January 26, 2021 — City Council Study Session

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] [Music] bloody idiots but but this was to me very offensive language great point okay so everyone uh good evening i'm i'm your conductor uh tonight um so it looks like it's six o'clock um bob will not be joining us uh do we have uh channel eight should we uh get going here and by the way i've never got a script so i'll just be winging it but hopefully i'll i'll manage all right your experience taylor carl taylor everything good on your end with channel eight oh yes everything is good on our end all right now begin recording thank you great well good evening everyone and welcome to the january 26th of boulder city council

[1:00] study session uh i'm erin brockett i'll be leading the meeting tonight i'll be doing the facilitation um before we get into the meet of the meeting i just want to acknowledge that we had a notice of um tom carr gave us notice that he will be retiring a few months from now and um tom would just want to take a minute uh to thank you for all of your years of service we still got you for a few months still fortunately um but uh you know congratulations on on the good news for you but uh sorry for where the the the loss to us so i just i want to thank you and acknowledge the the news here thank you and if anyone else wanted to say something about that news as well please feel free i would thanks so much tom for 11 years of great service it was as i said to the paper i remember you from my first day being oriented on planning board and it's been great to work with you all along through my city arc as well so i just want to acknowledge all the great

[2:00] work you've done for the city and thanks for your your time thank you sam and tom all i have to say is i love your passion thank you mary i also want to say on a personal note i probably wouldn't even be here um without tom's help and his knowledge about the city so i appreciate everything uh you've done for me too tom thanks erin and there will be time for many more uh words before before you head out the door in a few months here but i wanted to wanted to say that tonight so thanks all right thanks again all right and um before we dive into the agenda i did want to mention that um we are still recruiting for boards and commissions uh but not for much longer you've got just under 48 hours the admissions are the submission deadline is thursday the 28th at 5 p.m so if you're interested in volunteering for our

[3:00] boards and commissions please step up and get those those submissions in the next 47 hours okay um so now let's move into our agenda we've got three items tonight um an update on the newer program an update on the amps uh parking management parking strategy implementation and also an alpine balsam update so let's get going with the newer implementation um chris should i be turning to you to kick us off here sure i'll just kick us off to introduce kristen heiser our deputy director of housing and human services to give the presentation good evening [Music] i just want to make sure that presentation is pulled up great thank you good evening i'm kristen heiser deputy director of housing and human services and i am joined tonight by karen armstrong who's program manager of the housing and human services community mediation and resolution center to help inform the conversation we're joined by tom carr the city attorney

[4:00] joel wagner from finance and edward stafford with planning and development services next slide please tonight we're going to be providing an update on the city's implementation of ordinance 8412 which is titled legal representation provided in cases of eviction also known as no eviction without representation also known as newer we will start with an overview of the ordinance uh followed by review of the implementation plan and wrap up with feedback from city council did i just see sam's hand jump up nope okay sorry next slide please tonight we will be bringing two questions to city council number one given the broad range of services available to provide eviction protections what should the initiative be named currently are working titles of fiction prevention services number two does city council agree with staff's direction

[5:00] or have input on the program design and implementation plan next slide please so a quick look back ordinance 8412 a renter driver driven initiative was approved by voters in november 2020 affirming boulder's community's commitment to becoming a welcoming inclusive and diverse community ordinance 8412 establishes a rental licensing tax to operate and fully fund a program to provide housing supports including rental assistance and legal representation to tenants at risk of eviction the revenues generated from the tax will support the administrative costs of the tax and the program provide rental assistance for persons that are vulnerable to eviction cover all costs of the tenant's legal services and create a tenant committee the ordinance calls for the program to be fully implemented 12 months after the effective date of the ordinance next slide please so following the voter's approval in

[6:00] november the city convened an interdepartmental team to implement the initiative including housing and human services the city attorney's office finance and planning and development services fortunately due to the city's long-time commitment to providing services to residents experiencing housing instability many elements of the initiative have long been in place and were fortified this past year in response to the pandemic these include strategic investment of local and federal funds to address housing needs of community members the city boulders long-running community mediation services which was founded back in 1981 specifically to address landlord tenant concerns including eviction cities coordination with the courts making sure information and resources are known and available this past year that looked like requiring information about mediation services being provided in both english and spanish when cases are filed and summons are issued and also this past year we saw the launch of the housing helpline which was stood up by boulder county housing and human services which is staffed by experienced housing and human

[7:01] service experts that can refer people to rental assistance community mediation and legal services for both landlords and tenants as well federal and state action this past year went a long way in keeping people housed these included the moratorium on evictions which has just been extended to march 31st and moratoriums on late fees as well as the extending the usual 10-day notice to cure to 30 days while a variety of safeguards have long been in place standing up the eviction prevention services program has provided the opportunity for the city to align shore up and enhance protections provides civil stability for both tenants and landlords so karen armstrong will now discuss these safeguards next slide thank you kristen i'm karen armstrong and i'm the program manager for community mediation and resolution center housed within housing and human services so the essential services of this new program include rental assistance mediation services and legal services

[8:02] for rental assistance non-payment of rent is the most common reason for eviction ordinance 8412 ensures that tax revenues will help fund rental assistance programs through the city and community partner agencies conversations have been underway with community partners to determine what are the best access access points for these rental assistance dollars most likely that will be effa the boulder county housing helpline and the city the role of the coordinator will be to assess the circumstances of the tenant and provide a warm handoff to the assistance provider that is most appropriate to meet their specific needs rental assistance will be limited to circumstances when inability to pay is the grounds for eviction and the impacted household income qualifies moving to community mediation services so as um kristen mentioned the city's mediation services is a program under housing and human services and has been

[9:00] an essential service at eviction court for nearly 40 years experienced mediators with eviction specific training assist landlords and tenants to reach agreements either allowing tenants to remain housed or work out mutually agreeable terms for attendance to move out in many cases avoiding evictions on the tenant's record last week the courts instituted administrative order 2108 which now requires landlords and tenants to participate in mandatory mediation prior to eviction court so mediation will most certainly continue to be an integral part of the eviction prevention toolkit and lastly legal services so the city has entered a six-month contract with bridge to justice to provide advice and legal representation to tenants who are at various stages of a potential eviction all legal advice and representation will be provided by an attorney employed or contracted by bridge to

[10:01] justice this initial contract for 50 000 will provide legal services in the immediacy and as the program evolves over the next six months we'll adjust to in order to be the most responsive we can to community needs next slide please so this is an overview of the client experience so a tenant will contact our office by phone or through our online form which is available on our website the earlier the tenant contacts the program for assistance the better since this allows for more time to connect tenants with the various services and negotiate an agreement potentially avoiding eviction court we expect that the new court mandate for mediation that i just mentioned along with a new court requirement that eviction services information be included with with each eviction summons should hopefully help connect tenants to these eviction prevention services earlier on once they're in touch with our program

[11:01] the coordinator will assess the tenant situation to determine whether rental assistance is needed and gauge whether legal or and or mediation services will be the first step in general the less imminent the eviction the more likely mediation will be saw as the first step in cases with an immediate threat of eviction or cases with complicated legal dynamics legal services would be prioritized so the coordinator determines referrals on a case-by-case basis in our early experience often mediation rental assistance and legal services are utilized in coordination moving down on this chart on the day of eviction court the eviction prevention coordinator two attorneys and two mediators from longmont mediation services are available at court since half of all eviction cases typically involve a city of boulder property and the other half are usually outside city limits the coordinator first determines

[12:00] where the property is located so eviction defendants in the city of boulder rental would be connected with an attorney through this program and those outside city limits would meet with a mediator first regardless of location the coordinator will connect all tenants who may be in need of rental assistance to the appropriate assistance provider while at court next slide please so for the past three weeks we have been up and running and there have been a total of 33 cases on the docket and that is low due to the current eviction moratoriums of those 33 cases there were only four cases where tenants who were eligible for this program who resided in a city of boulder property appeared on their case so as you can see many tenants do not appear in court for many of these no shows a lot of these cases have already been dismissed but there are a lot also that have not been dismissed and the result is an automatic default eviction against

[13:01] the tenant the mediation program recognizes the importance of encouraging early tenant engagement and there have been ongoing efforts to get information out to tenants earlier on we hope that the recent process changes that i've mentioned already the mandatory mediation and eviction program information will help to engage more tenants with our services preventing these automatic default evictions next slide please so this shows the combined totals of clients who have contacted the program at all stages of the eviction process so this includes the four tenants that you saw on the last slide at court and eight who have contacted our services pre-court they found out about the program and contacted us so you can see in the center of the diagram here that three clients received all three services they receive legal mediation and rental assistance and in most cases you can see it's usually a combination of the services i'll give you a fairly

[14:02] typical scenario that we're seeing right now where tenants have fallen behind on rent due to the economic impacts of kovid in a recent case at court the coordinator connected tenants in one of these cases with an attorney who advised them to assert their current protections under the cdc eviction moratorium they completed a cdc affidavit to prevent the eviction from moving forward and the coordinator connected them with rental assistance through the boulder county's housing hotline to get them back on track with rent and retain housing so it's important to note that not only does this benefit the tenant but the landlord also gains some financial security through this and is able to retain their tenant rather than having an abrupt lease disruption and deal with the process of releasing the unit you can see that this combination of legal and rental assistance and accounts for four of our cases over the last few weeks

[15:01] so we're seeing that's a powerful dynamic it is it's also important to acknowledge that not all evictions can be prevented and in certain cases no amount of rental or legal assistance will fix the issue at hand for those tenants who will need to vacate their property mediation often assists both sides to negotiate terms and a time frame to move out and the coordinator can connect them with supportive housing services so not all evictions result in homelessness next slide okay thank you karen so we're going to transition from services to operations the ordnance established an annual excise tax of 75 for each dwelling unit that is required to have a rental license within the city of boulder it's estimated that the tax will initially generate approximately or upwards of 1.5 million dollars annually because this is a new tax staff is in the process of researching systems and options for the collection of the tax

[16:00] this exploration is focused on minimizing the administrative burden for rental license holders while ensuring efficient collection and enforcement as work continues to determine the process and mechanisms for collecting the tax and the city is committed to standing up the program now funding is needed to operationalize the program before revenue is generated so you'll be staff you'll see staff coming to council in february to request an advance from the general fund reserves to support the launch of the program as for the administration housing and human services has loaned a temporary program coordinator to launch the program who is already in place and we will be hiring a permanent coordinator as soon as possible there is also a need to hire two staff members one permanent and one temporary to implement the tax collection process and support long-term administration of the tax along with salary and benefits there will be a general operation costs that the tax will need to cover the implementation plan also includes a communication strategy

[17:00] prioritizing reaching renters and property owners and landlords both large and small independents to share all there is to know about the resources available and the tax we understand the implications of this tax on landlords and are prioritizing them in our outreach so they re receive this information sooner rather than later to make informed business decisions through this year also a rental lease disclosure form has been approved and landlords are required to notify their tenants of their rights to legal representation and rental assistance next slide please so what is ahead over the last couple of months we have prioritized standing up the availability and accessibility of services to make sure people remain housed the full implementation of the program will continue to work continue to be a work in progress but we will shift our focus now on to hiring the permanent coordinator continue tweaking the ordinance to ensure its efficacy finalize and commence tax collection and

[18:02] recruit and seek the tenant committee this will all be informed by our continued outreach to the community including housing providers renters and regional partners as well we are likely to make a trip back to council for a mid-year check-in providing an update on the usage and outcomes of the services and seeking some direction on possible ordinance modifications and a process to make appointments to the tenant committee next slide please so speaking of the tenant committee with immediate focus on keeping people housed staff has prioritized making sure the services are ready and available now um ordinance 8412 does call for creation of a tenant committee comprised of five members but the ordinance doesn't specify who appoints the committee so as i mentioned a second ago we will be making a trip back to city council to seek guidance on the appointment process as well as at that time we might come back with some modifications to the ordinance to make sure it is as effective as it needs to be next slide please

[19:01] so wrapping up i'd like to take a look at our timeline since adoption two months ago the city is contracted with bridge to justice to provide legal services we've aligned and enhanced our existing services we've designated a phone number and website and have assigned a temporary coordinator throughout 2021 as we work toward full info implementation we will continue to promote the program stabilize the staffing collect the tax and recruit for the tenant committee all the while evaluating and adjusting the program to make sure it is the most effective it can be and achieve the goal of the ordinance as karen mentioned while or not stop evictions from happening or will not stop all evictions from happening it will guarantee legal representation of resources are available for all residents at risk of eviction next slide please so at this point we are happy to answer any questions and would like to receive direction tonight from council on the two questions on the screen thank you very much

[20:01] thanks so much for that kristen karen for an excellent presentation so why don't we start with council questions for staff before we answer stats questions for council do we have any uh questions for staff not seeing any smart okay there we go mark your first side of the gate then see it okay um what do we anticipate as a percentage of revenues uh as the administrative costs for this program and it's really a two-part question given the number of other agencies that are operating in this space are there things we can do to make it administratively um less expensive so that we have more money available for other rental assistants uh or legal services for attendance kristin can i answer that

[21:00] sir so so mark that's an excellent question it's one we've been focused on our whole our whole plan has been to try to maximize the amount of dollars that are available one of the challenges that we're exploring you may have seen that there was a significant amount of money in administration for collecting the tax um it's as i'm sure you know this tax is unprecedented we don't have any uh existing ability to collect this tax we have no relationship with these tax payers other the both taxpayers other than the licensing so we're exploring the most cost-effective way to do that the other thing is it's a relatively small tax 75 a year so this is one of those areas where cost of enforcement could exceed cost of collections i see joel turned his camera on so we have not determined what the total cost of administration is we we've budgeted but we're still working through ways to collect the tax and trying to find the most cost effective way to do that that will probably be the most expensive part of the administration we'll also have to hire a coordinator uh right now jay allen is

[22:00] doing that as part of his normal duties as hhs we're looking to see ways to uh save money in that area uh but still we'll have to do that under the ordinance okay and i just have one one follow-up question we we just received an email um i think in the last day um from mary duvall of thistle asking for an exemption from the tax i do not know at the moment whether that such a thing is even possible before we get to the question of whether it is desirable and proper um so my question my first question is is that something that is even possible under this statute so mark that's a there's a two-party answer that you may recall that that was a question that came up uh in august when you were or september when you were just discussing putting this on the ballot um the the the charter says that there are limitations on the way council can change people's ordinances this is not however what i would call a people's ordinance this ordinance was was put on the ballot by council not

