September 8, 2020 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[3:51] hey hi hi everyone JY how are you good thank you

[4:08] good evening good [Music] evening [Music] it is 6 o' but we are not full yet oh I'm full what' you have for dinner Mary AAP missing two

[5:05] nearby and Aaron can we give him another moment you're in charge Mark we have to ask ourselves what would Adam [Music] do the clock hasn't tick to 601 yet so if it was Adam we wouldn't be having this problem could have been solved we're at 601 so Mir has indicated she's going to be calling in I would not necessarily wait for her cuz she's going to be trying to connect by phone for the beginning of the meeting but I do think you might wait a minute to see if Aaron can join us Aaron texted me that he has technical difficulties please start with Adam oh dear all right then we then we shall right it is 601 um welcome all to the Tuesday

[6:00] September 8 2020 study session of the Boulder City Council going to begin with a short announcement about the 2020 census Boulder County is currently at a 73 response rate which is very good but there is still time to do better and to respond to the 2020 census don't be left out your response matters completing the census is safe easy and important the questionnaire only takes a few minutes to complete your respon resp Es are secure and confidential results help direct billions of dollars in federal funds to our community including resources for emergencies and disaster Pro responses please encourage your friends and family to respond by the September 30 deadline at my2020census.gov or by calling 8443302020 and with that we'll move on to the agenda and first up is a DEC ation on

[7:00] pridefest which is going to be read by Bob Yates and I believe um accepted on behalf of out Boulder County uh by their executive director Marty Moore Bob you're up thanks Mark I'm GNA read this declaration on behalf of all of city council then we'll turn it over to Marty to to share with us a little bit more about pridefest the city of Boulder recognizes and honors the lgbtq plus community in Partnership without Boulder County by celebrating pridefest in the month of September as we celebrate we are reminded of the remarkable progress towards acceptance and equality in recent years the lgbtq plus Community has worked tirelessly for recognition and respect fighting Court battles from Marriage equality to equal protection under the law the city of Boulder continues to demonstrate support for our lgbtq plus

[8:01] residents and visitors with many major accomplishments just in the last few years in 2017 the city's Police Department partnered with out Boulder County to create an lgbtq plus liaison program and in 2018 the city appointed their first executive lgbtq plus liaison to the city manager's office these Liaisons work more closely with those members of the community and City officials to better support lgbtq plus people and Advance the city's goals of inclusiveness this year in 2020 the city approved an all-gender bathroom building code update and the Boulder Public Library unveiled newly renovated all gender restrooms to ensure increased privacy and comfort for all users from restrooms to the road the city has led an Initiative for painting rainbows on downtown crosswalks and a Philadelphia flag mural to

[9:01] specifically recognize people of color in the lgbtq plus Community pridefest celebrations may look different this year but no matter the circumstances we are proud to support our lgbtq plus communities right to live out loud in Boulder Boulder is proud to be a partner in the ongoing efforts to expand and enhance equality for all people but there Still Remains much work to do to extend that promise to everyone the city council of the city of Boulder urges all residents to join in celebration of our diverse community and help to build a culture of inclusiveness and acceptance with that I'll turn it over to Marty Moore the executive director of out Boulder County to share with us some of the celebrations the next few days for Pride week Mary good evening thank you Council for that Proclamation and Bob thanks for reading it so well that was beautiful I

[10:00] cried a little bit you couldn't see me because my video was off I want to say thank you uh to the city for this um on behalf of lgbtq community in Boulder I also want to give a special sh shout out to the human relations commission who's been an ongoing sponsor of of our pride week this morning you might have turned into our rainbow story time where we had a drag queen reading some great books uh on acceptance and love uh tomorrow as part of Pride week you can bring hot Coke in a blanket to carpool cinema at the reservoir um last year we planned for rain this year we're planning for snow um so but that'll be a great event it's uh we're following all the rules of Boulder Public Health and and the city of Boulder and doing that kind of excited to see Priscilla Queen of the Desert one more time um on Thursday we will have a gathering of old lesbians like me 50 plus and and older uh and what we're finding u in this is we're seeing some people we wouldn't otherwise see live in person uh because of health

[11:00] issues ETC um so we're looking forward to um that Gathering and then on Saturday Dave insign and some of his friends had qualified for the Boston Marathon which has been called off so Dave's put a fundraiser together and there's going to be a a very quiet um race on Saturday for us which will be fun to watch and then on Sunday we will have a pride motorcade I can't tell you where it begins and where it ends because we're not asking people to gather but if you email Juan Moreno and you want to be part of that uh please do and we'll tell you U where we're going to start that day so we you know it's a strange strange world I was listening to some of the conversation Mary in general about what a strange year this has been and it's been a strange year for out Boulder County I want to thank you for for all of this um more information is at out boulder. org and before I close I want to thank uh Jane for her years of service one of the first things that happened when I got to out Boulder was

[12:01] Carmen natano who I hadn't met yet reached out to me and said the Human Rights Commission grades uh the city of Boulder every year and Jane says we have to do better um and it took a couple years before I actually got to have coffee with Jane but in um in that directive that was given to me and others um the Layon program that has been mentioned Pam Davis who is now actually in as LGBT ladies on in the city there's some good things happening the bathroom is a big deal um Once We Gather we'll do a big blast about that but Jane thank you for your years of service and for your commitment to the lgbtq community thank you Marty I appreciate it thank you Marty thank you Bob uh before we move on do any members of council have anything to say in addition hearing none we will move on to the next agenda item uh our esteemed director of Housing and Human Services Kurt ferer is going to uh do a short

[13:00] presentation on a severe weather shelter uh Kurt are you here uh I am here hope you can good evening Council um so as as you're well aware there's been um some real changes in our weather um as of uh uh last night and this morning so uh at CAC this morning um I was um asked to do um just a two-minute um update on um some of the changes that we've made um as as it relates to the weather so last week we were um tracking the weather um for um what we're currently um living in right now um and with the Labor Day weekend coming up we wanted to have something uh in place so we could actually um uh spend the weekend um in labor day um with our family so on Friday we um we

[14:01] tracked through that and then made a and we're in conversations with the the the boulder shelter for the homeless to uh come up with a plan for this week normally our uh severe weather shelter runs from October 1st through May 31st so this is certainly outside of um the norms for that the the triggers for severe weather shelter um are 32 degrees with precipitation or or I'm sorry 38 degrees with precipitation or 32 degrees without uh precipitation um so the the shelter um was open this uh this afternoon um for individuals who um are not part of um the the um the the housing system we currently have about 80 to 85 individuals in housing Focus shelter um and five to eight individuals

[15:00] in in navigation that leaves about 25 to 30 beds that are are currently available um those those are available for individuals um who would um go who either have gone through coordinated entry or can go through coordinated entry um once they um um register um at the shelter and um that that registration goes from 4 o'clock this afternoon to 7 this evening um so we've communicated with um lots of different organizations that work with the homeless um and most of the people who would use severe weather Shelter tonight weren't here last year so a lot of the systems that we may have had in place last year may not reach um those individuals so we've reached out to the community table where a lot of them um probably the most likely um those that would be receiving service would be at Community table um Harvest

[16:01] of Hope as well Clinica um the housing Outreach Team U Mental Health Partners um and the city of Boulder um today updated its um its homeless um web page as well and reactivated that um so the um the other update that I'll give you is on the 22nd of September we'll be doing update we'll be doing an update to you on on severe weather shelter you would ask us in July to look at um ways of increasing severe weather shelter on particularly cold nights and having um an overflow to that so we'll be updating you uh then so um the last thing I'll say is tomorrow night um I think we're likely to be open for S severe weather shelter as well looking at the weather now um that would be be based on the weather triggers that I just described so I'll

[17:01] stop there to see if if anyone has any questions any members of council juny thank you um Kurt you talked you talked about where you are right now are you buy any chance at capacity or is anyone who needs shelter at this moment is being sheltered um I haven't spoken with them this afternoon um last night I think we had um if I'm correct I think we had about 26 um empty beds um I expect that those would be filled uh this evening though Aaron yeah K I appreciate the um update thanks very much I know we're going to be having the Fuller discussion about this in a couple of weeks I'll of leave the sort of systems discussion to that point appreciate people stepping up to do this during this cold snap do we if we do um really overfill if the shelter

[18:01] really overfills tonight you do we have the ability to find a few more places for people in this in this particularly bad weather we're having right now we don't okay I can we monitor that or have any contingency plans I just I know it's really bad out there right now um we can certainly monitor it I don't know that um we would be able to put plans together at this point though okay well uh sorry to hear that but I guess um I know that we will have plans uh for the rest of the season and we'll be for overflow and we'll be talking about that in a couple weeks that's correct okay thank you any other members of council Adam thanks Mark um yeah this isn't really a question for Kurt or anything but it's pretty obvious that the weather is only going to get crazier year after

[19:00] year so our contingencies have to come earlier and earlier and I guess we should plan on having something ready for the 1 of September next year since that's obviously where this is going now just throwing that out there thank you any other members in that case we will move on to the next uh agenda item the main agenda item for tonight which is the 2021 budget uh before I turn this over to uh staff for their presentation uh I just want to note that this is a very difficult subject in a difficult year um it's no mystery what our financial status is although we will learn more about that shortly um and difficult decisions have had to be made as a result I want to thank Jane and her entire staff for the hard work and effort they've put into doing this and trying to make the best decisions possible possible for the community of

[20:00] Boulder I greatly appreciate everything that they've done and with that I'm going to uh turn it over to Jane thank you Mark and thank you city council members uh Chris I think you're the driver of the presentation tonight so um here's the first part uh we have a number of presenters this evening and even this slide doesn't include all of all of us um this is a very long budget and the meeting will take quite a while and we've asked several other people besides those listed here to make presentations can you go to the next slide so the agenda for tonight is going to start off with a really quick introduction by me then we'll be moving to an economic update and Rich wakin and others from CU Boulder will be presenting that what we intend to do is after that presentation we're going to take a pause for city council question questions so that the CU folks can

[21:00] answer them and then they can leave the meeting um so please um make sure that you ask all of your questions following that then we're going to turn to the 2021 budget overview and this is the thing that you've seen many times before it includes graphs and slides and pie charts and excuse me Cheryl and Cara will be presenting that we'll pause again at the end of that for question questions about the numbers and then following that I'll take over to talk about budget impacts new funding proposals for 2021 Cara will talk about the capital Improvement program and I'll talk a bit about contingency planning um and all of the questions that you have about the budget and the budget changes please hold to the end um so that we can answer them kind of all at once we're sorry that the presentation is so long but as Mark pointed out this is a difficult

[22:01] year and there are lots of changes and lots of things to talk about so my quick introduction on the next slide is this um we have amazing employees and I really want to give a shout out to our staff teams um in particular the budget analysts from the different departments and the finance department staff we as you know we spent many months in the beginning of the year redoing the 2020 budget and makinging a number of changes and then immediately they had to Pivot and start working on the 2021 budget we asked departments to prepare budget recommendations to us that were due at the beginning of June and we looked through them and we able to make a number of changes to the 2021 budget but they weren't big enough based upon our financial considerations and so we went back a second time and asked everybody to do it again to make even deeper cuts and so they' put in so much work I also

[23:00] want to give a shout out and thanks to juny Mary and Mark for the work that they've done as part of the financial strategy subcommittee they've been enormously helpful to us in um thinking through some of the things that we've done and in this presentation um the budget that we're preparing for you is a very conservative budget we wanted to make it conservative so that in the event that things improve next year which we certainly hope they will it will allow you some flexibility to add things back instead of having to take away and so we we hope that you'll understand that a lot of the reductions in the budget we hope will not go entirely through 2021 but that there will be funding in the future to improve those so that is my presentation uh for the introduction and we'll turn it over now to Rich wakin and friends from CU Boulder rich well thank you um and and let me say um

[24:02] I certainly think the the approach is uh prudent to say the least in terms of uh H how you're thinking about the budget I I think the one thing you'll see uh at the end of our presentation is the number of uncertainties are so large that it's extremely difficult at this point uh to pinpoint any you know specific number um as mentioned uh I'm joined by my colleagues Robert mcnown and Brian leowski our presentation is intentionally short given the length of your deliberations tonight we're not intending to chew up a large part of your meeting I think we have 15 slides in total and really uh very much welcome your questions I'm I'm setting up a little bit of the sort of national picture and uh Brian's going to uh I'm G to give a handoff to Brian to to talk to you a little bit about um the color our

[25:01] forecast and also sort of the tax forecast but the underlying theme I have to say is uncertainty and and I just want to sort of continue to reinforce that and continue to reinforce what your um Finance group is telling you um they've been great to work with we really appreciate the opportunity to work with the council and to work with your staff so with that on the next slide let me just talk a little bit about you've seen this before but just sort of reiterate a couple of comments about the national uh economy the GDP part uh you know now we know now that the second quarter was down almost 33% actually a little better than some thought and now we're talking about a third quarter GDP on this slide it's a little over 20% it might be 20% growth but something very positive again this is quarter over quarter uh what happens after that of

