June 18, 2019 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:07] [Music]

[2:01] good evening everyone we're going to call to order the boulder city council meeting of june 18 2019 lynette will you call the role council member brockett president carlisle president jones beer marzell president nagel weaver here yates here young present mayor we have a quorum great a couple of comments uh announcements to get us started here one is um the perennial board and commission recruitment announcement which is we are still recruiting for the two boulder junction access district boards and the university hill commercial area management commission all three of these seats require the applicant to be a property owner or a resident with permission to represent a property owner's interest inside the district and you can go online to apply and we encourage folks to do so you need to be at least 18 years of age and have resided within the city limits

[3:01] for at least a year although i don't know if yeah we'll just go with that we need to have a discussion about amending the agenda we wanted to add item 6d which is a discussion about ballot polling i think whether we want to still pull and if so the question the what needs to be in the content of that so that's one item we got an email from mary about adding boards and commission appointments as well um i will say to that i guess i got to miss cue but at cic we talked about doing it mid-month and so that's when it was scheduled and i didn't review my applications and i don't know if other people are prepared fine but i am not so i'll just throw that out there and maybe we can discuss what other people feel about that

[4:01] yeah i'm happy to speak to it yeah right now we have a position that um is empty and the board is one person short and i think it's actually so that's one board another board is another person short so they're functioning without a full board and i think we owe it to that board to appoint these people you know who had applied and we've talked about this multiple times at our last meeting we said oh we're not going to do it we'll do it at this meeting and that's why when i was at cac yesterday i said well where is this where is it and it was just some vague answer and then i came home and i looked at cac minutes and there's nowhere in the minutes where we have the boards in the point and commissioned appointments wait a minute we had a discussion at cac and we put it for the business meeting when we come

[5:00] back from break right to the top of the appointment what we didn't talk about but we talked about adding other boards and july commissions right okay so that's that's that's how cic left it so okay more discussion yeah so at the last business meeting um we were going to make appointments and then we took it off the agenda and said we'll just do it in two weeks and it'll give staff more time to you know call people and it'll give us more time to read so that's how we had left it to to at the last business meeting that we would do it at this meeting which is why um nearby and i brought it up that's how we had left it and the idea was that we could do it um before the recess so so yeah that's that's my recollection as well and and since i remember that i was watching the agenda and when it came out

[6:00] on thursday i said oh appointments are not on the agenda um so maybe that's not happening on tuesday and i and i checked in um on cac after cec minutes were posted i said oh it got moved to next month um so for me personally i have not reread the applications um and i am not at all prepared to to make an appointment tonight does it feel like from a process perspective we need more than a few hours to to do and these are important boards environmental board in the open space board so and and we got new information on people today so i absolutely do not feel comfortable new information somebody emailed us and said oh actually i do want to be considered for osbt um okay hang on to anybody did you i'm going down the line and we'll come back i think the recollection of the meeting two weeks ago was right and i guess we kind of messed up at cac yesterday but unfortunately we didn't put on the agenda and then people only had a few hours notice today so i'm kind of there and i'm a little handicapped and having not had opportunity from this afternoon when this came up to read the applications

[7:01] okay so maybe i'll just say maybe we screwed up i wasn't at i don't i was like on two weeks ago i think it was um so anyhow i it wasn't on the agenda it came up and we scheduled it so if that was a screw-up i apologize but there um who else wants to add you both had your hands up or same i'm done adding okay i i would just say um depending on how we do i don't know we've we've interviewed these people once we read all their in their applications once i would assume everybody's read them we've had this conversation now three times so maybe what people need to do is we do a 15-minute break and then we come out and make the appointments to fill the positions that aren't filled that would be two boards so what would make up my mind would be whether these boards have a meeting scheduled between now and the 15th because we're on recess so if boards do

[8:00] then i would prefer to go ahead with it if they don't or any boards that don't i'd prefer to skip it so if if there's no harm done because there's no meeting scheduled then i don't know that we need to rush into it though i do recall two weeks ago um we did say that we were going to do it and i support that yeah i support that too we know i'll have to take a few minutes to look it up okay okay so uh in terms of amending the agenda um what are we going to say contingent well let's let's just not amend that part of the agenda yet and if we hear that there will be a board or two boards that are meeting in the interim we can go ahead and make appointments to those boards i i don't agree with that approach okay aaron doesn't agree i mean i will probably abstain if we

[9:00] appoint board members tonight under significant protest okay yeah i'm almost certainly i mean this is the what's today the 18th of june and our next means the 16th of july so almost certainly in the next 28 days those boards are going to meet because they meet monthly so i'm not sure i get i get the the point sam about if they give me handicapped i understand there was only one board that had a particular handicap and that was the eab right that was two seats down correct i wonder if we could maybe a compromise tackle that one now since that seems to be the board in desperation the other boards one of the boards is not going to lose their member until august 2nd that's open space there's no rush on that one and so i wonder if we if we maybe maybe as a compromise aaron tackle eab tonight maybe at the end of the night so everyone has a chance to go back and refresh their views on the applications and then park the other ones because that's the one that has the problem i think well hab is also functioning as because they had a recent resignation

[10:01] so they're but that's a seven member reward and they're only down one didn't you already get consensus on what we would do we're waiting we don't have consensus aaron said he would abstain and strongly so so bob's trying to come up with a compromise that brings us together um i do think h hab and open space are particularly sensitive appointments so i guess if people are willing to do bob's compromise let's chalk it up to and i'll just take full responsibility i wasn't there when it wasn't on our list we scheduled it thinking we were doing the right thing so um some updated information so on june 10th eab meets and for hiv or july yeah for ajb and ospt they don't meet until the end of the month on july 24th that works or we can do ea tonight yep we can work with them okay okay with that can we have an uh

[11:01] emotion so moved move move the agenda as amended second all those in favor yeah thank you all for being flexible okay with that we're going straight to open comment just a reminder to those folks signed up you can you're free to speak to us about whatever topic except for the topic of tonight's public hearing which is related to the electric utility if you want to speak to that sign up separately over there and with that um if you can start with your name and address each speaker has two minutes and the first person is lynn siegel flynn here patrick murphy with the caveat about municipalization patrick i am speaking on municipalization but not the uh the vapor muni okay

[12:01] my name is patrick murphy i live in boulder the mini propagandists have duped you long enough you need to wake up and smell the scam if you truly represented citizens of boulder all your votes for the meaning should have been divided in half just as the votes have been you lack real critical review of the muni for example the bogus propaganda that shows a graphic comparing totals spent on the muni versus the annual amount excel takes from boulder misses a truth by a mile and ignores true future costs because it's propaganda the 120 million is composed of about 98 million dollars that are basic costs not profit the 32 million of profit is based on boulder's share of the infrastructure mortgage and was reduced by a third due to taxes so the real profit is about 20 million here's a graphic that tells the truth not propaganda

[13:01] here's a third bar that shows true cost and includes assets with going concern not boulder's crazy 82 million final offer then separation cost then startup cost then stranded cost that will never ever be zero consider the urgency of climate change that you seem to have forgotten or denied in order to achieve a vanity project that will have consumed more than a decade look at this graph and ask yourself why the propagandists have not done anything but marginalize the realities under the guise of will get to vote on it yeah right in two years refer a measure to the voters in 2019. that will allow us to end the muni and let real carbon reduction begin wake up and smell the truth thank you patrick john taylor

[14:04] john taylor boulder chamber i'm going to try to summarize in two minutes my gettysburg address from today um so i will say first of all i i know that you are tonight discussing a couple of funding items open space and transportation um but you do that in the face of what we know is a or many project a pending economic downturn which very likely could lead to reduced revenues for the city um and also we recognize that we are now up near the highest level of sales tax rates of any community in the vicinity so at this time the boulder chamber asks that you please take the time and consideration to consider our true priorities we know that you're evaluating a potential open space tax and the boulder chamber loves open space we've supported many taxes but we heard ironically just a little over two years ago that open space was

[15:00] not in need of additional funding but yet tonight as another priority confronts you transportation you'll see that there are just grave needs in that area an area of our infrastructure that has both environmental uh economic as well as social equity implications so we also urge you that when you're considering financing decisions for these priorities to make sure that you're considering the fair balance always tempting to tax the other guy as it were but too often that other guy is is the business community and we know that small businesses in our community are already struggling with the high property tax and sales tax rates that we face as well as large businesses many of them important and critical to the funding that keeps the burden of the tax base off of our residents some of them are making decisions about moving and relocating outside of our community based on the high tax rate

[16:00] and then finally i just draw your attention to the other side of the equation we always talk about uh oh all right wait you were gonna get to the the the timeless end of it that would be remembered for all time yes i it is a partnership business in residence so let's make sure that we're considering not just the taxation opportunities but let's continue to beef up and focus on our economic vitality that will strengthen our economy for years to come got it thank you stephen and then allie catherine wilde i have a presentation but it's in protective mode so we're on one slide which is okay um stephen heidel 1935 grove street i'm here to talk about um door zones so oh my god we'll get one slide

[17:00] so this came up with the north broadway reconstruction project 2016 2017 it was presented it was rejected by all the cycling community because it kept the door zone which there's a graph but it's pretty much what we have now you have parking lane you have a painted bike lane then you have a lane of traffic doing 30 to 40 miles an hour um and in this store this door zone is not a protected bike lane which we're sort of which is part of our vision zero action plan um so this is sort of one of the slides but when you get into the door zone somebody opens the door in front of you you have two choices run to the zord the door or fall out into the lane of traffic if you fall in lane or traffic you get run over by car and you get killed this happened to a 52 year old guy and this is california another example i had was a 30 year old woman who just got run over in the

[18:01] spring and after she got ran over in the door zone the city of san francisco within two weeks changed it to a protected bike lane for north broadway one of the slides you'll see later there's actually part of the vision zero low stress bike network one of the recommendations is to do a protected bike lane along that stretch of broadway and this project is a 40-year project where once we make it we won't change anything for 40 years so we're losing this opportunity to make a protected bike lane on this whole stretch of north broadway so when you hear the presentation later just keep that in your mind that a bike lane is they're not all the same hey steven let me just ask you a question so on like north broadway the treatment you would like is there's too much physical i mean i'm just curious which one you're proposing

[19:01] for that stretch um the easiest way is to to do a physically separated parking lane and that would protect one side sort of along the monte and cycle sport on that side or to get rid of parking which is two dozen cars at the most on that entire section and do a physically curb separated bike lane on both sides of broadway and that is the recommended action plan in the vision zero network okay thank you thank you ellie catherine and then charissa poteet hello i'm ali catherine wilde and i'm pleased to be able to talk with everyone tonight but one of the biggest concerns that brings me here is uh it's pride month and boulder has made such a big difference with lgbt civil rights everybody's civil rights so it's really fun and i wanted to remember some of my friends who um brought that initiative and with my work you know in the 80s and

[20:00] early 90s so it's really great so boulder often there's boulder county pride that's coming up in longmont and that's this weekend denver pride was black this weekend boulder has stuff more specifically in october because at that time the coming out stuff was october 11th 10th or 11th i forget what it was so yay for pride hello here's what i came for i came for because there's violence in my neighborhood and i was going to read a happy little um it's not happy police report that talked about specific violence i have housing and boulder housing property and so i live at 3rd and pearl there has been a household where people have sold meth and other types of drugs and had a bike ring that took apart bikes put them back together and sold them and that has been allowed to stay happening for the last year and a half or two years now what has happened is this there's been restructuring with boulder housing partners and one of the things that happened is site managers no longer

[21:02] stopped minor lease infringement like any social behavior smoking in the wrong place playing live music stuff like that because they don't handle um small lease infringements then things become a police matter and when it becomes a police matter those police reports like this are used for eviction once it's used for eviction then somebody who has been housed a homeless person who has been housed is then out of a house but they know they do not get support within the system so i think my time is almost up what i want to say is that i think there's a communication and a systemic problem that is your sentence yeah you're glad yeah i believe there is a communication problem and a systemic problem that stops advocacy for residents who need housing and it also so i don't i can't speak for boulder housing partners because you know i'm on the resident end but i don't believe that the site managers or even the

[22:01] people up the chain have the capacity to attend to matters before they get blown up into police matters and then become grounds for eviction okay maybe we can have staff follow up with you have you have you emailed us about this no i haven't could you do that sure thanks have a great day that'd be great theresa and after theresa we have lisa white good evening my name is charissa poteet and i live in the ponderosa trailer park two years ago

[23:01] after the city purchased the site the city introduced community in a community engagement program we were told that our involvement and voices mattered in the beginning we were pulled on amazing images of single family homes with shared without shared walls and private yards now the plan has duplexes and triplexes the main goal of the city council was non-displacement of residents eight families have moved out of the ponderosa please consider the residents that are among the poorest residents of boulder in your handout this is information that was taken by polls of the residents 65 percent of residents in ponderosa are on an extremely low income bracket

[24:00] earning thirty eight thousand nine hundred and per family thirty percent of the residents are low income earning between twenty thousand six hundred and forty one dollars per year to sixty four thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars per family most don't qualify for the habitat for humanity homes i fall in the moderate range that means currently i pay 5 30 and own my trailer i'm looking at a thousand dollar to fourteen hundred dollar increase to get a duplex habitat for humanity home is it really low income housing i ask i wonder why so many people are homeless we are asking for just compensation for our trailers in the current market trailers are going from sixty thousand to ninety thousand our appraisals were half that value the consumption of the poor have mercy

[25:00] on city council as your decisions lay on the backs of the very poor of boulder thank you great thank you very much lisa and then mark hemphill okay hello city council my name is lisa white and i'm currently serving on the pedestrian advisory committee uh i spoke to you last month and i'd like to say i've been extremely impressed with by both city staff and fellow pac members through this process i'm really excited about this opportunity to help shape the future of transportation in our city in the council memo i'm happy to see that there's a focus on sustainable transportation that supports our climate goals safety equity and health and i hope that you'll support bold ideas for funding so that we can achieve this bold vision and save lives and improve our community faster i noticed that the reduction of vehicles mild vehicle miles traveled was called out as important for reducing greenhouse

[26:00] gas emissions but i'd love to see more focus on reducing vmt as part of the other goals while improved multimodal transportation infrastructure is important reducing car dominance with things like reducing vmt and slowing car speeds will continue will contribute to the safety of all road users improve our air quality and add to our community's vibrancy as well as increase the comfort of our walk and bike networks to achieve that let's rebalance streets in favor of the most efficient means of travel yes i'm talking about lanes and i'm also talking about street parking we currently subsidize driving by giving away vast amounts of public space for little or no cost cities like colorado springs are realizing the true cost of free parking and they're increasing parking prices and starting to charge for parking on sunday's downtown additionally as part of a comprehensive funding strategy i'd encourage the city to consider user fees that help us achieve our mode chef targets seattle recently hired a firm to study congestion pricing without exacerbating

[27:01] socioeconomic inequities and i think that paths like that should be considered i ask that you push us to move faster and be bolder to reach our climate goals and also save lives and increase health equity and vibrancy of our community thank you thank you mark and then leslie lester yeah hi um my name is mark hemphill i live at 664 walden circle so my my background i was a lifeguard a swim coach i have a masters with a thesis focusing on kinesthetic aptitude i design play structures for a living ninja warrior courses climbing structures parkour things zip lines and so physicality is really important to me as i'm sure

[28:00] as i realize it's important to a lot of people in boulder and i was ecstatic to to learn about the rec center here it's got a million things it's a reasonable price and it's got diving boards which is great it's super fun and i think in the same way that everybody here probably wants to be able to ski or mountain bike or or run or whatever it is you like to do that i should be allowed to jump off the diving board if i have the physical capacity to do so right now you're not allowed to do backflips gainers or any handstand based maneuvers i understand there might be some movement in the sort of like lifeguard or rec center management ranks towards some sort of waiver and i merely am coming to support that endeavor to not only allow me to act like a little kid but to allow little kids to

[29:00] jump into the diving well with their parents because that is also currently forbidden i was told it's related to the insurance i'm not sure if that's true or not there are obviously facilities that have insurance that permits it and you know i don't know what the what the cost difference would be but i think you guys get my point and i'll leave it at that thank you for bringing that to our attention leslie who knew good evening council my name is leslie glustrom i live in boulder and i'm here to thank you so much as always for caring about climate change just the things that have happened this last week have been horrendous and of course we're just at the beginning when i did the powerpoint last night 50 people had died in india when i checked this afternoon we're up at 200 it's 40 and 50 degrees cent celsius there 120 degrees fahrenheit above about

[30:00] 104 your body just starts shutting down if you don't have air conditioning so greenland the red line is what's been happening this year the blue line is the normal for 1980 to 2010. so thank you so much you've all cared so much you've provided tremendous leadership despite patrick's uh claim we have actually been working in parallel both to deal with our electricity through the municipalization exploration and also all the other programs we have and we did meet our 2020 goals three years early i want to thank you for that i spent saturday afternoon with climate activists from around colorado our leadership has been recognized over and over and over again and not just in words but in action community after community after community is taking responsibility for the carbon intensity their electricity and they know and state and in all these different ways make it clear that our leadership has been so critical so i want to thank all of you for that still 50 of our greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity xl is still 73

[31:00] fossil fuels we know from the rfip there's very good chance that we could get well above 70 renewable maybe 80 maybe even higher save money 40 million a year these are all things with patrick stranded assets i he didn't go about that today but if anybody wants to know about his numbers i'm happy to talk about them i do want to do a quick introduction to excel's rate increase looking at close to a nine percent summer increase for commercial residents so people that who say no to municipalization please say please consider what that means uh this would be about six to eight million a year 6.8 million a year excel's not going to get all that but they'll come back for the rest times 10 years we're talking 60 million it all puts everything else into context so thank you so much as always question listen good question here are you aware of what's going on in chennai i mean if you're looking into india it might be worth looking there for reservoirs are all dry yes and one of the pictures was that the women if you saw reaching down into what used to be the lake and now is just this

[32:01] little thing and it's 120 degrees there and we've only just begun so thank you so much boulder has led the way and and and nothing's perfect but our council has been huge for this state i want to thank you all so much and i just wanted to add to that as well it's the humans are suffering and dying so are the animals and it goes on and on blah blah blah let you carry on thank you for all your good work thank you leslie andy and after andy we have kathy schlereth [Applause] andy breiter 3375 75th street in boulder i'm here to talk to you guys about the opening that's on the open space board of trustees board and i want to urge you guys that when you're considering that open to consider someone with agricultural experience and not just with agricultural experience but with

[33:01] experience in terms of how we want our future of agriculture to look there's a lot going on with the master plan and forming that vision we need to make sure the board understands what a vision can look like for not only improving our land with our agricultural practices but also for improving our health by feeding our community here and making sure that we continue to have farmers grow food for our community i myself am a farmer here in boulder and i'm also a representative of the flatirons young farmers coalition and the reason why i'm speaking to you tonight is because andrea bilic who is leaving the board really wants her seat to be filled by somebody with agriculture experience who is a young voice and there are many members of our organization who really want to participate in that or just becoming aware of it now who will be applying for that position i also want to touch on the last lady's comment in terms of leading the way with climate change and a big part of climate

[34:01] change is how we work our lands and how we sequester carbon within our lands and there is a good chance for us to continue to lead the way in how we participate in agriculture here by providing good healthy food for the community and also good healthy land for the wildlife and livestock so thank you guys thank you kathy and then if greg thornton could be ready to go good evening my name is kathy slurth and i live at the boulder ponderosa mobile home park here in boulder i've lived there almost 20 years um and as you know the city is in the process well they've already purchased this we have they haven't brought us into the city yet but part of our problem is there's only one the only going to be one entrance exit into ponderosa through

[35:00] off of violet through cherry and 10th avenue once you all close the broadway entrance there's three sets of neighborhoods back there besides the waldorf school and they're getting ready to build a new high school there on the corner of tenth and cherry also so somebody needs to sit down and find an extra way out for all of our safety in case of an emergency there's only one exit please look into that it's a very serious and safety problem thank you um we have a question i think well i should just kathy i'll just mention we'll follow up with staff at the end of open comment but my memory was that we were looking into adding that other entrance so hold on and we'll get back to it in a few minutes thanks great and then gary erling good evening i'm greg thornton

[36:00] along with my wife donna and i we own property located at 1126 union avenue in boulder we've lived in the house for 20 plus years my immediate neighbors to the east are rebecca d de monaco and dr richard perry owner of 4295 broadway a unique property known as the swoon art house the swoon oil house is also used for hosting a number of events including according to their own website large parties like open arts parties classes for cu artist talks dinners they have hosted number numerous fundraisers over the years as well the events that the swoon art house has hosted have been a significant nuisance for my wife and i these events have often involved over a hundred guests and the attendant noise swoon house is located in the

[37:00] neighborhood zone r1 swoon art house is no ordinary residence it is an art gallery and an event center in late 2017 the city prosecuted swoon art house for violation of boulder's land use code specifically miss d de monaco hosted the large fundraiser event for resource conservation the city took the position that miss d demonico violated the boulder code because swoon art house was being used as a type of indoor amusement facility banquet not merely a single family home in the r one neighborhood the city was successful in its case mr monaco re appealed the municipal court's decision in a pending case before boulder district court there is no reason to believe the city would i'm sorry there is no reason to believe the city would not prevail on appeal however mr monaco lobbied non-profit organizations in the community

[38:02] to come forward in a minute no not another minute you can email us that though thank you um gary i'm back here six months later talking about the same subject i was told last time i was here that it was a priority for this council to pass a new minimum wage law for the city of boulder and i'd also talked to the governor and i'm sure it wasn't just my voice he heard but he agreed to the problem of cities being able to set a minimum wage for themselves

[39:00] my governor did what he told me he would do he said he would sign that bill and he did now it's in your ballpark you've talked twice in that same time period for raises to our employees that us taxpayers pay but we'd like we'd like our businesses to also step up now i don't think you need to take the time out of your schedule you could do a democratic thing put it on the ballot let the voters decide do they want to pay all people in boulder a fair minimum wage you've done a lot of things in your tenure here that change things in boulder permanently the minimum wage is not a permanent thing you can

[40:00] you can resend it anytime you want but you have to take this it is a whole you can't be a business first council you have to be a people first i'm not affected by this i don't i i'm well off i don't have to worry i'm a neighbor of many of you i can afford a house there are many people here who can't and there's many issues with poverty and boulder that you just don't understand or haven't looked at because you're not data driven thank you jeff jeff rifkin and then elizabeth black hi my name is jeff rifkin i live on cimarron way my understanding is that flood mitigation at cu south is at a standstill due largely to regulations and disagreements with cdot and cu so

[41:02] i'd like to suggest that you reconsider gordon mccurry's concept for an uns for an upstream detention that concept was presented to rab osmpnu last summer you had asked rgh to do some preliminary design and they returned with their own version of the concept as i recall the only downside was a possible environmental issue that the army corps of engineers might have with the diversion of water from south boulder creek to the detention ponds but other than that i believe that this concept has the potential to resolve the conflicting requirements excuse me and provide an environmentally sound solution that may be acceptable to all parties involved thank you thank you we have a question yeah sorry was this the the map that you sent to the council yeah at the time we called it i think variant 2 with modifications great thank you very much thank you elizabeth

[42:04] and then ryan welsh hi elizabeth black 4340 north 13th street recently you all correctly spotted conflicting reports about whether prairie dog sequester carbon and make healthier soils boulder cu researchers have found that no prairie dogs do not but the web says yes prairie dogs do all the pro pray dog reports on the web trace back to one study at the yanosh reserve in chihuahua why are yanosh's results so different than boulder's researchers well if you dive deep into yanish data you find a couple disturbing things first janos sampled only three prairie dog sites an exceptionally small number to base conclusions on boulder's researchers on the other hand sampled over 70 sites secondly yano soil pits were six feet

