March 16, 2020 — City Council Special Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] to belong a place to forge their future because while many doors open these doors transformed they did for us support your local Boys and Girls Clubs great futures start here [Music] [Music] sweat live president Wallach president Weaver young present we have a quorum

[1:01] thank you I'm gonna do a brief announcement and then we'll get into our business for the order of the city manager no member of the public will be permitted to attend this meeting in person the city Boulder has canceled all board and Commission meetings and has also closed all city buildings and facilities to the public effective March 15 through March 29 the city will continue to provide essential city services to the community including public safety water utilities and emergency response services this meeting is being broadcast and televised on Boulder channel 8 and live strain on Boulder channel 8 comm I want to explain why Sam Weaver and Rachel friend are not in the room they both decided for health and safety reasons to unknot be physically present tonight they're on the phone and we're gonna take up now you measure right now item 2a relating

[2:00] to the ability and emergency situation of council members to dial into council meetings Tom do you want to walk us through item 2a ordinance eight three nine one sure about the the city has a code four code provisions relating to emergencies there's a section 2 - 2 point 5 - 11 that deals with local and special procedures for governing body meetings and departments which basically allowed for meetings outside the city it did not allow for any kind of meeting remotely so we've proposed an amendment to the section adding a new subsection G which now it would subsection G would itself have seven subsections and I'll just walk through them really quickly on what they do subsection 1 would allow for city council members to attend city county council meetings remotely this would only apply in the case of a emergency caused by a contagious disease section of subsection 2 would allow border commission members the same

[3:01] rights in both cases the public has to have the ability to paid in the meetings for the for those the council be able to participate remotely subsection three allows for exclusion of the public from meetings and circumstances such as this one there's an emergency caused by contagious disease subsection 4 allows for the city manager to cancel any meeting subsection 5 provides for waiver of procedural rules as you know the boards and commissions have timelines such as a landmarks board hearing that has to be approved within 60 days if there's no meeting we could end up either denying or approving something that without deliberation the subsection 5 gives the city manager the authority to suspend all of those deadlines and then reschedule things subsection 6 allows for changing timelines and deadlines based for permits contracts and licenses and subsection 7 allows for

[4:00] changing a procedural requires for development review applications so basically these are all authorities that are added to the emergency powers of the city manager during a disaster emergency although when I wrote this the city had not declared a disaster emergency but the state had so it provides for either a disaster emergency based on a contagious disease either declared by the governor or by the city manager so it would cover either in this case we have both great questions for Tom but have any questions ok entertain a motion to yeah on your diets and I posted on hotline there are some amendments that basically are included in the overview that I just gave you that is they would allow for the the changing of deadlines for permits and it also allows for the city manager to for the situation where we have already gone through say the publication notice for a certain type of permit of application we wouldn't have to redo that notice as long as the hearing was rescheduled in accordance

[5:01] with the notice requirements under the Colorado opens Records Act so we wouldn't have to go through the republication requirements those would have been satisfied this would this change this amendment would allow for the city manager to just say we scheduled a meeting and the person would get notice as they normally would without going through publication or notifying neighbors as they do with the neutron okay any questions on that Mary so thank you for that Tom I do have a question with respect to item number six on the amendment that you sent out where it says that the city manager may waive alter reschedule and you time requirement deadline procedure schedule hearing etc and tonight for this particular ordinance we are waiving a public hearing where we're doing certain things so is that covered under a different so there's no requirement that you actually have a public hearing before an emergency ORS okay at all so

[6:01] that's a rule that you could waive this would this would have more to do with say the it comes back to the the landmarks board that has to be reviewed that was originally on the agenda tonight this will allow the city manager to extend those deadlines so the question I asked would be more pertain more to council rules rather than okay thank you you have the questions commotion sure I'll go ahead and move that we introduced pass on emergency and order published by timely title only an ordinance 83 91 as amended with the amendments on the Dyess allowing for remote participation at City Council and board and Commission meetings on for limited public attendance and meetings provided that there is an alternative means of participation and setting forth and related details yes now joining in relation there to second second okay any further discussion I believe this is

[7:01] roll call great we start with councilmember Yates hye-young yes brachot hi Joseph yes Nagel all right sweat look yes Wallach aye the motion passes unanimously great so with that we want to bring in our council colleagues for on the phone Lynette can you recall the roll with them all nine council members council member friend eric counts mayor Weaver yeah thank you the rest of us are still here okay the next item is I'd like to get a motion to amend the agenda that's on your Dyess item 4a is a discussion really about whether we should have a discussion tonight on approving board and Commission appointments CAC because

[8:03] there were some different views expressed by council member CAC felt that this is something that should be brought to the entire council I'd like to move that up to right now rather than waiting to the end of the meeting to have that discussion because I think we may be able to decide pretty quickly in the process question because debbie is here for one reason and one reason only to run us through boards and Commission appointments if we were going to do that so I like to let Debbie go if we're not going to do that tonight do I have a motion to amend the agenda to move item 4a up to right after them right now so moved second all in favor cm and Rachel okay so let's do that now so I just heated up there's been some discussion about whether we were scheduled to do board in Commission appointments tonight Tom do you want to briefly mention the legal issue yep you cannot do this legally so there's

[9:00] absolutely no way you can do this legally see you're going to have to violate the Charter in one way or the other and the question is which way you violated so charter section 130 provides that you shall appoint by March of each year one member to serve for five years and that appointment has to happen at a regular meeting of council you're not gonna have a regular meeting of Council and March assuming you'll cancel the meeting for tomorrow this is a special meeting if you don't do it tonight then it won't be done in March because you're not gonna I don't know that you're gonna have another meeting in March and you can't just appoint somebody for say since we're new the terms for say a month then appoint new people because it says for five years so the choice that you have is which way there's minimal risk in this violation of the Charter the risk I see is where you have a board that has quasi judicial authority be la Planning landmarks who makes a decision someone could challenge on due process grounds of the person was not was not appropriately appointed

[10:00] according to the Charter a person making that decision I think that would be a stretch and I think because of the situation that we're in now that's a lawsuit that we would be able to defend easily so it's it's really up to you from a policy perspective which way you want to do this there isn't a legal way to compel you one way or the other Aaron so Tom if CAC at next Monday called a meeting for two weeks from tomorrow that would be in March would that count as a regular meeting I don't believe the regular meetings are the first and third but if we did that you might be able to make an argument that we're a little closer to compliance because it would still be in March I think any argument is going to be the equal of any other art can you do it in April if you do it tonight if you do it tomorrow well tomorrow would actually be legal but I wouldn't advise that you they're all defensible other questions

[11:00] for Tom Mary so two questions one is and you might have covered it and I missed it just now one is we make the appointments and then we ratify them correct so is there is there can the appointments be made and then ratified in April or do both have to be well usually I mean it's just a vote but you just you you the way you usually do the process is you go through and you select them at the end you just vote approving the slate that it is it's not really ratification it's just the motion for convenience right but my question goes to my next question which is we don't have well we have a hearing at the end of all matters and typically we make the appointments under matters so we could make the appointments and then withhold the public hearing until later is you could do that the public hearing is a matter of your rules so you could you could

[12:00] also waive the public hearing if you chose thank you Mark Tom on a scale of one to ten what's your confidence level in defending this any potential suit it's fairly high kind of following on Aaron's point we're gonna have a discussion I think a little bit later this evening or we can have a now if folks would like about on whether we want to schedule some other and meetings during the month of March our next regular scheduled media is not until April 7th which is more than three weeks from now there may be reasons for council to get together I do to the emergency and other other pressing matters that we may want to tackle between now and April 7th and so I'll just throw out there that the possibility of doing what Aaron's suggested which is to hold a meeting either next week or the week after it's still in the month of March it doesn't count from a legal standpoint it sounds like but it still does get our boards and commission appointed so we don't have we're not asking the incumbents to stay on that much longer I would also observe our boards and commissions our meetings are suspended

[13:01] at least through the end of the month so I think if and we don't know if that suspension will continue beyond the end of the month but if we could have a boarding commission appointment and hearing and ratification maybe in a week or two that may be a solution rather than trying to jam it in tonight cuz I know we've got a pretty full agenda tonight how do folks feel about that as an idea it's a great idea okay yeah and I just wanted to comment I I would support that idea and one of the reasons is that one of my concerns about not making the appointments tonight was that there's a lot of time between there would be a lot of time between the interviews and the appointments which would then basically require us to go back and watch videos and do things all over again point samer or Rachel do you want to weigh in on this idea

[14:05] teleconferences and you know i think that we can work in the board and Commission appointments as long as we dealt with all the coronavirus litigation that we need to I think there will be a lot of that I think we're gonna want to get updates from all the people we're gonna hear from tonight but I also think that we can do our business and and make our appointments whether it's next three third two weeks Rachel can you hear me yep I I think that we should push this discussion so when everybody's at home and get everybody out of where they might be infecting each other and well not great social distancing so I would I guess make a motion to amend the the agenda and kick this to whenever we want to kick a cue

[15:00] we can decide that when we're not all within room okay but we conceptually you're okay with with not doing boards and commissions tonight and maybe doing it whether it's one week or two weeks or three weeks from now CAC will be meeting next Monday we can talk about how we hold our meeting and when we would hold it but you're okay with the concept okay sounds like we have consensus okay everyone's nodding do we need to do anything else procedurally we don't need a motion ring like that right now we're just major major scheduling change okay already we just did it yeah okay okay I think we're good then so let's move on to the next item on the agenda which was originally labeled to be which is the coab in nineteen briefing we have at least three briefings one from Jesse ACK with

[16:00] Boulder County Public Health Jeff has a 30 so let's get Jeff on first and then we have dr. visitors from Boulder Community Health on the line and then Sam has some stuff to report based on his interactions with Cu so let's start with Jeff Jane is there any further introduction I know there's not hey Jeff hey thank you very much Jeff say I quit Boulder County Public Health I'm the executive director I appreciate the invite to council and for me to give the opportunity to give an update I am actually okay I've got somebody covering my other meaning for the for the first part of it so I can answer questions because I know this is a big topic and we're in obviously pretty incredible times at this point so I've been in public health for going on 31 years now and we've never been in a scenario like this where we've had such widespread impacts and such big challenges to the decisions that we have to make in order to control this disease so and I know

[17:02] everybody is very aware of that so what my plan is to do is to make sure that you are aware of some of the big things that we are working on and what to expect especially over the coming weeks and then to be able to answer any other questions associated with that if there's anything you asked me that I can't get or I don't have the information on tonight I'll commit to making sure that I follow up with the council on that so let me let me start just with the situation that we have right now so in Boulder County we have seven positive or presumptive positive cases and what you're going to hear in a minute is that really is not going to matter much for us it doesn't really matter for much for us now and it's not going to moving forward because the best modeling that we've looked at and the best predictions that we have are that if you have a case you can multiply that case by 50 times and that's probably the number of cases that you actually have

[18:00] positive in your community and that's because the testing not not just in Colorado but the testing in our entire nation is really not adequate in order for us to really be able to pick up all the disease that's spreading in our communities and we know that the governor's talked about that several times we've we've asked or better testing support multiple times through multiple folks and again the governor is very aware of this so the approach that we're taking in Public Health is that we've got virus in the community and that we ought to be doing exactly what you're all doing I applaud gene for the actions that she's taken to really help start the social distancing in the mitigation strategies because those are going to make the biggest difference right now the governor tonight or this afternoon I believe is announcing some of the orders that he's putting in place that we have

[19:00] been working with the state on that will go out on a statewide basis we will adopt that state order here in Boulder County and the state order includes I can just tell you what is included in that if you give me a second so the order will include all events for 50 people or more will be prohibited all restaurants with the exception of takeout drive-through or delivery will need to close all bars will need to close all gyms will need to close casinos will need to close and all theaters will need to close and again I believe that has been released from the governor's office at this point and the recognition again of the impacts associated with what I just said I know you all are aware of this this disease as I'll tell you in a minute about what we might see in the next weeks it's really important that we do those kind of actions now because again we know

