February 9, 2021 — City Council Study Session

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] we do have a series of announcements so please do bear with me and um alicia or debbie i think we have some or where i was running the slides i think we have some slides for each of these public service announcements is that correct yes there it is carl if you could put up the first slide that'd be great so um looks like i just lost my lost my script here i don't know how to escape from this hold on a second apologies but i can't carl can you um reduce that carl can you make that a little bit smaller it's taking up my whole screen and i can't escape to get to my script thank you uh do you want to try that again

[1:06] okay there that word thank you sorry about that uh first announcement is um related to a couple of concerns that that we in the city have and they relate to street drugs and suicide prevention first with respect to fentanyl waste street drugs we want to make sure the community is aware that lethal fentanyl laced street drugs are being sold in boulder right now three area teens have unfortunately died from overdosing on these pills in the past week these deadly laced pills look like xanax or oxycodone but they are actually 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin which leads to death from accidental overdose we encourage community members to talk to your teens about these strange dangerous street drugs and to review information on boulder county health's website on a related matter we have become aware that teen suicide rates are on the rise this year we plan to take additional steps to help address

[2:00] the twin plagues of teen suicide and substance abuse and depression but to start we want to quickly share the resources listed on on this slide and so if you have teens or others who need assistance please contact one of these organizations next slide please the the next thing we want to talk a little bit about and we've we've mentioned this in past meetings is coveted exposure notifications and vaccination we encourage folks to sign up um for uh exposure notification at www.addyourphone.com and that will allow your phone to anonymously be connected to somebody that you've been in contact with and it turns out that person had coveted you'd be notified similarly we want to encourage people to keep up to date on getting your local vaccines and to sign up for notifications when you're eligible and you see the website on the right side of that slide and that's the place you can register and they will notify you

[3:00] when your cohort comes up for a vaccination next on boards and commissions i don't know if you have a slide in this but i want to mention that we annual recruitment for the 2020 one boards and commissions is closed for most of the board certain commissions the city clerk's office is in the process of reviewing all the applications to ensure applicants meet the requirement for board and commission applied for and they're scheduled to have that application notebook posted online for everyone to see by monday february 22nd city council will interview all the eligible applicants um in early march we do however have three boards commissions that did not receive enough applications to proceed on the interview portion of of recruitment so we will continue to accept applications for these three boards through march 18 and those three boards are the boulder junction access district parking the boulder junction access district travel demand management and the beverage license authority so if you're interested in applying for any

[4:00] one of those three boards please go to the website indicated on that slide and consider applying by march 18. and then finally the fourth announcement relates to the excel partnership advisory board the city of boulder and xcel energy are seeking a representative group of community members to serve on the first energy partnership advisory panel the panel will meet regularly to review and discuss energy issues and provide feedback on projects and programs that arise from the partnership the advisory panel will serve to connect the community to the new partnership by representing electricity and gas customers in boulder in both residential and commercial sector the panel will review project proposals gather perspectives on community impacts and make recommendations to the partnerships project oversight team interested community members are invited to learn more about the working group and to consider applying at the website indicated on that slide the application will will close at 5 pm on february 26th

[5:02] with that that's the end of the public service announcements thanks for bearing with me we have three topics to review tonight we're scheduled to go till 9 30. we might beat that a little bit the first topic is on the police master plan project plan and timeline we've scheduled 60 minutes for that second we've scheduled 90 minutes for a capital infrastructure tax renewal and other tax items and then finally we'll close with 60 minutes of a new uh demonstration of our new city website so chris i want to turn it over to you for the first topic the police master plan great thank you bob good evening council members uh so for this item we've got a team of folks that are going to present first to kick up the the presentation i'm going to turn it over to chief maris harold thanks chris good evening council members before we begin tonight's presentation i just want to say a big thanks to master plan project manager wendy schwartz

[6:00] and sarah huntley from communication and engagement they've worked so hard thus far and i really appreciate their work i also want to thank the master plan subcommittee council members yates and joseph and community members marina lagrave and mallory cates for all their hard work and dedication to improving policing in the 21st century i think it's important for council to know that boulder police department supports this master plan process and are looking forward to robust community engagement and continued efforts to create a model police agency that is both effective and ethical this master plan process provides an excellent opportunity to understand the community's vision as it relates to policing while also strengthening boulder police department's commitment to true police reform so with that council members i would like to turn it over to wendy schwartz thank you chief good evening council

[7:01] members wendy schwartz human services policy manager and glad to be back with you tonight in my capacity as project manager for the police department master plan update next slide carl so tonight we're going to go over a few key areas on where we are in the project um first some context and process to date so the background and how we've been doing the work next foundational information about our project scope and approach which of course has informed the next topic our project plan and timeline and finally sarah huntley who is my co-presenter tonight is going to walk us through the engagement process planning we've done so far next slide carl so these are our questions for council tonight and i'm not going to read through all of them right now

[8:01] we will go through these questions one by one at different intervals throughout the presentation so we've got three major uh sections of the presentation and we'll stop at the end of each one to discuss the corresponding counsel questions next slide please so we're going to start off with a really quick review of master planning for people who might be watching who aren't familiar with the city's process so most city departments have master plans and they provide a common framework for planning programs policies and capital improvement projects they must be consistent with our overarching plans such as the boulder valley comprehensive plan and our community sustainability and resilience framework the length of master plans varies but generally is between five and ten years so that's for the life of the plan itself we do have a

[9:00] standardized city master planning process and that has four phases and that planning process goes about two years roughly and we'll talk a little bit more about that when we go over the timeline next slide please the police master plan was last updated in 2013 and since then of course there have been many changes in policing in general for the department here in boulder and with local and national conversations about policing some examples of questions from inside and outside the departments the department that we've seen are reflected on this slide so for instance what should the department's role be in issues like homelessness or mental health or other social services concerns racial equity concerns certainly community relationships and trust changes in crime rates determining what the right level of police presence might be in the community having the

[10:02] right staff in the department and being able to effectively recruit and retain that staff and of course we do have a new chief here in boulder who's implementing a police reform strategic action plan next slide please so here's how we've been working on this plan um thanks chief for introducing some of our team at the beginning of the meeting i've listed the departments involved in our internal staff team we call it the core team here and it's been great to partner with the chief and as well as deputy chief johnson before he left and now we're transitioning to work with commander katie mceldowney in the police department which we're really excited about pam davis our assistant city manager from communications engagement sarah huntley and shannon alba and our equity program manager amy kane

[11:02] we also have maggie lockwisson from osmp who's in equity program assistance and is also helping us with our equity approach justin green from finance and chris wrangles from comprehensive planning so really good cross-departmental team working on this and then as the chief mentioned we are also working with a process subcommittee that includes two community members mallory cates and marina lagrave who were selected in october through a community application process and of course council members joseph and yates and i do want to just take a minute to emphasize the process part of the process subcommittee sometimes it's easy for folks to get a little bit confused about that but definitely the process subcommittee's focus is on working with the staff team on planning the process and the public engagement to make sure those things are really solid and accessible for the community

[12:01] um so the commit the subcommittee's purview is not on planned content and policy issues and toward the end of this presentation we are going to put the project's website on and folks can learn more about the process subcommittee there next slide please so all the change inside and outside the department one of the first things we discussed on this project was that the scope was probably not just a minor update of the 2013 master plan but really taking a step back with a broad scope to re-envision policing in the city and certainly that affects how you plan the project out and so with this type of broad scope uh what is envisioned is an in-depth process with the community over two years um five engagement windows that we'll talk more about in a few minutes when we

[13:00] do the timeline and what we're calling did did we get it right opportunities so really creating products listening to the community feedback circling back with those draft products to say did we hear you did you did we hear you right and this also this process also includes seven council check-ins next slide please and so with that we get to the end of the first of our three sections in this presentation and the first question for council which is does council agree with approaching the plan as a new document re-envisioning the police department rather than a more limited update of the 2013 plan house members we'll we'll pause here and answer this question um if you don't have any comments we'll assume that you're you're content with the staff's uh proposal uh aaron well i'll just say absolutely thank you for taking this approach i think with the arrival of chief harold and some of our societies wanting our society one to

[14:01] rethink some things about how policing works in our communities this is a great opportunity so i really appreciate you taking this more comprehensive approach this year thank you aaron um anyone else i don't see other hands up going once twice okay let's move on okay great so um next slide please so the second part of our presentation is going to cover um key elements of our project plan and timeline so the first section of that plan is purpose and background of the project and we just covered that earlier in this presentation so i won't repeat that the second section is our project goals and so those are different than when we get down down the road to actually having a draft master plan and having goals in that master plan these are goals for the the project planning and the

[15:02] the process of developing the master plan and so it's what we hope to achieve and the way we want to go about achieving it in the process so those goals are design and communicate a master plan process with transparency and clarity so people understand what to expect and how to engage incorporate diverse stakeholder values and priorities for the police department in a way that is inclusive balanced and equitable including trauma-informed focus and tools for advancing racial equity explore and develop evidence-based practices training and data to incorporate into decision-making create a community plan with realistic scenarios a definition of success and indicators of how we know how we'll know we're on the right track recognize the role contributions challenges and changes that are going ongoing in the boulder police department and finally approach the project with curiosity and openness to transformation

[16:00] of policing in boulder next slide please the plan talks about the types of products and reports that people might expect to see during this two-year process and so the first one here is the systems overview report and that really reflects the current state of affairs in the department such as how the resources are allocated trends and emerging issues benchmarking of where the department stands in comparison to national standards and this is really intended to provide a basis of foundational information for the process engagement plans so the overall approach to engagement is included in the project plan and throughout the process individual engagement plans will be determined by the needs of the process and responds to previous engagement window results and so that's going to be an iterative process and sarah's going to talk a little bit more about that in our third section today we'll have draft and final focus areas

[17:00] and key issues that will be produced for public review and these are major thematic areas that are determined for the plan to address so what are the important big ideas that we want to work on and address in this master plan and then we'll also have draft and final strategies and priorities so these are more specific ways to address those focus areas and key issues the strategies and how to prioritize which ones might be more important or more important to start first and finally of course we'll have the draft and master plan documents next slide please [Music] we want to really retain an equity for focus throughout this two-year process we know that's going to be important and so that's why we're glad to have two team members including our city equity manager on our core team working on this project we want to use existing city equity tools

[18:00] and we're very excited that the department is going to be one of the departments piloting a new racial equity assessment tool that's going to be designed for department level analysis next slide please of course it's also important in developing this master plan to keep in mind the other city commitments and i won't go over every plan on the screen in the interest of time but but we're going to have to really keep in mind a broad variety of overarching plans and commitments in the city as well as complementary plans that other departments and organizations might have next slide please so in the plan we include a very detailed four-page list of the stakeholders that are going to be important to engage in this process and of course a four-page detailed list isn't very practical for a powerpoint slide

[19:00] so what we've included here is some broad general categories uh that are reflected in that larger list and we talk about internal and external stakeholders and what we mean by that is our internal stakeholders are folks that work in the police department so it's sworn personnel like officers the police officers union and then the the civilian employees as well as the volunteers our external stakeholders are everyone else in the community the broader community organization other organizations and groups in the community next slide please so here is the project timeline and um just to orient everyone to what they're looking at and how to look at it we have some dark or navy blue blocks in this timeline and those areas really reflect time for staff analysis of the feedback and information we're getting as well as time for staff to create the

[20:02] products for the next stage of the plan for folks to react to the lighter or more periwinkle blocks reflect engagement windows for internal stakeholders external stakeholders and that also includes city council you'll see some gray blocks that have the cc city council uh process are check-ins in them reflected throughout and most of this timeline represents the iterative blocks of these steps to really produce key products and decisions with multiple feedback loops based on draft products so as we discussed when we came to council august 25th we spent the latter half of 2020 and um the first part of this year in really that first phase of the standard city process which is project planning and we do have at the police department the systems overview report in progress

[21:00] and we expect that to be released in august now we're in phase two and we're heading into our first um big public engagement window in april um so we've borrowed some friends of some language from our friends at osmp to call this window values hopes and concerns to engage people on major thematic ideas that go along with how they view the department and the ideal relationship with the department we then have some step time for staff to work with that information to develop those um draft focus areas and key issues that i referenced earlier and then in we'll go through a few more iterative steps there with council and with the broader stakeholder audience some of those kind of here's what we came up with did we get it right steps do a little bit of refinement and have a check in with city council on window 1 feedback draft focus areas and key issues and the

[22:00] systems overview report in august then we'll be in that cycle to finalize those items when we come back to council in november of this year toward the end of the year we move into another iterative block on strategies to address those focus areas and priorities among strategies and we go through another series of steps from december of this year through finalization of the strategies and priorities with a council check-in in august of 2022 and then the last iterative block we have goes from august 2022 to february of 2023 and that is really about developing and getting feedback on the draft and final master plans um which we would hope to have final council approval on in february of 2023 next slide please

[23:00] and so this leads us to the end of our second section of the presentation and our question does council have any input on the draft project plan and timeline for the police department master plan and i will make a suggestion to council members that if your question is really focused on engagement or how we're doing engagement you may wish to hold it until after sarah does the third section of the presentation because your account your question might be answered then thanks wendy um adam i saw your hand first followed by rachel thank you bob um i have two questions one i know you said that the slide um about who was going to be involved wasn't comprehensive but i noticed that the human relations commission wasn't on there and i thought that was kind of a pretty important one for a policing standpoint so i was wondering if that uh human relations commission specifically was going to be part of that you know city boards and commissions