[43:00] deep and were sampled horizontally at inconsistent depths down to the six foot level soils six feet down were formed long before prairie dogs even roamed janos's site boulders researchers on the other hand sampled only the top six inches of soil formed in the last six thousand years and thirdly janos found exceedingly high carbon levels five percent carbon several feet down in their soils yanosh's assertion that prairie dogs sequester carbon totally depends on these five percent carbon values which are unheard of at that soil depth but you can get high carbon values like janos if you sample a caliche layer of calcium carbonate and don't correct for the carbonate caliche soils are common in chihuahua and janus does not mention any corrections it's a big red flag so

[44:00] our own boulder research is more credible than janusz's i've given you some prairie dog research abstracts mostly by cu researchers mostly on osnp land for your bedtime enjoyment thank you thank you ryan and then nikhil hi city council good evening my name is brian walsh and i live at 22nd and walnut here in boulder i bike every day in town and i also drive when i need to um as you know you're going to get an opportunity to give some feedback on the transportation master plan tonight um many thanks to the staff and transportation planners who have put so much time and thought into the tmp i'm happy to see some great goals and uh sorry some great goals being made for the city in that plant including slower vehicle speeds on interior arterials further deployment of right on red restrictions and a 50 reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030. i'm also enjoying a heavy emphasis on buffered bike lanes a low

[45:00] stress walking biking network and at least a mention of congestion pricing i think these are great steps but i'm asking you to think a little bigger um buffered bike lanes are great and they're more comfortable feeling than no buffer but studies show that our safest option is protected bike clients instead of sparse red and red restrictions we can have pedestrian-only intervals at all intersections pedestrians scrambles which we have one or two of could give vulnerable people in crosswalks uh clear priority over those in large metal boxes at every intersection instead of just slower speeds on our road we can emphasize fewer cars lowering that 80 sov number that we all know could directly decrease risk for every road user a 50 reduction in emissions by 2030 is the bare minimum recommended by the ipcc for the entire planet if wealthy cities like boulder can't do better there's no way we're going to hit our climate goals nationally or globally this is our chance to take the lead on transportation emissions our tmp should

[46:02] at least match the city's climate goals of an 80 reduction by 2030 and i believe it could even be sooner i have a vision for an even more beautiful boulder and i hope you guys do too my vision is one with less pavement more shared green space more walkability and a whole lot less air pollution than cars the transportation master plan is a vehicle for that vision and i hope council both support its goals and push them to be even more ambitious thank you nicu and then james feeney hello i'm nikhil manchekol i'm the chair of the city's human relations commission i did send in um a letter from on behalf of the commission to you but i just wanted to show up to take questions because i'm not going to be with the uh the discussion later then i'll just read through with the community uh what they'll stick to what this says so uh two members of city council and staff i'm writing on behalf of the city of boulder human relations commission to

[47:01] express our support for the proposed increase in the living wage paid to city employees from 15.67 to 17.42 and we're continuing to index the living wage to the self-sufficiency standard for boulder county at last night's human relations commission meeting we discussed some of the history of this policy i was lucky and honored to be able to present the living wage recommendation on behalf of the hlc to city council in february of 2016. at that time we had agreed that implementing such a policy and indexing it to the self-sufficiency standard for border county was the best path forward that was based not only on staff research but also community feedback we received during many living wage public healings we had in 2014 and 15 before that policy went to you additionally though not part of the initial recommendation doing q and a from city council that night i i had also recommended that we bring in outsourced jobs for city custodial

[48:00] and landscaping workers in-house so they may access and receive full city benefits and insurance and additionally it is important that we treat people who make things run and work for the city and contribute to the city such as they do as full participants and members of the city and its staff we believe respect matters one of the most shocking revelations that came out at that february 2016 city council meeting was that among uh ems workers and emergency responders um that they were only getting paid a minimum wage um there was some passionate discussion among council members that night of bringing these workers in houses full of city employees and renegotiating the city's contracts with uh to bring them up to the full living wage in the meantime i'm disappointed in the lack of follow-through we have seen on that so i'll leave it at that if anyone if you have any questions for me we just went through this living wage stuff at the meeting last last night but i'm happy to take any questions yep we do lisa so nikhil as you know

[49:01] we're talking about in house we're sourcing our our custodial workers in-house and as you know we have seven city custodial workers that already work in-house and then 46 that do not did you guys take that up and did you look at the recommendations that staff had given us so this was something that came to us kind of last minute we it was not on the guido so i just added it to the agenda last night so we didn't have a chance to look at the full memo hence in tonight i went into basically what i saw in some of the history and what the commission in 2016 had recommended in that discussion so i can say personally just for me nikhil is trailer of the commission i would support bringing in custodial and uh landscaping staff in-house and in addition to you know tweeting the ems with respect we should especially given the job they do i think it's really

[50:00] important um and that this is even this is a still dis discussion happening now see is a bit confusing to me because i thought this was all decided given the go-ahead back in 2016 and is now uh there seems to be some some disagreement on that um additionally i uh what did come up at the meeting last night among commissioners was that the indexing to the self-sufficiency standard which we did support that was also something that was decided on at the time so that it we thought that was something that would be automatic among city staff and it wouldn't have to keep coming back to council for the vote each time um so if there's some way to most strongly support that i believe um that would be excellent because as we're not going to be in the economic boom latin when we have a downtown that's often how when things get outsourced and wages and and exploitation and things like that no that's true that's what happened in 2003 so um

[51:01] when you are meeting um i'm surprised you didn't have that on your agenda last night given that you were the ones who brought forward this recommendation back in 2016. so is there any appetite by the hrc to have this discussion in your next month's meeting um we could um we have a yeah i mean i think it would be good to have um some of this come back to us and we'd be happy to take a look at it and and give a recommendation to council i think i'm the only one who's on the commission now who who was still on the commission at the time when we did that so when i saw it you know in the news it caught my eye so that's why i added it to the agenda um but yeah we i think we could cindy so um nikhil maybe this isn't the time but i'm hoping since i wasn't on the council at that time to find out what happened why it just so we'll talk about that later on yeah we will okay yeah yeah i

[52:02] think so i just wanted to make sure to get something to you all expressing you know my own support based on what happened back then and showing that the commission did back that back then on these bringing these employees in-house so so if it's sent back to you again would it just be looping through again is that um i mean it might be looping through we could i mean we would get like a more a unanimous vote from the commission back then but i think um on the increasing the wage this time and continuing to index to the self-sufficiency standard we do have that voted on to you and that's what i can speak to on behalf of the commission as a whole and then on getting this ems issue settled and get and bring them in-house or getting the wage that that we need uh and then the custodial and janitorial staff that's just me personally as chief of the commission and with my experience saying that i think that would be a good idea um as something to do thank you so if if you all have to make

[53:01] a decision tonight to get things in the budget and stuff you know move ahead and hopefully this input is good enough i just think it would be good to hear what the commission has to say since even if they weren't i mean your commission is always changing every year so it would just be insightful and informative to see what another set of five pairs of eyes absolutely and i think we we had we had an absence at the meeting from someone last night and we didn't have the full memo in the packet so it was just i did the best we could with something i added to the agenda at the last minute to try to get you at least some input um tonight but i'm happy happy to do what what council asks us to do all right well we'll uh after our discussion we will be clear if that is the will of council but thank you very much for taking the time to be here yes okay and i i have these just pointed out it might be convenient if you don't have one you

[54:00] can use computers so i'll just give them okay thank you james and then deborah ordway i'm james feeney from north boulder two weeks ago and after seven weeks of research in response to a question from council as to whether city ordinances were actually enforceable on private property including particularly mobile home parks city attorneys stated i don't know at the same meeting city manager stated that she had asked her housing department staff to see if they would voluntarily require people to comply with the dark sky ordinance the dark sky ordinance went into full force in 2018 november 1st while parts of it went into effect in 2004 now after 16 years of advance notice city manager has a duty of action to enforce the ordinances in the city of boulder it is not a discretionary authority

[55:00] the duty of action leads to a duty of care sufficient to establish an action in negligence against the city of boulder i'm in receipt of a council hotline email from chief deputy city attorney dated yesterday in it we see that city's official legal opinion that quote the dark sky ordinance does apply to mobile home parks such that the city manager's non-enforcement policy is in conflict with direct advice from city attorney the opinion goes on to say that quote however in light pollution standards of the dark sky ordinance cannot be enforced against individual units within a mobile home park unless there are actual property lines between mobile home lots nonetheless uh as i have mentioned in the past boulder revised code chapter 10 2-5 abatement of public news especially section 4 nuisances prohibited itself specifically references the rights of quote any person having a leasehold interest in any lot unquote and recognize the leaseholders right of exclusive possession during the lease

[56:02] term lend leases do not exist without actual property lines between mobile home park lots so now i ask again is it city attorneys advice that city of boulder ordinances and in particular section 9916 are unenforceable against either party to a mobile home park land lease or against the city of boulder itself and if so what is city attorney's legal basis for this reasoning um please ask the manager to manage your career we'll keep last speaker deborah ordway um my name is deborah ordway my address is 3820 north 26th street um sorry for the only single one that's going to 10 of you it's been a while since i've been back to council

[57:00] so my conversation tonight is that i live on a cul-de-sac that's a private road at the end of this road is adjacent to winding trails estate which has a gate that says no parking fire zone now on the map that you see is everybody has a certain easement the neighbor that i'm referring to in your pass-through is using more than his easement i've been on that road for 27 years he literally parks both trucks on the easements and it makes it challenging for cars to come in and out now if you're going to have a fire truck or an ambulance or any other cars if i used my easement i have measured what it cost for a fire truck to come through and there's no way a fire truck can get through that road if an ambulance needed to come through

[58:00] and everybody used that separate easement nobody would get through so if there was a fire you better prepare that your fight your house would go down in flames and if you were dying heaven to help you that a emergency truck can get to your house and raid that emergency address so my concern to city council i did touch base with the fire marshal he said my uh choice would be coming to council to either propose emergency easement getting to that gate and they do have another gate on 28th street that also says the same sign with no parking and there's that easement that goes through so in case of a fire going into another winding trails so i need this help because my house is on sale so we need a parking issue it's a private road easements great thank you for

[59:00] raising this with uh raising this issue yeah we're gonna yes after we're done we'll have a little discussion here wonderful thank you great okay so that's the end of open comment staff we have a list of about eight issues that have been raised um do you have okay sure so i'll start off with a few of the issues um we had a resident expressed concerns about boulder housing partners and enforcement of lease matters so i'll be referring that to the housing department to look into and they'll contact bolding boulder housing partners we had two folks who are residents of ponderosa come with questions about that we have the ponderosa annexation coming up to planning board and then city council in the fall with regard to the access i believe that we are planning to provide a second emergency access i don't know the exact details of it but again the

[60:00] housing department is working on that and then the other concern was the um not not liking the plan that was brought forward i don't believe that there will be changes to the plan to allow single-family homes the plan that's been approved or proposed is duplexes and triplexes but i will again refer to the housing department to find out more about that let's see could you also oh what else would you like me to answer um well just on that one sure there was a mention that eight families have moved can you have curt look into that yeah absolutely we'll look into that as well for sure okay well increase but the increased the increase in the costs because it sounds as though gentrification is going on here as well relative to the people who are there and whether or not they're able to live there yeah certainly we'll look into that first yeah i may have misunderstood but i thought the comparison was to um the current lot rent versus what would

[61:03] occur in a condo one of the equivalent condos there um so yeah if you could look into that and clarify what will happen with the duplexes and their rents versus what will happen and the other issue i just thought i would would point out when we're on the subject that i seem to remember that there was discussion that we had during our last review of a access on broadway that would be exit only right turn only and so i think that's where the last plan we saw was was considering that as that's what i thought as well but i i'm not sure so i don't want to say it in a public meeting is that what you're i definitely remember us discussing that we were advocating for the right turn out on broadway and i understand city staff had some concerns with that but i believe we were very clear that we thought that that should proceed and i will continue to advocate for that and i think it's still in the plans and i just wanted to add one

[62:00] one more question to the set of questions that were just posed with respect to ponderosa and that would be who qualifies for the homes the the qualification requirements okay one other thing the speaker also referred to eight eight homeowners leaving right yes um suzanne mentioned that and we'll be looking into it oh it's good okay anything else on ponderosa okay okay mr erling brought up the minimum wage and of course what council has said before is that you are very supportive of legislation with regard to allowing cities to have the minimum wage and in fact the city followed through with that by lobbying in favor of the minimum wage and putting forth a legislative proposal or support for that so from my point of view the council has fully followed up on it the next thing to happen though is that the legislature did pass

[63:02] legislation that allows us to impose a minimum wage it does not go into effect until january 1st the research and community outreach needed to implement a minimum wage for the entire community is significant there's no time on your agenda to do this between now and the end of the year and so our proposal is that the new council that will be seated in november would look at this during the retreat and make it a priority if they chose to do so for city staff to put on the work plan great thank you for that um what what else mr um the city attorney is going to talk about the dark skies ordinance and the swoon house was there something else um well can you remind us what oh swoon house and that um well start and we'll keep going okay so the swoon art house um mr thornton was correct we um did bring

[64:00] a prosecution for uh operating an uh amusement center um and we we prevailed uh the court issued a hundred dollar fine um the homeowner has appealed that um i have been working with the homeowner's attorney and attorney for the thorntons to try to uh structure a settlement that addresses many of the concerns um it is the the swoon art house is a single-family home in a single-family neighborhood so what the city can do to restrict use of a single-family home is somewhat limited there's been allegations that the ms domenico and dr perry don't live there we don't require people to live in a home unless they have a short-term rental license and they they have and have not at various times they do they have one now but sometimes they don't uh it's gone back and forth so so what i my report is that the deadline for finishing these negotiations is friday we have had intense drafts back and forth uh the thornton's uh one of the good things for

[65:01] the thorntons and the d dometic and minnesota and dr perry had never sat down and tried to work this out themselves the thorntons were kind enough to retain the law firm of ditsy and davis so they are represented in these discussions and we're trying to find something i think we're going to end up with something that neither side really likes but is probably beyond what the city can do through enforcement actions uh with voluntary restrictions that the uh that the the dr perry and ms d domenico will accept um to get a little bit further to protecting um the thornton's interests um we've by having the thorntons represented at the table we've been able to understand more of what their specific concerns are and we we should be able to address them i think we we will have a settlement discussions broke down a little bit today but that's always happens towards the end i will report further when we complete this but as i said the deadline is now friday so we i expect to have

[66:00] something done this week it's a very difficult situation i don't think either side is very happy and we're doing our best to try to come up with something that's a little bit better for both sides um with respect to mr feeney david did do a lot of research on this and we have talked to the enforcement section and it's kind of a little bit of a mixed bag so if you look at the dark skies ordinance there are three separate ways you can actually more than three but let's let's just take three generally um you can there's a limit on the number of lumens that you can have in a light there's a limit on the number of watts you can have in lights and there are certain shielding and placement restrictions all of those restrictions are enforceable in mobile home parks like they are anyplace else the challenge is there's another provision that says that you cannot have a light that exerts more than 0.1 candle power at the property line um

[67:00] for that the property line in a mobile home park is the property line on the park so that's what i think mr speeney's concern is you we can't say when you've got two mobile homes next to each other that there is a property line between them because there isn't so it's our interpretation that the property line is the property line around the whole park also it would be very difficult to afford to now i'm not an expert on lighting but i think that 0.1 candle power is a very low level i mean maybe sam you know better than me so trying to enforce that between two mobile homes would be very difficult however as i said there are very strict requirements for lumens watts and shielding and all of those are enforceable we have talked to john bergeron who enforces and he will be enforcing those in mobile home parks okay and it's a question then um so three of the four components are enforceable yes on mobile homes absolutely okay and

[68:01] so the only one that's not enforceable is the number of foot candles the point one foot candle candles and across a lot line yes and so it would seem like the the three the first three um would be pretty important steps forward absolutely and the fourth one maybe could get clarified later if if need be yes and our enforcement folks are aware of that and they will be working on it okay and i should say just to clarify it is enforceable but it's enforceable the lot line of the mobile home park not at the between the individual homes okay that's very helpful um what about the winding trail easement blockage i don't know anything about that it's the first time i've heard it right same for me so um we will [Music] it seems like the resident has spoken with our fire marshal so we'll definitely check in with him and then get this issue to the appropriate party in the city so i just want to clear up what i think is the case but we

[69:01] will talk about the ems situation under the living wage a little bit as an update or should we do that now well we're actually not going to talk about it very much so let me try to clarify a little bit wait wait can't we do that as a part of the whole thing well i'd love to but i'm happy to hear an update now and it just seems like we're going to be talking about minimum wage now no oh can we do that of course we can do it later all right that's great okay the only other thing was will you i just have a question so we're revisiting our diving rigs is that a city a parks and rec process again we will look into that well yeah we are as you know pretty generous on letting people do things that are questionable we let people climb mountains so we do on our property which most lawyers would say is insane but we we do it and we've never been sued for it so um i will work with parks and rec sandra yanus represents them and uh

[70:00] people sign waivers all the time to do things and uh we have pretty good protection so i i think obviously as you all know there was a spate of really serious diving board accidents 10 20 years ago and most people got rid of diving boards completely a lot a lot of public facilities because the accidents tend to be really very serious i mean parallel usually parallelization so uh i i i'm not an expert so but um clearly someone who knows what they're doing should be allowed to do it and i assume we have diving competitions for the high schools so we do allow some we must allow something but again i'm not very familiar with it but i promise we will look into it okay i just anybody out there cares i wanted to direct them towards whatever process is happening okay is that good mary so i have a question and a comment i'll start with the comment um with respect to mr breiter's suggestion for open space board of trustees i just wanted to remind

[71:01] him that we will be appointing from this if he's still here from this year's [Music] march applicants and to urge him to apply for it next year we won't be appointing from a new pool until next year so please apply um i begin i i think the application process opens up in january so look for that and the question um is first half and has to do with mr rivkins testimony regarding cu south and the i guess what it brings up for me is um [Music] we're in a preliminary design process correct yes we are and and so given given what's come up with with c dot and the questions around disposal with open space and

[72:02] i guess [Music] i want to understand where we are with a preliminary design and i guess for me it opens up the possibility of having more options opening up for us because of those questions that are sitting there so i guess i want to know what where are we what are we designing to with in this preliminary design because so we had a meeting with cdot and they provided us with some very helpful information that would allow us to put structures that above ground would be adjacent to their current right-of-way but below ground would actually impinge on their right of way so they made significant concessions to the city and we are working based on the direction of council to look at the

[73:00] detention capabilities of that area along with the land use designations from the boulder valley comp plan to see what modifications we might make with regard to the extent of detention and the land use category lines and we'll be reporting back to the council i believe on july 16th with regard to that so if at that time the council feels like we're not making progress then i suppose you could ask us to do a completely different design as suggested by mr mccurry but right now we're not looking into that and we also had some questions with respect to the charter purposes of the open space and how that may or may not work right and i i believe that we'll be reporting further on that on july 16th yeah we're working on a memo on the legal issues okay and then um

[74:02] the other question it raises for me is the the cu berm and um what what we might be able to do in terms of flood mitigation in a more immediate time frame so i'm wondering if if we could i guess i'll ask the council about this i'm wondering if we could um have rabb at least take a look at that what the immediate removal of the cu berm would provide in terms of some immediate relief for flood mitigation is this just from a process point of view is this a discussion we can well july 16th and then we can discuss it and direct grab if we'd like rather than have that right now that would be my proposal okay go ahead

[75:00] yeah i guess further to digest exactly what we're thinking about perhaps hotline posts that are appropriate to the questions that might be outside of what's in the memo that's coming out on the 16th would be helpful because it would direct staff to put those things in the memo as talking points and information for us so when it comes to i didn't remember that we were having a uh council discussion on this this quickly and i also um so i think we can tee it up for that um and you know i'll also be asking questions of dr mccurry and others to get a sense of what what they're thinking right now versus what they were thinking before so if i agree with suzanne about holding it till the 16th but if we want to tee it up so that it addresses issues that we want to hear about including the berm issue i think that would be useful

[76:00] and and i would agree that i would like to get some sense from rabb since um rather than just leave all the questions out there so that we might see what what their thinking is on this given that although c dot did make concessions the concessions raised another whole set of issues to deal with for the council that we had not anticipated because we had been told by staff all along that the cdot right of way was going to be something that we could build into not something that's way out into the lands so i would like to see us move on this again the community has been asking us to move on this at least to look at other options so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel but see some of the things that we've already looked at and and try and move this along so that as sam says it's teed up for this july 16 discussion rather than having it go on and on so the city staff does not have

[77:02] the capacity to look at any other options right now we're working as hard as we can on the latest information that we have from cdot and the direction that we got from council the last time we spoke about this so stopping that or adding staff to look at other options that i don't know what they are is just not something that we can do so i'm not asking that staff do this i'm asking that the rab be able to take a look at it the the variant ii um with um i believe variant two is off the modifications of the difference is off the table based on most of what cdot had to say the the flood wall which is what you're referring to in dr mccurry's original drawing is the same between the variants and so i think that the things to think about are where the spillway or siphon is going to be you know in the new and yeah disposal issues will for sure

[78:01] come up along the strip but unlike variant 2 where disposal issues could have been much larger than just a strip the i'll call it the north west um siphon could still have this this detention that i think dr mccurry was talking about right but so i would i think we're trying to drop the variant nomenclature going forward kind of thinking about it was just because it was reviewed our mentioned is that right okay so good enough for now if we're not making requests of staff but if there's specific things that we want to heat up for discussion feel free to send them to cicn staff but it's not go research something new well i do have one request which is that in the packet if you could attach what the consultant's evaluation of that upstream detention was that might be helpful so that we don't have to dig for

[79:01] it because that ver that modification was given to a consultant and we heard something back from them and i'd just like to have that information available for the discussion i'll pass that along yes sir okay and all right and i'd also in this packet that's coming up i'd be interested mary mentioned about what would be the impact if the existing berm was removed and i don't know somewhere in our materials i remember saying seeing something like it would reduce something like 20 of the blood hazard downstream and i just think right now we're going through almost every day is a rainy day and we get in situations where the ground is become saturated and then there's no more capacity for it to absorb water so i guess i would like to know well

[80:01] could we do something in removing the berm sooner than later and i think in what we had looked at earlier in the variant one we had talked about removing that berm so right that was one of the i right and long-range things we were going to do so we can look into finding out information about what the removal of the berm would result in right um we can't remove the burn because we do not own it i get that but i would just like to know from an engineering perspective what what would be the impact of that and would it would it reduce the flood risk to downstream by 20 or by how much right and then in what time frame so it's not a long-term thing okay and and not only that but what kinds of the constraints that we are faced with now would it be alleviating so okay you guys can talk that i think the plan of record as jane said is to remove it

[81:01] at some point and i think what mary's asking is could it be done sooner than later yeah to provide some some immediate flood mitigation yep that's cool okay you all pay me the big bucks to keep moving and we are now behind schedules so items a through f are before you tonight on your content agenda okay these are there's one settlement otherwise they're all meeting notes could i have a motion move the consent agenda second any discussion cindy so i would like to um i'm going to not support the consideration of a motion to accept the study session summaries on large lots homes and lots i'm concerned about this i heard from a member of the public some people actually who are concerned that even though there

[82:01] was outreach done with this that um people don't really know what's happening on the ground and that people who are in these rr1 zoning districts for example may make a wake up one day and see that there is a cottage development with six dwelling units going in next to them or triplexes or duplexes and i'm just wondering if this has gone out enough to the broader public to have this kind of um resolution go forward as it has done from this study session so i'm going to not vote for e under the consent agenda for those reasons is it d yeah but all these are the meeting notes well they're meeting notes i'm just going to say i'm not going to accept that okay others you're with cindy you're not going to accept the notes well let me let me tell them too it's

