February 26, 2019 — City Council Study Session

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[4:46] all right we're gonna call to order the Boulder City Council study session of February 26 2019 we have a couple of items before us the first one deals with mobile homes and the second one the variety of issues

[5:02] teed up for us by the Human Relations Commission before we get started just a couple of things one is you guys may recall that we are having on march 19th and 20th a bunch of the I don't know how many tribes are coming to have a two-day session with us and you may recall that some parts are open to the public and all of us the entire City Council is encouraged to come and then other parts are you know government-to-government consultations so only two council members can attend and some I'm supposed to attend to do the pomp and circumstance you know this will be circulating for people to sign up council members so it's kind of complicated but it'll circulate during the meeting I guess that's gonna do one other housekeeping thing yeah we also to receive today an email from Jennifer

[6:02] Faris at the deputy director of the library with draft poll for the library board member we could read a few months ago that we had to pull the community on but Solis and I have served on the polling committee with Johnny Teeter him as well the poll that you got in your mailboxes today is the product of three or four means that we've had so he would all respond back to Jennifer by a week from today with any comments you have in the poll that would be much appreciated okay I guess the only other thing I want to tell you is that the u.s. 36 mayors and commissioners coalition going to DC tomorrow for a new Lobby trip with all the muckety-mucks around here to go and pitch a couple of our transportation projects and yes I'm going on that but even the last time anyhow just just know that and I'm going to send around all the materials to so you can be aware of the messages about the specific projects for pitching

[7:01] but just an FYI to all of you okay and with that would do mobile homes yeah so good evening before I start I have a housekeeping item as well so we have a translator here tonight marina look rave and I'm gonna hand it to her so she can make the same announcement for any individuals that are here persona que necesita interpretation al español aqui tenemos copias de la presenters yoga español y los Piratas para la interpretation yes our presentation is in Spanish here as well so I'm Kurt for an hour director of housing Human Services and this evening we're going to be talking with you about an update to the manufactured home

[8:00] strategy and I'm joined tonight by Brenda written our crystal Lander and Jeff yin and Erin Poe is also here and Jeff Arthur is here if we have any infrastructure discussions as well so the mobile home our manufactured home communities have been valued by our city for many years there's many policy things that we've put in place many programs that we've put in place and one of the the residents that I that I'll be highlighting shortly Isabel Sanchez she lives at the the Mapleton Park and I think she really demonstrates the the leadership and community aspects for from Mapleton she's been on the on the

[9:02] HOA board for 11 years and we've we've worked with her with some difficult and challenging issues there and she's really committed to her community but the thing I found interesting is that like her and other families they have a sister or a brother or aunt or a mother who lived down the street with their families and it really creates a special place and so if you could go to the next slide I'll just read a quote from from her at present three of my adult children have purchased mobile homes in the Mapleton in Mapleton and a fourth is currently in the closing process I have come to value the unique sense of community fostered in Mapleton so tonight we're going to look at three well we're gonna we're

[10:01] going to start off by giving an overview of some of the city initiatives and and hi and give highlights of the community engagement that that's occurred to get us to this point and what we heard from the community and then we're gonna have sort of five areas of focus that we're gonna present to you and the goal is to get feedback from you are these the right areas of focus and you know what would your priorities be around them so one of the the councilmembers I believe at CAC asked also for an updates on Ponderosa so this past week we put an application and annexation application into the city it includes a site plan and really a plan for how Ponderosa would be developed over many years and

[11:02] focusing initially on the infrastructure and getting that upgraded and then gradually replacing some of the older homes with energy-efficient homes on foundations there's been a huge amount of clean engagement on that and we have a resident Leadership Committee there that meets on a very regular basis we have office hours out there and it's a tremendous community going through some very difficult change and it's it's a difficult process for them but we're glad that they're participating in letting their voices now and around having input to what their community will be like in the future so with that I'm gonna hand it over I think to Jeff thank you good evening I'll give you a short

[12:00] overview of how we approach development development of a manufactured housing strategy will provide a significant amount of background for that's drawn from the memo and other sources talk about the engagement and the results of that and then move into the items that were particularly interested in hearing from you about the proposed principles for decision-making around manufactured housing communities and then the areas of focus for developing work plan items potentially the approach has been to divide this project into three phases we've completed the first which is that of inquiry and information gathering and we have presented that to you we're in the middle of the second right now with you to try and sort what we learned into something that's actionable and then our third phase of this will be to flesh out those actions into work plan items that

[13:01] or can then be prioritized and incorporated into work plans if you so direct us the input we're asking is you know of course if you have thoughts about what we you have in your experience or what you've seen from what we have gathered but particularly we're hoping to hear from you as Kirk pointed out if the areas of focus are the right ones if some should be prioritized over others and either in terms of work effort or in terms of calendaring that would be particularly useful we are not proposing to go ahead and do any of these work items in the next couple of months rather we're proposing that they be fully scoped as we're playing items to give you a sense of the options to accomplish the goals in each area and what that might cost in terms of time effort and potentially money to do one thing we want to point out is that the city has had a long-standing policy that

[14:02] unlike most parts of the country we want to keep manufactured housing communities as a vital important valuable kind of housing option for our community and the boulder valley comp plan has had for almost two decades now the outlines of what we're trying to accomplish here which is to preserve the parks that we have develop new ones if possible and when possible try and find opportunities for residents to own and control their communities and then to address health and safety issues ideally before they happen so those are the main components of the adopted policy you'll see the strategy as we've developed it is organized around these and has some actions or orc plan items that could address them and in many different ways so for a quick overview of background information I'll hand it off to Crystal under good evening so I'm just providing

[15:05] this background information is somewhat is context and then also based on requests by councilmembers so to begin with 2.8 percent of boulders housing stock is manufactured housing that's about 1,300 units and I think the significance of it that we understand is that it's a detached relatively affordable housing stock and there are four communities located inside the city limits so that's Boulder Meadows Mapleton Orchard Grove and Vista Village those communities were built all between 50 and 60 years ago all of these communities have pretty much in your zero occupancy or a zero percent occupancy I'm sorry vacancy so they're they're all fully occupied and it's been that way as long as I've worked for the city they're Mapleton

[16:00] mobile home park has 120 permanently affordable restrictions on their on home pads and then as far as the housing stuff the homes themselves they're by and large owned although Boulder Meadows does have 119 licensed rentals and then another kind of distinguishing factor that comes up over and over again when we talk about manufactured housing is it pre HUD or is it not and that's really about in 1976 they established HUD standards for manufactured housing and and the quality was variable for homes prior to that so some were you know are very high quality and there's some that aren't so much Boulder meadows and Vista Village have a low share of homes that are pretty 1976 and Mapleton an orchard Grove have a higher share so some of the

[17:01] work that we also did is for the memo was to reach out to the mobile the manufactured home community owners and then also to residents to understand what's happening with rents and rent increases in those communities currently the market rate rents in the market rate excuse me the market rate rents in Vista Village Oranje Grove and Boulder Meadows are arranged between 725 and 800 and we've also looked at these rent creep increases over time and for market rate manufacturer home communities that's 4.2 percent similar to a two-bedroom the affordable Mapleton had a point 8 percent increase on average annually in our in the inflation rate was 2.4 percent so a little more background on on

[18:00] have been underway since 2015 when we did our last study session focal focus on manufactured housing we have a we've had a manufactured home community consultant for four years really focused on developing the collective voice of residents through by supporting HOAs also a citywide resident organization called Sima or the Coalition of manufactured homeowners of Boulder and then also helping to get the Colorado Coalition of manufactured homeowners which is a statewide organization established that the manufactured home consultant helped to inform ordinance 8216 which is on the next slide they also there we had a 1999 manufactured homeowner handbook that was updated by the consultant and then we've had two consultant teams and so we've had with with their support to fall programs on

[19:01] manufactured housing have occurred and there's been a shift more and more towards trying to figure out how to do more inclusive engagement in these communities so background on ordinances 80 43 in 8216 so those ordinance where ordinances were passed in the last five years and the purpose of them really was advancing a manufactured homeowner protections ordinance 80-43 passed in 2015 limits manufactured home community owners ability to prohibit the sale of pre seventy six homes it also limited required upgrades to existing manufactured homes and it and it placed the responsibility of tree maintenance on the owners of the manufactured home communities and then the second ordinance passed in 2017 focused on the right to privacy of manufactured homeowners prohibited retaliation by

[20:02] manufactured homeowners or manufactured home community owners and also introduced mandatory mediation I have a question sure could you explain how these are enforced like the tree maintenance was something that was brought up a couple of times with our high winds recently I can see this around the city also the prohibition of retaliation the enforcement provisions are contained in the code and rely on action taken by people who believe a violation has occurred the procedure then and I'll probably defer to our city attorneys if my overview is not sufficiently detailed is essentially to provide us a notice of a potential violation to the parties in

[21:00] some cases it's required to be that they're required under the ordinance to enter into mediation in other cases it would go to our code enforcement folks to evaluate the extent that which a violation has actually occurred and then the penalties for non correction of a violation are can vary but are also defined in the code I don't know if Brenda if you want to add anything or Tom I will I understand all of that but I guess my question goes more to the which ties into the prohibition of retaliation if it's an individual or whether or not it is can be the homeowners association itself how many times does this happen what kind of response is there and maybe those don't all have to be answered right at this moment but I think in terms of putting teeth into some of these items that we've heard about in your in your memo that that would be helpful Tom do you have anything to add here not

[22:04] really the it's like most of our code enforcement its complaint based in some areas we have dedicated resources to have more proactive enforcement this isn't one where we've done that so it goes with all of the other enforcement that we do for code violations so that's something that you could consider is whether or not we want to provide dedicated resources that's a council choice thank you okay so moving on to the next background item we were also asked for an update on the 2019 state legislation activity and it's a little bit premature to discuss it in detail but we're focusing on the state enforcement of the mobile home park act we're also looking at county powers to regulate and enforce the mobile home park act and then extending time to move

[23:04] or sell a mansion home upon eviction and then I know there's a lot of interest in in amending the mobile home park act and it just seems that generally there should be that some stakeholder engagement would need to happen and inform at 2019 22 so that would happen kind of 2019 2020 is how we're looking at that to figure out what exactly it might be amendments if I remember correctly one of our representatives Edie Hooton was talking about legislation is there draft legislation yet it hasn't been drafted yet it's in the works and the second item that we were asked to provide an update on was the rent a rent control bill and so we

[24:02] and I reached out again to tocar el castillo for this update so we do have a state statute what we call the state statute on rent control and that prohibits counties and municipalities from rent from enacting rent control and so that 2019 bill proposes to eliminate the prohibition on rent control and Boulder was actually part of a successful effort to get the Colorado Municipal League to support to support that bill however there some concerns that there some there's some opposition in the house concerned specifically about whether or not that would create substandard housing and so an idea that you can certainly reach out to Karl about is whether or not it would make sense to do a bill amendment and then

[25:00] with that I'm going to turn it over to Brenda rittenhauer so it has been my honor and pleasure to support the community engagement portion of this work we've gotten to talk to many stakeholders and so it's I'm happy to be able to share that work with you tonight as you'll see in front of you on the slide we've really been trying to follow our new community engagement process which really is the decision-making process we're trying to adopt as a city so you can see because of the timing of when this project started we've been able to fully utilize the decision-making wheel so we worked to define the issue before we started we determine who we needed to speak to who we needed to bring into the process and then we really did go to the community to ask them how they would like to be involved before we went out with our questions and that was an interesting

[26:00] process I'll explain that in a on the next slide we created the plan we did the plan which was the sharing information a foundation of information and inquiry and now we're here with you to work on identifying those options so so really we went with the first primary audience of stakeholders which was our manufactured housing residents and the owners and management was very important to us to get both sides of that story and we asked them how they'd like to be involved and we were surprised by the answer and grateful that we asked we had thought maybe this is an opportunity to bring everyone into a room together to have conversations together and that didn't quite fit with with how everyone wanted to engage everyone wanted to have the comer and where they were really able to bring forward the things that were important to them and that they needed us to hear so we did a staff led process where each