[26:01] course is much more open to speculation um but give or take we're talking about this overall this year for 2020 the uh gross domestic product being down roughly uh five and a half percent or somewhere in that range somewhere between maybe five and six% so we're talking about you know you know a fairly dramatic loss when when we look at this and then we go into you know as going forward what I said when I was saying um you know right now if you said pin me down on a number I'd say I think the fourth quarter GDP is going to be positive but lower the the first and second quarter of next year 6% 5% and then tailing off by the second half of next year but there's always the possibility unfortunately of more of a double dip kind of scenario uh based on polit uh uh

[27:03] political things that have happened and this may I'm not making this a political presentation but the the failure to pass any additional fiscal stimulus at this point um after having passed significant fiscal stimulus gives you the possibility of weakening in the second part of the Year certainly the potential for an outbreak uh more significant outbreak gives you the potential for a weakening in the second part of the year or the beginning of next year and just the winter effects so all of those could you know be if you want to say it downside risks to what I'm I'm saying right now or what what we're thinking um you could also say is aren't there any upside risks and the and of upside positives if you will to the forus and there certainly are if something one of these um you know vaccines works and

[28:00] comes out sooner uh if we don't have any sort of spreading so more things are able to open nationally all of those things might actually you know accelerate the growth more than we're using in sort of the Baseline forecast so that's a little bit of a background on the GDP if you look at the employment slide which is the coming up here so just to be clear and make this just very quick the detail kind of dark darker brown piece you see as if we had it scaled to zero but it looks so ridiculous with what's happened that we're starting this at a 130 million and over there in the leftand corner in 2017 and just trying to show you the what's happened since February of 2020 so you can see the drop off of 22 million jobs and a recovery at this point of a little over 10 million jobs so the employment numbers have been pretty good but what you're seeing is

[29:02] not the V specifically jumping all the way back up but you're seeing um if you look at the right hand side increasing at a decreasing rate in terms of the month-over-month job growth and and we think this will continue that's sort of what's built in so that creates more of the sort of swoosh kind of recovery that we've been talking about in the past and your staff have talking about in the past so we're trying we're we're thinking more in that mode yes there'll be continued recovery in terms of retail and and some of the things that are coming back but you don't need to spend very much time looking at the newspapers and seeing um significant Mass layoffs at companies across the country even the successful ones um doing employment cutbacks right now and certainly we're seeing it some of this in government so the collateral damage or the second

[30:00] order effects if you will are starting to um suggest that the tempering of and the swoosh seems uh pretty likely and and to just give you a little sense of that that probably means we don't get back to sort of the same employment levels until 2023 uh in in that kind of Outlook we get nice numbers we get down to reasonable unemployment rates by say the end of 2021 we get down to 6 and a half% or some number like that not bad but but in February we were at three and a half% at the national level next slide please so then we want to talk a little bit about personal income and this is one of the things that was really tricky in terms of the forecasting and I just want to talk about this briefly uh we haven't really ever seen a surge in personal income as dramatic as we we saw in the second quarter and particularly fueled by what happened in April so

[31:02] again we had the tax rebates as you know we had the big jump in unemployment insurance and we certainly saw that in April May and June uh and you can see in the right hand box the takeout from this slide is we saw a record increase in personal income we'd never seen a percentage increase like that in history we saw a percentage a record increase in transfers that the Green Piece in there uh but at the same time we saw a record decrease in employee compensation which we would call you and I would call wages and then we saw almost a record increase in proprietor income um this sole propri the Proprietors or um Schedule C types of folks that's in the sort of red piece in the middle so in terms of earnings if you will you would be thinking about um where are the big earnings place is

[32:00] that we would talk about and it's obviously the tan on the bottom and then the proprietor income in Red so you're you're getting those sorts of pieces there and you get the sort of sense and so that surge in personal income while associated with very high savings rate increases also helps sustain consumption in the economy um year-over-year it's going to be down uh somewhat significantly but we did see a bounce back in retail sales and and again Brian is going to discuss that in more detail here in just a moment so if you look at the next p slide you'll see that um my my last set of comments here is this is what was happening with consumption The Big C we talk about we call a personal consumption expenditures and there's a very interesting pattern that you see in this year in Q q1 and Q2 so um the red part is Services the uh black part as is labeled is durable goods things that

[33:02] last more than TP we typically say 18 months so you know appliances uh automobiles those types of things and then non durable goods are things like clothing uh things you might get in retail you know that we we consider to be short-term sort of expenditures so what you see happening starts in the second quarter of first quarter uh with the shut the semi shutdown and then the shutdown in you know February going into March and then you see the full effect of this uh coming on in Q2 in the second quarter and the big drop off is in Services well certainly some of the things in Services obviously are um um beauty salons or tattoo parlor or you know um spas in general but personal services are in that category but a lot of things like travel and other types of things like that are also

[34:01] in the services category so um the good thing is and know a lot of those things aren't aren't in the tax base so but you saw this you know huge drop off but if you look at the second quarter you can see non-durable Goods can uh really took a hit clothing and those types of things Brian will talk about that more in just a moment but durable goods hardly budged at all so people started to you know move into some of the other things uh not spending on Services they started to spend on some of the other things like automobiles like um you know swimming pools uh you know standup swimming pools all the things we know people bought that are not you know fully consumed or utilized in a very short period of time so with that backdrop I'm passing the Baton on to Brian and talk to you a little bit more about uh the consumption patterns uh in the you know nationally and then to relate that to Colorado and

[35:01] and to the tax forecast uh for Boulder well thank you for that National overview Rich since the taxes our team is modeling is predominantly driven by retail sales I will start by discussing the national retail environment it said that a picture is worth a thousand words and what this picture illustrates in essence is a retail recovery this is about as v-shaped of a recovery as we can get yet we faced a record drop in retail sales nearly one quarter of retail activity dried up from January to April but National Retail Food Services um I'm sorry retail and Food Services sales are down just 2.1% for the cumulative period from January through July and July is up 2.7% over last July and July is up 1.2% over the pre-recession peak in January so this is truly a phenomenal rebound supported by government stimuli as Rich

[36:01] was describing earlier which propped up personal income which therefore is propping up uh consumption next slide please however zooming into year-over-year changes and Retail activity by component illustrates the disparity among retailers grocery stores building materials stores and Sporting Goods are up 11% to 18% while clothing stores restaurants gas stations and department stores are down 133% to 21% year-over-year this reflects observed behaviors we we've heard of bike stores I can't seem can't seem to keep an inventory of bicycles we've heard about trampolines uh that are on back order we've we've heard about people noticing all of their desired Home Improvement projects as they're working from home and uh and and this is really reflected in those categories of retail sales at the same time depressed commuter traffic and travel and uh lower gas prices are also depressing gas

[37:01] station sales and restaurants are still impacted by social distancing regulations and shifts in human behavior away from dying out slide please so as we reflect on economic shifts as they relate to Boulder we note a few observations that may post additional risks locally Boulder lacks many of the big box retail stores that have thrived during the pandemic stores like Costco and Sam's Club and Walmart and Lowe's Etc uh we note that not all retailers are thriving many Main Street mom and pop retailers are struggling we note that some retail uh Outdoor Concepts like outdoor malls seem to be outperforming large indoor malls especially coming right out of the pandemic as economies reopened and people were craving a retail experience uh and they were able to do that perhaps a little bit more safely at some of these uh outdoor malls we note that

[38:01] tourism communities have been disproportionately impacted and Boulder while not while it's not a a veil or an aspen in terms of Tourism activity Boulder certainly has more tourism than its immediate neighbors we note that the university is usually a stable component of the economy during recessions um but we also have seen that um operating costs are are being reduced at the University we're seeing uh pay cuts via furlows 5% for most employees as well as other operating budget cuts that will certainly impact the local community as well um the community will tabulate the loss of economic activity from foregone football games and other sporting events as well as the lack of meetings and conferences hosted by the university the federal Labs uh the private sector companies and Boulder so that that impact will surely be felt next slide

[39:00] please and while Rich illustrated The Healing job situation nationally he noted the long road to recovery Colorado recorded one of the largest improvements in the unemployment rate in July and boulders unemployment rate improved to a similar degree decreasing three% uh percentage points uh over the month but the devil is in the details Boulders unemployment did indeed drop but Boulders resident employment also dropped and Boulder's labor force dropped by even a greater degree so over 9,300 working age job seeking Boulder County residents decided to no longer seek employment and that's a problem and 3,200 city of Boulder residents stopped the employment search and dropped from the labor force so the the Improvement is somewhat mathematical where the unemployment rate is simply the number of people unemployed divided by the labor force and since both of these numbers decrease and labor force decreased by even a greater amount

[40:00] that's why we saw the mathematical decline in um uh Boulders unemployment rate next slide please which leads us to our our economic projections efforts uh go ahead and Advance one more slide please our models are time series econometric models that forecast economy and taxes based on historical relationships between Boulder and the state economy and the national economy we project Colorado employment to be on a similar check mark recovery as a National Employment recovery regaining Peak employment early in 2023 next slide please as Rich shared at the beginning personal income has been the most significant surprise impacting our modeling efforts uh initially if you think back to when we presented to you a few months ago we were projecting a decrease in personal income similar to Prior uh recessions similar to prior Cycles which would drive down consumption and weigh heavily on taxable

[41:00] goods and therefore by extension would weigh heavily on sales and use taxes however as Rich explained while employee earnings and proprietor income is down personal income is up due to Federal stimuli coupled with State unemployment thus our outlook for personal income made an about turn over the past few months and you can see how it's actually positive in the short term next slide please th our tax forecast while it is still negative it has improved over the last few months as a reminder we are projecting sales taxes construction use taxes Auto use other use and and uh property taxes our projection for these Revenue sources as of early August called for a collective decrease of 6.3% in 2020 with a return to the previous peak in uh early 2022 we projected sales taxes to be down about 12% this year and use taxes to

[42:00] decrease about 7% we also provided you with an upper and lower Bound for our expectations which reflects some of the inherent uh uncertainty within our forecast the upper bound projects a return to Peak in 2021 while the lower bound keeps Boulder below Park much later into the decade about 2024 we're collecting data right now for our next update and the preliminary indic based on the numbers that we're looking at is that this forecast will improve um albeit modestly when we uh run the model next week next slide please and to close out I just want to discuss some tail winds headwinds and unknowns um there's uh there's uncertainty uh that's sort of uh behind us it's no longer as uncertain we don't expect another 30% drop in GDP or another 22 million jobs lost nationally these metrics are improving however there are known headwinds as I described

[43:01] the university budget is a headwind uh depressed tourism as a headwind lack of events and conventions uh students not returning to Boulder and spending money in Boulder lack of new stimuli and uh and winter is coming how will restaurants be impacted if they can't have these these outdoor dining experiences so th those are certainly known headwinds and then there are known unknowns like a vaccine or changes in human behavior will people return to the office space or will people continue to work from home and how will that impact uh real estate and then of course there are the unknown unknowns the things we can't even anticipate like so many things we've experienced in 2020 uh but over the the next week we'll continue our modeling efforts and we'll provide uh City staff an update uh of our projections in very short order next slide please and uh rich Robert and I are all

[44:02] here to take your questions if you have any thank you members of council any questions seeing none thank you gentlemen oh Mary oh Mary go for it just um thank you very much for the presentation just one quick question I was curious as to how you determine the number of folks that dropped out of the labor force Brian want to pick that up it's sure so that is that's based on a household survey that's done by the labor department and so those are numbers that are uh reported uh for anyone to to download from the labor department and we're able to see that um for the state and for metropolitan areas and for counties and for C cities above a certain size so the city level has to be above 25,000 residents so it it is a

[45:03] survey so there is a margin of error um but that that's where we pulled those numbers from thank you very much I have a question that I will ask um you looked at the personal income statistics in the aggregate um do you have a sense of how those numbers play out in different um segments of uh the wage earner population in terms of people making 40 to 80 versus 80 to 120 um I I suspect that not every uh income category is fairing equally well so there are people addressing sort of those questions using very Innovative approaches uh it's a group at MIT um that that's doing a lot of work with that and you can look at that at the state level you can't look at it at the boulder level um but what we're what they're seeing in general around the

[46:01] country is that um people in the higher income brackets are in fact the big Savers in this whole deal they're getting um especially if they got a tax cut and they're still working or tax rebate and they're still working they're they're holding on to that money so their savings rates are really high and we're still seeing the sort of lower income people spending the vast majority of the money that they're getting so we we know that much about um the personal income piece uh we also know that relatively um the in the unemployment payments that were going um that continued through the end of July um were substantially higher in terms of replacement than over 50% of the unemployed were making as workers because that 600 plus the 350 on average from the state that 950 was higher than their average wage so we know that piece

[47:01] but we also know since since the end of July we no longer have that other piece in place so one of the reasons we're very sort of nervous about the personal income numbers going forward or concerned I shouldn't say nervous is that we're missing the supplemental payment from the federal government there seems to be a lot of contentious debate going on about what they're going to do the president did something on his own um but we don't expect that sort of surge personal income to be continuing as we go forward thank you sure anyone else okay I think we can move on super so now we'll be turning it over to Cheryl and Cara who will be doing the presentation of the numbers thanks Jane uh good evening Council I

[48:02] want to start by just uh also reiterating um my appreciation to all of my colleagues throughout the city for their amazing work on this year's budget as well as all of the great input that the council strategy committee brought to us um throughout the last several months next slide so as a reminder uh the Council budget Focus was brought to you um from the C from the financial strategy committee several months ago just a few things I want to highlight as it relates to what we are recommending uh this evening first Public Safety was our number one priority when um looking at this year's budget we also prioritize funding to address the most basic needs and health of our community and then we continue to focus on advanc ing racial equity and I'm actually going to turn it over right now to Amy Kae who's our

