February 4, 2020 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:01] the other thing I just want to mention about municipal courts as many people will only ever get a ticket in their Municipal Court and they won't be in one of those other courts so municipal courts really help inform people's impressions of the justice system as a whole so these are the traditional role those are the traditional roles of municipal courts for some places it's a geographically convenient forum because some municipalities are pretty far from their county seat sometimes there are local law violations for which there is no state court counterpart so we can handle those cases and then they're the kind of the costs of judicial hearings which are more or less civil in nature and again those can only really be heard in the municipal courts so that's the traditional role and I'm not going to read everything that I wrote up there because I know you can do that yourselves but I want to talk a little bit about the role of our Municipal Court because we do do all of the traditional Municipal Court functions

[1:01] but in addition we do other things so first of all we deal with quality-of-life violations and they may differ from municipality to municipality because people in cities have different social problems that they're trying to address so not every not every city is a college town and has to deal with the kinds of issues that come along with being a college town and not everybody has a high population of homeless folks so that's what's nice about municipal courts is they can be pretty nimble and respond to what the local environment is the second thing is it can really reflect the community values so here in Boulder we have a real problem solving approach to the violations that occur in our court whereas some other places might value that less and they might value sort of the more traditional Municipal Court approaches another difference is that we really care about the process itself and having the process be a good experience and that's

[2:02] actually really been emerging in courts as you know since about 2005 when somebody wrote a white paper about that but the process is really important to people's perception about they're not they were treated fairly and it's really seen as more critical to that decision or that impression than the outcome of their case and so that's something again that we really work on to a very high degree in our court and then all of those other nice things we are evidence-based in our approach as we collaborate we innovate some of the things that we're doing are things that are not being done anywhere else that I'm aware of so I want to talk a little bit about the kinds of cases that we see so these are generally the categories of cases over there on your left with the numbers that were associated with filings of each type of case in 2019 so you may not have known this but parking tickets are actually

[3:01] handled in our court that's not necessarily true in a lot of other places but that's true for us and then you can see the other types of cases that we have as well and even though you can see that we have a very high number of traffic court filings really where we concentrate our efforts as judges and probation officers and other courts staff the the ones who are charged with doing some of the things other than taking payments are doing data entry we're really spending our time in those bottom three categories of cases you might wonder where we are cases come from they're not all the boulder Police Department that might have been something that you would intuitively think but we also get cases from the Cu Police Department so I'm a lot of our on campus violations are from there as well as from open space and mountain parks Rangers so I thought that might be of interest to you and you can see the percentage of cases in 2019 that came from each of those agencies I'm not gonna dive into this in any level of

[4:00] detail but I just thought you would be interested in our organizational structure and who we have working at the court our court administrator is James honcho he's also the department head I am NOT the department head that's not unique to Boulder the municipal courts are around the state are split about 50/50 in terms of whether the presiding judge is also the department head or whether the court administrator is one thing I do want to point out though that is thing that's probably new to most people on the Dyess tonight is we added a half time homeless specialist in the last six months so you people who know the court know that we have had a homeless navigator for a couple of years but we and I'll talk more about that for the newer members in a little bit but we were able to add another half time person to do more of that kind of work because we were getting so much value out of it these are some of the innovations that we're really proud of

[5:01] in MIP which is the abbreviation for a minor in possession cases we assign the treatment that the person receives based on an individualized screening that happens at the court using an evidence-based tool we use restorative justice that's not unique to Boulder but it still is a really important approach to use with especially the young adult community having a homeless navigator is actually something that I'm not familiar with any other court having in the state of Colorado there are some places around the country that are doing some pretty innovative things and some community court models that have people who serve a similar function but it's really relatively rare and then we have a pretty robust use of technology in our courtroom I thought you might be out so I'm gonna talk a little bit now about two of the big categories of defendant types that we see in our court the first is young adults in 2019 we that's how

[6:01] many minor in possession cases we had that's up a little bit from previous years and I think that what that change is attributable to is for the first time this fall they have what they call on campus Community Safety officers who were not commissioned officers before this fall and so they could not write these tickets themselves they could call in a police officer who could write that they are now commissioned to just write MIP cases only and so that's increased the number of referrals to the court and the benefit of that is the people are getting the the intervention that occurs by coming to court and being assigned to treatment and and so forth and so we think we get a better out for students that end up coming to court on those cases quality-of-life violations it's hard to quantify resisting and obstructing for this population because there are plenty of other people who are not young adults who get those charges but the noise and nuisance party cases we see are almost

[7:00] always that population so we can make that generalization there and then with the other types of violations again it's hard to break out the young adult population you might not think of getting the bare trash violations but actually because they are a fairly they're fairly short term you know one year in their rental units and we do really great education so people on the hill who lived there a long time know about those or parts of the city that have those violations know about them but if somebody moves off campus after being the dorms a previous year they're kind of likely to get one of those tickets because they don't necessarily know about that type of violation these are some of the strategies that we're using with this population again I'm not going to going to go into that into real depth tonight but certainly something this is a topic that I sometimes bring to Council in a quarterly update so that I can sort of give you current numbers so this is not meant to be current numbers but just by way of example I

[8:00] might come and show you how many minor in possession cases we've had and this was this slide was something I did a couple of years to show ago to show sort of the increase in percentage that are attributable to marijuana since legalization of marijuana versus alcohol another type of data that you might see is a discussion about noise and nuisance party violations and how it compared before there was a party registration program and after so again I'm not planning to do a deep dive into that data tonight but you may see some of that in a future presentation we have a great database court records management system so there's a lot we can do in that regard the other big sub population that we deal with are no surprise probably the homeless population and these are some of the most common kind cases that we see charged in our court that our commitment committed by homeless offenders so some of the strategies that we're using is really

[9:03] where I want to focus here's what we certainly try to refer people to resources and there's some examples up there we're trying really hard in our sentencing to work with people to help them accomplish things that they want to accomplish anyway so if somebody who doesn't have an ID or a copy of their social security card or copy of their birth certificate a typical sentence would be that we would impose some amount of community service and then suspend it on the condition that they obtain one of these documentation or they might be asked to complete coordinated entry or to sit down with one of our navigators and do the VI spinette that's the vulnerability index that's the VI that's that is necessary to get people into the system for eventually getting housing and housing is people are matched to housing based in large part on the on their vulnerability index score so those are

[10:02] the kinds of things that we're doing and the people who are helping them get that done are our homeless navigators are homeless navigator now homeless specialists oftentimes in conjunction with the homeless outreach team officers because transportation for instance to the Social Security office in Louisville is often a big barrier for people to get their Social Security card and so the homeless outreach team may be able to help with that recently just last fall we created an uber account for the court so now the homeless navigator and specialists can go in a new bur we don't always have to rely on the homeless outreach team officers but if we feel that that's an appropriate use of that resource we will but it's nice now that we have another mechanism for helping people navigate these bureaucracies and get done what they need to get done we're also working really

[11:01] collaboratively within all of the systems that are addressed the homeless so the coordinated entry system all of the different homeless service providers some of the main ones being called out there on that bottom bullet we are on different committees both locally and regionally and the top bullet we're really trying to work hard and identifying who are the highest utilizers of the court but not just the court in the criminal justice system across all courts but in other places as well like hospitals and so forth emergency rooms jail beds so that we can try to strategize about who those people there's a new thing that's you heard Vicki Abner about a month ago and Heidi grow from the county we just had a presentation since your presentation about fuse which is a national model for looking at identifying the highest offenders across systems and trying to prioritize them for services as an

[12:02] example again I won't go into this this is document 8 or these are outcomes though that we shared two years ago with the then incoming council members about some of the things that our homeless navigator was able to accomplish in that time frame of course these numbers need to be updated but and you know with two more years under a belt we have that much more that we've accomplished but these are the kinds of things that you can see that we've done and these are some of the housing related outcomes back at that point we're way higher now than we were particularly on people housed but it's it's always it's always one of those things that takes many many many steps and navigation of a lot of barriers for lack of a better word because moving into housing and getting the appropriate documentation to get there is not a low barrier endeavor it's something that takes quite a bit of assistance just so you know what's on

[13:04] the horizon I talked a little bit at one of one of my last quarterly presentations about the community court model since then there was a nice article in The Daily Camera that was over Thanksgiving week so I don't think it made it to the to the daily download but if you want to go back and look at it the link is there and we're doing that with the assistance of a technical assistance grant we hope to launch that this coming year and also we I'm part of a an association Municipal Court judges from around the country that's trying to establish a National Association of municipal courts under the umbrella of the National League of Cities so the last two NLC City summits myself and my colleagues have presented that's a picture of us right after our presentation but it's a really worthwhile endeavor because we have what's so great about this group of people there's about 12 of us judges is that we all have the same issue so when

[14:00] you heard Mary young for instance talk at the retreat about the the white paper that was issued about municipal courts in the aftermath of Ferguson everybody around the country is dealing with that and it's nice to be able to connect with peers who are looking at the same issues that we are bond reform is another big one so that's a it's it's going to be a great organization and we're hoping to grow it to critical mass at some point but it step by step if you want to come to court those are the dates when you can come and see the various types of cases that you might see and so you have that I'm sure you have a copy this PowerPoint so you have that at your service and that's all I do people have questions you may have questions thank you all right and again I invite any of you who wants to to come and meet with me and find out more thank you good

[15:15] evening Anna Anderson Golden Colorado where I have a national award-winning preservation firm I am the president of the Colorado Chautauqua Association here's ten just to underscore why I guess vote to change our bylaws is so desperately needed when Susan Connelly became Chautauqua's executive director in 2003 a respected Boulder citizen told her something is badly broken up there and it may not be fixable in large measure he was referring to the longtime practice of Cottagers to purchase multiple memberships for their family and friends as a way of buying votes something that is totally allowed under our hundred-year-old bylaws and here's

[16:02] recent proof that vote vine is alive and well in our elections most of our members buy memberships in the spring when our concert series is announced but the second pump is happens right around our election time right up to the the run-up to the election last summer 230 memberships or 36 of those who voted were purchased within 48 hours before the election and with some people buying up to $1,000 worth of memberships so what happens when vote buying elevates special interest to board seats in my four years on Chautauqua's board I've witnessed exactly what happens Cottagers with special interests asked us to set aside 50 thousand dollars for lowering lodging rates and tell us that our loyalty discount program just isn't good

[17:00] enough without ever letting up on this drumbeat they continue to recommend that if we just stop rehabilitating our cottages and laid off some staff we could pay for these special perks these special interests are disruptive destructive and often handcuff the good work that the board and staff do man we have a question for you thanks for coming in I actually have two questions you mentioned somebody about a thousand dollars were the memberships how many how many memberships were votes is that how much they cost proof that's forty votes yeah memberships are pretty inexpensive at twenty five dollars so that real bump happens in the twenty five dollar range okay thanks and then someone unrelated what's the what's the ground I know that the city owns the the real estate should talk while and then Chautauqua intern subleases it to the cottage owners what's the the ground rent how much did they pay per month or per year to I think on average is about twenty four hundred dollars per year yes so two

[18:02] hundred ollars a month roughly roughly okay thanks Evan Ravitz North Boulder the elections working group got together on December 18th and we found a whole bunch of interesting stuff we found out that in nine months the city IT person had failed to negotiate a Memorandum of Understanding with either the state or the county for the voter registration

[19:02] database access necessary to identify people by their driver's license before they sign a petition and Denver's had no problem getting that access for their tablet version of petitioning next slide please but more importantly we found that map lights free offer was rejected under false pretences could we play the first sound file please this is your IT director not working okay so she says as you can see map light has never built a secure web site available to the public this is false she also said map lights free system including zero security protocols this is also false next slide please so here's the view of map lights public