[27:01] of us took part in meeting with parts of each of the communities separately so we met with residents in various ways we met with the owners and management in various ways we then also took that out to agency partners outside of our organization and internal departments inside the organization and we asked them essentially the same questions so while they were in different rooms but we were asking for the same information really what we were talking about is what you see there the value of manufactured housing communities to each person we spoke with the challenges that they see of the type of housing and their ideas for the preservation and expansion we would lead with the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan commitment and asked them what they thought would lead to meeting those goals we engaged in a lot of different ways and we created a webpage that had a lot of the background

[28:02] information on it and a survey that people could take online in English or Spanish we sent out project email updates when they were relevant on that webpage people could sign up for that list we ended up with over 100 names on that list as I said we met with owners and managers for each of the four parks we did resident outreach in a lot of different ways we went to see mob meetings we had a table at Thal forum we had a table at Vista villages holiday party which they were nice enough to invite us to we also used some of the best practices we've learned at Ponderosa we really resourced each engagement with bilingual support and with childcare so that it could be as accessible as possible we did have monolingual and bilingual people participate from at least three of the parks so we felt good about getting that message out we also did a lot of flyering of doors

[29:01] particularly in Orchard Grove and Boulder Meadows where it's been a harder to engage we put flyers on every door in each of those parks with ways that people could get involved and then as I said we met with about nine outside agencies and about 15 different internal departments to get those ideas and values and challenges as well so as I said we talked about values concerns proposed ideas and solutions we got over 300 different unique ideas and heard repeats of many of those ideas from people we talked overall to over a hundred people the topics that really rose to the top you'll see on the slide housing which really is about the stock about the homes themselves about the types of housing that could be in the parks the types of housing that are in the parks now how to preserve them how to make them be viable into the future preservation of the communities development of new communities

[30:01] alternative ownership options including resident ownership which our residents have taken a lot of time to inform themselves about support of diversity and inclusion a lot of supporting those practices that we're trying to institute for making sure that everyone who lives in the parks is informed and involved when they need to be and manufactured housing resident and owner management relations a lot of ideas came up around how those relationships could really strengthen turn it over to Jeff in addition to learning from people that we talked to and with about these issues we also conducted some research we've clearly done a fair amount of work on this in the past so that formed a foundation but we did a variety we consulted a variety of sources and people at national organizations and other communities and and saw what

[31:01] resources were out there to try and assemble a list of ideas that was as comprehensive as possible for ideas that seemed relevant there's a list of those on page 11 in the packet and the memo if you want to dive in I also want to thank to use sustainable Community Development Law Clinic they can in partnership they conducted a an analysis of all 50 states relevant legislation for manufactured housing communities which is one of the attachments ba to help us identify what is going on in other states and clearly much of that is being applied to our discussions around what would make sense to do with the Colorado manufacturer mobile home park act but it also has local relevance and we've drawn from that so if there are questions on that they are here to address those more thoroughly than we could so from all of this input all of this research the prior work all the conversations we had

[32:01] we took on the task of organizing it and we tried a couple of things and ended up deciding that the the two ways we would present the information and organize it were to try and identify some general principles that we as a community could use in deciding how we're going to accomplish our or pursue our policy of preserving expanding this housing option and then from those and the work that we've done identify areas where we think more work would make sense so we would like to go through those three principles that we're proposing and then the actions and then get your feedback the principles were really an outgrowth of what were fairly clear themes that we heard from talking with people and by far the most prominent among those in and this includes park owners agencies departments as affordability is this is

[33:01] one of the very important things this housing option offers is a relatively affordable housing product that provides a living opportunity that you can't find in other ways so we drafted the language which you saw in the memo but essentially let's keep it that's let's see if our actions can help us maintain this option as the most affordable form of detached housing that we have and actually stay more affordable than other rental properties on or at least no more expensive than comparable rental properties so we will be interested in your thoughts on that next please the second one we chose and we heard from everyone if we want to keep these parks permanent as a permanent feature on our community they have to be economically viable they have to provide a safe and healthy and well ideally well maintained living

[34:01] environment and that applies to the community's infrastructure Common Spaces roads etc and the homes themselves as crystal pointed out most of these communities were built 4050 years ago many of the homes are approaching that age as well not you know all housing needs to be updated over time and so that's part of this is how well the communities can continue to function and the housing can continue to serve the people that live there the parks if they do not operate in in a financially viable way will end up either needing additional funding in many places they will close because they can't afford the investments we would hate to see something like that so financial viability was called out and then given that the three parks of the four and they're the three largest parks and in the community are privately owned they

[35:01] represent a substantial investment of capital which capital seeks return if they if the if parks cannot generate a reasonable return on investment I either there will be no additional capital brought to them or potentially cost the the the costs of investing in them over time will be too significant to maintain the rate of return that's required so they'll be deferred or put off which is has an effect on the potentially the health and safety and livability of the communities or there'll be upward pressure on the rents which hurts the affordability principle so that's why you see that there and then the third principle worsen thing is and we heard loud and clear is that the each of these parts provides a really strong community it provides an opportunity for people to live in a way that other neighborhoods don't the community members value living in that particular type of housing with their

[36:01] neighbors in a way that is very strong and has quite a significant value to them one thing that you will see in the near future is a collaboration with the boulder affordable housing research initiative out of CU to really accomplish if we can as best as we can be done a census as it were of Park residents so we have a better sense of the demographics of who lives in the parks what their particular resources and possible vulnerabilities might be so although we weren't able to get that information compiled yet that is a feature of this project that we'll be able to inform the actions as we move forward so we have are proposing these three principles they were built off of the community input and the research that we've done as a way of trying to guide the decision-making around what we

[37:00] should be doing they weren't meant to be all inclusive there is an important area our theme that came out of our conversations which was the need for the desire for improvements in the relationship between park owners and residents we thought about including that and decided is a decision-making principle for the city it would be difficult because we don't have much ability to influence that we have a lot of ability to encourage we can participate in some ways we can support but ultimately it's not something that we can control so I know that there have been suggestions about accountability being a principle we considered that as well we had two main reasons for not proposing it one was that on the one hand we think anything that is a requirement or is that otherwise is something that should people should be held accountable for that's just a best practice there

[38:01] shouldn't be requirements that are there's no mechanism for keeping people accountable so it felt more like an obvious Prince obvious feature to include in anything we do the other was many of the things that could support these principles don't have an accountability feature to them if we develop a program to help people replace their homes that's going to be voluntary almost certainly it will be probably a financial support and and perhaps some negotiations but there's not really an accountability approach to it so that was our rationale and it is something we believe is very important we just aren't defining it as a principle so moving on then we took all the information we gathered our research the past actions the cities had looked at our policies and then tried to identify actions or areas for further and more in-depth analysis and scoping of potential work

[39:01] plan items and we landed on these five to suggest for your consideration they as you'll see in the next few slides that they include multiple options or actions from that list and attachment C so they are there's no one-to-one correspondence there and we did that because there are several paths to accomplish the goals that found in each of these work areas and we thought that the analysis for those was overlapping and we would want to investigate in multiple ways of accomplishing an outcome so pad rent stabilization is clearly linked to affordability it's a principle concern of residents there are a variety of ways of getting there clearly the infrastructure in the parks because it delivers vital services to Park residents is of concern as we've seen recently it can be very disruptive and there are many ways of addressing ways of ensuring that those vital

[40:01] services are delivered to community residents and the variety of ways to accomplish that energy efficiency is not only consistent with our climate goal and our sustainability goals but there are significant challenges to doing some of the things that we almost take for granted in our community around that it's very difficult to do solar photovoltaic in mobile manufacture housing communities and there are barriers to that that we can look at ways the city might be able to help or others might be able to help address that and replacing a replacement of homes can not always but can result in significant energy savings for the individual homeowners as well as the community at large and as was pointed out in the email to you today there's the part of the analysis of that would be to determine whether that can be accomplished through retrofitting existing homes we have a little bit of experience with that but we want to look at that and more depth if this is an area that you direct us to do so we can

[41:05] step back if you'd like I'm so an infrastructure we identified or people identified many ways we could accomplish the goal of ensuring that the infrastructure continues to function well not only immediately but over as it ages further gets replaced and upgraded so there are a variety of paths for doing that we would like to be able to analyze all of them together and see to what extent each of these paths might make sense they can work in combination for sure they can work in combination on some of the other items that we're proposing as well so yeah yeah one of the things that was identified our current mobile home zone and our land use requirements was generated a long

[42:01] time ago and really hasn't been used for a new park yet and creates some complications for replacing of homes in existing parks so we want to make sure that our land use code our zone and other design guidelines actually supports the outcomes we want so if we want to have a new park that meets certain goals or new community let's make sure our zone is something that could be used right off the shelf so that we don't have to negotiate that if as part of creating a new community so we are proposing to take a look at that our zone currently doesn't allow for many housing options in manufactured housing communities many people suggested that we perhaps it should and in some cases shouldn't allow for different kinds of housing so that's included there as well and then finally the fifth area that we are suggesting is licensing whether you consider registration or licensing some way of as a community establishing standards whether it's for infrastructure or

[43:01] various forms of operation and the relationship between the owner and the and the tenants or the residents who lease land from that owner so there are some licensing programs out there and stay at the state level or local level that we could model on and worth investigating we believe we also suggest in looking at the long list of 60-plus actions that people had suggested or we came up with there are a few that we don't think are really big work efforts that we think with some outreach with a little more research we could decide or find out whether they're viable or could move forward I won't go through them but they're listed here the one under the city action that is a particular interest I think is a suggested program that would be an alternative if someone can no longer maintain their residency in a manufactured housing community rather than using an eviction path there

[44:01] might be alternatives that would give people more support help them move more slowly out without creating a financial hardship for the park owner enable them to have more time to sell their home Empire or relocate it if need be so that's one we think with a little research we could find a model and see to what extent that would be a good option and then the resident rights and notification seemed not like it doesn't need a lot of analysis it's something that we could just move forward on timeline we've requested a July time to bring you the fully thought-out and prioritized or suggested prioritization of work items and the full scoping of them following as you'll see analysis another round of communication engagement with all of the stakeholders and drafting the work product that would go to boards and commissions we are we've tentatively

[45:01] proposed going to the housing advisory board Planning Board Human Relations Commission and youth opportunities Advisory Board subject to your your desire to hear from those boards I suppose and say advise you so that's our plan from here we have four questions for you really do you have any feedback on what we've presented what you've read are you how do you feel what do you think about the decision making principles and that approach of music using those to guide how we move forward we have a brief summary of the engagement we plan to use very many of the same tools and same approach that we've used so far we're curious to know if you feel like that needs any adjustment and then lastly are you supportive of the actions or the work plan development of work plan items and scoping that we've laid out for you so with that I'll open it to questions okay

[46:02] questions so thank you for that good presentation in the memo it talks about Boulder Meadows being the only one of the four that has rental options is that right so what fraction of the pads in Boulder Meadows are rental versus ownership model it's approximately 20% 20% of rental okay thank you and then I know you went over this at some length but I was just a little confused about the accountability so the discussion that you held around that it seems to me like some of the five groups of actions that we're talking about do have a significant accountability component to them that would drive some amount of decision-making such as infrastructure obviously or if we licensing or warrants of serviceability any of those seem to me along with operational things to have

[47:01] an accountability component to it so how you know again if you wouldn't mind expanding a little more on why you didn't want to put that in even though it seems to apply to a few of these point out one of the things we added was believe it was a CAC request is which which would require legal analysis and you'll see a whole lot of asterisks out there part of that is how do you ensure that we can get the outcome we want with any policy actions that we take so that is an accountability feature and that was a lot of a lot of that the legal analysis would be not only how might we get to an outcome a policy or an ordinance a agreement but how would we then have it be enforceable so that the outcome is something would result from that right I mean that that's well said it certainly seems to me like accountability is a big part of you know making all of this hang together I would

[48:00] just put out there we can have it for discussion I just wanted to understand a little better I certainly think there are uncertainties here clearly going forward but the accountability is I think a driving goal of being able to hold the ownership accountable to good fair service to the community members well can I just add maybe improve accountability I mean because I do agree with what you said before I know we're doing questions but just a thought yes whatever we do should be accountable it's may be we are trying to make up for lost ground whatever in the past we if I may add um and I think also part of our discussion has was with the principles was really trying to boil it down to three factors that could apply to all of all the things we were proposing across the board we did definitely bounce