[23:00] as the result of an initiative petition so i believe you do have some leeway to alter the ordinance to uh to as long as it stays within the basic intent um whether or not you exempt uh non-profits that provide affordable housing is up to you uh and the question of whether or not that is within the intent of the ordinance is is one that you'll that is more of i think a political policy question than a legal one all right we can we can take that up at a later point thank you yeah as kristen said we plan to bring some tweaks back to you uh in the coming months probably the second quarter and you'll have a chance to discuss that then tom i appreciate it thank you thank you i would just like to follow up on two items really quick is that when it comes to the rental assistance as you're asking about that one of the things that's really amazing about this opportunity or and we do see it as an opportunity as the city um you know i've been here for eight years we've never had a rental assistance program um we do provide some money for to effa traditionally to keep families house

[24:00] that's very much focused on family homelessness um but until coven hit and we had the federal funds come through the cbrf funds we've never had a sturdy steam a stream of rental assistance so this really provides us moving forward to having a program that we will continue into the long run of providing rental assistance so that's a very exciting thing i will also say right now we are relying on the federal funds to meet those rental assistance needs in the community through the cbrf funds that we allocated this past year um but moving forward we'll replace those and work with our partners to provide rental assistance using this this particular source and just also rounding out the conversation about pistol and other partners we do we have started to engage with our housing partners our first meeting was with them in december to start to roll out kind of the proposal of how we want to uh structure this and implement this and we are going to continue that engagement moving forward and so we have been in communication with mary and the soul we will continue that

[25:00] engagement thank you i appreciate it great sam and mary well mark got to one of my questions thank you mark and then the other one is i just wanted to make sure um kristen that i understood what you said um i know that in the memo it said that we would need to council would need to decide who's going to appoint the tenant council were you going to come back to us with a recommendation on how to handle that or is that something you're looking for feedback tonight on to be honest we've been so focused on standing up the services that we have not been able to um really think through how we might recommend that so our intention is to if you want to provide feedback tonight to inform that process that'd be great but we do intend to come back later in the year with a proposal of how we might approach that um and as tom said there might be some other modifications that we might recommend to the ordinance um with the intention of just strengthening it

[26:01] okay very good and i'll just ask chris maybe you don't need to answer now but um you might think about whether you think it's appropriate that this be a city manager type of appointment or housing and human services or whether you'd like to come to council so that was my only issue thanks great mary and then i'm going to call myself thank you aaron um so during the presentation kristen you said that um not there are some cases in which no amount of legal assistance or rental assistance can prevent eviction um and i was curious to know as to what are the circumstances under which those cases happen and also you said i missed it and um i apologize for that but you said something after that that not all of those folks um become homeless so i just wanted to better understand that i'm gonna defer to karen

[27:01] on that answer yeah so there are circumstances where um a tenant is being evicted and the the reason the complaint is not related to non-payment of rent it may be that the lease has simply expired and the landlord doesn't wish to renew it could be that the tenant has um violated the lease in some other way having nothing to do with rent and it may be that there's no legal challenge or legal defense to those situations and it's just a matter of negotiating a time frame for a move out and so and when i said that not all evictions so even when a tenant does have to vacate the unit and there's still safeguards in our community there's housing supports and the coordinator we're working at building in more case management to this position as well

[28:00] to hopefully support folks who are going to be losing their housing their current housing to make sure that they have a smooth transition to um to a new housing may i add a little bit mary please tom the what uh david gear and i interviewed a bunch of lawyers who do this for a living as we went through this and one of the things we learned was that even for a non-payment of rent case even the best lawyer can't really necessarily win at trial if the only issue was was rent paid so and taking a case to trial can actually end up hurting the tenant because a judgment for a vic an eviction on the tenant's record can make it harder to get them re-housed so what we've learned is that lawyers can help and they do help in a lot of cases sometimes the notice is defective sometimes there isn't enough notice sometimes i don't serve the notice there are a lot of technical things lawyers can do to help but actually trying to defeat an eviction when the the landlord has a right under law

[29:01] to retain the property is really difficult and can be counterproductive which is why the work that karen is doing and the the idea that we're getting people the assistance to help them get housed even if it's not necessarily in the same place is is really important part of this program thank you tom and then um my next question was is about um and this is this is hearsay so i may be completely off but one of the things that i have heard of that happens with people um with some landlords is that they present them with um notices that look like eviction notices but they really aren't um and so it can be kind of misleading or intentionally misleading or confusing or um and so i'm wondering um if there is anything that these funds can do to address that if in fact that's true

[30:03] i guess i can go ahead and respond to that so i haven't heard of like a fake eviction notice there's some notices that are are given sometimes tenants don't know what type of notice they've received there's usually a 10-day notice that starts the process um and it's not actually an eviction notice but uh alerting the tenant to that they need to fulfill their obligations or leave the unit and sometimes tenants think that is an eviction notice so i don't know but if somebody were to come to our office with that type of um saying that they have an eviction notice we would immediately that qualifies as an imminent eviction and we would connect them with legal services to determine what type of notice they received and try to sort that out so by virtue

[31:03] of you connecting them with legal services then they would qualify for these funds is that a correct assumption they would qualify for legal services we are working through with the rental assistance at this point we are intending for that to be need-based um just because there's a finite amount of money and if an individual is financially um you know in the income qualified qualifications while we're still working out some of the details with our partners um that is our intention so well everybody will qualify for legal representation as well as community mediation as for a financial um assistance that um would be be based thank you good man that's it thank you aaron great thanks i'll uh call on myself now

[32:01] and actually i'll start with a follow-up to what mary just asked you mentioned the uh need uh qualification for the rental assistance and i certainly understand the desire to do um some of that but will we make allowances for like crises or change in circumstances like maybe last year your income was healthy but now you're in june you lost your job in january and you really are having tough financial time so how will we handle kind of cases one of the other benefits of this source is that it doesn't have a lot of the strings that are attached to our federal resources for example and so it could provide us a lot of flexibility to be um thoughtful about that so as of right now we are looking at maybe some income limitations but also calling out if somebody has a medical uh emergency or a loss of a job or you know circumstances um um are um you know impacting the situation and then also we would like many of our programs we would have

[33:00] some sort of ability to uh take into other things into consideration and make exceptions but right though flexibility worked out good um next question is so i know you mentioned that we are going to have um property owners give notice to tenants about the existence of this program and can you just walk me through what the opportunities are for that to happen where it'll be required and what the touch points are with people who are facing these difficulties karen do you want me well the ordinance provides that that the landlord include notice about this ordinance and at least disclosure so that's a form that is utilized widely by landlords most uh landlords if they're they have their rental license they they should know about the requirement of the lease disclosure and so we've updated that and

[34:00] that's live and available um so that is ideally one touch point we're going to be doing community outreach to ensure that all of our community partners are aware of this program and we've already been getting referrals from community partners so the logical places where a tenant might go to receive assistance if they're in trouble we'll hopefully be fully aware of our program and refer and then if they don't find out about it beforehand and they are facing an eviction that they should receive information about the program in the summons we're also looking at other avenues to proactively reach out to eviction defendants prior to court so that they'll get a notice in the summons right so that's part of the program right what about that um that that notice that you mentioned that starts the process that's not an actual eviction notice do we have an opportunity to get tenants provided with the information at that point that's a 10-day notice and that's um

[35:03] [Music] that's under state law that's not something that's uh under the jurisdiction of of the city tom do you have any other thoughts on that i don't think we can affect those notices aaron and i think this is you've you've hit on one of the most challenging parts of this is getting people the information that they need when they're in crisis um and karen has has done some really excellent work in that area and we've actually started to get more phone calls than we were getting before so some of it's paying off uh they actually i wasn't three or four people before last friday's calendar actually contacted the office beforehand which is unusual so you're exactly right that's the hard part is letting people know that this help is available um i do also want to mention and give a shout out to barha they do an excellent job of making sure that landlords have this type of information and they do encourage their landlords if they are

[36:00] going to be serving a 10-day notice to include information about local resources great okay very good and tom when you said aaron's been doing great work that's aaron poe city attorney correct no uh karen yeah karen oh karen i heard aaron all right i guess i just i hear my name and everything i guess okay uh last question uh so okay so we're we're still figuring out the timeline for the tax implementation and you know we we've heard from uh thistle and i've heard from others you know about that there may be some budgetary difficulties particularly in this first year right where nobody was necessarily planning about this if they weren't following closely weren't sure it was gonna pass are we gonna consider maybe in this in this initial rollout maybe a payment plan option you know that maybe we start a little staggered or something like that to um since people didn't have as much notice about it this year hi joel wagner tax and special projects manager and

[37:00] uh thank you for the question yes it's it's a uh frankly a really good consideration that um as we were starting to look at this wasn't as much on our radar and we certainly appreciate our partners at barha and others of for bringing this up the just to give a idea of the scope there about 9 500 licenses in the for rental house housing licenses here in the city of boulder about 87 to 8 800 of them are duplexes or single-family homes or condominiums um so you know frankly as we're thinking about the administrative burden of this our our minds were thinking about the individual taxpayers uh but as we're going through this planning that is one of the things we're definitely considering regardless of the effective date of the tax at which point you had a license and you would owe the tax we are looking at options but to potentially delay the payments of that for larger taxpayers

[38:01] you know for an individual my neighbor across the street who has one license a 75 fee is not going to be that much but um you know thousands or potentially tens of thousands is going to be significant so we're definitely going to take that in consideration great i'm glad to hear that that flexibility will be very helpful for some people that's it for me adam i see if your hand up yes i do thank you aaron um tom this is a question for you too i remember during our last retreat we had discussed revisions to the generic [Music] lease agreement that the city had on file did that ever get updated and if not is now the time to do it since this is sort of a major overhaul when it comes to rental agreements i think that it did i'd have to double check and karen might know better than ice since she works with that on a regular basis karen do you know it has not been updated but that's a

[39:00] great idea we'll we'll go ahead and add that cool yeah i just remembered that as being a potential project last year that seems like a perfect time to roll it out so great um well if we don't have any other questions for staff staff has questions for us so do we want to bring those up the presentation back up so we can get those answered i think the first one was about the name of the program so while that's coming out there we go yeah so um staff has questions about the name the current working name is eviction prevention services do we have uh nominations for others just mentioned we could still call it no eviction without representation the the name of the ballot measure that would be

[40:01] one possibility other thoughts we got sam yeah um the only problem i have with eviction being the only functional word here is we've also tried to um focus on rental support earlier so i i would be happy with um rental support and eviction prevention services just something that also references that it's not just about eviction interventions but it's also about rental support that's a great point mark i actually like the shorter version but um i'm happy to go with sam's version as well um either one would be fine mary thanks aaron um yeah i'm gonna throw out a name just to see if it sticks um housing retention services

[41:06] okay we got another nomination on the floor here thoughts from people i know this is a group that has opinions uh rachel well no strong ones here but you know in that the origin of this was um eviction representation uh it just feels like we're getting a little far away from that like we don't have anything about representation in there if we take eviction out then um it's a little diluted so whatever it is should should uh make sure that people can understand the the big benefit that that we're talking about which i think largely is um eviction representation sam um this is just to mary's idea my only um challenge with that is retention housing retention kind of makes it sound like we're

[42:00] wanting to focus on having housing not be destroyed so and i kind of agree with rachel as well i would like eviction prevention to be in the name at the very least because that way people who are looking at the name of the service will clearly know that they can go here for um avoiding eviction if possible so adam points yeah i'm gonna dig into my personal background here and use my marketing degree uh i definitely think it's important that eviction is a word in it simply because that's what people are gonna be looking for help with and when you're looking on any you know google search you want to have the the primary word in there so i think that's super important yeah now i'll just weigh in i i guess the i kind of like the you know no eviction without

[43:00] representation is a snappy name and people work hard on it but it does it is just about eviction prevention and it would be nice to um have a mention of the the rental assistance so maybe that earlier suggestion about eviction prevention and rental assistance program something like that um i'm not seeing any other hands at some point we kind of need a straw poll or something to figure out what people want to which direction people want to go sam and jenny i could i could support your sarin eviction prevention and rental assistance services eviction prevention and rental support services either one of those works for me okay juni oh you're muted still muted thank you aaron um i do like your um

[44:01] your audition event eviction prevention and rental assistance services i think he didn't come past everything we want to say that we offer and i think that's a great idea that people know you know if they want help here's where they can go and i think even just with the title can you know give people idea on how to reach us so i think that's great okay great and i got to give credit mark was the one who first raised that um so we've heard a few positive things about that uh maybe does anyone prefer a different one that they would like to speak up for a different approach at this point okay and see no one can are we all right then with eviction prevention and rental assistance services okay i'm seeing thumbs up speak now or whoever forever hold your peace wait rachel we just wanted to make sure that was cool with staff because

[45:00] it it's wordy so as long as staff doesn't object then cool with me yes i think we could be supportive of that and easily market that so thank you very good okay thanks we got that one polished off and now the city council agree with staff's direction or have input on the program design and process so i'll take people's comments we can probably remove the presentation now so we can see people better who has comments on direction and design and process mary then sam yeah i'm sure you're already doing all of this but i'll just bring it up anyway one is um because they are city funds i'm assuming that um they're available regardless of your documentation status i'm saying that's correct okay thank you

[46:00] and then the other one is that everything will be available in um [Music] languages other than english that is correct we we are working towards that um right now if you go to the website it is in english um but we are that is our list of things to do um in the immediacy and that your marketing will also follow some cultural appropriateness that is correct yeah and we will be working very closely with the community connectors um as we roll this out so that we have a pretty um robust strategy to reach um all parts of our community thank you sam mostly just going to be super complimentary of staff um i am so impressed with how quickly you stood this program up i mean we only had it pass in november and gave you the thumbs up and an ordinance to support shortly after that so thank you for getting this

