May 26, 2020 — City Council Special Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] for me with those those images yeah for sure those are my favorites um i could not find cuber that was the only one i did this is the oldest school i went did anybody have this one oh you have died of dysentery of course yes i do still play frogger but only on actual city streets that's funny going back to my attack my favorite thing about zoom meetings is the best the only fun part really well i mean you guys are great but i mean all the fun part but you're better in real life it is 601 who we got here me adam mark nearby jimmy rachel mary aaron so is bob here bob is here can you hear me i hear you coming to see you can you see

[1:02] me i'm using a different computer so i just want to make sure this one works i see it now okay i believe that we are good to go i guess shall we welcome everyone to the boulder city council meeting of tuesday may 26th ham can you call the roll do we have pam here i guess no actually debbie's stamp is going to be the clerk tonight okay very good debbie would you like to call the role absolutely council member brockett president friend here president nagel [Music]

[2:06] young great thank you very much and i guess i will check in with sarah sarah did you want to go over the ground rules at all for the meeting on soon sure i'd be happy to do so good evening council this is sarah huntley i'm the engagement manager we actually have no open comment or public participation this evening but for consistency's sake it's probably a good idea to go over our rules for council members you'll be able to use your raised hand functionality to indicate to the mayor that you wish to speak you should be able to see that for each one of you we do have some folks on the line who are listening but members of the public are watching via the link tonight we do have the rab chair on the line listening just in case the council has any questions when you get to that agenda item so i just thought i would point that out for you i'll quickly call up the rules this evening bear with me for one moment

[3:01] [Music] so as always we're trying to strike a strike a balance between transparent meaningful engagement and online security so the meeting's been called to conduct the business of the city of boulder activities that disrupt layer otherwise interfere are prohibited we're going to have times limits for speaking although as i mentioned we have no public comment or no open comment this evening each person shall register to speak at the meeting using that person's real name and no video will be permitted except for city officials employees and invited presenters the person presiding at the meeting shall enforce these rules by muting anyone who violates any rule we'll be using the chat function tonight for panelists to communicate with each other we do have the q a turned on if attendees have technical questions only for the moderator that's me this evening so if you have questions about the platform on how to view people i can certainly assist with that but we're not going to be doing any substantive commentary

[4:01] about the issues in the q a box and only the hosts and individuals designated by the host will be permitted to share their screen during this meeting tonight i think that's pretty much all i had to cover um mayor i turn it back over to you thank you sarah and i will just note that i'm using a new headset tonight so if you're having trouble hearing me or whatever i can always go back to the old one just somebody let me know in the chat box or whatever he celebrates him okay super thank you aaron so i guess the next order of business is to solicit a motion to amend the agenda so there are four items that we would potentially add or re-organize as far as order for the agenda that's item 3a which is a cares grant for the boulder municipal airport item 3b which is an update around the city response for reopening restaurants uh item 3c which is an update on the

[5:02] 30th street transition as far as severe weather sheltering and operations of the covered recovery center and then there's item 4c which is a motion to amend council rules a procedure regarding declarations um so if anyone would like to make a motion to amend the agenda [Music] okay so i've got bob as the motion rachel as the second are there any objections to amending the agenda seeing none that's unanimous vote in order to approve the amended agenda and i believe that next we want to move to a declaration in honor of everyone who's graduating this year who has had a change in their planned graduation to something new and to present that declaration tonight we have um judy joseph junie europe

[6:01] thank you very much it is an honor to present this declaration celebrating the 2020 high school graduation class in the city of boulder may 27 2020. due to the covid19 pandemic the 2020 graduating classes of arapaho ridge high school boulder high school boulder prep charter boulder universal fairview high school new vista high school september school and watershed school are not able to participate in the traditional style commencement ceremonies at their respective schools this council wishes to congratulate all graduating seniors with a permanent memorial of their accomplishments the graduating seniors have endured many struggles that have not stopped them from continuing on their path to graduation the graduating seniors have adequately passed each grade level leading up to their final year in high school

[7:00] the covit 19 pandemic will not stop the 2020 graduating class from achieving the honor of graduation that should be bestowed upon all graduating seniors the kovit 19 pandemic will not prevent the 2020 graduating class from going forth into the world to fulfill their dreams the city council of the city of boulder colorado congratulates the graduating seniors from arapahoe ridge high school older high school new vista high school watershed school older universal fairview high school older prep charter school september school this will be a day in history and the graduating class of 2020 will never be forgotten and shall always be honored [Music] very good thank you junie and now i believe there's a short video from all of council that we'd like to present to the community [Music]

[8:05] hello i'm sam weaver mayor of boulder our boulder city council members wanted to take a minute and congratulate the entire graduating class of 2020. it is an honor to congratulate all my fellow buffs who graduated from the various eu boulder colleges and schools in the spring of 2020. as a city council person and a currency law student you have inspired me to keep pushing forward during these challenging times thank you for staying the course and leading the way for the next generation of graduates special congratulations to all those who are the first and the families to graduate and to those graduating from other colleges including boulders naropa our many outstanding area community colleges and to those graduating from non-traditional and other programs congratulations on y'all's huge accomplishment

[9:01] we hope you've all enjoyed your years here in our beloved city we appreciate all that you've added to our community while you were here and to all who have helped the graduates to succeed the teachers family members coaches advisors we congratulate you on a job well done too not many generations have been tested as you are we admire your grace and rising to meet the challenges of these extraordinary times we honor your resilience and we have faith to make our world a greener safer and less divisive let me close this video by joining my city council colleagues and congratulating each and every member of the class of 2020. best of luck to you [Music] very good and i will say thank you to juni and rachel for helping organize the video and to all council members who participated thank you very much

[10:00] i'll turn back now to the city clerk and i think we're on to item too i'm sorry go ahead nearby um i just wanted to include um i wasn't able to join in with the video but i also wanted to include tara high school and shining mountain waldorf school which were both left out so congratulations to all those seniors as well and to all the rest of the students who graduated okay very good thank you nearby okay next on the agenda is your first call up it's a landmark alteration certificate for 734 maxwell avenue great does anyone have any urge to call that one up seeing done the next one the next one is a landmark alteration certificate for 956 16th street very good anyone who would like to call

[11:00] that up [Music] seeing none i think we're ready to move on to the next item um matters from the city manager the first item is to approve by resolution the boulder municipal airport federal cares act grant yes thank you earlier today bill cowering prepared a memo that was sent to you we have received the grant from the cares act of thirty thousand dollars to support the municipal airport operations um in order for me to sign that agreement i need a motion approving it from the city council so we're hoping that you pass that motion quickly thank you [Music] great so i turned out a council are there any questions on this issue comments or feedback uh mary i just wanted to make a motion go for it so i moved that we approve the city manager's request for the air

[12:01] boulder municipal airport cares grant um to be accepted accepting this grant seeing no objections that's a unanimous sense to pass the motion created thank you city council thank you next on the agenda is the implementation of the city response to the needs of reopening restaurants so let me just introduce to you one of our favorite presenters yvette bowden who will give a short presentation on this item and following a vet charles farrow will be also making a presentation about um reopening in general in the city and a webinar that he was able to participate in today so event it's

[13:01] your turn great thank you council uh and thanks jane we're going to be um turning off my videos so that i can make sure my uh reception is well we can go to [Music] the next slide last week council gave some direction to us following our recommendation about the needs of restaurants in our community restaurants like all retailers are very important segment of the community contributing to the economy and our local quality of life as we told you in our timeline last week we wanted to follow your direction and so we have this update for you tonight to share how we've progressed against that timeline in your additional context you provided on friday you received a memo from me outlining the additional information we received since your last council meeting so some of this work reflects that input and charles will follow me this evening as we explore a little further the information we were able to share with

[14:00] the community earlier today first as we expected the governor did issue guidance on monday regarding opening opportunity for restaurants this included extensive information on social distancing and other safety related efforts as they reopen the governor also encouraged as we all thought he would outdoor expansion opportunities to be managed and handled by local municipalities with your direction we're a little bit ahead of the game here's what we've done so far first earlier today an emergency order from the city manager was posted allowing us to move forward with some of the things that you asked us to waive and implement the city has waived administrative fees as you suggested and eliminated or waived i'm sorry temporarily the minimum parking requirement for retailers across the city the online application and faq that charles will talk about in a minute in a

[15:00] minute uh will be live on the web page if not now then certainly maybe even by the end of this meeting allowing people to apply right now for those temporary modifications to the alcohol licensure and to use the right of way to expand and allow for social distancing in reopening restaurants earlier today there were two webinars one from the county that further explained the state's guidance and the county's support for that guidance and the second one at 3 30 this afternoon that was for the restaurant industry hosted by the chamber outlining the online application process and faqs that will be provided and discussed a little bit later in this presentation we're also moving forward regarding a first phase of closures on west pearl and the event stream let me pause here um when during your last council meeting you gave us direction that we should be flexible and listen to businesses and

[16:01] trying to accommodate that wherever possible following your uh the presentation which also included a suggestion around closure of a portion of east pearl and 13th street on the hill we got some additional feedback as a view from the community members particular retailers that were concerned we did not hear the same kind of feedback everywhere so we are moving forward swiftly to close west pearl and the event street and i'll have a map for you in just one second of course we are also planning to provide you with a thorough update on july 28th next slide so the closure areas that we are moving forward with right away are pearl between 9th and 11th including a portion of the alley on 10th north of pearl and the reason for this is because otherwise 10th would dead in into pearl and there'd be difficulties of turning vehicles by allowing this alley access

[17:02] we're also accommodating the many businesses that need to continue to receive deliveries and to provide for safety in that area this uh area is something that we're working on and have received feedback on from downtown boulder partnership and we continue to work with all of our partners on the hill there was a lot of support expressed for event street closure and so we'll be making that similar modification um one half block west on pennsylvania from 13th up until that alleyway there between 12th and 13th this is infrastructure that was built for this kind of flexible retrofitting and so we'll be moving forward with that and the hill boulder looks forward to continuing to listen to merchants on 13th street who are not yet quite ready to go there and who wanted to have other options so there we anticipate some moving forward with parklets and other ideas earlier today there was a lot of

[18:01] conversation about curbside and other retailers and how they can benefit from this and staff will continue to do just that listen to the work of our partners on the alliance and to the work of our peers and navigating not only with the county the safety precautions but also with each other across departments i for one want to thank all of my colleagues including my my following presenter here charles farrow for all of their work michelle's team charles team and all of our colleagues that have been um so instrumental in helping us get this far you will learn a little bit more in the slides to come we thought it prudent that charles could fly through some of the slides that we presented earlier during the webinar and talk a little bit about the time frame and processing and with that i'll turn it over to charles [Music] one more slide sorry very quickly so you remember the timeline um i've

[19:01] highlighted in red here where we've kept to those dates or even beat those dates and so the application goes live later this evening or at the latest tomorrow morning and we start review take it away charles thanks so much of that good evening council i'm going to stay off camera because i'm struggling with bandwidth issues this evening myself but um i'm charles farrow i'm the development review manager for the city and i'm also serving as uh the city's economic recovery coordinator for the time being chris did you want to pull up my [Music] deck there we go thank you very much um so i'll be speaking with you this evening just briefly about our brand new temporary outdoor seating area program for restaurants you can advance the site chris so we recognize how important restaurants are to our local economy as are all retailers and recognizing the rapidly evolving guidance from the state on restaurant reopenings we wanted to be

[20:00] ready when the orders were given from the state and i'm happy to report that we are our application went live this evening at 5 30 p.m so i wanted to talk just a little bit about um some of the standards that are going to be included so as you know we've had a staff team internally working very diligently on establishing a temporary program to allow for additional outdoor seating on public and private property to support restaurants during the kova 19 crisis our intent has really been to create low cost options for restaurants with minimal requirements for additional outdoor seating that encourage social distancing and honor the most recent guidance provided by the state over the weekend and finally we wanted a simple streamlined online permitting process with a detailed checklist and comprehensive faqs we even made an instructional video that went live this evening so just a few notes on eligibility all licensed restaurants and all zones are eligible to use the city's right-of-way

[21:00] including on-street parking sidewalks and alleys adjacent to your restaurants the city has waived all minimum parking requirements as a vet has mentioned so privately owned parking areas and other privately owned spaces could be eligible as well for the state's recent guidance as of now bars and other establishments that are not licensed retail food establishments with kitchens will be considered in june and while this program doesn't directly impact food trucks as we discussed with council over the past few weeks they'll be able to operate in residential zones in addition to the industrial zones that they're allowed to operate in currently but i do want to be clear that food trucks still will be precluded from operating downtown and in mixed use in other commercial areas you can advance the side chris [Music] um zaven mentioned we waived all the fees the only fee that will be applicable at this point will be the state's liquor license modification fee which they have reduced from 300 to 150 our process is completely online

[22:02] we've created a simple application a very detailed and prescriptive checklist and a comprehensive set of frequently asked questions as we've noted the window for applications will begin um now through june 30th with the program concluding on september 30th um with regard to review times our reviews will take no longer than three days with inspections to occur very quickly thereafter to ensure compliance and applications for liquor license modifications will occur concurrently over that three-day period but i want to be very clear for our applicants we are not asking you to wait for inspections or formal approvals your application you submit you're going to agree and acknowledge to comply with the standards which again are very prescriptive and then you can go ahead and start getting set up an inspector will come out to ensure compliance and issue a certification and will work with you in a socially

[23:01] distanced way to resolve any issues or questions you may have on site so there isn't really a waiting period you submit your application you start moving the only caveat to that is you won't be able to start serving alcohol until your modification has been uh approved so you can go ahead and advance the slide chris so just a few notes on outdoor seating design and operation the state's guidance that was issued over the weekend provides really detailed recommendations for things like table spacing occupancy communal seating so we're asking our applicants to abide by those uh by that guidance and we've established some standards that are really designed to be flexible and encourage simple outdoor seating elements that don't require separate building permits additional time or cost and i really want to emphasize that simplicity so we're suggesting things like removable tables chairs and umbrellas the use of rubs and artificial turf temporary barriers of all kinds that can

[24:02] be pellets movable planters temporary fencing railing applicants can have low wattage ornamental lighting and outdoor music and the city even has a program that will connect you with local artists to make your temporary barriers engaging and beautiful outdoor seating areas would be able to operate until 10 pm sunday through thursday and then from until 11 pm on friday saturday and on federal holidays next slide please so there is a little bit of fine print um the areas are used to be for sit-down dining only not for long games we really want to discourage kind of congregation we want to encourage social distancing we don't want elaborate structures or decking in the right-of-way again it will lead to subsequent requirements for permits additional time and cost we're going to ask applicants to not obstruct things like storm drain inlets drain pans valve boxes manholes

[25:01] we don't want extension cords across the sidewalk or parking lots tents and canopies will be allowed but there's some size limitations to be aware of there's obviously a requirement for proof of insurance and there'll be instances where we'll need permission from private property owners we're asking that fire hydrants are obstructed and that no outdoor grills heaters or candles are used all of that is specified in detail in the application package and more particularly our checklist chris if you want to advance the slide so just to highlight some of that simplicity this is really what we're talking about very basic elements out in the city's right-of-way you want to advance one more time chris again discouraging elaborate structures this is really more of a cafe seating model which i think would be successful one more chris and then the repurposing of public parking areas to allow for dining opportunities one more

[26:02] and there's a few more of those and on the lower left hand corner you'll see some of the mural work um the barriers there so that concludes my remarks tonight for the board and i'm happy to respond to any questions you have great thank you charles um jane anything else uh no i don't think so thank you great event and charles i just wanted to say i i attended part of the webinar this afternoon i give you great kudos for how quickly you've moved on all of these issues and also i had no idea how detailed the questions you would face would be at the early stage so um john and phil did a great job and we're thankful to our partners for hosting thanks at the chamber good so i thought it went well and i think um we're getting set up well for the opening on the 27th so i've got two hands up three hands i've got bob and

[27:01] aaron and mary bob well let me first just by saying wow that was fantastic um you delivered everything we asked for last week and then some so you guys did a fantastic job in a really really short period of time so i want to thank everybody particularly um yvette and charles and ms sean and i know transportation and fire and police and everybody was involved it's just absolutely fantastic thank you for pulling that together so quickly um i had just one question um did you mention charles precisely when the 9th to 11th street and the event street would be actually closing i didn't but i would defer to either yvette or bill on that i can cover that go for it bill so we're actually going to purchase the barricades um to cause these closures to occur so that we'll have them in perpetuity those barricades are going to arrive on friday and we'll have the whole street both streets shut down in time for friday evening

[28:02] that's perfect thank you so much just a great great presentation great work by everybody thank you so much [Music] sam you're muted but can i go next sorry i've got aaron and mary aaron your next go ahead thanks well just echo the enormous thanks and how uh how detailed of a job you've done in such a short period time is phenomenal um so just one quick question so i think you've laid out the requirements in the right-of-way really well and so if um if a restaurant owner who's interested in taking over like a plaza or a parking area in a privately owned parcel um are there similar requirements or or is it just that they can kind of do whatever their landlord allows them to do there are similar requirements again we're recommending that everybody keep this really simple at the end of the day on private property the landlord will have to um approve the work that's being done

[29:01] [Music] and so would you kind of start with the landlord and then go to the city for a permit and then come back to the landlord to show that you got the approval no we actually have a forum that's included in the packet that will be submitted so you get your landlord to sign and you include that with your package great okay can't wait to see these bring it up thank you barry so first of all i want to extend my gratitude for all the work that was done in such a short time thank you thank you thank you um i have two questions one is um i read somewhere and i think it was in one of the yvette's emails that mentioned that there was the city was moving forward with the planning and was opening up leasing for furniture or something like that and i just wanted to find out more about that if that had to do with helping out restaurant tours that may not have the

[30:02] capital to come up with the furniture so that's my first question hi mary so let me clarify the materials that we were looking to lease are the barricades that bill was referring to and the other closure materials not furnishings we are unaware and i've talked to my colleagues in a couple of other cities including denver um we don't know the scale of this and cannot see a way to do it equitably um but i know that our partners are looking into creating potentially lists of local providers where they can rent furnishings and and i think that's a good first step so i'm glad for the opportunity to clarify thank you thank you yvette and then my second question is um with respect to the private um parking lots that may be available for um businesses in those areas

[31:02] can property owners extend a fee for to the restaurant owners for using their parking lot so that's a great question and it is their property and so the relationship they have with their tenants would be their ability to do so i would say that our partners on the alliance have been really great about outreach to local property owners and commercial property owners and everybody wants uh reopening businesses to be successful we'll keep a barrier to the ground and find out what we can but it is certainly possible well so i would just like to discourage that kind of um of behavior i guess and um and if the property owners can just extend their parking lots at no charge to their

[32:02] renters that would be that would benefit them as well and so i think anything that they can do to allow them to reopen without any extra burden on them would be very much appreciated i know that our partners are listening so i'm sure they'll convey that thank you sure great i don't see any more hands up when you double check i appreciate it sam um if i could just conclude by thanking my stunning colleagues across the organization who worked busily all weekend to stand this up amazing team effort between pnds transportation community vitality the attorney's office support from the manager's office and then of course all of our partner organizations in town dbi the chamber it's really been a fantastic effort it's been an honor to be a part of it [Music] great well thank you charles thanks to

[33:00] the entire staff team um it's clear i think to all of us on council that you guys have burned the candle at both ends and gotten results really quickly so looking forward to the restaurants being open and um great work and i think next week maybe we'll want to check in again see how it's going sounds good thanks very much okay the next item on the agenda is an update on the 30th street transition and the crc operations council this is curt fernhower director of housing human services and i'm going to give an update on on two areas one is transitions with our coveted recovery center and the other is transitions at 30th street um many of you have been asking questions um about the various services to the homeless um over the last couple months through this this coded process

[34:01] things have changed um but uh as we get to the end of may when transitions normally occur i wanted to give an update on on those two items uh next slide so the um this is just a look back at the last two months um the covid recovery center was uh another on the 20th of march it was a proactive step to try to prevent the spread of of coven through the whole population which many have seen as a vulnerable population if we look at the results of other communities they haven't had near the success that we've had of keeping the numbers down um as a result of this you'll see in the in the chart on the left is the number of individuals that were staying there

[35:00] each night and then the orange is the number of individuals who were exited the crc most individuals stay stay there between five and ten days and uh can leave once they receive a health check from a clinician who does daily rounds there you'll see a green mark of a vertical line that's when we're able to start testing we weren't able to test for the first three weeks or so so the the numbers of positives was mostly higher than this and um because we were screening people and continue to screen people every single day that goes into they go into shelters both in boulder and longmont we're able to immediately pull individuals out of the system um you'll see the earth we've noticed a

[36:00] real shift in the last or so we've had significant contributions from cu students who are now um leaving our community and getting on to other things next slide this is one of our volunteers working at the crc so one of the transitions we're making where we're opening the east boulder community center for other expected purposes related to parks and rec beginning in later june so we've been looking at a different location to hold the crc and our anticipation is that we may need a crc type function going this next winter season so looking for a new location we were looking for a place that could be open for some months to come we're at relocating at mount calvary

[37:01] uh previously mount calvary lutheran church in south boulder it's now owned by boulder housing partners who are through the entitlement process create affordable housing there starting in 2021. we also looked at hotel options and um we looked at other communities that had a lot of concerns um how that actually turned out um down in denver one of their locations up to 25 of the individuals tested were positive and they've had over 200 individuals that have tested positive the costs are eligible for fema and we have been um structuring the financing of this um with anticipation of being or um by fema and um this is a

[38:01] coordinated effort with the city of long island city of boulder and county next slide let me get to the the transition of 30th street on the left there you'll see the various services um that occur within our homeless program currently severe weather shelter normally closes on at the end of may it will be closing the end of this month like you normally would what was really different in this spring is primarily it was open virtual almost virtually every night since the middle of january uh navigation services there is an rfp that was put out um several months ago for that [Music] and the boulder shelter uh one that rfp they will be starting

