September 10, 2019 — City Council Study Session

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[6:07] [Music] September 10th 2019 sorry we've kept you waiting we had a sister city signing with folks from around the other side of the globe downstairs so we are trying to catch up there's a few people that are gonna come join us but we might as well go ahead and get started so the first item on the agenda is a presentation from three representatives from the police oversight task force and this is an update to provide you with information about what they've been talking about where they've been and just Ts up for the big study session that will come in October so we are very anxious to welcome them thank you for being here I would like to thank you all

[7:04] for being here as well I hope the meeting downstairs went well I'd like to start off by acknowledging that this meeting is happening on occupied indigenous land of the Arapaho you and Cheyenne tribes my name is michelle de neige I lead a group here in Boulder and the greater metro area called families of color Colorado that's basically what it sounds like we bring together families of color and let the kids do things and have all kinds of activities my name is Todd Conklin I'm currently a student at cu-boulder I'm Sophia Pelecanos their cousin I work in immigration law here in town and I also work with trans youth and we have the rest of our members of the task force and if you guys might stand but we have the rest of our members here with us as well thank you for your service by the way we are appreciative we read about how much you've been meeting and it's

[8:01] truly amazing amount of effort you're putting into this so thank you in advance thank you I wanted to start with a couple of quotes that we felt really brought the emotion of what brought us here to this room the first one is from mr. Atkinson on Good Morning America that was April 5th of this year instances like this where people don't come out alive I'm blessed that I got it alive and unharmed it definitely brings fear to my heart knowing that some people don't survive the second quote is from pastor Nate Pyle and it just sort of further illustrates why we're here to understand racism you need to understand power dynamics to understand sexism you need to understand power dynamics to understand poverty you need to understand power dynamics and to

[9:00] understand power dynamics you need to listen and believe the stories of the powerless a little bit of a timeline on how we got here the current professional standards review panel started in the 90s further in November of 2001 the community drafted a declaration to end racial justice in the city of Boulder and here we still have ongoing issues in February of 2016 you might remember the Hillard Hinds report that came out it was an independent analysis of boulder police data and review of professional police complaint process which assessed the structure and work of the psrp as well as other topics March 1st of this year there was the incident between boulder police officers and community member mr. Atkinson March 10th more than 500 people gathered in protest of that event and demanded oversight and transparency and urged the city to build trust March 18th

[10:00] the council held a special community meeting to reflect on the March first incident between boulder police officers and mr. Atkinson one of the key requests by community members was to improve community oversight of the department April 2nd of this year Council approved the Charter for the police oversight task force May 7th Council approved membership of the police oversight task force selected by a committee consisting of two members of council and three representatives of the Boulder County branch of the n-double a-c-p as a result we got an incredibly diverse group and it is recommended as a similar approach for other city boards and think tanks in the future May 21st of this year the independent review of the police department's internal investigation of the March first incident was issued concluding that the investigation met all standards and there was no indication of bias in the investigation May 30th of this year was our first meeting as a group and since then we have invested over 500 hours in the project our timeline moving forward we

[11:03] will be back October 10th to meet with you all and give our final recommendations about what's going to be best for Boulder October 15th will be the first reading of the recommended improvements October 29th will be the second reading of the recommended improvements why are we here and in the seeking justice we decided that the main factors were building equity as a community transparency from the department timeliness and investigations accountability in these sort of instances and trust from the community and from the police department how we got this far as a group we started with team building we established operating procedures and building as a community group we did some visioning we developed

[12:00] a guide for internal decision making and then we started researching we researched current practices in law enforcement oversight around the United States we conducted direct outreach to several cities with different oversight models to learn from their experience we learned about the boulder police departments current internal investigation and review process we've received public input during meetings as well as online via our task force website we also reached out to the current psrp both on the citizen side and the police side and we're able to meet with them and figure out how that works further we spoke with the National Association of citizen oversight law enforcement which is essentially the the ones when it comes to the sort of thing they gave us a lot of guidance on the strengths and limitations of different oversight models and that would affect us here that's also attachment D in your memos and then Todd's going to give you a little bit more details about what those models look like so the current psrp was

[13:02] created in 1993 as part of an internal review process in 2016 after the Hillard Heinz study many recommendations were made in an effort to update the internal investigation process as well as the psrp the composition of the PSLV is have both their Police Department staff and have civilian community members the chief appoints the boulder Police Department half the Chief of Police and the city managers solicits and selects the civilian members for the civilian half of the Boulder psrp complaints are currently accepted from any source that are internal or external to the boulder Police Department complaints may be accepted via phone written impersonal online and can also be submitted through the human human relations commission the PSAP only reviews investigations regarding class 1 violations some examples of class 1 violations are use

[14:01] of excessive force misuse of police powers or controlled substance violations during our time as a task force we have worked with an organization called Nicol the National Association for civilian oversight of law enforcement this organization is nationally renowned highly regarded they assist localities in creating systems of civilian oversight of police departments from our research with them we have learned that there are three main models of the civilian oversight of law enforcement the first is the investigative focused model this model consists of civilian investigators that conduct independent investigations of complaints against police officers they may replicate replace or duplicate the police internal affairs process in this model the investigative officers may serve as an intake point for complaints receiving the complaints they would then interview officers witnesses and complainants the second model is the review focused model a communal review board or Commission

[15:01] may have anyway completed internal affairs investigations public forums make recommendations for further investigations and/or conduct community outreach the third and final model is the Auditor slash monitor focused model this model consists of one or more professional staff that make up an office that is independent from the police department this model seeks to promote large-scale and systemic change of policing by taking in data analyzing the data and then making policy recommendations to the police department this model will also can also oversee completed internal affairs investigations to make sure that they are fair complete and thorough most communities choose to create a hybrid of two or more of these models depending on the needs and desires of each specific community during our time as a task force we have researched many different cities for our presentation today we have selected five cities to present to

[16:01] you all in addition to being our neighbor will specifically referenced by Nicole as a best practice with the Auditor model Sun Arizona was specifically referenced by Michael as a best practice with a hybrid model that is a combination of an auditor with a community review board Eugene Oregon is very similar to the city of Boulder in that they house a major major university the University of Oregon much like how the older houses University of Colorado and the Open University Eugene Oregon has chosen to select a hybrid model that combines an auditor slash monitor with a civilian review board Tampa Florida is a city with three times the population size of Boulder they've selected a community review port as their model California is very similar to both in terms of population size they specifically referenced by Nicole as a best practice with a contracted auditor model a contracted auditor model is they have an auditor but they contract with a

[17:00] private company to oversee their Police Department most importantly we have learned that every city in the country tailors oversight to the specific needs of their community there is no single best model of oversight it has to be tailored to the needs and desires of each specific commune I'll now transition to Sofia we'll talk about community outreach among other things so a major component of what we have been working on as a task force is reaching out to the community we worked as a group to come up with an interview guide and then we took that interview guide to community stakeholders our focus for looking at community stakeholders was diversity and intersectionality we ended up interviewing over 70 community members and then we took that feedback from them and created graphs which you will see as an attachment to your memo next we entered an analysis phase so we took what we learned previously in all of our research and then we compared that to some of our learnings from Nicole in

[18:00] that we came up with some concerns of how the psrp is currently run one of those concerns is around the composition so it is currently 50% community members and 50% police staff and police members which was of concern according to what we learned from Nicole it also lacked racial diversity when we looked at the community member side there weren't any non-white members and then it lacked other diversity we saw homogeneity and the type of education the professionalism the age of all of the current members as for their training the community members currently receive one day which is an eight-hour day of training when they go through their process they can also opt into a police academy which some choose to do and some don't additionally the police have a PowerPoint training that they go through in regards to their roles and their responsibilities on the psrp and then every other year they receive some

[19:01] racial bias training but it's not specific to psrp which means the community members don't receive that training we also had some concerns around the authority of the psrp basically they're handed a case from internal investigations and told to review a limited section of that and they cannot go outside of that Purvi to examine any other things that might be of concern to them they also only ever see the class 1 investigations that Todd mentioned which means if there's a pattern and class two violations that has never brought before community members additionally there's rarely dissent among a few members but as a whole that psrp doesn't ever dissent against the internal investigations findings some may view that as a positive but it disrupts community trust the community doesn't feel good about the continued cycle of agreement between internal investigations and the psrp and

[20:01] finally our last concern was around the recruitment process which currently is a passive process there isn't any outreach which we believe is what's contributing to possible composition issues and diversity issues and and those that are reached we also had some concerns around Police Department operations one is a lack of clarity and how to identify bias especially racial bias and also a lack of ability to acknowledge its existence and we know that the independent reviewers say that the internal investigations process is thorough but once again there's an absence of public trust around that process and they don't the public and the community members especially those we spoke to don't believe that police should be investigating themselves finally the promotion structure creates a potential conflict it may or may not but it's of concern so of the models

[21:02] that Todd mentioned we looked at some of those new models and thought about what could we include some of the possible inclusion choices could be professional staff to compliment a board or panel it could include increased scope meaning that they could analyze trends in policing or they could recommend future policy and finally there the new model could include increased visibility and public trust and that could be in both the complaint process and the review process good job task force ease I love you all right question does counsel have further questions or additional considerations that they'd like us is the task force to address in our final report on October 10th so maybe we should just ask a few clarifying questions first before we answer that question and let me just

[22:02] start with one can you go to the slide right before this so these are some of the things you're thinking about or you've already narrowed it down to those we have not narrowed it down to those that's from looking at all the models and options especially what Nicole presented to us this looked like possibilities of what we could incorporate in our recommendation but there's still other stuff on the table right absolutely okay just that just helps us understand where you're at Sam I just wanted everyone to be real clear about the police oversight board that's currently in place the psrp one of you mentioned that the source of the complaint could be from anyone in the community right it could come in by email or or phone call as well as through the police asking for that review and then I thought I heard something that contradicted that that said it's only the result of internal police investigation so is it the case

[23:00] that the psrp will now take requests for an investigation from anyone as long as it's a serious accusation so complaints can be submitted internally or externally [Music] okay and for clarity the psrp doesn't take any of the complaints that's internal investigations that gets it and then after their investigation is Rp so the complaint then is investigated by the internal investigation and the psrp thank you thank you for all your time you've put into this work one of the things I noticed was you did you conducted multiple-choice interview questions some one thing that was very stark that came out of this was there's a huge divide between different groups and how they perceive themselves how it seems to me

[24:02] in order for a better Oversight Committee to function effectively it seems that that divide needs to be bridged how do you plan on trying to bridge that and bringing better understanding I think that really depends on what model we end up finalizing some of the models include the community outreach training or things like that to make it more of a two-way street so no one feels like they're being overly pardon me a policed so there's that and then you know there's ways to incorporate there's so many that involve police training and outreach like do you remember coffee with a cop was like there's a lot of things along that line that are incorporated in some of these models but it really depends how we iron that out in the end

[25:00] mm-hmm but it is important it's absolutely a part of our consideration very stark thanks for being here tonight edge in to questions I don't know if you mentioned this of e59 mister I'm sorry how many roughly how many complaints come in to the review board per year did you guys look into that somewhere between three and six make it to the make it at the classroom on average about three or six per year mm-hmm okay great that's helpful and then different questions the what do we know for simplification for us to think about this as I guess I'll call it investigation of incidents or complaints right that's kind of one category and then and then policy I guess I'll call policy stuffs that wouldn't would be unrelated to a complaint but there may be a policy question or staffing question or something that has to do with operations there's no complaint pending but it's a recommendation or best practices with that thinking about that into into parts is that an oversimplification or am I missing like

[26:01] a third or fourth category yeah I mean definitely what you're referring to as as best practices and looking at the recommendations and the policy side that is that more auditor monitor style and that can be combined with and often is in the hybrid models with the investigation side but it's not a nobler oversimplification to look at those two very different branches of overview ok great things that's helpful and thank you as well for all the time you put into it and I am I was several people mentioned to me how amazing the group has worked together and and I hadn't been able to make it to any of the meetings I popped in it was last week and you all were finishing up your presentation so I didn't get to see any of the awesome discussions that everybody described so anyway thank you very much for putting your hearts and

[27:01] souls into this during your presentation you mentioned that there are certain shortcomings of the current psrp in your discussions have you considered addressing some of those things like the that opaque nature of the appointments and the lack of racial diversity is there anything there that could be to work with that could the city could use moving forward I think that there is possibility for addressing some of the issues I think it depends on the overall model that we come to what you'll you'll hear at our final presentation what we feel is a best fit whether the current psrp could be could fix some of those concerns and still function within that

[28:00] model or not it'll depend on what what model we ultimately recommend and my other question is with respect to the there is an effort currently in the city to address racial equity and it's through the government alliance and race and equity and so one of the the things that it calls for is to look at all of the processes and in light of a racial equity tool and basically it's to dismantle if you will systems that basically cause discrimination so in your deliberations and your meetings have you considered which model might work best on in light of that effort that is ongoing in the

[29:02] city I'd say we've narrowed it down quite a bit as far as aspects that are gonna be most beneficial for Boulder but as far as how that would be impacted by the current program I don't think that's been part of our consideration Cindy I I also would like to thank you for your work there's quite some depth in here but just following up on Mary's first question I wondered I'm curious about this passive recruitment process that happens with the current Professional Standards review panel can can someone explain that to us to the white audience yeah sure the the passive process is that an application goes up I believe through

[30:00] the city managers page and people are invited to fill out that application and then they can go through an interviewing process if they're chosen by the city manager however there is no marketing or advertising to a diverse group of people or output to any of the activist groups or any of the more racially diverse aspects of Boulder so that they can know that the application exists or that the time has come to apply if they'd like to so in and you addressing these issues and more with greater perspective as this as you come back to us absolutely thank you thank you one more question for me um since one of your questions has to do with what the whether we okay I think getting rid of the current model for another model I was just curious did any of your interviews include civilians serving on

[31:00] them on the review panel and did they also agree that the process needed to be improved I'm just curious if they recognize that or they actually thought it was working when we spoke to the psrp at the current PSA yeah you didn't speak to it did you already said I'm sorry no it was that you did speak to them and what were their thoughts on did they concur that we needed to throw it out or that there were improvements or what sense did you get from them if I'm allowed to ask absolutely okay I think that there was a lot of enlightening in our conversation in both directions and they showed up and they were very willing to answer all of our questions and they kind of looked around and realized that they did have room to grow and whether or not the I don't know if I would say dismantling but they did say if something was to be reformed or if the psrp was to be excused pardon me um that they would be interested in continuing on whatever we created they liked what we our discussion thank you

