December 11, 2018 — City Council Study Session

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] sure to leave them on bury containers wax-coated drink boxes bound notebooks and staples are all okay give your food containers a rinse and ball up foil but resist the urge to crush cans and other items which confuse the sorting machines we like to say that if it was alive in your lifetime it can be composted so that means all food waste including meat bones and dairy the heated our compost site has the power to break down a pile of baby back rib bones and the mass of dirty napkins that piled up while you eat them but plastic is another story keep anything plastic lines like to go boxes out of the compost don't be conned by these faux compost items labeled biodegradable organic or natural your item must say BPI certified compostable when in doubt look for the BPI logo any contaminated paper products with food on them that would normally be recycled like last night's pizza box now should be composted last and we hope least filled landfill

[1:01] landfills are designed to keep out air water and sunlight while trash sits there without breaking down for a long long time only a fraction of what you throw out should end up in this dark sad mountain of methane releasing waste for chip bags squeeze tubes styrofoam anything plastic lined dog poop and candy wrappers these all go in the landfill the recycling bin is for paper and containers but keep out plastic bags plastic coated paper like to go boxes and coffee cups things like paper towels and tissues can join your food and your waste in the compost but again keep plastics out visit zero waste Boulder calm for a full list of items and where they belong together we can help Boulder become a zero waste community [Music]

[2:13] food it nourishes brings us together and adds flavour to life that's why it's important to wash hands surfaces and fresh produce keep raw meat poultry and seafood separate from ready-to-eat foods like fruits and vegetables and cook to proper temperatures using a food thermometer enjoy and refrigerate leftovers within two hours for more tips on safely preparing foods visit home food safety org [Music]

[3:01] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

[4:16] [Music] [Music] [Music]

[5:06] [Music] [Music] [Music]

[6:08] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

[8:37] small issues that we're gonna dress with very efficiently just note to colleagues without having long conversations on either of these topics there clarification ones before we dive into our two main discussions so the first one lisa has to do with you so actually I can start it all so that I can get settled so at the last council meeting a

[9:01] week ago we talked about the large homes and large Lots project and the scope of the project was originally to include four zone districts those were RR r e RL and RM x one and the council asked us to move forward with that the next day Lisa thank you sent out a hotline saying that on further reflection perhaps to assist with the work plan we couldn't focus on just the r r and r e zone districts so the council is going to talk about that briefly tonight staff would be supportive of narrowing the scope if you want to do that and among the things that we're thinking is that the largest homes in the city are actually in those two districts are R and R E and then because the Lots in those districts are larger the ability to have innovative solutions with the land is a little bit greater in those areas as well so if you would like us to do that we can add the

[10:00] changes to the other districts into a future land future land use code changes but it's up to you you want to do do you wanna add anything to that Lisa so today we've gotten a few emails asking us to keep the LRS and then I don't know if people saw Aaron's email and he's at home with a migraine not feeling so well and he said one thing he would like to say is that he wanted to include the RL zone to continue to be included in the first phase of the large lots project now I have not spoken with him but it was Erin and I who have been kind of working on this together and from my perspective I agree what I said to Bob Jane you could have been speaking for me right there and and I think the two are ELLs and are ours and our E's have different solutions and Mary also rode

[11:00] in today and I think she agrees with this direction but I think if there's a way and staff needs to be tell us what they think but if there's a way that somehow they can address the RLS in looking at the FA are with the compatible development you know to me it's two different processes and two different projects but I understand some of the people's comments that you know we should include every all of these because there are all large lots but I think the solutions or what we can do on the artis and our ours are very different than what we could do on most RL Lots so I think and Mary's comment was something to the effect of if we could just do it with the FA are kind of recalculation or formula on the RLS so that we could somehow get smaller

[12:01] compatible development units I don't know so maybe Chris speak a little bit I'm sorry for not being clear but I this is just kind of happened in the last in today so sure so Christmas check we if if council would like to keep the RL zone in we can definitely do that that's how we had scoped the project as we presented last week another thing we could do based on your concern of just focus and making sure that we reach some conclusions on this work before next fall is we could prioritize the RR and Ari's own still include the RL zones and rmx zones but as we get into it if it starts to get more complex then we can focus on our R and re first and I think you're right the solutions are going to be different for those different zoning districts so we can also do a bit of just prioritisation if you want us to keep

[13:01] everything on the table we can and then as we get into the work if if it starts to get really complicated and especially the RR l zones then we can focus on our R and re first if you'd like we could almost I think we're gonna run out of time on this counsel given our ambitious agenda but we'll be discussing at the retreat but we could kind of tee it up frame it and end up addressing it sequentially knowing this council may run out of time and it goes to the next one something kind of like that yeah and if it's hearing from you if it's RR and re this kind of priority one or tier one of the work we can focus there but still start on everything one person wrote was about the AG district as well would it be possible to do I know there's not much but the AVR are in the REE as one kind of phased in cluster of issues because I agree the solutions will be different between them and I think it'll

[14:03] get complicated about the RL is we'll be talking about lot size because there's a huge range of lot size in RL and not so much in our RN re so I would say I'm happy with the prioritization that you suggest and was curious would it add much to that if you added the a zoning and we could look at adding the agricultural zoning there's actually very few sites in the city that have agricultural zoning so I'm not sure that issue exists in the same way and so my preference would be to leave the agricultural zoning out at this point but then we can we can look at that and explore that further in the future but I don't see the same issues initially that we're seeing in the RR and RD zones if there was just one very extra-large house that got put in recently on a zone so that was the reason that got brought up so I leave that to your discretion that's right and and I think you know I think that just being updated and

[15:01] briefed and you know have an honest discussion of if it's getting overwhelming or you know if it's way too much so I'm happy to go forward with what you're proposing I for me I would like to look at a timeline of end of August you know middle of September at the latest so but I also don't want to kill staff so and I'm not gonna let's cool let's hear from your colleagues who I agree with Sam I would love to see a in there no I I think there's a lot of work we have to do in the RL zones also so I would I'm you know I guess I would prefer to look at all of them but starting starting off like you said kind of tearing it makes sense I agree good good that good enough yeah that's

[16:00] great you can hear it Lisa fingers very much thanks I sent out an email yesterday about demolitions and I spoke with Chris and that all the answers to that are gonna be in when we have the next discussion the next round how about at the retreat we can I mean whatever in yeah we're not thank you because we're not going to draw such discussion yeah I'm gonna bring that back large thing yeah okay okay the next other small issue that we could talk about a lot because we like it but we're not gonna is Long's garden and so let me have Dan Burke our interim open-space director up and discuss very briefly the conversation that he had with Catherine long gates and Vanessa yes good evening Council and just a reference that Catherine is in the audience today as well as Vanessa Keely from growing gardens um so I did send council a correspondence a few days ago that

[17:01] summarizes the the meeting that open space staff had with Catherine and Vanessa a good part of it was just to reintroduce open space staff who weren't present during the prior negotiations to get a lay of the land if you will get a sense of the buildings get a sense from the family as I need what's changed if anything since 2014 what are they open to and and just kind of set us up for if there's a next step in this process that that staff is is is is ready to move I also put forward a number of sort of neck next steps that we would take from real estate services aspect within the open space department as far as just due diligence with a negotiation and one of the big questions is the valuation question says because a few things have changed on the property since 2014 including a very long lease encumbrance

[18:00] with growing gardens that could affect valuation so I'm happy to answer any follow-up questions that you may have about Mike about the meeting we have and about what potential next steps could look like it's so I guess mostly here's how I sum up already is that we wanted to have staff check and see if this issue is right again it appears like it is and that having more conversations makes a less sense and we just want to have a thumbs-up from counsel keep on keeping on with the idea that we would have a more in-depth conversation and some time and the first quarter about as you do some of your due diligence and principles or things that we think are important in whatever agreement is you know created but that we wouldn't do that tonight but just sort of signal that yes as a council we're interested

[19:00] in in moving forward and city wants to say something yeah I just want to say you did mention that we would look at it in the first quarter and I would stress that we get it as soon as we can without stretching things so that we can actually start moving on it 2019 pretty quickly and if people are in agreement with that for multiple reasons or this has gone on a long time in it'd be really nice to get it done with this council before so that there's a memory I would say several of the next steps could be done fairly quickly so first quarter sounds reasonable to me for sure the question on how we want to revisit valuation if it is determined that the best course forward would be either a revision an update unfortunately the appraiser that

[20:01] appraised it in 2013 is no longer in the business so that would be a little bit of a bump in the road as far as just having him update it but if it is determined that through evaluation process it would be wise for us to update it the appraisal process you know it could be a 12-week type of process so just FYI on that and I really appreciate you taking it up and and working with and I think it's I think I think I could speak for all of us that this we really appreciate Long's garden and we understand how beloved it is and I guess what I want is a thumbs up but people want to continue I think most people are nodding yell yes okay and so it feels weird not to have you guys speak but we're having a very short conversation so we'll just leave it at go forth and we look forward to talking about it in the first quarter sounds good okay okay

[21:07] now we get to our big topics hey council we're doing this now we are here to talk about the prairie dog working group and Suzanne before we get 18 and my understanding is this group gets one hour and 15 minutes of your shared time 30 Sun right that would be great that was our agent so the plan as perhaps you already know is that the prairie dog breeding group is going to give you a a presentation first from their phase 1 recommendations and we'll pause and take some questions about that first phase and then they'll resume

[22:01] their presentation and catch you up on all the phase 2 goodies that they have to recommend and then we'll take your questions and do more discussion at the end so my job is to sit here quietly while the fine people do the presenting just if it's not clear I am NOT in charge I also wanted to point out that this presentation will be given by staff and by some community members from the working group will each and introduce ourselves as we're up to talk but I wanted to point out some community members Deb Jones from the working group is attending behind us and Kristin cannon from Colorado Parks and Wildlife is also a beautiful yeah I'm not sure how I get this just so that all the

[23:03] working group members know you have to speak into the mic so it shows up on the TV so we will and it's got to be green [Music] so I'm Val Matheson I'm the urban wildlife conservation coordinator and how they did a great job of already discussing where we're headed today for our presentation as she mentioned a little background and we'll talk about the early work of the working group that we refer to as phase 1 then we'll pause we'll talk about phase 2 recommendations and that would be from our community members initial staff analysis on phase 2 what we heard from our boards and then the initial implementation of phase 2 and then ending with the future analysis

[24:01] we have planned in next steps and getting our feedback and questions answered from council questions so a bit of background the prairie dog working group was formed after the August 16 2016 council meeting where council members suggested the city form a working group that could suggest prairie dog management practices based on a broad understanding of the full range of community perspectives the role of the working group was to make consensus based recommendations to the city manager the working group was facilitated by Heather Heather Bergman of peak facilitation the meetings were open to the public and public comments were considered during the meetings the recommendations were produced in two discrete phases phase one was focused on relocation methodologies under current or existing plans and policies and that work was completed and approved by the

[25:01] city manager back in June of 2017 and phase two focused on goals objectives strategies that included recommendations of planned and policy changes and that work was completed in June of 2018 the prairie dogs working groups work has been completed and sincere gratitude has been expressed to all the group members for their long hours and dedication through this process so I'm gonna list out the six recommendations that came out of phase one the first was to establish the criteria for prioritizing relocation sending sites or where the prairie dogs were going to come from the second was establishing the criteria for prioritizing receiving sites are where the prairie dogs were going to go to ensure adequate accommodations for relocated prairie dogs to find what

[26:00] success is for prairie dog relocations and use plague vaccine on the southern grasslands and create a sub group to develop those recommendations and I should point out that all of these recommendations have been implemented with the exception of number two and number four in which we've established the framework for but those are still in progress and development so I'm gonna highlight some of the issues that have already been addressed under current policy through the implementation of the prairie dog working group phase one recommendations first is establishing criteria to prioritize relocation of prairie dogs subject to lethal control this was a change from prioritizing relocations within city owned managed lands to prioritizing the relocation of prairie dogs subject to lethal control regardless of the land ownership and

[27:01] within the city limits of course the next was insuring receiving site infrastructure so this was ensuring every relocated prairie dog was released into either a natural burrow or into a nest box and you can see in the upper the left hand side the photographs are at the top an actual nest box or artificial burrow and then the series of implementation what it looks like in the landscape the city had used a variety of relocation infrastructure techniques including releasing prairie dogs into augered or starter burrows that were augered a few feet into the ground and this change consistently offered more established underground protection for newly released prairie dogs and this practice also includes a greater ground disturbance or footprint to the increased number of nest boxes that are installed and last the plague mitigation

[28:04] in the southern grasslands historically there was no plague mitigation on relocation receiving sites and plague vaccine was distributed twice in 2018 into the southern grassland of the colonies in the southern grassland including the relocation sites and the vaccine was also distributed to prairie dogs on the sending sites prior to moving them and with that I will take clarifying questions on phase one okay counsel any questions on the first round of recommendations from this group some of you might have been aware of those some of you weren't on council when that group was created any thoughts or questions on that phase one Suzanne

[29:00] Jones okay but really Suzanne Jones has some questions also Lisa anyone else okay Lisa you want to take one first then we'll go to Stan she's in the penalty box so you go first well I guess I have a question about relocation and the whole lethal control and using the vaccine and I know the vaccine there's kind of mixed results in terms of if it's really effective or not I'm glad the vaccine is is being applied but I also understand that in this southern grasslands that Delta dust is not being applied to the nesting boxes or the burrows and so what's happening when the prairie dogs are relocated from like foothills or other place is they basic they're relocated but then they die when they get there so can you address that did you want staff to address that or I remember of the

[30:01] working group study who can sure so on the relocation Delta dust is used on the sending site and Cindy in the sending site prior to trapping the prairie dogs and then the prairie dogs some are sprayed with an insecticide after they're captured and prior to release you're right there hasn't been Delta dust used on the receiving sites that was something that was discussed as part of the phase 1 recommendations for the prairie dog working group but at the time the group did not come to consensus around that so it wasn't included in the recommendations so how do can you address the whole issue of what's a survival rate of your relocation prairie dogs well I can I can address the last couple of years we have done a couple of relocations to the same site to the damiana vich site in the past at the wanaka site we did have a relocation that then about a year later suspected plague we never had confirmation of that

[31:01] did move through the whole area and so that colony was reduced substantially in size on the dam iana colony over the last couple of years we've had what appears to be a very high level of survival okay okay great thanks it's good to be here we there's several of us on the prairie dog working group who have tried diligently for the last couple of years to really move this forward and express the importance of getting Delta dust out there especially to the southern grasslands and we've been really concerned that really it seems like it's almost a lethal process to take the prairie dogs you know away from a conflict area where they would have been buried or or poisoned or gassed or

[32:01] whatever and take them out and release them to the southern grasslands but once you release them then they aren't protected by the plague and so historically well the one that really upsets me the most I guess was the foothills colony that was relocated out there and I think there were Kara members between seven and eight hundred and they were relocated out to the grasslands and they all they all died out there and there are that's sort of what happens and so once the colonies death happens from the plague then that opens up that site again and I think that the staff has been sort of dependent on that because that provides receiving sites and so if you apply the plague if you have a plague mitigation you'll have plague resistant period oxen and I think there's concern there was concern among staff but it was it was

[33:02] important to to get some plague resistance out there and that means then the prairie dogs will continue to to live out there and then they won't vacate those sites and then those sites won't be available so then the whole issue we discussed then it was that well then we need more sites if we're going to have plague mitigation so we'll just be sharing a darling okay Suzanne question I just want to have a better understanding of and I guess this will be my theme tonight is the trade offs and my understanding is that well here's a question the backlog of areas we're trying to relocate and the receiving say talk about how the how those things line up I I think there's AG lands that have conflicts and anyhow we have a bunch that we would like to read allocate we have you are receiving sites did we get behind you could speak to the status of how that's working sure