[49:01] Equity program manager to discuss how we utilize the racial Equity tool when preparing our 2021 recommended budget Amy thank you for that uh Cheryl so as an organization we make important decisions every day with regard to the programs policies and budgets which have a tremendous impact on community members only in the last two years have we started seriously considering the racial Equity impacts of those decisions using a racial Equity tool or instrument as we prefer to call it actively inserts racial Equity into our Collective decision-making processes so while the instrument can be helpful when used at any decision-making phase it has its most impact when it's used at the beginning of planning for a program project or budget process it's also most useful when it can be applied over a long period of time with extensive stakeholder input in data analysis next slide

[50:00] please so emergency situations like the one that we're in currently more clearly exposes the health socioeconomic and other disparities that have existed all along unfortunately often due to the need for a rapid response it can also be harder for us to deploy new thinking during times of Crisis however along with our elected officials our fellow employees in the broader Community we expect that we will live our values and remember our goals even when we're acting swiftly to address Community needs the most recent CommunityWide crisis was the 2013 flood some examples of disproportionate impact during that time was that attention was given to individual homeowners with temporary inconveniences versus the structural integrity and safety of entired manufactured home communities the knowledge and the self-efficacy of people who were more aware of how to utilize government systems with who also had higher incomes were able to get assistance versus people who were living

[51:00] on the economic margins some Equity rooted initiatives did come from the flood including the county um implementing their cultural Brokers Network and a larger focus on resilience for all community members the city has also implemented changes to its information sharing and Community engagement structure and City Investments are increasingly including a Fus focus on neighborhoods with a great need or who have been inadvertently left out of the communication stream so over the past year as an organization we have drafted a racial Equity plan outline and we've been implementing racial Equity training modules also we've started implemeting a racial Equity instrument we also wanted to make sure that in our covid-19 decisions that these are also rooted in equity so we put together a rapid response racial Equity assessment that has been utilized also in a handful of of other gear communities while we were needing to make decisions as a result of reduced

[52:01] revenues and public health guidance which either closed or put many of our city facilities and programs on hold the budget team thought that this would be an opportune time to implement the rapid response racial Equity assessment in our budget reduction and request processes as you can see on this Slide the rapid response racial Equity assess assessment focuses on four essential questions what is the polic activity or budget decision that could impact racial Equity who is or will experience negative impact based on the decision who is or will experience the benefits and what strategies might mitigate or avoid unintended consequences for people of color this was the first time that the city applied a racial Equity focus in its budgeting processes and in all honesty the results were mixed it highlighted elements that would be helpful to incorporate into the assessment in the future as well as areas where better training could be made made available for all staff it also helped further highlight the need for systematized race and ethnicity data

[53:01] to be captured across the our organization members of our racial Equity core team are looking forward to refining the process including capturing just how utilization of the assessment impacted decisions so I think it's really important to emphasize that departments have been working hard to advance racial Equity within their departments but this is long-term work and this is an interative process thank you thanks Amy um next slide so I'll start with a discussion of the revenue for the 2021 budget the budget is uh based on projected Citywide revenue of 337 million which is a 7.7% decrease from last year the three largest revenue sources that you can see on this chart s sales and use tax utility rates and property tax represent roughly 74% of total sources by fund

[54:04] next slide so this next slide is the revenue um excluding our utilities which is our water Wastewater and storm water utilities and as you can see if you look at sales tax property tax and other taxes um taxes do account for 80% of All City Revenue which is pretty significant next slide and this further uh pairs it down to talk about just the general fund Revenue which is projected at 147 million next year which represents a 6.4% or $10 million decrease from our 2020 original um budget I just want to point out the cost allocation transfers in the far our right corner um what this means is this is money that the the general fund

[55:01] receives from other Citywide funds such as osmp transportation that helps pay for General government services so this would be it Finance HR and next slide because each of these funds has their own Revenue Source I think this slide is a better picture of um the revenue that's generated so we took took out the cost allocation and included the funding sources or added to the funding sources that each of those funds has is using to cover the general fund costs so for instance osmp which is mainly sales tax generated um their cost allocation uh share was put in sales and use tax on this chart and again I think this really points out how very much uh heavily we rely on sales and use tax um other taxes and property tax in the general

[56:01] fund next slide so talking about sales and use tax uh sales and use tax makes or the I'm sorry the city of Boulder rate is 8.85% and this and I'm sorry that's for the city a boulder for all taxing districts the city itself it's 3.86% so what uh this chart shows is for every dollar of retail tax collected in Boulder the city of Boulder receives 43 cents or 43% of which half goes to the general fund and the remaining half goes to various funds open space Transportation parks and wreck and then our community culture and safety tax next slide we wanted to um be sure that you realize that a lot of our sales tax here in the city have ex exporation dates so

[57:02] um this chart goes out to the year 2039 and it shows the different expiration for these different taxes but of note is in the orange that's the community culture and safety tax this tax is set to expire at the end of 2021 so staff will be starting to work internally on developing some recommendations to to council uh next year related to the community culture and safety tax next slide thanks Chris so this slide is similar similar to what um we've been presenting every month and please note it's just the retail sales tax what you saw a little earlier was all tax types but um what we wanted to point out here is uh the UN certainty again uh rich and Brian talked about it although this amount has gone up in the last month or

[58:01] two certainly there are many things that can adversely affect um our Revenue estimate moving forward also we utilize the July 14th um projection for our budget at some point we needed to to make a stop in time um in order to prepare the budget but we certainly will be looking at that and bringing updates to you uh throughout the year we do believe that a cautious approach to next year's budget is is prudent and that's why we utilize the medium case or the most probable case um when preparing our estimates next slide so similar to sales tax what this chart represented represents is for every dollar of property tax collected in Boulder the city of Boulder receives 14 cents for 14% um of that it's split into several different funds the general fund getting

[59:01] the majority of those funds but also as you can see community housing parks and wreck Library um and then a small portion to the general fund solely for Public Safety as a reminder our Mills currently collected from the city of Boulder is 11.98% um to 13 Ms if we were to go higher than that we would need a ballot item for a charter Amendment next slide so this is my final slide on revenue and this is general fund only the eight Revenue categories represent um the majority of Revenue accounts for 72% of general fund revenue and as you can see um with the exception of property tax most of the or all of the other Revenue sources have declined pretty significantly accommodations and

[60:00] admissions percentage wise as highest but certainly s retail sales tax dollarwise at an almost $6 million loss from 2019 actuals has the greatest impact on the general fund property tax is up as you recall the year 2020 was an assessment year and we saw a pretty big increase in assessments which resulted in a 10% increase in revenue for the city we do think that our 2020 um estimate will be on track which is good news and then for 2021 on and off assessment year we typically just see some increases from additions to the property role so that uh slight increase in 2021 is related to those additions I'm going to hand it over to Cara to talk about the other side um our expenditures thanks Cheryl and good evening

[61:01] Council I'm going to go quickly into the uses or what we call the budgets um the budgeted expenditures for departments and we'll begin the conversation with the B budget development process and really all the impacted funds in the city had 20121 budget gaps and the general fund Gap was 13.2 million and what we mean by that is when we begin that budget process we look at what is our revenue forecast and then we look at what were our previously approved ongoing budgets and assumptions regarding Merit increases for personnel as well as health care cost increases and we compare those two and when we did that this year there were gaps and meaning that Revenue was not sufficient to meet those ongoing costs or those expected increased costs and that Gap um that we identified for the general fund and these other funds also did not necessarily include the reality that we

[62:02] would need to fund some new Investments or priorities so many funds across the city did have this task of bridging these budget gaps so as we looked to bridge the gaps particularly with regard to the general fund um we always consider the reserve level and certainly we hold reserves in the general fund um for a variety of reasons as shown on this chart um we focus on the general fund because it is the largest fund and the fund that is responsible for funding core public services that don't have a dedicated funding source and is also sometimes thought to be the back stop for other funds um but it is the policy goal to hold 20% general fund reserves the 2020 original budget had that programmed to be 19.5% but of course covid happened in

[63:01] the economic crisis and while we did make midyear reductions we did also recognize we were going to have to draw on reserves during 2020 so we are projecting that at the end of 2020 the reserve level may be around 15% now when we look to the 2021 budget that we built the reserves are actually programmed at about 177% now and that's really um due to a couple factors we did not go to the general fund reserves to plan to draw down anymore for 2021 and in fact when we looked at the revenues we thought it was prudent to not program all of the revenues um for expenditures so we left about a little over a million dollars um unprogrammed and that million dollars is being held in these reserves and the reason why we did that is we think there's just tremendous uncertainty we think that our revenue forecast May fall

[64:00] short so if it does then in essence those reserves won't be there um or there will be unexpected expenditures associated with covid and so we may need to tap into that sort of dedicated uh or set aside million dollars that are in the reserves um we also had some legally restricted reserves that um could be reduced for 2021 and so those legally restricted reserves moved over to the emergency Reserve so this slide shows you total reductions by department so as the departments were looking to make reductions and the reality that they had to make reductions across many funds these are the proposals or the sum of the proposals that they brought forward and were accepted um so we did compare it to what the 2020 approved budget was because

[65:01] that was the last Council approved budget um and the 2020 while we did make reductions during 2020 most of those reductions were one time um so these are the reductions and it is the reductions by Department across all funds that those departments manage and so some departments are only general fund funded um like the city clerk's office and the city manager's office but other funds like housing and Human Services and Parks and Recreation have multiple funds that they manage so these reductions are across all of those [Music] funds so this is a slide you've seen before this is the total budget excluding transfers and internal service funds so that we don't have essentially some double counting the total budget is

[66:02] $341.25 million is operating and just over 69 million is capital and of that operating um 120 million is general fund and uh more than 50% is dedicated at 151 million and similarly in the capital budget uh the governmental Capital fund is general fund funded at 9.7 million but the majority of our capital budget by far is funded through these dedicated funds so this is the 2021 recommended budget um by department and this is that total budget so you can see we have many different um departments and programs and services that we provide provide to the community uh the largest of course at the top is Public Works utilities um and then there are many

[67:01] other large um pieces of the pie after that of transportation and Mobility police Parks and Recreation open space in Mountain parks and internal Services together and this is that same uh recommended budget uh by Department however it excludes that utilities piece so excluding utilities this is how the breakdown is between the different departments and then last this uh breaks it down even further to that general fund that we focus on often and so between the general fund the largest pieces of the pie are these internal Services police fire rescue um and the general governance and these transfers out which is relates to a lot of these relationships between [Music]

[68:07] funds and with that I think that's the end of our uh numbers portion of the presentation and uh if you have any questions for Cheryl or me of council questions see no hands up I have one short one um uh in one of the previous slides the dedicated funds actually exceed the general fund in in size is is that correct that is correct in fact I have the statistics here that um of the operating budget 56% is dedicated and of the capital budget 86% is dedic medicated okay um

[69:01] Aaron you're on helps if you unmute yourself um not sure if this is the best place to ask this question but I'll try um about our Revenue sources do we have any of them left that are have not been removed from the Taber restrictions on percent increases so in other words do we have any left that would be subject to the ratchet effect that couldn't come back as revenues increased in future years uh this is Cheryl the property tax for kid and uid are the only ones that would fall under uh that category great and those are more static right so that's probably not an issue for those great that's I hoped that was the answer so that's good news thank you you're welcome any other questions please continue great so I'm next and here is when we will start talking about the actual

[70:00] changes that the community and the council will see so next slide please what we intend to do is go through Department by department so that you can see the changes that we're proposing so the first changes uh we'll talk about is the police department we have had Success With The Edge program over the last few years um but we feel like we can do a better job with it and of course as you all know we have asked our police officers to do a lot of things that maybe they should not have to do and so in order to really focus on Mental Health um response we are suggesting that positions from the police department be moved over to housing and Human Services and what will happen with those positions is that HHS will actually hire in-house mental health professionals who will be ready

[71:00] and able to respond to mental health uh calls that that we receive I think on some occasions of course they'll be showing up with police officers and on other occasions possibly not so that is one of the major changes from the police department we also are holding a number of positions um vacant we have some layoffs for 2021 um and we also had some for 2020 and we're holding five police officer positions vacant so a thing to say about this is I'm now going to talk about the school resource officer situation and the training unit that we hope to set up in the budget that we published because we had to start working on it in August um we had suggested that we would form a new training unit and the only way to do that that without adding new employees was for us to have a cut somewhere else and the proposal was that we would not

[72:02] have school resource officers this year um we felt justified in doing that partly because um the school district does not actually pay for those officers it's completely paid for by the taxpayers of the city of Boulder and in other communities um not Boulder Valley Schools but in other communi around the nation um the schools often do contribute um so anyway we also know that school might not have been in person this year so it seemed like a good position to take particularly because we really want to focus on our training unit on our training section uh we believe that these are critical to reforming the police department to oversite and in particular to accreditation which is one of the goals that we have for our Police Department we're already a great department but we want to achieve that accreditation um through Kalia so that our community and