[32:02] for that Sam it's had a quick question about history of my this will be asked of my fellow council members I believe ended in 2014 didn't we rework the psrp to have more citizen participation I was just curious if you heard any discussion yeah we did discuss it and what we did is after the Hillard Hinds report came forward we created a community engagement panel that works with the police so we created another panel that is all civilians that meets monthly with the police or bimonthly I'm sorry with the police department and they've been in operation for at least two years of non free I'm not exactly sure how long they've been in place but their role is not to review any of the Professional Standards issues

[33:03] theirs is to be a liaison between the community and the police department so that was perhaps what you're thinking of and did you speak with this group by any chance we did not okay all right so it's obvious there's holes in what we're talking about here but I just wanted to get on the ground kind of like what pieces we could pull from as we think about going forward not to say that what we're doing now is is that all good enough just that those are the things that we have in place at the moment so we're looking at talking to them looking forward I guess we didn't know they exist did you know I was gonna ask did you know did you know about them Lana no I did not did so I did not know about them either so this is an issue in it yes it sounds like we didn't really fully remember ourselves so slightly thematic Lisa so one of the questions I

[34:02] have you noted that panelists can serve up to four years and that that limits turnover and stuff but it also allows somebody to get more experience and knowledge of the issues and so I'm wondering if you have a recommendation in terms of term of length of term how you make sure that you keep experience but also get new people in there so you have fresh eyes looking at the issue that's definitely a part of our consideration currently nationwide you'll see members serve anywhere from six months to eight years and I think it's really relative to how many complaints they're receiving so if they're only currently both are only receiving for a year they felt like the psrp stuff that we talked to felt like they have enough time to really get a feel for it before they were moving on but alternately like you're also not getting

[35:00] fresh fresh faces so ideally I think we would like to see whatever comes of this reviewing more complaints or like a broader breadth of complaints and then I think the term limit would be I'm not sure we don't have a number on it but relative to what's what the scope is and then one of the things I was somewhat surprised is that there's only three to six complaints a year and it seems that that must be somewhat underreported mm-hmm and so what are your recommendations to encourage or to bring concerns or complaints or whatever forward more so that people aren't feeling retaliation or intimidation or just being scared to bring something up well currently that is those that 3 to 6

[36:01] that you mentioned is reflective of what comes to the psrp what the number of complaints that come through the department is not the same and I think either way would be an issue of accessibility so where are the places you can drop a forum where where is it on the website how are not only how anonymous does it feel if they have to walk into a government building to do it so things like that is it in more than one language it's definitely been a point of discussion and something that we intend on absolutely addressing and and I was wondering in addition to kind of those you know is there a Dropbox do you come on internet I know in the federal system you know sometimes there's um a limitation in terms of days or amount of time in which you've experienced something and sometimes it takes a while to process that and then to bring that complaint forward is there a time

[37:02] limitation right now in place in terms of what people how people can report something currently there is no time limitation I think the issue with timeliness is timeliness so if they if there's to be an investigation and it's now four years out right just gets a little bit challenging I think for the police department at that point so I think by creating more accessibility and having it be known in inclusion areas where it might be more likely to be an issue having a Dropbox there and making sure that everyone feels safe to do it in a timely manner will make it a more effective process thank you I don't wanna stop the flow of conversation we want to make sure we get to answer the questions because we're gonna have a much longer discussion when you come back to us and it's important that they

[38:02] walk away with the two questions answered that they need direction on so with that if people will have questions that are important to us giving direction go ahead but otherwise we're gonna move to that because we're behind already I guess I'll see this in the form of a I guess a direction or a request rather than a question it sounds like there's a hierarchy of complaints in other words you sorta described the ones that go to the board right now right it sounds like there was three or four categories of that that which result in about three to six coming to them and then presumably there's another hierarchy of other types of complaints and then there's maybe all the way down to more I guess I'll call them more minor complaints right so it'd be interesting to know inter see in your report where you where you want to draw the line for the new board you know which because it sounds like you're suggesting that that this that the new organization new board take on farther down the stack more complaints and more broad oversight it so be interesting to educate us on what those that hierarchy is and then we're you're recommending that line be drawn so that would that

[39:02] would be a good most people agree with that statement yeah okay good and you said a couple questions to have more than the one question what we had we had three and we narrowed it down on her advice of yesterday's meeting oh so the second question is often okay so basically do we have further questions or additional consideration would like you to address right that's a-that's her question why I've been I've been waiting because I've been I didn't have any questions per se because I know you're still forming your recommendations right so I'm really looking forward to getting those and I appreciate so much the incredibly deep dive that you're all are doing on this topic and how much work you're putting into it and so I'm really looking forward to getting this and taking the next step on dealing with these issues of oversight and bias and in our community I guess one thing the one bit of guidance I might put out there would be that I would hope to look for for

[40:01] this new group or what a however it ends up coming out to be analyzing kind of overall patterns right so like Bob was talking before there's this reactive version where you we say okay we have a complaint what's going on with that complaint but then there's also the question of like okay let's look at everything that's going on and are there patterns are there places to get better right because I feel like what we need from this group amongst a variety of other things is is to try to make progress on you know working on the issues of the structural and systemic racism of our society as a whole here in our community and and and I feel like that needs a analysis and more than just being reactive so I'm sure you're all thinking about this but that's it's just the one thing that I wanted to put out there is you proceed for it and I'm things again I really look forward to the next steps I'm gonna ask again the people also agree with that statement about looking at some brighter twin okay

[41:00] great so we're gonna go ahead and answer that question sounds like we've already started so Mary I'm just gonna get the cue up Mary Cindy Sam Lisa me okay and so I I would just add to what Aaron just said and make sure that as you go forward and with your recommendations to address each of them in light of the racial equity tool that I believe is under development or completed but I was looking at Amy so and because it seems that this would be a really good place to start and apply that and and look at things with with that tool in mind but thank you I look forward to it as well I wondered I can't remember if it was in my reading or not whether or not you've been in contact with the University Police as

[42:00] well and whether they're a part of this in terms of outreach because I know there have been many issues up there ongoing so boulder police department in CU police department are separate entities and this task force we only have jurisdiction over boulder Police Department so that might be a bit outside of our purview for see you Peedee I understand that but in light of what Erin just said this business of systemic outreach I mean as I said I know that there has been long ongoing issues with the University and just as an outreach perhaps whatever the city puts together would do some outreach with the university because it's needed and in terms of addressing the the larger issue I would think that it would be very helpful I would say that the intention of this group is absolutely for it just to spread so while we only have this right now I would I would personally

[43:01] like to see a go to not only see you but the Sheriff's Department and have it I think that this is a necessary tool to build trust in both directions and these issues are I mean they're pervasive so it absolutely needs to be addressed but I guess the idea is we're hoping that it'll be contagious and the work can continue once this is formed maybe it's something that the city can bring up at its next meeting with the University for topics that we address I'd be happy to you know share whatever we have between yeah good idea I'll soon thank you all again it's much appreciated I think you can hear how the whole council appreciates the time and we know we've heard from lots of people that you're putting many hours in so good you I want to do that what Mary said and we're trying to build capacity with this care process and so if there's an intersection if it's useful to you then I think it's worth taking a look at so

[44:01] that we here right we can hear back from you as well here's what we didn't see there that we would like to have seen or something along those lines the other thing I will add to what I heard from Bob earlier is that there's the procedural bit where you might want to be able to handle complaints and there's a bit where you want to look at patterns and you want to look at you know maybe policy changes and so on but I think earlier someone hit on something which is the outreach to the community I mean I think that that's a third component that for me is really important because we have work to do and it will help us if we bake that and I think to the elements of the plan so I'll be curious to see what you guys bring forward with that Lisa so um I would agree with what my colleagues have said I think there is I know that our boulders lease department do collaborate or work with Cu Police Department do work with the Sheriff's Department so

[45:02] there's a certain overlap there my only thing is keep going and you guys have done a great job I would like to see and I don't know exactly how you would establish it but I'd like to see some thought being put into metrics and establishing a baseline where are we today I mean I like that timeline that you showed at the beginning and if we could apply some metrics to that and then see overtime are we improving are we not improving are we just staying flat and so I think that would be very helpful because that could help inform the discussion quite a bit so did anybody else want to go let me just add a couple things but yes I think what you're hearing is a lot of agreement on [Music] the trends issue

[46:02] giving us some thoughts about the complaint you know where do you draw the line in terms of complaints what would make sense in terms of overview and that's to get that piece of it I also think that figuring out how to continue this conversation across jurisdictions was the Cu and the County piece even now if it's not this body that we're setting up that if you have thoughts on that I think that that's useful to figure out whatever systemic changes we're trying to make it the city that they that they are reinforced and the county's doing a lot of work on equity and racial bias themselves so it would be interesting if and I'll see you as to but I don't know that we're talking to each other we're talking to each other at the top level about this but we're not below that so how do we coordinate and and deepen that

[47:02] how you think accept that you have you guys have thoughts on that I think that there's the we talked about outreach I think and I'll just want to broaden that thought there's outreach to people to serve on this entity but there's also the liaison between the department and the community which the police department does some of that now but if there's thoughts on how that could be deepened I'm also interested in that and also how this conversation it sounds like you you guys have gone to a really deep and wonderful place with this how do we continue that or maybe not I don't mean how do we keep having you guys meet every other week but I meant as a city where does that need to emerge as an ongoing conversation and then finally I know that you're thinking about this but so maybe it doesn't need said but I will

[48:00] say it anyhow we the goal is to evolve together as a city as a police department as a community and coming up with a structure that works for the folks that have been disenchanted in franchise and do not feel heard is important also a system that will work for the police department otherwise it will ultimately fail so figuring out how to make it so it it's it builds rather than is resisted I hope you build that into your model of what you bring forward because that I think will help with the success of it anything else other than to think you yet again I think we were all blown away with when we saw how much time you're putting into this that speaks volumes and we can't thank you enough so all these individuals have been

[49:01] working since May 30th I would like to know just individually who you are I mean we had a little bio and if you could just introduce yourselves so that we could actually say hi to you as people I am Madeline strong Woodley hi I'm Nami Thompson I'm Sheila Davis I'm John Gifford I'm an ex officio member from the public defender's office the Mike Center meetings are always a long going controversy I'm Sean rapist a lot of my pronouns are they them there I'm a local educator hi I'm Michele

[50:00] Simpson I'm a professor at cu-boulder I'm Chris Reynolds I'm in the City Attorney's Office I'm a support staff for the task force Mike Rafiq I'm a criminal defense attorney in town and one of our colleagues our Shirley White was here earlier and had a dead leaf I guess next time we get to start that way and I just want to say a final thank you to you all hearing back your your questions and and your feedback about what we should bring next time feels so in line with what we're thinking and it's exciting to be able to move forward with that okay well we look forward to continuing this discussion thank you

[51:19] so at CAC today we are yesterday we talked about adding two additional items to the agenda and the first one that we're adding comes now and it is a discussion about the large lots large homes matter and whether we should move forward with scheduling that so I turned that over to Council CAC I think you were wanting to move forward with this yeah maybe might be half I see Chris is on the front row I wonder if it'd be helpful if Chris could share with us I think the Planning Board took this out for a couple weeks ago helpful to hear

[52:00] from Chris what the Planning Board's recommendation to us is about whether we should tackle this phase one of the project this year sure so Christmas check planning the Planning Board did review the first phase of large homes and large Lots a couple weeks ago and I can pull up their specific motion they did not adopt the staff recommended motion which was to recommend approval of the first phase of changes for ad use and internal conversions for duplexes and triplexes what they did recommend was a series of of thoughts related to the project as a whole and so I think that's the perspective that the Planning Board had and maybe what spurred some of this conversation tonight I just like to light it what the Planning Board said and I appreciate them weighing in and I

[53:00] like to you might let me back up back in the end of May we looked at this with staff and I think we broke a discussion about Adu density and duplexes and triplexes and some other things were leading to lots into two phases one phase which was gonna be a small phase phase one was gonna focus on ad use and duplexes and triplexes in just the re and our our neighborhoods which i think is a pretty small number of our Lots in the town and then Phase two which I think the suggestion was council would tackle that next year which would look at things those things maybe some other things holistically across the city and I guess my recommendation would be to collapse or combine phase 1 and phase 2 and tackle those next year we've got a pretty full calendar here over the next few weeks before this council adjourns and the plane board is recommended that we do that as well I think we've all seen that we've received a petition from folks in the community 700 people have signed a petition asking us to do the same thing and last time I

[54:03] checked with with Carl Guyler I maybe the numbers a little higher now but last time I checked with Carl few weeks ago we had only received nine Adu applications and the re in our our maybe we're up to ten or eleven but I guess the point is if we doubled number of the concentration of AD use in our in our our presumably we're gonna not get a lot more incrementally and so I guess it seems like it's a lot of it's a pretty heavy lift for probably not a whole lot upside just to focus on our you know our our side I like to suggest that we look at this holistically across the city when the next council adjourns could be early in the year I'm not fussed about when we handle it but I think I'd like to recommend that and I did speak to meerabhai and she supports that as well are you talking about the second ATU or the first one or the first one is already allowed right now that's something did it but you're gonna have to go I think the this phase one it was allowing a second Adu and re nrr zones and also relaxing the rules with

[55:00] respect to conversion of single-family to duplexes and triplexes that's kind of the narrow scope of phase one and then everything else was in phase two and I think what I'm recommending I think Mirabai supports is collapsing those into one phase that would happen sometime next year so Suzanne do you want us to go ahead and indicate is this a straw poll kind of deal or what it is so I agree with Bob I I think that we've heard a lot from the people who are in this part of the community and and in these these zones and during our study session we talked about having a larger sub community conversation with that and allowing these people who feel sort of left out in terms of how this is all gone to actually have a place at the table have a seat at the table and I agreed with Bob during the the the study session that we should wait and see how this first since we've just put the ad you piece into place rather than having

[56:02] two of them go that we just wait and hold off so I agree that I think that's a good idea plan to let it go and have everyone have some time and have people more involved in it yeah I mean that's fine with me as well I like the idea of looking at it more holistically I was a little disappointed when got split into phase one and phase two in the first place so I've been doing it together looking at at citywide as next year with you know at that at that time makes sense and in particular you know we've heard from a lot of folks in some of these areas who feel a little bit like they're being focused in on when this maybe maybe these are citywide issues and like the focus of the large lot program a lot of it was like the North Boulder the bigger Lots where they're being scraped there's a lot of change and we're trying to direct the change and what we see is things that serve the city's goals a little better but now we're hearing from folks like in the Fraser meadows neighborhood where there's not really

[57:00] any change going on and they you know they rather than there being a lot of scrapes they're fearful that will introduce negative change and that's not the intent of this initiative at all so yeah I'm fine and I mean we were hoping for four baby carrots but I think somebody on Planning Board instead called what was in front of us a nothing burger and says damn supposed to be baby carrots so fine next year's Lisa oh I'm fine moving forward in taking it into the next year I just want to say that the are ours and our ease there were and now there's nine new applications for ad use in 2000 lots and there's 40 ad use existing so I think what we were doing and I think unfortunately because it got very politicized and I think there were individuals that misrepresented what the city was trying to do vastly the city was never intending to

