Boulder stand out is truly a great community to visit to come to the reservoir and so I'm personally excited to see it be built and be used by the community I'm Douglas Sullivan the principal engineer for the utilities work group in Public Works and we are at the boulder

[16:01] reservoir water treatment facility in Boulder Colorado hi man is the capital improvements program for the utilities work group and Public Works and that includes three enterprise funds the water fund the wastewater fund and the stormwater and flood management fund and there are large capital projects in each of those the solar project out here at the Boulder Reservoir facility was initiated because this facility has the second largest energy requirements for any city facility and so the solar facility out here is 1.6 megawatts one of the neat aspects of this solar project is that it greatly reduces the cost for the city of Boulder in terms of energy is the cost to run this facility is about three hundred thousand dollars a year and the solar project will take care of two-thirds of those needs one of the other major projects in the capital improvements program is the Wunderland Creek project the project is a major drainage way improvements project which provides additional conveyance capacity for large floods there are 15 drainage ways throughout the boulder community 14

[17:01] which are tributary to Boulder Creek the Wunderland project is one of the highest priorities and stormwater and flood management utility after the 2013 floods there was significant damage done throughout the community in both the storm water and the wastewater utilities along this strange way there were evacuations required and significant damage done to structures into houses the Wunderland Creek project provided improvements to where future flooding would be able to be conveyed in the drainage way himself and not flood the areas that were damaged in 2013 it feels great to be part of the CIP planning process and to provide projects that help with the community both in terms of new projects and replacement of aging access as always Boulder will continue to invest in our capital infrastructure in order to ensure our community is a sustainable and resilient City it's my name is Chris

[18:02] Rose my confidence of Planning Division here at the city and helped coordinate the annual capital improvement program every year with our colleagues from the finance department so I'm gonna take you guys through a brief overview of our 2019 CIP first I want to echo genes acknowledgment of all the city staff in the audience tonight along with the CIP there's a lot of coordination and dedication and a lot of effort from a lot of different departments that go into getting where we are today so a big shout out and thank you to everyone in the audience they're also here to answer questions about any questions you guys might have about their departments specifically so as you see here we have the total budget the operating budget and then the capital budget and the majority of that really consists of dedicated funding sources to because a sort of a brief overview of the definitions and different types of CIP projects the CIP is a comprehensive six year plan for

[19:01] maintaining and enhancing public infrastructure by correcting current facility deficiencies and constructing new service delivery infrastructure departments work together to determine the coordination of projects to maximize leveraged being the find cost savings and reduce impact to the community during the time that the work is being done on these projects the CIP provides a forecast of funds available for capital projects and identifies all plans CIP projects and that's mated costs over the six-year period this is a framework for achieving the currently and future goals related to the physical assets of our community lastly capital projects are considered to be major projects requiring the requiring the expenditure of public funds this is not including operating expenditures for the purchase construction or replacement of the physical assets in the community so for the 2019 to 2024 CIP to six-year period that includes about four hundred and

[20:00] eighty five four and eighty eight million dollars one hundred forty-five discrete projects this includes projects as well as categories of funding for ongoing needs like local drainage improvements as well as trails maintenance the 2019 CIP specifically at about seventy point six million dollars are the projects that would be approved by council concurrently with the city's budget that you'll hear later tonight with a focus on taking care of what we have about seventy nine percent of the proposed 2019 capital funds are dedicated towards capital maintenance in an enhancement and this is a trend that we see often every year and really indicates that we're committed to taking care of the existing assets that we do already have some council members here are likely aware of the city plans and projects handbook it was less adopted by council about ten years ago we are looking into providing an update on that depending on some work items in our division over the next year so the handbook essentially describes the city's process for master planning and

[21:00] capital projects so the figure you see here until the right shows the general phases that are outlined in this handbook so the CIP if you look at step two or phase two here it's really our second step in the process following the adoption of departmental master plans and those master plans includes the highest amount of community dialogue identifying policies and projects though projects are at a pretty conceptual level and little to no design detail at that the CIP is one of the implementation tools of those city master plans or identified concepts become fun didn't so taking a look at funding by Department for the six-year period of the CIP unlike the operating budget the city's CIP fluctuates any given year and due to the timing and available funding for projects you may recall that last year in 2018 the CIP included several high-dollar projects like the Carter Lake pipeline which brought that year's total to one hundred and eleven million

[22:00] dollars the 2019 CIP is more in line with what we typically would expect out of a capital year where a majority of the projects are routine maintenance and enhancement you will see though in this slide that 2020 and 2022 we are expecting to be higher dollar years mainly due to the utilities and project public works projects so with that speaking of project Public Works and utilities projects I'm going to turn over to Jeff Arthur who's gonna give you guys a brief overview of some of those projects thanks Chris so just to kick things off we have three separate utility enterprises water which is what we drink and use to irrigate landscaping waste water which is what goes down the drain gets treated and goes back into Boulder Creek and then our third utility is a storm water and flood management utility and that's how we deal with the runoff most from precipitation events in town and and rainfall that falls in the mountains to our West can you hear me don't know okay

[23:02] usually I don't get that complaint so each enterprise is funded by separate rates and fees and the revenues in expenditures generally don't correlate particularly well with sales tax or overall economic conditions you know the thing that correlate most to is probably the weather and the enterprise funds allow us to use fund balance to manage the the fluctuations from year to year in that regard the rates themselves are largely driven by increases in regulations and cost escalation associated with things like construction and materials and even energy costs associated with operating the facilities so one of the things we focus on is to try to avoid big spikes from year to year and rates or what's called raked shocks and to do that we

[24:02] look at really long planning horizons well beyond the six years CIP and tend to come each year with smaller annual increases to avoid coming with very large increases in a year where we might have a major capital project or an emergency so I'm gonna provide just a few highlights by fund summarize overall rate impacts happy to go into more detail at the conclusion of the CIP portion of the presentation I do want to note that the water resource Advisory Board spends about four meetings going through all of this in great detail I just want to pass along a thank you to them for their dedication and going through all this with the fine-tooth comb on your behalf and they did recommend unanimously both the CIP and the rates back in June so let's start with wastewater I've focused for 2019 both in capital and operating as on asset management and regulatory compliance the wastewater fund in general is on a good overall trajectory council supported a significant rate increase following the 2013 flood and

[25:02] that allowed us to do a couple things one was to aggressively go after our aging clay pipe wastewater collection system and that allowed us both to implement a comprehensive inspection program but also get going on a 20-year plan to line that so if you look on the right on that photo the red our pipes that we were able to get into mine in 2018 and if you look on the left in that lower corner that's kind of a before-and-after so basically what we've been able to do is get in and actually use these cured in-place liners to to make a new pipe inside of an old one without digging up the street and that program continues to be a big success and we're in your four or so of what's probably a 20-year implementation so a proposed increase in wastewater for 2019 is 5% to put that in perspective that work to about a dollar 70 a typical single-family residential bill and that

[26:00] will help us basically maintain the trajectory we're on in terms of the priorities that were previously identified shifting gears to water similar priorities to wastewater very much a focus on asset management in the water system we have some assets that are much older and in some cases in worse condition we actually have some things that are still in service that are over a hundred years old and this will just continue to be a bigger challenge going forward particularly as we deal with things like the impacts of climate change and if we see changes in timing of snowmelt or frequency of droughts or fires that impact our watershed being able to have our full system online and operational is really critical to be resilient in the types of shocks and stresses we can expect to see in the future so a good example is the Barker gravity line and if you look at this that that drawing is historic drawing from the original construction that pipe is actually put in the ground and completed around 1909 it is still in service it delivers about a third of our

[27:00] water supply annually and it is in need of some serious work and it is risen to the top of our priorities and for expedited rehabilitation in this case expedited actually still means about a 10-year plan and that's for two reasons one it's really expensive and two we can't take water from Barker reservoir and treat it when that's out of service so we need to stage and schedule that to be able to complete that over time but that's a really critical asset given the amount of our water supply and a top priority going forward in terms of rate increases we are looking at a 7% which on a single-family residential typical bill works out to about two dollars and 55 cents more but just for context a gallon of water is going for about a half a cent with our proposed rates so moving on to stormwater and flood management this one is significantly different than the two other funds much of the city as you know is built prior

[28:00] to modern infrastructure or flood management standards we've actually only had a storm flood management utility since 1973 so this one a little more emphasis on new infrastructure than the others in particular extending basic drainage facilities to portions of the city that don't have any facilities and large flood mitigation projects along our major drainage ways stormwater flood is the smallest of the three funds a 1% increase in this FUD generates about a hundred and twenty thousand additional revenue so there's not a not a lot comes out of an increase in terms of our opportunity at the same time city of Boulder you often hear from us has the highest flood risk in the state of Colorado if you want to jump to the next slide we did some research this year through our discussions with Rab to understand how to substantiate the number one claim and this was an interesting data point that we looked at with Rab and this shows flood insurance policies across communities in the Front Range it's adjusted based on population

[29:03] just so you get a better sense of you know compared to much larger communities like Colorado Springs and sorry Mary did you have questions yeah real quick question does this account for people who should have flood insurance but don't probably not this was data we got from FEMA and so the way flood insurance works is if you have a federally back mortgage you're required to get it as part of your mortgage so there are probably people who have paid off their mortgage or financed in different ways that wouldn't have it there may also be people that even though they're outside of a regulatory floodplain choose to get it so it's kind of give you a general idea what we found really interesting is when we talk about being number one we figure we probably have four Collins or Longmont by a little bit and it's actually pretty distinctly different and if you look we're you know in the order of ten times some of those other communities and so what does that mean so we are continuing to focus on flood

[30:02] mitigation we have a backlog of about a hundred and seventy million dollars worth of flood mitigation projects that are in mitigation plans that councils already accepted and so we are going to continue to chip away and or ties those in the stormwater master plan City Council last year updated the stormwater master plan which is more the neighborhood scale pipes that deal with local drainage issues and that plan identified a number of Tier one priorities that we'll be focusing on over the next 20 years for 2019 we have also proposed an increase in maintenance of some of our existing infrastructure and particularly some of the major drainage ways that are well into their lifecycle that could use some extensive capital maintenance to restore original capacity and function so in the stormwater fund we are looking at a five percent rate increase that amounts to about seventy eight cents on a typical

[31:03] single-family residential account so I'm just again for context so last year we had projected 7 percent as the increase for stormwater and flood we went with five because because of scheduling we've got a couple major capital projects that are moving out of 19 into future years next we have one question for you sure I was just wondering regarding the flood insurance policies if it had anything to do with the amount of building that is allowed in major drainage ways in the other cities as opposed to Boulder whether or not you even had a chance to look at that I would I think I could probably safely say yes and again some of it is that Boulder built in a lot of these areas before flood risks were fully understood and in certainly other parts of the state in other parts of the country you just wouldn't build in 100-year floodplain at all or you might design differently so yeah we certainly continue to better understand the risks

[32:02] but we have a whole lot of of homes and businesses that are in existing flood plains or 500-year flood way for that matter yeah that and that is a whole other challenge these are you know likelihood properties that are in the 100 because the regulatory requirement for the mortgages is only the 100-year flood that is correct but I will put in a plug if you live in the 500-year floodplain you can get discounted insurance through FEMA and I would encourage people to invest gave that so just on flood insurance um in 2013 we had a lot of people who were flooded who don't live along creeks but their basements were flooded because of groundwater coming through and then saturating the concrete and then sweating through into the interior of the house are those people can they be covered by flood insurance so I would encourage people to talk to their specific insurance agent it seemed like

[33:03] in many cases people might have coverage for a couple things and the ruling from the adjuster was that the cause was the other thing so if you're outside of the floodplain you can get what's called a preferred risk policy which is substantially discounted over the FEMA flood insurance but the other things to consider is that sometimes sewer backups are a separate Rider groundwater may be a separate Rider so it's really important if you were impacted in 2013 if you live in a flood plain near a floodplain if you've had those issues really make sure you have that coverage and I'll also add the FEMA flood insurance is pretty limited so it is generally based on the premise that a basement is a furnace and maybe some storage and obviously in Boulder people have very expensive and utilized finished basements and the coverage on that is very limited thank you sure so

[34:01] this is a comparison between boulders 2018 and 2019 rates and a number of other communities across the Front Range it's you know it's provided for context not everyone has the same age of infrastructure or flood risk not everyone even has a flood and stormwater fee but it gives you a generalist sense of how we look relative to neighboring communities and then this next slide which is a little more dated but again gives you some context these are some cities that we more typically compare ourselves to in other fronts and along the western portion of the United States so again context and then finally this is just a summary of what I've gone through in terms of the individual increases and it works out to a total of about five dollars and three cents for what we're calling a typical customer obviously people who use less or people who use

[35:00] more are going to experience different rate impacts depending on that so with that I will turn it this way so Jeff it as we all know we we have pretty significantly raised our rates and all three categories over the last five years or so we're proposing another rate increase of about six percent it looks like what can you um what can you say about the future in other words you talked a little bit about some of the types we have to replace the other work we have to do are we gonna see you know rate increases of 6% a year from this baseline going forward or does this does this increase kind of do it for a while so there's a couple of factors so one is there certain things that you know goods and services that we provide that if we don't keep up with inflation so we you know we buy chemicals for treatment we buy electricity we are at the will of a construction market so we look at increases each year based on keeping up

[36:01] with those indices the capital is is more variable so in the water fund we have a higher increase this year and that's in part and that it we appear to have some catch up to do there to get ahead of some things and hopefully save money in the long run the wastewater fund as I mentioned I think we're probably more in the zone and it's more keeping up with cost indices and then the the storm water and flood fund is it's kind of going to depend what the community is up for in terms of investment in flood mitigation because those projects are very very expensive we do typically bond form and spread those costs over 20 years but if if we want to more aggressively go after flood mitigation or storm water we would be looking at increases bigger than what we have this year I guess the other there is we do have regulatory projects that come in we generally try to plan ahead for those and not hit with a big 20% increase in a given year so we could

[37:01] have the option to seize smaller increases year to year but that potentially runs a scent of a situation where in the out-years we're having to do a catch-up or a one-time - to pay for a specific project maybe let me ask you just like a different way um if this is roughly 6% increase how much of that 6% would you say is just ordinary and homme increases in operating expenses the things you listed at the very beginning because inflation is at 2 or 3% and how much of this of that 6% you just kind of catch up towards capital projects I'm gonna look to - Ken bear who's our numbers guy in tracks all the various indices roughly half of our expenses are operating about half our capital in our operating budget from 2018 to the 2019 proposed the operating portion is increasing about 2% as a point of reference so a lot of this is related to as jeff says infrastructure costs in the