[83:01] not so much i don't accept the notes but the notes are unclear because i think what was discussed after we decided not to put a cap on large houses is that we instructed staff to go and evaluate the possibility of doubling the number of adus in our e and r r districts from one to two and also to do some things with respect to um uh house splits and the minutes don't reflect that we have several community members reach out to us and say what is it that staff is meant to do because what was said at the council meeting and what's reflected in the minutes are inconsistent and so um we can't object to my views we can't object to what happened but i don't think they accurately reflect what happened so that's very different so if we want to pull them and you know why don't we pull them and make sure that they are accurate before we bring them back okay which is slightly different from the process issue right um but we at least want to make sure that the notes are accurate well i'm learning about the process um but there's one

[84:02] other thing that i'm also still confused about and this was that we asked staff to deal with the diagonal to bring forward a prospectus or something like that and i'm concerned wait wait this was in the meeting notes or in the notes but diagonal help us we're not following so we talked about it being a great um [Music] area to deal with this had to do with the form-based codes um or the diagonal plasma right diagonal plaza and so we asked staff to go forward and do something with that i'm wondering whether or not we want to just leave it as that again whether or not the minutes reflect accurately what it is that the council wants done i'm concerned that we've just sort of pushed this off onto staff without giving clear enough direction about what it is that we would like to see done there if that makes okay i remember less about

[85:01] consensus around that so what there was was a request that we work on a prospectus um with regard to the diagonal plaza and now i get it right and so we are working on a draft and in a conversation that i had with yvette bowden today we've got some more internal work to do but we are going to bring it something back to you because we can't complete a prospectus unless we get further information from council so that's going to come back at a later time so i guess my concern with that again in in terms of so a prospectus from the staff but one of the things that has been talked about is using the holiday neighborhood aaron as a as a sort of template for this kind of thing and what could happen but my understanding is that the holiday neighborhood had a very robust community

[86:00] involvement in what it was that would be happening there and that there was a lot of planning involved on the front end in in terms of of what happened rather than just something brought and then brought back again so i would hope that we would be much more involved instead of just reactive that something to something that is being brought to us basically right so the way that i think this would work is that this prospectus would be to lay out the kinds of things that we're thinking about in the diagonal plaza and asking people that might want to work with the property owners to redevelop it to come forward but they would come forward if they did with a site plan that would have full review by the planning board by staff by the council it's a very long process the prospectus is simply to find out if

[87:00] there's interest out there in the world for looking at making changes to the land uses at diagonal plaza so this would be a very preliminary step it would not be a decision or a commitment it would be an invitation so in other words it's an invitation to the landowners to find out whether or not they're interested in doing something in terms of bringing it all together yes and an an invitation to developers or investors to work with the landowners to to come forward with future plans for that site but it sounds like regardless you would be bringing it to us to see before it's made public so this council or the next will have a chance to chew on it before it goes out okay all right so you made a motion you cool with pulling

[88:01] amending your emotion to pull those notes right yes friendly yep accepted okay all those in favor of the consent agenda all right okay now everybody on board yeah okay unanimous your call-up check-in tonight is the utility easement vacation at 2010-21st street is anybody interested in calling that up any questions moving on okay you're public hearing the second reading of ordinance 8332 good evening so when we scheduled this at cac the committee asked us to do a brief update on where we are in the overall project before we get to this specific thing uh just because some of this had been taken a little bit out of context and um the settlement of the

[89:03] utility formation litigation is a very small part of a much bigger project we don't talk about so we've asked steve katanak the director of climate initiatives to do a very brief presentation just bringing up you up to speed on all the various moving parts we've been working on for the last few months and i will then segue into a brief presentation on the ordinance and the settlement and we'll get to the public hearing on that so steve's going to start and then i will follow steve great well thank you all very much and thank you for the opportunity to provide an update on our local power initiative what i'm hoping to do and as tom reiterated three times in his introduction is give a brief discussion on where we're currently at with the project so my intent is just provide a general overview of what we're doing why we're doing it and then some specific updates of the actions that we're currently undertaking

[90:00] so of course local power is the development of a locally owned electric utility that our mission is really to provide clean local and affordable and reliable electricity to the community and it's really a key component of our energy future of how we move forward with the city's climate commitment our primary goals related to the development of the electric utility really have to do with ensuring a clean power supply is brought to the community and removing fossil fuels from that supply but along with that there are other values that we are really trying to bring to the community and one of those is local control the ability to make decisions about how we run the electric utility and how we invest our revenues back into the community as we operate the system

[91:00] and there's other values that this also brings and that is the ability to make decisions related to innovative processes and projects to take a look at the implementation of things like microgrids of shared distributed resources where perhaps somebody that really can't utilize their rooftop space perhaps their they and their neighbors can share that type of thing and all those come back to that level of local control where we're making those decisions locally and of course one of our core values is to ensure that the electricity we're providing is both reliable and secure so just as a reminder the city climate commitment goals currently relate to an overall emissions reduction in the city of 80 by 2050

[92:00] we have achieved 16 percent of that which our 2020 goal was 15 so we've achieved that goal early we also have the goal of an 80 reduction in emissions of the city organization 100 renewable energy by 2030 of which we've reached about 28 and that's still the excel mix and i do want to recognize the state has made significant progress some of this legislation that they recently passed really moves the level of carbon-free electricity to 80 by 2030 in the state and 100 by 2050 and this should be applauded i mean these are really uh strong goals and as we come before you on july 9th we have a study session that is scheduled with you all to talk about how we move forward with a public

[93:02] process to re-examine our goals and the climate commitment that we have i do also want to note that our local renewable generation uh we're up to 53 megawatts with a goal of 100 megawatts by 2030 and i did uh hear statistic today that currently we have uh the highest per capita level of renewable energy in the community which should also be applauded a lot of people putting solar on that out there in the state yes so we want to take a look at where we're headed and where we're going really has to do with a community decision our current target is to move for a vote to the community by in 2020 certainly there are obstacles in the way to getting there to by that date but

[94:02] it is currently still the target that we're looking for and what we plan to inform the community on is what the actual cost is to stand up that electric utility and move to operations so as we take a look at where we're focusing it's really determining the cost of creating that utility we're working to ensure the community is well informed and that they're educated on what that cost is but also what that cost means as we move forward and we start to develop more exact figures for these costs we understand it's going to be a very large number that we present to the community but our commitment is also that our rates will not be higher than excel's rates as we move forward so we need to ensure that people understand that well it sounds like an initial very large number as we talk about it being

[95:00] paid for through electrical rates it'll be very comparable to what excel energy currently charges we're also of course working at the benefits and we are working right now to get through the puc process as far as the puc goes we had a june 12th filing where we still have a lot of activities going on in relation to our work with excel and our work at the puc but fundamentally what we informed the puc of in our june 12 filing is that all of these actions can occur in parallel along with moving to towards the acquisition of the system and that acquisition can be either through negotiation or as we move forward it may be through condemnation

[96:00] so as i noted the areas we're really working on determining exact costs are that acquisition and that'll be as i noted through negotiation or through condemnation we also have developed a separation plan and we're working to identify those costs we have the cost of transition which is standing the utility up in order to operate a utility whether we contract the services out or we bring them in house we have to have linemen we have to have billing services and meter reading services and all of those things that go along with operating an electric utility so we're working to identify for those costs as well so that the community understands what that cost will be we also have taken a look at potential power supply and what the cost of supplying power to the community will be along with that we've developed a financial forecast tool that's available

[97:02] online that allows community members to go in and to insert numbers or select certain ranges of numbers and a lot of those we look at them as high impact variables and those high impact variables are things such as interest rates so if interest rates go up too high it may make the financial viability of an electric utility unfeasible certainly if acquisition costs come in too high or separation costs we do also recognize that there is a risk of stranded costs which are an obligation to pay for the generation systems that we're no longer purchasing for so we're working to identify all of these costs and online community members can plug numbers or select interest rates in that model in order to develop and see what impact

[98:00] it has as far as developing the acquisition cost we're currently on a timeline december 4th you approved ordinance to move forward with condemnation if necessary we have presented our last and final offer to excel energy i believe last week tom and we're of course waiting for a reply on that and it is our intent that we will move forward with condemnation here near the end of the month and we anticipate that that trial will take or that process will take anywhere from a year to i think 18 months in the outside on the engineering side we have hired two groups of engineers a company out of denver that is working on our distribution system engineering

[99:00] we also have a company out of fort collins that's working on the substations which substations are what take the transmission the very high voltage energy and transitions that to a voltage that we can move it across the community xl energy along with us has also hired engineers to do their portion of our separation engineering and they have a group out of california with denver offices and another group doing their substation engineering and i do want to comment the engineers are working together very very well they've made a lot of progress and things are very coordinated because as you can imagine as we show here this is what the excel electric system looks like today as we move forward we are proposing a set of construction around the community and it's hard to see on this map but the dashed lines represent the work excel will be doing the solid

[100:00] lines represent the work that the city will be doing and all of this with the intent to create two independent systems that maintains the same level of reliability and safety and effectiveness as the current system does today so what we have here is the blue system is what the city electric system will look like the gray area is the city limits so this blue system will only serve those customers within the city limits of boulder on the other side we have the orange system and that's what excel system will look like after separation and they will serve customers outside the city limits with the power supply one of the things we pursued was we were not sure if the city because of the size of customer that we are would be able to receive the same level of bids same cost for power supply

[101:02] as we saw with excel in their most recent electric resource plan and to our pleasant surprise uh the city did receive bids that were comparable to excels that really would allow us to move forward and if after separation of the systems they were operational by 2024 our power supply would be cheaper and we would be able to serve the community at about 90 percent renewable energy on day one so we we have a lot more information and some a lot of detail at our website so if folks are interested i'd like to push from that direction so to summarize our next steps are really to meet the conditions of the puc and move forward with that negotiate or move to condemnation to acquire the excel system

[102:00] complete our detailed engineering in order to develop that cost of separation negotiate contracts and all of those things that go along with standing up a utility we will issue formal bids for power supply as i noted we did a request for indicative pricing so nothing formal that will contract and of course ongoing community engagement which again i'd like to thank you all for this opportunity to speak to not only you but to speak to the community and give them an update so thank you all great that's very helpful thank you do you have questions for him or do you want me to go right into mine but i do have it okay just one little question i thought your maps on um post separation systems were really nice and clear and um i'm just looking at some of the posts the post-separation system the outside

[103:01] part of it and as you're aware that we have enclaves within the city that are still in the county how will those be treated as those enclaves annex into the city so typically investor-owned utilities and municipal utilities have annexation agreements where it's a negotiated agreement that where the municipality will compensate the uh investor owned utility for the system that's in place at the time they take over that that area and they're all different there's a different one in fort collins a different one in loveland one and longmont and estes so we also will negotiate a annexation agreement with excel and with pouter valley and that would be done on a property by property basis because some of these enclaves are kind of big and we're not annexing them uniformly

[104:02] the property owners are coming in on their own and asset requesting annexation so it's kind of real piece meal yep absolutely or if um as in the case with i believe it's no wood that might be coming in as a subdivision it would be negotiated for the whole subdivision thank you to the extent that we can get that done before cut over we're in better shape so if you look at the the orange map on the right you'll see that there are fewer than the last time you saw that we've been working on that at least you'll recall that we straightened out the the blue line in large part to clear some of the issues we had on the western boundary right and you notice the western boundaries looking a little cleaner looks really straight yeah and well yeah pretty sweet and no wood will be a big part of that one of the biggest areas that we have not brought in there where they're doing an annexation election very shortly so we'll see where they go thank you thank you the only other thing i wanted to mention is i was just at a

[105:02] ribbon cutting for ibm solar project which i believe is 10 megawatts with a couple of my colleagues and i guess just wanted to acknowledge that as a big step forward in terms of reaching local generation goals absolutely highlight that effort it was 10 of our total goal in one fell swoop yeah it's pretty good so the the agenda item before you tonight is uh approving us on second reading and ordinance to uh complete a settlement of the utility formation lawsuit litigation um you'll recall that in well you may not because it's been a while but in august of 2013 council passed ordinance 7917 which uh vera which accepted the third party uh third party consultants uh review of the city's compliance with section 178 of the charter which were the metrics for forming a utility and then in may of 2014 the council passed

[106:00] ordinance 7969 which created the elect the utility enterprise just the thing itself uh we did that in large part because we were planning on the same day that council passed ordinance 7969 council would pass ordinance 7968 which authorized proceeding to condemnation and we thought at the time would be going directly to condemnation we've had a slight detour to the puc for five years which we're hoping is coming to an end but our main concern was that there would be a defensive condemnation that we could not engage in good faith negotiations because the acquiring authority that is the utility didn't exist so we created the utility in large part for for to be able to forestall that defense in condemnation we have litigated that lawsuit since uh it was filed in uh june of 2014 in we have been through the district court the court of appeals the supreme court and back to the district court uh when we got back to the district court we made a motion for legal rulings from the court and it seemed clear that we were going to

[107:01] face a trial sometime in august this year of some complex issues and then further appeals both sides were not happy with this prospect so we sat down and and negotiated a deal and the outline of the settlement is fairly straightforward um we agreed that we would get rid of the utility um that we would not create the the utility until after the go no election and that when we did create it would comply with the charter uh excel agreed to dismiss the pending lawsuit and to not assert the lack of the utility as a defense in the condemnation so we pretty much got what we wanted they got what they wanted it's the kind of thing where i'm not thrilled but i'm not also very upset it sort of takes care of the pending issue the proposed ordinance just does that it repeals section 11-7 and i explained that's why we did it so um we've had some discussion with community members and with council member weaver and i want to thank sam he uh worked on this over the weekend while he was at a family graduation so i mean email i think at 5 30 on saturday

[108:01] morning expressing his concerns and we've had ongoing discussions back and forth and i think we've addressed them so in front of you on the gold piece of paper you'll see a proposed amendment uh what the amendment does is there was concern about section three of the settlement agreement section three of the settlement agreement is the one that says that we will not recreate the utility until after the go no go election and there was some concern that that could be interpreted to uh require that the utility comply with the charter in existence at the time of the settlement and not the charter in existence at the time that the utility is reclaimed and of course as you know we expect to have it to have an election either in uh 2020 or 2021 where we um the council will amend the chart will well the voters will approve uh hopefully going forward with um acquisition of debt which is required by section 178 d of the charter um the thought is that that council may decide to alter 178 a in some way and so the charter requirements could be different at that time if that happens

[109:02] we wanted to clarify that the charter that applies is the charter in effect at that time so what we've done is suggested that um council is insert a new finding in as section one of the ordinance that says what this says up here and i will read it for the audience the city council is adopting this ordinance to fulfill the requirements of a settlement agreement entered into between public service company of colorado doing businesses excel energy and the city of boulder executed on may 17 2019 by alice jackson president on behalf of excel energy and on may 14 2019 by jane brodigam city manager on behalf of the city of boulder the city council finds that the reference to charter compliance in paragraph three of that agreement refers to the charter in effect at the time the utility is created and the election referenced is an election required for the issuance of debt if council adopts the amendments on the gold the ordinance will be required to be passed by emergency the settlement agreement says that if you don't pass this within 45 days of execution the settlement is void 45 days of execution would be about july 1st

[110:01] depending on which signature you go by so if you don't do it tonight um there is another meeting before then so i'm recommending that you adopt the ordinance the the amendment in in gold and that if there are six votes that it be passed by emergency thank you thank you tom any questions before we go to the public hearing okay is anyone signed up to speak yes are you have three people great real quick each person has three minutes i'm going to start with carrie if you can start with your name and address that would be great good evening council it's on good evening council i live in berthed i'm a utility reform and renewable energy advocate named carrie christina and i have one rental unit here in in boulder

[111:00] and i remember really well the night that this utility was formed as we used to have 100 people here those nights and macon's tears of joy well some of us rolled our eyes a little bit as you know thinking this is going to take a lot longer mostly because of my discussions with excel and people that know a lot about this process and you know here we are i guess six years later and the concern was at the time is that things change and things have changed they've changed tremendously and they've changed the most arguably in my view this legislative session k.k du vivier is a professor at du sturm college of law and she wrote a letter to the editor in the denver post on april 30th cautioning legislators not to vote for hb 1313 which was introduced by casey becker who i believe might have been on council at the time um

[112:00] which basically she says she quoted it as it will expand the monopoly dominance of excel and in many ways i think she is correct it's going to create an incredible clean energy plan that will do exactly what mr catnock said 80 uh greenhouse gas-free uh energy for for excel territory um by 2030 and you know at one which means they're going to buy a lot of stuff they're going to build a lot of stuff it's just what's going to happen so your standard costs right there are in a completely different ballpark and you should discuss this with your staff and i think you need to think it through this at some point if it's going to take every city 10 years or more to municipalize by continuing this process you could actually be holding the state back in my view at this point that's the first time i've ever said that but actually i think it might be true cities like denver who are at the stakeholder meeting at excel today which we have quarterly meetings um about new products

[113:01] you know what solar rewards are doing they're looking at creating in their rate case a process by which cities will be able to go more renewable pretty much instantly by claiming the wrecks that right now they're selling to california to ccas like like the california market and they're making quite a lot of money doing that um and there so you should look into that too matt lehrman was on the the call and um and it would be something to look into lastly i want to talk about local power local power is the name of a company that is that is formed by paul fenn president who basically is the co-founder of community choice aggregation back in 20 some spring of 2011 local power was not a concept that some of the main uni advocates some of it are in the room wanted i'm so glad that that concept has now been embraced but california it was it was invented in california thank you thank you patrick

[114:04] my name is patrick murphy i live in boulder so you didn't meet the charter requirements and now the paper muni is a vapor muni this has been a long series of bad decisions the inability to do math and then representations of a pollyanna world not based in reality how did we manage to get eight years into this and we don't have an estimate high medium or low for stranded cost because the charter said we have to fit uh stranded and acquisition in that 214 million and i asked i said well if it's not zero what is it i got two paragraphs of talk talk talk talk talk talk and not one

[115:02] number eight years not one number on stranded cost these are supposed to be professionals we're not getting good leadership you know you're not being critical okay so we missed uh the criteria way back and i don't know what 2014. we hired somebody to tell us whether or not we met the criteria and then you know half a decade later we're still basing our success on something way old way out of date you know you're just not up to speed with reality you're not adding these numbers you're not i showed you that graphic you know all these happy happy day sorts of things like oh we're going to get power so cheap you know oh our rates are going to be so low they all presume that we're not going to have this gigantic bill to

[116:01] pay we are going to have a gigantic bill to pay and we're going to and democratize it's going to be two years before we get to vote estimates of 2020 are baloney we're never going to get there i mean we're lucky we got this uh a little agreement that you know even though they want to gloss it over it agrees that we totally screwed up in the past and we are going to continue to screw up because our leadership doesn't do critical review and a lot of that rests on you you know you do a lot of good things uh in two months i will have lived in boulder for 50 years so i love this place i've seen it change you know and and i like a lot of the change this is the one thing other than dog crap that i

[117:01] do not accept so you know put yourself in the category and get it fixed thank you patrick leslie evening council leslie lustrom i live in boulder and thank you for this opportunity and just to cut to the chase from what i didn't know about the language on the gold page until we saw it on the powerpoint a few minutes ago uh my my belief is that that's very good language to adopt and it seems like a good thing to do to just be really clear about your legislative intent so i would support a yes vote on that gold language i was going to say you know these are really complex legal issues and but i did want to comment a little bit on just this whole concept of doing agreements with excel and i'm not really trying to criticize this agreement i'm just trying to make sure that we keep going forward with our eyes wide

[118:01] open once again a lot of things patrick said i really disagree with the you know supreme court you know it goes on and on the things that patrick said that frankly don't really stand up so but i don't want to go down that road right now because i think it's really important that the city and the community finally start to get clear on what this i think the city attorney referred to it as the five-year detour or whatever it is been down at the commission and i just whenever we sign an agreement with excel it's very hard to believe but we cannot believe that they will conduct themselves in good faith and that even when they sign an agreement that doesn't mean we have an agreement that's one reason i think the gold language is very important as many of the council members know i've been down at the utilities commission you know a gazillion hours starting in 2004. i have watched excel do things that have left me way beyond speechless the

[119:00] biggest one of course was driving a billion dollar coal plant through the utilities commission that we didn't need and that of course was the wrong resource and now everybody including excel recognizes that you know i have stories that go on forever but the one i want to remind the council of i think you all know but just to be really clear about this after about four years of that detour down at the commission we got a utilities commission decision that said and david ease from public service company colorado excel said we're here to help help the city move forward and i had visions of saturday morning cartoons and the fox in the suit taking the chickens and said i'm happy to help you get home and but somehow everybody down at the commission was like okay so instead of taking three months to negotiate the three agreements that the commission asked for excel just couldn't really find their homework time and time again and so that process took 14 months in october of 2018 chris irby signed the the filing with the city and three months later chris irby

[120:01] signed a withdrawal of that agreement other than driving through a billion dollar coal plant that we don't need because it was excess capacity on top of a thousand megawatt reserve margin this is so far beyond a stunning i had thought of the words i know i can't remember them anymore but it's just really really gobstopping bad what they have done so just be aware of your agreements so thank you thank you leslie okay with that we'll close the public hearing um let me turn to council sam and then aaron so i have a little bit to say about this but i want to start with a thank you to our legal staff for all the hard work i know it took a long time and a lot of work with excel to get this agreement i have worked with excel for a long time in the past to try and bring settlement agreements forward so i know what that experience looks like from the inside and it's a lot of work and it's a lot of changing of things as

[121:00] that you thought you had agreed on and now it's going to be something a little bit different so first of all a big thank you to all of you again also thank you for listening to my concerns about how we can strengthen our interpretation of this agreement without having to go back around the circle again which might not have happened so you were really responsive to my requests and i think we've come to a pretty good spot if it's okay i'd like to start at a high level and come down real quickly we started this in order to accomplish the goals of decarbonization democratization and decentralization while paying close attention to rates and reliability and that's what we've always tried to do and when we created this paper utility it was for exactly the reason that tom said it was so we would have a defense against you don't have utility charging condemnation well excel has just agreed they won't make that legal attack and we no longer need the utility but we did go through

[122:01] and do our homework on what the rates would be given what we knew about the costs at the time and what the impacts on the carbon decarbonization would be and reliability and we paid for i think it was a 75 page study from an outside consultant that does utility analysis and utility budgeting and they're the ones that told us that it was good to go and much like we would do a nexus study in order to adopt a linkage fee another thing i'm proud of we did this utility study so that we could see if we could meet our charter tests and we did it at the time and now the need for that utility is gone and we've committed to going back to the voters for a vote a final vote that says here are our costs here's what it will mean for rates would you like to form a utility and if so what would you like that to look like and would you like to approve the bonding costs and if so here's what they are and so i believe that we have kept faith

[123:00] with our community a hundred percent we've had multiple votes four or five votes around this issue every time it passes with a majority and i will point out that our community is proud of taking action on this and we're breaking a path so i will say again the 10 years it took and miss jenner left miss christina left but the 10 years it took will no longer take 10 years if pueblo wants to do it because there will be no more dilation and dilatory action by excel because there will be a pathway through the puc first established separation process and separation costs go to condemnation find your numbers here's what they're going to look like roughly speaking for a city of your size so this is what it looks like to be path-breaking in doing something no one's done in colorado in 60 years or more and so this is what our community has asked us to do and they