[58:02] come and take somebody's part of their lot away from them and so I think it really got conflated to a point that maybe we need to take it back and palm down and look at this holistically I will also say though in our conversations with planning staff and having been very much involved with the North Boulder sub Community Plan I knew and I know that we would have to make changes to the North Boulder sub community plan before any of these you know changes could happen because in the North Boulder sub community plan the focus is on the North Village area and there was kind of an agreement that you know we wouldn't go into these other large lots and and do subdivisions or

[59:01] things like that or make much change but there there are as Erin said there is a lot of change that's going on in North Boulder and how we address that change by maybe asking for reduced FA art or whatever I'll leave it to the next council to make that decision we talked about that early on and people weren't comfortable with that so I think there needs to be a broader community discussion very once are you see them and then Mary I'm in agreement I think we should leave it it's late in the game for this council and we're gonna be rushing to try and get it done and I think we should be a little more methodical than that I do think that I would like to have this brought up as part of the East Boulder some community planning process which is asking residents what would you like are you

[60:02] interested in having the ability to do this kind of subdivision you know and because different neighborhoods have different topologies even with East Boulder and so I think some places might be interested other places are industrial you know we have to have that whole conversation so I'm I'm in favor of punting on this one for now but checking in with the new council when there is one and seeing if this is something that they want to prioritize or not because with sub-community planning on going we may eventually get you know more localized conversations or it's not so geographically disparate and so maybe it's a little more politically feasible so I'm okay with it as well this project has struggled from the beginning with a solution so the the the problem is again as I think Erin said was in North Boulder with houses getting

[61:00] scraped and getting replaced by large ones which seems to me the solution was to address the bulk and massive houses the fa r as well and there was no appetite to do that in the beginning so the other solutions seemed to be responding to another problem that wasn't their original one I agree with Sam regarding the sub community planning I always kind of envisioned this as something that could be applied to North Boulder because it does have a sub community plan and then take whatever is done there and offer it up as some of the options that could happen as other sub community plans happen and and applied that way if people in the sub communities want them as Sam said in a more localized manner so I'm always for looking at things more holistically so

[62:02] so all this weigh in and say with disappointment cuz I'm not gonna be around for that conversation and but but it's fine I taking a deeper broader look and figuring out how you said methodically I think that's a good way to think about it but I will just put out there that the trend of replacing modest homes with large homes is not just in North Boulder it happens in my neighborhood too and it is ice low but I think I'll use the word insidious trend that just puts things farther out of reach so I guess I would say to the new council this is a real issue and at some point we want to we need to figure this out and there's a lot of different ways to come at it and that's I think what complicates it do you look at the FA are you good look into subdividing Lots you look at incentivizing smaller and more

[63:01] affordable units do a deed restricted affordability as an element there's a lot of really creative ways how would you do it as a part of sub Community Planning so I guess I would encourage the new council to to embrace this issue and maybe approach it a little more methodically than we did but it needs addressed so it looks like we've effectively put this on the list of things that we're leaving to the next council but I do want to say I do want to thank Chris and I want to thank Andrew and Carl and Charles for so much work that they put into it so I think you have a good place to start and a lot of that basic work has been done and I hope you can move forward I to him disappointed we can't figure out how to come up with a better model and and I think Bob very said that there was a lot of misinformation and I

[64:01] think that misinformation got people really more freaked out than they need it to be and or concerned I appreciate people writing us and stating their concerns but I don't think it would have affected very many people so and it was all voluntary there was nothing mandatory in this whole thing so well and I it gets at what Aaron said which is how do you sort of steer change without inviting more change then there's an appetite for in terms of you know incentivizing conversions and we're gonna happen okay well thank you for the work I agree what you've done so far will be useful to whenever it gets picked up again Thanks okay the next item that we added is with regard to Cu south so as you will recall we had been waiting for a letter from the Colorado

[65:00] Department of Transportation with additional information about the bridge and their right-of-way and so I've asked Joe Teti who is our interim utilities director and Kathleen Brockie who is our interim co transportation director to come up and give you an update about what's been going on we'll see yourself we'll just put out there I made this request because I wasn't sure that we would get to see that letter or not so I just wanted to hear a short update on what we thought writing Kathleen is handing out the letter right now but in addition Joe Todd ug has some information for you about our engineering thoughts on the project so I'm not really sure who's gonna go first thank you Joe I can start while Kathleen is is passing those out and again can

[66:06] you hear me now it's for the folks on TV so again I'm Joe Teti I'm the interim director for utilities in our Public Works Department and so for the last several weeks there's been discussion about the South Boulder Creek flood mitigation project and some questions or discussion around the alternatives and specifically variant one invariant to and I think that frankly the real question is has variant to come back to life I think there was a perception that that was we had put that behind us and based on past council direction we were focused on very one so as Jane mentioned the we received a letter from Sadat today and between that and some staff discussions that

[67:01] we've had we're hoping that provides some clarity around around that issue so I'm starting about but I think if you go a little closer to them I can even put to the side I find that works out pretty well all right tilt it towards you haven't had this issue before sorry about that can you hear me now okay she talks straight up into it that's the best way okay so we just handed out the C dot letter I think we emailed it to you earlier today and basically what C dot has said is that we can build any option as long as it's outside of their existing right-of-way they don't have a position on any of the cities flood mitigation options or variant one

[68:00] they're very into they have expressed no preference and they don't want anything permanently attached to their to their bridge so I think that gives us some clear boundary conditions to work from and some desired clarity that we had around their position and I know in talking to our city staff who have participated in those discussions and conversations with C dot that C dot has made some concessions in in getting to that point which we appreciate so then our staff discussion over the last week you know sure sitting in that meeting one of the things that I thought was really useful that gets 20.3 was what the right-of-way looks like when you get to the bridge and the map of the highway the

[69:00] right-of-way comes up much further in and I don't know if we have a slide of that but because that was a key piece of that conversation was it would be 50 feet away from the brighter where goes 50 feet away from the bridge which led to a conversation what so you'd have to move worth 50 feet from the bridge and and do a lot of hardening of the stream and various things which had an impact on that conversation so but without that right-of-way shown on a map and this doesn't get us to south Boulder Creek I guess I feel like people are still gonna walk away with different impressions of what this means without seeing that does that make sense yeah so I'm early er today in addition to the map that we handed out and the letter I also emailed just a PDF of the right-of-way along where the bridge is

[70:00] over South Boulder Creek so I'm looking to see if we can pull that up as a side right now it was in the second email I that I sent for you oh here Garrett's got it here so will this work to play here well alright so we will work on getting we do have the image that's getting it a staff discussion for the last week or so with those new boundary conditions in mind from seedot is basically when you when you move the variant to concept upstream outside of outside of the right away it it becomes

[71:03] sort of a new creature we're not building on to existing infrastructure and the bridge and the embankment that's all ready there we basically have to recreate the whole thing upstream and so that becomes a bigger engineering challenge and so from from our engineering team and our utilities staff point viewpoint it's no longer a preferable option in coordinating and discussing that variant to upstream of the seat out right away option with our open space staff it raises questions about permitting feasibility it moves the project more into sensitive habitat and it frankly that puts more of a burden on our open space staff and the board to accept impacts on on their

[72:02] property that are over and above what we had been talking about before and in addition to the variant one concept that counsel had directed us to to work on previously so could I so the scale here is hard to understand the map I had seen before was a schematic not a photo and it had a drawing of the roadway in the right away so how far would you say it is from the bridge at 36 out to the right-of-way where we would have to put the flood wall I believe it's about 50 or 60 feet okay and so it's hard to tell from here yeah but the other map that I had seen it had come right after Suzanne had her conversations with seed out with you all was really clear about you know it's a big bulge that comes out pretty sharply now what is if if the light white lines that we're seeing can we zoom in so we can see this a little

[73:01] better that's better sorry sue no no that's fine so so what is the feature that looks like a roadway is that that's a bike path right and so are we within their right of way on the bike path yes so the bike way is built in parts of seed out right-of-way and it's jointly maintained by the city in the county and other cities along the corridor so the the commuter bike way was built as part of the u.s. 36 corridor improvements and it was built by C dot IC into the light white lines are the boundary of their right-of-way yeah okay you know what maybe it'd be useful because I'm trying to remember at some point along 36 there was some talk although I'm not sure we got permission of building the bike way on top of the

[74:02] berm and then at some point the burn becomes a wall and so in terms of when we get to this point C I don't know it'd be useful if somebody could just show us right so I want to create some clarity on what we talked about at the meeting because when we were talking about the location of the commuter bike way it was along the other map that we provided the one that shows the wall being built along the existing right-of-way line and the conversation was recognizing that the seat outside of that wall they initially were saying they don't want any flood structures in there but that the commuter bike way could be located in there and it could be designed so they would also serve as a maintenance access for the wall so that's where in the conversation we were talking about co-locating the commuter bike way and

[75:01] the wall so that's on the larger 11 by 17 map though that we handed out it wasn't we didn't get into that level of specificity here at the bridge and I guess I also want to say and as a follow-up from the are meeting with C dot we recognize that there's a lot more design detail that we need to go through together with the city will see you with C dot this was just our initial conversation was seeped out - to move forward and be able to reach a more suitable decision than what they had told us earlier in the year where they were saying the wall had to be located outside of the future right-of-way line which again on the 11 by 17 I think is the red line that's where we started that day and they and what we had previously been told and now they've said we could be along the existing right-of-way line so to the point that Joe made earlier that was the the big gain that was made in

[76:00] that conversation is that they were willing to scoot the wall over and have it be located along that existing right-of-way line so I'm just trying to provide clarity about what we did and didn't talk about in the meeting you send us I I followed up the initial email with the ones that included the maps in there and we and if we need to provide something that has more of the dimensions on it we could do that as well we just grabbed these quickly this afternoon to be able to provide the context for it this evening so a thing that I think I want to say is that Joe had a very important statement that he made right before we started looking at these maps and please correct me if I'm wrong Joe but I think the bottom line here is that we're taking variant two

[77:02] off of the possibilities is that correct yeah I think when we talk about the engineering solution to move the very into concept down to the south of that thin white line you're basically building a new dam or a new embankment and and creating a bridge like structure that the flow has to go under for normal low flow conditions and and capture the flow during flood conditions and back it up with the flow restrictor concept there's a lot more to that when you move it outside the C dot right away than there was when we thought we could potentially attached to their bridge and that kind of thing that combined with the open space impacts and some of the permitting challenges frankly we just don't feel like it's a good investment to spend a lot more staff resources and funds on that

[78:04] concept we just don't know that we can get to a viable solution that works for all of the the interest involved here so if I could just ask a couple of questions I understand that a little bit better so the so you'd have to you'd have to build kind of a new bridge 50 feet out or so and then in order to make that work would you then have to kind of tie it back to the flood wall on either side like I mean it's um the water would go around otherwise right like how would that work if you were to it would be like a roadway embankment or an earthen dam embankment with with a hole through it like you would have for a bridge and so we would have to build that whole thing upstream so an embankment that would tie back into the flood wall yeah the north and the south right that would and and so what and like how many job in space land would be severely impacted do we have a sense roughly well it would it

[79:01] would I I would guess it would be a hundred feet or so to build an embankment like that and and construction just off the top of my head and your feet and it just success I just want to be able to explain this to people right because because I know that this is important to some folks so wouldn't you say a hundred feet that's how wide the embankment is that what you mean it would be a component of that it could be a hundred or even a hundred and fifty feet with with the construction easements that you would need to build it it would be somewhere in that range I would guess and so and then along the creek obviously it's very sensitive habitat like high quality sensitive habitat for sure for sure and I know that when we've talked about different alternatives in the past some of them have prevent presented large enough impacts to sensitive ecological habitat that we feel we might not be able to get it permitted do you feel like this would

[80:00] fall in that kind of category so yeah that was one of the comments I made in discussions with our open space staff we feel like that's that's a possibility and I know our open space staff and utilities staff are going to be talking to the open space Board of Trustees tomorrow and having some of these conversations and in the memo for that the staff said there may not be a mitigation package that could support the variant two outside of the seat out right of way so for all those reasons we're not sure it makes sense to spend more time on that and so continuing to go down the path of the previous council direction and focus on variant 1 we're not asking for any new direction tonight we just that's that's the path we think we're on can I just speak to that real quick so just and that I just wanted to

[81:00] be on record that's fine with me with that I appreciate you all pinning this to the ground so I felt like they were still unanswered questions around this now I feel like those questions have been answered so I appreciate you doing that and can we put a ball on this I think it's really important what you just said and looking at the map and I guess I because I was in that meeting and a light bulb went off going okay I think I heard something definitive but then we wanted to go back and make sure and I guess having that publicly stated and explained with the map I think it's really important so that now everybody in the community understands we didn't take it off the table it has been taken off by a coma the reality of engineering and stuff but it's off the table if that's what you're saying so yeah I guess I'm just saying this one more time is to put it out to the public in a way that everybody understands it so we don't do a a Groundhog Day where

[82:00] we wake up and suddenly we're re-examining things that have been taken off the table that would be very helpful okay Bob and then I agree I agree with you Suzanne and with Aaron I think one thing would be helpful because we are gonna get follow-up questions and we're probably not thinking probably not anticipating tonight because we're just doing this all the questions that we might get the community I think one thing that would be very helpful Jane and Joe is if you guys could just write up a little memo that summarizes the things that Joe is sharing and Kathleen are sharing with us tonight just so we have it kind of a little bit of a record about the impacts and permits and open space and staff recommendation with respect to Brian - I think it'd just be nice to have in a couple - three pages your this definitive recommendation from staff that way when we get questions from the community we can point point them to that sure and I would I would just add to that that it really it's not how much open space land this is but it's what kind it is and it's that that that really drives this in terms of the impacts and the kinds of assessments

[83:00] that would need to be made environmentally and probably couldn't get by since they're endangered species on that land so thank you for this it is extremely helpful to get something in writing that we can clearly show the the concepts that we had in mind previously for engineering that variant were not supported by C dot they would not give us permission to put this flood restriction or effort Terrance's on the 36 bridge over South Boulder Creek or adjacent to the bridge within C dot right-of-way or within the existing roadway prism so there's just a lot of clarity here that I'm sure you guys got from your conversation but it wasn't translating as widely and so this will help us translate widely what the technical restrictions would be and then how that would make a whole bunch of cascading impacts on really high-quality open space so I mean thank you for doing