[38:00] CIP into earlier question right now in our financial planning for the out years the next couple of years it's pretty similar with all three together around somewhere around 6% we look at also ad we look at like nationwide indexes of what water and wastewater rates are doing throughout the country and that's it's lately been around maybe four to five percent generally under the CPI data thanks Jeff so in 2018 we previewed the idea that the city would be putting forward a proposal for funding that general fund CIP this was presented to City Council last fall and adopted as an ongoing funding mechanism to achieve a sustainable source of funding for council priorities and for departments I like their own funding sources in 2018

[39:01] as you see we funded three point six five million dollars worth of projects and in 2019 we're continuing our commitments by funding the city's five-year debt service payment for the Pogan pan costs property ongoing cost related to the certificates of participation for the construction of a fiber backbone in the cities in the support of the city's broadband effort and the replacement of an eighteen year old vehicle used in the critical incidents like fires and floods this vehicle would allow the city to be more effective more effectively communicate with the Boulder County Sheriff's Office the city of Longmont police CU and other agencies in multi jurisdiction incidents so we'll be discussing how the operating budget has been affected by the flattening sales tax but it's also important to note that departments also had to strategically review the CIP and focus on core services and maintenance of their systems the two departments are the most primarily impacted by this is the

[40:00] Transportation Parks and Recreation Department and you can see some of the adjustments that were made because of this so the proposed CIP includes many projects beyond what we talked about this evening some of those being pavement mate pavement maintenance transportation under passes several of them the Barker pipeline wastewater maintenance the North Boulder library scott carpenter pool redevelopment in 19th Street Complete Streets so we've set aside some time for council members ask questions to us and anyone in the audience about specific projects prior to moving ahead with your discussion around the budget so with that we're happy to take any of your questions right CIP questions and I guess in general I think if this works for folks somebody brings up an issue like storm water and we all wait stormwater and then we'll go to the next top issue does that work okay so Lisa and then Aaron well I was

[41:00] just gonna just based on your previous site I was just gonna ask you about transportation under passes and maybe mike is the person to answer this but from the time that you identify a need for an underpass to the design to the actual implementation how long does that take it seems like it takes quite a few years in a big aspect to those types of major projects that also enters into the equation is a lot of those we secure federal grants so and those tend to come on multi-year cycles and so a project is an example in our current CIP of two underpasses one is replacement of the foothills in Colorado overpass with an underpass and xxx in Colorado underpass and both of those were funded through a federal grant that came to the Denver

[42:00] Regional Council of Governments funding process and so when you add that into it in that we apply and then we hopefully get a word of the grant and then and then the contracting cycle can take more than a year and so a lot of those projects tend to then get extended to you know probably more like five years six years from kind of concept completion and what's just the average cost opponent of these and I'm sure you know they're all complicated yeah and have their own peculiarities but just average yes you know things that are more complex like the one that's at 30th in Colorado where we're trying to connect multiple corners and I think that that one is closer to somewhere in the neighborhood of seven million dollars and the simpler ones are somewhat less expensive things in terms of transfer to reach transportation okay

[43:00] so I got I got you peez so the 19th Street Complete Streets thing what's the timeline looking like for the so we're currently in the public engagement phase in the design phase and so we're out talking with the neighbors there's a series of different grants that are applying to that there's something that's called a tap grant which is through the Colorado Department of Transportation and a safe routes to school funding and so we're currently in the process of doing the seep for that project and hope to bring that to you I think right around the end of the year so November December and so implementation would be next year 2019 and will there be any coordination with that with new underpasses along four-mile Canyon Creek or those running on separate schedules yes the scheduling will be separate but definitely the coordination will be there and so we'll be making sure to not build one thing and then dig it up and build another thing and so we'll be phasing the part

[44:01] where the underpass to make sure that we don't do that but I think that the underpass was actually slightly behind the project so we'll be stopping just short of the underpass in front of us we let this finish okay great I look forward to that that's part of the daughter's safe route to school yeah so there's expected improvements along 4 Mile Canyon Creek to the west of 19th Street so I assume these will all be that's what I was just asking yeah yeah no sequence together I understood your question is the underpass and then the street but then there's the whole Creek improvements right which I think is that stuff is primarily further to the north so it's from kind of where 19th and upland up to the the future Park and then up to Broadway and that is not part of this project but and also I think

[45:01] slightly behind from a timing perspective yeah just so I make sure I understand but the underpasses would be done as part of the flood improvements right they would correct one yeah they're all one project and there's these underpasses and I think violet and that would be about 16 so violet and then upland and then 19th are the three of them so I had a question and you started you mentioned that if proposition 110 passes yeah we are also 40 which is the statewide tax to fund transportation we know some of that that there's local funds there's regional funds I guess how if that passes you know some of it can use be used and operational but some can be use on capital how do you see that what's the process by which we'll go back and decide how we can maybe do more we already have our prioritized local list or how does that work out so I think

[46:01] some said a bit of perspective and the general fund the reductions for somewhere in the neighborhood of 4% but since transportations is a fairly focused on sales tax the reductions there were in the range of 8 percent and about 1.8 million dollars and so our proposed 2019 budget has been reduced by that amount because the Transportation Fund is about 2/3 and then depending upon whether or not you're including the grants in and so part of the the new tax would allow us to then look at reprioritizing and potentially adding back some of the reductions that we've had to do in this year's budget that as I understand it is about 20% of the total of the new tax would be focused to

[47:01] local municipalities and so that would equate to about 2.8 million dollars a year and so it would basically give us the capacity to add back to reductions which we've kind of prioritized that enhancements would be the first thing that would be reduced while core services would be maintained and so we would probably look at adding back in that reverse order and then it would give us about another million dollars to again potentially explore what would be our top priorities from there so does that yeah that makes sense okay I think we're good on transportation then thank you a question about the broker project the broker take about 12 years is that starting when does that 12 year start so we actually have started but we're proposing

[48:00] increasing the funding to increase the pace of that okay so I you know it's it's in that ballpark and we some of the uncertainties we are looking at a variety of technologies so we beginning last year we started doing some lining or rather than replacing so it actually kind of hangs off the edge of the hillside coming from Barker to the top of Flagstaff and then down to Boulder Canyon hydro so it's kind of precarious so as we find better ways to get in there and replace at the time schedule probably will adjust okay I was asked that next if you could line it instead of replace it yeah that's that that's the plan it's a relatively recent discovery of being able to have water our miners that we use for potable is the current pipe light or steel or what believe it's concrete in that portion it's there's there's two different pieces so there's a there's a section that goes from Barker to the literally to costly reservoir on the top of Flagstaff and then there's another piece

[49:01] that comes down to Boulder Canyon hydro it's the upper portion the upper portion still okay thanks so much and mine says quick are you gonna be working with the county then on this week um yeah its its County it's Forest Service it's it's a variety and so that also implemented the sequencing of how much we can get done at one time and and so then because the hydro is right on Canyon so is that going to affect traffic on Canyon like people who know the pipeline itself is actually not in the road it's it you said it's not literally like hanging on a sort of a shelf benched on the side of the hillside so most of it is go up and out of the way it just might be some trucks going up but it's not going yeah okay then again we've been doing it and knock on wood only a few people have haven't noticed or been disrupted by it so

[50:01] hopefully well relatively not impactful the public but it does mean that we don't have that water source available while we're working on it Thanks so I have a water question and at the risk of opening I'm just kind of curious how this use I'm sorry Boulder about South Boulder Creek flood mitigation is reflected or not in our long-term CIP plan so we have moved it out of the 2019 CIP is still remains in the six year CIP which is basically placeholders for planning purposes so it shows up in 2020 so if we are at a point of being able to instead of if when I'm sorry so potentially 2020 and again council would have the opportunity to make a decision on that through the 2020 budget process or it or it could move farther beyond that it would be a bond

[51:00] project so that you know while it would show up in the CIP and the budget in that year we'd be paying for it over 20 years because it's as you know is well beyond our actual annual revenue and the fund great thanks anything else on water so just CIP okay thank you I think one other thing we wanted to go back to in this first part had to do with percentage of reserves no it was in the no we're talking about CIP and also the context you'll have an opportunity to talk more about it in the financial update then we will hold all right anything else on the CIP right great thank you very much we're gonna now transition and wait one minute while chris pops out of that chair and car comes up thank you Chris

[52:16] okay thank you good evening I am going to quickly push the right button there we go present just a few slides regarding the economic climate and specifically national state and local trends that impact our outlook for the budget first economic growth is strong 2018 u.s. GDP growth rate is expected to be between 2.5 and 3 percent the second quarter was quite strong at four point 1 percent but most expected to come down off of that number for the rest of the year Colorado is expected to outpace or stay on pace with the US and the strength is

[53:01] in part due to significant business investment the labor market is healthy the US unemployment rate is three point nine percent Colorado unemployment rate is even lower at 2.8 percent and there is even slightly below that at 2.7 percent as a result of that strong labor market many businesses and organizations are experiencing challenges filling positions and they are seeing wage pressures as they try to compete for skill and talent consumer confidence is high the measure actually increased 5.5 points in August to the highest level since 2000 historically high consumer confidence has predicted healthy consumer spending in the near term the housing market is strong particularly in Colorado and there is a construction labor shortage which is resulting to some supply issues and then just in general overall inventory is at historic

[54:01] lows in many markets including Boulder the result of that is price pressures or inflation and we see appreciation in housing costs there are other inflationary pressures the July CPI was two point nine percent consumer prices in Colorado are expected to rise and an even greater the nation these pressures result from recent interest rate hikes the tight labor market that we talked about and also recent trade restrictions with the imposition of tariffs the resulting price pressures on imported goods so we do see significant inflationary pressures on the horizon we have seen mixed retail sales measures nationally the measures are quite strong July retail sales were up 6.4% year over a year Colorado forecasts are moderate to strong with many of the Front Range cities forecasting 3% to 9% growth on

[55:00] sales and use tax revenues some of those real strong forecasts are the result of some retail marijuana coming online and also some significant retail that's opening in certain cities so it does vary across the Front Range but but it is moderate to strong there however is lagging we are seeing and experiencing slow growth in retail sales and we'll talk a little bit more about those trends on some subsequent slides but with all that we do want to say that there is a fair amount of uncertainty out there even with all that positive [Music] indicators there's uncertainty regarding interest rate hikes how many and how and when there's still a lot of uncertainty with regard to trade and the trade wars you know the breadth and the depth of them there's speculation that with the elections this file that there may be financial market volatility there's also continued global concerns

[56:02] with regard to North Korean Russia particularly and then the yield curve as we discussed in April has flattened over the past year which often is a precursor to a recession so there are some cautionary tales about possible recession on a horizon so we did have a lengthy discussion back in April with regard to sales tax in Boulder and we expect to have much more detail information as a result of the citywide retail study that's going to be kicked off shortly but we did want to follow up on a few of counsels questions or requests from that study session with regard to spending patterns and trends in Boulder and specifically the impacts of aging online sales and shifts with in Boulder County with regard to aging we have kicked off an effort with Phyllis Resnick to develop an economy trick sales tax forecast model and preliminary

[57:01] results from that work show that age is a statistically significant variable that is negatively affecting City sales tax revenues so when we complete that model we'll have more to share with you about that can I ask a quick question are there is there like national research on that that you can tie to or is this something you kind of have to create a model for from whole cloth she is creating the model for us she is using some national data sets for the variables in the model but she actually was a remark intelafone following Phyllis for years that age was going to have a significant impact on sales tax revenues across the state and she's was remarking to us that this is the first model using our data where that's really showing a statistically significant to be true a lot of areas I look forward to

[58:02] that yeah interesting the next is online sales we use readily available information and revenue data from those online retailers that do room it and it would collect and remit sales tax to us to estimate the current revenue lost from online sale online sales to retailers that do not collect and remit and based upon that combination of information we're estimating the raus associated with online sales to those retailers that do not collect and remit to be between five and eight million dollars for 2018 online sales are growing approximately 13% year so that revenue loss will continue to grow by approximately a million a year maybe less so again online sales are also negatively affecting City sales tax revenue sorry there's a Supreme Court ruling on this matter earlier this year

[59:01] do we expect that to make this trend better rather than worse over time at all Tom looks like he wants to answer it requires several steps before it will help it's it's a few years off including a change in Colorado state law so it's a while off North Dakota law is very different than Colorado's okay and next is with regards to spending patterns in Boulder County this chart shows two lines the grey line is the cities or actually they changed colors changed colors on me the blue line is the city's actual share of County sales tax revenue and so you'll see that over time the city's actual share of the county sales tax revenue was increasing and then beginning in 2014 it started to fall down the gray

[60:02] line is the trend line and so not only did it begin to fall so our share of Boulder County citizens revenues has been falling it has now fallen below the long-term trend line so few stories behind that possible shift fewer County residents coming into the city to shop and dine or more or all of these Boulder residents going to other parts of the county to shop and dine and largely those decisions being impacted by more retail choices out in the county so there is some evidence that competition from within the county is also negatively if acting City sales tax revenue so that's sort of in summary the economic climate and analysis that we did with regard to local trends can I ask you a question about this have you done an analysis of because I know a lot of the cities in the county around us have added a lot of retail square footage as compared to us

[61:03] have you done I guess effectively a a sales tax dollar per square foot analysis in other words are we are we losing our share of retail sales tax because there's more square footage or are people buying less per square foot in Boulder than they used to so we have not done that analysis we did do some preliminary data seeking and regarding commercial square foot and it is a little bit challenging to get we do anticipate that as through the citywide retail study we may have more of those answers we do have some additional data points with regard to sales tax and benchmarking that katie is going to cover in a few subsequent slides but we will we do have that idea on our list so we will look at that through the citywide retail study great thanks I just wondered whether in terms of the data that you were talking about the aging and the online sales aren't also

[62:03] affecting other cities in the county so that it's just not happening right here in Boulder but across the county that's correct and we did have a little discussion about this in April in that online sales yes it's impacting everyone so why is it possibly impacting us more significantly and are there is there something about the demographics of the residents of Boulder that make it impact us more significantly and again we don't have those answers we may hope to get some more of those answers through that retail study and with the assistance of a consultant thank you and I think Bob's question was a really good one as well the retail square footages I'll agree that that Bob's question was a really good one another one that we hear from residents talking to residents and emails and such that we receive where people say well the café's traffic