[49:01] accountability off these ideas as we were discussing them and and as Jeff was saying they are part of the analysis of many of them but we were really trying to hit on three principles that would apply to each of the things we were analyzing so we will we will definitely be looking at accountability where it's applicable right Cindy yes I was just gonna tag on it's more of a comment to what Sam said and I'm calling it putting some teeth into it the accountability thing and his and I understand that it doesn't apply to everything but some things and I didn't know that those the asterisks I hadn't read the small print below were all legal analyses which is great I mean that should be very helpful but one of the things under the affordability the was this increases in operating costs that a manufacturer or an owner I should say might claim for his lack of her lack of maintenance of

[50:02] infrastructure that has been passed on unfairly to residents so that's the kind of thing that that I think would be really important again to tie into this as I said more common well if nobody has questions maybe we jump right into do you have questions otherwise we'll jump into comments since we like those better I have two questions and one has to do Jeff you talked about I think under our land use code about barriers to solar PV is can you go through that a little bit more I don't have an in-depth understanding of all the barriers I don't know to what extent they are local versus potentially Xcel potentially Park owner so that is part of the analysis we want to do we have heard from residents in particular that there are significant

[51:00] barriers to doing that I don't know my teammates have any better understanding of that or not it doesn't look like we have in-depth knowledge yet you're gonna look into that like us to look into we will I get to put solar panels on my house it's it's kind of an equity thing and so people should be able to put solar panels on their houses and it really does reduce your outlay of cash you know and so it makes a lot of sense and it's where the city wants people to go so definitely I want to look at that and then with respect to the land use code I think there was are you talking about like setbacks anything else or spacing I guess we have some spacing requirements that are different that you know comport to fire code type regulations

[52:03] that's correct Lisa so that came up in in interviews with staff I'm trying to think it may have come up with interviews with some of the people at Mapleton with the Mapleton home association and it right now there's just one individual who's a realtor who has used the Board of Zoning adjustments to be able to put a new home into at least in the last I don't know six years or so a new home on a pad which means that there's a level you know it takes a level of understanding of how to approach the board in order to get a home replacement so it again it C it feels like an equity issue from what his staff is observing that would be good I think I know it Boulder Meadows at one point they put some rental homes on and they were smaller than I think the

[53:02] standard product but I think that was because of our land use codes so that's my understanding as well and I believe the regional manager going couches your if you'd like to yeah I get more information on that either in the break or no yeah no I it was explained to me yeah okay well you put the questions up and we will jump right into the meat of it oh I'm sorry yes Mary's up do you want to do so I think one of the things that Mary requested and is probably for Karl to put something out on was the rental application fee house bill and the local wage option house bill I would also add that when Erin and I visited with Casey Becker yesterday we also heard that one

[54:00] of the things on the table is the longer grace period at eviction so right now it's 48 hours and something that I think will be included in those but we might just check with Karl and get a update to Mary if I may take them sequentially here so I did speak with Karl about that he reminded me that you have a legislative update with him next week where he'll speak to those questions specifically the bill for considering the local minimum wage was just introduced there's a and with strong city support you know he will be planning to ask you about the rent rental application fee legislation which we don't know haven't looked at it closely enough to know that it even would apply to manufactured housing communities but certainly to rental product in the city so you'll be getting a chance to talk about that certainly next week the 48 hours for is referring

[55:03] to the time allowed to remove a home from a park in the event of an eviction and that is something that as we pointed out we are proposing for hopefully legislation this year to extend that to significantly longer given the financial and logistical barriers of removing a home or selling it yeah great and so that was one of hers that the only other one that's really a question and not a comment is she made a request about understanding the factors that park owners use in raising rental rates for pads and how that turns into at least maintained hopefully better service for the residents as far as infrastructure goes so again I don't expect you have to answer that now but she definitely wants to Danny into you know again there's a clear difference between the one city managed and owned

[56:01] park and the other three that are for-profit as far as rate of increase can I just do a clarification on that and so it's it's actually a resident managed part of Mapleton is me the city owns the land right and thistle and the residents its thistle is the owner and they have a land lease the Mapleton home Association has a land lease and an agreement whereby they managed the community great thanks for the clarification okay continue she also was in favor of the three principles but she said an additional principle to consider would be to build on the inherent resilience of these communities and that's I think where people were getting to unaccountability and it seems and I guess accountability could very easily go under vitality because if you don't have water you it's

[57:02] really hard for you to get to work in the presentable way and that's just a simple example okay so let's go to the questions can you put them up there and I have one more question I have one question all right he's already given comments in so in the legislative attempt intent one of the things that beacon came to my attention and speaking with the vice president of Riverstone was that while they put some little notices on residence doors in both English and Spanish there was no attempt to put the update of information on people who are living in that house in Spanish and she gave me a reason which I thought was very implausible which was that there

[58:01] are too many Spanish dialects but I guess I'm I'm wondering if there's a way at the local level that we could ask that these basic forms applications update forms things like that could also be in Spanish it can't be that hard of an ask and we have so many people who speak Spanish as their primary language it should just be a given and so I'm wondering this could that be done at just the local level or does that require state so that's a question off the top of my head I'd say it could be done at the local level but I'd want to do a little research to firm them okay so I'm just aware of any preemption on requiring bilingual but you never know what's out there until you look okay so

[59:00] I just think well-informed community is a happy community and so if we can have those forms in Spanish I would like to at least somebody to look into it thank you and just to piggyback onto that some maybe that's something that would would be fairly doable as part of a licensing program but maybe it's something we could just put in an ordinance separate from a licensing structure so whatever you can give us for the next round would be helpful because I agree that that's a priority I agree more piggybacking the one thing that came out of the recent Riverstone incident was also that there wasn't a uniform multi-faceted way to communicate with everybody and it was amazing how they didn't have phone numbers they didn't have cell phones they didn't know like it was like it never occurred to them so I guess I would put that not only as part of a the thing to research is maybe that it's it's both in Spanish and if there's another major language spoken

[60:01] there but also that they clarify the the mechanisms by which people can expect to be complicated with be it mobile phone Flyers whatever that it'd be much more rigorous okay so it seems like we should go through the actions but is there any and the blue questions just sort of the any other input on information that was collected I think we had some that does anybody have any on that I think the principles we had some thoughts on so accountability keeps coming up do we have I get that it's embedded I'm not sure if people want to add it because it keeps coming up Aaron well not directly to dad but just in terms of the community engagement just you know we're doing a lot of deep engagement work with Ponderosa and so hopefully the next phases of this plan will be part of what

[61:00] you engage with them on as you work with them through the other issues that you're talking to them about it seems like a good opportunity yeah on principles I mean I think the three that you have outlined are very important and they're they're good touchstones for looking at specific policies I don't really care if accountability is a separate line item or if it gets embedded explicitly so that it is very clear to the members of the community and the owners of these facilities that we're gonna have some expectations that we're going to continue to advance I mean the recent event or tchard Grove was big enough that we need to be thinking about what that tells us about all of our mobile home parks and so I think accountability is what the residents are really asking for here and they're asking for us to dig in and whether it's licensing which i think is a very interesting idea whether it's a warrant of serviceability whatever penalties that would bring if it was

[62:01] breached I believe that there are outstanding questions still and so making it clear everyone involved that we're taking this quite seriously I think is the reason why people are asking about the accountability so however you want to manage it I don't really care if it's a fourth one or not just that it's clear that you know vitality requires sewage water you know roads all the things that vitality requires so anyway it's not a big point for me how you do it but I really think people are looking for that and if I could just add to that I think people just feel like you know they pay their rent they they pay their mortgage on their homes they have and should have certain expectations and if we are not going to hold the the managers or the

[63:00] owners accountable then where the people supposed to go and so I I it doesn't have I I'm like Sam I I'm agnostic as to whether it's a fourth point but I think it needs to be a significant part and and for me I would put it in vitality because it's just I think I would just add it frankly I feel like we need to send a message both to the residents that we got their backs and we also kind of need to let the park owners knows you know what they need to be more accountable especially certain ones up them I would just go ahead and just put it out there so everybody's clear I agree and I think this whole thing of people not being able to contact their councilmembers we've heard some emails that you know different things have have occurred and then they have not they've

[64:01] been told not to contact council they again it's an equity thing every resident of this community has a right to contact any member of the City Council so oh good point of clarification that um it's the second principle is actually viability as opposed to vitality well okay viability but still business model which is why I think we need to put accountability in there we understand that some of these privately owned mobile home parks are supposed to be viable for the owners I'm sorry the park owners so I think accountability is a nice counterweight to that but and they should be viable for the people who own home so okay I agree

[65:01] anything else on principles I'm gonna jump in and say I agree with Sam and don't think that it needs to be because it is embedded that the the pieces that have been pursued in here again and again and again are really demonstrate to me and I really think that the community and the staff has done a really good job of bringing these forward to us so we can see which things need to be done before it goes back to have the prior prioritization done that the teeth will be in there if we tackle the right issues so that we don't need to have it called out and particularly in the ways in which some of these things are introduced just my opinion so I can go over Mary's if we would like to just have comments I just want the public to be able to hear them I know that you've you've received them so I

[66:04] have one of the important things I think she said is as priorities are established it should be taken into consideration that this is about reciprocity and equity residents at the various parks pay into water and sewer that they do not receive any of the benefits that the rest of the boulder community sees so that's just a general comment I think about infrastructure as well and about if there are these 4 percent annual rate increases on average what are the residents giving for the extra money that they pay every year can i colloquy on that and at this point in time many of the residents can't even see how much water they're actually using and to be good stewards of the earth the residents do want to know how much water they are actually using there's probably a park fee on top of that but I think we need to get to a point where we can look at meters and

[67:02] how those meters might happen and we've been talking about this for I don't know many years so it's just it's just it's an equity thing all of us who have apartments or detached houses or condos we all get a water bill every month and we know exactly what we've used and we know where we can cut back or not so good okay another thing that Mary mentioned is whatever the method used to establish the priorities it should Center the needs of the residents focusing on life safety health and well-being she's concerned with I think particularly with the pad rents going up at the rate they are that there's gentrification and displacement there could be happening as a result of that and that's something that we should address per se as that she talks about

[68:00] enforcement and then she also talks about both the resilience as Lisa mentioned but also putting accountability and specifically and then yeah so she mentioned like Lisa that there are other languages besides Spanish which maybe need to handle on a case-by-case basis and then she mentions that the open space master plan micro engagement approach could be something to look at here and that's just her earth out there and I think that's it for her list so can you let's just go march through each one of the proposed actions and see if we have stuff to add on rent stabilization obviously you have three different approaches that need researched I would say that this is key to affordability and a top priority I'm guessing everybody agrees yeah is there any other ideas underneath this well I mean I think from a legislative

[69:02] agenda standpoint we may need to bring kind of our particular issues that are related to rent control out specifically and Tom this is just a comment for you to think about it's not clear that the blanket the suspension of the rent control preemption is going to go through in that way and so one thing that we heard was if you have specific ass that are something that the city would like to be able to do along this line it's not kind of the classic apartment rent control that we need to bring that forward so if indeed we do hear that the general rent control preemption bill is not going to pass I think we need to have two or three specific ask this being one of them because I think there may be more appetite for that and then a generic bill Aaron do you have anything to have you yeah thanks for bringing that up Sam so I'll like with that and you know we

[70:00] are just talking about our legislative agenda next week side I have a request to y'all city staff if we could get a thought on if there are targeted ways that we could make rent stabilization for mobile home park pads more doable with a change to the state statutes that would be very helpful to know about because Sam and I both heard you know the whole repeal may not happen but maybe there's some openness to targeted things so so that on this topic I'd really like to hear that and I'll just throw up while we're talking about if we have any other we have a couple other great ideas a little targeted ways to help with rent stabilization in the city in general love to hear your ideas then next next week or do one thing I'd like to just make clear is we have some examples of things that people have suggested I don't want you to think that's all we would look at we will we tried to frame these as issues or goals we're trying to accomplish if we can

[71:00] accomplish pad rent stabilization and an error in a way that we haven't heard about yet or that isn't up there we want to be able to consider we plan to consider it if you give us the go-ahead on this so it's also possible that in investigating some of these they'll drop off so we want to keep focus on how do we accomplish a goal in this case pad rent stabilization and there are many ways to do that so just to clarify didn't you just want to know if we like the five that you've outlined and not the sub bullets or less material you say if you have strong thoughts about them sure but generally speaking we're hoping you will give us some clear guidance around these the goals were trying to accomplish if we say yes all five are really important is that helpful or is that are we supposed to be picking winners if there's one at one or more that you don't want us to work on or invest more time and that would be very helpful if you have a clear sense of priorities amongst yourselves that would be very helpful as well okay so we'll

