January 22, 2021 — City Council Retreat

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] official things before I start I do not Sam your audio is really hard to understand y you want to lose the background for now see if that helps it won't or maybe you do what iidea where you'd like switch networks how about this one how about this one all right well while we're getting that better much better there the other one was a little robotic and scary okay how about now now it's good okay super here we are all right well good evening Council thank you all for coming tonight this is the first night of the council retreat in 2021 and we have great things on happened to have a Gand at it before you join today what you would have seen is um first we're going to just do a quick welcome welcome and then uh we're

[1:02] going to hear reports from your paired discussions and I will look to you all to volunteer the order in which you would like to do that I'm agnostic on the sequencing of the reports part of what you'll share in your reports is just generally the themes and um the sense of your conversation and then of course you did have an a specific assignment to think about any proposed uh changes to uh Council procedures rules or overall approach to counseling um that you'd like the rest of the group to consider today and as you're doing those um I have a little uh discussion board that I'm tracking over here so I will put them up um on the board and then we'll share my screen a little bit later to talk about them so just to be super clear on the plan we'll hear your reports first all of them and then we'll Circle back to the specific ideas um for process change um I got a couple by email um so those that came in by email are already uploaded to the board so if you sent those they're great and and

[2:00] then um Bob and Adam sent some and I've added those as well uh so we'll do that somewhere along the way uh sixish we'll do do uh a break for dinner you all have dinner coming to you um so if you could just pop in the chat when your dinner arrives once we know that we're pretty close to having everyone fed we'll take a break um I'd hate to have somebody have to eat during the meeting if we can avoid it uh we'll come back from the break and resume the conversation about the proposed changes to council procedures and we do a to stop that ride 15 um so that we can uh have you chat a little bit hear a presentation from staff on engagement um and again supporting that constructive atmosphere that some of you have talked about and then uh if there's changes to your procedures that come out of that conversation We'll add those to the list um and then get you out of here as close to eight as we can so you can party like rock stars uh right before we join up uh tomorrow morning early again um so that is the plan

[3:00] um I will ask you as you normally do during meetings to raise your hands if you want to jump in just so we can manage um all the the chaos and the overt talking and other than that I think we're in great shape I would welcome a volunteer team to go first and share uh the content and general sense of your paired uh your buddy dialogue if you will anyone want to volunteer any me money thank you mby uh Chris and I can go we were Partners I don't know if Chris if you want to start and I'll jump in or vice versa whatever makes you happy I am flexible if you want to start and then I'm happy to add in okay um so Chris and I kind of I'm gonna let Chris seeing as you wrote down some of the notes I'll I'm going to give an over for you and then maybe let you start kickoff and then I'll jump in but Chris and I basically went through the list um that you gave us Heather and

[4:00] kind of looked at it to see you know what surprised us or or didn't surprise us and then we kind of just reflowed between the two of us on each of those topics and I think the things that came up that were most concerning or interesting or you know whatever the case may be um is what we really dove in on and so um Chris do you want to start on the first one maybe or yeah and and some of the notes and and feedback that everyone shared around um when they felt most prepared um and and and at ease um that those points about kind of decision points versus administrative was a really interesting uh uh conversation and and was uh uh worth trying to kind of have more clarity maybe around what are some of those administrative items uh and uh you know that that took us on also a bit of

[5:00] a a tangent of a conversation too around um just sometimes how some items feel very dichotomous um and and uh are there are there ways when we're working on decision Point discussions uh to to talk about that um and then nearby if you'd like I can go on to kind of the vulnerable section too yeah that's fine and then I I'm pulling up her Notes too while you're doing that so I can go off the topic so yeah that'd be fine great uh um we did we did talk about a little bit of some of the points around revisiting conversations um and uh also uh in talking about various items in uh in the community um how do we also um start to start to broaden that conversation a little bit around um how how does sometimes where when issues come up how how do we work on it broadly as a community not just what the

[6:00] city can do but what what can the community as a whole do so it was a it was a good conversation around that um and and I can jump in there for a sec Chris so like that was one big thing for me is it's very difficult on some of these really hard topics especially the homeless topic is that you know we'll have people with $3.2 million houses screaming at us to do more and we'll have community members that are extremely well to do we'll have community members that aren't well to do it doesn't matter where their Walk of Life is but they're screaming at us to do more and we you know for me strongly government can't fix everything and I think Boulder does one of the best jobs especially around homelessness to give the resources but these public private Partnerships you know um if if there's people and individuals who feel so strongly we have 25 different organizations that help with homelessness and if it's not enough which you know I think for some people they feel that that's the case then having private partnership start and seeing what individuals can start doing would be a really big step in the right

[7:00] direction because I just I don't feel like government is ever going to be able to fix that issue and so how do we bring in um cast a bigger net so that more people can get involved to help a bigger part of the population and maybe in ways where it's not so formal so we have um the entry program for to House people but some people aren't willing to do that so maybe if there's Partnerships where people have um less stringent criteria that they need to follow then people could be that way and so that was one of the big things and again that's for homelessness but it could be around many other issues the prairie dogs where you know we're talking with the government Governor to bring in different aspects and how can a broader portion of the public help where the city can't just help so I know that's another huge program but I really see it as a way moving forward When government can't be the answer to everything and you know we're getting yelled at all the time and there's it's a huge dichotomy so that was for me that was probably one of the biggest points that we discussed

[8:00] and then lastly in the in the suggestions uh section there was a lot of the the suggestions that resonated uh in our conversation uh and um and how do we balance uh especially related to the agenda how do we how do we balance making sure that uh when there are Urgent items that come up that we accommodate those but um it also isn't uh um kind of we use the phrase of of kind of it squirrels popping up essentially yeah so um we talked about that and then also um there's so much incoming sometimes that uh that in the moment there may be a rule or a procedure in the council handbook related to that but it isn't always top of mind um and is there a is there a better way that we could think about how do we help uh uh support some of those uh procedures that are in place um and I think that was it that I had in my notes

[9:00] near by what else yeah and I think um I'm just trying to go sorry it's like we did this a week and a half ago so now my brain is what we were discussing um I'm sorry I'm just looking at the notes here that we went through I think issues May we're losing your audio is pretty rough yeah h better okay um some of the vulnerability issues around Council was one that I think we just kind of got into our own Riff on of you know where Comfort levels lie and that you know I don't think you're ever going to be fully comfortable on Council I mean I just right before I got on I got a really nasty email from someone telling me to step down because I don't care about counsil you know and it's how do you deal with with that and and having other people know where you're where you lie no one steps into anybody else's shoes and I think with Biden's

[10:01] inauguration um and some of the speeches that were given was this idea of stepping into other people's shoes and it's really easy to categorize the homeless as oh they're just the homeless and you know but when you actually meet an individual or Palestinians and Israelis often don't get along but when you meet one individual you feel really differently and so taking that time to sometimes before you scream at another member or disregard a topic think about one person could you really stand there and say that to one person and say oh no you're not worth anything or you're a horrible council member or you know when you get to know someone can you really treat them that way it's a lot easier to do in a big group setting but individually it's not and so there's just you know it's the biggest thing of stepping into somebody else's shoes and and you know coming from a side where you weren't a council member to a side where you are a council member I think it's really helpful to see both sides and you can get jaded to both sides but you know I think just having that Consciousness that everyone has had

[11:01] their ups and downs might be having a bad day might have something else more important going on might be worried about whatever have health issues so just remembering that and stopping for a minute and not categorizing everybody into these big groups so that was I think you know and I think the other big thing Chris was saying was about our squirrels and zombies of not continuing to you know throw in new projects that just all of a sudden something happens and we re react and start throwing a bunch of squirrels at at it or these zombies where we've put the project to bed and the projects keep the zombies keep jumping up so that's two big things I think that would be really nice time savers for us where we're not continually having to go back or bring issues up um and really sticking to the agenda that we have and and um being efficient there so right Chris anything else to add no so in terms of specific um procedures for Council to consider um am I right that you you sort of have touched on three one is clarify when

[12:00] agenda items are decision points versus discussion second one is sort of a vague suggestion that we can figure out the details on but try to find a way to balance urgent items new things with minimizing the chasing of new squirrels um and then uh the last one is uh did you say something just related to once we decided a thing Let It lie um or did I make that up that you didn't say that that's correct when you know instead of continually bringing things up once we've made a decision then they're they're done and we move on okay um all right we got zombies we got squirrels um it's going to be a fun Retreat I love you guys all right uh Chris and mirb thank you very much um who's my next team Mark I looked like you were willing to go next who was your buddy gotta go at some point uh Sam was was my buddy uh this was relatively short we we actually had a um lovely conversation although it was not focused on the specific questions of of the questionnaire um we took a walk up to

[13:02] 311 Mapleton uh which was simply a hole in the ground uh we went down to the library and walked through the um the encampment there which was a bit of an eye opener uh I had not been there previously um uh you know a lot of our conversation was I guess discussing the state of the world as opposed to the questionnaire itself but with respect to the specifics that we talked about um I believe Sam believes we have a good Council in the manner in which we relate to one another and and express ourselves um he is concerned with the nature of our public discourse and debate um he expressed that he would want to get out the message that you know abusive Communications tend to be unpersuasive and that avoiding personal attacks is not inconsistent with passionate advocacy and after we talk talked I went home and it was it was nagging at me a little bit

[14:01] and I ended up pulling up the Declaration we read um in connection with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and I I thought the last sentence of that um really reflected what saying and and that quote is fight for the things you care about but do it in a way that will lead others to join you and I I think that was um the message I thought Sam was communicating to me uh I will tell you that we did not spend a lot of time discussing vulnerabilities um I don't think Sam uh experiences a lot of vulnerability on Council um and uh other than that I will leave him to I had some very specific comments but I will lead him to discuss those as he'll do it a little more politely than I would I think fantastic thank you Mark Sam what did you hear from Mark that's see I also heard from Mark that he thinks that we

[15:01] have a good Council as far as being able to speak with each other um there's not a lot of name calling on the dis or um folks who seem unable to reach out to talk to people who disagree with them so I um also felt like Mark feels like there's a good working relationship that we have as a group which I agree with as well um one thing that Mark remarked on was you know this is a little bit around the vulnerability and and how um we speak publicly with each other is that um the word courage was used in the um question you know what what does take courage to do and Mark made a very strong point that he thought that true courage involved people who are putting their lives on the line for things whether it's firefighters and policemen in their line of work or people working

[16:00] um to treat people have covid or do testing um he just wanted to emphasize that we do hard work on Council but that um the the courage that's required to do the work on Council pales in comparison to the courage it takes people who are taking risks with their lives so I'd ask Mark to clarify that later if I didn't quite get that right but he made a strong point that um it takes a certain kind of fortitude to be on counsil but that doesn't really compare with um folks who risk their lives so I think that was a a big part we talked like Mark said about how we can um disagree without being disagreeable what it means to be passionate and to really push for your agenda um but be able to negotiate and compromise because it's rare enough that anyone gets completely their way in government or on Council so you know how do

[17:00] we how do we thread the needle of not saying Unity when Unity isn't something that that you can always get to but how respect is important so we talked a lot about the difference between respect and capitulation and how we can model that for the entire community so that was kind of along the lines I think of our big picture discussion I think that um Mark brought up some stuff that I think is a bit more actionable than anything I put out there um in specific I think Mark indicated that he feels a gap in the way that we can talk to each other about ideas and so um specifically this was around hotline and he talked about some of the posts he had put on hotline some of the blowback he had gotten for those posts that weren't about the substance exactly but were about the idea that he was making political statements about why he was going to vote or look at things the way

[18:00] he did and then people said that's not an appropriate use of hotline and I agreed with those people that generally speaking that's not the way that we try and use hotline that it's either to add information to a discussion so it's informational or asking questions of staff and we got into a conversation around how is it that we can have intellectual debates among the group and I pointed out that's hard you know because we have limited time and that you know we usually have a lot of work to do on specific items that are on the work plan but around we'll pick homelessness because it's a recent issue you know it feels like there's a lot of big picture ideas that need to be exchanged to kind of dial into exactly what we're focused on at Council and so I think that big picture question that Mark was Raising is how do we have the kind of discussions like you'd have at a salon or in you know a group of people

[19:02] that we're just meeting for um a get together and politics comes up so how do we exchange ideas that aren't directed towards coming up with an action to take and um I think really obviously we can do that um oneon-one or with each of us or with groups that we're in but I think Mark was um aiming at is there a way that we can have an electronic venue where Council Members Exchange ideas and we realize in our conversation that there's all kinds of Sunshine Law implications and serial meeting implications to that so it's a big meaty topic I I've heard from other council members anecdotally that that's a gap that they feel like we don't have a way to get together and as a group kick around ideas when we don't have agenda items or action items that we're trying to take so I leave that is a big question for our 530 discussion is is there a way for us either electronically or in some other way to be able to

[20:02] exchange kind of more philosophical political sciencey ideas that are above and beyond what we're actually working um for our decision points on Council so Mark did I get that mostly right I would say so with the exception that my concern is not just the philosophical exchange of ideas but it's to be able to present more detailed explanation of how we feel about various issues um you know at the council meetings uh we hear from staff it comes back to councel we really don't get more than a minute or two to express our views and there are issues and it can be any of them whether it's uh prairie dogs homelessness CU South where the issues are complex and nuanced and we don't get at the meetings the ability to to Really exchange with each

[21:00] other and we don't get enough time to to fully uh Express what we feel and um now one of my suggestions along those lines was that Council allocate to me 20 minutes at every meeting so that I can expound on every issue uh to my heart's content but I don't think that's practical so we'll move on to something else um I I just think that that we're dealing with with great detailed issues and we need to be able to talk to each other on the level of detail that those issues require um and I'm not sure that that we are set up structurally or institutionally to do that today it's good stuff thanks Mark thanks Sam anything else from either of you not for me had a fantastic conversation and a lovely walk um excellent who is my next crew Aaron who is your

[22:00] buddy so juny and I did uh did ours together and juny do you want to start us off or should I no remember uh you are our spokesperson right I just wanted to give you the chance of the meeting in case you you you reconsidered but um well juny and I I have to say we're we're ahead of the curve TimeWise and so it's been about three weeks since we talked so um the the memories are are a little faint but I'll do my best to get get it a few things across you know so we went over um Heather the some of those topics that you gave us um for for that discussion and so for example talking about passions that drove us um for serving on Council and um I think juny and I felt you know pretty similarly about that about the being of service to the community you know helping people in need um and you know making making our town a better place or trying trying very hard to and hopefully accomplishing it um at least some of the time so that

[23:00] that we both felt like Council was a is a very rewarding thing to do um and in large part because of the the way that hopefully we're able to to uh help people in our community so um agreed on that kind of thing but on the we sort of got into the questions about you know when do we feel confident or when do we feel vulnerable and such and and we talked a little bit amongst ourselves about that but we sort of agreed that you know it doesn't really matter so much what makes us comfortable or uncomfortable or vulnerable or not vulnerable because um you know we're elected officials you know we're we're here um to to do things for the community and um and you know whether whether we feel comfortable or not in a meeting is not kind of the top priority so uh that we should be we should be doing the work we should be doing the reading we should be having the discussions having the hard discussions sometimes that'll be easier sometimes it'll be harder but um you know we're we're here for it and and we shouldn't

[24:01] be shying away from things um based on on whether they kind of feel negative or positive for us um so I think that that was about it for that um so and then maybe I'll go into some of the uh Council rules well and I guess I will mention that we both talked about feeling the strain of serving During the covid period right sure it's true for all of us but that uh you juny was only on Council for a handful of months before this all hit but you know back back preco um you had this direct uh link with a lot of community members because you would see them out uh in public you would uh go to an event uh of one kind or another or a fundraiser or nonprofit event or just at the grocery store and you'd have this you know regular feedback with members of the community um where you would run into them and maybe it was just for a couple minutes or maybe it was a chance to sit

[25:00] down for 10 or 15 uh but that there was um kind of a personal um aspect to that of exchanging ideas with community members that has is almost entirely lost uh during the co period because you just don't run into people there are no events right there's um so certainly you know you have phone calls from time to time with friends and uh experts on certain subject matters but um so that that was something that that JY felt some but I think I probably felt more because I spent longer on Council before it all hit uh so that's been um that's been a struggle and uh something that really that we really miss during this period so um in terms of council um rules and procedures and and other things that we might look at um I think we agreed on the the idea of some some of these that were in your list Heather but like um excuse me forming better and shorter agendas and um not having to touch

[26:02] everything with a council discussion like we don't necessarily need a review of administrative things uh we can put some more things on consent agendas we don't necessarily need you know staff presentations on as many things because of course we're doing our homework right we're reading the packets carefully and and we all come prepared so that um so you obviously want to put out enough information for the community to know what's going on but um but we felt like some of those things could be tightened up um and and actually I feel like of course juny is now mayor pm and as at CAC and I feel like maybe maybe that some of that has already been happening I've noticed a couple more things on consent Jettas and such which was which has been nice um and yeah I I think um I feel like those were the primary things we talked about I I did raise up something about a hotline uh about um you know I just sent kind of a long hotline post but I don't do too many of them about that I think

[27:02] it would be helpful for Council to have a discussion about what we use hotline for and what we don't so I think similar to what Sam brought up in his discussion with with Mark I think it I think it'd be helpful for us to have a little bit more clarity um for Council as a whole in some more guidelines on you know here's the things you use hotline for and here are the things that you don't use hotline for um so I feel like that covered the major things uh Junie did did did I get anything wrong or did you want to add anything you covered everything perfectly thank you right well it's the first time for everything right even a blind squirrel finds a nut out again Ain that's right first time somebody calls me a blind squirrel so you know it's their first all time Erin and juny thank you very much um Mary L like you wanted to go next who was your H interview buddy great fantastic and Rachel please jump in if I

[28:03] um miss something um but you know I just wanted to start out with some of the stuff that I've heard so far that we discussed as well and um one of the one of the things that we talked about as well was the the and this was around the topic of vulnerability and um how do we how are we able to to have a discussion outside of C Council and in a in a more free flowing manner that allows us to be more vulnerable that it's really difficult to do that in Council meetings um and perhaps most especially because of the covid setting we're in so that was one of the things that um we've heard um I I've heard that we discussed and then um we also kind of with respect to that tendentially I think that we we both

[29:02] felt that um this Council was not able has not been able to really develop um the kind of Rapport that comes from um sitting down for dinner prior to meetings um which you know Rachel as um juny they had like you know I think it's it it it amounts to like three months or something in terms of face-to-face meetings before covid hit so the the vast majority of their service has been on zoom and so it it's really kind of handicapped the Rapport um another thing I heard that we discussed was um the Comfort piece um both Rachel and I felt that um it's not council's responsibility um to provide us with comfort that it is our very own responsibility to to provide ourselves