[20:00] that we're going to see an increased spread with every one of those decisions it has significant impacts in our communities and it's extremely sad that we're at this point that we know we're gonna have to do this because it's the best way to control the disease it's going to have impacts on our folks in our communities who don't have access to services it's going to have impacts on our businesses who don't have the ability to pay their employees know these impacts are significant and we don't take any of these decisions anywhere in the state lightly it's it's a pretty pretty difficult time right now and it's really a no-win situation but the information that we're seeing and the reason that we feel this is so important and I'm sorry if you want if you want to ask a question to get stop me I was just gonna confirm that I think that the governor's speech and he did about 15 minutes ago okay great

[21:02] [Music] the the lower singing that's happening right now in Eagle County and the State Health Department and some folks from the Carter School of Public Health or who are done doing some of the projections for us are seeing a really significant increase in spread in the disease so as an example um there's much more community-wide spread now in in Eagle County and in Pitkin County it's it's impacting their healthcare facilities we expect that fully to come to us but we're expecting by the end of the week that we're going to start to see that kind of increase here in our own communities so again we are we are really approaching this less from we have to validate testing and then try to control the spread and more from we just need to take a prevention focus now and really start messaging about social distancing making sure that people are following these orders we do

[22:01] have which has been great we have an administrators group that includes all of our towns all of our municipalities our University both of our school districts our fire and police chiefs and we're meeting on a weekly basis to share the work that we're doing together so as an example with this order that goes in place if towns or municipalities choose to want to do something additional to that the nice thing about having the administrators group together is we can learn talk and share with each other about what we're thinking and then we can make sure we know what each other is doing and support each other and moving things forward so I've really appreciated the commitment from the city of Boulder and from others to make sure that they're making time to support being at that meeting and thinking through those things together I know that we're gonna and I and I know dr. Visser's is on the phone but we know right now that we're already stressing

[23:00] our health care systems we like I had said we have pressed pretty hard on the testing and I'm not I'm not we are not approaching the the prevention messaging that we're taking forward by waiting on tests because we are not convinced that that is going to improve much and we just need to treat it as though it is in our community and spreading and we also don't want to send you don't want people to go into chaos mode when there is when they're sorting buying that happens we all know that when that occurs and then some people get a lot and some people get none and that's that's not necessary to do at the same time we do want to practice social distancing and we want to make sure if we're sick that we are staying home ourselves we can you can always get somebody to to reach out for you if you're sick to get something and we want to protect ourselves from others who are sick by saying at least six feet away so I know that's a ton of information we're

[24:02] working and and Mike chard who's our office of emergency management director could probably talk more about this but we have our OEM activated we have we've activated a lot of areas of supports and we're looking at how can we do that best to provide supports to people in our community who are going to be most impacted by this so I'll stop there because that's a lot of information great that's um maybe it's a courtesy let Sam and Rachel go first so they've got questions for Jeff and then we'll bring him back into the room Sam do have any questions for Jeff I like and I appreciate all that you're doing it sounds like from our briefing earlier this afternoon that you have capacity right now and that you don't feel like you're gonna be overwhelmed at the

[25:01] moment unless something changed is that right and is that question to dr. Visser's to either one of you um you know do you feel like you have at the moment isn't given the rate of disease spread that you've seen so far you feel like all the community has asked me to handle what we're gonna say dr. Visser's do you want to answer that from your perspective yeah and I can certainly go into more detail I think the short answer is right now we can but it all depends I think it depends on on where the speaks and what the numbers are and how many really sick people we have all at once which goes back to Jeff's point that anything we can do right now very aggressively to mitigate the spread and even just flatten the curve and I'm sure you've all seen that the diagrams and explanations anything we can do to

[26:00] flatten that curve even if it doesn't reduce the overall cases but spreads the case burden over weeks to months we're much better prepared but I can I can speak to that in a minute and great dr. Visser's I have one more question um you had spoken about how earlier this afternoon how you might divide and conquer' people who are Kovac positive and who are negative you want to tell us a bit more about that yes you want me to [Music] kind of just give an overview of what we discussed earlier with that helpful if you guys are finished with Jeff or well let me let me say this is Bob Bob what do you think I was let's see if we have some more questions for Jeff first since there's a little time sensitivity there and then we can ask dr. visitors to do his presentation is if that's okay with you Sam yeah

[27:04] Rachel one process question Jeff you mentioned that the county would adopt whatever the government does does the city of alder actually need to adopt anything in light of the governor's statements or does that sort of cover us for things like restaurant closures so the only you don't need to adopt anything our authority covers both municipal as well as I'm incorporated and it would only the city would only need to adopt something if you wanted to go more stringent than what the state Public Health order says thank you Mark has a question for Jeff I hope it's for Jeff let me know if I'm in the wrong place what do the models show about the efficacy of the the actions taken by Governor Poulos today do you have a sense of what the impact of those could be or would be yeah I can't

[28:00] quantitatively tell you what that would be but what we know and the reason why the governor has been encouraged to act is because exactly because of what dr. Visser said we know from from modeling from I'm sorry Washington and Oregon as well as from the Centers for Disease Control that earlier on the front end of this that we can put in those those strategies that mitigate the spread of this disease the less that curve shoots up really fast in terms of number of positive cases so ideally we would be as far on the front of this as possible and it's and as you all know it's a really difficult decision to figure out when the best time is because you're going to have impact on your community and on the economy and on people so we want to make sure that we're implementing those now that were the sooner that we implement them the likelihood is the least long longer period of time that you're gonna have to have that in place so as an example

[29:02] I think the orders that I've been seeing have been carrying between four and eight weeks and each of those orders would be evaluated by those public health directors in accordance with a state to make sure that we've actually knocked down the spread of the disease and that we don't have widespread disease happening before we open things back up other questions for Jeff Jeff if you have a few moments to stick around on the call after dr. visitors makes his presentation we may have some follow-up questions if you can give us a few more minutes till the end okay great dr. visitors you want to identify yourself and let us know how things looking from the hospital's perspective sure this is Rob visitors I'm the CEO president Boulder Community Health I'm also an emergency physician for 25

[30:00] plus years and had some experience I guess and maybe not exactly like this but similar situations so Sam's question currently we are ready and we were able to care for patients infected with kovat although the scale of this is potentially unprecedented the disease is not unique if a severe respiratory illness caused by an infectious disease that we care for even now and it's no different than taking care of a very sick patient with influenza or pneumonia respiratory disease and potentially sepsis so we have you know right now we have the certainly we have the expertise we have the capability and the competency to care these page and even the very sickest once our challenge will be the capacity and and if we are overwhelmed in capacity we

[31:01] won't be alone so it goes to my other point is that although we're ready and prepared and can care for these patients it really comes down to how much we're able to mitigate the spread and the peak of this and how quickly it accelerates in our community and what will overwhelm us is when we no longer have enough specific resources intensive this nurses that can provide ICU care ventilators to the patients that are very sick and we can do the care but the mitigation the response to that the flattening of the curve 100% of that lies in the actions of the community and the decisions that you make tonight and going forward and in the sooner we can act then we know that the flatter that curve will be and the more that we can spread this out and the more that we are in in a position to

[32:00] take care of these patients let me just go specifically to some of the things that we're doing first of all while the scale of this is is somewhat unprecedented or at least the potential we have been through this a number of times whether it was the preparation that went to Ebola which didn't manifest severe flu season SARS etc we do have some experience at least in the preparation side we're not doing this alone we're in daily communication with the Colorado Hospital Association the governor's office local Public Health Jeff and his team as well as constant communication with other health systems making sure that we're sharing information best practice and resources we've established a command center where we're monitoring the constant changes to facilitate communication and to preserve the resources including personnel and protective equipment

[33:01] we've canceled or delayed non-essential services surgeries and visits we've expanded telehealth and nurse triage and currently we are not experiencing any provider shortages anything quite the reverse because we are shutting down some services and when there's an opportunity for someone to stay home or to do that work remotely we're facilitating that we are freeing up capacity to cohort than Cobra to take your question earlier Sam we are this week we will be creating units where we will cohort both the colon positive of which we do not have any in the hospital right now or the Kovac rule out so people that we suspect may have it but we're waiting for a test result and this will help preserve a best practice equipment and

[34:01] hopefully protect others in the hospital we also are already have plans in place to expand our intensive care capacity and we continue to protect our workforce and so one of the things that we're doing is significantly limiting visitors to our Hospital in our campus we although there are significant limitations and testing that that are still ongoing in the state we do continue to test that all of our urgent care facilities or locations and we do have enough testing to ensure ongoing tests of inpatients making clinical decisions and making sure that our workforce is free of the disease I guess the last few things is we have a we

[35:00] continuously update our website and we have links obviously to Public Health than others but that website is updated every day with advice and best practices and I'll just close with that our ability to deal with this is is comes down to how well we do in preventing the spread and flattening the curve when it comes to the spread of the disease great thanks doctor visitors Sam DfE questions for either doctor visitors or follow-up questions for Jeff could you dr. bitters we tell us what we can do that individuals to prevent the spread hand-washing separation so on two minutes like well I think the you know

[36:01] you've been inundated with good advice hand-washing social distancing but I think we're at a stage now where we really need to be isolating and keeping in groups far less than 50 probably five or ten and in any unnecessary travel or exposure to others should be stopped and and I would follow at a minimum the advice that's put out by Boulder County Public Health and and Jeff's team I would do whatever you can to reinforce what the governor has just put out I think being aggressive and proactive is only going to help in at the any end it will probably reduce the overall social and economic impact you know obviously if we can reduce the number of cases and flatten that curve and get out of this quicker the impact is less but so you know but I would just follow

[37:04] those those guidelines that are absolutely parent the other thing is if you have symptoms stay home and 95 percent of the patients that we're testing our negative for kovat this is flu season there's a lot of allergies and stuff around but if you're concerned at all but you're it feels like a cold to you just stay home seeking testing isn't going to change the care that we have whether it's positive or negative you should be home anyways we don't have a lot of available testing so I think practicing self isolation and being thoughtful about that is probably very important as well right Thank You Rachel do you have questions for me the doctor visitors are joking thank you so much for all that information is very helpful at a couple follow-ups number one you mentioned you've got a great website in case some people are watching this and aren't

[38:00] checking website can you confirm what that website org you see a chat organ Jeff Jeff can you give us your website for Public Health you mentioned you know people shouldn't stay home and we've had a lot of questions about maybe when and I think I'm getting extra good a family member who people call who works in the emergency room quit when should you go to the hospital like can you give people advice for when when is it sort of go time to worry and come in so I think going to the hospital or specifically going to the emergency department should

[39:00] be the last resort that's where you're very sick and we're using the emergency department to triage patients who we think may or may not need to be admitted and obviously we need to continue to care for the you know all the things that we've been doing last month the month before and all last year that doesn't go away people are still having hard tax and car accidents and and heart failure etc so we need to retain that capacity the best advice is and I should have said this is to call your provider if you call your provider we've set up a nurse triage line that will help triage you in terms of the care should you just stay home should you go to one of our urgent cares for testing should you go to our drive-through testing that we've set up or should you go to the emergency and so I'm going to call your provider thank you provide the answer you will be channeled to a triage nurse who will be able to triage you based on yours your risk and your symptomatology thank you

[40:01] awesome and then one more kind of multi-part question we've gotten a lot of emails with people asking like what is our plan for overflow at the hospital does fill up and do we have enough ventilator locally so I don't know if that's something you can speak to but that might be helpful information good couple the answer is yes we have a plan and it includes more than just ICU care so we have an opportunity to expand other non-critical care inpatient we also have some space at the newly built dela tava pavilion that we can utilize and finally we also have plans for triaging and care in a space away from the hospital so for example the lower floor of our parking garage or setting up tents which I've done in the past and you know they're similar episodes like this or so so we do have plans in place

[41:03] when it comes to the ventilators I think answers it depends how how how many people get sick at once and right now we're doing everything we can to preserve so for example if we think that a particular surgical case can be delayed and that case is something that might potentially lead to the ventilator support then we'll defer that we also are considering we have because we're deferring a lot of surgery we now have skilled anesthesiologists and their ventilator machines that we can utilize so we do have plans in place and our hope is that by flattening the curve by mitigating the disease that we can manage these patients and give them the care they that we know we can provide Mary thank you doctor I have a couple