[124:00] will vote again and so until we're told something else by the community we need to stick with this if people more than half of the people agreed with some of the speakers that we've heard tonight they could easily collect signatures put something on the ballot and it would put this to an end and that would be the voters speaking but until the voters do that we have a duty really to do what they asked um then another thing that i think gets left out of this is this is not just a cost it's not like we're going to pay this and there will never be income we will receive money our utility will for rates in the form of rates which will pay off any bonds that we put out there and that will all be clear to the voters when they make the vote to go or to not go so you it's always spoken of just as a cost center and it's a big scary number but it comes with with a recurring revenue stream and that recurring revenue stream is what will be used to pay off the big

[125:01] scary number whatever it is and finally i'll say we have a new state government we have a new puc that's different from the one that we had when it started and i trust this state government to continue to improve the puc so that future cities should they do this like pueblo will have a puc that is interested in moving the process along and they won't have to reinvent the wheel as they're doing it so i feel like where we've come to here has had value at both the city level for our voters and at the state level for encouraging utility choice i also think it's why we've been fought so hard by excel on this subject i will point out finally two things first of all san francisco is thinking about doing this with uh pacific gas and electric you know after their poor maintenance practices killed a whole bunch of people and burned down the town of paradise

[126:01] that san francisco said enough they said community choice aggregation is not working it's a weak tool it was put together in order to preserve the power of the utility but while we still give some small amount of choice and san francisco i think is going to go forward with the municipalization process and they're going to do it with the california puc that just held hearings on safety culture and how utilities should be governed and managed and i was lucky enough to be able to be invited to speak at that and so it was extremely interesting to hear the questions from the california puc commissioners about safety culture and how governance either gets you good safety culture or it doesn't and it's all about alignment of values so with that said i will state for the record that in paragraph three of this settlement agreement that i think that i'm going to read it the way i think it should be or rather i'll just

[127:01] say i support section 1 here which clarifies that the charter that's referenced in paragraph 3 is the city's charter that's in effect at the time of the formation of the utility and that the election that's referenced there the majority vote of voting citizens is for 178 d charter requirement of approving bonds for the first insurance of debt for the agility thank you for letting me go on for a bit but i think to me this is an important issue do you want to make motion sam it's an important issue to many in the community and i thank you and i thank you for all your work done right aaron's next i just want to know if you want to make the motion i will do it aaron would you like to speak first okay so sam i've put it up on the board with the additions in brackets if you're going to adopt the amendment so okay thank you so i moved to adopt ordinance 8332 as an emergency measure repealing ordinance

[128:00] 7969 chapter 11-7 boulder revised code 1981 light and power utility in section 2-2-23 boulder revised code 1981 electric utility board as amended with the amendment provided to the council on the dyas and setting forth related details second okay well um i want to thank you for that that sums up things very well i appreciate staff's work on this i know it's been a long process just to get to here um i guess the things i would add um i think sam you said it very well but um i think it's very important that we're very clear so i really support this language i think as you noted it refers specifically to the charter in place of the time and to the election go no vote go no go vote

[129:01] that would allow us to pay for debt so i want to make sure that that's very clear i guess i also want to just say that the world is changing i think we get to take part of the credit for the change that's happening these are good changes the world's getting greener i still think there's no doubt that we already municipal electric utility we would be so much farther ahead of the game and there's a lot of reasons to keep looking that looking at this option and moving forward and again the voters keep telling us to do that and that's what we're doing and of course we knew it would be long process and excel is proving true to the word and making sure it's as it goes on long and i mean let's be clear that's why this is taking forever um but that's not a surprise so um with that thank you um others want to say anything bob you're going to watch bob though yes and i'm on a beauty matter about time

[130:02] none of us know how this this muni endeavor is going to turn out but um i think cleaning up this um 2014 vestige this paper utility that we don't need any longer is makes sense regardless of what people think of the community i think it's a good cleanup and sam i really appreciate your work in tightening this up okay it's emergency vote oh i'm sorry mary no just real quickly i did want to thank sam for getting up at 5 30 in the morning and waking tom up at 5 30 in the morning hey he called me at 7 30. no he called me at seven actually it was a little bit before seven but it was okay anyhow you did you finish i did okay i didn't know if we interrupted you okay we start with mayor jones hi councilmember marzell yes

[131:02] nagel aye weaver hi yates aye young yes brockett aye carlisle aye the motion passes unanimously excellent thank you your next item is the 2019 transportation master plan update 45 minutes off and we just got back 10 minutes so now we're 35. not a chance good evening just kidding yeah we're gonna um

[132:07] okay okay but that's okay as long as we schedule again yeah but then you don't okay but in terms of whole blue one

[133:01] so we can talk about it when we there's a meeting devoted to ballot measures yeah we should talk about it i mean maybe we're not going to follow i mean i just wanted to bring it up because it's a new thing and time has been done we're going to wait till another council member joins us hey council members we need a quorum somebody come back okay here we go thanks so let me present the interim transportation directors kathleen brackey and bill cowerin who will start out by presenting the beginning of the transportation master plan update but we have a number of staff members in the audience all of whom have done amazing work with the transportation advisory board and they'll be coming up to the podium so let me turn it over first to kathleen this better yep great um we really

[134:01] appreciate the opportunity to be here this evening and provide this update um bill and i and the transportation team and thank you jane for the introduction um i'd like to acknowledge some of the additional staff team that's worked very hard on the tmp update including randall rudge chris haglin amy lewin d.k kemp garrett slater and the whole team from transportation and also colleagues from across the city organization with us tonight is bill rigler the chair of the transportation advisory board and also alex weinheimer from from tab we also have members from the community working groups for both the funding working group and the pedestrian plan working group that are here this evening as well so very much a team effort tonight there are a lot of topics that we have to cover with you so we would like to run through the full presentation and then hold the question and answer to the end it's very important that we have the opportunity to talk with you particularly about the funding topic and transportation investment and we're seeking council

[135:00] input and guidance on these particular building blocks of the tmp update so that we can move forward with developing the plan document bringing that forward to the community and tab this summer and then back to city council this fall for your consideration of acceptance so when we've been working on the new tmp update for 2019 and we've updated the vision statement and really the focus is to having a people-centric approach so it's really about moving people to and through the system and also connecting to our broader community sustainability goals when we talk about our transportation vision it's really about creating an experience and a place for people and that our streets will be beautiful they will feel safe they will be inviting and comfortable and serve people of all ages and stages of life i think one of the really exciting things about the work is that we're building from a great foundation the

[136:01] 2019 transportation master plan will be the 30th anniversary of a tmp for the boulder community so it's really fantastic and we're very very thankful for the work by many people over many years to create the transportation system that we have today and then to work from there as a foundation to go forward for improving it into the future um a lot of our work on the tmp is really about creating that customer experience and how can people have easy access to affordable and accessible and convenient reliable transportation choices so they take transit and come to a well-equipped mobility hub they'll have lots of options and choices to get to their final destination that are enjoyable to use we also recognize we're facing a lot of challenges locally we know we need to be doing a better job with our essential services and our core street maintenance and our snow removal

[137:00] and landscape maintenance we we have to get better at those very fundamental functions of the transportation system people who use all modes of transportation rely on that for to have a safe and reliable system we're also part of a large regional ecosystem and we're facing a lot of trends together in terms of traffic congestion but also a lot of growth along the front range and in the denver metro area and how do we provide travel options and choice in that environment um and in in sorry you can keep the access to jobs that we have and provide viable choices for people it's also very important that we're addressing our air quality and our climate commitment goals and challenges as part of the transportation system and then certainly looking for ways to grow the investment in transportation over time as part of the tmp update the focus is on how do we flip the challenges into opportunities and how do we use the new

[138:00] forms of technology and services and to make all of those improvements and increase the access that people have to where they want to go so when we talk about investing in transportation and chris haglin we'll cover this more in detail in the the funding section it's important to think about the interconnectedness of our transportation goals our strategies our targets and our investment levels all of these pieces of the puzzle are interconnected and i also wanted to take a moment to say we we understand and appreciate how difficult it is to talk about transportation funding there's a we have a lot of needs within transportation but we're only one part of many needs across the city organization and across the community so we want to be part of that larger context and understanding how we can best serve all of the needs of the community i think one of the most exciting things we have is thinking about the future of transportation many different opportunities ahead in

[139:01] terms of communication systems and mobility as a service and not only smart and complete streets but how do we help move people in new ways into the future but all of this needs to be centered on how these new technologies and innovations help us achieve the community goals and values it's not just about the new shiny things it's about how those new types of mobility choices will help us achieve our climate goals our safety goals our neighborhood livability goals and more some of the pilots that we're working on as part of the tmp update to test these new ideas are partnerships that we are doing with via mobility services with cu with nrel and the downtown businesses looking at ways to integrate new forms of shared rides looking at electrification of the fleet both personal vehicles and as well as transit vehicles so we're doing a lot of work to create the hop fleet so that it will be fully electric over time

[140:01] so there's a lot of really neat and interesting things that are underway or that are on the horizon with the goal being to create shared electric and ultimately automated types of transportation systems but it's where those three types of strategies come together and i think the most important thing to stress is that all of the work we've been doing as part of the transportation master plan update is community centered we've been doing extensive outreach throughout the community through signature events through small walking meetings and going out to different organizations and meeting people where they are to hear what their concerns are and integrate those concerns and those desires and the dreams that people have for transportation into the recommendations and the building blocks that we'll be sharing with you this evening so we we've accomplished a lot but we have a lot more to do and we appreciate your input and guidance as we move forward in the planning process

[141:00] so with that i'll turn it over to my colleague bill thanks kathleen and good evening city council we are so excited to be able to present our newest safe streets boulder report and corresponding vision zero action plan to you we hope you had a chance to read it this is the culmination of a considerable amount of work over many years by our staff by the members of our transportation advisory board and by many members of the community it's this document that we are extremely proud of and i hope you will feel the same next slide the work began with um creating a crash database that allowed us easy access to the data which we were then able to we were able to go in and look at several years worth of data looking specifically at severe crashes or crashes that are serious injury or fatal understanding what the trends that are associated with those crashes are

[142:02] and that helped us to identify several severe crash focus areas vulnerable users bicyclists pedestrians impaired driving has a alarmingly high fatality rate speeding especially on our arterial roadway system there's a direct correlation between arterial speeding and severe crashes and then left turn related crashes and this one is a particularly strong focus almost 20 percent of all of the serious injuries and fatalities came from people making permissive left turns at traffic signals almost 30 percent came from left turns either signalized or unsignalized there was nothing even close to that category we also did an evaluation of what's been done to date what we've done in the past that's effective and not effective and

[143:00] also looking at other types of crashes not just severe crashes in particular looking at high crash locations identifying places where there were lots of of crashes and trends today that we would want to take specific action at those locations and also focusing on the perception of safety i mean we want to obviously focus on removing crashes but we want a community in which people feel safe and because they feel safe or willing to use any mode of transportation so their comfort and their security is an important focus of vision zero as well we need the community to be engaged there are many types of crashes that will not um go away unless we get changes in behavior from the community and we need data transparency we need the community to have access to the data so that they can have the conversations they need to have and then all of this culminated in the vision zero action plan which i think is really the meat of the document

[144:01] this is 50 specific actions that we will complete in the next three years or have an ongoing effect on the community next slide and i'm going to talk a little bit more about the the action plan but i want to talk a bit about our approach to date and how we uh what we've done and the things that we will continue to be doing from an engineering standpoint well this obviously focuses on the 40s from an engineering standpoint um we've made over 160 specific engineering related safety changes in the community in the last three and a half years about two-thirds of those have to do with our traffic signals left turn phasing leading pedestrian intervals or pedestrian head starts um and we're obviously we're going to con we have more to do and we'll continue to do that from an education standpoint um we have the uh the vision zero community partnership and working with that group to um chart our course

[145:00] targeted safety messages including the um the jumbotron messages that we have at cu football games and then programs like the heads up campaign which is around crosswalk safety it's been a great program next slide enforcement is an important piece we collaborate with our colleagues in the police department they are a very valuable and very limited resource and they need to be used strategically so we need them to be and have been working with them to be focused on dui enforcement or anti-dui enforcement on speeding again particularly on the arterial network because it's one of the few tools that we have available to deal with speeding and arterials and um the oh red light running in particular um use of photo enforcement as a tool to combat red light running

[146:00] which is a a crash that can have serious outcomes next slide so again the vision zero action plan major component of the document there are a few high target items in here next slide specific high impact items um and this was something that was um actually brought up by our transportation advisory board so thanks bill specific countermeasures at the high crash locations these these are places that have crashes today we know that when we go out and take action at those locations that crash trend is going to go away new signal timing practices and again particularly the left turn phasing is going to be um profound in terms of of impacting severe crashes in the community but also things like the pedestrian head start will be very important to increasing people's comfort

[147:00] and and feeling like they are comfortable walking and then innovative intersection treatments and the picture here on the right um that is the intersection of 30th in colorado that will be we'll be experimenting with a protected intersection at that location and the protected intersection has um these curb um like footballs that are out on the corners that force vehicles to turn wide around the area where their bikes are coming through this is a treatment that has been used in europe and we expect at these locations that it will mitigate crash trends between turning vehicles and and bicyclists next slide we need to develop an arterial speed management plan again speeding on arterial roadways um is a problem and we've got to get people to be driving slower on them this will be a challenge getting people to drive slower on arterials there's not a lot of great tools for that the police will be very important to that effort

[148:00] we need to advance our low stress walk and bike network we want to have lots of facilities that people feel comfortable walking and biking on we need to continue to expand our education programs again a lot of crash trends are mitigatable only through changes in behavior and we need to use education as a tool to address that and then we need to stay focused on our routine maintenance we need to be dealing with snow in the winter we need to be sweeping and dealing with potholes there are real safety implications of not doing that so at this point i'm going to turn the presentation over to senior transportation planner amy lewin thanks bill good evening members of council my name is amy lewin and i'm thrilled to provide an update on the pedestrian plan next slide please it's really interesting how far-reaching the benefits of walking really are we know it's good for the

[149:00] environment but it's also good for your physical and mental health and it helps build community so we're really excited to be updating the pedestrian plan in concert with the transportation master plan next please and key to this process has been the pedestrian advisory committee we have several members present you heard from one member earlier lisa white such an engaged group i've been so impressed we have 18 members including representatives from the transportation advisory board we've been meeting regularly since late last summer we've done walkabouts together we've done webinars on some of the more technical subjects and this group has really helped shape the pedestrian plan including the vision and goals on the next slide so here the vision for the pedestrian plan is in the center surrounded by the various goals so you know the question is how are we going to make walking easy safe and well connected next so wanted to highlight some of the key

[150:01] actions that we've identified so far first is that concept of comfortable low stress walking specifically to be able to access daily destinations and i'm going to talk about that more in a minute we also want to implement all of those action items that bill just mentioned in our vision zero action plan another key item is to update our pedestrian crossing treatment installation guidelines we're looking at ways to enhance alleys to make them more comfortable and provide some nice direct connections in certain parts of town and another thing that came up is really enhancing our snow removal for example making sure that we're providing good access to bus stops during snow events and the bottom right indicates the use of innovations like automated pedestrian detection and counting in a way to enhance the pedestrian experience but wait there's more we're also starting our americans with disabilities act our ada self-evaluation

[151:02] and transition plan to make boulder more accessible for people using wheelchairs and who have other sorts of disabilities we've identified the need to really enhance our encouragement programs we've already started pumping up our boulder walks program we started our first walk with council which was councilman yates's idea and councilman brockett just joined us on saturday and it was pretty fun right lots of fun and we look forward to doing more events like that and more campaigns like the consider walking campaign that councilman yates also has suggested and another thing we're doing is streets for people things like play streets and more event streets like what we have on the hill so talking about low stress i have to acknowledge my colleague dk kemp who's instrumental in this effort as well and so what do we mean by low stress walking and biking well it's really about connecting people and places comfortably we have a very active community and our

[152:00] community members want to be able to walk and bike more and we want to make sure that they don't feel dissuaded from doing so because they don't feel safe so next slide talking a little about the low stress walk network we did an analysis built on the 15-minute neighborhood concept and one of the things we learned from the community is that they want to be able to walk to places like grocery stores and restaurants and cafes so the first part of the analysis focused on identifying areas that have these sorts of destinations but that also have some barriers to walking comfortably to go to those destinations so the circles on this map show some areas that we propose to study further to identify the exact improvements needed so the next slide shows a compliment to that and this is par in concert with the low stress biking analysis to identify uh cord or level

[153:00] improvements and i'm going to talk about that more in a moment so again we combine these together to identify specific areas and specific corridors shown in green to really figure out how to make it easy for people of all ages and abilities to comfortably access their daily needs by walking so when it comes to the low stress bike network this uh idea originated in the 2014 tmp and the idea is that we provide bike facilities for all ages and abilities with as much separation from vehicle traffic as possible and we do this through a seamless network of different types of facilities that are connected together so that you can basically bike anywhere in the city comfortably and so what types of facilities are we talking about multi-use paths protected bike lanes neighborhood green streets which again i'll talk about in a moment and buffered bike lanes and this map shows our proposed facilities

[154:02] for the various corridors throughout town so this is based on best practices and we've really been refining this to best meet our needs here in boulder and we'll be finalizing this soon coming up with cost estimates and priorities and then finishing the plan in the summer so neighborhood green streets this is a new approach in boulder the idea is to focus on corridors throughout town that have low vehicle volumes and speeds and then we really focus enhancements on walking and biking and the intent is that this is a low-cost approach with big impacts and so we're excited to present our first neighborhood green street this is on 13th street and extends from downtown to iris via 15th avenue so it's connecting important activity centers downtown casey middle school community plaza north boulder rec center

[155:00] and then up to our northern neighborhoods so the types of improvements that you'll see here are green paint to indicate where cyclists should be and to alert motorists to high cyclist activities painted bulb outs that shorten the crossing distance for pedestrians and offer opportunities for public art and wayfinding to help you navigate the corridor so we've started outreach we had an open house earlier this month we had a lot of positive response and some constructive feedback and we're planning to implement these corridor improvements this summer so stay tuned for more on that and with that i will turn it over to chris haglin to talk about funding thank you good evening council chris haglin senior transportation planner so our community's vision for our transportation system is one that is well maintained it's safe it's sustainable it has viable multimodal options

[156:02] livable neighborhoods reduced congestion and improved air quality we get there for from a variety of strategic investments by fully funding capital and routine maintenance by investing in the four e's of the vision zero program completing our bike ped network and our new low stress network and investing in local and regional transit service and programs like the eco pass however today we are facing some significant issues sales tax is not keeping up with inflation thus we are facing declining purchasing power we are deferring maintenance at this time at sometimes critical levels there is increased competition for funding at all levels from our local level to the federal level and rtd is simply unable to provide the local and regional service that we need to meet those goals in addition affordable housing issues are creating longer and longer commutes

[157:00] for our non-resident employees who have little options other than driving so tonight we are seeking council's input on potential new funding mechanisms to further research evaluate and design for possible implementation in 2020 or beyond or potentially for a 2020 ballot item and we clearly understand the difficulty of this request in light of the collective needs of the city across the board and but we understand you know we are one boulder we are one city uh and council will have to take those those collective needs into consideration and may look at a funding package that is broader than just transportation but we're here today to let you know about what transportation's needs are and some of the ideas we've come up with how to solve those needs ultimately what council will have to do whatever matter we get there whatever funding pathway we choose we'll have to decide

[158:01] how big of a bite we're going to take what's in the bite and how we're going to pay for the bite of our unfunded needs if we don't do anything we will continue to defer maintenance which has a higher cost in the long run our services will not meet our community expectations and our transportation goals will become wishful thinking for the last 50 years our community has taxed themselves to provide local funding for transportation through a dedicated sales tax and this sales tax has provided the majority of funding that we've used to build and maintain the system that we have today minus federal funding which fluctuates frequently year to year sales tax revenue provides the vast majority of our funding as dr robakein from the leed school of business recently said at a lewisville business forum we we used to think of boulder as 25 square miles surrounded by reality now we must think of boulder as 25 square

[159:02] miles surrounded by sales tax competition in terms of how we invest this revenue you can see that over the years the amount of money that we've had to spend on core services has steadily increased at the expense of enhancements if we were not deferring maintenance today that pie that wedge of enhancements would already have been gone i have a question yes how many vehicles did you have sorry thank you how many vehicles were on the road in 2001 as opposed to 2018 have you all done those kinds of counts we certainly have those traffic counts i don't know the numbers off the top of my head but we have seen an increase in in vehicle trips i would assume growth does have something to do with these kinds of different pie charts right so that was just knowing the numbers would be helpful in

[160:02] terms of determining the funding next slide please they made us promise um since 2012 our purchasing power has declined by 23 as uh inflation has increased faster than our revenue what this means is a capital improvement project in 2012 that cost around 10 million dollars now costs almost 15 million dollars and this is true for our routine and capital maintenance as well as the cost of concrete asphalt rebar has all gone up higher than our sales tax revenue uh an internal needs assessment identified a significant number of unmet needs in our city's key essential services again we understand the difficulty in balancing these needs across the city-wide needs that you did see in april but we wanted to provide you with a complete picture of our funding needs so this represents both the annual unmet

[161:01] needs by category and also unmet capital needs as well those capital needs are primarily the electrification of the hop and also the modernization of our traffic signal system in addition to those local costs we also see significant costs regionally uh if we want to implement the renewed vision of transit and bring both local and regional transit to the level that we need to meet our transportation master plan and our climate goals now certainly not all these costs would be born locally but this would be a mix of federal money regional money and local money and we would hope in our local context to continue the hop reimbursement model that we've used in the past that that collects money from different sources to fund those continual operations to help staff with this process we formed a community working group in late 2018 and begun a series of meetings in january 2019 through june

[162:00] uh the primary purpose of this comm of this funding working group was to identify a short list of funding mechanisms to bring to tab and council for your consideration and direction of whether we should continue to pursue these to further evaluate and actually design exactly what these mechanisms would look like and rates and so forth and that community working group has done that job and what they've done with with staff is created a tiered and layered approach to transportation funding and identified six mechanisms that they think that council should consider for further evaluation and potential design so beyond our current dedicated sales tax impact fees and excise taxes they've looked at these at both a local and regional level certainly there are local needs that only we can solve in terms of our routine capital

[163:00] routine and capital maintenance for example but also they saw significant needs regionally as we need to solve some of those issues around our multimodal corridors and our and our transit brt service tier one uh in blue those represent the funding mechanisms within the working group that had the highest level of consensus and support for moving forward and could be implemented in the near term these include a transportation utility fee and a county-wide transportation tax the transportation utility fee is very similar to the transportation fee that you if you were on council a few years ago i presented information on and we can discuss these all individually during your discussion period the county-wide transportation tax has been gaining momentum with our regional partners looking at a way to fund some of those regional corridor improvements and then provide ongoing funding for things like our brt

[164:00] service i have a question we got a letter today for or an email from somebody on tab yeah mcintyre right and he talked about a vehicle valuation fee or so that that would be the vehicle registration fee the the registration mechanism so it's just a tiered version of a flat fee yeah well i i'll i i can talk about that in later time okay so the tier one or the utility fee and the county-wide transportation tax they're tier two mechanisms those that had still a high level of consensus but there were particular issues that the funding working group members thought needed to be worked out a little bit more uh and then also these are mechanisms that maybe are more near to mid-term implementation as well so that includes the vehicle registration fee so when we looked at vehicle registration fees we thought that was certainly a viable mechanism but there was less consensus in the group for exactly how it would be