[30:01] our own comfort and um and in fact um when we're uncomfortable probably means that we're making a little bit of progress um that was my own editorial I don't think we talked about that you got double thumbs up though yeah and um let's see oh and then the other thing that um I've heard that we chatted about as well was the the Rel litigating of issues that have come up before um although we called it Rel litigating not squirrels and I forgot what the object was zombies I believe was the reference to that one yeah squirrels and what zombies oh squirrels and zombies okay um yeah um so so we kind of talked about that as well um and then um I'll go to my notes on our conversation um yeah we ched little a little bit about um the the focus of

[31:01] issues in the community and we [Laughter] both of issues is evolving and that there seems to be a more balanced um focus among the issues of of social environmental and um economic um so so that was one thing that we talked about and then um the vulnerability piece um we tried to brainstorm ways in which we could [Music] um have those kinds of conversations but we ran up against the same things that um Mark and Sam did which is the sunshine laws um but uh one suggestion was that there's a little bit of chitchat prior to um Zoom meetings if you log on a little early but it's just chitchat and um so maybe that's one form to one way to form a little bit more of a rapport hopefully we'll be coming out

[32:00] of this soon but um and then um one of the questions that we have that perhaps we could um talk about later is what what what what might we be able to do in order to accelerate meeting in person so that's a question for later um and what I wrote down here I'm not entirely clear on so I'll ask for Rachel for some clarification um soften engagement in order to facilitate broader participation um so Rachel I kind of turn to you um um okay thanks for that so we talked about and I don't know how much is coming next in your notes but like different ways that we could invite Community engagement um that would be more Equitable and um would probably uh maybe just soften the tone so as examples of that can we um maybe change

[33:03] some structures so that it's not people talking at us but more of a conversation so were there things that we could do that would invite dialogue and you know Mark was talking about that between council members but I think it's also between council members and members of the public um we talked about like um having some format where maybe it could be like collated questions so if you know 10 people want to know you know this same topic and kind of where counselors are like you know if you go to town halls for um federal or state um electeds you know there's often like somebody El stand out there well a lot of people have this sort of theme or conference for world affairs or that sort of thing and then it's more us um answering the questions rather than people talking for like two minutes at us and not getting any sort of helpful response so I think maybe that was the softening piece Mary but we T talk we talked a lot about different engagement things yeah yeah thank you for that um I think

[34:00] that kind of covers some of the stuff we talked about um and then um go back over here um let's see and we also talked about um the idea of focusing um Council conversations on the areas of agreement rather than on the areas in which we disagree um and then and then problem solving on those of agreement so that we can move forward and Rachel I don't know if you want to comment on that nope I think you I think you've stated it and and I would just add on the front end of this that Mary and I had a lovely something like five mile walk um around uh a lot of downtown and CU area um and and Mary volunteered to take notes and Report out so I appreciate you inviting me in but I'm I'm happy that you are that you took good notes and are reporting our conversation nicely happy to do that um

[35:00] and then um yeah there's some stuff that we didn't um talk about but that I have as a result of some of the letters that we received from the boards and commissions which I will bring up later fantastic and I had I have a couple more things you know I had emailed you on just engagement and hotlines so I don't know if now is the time for me to bring like my additional pieces or if you want to hit those now that would be just fine or we can talk I have them on the board and I'm going to ask you guys to talk about so we can talk about them too okay and Mary and i' hit a little bit on this one too but um in terms of open and public comment you know there is sort of a question of whether they hit like our Equity goals so for people who have time energy and information and ability to speak confidently at Council meetings they can come and and give open um or public comment but that's not necessarily Equitable so is there a way that we can do it differently and better and then second is something that Mary and I didn't talk about but I also have a question of whether those comment

[36:00] periods are super effective um and I I come from that from a few angles number one I was told um when I was a member of the community advocating um by an Advisory Board member everybody's already made up their mind by the time we get to public comment like we've been looking at these issues for a year in a lot of cases and you're coming the night that we're voting um and so you're not likely to change hearts and Minds so I wonder is there a different way that we can do engagement that's not the night that we're voting and can we think through um our strategize how we can give people time to be heard when we will actually listen and be able to act on it um and and some of that's true for open comment as well so that's one thing can we kind of meaningfully change How We Do public or open comment and and maybe have the engagement subcommittee look at that um another is on hotline so mark got at this a little bit um and I think Aaron touched on it too but if hotline

[37:02] according to our Council procedure is supposed to be used for us to ask questions of staff and convey information to the public um I don't think it works very well I think it's from the user side as a member of the public as somebody who subscribed to hotline before I got on Council it's archaic it's cumbersome I had to try like three times to sign up for it um and I really want and like it so it's just not user friendly um and I don't think there's a high percentage of community members who are signed up for it so I do Wonder like what is the 2021 version of hotline how do we um ask questions and convey information that's not on email which a lot of you know a lot of the kids don't even use um we also ask a lot of questions that aren't on hotline so why do we have to send any to hotline like can staff just take all of our questions and um get back to us individually and I can also share information on Twitter or Facebook with all of you and members of the public anytime I want so I don't think that was there when we invented hotline so I just

[38:02] kind of want us to look at why do we have hotline and if we want to keep it let's nail down as somebody else said what are the appropriate uses and then last thing was on surprise meetings um I understand I went back and looked at the procedure on this well as well it says that we will make every effort not to surprise each other by bringing up something new at a meeting and I think we have different in different um definitions of what is something new at a meeting so I'd like us to just drill down on what is a what is a surprise thanks I'm glad you go I just surprised Mary with all of that I'm sorry okay fantastic thank you um excellent and that leaves Bob and Adam and you um fellows have a handout Taylor are you going to show that that or did you want me to show it I'm bringing that up right now thank

[39:02] you and um Bob or Adam which one of you is gonna tackle this one for us um we're gonna go back and forth odds and evens I think uhu Adam you're gonna do the odds is that right that sounds right to me all right um before I get into the list itself Bob and I did talk a little bit about the challenges of just being on Council how you're probably either making 50% of the community mad or 100% of the community mad in in any given night and how that's just a a difficult thing to do um as a human being uh especially if you really are a people pleaser like many of us are so um we talked a little bit about that uh before we got into our suggestions here and um tried to focus on ways that not only can we make it a little easier for Council to work together but also to work between between Council and the community so hopefully we can keep um a relatively

[40:02] high level of good communication and um functional government going which we seem to be doing better than the nation as a whole so that's at least one step above um but to get into some of the recommendations here you'll notice a few of them are kind of repeats from what we've heard already which is probably a good thing but um first one is uh there's a lot of instances where community members either don't have full information or don't know what's been decided already um they don't know where we are in the process so in these really really big topics um we end up getting a bunch of emails about things that we've already covered or that can't be changed at this point and we're just sort of well beyond um so in those instances we think it'd be really nice at the start of um big discussion topics to run down very explicitly what we can't change

[41:00] that we're still hearing from the community who thinks we can um and sort of what specifically we'll be deciding on so that they know exactly um they come in with an expectation of what can sort of be changed going forward and what we're going to be deciding on any given evening um right now it just sort of feels like a free-for-all I think all of us know we we get a lot of emails regarding decisions that have already been made about CU South we get you know any number of topics there's decision points that have already been passed and we just kind of want to make sure everyone is up to date at the start of the meeting before we do the public comment I think this is another way we can tackle um making sure the public comment is helpful and maybe does sway some hearts and Minds rather than just repeating facts that are not useful or decisions that we already Beyond so

[42:00] that's uh observation and recommendation number one okay number two is um as we've heard from some of our colleagues um there's still some matters I think that are coming to us um from staff that um don't really require a council decision they're really information points and uh so what we like to recommend is um a couple things first of all that um if staff does believe a decision has to be made when they add a new matter to matters um that they clearly State um in the subject matter uh what it is what decision you're seeking from Council U and if it's not a decision um pretty pretty uh doubtful that we need to take it up at a council meeting um can probably be an IP or otherwise communicated and then we parallel to that we want to make sure that CAC feels empowered to um to take take items off of matters if they feel that um it's an information item it really doesn't

[43:01] require a council decision uh next we talked about how on occasion this happened pretty recently we'll have a a big schedule and it ends up going longer than we thought it would um and we end up having some members of Staff or some community members who are there to testify or give us presentations and we end up saying at at night well we're not going to get to this tonight uh guess we'll have to let you go and reschedule this for another time and then we've spent five hours of uh staff's time in Waiting or community members time in waiting and I think we all feel pretty bad about that so um we're suggesting that we do on nights like that we think around about nine o'clock we know where we are in the meeting um as far as the agenda goes so if we all collectively do a check-in at 9ine and see hey hey are we actually going to get to the rest of the meeting um if not we can decide then at

[44:01] 9:00 what we're not going to get to and let those staff and community members go so we don't string them out for two more hours into the into the late evening the next item relates to um length of Council meetings and there's really two things obviously the meeting takes What It Takes and sometimes we guess right and sometimes we guess wrong sometimes we'll say it's going to take four hours and it takes four and a half um and and there's often good reason for that this is not about um did the meeting run longer than it was scheduled this is about scheduling meetings that are longer than four and a half hours I think we had agreed at our Retreat last year that we were not going to schedule schedule meetings longer than four and a half hours but then during the course of the year we've kind of gone down the slippery slope of scheduling meetings that are five hours and 15 five hours and 30 sometimes longer and and you know I just served on CAC so I'm as guilty as anybody and we kind of have shrugged your shoulders and say well well it's all stuff we got to take care of I guess we're just going to Buck Up and um I

[45:00] think if we're disciplined we can get every meeting down to four hours and 30 minutes that may mean that some things get deferred um and again going back to number two maybe some things just don't even get tackled at meetings but I think we need to reaffirm to each other that we don't want meetings to be scheduled for longer than four hours and 30 minutes okay there's a few more uh if you don't mind advancing the slide I'll I'll read right from those perfect thank you um this one uh Rachel covered a little bit um but I also thought it was a great idea worth bringing up is maybe offering a hey I want to seed my time but can I ask this question and maybe can Council give me at least a brief response um and this also bleeds into a little bit of the how do we talk about um our our viewpoints more in depth you

[46:01] know how we're making our decisions not just the decisions we've been making and we wanted to offer hey maybe it'd be cool if we hold um a little preeing session before the meeting so that a few of the community members who are super interested or some of the council members who are super interested or just want to get more out on the table can come to this pre meeting it's more of a Roundtable discussion rather than a um you know only council members talk to each other but we'd have opportunities for everybody to raise their hand and speak their piece a little bit and maybe we could get a little bit more understanding about how the decisions are being made not just the two minutes we get to talk um when we're in the actual meeting making our decisions and saying how we're going to vote so um that was an option for a little bit better engagement this next one doesn't relate to uh meetings it really is just Communications with community members particularly by email and this is a

[47:01] perennial problem it seems like we've talked about this almost at every Retreat that I've been involved in which is U how do we ensure that community members receive at least one response to their emails um um you know some of us respond to some emails others respond to other emails we can't we're not allowed to copy each other on our responses so we don't know which council members responded and then of course some staff members get on top of some emails as well which is great the problem is is that um the the the lag from um from the time an email comes in to the time that a staff member responds is often somewhat lengthy several days and as a council member you're sitting there kind of going huh I is is Staff G to respond to this one or staff not going to respond to this one do I need to get on this one staff would probably be better on this one um and so it would be helpful if we could get a commitment from staff to to let us know which things they're going to respond to and then to respond to the community members I'm suggesting within 24 hours for one business day um um because I

[48:02] think our community deserves an at least an acknowledgement of their of their email I know they get auto reply but that's not really a response um so if we could figure out a way Chris that to have your team let us know which ones you're going to cover um and then to to actually in fact cover those you don't have to copy us on everyone especially if we get you know 18 of the same email you can send us one and say we're going to respond to all 18 the same way that way we just simply know we don't have to necessarily uh respond to it if we don't want to um but it it kind of leaves us Twisted in the wind there and and I think community members get pretty frustrated and the last one we touched on several several of the groups touched on already but um yeah we really find it hard to not have engaged with council members not strictly about council stuff um you know I really care about the human beings who are on Council as human beings not just how we vote and how we

[49:01] show up at these meetings so um without that pre- dinner and everything like that I I have gotten very little time to talk to you guys and see how you're doing with the rest of your lives um so Bob and I both were really interested in I don't know if it's a virtual happy hour where we strictly talk about our our actual lives um but we think there would be something gained from doing that um I'm also super interested in that idea of figuring out how we can get back to regular meetings as soon as possible so um I think that goes right along with it that's it fantastic Bob anything else to add okay thank you Taylor you can probably stop sharing that thanks darling and uh Rachel you sent me one more um originally did you want to just clarify that for Council before we talk about it yeah thanks um and and also Mary and I forgot to mention one one thing which was another engagement idea which is you know like when you write a letter to the editor you then can't

[50:02] submit again for 90 days so we wanted to lift up the possibility of if you speak at open comment then if there are the maximum number of speakers signed up you then don't get to speak that week so that we're sure that we're more Equitable in hearing from as many voices as we can um a lot of times when I would try to sign up for open comment I I would not win the lottery so want to make sure that there are are enough spots to go around kind of um so that was last thing on engagement and then I had also asked about advisory boards um it seems that there's a kind of scoping question of some boards kind of can lift up their own concerns under their like um activating Charter or whatever the right word is and other boards cannot so I wondered I just wanted to get some clarification on why we give boards different Scopes if it's not listed in like the the you know the charter somewhere and that's just our decision that seems a little odd to me um also the communication from boards is a

[51:00] little bit hit and missed so some boards give us really thorough minutes every month or every couple months but not all of them so just wanted to see if we could improve that communication um wanted to lift up that we had an issue where a board member resigned and it sounds like we don't have a clear cut off for when we would replace a board member so if we could like maybe come up with a hard and fast date replace before you know xate but not after xate um and then wanted to specifically see if we could look at um or what it would take to have tab more um just on an ongoing basis invited to weigh in on on land use or planning issues um because I think a lot of times there are Transportation impacts and we've got like Community Cycles writing us and that doesn't seem like we should be reliant on community members to to flag that for us that was my Advisory Board questions fantastic thank you all right so before we jump into my

[52:01] handed Dany discussion board which I'm real Jaz to show you um I wanted to give each of you just a minute to ask one of the other pairs any clarifying questions you might have um about specific content um or recommendations from their conversations yeah Rachel go ahead Yeah question to um Bob and Adam are you asking for all emails to get a response from staff because I I would like that or to maybe extend your I in my in my opinion in the perfect world yeah I think every every Community member who takes the trouble to write to us I mean there's a few community members who write us very rudely um and I suppose there may be an exception um but for the most part I think everyone should receive a response whether from staff or from council members and it' just be good to know as a council member which one staff's going to get on I agreed and I would maybe advocate for us to to expand on that but so we're not worried about us responding

[53:01] because no one has responded but then we respond if we have something pertinent to say and I bet we'll hear from staff on that one when the discussion time comes excellent Mary have a clarifying question for one of your colleagues um no I just wanted to make a comment with respect to the responding to emails I just wanted to point out that not all emails ask questions um or you know some some of them are um basically just thoughts that people share and um it would be difficult to respond to those so um if there you know we need to set some sort of a threshold because we get a lot of emails and um staff has um you know I some some departments more than others and um um so I do think we need to set some sort of a threshold um but to say

[54:01] that every single email is responded to I think is neither practical or neither does every um email re require response because they're comments okay so quick reminder we're going to discuss all these things here in a quick minute just want to make sure you have your clarifying questions answered from one another I promise you'll have a juicy time to talk about all of the things um ah JY was like oh okay just put her hand down um sounds like we can spend some time talking about this one anyone else have a clarifying question for one of your colleagues or another pair about what they talked about or what their thoughts were all right so I'm gonna share my screen before I do that um I want to you're all Zoom experts but I just want to make sure that we're going to be looking at some stuff here and want to make sure you know that you can make what's on my screen bigger or smaller on your screen by going up to the view and changing uh from 100% 50% whatever you

[55:01] prefer you can also move the two parallel lines between the Brady Bunch Face Screen and my screen left or right to make it bigger or smaller and I tell you that because what I have prepared is um an idea based on your discussion items and um it's it's a little sprawly is what it is um so let me show you what I got here for you uh based on your conver your reports just now and the things that I received previously I have put these into some rough categories that we can tackle um so starting from my left over here and I can zoom in if it's helpful you just let me know um we have that's too much we have this bunch of things here that seem to all be related to how agendas are set CAC function um what you're hoping to see in terms of agenda there's a whole bunch of ideas there so we should tackle kind of agenda

[56:00] things one by one but all in an order there this next group here um in the in the middle on this side is just this the hotline things and and what ideas or thoughts do you have around hotline so we could talk about those these aren't in any particular order FYI um here's kind of this Bunch just about you know Council relationships and trying to spend time together um the happy hour and the logging on and um again getting back together in actual person sooner rather than later so that's our third category then over here I have three more categories I got a long stack of stickies here related to ideas around Community engagement and Community conversations um and lots of Juicy ideas for us to tackle there so again I think we should tackle them all as a bunch um and then here just these ideas specifically that Rachel just shared related to boards and commissions um we talked about those as a group and this last group here um I think of it as ways ways for you to engage or behave during meetings

[57:03] right so this is the the the agenda check at n how we're doing and sending people home focusing um conversations around where you agree and then problem solving and where you don't and then this concept again of identifying um what's already been done and decided on a thing before you jump in so those are sort of more how to do things once you're in a meeting so then if we zoom out I not me that that much I have two boxes here one is the things that after your discussion tonight you will agree that you um want to implement and then anything that you're not ready to implement now or that needs further action or discussion we'll put over here and make notes accordingly and just quick reminder as we go along um in order for you as a council to change uh your procedures however uh official or unofficial they may be I will be looking for that not of five um so what we have here is kind of the plan for the rest of the evening um one two three four five six topics clusters um generally with a

[58:02] lot of individual ideas in them um we can start wherever you would like I would welcome a suggestion for a specific place to start um Sam go ahead I just wanted to add one to the boards and commissions so over on the right the second from the rightmost um I would just like to add that we discuss um board Charter and orientation kind of generally like how we um get board new board members oriented and seated um because I think uh we could do better there so I just wanted to add that we it didn't really come up in a discussion except some with Chris and some with Mary so it wasn't part of the formal discussions but I just wanted to throw that thank you okay fantastic oh I I just saw your chat Rachel I wasn't sure about that so I'll add that back in um just Rachel had emailed uh just about wanting to

[59:01] generally Empower um boards and commissions and uh Rachel when we get to this one I'll look to hear your specific thoughts about what that might look like um so does anyone want to suggest one of these uh rows of similarly themed topics to start on I think we start with the left one I propose we start with the left three fantastic FC um so this Bunch right here there's actually a total of seven that are in this category related to how you decide as Council what um is on the agenda um so uh we can so this one up here about balancing urgent items with the minimizing of uh the chasing of new squirrels again is maybe more conceptual but the others are are fairly specific um I would love uh anyone Sam do you care where we start in this column or shall I just pick one any mey miny