[72:01] answer that one at the end but meanwhile just following up on that this rent pad stabilization voluntary by owners doesn't seem to be working so so I don't so that one may be one that's already been fully explored but the second one is something that might have some teeth in it so in in going through these like this when I looked at it I thought what could actually make a difference here in what the goals are for the communities so we've also heard some really interesting ideas from both the management and owners and from the community for incentivizing that stabilization so there could be a way that that we could get to that voluntary peace as well that's good to hear better communication for starters maybe okay Geoff I appreciate that thought in general I'm happy to have you all go work on this it's a great list I just

[73:01] want to make clear that just on the rent stabilization thing that we have potentially a hot iron right now at the legislature so a timeliness to that bit of it so just want to make sure we're thinking about that in the short-term not just with everything else I'm just gonna confirm that all the whole council wants us to work on potential amendments to the rent stabilization bill because generally we we've got it from right now as councils direction to support the bill as it is and so we generally don't propose amendments but I've heard from Sam and Aaron that that's something you'd like us to work on shortly and if that's the will of the council will certainly do that I just wanted to clarify that that's what that is so my suggestion I think Aaron's as well is this is a plan B I mean I think if it we want to support it as is if it could pass that would be fantastic because then all the rest of these things would naturally be allowed but in the case that it doesn't pass and you can ask Carl what he thinks the likelihood is I think it would be great to have not an amendment to but

[74:00] you know language that would replace essentially it's so and to the rest of you agree with that approach okay so I'll work with Calder in the week and see what we can get done and we'll certainly have a report for you next Tuesday thank you so much so at the last see mob meeting that I was at with you guys Jeff you proposed something and maybe it's on the MHC infrastructure that city ownership of infrastructure might be one thing we could consider in exchange for rent stabilization so I don't know if you want to expand upon that certainly that's an idea that people have been shown a fair amount of interest in and in a way of linking a couple of things that we feel pretty strongly about so we would want to definitely invest some time in scoping out what that would look like questions of timing and are central to that as well as what the exchange is okay so

[75:07] let's go to the next one yeah infrastructure is another top one given what we just experienced at Orchard grove or more importantly the residents experience it or it should grow so I'm thinking that that is definitely a top priority and again you when you mentioned these these are all options to explore and obviously you'd bring back the one that's best options with the pros and cons and trade offs for you to consider and yeah and I would tag onto what Lisa said and put in metering under this as a possibility because you know if we end up with city ownership of infrastructure we would potentially have a lot of control over what that looks like yes I guess this is a question but I mean it's been said but I guess I want to underscore it everybody that lives in the city is entitled to some basic infrastructure

[76:01] services being provided like water and sewer and if somebody is like an owner park owner is tasked with that and fails like there has got to be some mechanism to ensure that that happens or that they pay us and we do it for them or whatever but I guess that's the accountability piece but it strikes me that surely there's they are obligated to meet those basic services otherwise somebody else will do it for them and they all have yeah just like snow shoveling if you don't shovel the city comes in and does it and then you pay yeah it's a big abatement yep it's just a really big abatement yeah it's the time okay so anything else about infrastructure other than it's really important okay energy efficiency so I guess I would say yeah that's important to us I think well

[77:04] it's it is important I think we need to get basic services I mean if we have to choose I don't think you have to choose but if we had to choose first let's make sure that basic infrastructure taken care of but I would like these same options for sustainability to be available to everybody those in our community whether you live in a manufactured home or not so in that sense it should be I think equally available I would just add water efficiency into this because whether the pipes are leaky and residents are being you know apportion to pro rata share for leaky pipes or you know we would like ways to encourage the residents to know what their their actual water uses and to reduce it to the extent they can and to pay fairly for what they're using so I would just put that here as well because that's a way to tie that in from my

[78:01] opinion the first second and fifth are potentially the most important because they implicate like Suzanne said basic services and five is maybe a way of getting at those basic services and and requiring them in certain ways I think energy efficiency is obviously important that's near and dear to my heart but it also isn't as important as water and sewer necessarily in the short term so I would prioritize those first same with the land use code I don't really know what you're thinking completely there I mean I've heard setbacks and spacing and so on but again I think well that's important that the basic services and making sure that we have hooks into that are more important so I would say one two and five are at the top of my list and three and four kind of second and I would agree with that except for to the extent if if for its preventing us from doing one two or five then obviously we

[79:01] should get to it sooner rather than later and and I think I mean when you look at the Bulova a comp plan and we've passed it several times we say we want new mobile home parks and so those new mobile home parks I think we need to look at well what would the land use be would we have a foundation could we have a manufactured home that's a stick belt that would be easily put on a frame I think there were some concerns from people and I share those about having to have their homes for placed at their pre-1976 I've been in some of the pre-1976 homes and some of the people that have really made them very very very nice and so I wouldn't want to move out of that but any other thoughts is everybody agreeing

[80:00] with Sam on the one two five okay Aaron sorry just one more additional thought I mean I I mean I agree with the basic prioritization but seems like there's some potentially some Ishi's easy stuff like energy efficiency if there's some easy roadblocks to overcome with PV solar for example may as well get those done so I understand we keep them all on the list but and then just that interplay of energy efficiency and permanent foundations which we don't allow currently you know how different kinds of manufactured homes going forward particularly were exploring new parks might interact with energy efficiency and that kind of way so it'd be very again lower priority than making sure that the current parks are safe and have good infrastructure but I think intriguing to explore one of the things that came up in my discussion with miss jurgis was that we talked about skirts

[81:00] and we talked about energy efficiency of the skirts and stuff like that and she said that when there become holes or drafts are in there then they affect the pipes and so I guess I'd be very much interested in looking at how do we help people with skirts or do we do that I used to live in a mobile home in Idaho that they used straw bale around the base and it really end around the house and it really made it much more energy efficient but you know the thing is since we need to make sure that whatever infrastructure is exposed isn't exposed to the elements okay anything about anything more about land use codes anything else so mostly I think we're agreeing with you are there any other specific

[82:02] questions you have that you'd like us to hold forth on I think so the issue of parks new parks came up and then being landlocked and limited and I would be remiss if I didn't bring up my favorite topic or one of them which is putting a mobile home park eventually on our Municipal Airport that serves less than 200 people we could serve a lot more people using making a new mobile home park at at least some of our land at the airport and I won't be here when you get to talk about it for the next comp plan but I really hope you do remember that and it's in area one I think our Airport is a hundred and thirty-some acres and certainly we should be able to carve out some of that for a really nice

[83:00] manufactured home community I think you have answered our questions well and command giving us good guidance if the timeline and if there are no comments about the timeline that's the time we'll have we'll have the staff resources we have and we will prioritize developing more thoroughly the items around pad rent stabilization infrastructure and licensing than the other two with the time we have available but you'll still get an analysis of those and just clarify you know be coming back in the summer to actually with actionable proposals so our intent is to take each of these to do some more work with other staff and other experts to try and scope out what it would take to identify which options have the most promise what the pros and cons might be and then bring them to you in July at this time is what

[84:01] we have scheduled to get your direction on which to turn into actionable work items and move forward under our work plans okay so then I guess that prompts a question like if we said yeah let's figure out licensing one would be the soonest we would see ordinance language it will depend on what we find and in terms of our legal analysis what our constraints might be what other models we can pluck off the shelf and turn into something actionable that's work that is what we intend to do over the next couple of months and then get community input on that okay well do you think I guess I'm just pushing a little bit I appreciate do you think we'll get to or defined without any of these discounsel I hesitate to say I don't know not knowing the legal issues unless Tom has some thoughts on that we can always try and

[85:01] advance something and with the amount of research were able to do but I think there's a good chance we'll get to some of this with this council system okay I can't promise all of the harder stuff but several other things you suggested we're not heavy less and so to answer your question we'll try to get some of it done just tell us what you want and we can do it well they're gonna come back in July right yeah and then we can go from there and maybe at our July meeting you might have a couple ordinances prepared that we might be able to take on we could certainly work on it no and it would be greatly appreciated I for one would find it very satisfying yes okay and if you do find that some of these are easy lists and we can fit them in as we go then that feels all right - yeah I think right I do want to say thank you so much for the work

[86:02] you've done on this and I feel like the materials presented tonight and prepared for tonight we're just outstanding and I just want to thank you and I want to thank the community out there in the mobile home park owners who have participated in a constructive way and let's just keep the dialogue going and we can't do what we do without your involvement so keep it up and thank you for all your involvement well said Aaron yeah I'll second that thank you to the mobile home park residents thanks so much for your constructive involvement for being here and being so engaged and I also want to give a shout out to the folks at the sustainable Community Development Clinic at CU law the policy analysis was really helpful and I was actually meeting with them this morning on some different topics around affordable housing and homelessness it was very impressed with their dedication and knowledge and hard

[87:00] working attitude so thanks so much for the work you've done yeah all right and thanks to staff yeah I know this is a big priority and thanks to Boulder Meadows owners for coming in managers that's a big deal yeah okay then

[90:26] and you guys come back soon get this

[92:23] what we're missing Nikhil I know it's really surprising Texan

[93:39] and we're starting with those 16 going okay everybody we're gonna reconvene now and start with the Human Relations Commission series of topics so good

[94:00] evening again i'm kurt for an hour director of housing human services so this evening we're gonna be talking about three items and just to give you I'll do a little brief on what that structure will look like so we will start off with a brief presentation we'll have some input from the Human Relations Commission person who's been related to that or put some additional efforts into those items and then we'll have the discussion so there's basically three sections that we'll be going through so tonight clay Fong will be is our staff member leading our our presentations and all three Lindsey Loberg is has joined me and Nick l-man cacar I'm not sure where he is but okay but we are starting a little bit earlier than we thought so I think you'll be joining us shortly nope

[95:02] there's actually a button okay hi everyone I'm clay Fong as Curt is indicated I'm the manager of community relations in the office of Human Rights as Curt indicated we'll be doing almost like three mini study sessions tonight the first voting initiatives ii on hate crime sentence enhancement and the final on gender inclusive language revisions so that's sort of self-explanatory on the first topic on the issues relating to voting the first question for counsel is the City Council wish to move forward with referring voting by sixteen and seventeen year olds and municipal elections as a 2019 ballot initiative absent a citizen led initiatives the second question which is quite similar is the City Council wish to move forward with referring voting by non-citizens in municipal elections as a 2019 ballot issue absent the citizen led initiative we can just see what brief outline of the discussion looks like tonight so

[96:02] we'll start with the vote 16-piece and as some of you may be familiar with this part of this originated with you AB the youth opportunities Advisory Board and in terms of analysis and you know this has happened in a few other jurisdictions there's some reasonably compelling reasons to extend the voting franchise to younger people one is that you're essentially building a foundation for more civic participation by getting people started more young and there is some data to indicate potentially that there's a longer-term increase in voter turnout the other piece too is that 16 and 17-year olds are impacted by local policies maybe more than somebody younger you know at they're at an age where they may start driving decisions made regarding education public welfare etc start to have more of an impact and you know they might have on them if they were younger people another interesting piece and I suppose this goes a little bit to sort of bring development issues and what-have-you is that there's the body of evidence indicates that individuals in this age group are

[97:01] equivalent to 18 year olds and relevant capacities so decision-making analytical skills and the like are all comparable to those that currently enjoy the benefits of being able to vote we've had some municipalities Takoma Park in Hyattsville Maryland and you'll be hearing those about those municipalities again a little bit later they have adopted this and what they have found is they found you know higher level of civic engagement amongst young people and you know in things like civics class they're saying folks are more engaged because they have a real stake it's no longer an abstract issue they're also seeing more engagement on the part of some political candidates and people bring forward certain issues with young people so there's really a greater sense of sort of public engagement with young people that are allowed to vote so you know and this is a little bit challenging in some ways because you know currently you know as we are you know my current understanding right now