[47:01] done so quickly i also really appreciate the the balance support um it's obviously better if we can assist people with mediation and rental support prior to going into eviction because what we've heard all along is that once you're in eviction proceedings it's really hard to reverse those so i think this is all headed in the right direction i also want to do a shout out to the proponents of this measure it was ultimately put on the ballot by um city council but all the heavy lifting was done by the people who brought this forward so thank you to the newer folks and thank you to staff for being so responsive with it i look forward to this program continuing and evolving for many years thanks for that sam i'll call on myself i was going to say all those same things i won't repeat them all but yeah phenomenal work staff this i i had not expected it to be stood up so quickly so incredibly appreciative now is a time that we need

[48:01] this more than ever so i'm very very glad it's gotten off the ground so quickly and i just had uh one comment um which was about the tenant committee just in the in the memo um it mentioned potentially having those people appointed in march of 2022 as part of the next sporting commission cycle and i just said i'd love to see that uh created earlier um so i think that as the program is forming would be a great time to get input from a attendance committee i think their voices could be really helpful as we're developing the program so you know obviously there's no time before this set of appointments but whether that is done by the city manager or whether it's done by city council i'd recommend you know maybe mid-year um in 21 rather than waiting until march of 22 and you know we i guess we can figure out who appoints them in a few months but i'd love to see it

[49:00] happen in more like six months rather than you know 14. um that's my one comment and also the um yes mary you're you want to finish harry no that was it go ahead okay thank you um yeah that with respect to the standing up of the committee i think that the way that the health equity fund committee is done is works pretty well um i occasionally look at who's on the committee and it's really well balanced in terms of representation so uh whatever methodology you're using there i think that would likely work very well here that is um appointed by the city manager staff bring um recommendations to the city manager for appointment yeah and i can imagine it working that way as well okay any uh last thoughts from council

[50:03] seeing none i'll uh give another huge thank you to staff and and also another um shout out to the uh the newer organizers for the amazing work they did this last year and bringing this measure to us and and campaigning for getting it passed so good work all round and with that uh shall we move on to our next item about uh amps and parking yeah as we uh swap out staff here for this next item uh first uh i'm gonna hand it over to chris haglin from our transportation and mobility department and then he's gonna pass it over to chris jones from transportation and mobility so we now have three chris's here so uh don't hesitate to use last names uh as we begin our presentation here so uh with that i will pass it over to chris haglin all right thank you chris m uh good evening mayor and council uh my name is chris haglin senior transportation planner and

[51:01] currently also the acting manager of the city's transportation planning division and i am joined as chris mastruck uh mentioned by chris jones who is our deputy director of community vitality uh with us tonight also is mallory baker and andrew the door of walker consultants who are assisting with this project and they are here and available for questions as many of you know amps is short for access management and parking strategies and this is an ongoing cross-departmental effort with staff from community vitality transportation mobility planning and development services and in the case of parking pricing since we're doing also parking violations the municipal courts under the amps program there are a variety of projects and programmatic efforts underway aimed at improving multimodal access and managing parking demand across our

[52:00] city next slide please we have created the following agenda for this evening study session following a brief overview of amp's efforts we will describe for you the framework of this project which is focused on the neighborhood parking permit program and parking pricing we are going to begin with the npp and have a discussion and then following that discussion we'll move on to parking pricing but please keep in mind we do have 90 minutes uh for this item for you uh tonight after that brief overview we will explain our community engagement plan which has been tailored to our new way of working and communicating in this covet environment and also our engagement plan with boards and council we will also be sharing with you goals and some key findings that have been identified during the existing conditions phase of the project and then finally we're going to move ahead and describe the next steps

[53:01] in the project and asking you questions to gather your input and advice next slide please amps in the projects under its umbrella are ultimately guided by a set of planning documents that provide a policy framework and a set of objectives to fulfill the vision for our community these documents include the boulder valley comprehensive plan with which outlines land use policies and the vision for our community and broader region the sustainability framework covers our environmental and resilient policies and objectives related to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and responding to climate change the transportation master plan which outlines the city's multimodal transportation policies its operations and maintenance efforts planning and capital improvements and key initiatives and measurable objectives and finally the economic sustainability strategy which which promotes economic vitality

[54:01] and a strong relationship between the city and the business community next slide please all of those documents have informed and shaped the amp's strategy to this point uh the amp's guiding principles which were adopted by city council in 2017 include that in boulder our residents our employees our visitors use a wide variety of transportation options in our community and we need to plan to provide access for all modes and all people we need to employ new innovative tools and strategies to improve multimodal access and manage demand throughout our city we also need to be inclusive and recognize the diversity within our community and strive to advance social and racial equity we need policies and programs that not only improve transportation access but also meet our economic vitality and environmental goals

[55:00] and of course in our fast changing and very unpredictable world as we know over the last few months we need to plan for the present and adapt to the future social environmental technological and economic changes next slide please this chart provides some examples of the variety of projects that are underway under the amps umbrella our chautauqua access and management program is our annual uh parking management and free shuttle service to chautauqua from memorial day to labor day for our city governor government offices and the main civic uh library area we implement implemented a new parking management strategy and a very successful parking cash out program for city employees under amps staff continues to work on parking code changes but this work has unfortunately been delayed due to staff reductions in planning and development services however we hope to get this project back on track this year

[56:02] this parking code change work is also linked to a potential new transportation demand management ordinance for new developments which seeks to mitigate impacts on the surrounding transportation system from new development the final two projects are what we're here to discuss with you tonight and those include parking pricing and the neighborhood parking permit program and with that i will turn it over to chris jones of community vitality thank you chris haglin and good evening council as chris indicated the chart indicates community vitality is taking the lead on two components of amp's implementation parking pricing and the neighborhood parking permit review so i'm going to share the work that we've been um up to so far and i do also want to point out that yvette bowden and erica vandenbrand are also on the call here to help answer questions as this is a joint transportation and mobility

[57:01] and community vitality effort so the key product current project objectives at this point in the work that we've been up to are to reimagine the neighborhood parking permit program we also want to be creating a community-centered pricing approach to our on and off street spaces currently dedicated to parking and finally we want to achieve broader city goals with our parking and access management strategies the key themes that have been guiding this work thus far that we've been seeking input from boards and commissions and the community on are that we want to be managing parking and access for the entire community we know that active management can help distribute parking more effectively promote equity preserve neighborhood character reduce vehicle congestion and excessive circulation and improve the experience for all travel choices the public right-of-way including the curb serves many functions and offers

[58:00] significant value to the community seeking the highest and best value for the curb is essential we've seen this in the pandemic the demand for the curb is always changing we've got folks out in outdoor dining which is a use that we have not traditionally seen and it's just one more demand that we can realize that there is value in we also know that neighborhood specific parking solutions solutions such as the mpp program help shape outcomes that meet the unique needs of specific areas and communities parking pricing is a key part of any access management strategy it can help support and encourage travel choices outside the personal vehicle create more equitable distribution of parking across resources and support our sustainability goals this is our timeline of our work so far so we began this work last summer with our kickoff meetings and data collection our consultant team analyzed that data and developed an existing conditions

[59:01] report a summary of that report was available in your memo we've moved into our strategy development phase we've sought input from the community from boards and commissions and now tonight we're seeking input from council as we seek to develop these strategies and refine into what's coming next in our alternatives analysis that will finally lead into our implementation and action plan all this effort is really focused on our key outcomes of developing a firm decision on the future structure of the mpp program and adopting a parking pricing strategy for both on and off street facilities and a fine structure that we will incorporate into our 2022 budget proposals so we really want to make sure that we're getting our progress on this work done in the first couple quarters of this year because we want council to be able to consider possible impacts to the 2022 budget successfully achieving these outcomes is

[60:00] going to require a robust and effective community engagement plan particularly in the light of the pandemic and so i'm going to share some initial results with you all so far a detailed community engagement strategy was included in your memo and we found that the digital hub component of that strategy has proven to be an effective engagement platform through the pandemic these are some metrics um on who we've been hearing from so far in our process and it'll continue to change throughout the months ahead but we're really pleased to say that we've had over 1500 unique visitors to our digital hub more than 400 of those users have participated in our quick polls and 150 or about 150 visitors have participated in a longer questionnaire that does take up to 10 minutes and we asked some specific questions on motivations around parking and access and i'll share some results on that as well we also have an opportunity for unique discussion

[61:02] as far as demographics we've been closely tracking them according to goals set by our public engagement process and our racial assessment tool we've been targeting social media advertisements meetings and more to increase inclusivity and hear from audiences that are not represented yet or traditionally underrepresented and so we're really proud to say that so far from self-reporting about 20 percent of our participants are minorities we have a good number of folks who are under 25 a group that's typically hard to reach especially with cu students being away for much of this process so far and then 27 of our participants so far are renters and that's a demographic that's impacted particularly by our decisions in the neighborhood program um so we're really glad to report that we've got some good representation there as well so far our feedback to date we're really pleased to say that our collaboration

[62:01] has focused not just on user experience we all know that everyone has an opinion about parking no matter where you are at um in the country um but we've gotten a lot of input based on foundational ideas related to parking and transportation of man management we know that um from what we've heard so far that improving the experience of travel choices like walking biking and transit are seen by collaborators as the most important uh most important parking management goal 62 percent of our collaborators so far think it makes sense for public parking to cost more in the busiest areas of town or at the busiest times seventy percent um to date disagree with the idea that public parking should be prioritized over other potential uses of the public right-of-way and the desire of the community is to encourage other travel choices and that's seen as the number one factor in determining in determining the price

[63:00] of parking all that said we have received feedback from from folks that they recognize that price pricing approaches should consider the needs of price sensitive community members so that will still certainly be a guide for us moving forward our collaborators clearly see the link between parking management and improving experience for other travel choices and they want to strengthen this link they understand and support demand based pricing and know that higher demand means higher value they support prioritizing active travel and transit access over parking in all areas of the city and they understand and support the inherent link between parking pricing and the desire of the community to encourage other travel choices so we've also been meeting with boards and commissions since november we met with downtown management commission first then moved on to boulder junction access district commissions uh planning board then university hill commercial area management commission and finally the transportation advisory

[64:00] board in december our input so far has been largely positive we asked for specific feedback in some key areas we presented the project themes that were mentioned earlier in the presentation and the overall amp's guidance and again the feedback was largely positive we also asked for input on our planned public engagement strategies especially within the context of the pandemic to make sure we were on the right track there since we can't do public open houses and go to the farmers market and maybe do some of the more traditional outreach activities we wanted to check in and make sure we had agreement on our existing conditions and our key findings and we're going to ask some questions of counsel about that as well today and then we asked for input on next steps so that leads us to our study session with you all this evening um and our objectives for tonight um as i mentioned we want to

[65:00] uh chat with council and on a review of our key findings and our stated draft project goals that were included in your memo and we specifically want to get some feedback on how council would prioritize the roles of quantitative data generalized community input or qualitative data and our broader city long-term goals for both neighborhood parking management and parking pricing and bind strategy the input that we receive from council tonight will be used to both to confirm and or adjust our planned engagement and project timeline as well as inform our strategy development moving forward um so we're going to be developing strategies further that we'll then take back to the community boards and commissions and then ultimately come back to council with some some more developed options moving forward later this year as far as the neighborhood parking management program

[66:01] currently goes an overview of our existing conditions the program was initiated in 1994 and has had very limited updates since then we offer three types of permits in our neighborhoods we have the residential permit which is 17 per year and with that it offers two free visitor and guest passes these these passes are for friends and family who are seeking to park um in the residential zone or for service workers landscapers contractors who want to be able to park in a neighborhood zone without threat of a ticket this is not guaranteed that they will be able to find space our program does not currently manage the the space in a way that we can guarantee parking but using those passes and finding a space will prevent you from getting a ticket we also have business permits that are 75 per year these are for businesses and their employees that are located within an npp zone and we have commuter permits that are 100

[67:00] per quarter so these are permits for parkers who are coming from outside the city or other neighborhoods who don't want to park in our managed districts like downtown or the university of colorado and they pay hundred dollars per quarter to be able to park all day in our neighborhood zones there are currently 13 neighborhood zones where parking is restricted um generally through time limits so anyone is allowed to park in our mpp zones there's just a time restriction and so our parking enforcement officers are looking for for violators who don't have permits who've parked for longer than the designated time these zones have been created through a community-led petition process followed by city review and so um all of that leads to where we're at with the current program and the number of zones that we have and our cost recovery where we currently are recovering less than 50 percent of what it takes to to run this portion of our parking and access program

[68:02] some key findings um from the the data collection and further analysis and and conversations with with folks who are involved with the mpp is that we know that the mpp program focuses on achieving um objectives that were developed at its inception so this includes protecting and preserving residential neighborhoods but is not necessarily consistent with some of our adopted master planning documents that suggest some broader goals for neighborhood parking and access such as customizing strategies to meet the unique needs of neighborhoods expanding and encouraging transportation choice beyond the personal vehicle changing transportation behaviors to meet boulder's climate commitment equitably serving many kinds of people from all socioeconomic backgrounds and improving accessibility and safety for all users of the transportation system

[69:00] some other key findings is the role of data currently is not front and center to how we run the npp program because the mpp program uses a community-led petition process as a primary method for creating and expanding zones so while this allows for significant community involvement in the decision making about the program it limits the city's ability to use data to help make decisions that need broader community goals so we're not using data to expand or create mpps we're relying on the community to lead this process um also cost recovery as i mentioned the npp program generates less than half of the funding that would be needed for operational administrative and capital expenses associated with the program so this program is subsidized by the general fund all of these key findings existing conditions and feedback from the community and boards and commissions have led to our draft neighborhood parking

[70:00] management goals that we're seeking input from council on this evening the first being we want to respond to user behaviors and the diversity of neighborhood needs in residential zones promote predictability transparency and understanding of neighborhood parking regulations generate revenue needed to achieve cost recovery and support evolving community needs advanced transportation climate and sustainability goals by supporting travel choice beyond personal vehicle and increased value for the entire boulder community so that leads to our key questions for council that are specific to the neighborhood parking management approach um and so we can move into discussion now specifically on npp and our key questions are does council agree with the key findings and stated draft project goals for neighborhood parking management and in the development of possible neighborhood parking management strategies how would council prioritize the use of the following quantitative data collection and

