April 21, 2020 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[6:31] and comment participants who are watching um to please watch and listen to the meeting through the virtual meeting stream that was provided to you in your confirmation email instead of using channel 8 or youtube live streams and that way you'll avoid delay and your comments will come through live so sarah would you like to tell us about this new platform sure good evening mayor and members of council my name is sarah huntley i'm the engagement manager we have switched to a zoom webinar platform for tonight's

[7:01] meeting for security reasons um so i just want to alert folks that many people who are participating from the public are participating as attendees which means you can listen to this entire meeting and watch it if you're using the video link but you will not be able to participate with your video you will be able to participate fully through audio when it's your turn to speak so we have some people who've signed up in advance for open comment tonight and when we get to that portion of the meeting which is a couple of agenda items in the mayor will signal me and i will call on individuals in the order in which they made their names appear on the sign up list for open comment we have no public hearing tonight so there will be no members of the public participating in that way people who are panelists that's mostly all of our council members and staff members who we are certain are likely to need to speak tonight you may mute and unmute yourselves and turn your videos on and off one of the easiest ways to do

[8:00] this is to open your participants box we also have the chat function disabled this evening so i believe attendees will not be able to chat but panelists can chat with me as the host if you need to get a hold of me for some reason without disrupting the meeting i think that's the basics this meeting is also being live streamed as the mayor mentioned on channel 8 and youtube so if you simply want to be observing the meeting and you don't anticipate having a need to chat we invite you to watch on those streams as well but do know that if you try to watch on both you'll have an awkward delay thanks so much great thank you sarah and i think i would also add that this meeting is being recorded as well as normal meetings ours at correct sarah it's being recorded through the live stream functionality as we usually record it very good thank you um and then i guess the next step here is we need a motion to approve the

[9:00] amended agenda to add items 1a and 1d so very good does anyone object can you call out what those are please sam i've got them sam they're the introduction of our new police chief and a consideration of a motion to approve council rules related to virtual meetings thanks very much and who was the second on that i was mark wallach thank you very good and hearing no objection we're going to say that passes unanimously and so let's move on to item 1a jane thank you so much this is an exciting night for us because our new police chief maris harold is with us before i introduce maris let me please take a few minutes to thank deputy chief carrie weinheimer deputy

[10:01] chief weinheimer served as the interim chief of police since september so for over seven months he's been in that role he's done an amazing job in a difficult time and in particular in the last six or seven weeks he's led our police department through the coven pandemic response and done an amazing job let me also congratulate deputy chief johnson and the other commanders for the great work that they've done and of course our police department on the front lines every single day doing the best for our community so thanks to all in the police department for the excellent work they've done in the last weeks and in the last months so now i get to introduce our new police chief maris harold maris comes to us having been previously the police chief for the university of cincinnati in ohio and before that she worked for many years for the university or for the city of cincinnati so she brings with her both city experience and college

[11:00] experience which is great for our community and among the many things that maris has done is that she is very focused on community engagement and particularly with an equity lens so she's the right person for us at this time so let me introduce maris harold maris well thank you so much and may i echo the city manager's thankfulness of the boulder police department's administration through these very challenging times i just want to let you all know how excited i am to be in boulder it's a very strange time to start a new position but i'm excited i think that i have all the tools in place to really make this a model agency and to really um mimic the boulder reputation across the country and internationally for being innovative and progressive and most certainly that's been my background is innovation and bringing police departments into best practices and

[12:00] model policies and procedures and most certainly community engagement and so i just want you all to know from the bottom of my heart i am just so happy to be here finally and i look forward to a great relationship with you all well welcome maris and thank you so much for putting up with the hard transition during the tough time we look forward to having you here and we look forward to having your experience with both city and counting down issues i would say and we are very focused on equity issues right now and so this will be learning for us and um we look forward to learning from you thank you thank you very much sam and uh again we'll do some great things with the police department i guarantee it and with the city of boulder all right would any other council members like to speak i don't see any hands up

[13:00] sorry i was too slow to do the digital raise hand thing but if i may uh we'll just welcome we're very happy to have you here as i said before let me get started um and i also want to echo jane's thanks for um uh i guess deputy chief weinheimer and the great work that you did as acting chief during this extremely difficult time into the whole department so thanks to everyone okay seeing no one else very good yeah thank you i raised my hands you didn't see me thank you not yet go ahead that's great thank you so much marissa i just wanted to say it's such a pleasure to meet you and i can't wait for when kovis when all this is over so that we can meet in person it's truly an amazing it's great to meet you well thank you and i look forward to working with with you and on some very challenging issues but i am confident [Music] we will do some great things and i look

[14:01] forward to working with you so thank you very good thank you again i'm chief weinheimer and to the whole force for the work you've been doing through this tough time and thank you for serving as interim chief as well it's much appreciated thank you thank you a lot okay with that um i think we'll move on to the covet briefing yeah thank you so the first person to speak will be susan motika who is a representative from our public health department jeff zayek can't be with us this evening but susan is the right-hand person so i think she'll be ready and has a good presentation for us susan can you take it away you're on mute

[15:23] susan we're still not hearing you susan you should be unmuted now oh

[16:12] um we're having difficulty unmuting susan bear with me for one moment sarah yes the person that you mentioned as susan monica is actually mark gelband i saw that earlier as well in attendees or in panelists susan should be in panelists so she should be able to unmute herself

[17:01] i also saw what junie saw which was at some point there was um we had videos and susan's name came up with mark gelban's um image so maybe she's somehow on the wrong screen i don't know how that works susan maybe log off and log back on and i'll also note that the chat is working could we switch the order i think we could chris can you go move forward to oh yeah um why don't we no offense rob but let's maybe skip rob and do the first city presentation so

[18:00] we'll start off with a city update the people that will be speaking tonight are not only me i'll be at the end but carl castillo our chief policy advisor and kurt fernharber our housing and human services director but before we even do that sam weaver our mayor was on a call with other mayors and the governor this afternoon right before this meeting and we have arranged that sam will start off by telling us what he's learned from the governor so sam can you do that now yes i'll do that thank you very much chris christmas check if you could go to slide three of carl's presentation um i think that has some next one yeah there you go so as we heard yesterday the governor changed the executive

[19:00] stay-at-home order to a safer home order and he did this based on a whole bunch of epidemiology the modeling that they've been doing there are several people who are experts at this who work at the university of colorado and and study epidemiology and they look at the interaction of four different variables so they're looking at social distancing they're looking at volunteer populations doing extra social distancing they look at the wearing of masks and they look at testing surveillance and tracking so those are the four kind of buckets that they tend to look at and they've been looking at each of those buckets if they do kind of extreme levels of those what does that mean for the number of icu beds that we will need and the number of ventilators that we'll need and the conclusion that they came to

[20:00] after a pretty good amount of work and there's a nice paper out about this is that the any one of these is not good enough so even if you go to the extreme and you have a hundred percent of people doing social distancing that alone isn't good enough same with any of the other techniques and so what they've landed is that we need to do a combination of the four of those things and so it's the level of the combination that you do that can keep you below saturating the number of intensive care beds that that are needed in the state and so part of the the work that they use to decide to move from stay at home which is the the really high level of social distancing safer at home which is a slightly lower level of social distancing includes other components to it as well and so what we may have heard yesterday on the news is that

[21:01] that governor polis had lifted the stay-at-home order that is true but he replaced it with something called safer at home and some of the components of safer at home are you should stay at home unless you need to so in other words it's not just necessities like the pharmacy and the grocery store if you need to go pick up a meal or you need to go visit someone you're going to maintain social distance but it's voluntary the request here is to be as responsible as an individual as you can so it's not a state at home order but it's recommended to maximize your time at home and go out only really when you need to or when it's an elective thing but it's an elective thing that you do rarely so the other components of that are vulnerable populations need to maintain the stay-at-home order so the elderly people with underlying

[22:00] medical conditions and so on need to stay at home everyone needs to wear masks so when you're in a situation where you may encounter other people mass are really important and master to protect other people from your potential um covet infection because it turns out that they're learning that 40 to 45 of people who have coveted are asymptomatic and so they're infectious but they're asymptomatic um and then testing and tracking is not where we need to be yet but the state is working really hard at ramping that up and so the the the basis for which um the governor made this change from stay at home to safer at home was based on this work that they've been doing this modeling work and the epidemiology so what does the order mean and the way the way the governor summarized it this afternoon is what the executive order did and i'm

[23:00] not sure the order is fully out yet but the goal of safer at home is to describe what is being changed but what has not been described is how it's going to be implemented and what he means by that i believe is that there will be public health orders that are going to be coming out in the future and those public health orders are going to pertain to different kinds of businesses in particular so this change the safer home means that there's going to be some relaxation of the restriction on businesses and so the way it was described on the call and don't hold me to this but on april 27th next monday is when this change is going to go into place and the change is not everything all at once so on april 27th one of the things that's going to open up is curbside retail and so that's that's something that is expected to happen and it will follow kind of the way to pick up food pickup has been done where everyone

[24:02] wears mass the people handling the bags or the products are wearing gloves and it's handed from the curb to the car and then during the week of the 27th these additional health orders will be rolled out and there's three areas in a business they're kind of in different segments one of them is retail one of them is personal services like having a haircut one of them is office work and the understanding i have is that during the week of the 27th the rules for personal services of different kinds will be rolled out so there's nail salons there's hair cutting there's estheticians you know there's a whole range of different personal services and there's an attempt to work with the professional organizations that represent those different personal services to come up

[25:00] with what the best best practices will be including mask wearing and distancing and in some cases you can't social distance right and getting getting a hair treatment you're not going to be able to be six feet away and so they're working through defining those health orders the only other date that i really have down here is that on may 4th the goal is to have the rules for non-essential businesses like office work you know the goal is to maximize telecommuting but for those who need to be in an office for some reason what are the protocols for for doing so and i'm sure that there are some categories to that as well i believe that the goal on may 4th is also to have in-store retail sales so much like grocery stores have ways in which they meter people going in and out and they have different ways of making sure that

[26:02] social distance is maintained by markings on the floor and so on i believe in may 4th the goal is to be able to have retail stores able to have customers enter rather than than simply being curbside so that was what i picked up as far as the dates and kind of the general picture one of the the things that it means to us differently is what the governor mentioned was during stay at home the focus was not on enforcement it was on education and the goal was to make sure that people understood that the reason for social distancing the reason for mass wearing the goal of of the police was to make sure that that education what the governor said now is they expect more enforcement around the business practices so um he said that's up to each city to decide

[27:01] what that looks like and how it's going to work but but if there's a systemic lack of social distancing in particular businesses um he feels like there needs to be some kind of consequence to that so he didn't elaborate on that he did say it was totally a municipal decision so it's something that we will need to talk about as we go forward with this order um and that's much of what i gathered the one other thing that they highlighted for us is that there is a tool they're working with google one of the google subdivisions as working with the department of local affairs department of natural resources to develop a tool which quantifies where people are congregating so in parts at trailheads on trails the governor emphasized if you're not

[28:00] maintaining social distancing this this order is not going to be effective and so there's going to be a digital tool that cities will be able to access that will help us quantify where it is that people are congregating and maybe not maintaining social distancing so at the end of the day he really emphasized personal responsibility he emphasized that this is a a work in progress it is not done yet these public health orders that will be coming out will be kind of the defining you know practices that each type of business is supposed to follow so at the end of the day that's what i took from that there's a lot to be determined as we go forward but you know stay tuned so sam let's see if susan motika from public health can start off at the beginning and then maybe there'll be questions about what you've said and

[29:00] what she said susan are you able to get on now we're still having difficulty bringing her back into the meeting jane i'm trying one more thing and then she may have to call in okay so then why don't we go back to the first city slide great and from there i'll ask carl castillo to make the presentation um to follow what sam just said so carl are you available yeah can you hear me okay yeah thanks okay great good evening everyone uh the only thing i'll say to follow up on what sam said was that um the governor is thinking of this as what is more sustainable so where we've been up till now it's just not something that we can sustain so that's that's another concept other than individual responsibility that he really focused on he also did mention the local

[30:00] governments have the ability to be more astringent and in fact denver will continue to have their stay-at-home order in place until the end of april and local governments can also be less strict they can ask for variances and the the state will consider those based on public health data so yeah if chris if you can move to the next slide so backing up here uh i wanted to really quickly run down you're having many many pieces of federal legislation passed so i'm just going to give you a really quick rundown of what we've already seen um we of course back in early part of uh of march had the first package we call it covid1 it's specifically named the chronovirus preparedness response act that provided mostly funding for public health expenses like the cdc and some increased administrative costs for the sba cobit 2 the family's first coronavirus

[31:01] response act passed on march 18th provided sick leave tax credits free copy 19 testing expanded food assistance and unemployment benefits and increased medicaid funding and if you can go to the next slide or actually stay on that slide i'm sorry um the the copic three package was the kerosene which was the big one the 2.3 trillion and that provided um lot of funds for individuals in the forms of cash payments extra unemployment benefits extended tax filing deadlines for small businesses that provided emergency grants forgivable loans and for cities and counties and states it provided 339.8 billion dollars in what is known as the coronavirus relief fund and this is what i really wanted to

[32:00] bring council on of this amount um 560 million is being directly allocated to denver adams county arapaho county jefferson county and el paso county those be the five local governments in colorado that have populations of over 500 thousand this money will be uh directly allocated to them by the state will receive 1.68 billion dollars and there's no clear direction on how the state is to use that much less on whether they should be sharing it with with smaller local governments including the city of boulder what we do know is that it is limited for necessary expenditures incurred due to the covet 19 crisis and ones that were not accounted for in the budget we are waiting for guidance from treasury secretary mnuchin

[33:00] that was due earlier this week we are hoping that his interpretation and the guidance allows it to be used more flexibly than we currently read it so that is something that's in place and if we can go to the next slide so that brings us to today which as you know there is a bill that was passed by the senate it was called the paycheck protection program and health care enforcement act enhancement act excuse me it provides 484 billion for small businesses 320 billion for the payroll protection program uh with 60 billion of that for restricted for smaller institutions uh and they make that evaluation based on the the value of the assets of the of the company also 10 billion for for loans and eidl loans and for eidl advanced grants

[34:03] 75 billion will go to hospitals and 25 billion for testing significantly no new money is going to local governments you see on this slide that we indicate that it may allow for the coronal virus for a weak fund to be used for loss of revenue it turns out that was not included unfortunately so we do not have that additional flexibility that we were hoping for we're still having to rely on the treasury secretary for that interpretation what we did get however is a commitment from the president to support the next bill that would include a variety it would be like a really big stimulus bill that would address infrastructure needs he has committed in a tweet noes to ensure that it includes funding funding for local governments cities and counties of smaller than 500 000

[35:05] one more thing i'll say on the call today i did join uh the mayor in the call of the governor this afternoon and both the governor and his chief of staff were very encouraged and very optimistic that there would in fact be this um this next bill so if we could turn actually on the same slide we have that what i'm calling cobit five is is the big bill that we're expecting to to yet uh that has yet to come but we're expecting to come forward um what we have requested and we have put this in a letter to our congressional delegation that we sent is to make sure that it does in fact provide this direct flexible funding for local governments to help us stabilize and that would be funding that could be used for offsetting our revenue losses as well as for additional expenses for kobe kova 19 expenses

[36:00] um funding for housing and the support to support homeless increase money for small businesses additional direct funding for households access to health coverage for covet patients and the big one i guess would be the funding for transportation infrastructure so with that if you can go to the next slide okay so uh sam just spoke about the state home order so i will not reiterate anything there so the question now becomes does the state of colorado decide to sub-allocate any of the funds that they receive on the call today the governor reiterated a message that we've heard loud and clear from his administration that whereas no decision has been made on whether any of that funding will be shared with the cities and counties um they are

[37:00] committed to well they have they said that they have not made a decision but they are committed to focusing on increasing the amount of money that is available by lobbying the federal government for more funding so not a clear answer um what i can tell you is that we did send a letter to the governor requesting these funds um i did share that with council late last evening um so we also met with our state legislative delegation and in that meeting we made a um an appeal for their support and the reason that's significant is because it's not clear that the governor will be able to make this decision on his own in fact today he's indicated that he will need to have a discussion with the jbc it could very well be that the general assembly needs to concur if not even and perhaps even appropriate money

[38:00] from this current virus relief fund so we continue to try to urge the governor and to urge the general assembly to consider a local government uh it's not enough for us to rely on a promise that the federal government may yet pass another federal bill that is uncertain we'd like there to be a commitment that this funding will be used for the local governments and that in the future there is new money fantastic at that point we can address that issue we can certainly have money distributed on a contingent basis so that's the message we've been conveying and that's perhaps the biggest takeaway that i want council to have from this briefing um lastly if you can move to the next slide uh just a quick update on the general assembly as you know they have not been meeting for quite a while the jbc does resume working on may 5th

[39:02] um and they in the office of state planning and budget will be presenting a fiscal forecast on march 12th uh not to interrupt can you say what the jbc is yeah the joint budget committee it's a committee of both the house and the senate and they are the ones that are charged to come up with all appropriations and and to develop a fiscal forecast um so this they are anticipating approximately a three billion dollar decrease in the revenues that will be available for them in this next fiscal year fiscal year 2020 through 2021 which begins this july 1st so a substantial amount of money of course the general the full legislature then will convene on may 18th and they will have 53 days remaining and they will have to decide how they're going to use those days the one thing we know that they are constitutionally required to pass the budget which is known as the long bill

[40:01] the budget orbitals which are related bills and the school finance act so that's one thing we can expect them to do in the last week or two of may um the question then becomes of the hundreds of pending bills that they still have before them is will they be able to uh consider any of them the standard by which these will be considered as described by the speaker is three criteria are they free are they fast and are they friendly by three that means are they going to have a fiscal cost if so that's going to make it pretty much impossible right there to say it's not going to be in a position to incur new costs are they going to be fast in other words are they going to require a lot of dollar wage excuse me deliberations and amendments if so again that's probably not something you're going to focus on and are they friendly by that they mean are they likely to have bipartisan support and at the very least

[41:01] not opposition from from industry from other special interest groups and i guess another one that i will add is will any bill that is going to be considered will have to be deemed to have some sort of helpful relevance to the pandemic error that we were in um so we have for example a couple of mobile home bills that we're really focusing on we believe that housing stability is now more relevant than ever so we will be making the case that those are bills that meet these criteria and should be considered and the last thing as i said they will have to decide whether to support any decision that the governor has recommended on how to use this 1.7 billion dollars that they have and they may in fact have an appropriation that's required so that is all i have i'm happy to take any questions and if there are no questions for carl

[42:00] we do know that susan is on the call now so we can move to public health carl stay on for later questions [Music] thank you jane can you hear me now yes wonderful okay thank you all thank you for your patience um jeff zach would have been with you all tonight for his regular briefing but he had to give two other city council presentations one in lafayette and one in longmont so he asked me to make this one today could we get the next slide so you can see our case counts at 365 in boulder county the hospitalizations those have recovered the growth rate um you can see that 23 of cases are from long-term care facilities and that roughly 85 of deaths are from long-term care facilities a promising statistic is our

[43:00] growth rate it's still between 1.5 and 3 so this is relatively low but still still growing slowly next slide please so this is a slide that is dealing with residents who've tested positive or considered probable by boulder county municipality and this is calculated based on the rate not on the count for example the rate in the city of boulder is 139.7 per 100 000 people i would also note that it's been asked before the definition of probable cases are cases of individuals who are determined as likely to have or have had covet 19 using both epidemiological and clinical criteria you may have heard the governor repeat the statistics colorado has 10 000

[44:00] reported cases however the state believes the real number is closer to 65 000 to seventy five thousand coloradans next slide please so next we're looking at boulder county residents who have tested positive or considered probable displayed by age groups and you'll see what those three largest categories are 20 to 29 50 to 59 and 60 to 69 and we know that older people are facing increased risks and a harder experience with the virus and more likelihood of death the epidemiologist who i worked with on this said the numbers for 20 to 29 she thinks may be attributable to the influx of cases early on when cu was still in session next slide please next we're looking at the source of

[45:00] transmission among boulder county residents you can see early on that there was travel and limited person to person as the slides proceed you can see it is community-based transmission at this point and we want you to know that 23.1 or long-term care resident facility residents or staff could we go to the next slide please so this slide is interesting from an equity perspective and i think there's two there's many takeaways and emily payne our epidemiologist working on this is going to have a deeper briefing on this so stay tuned in a future briefing for um much more unpacking of these numbers and what it means but just two take takeaways for tonight the fact that the latinx population has 28 cases this is double their percentage of

[46:01] the population in boulder county and obviously they're 14 of the population and have 28 percent of cases here's another fact over one-third of people hospitalized or latinx and this number is triple their percentage in the overall population of boulder county so i could imagine we're asking ourselves and you would want to know what are we going to do about this what is next so here's some ideas and sort of um planning notions that we have because we have to take action on this as you may have heard the governor talk about webb brown at the state really initiating a working group on this because this is a finding that's not just in boulder county it's across the state and it merits a systemic solution so we'll be working with them [Music] we need to think more about prevention of chronic disease in boulder county

[47:00] prevention of chronic disease is really critical we know the latinx community has this in higher numbers and as i said before we know that people with chronic disease experience the virus with more severe symptoms jeff and i also talked today about boulder county programs and how we can look at county and boulder county public health programs serving clients and how we can better serve them and be more responsive to the aftermath of the virus that's going to be really critical on many economic and social justice fronts and then not lastly we need to listen to our community work with cultural brokers and follow their leadership also translation of materials increased translation in public education on materials next slide the next slide is the three-day average