[84:01] this I know that in your minds it was probably decided but the community needs to get this kind of clarity you know and I don't have anything to add I think people have said what I was going to say so but thank you and in things to see that for getting that letter to us as well that was the other part is this letter also says and here's the way you can go forward and that's the other part and again you thanks edad i guess i want to thank them again for it wouldn't have been good if we had to build it outside the potential future right-of-way that they originally wanted so this is also the path forward I guess the last thing I'll say is I know that opens faces meeting this week and without opening a can of worms I would just say that as we narrow down the set of options I think one thing that shifted a little bit is before we had

[85:02] clarifications for seed out we thought there'd be much more much less impacts to open space because the wall wouldn't be on open space it would be on the other side of the right-of-way line but now that we know it that it has to be on our side of the right-of-way line I guess hearing from open space staff and the board mitigations you know as we as we narrow down the the engineering options what's the best habitat that we need to protect if there's ways to to tweak the project to make it more palatable more more permanent than say use that's useful input since the world shifted a little bit so any I assume that that's a conversation that we'll be having with open space and I think that would be very useful to this council on the next one as we finalize kind of what this project is going to look like and we're having those conversations okay I think that's great anything else on this I'll just say

[86:03] thanks for bringing this forward this is timely and important information yeah and thank you for stepping into yeah okay so now we're back to the two big items that we had or two remaining big items that we have which is east arapahoe sub community plan and then the budget and we're not too far off schedule so

[87:07] okay well Kathleen pulls up the presentation I can go ahead and kick things off here we're here tonight to talk about the East Boulder sub-community plan that planning process began earlier this year Kathleen King who is a Senior Planner in the planning department is the project manager for this and is going to walk us through the presentation hello I'm excited to be here tonight it's been a while since we've caught up about sub-community planning nice Boulder I heard the term sub community planning earlier tonight so I know it's on top of everybody's mind so I'm gonna go through a couple of topics tonight we'll review some of the commitments we made excuse me some of the commitments we made back in January related to sub community planning and I'll discuss what we've been working on over the past couple of months and share the results of the

[88:00] inventory work that we've completed so far and we'll talk about some of the next steps for the project and our work for getting us towards the end of the year so the last time we met as I mentioned was back in January and at that time we made some updates to the overall sub community planning program we revised definitions to more accurately represent the intention of sub community as well as area planning we revised the sub community boundaries to better respond to the city's areas of change and align with census tracts we identified a scope of work and deliverables for sub community planning projects we established tenants of community engagement which includes a commitment to working in the collaborative space of the city's engagement spectrum and we talked about phasing of the East Boulder sub community plan in and some future projects as well so also in January council a selected East Boulder as the

[89:01] next sub community to go through this planning process this area includes land north of Arapaho Avenue and east of Foothills Parkway and at that time we really discussed that while these boundary lines helped us focus on an area of study that were not entirely sort of by that red dotted line and that we're considering areas of impact surrounding the sub community as well can you mm-hmm that was one of my key questions as we talked about both sides of Arapaho being very much a part of this is that your take on what you is it what you just said mean that yes okay that's right excellent thank you sure um so then we've also strived to really create greater clarity around the purpose of sub community planning so why do we do these types of projects and that's really to implement the goals of the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan so in the East Boulder project we've worked really hard to communicate this and I think the the work we've completed so

[90:01] far has been directly guided and informed by the goals of the BBC P so the East Boulder project kicked off in February and we spent the first couple of weeks establishing teams and a working group and creating a work plan that aligns with our community engagement commitments and lists of deliverables and as this is the the first project of this kind in the sort of reinvigorated program we've tried to be really intentional with establishing precedent and creating templates for future sub community planning projects during this initial phase of work and then we also launched into the inventory analysis base and I'm going to present some of those results in a bit and to describe where we're at on the city's decision-making wheel working towards the completion of the inventory and analysis phase of work brings us to stage four so sharing that foundation of information and inquiry and a lot of that kind of information and and the

[91:00] questions that we're asking are included in that inventory report they think I think everybody has a copy of it um so that brings us to what we're up to today I'm gonna present some of the work we've completed through engagement and kind of data collection and analysis and our big questions for discussion tonight our discounsel agree with the key issues and conclusions of the draft inventory and analysis report and discounsel agree with the proposed next steps so all of your feedback that you give tonight we are going to work to incorporate those thoughts and and really document those in that report and then the report is scheduled to be posted to our project website this Friday so and our work and sub community planning is really directed by answering these three questions with the community first who is East Boulder what you want to be and then finally how do we get there the work we've done thus far is striving

[92:01] to answer that first question and we've taken kind of a two-pronged approach to this we've conducted both the data based inventory and I've been developing an experience based inventory and I'll talk a little bit more about each of these the data based inventory is really about the numbers what do we have a nice Boulder today and how much of it is out there we've used a variety of sources to collect this information including national resources like the census and some state resources available to us through cdot state demographers office among others and then a lot of local resources including our own in-house data as well as some as well as some of the internally generated reports to departments across the city have collected a lot of great data on all kinds of topics and have been really useful in helping us paint a picture of East boulders existing conditions and but as we know you know numbers really just sort of represent kind of a moment

[93:01] in time numbers change constantly and data doesn't represent the entire picture there's much more to a neighborhood or sub community than just the numbers and so we've also been developing a catalogue of experiences with project teams working group members and the community we've walked different sites throughout East Boulder to document experiences of comfort or discomfort we've ridden bikes and taken buses through the area to learn what it's like to travel in East Boulder and we've met with local business owners and area workers to hear about their challenges and hopes for the future and so one of the ways we're documenting and sharing this information is through a series of videos for calling sub community stories and I'm gonna see if I can play this first one and this features artist Mitch Levin whose studio is in the sub community see if it works and if it doesn't it is

[94:04] available online and it might not oh it's only playing online okay well I can send that link around if people want to check out the video it's um the whole thing isn't showing right now so is that why okay by the way there is no council meeting without a technical difficulty series getting us to our quota okay well I can send around the link and if you haven't seen it yeah it's worth looking at this is the first in a series of twelve videos that were creating and so the intention of these is is to share some unique experiences from members of the community and using a different method to kind of get people interested

[95:01] and informed about the project so another way we've been collecting information about area experiences is through our working group so we've established a 22 member East Boulder working group 21 members of the community that represent property owners business owners nearby homeowners nearby renters and area workers and then we also have one member who serves as our Planning Board liaison and I have to say this group is awesome they've been super motivated and I think they're having really important and productive conversations about how to make positive impacts in the area we've also collected experience based information through a recent series of events hosted by working group members and city staff in August we went out to nine different locations throughout the sub community to ask people about their experiences in the area and this effort was really focused on going to where people are

[96:00] so we tried to engage people kind of as part of their their daily activities so over for example we went to the hospital cafeteria over lunchtime to chat with hospital workers and visitors we were at Philmont bike park during a Wednesday night race series and then we hung out at some of the popular bus stops during rush hour to collect feedback from daily users of the sub community and I think I think that series was a great learning experience for both our staff as well as the working group members we got to speak directly with folks who are directly impacted by this process and we learned a lot about different sites throughout the area so then I opened the conversation beyond just those those events we also hosted a series of questions on be heard Boulder which allowed folks we didn't catch during our events as well as community members from outside the East Boulder sub community to share information and participate in

[97:00] the process so I'm going to share what we learned from all of this and attempt to combine some of that data based inventory with community experiences so first some quick numbers the sub community includes about 1600 acres there are 691 parcels in the area about 466 residents and almost 17,000 jobs so for a bit of context and the area makes up around 10% of the city and this sort of makes sense we've got 10 sub communities what's interesting is that the number of parcels represents less than 2% of the number of properties in the city so what that tells us is that we have really large properties large parcels and fewer owners that are making up that land area the 466 residence is really just the population of San lázaro which is a mobile home community on the east side of the sub community and that site is actually located outside of the

[98:01] city boundaries in Boulder County and we'll talk a little bit more about that area and then the 17,000 jobs represent about 16 percent of jobs in the city so as we know this areas and major employment for Boulder so as I mentioned earlier and the purpose of sub-community planning is to implement the goals of the BBC P and so we've directed our inventory work to inform these goals and aligned with the six focus areas of the 2015 update so I'll present the goals and our findings for each of these focus areas we're going to start with a really easy one housing affordability and diversity the major goals of this focus area are to increase the number of affordable units in the city and increase the diversity of housing types so as I mentioned there is only one residential area within the boundaries of the sub community San lázaro Park the neighborhood includes 313 manufactured home sites in Boulder County and there

[99:02] are no other residential properties in the area today and no units that are part of the permanently affordable housing program so while when we compare these numbers to other sub communities in the city they can seem kind of striking but it's not super surprising the area was historically developed as an industrial site industrial area and in the past that type of land use was not really compatible with housing but as we know things are changing during our engagement series we asked folks if they would consider living in East Boulder sixty-one percent of the people we spoke with in person indicated that yes they would consider this many offered the caveat that the housing would have to be affordable to them and then online thirty-eight percent said yes they would consider living in East Boulder excuse me 20 percent said maybe they would consider it and 42 percent said no thank you I it is the next slide so the in-person

[100:05] folks are the majority of the people that we spoke with in-person are not bold our residents today but they come to East Boulder from Boulder County Denver and some of the other surrounding areas whereas a majority of our online participants through be heard Boulder do already live in Boulder today so I just I kind of want to mention that the working group members wanted to make sure that I community communicated very clearly that the questions and the responses that I am sharing today were not distributed through a statistically valid survey and that participants volunteered their time and responses to these questions that were posed by the group and stuff so the next focus area is the balance of future jobs in housing so major goals include adding housing and commercial and

[101:00] industrial areas the BBC P calls out east Boulder specifically related to this goal and to increase access to multimodal transportation options so as I mentioned earlier lots of jobs in the area there are 820 businesses located in East Boulder and this includes some of our major employers like Ball Aerospace as well as many of the area's important small and local businesses we have 887 acres that are zoned for industrial or commercial uses so that's around half of the total area and then related to getting all those people to their jobs and businesses our colleagues and transportation from that seventy six percent of the areas daily commuters are driving alone to work this is pretty consistent with what we found through engagement most people are driving to East Boulder and so there's a lot of room for improvement to meet some of the citywide goals on reducing the number of single occupant vehicles coming into the

[102:00] city and I know you're considering the transportation master plan update next week which has some pretty ambitious goals surrounding this topic we've been working closely with our colleagues in transportation to collect information about transportation and options in East Boulder and we'll continue to work with them to identify solutions for some of these issues another issue to consider in the area is parking so we asked people about parking at two of our engagement events at Boulder Community Health and in Flatirons Business Park at the hospital majority folks said there's not enough parking whereas at the Business Park ninety-five percent said that there is enough we did offer a third response to this question which is I believe there is too much car parking in East Boulder no participant selected this response however you know we've been collecting more and more data and we had a recent study done on parking utilization and

[103:04] that study concluded that there is an excess of parking in some of our office areas in East Boulder so definitely a topic that needs some further consideration the next focus area is design quality and placemaking so major goals include ensuring that redevelopment delivers high quality design for buildings in public spaces and that we are creating pedestrian oriented neighborhoods so one of the things we consider when we think about design qualities and aesthetics is historic character so there are two historic landmarks in the sub community one is a small white house on the south side of Belmont and the there's a white farmhouse structure they're both located in Belmont City Park one on the south side and one on the north side but they're not really connected to other areas of the sub community compared to

[104:00] other city landmarks our historic districts in the city there really isn't kind of a unified aesthetic in this area to define a character for East Boulder so we think this is both a great challenge and a great opportunity it provides a certain level of freedom and creativity and we will work with community members moving forward to help define the character of the area so that future redevelopment is in line with community expectations related to pedestrian oriented neighborhoods we looked at the walk access model that was developed as part of the pedestrian plan update to help evaluate the area East Boulder scored low or very low for walk access and what's great about this updated model that that the transportation folks created is that it considers both availability of facility and quality of facilities and then it also takes into account destinations and so what we learned is not only does East

[105:02] Boulder score low for availability and quality of facilities but there's also even if those facilities were there there's no destinations that people want to walk to to provide that that kind of great pedestrian environment so room for improvement in in this area to explore this further talking about destinations we asked community members what kinds of destinations or businesses do they currently visit most often both in person and online responses highlighted food in restaurants as well as medical and health and auto services as top destinations when asked what kinds of businesses people would like to see more of the majority of responses also describe food in restaurants and we found that this is consistent with the findings of the city citywide retail study we also we also asked participants about feelings of safety walking in the

[106:00] sub community most people who participated in person said yes they do feel safe whereas online it was about half who indicated yes and a third of participants indicated that the feelings of safety depended on the time of day so this option that depends on time of day wasn't available to in-person participants but we did hear this a lot especially from workers at ball in the hospital that they feel less safe walking back to their cars after dark or sort of less comfortable walking along Boulder Creek path after sunset so the next focus area is resilience and climate commitment major goals include achieving energy system resilience improving community capacity and resilient resilience to natural and economic disruptions and reducing carbon emissions so the East Boulder sub community is at the confluence of a lot of the city's major creeks including Boulder and South Boulder Creek 450 acres of land er and the high hazard and

[107:01] conveyance zones and we heard a lot from community members that this is a great concern we have a lot of folks in neighborhoods south of Arapaho who experienced the 2013 floods and incorporating flood mitigation and resilience planning into this project is extremely important to them and so we will definitely continue to consider that moving forward another issue that we can look at which contributes to flood mitigation but also air quality and energy use is canopy coverage so how much of the area is shaded by tree canopy an East Boulder we have less than five percent canopy coverage our citywide urban forestry goal is 16% so there's a lot of room for improvement here as well and something else that is unique and I think it's kind of cool about East Boulder is that we have a concentration of waste and recycling and recycling facilities in this area so including eco cycle and resource which are on the south side of Arapaho but

[108:02] also Western disposal and Boulder County recycling so we're thinking about how we can take advantage of this concentration and work with area businesses to improve their sustainability efforts also related to resilience this is a very important area of the city for emergency management Boulder County sheriff's office the office of emergency management and the hospital and emergency room are all located in East Boulder so these are considered critical facilities to the community and important places to incorporate in our future planning as I mentioned related to this topic we've heard a lot from community members concerning flood impacts and storm water control so I want to reiterate that we hear those concerns and we'll be taking those very seriously in future planning the next focus area is about small local business and the major goals are to support and retain small small local businesses and to provide affordable business space in the city and as I mentioned earlier

[109:02] there are 820 businesses in East Boulder and a lot of these businesses or what really define the area for community members in February we did a Valentine's Day campaign where we asked people what they loved about East Boulder and an overwhelming majority of responses to scribe some of the businesses people love and cherish in this area related to affordable space we're looking at a couple of different resources to better understand rates for renting space in the area listed here are some of the median rates for office flex space and industrial or warehouse space we found that while these rates remain lower than rental rates and other sub communities like central Boulder we have seen some significant increases in rates since 2009 and this is described by community members as well the industrial and office space is really important to businesses in this area but rates have definitely been increasing this is a