[73:01] our state will know that we're the top performers uh what we ended up deciding though after I had some conversations with the school superintendent is that rather than reducing all of the school resource officers instead we would keep two of them and we'll be working with the school district to determine where those officers would go I think likely at Boulder and Fairview high schools and what what that ends up doing is that we'll be using other FTE for the training unit we think we have enough staff to be able to fund both of those school resource officers as well as the training unit and we're excited about that new training unit so next slide please some other cuts that we're making to the police department is that we're eliminating overtime time on the municipal campus this was a difficult cut to make because as we know this is one of the um areas where we need extra

[74:03] Patrol um and so this would be one that next year if the budget starts to improve or the financial condition that you might want to add back in we're eliminating the Hill Police Annex and what that is is a lease of a location a building up on the hill where our officers go to write their reports this will allow them in instead to have to go back to the office or possibly to be able to write reports um from the annex on Pearl Street we have reduced equipment and supplies pretty significantly and importantly we are eliminating the purchase of the incident command vehicle that's not being postponed it's being eliminated so next slide housing and Human Services is one of the main functions that the city um provides and when HHS took a look at their budget they wanted to prioritize the preservation of programs and services

[75:00] and Grant funds that would be focused on basic needs for Boulder residents that have the greatest socioeconomic and health disparities and challenges and so they took a really hard look at how we've been spending all of our dollars what we ended up doing is making a decision to maintain services and actually we've expanded services on the community mediation program We are continuing to work on diverse housing options and financial support to our Community Partners and agencies so for example during this covid crisis and then going forward next year we'll be working with EA and Boulder housing Partners to make sure that they're receiving the funds that they need of course our homelessness strategy is a top priority for the city and for the city council and we'll be funding that and maintaining those services and then our pondero Community stabilization project is a commitment we've made um following the flood and ongoing to

[76:00] improve that community and to provide them with the kind of housing resources that they would need some of the changes that we've made are in Older Adult Services so covid has created a situation in which in particular older adults are at risk and so reducing our in-person programs was something that we had to do because of covid and we expect to be continuing that next year um certainly if things change this might be one that you'd want to look at our family resource schools again inperson meetings were not available but we are working with them to um we we transition to online and we're going to be continuing to do the online remote services that we have been providing Youth Opportunity program we've reduced the grant funding we've eliminated the grant funding that the Youth Opportunity Advisory Board was spending each year but we'll be helping those um yoab

[77:02] members to work on leadership skills um and strategic planning and policy development including they will be working on an anti-bullying policy this year so they've got some good work ahead of them um but they do not have the funding to distribute to organizations as they did in the past um and then the community relations work is where we fund small amounts of money for Community parties and events and of course we can't meet in person and so we have eliminated that funding as well so the Edge program is our big ad for housing and Human Services this year and we're excited to see what having in-house mental health staff members will do to really improve our community so the next slide is um our impact on library and arts and similar to housing and Human Services covid has really had to change the way that we deliver this

[78:02] important community service so in-person Services really um disappeared in the middle of 2020 and we're slowly bringing them back one of the main things that we're adding next year is this first item which is um we're repurposing the old security contract that was at the main library to to an in-house what we're calling concierge and peer Navigator positions this was requested by the library board Library commission um and we weren't able to fund it in the past but this opportunity now that Co is providing us gives us a chance to do that we think that will really improve the patron experience and allow um persons that are experiencing homelessness and in the library to get um additional help if they need it so some of the service reductions is that our programs and events are remaining V virtual the main library is open for

[79:00] Limited hours and The Meadows Branch is available for pickup but we are closing for now the Reynolds and um the North Boulder Corner Library Carnegie Library research requests are occurring by email and other things are occurring virtually um one of the great things that the library um director and his staff did is they created a potential reopening plan so in the event that our finances improve in 2021 they have a plan so that they can move forward to add different Services back over time um to increase in-person service at Carnegie as well as increase Library hours and other things at the at the main libraries um in the Arts area we have reduced the Arts fund in um and we have done that in collaboration with the Arts commission public art maintenance will

[80:00] be deferred and there'll be reductions to Boulder Arts week sponsorships but one thing that the Arts commission as you all know has wanted for a long time is another staff member to assist in the public art program and so we were able to take some contractual services that we otherwise were using and turn that into a part-time position um which will really assist our public arts program and hopefully the Arts commission is pleased with that addition so next Parks and Recreation so Parks and Recreation um receives its funding from the general fund as well as a 0.25 C sales tax and of course the recreation division also gets revenues through um Patron payments for services what Parks and Recreation did as they looked at their budget is to take a real focus on maintenance and refurbishment of outdoor

[81:00] public spaces and they're trying to manage the heavy usage that our parks are getting in this time of covid with reduced funding so some of the things that we'll be changing is that we're going to be reducing some of the more aesthetic services in our Parks so while there still will be weeding and tree tree pruning those will be cut back um to only occurring when the necessity arises for health and safety concerns will be employing healthy tur Turf practices and that we've made some reduced services in our community work programs obviously there'll be a phase reopening of facilities and I think that Parks and Rec has been doing a great job this summer with the outdoor pools as well as slowly opening the indoor spaces as well in fact we heard today from Ali roads that North Boulder pool was filled with people today as was the North Boulder Center so that's that's good a

[82:01] really big focus of our Parks and Recreation Department and this has come about as a result of the master plan work they've done in the past is to focus on means-based free access so this is one of the the equity lenses that we have applied this year and have also in the past is that we're trying to maintain um means-based access for youth for older adults and for those of low income so on to the next one is community vitality and the um main maintaining service levels that we're doing is that we want to support our ongoing economic recovery as you know from the several times that a vet has been able to speak to council over the last few months we're working really well with our partner agencies with the chamber with the community foundation with the small business administration all of these have been working together with the city to continue small business retention

[83:01] strategies and to um pilot affordable commercial efforts which are some of the goals that the council had had the service levels that we're going to be needing to reduce are related to parking and in particular parking in the downtown area one of the things that was a result of the pandemic is that there's been substantial reduction in the number of people driving downtown and parking their cars um and because of this we've had to reduce uh the upgrades and maintenance that we were planning this year to make to those parking structures because the funding is simply not there we also have repurposed the flexible rebate program um and that will be a reduction that that you will see um the flexible rebate program is one where we try to encourage primary employes Employers in the city we took th those funds for 2020 and um sent them to the Community Foundation to help with

[84:02] Outreach to small businesses during the really bad times of April and May and again will be reducing that funding for 2020 so that will be a change that you'll see so next is the boulder fire and rescue Boulder fire and rescue um has made a a very important change which is they want to maintain their emergency response and one of the things that that happens is that um sometimes the budget gets out of whack because of the need for overtime and they've come up with a very creative solution this year to have a light response um vehicle so in times when Staffing gets tight they will con convert one of their stations to have have the light response vehicle respond which will free up other firefighters to remain in the station for emergency fire calls and that will be a savings in

[85:02] overtime expenditures they're also making a few changes in other programs so we currently have a water rescue program um in particular firefighters are trained for that um there's different kinds of water rescued which I most recently learned so there's Swift moving water and surface water and we will be maintaining our programs there but then there's also subsurface water programs which we will be eliminating the training on because we have very few calls for that and our calls are mostly for the other kinds of of rescue operations um we also are somewhat reducing our life safety education classes and our code enforcement inspections um in the fire department but we're maintaining all of our firefighter staff because we felt like our Focus as Cheryl said at the beginning is on safety and safety being the most important thing we're maintaining those firefighters this

[86:00] year the next uh slide is planning and development services so planning and development services um has a number of key Council priorities that rest with them they will be maintaining those Council priorities but they will be occurring at a slower Pace because of the Staffing reductions we are going to be delaying some technology system enhancements and we plan to maintain service levels on land use applications building permits and inspections they've been focused during this time of covid on process improvements and have made really great strides over the course of of those months there is a significant Staffing reduction in this area 17 fix term positions are are being eliminated and those were actually scheduled to end at the end of this year so they don't show up as a a reduction for 2021 because they weren't programmed for 2021 originally but we do want to point out the fact that there will be

[87:00] substantially fewer people working in planning and development services as we move forward the next one is community engagement and the way that we hope to maintain service levels here is to really focus on our Community Connector programs including the covid related team um for as long as possible our community connectors have been doing a fabulous job and really helping us understand the needs of our community we'll be continuing our language AC Access program and inclusivity effort efforts sorry can't talk um as well as varied Community platforms our Zoom meetings for Council and um virtual engagement guidance and planning the way that we'll be reducing in this area is that we had a position that was for internal Communications to City staff members that position has been eliminated and others in the department will have to take over that scope of work we also had neighborhood grants

[88:01] that we started a number of years ago where neighborhoods could apply for small amounts of money to have Community parties or community cleanup efforts we're eliminating those for 2021 the newsletter um we thought about eliminating the newsletter but we ended up deciding that it is a way in which members of our community get good information about the city but we did reduce the number of newsletters from 3 to two for 20121 and then finally Channel 8 support for boards and commissions will be reduced next one is Public Works transportation and Mobility so I want to start off by reminding us of the amazing and great work that was done last year uh for the 2019 Transportation master plan and one of the things that I think you'll recall about that Master plan is that we knew that operations and maintenance was an area in which we needed additional funding and we had

[89:00] expected in 2020 to be focusing on ways in which we could um increase fees or find other Revenue sources we were not able to do that and we won't be able to do that in 2021 either it's likely and so um transportation and Mobility is really going to be not able to complete all of the things that we hoped for in the um transportation master plan but again we focused on Public Safety as our highest goal this year and so we want to maintain our service levels for vision zero funding for snow and ice control pavement management and sidewalk maintenance the way that we'll be reducing our our funding or our expenditures in this area is in median maintenance which was something that we had tried to increase over the last few years but in low priority areas we will be reducing it for 2021 we had planned to increase some service levels in 2020 and we won't be

[90:01] able to do that for 2021 um the emerald ash Bor removal that we have been doing on a proactive basis will now only be able to do for Public Safety threats we've received significantly less demand for our hop service so we'll be cutting back on that um as well as traffic demand management traffic study and metrics and we'll be delaying some of our CIP projects the next slide is osmp so osmp um has had increased visitation to our open space as council is well aware of and so they are looking forward next year to really focusing on the impacts of that high visitation so they will will be um spending their dollars on trail head maintenance Ranger Patrol and education and um research around the usage of the system during

[91:02] covid-19 they feel that they'll be able to maintain most of their services at the 80 to 90% level but they've had to uh rescale and by that we mean lower some of their abilities to do projects so they had many plans for trail maintenance and Trail restoration and improve M ments they won't be able to do all of those anymore um and they'll be focusing on some of the most important um ones that they had found in their master plan and there will be no land acquisition dollars in their Capital Improvement program for 2021 next so among the major impacts that you will see in the budget for next year is the impacts to our Workforce course um when we did the budget one of the things that I think Cheryl talked about is that we started out with the thought that of

[92:01] a merit increase next year for employees and we um we programmed that in in the first iteration of the budget as we were able to reduce expenditures we saw that we were not able to reduce enough and the only way to do that would be to um focus on employee salaries so our decision was that instead of extending the furlows that we have had this year that the most Equitable thing to do for employees was to keep their salaries the same with no merit increase but to eliminate the furlows which actually were falling most heavily on the lowest paid employees so we're projecting no merit increase next year for the management non-union employees the boulder Municipal Employees Association and the International Association of firefighters both of whose contracts um it were ran out at the end of 2020 the

[93:01] Boulder Police Officers Association or bpoa does have an ongoing collective bargaining agreement that goes through 2021 and that bargaining agreement calls for a three and a half% increase and we intend in this budget to honor that increase um in order to make it all work we did extend the holiday closures and we call them furlows this year we had six of them and our initial thought is we would have 12 next year we were able to not uh program that and instead we have two half days at the winter holiday and the day after Thanksgiving these apply to All City staff except for fire police and osmp Rangers at the end of this meeting I'll be saying again the following that I hope that the finances of the city improved next year and that by the end of the first quarter Council will eliminate these furlows um because they

[94:01] cause harm to our lowest paid employees so that will be something for you to look at at the end of quarter 1 next year next so um we also needed to eliminate positions and you can see here that we're eliminating 56 positions in total um 41 of those are vacant some of them from the layoffs that we had done earlier this year 15 positions are currently filled and all of those employees have been notified and these will result in resignations by the end of the year um or ultimately layoffs as of the first of the year we also are proposing a strategy that we used in 2020 which is to hold some positions of vacant and so there are 35.25 positions that we're holding vacant through 2021 again this will be an opportunity in 2021 if the finances improve to make decisions about bringing a few of those

[95:00] positions back our medical benefit premiums are actually going to desre decrease slightly depending on a person's plan choice we were very worried because our first um cut at this from our insurance carrier was a significant increase but we wanted to try to keep those even for our employees or slight decrease because of the no merit increase and so we were able to make a few plan changes that controlled the premium costs those will be um increases to out-of-pocket maximums and deductibles and a decrease in the city's contributions to health savings accounts however the city will continue to make um contributions to those accounts it will just be less than what we have had in the last few years next so over the weekend there was a request um from a council member to add some information to this slide this is a slide that shows our Workforce impacts