[48:02] growth in the number of boulder county residents with confirmed or probable covid19 cases so this is modeling is showing that the stay-at-home order has reduced social interactions by 75 to 80 percent and that our um three-day average case rate continues to decrease meaning that these you know very pretty severe orders are working next slide please this is a slide showing all of the metro area counties and their hospitalizations so even with the top number that's denver at the very top and boulder is the red that is the fourth from the bottom what is interesting and important to see here is a stabilizing a continued steady slowing

[49:00] of hospitalizations here next slide please so this is kind of our stoplight system on hospital resources and this data originates from emergency management resource an emergency management database populated daily by our five local hospitals there are five in boulder county so this is a summary page that shows counts for critical care and non-critical care ventilators out of the total available and you can also see counts of medical surge and icu beds available out of the total reported capacity in the county so the slides towards the right are the percentages of med surge medical surge and icu bed shortages and this shows the percentage of the five hospitals reporting an expected shortage of supply this week

[50:00] and then at the very far right we've got the [Music] personal protective equipment supply showing the percentage of five boulder county hospitals currently reporting sufficient ppe supply for the next week so we have just recently as we say in emergency management stood this up and uh would look forward to feedback and and improvements as we are as we're refining this so um what i'd like to do is shift to the discussion about the orders if that would be okay right now and if and if i repeat things that mayor weaver covered feel free to just engage because we did have that little technical difficulty in the beginning is that okay yes all right so the public health directors in the metro area really looked at national best practices and studies and looked at many of them and said what are some of the key

[51:01] criteria we need to look at for for reopening and considering the relaxation of the orders and one is of course testing and colorado and boulder county are very short on testing the other is containment the issue of contract to tracing contact tracing excuse me voluntary quarantine and isolation and to do that really well to trace people that have come into contact with this disease you need people you need boots on the grounds and we do not have enough people performing this function either in boulder county or in the state of colorado another best practice indicator is a 14 day steady decrease in cases and we haven't seen that we're seeing stabilization but that steady decrease in cases we haven't seen yet either we

[52:00] know that masking is critically critically important next slide please so i think mayor weaver probably went over a number of these issues but you can see that the the governor has really shifted to the safer at home you know the first phase being stay at home the second phase being safer at home with an understanding that a combination excuse me just that a combination a combination of factors are going to serve us very well going to serve the best chance of keeping the disease from increasing in a way that the icu beds are over extended and that is the that is the critical criteria here so in these modeling scenarios scenario f was really favored so this was maintaining a

[53:00] sustainable level of social distancing promoting mask wearing pursuing aggressive case detection containment and recommending that older adults maintain a high level of social distancing so jeff zack was involved and we we have been in many discussions with the metro directors with cd phe with the governor's office just happening in the last few days and i think that we are still looking for this notion of what as you see in these slides what does strict precautions and protections mean like it says critical businesses open with strict precautions we're looking forward to guidance from the state about that we have some indications and many of us who have been on the calls have heard some indications some inclinations but we actually

[54:01] need to see the order we have heard it may be the end of this week or it may even be early next week that the governor will issue an order on this jeff reported that the governor will be convening a restaurant working group and this will [Music] nobody knows that this will be the governor's office cdphe director will set out a process for who will be involved and that this group will really collect guidance because um the curbside service and the deliveries will continue how things reopen with the restaurants and how that social distancing will work will be part of a working group making recommendations on this we've had some questions next slide please

[55:01] we've had some questions going back and forth among the metro directors okay if we're moving moving out of phase one how long does phase two look like um what we heard on the call with the governor was some weeks uh perhaps into june i think it's really going to depend on the case counts and how the second phase of social distancing goes so i emphasized before that criteria in the beginning a harvard study that jeff has been citing has really talked about the need for 150 tests per 100 000 people and that colorado currently has 29 per 100 000 people so we really need to step up those efforts and a lot is happening on the testing front the next time we report we'll have much much clearer information on this [Music]

[56:00] i mentioned the strong workforce needs and i think that jeff and the metro directors are really evaluating what can we do to beef up both the testing the workforce that um the containment issue in in the next couple weeks while we're waiting for the governor's orders and for the relaxation of these orders so there's questions about whether metro directors could extend the orders um the the original stay-at-home order whether there would be a relaxation that would vary from the state all of that is under discussion at this point um one thing that mike chard our director of the office of emergency management discussed today on the administrator call was a data collection system basically an early surveillance system that would involve a survey it would involve data collection from existing

[57:00] sources it would gather 911 data but it would pull data from very various systems to help us help us use an early surveillance system perhaps as a proxy for the kind of in-depth testing that we really need so um i think that if we could go to the next slide you can see what these categories are and i think that in my conversations with the county attorney today uh they were very um as jeff was as well we just need to see the order it's very hard to make predictions i think that um having as much collaboration cooperation so that our residents are not having to deal with disjointed or contradictory instructions is still paramount but obviously

[58:02] the virus has shown up in different ways depending on which county you're in so we'll just have to look really closely and work together very closely as this order emerges so that's about all i've got right now so i guess i would ask if there are any questions for susan you can either use your raised hand or i guess if we get rid of the presentation we can go back to uh damn i can't find the raise hand button today so so just some people did something i'm just gonna hold it up if that's okay my hand is raised and then the audience will know too and i'm just going to do that so okay that's fine i do have a couple questions but are we just asking um is dr visters also going to give a presentation

[59:01] yes dr visters is scheduled to give a presentation so if you'd like him to go now and hold your questions or you can ask questions now okay so i do have a couple that i think are probably relevant to this so my first is i know that the governor gave some clarifying guidance and information on long-term health care facilities um but we're getting emails um pretty routinely saying there's a new outbreak here there's a case here so i just wanted to make sure that um that's is there somewhere that we can track and see where there are cases and whether we need to take further steps if somebody alerts us um so that's one number two there was some confusion i know previously about if someone had a roommate who was infected with the protocols were and some people were being kept in rooms with positive diagnosis roommates and so the what's the thumbs up sorry that's to uh go ahead

[60:00] maybe you just appreciated what i was saying right yeah um anyhow so so people were in rooms where one person was healthy and the other person was infected and then like staff would come in and you know full gear and the other person was sort of a sitting duck so i wanted to hear about what's going on um there and then also are there like for people in in long-term care facilities and that's where so many of the deaths are coming from and i think you said 23 of the cases are emanating from um do they is there a requirement that they get you know temperature and o2 checks daily or anything like that that's kind of my first question i'll pause why would you like me i'll address those as best as i can right now so the first is the governor's orders on long-term care we are studying that we have a team that is working very hard with long-term care facilities

[61:00] i was on the phone with the state of colorado with their health facilities division really talking about the guidance and the support that they can provide as well we're looking at the at testing and having ongoing meetings and checks with long-term care facilities um to answer your your last question the the guidance from cms in nursing facilities is that there really should be um isolation and there should be a moving of people who are not infected from people who are infected so that you know that's the guidance we've seen on the long-term care facilities and then the temperature and there's a whole set of protocols and i can send you these from the state of colorado i don't have them all memorized but they are routine checks that are from the health facilities division division at cdphe

[62:01] and the kind of protocol that must be conducted on um you know surveillance of resident symptoms so i'd be happy to send you that sure and are those specific to covador just generally i believe they are so uh i saw a sheet that was specific to kobe so i could send you that okay great um and then in terms of sort of shifting to stay at home i think i'm i'm hearing you say we need to see the orders um and we don't know exactly what that's going to look like yet um i have a couple concerns one with the severe um disproportionate percentages for our latinx population will we be looking at anything when we transition into phase two that will heighten protections i don't know if there are i don't know what that could look like but obviously we are doing something wrong and not protecting people well enough so is that something even

[63:00] outside of the governor's order that we may need to be more restrictive on well yeah it's interesting you mentioned that one of the things we were talking about today as i was really thinking through that equity questions that that are very understandable we need to act but really being vigilant about the face masks the ppe if we think about latinx population in retail or client-serving situations the masking is absolutely vital so i think that is a short-term thing and the more we're learning about masking and i should have emphasized that more you know it is but it's really a two-way transmission but it's to prevent people from getting ill if we are [Music] if we may be a carrier who are asymptomatic basically so i think looking at the masking and personal protective equipment

[64:01] of those workers would be vital okay thanks for that and then i guess just again as we're transitioning and sam you mentioned that it was going to come down to more enforcement now and that sets off some rad red flags for me that you know we're enforcing we can do that in a biased manner also enforcement might be targeted at people who are obviously public facing and there may be certain jobs that get targeted more so i would just want us to be very thoughtful in how we go about enforcing um i don't love it that it's coming to that and and i think we it would also be helpful to know whether we're going to take a more cautious approach than than statewide that's all i got for now thanks so much for a second and address the last point that rachel raised which is about equitable enforcement so um as you know

[65:01] rachel we're very well involved with the national league of cities and they are going to be putting on a webinar that we'll be listening in on to understand how we can make sure that our enforcement efforts are putting issues of equity first so we are definitely having that in mind and going to be or getting some training with regard to that to make sure that we're focused on it so i just wanted you to know that that is something we are doing you're welcome and i think it's also community like you know a lot of the complaints that we're getting are about landscapers as an example and i think that's a you know could be some bias and targeting there so if it's coming down to enforcement i just think we need to be super mindful thanks jaden great and just to emphasize make sure that i put the correct context around enforcement he was specifically talking about businesses and the way that behavior is in businesses whether people are wearing the proper equipment whether you know

[66:00] there is a way a method within the business to create social distancing so i've been in one grocery store that did a good job at that and another that did a poor job and so i think we do need to be mindful of what you mentioned but he was not talking about necessarily anything except for making sure that businesses are i'm sure education is first but once educated then how to make sure that once the education has been done if they're being non-compliant willfully that there'd be something some steps taken to try and bring them into line so um so i have four i have four hands up i have bob aaron mark and mary sorry i didn't see you right away getting used to the new equipment so bob susan thanks for that presentation i have two questions i'll ask them both now and then i'll turn off and let you answer them first in your presentation you refer to the difference between people contracting the virus through

[67:01] travel versus community versus person to person so i appreciate if you could distinguish or tell us what the difference between community contagion is and person-to-person contagion and the second question is um you and others have referred to a percentage of people percentage of fiscal distancing i'm trying to understand what that means does that mean that the percentage of the population that's engaging in physical distancing so if we say 75 physical does that mean 75 of people are physically distancing at six feet and 25 are not or or what what do those percentages mean when you're referring to physical distancing those are my two questions um i yes on your the answer to your second question 75 are physically distancing that is correct so when we hear about 70 to 75 percent or physically distancing in the stay at home orders and we're considering dropping down to 60 to 65

[68:02] that means that 70 to 75 percent are doing it and there are other people that are in the workforce that are critical workers that are are not able to do that so you're correct in that analysis on two um on that issue of the travel versus the um the community versus person to person um when we were first and i'm going to say what i know and then i'm going to be happy to get a more fine-tuned question answered to you uh from an epidemiologist but the first incident of cases incidents of cases that we saw was really due to travel people who had traveled to affected communities and brought back the disease and we were able to use that contact tracing method to find this out so we've been using con contact tracing really through this whole period but

[69:02] really found that as this tracing was not able to identify the source of how somebody could have contracted to that that's where we call that community transmission so if there is something that i need to parse out or define a little bit better than that on the person to person or the community transmission you don't know where the source was but it came from the community but i'm happy to get you an epi's take on your question if that'd be helpful okay great thank you for that um next i have aaron and mark and mary susan thanks so much this very helpful presentation um so you you led off by talking about how we still don't have the the testing levels that we need and we don't have the people power for the contact tracing yet um and that we haven't seen yet that 14-day decline in cases

[70:02] locally here so given that i'm wondering to what extent the county public health department is thinking about maintaining a different stay-at-home order from the governors like perhaps going back to the previous uh one that was issued before the governor issued his and and i heard you address that a little bit but um the the timing was unclear because it sounds like the new approach is going to into effect on monday so i'm just wondering like how are you going to be able to get ahead of that if you're going to if you are going to consider maintaining stricter rules here in boulder county so i think that if you look if you look at the governor's scenarios and let me let me just look at my slides for another second please

[71:00] so i think that what they are relying on is this achieving the 60 to 65 percent um social distancing physical distancing by encouraging people to stay at home except when necessary that the privacy of masking in public the no gathering's over ten people and that sick people may not go to work and avoiding a necessary travel those are really the indicia of what is thought to be a successful path for keeping those icu beds not overrun [Music] i think that we are going to look at the order and going to consider some options that that may involve it could involve an extension of the existing stay-at-home order could involve other modifications or approaches i think that having our employees and really looking at

[72:02] the telecommuting and the governor's order or his his guidance if you will that he gave us in the press conference yesterday and in calls today is really talking about the telecommuting and really thinking about which sectors of our population really need to telecommute because of a higher risk factor and really moving moving our society at least for the short term towards much much more telecommuting so we're just going to have to see i mean i can't answer i can just kind of restate what our options would be again and that we're going to need to look very very closely at how cases increase if they do or if they plateau or if they decline as to what kinds of other enforcement may be needed because i think the governor really foreshadowed that the data has to drive this and there may be relaxation and then additional enforcement if cases spike i

[73:02] don't think anybody wants to see that which is why being really thoughtful and careful at the outset makes a lot of sense so that's what i would say thanks for that i guess we'll just wait to hear back from your department about your thoughts on the next steps yep thanks so erin if i could just say something that i heard on the call today the governor said that april 27 doesn't mean anything can necessarily open for business he said we'll see how the week goes but it could be that on april 27th people at say hair salon can go in and begin preparing their business to receive customers and once the guidelines for hair salons are out the public health order then they can open for business so i think there's still a tbd about that monday is when the stay-at-home order is lifted and so for a lot of people individuals that has maybe immediate effect but for businesses it's not clear what it means

[74:01] yet so there's still that uncertainty as well next i have mark susan thank you for that presentation was very helpful my questions i have a couple of questions surrounding testing are we tracking any data to determine whether the testing in the latinx community is uh at a disparity to testing in the rest of the community and given the results that we're seeing should we not be tracking that and my second question i'll do them both at once is you reference the covet tracking project out of harvard and looking at that it appears that colorado's incidence of testing ranks about 42nd among the states and my question there is how did we get in a position to be so deficient in our testing patterns and what are the kinds of strategies that we can use to improve that performance

[75:03] those are both questions that a lot of people in the state are asking right now and i would just say that we're in a period of working closely with the state to shore up testing both a methodology for it addressing priority populations as you suggest and getting the much needed supplies we've heard there's been a loosening of some of the suppliers and that we're going to have you know some better results on the supply side and as tier tracking and the methodology of the harvard study i would just you know that is really a policy question that relates to public health funding and the decline of public health funding it's a very complex question but i would be delighted to get you an answer on that um before public health comes back to city council for a briefing because it's really critical and the next week we're going

[76:01] to have a lot more information so i'd be happy to furnish an answer in writing i appreciate it and i look forward to hearing from you again all right give me a moment i lost my window i have mary next susan thank you very much for that and um for helping jeff out um i um have a question kind of similar to the one that mark just asked in terms of the testing and how that might be used or the criteria for testing how that may be used as a strategy for improving some of the disparities that we're seeing in the disaggregated data that we saw um so that's part a and then part b what what other um [Music] things can be

[77:00] um incorporated in the short term to kind of try and address that for example um it seems to me that something like paid sick leave going hand in hand with more testing um of that particular population might be ways that could improve in the short term and of course in the long term you mentioned the systemic issues so that's my first question i'm glad you brought up that very important policy issue about paid sick leave i think that we're going to need to look back there's an excellent presentation on the state legislative forecast both the jbc and the legislature that i listened to and i think that being able to link paid sick leave family leave act you know as absolutely vital some form of these things being very important policy actions for the

[78:02] state legislature and for municipalities and i've been tracking some of the federal you know there's been the forced stimulus now we may be getting into a fifth as you heard but some of those economic justice provisions that were embedded in some of those stimulus packages really studying those and unpacking those and seeing what we can get out of those i think is really important so you know action at the local state and the federal arena on that your question be mary um as to your first question i think you know we are very very concerned very worried about the criteria for testing and how we can be supportive of the latinx population and i would just fold some of these responses into the earlier question about testing and and get more you know get a more detailed answer on that in the written response that i'm going

[79:01] to provide on the previous question thank you um my second question um has to do with uh you mentioned that there would be the governor was going to put together a working group to address the restaurant um recommendations and so again that may be a place where some of the short-term strategies can be could be addressed but i also was wondering who if you have any idea [Music] what the makeup of the working group will be no i don't have any idea but again that's something we can update you and boulder county about that's that would be something a lot of people would be interested in it should be a thoughtful diverse group and we just don't know we heard about the um that it's going to be established we

[80:01] don't know who's going to be on it but we'll be tracking that closely because we get so many questions from businesses that are restaurants you know this is something that's a vital concern and then the community concern you raise as well with the workers so we'll just update you on that jeff didn't know any more than i've told you and uh thank you for that and just just to say that if if um you get the opportunity to um make any recommendations that um folks that have could represent that community would be i think very essential here in order to help address some of these disparities in the short term absolutely thank you any other questions for susan thank you very much susan that was very helpful you're welcome [Music] so sam our next presenter is dr vissers from boulder community health and i

[81:01] apologize to dr visters because he's been on the line for a long time but it's your turn thank you um i'll try and keep it brief [Music] first i'll give you an update on what's going on in the hospital we have eight positives that we're caring for five in the icu um and uh i think a total of nine rule outs although that may be less now so we continue to be anywhere from 10 to 20 positive patients and rule outs the rule out number varies a lot with testing so how quickly we get the test back we have seen a bit of an increase since last week in some of our inpatients almost all these patients are coming from long-term facilities jeff zayek and i were in communication throughout the weekend we have some concerns about small outbreaks not a tremendous surge but concerning nonetheless i will say overall across colorado probably the best marker of

[82:01] how we're doing in terms of covet and the greater population is inpatient so again this goes back to testing the only people really being tested are healthcare workers pre-hospital providers police fire and those that are admitted or sick enough to be admitted and the over the last about seven to ten days we see a continuous decline in total numbers of beds being occupied by covet positive patients and as you recall first you'll see a decline in the population then the admitted patients then the icu patients then vented and then the last to drop just because it takes three weeks uh are the inpatient deaths which has mostly leveled um so we still have only had three deaths at our facility and and um two were came in as comfort care and so we've only had one vented death so far and our mortality rate for

[83:01] the ventilator patients is about 25 um which is pretty good most of the international national data is around um 65 or so so unfortunately if you get on an event um your chance of dying is about two out of three um at least nationally but there have been some changes in the management and or it could just be the small numbers but so far we feel very fortunate in terms of how we're doing um i would like to emphasize uh a few things about the testing and the challenges that we face so as we expand and and we want to answer questions like why is the latinx community appear to be affected more it's incredibly uh difficult to make those uh interpretations when we're only testing a very select uh population and so right now most of our tests are either healthcare workers or admitted patients so you could say well it's more positive because of

[84:01] lack of social distancing or we're not intervening enough or the jobs that they're in put them at greater risk or is it that they have co-morbidities that are higher in the population so that makes them sicker so they end up in the hospital more which is over represented in in this cohort etc so testing has been a tremendous challenge for us to um at least to do anything beyond managing the acute patients and saying that a healthcare worker or ems provider can go back to work and just as an example we are capable of doing testing in boulder we've been able to do that for over a week so far we've received 31 test kits we can turn the test around in less than two hours so you come in and but we've had to preserve those for where we need that two hours because we've only gotten 31 kids of the other testing is out there over 90 percent of it's been done by

[85:00] private labs so the state testing has accounted for less than 10 at least from the healthcare point of view and i think probably across the state so we are pretty far behind on um our ability to expand our testing and it's going to be critical as we start to relax some of these stay-at-home orders um i don't know what to do about it we we've done everything we can our end we're ready to do testing um for the lab stuff we're missing uh we don't have enough swabs or medium and for the in-house testing it requires a specific kit that we don't have we have started doing uh the antibody testing which is more um uh measures people that are convalescing so they've recovered and now they start to manifest the antibodies in their bloodstream and again we're unclear how that translates to immunity but there's assumption that for some period of time it does infer some immunity um so we have a we

[86:01] received a grant and we're going to be testing about 200 individuals over the next week and then hopefully we'll be able to expand that and it is available to providers in the community to order as well so so that's some positive movement there it doesn't help us as much on the front end of managing people when they're acutely ill it's more of a post illness test the other thing i wanted to talk about is as part of the relaxing or changing of the stay-at-home order was also there's been a lift on the prohibition of elective surgery and so as of monday we will be expanding our inpatient and outpatient surgery um uh it's a little bit uh unclear um the specifics around it um a call on the governor today suggested that they were going to come out with more guidelines but essentially

[87:01] what they're saying is we recognize that the need for this that the harm being done by the delay is starting to exceed the risk for covid the primary reason to not do these surgeries was to create capacity and preserve ppe and so the any prohibition around it or restrictions will likely be related to your a hospital or health system's ongoing capacity and the ability to provide the extra protective personal equipment that would be necessary to expand the efforts to operate the it's not about spreading covet or the safety so if i had one message to leave here and to spread to the community is that we are starting to see significant harm in our community and our patients because of people deferring care being afraid to seek care when i rounded