[42:02] questions and one of them has to do with who you will care for are there any restrictions on whether or not people have health insurance whether or not people are documented and so I guess those that's a one question with multiple multiple parts last year we provided sixty million dollars in uncompensated care and it was regardless of your ability to pay your insurance status or whether you were documented or not and so we obviously in a crisis like this would continue our mission thank you and my other question is do you have any of this information available in languages other than English do you have

[43:03] any information available other in languages other than English we do on the on the inpatient side but that's a great point and I don't know that our constant website updates have I'm sure they have it and so that's something that we can get on soon I appreciate that that that input we do have Spanish translators and medical providers Spanish speaking on the campus but as far as the community facing I think we can beat that up thank you thank you Aaron thanks dr. vistas for a lot of information as well as Jeff by the way I was just on the bch website and there is a Google Translate function built into the website but that's not quite the same as actual translation right and so I do have a question for Jeff Oh Jeff it sounds like you were part of the discussions your department or part of

[44:00] the discussions with Governor Poulos about the steps that he's just announced when if you have any recommendations for us here in the city of Boulder do you feel like there were any things that weren't just announced that our particular city might benefit from over and above those actions I think others have done that we've seen across the nation business functions as an example and I think that was a little too far to go because the potential impacts in our community and I know that there is a potential group that's gonna be thinking about that but at this point I think the recommendations that are put forth are the place to start and then we should make sure that we are messaging and that people are following that and that we're supporting them and we're using the prevention message and it's a long way if we can do that thanks so much mark

[45:04] a couple of questions exactly how many ventilators do we have with that that directed to me it's directed to either one of you I would go to doctor this is for that for BCH I could answer that if I had access to all of the hospital websites but I don't have that information with me and I guess this question go ahead not sure I can give you the exact number but I'm not sure that that matters I think we are working with all the hospitals where we are reporting all of our total equipment ventilators mask protective gear etc to make sure that they are adequately distributed or allocated where appropriate and right now I haven't seen what that statewide number is but certainly right now we have

[46:04] capability both in personnel and ventilators it doesn't just come down to the ventilators you need physicians that can manage it you need ICU nurses that can care for it you need respiratory therapists and you need the care environment and in some case negative pressure rooms and so although we like to get it down to a single item it's the entire team and and their competency that that's required beyond just the machine itself my second question is you've emphasized the need to get out in front of this and I certainly share that concern does that argue for something as dramatic as what San Francisco did with a shelter-in-place order I mean it would be disastrous economically but would it be efficacious in terms of the curve [Music]

[47:07] doctor thought she would would lean forward and encourage that you do those kinds of measures very early on before you have almost any cases in your community and that is best approach to stopping the complete spread of the disease so that that is one perspective from a public health expert that's been out there for a while and I think we have to see what's going to happen in Colorado with the approaches that we're taking here and and hopefully it will reduce the curve I do believe it will reduce the curve if we reduce the social distancing and we implement these strategies and we do it in a comprehensive way where people really follow it I do believe because there's so much focus that's put on this right now and you can see this so if nationally as well as Colorado as well as locally that people are jumping ahead and they're taking actions themselves to

[48:03] ahead of even what's out there right now I guess my concern is is should we be jumping to the end of the movie and looking at something like a shelter-in-place action would that do more for us than chasing the curve with a series of lesser actions that we may have to amend later and you know could we get better effect from doing that for two weeks than doing a series of things that that we may have to keep momentum and revising as where as we're chasing the virus I don't know the answer simply asking yeah I would sorry let me take you off the speaker I would I would not recommend that we do that at this point

[49:01] we will like I had I think I said earlier we would support people who want to step ahead I'm Matt but we the data that we're looking at as well we know that there's impacts to residents when we do things like that and we've heard this loud and clear from our municipalities that doing those kind of measures will have significant impacts on our children they'll have significant impacts on families that can't get the services that they need and it's a really difficult balance it's a really difficult balance when we start talking about those things and it's been a really difficult decision making process I understand thank you other questions Mary so I have kind of a follow up question to Marc's ventilator question which is you were talking earlier about how you're preparing and you're making

[50:00] room for being able to handle more patients and I was wondering if you could give us an approximation of what that extra room including what you have now or on a regular basis what that number might be I'm not sure I can do that I can tell you that yeah it really depends on on how well we're able to manage the current load of patients that we have that aren't related to kovat we we expect that we by Wednesday are going to be able to free up a 23 bed unit and have that available unfortunately historically at least this year for our medical surgical beds we've been running at about 90% occupancy and but a

[51:00] significant number of those are elective surgical cases so but we will be freeing up a 23 bed unit by midweek and hopefully we can increase that as time moves on that's just within the hospital itself we are looking at other other areas that we could care for and manage patients including the operating room or a recovery area or some unbuilt out space so something above 23 is that what I'm hearing so I think you're looking for a specific number - or just noise because even just within our Hospital we don't just have beds we have critical care beds we have stepped down beds we have post acute care and post off recovery beds maternity beds

[52:03] emergency etc and and so they are all designed to manage the gamut of severity and acuity which we expect that that will increase and it will increase across that acuity as well so so I would say yes at a minimum and we expect to be able to expand that but it depends on the type of beds as well and we do think that we would be able to significantly increase our ICU bed capacity as well thank you other questions for our experts Jane do you have anything that you'd like to ask no I don't Thanks great so doctor visitors and Jeff thanks so much for participating you're welcome to stay on if you'd like to listen in as we as we move in a few minutes to policy questions your assessments and your recommendations were certainly sobering and I think they provide us with some good guidance about what we do from a policy perspective and we really appreciate your expert opinions and

[53:00] advice and your connections with healthcare providers around the state and across the country we may be having some more meetings here on the next couple of weeks on this topic and we would always welcome your participation and we may very well fight you to come back again and give us some more further further briefing but thank you so much for being available tonight on short notice yeah my pleasure and certainly if not myself someone from our team will make themselves available great thanks a lot we have one more item on the briefing we again this was all put together on very short notice so this is not a criticism but we had hoped to invite or get somebody from cu2 to be able to come tonight but they were dealing with some other issues as well but but Sam Weaver has been able to communicate with Cu and and can pass along some of the things that they're doing Robert is now exiting Sam can can brief us on some of the discussions he's had or information he's

[54:00] gotten from Cu and maybe I had one of our next meetings we can get somebody from Cu to attend but Sam do you want to brief us a little bit about what's to use doing shutting down the campus more or less so is now exiting sorry so I think a very responsible measured response to what's going on you know one of the things that we've heard about is our views on the hill and you know we have a response from the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Acura Bradley is encouraging around you responsible

[55:03] mindful of their actions look out for themselves and each other so that's one big thing I think the other main thing is that we shut down so as well as students who are still around for the responsible research labs are being asked to shut down so that's what I know need to go on at great length we will hear from you representative and Jane can speak a little bit about the order that she signed this morning relating to gatherings any questions for Sam of us you will hope to get to see representatives to an upcoming meeting okay great so that's the end of this briefing again we'll probably have additional briefings in the future we

[56:02] just want to point out we've got really great resources at the city's webpage simply Google Boulder and coronavirus and Patrick Kaiser Lee and his team have maintained lots and lots of information and links there to Boulder County Public Health to state and national resources that is also in Spanish and that continues to be updated daily sometimes hourly with new information new resources new FAQ so I would encourage folks to to go to the city's webpage on the coronavirus and and learn more information and I think with that we're going to turn it over to to Jane and her team to talk a little bit about some of the steps they've taken and then some steps that we might take I think Jane's gonna be looking for some direction from us and a few things and we can certainly

[57:00] provide direction whether saw it or not and then we do need to do a matter of business at the end of that discussion which is to affirm and extend the emergency emergency powers that were put in place a few days ago so Jane is yours thank you and before we jump into the city update I did hear from Francis Draper just a clarification that the dorms are actually open because there are students that really cannot easily go home so they're open but what we're doing is that we are encouraging them to go home if they can but allowing them to stay if they cannot so that is just a clarification from Cu but anyway on to the city response so we have a number of people that are going to be talking about it and I'm gonna start off with Tanya Angie who is our deputy city manager and she'll be talking about the teams that we've established and what we're doing there Tanya thank you Jane Tanya Angie WD city manager Chris can

[58:03] you forward so the city staff have come together and created guiding principles and response team objectives that we've used in our decision-making process and I just want to step through those with you and also for the benefit of the community so number one is preserve the health care system we've already talked to tonight about flattening the curve in addition ensure continuity of government deliver essential services in a bit Chris we'll talk about what are our essential services focus on equity all community members are included meaning that we are looking at the impacts of all in the decisions response team objectives include effective communication that is within the organization with council with the community ensure continuity of operations that goes back to the delivering the essential services meet

[59:00] emergency needs in coordination with partners you'll hear more about that tonight and I think the conversation so far illuminates we cannot respond to this alone or in a vacuum we need to be doing that together with others equitably equitably care for employees and the community and identify and address ways this pandemic may exasperate existing in equities and I do want to highlight thank you to councilmember young for forwarding the real reals principals because we actually went back and made some amendments to our guiding principles and team objectives to reflect that Chris can you forward please so high level actions that we've taken to date have been launched or internal city response team and we've broken that response team into three different Ariel's areas so one focused on internal operations so

[60:00] finance HR can occations external operations so that's really focusing on our direct essential service delivery operations and then community services so community partnerships etc we declared an emergency on Saturday March 14th the emergency operation center was activated which is commonly also known through the acronym AOC and we are moving to a regional coordination response I do want to indicate that Mike chard is also on the call so if council members do have questions specifically around the EOC actions he's on the call to be able to answer those I mention who Mike chart is oh thank you Mike chart is the director of emergency management for Boulder County and the city of Boulder we closed all city facilities to public employees on Sunday 00 p.m.

[61:00] today to actually take any needs that they have out of their offices so that they can work remotely this is incredibly important because we are going to be focusing cleaning of facilities for essential employees but we also do need to go through and clean other facilities as well I do want to indicate because this question has came up is our passive open spaces open still with this closure and yes they are issued three emergency orders which included the closure of city buildings quote closing of tonight's council meeting and prohibiting public gatherings in public spaces tonight discussed at the end of the staff Breen briefing is consideration of additional emergency order or orders so mr. Yates had already highlighted communications and I do want to commend the communication staff for the work that they've done very quickly in this

[62:01] space so Boulder at Boulder Colorado gov coronavirus is the landing page for all coronavirus information as was previously indicated this is updated throughout the day including on weekends this information is actually available and translated in 00 p.m. today all city press releases and other communications will be in both English and Spanish coronavirus video news will be starting to be produced on March 13th which will be a weekly video production this will also be in English in Spanish and we will be posting that not only on the city website but also on social media as we've seen great great utilization of video and social media interesting data point is our web traffic on the coronavirus page and so

[63:02] that data point is seen on your screen that's a three thousand two hundred percent above average stop so we've we feel that community as well as employees are finding this page to be a value with that I will turn it over to Chris who will talk briefly about essential services and protecting our employees thanks Tanya Christmas Chuck I'm the other deputy city manager right now we are in an operational state where we're focusing on delivering essential services to our community and so listed on the screen are really what are our critical essential services what are the things that really really have to continue and that is our law enforcement so our Police Department as well as the open space Rangers on the fire rescue department our water and wastewater services and we and delivery and treatment as well as transportation and access and then of course our citywide

[64:00] response team that's the team that are our core essential staff that are continuing to work we do have other essential services that are essentially for emergency response or in order to kind of keep the rest of the operations running so our Parks and Recreation forestry department is on call in case there are any winter storms if there's any trees down in other words those things to ensure continued access throughout the community as well as right-of-way inspectors and our building inspectors are available for emergency on-call as well as then we have some of our internal operations staff from finance the City Attorney's Office Human Resources etc that are still working to support our essential operations the rest of our staff are working remotely from home if possible and or maybe redeployed in support of one of these essential services through something Adam has question yeah Chris this is an

[65:01] hour essential service but have we've been in contact with Xcel about electricity and anything that they're doing you know in terms of mitigating there are other essential services in the community power trash collection as another big one and so we do have folks both inside the city as well as through the Emergency Operations Center that help interface with some of those critical services you know exhale put a statement out today I wonder if we could link that on our website and if Western disposal also has one maybe we can link that yeah we'll look into it innama so there was some questions that came up around what are we doing to take care of our first responders and our essential employees and so within our Public Safety dispatch we have sprinting screening protocols for those incoming calls to 911 screen for potential Kovan