[63:02] has gotten so bad a boiler that we go somewhere else to shop we can't find a place to park a boiler so we go somewhere else to shop so similarly to Bob's question have you done that analysis and if you haven't could it be part of the retail sort of thing nice thank you anything else on the sales tax piece okay great and again we are going to go through a few more data points per capita because resident retail is difficult to parse out of just a commercial square footage as well so we're working on that piece but it does take a little bit longer so I wanted to touch on two slides that we typically show during the budget presentation mostly to highlight the variety of revenue sources that the entire city receives so for 2019 our revenue budget is going to be about 359 million dollars

[64:01] of course there are three major revenue sources sales and use tax which is the largest followed by utility rates which Jeff Arthur touched on earlier and then property tax rate but it is important to note that we do receive other taxes in the orange like accommodations or our franchise agreements and then in the gray there's a whole slew of other revenues that we receive that do help make for a more robust revenue source like permits and fines grants and leases similarly for the general fund while it doesn't have as many revenue sources it still has several beyond the sales and use tax and property tax but again the majority of the was revenues in the general fund are from those two sources about 70% in fact but we do receive franchise taxes this is where our accommodations tax and utility occupation tax come in in the general fund and then briefly I wanted

[65:01] to touch and rewind counsel the purple color of cost allocation is charges for service that the general fund provides to other funds so similar to a business that would have its own attorneys or HR system funds that don't necessarily have the support pay and to help provide those internal services I have a question on the admissions taxes I noted in the reading material that those events that were that that there are that are either swimming events or racing walking or biking do not have an admissions tax and I thought you know we all love the Boulder Boulder right we celebrated it earlier in the year but doesn't it wish itself as being one of the largest foot races in the country and that we don't end their fees I think

[66:00] are relatively high and it would just I don't see why we don't take advantage of some of these things as well and particularly with the swimming events since we're putting so much capital into the reservoir and attracting so many people there it would be another place where that might be worthwhile is there reason for that this was a policy decision that was made by counsels well over a decade ago and in fact no outdoor events were charged an admission tax except the Boulder Boulder which was charged one for a period of time and then during the two thousand five six and seven discussions decisions were made not to charge them in admissions tax however they continue to pay it for of time and now excuse me just folder just the Boulder Boulder and now we're actually working with the owners of the

[67:01] Boulder Boulder race to reimburse them because they they paid a tax kind of voluntarily that they weren't required to pay but to get right to your question I'll just repeat the council made this decision and probably in the late 90s or early 2000s and so it's been in fact for a long time so this is something since it was a policy decision that could be changed if this council thought it was reasonable to do so council it was other cities don't charge it for these events so if you wanted us to look into what we need to do some research on it might also require an election table requires elections for tax policy changes that increase revenue beside beyond certain amounts this there's some dispute about whether such an a change would be

[68:00] covered our policy in the past when we did is with short-term rentals was to take it to the course since we have admissions taxes in place though this so you're saying any new category would have to be taken to the voter you think that's been our policy in the past I think there's an argument that you don't have to pay it there's a case that sort of restricts that part of Tabor but because of the penalties in Tabor in the past we have gone forward and as I said we we did this I believe with short-term rentals because we've always taxed rentals and four terms are just a different kind of it we decided to go to the voters for that just to be absolutely certain so it would be that would be a choice of council if you decided to do it our advice is generally to be conservative on matters of Tabor and the other thing would be to see how much something like that we bring in like the Boulder Boulder since it's a pass-through kind of thing it doesn't really hurt the the funding or the enterprise that's putting it forth so I

[69:03] just have a quiz following up from Cindy's and that is it would be interesting it used to be it was really just the Boulder Boulder and that was it and I have no idea at this point how many events how many races how many whatever there are that might have considered admission tax so unless you have that number in the top of your head I'm just asking that for additional information and maybe that can come back at our October 16th meeting that was the plan so what could come back at October 16th is probably the number of event permits that we issue for the year but to calculate whether or not how much of emissions tax would bring in for those events we can't get by October because

[70:02] we'd have to everything about the number of participants and the cost and stuff like that so that's going to be a much longer effort but we can get the number of events and that's fine I'm just curious having sat here for a while you know how many events we do have and it seems like it's a lot more than what we used to have okay we still on this and then Bob's in the queue yeah well just I mean we're gonna have a discussion period right after we get through the presentation question right okay so because I just would like to talk about whether this something we're interested in forcing but I'll wait till we get to discussions maybe we can put that on though question stack see okay Bob do you wish your son does tax accommodations - I'm different okay okay and if possible Jane another thing that I would be interested in seeing a thieved October 16th hearing would be the

[71:00] process by which larger events and larger events I mean things like the the iron people and the larger events like that the process by which they have to go through to be able to put that event on in the city yeah absolutely we've got a very robust system in place that has been developed over the last the last three years with a pamphlet that helps people understand how to do it so we can provide all of that data for you in October thank you okay okay my question goes back to the pie chart there on the profile you just briefly touched on all the other sources are external they come from taxpayers effectively or fee payers where does that purple money come from the eleven million dollars it comes from another city funds is that right that's correct and largely which city funds

[72:00] does that come from it's proportionally divided across the city funds based upon their utilization of internal services so each department categorizes their charges differently so for the attorney's office that charges two different funds would be based upon caseload or workload for the finance department that provides support to all city funds it would be based upon you know transaction type so will vary but we do have a breakdown that we can provide as well of how much each fund pays in that cost allocation it's also in the budget book okay but this the alternate source of that 11 million dollars is some combination of sales tax and property tax and III okay so would it be fair to assume that is roughly proportionate to the other colors you got around the circle or is it gonna be skewed towards something like fees because a lot of it comes from utilities it might be off the top of my head but we can provide that breakdown I would just say as a matter of feedback just

[73:00] for future budgets I'd like to get rid of that purple part and just and just call it what it is other words I'm more curious on the external sources rather than intra because internal sources and I have to trace that back to another pie chart and figure out what the sources of those are so I would find it more helpful to just take that 11 million in person among property taxes and sales taxes and other taxes and fees and so on so just that's just a personal preference so you're saying that you would depending on which chairman paid the fee and where their revenue comes from to then distribute it out yeah cuz I think the purpose of this pie chart is this arrows we're gonna spend a hundred fifty two million dollars and in general we have received a hundred fifty two dollars and general fund sources and we're showing the six or eight places they come from and that 11 million doesn't really show the place it comes from it comes from yet another pie chart which has its own sources and so if our question if the purpose of this is who's paying one hundred fifty two million dollars I'd like to see who's been one hundred fifty two million because it shows one hundred forty 1 million dollars for sources and the 11 million

[74:00] of some other pie chart yes I just understand it's a great point it is confused us for years okay great so we did already discuss utility fee so I wanted to touch on briefly the two other major revenue sources first beginning with property tax so as a reminder we talked at length last year about property tax largely because it was a assessment year for 2019 we're projecting that the revenue remains flat again as a reminder though we receive about 14 percent of all property tax revenues the largest of which goes to the public schools and then to Boulder County and then of that property tax that we receive a portion of it goes to the general fund a large portion of it but the blue-colored in the pie chart below our dedicated funds that receive property tax that it can be exclusively spent on those funds and purposes so it's just important to know that the we

[75:00] don't the general fund doesn't receive all of the property taxes either again the mill levy is remaining at eleven point eight nine one or nine eight one and then again twenty twenty does pose another potential for adjustment to the assessment rate for residential property to comply with the Gallagher amendment and more to become at the state level question how much did the property tax in take rise for the city last year I'm seeming to recall someone said something like seventeen percent it was right around 70 percent in ten eighteen seventeen to eighteen percent sand how much did that translate into in dollars altogether I would have to do a little work to remind myself week and then that just went in to this chart over here is that correct I went to the general fund to the library fund Parks and Recreation fund in a community housing assistance program fund equal proportions I I would

[76:02] be just curious to know the dollar amount of of that the whole thing Cindy you asked my question well I'm actually also curious kind of we know property taxes or at least the the word people feel that poverty taxes are increasing and I'd be curious to see how it's going over time and also but also I mean I know our portion of that is relatively small over time but nonetheless so if it's not a lot of work it would be really useful to see what the trends are there we did a lot of that last year so I'm yeah okay data any other questions on property tax alright similarly for retail so retails tax sales and use tax we receive a larger portion comparatively but we do share retail sales tire sales and use tax with other entities namely the state of Colorado and the county in RTD again

[77:00] less than half of the overall real retail tax goes to the general fund and then it also is dedicated to specific funds namely open space transportation Parks and Recreation and then the community culture and safety temporary tax for 2080 air 2019 the city wide sales use tax remains the same again it's important to note we do have fluctuating tax rates and in 2020 we anticipate the expiration of a portion of our overall sales and use tax rate declining it to three point seven one that is not related to CCS okay remind us how much that is and what which taxes sunsetting so it's sunsetting in the open space fund and its 0.15% and isn't there a shift also between open space and transportation that's coming up this year next year mm-hmm yeah next year so there's a shift that one from open space to general fund this year and then again another chef next year which leads itself to the

[78:01] elimination of the open space portion of it oh those are tied together okay questions great so here's where we're providing a little bit more information following up on the April study session as well we are asked to look at the taxable transactions per capita which does normalize a little bit of what our revenues are seeing and overall I think it's important to note that our retail sector is robust it does generate more taxable sales dollars per capita than other cities when we compare except for golden the three highest communities are Denver Boulder and golden and they're also important to note that their employment and/or visitor hubs which could lend itself to the reason why we're much more higher per capita than our surrounding communities so this slide is really showing us that retail is still doing well but it's not growing at the rate that it had been in recent years wait a minute so the trend the

[79:00] graph you showed before which showed are the trend of our percentage of Boulder County taxes sort of descending rather rapidly it's just reflecting that the rate of increase is going down but actually we are one of the strongest by far in the region those two things are seemingly at odds and on one hand everybody's going oh my god retail is dead and in Boulder but this shows us we're kicking butt so I would yeah I would say we've been kicking butt okay and we might not be as much so going forward you know that it sort of it was great but it probably just put us at risk in terms of we were sort of outperforming other communities in terms of retail per capita are we becoming more average but we're still way ahead we have to change the name to the Lake Wobegon okay we have Aaron and Lisa oh just a quick comment of it so some of the

[80:01] trends are shifting relative to other communities but I think the message here is that our sales tax is still very strong our retail scene is still very strong and so well I think our position is shifting relative to other communities which are getting stronger I think that this guy is not falling right wait what yeah this normalized graph is telling us is that we continue to be to be strong yeah what does golden I haven't seen this kind of a graph before in previous budgets and I'm wondering if we have them I mean just following up on what Suzanne said it just doesn't that one graph that you show were we're really trending downward I'm gonna jump in on that other graph you have to look at the scale of that graph because I think it has sort of an outsize impact the way that we've done the scale on it if you go back and look at it yeah the

[81:01] difference is from 1% is a huge amount so we in 2006 we were at 48% and now we're at 49% but we made the scale makes it look really sharp a little bit for heart attack season zero based graphs can you show the Transvaal there yes okay okay any other you dig in for future budgets this is really really helpful graphic I agree can you do this historically I mean not now if density for this budget cycle I think the future if you could go back like five years and see you know we're in second place were we're in first place at one point in time were we in fifth place I mean which what are the trends both of the other cities thanks for producing this this is very helpful so similarly we were asked to look at our reliance on sales and use tax compared to our surrounding

[82:01] communities and you know we're right about in we are relying on sales and use tax we're not as relighted as some we do believe that our recent bump in property tax revenue has kind of stabilized our reliance on sales and use tax but this is just another data point that we wanted to show to council following up on the April study session is that general fund is that normalized for utilities some companies have utilities and some don't so you do take that all out this is just general fund it's general government yeah great thanks Munson if I could just ask so what's Denver do I mean there's a big difference between Fort Collins and Denver it seems like a huge commercial and business an area think of downtown Denver and the property tax that they have for that area that okay it's wearing use tax

[83:04] again it's important note there are four components we do focus on retail sales which is the dark blue line which is it comprises about eighty percent of our overall sales and use tax so that's why we do focus on it heavily but we do have other revenue sources such as our motor vehicle which is remained fairly steady it's the smallest portion contributing to it but it is reliant revenue source in the past few years and then in our use taxes are the ones that are most volatile you'll see the business using construction use especially over the past several years have gone up and down and we also know am in 2018 that we are benefiting from some of those volatile revenue sources coming in higher than projected again why do we talk about kind of year-end in our projections I think it's important to note that December is our highest month for sales and use tax collections and so while having data through July is important as

[84:01] a baseline measurement oftentimes what we see in July isn't necessarily what we reflect come your end so this chart demonstrates the fluctuations and timing differences when you compare the collections through July again the last two three years we were growing more strongly in July than how we ended the year so right now through July our sales new stack or retail sales taxes up 1.7 and we've projected one person so to wrap up the financial section we wanted to remind council of our revenue projections again I just hit on a retail sales tax in 2018 we are projecting a 1% increase in 2019 another 1% off of that number and then business use tax and construction music in because of their volatility in 2018 we hit on I'm setting a baseline number for that and then anything above that baseline dollar amounts are considered one-time so what we received above 2017 projections were then utilized during or 2817 words then

[85:03] utilized during our 2019 budget process for one-time items depositor I think we got ourselves in trouble in 2018 because I think in six was 16 17 or maybe even 15 16 17 or construction use tax jumped up from what it had been historically and I think we budgeted to what we thought was the new norm it turns out that wasn't the new norm that was an aberration so is this construction use base of 6.5 million the old norm and we're being conservative now correct okay great things understand maybe it said this but I just don't understand the base is based on the average several years looking back when we had slower growth looking for it's a more robust years but we also can't rely on that so we took an average of several years and realize that for construction use at least six and a half million dollar was a rough estimate yes I guess it's consistently receiving I guess business uses what I

[86:00] was more curious the same evening beverage but is that as well tall atilla's construction yeah any other questions so the key takeaways before we dive into more questions are Cara also mentioned them earlier but we have a strong economy on sales and youth sales tax growth has slowed and spending patterns are shifting to online sales and within the counting potentially and we will obviously continue to study the trends and data and expect to learn more as we dive more into the retail citywide a retail study so with that I'll open it up for additional questions is this where we would talk about research mm-hmm you can did you you want to talk about anymore I'll just start where I had before so let's just say like when I