[110:01] major topic taken on by the working group and they've been having some really candid conversations about how to make improvements in the area without creating an environment that becomes unaffordable to the businesses who are there today so we'll continue to explore that the final focus area is surrounding arts and culture and major goals include including arts and community benefit policies in supporting arts and cultural experiences as essential to well being one of the things we looked at in our city data was the availability and access to public art so I think the city has around a hundred pieces throughout throughout the city three are located in East Boulder two in Belmont City Park and then there's one at an accent access point to the Boulder Creek path and then something really fun that we've discovered through this process is that the sub community has a ton of arts and culture related businesses artists galleries studios performance venues and places to learn about art are kind of

[111:01] clustered in these pockets of East Boulder so we have a great opportunity to celebrate the work of these artists and find ways to expose some of this arts culture to the rest of the city when we ask people if they consider East Boulder a destination for arts and culture today the majority of people we asked in person said yes however I should mention that we asked this question to folks attending a matinee at the boulder dinner theater so that's me - skewed their responses there but participants online as you can see do not consider East Boulder a destination for arts and culture so not why they're traveling east Boulder currently but knowing what we know now we'll work with our colleagues in the office of arts and culture to shift that perspective the better so all of this inventory work as well as other detail is included in the draft inventory and analysis for report we've provided copies for each of you and the intention

[112:01] of this report is to really capture and document a holistic understanding of both the data and the experiences of existing conditions in East Boulder today as well as identify the ability and capacity for the sub community to contribute to the citywide goals of the BBC P so what we found through this process is that East Boulder has the ability to make significant contributions to citywide goals in all of these focus areas I don't think that will be true for every sub community but that's what we found in East Boulder as we move forward into concept development and scenario testing the challenge will be prioritizing where how and when we can make impacts on these goals so that's the work that we're gonna dive into next at the working groups last meeting they kicked off the concept development phase by brainstorming a bunch of programs policies and projects that could help achieve those citywide goals we're gonna share those ideas with

[113:00] topic area specialists across the city to refine some of those concepts and we'll be back in December to share those ideas with you coming up next we're headed to planning board in October and then as I mentioned back back in December to talk about concepts for for impacting those citywide goals and again here's here's the questions for tonight and happy to answer any questions that you might have for me excellent thank you mm-hmm that's a lot Mary's first okay Mary questions and then Lisa and then Sam so thanks for the memo in the presentation in your presentation you were talking about the number of parcels and the sizes of the parcels and I was wondering and you also said that there was I believe like no affordable housing in

[114:00] this area so in looking at those parcels have you identified parcels that belonged to the city yes and the city is the majority landowner in East Boulder a lot of that is Valmont city park land along the Boulder Creek path the airport I think those are the biggies majority owner or the largest donor the the owner of the largest amount of land yeah but not fifty percent plus yeah so that I think that would be valuable information to demarcate as we move forward because it's city land is always a good place to start for affordable housing I think so if that could be

[115:01] evaluated in terms of whether or not it would be appropriate to use those parcels for housing I think would be a really useful exercise and then I don't understand my notes and then another thing right right at the end where you showed those two is is East Boulder a destination for arts and culture the in person versus online I think that was a really good example of self selection in answering and so I was just it made me curious about how how do you plan on arriving at at community sentiment without the use of statistically valid survey or are you planning on using one we don't have a statistically valid survey as part of

[116:03] our scope of work currently if that's something that we consistently I think here people really want will certainly explore it they're very expensive to conduct but we have budget for this project beyond beyond that I think we're really trying to combine feedback from users of the area who may not be included in a statistically valid survey they don't live in Boulder today with the rest of the city and so we're trying a couple of different approaches definitely sort of this direct contact kind of pop up where we speak with people as part of their their daily activities as well as hosting things kind of online hosting larger meetings things like that to get a broader sense

[117:03] from from other community members as well what their what their input is and kind of what their take is on the area we do document everything and we do apply metrics to all of the the input that we've accumulated I guess that would be hard when there's only four hundred and sixty something residents and 17,000 jobs so that's understandable and then the other thing I was curious about was is it typical to include unincorporated parts of town in a sub community yes so the sub community boundaries include everything that it's within the service area of the city so area one and two are including can I just call the cui on that one which is

[118:01] like the issue of enclaves mmm actually I'm gonna I'll I'll defer and wait in line I had some questions around how we address those things but I'll just wait we have Lisa and then Sam and then me thanks Catherine for your presentation I want to go back to the beginning where you talked about that the boundaries of the East Boulder sub community plan included both sides of Arapaho and so I guess my question is where that line is D marked wouldn't you want that one property line one property in to the south side of Arapaho and right now that line is on Arapaho yeah so today the the line is like right down the center of Arapaho and I think back when we looked at the boundaries in kind of November December January we decided

[119:01] to maintain that line to be consistent with the census tracts for the area it is helpful in that it gives us a picture of area demographics without kind of skewing the numbers by including an entirely or an additional census tract that has a much larger population that would represent a community that is not really representative of that East Boulder area and then you know the other thing about sort of that boundary line is it is serving as as kind of our clip area for data but it is not serving as a boundary for engagement for collecting input for recommendations we we are thinking of the Arapaho corridor as a

[120:02] corridor and are considering both sides of the street and I meet every other week with the project manager for the East Boulder transportation plan as well so where we're coordinating and ya know it's just that if you know if you did bring it to this I mean in the first place it seems kind of by looking at that it seems a little bit if you were looking at and you were in the neighborhood and you would say oh okay that's not my sub community but you live at what is it Park mosaic now somebody else might but but anyway that would include residents right mm-hm so then you would change you know your demographics that way but I get what you're trying to say about the census plan and stuff but I think somehow that needs to be represented because I think

[121:02] it's somewhat little misleading to somebody just looking at that or maybe you put a caveat or something like that but I think people need to understand that it does include both sides of Arapahoe and all those buildings that are facing rapaho and then again on the boundaries and I just looked at this and I don't know why it didn't pop out out at me before but when you look at King's Ridge that's in the pelo park sub community plan and so it it seems like somebody took a bite out of the East Boulder sub community plan and it and Foothills Parkway seems to be maybe a more natural boundary and so you have Kings Ridge over there kind of off by themselves separate it from pillo park it's just a comment but it just seems if you just went up to include I

[122:01] guess that would be what's that McKenzie Junction and Kings Ridge that would be seems to me to be a more natural boundary but that's just a comment and we pause is it that wasn't in the census tract is the same thing apply there or is there a reason why there's a chunk out there yep so we originally kind of made that recommendation because we were trying to group residential neighborhoods residential areas with their local neighborhood center or commercial center and so that's how Kings Ridge got connected more to the area to the west hmm but there's nothing in peeler Parkway that's a commercial would peel apart that's a commercial I mean it's just residential and there's parks but there's no shopping really er correct those no sinner those residents actually go west

[123:03] to either diagonal Plaza or the Safeway right as their commercial center and so that's why that geographic area actually is more logically connected to the rest of paylo park sub-community right so that's why that boundary change was made last year okay and then I was surprised I understand most of this is industrial until you don't have many trees which is kind of unfortunate and hopefully that can be rectified but I was surprised that the city only has is did you say a 16% citywide tree canopy yep so um our urban forestry plan today has a goal of 16% and my understanding is that goal is to maintain our existing canopy I misheard you I thought you said 16 not I'd say 16 Oh but the goal is 60 nope

[124:01] the goal is 16 so maintain and and then definition of small business what what's the criteria in which you're calling a small business small um so the way we look at businesses is we have primary employers which employ a large large number of folks the small business is that we've been looking at have less than 50 employees okay so it's not a square footage no okay and then my last comment is kind of takes off from Mary's in terms of land that owned by the city and most of that is a lot of that are parks but the one significant property that I would hope

[125:01] we do look at is the airport for future affordable housing and a center a neighborhood center obviously we want to keep some of that for emergency but a good part of that it's I think about 130 hundred and forty acres and a good part of that hundred acres could be used for housing in a neighborhood center and it's out of the floodplain has great views and is developable so I'll mention that our September working group meeting actually will take place at the airport and we're meeting with the airports manager to learn more about the operations there and they are master plan okay thank you so thank you for this really cool information in here 1891 advertisement for the resort that was going to be east of all so I'm gonna

[126:04] agree with Lisa but I think you really need to extend at least several blocks to the south into the neighborhoods which are on the south side of Arapaho I think we made this mistake before when we were doing just the road project except that everybody who uses that road many of them lived to the south and so it was a really big concern what was gonna happen with Arapaho and so I think you know as you say doing the outreach is great I think you could even do some numbers that say how many people live within a short commute of all of the jobs which are there we know that something like a big fraction of the jobs are in this sub community and then some are just to the west and so this is an important mobility corridor which we've already noted there are some missing bike connections

[127:00] out here so if I want to come up via the creek path either and I'm at 55th and central I want to come up via the creek path the most convenient way for me to go is west on western you know and then you end up with a series of parking lots that you have to get through and there's people intentionally trying to stop bikes from going through those parking lots for reasons I don't understand but it sure seems to me like a connections plan to get from 55th to Boulder Creek would be really nice there's a decent connection of course to Goose Creek path as you go north on 55th you can just hop onto Goose Creek I think some of the bike facilities in that direction are in really good shape but going in the other direction may be not such good shape and so I don't know if that's part of the sub-community plan but it sure you know working with Ball Aerospace and you know some of the other parking lots over there if there would be a way to put a bike path through that gets you over to

[128:01] the Boulder Creek path that would be a great convenience without having to go because it's really just not all that appealing to go out 55th to Arapaho and then go on that multi-use path so anyway that's and I think improving the bike connection to Ball Aerospace and Flatirons it's pretty good for a ball right now but all the way into the park might improve people's you know concept of being willing to bike to get out there it is very clear that many people are coming from outside of Boulder who worked there so and then I guess another thing I thought Lisa's point about King's Ridge is interesting as well I agree with you that they probably use shopping centers to the west mostly but they still are a part of this and they're part of the connections for this too so however you would think about doing the home south of the rapaho you might include King's Ridge because they probably have opinions about getting out

[129:01] onto the Belmont Road for instance and and other issues like that the connectivity over there has improved dramatically of course with Wunderland Creek project so that's good and yeah I guess the the one thing I would say is that with this as a regional employment center we probably when I think of a statistically valid survey it's not the 450 residents of San Lazaro even though they're important as well and and we want to hear from all those folks but it's the 17,000 employees that work here and how they get here and what we might be able to do to get their mode shift moving because as we know three-quarters of them are driving in alone to work in this part of town and if we don't talk to them we're not going to be able to find out what would it take I mean I know one thing you'll hear is better bus service over there it's

[130:00] it's not that there isn't any it's just the headways are really long and so you get I mean I've had people who have commuted by bus with me and they get frustrated with if they missed that one bus that's now half an hour or 45 minutes or an hour until they can get to the next one and so I know that's not under our direct control but it is certainly something that we should be keeping aware of because I think I would suggest doing a statistically valid poll of the employees and the employers in this particular sub community because they so outweigh the resonance so I guess that's enough for now I really like the way this is going though and I really appreciate the inventory after me okay and at this point we're just doing questions and input at the same time okay a couple I got actually I got a list building on what you said about commuting and whatnot we got the

[131:03] chamber who's very active in that conversation and commuting solutions who's very active in rather than have you guys do all of that work that's a very engaged group and you could ask them to play a big role in talking to employers in this region and getting them to the table if you haven't already I think I heard you say that you're meeting every other week with the transportation team that works on highway 7 and that's huge you guys saw in the transportation plan that there's hablas plan for a long long rap awho whoever's mayor next or maybe you guys decided to do differently will participate in there's a highway 7 coalition that meets monthly bimonthly I'm on three different one of those anyhow that work you know Boulder to Brighton and it is looking at all of those issues and what comes next which intersections you know 95th there's

[132:00] someone you know there's a lot of stuff in play that's relevant to this plan so I am glad that you're talking to them and that that's integrated because I think that's huge I want to say I'm gonna agree with what's been said this is awesome this is cool I think this subcommittee plans on its way to being another model of how the city wants to do public process it already feels that way and we just had one with the open space master plan you know just kudos to you it feels like we're off to a really strong start in terms of both the work the task force and including people and you can see it reflected in this report already and I saw in there that there that you guys are gonna use arc urban tool as a way to get people to be able to see 3d scenarios and I think that depending on how that looks will be some a tool that we end up wanting to use and a lot of different applications a couple

[133:03] questions we made are there are a bunch of enclaves in here and I wonder if as part of sub Community Planning we have I know some people don't want to be an X but there's probably an invitation in a subject community plan to invite those who haven't thought about it in a while to come in and we had a bunch of marijuana businesses come in whether they wanted to or not along 55th but I guess what's the approach there is there an active component to both inviting those people to come to the table and it may be even considering the annexation and so I'll just speak to the engagement of the residents that we've done so far in businesses and businesses specifically for the San Lazaro community we have been engaging those residents and learning about what they are interested in related to access to

[134:01] city services we've definitely heard interest from there and then I might let you speak to the Enclave issues I think a key part of sub community planning is to look at the entire sub community everything inside the service area so all the properties in area 1 and area 2 so those Enclave properties and as a part of that I think in this sub community there aren't as many enclaves as say like when we did the North Boulder sub community plan that was a key focus was as annexations occur in this area how do we make sure that all those urban services are delivered effectively and so I think we'll think about it in the same way here in East Boulder as with all other sub communities and if there's any focus areas or specific recommendations that we need to look at related to future annexations we can do that as a part of the sub community plan if if it looks

[135:01] like they're warranted especially around let's say there's an area that that we may need to do some infrastructure upgrades we would want to think about that as a part of the sub community plan but all the enclaves will be engaged and looked at as a part of the planning process assume that means that we're talking with the county about San lázaro and they're a part of that another question Belmont power plan that is kind of a huge influence it's sitting over there and I don't know how does that factor into this and is there conversations about the future of either what cells gonna do with that or I'm just curious so there there are my understanding is it is scheduled to decommission in 2023 or 2024 there are plans to install a major solar garden

[136:03] project there I have some crazy ideas about what I'd like to do with the building because I think the building is really cool but as far as what I've learned from utilities the city is not considering purchasing that property at this time and wasn't suggesting necessary that we do but we still want them to do something interesting with it even if we don't want the liability of whatever's in those ponds I don't know it just seems to me that it could have a huge influence on this community sub community doneö we have a colloquy yeah I mean I just want to comment of course that what's in those ponds and what's in the buildings might not be something that we want to get involved with at all because the building's even themselves we could be exposing people to all kinds