[60:00] Heather pick a mo I'd start with the upper left one you got your cursor on it um I I feel like we've already decided this one I think we may want to have a conversation around what what overturns that and I think that would be a conversation because you know we sometimes things are iterative and require a trip back because things didn't work out the way we thought but um I guess my perspective since I like this one and think we should implement it is that this is something we've already decided on and then there are exceptions to it that we might want to talk about but I feel like that's an agreement we've already made love to hear additional similar um perspectives yeah juny yeah I have a question for Sam before I start talking what does he mean that we've already decided are you talking about the ones we decide a thing and let it lie I I feel like we've made this

[61:01] agreement with this Council which is that we try not to return to things once a decision has been made about it generally speaking thank you well I wanted to add um during my conversation with Erin I brought that up as well and I think I was convinced with his perspective that sometimes things need to be brought up back because maybe the circumstances have changed and times have changed or community members there's either more support for that so I think that really it's almost like keeping beat with the community so I I I think that was convincing and I hope that I'm reflecting our conversation well and maybe part of this discussion as opposed to just if we were to decide whether to let it lie or bringing things forward again maybe it's the way we the process of bringing these things back is the real issue

[62:01] because for instance when a council member brings something back which has happened quite a few times even though we've agreed to it they just send an email to CAC and there's only three of us on CAC and the three of us decide I guess if two people agreed chances are because we work well together the next person agrees as well so somehow the three of us agrees but maybe instead might be under the discussion item during a council meeting to have someone bring that up for like just a couple of minutes not making it extra uh meeting but just bring it in under discussion item and have the person explain it for one to two minutes and get a sense of where the entire council is on that particular discussion or that particular item and whether Council want to bring it back as opposed to just having three people dur CAC decide the the item okay just because you referenced

[63:00] Aaron I want to give Aaron a chance to clarify um if juny did not um cover your comments accurately yeah thanks for that Junie I it wasn't that it was inaccurate I'll just add a little a little bit which is I think the there's the question about um what constitutes a material change that uh makes for a reasonable rediscussed previously and I think there has been some disagreement on Council about what constitutes a material change and what does not so um I I think we we've had some maybe unhappiness uh in our interactions because of that disagreement um I I'll just say as as one who I think has been seen as bringing something back up um that that was already decided um that you know it's I've only done it when I've seen it be a material change and if other people disagree I mean it's fine to not relitigate something for three hours right like if we've talked about it before and a council member thinks

[64:01] something's changed and people don't agree then that conversation can be pretty quick but people should still be allowed to argue for material change if they think one has happened okay got lots of folks who want to weigh in on that may go ahead I was just going to jump on with Sam because Sam you said that we had agreed on it which we did but part of the reason I think Chris and I brought up is because it is happening a lot and so it sounds like from what Aaron and juny are saying is that they want to be allowed to bring items back up if there is a material change so maybe we need to readjust this but my point in bringing it up for the rules was because we have the rule but it's still happening so to clarify yep Mark yeah I I I tend to side with um aon's perspective on this it can be a fairly short process if you think something uh needs to be reexamined uh a

[65:00] very short period of time to express yourself and uh we'll get the consensus of council and if the consensus of council is that things have changed sufficiently uh to Warrant another look at it we do that and if not uh we put it to bed um but I think a a brief process for being able to at least raise the issue I think is is perfectly fine and mark would you envision that happening um during a council business meeting under Matters from Council how would you propose tackling that I would think under matters okay but I'm relatively agnostic as to where it happens uh I just think the process can can be useful okay um and uh you know and the speaker can can articulate the basis for reevaluation and again the council will decide whether that's enough or not enough to Warrant treading over the same old ground okay thank you

[66:00] Mary so I would think that what one of the things that we would want to do is to um Define what constitutes a material change and agree on that and um I think that that's key because if we decide what constitutes a material change um then the individual can kind of run it through that definition of material change instead of having the whole Council Do It um so that that's just one thought and then um part of what could make up what constitutes a material change would be not a material change in and of the issue itself but um how it would affect the um the work plan and um you know what what the size of the zombie is and how many squirrels you got to throw at it so it's it's not just

[67:03] it's not just um material change it's like well how much space is there to do this again um so so I think it's that's part of that should be part of the um the gating question for what kind institutes a material change okay Rachel how about you first I want to say there are going to be memes of us throwing squirrels now Mary so you just plan on that um I I guess I wanted to give just a a like a soft nod to the fact that it's been a weird year so we would decide things and then there would be like a CDC recommendation or Governor polus would issue an executive order and and that would you know compel arguably a reexamination of things so I don't know if this is going to be as as pertinent an issue six months from now um I think it's still worth looking at but I do

[68:01] think that a lot of what we saw was the result of covid specifically um and then I just wanted to clarify it sounds like I like jun's idea of putting it at matters and kind of make in your case um and so I just wanted to see would that be like I would email CAC and say please schedule for matters I want to talk about whether there's been a material change to XYZ and then it would get scheduled for matters clarify the process okay um I'll Circle back to see what folks think about that process after we hear from Aaron anyone else who has a thought or suggestion on this one Aaron go ahead well I just want to call it with Rachel I I think her point about covid times being extraordinary is a really good one that uh things have been changing at a in our town at a faster Pace than in any time in recent memory so that's where a lot of this stuff is coming from excellent thank you um so do I recall incorrectly but I thought that you had previously after at or after a previous Retreat had developed

[69:01] some criteria by which you would decide when to um do a new thing do those does that replace or address more this other item of balancing new things and not so much of the revisiting Heather are you referring to the not of five no I thought we had criteria at one point about when we when you would add something that was a departure from the uh work plan but Heather I think that was one of your many other councils that you work with got it no it might it was I feel like this was something Bob Yates suggested but you might not have done it anyway um I do I do tart around with a lot of councils though as you know um so let's talk about about what a procedure might want to be I hear two specific things and we can address them separately one is the need to better identify what mean means a material change and right now do you just sort of wing that based on your gut or has is

[70:00] there somewhere a written definition that might um benefit from some more clarity that's thing one and then thing two is um does it make sense to give council members an opportunity to uh raise something um to bring it back up again before Council by emailing CAC asking it to be added to the members uh to the matters uh from Council on the agenda and then I would recommend commend strongly that you would time box um that proposal and get clarity on it so you didn't accidentally talk about the thing while you decided whether or not you're going to talk about the thing which and would be my concern um on a process front for this one Sam what are you thinking um so since I kicked this off I I had always envisioned that there would be a way to bring it back up so this I agree with pretty much everything everyone said I think matters is the right place to talk about it I think Rachel's idea of send something to CAC and get CAC to put it on uh so and also agree with the idea about having

[71:01] criteria though I think they're going to need to be somewhat loose you know it's going to be hard to Define everything that could happen nothing we wrote down would have anticipated covid and the quick changing of all the things there but I think that's an easy enough way to do it have it you know somebody writes to CAC says I want to talk about this again let's do it under matters and then we need five people under matters to give a thumbs up and I think we should just say 15 minutes because it's going to take five minutes for somebody to Tee It Up and 10 minutes to talk about it so I guess a a default would be 15 minutes and I'm I'm open to trying to put out some criteria I call them guidelines about what would constitute a material change um but I'm in agreement with kind of everything everyone has said that uh there's nothing we decide that can't have a change that six months later we need to look at it again but um the the

[72:01] rub is what's enough of a change fantastic Bob similar different um similar two things I'd suggest um one is you know under the definition of of material change I think material change is a change of facts there's there's been new facts that have occurred um that did not exist at the time we decided the thing um and um so let me give an example of what's not a material change material change is not we make a decision and then 150 community members write us and say you know you guys made a really bad decision that's not grounds for red deciding because we presumably red decided based upon input from staff input from the community and the fact that Community members are squawking at us I don't think is grounds for material change U so I think the council is incoming on the council member to um to say specifically what facts changed in the intervening time and then second um because when we made our decision in the first instance we usually were the beneficiaries of a comprehensive staff

[73:00] memo we should make sure that that staff memo um is included in the packet when we're considering this under matters okay thank you Mary so one item um that is a material change is um new Council so your thinking would be that anytime there's a new Council during a council Retreat presumably that's when you could add new things from the new Council or once there's a new Council well so so just a little bit yeah I'll I'll provide just a little bit of um history here um yes it's typically at The Retreat where it's a new Council so like in 2022 it'll be a new Council that that's when you bring your work plan items and the way I see the midterms as um check-ins to see how we're doing on the items that

[74:00] were brought up in this case um in 2020 so um as an example Sam and myself after the 2017 election um we had put to bed the whole um um I'm forgetting the name of the affordable linkage fee thank you very much the linkage fee had been put to bed and then um Sam and I ran on bringing it back and so at the new Council we brought it back so those I think a new council is when you bring something back and um so just wanted to make that one of the material changes so Council love to see if we can't get some agreement on um how to proceed with this one and move on so blue stickies are the things that are going to find

[75:00] themselves in this box so I don't lose my original notes on your thoughts over here this first item council members um can email CAC to request an item under matters if they want to revisit a topic um we would require a knot of five to revisit and 15minute limit on the discussion about whether to do that and you would want to include the original packet information um in that evening's packet to make sure council members could make smart choices um if I could get thank you Adam um either a visual thumbs up or a hand raise if you support doing this that be great one two three four five fantastic thank you I'm gonna leave that one over here um this next one uh some of you have suggested that we should develop um or clarify what we mean by uh material change and then others of you have suggested what that change might want to be um I don't know that you want to Wordsmith that work right now so I wonder if any anyone has a specific suggestion about who and under what um what method we could come up with for developing an actual definition of material change for you

[76:01] all to address like can some of you work on it offline and bring it up Sam what do you think and then Rachel yeah I I think that's right I think um we could have staff help us with this this is a uh Council guideline and a lot of times we come up with a direction and staff will help kind of write it down and and Tee It Up so one possibility here would be staff's heard the discussion they know what we're interested in and they could take a crack at guidelines and we could bring those the council under matters and see if that's a good enough guideline because that's all these to be as guidelines right anybody could at any time make this proposal and we could say in two seconds that's not a material change we don't agree and move on so I would suggest we ask staff to help us with a few guidelines about what's material change Rachel similar or different yeah yeah I was going to specify Tom car but staff's staff given us taking a crack at it makes sense fantastic um so Council if I move this

[77:01] one over here would love to see any visual indication that you have that you support asking staff to do that and bring it back for you one two three four six thank you very much excellent so this is how this this how we're going to do it we'll talk about the things and then we'll decide and then we'll move things into our agreement box um coming along swimmingly so we tackled this one so we'll put that over there um um so how about this one Speaking of matters Bob and Adam suggested that when staff wants to add an item under matters um they first need to specify what decision they want or what's the action that they're looking for it also I put them all on one maybe they need to be on separate ones you tell me but also um talking about uh empowering CAC to request an IP instead and empowering CAC just to not put it on the agenda um let's hear your thoughts around that Adam please go ahead i' just love to hear from Chris mesek what he thinks about this idea since it's essentially pointed at staff Chris

[78:02] what does Chris think about this thanks Adam you uh you caught me and just actually flipping through the council procedures to look and see kind of what the description is between public hearings and matters um and kind of what the purpose of those are uh and so I I think making sure we're clear why a item is under Matters from the city manager um I think that is something that would be be helpful and important for us and for CAC to feel empowered to say that'd be helpful for us to to get an update on that but that that sounds like something that we could just put in an IP there are other times that we bring items under matters which are uh either um you know process check-ins or essentially um progress markers or Milestones along the way and so that's another reason why we'll bring items under matters so um while there may not

[79:00] be a decision um Coming forward like I I think a good you know recent example would be um say the Parks and Recreation Master Plan update so that was the kickoff of the Master Plan update where we were laying out the process that we were going to embark on and what we want is is a nod from Council that this sounds good or any feedback on how to modify it before we start and that way uh as we go down that embark on that process um everybody's aware of the approach that we're going to take so there isn't a vote there isn't a decision um but we're looking for feedback um and uh an input from Council so I think as long as As We balance those knowing that there are times where that checkin is really important um for supporting a project other times it may be that we're we're just trying to give Council an update and I think for CAC to feel confident to say that sounds like that could be under an IP um I I'd be supportive of that does that help Adam

[80:01] kind of answer some of your questions definitely yeah I'm interested to hear what other people have to say um was Junie is other people who has things to say juny doesn't have things to say jun's like what they do you do okay cool go ahead I thought I saw Mary's hand first um I appreciate Adam's comment about having the minute um the meetings for about 4 hours and 30 minutes but I'm wondering as well if part of this discussion having to do with the length of Staff presentation and I suppose the idea as well is to empower staff to do its work and also show us that they're doing their work but the presentation can be quite lengthy and I think Aon mentioned that earlier and I wonder if that also part of of the process is to limit I don't know if that's something we as even a council can do to limit the amount of um

[81:00] time a presentation goes for instance if it's you know an hour presentation is that too long for a presentation can it be shortened and then the rest of time is discussion because if we want to keep our meetings for less than 4 hours and 30 minutes we have to factor in the length of the presentations yeah and there's just to jun's point right there are several items here that are very much related um right this shorter agendas removing things more things on consent fewer shorter PowerPoints Etc can all maybe lead to this one um would love to hear other thoughts maybe Chris can we come to you first on just this question of council just ask staff to have shorter presentations do you have thoughts on that sure yeah and this is a it it's a I think a an item that comes up often uh um and is a is a discussion that we have

[82:00] every couple of years and on staff presentations there's there's there's a balance we're trying to always strike of presenting the information to assist Council in the decision making uh or the discussion and and building upon or maybe adding uh uh um essentially a verbal description of what's written in the memo and then really the other audience that we are always presenting to is to the community um community members that are are there for the item or that may be watching uh um the meeting and there's there's a a bit of a an art form in balancing that and so I think if uh if Council has a a desire in terms of kind of a a Target time for us to um try and strive to meet for presentations and if we're going to go longer than that maybe that's something that CAC needs to approve um I think

[83:00] that's something that we would be open to uh and um uh it it's always our goal to try and have roughly a 15minute presentation I think part of what we also want to probably um factor in is for many of the the presentations um we we can either get through the whole presentation and then do counsel questions or we can stop along the way and ask questions um and so uh maybe understanding when when is it preferable for staff to get through the whole presentation before there are questions or or clarifications or when um should we stop along the way excellent Council thoughts on that yep Mary and then Mark and then Aaron Mary you're you're muty muty Mary yeah

[84:00] um I'm done for the night being muted um so couple of things come to mind one is um some issues are more complex than others and so for instance um the library district issue is really really complex and um when we've done that before the presentation was actually close to an hour because it's so complex um so maybe so that's one um as Heather would say thing one um thing two is um maybe if it's a complex enough issue and it's gonna have a really long presentation that immediately throws it into a study session um so that's um that's just a couple of thoughts okay

[85:03] Mark how about you I guess I'm a little less interested in putting AR official constraints on the timing of Staff presentations although I think CAC should know those uh and factor that into the manner in which they they schedule the meetings keeping within that four and a half hour limit I it seems to me that should suffice um to meet that objective as opposed to saying you got to do it in 15 or 30 minutes Mary is I think quite correct some issues are going to require longer presentations and and some not um uh perhaps we you know we look to the uh the city manager to um look at those presentations and make sure they're uh sufficiently concise but I don't really think that I want to say that you know there's some sort of artificial deadline uh that shouldn't be exceeded I think getting to the fourth four and a half hour goal which I

[86:03] fervently share is simply a a function of the the way in which we or CAC schedules the meetings um and I would prefer that that that regulation of time occur at the CAC level thank you Mark and Aon how about you yeah I mean it's a difficult balance to strike it it is an art form as Chris says um but I and there is no one- siiz fits-all I think it's just maybe a good reminder um to to have that be kind of in in the in the back of people's mind when during staff presentations and and it generally goes well but I mean there there's the occasional one that just goes um much longer than is scheduled for I mean we there have been a couple of meetings where we've had an item scheduled for an hour in the presentation has spend you know half an hour 45 minutes so I don't know if there's a way for maybe you know staff internally if if a if a pres presenter is going a little long if somebody else

[87:01] can text them or something and say yeah you might want to speed it up a little bit um it's not on schedule maybe to because I think a being able to occasionally adjust in real time without I me it's kind of you don't want council members like interrupting staff and saying hey make it faster but maybe there can be some some internal adjustment when things are going a little long okay Council what I think I'm hearing is is maybe mixed enthusiasm for setting some specific guidelines more what you're saying is you really like to empower CAC to ask questions make suggestions for length of presentations moving things to study sessions moving things to matters or consent and really again pushing on this thing of so that the meeting itself is not scheduled to be longer than four 4 and a half hours um so sort of a mixed thing agreeing that the four and a half hour limit for schedule is is is legit and you want to

[88:00] stick to that and then empowering CAC to make it so and that's more or less what this item here that I have um is is saying says do not schedule meetings for longer than four and a half hours CAC to understand length of items and plan accordingly CAC empowered to ask um and make suggestions um Rachel what do you think about that yeah I guess I would just add again that I think it was a weird year so when we committ

[90:50] this one I just wanted to add that I will also commit to reminding uh Sam and also the rest of

[91:00] Staff when it comes to keeping up to the four and a half hours fantastic so Council uh I'm G to read this one again and then I look for your visual indication if you support it do not schedule meetings for longer than four and a half hours CAC should understand the length of items and plan accordingly CAC is empowered to ask and make suggestions about moving items to matters to IPS to stud study sessions Etc if you support that thank you Adam love to see a visual 1 two 3 four five Fant oh you're all on that one fantastic thank you excellent um that means this one have we covered this one CAC to form better agendas we can Chuck that one over here need did that one okay um let's talk a little bit um speaking of agendas about this item and about clarifying when a when agenda items are decision items discussion items um would love to hear thoughts around this

[92:00] one yep Sam I'm just going to State the obvious when something comes to us as a public hearing it almost always has a decision point so I think we can agree that anything that's a public hearing is a decision point I think the real question here is uh and I'm not reading it again because you're in my way but there yeah and so under matters um we're offering guidance typically and so I think really this is focused on um matters it I just wanted to say that it's and people disagree say so but it seems to me like um anything under a public hearing is essentially a decision point because it's a public hearing any and things under matters may or may not be decision points okay Rachel is that your understanding is I think that we've had that issue where matters then turn into something that requires a public hearing at the last minute that has been

[93:00] difficult online so I don't know if that's what this is getting at or if we have that somewhere else but I think we we're going to address that at the retreat so this is the retreat so we should address right exactly so okay let's hear from other folks if we can get some clarity Mary what are you thinking Hein so um the this came up around um the concern that community members come to um public hearings or um wanting to change hearts and Minds at the final decision point for instance um so and this would be a whole heck of a lot easier um on Zoom than it would be on um in real life but maybe not what I'm thinking is for each item that's that's