[96:01] and the eliminations for each of our departments the last column shows the the total employees that will um that we're budgeting for in 2021 so you'll see that that comes up to 1375.4 um FTE full-time equivalent employees and you'll see that there are a few new positions that are coming on and a few vacancies that are being held and we can come back to the slide if Council has questions later of course so next so we wanted to take a look at the racial Equity of our staffing reduction and so what you see here is in the first columns there's the number of people that we had in each one of these categories before our reductions in June and the percentage of total employees that made up that classification then the middle columns

[97:00] are the number and percentages of persons laid off or terminated and then the last two columns are the number and percentage of those remaining so I'm going to quickly call out that you'll see that the total number on the last column 1, 157 75 is different than the number you saw on the last slide and the reason it's different is that we count differently in this in these two slides the slide that you saw before was what we call FTE or full-time equivalent standard positions this includes non-standard positions so there we're counting positions and here we're counting people so that's the difference in these two slides we can again come back to this I think the uptake on this slide is that we are not seeing a disperate impact on Persons of color as a result of these

[98:01] Staffing reductions next slide so I have a pretty quick slide on new programs or enhancements because we're not adding a lot so the first thing is housing and food security um the thing that we want to say here is that again the house and Human Services or Department yeah spent a lot of time prioritizing um the things that they wanted to spend money on next year and as a result of not funding some of the activities that they normally would have funded like the the community relations like soccer programs other things they were able to redirect those funds to housing and food security and so that is really the main focus of in particular the Human Services programs for next year we also are having dollars that we want to put aside for city-wide personal protective equipment our Frontline workers our firefighters our Open Space

[99:01] Rangers our police officers our streets workers are needing this um personal protective equipment and so we have dollars appropriated for that police accreditation um costs money and of course we talked a little bit about the training um unit that we are standing up but there also is work that we have to do with Kalia which is the accrediting agency and we want to support that police accreditation to make sure that we are recognized as a premier agency the radio infrastructure and radio replacement has been an ongoing project for a couple of years and and I think we're finally in the last stretch of that and we wanted to fund that and make sure that we could stand that up the human resources information system is actually a um what we call an Enterprise System of Technology it's a very important system and it helps us move from being kind of transactional in our human resources area to being much more strategic one of

[100:02] the things that we currently experience in the city is that we do not have adequate technology to do data analysis with regard to our employees and and a lot of the work that we do is Hands-On it's the workflow is based on paper it's based on email it's based on non-automated processes and that costs a lot of time and and effort um in in digging out the information that we need we have needed this system for years and years and we have been preparing for it for that period of time what it we'll do is we'll Empower our Citywide leaders and our HR department um to be able to have the data information about employees that they need in order to make important and critical decisions so an example just in this very um presentation is a a few slides ago you saw the equity analysis it took staff members a long time to prepare that

[101:00] slide a couple of days because we don't have that information at our fingertips and this is one of the things that the HRI system will do for us of the many things in the budget this is one of the most important priorities that we have and then finally we wanted to call out that we are proposing an an addition of an internal auditor for an organization of our size and complexity this is a position that we normally would have we did have this position back in 2008 but in reductions um as a result of the Great Recession we eliminated the position we've been talking about it ever since and this is the time that we really think it's important to bring it back one of the things that it does is it helps us verify compliance with policies and procedures it educates our staff members on financial risks and and how to mitigate those risks so it's it's really a timely position for us to bring back so next next is the capital Improvement

[102:00] program and Cara is going to give me a break and take over at this point Cara thanks [Music] Jan so the CIP program is a comprehensive six-year plan for the capital investment in maintaining and enhancing public infrastructure and it provides a forast test of funds available for capital projects and identifies all planned CIP projects and their estimated costs over the six-year period prioritization of CIP projects involves balancing competing needs correcting service deficiencies enhancing service levels for the community as a whole and providing services to new development the first Year's program this year 2021 is what is actually appropriated in the 2021 budget and then the following five years are just the the forecast and the plan for those five years we have four different project

[103:00] types in the CIP plan Capital maintenance and enhancement and that is what our focus is taking care of what we have we also have new capital projects as well as capital planning studies and land [Music] Acquisitions and for the 2021 to 2026 CIP funding this is the break down by department and you will see that the largest is this blue bar in every year actually and that's our Public Works utilities which is very Capital intensive and you'll see that there's large funding programmed in the Years 2022 through 2024 and in 2022 that's largely utilities driven and there's a large Wastewater project the Interceptor sewer realignment as well as a number of large water projects programmed into that amount in 2023 um there still is substantial utilities but the the thing that's

[104:01] different here is this gold bar and that is a facilities project and that's the um Alpine Balsam rent Rehabilitation project that we're anticipating to issue some debt and do that project in 2023 and then again in 2024 it's really about storm water flood management and a big chunk of this utilities portion here is the South Boulder Creek project which is 66 million this is that same slide just excluding utilities as we do in many of our charts um because they are very significant so that you can sort of discern these different departments more readily um you can sort of see that um Public Works Transportation Mobility has sort of a a steady Capital project that goes up and down a little bit but has substantial Investments as well as um open space in Mountain Parks as well as um Parks and

[105:05] Recreation and then this slide is the 2021 to 2026 plan by project type so you'll notice here that the blue and the orange bars combined are capital maintenance and enhancement so that is focusing on what we have um and this year that comprises about 93% of the sixe CIP which is actually up from 82% last year so really a focus over this planning Horizon on taking care of what we have so we have talked about how with the decline in Revenue um and across many funds we've had to make difficult decisions and we have delayed projects or canceled projects as a result so this is just a sampling of some of those delayed or canceled

[106:00] projects uh the first is uh Jane noted is the incident command vehicle and that was funded by or was intended to be funded by the governmental Capital fund and that is cancelled um and then CID has had to cancel some maintenance and installation of enhancements at their facilities um the fire station number three which is CCS and governmental Capital fund funded is moving forward but it's delayed um Table Mesa multimodal improvements by the transportation fund they're reconsidering that that is delayed and they're going to make decisions with regard to that project in the future and then osmp has had to delay some of their projects but have been aligning theirs with their master plan goals and then while utility funds does have many projects funded over the planning Horizon they did delay multiple utility projects and then what are we going

[107:00] forward with for 2021 for facilities projects um there's this final trch of funding for the design of the Alpine Balsam Redevelopment and then an annual amount that we fund for deferred maintenance um IT projects we are moving forward with the Enterprise constituent relation cens ship management software hard to say it's going to replace inquire Boulder uh much needed replacement and then this Human Resources information system that um Jane spoke to earlier for open space in Mountain Parks 2021 is the first year that the osmp master plan is fully incorporated into the budget and these projects align with tier one strategies and focus on taking care of what we have in 2021 osmp is especially emphasizing the tier one strategies in ecosystem health and resilience and responsible

[108:00] Recreation stewardship and enjoyment Focus areas for transportation their projects again are focused on safety and maintenance as Public Safety was a focus for this budget year especially um those include continuing the pavement Management program intersection safety projects and safe route to schools projects as well as the CCS funded um multi-use underpath for Parks and Recreation they have General Park improvements funded Urban Forest management projects as well well as they are um funding an update to their master plan and then their their other large uh CIP project for 2021 is

[109:00] the flat irons Golf Course facility and I think at this time I'd actually like to invite Ali rhods to to share a little bit more about that facility thank you cara this Ali rhods director of Parks and Recreation and we understand there were some questions about this project at last week's review with the financial strategy committee the picture in front of you is the demolition of the previous flat irons Event Center following the 2013 floods an assessment of that facility revealed significant damage deteriorated conditions including to Life Safety elements extreme energy inefficiency such as 600% the expected energy consumption of a building that size and so with Council input the decision was made to demolish that facility we installed a temporary restroom trailer while we planned for the future so following our 2016 capital investment strategy that was approved by our prab

[110:00] we have been saving for to address our major deficiencies while still addressing every year critical elements in Parks as you see on the slide before you and so we've been able to do that at the recently kind of opened Scott Carpenter pool we look forward to a bigger grand opening next year the visitor service center at the reservoir the Civic area and now this facility that has been delayed for a while and now drastically reduced however um the vision for this project is really a neighborhood focused family-friendly facility that will allow golf to be a contributing Enterprise in the recreation activity fund um it will be more energy efficient it will serve the area the East arapo study one of the key findings in the community survey that was conducted as part of that is that over 50% of respondents really would like more restaurants in that area and so this facility in addition to having permanent restrooms and some space for golf services will include a smaller scale restaurant not like the large

[111:02] facility that was there before but enough to serve the neighborhood and some of the golf uses that are currently restricted and hindered and so Jane mentioned earlier um when talking about operating budgets how thoughtful the Parks and Recreation Department is about use of subsidy and we think moving forward with this project right Now is really appropriate because it'll ensure that golf contributes to our efforts to serve um other communities and that we're not subsidizing operations at that facility so um not sure if we're taking questions now or waiting till later I'll toss it back to Cara I think I see Jane nodding her head that's the right thing and we can talk more about this later thanks [Music] Ally oh my presentation's stuck Cara actually I'm gonna interrupt you real quick the okay presentation computer is about to restart itself so I am going to

[112:00] uh share a new presentation here for you so that uh you can continue the presentation I apologize okay just go ahead and tell me next slide whenever you're ready oh okay next slide so you're gonna control it now Chris okay yes okay good so the last that we have for um CIP project highlights is the the utilities and here is a sampling of the larger dollar 2021 projects for each of the utilities and of course due to the age of the system demand and changing regulatory requirements the systems require continuous maintenance and upgrades and as we noted with the bar charts earlier utilities is highest dollar projects will be in 2022 through 2024 but they do have very important projects in 21 so next slide so as part of the annual budget

[113:02] process we always include um changes to rates or fees that are codified and in this presentation we're going to first discuss utilities rates and then one other fee and I'm actually now going to invite Joe to walk you through the utilities rate charges good evening city council thanks Cara um I'm Joe tauchi utilities director so um in utilities the biggest component of our annual budget is our Capital Improvement program and just uh maintaining and keeping up with the system systematic replacement of our infrastructure we have about $170 billion worth of in infrastructure through three separate utility funds and our biggest challenge frankly is is funding the Aging infrastructure and keeping up with needs across the three

[114:00] Utilities in in our water utility we have critical system components that in some cases are 100 years old um you can see on on this photo in the upper left it's a represents our colar water tank which actually isn't a 100 years old but the but the piping and valves around it uh earlier this year we discovered they were at the point of of failing and we had to take that part of the system off offline and do immediate repairs uh totaling about three4 of a million dollars rather than a planned replacement in 20124 in our Wastewater utility we have upcoming major plant upgrades that will be made mandatory because of um more stringent upcoming regulatory requirements and we also have capacity issues in our large diameter Wastewater collection system pipes uh there they're fine for everyday operation but when

[115:00] there's uh rain events and infiltration like happened in the 2013 flood the system can get um pressurized and and cause backups so the middle photo on this slide represents replacement of the the main Interceptor uh Wastewater pipe that brings the Wastewater to our our plant facility and it is also at the end of its useful life and then in our storm water and flood utility we've discussed in in some previous Council meetings the need to bring a city that was formed in the late 1800s uh up to date to Modern flood plane regulations and we've talked a lot about the South Boulder Creek uh project which is represented by the photo on the bottom right the primary source of utilities revenue is through customer payment of utility bills and the amount that customers pay is based on uh rates that are set

[116:01] through this budget process next slide so we we spent a lot of time earlier in the year in utilities evaluating our options especially with the unknowns of of covid impacts and as we started to see more data and how our year was unfolding we needed uh a financial strategy to balance the need to keep up with this important infrastructure and the vast needs there while also recognizing that some of our customers are having real financial difficulty because of the recession and so to balance those two things we we are proposing rate increases as shown on on this slide recogniz izing that fortunately most people are are still employed and can afford to pay but we're also working on an enhanced customer assistance program

[117:00] where we're targeting that assistance for our customers who are who are having payment trouble we've received positive feedback to this approach so far as we've uh gone through the board process and some internal discussions uh throughout the budget process and so this slide shows what we're proposing for rates in 2021 2022 and 2023 and the the bottom line is that in uh 2021 res single family residential customers would see an increase of about $730 per month on their monthly bills next slide so just uh uh expand a little bit more on customer assistance we have a current program and it includes flexible payment arrangements if if people start to fall behind they can call our Utility Billing

[118:02] staff and um make a payment plan to get caught up we have programs that are aimed at um helping our customers reduce their water use and and which results in lower bills and we also have a rate structure that charges lower rates if people use uh less water than is allocated in their water budgets and and in normal years we have a handful of customers who receive uh direct assistance either through FAA or other agencies and so customer assistance was something that was on our uh on our plan in utilities at the beginning of the year and it's something we wanted to work on building um and with Co we have raised the priority for this work and our staff are currently working with effa and our our utilities and housing and human services staff are P partnering to find

[119:01] more funds and and more ways to provide Direct customer bill assistance we're also currently looking into cares act funding and um pursuing options that would allow uh through our Billing System uh customers to make donations uh from community members who'd like to help people who might be struggling to pay their bills so that's kind of the a snapshot of our our strategy for utility rates and and increases and I think I'll turn it back to Cara thanks Joe so the the one of the fees that we looked at this year was the rental housing license LIC application fee and this fee has historically recovered around 60% of the cost administering the program and staff is now recommending to