[87:04] first came on we had less than 2% reserves so that was like 1995 1996 and best practices told us at that time that probably 10% reserve was what we really needed who sets those kinds of I mean we set our own policies but these financial guidelines of where you should be who sets that kind of guideline is so in other presentations that we've had we've reflected the government finance officers association view of what would be adequate versus superior and it has ranged from sort of the 10% up to the 15 to 20 percent range you actually said our policy with regard to reserves and I'll just jump to a question that Sam

[88:01] had on hotline today about where did it come from and it really came from the idea that 10% was quite inadequate and so the council in around the mid-2000s decided to move up to 15% and around the time of the flood we were at either 14% or 15% because of the risk that we've seen with regard to flooding in the city and then the actual occurrence of the flood in 2013 and our relief as a community that we had adequate reserves of 14 to 15 percent and sadly other communities didn't we made a decision or I'm gonna say I made a decision to work with the budgets as we move forward to shoot for a goal of 20% reserves which is less than three months really reserves so 25% would be three months reserves and so we knew that we couldn't just jump to that

[89:01] and that may be adding slowly over time one percent per year would get us to 20 percent by 2020 council did not adopt that as a policy goal however we've recommended it each years we've brought forth the budget and you have approved the budget each year with that in mind so 17 percent 80 percent etc you can make a different decision for 2019 we're still recommending 19 percent it's up to you thank you that's very helpful and I think it's also helpful to understand what those are reserves represent so three months reserves would be 25 percent of our budget and in a previous slide there was something that go back here about sixteen point seven percent is kind of a prescribed place

[90:02] you might want to be at and somebody help me seven percent I just can't get to that slide there you go yeah and so that's the best practice so is that from government office or where is that from Cheryl's going to help us with Cheryl patellae CFO yes that 16.7% is from the government finance officers and again we want to remind you that that's just the minimum and then we add on but another important part of this is for bond rating so our bond rating agencies look at anything 15% and above as strong financial reserves this is really important it's mentioned in our rating agency reports that we get that we maintain those reserves when we go out to do bonding

[91:00] it'll help us with interest rates and those types of things right so I was going to go into into that and so at a for 2019 the idea would be that we'd go up to 19% reserves and is there some kind of a sweet spot where our triple-a rating is you had said 15% but it's there by being 19% do we get even better interest rates I can't answer that question there's a variety of factors that go into our ratings but certainly the stronger reserves that we have the better we will be when we compare ourselves to surrounding cities 20% is right about average in our surrounding cities and actually if I recall there aren't any cities that are less than 20% so long different yeah it's not an

[92:01] unusual unusually high reserve level so this is a standard practice exactly you know wait so Denver has 20% in reserves I don't know we have that slide in the back pocket but we presented it in April so I apologize we'll be sure to include that in your next we have interesting because I think people are interested in looking at the reserves but I I certainly am NOT if it's gonna affect our ratings and so what can I just I know you're in line but I guess to me the question is simply that we are knowing we know we are aware of the trade-offs right there's a trade-off between investing in their community now versus putting out reserves for right right and so what is I know it's written somewhere about 1% reserves equal how much money ish about 1.5 million dollars like well we have it in black pocket slides out Sanford you could choose to

[93:00] invest in something in one-time items yes sirs so I think that's just a good thing to think about as we we lay these 1.5 okay I have Bob and then Jill has a different line of questions I started to go down that I wanted he started work on past the end that I wanted to go down so it's a 1% of the general fund right is 3 I apologize at 1.3 million horses the Delta it's over roughly at 18 percent right now john staff's recommendation is good in 19 percent which we about a 1.3 million dollar increase in our cumulative reserves that right correct so a couple of questions relating to put that 1.3 million perspective well overall our reserve would that be roughly 1.3 times 18 is the size of our reserve there right so about 23 million dollars right there four million dollars how much how much did we go out of I know we eventually were reimbursed to some extent from FEMA but we had to lay out a lot of cash first and this is pointed that we're having this discussion on the fifth anniversary of the flood how much did we repeat

[94:02] negative outlay for flood flood work emergency flood work did we go out of pocket do you remember hopefully Katie remember I do remember so in the general fund we actually didn't touch the reserves largely because you had to shift a lot of the dollars in your budget to then focus on that work so instead of being able to do the work that you were doing and the flood recovery works you just shifted their budget to focus on that so the general fund largely saw hits and the public safety related to the cost of FEMA but the other funds like open space and Parks and Rec were the ones that really got hit the hardest but again it was reshift in projects that they could no longer complete because now they were focusing on the restoration or cleanup efforts I seem to recall a number of like 20 million or there I realized that we Nate mean out of the month a the dollars me I'm not have come out of the reserve but there were dollars that we didn't spend he just remember I mean just ordered made it is

[95:00] what I'm looking for I'm looking for the next flood and I want to know I think it was about twenty eight million dollars six twenty seven point six then I reserve right now is about twenty four and we're talking about taking it up to like 26 or 27 that twenty percent yeah okay so that was commissioned line number one question line number two is I saw somewhere in the memo and I can't find it right now that we're projecting in 2019 to need to dip into that twenty four million dollar reserve by about was it three point seven million dollars to fund the Muny that's over and above the cumulative immunity tax we paid that's right I will be voting against that and I will be out voted on that and after I'm not voted on that how much would that take our reserve down from eighteen percent down to sixteen yeah it's about fifteen and a half percent so we really go to even even with your recommendation we're still going to fifteen and a half percent if we spend that money on the muni is that right yeah if the budget is realized next year okay and it's simply

[96:00] a timing of reimbursement so we will be receiving those revenues after the expenses are incurred so it's a timing mechanism was luck in Twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two and the rest of the tax collected okay so we're going down to fifteen or sixteen percent even even with the one percent addition to the reserves is that right right okay I just won one figure though to go with so we can just remember this for the future twenty seven point six million on the flood and how much did we get from FEMA seventeen seventeen million so at some level you could argue we were out eleven million from that disaster yes okay we got Steve funding as well didn't we some I ma'am well the the state funding was sort of a pass-through of federal funding we think that we are down 11 to 12 million great think on reimbursed okay any other questions on this yeah I

[97:02] just wondered and how many of the departments also hold their own reserves and how much almost all of them do we do have that outlined in the budget book so it varies between you know 10% the utilities are closer to 25% I believe due to the large capital projects but it's a range depending on the risk level how much for that fund is based upon capital dollars and in typical capital projects you already have contingency built into that project dollar or whether it's largely an operating fund that funds staff or not you could ask later okay why don't we keep going any other questions well shifting gears you talked about

[98:01] inflation does seem like that's a really real pressure you said that it is impacting cost but not revenue but for obvious reasons it'll eventually impact revenue buyers have less purchasing power marginalize business sales or go elsewhere or whatever I don't know economic cycles well enough to know how long does it take for that to start happening though when will we see the effects of inflation on revenue assuming it does continue that is a good question we typically think inflation you will see it in your revenue and that your revenue would go up from sales to end use text because if the price of the product goes up then the sales tax goes up it's just if it the elasticity or it gets to a point where the actual revenue from the sale of products goes down people buying less and so some products are inelastic some are elastic and so it's really a mix of the two but we'd have to go back and look at sort of past recessions but it is sort of surprising

[99:03] that we aren't even seeing sales tax growth that reflects inflation but we are not so I think as some of that shifting spending patterns that's sort of carving off the inflationary impacts that's an sales tax revenue could be our youth that we've reached that point of elasticity too though if people are already going elsewhere for for goods just really quick on the property taxes was our total 47 47 million was that right around that that was what was in this slide yeah so if it went up 17% yeah in actual dollars it was like six six point five million I was having some yeah helpful and my research over here so yes be tweaking 17 and 18 we saw overall six point four million dollars divided by those funds that we displayed proportionally speaking of inflation I

[100:02] saw that our general fund increase year-over-year between 1800 we're proposing 419 is about 1.8% so right yeah for ongoing rocktron going yeah and and I think roughly 65 or 70 percent of our expenses are head counter personnel is that right that's fact so it would it be fair for us to assume and presumably wages go up at about inflation rates two percent three percent would it be fertilis for us to assume that most of that 1.8 million dollar increase the ongoing general fund expenditures relates to just plain old wage increases for our employees is that not all of it but a big part of it I think that's a big part of it and we'll talk about is we jump into the operating budget okay sorry yeah no you're great Cindy I just had one question about the bond rating for I guess Cheryl or whomever up here we've had trip that triple-a rating for a period of time have we not correct on our general obligation bonds and some of

[101:00] our utility revenue bonds for like five years ten years I mean before this in in other words what I'm trying to do is get some basis that we have some strength besides just the reserve fund in order to gain that kind of rating correct a lot of it relates to demographics so there's a variety of factors that lead to the bond rating so as far as for how long I know since I've been here which is around six years it's been triple-a for those mm-hmm it's been a long it's been a long time it hasn't been commensurate necessarily what I was just trying to establish with the twenty percent reserve necessarily no I mean I don't know because now I'm going way back but it's I think we've had triple-a rating for most of my time here even though I think it changed when we went from two percent significantly

[102:01] and I think we got to maybe ten percent at about two thousand one two thousand three something like that but I think it's been triple-a for a very long time writing as Cheryl mentioned there's so many factors there's not just one silver bullet it's that we have a really strong at local government we have a resilient government they look at councils they look at staff members that they do a very thorough analysis of how our operation works across the whole community and I think that we've showed strength in every area mm-hmm well and if I can also just add that we just did our audit and we also got another I forget what they call that but a recognition of having such good numbers and being practices I guess and that you know the flaws that they find every year not significant but we've

[103:01] always corrected those and so there's always room for improvement but we've at least for quite some time we've gotten that recognition I think okay we better keep me because we actually have a lot of questions about the actual budget yeah moving on to the bulk of the presentation I'm going to kick off the operating budget discussion and then Jaden's going to take over with specific examples of the 2019 budget so as a reminder we're talking about almost two-thirds of the overall city budget there's pretty evenly between the general fund kated funds so busy chart but just goes to show that our city supports a lot of different operations Public Works and Public Safety comprise over 50% the blue and the orange colored charts but we also have numerous departments within the city including our internal services which are finance IT and Human Resources PhDs is an acronym but planning housing

[104:02] in sustainability open space Parks and Rec as well as numerous other functions within our community again busy chart intentionally but we did want to show that the city also in addition to numerous departments has numerous funds the largest of which even though it's just one fund is the general fund which is why we'll be spending a majority of the presentation focusing on general fund budget so the general phone also supports numerous departments a lot of these don't have dedicated right for new sources to help support their operations so largely the internal services and Public Safety do not rely on any other funding mechanism to help their budget out so a similar chart but just to show what goes into the general fund kind of highlighting Bob's question earlier the general fund recommended budget is one

[105:00] hundred fifty seven and a half million dollars which does include as we touched on an increase in the sales and use tax rate in 2019 the revised budgets a more accurate picture when we're looking at comparisons year over year simply because at the time of the budget adoption last year we had two large bow we had one large ballot item that affected the general fund the utility occupation tax and then we also had very little data collected on the sugar sweetened beverage tax so we projected those two budgets at a very minimum rate so in February you'll recall you do to adjustment to base to better reflect those revenues receives so that's why we think it's best to look at the adjusted 2018 budget when comparing so the overall budget for the general fund is recommended to increase three point four percent but this is mainly and slowly exclusively to one-time spending which we will discuss later as far as what our projects are going to be but ongoing expenses have in fact decreased by 4% are about 5.6

[106:01] million dollars to align with ongoing revenue projections this is just one more way to show the ongoing budget and the four percent decrease that we saw in 2019 s recommended budget so where did these come from you know the general fund had shared responsibility focusing on maintaining those core services as I laid out in that framework what we saw is overall our PE ongoing reductions comprised about 60% of that 5.2 million dollars and ongoing n PE was about 40% we looked at vacancies that were held in 2018 to identify if those could be ongoing positions we also realigned our non personal expenses and then for those departments that are supported by other funds they identified whether they could those other funds could support ongoing operations within that fund so not surprising that the ongoing reductions were majority from personal expenses

[107:01] given that it's such a large portion of the overall budget again I'm looking at it a little bit differently we also looked at the proportion of budget by external facing departments are supported by versus internal facing so external receive about seventy percent of the general fund budget they cut about sixty percent is their contributions that 5.6 million dollars was about sixty percent so the overall share of the internal services was hit a slightly higher than what their overall budget contribution is again attachment a has a lot of detail specifically on what the reductions we are going to be touching on a few of them Jane did you wanna so no I'm next right so as we prepare the budget we take a look at sort of the overarching objectives that the City Council has established through its retreat and just through ongoing policy and to make sure that our budget is focused

[108:02] on achieving those goals that you have so certainly the boulder electric utility is one of those goals our voters last year continued the utility occupation tax and so we will be focusing on that as we move into 2019 broadband was another effort that we had a lot of discussion on early this year and so we're making sure that we're funding that broadband backbone and the CE o P's payment that we need to make and we're also adding we hope a fixed-term employee that will help us get that broadband project up and running the climate commitment is another commitment that the city has made for a number of years and in particular in 2019 we're looking at the energy offset fund this fund is operated through Boulder County and we have an agreement with them about how we will be working but we've got a lot of ideas for improving our climate focus through the energy offset fund one of the top priorities for the council is sub

[109:00] community and area plans and as you'll see when we move into 2019 a focus on the Alpine balsam site will be a major effort in that year one of the things that will be happening is that in June of 2019 Boulder Community Health will be exiting the hospital permanently and so we are the proud owners of it and now we will be operating that building we need to keep that building safe and secure and so we'll have expenses in the 2019 budget to make that happen and then vision zero again another top priority for council that you did discuss at your retreat the vision zero is a collaboration between the transportation department and the police department and so through enforcement and engineering education and evaluation we are aiming to reduce the number of serious accidents and in particular the serious personal injuries that occur particularly to pedestrians and bike riders so we have a large focus on that