[88:00] in the hospital this weekend there were a number of concerning cases of people that required emergent bypass surgery coronary stents some that had sat at home for two or three weeks delayed strokes um etc so please my encouragement is to please go see your doctor there's probably not a safer place in boulder than the hospital so it's one place where we test everybody with any symptom and we have not had a positive employee for over three weeks and uh the 13 positive employees that tested positive that was very at the beginning of the outbreak we did contact tracing and as far as we can tell they were all um infected in the community so uh you're walking into a facility where everyone's wearing masks gowns washing their hands frequently and their entire training in existence has been around preventing infection and so people should feel very comfortable very reassured that

[89:01] any hospital not just ours is a very safe place to be and is much safer than sitting home with ongoing chest pain or mild symptoms of any kind or anything that worries you now if you don't want to go obviously the emergency department isn't the primary place to go to but contact your physician if your doctor feels it's okay for you to get your surgery trust the judgment of your surgeon i will finish up with addressing some i think reasonable questions around adding elective surgery one do we have the capacity to do both and i think you saw from the slides that were presented this evening that all the hospitals have capacity particularly around med surg which are your straightforward beds that most people would recover in very few surgeries require an intensive care stay after the surgery and those are generally predicted so we we absolutely have capacity

[90:00] if we need to increase our icu capacity we've spent the last month planning we demonstrated that we can increase it five or sixfold and so a month ago although it was a challenge i feel much better about a plan to accommodate an increase if there's a surge can we manage the surge and yes we have a plan i also think that we're going to have a lot more warning and so we'll see a gradual incase increase in patients hopefully the social distancing if it if it relaxes too much we begin to see a surge we're now at a doubling time um of 15 days and when we started it was one to two days so that exponential growth on those graphs we were seeing at the beginning it's much flatter now it's not going to jump to one to two days it will start to gradually increase and just to remind people we our ability to decompress the hospital is is

[91:00] is very good and we can um it's not unusual for us to discharge 30 40 patients a day so we can create capacity very quickly as well so we feel good about our ability to accommodate these patients we have significant concerns about any further delays and we would like to emphasize that it's a very safe place to be and it's absolutely the place to be if you have any medical needs right now i'll pause there and take any questions very good thank you dr visitors that was very helpful and very thorough um does anyone have any questions for dr business very good well i do my question and i'm sorry if i missed it my um my audio was going in and out so i'm trying to mute my screen to see if that helps fyi um but my question you said you were going to do 200 um

[92:01] antibody tests antigen i forget what the word is antibody i think um who qualifies for that and will that ramp up i know a lot of people would like to get that testing so how will that work thanks so right now and as you may be aware um there's all kinds of antibody tests out there and some are more sensitive and specific or better than others and we think we've identified one that at least shows the best characteristics the testing right now will be primarily done on our employees who are working directly with the cova patients so those theoretically are people at higher risk or at least have been exposed before if we know that they're convalescent or or they're positive then we can try and primarily place those patients working with those that are covered positive so there's a direct impact but the primary goal of the first 200 is to see if the testing works and

[93:00] get a sense of of the quality of the test and be able to expand it this was a grant that was internally funded through our foundation however we do have the test and and we'll make it increasingly available to providers so for provider one if someone in the community wanted it and their provider thought there was a reason to get it we can do the test at bch or at least we will be shortly thank you thanks for all the information tonight you're welcome well i don't see any other hands raised and so thank you again we really appreciate these weekly updates and it's been pretty amazing how responsive bch has been and it seems like you're quite on top of things so much appreciated we've got a a great team and a great community thank you sam very good so i i guess jane at this point we'd be on on to covert response yeah absolutely so carl castillo did

[94:00] make his presentation about state and federal legislation so the next person will be curt fern harbor our housing and human services director so kurt and so if i could just interrupt right before kurt starts i've had some requests to make sure that we have time to get out for the eight o'clock howl um so kurt if i interrupt you in 15 minutes or if you're not down there we're in the middle of it um we'll come back to it so i think we'll be done before then uh again secret fern haber director of housing human services i'm going to talk about three different things this evening is going to be pretty concise um the first is the uh the current rent picture uh in our community what what information have we have we found out um process for those needing rent assistance and finally funding for food and rent support that we as the city have put out there

[95:01] so we got some information a couple days ago from the national multi-family housing council in the colorado department association and that guide some of the information in front of you so what we we looked at in from recent information and then what it looked like um about a year ago as best we could so if you look at the national survey there's been a 16 delinquency recently compared to 10 from april uh a year ago for colorado um we're doing a little bit better than that um nine percent and seven and seven point four percent um although the seven point four was from january february um a year ago three percent of the uh the renters in colorado have approached their landlords and had conversations about um deferments of of rents

[96:01] so in boulder borrow did a a member survey i think we got the results earlier today and you'll see 88 at a normal rent collection and as mentioned there several payments were late but 88 of the of renters were able to pay their rents this this month and that that um applies you know to market housing and those under the bara uh membership there were numerous requests for um for assistance in april and um i think the one of the important messages here is if you are struggling with your rents to reach out to your landlord and we have found that many of the the landlord members of bara have really

[97:00] worked towards finding solutions for their boulder housing renters in our boulder county housing authority so housing partners did relatively well in april um they normally have about a three percent um later on payment amount amounts in april it was six percent which represented about um 100 000 and they also have market units so they market units they if someone lost their position or their job related to covet they would give up to a thousand dollars in waiving rent and for the affordable units if you lost their job they both the housing authority for the county as well as boulder housing partners waived the april rents so that really helps get a number of individuals and

[98:02] households over that initial sort of shock threshold of losing their position being able to cover their rents while things like the stimulus check and unemployment insurance come through so the housing authority received 85 of their um their rents typically it's 97 so very similar to bhp and four percent had difficulties paying rent uh next slide please so one of the um important developments over the last few days is that the housing boulder county housing authority has opened up a um a helpline for anyone who's struggling with either rent or mortgage

[99:00] and the the bulk county housing authority has a team of housing specialists who work with community members who are struggling to pay their rent um and need advice on their mortgage as well the housing specialists will work with each household to explore self-resolution options including applying for unemployment benefits negotiating with their landlord tenant rights education and referral linkage to community mediation services so we've also increased our our mediation services both the city of boulder and city of longmont have mediation services so we've sort of split those out the city boulder mediation has expanded their service area to include gun barrel netherland lewisville and superior and then the city of longmont has expanded to lafayette lion and lions and allen's park

[100:01] so these um these housing specialists will also work with them on an individual basis to understand what housing supports are best aligned with their income and their particular situation so you'll see the the phone number there as well as the um the web address that people can go to for those supports next slide so this this uh represents the um the funds that housing human services has put out um uh over the last um two or three weeks these are funds that have gone out earlier than expected to these organizations all of these organizations would have already received assistance in 2020 these are early payments towards

[101:00] that so the effa organization that's primarily focused on rental assistance and the others are our focus on assistance for households needing support with food so i will stop there for any questions that you may have very good thank you kurt it was super helpful um i see mary's hand up mary thank you kurt for that so just so everyone knows i'm having dinner so that's why i'm turning off my video but um i wanted to first of all thank um both the city of boulder and and longmont for expanding their um coverage in their mediation services i think that's outstanding um i had just one question about

[102:00] the data that you presented uh at the beginning on renters slides please right there and um i was just wondering um so the call it was the colorado survey um so that that is as of january and february um will that be re-run or how will we know what happened in march and april um so the nine percent is a more recent recent look at the difficulty rate i don't know the exact date of that um i compared it to january and february of the previous year i don't know the schedule for for the next survey of that but we will find that out but they are planning on on doing that

[103:00] again i will have to get back to you on that okay thank you this this survey was or these the two surveys that i mentioned are specific to concerns about the current environment though okay um that's all i have thank you yeah anyone else rachel you want to wave your flag i'm good also eating sorry okay so very good um kurt thank you very much thank you helpful it's good to track this as mary says it's going to be interesting to see as we get the additional data going beyond february so okay so i would guess i'm looking at the time it's 7 44 right now so i think our next step jane right is covet response yeah right and so if we get launched into that i think we probably would just interrupt somebody in the middle of their thoughts

[104:00] so i'm gonna propose that we take a break until five minutes after eight does anyone have any feedback on that well uh actually sam that's a 20-minute break and we've got a long evening ahead of this okay well um the request was to break at eight sorry 7.50 so if we want to take five minutes of discussion then we can start that so could i could i just make a comment um the house pretty prompt it starts at about eight so if we pause at 7 59 we'll be okay yeah i'm not going very far to hell i don't think anybody does so it's fine with me i i wouldn't i personally probably wouldn't take the pause but i've been asked to do it so um we'll get started and see where we end up great thank you so can we go to the next slide chris thanks so we're currently in a place uh in the city of boulder where we're in response but we're getting

[105:01] ready to move to the next step so as you know our guiding principles around response have been preserving the health care system focusing on equity and ensuring continuity of government so next slide but as susan talked about it as the governor has said we are now in a time where we're moving from response to recovery and we have a four phase plan that i'll talk about in the next slide um about that some of the goals of it is we want to integrate the work that we're doing in the city of boulder with the state and public health guidance that we're receiving because we again we still care about preserving the health care system and making sure people are safe and healthy and that's the top priority we also want to model anything that we do after state and federal guidance on reopening and we'll be looking at national publications and other communities and best practices before we make efforts as a city organization to

[106:01] undertake the reopening of our facilities and as susan mentioned we will have to continue to adapt to the information as it becomes available one thing i do want to remind you of with regard to city facilities is that we have an order in place that closes city facilities until further notice and i have indicated to city staff that that will be until april 30th but it is i think very likely that it will continue after that because we as susan pointed out have not yet met some of the safety requirements that we need to open those facilities so chris could you go to the next slide please so the restoration of city services has been created into a framework and we have these four phases the first is limited travel which again is similar to what the governor is saying about retaining 60 to 65 of social distancing but the real focus of this is staying at

[107:02] home and only traveling under the circumstances where you absolutely need to do so phase two will be open but a very limited opening and it will be beginning to open city services but only in accordance with public health guidance and we are not at that point yet then phase three which will be much farther in the future probably well into the summer we will be open except large gatherings and vulnerable populations so we may at some point be able to open many city services as long as we're protecting the vulnerable populations and staying away from large gatherings so just an example of this might be city council meetings it may well be that we do not start up city council meetings again for quite some time because we want to preserve the social distancing as the most important thing and then finally phase four will be fully open and this will return to

[108:01] whatever the new normal might be we don't know what that is and the thing that i personally believe is this may not happen until we actually have a vaccine available across the board so it could be quite some time next slide we have created a matrix for city council to take a look at and for the community and obviously we have not filled this in completely because we just have started to understand exactly how to work this but phase one is where we are right now and or we will be at the end of next week when we've indicated that we would begin considering opening city facilities so you can see that we've talked about community programs and community programs are cancelled parks and public gathering areas currently our golf course is closed but we may begin at the end of next week to be thinking about opening that golf

[109:00] course as one of the first city amenities that we open we also will be looking at other park amenities that may open but again this will depend on public health guidance on customer safe facing service centers these will remain closed um one of the reasons for this is that we cannot assure social distancing in those locations and until we can do so would be inappropriate to open them facilities the libraries the age well centers and the rec centers will remain closed because again we need public health guidance before we can open them city administrative offices those essential services will remain open but telecommuting will continue for most city employees that are currently telecommuting we've been able to prove that we can do a great job of it and keep the city running with a substantial amount of telecommuting and so that is the plan for the foreseeable future and then with regard to special events and travel we've already indicated that

[110:01] there'll be no city travel or through may 31st or special events through june 15th so of course all of our current online and virtual services will continue so you can see that the rest of this matrix is not really filled out because we don't know when phase 2 3 or 4 will start to open some of these facilities and we hope to have more information for you a week from now obviously we just heard about the governor's order change late yesterday and we have a staff team that's working on making guidance for our city operations and facilities about when they will open so next slide this is the um response team moving from response to recovery and now we have the establishment of a recovery team led by recovery manager pam davis out of the city manager's office we have four coordination teams one will be focused on operations which will be the

[111:00] restoration of city services and facilities and so a point that i'd like to make here is that before we can feel comfortable opening city services and facilities we need to know that every employee coming into the space is asymptomatic and just does not show signs of sickness and we need to make sure that they're masked that they've got the appropriate ppe and so before we can accomplish that we need to make some changes to our facilities and available ppe we have a coordination team focused on equity making sure that equity is considered in all the aspects that we have of recovery and earlier i mentioned the fact that we're going to be doing some training around enforcement to make sure that we are doing so equitably we will have a team focused on the community supporting individuals and community outreach on the economy supporting businesses and partners in economic recovery and finally on finance the city financial

[112:01] management and grant management a really important point that i know you all know is that we want to align with county and state recovery efforts we need to be all in this together and if we stray or have different rules makes it very hard for our community to know how to react how to reopen how to start their businesses again and so we're trying to work super closely with the public health department and i know they are working hard with the governor's office to make sure that we have consistency and then finally as i indicated earlier next week our covet update will include some additional information on the restoration of city services so i went through that fast so that you can go out and howl if you want to but i'm ready to answer questions hi everybody um for that just one question will the east boulder rec center have a different timeline like do we see the

[113:01] um crc continuing even after the rec centers are open so so it's almost impossible to answer that and so i'll do it this way the crc is going to remain open at the east boulder rec center as long as we need it to remain open to protect individuals that are unhoused we're also expanding crc a bit to include individuals that maybe are released from the hospital but they can't actually go home to recuperate because of vulnerable populations at home so we do have some extra beds there that we want to use for those folks so until the time comes when we don't need to use that facility to help sick individuals it's going to remain closed and and the other part of your question is what about the other rec centers and rec centers are going to be a difficult decision to open them because of the fact that there's so much equipment

[114:00] there there's so much interaction among people social distancing is much harder in a rec center than it is in other places and so we're going to have to be very careful and cautious about how we open up so i have no clue about when those actually will be opened fair enough and can you elaborate so i don't know that i had heard about the um the crc expanding it sounds like maybe it's um expanding beyond unhoused individuals just for maybe anybody in the community who would need a separate place to recover to keep their families safe did they hear that right um well first of all it it's just about to start i think tomorrow so i probably gave you advanced information that perhaps kurt is shaking his head over and i'm sorry if i did that um but what we have seen is that we have some capacity at that facility for people

[115:00] and we're able to separate those that are in the unhoused population from other individuals and it would only be for persons as i understand it that are released from the hospital to go home but they can't go home because if they were to go home social distancing could not occur and there are perhaps vulnerable populations at their home that they could infect and so this is a respite kind of area for a very limited number of people that meet those specific qualifications it's not anybody it's people that can't otherwise go home okay thanks for clarifying that sounds um like a good additional service as well yeah thanks to you and kurt next i've got mark and mary thanks jane um earlier in the presentations it was discussed that as governor polis loosens restrictions he might

[116:00] paradoxically be requiring some greater enforcement of those looser restrictions will we be adopting that principle as we move forward so we don't know what our boulder county public health department is going to do we're really going to take our lead from them the way that our order reads right now is that we have adopted if you will the boulder county at home order and my presumption is that they'll move to a safer at home order that we will adopt by reference and so we'll be following those rules whatever they might be did i answer your question sort of like what's the what didn't i answer i'm sorry the issue was that the governor apparently made some reference to um moving past an educational orientation in enforcement to something a little more

[117:00] robust even as he is loosening restrictions and my question is is that an approach that we would be looking to adopt as well are we going to or not yeah okay so i lost my train of thought which is why i didn't answer your question i guess so the way that things have been working right now is that if people see something that they'd like to report as a violation of the stay-at-home order they call it into the public health department and if it occurs in the city of boulder the public health department will then send us information about that and we have some of our non-sworn personnel that go to check it out and then report back to public health and provide information to the possibly offending party i don't know what public health will want to adopt with regard to the governor's call for increased enforcement and so we will do whatever public health is indicating is the

[118:01] appropriate thing to do with regard to that again with an equity focus [Music] thank you yes mary at 6 58 do you want to ask your question or do it after the how i can wait after the hell okay very good we'll break and meet back here it's 805 okay aaron or what would you like i hear the house starting right now 805 will return

[124:53] okay it is 805. i'm back in session mary if you have a question yes i do um

[125:01] thank you for that jane um i my first question is regarding the um restoration of operations you mentioned that there are certain um you mentioned ppe's you mentioned masks and i was just wondering how testing plays into that given that we heard earlier that we don't we're not quite there with testing right so um testing really as the public health folks talk about it applies to persons that are exhibiting symptoms and then they get tested to see if they actually have the virus what and i hope i didn't use the word testing but maybe i did um what what i am talking about is that we would like to make sure that all of our employees coming into work are safe and already a number of them have their temperature taken and that's the main

[126:00] test that we to make sure that you don't have a fever so we need to put that in place okay widely no and you didn't mention testing i just deduced um and then um my other question has to do with um as things begin to reopen um will some of the furloughed employees be brought back um if the services that they would have been providing are are added back in so an example of furloughed employees would be lifeguards that we had hired for the summer so i don't know if the pools will open or if they won't open but if they were to open we'd need lifeguards so those folks would be brought back okay thank you i do miss swimming um and then my final one is just um to give my thanks um to the staff who's been working hard with the emergency

[127:00] response connectors and all of the work that they're doing so i just i'm very grateful for that and i just wanted to thank everyone that's been involved in that so thank you very good and bob you had your hand up you already asked my question thanks okay very good so remind me i've forgotten what 1d that we added was because i don't have a sheet in front of me so that is a motion to approve council rules related to virtual meetings great tom thanks sam i have a presentation that should come up and sarah and i are going to do this together there we go so we have been operating ad hoc for the since the the we went to virtual meetings and last thursday night i think it was there was a council chat and there was a kind of orchestrated

[128:01] effort or maybe disorganized effort but to disrupt the meeting by people who did things that were completely inappropriate the challenge that we face as a government is that we can't um we can't be ever do anything that would seem to be a viewpoint based restriction so we have to have clear rules that we established beforehand that that allows us to prevent people from making shouting racist things and putting up pornographic videos and doing things that have happened in other communities while at the same time making sure that we promote and allow for free speech so we've developed some proposed rules and there are three sets i'll go over relatively quickly i posted them all on hotline uh friday and today or monday and today and i'm happy to answer any questions uh this the slides take a second to advance and i apologize for that i was hoping that my talking would have allowed me to

[129:00] do that chris can you advance the slide i apologize so there are three sets of rules and when i get the slides up it'll show you there's one set of rules for that which is a modification of the council rules procedure which are found in title two of the bolder revised code uh and what i've done in the in in the proposed rules is take out things that are for for uh to take out things that are uh involve live participation i've changed the uh open comment rule to change it from 15 to 20. as you know prior in under the current or the old rules we had 15 people chosen at random who signed up the day before and five who could walk in on the day of the meeting so since we can't have anybody walking on the day of the meeting we just extended it to 20. um i guess the presentation's gone now i'm hoping we'll get that back um

[130:01] there are things about not having signs in the chambers and uh things like that uh there's also under the first amendment um we you have a council meeting is what's called a a limited public forum so in a limited public forum you can control content but not a viewpoint and what i mean by that is that you can obviously say on our agenda we're only only going to have people talk about the the public hearing matters um it's changing there so we can do that but it has to we have to make it clear that what we're doing is focusing on the business of the city and the the participation is going to be for the business of the city so there's those rules the second set of rules are the quasi-judicial rules as you know council from time to time will hold quasi-judicial hearings in fact at the next regular council meeting you will

[131:01] hold one on a landmarking um quasi-judicial proceedings are governed by to process rules under the 14th amendment to the united states constitution so that that's because in any quasi-judicial proceeding you are deciding someone's property or other other rights so they're entitled to due process uh so the lawyers in my office made an effort to uh to come up with virtual rules i'm asking council to adopt these rules for council proceedings um and each border commission that has quasi judicial hearings the planning board the landsmart board the beverage licensing authority they will um adopt them as well uh and they do with how do you present evidence if you're on the phone how do you uh question a witness how do you swear witness um and they're pretty thorough i appreciate david gear led that effort with the lawyers in the office and they did a great job of coming up with some rules the last set of rules are general rules

[132:01] for virtual meeting meetings and chris if we could just go to the last slide i'd appreciate that because i have those rules printed out and i wanted to just go over those in a little bit more detail because they sort of summarize everything that we're trying to do and they address some of the issues that have that happened at the council chat and give us ways to deal with them tom i apologize for some reason the computer is frozen so i'm going to unshare this and reshare it hope it gets your slide up okay thanks chris but let me just explain what what we're trying to accomplish uh so so uh in zoom meetings you may have noticed that we did not authorize the public today to be shown on video and that's because there are many there are techniques that people can use to hack into the video and either show videos that are obscene or inappropriate or um or or display things behind them in as we did with as you can see with virtual backgrounds so we're concerned about that um the the um

[133:00] there are people who signed up with um names that suggested that they did not have an interest so for example someone signed up is the name of a porn site um and a staff had to decide whether or not to allow that person into the meeting i'm very concerned about any staff maker member making a decision about who should or shouldn't participate so we have these rules that chris has gotten up um so the first one is important meetings are conducted for the business of the city of boulder activities of destructive layer otherwise interfere they are prohibited that's a clear statement that we're limiting that this is a business meeting and that that creates the the limited public forum that i talked about uh there's this express this next one is a express limit on speaking the third one is that they have people have to use their real name um this prevents the the staff from having to make a judgment obviously the name of a porn site isn't a real name and then so then you have a criteria that the account that a staff member can use not to allow someone into a medium um