[34:02] so in 2018 we had about 900 acres on city owned and managed lands that were in areas that had been designated for removal largely on open space that's due to irrigated agriculture on park sites it's due to development plans on the sites and there are a couple of other properties in the city utilities properties and such where there are conflicts with the the prevailing land use so they're about 900 acres of those we the receiving site availability varies dramatically from year to year so it's not really an answer that always holds from year to year and that that really shifts with the occupancy levels of prairie dogs what plague has been doing on the landscape the level of drought that we've been experiencing because prairie dog colonies will move and expand and densities will change based on drought so that's really a shifting Lance I guess so are we keeping up was there a backlog I mean are we getting to

[35:03] relocations in a timeframe that feels adequate I'm just trying to well so I get I think certainly there was a backlog the city did not do any prairie dog relocations from about and II might remember 2002 possibly until probably 2012 when we moved the foothills prairie dogs and in that time again the you know the acres went up and down and so it wasn't always a solid increase but right now we're extremely high occupancy levels system-wide on both the conflict areas as well as our north and our East grassland preserves and most of our product conservation areas the southern grasslands is the one exception to that and so we have been doing relocations and the numbers of relocations that have been done over the last several years are largely based sort of on capacity as far as cost and staff capacity to oversee the relocation so we have been addressing the eminent lethal control on

[36:00] private property as well as this year we're addressing some agricultural properties on open space and we're hoping next year to address some parks needs for their future development so it's a there isn't there is a large backlog but we are making incremental progress up to essentially what we can accommodate each year nearby has a question then Cindy so I apologize if I'm going into phase two and I'm trying to keep it but my notes are based on the packet rather let you know if you do so if we're going back to in terms of the grass southern grasslands and that's where I'm going to specifically focus tonight because that's where when we asked council in 2016 for this working group to happen I was part of that group we were focusing on the lack of prairie dogs on southern grasslands so my information is from 2016 granted it's now 2018 so if I'm incorrect on these

[37:01] please feel free to correct my numbers but per my understanding we're at 2% of population for prairie dogs on the southern grasslands and so I think my goal here and again I understand this is clarifying is that we're looking at my goal is to find more receiving sites so if we're willing to start doing the correct type of relocations and not using auger holes which have been proven not to work and the fact that we are going to move over to the nest boxes which is fantastic is there now possibility to start relocating prairie dogs into areas that may not have had prairie dogs previous but because again southern grass hands-only is filled with 2% I mean that's a lot of land now that we can start using and we can start being good neighbors to some of the AG groups and taking the animals that have been being killed on their lands and hopefully start moving them so is that gonna be happening here where we're gonna start opening up a lot of lands and hoping so that is largely

[38:03] phase two one of the recommendation deals with the relocation criteria and phase two so we will get to that I would say that in the past southern grasslands has had occupancy far higher than it does now and two percent is about accurate still and so there are large unoccupied prairie dog colonies that currently could could qualify as receiving sites which is why we've had spots to be relocating prairie dogs so I would say that you know the implementation of the phase two recommendations could result in changes to those that's that's certainly a change to a plan that's in existence and so that's part of what we're going to be analyzing is how to move forward on on those phase two recommendations like that but I would say that currently there are many hundreds of acres that have had prairie dogs in southern grasslands that are already included on the list as potential receiving sites okay great thank you yeah more on that in Phase two excellent did you have a

[39:02] question before we move on I did have but it also has to do with the carrying capacity of the southern grasslands whether or not that has been ascertained mm-hmm tackle that one now where you carrying capacity is a difficult thing to look at we have looked at soils one thing that's going on in southern grasslands is it's an outlaw from the Rocky Flats alluvial mesas that sit to the south so large swaths of southern grasslands have extremely rocky soils so the areas that could be you for relocation and for a prairie-dog occupation our places that prairie dogs have previously occupied without any control or limitation on their spread and so there were about twelve years of plague free time in the southern grasslands where prairie dogs expanded as they wanted to and so you know there's some case to be made that they chose the best spots because they had the ability to do that whether there are other areas or not that are suitable for them we haven't looked at is can you is

[40:00] it on the map the area you refer to as you point ever so hopefully so on your map it's essentially this area south of us 36 which runs diagonally down here sort of at the bottom of the map you can see us 36 and east of Highway 93 so it's essentially this big chunk of green down here and you can see the sort of olive colored polygons are where prairie dogs have been the sort of reddish brown color is where they currently are so when we were talking about what what sites might there be out there that prairie dogs could go into all of that olive color represents those you can see there are large areas that have not previously had prairie dogs down there

[41:01] and so as far as carrying capacity for those areas we haven't done that analysis in doing any carrying capacity I would think down here you have all of these multiple agencies open space or you know wildlife refuge or whatever and so it comes to about 88,000 acres and so where you have the white spot that's Rocky Flats in the refuge and I know they're very active in relocating prairie dogs on to that site as well as black footed ferrets and so I would think that in calculating carrying capacity you'd have to look at the area that they might go I mean the entire area so I think it would be difficult just on the southern grasslands sure in our grassland ecosystem management plan definitely focused only on city properties the

[42:00] County and Rocky Flats have their own prairie dog plans and objectives and so we would need to coordinate with with them on that right and I hope we can do that because I think there's a lot to be gained by working together you and Lucille here in the phase two recommendations and bigger picture thinking related to weird barriers of land ownership that maybe aren't as helpful as they could be any more questions from Council or shall we move on to the phase two recommendations it's a lot of juicy stuff coming yep phase two question I know we have a lot of egg conflicts up here and I guess at some point want to hear how we're gonna address them and is the plan to move all these down here or how are you gonna do this job just curious whenever that fits in kind of what's the vision around that there's some some recommendations about that about the social conflict piece that will come and then maybe your question would come up better after those okay it's just before but in this discussion I'd like to keep the when it

[43:02] comes to acne and looking at keyed lining and key lining and which is basically cutting a swath or a large line of it's like a plow that it goes down like 18 inches it helps with water conservation but we went to four eco cycles I don't know annual thing we went to a farm next to open space and they're trying this right out right now where they have planned two different kinds of plants and it's their co-locating with prairie dogs and it looks like it's a pretty successful program so I'd like to know in this whole kind of larger perspective if that's going to be included in some of the management policies and trying this co-locating of prairie dogs and Kili vegetation so we'll circle back to that question that took two xan's question

[44:01] into your question first let's hear at the phase two recommendations would you start and introduce yourself and then take it right sure everybody I'm Pat comer what I'm going to do is sort of lead us off on this little bit of discussion and we'll share among several of us from the working group discussing these phase two recommendations so what we were doing in Phase two was you know because phase one was it was you know focusing on some fairly urgent management issues we had we were able to then in Phase two sort of step back and ask some basic questions about what a sustainable management looked like as a release of prairie dogs in this landscape and and so we started to lay out a little bit of a vision where you could see I think we all agree one we absolutely want to minimize conflicts associated associated with prairie dogs and conflicting land uses we also want to have prairie dogs on the landscape

[45:00] prairie dogs are a natural component of the grasslands that are there right here and in the foothills and right on this you know in our neighborhood here and they play an important ecological role ideally they're there would be enough space for for prairie dog colonies to be functioning and not be plagued out and having these sort of up-and-down population cycles but in fact be large enough to be kept in check by native predators and so that's really our ideal the question is how do you get there it's complicated and what we did was work through a number of different ecological social economic goals objectives specific kinds of things that we would view these is all kind of equally important a lot of these things are codependent in the sense of you got it you can't you can't address one without actually addressing the other things because there's a lot of energy dependencies here so so what we did was was start to lay these things out and like I say I'll just go can I advance

[46:00] this just advance it once so there's sort of ecological goals and objectives you're creating and maintaining under ecological sort of creating maintaining at least one or one or more large landscapes where prairie dog prairie dogs can occupy that the grassland ecosystems they're their plague resistant populations but the integrity of those grassland habitats are maintained in a hi-hi condition from a social standpoint we really see the need for sort of innovative but still non-lethal strategies to minimize conflicts and increase public awareness as it relates to prairie dogs on the landscape and then economically you know we need to provide the resources the resources and capacity to really secure prairie dog conservation in an in a real sustainable functioning system on this on this larger landscape and you know bottom line for a part of this and we'll get into these recommendations a little

[47:01] more is we do need to look beyond the city lands we got to look at this entire landscape and we we have the great fortune actually to have existing investments and then neighbors who have compatible you know goals that we do and so we really need to maximize that so I'm going to pass it two cars now to talk about the ecological goals and objectives Thanks that I'm car space Muller and I am an animal ecologist and behaviorist and been really involved in the prairie dog issue since several years ago when the armory thing blew up so I'm happy to be here tonight so really the southern grasslands was our focus for where the city would likely create these large blocks of occupied by viable populations of plague resistant prairie dogs and one of the reasons we were looking down there is that it is adjacent as Lisa was talking

[48:02] about that it is and also Pat that is adjacent to larger other properties that are not city-owned and so if you're going to actually have colonies limited by native predators including say the black of an affair you might need to have a larger area than the city so we did talk about that cooperation among entities so there are three objectives to reach this goal and the first one calls for quality grasslands that contain viable populations of plague resistant prairie dogs that are naturally limited by native predators and so one of the strategies we have is that the city would complete and implement a reintroduction plan for the federally endangered black footed ferret which is a native predator that depends on prairie dogs for more than 90% of its diet and so and also for its survival to other strategies to meet this first

[49:00] objective one was to complete and implement a plague management plan that uses state-of-the-art methods that have already proven effective in protecting prairie dogs against the plague protected prairie dogs would have a chance to survive and thrive and to secure the sustainable and plague resistant colonies that we have in our objective limited use of Delta Mathurin also known as Delta dust which we've mentioned earlier is currently recommended as the best tool to protect prairie dogs against the plague the sylvatic plague vaccine which we've mentioned also which the city is using on the southern grasslands is unfortunately proving less effective than previously thought as you've seen from some of Lindsay's slides that she sent you already another strategy is to update and implement the grassland management plan that as it pertains to prairie dog goals and to amend the plan

[50:01] in a way that will increase prairie dog occupancy on the southern grasslands and also to revise the criteria that qualify a receiving site which Heather mentioned or vow to release prairie dogs there so we can have some new receiving sites that can be established and utilized and the purpose of this is to increase the number of available receiving sites on the southern grasslands where prairie dogs can be released to help build up those large blocks of active prairie dog habitat that we have on our objective also it would help the city better handle the demand to relocate colonies from areas of conflict a demand that far exceeds the supply of available receiving sites on the grasslands which we've already mentioned as well and we also mentioned you know briefly about the the current way of using receiving sites that the available receiving sites on the

[51:01] southern grasslands are really those that are vacated by colonies that have previously been relocated there and died there and then another colony come it comes in to the same fate and so on so this really shows the need to have additional receiving sites because plague resistant colonies will not be dying off and hopefully they will be thriving and so their site won't become available as they have as has been the case the second objective which we had to reach our goal number one was to call for the was for the city to implement non-lethal methods for managing populations that are in conflict with urban and agricultural land uses such as implementing non-lethal relocations are doing relocations that are non-lethal and creating buffer zones the working group agreed that implementing this objective would not override the

[52:00] implementation of the other two objectives in this goal we thought that the other two objective one and three were really would overwrite will be more important and a lot of these and objective to Dan is also going to be talking about when he talks about the social goal the third objective is to make amanda's necessary all of the existing prairie-dog plans and policies to make them compatible with this goal one and all of its objectives amending the grassland management plan as it pertains to prairie dogs should take precedence however to make sure that additional receiving sites can be created in the southern grasslands and the prairie dogs be look relocated and into unoccupied suitable habitat there as soon as absolutely possible so that was our first goal and thank you and now I'll turn it over to Dan and he's going to talk about goal - hi I'm Dan brand Emil and when it came to

[53:01] coming up with our social recommendations it really all centers around the conflicts that exist between prairie dogs and the people that are the neighbors that have to deal with them we found that one of the first things we need to do is really get a thorough and complete list of all the different types of conflicts that are out there so we can actually track them and map them and see you know where are the AG conflicts where are the adjoining property owners where the Parks and Rec conflicts and actually track that on an annual basis and make it available to the public so that there's more visibility to recognizing where the real conflicts are once we've identified the conflicts and are tracking that then we can come up with a set of most effective means for addressing those conflicts in each of the different categories because each category may have a different set of mitigation techniques that is more effective with that type of a conflict and we think that parks and recs is in a

[54:00] good position to make those decisions as to what techniques are best for this type of conflict as part of that objective we would like to see in the coming years getting to the point where 10% of the conflicts that are identified in each cut conflict category are being addressed annually to show the public that there is actually some progress being made to address the conflicts that are out there not just within the city of Boulder but within all the parties that are being affected by these conflicts our third objective is really more about getting that communication methods throughout the city updated so that all the different departments in the city understand that when prairie dog conflicts come in they know where to direct them so that we can track them and address them appropriately the fourth objective is really to do more of a outreach campaign to the citizens of Boulder and the Boulder area

[55:01] residents to raise their appreciation of the role that prairie dogs play as a keystone species in the ecosystem a lot of people really don't appreciate how important they are in the ecosystem nor do they recognize how complex the issue is and so he thinks about region education or expanding their appreciation for the complex issues around prairie dogs and what the city is doing will help to raise the level of tolerance when conflicts do arise number five is really sort of a given in my mind that there have to be feedback mechanisms so that if new techniques or new mitigation things come up that are more successful that policies and practices are adapted to take advantage of those and then number six is to secure some modifications to the state regulations so it's easier to move prairie dogs across county lines or into

[56:01] places like federal land on Rocky Flats and right now there are some regulations that limit our capability to do that so those are the social recommendations that we have I'd like to hand it back over to Patton house for ecológico Nam ik so yeah let me we just have three three major objectives under the economic economic goals the first is actually what we recommend is it's kind of an approach and that is some of you may be familiar I'm involved in environmental conservation a lot of for many years and you see these days the term net positive impact and what that's about is is really when you have conflicts you have inevitable sort of environmental conflicts you you first try to avoid those conflicts if at all possible but sometimes you can't avoid them entirely so you so if you're going to have a conflict you need to minimize the impact of that

[57:01] flicked and if you can't completely minimize the the conflicts you're going to mitigate that is you're going to find some alternative investments that will somehow compensate for the impacts that you've had and really the fourth is to say not only to just sort of compensate for what you've done but really seek a net positive gain in the overall approach and and this sort of situation with prairie dogs the kinds of conflicts that we have is actually an ideal sort of circumstance where this sort of model of approach to decision-making really applies pretty well and so we recommend that we think hard about how it can apply in this particular kind of and so it applies to to really making decisions about relocation and what do you do about the particular circumstances to really help resolve the particular conflict the second second objective is really to to establish a grassland conservation fund that you should be augmenting existing operating budgets so that we could

[58:01] really meet the needs for prairie dog management it could be you know using expenditures that are derived from let's say it could be a fee that is part of the relocation fee but they would it would help pay for perhaps land acquisition or easements and/or land stewardship as it relates to grassland management an example of that is a milestone sort of bulleted under these and underneath this is you know we really need the mechanism to clarify the inflows and outflows of that fund is there a fee structure that we could start to put in place that does help people consistently from let's say a private landowners perspective have clarity about this is what it'll cost to do a relocation and everything is clear to me and it's consistently done and I can see where the money is going and and it could really produce you know a consistent kind of output other sorts of sources of that kind of funding we've

[59:01] explored is you know there is public funding that is currently utilized for example under the farm bill that private landowners currently in the city I think with leases received can receive funding to do conservation practices on private lands this is another source of funding to actually make this sort of thing happen we also feel like if we can put together a functioning system here we ought to be able to attract philanthropic money to this this sort of activity if we really are resolving a sustainability problem that we have as it relates to grassland management we ought to be able to attract some some private philanthropic funds to the to this sort of endeavor so then our third objective is really to think hard about making sure we have sufficient budgets for city staff to fulfill their roles that they have in making all of this happen and and in fact you know thinking