[110:02] in 2019 and a lot of budget dollars in both of those departments is moving to that effort we have a clarifying question first of all thanks very much for that focus on visions here and how you laid it out in the packet that was much appreciated but on the hospital I don't want to talk about this at all right now but we talked to maybe a year and a half ago about the possibility of temporary uses or the hospital and that was put on on hold because the hospital is going to continue to use the space so hopefully we will have that discussion again as the hospital reaches the end of its term that we can talk that back over again when the time comes well we actually don't want to dive into that tonight but the direction that we got from counsel is that the hospital would not contain any uses and so if the council wants to make a change in that we'll have a very robust discussion in 2019 because we're planning to close the building because it's not safe and uses would require zoning changes in order to be added to that facility

[111:03] absolutely okay so let's focus on some of the recommended reductions so the first one to talk about is staffing reduction so you can see in the upper right hand corner we actually reduced the number of current FTE authorizations by 45 point three six positions however when we asked departments to prepare the budget not only did we ask them to suggest reductions in their budget but also were there great things that they could do if we did additions to the budget and as a result of some of the proposals that were made we decided that nine point three seven FTE was an important number to add and we'll talk about a few of those as I go through the rest of the presentation so our net reduction is around 36 FTE reduced from the budget what this graph shows is the departments that they've come from and I think we're proud to say that every department was able to find savings in

[112:02] regard to their FTE count we're also showing the number from each department and then the graph is showing the percentage of that department and that is to indicate to you the impact on the Department of those particular changes so we really did focus on staffing reductions one of the things that think you recall is that in 2018 we held a lot of position positions vacant and most of these positions are vacant positions that we're just eliminating from the budget and not funding so on to some notable general fund reductions you've received a lot of email with regard to Carnegie Library so what's going on with that is that this is actually a really great exercise in priority based budgeting the library keeps fantastic statistics about the amount of views that goes on in the library and what we know is that across the entire library system there are just

[113:01] under a million visits per year the Carnegie Library enjoys less than 2,000 of those visits and so when you look at the priorities about where we would place our funding it seemed that that was an area where we could possibly make some reductions so contrary to what some are saying we're not closing Carnegie Library and we're not completely stopping the visits we're changing it so that the library will be open one day per week and two days by appointment so that residents or other users could come in and actually have personal touch from the employees there as they do their research we're also prioritizing for the Carnegie Library digitizing the research so that it will be available online 24/7 so that's kind of the Carnegie reduction and we're going to be talking a lot more about the library later in my presentation the human services area was

[114:00] also an area and where we made some reductions particularly in staff members so where this came from is that you may recall about two months ago we combined housing and Human Services into a single department when that happens we often have overlapping positions and in many cases those positions in one area or another were vacant and so we were able to take two overlapping positions that we didn't need both of them and more and reduce those the two other reductions in human services in terms of FTE or positions that were vacant and they had been focused in the last couple of years on strategy development and planning so there was a position that was focused on the human services strategy which you adopted last year and on the homelessness strategy which again you adopted last year we're moving to a time where we don't need as much planning in human services we need more doing and implementing and so we felt

[115:00] that those two vacant positions were no longer needed in that particular department another change that we did in the Human Services area is that we were the proud owner of a bus which was a very costly expense for senior services we're suggesting that we will sell the bus and instead use via mobility services for all of our senior transport which saves us several thousand dollars a year did you have a question Erin yeah Jim thanks for walking through that Human Services changes so then the the reduced positions which sounds like we're vacant generally yes will not then reduce our ability to implement the Human Services strategies etc it will not will not impact our ability to implement that strategy okay thank you yes okay moving on to some other funds so in that lovely mosaic that Katie showed you a few slides ago you could see that there were lots of other funds among some of the changes that we've made were in the Parks and Rec fund open space and transportation so Parks

[116:02] and Rec is a department that has any number of funds and in order to reduce their spending they were able to shift some of their expenses to other sources of funding and they also delayed a number of capital projects so you saw on the CIP video The Lovely project that's going on at Boulder reservoir and of course scott Carpenter Park is another one that we've got going on next year thanks to funding through the community culture and safety tax but other projects are delayed out into the six year plan and that has been able to save them some dollars the open space of mountain parks and vitia improved their proposed reductions there were a number of fixed term positions that were expiring anyway they have been identified in an organizational assessment for no longer being needed and as they were fixed term they I think they were mostly fixed term we reduced those we're also to saying that in open space and mountain parks

[117:00] they're reducing their capital carryover and they're going to be focusing as we move into the open space master plan on maintenance of the system and then finally in transportation the biggest change here is that RTD is reducing our transit service frequency so what goes on with regard to our relationship with RTD is that over the years we have requested that they provide a more robust service than they would normally do and so we buy up the service we pay extra dollars in order to get more frequent bus service they're having troubles recruiting drivers and with their other funding and so they've told us that they are reducing service on probably our best route they're reducing it from seven-minute headways to 10-minute head waves and reducing the cost to us and so that's a savings to us sadly it's unfortunate for the community but that is a reduction that you're seeing in the Transportation Fund so

[118:01] another thing that we did this time is that we were focusing on reallocations and so part of it was what I was talking about before with the change in FTE we took some existing FTE positions that we reduced but then we reallocated them to other important areas in the City Attorney's Office is one that we've been working on for a couple of years there's a vacant paralegal position and we finally got Tom to agree that he really did need a new assistant city attorney to better address the issues that he's got facing our city and the complex matters that he has under healthcare we've had a really great wellness program for the city and a good health care program we had anticipated that there would be an increase in healthcare for 2019 it came in there was a 0% increase in healthcare so that was a savings to us and in addition we've had in the last year four different health plans for

[119:03] city employees one of those health plans is underutilized very much underutilized and very costly to the city and so we are reducing or taking away that particular healthcare plan with three remaining plans that's a savings to the city and we're going to be focusing on employee recruitment and retention through our total compensation strategies with those savings under economic vitality for a number of years we've had what's known as the flexible rebate program and I think you're all familiar with that as we've looked at it in the last few years that seems to be an underutilized program it normally has around three hundred and fifty thousand dollars allocated to it and this year we're suggesting that we're reducing that by two hundred thousand dollars and we're reallocating those dollars to go to the Small Business Development Center which has a wonderful incubator program that's actually statewide known that

[120:00] focuses on technology and aerospace for small businesses we've got a small amount going to the boulder chamber innovation venture again focusing on our entrepreneurial community and the other thing that I think we've all heard from counsel over the last few years is that affordable commercial is to be more the focus of our economic vitality and so we plan to use some dollars to develop a new program or a different program where we'd be able to focus on affordable commercial that was one of the things that was mentioned in the downtown retail vibrancy study and we think that it will also come out of our overarching retail study study so a full affordable commercial seems to be a focus for our future that we'd like economic vitality to be spending some dollars on so then yes but we're gonna have a look the whole rest of the night is for questions after I'm dialing unless it's clarifying it's okay okay I think we're way up some discussion

[121:01] matter okay under recommended investments as I think you know from reading the packet what we asked all of our departments to do is to recommend a 10% cut what would that look like and then if things were good and we had a 5% increase what would that look like and so for some of the 5% increase we went through and picked out a couple of things that we thought were very important to fund in 2019 the first is police officer in 2013 the police department completed its master plans staffing study and they suggested in that study that we needed to add a new commander as well as eight police officers by 2018 we were able to add the commander and seven police officers by 2018 and we do think that that additional police officer is necessary and so we're adding that or proposing to add that in 2019 the police department is now going to be entering into a time where they will be re upping their

[122:02] master plan and so in 2019 you'll see them reaching out to the community and renewing their master plan to see what the future holds for them so you're increasing an officer but you're cutting several other positions in the police we are but they're not officers they're not officers in the library area a thing that has been evident for a number of years is that material circulation is really important to our community and the patrons use those at an increasing rate one of the things that that you may not know is that a lot of our patrons are using electronic books and other electronic material the way that we purchased that is actually different than buying books and we have to kind of renew the electronic material a lot more frequently than you would for a particular book and so we're increasing the material circulations by a hundred thousand dollars we also were focusing

[123:00] on something that was brought out in the Civic area plan and also the recently adopted library master plan which is to take a look at the main library north building so as you may know that building sits in the one plane and any changes that we would make to it in terms of use or building updates would require some regulatory investigation we would love to be able to expand building 61 which is our makerspace and it's just such a vital part of the library these days and also can we reimagine and increase our uses of the canyon librarian gallery we don't know if we can do either of those things unless we do a feasibility study that would focus on floodplain rules and regulations and so we're investing in that study in 2019 and then finally the we have the Rebbe's website redesign so during the public participation working group process one of the many things that they called out

[124:01] for us with regard to our Community Engagement is that the website needed to be redesigned the last time it was done was about five years ago so certainly that's an a on time in the internet world so we're ready to do that we started working on it in 2018 we've done outreach both internally and to our external customers and so that redesign is part of our focus for 2019 so some other really important investments are in the area of social equity in 2018 we added 30,000 dollars in one-time funding funding to the Human Relations Commission they had been doing grants and they requested that there be additional dollars to be focused on cultural events grants for different groups to put on other kinds of events and we add a 30 thousand dollars in 2018 that has proved very very successful and there is a even greater demand for those

[125:01] kinds of dollars and so in 2019 we're proposing that that money would change from one time to ongoing and would be doubled so instead of $30,000 it will be 61 thousand dollars ongoing funding for Human Relations Commission grants Family Resource Schools is a wonderful program that we operate in collaboration with Boulder Valley School District and a number of schools in our community it's funded by the city by Boulder Valley School District by some donations and also by the Community Development Block Grant funds from the government as you have noticed over the last few years CDBG funds are drying up they're becoming less and less and our funding as well as the school districts funding for this program has been pretty flat we were in danger as we looked forward to 2019 of losing two of the schools because we would not be able to fund all of the schools that we have family resource schools in we don't want that

[126:00] to happen and so we're increasing our funding to family resource schools to support all of the schools that we currently support and then we'll be working with Boulder Valley School District to determine if they would similarly be interested in increasing their funding so that this remains a viable service for the future and then the last social equity thing that I'll call out is the elimination of library late fees this sounds a little odd but this is actually a trend in the library industry to get rid of late fees part of why we do that is because the late fees fall disproportionately on those of lower income and other disadvantaged patrons and so to come into the modern era we do want to eliminate them one of the things that we do want to say however is that the Library Commission wants to be careful about how they do it and when they do it and so they'll be working with our department staff in 2019 to determine how to move forward with it nevertheless we wanted to take

[127:00] that funding out of the budget for 2019 so that we wouldn't be reliant on that that funding so we'll see what the Library Commission and our staff does in that regard so on to some one-time investments we've talked about a couple of these when we talk about the increase in business use tax and construction use tax some of those dollars are one-time dollars here are some of the things that we're focusing on we when we purchased the Hogan pan cost property we had an inner on loan between other funds of the city and the general fund we want to pay them back with some of these one-time dollars we've already talked a bit about broadband implementation and outreach we need to be paying off the co-pays that we'll be issuing and hopefully hiring a fixed term employee the police master plan is another effort that I recently mentioned to take a plan that's five years old and it's now time for it to be renewed and then finally the Alpine Bossin Bob Alpine balsam hospital and

[128:01] garage food facility is going to require some investment in 2019 especially after the hospital leaves so then we have some possible additions that we think you may be interested in so as Katie talked about a couple of times tonight we mentioned that when we prepared the budget we knew that for the general fund operating portion ongoing day-to-day operations we needed to reduce the budget by about four million dollars we decided to be more aggressive than that and we asked all the departments to propose lots of cuts beyond the four percent which they did and which I thank them for we ended up being able to propose a budget to you that actually reduces those expenditures by 5.6 million that means that there's 1.6 million dollars that falls to the ending fund balance unless council chooses to

[129:01] appropriate those funds for other purposes a week ago you passed the library master plan if you'd move to the next slide the library master plan contains a number of items that the library commission is suggesting and the department is suggesting that would be needed to maintain the level that the library mount the new library master plan says is the base level we're calling it the fiscally constrained plan because certainly they have a vision plan for more libraries and Gunbarrel and lots of other things but in order to meet the requirements of the master plan we think that we can make some additions so the funded could you go back for a minute so the grand total of additions for 2019 will be 1.3 million we're already funding 900,000 of that and so the total unfunded ongoing

[130:00] expenses for 2019 would be that three hundred and fifty six thousand and the unfunded one-time would be eighty five thousand we're gonna break that out in the next slide so what that consists of is that a focus on personnel you'll see that there are around 3.5 positions that the library commissioned in the library Department wish to fund one of those is the Carnegie archivist that you may remember a few slides ago we were suggesting that it be deleted from the library but we know that that there's concern in the community about down and so you could add that back the the personnel total for 2019 would be around two hundred and fifty thousand dollars the non personnel which are other cost building maintenance training and office supplies is a little over a hundred thousand and then one-time capital would be eighty five thousand that comes up to the total that you saw on the other slide if you were to decide to spend

[131:04] that 1.6 million dollars in this way you could spend it three only three hundred and fifty six thousand dollars could meet this need for the library that need would then continue into future years because we'd be hiring employees to achieve these goals and so you'll see how much that would add in 2020 and 2021 as well by the time we get to 2021 we believe that the North Library may well be open and so there'll be additional expenses but we're not projecting those right now we do think that there's funding available if you wanted to fund this for the library so on to the next one while you're talking about this this 1.3 was it 1.6 sorry 1.6 million it was that the amount that was increasing the reserves are is separate from their work this is separate this is savings and I guess I'm just gonna say one more thing about that in the last couple of budget cycles

[132:00] we've presented council with budgets that didn't have a lot of what I'll call wiggle room in them and we've been feeling I've been feeling the council wanted to be able to have more impact on the budget and be able to make some more policy decisions and so that's one of the reasons why we reduce the budget more than the four million dollars so that you would be able to make some policy decisions with those additional dollars this slide however is showing you what that impact would be and so in the event that you did fund the library under the fiscally constrained scenario that we just presented we would still be in fine position for 2019 as we move to 2020 you'll see that we're at about a break-even position and that's not spending the whole 1.6 million but it's spending around 450,000 and so that means that for 2020 our work on the budget will not be done by adopting this budget but instead we'll have more work

[133:01] to do to continue to keep those lines in with the blue one on top and the orange one on the bottom but you will still stay in budget with this particular addition so then on to the next slide this is just the wrap-up slide to say that we think that the 2019 budget really reflects all of the goals that we had it reflects what we call inside the organization one city one Boulder every department contributed to this every department worked hard every department had great ideas and we accepted something from every department with regard to reductions as well as additions we continue to focus on using one-time dollars for one-time items we also are funding the strategic priorities of the City Council or focusing on master plans and assessments that we've already done we're reducing personnel expenditures to achieve these ongoing savings we are preserving investments in employee retention which