[66:00] 19 patients that helps inform our response personnel to know where you know what's the condition of the person that they may be going to interact with both our police and fire department have personal protective equipment that they are carrying with them we've also increased cleaning of vehicles there's a very detailed protocol on how to do that especially for ambulances we're also encouraging online and phone reporting for folks of course practicing social distancing in our buildings as well as social distancing for our first responders in certain cases of where they're responding to certain facilities like long-term care facilities we've also of course increased the cleaning of essential workspaces here inside the city and then we've been working in partnership with our medical director and both fire and police regarding our return to work and quarantine protocols in the event that there is any exposure or illness for our first responders so

[67:00] with that I'm gonna turn it over to Kirk fern Harbor our director of housing and Human Services to talk through some other work detailed work that they've been doing with their services good evening Council heard from our director of housing Human Services so last week we started working on a plan for individuals that are experiencing homelessness in relation to the The Cove at 19 and as you're aware there's challenges of faith faced that the rest of the community has an easier time with and things like social distancing is more difficult and you know when Jeff earlier was talking about you know stay at home if you don't feel good that's that's difficult for our homeless population their general health is not

[68:02] as good and those that are have symptoms of kovin 19 we don't you know currently have a plan for where they go or where they would be housed so the end of the last week we put a group together with members of our team city along Mott Boulder County Public Health and members of the EOC and we came up with a plan that was completed on Saturday which which is the slide in front of you called phase one so phase one was was implemented this morning so the table there kind of shows you the the different services that we have that are critical to this population and particularly you know where they sleep at night so you're

[69:00] familiar with the 30th Street location which has three functions navigation which has 50 beds we currently have about 20 that are the navigation program that's dropped from the average of 38 that we had a month or two ago coordinated entry which doesn't require beds and severe weather shelter which is 72 beds the the North Boulder shelter where we have housing focus shelter has 160 beds and that bed use has about has been about 120 over the last month so what we've done is we've moved some of these functions so you may have remember remembered from the last time I was in front of council on this particular issue we were going to move the navigation services to the north older shelter in a few months we've actually

[70:01] moved that function there this morning so those individuals that were in navigation are now at the North Boulder sole shelter we'll see we still have about 20 beds of additional capacity and the services for navigation will also be occurring at the North Boulder shelter so the staff from bridge house will be providing the services there severe weather shelter will stay where it is however it will take over the entire building instead of half of the building as its previously been set up so what is what has occurred today is that there's been a thorough cleaning of the 30th Street location and then the 72 beds have been spread throughout the facility to increase separation between

[71:01] individuals it's like it gets you to go on to the next slide phase two so this is a a plan which is in process right now and this this the evolution of this plan also started last week we've also been working with with public health and the EOC on this plan essentially it's correct it's creating a third location for homeless individuals to go if they're symptomatic and so with this each person would be screened every evening at entrance of one of the two facilities if they're symptomatic they would be taken by transportation directly to this third facility where there would be 24-hour service and some

[72:03] medical staff to to oversee their care at this point Public Health has told us that they don't have testing and you sort of heard that earlier there's not a lot of testing available so it's in question whether those individuals would be tested or not but they would be put in a facility where they had more isolation and supports including medical support were I I just got off of a call at five o'clock with the EOC on this particular plan some of the challenges that we're having are the availability of PPE or the personal protection equipment and until that can be sourced we wouldn't be able to set this up we're looking we're currently looking at two different possible locations one is the fairgrounds in Longmont and the other is

[73:02] the East Boulder rec center if you could move to slide 12 so there's sort of three areas that we've been that we've been focusing on the first is community services so the the city has been carefully tracking the needs of the community members really through close coordination with Boulder County and many of our service agencies in the community so we've organized the structure to regularly communicate with our various nonprofit organizations that are doing this work also you will have 30 this afternoon on this disease walk run a virus website that's been mentioned earlier we had a document

[74:00] go up there which is frequently asked questions which guides the community to where they should go for particular needs and we've we've also been able to maintain support with the food assistance financial assistance transportation child care supports base management for older adults and mediation so the the we've also organized to group well we haven't organized the there's two groups that have been going on for some time but we brought them back together one is our funding funders collaborative which has been meeting which meets typically two or three times a year but now we're

[75:01] meeting on a regular basis the funders collaborative is made up of City Boulder city of long lines Boulder County the Community Foundation's from each of the the communities and other funders like the United Way so the what we're doing with the funding collaborative is ensuring that we are aligned in what we're supporting and making sure that the needs of the community are being met with the various funding streams also the the Community Foundation has set up an account for support that can go towards several different organizations and then at the end their Family Resource Network that's also an organizational structure that

[76:03] has been in place and that's you know various organizations it's you know support the community in various ways so really bringing them together and understand we understand what their needs are and lastly before I before I close and then you can ask me any questions so the we've heard from the community about some concerns with the eviction and I would I would say that eviction is one or the inability to pay your rents at the end of the month is one of many community needs that we're tracking right now and it shouldn't be looked at in isolation we have several organizations that we fund that give

[77:03] rent assistance and so we have structures in place to assist families and individuals that are struggling with that as well as other needs we also have contracts in place with all of these organizations and we would be able to [Music] with our funding collaborative add resources to that as needed within the community so I will stop there if there's questions or if you want to keep going and come back for questions yeah we just keep going a few questions first and then you're in America so I do want to touch more on this part in particular I assume now it's not the time to do that well let's go ahead not you use a

[78:03] question over more about no just more of a discussion a little discussion because I think when we get to the end of the meeting we talk about future meetings that would be a good time to talk about those types of topics perfect questions recurred up to this point Aaron then Mary thanks for all that Curt very helpful I'm just other thing we were just talking about you're saying that additional funding could potentially be deployed for rental support can you elaborate a little bit on that I know we have the keeping families house program that we work with emergency family assistance Association on are there other rental support programs that we currently run or that we might that we might to support as well so we have one one program set up for families of one for individuals okay where's that individual one run out of I don't think I'm familiar with it so currently that actually wanted runs to our coordinated entry program and part of that is is to

[79:05] actually prevent individuals from becoming unhoused great earlier this year we actually I think it was about well now it's actually in 2019 about midway through 2019 I believe we started that program thanks for that going back to issues with folks experiencing homelessness I one of the the things that we've heard about is the need for potentially better sanitation facilities for folks who are who are unhappy thing about providing say hand-washing stations for out in the community at all I wouldn't be able to answer that I don't know I know Parks and Rec was was looking at that but I wouldn't be able to I wouldn't be

[80:00] able to answer that okay that's fine I'll bring it up a little later in the meeting then thanks for all that there's been increased infection control within both 30th Street and the North Boulder shelter they've at the North Boulder shelter they've added additional cleaners so they're cleaning a couple times per day at 30th Street their bed layout they've they're masking individuals who are symptomatic clínicas visiting twice per week they're changing some of the food service protocols and staggering meals and showers and they've also put in place PVC clean protocols and signage that's great to hear actually I will do one another follow up the phase one and phase two the shifting of services sounds like a really well put together plan to minimize the risk

[81:02] of infection and transmission for foreign house folks that phase two I hear it would be challenges finding a location on that but do you have a potential time frame for that hitting that phase two goal tomorrow we have a meeting with ELC tomorrow where we'll be able to probably come closer to answering some of those questions the challenge I don't think is finding the location we have two locations that will work okay we have the transportation setup we have the meal setup it's really the support in the PPE which is sort of the challenge at this point okay thank you for them Mary so on with respect to

[82:00] getting information to both families and individuals who are unhappy receiving information just like the basic information about how symptoms and and and sanitation things like that okay I'm not sure totally how individual is being communicated necessary information such as what the symptoms are of the illness and rakaat the the precautions to prevent the illness and the shelter their strap their staff have gone through training they have signage up there monitoring individuals as they come in there so they're doing an educational outreach

[83:01] within the facilities and as far as reaching out to the to the wider community we're really relying on the existing structures and the organizations that are connected with the community thank you and you mentioned funding collaborative I was curious to know what the source of dollars is that mostly donations are there other sources as well and we do have sources there we also have a system in place called the opportunity fund and

[84:00] that's funding that can come through at any time of the year so we have a structure in place where we can move quickly if needed but the the Community Foundation will is has certainly started a process for trying to raise resources to support these initiatives and Kurt on you mentioned the health equity fund is that that's usually distributed by a grant proposals and is there a way to allocate for emergencies such as these as this yes yeah that could work within the structure of the Opportunity Fund thank you and then finally with respect to the question about evictions I heard this afternoon that the courts have suspended non-essential cases through I

[85:04] believe it was May 31st maybe that's not for you Curt but just in general I heard that and I just wanted confirmation and if that does affect eviction cases information first you looks like he gave something this thing just did we were on a phone call last night that included the courts and they were talking about adjusting and changing their operations I don't have the details on exactly what they've done but we can follow up and find that information yeah I heard that I spoke with Megan fans'll of bar huh this afternoon and she's the one that mentioned it so thank you Judy I think Judy had some questions along to be posed

[86:06] Baro reached out this afternoon and they're really encouraging their landlords to work with their tenants as necessary to find ways to you know create flexible payments and that sort of thing for individual needs okay we have juni and then Rachel and Sam maybe slightly an update if there are still people living in camps we just mentioned

[87:00] you know what type of outreach we're doing any mention parking wrecks because to me goes back to Aaron just mentioned about sanitation and outreach for people who are living in encampments and in tents around town if we don't have people living in camps in tents I suppose that question but I just wanted you to give us a little bit of an update or some information around that thank you yeah thanks for allowing me to clarify that so my understanding from from Aaron's question was hand washing and sanitizing for people who are out in the public which I understood you know could be anyone that was I was in the parks

[88:01] during during the day I wasn't necessarily reflecting on those that worked there were camping while there we don't currently have encampments right now there are visuals that do camp within the city and [Music] the the the hot team really works with those individuals and is aware of almost all of them and connects with them on a regular basis to try to assist them and getting into services okay anything else tuning Rachel [Music] number one I think it's probably a simple one to answer but I think I heard

[89:00] you say that for sheltering people with symptoms we were maybe looking at East Golder rec center and I was kind of just wondering why is that particular rec center I understand that they are all shut down and nobody should be going but let's say that somebody does show up and encounter somebody in the parking lot or makes it through the door or whatever why would we have the rec center that doubles as a Senior Center be the one that we target for this well we we have communicated well with our seniors that both of the senior centers have been shut down the reason the rec center is being looked at and I would say the rec center is probably a second choice at this time the fairgrounds was put up as as the first choice from the from the perspective of the EOC the the evil direct center is better structured than the North Pole direct center from the number of rooms and size of rooms and

[90:03] sort of the layout of the facility there's work to be set up there would be the people that would be coming there as clients would actually be coming on a designated bus and so others wouldn't be coming into the facility unless they came through in that fashion so it really wouldn't be to the public the doors would likely be locked okay perfect and then second and I'm not sure this is a question for you I don't know what points should bring it up but part of my background is both working as a guardian ad litem and as a YWCA attorney and victim advocate and so I've got a lot of experience of going into homes with abusive parents and battered women and I understand that a lot of this is gonna be the County purview but given that safety is within the city purview and we might be locking

[91:01] people down and having people shelter in place with their families and some of those families are going to be abusive families and unsafe homes I'm just wondering what we might be doing to address that for women and kids who might be you know instructed to stay in those homes I don't know that I have the answer to that I we could reach out to Boulder County because the the social services would fall underneath them but I can certainly reach out to them tomorrow to get a response to that okay and and again like you know I know we're not supposed to intermingle sort of with other families but if we could find a way to make sure that we are checking in on families that have known risks and also maybe some public education around you know if you've if your kid has a friend who you know Rachel Rachel and Kurt this is Tonya can I just add additional context to why East Boulder