[165:00] assessed earlier you heard from our climate initiatives department that they were looking at a vehicle registration fee that was based on the vehicle's efficiency mark and others on the funding working group thought that may be a regressive tax and therefore offered an alternative being a vehicle registration fee that would be based on the value of the vehicle there's also the idea of a vehicle registration fee that would be based on the annual vmt vehicle miles of travel that the vehicle uh conducted during that past year in between the registrations so i think in general a vehicle registration fee was thought of as a very viable mechanism to raise uh revenue but there was less consensus on exactly what it would be assessed on um another in the tier i'm sorry to interrupt you but do you but do you know the the doing it on valuation are there any legal impediments to doing so are we allowed by the state to collect such a fee that that would certainly be part of the

[166:00] next phase of research we this was an idea that came up in the in the working group we haven't done any analysis on it you know you get the there's a state prohibition against this local income taxes be careful about that but we haven't seen any anything that absolutely prohibits it yet okay thank you yes a second tier two mechanism is a curbside management fee so this is related to the use of transportation network companies like uber and lyft delivery companies like fedex or amazon using public right-of-way to access our curbside we are in the process of developing a curbside management policy right now but there is a lot of talk in the transportation industry about how a curbside management fee could also be used to raise revenue but also stir the um the use of those tncs for example in the in the way that we want them by incenting the right behavior such as shared and electric trips

[167:01] but you could use technology to assess a fee each time a tnc or a delivery truck accesses our curb in a designated area i have a quick question okay you have exceeded our limits how close are you to the end because i cannot hold people this is my last slide on funding okay so how we're going to do it and then we're going to come back to funding at the end so later keep jotting down questions thank you i still get yes i still get this the third tier two mechanism is user fees with congestion pricing so there are a variety of different ways in which user fees can be assessed on a vehicle trip you could have a cordon fee where a fee is assessed when a vehicle passes a line a boundary you could also have pricing along a quarter which we already have in the hot lanes the high occupancy tow lanes on us 36 or e470 technology exists and you can also have it at the

[168:00] end of the trip at the parking space the working group felt that congestion pricing is a mechanism to continue to move forward and research and very well may be a significant revenue generator in the future and can also be used to incent the right type of travel behavior finally the third tier is really just a single mechanism and that's the vehicle miles travel tax currently there are over 30 states that are in pilots colorado already did a pilot on a vmt tax and so this would be a tax that would be assessed annually based on the vehicle miles that you traveled in your vehicle this is something we would not implement locally but is very likely to be a mechanism at the state or federal level in the future so those are the the mechanisms and then we have one very brief section just on the the tmp planning horizon horizon that i will cover so kind of related to the funding we're also asking council's input on the target year for this tmp typically when

[169:02] we do a transportation master plan update the horizon year goes out 20 years based on some of the information we're seeing from the climate action and the climate reports we are seeing we are asking council to look at a 2030 horizon date for this tmp this will have some implications of course on funding and possibly the use of policy to to change behavior but it would also be really taking advantage of some of the technology and innovations that we're seeing and also electrification so we'll be looking at how do we take advantage of these new technologies micro mobility for example that have all come about with these new mobility on demand services so those will be critical if we move that horizon date from 2040 to 2030 there's just a lot more to do in a shorter amount of time

[170:00] but we can take advantage of some of these opportunities but you're recommending that yeah okay and that we also provided in appendix f of your packet just a matrix that goes over our different funding levels what items are contained within those different funding levels the cost of those funding levels that can also help with our our discussion tonight and then of course we'll after tonight we'll continue uh with our next steps in the tmp continued in community engagement and of course the technical technical analysis of any uh funding mechanisms that you wish staff to continue to research and then we'll plan on coming back in september for adoption of the tmp thank you okay yeah don't just keep going yup i'm

[171:01] going to plow right through i know you're keen to get on before i begin i just want to say that this is my fifth and final year on tab my third meeting was the meeting that we voted to approve folsom or right sizing as we call it i felt it then and i feel like we've come a long way since then um i'm sorry my third tour is tab chair somebody mentioned to me that may be the first time that that's happened for tab um i'm not sure if that's true but i do know it's been a great privilege to work with all of you with an incredible staff um with the community with with the media and uh some great tab members so so thank you all um and i'm gonna whip through this so you guys can get onto the more important things um so this does mark the 30th anniversary of the transportation master plan and it's exciting and we really wanted to do our best as the transportation advisory board to honor the great commitments and the giants who shoulders that we're now standing on and to the best way that we figure that we can do that is by taking a very progressive approach that focuses on

[172:00] best practices around community engagement public awareness accountability and transparency and through it all we've really tried to focus on the tmp as our singular priority for this year we've we've really worked closely with staff to ensure robust public awareness and engagement process that's been coupled with expert input that together has resulted in scores of meetings over the last 12 months public meetings working groups community engagement projects social media campaigns to make sure that the core elements and the public case and the public understanding of why the transportation master plan is needed has been there in short i would say that we've seen part of our job to do a lot of the heavy lifting for councils so that the public is aware of the importance of your votes and support for these initiatives um some of the key learnings over the last five years including folsom and the nsmp which is the revamp speed management program have fed into our experience in

[173:00] crafting the best possible public engagement processes over these last 12 months um so so let me talk to you a little bit about some of the highlights that that really jump out at tab first of all on the safe streets report again if you've not had the opportunity to check it out please do so some of you may know that my day job is public relations and we counsel our clients that it's a venn diagram right so one circle is what's the story you want to tell and the other circle is what do people want to hear and that sweet spot is a very very tiny area and we really feel that staff did a great job with this report and hitting that sweet spot it's user friendly it's a quick read and we hope that you can skim it when you have a chance um one thing that the report does is it also places a huge emphasis on readability uh it has a really easy to use scorecard uh and presents actionable recommendations for our community and along the safe streets uh line i really want to thank council again on behalf of the entire transportation advisory board and i'm joined by our newest tab member alex um just for your

[174:01] support of vision zero um on to innovation um we really wanted to applaud and uh thank mayor jones for her support of innovation when she said that it's time for boulder to own innovation again we agree i'm reminded of you sure did um you know and and we get it right i mean as folsom has taught us that innovation with transportation is risky um one of the approaches or one of the my favorite quotes from samuel beckett is fail fail again fail better and while we're not necessarily failing in transportation we're always learning and incorporating so along these lines we really look forward to working with council and a broad cross-section of experts community partners local businesses and staff to help inform future future discussions and actions around micro mobility pilots with transportation network companies such as the d2d program curbside management best practices and pricing technology safer roadway and

[175:00] intersections designs and policies to shape the future of advanced mobility and micro mobility uh including autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles finally uh i just want to talk about funding um we are all aware that funding uh transportation is a is a tricky business with lots of trade-offs but and we also understand that without additional funding both locally and regionally we're simply not gonna be able to to attain our considerable goals that we've set out so um one thing that we just really want to reinforce is that over uh over the course of 2019 we are going to be working assiduously with community groups of all different shapes color sizes to help make the public case for what the investments are are needed for how they can best be prioritized and really to help people have a fuller understanding of just how important transportation is um in closing i just wanted to share a story that i know some of you on the campaign trail may have remembered but

[176:00] um two years ago there was a cyclist named bill davis who was biking down jay he was killed and hit and run by a drunk driver that year we had seven fatalities um and bill was one the youngest was four um the oldest was 71. so everything that we do here is about minimizing those risks and paying it forward so thank you very much thank you so much bill i really appreciate your service okay so the plan is to go through each of these buckets one by one and um i don't think we necessarily have to separate questions from comments but go ahead and just delve right in so um i'm going to start with safe streets if that's okay i'll just want to say i feel like um staff has been so incredibly responsive we've come a long way on this topic i feel like um

[177:02] we finally arrived in terms of data driving our decisions and i feel like we're also finally doing stuff on the ground i think there was a real hunger to start implementing some engineering solutions in particular as well as those and for i mean education is important but actually changing how cars behave and people behaving in tricky intersections so i guess i feel like we've this is amazing progress so i guess i want to salute you um and i hope everybody's seen the 50 the action plan i think is actually really key because it's um you can actually get your hands around it um i do have one question which is what on earth is happening at broadway and north yeah at the same time um sorry i know i just split this skipped from 30 000 foot but there's an intersection right in the middle of town with lots of um fatal oh severe sorry

[178:00] five severes which is just it seems out of keeping it's not like a major i mean broadway is but why at north yeah i'm not sure i'm not sure we can tell you exactly why i can tell you what's happening which is that people are making left turns and they're hitting pedestrians in the crosswalk and because that's a single lane right it's not something that we can separate out the lefts from the through traffic so it's not a location well served by say protected left turn phasing so what we've done there instead is put in a longer leading pedestrian interval in place and let the pedestrians get most of the way across the street before we let the people turn and that's to try and counter that crash trend i i'm as mystified as you as to why that particular location is that way um there's lots of locations that have more left turning traffic and that have more potential left turn or more potential pedestrians to be in

[179:00] conflict with um but okay well i mean i get the 30th and arapahoe but those are major arterials and this one just seems out of keeping good so back in the day there were a couple of intersections and they're not very used uh less so than this where i mean if we have that kind of accident rate i would think you just go stop and let pedestrians have the right of way right as they do at 15th and walnut for example which is not a very highly trafficked place because um otherwise the it's speed on broadway i stood at broadway in pearl today and watched the trucks the suvs it's just like that you know so it's probably the same kind of thing people are thinking about getting someplace too quickly and not paying attention to people pedestrians or bikes

[180:00] yeah i just had i had one detailed question on the on the report and which was the it's the the crash maps which i think are extremely helpful for getting a sense of where things are located where the problems are but on early on there's a high crash locations map and then then you have a pedestrian crash locations and then bicycle crash locations and it um it seemed like the high crash locations didn't include all the pedestrian and bike ones it seems like those had additional ones and so what what is the first map is the the is the first map being the high crash location map so that would just be locations that have high numbers of total crashes at them so not necessarily a particular type of crash which is the other maps but just all crashes in general so what is your threshold for a serious or fatal number to be high um well i mean any right well that's what all right well

[181:00] let me just be more specific i noticed in the bike map that there were on 13th street there were examples of one intersections with one series or fatal crash but those don't show on the main high crash location map yeah yeah so i'm going to ask my colleagues do we know what the thresh how we set those thresholds yeah okay yeah and are you going to tell us mark schisler is our transportation engineer mark schussler transportation engineer with the city of boulder so council member yes really good question so in terms of the first map that you're looking at with high crash locations this is actually aggregated crash data of all crashes that was geocoded and then we used um some gis techniques to basically represent the locations of high crash high crashes based on the

[182:00] number of crashes which you see in the chart there's the 10 the 49 the 50 the to 99 and then we went through and we noted all of the severe crashes those that both resulted in serious injury and fatality and then because there's different numbers of bicycle crashes and pedestrian crashes and left turn crashes we actually kind of changed what those thresholds were to kind of emphasize those locations and i get all of that and how the thresholds are different for the different modes that all make sense my specific question was there are serious and fatal crashes that show up on the bicycling map that are not on the main map and it seemed like the threshold for a serious and fatal probably should be one that's that's correct we want to show all right and i'm specifically looking on 13th street on the bicycle so can you tell us what package so this is page 95 is the bicycling map 87 aaron compared to 87 which is a high crash

[183:01] right okay well we so the reason we did so so aaron hi uh dave kemp senior transportation planner so the reason why the high crash locations is only 10 through 49 was because if we had shown every sorry i'm going to interrupt you sure i think you're misunderstanding my question okay it's only about the serious and fatal crashes right okay right so the so the the bicycle one has you're correct they should show on the on the high crash location and we can make that change and thank you very much for for looking at that and so we can make it right on the report great because i think it's i think it's important for that map to show all of the series right because essentially that's kind of the first division zero goal and so thank you very much and maybe can you change the title high crash locations we can play around with maybe it's of all types right yeah it's of all types or anyhow we can make that we can make that more clear yep yep

[184:00] we have a cube that was that i wouldn't follow up with a couple of comments mostly just to ditto what zan says which is this is a phenomenal report and you've come we've come so far and the just the hard data is amazing and all the action items i mean i think this is we're moving in a direction that's really really positive so i just want to say thank you for that and i look forward to the implementation of all this over the next few years so i have sam mary and then mirabai and then maybe maybe cindy's in there so thanks for this and really thanks for the safe streets report that's great um and since we now are working in a really data-rich environment i would like to also propose that we use that data to analyze the solutions that we implement um because i i noticed that you know we have a few new leading performance intervals scheduled but we have tons of relatively speaking to that flashing yellows that we're bringing in

[185:00] okay maybe it's 11 new for one and four new for the other but i think when we look at preventing the crashes that are involving pedestrians or bicyclists crossing on multi-use paths i think the lpi can be a very positive tool and so if we can analyze how those solutions impact the number of crashes and make sure we get down to that level because i in limited transportation dollars i would like to spend on the most effective things at preventing very serious accidents so that i think this data approach like zan and aaron have said is really helpful and we want to use it to spend our dollars to protect people most effectively and i apologize if i wasn't clear about this um the e in evaluation the fourth e right is all about continuously evaluating what we're doing understanding whether the mitigation we're using is effective or not figuring out what other mitigation might

[186:00] be available to us what other communities are doing and constantly improving the program that way great so we in this report we looked at the mitigation that we installed from the prior report and we will continue to do that great and then i just have a few small detailed things um the uh so we're talking about e-scooters right and what we're gonna do with with that and i've been down to denver a few times and seeing how they're used and how they interact with pedestrians in some locations and cars and others and i think we need to have the safety and the safe streets as a big part of that discussion so i just wanted to flag that it's great that we know that left turns are as dangerous as they are and so a real focus on that would be awesome i want to say that we have a fight at the legislature every single year about photo red lights and so we want to like highlight that a little bit in here so we can take it down whether it's here elsewhere so we can take it down a wave at the legislature every time

[187:02] that some legislator tries to get rid of that so that i think is important can we can i just call clean say when we have our delegation breakfast come and talk legislative priorities i think we should hand them the report on the success of that yeah and so they all know it um when they go down there to the legislature so we got a real scare a couple years ago when the state legislation passed legislation which and it had to be vetoed by the governor thank goodness so um we we were actually watching the governor's race um to see how we would potentially move forward with um photo red light and now that the result is the way that it is i think we can i don't want to stay safely but we have a lot more confidence that we can move forward aggressively with photo red light it'd be nice to be proactive with it and do state legislation that explicitly protects communities rights

[188:01] or something like that but that's a separate thing and then i guess the the very last thing was oh um you know i think it's a safety issue snow removal is and so enforcement of our ordinances around removal of snow i mean i walk a lot in my neighborhood and there are plenty of residential and commercial folks who don't get to it within the window and i think that is you know for for elderly folks or folks who are in a wheelchair or others that can be a big mobility impairment as well as a safety issue but thank you for this it's a very good report mary and then nearby okay so i wanted i wanted to offer up just sort of some high level observations and again i echo all the the things that have been said about how far we've come and how much data is presented here that was it's quite remarkable so thank you um

[189:01] a couple of things that jumped out at me is um on the sheets that you gave that have the circles that um indicate the ghg impact and then right next to it there's a dollar sign that indicates the the cost and there it seems to me that there should be another symbol i don't know what the symbol would be but something that would indicate um something with respect to whether or not it's regressive equitable and who benefits um and i don't know if that's an additional two symbols but and i think another indicator that tells us is this serving the greatest number of people equitably or an equitable um um methodology that that

[190:00] this indicates something that gives us an idea of the the social piece of it because essentially what we're doing here is we're looking at the environmental and the economic but we're missing the social piece so something that indicates that that kind of value for that method and then um kind of to answer that question and on the safe streets again um overlapping the the green streets with the engineering because it seems that we're separating out the green streets for pedestrians and bicycles and then giving the automobile traffic a whole different the the engineering piece so where where are the overlaps where we can do the engineering um and the the green streets and again affect um

[191:03] automobile traffic and pedestrian safety and bicycle safety all all together because it's we're really always all together so to separate him out doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me and again to um kind of drilling down now going from the higher level to drilling down a little bit i wanted to comment on the d2d and i think that we're just doing safe streets oh well i was going to go to speed bumps okay well i meant which we're going to we're going to keep moving to the next we're just trying to go through each of the five buckets so well bucket's just another name for silos to me but okay we're trying to be responsive to this question okay sorry about that well i won't just just

[192:01] just try to organize a conversation okay well i'll bring it up wherever d2d comes okay nearby mine's really quick and first i just wanted to say thanks for all the work and kathleen thanks for your work on commuting solutions you're passionate and all this really shines through so thank you um this was just a quick clarifying you had spoken to the fact that i think you said 20 of the accidents happened on left turns and i was just curious is this are they is it a combination or cited on one way or the other of cars hitting pedestrians while they're walking through walk signs or are the pedestrians not following the walk signs and walking through when they should not be and then cars are going or is it just a combination so it's just to be clear it was um just a little bit less than 20 30 of the 160 severe crashes that we looked at were people making a permissive left turn right not on a green arrow and

[193:01] hitting something a car a bike a pedestrian and that crash would likely be avoided if we had protected phasing at that location that's what i was implying but but in all of those cases it was a bad decision on the part of the person making a left turn okay and they wouldn't have to make that decision if they had protected phasing perfect thank you cindy so i want to thank you as well for all of the work you've done and the data you've gotten um bill briggs i chaired the first ad hoc transportation master plan committee and so in the intervening time um it's very frustrating to see how far we haven't come in terms of recognizing for example when i look at the numbers that between 2015 and 2017 we had 21 000

[194:00] people involved in a crash in boulder it's so many and then again so my big thing is enforcement and that's where i think rather than regardless of the size of the car or how many vehicle miles it travels that's where red light violations in 2017 violations 27 791 summonses now that earned some money right as well as we hope altered people's behavior in terms of driving photo speeding violations 2017 13 065 summonses again changing behavior and also having some money at least put in that i would hope could be directed towards more safety on the streets but i'm i think enforcement is one of the answers for these things and would love to see that kind of thing done as i said earlier like just putting a big basket on that intersection and saying okay

[195:00] automobiles you have to stop when pedestrians are present anyone who's been to the netherlands knows that bicycles there have the right-of-way cars stop for them i mean they just do regardless wherever they are on the streets so part of that is changing people's behavior if we value safety then we have to enforce it somehow so that's just my two cents on that but the data is great and i agree with sam and suzanne the legislation is really important as well while we've got someone there who will listen great job lots of good data um a lot to chew on i'm i'm gonna agree with what's been said but i do want to bring up this issue of speeding on arterials and and placement of crosswalks and speed bumps and i um i noticed that

[196:01] i think we could actually people's behavior have has changed i think a lot in some in terms of like with the yellow blinky lights or whatever you call those i still call them blinkies but um they do you know people are stopping for people and even at crosswalks that don't have the blinky lights and um i i over 20 years have seen people's behavior change it's amazing it takes around 20 to 25 years for that behavior shift to happen so i guess we have a lot more work but i want to say people's behavior is changing but i do wonder if we couldn't help some of the enforcement and speeding issues if we had more crosswalks and if we had more speed bumps and crosswalks are far less expensive than speed bumps i assume

[197:00] but i think we need to see more so people can feel like they can cross so for example i'll just bring up one specific place so when you go down yarmouth from 19th all the way to broadway there's one crosswalk maybe there's two i think there's only one and i went down there last night and it was it's like now why would you pick putting a crosswalk at this location and not putting that doesn't have a bus stop or anything instead of at 17th street which does have uh is it 17 yeah 17 that does have a crosswalk and is a major arterial or major street or crossing for people from boulder meadows mobile home park up into the holiday inn neighborhood so i just kind of questioned how much luck has there been on putting

[198:01] in speed buzz i'll just stick with crosswalks right now and i do think that if if you signed those crosswalks and made drivers of aware of them they might not go so fast or today i crossed 19th street and because i walk every day and somebody was coming really fast down from violet and i just thought i'm going to make him stop and i did and um and you know and there's no crosswalk and i know you guys are doing 19th street and that's going to happen but there's no crosswalk from maybe it's upland all the way down to maybe oak and i think if we had car drivers more used to people are going to cross it their intersections and they should they should have that

[199:01] right i mean pedestrians right should be first bicyclists second cars and it's for me it's all about your mass and how how big and how fast you can go i also want to speak about crossfit um and then colloquium books briefly um i'll talk about a situation in my neighborhood where i think we could use one that brought it up many times but it's for the same reasons it's at a bus stop at a place where it's a long way to either other crossing and um it's 23rd and pearl and i've brought it up over and over again but the answer i've gotten is well that not enough people crossed there for it to be worth putting a crosswalk there and i just want to bring up in this kind of whether it's that one or not i just happen to know that one it's the methodology that we use to decide if we need one and so sometimes people won't cross or won't

[200:00] end up walking and taking the bus because it would not be easy to cross there and so just think about the methodology that you use because i agree paint and a sign is a lot cheaper than than other things so that was one and what was the other one um can i can i just real quick tell you just because i know this will make you happy we um we're building the pearl and 23rd crosswalk this year good so it does make me happy it's designed it's just yeah just waiting to be constructed that's correct yes okay and we will be updating the pedestrian crossing treatment guidelines and methodology okay super the one other thing as long as i'm talking about my neighborhood this will be brief there's a crash that happens frequently at 23rd and bluff it doesn't happen frequently enough that it gets a lot of attention but maybe once a year and it's because the 23rd street doesn't have any um stop sign and bluff does have a stop sign and so as my

[201:01] neighbors had the fourth car towed out of her yard i thought that maybe what would be helpful there is on the stopped part of bluff it says two-way stop right just something simple so cross traffic doesn't stop traffic doesn't stop and so that i was thinking about that going around town and i've seen more intersections like that so there are some two-way stop intersections where it says it and somewhere it doesn't and so i think that's also a cheap treatment so sorry did you okay so i just want to go one more on one of my favorite crosswalks which is 34th and belmont which was taken off when i first came off council and then after coming back like 10 times we got it rebuilt and again it it goes to mary's issue of equity and you know trying to be all be fair to everybody

[202:00] and um and i was kind of amazed that in that when that crosswalk was taken out people had to walk a good like 10 blocks extra to get home because in order to cross safely they had to do kind of two ways so now there's an issue on 34th street in san juan del centro where we have excessive speeding all the time and i would like to see some cross some speed bumps in there and you we have a large population in there we have a lot of children in there people who don't generally always feel like they can go and call the police or or call the city and so i would like some real attention being put in there because right now what we have is a lot of speeding and i don't know if enforcement is in is what's going to do it but i think the physical measures are good so i'll just

[203:00] leave it there and um i'd like to see more crosswalks and speed bumps thank you did you have any response to that otherwise we better move on right well my only response i guess to a myriad of these is that we we have a program around where we install pedestrian crossing treatments and we're going to be updating it it is largely based on where pedestrians cross it's not been our experience that pedestrians don't cross because they don't have a crosswalk in fact there are some unbelievable places that people cross that in large numbers that are hostile conditions and so they absolutely vote by going out and crossing the road and we try not to be stingy about where we put them if there are people crossing somewhere we want to put a crosswalk there if if people are not crossing there we don't want to put a crosswalk there because we do have some crosswalks in town that don't have a lot of people crossing at them and we

[204:00] don't get good compliance with at those locations don't stop it okay good same thing for speed mitigation we have a a great program that council endorsed a while ago about how we build traffic mitigation right and uh right and we're very excited to be out building traffic mediation again after like a 15-year hiatus right now let aaron go i might have another question or comment okay so bill i mean i hear your point and i get that there are desire lines and people kind of cross where they're going across a lot of the time but i just urge you as you as you develop that next set of guidelines to take into account the fact that i think people do pay some attention to where the facilities are i mean i lisa brought up my neighborhood with yarmouth there's no croc no crosswalk between 16th and broadway if there were i would use one instead i wait until i get to broadway and occasionally i jaywalk but only when i have to and if there were crosswalks somewhere in there i would use that instead i i know there