[60:00] about our goals and our objectives as we've stated them but also to really have the time and ability to collaborate with neighbors as is really needed and really called for here as we've been alluding to we've got county and federal and other private partners who are our neighbors and staff need the time and ability to really engage with them so Pat is now handing it off to Heather Swanson to talk about the staff analysis all right so you're not intended to be able to read this but the periodic working group members just went through sort of the higher level objectives with a couple of examples of the finer scale milestones so in your memo packet on pages 50 and 51 as well as printed on the table are tables that include the full text of all of those recommendations so if you're looking for that that's where you can find that so staff did some initial analysis

[61:00] before we went to the boards for feedback and current expenditures on prairie dog conservation and management are somewhere between twenty seven thousand and three hundred thousand dollars annually and that that varies a lot depending on what the relocation projects are and where the prairie dogs are coming from city land or private land in any given year and we use about 2.5 FTEs working on prairie dog management that spread across open space planning and Parks and Recreation and so the initial analysis did not include the costs or the time estimates either for the implementation of phase one ongoing current prairie dog related work that's that I just spoke about or the work associated with the prairie dog working group itself just looking at implementation of the phase two recommendations maybe all right there we go so the cost for implementation were estimated between an additional six hundred and eighty thousand and 4.25 million and really the

[62:02] large variability there has to do with the fact that a lot of the recommendations are not specific enough that we can put dollar amounts to them right now there's sort of a low level of implementation and a high level of implementation which require very different funding scenarios and then an additional back for one more 2.2 to 2.5 FTE and that citywide again largely over those three departments planning open space and Parks and Rec yes 2.2 to 7.5 in addition yes in in addition to what is currently being used for product management also for the boards we did some initial analysis on possible trade-offs of implementation of the recommendations and some of those trade-offs are the potential limit to the protection of natural communities and species that do not thrive with prairie dogs we've been talking a lot about the grassland preserves and those are the large blocks of grassland

[63:01] habitat on open space in mountain parks and so those are not only some of our best areas to support large landscape complexes of prairie dogs but they're also the best places to support some of our other grassland communities plant communities and species that don't necessarily occur elsewhere on the system and don't overlap with prairie dog occupation we also looked a little bit at the potential for plague management using insecticides to have some impacts on non-target species and the potential for higher prairie dog populations as we implement recommendations to potentially have additional impact agricultural operations or plan to parks development and I will turn it over to Andy poster to talk a little bit more specifically about the agricultural trade-offs thanks Heather I'm Andy pester the AG stewardship supervisor our recent mapping in 2018 indicates that we have about 900 acres of irrigated agricultural land that's currently

[64:00] occupied by prairie dogs and as you can imagine irrigation become very difficult in these situations because of the borrowing activities the clipping and feeding activities certainly reduced yields and productivity on these sites and once these sites become occupied on city property common agricultural practices like tillage or field leveling that might help establish crops or enhance irrigation practices were actually prohibited by the active burro provision in the Wildlife Protection Ordinance so without significant intervention these colonies tend to stick around quite a while on agricultural properties so and after long periods of time these lands often need complete renovation to to return back to agricultural productivity as found mentioned in phase one or actually in our experience these sites

[65:00] also aren't as resilient as native grasslands so we find they they have a history of agricultural tillage the systems have been simplified by planting hay crops for example in irrigation and active management is required to keep these sites productive and so once the site's become occupied that management goes away and so they degrade in phase one we did talk about prioritization of the sending sites the consensus of the group was that a lot of the agricultural land would be second priority because they they aren't an imminent threat of poisoning or removable like in development sites so they are a second priority so and as I think we've discussed here in the recent past or haven't been enough relocation sites available to accommodate sites and imminent threat of the development as well as the agricultural sites on open space land in Phase two the working

[66:04] group is primarily suggesting that in the long term proactive bearing proactive providing barriers and a proactive basis and then more resources dedicated to lot non-league mitigation activities would be the preferred strategy however that doesn't help us with the current challenge we're because barriers aren't effective in our insights that are already occupied and also the scale of relocation at this point is pretty large so I did provide a map that shows a couple of examples one of them is in the northern part of the system on the top map the blue gray areas are irrigated lands irrigated open space land and the hatched area is our sites that are occupied by prairie dogs so you can see there's quite a bit of overlap up there and that these sites happen to be next to large grassland

[67:01] blocks of habitat where the prairie dogs have simply moved into the agricultural sites in the lower map that shows kind of an East County location again lots of irrigated land out in that direction on this particular site is is the Hart Nagel farm that we would like to move into local food production or diversified agriculture but it is occupied and therefore we we can't move forward with those types of developments okay so I just like to talk very briefly in August in September we did go to three of the city's boards the environmental and Parks and Rec advisory boards as well as the open space board of trustees to present these recommendations and some of our initial analysis to them and so some of the themes of their feedback were they certainly expressed real appreciation for the thoughtful recommendations on this very complex topic that the prairie dog working group put together they did

[68:01] have some concerns about impacts and we're interested in learning more about the financial trade-offs of implementation some of the ecological impacts to high integrity glass grasslands and overall ecosystem health especially in the grassland preserves and the impacts to operations including agriculture and the development of Park sites and they did offer they did ask for additional information and suggestions as far as identifying what the relationship of the period of working group recommendations was to other city initiatives and they suggested further analysis to better help them discuss the recommendations so we are implementing some of the phase two recommendations now or will be in the near future first of all as we said all we located prairie dogs in 2018 did receive the sylvatic plague vaccine on both the sending site and then they will receive it on their receiving site for their second dose we increased the number of successful relocations over

[69:00] the last couple of years these were all from conflict areas we've begun the process of evaluating where it makes sense to provide barriers or other exclusion methods on agricultural lands we've gone through clarifying what communication should look like if there's a legal activity observed related to prairie dogs or prairie dog relocation and we do have plans in 2019 for a prairie dog management update meeting which would include the prairie dog working group members as well as other members of the public who may be interested yes could you explain what illegal activity might be yeah I'll let Val it was highlighted during our conversations of the working group that it was confusing generally when there's a birddog violation animal control is called when there's a prairie dog 00 p.m. say or when they're off shift it gets deferred to police officers and so there was a need for making sure there was a clarification in the protocols as to

[70:01] what happens when someone calls about 00 who would be responding so in the recommendation it was just based on a specific incident where someone suspected that there was bulldozing or digging on private property that was killing or so after the feedback from the boards we did present our recommendations to the city manager and she has given us direction to do some further analysis and so the first step in this that we've already completed is to divide the recommendation into four buckets so that we sort of knew how to approach them the first bucket then is those recommendations that are aligned with city goals and policies and are feasible with current resources and so everything that went in that bucket will be part of our 2019 work planning conversations the second bucket then is

[71:00] those things that are aligned with current city goals and policies but are not currently funded and so for items that that are in that bucket it would be included in the 2020 for more short-term items or in future longer term budget requests and then the third bucket is those things that do have either resource trade-offs and or policy or plan changes associated with them but are possible with existing resources and then the fourth would be the recent ones that have resource trade-offs and/or plan and policy changes and are not feasible with current financing or staff resources and so for both of those buckets the next step is to analyze those further provide additional information on those with recommended implementation and action plans and so the timing on the next steps would be that between in March of next year we will be completing our 2019 work planning as well as the preliminary steps in the 2020 budget and that will be addressing those items in buckets one and two and to look at further analysis of buckets

[72:01] three and four we would then take that further analysis in April back to those three boards we previously visited if we feel that we need additional feedback from them or from from members of the public and then in May we would return to City Council with a written report that details the plan and policy trade-offs as well as recommended implementation plans and next steps so staff has identified four factors to be included in the analysis of those bucket three and four recommendations the first is to further analyze funding and staffing requirements the second is to look at the work planning and the phasing of those recommendations the third would be the plan and policy changes and what process needs those might carry with them whether there would be additional public feedback required or what that process would look like and then to further identify the trade-offs with other city priorities including ecological sustainable agriculture and parks development so our question for Council today is are these the right factors for future analysis and are there any that should be

[73:01] emphasized or are there additional considerations you'd like to see included Thank You Heather I'm gonna leave this question up so y'all can have it for reference but I just want you to see the really cute picture because Vicky pictures are darling okay so council we have some time left here for your questions of the working group being mindful at the end of the day staff would very much appreciate your clear direction on this question is this the right stuff for them to be looking at or are there additional considerations I just wanted to go back because zan and Lisa both had questions related to the AG component and did you want to take a stab at those generally about how we're addressing conflicts a compass with and trade-offs on AG lands and the Lisa's questions about that special method that I actually hadn't heard was it called key lining key lining do you have any thoughts about either one of those sir sure I'll talk about the key line plowing and some other things were working on so we had several hundred

[74:00] acres that we currently don't lease agriculturally and we had our network plan this year to try various methods of seating irrigation cover cropping to try to reclaim these and we were also working with Brett Brett can Karen and some folks from the county and a Carbon Farming project where keyline plowing was part of the protocol and we were cooperating on one of our properties and the key line with compost amendment was very effective in allowing us to establish some vegetation on those sites the site we selected there did have a low level of occupation to prairie dogs and that was the main reason it was selected because we could implement those treatments without having prairie dogs potentially caused a complication so that has been effective and we are looking at ways where we can scale that up a bit on some other city

[75:00] properties to try to reclaim some of the agricultural sites so that's something we're working on in that measure and then other than what we said during their presentation did you want to address conflicts or trade offs on a glance or do you think we covered it could I ask just he lined it so when you talked about restoring or reclaiming the land was this land that had been I don't want to use the word decimated but had been denuded by the prairie dogs then if that really was a combination of both we had poor agricultural management over grazing in combination with prairie dogs so the two working together caused some degradation on the site that we tried the key lining and that was on that particular site thank you Zann did you hear enough and the earlier presentation about the AG lands to answer your question are jus here Marc Mandy I thought that was helpful I think the

[76:02] question is okay so we have conflicts they're real we said I think the recommendation was to chip away at ten a year and I guess I feel like that means we're gonna have a growing backlog of conflicts I guess so I'm just trying to figure out how we intend to kind of catch up on that and whether that's awaiting the Phase two analysis or whether that's ongoing now to try to catch up on some of these so I guess that's my question well I would say it is ongoing now this year we will have relocated close to 400 prairie dogs off of agricultural lands into the southern grasslands so it's a little bit at a time and that that's a complicated situation and it's probably a situation where one approach is not going to get us there so it's probably going to have to be a combination of things like Andy's talking about how can we reclaim sites in the presence of prairie dogs in

[77:02] a way that they can still fulfill some of their their agricultural productivity goals in the event that that populations are reduced we need to be ready to move into those sites to exclude the prairie dogs in the future and to restore them I think that's one of our best opportunities to make large-scale impacts on that backlog and then we need to be chipping away as we have the opportunity to do relocations or look at portions of properties where we can exclude the prairie dogs through non-lethal means and either through barriers or other techniques try to keep them out so that we can restore agriculture to the property unfortunately with the backlog that we have now if populations remain as high as they are which they often don't it tends to be cyclical cyclical but if they remain as high as they are relocation is unlikely to be a realistic scenario to address all of them in any short period of time okay well we're just asking questions I just feel like I mean we have a we have a real conflict between two values that we have and I guess I want us to be real

[78:01] clear about addressing that head-on and I feel like we're losing maybe the battle unsustainable egg here so I guess I just want to understand how we're going to try to get back so Sam wants to help you with his question so it's about sustainable Ackland and how much there is so I read in the packet that there's about nine hundred and sixty acres that have prairie dog impacts on AG land how much total AG land is there in the system so we at least 15,000 acres of land to local producers 15 one five one five thousand three most of that is native grasslands which we have not included in the Coe occupation numbers the numbers that I'm talking where the conflict is on the irrigated agriculture so in fact I would guess well I don't want to state a number but a large amount of our prairie dogs do Co occupy

[79:01] with leased grazing land we have about 7,000 acres that's irrigated most of that is used for growing hay and forage crops for for cattle grazed on the range lanes so I'm just trying to scope the problem this sounds like about 15 percent of that irrigated AG land is impacted by this yeah so then it seems like if there's a timeline in the plan that might be five years long or you know I'm not sure exactly how urgent this is but a combination of removal from the sites that are amenable to removal plus this key lining which sounds like a really interesting way to maybe coexist depending on what the crop is it seems like I would be interested in the staff taking a look at how you could paste that you got 960 acres to address maybe 300 or some number is unaggressive all right it's just not worth doing but of the remaining six

[80:01] then what what kind of timeline and plan would get those 600 acres remediated and back into the system so that we only have say five percent of the overall system that remains in a degraded condition from an agricultural standpoint so it sounds like a manageable problem to me to at least scope that and have it be something that we talk about and look at okay and I'll come back to SAP at the end and see if they can deliver all the additional things that you have for them two more questions and one is related also to this conflict appeal which is it also said in the packet that there were four and a half miles of barrier fence that had been erected I don't know that's probably around the combination of our fields and private fields or something but anyway there's four and a half miles is now degraded and it would take $650,000 or so to replace all of that so another question I have going forward is is there maintenance protocol you know is there a way you put it fenced in and you can keep it up with

[81:01] certain tending or is it something that like some kinds of fencing construction fencing you just put it up it gets wind pattern and then you replace it how does that work so it depends on the type of barrier most of that fencing was put up prior to 2000 and by the time I started in 2004 most of it was no longer effective because it had not been properly maintained it was almost exclusively vinyl fencing which is pretty susceptible to degradation due to you know solar radiation as well as wind and that type of thing so it does take a lot of ongoing maintenance patching holes and that kind of thing it can be done if you stay on top of it but it does take a lot of maintenance since then people have started using other materials that are a lot more resilient so metal barriers like you see out at the reservoir the Fire Training Center are one of the most popular and effective that don't require nearly as much maintenance however they're a whole lot more expensive upon initial installation so there are ways to keep

[82:00] up with the maintenance but you certainly have the trade-off of either a high initial cost or the cost of ongoing maintenance which was the successful one the metal barriers so I mean I guess my my for the future is it would be great to have that be part of the trade-off so we take a look at and again phasing so it's not all six hundred fifty thousand or two million dollars in one year it's like how can we phase in and you'd want that coordinated I think with land remediation right so if you're removing prairie dogs or doing some kind of barrier fencing you want to do those together at the same time so that when you make the land better you protect it at the same time so those two things were my thoughts with Ag land the one other question I have is this dedicated fund concept seemed fairly nebulous to me from what I had seen so far dedicated funds in city

[83:00] talk are usually taxes of some kind that are dedicated by the voters to go into a particular fund and then there's budget line items right which are different because they're not statutorily dedicated they can change from year to year so I'd like to learn a lot more about the not tonight but about the fund structure the management the inputs you know what the expectations are what other governments participate you know it just seem like it's a nice concept but the details on that will matter quite a bit wait can I call the Queen on it you guys thinking like the Library Foundation fund that it's a private fund not a dedicated tax formed I had a very different impression so can you clarify that I've I don't think as a group we had tried to nail it down that precisely because we don't feel like we're in the position to know what are all of the constraints on creating a fund like that

[84:00] what we're getting at is that I think we would all agree that there was a structure in place that can allow us to take advantage of opportunities to bring in resources do it in and from multiple multiple sources and create more clarity about how our resources are coming in to cover the costs of Management and the reason I bring it up is it's one thing if it sits in the city you know and that's one kind of ask from saying the working group to the city it's another thing if it sits outside the city and you're asking the city to contribute to it that's you know another thing and so who would be the convener who would manage it so if it's going to be focused around the southern grasslands and there's multiple actors involved would that go and so I think a little more clarity from the working group in fact not just staff would be really helpful and the fun bit I have that mirror buddy has a question and then Cindy and then I want to give Jill and

[85:00] Bob a chance to weigh in if you wanted to and then we got to finish up our time here near by hit it okay so I'm gonna go for what I think I'd like to see but I will also just comment here that we're talking about nine hundred fifty nine anchors of colony that need to be relocated there's twenty four thousand acres right now if grasslands per our packet and if you look at what's actually has prairie dogs on it we're looking at 13 percent 13 percent that's nothing so we're talking about 959 a KERS and so one of the big things I'd like to start saying is a loosening of we're making more flexible the receiving sites because I think this could be handled extremely easily if we would be more flexible with receiving sites and that we could then become good neighbors and that we wouldn't have the AG community up in arms and writing letters for four years and not having a response to the issues that they're facing and so I do think it's incredibly important to be good neighbors with that community because they have a valuable side on