[137:00] of heavy metals and so on and so I would hope that we would work with Excel as a partner to figure out what they're gonna do and to figure out how we can over time make those into less of an environmental hazard than they may turn out to be in the long run but just anyway caution with that facility yeah but nonetheless regardless of whether we take it on mm-hmm it's relevant and then I guess the the only other thing I guess I wanted to say and I'll cede the floor is this feels like a really good model of how we list out these boulder valley comp plans city goals and the question is how is this sub community going to embrace and manifest those goals and and you know tailor them to this region and then along with the local unique aspirations but I think that's a good mix and a model of kind of having each area the city think about how they're

[138:01] going to help further the citywide goals as well as their own unique so I minds that kind of underscore that is a very good approach because I think all parts of the city have skin in the game on some of these important goals that you've outlined so I could say more I will stop Aaron and think saying I'll just did it at that last point that was a great point thanks for saying that I might also do all the praise for for this you know draft in toward its was extremely well-put-together and really kind of a delight to read through it's really interesting great information graphics etc etc so thanks for that a few a few quick points one is I just really look forward to the an updated transportation and connections plan as part of this process Sam made some great detailed points about that but you know the transportation master plan has certain changes designed for this area but obviously we would revise that right as we go through this so that'll be great and I know you're doing these kind

[139:00] of walk and bike and thing audits and but hopefully that'll really closely inform the revisions to the transportation and the connections plan so look forward to that I know you're thinking about it but the the concept of additional retail and restaurants in this area because because I kind of lost the battle on whether to include that in our use table discussion so I just want to make sure we're including it as this because I was told no well talked about here but just to get to the point where because of course we hear from those business businesses all the time there aren't enough places to eat lunch and such right there in the business park so making sure that staying on the agenda I want to offer a little bit of a counterpoint to my colleagues on the question of boundaries so I you know the rapaho is an arbitrary boundary line and we need to incorporate ideas from people south of it as well but I would I would worry about just drawing a line just you know I don't know how many hundred half a mile further south or quarter mile further south you know east-west going

[140:02] on there because some of those residential neighborhoods would be cut in two by doing that right so so the the ones over by 63rd are right up next to Arapaho and then further west to the west of 55th Street you those go south quite a big deal quite a distance and so it feels like those residential neighborhoods properly belong as one as their own units in the other sub community plane to the south but I wonder if we might consider if we wanted to think about extending it south if we might look at irregular boundaries I mean I'm personally I'm finally me to rapaho but if we were to draw it further south of a regular boundaries that captured like the commercial areas like along 55th or 63rd so the the things that really are really participating directly in a rapaho and that our own that where we could include the entirety of those areas in the plan as opposed to

[141:02] cutting residential neighborhoods in half into two sub communities so I'll leave that to my my colleagues to just the idea of kind of having you talked about an influence zone and I think there would be a way to visually show that some sort of not a sharp boundary but a great a great out yea the fuzzy thing that goes around the census the census thing makes sense right but showing that puzzy area of I think would be helpful is that what you're kind of I think that would be great we're approaching it is like a little extra fuzzy influence zone to the South Arapaho you know like I mean now just colloquy I I just don't want to lose the input those folks because they they will participate one way or the other and so we should be inviting to them that's all go do all this reanalysis of all the I think the numbers aren't important the input is exactly yeah so maybe a little

[142:02] little extra fuzzy thing to show we're not changing the hard line of the boundary but you know show we're incorporating you put in particular from those areas might be a good thing and just one little point the the packet itself didn't have a map of the area until kind of deep down into the package so just in the future I think it's handy to get the map right front and center and all the all the bits that was it thanks so much so I just wanted to add one comment with respect to the engagement and the the city process and just to kind of reiterate and emphasize how the open space master plan did the engagement windows and we're really really clear about the opening and closing of the engagement windows and what the goals were of each engagement and then communicating the outcomes to the next

[143:00] engagement window I thought that worked really well and and that was I think communicated really well to the community so I think it helped avoid issues that might have come up so or just yeah just reiterate that yep yes and I just I'm gonna get Oh everyone all around and Andrian facades and following up on what Mary just talked about with engagement the statistically valid survey which you mentioned which is figured in your budget because that's something that figured strongly with the OS MP master plan okay we just talked about it in particular if there's and with scenarios right that yes you really need to so far we haven't uncovered the we really need to know what you think part yet but it seems to me that that will probably be revealed and then that will become more clear and and that we

[144:01] need one yes and including the areas that Aaron was talking about others of you have talked about the other side of Arapaho as well some of those then we'd want the city we also want a city piece to that too right don't when we do it well we haven't done one Ethan well a sub community plan you want people that are in there you also want to know what there's the city or at least the portion of the the survey is going citywide so you can write absolutely okay well and I think Sam made a good point about the vast majority of the people who are here are here for jobs so I don't know how you do a statistically valid survey to all the employee all the employees or but but it seems really critical to include their input because that's a lot of the people that are probably aren't residents just to follow up on that one

[145:05] thing that you will learn at some level of granularity 70 people in that area Flatiron Park in the hospital and so on come from within Boulder and how many come from outside of Boulder and so you'll figure out what the balance in that sub community is of in commuters who are coming from maybe further away than and folks who might just be going across Boulder and I think that could be valuable for transportation that reminds me of some work that the city in the county did when looking at the community why'd he go pass they had all kinds of information about where people were going and where people are coming from and projections and things like that so might be worthwhile to dig that up and so I do we answer your question okay I

[146:05] think so I will just note that you also mentioned recycle row I know this is my day job so I'll just say this real quick that just like there's a lot of unique assets that exist throughout this area like the hospital like recycle row like I don't know there's a bunch of them listed here and I think figuring out how to support and emphasize those uses as not just I mean you said hey the recycle roads there let's make sure all the businesses recycle I think it's yes but more importantly it's like just cuz we have a hospital they're not gonna make sure everybody has healthcare there we're thinking about how do we make the most of that asset and and I guess the same thing I would say would apply to these

[147:00] other two assets how do we support them in the land use in the connectivity and and what we highlight about the area so I just offer that perspective okay anything else thanks so much so the next item is the budget and while Katie gets set up I'm gonna do a very quick introduction normally we have Katie speak and I speak and other people speak but in order to streamline things tonight I've asked Katie to do the entire presentation so I thank her for that I also want to point out that we've got staff members from every department in the city organization here so that if you have questions at the end of the presentation they're available to answer them mostly Department directors and finance staff from the different departments they have done an amazing job this year

[148:01] and presenting what I think is a budget that you will be very pleased with and many of the items that council has indicated our council priorities and community priorities are reflected in the budget Katie's gonna go over all of those at the very end she doesn't know this but I'm going to mention another item that's in the budget this year that we didn't call out in the presentation but I think you'll be very interested in in light of earlier discussions this evening so Katie take it away yeah I think I know your grams prizes as well it's gonna touch on it yeah as you can see I travel well so I have a lot of friends happy to help me out even though I'm gonna be the one doing the majority of the discussion so good evening we're here tonight to present the city managers recommended 2020 budget again we're very proud of this budget worked hard to incorporate council and community priorities and we will dive right into the context setting so we recognize that there's anticipated

[149:01] slowing economic growth the u.s. GDP is expected to be about 2.4 percent in 2019 and dropping down to 1.8 percent in 2020 Colorado continually outperforms the county or country I apologize and there's also coupled with a tight labor market Boulder unemployment rate is continually less than the state and national and it's been challenging to fill positions in addition to having wage pressures so all of that led us to continue to be conservative when we look at our sales tax projections for the coming years given all of the heightened uncertainty also included in the 2020 budget is the goal of reaching 20 percent reserves yay we will not be going above this next year don't worry this is what we hope to achieve several years ago and you can see it pairs us with some surrounding communities the 2020 staffing level is 1475 FTE which

[150:02] stands for full-time equivalent this includes staffing that were added to off-cycle during the 2019 to accomplish many new priorities also included this year both here and in the budget book is an estimation of our non-standard staffing or what you may typically refer to as seasonal employees I think it was important to include here because they do help supplement standard staff during peak seasons especially within the parks public public works and open space departments so they are important part of our workforce before we dive into the numbers we wanted to preview how this budget is able to fund key council and organizational initiatives outlined here we'll dive into each initiative later on in the presentation it's also important to note or pause here that the 2020 budget like Jane said tries to accomplish a number of council requests and we've incorporated them into the recommended budget versus waiting for first reading so we hope that that

[151:01] achieves a lot of your key priorities with that being said if the council does wish to make adjustments for it it doesn't need to come at the expense of offsetting something else or you could give direction to staff that should revenues next year come in above projections these are some of the key things that you would like to see added in first during the ATB so just kind of keep that in mind as we go through so the 20/20 recommended budget is based on citywide revenues of 360 point 3 million dollars in supports to note that it's flat over 2019 even though there are several revenue sources increasing the flatness really is due to a cyclical decrease in federal and state grants related transportation projects and last year we had a small debt issuance that is considered part of our sources of revenue the three largest revenue sources are the sales and use tax utility rate charges and property taxes and these three funding sources represents 71% of the total sources of city funds and pausing here for a moment

[152:01] it's important to note that the 2020 recommended budgets does not include any potential adjustments to revenue or expenses as a result of any November ballot issue those are typically caught up in January February first adjustment abase excluding revenues you can see that when you take out citywide revenue sources without water wastewater stormwater utilities the reliance or importance of sales and use tax and property tax increases we take these out to demonstrate kind of our revenue sources because root ility fees are based on the use of the system and not reflective economic conditions the 2020 recommended budget for the general fund has a revenue of one hundred and fifty seven point four million dollars and it represents a three point one increase over the 2019 budget the increase is largely due to the city's portion of property tax revenues and a slight projected increase in retail sales tax and Bob this slide is for you next one

[153:01] if you look at the cost allocation in purple and you take where those funding sources come from you can see that putting the originating funding source that the contribution from sales and use tax funds increases this ratio as well as service and utility rates really we're taking if parks contributed to cost allocation that came from those sales tax fund so it's just a different way to look at it as a cost allocation kind of removed with its source important to note here that for every retail dollar collected the city of Boulder receives 44 cents of that dollar and again less than half goes to the general fund and others go to important dedicated funds and just again for every retail tax dollar correct retail doll yes thank you yeah this also was presented last year just for information regarding the reliance on city of Boulder sales tax compared to other four major cities it's important to note that we are in the middle kind of compared to

[154:01] pure communities which is important and it speaks to our diverse revenue structure where we don't rely too heavily on any one source of revenue we also find it helpful to look at inflation-adjusted figures when looking at trends we call this slide the revenue or the buying power slide and what it shows is the difference between raw taxable sales and purchases shown in blue and an inflation-adjusted number shown in green that widening gap represents that our sales tax growth has not been keeping pace with the rate of inflation so in July we asked about this because our sales tax growth has been pretty close to the rate of inflation are there particular types of building materials or salaries that you're looking at with this because this isn't just compound inflation is it no so I mean what it does is really say that our dollar hasn't gone as far so in the last few years you know we've been a little

[155:00] less than inflation especially when it was increasing at 3% and our revenues were a little bit higher than that but our costs also related to construction costs are closer to 5% 10% eventually and construction cost is a particular one that gets weighted in here and why is that we do lots of construction or you know what's the reason for talking about construction in particular when it's around the city budget yeah so this one is particularly just with CPI and we can do a little bit more context setting of like what the factors go into it for a first reading if that makes sense this is relevant to CIP stuff for the capital stuff right this is relevant to just any sort of city expenses well construction doesn't factor into a lot of our city expenses yeah I think that's what he's trying to unpack right so this is just CPI not construction expenses but we know that we have other costs that are increasing so July we had estimated that

[156:02] property tax increases would be around 15% and because of countywide reports but due to timing within the property tax cycle we received reports from the county itself late last where a couple weeks ago and our citywide property taxes are actually just increasing at a lower rate than the rest of the county at ten percent and then it's important to note that is an assessment year that the state oops changed its percentage for the residential property two main compliance with the Gallagher amendment that's happened two years ago as well and so the residential assessment rate dropped from seven to seven point two percent to seven point one percent so just interesting fact and again we receive a smaller portion for every property tax dollar collected the proposed budget also reflects the following increases to the base utility rates it represents seven percent to water five percent to

[157:00] wastewater and seven percent to stormwater and flood management and while the base charges going up by seven percent for the water rate how much each customer pays is dependent on how much they use and we know that over the years there's been a decline in water use so while the typical bill rate has been roughly five percent over the last ten years the actual average single-family residential bill has increased by just three point seven percent annually so projected increases for next year with all three funds is about five dollars and sixty six cents each month moving on to the 2020 recommended budget so it totals to three hundred and sixty nine million dollars and represents a four point three percent increase over the 2019 budget for all funds and the primary increase in this budget is due to additional 15 million dollars in capital spending in 2019 and the proposed operating budget of 288 million

[158:00] represents a modest 1.8 percent in compared to 2019 so you can see just by this chart that the city provides a lot of services to the community Public Safety and Public Works contributes over 56% of the total budget again this chart excludes utilities and you see that there's even larger percentage of services provided when you exclude the water wastewater and stormwater flood management utilities so in July I showed you a slide with a lot of numbers of how we went about balancing the 2019 budget and a lot of numbers and words and saw a few glazed eyes understandably so I thought I would show this more visually and then compare it to how we're balancing the 2020 budget so our budgeted expenses in 2019 were 158 million dollars we had budgeted revenues of 152 million dollars so how we completed the balancing of this budget was drawing from our

[159:01] reserves for the utility occupation tax which we knew due to the timing of attacks we would need to draw for reserves and then we also drew from our fund balance for two one-time projects the Hogan parent cost loan and part of the hospital deconstruction so in balancing the 2020 budget we have budgeted expenses in the general fund of 160 point eight million dollars budgeted revenues of 157 million dollars we're doing a small draw from reserves for the utility occupation tax and a small dollar amount from the homelessness Reserve that 1.9 million dollars that was set aside several years ago can you pause yep explain the homeless reserve again so and I can't remember the year I apologize but several years back a council dedicated one point nine million dollars to hold in a reserve to use for various homelessness initiatives including the shelter and we've been drawing from that reserve as opposed to taking it from our budget annually so

[160:01] it's been set aside for that specific purpose and so this year there's about five hundred and eighty five thousand dollars that were using towards that those programs as well and you're drawing from that in order to use for homeless service that's kind [Music] and then in May I came before you to talk about the 2019 adjustment to base but also highlighted that we'll be drawing from our excess fund balance to fund the hospital deconstruction so there is a large portion in 2019 and this is just the remainder of the total project costs that we said we were being drawn from fund balance so that is how the 2020 balance was budget and the general fund to provide a host of variety and of climb community goals so the general fund is one of the most flexible funds we support climate human services library Parks and Recreation and other essential services like Public Safety that don't have a dedicated funding source so there's two components