[24:01] that are related to this work are a really important point to bring up adam and i'm really i'm making a note to make sure we figure out how that can be appropriately uh incorporated so thank you yeah thanks for that my second question is i notice this is a pretty long process and um we're gonna have a pretty small chunk of it done with the current council and then a very large chunk of it done essentially the rest of it with the next council which could have a very different makeup so i guess i don't have a specific question other than how do you foresee dealing with that um difference in councils and i guess we as a council sort of have to figure out how we can best approach it to tee it up so it doesn't restrict the next council from taking actions they see fit as well adam you have a really great point with that and i think um

[25:00] when those new council members are seated we're going to have to try and do some orientation with them um about where we've been on this process so far but you're right that um it is of course challenging when you have a changeover with that and so we just really on the project team want to provide as much support and information to those new council members as possible gotcha thank you wendy appreciate that thanks adam uh rachel and then um sarah huntley has her hand up too but rachel you have a question um thanks for the presentation so far wendy i um you mentioned something about the racial equity instrument maybe being tweaked or something or something done internally for this project and i hope that you could explain that um and sort of how the racial equity instrument will be used it's that's still conceptually difficult for me to wrap my head around like how it gets implemented and used to to um

[26:00] help us make decisions and also wanted to um know what data if you already know will that well the um like what current racial inequity data will um be utilized so i believe amy amy kane is on the call um because i thought there might be some questions and we've got maggie i think too and if you guys want to chime in a little bit on rachel's question that would be great sure i appreciate that thanks so much and i guess there is a little confusion with the terminology we're not actually talking about utilizing the racial equity instrument as the sole tool um for the master planning process as the instrument is utilized throughout it can be the instrument can be applied to different decision-making points along the way what we're developing um and maggie lacrosse lacquerson who is on the call can talk a little bit about this because

[27:00] she is the project manager for this work and this is a departmental assessment so each individual department can really do you guys hear my roommates sorry about that um they have the best timing um the racial equity assessment is so departments can really evaluate where they are as a department in understanding where the instrument can be applied through policies programs decisions and i'm going to turn it over to maggie because she has been the project manager like i mentioned doing a staff team to lead this work and the police department was one of the first departments who agreed to pilot it so we're really excited about that so maggie you want to take it from here thanks amy um yeah as far as the information that we'll be collecting um it really is focusing on whether or not uh departments are using best practices when it comes to hiring when it comes to um retaining employees

[28:01] building master plans you name it from the ground up what programs policies plans and the department is has on the ground and if they are considering racial equity um when they are forming those plans and specifically as to policing well i understand it would be used for hiring and internal decisions but are we also um going into this with an eye on data on people who are police yeah absolutely um so i think the police stop data is going to be incredibly helpful in this work and i do believe chief harold has been working with her data scientists and her data teams to really look at other place other indicators on on the data that they're collecting um the other thing is with the

[29:01] assessment it is done at the department level in different work groups so it would be applied to what does it look like in the area of detectives what does it look like in the area of doing investigations or the records area what does that look like for dispatch but it also gives an opportunity to do an assessment at the individual employee level so we can really understand where we need to focus our efforts on education training and policy updates okay um thanks for that it might be helpful if we have more information on sort of the specifics of of where it's like being plugged in yes thanks yeah for sure thank you thank you rachel and it is a pilot thanks um sarah you have your hand up did you want to contribute something yes please good evening council i'm sarah huntley director of communication and engagement and i wanted to specifically address the really good

[30:00] point that adam raised about the fact that this timeline will span two different cult different councils and i wanted to point out and we'll get into this in a little more detail in my engagement portion of the presentation but one of the things that i think is important to realize is that the first window of engagement really is a lot of open-ended listening questions some open-ended questions and some listening it's probably going to be our most robust period of just hearing from the community in their own words and figuring out how to categorize and theme what they're telling us and so we're really not going to be at a point of having to make some difficult choices that will guide the rest of this work until engagement window two and certainly engagement window three so i'll point out that that engagement window 2 ends in november based on adam's feedback i would suggest that we think about having our check-in with council perhaps be the second half of november

[31:01] so new council members who might want to catch up on what we heard in engagement window 1 and have some direct feedback on what we're defining as focus areas would have a chance to do so but then it would be the work of the new council to really get into the i think the tough most challenging conversations which will be around strategies and priorities thank you sarah and i'll just weigh in as a as a member of the process committee and junie of course may have some thoughts and i see mourinho lagrave from the community representative of the process committee is also on they may have different thoughts when when staff presented this to us um oh a month or so ago this timeline this two-year timeline i think we all had the same reaction which is whoa that's a really really long time but then as they walked us through it it made a lot of sense and we kind of drilled into it and we kind of tested it and said what can we accelerate this can we shorten this and um i think we've all come around or at least i've come around to understanding why this is going to take

[32:00] two years i think we did have some concerns about gosh's feedback that we get from the community in 2021 still going to be applicable in 2023 but i think the way that the engagement process is set up is and sarah will talk about this more in a few minutes is i think there will be constantly an opportunity for community members to weigh in on whatever the topic of the day happens to be and i think we'll be nimble and responsive to that um and then adam i think i'm 99 sure a response your question that on that four page list of every stakeholder we could possibly think of i'm pretty sure the hrc's on there juni or marina do you have anything to add about the time frame and kind of what our thinking around that would uh has been and bob i think mallory might be on too i think ryan said she was on so mallory feel free okay good mallory is maybe mallory's okay great great thanks mallory mallory or marina do you have any comments that you'd like to share with the council

[33:00] [Music] hi mallory do not thank you mallory hi can you hear me yes yes oh hi so it's marina hi everybody thank you so much uh i just wanted to uh highlight what uh sarah mentioned i think that it'll be crucial that at the beginning of this process we do the listening and with the capturing of the community's comments and needs and wants so i think that's what's going to be key in moving forward just wanted to highlight that thank you marina juni did you have anything to add i i don't have anything to add bob i just think um i'm doing more listening than speaking tonight but because again i'm part of the same committee with you and i think you've really highlighted everything that needed to be said great thank you juni um i don't see any other hands up so unless we have other input on the timeline we'll assume that we're we're good to go on that thank you adam for the good suggestions about um getting the next council

[34:02] oriented and up to speed and making sure that they're equally comfortable with this plan so we'll make sure do that at the end of the year so i think we're ready to move on to section three and sarah i think that's you it is thank you so much carl could you please go to the next slide thank you okay so i'm delighted this evening to be able to share some of our thinking and planning related to community engagement i think it's pretty clear that if we're talking about a transformative master plan process for our police department we really need to include our community envisioning the kind of policing they want to have here in boulder for at least the next 10 years right and we have already talked a little bit about what a transformative change policing is going through in general across the country and we really want to make sure that we are learning from best practices and lessons as we create the master plan that will apply here to boulder i wanted to assure council in the community first that the overall approach we're taking for this master plan process

[35:00] really is grounded in our engagement strategic framework which we um really created out of the feedback we got from the public participation working group some years ago as well as our own staff perspective on improvements we could make to our system so we will definitely be defining a clear purpose that's part of what this framing of the conversation is we want to recognize that policing is in a great place of transition and our national scrutiny and local scrutiny is much higher than it's been before and we want to talk about those issues in a very honest and transparent way we are doing a lot of work to plan for thoughtful and respectful engagement and i'll talk a little bit about that as well as the next item which is encouraging and including all voices that's an area of a considerable focus for us as we embark on this process we of course always want to foster public contribution and civic participation council heard about some of those goals at the retreat

[36:00] and then we want to implement a trustworthy and transparent process and i'm always kind of reluctant when we're looking at a process that's going to go over say just a few months to try to chart out every little detail of an engagement process from start to finish for two years i don't have a crystal ball and as as bob said there will be issues that will come up over the next two years that we really want to be able to respond to in a nimble way so what we've done here is we've created sort of an overall engagement plan that talks about our principles and commitments of engagement and you're going to see on some next slides how we plan to use some of the framework tools that we follow as a city but then for each engagement phase we have an addendum which is a tactical plan and the reason that that hasn't been fleshed out all the way through all the phases of the project is because we really want to learn from the previous page phases evaluating and adapting is absolutely a best practice of engagement

[37:00] so we're going to talk a little bit today about what we're calling engagement windows 0 which wasn't even on your timeline it's pre-engagement and then we're going to talk a little bit about the preliminary plans and approach for engagement window one and in each subsequent check-in with council we'll look ahead to the next engagement window with more detail so you have an opportunity to give us some feedback next slide please carl okay so i'm hoping that this wheel this decision making wheel is not brand new to council members but i just want to say that this is a wheel that was primarily created by our public participation working group as a way of bringing consistency in decision making we made a couple of friendly amendments to it and changed the name to have it be the city of boulder's decision-making process but just to orient you there are nine steps to our two-year process for this plan and step one is to define the why before embarking so

[38:02] that's developing the scope and the purpose statement and that's essentially what you just helped us do this evening by verifying that you agree that this is not just a nip and tuck of the 2013 plan but it's actually a real opportunity for us as a community to vision policing in a new way um step two is to determine who is affected and that's that four-page stakeholder analysis we did an incredibly robust job i think and i do think hrc is on there but if we missed it we'll absolutely call it out um really just trying to think about all the different people who might want to participate in this um and who would be impacted and how good bad or otherwise by the decisions we make in this planning process we've just basically completed step three except as i mentioned for each of the engagement windows we'll have a tactical plan that goes with it and we are at the point right now at the end of step three

[39:00] of sharing project management plan with city council in the community to get your feedback once we have some feedback that we can integrate and once we get through our pre-engagement planning process which i'll talk about in a minute we will be ready to go to step four um and we'll really spend the bulk of our time in step four five six that'll be the um engagement windows one two and three and then we'll come back to council to make a decision one of the things i think is really important is that sometimes our community and our council and our staff think okay we made our decision we're done but actually in a good decision-making process there's two steps left on the wheel so one of them is to clearly communicate the decision and the rationale to people who participated in our process it's a really important part of the feedback loop and then the other one is to constantly learn right so the reflect and evaluate and we're going to do that after each window of engagement but as a whole process and project we're going to want to step back and debrief and learn from

[40:01] this because we'll have many master plan processes in the future next slide please so the other tool that we'll be using primarily as a way to communicate what our commitment and promise is to our communities for each window we're going to give community members a very clear idea of where we think we are on this engagement spectrum so for council members who have not seen this there are four different levels of engagement that we engage in in the city inform is your basic communications function where we provide information and keep people informed it's the piece where we get the right information to the right people at the right time right that's sort of the inform mantra consult involve and collaborate all involve some level of engagement with varying the intensity gets greater as you move into the collaborate space and the important thing to understand as decision makers is that with each of these participation categories

[41:01] you're making promises to the community about how much authority you're going to seed to the community so you'll note that when we're on the collaborate part of the spectrum it actually says that decision makers will seek to incorporate the community's advice and recommendations to the maximum extent possible so once we're in that space which we might be with some of our harder to reach populations who are going to commit a great deal of time to with us to really make sure we're doing a good engagement process and hearing from as many voices as possible you know you'll need to be able to honor the work that they put in by recognizing where we are on the spectrum next slide please okay so i want to talk a little bit about engagement window zero or pre-engagement it might be called it didn't even appear on your timeline because it is intended to be really informal but i think it's

[42:00] critically foundational work that we need to be doing so one thing that we recognize is that there are not very many people in our community um who have a very clear understanding of what our police department does today and there's a certain amount of capacity building that we need to do with community members to be able to answer questions about what things are we doing today that we should should we continue to do what things are we doing today that you'd like to see the department not do any longer what things are we doing today or things we're not doing that we should start doing um so there's you know some conversations we want to have with some community groups that we think are going to want to play a very active role in this conversation and we thought why waste this time at the beginning of the year why not start to mobilize some of those folks so what we've been doing over the last couple weeks and we have about two more weeks of this work is we've identified a small cross sampling

[43:01] of community members trying to really look at that four page list and figure out which stakeholders are probably most interested in having a start to finish participation level on this plan and we've invited them to some informal open houses where we're sharing information about the process and the plan and telling people why this police department master plan process might be of interest to them and is important to us and then we're doing a little bit of consulting so that list that wendy shared with you about things that have changed since the last master plan we are also presenting that in pre-engagement window to community members about to see what's missing so what thing what external factors do they think we need to be having honest conversations about as we embark on this process together and in addition to the list that wendy came up with we've already had some great feedback where the youth opportunities advisory

[44:01] board for example really wanted us to recognize the conversation that's going on right now around school resource officers and some of the sort of conflicting desire to have schools be safe from you know attacks or other types of violent situations but also recognizing the equity concerns so we'll probably add that to our framing list of things we need to talk about during this process likewise there was a suggestion from one of the community members who we've talked to so far that we really need to put retention recruitment and officer wellness and and safety on the list as well as a factor that our community needs to become more aware of as we balance all of the desires we have on what we want from our police department we're also going to be asking these pre-engagement groups to help us identify prefer commun preferred communication channels so as council knows by now we have a really robust toolbox of communication platforms and we want

[45:02] to hear from the people who want to stay abreast of this planning process which ones they would prefer for us to use so that we can build that out as part of our communications plan that supports this work the last three items on this list we have created three uh well two so far and we are embarking on an effort to create a third specialized teams of community members that really represent either hard to reach communities or communities that may frankly historically have a very different lived experience with policing or different perspective based on policing as an institution as well as individual experiences with officers so marina lagrave has really stepped into her role as a process subcommittee member and she has developed the latinx leadership team that has um it's roughly 14 people um because some people are serving um