[205:01] are cases like that where where people have a long stretch with no crosswalk and they kind of pick wherever seems best and if you gave them a crosswalk at a certain distance they would use that more often so i think if you can just blend that those approaches a little bit when you develop those new guidelines i think we'd be a little better off you got it great so we bring up one more and that was kalmia and broadway and that is a pretty long stretch between linden and iris and people walk calmia as like a outdoor walk and there is a lot of people there are a lot of people who cross there and so i to me we don't put we're trying but i'd like to see us put pedestrians and bicyclists their safety first because they are the most vulnerable out on the streets which might segue to our next question exactly okay so we've talked a lot about crosswalks here um

[206:01] any more on the pedestrian plan piece of this you know i i for you i'm not sure exactly all your questions but is there going to be some bike specific stuff that's the next one so there's questions on each of the topic areas so we had the safe streets and now the pedestrian plan then low stress and then uh funding and then the target year so we broke out the questions for each of the ray okay so anything on pedestrians per se i'll say something i mean i i've already talked to the crosswalks and so on as a um as a safety thing it also has all these other holistic things that were written into it so i thought the nice thing about the pedestrian plan was how it framed it up as and the community piece i think is one of the more um unspoken pieces right because like in the pearl street mall we all acknowledge that walking creates community but in

[207:00] neighborhoods it also does as well and so i just thought it was a really nice framing thank you well and i would go ahead um just the part where as we as we're working on the 15-minute neighborhoods and the places where we're trying to encourage people to walk that gets at the crosswalk piece of it where we're trying to create a culture of walking um i'll just throw that and i think that that's part of build it and they will come kind of piece to it mary okay so we're talking about pedestrian plan and i think this is where the there was a section under green streets implementation on 13th street where it's talking about traffic diversion and um i was just going to mention to be cautious about when there's traffic diverted where the traffic ends up diverted to and how that impacts the the walking or bicycling that may have

[208:01] been going on there um so um to just be mindful of that um and then with respect to um alleys i don't know if it was in this section or not but with respect to allies when when we talk about enhancing alleys i think that's a wonderful thing however it does imply a certain part of town where there are alleys to be enhanced so it presents a kind of equity issue where we might want more walking to occur say on the east part of town and we spend all our time enhancing the alleys where there's already a lot of walking going on anyway so just again just be mindful of that piece which is why i think we need that that third symbol of who benefits um and um i think that's all i have on that section aaron well i'll just give a big thumbs

[209:01] up thanks for working on this i want to appreciate the people out there who are working on this the members of the pedestrian advisory committee and then amy who's working on this from the staff perspective and the walk with council was so much fun and bob thanks for the idea and um look forward to us doing a lot more of that kind of thing maybe we could do that now maybe we could just start doing that maybe one thing i'll advocate for is as we do that just to make sure that there's a feedback loop that when when you're out there walking with a group and you see maybe that there's an issue to have a way for that to get into the plans for improving things in the future i know you do some of that in already but i will say i'm very impressed again they're blinky lights but where you've put those in and how well they work and people are able to see them drivers are able to see them well in advance and again we i think we've shifted people's behaviors and so i really appreciate all the new

[210:00] crosswalks with the blinky lights and the well-marked crosswalks so those are great i was at a meeting once in denver and somebody made the comment that you know those crosswalks and boulder and those blink lights you can see them from outer space so there you have it there you go well it's funny at first i didn't think they worked because it was scary but it's true people have changed it's changed people have changed go figure okay yeah it shows the same good data shows the same good yep okay how about the bike network how about yay for 13th street long time coming but here we are i just want to make a comment or a request for 13th street um it's got the that weird curve that happens right at 13th and um alpine yep and it's people just it's utter chaos there um so

[211:00] yeah and i if i can just um i've always gotten hit there a couple times on my bike and people are on their phone and i they just they're supposed to kind of go around the bike and maybe you can put one of those red footballs yeah there that would allow the bike to go through and not get crossed over by a car um you're going to love what that looks like huh you're going to love it well let's try him on alpine in 13th that would be great because it would resolve some issues can i yep call it on that because and and i i was at the open house on the 13th street and i'm so excited about it and i i made a few detailed comments there i'll just reiterate one of them which is kind of lisa's point is that i get that we're doing this as something that's affordable because we want to do a fair amount of them and i support that but it when i've been in other cities i see

[212:00] occasionally some a little bit more of a physical intervention because like at those intersections you're talking about painting them which i think is good but that does not include the actual physical football the sort of concrete kind of thing and one of the things that i've seen is where where a little bit of concrete is added to narrow the road for cars but the bikes go straight through to the right of them you know because one of the ways that you can control car speeds as you very well know is to make the streets a little narrower right and so that if you it just seems like a really effective treatment as a way to you still get to go straight through on a on a bike but the car pinches down and has to take it a little more slowly um so i just i would love to see um on on this one in particular on some of these in in certain cases we just put in a little bit of concrete it doesn't have to be an enormous amount but to kind of guide the cars to help help pinch them down we're a big planner like they do in portland which are pretty nice yeah exactly hey um a couple more oh you're not done good

[213:00] yeah and um well it's just one more so the the north uh broadway reconstruction project are we going to be reviewing that as a council at all or is that kind of flying just to the staff level so i'm going to call up garrett slater the capital project engineer and he can answer the questions about north broadway just kind of the process that that will come forward to tab yeah and to count so we'll be going to the transportation advisory board at their next meeting right so they'll see it in july and then specifically i was asking if council would have a chance to review it at all or if it's at the tab staff level hey garrett so there's currently not on the calendar for the council to comment on the north broadway project it's currently scheduled to go to tap next month but we don't have it on the calendar at this point in which case i will make my comment now which is i was

[214:01] going to do anyway but you know so um but now i know this is my only crack at it so i'll make it a little stronger so uh mr heidel earlier in open comment brought up a point that was exactly the point that i was going to raise um so thank you stephen which was that i i'm really excited about the low stress walk and bike network plan i think it's a wonderful vision for our next steps on on biking in particular and the green streets are going to make an amazing network and then there's a designated areas for for uh buffered bike lanes and vertical separation which means a multi-use path or a protected bike lane and it's ambitious right and but if we're not going to make it happen i'm not sure what the point of the diagram is and so i i wonder with broadway i mean i know we've got other plans 30th and colorado we're going to make them happen but broadway is the substantial project that's getting done right now that this map has designated for vertical separation meaning a protected bike lane

[215:01] um and yet it has a buffered bike lane so it just seems like what is this map really representing if one of our three projects we've gotten on right now isn't going you know being compliant with the plan so to clarify is your question about north broadway or more about the low stress bike network well it's specifically about north broadway but then to kind of going from there like is the rest of this stuff going to get done kind of as we have a chance yes so um i think it's um important to remember that the north broadway project has been in planning and design for a number of years well in advance of the the work that's taken place on the low stress bike network and uh so it was originally we just a little bit of background on the north broadway project we received dr cog transportation improvement improvement program federal grant funds to reconstruct that section because the payment condition had degraded to the point that it qualified for federal funding and so that is why the strategy

[216:02] yes that's one strategy that degraded payment every day and funding how do we get our federal dollars that's a category that doesn't exist anymore so that's probably the last time we'll see that for a long time but it did exist in the prior cycle so we were able to take advantage of that and so the primary purpose of that project is to reconstruct the pavements to improve the overall condition but as we undertake every capital improvement project we look for opportunities to implement the multimodal components and goals and objectives that are found in the transportation master plan and so the project will be looking to enhance the pedestrian and the cycling experience so today there is a four foot standard bicycle lane the project is recommending the uh implementation of a buffered bike lanes on each side the challenge with implementing a protected bike lane facility on north broadway is that we would only be able to do so between violet and lee hill

[217:00] because we can only implement parking protected where there's parking and there's no parking north of lee hill and furthermore we don't have the ability to implement parking protected bike lane on the west side of broadway because it's a lot of that is controlled by the the fact that a lot of that isn't in the county and we don't have the ability to go in and impose that full protected bike treatment on both sides of broadway until the west side of broadway comes in for redevelopment so we would only in fact be able to implement on the east side a protected bike lane facility so what we are working through right now in the design and in recognition of the fact that the low stress bike and walk network says that we are recommending vertical separation which can consist of a protected bike lane or it can include a multi-use path we are looking at implementing a multi-use path between highway 36 to south of lee hill on the west side of broadway and setting

[218:02] and stage the ability to have a protected facility on the west side of broadway as development comes online and we are also as a part of the north broadway project looking at improving improving the flood capacity of four mile canyon creek which will improve the the bike and pedestrian connections both underneath broadway as well as up to broadway which will then uh provide an opportunity to set the stage for that multi-use path connection coming from the south and so we are are working to implement that low stress facility throughout the corridor and just in addition to improving the on-street uh bike lane experience that's uh there today i said just follow up and yeah i'll let you thank you for that garrett um the singing on the north side of um of yarmouth or lee hill that you can do parking protective bike lanes i mean that that's fine there's no parking you don't need to do a parking protected bike lane just a protected bike lane

[219:01] would be fine but i don't know exactly how the sections end up working out but um i get that it's been in in progress for a while but it's not approved yet and we're looking at this um this new network that we're trying to implement and i assume that we're probably not going to reconstruct broadway again anytime super soon once this project is done so i i just and and the the the multi-use path on the west side would be a great thing up there for that little section for that section would be great anyway i would just urge you as you move through the to the final approvals on this project to see if you can't improve the protected facilities a little bit more because this change this this street is not going to change again for a fairly long time i would assume so so i'm in the queue then you then you i guess i that was what i was going to bring up and it just seems like north broadway is such a key corridor it is really used by bikes both

[220:00] in town but also leaving town to go on major rides anyhow it's and if we need to talk to the county i'm sure they're interested i mean because so many rides immediately leave to the county from there anyhow it just seems crazy not to to do as much as we can on a corridor that is kind of front and center major through our city um so i guess i i hear what you're saying can i guess i would just say can we do better we'll certainly look at the opportunities we have uh available to us i would also add that not an insignificant consideration would be the cost so it would to to implement a parking protected bike lane would cost an additional three million dollars which would create some pressures on our already constrained budget and is that the cheapest kind of protected lane we can do yes i'm sure the county would pony up for that well we won't know unless we ask okay so we had sam and then lisa yeah so

[221:00] um generally speaking to me this integrates with the the pedestrian plan a lot because a lot of times bikers and walkers especially on multi-use paths are you know sharing the pathways and so and you i don't think i have anything else about north way um the um so you know to the extent that there are chances to further separate you know off of the multi-use paths i think that's very helpful because you have different speeds of the different biking and walking and with micro mobility coming in and whatever we do with that you know i think we want to think about the micro mobility being like a bike in some way because they have higher speeds and so the additional separation over time of pedestrian and bikes spatially but even though they're moving in the same area is fine the part i want to bring up about all of this is let's keep east boulder in mind so i bike to work all the time and so i go down goose creek or the the boulder

[222:01] creek path and the north-south connectivity out there is not great and a lot of it is scary so we know 30th street is scary and something is being done about 30th street 55th street is also very scary so anywhere i'm on 55th street i tend to end up on the sidewalk for part of the the bike because i have to cross four lanes if i want to get over and so it's easier just to go on the bike sorry the sidewalk to the crosswalk so north south connectivity in east boulder it's good at foothills and we've improved with the wonderland creek facility that we have that's that really helps it's going kind of caddy corner not straight north or south but anything we can do to get east boulder some improvements for biking i mean i will what i see out there is many many bikers end up on the sidewalks all along 55th and then when

[223:00] they get further north of arapahoe they cross over into the parallel street that's there whatever that is because it is not a pleasant experience to be on the roads with the speed of the cars there so i just wanted to call out that i would like to make sure the 13th street thing is great north um broadway would be great but east boulder also needs facilities did all that lisa and cindy i i am just going to ask everyone for to excuse me i have a splitting headache and i'm going to have to leave so i'm out of here there anything you want to say before you go good luck with the funding cut down on the parking charge for parking okay sorry you don't feel well okay um so i wanted to go back to north broadway

[224:00] and um you you spoke i forget what your name is garrett slater transportation projects engineer thank you um so you talked about you know the flood dealing with the flood capacity at four mile canyon creek bridge and so that was rebuilt like in the early 90s are you going to try it are you talking about rebuilding the bridge or so we're not going to reconstruct the bridge we're going to expand the capacity by doubling the opening that's there today introducing an additional cell to the south of the existing one okay and then you you spoke about a multi-use path coming in from and i agree with everything that's been said on north broadway about coming in on the west side coming south and as you know there's a lot of curb cuts in there and so i would hope that you pay attention to those curb

[225:00] cuts that you know and i don't know if it would be a multi-use path on the sidewalk or in the street so it would be above the curve behind the curb and uh that multi-use path is it's slowly implemented as development occurs just as has happened on the east side the curb the driveway cuts get consolidated into formal street intersections we expect the same what happened on the west side over time and yeah get the county to pay for um for improvements that we need i mean it it goes back to my question when we were talking about the electric utility and we have these enclaves in the city and you know development or people come in individually and i guess maybe that's something we should work on in planning but you know to have more of a you know instead of just incremental annexation i guess i shouldn't be saying that but anyway it would be a lot a lot easier um

[226:03] i i am a little concerned um about a comment that was made in public hearing about north broadway and i guess this would be between violet and yarmouth or yellow pine and um i think um it's important to keep cars parked on the street because that in and of itself on the east side of the street and i think in the north boulder plan we had envisioned that being on the west side of the street and we had seen those cars parked there as traffic mitigation and and narrowing the street back in the must have been late 80s or early 90s there was a proposal to put five lanes on north broadway and we shut that one down making it just three so we were assured of narrower streets but one of the plans in the north boulder sub-community

[227:01] plan is that we've only built half of the north boulder village and there will be at some point a north boulder village on the west side and i would hope we're not going to remove parking from broadway there because we do reduce the speeds i think the speed there is between violet and yellow pine it's 30 miles an hour and we were pretty adamant that the speed be reduced and i think if you took the cars away i i'm afraid it wouldn't do that narrowing of the street that we and so two responses that one is uh we fully expect there will be parking on the west side okay and uh further as a result of this project we are looking at implementing speed reductions through this stretch of broadway um bill i'll let you speak to that um well i don't know what they are but i know we're down to 25.

[228:02] it's 30 now so there's there's a section to the south that is 40. still 30 well that's 35. i think we've gotten rid of all the 40. right there's a section down to violet that's 35 that still has the same characteristics as the section to the north that's 30. so we're just changing oh good that area that's what you're talking about not speed mitigation no no yeah yes yeah no that would that's good to get the speed limit down would be great okay i did have one question about snow removal and i just asked this one question yeah and it you in your um in your presentation you have a picture of a snowplow and the snowplow is actually kind of a cool snowplow because um the way it's shown it's on your page 29 of 60. it shoves the snow into the street instead

[229:01] of on the sidewalk and do we have a snow removal truck like that that would be really nice to get into our fleet um yeah i mean if the question is can we plow the snow in either direction i think yes um i don't know if the vehicle is a smaller vehicle yeah it's a smaller vehicle and it's going in the bike lane yeah so we don't currently possess a small vehicle like that but we need to obtain one and are pursuing funding to do so yeah to so because we'll need that in order to plow the protected bike lanes that we're building and the protected intersections right and i just think i just want to make a comment that it's really important during the winter that when we plow that we make sure that we have pedestrian access and so that people don't have to climb over mountains of snow yep and um and that the bike lanes are

[230:01] cleared as well as the sidewalks and i and actually i misspoke we're not pursuing funding for that we have funding for that okay great all right next question okay and we're getting advanced mobility pilots okay d d so um the d2d and that's that's one where i think we should really look at that third missing piece of the of the evaluation where and i appreciate that it's changed from um it's becoming a little more equitable to to bring workers in from um from out lots into downtown um and i'm assuming that's like restaurant that would include restaurant workers and um and so one of the things i would hope that you analyze as you're looking at that is what would it cost

[231:01] does having them use outlots and then taking some sort of lift or uber into town to their job costs more or less than just allowing them to park downtown for free um we'll just look at that as part of that yeah so i i think that would that that would bear um an analysis because it also kind of devalues their time too because it's going to take quite a bit of time to go from wherever the outlet is to into downtown um so i think that was um and then i'm going to go back to a previous one and just support the what lisa said about the speed bumps on 34th street okay erin i just want to support the kind of curbside management stuff you're looking at i will maybe talk about some funding stuff too but

[232:00] just i definitely see how in in the downtown occasionally people just stop on broadway right on pearl street and the traffic backs way way up and um so it seems like we need some carrots and we need some sticks right like you know give them here's the great place to drop off and pick up passengers um and here's where you don't do it and if you do you'll get in trouble and can we have some enforcement that that works on that so i just i think it's a current problem that we do need to be actively working on so i support what you're doing and i had a question about that if i may piggyback on um we talked about curbside management for that that kind of vehicle but there's also the one for like delivery checks fedex and and um ups and i was wondering who the fee would get assessed on is it the deliver or delivery so i think those are the the details we need to look at and how how are those types of programs being um deployed around the country and what are the pros

[233:01] and cons of the different ways to do the incentives or disincentives for um the use of the curb so um yeah we have a lot more work to do in that particular area but we wanted to start this year with the transportation network companies and then we'll expand the work into looking at freight and the other uses of the curb thank you so one other thing i just wanted to throw in the mix and since apparently i still think boulder should own innovation again i think to the extent that we need to put into place some legislative sidebars guide posts pilots i think that this is a really good time for us to go on the offense rather than waiting to see what happens and trying to fix it and i think especially given the leadership role our delegation plays that this is a really good time to try to

[234:00] encourage them to do that so i just want to throw that in addition to us trying some pilots trying to frame it well for the state i think is also important since things before there's a constituency that's bought into things being a certain way we have i think more flexibility to to make sure that the advanced mobility changes actually further our sustainability and equity goals so i guess i would underscore that yeah i mean advanced mobility and advanced mobility deployment can be both promising and scary i mean the e-scooters in other cities are having people killed um because they don't have good enforcement they don't have good guidelines you know in nashville there's a recent story about they have i don't remember seven companies operating there and they just had their first death but they've had

[235:00] many injuries because they don't have a bike network that's quite the same as we do and so you can get you know the sidewalks crowded with the scooters or the the bike the dockless bikes or you can get safety issues um and so i agree with zan completely on the trying to be ahead and see what's coming and see how we can set up for it um for instance um we are preempted from doing any regulation of autonomous vehicles at the state level right now and i think we might have our own needs and desires about how autonomous vehicles could or should operate here so we missed that opportunity we tried we lobbied on that one and we were denied but we might go back to the well and we might do it as part of a package of things that look ahead i think aaron is exactly right about the curbside management i think it would make traffic flow you know more smoothly more safely you know stopping at the corner of pearl and broadway is

[236:01] not the safest spot to get in or out of a cab either uber left and so there's promise here but i think we need to be careful not to see this as a silver bullet you know how they're driving everything and dockless everything isn't going to make us walk more and so i think we need to just keep a big picture view and if we regulate well i think we'll get good solutions right i want to see e-scooters and and all kinds of other things but we just need to get them into the right category so that they move well and safely so that's my thoughts on this um any thoughts on the pilots being proposed are we good with those yeah okay next funding do you have um you don't have a summary chart do you um i can go back to the summary chart that yeah yep that'd be different

[237:00] this one sure so so in january 2019 i don't know what the amount was at a point some 0.15 or something from osmp came into transportation how much was that and is that included in your in the financials that you showed at the beginning and then you're going to get another .15 january 1st and it's it's not an additional point no the the first 0.15 was a actually a temporary tax that started in 2014 and went through 2019 a separate tax okay and then in 2020 i believe it is that tax goes away right and the 0.15 that had been going to open space was approved by the voters to go to transportation right so included in our okay so that's all been

[238:00] included and what's the actual value of that about so four million per year four five million per year okay okay okay is that was that your question yeah just take it let's start it i have a question here yep questions um so chris if you could give us a two minute what is the transportation utility fee i i mean i may have not been here or whatever i'm not clear on what it is okay so a transportation utility fee it's also commonly called a transportation maintenance fee this is a fee that is typically assessed on utility bills and so it comes as a line item for example loveland has a transportation utility fee they call it their street improvement fee it occurs on a utility bill and they assess their fee based on the length of your frontage to public right-of-way typically

[239:00] throughout the country where you have transportation maintenance view or utility fees it's based on vehicle trip generation so you look at the type of land use it is the size of that land juice and the institute of traffic engineers or ite puts out their trip tables every year that say okay an office of this size generates this many trips a residence generates this many trips a warehouse generates this many trips and so essentially you look at the proportionality of trips that are generated by different land uses to come up with the rates of how much people pay based on how many vehicle trips they generate to their property so is this subject to tabor would there be tabor vote in order to do this this would be a fee i know no i'm just i understand the word yeah um you know but sometimes people challenge you on you'd do a fee study and um you would have to show that it was proportional to what you're trying to address um there are others in the states so you could probably do it councils in the

[240:00] past have decided to call it a tax since these sort of things like this is a tax instead and put it before the voters that would be a choice of the council got it yeah can i just one question about that you said the volume of the land use does that is that akin to the frontage i mean no i mean i get that the land use times the frontage or what do you mean by volume loveland just uses the length of the frontage that is adjacent to the public right-of-way not at times yeah right that's just how they do it but typically when you look at other uh utility transportation utilities fees across the country they simply use vehicle trip generation they typically base it on these ite trip generation tables but there's nothing to do with how big well it has to do with square footage not the frontage but not the frontage so let me just comment uh well we're talking about this so it can go back to the group i actually think for commercial properties that trip

[241:01] generation thing makes great sense but i think from a social equity perspective as we've been talking about for residential the frontage makes a lot of sense because you're going to have a lot smaller frontage if you live in a smaller place likely than if you live in a bigger place and you know trip generation is also an interesting way to look at that but um i've been thinking about the equity component since we got the email there there's a variety of ways if you look at different some places based on the number of bedrooms for residential some have flat fees for residential detached versus attached because there are different uh generations for multi-family versus a single family um so there's a variety of square footage he said square footage you said square footage yeah okay or number bedroom most most of the commercial are all square footage no no i meant roseville yeah okay um are you on this topic yeah i did i just said drilling and if we did something like this i mean could we have a rebate program for people under a certain income level

[242:00] right is that something you've looked at yeah and that's something we um i guess it was back in 2012 to 2014 we had brought a transportation maintenance fee as we were calling at that time to council and there was a large discussion based on what are the different types of of rebates that would be provided to different groups non-profit commercial properties versus you know houses that are in neighborhood ecopass neighborhoods so we discussed a variety of different rebates but they're all possible okay and and so i remember that that thing that you all were working on back there was before i was on council yeah so was that essentially what you brought that council didn't decide to put on yeah yeah i think the opportunity to use the open space tax came in front and that was uh that was chosen interesting well i'm just going to weigh in with an opinion which is i think separating out and it seems to me there's a couple buckets one is maintenance one is operations

[243:01] and one is enhancements and at least getting a portion of the maintenance piece and i don't know if that includes operations or not by a more a steady dependable um yeah makes a lot of sense to me because i'm involved and others are involved in a lot of regional discussions about enhancements and regional um hov lanes and all those corridors and um somehow separating those discussions from what we need to take care of in-house locally i think is wise so i'll just i think that this utility fee or i think maintenance fee would be a better word but that's just me um what you use it for corvallis oregon uses their utility fee for for transit service so you know well then so i just left it open given everything