[39:02] um the navigation program starting on the first of june back when i presented it in january there was concern by some council members about the capacity for the north shelter to house navigation center services as well as the housing focused shelter in my next few slides i'll go through what that looks like the vocal shelter stays the way it is that's the primary program at the north boulder shelter coordinated entry is since we've been under this covet environment has been uh by my phone and we're going to be moving that service to 909 arapahoe which is the age west center on arapahoe and 9th streets

[40:02] probably about in august next slide [Music] so the the transition um over um this next week and last week um was really the two organizations working together bridge house and the the shelter um to work specifically with clients that were that are in the navigation program and having a smooth transition to a new location with with different staff there's been communications at both organizations on our websites and signage as well next slide so this is a look at navigation navigation [Music] around 38 individuals at any one time for probably a couple of years

[41:00] in january that really started to go down it continued to go down through the spring we're now anywhere from five to ten individuals that are that are currently in the navigation program the coordinated entry screening that occurs on a continuous basis since january seven percent of the individuals have been in in the community for less than six months it's hard to pinpoint all the reasons why the navigation census has dropped but a couple key reasons um we think and it's hard to attribute um to each of them um in actual numbers shelter remaining open every night you know that shifted individuals from navigation to brother shelter the first week that change was made in

[42:01] january for individuals um out of navigation and we've seen a reduction but a lot of it also is is related to the change in residency criteria which occurred in february next slide so this is the um this is what the the boulder shelter looks like on the left side as far as number of individuals who are there that's been on a downward trend um over the last year really a result of our our focus on getting individuals housed we've been able to house 122 individuals over the last 12 months an average of 10 per month we've also worked real hard particularly with boulder county in increasing the availability of vouchers as well as the city voucher program as well that expanded in 2020

[43:00] some of the impacts of kovid we there was a reduction in the number of beds down to 90. our census there over the last month has been 75 to 80. we met with public health last week and made some suggestions that have gotten it up to 100 beds and the plan in place to look at continuing to increase that over the next few months as well we also have been using a hotel where we are able to place individuals who we believe are vulnerable um both because of age and medical conditions the the capacity of the of the shelter for navigation um we believe um will fit within the north boulder

[44:00] shelter in combination with focus shelter [Music] the reduction in beds does make it challenging um as you can see it looks like you know the numbers add up um now we'll be continuing to add beds and we'll have flexibility uh in the in the hotels so we believe we've responded well to the challenges that covet has put on the on the community and our services and just wanted to answer that question that i know council had back in january and what it looked what it looked like on on the 1st of june the next slide so we've been working very diligently on continuing to get people housed the first three or four weeks of covid was uh pretty frustrating everything was shut down we were all trying to figure

[45:00] out how to get work done um not too many people were getting housed the housing exits team worked incredibly hard on trying to figure out how to get around a lot of challenges on the right side all those bubbles are all the various voucher programs that that team has been working with but you'll see mhp was also quite successful over the last four weeks getting 20 people housed boulder shelter got 23. we have people that are being processed currently moving at cclo which they received their tco on friday of this last week uh next slide this last slide really is uh is a thank you bridge house bridge house been an incredible partner over the last couple of years particularly around

[46:01] navigation and really inventing a program for our community on how to get individuals housed into different directions these are on top of the housing exits that come from boulder shelter and you'll see that the average length of a navigation process with bridge house has been 10 days they've touched the number of individuals and along the bottom in the graph there you can see month by month the impact this program has had housing individuals in a number of different ways and so um i think uh bridge house has been a great partner and we really appreciated that and we really appreciate appreciate the way that they've worked with the boulder shelter in this transition over the last um or so

[47:02] and we look forward to continuing this this legacy program that they really helped our community with and lastly before i close um one thing i forgot to mention about the crc is that we the cdc contacted us about two weeks ago and we a tour to the crc this weekend they contacted us again they're developing protocols infection control procedures for cognitive living in in shelter type settings similar to our crc and so testing and evaluating those those protocols against our experience so that that concludes my my updates and i'll turn it back over to you sam

[48:02] right thank you kurt that is an amazing update and it is um very thorough um just to make sure council and the public knows the intention of this update is simply so that we can see what's changing as we go forward through the summer we will have another longer deeper dive into the overall um homeless sheltering initiatives that we have going on in july and so please keep questions and or comments focus specifically on the changes that are coming at 30th street so i have some questions for you kurt i have aaron and rachel and mary aaron you're up great thanks so so much for that update and i want to say how encouraging it is the number of housing successes that we've had the numbers of folks who've been housed recently during these incredibly difficult conditions is truly amazing so

[49:00] huge thanks to everyone involved with that in the city and our partners it's really impressive my um one question is um you know so all the services are transitioning to the boulder shelter for the homeless here coming into june and they do have a reduced bed count i appreciate how you've worked with public health to increase that a little bit and also get some um hotel beds that's another great move one question is it's one of the functions of the path to home program was the navigation services you know which have done a lot of great work over the years and part of that program is the ability to have some services provided during the day not a day shelter per se but particular services for individuals that need them case management inside is that going to be continued at the boulder shelter for the homeless site

[50:00] okay so aaron i think i missed a couple of your words but i think i got the gist of it um so the the navigation services um they meet with a um an individual that helps them through the navigation process and that happens during the day um and those are those are scheduled and they work together with that individual over a week or two period it's not open for daytime services but those functions do occur during the day it's also worth noting just for clarification that you know part of navigation is the individual um taking steps as well through their navigation plan so they will do things like you know visit social security or get connected with um medical services or other benefits um that will make them successful in their housing transition you know each

[51:02] person will have possibly different things that they will be working on um during the day so the navigation process is more than just um meeting with um um [Music] the staff member the other thing in in um that i forgot to mention in my presentation and your question prompted it is that starting on june 1st the boulder shelter will be um opening their doors in the mornings for individuals who are not engaged in services to receive breakfast and showers and that's really a response we requested the shelter to look at this in response to the the rec centers not being open right now and we're a little bit unclear on that

[52:00] process of how they will open in past years rec centers provided some of that service for individuals and that service was provided at 30th street up until now so that's an additional support that we're trying to put in place um during this transition time great that's good to hear on both counts thank you kurt thank you kurt and aaron rachel and then mary rachel hey thanks kurt for that presentation um great information as always and um how awesome that the cdc sought out the crc for um information congratulations on doing such a great job that you sounds like are a national model so kudos to your team my question on oh and also i want to say thank you to bridgehouse for the services that they provided all these years um and are going to continue to provide in a different way on the 30th street it was a little bit hard to follow some of

[53:01] the numbers because we you know we've thinned out some beds and then we added some beds and we're putting people in hotels and we've got crc um and maybe mount calvary so long term putting all the covid stuff aside i had been concerned um you know six months ago that we might have a reduction in overall bed capacity or numbers how did that shake out when we didn't get another at least somewhere else right we're just moving everything to the homeless shelter so i was just wondering what the long-term bed numbers look like yeah that's um so i i don't completely know the answer yet because we're still working on that with public health in the conversation that we had last week um we um what we're trying to get to is probably closer to the 140 mark at the north boulder shelter hopefully we'll get there and with um if we can maintain um some hotel coverage if needed for

[54:01] individuals um who are at risk you know that gets us up to the original capacity of of the north boulder shelter and um so that i mean the covid recovery center like you said that's a little bit of an unknown that could close in august it could close in november it could close next spring um if it is open for that period of time um through next season that would have obviously add some capacity as well but that really isn't the the purpose of the of the crc great and then one other question obviously we um own the east folder rec center and um bhp owns mount calvary would there be a fee associated with moving the crc there um no there will not be a fee for renting it will um likely cover some utility costs

[55:00] awesome that's great thanks great goodness thank you kurt i want to echo the gratitude that rachel expressed about um your recognition with the crc um and also extend gratitude to bridgehouse so thank you and your team and bridgehouse for everything you've done [Music] my question you don't necessarily have to answer now and perhaps you can cover in july when we have our full study session on this um the graph that you showed of the housing that's occurred the ready to work engagement the placement reunification all of those successes are largely due or probably almost entirely due to the engagement with navigation services so it's disconcerting to see that

[56:01] the engagement and navigation services is dropping so um as part of what you cover in july i'd be re really interested in understanding what you might be able to do in order to help people re-engage with those navigation services absolutely i'll say most of that for july the other thing that i'll add though is we started in a new program um the end of january that we hadn't done before called diversion so it's um it's really the step for individuals that um aren't necessarily qualifying for diversion um and it's a it's a much broader program that can support um you know um you know many individuals of different lengths of time in the city of boulder um so um but i think we share your concern that we want to

[57:00] [Music] ensure that the navigation the numbers are successful first of all um but um that that that program continues thank you great thank you mary i've got aaron again yeah i just wanted to add my thanks to to bridgehouse for running the path to home program so successfully for the the last however long it's been exactly it's been a phenomenal program and they've been fantastic partners and of course they're still still at it with ready to work so just want to echo those thanks for the amazing work they've done in our community and we'll continue to do so great i don't see anyone else so i will go ahead and jump in first i want to join my colleagues and thanking people i think many have been touched on by other council members i want to say thank you to older housing partners working with us on the mount cavalry

[58:00] church site to be able to relocate the crc is great because it allows us to get east boulder rec center ready to receive visitors but also preserve that function which as others have noted it's a model that other communities are looking to so thank you to bhp and to everyone that's been involved with both the crc and our ongoing homeless services journey a couple questions that are quick answers and then some to think about for july first question is could you tell us how many people will be housed at seaglow and canopy [Music] um i don't have those numbers but typically we're trying to house anywhere from 10 to 12 individuals out of our psh or voucher program that are focused on homeless individuals um there's um

[59:00] and bhp works with us across all of their properties so these are really just the new properties that are coming on there's also other developments that are coming on at the same time like like bus stop and mckinsey junction and we're working with them to hopefully get you know some individuals in there um as well okay super and then the more complicated questions that you don't need to answer now but i'll just put it out there it kind of follows along with what mary said so we've seen a drop in folks who are navigation services and to some extent that's been attributed to severe weather shelter becoming open all the time it seems to me like that conclusion is somewhat confounded by the residency requirement um changing somewhere in the same ballpark of time which said you have to have been in the county for at least six months in order to qualify so

[60:02] when we come to july i'd want to dig into how can we tell the difference between those two impacts and then each diversion program and how the diversion program fits in for those folks who haven't been here six months but who are being treated in the sense that we're trying to help them find either reuniting or another option for housing so anyway when we get to july i will be wanting to dig into the cause of the drop in navigation services yep be glad to do that thank you thank you kurt so this is great it teases up really well for our july conversation thanks to everyone who's been helping with this effort and i'll turn it back over to debbie your next item is the flood and storm water update and so i'll introduce joe tadiucci who will introduce his team to make this presentation joe thanks jane uh good evening city council

[61:02] my name is joe tadiucci and i'm the city's utilities director and we're here tonight to talk about our flood in stormwater utility and there are a few different reasons for tonight's discussion the first is that we've typically done a study session on this utility every few years and it's been a while i think it might go back to 2013 or 14 since we've done one and as you'll see in the presentation there's a lot of process associated with this utility and as you know there's always a lot of public interest in the in the projects that come along uh next we're starting an update of our flood and stormwater master plan it's it's been since 2004 since we've done a master plan so we're due and you'll hear some about that in the presentation and there'll be an opportunity for city council to provide

[62:01] some input the last reason for tonight's discussion is that we have on june 16th a public hearing coming up on the south boulder creek project and we've been talking about different levels of flood protection and funding and so in our memo for this item we had a table with that showed some of the other projects in our six-year cip from last year and so that'll give you a sense for some of the other needs across the city and so for our presentation tonight we have some powerpoint slides and douglas sullivan is our principal engineer in utilities and he along with katie knapp who's a utilities engineering project manager and she's leading the master plan update they'll both be running through some presentation slides and then we also have

[63:01] ken baird who is our utilities finance manager and he'll be here in case there are questions in that area and also pleased to have kirk vincent who is the chair of our water resources advisory board joining us tonight so i think we have about 15 or 20 minutes of prepared materials and so i will turn it over to douglas sullivan to get started great thanks very much joe uh good evening city council i'm douglas sullivan and i'll be taking the lead on this presentation with katie nab she's an engineering project manager in our flood and greenways group and we'll be moving back and forth depending upon the components we're talking about on the agenda here we're going to do a brief introduction and then katie's going to cover a bunch of the flood risks and the major program components that drive a lot of what we do i'm going to speak about some of the projects that have been completed to date high profile ones around the community and then we will

[64:01] end talking about the flood needs going forward and what that means for the cip so i thought we'd start with a visual here about the three utilities components for the most part people are very familiar with both the water and the wastewater utilities and i've got a couple of buzzwords here to sort of capture what are the critical elements of those and when we think about water and wastewater we think about health and safety specifically and the reason we're drawing a contrast here is because the storm and flood management utility is so different for so many communities on the water side it's fundamentally about providing safe clean drinking water that's reliable 24 7. and then the wastewater utility it can be summed up to separate you know water and wastewater and to basically collect and convey and treat that and meet standards that are put forth by you know cdphe the storm and flood management utility was created in 1973 and this is

[65:02] important from a history standpoint because there was a significant flood in denver in 1965 and it is pretty much understood to be not only the most costly but also the most devastating in denver's history and what followed that right away was the development of the urban drainage and flood control district when a number of engineers and community leaders got together and decided there need to be a greater focus on that so that was only four years after the big flood the urban drainage and flood control district continues to this day they had their 50th anniversary last year and they renamed the district the mile high flood district so if you're not as familiar with that that is the group that we're talking about and we can speak to them later so when we speak about the storm and flood utilities specifically we speak about life and safety the presentation tonight is going to focus primarily on the flood management program i want to mention a few things in the storm and flood utility because

[66:00] there's so many components here but there's not really an opportunity in this length presentation to talk about all of these components but we do have an opportunity for the council members to ask questions later for the ones we didn't cover so when you think of the storm water and flood management utility you might think of storm drainage storm water quality the major drainage way program is fundamentally what we're talking about tonight there's a big component on emergency preparedness education and outreach and of course regulations and development so we will have a list of some of those topics later in the presentation to cue up questions specifically because we did not cover them so i'm going to hand this over to katie now to start with the flood risks and some of the main components and then i'll jump back in later to talk about projects yes thank you so my name is katie knapp and i am an engineer project manager with

[67:00] the city of boulder i have been with boulder for 14 years now um so i i have a little bit of history with the city myself i'll get into some of the city's flood history but first i'd like to talk a little bit about the risk boulder has often been referred to as the number one flash flood risk in colorado and this is due to the geographic location of the city it is directly adjacent to the mountains which are right to the west as you can see in the picture in the slide so rainfall in the mountains can quickly collect in the canyons and create a flash flood situation with very little warning [Music] all right so one thing i would also like to point out which is unique about boulder is that we have 16 major drainage ways with mapped floodplains which you can see on this map so

[68:02] it is impossible to cross the city in any direction without caught crossing into multiple creeks and so that really exasperates the risk that we have to the community we have quite a history of flooding um so the list here shows some of the more significant flood events the city's flood of record occurred back in 1894 where it was estimated that boulder creek reached 100 year flood levels [Music] but many of us remember the 2013 flood where several days of rainfall resulted in flooding along all of the major drainage ways in 2013 the damages were widespread and they extended well outside of the 500-year floodplain so the orange dots on this map show the locations

[69:01] of flood insurance claims and the 500-year floodplain is shown in light blue so in addition to creek flooding sanitary sewer backups and high ground water contributed to the flood damages and this map illustrates why we encourage everyone to purchase flood insurance even if they do not live in a designated flood plain area so i'm now going to give a brief overview of some of the elements of boulder's flood management program and we often consider flood management as cyclical process that starts with floodplain mapping to identify the highest risk areas mitigation planning then identifies measures to reduce risks and projects are implemented through a design and construction process following significant construction projects floodplain maps are then updated to reflect the changes to the flood risk and that completes the circle

[70:00] so i'm going to briefly touch on each of these so we have four main flood zones that are included in um floodplain mapping studies and each of these zones also has specific floodplain regulations the high hazard zone is the area with the highest risk to life and property and also has the greatest development restrictions the high hazard down is a city designated flood zone it is not a fema flood zone unlike the other three zones as you move down the list the flood zones are generally less hazardous with fewer regulations the 100-year flood plain or the 1 chance flood is the fema regulatory flood zone and drives flood insurance requirements the 0.2 chance flood zone or the 500 year flood plan has requirements only for critical facilities such as fire stations

[71:00] hospitals schools and daycare facilities there are no restrictions on standard development in the 500 flood plains so basement construction is allowed so floodplain maps are routinely updated to incorporate both advances in technology such as improved floodplain modeling methods but also to reflect changes to land use from development or flood mitigation projects we currently are working on two floodplain mapping updates on the the left or west side of the map is sunshine canyon creek and that is a new study to update the current mapping which dates back to 1987. and then the floodplain mapping for wonderlin create on the the other dot on the map there is being updated to reflect improvements that were recently constructed between 28th street and foothills parkway

[72:02] so mitigation planning studies typically follow flow plane mapping efforts to develop some recommendations to help address the flooding risks public input is a very important part of mitigation planning and is really most valuable at this stage of the circle so mitigation planning studies will typically include a robust public public engagement process during the mitigation planning stage different flood mitigation alternatives are evaluated using a variety of criteria we consider social environmental and economic factors with a few of them listed here on the screen final recommendations for flood mitigation are adopted into flood mitigation plans and we have different mitigation plans for the different creeks we are currently working on two different flood mitigation studies the

[73:00] southern study is for skunk creek bluebell canyon creek in kings gulch and the northern study is for the two mile canyon creek and upper goose creek area so flood mitigation projects are then implemented through design and construction so i'm going to turn the presentation back over to douglas sullivan to show some examples of major flood mitigation improvements great thanks katie so the utilities department has been fortunate enough to be part of some really remarkable projects over the last 20 or 30 years so for this presentation we pulled together just five photos that have some before and after slides for drainage ways that the council members may know quite well so on your left this is goose creek goose creek is a drainage way with its head waters up near the old hospital at 9th and alpine and it and it eventually

[74:01] has a confluence out with boulder creek out near 55th past the municipal services center you are looking at folsom um on the left side of your screen and what would be considered an incised channel which is about three or four feet wide by three or four feet uh deep in this particular project this drainage way went through what was known as is known as the mapleton mobile home park which had 125 units and i believe 90 of those were in the 100-year floodplain so at this time when this project was constructed it was one of the highest flood dangers in the entire city so the city worked with thistle community housing and hhs to actually purchase the mobile home park at that time to be able to construct some of these drainage way improvements and then sold the park back so what you see on the right is the bike path and also the the improved drainage way one of the things of note we coordinate with transportation on these projects and the

[75:01] circle boulder by bicycle uh the 360 came through this in june and we had a ribbon cutting with 400 cyclists that moved through at this particular project when this was completed one of the other interesting and very difficult aspects of major drainage ways is they often interface with irrigation ditches so the picture on the left this is also goose creek and this is in the vicinity uh back in the mapleton mobile home park which is west of and behind the shay tui restaurant the picture on the left shows goose creek and in size channel that is actually discharging into the boulder and white rock ditch so this causes a couple problems uh the flood waters from the creek itself inundate the ditch which does not have the capacity further downstream and often causes flooding in a number of areas that's not prepared for it so the picture on the right what you see is an improved structure that is conveying the ditch water actually

[76:01] across goose creek and goose creek flows from left to right underneath that and if you look at this particular structure it has an overflow mechanism so if the ditch was ever to overflow it defaults into goose creek which now has improved capacity to handle about 3 000 cubic feet per second so this was completed about 15 years ago one more shot just as a reminder of the goose creek of what you saw before there was a parking lot for the mobile home park which bifurcated the north and the south half and so you can see behind the curve the size of the drainage way and the vulnerability to large flows associated with it the picture on the right is where the ribbon cutting actually took place so two more photos moving forward i mentioned the shay tui restaurant behind that is actually the confluence of what's called elmer's two mile creek and goose creek elmer's two mile creek flows

[77:01] south and it is located between folsom and 28th street it would come back behind what is known as the rayback collective so the picture on your left was the unimproved channel this drainage way now has the capacity for an additional 800 cfs it joins goose creek just west of 28th and then conveys safely under 28th for 100 year improvements all the way down to boulder creek one last photo we pulled in as part of this presentation was the recently constructed wonderland creek improvements this was a substantial project that ran about 20 million dollars it covers about a mile of drainage way this is the upstream end which is in the vicinity of 28th street and the intersection of paulo park to the east and winding trail to the west the drainage way continues in an east southeast direction all the way down to foothills parkway this picture on the left shows a number of garden level

[78:01] apartments and homes and also what was the former conduit and and conveyance capacity under 28th street there was significant flooding and an emergency evacuation required in the 2013 flood associated with this the picture on your right is an update if you look very carefully in the back right hand corner it's in the shadow but we maintained the very culvert that conveys some of the flow however what you see with the two larger culverts now has the capacity to convey the 100-year flow safely under 28th and safely all the way down and under foothills parkway back to you katie oh no this is still mine excuse me okay one or two more slides we have a timeline here for the wonderland creek project this shows about 15 years which is a little longer than what would typically be associated with a single phase but it speaks to the circle of the