[46:01] with their spouse or their partner so it works out to be about 14 community members all of whom are bilingual bi-cultural who are going to meet monthly together to help us um first of all get their individual personal perspectives in each of the engagement window as boulder community members but then also really help us make sure that we are meeting the language needs and the cultural needs of the spanish-speaking community in boulder to really help them be able to participate in a meaningful way we started with latinx as our first primary focus because spanish-speaking community members are our largest population of non-white community members in boulder and they come not only with different lived experiences and perspectives that we want to capture but many of them come with different language needs so we really wanted to make sure that we were learning everything using all the learnings we've had over the last couple years on language access

[47:01] to be able to create a way to ensure that their needs are being met so they can participate um the next group that we have identified as a stakeholder group that we wanted to have some continual communication with is our young people i'm i'm always like to point out that these master planning processes create plans that first of all they take about two years to create and then after that they're supposed to be living breathing documents that affect our work for another decade so if you think about that teenagers middle schoolers elementary school kids those are the folks in our community who are really going to feel the impacts of this planning work that we're doing now and so we really wanted to make sure that we are involving them in creative and meaningful ways so our youth opportunities advisory board has stepped into this space admirably and we've started to have some really great conversations with growing up boulder we're going to use a large part of our city contract with that organization

[48:01] to reach particularly vulnerable young people but young people in general to hear their hopes dreams and concerns about policing and then lastly i would very much like to create an additional leadership team um probably focused on black and african-american perspectives in our community we don't have as big a network in that space yet in the city of boulder so i'm going to be working with some community groups to see if there's interest among individual community members to join such a committee but we would like to be able to provide it with the same level of support or similar support to what we are providing for our latinx leadership team because i think it's really important i think we all recognize that the black community in particular has had unique experiences with policing and given the institutionalized routes of policing in cultures and and practices of slavery i think it's really critically important that we lift those voices during this

[49:00] process i just don't have i can't report at this time that we have an assembled group we're still working towards that one of the other things i'm trying to let people understand in engagement window xero is what are we going to be talking about why is this going to be of interest and i already reference the fact that we're going to try to help educate people about what currently our services provided and approaches the police department takes so they can tell us what should stay what should go what should change and what should be added and then also we're going to talk about all of these external factors that make this such a more complicated discussion and we really are committed to trying to hear different voices and different perspectives in this first engagement zero window zero and engagement window one as i said we're just gonna be like sponges gathering perspectives and feedback at the end of the day as is true with most engagement processes we're going to have to sort through conflicting perspectives

[50:00] you know when you ask one group what's the right presence level for police in our community they might say something that's very different from what another group will say and so part of the hard thinking we're going to have to do as a communities how do we balance those different perspectives and reconcile any place where we have to make tradeoff decisions next slide please okay so the the main show the very first of our formal engagement windows will start in april and continue through early june it is engagement window one values hopes and concerns and this is intended to be a time to cast a much broader net than we were able to in pre-engagement and inform anybody who might be interested that this process is going on and help them understand where the different windows of input are going to occur and encourage them by offering different ways to meet different audience members needs to participate we want to seek out and listen to the values hopes and concerns for the future

[51:01] of policing in boulder i'm going to get a little bit more into how we intend to ask those questions with the next slide and any feedback that we get will be collected and tabulated i i can't emphasize enough that that behind the scenes work for tabulating open-ended commentary is really essential because what we're going to have to do and our friends at osmp learned this in practice is that we really are going to have to look at each individual comment and come up with a keyword or a way to tag that so we can look for themes and so that um darker blue that you saw in your timeline is the reason it's such a little long period of time is because we really want to make sure that we're capturing this feedback in a way that can be analyzed and sorted later on next slide please so framing the conversation particularly in this first window is going to be really important and we are not going to really ask

[52:01] people to make multiple choice decisions or rank priorities too much we might ask them a little bit about the services that the police department currently offers today and how they would rank that importance to them but we really want to have more of an open-ended conversation and one way that we've thought about doing this and it's been interesting because we've seen other communities coming to the same realization is that i think we really need to explore the concept of safety so safety is a fundamental part of boulder police department's mission and whenever we think about public safety although it can take many different forms it's not unusual for the police and the fire departments to come to mind but we're learning that safety means different things to different people and what what one p person perceives as a safe situation might feel very different to somebody else so we're going to be asking some open-ended questions about what safety means in the law enforcement context to all of our participants and we'll explore diverse perspectives

[53:01] we'll hear a little bit about hope's fears and definitions about what makes a community safe we're also going to ask a couple of other un open-ended questions one of the ones that we've thought about asking is to ask people to briefly describe their ideal encounter with a police officer if they're in a variety of different shoes so you're in your ideal encounter if you're the victim of a crime your ideal encounter if you are the suspect or somebody who's being investigated for a crime as well as your ideal encounter with the police department if you're a witness in a crime we think really trying to understand the different ways that people envision nirvana in policing will help us really be able to set some strategies and priorities next slide please so the other piece of this is that we do need to commit in each engagement window and all along the way to keeping people informed and

[54:01] we've identified a variety of ways that we might seek feedback social media will absolutely be a big player in this we are creating an email list serve so for people who want more frequent updates a little more detailed updates specifically on the police department master plan will be invited to sign up there with their email we've put virtual or in-person events on this list realistically i think that for all of engagement window one and presumably parts of engagement window two we probably will be emphasizing virtual and online participation options we are going to do informal questionnaires as well as we are anticipating doing a we've budgeted for one survey by a professional survey company that tries to create a cross-representation feedback loop the council can consider we have not decided which window that's going to be in but my

[55:00] experience is that's generally more helpful when you have choices to make and priorities to establish and so it probably will be later in the process in engagement window two or more likely engagement window three we're absolutely seeking to partner with organizations who might be willing to put occasional updates or links to participation opportunities in their own newsletters because we find it's helpful rather than asking people to add to their email to just make sure we have meaningful information and emails they're already getting we do have a project website and we'll be doing a number of partner meetings next slide please okay so that brings me to the end of my presentation and we wanted to hear back from council members about whether you have any questions about this preliminary engagement planning um or any specific suggestions you'd like us to take into account as we enter window one and

[56:00] this is the end of the uh the presentation so um in addition to answering question number three this is also an opportunity for council members to weigh in on anything they've heard this evening or any suggestions you have for the process committee mary thanks bob and thanks sarah and um the whole committee that's been working on this um i have um i really don't have questions um i have some comments however and um one of them has to do with the final slide that was presented about the different kinds of channels that we have for reaching people um last night i spent a little bit of time kind of um listening through bits and pieces of um the somos boulder podcast and um i think that might be a really great opportunity for um

[57:03] for engagement and um and to kind of combine that with um kg and u's efforts and um and do that kind of call in like we've attempted before um so that's that's one comment and then um on that list i also didn't see good old-fashioned paper um to communicate with people like flyers and things like that so um that could be an effective way of reaching some folks that don't necessarily um have facility with um electronics um one of the things that i've noticed i've been in conversations and in meetings with chief harold and the topic of place management has come up in those conversations and how important that is in terms of um of elevating the quality of life and so in the engagement you know sarah you put

[58:01] together all these different groups of people um and not and i think it might be interesting to consider um place groups so um you know places that have issues that are different from the rest of the community and to try and reach out to um to groups on a place based um with a place-based approach and i will just say working with brenda rittenhauer to identify some neighborhoods for example as place-based approaches that might have specific challenges that they faced with crime or other issues that might have an interest in weighing in from that unique perspective so yeah that's really good advice thank you and um and then the other question i guess i do have a question is um you know we're finding ourselves right now still in a remote kind of um situation

[59:00] and i'm wondering as we move through the process what kinds of i guess strategies are you setting up in order to be able to go from um from being on a remote communication basis to a more in person um hopefully that will happen and and i'm just wondering if you have any kinds of of thoughts on that yeah one of the things mary that i think we'll be doing is um making a similar commitment the council has talked about that as we make a transition to in-person opportunities we will probably try our best to provide hybrid opportunities so some folks might be more comfortable coming back in person sooner than others we also have had some really great learnings um in this online space about some inclusivity benefits of having an online forum certainly from a convenience perspective but also people just feeling more comfortable providing

[60:00] their feedback from their own home than in an environment that might seem more governmenty or formal than what they're used to so i wouldn't want to go wholesale from virtual to in person i would like there to be some opportunities for both when we are in person so what we're focusing on right now is making sure that we stand up online tools that will stand the test of time that people can continue to participate in even when we go to in person and then we also know that the in person has the extra value of really building human to human connection so we will be implementing some of those opportunities when it's safe to do so great thank you sarah and thanks everyone um you're doing a great job appreciate it that's all i have great suggestions mary thank you so much i'm erin just a quick comment um thanks to everyone who's brought it to this point uh the engagement approach looks uh very thorough and it looks very similar to the open space

[61:00] master plan engagement process uh which i thought was incredibly successful so i think that that was a great template i'm glad to see you using it and i think this will also be a successful outreach firm so thanks for putting it together i do i do have to comment aaron that um you and mary did such a great job on the open space master plan process that we have borrowed copied and plagiarized much of the groundbreaking work that you and and the staff team did on that and incorporated that into um to um to this plan so we're running on your coattails and it really you know that's part of the reason why osmp stepped into a pilot phase they were the pilot first master plan to um try to respond to the engagement strategic framework and the lessons that we learned from them is that it holds pretty solid and we should follow that framework as much as possible and they iterated in some ways that we really loved so we're making sure we replica the replicability um piece um lives on it's great to hear

[62:02] well the credit goes to staff and the community members who participated for sure for the space process um yeah i don't see any other hands any other final comments or questions from council members um if um i see juni has her hand up and then after that i think wendy will bring us home with just a look forward junie yeah thank you for this presentation i think it was great as well and i think i just wanted to make a comment um about the outreach to the black community and i know the last time during our meetings we i think it's part of your um how do i put it part of the process and reaching out to the naacp but also i know right now a lot of students are online but cu is is a huge resource especially when you think of young people of color they have a lot of student groups and organizations and i think reaching out

[63:00] to them might be helpful as well they would tell you where exactly you know a lot of these young black people and other people of color are located as well in the community and i think mary's point was well taken i think again it goes back to what you said that you know people have different perspective on on policing right and different communities have different needs no matter what we hear when it comes to you know how people feel about policing so i think it's very important to get a sense of where some communities are so thank you for this presentation thank you juni i don't see any other council members why do you want us um to wrap us up sure um we have one last slide and carl it's just the next steps slide um right there yeah so just to cover our next steps um late

[64:01] march early april opening um our first broad public engagement window engagement window one i think most of the community will really experience that in early april we are starting with some students in late march because of their student schedule that window is going to close in early june we expect the systems overview report on the police department to be released in august and we are also planning a council check-in in august and then we've placed the project website at the bottom of this slide so that people who would like to keep up with the project or learn more about it can go to that site and you can also sign up for updates on that site as well great well thanks so much to the chief to uh wendy and to sarah for that great presentation and thank you in particular to um the council members um we're actually having a process subcommittee meeting on thursday and so while all of your great comments

[65:00] and suggestions refresh our minds we want to huddle again and talk about any adjustments we need to make you guys make some fantastic suggestions tonight so thank you so much for that feedback and we will continue to um push forward and then we'll i'll be reporting back to you in in august on what we've learned from that first engagement window so thank you so much to everybody thank you thanks bob thanks everybody thank you all and thank you to uh mallory and marina both for serving on the committee and for being here tonight i think we're ready to move on we're just a few minutes behind schedule probably primarily because of the long public service announcements we're ready to move on to the second topic of tonight's three topic presentation before i turn over to chris to introduce our next topic i do want to just kind of frame up from a process standpoint how this one's going to work which will be a little different than the first presentation we'll hear on a presentation by our finance team uh and they'll go all the way through their

[66:00] presentation and then we're gonna hear some recommendations from the the financial strategy committee of council i think mark's going to make that presentation on behalf of the committee and then there's five questions at the very end of the presentation for council to answer so let me suggest that we do this since there's no natural breaks and this is a relatively long presentation if you've got questions along the way that probably we should pause on and get answered right then because the slide is up and the comments just been made please raise your hand and i i've already indicated to um to cheryl and to mark that we may interrupt them from time to time with questions just raise your hand i'll watch for those and i'll look for natural pauses and then we'll jump in with our questions along the way and then just be prepared at the very end of the presentation from cheryl and cara and mark um that there will be five questions coming back to us with that i'll turn it over to you chris great thanks bob for teeing that up and um before i pass the presentation over to

[67:00] cheryl patel our chief financial officer i just wanted to tee up at a high level um while while sometimes talking about taxes or capital infrastructure doesn't always seem the most uh exciting topic when we really step back and reflect that the city of boulder is the steward of billions of dollars in uh public infrastructure that really is what makes you know daily life occur smooth here in the city from making sure that clean drinking water gets to your your home or business and the wastewater goes away and doesn't come back uh to the paths and streets that we uh drive and ride our bikes on um and the parks that we recreate in the open space that we we also enjoy um and all of that infrastructure takes uh funding to maintain to enhance to replace and how we do that in in an effective and efficient way is is really important and so this

[68:01] conversation as cheryl is going to tee up has been a conversation that is um spread over many decades actually of what's the best way to maintain our infrastructure um and so with that i'll pass it over to cheryl to begin the presentation thanks chris okay next next slide please so uh thanks again chris and and to my great team for all the work that they've put into this and also the finance uh strategy committee i'll start with a background of the last 10 years and the work that we have done here at the city related to our finances and capital infrastructure followed by just talking a little bit about this tax renewal and some of the projects that we're thinking about related to a possible renewal and then finally um council member wallach will talk about the financial strategy committee

[69:00] recommendations that the committee has been working on so next slide so we've talked about this a lot in in the past but i just wanted to remind some of the newer council members about the blue ribbon commission work that was done actually almost or over a decade ago this was a commission made up of community members staff to really look at our finances because at the time there was a very significant gap between revenues and expenditures that were identified the blue ribbon commission one focus on revenue stabilization and they really talked about the reason for this big gap was the fact of our decreasing productivity of sales tax along with the above average inflation of government input so what that really means is we have certain things like health care definitely construction costs which make