[120:01] go to 100% cost recovery this will reduce the uh general fund support for this program so it will save the general fund approximately $220,000 um the proposed fee would be increased to $19 $90 but that fee is um only once every four years the license is good for four years and so at that rate it would be the equivalent of just under $4 per month at that fee level uh this license application fee increase was discussed with the financial strategy committee and some of that discussion was around if this charge is sufficient to cover program costs and also the potential of charg ing different rates per number of units and this fee would cover the costs of administering the program and uh staff looked at this and they did see that historically the same

[121:02] amount of work is required regardless of how many units um but they will relook at that possibility in conjunction with review of impacts related to the no eviction without representation proposed ballot initiative also they wanted to note that there is a separate Fe that is charged related to investigations of rental units that are not uh in compliance with the code so this is strictly a license application fee to cover the program Administration costs essentially so then with that I'm G to hand it back over to Jane and we're really close to the end so next slide please so because of the volatility of the financial condition we wanted to think a little bit about contingency planning for next year um certainly our finance staff will be monitoring our Revenue monthly and you all get a monthly report about it and what we're

[122:00] thinking is that after each quarter and particularly after the first quarter next year you may be in a position to make some adjustments so one scenario is that Revenue could fall short of the forecast the way that we are planning for this is that there is just over a million dollars that is unallocated in this budget and we've put that into reserves which is part of why the reserves are 177% instead of 15% um we also are consolidating city services and reducing our building footprint we've given notice to the landlord at Center Green that we are vacating that facility and so we have to give six month notice so there'll be some expenditure next year but um we'll have a savings from that as well and as as we return to the work world and whatever the new way is um we'll be trying to work on consolidating city services and making sure that we can

[123:00] save dollars there and then another thing that you could do next year similar to what we did this year is to reduce the budget in the midyear time frame we're very hopeful that that won't happen and that instead the other thing that could happen is that revenues will exceed forecast and I think that what rich and Brian presented earlier today gives us some hope that that could happen in 2021 my recommendation to you is that the very first thing that you do if you see that happening is that you cancel those endof year holiday furlows for employees that will be dollars in the pocket of our employees and I have to say that our staff members have worked really really hard during this covid time um and they deserve more which is why I'm making a second recommendation is that you can consider a mid-year Merit increase next year if the funding is available and then finally each of the Departments have prepared prioritized plans to restore services and service levels if things

[124:01] improve and so they will be able to come to you at the end of the first quarter or at sometime during the second quarter when you normally have a financial review to make recommendations about positions that could be hired or services that could be continued so next slide is our next steps um as you know in the budget we have two public hearings and those public hearings will be on October 6th and October 20th and of course we are encouraging the public to write to council and City staff with any um concerns that they might have about the proposed budget and any recommendations the thing that we're asking from city council is that as you take a look at the budget and ruminate on the presentation tonight that you per provide us with your follow-up questions or requests by September 25th that will give us an opportunity to be able to answer them at the October 6th meeting and avoid staff having to scramble at

[125:01] the last minute and that has happened in the past and then the final slide is questions turn it back to you mark okay council members questions surely there must be some I am seeing No Hands ah Bob thank you now they're coming in Bob Rachel Mary and Aaron I don't know if this question is for you or maybe for Kurt or Maris um I noticed that there was um a shifting of the um the funding for The Edge program from the police department to Human Services which I'm really really happy about but I know that we're also planning to launch a another mental health program later this month called be there I can't remember the acronym stands for um where where does that funding come come from and I assume that's also part of Human Services it is part of Human Services and I'll ask Kurt

[126:00] to answer that question thank you Bob so the [Music] um hey Kurt could you turn off your video his video is off it appears that his audio might also be off so I suspect he's having technical difficulty Kurt if you can hear us we can't hear you or see you Bob how about if we recirculate back your question lat oh is he here there's Kurt okay Kurt can you hear me we can hear you now we can not sure what happened [Music]

[127:01] there you've lost audio again Kurt yeah turning off your video is probably a good call uh can you hear me now yes Canen you might turn off your video Kurt um my video is turn okay we can still see an image but it must be a still image thank you yeah are you with us CT you can hear me yes we can now I I wonder if I should sign out and come back in well you're doing all right at the moment so proceed um so I'm not sure what you've heard and what you haven't heard um so it part of it's coming through a grant that we wrote a couple months ago and that's a come that's coming through assistance um

[128:01] from Boulder County we're also in some of our own [Music] funding um from the Human Services budget and then um uh our partner attention homes is actually put you have faded out again Kurt yeah so while we couldn't hear all of that I I think the point is that we are putting in some city funding and we are getting grants from attention homes and other nonprofit Partners we are standing up the program this month and um the the one thing that we're waiting for is that we need to hire the mental health professional that will be part of that cohort of people that will be um servicing our community so there's a person with lived experience a social worker and a mental health professional

[129:00] and that should be starting this month thank you so much Rachel I think you're next all right um thanks Jame for that presentation I was sort of thinking I hope she'll like call us Midway through next year and make sure we're remembering the things that she's telling us like te up um so stay in touch um actually Kurt's technical difficulties tiing into one of my questions which is does the budget account at all for people who are working from home and supports that they may need like did we budget in anything for um you know people having to have quality internet access from home and um headphones or whatever may help people who are working from home printer cost things like that I just wondered like it was that taken into account in the budget as it sounds like we're going to transition more to working from home maybe um it was partially taken into consideration so we allowed folks to get

[130:02] headphones this year um that the city paid for if you signed up by a particular period of time we had discussions about um internet access and paying for it and we made the policy decision that that was not something that the city was going to pay for um we have allowed people to take equipment from city offices so for example chairs and desks if they want to um so those sort of things are available I don't know if others can jump in and have other comments I'm not seeing anybody apply not um maybe something to think about just especially um for people on the the lower end of the pay scale if if we're still expecting participation um there may be some some issues with making sure

[131:01] that that's um doable um next question is on the policing and the SRO yeah keeping two and it looks like maybe bbsd changed something tonight but my original question which may or may not be relevant is if schools aren't going to be um in session Fairview and Boulder where we would have those two SRO why would we want them this coming year Maris hi Jane hi Rachel hi Maris um I think this is all uh still being decided on but um my understanding after talking to school board representatives and the uh High School principles and so forth is that they may be trying to come back uh later in October and so we would provide that service at that time okay soel yeah I'll stay tuned on that but it it um especially if if it stays true that schools are going to be out through you know next August that would that

[132:02] wouldn't make a ton of sense to me to prioritize that to continue in the budget so we'll just flag it um do you mind if I follow up on that go for it thanks and I've also I understand that the the school board is undergoing a kind of a multi-month process about the future of SRO um within the school district from their perspective as well so just I know you're following that but just flag that as well that you know this this is an area where you know we may want to be nimble and um you know that maybe there's um those positions may not end up being what the school board is looking for you know either so just want to make that point thanks yeah I guess I'll jump in and just say yes being nimble is what we're this needs to be about but in conversations with Dr Anderson it was very clear to me and I think to Maris that he was wanting to make sure that there would be

[133:01] coverage for the high schools if they opened and so that is what we are suggesting certainly if they're not open then those dollars can be or employees can be redeployed okay thank you um I would just point out and I'm sure that everybody noticed it but the the fact that the um collective bargaining agreement you know requires a 3.5% salary increase for just one class of employees just doesn't feel good you know while other people are losing their jobs so I understand that we are contractually obligated um but and I don't know that there's a fix for it but it it um it just doesn't feel good in this year of pandemic that there's only one category of employees in the whole city City that would get an increase if I'm reading it right so maybe something for us to keep in mind for future collective bargaining agreement negotiations as a city or a council um next question I just I was a

[134:01] little bit confused in the capital Improvement projects there was a line about continuing payment support for Hogan pancost and I didn't understand what that was I'm hoping that Cara can answer that yes that is I I think when we purchased the Hogan pancost land um we financed that so we have payments that extend for a number of years so that's just that's continued to be included in the CIP that payment that we make for that purchase okay um all right and then on the um Golf Course maybe for Ally I just wanted to see if I followed correctly um because it you know it does stand out that in a year of cuts and hardship we're going to spend four to five million on a golf course like it it um it it jumps off the page at you but with those upgrades be sort of Revenue generating and pay for themselves over

[135:00] time with user fees and possibly also um P pay into um a fund that then funds other things that we need in parks and wreck yeah exactly and let me clarify a few things nearly 80% of the funding for that is from the permanent parks and recre a fund which was is included in the charter and is strictly limited to the acquisition or permanent Improvement of Park land so it cannot be used for programming or even operations we can't use it to mow the grass shovel snow any other important work so um and and the other thing I want to clarify is this isn't an upgrade we have a trailer out there right now that is serving as our restroom and it's fine we've made it pretty with some flowers but it is in going into year five of what was anticipated to be a 3 to five year lifespan in addition we have a very minimal I I'll call it a Snack Shack that our in-house construction crew has made lovely but it is very um much hindering the business of the golf course we have a team out there that is

[136:00] doing really great work we've made some staffing reorganizations but with this construction we anticipated it'll pay back in less than 10 years and then moving forward absolutely allow ways to put money back into the recreation activity fund and immediately we can continue to do some of the great things the team is doing out there to make the golf course more accessible and inclusive which is one of the great things about Municipal Golf thank you um that helps um May I cqu on that particular question if if you're moving on to another question Rachel was yep um Ellie um that building that's going to be constructed out at the golf course is that the one where the spice of life used to be correct correct however it will be a significantly different facility but it will be in that footprint okay so it was the spice of life and and it used to have tons of community events there used to be something every single night out there

[137:01] and so I'm wondering um since that uh since the 2013 flood The JCC has been built and it's kind of taken over that kind of function so um so I'm wondering to what extent was that change in um the use of that building um was taken into consideration or how that yeah have changed significantly oh sorry go ahead no yeah so so significantly so could you just say more about that there there is no indoor event space at the new facility it really is not only because of what we see as the role of the golf course but due to funding restrictions it is the critical needs that are really what we need now for the golf course to serve its function and to not be a drain on any of our other resources and so it's restrooms it's um very small and in fact every time we look at it we've limited even more the staff office space a restaurant with a kitchen it what it

[138:01] really is going to do is also take advantage of the incredible outdoor space which we're really excited about I keep talking about the East rayback and I'm really excited for some of the family programming I hope to see in that area and and at that site it's got some of the best views in town and it's gorgeous and I want everybody out there well um so it seems like perhaps the the function of it will be more of a community focused um Center and so I'm wondering if the issue with this is more of a naming issue um and and how that might be addressed in the naming of of the project just so that be because the the budget subcommittee um all of us felt the same way it was like what are we doing and um and so as we learn more I think we're all getting a little bit better understanding so I just wonder if um there might be an opportunity to um change nomenclature into something that

[139:02] um conveys what it's going to be AB absolutely we can work on that I think our story telling to address that this really it's not an enhancement it's not an upgrade we are addressing a deficiency at a facility and it will allow us really to enhance services and and it to be a community facility thank you that's all I have thanks Rachel oh do you mind if I follow up as well so we'll just keep piling on Rachel we'll get back to you in a minute thanks so Ali thanks for those answers and your your passion for the project shines through right so there's sounds like there's a lot of good things about it but I'm I'm struggling with this as well kind of from that Equity Focus you know I think about like that there are Park sites that are going unbuilt like get the get the like the permanent Park um purpose is right but things places like the Violet park that's right next to the Boulder Meadows mobile home manufactured home housing community and eaten Park um in Gun Barrel right which the residents are always over there talking about how they're lacking Park

[140:01] amenities so you know I hear what you're saying about it but may maybe in the next iteration as we get towards first reading maybe you can itemize a little bit more about what's more community space and what's more Golf Course upgrades and you know and I guess I need a little more convincing on you know putting this much money into the golf course and not into some of those neighborhood parks that's helpful and I think the other thing we can do is zoom out on the full scope of our six-year CIP where we do plan to address both Violet and Eden that would be really helpful thank you so so if I may follow up on on Erin's followup um just real quickly um so if if there were the possibility that um the golf um the community center at the golf course could be delayed for a year or two and address the parks that that um Aaron has brought up ahead of that um I

[141:02] don't know how far down the road you are already in that but if there's a way that you can sort of manage this by shifting when projects happen and and give things higher priorities and I assume that um you've considered who will benefit from the from this project versus who would benefit from the um the parks that Aaron brought up sure we we can look at that we can go back to that we have another prad meeting before your first reading the thing I'll point out is that this project it is we are at the final concept design whereas neither of those projects are shovel ready they haven't you know had the full while we've had some incredible engagement with growing up Boulder and with University of Colorado we don't have Concepts we haven't done any Community engagement on either of those projects projects and so if we don't do the golf course project we wouldn't be able to proceed on those other ones the money would sit there right I think we've taken the long way back to

[142:01] Rachel is it everybody's col Queen you I just had a thought um because I'm again I'm a member of the comittee with Mark and Mary and I was thinking you know I had the same reaction when Mark brought it up that you know to have at this moment this $6 million go golf course going ahead is just not the right move for community and I think the next day I was thinking to myself okay what is the purpose of this golf course I think again it goes back to what you know what Aaron just mentioned what is public what you know what will be used for others things but I think as well who who are the benefit beneficiaries maybe if you can let us know a little bit more about that because I was thinking what if there are young people in this community who are you know because we're talking about Equity if it's being used as well in an