[244:00] else going on with utilities yeah i would not use that one okay transportation operations fee yeah that's that's that was good that's awesome um so i'll i'll echo that zen but just to put a finer point in it i'm we have a lot of transportation needs um and but i feel like there's a couple there are a lot of enhancements we want to implement but there are a couple areas that i think are really critical that we're neglecting right now and one of them is is maintenance um street maintenance i think um you talked about the deferred maintenance the level deferred maintenance that we have and that's how we're able to implement any enhancements at all but i mean our streets are a lot of them are not in very good shape and uh that's a it's an experience issue but it's also a safety issue i you know biking down here today on the broadway bike lane i'm like bumping over a couple of potholes and if i lost control i would be in bad shape so i think it's really critical that we that we really do something about this and catch up on some of that deferred maintenance and so i feel like we really need to do something about funding i'm

[245:01] very interested we can talk about more details but i'm very interested in maybe partnering with the county on doing on some of those like transit and enhancement kinds of funding but i feel like we got to shore up our basic maintenance to some extent and then also to make progress on our vision zero goals i think the safety of our transportation users is critical and we we've you guys have made enormous progress on nailing down what the next steps are but i know we don't currently have enough funding to implement all of those next steps and i think we really should prioritize those safety measures so we got to do something and especially if we can figure out the low income piece okay sam and then mary so for me in the local section which i think if we want to look at the buckets of operation and maintenance that's going to be local both the transportation fee and the registration fee makes sense because you're taxing the thing that is

[246:00] causing the need for the solution right you're you're addressing um and i i call it a mobility fee because we'd also want to use that funding for sidewalks and for bike lanes and for bike paths and so on so maybe you could call it a mobility um fee and the transportation utility fee and i think it's really interesting because you can come up because it's on a utility bill you often have access to databases of who has low income or subsidy you know on their bills to begin with assistance for paying their bills and so we were talking about doing things with natural gas and you know attacks on natural gas that that group the sustainability group came up with a plan a rough plan for being able to help proactively identify folks who might qualify and so you could address the social impact there but i always

[247:00] like funding sources which are paying for things that they ultimately have access to and it's related so i like those two a lot thank you the one thing is that so let's just talk about all the local stuff the vehicle registration fee we recently looked at and said nope not yet yet but in part because it didn't quite get at the use issues as well so i guess i wouldn't take it off the table but i guess to me that one still has concerns i agree that figuring out the dynamic pricing around curbside management to me is a little bit different because it's dealing with another use piece so i guess i don't know if people have any other thoughts on that i guess i would prioritize the transportation fee yeah i would as as well but on the vehicle registration fee the idea i think before it was tied to miles per gallon but the amount was it just wouldn't operate as a disincentive at all if it were tied to valuation

[248:02] that that so that email from mark mcintyre had some good ideas in it and that time the idea of tying it to valuation made a little more sense to me um because it is it is uh a progressive then because the more the more expensive your vehicle the more you're paying so that's not tied to use as much but um at least it would be uh it would be better proportioned by income right i guess to me it doesn't get at the behavior yeah it's true i'm sorry i just have to bring this up i fully understand we need transportation needs i hear everything i think it's incredibly important but just coming from somebody who's born and raised here who works here and who has zero other options but to take a car every day to work i try to work from home as much as i can but there's no other option and being pretty middle class i think that it's almost like we're making walking and biking for the elite people who have the time to do it people who

[249:00] i don't know maybe are lucky enough to work close to their home i i'm unfortunately 14 and a half miles from where i work and i have to go through boulder and i have to go up into the foothills and i do not have the time to take a bus walk a mile up sugarloaf road and i don't know it just it feels kind of unequitable to the to the working class people i i'm sorry i just i mean being in this exact position i i have to drive and and that's just the way it is and i think there's a lot of people in our town who feel this way so to be taxed and sticked on so many things we unfortunately are not a town that was built around bikes and and pedestrians and though we can continue to move in that direction and i think it's wonderful that we do we do have to remember that there is a working-class community here that relies on automobiles unfortunately as much as we hate it it's a fact and so i just got to bring this voice up so

[250:01] look but i am can i ask a colloquy about this because the transportation utility fee is getting at a lot of the pavement work um so it's actually having everybody um help regardless of your transportation type are bikes and pedestrians going to help everybody that lives here every single person that lives here is going to help with this yeah and so this will go to the ballot for our residents to vote well or it depends we can decide whether to put it on the belt the idea is that we're talking about is based on the frontage of your house or your business or the use trip the trip generation so it's it's really trying to get it pavement management is a big chunk of what we're behind and that's fine but i'll just again bring up the side of it's already expensive to live here taxes are getting higher on our homes their increase in utilities and all these little things and they keep adding on more monthly tiny little bills it just all adds up to the level of expense that it costs to live here so i'm just

[251:01] bringing it up from a devil's advocate side so that's just my two cents well if i could just yep um i think nearby you bring up a good point and i think that was part of the failure of folsom is that we didn't realize people didn't realize how many people do rely on their vehicle for their um work and so there were other things that were there were physical impediments that was really the problem but i think if it i think that it brought that to light because we heard from a lot of people who were in this predicament okay mary [Music] so thank you mirabai for bringing up that point because that's true i think no matter what we do i think the the reality of it is is that at least east of um folsom it's the other boulder right it

[252:01] was built during the time of the automobile and that's the land use pattern there so we've got a long way to go there um but um i wanted to agree with um aaron about the basic road maintenance and taking care of the roads actually cuts across safety and enhancements and users so it it it benefits people who are driving it benefits people who are riding bikes it benefits people who are pushing baby joggers um so it it it has a a big value i think to the community because it is it's pretty basic um i did really like the the points that mark mcintyre made in his email to us today about the vehicle evaluation fee um especially the point that all of

[253:01] these up here except for the way he proposed that vehicle valuation fee was are regressive and that was the only one that was a progressive um approach which would then um do away with the need for rebates or discounts or anything like that because by its very nature it wouldn't need them so i i would support looking at something like that and and i think we do need to be careful again looking at all of these fees and these taxes and how they look in the aggregate because i agree mayor bye it's death by a thousand cuts and um and and we need to realize that um because we up here may be able to pay them everybody can't and it does matter to a lot of people so thank you

[254:00] sam so mary i agree i found mark's email very interesting he brought up a very good point and i would be in favor if we did something like a mobility utility fee that it would need to be in a way not regressive and so you can approach that by looking for people who have assistance on their water bills or assistance on their energy bills but you can also do it as i think we heard on the number of bedrooms in the property or the size of the property so there might be a way to make that one as progressive as possible so i wouldn't take it off the table because it's regressive because i think i heard that we can work with whichever option to try and be very careful about that great aaron you uh agree with with sam on that i mean i think that that the the utility or the the operations fee could could be done in in a much more progressive way

[255:00] if you tuned it right which sounds like you've already done a fair amount of work on a few years ago yes um you know with rebates and scaling up on larger houses and things like that um you could manage it and just mayor buddy appreciate you raising the point the um the the two areas that i was talking about which were um road maintenance and and safety are both across all months you know that's not just about walking and biking about all of them but also i just want to keep in mind that if uh certainly some people if if you have a certain distance to travel a car it's going to be pretty much your only option but if you have other shorter distances to travel um it's a lot cheaper to do it without a car if you can do it with one car and a bike in a family for example so i mean i think you know by by helping out those modes you often help people who are struggling as well it's not just an elite thing so lisa and then let's talk regional i'm just going to say i'd like to see it as progressive as possible i really appreciated mark's comments and i thought it was a creative way i i

[256:01] know we have to figure out some of the legal stuff and exactly how you would do the valuation and i know that's probably a heavy lift but i'd be very much interested in looking at that i do wonder oh well you know i would hope it wouldn't be taken as have gas polluting vehicles as the alternative but um i think it it seemed very progressive and um i would like to do that i think people are hurting and i definitely don't want if we consider and it seems like we we probably will this transportation fee cut i like the operations and cut the utility just yeah yeah we can name it something different yeah okay on on the regional front there are a lot of discussions going on the county level but even at the larger

[257:00] dr cog level about how to fund basically what didn't pass with 110 last year how are we going to fund yeah more of the u.s 36 model on our highway 7 corridor on 119 and how do we do that as a region or as a county if if there's not enough heft out there you may recall that denver the city and county of denver and older county were the two places where 110 passed in other words there's an appetite or a recognition maybe let me put it that way a recognition that it's important for us to address transportation needs and a willingness to do that which i would say is getting us a lot of credit around in these conversations is that folks in our region understand this issue um

[258:00] so anyhow i think those conversations work will continue i do think we want to keep playing regional ball um i think it'd be interesting to marry transportation and housing together if we're going to look to something in the future um i don't know where that'll go but we know so much things that are happening yeah just affordable housing and mobility to and from your job is those things are very linked and um as a county we have a lot of our fellow municipalities in the county are very committed to the affordable housing goals and addressing regional transportation issues together and it's a pretty powerful combination so anyhow i guess i would like us to be collectively continuing to participate and shape those conversations because i think they're very linked but they are going to take money and i totally get that people are strapped but they're strapped because they need better housing and

[259:00] mobility options and so the better we can solve that the more affordable our region will be our city will be i might say they're also their wages aren't keeping up with their housing and their transportation costs so we'll talk about that next yeah i mean right it does go hand in hand doesn't it okay other than do you want um i think it would be helpful if we take stuff off the table or what are you looking for from us on the regional well um you know certainly i think the the county-wide or greater regional transportation tax is in being discussed it is you know moving forward there is some momentum behind it um i guess you know getting some input on what council thinks of user fees is um would be helpful um i can tell you a little bit about um the funding working group's perspective on user fees is that congestion pricing is that what you mean by yeah so it could be you know a user fee could be a coordinate fee you could put a line

[260:00] around boulder and say any car that comes in here pays a dollar at peak hour you know you could also have corridor pricing like we have on us 36 right now in the high occupancy tolling you could also do it at the end of the trip as parking a parking fee that to me is a little more difficult to to implement and administer but i would say the main views of the funding working group were that if boulder and boulder alone implemented let's say a cordon fee or corridor congestion pricing within the city limits that we would put the city at a significant economic disadvantage regionally and so the funding working group what they said was if we were to implement user fees and congestion pricing we should do it on a regional level as those regional corridors

[261:00] are improved and that greater mobility options exist for users so once 119 is done we've got brt we've got first and final mile services to help people that would be the time that you could think about doing a user fee and congestion pricing and it would be regional not just the city so that that was the the view that i heard loud and clear from them there were also concerns about equity about low-income workers that often travel the furthest and live outside of rtd district and this would be you know a fee that would be charged on people who had the least amount of mobility choices um so that was i guess the second concern and that i think that's really why you know it ends up in that tier two level of it's a it's a it's a viable mechanism but there were concerns about how it would be implemented equity issues and then the whole local versus regional application of them

[262:01] does anybody disagree with that sentiment i think yeah it's similar with the vmt right um because that people who are having to travel the furthest because they can't afford to live here will pay more for vmt so it almost doesn't matter whether it's tolling or recording or vmt it's all going to impact you know if folks can't afford the tolls they have to sit in the congestion so it's you know got social inequity written all over it i think the one thing that i will say that's very nice about the us-36 model right is that the managed lanes that got put in increased travel times for every like even the non-managed links decreased what i meant to say not what i said so anyhow it it also made bus travel just so much more convenient it also gives the option though if you

[263:01] if you you know the time when you're really rushing you can pay the extra and you can you can go faster but it worked on so many different levels and that's what we're trying to replicate on the other corridors so people have options um then both in type and speed and cost um but that improves everybody's options i think is there's a lot of appeal to that because it addresses equity and efficiency and modes so so i just want to say that going back to what you said on regional um that there's discussions going on about what to do in a multi-county setting is i think the right way to address this i don't think a county-wide transportation tax is necessarily the right way i don't think the hot lanes or the congestion pricing of the vehicle miles traveled and so i'd be interested in hearing at a regional level

[264:00] we don't need to hear tonight but about the vehicle registration fee approach because that could be done regionally or about the transportation utility fee approach because you could imagine ways to do that regionally and use that to fund improvements um so i for me a lot of the stuff that's up there regionally just isn't appealing at the moment and i would want to talk in the multi-county area about some socially equitable approach to funding it well can i just say one thing controlling how the money gets spent and making sure that the people that are paying are the people reaping are going to fit are really important and that's why i would separate the local from the regionals sure because we got burned before in regional and so um so that's why i would say you know the operations and maintenance fee for taking care of our streets let's keep that separate from and the multi-county thing maybe that works but then maybe you have to go down

[265:01] and fight at dr cogg for your portion so that's one of the things is the governance of the and of the mechanism is also really key so so that's why county wide still has a lot of legs to it because boulder county and the municipalities and that we all think similarly and we could get in what we put out i mean that's we have a lot more control over that more more control yeah so just keep that in mind as well so the colloquy on that when i went and filled in for you at metro mayor's and you at dr cogg what i heard down there talking about the subjects of this is no way does this go to rtd right there's not a chance because a lot of people got burned at rtd and because dr cogg already administers the transportation improvement program fees and there's an equity component built in there so the counties get their fair share and then there's merit-based stuff there was a pretty good agreement i thought and this was just the high-level conversation

[266:00] that dr cogg would be a fitting organization to administer those funds because they do a good job with the tip fees right now so i just wanted to say that i would imagine it would be doctor yes but yeah i mean i think it has promise for sure and i mean we're we're sitting at that table where part of those discussions were open to it as long as our kind of requirements are met about that we have some control and that the if we pay or certain amount of taxes we're getting most of that back i will say that um uh the the the battles at dr over funding get tough and and so if you i wouldn't want all of the money to go into some discretionary pot at dr cogg like some of the money in a discretionary pot can work out but given the tenor of those discussions they don't always come out in our favor as hard as we try so okay is that okay that is excellent direction and we will continue to do research and flesh out

[267:01] these ideas and come back with you come back to you with different ideas on how they actually could be implemented and i certainly we certainly heard the issues of equity being very important and being as progressive as possible so yes all right thank you last question anybody care if we move the tmp date to 2030 so it aligns with climate no efforts that's a positive thing perfect is that our last question yep yes yes aaron wants to gush no i wasn't getting gosh no well no i just want to get into one thing that you know i talked about the the taking care of our streets and i just like to see the language about that in in the plan itself so it's it's what part of the funding goal but i just want to make sure that it gets in as part of our goal for the next 10 years is to get our streets in better shape and then i'll gush because you guys are doing awesome work and i'm really excited about this and i can't wait to see the final plan get approved i think that captures the sentiment for all of us okay thank you very much

[268:01] now we are woefully behind but that was good yeah special forward okay you tell that to your fellow colleagues so we need to have a time check yes and we have way too much on our on our thing and we i cannot sit here two more hours okay and so and it's actually two hours and 20 minutes right on the agenda that's one o'clock so i i just can't i'm almost asleep right now so i would like to take off the big big items so i would take off the possible ballot polling questions library district update that's an hour and 15 minutes no together yeah yeah and i don't know if we can really have a a good discussion about living wage given

[269:00] it will be a lengthy one i think so okay i would suggest that we just finish with these small things and call it good well okay can i counter on living wage mostly we have to decide about in custodial in or out that can be a long or short conversation all right um and we can tee up ems to talk about it another night i guess i feel like we don't have to make everything long we could say i'll just throw it out there i think the ballot i agree let's take the ballot pulling off because i was going to say you know what we don't need a ballot poll yep i think it's about us because we know the outcome of the ballot bowl do you want to fund open space people will say yes it's what amount and we should have that as a public discussion we're going to have a whole financial discussion when we come back right let me say what we're going to do with adam what we would have recommended tonight is that on july 23rd we have a

[270:02] study session that will be focused on kind of a financial update and an opportunity for council to learn about as you know about the needs of the open space transportation other needs and then we were going to ask you based upon that financial update do you want us to pull on putting a question on the ballot for a sales tax increase for some all general fund open space you know whatever so there'd be an opportunity then for you to talk about what you might like to put on the ballot we can poll in the period of time that it would take to get to second reading and then um you can make those final decisions so if you look at the document that you have on your table you'll see at the very end there's a timeline that we think would be helpful and you also could say we don't want to pull on anything

[271:01] we've got lots of things to do but you don't need to do this tonight i will get rid of the poll and listen to the public comment okay so are people largely we can revisit this at the july meeting but is everybody fine with punting it to them okay so that's off um the library district was mostly where i thought they were they're going to withdraw it if we say yes you'll make it a priority if we make it a priority next year well it's already off because they can't get into that you know but it's a nice thing to say yep funding of the library is something we will recommend to the new council to make a priority actually staff has agreed to recommend it to the new council it's just they just want to hear a general statement of support from all of you well plus i further think that we're going to be talking about the library budget during the budget cycle this year with this council so this council is going to talk about it so yeah i don't i think we can get rid of that too okay i think you've just done it okay yep so okay

[272:02] okay we're not gonna pass it to the next we're supportive of yes absolutely having that public conversation so the question is can we do the living wage um so one thing about the living wages suzanne you're right that the first part of it is just information for you that we are planning to move forward with the living wage in the 2020 budget and explaining how much it was going to cost and things like that so that we're not even asking you a question we're just providing you information so we could focus in on the cust custodial services in sourcing issue if that's a thing you wanted us to do yep oh good i'm just going to ask a question because there's a staff recommendation on the table to not do this does it make sense to do a straw poll because if there's a majority that agrees with the staff then that's a really short conversation okay

[273:01] do you want to take a straw poll before we even hear the presentation well we all read the materials yeah but the public hasn't okay but we're talking about okay um i ca how long is this well because we cut off the first part of it we can probably do 10 minutes on the custodial sourcing and then it will depend on how much time you want to spend discussing it and lisa i mean i just want to point out that this meeting was scheduled till after midnight i scheduled till after midnight so we just punted it to be around what we had said or less so no okay so go ahead and proceed yeah okay the last presentation was supposedly going to be 20 it was 45 so we did read our memo challenge accepted skip over the yeah skip over right answer skip well just tell the public the punchline on the self-sufficiency wage i think that's

[274:00] important sure so as i go up to the next slide thank you again katie doling executive budget officer in the last several years we've switched our methodology for living wage to the self-sufficiency standard our current living wage is 1567. in december of 2018 the self-sufficiency standard was updated and based upon our current methodology we have calculated that the new living wage rate will increase to 1742 which as jane mentioned is what we are moving forward with per council direction and the 2020 budget applicable to standard employees non-standard employer standard employees part-time temps and our various contracts that we already have applied to the living wage is that short enough or would you like i have a quick question it says on slide six of your presentation living wages also applied to contracted services including custodial landscaping and ems

[275:01] so that was my understanding was we had already done that and figured out with amr how that worked and so the information that we got earlier tonight that it it hasn't been done or slowed down was just incorrect right that's right it was incorrect information that you received okay and that's what i thought and just checking in and that so that makes that a very short discussion um one quick question about ems and this will be short too um the fire department is moving forward with a program of mapping out what that looks like and budgeting it correct well that's partly true the budgeting it is not necessarily true they're working on their master plan and either very late this year or early next year they'll be bringing it forward and it will contain data and information that you need to help us decide how to move forward with ems it is expensive and our facilities do not currently support it so we'll have to figure out what the funding would be but it but they've done the data the research you will have all of that i also thought that was true there

[276:02] was a process we were going through to arrive at a decision point so i just wanted to get all of us clear that that is moving forward i'm sorry the timing for when that comes to us is ish it could be the study session in december or it could be early february because january is usually taken with retreat stuff okay thank you next year all right great that feel right to everybody i do have one more question somebody asked in the future this just happens automatically which i guess is what's happening now because you're informing us rather than asking us is that the intent yes it is the thing is that we want you to know about it because it does have an impact so an example would be that it will impact the fees that we're going to be recommending for the 2020 budget for the recreation centers so you'll see that later and this is part of the

[277:01] reason that it's occurring okay anything else on that no thank you for that very clear okay so i'm going to turn over to my colleague allie rhodes hi allie rhodes deputy director for parks and recreation uh we're back here talking about custodial insourcing at your request from the retreat in january for the reasons in your packet i've heard you all say you've read the packet so i'm not going to repeat a lot of information in the slides i'll focus on where we think there are key points or analysis that will help the conversation if that works for you all so real quick history during the downturn turn in the 2000s and as part of the blue ribbon commission on expenses we began outsourcing almost all of our custodial services because of the cost effectiveness the flexibility and ability to scale contracts up and down based on business needs and the custodial services are just not a core competency for the city of boulder

[278:00] and so currently we have two providers that are contracted for custodial services per the comments earlier both contracts include compliance with the living wage which we audit twice a year both contracts regularly demonstrate compliance employees are paid at the current living wage and so we outsource in all of our office buildings the recreation centers and the night service in the libraries where we in source is in the public safety building because of homeland security our homeland homeland security requirements i lost the words and then in the main library uh and the main library the the custodian there is performing also library duties like book delivery and then in the fire stations this is just a culture of the fire service across the country that fire firefighters do their own landscaping and custodial the reasons for outsourcing oh try that maybe all of our employees should do

[279:00] that i enjoy yardling excuse me i need to go vacuum right now so uh reasons for outsourcing and i'm pulling these from in 2017 we worked with the novak group to do an initial analysis of insourcing and we in fact have our partners from the novak group in the audience tonight thank you and the reasons for outsourcing for local government are these and it's about focusing on core competencies cost savings flexibility efficiency and performance those are covered in more depth in your packet and were discussed in 2017. so on these next two slides and in your packet there were answers to the questions from council both in caec and then via some emails i want to call out that the average pay in both contracts is exceeding the current living wage that the billable rate i'll just call out includes we can say overhead really generally it's covering insurance it's covering supervision it's covering vacation it's covering sick time it's covering

[280:02] other benefits the travel the supplies and many other things at that billable rate so if i can ask what does it cost where's their profit how much profit are they making i don't know exactly that number that's what i'd like to know that's what i've been asking from um i asked yvette that when i had a conversation with okay yeah i'd be speculating if i were to answer it now if we could get that how can we know what is that a noble number that are they going to tell us what their profit is i don't i think that that's the kind of thing they well i would just like to know well i meant businesses hide that i mean that's proprietary that's the word proprietary that's what i meant i i think that's how would that information help us make this decision it's comparing how much we would um well let's let her finish okay thank you so benefits this is a very high level summary but what we know is that anyone doing custodial work in the city there

[281:01] is some level of benefits available to all employees for both the city of boulder and the contractors that varies based on your employment status whether it's part-time or full-time and whether you elect to to enroll in those benefits uh upward mobility this was another big question this exists in both models one of our providers all of their supervisors were previously custodians that is their model for developing leadership the impact of living wage on hours there were specific questions as to has implementation of living wage reduced hours for any employee there is one employee who from 2017 to 2018 was a employee of the previous contractor parks and recreation and other departments issued an rfp in 2017 and we adjusted the scope and this was out of fiscal prudence there were several areas that were adjusted we call it um gold plating where you just right size the level of service based on business

[282:00] needs again jane mentioned earlier recreation fees were always trying to manage expenses so as not to increase fees so when we rebid the contract the scope was adjusted and one employee was rehired by the new organization and and that specific shift had been adjusted down five hours per week there were no other changes to the schedule and they were not a result of living wage and then living wage implementation as we called out it's called out in both contracts the other thing to note here is that the contractors call out this is similar with ems that the implementation of living wage in the city of boulder is having a regional impact on their contracts and that's one benefit we see of this outsourced model and can you just say one more sentence of that household that the wages are going up in those other communities as well because employees either are talking to their co-workers and saying hey i'm on the boulder job i make more or they're those same employees work several contracts and they're not going to work on the other contract for a lower wage