[71:00] analysis of parking activity in residential zones versus generalized qualitative neighborhood needs communicated by community members and finally the broader larger long-term city-wide goals so again we can move into discussion now unless a council would prefer to to just continue on to our parking pricing and and fines slides we have another series of questions related to that portion of the program um and then we can we can tackle all the questions at the end but really wanted to to see if we wanted to break this up yeah thanks for that chris i would propose since the two items are pretty different that we pause here and have a discussion about the mpp unless other folks feel differently i've seen a couple thumbs up on that so great i will stop sharing my screen then if it would be helpful for folks to see each other's faces or i can leave the questions up it's always good to be able to see each other i think um although the draft project goals were

[72:01] pretty detailed so we'll see if people want those back so uh what are people's thoughts on those uh draft goals for the neighborhood parking program that staff is proposing thoughts i'd like to see them all right let's get this back up there all right just a moment are you seeing the questions yes all right now are you seeing the goals there we go okay council thoughts on these goals rachel i'll kick it off they look like great goals i wasn't totally clear on like what outcomes might look like from these goals like what are we possibly driving towards if that makes

[73:00] sense no pun intended chris has left thank you i don't know if my question makes sense but like they're that i love the goals and i i wasn't clear on on what this might lead to like what are theoretical things where we're going it makes it makes perfect sense uh i'd say that it depends on which goal we're looking at so i'm happy to go through each one and kind of communicate the trade-off of kind of the nuances um so or maybe more particularly i'd say one is the generate revenue needed to achieve cost recovery so right now we know that the mpp is not um priced in the way that is that is generating enough revenue to cover the program so that's a key tradeoff an outcome of that would be changes of the program that will will affect the rates that we charge and then i would say the last one increased value for the entire boulder community i'd say the the foundational

[74:01] elements of the program that as it currently exists was focused on mitigating spillover parking in neighborhoods surrounding our managed districts and so it was very much uh neighborhood focused um and impacting parking in front of someone's home so it's very much based on responding to um localized neighborhood parking challenges and the city responding to that where if we were to change this program and focus more on making sure that there's value for the entire community and where there might be other types of parking challenges we could we could see some different outcomes does anybody else from the project team have have more to add on on that um chris i'd just like to add you know with the first one you described with the the generate the revenue to achieve cost recovery um you know we we could look at a system that increases the revenue and then that revenue is reinvested

[75:01] into that neighborhood into the community in other ways you know a common idea sometimes is you know a neighborhood ecopass type program so there could be ways to reinvest additional revenue if the costs were increased if i could quickly add something um this is mallory baker i'm with walker with the consultant team um i think in any in any case to achieve these goals one of the the directions we might head is more of a strategic process where the city is actively using objective data quantitative data from the system to make the make decisions around neighborhood parking management so enabling a process where the city is more empowered to make data-driven decisions that are strategic in mind so you can achieve some of these broader goals and then the second component is broadening the neighborhood parking management and access management program

[76:01] right now it focuses pretty exclusively on parking permits so enabling people to drive and park in certain areas so we're really looking at expanding the capabilities of the program so it's more about access for everyone in the community rather than just enabling certain people more extensive or exclusive access to the curb in front of their home that helps thank you all thank you great um same and mark but i want to call on juni she's not feeling well she'd like to squeeze a question in here if we could junior yep for asking that question thank you thank you very much aaron i just had a quick question about i didn't fully understand the first question about diversity or in residential zoning and i wanted to get some elaboration on that thank you sure so um i'd say that while we have one mpp program currently we have a variety of different types of

[77:01] neighborhoods across the city where a lot of our our neighborhoods that currently have mpps are pre-world war ii or or pre-world war one developments that were not designed around the automobile and so the parking challenges that they experience are significantly different from our post-world war ii um neighborhoods then we have other neighborhoods that are near trailheads or other types of trip generators that even though they're post-world war ii communities they have a different type of parking demand because there's a another type of of use or or trip generator nearby that's not just a downtown university or or a higher density boulder junction type zone and so the the we have one neighborhood management tool available to us currently we have a variety on a diversity of needs of parking challenges

[78:01] across the city does that answer your question yes thank you very much very good thanks juni uh sam and then mark great so um this is actually a fairly complex topic because um it has been stated a couple times that we're you know we need to be careful that we're not just preserving you know curb space for people who live in a home there but in several of these zones um they are rmx zones that probably have a higher proportion of renters in them than some of the other zones which are as you say near chicago for instance which is an attractor for visitors so i think one your first goal talks about the diversity of neighborhood needs and i think we need to express that pretty clearly that there is a diversity across the different neighborhoods it is not all just about preserving curb space for people who live in homes there it's about using a public good most

[79:01] effectively i think and so maybe if we were to put it in that light that we want to use the public good in different neighborhoods in a way that does increase value or i would say maximizes value for the entire boulder community um so i would just point that out um and towards that end you you talk about data types you talk about quantitative data and i think more clarity on what that looks like so there's one type of quantitative data which is polling right you can do statistically valid surveys there's another type of data which allows you to count numbers which you've done but which is not a really scientific poll it's just telling you know who has responded and have we had good representation of a bunch of different kinds of of users responding to the way to use this public good so i would say that we need a little more clarity on the

[80:00] type of data that we're going to use to make distinctions about different neighborhoods so you know one type of data would be like what's the demand for commuters to park in a neighborhood another would be what's the mix of housing you know some of these areas with npps are almost entirely single-family detached homes others are much more of a blend like you say in pre-world war one and pre-world war ii parts of town that have high parking demand they might have a quite a mix others are really university influence so when you talk about quantitative data i think it would be helpful going forward to really define what that looks like because some is easy to get to objectively others require you know a lot of outreach and a lot of surveys so i think both are important but i think the qualitative data which is asking people in those neighborhoods what they think maybe should get broken down into the different neighborhoods so i i

[81:02] think it's really important to be having this conversation because it's 25 years ago that we started this and i think some of the drivers were things like increasing you know amounts of jobs being concentrated in one area that within bringing in commuters and similarly with the university as it grew bringing in additional commuters so there's commuter impacted neighborhoods and then there's like visitor amenity impacted neighborhoods so i guess i would just say that we're going to talk about quantitative and qualitative we probably have to be fairly granular if we want to make good decisions but i generally do think that having different flavors of programs in different spaces is helpful and it relates to and i don't want to bring this completely in but i'll just mention that it relates to how we're going to look at curb use you know for deliveries and so on because another big thing that's changed is there are tons and tons of deliveries at a rate

[82:01] that really hasn't occurred prior to now so that involves needing access to curbs and doing so in a way that doesn't block bike lanes for instance like it's a frequent occurrence biking around town that there will be delivery trucks and and bike lanes and to what extent is that um because there are cars parked there so i i just wanted to kind of riff on that a little bit because i think we need to get real clear on how we're going to increase or maximize the value which is going to look different in different areas then i had a question that um i wanted to make sure i heard it right it sounded to me like um quarterly commuter permits in npp zones were on the order of 90 did i get that right what's the cost for a commuter permit in an mvp zone 100 a quarter okay so 100 quarters so it's about a dollar a day give or take and so i think another

[83:01] thing that we might want to look at when you're talking about cost recovery is you know it's a dollar a day to park all day in an mpp zone it would cost way more if you're parking at a meter or in a garage so you know our our npp commuter passes commenter with say what it would cost to park in a garage so i think that's a really important it gets it equity but it also gets it you know we don't want to create through low pricing demand that wouldn't otherwise be there if the pricing was equivalent to say garage and manage parking i think that's enough but to respond directly to the question about the goals i think the last one should talk about maximizing value and somewhere in here early we should be talking about this is a public good and we're trying to make sure that all users have equitable access to a public good thank you and mark and mary and then i'm

[84:00] going to call myself okay uh a couple of things i would certainly be very supportive of cost recovery uh on in npps i i think that's long overdue um but i also want to say that i felt similarly to to rachel it was not clear to me at various points exactly uh what you were heading for in terms of outcomes other than presumably some some higher prices on uh on parking and i think frankly there could have been a little more clarity as to the directions you want to go in um and where you want to end up um and i am i'm hoping that all changes to pricing will also be done with a view towards equity considerations um uh you know for those who are less capable of affording higher rates and lan well almost lastly

[85:01] i assume you're going to look at sort of the inflection point between higher rates that may encourage alternate modes of transportation versus higher rates that will simply drive people to flat irons or dining in main street lewisville um because that's an alternate consideration that we need to to be looking at and the last point i will make is there was a reference in the memo to the scope of the consultant study and it mentioned that we were going to be looking at examples of parking solutions in places like seattle portland or boston i i would point out that seattle has is a city seven times our size with a metropolitan area almost 38 times our size boston is over six times with a metropolitan area over 40 times our size and portland is over six times our size i'm not sure those are the best uh examples of

[86:02] how to manage parking solutions they're different cities and we also i'm happy if we want to look at them but i would also want us to look at cities that are more closely related to boulder in size to see if any of them have policies that are worth emulating and that's about it thanks mark mary than me thank you aaron um thanks for the presentation chris and um my question my first question is um about the i'm curious to know what kind of feedback you received from um in during the outreach phase of from businesses that are vehicle-based so you mentioned landscapers i'm also thinking about roofers and

[87:00] painters and housekeepers businesses such as those that basically travel it's a traveling business so i'm curious to know what kind of input you receive from those kinds of businesses and how they are incorporated into these goals thank you mary that's a really a great question i am actually going to defer to mallory um from our consultant team because he has been having those types of conversations with a variety of different students and i know that she's reached out to those types of businesses mallory do you have any specifics to share on that yeah first i'll say that our outreach process is still ongoing so the initial phase of this project the community engagement efforts there was really to ask some general foundational questions around you know how people make transportation decisions so we're really we really went for kind of broad impact trying to get at a broad swath of the community so we haven't done that focused work

[88:00] we've we've specifically approached folks that might have that particular sensitivity in the the next phase of this project so quarter one 2021 right now we're doing several virtual engagement modules through a number of um community organizations in addition to downtown businesses we also have an access allies group that has strong business representation that have been guiding us throughout the process so i'll first say that you know the outreach process is ongoing and we haven't really gotten any specific feedback from those groups however in some of our survey work we have heard quite a bit from domestic workers that benefit from the mpp program in its current form and that's been echoed by some of our engagement with community connectors as well that this is not just a program where homeowners are benefiting but service workers domestic workers also benefit from

[89:00] the visitor permit program that's associated with the mpp so any strategy that we look towards will will look to preserve that component of the program to make sure that there is equitable access for folks that uh whose businesses and whose very livelihood depend on access to the curb um but i think that we that's a it's a really good point that we should maybe do some more work to specifically engage and target that audience with our upcoming virtual engagement modules so we'd be happy to do that um that would be great yeah that would be great thank you appreciate that and then um my next question or actually yeah i guess it's it's a comment or suggestion um that is came out of sam's um parking riff not as good as a guitar riff but a riff nevertheless um and as i was listening to him um make his comments i was thinking

[90:02] what if you had a whole bunch of questions um that covered all the different kinds of neighborhoods and then as you came into a neighborhood you kind of did a cafeteria style selection from that that set of questions that you have so that this the the set of questions that you pick for that particular neighborhood really fits that neighborhood instead of applying all the questions to all the neighborhoods you just kind of pick and choose based on the challenges of that particular geography so that's a suggestion um yeah and that's all i have thanks mary and i'll uh call on myself i want to say that i think these goals are fantastic i i really appreciate this holistic set of um goals that you've picked and the way you're looking at through uh the program through different

[91:00] multiple different lenses i do think the program is long overdue for a revision of its goals and its approaches it's over 25 years old so i'm i'm glad to see you kind of broadening um the scope of what the program is trying to accomplish so absolutely support you in that um and speaking back on what um was said before about the cost um and making sure that the the cost is appropriate it's not just about the commuter permits but you know clearly also for the resident and business permits right so i know you'll be looking at all three but um they all three probably need adjusting uh from a cost recovery and the um you know the utilization of that public good like sam was talking about for the benefit of the entire boulder community so thanks for your work on this i look forward to the next steps um any other comments on the goals if we don't have any can we go back to the second question pardon the scratchy dog in the

[92:00] background okay so some of us have already addressed some of this but in the development of possible neighborhood parking management strategies how would council prioritize the use of the following quantitative data collection and analysis of parking activity in residential zones generalized qualitative neighborhood needs communicated by community members and broader long-term city goals thoughts on that one nearby so thanks for the great work on this and i'll echo what my colleagues have said it's definitely time for a revamp um i would like to see i mean i thought sam's riff as mary was saying was quite um accurate in terms of how you would dissect the quantitative data and so i i mean i would like to stress the quantitative data as well as the actual actual neighborhood needs i think that one of the issues and i've you know just heard from a few constituencies which we always hear um is that you know the outreach wasn't as known to as many people um and so i

[93:02] think that as with pretty much everything that we see across the city there's a few people who are always on top of what they um what the city's doing and so they'll always respond to those um whatever the word i'm looking for the information requests and so i but i think a lot of the working people who don't you know just don't have the time to stay up um on what the city is doing miss out on what's happening and so the data may not accurately imply what um is happening and so if we can really look more at the actual data rather than just the comments that were put in um that's how i personally would like to see it um you know the the information leaned so if that helps staff at all thanks very much and seeing no other hands i'll just jump in and say i mean i think all three of those are important you know you got to look at your quantitative data like you have to actually know what's going on with parking on the ground

[94:00] uh you do want to respect and be interested in the wishes of the immediate neighborhood and the neighbors who the people who live there and their thoughts on it because they'll give you insights you wouldn't have otherwise but you also still got to keep in mind uh those uh long-term citywide goals of which you mentioned in in your slide about goals so it's a balancing act like i how was that for super unhelpful um sam and then mark yeah i covered most of this in my first riff which is not as good as a guitar riff for sure but um i do want to support mary's idea of a set of questions that's kind of broad and holistic and then they're kind of aimed at learning what you're trying to learn from each of the different neighborhoods like stuff around downtown we'll have some similarities stuff around the university we'll have some and stuff around trailheads we'll have different ones so i thought that was a really good idea on mary's part and um the only