[20:05] website for the California League of Women Voters and you can see by the little lock icon to the left of the URL that is secure next slide please and here are two more places you can go and see the security of their websites for the league and for the California Secretary of State over the next weeks and months good evening Council Lessig lustrum in Boulder and as always thank you so much for on top of everything else you do for caring about climate change all the other decisions we make obviously don't matter right when they get flooded in one way or another so as

[21:01] you know Patrick's gonna get up and okay yes we'll do it without that's been spent on muni over the last eight years this is representative of the after-tax net income from excel over that same period of time I'm a scientist I think in graphs you can see the little blue bar that the red bars is excels revenue from Boulder about over a hundred million a year this is such an important decision for our community I continue to hold hope that Councilman Yates is gonna take this as a business decision which it really is an addition to all the climate reasons 100 million dollars a year we don't want to make that decision before we've actually looked at what's going on so it's gonna be great to have you on board right with the analysis I'm not asking for support I'm asking for the analysis I'm not

[22:02] gonna call it the naughty list for the most part but just to kind of get started we didn't do any analysis of our own supply Claire plants supposed to last for 60 years didn't analyze their cold supply [Music] what it costs for the decade to operate it I've broken it down if we take 4% of the annual operating cost Bowl there's about 4% of excels load we're looking at about 3 to 4 million a year just for Boulder to pay off that massive mistake all the other mistakes Hale in comparison and that's bigger than our 2020 utility occupation tax so thank you so much black and mark del band

[23:15] my name is Patrick Murphy I live in Boulder this is the continuation of the 24 articles of the Muni naughty list article 10 original intent to take 5700 gun barrel customers and facilities outside the city Boulder can't just take customers and facilities outside the city limits that's clear in the regulations and PUC chastised boulders arrogance for thinking we could get away with pirating Accel's customers and facilities in a meeting with the city lawyer he stated he still thought the city had a right to take what we wanted but just didn't have enough money to pursue a court fight it was currently an organization called keep boku out that has standing at the PUC to stop the

[24:01] boulder bully ignoring over 10 million dollars in lost undergrounding Boulder loves to list all the wonderful things immunity can accomplish to add reliability and resiliency including powerline undergrounding but fails to include over 10 million dollars of undergrounding we lost and would have been entitled to if we kept the Excel franchise this is a true cost to the Muni that's not deniable yet Boulder ignores it in the cost assessment article 12 trying to claim the shared power poles doesn't decrease safety and reliability thinking Excel could be forced to share polls when there was no reason for them to do so sharing pools with different utilities is risky business that only occasionally occurs when it's advantageous to both utilities there was no advantage to excel to share pools and plenty of added risk the PUC put an end to this ludicrous effort by Boulder to bully

[25:00] Xcel into doing something stupid to be continued with articles 13 through 24 the planet burns floods and dies while Boulder fiddles time to burn the fiddle and the Muni and let real carbon reduction begin Elizabeth black then mark Gelb and and Nicholas Freeman hi Elizabeth black 43 14 or 13th Street good evening last month I described the citizen science soil health projects findings that tillage is hard on soil health now tillage does some great things it breaks up compaction kills weeds and incorporates organic materials all farmers depend on tillage to grow food but tillage has downsides to frequent

[26:01] tillage destroys living roots soil microbes feed off of without carbon sugars from living roots soil microbes can't multiply and sequester carbon their numbers drop tillage is especially hard on soil fungi which are symbionts tapping directly into plants roots for food in exchange fungi send little threads out many feet to gather water and nutrients to feed back to the platon plant tillage breaks all those little fungal threads and fungal numbers drop which in turn hurts plants growth soil fungi produced glomalin a soil glue which cements soil particles together to form micro aggregates micro aggregates are heavy and craggy they allow better water and air infiltration into your soil wind and water can't move them easily so they are less irritable but tillage breaks soil micro aggregates back into teeny soil particles which

[27:00] pack together tightly this makes soil less able to absorb water and much more irritable and finally bare soil off gases co2 from its surface into the atmosphere when soil is plowed all those extra surfaces on all those clods volatize even more co2 so like many things we humans do tillage has both good and bad sides next time I'll tell you about water's effect on soil health and soil carbon sequestration thank you mark Gelb and nicholas freeman and star wearing mark here nicholas freeman and star wearing fall all right my name is Nick I'm studying environmental engineering at CU I'm here today today to suggest that we as a community focus on climate change and the ecological damage taking place I came to polar from Chicago thinking that

[28:02] the people here would have these issues at the forefront of their minds to my surprise lots of people commute many miles from Denver and pollute the air with toxins people litter cigarette and joint boots on the ground our sidewalks and creeks are riddled with plastic bags paper and miscellaneous rubbish it's just really the world we want to live in these plastics and trash are bio accumulating in the ecosystem as well as hindering water flow I cannot be the only one noticing this let's come together as a community and invest in the most sacred asset we have which is the health of our ecosystems I do not want to be the only one that cleans up trash off the ground I advocate for our community here to take a look at the bigger picture not just for ourselves but for the future generations I also find it hard to believe that homeowners are not allowed to grow native grass in their front lawn I feel that some money from the budget should go towards ecological and soil restoration because

[29:00] our earth is in grave danger also everybody should do their part to clean up water systems such as creeks because this is not a one-man job today I hope to find out what the discussion is that is more important than the cries of Mother Nature why must we imagine mass-produced gas vehicles plastics and dyed clothing just to discard them later it all ends up somewhere in our plant I cannot take much more please consider my ideas for cleaning up streams and bodies of water limiting emissions from cars and fossil fuels and building soil health from native grass thank you I do Nick next so you mentioned that homeowners are not allowed to grow native grasses in their front yards yeah in the city of Boulder I'm not really sure about that okay thank you star wearing Ben bender and then Siegel good evening and my last name is

[30:02] actually spelled waa RI ng I'm here to talk about the lawsuit that was filed today against Chautauqua and the city and I'm on the Governance Committee I'm actually the chair of the Governance Committee of the Chautauqua color - Chautauqua Association I'm a lawyer and I'm a long-term resident of Boulder the lawsuit illustrates the real problem there's been a lot of publicity about it both on both sides but this lawsuit demonstrates that a very small group of wealthy mostly out-of-state cottage owners has hired a large denver lobbying firm to put their interests above all others Chautauqua stakeholders and what do they want they want a court to treat Chautauqua as nothing but a common homeowners association that exists to

[31:00] serve their property interests above all else there's no amount of money or lobbying however that can make this true Chautauqua is not an HOA Chautauqua belongs to all of us CCA has worked very hard to ensure that our meetings are held in full accordance with our bylaws and our membership is well informed on the issues at hand for example our activities have included hosting a public town hall with city attorney Tom Carr to answer questions from Cottagers and others we've distributed membership email updates before and during the election which is still going on a bylaws specific page has been put up on the Chautauqua website and Chautauqua's board continues to receive input from a broad range of stakeholders including Cottagers that will consider and act

[32:00] upon at its board retreat in March thank you thank you bender and Siegel good evening my name is Ben bender and I live in so folder I received today a copy of the concept analysis that you're going to be discussing under item 6b I believe and with respect to South Florida Creek flood mitigation who's running the show who decided that the city should pay Cu 15 million dollars for impacts shown in the concept analysis in fact C you should be paying the city of Boulder millions of dollars for flood damages caused by the 2013 flood when Cu purchased the depleted gravel pit in 1996 it had a reclamation plan that included many ponds that would absorb flood waters and did not include an earthen levee around the gravel pit to divert flood waters onto neighboring properties but see you change that

[33:00] around and they added they got rid of the ponds they had at the earthen levee so when the 2013 flood came the gravel pit was dry and neighborhoods were flooded there's a lot to discuss about this and and also a lots to discuss about why the city has been working on flood mitigation engineering for 20 years spending millions of dollars and we still don't even have preliminary engineering plans you have been very remiss on public engagement so I have taken the initiative to reserve the large meeting room on the west Boulder Senior Center for next Monday evening at 7 p.m. and I am going to give a well documented presentation about the history of Cu South in the cities for Dometic mitigation efforts that's next Monday at 7 p.m. and the West Boulder Senior Center you're all invited in each one of you after my presentation can speak for two minutes about your comments thank you and there will be cookies

[34:04] Lynn Segal Boulder the first thing has changed to three minutes the landmark property on the 311 site was damaged November 16th there was a fire on the property June 7th the landmark building when I looked at the image in the paper and when I went up to the property myself first of all after November 16th and before the further damage because apparently there's another homeless rogue bulldozer driver because more damage has been done the roof also is curved now that might have been from the original damage or or the secondary damage I don't know over

[35:01] time James Schubert says that this building is going to be rebuilt but from looking under the tarp one day it was open and I rode my bike up there and looked under the tarp and the damages on that earlier time were not nearly so bad as what was seen in the newspaper and and they were bad though I didn't think that that place could be repaired but I'm not you know a contractor so I think something really needs to be done about this site and it needs constant surveillance apparently they're doing further damage up there Thank You Lynn and we're open comment to closed there anymore okay bring it back to Council for the consent agenda

[36:04] nothing from the city manager so I wanted to just say a couple of things about the online petitioning I've got a matter scheduled later but since Evan has raised it an open comment I thought it fair to say that we're not going to make the 2020 election we have gotten delays we got it on Friday I learned that our new our vendor has proposed a timeline where they will get us the the the minimally Viable Product by June 13th the deadline for petitions is June 15th so it's not gonna work this year the minimally Viable Product would have been limited tested very limited ly and would not have had all the bells and whistle the final product is done so we're looking at and reevaluating is whether we can do a full-scale live test of the the product of the full product in time for the 2021 election to adjust some of the things that have been raised the the reason that Denver is able to get access to the database which we're still

[37:01] struggling we've reached out to the county again today we do not have an MoU to access the database which is one of the primary reasons for the delay we need we need the data and we in in the form that we're gonna get it for the vendor to build a pro at the software program is Denver's accounting Denver has the information already they don't have a doing MoU with anybody we are not a County we don't have the information we have to work with the county and the county has been concerned about giving us this data we continue to work with them we're totally would have the MOU mid last week we did not we called them again today we have not gotten a response so we keep pushing we hope to have it we've been told that they will get it to us and with our partners at the county generally work with us when we ask them for things so we expect to have it there was also a significant delay in getting the contract done as there always are in negotiations particularly with IT companies anything else from to the attorney we did get sued today by Chautauqua I believe the

[38:01] suit is frivolous and we will defend it oh I'm sorry that's right we got sued about Chautauqua by a group of cottage owners okay that's everything mr. Freeman mentioned that you could not grow native grasses in your yard is that I don't believe that's true I think that he may be returned to his I believe there's a limit on the height you can have in your grass in your yard before it's considered a weed native grasses to function properly you should be tall because we are a tall grass prairie so I in my yard we skirt that rule a little bit it's a foot but I'm not sure I can I can find that for your errand but I know my wife and I argue about this because she would really like them before if we talk cuz that's the way they're best well and we could bunch grasses in my earth they're taller your consent agenda

[39:08] tonight contains items a through D I had some questions on the lease with land lock LLC we have someone who can speak to that sorry here's Alison Rhodes our deputy director of Parks and Recreation and I also have Kate diner with me who is the lessee okay I just have a few questions I understand that the tenant is permitted to expand its hours essentially at its discretion is there any limit to that expansion there are the limits they're within city code around noise and operations of a business and certainly related to the

[40:00] liquor license and the lease is very specific around complementing the natural area and that it be an agreement with the city operations and so I think the current plan is for the restaurant service to go around midnight but that doesn't mean for the full extent of activities I unfortunately had very extensive experience in negotiating restaurant leases in my legal career and in almost every one of them there's a percentage rent clause on top of the base rent and the cam this lease did not have that was there a specific reason why we did not mainly for the administrative burden of auditing rents and other incomes okay I need to point out to you that paragraph 10a is a little bit self contradictory the assignment paragraph and I read assignment cannot cannot be simultaneously at the city's sole discretion and not to be unreasonably withheld but I don't think that really