[134:00] the next one prohibits video as they spoke and the the last one gives the presiding officer uh or the person presiding at the meeting the ability to control the meeting so that's that's sort of overarching those are incorporated in the changes in the council rules but they're intended for all public meetings to allow for um us to to protect the community from some of the things that are going on the challenge that we face is when we have an in-person meeting there's a natural limitation by the number of people who can get to the meeting when you have a virtual meeting everybody in the world has the ability to get in and there are people who in the world who have poor judgment and do bad things and so what we need to do is is adopt my recommendation is that we adopt these rules to allow for a um some protection and still be able to for the city to do its business great thank you tom that's great um it's really good that you you took this on and we're proactive with this um i have a question from aaron yeah thanks very much for this tom um a

[135:01] couple specific questions um so one of them was the the rule is that people have to register for um open comment i think that's in these rules uh by 2 p.m the day before just checking in and this is probably more a question for lynette do we need that much notice or is it possible to to have the cut off some sometime closer to the meeting we could probably get closer to the meeting um what we do is we we randomize the list and then post it and then contact all the people separately so we would just need time to do that and aaron i think that's been the rule since 2017 if i'm not mistaken we're not really changing that uh we just had we're eliminating the five who would come in person and adding those to the randomized to allow for more participation sure yeah and just but that that is a change that since we don't have the in person so anyway maybe that's something you could think about um about

[136:00] if maybe there's an amount of time that would make that still doable erin if i could just interject for a moment we also will be requiring people to register to speak during public hearings so we don't have a public hearing tonight so tonight everybody who's on the line is attendees waiting for their turn to speak is someone who's been approved to speak for open comment but we will need to determine how our registration will work we can create a form within the actual zoom platform for people to register with their name in advance and we will have to make some determination about how late we let people register right and that one wouldn't be randomized right so it seems like allowing that until closer a fair amount close to the meeting would be easier you could allow it right up until the meeting um but you're correct it's not randomized and there's not a limited number of people so it's not quite as big of an issue okay can i call away on that aaron before you ask your next question

[137:00] please do um so that is a big change though right because usually you can register for public hearing comment up through you know while the hearing is going on if i'm remembering correctly so why are we cutting it off at all so we actually could allow the registration to occur through the meeting but they don't get the link to come into the meeting in the zoom platform until they've registered if we require registration certainly people can watch it on the um live stream and then when we get closer to the time for public hearing if they decide they want to speak they can register and zoom will give them the link to access the meeting because it does seem like that sometimes happens somebody's listening and then they you know go up to the registration table and decide they want to speak while they're hearing something so sure and i don't i don't know tom that you're that your um rules hit on public comment

[138:00] at all or any changes there we changed the public hearing the public hearing we did not change no well except that you're requiring them to register to speak at the meeting using that person's real name that's for requiring a registration in the overarching rules for all virtual meetings if you approve those that would be required yes but we did not change the council rules on public hearings at all thanks thanks for letting me call it later yeah of course um okay the next question was for the virtual meetings it says the person presiding at the meeting shall enforce the rules by meeting anyone who violates any rule is the mayor count as the person who's presiding well these are men yes at this meeting it's the mayor this these would also control council chats so i would be one of the council members i would think would be the presiding person at that meeting so just would they allow for a staff member who's running the meeting from a technical perspective to people

[139:01] my preference is not to do that usually the case law involves a presiding officer usually an elected official making that decision for council meetings uh council members have legislative immunity staff members do not um so and also aaron and sam and i have talked about this our preferences like all mayors in the history of that i've worked with sam tries very hard to not cut people off and give them an opportunity to conform their behavior or to to to to not do whatever they're doing which yeah absolutely and i in no way want to say that we should be cutting people off uh quickly or easily um but just with this fully virtual meeting you could certainly imagine bad actors from around the country or the world uh you know doing things that are kind of vile and horrible right that you would really rather cut off sooner rather than later as opposed to like a community member who we just feel like we should you know have a conversation with right

[140:00] if a presiding officer has difficulty managing the technology they can verbally direct staff the technical hosts okay so maybe that's verbally before we can do that gotcha okay so maybe that's the the out there is if um because i understand is doing a million things right so trying to find that one little spot to mute somebody could be a little tough and then just my oh i'm sorry if i may call again please um just real quickly um so this afternoon we had a pre-meeting um for the kgnu council chat and in that case i mean tom just said that a council member would need to um terminate the whatever conversation is undesired so how i couldn't see that happening in that setting so so mary i guess maybe it's better to

[141:01] say a council member should make the decision and then direct somebody else to do it uh and obviously in the kgnu studio you wouldn't have the ability you wouldn't have the ability to do that but it's best if the decision maker is an elected official and then the direction goes to some other staff person who can actually do the physical muting tom in that case kgnu is the host of this program they have their own standards and guidelines we're simply serving as guests on an existing program that they have so they have proposed that their host will make the decision based on their own standards and guidelines as a radio station yeah they have fcc rules they have to deal with correct and just to colloquy on that my experience in our council of chat last week was that you know when the images came on that were extraordinarily offensive like you wouldn't want to build in any delay like where i would look at it and see it or maybe i'm not even looking at the right block to know

[142:00] that it needs to be muted so i don't i wouldn't want to make it so cumbersome although i appreciate the liability and risks assessment um when something you know pornographic pops up say like you want that gone immediately so i i'm a little bit worried about like building in a delay and requiring like a direction to yeah it's best if we can prevent it from happening it's best if we can do it quickly of course rachel the challenge is that we're a government and we the first amendment precludes us from restricting speech so we have to be careful about not being too aggressive about stopping people from speaking because sometimes speak that's a speech that's offensive is book viewpoint based and we have to respect that we do believe that by moving into this webinar platform which is the platform we will use for all council meetings and virtual council chats that you zoom moving forward we'll help prevent some of that from happening so we're not put in that position

[143:00] okay and then i'm just going to say like what i'm talking about that i think sarah saw last week as well was not something that i think is confusing with protected or confusable with protected free speech it was absolutely clearly across the line yes absolutely no question and by not allowing video from attendees um that prevents that kind of horrible visual immediate thing that you might be broadcasting out right so um the the audio things while uh they could still be really violent offensive um might be a little bit more tolerable for five or ten seconds absolutely um so then my last thing was i i thought they when i read through them they looked good my one request would be if we could get a follow-up with more of a red line or kind of a change sort of approach from what we had before just so that we could do a last check afterwards just to see if we felt like there was some change that wasn't so i thought the ones i posted online were redlined not to me when i opened them

[144:00] i apologize for that i will take a look and send and post another copy maybe i was looking at them in preview mode that didn't show the red lines but that's hardly possible but i thought in fact i think i double checked to make sure it was the red line copy okay i'll take another look as well that's all i had thank you mary i just got your hand up that was from the colloquy is that correct or do you have more that was from the colloquy so i'm good thanks very good so tom what's your hope do you want us to take action tonight or would you like us to take action at the future meeting my preference would be if you would take action tonight because then we can govern this meeting and the meeting on uh next week by these rules so if you'd approve them we can we can certainly enhance them or you can approve them next week if you prefer so aaron might make a suggestion that we go ahead and approve them tonight and if you find anything that you would like to see changed we can make an alteration

[145:00] yeah that was my thought i'm happy to make a motion okay go for it sure i'll move that we well i don't actually have the names of them in front of me but that we approved the three anyway go ahead aaron if you can bring slide two up please i'm trying chris can you do that i i was i hate just saying so moved i like to put just a little bit of specificity and emotion so there i i'll move that we adopt um these amended council rules and procedures rules for quasi-judicial hearings and general rules for virtual meetings second okay so if anyone objects speak up now okay we'll record that as a unanimous vote in favor thank you thank you the clarity is very helpful

[146:01] for those of us who are hosting meetings appreciate it okay okay your open comment is next very good okay so sam i have a list of 13 people who are invited to participate in open comment i think most of them if not all of them are on the line so i will go ahead and just call them by name and unmute them if you're okay with that i can call them if you want to unmute them that's fine i have the list in front of me as well so we start with amanda mercado followed by chelsea castellano and then jackie richardson okay i'm not seeing amanda on the line we have a little bit of a challenge because one person has called in with a phone number so i'm not sure who that person's name is um

[147:01] but it does look like chelsea is on the line um mayor did you want to sign a time limit for this it's uh two minutes a piece okay so chris i think you were going to pull up the timer clock you want to reset it'll be great and then when i unmute okay chelsea you're live all right can you hear me yes okay perfect thank you um chelsea castellano 3481 creek square boulder i'm here as an organizer of the bedrooms are for people ballot initiative and i'm here to speak with you about the online petitioning ordinance that is in front of you for your review while we are so appreciative of the intent of the ordinance there are a few critical issues that need to be

[148:00] resolved in order for this ordinance to be fair balanced and effective in addition to the comments that we've already provided to you via email i'd like to highlight one of the key issues section e of the ordinance requires a 90 response rate in order for the entire petition to be deemed valid so as it stands now if the clerk contacted 100 people only 10 people not responding would permanently invalidate the entire petition and effort first requiring a ninety percent response rate is an unreal is unrealistic at best from an email marketing perspective a sender would be lucky to get a 20 open rate plus with the growing number of robocalls and scam calls from the quote unquote irs and other so-called government entities is unreal unreasonable request to have 90 of the people respond to an unexpected email or phone call by the city clerk's office we believe requiring a response rate to a city request is an undue burden for the people who are hoping to participate in

[149:00] a fair democratic process and would like to recommend removing that element altogether that being said we understand the desired intent to ensure that a high portion of the signatures are valid we want that too but if you are going to require some of some type of response from petition signers it should be requiring a response from people who feel that their signature is not valid people who do not respond should not be assumed to be guilty of fraudulent behavior i'll leave you with this it shouldn't be harder to indicate that you want the chance to vote for something than it is to actually vote for that thing all of these measures and requirements are just to give the community an opportunity to vote thank you chelsea thank you next we have jackie richardson tristan nordbach followed by lynn siegel

[150:01] jackie you're unmuted hello can you hear me we can okay um so i think the phone number that called in is actually amanda um if you wouldn't mind having her go behind before me that would be great all right um i'm no longer seeing a phone number on the line she may have disconnected i see it it's right here two one eight so i can allow her to talk and we can please okay uh color on the line you're on hi this is amanda renkado this is amanda mercado okay very good hi this is amanda mercado and i live in the city of boulder tonight i'll be giving some background information about

[151:01] the no eviction with our representation the newer electoral committee we are a group of renters and neighbors among our committee you'll find school teachers later librarians researchers people who all live and work in boulder and are concerned about the rising rates of homelessness and the nationwide eviction epidemic and we've been working on the issues of eviction and housing security in different ways for many years our work has ranged from tenant advocacy and education to emergency eviction support and most recently we conducted a research study to improve our understanding of eviction rates here in boulder county we spent hundreds of hours attending eviction court and published a report which jackie richardson will share more about in just a moment all of this led us to learn about the growing nationwide right to council movement which is a coalition of municipalities elected leaders and advocates who are working to give folks the right to an attorney and eviction court over a year ago we began meeting with

[152:01] people around the country who have successfully implemented right to counsel programs and their communities we have worked with local attorneys and legal aid groups to learn more about the eviction process colorado housing law and the needs of our legal community we engaged an attorney and planned and argued the details of our ballot language to make it as strong as possible in january we began collecting signatures embedded in march we estimated we had almost two thousand we were on track to easily meet the threshold to get the measure on the ballot and then came cloven 19. as the first reports came out in colorado we made the difficult choice to stop collecting presenters even before the stay at home order had been issued we want to get this initiative on the ballot but not at the expense of public health at the time we anticipated that we would have to stop petitioning for at least a month but it became clear that that would not be possible we're grateful for the council that you're taking this into account and thank you okay and then we're on to jackie

[153:00] richardson followed by kristen nordbach and then lynn seagull okay hello my name is jackie richardson and i've lived in boulder for the past 16 years and i'm going to summarize our findings on evictions in boulder county as amanda mentioned we've collected our evictions data which is available in our report at www.newr boulder.com um so our biggest findings can be summed up in two points first 88 of evicting landlords have legal representation while only two percent of tenants do and second without legal counsel more than 75 percent of these tenants will ultimately lose their homes either by direct eviction or with stipulations that do little more to buy them some extra time um so we believe the no eviction without representation ballot measure which is inspired by similar working programs all over the country could dramatically correct the power imbalance in the judicial system address a root cause of the homelessness crisis in boulder county and protect the livelihoods of

[154:01] the working people at boulder and it could also provide significant savings to the city of boulder as disruptive evictions create a lasting burden on public resources for example the philadelphia bar association found that by investing about three and a half million dollars into universal evictions council philadelphia could save up to 45 million dollars annually um also the mid minnesota legal aid found that tenants with full representation were four times less likely to use homeless shelters in the 60 days after their court hearings the newer ballot initiative would not only cost the city of boulder nothing out of pocket since the funds would be coming from an increase in fees paid by landlords it's also crucial to allow this measure of fair shot at getting onto the ballot given the massive spike in unemployment and the oncoming tsunami of evictions that are likely to result from covid the city needs to have mitigation plans in place and this would be a crucial part of that and my friend megan is going to share more about the details of the initiative

[155:00] shortly thank you jackie next we have christian nordback followed by lynn siegel and mark galband hello this is krista nordback 777 delwood avenue boulder i am speaking today on behalf of bedrooms are for people ballot initiative and i'd like to reiterate chelsea's point that it would be near impossible for us to get 90 of people to respond to an email or phone call um five to 15 percent maybe but 90 i don't see that ever happening we would be more likely to win the lottery so um another point about the um proposed language i'd like to mention the concern about privacy for the 4 000 plus people who would be signing our petition

[156:00] the proposed ordinance would post their names and addresses on the city's website we are very concerned about the privacy and safety of those who choose to support this initiative and any of the initiatives for that matter we have already received hateful messages and we wouldn't want four thousand other community members to be exposed in the way that we are as organizers we feel that revealing that level of personal information publicly and then having that information connected to their support for this ballot measure is a high price to pay for participating in the democratic process we understand the intent of this section is for people to see if they themselves are on the list so we are suggesting that instead of putting out everyone's name and address put out information that is identifiable by the individual but not everybody else for example the city could post a list of all the signers initials and last four digits of their phone number this could limit harassment of signers while still

[157:00] allowing them to validate that it was their signature we hope you received our letter detailing this and other recommendations and uh last thought changing hats i want to voice my support for 20 is plenty to reduce residential traffic speeds to 20 miles per hour thank thank you krista so next we have lynn siegel followed by mark gelband and megan orongo would you like me to unmute so i needed myself can you hear me yes okay yeah um first of all you've received my emails from yesterday and today and i i really think that under these coveted circumstances

[158:01] we've got to be a whole lot less more accommodating to the public in an open process um i think that generally the council is just kind of assuming that this thing is going to be over soon and no problem and i'm perceiving that this is the way of our lives maybe for a decade and and why not assume that and take the risk of having the video up and a more interactive process and mix it up and not so draconian regulations with regarding the public process and the chats are fine if you don't want to look at the chat don't look at the chat but sometimes it might be illuminating to you you know but it's like anything else in life security actually comes back and hurts you ultimately and in this covet situation

[159:00] it does that a lot in a much more intense way um the other thing i wanted to bring up um is the annie antibody antigen um plasma test a convolent convalescent plasma um and it's used for a kind of a form of immunity or for people who are really sick the whole idea of the blood test is where we i think we should really put some of this money that's coming into from this from the state um to to to be able to really um do something about the 40 to 50 of people that are carriers and not knowing that they're spreading it and not knowing you know is that only in an active infection state um when so next we have mark gelband megan

[160:02] orongo and patrick murphy mr gelband here i do not see mark gelband on the list of attendees i'm not seeing him i'm having sam i gotta notice that he has an older version of zoom so i'm having to bring him in as a panelist just briefly for him to speak so we'll take a moment oh you're doing that shall we move on to one of the others no he should be available now okay very good so at a time at a time can you hear me yes okay at a time when um the gop seems hell-bent in keeping male um voting from being a national right it seems odd that the city of boulder would even

[161:02] consider not putting all three ballot measures to the people for a vote at the very least considering a reasonable form of electronic signature gathering um number one number two i want to switch gears and like kristen i'd like to say that i wholeheartedly support 20 is plenty and if we're going to talk about vision zero but i'd also like to say it seems ridiculous that we would spend a hundred thousand dollars to study something that's been proven in other communities and speaking about things that have been proven in other communities um maybe boulder should just stop pretending that we care about people on the street and bike riding and protected bike lanes and i know y'all put this to bed or put this to rest last week but the notion that we're still not considering closing down streets for excess street capacity gives me grave concerns

[162:02] i heard a lot of huey from bill cowan and the rest of staff there and then just yesterday on my run home i saw that part of college was closed down with a couple barricades that clearly the city already has it wasn't as if there was a staff person there there was no one that was disobeying the rules i went out there today and observed for about 15 20 minutes and it wasn't as if anybody was going to get hurt from those barricades so i'd like to to implore council to reconsider the notion of closing excess street capacity and blocking our talk for a change and trying to help us move toward a less car-centric future thank you thank you mark and we have megan arango patrick murphy and roya rongo

[163:03] megan you should be able to unmute yourself now hey can you hear me yes we can okay megan orango i'm also with newer no eviction without representation uh the newer initiative will provide a tremendous service to our most vulnerable neighbors eviction which has been linked to chronic housing and security job loss health declines and homelessness ruins lives but studies around the nation have proven that with access to a lawyer in housing court many tenants can reach better and safer outcomes when faced with eviction the newer initiative will provide free legal counsel to all renters who experience eviction in the city and the service will be available to everyone regardless of age income or immigration status in his recent opinion for the daily camera steve pomeranz asked what problem is this solving and the answer is clear tenants in boulder need free legal counsel because they can't get it on their own as jackie mentioned before only two percent of tenants appear in

[164:00] court with an attorney compared to 88 of landlords not only that many ranchers don't show to court at all leading the judge to automatically rule against them so we have to ask are we okay with this critical imbalance are we content with rubber stamp rulings that force families into homelessness the benefits of newer will come at no additional cost to the city indeed many cities with right to council programs report significant savings because so many families are diverted from other safety net programs like emergency sheltering instead a small fee just 75 per year will be placed on each rental unit for reference that comes to six dollars and 25 cents per month for those who say this will increase rents we argue that rents often increase with renters receiving nothing in return and while some have suggested this fee could face legal challenge such a lawsuit would have to overcome significant legal precedent which clearly defines the difference between a fee and a tax we believe newer is an obvious good and something bolderites will support volunteers have gathered close to 2000

[165:00] signatures and the initiative has been endorsed by many organizations individuals and elected officials we encourage you to visit our website for more information thank you for all you're doing to help us thank you megan next we have patrick murphy roy arongo and sammy lawrence good evening my name is patrick murphy i live in boulder everything all together is different from anything by itself the pandemic really is part of everything altogether and now everything all together is making us think critically of everything else the muni by itself has been an eight-year-old over ripe albatross hanging us by the neck you need to let us vote to end it with one option or two your option asking for more money

[166:01] and or our option to use the existing money to reduce climate change now not five years from now too much time too much money too little truth and still no estimate of stranded cost or going concern if you take money from the general fund again it reveals a gambler's addiction and a pattern of theft if you want to end the muni i can tell you how go to end themuni.org and the muni one word sign the petition and let us decide and so we come to the online petition have we figured out the rules i wish by now it was resolved because we have 45 days the city had 532 days to figure this out and now we have 45. will this be article 25 of the 2020 muni

[167:00] naughty list the muni needs a democratic rethink and a plan b needs to exist end the muni let real carbon reduction begin now not five years from now thanks patrick next we have orongo sammy lawrence and then sarah don haynes where you may speak right can everyone hear me yes great thank you my name is rui rango i live here in boulder i'm also the campaign chair for the no eviction without representation or newer initiative and i'm here to um talk with you tonight about the eviction crisis in our city i expect many of you have read the guest opinion written by steve pomerance former city councilor in the daily camera last week

[168:00] in it he argued that boulder tenants do not need the free legal counsel provided by newer because boulder does not have a problem with eviction well boulder does have a problem with eviction now and i believe boulder's going to have an even bigger problem with eviction in the near future given our coveted pandemic i'll share some figures with you from 2016 to 2019 the number of summons to eviction court in boulder county increased by 27 that's an increase by nearly a third and that was before the cupid crisis hit i am uh almost certain that in 2020 that number is not going to go back down it's going to get even worse the colorado sun recently shared a study that projected that up to 450 000 coloradans could face eviction at the tail end of this crisis in addition eviction lab coming out of princeton university the foremost

[169:00] authority on eviction in our nation gave colorado a zero out of five rating for covet 19 housing policy i think we are in a grave situation and i'm worried that there is a lot of human misery in store for us here in boulder our friends and neighbors at the tail end of this crisis i believe newer is a component of alleviating much of that it will provide a reduction substantial reduction in addictions in the city at no cost to the city that is and i'd like to encourage council to consider that thank you thank you reid um sammy lawrence sarah don haynes and then stephen hagel greetings greetings dearest majority of city council and co-conspirators this will be my final public addression to you in regards to accountability for the abysmal treatment disabling and cover-up