[70:02] up a significant part of our budget that have been rising the costs have been rising more than what we've seen as far as an increase in sales tax so it's really led to this gap situation that we saw back in the late 2000s a blue ribbon commission two met and they focused they turned their focus to expenditures and looking at ways that we as a city could enhance our organizational efficiency next slide so i want to talk about some of the steps that the city has taken related to the recommendations made by the blue ribbon commission we have renewed several different taxes since uh in the last decade so some of the renewals have been permanent renewal some temporary or fixed term renewals and most of the renewals that we've done are dedicated and i will uh point out that the blue

[71:01] ribbon commission did recommend that we look at permanent renewals that are flexible in nature so therefore not dedicated now there are reasons why we have done these dedicated taxes but that was the initial recommendation from that commission we removed the final um taber restriction on our mill tax revenue back in 2008 we've increased sales and use tax accommodation tax impact fees and other fees and just probably nine months ago or so we brought to you the expanded sales tax base including marketplace facilitators so we now collect sales tax from those third-party um facilitators on on platforms such as amazon moving to expenditures we've done a lot with budget prioritization we've done priority based budgeting it's

[72:00] now turned into our work on budgeting for resilience we've looked at compensation our pay for performance plan our health care benefits along with other benefits and we've made many service and process efficiencies along the way some of which are consolidating functions like some of the financial functions looking at our citywide contracts um consolidating those to save money and also looking at our it management of our software systems so there's a lot more but you know i'm just going to point out a few of those that we've done next slide so moving to the capital infrastructure recommendations made by the blue ribbon commission they really focus their time on financing methods and how to mitigate some of the future capital expenses they talked about pay as you go which is simply just using the money you

[73:01] currently have to pay for the projects and they said you know that's good if you have small dollar projects if you are in low inflationary time so you're not worrying about construction costs rising much faster than the money that's coming in and then they talked about debt financing and the need for that when you have large dollar amount large dollar pro projects high inflationary times and also using that when um the cost of borrowing is low like it is now and and mark will talk a little bit about financing as it relates to the possible extension of this tax in his section they talked about how can we mitigate future expenses and the one thing i just want to point out on this list is the uh you know their recommendation to not defer maintenance and basic renovation and you'll see there are projects on

[74:00] this list that uh relate to unfortunately because of budget constraints us deferring some of the maintenance that we should have been doing um all along next slide so what have we done from their recommendations we started in 2011 with our 49 million capital improvement bond this was a hundred projects throughout the city um followed by the community culture and safety tax so this is really the tax we're talking about this evening this uh first round of it was a three-year 0.3 sales tax that was for capital projects and there was some city projects some non-profit projects there and after the three years was up we went back to the voters and uh thankfully they passed a 43 million dollar phase two of this tax which is a four-year tax and this tax is the one we're talking

[75:01] about it's set to expire um at the end of 2021 and we said for this tax 80 percent of revenue collected would go towards city projects and 20 percent would go to non-profit and then also what the city did which i think is a huge step is developed a general fund capital fund so the city really never had um ongoing funding for general fund capital needs which is partly how we've gotten to the situation that we find ourselves in but we are now programming operating revenues that come in into the general fund for ongoing capital needs so in 2021 we budgeted around 6 million which is about 4 of the general fund revenue for uh general fund capital next slide so we wanted to talk about and we will

[76:00] get into i know the council has asked for information on kind of what kind of revenue is in the toolbox and we are planning to bring that back to council at our financial study session in april but we did want to bring up to you this evening what potential tax items do we know about that are out there we've heard that the county is considering some sort of affordable housing or and or transportation sales tax not sure on the timing we're thinking it might be 2022 based on discussions with them um as we all know we'll be talking about the library districting in the coming months and and how does that impact the tax structure here at the city we've heard about homeless services sales and use tax the climate action plan tax or the cap tax is expiring in march of 23 will be coming to council probably later

[77:02] this year early next year to talk about that and then something i think not many people are aware of but at the end of 2024 the general fund a portion of the sales and use taxes expiring and as you can see by the amount it's um going to have a pretty significant impact on our operations so we'll be talking to you about that as well in the coming year years i should say sorry next slide so this is just a chart of how our sales tax looks if we were not to renew or add any new taxes over the next um about 20 years and you'll see the community culture and safety tax is expiring followed by several others next slide i apologize this is hard to see but on the left hand side is the

[78:00] um total tax that boulder paid or boulder residents and others pay and this includes uh the state's portion the county's portion as well as rtd and a few other special districts but you'll see that the boulder currently is paying 8.85 which makes us the highest among our peers i will note though if you look at lakewood which is at 7.5 there's about a 1.35 percent difference so although you know we are high it's not very significant the difference between the high and the low and then on the right hand side that just represents the city's portion of the tax which for us is 3.86 again we're higher than most other of our peers but again the relative scale is not that large next slide

[79:02] so i don't know bob if we want to just stop there before i start talking about some project examples and ask if there are any questions about what i've presented so far for council members do we have any questions about the background before we move into possible uses of an extension cheryl i don't see any hands so listen okay great uh next slide please so um this just represents what are our unfunded capital needs in the next 20 years and i just want to point out um this really is mainly general fund departments um departments that don't have dedicated funding sources like osmp and it does not include utilities so if we take all of those out we're looking at about 300 million of unfunded needs for the next 20 years and i will say

[80:00] that's not all of our capital needs we have about 56 million that we do have a funding source for this just represents items that don't have a funding source departments have and you have a list of these projects with some detail as an attachment in your memo and i'm we're not going to go through all the projects this evening that's something that the finance strategy committee is going to make a recommendation on but we just wanted to give you an exam some examples and types of projects that we're looking at and we have um identified the projects as essential which is basic city functioning critical to life and safety and important valued by the community with clear legislative report for you and basically every single project that we're bringing to you fall into one of those two most important categories they have been

[81:00] vetted by the departments and the finance staff so we've been working on this list actually for several years but we revised it and are bringing you the most up-to-date this evening and they also have been identified by current or pending master plans so they're on these the master plans that exist i want to note the time frame we do have an immediate need for 66 million in the next uh two years about the the vast majority 144 million is the two to seven year time frame and then 84 million is beyond seven years next slide so here's just um some examples of the types of projects we're talking about you'll see that a lot of the requests are related to fire stations so we have several stations that um with average age over 45 years so

[82:00] stations two four and five and then station three which were in the process of uh building or will be building does not currently have admin space and with us vacating center grain there is a need for a fire admin space in that building so the estimated cost there is an over 10 million additional to that building cloud migration we realize um everything is going to the cloud we as a city need to do the same for cost security and redundancy reasons to fully implement vision zero transportation needs funding across the system boulder creek creek has um issues that that also need to be addressed and there are many uh athletic field improvements as well as park improvements slated in the uh parks and rec master plan that are on this funding

[83:00] list next slide so looking at our list which is 300 million and um this point three percent sales tax this is our initial estimate of the type of money that could be generated if this tax were to be renewed and this is based on our 2021 forecast and then we increase by three percent every year and i think the important thing to point out here is even if we did this tax for 20 years we would not be able to cover all of our unfunded needs especially if you add into that debt financing and the cost of that so um it certainly is important that we we get some funding mechanism but this need just is something that will most likely grow over time as well and that is all that i have for my presentation before i turn it over to council member

[84:01] wallach if anyone has any questions on this part of the presentation questions council members before we we hear from mark uh still no hands cheryl uh we may have some questions at the end and of course i know that you have a whole bunch of questions for us um at the end of the presentation so mark i think um you're representing the financial strategy uh committee of council and and uh are you gonna make your committee's going to make some recommendations now is that right yes i will temporarily be the master of ceremonies for the next few slides um first i wanted to thank um all participating members of the city staff who guided us through this conversation uh financial strategies as well as my colleagues uh junie and mary we've had some fairly um informative uh direct and robust conversations about this and we have several recommendations we'd like to make to you tonight

[85:01] um the first concerns the designated uses of funding from any uh tax that we might put in place next slide please again okay it is our recommendation that the vast vast percentage of these funds be dedicated towards city capital infrastructure projects we would recommend that at least ninety percent or more of the funding uh would be for that purpose uh as cheryl described our unfunded capital needs are so quite large far beyond the capacity to address from the general fund and the impact of continuing to defer capital expenditures can ultimately impact core services in addition delays lead to higher expenditures ultimately resulting from continued inflation of construction costs we think that there's a there is room for the remaining balance of approximately 10 percent or so

[86:01] raised from this tax could be used to address community projects selected from a grant pool uh through a robust community selection process that would expand opportunities to more community organizations if you recall in the prior ccs one and two programs some of the organizations that received funding included the dairy center for the arts the museum of boulder meals on wheels growing gardens and community cycle we would hope for a similar or greater breadth of participants going forward next slide please a key element of course in this is the term of the tax and the amount of the tax we have proposed not to alter the current tax rate of 0.3 um but we would like to extend it for a minimum of 10 years and we would request the

[87:02] council seriously consider an even longer 15 or 20-year extension in order to put our capital expenditure program on a firmer footing for the future this is really nothing more or less than a revenue stabilization program for our unfunded capital needs uh going forward um doing this permits a more rational planning process um and aligns with identified long-term capital expenditure requirements a longer term also permits for adjustment to capital expenditure needs that we have not identified but will surely arise over the next couple of decades and permits more input on those matters from future councils and finally a longer term tax permits more flexibility in the future issuance of debt instruments next slide please we are recommending that along with the tax renewal and extension that we also place on the ballot a

[88:00] question asking for voter approval for the authority to issue debt next slide and lastly in terms of public process the committee recommends that the process relating to the extension be focused primarily on framing the ballot question um initially this process would would utilize some outside expertise develop surveys or polls to gather broad community sentiment and input we also recommend forming a committee consisting an issue i thought was consisting of fsc members with community members although there's no requirement that it be fsc members to develop the community non-profit grant program and process and make recommendations for that portion of the tax revenues if approved by the voters with respect to projects under the uh the city portion of the tax measure

[89:01] it was our thought that fsc would work in collaboration with city staff to identify and recommend to the council for their approval or disapproval uh initial projects and project categories um it's our hope that we can uh do all of this and get to a more stable platform for addressing our capital needs as cheryl mentioned there is no way we're going to get to all of them uh we will always be making those decisions um but you know at 10 years at a 10-year extension raising 114 million dollars we would only be able to address 39 of our current unfunded needs and that number of courses is going to grow over time so we are recommending the most robust program that council can uh will approve and with that i'll turn it back to cheryl

[90:03] unless my colleagues have questions i think you have one more slide on on uh process maybe you could go through that real quick and then we can open up the questions the timeline i think okay thanks so um depending on the answers to the questions tonight um our timeline we would start work right away on this because we do recognize that there's a short time frame between now and when um we need to decide on ballot items we would work on any polling or outreach in the next few months along work along with working with the community members on the non-profit portion of this we hope to bring an update to you on kind of where we're at at the april finance study session and then work on finalizing recommended projects um structures like the specifics of the

[91:00] ballot language may through july and come back to council in july with final recommendations next slide so here's the questions that we have for you this evening and bob i'll turn it back over to you if you wouldn't mind leading counsel with these sure um maybe before we uh ask questions of counsel let's check in to see if we have um questions of of you or mark um i do i do have a couple of questions and i see aaron's hand up aaron please go forward well thanks for that cheryl and mark really appreciate the work mark you and the financial strategy committee have done thank you for that um my question is is are you imagining that the initial proposal would have any specific projects built into it or or are you thinking about just creating a process for deciding what projects get funded you know i'm not sure if we came to a final decision on that um

[92:00] i my personal view would be to identify a couple of projects but essentially establish categories and process for projects to later be identified and approved by the council okay thanks i have some thoughts on that but i'll wait till the questions you have thanks aaron uh sam and then rachel great and i will also give the thanks to the financial strategy committee this is super important and much appreciated um my question is about debt so you briefly touched on the idea that we would authorize um the issuance of debt and then the memo speaks to it as well but were you thinking about that debt as like we issue debt and then we pay it back as part of the um revenues from the tax or was that debt issuance above and beyond um what's the revenues from the tax

[93:03] that's another question i don't think we really look that closely i think we probably thought of it mostly in terms of using the proceeds from the tax to service whatever debt we're issuing although we do have capacities now if you recall the the last memo in the uh in the council packet we currently have capacity to issue um in terms of financial prudence uh more than a hundred million dollars of additional debt and still keep our uh very strong financial rating um but we did not integrate that with the potential debt issuance that would arise from um this tax measure got it and so your recommendation if i understood it correctly is that we proceed with debt financing i think one of the

[94:00] questions i'll have now and in the future is is that just related to the revenues being raised or since your financial strategy committee looking holistically uh are you going to bring us a recommendation about um debt issuance that goes above and beyond the revenues that would come from it i think that would be a subsequent conversation for the fsc i think at the moment we're looking to obtain the authorization to issue debt based on these revenues got it thank you thanks sam uh rachel yep um bearing in mind i've only been on council during a pandemic awful budget year i wanted to get a little bit more information on the dedicated nature at the 90 would be as i understood dedicated allocated um tax and that sort of made me think of the golf course you know we we put five million dollars towards the golf course this year during