[79:02] life and the key components that katie spoke about before the floodplain mapping was key the mitigation plan is an alternatives analysis that has all the ideas once the alternatives analysis are identified the seep the city's community and environmental assessment process is a critical outreach mechanism the design then the permitting then the construction my screen is covered a little bit at the lower right but if yours is not it says lomr for lomar the letter of map revision so once these substantial improvements are completed we then submit an updated floodplain mapping to fema for their acceptance and once they accept that then those homes that were formally located in the 100 year floodplain can no longer be located there so it is a substantial process in this particular case there were a number of partners associated with that one last piece we wanted to talk about since it impacts a lot of the major drainage way planning is a property acquisition we have a line item in the

[80:01] six-year cip that funds it about 600 000 a year and we are opportunistic working with other departments and with staff to basically purchase homes that are in the most critical of the four flood zones that katie talked about before the high hazard zone this particular home was one located on university and by removing it it created a greater opportunity for katie as the project manager to complete improvements on the upcoming gregory this particular home was actually relocated out to lafayette so there's an interesting story there but katie would have the details if if you were curious now back to you katie all right thank you douglas um yes so we have several projects that are currently in the design and construction phase so i'm going to highlight a few of these at the top north of the map are two projects along four mile canon creek one at broadway and one at 19th street for these two projects utilities is partnering with

[81:01] the transportation department to add some key flood improvements at the roadway crossings so these improvements are being designed to ultimately accommodate a 50-year flood event but the improvements cannot be fully utilized until downstream improvements are constructed so we are going to have to put in some temporary blockages at broadway to keep the flows in a similar condition what they are today until we're able to complete some further construction but we do try to partner with different divisions and departments where we can and be opportunistic with that so then also i want to point out at the left or the west side of the screen is the gregory canyon creek project so that's along where a couple of structures have been removed and on that project we're partnering with the mile high flood district and um for some channel and culvert

[82:00] improvements to convey a 10-year storm event so it's an older more historic neighborhood with very tight sight constraints site constraints so although typically we aim for 100 year improvements it's not always feasible so we try to do what we can i'd also like to highlight two projects in the middle of the map one is on goose creek and one is on bear creek near the boulder community health facility and these both of these two projects are creek restoration projects and they're in the final stages of construction right now we're doing some getting some revegetation and stuff going and that and finishing those up and they were both funded and managed by the mile high flood district so they are definitely an important partner for us on many different projects so i'm now going to speak a little bit about the master plan update that douglas had mentioned so

[83:01] we have started the process to update the stormwater and flood management utility master plan um this is our overarching planning document for the uh utility the stormwater and flood utility and so we are going to be reviewing and updating our guiding principles developing recommendations for some future work items looking at funding and developing a system for comprehensively prioritizing flood mitigation projects across the city [Music] and so there are many elements to the master plan tonight we touched on just a few of the topics that we are going to be revisiting some additional topics include emergency preparedness regulations and water quality groundwater is also a new topic that we are going to be looking into as part of

[84:00] this update there are many related master plans so i'm going to highlight a few the boulder valley comprehensive plan sets the framework for the city with policies that form the backbone of the storm water and flood management master plan and i did include a few the pertinent sections in the packet for tonight's meeting the greenways master plan covers our major drainage ways as well and that is also approaching that 10-year mark so we are planning to update that plan following the flood and storm water master plan update the stormwater master plan has some recommended improvements to the local storm drainage system was which is generally a pipe system to convey flows from minor storm events and that plan was updated in 2017. so as far as our master planning process goes we are we're currently getting our

[85:01] consulting team on board and working on engagement plan we like a comprehensive and robust robust public engagement for this effort and so part of our engagement will include working with a community working group so we are working on the logistics to begin recruiting those members so a detailed schedule was also included in your packet um this is a bit of a simplified version that highlights some of the key phases so as i mentioned we are starting to plan the public engagement um after this check-in with council so any feedback you have would be uh you know is always welcome we're then going to be moving into the technical review and analysis of the different program elements so with that i'm going to go ahead and turn it back over to douglas to talk about some of our our flood needs and funding okay so we're approaching the end of

[86:00] this presentation um in preparation for this city council presentation utility staff uh went before the water resource advisory board a week ago and on the subject of flood needs this particular map was a new one that we had not talked about before and so one of the things we tried to convey here for city council was the level of conveyance capacity in the 16 drainage ways across the community so you have a color-carded chart color-coded in the lower right-hand corner and i guess the easiest one to start with would be the black color and that shows you for example unimproved drainage ways at the other end of the spectrum there have been a number of capital projects uh that have green which is the 100 year capacity so if you look in the center of this uh map in the upper center the green line that goes from east to west is the goose creek drainage way and so those four phases over 20 years of projects

[87:00] show that that has a capacity basically between boulder creek all the way up to folsom for a greater conveyance you then see a black line on the west end of that and that is the one mile section behind edgewood that has 29 homes for which there is less than a 10-year capacity at this time that is actually in the six-year cip further west of that we would not refer to it as a major drainage way because it's in a more commercial area where we would deal with the pipe system and the stormwater capacity that katie spoke of before so maybe the next slide we tried to capture this then in tabular format to basically show that we have a number of projects that have been completed we have a lot of miles of drainage way that require some sort of improvement going forward katie alluded to the gregory creek project earlier in the presentation and because of the density of homes and the expanse and the steepness it was decided that a 10-year

[88:02] level of effort would best fit that element of the community one of the things that is more flexible now is we have to determine what level of conveyance is appropriate for various uh drainage waste throughout the community there were a number of times in the early projects in the last 40 years where because of the density and the lack of development it was much easier to accomplish hundred year conveyance going forward that is clearly not the case across the community as a whole one last slide here that we've shown to council and the water resource advisory board before is really the flood need fundamentally so this graph shows two things in orange it shows the number of flood policies for boulder relative to 12 of our neighboring communities the blue dots show the population so if you look at the left side of your screen you see that boulder has over 4 000 flood policies now one of our sister cities that is

[89:00] similar in size like longmont or fort collins has on the order of 350 to 400 so although their population is almost identical we have 10 times the flood policies in fact it's so extraordinary if you combine the populations of colorado springs in denver at roughly 350 000 and 700 000 respectively to total over a million we still have significantly greater flood policies despite they're having a population of 10. so back to katie's initial point of why boulder has the flood risk it does topography is a big part of it the number of drainage ways is the development for a community boulder that was started in 1859 has tremendous development in regional areas specifically along all of the corridors and that fundamentally is what's driving the risk and that's why we're playing catch-up in the way that we are okay so a couple slides just super quickly on the cip the capital improvements program what you see is a

[90:01] pie chart on your right which shows that this fluctuates a little bit but by and large this utility is funded at about 15 million a year and we have that split roughly into 60 you know on the left side and the capital projects and about 40 on the other side in the operating there's no hard science for that the majority of the dollars are associated with the major drainage way programs and the majority of dollars are on the capital side because it's a young utility and we are still building assets as opposed to maintaining them which is more true of the water and wastewater utilities that we spoke up at the beginning of the presentation moving on then we have a very simple breakdown of that nine and a half million dollars and what we talked about before there are many many components in the storm and flood utility the major drainage way elements associated with it take about two-thirds of the dollars however we also have an aggressive program for localized drainage projects and also a lining

[91:02] program and also an open cut program for the very storm sewers that have to deliver the runoff and the rain water uh to the major drainage ways on the right very simply you see a breakdown of the 6.3 million dollars what this effectively says is we have about two million dollars cash to spend and that two-thirds of this is tied up in debt service and the debt service is the annual payment on the existing revenue bonds we have currently for the projects that have already been completed so this is our last slide before we go to summary there's nothing to talk about here it was more to give council members an idea of a couple of the topics important but not at the same level of the major drainage way that we did not talk about tonight katie has expertise in every one of these areas and can speak to any one of them if you have questions otherwise we can pull up the summary slide and then throw it out to council members for questions

[92:02] in summary we wanted to remind you that the presentation fundamentally is speaking of the number of drainage ways and the need in the city we have significant flood program needs across the community north south east and west katie noted that we have a master plan update for what would be the overarching master plan similar to the other utilities and that is estimated at an 18-month to two-year effort and has been started the last point is that we do have limited funds like any of the utilities but the difference here instead of trying to address existing assets we have the critical need for new infrastructure for the next hundred years so thank you very much for the time i think we might have gone over 20 minutes uh i'll throw it out to questions or back to joe or or to sam please great well thank you douglas and um joe is there anything you wanted to finish on before we start asking questions

[93:00] no i um thank you for douglas and katie for putting all that together and i think that was a good summary of of all the different aspects and and there were probably twice as many subjects that we could have gotten into as you saw the on douglas's last slide i think one point i would emphasize that douglas made in the presentation is that the i think he said the storm uh flood and storm water utility was formed in the early 1970s and so the the challenge is that we have an old city that was developed largely before modern uh floodplain regulations came into play and so um that's not uncommon in colorado but that that's why we talk about playing catch-up and trying to get back around and get things up to modern standards which is a challenge okay very good um thank you to everyone

[94:01] who was involved in putting this presentation together i'm very helpful i'll turn to council and see if council has any questions i don't see any hands right now but i will remind us that the two questions in the memo were are there questions about the flood management program and then the second question was is there any feedback on the planned update the master plan for the storm and flood management utility so now i have hands i've got rachel mark adam mary and aaron so rachel europe um thank you joe and douglas for the awesome presentation it was very illuminating and educational just one question you had a slide up there i think douglas that talked about the numbers of years of protection that we have in the city we've got i don't know six ten-year mitigation projects and eleven hundred years something like that and then it shows zero five hundred is there anything between 100 and 500 or is

[95:00] 100 the max that we've ever done uh sure yeah 100 is the max that we've done and historically most communities do projects to the ability that they can to that level because of the nfip the national flood insurance program regulations um a couple of the key components that that circle of life that katie talked about when you complete a project and you do a letter of map revision you then are inability to to remap the area for which the improvements were completed and let's say for example one of these projects took 150 homes out of the designated floodplain it is required that you have flood insurance for federally backed mortgages and since most people have a mortgage it puts you in a position to get out from under that now you could still carry that mortgage going forward but to answer your question directly there are no set improvements between the hundred and the five hundred years specifically

[96:00] the 500 years yeah no i'm sorry i didn't mean to cut you off 500 year what i was just going to say the 500 year is a designation that the city of boulder started a few years ago with respect to the critical facilities list both facilities like the water and wastewater treatment facilities that we own and also hospitals and day cares and other facilities like that that katie mentioned okay thanks and i want to jump in and call agree on that doug if that's okay um so the 500 year in the 100 year are mapped as part of the same flood mapping project for fema is that correct katie do you want to take that one to explain the zones specifically about how fema looks at that sure yeah it's typical when we do floodplain mapping updates to do to map the 100 and the 500 year those are the standard fema designations and they use them for where flood insurance requirements

[97:02] are and then also different regulations and so there it's pretty standard and they have um guidelines for the storm events associated with those thank you and it's been i don't know three years or so since we did the critical facilities ordinance which then look to certain facilities in the 500-year floodplain are regulated is that common in other communities that have flood risk that they have maps for about 100 and the 500 but for the 500 they do a little bit and for 100 it has the insurance requirements yes a lot of that is um really fema standards and then the fema and the nfip the national flood insurance program encouraged communities to develop critical facilities ordinances and and we decided to have that really focus on the 500-year flood plan extend it beyond what our regulations go to

[98:05] okay thank you so now i've got mark adam mary and aaron mark here douglas katie thank you that was a a very informative presentation um i have a couple of questions and they're based on the materials we were sent in preparation for this meeting and because i have my notes but i don't have it in front of me please feel free to correct me if i get any of the facts wrong the is it correct that the upper goose creek project is scheduled for a 24 million dollar capital expense in 2023 yes mark i can speak to that one um one of the slides that you saw were the what we call the major drainage way improvements which happened over a period of 20 years coming east to west then there was that section that was in black which has less than a 10-year

[99:01] capacity in the section behind edgewood when the stormwater master plan was completed a number of years ago it is a master plan specifically for the piped improvements not the major drainage ways and we differentiate in master plans between tier one tier two and tier three those are high medium and low priority projects so what came out of that master plan the number one tier one project was what was called the upper goose creek basin and this requires a comprehensive piped network in the vicinity of 19th and alpine all the way west through colony market and that area near ideal across through the hospital up to 9th street and up to 4th street so there were two projects originally identified mark in the cip one was the pipe section and one was drainage way improvements behind edgewood we couldn't do the pipe section first because if we increase the capacity of the pipes to a five-year capacity we didn't want to discharge those additional waters to 19th and

[100:00] alpine where that one-mile section goes so what you see in the cip is a 24-25 million dollar proper project that is about 15 million dollars in a pipe network and about 10 million to improve the capacity of that section behind edgewood to a five or 10-year conveyance capacity and how is that project going to be funded is that will that be another bond issue for something that size that would be a bond and that's going to come hard on the heels of a bond issue for cu south in whatever configuration that that ultimately ends up you know our six-year cip is our best estimate at any given window for when we think staff has the capacity and when we can pay for those at any given time after we've bonded we reassess our capacity at that time for the next one i noticed in those materials again assuming i am correct that you had a 40 million dollar bond proceeds for cu south

[101:00] but the estimates that we've been looking at showing a far larger project are you expecting a mile high district contribution towards that or is that is that 40 million number not the correct number so the 40 million is not the correct number that was in the cip for last year's budget process and on an annual basis we update all the capital estimates for all of our projects when you saw the previous presentation for south boulder creek you saw a range of what was the the current estimates between 66 and 96 million so that particular project now factors in a number of components that were not anticipated before it is much easier on a piped project like the goose creek project to anticipate the cost so we would not expect increases in that on a percentage basis like what you've seen elsewhere lastly part of your part of the materials we received was a sample bill with a charge for stormwater and flood

[102:03] um has anybody done an analysis of what that charge will look like or what the nature of the increase will be when we factor in the current estimates for cu south and the 24 million dollars for upper goose creek and i don't know if you have any other projects that need to be bonded in the next couple of years but what's the impact going to be on those charges um for the average home so i i can answer those but i'll defer to ken who is the utility's financial manager um if you'd like to speak to the the relative nature of the debt service associated with bonds that size yeah thanks douglas generally speaking we have for the south boulder creek project that 66 million dollars project or so we've stated that that would itself involve a potentially 50 percent

[103:02] rate increase to the storm flood project and then and it depends in in which year that project happens along with the goose creek projects but also they'll be in douglas with the goose creek 24 million dollar one off the top of my head i don't remember what it was but you know it'll be 50 for the south boulder creek kind of in talking today's if we did a today's rate increase and then it would be about another let's see about another it was about another 20 20 ken i believe for the goose creek one and presumably if the estimates go up those numbers will go up commensurately yeah that's right the the depending on how much the debt service is for those projects will require rate increases

[104:02] as those debt service amounts go up so we're looking at very very significant increases in that in that category of uh charge yeah in terms of a percentage increase and like a 50 rate increase if we were to do that in the near term that would be about eight dollars a month on a single family residential bill an additional eight dollars a month on the on that bill okay thank you appreciate it good i've got adam mary and aaron adam europe so mine is more just commentary than a question but um it's interesting to me this even though we don't have the full um plan in front of us it's pretty clear that this sort of lines up with the um fire department plan in the fact that we have some critically underfunded life and um

[105:00] safety needs and we had them before we lost you know one out of every seven dollars in our sales tax revenue um so to me this is kind of just a request that when the finance committee is looking at things to make sure that we really look at the core principles of what the town needs and also look at alternative means of funding since we're critically funding starved on some of these really important needs um and that's that's really my only feedback but i really look forward to looking at the whole master plan when it does come to fruition thank you adam mary and aaron mary thank you katie douglas and joe for an outstanding presentation i i always find this stuff really fascinating um my first question has to do with um kind of is um adam's comment was a

[106:03] great segue into my questions um one of them has the first one has to do with funding and how um what i know about the mile fly flood mile hive flood district is that um they are looking at a cp a cip as well and um and they fold in rcips into their cip and so there's money that's being put aside um for the big projects such as for example south boulder creek so my question is what percentage or what amount is being put together by the mile high flood district towards that project and um is that factored into the numbers that we were just talking about with mark so that's my question sure i can start with that one so mary

[107:02] the mile high flood district provides funding for a number of communities and they recently sent us a copy of their five-year cip for boulder county and so some of those are other towns and some of those are in the greater community in the unincorporated areas in general terms the city of boulder receives about half of their total allocation and their total allocation is about 3 million a year so to give you a reference city of boulder projects receive about 1.5 million dollars a year from the mile high flood district now they don't specifically tell us which projects we can use that on we our staff sits down with theirs and then we talk about uh which projects we would like to do it in which particular years so if you will we sort of blend our cips together so they could all go towards something like south boulder creek or they could go toward goose creek and as long as they're going for design of construction

[108:01] in facilities that they uh have faith and and are in agreement with uh it's a very it's a very cooperative teamwork thank you my next question is um kind of also folds in with um adam's comment in the budget strategy subcommittee we were presented with the the budgeting for community resilience report that came through a dollar grant and in that dola grant there are several recommendations about how to move forward with master plans um one of the recommendations is about well several of the recommendations have to do with developing kpis and i forget what that stands for the kpi but that was that process or format was piloted by the fire master plan and i'm wondering if there are plans for this master plan to

[109:03] follow those recommendations from that report i might kick that one over to katie i'm not i don't know the answer to that question we may have to get back um unless you know what katie yeah so um that's a great question and i'm not sure about the answer that i guess i'd like to know a little bit more about it and i would definitely be interested in in looking into it and seeing if there's recommendations that we can follow on that um i do know that you know when it comes to fun you know some of the funding for one thing i wanted to mention the funding for the utilities um you know as you mentioned is through the bills and there is that difference in sales tax revenue and the revenue that that we deal with with the utilities just to kind of remind people about the even though the there's decreases in sales tax we're not

[110:00] necessarily going to see the same sorts of decreases in the flood utility because it is for utility bills so mary i'm also going to try to answer the question for a minute the dolo grant that we got we piloted of course as you know with the fire master plan actually the stormwater master plan and all of the utility master plans already use key performance indicators as we figure out what the future is of our infrastructure and so while we haven't actually as the finance committee spoken necessarily with joe and katie and douglas about using that process in fact utilities operations and utilities infrastructure is always focused on key performance indicators and the items that katie went through about the elements of the master plan are part of that and indeed the um designing for the 10 50 or 100 year flood is related to the key performance

[111:00] indicator so that's what we will be guided by so i have actually myself no concerns about the fact that this will comply with the dola recommendations thank you jane and um katie and douglas and joe thank you mary aaron yeah thanks for that everyone appreciate the presentations uh just one question in the master plan well i'll just say so in the packet you provided some projects from the cip and in the master plan um will you have uh include like a very very rough estimate of the costs of building out the network to what we hope to build it out to you know just kind of order of magnitude kind of stuff so we have a sense of what the the total needs of the system are douglas do you want to kind of explain the overarching master plan what we

[112:00] intend to accomplish there versus more fine-grained master plans sure and then i can i can kick it out to katie for specific answers one of the difficult things aaron of the overarching master plan like this is that it typically doesn't get into the delineation of projects and costs in each of the three utilities subset to the overarching master plan we have specialty master plans and that's why when i referenced the stormwater master plan which was just for the pipe system it's very easy to look at a network of 160 miles and look at size and condition and to what degree those existing pipes in the ground serve the community for the two year and the five year storm event what's much more difficult is actually what you're asking for and it's not impossible uh to do back of the napkin estimates but a greater granularity is difficult for a couple of reasons and katie can add to what i'll say but the floodplain mapping for the many drainage waves are all at a

[113:01] different generation and therefore the mitigation efforts that follow those are also out of sequence as well and so there are a number of different components that come in the map that we shared today is is a great step forward to have a conversation in terms of what is realistic in terms of the type of projects that we could build throughout the community one of the questions came up for example years ago after the fourth goose creek project would we in fact continue the 100-year improvements up to 19th and alpine and the decision was made long before i started that it was no because at 29 homes at a half a million to a million dollars a year it didn't represent the benefit to the community and so those dollars were then focused on one or two other major drainage ways like four mile for example and all those improvements and also wonderland and also skunk and a couple of those so it's a long answer we will

[114:01] do our best as we scope this master plan to help council understand the interplay of these 16 drainage ways and what is realistic going forward yeah thanks for that that makes sense and i guess the the the request i would have is that whatever you can include in the master plan to give us and the community a sense of like what's left you know and and what the scope of that and and and you know the number of years involved in working on it again not expecting uh very fine-grained numbers but like i i love the map that you presented tonight that was really helpful um about what level of flood protection has been implemented on those different drainage ways another one that would be helpful would be to compare that with what level we plan to implement on those various drainage ways right because like gregory canyon that we did i think my first year on council and when i say we i mean all of you i just happen to vote on it um you know that was decided for the 10 10 year

[115:01] level of protection i believe because of practical practicality reasons so getting that sense of you know what's what's been done and then what's left to do so we have a sense of the whole big decades-long project in a very rough outline i think would be really valuable i appreciate the question very much and and we will work hard on that messaging piece it's a very natural question to ask in light of updating a master plan that's 16 years old right thank you great so i see no other hands raised so i'm going to ask a couple quick questions here this one is just out of curiosity douglas i think you can probably answer this there is a mile high flood district funded project going on in goose creek right now so what is the project that's going on at goose creek so i can answer that one but i'm going to kick it to katie because she's managing it but i will preface one or

[116:00] two sentences the mile high flood district sam contributes dollars toward capital programs where they can fund up to 50 percent of the capital improvements however when it comes to the maintenance element of what they do they can provide a hundred percent of the maintenance and so that's my segue to give it to the to katie who knows quite a bit about that project yeah thanks douglas um and thanks for the question and the interest in the project so that project is one of mile high flood district's major maintenance projects and so projects that go beyond the capabilities of what we would do for like a routine maintenance with with our crews we really lean heavily on the mile-high flood district and work with them on areas that need significant reconstruction or major sediment removal and things like that so the goose creek project is it's a channel reconstruction it removed a lot of sediment a lot of cattails realign basically brought the channel it had been degraded