[134:01] is a very difficult thing in this very tight labor market and so it's a very high priority for our organization and we're maintaining an adequate level of reserves to be one of the items that supports our strong bond rating so we are very very proud of the budget that we're presenting to you and we think it gives you some options to make policy decisions that will affect our community and our future and so we're ready for questions okay thank you for that from all of you okay so here's where I propose we do the pick a topic let's wrestle it next person pick a topic and we'll go down the thing we we have given ourselves to nine we can go over but let's do so if we decide to with deliberation I don't think we have to weigh in on everything tonight because we're gonna have a public hearing in two weeks on this this is where we get our questions answered if there's more information we needed if there's something really disrupt those you like

[135:01] let's get rid of a department or something you know it's good to let folks know that but this isn't the night where we weigh in on everything okay so one thing I could say is that if you feel like there's a consensus around something you really want to do letting us know tonight would be super helpful for our next meeting okay so all right so we're gonna have good I just have was gonna kick that off but you know I was gonna say my I have all these eager hands but I did see Lisa's first so what's the first topic libraries okay and I just want to thank Jane for putting that wiggle room in this is my I think 18th or 19th budget and we've never had a room so thank you for that when I look at our library budget and how much we've funded it I do

[136:01] think it has been traditionally underfunded so and that's not pointing fingers at anybody it's just the way it has been and I think it needs more money put into it I no 400,000 is the right number I'm happy to hear that you're proposing to continue that increase in future years you guys will have some work to do but I think it's a very important social and needed knee is a social and educational and fair need in the community and and so and I think everybody I mean over a million people come and visit our library I think we've all heard from about Carnegie so I'm glad not to change those hours or change that position so anyway I'm just saying thank you and

[137:02] I hope we can have consensus on moving forward with your in particular supporting that 353 owner of had 11,000 so it's ongoing 356 and one time of 85 what's the one time studies three studies so that's a feasibility study for the north part of the like you know that's already funded that's already in the budget so that they would like to do a technology strategic plan Jennifer can hit me if I'm wrong but one of the things that other libraries do is that they lend out iPads and I and make decisions about how many computers to have in there and I think this is focused on on how we deploy computers and iPads in the library and that would be best than a patron satisfaction survey and an inclusivity campaign for $85,000 okay and and so anyway I'm very

[138:02] happy to see that and I I did have a question about late fees so maybe Jennifer you can come and ask and I understand that it does disproportionately affect lower-income people but how are what's going to be the piece that the library's going to use to make sure they they're books in that and could I just add on to that question which is how do you know that it disproportionately affects it says lower income and disabled people or something like that so how do you know it and how we going to get people to get the books back well they've told us that it's a barrier to them returning to library if they have any amount of fines our limit that we restrict access to library materials is ten dollars so you have to pay under to get yourself under the ten dollar

[139:01] limit in order to use library resources again and library users in general are pretty conscientious people and the guilt gets to them and so if they owe us a dollar that might prevent them from coming into the library and we have spoken to low-income families and learned that owing fines is a barrier to using the library so how do they how do we get the books back let's deal the question what's the charging fines is not really an incentive to have people return the items so so the mechanism will be well if they don't return them eventually send them a bill for the total cost of the book and that if they return it when they receive the bill then they're charged a fee a flat fee and we're done if they don't return the

[140:00] book then they they owe us money and they're not able to use the library and most people eventually return books you also tell people if there if you have a book and and you need to return you tell them that there's somebody waiting for that book so that is that an incentive as well mm-hmm just does not hold somebody else up okay thank you for that is that good enough for them yeah I still need some clarification on it says the fees disproportionately affect lower-income and disadvantaged patrons you say that you've gone and asked people about this I mean I'm just trying to get some real clarity on this we've talked to people about what prevents them from using the library and that's one of the things that but that's they've told us that they have fines and that they don't want to come in mm-hmm so what proportion would you say that is of people who owe fines like 90% we could find out for you I don't know off

[141:01] the top of my head how many people well in terms of reducing an 80,000 in revenue annually since the libraries had so many problems it would be helpful to know and perhaps there's something that could be done for that portion of the population rather than just generally but it you say yeah it is a best practice and one of the things that we were trying to quantify for this budget presentation but we weren't quite able to do it is that there's actually a cost to collecting those nickels and dimes and dollars in terms of staff time and we did try to figure out what that might be but we weren't able to to finalize it for this budget so the $80,000 isn't a complete net gain there there is cost associated with it okay and my larger point here is that if we're gonna make representations like this I would just like some backup data that's all and across the board I mean not just from

[142:02] the library not paper fees thank you okay on libraries though let us get a sense of our people leaning towards this well you said a different topic no no this was exactly what I wanted to talk about Oh Aaron would like to talk but I just want to follow up from Cindy I mean just sue me I would think about it from perspectives if you have ten dollars in fines is that a bigger deal to someone who makes minimum wage or to someone who makes $60 an hour I mean I think it's not just about data it's also just about who do fines impact I think it's people who were lower income it's true but then their privacy issue issues there and their assumptions that are just made and I'm just asking for clarification on that in terms of how and it's not just this one any I've got questions throughout this budget that say numbers data dollars you know so it's basically just a I understand the principle mm-hmm but it's just you want backup got you okay well I'm supportive of the policy based on the

[143:01] principle that fines disproportionately impact lower-income folks because they have less money available to spend on fines um but just on lab race that I'd agree with Lisa and I'd appreciate you moving us for in the on the same but particularly I think it's important for us if we support refunding Carnegie would or continued funding with the Carnegie which I do to be very clear about that because we've heard from a lot of Concerned members of our community about that so I would like for that to be a clear outcome from tonight's meeting but just the one of the thought on the library funding I support the increased funding that's overdue for sure but some of these are increased positions and ongoing salaries and just want to make sure that we're positioned for thinking about the bringing the North Boulder library branch online so to the extent that these are new positions perhaps they're people that could work at the North Laurel library branch or part-time work there just so that we don't increase the budget that a certain about now and then it we have to start from scratch for new

[144:00] North Boulder bridge so that would be my one comment on that additional funds and the branch library specialist is intended to move over to the North Boulder Library when that because online great thank you awesome on libraries I had Mary in then bump so thank you for that Jane the them in the memo in attachment B there was under the reductions there was a eliminate the work-study program at five thousand dollars and I didn't see is that reflected in that three hundred and fifty six thousand or keeping that work-study program no it isn't that program doesn't seem to be as effective as we'd hoped and we've had it around a long time and there have been some years where we haven't had any student interest in working positions in the library for work-study there are there other places that you

[145:03] might look for folks to work the program or is that you've just made the decision that it's it's not a program that is worth keeping around it just there doesn't seem to be the interest from you students to work in the library for the low paying jobs that are usually for work study well and then so would I guess what I'm asking is instead of going to see you where there may not be the interest perhaps there is interest from the high schools from other locations where a minimum wage job might be a real boon students can apply for the jobs that are available in the library see you has a structure work-study program structure I don't know that the high schools have that something we could certainly explore I

[146:02] don't know that five thousand dollars would be enough to really make an impact you'd be surprised how little it takes they can in fact some people but yeah just a consideration I'm not you know I I don't know where we might land on this but just to consideration okay okay by the Carnegie so I see on page 129 of the budget that in this year 2018 we've budgeted two hundred and twenty two thousand dollars to operate the Carnegie and the original proposed budget was to reduce some headcount and we used some hours it would take it from two hundred and twenty two thousand to about a hundred and seventy four thousand if we add back in the sixty thousand that's part of this package that mean we would go to about a hundred and excuse me two

[147:00] hundred and thirty three thousand so 222 this year and we take us up to about 233 234 for next year okay I guess I'm one first well I'm all support of maintaining the carnegie hours that we have right now 25 hours but yes I'm wondering if for two hundred and thirty three thousand dollars we can do we can provide that service a very valuable service less expensively for example in Jeanne and I have talked about this I'm going to guess for two hundred thirty three thousand dollars for a number of quite a bit less than that the Museum of Boulder which is right next door which is open six days a week would be happy to staff the Carnegie on there may be some reasons not to do that but just looking at that from a purely financial standpoint their missions are aligned as a matter of fact one third of the content of the Carnegie Library actually is unload from the Museum of Boulder next door and you know given the infrequency of visitors I'm just wondering if we could outsource the operation of the Carnegie to the Museum

[148:01] of Boulder and paid them some amount of money that's less than two hundred thirty three thousand dollars to be basically a next door service if I look at History Museum's up and down the Front Range from Collins and golden and Denver all of them have their archives either in right next door their museums and it seems to me this may be a good opportunity for us to say the museum a boulder will pay you a certain amount of money and have you operate the Carnegie for us and it could save us money but still have the Carnegie open as many hours is our community wants so thanks for that and yes we have discussed this before what it would require from the Museum of Boulder is that they'd have to take one of their dedicated employees and have that person be at the library and and we they would need to be trained to be a person that could look up stuff and be the archivist and digitize things I guess I feel uncomfortable doing that

[149:03] because that person would not be a city employee and would not get city employee benefits and that's sort of where we'd be saving our money and that seems like from a living wage standpoint it's not exactly the right thing to do but I don't know if if all of Council wants us to take a look at that we can continue to do that I wonder if they detect those last issues I wonder if as part of that outsourcing contract choises I think we've done with other outsourcing services we worry I think we did this recently with landscaping didn't we where we require a certain living wage and require certain benefits I believe the museum molders pay scale and benefits are not dis aligned with the city but we would we would want to ensure that in whatever contract we have as far as far as training is entirely possible that the personnel of the city would simply be those employees of the of the museum so that no one would lose their jobs would simply transfer those employees over they would lose their

[150:00] retirement that would be a factor yeah okay it's kind of related to it Bobson was talking about okay what does anybody want to respond to what bugs I'm just trying to make sure everybody's suckered you can talk and then I'm in the queue oh I do in respond to pops also do I so good okay thank you did you want to go first no it's fine okay thanks for that Bob I would like to propose something different I I don't think I could support that for the reasons that that Jayne pointed to and also you know one of the things that we've been trying to do or at least I know lisa has been trying to work on is to bring custodial workers into the city and this would be going in the other direction so so just that but one thing that I would like us to going forward on by the way I support

[151:00] this proposal is to look at how the museum of older that's now operating right next door impacts the visitation so does that museum next door actually increase the amount of visits to the Carnegie and and then make some I don't know what those decisions would be but but I think it's something worth knowing and seeing how what kind of synergies we can leverage there so although I've been I agree that given the the fact that we haven't been keeping up with funding increases for the library over many years it makes sense that this would be a place where we invest more this year or going forward starting this year and I'm agree with what you said about it seems to me there should be synergies between the Museum of Boulder and Carnegie

[152:01] Library and we should be making we should be trying to enhance that and make that happen and I'm open to how that happens but it seems like we should be celebrating the Carnegie as part of the Museum of boulders emphasis on our history so I do think we heard loud and clear from the community that the Carnegie is more important is too important to cut so and I'm open to how we do that so I guess the question is does do people in general concur with this idea of spending in additional money go forward on this I was just gonna say I'm fully in support and I think Bob made some good suggestions as did Mary and we've heard from the community about those synergies as well and so moving forward I think it's great to do that yes does anybody disagree with spending more money as generally outlined here next year okay I hope that the Carnegie

[153:01] is such a beautiful historic facility so to me that's part of the importance of having still a certain number of hours that it's open to the public is what it would important building it is insane right and I think it's it's a museum a bull that wants to make it to flesh out something more specific I forgot to be interested I'm open to hearing it but yeah I'll just leave it there okay yeah that was how we be creative here okay is that I just had one little comment about the Carnegie I think we got one email that said that it is was the only library the Carnegie and the in the in the country that has been in its original use operating in its original use the whole time of its existence in that building yes worth keeping worth keeping okay so that's libraries I guess I would like to throw another issue out there okay well

[154:00] I want to throw out there open space I guess I'm a little concerned about what feels like a lot of cuts we're ending at axes ending another one's being repurposed and it feels like we're cutting a lot of staff so I guess I would like to look a little closer at that I don't know if you have a slide that does but I would just want to hear from open space a little bit about that we are trying to I don't think we're we're not ending acquisitions and what we are trying to increase maintenance and we're doing a lot of planning so I guess I feel like we're decreasing a little quick great Lauren Hill coin Oh SMP so I think what you see in 2019 is a continuation from the last four years of budget cycles for us related to staffing we had in organizational assessment back in 2015 that made a number of recommendations since then we've moved forward to job steady a hundred percent of our standard positions in the department made a

[155:00] number of adjustments from seasonal to temporary classifications living wage Affordable Care Act etc so what we did last year to Jane's point was look at those fixed term positions that we had created for succession planning and specific projects so a lot of the times where we knew retirements were coming we would over fill those positions or create fixed term positions to transfer all of that knowledge and then when those retirements lined up as we thought they would we expired that fixed term position as it worked out for the most part the timelines really lined up well excuse me well and then moving forward into next year it's really the next step of it looking at positions that we've held vacant well we've participated in a number of studies so trails condition assessments facilities assessments things like that so post assessment looking at what our staffing needs are we really feel like can expire these positions responsibly that the work that those particular positions would be doing is no longer needed I think that caveat there is we're going through a master planning process which

[156:00] might give us well it will give us a lot of direction on what we need moving forward which could be different from what those positions are intended to do right now so I think for the next couple of years it sets us up really well and then it allows flexibility coming out of the master plan okay does that answer the open space board of trustees approved these recommendations yes it did okay so I guess in terms of all this asking one of the one other way and I'll just let others jump in if you have any questions just in terms of we know we have a backlog of maintenance we there's so much more that people want from this system both in terms of restoration in terms of completing trails that we've agreed to build regional trails and this is ongoing we can't keep up with all the trail maintenance given how much use for getting so I guess are we limiting our ability to address what I would consider

[157:00] a backlog on all those fronts yeah it's a great question thank you if you look over the past few years we've actually doubled our temporary trails crews increased capacity in the trails work group and other work groups across the department the goal of that was really to meet our FEMA deadlines and to accomplish things before those FEMA reimbursable projects that deadline would have passed so I think things like the West TSA we implemented and we worked on priority items where it aligned with flood recovery and now is the time as we move forward from those FEMA reimbursable projects where that excess capacity that the doubling of our trails crews etc can now get to work on all the deferred maintenance so I think 2019 is the first year where you see those FEMA projects fall off and we can really put that that capacity to use some of the things we know we're behind on and in that's ecological restoration trailer repair making sure we're tackling the North TSA and West TSA so those are absolutely the top priority for for next year and we know future guidance will come from the master plan