[95:00] a really tight budget year and that just felt um i don't know awkward and and maybe not where i would have put money this year so would we be doing that would we be dedicating like we mentioned fields and creek upgrades like the fire station seems first i'm sorry to interrupt i think we both shared a degree of discomfort with that particular expenditure um but i think what we're trying to do is create a mechanism for council to make those decisions uh we would identify with staff particular expenditures and categories of expenditures and send them to the council for their ultimate judgment um uh a lot of this then they don't sound totally dedicated like if we're well noticed i'm just confused by how much we would be dedicating and to what it's dedicated to uh unfunded capital expenditures and

[96:01] as the memo points out that could be everything from hvac and plumbing in our city buildings it's bridges and sidewalks it could be broad ran broadband traffic signal uh modernization um i t infrastructure upgrading so that we remain on top of uh you know of our i.t uh and it can be restoration of enhancement of parks and recreation assets um it is not programmatic it is not intended for uh operating programs other than this type of how should i put it generally more boring capital expenditure needs but totally essential capital expenditure needs can i comment oh um yeah can i jump in um mark and just just kind of elaborate a little bit um thanks for the question rachel and what what um was presented at the beginning of this presentation

[97:00] was the essential and important projects all of the projects that would be considered the majority of them are general fund-funded only projects and the focus was on the essential ones and so all of these projects are don't have dedicated funding that's that's the whole thing unlike the the um golf course which comes strictly from dedicated parks funds which is why we could not spend them on anything else which is the problem with dedicated funds so these would come they're already defined by the master plans most of them are if not all of them are strictly general fund only projects that have been identified in the um in the master plans so um i think to your to your question is no they're not dedicated they

[98:00] are already things that the master plans have identified as necessary thanks for that clarification i guess what i read was you know there were the top four that were i think fire station transportation creeks and fields so it seemed like if we were dedicating we would be dedicating to those four and um you know if it's another year like this year i guess it would feel again i wouldn't want to necessarily tie a future council's hands to upgrading fields if they're in the middle of a pandemic so that's my concern thanks great um chris i think has a comment yeah just to flush that out a little bit further uh for for you rachel is typically if if we were to go forward with renewal of this sales tax um the way the ballot language is written is really what drives how the money can be used so um in 2014 and 2017 the ballot language has

[99:00] written that it's for the use of capital infrastructure and then it goes on to list some of the specific projects that can be used um that the money will be used for then it describes some categories to create some flexibility in um in how the money is used so um that's part of the importance of how the ballot title is crafted within the rules of of uh tabor and and the way that we have to write ballot titles um but that's what i think mark was describing in terms of um it's nice to be able to flag some of the specific projects so that voters have an idea of what this will fund and then those general categories of areas um uh for for more more information so does that help answer it a little further yeah i guess um i'm you know if if the ballot language is going to say that this is for uh capital funds why are we additionally saying 90 of them are going to be

[100:01] somehow differently dedicated or is there a way to make it loose if or a little bit less tethered if a future council needs it to be so yeah there's flexibility and and what the the 90 piece of really getting into the second question is is around um the first community culture safety tax and then the the first renewal so ccs1 and ccs2 were both um there was a portion of the tax that was used to fund um community organizations nonprofit organizations capital projects um and so part of the question is uh if if we want to continue to use a portion of this tax to fund those uh improvements and if so we would just need to describe that somehow uh in in the ballot language so that way there's the voters have an idea of the intent of the use of the funds rachel in in recognition of the the greater need

[101:01] for capital expenditure funds for the city uh we reduced the the community um project portion of this from 20 in ccs2 i believe it was um to 10 we're not trying to um uh limit uh council's discretion in future years and if this is a 15 or 20 year tax um you want to preserve as much flexibility for future councils as as you can they will have their view of what needs to be done and they will have new emergencies that we don't anticipate at the moment and that they will need to address using these funds so i mean there's no point in being too um too limiting for future councils that's not our intent this is maybe a good time for me to jump in with my question um it's somewhat similar to aaron's um so i think we've talked about the 90

[102:00] percent and that would be dedicated to city um city projects and it sounds like the committee will come back with maybe some specific projects that might be enumerated in the ballot and there may be some general categories for future councils to allocate um my question really relates around the ten percent the advantage of um identifying specific community projects or non-pro project profit projects in 2014 and 2017 obviously was those organizations were highly motivated to help get the ballot measure passed and those ballot measures passed by significant majorities is it the intention of the financial strategy committee to identify um specific nonprofits and specific nonprofit projects this year before we get to ballot which may be challenging given the time frame and the fact that there probably are not a whole lot of shovel ready projects out there or are you rather intending to allocate 10 percent of the tax

[103:00] with a process for a subsequent grants a grant pool that might be applied in future years um could could you comment on that mark or anybody from the committee um i believe the second is is more the direction that we're heading in um we don't want to restrict the potential recipients we don't know how many projects are ready to go and i think it's important for um the there to be a process by which uh any community organization can participate uh if they can meet the standards and defining the standards is also part of the uh part of the work to be done going forward bob you you bring up a really good point about identifying the um organizations so that they can help with the campaign to pass the ballot measure um i do think that we're in a different situation right now one one of the things that came up during the conversations is

[104:00] that um a shovel-ready kind of approach tends to favor larger more well-off organizations and so hence we put in the planning grant opportunity and as i've been sitting here listening to the conversations um i think maybe another approach to it might be something where you have a temporary kind of a a localized ppp sort of thing where you help out organizations that have had a hard time um during during the pandemic so there's i think there's an opportunity to have a different approach but i think your point is well taken is how can we frame it in a way that motivates the passage of the ballot measure because as mark mentioned these are generally very boring projects however essential essential and fundamental to

[105:00] city operations thank you mary any other council questions before we turn questions back to us i don't see any hands up right now okay let me suggest this by way of process some of these questions are probably relatively easy and don't require a whole lot of discussion so let me just go through the first couple if you're in favor just flash a thumbs up on the screen if you have a comment either pro or con please raise your hand so question number one is counsel in favor of um having the committee and staff work on uh preparing uh the work necessary and ultimately the ballot language to seek an extension of the 0.3 sales tax this year thumbs up or or raise your hand if you have a comment looks like we have a lot of thumbs okay great yes but just um with the presentation up not everyone can see everyone's face or hands or anything

[106:02] do we want to take that down and have you read us the questions one by one maybe i'm happy to do that let me just call up the questions myself thank you good suggestion aaron thank you for that um so next question is i'll just read it out loud does council support allocating 90 plus of proceeds to city capital projects um uh in the past just by the context in the first capital uh uh infrastructure safety tax 2014 was about one-third uh community projects two-thirds uh city projects that got shifted to 80-20 and i think what the committee is recommending is at least 90 percent uh city projects so either thumbs up or hand raised i see a couple hand raises so let's call on those first um aaron and then sam so um i know that um you know the city has a lot of unfunded needs right so we need to to put a pretty high priority on those but the the previous sales tax rounds that have gone to some

[107:01] of the local nonprofits have been really transformational um for those organizations but also made some then really improved the quality of life here in the city you think about um like the dairy arts renovation they're they're a number of the museum of boulder um that opened a couple years ago we've really accomplished some amazing things with that tech source in the past so i i'm not sure that we want to lock ourselves down to 10 um you know i i get that we're going to be creating a mechanism whereby future councils will decide what to fund but maybe we we at a like a 10 to 15 um range something like that so that you know if there's an opportunity in one year to you know fund a transformational project that the council has some latitude to be able to do that so something like that i just i feel like 10 percent as an absolute floor might be a little low thank you aaron sam and then i'm going to call on myself um i i think it's very important that we

[108:01] listen to mary's and others many others caveats about dedicated um taxes and i don't think this would be dedicating ten percent to um nonprofits and ninety percent to the city in stone right so i think um aaron's right we should talk about what the number is but i think we need to realize we're going to present the intention of this council as we bring it forward but that does not bind us in any way to a certain distribution i do not believe um i don't know who is filling in for tom tonight but we could turn and double check with the city attorney's office that that's true um also and like aaron i think it may be 15 85 but i do think you know one of the things that's come out of the recommendations from the um strategy committee is we do have some major unfunded city infrastructure needs

[109:00] and we need to acknowledge that we have by creating the capital fund within the general budget but that is woefully inadequate to any of the big projects that need to be funded so i don't know that there's a right number for tonight um i'd like to send it back to the financial strategy committee to juggle around i would be willing and interested in going to maybe an 85 15 split but these are guidelines and i'd love for the city attorney's office to weigh in on to what extent would we be bound to some proportion um if we intended it that way but did not dedicate it in that way aaron poe do you want to comment on sam's question sure and i think it will be very important how we draft the ballot language um i think we could build it in a way where there is part that is discretionary and i'm not a tabor expert and that's something that we can work on and check back in with as time goes

[110:01] um but my understanding is it is that we we probably could um if he wanted to have a certain part set and then maybe another you know ten percent certainly going that way and then up to another five percent um we would just have to we have to really watch our language thank you aaron i'm gonna comment and then i see mark has his hand up as well i actually agree with sam and aaron um i want to observe that when we did the tax the first time in 2014 [Music] almost 10 million dollars of that tax went to some projects um and that was just a three-year tax similarly in 2017 when we had a four-year tax again it was almost 10 million dollars for for various projects and now we're talking about attacks that will be anywhere from 10 to 20 years and at 10 years uh 10 is only 10 million dollars and 10 million dollars is not much money to um distribute over a 10-year period of time so i would

[111:00] uh support um aaron and sam that we we have that percentage be either higher as built into the ballot measure or at least flexible so that future councils have the opportunity to um to allocate more of that money to non-profit projects if worthy projects come along uh mark and then mary yeah i want to comment on aaron's suggestion which i thought was a a well-considered suggestion um if we could do something along the lines of 10 with the discretion of a council to go to 15 that makes some sense i only want to point out that that unlimited discretion will ultimately lead to more and more money going to community projects than to unsexy unnoticed underground capital infrastructure projects that is always the temptation for any council because one is

[112:02] highly visible and one is necessary but not visible and i would urge us not to open the doors too wide for uh for unlimited shifting of funds thank you mark mary yeah i would agree with mark i hear you all and i think i think it's a good suggestion but it is a reminder that one of the reasons that we're having this conversation is because of the dire need and the dire need is something that we hear about kind of on a on a steady drip basis when we hear about the conditions of roads when we hear about um unfunded transportation needs and vision zero um you know when whenever we hear you know park maintenance things like that those are the steady steady that's the

[113:00] steady steady public feedback that points towards these kinds of expenditures that you know as mark said they aren't sexy but without addressing them we have no city so um so i you know i would like us to keep that in mind thank you uh mary juni yeah thank you bob i think my comment was actually closer to yours and i took my hand down because i thought you really um responded to the thought that i had but i think i really like aaron's idea and i'm thinking maybe the idea is to first decide whether it's going to be a 10 5 10 20 years and then we will know how much how much higher we're willing to go because i was trying to do the math just like you bob and i'm not a great

[114:01] mathematician but i think that's 2.6 million a year if we go to 20 years so and then if we go to only um five years it's less so i think that might be i guess the threshold of looking at where we are we gonna go higher or lower based on what we decide on the length of the tax itself that's a great point juni and maybe that's maybe that's the order of of of things is maybe the committee should come back with a recommendation on on length of tax and that will inform us as to the allocation for the for the non-profit groups any other comments or observations on question number two okay let's move on to question number three question number three is does council support exploring a minimum of 10 years up to 20-year extension of the tax so 10 to 20 is council content for the committee to come back with a recommendation in that range maybe

[115:00] that's just a thumbs up we have any comments on that okay it looks like we got a lot of thumbs there uh question number four um subject to sam's great question about what we mean by debt financing is council comfortable with with the committee coming back with a recommendation on the use of debt financing in parallel with this tax increase are you all comfortable thumbs up with um with a debt recommendation in parallel subject to ham's comment aaron you have a comment yeah and i'll just say that these historic historically low interest rates present us with a remarkable opportunity so definitely support it great point erin any other comments on question number four okay it looks like there was support there and finally question number five long question is council comfortable utilizing the financial strategy committee to explore tax structure initial projects uh initial project selection ballot

[116:02] framing as well as exploring community collaboration criteria and process for future community non-profit project phases let me just make a comment here i had the opportunity in 2011 to serve on uh a ad hoc committee appointed by jane jane was a relatively new uh city manager then and um council in 2011 was faced with a renewal of attacks um that renewal was going to generate 49 million dollars over a period of time the city at that time had 700 million dollars in um deferred capital projects uh needs and council didn't want to make that decision so we stood up a committee jane stood up a committee and i served on that committee and they organized us i think in february or march and we had to make a recommendation by july and it was tough because we had a huge huge learning curve and so i guess the question is are we can do we want to stand up a community committee which we could um and have that committee

[117:00] um uh learn about what we've talked about tonight and make recommendations or are we happy to have the financial strategy committee which an existing committee which with lots of knowledge and experience obviously reaching out to the community as they determine appropriate and have that committee serve as our guiding committee this spring and summer comments aaron sorry to be the first one out of the game all the time here but um yeah i i am um it's a always a tight time frame but the pandemic year makes um standing up a community group more challenging and so i'm comfortable uh relying on her very capable financial strategy committee but i do want to make a couple of points uh which is that i think um to what some other people have said earlier like like bob mentioned that having some certainty about what some of the projects will be i think is really helpful for

[118:00] the community to understand what they would be getting with a renewed tax and if there are a couple of community projects that that might be shovel ready or would be ready within a couple years they could make it in that helps build community support because that organizational organizations um work to support the tax and um and also proponents of that particular organization always come out in favor so i i think it makes sense that with something that's 10 to 20 years long there's no way we're going to pin down the entire list of projects right we need to set up criteria we need to set up a process so that future councils can have a way of deciding what projects get funded over time but i would i would recommend that we do come out of the starting gate with some at least a handful of um high priority important to the community projects that we would make a pledge that we would be doing in the next you know two to four years um because i think