[41:02] works okay okay and last question who's responsible for keeping the outdoor area in which they operate free of trash and refuse it just wasn't clear to me sure it's a shared responsibility so the city has a basic standard that we're operating now within which we groom the beach do trash pickup and the tenant should there be increased trash or other things related to their operations they will pay for that as part of their cam and will likely provide the service okay thank you just as a frequent user of the reservoir does this mean that the reservoir main gates will be open until midnight most days how the gates operate is really important to protect the water quality there and so we anytime the restaurant is operating we will have staff at the gates to ensure that boats are not coming in at the city's expense anything above and beyond current operations will be funded by the tenant perfect thank you anyone else okay

[42:01] any other points about the okay you may want to put a motion on the table I'll move the consent to Jim second all in favor it's a roll call vote oh sorry we start with councilmember brachot i friend yep Joseph yes so Ilyich yes Wallach yes Weaver yes yes yes young yes motion passes unanimously your first public hearing your only public hearing tonight a second reading of ordinance 83-78 landmarking of 601 Kalmia Avenue so this matter will be

[43:03] presented by Jim Robertson and Marcie Cameron I think that's the applicants all right good evening I'm Marcy Cameron with the planning department so this is a quasi-judicial hearing and so council members know any experts contacts I'll give a staff presentation followed by the owners presentation the public hearing is then opened and after the public hearing the applicant has a chance to respond to

[44:00] anything that was said and then the public hearing is closed and council discusses a motion requires an affirmative vote of at least five council members to pass a motion all right so tonight you want to approve the designation by ordinance modify and approve the ordinance or just the designation there criteria for your review tonight is in 911 1 and 911 2 of the boulder of ice code and that's whether the subject property meets the criteria for designation and conforms with the purposes and standards in the ordinance in balance with the goals and policies of the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan 911 1 and 911 2 intends to protect enhance and perpetuate building sites and areas reminiscent of past eras as well as

[45:01] enhancing property values stabilizing neighborhoods promoting tourist trade and interest in fostering knowledge of the city's living history the property up for designation tonight is at 601 Kalmia Avenue heated on the north side of Kalmia and west of Broadway the history of the application is that the property owner submitted the application in October of 2019 and on November 6 the Landmarks Board voted four to zero to recommend the council that council approved the application to designate it as an individual landmark we've had limited public comment two letters were received in support of landmark designation and one member of the public spoken spoken opposition of designation saying they would they were opposed to the current owners name being included in the landmark name which I'll address under the recommended landmark

[46:01] name and again the owner is in support of landmark designation so the criteria for designation asked us to look at the historic architectural and environmental significance in terms of its historic significance it's associated with the Braden family who commissioned the house and and it was built in 1964 and they lived there for about a decade Jack Braden was in the oil and gas industry and he shared an office with this architect Philip Carlton Jones Lilly and Braden was very well educated with multiple master's degrees and taught special education here in Boulder and wrote a really beautiful letter in support of this landmark designation in terms of its historic significance it's also associated with the modernist architectural movement in Boulder Boulder experienced a really unique and

[47:00] very impressive architectural landscape in the post-war area from about 1945 until 1965 or 1970 and this is part of that where architects here came and experimented with the trends that were happening so it was designed by Philip Carlton Jones as I mentioned he shared an office with Jack Braden this was his first residential commission and he said that they were ideal clients who said free rein to design whatever you'd like Philip Carlton Jones studied under Bruce Gough who was also an expressionist architect who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright and was really the powerhouse behind the University of Oklahoma's modernism school and so it serves as a unique example of early expressionist design from the first work period it plays with the same materials on the inside and out it incorporates

[48:00] exterior spaces as well as the interior and has these strong sculptural forms so in terms of the proposed landmark boundary the owner has proposed and the landmark board recommends that the landmark boundary follow the property lines of the house which is our preferred boundary it makes it easier in the future to tell what's designated and what's not and then the name the landmarks board also recommends that it be the Braden Belle's house recognizing both the first owner Jack and Lily and Braden and also the current owner sherry Belle's who's owned it since 1994 and has been a steward of the property and has really taken it or is really the reason it's so well preserved today so I thought I'm happy to answer any questions you may have council members have any questions okay I'll go to the public hearing

[49:19] 01 Kalmia thanks to staff for collating all the information that I gave to you for the packet and presentation and to the Landmarks board for voting unanimously to approve the designation and thank you all tonight for considering this you might ask why am i landmarking if my house isn't threatened with demolition unfortunately preservation and Boulder has more often than not been reactive rather than proactive and this goes back to the whole reason historic Boulder was founded back in 1972 and in the subsequent preservation ordinance passed in the Landmarks board form it's time to

[50:02] try to turn that around to be proactive rather than reactive and that's one reason why I'm here tonight for many years I lived at forth and Evergreen since the 80s and every day I would walk my dog up fourth Street and down Kalmia I was always taken by the unique architectural artistry of the home at 601 and daydreamed about living there someday in 1993 it came on the market and I was lucky enough to buy it the Braden's had built the house in 64 and sold it in 73 to the dew bucks 21 years earlier when I bought it there was a lot of deferred maintenance both of the physical structure of the systems in the landscape you can see that from the pictures in 65 when it was first built

[51:01] then in 92 93 when I bought it the cedar shakes were discolored and breaking single pane windows were drafty and let much of the solar heat gain during the day escape at night flat roofs leaked solar system was malfunctioning and dozens and dozens of trees had not been trimmed or pruned and there were many dead ones and then that's the back again you can see the deterioration when I bought it I carefully cleaned and repaired the cedar shake walls and parapets I replaced the leaking flat roofs which I'm now having to do again I had all 159 of the single pane glazing replaced with insulated units I worked out details that maintained the original exterior reveals albeit there were a few awning windows that I exchanged for casements as a side note I used a similar detail and changing the glazing

[52:01] when I redid the landmarked lebra house at 819 sixth Street it took me one and a half years to get the house back in good condition and in his continual process to maintain and improve both the house and the landscaping I look forward to staying there till they take me out in a black bag and hopefully for my sons to live there regarding the naming of the landmarking Braeden bells there was an email that stated that the Landmarks Board has seldom included the names of current owners in the ordinance two exceptions that come to mine are the Whitney Holmes house and the died Rose Saul house there is no attempt to diminish the current owner I'm quoting the letter that was written however and especially in the case of the Whitney Holmes house Judge Horace and June Holmes were longtime over 50 year

[53:00] residents raising their six children in the house as well as being actively involved in philanthropic and civic activities well I'm not judge Holmes but I would like to point out the following I moved to Boulder in 1977 so I've been here 43 years I've lived in this home for almost 27 years and that's the longest of any of three owners and I raised my two sons here I too have been actively involved in philanthropic and civic activities including the boards of the BC VA which was the precursor to boom oka Bixby School Boulder hockey club the Dairy Center for the Arts flat irons ITAT for Humanity and now historic Boulder as well professionally I have contributed to boulders built environment by remodeling designing and building close to 50 homes quite a few of which have been published or for which I've won awards the Braden's were

[54:00] trusting visionaries giving Philip Carlton Jones free rein to design this house in my conversations and correspondence with Lillian and her daughter Lisa I learned many interesting stories about them and the house itself as they expressed after nine years of living there when they moved back to Kansas and sadly left this house they considered it their souls home it's almost prophetic that my whole career as an architect my catch phrase has been quote one's home is the merging of the spirit of the place with the spirit of the person this house is also my family's soul home and in that way we and the Braden's are truly connected thank you for your consideration no go ahead I guess the public hearing I don't have anyone signed up for the public hearing Sam could we do ex parte disclosures

[55:02] does any further than the ex parte disclosures that the applicant might want to rebuff nothing great thank you the original home was single pane windows and they had been replaced with double pane will subsequent owners be permitted in the ordinary course to be able to replace those windows with additional double pane windows or they gonna have to go back to the speck of the original house great question I think windows and preservation is a complicated topic and I think as we go in designate these homes that were built in the 50s and 60s that had these experimental technologies we look at them differently than a turn-of-the-century house with traditional wood windows or leaded glass or stained glass where a guide I strongly recommend repair rather than replace when we get into mid-century

[56:02] design it's more about the relationship of solid to void than it is about the the wood material or the glass itself and so the second part of the question that I heard was can you replace non-historic windows in the future and the answer is yes and you we would point back to the original design of the house of what is that relationship to solid invoice to continue that on from Boulder hmm that's too bad it's not required to keep the double panes maybe we need to make some changes in our building code for landmark properties or historic kind of properties I've seen sherée bellas worked for many years and really have

[57:01] appreciated her architecture one thing I could suggest is that the original architect's name get put on too and it's kind of interesting that another architect gained inspiration from the work that she does around town from living in the house and I think it's a great landmark an opportunity of course you know I want to landmark just about everything in town but I still think this is a great thing to landmark we would like to kick us off this Sunday does she have to responder we should at least give her the opportunity to respond right okay would you like to

[58:02] respond to what you heard from Lin for me this is a relatively easy one I mean this is a very distinctive property I think it's appropriately being landmark I'm very grateful that the current owners are willing to do this and this is an asset to preserve what I think is truly a landmark property into the future great I moved to Bob ordinance 83-78 designating the property at 601 Kalmia Avenue to be known as the Braden Belle's house as an individual landmark under the city of Boulder historic preservation ordinance I just like to thank miss bells for the extreme care that she's taking with this property and improvements that you've

[59:00] made to it and it's a gorgeous landmark for the future and thank you for being proactive I just wouldn't thank sherry as well yes thank you roll call vote we start with councilmember friend yes Joseph yes yes Wallach yes Weaver gates yes young yes rocket all right the motion passes unanimously congratulations and thank you your next item tonight is south Boulder Creek of flood mitigation yeah this item will be presented by Director of utilities Joe tanto gee and as you know when we spoke with CAC about the preparation of this item it was agreed that there would not

[60:01] be materials in your packet but that Joe would be presenting the PowerPoint which he sent out on hotline last night so city council I'm Joe Teti Yuchi Utilities Director in our public works department and tonight I've got a brief presentation on the South Boulder Creek flood mitigation project as you know we have a study session coming up on February 25th where we will be talking about the project in detail and tonight I wanted to do a limited preview of some of the key findings that's coming out of our consultants work in our concept design report which is in draft form right now sure so start tonight with a quick review of

[61:03] the project and then talk about some of the primary trade offs that we're seeing as a result of the design work and the consultants work and then at the end of the presentation I'd like to check in with the council on the study session and what we'll be talking about on February 25th and so before I leave this slide there's a photo up there that shows a car underwater this is on koala Drive there's about four feet of water there and this is what happened when the 2013 flood over topped us 36 and project that we are working on is aimed at preventing that type of flooding from happening in the future so this slide that you're looking at here is a rendering and just kind of going over the the basics of the project

[62:02] and the vantage point here is looking from the intersection of us 36 and Table Mesa and looking to the south and the blue area that came in that is the water that would pool behind an embankment and a flood wall that we would build under a concept that's called variant that we've been referring to okay we've been referring to as variant one it's what council directed staff to work on and this alternative would prevent us 36 from overtopping and creating scenes like the photo on the slide before Joe could you go back to that slide can I

[63:00] ask you a quick question sir that photos real helpful can you I don't know if you got a pointer can you just show where I'm see you construction area would be on that photo and I was kind of a little bit in the distance there I can but I'm gonna have a series of slides coming away thanks well so this slide kind of shows the area from a different vantage point this is a full-on overhead view or what we call a plan view of the project the diagonal line that you see coming through the middle of it is us 36 you see Table Mesa and as this yellow rectangle comes up the flooded area that's shown in there in the blue area is what we're trying to prevent that is an area that we've referred to as the West Valley and that's what's floods when us 36 over