[170:01] of said actions towards me at the hands of officer lola thai multiple impeded investigations a hospital some city council members as well as those who sit beside them like tom carr members inside the local courthouse and racist people's actions towards me the collective ignorance of all mentioned above is complacent racist behavior that is similar to amazon scapegoating a black man in april of this year likewise it is as well behavior that elders of the past warned us of specifically mlk junior in birmingham jail alluded to white moderators and how we cannot be angry at black men when they try the path that i have artistically undertaken for healing and growth it is for this reason i declare a holy righteous and civilized war upon all who oppose my path harassment and violence taken in my name will not be tolerated by me the end of my path will consist of four things two of which are a platform to address the wrongs done on the record as well as the willful resignation of any major contributors to my pain and or public apologies after current events the

[171:00] ancestors of this land as well as my personal ancestors guide me and stand beside me the creator as well as spirits of others who have failed fallen and succeed in a past like mine also stand beside me the community in this city and nation will stand beside me those who have experienced covet 19's impacts will also stand beside me for all of you have lived a fragment of the past two years of my life it is with a heavy heart that i declare this war however i sacrifice my heart and become heartless towards all addressed my heart is not needed when it comes to truly unleashing my purifying blue flames especially when it comes to those ignoring my heart's please there will be no questions taken publicly on this forum for me anymore until our demands are met my medical records full demands and evidences will start being released tomorrow at 12 p.m for public consumption my name is sammy lawrence and i'm the dragon of the west i will see you on the battlefield sos thank you sammy so next we have sarah don haynes at followed by stephen heidel and

[172:00] william mcgrew thank you hello i am glad to be with you tonight i am also um here for the mechanics of the ordinance for our ballot initiative for bedrooms for people we are concerned about the petition um being disqualified if um [Music] not having sorry not having enough opportunities for resubmitting if we have issues found and being able to cure any discrepancies this is you know trying to avoid any fraudulence but we believe that the petition committee should have the opportunity um

[173:00] if we go for 4 000 signatures and are disqualified because a portion are invalid our recommendation would be to use the rules and language that already exists for in-person signature collection and that we would have 15 days of filing um to remedy we um are also um you know looking forward to supporting the other ballot initiatives and hope that we can find an easier way to do this since um there's there's a lot on the line for the community i also support 20 years plenty for our streets and think that you know not just um housing but also overall safety is so important for us thank you thank you sarah don so stephen heidel and then william

[174:00] mcgrew there you go that's stephen heidel grove street boulder um i am talking tonight about 20 is plenty and the adoption of option two um last year city council tab and even planning board called for 20 is plenty across boulder it's time to enact it no more studies just let's do it option two will make the road safe for all users of all ages raises income levels um as we've seen with the current limited traffic people are feeling safe to actually use residential streets on grove street i see walkers of all ages skateboarders blurb lighters bicyclists using the road where before they be afraid to use the roads with all the traffic

[175:00] staff a few reasons they don't do um option two is they're afraid of negative feedback um whatever we do we can get negative feedback we saw this weekend with the covidius out in denver protesting um when we did the assault weapon ban we had to nra gun nuts out protesting we will get that we will get some of the car lobby we'll get letters and emails but let's stand up to them and enact 2020 is plenty um and also one thing they said his neighborhoods being met speed management program will get more applications because people will actually see that lower speeds are good for their neighborhood i think that's that's a great problem to have and we'll worry about that next year when we get to it um 73 neighborhoods have applied for the ns the university management program um which really shows that people want slower speeds on their

[176:01] neighborhood streets thank you thank you stephen last speaker william magruder me speak can you hear me yes okay great i'm will mcgrew from the city of boulder and i'm also speaking for newer we here at newer consider ourselves fortunate to live in a city that recognizes the value of direct democracy and we're grateful that council has prioritized setting up an alternative petitioning procedure in response to the coronavirus pandemic city staff has put together a proposed ordinance to allow for electronic signature gathering in broad outline this ordinance seems like a workable solution but there are several concerns we have about the ordinance in its current form firstly and most importantly the current signature verification scheme would

[177:00] almost certainly disqualify every ballot initiative the plan is that signatures are validated by contacting 100 of the signers through telephone or email and all signatures are accepted only if at least 90 of those contacted confirm that they wanted to sign if the signer does not respond this is counted as a negative response however many people don't answer their phone when called by an unknown number or respond to emails from senders they don't recognize i would not be at all surprised if there was a response rate of less than half non-responses should not be counted as negative responses secondly the ordinance mandates that voter id numbers be collected though this is not mandated for in-person petitioning as we understand it this was proposed to reduce the labor required of city staff and verifying the signatures while we are sensitive to this concern we feel that it is unduly onerous to require signers to look up a voter id number which most people will not know how to find this may also cause issues of accessibility for less privileged residents who lack internet access

[178:01] particularly those who sign up over the phone with petitioners thirdly the ordinance suggests that all signers information be posted publicly and we view this as an unnecessary invasion of privacy which should probably be avoided finally given the break-in signature gathering that was necessitated by kovid it seems appropriate to extend the deadline by six weeks assuming the ordinance is adopted on may 5th thank you for considering our suggestions we're not looking for a handout we just want a fair shot thank you will and that concludes open comment so i want to take a moment to thank staff for making this happen i mean i know it's not easy to adopt a new platform yet again and to be able to um get everyone in so um let's start with um staff the staff and any response to open comment

[179:01] no not from the city manager's office nor from this nor from the city attorney great and turning now to council i see junior joseph has her hand raised junior hi um thanks i have a question can you see me no no can you see me now okay i have a question about some of the comments that were made there was a comment about the name of people being added to the website and i wanted to know if that's a procedure that we also do for paper ballots so juni uh no although paper ballots are available to anybody who asks for them so we're going to discuss this later i have a full presentation and i expect council to have a full discussion on those issues later if that's okay okay that's that's fine and

[180:00] i think as well um i'm not sure if you can answer that for me now but i did find mr lawrence has comments slightly stressful and also i was wondering he's been coming to council quite often and having the same speech and and i i'm still not fully i don't understand what he's asking for and i wanted to know if maybe you could tell us you know what this conversation is about because i would imagine people in the community are wondering the same thing as well because he's talking about he's feeling a sense of injustice and i just wanted to hear you know where was that coming from it could be from you know of course as a new council member we've inherited things that we didn't know about but to me i just find that um i wanted to know more so mr lawrence was charged with obstructing and resisting when he interfered with an arrest or actually

[181:00] wasn't an arrest officer waylon lowatai was uh was responding to a complaint about a large group of people who had gathered at the mapleton fields uh three of them were sitting by the bathroom and he went to talk to them they were having a fairly peaceful conversation in fact one of the one of the individuals offered the officer a cup of coffee mr lawrence came and stood next to the three of them he was at the time carrying a four foot long staff that he claimed he needed to walk and wearing sunglasses officer lolita repeatedly asked him to step back or put down the staff officer lolita was by himself at the time uh mr lawrence refused officer lolotay told him that if he did not step away or put the staff down he would be arrested when backup came back up arrived the backup officer also asked is the lowell ty to step back or put down the staff he continued to refuse this interfered with the investigation the officers were trying to conduct they did arrest him he resisted arrest fought violently he skinned his knees he was

[182:00] taken to the hospital he uh reportedly had a seizure in the hospital nurse on the videotape tells him he's not having a seizure that he's faking mr lawrence claims that he was injured in a workplace accident that occurred in a marijuana business um he he applied for worker's comp never submitted any medical evidence and the judge found that cheeking was not credible there's a videotape of the incident that shows that he was not in fact injured at all in the incident he comes to he apparently believes that none of these facts are true um they are officer weyland lolotay is an excellent officer who does a great job i i believe that mr lawrence picked him out officer lolota is a person of color he in fact suffers an immense amount of abuse himself because of the color of his skin uh mr lawrence i don't i can't quite explain why he seems obsessed with the city council i do not believe he is telling the truth

[183:00] i and i'm happy actually i will add that after this incident occurred council requested that we have an independent investigation done of the the police investigation of this incident we hired the same investigator we hired for the atkinson matter who was chosen by mr atkinson uh he found that the police investigation was absolutely appropriate i'm happy to provide you with that report we have the videos of the incident um they're really and i can also provide you with the judge's ruling in his workers comp case and i believe we even have the video thank you so essentially you're saying the issue has been resolved in some way shape or form i'm not sure what else we can do as i said he was charged with just with uh resisting uh and obstruction uh the district attorney prosecuted the case he was he was offered a restorative justice program he participated successfully completed in the charter's world business i'm hoping that he moves on with his

[184:00] life uh this this is not healthy uh and i and i do really uh regret that he spends so much of his time attacking an officer by name who is a very good officer and serves the people this community very well thank you okay uh rachel um thanks for that tom i was gonna want to address sammy's um comment as well i uh heard a lot of pain from him tonight and i i'm hearing what you're saying but i think that there is such an inherent power imbalance in the criminal justice system um and what i see sammy asking for is essentially an opportunity for us to hear him and listen and it's so easy for us to get our own side of things um and and it's harder to get an audience from his side so i i for one am willing to give him a a more [Music]

[185:00] robust or just more time to communicate with us and i agree that it doesn't sound like he's healthy right now and if we can help him to heal i would give him the audience i already meet with community members all the time i know that there it's a problem for more than one of us to meet at once but um i would be in favor of of giving him the time he went through something traumatic with our staff and um i'm sorry that he's hurting so much thanks anyone else on council okay very good you're around me lynette your next item is a consent agenda you have items a through f before you tonight very any council member have any comments on

[186:01] the consensus agenda if not may i have a motion i move the consent agenda second okay is this a roll call vote okay would anyone like to speak to the motion okay we begin with council member friend yes joseph hi nagle hi rightly yes wallach hi weaver hi yates hi young yes rocket hi the motion passes unanimously your next item tonight is under matters from the city manager the 20 is plenty

[187:02] discussion [Music] yes thank you and um interim transportation director bill cowan will present this matter to council bill yes good evening members of council can you hear me yes great um so we are here this evening to get some direction from city council about how we should move forward with transportation master plan action um 1d which is to explore reducing the speed limit on residential local streets from 25 miles an hour to 20 miles an hour our presentation this evening is going to be given by ryan knowles who is our transportation planner who run amongst many other things runs our neighborhood speed management program and um then we will hear from our transportation advisory board chair tila duhain um and then we would be happy to answer

[188:01] any questions and most importantly receive direction from you if you could ryan do you already have control of the presentation can you hear me now yes yes okay great i believe i can advance so i'm ryan knowles i'm a transportation planner in the transportation and mobility department here at the city and i'm going to be talking about uh the 20 is plenty residential speed limit project um this evening and uh also ask our tab board chair uh taylor duham to weigh in on tap's perspective as well

[189:08] and it doesn't look like it's advancing oh there we go so why is this important so we know that higher speeds result in higher crash severity so the faster vehicle is going the more severe a crash will be which is dangerous for our neighborhood streets and so we are exploring 20 mile an hour speed limits in our on our local streets in our neighborhoods to improve safety and really to improve comfort for all roadway users so part of the purpose of the neighborhood speed management program

[190:00] and really this project is we want to promote residential streets as shared spaces we want people to feel comfortable walking and biking and really recreating and treating their neighborhoods as uh high quality places to live and so like bill said the transportation master plan identified 20 mile an hour speed limits as a priority item and so that is why we're before you today the vision zero action plan also identified 20 mile an hour speed limits um in actions 25 and 29 as something that we would like to be implementing through the neighborhood speed management program and the green streets program so what we're proposing is evaluating and implementing the speed limit as a tool in reducing vehicle speeds in residential areas the um

[191:00] the question we have really is is that tool best a policy tool an engineering tool or some combination of the two so the overall goal that we're working toward here is to [Music] have people actually drive 20 miles 20 miles an hour on neighborhood streets and so we have three options which we think will advance that goal so option one is a comprehensive 20 is plenty study and i'll go over the components of that in a moment option two is to amend the boulder revise code so that's the default speed limit that's currently 25 miles an hour unless otherwise posted and option three is an abbreviated version of the option one that we're proposing in light of the coven 19 situation

[192:05] so the components of option one are to pilot 20 mile an hour zones across the city so um to basically do uh between 20 and 30 20 mile an hour speed limit zones um city-wide in all neighborhoods or in neighborhoods across the city not in all neighborhoods also to look at what other cities have done so to use the best practices we've seen in cities like seattle portland and cambridge massachusetts we've already reached out to some of these cities and had pretty good discussions with them we're also looking at doing a statistical survey really to get a good idea of where the community as a whole lands on this topic so we've heard a lot of support from from a lot of people and so we just want to make sure that we are hearing the entirety of the community

[193:01] and then we would also conduct additional online engagement around that to make sure that there was an open forum for people to discuss the project the timeline for this option one would be basically starting at the end of this month and going through the end of the year and this was the staff recommendation that we took the tab last week option two would be to amend the boulder revised code um so that is title seven chapter four part 58 and so again that says that the speed limit currently is 25 miles an hour unless otherwise posted and so we would amend that to say 20 miles an hour unless otherwise posted we would then uh basically go out to all the local streets in the city and replace existing 25 mile an hour signs with the vision zero

[194:01] 20 mile an hour signs that we installed on 13th street and we we would accomplish this by the end of summer 2020. so some considerations for this option [Music] so this is a policy approach so we would have to amend our programs to implement the policy we are unsure how effective uh signing 20 miles an hour on streets will be in an action of itself so that's why we were proposing um option one doing a more robust study we also see short and long-term impacts to the neighborhood speed management program so specifically with no changes to the way in which we prioritize projects we will have more projects with the same amount of resources however this is the quickest implementation of 20 miles an

[195:00] hour in neighborhoods and then option three again is a uh abbreviated version of option one so it's really just the uh the pilot of the 20 mile an hour speed zones and neighborhoods as well as a technical analysis of of that pilot so determining what effect that signing has on actual speeds that we observe in those neighborhoods and so um we're proposing this because we are facing some very significant budget constraints with government and so the the timeline for this would be again starting by the end of the month through the end of the year and then we would come back to council with the findings from that bad pilot and report and ask for guidance in terms of either completing the rest of components of

[196:01] option one were moving ahead with a an action at that time so it would require additional work in 2021 so the costs of these three options so option one is the highest cost of the three and that again is the pilot program with a industry review also analysis of crashes that occur on local streets city-wide and then the community survey and engagement so in 2020 that will cost a little over a hundred thousand dollars option two which is changing the default speed limit to 220 miles an hour unless otherwise posted will cost 65 000 in 2020 and again that includes switching about 465 25 mile an hour signs to 20 mile an hour vision zero signs

[197:01] and then option three is the cheapest in 2020 however depending on the findings of that pilot and study we would either proceed with the rest of the costs of option one or we would uh move to implement uh signing citywide um so doing the default speed limit change which would add an additional sixty thousand dollars in 2021. we brought these options and the staff recommended option to tab last monday on april 13th and uh up to and including during the public hearing at tab we heard very strong support for option two we did not receive many comments in support of doing nothing so many we didn't hear a lot of opposition which i think is

[198:00] pretty consistent with what council has heard up to this meeting uh tab unanimously recommended option two moving forward and i would invite tila to weigh in on tap's perspective at this point thank you ryan and i'm actually really glad to hear you and see that you're still on duck you are one of boulder's best and brightest um it is unusual for tab and staff to lock horns this seriously and so i think it's worth stepping back and looking at why this ordinance change is even on the table for city council tonight as ryan mentioned it's in the tmp update the vision zero action plan as well the vision zero action plan was developed as part of the tmp update over the past year of intensive community engagement and public outreach mostly done by city boulder transportation staff and as a result we have a 50-point action plan that finally put some

[199:03] ideas and meet on the bones of what we meant behind a system-wide effort to eliminate serious injury and fatal crashes in the city of boulder many of those action point items um directly affect those those very serious crashes and a number of them are supporting efforts and this is one of the quick but high impact supporting efforts so i just want to step back and realize that this overall vision zero action plan is addressing a public health emergency that we have been grappling with for a number of years it kills about traffic violence kills about 40 000 americans every year about 600 coloradans and fundamentally the reason that staff is wanting to evaluate this as a tool is i think

[200:00] out of skepticism that doing this step although we recognize its high impact and part of the system-wide change is probably not going to directly drop the numbers that we're aiming for which can vary from zero to eight in just any given year in recent history in boulder so the reason that we've approached vision zero the way we have and that other vision zero cities have is because going the way that we've gone for the last 25 years troubleshooting a particular problem spots doesn't work we need a system-wide change and i think that ryan was really clear both at the meeting and cleared tonight but that the tab meeting clear tonight we need some direction from council about whether we should be viewing this as a policy change um or if it is an engineering tool to be tested and tab's recommendation um i think it was an endorsement of the former that it is a policy change it's

[201:00] fundamentally a statement of what the rules and expectations are for drivers on our roads and on our local roadways and that kind of policy change and policy statement that's that's your wheelhouse that's that's what council is for you guys have set the policy you are our legislators um if it's a tool to be tested and evaluated by our traffic engineers they're gonna approach it the way that they did with option one they're going to weigh it against data and try to count changes uh to tell if it's a useful tool and so it kind of does matter what we think this tool is supposed to be doing to be able to evaluate whether it's useful i would argue and i think that tab's approach and tabs recommendations brings from a recognition that we find value in system-wide changes and system-wide statements about community expectations and that if we expect any one of those vision zero action items to stand on its own and independently move the needle

[202:03] towards zero traffic deaths we probably would never enact any of them we almost certainly would never enact any of the 30 bottom of the 50 action items so that can't possibly be the way that we are expecting our community to proceed so tab made its recommendation plain and simple just to proceed directly with the ordinance change we all agree that in isolation this one change probably wouldn't lead to measurable impacts on fatal and serious injury crashes anytime in the near future um but that's not the intent now we consider quite seriously at the meeting packing in our commentary and um our feedback about whether we should be doing data collection or whether a pilot study was a good idea or whether we should engage a survey firm those we had broad consensus on tab that none of those were a good idea

[203:01] and also clear consensus that the kinds of peer city review that ryan mentioned and reaching out and learning from other cities who have adopted strategies of system-wide reducing speed limits that that was a valuable thing to continue doing but we left that out of the formal recommendation just to make it as clear as day we think you should proceed with the 20 is plenty ordinance change i'm happy to fill you in on the board's discussion on those other points but really what we wanted to get was this is a great time and an important time and in fact in light of covid a critical time to be acting and proceeding in pace instead of doing some more public outreach on top of the stuff that we've done for over the last year on the tmp update and the vision zero action plan i should also note that the tab meeting last week included a public hearing i understand the number of you have received a lot of the same emails that tab did that's been the bulk of the public

[204:00] feedback that we've got we've gotten more than 50 very thoughtful emails from a number of individuals including people with extensive urban planning community organizing transportation related efforts like this for public safety but we've also heard from larger groups like cyclists for community community cycles the pedestrian action committee submitted a letter that group is a continuation of the pedestrian advisory committee that the city of boulder itself convened vetted we had more applications for that group than we could accommodate those people were involved month in and month out over the last year on the transportation master plan update and we're so innervated by their work they wanted to continue and weigh in on this um all solidly supporting this effort and then of course bicycle colorado weighed in last night meaning that people at the state level are watching what we do and nationally

[205:01] they're watching what we do boulders continue to be a leader we are falling behind in some respects and we probably will by pausing and stopping and thinking and analyzing even further what is at base a very simple ordinance change i think that this could be a very big safety win for us um especially at a time when it feels like we only have bad news it could feel like something positive and proactive that the city is doing and it's in fact a unique chance right now for the city to set a new normal for how our neighborhood streets should operate i think it's that's really at base um the reason we should be viewing it as a policy change and not an engineering uh tool to be weighed against crash data thank you bob you tis his hand up i assume he wants to ask a question of either you or the presenter great my question's for staff so if tila wants to finish up go ahead okay great

[206:02] i just wanted to note that we tab has also discussed that we would have made the same recommendation even if covid were not a factor um that's the reason that we listed the tmp update and the vision zero action plan and our formal recommendation before code but that the covid um crisis emerged as an additional reason to proceed with option two based on the benefit to public health the relatively low cost of just proceeding with the ordinance change and changing the signs as we could afford to do so myriad data collection problems posed by cobia 19 and the rare opportunity to reset public expectations that are effective right now i would all like to close just by saying that if council proceeds with an ordinance change we have some time built into the system to continue the public outreach that we've done to continue the peer review that staff has already started but that the the public engagement side of things i think should be something that should be tasked more to tab

[207:01] and to the public groups that have weighed in and support and try and volunteer to help and are really excited about advancing this proposal it's not staff transportation staff's expertise to be doing the public outreach it's not something they're terribly comfortable doing and they have a whole bunch of other things that are quite important on their plate right now that's the substance of tabs feedback for uh city council thank you okay bob you ask now or let the presentation finish i can wait till the presentation's finished i have a question for staff i have a question for teela great mary thank you thanks for your presentation and for your email um ryan during his presentation at the beginning of it said that the goal of this project is to have people drive 20 miles per hour what does tab view the goal of this project as being