[283:00] so i'm having a little trouble understanding why there's such a difference between outsourcing and sourcing in the sense that you're paying the overhead burdened rate right which includes to to the contractors you're paying about 2187 or whatever it is an hour and they're paying a living wage or better and so now we go to bring them in and we pay them a living wage is it that our overhead rate is much much higher because their overhead plus profit if you believe that they're taking it all from the 2187 less the 1587 is 5.50 an hour and so i'm a little mystified by how much the delta is between what it would cost net and and what we're paying so i can summarize that it's covered in detail in the options in the novak and i would summarize it down into economy of scale so a company that is providing custodial services that is

[284:01] doing this across a community you know the contractors are providing it across the front range their supervisor may not just supervise on this contract it may supervise several contracts the vehicles may not just service this contract they might service other contracts and so the economy of scale it provides an efficiency and that's that leads to that cost effectiveness that is why outsourcing is what we've recommended it's still that is my experience and my day job as well but whatever that's worth so in this slide with the options at council's request and with the support of the novak group we did explore four options for insourcing custodial services options one and two focus on some of the public buildings downtown with option one being specifically office spaces option two expands that to include some of the more public-facing buildings including the west senior center and the library options three and four reference the

[285:01] recreation centers whereas option three is just the day porters the folks that are in the building during the day keeping it fresh and available ready for patrons throughout the day and then option four adds in the heavy cleaning that happens at night to ensure that the building is is prepared for the next days of activity so there are a lot of numbers on this slide we've highlighted in orange the annual ongoing increase because we think that's the subject to your conversation were we to in-source and any one of these options that number in orange would be the yearly ongoing cost i'll call out though that that number is in addition to the existing spend that is the number above it and so the new annual ongoing spend would be that fourth row so the other things that we would call out as considerations should we insource we've talked a little bit about the funding implications so no matter which of these op options that are selected that number in orange would be a new expense and require a new funding source so in the

[286:01] recreation activity fund that is a quasi enterprise fund and funded 85 by user fees it would most likely require an additional increase to user fees which we've mentioned we've already are recommending around 9 this year around 20 of which is attributed to living wage increases to our contracts and employees and i just asked that by allison that yeah are you saying that we wouldn't really even be able to pay that with the general fund that because of where it is you'd have to pay for with recreation fees no i'm not saying you you can't at all and so the first option is to increase fees the other option for any of these scenarios would be to divert funding or reduce service levels and additional in a separate general fund service and so your option is either to increase revenue through user fees in the record for options three or four for options one two three or four your other choice would be to reduce services elsewhere to divert general fund dollars thank you so why is um parks you know parks taking 47 of these

[287:01] or accounting having to pay for all of these custodials is it because it's in parks and rec we're paying for the custodians in option three and okay and that's due to i mean this is brc direction regular direct the city manager work group on recreation financing in 2008 our master plan that talks about that those who benefit pay right you i know you all i know are very familiar with this concept but those who use the recreation centers pay the 1.5 million transfer to the rec activity fund supports age-based discounts for seniors and youth it supports discounted access we have an expansive financial aid program but but the rest the user fees pay for those cost of operations that doesn't include capital that's a separate conversation right okay are you yeah so i'll just funding implications we're talking about service impacts so when you have a large contractor they

[288:01] can cover when people are taking vacation or on leave where we have in-sourced we actually use our we have used our contractor to cover for leave to maintain service levels and then just the scale of the contract there are concerns that if we were to reduce either of the contracts to in-source that they would not be interested in providing the service because we believe the margins are small they are so that brings us to our recommendation and really the predominant areas here we think we can shape the contract to achieve the goals of living wage we think that the contract results in a higher percentage of custodial workers living in the city and we are concerned about the additional expense just bringing it down to the human level ali um are you saying that um the net benefit to the employee would be the same in other words they'd still make the same wage and receive roughly the same benefits is that right the benefits are not exactly the same there is discrepancy in the benefits the city has a very rich generous package and i i won't say it's the same provided

[289:01] by the contractors so the benefits are better the wage would be roughly the same yes okay thanks and could you speak to um the number of part-time people who don't um qualify for aca on the contracts the exact number i i mean don't you need to earn uh aca requires 30 hours or hours period the average in the contracts is 24. right and so i don't know the exact number off the top of my head that are eligible for benefits and then selecting them is obviously a different question so that would be useful information well can you actually i'm sorry i do have that number well do the people that service our contracts fill in the rest of their time working on other contracts i don't know i can tell you anecdotally that the one employee i spoke with in exploring the question does have another position and we also know from the novak report that

[290:01] many of the night custodians this is a second job okay did you have a question no okay so you're done and the question is just the question is does council support the staff recommendation to enhance the contract where we can to continue to direct alignment with the living wage and the goals of council related to that and and so you can see before you the two ways we think we would do that we would expand the scope of the audit to address hours per week to ensure we we don't think it's happened and we would strengthen the contract to protect it from happening we would also want to allow for upward mobility so should there be an opportunity to become a city of employee we wouldn't want there to be a non-compete clause in the contract so um ali you mentioned the in-sourced library custodian that and you also

[291:00] mentioned that these the dayporter jobs are part-time jobs so when the library custodian came in house they were also given additional duties in order to make it a full-time job so if one of these contractor employees wanted a full-time job but the job by its nature the contract out by its nature is part-time with this upward mobility clause allow them to outside of that contract do additional duties like that might be available at the rec center is i think that's possible mary what i hear you saying is could the upward mobility not just preclude switching it to but working both in tandem and and i don't think that would interfere with the employer contract relationship and we could certainly explore it correct because um i you know some some of these part-time employees may actually want full-time i mean and and you mentioned that um a lot of them

[292:01] do live in boulder so it would be great if they didn't have to like go off to another job somewhere outside and come back and so if if that's a possibility it would be great to be able to make that work for them if they wanted to well likewise it would be good to require their working hours to go up or not require but to encourage as many of them to go up to 30 hours a week so that they do qualify for aca that's where they're making their profit what i'll share about that is that the hours per week for the day reporters are very much driven by the business needs and the the nature of the traffic and the recreation centers and so what we can explore is what additional work could be performed to get to 30 hours is it yep and there's probably plenty to do so okay did you have a

[293:01] i guess to me that that is the the one piece i would add to this the other oh can i just add one more thing on that lisa when we were doing our homework today and reviewing the the novak report they did the benchmark study on living wage one of the things we noted is that some communities who have applied a living wage have two one for employees who are eligible for benefits and one for employees who are not eligible for benefits and so something else that we could explore thank you for reminding katie is is a living wage that is higher for those employees not eligible for benefits that would be paid for by the contractor that would be part of the contract correct that is that is how some communities have addressed something like that [Music] because that would address the initiative sure well i'll just point out that it would make the cost of our contract go up which might be just fine but um the contractor almost certainly has a margin that they need to survive on as a business and they're only going to take work that gets them that margin

[294:00] and you know the margin plus overhead that's in here averages about 37 and that's very low when you combine the profit and the overhead so i would agree to do that but it would also have a cost and that's fine but we just have to acknowledge if we wanted to do that it's one thing to encourage the contractor and the contractors probably got their hours set up so that they make the margin they want because they're not they don't have the benefits but just for us to be aware that it would come with a cost and we should probably know that cost if we were going to go forward with it it would come with an expense that would require revenue to fund it that's what i mean yeah yeah i'm being explicit about it that the conversation about where would those funding come from would have to go with it that there's an additional cost and how do we pay for it right and so so you know i'm fine with whether we try and manage it with the contractors and make it a requirement on them or

[295:00] or bring them in house i think it might be better and more cost effective if we did it the first way but either way it will come with a cost we're going to need another chart with the orange bar about what that's going to look like because the contract costs will go up i think but actually what we need is more information about their benefits package rate and whether the folks that are working 20 or 24 hours on our contracts or somehow working more for that company and therefore covered i i predict they're not i mean [Music] so i think we can ask that question but you know you can tell by looking five full-time 41 part-time i'm guessing the contractor has it set up that way intentionally for their margin purposes yes so so this just brings me to my point of why do we allow a contractor to make money on the backs of other people you've made an argument that custodial services aren't core

[296:01] competencies that we want in the city so why don't we just try going without their work and see how everybody likes that i don't think they would like it so and you're scrunching your face so i'm following you i'm sorry so um so i'm trying to figure out really what is the difference except that i you know intuitively it seems still cheaper to bring these people in house and make them so those are the numbers that i want to see without the contractor in there and i can't find those in here and i feel like some of the comments in this memo were pretty elitist and that comments such as um you know the skills that that these people don't have skills that are appreciated

[297:00] um anyway and it's the whole thing of just making people feel part of the entire um community of the city and so to me it's like having the haves and to have nuts and then when you break it down on racial you know i find it interesting the seven contractors that we have in-house i'm trying to get to that number are 57 people of 57 people of color yet the contractor people are 93 people of color why wouldn't we want people of color working in the city of boulder since i look around we have hardly any why wouldn't we want to have that and we're putting all this money of course we want people of color well we're not hiring them it's difficult to hire people of color for just seven jobs there the factors have 46 jobs that they

[298:02] have and they've got contracts all over the region and so they have better ability to hire folks we are trying very hard to hire people of color okay at least i feel like you're not being too fair but but you said your piece i i'll just say my piece which is that i think it's really important that we pay people liberal livable wage and i am would like to understand a little bit more about the benefits package [Music] that to me is the important thing well excuse me okay i think we are also as the the keeper of the fiduciary responsibility also is for us to keep costs low in the city especially for things like rec center fees matter to people that are middle income i think we try to lower

[299:00] the cost for low income but everything has cause and effect and we're trying to reach good for the entire city so i think paying a livable wage is really important and i'm glad that you've helped drive this i'm glad that we're going to do this and i think it's the benefits piece we need to check into but there's an economy of scale of going with contractors and so again let's balance that and make sure that we're taking care of the workers that either live here or or work for us whether they're in-house or not and i think that's the higher goal um so i guess to me i would just like to understand the benefits piece a little bit but can you just can i clarify do you want to know how many people are taking i understand that's lisa question lisa's question i can summarize the benefits currently available is that your question or is it how many people are taking it just that the people that are contracting for us are they covered do they have a benefits package that's taking care of their health care or not or not contractors have benefits that are

[300:00] available one contractor has a limited plan that is available to any employee regardless of hours and then there are higher levels as they increase in hours per week so it's up to 30 and 40. the other contractor offers benefits health benefits for 38 hours and above where dental is available to everybody after the 90-day probation okay so it's just that we're not hiring these people full-time and so i guess that's the only thing is whether we're leaving people in the lurch there right that's the the only part that makes me squirm yeah and there's a significant number of people it seems that are working at 24 hours a week right i will note so we have done a lot of outreach um thanks to dave bannon over in our purchasing department we have noticed that those that are offered them oftentimes also don't elect to take them and so that's another part of the conversation that are offered what offered benefits oftentimes often don't elect to take them as well they have to pay for

[301:00] or a certain percentage of them yeah we'd be speculating what i can tell you is that the limited weight the limited benefit plan offered by the one contractor the the rates were below 50 bi-weekly for that limited plan which i understand i heard the thousand it does it all does add up um it was it was more affordable than what our part-time packages okay other thoughts from people what happened to aaron we should try to see to what extent that we can we can make sure that the people are doing the contract work or having the opportunity to like for these benefits because we do want to make sure people working for the city are being taken care of but can you flip to the the cost um yeah that one i just it's just so so striking that that in the first two options the cost to the city is triple what if we were to go into insources

[302:00] triple what um uh in outsourcing is and in the third and fourth option it's double those are just enormous margins to kind of charge start our taxpayers and our recreation for users so i think it's really important that we make sure that the people that are doing this work are well taken care of but if we provide them a living wage and um and the opportunity to make sure that they have the opportunity to get benefits i just don't feel like we can justify the the cost to our taxpayers and recreation facility users of those very large increases in costs damn so the one thing about contracting that is hard lisa is you can't know all of those things unless you contractually agree with the per the group contracting with you and so one thing it looks like staff has done is said propose 2020 contract enhancements expand the autoscope hours

[303:00] per week for employee upward mobility those are all good things i think one thing that might get at what is being talked about here is that they need to provide us statistics on benefits packages and what i mean by that is i don't think that we can know individually because of hipaa restrictions and other requirements who is taking what but we need to know how many are being offered which package because i think expanding the audit scope maybe should just add benefits to that and they have to agree to that on the front end so that we can be sure that they're being offered packages that aren't just entirely stripped down high deductible packages because when you look at the world of health care and health care offerings which is probably the most important benefit there's just this spectrum of what's available and some of them are terrible and some of them are reasonably good and so i think if we want to do a better job at making sure that those employees have good benefits we need to make that part of the audit we can't know which ones

[304:01] are taking them but we need to make sure they're all being offered them and if there is a difference we need to be able to talk about it and there's also i mean i'll point out that this low difference between the revenue that they're getting and the cost they're paying the employee is a combination of two things it's margin and it's overhead which includes benefits and so i would expect this is a low margin business in other words there's not a ton of profit going to the owner but also the benefits are probably so-so and so we should just add that to the audit scope and find out if we move forward with a contracting arrangement because i think you know we've done the wage piece and now we need to do the kind of holistic compensation so you normally think of a compensation package and the compensation package includes time off paid time off and it includes benefits those are probably i mean healthcare and those are probably the

[305:01] two most important so if we could learn about those and at a future conversation be able to compare those to what an equivalent city employee would get it probably explains some of the difference in the cost there i generally am impressed that we have the level of information that we do about um you know what the contractor composition is and what the in-house composition is it it is a big chunk of money to do it i'd like to understand if we do it what the difference is you know if we pay the price and bring them in-house what the difference in benefits to the employees would be um so that that's the missing piece for me and i think it's the last piece of the conversation that we need to know is so so there's on page 136 of our packet there's next the last paragraph it says standard city employees who work 20 hours or more

[306:02] per week receive benefits non-standard employees receive benefits in alignment with the affordable care act can we put that in in the contract with the contractors so that that they don't have to that they can work a minimum of 20 hours a week and get aca benefits well to be clear the aca requirement is 30 hours a week well then so for non-standard employees those who've averaged 30 hours a week or more over a look back period are offered benefits um we need to pause and let uh continue the meeting i move that we continue the meeting second all those in favor one two three four okay matter yep comment and ali another question that just was just raised in terms of if

[307:01] cost goes up we need to find the revenue source do you have data does parks and rec cab data on how any increase in rec center fees cause a drop in in visitation user fees or users i can tell you that with the last fee increase in 2018 we we look when we do this for any kind of price sensitivity both qualitatively and quantitatively and with the last price increase with and i'm looking to brian bury it was around seven percent we went from we did we did not hear a lot of negative feedback nor did we see a decrease in usage and so it seems like from those with an ability to pay there is not an impact what i'll add is that you know where we've really been able to bolster those efforts is because of the health equity funding that has allowed us to so so greatly enhance our financial aid program that's good okay um all right so let's get to resolution here

[308:00] um i ask a question so we mentioned the option of because i hear very much lisa and i apologize for any face i was trying to understand your comment about the just something about appreciating the skills and i'll look back through that because that's certainly not our intent to be elitist we we very much share the goals around equity and and having a diverse workforce well that's how it comes across page 139 i'll look for that and we'll try and do better next i can show you all of these places okay um yeah and i'd love to follow up with you this approach allows the city to more effectively employ skilled workers who are thoroughly trained to know their business so these custodial workers don't aren't thoroughly trained to know their business what page did you say it's page 139. i'll look on that so the question i was going to ask though we mentioned the the benchmarking had that the some of the communities have a different living wage for those who are not eligible for benefits if council is interested we can explore that my

[309:00] understanding is that you're going to get a financial status update somewhere in july and we thought we might be able to squeeze this into that in a very simplistic manner would be good maybe okay with that you look do you have anything to say are we going to do a struggle or you want to have people say more things i'd like them to come back with more information oh on the 23rd in terms of timing if we don't decide tonight how does that affect it does affect how we work on the budget because next week and the two weeks following that are the weeks that we prepare the budget for city council so in the event that we prepared the budget based on our recommendation and then later you asked that we insource some or all of the custodial workers we would have to

[310:00] either figure out a way to raise fees or take budget dollars that we'd already allocated away from another general fund department so a way in response to that that's what i thought the answer was so i i i tend to agree with um what i think what zan and aaron said that um this probably doesn't make i like all the suggestions here for 2020 so i wouldn't in source for purposes of the 2020 budget i would not in source i try to see what you can get and then i also agree with sam you said we can grab the more information and knowledge over the next it's not going to be during this budget cycle but over the next few months i think what we're struggling with is we don't know how much of that delta is because of benefits and how much of this because of economy at scale that's what that's the missing piece of information and i don't know if we'll ever get that but we can try to get that because if it's largely economy scale then we're not going to improve that it's largely because of benefits then it comes back to the social equity issue that i think that lisa initially raised when we started this discussion which is are there folks getting effectively paid all in less than our folks and that's

[311:00] what we're struggling with here right that was well said thank you i think that sums it up so i guess the the question is um can we vote to proceed tonight knowing that we want to continue to have that conversation about that missing data but it will allow staff to proceed with the budgeting process can we do that i guess i'm i'm prepared to do that i understand the goal and i think we want to keep having that conversation um but meanwhile i like where we're headed with this and we just gave them a 2.50 raise which i think is also um important with this work so i would summarize that by saying we will explore total compensation with the contractors right that it's not just about this living wage it's the total compensation that these employees are

[312:00] receiving could i just add one more thing and i i i greely said that it would be a wonderful thing to bring them in house but the other thing that's going on here is this living wage um that we're doing here is actually having spillover effects and that's i think that's a really great thing [Music] and i've one thing i found interesting is this would be my final comment was a higher percentage of contractor employees live in boulder than of the city custodial employees so i thought that was interesting um and i'd like to understand that if we have any act inside him we had that information at some time back and this has been known for a few years that these guys the people who are contractors like something like 63 or 65 of them live in the city of boulder yeah it's

[313:00] interesting so isn't that the kind of employee you want to encourage well but why aren't the other employees but it yeah to understand the cause and effect um is interesting well just to make the point we would not be hiring the contractors employees correct right we would be hiring new people so the contractors are doing a better job than the city is having people who live in the city we would not be able to hire those people we would be hiring new people okay emotion perhaps is there i don't think we need no we don't need emotional emotion so okay so i think you what are you hearing from us have we conveyed clearly what i heard is that council is not interested in in sourcing any additional custodial services in 2020 council asked that staff continue to influence contracts to achieve the goals around

[314:00] equity in our community uh in looking at total compensation so not just a living wage how can we how can we enhance the benefits that those employees are receiving the other thing that you maybe didn't say but i heard is that we continue to address our pipeline to employment for people of color and we are actively doing this i can give several examples in parks and recreation good great and i have to say that just anecdotally i think the parks and rec department i mean is probably one of the most diverse departments in the city we're all trying very hard great great um okay okay so with that and then thanks again for the work on the self-sufficiency wage yes i think that that is important and is moving the needle one last thing there is a large contingent of staff here that has been working very hard on this for a while so i just would like to appreciate that it wasn't just katie and i whipping this all out and there's been a lot of great work on this thanks so much you all really appreciative okay

[315:00] tom i've got two really quick things uh one uh the there's a case challenging the state ban on high capacity large capacity magazines you may recall the city passed a ban uh making it smaller actually than the state ban there's a case called rocky mountain gun altars against paulus which is in the state supreme court i was contacted by every town for gun safety they're interested in helping us do a amicus brief my plan is either to do it ourselves uh we've been talking with denver about doing a joint brief and if council approves i'll also make an application to the colorado municipal league and maybe have them do a brief for all of us right now the brief would be due july 8 which is why i'm asking you to for permission tonight um that the brief is due the day that the response brief do so the state ag's brief is due on july 8th they may have sometimes those briefs get extended so it might be later but right now the deadline's july 8th so i need the permission now to go ahead and get that filed

[316:01] and i should mention we have uh a large law firm uh not alden porter but a different one uh that's willing to work on the brief for us on a pro bono basis so i think you have it thank you the second thing may not be necessary uh it was a consideration of a motion for appointment of two council members to receive an oral report of the independent investigation of the arrest of sammy lawrence um chief testa contacted me today and he was his concern was if we did just an oral report there were members of the community who might uh be worried that we were hiding something and that we did not do anything in writing uh so my concern my reason for uh suggesting only an oral report was because there's a criminal prosecution going on mr lawrence and i did not want anything that could possibly interfere with that so a chief tested suggestion i reached out to michael doherty and asked him if we could do something public in writing so the community could have something to see michael said that as long as bob troyer did not interview any of the witnesses who would be witnesses in the criminal prosecution he had no problem with a

[317:01] report i confirmed with mr troyer that he did not his review was only of the police internal disciplinary process to make sure as it as it was with the uh the zaid atkinson matter to to see that the police took the proper steps in reviewing the case so he is prepared to do a written report for us which he he says will be available on monday um so if council members would like to still appoint two people to meet with mr troy you could go ahead and do that but my initial request was that that would be the only report you'd receive now you will receive a complete report in writing on monday sounds i think that sounds good good point yeah good thank you okay um that is it for our items um you had some feedback on process hang on forget the process you x you missed i did i'm sorry evaluation so lisa i think i'll go ahead i'm sorry just real quickly we did say we were going to appoint eab you're right

[318:00] okay let's do that first um thank you boy i didn't even write that one down okay where is oh there we go and so martin harling did respond okay and so toria we just never heard back okay so the floor is open for nominations i'd like to nominate marty holding poorly does can we that's not here we go um any other nominations closing nominations by acclamation martin orlean [Music] okay

[319:00] uh we need a motion to accept that i move it second [Music] does anybody from the public want to speak to this okay we'll close the public hearing all those in favor it is unanimous uh yeah at least raised your hand okay now evaluations so go ahead so in the last couple days everybody should have received a notification a heads up from either sam or myself um introducing you to mark spur spiroth who's our consultant this year and he's going to be contacting you with confidential materials on our three employees the city manager city attorney and municipal judge and you have until i think july 8th i think that's what it is um to get

[320:00] those in if you have any questions you can call him or you can call me or sam um and that's it but please pay attention to those and your due diligence you guys happen to know i know in past years it's been difficult to complete those online you actually had to fill them out and print the documents and the pdfs and then scan them has that been improved we have tried really hard this year to make it all online okay so you know if you were successful have you tested it well no we we all just got our we looked at what the questions were yeah online yeah but we weren't actively filling it out we don't know yet but but this is their job and you know they they hopefully will do it well um so i got my first package i got my package today of information so i think both you should have heard from me or lisa and you should have received your

[321:01] materials today and so yeah i mean we intentionally do this around the break time so you get some time off you don't have to think about it for a while and then when you're feeling oh i need something counsel to do this can be what you do for council when you're missing it when you're missing it exactly actually it's july 11 11. the emails from lisa and i we split you guys up have the schedule so you can look for that email if you want the schedule and then mark spearoff's email for the substance i just put it in my calendar wrong that's okay okay anybody have questions other than thank you for you guys yeah thanks very much yet again um okay happy break happy break um skinny processed debris it would just i just obvious observation we got really really really into the weeds on stop signs and certain

[322:01] intersections this was supposed to be a master plan review so it's not surprising that we ran out of time so i think we just need to have a little bit more discipline about micromanaging stuff that's my comment and i have a comment and i wasn't at the cac but i've been guilty of this previously we had it scheduled till 1205 and like likely we would have gotten out around that time because the thing we took off was probably going to be shorter so discipline also needs to be at cac as well as and i know yeah my comment was that's that's a separate issue that's a separate issue but i just i just from time to time we get really really really into the weeds and i think we need to empower the mayor to pull us out good luck it's not always appreciated when i try but okay all right happy break everyone

[323:05] live from paris of northwest