[117:01] filled in with sediment and and vegetation it's bringing it back to more of its original design capabilities and when it had filled in with sediment we were having issues with the multi-use trail flooding really frequently so we did some modifications to the culvert there at the railroad um just nothing i guess not the culvert itself but the little wing wall there and and regraded the path to try to solve some of those um flooding issues and get that capacity back in the creek and so that's what that project is great thank you and just so i can follow up on what douglas put out there for us so is mile high flood district covering a major chunk of the cost for that maintenance they're covering that project 100 oh that's awesome yeah okay and you know i'll just comment that um you know it's tough because we are in

[118:01] one of the most cities in colorado by longshot but it does lend itself to the greenways that we have now because you know i sat for one year on the urban drainage board it was interesting one of our projects the um the wonderland creek project that featured at the first meeting i was at and so they talked all about the wonderland creek project and one of the folks there highlighted the the bike path along wonderland creek and so a couple people approached me afterwards and said how do you handle having bike paths near your floodways and i said well we just transportation takes care of the maintenance of the path and utilities takes care of the maintenance of the drainage way and there were a lot of people who are just totally confused about the concept of putting your bike paths along your floodways so i just wanted to say that that is one of the

[119:02] best things about the way that we manage our floodways is they give us alternative transportation elements as well so um one more question and i'll be done on slide 31 which is the tabular piece of the presentation where you talk about how many miles of our floodways have what level of flood protection so we've got 11 miles that have hundred year capacity and then there's 25 miles that have less than 100 a year in some way or another so the first question is how will the cu south project impact that slide so just will it bring some of those 25 miles that are less than 100 year into 100 year what will be the impact of cu south on that tabular chart that you showed uh so i'll i'll start that generically uh if you recall on what what the south boulder creek proposal is sam there are three phases to it that basically work

[120:01] in a northerly direction the most southerly one is the detention facility on the south side of 36 then there are significant improvements moving up toward manhattan middle school and then all the way up toward the golf course so this project differs in that it's not starting from downstream with drainage way improvements but the detention facility itself because of the capacity and the mechanism for how it would release water slowly back to the drainage way would address the hundred year improvements what's remarkable about what's being proposed there it also addresses improvements that are in the west valley which are outside of the major drainage way and that's why that proposal is so different but the intention would be exactly as you said would be to move areas that were in the less than 10 but i don't specifically into 100-year conveyance you know all the way up to arapahoe over some number of decades for the three phases got it and then the first phase it might

[121:02] move a few miles um from the less than 100 to the 100. you know i would i would have to defer to brandon's expertise on that um i know that the outlet structure that you've heard a bit about releases water into veli and veli channel releases it back into south boulder creek not far north and so it's been a little bit since i've brushed up to speed on the hydrology of all the return flows but i'd be happy to chase that one down for you i'm just curious if you if you happen to come across it or it's pretty easy it'd be fun to know because that's going to be an expensive project i know it's got the other two phases it would just be interesting to be able to point to what it does um i guess that's one thing i guess i'd like to add to that is with the south boulder creek is a little bit unique in that we're not really looking at the entire floodplain that project is really focusing on the west valley overflow so

[122:02] it's not it's it's trying to mitigate flows that have already left the channel um and so it's not really doing improvements along the channel so you might not see that same correlation i see very good well thanks very much for this this was a fascinating presentation and um i appreciate kirk being here um from the water resources advisory board and i invite kirk do you have any closing comments that you want to give us about brad's take on this so you see kirk is here isn't it let me go ahead and unmute him he's an attendee so bear with me for one moment yep okay kirk you should be able to speak now can you hear me now we can thank you well i i think stanford has done a great job a job of summarizing the goals and intentions and the limitations and we've

[123:02] got a lot of areas of risk you know the utilities working everywhere in town to minimize risk and the i think that we can afford the master plan update and utilities division funding separate from sales tax and property tax can afford the proposals that are being discussed very good well thank you all for the presentation um and the great work doing this we're leading up to the master plan ultimately so that will be a big milestone thank you kirk for being here as well and i'll turn it back over to debbie okay your next item is the ballot items from the charter committee and i believe that cheryl patel is going to start with this presentation this we normally do have the finance

[124:00] department start because we often take a look at our tax measures i don't believe we have any tax measures this year but cheryl has prepared the presentation so cheryl hey sam real quick adam yes uh can i request a really short break uh sure about eight o'clock okay why don't we take a five-minute break and be back here at 8 10 and cheryl can kick us off

[127:58] [Music]

[128:11] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music]

[129:12] you're welcome adam um let's see if we got everyone here i adam sam mark mary bob rachel jimmy nearby yep i think we're there there's aaron so cheryl if you want to go ahead and kick us off sure thanks um good good evening members of council chris would you mind putting up the presentation thank you and next slide please thanks so on the agenda tonight we have three items that were brought forward by the council charter committee and i do want to thank that committee um rachel nearby and mary are are all members of that committee and they've been super helpful

[130:01] this year during this process those three items are increasing the size of the art commission adjusting council compensation payment process and then allowing council to waive charter requirements during emergencies and kathy haddock will be here this evening to discuss these three and then i have a couple slides we don't have any other potential ballot items that staff is recommending this evening but just a couple slides to remind you information regarding property and sales tax and then i will finish the presentation with next steps regarding ballot measures so i'm going to turn it over to kathy for the next slide thank you cheryl um the if we can go i think we're going to need to go two slides ahead to the increasing the size of the arts perfect so if you may recall that last time

[131:02] there were charter amendments um it allowed for council when they originally forming a commission whether or not to have a five member or seven member commission however existing commissions were not changed at the time um and the arts commission has requested that its board be expanded from five to seven members some of the reasons are that there are currently several subcommittees that have significant workload and they would like to distribute those assignments more evenly across the board members so that would require a change to section 130 and if that is something that you want us to pursue we would come back to you with proposed ballot issue language for that item [Music] the next one was if we can go the next slide is the council compensation payment process and this is not a request to increase

[132:01] council compensation at all but the um the way that it is drafted at this time it's for attending 52 or up to 52 meetings in a year and so there is you get paid for every meeting up front and then towards the end of the year you don't get start paying as you get more than 52 but for those who have elected to take benefits from the city they are equal payments throughout the whole year plus the city pays every two weeks so there's 26 pay periods the result is that sometimes council members pay does not cover their benefits or deductions and they have to pay the city money and then the next pay period that there's not that so what we would like to do is do an amendment that would simplify that payment process make the pay for a total of 52 meetings a year and have it spread consistently over the

[133:00] whole year so again if you want to do that one we do have count or ballot language that we would propose at your next meeting and then the last one was brought up at the um charter committee and um this one i'm not sure there was a recommendation on i'll let the committee speak to that but something more for you all to discuss but what has become clear in doing the emergency dealing with the coveted emergencies is that there are people requesting that council make changes to the charter um that right now there is not the authority to do even in an emergency so the suggestion is that and we're not concerned what the next emergency is going to be i mean if we got flooding at the same time as we had coveted like michigan did we'd be much more limited than we are and so

[134:01] whether there should be a waiver of in the case of declared emergencies for actions that council may need to take to deal with the emergency that are that are not consistent with the charter we specifically wanted to exclude executive sessions or increasing council compensation for those times i would argue that neither one of those is necessary for an emergency but we want to be really careful and this would satisfy some of the issues that have been raised during this emergency so again if that's something you want us to pursue we would bring it forward to you at another meeting so those are the quests the next slide is the questions that we have for you on each one of those and i'm happy to answer any questions if you want to go the next slide

[135:00] chris great thank you kathy [Music] okay so let's pause here and so i assume this is questions about the um three that have been brought forward in tonight's presentation so i've got bob mary mark and aaron bob go ahead this is probably as much a question for jane as anybody on the last um i guess what i call the emergency provision uh proposal um jane can you give us some examples of things that um you would have liked council to be able to have done in this current emergency that we were not able to do so in a way this question is less for me and more for council but i think what was in mind were the ideas about reducing the number of signatures

[136:00] required for a petition or changing the timeline on that or changing um petition and initiative requirements there's one other that i would like to mention is the charter prohibits getting free water and um that's that's been something of a challenge for us okay thanks mary mark and aaron mary yeah my mind was going to be more of a comment um and i'll add to what jane and and bob have commented um with respect to initiative petitions the idea of being able to um i think jane brought this up is change the number of signatures required in the timeline as well as being able to transfer signatures to the following year so in other words

[137:00] suspend collection but resume um when things have when conditions have changed so um that that's another example of the things that um that would have been helpful to be able to do um [Music] yeah that's that's all i have [Music] hey thank you mary um and i've got mark and aaron mark yeah my mine is also in the nature comment um as described here the um the third potential charter provision is very very broad and i think it needs to be very carefully circumscribed to me i would focus more on financial flexibility in a time of emergency um not something broader

[138:02] in terms of changing our electoral processes you know the the potential scope of this is unlimited i mean would we be able to wave uh height limitations um the things that are unrelated to the exact financial crisis that we're experiencing um i'm very concerned about how this is drafted and its specificity um and how we make it as narrow as possible so that it is an instrument to be able to navigate a crisis such as what we're in uh and when that crisis is over that power you know quickly goes away um and we can at least say to the community this is a necessary tool for our financial survival not a tool of convenience to circumvent

[139:00] uh charter provisions that already exist thanks could i all agree on that sure just that we did discuss um in the committee ways that we would want to buffer against abuse so the um exercise of that power would be limited to a super majority of council and it would have to be tethered to the whatever the um named state of emergency related to so i don't see how like a height limit could be circumvented because what emergency could that possibly be responding to and in terms of financial like you know if it's a health crisis like we're in right now it might not be directly tethered to finance but you might need as an example we were a little bit confused back in early march like are we allowed to have remote meetings and so that would be an example of if the charter had prohibited it we need to emergency be able to change things like that to

[140:01] address a current crisis so that's what we were visualizing and i think that we could probably find the language to come up with it but just wanted to put that out there what we were thinking of on the committee if i may also collaborate with rachel um that gets more interesting to me i'm simply responding to the languages submitted to us and and to me it's overly broad and as with many things the devil's in the details so yes i mean as well um i agree with with rachel and um thankfully the the ability to meet remotely is was done by ordinance and not charter change so we could we could manage to do it but things of that nature and i agree with mark that it needs to be

[141:00] very precise and and clearly delineated as to its relationship to an great emergency and the bob so my question was pretty much the same as what uh mark just uh asked and rachel and mary answered very nicely but so i'll just make one a little additional comment that you know the the guard rails would be important for something like this and um so another thing would be duration would be a kind of guardrail that we might put on this right that um you know it couldn't you couldn't institute it for 10 years say you know maybe there's a limited time period so it's another thought on that and i guess just while i'm talking about it that we might if we're going to put this on the ballot we might spend some time looking at items in the charter that would be something

[142:01] consider varying in in a future emergency if we're going to make that case to the voters bob um since we've moved on a comment i'll i'll throw mine in here i i agree with mark i'm concerned i guess i'm still struggling to understand what we were unable to do that we wish we would have been able to do um i think jane and her team have done a wonderful job of managing through this crisis including on financial adeptness we were able to meet remotely we were able to do a lot of things so the only thing i've really heard so far is gosh it would have been nice if we could have waived the number of signatures on the um the ballot petitions which i think we're going to talk about a little bit later and but i'm not sure that we would have waived that there those those numbers are in the charter for a reason and that is to protect uh those people who um don't want a provision to go forward they want to make sure that

[143:01] there is a certain number of people in the community who are supportive of something before goes on the ballot and um i i still struggle a little bit to understand how that directly relates to our dealing with the emergency it certainly is a consequence of the emergency but it doesn't deal with the emergency so i have yet to hear a charter provision that we would have liked to have waived to allow us to deal with this emergency so i'm i remain skeptical that this is necessary from charter perspective again just that i think that um we saw again in early march that we had not anticipated what we were going to need for this pandemic and so i think that the when tom raised this it was sort of an awareness that you don't really know what's going to come up and what might be necessary and so we wanted to leave some maneuvering room that we won't be in this position again as a city next year and 50 years or however long it's going to be until something like this arises again and we

[144:01] wouldn't necessarily be able to anticipate what we might need to change because we don't know what the next exact crisis would be so it was away again with the guardrails of things like super majority and it has to be related to the issue at hand that um a future commonsensical bright council would not abuse it and the guardrails would be in place and we would have that option if i could just call it clear on that i mean we've in the last decade we've lived through two types of emergencies we had a horrible flood and i'm not aware of any charter provisions that tied our hands back then and we're not going through a pandemic and i'm not aware of any charter provisions that are tying our hands now as it relates to responding to the emergency and so i i get the fact that it would be a super majority although that's really only one more than the five that normally takes to pass something so this doesn't give me a whole lot of comfort and again if somebody could point to something that said gosh we would have done this to address the emergency or any of the emergencies

[145:00] we've had over the past whatever history but we couldn't because the charter tied our hands and we couldn't wave the charter but i i yet hear a good example of that so i remain unpersuaded and been here and then i'm going to go yeah well just to further colloquy on that i mean tom did mention also the the charter doesn't allow providing free water and that is sounds like something that we might want to be able to do at some point um and so i'll just reiterate my point that um if we're going to consider this that [Music] we spend a little time looking looking at possible use cases okay so i guess i've got a few thoughts one thought is there were multiple things suggested and we've really only talked about one of them i guess for me the arts commission and the council compensation

[146:00] are both things that should be done at some point but i don't think they rise to the level of needing to do them this year i think we have an emergency one that's on discussion right now which i'll get to in a moment and then we're going to have something i believe where we talk about signature deadlines and so on so i think there are some things which are actually important to do now i think the emergency one is good because we're thinking about it now in the middle of an emergency and trying to figure out what we need to do and not do relative to what the charter constrains us around and then the other one we're going to talk about signature deadlines and signature requirements and so on i think that is looking ahead to when next year we'll be able to gather electronic signatures for petitioning once that's in place and so if we don't have our rules tight and then we go into the first time ever that we're doing electronic signature gathering and we still have some

[147:00] uncertainty it's just going to get further confused by the fact that we have the electronic signature gathering so i see no reason to move through the art commission one or the council compensation one and i would just pause there and ask for people to colloquy if they disagree with that if people would like to move those ahead i'd like to hear about it so rachel i have my hand up yeah i was getting there so i'm going to make a i'm going to make the case for the council members pay schedule measure moving forward i think that historically it is easier for people who are wealthy or retired or have other sources sorry about the cat here if everybody's hearing the cat meow i have no ability to help that um to be able to serve on our city council and i think that we need to be aware that we have to take steps to make it more amenable for people who are not wealthy to be able to serve on council

[148:00] without undue burden and so as it is if you take health insurance like i do because as as kathy explained the pay schedule is not level some days sometimes like the city will charge your credit card or dip into your bank account and so for people who have uh enough money that's not a big deal but if you are living paycheck to paycheck you need consistent and reliable pay dates so i support this going on the ballot this year so that people running in 2021 can count on a steady paycheck as part of this job even though our pay will remain exactly the same this will benefit working class people so i don't think it should be delayed okay i've got junie aaron and mark and mary i just wanted to say i support the idea of uh [Music]

[149:00] for the for the pay change but i anyway no one can live in boulder on eleven thousand dollars i just think that discussion about working class people i don't think it really there's any connection between the two but i do support it um my question or my comment was about number three the charter provision for the super majority of council two-way charter provision in the event of emergency so are we moving forward with that or is it off the table as of right now well i don't think we know yet so i was trying to organize our discussion to go one two three um because i thought one and two would be easy but i'm apparently wrong about that so why don't we frame it up and talk about whether we want one and two to move forward go through that and then i think there's a longer discussion around the emergency well like do you want me to save my

[150:00] question for number three for later then if it's a question go ahead and ask it yes my question was why does it say the word super majority what's the difference between five and also can we add for framing whether it's a national emergency life threatening or flood emergency so i'm thinking maybe some of the framing can also help with some of the issues that we're having okay aaron mark gary nearby and adam erin darren you're um so i'm perfectly happy to to move those first two forward i'll just say in terms of the arts commission they sent us a really heartfelt letter this last year about the need for more

[151:01] people and they actually were one of the boards that met right away during this period during the covet period so that they could get money out to the community as quickly as possible um because of the grants that they distribute so it seems uncontroversial and um and it would be i would appreciate responding to their request but see seems like you could move forward this year and the second one on council compensation uh feels like a kind of a cleanup measure that makes things a little easier for for council members who might be living a little closer to the financial edge so i'm fine moving that forward too mark uh i think rachel is absolutely correct about the benefits of the uh the pay uh charter provision but i also think sam is correct that there's no particular need to have that conversation at the moment and i would

[152:00] put it off you know it's beneficial to some council members and i'm a little reluctant to uh put on a charter amendment that's mostly beneficial to council members uh and and judy is also quite correct that no matter how you slice and dice or eleven thousand dollars a year um it's not going to be sufficient for someone to live on and i don't think it's going to make a material difference uh to whether someone runs for council or does not run for council so i you know it's a good amendment but i think its time is not quite ripe and i would agree that it could be put off for one more year great thank you i've got jerry i'm just going to calculate real quick on the at that point that's been brought up twice now i think that eleven thousand dollars a year could make a difference to somebody running for council if they're making um

[153:01] some amount that combined with eleven thousand dollars a year would get you uh into a a less financially unstable quality life so i don't think that we can pretend to presume or know what anybody who might be running for councils situation is other than right now we make it very difficult to take on this job but we can make it easier for people who could be combining this with another job to make a go financially in boulder rachel i do not disagree with you on that um i i think it's a good uh a good proposal i'm just not sure that it needs to be done this year i'm not disputing the substance of it i think you're right it's just for me it's a matter of timing so mary nearby adam and bob mary

[154:01] so i think the um arts commission one should go forward um because it is something that was requested by the arts commission and it is um a workload question is they they simply can not get through the amount of work and reading and evaluation of grant proposals that they have to get through in or in order to to meet their mission so um i do think that that one could move forward um although i do agree um with sam and mark that it is about timing um but i think that the workload will exist for the arts commission once we come out of this however long it might take um the workload will be there and

[155:00] it seems like a as as as aaron put it a non-controversial item um if it if we had a controversial item before us i would be more reluctant as i've said before in the petition discussions is that what we want to do right now is we want to keep our community together and avoid divisiveness so um so i i think that one should go forward um the council pay one i'm i'm of two minds on that one um i did approach the charter committee um to remove that one from the recommended recommended list um for the reasons that mark has stated it's a timing issue um on the other hand when you combine the council pay which is because it increases annually and it has since the 90s when

[156:01] it went into place it's now up to twelve thousand dollars so it's more than eleven thousand dollars okay but um not by much but um in any case um i do think that when you couple that with the insurance um it can make a difference for somebody um running for council um and who's to say if you are retired or have the means not to have to worry about this who's to say that it does not make a material difference people can live with very little amounts of money if they really want to do something so and then additionally the workload is such that it it can be very uneven and in this way at least it's a compensation that

[157:02] is more regular rather than tied to meetings you can be not meeting and still having lots of council work um from the outside meetings that you have to um do so i'm of two minds on that one um so i'm not sure where i'm sitting yet i i can still listen to more arguments one way or the other um and then i'll wait to have more discussion about the third one in the context of the the ballot um and initiatives conversation that we're going to have later adam and bob forgot adam uh nearby you disappeared so i'll add you in right after bob sorry i'm not sure your hand is down okay um so i have a question before i make my

[158:00] comments uh the way that the ballot language is written for the um change in council pay uh when would that implement so say we were to hold off until next year would that happen immediately upon passing that that would change i i think that really is an important aspect of this as to whether it should go this year or next year because it's pretty clear that there's a majority that are at least interested in doing it at some point anyone have an answer to that well it's your that's a drafting question adam we're still at this conceptual stage here generally we don't uh have in the past when we've changed council compensation we've had it applied to the next council so our the default for me would be to draft it so it applied to council members elected in 2021 and so it wouldn't apply to some until 2023 so if you put it off until 2021 that would back that up two years

[159:04] i was thinking in the charter committee that we thought we wanted to have it go if it went on this year it would go into effect like january with the first paycheck of january 2021. so that's the way that it came out of the charter committee is that it would it would be an annual thing because that has to do with the way paychecks are distributed over the course of the year so starting it close to january 1st with the first paycheck is what we were looking at rachel's absolutely right about how we talked about it and tom's right that you usually have increases well you have to have increases applied to new council members that are elected after the increase is approved however this one is not an increase it's written so it's not increasing anybody's salary so um obviously i defer to tom but these are the types of things that you could just

[160:01] decide when you're actually looking at the ballot language and i'm sorry to be confusing these are the concepts that we're giving you this is not the actual ballot language we're looking for exactly what you're doing now of saying what specific things you would want to see in specific ballot language that we would prepare and present to you later thank you kathy i'm going to slot in nearby because she appeared and disappeared and then bob some nearby i'm not done yet either sam when oh sorry um so that being said if we can make it so it applies immediately after the next not this election but the following then i'd be on board with moving it a year but if we can't do that then i'd be more inclined to actually put it on this one um just because rachel makes a great point and it's one of those people where this amount of money doesn't make the difference and cleaning it up so it