[64:00] tops the blue shaded area on that map is the extent of the hundred year flood limits we have similar maps for the 500 year flood so the goal of the project is to prevent that overtopping and protect people and property in the West Valley so this slide is is really the reason that I felt it was important to check in with counsel before the study session and the most striking thing on it for me is the total project us at the bottom and particularly how quickly they go up the first column is represents the hundred year flood the second column the 200 year flood and the third the 500 and so the cost go up pretty dramatically for the project as you move up in a higher level of flood protection and that is the reason for that is because

[65:03] it it transitions from just a dam in the flood wall and embankment and a flood wall to an earthmoving project as well and the earth moving and and Phil that's required is to build up property in the Cu South area so that University can have a hundred and twenty nine acres to develop their land which is a component of the older Valley comp plan and guiding principles that were agreed on as a part of this project I will note that the two hundred year flood column you see that the values for the properties and people protected are penciled in and marked draft and that's because in our planning documents the hundred year flood and the 500 year flood are recognized regulatory

[66:01] components of FEMA and flood plain mapping and so we have those red we have layers that show those extents readily available in our mapping in our GIS information the two hundred year flood really isn't a part of the regulatory world and so we're having to build that information ourselves and so we'll replace the penciled in calculated values at the February 26 our 25th study session with more accurate information so Jericho question on the site you know - it's a total project costs include 15 million dollar estimate for impacts to Cu facilities is that those South Loop Road the warehouse and the tennis courts exactly it's a collection of things that would wear see use property would be impacted if we built flood detention on top of it and if when a flood occurs the

[67:00] reservoir fills up things like the tennis courts would be under water and so they would have to be relocated just maybe something as you move to the other slides is the impacts and the cost the same for those three scenarios or would there be additional amounts in some the higher scenarios the 15 million dollar costs that are noted in in the second note there would be the same for all of the flood levels will be showing a more detailed breakdown of costs at the study session the amount of fill that is required as you go up in flood protection level and you inundate more area you have to import more fill to create the hundred and twenty nine acres for the University and those costs change with the flood level as it goes up thank you so this next series of

[68:00] slides kind of going back to the overhead view or the plan view shows what the different flood levels look like this slide is the 500-year flood and you can see the blue shaded area that that's what would be inundated during that flood and brown shaded area is the area of property that would have to be filled up above and outside of the flood level so that the university could develop so that's the 500 500 year flood the next one shows what that looks like for the 200 year flood lesser area inundated lesser area of fill some of this gets into the way the areas are shown for the fill gets into the land use designations underneath which I'm not really prepared to speak to that tonight but we'll get into those details for sure when we talk to you during the

[69:01] study session and then the the third one here is the 100-year flood and a much lesser area inundated still some fill that's always been anticipated as part of the hundred year flood question yeah Joe that's helpful so the dark brown that we're seeing on these three alternatives you say Phil that's that's um earth being brought in to raise the level right can you give us an idea are we talking like a foot or like several feet I actually don't know off the top of my head I believe it's it's several feet it's hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of okay and the reason you said that regardless of what well let me ask that as a question if no one was gonna build on that land at all would that feel still be required for flood mitigation just to make the water go where it needs to go No so the fill is being done solely for

[70:01] purposes of upgrading buildable land is that right now the agreement reached with the University and establishing those guiding principles is that as as part of giving us property for the flood mitigation to develop our project on we would leave 129 acres for them to build on and to do this to do that we have to raise the elevation of the land so that out of the floodplain when you come back on the 25th would it be possible for you to break out those fill costs underneath each of the three scenarios yes okay thank you because on slide five here you do have three roll-up numbers and we'd understand that the fill cost is part of those total numbers the fill cost is is part of those total numbers okay have the you have the 15 million for the moving the tennis courts and things like that and then the flood project itself

[71:01] the the dam the flood wall and the embankment at the 100-year flood is a little over 40 million for the 500 year flood if I recall it goes up to 47 million and so the fill costs as you get to the 500 year flood can be almost as much as the flood project itself except more get the zone okay who has prepared these cost estimates and how reliable do you believe them to be so our engineering consultant prepared the costs associated with the design components of the of the dam and the embankment and the fill and then we have

[72:00] been working with and meeting with the university to talk about some of the costs associated with moving the tennis courts and their maintenance warehouse and from the road and things like that so those are more staff developed costs the phase that we are in in this project again is conceptual level design we're trying to land on which one of these concepts are we going to move forward 100 200 500 or something else and so the the cost estimates do have a margin of error of plus or minus 50 percent or 50 percent and so as we as we move through the more detailed design of a project that contingency if you will will shrink the the amount of plus or minus will will shrink as we get more detail on the project and understand more about it get

[73:01] further along in the design I just want to make sure I heard you correctly that was a 50% yeah okay the difference between 100 and 500 plan is coverage for about 800 homes do those homes see any benefit at all from the hundred-year do they experience flooding but less than they would have otherwise or those homes just going to be naked let me go back to so if you if you look at this slide with a hundred-year extent limits when you go up to the 500-year and we can show you some of this information on February 25th the blue shading would expand out further and so they they would see some benefit I guess in that the water that's stored in our reservoir all of it

[74:00] wouldn't come downstream so they might have more time to get out but as as if we're protecting for the hundred year flood that's the volume that we're storing in the reservoir the dam and the spillway will be designed for something much larger than that so if the 500 year flood happens the whole dam won't fail water will just continue to increase in the reservoir and start to flow over the spillway and and so people would start to experience flooding downstream so that that's a big piece of the choice that would be accurate to say that the folks will be protected by the one out of your project those are the people who are in the 100-year floodplain and the 800 that would be additionally protected by the 500 year level of protection or people who are not in the 100-year but are in the 500 yes yes so if you had a

[75:00] hundred year storm those 800 households wouldn't be flooded anyway it's the the problem is that with the bigger storm they wouldn't be affected but if you were able to build the 500 year level of protection they would also be protected from that that's exactly right okay thank you thanks for the presentation Joe quick question the you mentioned the spill way over the the flood wall and if I recall correctly there's a rate at which that spills there's a design rate am i recalling that correctly or did I make that up well yes every every dam that is designed to have an overflow spillway there there is a rating curve that goes with that and so as as the water level comes up there's a calculation that can be made to say how much goes over and as the water surface in the reservoir increases

[76:00] more and more spills there are many different types of designs for spillways and so depending on the type it can have different flow characteristics but each one has a as a flow rate that goes with it and the whole because this will be classified as a what the stake ins that are is a high hazard potential dam it has to be protected up to a flood level called the probable maximum flood and so there there is a a storm design that goes with the probable maximum flood and that translates to runoff and an amount that comes into the reservoir and a calculated flow rate that goes over the spillway I'm not sure if it's what you're asking but this will be designed to handle the probable maximum flood between the amount that's stored in the reservoir and the amount that can go over the spillway it will be safe for

[77:01] those for that that's part of what I was recalling the other part that I was recalling was I had to do with Colorado water law and how water is supposed to be released by yeah I think I know what you're referring to so for storm water there there are water rights in Colorado and and every like Boulder Creek all the water that comes down Boulder Creek there are people all along the creek the city of Boulder irrigation ditch companies that have rights to that water and they can divert it from the creek so in a storm or a flooding situation where you're detaining water for a flood you can only hold it for 72 hours or three days typically when you're in a flooding situation where reservoir like this would activate nobody's too worried about water rights because there's more water than anybody

[78:00] knows what to do with water rights come into play more when the during drier conditions but that is a requirement of the state Joe could you go back to the cost table sure yeah so did I I thought I caught you correctly and I know you're doing some of these numbers off the top your head and we have more granularity on the 25th did I heard you say that the the difference between the flood mitigation part of it not the filtered but the flood mitigation part if you weren't worried about 129 acres the difference between 100-year and 500 year it was about 7 million was that right yeah 100-year flood is about 41 million dollars for just the flood mitigation costs and I am components the 500-year is estimated at 47 million so about 6 million so that that an incremental number of people protected in structures

[79:03] and dwellings protected if we didn't have to worry about fill dirt or or or how many acres are buildable that difference between the left-hand row in the column in the right-hand column would be six million dollars correct okay great thanks thanks for the presentation so far I'm guessing you're not done yet more so I'm piggybacking a bit on marks question if we do 100-year mitigation and there's a two hundred year flood is the you know in that first slide that you showed on quality you don't have to go back to it but is are we protected from some of the more catastrophic and menacing flow by just having the hundred year so I understand people in the 500 year plane won't get maybe anything in a two hundred if they're outside of that but does it help just to do 100 year in

[80:00] terms of lessening the damage and the the catastrophic nature of the water by having just the hundred-year wall in place does it slow down does it give people time to escape and exit their basements and things like that and I understand you don't have to answer these today but that would be helpful information for the study session what what benefits does the hundred-year conferred and safety even in the event of a 500 year flood yeah so definitely there's some benefit that the whole time the reservoir that were in the dam that we're building the whole time that's filling up during the flood that water is not overflowing us 36 and going down into the neighborhood whatever flood level is chosen for the ultimate design of this project again what happens once once you reach that is water will start going over the spillway and eventually will go over us 36 and some level of flooding will be

[81:00] experienced downstream but there there is benefit to everybody from having flood mitigation out there at any level so just to go through the last few slides here again going back to the rendering this is what the project looks like and it's we could enhance this slide to make the embankment and the flood wall stand out a little bit more there they're marked on here but if you watch what happens as I advanced the slide forward you can see that the fill area comes in and this is just for the hundred-year flood so if you go back to that other series of slides I showed that area would that gets filled in would be much bigger and so I'll just go back and forth a few times you can see

[82:01] that so that's what we're talking about of with the selection of this concept and the end the agreements that have been put into place with the comp plan guiding principles which for our design team and our consultant our criteria was stick to those guiding principles in the way we're developing those project as we as we go forward and move to a decision point for May and get into the final design of the project there's certainly some opportunity to have conversations about those guiding principles so the last thing that I wanted to mention was just talking about the agenda for the February 25th study session in general so our staff team we're planning to

[83:01] review the design work that we've been doing in a lot more detail talk about the flood modeling show some of the maps with the land use trade-offs and things like that before we even talk about that we would go through a bit of the history of how we got to this point because I know in some conversations there's been interest in that we would also give updates on the groundwater modeling work that is definitely an item of community interest and will be a part of the project as well as the geotechnical analysis that would all be part of the design discussion and then the university has recently resubmitted its annexation application and so we would see the study session being split into two parts first the design and then a discussion about the annexation and looking to get feedback from City Council on both of

[84:00] those as far as how we move the project forward and specifically we would like to have a discussion with you about the board and public outreach that we would plan to do between February and May and getting a sense from you of what you would like us to bring back from those discoveries in terms of annexation status before February 25 I assume you'll be sending to us the latest submission by Cu so that we can review it it may have already been sent to Council I will double-check on that it will definitely be part of the study session packet that sent to you in advance of the meeting okay thanks for that can you go back a couple slides please it's maybe to the 100-year map this one the one yeah that that one so I was curious so the you know one of

[85:00] the the costs and sort of inefficiencies about all of this is the need to move the tennis courts so I'm seeing from this that that's not an area designed to be inundated in in this one is there at all the possibility of shifting fill locations around such that we wouldn't have to rebuild the tennis courts under this scenario what could shift that buildable area to different part of the same I would have to check back with our design team we have been showing the fill area this way for for quite some time for the hundred-year so I'm not sure what what options we've considered on that but we'll be prepared to talk about that if you could look into in between now and then just a quick answer of either it has to be this way or oh you could put it over here maybe if we look into it that would be interesting to know thank you just a process question following up with the marks will the final packet also include

[86:03] the consultant's report yes I'm glad you asked me that question I know there's a lot of public interest in seeing that report and we should have done a better job as staff about clarifying that way we would receive in early January was a draft it took us some time to review the draft our comments are back in the consultants hands and they're working on it and one of the things that we realized in the way we set out with the consultants report we had done it and set it up as an appendix to Ana previous report that was done and enough has changed on the project that we felt it would be more meaningful at such a critical time to repackage it as a standalone document so it will definitely be available as part of the study session packet and will be kind of the foundation of the conversation that