[95:01] other thing i will say about the draft goals um is it is really hard to say what is going to help meet some of our say climate goals or lower vmt goals because as you free up and make it easier potentially for people coming in from the outside to park that could promote sov type compute commuting or if you make it so that anybody can always um find a parking spot in front of a home in those areas then maybe they're more incentivized to to run errands that way um in a car so i i would just point out that as it is i think aaron was was saying that it is complex to say what is going to actually promote your goals better and that would be one of the things i would think we'd want to lean on our consultant for and their experience in other cities would be they might have come up with clever ways to to

[96:00] balance the commuting effect versus the air and effect neighborhood so anyway i as as others have said it's great to do this now and it is a complex topic thanks mark and mary yeah i'm gonna echo aaron i i don't know that we can give you um affirmative guidance as to which element uh of these is should take priority over others it is a balancing act i i think we're going to rely upon you and your consultant to um weave them together and produce a a set of suggestions that we can act upon um i don't know that we have the uh the insight necessary to prioritize one over the other i think they're all important and so um as aaron said that that's not very helpful but i i think that's about the best we can do for you um we're going to lean on you to unravel this and unpack that

[97:00] the elements of it um as you see best as you see fit thanks mary thank you um well i would have this suggestion about how to use the the information so i would use the the quantitative data um as kind of a baseline and that's measured right and then i would use the the qualitative neighborhood communication as kind of a confirmation of what you see with the measured data and then lastly i would look at the the broader term long-term city-wide goals i i would use those to adjust so um yeah so i would just measure and then confirm and adjust um and that's more how how i would use it rather than what

[98:02] takes priority over what and that's all i have thanks mary uh rachel and jeannie um you uh one of the chris's or maybe both mentioned that we got some board feedback and it was described i think is mostly positive i was just wondering what negative feedback was received was that like acted on before it got to us or are there considerations that the board brought up that um a non-expert like myself might not be flagging so that's um one question second is of the boards that weighed in and this is a broad question so i'm i'm sorry to be um asking it out loud in public but you know tab is transportation's board basically is there a board that is sort of uh what community vitality would usually look at it or was it is community community vitality um the boards that sort of represent those considerations the

[99:02] you know downtown and boulder junction do those all add up to community vitality or is there a different one those are some big questions and i'm happy to answer them and that you might want to poke in as well on this but it's it is very nuanced in the sense of yes transportation advisory board provides guidance to all transportation related decisions which parking is one of them when it comes to community vitality through our district management area of our work we have downtown management commission as an example is a representation of folks that you all have appointed for a taxing district that has built district-owned parking as opposed to our on-street program which is city you know general fund publicly owned parking and so um there's this there is a nuance there

[100:00] where when we are making um uh decisions around our capital improvement plans for our district owned assets in the downtown we tend to vet those with our downtown management commission for their guidance or along those lines the three dollar evening parking product which certainly has implications for how people behave on street um evening parkers were much more willing to use district owned parking assets once we made pricing in those facilities more amenable to their needs and so it reduced our parking challenges in the public right-of-way that was a decision that we made in working with our downtown commission we didn't necessarily take it out to the broader community um and and to tab and we did get some feedback on that from them and and that's translated into this process

[101:00] where we are wanting to take a holistic citywide approach to decisions we're making around parking for assets that are owned by individual taxing districts like downtown university hill and boulder junction and the broader public parking on in the general public right-of-way um on-street both in the downtown and um in neighborhoods and so um the feedback that we've received thus far from tab was certainly around that of they're very interested in working with us more on this decisions around parking and parking pricing they also understandably their interests are related to the transportation master plan and the tmp goals specifically and so their feedback was very much tied to wanting that to be our our north star in the decisions that we're making in this conversation um and that's where we're in this this middle zone we do have a lot of other interests that are represented

[102:00] from um the downtown management commission or the downtown boulder partnership or other stakeholders that community vitality works with on a regular basis that that might not see the transportation master plan as the only um uh set of policy guidance that we should be thinking about in these decisions does that help answer your questions oh and eventually well yeah the second one i mean i was just visualizing there's there is sort of a tension between i think community vitality and transportation interest and so i was just trying to figure out like uh if that gave me a little look at that but there you know there is like you know some some varying goals there and so i understand tab would be uh advocating uh on on one side and i was just trying to visualize like what is the community vitality um other side of that tension so i think that does explain it but still wondering what the negative feedback might be from the boards that you got and then just one other question and i'm sorry if you answered it already but you know we during covid have used parking as

[103:00] parklets if that's the right word and you know outdoor dining is are we looking at that in this process too like using you know using parking spots quite differently and going forward so thanks for your question rachel and i think you did a great job with that chris i first let me say that we also visited with planning board and i think if it's one thing that everybody wants to have input and it is sparking so um you know we are benefiting from the contributions of a lot of boards and commissions and i think it came up during retreat the importance of giving opportunities for boards to hear each other and work across so i think our our engagement plan will start to reflect how we accomplish that do we put something together that allows the boards to work a little bit more refined across i also think we are benefiting from the community's feedback uh but to chris's point right now the boards are kind of seeing this through

[104:00] the lens of their particular missions or master plans i don't know that i would um well i guess i wouldn't refer to things as attention i would certainly reflect that if that's the case erica i and the chris's are doing everything we can to reduce those tensions because that we're all about access everybody should be about access and the the varied needs there are differences of opinion and we'll continue to explore those and reflect that accordingly but i think the work is still to be done and we're looking for council to kind of help us lay that groundwork um at the end of it i guess i'd just say you know there's lots of input and you asked a question about parklets this particular project will not be addressing that particular program that program was recently extended and as i think you showed an earlier information there's other studies coming regarding curbside

[105:00] utilization that we still have to work on including parking code but in the meantime in response to covet we are continuing to do what we can to support the community but thanks for your question rachel thanks yvette and i'm not sure chris if i still yet heard about like what the negative feedback might have been if and i don't know that i'd characterize it necessarily as as negative but certainly some constructive input that um was around the original um intent of the mpp so the phrase preserving neighborhood character certainly did solicit some strong feedback around what that what does that mean and and that was heard loud and clear and i think that collectively we agree that that 1994 directive of what the npp program was all about is outdated um to a certain extent and um that's why we have reframed our our goals a bit to be more

[106:02] inclusive and and city-wide um and and mallory uh you you've suggested that there's some other things that we've changed and and i'd say also um some of these questions we've tailored to really try to hone in on on how do we weave the difference between just taking in data um to help make decisions around how much we should be charging for for parking um or use of the public right-of-way um how much should we be relying on that you know when we say qualitative input in a lot of senses it's the folks who we hear from all the time saying that they have a parking problem in their neighborhood and they want us to come in and fix it and then we know that we have these longer term um broader goals for for achieving sustainability and and and reducing impact on climate and how what role does parking play in that and i think that there are a lot of folks that feel like parking is the thing

[107:00] that will that will help us make a lot of progress in that area and so that's what this work right now is really about is is understanding all those nuances and weaving a strategy that that appropriately um uh moves forward in all those realms and that's why we we pose the questions the way we did this evening mallory do you have anything else to add on on how we're addressing the specific feedback from boards and commissions yeah just really quickly one of the again i wouldn't um say it was negative feedback but certainly constructive feedback on the community engagement and outreach efforts when we when we went to tab specifically we had actually just come off the tail end of canceling a series of virtual community workshops that we had developed and advertised heavily and we just weren't getting the traction um people weren't signing up and we we really saw that and responded to that we recognized that people were just burnt out on new virtual meetings i

[108:00] think we all are experiencing that i know that i i am and so we decided to take a step back and really think about um how to engage the community where they are and where they're at so we created these virtual engagement modules that are sort of plug and play modules that can be used at existing community meetings so community organizations that are already doing amazing work in the city of boulder are tagged are tacking on these modules to their meetings and we're engaged we're able to engage with a broader swath of the community that way than we were with this you know new zoom virtual work community workshop series so tab had some you know comments about how we could have done better and maybe anticipated some of that burnout but i think you know we're all learning how to do successful community engagement in this new era of covid so we we hopefully you know responded to that loud and clear direction from the community and have kind of redirected

[109:01] our community engagement effort to be better reflective of where people are at right now and how they're able to respond thanks thanks mallory and i really wanted to also point out that we have the the great um asset of of erica vandenbrand who's coming in from new perspective um but has worked on efforts like this in the past and uh would love to hear uh from her and her perspective especially in this conversation on with uh how tab fits with this work as well so um just very briefly to answer your question rachel i wouldn't say that things were negative i think that what tab said very clearly and we heard very clearly is that they want to be involved and they want to be an active and engaged partner and so that's how i would characterize the tenor of tap's feedback hi rachel did you get what you need i think so thanks

[110:00] great all right junie and then marion then maybe we'll move on thank you aaron i'll still keep my camera off um and i think i just wanted to make a few comments and also maybe ask a question as well as part of my comments and you mentioned which one to prioritize when it comes to whether qualitative or quantitative data and i think my comments based on my own personal experience with qualitative data i think to me it's more useful because although it's probably more expensive and more time-consuming but at least it's more descriptive and it'll give you a sense of because bolder again it's more diverse it's you'll get a sense of where different neighborhoods stood as opposed to just have point stated data which sometimes doesn't really reflect the differences in the communities and i think as well

[111:00] although i did not see that as part of your program goals when we think of equity we don't just think of race we also think of class and i think that's something i think um sam mentioned when he talked about diversity earlier so i think it's very important that you know even in the research the equity is reflected but also in class so to me i think that's very important and another comment or maybe part of it as well i guess it's a question but i think it's been answered earlier when it comes to the community engagement you mentioned the different groups but i wonder as well how diverse is that engagement group for instance um i'm sure different businesses are very interested in that work but also neighborhood groups as well would be very interested when you think of martin acres and also their proximity to

[112:02] different um institutions i would imagine martin acres is very different than say certain neighborhoods for instance whittier it's not the same thing because of what's there what's around there and the pressure on the communities that live around there so i think it's very important that we uh in the data that we focus a lot on qualitative data because i think just quantitative data it can be whatever we want to make it actually thank you thanks trini mary i just i just have a comment about um how the fun the function of a board and um if if a board is strictly providing advocacy i certainly want to hear about that because i think um no not i think but i

[113:01] know a board's function is to think critically and within their own board consider those tensions and then balance those tensions and make their recommendations based on what they know and their own individual lenses but to strictly provide advocacy for one viewpoint or another i think i want to hear about that because that is definitely not the function of a board and thank you okay thanks for that mary so maybe we can move on to the next one we're running a little bit behind so let's see if we can make up a little time thanks so much for that that was very helpful and let's talk about pranking parking pricing uh thank you yes we can we i'll move through these next slides very quickly and our next questions focus they're very similar questions but yes focused on parking pricing and fines so existing conditions we know that

[114:01] users pay for parking on street and off street both downtown university hill and boulder junction prices are generally set at a dollar 25 per hour um for both on street and off street with some exceptions if you stay in a garage after four hours then your rates go up but largely if you're a short-term parker you're paying the same on street as in as you would in a garage um we have uh low fines for parking violations when we compare ourselves not just with communities across the front range but across the country um and we only have two violation types that are eligible for graduated fines currently and our pricing policy is generally guided by the 1994 pricing policy guidelines they were included as an attachment to your packet so despite those guidelines our pricing strategy seeks to prioritize customer access in on-street spaces and employee and longer-term parking in off-street facilities and so that's

[115:01] partially why we have we have time limits on street in the downtown we want long-term parkers to to be parking in the garages and we also want to be incentivizing mode shift for all users and so we do that with subsidizing the employee ecopass and helping to provide a variety of transportation options our current pricing approach with on and off street parking is it's priceless with it price the same and combined with the low cost of violations of parking rules and regulations make it really hard for us to achieve some of our bigger goals around behavior um so some additional key findings we because our pricing approach doesn't use parking data um we we're we're not using uh the qual the quantitative data right now we haven't updated pricing in about 12 or 13 years in our districts it makes it easy for us to administer

[116:00] the program and helps people understand what to expect to a certain extent and how much they're going to pay for parking but it doesn't allow us to use pricing effectively to achieve our parking management and transportation demand management goals that said we are generating enough revenue from visitor and permit parking in our managed districts to pay for our operational administrative and capital costs associated with our parking and access program so again these these key findings existing conditions and community feedback and input from boards and commissions have led to some very similar draft parking pricing and fines goals there are a couple nuances that are a little bit different but again they are recognize the value of the right-of-way by using parking utilization data to inform parking pricing decision making respond to user behaviors and the diversity of business and customer needs in commercial zones

[117:02] generate revenue needed to maintain cost recovery and support evolving community needs achieve transparency and predictability to create a more equitable system promote effective parking management and customer compliance and advance transportation climate and sustainability goals by supporting travel choice beyond the personal vehicle so that leads us again to some very similar questions to the neighborhood program does council agree with the key findings of the stated draft project goals for parking and pricing fines and in the development of possible parking pricing and fine strategies how would council prioritize the use of the following quantitative data collection and analysis of parking activity and commercial zones generalized qualitative business and customer needs communicated by community stakeholders and broader and broader long-term citywide goals before i hand this over aaron i just want to speak to some of the responses on these types of questions in the neighborhood parking management

[118:00] round is i really liked and appreciated what mary had to say about the it's about what triggers what and that's i think a key part of this question is right now in the neighborhoods it's the qual it's the qualitative experience that's triggering our process that then has us do some qualitative analysis to determine whether or not we're going to have an npp so it's almost like we wait until we have a problem before we start figuring out a way to address it where this this question for both neighborhood parking and for parking pricing is do we wait until we recognize that there's a problem whether it's we're not generating enough revenue to cover our expenses or we're not keeping up with other communities that are charging more for parking or some other changing need a curbside management strategy that has other uses going on on the curbside do we want to if we prioritize our quantitative so using parking

[119:03] utilization data to help us price the curbside appropriately that would be an attempt to more get ahead of waiting until there's some of those qualitative challenges before we make decisions and then finally again as mary suggested there are the broader long-term citywide goals that still need to be kind of the the north star um in these processes so with that i just wanted to to provide some thoughts on where we might be going with this work thanks for that chris so um we've got adam and then i have a question and then we'll we'll hear from other people and maybe you can move back to the the goals chris while we're getting there adam thanks aaron uh i'm gonna start out with a question as well uh my question is what are the capabilities of um charging different rates based on the time so i know we implemented that three from three to three program i think it is um