[161:05] of the budget that we typically talk about the capital improvement program in the operating budget and I'm going to dive into the capital improvement program budget real briefly so the CIP is a comprehensive six year plan for capital investments and maintaining and enhancing our public infrastructure and prioritization of the CIP projects involve balancing competing needs of the community correcting service deficiencies enhancing service levels and providing services to new development in the proposed 2022 2595 CIP eighty five point six million dollars is recommended for 2020 and the figure on the Left we shown the last year it really highlights where the CIP falls in with this overall steps of capital planning it's a second step and also demonstrates at various levels where the community engagement occurs so

[162:00] you can see in the first step which is master planning that typically involves a large level of community engagement and you have decreasing community engagement as you get closer to project closeout one of the core tenets of our capital principles as in investing and maintaining what we own and you can see that the chart the darker blue and orange sections combined which include capital enhancement and maintenance represent about 82% of our six-year CIP want a note here both that you can see the CIP fluctuates based on timing and availability of dollars and just project timing and so the spike in 2222 reflects large projects and the utilities specifically around regulatory improvements to the boulder water resource recovery facility which is about 18 million dollars south Boulder Creek mitigation which is estimated at 40 million dollars currently and small several there smaller that I joke about because it's

[163:00] still utilities multi-million dollar projects like the Albion Dam and the lower grooves Creek sewer replacement so big anticipated year in 2022 and then you'll also see in the 2020 budget that the general fund continues to support CIP projects included in key council priorities outlined a little bit later on in 2018 we adopted a policy to start increasing our general fund contribution to capital projects and in 2020 we have about four point seven million dollars dedicated to continuing hoga and Pancoast payment fiber backbone CIPS and new to 2020 is the bomb team vehicle the electronic signatures and petitioning system and the municipal building an East entry door which we'll get into a little bit later some other notable investments are within our essential services such as pavement maintenance in a complete replacement of

[164:01] the pay parking stations throughout the city and then the city also approved in 2019 to begin construction of the hospital which you'll see in that second bullet and thanks to money within the community culture and safety tax at the cities in process of constructing a new full-service library in North Boulder okay very excited about the North Pole new library branch my question the payment management program is that something different from what our annual payment management is no that's just a continuation within this it's our typical annual obligation to management okay thank you and then the CIP includes many other projects beyond what we just listed these are some notable investments I go through the whole CIP pro yearing yearly says through 2025 and we've set aside ample time and you can see it lots of folks here to talk about any specific once EAP project that you'd like to talk about later on so jumping into the core of the presentation these are the 2020 key council and organizational

[165:01] initiatives that we outlined in the city manager's message starting with electronic signatures and petitioning measure 2g authorize the council to allow for online signatures of Oringer endorsements of initiative petitions and this project aims to identify the requirements needed in order to achieve the goals of this measure staff are currently in the process of selecting vendors for this project with hopes to begin work later this year in anticipation of the 2020 elections the total budget is one time of 400,000 and then ongoing maintenance of about $40,000 is that four hundred thousand mostly staff time I don't believe so and Julie is here but I believe it's to actually have someone build a unique system for the city of Boulder okay so it's the cost to build the system all right the Municipal Building East or interests will add back an exterior building entry on the

[166:01] northeast side of the municipal building facing Broadway it includes adding flood proof and exterior doors sidewalk and sister plaza reconfiguration to address the new entry and in interior modifications to the current reception desk to better address the new entry point and the budget is one time of seven hundred thousand dollars that also include any of the interior for mr. city the sister city work is already underway actually if you go downstairs today you can see like we're starting yeah so that is already budgeted for 2019 and this is for 2020 so it's not extra okay shouldn't ask this but I want to the process by which we decided to change it back one and now that we change it now how does that work like

[167:00] how do we decide to do this the council directed us to do us do this at the retreat oh okay so from that all this is happening okay the 2020 budget continues investment in the library's master plan by bumping up to the addressing community demand master plan level we're gonna be adding a new bilingual Youth Services specialist a new volunteer service specialist look at the George Reynolds public space reconfiguration as well as planned investment in the North Boulder library operating expenses beginning in 2021 so wanted to show a brief visual and not to scale but hopefully to give order perspective of in 2019 based upon the master plan what did we achieve there and you can see we hit the all the items included in the maintained service levels plus a few items within the meet community demand 2020 moves the needle a

[168:01] little further in the meet community demand but recognizing that most of the meet community demands master plan level was for North Boulder operating costs so I wanted to show by 2021 we anticipate that we will be darn near close to fully meeting the community demand master plan level and KT those numbers below the dates are all incremental to some - like the 2018 correct it's just that's just that much more okay good yeah can we dive into 2021 so that's when you've added in the North Boulder staffing in operating a one-time dollars yeah all of that okay so is that gonna get maintained rolling forward yes yes okay all of the pieces that are ongoing so there's a pretty large portion that's one time but all the pieces the staffing are all included in the fund financial in perpetuity okay so if we go back and

[169:01] look at whichever slide had the library budget on it it's around nine million this year is that right for the library Oh probably yeah okay and so then something new normal as of when the North Boulder libraries done will be 11 million probably a little less because there is some one-time dollars but probably ten and a half if I were to guess but we could get that number and put it in first reading for sure yeah I think there will be a lot of interest in that number yeah thank you for that and very glad to see those changes in the library funding that's good to see but one thing I don't quite understand so we're approving well we will be approving eventually the 2020 budget right so you're including intentions that we have for 2021 how does that get included in the 2020 budget other than in a slide that you're showing yes it doesn't get included in your formal appropriation because we

[170:00] appropriate by one year but if you do look in the budget book and look at the fun to financial you can see a specific line called out for an oboe so if you're okay with that intention in 2021 that's where we're staff would recognize that wouldn't necessarily need to come forward as a budget request next year great thank you have a question yeah you have 7.5 FTE scheduled for that North Boulder library how does that compare to the George Reynolds branch and the Meadows I'm gonna invite my friend mr. David Harden up here [Music] you counsel David Farnum library notes director it's slightly higher Cindy one reason is we're planning for a full-time security at North Boulder and that is something that we have plans for with the other branches at some time in the

[171:00] future but not in the near future but yeah it's I think it's 1 ft higher 1 ft plus the security guard so 2 ft si so it's and you're the security is the security garden does it have to do with location it was heavily requested by the community that we have full-time security at the North Boulder Library we have full times carried the main library now it's reduced the incidents in this past year by more than 50% you is there is there a need at the other branches at this time we're monitoring it I mean so we may be fresh in the last two weeks we've seen an increase at the branches but I they've been relatively steady the master plan calls for initially a piloting a program where they would be a rotating guard between the two locations and perhaps more you know regular but not scheduled visits by PD so both of those things would help and in the

[172:01] instance we've had the past couple of weeks PD has been very responsive thank you okay the next key initiative is around transportation and essential services so safety and providing those services are the highest priority within the transportation master plan and so this budget request increases services such as snow and ice removal pothole filling and street repair as well as median maintenance and some vision zero safety actions so that we can have travel safety and multimodal access and protect the investment in the existing infrastructure within transportation thanks for that I'm very glad to see that is it possible as we move forward to get maybe some metrics in terms of what kinds of improvements may be percent wise or that would come from that sure I'll work with transportation to develop something and I was just

[173:00] gonna ask on this people use inquire Boulder and I'm wondering and I think it really helps so how much is inquired who pays for inquired Boulder and where does that come out of it I think that that is an item that is cost allocated to all of the departments based upon their usage so if you have more users using it they pay a greater portion of it but I know that within the 2020 budget we are looking at The Enquirer Boulder system through the CRM I believe no I mean it's so much better than it used to be in terms of reporting headings yeah I'll note that we're gonna be talking about the transportation master plan update here shortly and so between the budget discussions and that I don't know where the best place to have this discussion but it talks about vision zero safety actions and there is a capital component to that as well and I think it would be

[174:00] useful as we look at that kind of get a break out of you know we're looking at 30th Street at some point actually making it safe to bike versus I assume some of these actions that go into 600,000 are much smaller but I think I'm just gonna channel council I think we we're gonna want to have a fuller discussion when we look at the transportation plan which will include dollars allocated to these things so again wherever it flows best are you hoping if I'm hearing you correctly the you would like to see that $600 kind of broken out into those different pieces of whether it's capital or operating dollars to achieve I think more when we get to the transportation master plan look at what we're investing in vision zero and how what that looks like so I mean I guess we'll get this in the breakdown but when we have the full budget to look at but

[175:01] we've got Public Works and there's some division between utilities and transportation there so then there's a big annual transportation budget and it's hard looking at a slide that says six hundred thousand dollars to put that in context you know what is that getting us relative to what we're already going to be paying for many of those things if it's you know I think when we do the transportation master plan we'll be able to answer that with more certainty but then we'll want to see the breakdown of that six hundred thousand and see how much of that's going towards what is a life safety you know set of actions for our roads so I mean I think just giving that whole context and making sure that you know at least I'm sure some of us will be asking questions both during the budget process and during the TMP process just because it's such a high priority so just so that we're fully aware of how much skin we're putting in the game yeah so just to build on I'll give you a concrete example I think currently our funding for the neighborhood speed management program is

[176:01] about 250,000 does that sound right so the question is is is is that going up at all or is that just staying at 250 in the 600 thousands go into potholes yep we can definitely provide a break out look at her sweetie if that's helpful great thanks Edie I thought I heard you say that the six hundred thousand dollars included both capital and operating that's my understanding and if anyone from transportation wants to correct me they would be happy to pipe in looks like a whole lot of people are coming up so we can get down first like the end of the Cu game people are trying i missed the field goal so now i need good evening bill cameron acting co-director of the transportation division first let me clarify and correct and i apologize for this that

[177:01] $600,000 does not represent any vision zero safety actions that is for snow and ice removal potholes street repair and median maintenance there's a separate line item for a vision zero position that's included in the budget but it's not included in that six hundred thousand so sorry you just had all that conversation okay but that this is essential services not vision zero the each of these items is a operating increase not a capital increase so it's three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for median maintenance to bring our median maintenance back up to a level that deals with some of the deferred maintenance that has occurred in that area an additional 150 for snow and ice so that we can expand our snow and ice

[178:02] programs to include more multimodal facilities and more residential streets and a hundred thousand for pavement management particularly potholing we would very much like to increase our ability to be proactive in our ability to get potholes filled rather than being reactive the way that we are mostly now and street repair is in the hundred thousand yes so and so there was that request from before just to kind of give us a sense of what changes that will result in kind of in terms of not right now but just is you know how many more right like what what additional comes with us so in other words how far does that extra go yeah yeah I mean just to whet your whistle last year we did 1700 potholes this

[179:03] would bring it up to over 2,000 potholes per year that's an example thank you yes if you can bring us yeah great did you stay here eh are we going to oh no that's it okay one that build so do we have like metrics for that so we can see how this has improved over time I like the potholes I mean that's great 1700 next year 2000 we will certainly confirm by first reading just what metrics we have okay okay so I'm gonna ask aren't potholes is it pothole repair necessary when your pavement has actually deteriorated to the point it's my understanding that by the time you're seeing potholes your road has deteriorated really badly yes you I'm

[180:11] Garrett Slater the principal transportation engineer for the transportation division and I coordinate the activities of the pavement management program from the capital maintenance side and so it's I'm true what you're saying that it's good that we've got this operational budget to be able to increase the rate at which we can fill potholes but we don't want to chase that metric right if we get to a point that we're filling 5,000 potholes a year that's not something to be proud of we would much rather be able to reduce the number of potholes were taken care of by having our focus and emphasis upon the proactive pavement management program and so you're right that it's it's good that we're able to take care of those short term deficiencies right

[181:00] but that the purpose of that program is to take care of those streets before they degrade to the point at which potholes are appearing so the potholes do not typically appear on streets that are in good condition and so we within the maintenance cycle of a street we typically see potholes will start appearing after about years eight nine ten year after they've been treated with a new overlay or a chip seal and so okay so when we look at the the next iteration it would be helpful to look at [Music] where all the streets are that are at the pothole level and where the streets are that are in good shape and what are we doing to get things into good shape versus just chasing the potholes will

[182:00] that be a part of the update okay coming up in a couple of weeks in a week okay so we can answer all these visions zero questions then correct okay so that's useful for us to know we can hold some of those moving on to the tribal consultation so there's a budget request for seventy-five thousand dollars as many of you are aware the city participated in a government-to-government consultation with several American Indian tribes in 2019 and based upon the effort the team agreed to hold future consultations in 2020 with the goal of updating existing and outdated agreements and rebuilding relationships with the people who are indigenous to the boulder region so this budget request continues that key priority and is this general fund money half a business general fund and half as open space why is that it's open space

[183:03] money because most of the Native American lands and cultural sites are an open space within this not all within the city it's open space lands we run culturally and right here there's a graveyard exactly so part of it comes from the general fund and part of it comes from open space where our cultural resources manager I think samanage er resides so that's that's why we've divided it in that way I'll just note from being a part of those discussions that a big area focus at least for the foreseeable future it's figuring out how to address some of the charges are most interested in that overall issue around open space and where they might feel welcome to

[184:02] come and how their stories might be better told in relationship to those lands so I'll just add that there's some relevance that having holding that conversation in that space anyhow or whatever that's worth alright the next items touch on is housing opportunities for people experiencing homelessness or what we otherwise call the housing voucher program this funding includes direct voucher financial assistance and case management support for permanent supportive housing units the funding is also part of an overall coordinated housing response and is lined with the goal of providing 200 plus permanent supportive housing resources in Boulder County as well as alignment with homeless solutions for Boulder County year one recommendations more information regarding the homelessness strategy will be discussed and is planned for in greater detail in October first I just want to let you all

[185:00] know that that is coming excellent I was just gonna say hey we're gonna want to understand that same question of how that and how this represents an increase in yep yep all right next in 2019 the open space Board of Trustees and City Council made recommendations are on increased support for prairie dog management and soil health upon review of the prairie dog working group recommendations through budget reality Asians the budget or the open space mountain parks will dedicate two hundred thousand annually for the next three years and it's also important to note that in 2019 we did hire three additional staff members to help with this effort funded out of the general fund so that represents mostly salaries no this is completely different this is in the open space fund and represents various efforts that day I couldn't speak to you but it's not related to the salaries that were approved in 2019 which equal about that amount that was is within the general fund but you're