[86:01] this and so I'm extremely in favor of finding ways that we can start loosening this receiving site the second thing that I would like to see implemented right away is having Delta dust be placed on the receiving sites this is something that Lindsey Stirling Krank sent to all of us and as you can see there's a very very little problems with this dust its you know said to be a pesticide but if you go look at the studies a spider and a moth died so this dust is 4 ounces getting put 6 to 8 inches into a burrow and it's not like you're having pollinators down there and it's also been said that the roots of the plants don't suck this up so it's not going to affect the pollinators so if we want prairie dog was plague resistant prairie dogs I think implementing this Delta dust is imperative the other two points that I would like to see is the creation of the

[87:01] Conservation Fund I think it's going to be incredibly important moving forward and the last thing I want to make sure that we continue to have someone from the prairie dog working group working with staff as we move forward to implement these goals and having that their input from the people who were specifically working on the sides of the prairie dogs now grabbed and we if they want to include someone from the AG side as well but I think someone like Lindsay or cars or Deb who have relocation experience and understanding surrounding this I'd like to see them continue on thanks Mara bye so did you have a question I do concerned about Sam's talking about speeding up and mayor bys getting it off of Ag land and putting it in the southern grasslands but my understanding is that it's one of the last largest intact special areas and so before we

[88:03] start moving animals from AG land into one of our last remaining special conservation areas I would hope that we really do some stopping and assessing first because it says right up there that there are going to be trade-offs ecological other species and communities and I'm assuming that's not one moth and one spider but a whole host of other creatures as you mentioned earlier in the presentation so my concern in terms of trade-offs I recognize that this is a keystone species and how important it is but those others are also important particularly as the pressures of population are impinging on them so that's what I would ask briefly I would forget to ask the same thing because I know that we have integrated pest management expertise on staff and so it would seem to me like

[89:00] it's really important that that happen I agree but also just in numbers Sammis what I'm talking about that we just don't wholesale just start moving things from one place critters from one place to another without assessing what the impacts may be okay Jill would you mean thoughts or questions colleagues covered it yeah want to get right to the question okay no I don't have anything to add that's what you think I want to thank the work you do for all the hard work that they've done and the staff as well as always for all the hard work we always do I think that's great I don't know anything dad and I just wanna weigh in and say I also agree with each one of Mira pies points I think Mary also had those same four points in addition to that though I would assume that at some

[90:02] point in time I do want us the application of Delta dust to the receiving sites because I I am very concerned that we are not doing non-lethal control and that's what we're doing that's why we're here is to try to do non-lethal control and find acceptable environmental situations for these animals but my assumption would be with using that Delta dust and I was very much involved in no neonicotinoids and no pesticides and things like that but it does seem to me that if we can apply this Delta dust at the receiving sites for a period of a year or two and I'm not a biologist I'll be the first one to admit that we the hope would be that you'd get healthy colonies now thriving and then you could suspend or

[91:01] pretty much eliminate the application of the Delta dust so I'd like to see a temporary method at which we could the Delta dust and and work with the establishing healthy prairie dog colonies I'd also point out that and I've already said it but that we have the federal government and we have other counties not just Boulder County but we have Jefferson County Westminster has their open space and superior so we have all these different agencies and that we should work with all of them to come up with a more comprehensive plan because I know like I said with the Rocky Flats they're they're moving forward and then I'll just bring up I am concerned about the open space taxes expiring and I

[92:01] would like to bring up a conversation of discussing having a dedicated tax in 2019 for open space for the express purpose of management and some acquisition I don't think we're done acquiring I know there's very important 160 acres out in that 88,000 acres that we should be picking up but so that's something I will bring up later probably at the retreat because I think not having a dedicated open space tax is not a good way to go okay looking forward to that conversation at the retreats I have ever so short questions or comments from Cindy a nearby and then zan and then we got to get out of your hair how their response and heads-up that I'm gonna come back to you at the end to reiterate what you think you heard from council in terms of adding to your analysis Cindy quickly continues to lead this it seems that she has some long history with the

[93:00] prairie dogs all of the pros and cons surrounding them and with regarding the Delta dust I don't know that much about it but I would leave it up to the biologists rather than the council to be giving direction on the safety of that kind of thing and would hope that we would have more answers from okay everybody so an Aldus task that the four items that Lisa Mary and I have quested be fast-tracked and not wait until May of 2019 and I'll also say that I don't think staff should be wasting their time on the study of Delta dust when Dan trip has already done a very very thorough study and I would suggest I'm assuming you're working with him but I would suggest working with the studies that already exist instead of taking our time and our money to continue doing more okay thank you all of you in addition to okay it's already been said the thing I would add on top of all of this is and developers should have to pay a lot to relocate on our public

[94:01] lands I think that's an important part well anybody from yes the developers in particular I think she should have to to be a part of that solution and help us deal with the thumb the cost I don't think our lessees should have to but I think developers should in addition to fast tracking those specific items that you've heard from Council what did you hear that they would like you to add to your analysis that you're gonna be back to them let's see I heard at looking at how we could address the 960 acres of overlap with with irrigated agriculture what that timeline and plan would look like looking at the trade-offs of installation and maintenance of prairie dog barriers what it would take how long it would take and how that would be phased looking at how the fund would be structured whether it be a dedicated fund or what exactly the best way to move forward with something

[95:01] like that is to make sure that our IPM specialists are involved in evaluating the use of Delta dust and its potential impacts on other species I think those were the main additions I also heard the four things that that mirror by a list of the looking at at how many receiving sites we have Delta dust on receiving sites creation of the Conservation Fund and prairie dog working group members continuing to be involved I heard making sure that we're looking at the trade-offs with moving prairie dogs to the southern grass and the trade-offs with other species and communities working with other jurisdictions and surrounding landowners to coordinate our prairie dog management so we can look at a larger landscape scale and then looking at developers and when they relocate to city lands what that pay structure looks like excellent those the items that I had as

[96:01] well Council a couple things it is always my privilege to facilitate working groups at your request thank you very much for letting me do that this is a fantastic group of people and they worked their buns off for you on this topic and pushed each other to find an agreement and really did a great job staff was an excellent partner in their conversation so I hope that you appreciate their work and I know that I speak for all of them when we appreciate the opportunity to present to you thank you very much mayor Jones I hand you back your meeting darling we appreciate your work yes

[97:35] [Laughter] [Music]

[98:05] [Music] [Music]

[101:08] Cindy Mira bye Lisa hey one thing I wanted to mention and maybe I was remiss about the other panel was L Cushman who's sitting behind was on the prairie dog working group but she was in one a grep and she had issues with five things in our it that were in the consensus recommendations I what I wanted to say is she's available to give tours of some of the conflict areas just so folks could have a better sense and I did that with her and it was very eye-opening and she's anyhow so over the next few months she's very shy so I am letting you know that that is an offer Sam what's her name again it's L he ll she was on the working group and just to

[102:03] see yeah it's an easy way to write around if she doesn't get a sense of yeah yep but I also warn council that she also disagreed with everything that the prairie dog working group was working on so just five of the things it's in our packet just five of those things she had issues with I mean yeah it's II just it's just useful I'm not saying that's the answer and people can disagree yeah yeah but she was one of the minority opinion so I just want to make sure we were aware of that okay now we're gonna turn to the use the other side of our brain talk about something completely different and I'm gonna turn it to Jane to start this off yeah I'm just gonna kick it off really quickly and I want to start off by giving huge thanks and kudos to this working group we have four members with us today it was a little bit larger group than that but I want you to know that they worked tirelessly since January many many meetings really goes

[103:03] into the intricacies of both our city charter and our city code and constitutional election law and I thank them for the great work that they did so when this started we had a charter that the City Council approved for the working group to look into and the Charter was focused on promoting the integrity of Elections in Boulder and the the mission that was given to the group with regard to campaign finance which is what we're talking about tonight was to figure out a way to maximize the restrictions if you will on campaign finance under existing law and then also to take a look at ways in which the Constitution can be followed and yet maybe pushed in ways that that perhaps have not had a judicial decisions yet and they really did that and you could see their work in the report that they provided with you so quickly the the agenda that we're gonna go through tonight is that we're going

[104:00] to start off with the presentation from the working group itself they'll be talking about the items that they are recommending that council look into and move forward on and then they'll be turning it over to Lynette Beck who is our beloved city clerk who's going to talk about election code enforcement so just before I turn it over a thing that I want to say about how great this group was is that a lot of times when we have working groups for the city we try to beat people I try to pick people that are sometimes not that knowledgeable I like to get people that are coming with new eyes to the issue that's not what we wanted here and we wanted people in this working group who had been through the ringer so to speak of Elections we had former council members on we had folks that were candidates in elections we had a representative from the League of Women Voters we had representatives who had worked with candidates and so we had people that

[105:01] were very very knowledgeable already because this is a very complicated area and what I wanted and the council wanted folks that could really dive in and they did that so among the things that they worked on were let's see they started out by developing a list of issues and they already had some ideas about what the issues were that they had experienced in the last election campaign but in other election campaigns as well and then they focused on what the options were to address the issues and from what I would I did not go to the meetings except for the first meeting but I did speak with David and Kathy and Jeff and others to learn what what they were talking about and I think they can help a lot of really out-of-the-box options as well as some options that are inside the box and you've got a mixture of them tonight so they're here to talk about it and I think that Matt Benjamin is the person that is going to take over so the way that will do it is that me I'll go

[106:00] through the recommendations and then our outside counsel Jeff Wilson will comment if he needs to about those particular items so Matt thank you for doing this and there you go thank you guys for having us Matt Benjamin thanks Jane for the introduction and I'm presenting on behalf of the working group and let's just say it was a wonderful process I think I can speak for all of us it was a lot of fun to get together and start to riff on some of the ideas but more importantly sort of meet your charge as to how to tackle some of the challenges ahead of us and some were straightforward and others there is a litany of potential ideas out there and so you'll sort of see that in some of the recommendations we have of we they're narrowing it down or said there's just too many to choose from we kind of leave it to you as go forth and find the one that you think works best given the parameters that you see fit first off the thing we tackled was looking at Express

[107:01] advocacy and expanding the definition what was really important here is slide yes thank you appreciate that that's why they're here to keep me in line so Express advocacy one of the things that we looked at is some of them were are we gonna look at other communities and really sort of see what are they doing and are they doing anything innovative that we want to emulate the other was were there specific problems that have occurred either in the last election or in past elections that have really triggered a specific thing to tackle that was certainly the case with some our campaign of campaign finance months stuff like dark money but in this case there was a specific issue of an advertisement I think in 2017 we're open boulder put out an ad with checkboxes and it was a it sort of brought up an issue as to what where does that fall how was that defined and that was an issue where when we looked at and we realized that the term Express advocacy wasn't really fully defined for us here and it needed a more clear definition and what we found is not just a clear definition but there's legal precedent

[108:00] that helps us define it and not just using these trigger words but specifically like vote for elect support cast ballot for etc but sort of a catch-all that came set forth with the Buckley Vallejo decision which was the functional equivalent and that was sort of the key here that we wanted to touch on those how do we add that so that something like checkboxes which everyone and their mother knew was a pretty ringing endorsement for candidates could be caught up and then be defined as Express advocacy and this trigger the disclosure requirements accordingly so that was one of the first things we came out because it was poignant it was fresh in our minds and it certainly demanded that we help define that so should there be issues down the road that it can be tackled cleanly we did yes legally this this reflects the evolution of a campaign finance disclosure in a lot of jurisdictions everybody focused on Express advocacy at the beginning including the US Supreme Court because

[109:01] that's what the language was of the federal law they were construing but that wasn't a constitutional parameter and so the case law has evolved and now not just the magic words can be regulated in terms of disclosure but functional equivalent in that will this will this evolution will be reflected in the next topic as well okay we're gonna pause let's see if we can address this does anybody have any questions I just have a process question and this is probably as much for the cleric as anything so I agree with the broad and I think that's great if if a group wants to do something that are not too sure if it crosses the line of the Buckley line is there a potential or an opportunity for kind of an advisory opinion from the SI attorney's office a clerk's office say this is on one side of the line or the other usually they ask Diane and she tells them okay great then certainly if we need help interpreting case law or

[110:01] whatever then we would ask the City Attorney's Office it certainly seems like if Diane will be the point person for this that once we get the ordinance is done and so on that we need to just make sure that staff is like all on the same page so that the answers whether it comes from the clerk or somebody else are all like lined up and I think at the end of this process we're gonna look at the work plan and one of them is a bit of a guidebook so that it examples like this is this isn't kind of thing so I think that's it so are people in agreement with this one this one just feels very straightforward to me okay done check alright next slide so as Jeff mentioned Express advocacy clearly then I think necessarily goes to what we're gonna talk about next of electioneering communication bless you because we now have narrowly defined

[111:00] Express advocacy it now leaves a void for all other forms of advocating for a candidate or or something in that regard it's the left overs that aren't defined and so what electioneering communication does is it tries to then catch all the other forms of communication that would happen in a campaign so that we do have way of triggering disclosure should any individuals or group participate in what is defined as electioneering communication but it is the leftovers or what is sort of not captured and Express advocacy and so I think what's interesting here is we do have some local municipalities our sister cities I think Longmont in Denver have existing rules on electioneering communication as do a lot of communities around the country so this is a well-defined thing that is out there and we were able to sort of pull from that a really good set of how do we justified and what is sort of the right definition for it and therefore how do we trigger disclosure at certain levels of electioneering communication so it's really the

[112:01] spillover of what express that but because he doesn't catch and it allows us to make sure that we have a clean complete net for all forms of communication during a campaign season can you explain your why you picked 1,000 oh why did we pick 1,000 I think well Jeff may may correct me here but I think it came down to finding what is a defendable amount of money that one could find for disclosure as I think it's mentioned there is no formula to determine what size city or how a city comes up at that number and as such we kind of had to find what's the low and the high end and find some middle ground that we thought was legally defensible and somewhat conservative so we sort of pegged it but I'll let Jeff perhaps give a more detailed description as to where and how we finalized that that specific number we lifted it from state law okay do you want to say anything more about

[113:00] yeah as I said a moment ago this is the ultimate evolution of the case law away from the Express advocacy notion here we have a disclosure requirements applied to communication that involves no Express advocacy at all merely mentions a candidate within a certain proximity to the election the one thing I want to mention here is that the group also recommended requiring disclosure of electioneering communications in issue elections that's uncharted territory legally electioneering has been well under it was legalized by the US Supreme Court in 2003 in the McConnell case but I'm not familiar with it being applied in the context of issue elections and the applicable court a test for this is that there has to be a substantial relation between the regulation and an important governmental interest like deterring quid pro quo corruption well you don't have that with an issue election right so any kind of this is reflected in a

[114:02] bunch of core decisions that have really cut the pins out from under the states with disclosure regulations relating the issue committee so just want to highlight that potential exposure on that end of things wait we're gonna push you on that so you're saying this is on legal thin ice to apply to ballot measures or just uncharted territory or we I'm not trying these are issues my comments are issue spotting they're not the final word on any of this stuff but this is something I think would mayor of some further investigation before it admin people I do you committees why should Sam Cindy so mines around $1,000 as well does Denver have a limit a trigger point and as long might have a trigger point in other words they have laws like this on the books for candidate elections right I don't know I'm sure they all have trigger amounts

[115:01] though that I can tell you so I think that would be one thing I'd like to hear an answer to is what are the pier cities because I know Denver just went through within the last couple of years a big rewrite of their campaign laws and so I'd love to see if we land somewhere near where they land on the trigger then we're gonna be walking hand in hand if we do amicus briefs or anything like that and I agree just a brief comment about separating the conversation around candidate elections let's get that done because it's clear that that's legal and let's do a little more investigation as far as legality or what the potential legal risks are around issue elections Cindy I would like I'm wondering if someone can give me some more concrete samples of the electioneering just say one or two well the the notorious checklist that came up in over and over and over again in our working group apparently I didn't I've never seen it but I guess it didn't it didn't use any