[161:00] would be evenly distributed that would be super helpful so the insurance actually comes directly out of the paycheck rather than out of the bank account that would be super helpful for anyone in that position so for me that is the distinction that that would make is if we can make it so it applies immediately then i would put it on the next ballot if we can't then i would put it on this ballot as for the arts commission um i can go either way on that i too want to avoid ballot bloat if possible but um this seems like a pretty straightforward one so i'm like mary i can go either way right now okay are you done yep done thank you great nearby um i just wanted to say that i will fully support the arts um ballot measure uh again they did write us a really wonderful letter and i think they need the help and something i think we should be supporting right now uh as

[162:01] for the pay i definitely hear what mary's saying but i'm fine with supporting it i think it cleans it up i agree with what rachel said on this topic so um and you can see adam was saying that for him it makes a difference so i'm fine with moving forward with that um i'm gonna agree with the people i think it includes mark and sam and maybe some others who were concerned about putting these forward this year in light of the situation we have um so i would also be in favor of deferring and particularly if as adam said on the council compensation one we could make that effective january 1 2021. uh or 2022 i guess would be um i'll speak to each one of them individually however i am sympathetic to the arts commission's workload and i do want us to be responsive to them i think what we should do on this one is sit down with the arts commission i mean we're we got their letter in december it's now may and a lot of things have happened since then and i would sit down

[163:00] with the arts commission or at least their chair and find out how they would feel about deferring this until next year i know they have a they sometimes delegate work to subcommittees i believe there's a public art subcommittee and i'm wondering if if the issue is worklet if they could do some more of that delegation at least for the next year and a half until we could put this on a ballot uh in 2021 so that's that would be to step forward or walk way forward that i would suggest is let's talk the arts commission see if they can do some delegation see how bummed out they'd be about not putting it on the ballot this year and if if they can live with that i that's where i would go um with respect to council compensation it seems like we were debating the wrong thing we were debating about whether somebody could live on 11 or 12 000 a year or not we're not talking about that because you get paid the same amount of money it's just a timing question i think if you look at your pay stubs um you'll see that actually and this has been my experience now for five years on council our meetings are actually front

[164:00] end loaded we have more meetings in the first half of the year than we do in the second half of the year as a matter of fact you look at your pay stub you'll see that we're almost halfway to that 12 000 it's only the end of may um and um and that's just because of we have more meetings in the first half of the year and we have more holidays in the second half of the year um so if if the issue is issues not 12 000 or not 12 000 the issue is when you get the 12 000 then it's actually relatively spread out with a little bit of front and loading to the first half of the year um if the issue really comes down to the fact that some people have insurance payments that come due at a time when they we might be council may be taking a a one or two week break and they don't have any compensation to offset that payment against i would fix the problem not through a charter amendment but work with our hr department to see if we could adjust the way that insurance payments are made maybe an exception can be made for council members where that insurance premium is deferred until such time as there is compensation offset if it feels like we're making a

[165:01] charter change for what it seems to be a relatively small problem that relates to timing that we can probably fix in another way so i would agree with mark and sam and others who have said let's not put either one of these on these are both fine ballot measures and let's definitely uh look at 2021 but i think it's a bad look for us to put things like this on the um on the on the ballot if we don't have to bob so rachel your hands up is this a collard green um it is and my hand was also just up so all right go ahead i mean i think it's a little bit okay i would say it's a bit of a worse look for us not to put it on this year i think part of the reason we wouldn't be putting it on is because we know that other people are struggling to get signatures safely for the ballot and kind of don't want to put something on the ballot this year put much on the ballot this year um but again i think as somebody who has lived

[166:01] paycheck to paycheck it might be hard to understand but it is important that you have you know a similar amount of money coming in on a schedule that you can count on because you have rent due at a certain time and you have again this health insurance due so it is if you're right on the edge financially it is it is meaningful to have things come in regularly and routinely um and i i don't think that um it's good enough to say we'll do it in 2021 because then people who are on the fence about running in 2021 have no idea whether they're going to have a reliable pay schedule and for somebody that may be on the fence and that makes a difference for it seems like an easy enough thing to do this year instead of next year and and have it be for one thing have a send a message that we we do want you to run we want you to be able to run and we see that this is something that we can um ask the community for if they're interested in um and i don't

[167:00] know why we would shy away from it in terms of ballot bloat i would expect there will be a lot more next year because it's possible that um after we get the electronic signatures going and then later this year there's going to be more stuff on next year's ballot so this seems like a cleaner year to do it as well great well i was trying to focus this on the first two it seems like that was successful um and i'm gonna do a straw poll here in a moment but i'll have my say on these um i agree that the art commission uh change is probably a good idea i think it might be a good idea on other boards as well um i i just i think we're going to move forward with one or two big ticket items this year that are urgent and that do need to happen right now i agree with bob i don't think the art commission thing needs to happen right now so i'm going to say the two things that others have said i think it's a good idea i don't know that we need to do it right now

[168:00] council compensation it's really just about smoothing it out um i've lived paycheck to paycheck in this town before um it's difficult um i don't know that this would make much difference this is a cash flow thing whereas you know the size question i think is a far bigger one if people are on the bubble about running for council i don't know that this is going to make any difference whereas if the pay was 22 000 a year or four thousand a year and go make a huge difference in people's perspective about whether they want to run for council so i would say again i wouldn't put either one of these on this year i think the emergency um to the extent that we go there and potentially changing charter requirements around what signatures are due for petitions i think those would be two big things ballot bloat's already here doesn't matter what we say about what might happen next year we've got every you know this is a an even year elections

[169:00] presidential year we're going to have like a full slate of tickets that we have to vote on up and down um the candidate list and then to bring forward a whole laundry list of things having to do with the city many of which people won't start getting familiar with until right before the election i think is we're going to waste bandwidth and we're going to waste people's attention span and so i guess i think we should bring things forward this year but only if there are things that we think need to be done in the next year as far as council compensation to get to adam's question because this doesn't change the salary level i think we could do it in 2021 and have it apply to the first paychecks of 2022 when the new council is seated at that point so um you know typically the way it's worked when we changed anything around council compensation which increased it that couldn't go into effect until every council member who voted on it had to be either reelected or was out of office

[170:02] and i think this one's different and tom you can correct me if i'm wrong but i think we could put this one on in november 2021 and have it start applying to paychecks for the new council is that correct yes you could okay we talked about that in the charter committee we talked about um doing it in 2020 so that wouldn't go into effect until 2022 and because of the way the pay periods align with the council elections it wasn't working quite so well and cheryl might be able to explain this better in any case i am starting to be persuaded that maybe this isn't the year to do this maybe we get the language set and do it in such a way that it would go

[171:01] into effect as um sam said when everybody on this council has rolled out i mean actually i was surprised when the the health insurance was available because that happened i think before i got on council so definitely everybody had rolled off but anyway i do think that it's not so easy to say to move it out to next year and have it go into effect 2022 because i think there's a way that things relate to i don't want to spend too much more time on debating this um but we could just move it for next year and have it go into effect after everybody's rolled off and it doesn't interfere with the way that the paychecks work okay so i've got mary's done i've got two more hands up mark and aaron i would put out there that i'm ready to do straw poll once

[172:00] we're ready so mark and aaron if you want your comments on these let's go ahead and do it and then let's do a straw poll because if we're all clear we can just move ahead um mark and then aaron mark my very last word on the subject i'm just reluctant to put the initiative on the ballot in a time of financial emergency and great hardship putting something on that is basically for our convenience to me is is a an unsatisfactory look i would pray erin yeah so i guess some things folks have said convinced me on the deferring the payment thing but i so i liked adam's idea um about uh putting it on next year and if it could go into effect immediately maybe there'll be a little difficulty with the pay periods but um that seems like maybe a more reasonable way to go okay so let's start from the top and let's do the art commission one so um

[173:00] this is just a straw poll um raise your hand so i can see it if you're interested in moving the art commission initiative forward so i see mirabai aaron juni so and mary so that's five so that's a majority so arts commission we will move forward and deal with i think that one's pretty straightforward and then council compensation who would like to move that forward this year rachel mirabai that's all i see so sounds to me like we'll do the arts commission this year but not the council compensation um tom kathy do you need anything else from council on the arts commission no thank you um that's all we need great okay so we're done with the first two let's move on to um changing the charter to allow emergency

[174:00] powers um who would like to speak to this on bob this is more of a request um because i've already said my piece on this um sam you would mention something what i think is different than what's being proposed which i'd like to talk about as well but i want to make sure that we distinguish between what the charter committee proposed and what i think you're proposing if you see the difference okay so describe what you think i was proposing i think you were proposing a as i understood it as a clean cleanup to the charter related to potential inconsistencies between our charter and state law which i would fully support so if that's what we're talking about i would like to talk about that i think what the charter committee has proposed is is allowing council to um waive charter provisions in the event of an emergency and that's the one i would be opposed to because again

[175:00] let me just frame in the form of a question what's the water issue tom and is it fixable uh well it's an issue we're avoiding right now the charter says that you can't give free water to anyone you have not done any water cut offs and there are people not paying their bills okay so we administratively we've kind of gotten around that by simply not uh not cutting people off if they don't pay their bills yes right we're not giving free water we're just not charging for it yeah well they're accruing debt right so i mean this is kind of like the rent holiday versus rent postponement question so bob i'm just going to jump in here and say my point about the deadlines the potential inconsistency and deadlines for submitting signatures was separate from the emergency stuff proposed by the charter committee so i want that to be a separate bullet that comes after this discussion yeah i agree with that completely so i just

[176:00] want to make sure we were distinguishing between those two um and so if if the issue the primary the primary thing that people can think of that we need to address in an emergency the charter prevents us from dealing with an emergency that relates to that emergency is no free water then let's just put let's just put a charter amendment on that says we can provide free water either in the event of an emergency or otherwise i don't really care about that that's the only one i've heard so far that relates to the emergency that we can't wave although we've handled it elegantly administratively already but but if that's what people really have heartburn about is free water then let's put a charter amendment on this as we can provide free water okay i see no hands up um mark yeah i actually have a question which is um how would this be flesh i'm sorry fleshed out what would be the process by which we would get a draft amendment that actually relates to the specific issues that

[177:01] we're talking about so we would bring forward a first reading ordinance with a memorandum that explained it we take into account the comments that council members have made tonight and shape it and sometimes we'll put together two or three options for council to consider either as different ordinances or with potential amendments and so what i've heard is that council members want to clearly define what the trigger for this would be what the boundaries are what the limitations are what could be done and what couldn't be done and so we draft something like that and get it to you probably probably the first meeting after the break is first reading maybe the first the last meeting before the break [Music] um mark any other questions no but i guess i'd be wondering if you could get it to us in informally a little bit earlier than that this is a very consequential proposal and yeah we really need to understand exactly what is being suggested and what

[178:01] the scope of it is and how it would be implemented and the more time we have to actually absorb it and think about it i think we will be better off this is as consequential amendment as i can think of the last meeting before the break would probably be as early as we could do it and that that's usually that's aggressive for us for doing ballot measures where you have all of you have the all of july and august to refine it so uh getting it much earlier than that we could probably do it but that would be challenging great and i've got juni and mary junior [Music] i think part can you hear me i think part of my question was already answered um but i think my understanding of number three is that we want something that is slightly more

[179:02] generic that is not too specialized or constrained because if we just said if we created a free water one then it would just be for water then when we have an emergency situation we would be exactly where we were a few weeks ago when we were wondering what do we do because we couldn't have remote city council meetings so i think from what i'm hearing best as tom mentioned is to have something that the power of an individual or of a group because when you just unleash people and you just have them they have as much power as possible they just can come up with any kind of emergency they can call it an emergency themselves so that's not what we want we want more constraint but at the same time we want some level of flexibility so that we can get our work done um i do still have a question to tom about what is a super majority i still i'm lost on that we were thinking two

[180:00] thirds or six council members why oh is it because it's an emergency you want it to be six to make it a little harder to pass okay yeah fair thank you so super majorities exist today right tom we have to have the super majority to pass something on emergency like on second reading so juni a super majority is already codified in certain parts of our ordinances okay mary [Music] and so is unanimity and so i you know to put a further um constraint on it i would propose making it unanimous and um and juni has said earlier that um further constrain it is put to make it that it's also a national emergency so that further constrains it i do see

[181:02] value in doing this and i think the guard rails are going to be important so the three guard rails i see are making it unanimous making it in the context of a national emergency and putting a very um short and finite amount of time on it um so those are those are the three big guard rails that i see and um and then to mark's question about getting it to us prior to the break i we've had other ballot initiatives come before us that have needed thought and um i've always found that the time that we have july and august before we finally settle on something in september has been adequate amount of time um and then just i don't know how much thinking you want

[182:00] to do about this on our recess [Music] thank you mary rachel i agree with what much of what mary just said i think unanimous might be one too many because what if you just get like a um a hold out who's i don't know irrational or [Music] just i think eight out of nine would be like leave that little bit of wiggle room i can understand how six doesn't feel much better than five but unanimous i don't know that sounds steep okay so i'll jump in here i agree with rachel i think unanimous sounds steep um super majority with nine is six people so i think three quarters would maybe get us to where we wanted keep in mind that you won't always have nine members right so you need to set it

[183:00] as a fraction of the quorum whatever that needs to be is that right tom if we had a two-thirds or three-quarters it's of the members who are present in the quorum yeah that's the way it's written in the emergency right and so just to say five times nine yeah so the weight to get to seven um as just for instance if we wanted to have 75 or three-quarters um for a nine-person council that would mean seven members would have to vote for it i i think unanimous is you know that leaves you vulnerable to one curmudgeon um who is just not going to go there because of some ideological reason and i think even with two that can be a threat if you have one person missing from the council meeting it's basically gonna have to be unanimous minus one uh so i guess from my standpoint if we want to put that guardrail on which i agree with i would do a three-quarter majority as a

[184:01] suggestion between unanimous and six-person or two-thirds um i think we have to be real careful with this one i agree with bob in the following sense he did an interesting thought experiment about what is it we couldn't do in the flood or what is it that we couldn't do this year for the respective crises that we've had i think one of the the temptations that we would a council in that situation um would find themselves in is to undedicate dedicated funds okay so i think one of the justifications i heard for the emergency powers would be to be able to undedicate funds like open space and transportation and the library and everything just magically goes into the big collective pot outside of utilities and then the council could then decide along with staff how to allocate the monies that were dedicated for open space in the charter and then we would

[185:01] come back and say oh we need the emergency powers we're going to redo it um as far as the dedicated funds go i think if we want to un-dedicate funds we need to un-dedicate funds and it shouldn't be part of emergency powers you know i think if we can convince voters it's a bad idea and you know we don't want you knowing for sure that what you vote on in a particular ballot initiative is binding throughout the the terms of the tax you just approved that's fine but i don't think we should do that part through emergency powers so i'm just saying that for me an important guardrail would be that the emergency powers don't let a future council raid the piggy bank of any dedicated funds that are out there i know that lots of people hate dedicated funds and that's fine that's an argument that could be had on its own merits but i'd like it not to be part of emergency measures i'm going to point

[186:00] out a bit of trivia here somewhere in the charter as i was reading it in the last few days it says that the mayor can council can designate the mayor to take command of the police force from the city manager in an emergency i think that's a terrible idea speaking as a mayor and i as we go through whatever we do for emergency i would also like us to review what's in there right now in the charter and make sure that we don't have any emergency provisions that we don't think should remain in there and then you know finally i think this one is good to pass now or at least put on the ballot now because we're thinking about it real time we're having to deal with this issue so you know the water thing as tom says i think we've come up with a workaround for that um but keep in mind that people are accumulating debt so nobody's getting free water we're just not making them pay when they may not have money but that bill will

[187:00] come due so i don't know if free water means that they don't have to pay for a period which is one way that water is free but they owe the money um or if we're intending to just give people water i think the reason that that's probably in the charter is there are probably fights about that like there's always fights about water in the west so i would support moving forward with an emergency um measure to go in the charter but i think like mark i find this very consequential i think we have to be really careful about how we go about it next i have aaron and then rachel aaron you're on mute there i go again and i never do that really i never do that okay so um really quickly uh sam i thought those were great points um and i i was gonna go to the seven uh

[188:01] person majority as well so i think doing three quarters doing it as a three-quarters vote would make sense um and i thought junie's points were great about that we're we're dealing with we'd be granting future councils the ability to have some flexibility to deal with unforeseen um things that we're not we're not sure what they are right who i don't think we would have anyway so um can i just ask one separate question while we're talking about ballot measures um in terms of dedicated funds jane or somebody else have we at all considered like that we might need to or want to do like a a one-year pause on on on some dedicated funds like consider putting on the ballot something that would um give us a little bit more flexibility for a short period of time to weather this financial crisis so the financial strategy committee um discussed this very briefly i think at their last meeting

[189:01] and my memory is that they were not going to bring it forward and there i think there's further sort of thinking behind the scenes about whether it's appropriate or not to do that so it's actually kind of a discussion that maybe council might want to have i'm going to just say my personal view which is that only undedicating funds for a short period of time is probably not going to be as effective as we would want it to be and i i believe that our residents voted for dedicated funds for a good reason and so it might be a difficult position to put the council in to say let's un-dedicate funds for um such a short period i i

[190:01] don't know it really is a political question for the council to take up okay thanks for that and i don't want to start a big debate over this tonight i guess i would just say that it would be useful to know if the financial analysis by the staff felt like they were falling into a crater and that would be a rope to get us from prevent that from happening so not that we would do it but just it would be helpful to know okay thank you thank you aaron so rachel mark and bob rachel europe real quick i like your 75 idea that sounds like a good compromise and then in terms of um the guardrail around a state of emergency i'd be cautious about tying it to a nationally declared state of emergency because i don't know that that would cover things like the flood that we had in 2013 so i would hope that there's a more local emergency option um i would think the state of cal i just don't know how that works but the state of colorado i assume declared a state of emergency during the 2013

[191:01] flood and the federal government did not um so whatever we need to do to tie it to two localized emergencies that would be a legitimate outside of boulder city council declaring something is what i would hope it was tethered to great and i'm going to call agree on that rachel i meant to bring that up thank you that's a very good point i believe that when the state does disaster declarations like for the 2013 floods it does it by counting and so i would just ask that staff take a look at that and to mary's point about you know it needs to be in the context of a larger emergency um i would i would support if the state declares an emergency in baltimore county that we would then be able to proceed with the emergency measures plus any other requirements that might be there so i agree with what rachel just said that maybe it doesn't need to be national but if maybe we can have this kick in if the state

[192:01] declares an emergency in baltimore county and we're affected then maybe that's a trigger then next i have mark and bob um just one comment uh about what jane said it's my recollection or it's not my recollection that the financial strategies committee had rejected the concept of unde dedicating funds for a small period of time it's that we simply had not fully gone through the analysis and it's probably something we ought to do but i do not recall that we as a group say we don't pursue that particular alternative i also want to weigh in on what rachel and sam said a uh a local emergency can be as valid an emergency as a national one and we need to have the flexibility to take advantage of something that you know a more local declaration and be able to act

[193:00] accordingly i may be misremembered i know we talked about it but your memory is probably better than mine mark about that don't count on that no and uh and um i remember when jane brought it up i did remember having that conversation but i also remembered um when mark you brought it up that we didn't really come to a conclusion and what it was was a short discussion under the the financial sustainability piece of it and what things can we do to make our um finances more sustainable and there's the whole do we do different kinds of taxes and we had a conversation about head taxes um and then we did we you know undedicate funds but that was the extent of the conversation

[194:02] there's more work to be done for sure great thank you all bob you're next yeah um well sounds like there's maybe a majority for going forward here i'm still opposed i would just observe for those of you who do want to go forward that the the two exceptions that have been teed up cannot possibly be the limit of the exceptions i just went through the charter really really quick there's hundreds of provisions in the charter literally hundreds there's 13 articles and each one has dozens of provisions in it and i'll give you some examples of some of the things we'd be able to suspend unless we have an exception for them we would be able to change the term of council members we'd be able to suspend elections we'd be able to enter into franchises or terminate franchises we'd be able to abolish boards and commissions we'd be able to suspend um article 13 uh relating to human rights and we would even actually could even change the name of the city

[195:00] because that's an article one and we could change the name of the city because um that's would be within our power so i would suggest that if you're going to go down this path you're going to have lists of dozens and dozens and dozens of exceptions with where it's going to say we can we can change the charter except for the following dozens of things and so i think your list is going to be super super long so rather than trying to um give us blanket authority to suspend the charter whether it's on seven votes or some other number and then having lists of dozens of things that we can't change because we don't want to give ourselves that much power i suggest we tackle the problems that we do have rather than tapping all the problems and then trying to accept out the list because i think if you go and read through the charter you're going to find there's lots and lots of stuff in the charter that our voters are not going to allow us uh even an emergency suspend so that's that's my final piece on this i i continue to be opposed i'm mark bob i have a different view which is not that we would grant

[196:01] generalized power to suspend the charter with exceptions where we can't but to have a very narrow and limited group of of items where we could and specifically enumerate those and circumscribe them so that everybody understands exactly what the nature of that emergency power is how long it can be exercised and what are the conditions under which it can be exercised um and and so i would take it differently i would start from the particular and not deal with the general at all so i'm going to jump in here i agree with mark 100 i think this should be a set of powers that are enumerated as mark said that that council can affect um and they need to be things which would have an impact on an emergency and i think going through the exercise having staff go through the exercise of what powers that are granted by the charter could be things that council

[197:01] would have more flexibility if they could alter so there's certain provisions which are in the charter that are restricted that staff can point to that could have an implication during the flood a pandemic fire a nuclear war you know you name the things that were you know the half dozen things that we might have to cope with that are major um what elements of the charter if suspended would give council on the city manager the wherewithal to get done what needed done so i'm not sure i would vote to put this on the ballot yet because i don't know what it's going to say but i agree that if it's going to be something that i could support it's going to have to enumerate particular powers of counsel and not just say that council can suspend with a vote of 7 every provision in the charter so i see no more hands i think the question before us on this issue is do we want to move forward