[119:00] i think the community would appreciate that and i think it would increase the chances of passage um as well thank you aaron sam and then mary so i generally want to agree with what aaron said um it would be great um for the non-profit side if we had exemplar projects the one thing i'm a little concerned with is that we get ahead of ourselves and say these projects meet a criteria set that we haven't established yet so i think one of the the only challenges i can see in featuring non-profit projects as projects that will definitely be funded is if we don't have a process that they've gone through already how can we know that so i i would like the committee to wrestle with that tough question which is you know can you say ahead of time what you're going to fund as far as non-profit projects but coming to the other 85 or 90 percent i think it would be super helpful to the community to know what kind of capital projects

[120:01] could be funded out of this so um i don't know exactly what the committee envisions for which ones are already covered by cips and which ones aren't or which ones are in the cip plans for say utilities but are way way out i think it's also to mark's point you know these are quote unsexy but some of them involve our water supply so one of the key functions of city government in my opinion is to make sure that the infrastructure of the city works and is robust for a very long period of time and so as i think about some of the presentations we've had about some of the failing water infrastructure water supply infrastructure and flood management infrastructure i think it would be very useful in for the strategy committee to bring back the council a suggestion about length and a suggestion about distribution like whether it's 90 10 or 85 15 but then within

[121:03] the big bucket that is capital projects that we say that these are city control projects that we definitely want to have happen and if the voters says yes that these things will happen and i i think the examples of water or transportation are very helpful for people to see what those quote unsexy projects are because if we have a failing water supply system or failing sewer system it is something that people will notice and they'll be very upset about and it's a lot easier to fix or replace than it is to repair i guess i have a strong preference that we look at a 10-year tax and the reason for that is because it is really hard to see more than 10 years forward and you know we have run into situations in the past where something that looked clear for a very very long tax extension as as other member council members have

[122:01] pointed out you know been dedicated in a way that didn't give flexibility so i guess i do understand why a longer tax is helpful for a lot of reasons but i think um to me 10 years makes a lot of sense 20 is getting pretty far out thanks barry you had your hand up but it's down do you have a comment no um no no i it it's been covered okay great uh i don't see any of the hands up i gotta um comment on uh what aaron said and also what sam said uh first i agree with sam about the 10 years i mean i'm not morally opposed to 15 or 20 um but it becomes very very challenging i think to to um gauge out 15 or 20 years and i realized that as mark did the math for us that that a 10 year tax only covers 39 percent of what we believe our needs are right now that doesn't mean that 10 years from now we can't go back to the community and ask them the question again and then fund the next five or ten years worth of

[123:00] taxes doesn't foreclose us from asking for more i think the longer out we go the riskier it becomes in trying to predict what our needs are in the well into the 2030s and also i think um i would guess the pollsters would tell us that the longer the tax uh the less community support there will be i don't know how what that correlation is but that just my gut tells me that the longer and that's one of the reasons why we asked for only a three-year and four-year tax initially we're obviously approaching this a little differently so i would i would probably tend to support sam on that i also agree with aaron that um while um because we're going out to 10 years or more it may be difficult for us to allocate all of the money and we probably shouldn't allocate all the money but i do think it's it is important to earn voter trust by having specific projects i don't know if it's a third of the projects or half of half the money but i think that we should have very specific projects identified so the voters know what they're getting and then we'll have categories of projects maybe transportation or parks

[124:01] for the rest of it and let future councils decide um but i so i support both both erin and sam's suggestion mary you have your hand up yeah um i just wanted to um comment that i i um it'll be a balance between um you know the the length of the tax the duration of the tax versus the opportunities for doing the debt financing um and then you know taking advantage of the fact that we have really low interest rates along with um very high escalation rates of construction costs so so balancing those i think will will determine the length of the recommendation for the length of the tax and and the communication plan i think will be critical is how do we communicate to the community um the importance but but you bring up a good point is

[125:00] um you know at the higher the the time frame for the tax goes the less support there is from the community so um i think that's that's worth asking um diving more deeply into and getting an answer i don't see your hands up um this was a good discussion here at the end i don't know that we actually answered the question which is is council we'll just do this with a thumbs up is council content to allow the financial strategy committee with obviously appropriate community engagement to actually go out and make these recommendations to us rather than standing up a new committee thumbs up on the committee serving good aaron you have a final comment well just uh mary that was a great point that you just made and i saw there was something about the statistically significant outreach are we planning on doing a poll to the community at all because i mean polling on the community's interest in like a 10 versus 15 versus 20 year could be very instructive yes um that is that is part of the plan

[126:02] either polling or a survey um statistically valid survey one or the other and um we have had conversations about um the committee being the ones that formulated that survey or work with the pollster fantastic so that can be a way to maybe help guide us in picking some of those making some of those choices about the amount that we allocate towards specific projects versus left up to future council's discretion and the length of the tax be very interesting to hear about in surveys or goals great any final comments from council nearing the end of this one let me ask a question of both staff and the committee did you um did you get everything you need from council do you guys have marching orders and direction on what to do between now and the time you come back to us in april yes yes thank you i think we have a pretty good idea great great well thank you so much for serving and

[127:00] if council members don't have further questions i think we're done with this topic thank you all who presented we are um 23 minutes ahead of schedule which is great if if council doesn't mind i think we'd like to plow through and and not take a break and and wrap up our evening so with that i'd uh like to turn it back to chris for introduction of our third and final topic great thanks for our final topic for this evening is a demo and preview of the new city website uh so to kick off the presentation i'm going to turn it over to sarah huntley who will then uh introduce the rest of the team oh and you're muted sarah good evening again council i'm delighted to um sarah you're hard to hear yeah better uh check yourself on sarah i think you may be uh

[128:00] plugged into the wrong one your headset doesn't look lit up my friends can you hear me now yes yes okay thank you i apologize for that my headset does not appear to be working this evening or at least for this part of the evening um i am delighted to tee up the conversation um with you all on the next topic which

[129:00] is a demo of our website work to date i'm representing both myself and my department communication and engagement and also innovation and technology so jennifer douglas is my co-executive sponsor on this tonight you're going to receive a presentation from brian bullock in the communications department and leslie labreck from it and what they want to share with you today is the iterative work that's been happening to transform our website i know the website has been an issue for um many of us in communications in the city as well as council in the community um and we are eager to unveil a new website um before the end of the year um we're kind of in an in-between stage at the moment so we've done um some work and have some parts of the website the new website live for the purposes of a beta launch but we also um have are still working on

[130:00] the back end to transition much of our content over to the new site so you may be seeing um sort of if you're looking at the beta site an incomplete product it is best practices for us to be able to get feedback from the community as we go and this can is going to continue to be an iterative process all the way through with feedback from the community influencing us for the next couple of years i also want to put this project in a little bit more context to explain that it is part of a digital transformation effort overall um and in addition to updating our website i.t and communications and other departments are working on other enhanced features for digital engagement and participation by our community including the possibility of some more consistency in pay portals and things like that so people can do quite a bit more city business using the website that's all i have for opening remarks i'm going to turn over to brian and leslie to share their presentation

[131:00] and after they give you a brief demo and update you on the project work to date we'd be happy to entertain questions or take any feedback thank you sarah can everybody hear me okay great okay brian's our brian sharing our slides okay so if you want to put us on the next slide there brian okay so project phases we have been working on studying our website since about 2016. so the heuristic study

[132:01] really put us on the path to researching our information architecture and when i say information architecture really referring to how the stuff is organized on our website during the web strategy phase we conducted various different kinds of research such as user surveys both with our staff and external users as well as user testing where we would assign users a task and ask them to think out loud and we videotape them doing the exercise as well as we did some card sorting where we asked our users to show us how they would organize our content in a way that made sense to them one of the main deliverables out of that phase of the project were web page wireframes and those were based on our various content types so some of our content types include things such as project pages servicer program pages etc these wireframes were given to us and then we gave those to the vendor that

[133:00] we're working with now and we're currently in the implementation phase with a beta version of the website that we've launched the beta version is just a small subset of the regular website and includes examples of several of our content types that i just mentioned but with real web page content in there so we're continuing to collect data from the website so we can learn from it and start you know working on like the things that weren't working and just because we've been studying our website since 2016 we've been making improvements ever since then we've been implementing several of the lessons learned so far such as you know trying to fix and optimize our search engine as well as cleaning up and consolidating old and outdated content okay next slide brian so these are our current website lessons learned so the data on how people use our site this is essentially from january 2020 to

[134:00] january 2021 the average visit's about two minutes they come into the website they go to about two or three pages about eighty percent of the people are brand new people that have never been to the website and about 34 is traffic coming from boulder and about 66 from colorado and over half of the people that come to our website come to us on a mobile device in terms of what we can improve this is from our work with that uh information architecture study that we did in 2018 so and then top requests for improvement better navigation improved search and an updated look and feel so our website vision so all the studies and projects that we've been doing up to this point have really helped us to gain valuable insights into our users pain points and really the lessons learned from all that is what's informed our website vision so we need a website that's more

[135:00] intuitive and easier to use as well as more efficient for our staff to update and our information needs to be consistent uh in terms of how our content is structured and how it's presented the design that we currently have was implemented in 2013 so it's very old and outdated and it needs to have a more modern and visually engaging design so our plan with this website once we launch it and going forward is to continue to gather user research so we continue to iteratively improve our website based on what our users are telling us so in terms of features and functionality with the new site since we know that you know over half of our traffic comes from mobile devices we have to make sure that our website works well for mobile it's fast loading and it has a responsive design that's we have to have that and then when we talk about accessible we're talking about a website that that works well for users with

[136:00] disabilities in the us alone roughly 20 percent of users have some sort of disability and around 13 percent have a severe disability our new website is being designed to adhere to a minimum of level a a in the web content accessibility guidelines we'll continue to offer machine based translation using google translate and we also have other we have a communication engagement staff member who's helping us directly translate a lot of our content into spanish and the new website since it's user centered is going to focus on getting people to the things that they need and the how they need to interact with us more directly instead of being organized by departments similar to how it's organized now departments will still have a dedicated presence on the website but a lot of that content is going to be elevated and organized and be able to be filtered into different user-focused views so in addition to us having a new search

[137:01] engine they're also going to be able to filter and search within popular pages such as projects trails and parks we're going to have a more robust alert system that's going to allow us to not only add alerts for all through the whole site but departments will be able to add alerts with their specific sections as well if there is content that they need to alert uh users to and then we're going to have improved calendar function functionality so people will have the ability to download events add them to their personal calendars and they'll also be able to subscribe should they want to be updated to events on the website so content management and governance so we're using a new open source content management system drupal it's an industry standard for many governments websites and due to its open source nature there's a lot of additional modules and plug-ins

[138:00] available to extend the system beyond what we go live with we'll be able to add other things we're adding governance and quality control so you know content can will be reviewed before it's published making sure it's accurate and up to date we're going to be consolidating content that's appearing maybe appearing in several department locations now that'll be consolidated into one location um and then in terms of you we're going to have guidance and training to help our authors create content in a clear and consistent way using things such as plain language principles and helping so that our content is a lot easier to find and understand so here's our implementation timeline so right now we're currently in transitioning the content we have the new content type so we're taking content and we're putting it for example if it's a project we're putting it in the project template brian will show some of that kind of stuff in the demo

[139:00] and we're working to translate our trans we can talk now content transition from the old to the new and that's what we're doing now and within about april 2021 we should wrap that up and then we are anticipating a full website launch in may 2021 we want to make sure that we do this right but in terms of migration we started with about 5700 pages and we're only looking to migrate about a thousand so we've really consolidated you know put stuff together and removed a lot of duplicate content and consolidated content into specific content types so the next slide we're going to talk about user input and this one i'm going to turn over to brian thanks leslie um hopefully everyone can hear me okay um i'm brian bullock i am a communication manager with the communication engagement department very excited to work with leslie as the representative of the information technology department

[140:01] innovation technology department on this project and partnership we launched the beta for this website on october 5th and as sarah kind of alluded to and her opening statement is that this beta is very kind of a stripped down user experience we've never launched a city website this way this is new we're seeing more municipal governments take this approach city philadelphia city of boston a couple examples that immediately come to mind where you put out a product that's not complete but you try to get feedback on it at that stage the idea being that it's not so complete that you couldn't actually use that feedback to implement meaningful changes um and so we've had a pretty decent amount of traffic on the beta website since launched on october 5th i'm over 11 000 page views and we've had nearly 400 feedback submissions on beta and when we say that there's really two primary ways people can provide feedback one is we have a br builder page the city is online engagement um web platform that we promoted heavily on

[141:00] social media with the various e-newsletters as well to build awareness of this project we've also re-engaged community members who provided input in 2018 and 2019 in our prior phases of work for this project to both thank them for that input let them know how it was used as well as welcome further input and then we also have a pop-up box that appears when you visit the beta website that allows users to provide feedback directly on the page to where they are and if they're so inclined to provide additional feedback on be her bolder and so we're getting a regular stream of feedback on the beta website just as we do currently on the external the current city website and that information is really helpful and so we'll give you a look at the data we have right now we're going to collect this on an ongoing basis the plan is that we will always get community input user input and we'll use that to assess what changes might be needed to the website and they could be as simple as improving content creating content that doesn't exist and it could be a certain feature that might need to be developed if we see a big trend in terms of requests for functionality