[143:00] equity sense although it's $6 million but if it's also being useful for the betterment of other people as well so that's what I wanted to hear a little bit more about because yes the $6 million sounds really bad just for the golf course but if other people are using it as well young people and people from marginalized Community I think you know all these people need access as well especially in this time so maybe if you can tell us a little bit more about that I think that can help us as well in making that decision I don't want to be left out as the only council member not the colloquy um as you know car I also had those reservations and I think that the the moral here is uh we need more information um we need a different kind of community cost benefit analysis to understand what this will do for Boulder in lie of doing other projects that might help some of our underserved

[144:01] communities and with that I am going back to Rachel I I think Sam and Bob may want to get in on this but um I'm gonna proceed assuming that's not the case um one other parks and re's question that I don't know is exactly for Ally but there's a line in there about um estimated growth of 17% population jobs housing during the next 25 years um and I just wondered did that factor in like recent population decline definitely not for me as I think our population went down last year and maybe years prior to that as well so I just wondered are we still accurately predicting um that trajectory Rachel I'm sorry let me clarify are you talking about in the description for the flat irons Golf Course project or in the other budget memo there was around the population growth I don't remember where I just wrote it under parks and Rex questions that I had so I don't remember

[145:00] where in the memo it was but in it was under parks and Rex and it I just mentioned a 177% growth and it may be that it does take that into account I was just wondering yeah I I know that we have talked about the growth in the area and specifically in East Boulder as talk about the use and as Mary was commenting the golf course as a community facility so for the October 6th meeting what if we provide information about um city population growth or decline in the last few years and going forward so that we will have the information because just just wondering if we're if we're projecting on current numbers or not or if we need to revamp that at all that yeah I don't definitely don't need an answer tonight and then just one last question um in this budget um is that is that pool of money that's specific to covid that was somewhere I don't know6 800,000 is that

[146:02] captured um or that's going to be gone at the end of this year and we don't expect any next year like is there any uh any of those pools of money that are are in the budget or expected to be in the budget no that right now we don't think there'll be any money from DOA or the federal government in 2021 okay thank you that's all I got all right I think Mary's up next thank you Mark um so my first question is likely for Maris on the incident command vehicle what do those Vehicles do um you've probably seen them at big events Mary they're the big uh you know look like huge trucks that can be opened up as command centers they have communication systems in them if there was a critical incident of magnitude we

[147:01] would pull that vehicle out and we could house uh police officers and firefighters and um any other uh you know rescue Personnel um so would almost be like having a full-time Police Department out wherever the critical incident would be occurring so think like active shooter huge fire um you know something horrible happened at the schools Boulder Boulder um where you would have to have an on command uh presence and Facilities that could run just like a police district would okay and um and do we have one now is this so there is one that exists right now so in um it seems to me that something like this would be something that um could be regionally shared and has that been considered

[148:01] um yes um you know Regional equipment is all you know as people Scramble for finances we're always trying to to use each other's equipment um I would not want to be dependent on another um cities you know if we're all if we're all having a similar crisis then we'd all need one of the vehicles but I guess in my mind right now ours is is good for the for the future and um I think we're in good shape for a little bit of time but I you know one critical incident and I would have to wait in for another city if they would even let us use those resources but I'm always open to that but we have one and I think we're in good shape for at least uh the near future okay great thank you um and then um my next question is I'm not sure for who it would be um but um as part of the

[149:04] maybe it's for Kurt the the HHS um budget budgeting process um there was you mentioned Jane an effort to focus on basic needs and I'm wondering if that focus on basic needs has included um additional funding I know that every year we have been providing somewhere on the the the nature of like $250,000 for the keep families housed I believe and so have are we increasing that um for for EA and what would will we be doing for Boulder housing Partners um so I don't know that we're increasing the amount I think we're increasing it

[150:00] slightly to to EA this year we've we've been able to bring in additional funding to EA um um with some car's money um we've also moved our budget around when we did the midyear adjustment increased funding to to EA um Boulder housing Partners has also allocated funds within their own budget towards um towards rent relief um so one of the big big shifts that we've made is as you're aware the the Health Equity Fund is a a relatively new fund it's I think we're going into our our third year now and um the funding for that the first couple years grew more than we anticipated um it's allowed us to shift some of the funding that normally would have come come from general

[151:01] fund um and sort of um back stop it with with health Health Equity Funds so we've looked at all the the various programs that we support in the city particularly those under the general fund to see which ones can be um could also be supported from a um sort of a um a use standpoint from the Health Equity Fund so that's that's helped us to um so so we have um shifted the resources but we've also reduced resources for some aspects and increased it for others so um there um there has been some increase for um for housing supports also for food supports and um um while using less general fund money and so do you anticipate that the given all of these adjustments that the

[152:01] needs will still exceed the resources yeah I don't yeah we we can't anticipate that right now I think we're we're still too early into it um but we've reallocated the funding so we can increase it to areas of more critical support like housing supports and and food supports okay thank you and um another and this may kind of be outside of your belly wck but um I'm wondering what kind of supports are being provided for transportation given that there has been less of a demand for the Hop and RTD has reduced its services quite a bit there are still people out there who are Transit dependent so I'm wondering what kind of um assistance in the transportation arena is being provided so we also do provide some of that funding but I don't have those numbers um in front of me this evening

[153:01] but we could get that for you and that would include um like car repair as well uh yes okay so whatever you have in um in terms of um transportation assistance would um would be helpful to understand sure um thank you um and that's all I have in that question my next question um was about the channel 8 support um decrease on boards and commissions what does that mean in terms of how people what basically what will be televised and what won't Sarah do you know the answer I do so what we are proposing is that City Council meetings continue to be televised and live streamed live and as on demand videos after the fact because we are anticipating that we will probably go to a hybrid approach with

[154:00] inperson and zoom meetings for people who want to participate from home we can record the zoom meetings we can record board and commission meetings so people will be able to watch them after the meeting um they can also par participate in the meeting itself as it's live but we won't be broadcasting it on Channel 8 or via our YouTube channels that saves significant staff resources and allows us to reallocate that Staffing to um meeting some of the other community needs in terms of video production of informational and engaging short form videos so if I'm understanding correctly what you're saying is is that because of the way we are doing meetings right now the manner in which we are doing the meetings is in and of itself the cost savings it is we can record without needing to use all of the equipment and a staff person to sit through the

[155:00] meeting manually running that equipment and we anticipate that because we likely will continue to offer this format even when we go back to inperson that we would be able to leverage the zoom platform to perform some of those functions Okay so so the the the current um video um availability of um of the planning board and the open space board and housing Advisory board that will continue it's just that the way it's done will provide cost savings correct but in order to watch it in real time like with the broadcasts that are live for Council and boards and commission meetings in the past people will have to watch it through the zoom platform and then the recording becomes available the next day okay great thank you I I understand now Mary can I follow up on that please please thanks I was gonna ask about this as well that's

[156:00] that's helpful to understand Sarah but would we continue uh to offer people uh the ability to attend through Zoom after in-person meetings recommence is that our expectation we are anticipating that there will be a desire by our community to be able to leverage what we've learned during this pandemic about how to participate remotely we've heard feedback from people during our listening session that there are some segments of our community participating for the first time because they can do so remotely that there's a convenience factor and it's also we've noticed from an equity perspective it's kind of leveling the playing field in terms of people feeling more comfortable in their own space than in the sort of formal council chambers so so the staff recommendation is going to be that we attempt when we go back to inperson to also keep this resource available simultaneously great that's great to hear and just to get a little bit into the weeds if we were having an in-person

[157:00] meeting and people joined via Zoom would they still be able to see uh the People speaking like the council members or um you know housing Advisory board members or whatever the the board was so there is work underway to configure council chambers to be able to accommodate this type of a hybrid approach there will be a large screen envisioned so the council can see the people who are speaking to you via zoom and likewise we're talking about potentially installing some more cameras to have some different views and images available one of the things we want to make sure of when we do go to a hybrid system is that a the technology works but B we've created a situation where the participation experience is is is as Equitable as possible whether you're in the room or not in the room um and so we've been giving a lot of thought to that that's great to hear thanks thank you Sarah thank you um and I think my next question is

[158:02] probably for evet and it's a a fairly short question regarding um I noticed in the in the budget document that there was a going to be a delay in U maintenance repairs for elevators um I assume it's at the 15th Street um garage but I'm not sure but that the elevator at the St Julian and I'm assuming it's the parking garage not the hotel um will be um will be maintained so both of those being elevators um I'm wondering um why one and not the other in light of the fact that for some people elevators are you know people with disabilities are the way that they can access um facilities so I'm just wondering how that decision was made thanks for your question Mary

[159:03] um so I'm really proud of the community Vitality team what you're seeing is a result of um a very thoughtful approach on a a significant backlog we prioritize all of our Capital infrastructure both on its age and utilization and its current state of repair um when you look at the visitation to the St Julian garage both the times a day where the garages are how the public access that um and the last time we've had servicing so some of the other um facilities that we have across the different cages properties um this one rose to the occasion we also have a project manager underway that is helping us to prioritize and price to make sure that we are uh trying to capitalize and make these things a little bit more in a routine up uh update and maintenance rather than um you know trying to come

[160:00] off cycle for some there are some of our infrastructure that you've seen in our six year six-year CIP um that looks like we're spending a little more on one facility than others some of that's opportunistic but I will tell you that our long-term goal um like all of my colleagues is to take care of what we have first to look at what we can repair in place and to plan for a future where we can get to a more stabilized situation with fewer backlog Mary I can tell you that we work and continue to work very hard to make sure that there are Equitable solutions for everything and that we're not inconveniencing or making it impossible um for people to get to the facilities and use them as they're intended thank you Evette appreciate it um and then let's see just one final question um regarding um assistance um for the um utility

[161:03] assistance and I'm wondering if any utility assistance that occurs has to come from um the utilities fund um so can could assistance come from um the general fund say for example I I think I heard that the question was could could the utilities assistance come from the general fund or or somewhere other than utilities correct so um in fact there there are um there are Charter restrictions on on using utility funds for the assistance program so we're we're are our efforts are aimed at finding external funding sources or other sources of internal

[162:00] funding I don't know that we've talked about uh use of General funds and uh Kurt may be able to respond to that more or uh Ken Barett is here as well who is kind of more in the details of that assistance program so I'll just add in uh slightly to that so Joe and I met about this um uh a few weeks ago and um we already have some funding that was that was supporting this both through EA and also through our Older Adult Services programs um so we have been um supporting individuals in this way um through some of our funding but it hasn't really been coordinated as well as it could have been um so we want to coordinate that better um with the work that Joe's team does through through um their various efforts that they're doing

[163:00] um and then he He also mentioned you know others in the community that can sort of donate towards that um fund so yeah so that's that's how we're looking at it and as I talked earlier about prioritizing our funding and increasing in certain areas th this would be an area that we could probably support further okay great thank you for that and I guess I have just like one final question for Jane um Jane in the past there's been um some funds at at budget time that um council is allowed to allocate in a manner that is to council's desire I guess and um is there is that kind of a fund allocated this year as well not specifically in that way what we're telling you is that there's a

[164:01] million dollars that is not allocated um some small amount of that needs to go to my SRO request that I hope you'll um approve but there are there's money remaining we have shown that as being part of the reserves so these are onetime dollars but if Council wanted to spend those in a different way you may do so okay um so it's it's that that $1 million that we saw for whatever expenses just to make up for the the unknowns that might happen unanticipated things okay great thank you that's all I have all right we have Aaron Adam and Sarah I know mirabi would like to ask a couple of questions I don't know if you have to do something to get her uh on well not on screen but on audio so she is able to unmute herself when you call on her she should

[165:01] be able to do that mirbi if you're listening you may have to press star n on your phone to unmute yourself when Mark gets to you in the list okay Aaron you're next thank you all right uh a number of my questions have been answered I've got a few left and some of them are just for followup from before the first reading and one of those is uh Jane you mentioned there were a number of fixed term positions in planning and development services uh that are not being renewed and could we get a summary of what those position what the function of those positions are please it just be helpful to know what's changing in the department yes thank you and another sort of informational question uh follow up was uh you know the uh water utility um has a lot of capital Improvement um projects and um a lot of them are just identified by their name you know things like the albon dam the kler dam the Lakewood Pipeline and maybe I'm the only

[166:02] one on Council but I don't necessarily know what those all are and not that I'm thinking about saying well no we shouldn't do that but it seems like it would be helpful for us as council members to have a little better sense of how those changes and upgrades are playing into the function of the system so I just wondered if we could get a little bit more background um at some point about how those projects kind of contribute to the overall system do you think that would be possible Joe that would be possible we we can provide some additional information and context on those projects great thank you so much um and then I noticed that like uh I think it was library and Human Services or both seeing a number of um positions cut whereas some other departments are having positions held vacant and I was just wondering what the reasoning was for some departments to hold positions vacant and others to have them kind of permanently or semi-permanently

[167:02] terminated it it depends on of course each different position but um some of the positions that we're holding V vacant are ones that we know we we really need and we didn't want to just completely cut the position so that if um revenues increase next year we could fund those positions the the ones that were actually cutting we're kind of changing the service level in those positions and we intend for those to remain not filled going forward and I guess just to follow up on that like in the for libraries for example it seemed like some of those lowered service levels were because of continued public health concerns and and I know that even after that we're still not coming back at 100% but like I assume that like George Reynolds is a branch that we would want to reopen