[186:02] also saying that it's going to be about this amount for the next three years correct yeah well without opening a can of worms is that's something we can get more just more information on some of the AG you you don't have to do it now just activities over the next few years I think you were gonna talk to us some time about acreages we were hoping to treat and that sort of thing that's it I knew that we had talked about this okay so we'll see it an IP thank you all right the next item it highlight is a language access access specialist it's a position that will support the city's efforts to identify and implement best practices to support inclusive and meaningful communication and engagement and specifically this position it will spearhead the creation of a language access plan which will chart short

[187:00] midterm and long term goals and strategies for when and how the city will offer Spanish translation interpretation services in addition to overseeing the plan the bilingual employee will support strategic counsel related language access and vet outside translators and interpreters and back translate city documents to ensure consistency and quality let me just say yay no I think this is really great and I think it will really improve the quality throughout as stated in the goals but question I have noticed oftentimes in situations where there'll be a bilingual city employee who is safe for example in police and because they are bilingual they get pulled into some other

[188:01] department to use their skill and so I'm wondering if and Jana and I had had this conversation about a pay compensation for having that skill because you do use it and you are working extra yeah I think that there's at least efforts underway to look at what that might be and we could provide more information to well then maybe you would hire more people with that skill so that they would be more sprinkled to that so Abbie Pawnee and Husky who is our HR director that's an answer already thank you hi I'm Abby Pawnee and toski we've been working on coming up with alternative pay to recognize skill that's outside of the normal requirements for the roles and so there's a lot of different skills that can be acknowledged through alternative pay and so that's what we're planning to do to recognize the language

[189:01] access specialist so if you have another language or you have another specialty skill would give you alternative pay that is in that budget number no that's right this is a new employee to focus specifically on the items indicated fantastic alright so we've mentioned living wage a lot saying that we were planning on incorporating the updated self-sufficiency wage rate which is 1742 an hour into the 2020 budget and so we're continuing our promise to look at this whenever the self sufficiency report comes out and again it's updated in the recommended budget include my employees as well as our contracts for which the living wage rate applies to so the city of Boulder also manages a

[190:05] cybersecurity program through our technology or a chief information security office officer and this has been in operation since April of 2016 with goals of coordinating security improvements to the technology infrastructure providing insight into emergency or emerging cyber security risks and protect everyone from data breaches service interruptions and financial loss and other damage so what we're doing here is providing an additional resource employee to help with the cybersecurity program as well as support server administrative tasks that have a security or resilience component sir I just I know I remember one of the things called out in the audit was some older and more vulnerable computer systems will this kind of include a focus on bringing those up to stand

[191:01] alone to leave I think Julie I can speak best to that good evening Julia Richmond chief innovation and technology officer so this role right now we have one security professional for the entire city and so this is doubling our staffing so this person will support overall task management including things like remediating old systems and security audits and all of those kinds of things so it's a general support role across all of our makes sense secure so just while you're up here dude do we have a sense of when we might get to the remediation of to plug that a hole I didn't find the audit we're continually working that we have a number of legacy systems across the city so it's an ongoing effort across all of our technology infrastructure and applications so the answer is some time

[192:00] but as we term out old technologies new technologies also become old technologies and so it's just kind of a continual cycle last question are we y2k compliant the answer is yes I just want to briefly say but I think this is a really big deal to be paying attention to because other cities have been held ransom recently it's clearly a trend and once your computer system locks up your organization can be done for a while and so I think this is a good one to be on top of all right finally cultural grants this budget request responds the recommendations of State Council and the Arts Commission to make the one-time increase approved last year to large facility based cultural organizations to ongoing grant category

[193:02] all right that wraps up key initiatives first up Jane has her secret it's not very secret because it's on page 115 so after the Hillard Hinds report we were asked to take a very serious look year-over-year at stop data from the police department and we did so by getting a new records management system that came up I think in the 2017 time frame at the end of last year we were able to finally take the data that we had received from that system and start to analyze it we analyzed it over the first few months of this year I made a report at the end of April or early May that report actually coincided was the work of beginning the oversight task force and in the work that we had done to present that report it became really clear to staff that we need a person who

[194:02] is really focused on data related to the police department particularly around our stock data our equity data our trend data those sorts of things and we did not have a person in either IT or the police department that was able to take on those responsibilities and so we've added that to the budget it's on page 115 its line 48 there it was a request when we heard tonight from the oversight task committee I wanted to bring up the fact that many of you on Council suggested that we have a person that would really focus on trend data for the police department and it has been our intention that this budget recommendation would meet those needs and so we think that we are already ahead of the curve if you approve the budget approve the budget and improve this position to provide the kind of data that we're going to need going forward to understand the work of our

[195:00] Police Department in the community so we think that we've checked that box if the budget is passed in this fashion we do the anticipatory all right so next steps and sorry well yes and to follow up on a critical need on this program so thank you very much or next steps include first reading a public hearing of the 2020 budget on October first and then second reading of the public hearing and then first reading of all of our special districts were you switched off you had and become the board of something else but those first readings occur on October 15th sir questions for you is broadly just gaining feedback on the 2020 budget seeing if you have any questions on the economic projections or on what we've proposed and this three hundred page document which we're so very proud of

[196:00] well in terms of the economic projections with their questions thoughts on that piece of it let's do that first and then before we get into the let might get into pet projects hopefully we won't does anybody have any questions or comments on the projections okay then feedback on the budget that was just presented to us Mary so in the memo there was like one page of requests that did not get funded and which made me think back to that April memo that a study session memo that you provided that had like pages and pages of unfunded needs so I would be interested in seeing what of those unfunded needs aren't getting funded and through this

[197:00] budget process and and to see them separated out capital and operating and yeah in their term sure I believe that a lot of this not a lot I believe that there are several key priorities in that unfunded list that have either been achieved in 2019 or 2020 budget recommendation and a lot of the unfunded continues to be large capital dollars that would require additional funding sources but we can certainly outline it more comparable to what you saw in April - what's funded and what's remains unfunded yep so I had one actually a question that I wanted to bring up which was so the Planning Board considered this right they and they had a motion I think was run the CIP specifically right and I'm not finding language here exactly but they recommended that we look at I believe increasing our work with minority and women-owned businesses do I

[198:00] remember that correctly so it was related to and I find it but so for the past several years one of the planning board members has made a motion to encourage the city to look at yes inclusive inclusive purchasing practices which I think it's kind of twofold there's work that we are doing and I think that Julia could speak to some of the work that she's doing on the her most recent RFP with becoming more inclusive and also just a more broad understanding from the Planning Board member of what our practices already are which we have engaged with them to meet with our purchasing manager to better understand it as well but we certainly take that serious and again I think have done a lot of work with a recent RFP to make it more broad and inclusive through it equity lens which I would love Julia to shares I don't know that it's widely known hello again so the city of Boulder is a partner with Bloomberg philanthropies and something that's called what work cities and the idea is capacity building in municipal

[199:01] governments across the country as part of that they helped align resources from various institutions Harvard Johns Hopkins Hopkins etc to city priorities and city capacity building so we're actually working with the Harvard government performance lab to evaluate our procurement practices particularly looking from an equity standpoint and a couple of findings there in general it's just the kind of data that we collect we're not getting good data right now on the kinds of vendors that we interact with and so we don't have a good baseline measure of those minority-owned women-owned businesses that we have been buying from and so there's there's some efforts that were identifying in terms of the future needs and how we gather data and then we are piloting some of those efforts through the broadband procurement so we are kind of changing the way that we do capital procurement in the city looking from starting from

[200:01] the broadband perspective so a couple of things that we're trying to do are expand the number of participants in the process engaging prime vendor x' and subcontractors in new ways and allowing them to engage with each other providing longer runways for folks to understand the procurement that we're doing so that they can better prepare and brought a better partner as part of that we launched the first stage of this activity maybe two weeks ago with pre RFP vendor webinar we had 90 firms or 90 participants sign up and 70 people participate in that call and that was basically to talk about the purpose of the project what we were trying to build some of the goals that we have from an equity standpoint some of the different ways that we want to engage with funders so we're trying this out on a big procurement we have a lot of work to do in terms of policies and procedures how folks engage with us on a

[201:00] general procurement level but we're hoping that we can learn a lot through the the broadband procurement and thank you for that Julia so I guess I just make a request that we highlight these efforts in the budget as we go forward and maybe to talk about what we're doing now and what we think we could do in the future so of course the city spends a fair amount of money and it's one of the tools that we in our toolbox to increase equity in our communities through the procurement process so thank you yeah can i clarify do we have a stated goal around this or is this a general we headed this direction and then from this we'll develop criteria from a broadband perspective it's a little bit tricky based on what we know about the market for construction firms in this space I'm or as a city around the larger issue so I think we're using an inductive approach where we understand how this works here and then can start to apply that more broadly we're also looking at process questions and things like that

[202:00] that we can kind of immediately take action on but we haven't stated a goal yet at this point okay I think a new council might want to look at our ambitions around minority engagement of minority-owned and women-owned businesses I know some other cities have goals and criteria around that that we might learn from I'm gonna jump in just quickly though the work that our gare 1.0 team is doing has been to focus in a couple of different areas and they're not all coming to me right now but one of them is procurement and so we are gonna be focusing on trying to improve our equity and establish goals like that through our procurement processes so that work is already underway it's not completed and I failed to mention that connection because we did start with the gare work and then we moved backwards into this project so thanks for that James so it seems to me like this is a very good thing to be doing and it also

[203:01] seems like the next council should bring it up during the retreat and say does the council want to participate in this goal setting because I think if that might be the kind of activity that's appropriate for the council to weigh in on with appropriate staff kind of support so there's my one kind of question feedback but other than that you guys have done a phenomenal job oh my goodness so and I feel like the new initiatives have been tied very carefully to the priorities that this council has expressed so I feel like we're going in the right direction yeah oh sorry I lost the track Bob and then Sam well the items on the Katy on the the not funded list on attachment B was aligned eleven senior internal auditor position as a salary of filly with that we talked a little bit about what that position is and then and then how we

[204:01] feel comfortable getting by without it so I can start it maybe see Cheryl's on the move start with it what I will say broadly about the unfunded list right now is if you notice there it's heavy on staff so a lot of the unfunded that we move forward with our staff just because we're trying to be cautious about adding ongoing resources and so while we are adding other resources I just wanted to kind of date daylight that while I waited for shell to come up and and talk more about the internal auditor thanks Katie Cheryl patellae CFO we the finance department saw this as a pretty high priority for us a lot of it has come about through some of the things that have occurred such as our a recent issue a recent issue with the Accounts Payable scam that we had and also just looking at best practices for an organization of

[205:00] this size having an internal auditor it's something that the city used to have and during the recession back in the late 2000s it was the position that was eliminated so we thought it was a very important position to bring back but looking at all of the priorities of the city it was something that did not make make the cut this year and so I'm gonna jump into because I was hoping that a councilmember would ask if there was one thing that you can this would have been my selection for the one staff member and theirs is one more item I'm gonna lift up on that list that made me sad not to include was the tree imagine Boulder campaign incentive program which is to add more trees to the city but you know the dollars only go so far and so those were the ones that were on the bubble and did not make it so so let me just

[206:01] maybe follow up on that are there to be now on first reading are there some things I am send this to tight budget we don't have like hundreds of thousands laying around and just we can find our own wish list but are there things within the incremental budget so you just pilot the key that we could dial back a little bit Jane and pick up either the thing I mentioned or the thing you mentioned I mean these are some flexibility any of those things I don't believe there's flexibility and the things that we add in we'd have to think about a service that we would eliminate or dial back and honestly we did think a lot so so no I guess I think that we got one of the cleanest audit reports that we've ever gotten this year so it might be an okay thing to wait a

[207:02] year and see how the next one comes out that would be the fifth year of the five-year cycle for the audit firm so I don't know Bob because you and I are on the Audit Committee it seemed like it was so clean this year that maybe we don't need this function yeah it's but you know we did have a you know fraud in it which says doesn't anything to do with the audit it's just it's just an internal opportunity to check those things and catch those things before they become problems I guess I you know to the extent I know you guys keep a running list of adjustments to base I guess I'd put that on the deejay and I put that on the list and if to the extent that we are as we get into next year we look like we have a little bit of extra money because of revenue positive revenue surprised as I would put that pretty high up in the list thank you so can I ask how many auditors we have working for us now do we have any we don't have any we do internally we don't and we do have some of our accounting folks do just minor audits

[208:02] but really that's not a great practice with separation of duties to have the people who kind of run the books also audit the stuff that's going on there sodas our audit firm offer an enhanced service for because I know that they go through and they check a whole bunch of different things when they do their annual what would you view the internal person's job as different than like hiring a consultant to come and help with that we have hired our external auditors for certain forensic type audits that like we recently did one of P cards so the internal person would would replace some of what we would hire an external auditor to do an internal auditor would also work more with departments on their internal control procedures around cash and other highly sensitive processes that are ripe for

[209:01] for problems could this be part-time I mean is there way that we could move it faster because this was a full-time employee right it was a full-time employee I mean it could I mean anything would be better than what we have now so certainly we could make this a part-time position but given the operations at the city our preference would be full-time thank you well so we're not giving direction but let's put that on the list of things as we get to first reading to discuss maybe more fully if we want there may be other things that emerge is the public also ways in were you done Sam oh just great job the budgets in really good shape it's easy to read and and look through and I do look forward to hearing what members of the public might have to say I had a question you listed in the document highlights or the new things

[210:00] one of them was 400,000 for the energy impact offset fund you say more about that what that goes to Carolyn with climate initiative so if you'll recall I came to you earlier this year to discuss bringing the fund in-house from Boulder County who had been previously collecting it so we're now collecting that as part of our total budget and that is our annual estimate of what our funding is going to be accumulated so that's the fee we charge to marijuana cultivation businesses that are unable to offset their electricity through on-site solar and so that's the fee they're paying us and so that's the money we have available to do offset project wrecked mm-hmm that's what I was hoping that was and we're looking forward to beginning to spend it very soon great

[211:03] all right any other issues feedback if we have other things that occur to us let's sort of standardize what expectations are if people think of other things that they they have questions on or if they think you know what that unfunded thing on page whatever what's the timing for communicating how do we want to handle that so the thing that would be super awesome is if we could get your questions or requests by - from tonight so that we can try to turn it around in two days and get it in the memo that is due on September 26 for the October first public hearing yes really you're gonna give us two weeks and you two days that seems crazy well yeah it's not fair

[212:03] how about we have a week does that work for us yeah how about September 20th that would be perfect okay so questions requests to staff and frankly put on one hotline or to Council so everybody else knows by September 20th Co be right around this time of year we often we have we have some members of the community will actually read our budget and have questions about that should we direct all those to you Katie yeah I'm happy to start with that in we get the comparables like we like Ann Arbor and stuff like that it all goes to you right yes that'd be great good anything else all right well thank you so much yes thank you very much really appreciate everyone's time and thanks to everybody who came out is probably half the city staff is up for the princess also say

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