[198:01] with the ability for council to waive some or all charter requirements during an emergency so i just like a show of hands for who'd like staff to do more work on this and i'm sure we'll have more conversations so i'm going to support it i think we've got everyone except for bob so i think that's eight people who want to move forward so let's move forward with it tom and kathy do you have what you need from council as far as where the areas of concern are with this one yes um i do it i think you'll probably be getting several options for this since uh but you've given us a lot of material that's really helpful okay could we have a quick discussion about or maybe show hands about whether um whether the other council members agree with what you and mark said rather than a waiver of all provisions except those enumerated that we would only be able to affect those things or enumerate because

[199:00] it's a i want to be sensitive to staff because that's those are two different completely different work work streams and if staff is going to be preparing a list of things that we could waive that's a different exercise than a list of things we couldn't wave so i guess the question is does the rest of council agree with mark and sam on that point great so i i'm going to put a pause on that and we'll come back to that rachel has her hand up go ahead rachel well it was on that i was just going to respond to bob i think i would need to know what what we're looking at because i think it's got to be broad enough to include these emergencies that we cannot see you know is it is it possible that there could be some way that changing the name of our city would respond to a crisis i can't imagine it like i guess if if there was like an alien invasion and they were targeting cities named boulder then you would change the name of the city right so maybe that's an option seems very far-fetched um but

[200:01] i don't know that i want to limit us to we have no idea what we're looking at so i'd be really curious what the what these lists look like because it's kind of pointless if we think we know we're responding to the emergencies that we had today and six years ago but we don't i don't know i it's got to be broad enough to be helpful thank you rachel the journalists in the audience thank you as well aaron yeah i agree with rachel there the way that i would approach this would be to have uh real strict time limits around any actions that were taken rather than to circumscribe it um because i think you could have a crisis in the future that we can't even imagine and you're not sure what would come in handy and be necessary okay so i think we have a bifurcation here that bob has pointed out which is

[201:00] um do we want staff to approach this as enumerating specific areas of the charter that could be suspended or changed or do we want council to make it general and try and put guard rails like aaron suggested with time so and i think that's a fundamental bifurcation um hang on i'm going to check my chat box here briefly to see oh kathy you had at one point raised your hand have you had a chance to say what you're going to say i think we're fine you've given enough guidance i was thinking of the elections issue that if this pandemic would have happened at a different time that nationally elections may have been changed and as one of the enumerated items i see okay so i think we're going to go enumerated versus non-enumerated because i think that's a as bob said that's a totally different set of tasks for staff to do so one is a general provisions

[202:00] saying council can suspend any any of the provisions of the charter but there's some other guardrails and i don't know what those are things you can't suspend the time limits and so on another approach to this is what mark had suggested which is enumerate specifically the areas of charter that could be suspended or altered during an emergency so we'll call one card blush which is guardrails on being able to suspend anything another one is enumerated areas of the charter that could be affected by an emergency declaration so just for straw poll two leans more towards the first one which is not enumerated specifically but a general emergency power of charter of council rather to suspend charter provisions in an emergency who favors that is the going in approach i see rachel's stand up aaron's hand up junior's hand up

[203:01] so i see three if this is to go forward who would prefer that we enumerate the specific areas of charter that could be suspended in an emergency so i see one two three four five six so i think it's pretty clear that a majority would like to go with enumerated so that's just instruction to staff when you're putting the options together i think it's more like look at which areas could council modify or suspend and i have hands up here i've got aaron no aaron's no longer okay so i think we've given clear direction on this one to move forward with options around emergency powers of council to suspend the charter but only specific areas within the charter is that clear to staff yes thank you okay good enough so i think we're through

[204:02] what has been brought forward cheryl i noticed that you have more slides in the deck um yeah just sure just a couple more um quick i'll go quickly so when we look at other tax or other ballot items that could potentially be put on the ballot like i mentioned before staff is not recommending any items typically these are financial in nature um they could be something else too depending on what we are working on at the time but just a reminder about our sales tax and property tax our current rates and what additional revenue would come if if rates were to be increased or decreased and looking ahead uh to the next several years for our expiring taxes

[205:00] we have next year our community culture and safety tax is going to be expiring and then in 2022 the utility occupation tax for both uh energy strategy and the general fund followed shortly afterwards in march of 23 the the climate action tax and then in december of 24 there's a 0.15 general fund tax so that's it for actually quite a while of taxes expiring [Music] and then this is just kind of a catch-all question if there's any other issues other than what tom will be discussing next that you would like to consider uh bringing forward for the 2020 ballot okay so i will jump in there and say the answer is yes on my part do you want to continue with the last two timelines sure and then come back to that sounds good so as tom discussed june in july is the

[206:02] time period that he and his team will go back and draft potential ballot items there are times that he'll come back to you before the break if it's it's a simpler issue perhaps the arts commission i don't want to speak for tom but that does occur but typically he will come back end of july early august we do have three meetings starting in august that we can discuss the ballot items including any needed public hearings and then the final meeting that we could use to discuss ballot items is september first after that it's it's really too late the clerk needs to submit by the end of that week to have these items placed on the november ballot that's what i have thank you great thank you cheryl this was a really well organized presentation helped us walk through the issues so the the remaining question before us

[207:01] is are there any other ballot items that we would like to talk about um i previewed that i'm interested in hearing from tom and staff about potential conflicts between the state rules governing land signatures to on a petition to change the charter need to be turned in versus our bolder charter rules about when such signatures need to be turned in we've had a few members of the public raise this for us and tom i think you've been giving advice to um the groups carrying petitions right now that if it's a charter amendment they'd be safer getting it in earlier per the state deadline but it's possible that we would accept them through our charter deadline so do you want to speak about that a bit sure sam i have a presentation if you want to move on to the next item so the next item i believe correct me if

[208:01] i'm wrong the next item is the um the governor's order is that right i rolled it all in together sam perfect yeah if you want to start with your presentation i think that'd be helpful great thank you there it is [Music] all right take a second for me to advance it there it goes this is just a brief overview of governor paul's order uh it applies only to state initiatives i saw an email over the weekend that said that my memo wasn't clear i read the memo i have two sentences in there that says it only applies to state of initiatives it doesn't apply to this foreign issue [Music] secondly it suspends some of the following provisions as applicable estate missions provisions related to the form of the initiatives the six-month filing requirement and requirement for signing in the signature in the circulator's presence it extends

[209:02] the deadline for submission and then it requires the secretary of state to issue rules my original charge was to describe those rules those roles have not been published yet i'm not aware of when they'll be published but we have not seen them so i do not know what the secretary of state is going to do in terms of work of allowing email or mail signatures so that's my overview of governor polos's order which is in effect but has to be implemented through secretary of state's rules which are not out yet so i wanted to turn to some of the comments that we've seen basically from one person i've seen them from but uh i kind of want to go over where the city's power come from and and it's the extent that there's a conflict how it arises um so article uh 20 section six of the constitution is part of the home rule provisions of the charter of the constitution and you can see it it gives the home rule cities the power to amend and replace the charter provisions it says that

[210:01] chartered ordinances may pursuant to you to supersede within the territorial limits of the restrictions of any law or state in conflict there with so so for on matters of local concern city law overcomes state law and it also says all matters pertaining to municipal elections in such city or town um and submitted on the charter are matters of local concern so uh elections are defined in the constitution as matters of local concern so going on i got an email over the weekend that said section 9 supersedes section 6. that's not true the language in section 9 that the person was relying on says notwithstanding any provision of section 4 5 and 6 of the of this article to the contrary the registered electors of any of each city and county city in town of this state are hereby invested with the power to adopt amen and repeal a home rule charter this section supports the language in section six

[211:00] giving home rural cities the ability to determine how their charters are remembered are amended there's also a provision in section nine that says the general assembly shall provide by statute procedures under which the registered electors of any proposed or existing city or county city or town may adopt amend and repeal a municipal homeworld now notice the constitution uses the word may and not shall the state law is intended as guidance um section 31-1-102 which is at the beginning of title 31 which governs which is all the municipal provisions in the constitution in the state code it is the intent of the general assembly that the provisions of this title shall apply to whole new municipalities except in so far is superseded by charter or ordinance past pursuant to such charter so what the state was saying when they adopted those provisions which are in title 31 section 2

[212:00] article 2 is that you can use these if you don't have anything yourself the fact is the city has some things ourselves we still have some level of confusion however because there's a question of what governs what in our charter the charter was amended in 2017 to clear all this up and then the same person who is raising questions now advocated for the council to undo the changes that have been made by the voters in 2017 and we had another election in 2018 to revise the charter again and put in these provisions which now are being suggested are ambiguous um i don't know that they are but let me go through them so charter section we're going to start with starter section 37 which i don't have listed here charter section 37 says that uh initiative petitions and charter amendments shall be called initiatives throughout the charter so anytime the work the charter uses the word initiatives it includes both people's ordinances and charter amendments

[213:01] they're not separated in the charter and charter section 37 says that expressly they are treated the same all right so for initiative positions charter section 38 says 10 of the average of the last two municipal elections charter amendments the staff has decided on our own to rely on state law to use five percent of the registered voters we could have said rely on the charter but we didn't we gave guidance early on that five percent of the registered voter was required an issue came up about a provision in state law that requires double the number of signatures if you want a special election the argument was well then you need double the number of signatures to make a charter a minimum because this is a special municipal election year the charter our charter uses special election to mean an election held other than in november it uses special municipal election to meet elections that are not the municipal election held in odd-numbered years

[214:01] there's a distinction there we used to have a provision in the charter that allowed petitioners to force the council to have a special election other than in november by getting more signatures the voters removed that provision in 2017. what the argument that's being made is that we should reinstate it but reinstate it as to even year elections even elections and even years which was never the intent and doesn't comport with charter language tom canada briefly with the question um your second bullet you said that staff chose to use the requirements of the colorado or by statutes to advise people they would only need five percent of the registered voters rather than 10 of the average of the last two municipal elections so why did staff choose the crs rather than the older charter i'm not sure steve i'm not sure uh sam the the

[215:00] we we probably should have used the the charter provision but we decided for some reason to use the provision in state law i think there was an argument at the time the actually five percent of the registered voters is a slightly bigger by about six seven hundred signatures than the ten percent of the average the last two municipal elections so this actually poses a higher requirement our general policy is to make it easier for initial gatherers but this is what we've told them and my strong recommendation is that council not change the rules midstream that we establish the rules by uh with a memo from the clerk at the beginning of the election cycle and we should really stick with that interpretation if council wants to clean these things up we should do it but do it for the next election not for this one okay thank you deadlines initiative petitions are due 150 days before the election that's charter section 89. charter amendments again we gave the advice that they would

[216:00] do 90 days before the election this is based on crs section 312-222 we could have said 150 days before the election we didn't and people have relied on that to their attachment so again i wouldn't recommend changing we could clarify that that charter amendments are governed as the charter says by the charter provisions by nothing else um the charter provides the petition signature gathers shall have 180 days to gather signatures that's also in charter section 39 state law limits charter amendments to gathering for 90 days after the statement of intent is filed we could have applied that we chose not to and we advised the uh the committees that they had 180 days to gather signatures and that therefore they would the other deadlines would apply okay so help me out tom i'm just trying to track yeah so why is it that you were picking and

[217:00] choosing or staff whoever did this with picking and choosing between charter section 39 which is 150 days before the election they're due and crs so again i'm trying to figure out if your argument is if i followed correctly that the charter trumps the state for home rule cities and we've been you know we're not silent on these issues in the charter we're actually stating deadlines and and petition signature amounts then how come we're toggling back and forth between the charter requirement and the crs yeah i i sam i don't think we should have done that but that's what we did okay so is it the case that going forward if we give staff directions to use the charter as the only document that we're you know following and that we believe the justification for that is everything that you put at the beginning of the presentation which is homeworld charters have the ability

[218:02] to set these things and we've done charter cleanups twice in the last you know in 17 and 18. then can't we just from here on out give instructions to petition committees that the charter is the governing document and only numbers we give them signatures and deadlines are what is in the charter if we did that do you feel like we'd be protected under our standing as a home rule city absolutely you need to amend the charter you could have been in the charter to make it that absolutely clear but for the way i read the charter it's clear okay so i'll take that under advisement but this seems to be what we're looking at now is the the point of contention the 90 days before election 150 days before the election that was some guidance that staff was giving to the groups that are organizing around amendments whether the ordinances whether they're charter these were

[219:00] staff recommendations and so one thing we need to get crystal clear on is what the staff should recommend the second question then is do we need to make it more crystal clear and charter yes and i should add that those are published on our website there are documents that you can go to that say guidelines for initiative petitions or guidelines for charter amendments that were published months ago so they were published months ago did they have were they picking and choosing between the charter and the crs deadlines yes okay thank you at least for charter amendments for non-charter petition they they're pretty consistent with the charter great and i just want to check in i've got two hands raised mary and mark you guys have questions about where we are in the process so mary yes um so tom my question is um you're saying that we can or sam's suggestion was that council give direction to follow the charter yes and

[220:01] i would presume that in order to do so you would then add those to the council rules is that where that would go not necessarily i mean we could put in an ordinance um i think that we've all learned a lot through this process this is the first time we've really had to apply these charter changes and it's been a kind of a trying circumstance i think that we just changed the guidance that comes from the clerk's office but if you wanted to be absolutely certain we could put it in an ordinance because the method through which council interprets the charter um well it seems to me that if there's any potential for there's obviously potential for toggling back and forth between the crs and the charter and in order to clarify that it seems to me like we either do it one of three ways is we change the charter we do it by ordinance or we change the guidance that the city

[221:01] clerk's office provides um and i would think that um the the the two former ones and this is to my colleagues i would think that the either changing the charter or putting in an ordinance would provide more crystal clear clarification than um the situation that we have at hand which is we're going to have a change in city clerks and so just by virtue of a change in city clerks the guidance could change through interpretation so the toggling could happen again so it seems to me we either change the charter or we do it by ordinance clarify one thing so one of the things that one advocate has said is that we should follow state law for charter amendments and not have it in the charter you could do that too that in my view would require a charter amendment but it's a relative if council

[222:01] chose to say just rely on state law for charter amendments that's something you could do as well married are you done i am done great thanks um mark and then rachel in the nearby quick question tom is there a legal jeopardy to any of the actions taken by staff to make a selection or does sam says toggle between uh state and charter provisions in a discretionary fashion i think there would be more risk if we changed our advice after people relied on it i'm not suggesting we we should do that i'm just asking if somebody got it in their head that they wanted to move well yeah we've been sued before over uh initiative things they they often they're often very contentious i think we're on pretty strong ground with what we've done and we can articulate a rational basis for doing it it doesn't mean someone won't sue us

[223:01] i got rachel i'm nearby rachel this is kind of a broader question for tom and maybe doesn't need to be answered tonight but um are our charter and procedures sound like a pain in the butt to me and difficult to understand for a lot of people and i don't know how we got here or what the um yeah the genesis is for for the convoluted situation that we're in but i wonder is there are there specific things that are really helpful to community members that we have under our home rule for elections that we would want to salvage and keep and then as you suggested i think just revert to state law for some things such as charter amendments and is that you know do we want to look a little broader because this is all it all sounds um maybe more convoluted than it needs to be so i wonder what's in it for for bolder community members especially

[224:00] bearing in mind that usually people who are direct petitioning are trying to enact something that is you know not necessarily the will of the majority of council and that's the benefit of direct democracy and so how how arcane do we need to make it do you need to be a lawyer to be able to decipher some of these things well you know one of the things i've talked about is the guidance that the clerk gives to the community those are i i think those documents are pretty good and they break it down step by step so you don't have to figure out go to the charter and figure out what the rules are we tell you what the rules are and so doing that is helpful i wasn't suggesting that we rely on state law i don't think that's a good idea i think that how we do this in boulder is important to boulder and that the state has to deal with all sorts of cities of all sorts of sizes throughout the state and so a lot of their guidance is really intended for much smaller

[225:00] cities than boulder we have a very sophisticated electorate here uh and i think that it's important for us to exercise our home rule authority so i would not recommend relying on state law that's an option if that's something that you want and there is one very vocal person in the community who suggests that what that's what we should do in all cases but i leave it up to you which way you want to go i didn't mean for all cases i just not like are there are there you know maintaining home rule are there certain things that you would say and then can you default to state law for i thought you were suggesting charter amendments no that's possible but i wouldn't recommend i think if in my perfect world we relied on the charter for everything and it was absolutely clear that we were doing that um as you know rachel um charter amendments and initiative petitions are inherently political um and they tend to be hotly contested

[226:00] uh from the very outset so having clear rules is really important and um i hate for staff to be in the position of having to favor one side over the other in an initiative process we try to stay absolutely neutral because that's our job so the clearer the rules the better for me and relying on our charter rather than state law gives us control over what the rules say and how clear they are nearby so tom to kind of colloquy off all this um you kind of just answered part of my question was saying that you think we should stick to the charter on this but i guess i was of the mind of switching over the one section where we seem to be having this issue from the resident um talking about the days from when the petition is set to when uh they have to turn it in or when the petition's initiated when they have to turn it in

[227:00] and have that match state law because to me that's a pretty clear guideline no matter what it doesn't leave any areas for any gray areas i guess and so is if we did just that section and matched our charter to state law and that would you support that and if not it's not for me to support or not i mean the the discussion there would be you're cutting down the number of days people have to gather signatures and you're encouraging people to wait it's generally in our interest to have people get these things out there early so we can work on them if you look at the example of two charter amendments we have before us this would tend to punish the bedrooms or for people folks who got theirs out way early and encouraged the mayoral deluxe mayoral election folks who got theirs out late because they would have different deadlines and one would be much earlier than the other so it would be your choice if you wanted to

[228:01] go with state law on that i i'm not sure i understand why the state did that um our charter has always said you have six months to gather signatures and so um cutting it to three is a material change for folks so i we we could certainly draft something like that if council is interested i i just encourage you to think about the implications of doing that okay so that i mean i understand the logic there so ours is much more lenient um i get i guess i'm just confused then why i guess the problem is is being you know on the charter committee having you say one side and then getting so many emails stating that the other side and that the charter doesn't support it not it's just going back and forth and so being on a council you know and not having a law degree this is getting really really confusing to be honest so i i'll just i guess i don't know if the rest of council received as much as the chartered community received and whatnot but it would be very nice to get this figured out because there's a lot to deal with

[229:00] so i i can't discourage people from contacting the council that's their role um the person who's advocating is an advocate against the current petitions and all of his opinions would either shorten the petition time or increase the number of signatures and that's fine those are those are fair also he's not a lawyer i am and i try to stay neutral on these things i'm not trying to help or support or hurt anyone just trying to get this as as right as we can so um i don't believe that there is confusion i believe that for reasons of opposing the substance of the measures a person is raising potential conflicts that don't exist and i've tried to explain why they don't exist by going through the law that's all i can do i got several over the memorial day weekend to look at which didn't make a lot of sense to me but again it's his right to advocate for his

[230:01] positions and that's what he's doing we've got mary and aaron and then i'm going to jump in after aaron so mary so um thank you for that tom um what i'm recognizing here is that um there don't appear to be conflicts but there do appear to be choices so i think what we need to do is clarify or codify the choice so that it's always the same choice and my um i would lean more towards an ordinance because we just previously had a whole discussion about providing flexibility in the charter and instead of codifying it in the charter we could put it in an ordinance that could if we needed to modify it could be modified so that's my suggestion is to

[231:02] not put it on the ballot but clarify it via an ordinance are you married we've got aaron and then me and then adam yeah well if i can just ask council like are we what are we considering doing with this like tom i appreciate the presentation this i agree with nearby this is tough to sort through as a non-lawyer but is anyone proposing that we reverse the guidance that staff has been giving this year i haven't heard anyone say that here okay great because i would just want to get that clear so i'm glad to hear that so we're really talking about how do we want to make sure that there's 100 clarity for future years is that really what's in front of us that's what i was bringing forward when i suggested this it's about we don't want to have this discussion during the first year that we have electronic signature gathering we want to be crystal clear when we have that occurred

[232:00] got it well i um i you know tom's recommendations and and mary's way of implementing them made sense to me thanks thank you um so i'd be okay with an ordinance here um i'm not sure one's needed but i would appreciate the clarification of having it you know said out loud in a vote of counsel you know i believe that tom is probably right in that [Music] the charter can take precedence i'm not sure why it just doesn't take precedence by being the charter in the home rural city i think that would normally be where you would look for the rules of ordinances and charter changes um that that can be put on the ballot by petition but if we did an ordinance it would both be flexible and it would state specifically what we want to happen which is the deadlines for referred ordinances

[233:00] people's ordinances and the deadline for charter changes are specified in the charter and our ordinance will say the city clerk should use the deadlines and the signature thresholds found in the charter um and then we've said it twice you know we've said we've got legal advice legal advice said this we made changes in 2018 to the charter to implement them and we're going to say in an ordinance the clerk should use those changes that are in the charter if there's a legal challenge then i think the intent of voters in the council is super clear about what we wanted for our deadlines and thresholds if in fact the state rule overrules what's in the charter that would be a pretty heavy lift for somebody making that lawsuit and if they win it will be super clear what the rules are um as to which applies i think tom's made a convincing

[234:01] argument that home rule allows us to set our election rules and we just need to be super clear so that when there's the next transition of the clerk's office that council has said this is the way the clerk should should handle what's in the charter versus what's in the crs adam thanks for that sam that was i think that summed up a whole lot really well um i just wanted to give one more point to recognize that i i do have a major concern for one of the ballot initiatives um the charter amendment ones specifically that they could run into the possibility of having a lawsuit on their hands and then all their work could be for naught so um i have a personal concern just that you know they might want to follow the the worst case scenario for them um because i would hate to see that happen and that would suck a whole lot to try to gather all those signatures