[92:01] rec center so the reason for East Boulder is also because there's multiple divided spaces within the facility so that we can separate it's the largest space and it's so it's most easily supported by EEOC also the proximity to the hospital is something that was taken into consideration as well and then specifically Rachel this is Chris thank you related to your question about also some of the supportive services that go and enter into homes that's an issue that we are aware of and coordinating through the Emergency Operations Center our vulnerable populations section within the EOC has that on their radar and is coordinating that with those service providers great thank you Sam did you have questions for Curtin

[93:04] yeah anybody else have questions Sam Sam may be speaking on a mute or maybe doesn't any questions sounds like tom has nothing I just wanted to confirm what we've also heard that the the district the district court in the county quarter can continue all non-essential cases until after May 31st okay good may we get some more information and then the next meeting as opposed to announce something next week it's not formal we've heard that informally oh great thanks for that update other questions I'm aware that I'm aware that Sam had a question earlier today about meals on wheels so meals on wheels is continuing to function out of the aged West Center and although the building is locked up they're continuing to make meals from there they are delivering meals and they're also looking to increase their capacity for to support additional seniors they are looking for more

[94:02] financial resources from the community to support that work as well as drivers okay so just to repeat that wheels and wheels is looking for financial support and some additional volunteers as drivers that's correct and you can go to their website okay if someone wants to volunteer make a contribution go to meals on wheels website you're in Boulder okay great other questions for current I know we can I interrupt you there Kurt do you have some more thank you okay okay I'm financial just second everybody has something actually Chris could you also if it's okay with counsel I had one more thing to the web page there's some really good articles out there from the Humane Society and whatnot that you know your pets aren't carriers so don't be dropping your pets off and having him euthanized it'd just be nice if we could get a good link with I mean there's a ton of articles out there about how it's been proven there you know there's no proof that they are

[95:01] carriers great anything else Eugene super so at CAC council asked for information about the financial considerations that we might encounter as a result of this situation so we think that the new impacts could be significant but it's way too early to tell what they are as you may know but maybe the community doesn't when we achieve revenue in March we don't know that we got it or not until it's received in late April so we're always lagging by a month to know how our revenues are coming in so we're gonna process it and report it as quickly as possible one of the things that could be helping us is that while there's definitely going to be a significant impact there has been a lot of people going to grocery stores and general retail stores and so that activity may well be up for March which might modify to some extent the the

[96:02] negative downturn that we think we're going to see there's likely significant both medium and long-term impact to the economy because we'll have reductions in tourism activity which brings quite a bit of revenue into the city as well as store closures with possible job losses of the employees that are working there unless consumer spending as a result of that so this is all a vicious circle that is really going to be hard to move out of as of March 10th the official state economic forecast has not been adjusted so looking at the next slide some of the things just to keep in mind this is a little bit of data that you might be interested in in a normal year 38 percent of our total revenues come from sales and use tax and forty eight percent or fifty percent of it comes from our total revenues when you exclude utilities so just remember that we do get a lot of income from people paying for their water bill their sewer bill if

[97:01] you take those out of there which are enterprise funds that goes specifically to operating those facilities the general fund operates without that money being considered so 50 percent of our general fund revenue comes from sales and use taxes when we take a look back at last year our total sales and use tax revenue for 2019 was around 142 million and in March which is the month that were in now a year ago we got about eight and a half percent of the total and when you take a look at where the came from about 30% of that total comes from eating places in general retail 12% from food stores and almost 60% from all the other so this is one of the great reasons why the council approved a budget that included significant reserves we have 19 and a half percent reserves or 28 point two million dollars for the general fund operating expenses so we believe that despite the downturn

[98:00] we do have reserves on hand that will help work us through any downturn that we have in the short term we'll have to see how the economy bounces back when things begin to return to normal and whether our reserves will hold through for that but we feel very confident that we've done a good job in financial planning thanks to the council's agreement with those reserves so then on to the next thing so as I think you heard we are working in partnership with a lot of agencies around the region and we really appreciate all the community partners that we have Curt talked a little bit about the funding collaborative working to coordinate residents support and the community vitality has already been working with our partners in that area including the Small Business Development Center the boulder Chamber the Latino Chamber the county and the boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau so we those are just examples of things

[99:01] that city staff members are doing we're reaching out to all of our partners and just like dr. Visser said that they're working with their Hospital partners around the region when you face a crisis like this working together always makes a difference so we obviously are going to be providing more updates in the days and weeks ahead and council will make a decision about whether or not you want to have meetings more frequently and we can talk about that later one of the things that we're doing is we're taking a really hard look and our programs and services so that we can be ready to respond to the needs of our community and I think that's a lot of the questions that you were asking of Curt fern Harbor a minute ago because we definitely want to be focusing on those who are most vulnerable in our community so then the next slide I think starts to work us into a discussion that you may have we have the next slide coming up yeah so as you know we issued a declaration of emergency and tonight we're asking

[100:02] participant is now exiting we're asking Council to extend that and approve it but we also had some orders that occurred underneath that particular emergency power one of which was today we issued an emergency order prohibiting gatherings of more than 20 people on public spaces in the city that's different than what the cat the governor did which is 50 people but we went to 20 anyway we've been hearing a lot about things that we could do and so we prepared this slide to show you some options the first one is no person shall allow in-person consumption of food and drink at any restaurant bar tavern hotel we would allow takeout delivery and drive-through and so this is something the governor has done on a statewide basis and we can talk to the city attorney about whether or not it would be important for us to also issue that

[101:00] to make it more enforceable in the city then we were also thinking about health clubs gyms or theaters again the governor did this as well and will need to know whether or not we should legally also adopt it in the city and then we tried to come up with something very broad that you can talk about and adopter or ask me to adopt or not so this would be that any business or organization should not be open to the public unless they exercise good sanitation practices so that's pretty broad I'm not I think it'll be difficult to enforce but we wanted just to show you an option that would have something much broader certainly our community members have been writing to City Council and providing you with lots of ideas I know that you yourselves have a number of ideas that you'd like to talk about and so I think we're ready to begin the discussion phase this conversation unless you have further questions about our response to

[102:01] the emergency big questions first and then and then open it up for discussion Adam do have a question yeah just a point and because I didn't remember at the time that we were talking about to see you and I don't want it to get lost it would be awesome if we could find out is still dining-hall services open for residents I believe that they will remain open for their people that are staying in the dorms okay perfect thank you welcome that kind of begs a broader question Tom do you know the answer do we have jurisdiction over you in other words if C was doing something that we would otherwise prohibit of private parties do you know we have jurisdiction to tell them tell them as opposed to ask them I would always ask them to tell them what to do horses don't exempt the individual or the the university itself that's one of those tough questions I think we would have if they were violating our laws the the ability to tell them to stop okay the questions before we kind of go into a broader discussion about what we'd

[103:00] like to see gene do go ahead mark our reserves my shaky math is near accurate represent about two and a half months is that about right of operations yes that is right and that would be if if everything stopped and our view is that everything is not actually going to stop but that has been one of the reasons we've been trying to push it up and up since we have no idea how long this is going to last or how severe it's going to be has there been any contingency planning for those things we're just going to stop doing we're not fund or put off to another for another six months or a year until we have the capability of doing it and in fact a doomsday list so we did this during the 2008 2009 downturn and we will be as we start talking about the budget for next year thinking about the

[104:00] budget for this year now and coming up with ideas but we have not done specific planning around it so that it's not like tomorrow we could start shutting down stuff we need to think about what would be appropriate to stop doing is it worth initiating that process of planning yeah we could do so one of the issues that we have however and I don't even want to call it an issue is the requirements of federal law and our own policies with regard to paying our employees during this time and so if we stopped a service the only way to really save money on it would be to have employees not be working and not be paid and we've made a policy decision to pay our employees thank you let's go to Rachel and and okay let's go to the phone people on the phone because I've been waiting patiently and then we got Marian and Ginny Rachel and Sam we're just asking questions of Jane now

[105:00] we'll brought brought into an open discussion but you've got some questions Thank You Jane that was really helpful and I'm glad to hear that we are going to keep employees policy my question is I absolutely encourage us to shop locally but given that we are trying not to go out I I personally have been doing some online ordering I want to make sure to clarify for the community does that continue to sustain or sales tax equally I know that benign yeah it depends where you're from I guess is the answer Amazon and other the other large ones to submit sales taxes CMB have any questions of James okay I think we went to Junia and then Mary thank you I just have a question for some of the emails that receipt we received about people on the hill and I did read the declaration

[106:02] the emergency declaration when we talked about no gathering of people of more than 20 people in public but I think part of the issue was there were a lot of students inside at home and I was wondering I don't know that's something we can restrict people from having that many people but because I would imagine that also impact the community if you have 50 to 100 student just in their homes partying and then dispersing into the community so I just wanted to have some clarification thank you so I don't know if we can lawfully prohibit actions inside of homes or not one of the reasons that we did pass this emergency declaration is is to address some things that were going on on the hill so in the event that a party spills over into the street then the police would be able to enforce it and I'll

[107:00] tell you that they've been working really hard up on the hill to enforce all of our rules up there and I think they've been doing a good job of that you know it's hard to control what others do but we are trying to do that Mary so thank you as well for the policy of continuing to pay employees so we also have our custodial employees or contracts with custodial companies that we've done the minimum wage work and all of that and so I'm wondering if those contracts cover situations such as this where the rec centers for instance are closed now and if those folks they may be working I don't know but if they are not working is there something in the contract and if so what might it say regarding pay in situations such as this

[108:03] one so Mary I don't know the answer to that question and I don't think we know now you know yes I can so we are actively looking at all of our contracts in addition to janitorial for the reasons that you mentioned Mary specifically to janitorial we are actually increasing our cleaning so there is not an impact to our janitorial contracts and frankly we look at that as essential contracts to stay in place so that we are protecting our first responders and essential employees Thank You Gina I have a question for you and we received a number of emails over the last few days from community members with helpful suggestions and one of those helpful suggestions that they've offered is is that because the city owns the former Boulder Community Hospital site on Broadway that perhaps that could be a facility that could be used either for patient overflow or quarantine or

[109:00] other sheltering if that need ever arises can used to be a little bit about the purpose of using that building for that for those purposes yeah thanks for that question Bob so as you all know we've been working on that building for a long time and a number of months ago council authorized us to begin deconstruction of the building and so we've started to do that in a very environmentally sustainable way so one of the first things that we needed to do to shut down the building was to turn off all water services to the building as a result for months there has not been water or sanitation services in the building it is currently not habitable not only does it does it not have a certificate of occupancy it is not habitable for human life and we cannot bring it up easily it would it's mostly impossible there are hazardous material there are hazardous concerns there of black mold which we

[110:01] continue to abate every time we find it but it's just not an appropriate place to put human beings so it is it's not an alternative so that's why I'm super glad that dr. Visser's and Jeff Zack were here earlier tonight and explained to us that indeed they're working on alternative care facilities that they do have plans for that so that we do have overflow capacity in our community through the hospital and Public Health working together Mary so Jane in your one of the orders they believe it wasn't one for this morning it was 20 people in public right spaces and during Jeff mosaics presentation he said that it would be better if it was more like five or ten and and that was also what was recommended at the federal

[111:01] level so I'm wondering if that can change yes it absolutely can in fact we had an interesting conversation around what number we were going to pick and we ended up with 20 because we felt 50 was wait too large of a number and we weren't sure that it was appropriate to go down to 10 but it would certainly be appropriate for council to give some guidance on that and then we can amend that order well one of the things that I heard during Jeff's presentation was that you take the number of cases and you multiply that by 50 as the number of probable cases out there so maybe that provides some guidance yeah thank you now there's a little bit out of left field but it's a question for Tom regarding trying to mitigate some of the parting that's happening is is there any

[112:00] enforceable way to prevent a certain amount of alcohol being purchased at a single time like is there anything we can do in that term yes yes the the emergency code provides specifically for limitations on the sale of alcohol you could theoretically do that just offering enough any other questions for Jane before we kind of launch into a discussion about things we should do Mary one more I received a question about whether or not we might be able to do something similar to the way Amber Alerts are done in terms of anything that should go out immediately in a very broad manner so I'm just asking the question I would need to talk to Carrie Weinheim er and might call Durazo for clearer information but we do have reverse 9-1-1 we just need people to sign up for it