[116:00] of the magic words right and it didn't it didn't have other language and it would that was the functional equivalent of Express advocacy but it had pictures with a check next but I thought that was the functional equivalent because it had you can go but you could say maybe it is the functional equivalent if it isn't it constitutes electioneering and it's disclosable under that basis so what we well so this is belts and suspenders well no the proposal here is to remove a loophole that was used to avoid disclosure altogether okay so there was two ways to sort of view this if we didn't had the functional equivalent and we took things as were as was in the 2017 and how it was applied it was apply it was basically considered electioneering communication but what since we had new rules defining what it was or any way to trigger disclosure that sort of communication could just happen without any idea of how who when where why or how much was spent so to Jeff's point it

[117:00] was a way to catch it so we added functional Clinton to further refine express advocacy and then still to sort of clean up the backend if you write if you if you did an ad that said man Bob's a swell guy and in a letter or in an ad and you didn't use the words and you were using the functional equivalent but you're still pretty much nudging in that you needed that this is where a lecture in communication is meant to encapsulate that sort of soft advocacy I think is the term that we've used that wasn't expressed but it sort of innuendo and hidden there it's also the robocalls and some other things that we that happen during election season and talk about the election but don't necessarily say one way or another that that we're trying to capture those two that and that's helpful and I just also like to point out that on that second bullet down there's some subject-verb number agreement there that needs cleaned up yeah

[118:01] just with the grammarians in the crash no wait wait you have to grab them like thank you wear this well I just because I I spent a lot of time on this particular stuff where it started was our code before now what we started with does not even define express advocacy it only has a line there's one line in some part of the code that says expressly advocate and so that number one job was to define express advocacy put a comprehensive definition and so you know what was in and what was out that was the first job that was the previous thing electioneering communications are if you were to take open boulders stuff the box the picture with the checkbox that would have been expressed advocacy under the new rules but all the other stuff that wasn't didn't look that clear

[119:00] was would fit into this an electioneering communications is simply if what is it if you mention the name of the person during the two months is that right I think it was from when they can first be certified to to be a candidate if you mentioned the name of that person and an ad or whatever that's like education okay so roughly that's the rough thing thank you yeah so we have four candidates that seems pretty clear yes everybody for ballot measures then we're still interested in going there but that one requires a little bit more investigation and we want to know where Denver and Longman are on thresholds for the candidate and then in addition for us to look at the issue ones and probably use the same threshold right if we come up with some threshold we add issues to candidates

[120:00] and I think we want to use the same threshold okay and we recognize that that one's a little bit more trading new ground and as we proceed we want to if we come up with something if we find out new information that might alter our thinking on that we might change your mind yes it's just worth noting that this is the thousand dollars is on the expense side of it but also to make sure that in that sort of very soft communication that you don't want to set the bar too low where every single thing that's mentioned at any level of Facebook or Instagram and something that's pushed for $5 because then that just creates obviously you know you get the domino effect and it's a slippery slope so just keeping in mind as you consider that where's an appreciable threshold to catch the really big stuff that's important versus letting the other stuff that's unimportant fall through the cracks just to not have such a nightmare and my understanding is there's a legal concept around that as well which it's not this personal communication right it's not just a group that's communicating with themselves but that it be at some level that really is

[121:02] clearly you gotta use a mic otherwise they can't hear you in TV land yeah all right well so good enough for now yes direction wise okay keep going hardest identifying the natural persons who are making communication for contributions and expenditures because we're a corporation stand in the equivalence of people and speech and natural persons this is really kind of a way for us to sort of say where do we

[122:00] validate the trusted faith and elections by people knowing where and who and what the money is doing in regards to influencing our lecture sorry I did not have that on so you said that TV land and I botched it okay sorry so yes thanks yeah I look over my shoulder identifying the natural persons who are making contributions and expenditures again this was sort of a derivative I think all of us on the group we're understanding sort of the Citizens United this sort of corporation identity around what they can do with regards to contributions to elections and in ours looking at how do we make sure that people have a better understanding of where the money comes from as it pertains to how it influences our elections and so we wanted to look at how can we sort of get down and sort as the word the term is pierce the corporate veil so to speak and get to who are making these contributions not what entity so that people have an idea of judging for themselves what the

[123:01] intent of that contribution or expense is and so that was really the thrust of this and as you can see from our recommendations this really sort of builds off that sort of Express advocacy or electioneering communication and it identifies an actual person with a very with every contribution provides maximum transparency and the working group as I said earlier some of these things we did not have a specific settlement as to a specific recommendation but there are a multitude of ways in which you can pierce the corporate veil and find ways to get to that natural person some examples are using sort of the aggregate of a personal contribution and if they have a over fifty percent stake in a company that then contributes that accounts against their 50 percent of their individual I mean we can get nasty and you can go down the rabbit hole as far as you choose we didn't want to define where that rabbit hole started or ended but nonetheless there are a multitude of options for you to choose as to how you

[124:01] to get to that natural person should you choose it as necessary to do so yeah what are the perils of this one and I want to take a minute here to to again point to the test that these disclosure requirements have to satisfy they have there has to be a substantial relation between the disclosure regulation and the accomplishment of a important governmental interest and the court has said the courts have said those three interests are avoiding four quid pro quo corruption or its appearance getting information to enforce campaign finance rules or providing general information to the public wait that lesson it is it's very general that's the only rationale for requiring disclosure in issue elections for example the first two don't lie in this cone in the context of this one and another I'll mention in a moment yeah they have to be considered in the context of the city's $100 contribution

[125:00] limit and in the context of such a low contribution limit for any donor the court might not find additional disclosure from people that are only donating $100 substantially serving an important governmental interest in that context so that's something I want to highlight so okay it's just to the other side of me which is what we did discuss the current under the current system anybody's owns multiple LLC's and donate multiple hundred-dollar contributions they know it the candidate can be told and nobody else knows it that one of the points of this disclosure requirement was to go but that was to reveal that for two reasons one so people know who it is so it isn't you know ABC LLC but it's actual real person then the other was because there are people that own

[126:02] multiple LLC's and they can make fairly significant contributions under the current system and nobody's the wiser this would not allow that this is because of the person every bution down to some level would be attributed to a real human being so they asked us to push the envelope by the way and this is one okay actually I did this is another one where the proposal is to also extend it to issue elections and so you they may be more defensible actually these sorts of requirements because an issue elections you don't have a hundred dollar contribution limit you have no contribution limit however the courts have said as I indicated earlier that there's a very limited public interest in any kind of disclosure relating to ballot issue elections the courts have struck down reporting regimes where small amounts of money were involved at the state level at least in the what is small well the court said thirty five hundred dollars was too small to justify

[127:01] any kind of disclosure any kind of filing requirement in a local election with no local election these things are scalable so the numbers may be lower but it just the court the reason I mention it is cuz the courts haven't said what the number is yet so we don't know okay we have a bunch of questions Bob Sam I have a question Jeff I'm pretty sure I know the answer this question I'm gonna go ahead and ask it anyway focusing just on the candidate elections I assume that that would not be permissible for us to limit contributions only from natural persons no I don't think you could limit contributions just from natural persons at Calgary I thought I read that Denver has done so I thought for Denver's candidate elections that only natural persons can be contributors it's for their campaign finance matching further matching well that's another hook we have right because it's voluntary is that right David it's voluntary and they

[128:00] do a pretty big match and their new thing it's like ten to one nine to one ten to one so that's a very strong incentive right so if you're gonna take LLC money your private corporation money and all of a sudden you don't get the ten to one match that they're talking about doing so that might be another way for us to look at this is to do it as disqualifying from our matching if they take money from non non yeah but that was your question well but then if you say okay I'm not gonna play that game then what's a no disclosure I mean that would be the you you'd still want even if you're not gonna do campaign finance to try to capture the disclosure piece as well and even if we did do that yeah yeah I mean I would imagine so say that you with the I don't need your money Denver route and or Boulder whatever it was and you took money from corporate donors at that

[129:00] point they could still be limited to the amount and you would still have to disclose who they were right so it would still be you know the same deal you'd know who that LLC's were but you might not get behind the corporate veil in that case I have a question about the ballot measures side of things so I'm not sure if this is well formed but you know you donate to a lot of groups do I think let's say you donate to Sierra Club you know you denote it you're donating to the political side of things but you know you're just donating to them then when they make a contribution they have to go back and specify everybody that's given them contributions throughout the year because a portion of that might be spent on a ballot measure is that how this would play out no no I mean under what's being proposed I'm just curious as a nonprofit involved in elections if they have to keep track of any at every

[130:02] donation that might end up funding a ballot measure they have to keep track of what portion that of a dollar might have come from somebody you get my question yeah and we did try to parse that out and I'm not sure I mean you guys tell me whether we landed on something but you know if it is a general contribution part of membership dues now you don't have to disclose but if you do a fundraising campaign for a certain election then those would have to be disclosed so that's generally the bright line that we talked about I'm not sure we've got that super defined well that's something we'd be working on if you direct us to go ahead okay so everybody clear with what we're talking about there was my memory of this conversation and I couldn't miss something but my memory of it was that the way we intended this to work is that if you're going to if a group is going to do advertising in a campaign then those come the money then the money that they spend has to be contributed for

[131:02] that campaign and it's reported just like anything else so in other words there isn't any what you're talking about general contributions that then get spent in campaigns well I got a plenty of I thought that was what are what you tell Alan you were you were paying more attention but do you know if you do if you contribute to the political arm of many nonprofits you don't always specify but only for this ballot measure you're like hey I believe in your conservation actions I go knock them dead and so anyhow I just don't want to make it unduly complicate for nonprofits who are working on multiple issues in an election yeah that's just something to think about is how to make it so it's not onerous at least that's one of my concerns one of the things we certainly touched on was something there is a sometimes an expectation of anonymity if you give to a contribution that you're not expected to then this be too close

[132:00] disclosed if they then act politically we use the Real Estate Association as an example if you you give to them and then they support something like do you have an expectation of privacy to some extent and so I think there's some balancing to be done there but it is worth noting that as we discussed the LLC's is a potential problem we have not seen it as systemic in our current election so it's worth noting that this isn't a problem that's well defined that we see happening it's certainly more of a preventative issue of what could be seen as an issue that crops up down the road so it is worth sort of separating that out that we don't have any clear evidence that it is something that's systemic ly causing our elections to be swayed in a dramatic way based looking back at past expenditure reports so I guess I would say that I agree with that Matt I don't think it's really played an election there LLC contributions you can see them on many reporting forms so it does happen I would be kind of interested in the

[133:01] possibility of tying having to take contributions from real persons to our incentive program for our matching program so that would be something that I think would be clearly legal right so it wouldn't have any issues around that and it's just around council elections right that would just be around council elections because I don't think we would get away with that on an issue election so I be curious what other council members think of the idea of our matching funds being tied to only taking contributions from real persons and then yeah Jen so I was just gonna say I think I think it would be a good way of trying to make it more transparent and it doesn't happen very often right just in terms of the scale but this wouldn't I'm just trying to think just Teresa the scale of the issue I mean I think it depends on the candidates and their supporters right but I I have seen

[134:02] expenditure or donation that disagreeing might be ten people ten of the donations are LLC's out of maybe a hundred or more so I think it's okay okay so I'm game is everybody game on what Sam was saying if you don't mind so if you think about if you add that sort of requirement to the campaign finance stuff keeping in mind that the corporate side or business side is still limited to a hundred dollars and so where Denver does it is because they're contra contribution limits are higher it's trying to allow an individual to be closer to the capacity of a corporation to donate at that higher level so it's trying to bring equity by having that match at that nine to one if everyone here is already at $100 and then you elevate and added under more weight to an individual comfort comp ugh contribution over corporate then you may

[135:01] be swayed the balance the other way rather than trying to bring equity up like Denver's doing to make individuals closer to that of a corporate ability to contribute at the higher end of those numbers so that's the subtlety of we're already so low it's not undue burden on an individual to contribute at the same level as a corporation although you could do something like a percentage no more than X amount still get it that no wait no more than well I don't have the person 10% of what so I just finished in percent of your contributions can be from an LLC right no more than X amount person why why would we even go there I thought we always read that right now that we would have it associated with the natural person not an LLC and the problem as said the boss said with an LLC you don't know who it is and so I just think if you're gonna take matching funds you can be clean and you

[136:02] can take matching suits with real people well cuz if the LLC can only give 100 to its somebody's given the money might as well just give it right the bank check from your personal the problem with C's it could be and this math is kind of a counter-argument to what you were saying the same person could own all 10 LLC's each and now you're allowing the corporation to multiply the influence of one person behind it so I think what we're trying to prevent is the fact that we can't know when their LLC's if it's one person or if it's ten people behind ten LLC and and we've seen that so I just want to say it so I really studied up on the Denver measure whose ballot measure - we it won't go on in effect until 2021 because it's a significant they have to fund it it's it's a it's a nine to one match what they really the key element there is that if you

[137:00] participate which you would be a fool to be a candidate and not participate with a nine to one match so they did two things they limited the donation to natural persons if you participate and again it's a voluntary participation so that you're not required a ninety one match and a fifty dollar limit and natural persons only so I go out Matt gives me 50 bucks from my campaign that results in a total of five hundred dollars my campaign the way I can spend that what I can do with that money so in the advertising or whatever they don't limit expenditures they limit the income side the expenditure limits I think is harder to control than the donation side so Denver just maxed it out and said we're going to a nine to one natural persons only fifty dollar limit per natural person period done

[138:00] that's it and it's a really simple but super progressive way of doing it it's really interesting the way we have managed the expenditure limit which goes up with inflation every year is that you can't get your match if you don't agree to keep it within the expenditure limit so again it's that voluntariness of the program that gives you more flexibility right and I think we want to make sure that we are controlling the expenditures so I kind of like how we have it in Boulder where you what you get up to a certain amount is what you can spend it also kind of keeps a cap on things getting right okay so folks are interested in pursuing the voluntary if you if you want matching only natural persons less clear where we're at with the disclosure do we want to go there so currently that change wouldn't affect

[139:00] disclosure so you're talking about do we want to try and pierce the corporate veil yep I think for candidates if we make it natural persons it's a good question and then it just goes to issue elections and I think with issue elections it might be dicey er to do because of citizens united I'd be willing to willing to try it I mean push it actually the exposure in the issue elections isn't citizen united it's a couple of federal court cases the involving Colorado's law and Colorado have the core the federal courts have not given us the kind of a direction that we would like to have so I didn't this caution I keep bringing up cuts through anything we do with issue disclosure just because the the courts at the state level pull the pins out from every effort the state is made to try and secure disclosure so now the state has a regime where if you spend under two thousand dollars or some

[140:01] number like you have to disclose your name and your bank account that's yet then when you reach a trigger amount of $5,000 then you have to disclose retro actively all your contributions but up until then no did no additional disclosure required thought on that I read carefully the case that was used to justify getting rid of boulders remember about contractors in issue elections to get rid of that and that I have to say reading that case I would this is me I'd push the envelope on this one because the justification that was put forward was oh well there's no quid pro quo give me a break you know I mean you could make any number of arguments that supporting certain kinds of issue campaigns puts you in bed with can't with people who are elected officials and so all I'm suggesting is don't go

[141:03] you know cautious on this one I think you can push the envelope okay so people aren't are interested in doing both for candidates and ballot measures recognizing again that we might be pushing the envelope people are lying to put that on the list what is it would list but we don't really know what we're doing it means you're directing staff go forth and draft an ordinance to that end and bring it back and then of course we will have public hearing on it what I think we have to get a little let's have to tells us otherwise we have to keep a little bit more guidance because I don't think we're telling them what they what we want disclose with the on the issue side of things in other words is that that the owners of the company is that the CEO is the board of directors I think we have to give a I know you guys grappled with this for a long long time so we're gonna tread the same path but I think we can't just say the staff go draft an ordinance because they're gonna say what do you want it to say okay I don't have an answer I'm just so what was the ordinance from the air