[120:02] but are there you know can we be dynamic in pricing based on time uh and usage at that time yes soon we have new parking pay stations um that are hopefully going to be installed within the next couple months um and those new pay stations will allow us to more dynamically both communicate what the rates are and and charge appropriately based on on location and time that's awesome to hear and that's going to be system-wide that will be system-wide with the exception of a few spots where we have some pay stations that haven't reached the end of their useful life like the civic area but largely we'll be able to utilize the new technology yes thanks chris thanks adam i had almost the exact same question um but so that's great to hear chris that we'll have that ability soon and would that be uh just like

[121:01] pre-inputting parking prices at different times of day or would we have potential the capability to do dynamic pricing based on demand at the time um that's a really good question i i would need to get back to you on the specific nuances of just how dynamic we can be with pricing we will be able the great thing about the new pay stations is we can program to remote them remotely as opposed to right now we have to go to each individual station to make a change um and then their ability to process different times a day is just it doesn't exist but our new pay stations are much more dynamic i'd say that um let us go back to work on these strategies we want to leave a strategy that that adequately takes into the input that we're receiving from you all this evening in the community we'll certainly make sure that it fits within the the extremes of what our parking base stations can manage great thanks for that answer

[122:01] okay council thoughts on these draft parking pricing and fines goals who wants to speak to these don't be shy here we go sam and mary i think the goals are quite good um the the one thing i would say i guess thinking about both fines and parking pricing is i'm interested in hearing about increasing funds for repeat offenses so i think that that is something that you know presumably with fines we're trying to discourage a behavior and you know escalating fines are a way of making the point that um you clearly mean it i i don't think it has to be um super high but i think it you know needs to escalate and then plateau to make the point that if it's just a once in a while mistake it shouldn't be a huge penalty but if you are abusing

[123:00] the system because you have a lot of money and you you choose to do it that way i'd rather have that pinch a little bit i guess the other thing is we heard a lot of questions about dynamic pricing and i don't know if i need dynamic pricing that on a daily basis you know what the demand is but i think it's an interesting idea that the most in demand spots might want to either cost more or have like an even cost for the first 30 minutes and then the most in demand spots could go up higher at higher rates than that because it certainly seems to me that those most in demand spots are in demand for a reason and we'd like to get more turnover in those areas that have really the highest utilization and demand but generally i found the goals in the in this section to be a little bit more clear and usable than the ones in the npp section thank you gary thank you aaron

[124:03] um well first i have a couple questions and um the first one is what is going to happen to the three from three to three good question mary um it is being considered of course as part of our look at parking pricing um our consultant has uh been giving us rave reviews on on the product so we're pleased that uh um folks who have seen what we've done think that it was a good smart move to help solve some of our challenges um so i would be surprised if it's not included in our strategies moving forward whether it's still called three for three till three um maybe there need to be some adjustment um um depending on what we do with the prices of other parking opportunities but an evening product will continue i

[125:00] would say in some form or another ongoing that's good to hear that's the best program ever and then my second question is as we know the the whole parking scheme downtown has changed due to covet and we've heard a lot from a lot of people that want to make that permanent and i'm wondering if you are making adjustments or adjustments and what kinds of adjustments you are making um to take that into consideration i guess i'm curious what you mean by or which parts permanent the the lack of people coming downtown and parking no no no the the the um the use of a lot of parking spaces for outdoor seating and to make that a permanent feature of downtown thank you for the clarification yeah no we don't want to make the lack of visitors downtown a permanent thing

[126:03] um and i that did speak to this a little bit before i'd say that there is um well that the the curb side um and the business response program that's currently going on is is one um program that that we will it will need to come to an end when the emergency orders come to an end um because our current um ordinances that exist outside of our emergency orders don't allow us to have people go and put structures in the public right-of-way without some sort of more thorough process that said i do know that there is curbside management work that's planned by transportation and they are really as part of public works they they have um the the greatest purview over what we collectively do with the public right-of-way where community vitality does step in and manage the right-of-way when it's designated to be parking for vehicles um

[127:01] and so it's certainly a question that that will continue to come up throughout the the year and probably years ahead and we are certainly interested in working with transportation and the community the downtown business community on envisioning what that will look like in the future and we just again want to make sure that that our conversation is about pricing the public right-of-way appropriately whether that use is for parking whether it's for a micro mobility docking station whether it's for outdoor dining or some other unforeseen disruptive technology that we haven't discovered yet making sure that we have a thoughtful way to allocate the very limited precious public right-of-way curbside space to different types of uses and chris let me just add there there are also some transit access issues and circulation issues that

[128:00] you know also uh need to be addressed post covet as well um you know we've had a reroute bus routes and everything as well um so that's just another impact of the program that you know we'll have to look at in the future and address see how we evolve thank you for that chris and chris and um other than that i think these goals are um as stamp set pretty clear and um i think we'll i look forward to the outcomes thanks mary i'll i'll call on myself and i'll agree i think these goals look great i i think this is an exciting sort of rebalancing of our parking pricing and fine approach so i look forward to seeing what you come up with to be clear i mean i was asking about dynamic pricing i'm curious if it's a possibility i'm not necessarily saying that you know that the price should go through the roof if five minutes ago you know the second to last open space was

[129:01] taken on the street you know not not necessarily saying we should do things like that but be interesting to know if the capability is there and what you might do with it but it does seem like our parking pricing should be a little bit more dynamic than it is right now so i'm glad to hear that the new pay stations will have that capability you know i'm sure you all are familiar with donald trump's work you know about the high high cost of free parking and uh part of the the stuff he talks about is um making sure that pricing is set such that um there's generally an open space you know somewhere not too far away and that if your pricing is super low then there'll never be any open spaces anywhere so i imagine you all are keeping that kind of principle in mind so look forward to seeing where you go with that i will echo sam's thing about the like the first offense on the fines versus multiple offenses you know periodically we get uh emails from people who say oh i came to your town for the first time ever and i got a parking ticket i'm never coming back again and um i think that's not very

[130:00] reasonable um but but if the if the first fine were you know 200 it might be a little bit more understandable right so something that's a little a little kinder to people who um it's their first time ever but then maybe ramps up for multiple offenses might be a good approach so those are my thoughts um any other comments on these goals before we get to the last question all right can we can we flip to that last question then chris i'll just read that real quick in the development of possible pricing uh parking pricing and fine strategies how would council prioritize the use of following quantitative data collection and analysis of parking activity and commercial zones generalized qualitative business and customer needs communicated by community stakeholders and broader long-term city goals city-wide goals and just while i'm talking i'll just say i you know you all get to balance that they're all important it'll be helpful again any other thoughts from council

[131:01] all right well seeing no one looks like we're wrapping up did you get what you needed from us anything else we need um i just wanted to go over our next steps um and make sure that there weren't any questions on where we're headed next so based on this input we will further develop some strategies and move into our alternatives analysis i would say i don't want to speak for the consultant team and the rest of the project team but i think this input has been extremely helpful for um help for us in our our next steps in moving forward um some clear well while the guidance was um diverse i'd say that it's exactly what we needed um so we'll look forward to taking this uh back and and getting some more work done with the community we'll be meeting with boards and commissions over the the coming months and look forward to bringing some more thought out um and developed concepts for and specific concepts for council to

[132:02] consider um in the second quarter please of course continue to engage as time allows on our digital hub access4boulder.com we will continue through the the next month or two with our engagement modules we'll be seeking out additional communities to make sure that we're we're getting input from from the types of folks that we know we need to hear from to make thoughtful decisions and again we'll we'll come back to you in the second quarter so if there are no questions on next steps then that concludes our presentation well thank you so much uh to the chris's and uh mallory and other folks i really appreciate the presentation and the work and really look forward to seeing what you come up with next uh counsel anybody else have any final thoughts or should we let them go all right good well thanks again and now it's on to alpine balsam all right thank you

[133:01] council all right for the last item for this evening uh i'm going to turn it over first to amanda cole who is our alpine balsam implementation project manager hi thanks chris uh good evening city council my name is amanda cole i am the alpine balsam project manager and i'm joined tonight by michelle crane the city's chief facilities architect as well as some technical experts from housing climate initiatives and community engagement okay make sure i could advance the slide okay tonight our update is more of a status update on what we worked on last year related to alpine balsam and what our key

[134:00] initiatives are for 2021 so i have a brief background on what the project is where it's located what the area plan says we'll run through the various projects that we're working on related to the site update on the timeline and the budget and our main question for you all tonight is do you have any feedback on our 2021 key priorities with that just a quick recap of the alpine balsam property and its history the city purchased alpine balsam in 2015 followed by an adoption of the vision plan in 2017 and renovation of the britain building in 2018 which is the current location of some city offices as well as some customers customer facing operations in 2019 city council adopted the alpine balsam area plan and the boulder community hospital moved out its last operations to its foothills campus and then last year we had been focused on concluding the

[135:02] evaluation to consider county services at alpine balsam some of you may remember that process we were considering moving the county service is currently located at iris and broadway to alpine balsam and determined wouldn't be the best use or the best utilization of our time based on a city county working group and based on that decision we've reconsidered the parcel previously identified as county services as affordable housing also in 2020 we began the interior hospital deconstruction so michelle will talk more about that and we began many of our engineering and technical contracts so that's the focus of tonight is to tell you what we've been up to as well as talk about how this timeline extends into 2021 and just to review what the area plan says this is a picture of the site plan so alpine balsam is located just north of pearl street off of broadway between 9th alpine and

[136:01] balsam avenues this picture has the land use colors on it and so i'm reading from the top left corner those colors mean brown is residential purple is mixed use and blue is public and so i'm going to go through just as a reminder of what the area plan says for each of these parcels beginning with residential and mixed use so those are parcels a b c and d a is intended for low density town homes likely market rate persons b and d they're in the in the middle are intended to be affordable apartment style buildings with parcel c being a flex mix use building likely affordable housing with some community focused commercial uses on the ground floor the western city campus includes parcels e f and g with e being the current pavilion office building that you can see on broadway and alpine that will be renovated for city services and offices we will maintain the britain building

[137:01] which is parcel f for city services and offices as well as maintain the parking structure which is in parcel g and use it to facilitate shared parking on site lastly one of the big programmatic elements of this site is the infrastructure and that's the blue and green horizontal vertical stripes that you see one of the main facets is the flood mitigation this site is located in the 100 year floodplain the alpine balsam area plan tells us to mitigate the 100 year flood along balsam avenue that's that blue stride that runs horizontally along balsam as well as improving walkability safety and connections with the connections plan that's more detailed in the area plan so there's lots that we need to work on before we can translate the area plan and this intended vision into reality i'm going to turn it over to michelle to talk about some of those initial projects including hospital deconstruction and the pavilion renovation

[138:03] thanks amanda and good evening to council so i'm going to be providing a brief update on the progress of the hospital deconstruction and the development of the portion of site that we are going to maintain to centralize city services so this year we made significant progress on deconstructing the interior of the hospital and the pavilion building including all of the abatement we anticipate being fully complete by late spring and this work has made the pavilion building ready for renovation and it's also made the hospital ready for area or deconstruction but while the hospital remains standing in a vacant state we also are no longer carrying the significant energy costs that were related to the hospital building standing up before we started deconstruction and the building is also now safer with the interior fully cleared out so our next steps

[139:00] in 2021 are to complete the design work necessary to deconstruct the exterior of the building and then temporarily patch back the holes that will remain in the pavilion building once we take the hospital down and when we take the exterior of the hospital down this will involve removing the basement and doing a lot of subgrade work so essentially we'll have a big hole left behind which will need to be filled and graded out to be made ready for future site development so while we have this big hole in the subterranean area exposed and we're pushing dirt around on the site it will be advantageous that we are pushing it around in a way that kind of paves the way for future projects and so as part of the exterior deconstruction design work we've been coordinating extensively with all the future infrastructure projects so that we can really um make progress in on those projects through the completion of our own deconstruction project and amanda will talk again more about some of those projects um

[140:01] in just a moment so next slide so when we received direction from council to deconstruct the hospital back in may of 2019 it was with these objectives to prioritize reuse of building materials over recycling and then prioritize that recycling over landfilling so to this end we've been working in close partnership with our climate initiatives group to develop avenues for reuse such as auctioning off building materials and then inventorying and tracking everything that's leaving the site we've also been profiling dumpsters so this has been an effort i'll make sure one that we've got the right materials going into each one of these either recycling containers or into dumpsters but also just to understand what it is that is going to landfills and what we have found so far is that 90 of what we're seeing going into the dumpsters is drywall and so

[141:01] this has been really interesting and with this knowledge it makes us think about future uh renovation projects and work um and how we use drywall and maybe start to con other kinds of systems and components that are easier to recycle or reuse at their end of life versus using something like drywall so as we continue into 2021 with deconstruction we will be holding several auctions to direct the reuse of materials we'll also continue with the tracking and reporting on the materials that are leaving the site and in this exterior phase we really expect to see the amount of recycled materials go way up as we get into exterior deconstruction and we really we track by weight mostly those materials leaving the site when steel and concrete start to come into this mix that's really when we see that recycled contact go up and that's how our codes actually measure

[142:00] um and and prescribe the amount of recycled material that we need through deconstruction but another exciting thing that we're looking at is is we started to look at the building in the hospital itself and the amount of steel that was in the building we have been engaging our structural engineers who are actually working on our fire station three to consider directly cutting out and deconstructing the steel in the building and directly using that in future city building projects and specifically we are looking at how much and and to what degree we could reconstruct or construct the new fire station 3 from the steel and the hospital and so the last thing that we will do on the hospital is we near end of the completion of the project is conduct a life cycle assessment of the embodied energy and what was preserved through some of our reuse activities so when we purchased the site back in

[143:00] 2015 we bought essentially four buildings we bought the brenton building the parking structure the pavilion building and the hospital in the first three we are directly reusing those buildings and those first three are also all constructed of concrete and concrete is a material that holds by far the most embodied energy of building materials the hospital's a composition of steel frame and concrete and so after we deconstruct and we find out just how much steel we could directly reuse in future city building projects we will conduct this life cycle assessment and essentially net what did we lose what was the embodied energy lost through deconstruction versus what we've been able to preserve through either full building reuse on the site um or just reuse of building components and so this will all be included in part of our final analysis and kind of report on the project and