[113:01] and I don't think we've had a majority of people do so so we can put out more information about how to how to sign up for reverse 9-1-1 and encourage people to do that in case of emergencies I'll just add Jane the police department has a really good app as well which is a little different than the reverse 9-1-1 and you can opt in on that have you download that app and opt in you can opt to receive notifications from the police department so that might be a way of communicating along the lines what Mary's talking about okay they're just they're just text they pop up you know and they're kind of like Amber Alerts but when when something's going down the police department pushes something out it's not really 9-1-1 but it's just letting folks know great thanks I'm sorry Jenny it's it's so far away social distance we talk about that later we focus on questions and then provide Jane

[114:01] some some guidance and then I think we'll wrap it up with a discussion of what what topics we want to talk about in future meetings and how often we want to have those well it's not about future meeting more about you know in the same framework of emergency I just I think once we talk about Jane's proposals we'll also talk about the ideas we have about what to do yes if you have a discussion item we probably wait until I think we're just about done with questions Rachel and Sam do you have any follow-up questions for Jane before we launch into the discussion well this is M clamp a whole bunch of stuff up they list I think we did touch on again okay well let's go ahead and move into those discussions yeah okay well you guys have been very patient on the phone so we'll let you guys go first I know Sam you've got a list and sounds like Rachel you got it and then Junie will go into eviction discussions and

[115:00] some other things so cm take it away so I don't have a directive yet though what I intended to adopt was the one with regard to restaurant takeout delivery and drive-through and possibly the health club gyms or theaters both of which the governor has done and we can mirror those if we need to but beyond that I had not made an intention to add places so that's why we're having the conversation to figure out what council feels would be appropriate let me process the suggestion because it sounds like we might be getting into a bit of a

[116:00] laundry list Jane would you prefer that people just speak to their laundry list without you responding to it or do you want us to take each item and have a little bit of a council poll what would be most helpful for you so I so I truly can't respond to everybody's single item yeah and so it seems like the council should talk about the things that they want and then all of you need to come to kind of a consensus about the sorts of things that you're most concerned about is there any way we don't know who's Chris you're controlling the screen is there any way you could do kind of a little whiteboard exercise where you could just do some bullet points and so maybe we could just get everyone's list out there and then we can go back and do it rather than item by item it can you do that for us so the first if you could when you get ready first item was private schools presumably that's other than be BSD and keep in mind our jurisdiction this is the city limits we say I'm go ahead and

[117:00] continue with your list we're just gonna I'm white board this stuff I don't know and then and then we'll control back and talk about what we might do with it so go ahead Sam great well I you know I can be free I think I email him right so school workshop and instructions of these which was I think super an in the remaining life you go a little over Sam Chris is trying to Chris is trying to type as you talk so just a little bit slower festivals workshop instruction facilities which was super aunt and her interest in so he's there any remaining like theaters that are open private

[118:03] events and festivals okay resource 2000 and charm I think they're gonna shut down voluntarily so that may not be a big deal but I just want to put that up and then you know the other questions I had work do we want to think about how we deal with groceries do we want to think about how we deal with farms and then shelters like shelter for the homeless you know what we're gonna want to do for any of the other shelters we have the mix and I can stop there I don't need to keep going but my email okay well let's just go ahead and throw everything from your email up there and and some of them we might be able to dress real quick Sam can I just ask you

[119:00] here Sam do you mind if I ask you a quick question sorry thanks well I just wanna are you do you have concrete proposals on all these are or do you want us to tuck them over one by one but like like that's question yeah yeah I do think that we want to consider shutting down any schools which are not shut down already I think any remaining like theaters that are up and down which includes movie theaters yeah some of these have been for some I thought we should just raise the issue and talk about it like with

[120:00] groceries and pharmacies and you know shelters anyway I'm just using my moment to put ideas out there and then we can figure out what let me suggest some Sami when you send your list out on hotline this afternoon you put things into categories closures or potential closures and then the second list was really more discussion items would you be okay of crisps kind of Davidian to those two categories okay so Chris I think the closure potentials would would include theaters gyms private schools workshop instructional facilities live theaters private event festivals and resource charm and that if you could just you know put a heading on those that are you know potential closures and then everything starting at grocery stores on has moremore discussion points jim's

[121:02] goes and jim goes to the top and then it's Sammy I think he sort of grocery stores pharmacy shelters clinics centers and then what can we do about offices that people might walk into Bobby thank you you brought a Knox and manufacturing what did we give that transit whatever and and I just wanted to raise all this so Chris got hotels offices and manufacturing transit and TNC would be like uber and lyft so those are those are really more discussion points

[122:00] probably less likely to be points of potential closure but just I think you'd think or think of a discussion about if there's any changes or anything so let's just go back to the top list of closures [Music] Rachel do you have other potential again this is all just potential we're just talking out loud here to provide Jane some guidance because we don't know we're gonna meet again anything that well that Sam hasn't mentioned on the potential closure list that you'd like to add go through it but I had like three buckets one proactive community help ideas second was we want to advocate for any like executive orders or state actions to be applied during the state of emergency and the third is City purview and decisions which is probably tied up closest with them okay

[123:02] I was like you if I understood you correctly it sounds like your second and third buckets are probably in the so I think what we're talking about right now is providing Jean with some direction for further consideration on potential closures and then another list of things that are maybe to be talked about not that long so under proactive community help I had do we want grocery stores to open early and limited special hours for people who are elderly are we working on organized delivery for things like groceries and the items for people who are vulnerable or we suspending eviction the homelessness sanitation hand washing station public bathrooms day shelter anything else we should be looking at and we want to maybe I mean it's a little bit inverted but we want

[124:01] to because we're closing so many things like where can you continue to get items at this groceries sort of the proactive helps buckets that I had second for executive order the things that I think are state level but I don't know things like no penalties or interests or payment holidays of things like mortgage and student loans who's advocating for those things other financial protections for workers protections for employees who don't want to risk going in to do non-essential work if the employers are not being supportive of social distancing I'm sort of akin to whistleblower protections in this scenario and then one question that I had sort of touched on with is it remotely possible that we can get in during this emergency period only a change to Cora and open records that might enable us to have serial meetings and discuss things like the board appointments more efficiently you get emails during the shutdown

[125:00] also one to get a little bit of clarification on Cora especially for a new member so I was sort of advised not the hotline about cabin Eco bid 19 sort of avoid confusion and so what are the exact lawful ways that I can communicate with the coke on slurs if not on hotline and wanted to get really definitions around what does constitute a serial meeting while we are in this just odd moment in history and then my third bucket was sort of city purview and decision so do we want to and I may have not been able to hear this but did me suspend any water shut-off do we want to lift it look at lifting the ban on prohibiting space parking and then systems the rest point of shutting down non-essential business make sure that we consider that there are benefits to small businesses that sounds like our businesses if we mandate or force it in terms of insurance availability there

[126:00] was a question about can we change the tip sharing for minimum wage law I don't know if that state versus local four servers can share without having to maybe reclassify them from servers to something else because we're not going to have servers anymore we're gonna have people carrying out so we may need to tinker with that and then apparently you cannot donate food if you've opened it but like right now there will be open food that is going to go to waste if we declares that people have to shut and so can those can we find a way for that to be donated I don't never gonna talk about open space that sounded like that is not impacted by the current orders and then I didn't know if there's anything we can do to improve transit I know that some cities are opening additional bike lanes on the streets can we make it easier to rent a bike some of that is equity considerations like if we want people not to ride the bus but they don't own a car and we make it easier for people to bike are we gonna look at public curfews are we going to look at sales tax abatements for people that are

[127:01] having to shut down and then there were some emails about balanced additions I think we could probably look at that at a later date that's my whole day ok great let's continue just to be fair to everybody give everyone an opportunity to add to these effectively what an hour three lists and then then let's just pause and before we talk about any of them let's talk a little bit about process because because we just generated like a three year work plan here I think and we're not gonna do that tonight or probably have time to do that even over the next several weeks so let's let's just complete the lists and then let's take a step back and talk a little bit about how we want to tackle them and what's most immediate so we really have three lists one is things that are potential closures things that are we may want to proactively support and then other I guess I'll talk to call policy changes or issues like eviction

[128:04] suspension and things like that assistance type of type of things so that's really the three topics we have so who wants to go next day potentially add to the list that cm and Rachel just started thank you yes I just wanted to add to what Rachel mentioned about the eviction which is possible if it is possible moratorium on eviction taking into account whether the person the renter can bring an affidavit from their employer as was mentioned so not making it too broad if we have that type of a moratorium and also supporting the working class community here in Boulder and also could would it be possible to get an extension of the deadline for

[129:00] rental licenses and as we mentioned earlier can we have sanitation and public areas frequented by the homeless I know that Kurt just mentioned there are not encampments but if their place is still around or town or community where there are a lot of homeless people would it be possible to have some type of sanitation system there and also since we're also talking about broad policy I'm not sure if this is something we can take on now or in the future would it be possible to lobby the federal government for an extension of the census because we know right now not everyone has computer access in their home in the library closures and and with everything that is going on I think that would be helpful if looking at the broad policy so thank you a quick question

[130:00] number two your extension of rental licenses can you expand on that a little bit I just not sure what you're asking the deadline not extension of if someone apply for rental license because we know there's a lot of closures with our services can they get an extension basically joonie are you asking are you worried about a rental license that might be expiring and an extension on like a renewal for getting a rental license yes yes also I wanted to add to the eviction part that I forgot to mention I know that's a lot to ask for if for instance someone's already going through the eviction process let's say they've already been through court can we stay that meaning that I mean they've already been through court they have to leave I guess maybe there might be some other mitigating factors we can help these people with for instance I don't know provide them housing so I think that

[131:01] might be more of a Curt question than it is anything else so thank you on that what extent does the close the suspension of non-essential cases at district and county court affect evictions it's hard to say I would guess that the court would not consider those essential cases so that they're probably not handling them in Colorado eviction as a state is a matter of state law you so they it's it's not something that we can prohibit so I would think that it's unlikely that a courts going to take up a case but again the court hasn't announced exactly what it's doing yet so I'd be hesitant to give you an opinion on how that's going to affect those cases so maybe the question here would be if the suspension of non-essential cases at the county and

[132:02] district court levels does not suspend eviction then what can be done I'm not sure Mary that the if the state law provides for the right for a landlord to evict somebody in a process for doing that we can't I don't think we have the authority to order the state not to follow its own process we could try to order the landlord's not to use it but I think we that's not a very strong position because they'd have that right under state law so I'm not quite sure how you would do it I think Kurt's approach has been to more in use city resources to prevent people from getting in that situation rather than trying to interfere with the process itself so but the question stands is what is covered or not covered by the yeah and we will report to you as soon as we hear from the court great thank you Adam and then

[133:00] Aaron yeah I'll throw up my limiting alcohol sales just for fun we'll see if there's anyone who is interested obviously you could go right outside the town of volume however much alcohol you wanted but it's at least an option you can be a real popular guy right now yes not out loud just limiting it local sales per day per person okay add that to the list Aaron okay well I had a shorter list they're pretty much all been brought up but I'll just real quickly go through them just a asterisk and interest and there was about eviction prevention not necessarily a moratorium but how can we make sure that people aren't kicked out of their homes that this public health crisis so that's a rental support thing as one aspect of that also small business support you know what we as a city can do to help support the small businesses that will be struggling during with some of these restrictions and closures and things like that the

[134:02] Sanitation particularly the hand-washing facilities that I mentioned before one thing that's probably easy for us is to not do utility shutoffs of city water so that's in like a potential measure we could take and then support for the essential businesses that's that proactive bit that their ritual mention like pharmacies and grocery stores like how do we make sure that they have City supporter there they are there ways we can facilitate some assistance for them and like I've heard some the grocery stores are starting off with an hour for seniors in the morning you know maybe can we recommend something like that so that's a way short list right nearby well I'm sorry you were you next month marking them I'm not I'm hopeful that the courts will not process evictions but I I would I'm afraid we're gonna be engaged in some magical thinking here because if evictions are halted for 90

[135:00] days or 60 days or 120 days if the people in those apartments are not working they're going to be evicted on the 91st day and so I would want to consider whether we can find any resources to augment rental assistance so that people can actually stay in their apartments otherwise where we're delaying that the day of reckoning but it's going to be a huge day of reckoning I also want to focus a little bit on evictions of commercial tenants you know in we often look to other cities for best practices well in New York some of the leading real real estate firms have banded together to commit not to have evictions for another 90 days and if we can encourage our landlord community to work with tenants to find a way to keep them in place