[235:01] especially in these times and then have it all thrown away essentially so just wanted to bring up that last point okay so i'm going to interpret that adam as we don't want to change the rules for this election midstream so the clerk has already given recommendations whether they would be what we would do if we were looking at this ahead of time or not is kind of a moot point because the the petitioners were told something and i think we should stick to that what they were told and if they end up in the lawsuit afterwards you know that will be what it will be but i don't think we should change the rules mid-stream for those petitioners so um tom is that enough do you would you prefer or i mean would you agree that ordinance is okay yeah that's great and i i i think that's wonderful we'll get something drafted and get it get it

[236:01] scheduled for first reading as soon as possible okay does council agree with that if we go forward as mary suggested with an ordinance clarifying this that what's in charter is what we're going to follow up if there's anybody who doesn't like it please speak up okay very good and tom i think you've got unanimous direction to create an ordinance that explicitly states that the charter requirements both in deadlines and in signature thresholds are what the clerk is to follow and then i've got bob's hand yeah i support this too i the only thing i would suggest is is that because there's a timeliness to this and people are looking for direction that we pass it on emergency rather than do a first reading and then two weeks later a second reading we just passed it out of emergency next week and be done with it well we're really thinking about having it applied to the next election correct oh okay okay this is all this is all about next year as far as i'm gonna get it okay that's fine then you take the time to

[237:02] sort of think about this so since you have that time got it okay thanks so bob had asked me one other question and that is whether or not it's legal for the uh for the mayoral election to be in an even-numbered year and there is a provision in the the colorado revised statute that sort of seems to say that municipal elections are always odd-numbered years that was added when some towns had elections in april that conflicted with uh tabor which requires that all tabor elections be in november so they clarified that uh again the section that leads in title 31 31 102 that says that these these rules apply to except to the extent that your charter says something different i believe that you could amend our charter to have the mayor directly elected in even numbered years so i think that would be consistent with uh state with the with the as i view home rule thanks for answering the question tom thank you bob okay very good um so tom it sounds like you've got enough

[238:01] direction on this particular one do any other council members have other issues that you'd like to bring up for this election okay i see no one so it looks like we're moving forward with three of them if i followed correctly the arts commission one is going to move forward [Music] the emergency powers is going to move forward enumerating them and then the um ordinance that specifies that we're going to use the thresholds and the dates in the charter for our elections is going to move forward so i count three is that right yes okay consider we'll consider that the summary um bob your hand's still up but i assume you said what you were going to say already no i have something new okay i just want to observe we talked about two ballot measures which is fine i just want to remind everyone that there's a

[239:00] possibility of a third ballot measure and that is if we um strike an arrangement with xcel energy um that includes a franchise agreement that franchise would have to be voted on by the people we don't know if that's going to be the case yet or not but i just want to make sure that people have that on their radar that that would be something that would be brought forward and potentially discussed in july and august okay thank you bob that's true i'm just going to point out if it's okay to make a mild amendment that that would be the fourth issue because we're going to do arts we're going to do emergency powers we haven't decided yet and then we're going to do the ordinance which i guess we don't need to refer you're right i take it back so we're taking three actions one of them won't go to the ballot and so you're right the excel could be the third one okay thank you for that sam there's also as you know the possibility for council to choose to put a competing measure on if anything qualifies for the ballot so we'll keep you apprised of that and if council members want to consider what what they might want to do

[240:00] you can always do that you can put a conflicting measure on yourself okay very good anything else on the subject rachel yeah i'll just mention i think we had discussed that um we would be open to discussing with the petitioners i don't know was it july or august whether we wanted to um if people don't get signatures promote any of their issues to the ballot i believe we kind of settled on leaving that open so possibly up to four in addition i didn't see support for that but we can always bring it up later um i thought we had had that discussion once before but we can always bring it up again i'll i'll just mention that i think there were there was there may have been majority support for that idea i don't think we ever worked through that specifically okay well why don't we wait and see where things end up before we take that out okay

[241:00] very good thank you for the presentation um tom and cheryl and i think um with that debbie we're on to the next item tonight is the criminal justice update [Music] all right so i i just want to introduce this very quickly uh we have judge cook sandra yanus and chris reynolds uh to make the presentation this is something we've been trying to schedule in front of council since i believe last summer uh there's there's some really exciting things going on in the municipal court about how we handle criminal justice issues this is particularly important now since we have very limited resources in terms of actual incarceration in fact we don't have any so these folks have been doing really great work and so i'm going to turn it over to uh linda i think who's going to lead it off and then sandra and chris linda

[242:01] thank you i'm unmuted let me just see if i have yes i can start my own video hello everybody thank you for um allowing us a little bit of time to speak here if you could go to the next slide chris please i've been here on multiple occasions and usually in the context of quarterly updates and i did one early this year talking about an overview of the municipal court its role in city government and some of our information about our work with defendants experiencing homelessness but tonight we really want to be able to highlight the great work that the prosecution staff is doing in partnership with the court and um in the context of what the court is doing so you can see here these are the key criminal justice system components that um inform our work next slide please and to uh take it down a level these are some of

[243:00] the key individuals who are involved in the municipal court initiatives and their roles i have i can't say enough about having homeless navigators and that has made our work so much more robust and given us so many more tools than we had previously and this is a really unique model nationally so i think it's something that we should all be proud of next slide please so this is an overview um there's some years back i began recognizing that our offenders experiencing homelessness didn't have the capacity to access housing or in other ways improve their situations without someone to assist them in navigating the various hurdles involved in collecting documentation applying for housing even just experi even just accessing some um homeless services like medical care so in early um 2014 we added capacity to begin addressing that service gap

[244:02] and i began using sentencing as a tool in a very small way to um to engage homeless defendants we were able to ramp that up really for the first time in summer of 2015 when we had a law school intern who worked as our homeless navigator pilot and that uh really cleared the way for us to convert a probation um position to a full-time homeless navigator position and from there everything is sort of ensued as you see from june um of 2016. to the present where we now have two full-time navigators thank you for going to the next slide that's fine when we added that um navigation capacity i began imposing sentences that i then suspended on the condition that somebody do something that was going to be helpful um for them in this journey whether it was applying for an id card with um the

[245:01] dmv office of social security card and so forth there's a whole bunch of things that we can do um so that so they're doing that um item instead of actually doing the community service so that how the offender is held accountable by doing one of these tasks and if any of you um has i mean we've all we've all heard stories about the dmv right and how difficult it can be to navigate some of the bureaucracies there if you can imagine on top of that being homeless and not having the right documentation and being rejected and so forth these are not simple things that we're asking them to do these are pretty arduous and are not um are not a light or an easy way off as opposed to doing community service so um having the uh homeless navigator on board has really helped us in getting that done because now we have the people who can actually help

[246:02] people navigate those bureaucracies and assist them as they obtain these various things and the homeless outreach team i can't um emphasize enough is also a huge partner in this because they are often as officer paddock likes to say our black and white taxi they're they're involved in helping with the transportation piece um with finding the person out on the streets in their normal location so that we can keep that appointment at one of those offices and so forth next slide and i'm going to turn it over to sandra and then chris evening council sandra yaz here as you may know the city attorney's office is comprised of a total of 15 attorneys and 12 support staff i supervise an outstanding team of three city prosecutors and one legal secretary the city prosecutor's offices are located in the justice center

[247:00] these city attorneys have jurisdiction to prosecute any violations in the boulder municipal code in municipal to my recollection this is the first time that we have had the privilege of presenting you with information on the great work that is being done from a prosecutorial perspective and the great relationship of collaboration and respect that we share with the municipal court we are here prosecutors legal support to many departments and partner agencies such as the boulder police department university of colorado police department open space rangers code enforcement and beverage licensing authority prosecutors provide regular briefing updates to officers on municipal violation matters as well as officer training for new recruits a portion such as animal cases code enforcement or

[248:00] homeless issues while all play an important role chris reynolds is the lead attorney for matters relating to defendants experiencing homelessness you will hear more from him about these connections new relationships with community partners and and an innovative pilot program he created involving warrant clustering next slide please all right here we go sorry i lost track here all right so common types of municipal court cases some examples include parking traffic including photo red light voter radar animal violations that include dog at large a breast of animal civil code violations such as the bear trash ordinance short-term rentals and

[249:00] sidewalk clearing of snow violations we also have quality of life violations mostly committed by young adults which would include minor in possession of alcohol or marijuana consumption of alcohol in public noise violations missed party fraudulent id and other quality of life violations mostly committed by individuals experiencing homelessness such as trespass camping smoking in public position of alcohol or marijuana in public and then of course we have various other misdemeanor offenses such as brawling harassment and third-degree assault general offenses carry a maximum fine of a thousand dollars and or a maximum 90 days jail there are three main groups of defendants that we generally see in municipal court the first group are young adults typically college students who are usually first-time offenders the second group are individuals

[250:01] experiencing homelessness and the rest are generally people that have never had any interaction with the court system next slide please our prosecution philosophy is to take a problem-solving approach this approach can be described as a proactive cooperation between a prosecutor's office and a committee and community representatives in an effort to target for prosecution those crimes and disorder issues that are greatest concern to the community key elements of this approach is the use of partnerships with a wide variety of government agencies and community-based groups and the use of various prevention intervention and enforcement methods on a very basic level this means the use of prosecutorial tools to address a person's underlying issues that result in criminal behavior with the ultimate

[251:00] goal of helping the individual and thereby reducing crime traditional prosecution on the other hand does not involve significant consultation and collaboration with other government agencies and limits its use of tools to jail and or fines well both problem solving and traditional prosecutorial models share the same goals of promoting fairness in the pursuit of justice holding offenders accountable and ensuring public safety by reducing and preventing crimes they achieve these goals using very different strategies even as far back as when i was a city prosecutor 18 years ago we have offered students an opportunity to keep their criminal records clean by offering a resolution to their criminal case that involves restorative excuse me it involves restorative justice a typical plea offer for first offense

[252:00] includes the opportunity to participate in the senior restorative justice program where the offender participates in a community meeting where volunteer community members are able to express how the offenders actions created a negative quality of life situation for their neighborhood with the goal of creating empathy remorse and understanding there is also a component of the offender providing some type of community service and if appropriate completing an alcohol class if the individual completes these conditions and has none of similar offenses for a determined period of time their charges get dismissed the goal is to stop the bad behavior by using more effective tools another problem solving prosecution tool is the use of mediation which is commonly used in resolving neighbor disputes in terms of homeless defendants for many years we have been collaborating and

[253:01] supporting the efforts of the boulder municipal court to better address the challenges of attaining successful long-term outcomes in the spring of 2019 we took a more focused approach to handling violations that involved these individuals each prosecutor was assigned an area of focus such as animal cases code enforcement or homeless offender issues while they all play an important role chris reynolds is the lead for matters relating to defendants experiencing homelessness since then he has established community connections forged alliances with community agencies to pool resources collected data and developed an innovative program involving warrant clustering he has done an amazing job i will now turn it over to chris so he can explain these efforts in more detail

[254:00] good evening council uh my name is chris reynolds if we could go to the next slide [Music] so i've been a prosecutor with the city of boulder for five years that i was a judge advocate in the united states marine corps where i was a prosecutor in a defense council tonight i'm going to talk about prosecuting individuals experiencing homelessness they represent a large percentage of the criminal cases that are filed in our court they have many challenging problems such as mental illness addiction and past trauma our philosophy in prosecuting individuals experiencing homelessness is to reduce their involvement in the criminal justice system and decrease recidivism there are some core principles that underlie this philosophy safety collaboration and harm reduction community safety means holding individuals accountable when they decide to hurt another person

[255:00] and adopt strategies to reduce the likelihood of further harm fortunately most of the crime committed by individuals experiencing homelessness is a risk to public safety more often individuals experiencing homelessness are being victims of violent crime themselves than perpetrating violent crime collaboration means partnering with key stakeholders to develop and implement strategies to solve challenging problems this includes collaborating with individuals who have experience of homelessness harm reduction is accepting poverty class racism social isolation past trauma sex-based discrimination and other social inequalities affect both people's vulnerability to and capacity for effectively addressing drug-related harm sometimes expecting somebody to completely change who they are can be

[256:01] unrealistic next slide so those are some general philosophies now what are the strategies that we use to implement this philosophy in collaboration with the municipal court we've developed relationships with organizations across boulder county who are involved in some capacity with the homeless services system conditions include the boulder county sheriff's office boulder county housing and human services community justice services mental health partners the boulder shelter for the homeless the bridge the people's clinic first presbyterian church the boulder entry council the public defender's office and the district attorney's office also we use the power of plea bargaining to complement existing efforts to house high utilizers my utilizers is a term that is used in this context sometimes and

[257:01] what a high utilizer is someone who has lots of contacts with the criminal justice system and frequently goes to jail or the emergency room or the detox center and so that's what we're talking about when we say we when we use the term high utilizer also we adapt to criminal justice reforms through innovation such as warrant clustering which i'll talk about a little bit later i want to i want to briefly mention a couple of organizations that i that i spoke about first is the boulder county re-entry council it's a group of criminal justice professionals who are dedicated to serving individuals who are re-entering our community from either the boulder county jail or the department of corrections with the aim that they re-enter the community safely and they have the support that they need and they don't commit more crime for the last year and a half i have served on the steering committee of the re-entry council

[258:00] the focus of this group is the the problem of the high utilizers how do we stop the cycle of homelessness jail detox center and emergency room the second group that i want to mention is the first presbyterian church which serves weekly meals to individuals experiencing homelessness through their lamb's ministry for the year and a half members of our office has been have been volunteering on thursday mornings that's when they serve their breakfast to cook breakfast and serve it to members of the homeless community the municipal court homeless navigator and the people's clinic also use this space for community engagement the people who tirelessly work to put on these meals week after week represent some of our communities quiet heroes they fill a critical need without asking for or receiving much credit for their amazing work serving in this capacity has taught me lessons in both the power of privilege and the importance of empathy for

[259:00] individuals struggling on the margins of society a special thank you to rob and carol wisselwick for their service at that important event i can go to the next slide so we're talking about strategies here and i want to touch on housing in particular now the graph that i'm showing you here is the effect of housing on 40 high crime received government assisted housing and so this graph represents those 40 high utilizers who were housed sometime prior to 2019 and the blue line on the top is their number of municipal charges and the green line on the bottom is the number of bookings at the boulder county jail other than being a high utilizer so homeless in our community lots of

[260:00] bookings at the jail lots of charges very diverse backgrounds the only other thing this group has in common is they all received housing you can see that in after receiving housing in 2019 their interactions with the criminal justice system are dramatically decreased of this group of 40 high utilizers that have spent over 10 000 nights in the boulder county jail not one was booked into the jail in 2019. [Music] people sometimes ask what housing has to do with criminal prosecution while in the homeless context many low-level crimes are inexorably linked to a person's housing status this doesn't mean that being homeless causes someone to commit crime or that crime occurs because the individual is homeless socioeconomic factors trauma and individual decision-making all play important parts in why someone becomes involved in the criminal justice system recognizing that both individuals and

[261:01] the system is complex and does not lend itself to one size fit fits all solutions housing is the only evidence-based tool that has been found to reduce recidivism in the context of homeless related offenses essentially what we have found is that when we get a chronically homeless individual housed and they retain that housing their contacts with the criminal justice system are dramatically reduced if not gone entirely hopefully you go to the next slide so that's kind of a higher level view of housing in the high utilizer context and i want to talk just about one particular individual i'm going to say that his name is john that is not his real name but i don't want to invade his privacy before our last homeless navigator elizabeth robinson left her position she said to me chris i wish that we could have done more for john never made any progress because the

[262:01] system is not set up to help somebody like john now i as a prosecutor had known john for a couple years from his frequent jail appearances and to me he was another homeless person in their mid 50s who never came to court we did a ticket after ticket for either camping or trespass never anything violent or threatening and because he would never come to court we would only ever see him at the jail when he was arrested on a failure to appear warrant every ticket or police report or body camera footage that i reviewed painted the picture of an individual by the ruthless winds of mental illness homelessness and trauma another thing that kind of set john apart was that he never had a bad attitude with the police officer it's always polite and accepted responsibility for his actions elizabeth left we didn't have a homeless navigator for about six months and that actually also

[263:01] coincided with when we didn't have an operational homeless outreach team and so i told elizabeth that i would be taking client management of ten of her clients and that john would be my top priority i came to learn a little bit more about john he had been a successful individual who had an international career that involved traveling to los angeles london paris and new york it wasn't until a month after 9 11 when he was on a commercial flight captain came over a loud speaker to say the plane had to be diverted because of bad weather this is the moment that everything changed for john john thought that this meant that the plane was going to get shot down and so he grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled a confused note on it and passed it up to the pilot it's being so close to the events of 9 11 people were on edge and so they actually scrambled fighter jets and the plane was grounded and he was met on the tarmac by

[264:01] the national guard fbi ever since that day almost two decades ago schizophrenia completely took over john's life and he bounced from mental institution and mental institution across the united states and he ended up in colorado sometime in the mid-2010s while the jail has mental health staff who are dedicated professionals to serving their clients the jail is an inherently difficult place to provide mental health care precisely because it's a correctional institution that is designed first to keep people safe this first approach is at odds with the environment necessary to provide meaningful long-term mental health care with the closing of the mental health institutions that president kennedy began and that uh president reagan finished this means that many people like john who are in desperate need of help but don't have resources or the ability to

[265:01] access it in the community really only have the jail as their mental health care provider we all knew that in order for john to have a chance at a happy and healthy life while at the same time reducing his involvement with the criminal justice system was to get him off the streets and into an apartment many meetings presentations emails phone calls consultations with mental health professionals social workers police officers and court staff we identified a housing resource suitable for someone in his situation mental health partners the municipal court homeless navigators and the boulder police department's homeless outreach team worked tirelessly to get john inside then almost a year after taking john from [Music] like the elizabeth news i've had since being with the city of boulder that john got and moved in and is off the streets john's story highlights

[266:00] what is possible when a system adapts to meet people where they are rather than as we wish them to be okay [Music] so a little bit larger perspective john's story is just one individual we actually in the last year uh prosecuted seven high utilizers who were housed uh and so those are those are successes each brought unique challenges uh that were no less difficult than the challenges that john presented we dismissed 131 criminal cases are also diverted they mean the same thing because of the positive steps that people took towards housing in the last year dozens of referrals to mental health and substance use professionals and established working partnerships with agencies across the county i believe judge cook is now going to talk about some of the great work that the court's homeless navigators do to help

[267:00] individuals navigate the complex housing process and after judge cook talks about that i'm going to talk a little bit more about the pilot program that sandra mentioned the warrant clustering program so if we could go to the next slide thank you chris that was great i'm not going to spend too much time on this because i've presented to city council with some information before and um i heard curt vern haber talk earlier about the uh the time when he'll be coming back in july and we're hoping i'm hoping that we can weave some of our outcomes in with him so you can understand not only the big context of homelessness and who's been housed but also the sort of subgroup of high utilizers that chris is talking about but um for those of you who uh didn't participate in er in mid-march justice bovid was coming upon us there was a

[268:01] tour set up for a group of people who were city council members as well as other officials and service providers to learn more about the homeless provider system in our city and um that that was supposed to start at the municipal accord and in fact it took place either virtually or at the municipal court depending on where you were in this slide is from that but since our homeless navigator started working with us in june of 2016 until mid-march this is uh some quantification of what we've been able to achieve so we've um served over 222 unique individuals they may have accounted for many more state municipal court cases than that but that's how many unique individuals we served and those are people that we served with anything more than what we call a light touch these are people that we became pretty significantly involved with in terms of case management um

[269:01] we don't have caseloads of 222 people these are people who've been served over a period of several years but again 222 unique individuals in serving them we've been able to help obtain or if they already had one to collect in a place where it can be used the following documentation and the reason you see these documents other than the other documents category those five documents are the key pieces of documents that you need for somebody to be housed under our various housing voucher programs so um 121 state ids 99 social security cards you can see the numbers there for yourselves you may not know what an uh disability verification is this is not um the type of disability that qualifies somebody to receive a social security disability income it's a disability verification that says that they it's it's something

[270:01] sort of a lot less than that but it says that they have a disability usually they're provided by a medical provider or a mental health provider lot h means in length of time homeless verification so there needs to be documentation to show that they've been homeless for a sufficient amount of time to qualify for that housing resource so those are what we've been able to collect and each one of those behind each one of those documents that's obtained there's a lot of work that's gone into place either by certainly by the offender but by the homeless navigator um assisting them or helping them um and sometimes for the birth certificates riding away for them so there's a great deal of work and effort behind those numbers but um they're numbers that we're very proud of and that we had been asked to see if we could quantify so that's where we stand with all of that and now

[271:01] i'm going to turn it back over to chris to talk about warrant clustering thank you warren clustering uh is essentially a diversion program and it was designed in response to criminal justice reform legislation and the revolving door problem at the at the jail when i say criminal justice reform legislation what i'm talking about is uh in april of last year uh the governor signed a bill that essentially means that when someone is arrested on most municipal charges they are automatically going to be eligible for a personal recognizance bond so even if they then fail to appear to court they can get out the first time they see a judge and so while there's a lot of really great work going on some criminal justice reform legislation has the effect of perhaps

[272:03] increasing the frequency that people get arrested for low-level offenses and so we don't want to start arresting more people we want to focus our efforts on the people who are causing the most harm in the community and trying to solve those problems and so what clustering allows us to do is to use the rest strategically to group cases together and address individual needs if we could go to the next slide so how what we're really talking about is changing the way that failure to appear warrants or bench warrants or arrest warrants work and so the way it used to work was someone would fail to appear on a summons a judge would review the case for probable cause and we have very good police officers in the city of boulder and so probable cause would be found 99.9 of the time and then a warrant would issue for their