[98:00] is that you know until city council decides to move forward on this you know we're not to expand much okay we're not to expand sort of city resources on looking into this further until you know we get the green light from City Council and you know one of the issues that we have not been able to look at or what are the real costs and resources involved in making this into a reality so if you decide to move forward with this that is something that we would need to assess to make this work you know we've identified three options to move this forward one is working with the boulder county clerk and recorders office to allow younger city of boulder residents to vote on a city ballot one reason for doing that is that there is a statewide election system and we would somehow need to have some access to that in terms of the registration piece and then I've recently learned too that we would not be able to have access to that unless we also had permission from the Secretary of State to do so so that

[99:00] would be part of the issues with that the other would be that the city of Boulder would run its own election for young voters sort of independent of everything else again we don't know what the resources involved would be for that so that's another unknown the last plausible option is to explore with other cities in Boulder County the possibility of doing the expansion of the franchise countywide so we would have to partner up with all the other jurisdictions in the county to move forward somewhat similar analysis exists when we start looking at the issues of non citizen voting like young people non-citizens to have a stake in local policies and decisions made through a democratic process can have a very real impact on them the second point which kind of reminds me of some of the schoolhouse rock kind of stuff is you know non-citizens pay taxes but are unrepresented in can't vote so you know some may say this raises a question of you know representation and taxation again we've seen that there are some municipalities and those are those two

[100:01] municipalities that we had earlier mentioned in Maryland that have extended the franchise to non-citizens but I think this is a very important caveat it's been brought to our attention that when you apply for citizenship in the United States there's a there's a questionnaire and one of the questions on the questionnaire is have you been registered to vote and this creates a potentially vulnerable position for people who have done so so this is a detail that would certainly have to be addressed it's a pretty pressing detail so that if someone answered in the affirmative and was voting in a boulder municipal election this would not somehow get them under the radar of ice and subject them to difficulties and applying for citizenship or criminal penalties so I think that would be the major concern around this particular piece and we would need to figure that out so we return to those basic questions and I think at this point we should be we should be open for discussion at this point okay I get some questions I'm

[101:12] interested in seeing this I think the process of having a citizen led initiative is actually a better one because it's a way it's a platform to educate the community about it to have dialogue about the the issues and I think people are more involved so that when the ballot initiative appears on the ballot people are more informed in terms of their voting for it so I got you next I guess and to me the question is what is the citizen engagement like as their group champion this is yo AB well for either of the two efforts whose gung-ho about this so my understanding and this is prior to my

[102:00] time taking this position is that when this was really brought up about a year ago there were some groups that had expressed some grassroots interest in that since then though we've not seen anybody reach out to the Human Relations Commission at least so it's hard for me to gauge exactly who is motivated around this okay we have a queue okay okay just two questions actually for Tom I think Tom can you remind us again if you know off the top of your head we change recently the rule or maybe maybe one that knows this rules for number of signatures on a petition and also when the deadline is for submission of a residence petition to get on the ballot do you know this so I know to turn in a charter change amendment that did not change that's August 7th okay these are the Charter changes yeah it would be August 7 okay and you know the number we change the calculation of the number right now we changed it for initiative

[103:02] municipal initiatives I'll check on the Charter one I don't think we changed it so it's probably around was it 4500 like around 45 that's good enough okay thank you a couple more questions before we get to commas golden recently had this on their ballot can we talk a little bit about their experience and had they worked out any of the questions on like how are they gonna do it with their County so on some of those specifics we don't have information on but we can certainly find out but what I've been led to understand is that it was not as much of a citizen lead process as it could have been I mean Council had embraced it but I understand that there are very little resources and very little public engagement and it's arguable that the lack of public engagement didn't do the success of the initiative any favors and then the other thing is do we have any sense for either of them the number of eligible voters

[104:00] that we would anticipate which I think is related to the costs and also the logistical hurdles we would also need to research that you asked us that on Monday we weren't able to get to that okay yep I guess I feel like I'm monopolizing it I guess one other question is on the non citizen voting obviously protecting the data of people that chose to give it to us would be paramount I guess what guarantees if any do we have that we can do that and do we know what to come a park in Hyattsville were able to do a little bit so we we don't think we can prevent it protected voting records are under state law considered public records and there's there's really no exemption that we can think of under Quora that would protect them what I read was I think it was San Francisco also extended non citizen voting for school boards and they say that the

[105:00] people who vote tend to be legal residents and not people who are completely undocumented so they don't expect them to participate and they just accept that so they are extending the franchise to some segments of the people who are non-citizens but not to all like okay do you have knowledge of this question you need a you know you gotta push okay I think yeah so I don't know about the vote 16 but on the non citizen voting that there's a community group the coalition to expand voting rights that brought us forth to the Commission and City lasted has continued going and I've been meeting with them every other week so and they have been looking into addressing these issues with some national lawyers and have also been building out the coalition to include people who say League of Women Voters and all the group says I just want to

[106:01] specify that there's an active group around this and we'll be sending they will be sending an update to the council I just talked to them today sometime next month on what they plan to do but they're looking at both 2019 and 2020 as a potential to collect signatures and women forth hey can you introduce yourself I'm Nikki the chair of the city's Human Relations Commission thanks thank you okay any other questions yeah so clay you mentioned that for the vote 16 that one of the options would be to get other cities in the county as well but sort of to eliminating the difficulty of the city versus county level voting we probably have to get like absolutely every city plus the county to pass that simultaneously otherwise you still the same kind of fundamental difficulty I think that's correct assessment yeah which would be be tough yeah okay thank

[107:00] you question it's not a question I was just gonna read Mary's comment okay you want it okay so Mary said my support for a citizen LED ballot initiative is based on observations and personal experience that they build community promote movement building enhanced critical thinking create connection solidarity and accountability the process also cultivates leadership in power and power is not near zero-sum in short democracy is is practiced for these three all these reasons I do not support a council led initiative on either of these proposals okay she also adds that she believes that at least some subgroup here's planning a citizen led initiative she doesn't I think it's non citizen voting so I'll just jump in with my comments Bob and I just met with some members of Joab before this meeting and

[108:01] it seems like they're still interested in pursuing this for the vote 16 it wasn't clear to me whether they were ready yet or not in other words fully organized enough to be doing a campaign on this but I agree with Mary that these are both going to be controversial enough in certain ways that having you know the socialization piece is important what I've heard about the golden situation was that that didn't happen very well and I think it went down something like 2 to 1 and so it was just put forward by a council and then not supported with like signature-gathering campaign which will serve to both educate people who haven't thought through some of these issues they will need to be able to address those with people letter-writing campaigns and so on so I tend to think that these could be pretty worthy but I think they're gonna need you know kind of a groundswell of support and so if

[109:01] there are people willing to run something this year and gather signatures this year I think that's the right way to go about it because the signature gathering and the coalition building really will serve to elevate it and people's consciousness so I'm not particularly interested in council putting this forward yeah and I would just add to Sam Singh I was on council when those initiatives were put on in the lost and there was a lot of the anger were one it was to put non-voting non-resident citizen residents on our boards that was the issue and so when up once and then it it was voted down and then a couple years later it came back and I think there was much more public discussion about it it did pass but since we've passed it we have yet I think we did it for one individual

[110:01] and that individual declined to serve on a board which we yeah well we had well week somebody served we had someone yeah but did the other it was it we have had one person who has been two people actually who have been not documented and who have served on earth but when we did that ballot issue it was of the concern that this person this individual had applied who was an undocumented resident and he wanted to be on one of our boards and then the site year cycle went and he didn't reapply something had happened and so anyway all I'm saying is that things have it needs to have more public discussion in the way you do that by doing petitions i'm with with a group as far as I'd rather have each of these brought forward with residents initiative it sounds like there's a

[111:01] group form at least on one new era might be another group that might support this I don't want to anybody what I don't organize themselves but but that's not like there's a little bit of work to do because these groups could come to you and say geez there's some issues we heard it at the study session can you help us do the issues and so I'd like to if Council agrees instruct staff to be supportive and helpful and do the legal research and the other work that might be necessary within reason to help these groups because I wouldn't want these groups to go out there just pull a petition get 4500 signatures and find out there's a really big problem so to the extent that there are issues or problems or maybe there's ways to do this that gets around some of these problems to guide these groups so that their path forward is is is logical and we don't run into a problem in November we know what the issues are in May or June or July as they're they're putting this together in collecting signatures so I'd like to if Council agrees I like to instruct staff to be supportive of a residence initiative so I assume that

[112:03] you want us to support a group that would come to us and seek that information or legal research some of the issues you identify which are not bottomed out yet I'm not suggesting you have to go out and figure those out because if no one shows up at your door staff right no sense in spending the time but if a group comes to you and right and asked for some help I'm sorting through some these issues I guess I'd like to suggest you know within reason that staff and our legal team beep helpful supportive of that that's the clarification I was asking well can I ask another question related to that though is there a recommendation from the Commission I mean is HRC fired up to do one of these or both of these or or they're just saying hey what do we think I guess because yeah to me that's also about if it's not a priority for HRC anyhow let's keep let's keep going down and hear from more people then we'll try to conclude where we're at

[113:00] oh sorry on Bob's so isn't the normal process that when somebody brings us a proposed initiative to carry that you give feedback to that yes yes and so it would be I think expected that we would provide that level of support so I agree with you but I also agree that doing the work ahead of time doesn't seem to make sense so Santa clarify though what I heard Bob and Kurtz say was the issues such as how we would go about conducting an election or what are the potential obstacles if this comes forward by what I'm hearing as you want us to explore that and maybe give as he said bottomed out those issues before so that people aren't discovering those in November and so that and that's your understanding so like contact the County Clerk and see what's possible or what put some numbers on what it would cost for the city to run an election can I jump in here I happen to see Hillary Hall and so I said

[114:01] hey by the way we're doing this do you have any thoughts about this more like what would be the logistical challenges and she was then she started going well okay think about how many ballots we have to do when you have a special district within your larger city within your larger County within your larger state well we have legislators you know half a boulders represented by eating and the other half by Casey for example anyhow you have to end up printing each new ballots anyhow so it gets led logistically more complicated Sonia but I do think at least a preliminary conversation just to kind of get the sense of what we'd be talking about it also is related to the number of voters so anyhow we could at least do that to better form out the playing field I guess I would also say I would like to know real quickly about if we cannot protect people's information that

[115:00] needs to be known from the get-go and so then this becomes about having green card holders vote and is that motivating to people enough to do this I guess I would like us to define the playing field a little bit forget who I interrupted Aaron yeah so I mean I'm supportive of these ideas you know just say I have a nearly 16 year old son who I think would make a fantastic voter and and I also think that having all of our resident adult residents be able to vote would be a fair thing so I'm supportive of these ideas I agree with my colleagues that I'd love to see a citizen initiative process and then to colloquy a little bit about how that might look I mean I think the the feedback that Bob gave was is not go ahead and do all this research on your own but I think it's to do more than just the level that we would normally do somebody brings in a potential petition and we answered well here's the kind of language you'd have to do here's the steps you'd follow but I think to go past that instead say well there's some

[116:01] complexities to these and to ask you if citizen groups do come forward with these ideas and are trying to work on them to assist them with some staff time on some research on how those things might end up working out so that's what I was hearing and that I would definitely support that a little bit of additional staff support if those groups come forward does that sound right to people it sounds right to me yeah I guess I would just say we should offer an invitation to the people who might do either one of these to begin an engagement with staff as soon as they think they're really going to move it forward because staff can at least tell them here's the identified issues how do you want to deal with them they may have their own opinions for instance about the protection of information and so I'd be happy whether whether they would want to carry it forward in light of that information so so I mean I think they would have strategic decisions that they would want to flesh out staff could help

[117:03] them identify the issues but they might you know they're the ones carrying the petitions they're the ones that are probably gonna have to figure out what makes sense yeah I just think so we just asked housing staff and this guy who's still here to put something together for July so we could try and finish some Ordinances I just I'm fine with that but I think we need to be sure how much time goes into it enough okay so let me sum up what I think I hear well and I would agree with Aaron I think both of these are laudable concepts and I especially think the sixteen to seventeen year old one I think teaching people to be engaged citizens or residents who vote it's a very useful thing and I think when you're in high school the place where you live growing up is where you tend to plug in