[158:00] too but delivering on plan come coming out of emergency response and recovery is the goal for next year okay anybody want any open space questions yeah I following up on that I have a question this is on page 10 of the the study session business under the reductions and this is maybe for the city manager subsidy reduction several funds including open space mountain parks etc receive general fund subsidies what what are these for and how much is that and what's going back I mean do these relate at all to the question that Suzanne had asked I'm gonna ask Katie to answer back if she knows the answer okay thank you the general fund provides subsidies to three major funds for different reasons the first one is planning and development services so it supports staff that are in that fund that support

[159:01] general fund type of operations that are not revenue generating and so that's been historic kind of agreement about the dollar amounts that get transferred into that fund similarly the recreation activity fund receives a subsidy as you know the recreation activity fund supports the rec centers the user fees golf courses and oftentimes those don't recover their full cost and nor are they intended to to be a community benefit of some of their programs so that subsidy helps support the sustainability of the recreation activity fun kind of briefly talking about it and then for open space there's been a kind of a historic agreement back when the mountain parks split and 2019 is actually the last year that open space was intended to get the general fund subsidy and so knowing that when we looked at reductions because they don't have any other really general fund support providing it that was the only reduction that they could offer up so as Parks and Rec they're able to take

[160:02] care of those shortfalls itself is that that what's happening now or what you proposed to happen if the subsidy was eliminated there I mean we could certainly have Yvette Bowden come up as well good evening Council Yvette Bowden director of Parks and Recreation the direction that we received in our master planning process was that we should be a community benefit but we should also attempt to recover we've been doing a great deal of study since 2014 to align prices for exclusive services against those that are more community facing I do not believe we're at a hundred percent recovery on all programs and certainly not on all assets and we want them to continue to be available for the community in addition there are some parks and recreation fees that support the general fund that don't come to parks and recreation so for example

[161:00] Park shelter rentals and things like that so it kind of all offsets I do not believe we're at a place where I can say we can make all that up without having a significant impact on the community by potentially raising fees with which I know council has shared in the past we wanted to be very careful with in order to provide access correct and you had mentioned somewhere in the budget I saw that you were concerned about being able to subsidize low income visits to the rec centers correct when we examined the process of doing rate changes that is something that prep spends a lot of time discussing and the community has told us many times that there was not a lot of interest in subsidizing necessarily free use or discounted use but that that was a community responsibility through the general fund and so we want to be careful in balancing that both to have it be accessible with an emphasis on

[162:01] disadvantaged households low income household seniors and youth as directed in the master plan but we also want to make sure that things that are exclusive are priced accordingly this has been something that's a road that we revisit every year and is an ongoing part of our master plan commitment follow-up question to Cindy first are you referring to in I think it was attachment C I think I think there where there was a hundred thousand dollars for enhanced yes and I don't want to get too far in fact the open space question but as long as he bets up here and that was that was what I think it was a proposed and not accepted category could you just talk a little bit more about what that $100,000 would cover sure we have worked especially over the last year to really enhance our

[163:01] access programs you've heard me come before council on how we are subsidizing scholarship and trying to contribute to the community's health and well-being some of this has been accommodated through programs in our own scholarship program some have been accomplished through the sugary beverage tax allocation and how we're working with the community in that area it has made a big difference to those community members but it is certainly something that we can look at and it's not immediately something that we'd be able to re-up at the same levels so that that was something that you have already been doing that would be eliminated perhaps curtailed we'd have to evaluate how we're going to continue that program and the health equity tax dollars and are not available for that well that is something that is allocated through human services selection committee so it's not automatic and so if we're

[164:01] selected again we'd be able to look at that but there's a process for that through the what is my deputy says it's a health active and and you have submitted a proposal to that fund for yes we have yes we have doesn't that come run by us at some point no it doesn't know we just get notified yep it's been delegated completely to the health equity Advisory Committee hang on so so can we maybe we want to just put that in the parking lot for now because we were talking about open space like nobody anybody else have any more open space questions because you went off on parks ice and no I went off an open space and then on parks because it was all in these equity funds that the city is now reverting back and I wanted to know how they affected the entities that we're now going to be responsible okay do you have any more open space questions or thoughts and we will move

[165:01] on to parks then heard and catch you I do want to emphasize this part of attachment see why you guys are thinking of other questions that we did asked Apartments to submit if they had additional dollars this way you know they wouldn't normally make this submission it was above and beyond what their kind of typical operating budget requests would be as part of a council directed question so that was one of them that Parks and Recreation submitted okay I just removing onto parks a question so are you reducing that hundred thousand or not I mean as you know was spoken about this a lot and it's really important for our youth for our seniors for people who just don't have the monetary means to be able to access our public resource through our

[166:00] master plan process and council direction we will continue to focus on providing access particularly for underserved seniors and youth and will continue to price accordingly and look for scholarship opportunities prior to this budget we already had a scholarship program which we've enhanced over the years with perhaps direction and input we would continue to do so this is the above and beyond request and possibly what allow us to look at an enhancement beyond what the tax is able to possibly consider thank you I mean we would continue our scholars program it may not be able to achieve all of the things that this was able to do right but I would think that the sugary drink tax should bring a lot of benefit to people who want to use the parks and recreation services that are of lower income and and we were very

[167:03] fortunate and thankful to be considered in the first round and as Jane has said that there's a selection process we have timely submitted as have many other great partner organizations and we look forward to that consideration okay so thank you I have a question so on page 35 oh those are but these are all things that aren't being proposed right so this is the 5% if we had a lot more money what five percent addition would you ask for so we're not reducing the scholarship program at all this was a request like can we enhance the call it the scholarship program do you mind if I just make it the attachment see that the reductions that we're not doing the heading for that was very subtle I got halfway through and my blood pressure won't want it like we're cutting an inch and what are these and then I realized

[168:01] oh these are the ones we're not doing so maybe next time we can have a bigger you so see is things that we do if we had more money that's not reductions and all of us know B is cuts C is items that the department's put forward in the 10% cut item that the executive budget team said bad idea were not cutting that we're keeping it okay is not happening at all we were talking about porta-potties and and this was it was the council's request we provide this information what counsel said is we want to see what every item that the departments have put on the table whether it's a decrease or an increase and so we provided you with every item we divided it into three

[169:00] categories so that it would we thought be easier for you to understand the items that were proposed to be cut and were the items that were proposed to be cut and were not cut okay and the items that were proposed to be added but we just couldn't afford okay one more comment on structures so that is very helpful it just needed a bigger heading in an explanatory note at the head of each section the one of the thing I got tripped up a little bit on to is the attachment a was 28 introductions attachment ds-2019 productions and investments and seems like maybe I'm wrong that's there were some items that fell into both categories into both categories because an example would be some of the staffing reductions that we are taking in 2019 these were reductions that we we took a count of in 2018 by keeping the positions vacant right so that would they were sort of one-time another

[170:00] ongoing it would be helpful to clarify for our public hearing is to talk about here are the things that are really just 2019 here are things that started in 2018 and are continuing on because I was double counting and get as I tried to really track the changes I got a little lost Shepard's request okay because of all that lost track of where we are I think we're done with libraries and I think we're done with open space but I can't get clarity on that okay we're done with open space does somebody have a new topic that hasn't started one Mirabai I'm just saying that I support the reserves 20% by 2020 so you see I'm supporting reserves for 20% at 2020 I think that's really important so okay let me ask you a question is that something that we need to tell you tonight about where we're at reserves I think you do the the 19% is included in the budget if you said we don't want to have 19% for sure then that would change things

[171:02] but for now we would include it and then you can talk about it on October 2nd it won't affect things too much okay so which is no no no that's totally fine I just meant we don't maybe we should save our reserves discussion for this second reserve our rich history deserve our reserve discussion unless somebody's proposing to do something with another 1.5 million dollars we have 19% of the discussions you can have 19 I'm just trying to get us out of here at a reasonable time so you don't ok buddy I have a question fire about fire so we have fun let's go to fire and I have a question about eco passes okay so we had a study session discussion I can't remember him a week ago two weeks ago we've had a lot of meetings and in there we talked about basic service basic life service what it was basic life support and then advanced life support and one of the things that was not clear in that

[172:02] study session was we know what we pay for basic life support but what would we pay for advanced life support and how would we get there and and and I guess I became alarmed last week and maybe I should have been alarmed at the study session but when Europe I said most Front Range cities have advanced life support and we don't and yet we're a pretty advanced City how can we be advanced without advanced life support well for the record of good evening council and other nights almost finished but mike colorado fire chief i'll just clarify one thing we do have ALS in Boulder the issue is whether ALS is provided as a service in house or whether we continue to outsource the

[173:00] advanced life support portion to a private third-party for-profit ambulance provider right so so I just want to be clear about that Boulder does have it what we differ from most other communities is a lot of the Front Range communities have actually upped the level of the the service of the municipality or the district to the advanced life support levels so the firefighters are both firefighters and EMTs paramedics so they provide that higher level of training ours are EMT basics so so that's that's the difference for the record so what would it take to or would you even consider taking your EMT basics to EMT advanced so that so in the white paper we did recommend a phased approach it's not something you would want to do overnight anyway you'd want to staff up gain

[174:00] levels of experience if you're gonna add staff over time you would do so in a measured way with experienced professionals so you have a mix of experience in town there there were some costs proposed in the white paper little dated but it essentially was saying for about a couple hundred grand if you fully built out the system the way it was proposed in the white paper five seven years maybe even longer if need be you could you could change the level of advanced life support service level in other words the speed with which it gets to people's homes or businesses by providing it in-house and the cost differential would not be huge but it requires a huge amount of investment upfront or over over that measured period of time and so as if we were gonna take on the advanced life support

[175:00] piece the very first thing we'd have to do is begin training our firefighters to that advanced life support level and and then we'd need to look at the smaller vehicles to implement in the fleet and we'd need some space and our stations which are notorious for lack thereof we do have one station and if station three is built out in the next few years as we plan there'll be space for those so so the capacity will be there in the next three to five years and there is a way to get there in a phased approach up front we kind of bid an estimate in terms of what it might cost one-time one-time funding we're thinking two and a half to three million would cover the cost of training and backfill existing responders this and eventually we would implement the light rescue vehicle concept or the a moans as if need be it also covers some of the additional costs of modifying at least one station the station 3 is already a different costs altogether because of

[176:01] the cap tax but but station one would also need to be changed so that it has the base base but doesn't necessarily have the living space so there's there's an expense there as well so we have a general idea of what it would cost we're waiting on our EMS consultant who's actually working on numbers for us now to update our numbers get us some some good numbers and some options but personally the real recommendation if we were looking at advanced life support would be to bring the level of our firefighters medical training up a notch when would we anticipate seeing some increase if we approved that it would depend on on whenever we wanted to begin that we could start that any any time really well or you're in the middle of a master we are in process is this one of the something that's going to be addressed there a specific recommendation coming out of that that we would then fund yes okay yeah things

[177:02] chief and so in other words or you feel like we're safe to not start putting this into the 2019 budget wait for the outcome in the master plan process and then start adding it into the budget process that's a fair statement okay great that's important because I'm very interested in this so I want to make sure we're not missing the boat on this budget anything else on fire okay you have a new topic I have a new topic okay and then I was I gonna ask oh I wanted to ask about eco pastures but you can go first I was gonna ask about I'm still unclear about the economic vitality this is done aged 12 and Jane you went through this talking about it I'm unfamiliar with the flexible rebate program and there are three new council members and maybe we could just have that explained to us and I can I mean it says it's been traditionally funded at 350 with just under 100 thousand spent

[178:00] what 2017 and then you went on to say some of it was going to be shifted reallocated elsewhere and I just wondered if you would go over that again please sure let me start out with a little bit about the flexible rebate program this program has been in existence at the city since around 2007 2008 and is money that's allocated to the community vitality department to focus on retaining businesses in the city and so what was happening in the mid-2000s between 2005 and 2010 in the city would say we've outgrown our space [Music] have a very small incentive program to allow those businesses to want to stay

[179:01] but we didn't want to just give away the money because that's not what Boulder does so instead we said is that if you need sustainability guidelines that we establish for example you provide a living wage to your employees are more than a living wage you provide health care to your employees you agree to engage in a recycling program you agree to donate to local charities there were a number of different things that they could do to earn points and as the earn points then we would say yes you are eligible for the flexible rebate program and then we would do a return on investment study for retaining this employer in town how does it impact our sales and use tax our property tax to retain them when we would do that then we would allow them to recover some portion of the construction use tax that they'd have to

[180:02] pay for moving to a different location in town because they would be redoing their space and so we did this calculation of return on investment and then would give a rebate to some of these companies the rebates were in the range of say ten thousand to the largest one in recent past is about seventy five thousand though we would give to the companies and and so every year we'd get a number of applications and maybe give out seven to ten flexible rebates over the last few years that has actually reduced the numbers of people applying and the numbers that we've been handing out has been reduced and so as we approach the budget this year knowing full well that what council has been talking a lot about and the downtown retail vibrancy study was talking about was affordable commercial we made the

[181:00] decision that we would cut the three hundred fifty thousand dollars by a lot and that we would refocus those dollars on areas that we thought were art were having a greater impact on small businesses in our community and so that's kind of the summary of what we're trying to do with these reductions thank you thank you for that my my understanding at least historically has been that a lot of these businesses move earlier on in because of bass needs and that simply we haven't been able to provide the amount of space they need as they grow that is actually very true Cindy we have limited available space for businesses so a lot of times they will start out on Pearl Street and then they'll get to be like 50 people and they need to move out to the Flatiron Business Park they do that when they could grow to around 200 it's really hard to retain them in the city

[182:02] we have difficult zoning in our city and we just don't have a lot of buildings that accommodate larger businesses and also until recently some of the buildings that we did have didn't really provide the floor plates that would accommodate the kinds of businesses that want to stay in the city there's been a lot of reinvestment by the new owners at Flatirons business part to improve their buildings but nevertheless I think you're right that when they get to be of a certain size it is more advantageous for them to move though the wonderful thing is that they usually stay in the region so we're happy with that yes so how many dollars would go to this SBDC incubator program about 50,000 50,000 well I was just going to make a comment if I may do that sir which is in terms of adding jobs to Boulder we just recently heard I think