[168:01] before too long uh when finances allow so I mean I mean I assume so right like am I wrong about that um David an on the spot sorry David yeah on the spot question eron um no um given what the uh the current city manager budget projects we don't anticipate opening Reynolds um in [Music] 2021 you well and I understand that that's what we're looking at for 2021 I guess I'm just wondering how we you know how we position ourselves for resuming services when uh as we hope um budget situations improve kind of to get closer back up to those service levels we've had in the past I just I worry a little

[169:00] bit about kind of final terminations versus you know um being more flexible for the return of some of those Services yeah I mean the the our next budget process will begin in March and so will be um laying out what we believe is possible if we know more in March or April of next year about what the funding um resources are going to look like for the city obviously we would be requesting funds for 2022 to potentially reopen George Reynolds as well as a new North Boulder Library okay well thanks for that I don't know if there's any more information to get about it for next time but just um I know Jane you said that people are the Departments are prepared for how to resume um some of these Services if revenues come back so I don't know if there's any more to be done this year or if we just wait for that

[170:01] um and I think just the last one was um was just that from the I looked at the fee schedule and um I understand about the sort of the percentage increase on the the water utility and the other um utilities there and appreciate the focus on uh utility assistance programs the other one that that stuck out at me was that rental licensing fee which is almost 100% increase U which just seems awfully steep for one year have we considered a step stepped approach to that one over maybe two years something like that yeah we we have considered it I think to say about that particular fee is that the beneficiary of the fee is the landlord the landlord um being able to rent their property and so the way that we have it now is that the taxpayers of the city are subsidizing landlords and we're you know just sort

[171:01] of a a theory about what's fair made it seem like the landlord should pay the full cost of the service that they're getting so that they can earn more income by renting their property so that's why we did it this way okay thanks for that explanation that's it for me okay Adam you're next all right I'll thank you Mark I'll follow up on erins since that's one of my you're one of my questions as well um I'm just trying to understand a little bit more so they only have to pay would they pay $400 approximately every four years or that that part of the chart was a little bit confusing they would pay $190 every four years okay so it's less than $50 a year to exactly license a a unit that seems deeply low to me actually

[172:00] um one other question in that regard um if newer does end up passing and that is an annual payment how will that fit within the structure of that program so newer if it were to pass is a is a completely different fee and so the newer fee will go to a new program that will provide um Attorney Services for people that are being evicted and so the beneficiary of the program will be the tenants that need Attorney Services this program is so that the landlord can have the inspection of their property to make sure it's safe so that they can rent it out so the the fees go in completely different places gotcha clear the newer uh thing is a tax not a fee oh I'm sorry

[173:02] that's right yep I'm sorry Tom you're so right got it okay um and along those lines also that idea of brought up of charging different amounts based on the number of rental units I think is a very interesting one that we should look at in the future um simply because it seems to me if you have a whole lot more rental units uh you're probably dis disproportionately impacting I know they say that each each one is uh the same when it looks at through the inspection process but that may be a way to minimize the monopolizing of uh rental property units just a thought there um thanks my next one uh I don't want to leave out transportation and we always seem to talk about median maintenance so I'm going to bring back up U my idea of replacing our medians with more natural

[174:02] um grasses and Native vegetation so that we have we could minimize the amount of median maintenance that may be required over the long term um I don't know if we've ever looked into that or what the best standards and practices are but maybe green grass isn't the best route um for the future Bill do you have anything on that yeah I mean I'm sure that we have some information on that and we can certainly provide it for the next meeting um I can certainly tell you that going out and replacing our current infrastructure with um that would not be a cost Savings in 2021 sure long term or a future project perspective um yeah yeah that just might be a going forward thing you know if we're looking at new medians or something along those lines right yeah yep okay I can provide some information

[175:01] on that I appreciate that Bill thank you um this one is for Kurt I believe one of the things that stood out to me was the the cuts for Grants to homeless service um I realize you know we all we all are aware of our struggles um with unhoused population right now and uh I was just wondering what that $100,000 probably would have gone to so that uh that 100,000 is actually a um a a savings in our approach um so the um the the navigation um moved um to a different service provider as I I think you're aware um that's actually that's been a a cost effective move for us um they already have a um um a building you know that

[176:02] they're they're working out if it's they're not renting a building um they have um staff um so if you remember the navigation has a has a shelter component to it as well so you're actually through navigation you're actually um providing a a 24hour 7 well not quite 24hour but at at least a nighttime and part of the daytime service so we're able to um um shift some of the the funding within that program so I think we're we're probably accomplishing probably the same amount that we were before with with less money um we've also started up the the diversion program so the number of clients that are going through navigation um has gone down as the number of clients to Diversion has gone

[177:00] up um and when we started the diversion program around the 1 of February this year we had ideas about how much it would cost um we probably over budgeted bit so the 2021 budget probably more um accurately reflects the the cost of running the program got it thank you for that Kirk Y and my last question um is in regards to the use of office space uh for city employees I realize that there's probably I don't I haven't seen any numbers but um the demand for office space may or may not go down down a little bit and in that I know office space is probably one of our most expensive things we spend money on um is there any plan to you know reassess or negotiate any contracts that we have um

[178:00] with rental office space within the community just based on fluctuations in the market so um I'm gonna turn it over to Joana in a second but I did mention that we have already terminated our contract on the center Green proper prop so that is one that we will be completely exiting and Joanna what other um thoughts do you have yeah hi I'm Joanna Kanan and director of facilities and Fleet so we have been looking actually at all of our properties and doing an assessment of all of our facilities cring lease space as well as um space that we already own and right now Center Green is um kind of our our best option in terms of the most expensive lease that we have um and some of the other spaces are smaller um and wouldn't have the same impact but you're right we are looking at how we um do work in a work uh in an office

[179:00] environment and what that square footage looks like is definitely changing um going forward in terms of any calculations that we're doing in terms of office based needs got it thank you absolutely I think that's it for me back to you mark all right uh mirabi is next um Sarah so I have toggled mirbi on so she should be able to unmute herself mirbi you may have to do it by pressing star n on your telephone okay I'm going to attempt to unmute you mirabi from here as we know this sometimes works and sometimes doesn't can we can hear you we can a um

[180:05] okay cool yeah it uh it told me to press star n and it would let you know so I think you do have to unmute me um all right well thanks for adding me in uh sorry guys I'm on a business trip and not by a computer so um Adam's question kind of brought me into the business side and I just wanted to first thank staff um for all the work on this uh it was very detailed and and thorough so thank you um so I kind of wanted to get into the business side I know we've discussed a lot of um residents lower income uh residents at risk and I kind of wanted to now switch over to what we're doing doing for the business community in terms of a lot of our struggling small businesses so you know as we can see the fees for water is going up and so that's obviously going to affect our businesses as well um but if someone could and I'm I'm sorry I'm not exactly sure who this question goes to but what are we you

[181:01] know doing for commercial properties and in general um with the fees that'll impact the businesses across you know our city how are we managing that do we have any specific numbers of that hi again Council um thank you for your question council member at this time um there are no immediate changes to the fee structure much of which is embedded into other Department's fee structures for reviews and changes um as you know economic Vitality is part of community vitality and along with our older business response and Recovery Alliance Partners we're monitoring impacts on small businesses um even earlier today um we were told that we are doing the right things to focus on uh trying to get some stabilized situation um we have repurposed a lot of our efforts over the next year or so from larger primary

[182:00] employers who are still very important in the community in terms of jobs uh stability to looking at the needs and um stabilization for small businesses but all of that is under the umbrella of the health directives and the safety of the community so first we have to continue to stay in line with the county structure as it relates to fees we're listening hard to our partners um but I don't have any immediate plans in terms of relief that would be suggested at this time as part of the budget okay so relief but but there's also not plans for like massive increases to anything other than again probably Water Services there are some scheduled increases but those are in the budget at this point within the budget okay okay um that was it and I guess then the last the only other point I had was um just one point with regards to open

[183:00] space and again I get that this has been voted on but I'll just give my two cents on it regardless is that uh with with the fact that we are going to have to we have no acquisition budget and that we aren't going to be Main Ming the trails up to what we would like to do I I personally think it's foolish that we're spending hundreds of thousands to kill prairie dogs when we could be maintaining and caring for the open space for our taxpaying residents to actually um enjoy those lands so I'll just leave that out there and that's all I have any other hands going once okay I have a couple of questions one is for Joe um you had a chart showing sort of the typical utility charge of 96.71 as of 2020 um can you uh take that chart out to 2024 and this is an anticipation of the public

[184:00] hearing not asking for tonight of course um and show the dollar amounts relating to uh those projected increases because I assume there'll be another one in 2024 given the size of the uh anticipated uh uh CIP budget for that year um I'd like to know whether 96.71 becomes $108 or becomes $130 um and will you be able to do that uh sometime before the public hearing we can do that okay thank you um Jane I have a procedural question because I sent out a hotline with a number of questions um some of which have been answered this evening and I was oppos not to go through each of them individually so that we can actually have a briefer meeting um how would I go about getting some responses to some of those questions at least the ones that

[185:01] have not been answered so we would answer those um in writing for the October 6th meeting that will do nicely and I will let you know which ones I don't require answers for because they've already been addressed okay thanks okay um are there any other comments from Council well this is extraordinary it is nine o'clock and we're about to adjourn Jane again what looks like there's a few ah they're not they were not coming through okay I see Mary now I see yeah just Mary and Aaron yes yeah just a just a couple of quick one question and um and a comment the one question is with respect to um wildfire um preparation I noticed in the budget book that there was a reduction

[186:03] in in Wildfire preparedness and I was wondering how how that is the case given that we're seeing increase wildi risks and chief cazzo is ready to answer this I'm here can you hear me okay yes all right um good evening Council my called rozo fire chief um we didn't actually reduce Services um in the Wildland um space so we had a position that um was basically deleted um but all of the we've got a a a chief in charge of the Wildland team specifically and we actually filled one of our uh specialist positions um in the interim in the last couple of months and so the the the response piece of things is exactly as it's always been um and that particular position was in the administrative side of the house and I've already got a chief who administers the budget and the program um so what

[187:02] we're doing now is taking time to reassess not only um the program itself for the city an open space but how it fits regionally and then um longer term um as things start to improve Citywide in terms of Revenue we'd want to be looking more towards how aggressively we cross Trin all of our structured firefighters so um that position itself may be a completely different one entirely and and may involve cross trining some of our our other firefighters okay thank you thank you for that um and finally just a comment for um in preparation for the public hearing on October 6th is um that that million dooll um un delegated budget um amount that was left that is actually out of the um

[188:00] um the reserves I'm wondering if at some point we're going to see know whether or not um to expect things to um improve or not and I would imagine that there will still be at that point a need for um for supports for people for rental assistance for um transportation assistance for um as well as for utilities assistance so I'm wondering um if for that hearing we could have some sort of a plan for how we could switch over and perhaps use some of those funds um for Aid in those areas um before just saying we're going to put it all back into the reserves um because I would be willing and I would hope that Council would be willing to support that um rather than putting it back into reserves that using it as assistance for

[189:01] um community members would be a better use of those funds yeah I we definitely can show that and the way that we have been thinking about those those particular dollars is we've talked about it as an emergency fund and and so it would be if things got worse with covid we needed money for other things it would be there in the reserves to be used so the examples that you gave about helping people I think is part of that because folks have lost their jobs they've they've had financial difficulties as a result of covid and so to me that fund is specifically already available for that should we need it that's how I'm thinking of it so I'll I'll work with um our finance team to make sure they're thinking of it that way as well um and we'll provide information about that all right yeah

[190:00] and it would be helpful since Joe said that they were kind of in search of funds to be able to provide the utilities assistance so if that money is available for that then it would be sounds like it might be helpful and put that in okay great thank you sure Aaron well I just wanted to thank um Jane and Cheryl and Cara and all the department heads who are here tonight for an extraordinary job uh this is these are incredibly difficult times and the budget you've put together is a really painful one but extremely well done so I want to thank all of you here tonight but also um every city staff member who's done extraordinary work through this very difficult time and some of whom have gotten laid off unfortunately and uh to all the hard work they're going to be doing in the months ahead we're just extremely blessed as a community to have uh the city staff that we do so thank you everyone and I would like to chime in and second what Aaron has said this has

[191:00] obviously been a difficult year um we're looking at another difficult year uh this is not the budget we would have wanted uh but it's the budget that we have and it's been put together with care and thoughtfulness uh and attention to providing the most service to the most people in in Boulder that that as possible and caring for those who are most in need um Jane again your staff you and your staff have done a tremendous job and I am very grateful for your efforts thank you thank you thank thanks to all the council members um and especially to those of you that were on the financial committee because you guys helped us quite a bit but the council this whole year has been very very supportive in such difficult times and it really allowed us to feel like we could prepare a budget that was going to make some cuts and and we knew that you'd look hard at it but that you would support those that are the the right

[192:01] cuts the reasonable ones so we have felt a lot of support from Council this year on it so thank you you're more than welcome thank you uh anyone else going once going twice all right Aaron Aaron you have another comment what did you no made mine already okay um I believe that concludes our business this evening um and uh we are therefore adjourned thank you Mark nice job thanks Mark good job Mark done night [Music] don't