[94:02] a big of of U much Community interest that we put some sort of a gauge you know like those fundraiser thermometers um where we are along the process and so like for instance with the parks and W master plan the thermometer would be like you know empty and then um and so for each item like that then we just kind of move along and when it's a final decision point you know you burst the thermometer um or you know some joyful thing like that um but that's a thought and that relates to something that I had in the community engagement bundle of things um just around the suggestion that someone else uh said that maybe before or you talk about an issue you first reiterate here's where we are like we've already decided these things and this is today's conversation so maybe that's a similar concept um Erin what do

[95:01] you think about this one well I'm going to bring up something a little tangential um but I just want to make sure that it's on our radar what so one of the the challenges about like items under matters and whether they're decision points or not is that when we do make a motion then it requires opening a public hearing by our Council rules and procedures and and so you have this wacky situation where you know it's 11:15 at night and um now we're making a a motion and now we open a public hearing but there's nobody left in the meeting um and then in Zoom it's much worse because people can't be ever speak unless they've joined the meeting as speakers and we were supposed to talk about this um at The Retreat because it's been a problem and I don't remember being on any of these lists so I just I think this has been a problem so my apologies for not bringing it up earlier but I feel like it's sort of related to this but we should talk about it sounds like it's all part of this this same

[96:02] bundle so I consider it officially on being discussed out the retreat Let Us carry on yeah oh sorry I wasn't yeah so thanks for saying that Heather and so yeah because I would I would really like to figure out a different way of doing that at least during Zoom times because it it's not being very functional uh for Community right now okay sorry Rachel go ahead that's okay so Erin's getting at the same thing that I was asking like is this the point in Retreat when we're talking about that matter becoming a vote issue and then I just wanted to say I really like Mary's idea about the you know the gauge because I do think there's a lot of community confusion around like we're getting a lot of testimony on if we should do something but we're at the point in the project where we're deciding like how to do it and and the if was decided at some previous point so if that can help um help inspire people to give us feedback on the on what's up at that decision point that would be great right

[97:06] um it a little loose Loosey with the words there all right so this item here tell me if I'm paraphrasing this correctly something shows up under matters and then you discuss it and then someone makes a motion and once a motion is made then you have effectively sort of in an ad hoc not necessarily noticed fashion created an opportunity where people need to speak to you and as Aaron said that's harder to do during Zoom but even um in a regular meeting you didn't know the community didn't know it was a decision Point unless and until someone made a motion and so it's confusing for everyone and now we don't know what to do is that a fair Fair summary Sam sometimes yes sometimes no most often that's a fair summary um sometimes we know ahead of time it's going to require motion um so there are

[98:02] times at CAC when things don't have a public hearing maybe it's ratifying a small change and most often at those times um nobody's interested in speaking to it however the thing that you described sometimes happens where there's an item we discuss and you know enough council members want a decision to be made that a motion is made and or we turn to Tom and say okay Tom we' chewed this over should we make a motion to do this and Tom says yes so um I think CAC tries to put things under matters that don't require decisions or things which are very minor don't need a public hearing on and do require decisions so there's buckets that CAC can put things in to begin with and then there's the surprise and so I think the bucket that CAC can put things in and say we're going to need a decision under matters we can certainly address Rachel and Aaron's Point around that I think we've struggled with this as long as

[99:01] I've been on Council and if we're parsing it out the ones where we know ahead of time at CAC maybe we can do something that says you know public or public hearing required right for this under matters so we at least give some notice and but the ones where we discuss it and decide that a motion needs made or council members want a motion made that's where we end up in these really confusing awkward sticky situations so if we could at least break them up into those two parts what CAC can know ahead of time and what do we want to do around those under matters and then items we don't know that are going to have a motion and they come up at once so we can talk about the planning part and the spontaneous part I think that might be a helpful distinction EXC from Rachel so I just had um some proposals for for the

[100:01] situation Sam's talking about where CAC knows in advance and can designate it's going to require a public hearing it seems like it would be helpful right now we give the zoom link sign up for other public hearings in advance to the public why not make a zoom sign up available to the public for that one as well in advance and then that takes care of that one and then for the surprise ones could we realize we need a public hearing and then have CAC schedule that again under matters but with notice of a public hearing for the next meeting because then we know we've given people an opportunity to weigh in if depending on can iqu real quick just just absolutely Rachel agree with everything you said the only time that the the last thing you said would be difficult is when it's time sensitive so in other words when we need something done in the next week and staff has asked for some kind of Direction in the next week and Tom says it needs a motion it can be hard to punt it off another week so that's the only I

[101:01] think everything else that you said is right if we have time and we decide emotions needed we should put it off until later but I guess one thing to keep in mind is if there's time sensitivity what do we do okay okay okay Aaron so I I have a question for Tom about our boundaries here Tom do do you know is this done because of kind of requirements for public meetings or in some some some rules or laws or is this purely a council procedure thing to open a public hearing when we make a motion it's purely a council procedure thing Aron there's no requirement in the open meetings act or in the charter that you have a public hearing at all but historically uh C have held public hearings on any matter of great public interest and great public interest so so I I guess I don't I don't quite of a

[102:01] fully formed thing but this is going a little bit of the opposite direction of where Rachel is going in but I just wonder if there sometimes these things are are pretty trivial like that that we you know Tom will advise us well the you know in order to move this forward you it's ideal to make a motion just to get it on the record for clarity but but it's about some really very minor issue and so I don't know um if like making that wait till another meeting and adding a public hearing to it um I don't know if that's in the public interest it take a lot longer and slow things down so maybe that's not always necessary Tom what do you think well I was going to suggest that perhaps we should alter your rules to say that um matters for that uh for a decision should not be placed under matters but should be placed under public hearing or consent sent if they're minor decisions and that only the only things that go on on to matters are things that are intended to inform the Council of the

[103:02] community that makes sense to me it and um and I guess maybe when when we do occasionally have one of those surprises like Sam mentioned where we really felt like it was it was a matter but then as we got all the way through it realized hey we really do need a motion um maybe that that um it is a smaller matter maybe that could end up on a consent agenda for the next meeting something like that um and then only when it's like Sam said then you're just left with the ones that are surprises but are really time sensitive that probably doesn't come up very often so then Tom you said the only the only things that would be under say your thing again just so I get the language right and then I'll come to Chris so the only thing that would be placed under matters are things intended to inform Council get Council direction or inform the community community that anything that required a public hearing a motion would be placed under public hearings if it's a matter of substantial public interest or on

[104:00] consent okay Chris what do you think about that I I like that idea especially for those items that we can anticipate um and that may that may add a few items that in the past uh you know have fallen under matters would now um fit under public hearings and then I do think there are those times where where something may come up uh that uh that is a bit last minute and so I think as long as we've got some sort of process and procedure similar to when we were in in-person Council meeetings where folks that were in the room then had that opportunity to speak um and I think Sarah has some some thoughts on on that specifically of if it's something that comes up where all of a sudden someone makes a motion and and now we need to have a public hearing so um I might ask Sarah to add in a little bit uh of her thoughts too Sarah thanks um I definitely think some uh strategic

[105:01] conversations up front about what to schedule in that slot makes a lot of sense but I also recognize that sometimes things come up and they play out in a way that could not be anticipated my staff and I have been thinking about how to deal with this issue of trying to get people into the zoom meeting should this happen and we actually came up with what think is a pretty easy solution originally we were trying to figure out how to get a crawl on Channel 8 and get things posted but if we just had a slide ready to go that had the URL um for people to enter the meeting should they need to at some point during the meeting we could share our screen and everybody could have access to that link at that point in time so I think we could do it fairly seamlessly without having to update three or four different platforms um you know in a Time constrained situation okay when time constrainted all right let's see what we have here all right I

[106:01] have several items now in blue Let's uh let me tell you what all three of them are Tom I'm GNA read the first one first and you tell me if I got the words wrong because you know how I am um so it says edit the council rules um so the decision items or when motions are expected those items will be listed under consent or under public hearings um surprise items when you didn't know the hearing was coming if it's not time sensitive you would add that to a future consent agenda um or hearing item and only um informational items would show up under matters I think that's right okay counil could I get um a visual indication of um how many of you support that sticky going into the box of a thing that you decide one two three four five six thank you all right excellent the next item is just uh Sarah's item right there which was to address this problem of when you have a time constrained situation and therefore you have a hearing on the Fly do you like

[107:00] this idea of having staff prepare this slide to pop up so that you can let people into the meeting um right there in that moment um if you like that I'd love to see your visual thank you Sam eenie meen1 two three four five thank you excellent thanks for that cool idea Sarah and your team um and the last one here which again kind of bleeds into my community engagement stack but let's talk about it while it's here is this idea of somehow creating a visual indicator or a gauge or the fundraising thing or what have you um just uh that shows the process or the status of the items um that you're talking about so that community members can understand and track where you are in the process which hopefully would focus their Community engagement on what you're actually talking about and not what you talked about six months ago earlier in the process Sam thought thoughts on that one yeah um I love it and I think a a logical place for that to go is at the beginning of every memo we have economic

[108:00] impact and sustainability impact and um social impact and so I think we could just add one to that which is you know place in process one to five and then we can do it visually as well in some way at the beginning of each uh presentation on that issue but I think that makes perfect sense it's great to bring folks along and I think we have a a logical place for it in every staff memo Chris questions or concerns around that one no and actually I think the suggestion is really helpful and I think we can draw on the city's engagement framework um we have the the nine steps to decision making and I think we could use that that graphic that wheel um as a as a way to have that both written and and visual indicator of where we are in the process okay Rachel I'm just going to say it it may also be useful like on beard Boulder and other places so not just in staff memos but anywhere that the public is is engaging on things

[109:01] okay all right and also on another all right Council if you like this idea as it has been described i' love to see your visual indicator thereof one two 3 four five six that's everybody fantastic thank you great all right so that is this one that is this one all right we have two more items um and I love to chat with you a little bit about this one specifically around things that come up things that come up along the way that no one saw coming that get added to the agenda um often described as new squirrels that you have elected to chase while you already have had a whole bunch of squirrels that were on the work plan um how how do you want to think about this one of balancing the opportunity to address urgent things while also honoring the retreat process

[110:01] and the existing work plan Adam you have thoughts yeah I think new things should really mainly apply to health and safety I mean that's you know this is the time to bring up nothing that is of critical health and safety concern and anything else that does have critical health and safety concern is worth looking at okay Rachel how about you I feel like we did this last year and committed to this and that the stuff that we've added like the squirrels that we've chased are covid mostly related so I actually think we've done a pretty good job of staying on our work plan and and had a lot thrown at us okay fantastic anybody else feel differently so would you agree then that with what I have here which is that um new things that would apart that would depart from the exting work plan they would need to be related to um health and safety obviously Co being the Whopper of the things that fit in that

[111:01] box but there might be others Ain does that make sense to you or not well generally I think occasionally you do get an urgent item that isn't necessarily specifically health and safety but that responds to something kind of critical in short term so I think that's a guideline but a very good guideline but maybe not 100 % okay Sam very much agree with Aaron and um we can easily come up with examples of things where time sensitive stuff we needed to touch on AR rows like funding um ways we could get grant funding and we needed to touch on it and approve something so I think generally I I just as long as we have this as a guideline and not a hard and fast rule I'm comfortable with the way it's put now Tom what do you think about that oh you're muted the one thing that always seems to come up is ballot measures U takes a lot of time last year Council put two on the B on the on the

[112:01] ballot um at some like last minute and so I think I agree with Sam this needs to be a guideline because things just come up and you you don't know what people are going to put on the ballot and what council is going to want to respond and that's just going to happen ballot measures are part of the work plan but we never really know until we get into the depth of the election season okay Mark we just add the qualifier primarily to the the words regarding health uh and safety and that I think will provide us with the flexibility to deal with other things as they come along excellent fantastic seeing no other hands councel what I have written here is new things to part from the work plan um need to be primarily regarding health and safety but this would would be a guideline and deviation may occur in rare circumstances Tom suggested one there might be others right cool lots of thumbs up thumbs thank you thank you thank you thumbs

[113:00] fantastic all right um then the last item that was sort of part of this conversation cluster was this uh item that that Rachel mentioned about um you have as a rule no surprises and no surprises right is about not bringing up new things without um other members of coun knowing that they're coming and the question is what constitutes newness what constitutes surprises um Rachel do you want to see anything else about this one before I hear from your colleagues yeah just that um to me a surprise would be something that's like off topic or not you know already on the agenda and yet I I think that some people would prefer that any like that maybe new ideas or new takes or new suggestions on a topic have to get transmitted via hotline ahead of time um which I think has serial meeting implications so somebody put something on hotline and I know I'm going to respond to it then people are still like well that's a surprise what you just said but I can't respond to that hotline because then

[114:01] it's a Serial meeting so I just want to sort of clarify from my perspective something new would be something you know if we're talking about homelessness it would be me bringing up something on um you know see you south or or looking at a new flood mitigation process I would think if I'm talking about something relating to homeless that that wouldn't be a surprise so wanted to see where other people are with that other folks on Council what's your understanding of the no surprises um Rule and what means what constitutes newness Sam well what I think what this really means and this is what it means to me is nothing actionable gets brought up during a meeting that we are going to take a vote on so for instance any council member can make a motion under matters we operate under Robert's Rules so it would be perfectly acceptable in our rule set for me to

[115:00] make a motion under matters that was totally out of the blue um so I think what no surprises means to me is we agree that we're not going to do that even though we have the parameters under Robert's rules to do it if we intend to do something that's going to it require Council action a motion requires Council action if it has a second so anything that's going to require Council action must be um communicated to the public and other council members that's what I think the no surprises rules means Rachel I don't think it means if we're talking about homelessness some new program idea that's totally in bounds I think I I believe that what this rule was intended for is that we don't have five council members who have somehow coordinated with each other somebody makes a surprise motion under matters and because of the rules of order that has

[116:01] to be voted on and could pass so that's what I think this rule is happy to hear what others think Ain what do you think this rule means yeah I agree with Sam um so I think that that's what makes sense to me about the no surprises I I feel like it has there's been a kind of unstated assumption that it means that you couldn't necessarily bring a new idea to an existing public hearing without getting it out there first so so that if you have um like I I felt like sometimes like if the day of a meeting I come up with like oh well we're having a a hearing on squirrels tonight and I just realized you know if we design a new squirrel feeder in just such a way it could work out really well that that I feel like oh but maybe I need to put that on hotline uh because I've never talked to anybody about this idea before and so I I want to make sure that we can bring new ideas on an existing topic to a meeting and that's not a surprise um and so I like the way Sam spoke it rather than something more

[117:00] restricted Rachel does that increase your understanding or further confus well it increases and I agree with Aon and Sam I think we all have the same understanding and um I've had some situations and and um I we use an example we had a landmarks hearing and I wanted I asked at the hearing for staff to do some more research and for us to delay voting um it's quasi judicial so I couldn't really put that out on hotline ahead of time if I wanted to but it was on the landmarks hearing as a question to staff and I got pushed back that that was a surprise to me given that it's on topic and how Sam and Aaron have described it it's not a surprise so I just want to clarify that my understanding is right going forward on that sort of issue Aon or Sam since you were Ser on the same page about that do you have Reflections on Rachel's example um so my reflection is if you know ahead of time that you are con contemplating a motion and it's not quasi judicial that that that would be something you would put out I I

[118:01] think it has come up many times in quasi judicial hearings that you continue the hearing to later so I think that's in bounds Rachel and any push back on something like that on quasi judicial is very complicated so maybe it wasn't an appropriate push back but um I think just generally speaking outside of Quasi judicial I think we're pretty clear on this um what we mean and Aon I'd invite your thoughts as well yeah I I agree except that I I think it would be good to write down more or less the definition that you originally gave Sam I thought that was right on target so maybe we can get that in our um rules and procedures as a as a guideline I want to real quick do you want to hear from Tom Carr about the Quasi judicial thing to see if we could get some clarity around that or is being unclear just okay Tom so I don't necessarily have a problem with someone's asking staff for

[119:02] U information in a quas Judicial matter as long as it's a public request and staff informs the applicant so the applicant has a chance to know that the information has been requested and it gets a copy of it so they can respond um it gets complicated we generally do say don't use the hotline for quasit addition because that's outside the hearing but a request for information isn't necessarily commenting it's a request for information so requests for information about quasi judicial items are okay in advance if staff notifies the applicant yeah do this help Rachel okay so here's what I have on my little blue stick okay is uh no actionable items are going to be brought up under matters if you anticipate raising or H posing a motion that folks would know in advance um H

[120:01] yes you need to identify in advance request for information about quasi judicial matters are okay in advance if staff notifies the applicant Chris this does seem to have a uh uh to do then for staff are you cool if Council supports this yeah I think it makes sense and specific spefically on the request for information in advance um I I think just like in non quasa judicial hearings we always do our best to uh to accommodate um that additional information request prior to a hearing there's there's always a timing you know if it if it comes in at three o'clock the the day of the hearing that that sometimes is tricky and tough but um I think as as long as that request comes in especially for quasa judicial hearings as far in advance as possible that way it gives us time to one gather the information and two get it to the applicant so if if Tom has other thoughts on that that'd be great Tom so I just wanted to no I wanted to clarify that the status of

[121:01] council's rules so the the council's rules under the chart or govern meetings council's rules then refer to Robert's Rules if there's a gap so Robert's Rules never override council's rules so if you want to say no one shall ever make a motion under matters unless they've fored CAC or their members before you can do that and enforce it um you don't need to say that under Robert you don't need to say Robert's Rules requires us to take any motion it doesn't because your rules are sovereign for your meetings and the charter specifically says that so um if you let me know I mean I can draft something that says no council member shall make a motion under matters unless having previously informed uh other members at least two days in advance or something like that Sam what do you think about that idea I like it I would suggest we turn this over to staff to draft and um discuss and adopt it if we agree because uh it really is the no surprises Rule and it really is about you know we don't

[122:01] want people making surprise motions under matters the rule came about because that had happened and had been very disruptive in the past so I'd be receptive to hearing a proposal from staff Aon how about you well I think for the really disruptive one I agree in in concept but we were just talking about those times when you know the discussion goes a certain way under matters and it oh actually it looks like we need a motion um and and council's in agreement or and there's nothing last minute disruptive about it's just sort of where the discussion has arrived so I wouldn't want to preclude that from ever happening so you prefer not to change the rules and have it just be a um a council agreement here to minimize this I I would go for it as a guideline the way it is right now with the no surprises and just write it out with the specific expectations Tom well and also Council

[123:01] always has the right right to wave any rule with a two-thirds vote so you I'm not suggesting which way you can go but you have the option of doing it either way making it a guideline and and asking for compliance or making it a rule and then waving it when it's something that everybody agrees on okay Council what I have right now is that you're asking staff to um draft an updated guideline along these items about uh that you agree that you're not going to bring up actionable items you're not going to make motions under matters unless you've told folks in advance um and again if the request for quas judicial information is cool as long as it's in advance um and staff notifies the applicant um I'm happy to entertain another version where it's a rule but first would love to see how many of you support just having it be a guideline if you could give me a visual thank you one two three four five that's all of them all right fantastic then Tada that's what we'll do um thank help with that one Tom appreciate it all 05 I want to do a