[142:03] so the input review so far today we have a few survey questions that we've asked people and the idea is based on the very limited content available because the beta is only maybe 20 or so pages how easy or difficult does the new website seem to be to use and um you know what the most important question we really feel that we're trying to answer this website is is it easier to use than the current city website and we did a lot of benchmarking in our prior work to really figure out what was working well and what wasn't with the previous city website so we can directly compare experiences specific tasks or services people are trying to find or accomplish and compare them on the new website and measure did we move the needle and if not how do we do that um so this level it's really just asking first impression so based on the limited content what do you think or please that you know roughly two-thirds say it seems like it's easy um and hopefully once there's more content they'll be able to more fully assess that

[143:02] so the second question we kind of asked um among them others was basically limited content available at this website seem to be easy to use in the current website um of course we um our goal is really to make the best uh user experience possible in the current website but we'd like to start with at least knowing that we feel like we make good progress from where with the current city website so we can continue to build on that um and so we'll obviously continue to get usability information the best way to really validate how easy to use the website is is to actually run people through testing and to measure that but based on the survey data we've heard is that um 60 so far say they think that it does appear to be easier to use we're hoping we can win that 20 over that said they are unsure um of course as well as the remain 20 um once there's more content available on the website and they can better assess how they can find that information and then uh lastly one of the things we ask people is does the new website design reflect folder we understand that design is very subjective it's very

[144:01] difficult to win consensus with any design whether it's a website or something else but our hope is that we really reflect our amazing unique community and the needle we were trying to thread here was really driven by the community feedback that we received which was that boulder is a very special unique place it's a hub for innovation it's very modern in somewhat in many regards but also we have this unique open space that we all love and know and cherish and so to incorporate the visual beauty of our community as well as kind of the heart and soul of boulder and that sort of economic engine of boulder and so um we're happy to see the initial feedback is that people seem to think the design is in the right direction the design is intentionally um integrates a lot of white space and really leans to photographs to help tell the visual story of boulder really felt the most compelling way to showcase boulder is to actually show boulder because it's a beautiful community and then you use some light touches in terms of natural elements and some of the iconography

[145:01] some of the natural colors in the design that you'll see here shortly so we asked people what the first impression of the website was this was an open-ended question and we created a quick word cloud that shows the most common words that people use being larger we're very happy to see that kind of clean and modern which are a couple of the objectives for ones that were came up high as well as easy to use so at a very high level what we're looking for with all those feedbacks we continue to collect it is themes we want to make sure that there's a plurality of users sharing that something's not working or working really well is before we try to come up with solutions to address it and one thing that seemed kind of clear is that people were very happy with the general look and feel of the new site um overwhelmingly um they seem to find the new design to be at least appear to be easier and simpler to navigate based on the limited content available and we did a lot of people provide feedback on specific pages and we got a lot of good comments on the projects and

[146:02] service pages and we'll show those here shortly um which we have surfaced those in a new way that's not currently available on our website that you can find information agnostic department without understanding city bureaucracy and to understand what the heck are they building in my neighborhood or how do i find this service and accomplish this task that i'm working on areas for improvement we heard a lot of people talk about content that wasn't currently available we recognize this as a new approach to kind of launching a site some people may not be as familiar with it or might think something should have been on the beta that wasn't the use of white space particularly on the desktop view and some people said that the design could be tightened in some ways and so we'll be looking at that and we want we did intentionally want to increase the amount of white space because our current design is rather kind of flat and cluttered and to aid with visual navigation so i think it'll be a matter of kind of finding the right balance there the naming conventions by that i mean kind of what the buckets of content were called we actually got those buckets directly

[147:02] from user feedback and so in our prior scope of work we did card sorting where essentially it's like a sticky note exercise where you ask someone to say hey take all the stuff and organize it and not only put it into a pile but label that pile and so that's where you got a lot of that information we'll have to validate those to make sure that they resonate with their community and they're clear and of course we'll adjust them as necessary and then we've got a number of questions about search search is not currently available on the beta it's certainly a priority an area we want to focus on and is currently in development as well as the translation ability is not currently enabled as leslie mentioned earlier there will be machine generated translations on our current website they will however be much more prominent so they're easier to find and they're currently kind of hidden in the footer of our web our current website whereas they'll be in the top right corner with a prominent button on our new website and we do have a subset of content that um is it professionally translated in spanish a large part of that has been translated by our new um

[148:01] relatively new i should say language access program manager um and excited to continue to grow that is that work progresses over this year in part uh based on feedback through the language access plan engagement um so with that that's kind of the end of our formal presentation we have one closing slide we'll share at the end happy to answer any questions at this point or we can transition to the the beta walk through and then answer any questions at that point let's pause and see if there are any questions before you take us through the beta great uh any questions from council members or comments i have one leslie um you kind of alluded to this about the migration you mentioned you're going to migrate um of the 5 700 pages you're going to migrate only about a thousand i noticed myself trolling through our website looking for things at various times there's a lot of orphaned web page there are a lot of obsolete web pages it seems like projects um web pages get put up and then they got get forgotten about maybe the staffer

[149:00] moves on or the owner moves on and we end up with a lot of stuff out there that doesn't um doesn't have ownership um so you're gonna clean that up it sounds like in the transition but how are you gonna ensure going forward that that doesn't happen again that five years from now we find that we have we go from a thousand pages to three thousand pages we have a bunch of obsolete or orphaned pages out there that are just not owned by anybody so this might i might need brian's help on this question because this is a a content question but we've talked about um you know continually doing content audits and keeping to do those doing those probably like once a quarter or so and just looking to make sure that yeah we don't get a bunch of junk in there again and making sure that we keep the content that we do have on the website um clean and and consolidated and up-to-date thank brian you're muted thank you i'm happy to expand on that and just share

[150:00] that um you know part of it too is we've also developed a really robust content strategy and so we're asking a lot of questions about what is strategic need for this content in the first place how does it perhaps overlap complement or duplicate content already on the website we have roles and permissions that will restrict the ability for some users to create new pages without an approval process through someone who has more experience and oversight on the website so our hope is through creating a lot of standards and processes we'll both improve the quality of content and then create some ongoing procedures in which we'll review content with more regularity one thing we heard a lot through the user testing is that there's a lot of information on the website which i appreciate but it is often out of date and sometimes hard to navigate to your point bob about how a page that about a related topic has doesn't have a link to it unfortunately and so that goes back to developing a a more intuitive content manage information architecture system where we organize things in a way that's in in plain language and not based on

[151:01] departments and so we're bringing related content together in one area it's very easy to connect those dots for users those answers uh sam um i have a list of questions but i i think i'll just put the subject areas out and i wanted to wait for the walkthrough but i'll just put those out in case you want to highlight them one is how people get to services they might want so really about customer service customer facing you know how they find quickly the service they look for whether it's planning and development services or looking for some kind of housing assistance for example the other big bucket is going to be around search in general and so a little bit more about archival like minutes and other actions that our boards and council have taken so those are my two interest areas if you got anything in your walkthrough you want to feature around those and then when we finish up i'll come back to this

[152:00] i don't see any other comments um so maybe you can go our hands up rather i'll maybe go to your walk through great well thank you um first of all the uh the beta website to get to it is linked as a banner on the top of our current website and we have kept that banner up there whenever there's not an emerging issue we need to communicate about such as a closure or a major development with coved that's kind of kept a trip goal of traffic coming into the beta website but the url is baited.colorado.gov if any of you would like to check it out this is everything i'm showing you right now is probably accessible um at this time here and so the beta site itself um here you can see the primary navigation is a little different than what you see on our current website there's a few different buckets of content and these are based on the new way of organizing information about what we learned from our community locations which would be things like rec

[153:01] centers trails things place places people are looking for parks services which to your point um sam is is kind of getting at the specific tasks people are trying to accomplish and i'll jump into that here in just a second projects is an area that we saw a lot of interest from the community and that they had trouble sometimes finding the one they're looking for understanding you know what department is in charge of it what phase is this project at um how do i get involved and so really pulling that out in a way that makes it easy for users to surface that content and then um government which is a tab we currently have on our current website in news which is another area we heard from a lot of our community members which is one of the biggest reasons they're coming to our website this is kind of the primary navigation i'm scrolling down through the main page here um we have a prominent area where we can highlight featured content here the idea with this is that it will be really timely information or perhaps really common services people are coming for um believe it or not pay a water bill or

[154:00] find trails they're like the top two reasons people come to our website um and so we want to make that as easy as possible people to find that i'm scrolling a little bit further down here is a primary sort of news area this is fed by the city's new newsroom a prominent jump to area for council this is expandable some more items here so these are just kind of some some high-level placeholders for now we know that city council information of course gets a lot of interest and traffic from our community and want to make that as easy as possible for people to find so that will always have a spot there scrolling down a little further we have some real estate here to feature different projects programs initiatives um that would be updated on a regular basis that's one area we've heard both from our staff and the public with our home pages and often on our current website it often feels very static and there's not a lot changing content and so they're very quickly moving off to someplace else so we want to make sure this is a valuable launching pad for people to get where they need to go and then down at the bottom of the website we have kind of information for broken down by category thinking of these

[155:00] different user types that we see jobs is another really big reason why people come to our website and of course with the business focus as well as recreation is huge as well and of course we have lots of services that are very relevant to our community members but aren't as relevant to people who might live outside of boulder and keep it in for work or live outside of boulder and come into boulder to enjoy you know all the wonderful amenities we have here so the homepage is very intentionally has a lot fewer places to click than the current website it's a lot more stripped down um i'm happy to answer any questions that come up or at the end of the walkthrough we can of course pause for questions as well i'm sorry i'm going to go into services real quick here and try to get at this this is an area that this type of content gets a lot of traffic on our current website but we've learned from users they have a lot of trouble finding it and one of the challenges with services is that a lot of the information is owned by multiple different departments and our current website is organized by department therefore people have a challenge finding it

[156:00] and so bike is a great example where some component of it is owned by um of course transportation and mobility police in terms of registration and so people might have trouble connecting those dots because that's not the way our current website's organized and so this is essentially an area where any tangible thing someone can accomplish on our website is listed they can explore it by category i hope these might be going off the screen here and these categories were based on the user research we did about how people organize our content so it's not based strictly on departments they can search by keywords to filter and get to information there's also a most used services selection at the top here there's not many of these in here currently but this will be a way to very quickly get to things like payday utility bill which we know a lot of people are coming for so i'm going to jump into a service page and to leslie's point earlier templates are a big part of our new website we don't currently have any tablets on the city website and that leads to a lot of inconsistency the way information is organized both within departments but including cross-departmentally

[157:00] and so a service or project will look completely different have a different level of information and it's very hard for our users to follow from one page to the next and really quickly find what they're looking for so this is an example of a service page where all service pages will follow essentially there's a jump down menu here to related information and there's a very heavy focus on helping people accomplish tasks quickly so if i jump down and register your bike for example here clear step-by-step process bullet points sub steps of necessary to walk through how to do something this is something usability testing we saw over and over people couldn't find this information or had trouble finding it even when it was on the page because it was buried under 300 words of text or it just wasn't delayed really clearly breaking out like this as well also allows this to be indexed by google search and so potentially if someone searches for this task that will come up it might actually pull that information and serve it directly to them within the search engine itself that of course we do get almost more than two-thirds of our traffic to

[158:00] our website is from google and so thinking about seo is a really important part of this next website um of course there's a lot of other information in here so these are designed to be really task focused help people accomplish what they want to need and go on with their day recognizing people aren't spending a ton of time on our website i'm going to jump to another content type here projects this is a list of all the city projects that are underway this is something you can't find on our current website unfortunately um within a different individual department in some cases you can but this is a cross-departmental look at everything going on in the city and here in this case if people are familiar city structure they can sort by department they can search for a product a project by name um and then um once you go into a project itself it also has a template you're starting to see some consistency here it knows contact information is a lot more prominent in the design that was very intentional a lot of people are just trying to figure out who the right person is to reach out to we want to make that easy and not very at the bottom of the page projects

[159:01] now have a template that really states clearly where they are in their life cycle um what's been accomplished what's still to come and then um with an emphasis of course if there's any community engagement in it connecting to that information events news can be quickly related and share with projects um in a similar sort of jump to menu where you can see kind of some information about the project and where it stands i'll just very quickly scroll through this and down at the bottom you'll see that i'm saying there's no example here but you can see related projects if there's similar ones so you can learn more about perhaps another flood mitigation project you might be interested in um last year last thing i'll just show you real quickly before i turn it over for questions so make sure we leave some time for that is that the trails and trailheads page we anticipate there'll be a lot of interest in our community on on this of course we all know uh polarized love their open space but we also heard a lot of people say that they wanted our information organized in a

[160:00] different way so it was more easy and intuitive to find um this has not been implemented on the beta yet so i'm showing you a design mock-up but essentially for the first time people be able to slice and dice and search and filter for trails so if you want to do a three mile trail you can bring your dog on it's also maybe wheelchair accessible you can see every trail in boulder that meets that standard you can also when you go into a trail see information about usage so trying to encourage people to maybe visit some of our lesser utilized trails and a lot of information that we have data on that just not currently integrated in our website um i think of all the things the new website this is the thing that the general public i think will be most excited about um where of course is this the organization really excited about being able to surface a lot of information about projects and initiatives we're working on but we know based on a lot of how people use our website that this will probably see a lot of traffic so there's so much more of course we could talk about and show you at this point um but i do want to pause for questions here hopefully i kind of helped answer

[161:00] how people get to services without a little bit of information they can also get to services from an individual to project page from the primary search on the website as well um i i will have to turn it over to leslie to speak a little bit more about search the details about how it's implemented to try to answer some of those other questions with sam rays so um we've got a couple hands up and i want to make sure that we sam had some open ended questions i think particularly around archiving leslie do you want to talk about that so so here's with search so we're implementing a new search engine with this website so that's one thing um and then like brian was showing like all the different like views like like a lot of them had like filter or search within the view so we're adding search like specific to different content areas so people can kind of search within where they are and then uh the other thing that's going to help with search