[118:01] and less so when you go away to college because you're kind of distracted okay so what I'm hearing is there's interested in the concepts we'd prefer a citizen led initiative and to the extent that one emerges or if the folks listening here say yes we already a certain amount of staff time but given other priorities and I would expect the HRC to also presumably you have priorities and you can help with the that effort so that's some up is that good enough okay okay so this takes us to our second topic which is hate crime sentence enhancement will be following kind of a similar structure to the previous piece so we'll be looking at analysis summary of community engagement next steps and then looking at again the questions presented to Council with respect to this so this is kind of a

[119:01] high-level overview you know we haven't looked at this for a while and we believe that there are reasons to revisit boulders hate crimes approach a lot of that is based on feedback from the process of public engagement around diversity inclusivity in Boulder from 2060 from 2016 to 2018 that includes what's been captured in the community perceptions assessment study the CPA open house event in 2017 there was an HRC public hearing on racial bias in Hayden since eight incidents a little bit about a year ago and other folks coming before the HRC and I understand in summonses console I feel very strange quoting buddy who's sitting down the table for me so nikhil maybe if you want to just expand on what you've said and or disapprove well I won't go ahead and leave the quote but I do think why we should strengthen the municipal

[120:00] ordinance is because of some of the difficulties we have in in keeping hate crimes one is that at the state level based on the past state legislators and I think nationally it's difficult to get the strongest and most effective hate crime laws passed at the state level and within alone we also have some gaps as well so hence we have the mixed motive and religious bias protections in this included in this that was not coupled under state law additionally while federal law is quite good you have to have a violation of the interstate commerce clause and and there's some legal reasons that make federal law difficult to apply at state level so for instance like the South Carolina trilled shooting there's difficulty in the in the feds coming in and doing something about that so you know again it goes back to a lot of what we've been doing without being conscious and doing the best we can and acting at a local level to address the national lies and hate

[121:00] and issues that maybe we have difficulty at the the state and national level doing thank you so we're gonna look at two areas that we feel are most appropriate for expanded protection one is that pertaining to mixed motive and the other is that pertaining to religious practice and Nikhil and I have been working very closely on these issues and he's you know taking a bit of a leadership role in helping us to identify some of these issues and what some of the possible solutions are so mixed-motive an example of a mixed mode of hate incident might be your classic fender bender in the parking lot you know people crash into each other nobody knows what the other person is they get out of the car it escalates into an assault and then in the course of it it takes on a racially charged nature or racial epithets are thrown about you know that's sort of a classic example somebody gets hurt somebody gets arrested the problem that that we found in other jurisdictions is that it can be very problematic to charge something as a

[122:01] hate crime if there are other motives involved so the mixed motive piece and that the workaround with that and we've seen this in a lot of state laws Illinois being most notable and we'll talk a little bit more about that momentarily where both the case law and explicit statute says that mixed mode of crimes you can still pursue them as a hate crime in addition to the underlying crime and you know locally what we're looking at because we're not talking about state law we're talking about municipal law so we'd be looking at things like lower level assaults the lower degree of assault vandalism etc you know we aren't necessarily going to be getting into things like murder or you know the much more serious crimes that are going to be charged out by the DA nevertheless I think that it's important or and I think this is the view of the HRC as well that essentially he crimes laws aren't just about penalizing the behavior that

[123:02] underlies hate offense but they are also about sending a message to vulnerable folks in the community that there is a degree of protection and a recognition of their vulnerability and I think that's very important especially and I think many will argue that in the last few years as certain sort of behaviors become more more millat normalized and I think that's to the detriment the need for such enhancements becomes increasingly necessary a good example of this and this may seem a little sort of time-travel is this quote actually comes from a 2000 report that covers the year 2002 but it actually was published after 2002 as these government reports tend to be and it actually refers to a 2003 state statute in Illinois and essentially the quote says that you know we now kind of have a conclusive guidance with respect to saying if there

[124:01] is a mixed motive this can still be pursued as a hate crime so you know I think that sort of sums up the mixed motive piece I mean it's a relatively simple piece but I think because of some of the challenges that are faced where you don't have explicit language allowing for mixed motive charges it's an important piece to pursue next up is religious practice and again HRC even the Human Relations Commission is receive feedback about incidents involving individuals practicing their religious beliefs and when we talk about religious practice we're not talking just about you know people in a church but people that might be engaged in individual prayer and a house of work outside of a house of worship you know a student on campus or somebody in a public space in a park or something like that so that's really what we're trying to provide here we have some good guidance at both the federal and state level and I believe that our current district

[125:01] attorney who had experience in New York State as prosecutor in New York City has pointed us to the New York State misdemeanor language is a worthwhile starting point it may not be enough to simply make some of those changes with respect to the language ordinance with sentence enhancements without also looking at some other pieces of the puzzle here one would be that look at who's currently protected under hate crimes ordinances those don't necessarily line up with the protected classes identified in the Human Rights Ordinance so it would be worthwhile to make sure that there's some consistency in that the other piece which is related more to a policy piece is really working with the police and helping to sort of boost the training on hate crimes and investigation because these do have some special sensitivities that may be absent from other types of offenses another piece to consider is that of looking at housing status as a protected class that

[126:01] could also be covered under a hate crime sentence enhancement piece so adding you know the folks that are unhoused as part of that because certainly we have seen attacks on folks in that population last but not least is the potential to encourage additional use of restorative justice as an option for offender dialogue of course we have to be careful that we're not creating a dynamic where victims are being revitalized but in cases where things may be a bit more gray taking advantage of an opportunity to create a meaningful dialogue might be one of the more constructive things that we like to do in dealing with these types of issues with respect to community engagement and perhaps this is a bit of a repeat of some earlier points you know there's been a lot done in the last few years and the reason why we're emphasizing that point is we have to recognize the possibility of feedback fatigue romantic

[127:00] our has pointed out to me that you know a lot of folks have been engaged on this issue and we don't want to sort of have them come to the table yet again when they feel that they've kind of adequately said their piece with respect to their concerns about these issues nevertheless with respect to community engagement you know options would include a hearing at HRC or some other sort of hearing or public outreach event if council decides to move forward on this here's just a bit of a timeline on how we might want to work with this and you know we can see it sort of has the steps of the City Attorney's Office working on fine tuning and developing language potential for public hearing a final sort of review and then ultimately it would come back before City Council for their consideration so these are the council questions the first being essentially to direct staff to you know address the issues of mixed-motive and religious expression and to also select which of the policy recommend recommend a shion's would the City Council wish to

[128:02] pursue okay so to summarize and again you know out of respect for his work on this as a commissioner main car do you have any sort of concluding statements on this topic just a couple things I will add when we look at the the municipal level as as clay had mentioned we those would be low-level crimes and assaults and in cases of craftsman but nevertheless it's important not to discount minimize rationalize those in any way so for instance a lot of this came out of feedback that the Commission Godse on you know Muslim students at CU and some having had call buildings torn off and being called racial epithets now that would not be an assault that put someone in the hospital but that could be classified as a simple assault that

[129:00] could go to the the municipal cordoned this could you know these changes could enhance those the ability to charge those as a hate crime with the religious protections and then also the mixed motive piece in case that came into play as a defense the other thing that a mixed motive pieces could also probably that you should know about is say attacks on GLBT communities and a common defense is used as like a gay panic defense with someone say someone you know hit on someone who was straight who then assaulted them lose something using that as a defense I mean it's ugly but that's been used in cases nationally and I think the mixed motive piece could go some way in terms of providing additional protections around the law to to victims in those instances besides that the only thing I have to add as I appreciate that the counsel Tom Jane our new office have all been really supportive in the Commission staff and my fellow commissioners in taking this this law it it means a lot

[130:00] to me personally after healing a lot of feedback that the Commission God over my whole time on the Commission and all of these people who see studies every time hate crimes came up it stung me quite a bit um due to my own personal experiences mmm due to some of my own personal experiences with this and knowing what victims go through in the system and what kind of defenses get used and what can happen to you and so you know over the past decade of my life I've devoted myself to assisting victims and trying to find ways to improve this and we had a have a really good law on the books and order that was passed I think we found some some loopholes that could I know personally would change some people's lives for the better so I thank you for taking the seriously and the consideration you gave tonight okay questions question on the restorative justice piece I can see that being

[131:02] something that cuts both ways where it could be good in certain cases and not so good for the victim in other cases have you talked to the municipal judge about this component what kind of digging have you done into how she would handle it if this were something that were brought forward well I have to confess in my previous position with the city I was running the mediation program on the restorative justice program so we even worked personally I've been working with the municipal courts on this stuff for over ten years you know I think there is a greater level of sensitivity and I think we would need to develop new guidelines with respect to these types of crimes versus your sort of typical disorderly conduct kind of charge and I think that you know this is a conversation that would need to take place I think the main safeguards I would be concerned about is really protecting the victims and one way that we've addressed that in the past is

[132:00] sometimes you may have a surrogate victim or for example you might have somebody from the HRC acting as a voice of an impacted community versus the actual victim themselves or even a representative from an organization such as the anti-defamation league I certainly share those concerns because really to me the the cardinal sin if you will of restorative justice is to cause harm to the victim I'm well Tom's trying to get in here were you I'm restorative justice I wanted to talk about this you know on a higher level a little bit and give some feedback from my perspective as the chief prosecutor if I could yep so I'm really excited about this opportunity to work on the hate crimes ordinance I think that there are some challenges with the ordinances that this gives us an opportunity to fix the the the sentence enhancement right now increases the maximum fine from $1,000 to $2,000 we very rarely get the maximum finding

[133:00] anything anyway so it's not a substantial impact I agree complete with clay that assuring our community that we're protecting them is really important but I think there are better ways that we can approach this that we should explore first of all fines are by their nature regressive rich people have a much better ability to pay a fine that a poor person and has greater impact on a poor person than a rich person restorative justice is one form of things that people are doing in the courts to change behavior more effectively so I'd like to expand this discussion a little bit in to see how we can make the existing ordinance more effective to protect people including a perhaps a mandatory educational component for defendants not just we're working with the victims but understanding the true nature of their crime and the effect on the community that goes beyond that that one of the challenges in the current ordinance is to get that sentence enhancement we have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the crowd that the purposes intent was bias that's a very difficult standard to meet and for right now not a large

[134:02] benefit in terms of sanctions so I would like to consider doing this in an alternative way where we look at maybe we don't increase the sanction but require mandatory education and don't require proof beyond a reasonable doubt but required as a as an optional sentencing enhancement for the judge so that we could have we could do more of these mounted my frustrations is we do bury many of these because they are incredibly hard to prove and you're taking on a burden that may make it harder to prove the underlying crime so I think that it this is really great work I appreciate what the HRC has done I'd like the permission of the council to take this a little bit further do that I certainly think the enhancements that Nicholas talked about are great and I think we can incorporate those pretty easily but I think we can make this ordinance a much better ordinance and much more useful to our community and protective of our community if we look at some other things that are going on in the criminal justice system today that that work more effectively to change behavior than

[135:01] just increasing the fine which I don't think it really doesn't all that much in questions sorry but that's that was I want to say soon yeah I wanted to ask about the burden of proof if you changed to mixed motive haven't you made it easier that burden of proof you still have to prove part of the motive beyond a reasonable doubt so you have to prove that so you it what it does is eliminates part of the defense that I did it for this reason but not that reason but you still have to prove that reason that what was in the person's head beyond a reasonable doubt which is still a very hard thing to do okay so would you be thinking about doing something more like preponderance of the evidence and making it civil I'd like to work with judge Cook on what she feels comfortable with in terms of a say-so generally a judge is free to take into account a wide range of things in a sentencing recommendation so and that since this is a sentencing enhancement we could consider yes making it a lower level of proof for the sentencing enhancement piece and so

[136:00] it's not an element of the crime and or maybe we have a crime of bias motivated crime and a separate sentencing enhancement that has a lower level of proof that provides some more protection weight so other questions on this point before I think we want to go back to restorative justice to but it's just a comment okay mandatory education and okay hang on a second look questions on what he said Tom can you clarify that in terms of what you're proposing is it to move something substantially similar to what's being proposed forward but then adding on to it or you proposed I'm doing something different as I said I agree completely with the proposed enhancements to the existing ordinance but I'd like to take the opportunity to improve it as well gotcha so to move forward on this but then add some additional pieces absolutely thank you very much and my question was probably it sounds like what Lisa is interested in is what do you mean by education I mean does this