[124:01] dinner check do you have dinners um yet Rachel your dinner's here Rachel's dinner's here everyone uhuh Sam is your dinner here Sam doesn't have dinner Aaron doesn't have dinner junnie doesn't have dinner all right shall we carry on with a couple more until we get everybody have dinner fantastic that's what we're doing I'm GNA go check but I got my headset so I'll listen but I'm going to go look so cool thank you um and I'll now check after each item until we have um all Council has dinner and then we'll break for dinner um so this conversation does seem to lend itself nicely uh into our next column here related to hotline and all of the hotline things um clarifying what the heck we're supposed to use hotline for and not maybe considering an alternative to hotline um and then this idea of s related but maybe different about coming up with some other way just for you to share your thoughts and perspectives on things in a less formal and time constrained way um let's let me

[125:03] just hear your thoughts based on what you've heard from your colleagues and your own experience does anyone have a specific suggestion yeah Mark I think the most important item is the second one um because as I said earlier the way we do business the way we conduct ourselves makes it impossible to have any kind of long form analysis of any issue that is before us and some of those issues um whether it's homeless policy or CU you South um really warrant uh an in-depth look uh and uh I know I would like to hear uh indepth thoughts on some of them from my colleagues and obviously as I have been a the primary user it seems of hotline um I am also interested in uh setting forth My Views in a way that is simply not possible uh at a council meeting

[126:03] and um and to some extent my greatest interest would be hearing from my colleagues um as I you know I'm always prepared to to be wrong on something and if somebody has a better argument and can be convincing and do it and has to do it in detail I'd like to hear it um and when I have a a thought that cannot be expressed in 30 seconds I would like to express it so I find number two and number three uh if we don't want to use hotline for those purposes uh I think it's important to create some alternative venue uh in which if if you can either talk to each other or talk to the community and be able to express ourselves and before before I go to Mary Tom can you just briefly remind us of what's the legal um what the legal context and constraints that we need to make sure we're thinking about as we brainstorm ideas here so anytime the

[127:00] council is is meeting to discuss business and it's more than two council members unless it's a committee which can be two then you're going to have to have uh notice and opportunity for the public to be present they don't have to be able to speak um that's kind of what study sessions are you could you expand that concept to something else and I don't think Mark suggesting doing something that's not transparent and I I I I will remind you that I I believe hotline was created in the late 90s so we're using late 90 technology in 2021 so it is time to look at or is there a different way to to share it was probably great in 1998 or so but it's it's age not if I can just cqu with with Tom a little bit I I I you're correct I I do not wish to be anything other than transparent it it's simply finding a form that we don't provide now and then um again before I take the other members of council Chris um am I

[128:01] right to just assert that there's a staff bandwidth issue here that depending on how the story goes there could be additional work for for staff that we might want to be considering in our conversation as well uh there there is but it's actually a good timing because as Tom mentioned the the platform of line is Way Beyond its its uh useful life in terms of of a technology so we are going to need to replace that platform um soon anyway so this conversation about really what does council intend for the purpose of hotline to be would be really helpful because then we can start to seek out what are the Technologies to help support achieving that um but first I think if if Council desires the intention of hotline to be different than what's in the the council procedures then I think that's the place to start okay um let's hear all the ideas on the table and then we'll sort out what we want to suggest Mary what uh what do you think about all

[129:00] this so my I have just an idea that I'd like to throw out there is there could be a page um on the website where people could write their thoughts um if you know you know and then and then um the public can go to that page as opposed to um hotline where you have to subscribe so that's one idea um what I it might be really difficult for every council member to write out their complete 30 minute thought um and put it on the website so we need to do it in such a a way that doesn't raise the expectation that if a council member did not put their thought out into the world um that well

[130:02] that you know we we just need to be careful about that because that can take a long time to draft um and some folks just simply don't have the time to devote to that so um that's all I have great May how about you um I'll second that with what Mary said we're all council members don't have the time but um what I was thinking is you know we do those sorry I forgot what it was called but the profiles where it kind of tells what kind of person we are and I think everyone communicates differently I'm not as concise in my speech because I find that I kind of think while I talk and that's my form of thinking um other people write um so on and so so forth and so you know I've agreed that you know the hotline posts weren't exactly what I thought they were going to be but maybe having an outlet for those members who tend to write down their thoughts better

[131:00] than just speaking them I mean I've noticed over the years that Bob really you know writes down great speeches and then justread them because he gets out exactly what he wants to say and so maybe if we change the requirements for hotline and that you need to put at the top a disclaimer saying I'm using Hotline in the manner to get Express my thoughts because I'm not able to you know Express them as well on a in a meeting as I am here or something like that where we demarcate what we're using it for you know again if if it's a page on our website that's fine as well um but it it was just a thought of maybe how we could use it and just put that disclaimer up to say this is why I'm posting it here so you can really hear my thoughts in a clear and concise manner Rachel what do you think I have a question for Tom um so I think maybe um I would have an alternative proposal to Mary's idea of putting it on our website which would be maybe giving everyone um an official

[132:00] City like Twitter handle or Facebook page and if we did that like can I go back and forth with Aaron on Twitter and you know knowing that I've also tagged another council member or five council members or whatever is that okay under the under the laws It is Well the the challenge is when you start getting close to making a decision outside of the meeting so uh you you post something and that's an idea and then Aaron says I agree and four other council members say I agree then you have a decision that wasn't done in the in in a public space and and so that's where it gets problematic if you want to express an idea and then Aaron wants to express an idea and there's no tcid or implicit agreement of how you're going to vote ultimately then you're okay but where that that line is becomes really hard because it's very natural for people that that's why we discourage people doing reply all on hotlines because it starts to you get into a rolling decision which takes it outside the

[133:01] meeting and arguably could violate the open meetings act so I mean we do you know we do have ways right now to communicate with the public in public um so I just wonder like if if Mark's goal is to be able to you know share ideas with each other I think is not the the use right now properly for hotline um can we do that in a way that the whole public can see and and maybe just get rid of hotline Al together that way with the caveat I'm also concerned sometimes we give like lengthy um staff requests in hotlines I've seen this going back years before as on Council and you know somebody will send that out like on a Saturday or Sunday for a meeting on a Tuesday and and you know the staff's going to be putting in a lot of time to respond to those requests um so I in my understanding from reading the rules you sent out is that we can't really ask staff to do multiple hours of research anyway over hotline that requires a rule a not of five so I would propose that if

[134:00] we have questions of Staff we just email the individual staff member or communicate it um and and they can know that we may ask that question at a meeting so I don't understand why some questions would have to go to all Council anyway so I would I would propose eliminating sending direct questions to staff and maybe find a social media platform or something like that okay um looks like I have Aaron and then juny and then Sam Aaron go ahead yeah so I mean I I appreciate the interest in having the discussions and getting our thoughts out there to the public but I mean I I feel like the open meetings laws really constrain us from from having any kind of real discussion about policy to anywhere but a noticed meeting so I think that that means that I don't think there really is an effective way of of getting our opinions out there in a way that we can all do um on some common platform kind of because

[135:01] of that because we'll inita sorry that will inevitably interact with each other if we do that I think um perhaps Erin's dinner has arrived um juny what are you thinking well yeah yeah I sorry I had a little more there so please with the dog noise in the background um so the um so I I think but you know certain council members who have had a desire and and uh and the wherewithal to get their opinions out are doing that already right so Bob has this newsletter that goes out to thousands of people with all of his um decisions explained he does an extremely good job of that Rachel and Junie have also done newsletters you know other are active on social media so I think if we if we have the desire to explain ourselves in detail I think there are ways and platforms to get that out there but I don't know that that needs to be a city

[136:00] function I think we can do that as we're motivated and desired to do so okay go ahead junnie thank you um I'm still not fully sure of what not just the purpose of hline but what are the perimeters that's an issue for me um so I understand where Mark is coming from and I don't know if I would want and I I just wanted to say as well hotline is an anxiety Laden for me I've used it maybe twice or three times and every time I've spent like a long time crafting this beautiful letter and then I'll submit it and then it just breaks apart and I remember calling it several times just like frantically because I spent time writing this letter and it gets to the community members and it looks like I did it in my sleep so so

[137:01] you know having a better process I think would be I guess it would make it's Prof more professional I guess right to have a better more efficient process um than hotline and maybe the idea might be a message board but I also agree with Aaron adding more work to staff and also adding more work to us as council members I'm not sure if that's the right way to go but I definitely believe hot hotline needs a lot of work it needs Improvement especially as a mechanism um to communicate with community members it needs to be improved excellent so we're talking about two different things as if they were the same thing and I just want to make sure you're considering them separately one is Mark's original question which was how can we find a way to share ideas because hotline sucks for that just to paraphrase um and then also what are the rules do we want to replace hotline hotline sort of as its own freestanding issue again gray area between the two and love to you can

[138:01] continue to mix them but I'm going to ask you eventually to make decisions about them separately uh Sam yeah I'll just say um social media is a fragmented World we've got I'm not going to go over them but a dozen social media platforms forms and they come and go with interests by age group and generation and so on so I really don't think that's a good suggestion anybody who wants to can get on hot or Twitter or Facebook or whatever and write whatever they want and whoever subscribes will see it so with that in mind as far as a platform goes I kind of like Mary's suggestion in the sense that at least if things are going onto a council thoughts page or something of that nature we can put out where it is and and the public can go or not go as they choose um and I I have found hotline to be quite useful in my time in this way if you know that you have an idea that you're going to bring

[139:00] forward in a couple of weeks you can put it out there and it goes to all council members and all staff members uh as well as to the public um there probably is a better way now in 2021 than in 1998 um to do this so I'm totally open to that but I would say I think the function is useful and so I'm separating the hotline where you're either making a request or you're telling people ahead of time what's coming so I like the public facing nature of hotline so that if you're going to suggest hey I want staff to work on this I'm going to ask for a KN of five here's the things I want then it's kind of out there and everyone knows it so I think that function of hotline functionally is important and good and and I'd like to keep that um and I'm not big into having people required to subscribe to a particular social media channel to get that kind of function um as far as a

[140:00] debating Society IDE exchange among council members I think that's super problematic like Aon does and I you know chats with Council there's other ways you can do it but you know going back and forth working over a particular idea um that might get voted on or that's out there and why to vote one way or another I think is super problematic so hotline let's preserve the function figure out a good um way to do that and uh discussion venue for council members I think is super tough thanks Sam well Mark we come back to you what do you think after you hear from all your colleagues I happen to like Mary's suggestion um I'm an admirer of Bob's newsletter uh um but I do not think as a member of council I should be required to do that in order to be heard um uh I do not you know in in making a statement about an issue it

[141:00] does not require a response it's simply a statement of how I feel and um you know the worst of all worlds is to have me you know lovate for 20 minutes at a council meeting um to impart my Pearls of Wisdom uh that's neither practical nor beneficial uh but there ought to be a form in which I as a member of council can express a Viewpoint doesn't mean anybody has to respond to it it doesn't even mean anybody has to read it um when I have posted on hotline you know some people have read it uh I'm sure it's in the tens if not dozens um some people like what I say some people call me an idiot all those respons responses are fine but it's it's a it's a mechanism as currently constituted for me to be able to express myself in a way that I am not permitted to do at a council meeting and I think that is

[142:02] important um and you know going on to Facebook to do that is is is really not a u an appropriate solution so I do like Mary's suggestion of Simply a page where you can set forth some ideas and again people will read it they won't um it does not require any member of council to respond to it uh but it's a statement of your analysis of an issue and as I said we are not permitted to do that in any functional way in in the the manner in which we conduct our business and I think that is a major issue that's why I have posted on hotline I'm gonna come back to the hotline question now I've actually written the specific specific idea here about adding a page to the website which I'll read to you in a minute but up um Mary Rachel Aaron thoughts on this Mary go ahead I just wanted to um throw out a

[143:03] additional idea that would be to um for those of us that have no inclination to um write out the analysis of why we voted as certain way that we can also just put the the clip or at least the start time of the deliberations to the end time of the Del to the vote on that particular item um and then just let the public know if you're really interested in this you can go to the link and listen to the tape here um and I think you know part of it I think is um I think that the public has some responsibility here too um to if they want to know um they can find out through some if we have a place for

[144:02] folks to go that they can find out you know if I go to this link and I go to this point in the video I can listen to the deliberations and find out how people voted I think that would capture um folks that are inclined to write out their thoughts in length um and I think it would also cover the idea of letting people people know why you voted the way you voted um and um I also think that one shouldn't put out their analysis and their thoughts prior to the vote you might want to do it after the vote um and I agree with Sam that um social media is not the best place to the best platform because it is so um fragmented um to require people to sign up for whatever um it it it just doesn't

[145:01] make sense thanks Mary Rachel what do you think so I would hate for us to like get rid of 1998 technology and replace it with 2001 technology a lot of a lot of people are not going to websites and that's why I suggested social media because that's where you know kind of the next generation is engaging um so you know my goal would be nobody's signing up for our our list serve on an email I don't think many people are going to go to our website to find the information so that's why I suggested a um government handle I think most state and federal legislators have them I'm guessing other cities do too so um that's what that's about and then um I'm I'm a little bit uncomfortable about also just having a place where some people deposit information that's on the city website or city whatever place it would be and then others wouldn't and then extra staff work for like pinpointing points

[146:00] in a meeting where things happened so I don't know it seem it seems like that would quickly be archaic and it wouldn't be like probably equally distributed so I would more favor us finding ways to communicate in you know and have discussion that feel fruitful and talk through ideas so if that's turning some stady sessions into more discussions rather than just like you know creating that space that Mark's talking about to talk through ideas and he gets his 20 minutes and and we do it that way so I know everybody's dinnner here so thanks for listening I was thinking that maybe there could just be an item on the agenda that's called Mark minutes let's hear from Aaron and then I'd like to get some clarity on this one before dinner uh yeah I mean I'm not a huge fan of the idea but if it were to happen I think it'd be critical for the postings to be all retrospective about things that have already happened and not posted ahead of ahead of votes because then yeah I think that'd just be

[147:00] important if you're going do that okay so there are um by my count four is options that have been explicitly stated and um they are as follows one is just trying to find a way to have more discuss time at study sessions um one is Ra's suggestion of getting giving City Council Members official handles or accounts um on some one or more social media platforms for sharing information one is Mary's idea about adding um a page for Council perspective I put pearls pearls and perspectives on the website um with do and required to post or read or respond and then the last one was uh just identifying specific clips of actual meeting discussions where perhaps you've already identified what your reasoning was and then putting a place putting that somewhere where uh community members could find it if wanted to hear more before I um hear council's uh or pull you all on these Tom I just want to see if do you have any legal concerns about any of these uh four blue items that I just

[148:04] identified oh mute M mute mute no my my concern is in the application as long as we have strong guidelines and council members stick to them then it's not a problem okay um fantastic well then let me pull you um on these one by one uh in no particular order um but let's start with the idea of adding a page on the city website for council members to share pearls and perspectives no one's required to post no one's required to read no one's required to respond if you could give me um a visual signal if you do support it and leave it up because I'm going to have to count them here because I'm not sure we're going to be quite so easy I got one I got Mary Sam Mark juny and Bob were you up on that one no nope okay all right so I only have oh and nearby so I think we have five for that one um as an option and I'm G move that one over here we'll Circle back um here in a quick minute how about this idea of identifying specific clips from meetings

[149:02] where you have discussed key things and maybe your own reasoning as sort of a a I don't know an annotated something for community members toine your thinking from previous meetings um if the I think the dets will need to be worked out but if the concept appeals to you Council I'd love to see an indication right now I see Bob I see mirabi I see Mary I see Mark and I see Sam fantastic Sarah I'm gonna come back to you to get some thoughts on these in a quick minute um and Chris whichever one of you is the right one thank you all right um how about the idea of having uh council members have your own social media accounts um with official City identific ific for you to share your views um if you support that again I need to see a visual I see Rachel I see Rachel sorry Rachel all right and what about just really thinking and being more intentional

[150:01] about creating discussion time um on study sessions if that appeals to you uh let me see your your thumbs up I see Mark I see Adam I see Bob I see Rachel that's four Eeny Meeny four is going to cut it all right all right so um coming then back ever so briefly Chris or uh Sarah or whoever is the right person to have a thought about these two on the website the pearls uh website or uh and the clips do you have any just can we just say that we want you to do this and y'all will make it so in some fashion so I just wanted to point out that some of these ideas would require staff to create some systems and procedures for this I don't think Council wants to have to go in into our content management system system for example to post things to the website but I'm sure that we can come up with a form or some submission system that staff um staff can work on I just wanted to clarify that with these ideas if there are um if there's staff thought

[151:01] that needs to be given on how to implement them I'm hoping we would be given ample time to think this through okay Sam sorry Heather if I canor yeah on that um I I think we would like to be able to take a little bit of time to probably figure out on the web page piece what's the best workflow to support that in terms of the the clips um right now we don't have staff resources to do that um and so uh I think that's one if if Council strongly feels that we should put together uh um you know essentially shorter segments of of Council meetings that share different council member perspectives um that were will require us to decide which of the the points of of uh of council's uh you know perspectives at meetings are those those highlight pieces so that one gives me a lot of pause for the role of staff

[152:00] to do that um and I think we'd want to know a lot more about what the desire of council is before we would start working on that one Chris um just to clarify um I I the vision I had wasn't to um clip out just certain council members the vision was to the start time for deliberations to the end of the vote so it captures everybody so identifying the clips as opposed to like the start and end time as opposed to creating separate little video and Snippets correct got it okay that was very helpful thank you Mary okay go ahead Sam um so i' like this a lot in a certain way um it it's very difficult to figure out where to go in a council meeting to hear kind of the punch line where was the deliberation what was done so to me this really gets to indexing of

[153:01] uh the council meeting videos and I think what Mary's done in a way is kind of cut to the chase here where um and I I totally agree with Mary's clarification I would not think of this as clipping out individual council members or even putting the clip on a website separately I'd say that the meeting repository the video is still where it is and if there's a link that takes you to a particular time in a meeting then you could imagine having um kind of like with the meeting minutes you could either call out times or have a link um on a subject matter web page that takes you to that so I think of this is a bigger question around how to index the video records of Council meetings as so I wouldn't I'm not going to Advocate that this needs to happen either one of these in a near-term kind of time frame I think the one about the website where council members can post actually be pretty easy to put together

[154:02] and if it were just flat listings or you had each council member that you could click on but I think the video thing is going to be much more complicated but it brings up the bigger question of how how the public can find the information they're curious about um so I acknowledge Chris that it would be a little more difficult but I was thinking of links that take you to the deliberation kind of like Mary described rather than clipping out individuals or even putting the even excerpting it from the the video record let's hear from juny and then H Chris I'll come back to you see if you have a greater Comfort oh I'll from Judy and Mark and then I'll come back to you um and then we should probably sell this one up for dinner go ahead juny thank you and I should remember that because I end up going through the entire council meeting last year when I was doing my uh last newsletter um and I do know that I think our Council me