[144:01] then will be available to inform future city policy and just direction on construction projects next slide so now turning to the pavilion's renovation and the development of a consolidated city service hub the key aspects of this project were to centralize city services that are currently scattered across town to better serve our community and provide a one-stop service hub we'll also be able to consolidate city staff out of four and possibly more buildings onto this one site and remove buildings from the high hazard flood zone or repurpose some other buildings for better uses and through consolidation we will make big advancements towards our climate commitment goals as well as other city-wide goals in the 2020 budget money was allocated to start design work on this project but it was delayed due to covid

[145:00] but that said as it relates to this project that delay has actually provided us some real opportunity to incorporate what we're learning through covid about hybrid work and our ability to work remotely and our ability to serve the community through more virtual services so as a local government we do feel it's essential to provide in-service or in-person service to the community and we also know that we do our best kind of collaborative work in person but a new hybrid environment that fully integrates the virtual aspects that we're learning through covid we think creates a lot more opportunity than we first expected before the pandemic hit and it's something that we'll be learning and incorporating into the design of the building as we move forward so we do plan to continue and start design work early this year and this will then include the renovation work um on the pavilion pavilion building itself and then the surrounding site next the other two buildings kind of to create that city hub and we plan to engage the

[146:03] community early in this design work to help inform a lot around the city services that are provided here as well as other kind of community uses that we could have on the site the project will go through the full regulatory development review process and so we anticipate trying to submit for concept review later in 2021 and so council will continue to have an opportunity to see the project throughout that regulatory project process and as we make progress on the design and the site's development we'll refine our cost estimates um to take into account also the cost duration from those other buildings that we'll be consolidating out of and onto the site so all these refined project costs will be addressed through our city's budgeting process and cycles and so with that i'll go ahead and turn it back over to amanda to talk about some of our other key work happening on the site

[147:00] thanks michelle so i'm going to talk on the next couple of slides about other critical projects that um advance the alpine balsam redevelopment project beginning with flood mitigation so flood in the area plan it tells us where we should mitigate the flood the work that we started in 2020 was to tell us how to do that from an energy or an engineering perspective so we hired a consultant to look at different alternatives to build the um greenway alpine balsam and remove the site from the floodplain we've arrived at a preferred design that is realistic from an engineering perspective it aligns with the area plan and so the the graphic that's shown here is a technical drawing that depicts an open channel greenway meaning that it's not a underground pipe rather it's an exposed naturalized greenway similar to other projects that we have in the city it successfully should mitigate the 100 year storm on the site on balsam avenue as well as potentially

[148:02] on 9th street which is one of the comments that we frequently have heard from the community about local flooding on 9th in balsam so it does successfully remove the pavilion building from the floodplain as well as the heart housing parcels which is necessary to qualify for federal funds it aligns with the city's flood program and the upcoming goose creek master plan and it uses less developable area than originally intended we originally thought this may be about 100 feet wide this is looking at about 60 feet wide granted that doesn't include landscape buffers and other right-of-way uh necessary activities there whereas it still does preserve all of the intent of the area plan and provides a buffer on balsam so our next steps in 2021 are to finish the design for this channel there's more engineering work and feasibility analysis that is required to ensure that we can deliver this design and that it

[149:00] will be compliant with fema's requirements the large majority of this year will be spent in the federal permitting process through what's called a clomer which is a conditional letter of map revision which means that fema gives us permission to do construction and they agree that we think our design will be able to result in a plain map revision alongside that as michelle said we are hopeful to combine the flood mitigation construction with the exterior hospital deconstruction meaning that we could have one contractor on site while they're bringing the hospital down they could also be building the greenway there's efficiencies in terms of contracting timing and likely costs that we are seeking to take advantage of another project that we're excited about is our energy feasibility analysis so we've hired a consultant to look at feasible options to construct district energy and thermal heat infrastructure and to install solar neb charging to

[150:01] bring the site near or to net zero that study is underway and will will have the results of the study in late february what we're looking at right now is regulatory financial and construction potential barriers to make sure that any solutions or packages solutions that are delivered to the city are feasible and implementable alongside the redevelopment this is a really cool study because it has a potential to lower utility rates and increase resiliency for the future residents and the office occupants and it could be a model for other boulder projects and it will be a really good test model to see what types of energy efficient infrastructure is successful on a mixed-use site like this so we will receive recommendations in late february our intent is to share that with the public through a webinar or public presentation in march 2021 so we will be arriving on a date for that in the next

[151:00] couple of weeks and then later this year the city will need to decide what type of investments it may want to make related to energy infrastructure the graphics shown here is it's technical it's a draft it's more to depict how we might look at connecting this site and potentially building a geothermal field which are the dots along the top that could go under the flood mitigation greenway potentially and also looking at interconnecting the buildings through a micro grid and so that's just to kind of show the way that we're looking at this study land use and zoning is another key aspect to being successful towards the area plans implementation city council adopted land use changes in december as part of the midterm comp plan update also in 2020 we looked at a zoning analysis to determine that form-based code is the best tool for the intended outcomes of the area

[152:00] plan and we've recently hired a consultant to help write the form based code perform in community engagement and the adoption process so that this project's just getting underway the key features of it and why we're choosing to do it now is that the land use changes is the first step in allowing housing development to occur here it would not have been allowed in the previous zoning and form-based code will create predictability to the development review process and add value to the parcels and we've done this in boulder before so the big work of 2021 is to develop the form based code and perform the community engagement and adoption process this will allow us to understand better what reasonable expectations we have for housing developers on this site it'll be a good chance for the community to be involved and design outcomes based on the area plan's intent and lastly i wanted to mention we have done some work related to housing scenario analyses we hired a

[153:02] consultant last year pre-covered to evaluate financial and program programming scenarios meaning what target markets might we might we want to ask for uh what makes um what makes a developer be able to pencil a a development here what subsidy would that require that kind of work we we started that in 2020 we have some good initial analysis we paused it during covid to pick up once we understood market conditions better but i did want to bring it up because i think in 2021 later this year once we have the form base code and some of our other construction projects underway it'll be a good time to revisit the work that we started involve uh council in the community on what expectations might be realistic in terms of housing outcomes on the site the the picture shown here it's really just a more detailed version of what's in the area plan we're looking

[154:02] through what's reasonable in terms of designing the buildings how much units to expect how much does that cost etc so i think later this year would be a great time to pick that work back up related to timing this is an overall timeline of our priorities for this year the yellow stars designate the community engagement opportunities so i'm going to read left to right starting in march like i said we're intending to do a public presentation on the energy analysis uh towards the spring we'll be communicating about our flood mitigation design and submitting for local and federal permitting as well as beginning our rezoning and for base code community engagement and issuing the rfp and selecting a contractor for the pavilion renovation design towards the summer we will be hopefully adopting or taking through the rezoning and four base code through the adoption process

[155:00] as well as conducting community engagement on the pavilion renovation design and then towards the fall it will likely be a good good opportunity to talk more about housing development strategy what our outcomes might be and how to realistically achieve those and we also believe that that's when exterior hospital deconstruction will begin followed by the pavilion renovation concept review towards the winter which will be another community engagement opportunity through the planning planning board and city council processes and finally last slide isn't as a budget update and so most of the funding requirements for the site are related to construction projects and we've bucketed those into three categories first being the flood mitigation that estimates coming in about 2.6 million dollars right now it's funded through existing cip the other two projects are currently unfunded one is being is the energy infrastructure so the results of the study we're conducting right now we don't we don't know those costs yet

[156:01] we'll know those soon this could be a good opportunity for grant and partnership opportunities and then the third bucket is really just the other horizontal infrastructure such as roads sidewalks underground utilities we don't have costs for those either that'll be dependent on designs that have not been completed yet but it's also unfunded that is dependent on what we call our delivery strategy which is in the box on the right and i'll circle back to in a moment i did want to provide an update on the fema brick grant which is just one example of creative funding opportunities we're looking at so brick stands for building resilient infrastructure and communities it's a new grant program offered by fema they're looking to be more creative about hazard prevention projects across the nation looking to mitigate risks caused by natural disasters we thought it could be well suited for the flood mitigation and energy infrastructure projects so during the pursual process we learned

[157:01] more about how fema evaluates grants and in this case it's mostly dependent on a benefit cost analysis whereas the benefits are calculated by historic hazards that are quantitative and financial based such as previous property damage insurance payouts that type of thing and we learned just due to the nature of this project we don't have any historic hazards that we're able to calculate into our analysis meaning we aren't able to show any property damage for buildings that will be there in the future this being a redevelopment project the buildings that will benefit from this project don't yet exist and in fema's eyes those aren't considered benefits as part of the grant program as well as we're not able to show at this time any historic hazards related to power outages or other hazards that have caused physical property damage because the buildings simply don't aren't there yet

[158:00] um so unfortunately we decided that we would we would not be well positioned for this grant opportunity and we did learn that all of the um energy micro grid projects in the state that had considered applying for this grant withdrew for the same reasons that we did but we are hopeful to continue working with the state maybe apply in the next cycle if there is an opportunity and we could be well positioned to do that however i don't think this is the only opportunity for us it's just an example of other options that we may have to fund projects on the site just circling back to the delivery strategy concept so the city will need to make a choice about how much to invest in the site to prepare for redevelopment on one side we can invest more we could build out ourselves the energy infrastructure and all of the roads sidewalks utilities that could could result in higher land values it would certainly create more consistency across the site it would take a more master planned

[159:00] approach whereas on the flip side would be to invest less in the site require certain expectations for energy infrastructure and horizontal infrastructure to be fulfilled by private developer that may result in a lower land value but it would require less capital required by the city i we're not ready to make that decision yet we'll need the information about those those variables related to land values and costs however you will see an upcoming city council agenda item on february 9th the culture community culture and safety tax renewal we have listed alpine balsam as an unfunded project that you'll see in your memo packet and i wanted to explain that that's the energy infrastructure and horizontal infrastructure projects are what we mean by those unfunded needs and the city will be able to make a choice on whether to fulfill those unfettered needs or not at a later time and with that thank you so much for your

[160:00] time our question is do you have any feedback on our 2020 key priorities or other questions thanks so much for that amanda and also michelle appreciate all the information um questions for staff or comments sam first out of the gate yeah um so i just want to start by saying what a phenomenal and phenomenally interesting project this is um i just took notes they're all in the presentation but we have the deconstruction work which has its own thing we have the flood management and mitigation there's the renewable energy energy efficiency heating district work there's form based code and then we have a mixed housing and affordable housing project as well um and that doesn't even touch on the financial pieces so i just want to say there's a ton here i really appreciate the project management that's been going on around this because we had all this potential and it's great to see that potential being

[161:01] realized so fantastic work um i have a few questions and then i'm going to make a few comments and i'll be done so the the first questions are really maybe the only questions are around the flood control is first we heard some mention that the flood mitigation work would reduce some of the flooding on night and i know that we have a lot of standing water whenever there's a heavy rain event in north boulder park as well which must not be great necessarily for um what goes on there so how how do we expect this flood work to impact the the flooding on night but also the the north boulder park and what will the impacts be on north boulder park thank you sam for your initial compliments and that's a great question um related to the work in north boulder park we have been working very closely with the parks and rec department

[162:00] and really the the impact of the park would be temporary construction activity if we are successful in building an inlet which would be you know the drainage under 9th street we would need to temporarily do construction in the park it would not impact the usability of the park or its features towards the end on 9th if we are successful in building the inlet under 9th street that would be the mechanism that would dry up or discontinue the flooding that happens on 9th the feasibility that we need to work through in 2021 related to the inlet and under 9th street work there's a farmer's ditch there and there's some engineering that we would need to verify can be possible to not intervene with the ditch but also create the gravity that's needed to get the inlet and the water over to the greenway it is a priority for the goose creek master plan and so we're working really closely with the flood engineers to hopefully get that to be successful that

[163:00] way we could clear up the water on 9th street and balsam although it may not impact kind of quote the sogginess that exists in north boulder park when it does rain or heavily storm but we have made an assumption that we would not be disturbing the usability or function of north north boulder park super great and two more quick questions um on the flood um piece of this you mentioned the goose creek master plan and i can guess what that is and it was in the memo but when do we expect that master plan to be complete i assume this is a major component upstream of that and then the second question related is are we getting mile high flood district support for this project or is it all cip uh that's also a great question i will need to get back to you on the exact dates of the adoption of the goose creek master plan i do know it was going through rab during this month

[164:00] which i think was their first opportunity to see it so my i'm thinking that it would come before the city council shortly we don't yet have any funding from the district and i don't know about the full goose creek master plan funding approach however we have talked a bit about whether there's any opportunity or benefits to funding sources like that for alpine balsam the challenge that exists related to our flooded mitigation project on the site is it doesn't provide any downstream benefits because we have to you know connect into the existing stormwater infrastructure however this is a critical component to building out the most up water upstream benefits of the goose creek master plan so we do think that we could have some cip dollars designated to it but i will check in with that and i'll provide an answer on the goose creek master plan adoption in the in the council summary cool that's great

[165:00] um so i'll just make a few comments real quick that are more specific um i think it is great michelle that you talked about learning from the deconstruction because i i know when we were starting this project and looking at trade-offs on deconstruction we saw the denver hospitals that have been just completely torn down and everything went into the landfill and so i i think this is great and there's a few things i think you mentioned code updates i think that's great because we'll understand some practical um you know what can be done and then i think really important is the cost we always hear you know about the costs and so having done a major deconstruction like this i just think it's critical that we track all those costs and that we you know are able to answer questions as we look at our code people will ask oh if you do that what does it cost additional and so we will have done it and paid the bills so i think that's really helpful and the last thing i'll say is people um when you talk about embodied energy i

[166:00] think people lose reference points um in in other words it's so much you know carbon dioxide was emitted in the creation of this and so there's all this embedded emissions and energy it will be really interesting to know how that compares to operating energy because operating energy is a cost that you pay for the entire life of the building and embedded energy you pay once and so i don't know how to really get at this but i just thought i would flag that when you're assessing kind of what you've learned comparing it to both the operating energy as the building was before it was deconstructed and then the operating energy expected with the new um facilities that will kind of be in that same footprint and i expect that will be a lot less the operating energy of the new building will be a lot less so some way to get folks be able to wrap their heads around it because i have trouble with it and i expect others might as well so some way