[142:02] that they did not settle on a specific recommendation no there's so many different ways to slice this pie of how you find a definition is it 50% stake is that the board of directors is it just the CEO is the person who writes the check I mean he literally could slice this a million different directions and so we saw that just bounty of opportunity and said until you define what you want you'll then find the solution that best fits that otherwise we'd be throwing a dart at the board and sort of hopefully pegging it something without any clear guidance from you as to what you're aiming for so it could just be the 50% controlling interest in the LLC as a person you disclosed you could keep it that simple that would that's the two simple solutions were that or back it down a bit and say anybody that's got an interest of over X percent has to be disclosed just the same thing but it's your that way you

[143:00] could guess a 25% 30% so then what else do you have for people oh no three people I guess it's more than 25 okay something like that seems reasonable okay that's an LLC that's easy now we have a c-corp that wants to write a check so or an S corp I mean how are you we're gonna have to define what it means for each of the different corporate types if you want this to be effective yeah it was probably created that literally changes by the minute right and even if you need to pick up my big threshold that could change frequently now you know why we avoid us punting to staff what you put it to us I'll just know that if we say if you're doing matching you got to limit to natural persons we will get 95% of what we want very quickly so maybe we say hey somebody spent a little time

[144:00] figuring out controlling interests and leave it at that and if it's too complicated then it's not a priority because we solve our problem yes because you're disincentivizing the thing that we're trying then effect that this complicated rabbit hole trying to define that if you just disincentivize the uses all together then the discussions rate just about moot so you're right on in that direction when it's a c-corp you know is campaign not Bobby it just can't be it's gonna stay in itself right it says just having that level of disclosure tells a lot about who is supporting an issue or who's opposing an issue so I really think on the issue side you know just being able to know who it is is best we can is the most important thing is that I'm sorry bad news on the text in my bed see that

[145:00] again okay I did you sum up all right I know you summed up all right I just said on the corporate side when we know that corporations donated to an issue campaign it often says a lot you know so if Anadarko donates against you some kind of oil and gas thing then we know you know that it's being opposed by a particular sector yeah I would say I think that that we are more likely to see that kind of thing in the future depending so well to me that's a higher priority than fact I'll see the donated bucks I think we've seen very very little LLC contributions to candidates but we've seen multiple millions of dollars donated by companies to issues campaigns right and in the past is we don't have to speculate about this has happened already right but maybe that's maybe that's that in and of itself is sufficient to tell you about how folks are lining up on the issue right okay do you know who the CEO

[146:00] of Xcel Energy you know it's Excel there's get an example randomly okay so to tie a bow on the bet on that that major part so just leave it live for now or if somebody has a great idea or know where is it in the priorities thinks i'ma leave it like as I think it's too complicated and I don't think there's much we can do about it but if we want them direct staff to try that's fine too how about this in the course of moving forward if we figure out a way to pierce the veil I think in particular in ballot measures is the issue I'm all yours especially if some other city has figured out how to do it given its complications that we understand it's second tier that's some things up yeah I think one thing we should just bear in mind is if we do it on that I'm with Sam I'm not sure I want to go down this path but if we do go down this path my guess is the pushback will get is okay then why stop it for profit why not nonprofits let us find out it okay who's on the board of the nonprofit's and who

[147:01] makes well and you say well don't profit some nice people and so on so forth no I just met they usually have less money but it's pretty easy for an organization to create a non-profit I guess is what I'm saying so you can kinda get around the rules I'm kind of Sam I'm not sure I'm not sure if I'd venture down this path I think the solution we came up with is a good one I might with Canada unless if we figure out somebody else's figure this out I would love to hear about it okay but for now we're gonna depend on whatever we just saw you said okay all right so clarifying the regulations for committees that coordinate advertising similar to Express advocacy this was something that kind of came up from a specific kind of general instance in the 2017 election this was where there was a plan boulder advertisement that had both their unofficial campaign committee and

[148:01] their issue committee have a joint ad and so thought being well is it appropriate to have joint advertising between groups that should generally maybe not be so coordinated was the thought what we what we sort of came on is that you were sort of walking a very fine if not a dangerous line down free speech but what it did really wake us up to a freedom association is well thanks mark but it also led us to maybe we should just be clarifying if they are to coordinate what that coordination or collaboration is and so because the thing that we got to was well there's no campaign limits for issue committees unlike unofficial candidate committees so could you basically be having unofficial candidate committees riding the coattails of what is an unlimited set of donations and and sort of coffers and is there balance there so the thought being here is an na and appreciate what would Alan Stevens they already operate under this sort of proposed to proportional allocation of

[149:01] spending by their own good deeds but we thought well why don't we recommend that that should just be the rule that you if you have a third of the page that that group covers a third of the cost and this is a way for us not to infringe on freedom of speech or freedom of association but it does in lay that there's trust and faith that one group isn't riding the coattails of one's bigger coffers on the backside so that's where we sort of have here reporting must include the total cost join material and the amount of committee paid for its portion and you know obviously prohibiting contributions from one committee being provided to another back and forth so that's where we're at it was a thought of an idea we backtracked it said let's just clarify the rules so we can just make this clean on the back end yeah no no legal issues with this so great solution love it that's fantastic the only thing I would add to it is as I've made an earlier comment it would be great if we could have staff trained and ready to provide advisory opinions so that if the of the UCC and the IC

[150:01] some sort of joint thing that can come in to staff and say we think this is lovely 6040 but we want your ruling on this we can rely on it and the staff says no it's really 5050 they say okay fine we'll go with whatever you say and then that so we don't have a fight somebody comes in later and says well you miss a portion did staff can say if they see kids they don't want to see it they don't have to as they seek it and that's kind of binding on the community that staffs opinion is objective and unbiased and they can rely on that and let's make it simple the whole idea is we won't want people to participate in elections but just make it real easy is it is it square footage of the flyer whatever it is so anybody can get out the ruler and figure it out okay otherwise you have to hire somebody to figure out the rules because you just can't yeah okay we good with this one okay this sort of necessarily rolls to the next there's sort of order to this

[151:00] ensure proper disclosure of various types of media this was in our due diligence of looking at other communities around the country and what they're doing with regards to how do we communicate where who is behind various ads and California has has probably perhaps some of the most progressive solutions with regards to how do we make sure that we know where the ads from who the ads from and do they have a very clear set of rules that everyone can follow as to whether it's a print ad and online ad a TV ad you name it governing all types of media and that really seems to push the envelope and I think a lot of us on on the working group like that it's very clear it's concise and as we were looking to get to natural persons and and in the purpose of transparency and fairness we liked what we saw in the examples that came from California and so we certainly are in many ways copying those in our recommendations to you in terms of disclosing the standard size

[152:01] that address the formatting size unit font type clarity duration location all those little pieces so it everybody knows without a doubt and you're not moving to that font type 0.65 size where you need a telescope to read it just very clear very simple so that's where this came from was just the general due diligence and enough recommendation to keep it simple there's nothing simple about this this one this so-called ribbon requirements and ads you know who pays the top contributor this was a scheme like this was challenged in citizens united in the Supreme Court upheld it so a pillow so I felt this ribbon requirement be paid for by Bob you know or the top contributors were Bob Betty and so on my the legal sort of issues spotting on this one is the same as earlier in the context of the $100 contribution limit it will will this ribbon substantially serve an important

[153:02] governmental interest you know identifying the two the three top contributors in the context of an election where nobody can contribute more than $100 see so that's that's an issue to look at with this again in issue elections where you have no contribution limit the it makes a lot more sense it might well satisfy the governmental interest but again you have to pay attention to that line of cases here in Colorado that basically don't require any kind of disclosure at all from issue committees until they're spending a substantial amount of money well so let's do what one and this is requirement for both candidates and ballot measures yes nope yes so I thought for candidates you had to say paid for by Suzanne for council right so isn't it covered by that you could just look up the website for the campaign you

[154:03] could you will know that you'll know who paid for by citizens for a better Boulder well I mean just for candidates okay see me that's right you could take an ad out for your candidate okay what did you like to see examples well we can imagine it a few so if you want them they're here and they could go around if you need it if not we'll keep them here but that's your call because sometime this is a visual thing so if you would like to see them let's deal with candidates for candidates nobody can spend more than 100 bucks so how would you do it I'm struggling with what you guys are recommending here you say the names of the people who paid for the ad if a candidate had a hundred donors you don't have to put the name of the hundred donors on there you say campaign to reelect Sam Weaver period right then that's good enough isn't it or you

[155:00] recommending something more than that for candidates Jordon the ordinance language that we've seen says if there is no one who qualifies as the top contributor then you don't have to comply with that requirement there's like a hundred way tie for first place right right so so that kind of is not relevant I don't you guys aren't recommending that we have top contributor disclosures are you I just talked about candidates just stay with candidates for a second so four official candidates committee are you recommending any change other than maybe font size we can talk about that but you're not requiring any you need listing other than a committee to really like Sam Weaver right that's that's all you guys are good with that I would say yes yes because the official candidate committee has donation limits you go back to the record you can see exactly what it is that's for the official candidate committee so so with for the official Kanaka me the only thing to recommend it is just a standardization of the of the ribbon the disclosure so no one gets away with it a

[156:00] little teeny correct but other than that no change is that right for candidate correct okay so move on to an official candidate committees same thing they are you guys requiring disclosure of names of natural people and if so how deep into the stack are you gonna go for that I think how deep is somewhat dependent on the previous conversation of the natural persons conversation whether you want those to be in parity so if you were to embark on that that would I think mean that you'd want to have a similar disclosure here as well so we leave that open based on if you choose option a you therefore choose option C and that your samples are really helpful this is really about readability not about who gets listed to me it is but it's in a totally different scale I mean I just focus on candidates for a moment because it's only hundred bucks per and you have the city clerk providing a website where as long as you

[157:01] list your name properly you know it's the committee to re-elect the Lisa Moore's l you know whoever treasurer right that's what we put on all our materials anybody can go to the website and look up who the donors are so I feel like we're like 90% of the way there for official candidates and even for unofficial candidate committees because they have the same limits and the same kind of deal if you put their the name of the unofficial candidate committee and you go on the clerk's website you can look at who the donors are and there's a hundred dollar limit so I feel like our risks here are actually more like Google Adwords and Facebook ads and things like that where I think when people started doing this like me in 2015 and more in 2017 it wasn't clear at all how that ribbon requirement applied to a Google ad right there when you click through you're gonna be at their website and their website is gonna be able to you know it's going to tell you on the website so there's a lot of gray area that I don't know I'd like

[158:02] recommendations from somebody because it's non-trivial to do the full tax that you would put on the yard sign or a sticker on a little thing that runs by Twitter or Facebook or whatever so I think the complexity for candidate and unofficial candidate committees is really around have you handled the electronic advertising component of it and I'm going to issue stuff yet but okay so pause and let us think about that to me it's just important that you have paid for because everybody's limit to a hundred bucks and this is a small community you just go on the website like we kind of know the the groups that that's a it feels like the disclosure is there me it's the ballot measures that I think are more important but candidates what do we think about candidates I mean the way the city is set up right now anybody can go in on the city's on a candidates

[159:02] thing and find out who's contributed how much you've spent what you spent it on so and I like that I like that transparency I did have a question about these and okay but wait a minute to stay on candidates how do we feel about candidates is it enough just to have on the ribbon paid for by either the official candidate or the official candidates there's also the treasurer that's the one person that okay so just making sure that applies to electronic ads currently for ads we have disclosure that says paid for by committee to elect ABC but if you're asking for donations contributions then you have to add the treasurer and if you're an unofficial candidate committee and you're asking

[160:00] for donations then you have more to put in this has been authorized by the candidate or not authorized so it comes in when you asked for money I see very few ads or Flyers that ask for contributions so then if it doesn't ask for contribution it's just paid for by yeah I guess in our 100 buckle xions I feel like that that's pretty good okay the extent that we need any changes to clarify that which already exists well in the language that the committee came up with I think effectively with candidates it would only apply to independent expenditures because it only applies to donations over a thousand dollars and that's the only way you can do a donation over a thousand dollars is through an independent expenditures once you combine you have a committee and then so that's four candidates okay okay so we're just gonna deal with candidates here so that's a that's a independent expenditure made by a human

[161:00] being probably right or an LLC single entity who buys an ad in the paper and says relaxers and Jones full-page and they have to been disclosed something yeah paid for by me whoever whoever does it then that same rule along that's what the committee worked through in terms of the language then that thousand dollars also applies to issue committees so with issue committees if you have contributors of a thousand dollars or more then you have to list you know committing to s to B and if you have two or three it's maximum of three contributors over a thousand bucks you're supposed to list the names of the three top people wait so what if everybody in your committee only pays 999 this is the electioneering stuff

[162:06] right this is related to the electioneering no it would be I guess it could be in terms of what you're spending the money on but primarily though the language that the committee came up with on this area it's predominantly gonna apply in the issue committee area very limited in candidate elections okay so candidate we're gonna leave pretty much as is okay except for the independent expenditure well that's the point the independent expenditure would trigger whether it was a candidate or whether it was an issue right David if they spend if somebody's no you know if somebody spent oh that's right they can't spend a thousand dollars on that thank you yeah so makers okay so moving on to issues then we want to come can we go

[163:00] back I just make sure we're all going to the same track here say that against him who can't spend a person can't spend a thousand dollars and say I'm a candidate an individual can yeah when when David says independent expenditure what I'm assuming you're talking about is an individual so so would they have to register as an unofficial candidate committee if they did that no they wouldn't have to register they would just have to disclose that they spent them so so it does apply to candidate elections because a individual human being you can't restrict their free speech rights they can take a full-page ad in the camera and say Bree Alexis and Jones and that they have to disclose on the ad and what the committee came up with was standards for the disclosure so it requires a human being to be associated

[164:01] with the disclosure on on the advertisement itself but if more than one person bought the ad that becomes an unofficial candidate committee and a different set of circumstances so this is only for a single person independent expenditure of at least a thousand books and and issue the reason I'm bringing this up is this goes to a whole other point which is not specific to this which is as we were working through all of these things what became clear to a lot of us is that the way the election code is organized right now is so complicated and we frankly could Mike certainly couldn't keep track of which piece is interacted with which people with with which pieces which is why in

[165:00] the end we recommended that this whole thing get rewritten just to sort all this kind of stuff out you know where we've got a rule what exactly does it apply to how does it apply to that because we simply didn't have time to do all of that yeah all right so we are we we have to keep moving so I think we say yes to this very rare narrow thing on Canada okay yes and then when we get to the issue part this is a lot more complicated let's talk about that what's being proposed is very clear I don't know what the whole font thing it is easier to read but but more importantly it's what must be disclosed right which in you are promoted you're proposing the names of natural persons you didn't say there's a whether it's the top three donors or whatever but that's where the range of options is and you said yes we can do this yes you can do that I think in issue campaigns

[166:01] though you pay attention to the cases that say below a certain threshold the government's interest in imposing this sort of thing isn't justified there's not a countervailing public interest in disclosure of all this stuff but top three donors top three donors I think in a in a otherwise otherwise a campaign or these kind of disclosures are gonna be made yes absolutely that that feeling right good yep yep so on this particular one it does address font and type in all of that and is that part of the just to make it really clear and so those will be spelled out like if you wanted to do something like this let's say I want to run this ad I'd be able to go to a guidebook or and find out okay I'm setting up the art for the ad and so

[167:01] here's all the standards I have to adhere to and then screw and then do you bring it to the clerk or do you just hope you did it right and somebody's gonna complain if you didn't we sort of talked about if this goes through working with the printing companies to give them a template for what it's supposed to look like oh okay thank you okay so I just I'm gonna be les convinced on that this is the kind of stuff that makes people crazy you're trying to design an ad you're trying to jam it in up the font is 0.5 less than it's supposed to be and somebody's gonna file a violation that's the kind of stuff that makes people go I hate politics so I guess well there's more than that but that is one of the reasons so I guess I think it's really important getting people to disclose the top three donors in a readable format or whatever to me is the most important part and I guess I'm a little wary of minutiae I'll just throw that but if you guys