[155:00] minutes are published and I I just wanted to say as well that I appreciate Mary's idea I think it's great and maybe which I don't think is noted in in the minute a link to the YouTube so a link to the YouTube with Mary's you know like this vote took place at let's say at 10:30 the person will know exactly how to go and get it so I think that's a great idea thank you Mary thank you Mark how about you yeah I I just wanted to point out I thought there was some consensus on making use of this new uh page retrospective as opposed to prospective I'm happy to agree to that if that's the um that's the direction we want to go but it's not noted in there now and and probably should be great double checking Council that I'm right to um amend this one to say that these that these postings on the website would be retrospective only thank you for the thumbs up thank you thank you thank you fantastic retrospective relative to

[156:02] anything that's voted on or going to be voted on retrospective votes all right cool Chris now that you've heard some clarifying thinking around maybe it's more of an indexing thing and a and a pointing people to specific minutes are you less troubled by the the video item yeah I think that's something that it it was helpful to hear the further discussion and um there's two ways that you can watch a city council meeting video right now one is through novas uh on the city website and that is indexed by agenda item um right now and then the second is um the the meeting is on YouTube and the playback is available on YouTube we could look into um uh using the bookmarks function in YouTube I'd need to work with Sarah and her team to understand just what's the additional ad of adding those bookmarks in but I think that's something that we could explore uh and and be able to

[157:00] report back to Council on fantastic so Council just want to give you a heads up that while you um a majority of you have indicated support for the website um comment place and this uh video indexing some bookmarking what have you exercise it does sound like staff will need some time to figure out the ins and outs of that so we just request your patients um know that they're on it and they'll Circle back to you when they have information and their recommendation um so with that uh does everyone on Council do you have your dinners anyone still waiting for dinner okay cool um then I would propose that we break now um let you get uh dinner and we'll Circle back when we come on uh our hotline conversation alternatives to um hotline or at least clarifying the purposes of hotline um and then just quick reminder we have sort of council relationship building um to discuss when we come back several topics related to community engagement um and then some boards and commissions ideas and then a couple more things just

[158:00] related to how you might uh be better in meetings um for yourselves and for the community so it is 6:39 we had um allowed for about 15 minutes just to go and get as much dinner as you could in that amount of time so if you would do that and come back if you would at 5 minutes um to 7 we'll jump right back in on hotline uh thank you very much for a fantastic conversation see you in a minute [Music] Heather [Music]

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[173:21] having time is everyone having tie no I'm having um a Greek salad with french fries and baklava what sounds good now I want to know what everyone's having Adam what did you have I made spaghetti nice I had left over lasagna e so I'm here but I'm going off video so I can eat okay you bet all right one two three four we count Mirror by four

[174:00] are back five thank you [Music] six all right seven thank you Sam and juny are you back jun's back juny I hope you're not eating dinner in the library that's not allowed no eating in the library Sam are you back did you say my name I was saying that I hope you're not eating in the library because that's not allowed juny H and I didn't see Sam we can get started once we have our mayor and um Council while we're waiting for Sam to join um just want to check in with you we look uh likely to be going uh over uh tonight depending on how efficiently you

[175:00] um tackle the raining items oh Dave Faron says eating is allowed in the Boulder Public Library so Juni just carry on girl um thank you Dave um it only took like five um so Council uh we again have a presentation from staff scheduled at 7:15 um and then we still have all of these items here on the board to talk about uh if we are going to go long do you prefer to go long tonight or do you prefer to go long tomorrow um obviously ideally we [Music] don't yeah we're we're we're we're it looks likely um the question is when do you want to have the staff presentation do you want to carry on and get through all of your things and then do the staff presentation you want to hit hotline and then do the staff I just they're waiting but they're going to be here anyway so it's not like they could go home um if we uh if we P to tell tomorrow um and so juny I don't know how long is long right

[176:00] what we have left to talk about is hotline and then uh Council relationship things that one I think will be fairly straightforward hotline we're pretty close on um we got a lot of these sort of Engagement how do we make it better and more interesting and more effective for the community items and then the boards um and then a couple other items so I think you as councel based on the pace that you've been um tackling so far you probably have a good hour and a half of things um but we could EAS we as a group we can pick some of these things up tomorrow so one option would be to do hotline and then take the staff presentation um to make sure we get that done and then pick up and maybe do one more of these tonight um anyone have a preference Ain says go along tomorrow not tonight because it's getting it's getting dark anyone feel differently okay thank you for the heads up and the nodding that's great so we'll go long tomorrow

[177:01] instead of going long tonight um I would love for you to get the staff presentation tonight if that's um if you share that priority so how about we do hotline staff presentation and then um we see where we are TimeWise and then decide how many of these things we'll take up in the morning um fantastic all right now that we're all here then what do you say we talk a little bit about hotline you've already discussed this a fair amount so we might be able to be relatively efficient about such things um we have a course course learned over the years that we never say easy wins anymore um but based on what you've heard we've now created this other Avenue um where council members can share their perspectives with the website site and then also make using the indexing of the videos to make it easier for um community members to find out why you voted the way you did and really tune into those deliberations so that's fantastic so to the extent you were previously some of you using hotline for this purpose hotline no longer needed

[178:00] for that purpose um heard several of you say hotline is Tiny um and uh not a great way for the community to pose a pain in the butt and um not professional in terms of shows up from the council perspective um so what I'm not sure is whether we want to ask staff to look into other options and what other cities do do you want to kick around some more ideas um maybe Chris I'll just come to you really quickly because you just put something in your mouth and that amuses me um have you all talked about other other tools to hotline do you have a sense of other communities do other things with their councils or this um are we starting from kind of a blank slate here um no there's there are several different aspects and I think they all relate to each other um in terms of just transparency amongst communication amongst council members um uh ways for council members to ask questions there

[179:00] are some communities that that's a part of um their agenda Management Systems um how this relates to council email and um the replacement of our CRM or inquire Boulder system I see all of those as a bit related so um that's why we we really would like to get a little bit more clarity of just what do Council seen as the current intention or or purpose of hotline as it exists or what we want it to exist here in the future then we can go to work on finding whatever that technology platform is to support that fantastic thanks that's super helpful Adam what do you what do you think we want here in a tool I was just gonna say what Chris just said but I've never used it because I think I'm just gonna piss someone off by doing it so I don't do it fair enough Rachel how about you muty mute mute mute I was gonna say pretty much what Chris said as well that we should just

[180:01] Define what we want in it and then ask staff to report back with some ideas of how we could um modernize hotline so I don't personally I don't know why all like why questions the staff have to go to all council members so I would eliminate that use personally it seems like I ask staff a lot of questions one on one so I don't know that we need hotline for that purpose Sam said that it's helpful if you're going to alert that you're going to make a motion so maybe just to say FYI I'll be giving a motion at at matters or something like that that be the only use that makes sense to me at this point okay to give an [Music] FYI hey folks thoughts on this Mary yeah um what Chris said and um I am supportive of the definition of uses for uses that Sam provided earlier um and

[181:03] then just to a little response to Rachel I think that sometimes it's helpful for other council members to see what your questions might be for that evening or to give staff um enough heads up to um you know if there's any preparation that needs to happen but um but yes everybody asks questions oneon-one of council but sometimes I think it's really helpful to give your colleagues a heads up on the questions as well I almost typed heads ups I don't know if that's the plural of heads up um Mark what do you think we're looking for here in terms of tools and then Aaron when I have asked uh staff questions through hotline their responsiveness has been uh extraordinary but I think In fairness it should be clear that after a certain point in time um they ought not to be expected to

[182:01] respond um before the meeting assuming that the hotline involves a matter at the next meeting um if you send a hotline in on Sunday for Tuesday meeting I don't think staff should have to feel obligated to respond to that um at some point in time yes but but certainly not you know in 24 hours um I don't know I don't know what deadline is is most appropriate whether it's Friday um the prior Thursday but I think it's important to ask the questions as Mary said but the responsive staff ought to be um a little more Humane uh in terms of timing okay so now I have two stickies going one on um trying to Define what the tool is we need and asking staff to um explore options once we figure out what the utilities are and then separately an item here about just setting a deadline for asking questions however you want to

[183:02] ask them of staff so that they're not working their weekends trying to get information to you Erin what do you think yeah thanks for that Mark I think that was a great Point um I think it's fine to have it can sometimes be useful to ask questions of staff that you'd like the answers to get in front of all of council and also maybe to the community I think I think we would just want to write into the guidelines that they should be like really strict factual questions I'm not thinking of anybody here on the current Council but occasionally we've had hotline questions that are extremely pointed you know the kinds of questions like why is this the worst idea ever you know given that it's the worst idea ever why did why is this being brought forward you know why so much for asking this uhuh right so so things things like that that really aren't questions as as opposed to you know you know please explain the thing on pack at page 54 in more detail kind of thing which are strictly factual okay um yeah the position in the form of

[184:00] a question is not what we're looking for here got it okay Sam I mean you're gonna cut off a whole bunch of options for attorneys if you have that position in the form of question not allowed so I'm just saying um the but then you can put your position in the form of a position on the website things so gonna be fine so I I like everything everyone said so far I think hotline still has a use whatever format we put it in I think first reading questions are a good example um if people had been prepared for questions for first reading which most people aren't I never am um in the course of business those questions would have gotten asked at a council meeting but we say could you please put them on hotline because that's the kind of thing that would have been done in public typically so I think first reading questions are exactly the kind of um here it's been on consent and if you have questions if you get those in the next week for staff before second reading um and I guess I would say of

[185:02] course we can all directly ask staff questions I do it all the time but when it's on an item that's going to be on a public hearing or on matters it's really helpful to put that out so that all council members can see the the answers and that's something that doesn't then have to come up at a council meeting so if council member asked a question publicly staff responded publicly then everyone knows that all council members have heard that answer and it doesn't need to take up time at a council meeting so another way to look at hotline is to the extent that it's factual questions and factual answers it can save time at actual in-person meetings Okay so if the request is to ask staff to explore um other alternatives to Hotline in order to accommodate folks giving a heads up if you're going to make a motion um factual questions for Staff first reading questions and anything else that sort of is geared around getting Council or

[186:01] staff prepared for a meeting um is that is that all we're asking seeing none then Chris does that give you enough information to get staff um out doing some research to Circle back to council yeah cool in that case uh Council can I see uh visual indicators of support for asking staff to do that research for you I see Sam Rachel Bob Mark Mary uh all the things fantastic thank you excellent and then we have this item here just uh specifically identifying a deadline for questions for staff through whatever methodology exists um so they are just to be more respectful of their time the suggestion of Friday morning prior to a meeting um anyone else want to say anything about this before I pull you to see if you support it in concept y Rachel we just said I think we would probably be in effect saying we

[187:00] can't really use hotline to ask questions for the meeting that's happening on Tuesday because we won't get the packet until Thursday night so that's not all lowed of turnaround time so I'm I'm fine with it but I think we should just be clear like maybe just say hotline you know questions that are gonna have answers due in a week or not for that meeting or something like that okay Aaron or or we could say you know Sunday night as a deadline with staff having the discretion um that we fully support them to be able to say too too complicated for for Tuesday it's like a hard deadline of Sunday night and then staff can say didn't get to that one not enough time so that because I I don't know about other people but I usually read my packet on weekends so got it go ahead Mark yeah I think that's a good idea um you know as long as we make it fully clear as Aon said that staff can turn to us and say you know too much

[188:00] can't do it um you know we'll get to you uh you know in a few days um if that if that becomes real uh then I would be supportive of the Sunday night deadline okay and of course we'll just have to trust that staff will do that um culture of yes is a thing that often exist in staff and is hard to upend but you know we can certainly ask them to push back on you okay that that's the thing to me is we'd be why would we have to send something that's a public hotline to staff on a Sunday night why not just ask staff privately that question and not put them in the position of having to reject us publicly because that's hard to do why not just you can send a hotline out anytime but not at you know not about next week's agenda items if you can't do it by Friday morning because it doesn't have to go out on hotline Chris do you have a preference about this on from the staff perspective one way or the other um have it be a a limit on

[189:00] when you can post questions to hotline um or the hotline thingy whatever it is um or have it just be a hard and limit on when you get questions in any venue with staff having some discretion what's your preference here yeah I think actually Sunday night is is okay um and and some staff really try hard to respond to the question in writing prior to the meeting um but it's also one where it's helpful to see just what the questions are or if it's a request for information to be included um getting that information those questions out on hotline actually is really helpful for the staff um in preparation for the meeting so uh so I'm I'm okay with it kind of as the um sticky note is written and so you're not just to be clear you're not troubled then that this would create potentially an environment where staff would need to publicly say

[190:00] to council thank you for your question but there too much I can't answer it in time you're cool with that yeah or just if if you kind of have have the understanding that anything that comes in uh after Sunday night or up to Sunday night we can usually work pretty hard to try and incorporate that or answer those questions in the meeting or be prepared for them after that uh it you know we may or may not be able to okay Sam yeah I'll just point out that a lot of times at CAC various council members um who are serving will put out they've heard that this question will come up or that they're going to have this question and staff's usually really helpful to know ahead of time with those questions are so I think one of the other functions of hotline and getting something in late even if staff can't provide a public answer they're teed up to be able to explain the situation at the council meeting um that's coming up so I've always heard from staff that hearing at CAC what's coming gives them

[191:02] time to prepare even if they can't respond to CAC about something okay all right seeing no other hands up Council if you support this blue sticky that have written here I'd like to see a visual indicator it says deadline for questions for staff prior to an upcoming meeting will be Sunday night prior to the meeting but staff can defer if it's too long or too hard to answer if you support that need to see a visual in Adam Aaron Sam mirb Mark Bob fantastic that's more than enough thank you all very much Diggity look at that we did a thing we did a bunch of things look at all the things we did um cool now that we've done those things it is seven 12 let us pause our Council conversations here from your items and um Sarah can we come to you for the staff presentation and uh we make sure we get that one done tonight and then we'll see where we are after

[192:00] that absolutely um Taylor can you please queue up the slides for the presentation this evening as Taylor's doing that I just want to say that much of the discussion that has already occurred particularly at the beginning of the evening when you were talking about your conversations that you had in pairs I think really cues up this presentation very well um you may recall that we were asked to prepare a presentation for the retreat um after Jane requested just before she retired that Council consider changing some of its rules related to what we've all been I think noticing as um more um challenging public discourse and we are eager to do that tonight we have many slides that have some suggestions not only about rules but also about ways in which we conduct ourselves in meetings and the way which we structure meetings that we think could help address this challenge but

[193:00] before we get into those I really wanted to invite my colleague neighborhood liaison Brenda rittenau to share a little bit of work that's been actually going on for a couple of years about how to promote Civic dialogue and discourse that is productive and respectful but also recognizes that when you're in local government space there is room for scrutiny there is room for what some researchers called reasonable hostility um given that we um as local government have the ability to make decisions that affect people's lives good bad and otherwise so um I'm she's going to share a couple of slides about what we were calling the building bridges initiative again this is work she's been doing um in 2018 and 2019 and then she's going to talk a little bit about some internal staff work that's been happening around this issue and happen to coincide with council's attention and desire to talk about this as well and

[194:00] then I will get into some slides that talk about what we are recommending in terms of addressing how actual Council meetings occur um when there are disruptions or behavior that is not desirable so with that I'm going to ask Taylor to advance to the next slide and also have Brenda um turn on her video and her mic so she can start to present hello thank you all for um having us and having this discussion this friend I'm sorry to interrupt you sound really faint I don't know if other people are having the same issue I apologize I okay I'm okay with it how's this is this better Sor it sounds like others are doing okay with it so we'll just go ahead thank you okay I made an adjustment so um let me know if it's better or worse okay great so um so yeah thank you for having us this has really

[195:01] um prompted a really important internal discussion um that I'm happy to share with you in just a few moments um but I want to start with talking about building bridges um so in 2017 as you see we got a great recommendation from what many of you may remember was the public participation working group this was a group of Highly committed um residents of Boulder who came together worked together for about 18 months to really help guide what has has now become implemented as the future of our community engagement here in Boulder um and one of the recommendations they gave us you see there on the slide was strategy g d they wanted us to work with community members to co-design what civil and constructive conduct could look like um so we di we dove into that work I started in the middle of 2017 um we received that report soon after and

[196:00] we got straight to work on that my first community meeting was about Building Bridges um and we worked on that throughout 2018 getting input from more than 300 community members um through live design thinking sessions and through online engagement as well as one-on-one interviews with some of our um less connected and Lessard populations um the key takeaways from that were that we really moved from the word civil to the word civic we heard from many of our community members that the concept of civil can be marginalizing to many communities the idea of having to show up in a certain way in order to be heard at all um really was a barrier to participation so that was interesting because we thought we were going into a process to come out with a list of guidelines that everyone would agree to and that ended up not being what our deliverable looked like at all so we had to figure out that deliverable and if Taylor you'll Advance

[197:01] please um where we landed was instead on a vision um so we took input from 300 people and we took a small group of those people and worked with them for about seven months um sort of synthesizing all of that information to come up with a vision that you see on the graphic in front of you it's it's more um addresses the way we show up together the way we create and protect an environment together and really acknowledges that everyone in the room has a role to play in keeping that atmosphere productive and constructive and always moving in a forward direction as you see on the slide it it really is a way to do public engagement better and a pathway to be on together toward what we seek um so I really would encourage you to go to the building bridges website if you're interested in learning more it's

[198:00] on our web page it's on the city website if you type Building Bridges in the search box you'll find it there there's um a quite compelling video explaining the work and explaining the vision um and there's lots of data you can deep dive into all of it if you want to geek out on this subject um so moving on to the next slide um obviously with the restrictions and the work plan that happened in 2020 um with covid-19 we had to set the next phase of our community work with Building Bridges aside um and that gave us bandwidth to address what we were really seeing as a need coming forward from several different directions for some internal work so we really started to hear a ground swell from the staff that they were having challenging interactions and feeling unequipped to deal with them at the same time as you all are well aware we were starting to see or see more incidents during open

[199:03] and public comment and sometimes in counsil feedback to staff that creates an unproductive atmosphere and at the same time as Sarah mentioned our former city manager asked Council to consider actions that could be taken to support staff when these moments happen next slide please so I was fortunate to get to work with a fantastic cross departmental team folks from seven different departments and supported by our Deputy City attorney Sandra Giannis and this team has strategized a plan to gather input from staff through focus groups and an online questionnaire to take that input to design a toolkit to help staff council members and board and commission members to plan prepare and react for all types of community interactions and then also to really consider long-term Solutions ways that we can start to