[136:01] I think that would be good they may do that on their own because at the end of 90 or 120 days from now there may be no tenants to be had if they evict somebody but I would like to find other forms of assistance for residential tenants because without it we just you know put him off the day of reckoning everybody of course I'm on board with the evictions both for business and individuals and the one thing I mean the list is obviously extremely long the one thing I guess I would bring to this and try to have have us remember is that though we are fighting a disease the longer impact is gonna be our economy our budget you know all of the individuals that are involved so when we start limiting sales of alcohol that's now the clerk that's you know the clerk that's handling that that's the business itself and that's our tax dollars not

[137:00] receiving those so maybe instead of many closures as we're talking about as I mean we've received a number of emails and I've received a lot of private emails asking me please don't shut us down and some of it's out of our control obviously the governor did that already um but maybe trying to figure out ways of shopping in a safe manner that will still allow income to come in and people to be employed but I mean this the drastic it sexist is possibly going to have on everyone I mean everyone's being touched by it and it's that's truly what's terrifying me so just while we're having this discussion of closing everything down keep that in mind if you can okay let me make a process suggestion Jane that you can react to we've got a really really long list here some of them are may provide some direction to you others will undoubtedly involve some staff work if we go back to scroll back to the top of the list and focused on those things let's assume for

[138:01] sake of discussion that we're going to meet as a council gonna meet in a week or two and we can give Jane's team a little bit of time to a little bit of time to come back and some of these things some of them may require even more some of them may be in flight but are there we've got really four or five things in to the closure category some of which would probably have already been addressed by the governor sounds like Tom's gonna go off and and take a look at those carefully and determine whether we need to you know built in suspenders to our own declaration but just focusing those five or six that are in the potential closure category let's focus on maybe those four purposes of providing staff Direction tonight and then let's give staff a few weeks to come back to us and some of the other things does that work for you Jane yes it does okay so yeah Mary so with respect to this as we move into it I have a question about the

[139:01] insurance thing that I brought up this morning was that this morning yeah one of the things I've learned is that the is that potentially if people closed before the mandate that they won't be covered so I'm wondering and this doesn't have to be answered right now is might it be possible to backdate the mandate so that people that closed say on Friday would be covered just a question okay let me suggest that we kind of park I think the insurance question is a really open question and I think some of us are a little skeptical about this and maybe it's right and maybe it's wrong or maybe it depends on what policy you have or who your insurers so let me suggest for purposes of this discussion we focus on health and safety and in following the advice that we've got from Boulder County Public Health and from doctor visitors we focus on what should be

[140:01] closed that's not already been closed by the governor or by us already and just make those determinations based on public health and if that happens to help somebody from an insurance standpoint that's fine and maybe it won't anyway does that make sense okay so let's take private schools we do even know the status of private schools whether they're open or closed I don't know okay what's your reaction to that Jane to the extent that they're in the city and they haven't already closed you yeah my reaction is that they should be closed okay just council agreed with Jane's recommendation there Rachel and cm just shout out if you disagree with what's being said okay I wonder if the governor's mandate prohibiting assemblies of more than 50 people affects that you could very well yeah go ahead Sam Bob and can we roll back a little bit and say restaurants

[141:02] and bars will we allow curbside and delivery I think that's I think that's what the governor's order says we'll confirm that and general retail how are we gonna deal with that as far as like allowing well okay let's just I know you don't have the benefit of seeing the whiteboard but let's we'll add retail including marijuana to the list of potential closures and we'll get to that let's just maybe go through methodically just add something yep in the discussions we had over the weekend on what we should do shouldn't do one of the things that weighed heaviest was the capacity of the police department to enforce the things that we just wish you think these through think about the effect it would

[142:01] have and the priority and none of us are public health experts so I can't tell you what there's a greater risk whether somebody walks into a store and pick something up or stands on a curb and pick something up there may be some logic but that's one of the things we struggled with all weekend long was how far we should go and then what burden you're placing on an already overtaxed police department for and what benefit you're getting from imposing that burden so as you as you walk through those I'd appreciate if you just keep those thoughts in mind it may be self-evident but thanks so it sounds like we've got private schools we've got thumbs at extent that they're not already self closed we've got that and sounds like Jane recommends we do that workshop instruction facilities I guess this is a kind of a general category of places like community cycles and studio arts and other places where the gathering may be the governor's limit was 50 is that right yeah so this was obviously anything that has more than 50 people to gather together would be bad anyway so this would be for the things that have

[143:00] less fewer than 50 people Jane you have a recommendation on this one if we can define instructional facilities I think that's a little tricky but I don't have a problem with this one council members if I can just see gyms were part of the governor's right I guess we don't we haven't seen the actual order yet so we're not 100% sure of exactly what it includes that's right well which is the extent that you had an instructional facilities like a yoga shop it probably is a gym well you know a cycling place probably isn't so so would it be like ballets studios so you might want to consider just taking what the governor did and lowering the number so how do folks feel about that I mean we've already got a number of 20 on public places we're not talk about private places and of course we've heard from Jeff about dr. visitors at least Jeff that suggests that we think about

[144:00] something closer to 10 so that we could short-circuit this discussion and and talk about gatherings of more than X number of people and we wouldn't have to go into categories because undoubtedly those four categories we're gonna forget about something we're gonna regret that Mary do you have a comment on that well I you know with respect to like live theater most of the live theater occurs at the dairy and that closed last week festivals a lot of the festivals occur in public spaces and so we're limiting that to 20 so I think some of these are already covered by virtue of where they occur I think you're right absolutely right I think we're just this is mayor of may be a sweep up of anything that might not be covered no might not are already be closed on their own initiative or may not be covered by existing orders I think we're just trying to be apprehensive here that's good yeah Erin Sue Jane your order restricting gatherings to 20

[145:02] people are fewer my understanding of that was that it was on publicly owned spaces correct right yeah so that's different from like a theater you know right a privately owned space they took it right right so just want to be clear I think the governor's may include private gatherings but I don't know where actually we just received the order it says movie and performance theaters opera houses concert halls and music calls or rolls to be closed I'd have but the other categories I think three chairs its restaurants food courts cafes coffee houses and other similar places of public accommodation offering food or beverages bars taverns brew pubs breweries micro breweries distillery pubs wineries tasting rooms special licenses clubs and other places of public accommodation offering alcoholic beverages for off-premises consumption cigar bars gymnasiums movie and performance theaters opera houses consoles music halls and casinos

[146:01] yeah I just want to remind everybody is watching that this or this governor had 30 this afternoon so this is only about less than three hours old and Tom just got the order so we're kind of working in real time here by Tom does there is there anything in there though about the 50 I think that was an earlier order I'll look for that okay yeah cuz that would answer a lot of our questions right okay so given let's assume for sake of discussion that that I think I think the governor did have an order over the weekend that banned more than 50 people gathering together but in public or in private that's or yeah I think you covered both so let's assume that that's the case and there's in the district Tom's list of what came out a few hours ago so I guess the question is is there anything L we talked about private schools is there anything else that wouldn't be covered by the statewide bans and more than 50 people together or the laundry list that Tom just read well I I will just note that the Jeff Sayaka from the county public

[147:00] health felt like he did not see a need for additional restrictions beyond what the governor just ordered today it's our County Public Health Authority but I think dr. Visser's was recommending tens you know I have to town that was the public in public like on public property was what we were talking about for that I well I may have heard it wrongly I did not hear it distinguish that in terms of public property and I would follow the medical advice well let me let me suggest we take this a slightly different direction I keep thinking about mcgucket's the guy couldn't probably on any given day has more than 50 people in the building right but they provide a pretty essential service for us Jane had on maybe Christian throw the slide back had a proposal at the beginning her proffer presentation that rather than trying to to go through and identify types of businesses or nice to leave a number of people is actually have a best practice

[148:02] requirement about distancing and sanitization and maybe that would maybe that would cover anything that's not already been covered by the governor's per hour orders is that bullet point there well using the MacGuffins example how are you going to keep the customers from walking up to the salespeople I mean it's I'm not sure who's going to enforce it right well that's Thomas appointed by police you didn't force me I mean I think you know I think we have to recognize that we have there's limits to our authority I think there are probably some things in the governor's actually taking care of a lot of that have you looking for us that probably requires some prescriptive action and then there's probably a whole broad category of strongly suggested strongly suggested you stay home strongly suggest that you only go out when you absolutely need to strongly suggest that you wash your hands we're probably not gonna pass a law this as you must wash your hands every hour but we can strongly suggest that and so I think I think Jane's you know change

[149:01] third bullet point really is probably falls in the category of strong suggestion we're probably not going to identify every possible behavior that some of us would say is not the smartest behavior and we have to trust people to make decisions based upon information we provide them a little ahead I think I got Rachel than Sam and then Junie I think in terms of not being able to anticipate everything and not being able to micromanage everything I'm sort of seeing our role as I think it's correct that we are advising Jane tonight but I have a pretty full faith that she is out ahead of the curve and making very strong proactive decisions on behalf of the community so I feel like we could sort of be here all night talking through individual points but the reality is we're in really good hands with Jane and I would I'd be interested

[150:02] in understanding what questions she has from us and how we can help her otherwise I mean you know I think we might micromanage this into next Thursday I agree with that completely Rachel I think we're not making any decisions tonight we're not passing any ordinance or make it any motions on this we're just providing we go to know we're going to get back together game with chain we want to provide Jane with some ideas thoughts some suggestions some direction but we're gonna leave it Jane has the authority under the order which we're going to extend here in a few minutes to to make these decisions so I think Jane's list seemed very actively in Kristen Tonya taking good notes and and I think you're absolutely right Rachel we're not deciding this thing and we

[151:00] have email our website is super helpful

[152:11] let's go to juni and then and then I think Rachel it a good suggestion which is we should ask Jane what more she needs from us tonight so I think I just wanted to add to the discussion because you were talking about retail stores my gawking and I was thinking okay what is a retail store and I quickly looked up that target this bar is a retail store and when we think of McGraw King how about Safeway but we also have to consider that for instance in some of these places do have pharmacies so we have to consider the health of people so if you want to shut down retail stores and you shut down my caffeine and they send us an email that they also you know provide services to some of the safety people in our community so I think these things that we have to weigh in the balance and also

[153:01] Safeway has pharmacies targets I do believe they also have a pharmacy so when we are thinking of the closures I think we also have to think about what Mayor buy was talking about as well great thanks good three-point gene what I know we've talked about a lot but what let's assume that we're gonna get back together in a week or two we'll decide that in a second what more do you need from us tonight this was just brainstorming talking about some of the priorities and issues that council is thinking about do anything more from us tonight I don't though I do want to say to you what I think about shutting down general retail and I think that would be inappropriate at this time so I want you to know that any order that I do won't include that unless you affirmative ly tell me that you want it to so that will not happen from me I don't hear it from anybody on council yeah but so no one's in favor of shutting down general retail

[154:00] for a lot of reasons right so the the ones that you've mentioned tonight I think we can work up an order on those and obviously tonight we won't be doing the order but maybe tomorrow and we'll let you know okay Jane can I just add yes Chris is actually going to be putting up the language of the governor's order on the screen we were able to get that so that you can see it in writing okay you can email that to us when you get a chance please okay email as well would be helpful please I'll Ford it right now okay and then I Tom had something to say and I think I saw Mary stand up to him I just wanted to clarify that the the governor has ordered limitations on gatherings with 250 people it was Jennifer that did 50 as the CDC's recommendation the state has not done that yet okay Mary yeah one additional thing that the thing that I think would be something that council members would do it may be a subcommittee of the

[155:00] council members to put together a declaration that considers things like asking landlords to work with their tenants and and then maybe some language about considering where we shop when we shop just things that can't be covered by mandates but that council members can as community members strongly encourage other community community members to to carry out great I think that's a great suggestion like I guess the question is is and we can bring that resolution back at an upcoming council meeting would be a declaration a declaration nobody declaration is that something Jane that your staff could put together having heard this conversation yes absolutely okay so we may not may not need a council I mean maybe a draft circulated in council members just trying to be