[168:00] really think people will just game the system okay but I think it's more important that we have the top to be donors thoughts well I was just going to go back to what was said earlier about trying to establish some standards so that it's actually easy for people that's what I know it sounds hard s so I like the idea of the readability of it I just think it's really clear so and I'm hoping that these things can be ironed out I mean that's what I understand it so that everyone can get it okay put people in for the three donor part the three top donors does that seem or did you have another idea just a question is this three top donors if they're over a thousand or three top donors no matter how big this is four issues over a thousand over time and the second is we're not going to go down the rabbit

[169:00] hole of natural persons versus donors so if Excel wants to do a million dollar ad then there and spend a million dollars their name is on his at the top three but we're not gonna try to find out who they the CEO of Excel is that okay but your recommendation is just it's corporatized where there's corporate or individual is just disclosure the top three however there even in the future even if it's an LLC for a better world well this is a question I'm asking the question so in the pre my two slides ago we we were asking whether you wanted to write getting pierce the corporate veil right it's sort of if you choose to do that then you will already be necessary information and if we choose not to then that's what we're gonna get here then - you don't need well though cuz then you would sort of retro actively kind of be doing that anyway so you could choose not to it was sort of the assumptive close that if you're gonna do the natural person beast then of course that thus would want to be included here as well that was kind of the combo here presumably this is some kind of political action committee that's been formed right and so they're the people buying the ad or an

[170:01] organization and the top donor or only donor is Corporation B then they have to put their name out there so I think this is perfectly workable without piercing the corporate veil because if they're you know some kind of political organization and we get to know who their top three corporate donors are that still tells a lot of information about who cares about the issue well just one thing on this whole kind of stuff is we were trying to at least start to look preemptively on a lot of this stuff because in 2017 there was you know we were way behind the eight ball and so this is you know pushing the envelope so you don't get behind the eight ball and if you don't ask who's behind the ad I guarantee you there will be a whole bunch of electioneering communication and you'll have no idea where the money is coming okay yeah it's that simple

[171:00] but you've already convinced us so top three donors yes and maybe simplify it like must be readable or something that's not so not so crisp prescriptive as to drive everybody's pro bono ad makers insane clarifying the role of the city clerk in sort of again moving through doing our sort of general housekeeping I think we sort of looked at there's we identified through three issues complaints about potential potential election violations are required to be kept competent confidential by the city unless a hearing is scheduled other complaints are generally thus released by the complaining party anyway this whole confidential eye thing usually gets blown up by an ad or some in the daily camera hearing officer perceived unfairness should the clerk be in a position to act as the hearing officer for disputes about his or her

[172:01] own decisions so that was something that we saw as perhaps the inherently conflicting and so we wanted to address that and then election complaint administrator perceived unfairness of the city manager as a named to be the person to administer the election complaints since the city manager is hired by perhaps the very people that the actions are under investigation by so that's another thing of wanting to maybe clean up again in the perceived fairness and transparency for the voters those are things that's left out to us and so we saw those as issues and that meant to try to tackle them so readability so with regards that recommendations election complaint administrator of the clerk rather than the city manager sort of gets rid of any of that issue of the hired individual

[173:00] making a passing judgment on those that hire them so there's an issue that that cleans that part up a little bit and then the administrator complaint practices divergent points of view on this in our group how do we disclose some wanted more public disclosure from the get-go that you don't take a vow of silence from the city's position and you just come out and say what's out there because it's already out in public anyway because the complaint is done it so you might as well meet them in the public realm and then some of us also said maybe just leaves it as is because you know unless it determines a higher level threshold of a hearing everything else that's either done in a cure or is handled between Diane and and everybody just let those things happen and you don't need to bring that up to public record so there was some mix on that so we sort of interested to hear your thoughts on that and then challenges the clerk can decisions in campaign finance positions should require an external hearing officer this is a way to get out of his the clerk a passing judgment on his or her own decisions and therefore having a perhaps also a right of repeat a right

[174:01] of appeal in that and in that instance as well so those are the recommendations we have to address and we'd love to hear your thoughts when when comment on that although the group as a whole didn't come to agreement on this how to handle complaints the four of us Alan us here was we were working through this stuff how we were going to present it we were talking to Lynette and about exactly what does she do and I thought we came to a pretty good resolution on it which was if I can describe it which is if it's a administrative kind of issue somebody didn't file something exactly properly and it can get handled and it gets handled in a couple of days fine that doesn't have to go public but if somebody actually file is a real complaint then the clerk and Lynette you correct me if I don't say it right they that clerk will the information is public the procedure is public but the clerk will not comment on the substance of it one unless it's either dismissed

[175:00] or goes to it we're hearing it got there about right but the idea is that there could be a threshold between minor and potentially more serious yes okay so let's just pause there is there any this is our business right were you giving up to say anything no okay all right let's let's take these one at do we have questions I don't say let's tick them off one at a time but good questions first it's a question of recommendation but did you guys consider with respect to those that dude go to a public hearing yeah I get the inherent conflict you know with the city manager and the City Attorney and the city clerk involved and you guys thought about a mutual age arrangement with another city or another County because we with the City Attorney's office does that already if there's an ethics complaint against one of us they don't handle it it goes to you know Fort Collins or whatever and it seems to me if we could do that with Longmont or Fort Collins that would be really really clean yes we did and that's who we would that would be the hearing officer and I think even Lynette

[176:00] mentioned that there's generally that sort of agreement working agreement that it tends to exist between municipalities missa palate he's already have that structure right well we did it last time for Holmes and sitting it's about I was gonna say that the exact same thing why why don't we just have these agreements with other communities that their hearing officer comes in and aren't hearing officer it goes up there so does that feel right to people because that seems to me an easy solution ideally somebody close by okay I just want to add one thing though or maybe Lynette but there is a problem with that model in that during election season the City Clerk's office is like one of the most busy departments in the city and that's not unique to Boulder so trying to get somebody from another city during an election season is not an easy

[177:00] task and some of the indications I think that Lynette has had is yeah we'll be there if we're available but good luck with that so I think that if you know if you're gonna go with a hearing on a hearing officer model it's probably more you use the municipal court judge you you know you hire or have people that are available to act as hearing officers and you just you just pay them but they're a municipal court judge reports that if we have a mutual aid with another County where if this happens it's one of the people from this to the attorney's office that does it because they should probably not be as busy as the clerk and they would be good at interpreting our laws and that's how we do it right now when we need to have an investigation well we do that for investigations but for a lot of kind of administrative decision decisions that are subject to appeal they're now done

[178:01] by hearing officers or they're done in the Municipal Court as it is pool of returned officers that exist that we couldn't reach out sure there are a lot of lawyers that do this and it's a very common practice for cities to actually issue RFPs where they say show me your qualifications to be hearing officers and then they build they basically build a Bank of hearing officers that they call on as needed don't live in the community they don't have you for example he's active in politics too so that would be but he said he serves in Denver okay well that's what I mean he's not active in the community where he's serving as the hearing officer yeah so so we it can be done in a way that's fair and but but I do think that while you can always try to share with other communities it's not

[179:05] a very opportune time for sharing and the one problem might have was the municipal court judge though generally I think you do a great job is you have that same conflict where the council hires that personal yeah so I wouldn't want that person to have to make it judgment about their employer so I like the hearing officer because then we could use them for the shelter when there's conflict so everything people sound right I mean I I still would like to maintain some independence and so if you could get hearing officers from Longmont or you have hearing officers in Boulder and have some kind of agreement right they can't you can't make a decision in their own community right and I think that would be part of the RFP is it can't be a resident yeah he was saying making serves for doing yes

[180:00] okay okay but I guess one thing is we had a complaint last election where I think Fort Collins came down and interviewed us all but it was it was a complaint that alleged something that wasn't against the law so we had to go through and they asked us if we did all these things and we said yes because it's not against the law and they agreed yeah it's not against a lot so it's like well why do we have to have the hearing because the law is that was not in questioned so it's means to me that there should be some thresholds which is if the fact if the facts that are agreed upon aren't a violation of the law then it doesn't meet the threshold that make sense so I guess there has to be an alleged violation of law not just a complaint but a yeah I to me that's a little muddy what is the threshold what well I was just going to say however interpretation of the law to many of us the law is

[181:01] quite clear right so there is no interpretation of the law but interpretation of the law or a violation of the law is in the eye of the beholder and so what may seem incredibly clear to you that was not a violation of the law may not be asked about was just did we do all these things and it's like yeah that's not the question but that's what they came in investigated in the video it was talked about the process okay because Mark's point is exactly right and that you know in the case in 2017 there was very strong and very divergent opinions on what the law said right and that's what needed the interpretation and so now we're cleaning up for something that didn't have enough clarity to it but I mean to me wasn't

[182:00] talking about I was I had to go through the same process you did but the so when there's a complaint to the clerk if it doesn't allege a violation of law if it's an administrative type thing where it's like they didn't file you know on time as opposed to they didn't disclose an expenditure as the expenditure as a matter of law and the timing of the reporting is more administrative in nature but if anybody alleges a real violation of law I think it should be disclosed so that people can follow the process does it go to hearing you know if the hearings held is the hearing fair and what's the appeals process for the hearing so I think administrative things that Diane can clear herself should they're not a matter of disclosure but if it's something to the clerk which alert alleges a violation of campaign finance law then I think it should be disclosed just as any action in the

[183:01] court of law would be so that people can follow the the resolution of it I think there are two tiers of things here and one thing is whether you know as an employee of the clerk could clear it is maybe one test point because if the clerk isn't required to clear it or it's not a violation of law then I don't think it should be disclosed but I really do think that if there's a process like it's just about transparency and during the election it's most important that the candidates not be involved but that the civvie process have definition so that in your scenario there's a record people can follow it and then that conclusion is published because that's the part is the part where we have to be silent which I find infuriating because then you're never really cleared nobody ever says if

[184:00] you're cleared or not don't it seems to me that if that's what you if you're including that the clerk publishes the result as well okay yeah one one quick comment on that before 2016 that was the case it was all public only in 2016 did you change the law just so you know okay building on Sam's I think two things one is um it would be hopefully if the ordinance could give I know it's not gonna be exhaustive David but if the ordinance can give examples of those things that can be handled administratively those things that are subject to a public hearing so I wouldn't want there to be fight later on about well that was just administrative and in the complaint says no this needs to be a hearing and then we have a fight about a fight and so I think to the extent that you can provide a non-exhaustive list of examples of things like finally in late it's administrative I'm failing to disclose a donor or an expenditure maybe a public hearing or the whatever you come with the list and put it on one of two sides and hopefully you'll be able to come other

[185:00] relatively comprehensive list because I think we've probably seen most things yeah if something it goes to the clerk does it automatically have a hearing or couldn't they just say you screwed up fix it yeah if it's administrative is there some is there anything to the court handles that doesn't go automatically to it here many things do most things and that's why I'm trying to make a distinction so if we all know going into it wanting to make sure I understand there's an administrative right there's the clerk does everything that goes to the clerk also have a public hearing so there's three that's all I'm just noting you did video okay a lot of things Dianne handles basically okay and then there are complaints basically is and a complaint is Diane's stuff is she sees something that's not right she gets hold of the candidate or

[186:01] their whatever and gets it straight down but then there are complaints which are third party issues I complain that so-and-so did acts that goes to the clerk right and that's like that's the stuff we're talking about now she could say you don't know what you're talking about you've completely misread the law I'm dismissing it or she could say I want to hold a hearing so I'm saying anything that gets to that level that's public that's was our ID and I think that's what you were saying Sam I think that's a complaint needs to allege a violation of law exactly so if there's a complaint that comes in that doesn't allege a violation of laws couldn't be improper I think it should still follow the course of the clerk acknowledges that a complaint was filed and says I dismiss it because it doesn't assert a violation of law and then that can be appealed right however if she says I think that there may have been a violation of law and it goes to a public hearing that's not the distinction

[187:01] though the distinction is that I say that I can't file a complaint without having a piece of law that got violated it's not a complaint it's just I don't like what you did David your ad was the wrong color I mean there's no law that says it has to be blue or green so what's the point of filing anything like that I say it's people do it all the time no yes they do and I think that that's the point is if it people file frivolous lawsuits all the time and they get dismissed because you know what sorry that doesn't meet the threshold so I guess that's that's that is a legal judgment fine I'm saying if you allege a violation of law the clerk can dismiss it saying no it isn't but I can say I'm sorry I disagree with your thing that's when the hearing officer would come in right and so I guess my point is anything that alleges a violation of law that comes to the clerk should be public and followed through and the clerk has

[188:00] every right to dismiss you know the frivolous ones and exactly so I guess the distinction is if there's an allegation of violation of law it should be public right that's one of the things we're talking about is what do we disclose so if there's a complaint and that complaint contains which I think you should have to an allegation of a violation of law then you you make that public and you determine the clerk determines and then beyond that it goes to and so that really puts the clerk in the position of what had been separated before right the clerk and the city manager you know they each had kind of different roles this consolidates the role in the clerk and it makes it public and then you can appeal and then we have the hearing officer come in look just one other clarification you're starting to code previous previous to 2016 did

[189:00] have the clerk in this position it got changed where every place had said clerk it turned into the city manager so we said we said we messed up and so I'm trying to so you know what your what the issue is here it isn't that the rules changed it's just the names changed okay we got it okay they made it real Sam was is I actually do believe in this disclosure when it gets to the level I think that's actually to the benefit of the candidate as well because the candidate wants to get this out there and and once both sides of the story to be told and once there to be resolutions but this possible I'm agreeing with them okay right okay and is everybody else okay so that makes sense can i clarify real quick yes so I get a complaint it goes public I issue a letter of no violation its public I give the person a chance to cure and they cure that's also public okay wait unless we if it's Ministry of talking about formal complaints game yeah and I want to

[190:03] clarify the Cure thing at least the way the code is now the purpose is compliance so if somebody can cure like they they do miss somebody in disclosure or some column doesn't add up or whatever and they can cure it within the 72 hours the code provides for that and says it's not considered a violation if they cure it in 72 hours it only becomes a violation if mmm-hmm they the mistake is there the clerk says fix it and they don't fix it so okay and in that circumstance is that a staff identified or somebody filed a complaint and you still have 72 hours to fix it and you're saying it's not a violation if somebody files a complaint you fix it it's not a violation right that's the way that that it is now there is the opportunity to cure and be found innocent so do we want

[191:01] the Cure process to be public or only if they don't sure you did not recommend that the cure process be public because this would just be something they'd be fixed and would be done and we just move off so the reason that I want to think this through is because if somebody goes public with their complaint so here here they have gone public alleging a violation of law I would if I were the candidate want the city clerk to say there's just a me to our cure period when the reporter howls and we're gonna see if the candidate does and then if the candidate does then the resolution is that the can be cured per the requirements of law and compliance has been attained so I mean that would have everyone come off smelling good if there was a dispute and the issue committee decided not to cure bhinneka good hearing after that but I actually think like Suzanne said it's to the benefit of the candidate to have this process be public rather than having a group waving a complaint around out there and nobody

[192:01] ever knows what happens things that can't be cured like so I mean the classic example would be the failure to disclose in an ad right the ads already been run and there's no way I can fix that I'd put in six points out of eight point right then what happens because that's not a curable offense and you could say man culpa sorry I won't do that again but what's the admit what's the disposition of that that's what's weird about the code that there is language about doing remedial things are doing corrective things it doesn't it's not really clear at this point who has the power to do that and under what authority you would do that so that's one thing that and redoing chapter 13 for is what we call it that's the important provisions that you fix that part some things have fines attached to them would write and the reimbursement agreements have specific fines attached