[137:01] mean like I think that so as a parent the last thing I do with my kids is punish though I always try to inform model put appear pressure on them there are models in the criminal justice system that use all of those things to try to change behavior I think what we ultimately want to do in the criminal justice system is get people to change what they're doing particularly in this area so education can be a mandatory course we do that in some areas it could be contact with the victims it could be socializing it requiring attending a meeting if you LBGT Luth to understand their issues we can do all of those sort of things and I think those in my own belief are far more effective than simple punishment especially if it's just a dollar amount okay yes and I would say in that with restorative

[138:00] justice the ultimate end of it my understanding is is that the the perpetrator actually understands the harm done to the victim yes so whatever it takes to do that and being involved I think with differing groups is part of that not just taking a course which sounds like a pretty light way out unless it's involved in having hands-on sounds right so many question was is if you require like mandatory education which i think is good more than a course but some kind of education about why they shouldn't have done that and how it makes other people feel and all these other stuff is there a lower burden of proof that you could require I believe you could I believe there are things that you can do in the sentencing area they're different than the proof area and so I said I don't have this all

[139:00] modeled out in my head and I think I want to listen to the community and see what they want and I also want to talk to judge cook and see how she feels about this yeah but we're doing many of these things in other areas for example minors in possession for first and second offense we don't we avoid a criminal record we do make them take educational classes to understand what and we screen them for alcohol or marijuana dependence to see to try to catch the folks who are heading down a bed path so we've already built systems in our court to do things differently we actually have a study session coming up but we're gonna talk about some of the more interesting things that we're all doing over there to help you inform so there's a wide range of behavioral changing things that one can do in the criminal justice system and as I said I think all of this is great and I'm very supportive of what the HRC has done and we could do that I my own little pieces I think we can do more and I'd like to the opportunity to work on that with you I think so I'm curious okay so we have lots going on here

[140:00] one is to address those two questions but then go back to the list of policy recommendations and dig further so I guess let us just clarify this and then go to the policy folks in general great with the proposal be forced to proceed on mix mezuzahs and religious expression yes yes anybody not okay can you put up the policy recommendations then okay so we started on restorative justice so I just wanted to finish that one I guess to me it is a little you want to be impactful but this trade-off about not harming the victim more by like maybe you don't want to deal with your perpetrator so I guess I'm just curious and I don't know Nikhil if you have anything to add on this concept of how you balance that or I can say I know that I've spoken with Stan

[141:00] of course moved the story of justice into a pilot for the adult evolution in his DA's office and then Michael's continuing that and it's only used on specific types of crimes and not on all of this so mainly like probably crimes and flawed cases we like restorative justice would be used on violent crimes hate crimes and sex crimes it is not used and you know Tom and you all could probably reach out to those officials and talk about why but it seems like we may be confusing two things in this discussion one is the salute of justice and then the second is whether what tom is talking about which is mandatory education and I know that to be an option that I've seen in cases I've observed up at the courthouse in sentencing a judge's discussion they will you know assign people to a defense which will need to contact anti-defamation league ooh some group for instance to help a defendant get education so I think I think polishing

[142:02] those two out and keep it in you know and being clear about what you want would be good and I would recommend reaching out to them and also span and Mesa as well have them feedback against to a story of justice and some types of cases so sort of justice in in our court is mostly program we do with Cu to help change student behavior and and it's it's got a particular model that model has been changed in various ways over the country and one of the things you can do is not necessarily have the perpetrator to meet the particular victim but there are many people in the community who will help model to help model better behavior so you can build a model where you the victim doesn't have the particular victim doesn't have to be involved at all you can have people with past victims or people with just who are in a particular group that they've victimized who are willing to share their experiences so you can build I mean there's a there's a model in oh I'm forgetting there's a there's a model where where they do there's a standing group where the the defendants go to

[143:01] visit so you can build these models and the the thing about the the evolution of criminal justice over the last 20 years is people are looking for ways to just solve the problem and get away from throw them in jail lock away the key there throw away the key and we can do a lot of those things and so I a little hesitant to use the label restorative justice because it means a particular thing here in Boulder and I'm not necessarily thinking that or and I'm not sure that HRC was thinking of that particular model but any model where you take the defendant and you put them in a circumstance where you try to socialize them into different behavior because as we all know social modeling is the strongest way to change behavior so if you get them into a group where the group doesn't doesn't do the thing that they're doing and they understand they can start seeing the problems with their behavior that is the most effective means for changing so I think there are aspects of that that could be helpful I think but I think you need to make sure that not only are you revitalizing the victim but

[144:01] you're not inflicting for the pain and suffering on other members of protected classes as well I mean if someone is can commits a hate crime where they're shouting racial epithets I don't want to make some other member of that minority group go have to deal with that either right and so I you know I think you need to be very careful about how you work that in there ways that sound like that it could be very promising but I think you'd want to be extremely delicate about this and certainly anybody who's engaging in it in helping perpetrators be entirely voluntary it might be their own social groups that can help them through these things rather than revitalizing somebody else so yeah I mean I'm not quite clear on the dividing line between restorative justice and education but they both seem valuable to me the restorative justice piece as long as it's well considered and that the

[145:00] people who are working to educate the person about impacts of their crime on the group that they committed a crime against if there are people willing to do that not necessarily the victim I think that that's worth a discussion worth having on the other hand sometimes it's more impactful to have somebody else who's arm's length distance from kind of tension explained in detail to the perpetrator what the impact is even if they're not a member of the group that was impacted they can know and be able to communicate it so I think something along these lines is important what exactly it looks like I think should be designed by people who are experts at this and so I would like to see it carried forward whether it's actually restorative justice specifically or more broadly education for the perpetrators so that they get the social impact that they've created I

[146:01] also think that there are some people who will be darn near immune to it I mean who are in some way pathological about their viewpoints of the world and I would just ask that we recognize that if it's the case and that if they are not good participants in the educational component or the restorative justice component that the judge had the ability to impose a fine or short jail time to make it clear that even if they were not able to take the social cues that they've been given that they still make some kind of restitution to the community yes instead of sending him to jail I'd rather see em do community service so to me the key is and Tom brought this up you know people can pay some people can pay easier than others I think what works is when it becames becomes a pain in the derriere and

[147:00] you're taking time away from somebody and you're making them use time to amend their behavior so I would want some kind of a thing that takes time from people okay just to reiterate that's what I meant by hands-on being involved timewise with groups and I wanted I don't know if this is the time but I wanted to go clear back before we finish on the other piece I didn't realize it was mentioned the the hate incidents pertaining to religious expression one of the things that wasn't included in there that I wanted to just bring up for discussion and that was referred to as clothing articles of clothing that one needn't necessarily be practicing or observing or in a house of worship but if that is also something that provokes an incident and that's part of it as I

[148:01] didn't see that specifically in there that's generally included in that correct it's not I think we had a we gave a couple of examples that have come to the Commission yeah you know for the Sikhs people who collages faiths who have specific yes I mean the laying into the language of the law yeah yes exactly and so we had some sample language from another community that may not have had that but I mean we we didn't want to get too into that but I think you all leave it to you all to give direction to Tom on what he would like to see included but that would be extremely helpful is to specifically name that as that is some of the feedback we were directly responding to so thank you for bringing that up folks of creation okay did you have your end up okay so let's summing up on restorative justice is yes with some with all the caveats mentioned and also

[149:02] maybe we need a different word if it's yeah maybe it's enforced enlightened or something okay okay housing status adding homeless or housing to a protected group what do people think of that yep as clay said we've had some recent incidents where some of our homeless population have been bullied or beat by [Music] deadbeats what else can they call them but they have adversely affected these people and I think a lot of times our homeless population is very vulnerable because they have no place to turn and so somehow we we do need to include them as a protected class and I don't want

[150:02] them while they may be violating some of our rules on camping that should not bring a beating from some deadbeat and there should be some way that this homeless person can get some help or restitution something but that's my I feel like homeless people can be really picked on more than other people because of this very vulnerable state my situation Cindy Jo I wanted I agree with Lisa and I'm specifically thinking of the man who came to testify before the City Council last year who had been attacked and there was a series of attacks against homeless people in the dark of night early in the morning and simply because

[151:04] persons are in that state does not mean they should be victims to that kind of thing happening Sam and then Bob well I'll say yes to housing status question I think that that is a good way to put it because it covers the whole spectrum of housing status I would also just tie it in with number one and say that I think all of the things in number one as far as the identification of different classes of folks I'm Dianne with number three housing status is just one of those it's important I also think it's you know oftentimes assaults on homeless folks are perpetrated by other folks it may be on housed and so I think even in that case we still need to consider that a mixed-motive crime and still treat that as a hate crime because it is an

[152:00] assault on someone for perhaps that reason and so I just want to be clear that even if the attack were done by someone else on housed on a victim who's on housed I think we still need to consider that potentially a crime I have a question for Tom on this one because you know the traditional protected classes tend to be characteristics or or of the person or sometimes their their faith this is this seems to be a status and somebody could be homeless one day and house the next day and homeless and the next day I mean it's not like people are primarily homeless not primarily homeless and it seems to me that there's a there potentially some legal issues around proof around status around whether the perpetrator was aware because it could obviously be hate crime I presumed that one of the elements would be awareness of the person's characteristic I don't know how you are aware of the fact that someone has a

[153:01] permanent address or doesn't have a permanent address simply by how they appear so I'm just asking I guess a series of questions around the legal aspect of of adding this as a protected classes that present some challenges I haven't researched it yet I know there are places around the country where this has been done and I'd want to look at the way they did it I think you identifies some of the challenges but I don't know that they're insurmountable I think you just have to have some clear characteristics that would signal to the defendant that that they're violating the law and so I think it's probably doable but I'd want to take a look and see what other people have done I support moving this forward as well I just but I do I would really like to learn more before we finalized an ordinance about how some of these that are the protected classes it wouldn't always be obvious like one of them is Parenthood so if you just see somebody you don't necessarily know that they're a parent right so how does that play out in a hate crime so what would be the the

[154:00] way that someone would victimize someone that would trigger a hate crime for being a parent or being homeless or something like that so I just want to dig into how that would work when we come back to it being a parent Parenthood is one of our protected classes and the Human Rights Ordinance so it's one of the items in number one well at some point ask a dumb question if we have it such a long list do we maybe it says dumb question but oh do we water down the impact of focusing on I mean part of it is to educate the community about hey we've been seeing more of religious persecution or racial persecution and we are underscoring that that's not okay so you know I guess it there's a part of me that says well let's just if we put everybody on the list it's it were just maybe not making that point as

[155:02] well so I'm not talking about housing status necessarily because to me that the but I just wonder at some point so when we go through one I kind of sorry I don't want to skip the one we're finishing three but anyhow I just make that point or yes all the way back because you because Sam jump to number one but I agree and so I want to I'm fine discussing this but I do I would one think about it very carefully when we come time to do an ordinance because of the same concerns about potentially diluting the very serious hate crimes that sometimes we see okay is there anything else on number three Jim can we just continue this conversation jump to number one so I find some of the proposed categories in number one to be quite important and directly in line

[156:00] with what we're talking about like creed sex immigration status for instance I think all of those we do definitely want to call out I don't know about some of the things like Parenthood or custody of a minor child marital status seems to me like that could be depending on who's married to whom and how it comes about that could also be one that's very deserving of being called out in particular so I think there are some in here that maybe rise to the level for me of really wanting to make sure that they're specifically called out and maybe there are some that we could talk about as perhaps not having the same level of import but I really creed sex definitely immigration status potentially marital status and source of income I think those are potentially bases of hate crimes and discrimination well I'm I don't want to go into

[157:01] personal stuff but I'm gonna say you've got to include parent so educate me people I just don't understand what why would that be a cause for some one day when I was having my third child I was pregnant very pregnant and I had somebody come up to me in a grocery store and scream at me that I already had two children this was not PC and then followed us out and it's like that stuff just shouldn't happen I mean people should not be able to just go up to other people and accuse them of something or hassle them and then follow them after the encounter is past so kind of other thoughts on number one wait just one more thing so I mean maybe maybe what we could get is at this next