[167:02] to make that learning accessible to to all of us would be great but i think that's just super interesting um what's going on with the reuse of the material and if we can reuse the steel on the fire station that's fantastic so then the other piece i wanted to flag which i think is great is we talk about a micro grid on the site and much of the discussion we had with excel during our partnership discussions you know kind of use this as an exemplar project and i think that's all great on the electrical side i think what's really neat here is what was called the memo a thermal micro grid right so that's heating and how do we do the most uh effective and efficient heating for all the buildings on the site water heating and space heating and i'll just point out and i'm sure some people know it but i'll flag it for everybody it's very popular in europe to do what's called here a thermal micro grid over

[168:01] there it's called district heating and i think to the extent that we can learn from this project maybe europe probably knows a lot of this already but i loved the geothermal underneath the floodway i mean that's talk about double dipping or triple dipping that is just a great potential if we're going to dig it up you can put the boreholes in for the geothermal and then put flood control on top of it i think that's just super interesting form based code i'll be uh interested to see how that works out here i'll just close by saying it's a great project in a lot of ways but um talk about a 15 minute neighborhood right by the time this is done you'll have commercial and and office on the site you'll have housing on the site probably some amenities right across the street is a shopping center and then just you know up broadway a little bit is a rec center so i think this is going to turn into a great 15-minute

[169:00] neighborhood at the end of it so really appreciate all the great staff work and sorry to go on so long don't worry sim um thanks mark then mary then rachel yeah michelle amanda thank you so much for the presentation um it was really very very well done um i guess my questions are as follows [Music] so many things have changed partly due to covid in terms of the market for commercial space the city's ability to finance projects and so i uh before i get to my real question um you showed a picture of the hospital as in its present condition is it now effectively a clean white box so when you mean a clean white box you mean

[170:00] shell contaminants removed down to floor slabs metal supports windows and exterior walls it's very much yeah close to that um by the spring that's exactly what it'll be it's floor slabs with just structural columns and then the exterior skin in the roof in light of the things that have been changed and our concern with releasing embedded energy has there would it not be appropriate under these changed circumstances to take one last look at adaptive reuse if not of all or perhaps a portion of this either for more affordable commercial space or for residential space um it seems to me that is even more important in terms of not releasing embedded energy and i i guess my question is why aren't

[171:00] we adapting and taking a look at those possibilities in light of all of the conditions that have changed in the last few months and year yeah it's a great question and you know we've continued to look at the reuse of the hospital for a while and how it meets several different goals and one of the things that we determined when we looked at the reuse of the pavilion is that the building floor plate and the form of the building really lends itself to um you know healthy buildings and and future building use because you can get daylight in from both sides and because it is a natural kind of shape uh to adapt to other uses one of the big challenges that we have seen with the hospital with the exception of a small portion of the towers is that one-third of the hospital is underground

[172:01] and so um that becomes a challenge we just to get daylight into that space and then the other component the the largest plate in the floor plate of the hospital is that first floor and again by and large it is very internally dominated so adaptively reusing that and trying to get natural daylight into spaces and to use that for other uses that was one key hurdle the other piece too is we looked at it on the site as the building sprawls the site it really worked against a lot of the vision of the area plan and just the way that we could utilize that site because it is a very kind of haphazard sprawling building across the site and then from an energy standpoint again you know we've learned a lot about the value of reusing buildings and we did that on the brenton building we turned that from the city's worst energy performing building into one of the best

[173:00] but again it had the proportions to really lend itself to that reuse and through that we had to rebuild all of the exterior walls we had to reglaze the entire building and so that is still something that even with a shell we essentially have to rebuild much of the building itself and so as we consider you know the cost to rebuilding all the mechanical systems to re-insulating and creating a tight envelope on a building that kind of just is sort of serpentine across the site and still doesn't lend itself to a good form that those have been some of the the kind of driving considerations as to why we have talked about reuse of the buildings that we have but why the hospital has been a real challenge to look at it um i'm sure it is i guess i would ask have we ever they brought in six or seven uh major developers including developers from denver and simply asked the question

[174:00] could you do anything with it what would you do can you meet our goals and our objectives and use this building to do so because i think i think we're missing there may be no opportunity here whatsoever but i think not taking a look at it is uh is at least is not asking the question and i think that's that's unfortunate michelle this is this is carolyn i think you know kristin had quite a number of conversations so maybe amanda we can also include some summary of some of the other looks um into the reuse that have undergone she's not available tonight but i think we can loop in with her and bring that into the conversation because we did talk with some architects i think around that as well as the university to kind of explore that particular structure and where the net benefit was going to be to sam's point around operational um

[175:00] energy over the lifetime versus what you could do within the structure so i do think we have some information we could certainly share with you mark and uh i think we'll take the action to to include that in the summary notes um just because we i don't think we can answer it adequately tonight would you mind sorry to interrupt but carolyn would you mind just identifying yourself for the problem well i'm sorry this is currently with the climate initiatives department thanks so much mark yeah just to finish because i don't want to take up too much time uh you know i certainly acknowledge that there's not a lot of daylight in that bottom floor but i would expect that there are a bunch of non-profits and or arts groups or other institutions that for the right rent uh would be happy to occupy the space who can't afford other spaces in the community and this is not talking about affordable commercial as eighty percent of um uh and as we delve eighty percent of market this would just be cheap space and i'll bet there would be a bunch of users for

[176:00] it so aaron do you mind if i jump in a little bit on this yeah please too mark i appreciate your question um and we have extensively looked at reuse of the hospital building and michelle described a lot of that we also had an urban land institute technical advisory panel examine the building and reuse of the pavilion their advice was reuse of the pavilion makes sense and that has guided us um we're in terms of reuse of the hospital structure um we're not headed down that path and we've we've asked council on three occasions i think uh uh that question and it's been confirmed that we're we're intending to to deconstruct that building if council did want to go down that path it really it it means we go back to the starting point uh in terms of the area plan the vision plan uh so uh i i appreciate your interest uh but it would be a a pretty big back

[177:02] step if we were to go down that road okay i hear you thanks chris okay mark if that's it then we got mary and then rachel so to saturday's discussion i think this would have been a great use of the uh little thermometer indicator showing that adaptive reuse of hospital building would have already popped the thermometer so i think that i appreciate your question mark but i think that terrain has kind of left the station um so first of all i a lot of my comments are kind of similar to sam's with a kind of a slightly different take but first of all yeah project management i had project management envy on this it's just so there's so many different pieces and all very interesting and um and you

[178:02] guys are doing a fabulous job i mean just being so creative i just i'm blown away um i am particularly impressed with the embodied energy analysis and i look forward i think that's really really cool especially part about trying to use it with in the fire station building and i look forward to seeing some sort of a depreciation of the embodied energy over the operating life of the building i think that'll tell us a lot about how successful we've been with the deconstruction um i the f the form based code is really exciting and then i'll be curious to see what they um come up with the energy project the thermal energy project sounds just fabulous and definitely i think

[179:00] exploring how we might be able to partner with excel on that to help us maybe financially as well so that's that's a huge opportunity right there and then um i do have a couple questions one question has to do with property h um where the little red house used to stand i didn't hear any mention of that in the plan um and so i'm curious to know what what the ultimate use for that now empty lot will be absolutely mary i'm just scrolling back up so we can all see what h is so that's that's currently two small vacant lots i think they equate to about a half an acre the area plan says that uh we'll know more about the use intended use of that vacant lot as the facilities master plan progresses and as we understand better market

[180:00] conditions for the rest of the mixed use opportunities on the site we have looked at it either as maintained as city services such as an independent building standalone maybe benefiting some of our customer service facing operations also it could be sold as a mixed use building the challenge would be related to parking but it is noted in the area plan the reason why i didn't mention it earlier and we haven't prioritized it thus far is because i think it'll be really key once we get to our financial strategy how we want to sell off the residential parcels do we need to fill a gap are we looking to invest more in horizontal infrastructure can this be a resource for that or is a city-owned priority more advantageous for that site so i do think that will come into play in the next two years that's the reason why we haven't prioritized it thus far though but we haven't forgotten it either

[181:00] thank you amanda and i think the sooner we decide um what to do with it the better people are starting to use it like a dog park so there might be a don't take our dog park away um but um so thank you for that and then um my final question is just about um are you open to providing tours of the deconstructed um inside of the the um hospital building i think that would be really fascinating um absolutely it is exciting to see inside um and and quite interesting so um we have provided tours i know to council um multiple times to just show the site and to um inform people so happy to do that yeah i haven't seen it since it was since before um it was deconstructed so i'd be really interested in doing that um that'd be great thank you and great work i mean it's impressive

[182:02] what's been going on quietly in the background thank you very much i look forward to getting that tour when that's uh that's allowed also can we do a haunted house in it in october with that is that an allowed use we've brought that up and now rachel then i'll say it awards it's funny i was about to say um my favorite thing i've done on city council so far was the tour i took of the i think pavilion and then you know caught like going to the roof and it would have been a cool haunted house then because there were like you know toilets with water still in them and hallways and like you know loose wires and stuff so it was definitely hard hat um situation so i i i would also like to see what it's looking like now but it has been it was impressive to see it in that state and um the whole project is exciting and i'm glad to hear that it stayed on track so well during pandemic so well done um and

[183:02] to mary's point about the thermometer the fundraising bar for people who weren't at our retreat like we're talking about sort of creating something a visual that you can look at that shows like you know here are the five stages of a project and we're at like you know it would fill up in red as you go over so like here we are at phase three and like you don't go back to phase one two and three because you're now at you know phase three or four or whatever so i agree mary this is a good spot for that um and i i i think it's uh a detriment if we really relitigate things that have already been well looked at and thoroughly um vetted and voted on um but my question i think is for tom carr um i know that many of you have already done something like this and we're on planning board but for those of us who are new i think that we're looking at um you know later on this year building e the pavilion i assume is city owned and we will do a concept review on it so i

[184:00] just wonder like how does one as the city um review the city's building and maintain um objectivity and not conflicts like how do we guard against conflict of interest when the city is doing a concept review of its own project so i haven't had that happen yet i'm not sure i don't remember this the criteria for concept review concept review the city tends to be tougher on itself than on outsiders and anybody who's ever taken a project through the city city the city permitting process knows how hard that isn't um my experience is that the the regulators don't really care if you're the city the city is the applicant or not um it's they do their job so i i don't see a conflict of interest but um because it's a it's a regulatory process that we do in the way we do everything else okay so there's no like special safeguards we need to be aware of as we're moving forward with this i don't think so um the the comment i've often gotten is why

[185:01] does the city have so much trouble getting through its own process and the people and fam will tell you that they whenever they do a project they're treated just the same as everybody else okay all right thanks yeah i'll just add rachel it's pretty common that we we apply to ourselves often on various city departments for for permitting projects uh and whether that's through land use processes or building permits uh or any of our other uh regulations so it's it's a pretty common occurrence and tom is correct that uh the criteria are applied to ourselves just as they are uh if not more rigorous than to to the general community all right thanks may i add just a little bit here um rachel the form based code was used at boulder junction for um some of the affordable housing that was built there and it really tended to streamline the

[186:00] process a little bit and so i think that we'll be able to benefit from the form-based code in this case as well good point thanks mary all right i'll call on myself and because actually my first comment was to be about the form-based code um which as well so that i'm i'm glad to hear we're headed in that direction because i think it'll give a level of certainty um you know if we're going to be selling off some of these parcels to developers if we have a form-based code that will dictate very specifically what has to go there and so that i think that'll streamline the process and give certainty to developers and neighbors and other concerned citizens so i think that's a great direction to go so i'm glad to hear that and i'll echo all the praise of my colleagues about all the complexities here and how your project managing this this is i can only imagine the the gantt charts involved here to keep this all going all together at the same time and emerging in the right time frame so thanks for for the fantastic work

[187:00] um and my one question is so i know that some of the financial issues are tbd as we kind of develop some of these concepts more thoroughly but do we see are there are there any things that major pieces that we're concerned about that we i know you identified a couple things we're not funding for but that we feel like are a threat to the project continuing any kind of financial red flags we need to be aware of i appreciate the question aaron it's a good one my initial thought is i'm i don't think we're yet concerned about the success of the project being dependent on any one particular project not being funded because i do think we have so many options still on the table and we can be creative about you know do we take less on the land value for parcel a in exchange for more money towards some horizontal infrastructure i think there's still plenty of options available

[188:00] i would say what's probably most important is the sequencing and like you just described the the gantt charts and how these are interrelated it's important to have timing and funding in a specific way and that's we'll spend a lot of time on that in 2021 trying to identify exactly what's critical i would say that's probably more important than any uh significant financial concerns however depending on where our costs come in on the energy infrastructure if the city does think it's necessary to build out energy infrastructure that may could be pretty costly then i think we would need to decide how we want to prioritize that either by funding other projects differently on the site we're looking at other funding opportunities such as with excel but i appreciate the question i don't think we're that concerned yet okay that's great to hear and just one follow-up there like for that infrastructure or like the pavilion building i know that when we build that out that's going to be a significant price tag like are we

[189:00] considering maybe a bond funding mechanism at some point in the future or are we thinking we'll be paying for it out of revenues or do we have a thought on that yet it's it was go ahead go ahead oh it's earmarked right now in general fund as a bond payment either through cops cops or another municipal financing we would certainly be borrowing it and i'd have to clarify all included in the study session summary the specific revenue source for that debt service but it is already earmarked in in this year's budget book for the debt service great thank you that's all i had of any other questions or thoughts from other council members well seeing none i will give another big thank you um to staff amanda and michelle and everybody else for a great presentation all the hard work that you're doing we look forward

[190:00] to these later touch points in 2021 to keep moving the process forward we'll be hearing a lot more about this uh any other last thoughts for us steph no thank you this is helpful i appreciate your excitement very good well with that i guess i will bring the meeting to close five minutes early any uh any debrief for the evening good job erin thank you mary all right well have a good night [Music] everybody [Music]

[191:02] and the smaller leftist free and equals party however if conte fails to find new allies matarella may choose