[156:01] yeah that's a great idea okay just for clarification it's great that we have the governor's order we will probably mirror that by our order we'll also say the things that the governor's order says just to make sure that we are 100% sure that we can enforce it so we've got a particular code provision that allows our police department to enforce local orders so we will mirror that and possibly add some of the things we've also discussed tonight right the only suggestion I would make it to that Jane is when we issue the press release on that order of presumably tomorrow we make it clear though that we're marrying the order that another that we're not initiating this we may we may have initiated it but we didn't have that opportunity the governor beat us to the punch that we're marrying the governor's order that was previously issued stay why absolutely just one more thing to add to that declaration which would be to consider the number of people at your private parties okay

[157:03] anything else I think we're gonna get back together again soon and we'll talk about that this I go anything else for purposes of direction to Jane on needs to get tackled in the next called week to two weeks okay great so Tom I think you need us to make a motion to tell us what you need us to do do we confirm extend the city manager's emergency declaration and that extension is indefinite that would be my recommendation although you can put a time on it okay we don't have actual language in from us we just would make a motion long languages in the motion it just sits in your agenda it's just a motion to I'm sorry a motion to - its - see ya extended until further notice declaration of local emergency signed watch 14 2020 we have a motion to

[158:00] question so I'm fine with the indefinite but I assume that if we wanted to rescind that at some point we could do that at any properly notice council meeting frankness okay so could the city manager suddenly everything got better no and we'd also want to rescind all the orders issued thanks good question or motion motion okay make it so moved totosai Mary made the second need further discussion Rachel uns in Sam Urie discussion on this point markiwood yeah I just want to address the yes the reporting aspect of this how are we going to do this so that we're up to date on everything that that's being done we we provide daily updates to counsel this or something additional no but them

[159:00] they will be continuing to come on a daily basis then yes okay and all of the orders are posted on our website so that the community can see what we've done under the that could be do we have the legal authority if we see in order we're not happy with to amend at our next meeting yes you well you could you bring it back and have a discussion about the appropriateness of the order and okay thank you can you further discussion on the motion cuz its roll call or oil some hands okay Rachel and and Sam we're gonna ask you a few support this is not roll call do you support the motion that had it made yep as a yes Rachel is that yes yeah okay and the rest of us in the room show hands Mary are you in favor yes okay sorry it looks

[160:00] to be unanimous okay great we just say Jane thank you for stepping up and doing this a few days ago I was really appreciate you taking the initiative on that yeah absolutely thank you the community needed it and I wouldn't I want to thank all of staff and just a tremendous amount of work that was done in such a short amount of time over the weekend and just the diligence it's it's pretty amazing yeah I think thanks for mentioning that Mary and all of you I mean our staff really stepped up early last week to create the response teams that Tonya was talking about and just everybody really pitched in over the weekend and and last week as well and you know we're asking a lot of people to work from home and there has been compliance with that and people eager to step in and help we have a great great employee base and I just appreciate all they're doing and I also really want to call out our frontline workers our police officers our firefighters our utility workers the

[161:01] people that are working on transportation and then just in our the grocery workers public health workers the nurses everybody in this community is really stepping up and we are so lucky to live here you're here right we have I think three things three more things to do which I don't think will take long one is next is item number three which is your consent agenda I'll just a way of background and then if if Lynette you need to read them off we can you don't need to okay sorry newbie the reason why the consent agenda is on here is there were a couple of items on the consent agenda that had already been scheduled for tomorrow night that were time-sensitive CAC talked about this morning and rather than cherry-pick certain things off the consent agenda and then leave other things behind for later discussion we just moved the entire consent agenda from tomorrow night to tonight some are time critical some are not but we have a motion to adopt approve the items on the consent agenda so moved

[162:04] okay any discussion on items a through G on the consent agenda okay sounds like no discussion is this roll call I'll show hands so again this is a show hands Rachel and Sam could you indicate just verbally whether you are voting YES before the consent agenda yeah okay the rest of us in the room show hands that's unanimous also okay great we already handled item 4a on boards and commissions want to come back to that in a second we need a motion to cancel tomorrow's regular City Council meeting the motion on that okay I'm a motion a second is that also

[163:02] show hands okay I'm salmon Rachel are you in favor of that yeah okay show hands in the room hey that's you manage so the meetings for tomorrow is cancelled now final item I thank is discussion of future meetings our next scheduled meeting is April 7th we now have the ability to dial in for discussions CAC will be meeting every Monday so we'll meet again next Monday right now in rotation in addition to Sam and you know and me is Adam and so next Monday we'll talk about the agendas for the next couple to three meetings let me just rattle through a couple things that I think that we probably need to talk about and you all have some things you probably want to add to that list and then let's talk about how often we want to meet you know we have

[164:08] rotations it seems like they're numerically lined up like we get six of them and if we meet weekly then we should probably hate them the rotation so it's not the same three people the full time okay well we can leave it to Diane to decide if she wants to make some adjustments on that just her note I have no problem doing it every Monday okay from that point of view CC is normally every Monday except one we only added one CAC meeting we were already gonna have one on March 30th so we really only added one and had them said he doesn't mind doing the extra meeting okay so my list of some things that we might talk about over the next few weeks we have to do our board and Commission appointments I like Mary's suggestion that we try to do this as possible why things are still fresh to our minds I think we have some work plan adjustments to talk about it we just added to our work load with this

[165:00] laundry list that we put together this evening and then we have the stuff that we were already gonna do in April in May and June and so I think we need to probably have a session where we talk about prioritization it would probably be helpful to get some more reports from some additional reports from Cu from BB SD from Boulder County Public Health from Boulder Community Hospital from additional briefings from staff like we did tonight and in perhaps more requests for direction financial impacts to individuals and businesses the declaration that Mary suggested we might have a little bit more visibility on financial impacts of the city or if we don't at least we could talk about our contingency plans what if what if sales tax went down by two percent five percent ten percent so you might have Katie or Cheryl come in and talk about what we would do once we start seeing those impacts other things that you folks think that we should try to tackle over the next couple to three weeks then we could talk about the frequency of medians to get Mary so I had brought up

[166:01] on no it wasn't hot line it was CAC I sent it about developing a plan B for our work plan so maybe that's an item for discussion at one of our meetings or and what I was suggesting on that is that we while we are not meeting in person that we have items that need to get done that maybe don't require public hearings so that we can keep moving on some items but do it virtually right yes that's great and one thing I found in the list is the library district question which we were supposed to tackle tomorrow night we need to reschedule that as well Marc anything to add to that list I mean no one's cut off from future discussion about this and please if you think of things and send it to CAC but anything else do you think

[167:00] we should tackle over the next two or three weeks I think nearby okay nothing to add but I just encourage cc's you look going forward to postpone things that are don't have an urgency send time sensitivity to them I think we probably want to stay focused on the matter at hand and only deal with things to have a fair amount of time sensitivity and that's that's a great point does council mind if I'm seeing if something seems to be pretty obvious - CAC CAC certainly can do that there may be some things that we may want to bring back to council in other words we may make a recommendation that we prioritize something to move it down the calendar but we may not feel empower to do that so if it's okay with you we might put some things on the list for council's blessing to live a bit yeah great idea and my only thing we already talked about a little bit but is um making sure we addressed what petitioners argument serving and that should be pretty timely since that is a pretty gray area great let's add that to the list and Adam you're referring to the two petitions that are out there

[168:00] right now and the time frame they've got to deal with correct okay joonie other things add to the list nothing to add to the list that is urgent and immediate but I think because we are charting new territories that eventually we need to look at cyber security contingency plan for the CD okay eventually okay Rachel other things add to the list of things to tackle the next couple two or three weeks nope Sam I just want to make sure that we will continue to meet with our partners going forward so in brief all of Council on what we learned with those partner meetings good suggestion Jayne or Tom anything deputies anything else though you think we need to I know that's a long list already you probably want to add to it you could we're good

[169:02] okay so that I'm just gonna throw a proposal that feels to me like we need weekly meetings we were not scheduled to meet on Tuesday the 24th or Tuesday the 31st how do folks on council feel about that a thumbs up from Adam and Aaron thumbs up over here nearby is kind of like not really happy about it but we willing to Rachel and Sam how do you feel about meeting the next two Tuesday's okay yeah I think we need to that we're gonna help me start to appreciate and I think that we have like be a fiction issue and you know to continue to monitor what's gonna happen with our Hospital so yeah I think we need to stay on top its constable okay

[170:00] with because normally our packets come out on Thursday or Friday for a Tuesday meeting and we've given staff a long list of eight or ten or twelve things that we would like to tackle over the next couple to three weeks is is constable okay with Jane and her team prioritizing which things we'll tackle on March 24th versus March 31st because CAC want me to get until the day before that meeting and we'll need to have that meeting agenda published by then so is everyone okay with Jane deciding what we're gonna do on which days lots of noddings of heads okay so James ham yeah okay yeah thank you and you won't have materials on Thursday right so you're gonna be getting them at the last minute of course guys yeah okay thanks ed one caveat this is a very fast changing situation I will tell you that every meeting we I've been in and I have been all of them it's been just different and I remember from the floods

[171:00] sometimes events overtake you and you have to give us leave to not have a meeting if particularly the three folks around me who do an awful and amazing amount of work if they're if they have to do things that preserve the public health I think I'm although counseling as a port and public health and safety of you is gonna come first it and nobody you know who's alive today has ever gone through this so I can't tell you what tomorrow has is going to be like I can tell you the last week was not how I anticipated it was going to go and it's likely to get much worse really quickly so just with that caveat it's important that you work it done and that you meet but there is a strain on staff particularly these three that may their resources their their efforts may be better devoted towards Public Health and Safety rather than arranged for a council meeting and getting together so with that caveat you're

[172:01] doing yeah no I think that's totally fair Tom and just keep in mind too that we could always do a 20-minute meeting too that we could assemble via conference call you know could give us a really quick update and say you know what that's all we get time for that Saul we need it for me right exactly and so we don't if you don't need us to help you do argent work for the community then you know we don't need to be there and I have a question about so next week is the fifth Tuesday and I would imagine that there are already sort of it's actually the fourth Tuesday next week s 21st 31st is the the fifth Tuesday so there were probably already some plans to count on that night off in terms of staff working so I'm wondering if that could continue to be an off day as I recall Tonya's presentation had

[173:01] something about weekly videos or something and maybe some of that communication because what I'm sensing is that part of having the weekly meetings is about continuing to make contact with the public and maybe there's other ways that we can do that like through these videos or some other way that that does isn't as disruptive to keeping our eye on the public health and safety law okay well how about this is a suggestion when staff sits down with CAC on Monday the 23rd they can not only lay out the agenda for the 24th but they can also tell us whether they think we should have a meeting on the 31st are you okay with that sure okay sorry Sam I

[174:00] was I was the idea that we previously an update by the mayor on Wednesdays and rotating council members on Fridays you know some way to humanize the kind of really contentious and very you know unhappy period that we're going through how can have like the fireside chat that FDR did and so it's just one idea I don't think we've touched on that yet is that something you want to bring back to us at the next upcoming meeting Jane yes we we can do that I know that Patrick our communications director has been working with me and Tonya and Chris and Sam and I think Bob you also were aware that we might be able to start doing videos as early as this week so we'll continue to see if we can plan to do

[175:00] that and if not we'll talk about it next week okay you need thing else you saw how difficult it was with two people on the phone I think it's going to be even more difficult with nine people on the call I don't know you know this is maybe something for you Chris if if there's some way we can see each other's faces video or something like that it's just really really hard to know who's talking in and so the extent there's a technology solution Etha that's gonna help us all talk to each other that would be helpful yeah we have some ideas that we can work through with council members okay you know I'll just point out if you there are a lot of services out there that have things like the virtual hand raising you know say you want us to indicate that you want to say something so can I say the University they use oome and we've been using it for about two weeks and let me tell you it's the greatest thing okay there you

[176:00] go quite an endorsement okay well hopefully we'll have we'll be able to see each other at our next meeting even though we'll won't be in the same room okay anything else be safe everybody we're jernt Adams public is now exiting My Luck has left the building Patrick Vaughn Carlin is now exiting