[158:00] iteration a little bit more of a recommendation if you dive into the different protect rather than just say yeah take them all really you know think them through and then come up with a recommendation that we could then chew over and and harderberg decision you trying to jump in oh yeah this to me that sounds like good idea that sound right okay to mandate of police trading well okay I'll just wait on this my understanding is because it's been difficult to prosecute given the burden of proof and the whole mixed motive thing it hasn't happened very often so certainly some clarification is specifically trained the law on how that how that works now would be an order at a minimum I don't know other thoughts on this Cindy I agree Suzanne I think as we move forward into strengthening it then

[159:00] it would be well to bring up the police force who are going to be implementing so that they know where things Dan I mean this is a very serious issue in this day and age and so I think it's well worth taking the time to make sure that everyone understands speaks the same language understands what the crimes are that they need to be looking out for and arresting for I just wanted to suggest that perhaps rather than use the word mandate use coordinate or cooperate with the police departments I think one of the things I'd like to do is get their experience because they're the ones out in the street who are seeing these things and help them work with them to develop the ordinance and my guests knowing our Police Department is they already do anti-bias training and so that's not an issue it's more how do we make this the most effective program and working with them and getting their wisdom and understanding as part of the process would be really

[160:01] helpful okay so I guess that's on those four I guess in terms of process you guys mentioned feedback fatigue and I guess one of my questions is some of this like the mixed-motive the religious expression some of this stuff I think you could probably go in right an ordinance today and it seems to me that sometimes that's what brings people to the table is here this is what we're thinking does this look right or how would you edit it as opposed to hey what do you think about a concept and since I feel like we've talked about this concept that we should go ahead and take the next step of putting stuff on paper and get any specific feedback in particular on a few of these things we've highlighted like how you know which of the protected classes or would you prioritize or however you want to do it so I'll just throw that out there yes Suzanne I agree I think we should and

[161:02] can move forward and there was a to be determined in terms of timeline this again I think is something very important because it has to do with the community knowing that we are trying to protect to the best of our ability and we're not going to put up with the underlying stuff that's going on that's causing this kind of disruption so I think it'd be great can you put up the process next sighs so just to help a little bit we did our quarterly dot exercise where we sort of laid out the council's agenda for the next quarter we put this on for second reading public hearing on August 2nd so that and I've been thinking about that date as the date when we would bring back the ordinance so having gone through the whole process by that so if that's acceptable then it's it's already built into your schedule for the summer August 2nd August 2nd is the day we I believe the day we put on so has HRC you've had a public hearing haven't you

[162:03] yes we've had we've had public hearings like Suzanne hits had mentioned you know open concepts like Davalloo City and inclusivity and then specifically on bias and hate crimes and do you think they would rather just come to Council I think the way we've done it in the past and this was kind of my take on these next steps was you know similar to others it kind of complex policies that like living wage for instance we had you know one and a half new list of public hearings and things which is kind of what we've done on this we gave recommendations handed them off to you and then you know not much else we can do and it's really up to you all and sit in City Utah you need to come up with something when that's you you know when Tom comes back with you know something

[163:00] has something that people can react to that's gonna go to you on a loose tweeting we can schedule that at our commission to do a public hearing on that item and I think we would that might look well and then the rest of it would be you know they process a council like one public hearing with with HRC and then when the ordinance came forward of course people would speak to that but wouldn't their hearing be on a draft ordinance first right okay yeah so anyhow so when you have a draft ordinance it goes to them first with some of the questions if there's something I think we just take that August 2nd date and work back for and make sure we made it I don't think it's that hard I think we can get this done okay cool we get on this final topic again a similar structure to our discussion a little bit of background this was brought to us around last summer by a boulder they

[164:00] were sort of the point organization on this and the last time we've looked at this language was about 18 years ago so I was looking at some of the legislative history underlying this and essentially you know I think there's a couple of dynamics at play here is that the thought process has become more advanced and more granular since 18 years ago there's a I think a greater sensitivity and understanding about where people that are impacted by this are coming from and it really did going through the language it became apparent that there are things that probably could use some improvement and Commissioner Loberg am I missing anything in the sort of preparatory thing I want to put you on the spot or anything but okay you've didn't write you an opportunity to examine the enclosed attachment which really gets into a pretty high level of detail with respect to what some of these proposed changes are and this is really just sort of a high-level summary

[165:01] of those changes and so that we you know we don't have to go into every particular change but there's a lot of definitional changes that we're looking at a lot of the language that was in the stuff from 18 years ago is really kind of no longer considered the best thinking on a lot of this there are language we have for example such as that pertaining to the number of times that you can express your gender in different ways there is like a limitation of three that is found to be offensive and that that is something that should be deleted and there's also some issues too around public accommodation I know that the CEO has identified there are some instances where we may have to a little bit of refinement because some of the proposed language may contradict some other pieces of language and I believe that pertains to sort of segregated sports

[166:00] facilities where in one instance it seems like we can I think it's just sort of a clarification conversation that needs to happen about some of the proposed changes the last piece and it's a little bit similar to the discussion that we have had on things that sort of can enforce that sort of support this but aren't necessarily part of exactly what we're talking about here is amendments to the Human Rights Ordinance address enforcement barriers so there are some issues around statute of limitations and the tolling of that that we might want to consider and also this was a little bit of a surprise and you know sort of the language we may in the section 12 which covers human rights we don't really have a definition of discrimination so that's something that we may want to assess perhaps different from what we talked about in the

[167:00] previous example basically you know I think that there's probably a need for more outreach we don't have the pre-existing sort of body of engagement that we've had with some of the hate crimes piece so we would have to and we have been working a bit on this development of a list of stakeholders and what that outreach would look like and then similar to what we're talking about with the hate crimes sentence enhancement changes you know looking at different options for the public outreach piece again to propose next steps you know and whether or not actually there were some pieces in the original [Music] sexes versus gender language and that was addressed in our last election and the voters approved that change so at least some of the proposal is off the table because we've already accepted and integrated that into our changes the other final piece that makes us a little

[168:01] bit different is there's a little bit of a trickle-down effect that if we make these changes we may see in turn be reflected in things like board and Commission handbooks other policies just so that we have consistency up and down the city in terms of our documentation but your next steps there's there's actually nothing that requires yeah I think this was sort of a motive piece I apologize so so we'll think about other timelines that would be just on an ordinance right right yeah this is kind of the council question you know to essentially look at these changes you know see what needs to be clarified or adjusted and then we dive into it I'm just Commissioner Loberg if there's any

[169:00] insight instrumentals or the point person on the HRC and working with this liaisoning with without boulders so certainly would like to hear their perspective Thanks yeah just to add on about the motivations for encouraging you all to direct the city staff and city attorney's office to move forward with these changes we are calling this inclusive language but it's also just more accurate more affirming and does a better job of ensuring the rights of the entire transgender community in Boulder I think one thing in addition to what clay has mentioned is that there's some language that might be I think I believe unintentionally exclusive of portions of the transgender community so also some I think other unintended consequences current language

[170:02] discourages participation in city government by transgender people discourages use of protections like the Human Rights Ordinance because when there is language like there currently is that like clay said is offensive and not affirming it makes you want it makes you wonder if the entity on the other end is going to be supportive so some really real impacts here and yes communicates whether or not Boulder is a safe and welcoming place for the trans community so thank you for mr. Berg the public engagement process and I think because of the nature of what we're talking about I think that it's something that we need to approach with great sensitivity and with a good deal of just really making sure that we're identifying the right stakeholders to be at the table it seems that it's been a

[171:02] little bit different from the process that we've dealt with with respect to the hate crime sentence enhancement you know certainly our Boulder is a leading group but we just want to make sure that we're addressing all the appropriate stakeholders and generating that group coming to that and the HRC commissioners have helped to start to generate a list of folks to work with and as staff we've been in very close contact with the community engagement folks to figure out the mechanisms that might be you know most effective because I think another piece too is and a couple events in the last few days have made me a little more sensitive to this is you know not everybody may wish to weigh in on this through a public hearing and coming into council chambers and and that is more than understandable so I think we do have to look at other mechanisms for people to weigh in that may feel you know safer and to make folks feel less vulnerable in expressing kind of what their needs are can I ask a

[172:01] question about that with the starting place be the out boulder proposed edits and take those out in whatever forms feel safe to get feedback on is that the proposed and then so we okay just because that makes sense again I think it's useful to have people respond to something yeah do things Lindsay thanks for bringing this word this was this was fantastic I'm questioning then for Tom you know based upon the engagement somebody that that zan just suggested would it be parallel possible to move this in parallel again moving against an August 2nd date working backwards through ordinances through community engagements from HRC public hearing is that is that possible from your perspective our lasting question Nikhil in a second in my perspective the drafting is not challenging okay it's the community engagement sure and one of things I'd like to say is that when they did this 18 years ago a lot of people contributed and what was many ways a groundbreaking ordinance and I'd want to

[173:02] honor those folks as well and make sure that we don't it unintentionally hurts them and I think that's what clays saying right so I the community engagement part piece of this is so much more important so assuming that can get done I can write whatever they tell me to write right but we do need to make sure that we don't do harm when we're trying to do the right thing so just then just to pivot to you guys both staff and HRC is it do you think that the community engagement can happen over the next course of the next four to five months I'm sensitive to to appropriate ways to engage folks so that Tom can have the feedback he needs to do the drafting speaking from a staff perspective we were fully anticipating that okay in Nikhil in lives he do you think that's doable for you guys yes yes the point that this ordinance that we changed 18 years ago there was a

[174:00] lot of community involvement so it's important to reach out to those individuals thanks so much for taking this up and Lindsay to you Britt in particular for moving this forward and so we do we do want to listen to folks who are involved the last time around but I know thinking has changed since then yeah you know our language and our code is not fully inclusive right now and sometimes somewhere in between embarrassing and offensive so I'm really glad to take that we can take this on and make these changes to have our could be more reflective of our community Jim yeah I mean I agree with Aaron here I was kind of surprised by some of the things that I read that we're still in there and you know 18 years ago it's been a long time ago it's most of a generation ago and a lot of things have changed in the intervening years and so well I do want to be respectful of the former contributors and council I also think that everyone would recognize that a lot

[175:00] has changed in the past 18 years and we want to make sure that we are not offensive in our code and that we are not in any way exclusionary in our code so I think the Charter change that you propose that the voters approved is a first step and then this just goes on down to correcting things and ordinance so thank you for bringing it forward I'm very happy to to be moving this forward and reading reading the changes are great and thank you so much Lindsay for everything you've done to make that happen and think out bolder as well thank you and big things to Apple they're moving it forward yeah absolutely I really appreciate their work yes thank you to you and holder to the extent that then there's work that flows and we have to change handbooks and stuff I guess let's not let the total project get in the way of me

[176:01] keep getting ordinates done and stuff can flow from that if it has to obviously the faster we move the bedroom but I just note that there may be more that comes down the pike but let's get this body of work done this year if we can and it sounds like we can so that's exciting I'll go second okay so anything else do you need from us I think we're in good shape you know I believe all our questions have been addressed my colleague Eitan Kanter will be developing I believe the summary points memo and the next day or so for folks um I'm actually leaving on vacation but I will be back so if people have questions I'll be day I just want to make sure I think so and just I have been thinking about at least as last question to me about the holding an

[177:01] extra public you know learning the council take that on with the ordinance and so what we think I maybe I'm confused but what I think is that as I go Tom's plan is to have a go to you on second reading and in August and have you have your own public use and process we I think we would be fine with leaving it to that and and what I was referencing was when tom has something that he's obviously going to get to you to Senate a each other Caesars said the Commission can have it as an action item for us to discuss and vote up to you to give the the final thumbs up kind of like the towing law and stuff I I just wanted to thank all of the people who wrote it was voluminous and it was really helpful and insightful so thanks again to our community I just want to say thank you to many community members that have been on the hate crimes and many of the Human Relations Commission issues and I know a lot of them have been really supportive of lighting into you so shout out to them because I mean

[178:01] without really these community to live in a flutes that's that's what Lilly pushes all these Human Relations Commission initiatives that have been brought to you and so you know the Commission is happy to take them on and it's really pleasing to see that both the community involvement and then the council supported on the other end and what we can do in between is just it's an absolute pleasure and and while we're having a love fest here the just thanks so much to the HRC is a whole you know Lindsay Nikhil here but I see the entire rest of the Commission out there sharing and art and Stan so thanks so much for being here and for all of your hard work on these issues thank you well is there anybody we haven't thanked all right on that note thank you and good night [Music]

[179:03] - parasol felt like that [Music]