[193:00] to them and specific amounts but those are not complaints that's a contract enforcement so we're trying to make I think that there are hoes in this that need to be worked out better I guess for the for the two cents I mean I understand what you're saying completely about the cure and somebody filing a complaint at least election season is really hard for staff because we're trying very hard not to put our finger on the scale on either side by what we do so what we talked about is when the clerk makes a final decision that's public because we're controlling what the city does what the complaint itself is comes from somebody else and if we make it public before the clerk has made a decision that also couldn't put the candidate in a pretty bad I wasn't concerned with the timing of when it's made public so in other words if there's

[194:00] a complaint that comes in and they cure you should just note that in the campaign website you know on their page however we want to do it so that there was a complaint and it was cured and it gets announced but not necessarily you don't call up everybody and say I want you to know this but if then the complainant says I filed this complaint and I don't agree that this cure happened at least got the evidence and you've said it and it's out there in public I just think this is all good for the candidate to either cure or were not correctly accused and some of this some of this detail I think once we put it by we I mean you put it in ordinance form and we put it out there then we'll be like you know what and everybody that's run in an election looks at it and goes yeah but what about then we'll think through like what is the timing of when everything is published right because I think those are important details Bob's question is really important I mean I

[195:01] think we that's the whole the Cathy's talking about is so you've done something your revocable right you can't unprinted you know on have the newspapers delivered so I think we need to have a set of fines which are probably fairly much you know if they'd slide with the scale you know we do it twice she goes up if you do it I thought there's is let's not fall into the trap that Longmont did cuz long my head finds the word cumulative and outrageous remember that woman had a sixteen thousand dollar fine and it was an innocent mistake and suddenly she's faced a sixteen thousand dollar fine they couldn't get out of it so I I think I think the embarrassment of having a complaint against you it's probably a lot more damaging than any amount of money you have to pay but I do agree there should probably be irreversible things should be small fine but it's public and that's that's where the real damage done right right okay what else well is there anybody everybody agreeing with where we're headed okay and then we already leave we've

[196:01] done all that okay we have a work plan I know coming up yeah the thing that's missing for me from this slide and we talked about it verbally but it's not really on the slide is clarity in an appeal process so someone issues someone goes to the clerk with a complaint the clerk makes a decision then you know what is this what other steps and can that decision be appealed or can even if it's if it's heard first by an external hearing officer can that be appealed when is the decision final and under what circumstances would a complaintant be granted an appeal or or a candidate who has violate in theory violated law be allowed an appeal isn't the idea was that the hearing officer be the appeal officer right so that clerk makes a decision and one side or the other

[197:03] doesn't like it and they call for a hearing and that's when the hearing officer comes and confessed the hearing and it may be Angie does specify times that cuz I do think in a lot of these things having a quick process is important so I do think that that's worth clarifying well already in the code it says you cannot appeal to City Council so that has been interpreted by some people as you can't appeal at all but the way the code works is if somebody doesn't like what staff does they have a right to a cross a judicial hearing under Chapter one three and then if they don't like that ruling and that's where the hearing officer comes in they don't like that ruling it goes to the district court on a 106 which is kind of how I assumed what else six section which is where they review the record specific about the appeals process thing he's inherently a hearing officer would do that but I think mark was right to

[198:00] say specifically yeah let's clarify that okay now we're getting to the how we're gonna do all this but what's next oh and you guys sort of already led there how enforcement is administered so Bob thanks for leading us in that direction this is not this is larger and more comprehensive is its I mean not just did a candidate or someone make a violation in their disclosure or law or their complaint but did some individual break some campaign finance law by donating five thousand dollars okay I mean the whole nine yards the issue is how is enforcement administered who is actually the watchdog to make sure that all rules and laws are being followed is this sort of citizenry just everyone doing their due diligence as good contributing citizens to our society or does staff take this I mean this was a question we had who's really in charge of making sure all this everyone follows the rules and then therefore what's the process so it was just there was some ambiguity as

[199:00] to who and what when where why that all occurred so we certainly would suggest some thoughts or at least looking at that from you guys because this is an application of election rules again this was just looking at how do we again stay consistent with this sort of multitude of laws we have given how many we've now applied and put into place consistency is key and then clearly consequences for violations I think we're bob was touching on is what's appropriate and to disincentivize people from bus braking law so I think he kind of already touched on that but we were certainly wanting you guys to focus on those areas as well revised campaign finance charter ins entirety Steve sort of touched on this as we looked at this at what we saw was very included that over the years has just been a patchwork of stuff added to it and and one could argue that the campaign finance section 13-2 is our only the most visible part of the BRC that the public is aware of and or has some general knowledge of so the cleanliness and readability of that is

[200:00] probably more paramount than probably any other section of the BRC one could argue and so we were looking at how do we make that real clean of making sure anybody can read that and certainly probably make Diane's life a whole lot easier in how she structures or Bluebook the way forth and then as I says making the code easier understand for people to participate a lot of the recommendations and thoughts and I heard make it easy to book put it into place for ezbee that's Blue Book so unfortunate that Blue Book is gonna get a little thicker but it is certainly as a former candidate the the gospel of how to do all things so we greatly appreciate that and that's where things should reside in our book and then streamline and clarify any redundant provisions there are a handful in there but the thought is to revise it and not continue to do a patchwork our underlying guiding principle at the very end of this was as a working group we didn't want to end our working group leaving undo work for someone else to have to clean up later on because we've just added more rules and made it more cumbersome set of policies so we do

[201:01] recommend sort of really cleaning up and rewriting this chapter so that we feel that anything we've contributed is thus part of a better document going forward so I think there's some feelings on how soon various aspects of this can be done who wants to respond on staff at least David does but because it was in our memo so sure so I think that you know in a little bit Lynette it's gonna get into the work program and we've got an awful lot going on especially in the area of Elections law we've already got something that is drafted that I would say is probably about a 90% draft of the work of the working group it's pretty it I think it's pretty good it could probably use some additional work I think what staff would like to do is perhaps work with as a group of volunteers from the working

[202:02] group a subcommittee if you will that would just go through and do the final drafting our objective would be to actually wrap up the drafting in the first quarter of next year so that we can implement some of the items that our working group recommendations as part of the 2019 election but most importantly probably the electioneering and Express advocacy provisions which really kind of gave us a lot of the heartache that we had during the 2017 election and then from there we would move forward into kind of the next phase of the work plan for elections and I don't want to take any thunder away from Lynette but she's going to be going through all of the things that they're going to have to do

[203:00] based on all the things that are coming up as well as the ballot measures that passed at this last election that we're also recommended by the working group so that we'll be able to implement those in the near term so just to play I'm sorry so David the that remaining work is still just what was in the original charge of counsel for what they were the scoop words to do it's not to add on additional that's correct that would be to finish out the work in the charge of the working group I know that there was a some material sent to the council this afternoon and those go the working group and that's not part of just one to me because we got that I just want to make very clear thank you and I just wanted to also make clear from what you had sent out that there isn't a real chance

[204:01] to rewrite those two code sections before the 2019 elections so your suggestion of the revising the campaign finance chapter and its entirety I don't think that can happen so that's at least my interpretation of what staff sent yeah and just to beat a dead horse you know so we're we're moving into the condemnation with Excel you guys have proved that the other night Kathy haddock is gonna be the lead interrelated attorney on that I think that in terms of what our plan is is that she is going to finish out a restructuring of 13-4 Tom car city attorney has authorized us to we hired another lawyer Louise Toro who is an elections expert as well he is going to be brought on board to finish out the 13 to work and probably maybe work with Kathy some on the 13-4 work and I think that we will

[205:03] be able to take what is now what I call a 90% draft and make it a 98% draft by the first quarter next year and does that even include I'm sorry there was a couple bullet points about restructuring I don't have the code sections 13 - 2 and 13 - for those the two code sections that will be done in q1 or that will be a second phase to the exist so one of the things that did not happen in the working group is that there were assertions that it's bad which is that's fine when that how they're organized that they've been scabbed on to as we have amended them over time when the question was asked what's wrong the response back was it's bad so at this point nobody has really kind of had the time to articulate what's bad about it clearly we could take some time and look at the

[206:01] organizational structure of it now it's based on the state federal campaign or the state campaign Practices Act so it's built on our existing codes built on the state model so it's familiar and there's case law and there's a lot of advantages to having it structured the way it is could it be done better of course it could be and I think that we will take some time as we move through December and January to look at some of that and if we can improve it we will that's very helpful okay and then if I can say about 13/4 on the record to do that that is something that I do think needs to be restructured for the things like Bob raised you know about these other things and and actually at each other things that you know do we the penalties are going to do and the authority to do remedial type things also you know what's the committee talked that the provisions in 13 for about citizen complaint versus what the city does as a criminal or civil matter all those

[207:00] things are messed up and make it very confusing for all of us so actually I have rewritten that to try to clear that up and Lynette and Diane are looking at that now so we do anticipate having that for thirteen okay so 13 for over a rework less so on 13 - but a subcommittee to help fix the 90% draft of that based on what the guidance we've given it is that working for everybody okay question and maybe this is for Diane as much as anybody listed we pass all this presumably they'll be then some regular to a regulatory work below the ordinance and maybe just explanations and all the Bluebook work so I imagine there's a fair amount of work that's gonna have to happen on the Blue Book then is in reaction to the ordinance is that a fair assumption yes it is and also just building the the internal infrastructure the reporting mechanism

[208:01] all that kind of stuff so what I was thinking that we could really implement for the 2019 election would be the expanded definition of Express advocacy the electioneering definition and then based on the fact that you made candidate donors natural persons we could probably do that to you you reduced the contribution scope rather than enlarged it so I think we could make sure you guys have an update because if we don't pass this until large let's say right I want to make sure you guys have enough time so that you can get the Bluebook up by June or May or whatever your quick turnaround but yeah we anticipate that it's gonna be a lot during that timeframe so yeah thank you okay and we'll just have to schedule some council a public hearing time on this okay so these are things you can already predict when we're headed here but go ahead final slide for for the working group going forward ideas to consider contribution limits for candidates and can be unofficial candidate committees generally should be

[209:00] attributed to national persons right we sort of touched on that but that seems to be a writing theme going forward review and adjust adjust the matching fund approach this is I think something ideas as Sam brought up earlier the Denver model this is also looking at also our matching funds 20,000 has been capped it does not rise at a cost of living increase or anything like that or we don't seem to have a ya know you used to be used to stood - yeah when did that happen Wow gift that keeps giving that one so we recommend me bringing back whatever formula was in place or just a one but a cola inflationary one seems to be appropriate and then enhancing public information materials explaining enforcement procedures and related Appeals we kind of touched on that but that's we're not just setting an ordinance on your end but then where does it come out in a blue book or

[210:01] something where the public has easy access to view it is is sort of vital revisit city contractor contribution regulations certainly some some of us on the working group are thinking that there may be some opportunity to relook at that going forward and establish an election commission this is sort of this future proofing some of those looked at this working group as being established in in many ways a reactionary sense to problems and issues that arose and then how can we come fix the things that went wrong the state of election campaign finance and election reform is so dynamic and changing so rapidly these days and case law as Jeff points out is in a rapidly changing environment we've been thinking that establishing commission might allow us to provide a more proactive opportunity to be suggesting things that are just beyond the horizon to get ahead of some of the issues that may arise prior to us needing to be reactionary to them and that does offer some other ways many communities throughout the Front Range

[211:00] and around the country have Election Commission's inherently built for that type of structure to advise Council on how to proactively enhance strengthen and and protect their local democracy so those are going forward ideas and thank you guys for the opportunity to serve and work with staff David and everybody it was awesome to work with and their leadership was great herding cats so thank you guys the opportunity and we appreciate working with you everybody so thank you back well Gus in a minute but the I guess I think you you switched the thing already she's / marché she wants to get to her stuff she's just oh you still have a whole nother I thought you were okay I guess the one thing is the cola for the matching things I think we might want to add that back and I would just like it's that's the questions you can we because we need that we can have that we need that to be robust an option that people

[212:01] keep choosing so I guess can we add that without much work yeah I think that that would be pretty easy to add back in the increasing amount for the maximum contribution for matching so that it continues - yeah I think the problem with that the reason why we did is because it got so confusing because it was accelerating and accelerating and accelerating since 1999 so nobody really knew what the number was and trying to do it so we talked about but the hundred dollars has never been changed since 99 yeah but it there's a and let's never change surely there's an easy formula that we use and that's how it was originally set up right nobody ever knows the number figure out a way to

[213:00] make it so it's not actually hard okay so other than that I think that was a good body of work it feels like the most important work is it okay if we let me ask a question given what staff just told us is anybody wanting to bite any more off this year okay so we'll put it on the list of good ideas to consider sometime by another council already tonight so okay so just real quick and backing up a little bit to the ballot measures that were passed this is kind of my high-level work plan for next year in 2020 for the 2019 election we will be doing the signature verification on it says municipal initiatives up here but it's actually municipal initiatives and charter changes it's all of the

[214:01] initiative petitions so that will be for 2019 we will make the changes to the initiative referendum and recall process changes that's the timeline for your municipal initiatives and the signature requirement number that changed under campaign finance phase 1 will implement some of those recommendations for 2019 we just went through what those would be and then I'll develop the plan for the remainder of those to be implemented in 2020 electronic signatures and online petitioning phase one of that is looking at a sign or something similar that allows signing petitions with the circulator and we are trying to move forward to scope that and implement that for the election this year which would actually have it up and running in June and then phase 2 after a sign is or whatever we end up with is implemented and the election is over then we would in quarter 3 scope the online petitioning project and check in with Council in quarter 4 and then you have

[215:00] the February 26 study session with the HRC recommendations and you're going to be looking at the boat 16 and the non-resident voting so I anticipate that could end up on my workplace as well it did not pass right okay and just to be clear so phase 1 of electronic signatures will be ready for the fall and then online petitioning which is a big early will start looking at that when the election is over quarter 3 okay just so that everybody's clear on that yeah okay you're not really asking us for our input on this you're just sharing your levy but I can I'll certainly take input yes does anybody have input other than awesome difficult is it time to go you done I'm done yeah the next two slides if you want to look at them they're they're just the work plan by quarter rather than by topic so I don't need to go through them again so we are we're done

[216:02] okay let the gushing begin you go ahead you guys I was just gonna say great job I'm unbelievable this is what a great citizen committee looks like you have done the work given us great recommendations and it's nice to have confidence in the work that you've done so it feels really good just across the board thank you all so much and did all that and of course we're not done with you because we owe a couple of you are going to volunteer to help with the drafting and then carrying understand if there's anything that didn't get caught presumably your help let's catch it but yeah it's been huge it is good to know we specifically said pick the people that have the strongest opinions and put them in the room yeah thanks thanks a lot for this I also want to thank staff

[217:00] for both managing this process and for having been really responsive I think to the suggestions that were put out there and I think we've ended up in a super good spot so I'm feeling really good about where we're going forward as far as campaign finance reform and the election rules because they are hard to get right and so like on the Charter Committee when we have put some things in there that we ended up rolling back in the end that's partly because this area is so complicated and it really needed this kind of focused work so thanks for doing that I also want to say that you know I think we can observe that you're pretty diverse group of folks come from come from different have different maybe political to use and I think I think and and I think it's really great great for a community that you guys demonstrated the leadership and the ability to collaborate and cooperate because I think you know we live in a divisive world it device the country right now I think the that this group of people who come from very different perspectives and don't agree on things substantively can get together from a procedural standpoint

[218:01] and and show the community how how we can lead and how can we can all get along and I think that's really great I really commend all of you for that thank you we all enjoyed the opportunity opportunity to serve and I can say that some unexpected friendships and relationships came out of this and and it was a positive experience I think all the way around yeah just one acknowledgement Valerie aces and here she was the one that wrote the report working the report and I thought it was just dynamite and she's also volunteered to work on the rewrite of the code and she is really really really good at this stuff that's great and then like thank you for saying that I think that that's very true and then finally a shout out I know he's left but Jeff he's one of the best and it's a

[219:02] glad that we had him you know so thank you all and with that [Applause] [Music] like that here is whether everybody is aware of what was aware before he actually committed these acts that he was intending to engage