[87:00] we have on February 25th but there will be plenty of opportunity between February and May for the public to review that and and give us feedback and comments as well great I know we duplicate our study session packets on either Thursday or Friday before the Tuesday so at a minimum we'll have it by then yeah potentially earlier but but no later than that yes okay great thanks thanks so we've talked a bit about our primary objective all of ours being to protect lives quickly so what I will be looking for at the study session is kind of information to make sure that we're staying on track so a couple issues that I see that I want to make sure that we are gonna have at the study session is one I don't think I've ever seen sort of who's in harm's way like if you go back to the who's protected in the hundred-year situation yeah that oval there's a lot of affordable housing for example right at

[88:01] the front there so I would be curious under the 100 200 and 500 year scenarios who we are protecting and who we are not protecting and so I think it would be useful to have data on that at least if we can't get like a full equity lens set of information at least you know the affordable housing units if we have we can get that like from bhp or easily that would be helpful so that we can have a sense of exactly who is in harm's way and again I think we're lessening everyone's harms way who is in harm's way even if we do 100 versus 500 but who were maybe leaving hanging would be useful information to me so that's one thing and and it also might be helpful I think if we did like a map of and this may be the map kind of what what flooded in 2013 and then an overlay of what we're protecting with a hundred years maybe maybe it's all of the 2013 flood I don't know and then what's protected

[89:00] under the 200 and 500 just to help us visualize that and then second we got a letter from Cu saying that they may not be able to build housing now under any of the variants so I'll be curious what conversations we've had with Cu what what they're saying now with what staff and see you have maybe come up might come up with on what possible paths forward there might be to still allow housing to be built there and third there's a lot of community engagement or request to us to look at a land swap for the planning Reserve in area 3 and so I have a feeling that will come up at the study session and I would appreciate clarification on timelines so what is the normal timeline for planning reserve area 3 to become area - how many years are we talking about leaving whoever it is in harm's way if we do nothing or we tacking on 10 years and then if there's

[90:00] talk about an expedited process this may be more - someone feels it's doing an unfortunate headshake over so if there was an expedited process what is the timeline for that and and what is the realistic process look like for that so I think all that would be helpful to have at the study session will be prepared to either speak to all those things or let you know in advance if there's information that we're not able to put together before then but yeah I think - Rachel's comment is that snow weather if that's even a viable option for Cu the planning Reserve right so doing research on something that C would not want may not be where we want to head so maybe knowing whether that's a viable option for them yeah important and just to get back to your point about what I I believe in somebody for

[91:01] planning can correct me if I'm wrong I believe that we can kick off a twenty-one twenty twenty-one urban services study and that would be the groundwork for what the sewer and the water and the stormwater services would need to be maybe staff can tell us how long they think that would take but that would be teeing it up for the 2025 comp plan oh it's my high alert at the planning department that's that's correct we're talking about doing the baseline urban services study around 2021 that would lead into a potential decision on whether or not to redesign eight the planning Reserve as area 2 which means it's sellable eligible for annexation during the 2025 Comprehensive Plan Update that's through our current process that's in our IgA for the comprehensive plan that we adopt with the county realistically that would probably mean those areas would become eligible in like 20 26 27

[92:03] don't go anywhere fill what Rachel I think I think what Rachel was getting at and I agree with is that's that's our plan right now other words if we weren't going to talk about a land exchanging like that that's something we talked about back in December and that's kind of road that we set up for ourselves but if we wanted to do something more aggressively we wanted to do things more expeditiously and you don't have to answer this question now if you don't know the answer will be very helpful to know on the 25th what's possible not what not what we have planned absent the land swap but if we really if you picked up the phone and called you tomorrow and said ok we'd like to do a land swap how quickly could we do it and just put some focus on that question I believe that we own somewhere between 190 and 215 acres of land that's in the planning Reserve is that correct we own quite a bit it was purchased through the Parks and Rec permanent Parks and Rec fun and then Housing division owns about 30 acres right so only point to raising that is

[93:04] we have a certain amount of control as a land over landowner as well and so can we go earlier in the queue if we had the urban services that he done forced a portion but not all of the planning reserve so would there be a way to move that forward if it were in the interest to see you in the city to do so I don't have the answer but we can find out the answer for council just where's the land that's owned by the housing department it's just above the go-cart track and it's the there's a long term lease on the site that is the tile flooring story the name is escaping me but that must listen can you send it just I'm just interested can you send this information on the our involvement with us I'm not really familiar with it I'm aware of the parks owned land further east there but be interesting to know with that

[94:00] personal status thank you and just to emphasize what Junie said you know along with updating us on the conversations we'll see you around housing it'll be important I think to be updated on the 25th what CU is saying about this land swap possibility I understand there are conversations happening so I think it's useful for us to be able to make decisions with all the information and have those conversations hopefully expedited if you would like we can ask them if they want to come up and share anything now hi-c you sure anything to share no good evening I'm Francis Street for the university I don't think we have anything at the moment we have had some conversations about considering what we could do for housing and looking at a land swap and Phil is just getting us

[95:01] some detailed information on that so it's pretty much where it is for instance will you be I'm presenting at the 25th that's part of the agenda we haven't fully decided on that I think we'd certainly discussed the annexation update but also looking into these options great we were just talking about thank you Joe given the complexities of this and then the volume of material we have to look at may I encourage you to accelerate the packet package so that we're not looking at it between Thursday and Tuesday of that week give us a little extra time to absorb it if it is possible suggestion by mark I also just observed for what it's worth

[96:00] the 500-year plan is the most cost efficient per person protected in this so to the extent that you just look at the numbers and you look at how many people are protected that's got the one that's got the highest bang for the buck as far as we take out of harm's way we can't do that and still preserve the hundred twenty-nine acres so there's that but just from a standpoint of comment on the flood design that is the most economical plus or minus fifty percent these are directionally correct and I think just looking at your notes here that's based on the the higher cost in other words we went back to just Joe's flood mitigation cost so this includes Phil and everything we need to do 149 I think it's even more dramatic and they can share numbers with us but more dramatically protected on a per person per dollar basis if you just focus on the flood mitigation facilities but you'll share those numbers with us

[97:02] anything else for tonight I just have a question if the information that I asked for about who's in harm's way does that require an out of five I don't know how long do you think it will take you to that would probably be a question for planning staff I don't so the question is how much effort would it be filled to come up with who's protected in the hundred and the 500-year scenarios we've talked with Rachel about this before and we cannot get that exact data about tonight what was asked for is where are their fordable units in the flood area and that data is data that I think we can get from HHS and Boulder housing partners so I think that that is doable we also have existing data on group

[98:00] quarters crib critical facilities listing so if I could just add another set of buildings to that perhaps the multi-family housing units in that area is that another we may be able to we'll see what data is out there and we'll get you everything we can get you would be interested in seeing right if the city owns the data so through zoning or building we can get the data if it's a census data or a demographic data we can't get it because we don't own that data we don't have access to it and what we could get access to is not accurate but what we have about buildings and zoning is accurate so we can get that do you know Jane if like the older housing partners sites if bhp keeps I don't know I know we're using

[99:15] bhp as shorthand here but there's there is affordable housing that's owned by someone by organizations other than bhp so I think we're talking about all affordable housing regardless of whether those PHP or I think the nest is in we will get all data that we can reasonably get with regard to affordable units by I don't think that would be a problem especially since that's spatial data that we're looking at and so it'll be turning on and off layers most likely okay because I think that will be informative as well yeah for most debate at least okay anyone else so it sounds

[100:02] like we can get this done without an out of five right okay very good let's have that for the 25th anything else on this at you very good thank you Joe your next item is local transportation mobility fee so for this item we have Carlos Fernandez who's the director of transportation and mobility and Chris Hagelin who is the manager there we go good to go

[101:13] yes great so thanks for having us this evening Chris is introduction Chris I just a personal intro I thought for our staff members those who might know Chris been with the city of Boulder for 12 years and within the gold boulder division he's graduate of Ball State University and he was a researcher of Drew's degree their master's degree there and he's researcher at Central the Transportation University in Florida which was Center for urban transportation research and they do a lot of journal publications so Chris is very well educated in terms of Transportation Research and Finance so we have him on this task because he cares deeply about it and so he's gonna give an overview presentation tonight what I wanted to ask before chris starts is to find out if you would be okay with

[102:01] option A or B option a being can Chris go through it he's got nine slides can we give him 12 or 13 minutes or would your preference which is totally cool if your preference is to kind of do a couple slides and have conversation and we'll do whatever you want we just want to know yeah what do you want to do Chris I would prefer to just get through and then have a lively to great thank you very much we do have a portion in the middle where Mayor Weaver will be giving an update as well so it will kind of be broken up in that sense good evening once again my name is Chris Hagelin I'm a senior transportation planner now also the acting NGO Boulder manager tonight I'm looking forward to a discussion with you on local and regional transportation funding and then also seeking councils direction specifically on some next steps on a local transportation mobility fee and its related community engagement process and then as I mentioned we'll also have an update on the countywide

[103:02] transportation tax issues that are moving forward from from Mayor Weaver our community's vision for our transportation system is one that it's well-maintained safe and sustainable as viable and provides efficient multimodal options creates livable neighborhoods reduces congestion reduces emissions and improves air quality we get there through strategic investments we want to fully fund capital and routine maintenance to provide a safe transportation system we want to invest in the for ease of vision grow we want to complete our bike Pet Network and our new newly conceived low-stress network and we need to invest in our local and regional travel corridors and also in local transit service as well as regional bus rapid transit we're facing a number of issues today sales tax is not keeping up with inflation and we're suffering from declining purchasing power we're currently deferring key maintenance in

[104:00] our roads and bridges there is increased competition for funding sources at all level whether at the state or at the federal level and one of the more pressing issues is RTD is simply unable to provide the service both and regionally that we need to meet our long-term transportation and climate goals with all this in mind in in kind of 2018 and into 2019 the city's transportation division conducted a needs assessment and this needs assessment revealed significant unmet funding needs in the realm of annual unmet needs which is everything from operations and maintenance to plantings and programs we identified approximately 23 million dollars in unmet needs in terms of one-time capital needs we identified at about 21 million dollars this is mostly related to improving our broadband network and our traffic ops system and then also the electrification of our transit system we

[105:01] also have the renewed vision for transit which essentially caused for a doubling in our level of both local and regional transit to meet those those long-term goals and especially deal with our regional and commuting issues with the completement of that needs assessment we formed in 2018 and work throughout 2019 with a community funding working group this contained community stakeholders and key partners your everyday residents as well and was hosted by our tab members the purpose of this funding group was to identify viable local and regional funding mechanisms for later tab and council consideration and we brought that to Council I think in in June of 2019 and then also in September of 2019 as part of that TMP adoption process what the working group did was work with staff and eventually developed

[106:01] this tiered approach and phased approach to both local and trans and regional transportation funding and this is probably a familiar slide for those who with have been on council and and new to some of those are newer members but what this really represents is this tiered and phased approach to transportation funding ultimately when you look at what the city can do in terms of raising additional funding for things like transportation there is a limited number of funding mechanisms out there but this funding working group started with you know over a dozen different mechanisms and really evaluate them in you know in many different ways and eventually came up with these six what they determined viable funding mechanisms in this tiered approach some local some regional and even identifying you know at the state and federal level as well I think due to the complexity of

[107:03] our of our significant needs and transportation there is no one silver bullet that's going to solve our funding crisis on both what we need to do locally you know like maintaining our transportation infrastructure but also the regional corridor improvements and future bus rapid transit systems that we want to see okay we have a question for you yes okay vocabulary question curbside Management is that a fancy name for something else this is managing the curb access to the curb and eventually creating a fee system for the news like FedEx or Amazon to use our public right-of-way to access to the curb to do business it could also relate to TNCs or transportation network companies like uber and lyft it is a mechanism that is really growing in interest in the United States has been implemented in a couple cities but certainly is a viable mechanism that we