[208:03] yeah so just to be clear staff tab the community everyone agrees life would be better if drivers drove 20 miles an hour or slower on residential streets i looked at the vision zero action plan it's there are five objectives in the vision zero action plan the first objective and the first 20-ish items of the action plan directly talk about reducing serious injury crashes um and fatal crashes those are the the critical things that we're looking for and the next two objectives are increasing safety and comfort you know just having people more comfortable be on their roads increasing awareness of vision zero objectives and the 20 is plenty items come under those two later objectives so they don't directly serve the goal of reducing serious crashes and injuries and

[209:00] in terms of whether just changing the rules is going to change behavior experience has shown that that's not true that's the whole point behind vision zero is you have to do a whole bunch of things at once i like to think of the analogy as having your car stuck in a snow bank right driving normally like you would on a summer day does not get you out you have to use other strategies as many of them as you have the resources to employ you can shovel snow out from under the front of the car under the wheels you can have your passengers get out and push you can put it in four wheel drive if you have that available you can throw something under the tires to increase traction but any one of those all by itself is not going to get your car out you've got to do a few things at once and 20 is plenty is one of the few things at once to sort of reset the expectations for how we drive city-wide and it's one of the high-impact items because it's one of the few that affects every city resident basically right outside their door so that's

[210:00] we fundamentally disagree on whether it will work or what the point is and that's why we're looking to you is it a policy is it a statement of how what we expect our city to be like or should we uh analyze it like we do other tools like uh speed bump yeah so to continue the this no the car in the snow bank analogy sure um you ultimately what you want is to get out of the snow bank um and and what the tool that finally gets you out um you may pay more attention to that in the future so i i guess um so i i didn't i didn't hear um if youth if cab thinks that the goal is as ryan stated it or tab sees it as a different goal i think that brian and the city staff are assuming that the goal of 20 is plenty changing

[211:02] the speed limit is to slow drivers down on residential streets i think that we agree that that is a goal i think that what staff's approach is assuming is that that that this change needs to demonstrate it will advance that goal all by itself and we are saying it is part of a package of things that need to happen sort of all at once to get everyone to slow the heck down everywhere okay thank you great ryan yes are you done all right did you finish tila yes thank you ryan do you want to finish uh so my next slide is actually the discussion slide so i'm free to answer any questions that you have very good thank you for the presentation i love your graphics quite nice and then i would turn to bob thanks attila first of all thanks so much uh for being here for being with us tonight and thanks for having for taking

[212:01] this on i really appreciate that very much my question is actually for staff probably for ryan um you know ryan you mentioned that several cities have already adopted twenties plenty like portland um which has about the same density as boulder cambridge which has about the same population as boulder or seattle some other cities and i'm trying to understand what it is that would be studied um either under option one or the abbreviated study under option three because if if other cities have already implemented this presumably they have real world experiences they may have even studied it prior to implementing i don't know if they did or not but we have real world experiences in cities that have adopted this over the years do we think that drivers in boulder are different than drivers in portland and cambridge and that we would learn something different here than they've experienced in real life we don't i don't think we think that drivers are different in those cities um i would say and i'll ask bill doway and after i answer

[213:01] so the city of seattle actually took a similar approach before changing their default speed limits in residential areas to the one that we proposed where they did do pilots and studied the outcomes of the data that collected um and looked at crashes and things like that my understanding from speaking to staff in portland and cambridge was that these actions were done from a policy perspective and so they have different relationships with their state legislatures than we do um so for example massachusetts is in a home real estate and so they had to lobby for actually to get the power to change speed limits um but i would say that uh the value in studying the effect of lowering speed the speed from 25 miles an hour to 20 mile miles an hour on

[214:00] specific streets is that we can see the characteristics of those streets and there are varying street widths and different contexts throughout the city of boulder some streets are wider some streets are more parked up some streets have higher residential densities and so from an engineering perspective it would be really useful to know exactly where [Music] those things contribute to slower vehicular speeds as drivers travel on those streets and from a budgetary perspective then if we knew that a certain level of signing were actually effective in lowering drivers speeds on those streets and that that could have big implications for traffic on and going forward i mean if it's a difference between uh aggressively signing a street with division zero 20 mile an hour signs or building a series of speedups there's a is a real cost associated with that so i think you know one of the values of doing the

[215:01] study is just learning about what is effective in different parts of the city on different types of streets what did they learn if seattle followed the model of of uh testing um and evaluating first and then ultimately adopted twenties what did they learn um and and do we think that what they learned is gonna be different than what we learn so i'd have to follow up with them i can get you a better response on exactly what they learned i mean i do know that they have a residential speed limit of 20 miles an hour city-wide and so i would assume that what they learned was that uh it was something the community wanted um they have a very they have an interesting um so one thing they did they did art is that streets that are 25 feet wide or less and that have a decent amount of on street parking

[216:00] they found that typically traveling speeds were at or below the speed limit so the 85th percentile speed which is kind of the benchmark for what we look at in terms of speeding was typically at the speed limit or below and so on those narrower streets they really deprioritize traffic homing and re-prioritized it towards streets that are wider have no curbs have less on-street parking and so that was a finding from that sounds like they may have saved us a hundred thousand dollars so this is questions i have adam mark aaron and mary so adam europe thanks sam uh my question is actually about the signage itself so something that struck me is while the newly designed signs are really really pretty and they draw a lot of attention um the cost of it especially right now seems super high so i was wondering if

[217:00] we could have essentially the same um product if we just use something like a really high quality vinyl sticker to put a zero over the five maybe uh you know a little extra yellow around the sign or something along those lines but not only would that save from a resource cost when it comes to having a bunch of 25 signs that we can't use anymore but it might also save on staff time putting them up because it would be a faster process than manually um uncoupling all those signs and recoupling the new ones so i just wondered if that was explored at all and what the thoughts were on that i'll take this one ryan so yes we certainly could do that and it would be less expensive to try and modify the existing signs with some kind of sticker it um i i will just say that um it's uh they don't tend to look very good that

[218:00] way because um what you wind up seeing at night is a really bright o or zero um that looks quite different from the rest of the sign but most importantly the design of the 20 mile an hour vision zero sign had a variety of things built into it the orange coloration around the edge was put there to draw attention to it because again right where i think tab and staff agree on this is that where there could be value here is in educating the public about what we're trying to accomplish with our vision zero goal and so drawing attention to the sign with that orange background um we thought had value and then getting the vision zero message embedded in the sign itself so that when people saw that they would

[219:00] see vision zero we thought there would be value to that as well so again i think we're going to all have different opinions about how valuable this is going to be in terms of meeting our travel safety goals but i do think that the cost to use these particular signs and to put them up um immediately if you decide to go that route rather than putting that off as was i think generously suggested by community cycles today um i i think there it would be worth that money if if you believe that this is something that we should do we should use these signs um and try and get the the outreach benefit of that thanks for that bill i just wanted to make sure all the holes were poked appropriately and yeah that doesn't change my thinking at all

[220:01] and what i feel about the program itself so just wondered yeah great and then i've got mark aaron and mary so mark bill a question for you first um do we have any data as to what percentage of accidents and fatalities in boulder actually occur excuse me occur on the residential streets that will see their speed limits reduced yes there's a considerable amount of data that's in our safe streets boulder report that speaks to this um and and um the i guess the way that i would describe it is that on local roadways um where we would deploy this um we have over a five-year span we have seen one crash that had a severe outcome where somebody was injured or somebody was killed in this case injured um

[221:01] as a result of speeding that particular crash also happened to involve alcohol distraction and it would not have been something that would have been mitigated so you know when i looked at all of the severe crashes that have occurred in the city and did this assessment um i could not find any that would have been mitigated on these types of streets in that time period it's not to say that we don't have a problem with speeding because we have lots of severe crashes that occur on our arterial roadway and i would also uh agree with tila that um it's not just about crash reduction i mean there is there is benefit to if we could actually get people to drive 20 miles an hour there would be benefit to making people feel safer and and

[222:01] feel more comfortable walking and biking and educate them about the program those i mean there is real benefit to that but to your specific question um no it would it would be pretty hard to improve upon what we have on our local roadways right now in terms of severe crash reduction let me agree on that real quick so bill how about total crashes because there's one thing which is um the injury crashes and you know i've seen injury crashes in neighborhoods but they often involve stop signs and and people you know that's correct yep but but how about total crashes because any kind of crash is a bad outcome right it's bad from property damage it's bad from you know people get scared you know that you being in that place on that roadway whether it's on a bike or whatever could get you hit so how about total crashes

[223:01] on neighborhood street yes we certainly have property damage crashes that occur as a result of speeding we had a really prominent one recently where somebody was intoxicated going extremely fast and crashed into the walnut sign that's over on walnut 17th and completely completely took it out um and and knowing exactly how many of those crashes there are compared to all the other crashes would be part of the analysis that we were proposing to do i think what we could tell you just by proxy is how many crashes speed related crashes we've seen when we've studied the neighborhoods that have applied for the neighborhood speed management program ryan do you have those numbers yeah so uh since the program started on local streets we have found two speed related crashes

[224:01] out of the would be the 16 simple projects that we've completed okay and so that's just 16 relatively short segments of local roadway is that right yes yes okay yeah so we also have a complex project list which are mostly collector roadways and uh i think off the top of my head we've i think seen three to four speed related crashes in the past five years on those 17 projects so again we're not seeing a ton of speed related crashes on on residential streets one last question i guess um [Music] yeah people who speed um [Music] are not really going to fear the posting of a few signs going you know saying 20 instead of 25. people who are

[225:00] not respectful of their neighborhoods see today you're not going to have any speed traps set up on residential streets as you might find on baseline or on canyon if those people are going to continue to speed i'm just not sure how much benefit we're getting for the expenditure of money under any of these options yeah if if i could um so i again i i do feel like um we have a lot of experience trying to change people's behavior just with speed limits in our community we have never been successful doing that but what we have seen then what comes from that and ultimately you can get there and i think that this is probably a bit of what tila was was referencing it doesn't happen all at once it happens over a long period of time and after

[226:01] spending a lot of money but you if you set these lower speed limits you will not get people to significantly change their behavior based on them but you will have set a different expectation especially a different expectation in the community in the neighborhood they will want people to drive slower they will come to the city and say we want speed mitigation on our street and over time you will put that speed mitigation out there you know that that is what has happened on streets like pine uh balsam at one time moorhead um that's so i guess really it's just something for council to understand and be okay with that the path that this takes you on could potentially take you to that place

[227:02] where people are driving 20 miles an hour but it isn't going to come from posting speed limit signs it's going to come after you've posted the speed limit signs and then after we've gone out um over over years and built traffic mitigation out there thank you great thank you and then mary you're next and then after that rachel so um the speed limit was changed on 13th street a couple months ago i believe it was um do we have any data on what has happened since then compared to what happened before we we do not we have not collected any uh after speed data out there and unfortunately we're not in a position where any reputable

[228:01] data could be collected okay um [Music] and um in the 20 to 30 neighborhoods that have asked for the neighborhood speed mitigation [Music] program would you if you put the signs in those places would there be any data collection that would occur in the post putting up the the the signs yes so that's that's actually the point of using the ones the neighborhoods that have already applied for the neighborhood speed management program that didn't qualify at the 25 mile an hour speed limit is that we had already collected data as part of that application and so we have before data we can post the signs collect after data and then see if in fact there is a

[229:00] difference in the speeds pre and post sign installation and mary just just to um i just wanted to clarify because i just saw a text from ryan ryan is it your understanding that pre-covid um we actually did go out and collect speed data on 13th street yeah i knew i know we were in the process of it i don't we'll have to follow up with mark on if it was completed before the stay-at-home order i would just like to clarify quickly though if i could okay let's go ahead thank you that the the 20 to 30 neighborhoods who've applied in the nsmp because of the way you have to petition your neighbors and meet a certain density of those petition signatures most of the test neighborhoods um they were on the slide that ryan showed they're generally one or two blocks long there are a few exceptions that are longer

[230:02] often where ryan thought there are a couple here that we should connect and kind of see how the whole corridor operates but these are not neighborhood tests they're not even end to end corridors the bulk of them are just testing a block or two and that is one of the the limitations on the data collection and analysis that tab objected to as being useful because i don't think it would be okay and so ryan just said the opposite so help me help me um somebody please help me understand the um i would say some of those streets are are shorter in nature um you know and we did go through the list and looked at doing longer segments you know so for

[231:00] example the one that pops out is a fourth street so we had two separate applications for two relatively short blocks of fourth street and to us it didn't make sense just to study two blocks of fourth street you should really study it from at least mapleton to calmia and so where where we went through the list and identified situations like that we did extend the study area and certainly we would look at extending it where we needed to to get a thorough study but certainly you know i mean there there are streets in there that are shorter than others i i would also say that there is value i'm again this might be something where we disagree but there is value in going out and collecting data on these different streets even just to see if there are different results on different types of streets

[232:00] again this is similar to what seattle did when where they were able to identify that on certain types of streets you could post a speed limit and and have a better chance of getting people to drive that speed um just by posting the speed limit uh because the street was so narrow already or conditions like that whereas other streets would actually require traffic mitigation if you wanted to achieve that speed and we could collect our own local data to help inform that the other thing i would say is is that the other part the other value in going out and piloting a bunch of different neighborhoods is it's a bit of a proxy for um public outreach because you're going out into neighborhoods and you're saying we're going to change your speed limit from 25 to 20. and you get to hear

[233:00] from the people that live on that street and around that street whether they liked that um and and would prefer that you do that more um or uh or that they didn't like that and that they didn't want their speed limit to be changed so i think it has value from all of those perspectives uh-huh and then it does cost an awful lot of money to do it yeah it does um in the the cities that you've spoken with um who've done this have they seen downsides i not that i'm not that i'm aware of no i've only seen this actually got asked at tab the other night and at that time i couldn't recall any any studies there was actually one it's the only one i've ever seen and it was a study that took place in england where um they

[234:01] they changed the speed limit they didn't have a change in behavior and um and then had lamented spending their money that way but certainly i think there have been more studies that have touted positive results and i think that that probably makes sense um people tend to um publish things that that they've done in their community that are positive they don't tend to publish things that are negative i can guarantee you that we did not go out and publish anything after we tried changing lanes on folsom for instance and so are we would we be changing the speed limit solely from 25 to 20 or would we be

[235:02] going in some places from 30 to 20 um what so it would be the default speed limit as defined by the boulder revised code which is 25 miles an hour unless otherwise posted and so effectively that means most of the local streets in the city because on higher order streets like collectors and minor arterials there are higher post limits and those would require a traffic analysis and study in order to and in many cases those are some of those streets are actually c dot phone streets and so it would require coordination with them as well so this would be 25 to 20 on local streets so this effort this effort would change local streets low volume residential streets from 25 to 20. but there is

[236:01] i think also some work to be done on i'll call it equity around the speed limits on other classifications of streets collectors that are have different speed limits on them or arterial roadways owned by the city that have different speed limits on them that is certainly something that's on our work task as well on our work program as well so for example um on alpine which is the street that i live on um that's not the speed limit is 25 so what you're saying is on alpine it wouldn't change on alpine it would change from 25 to 20. right would it would but on a but adjacent to it on a street like balsam that would stay at 25. um okay so

[237:00] um i have that ring that brings up another question because um back when um they were putting in the circles the traffic circles and the the islands that are so there's traffic circles on balsam there's islands on alpine and there are speed bumps um on north so three consecutive east-west streets have mitigation on them so after they put the circles on um embalsam the traffic on alpine i remember looking at the numbers the traffic on alpine grew and then after they put the speed bumps on north the traffic on alpine grew so i'm wondering if um [Music] it could we see any kind of that phenomenon where the impact to other streets it moves the traffic from

[238:02] the new street that's got the 20 miles per hour to the one that has a faster speed limit does it then increase the the traffic on those streets so i wouldn't anticipate that that would be the result of posting signs i wouldn't anticipate that the effectiveness of posting signs would yield that kind of change in behavior where we would have to be careful about that is when we came out to do traffic mitigation afterwards and and we've taken those we learned a lot from projects like the whittier neighborhood and balsam edgewood about how to run a good neighborhood speed management complex project and that's where we would take into account that concern and try not to move traffic from traffic circles or some other kind of impactful thing um off of a higher

[239:01] designated street onto a lower designated street but i wouldn't anticipate that that would come from sign in all right thank you that's all i have great so i've got rachel next but before we get to rachel could i ask staff to take down the presentation because one of the impacts of the presentation in the zoom environment is we can only see a half dozen people so if we can get a presentation there we go now we can all look at each other so i have to sorry i have to apologize i don't have a camera so you'll only see my name great and that's fine but others can see each other okay rachel if you're on um if you have your questions i'm here thanks uh yeah two questions one's for bill and then the next is actually going to be probably for carrie weinheimer he's still on um the first is um if we went with option two and just kind of

[240:00] pulled off the band-aid and implemented citywide could we then as financing becomes better available postcoded do some of the engineering studying and collect some of the data that you wanted to get to maybe make improvements you know in the future okay um and then second my law enforcement question um do we have data on ticketing in current 25 mile an hour zones anyone uh short answers i'm not i'm not sure it would take a fair amount of research to find that okay and where i'm going with it is do we have ready data on national and local level for speeding stops and tickets in terms of the ticket recipients race because generally um that can be racially biased so i wanna i'm i'm gonna be in favor of option two but

[241:01] i would like us to implement it in a way that is not going to harm people by increased ticketing so more traffic calming than enforcement and things like that um so that's my hope and just wondered if you could speak to that at all what our enforcement plans would be and if not tonight then the next time that we're talking about it sure i can give you a quick overview of our current enforcement plan and that is that we focus most of our traffic resources or traffic enforcement resources on the higher speed are two roadways enforcing violations that lead to [Music] injury crashes so speeding running stop signs running red lights i would say very little of our enforcement time is spent on residential streets with 25 mile an hour speed limits we do respond based on complaints from neighbors and most often we find that the traffic volume is very low and there are very few violations so if you think about it is it better to have an officer sitting on a residential

[242:01] street at 25 miles an hour at seven or eight o'clock in the morning when and other times kids are going to school or is it better to put that same officer in a school zone at that same time to prevent to slow people down and hopefully prevent auto pet accidents there and i would say we would take that resource and put it in a school zone or another busier street with a higher speed limit where the result of a crash is going to result in injuries okay because you know it's it would be easy to ticket somebody for going 15 over at least at first while people are used to the speed limit being 25 and maybe going 35 we take it down to 20 then that's a hefty ticket so i just would would hope that we can find a way to roll this out long term that is not going to be heavily reliant on ticketing as as the enforcement mechanism thanks sure and to add to that the plan that bill and i have spoken of for if we were

[243:01] to go this direction will be to use more photo enforcement primarily to issue warning violations at first for those that are speeding below nine miles over the speed limit and we were retooling photo enforcement for that capability to issue warning citations instead of tickets and that took some programming and there was some cost involved in that but that would be i think though i would agree that would probably be our our primary means of enforcement um for 20 mile higher limits on residential streets my kids will be delighted to hear that gary thank you can i call qui on that please um i just wanted to ask if um in these numbers that we've gotten for each of these options if um enforcement costs are included no enforcement costs or revenue are not included okay thank you

[244:02] great so i'm going to call myself and i'll be pretty quick here um so the city has really good crash data across the entire city right bill it seems to me like when every time we've taken a look at crash data i've been impressed and so we have crash data on all the 25 mile an hour roads right now right i would say we have very good crash data yes right so if we make this change to 20 miles an hour across the city we're going to be running kind of a big experiment right we're going to be able to say you know are those property crashes that are happening at some rate across the city in 25 mile an hour zones you know did that property rate crash go down or not um yeah so it seems like we'll you know we're this is going to run a natural experiment for us in which we're going to be able to see i i agree with tila there's a lot of reasons to think about doing this but one of the side benefits of this is we

[245:00] will be able to answer the questions that all these people have been asking and we can even write a paper about it and say here's the actual impact on crashes and you know if we're using photo radar or even be able to say you know what was the ticketing rate beforehand and what's the thickening rate afterwards right that's correct okay so so i'll come back to that later and then tom this is a question for you so if there's a property damaged crash and the police come out and they do an investigation they find that one of the parties was speeding and doesn't the civil and criminal penalties that are potential for the person um who is uh at fault in the crash those go up the more the higher they are over the speed limit um so the the ticket

[246:00] the the citation you get um goes up depending on the number of miles per hour you are over the speed limit uh the the civil liability would depend of course on the damages damages at higher speed but there's no there's no linear progression so so say somebody's going 40 and a 20 and they end up breaking and then hitting somebody one of the if if there's an accident investigation they can usually figure that out right they do the work to try and figure out when the braking started and how fast they were going i mean i've seen enough investigations it seems like there's at least an attempt made to figure out how far over the speed limit was somebody going when the crash happened uh sam you're out of my comfort zone i haven't seen that many investigations of that type i mean usually you know i've only seen those kind of investigation where there's a fatality okay so carrie i i don't know if this would happen at these relatively lower speeds i certainly know i've seen your accident

[247:01] investigation car that goes and probably tries to reproduce the conditions that led to the accident right yes but it's gonna the amount of reason of investigation we put in is gonna depend on the severity of the crash if it's a serious injury accident fatality you know we can do crash reconstruction to figure out speed if it's non-injury property damage only you know we might do some skid analysis to look for breaking speed or maybe retrieve the crash data recorder and look at speed that way but it really will depend on the severity of the accident how how in depth we go with trying to prove speed right and it doesn't seem like that's that's the kind of accident that tends to occur in these roads anyway okay so that's all of my questions um i've moved us into the discussion phase i think we can keep it relatively short