[183:01] it's Amazon across from the bus station the RTD station is putting in was a 1500 some human human number and then I just saw in the paper that boulders jump cloud is set to add 50 engineers and my concern about some of these kinds of jobs and these numbers it's what it's going to do to our ami and what it's going to do to our affordable housing numbers as which we have heard from going up so I just had some hesitation in doing more I know the university does a lot of incubator and incubator programs going so I just think it's something we need to be thinking about terms of moving forward about what we're doing what is happening now what we're doing but what's happening to the average median income and then how that's raising rents in our affordable housing okay yep thanks for those Cowan City I just have to chime in a little bit the the

[184:00] Small Business Development Center you know really does focus on small businesses Sharon King there does amazing work they one was a small business group of the year for for the nation for the country of the United States of America yeah so they do I mean they really are focused on the people you know trying to start a business in their there are however things like that I think it's a very worthy ever in worthy of our fund I support fine with moving it from you know the the grants to the larger companies to the small business group but I think that's just such a great place for our to devote some City dollars to supporting that kind of small business in community thank you for that comment because I didn't know what the SBDC was and now I do so yeah that's helpful the acronyms right okay so anything else on the economic vitality yes he's okay so thanks for that shift change and so you said that there used

[185:01] to be like three hundred and fifty thousand dollars kept in that fund and so fifty you know it was like 95 thousand dollars of it is I'm gonna ask Katie to talk about the details cuz I can't remember details are helpful but the the core of my question this was in the non personnel dollars and as I recall there was some restructuring happening to the economic vitality department a what's going on with that be if it's going to refocus on affordable commercial aren't they like wouldn't they be completely different skill sets right so the economic vitality program resides in our community vitality Department and what happened is that last year in the budget we had had two positions that were focused on economic vitality in that budget for 2018 we eliminated one of

[186:03] those positions and there was a lot of conversation and council about whether or not that positions should be eliminated I focused at that time was the downtown retail vibrancy study and now our retail strategy and our promise to the council and the community is that when we had that information we'd be bringing it back and and we would possibly be adding the position back but with whatever focus was needed based upon the studies that we had done so the situation right now is that we're still doing those studies we still have one person who does a lot of data work and works with the Chamber of Commerce and the Boulder Economic Council to talk to companies and provide kind of concierge services a little bit for helping them work through some of our processes the community vitality department is in a restructuring mode right now they are seeking a couple of new employees from

[187:01] vacant positions and as they look to the future and get these studies back I think that the positions will be maybe refocused on other things but the current position that we have is very much needed with regard to data gathering with regard to relationships that we keep with the chamber with the downtown with the Economic Council so I'm very comfortable retaining that position right now but not adding the other position back we're not ready to do that thank you the notion is of winding it with parks did you just speak to that because yes it's not being combined with parks okay they do share our director but those two departments are completely separate they each will have a deputy director that will be doing a lot of the day-to-day operations I believe that the very strong leadership that a veteran

[188:01] has shown in Parks and Rec is needed in community vitality and another thing you don't know maybe about a vet is that she's got an amazing background on working with communities in terms of nonprofits redevelopment those sorts of things so she's perfectly suited to be working on community vitality as we move forward we'll see if that changes but right now it's really serving the organization well and it's a savings to the organization to have one less director okay all right erin has a new question for us what I am not done which I exactly with economic vitality but I'm happy to wait a bow on it so I thought since we there are a number of places in here where we talk about constrained budgets and difficulties and funding things and all of that that one of the

[189:01] things that we would look at do we would look at doing was looking for new sources of funding and one of the things that I asked Bob Ike him to do was to give me he wrote a history of the accommodations tax and food tax rates and percentages referred to and I just wanted to bring this up to the council so that you would have this information moving forward in the budget process and this is not to say that the accommodations I think they've done the Convention and Visitor's Bureau which used to be a have a different name which was the boulder I forget as Marianne Mahoney has done a wonderful job with this so much so that in 2000 the totals for this is for the accommodation tax and the food services tax were three million one hundred and ninety five hundred and

[190:00] seventy two and the CVB's payment was six hundred and twenty six thousand in 2010 the totals were three million one hundred and thirty eight thousand one hundred and eighty and the CVP payment was seven hundred twenty seven thousand three hundred and seventy four and in 2017 through November for eleven months the total for the accommodations and food services tax was seven million three hundred and fifty four thousand a hundred and ninety nine with the payment to the CVB being two million one hundred and thirty six thousand seven hundred and ninety five so what I'm doing is just pointing out how much this has grown these are tax monies the city has a contract with the CVB and I would be interested in knowing how that set up I know that they get some portion of the taxes that are brought in the city the general fund gets some portion of the taxes that are brought in they get all

[191:01] of the food services taxes which have gone up almost doubled not quite double so I was just thinking of this if we thought about shifting taxes from one place to another that this might be a place to reallocate some funding and so for the October 2nd meeting we can provide I don't wanna say white paper but an attachment to our memo that will explain in excruciating detail what has happened with the occupation and food taxes over the years and we can show the dollars and how they've moved so they're happy to do that yeah there was an increase in the occupation tax approved by the voters a couple of years ago so that's part of the increase that just the rate increase but but Cindy's right that it's increased a lot one of the things I would say is that between the year 2000 and now focus of our community has really increased as an entertainment district and so I think that we see the

[192:01] downtown area really drawing in folks from our community that want to go out for food service and stuff like that but we would love to provide you lots of information on that thank you [Music] attachment could you just outlined and how things like personnel in the CVB have changed what kinds of programs they're providing something that gives us an idea what we're getting for that increase and I would I would be interested in seeing okay I don't know the production councils gonna end up trying to take on this but think about permanent percentage cut to the CVB maybe over that would you know impact them negatively in the future maybe

[193:02] percent they start to give back in ways you know and help fund Carnegie yeah Carnegie actually museum a boulder community katie has a slide can you explain it we can and we can provide all the information that I worked with Bob I come William he was developing the history of the accommodations tax but you will see in 2002 when the about item passed it did increase the accommodations tax fairly significantly as well as the growth that we've seen in the community so the relationship and contract agreement with the organization now is that they do receive all of the food service tax comparatively a smaller dollar amount and they received 20% of the accommodations text which is related to the increase that happened between 2009 and 2010 with the valid item but I just wanted to provide perspective to the

[194:00] numbers that Cindy was giving earlier and I just really do want to emphasize I think what a terrific these numbers speak to the terrific job that Maryann Mahoney is doing with a convention Visitors Bureau so I mean the she get deserves a huge round for that of applies okay and you're gonna get us some more on that anybody else want to speak to this issue or economic vitality note that they they do the BBC if he does provide some funds for community events like the they helped to fund the Jaipur festival for example yes that's funding like a policy of wanting to help emerging events and they'll fund I forget if it's for three years or five years I think it's three years maybe three times yeah three times and then they try to move on to another emerging event so we might be useful to kind of

[195:00] get a sense of what their funny okay yeah I just had a couple things I want to just bring up for consideration there are public hearing in terms of cuts the let me just say Jane I think you put together a phenomenal budget that positions us extremely well for the future and uncertainties coming coming forward in terms of revenue changes and you know possibly you know weakening of the economy that may come before she long so thank you for that and to all the staff for what a great job you've done they were just they were in addition to the Carnegie were a couple ones that wanted to I was curious to call out one was the in the police department I'm really glad to see that we're adding the other officer and getting to that point in the master plan but there were really substantial more administrative personnel cuts so I worry a little bit if that's damaging it all to the operational ability Department so is there anyone that is chief test here could somebody speak to

[196:02] good evening counselor Greg testa please chief so Erin the positions that we offered for reductions were vacant positions they had been vacant for some time and we really took a strategic look at those positions they are not going to affect our service levels in any way in any way for direct service to the community great that's very helpful things chief good enough for me that was I have a question about doing away with the annex on the hill which I saw was you're gonna move towards in 2020 I believe right that was as we looked at as we looked at cuts that was an area that we looked at as a deficiency it's it is based on timing it's not something that we could offer

[197:00] as a budget recommendation for the 19 budget we have our lease expires I believe it's in July of next year and we have to give them a certain amount of advance notice and how much is that lease I believe it's fifty three thousand dollars fifty three thousand and so you have a presence up there the hill as we know over time has had issues and the police present is presences thought I know by the neighbors to be exceedingly helpful both for questions directions and I think you have a patrol car that's parked there so that everyone who visits up there is aware that there is that is there and I think it's really important I would hate to see the annex cut from the hill personally just another budget item moving forward and I'm sure we'll hear about this from the hill neighbors in some someway once this

[198:03] becomes more widely known chief can you speak to the service to that comment so many years ago I want to say budget reductions we reduce staffing full-time staffing at that office so the office hasn't been open to the public to walk in for many years however we do have staff that works out of there police officers who work the hill area report to the main our main headquarters building and then they go up there and they use that as a workspace so they work out of there throughout the day and there's also a code enforcement administrative person who has their desk out of there also for people too so so people can come knock on the door or call and we can meet there but it hasn't been open to the public for for several

[199:01] years in terms of it being a presence because I mean I know that's generally a sentiment that it feels like a presence even if it's not open to the public right so there's no getting around the fact that an office does allow employees to work out of there the staffing for the hill would not change we would still maintain the same staffing levels officers would still maintain all their visibility if council approved that office space would not be there now one thing that we have talked about is future looking at the East bookend development and maybe taking a look at strategically do we reduce offices because as you as you counsel know we have a hill office and we have an office down on the Pearl Street Mall so we've we realized that this is some time off but we've started to take a

[200:00] look at that and look at efficiencies and how can we still maintain service levels so I had a question and you were also in the queue Mary okay to ask your ego past question what you want me to ask okay so in the it says we are paying an additional four hundred twenty two thousand next year for downtown Eco passes and I'm curious because RTD board is voting tonight on whether to do some really horrible things to our pass program and then to vote again in a week to make that permanent so I want to alert everybody that we have there's some real concerns as what may happen but is this 422 anticipating the cuts that they may vote on tonight yes the cuts and proposing increases in the fees for having a Eco pass and it's considerable I guess I'll just put in a plug that they would

[201:01] probably end to see you pass as we know it and also freeze the rates for our downtown by what is it four hundred percent so any anybody cares about that out there in TV land call RTD well I'll just make it common even though it's not about our budget but at a future meeting we might want to look at a different kind of district and do something with Cu and with the county I asked Mike to come up just because a 400% increase is not something we've budgeted for no we did budget for an increase but it wasn't that much so Mike you may know more today asking them to postpone the increases until 2019 because we really feel that the work of the the past program working group really came out with a conclusion that the program is

[202:02] basically recovering its full costs and so adding revenue in fact and so it's it's been more the stuff of late more the details like the service level area definitions and the master contract provisions that a lot of people good work and then changed it and said oh no this is what they recommend Dean but it and it was working group worked for nearly a year on making these recommendations and we followed all of the guiding principles that were set forth at the beginning of the process and one of them having to do with maintaining financial sustainability within our TD's budget which we accomplished all of that and then they

[203:00] changed everything so yes I agree with Suzanne call RTD and say that you answer your question more directly so what they're proposing to do is just kind of a roll out and so the first year would be a certain amount and then it would actually escalate if these changes it might be okay for our budget yeah but it'll it'll get worse and for instance I think the first year they're proposing a 20% increase but then by the third year they're talking about it doubling and so that's a bit of math with this budget for this year but the trajectory is such that it man do the it may become totally unaffordable to have equal passes and I think you pointed out some of the larger programs like CEUs program is definitely at risk and so one of the potentially insidious parts of

[204:01] this is that they may try and increase the pricing which may get people to opt out which we may really completely decrease their revenues and then there might have a different problem and then they'll cut our service and then everybody that goes to see you will need to drive yeah there you go please call RTD ok we have mary has a question in an urn has another one so this is a different topic yeah different okay in looking through the department titles one of them jump out at me we're planning housing and sustainability contains housing and Human Services housing and Human Services contained housing are they different housings no they're the same housing but we decided not to change everything in all the budget books until we get to next year so there will be a

[205:01] change from planning housing and sustainability to something else planning or something it was just thank you duplex so last question was about the code enforcement officer that's proposed to be eliminated could someone talk about what that position is and what it's been doing it's it's not proposed to be eliminated we were talking about it and it should not have appeared in your book so it isn't it's in the list of reductions that were not taken one of the many confuse in the right actually no it's in attachment B yeah it's in the it's in the fire rescue section in attachment B that's a different that's what I'm talking about

[206:01] yeah that's a different you know there's one and we are reducing that and Mike's gonna talk about that one is one of our inspectors so we have two inspectors and we're shifting the commercial inspections some of them to our line personnel that's that's how we receiving that production okay but you'll still be making the same will still be conducting marijuana inspections and the normal commercial inspections we simply won't be able to do them at the level that we've done in the past and we're expand the program so we're just shifting some of that responsibility to our actual line company officers that do inspections anyway and they won't for some of them they won't be as thorough as a true code enforcement inspection but the ones that we need done are going to get done by the one inspector so so that inspector is going to do both marijuana inspections and commercial inspections that we absolutely have to have done the bulk of commercial inspections and there

[207:00] are lots of them we will shift to the line and allow them to conduct those those aren't your typical if we know if we have to come back three times we'd have to charge you a fee those are a different level of inspection okay get just a little bit more information about we can do that could be great sure but then just to confirm there's there's no loss of code enforcement of the kind of like zoning violation there's nothing's changing it great thank you okay other topics okay I know that we have a lot of opinions and maybe we'll save them from October's October 2nd public hearing right the great direction that we received tonight we appreciate and the thing that I think we all agree on is that the slide on libraries will be now reflected as part of the budget that you'll see on October 2nd so it will be part of the budget you won't have to add it in okay that's great and then there

[208:03] was there's a few information requests absolutely and you got those will provide that anything else that people would like for before the hearing just thank you that was that was really well done thank you think you and everybody for all the hard work they put into the suggested additions deletions and into our large variety of staff thanks for spending your Tuesday evening right and if we didn't ask a question of your department just doesn't mean we don't like we still love you yes Thank You [Music]

[209:06] Ark in recent years but it still has terror cells throughout this region and carries out frequent suicide attacks meanwhile millions of people have fled their homes and are still packed in camps too afraid to return home