[108:03] are continuing to do research on and where do parking fees fit under one of these parking fees would be part of congestion pricing or user fees there's many different ways to price a trip you could have a cordon fee which prices when you cross the line you can have a tolling mechanism as when you use a corridor or you can price at the end of a trip which would be on the parking side so that that is still one of our tier twos so as I was saying you know we don't believe that there's a silver bullet that's going to help both our local and our regional and that we may have to take this tiered approach so the Tier one mechanisms that were identified by staff in the community working group those had the highest level of consensus they were conceived of as being ready to go and could be implemented into the near term those included the transportation mobility fee and the the countywide

[109:01] transportation tax a transportation mobility fee this is a very common mechanism it's throughout the United States it's used sometimes it's referred to as transportation maintenance fee or transportation utility fee at one of the council meetings the idea of a mobility fee came up and now the county is working currently working on a transportation tax more we'll have an update on that so those were the tier 1 mechanisms thought that they could go right away the tier 2 mechanisms included vehicle registration fees the curbside management and dynamic pricing and user fees like engine pricing these were considered to also have a fairly high level of consensus among the working group and staff but maybe needed some further exploration and and more research to do and in some cases were identified as maybe equity issues or implementation and administration issues that we would need to work out but still very viable and still something we could march forward on as well the tier 3

[110:01] mechanism was vehicle miles traveled tax which at the time at the state level was really kind of the darling child of future transportation funding but it seems as lately maybe waning in its popularity the state did do a pilot on this so I just before Sam provides his update on the county I do want to just stress that there is a significant difference between a local mobility fee and the countywide transportation tax that's being proposed the local mobility fee you know this is something that would be assessed locally it would be neat it would be used for our local needs it is a fee it could be enacted by council or it could be taken to a ballot if council so desired it does require a nexus study every fee requires that study to establish that rationale nexus between how you collect a fee and then how the revenues can be used it's very different from a tax that can

[111:00] be you know have a wide range of uses this new revenue source could be dedicated to any number of unmet needs within the city or in two new projects you know when I think about Loveland ample Loveland just to the north of north of us they have a street maintenance fee that they've had since I believe 2007 it is dedicated solely to Street maintenance and that's how it was packaged and and and delivered to their population but it could be used for any variety of things the nexus study would help determine that generally they're collected through utility bills and on both residential and commercial properties now one of the key things that council will have to consider is the proportionality between residential and commercial that's a sliding scale it can move you know who pays the majority of that what I really like about local mobility fee is its reliable its predictable and it can be scalable to

[112:02] conduct construction cost as well so cost of rebar cost of and it can be indexed to that on the other hand you have the county transportation tax that's currently being looked at and a number of us have attended meetings about that this is a countywide tax they're looking at different taxing mechanisms whether it's sale tax property tax even vehicle registration fees they're looking at this is a potential 2020 valid item this revenue the way it's currently conceived would be dedicated to regional multimodal improvements and then also could be used for future bus rapid transit service funding operating funding we're also looking at what a proportion of that funding be brought back to local municipalities that could be used on local projects first and final mile projects from those regional corridors there is also the possibility of linking it to affordable housing and so with

[113:00] that Mayor Weaver asked to give an update this is just from a county meeting that was held in convened last week and I just thought we should all be aware of what's being talked about there there's five major roadways that were being featured on nineteen Arapaho 287 42 and south boulder road these would be targeted I believe for the BRT service the thing I wanted to bring to everyone's attention so you can have your thoughts put in the hopper now before it gets too far down the road it's the levels of sales tax they're considering are 0.6 and 1 cent so that is pretty significantly high amount we don't usually talk about sales tax increments that are that large so I just wanted Council to hear that it's a pretty big increase in sales tax they did talk about a registration fee and they did talk about a lodging tax it didn't seem like the lodging tax was

[114:01] going to be big enough and it seemed like they were gonna pull on this and I also understood they were gonna have property tax in the polling so I don't know how many Mills that's gonna be but they were gonna pull everything and my feedback was let's make sure this is gonna pass if we're gonna do it because the worst thing we could do is put on something that is gonna fail and set us back multiple years and I guess the other thing I thought it was important for us to be thinking about because it's empower MPO bill the Metro planning area is moving forward at the state level fatal winner has introduced it it's hard to read the tea leaves about whether this is just an attempt to try and get a statewide tax passed or if it would really empower doctor cog the one concern I really think we would want to talk about if it empowered doctor cog to taxes is how would they spend the money like how would we be sure we're getting the types of transportation projects we

[115:00] want which might look different than other counties which are involved in doctor cough so I just thought and and this is all happening like right now the discussions about the county track transportation tax level that's like right now and this empower and Pio thing is also right now and Aaron do you have I wonder if maybe we can have this as one of our discussion points once you finish the presentation we're actually the doctor cog meeting tomorrow evening we'll be discussing the empower NPO concept so I do appreciate the chance to get some feedback from Council tonight so maybe we can let Chris finish and then come back yeah so I had a question about this update that Sam game gave where it's a county transportation tax that would cover the BRT along the basically what were the NAMM study the North Area mobility study routes it was

[116:03] my understanding that those routes were or that that BRT was to be covered in lieu of what we were supposed to get from the attacks that were paying into for the Train why are we gonna put a county tax on there to cover what we were supposed to be getting from the tax to our TDI I'm disconnected there well I certainly think there's a lot of moving pieces there is RTD if you look at 119 for example there is money pledged by RTD through the fast fast tracks tax the point 4 cent tax that you're referring to that is pledged to the 119 I think it's you know the view that will RTD under its current financial situation be able to provide the level of service that is needed to have an effective Boulder to Longmont service

[117:02] along the 119 and that there is possibilities that we would need to augment that that type of service it's also a possibility that RTD is not the service provider on that I mean there there's a lot of different conversations that are happening right now the total cost of 119 is you know it's significant we we're putting together money from c-dot there's money that RTD is putting in and there's money that this tax could help supplement as well I guess my point is is I'm not incorrect and in recalling that that was supposed to come out of fast tracks well I would say the names Court or funding and BRT service should come out of the fast tracks money that we are providing to them well maybe do you mind if I speak to this just a little bit I mean my Mary I think you're right in that that the the names

[118:00] quarters were developed as okay we're not getting the train anytime soon what can what can we do in a shorter term to meet our region's mobility needs and then ideal and then but then the question is where does the funding come from and so the we continue to lobby RTD for putting in money they've agreed to put in 30 million on 119 but that's essentially all they're promising anybody at this point where we've worked with CDOT to get these quarters high on our funding priority list to get additional help and had the statewide tax passed we would have gotten a fair amount of money out of that so we keep we keep lobbying for it and so then this would be a decision point if this tax goes on it's like okay well see that's probably gonna help us out on 119 some but we're still short for the funding we need for our mobility needs so this would then be a choice do we just not get it done or do we consider texting ourselves at the county level in order to actually accomplish it totally here with your fundamental point about where the money should be coming and it would just be a like a practical matter of well do we just say we're not getting it or do we try to think about money

[119:01] so I left out something that I should have included in this the discussion at the meeting was two-thirds transportation one-third for affordable housing so that was where it kind of got posture mm-hmm I don't know how firm that is but that is something else to have in the hopper is that there's an attempt to do both things at once and I think the idea is that if you put them together they're more likely to pass I I would ask for council's feedback on that as well because I'm not sure that's correct or incorrect but just FYI all of the revenues from either one of these level would not be going to transportation it will be a split about two-thirds one-third I'll continue so as stated at the beginning of the presentation and we're looking for some council feedback in direction specifically on the local mobility fee and if we want to move

[120:01] forward with the next movement on that what this would really entail is putting out an RFP conducting a nexus study getting the information back from the nexus study on depending on how we collect it and and and it will tell us kind of what we can use it for but there's also many other elements design elements of a transportation mobility fee that we would reconstitute our funding working group to work with and also internal staff analysis to look at some of those other elements these include the the fee collection process how is it processed collected who pays and at what rate and what is the proportionality you know based on what we want to fund and the revenue generation seeking that will help also inform what those rates are and then we also want to take a careful look at equity issues with this fee as well looking at our social and racial equity instrument this would be something that

[121:01] would be applied to this process and also looking at the the economic side as well with the residential versus commercial issue that will need to be determined as I said as part of the community engagement I would reconstitute our fronting working group we did have some attrition so we'd be looking at filling out that but I do have a number of members that said they would like to continue to work on that and some of them are representatives of our key stakeholders like Cu for example in this community engagement we'd also looking at applying this equity instrument and we would then hope to return council following the nexus study and the further research to provide some recommendations to council if you would like to move forward with this fee here are some options and then the staff recommendation so and so with that it's simply the questions that we're contained in your memo about shall we proceed with this fee design and the nexus study and it do you have any comments on our

[122:01] community engagement and then of course as well if there are other funding mechanisms that you are interested in we can certainly add those to the mix thank you thank you Mark I guess this question is for you and and possibly for Sam as well are you at all concerned that these two tax measures one is a FEMA and one is a tax measure will cancel each other out a little bit one of them building resistance to the other you're effectively asking for a fee on the local community and a countywide tax on the entire county and I'm a little concerned that running them simultaneously or almost simultaneously will have that kind of impact so that's a good question I'd like to ask Chris could you respond to how long the nexus for you will take just so that we have some idea of how yeah I would say you know with the RFP process included which you know drafting putting out for X amount you know two to three weeks

[123:00] getting the responses evaluate and then conducting the study I would say this is least probably a four month that may be the the tightest we could we could do in this type of situation maybe more realistic is a five month situation and and certainly there are concerns about timing and and the you know the messages that are being sent to voters about well we have serious local needs but there's also big regional needs and having you know two things at once could could be problematic for sure and so I think that's some input that staff would love to receive from Council was you know there are thoughts on that the timing of this issue and do you take a wait-and-see approach and see what happens at the county level you know the county tax is not going to solve our local issues but it it certainly the timing is something consider I had one last question looking at the 2019 needs assessment and

[124:02] the estimates of what you're going to generate from the from the fee is it a little bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic I mean it the need so overwhelmed the anticipated revenue well I think you know certainly that is true if we were to have a local mobility fee that would raise enough money to solve our issues it would probably be not viable but at some point we have to start we're deferring maintenance we're not going to find it within our existing budget there is a need for local improvements and at what point do we say let's start and you know maybe it's starting and just saying we're gonna fund some key deferred maintenance of our infrastructure with this that could free up some additional money for some of our other priorities but yeah it's it's going to be an issue of

[125:00] prioritizing those unmet needs yeah it's pre-process questions my first one was was kind of pretty much marks which is and I guess this is a question for Council as much as anything do we want to wait a month or two ish before wanting to spend sixty or seventy five thousand dollars on the nexus study because well I get the fact that what the county would fund and what we would fund may be different things I could see an impact on what we study and what we ultimately fund based upon what the county does or doesn't do and so I think I just throw that out there for consideration maybe we discussion we could talk a little bit about whether we want to like that because you guys could start down the path tomorrow morning and then two months later going like well that's not gonna quite work anymore I'm so a second is also a bit of a timing issue and this is maybe probably as much a question for Jane again it goes to time you know of the study one other

[126:00] piece of information I think we're gonna have here in the next few months and then ultimately I think developers are getting to decide is whether there's a formation of a library district and if there is a formation of a library district and it has a taxing funding source that may free up money from from the money we spend on library operations cause it'd be to be self-funding which could be potentially a source for funding for transportation and other needs is that a fair assumption Jane with all of your assumptions Library District were formed and we continue to collect the sales taxes that we currently are collecting there would be funds available in every budget year those funds would go to the general fund and the council would have the decision about how to spend them the thing is we have one group in front of