[200:00] change our culture at public meetings but also out at points of service so our next step after we talk with you today will really be to start thinking about how we can adust some of our internal policies and practices to make sure that we are setting some clear and consistent expectations and support systems for our staff and we're excited now to uh start to share some of the tools that this group worked on to share with you um before we get into that piece I just wanted to make um bring forward some of the things that we heard from staff from these questionnaires and focus groups that we received um sorry next slide Taylor I Advanced my slide that doesn't work for you so sorry Taylor next slide please yep so this um I just wanted to pull out a few examples so that you can really hear what we heard from staff um one of the most

[201:00] common things we heard is when the anger and frustration that community members are feeling about a system or a process turns into personal attacks on staff um often that looks like verbal attacks on their motives or the Integrity of an individual's work um or it looks like shouting yelling or cursing directly at an individual as opposed to at the system um also staff have experienced threats and intimidation in a lot of different ways and as I said in a lot of different forms um of course threatening of life or physical safety threatening to have them fired um verbal attacks on their identity particularly if they're member of a protected class um one thing that some staff have experienced is doxing which is a process that um that people can do where they collect and publicly share personal information about employees as a way to intimidate them and using size or gender to

[202:00] physically intimidate an in-person situations next slide please I just want to say as we're advancing that we're extremely grateful to the Brave staff members who came forward and talked to us um these were not easy stories for them to share and there was urgency um in the way they spoke with us and I want you to hear that it is extremely impactful that you're having this conversation tonight when we told staff that this would be happening this act alone helps them feel more supported the fact that you as leadership care enough to have this on your agenda is really important so thank you you um we wanted to be sure that we put um these lenses in front of you as well because we know that often um it's hard to look outside of your own experience when you're considering the impact that someone's Behavior or words may be having on someone else so we just

[203:00] wanted to encourage you to consider both our protected classes which you see listed there plus a few other um considerations that my team identified including ethnic appearance religious expression documentation status or military status which are not specifically called out in our protective classes so with that I will turn this over to Sarah to talk more about the tools that and recommendations that we've prepared for you tonight thank you Brenda that was a great presentation and I'm hoping that it give council members um just a better perspective on the fact that this is an issue that many people in our community and our organization are feeling um or are noticing and that it's not unique to City Council meetings of course some of the changes that we make in procedures and how we support staff um in other interactions besides Council meetings will be more administrative in nature

[204:00] but you all have the ability this evening as you think about the way you're going to be conducting meetings in 2021 and Beyond to take a look at the space you're in and consider making some some Chang es um as well as getting some guidance on what can happen when there are um disruptions that violate your rules of decorum with that can I get the next slide please Taylor may I ask a question you may Mark um can you define source of income as a protected class Brenda do you want to take that yeah I can that's actually something that our um human rights office and human relations commission worked hard last year to add to boulders protected classes um and one of the things that um that particularly speaks to and one of the reasons it was urgent in our community is that um sometimes um folks who receive Section 8 vouchers subsidize housing vouchers um have experienced

[205:00] discrimination from landlords who are renting them the properties and receiving those vouchers so that is how it how it ended up on our protected class but it really did start to illuminate other ways that the way people earn their money can can lead to discrimination understood thank you okay thank you all right so um when we consider City council's role I am going to try my best to play attorney here but we have Tom Carr um and I believe sandreas on line as well so they will certainly help me um but I think you all know that um the first amendment's protections for people who are participating in public forums are really dependent upon the way in which the Forum um is categorized so um for traditional and designated public forums the government cannot discriminate against speakers based on their Viewpoint or the content of their speech there are some Provisions government can

[206:01] put in place subject um to create reasonable content neutral restrictions on time place and manner but it really is um fairly Limited to what can happen in traditional and designated public forums there are some kinds of public forums which um the law defines as limited where there can be restrictions on content if they are reasonable and Viewpoint neutral unfortunately the case law on all of this is a little bit murky and the courts have struggled with the distinction between designated and limited forms and it's not entirely clear how City Council meetings and public comments sessions might be categorized but our city attorney's office advises that we take a conservative approach and assume that City Council meetings which really are sort of the epitome of decision-making in our community um and are really probably the most um public meetings that we offer in our community that we

[207:01] really think of that them as being designated public forums and so we really have to be careful about content types of restrictions ever the courts have continually upheld restrictions on speech and behavior in government meetings that can be considered disruptive so something that um actually impedes the ability of the meeting to continue or the ability of participants to continue is something that government often has the ability to take action on next slide please so when we think about all of that and we think about the sort of extra standards that we have to uphold given the types of public meetings that city council is conducting we decided to before we even look at enforcement and rules that we wanted to first talk about some things that we think you are already starting to do and we as engagement professionals would love to see you continue to do so first and

[208:02] foremost we would love for you to get familiar with the shared Vision that our community created along with staff and model that Vision as much as possible and as I said I've seen some really great strides happening in this area over the last couple of months and we want to encourage it to continue so some of the things that you all can do as individual city council members and also collectively is just ensure that you are treating staff community members and each other with respect we want you to be able to feel free to criticize Concepts and ideas of course that's part of your role but we are asking that you try to avoid disparaging remarks about others working conclusions and avoid verbally attacking individuals or more importantly perhaps their professional competence this happens to staff a lot in community interactions and coming before Council can be an intimidating enough experience that it's particularly difficult if it happens in the council

[209:01] context and then when lapses occur and they might from time to time or commentary from Council becomes more heated we're asking that you just take the time to remind each other and the community of the core tenants of our productive atmosphere's Vision the more we can familiarize people with it I think people even with very disperate viewpoints can see it as a common ideal and may feel inclined to contribute to that Vision next slide please so this might not be very popular given the fact that we've been talking about the length of Council meetings but we really believe as communication and engagement um folks who spend a lot of time thinking about Community expectations that we can't expect community members to show up in a certain way if they don't know um the way in which we intend to conduct our meetings and at the beginning of going to online meetings we did a pretty good job of giving people um guidelines and

[210:03] ideas of how we wanted them to interact we sort of moved away from that because our meetings were getting longer and it is true that we often have participants who have become very familiar with our guidelines but not everybody has become familiar it's not uncommon particularly with some of our more recent topics to have some newcomers to the council process so in order to establish consistency and set realistic expect expectations our recommendation to you tonight is that information about our desired Vision be shared at every meeting we've created what we hope is a pretty short speech that has been vetted by our city attorney's office office that the mayor could give when he gives his script to opening sessions I won't read it all to you but it essentially talks about this Vision that we've created um in collaboration with our community and that the vision is reflected in council's rules of decorum really wanting to create a space that supports diversity of identities and

[211:00] voices ensures emotional and physical safety and emphasizes Effectiveness we're going to in this meeting aimed to uphold this vision and we'll identify and take action when we fall short because sometimes ideals are difficult to as um you may aspire to them but they're difficult to achieve every single time and then there is a specific statement that our City attorney would like us to make that we recognize and value the individual's right to free speech we're suggesting that the rules of decorum and also that video that Brenda referenced about the productive atmosphere Vision be actually on the agenda for every council meeting um and also could be sent to people who have been approved or signed up to speak um for a meeting just so that they can familiarize themselves if they choose to on their own time next slide please in addition we think that for all virtual meetings and when we go to hybrid meetings it's probably a good

[212:01] idea for the public participation facilitator to at least show the virtual meeting rules and perhaps read them either after the meeting is called order or as we have done in more recent meetings just before any open public comment opportunities we are trying to think ahead to a time when we hopefully can return to in-person meetings and so we did also add a recommendation and I think this was happening pretty regularly when we were in person meetings but if there are people in Chambers either the facilitator or the city clerk would remind them to silence their electronic devices and sign in with the clerk if they wish to speak next slide please okay so that is how we hope to set the stage and perhaps minimize the potential for disruptions but we're also realists and we know that particularly in this politically charged environment and given frankly the complexity and

[213:01] difficulty of many of the issues that you as a council are addressing in our community that there will be disruptions and there will be times where people show up in a way that we wish they didn't um but that is their prerogative and that is their right and the city attorney's office has made it very clear that when people are given two or three minutes to speak they should be given freedom to use the content they choose for that two or three minutes but we are proposing that Council first and foremost lean into a diplomacy model that we have already seen happen um uh frequently um in in the last few weeks so the single best way to address behavior that does not not adhere to our shared vision is to acknowledge the troubling behavior and ask individuals to consider a different approach the next time they speak um we have seen that this is particularly effective and I was a there was an example where Aaron Brockett stepped into this space if a council member who may be seen as a political or philosophical Ally of the

[214:02] speaker just make a brief statement after after the testimony so this is not interrupting their testimony that the use of profanity or personal attacks are not only not persuasive but are probably counterproductive to achieving whatever policy change they're looking for and just encourage them to think about a different way to make their arguments in the future I can say as a staff member that several of my colleagues have said that they would also appreciate an acknowledgement at that moment by the council member that they are supported and their work is appreciated silence is almost always interpreted as acceptance or tolerance and creates a chilling environment ironment for staff who are appearing before Council um I also have seen council members um treated poorly um by community members and I know that Council needs to Grapple with the distinction between elected officials I personally think that human beings should be supporting other human beings whether they're elected or not so I

[215:00] would encourage this kind of a diplomacy approach to be considered in those circumstances as well although I do definitely understand and appreciate it that in a democracy the people who are in positions of Power are subject to more scrutiny and need to be able to withstand certain levels of criticism next slide please okay so what if diplomacy doesn't work we have had some situations where we've tried to um encourage people to change their tone or change their approach and they simply have refused to do so and we know that that could likely continue it's really important from the city of attorney's perspective that when you're assessing whether to take an enforcement approach you really have to focus on the whether the speech or behavior has been disruptive to the meeting and if you're going to take an enforcement approach which typically would fall probably to the mayor or presiding officer you must be clear that the action is against the disruption and

[216:01] not the speech itself conduct is considered disruptive if it prevents the council from continuing the meeting in a reasonably efficient manner so if somebody's speech or behavior is disrupting or disturbing the orderly conduct of a council meeting it can be appropriate to invoke your rules of decorum next slide please so what are some examples of things that are in your current rules of decorum that could potentially cause disruptions so we come up with some of them we've not looked at um we have not pulled out every single aspect of your rules of decorum but there certainly are some elements um that are listed here so use of distracting technology which is why we think the clerk or the facilitator should urge people in person to turn off their phones and silence other equipment being in a state of intoxication or impairment which unfortunately we have seen on occasion in Council meetings if a person fails to

[217:01] sign up to speak and attempts to speak anyway exceeding the time limit set by Council making threats or other forms of intim ation against any person in the council chambers or meeting room and I would go so far as to say online meeting space as well and then this one is a little bit tricky um but obscenity racial epitet and other disruptive speech and behavior that leads to A disruption of the meeting um so the next slide please Taylor talks about some cues that might help you um make an argument that A disruption has or is occurring now it is important that all these cues must have the effect of delaying or preventing the meeting work to continue um so some examples might be a participant is speaking over another participant making it difficult to hear either one of them frankly technology like phones are creating distracting noises or sounds someone is sharing

[218:02] material that is not related to the topic at hand causing confusion or scope creep the audience presenter or fellow councilman members have an obvious emotional reaction that prevents or delays their continued participation the next um item I just want to be very clear about we are trying to empower staff to be able to signal to councel if they need a moment to be able to reset thems their themselves and continue with the presentation but not all staff are going to feel comfortable with this so there is definitely an imbalance of power in the council chambers but but we do think if a staff member or a presenter asked you for a moment and needed to pull themselves together and become more focused that would be a q we're just asking you not to count on that to happen and to put the burden on staff to make that happen and then lastly if participants are being specifically targeted with obscenity and racial

[219:01] epitet so they're G they are aimed at a particular individual as opposed to frustration over the discussion or the direction that council is taking and those epitet or obscenity can reasonably be assumed to cause an individual to feel unsafe that could also be a cue that A disruption is occurring next slide please so our proposed enforcement approach if you feel like you can meet the threshold of there being a disruption is that you first imploy The Diplomatic approach use it often because if we use it often on a consistent basis it hopefully gradually over time will help set the tone for your meetings um it is important to note our attorneys would like me to note that the Diplomatic approach is not considered an official warning but nonetheless we think leaning into it could be effective um because public meetings are one of the most legally protected fors and we

[220:00] believe Council meetings are even among the most legally protected public meetings enforcement of these rules should be used sparingly even handedly and in situations where the conduct is egregious next slide please so because we really wanted to provide you with useful tools we developed along with our attorneys a potential script for the mayor or presiding officers to say so if an incident of disruptive speech or behavior occurs um the presiding officer could say I hear that you are upset your Pres conduct and we'd like you to elaborate a little bit on what that conduct is violates our rules of decorum and it's creating disruption to this public meeting in order to uphold our vision to productive uh for the productive Civic spaces I'm asking you to stop this Behavior please hear this as a warning and then if the behavior continues there is the um ability for

[221:02] the presiding officer to um inform the person that they're being removed from the meeting and we provided a little bit of a script there um it is important to note that this decision could be overturned but only by a motion approved by majority vote of council so if count if the majority of council believes that the presiding officer is overstepping or making a recommendation that's inappropriate there is a way to address that in the moment next slide please okay so that's our presentation for this evening we're curious to hear what questions city council has about the information and recommendations and I will um probably lean heavily upon our attorneys on this call if there are questions more about the legal implications we would like to know if city council is interested in adopting all or any of the recommended process and language suggestions and just have a general conversation about how we can support you further in this space

[222:00] fantastic thanks Sarah all right questions mark I see you're unmuted do you have a question or comment uh not not so much a question I do have a comment which uh I think uh it was a f fantastic presentation by uh Sarah and Brenda Sarah I think you uh could very well um find another career as an attorney I think you did a great job um and that was an extremely thorough and organized presentation I uh I really don't have any further questions I think it was terrific thank you thanks Mark Sam what are you thinking I just have a comment as well um this this was a great Pres presentation very well teed up as far as our goals and objectives and what our guidelines are around this and I would say that I had a thought or two about what could be added to the introduction so I I liked the script that you put out there one of the emails that we've gotten that I thought did a

[223:00] nice job of of showing the the rub here is that they would like their children to be able to listen to City Council meetings and so one of the things I think we might consider putting in as maybe a final bullet is if you have any question about whether your testimony um could be abrasive or threatening or um uh we come up with the words imagine if you were saying it to a child because there are children who could be watching this so not everything needs to always be appropriate for children but when it comes to issues like profanity people are allowed to say it because of their first amendment rights but it might help for setting the tone if we remind people that the public is Broad and does include children we've certainly been encouraging more youth engagement and I think you've seen younger speakers showing up to your meetings recently so that's a great Point Sam and we're happy to make any kinds of revisions or suggestions to the opening remarks okay

[224:03] Rachel I'm kind of wondering um you know I feel like we are twisting ourselves into pretzels to try and you know Square the Civil into Civic goal and yet support staff and create a space that is uh I guess okay for kids so I wonder what is the history of like public comment and open comment either in Boulder or in general and what are the goals for it so as I said up front like I was told that most of the time um board members at least at least for one board had made up their mind before public hearing started so is the goal sort of to give people a place where they can be heard even if not listened to or is the goal to give members of the public a space where they can be heard in a way that will impact decisions so I kind of would like to pan all the way back and figure out um is public an open

[225:02] comment the best way for people to have their voices heard like I personally and many of you who've been on Council for a number of years remember you know I did it on the other side of this and I didn't feel terribly hurt I think I cried one meeting saying I don't feel like you guys are listening so it's not very satisfying or it wasn't for me and I know some other people um to be on the other side of it so you know you you you get up there thinking that you're going to be able to have some impact and you don't know maybe as a somebody coming new to a topic that it has been going on for years or you're at like a later decision Point like Mary brought up with the timeline um and so you don't you come with hopes and they're sometimes dashed because um it's you know the night of a vote really isn't the night to be impactful so I guess I just want us to pan out and say like what is the value in this this particular engagement and if it's not

[226:00] really valuable either for members of the public or for City Council Members can we do something better I I also find that dialogue is more productive than a one-way conversation so I think there's problems with that aspect of it and you know would love to see us do more Q&A um questions and answers and and other formats if that would be more helpful to members of the public so I I don't think it's just a question of how do we ensure that this space is you know civy Civic or Civic without so much an emphasis on civil but as a place that we're actually meeting some Community desire to be listened to and heard so I think let Tom and Chris perhaps weigh in a little bit on your question about the history and the intention of public hearings and um open comment but you're absolutely right Rachel that we have for a long time as staff and I think as a community been frustrated by the sort of 11th Hour nature of the public hearings right so people get up just before Council votes

[227:02] in many cases council members have at least already started to try to give some thought to how they might vote that evening and that's part of the reason why we've been trying to create longer and earlier opportunities for people to give their feedback and to engage in meaningful ways the challenge we have is that people often feel like there's no substitute for actually standing in front of their council member so even though staff is creating lots of opportunities for people to give feedback I think there Still Remains a certain amount of skepticism in our community that feedback is making its way to council and is influencing Council and so I'm not really sure how to address that I certainly think having more Council involvement in the previous forms of Engagement could be a solution but I also recognize that many of our council members are juggling many aspects of life including paid jobs and careers that make it difficult to ask

[228:00] them to give more than what they already give so this has been a very difficult nut for us to crack but I think part of the way to deal with it is not to put much emphasis on that public hearing testimony and instead have more thorough reporting out from engagement and input collection that occurs earlier in the process thanks for that Sarah and just one other thing I guess to add and part of why I'm curious what the history is is because I do think that people who can show up on the night of a public hearing um it's a little bit easier on Zoom but are people who have the time and energy and ability to get there and are confident speakers and all that so you know was this this A system that was um created to benefit you know a certain type of person or demographic and it's not really serving us very well and that it's you know people may feel like they want that space But if they're not really being listened to I don't I don't get the benefit and and I don't know that everybody can access it rather than us going out and saying we really want

[229:01] to get a sample from people who who aren't necessarily opting in but we want to make a more statistically valid way to hear from the community all right that I I would have Lov to hear from any one other thing I will say is that we have had some really great interaction and feedback with community members one in particular who has helped us sort of design what a more thorough and comprehensive reporting out might look like from an engagement process it's a little bit like the um Federal Register which is really really detailed we're not talking about that detailed but where they talk about all the themes of the comments we heard and what staff's response is or or how that's already impacted the proposal that's going to be goinging before decision makers we would love to implement something like that the challenge we often have is that our processes are so compressed already that we need to be able to ass soon as we finish hearing input we need to be able to turn it around and create a policy

[230:01] recommendation to you so one of the things that I would love to see us do is particularly for some of these more complex issues where we are going to have robust periods of Engagement to build in a little bit more time so that staff can actually report out more effectively to the community as well as to council what we heard and what impacts it's already had on the policy recommendations so that's just one thing I would um suggest is another process Improvement Tom or Chris is there anything you would like to add well I'd like to talk a little bit about the differences so as you know public hearing are intended to give you information about a matter that's before you and Rachel I know that it sometimes seems like it doesn't change council's Minds I I will tell you I have seen it change councel Minds one example that comes to mind is short-term rentals short-term rentals our original regulation was pushed by the hotel industry with an eye towards Banning them uh and then the council held its