[273:00] arrest and this is whether or not it was a camping ticket an open container ticket a third degree assault that's how fta warrants used to work and if we could go to the next slide so what warrant clustering does is it adds an additional step to the warrant process where after a morning docket and a docket is just a date that people are supposed to come to court a prosecutor will review all of the cases where someone failed to appear and then depending on the type of case and that person's criminal history we will either ask the court to stay the warrant meaning not issue the warrant or we'll say we want this case to go to warren and so that in essence is what uh warrant clustering clustering is is that it's the kind of add some thoughtfulness into this process because maybe some somebody who gets a

[274:00] first-time shipping ticket doesn't need to get arrested if the officer who writes that person the ticket if that's the only enforcement mechanism needed to change the behavior most people who experience homelessness are able to get out of it within a few months and so the the work that the officers do on the street is sometimes enough to get the message across that certain behaviors are illegal in the city of boulder if we could go to the next slide so the preliminary results of the warrant clustering diversion program are that we so far have diverted or dismissed 308 criminal cases because they did not have a new violation after six months during the period of the pilot which was a 12-month period we had a 42 reduction in jail bookings uh with municipal charges uh we have uh around uh 730 municipal arrests per year

[275:02] and during the period of the pilot just just over 400. we calculated that this reduction in arrests and savings to the courts saved taxpayers 280 000 and important to the community safety piece is that we have additional officers on the street for 624 hours that they weren't booking people into the jail on municipal failure to appear warrants could go to the next slide so this is a graphical representation of uh the effect of warren clustering on the how many bookings we have per month at the boulder county jail top line the top the blue part is the 10-year average and so you can see that the warmer months so june through october we typically have an increased population of people getting arrested on on municipal charges

[276:01] at the jail and then it kind of drops off during the colder months and then the green portion below is the results of warren clustering we were significantly below the 10-year average for each of the months now i'm not going to say that just because we have fewer arrests means the program was successful it's what fewer arrests mean it means that the people who got arrested were the individuals who continued to commit quality of life violations in our community or that they couldn't be safe in our community and so the people who were getting arrested were the people who really should be in jail and we can could then uh because we had smaller jail dockets we could concentrate resources on the people who were arrested and do things like release them to the custody of the homeless outreach team who could then take them to the social security office or make it so that we'll dismiss their cases if they go and follow through with

[277:01] the housing process that they are so close to getting an apartment and we are very successful in those efforts and so it's not just that fewer arrests are in and of themselves a good thing it's what we were able to do with the smaller jail dockets and i think that if we could go to the next slide and so in conclusion i just want to say that team's going to continue to build on the progress made and work with our partners in the city and the county to address important problems that are facing our community and i really appreciate your attention and time and i think the next the next slide is the question slide well very good thank you chris and sandra and judge cook for the great background and the orientation but how how our justice

[278:00] system is functioning these days relative to people experiencing homelessness so i don't see any hands up for questions but i would invite council members if you have any questions now's the time to ask um judge cook is there a second part to this after this part is there a review of crime stats [Music] um yes but that's b that's we're going to turn it over to chief harold for that purpose that's what i was guessing okay so i see two hands at this point i see mary and erin mary go ahead [Music] i don't have any questions i just wanted to say thank you for all of this work um it's amazing work and it just goes to show what um some heads coming together and some ideas coming together can do to improve the lives of people using the criminal justice system and using um

[279:00] the police and um it's it's heartening to me that um one of the outcomes is that people are getting housed and um i i really thank you all for your work and for your presentation tonight thank you okay if anyone else would like to ask a question if you'd raise your hand aaron for some reason you're not coming here yeah i uh well i just wanted to add my thanks and accolades uh that was an inspiring presentation and i really appreciate the innovative approach you're taking and sounds like it's being extremely successful so thanks so much [Music] okay we'll see no other questions i guess i'll close and and echo what mary and aaron said this is really amazing work it shows a great amount of human compassion to try and take folks

[280:00] meet them where they are and help them get the you know the fundamentals that most of us take for granted like a birth certificate a social security number and an ability to get to the dmv it's great that our systems are providing those opportunities for people so thank you all for the work you're doing it's much appreciated and it seems like great work and with that um chief harold would you like to take the next section you sure would good evening everybody uh so if you could go to the next slide for me please so um tonight um i'll be brief but i'll be on point what i'd like to cover is calls for service trends um and then especially the impact of the code 19 on those crime trends for january through

[281:01] current i'll do a review quickly at part one crimes and also i'll discuss a couple of crime science principles that i think are very important for the community understand city leadership and also city council i'll do a brief review of crash reports and then i am going to talk briefly about some initiatives that i've started in my short time with older pd next slide please as you can see with this slide voter pd receives approximately 82 000 calls per year and what's interesting is you could probably go back years from these from 2017 you'd see the same fluctuation seasonal crime trends so this stays pretty consistent it's highly predictable and unless you have a pandemic and we'll talk about that in just a minute next slide please

[282:00] um perf which is the police executive research forum has done a comprehensive study of the impacts of covid and every police department they have studied have shown quite a decrease in calls for police service and this is coming out at the end of april of 2020. next slide please um interestingly um boulder receives about 6 500 calls per month um on average in 2018 and 2019 little fluctuation but pretty consistent about 6 500 calls for service but next slide if you look at the dramatic impact that the covet 19 has had on calls for service they've declined by over a thousand calls for service next slide please now if you look at the national headlines um across the country and this was also done by the police executive research forum you really see that crime

[283:02] is uh all over the place um there's no doesn't seem like there's a rhyme or reason for it but it speaks volumes for one of the crime science principles that i want to talk about later about the opportunity structures that are very crime specific and so if you look at some of our sister cities near us like denver we tend to trending away from denver where our violent crime is going down but our property crime is going up they're just the opposite in their major crime categories so i really want to talk about opportunity structures and i think this is a great way to visualize different cities across the united states are experiencing different problems because their opportunity structures are so widely different next slide please so in boulder we have approximately um 3 900 part one crimes reported annually and just as a reminder for everybody part one crimes include homicide robbery aggravated assault larceny thefts

[284:01] burglary motor vehicle theft and rape so part one crimes are more serious crimes and then there's part two crimes which are usually quality life issue type issues and disorder issues as well so uh boulder part one crimes per month we average about 300. next slide please so um what we are seeing so far is that january through april part one crimes we've seen an increase of almost 15 percent i would expect these crimes to start normalizing as more and more people are visible to the community and businesses so i expect this trend to start to normalize within the next few months next slide please so i'd like to go through these specifically because i think they're important so larceny and theft approximately we received about 29.34 per year burglary very low numbers

[285:02] approximately 411 are reported annually and then vehicle theft again very low numbers approximately 283 so this is a property crime part one crime next slide as you can see um from january to the end of april we're seeing increases in our property one crimes but i will caution everybody um these numbers are very small um so i put the numbers actual the actual incident increases per each part one crime property crime so as you can see burglaries are very concerning but in may we're starting to see those numbers slowly normalize next slide please so again with the violent part one crimes aggravated assault we usually average about 186 sexual assaults we usually average about 41 approximately

[286:01] and robberies approximately 39. again i caution everybody these are very small numbers to analyze so next slide please so again the numbers are at the bottom so we can really understand this we see a 13.8 percent decrease in aggravated salts on sexual assaults we are seeing approximately 10 fewer than we do and on robberies it's almost even though we had this spike it's almost um these numbers are so small that it's very hard to analyze but these numbers are also normalizing and coming down to three-year averages normal averages next slide please [Music] so this is probably the most important concept that i'll present tonight um you know crime science there is so much aggregated data for the past 40 years in crime that environmental criminologists or crime scientists have really um

[287:03] fortified uh the laws of crime and this is something that's vitally important for police to understand but also the community and and the the concepts are pretty pretty basic but i can tell you no matter where you go across the united states or internationally these crime science principles remain the same and they are very simple crime isn't concentrated it is not random crime clusters in particular places for very specific reasons and hot spots differ across crime types and so what i'm going to do now and i give great thanks to dr lee benson she helped me with the mapping on this but i just want to demonstrate with boulder's data [Music] using a few years worth of data to visualize these crime science principles next slide please so this is a three-year robbery pattern um from i believe the 27 to 19. and what

[288:01] this clearly demonstrates is that crime is concentrated across places offenders and victims for those of you in the audience that have studied finance this principle is known as the paredes principle but in crime science we call it the 80 20 principle and basically that says that very few offenders very few places and very few victims contribute to the majority of our crime type problems next slide please and this is very interesting to me there's a lot of discussion across the country about domestic violence numbers going up or down i think this is consistent nationally that as you can see pre-covered march 16th to may 25th 2019 you can see the clustering on the left side of the screen during the covet um stay-at-home order you can see that domestic violence uh clearly is clustering um at a higher rate and larger numbers

[289:02] exist but if you look at the difference you can just see these patterns clearly come out in the clustering and concentration really demonstrates itself and obviously this is because of the opportunity structure and the opportunities when people are clustered closer together and the domestic violence the clustering on this most certainly is impacted due to multi-family housing in boulder next slide please [Music] here's some other examples of clustering throughout the cities this is on two-year crime pattern trends from may 2018 to may 2020 as you can see each of these different type crimes cluster differently in different locations and the one that really jumps out at me is if you look at the difference between theft from vehicles and robberies if you look at the robbery concentration on the lower right hand side it is completely different there is no

[290:00] robberies in that from vehicle mapping and so it is very important that not only to understand the crime clusters it's not random but specific types of crime cluster together and similar types of crimes cluster together so next slide please [Music] uh if you can hit it again for me please whoops i think i was missing the crash reports um are not showing but i can just review those with you since covid crash reports have taken a dramatic decrease and obviously that's just because of the vehicular traffic during some of those months next slide please so as i was talking about this crime clustering i think it's so important for the police department to understand these very important crime science principles so looking forward i'm working with dr lee benson on

[291:01] developing a workload analysis and what this will tell us is the difference between police officers discretionary time versus the reactive time and obviously any police department once at least 40 hopefully more a discretionary time where the officer is not driven by calls for service as much as they have time to really look at problems like the judge was talking prior in really using a problem-solving math model that really solves problems and that we're not just responding back and forth to different uh calls for service and this leads me into the next important principle that i've been talking about through this presentation is that the police department has to develop a data-driven deployment strategy and it has to be based on these crime science principles it is the most important aspect of policing that i think a police department can engage in is developing a coherent strategy to

[292:01] deal with each particular crime quality of life and disorder issue that the city is experiencing so this is going to become more and more part of the police department's fabric and then lastly what i've already started is beginning the agency to get ready for kalee accreditation and this is a national accreditation agency that really comes in from the outside and takes a look at the department's internal structure and really provides guidance if we are operating within model policies and strategies and deployment strategies so those are just three of the initiatives that i've already begun since i started it's all very important work because i think it speaks volumes to the effectiveness and the ethical police work that this department will be engaging in and i do want to take the opportunity to just say what a service driven agency

[293:02] boulder pd is unlike a larger urban environment the statistics and the data that i'm looking at is really impressive as far as how much service this police department provides to the boulder community that you wouldn't necessarily see in a bigger urban environment so i just want to give kudos to the men and women that work for the boulder police department because they have been very impressive since i've been here and again thanks to dr lee benson for her help with the mapping and already she has developed um really impressive density kernel density maps uh not only for me but for my executive team so that's the direction i'm heading in and i'd be glad to answer any questions that you have well thank you chief harold that was a fantastic presentation you'll find that this council loves data and so you're presenting all that good data about what's been changing as far as

[294:00] crime goes is really helpful and and quite interesting so we do have a few questions for you i've got mary and then rachel mary i don't think i had my hand raised well it shows here so i'm sorry somebody didn't put it down not your fault actually um rachel [Music] rachel i can't hear you you it's late sorry i don't have a question i just wanted to uh thank chief harold for that presentation and for um directly diving into data i was really kind of geeking out to the hot spots and heat maps that you put together so i'm excited to to see where you take this and i'm grateful that you're here thanks for the presentation thanks rachel appreciate it great anyone else questions or comments

[295:00] okay i think that's mostly because it's late um mary you have a hand up now no just real quickly i wanted to echo rachel's gratitude thank you very much for diving right into getting her done and as sam said we appreciate data and data driven strategies and actions so go forth and do good thank you thanks mary appreciate it great okay with that i think we'll wrap up um this section of our criminal justice update thank you all for um your presentations and your your answers to our questions very helpful um and then uh we'd like to go on debbie the next issue sure we have the next item is consideration of a motion to amend the council rules of procedure regarding the declarations and tom would you like to kick us off

[296:01] please i have a presentation that will come up in a second uh i wanted to thank judy and sam they raised this issue they noted in the council rules of procedure that the um the rules relating to declarations were not really the policies the council were uh were following so sam asked me to do a quick draft of some potential rule changes that would uh fix that and i'm stalling to wait to see if i can get the powerpoint to change there we have it yeah it's up it just chris it's not working for me there you go so the existing rules for declarations mayor screens declarations the mayor issues those with with no substantial political issue they're kept in a binder uh the majority of voting councils necessary to call up a vote on a resolution and the proponents request the mayor may place a resolution on the council agenda next slide

[297:01] [Music] so the proposed rule new rule would be all proposed declarations would be placed on the cac agenda the idea that is that council members would have an opportunity to review the agenda when it comes out on friday and see if there's anything in which they're interested any council member could then ask the declaration to be issued by the entire council read out loud at a meeting or discussed by the entire council cac that would then decide how to proceed when to schedule and that sort of thing if no council member asked for further consideration the mayor can go ahead and sign all signed declarations will be posted on the city's website rather than in a binder and we don't there's a in section 15e there's a there's a reference to proclamations it's the only time that word is used in the in the council rules of procedure so we're eliminating that word and just referring to everything as declarations so i posted a draft change or next slide please i posted a draft rule change on the hotline and i would ask for a council to

[298:00] consider a motion to approve amending the rules by uh adding this and striking the word proclamation from section 15 e and that's my presentation anyone have questions um so just for a touch of background um the mayor signs proclamations that essentially just go into a binder virtually um where there are things that never rise to the level of having council do a declaration or or have people um show up and receive the declaration we're putting out and it's all at the um discretion of the mayor which is definitely not how we do things you know most of the declarations that we read are brought forward by one council member or another representing a community group so this is just an attempt more or less to bring what's written down in our ordinances in

[299:00] line with what we're doing today and judy brought this up because she wanted to have a proclamation issued and so we went and looked and tried to figure out what the proclamation was and it wasn't defined at all so that's why we ended up with declarations so i don't see any questions are there any comments great um would someone like to make a motion yeah sure i'll make i'll make a motion so um i move that we change the council rules regarding declarations to the language proposed by the city attorney as shown on our screen tonight second okay junior second so we have the motion

[300:00] and the second you need discussion right if anyone objects to this this is the vote please let me know if you'd like to vote no on this seeing no one it's a unanimous yes vote to i'm in the council rules so thank you tom for that appreciate it um so i think that's everything we have on our agenda i want to bring up one issue that was raised to me by rachel so i'll let rachel speak about it but it was about um enforcement of our health orders so rachel do you want to pick up on that sure um so real quick [Music] about this time a week ago we talked about um urban g fine and the um uh needing to maybe move from some education into enforcement and it was discussed that that was going to go to cac and then come up for council discussion and it didn't go to cac and um so i'm just asking that we

[301:00] take it to cac next week and bring it up for discussion so that we have thought through this methodically before we go on break great so that's a request that cac do what exactly so could you define a little better say we were to put something on the agenda what would the title be and um would it be emotion would it be direction to staff what do you what do you mean i think it would be a discussion of enforcement of covid related health orders and this would be direct and again that's just that's what we had committed to last week we ended it with we're going to come back to have a discussion on enforcement we also said that staff was not going to wait on our discussion to make necessary changes but my understanding was that we agreed to to discuss whether we were going to change from a more educational

[302:01] approach to covet health orders to some enforcement bob did i see your hand up you asked the question i was gonna ask thanks okay uh did i clarify it enough as much as anything i'm just reminding us that we we agreed to do that and we didn't do it yeah and i'll just say what i said to rachel when she first brought this up um i think the perception was that we had taken a bunch of actions around the evangeline thing because we have the closure of the creek and so on um it sounds like the issue is bigger than what got dealt with by staff last week so it sounds to me rachel i'm going to try and interpret this so we can have the right discussion at cac it sounds to me like this is more policy direction and an ordinance or some other kind of rule change it's more about asking staff to lean more heavily on enforcement than

[303:01] education around health orders masks and social distancing whether we want to do that given that um i think we can anticipate with loosening of orders and more people going out about that there may be more issues and you know the uh congregating at places like energy fine we'll probably move somewhere else so how do we want to respond to that um as we gear up for the summer okay so i guess what i would ask for we have all council here and this is being discussed do most people agree that we should have this discussion and you'd like cac to schedule it as a matter say under the city manager so let me see thumbs up so i see three thumbs up so i see mark let me make sure i got it mark rachel and adam the thumbs up on that so with some of you and aaron okay so that's four um i guess i'm going to say yes and i

[304:01] think we should schedule it i think we should put it on under matters uh for the city manager to get guidance from council on enforcement we can figure out to see how long we think that's going to take and what will specifically be there and i see mary has her hand up yeah i i just have a question this seems like a really broad topic um and and that's why i didn't raise my hand it seems like overly broad it seems like it should be a little more focused about the locations the type of enforcement the education versus enforcement is it that at the trail heads is it by the creek is it um or is it as broad as if you're walking down the street not

[305:00] wearing your mask you're gonna nail somebody i mean what i i don't it's overly broad to me and um are we trying to address a problem here or are we it seems that the discussion to me as i recall the discussion last week it was um we need to address eben fine um it was a dress that was closed and that seemed to address that particular concern is there another one that we have at hand or are we i it just seems overly broad to me so if there were more specificity around it i may be able to support that but i guess we're putting it on the agenda so um if in the interim there could be some thinking around the specificity it just seems really overly broad to me

[306:01] and so let's keep going erin i read you next yeah well what i remember from last week is that evangee fine was the the biggest issue but i think there was an interest that that i remember hearing expressed by council to say well we need to take a little bit more of an enforcement-based approach and because there's also the parties on the hill and maybe some other things and so we we said please work on that and then let's discuss it next week and the uh evangel fund got closed which i think was a great move um you know but i think we did bring it up in a larger context and so what maybe what we could uh have as a discussion is if city staff wanted to come to us and tell us what they're currently kind of thinking and planning you know about how to deal with issues as they come up and then maybe we could give some feedback on that and kind of maybe specifically around you know gatherings that don't have social distancing so it's just one

[307:00] possible approach to it i've got bob and mark yeah i'm i'm with mary i'm still a little bit confused what the question is if it's what aaron just said which is a presentation by staff about what they're doing that that's fine it's always interesting to know what uh what staff is doing just like we've we've heard this just just this evening but the question i think i heard was um are we going to do more enforcement and i guess i'm going to ask the you know ask a hypothetical question what if staff comes back next week or whenever we schedule this and says no we're not going to do more enforcement they'll have good reasons for it like we have a limited number of police officers or the jails are closed or whatever um so if the answer is no is that a satisfactory answer or are people looking for a yes if people are looking for a yes i guess it would be helpful to have a specific request as opposed to are you going to do more enforcement so i'm with mary i'm struggling a little bit about what staff is meant to put

[308:00] together by way of presentation and what answers people are looking for so might i make a suggestion here and mark i'm not trying to cut you off we'll come back to you in a moment but might i make a suggestion that we put a placeholder on cse for monday and we ask for rachel and or aaron anyone else who's interested to send a note to hotline that says specifically what they're interested in because i agree with mary it is general and generic i was going to propose that we start with the reason i suggested that we put it under city manager was start with jane and have her talk about you know the approach to enforcement any changes that have been made um based on evangeline and parties on the hill and then go from there because i think that would help us do what you're talking about mary which is define where are the problems and define what are the problems um i [Music]

[309:00] i guess it's kind of like what bob was saying as well in the sense that we start with staff we hear what staff is doing we know the subject is enforcement versus education particularly gatherings are of high concern and then we can give feedback to staff so this is more that's why i put it under matters in my head because it's not there's no ordinance involved and it's just feedback from council to staff i would assume that's half an hour or 45 minutes um and so what do people think about having the people who want to have this heard tell us exactly what they're thinking um mark europe and then i'll listen to anybody else who wants to talk about how to frame it up my recollection as to how we were going to move forward on this was similar to aaron's i think there was a sense that we were going to revisit it i don't think we defined it last time i don't think we've defined it tonight but i think there was a generalized interest in having a conversation about the balance

[310:01] between enforcement and education i'm fine with with bob's suggestion in terms of how to proceed and kind of bubble this thing up and take another look at it okay i think cac has enough to be able to put something on and make a guess at what we're going to talk about and how to frame it up but i would also suggest that if what council members have heard tonight about the way we might put this on the agenda and talk about it isn't clear enough for them feel free to write it into csc or the hotline about what you'd like to see if you're gonna start cac this week can i just bring my thoughts there or do i have to put it on hotline it's up to you um the only reason to put something out ahead of time is it gives me and bob time to think about it as well so just a little bit less reactive more importantly staff they have to do

[311:00] the work right okay so i think we have it to do for cac from council to at least clear this up a bit so i'm going to assume we're going to talk about it at cec if other council members have further guidance about what you would like or not like to see let us know great any other subjects we should touch on super well then i guess we'll declare this meeting of the boulder city council adjourned at 11 13. thank you all have a good night live from paris office