[248:00] um if we want it's 10 o'clock just doing a time check and we've got one other big thing so um unless there's going to be a lot of um divergence on where council wants to go i'll open it up for for discussion i've got aaron and i've got mark and then i've got rachel thanks sam i appreciate all the the good questions and presentations and things like that i would just like to propose that we move forward with the option two um you know the option one involves you know spending a hundred thousand dollars on a study um but as bob pointed out um other cities have done similar studies and mary's question was a good one that generally that they have found um only positive outcomes or i think it sounds like the worst case is that speeds don't change a lot um but i think tila's case for um moving forward with a kind of cultural change

[249:00] that um that you know starts to advance us towards our vision zero goals um by changing sort of how we interact um on our local streets with slower speeds and more shared street approach um i think the 60 000 cost for changing the signs is um very doable and we could always phase it in you know over over a time period if necessary but i think this is a time for for us to you know take um build upon the successes of other jurisdictions and um and go ahead and move forward and get this done it was going to call on rachel but she's left her post so now we'll go to mark oh you're brac okay rachel and then mark and then adam and bob sorry i'm um having serious technical difficulties that was asking the kids to turn off everything else in the house that's online to see if that helps um can you hear me yeah

[250:01] okay um i didn't hear what what was just said before because that was brilliant okay well sorry to miss it and i'm sorry if this is redundant um i would just say i assume we're on discussion now with questions and assuming that that's the case it's lovely to have this up tonight it's a great safety effort and it has a lot of community support and it's a really good step forward for vision zero so i think it's a good time in our lives to be to have something that that we are mostly together on as a community and is safety at a time when when i think a lot of us feel sort of unsafe or unmoored in life so um good timing thank you to transportation department and tab for their work on it um and and to me i can remember when i first started looking at this initiative and i

[251:02] was just thinking like the teenagers and young 20 somethings that i live with we're not going to be happy that that boulder was going to reduce the speed limit to 20. um but then you look at the at the hard numbers and it's so easy and plain to see that you know if you've got a crash at 20 miles an hour and 9 out of 10 people survive that versus 30 it's only 5 out of 10 and at 40 it's 1 out of 10 survive it's it becomes sort of a no-brainer and so for that reason because it's got such a as a package of tools that we need to pass as tila said to get us all the way you know the car um out of the snow it's it's a good step forward and a great um safety measure and so for that reason i support option two and just moving forward and doing the studying as we go um so that's that's what i'm supporting

[252:00] thanks mark well i'm happy to take a divergent viewpoint i think we ought to give some thought to option three uh for the following reasons um i think we all agree we want to get to a lower speed level we want we want to have people driving a little bit slower and i think option three at least provides an experiment towards getting there where we can analyze the actual effectiveness of a program uh it's the cheapest cost in the year 2020 in which we are in deep financial crisis and i find that interesting with respect to option two that boulder tends to be a very data-driven town apparently until it isn't um because we're not using data we're using um [Music] i think there's a certain degree of emotionalism uh to do a one-size-fits-all statute um when we ought to be looking a

[253:01] little more granularly at exactly what we're going to get out of it we don't have the good data that this is going to achieve much in the way of accident reduction on the streets in which it is going to be imposed and i think we ought to be taking a little closer look at it at a lower cost at least for the year 2020 and then we can decide how we want to proceed i don't think there's any divergence in this council as to where we want to get ultimately but i just find it perplexing that we would jump into passing an ordinance with very little underlying data other than people seem to like it sure thanks just on the data point i think we do have a lot of data it's from around the country and internationally and i don't think there's we got an email saying every city thinks it's special but we're not like we all have the same mix of streets and the same complicated issues and you study it in one place that you know it

[254:01] is pretty well transferable so i i like what bob said like thank you seattle for saving us a hundred thousand dollars so i would um disagree that we don't have the data i think we've got pretty strong data from around the world rachel you may well be correct but i will simply point out that on issue after issue as we consider things at this council we are always pointing to the uniqueness of boulder and its particular characteristics and i don't know why this would would be different from those other situations again you may be right but uh i would want to take a look at it in a different way okay adam yeah i'm gonna go ahead and support option two at this time um mostly because i think that's just where we're ultimately gonna get to anyway so why not just move ahead um and i would love to know where all those sadly only 25 mile per hour signs end up after they're switched out so good question

[255:00] yeah i'm going to join adam and aaron and rachel and supporting option two um i want to remind us that when we put together the 2020 budget and we actually um added some extra money for revision zero i don't remember how much was several hundred thousand dollars it was for just this type of of project um mark made a comment that the cheapest of the three options at least this year would be option three um i would actually observe the cheapest thing to do would be to do nothing i don't think any of us are proposing that and in the long term option two actually is cheapest because uh option three as adam just said i think correctly we would we would do it we would study it and then we'd say let's do 20 miles an hour across the board so why not just go forward now it is in fact the least expensive option and probably the most effective option and i take the hundred thousand dollars that we would otherwise spend on study under option one and when we feel comfortable um that we um are you know out of the woods on the budget use that hundred thousand dollars rather than for studies use it for education and

[256:01] enforcement i think tila was absolutely right that this is one element of a broader vision zero um project and we've been talking about vision zero for a long long time and i don't think it's time to move forward and actually do something great and i'm going to jump in here and i'm going to also um say that we should move ahead with option two i'm going to suggest that there are ways that we can save money and do that so definitely we want all the arterials that enter boulder every road that enters boulder from the county we want to put the speed limit 20 unless otherwise marked and you can make those fancy ones with the nice borders and the vision zero across it but i think you know at the very least you could just take down every 25 mile an hour sign in the city and the the speed limit there would be 20. i'm not suggesting that's what you do the way to phase this in if we don't want to do all 400 odd um 25 mile an hour signs at once would

[257:01] be to take them down um and and replace the ones that we can afford to replace so mark to your point the answer is that it you know maybe 35 000 or whatever the number was because we're in a budget crunch you know you can solve that in a creative way adam had another creative way to solve it which is put decals on so i think there are ways that we could roll this out and we could end up with the signs that bill described to us which are nice signs everywhere that emphasize vision zero but they don't have to go up all at once because the whole point of the you know the default speed limit is that you don't have to have a sign everywhere in fact you'll find a lot of streets in boulder where there is no speed limit sign because the speed limit is 20. so mary so i like that idea of taking down the signs and then maybe just saying um what

[258:02] i heard earlier i can't remember who said it but it was um unless otherwise posted um the speed limit is 20. so i would like to propose um a kind of a hybrid idea only because i i i do feel like we need our own local data and i think that we um we want to make sure that our final decision on this is um data driven so i would like to propose that if we go with option two that we have that um ordinance expire at a certain date and then we've gathered some information up to that point and then we have some data from which to say we're just going to renew it um or we're going to um

[259:02] end it um so i i would feel like we've done our due diligence and gathered our own local data that way um just because um just because i lived through folsom how's that um so that that would be my suggestion um and um yeah so it's kind of a hybrid of of two and three i've got bob and mark yeah um first of all i'm going to disagree with mary's suggestion i think if we go down this path we're not going to go back and i can't imagine us you know changing it to 20 miles an hour trying to teach people to drive only 20 putting up some signs and then after some sort of sun setting of two or three years reverting back i think it's this is a no pun intended this is a one-way street once we go down this path um we should stick with it and we can always revisit it of course but i don't think we need to put a date out

[260:00] there to revisit it i think we you know future councils can revisit anytime they want to um i do have a question however for for bill and ryan um just following up on on sam's suggestion that we could phase in the signage i assume that a fair amount of the expense of changing the signs is actually not so much the metal of the signs it's actually the labor to take down the old signs and put up the new ones and so i guess i'm wondering how much savings there would be if we took down the 25s and then later put up the 20s because it seems to me that's twice as much labor is that a fair assumption i'm very glad that you asked that question i there definitely is a sizable portion that is associated with the labor i would also point out that if we were just to take down the signs what we'd actually wind up doing because we don't just leave posts sitting out there without signs on them is to take out the posts and then potentially come back and put the posts back in um so i

[261:00] i would just reiterate my strong recommendation that if we did go down this path then we will we will take some of the money that you pointed out some of the 700 000 of vision zero funding that we allocated to this project we'll put these signs up um and uh and i think that what that will get you is the um the outreach component of this uh where people driving around the neighborhood will see vision zero and we'll will be understanding um better understanding that we're that we're trying to accomplish that vision zero goal that would be my recommendation okay i'm convinced i'm mark i take it uh sam that you no longer propose any kind of phasing in of the

[262:00] signage well no that's not true necessarily i mean i don't know how long is it going to take you bill to um to accomplish this you would be surprised how fast we can do this okay great because i was going to be supportive of your suggestion actually as well as mary's suggestion i don't think either of those suggestions are going to be uh moving forward so i've got seven people who have weighed in i'm looking for nearby and juni and then we can move on from this i can uh i'm kind of with mark on this but i think that the community has kind of spoken so i'm fine with going with the majority on this okay and ginny thanks um yeah i think we've talked about this atlanta then actually option two is

[263:00] where we are and again the cost saving and we're in a different time so yeah i support option two very good so i think it's a clear majority who want to move forward with option two and i would draw my cost saving suggestion because it doesn't sound like it would i want to thank tab and staff for all the work you put into this and i look forward to seeing those new signs going forward i think it is part of a cultural change and vision zero is something we committed to and this is an inexpensive way for us to move towards our vision zero goals and the cost sensitive way at a time when that's something we need to be doing so thank you all just a process point sam i just to clarify i think this is direction tonight and i think what would happen then is um i think staff would bring back an ordinance maybe in a couple of weeks for a first reading and second reading so that would become official sometime in may i think

[264:00] yeah thank you and i forgot to mention cac has already put those placeholders on going forward so we're ready to to do this at the may meetings so by mid-may this should be a law i think very good okay so let's do a time check council it is 10 24 and what we're looking to take on next is electronic petitioning which i predict will be a significant undertaking because it's a ground we've never tried before i i guess one thought might be to get through the staff presentation and questions and return then or another discussion my prediction if we try and get through the entire discussion contin considering what will be there is will be after 11

[265:01] um at least making decisions so i just put out there i'm happy to take uh feedback on how we'd like to proceed i'm just gonna talk i had my hand raised um so this is so time sensitive for people who are trying to gather signatures that i wouldn't delay i think we should it's one where i think we should put in some longer hours because we're already up against such a a major time crunch that i don't think it makes sense to delay aaron mary nearby and bob well i i have an idea i don't see if other people would be interested in this so i agree with rachel about the time sensitivity about this but the issues involved i think particularly in the validation of the petitions are complicated and i worry about us making the perfect decision late but one thing that we could

[266:02] consider doing would be to authorize the collection of signatures now and um finalize exactly how we would validate those petitions in a couple of weeks when we have some more time so let people get started but but i think you can disconnect exactly how you validate it from from letting people get started then we've got mary and nearby and bob so i was going to bring up the same um point that um it is kind of time sensitive it may not take as long as we think but i think we need to do it yes uh nearby um i'm fine with taking your options sam i don't have much more than me it's just hard to do this at 10 30 at night after a 10-hour workday so i don't just have a lot of brain power left

[267:01] i'm going to make a short substantive comment but that does it does go to maybe a process suggestion um i'm going to agree with leslie klustrum i'm going to repeat that again this is probably the first thing that leslie and i have actually been on the same page but leslie sent us i think a really um wise note today that um while we want to encourage people to practice social distancing that doesn't make it impossible for people to collect paper signatures and i won't bang on about this right now if we decide to have a discussion about it but i just want to observe that there is an option um that is available now that doesn't involve us making a policy change as aaron says after 11 o'clock at night when we're not probably not that sharp so i think i'd like to to see if there's if there's enthusiasm around the concept of staying the course and not making change because obviously if we decide not to make changes we don't have to make decisions late at night or next week can i call a queen on that sure um so i

[268:02] i agree with bob and leslie i guess um i do think that although up to the point where we don't need to make any changes i think we could make some changes to the um paper collection of signatures and and add some distancing requirements and some safety and [Music] hand cleaning requirements things like that for a collection process so but we can talk about that later okay um great show i'm confused about the process here but i guess like my experience right now in the world and i don't know that it's going to change in a week or a month is like people are making less eye contact they're like trying to scurry away from

[269:01] each other i just can't imagine that it's going to be um a similarly situated position that we would be putting in people in if we did paper signatures i think that it's going to be a hard year to gather them and most people are going to want to touch somebody else's pen no matter you know it's just going to be hard to trust um in the current world that that's safe so again i've never experienced that in boulder but people like just have their heads down and are like it's a very unsocial unfriendly sort of environment in a lot of ways right now and i think that proactively approaching people to sign would be a tall order so let me oh aaron's had his hand up perfect aaron and then mark here let me take my winner go ahead well i just i want a second what rachel said but also that not not only just that they wouldn't but also i don't think we should be um encouraging people to do that i mean the signing of a physical petition involves a certain amount of inevitable shared touching of surfaces and i really

[270:00] don't think that's something that we should be encouraging right now we've got mark nearby tom and bob so mark mark you're on view yes i was um i'd have to agree with bob and mary on this one um and as a fallback i would agree with uh with you about breaking up the conversation i just don't think this is the time to start a three-hour discussion um over the procedures for electronic balloting nearby i'm 100 on board with uh bob and mary and mark on this one now and then as i fall back with you and tom so i'd appreciate the opportunity to run through my presentation i've spent some time working with the various committees i've got answers to a lot of their questions and i think even if you want to start them collecting signatures what they collect

[271:01] is going to be important and just getting some feedback on that i think i can run through the presentation in about 10 minutes and then you can decide how much you want to discuss it after that um and then we have this public hearing scheduled in two weeks where you can do a deeper dive that would be great that'd be great and so just make sure bob you have one more thing yeah i just wanted to build on what mary said um you know we're as we heard from jane earlier today first of all we've been allowing people and to some extent encouraging people to visit our local restaurants and pick up food to go and the restaurants have figured it out um you can you can go up you have to sign you have clean pens and dirty pens right and um you come up to the counter and you don't have to be close to somebody there's a there's your credit card receipts there you sign it you head to back people are wearing gloves i think there's a lot of layers of protection that we can put in place we're now getting ready to um to allow that to happen in retail stores

[272:00] as well so it seems a little inconsistent for us to say yeah stop by retail stores curbside pick up stop by restaurants trips i pick up but it's impossible for people to sign a piece of paper the city not a table with a petition circulator a safe distance away i think there's a lot of ways that this can be done we don't have to tell them how to do it i mean the rules are there but i think it's a little bit of an exaggeration for folks to say it's impossible to collect signatures because it's not impossible for people to pick up food and other items on curbside and that's that's been happening throughout this and those restrictions are actually going to be lifted over the coming weeks can i do quick colloquy it's just that um with like the restaurant pickup which i've been doing it's the the restaurant person touches the thing and then you touch the thing and then that's it with a petition it's a you know a shared piece of paper potentially so i you know if you give everybody their own piece of paper then you are getting to similar levels but if it's

[273:00] done with a clipboard or a shared piece of paper yeah perhaps tom and during this presentation can tell us whether that's okay if they're separate pieces of paper i imagine that would be okay okay and tom just before you get going i want to make sure okay you need lord judy did you have something you wanted to say right now yes i just wanted to add to the to aaron's point about the social distancing i do agree with bob but i also want the petitions to move forward and i was thinking as well [Music] we want people to do the right thing and even if we are easing um people can go out there i would imagine that it would be hard for people who are petitioning to get access to people because we're still in the social distancing phase phase and we're still telling people to stay

[274:01] home so it's very hard and challenging and i'm thinking we have to do the right thing that move democracy forward and if it is electronic signatures we should just do it okay tom sounds like you're on okay so i asked luis toro to stay tonight luis was staff supporting the elections working group the campaign finance working group and he is a recognized expert in election law there were many questions on election law uh i sent you a confidential today that answered them if you have any questions luis is going to help with that i'm going to go through relatively quickly and hopefully it's going to work supposedly takes 30 seconds after i press the button chris

[275:03] chris do you want to run it from the presentation screens because i'm pressing the button and nothing's happening yeah tom i i apologize i'm not sure why it's not working for you let me uh let me try and advance the slide myself it's just karma chris no it's letting lawyers run technology well usually we have the capability of pressing a button right now tom some people are really good debuggers you use them because they're the ones that bring out whatever is going to come out in the code or the hardware so there you go is it working now

[276:03] chris can you go just go to the edit oh there it is all right is that the all right so first shooting tonight this is a rough draft council just gave me direction to generally bring something back the idea was that you'd have a discussion and then we'd um we'd adopt it by emergency on may 5th uh it's a temporary uncodified ordinance that would expire december 31st 2020. hope we plan for the 2021 election to have the online petitioning system in place so this is in the ordinance it is a conditional approval electronic petition sign that circulators do not engage knowing or not only in fraudulent procurement of signatures i put that in because that gives you authority in the ordinance to invalidate something if you detect fraud so that was one of the challenges to make sure that there was no fraud this is the definition of electronic signature for the purposes of this ordinance electronic signature means an electronic sound symbol or process attached to or logically associated with

[277:00] a record or executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record that is directly from state law as you can see it is a very broad definition of electronic signature that the state has adopted you can be on the phone and say i recognize that as my signature and under this law that would be sufficient so we're giving a very generous definition of electronic signature there is nothing in this ordinance that would require a campaign to have a particular software package or use any other tool they could do it by paper if they wanted to but we do have a requirement that they submit to the clerk an electronic spreadsheet with the information required so this is the information that we're asking that they submit to the clerk first name last name date signed residence zip code voter registration number telephone number and email address voter registration number you've seen some objections to uh there's a assertion that that's not something most voters know and i think

[278:01] that's right however any campaign can buy a list of all the registered voters with the voter registration number from boulder county for fifty dollars so they could provide it to the voter uh if they wanted to uh the voter also lynette told me she looked hers up in under 30 seconds by merely googling the secretary of state's site to find the voter voter id you have to put in your name and date of birth and it pops right up so it's not that difficult the reason we want it is we did a test it it adds about five to ten seconds in the best case by putting in name and last name uh they can add a lot more uh by my estimation uh three three petitions with about four thousand signatures each um that adds about um thirty hours of work um to the to the clerk's office if we don't have the voter registration number so there's a big cost to the clerk's office if we don't include that

[279:02] this again is a list of things that we'd be requiring so petition and validation this was the the council's instruction was to see if you could figure out a way to prevent wide scale fraud so since we know that names addresses and voter id numbers are available publicly it would be possible for someone to create a forged list relatively easily and to order forge a number of signatures i'm not suggesting that any of these petitioner groups would do that but it's one of the things we've been working hard to make sure that the person who is acknowledging their signature is actually the registered voter so this was a way this is the 100 signature take looking at 100 selected at random and then if 10 or more don't respond then you're out it's a harsh penalty i agree but it is a way to discourage fraud now after talking with the campaigns i came up with a different language which uh would so i asked since we're asking the campaigns to submit a

[280:01] spreadsheet with all the email addresses i asked the clerk's office how hard it would be for them to just email everybody and they said not very hard at all so the the alternative proposed language would be to have require the clerk to email all signatures and if more than 10 contacted did not have a valid email address or are not the voter name of the position the petition will be invalid so that's a much higher standard it's more acceptable there is still a possibility of fraud here because you could theoretically create uh valid email addresses by just signing up with you yahoo or gmail or any other free email service it would not bounce so you would and we would not we would not get any rejection so there's still a possibility so the other language which is language that um adam suggested was causing the list to be published online and then people could check to see if their name was there if more than 10 said i didn't sign it then we know that there was massive fraud going on

[281:01] there has been an objection that this invades privacy but voter records are public records uh it's not necessarily invading privacy with paper signatures anybody is entitled to come in and examine the uh examine the paper signatures this would be putting them online uh obviously it's greater publication but it's no less public information uh there's also a concept that democracy should be done in the open um and there is this idea that you're supporting something but i'm not sure that that hiding the information is entirely possible since we need to be able to provide it to folks who want to make a protest so tom can i ask a question on the previous slide real quick which was um i assume that you've already scrubbed before you send out the emails to everyone you've already scrubbed out the folks who don't live in boulder because it's quite often the case that you know some number of signatures don't actually qualify because the the signer doesn't live in boulder so is this proposed

[282:00] alternative after those names have been removed i i wasn't thinking along those lines and i'd have to ask lynette about her process uh checking checking to see if they're registered voters is a longer process well i mean i would expect that they would do this right away because they only have 10 days to do this to validate the signatures under the charter so good once we're down and i'll ask for that okay i'm sorry we put in a disclosure requirement that they were required that the committees would be required to inform all signers in writing that the signer's name and address will be published on the city's website the signed name and address and telephone number will be invited to any registered elector requested information protests that the reason for that is that people can and do file protests that under the charter they have to be filed within 40 days of the submission

[283:01] in the ordinance we provide that any registered voter can request a list of the the list and they must include the name the production's name and specific grounds for the protest which is an issue we've had in the past where people protest without providing any grounds and sometimes i think it's been done for political purposes um committee's concerns as i said the voter registration number was something that was raised yeah obviously you've heard about the invalidation procedures there have been suggestions both to increase and to decrease the number of signatures there is a provision for security requirements that is just wrong in the ordinance that we'll have to fix um that's the securable devices the affidavit requirement also needs to be fixed and publishing names and addresses uh is has been raised as well you've heard all of those that's my presentation that was less than 10 minutes awesome so if you get rid of your presentation that'd be great see each other okay so i have