[231:00] first public hearing the room filled with people who were doing short-term rentals and using it to meet their expenses so Council actually took that that ch completely changed the nature of Regulation based on what they heard from the community at that public hearing U so it does happen open comment is intended to be things that are not on the agenda and it's it's really sort of like a a traditional public meeting in in the in New England where people can come and tell you anything uh and it used to be at the end of the meeting and then people complained that that wasn't really fair so Council compromised and said well we'll do it for 45 minutes at the beginning of the meeting and if it goes over 45 minutes we'll put it at the end of the meeting and the challenge with that was that no mayor ever wanted to tell a room full of people wait you're gonna have to wait for three hours to talk to us so they that rule was disregarded so we we got to a position where sometimes open comment would take two hours at the beginning of the meeting so about five six years ago

[232:00] council did this rule for to limit it to 20 people that and chosen at random and so we've evolved to that and in my erence one of the changes that we've gotten which is is is unfortunate is that it used to be I I really loved open comment because you would get kids talking about their Girl Scout Troop or or some people dressed as bees or all sorts of interesting things people complaining about their neighbors it was it was a true sort of uh town meeting sort of feel and now what seems to happen is groups organized to bring and get as many people to sign up as possible so they can dominate the agenda for that night so we're hear you're hearing basically the same same agenda item over and over again an open comment I don't know know how to fix that but it's a real challenge I think and it just also seems to me that maybe because of covid this year almost every open comment speaker has been angry and that used to not be the case half of them would say some people would sing songs or write recite poems sometimes they were angry but sometimes they were happy sometimes they were thankful it it was really sort of more engaging our

[233:01] community than it has been lately um and I don't know how to fix that but public hearings again are not required but it really is helpful to get the feel for the community and I have seen it change council members Minds on many occasions uh I I you know I I really believe one of the the the great things about the Boulder City Council is that they do you do make the decisions in the room in front of the public people generally don't know and I've been doing this for a while and I will tell you that very rarely can I tell you how a a close vote's going to come out because council members make the decision based on what they hear in the room and that that's the way democracy is supposed to work and it doesn't always work like that so I when I hear from Chris I want to remind you all that you also as Council have several items that might attend to this and your sort of procedural things so you might have another way of tackling this so let's hear from Chris and then we have Mary Aaron and juny go ahead Chris I I just Echo a lot of what Tom said and and it has been my experience in in my tenure especially here in

[234:00] Boulder that uh the decisions are made in the room and uh I have seen uh the perspectives change I have heard many times either council members or board members share I don't know how I'm going to vote still uh and the discussion continues so I think there's an important role that public hearings play But as Sarah said um the the community input the community feedback leading up to decisions is just as critical um and and that's really what we've been focusing on um from uh from all of the work that has happened the the work that Brenda and Sarah presented tonight uh and so I think this is a continued journey of how do we improve uh that that Community engagement Community feedback um and the the opportunity for the community to to engage and and have their their input help shape the policy decisions that Council ultimately makes

[235:00] so um I just I feel that uh this is a continued work in progress it will be a work in progress uh and the the way that we communicate today as we were talking about with Hotline is different than the way that we communicated in 1995 and 10 years from now it'll probably be different again so it's also a constantly involving environment thanks Chris Mary what do you think yeah I just wanted to share one at least one roll call vote where I passed on my um vote because I didn't know how I wanted to vote yet um so I had to wait till the whole room went around but anyway um I wanted to just first start by um thanking staff for doing this work and to appreciate the work that you do and your public service and um public

[236:01] service has definitely changed in the last um year or so or perhaps even the last four years and I hope that things will the temperature will start to come down on some of these um challenges that we have um so thank you I just I I was wondering about um what kinds of um additional training um we as council members could go to I know is it just the building bridges website to go to in the video are there other things that we can um study basically to make sure that just to to to promote the the the Civic nature of what we're trying to do here um I was really happy to um as I was observing our bias and microaggression training the other day

[237:01] um the past two weeks actually to see Sam and Rachel there with us um so I know that's probably on all of your schedules that's a great place to um to be centered in the experience of other people so that when you're in Chambers and you have people before you who are experiencing something no matter who they are right you your awareness has been heightened some through that discussion I don't I don't know if Sam or Rachel would agree with me but that's one of the aspects I've been enjoying about that work and my um role and interest in that work is how we take it from our internal work to external work so how do we invite our community members also into that awareness raising and knowledge and sensitivity so um so I encourage going to that training sooner than later um there is a lot of background information and input on the building bridges page so I of course you can dive into that to learn what our

[238:00] community members have said they believe a productive atmosphere looks like um and then we will be working on um deescalation training part of that culture shift piece I talked about was working on expectations for our leadership and how how they're to support staff in the actions that Staff feel comfortable taking in those moments um and that will involve some deescalation training both for staff and we hope for Council and board members as well the other thing I'll add is that the engagement strategic framework that we created as a result of the public participation working groups recommendation ations not every council member has actually been able to receive orientation and training around that framework we had planned to do that um as new council members were seated and due to other pressing needs and priorities at the time it got postponed but we had planned actually a pretty fun interactive session that really um emphasized the values of and best

[239:01] practices of Engagement that is respectful and inclusive so we would always be happy to um try to resurrect we had planned for that kind of an event and offer that to council members who are interested um I also have found that um a particular organization um the National Coalition for deliberation and dialogue puts out some really interesting articles and writing about leaning into dialogue instead of debate as a way of improving public disc discourse um and so I'm happy I get their newsletter if if there are council members who are interested in their particularly interesting articles I'm happy to pass them along um we're always doing reading and learning in this space is a continuous Learning Journey for us and we're happy to include anybody who's interested in that Journey excellent thank you both if I sorry I'll also mention quickly Mary that our intended Community process for

[240:02] 20120 was to really um start sharing the vision and we also have aist of many things called enduring issues that make the vision hard um taking that work out to the community and creating opportunities for us to practice together um so that speaks a bit to what Rachel was talking about as well is how do we make more spaces for dialogue so that we can practice getting good at it as a community so I'll of course keep you all in touch with um what that looks like once we're able to go out and be in rooms together because we feel like it is very much an in-person effort excellent thank you Brenda thank you Sarah please go ahead yeah I'll I'll add my voice to the others saying thank you for your uh very carefully thought out um presentation here and for bringing this to our attention and thinking it through so well um so I guess that I I do have a

[241:00] couple concerns so that there's the the in the introductory speech the I I like the sentiments involved but it it seems maybe a little too abstract to change people's behavior that much I because it it doesn't list particular kinds of behaviors that might be problematic and and it references websites that you can go to and look at things but people probably aren't going to do that right at that moment so I'm just wondering if if there there are ways and I know you also tried to condense it but it is still maybe a little long so I don't know if there's a way to make it a little shorter and a little more spefic specific about the kinds of things we'd like to avoid or the things we'd like to encourage um it maybe a little less abstract so um that's a thought about that that that opening speech um and then the other one so that the I I I very much um support um working on responding to ad

[242:01] ad homonym attacks right and and as as you very kindly noticed I've tried to do that once or twice um and you know supporting staff in particular U I think a little less counsel because I think we sort of signed up for for criticism but um but I I do I wouldn't necessarily go to it on the like the profanity and anger side you know if someone's if someone's not you know making an ad homm attack or saying that certain staff members is a terrible person or they do the worst job ever but they're expressing uh anger and outrage I mean I think you know when when certain kinds of rules are K or enforced that can often be a way of maintaining the status quo from threats to the status quo so uh and and and outrage and anger and profanity can can be a way of expressing um that people don't feel like they're being heard or that really bad things are happening and nobody's paying attention so I I I would just be I'd be really hesitant I mean I get that you know we want an eight-year-old to be able to sit in on

[243:00] the meeting and for them and their parents to feel comfortable with that and and maybe we can we can call that out about kids that might be a nice way of doing it like in the opening thing is like actually I love that idea is that maybe the opening script includes something that says you know we may well have children here you know keep that in mind as you're making your remarks but I wouldn't necessarily call out people for using profanity I mean I think I there's the First Amendment issue but um I think we need to allow a certain level of outrage to express itself it if people feel it to be necessary okay thanks for considering that juny what do you think about all this yeah um first of all thank you for the presentation I think it was great and I think Sam's idea about the youth I think is very important I take on Erin's idea about you know free speech I don't know how far that goes um but I I think people should have the opportunity to express themselves freely but I was

[244:00] thinking going back to the youth um I think that was a great idea and I think making it a request as opposed to an Adon M Because by the time people get to us they are pretty angry and they're not going to listen so I think appealing to Something in them is probably better so saying something like we have young people attending this meeting uh who may be presenting and would like to ask you to just use youth friendly language something similar to that as opposed to saying well be mindful with your language and and and in certain things um because it sometimes it may seem like you're talking down to them especially when they're already angry when people are angry they're not really thinking in a positive frame you know frame of mind they're really thinking in a negative so anything can come across as being mean and I think part of it as well is disting making it more because I think

[245:00] when something fall in process a lot of time people are not listening and I think it goes back to what Rachel was saying maybe that little announcement whether it's by the mayor might be more powerful because it's not just a process it's me talking to you having a dialogue letting you know please use language that is youth friendly as opposed to oh okay somebody will just say these things as part of the process and you're barely listening because you don't really care about the process because the process has not worked for you um and I think maybe what I've been hearing as well from Rachel all of tonight um we used to to have chats with Council I have not attended one since May maybe we need to go back to that process because I think that's what she's talking about having that opportunity to get engaged with council members thanks good stuff Mark first I like Rachel's thoughts on on increasing engagement um Aaron I

[246:00] would probably disagree with you a little bit I I the the ways in which one can express outrage and anger and frustration are virtually Limitless and I I just don't know that it's a good thing to say you know to do it in that fashion where you're just cursing at people um so I would keep that as a as a standard but I have a one other question um I think we know what to do when um disruptive behavior occurs at Council or attacks are made upon staff and I hope we will um follow those those suggestions very closely but is there anything we as a council can do to help with people who are incurring that sort of cont contact or abuse uh at the service end of our city um you know that the fact that we will defend staff and and Council doesn't make it any better to

[247:00] have staff abused um in any other agency um somebody doesn't get the permit they want so is there anything we can do to Foster better behaviors at that end or to better protect uh staff members from that kind of abuse um we did hear quite a bit about that type of abuse in our um conversations and on the questionnaire um and one thing that was called out that would be helpful from the council level is the just to have the confidence to know that should the Community member that was treating someone abusively if if the staff member walked away from that Community member or stopped that point of service and said I'm sorry I can't help you today that if that person came to city council and shared that that happened their job would not be threatened so they're looking for backup from leadership so that's part of the

[248:02] conversation that we'll be having is what does that look like from all levels of leadership from from the council Das to the director's office to your direct supervisor's desk right so so making sure that there's a consistent level of support for staff to take whatever actions we decide are appropriate at those points when that's happening thank you for asking Mark even asking that question will resonate with staff I I hope we will institute some of those protections thank you I'd just like to add if I I could um I think that there this is just the beginning of the work we're going to continue working so this is the first step is addressing public meetings but um we've certainly heard um feedback from staff about personal interactions uh in their day-to-day workday and um we intend to find tools to address that and and

[249:02] hopefully even get to the point where we can have an internal City policy so that employ employees do feel empowered and and feel like they're supported when they you know they know that they can you know say something and stop the abuse or you know walk away or whatever the situation might entail um so that's something that's definitely on our radar so thanks for bringing that out I hope you will bring those suggestions to us do want to say that one of the um commonalities of almost every city colleague I've ever worked for or with is that they get into this line of work because they believe in serving the public so there everybody is coming from a public service mindset and when you're in that mindset it can sometimes be a little challenging especially if you don't have encouragement from leadership to set boundaries and to not always say yes to what the community is asking of you often we can't say yes because we're following either policies that are set

[250:00] by legal regulations or we're trying to frankly implement the policy direction that you all have made in very difficult situations so we're trying to obviously continue to cultivate a spirit of customer service and public service but also trying to let our staff know that it's okay to set some boundaries and be clear and respectful about what they are and any kind of backing you can give us and that is very much appreciated please come back to us with details so Sarah and um Brenda I heard a couple of um suggestions maybe for revisions um where to uh from here do you need need uh some nods from Council tonight to consider the work do you want to bring it back what what do you need at this time so I think what I'm hearing is that there's a general um concurrence that having some sort of comment at the beginning of the meetings can be helpful I think I heard some suggestions on how to perhaps tighten that up a little bit and enhance it so I'd like for us to be able to take um another draft um uh

[251:04] forward to whomever on Council would like to see it I can't imagine that we'll be able to dedicate a full Council um discussion on this again but if there are particular council members who would like to look at it we do have our engagement subcommittee which is Rachel friend and Bob Yates and so that would potentially be one mechanism for us to continue to refine what is said but my personal hope is that we can get that work done fairly quickly and begin implementing this I think our whole country is in a place of wanting to make discourse more healthy and better and I want to kind of seize on that momentum and get started right away if we can okay so oh yeah go ahead Brea and I just want to um acknowledge Erin and thank you for the points that you brought up it was a really um a a through line throughout our building bridges input process this idea of reasonable hostility that people have have a right

[252:00] to be angry about the things that are impacting their lives and sometimes that anger looks in in uncomfortable ways right and that we all need to learn how to be okay with that and so that's also why we really focus in addition to the legal piece on the disruption right so I just want to bring us back to we're talking about things that disrupt your meeting not all profanity will disrupt your meeting not all ways people are speaking will disrupt your meeting and that's really what we were hoping to provide you the tools to be able to judge in a moment like that appreciate that br thank you so Council I want to double check that Sarah's uh takeaway is correct if I could just get a visual indicator that you support adding some sort of comment um at the beginning of meetings I see one two three four five I see a bunch so fantastic and then if you would like to see a revised draft um of of the words if you could um also indicate that as well if you'd like to

[253:01] have Sarah and Brenda run that um sort of the speech by it looks like Sam would like to see it Mark would like to see it Adam would like to see it they would all like to see it if you'd run that by everyone how about we run it by everybody and give you a certain window of time where you can give us feedback if you choose to and we'll um approach it that way sounds fantastic thank you thank you very much I really appreciate your time and attention to this issue y thank you on behalf of all the staff that participated in preparing this tonight thank you so much and you know no one asked me for my opinion but I as you know like this is what I do is high conflict public engagement and what I would say is everything that you've said resonates with me and I have gotten Applause in public meetings when I have said to be clear I expect you to disagree it is okay to be angry but here's what it's not okay to do and then list the things that are not okay and people are just pleased to get the permission to engage in the dialogue but also welcome the framework um of civil

[254:01] or Civic engagement so they know um that they will be treated with respect while they are disagreeing so everything you've said is super consistent with my work not just in Boulder but everywhere Mary last thought on this before we decide where to from here my friend Heather um you had shared with me a um graphic that you had about how to cue people into um how how one way to show up I guess um and um that might be worthwhile to share with the rest of my colleagues I would be happy to do that I could also share it with Sarah and Brenda see if they wanted to wrap it into those things um what Mary's referring to is we've had some groups there are a couple things that bring out really strong feelings and one of them is Wilderness um we to designate or not we were doing a big process in New Mexico and had a lot of really angry comments and so we just had a poster that we put up in the front of the room that was like here's what here's what we're not saying we're not saying you're

[255:00] stupid you're wrong that's not what happened blah blah blah instead say these things I disagree here's my perspective that's not how I remember it and what I was sharing with Mary and Bob one day is over time what you see in a meeting is people go I and they know that what that their instinct is to say the thing that is aggressive and abusive and so they turn they look for the right thing they go oh I remember that differently and so it's part of what I find is that people have we just because we don't have the Habit anymore of the constructive dialogue we've lost the words for it and so sometimes just uh coaching um with a little bit of of scripts helps immensely and I put in public meetings now and be happy to share it if you're interested we would be very interested thank you heather um all right anything else on this important conversation right seeing none Brenda and Sarah thank you very much um just fantastic um Council we find ourselves 17 we have many other things to discuss um if you uh recall we have

[256:03] Council relationship things I mean you know happy hour and whatnot to discuss as well as many ideas that relate to tonight's conversation about how to make the engagement uh and meetings the dialogue more meaningful to you and to the community um some thoughts on uh boards and commissions and a couple additional things about um meeting how we might move through meetings um do you want to tackle one more tonight and then go till 9ine and start at nine or you just want to roll them all till tomorrow either way there's a lot roll them Mark says roll them Sam says roll them nod now if you would like to just stop now and pick it up tomorrow some sort of visual indicator I see visual indications from a majority of council so thank you very much we will do that um what I would like for you to think about um tomorrow is again how we're going to spend our time um you know I'll stay with you as long as you want uh I do always love when we talk about how um all the ways

[257:00] that we can make meetings shorter while we have a meeting that goes long you know the annual you know Council irony alert is my favorite part of your retreat um so we have this to talk about we have work plan um potential revisions to talk about I have a similar board to the one that you saw tonight uh with your work plan items so we can sort some of those that might be um straightforward it might um have a fair amount of dialogue around it so uh we shall see tomorrow uh as you uh many of you noticed when you got on or remarked when you got on I did ask if you come um with a background of a place a virtual background in Zoom of a place that is Meaningful to you and just like it'll will be the fastest thing I promise but sometimes just a nice Icebreaker um for our second day to try to guess where everyone's special place is if you don't know how to do that give me a shout I'm happy to help you um and juny if yours is already the library girl you're done but if you got another one I'd be delighted to see it uh Chris any last thoughts for Council before we set them home um this evening none for me thank you Mr Mayor

[258:00] anything for folks before we set them free all right see seeing none Council thank you for as always your thoughtful conversation and I am you know I'm not a resident of your community but I am a resident of a community and hearing um people actually in councils give a rip about how we show up as as residents and that how um we hear and experience your dialogue is is is heartening so thank you for um for tonight's conversation we will see you tomorrow morning and in the meantime it's Friday night friends go and do something that ain't this for a couple hours we'll see you in the morning we're adjourned night everybody all come to protest and end up paying a high price for the crowd control policies we currently have in France on the other side of the standoff

[259:00] police forces sent to protests are often understaffed and Overexposed here officers are faced with hundreds of notoriously violent Black Block riers they also face harmful exposure on social networks some Facebook groups post the faces of police officers alongside insults and threats they'd write we know where she lives I'll come and wait for her sometimes I'd say to myself what if they actually find me if they recognize me this policewoman was forced to relocate for her own safety the year 2020 began a new tragic Scandal Cedric Shier A 42-year-old delivery man died of aixia and a broken La chold so he won't you know what the interior Minister should do he should come to the demonstrations on Saturday and try to arrest people by the end of the year excesses in violence had increased footage of the police beating an unarmed black music producer in his

[260:00] Studio sparked public outcry as did the controversial evacuation of migrants the use of unwarranted foot spikes the president