[127:03] us with very huge needs we often think oh we could spend money on that but don't forget in two weeks we're gonna have the fire master plan in front of you this year we're working on a police master plan and a Parks and Rec master plan so there are many needs and six and a half million dollars or so gets spent very quickly so we have to be careful and not decide tonight thanks and then final question on process this nexus study and fees as my understanding and I think Tom's taught us this is is that there has to be a correlation between the fee and the thing the fee is spent on right and do you need from us what our priorities are all right in other words are you gonna study everything and I'll give you some examples obviously if our priority was Regional

[128:01] Transit then there needs to be a fee that kind of somehow relates to regional transit if our priority was local street maintenance you may come up with a completely different fee are you gonna study like everything and then of course money fees or do you need us to tell with you what we think the community's priorities are well I certainly think you know in in the complexity of the nexus study it would be beneficial to have input from council on what your funding and priorities would be and I mentioned you know when different communities have enacted these fees they typically have a theme as a way to communicate it to the population that we're enacting this fee and it's gonna go specifically to these things and this is how it's going to benefit you so certainly that would help narrow down the nexus study probably narrow down the time frame and the cost as well to have an idea of what those key priorities are are you hoping to get that from us tonight or is that maybe a subsequent

[129:00] discussion that could be a subsequent discussion okay in terms of the nexus fee is it primarily about the impact that different users have on the facilities or the amount that they benefit from them or some combination or other things right I mean just if you think about like you said the one cyclist may have an extremely minor impact to the multi-use path system but they might have a fairly substantial benefit from it you know my understanding it is what is the the process of the collection of the fee and what how is it assessed there's many different ways in which a fee like this could be assessed in Loveland they actually use a length of frontage on public right-of-way of the property to determine the the cost other the most commonly one used is using the Institute

[130:01] of traffic engineers trip generation rates so how many trips does a residential property generate how many trips do the different types of commercial properties generate and that is kind of used as a proxy for their impact and use of the system so would the answer then be impact rather than benefit maybe tom has a it can be either Erin you see there has to be a rational relationship between the benefit of the other or the the cost the the the person imposes on the system to the fee itself so I think Chris had it exactly right that that if you if you look say at trying to address traffic congestion and you build a Walmart that generates more trips than a single-family home and so you can say there's a rational relationship to their impact in the system that you're building from what they do so there's also you can you could look at it the other way and say a large commercial shopping center

[131:00] benefits more from a road that a single-family home does so it looks both ways there just has to be a rational relationship and it has to be fairly solid which is why we as Boulder we always do these studies and just to follow up I'm just thinking about like what would we be allowed to fund right like so if we're thinking about direct impacts then could we only fund the kinds of projects that had direct impacts no generally not you you may remember that the Supreme Court ruled on the aspen bag fee and upheld it and they gave rather broad scope to what you could do and so for example we fund with our bag fee replacement bags for folks and educational materials and things so I think we have more more ability I'd hate to go too far so but there I think you've got some scope this here's some

[132:01] latitude and yeah of course you can always go for a tax if you want to fund something completely unrelated the nexus study what kind of a shelf-life well that would it have so we don't let them sit too long that I don't know that there's a Burke case that's been challenged as one that was too stale as long as the logic is good we reused one for several years and didn't get challenged on it I'd hate to go too far if we're certainly if there was a material changing conditions then you would have some level of risk just add that the price the costs of transportation and delivering services and infrastructure 2030 percent every year we just open new bids from contractors for signals and they went up 40 percent so the delivery

[133:00] side of this conversation is advancing rapidly in terms of the cost so when I this about 19 months ago before I was here we had one that was two years old it was almost out of date at that point because of the costs so that's the high level I I would just ask a favor tonight we can bring back before we sign the RFP the consultant and you can you can ask them all of these questions because I don't think we're gonna get them right tonight entirely and you have a lot more and I don't want to short-circuit those the fundamental question that I think is really critical for us for path forward is would you like us to start that process given all of the tea leaves that are emerging or would you like us to hold and wait until we know more of those tea leaves maybe through the summer into the fall and I think and at that point once again we will bring back the consultant the everything you need to know as a first task in that scope and we'd be good to have the meet so we could talk through that but I don't think that we can get you all those answers tonight so which is the reason I was asking about the the shelf life for

[134:02] it because I think that if we go ahead and say go for it tonight and go get going on Nexus V study it made of tail well not a lot more nicely into the ballot time and so we'll be able to really look at things with more information rather than we may not have the information by the time the the ballots come before us so I I I'm of the mind to let's just go ahead and get the study going if it can be useful for several years and why not Thanks thanks for the great presentation thank you gentlemen I think maybe a philosophical question and I understand that other cities are doing this already but want to make sure I'm understanding we'd be getting a utility bill and at the bottom of it there would be a new

[135:00] fee for this transportation tax so that's correct and right now our utility bill doesn't have anything like that right it does okay what's what's currently on it flood storm water yeah but it all seems kind of related to the utility water and and water coming in and out of the house whereas Transportation would be sort of untethered to a utility bill and so that's one question and then could anything go at the bottom of the bill like could we eventually tack on say an open space text or does it have to be only transportation could we say we want to do some extra for the library because I'm a little bit worried about opening the flood gates to maybe putting anything and it may be because I'm paying college tuition right now to maybe June you can relate okay you know currently if you get a college tuition bill at the bottom there's like 1,700 pages of fees that are tacked on and so I am I just want to be sure that philosophically it makes sense that we fund transportation in this new way and

[136:00] and put it there and I'm very supportive of vision zero and great roads and reducing congestion and everything and so I want to get to the funding but want to make sure this is the logical place and we're not and then a generation removed people are like yeah that's how you fund things and so I want to be really crisp and concrete upfront on maybe what we're doing you know just quickly I think on the philosophical side I think you know looking at the transportation system as a utility system is where a lot of these ideas first formed when cities started enacting these fees it also is an established collection mechanism so in terms we wouldn't be creating a new mechanism collect funds we already have a utility billing system and it would could be part of that you existing things so I think that's why cities start when they started looking at a transportation maintenance fee they started putting them on utilities bills because it was an existing collection method that's a real policy question for

[137:03] council more than it is for staff you could you wouldn't never put a tax on a bill obviously because you can't attack there's nothing attacks it is you should be clear that the three fees that week are we have our four three distinct utilities we have a water utility a sewer utility and a flood utility we call storm water agility but so those are the ones we currently collect we don't have any transportation utility you you have the power to create one if you want not sure that's the direction you want to go so but you you could theoretically put any kind of fee an open space fee of course would have to have a rational relationship to the benefit that people are getting so there is always that constraint on this here I have comments but if anybody else's questions I really appreciate the fact

[138:00] that throughout all this you guys have talked about social equity and that's really great and obviously that we're gonna keep the front of our minds that if we come out with something we want to make sure that it's right I'll just use that word is there is a room in this discussion for in our instruction I like I like your day of having you know an interaction with the contractor or and an consultant and in providing air feedback gives us little bit more time to think about what our priorities are actually but there's a room in that discussion for another type of equity which is the equity between residents and commuters it occurs to me that you know a lot of our impacts are caused by people who don't live in Boulder right but some of the fees that I saw from the three tiers that we talked about last year we're really directed towards residents and so the question is is could a nexus study also include some sort of fee or maybe as a tax that that

[139:01] shares that burden of impacts on our transportation systems or whether there's roads or trans that are whatever with with folks that don't live here is that a possible I mean I'll throw one out there which is not really popular about it but maybe makes the point I mean there's been talk through the years of ahead tax right where were employers and employees kick in some amount per month I know a lot of seasoned Colorado have that and that could be a funny mechanism I would think for transportation and that maybe gets a little bit closer to this resident versus commuter equity as the issue is that within the scope could that be within the scope of a study that we're talking about well certainly you know when we when the funding working group and staff worked the occupational privilege tax or ahead tax was certainly one of the mechanism with that we looked at it did not reach you know a level of consensus among the working group that that would be a viable mechanism and there were concerns about the economic

[140:01] vitality of Boulder of instituting ahead tax so that was kind of what the discussion was about but certainly it is mechanism that is is already used in Colorado and we could certainly include into the study now how it fits within the nexus study I'm not exactly sure I would have to really think about that but the understanding of the mobility fee was something that was supported by the chamber was that it would be a fee that would be collected on both residential and commercial properties so by collecting the fee on commercial properties it would be in a sense a way in which the business community would be contributing to that follow up on that but I isn't one of our goals with a fee or a tax or whatever not only to collect revenues to pay for these impacts but isn't there a secondary objective which

[141:00] is to maybe shift behavior true sure and so I guess I wonder if we impose the tax in a commercial business how that gets people out of their cars yeah I think that was that was certainly one of the factors that we looked at for all the different mechanisms is is it something that changes behavior and really the ones that change behavior or the user fees and and congestion prices would actually be on the user themselves even ahead tax I think one could argue is is ahead tax something that would motivate a behavior change probably not anything compared to using parking pricing or using Corden fees or tolling fees that are direct costs on the user and have a direct economic impact and therefore could you know be an influencer in travel behavior change I think those are those are still mechanisms that we want to look at I think the and just to say the concern of the funding working group on congestion pricing and user fees was what is the

[142:01] impact if boater does it alone versus what if we do it as a region and I think that that was their key key key anjuna okay just follow up on that I think Bob does for good points I mean it strikes me that that the that this maintenance fee and we would have some connection to Inc commuters right because that you'd be charging for trips associated with a business and a number of those trips would be from the people are coming in from out of town right so I mean I think you would be hitting that at least a little bit probably not serving as a disincentive probably but you'd at least be associating yourself it seems like maybe a little bit so I just like to speak in support of moving forward here I think think Mary's point was a good one is I think this is a promising mechanism our transportation funding needs are very great we have so many other needs in terms of mobility

[143:01] and in terms of safety and our visions of our goals and we keep not getting the kind of statewide help that we would like to get the you know the tax failed and then the the taper repeal failed and so we continue to need additional help so this seems like very very promising mechanism to me I liked what you said about bringing a consultant back so that rather than just saying okay well we'll go do the study and then we'll come back and share it with you I like the idea of the next step being okay let's go find a consultant bring them back ask all the questions and then give them the specific direction about exactly how to proceed with this so I really like that idea one thing I want to be sensitive to though is the potential interaction with these other taxes that you all have brought up so for example if we if the county did decide to bring forward to transportation tax and we supported this as a body I would hate to impose a fee

[144:01] in October and then you know have the the new tax be on the ballot you know a few weeks later I think that would be a poor choice of timing so I think and and similarly the if this empower MPO thing gets anywhere I don't know if it will you know that that would be another thing to consider so I think we would want to be really careful about the timing of it as if he interacts with these other these other potential funding mechanisms and if the County Transportation texts went forward and it passed that may reduce the need for this so you know we could look at it differently but like Mary said since we have a bit of a shelf life for the nexus study I think it's worth working on okay so reiterate what he said I'm always up for a head tax let me take my bean - in economics and talk about opportunity cost for a quick second if we weren't to do this could we potentially do

[145:00] something with maybe a greater impact more quickly so I look at structuring our parking fees in the congestion pricing fee type of thing you know how much could we potentially move up some of those mid term items to near-term if this just because to me it feels a bit half-measure I'm still probably going to support it if council is leaning in that direction but I want to take a broader longer view here and I don't expect you to have an answer the second for sure it's just you know I'm seeing maybe a half-measure in this no no I certainly see you know congestion pricing user fees as being the future I think and we can and you know from my perspective it being a Tier two mechanism it still means we are continuing to do research and and determine what would be the best path for implementation it's being back-burnered in any way I think