[284:01] um first let's ask questions and then let's have a process discussion but um i i know people have comments i see adam has a question i'm gonna have a question adam this is for tom just wondering what in the current system is the available uh things that you can get from the voter file so anyone can go and get them is it first and last name voter registration id what else am i missing i think that's it okay well this is the only thing that the address is available your address i was gonna say oh an address is available okay sorry just wanna make sure we all have a clear basis is what is currently findable by the general public yeah but it includes voter id as well just for completeness right it's photo id name address yes that right lewis yes yes street address residential

[285:01] street address and does it include date of birth as well no you put your date of birth in to get it i think but i don't think your date of birth is listed on the record that's right um so i'm going to ask my question lynette so if you get you know a petitioner brings you their signatures what's the first thing you do with them the first thing we do under the current process yeah under the current process so their their written signatures they come you weed out all the ones that aren't residents or what do you do first yeah first of all we get a copy of the voter registration database from the county and we finagle that to fit into our tracking database and then we split up the petitions and one by one go through each line find their registration and mark that they've signed the petition got it and if they don't happen to live in the city of boulder

[286:01] they don't get counted as having signed got it and so do you end up with a list of um people who signed the petition who actually live in boulder some qualified electors yeah we end up with the petition sections we just crossed out the one the signatures that are not good so we don't end up with a separate list but we do end up with the original copies of the petition with approved names on it as well as ones that we've discounted got it and then do those end up in a spreadsheet or database somewhere electronically they're in a database because that's how we track to make sure someone doesn't sign more than once they only get counted for signing one so they are in our database yes got it and so then if you're going to do anything else whatever procedures we decide afterwards you have an electronic list of qualified electors who sign the petition

[287:03] we would under the current system yes right and so with this electronic system it would seem like the goal would be the same right whatever format we say they have to submit in you would be able to put that in your database sorted by who was and wasn't um a registered electorate in the city of boulder toss out the ones that weren't and you would end up with you got the paper section and you had the electronic section but you'd still have an electronic mist that's correct yes okay thank you your name yes can i can i make um can you hear me can i make comments about uh the ordinance in the different sections now i think we're in questions at the moment so if that's okay rachel wants to make comments as well um aaron do you have a question about the other question i have a question okay great so i've got bob and then

[288:01] aaron it's just in terms of publicly available information so currently with the current paper petitioning process those paper petitions are public record um but how are those accessible are those accessible online who sign those petitions no i don't think so that not to the public only if someone asks we didn't want to have the signatures out there so currently if you want to know who signed a petition you have to kind of come in person or what what's the process to figure that out they could just request it i'm not sure how we get it to them whether they would come in person or whether we would create a file they could look into okay so i'll just we could i'll come to a comment later but the just posting things online uh would be very different from our current practice posting the record name and address of everyone correct hey bob yeah i just wanted to ask a question following up on the the back and forth that aaron and i had tom

[289:01] um under our current system with paper signatures um is it permissible for the um the petitioners to deliver a separate signature a separate piece of paper for each um for each um signing elector in other words there's no requirement that we have a certain number of electors on a page it could be one page for a lecture is that correct i think that's right lynette do you agree yeah that's right they would have to have an affidavit with every signature but yes that's right paper has to have the warning and the affidavit on it okay but from a safety standpoint if the circulator wanted to uh not have somebody touch the same pieces of paper as as the prior signer they could have a separate piece of paper for each each of those signatories as long as they have the affidavit and the disclosure language on it yes and adam yeah quick follow-up question that aaron

[290:00] sparked um is there any legal um inability for people to post you know imagine they get the records to post them online themselves like is that currently illegal i don't know i don't know if there's a law and posting election i i've never seen one but i i can't say that i know luis do you know yeah i'm not aware of that either so uh um you know most people's voter registrations can be found online just by googling actually i mean there's there's non-profits than posts voter information just willy-nilly on the internet as we stand here today okay i was just trying to make sure all the questions were asked thank you okay so that seems to be the end of questions i guess the one process question so tom let's come back to your thoughts you had intended to introduce an ordinance tonight on first reading and then pass it by emergency at the

[291:00] next meeting correct that was that's my plan okay and what that would mean is whatever we do at the next meeting is going to be final correct it's going to become law and people can collect signatures based on it um but you don't need us to [Music] hash out all the details tonight you don't need us to make a decision tonight because this is first reading so we can take comments and then leave it at that without having to get to a decision point is that correct that's correct my major concern was giving the community time to digest this and give you feedback in time for a public hearing in two weeks got it okay so my suggestion and people can object if you'd like um but it's a thought because we each make one round of comments maybe it will colloquy or two but we don't turn this into a raging debate we just put our opinions out there for tom and louise to integrate and then we'll have time over the coming week to get community feedback over whatever our comments are

[292:01] um since we don't have to make a decision that's my thought is there any objection to that okay great then if we want to start comments uh rachel do you want to kick us off i can i guess um and i will but i have like a lot of thoughts on the signature verification and so um you want me to get it all out now right as well okay um and so i take it aaron's request that we sort of bifurcate and just decide tonight whether we want to gather signatures and focus on that and understand how to validate them as out do you mind if i if i throw that i'll withdraw that because it because um it sounds like sam's approach is a good one that we can we can throw out our ideas tonight and then do a final ordinance in two weeks by emergency if i understand correctly just to make sure we're all clear you could not begin gathering signatures electronically no

[293:01] matter what we do tonight because we wouldn't pass the ordinance until next week right okay great all right rachel i've got rachel bob and juni all right i'll launch in a little bit um first to bob's point about sticking with um paper ballots i i think we really have to be rational about what's possible right now and i personally have signed a lot of petitions and so i i know what that looks like and it's usually that you're at the farmer's market or on pearl street or you know visualize like where girl scout cookies might be being sold outside the grocery store you know you it's where people are congregating and gathering and we are absolutely not doing that now and we're not supposed to be doing that now so there's no way in in my mind's eye that that would be putting people in an equal position to be democratic this year if we pretend that we can do paper ballots we can't do that and with a straight face saying it's

[294:00] going to be the same so i'm i'm pretty strongly opposed to that and and also like if i'm going to a restaurant i'm i'm wanting to be at the restaurant versus if i'm signing a petition somebody's kind of coming after me and kind of coaxing me to do it so um you're not willing to take a pen from that person in the same way as you are if you're wanting to be at the store and wanting to make a transaction this is more like you have to be talked into the purchase so i think it's different and i think we need to be sensitive to not inhibiting democracy so then as to the signature verification and possible invalidations i think that most of the onus should be on the city or the collectors and not on the signers so as an example if we call people and then i think we've moved away from that and maybe we're going to email but if there's any onus on the person to contact us back and the lack of a return call or return email is somehow going to be taken as it's not a valid signature i think that's

[295:00] putting the onus on the wrong place i think that if we think about ourselves like how many of us do not return every single email or every single phone call on the city council like a lot of us don't return them all so that's just going to be the reality it's going to be coming from from a number or an email that you don't care about and so putting the onus on on the signer i think is the wrong way to do it and i think inaction should in no way imply that you disagree with something the same way that if i don't respond to your email it doesn't mean that i agree or disagree with it um let's see i think that we need to be sure that we're doing a statistically valid number for our vetting and the original um 100 was probably not it was probably too low so maybe we needed to send out more and have a lower threshold for what would qualify as invalid if a signature is seen to be invalid i think we need to give a chance to cure it um the same way it works with paper ballots right now so if the signature's

[296:03] defective you usually have a chance to cure it and it also doesn't invalidate the whole petition in some situations like we're talking about so again i think we need to put people in in an equal position not a better position i'm not trying to give anything a leg up but just as good of a position as we would be in without the the ruinous virus um for the voter registration number that seems like it's easy to look up for for people who would want to maybe forge something but it would be difficult to look up if i'm signing the petition and i don't have the internet say so i think there's an equity issue there so i would not have people need to provide something that they don't have at the ready that they don't know about themselves already um i agree with the concerns about privacy for posting the signers names i think that might discourage some people from signing um that just have mistrust and privacy concerns so i wouldn't i wouldn't do that um i think we need to

[297:01] think about extending the deadline so that we have several more weeks because we've sort of lost several weeks with covid and [Music] last but not least i think i'm always a little bit skeptical when people want me to sign something that i haven't heard of and i'll usually vet it and i think this whole thing is assuming that we do it and and support democracy moving forward i think this whole thing is going to be confusing to people and so we will need to give it um an air of legitimacy by having some information on our website having a landing page for yes you can now sign documents this way and and here's how they are valid and you know you can trust that this is not a scam and maybe have links to the petitioner's websites i think that's all thank you for um remember to call me sam okay you're welcome and then i've got bob and juni and aaron so bob sam can i say one thing real quickly sure uh you cannot extend the deadline you cannot change the number of signatures

[298:01] those are in the charter those are set and they were set by the voters just a couple years ago so i would not advise i mean it's there's a there's a specific language in the charter on both of those things the number of signature was certifications was very hotly debated and was put to the voters so i would again advise again sorry i wasn't suggesting that we changed the number of signatures you need to gather i was suggesting that just for our like spot checking verification purposes the number just betting 100 as opposed to 300 i think 100 might be too low i'm sorry for that confusion setting the deadline which you cannot do i have a question for tom um along those lines um so just as we can't change those two things that you just pointed out um we also can't um put a hold on the petition so that they could resume like next year no they if you get enough signatures you have to put it on the ballot

[299:00] and if they don't it's invalid the chart is pretty clear so it's a charter thing so we can okay great thank you you have no choice and there's a tom when you and i talked offline today there's a six-month um staleness period right a signature is only valid for six months after it's collected yes that's also on the chart okay um and then i've got bob and junie and aaron and mary are you in the queue for speaking later anyway go ahead bob judy and aaron yeah so i'm going to vote against this both on first reading and second reading i don't think we should advance this and i'll just write off a few reasons why um as we've seen here today and in the email exchanges we've gotten um and we've gotten some helpful advice from members of the community who've done some math for us this is going to be very fraught and complicated and i'm afraid no matter

[300:01] what we do we're going to somehow get it wrong or at least somebody's going to think that we got it wrong and this is going to end up in litigation and so we have a system that works it's a paper system and if i were a petition circulator these folks sounds like they they have long lists and they're hoping to get people to sign up um by sending them emails and strictly that around if i was a petition certain circulator i would use that email list that i have and and say please come to the park at two o'clock there'll be a table there there'll be a circulator there to uh supervise he'll stand six feet away separate pieces of paper and you can sign it and they can ask questions um and that like i said that's happening right now already with restaurants and we'll soon happen with retail establishments so i i think it's i think to say that it's impossible is is not accurate i think the best we can do is is get something which is going to be imperfect and will probably be subject to litigation um

[301:01] teed up two weeks from now if i was if i was to provide advice to these uh i guess there's four groups now i'd say that their their time is better spent over the next two weeks going out there and getting signatures and not hoping that two weeks from now we're somehow able to cobble together an imperfect system that um they won't know will actually work or won't be subject to some sort of legal scrutiny if they actually get on the ballot and pass the measure so if i was the leader one of these groups i would actually figure out how to get this done by paper and spend the next two weeks collecting those signatures and they have all the way up to june 5th and matter of fact of the um of the four petitions i understand two of them are actually charter amendments and thomas advised us that the charter amendments actually have until august so those folks well there's there's a second one that's been pulled that's also true so two of two of the four are actually charter members and they have until august to collect their signatures by paper and and one of the ones that's not a charter amendment has already indicated

[302:01] to us that they've already collected more than half the signatures they need and so they're they're well on their way and then i'll just close by reacting to um rachel's comment that we not inhibit democracy we're not inhibiting democracy covet has inhibited democracy this has been the system for decades this paper system's been in place for decades and no one said that the paper system that we had before inhibited democracy and i'm sorry for the the petitioners that they um uh ran into kovit but coleman has hindered a lot more than democracy copenhagen has hindered people's lives and livelihoods and homes and so it's unfortunate that they find themselves in this situation and that the timing is bad but i think that going down this path is going to create more problems than it solves and i think we're going to get a big big mess here and we're going to have people relying on us and relying on the system to work and it may not work so my recommendation is that we stay with the system that we have right now have

[303:01] people do it by paper if they feel comfortable if they don't they can wait till next year and for the charter folks they have until august to collect the signatures anyway okay and then i've got juni aaron and mark thank you i find bob's speech slightly irresponsible speak because if we still have a stay-at-home order i don't think it's right to say to people go to the park have a table and have people congregate so i don't agree with that but of course you've made some valid points one thing i wanted to know maybe from tom is has he pulled the um the committees and would they be willing to figure out another way does that make sense

[304:00] what do you mean by another way meaning because we're talking about paper would they be able to figure it out within the time frame i have not spoken to anybody about doing paper i spoke to i met with two of the committees i offered to meet with all three that existed before today and we talked about various ways to do it electronically would you consider reaching out to them and find out then we'll be able to put it to rest whether they would be willing to go out there and figure this process out on their own through paper of course but yeah i suspect they're they're like we know what their answer is going to be yes and i think the comments i wanted to make is that we should not um require a higher threshold anything we're not doing for paper ballots we should not be doing for electronic ballots because i feel that we're adding extra barriers so if we're going through the online petitioning process

[305:01] we should make it accessible to people meaning that um when it comes to publishing people's names if we're not if we don't do that with paper ballots we should not be doing that for electronic ballots either and also i think rachel mentioned um you know giving people the opportunity to cure i think that's a great idea if for instance you know someone didn't meet the threshold we should be able to give them maybe 48 hours or something to meet that threshold so that they can i just don't want it to be whereas we said yes let's do this process let's do the online signatures and then we put so many barriers in place to the point it's almost like we're saying no we're not really saying yes so i think it's very important if we're going to say yes that we have a process in place that is accessible because i think rachel mentioned equity and it's very important that we take into account

[306:01] these things i know we're going to have a reading of the ordinance next week something that i noticed was the lack of time frame which i mentioned to tom already meaning that if you are contacting people through emails when do you want them to get back to you within 48 hours within a week when do you want them to get back to you so i think that's important um but it's hard this is not easy this is a really really hard time and yes it's part of the democratic process and people people care about these issues and we care about the community so we have to find a solution but part of the solution that we have to find out we can't be cruel either we can't say to people go out there on in the park and try to get signatures when we know we have a stay-at-home order thanks i've got erin and mark great well i'll basically echo the

[307:01] comments that juni and rachel have made i thought they raised excellent points i'll just make a couple of additional ones just that i think the idea here is that kovid has interfered with this process of direct democracy and we have it within our power to give an alternative approach that would allow direct democracy to still have um uh an opportunity this year so without weighing in on any of the merits of any of the petitions it just feels like since we can still allow that to proceed this year um we should give it a shot and just that the kind of the worst case um scenario is that something makes it on the ballot that um you know the the possible outcome is that something makes it on the ballot and it still has to be voted in by the voters so it's not like any of these things would be passed um just by the the petition collecting process so

[308:00] rather than repeat all the other points um i'll just leave it at that hey um mark yeah i'm going to have to go with bob on this um i look i think we want to get to a system of electronic uh balloting but not under these conditions not on a jury rigged emergency basis but we don't know if it's going to work we don't know if it's going to be secure we don't know if it's going to be secure from fraud those are just unreasonable expectations to try to fulfill in this uh in a two-week period of time i'm very uncomfortable with uh with the direction that this is heading i understand the disadvantage that this creates for various ballot measures but a system that is going to lead to litigation [Music] or a questionable result is no bonus for anybody

[309:01] and so i i'm gonna have to stand with bob on this one barry and then nearby um i think there's a reason that the online petition systems use two-factor authentication because they've gone through probably the process that we're going through right now and determine that that is the safest way to do this um i um i have to agree with bob um that and and mark that we're jury rigging this and it's at best it's going to be questionable and it makes me um [Music] quite uncomfortable um and you know the alternative could be to come up with some um

[310:00] [Music] a framework for um for folks to do paper ballots in a in a physically distanced and safe manner great nearby i'll just keep it short and say that i think i really thank you bob you said very eloquently many of the fears that i couldn't quite sum up as nicely as you did but i do think in a time like this where we're trying to conserve our resources putting ourselves out on something that's just not strong enough for me a little faulty and opening ourselves up to possibly expensive litigation is just not the smartest thing so i think keeping it the same way that we have in the past and just you know trying to figure out some workarounds um i think boulder as we always say we're special and we know how to do things in a leading manner so i'm sure that the

[311:00] great minds of boulder can come up with some work [Music] yeah so there's two aspects of this that make me uncomfortable the first that we lose a little bit of democracy by not trying to find a solution um actually there's three parts that make me uncomfortable the second part is not having an abundance of caution for petition signing you know we're supposed to be setting an example in this instance and i do worry about the sentiment that we're saying not that democracy isn't essential but that you have to leave your house to go do something at this time when we're saying that shouldn't be the case um the third thing that makes me uncomfortable is the fact that if this does happen under

[312:01] not perfect circumstances that it is legally not justifiable so in my mind we have to take all those things into account and try to come up with the best solution because any of them could break the system essentially so to me i really would like to find a way to make it not health hazardous and hopefully stand up at the end of the day um if things get on the ballot through electronic petitioning um i think we're capable of finding that and i would hope that we are but um yeah that's i'm somewhere in the middle here between the two ideas for sure um and i'm hoping we can try to find an agreement that actually still allows us to maintain direct democracy this year but in a way that's actually going to stand up at the end of the day i'm not sure what you said um we we have

[313:01] to vote at the end of the day here and because this is a first reading right tom we have to vote to advance this so you're going to have to okay well to me then i would still like to try to find an electronic petitioning possibility okay um that puts me in an unfortunate situation because the i i kind of feel like adam i i don't want people going out and and trying to do it my signature but i also really really really am uncomfortable with every every single thing i've heard about how on earth we're going to do this in a way that comports with the normal standards that we have for signatures to be validated so in other words there we are taking the time we're taking and we have said we're going to roll this

[314:00] out for the 2021 election and we've always kind of said that and we've always kind of had that as the reason we're going to do that and aaron argued for this eloquently um is you don't want to rush it you don't want to just you know grab the first free software group that you can to be able to to throw something together and then have that gained i mean that's one of the things one of the reasons that at the end of the day when you do voting most of the voter security people talk about having a paper trail right so you do you do your voting and maybe electronically but you get some kind of paper record so that you can go back and check and so i i have not yet heard any way of both fraud prevention and validating who it was that signed that because we've got the electronic signatures as tom has pointed out his very broad definition

[315:00] under colorado law and so as much as i want to preserve direct democracy i don't see anything that's here in front of us that has to get done this year i mean the the the subjects of these are not things that i think are are imminent there's nothing about what's going to happen to boulder over the next year that's going to be resolved by whether one of these passes or it doesn't pass so i don't think i can support this right now just because i don't think in a week one week we're talking about taking one week more or less to design a electronic signature collection system that we previously said is going to take us 18 months to get done so i don't think i can support this so i think to be formal about this we need to take a vote we've all said our piece um so

[316:00] i guess i would say all those in favor raise your hand and i'll count can we be um and we probably need a motion don't we either actually i [Music] i'll go ahead if that's right sure i'll go ahead and move that we adopt with the language tom just used the ordinance as he amended it in his presentation tonight for a second second okay we have motion in a second all in just favor your hand i can count i count four opposed i'm raising my hand sam okay that's five so the motion fails four to five taking the time to do this i know it was hard late at night i appreciate your attention

[317:03] so is that the end of our agenda i believe it is right but we don't need to do the work plan tonight we could save that okay it is 11 17 mary or something yeah i have a suggestion about the work plan i think that needs to be an agenda item earlier in the evening i actually think that it needs to rise to the level of um [Music] a mid-year retreat or something um or an earlier retreat or something or a do-over retreat i don't know what you want to call it but i think it needs to the rise to the level of where we dedicate at the very minimum a couple of hours at the very minimum um because i think that circumstances have

[318:03] significantly impacted what we had talked about at our retreat earlier and even what we planned on talking about our retreat um in july i guess it was going to be when we came back and revisited it so that would be my suggestion um i'm gonna agree with mary um uh we probably need a couple of hours or at least an hour and a half to go through our um our entire work plan not just in the next couple two three meetings with entire work plan and figure out what's going to stay on for this year and what's going to move off we actually um found a little bit of time on not not next week is out of the question we've got a very very full agenda next week on some pretty important topics on budget finance um but um we have found some time on our agendas in the first couple two three meetings in may so i'm going to support mary's suggestion uh let's pre you know we know what we're going to do next week we know we're going to do the week after and let's have cac find um

[319:01] an hour and a half or two hours on one of our upcoming may meetings to have a little mini retreat on workland okay anyone else comments on work plan okay and jane are you comfortable with what you heard about that that we can work with cac to see if we can make a big enough time slot to fit that in yes okay good enough okay i think that is the end of our agenda um meeting debrief anyone want to speak about how the meeting went long but good thank you for running it yeah it's it's my worst performance so far in that regard right so okay with that the meeting is adjourned have a good night everyone good night

[320:10] [Music] live from paris office [Music] in other words four branches of equal length that revolve around a central axis formed by this double helix staircase this design means you can walk up from two different entry points and never meet before reaching the top and it's leonardo da vinci