[146:03] the tier ones were just considered to be more ready more ready to go the the congestion pricing in user fees is it's a lot more complicated in terms of the actual implementation and the technology and everything it would take a lot more time I think now parking pricing is certainly you know that is a different option that could have a more significant immediate impact I think that is you know certainly direction from Council we can receive thank you I wanted to go back because you're talking about user fees and congestion fees and you also talked about mobility fees and I know part of the discussion is whether we tax commercial or we tax people and if we're talking about equity taxing people we need to look into progressive taxing because if you really think about

[147:01] it a lot of the people well maybe you can provide us some of the statistics on who are the type of people who are coming in to Boulder to work and what are what is their socio economics because taxing we have to ensure that we tax the right people right because if we're talking about equity we don't want to hurt although yes it's good for the environment but we don't want to hurt people who are the only driving in because they can't leave here in Boulder right thank you that was certainly one of the main discussions that the funding working group had was but particularly around user fees in congestion pricing so thanks for that juni and that's one of the the things that is appealing to me about the fee is one of the things that you said that it it can be done as a sliding scale and you can take all of

[148:02] those things into consideration more easily with a fee than you can with just one set tax so I'm moving forward and then I just wanted to comment to Adam on parking pricing is a lot more nuanced I think that that meets the eye and I'll give you an example with my favorite program which is the the 3 from 3 to 3 the Holy Trinity but it has actually benefited a really broad section of people I mean people that are going at restaurants people that are working in the restaurants the tourists it's and it's generating more revenue so lower parking fee actually has created

[149:02] more revenue so I think that's an example of how nuanced it can be and now and how when you wrap equity into it everybody can benefit so anyway I just wanted to make that comment because I like to bring up that program whenever I can and so anyway let's go for the nexus study just for it to make earlier when we discussed this last year one of the attractive aspects of it was the ability to do rebates for folks who are lower income and I know you've worked on this idea like five years ago yes at the time you thought really deeply about how to work equity into this idea so I'm sure council will support you resuming that and and and getting as deep as diet as possible into how we can make this the most equitable possible for our residents and businesses and I just

[150:00] wanted to tag on to something about the rebates sound great but it requires people to engage in doing something and oftentimes just people too aren't even aware so it does st. not that rebates are necessarily the way to do it but just yeah yeah and and according to utility billing it may be easier to have exemptions rather than rebates you know in in the in the way in which they're billing system works rebates I think are a little more complicated more admin where if we find classes that should be exempt that would be from their perspective better so I want to support Aaron's approach and I think I think we can accomplish two things by doing what Aaron suggested one is is that I would really appreciate the opportunity for whoever you pick as your consultant to interact with counsel and of course I think guidance from staff so we're not overlooking all over the place right and

[151:01] so to the extent that you need us to focus on priorities obviously come forward with some ideas about you know and we can then pick you know three out of eight or however you wanted themes or however you want to present to us so that we're making wise informed decision maybe with recommendations to you and providing that to consultant that presumably will take a little bit of time rise can take a time for you guys to you an RFP and and then select somebody and then tee this up and then we'll schedule it in the meantime I think that a little bit of a delay is actually okay because we're gonna learn more I think over the next two or three months about what's going on with the county and regionally in the state and that may further inform what we ultimately would like the consultant to study so I think there's a win-win there just quick response and Mary I totally agree I love the new three to three program as a frequent downtown user and someone who worked there really really helpful my only issue is with our

[152:03] congestion in the mornings I don't think we've been nearly nuanced enough in our parking in that regard so going forward that's where I'd really like to concentrate yes I definitely want to make sure that our late downtown user you still have options and that they're inexpensive because I know what it's like to work in the industry but the people who are coming in and their early mornings tend to be at the higher income so working on that particular area is what I'm looking for in the future beyond this yes make sure I'm gonna support moving forward but I do have again continued concerns about why would transportation go here and as Jayne pointed out like when when Fire Department comes why wouldn't we decide we want to just also tuck a fee there and I'm concerned about why why this here and so I hope

[153:00] that when it comes back we have a robust discussion about the that decision and the precedent that it sets I would be very supportive of what Rachel just said I'm happy to go forward do it next to study talk to the consultant but I think there's a larger issue here and you know funding as we go forward for many many priorities has to be discussed it's a great points mark and Rachel and I'm Judy and Mary and I of course or on a working group that is going to bring back to Council I think some women early this spring and then I'm imagine will probably be a longer discussion than that about ways for us to use have some better priority tools so I think I think what we're doing here is getting these guys started on indexicality which is we're gonna need anyway that's certainly were not making any decisions with respect to fees or putting transportation and a higher priority

[154:00] thing else and as a matter of fact probably about the time these guys come back with their consultant we started looking at priorities we should Junie and Mary and I should have some preliminary recommendations to Council on tools that do exactly what you and Mark are talking about is the two of you were talking about is it's making sure that we're looking at things holistically and broadly and not just chasing the shiny object that's in front of us just close up here I also support going forward but Connexus study I think that has to get done one way or the other what fee method we choose will be kind of open to us to discuss I mean when we talked about this last time it was Street frontage you know which has some relationship to probably homeownership if it's privately owned home and it's probably less if it's an apartment building so I think there's ways that we could massage that and come up with creative ways of doing it whether it shows up on the utility bill or not I mean we can talk about whether

[155:02] that's the right thing or not but that's a convenient thing we've talked about that with our electric utility as well just because we already have the billing system in place but doesn't change the take-home message which is get started on the next to study and I agree with everything everyone said about tracking what else is moving at the same time and trying to get our timing right so we're not we're not negatively impacting certainly to the county if we're going to support the candidate transportation taxed if we have to be double careful the I've got some grave doubts about that so let's track it if it's not going anywhere fine but actually from Louisville is concerned that we could have a bunch of cities in Boulder County forced into dr. cog where we don't always have the same you know understanding of what transit means says the entire membership does so let's be

[156:02] careful about that one - and is this enough direction yes yes so we will proceed with doing an RFP Nexus study when we select the consultant will return to Council and go over kind of the you know the elements of that study and the work tasks we can narrow down some of those those priorities and issues can I just ask a coordination question so if we brought that back in May there's a first touch point would that be too soon if we all were forecasting I don't think so I think we did that in May that would be right before the summer we know more did that interface with the funding working group so we we would have to put something on the ballot September at the latest okay that helps just so that when we scope out the process that we know we

[157:00] have that person here and we're getting on the council schedule then as well like we'll do that next week okay so we'll see a man this topic have anything else thank you thank you thank you very much thanks very much okay matter from City Attorney next well I talked about mostly I just wanted to remind council that on March 3rd we will have a more detailed presentation on online petitioning we our staff met with the election working group they had some suggestions that differed from the approach that this staff was taking we'd like to bring those to you and get some direction on whether we should proceed in the way that we're proceeding or take a different direction for example the staff because of technical requirements has decided that you will either have a paper petition or an online petition but not both for the same petition because that you'd have duplicated signatures some handwritten some online the working group wants us to consider doing both at the same time which is a different project and more complex project we'd

[158:00] like to talk that through with you in on March 3rd and there are a couple of other issues like that that we would like to take a little bit of a deeper dive then so we'll bring that that back to you then okay this one says matters for mayor members of council but it's the Chautauqua update so that was me and why there's an update the original this was to address the major inaccuracy of the ad that was in the daily camera was it last Tuesday or Wednesday and read it is improper for a city attorney tom car without direction from city council underscore underline that to threaten Chautauqua with legal action and

[159:03] it is inaccurate in the sense that I believe we're all behind the city attorney on this just when it mm-hmm okay so I just wanted to make clear that that that that was drastically misleading if not completely inaccurate so that was my main point of bringing that up to call that attention to that there has been the new development that the attorney Stan Garnett is suing the city and CCA on behalf of yet undisclosed know their name and so I just I guess I have a question for Tom he mentioned a little bit about what he his thoughts were on that but if you could just elaborate on that a little more there's three crimes with claims

[160:01] really in the complaint two of them against CCA and one against the city the first one against CCA actually argues that CCA is a homeowner's association and that they fail to follow the state law for residential nonprofit corporations they don't meet the definition but that's one of the things that's always scared us that the the Cottagers would treat Chautauqua as their private homeowners association it's not it's a multi-faceted place that benefits a wide range of stakeholders and it's very important in our community and while most people agree that cottages are played an important role I'm not sure they play as an important role as the way it provides open space to our whole community and the the fact that there are million-dollar homes up there may be inconsistent with our goals for that for that property for the long term and we've kind of tolerated it for a hundred years and it's been a wonderful sort of nice thing there but that's that property serves so many

[161:02] important functions and now we have a group that has very valuable homes who are telling us that it's their private homeowners association I don't think it meets the definition I just think that it's wrong the city's the suit against the city alleges that that we've misread the the lease I wrote a lot of the lease I don't think I misread it at all and so so we will defend that and I think we will win in the long term you never predict I think it's really unfortunate that it's come to this the CCA executive director told me that they'd spent over a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees this year already and this just makes it worse and the prime goal for the city of Chautauqua is to have a partnership that preserves an important cultural asset and when we have money not going into that purpose and going into paying lawyers and I like lawyers I would rather not big not get paid with that money it's unfortunate and that was one of the reasons that Mary and Lisa Moore Zell and Bob who were all served on that

[162:01] board came to me and said this is a problem what we're wasting so much time and money that really should be going to benefit our community and it's instead it's going to lawyers and we will defend we will keep working on this it is unfortunate my hope is that the community as a whole sees this allows for the amendment in the bylaws and gets rid of a lot of this silliness that has been going on now for years and really needs to end helpful and agree to your points I just but you said something about whether you know homes up there inconsistent with other emissions but we're not trying to change the ownership of the cottages right I mean where did it kind of sound like you're going there it's troubling though the amount of money they've spent on this I mean if you think about how expensive Stan garnet is and he's worth every penny he's a good lawyer how expensive is to take a quarter page ad in The Daily

[163:01] Camera to do that all that they've hired mark Mike Mark Mosley as a PR representative this this is money that's being used to generate to force CCA to respond with money that really should be going into our community but yes I'm not saying that we're going to get rid of the Cottagers although and in the least we recognize their importance but they are one stakeholder this the other stakeholders are the open space users the community around it the people who go to concerts the people who get married there's so many people who benefit was 600,000 resident bizza ters a year to have 39 homeowners telling us what to do is really troubling sure absolutely and that's why we're supporting the revisions thank you the bylaws I assume that it's okay we just all endorse what you're doing obviously from a city standpoint some of us have also been asked in our individual capacities to take a position on this and to maybe write letters the editor or sign up the ads or whatever to endorse you know the

[164:02] bylaw changes the modernization the bylaws are you okay with that okay I just want to make sure that it didn't didn't trouble you that if we took aside okay thanks yeah my main point was that Tom was not acting without the support of the council and I appreciate they think yeah brief brief update from the sister city subcommittee so we have the quarterly meeting with the sister city coalition and a couple things of note one we are to still or we're still two tiles short of actually and those approximately cost $10,000 apiece so that's no small amount and that would

[165:00] come out of Parks and Rec budget but Parks and Rec didn't have that in their budget so that's something for council to be aware of that we are not you know supporting all of our sister cities to the equal amount which we may want to think about in the long term and we move on can I make a suggestion then yeah the Rotary Club the one that meets on Friday afternoons out on east arapahoe has had a special interest in the sister city plaza for a long long time it's been affect they'd like to do more there I wonder if we could visit with them about maybe doing some fundraising too maybe there could be a cost sharing between parks and in the Rotarians just thrown that out there yeah and there was also a discussion of having some sort of fundraiser near the conference on world affairs since its kind of a mutually beneficial type of thing there but that was just an update for council also it seems like a lot of the websites for the sister cities on our city website are

[166:00] kind of out of date so we're yet to work on hopefully getting the information from them that they want up there and then putting that up there those were the two main sort of things that came up I just want cancel now okay anything else that we need to touch base on Wow the meetings are getting shorter and shorter I don't know what to say about it [Music] from Paris on hold like that drawstring some other Christians who surround us