[162:00] is going from you know like i was saying the the 5 700 pages down to 1 000 pages that's going to be huge for search because it's not going to have to search through all that extra stuff and redundancy it's going to have less pages to search through so those are kind of three of the things that we're doing with search and you know we're going to keep gathering data to figure out is that working are there other things we need to change so that's kind of where we are with that sam did you want to ask them follow question questions before we move on to other hands i don't think so bob i have a lot to go over so i think we should just go down the line great um rachel and then aaron all right i think i will be um quick that this looks awesome and thanks for this presentation um and i was really excited about the trails uh like slicing and dicing that looks like that will be super helpful so i'm excited uh when that rolls out um and i would

[163:02] ask maybe bob or sarah huntley if she's still on the call to chime in on this but bob and i had done an engagement listening session a couple months ago and we got some feedback about how difficult it is to navigate if you're trying to sign up to speak for city council or just to get through the city council page so i wanted and i did try to play around with this and it didn't look like any of that like when i clicked on city council or i think at some point i could even click on sign up and it just redirected me back to the homepage so it didn't seem like it had made the beta version to play with so i just wanted to find out maybe what you're looking at for making engagement easier and specifically for participating in watching council meetings and signing up thanks for that question i remembered specifically what we heard from the feedback because i don't remember it exactly but i think somebody was saying like they tried multiple times to sign up to speak

[164:01] and couldn't so we did make some immediate improvements to the existing website based on that feedback for example we made there be a direct link from the main council landing page to sign up to speak and then we also changed our entire signup system so that we're using formstack and it can be embedded in the page instead of eventbrite those kinds of enhancements that we made to the old system will be taken into account as this tran information is transitioned to the new system i think you're correct that and brian er leslie could correct me that i don't think the city council pages have been part of the beta site yet they're pages that we're continuing to work on but we would be certainly taking that um feedback into account for the new site as well and will people have a chance to beta test that before it goes live if they have not had luck using the previous version um brian and leslie where are we in terms of moving those pages over and is

[165:01] it possible to add them to the beta site sooner rather than later yeah that's a great question um so we're actively building a whole another version of the site behind the scenes the goal is with the beta site is to add new areas we want to get specific usability testing on before we cut over to the live site and so i think that you raise a great point i think the city council in that process would be a great one to push over we also hope to push over the trail and travel ahead content knowing how much interest you think the community will have in that um so that's something that we can um put on our our punch list in terms of making sure we get more specific user feedback on and we also have the upgrade the new calendar on the new website is going to be a lot easier and more intuitive to use and we think that that will help people get to city council information in that way as well awesome okay thanks so much thank you rachel um aaron and then sam thanks for showing off the new sites looking great um could you go to the services section

[166:00] again please and scroll down a little bit so the there are a lot of things like say under what water utilities there's a whole list of things to do with little lines next to them what is the action you're expected to do are you supposed to click on the line how's that working yeah great question the website designs you can see there's a lot of clean lines integrated into it it was kind of one of the ways the designer tried to bring a modern sort of feel to the website um so the um you know they use dashes for instead of what you traditionally see bullet points either one will take you to the the correct place to go these um examples here kind of anomalies and where most tasks on the website actually usually just have a couple things like this um and so this is the category and these are the specific action items that can be accomplished from there and so the upside is showing this to a user is if you were to click you know start or stop water service it will push you directly

[167:01] down to that spot on the page so you don't land at a page and say okay now where do i go to actually do the thing i want to do so it's designed to kind of help people's self-service as quickly and efficiently as possible does that help answer your question it does answer the question so i have my piece of feedback here don't don't leave this page please those um so i see how they're using the lines for bullet points here like in here those are just bullet points right those are all informational items that we're seeing here but on the previous page those were all action items and just from from many years in experience with building websites generally you want to have some kind of visual indicator that there's an action that you can take and that previous screen didn't have a visual indicator that those bulleted lists with lines were actually actions you could take in not just informational items so so that seems like a potentially a confusing thing that the differentiation between

[168:00] things you can click on and take an action and things that are just informational lists would those be links um in the new system brian if there's something you can do with it i'm sorry these these are all hyperlinks um but you have to hover over it to see that there's something you can do yeah it does have a hover over state that indicates it's a link but we're certainly happy to pass on that feedback to the designer and [Music] great thank you and and are you going to talk more about search or what do did we already hear the information about the search changes i had a lot of questions erin but if you want to go through yours first um for search that'd be great yeah we're happy to try and answer additional questions about search i think the challenge is that the search has not been fully um implemented yet and so and we're somewhat limited in what we can speak to

[169:00] but um leslie can provide you that the most up-to-date information we have at this time yeah so it's it's index you know it's just a new search engine like i said it'll be indexing the page and the content on the websites um but i think like sam i think your question was more around like the agenda items and minutes and stuff and that's actually in um our gender management system so that's actually a separate system now we do link off directly to um those items within the context of like a meeting or whatever linked to the agenda but that's actually a separate system thanks for that so just a comment here i just don't search that i mean i find that our current uh website while outdated i find it pretty well organized it comes in for a lot of criticism but i can as a long time user i can generally find what i'm looking for but one thing that i've always found lacking is the search capability that um it generally does not bring up the

[170:00] top thing that you're looking for you know unlike uh you know google which is uh miraculously good at bringing up what you're looking for in the top five results um so that's one great hope that i have for the updated website is that that the search does bring you to what you're most likely to be interested in so i know that's still under development but to me that's a huge part of what makes or breaks an efficient and usable website because with hundreds to thousands of pages it can always be tough to find the page you're looking for but if your search is good then you can get right to what you're what you need so i'm really uh looking forward to seeing how that comes out and that's our hope too that it works really well so we'll keep working on it i think i just had our hope too is that uh search is a last resort for users when they can't find intuitively what they're looking for and not a first resort um and so if we can get the primary navigation more intuitive for individuals they'll be able to get to

[171:00] where they want to go with hopefully just a few clicks and google will still be the go-to for people no matter how effective a search we might develop and so we want to make sure we're developing content that's optimized for search so it's easy to find there as well yeah well and i hear it sorry but just i mean to your point i mean an intuitive navigation structure is the best thing but with a an organization as complicated as city government it's it's always going to be at least a little tough to find some of the items you're looking for so i would not think of search as a last resort but it's an important accessory to the website experience and i just wanted to add too that like our uh council documents and we're still going to be archiving those in laser fish and like that has a search so there's a lot of searches all over the place the laser fish uh um structure can be hard to navigate as well all right thank you thanks erin uh sam then mary great well to start off with thank you for taking on this huge task

[172:01] because it's like probably the main um face of the city to people who aren't sitting here within the city so the website's incredibly important and so thanks for taking it on i'll say another thing you're in a community that has a bunch of high expectations around something like this because a lot of people are professionals in this realm i'm not um but aaron is for example and so um one thing i think you want to think about is you will get a lot of suggestions some of which may not be helpful many of which will be and so there's going to be a launch and then there's going to be a rush of feedback and so preparing for that and figuring out how to sort it integrate it and then what becomes the highest priority i think is going to be an important process so when you launch it's you know i've launched a dozen websites over time and no matter how much time you try and make it perfect there's always something that comes up pretty quickly so i'll just

[173:00] say that and i'm going to save search for last because i want to go through a few other items here i think the trails thing is awesome i really do i think that that is one thing that many visitors who come here many people who live here who haven't explored the trails a lot will find that very helpful i also think that we have a lot of systems that have been developed in our community so that are not part of our open space department that we might consider linking to you can have all the warnings saying it's taking you to an external site we take no responsibility for the content but i think like trail conditions for instance or um mountain biking folks that track both trails that the city manages and trails the county and the forest service manages so having a link to those resources from within the trails page could be helpful even though they're external um i think that our community broadly has put together a lot of really interesting sites and i

[174:02] think that would be one thing and you can add that later right but it is something to be thinking about um building in one of the greatest things on the website in the last two or three years has been the dashboards in my opinion i mean they are incredibly revealing there's a reason why graphics are so important and powerful and also the ability to choose what you want to have plotted and how you want to have it plotted so i think of that as like the quantitative information interface and i think that there is a ton there and what's been done has been super powerful and usable and it's a great way to to look at the health of different aspects of the city so i think making sure that you preserve all the functionality that's there in the dashboards is really important um so i love the clean look of the site and so on but i really hope that when we move from the current site to the new site that we're

[175:01] not going to lose functionality and so for me the dashboards is a great way for not only council members and staff but community members that are wanting to do a deep dive into something i'll just say homelessness as an example and homeless services i think that the amount that a community member can access now is just way different than it was four or five years ago so don't break it if it's working now i guess is one thing um another way that i thought you could sort under potentially both government and projects is the council has adopted priorities that we set at our two-year retreats and then we've tracked those like all through their work plan items and we tracked them and so at a very minimum we could have under projects or government or somewhere the council priorities that have been set for the two year cycle and be able to click on the

[176:01] priorities and see where they are everything from not started which is some of our priorities to completed which is other priorities that we have in this cycle of this council so i think that's a great way to sort through what's going to be high profile because council's going to be moving forward and taking action on those so i just wanted to put a pitch in that that what comes out of the retreat an early kind of work item for the website would be making sure that those priorities are featured and easy to get to and are tracked on a timeline so that the timeline is updated as staff makes progress during those um another one is a calendar so and i know that this is hard but having a master calendar or at least a calendar page landing page that has different um you know it would be best if you're a master calendar but there's too much

[177:01] going on perhaps to have a master calendar unless you're looking at maybe a day or a week but some way for folks to be able to go to a calendar site and look for the schedule there and i heard you leslie that you talked about integrating the novus system and the calendaring system but making that interface user-friendly so that folks can navigate to what's coming up you know i know there's a meeting coming up in the next week or two in planning board on this subject and i'm just trying to figure out when and where that is and how i get to it so i would put a pitch in that a calendar is really important and some way i know it's hard but some way to make that accessible and user friendly another one that i've tried to use and i know this might be in a slightly sensitive area is a staff directory so say i know somebody's name in the city and the department they work in i want to

[178:01] get in touch with them it can be very hard to do um and so and i know we don't want to get everyone's name and email out in a way that can be scraped by web crawlers that's going to get a bunch of spam but i would just put out there that some way even if it's to put a request in hey i'm looking for this person and they can come back and reach out to you if you give your email address or whatever um i think that for some members of the community who are looking for a particular kind of help and they said hey i'll refer you to x and they've got the name but they didn't catch the contact information that might be another piece of this it could be helpful and then on search um i think indexing the pages and having them searchable is incredibly important and you're doing that i think to erin's point um i'd say organizations number one but a close second is search i will often come into a city website and type in what i'm looking for and

[179:00] hope that it gets me there so i don't know what the algorithms are like that makes google miraculous um in its ability to rank things but if it's a place that many people end up going you know is there a way to use our um users as voters like to to say that these pages tend to be the place where people want to end up you've done it with trails but if there's a way that's dynamic so that people are searching for like rachel said the the how do i sign up you know that that's something that when they search sign up that that would be whatever's the most popular sign up is something that would come up to the top and i have ever since my days on planning board been really frustrated with archival data management in the city um so minutes um you know like i wanted to search today for all the declarations we have done around black history month if any in the last 10 years and it's just not easy to do there is a

[180:00] resolution page so if i happen to know the year it was done and i go through and i look in the month that it might have happened i can maybe find a resolution those are actually listed by title which is helpful um but having to know the date of certain content you're looking for that it could be in council agendas is a real barrier like if somebody wanted to search cu south and get a whole list of the council agendas that had been around that or study sessions that had been around that and then go through them because they know that subject matter is in those meeting minutes i don't know how big a challenge it is with so much in pdf to do i know that you can search in pdf now i i don't know about historical but i will say that archival information say going back five years minutes declarations resolutions like a flat way to search all of those and get to the packets and the minutes

[181:01] and the text of the resolutions or declarations could be really helpful and maybe it's only power users like board members and council members and staff that would ever use that but i think interested community members would as well so i just want to put a pitch in that search is someplace that a lot of attention gets paid to maybe it doesn't prevent the rollout but that archival search over the last five years i can't tell you how many times i've butted up against it even before i was on planning board and it's continued to be a challenge with this website the way it's organized so to the extent that you're thinking holistically about information i'd really you know also concentrate on packets so that community groups who are really focused on a certain issue when they get recruited into that group you know can go back and and find the information to educate

[182:00] themselves um i think this is a really important project you guys are working on and i applaud you for taking it on so thanks leslie and brian that was a lot of um uh suggestions and observations you have any comments that or you just want to absorb that and take those all on board so some of the things i can speak to a little bit so in terms of the trails like we are so when we roll out the final site we do have a direct integration i don't know if you guys have ever seen osmp has this um interactive trail map and they update that trail map for when there's closures so there's actually going to be an integration with those trail pages and things that brian brian showed so that when osmp on that map closes the trail it's also going to close that on the website so that's going to be those two things are going to be connected so that's going to be like real-time updates that that's going to happen on the website so that's going to be a good thing

[183:00] um in terms of the calendar we will we we didn't show the calendar but we do have a calendar and you will be able to you know it's not like right now it's like set up to be more like a grid which doesn't work well on mobile like it's it's set up to look like a calendar which that's not what we want we want more of like a list view and then to be able to you'll be able to um you know when you go to the events page you'll be able to say i just want to see council meetings or i just want to see commissions meetings or i want to see you know like virtual meetings or i want to see like meetings held at city facilities or outside of the city so there are going to be other you know ways that you can slice and dice the events to be able to to to find the ones that you're looking for and i'm trying to think if there's anything else i mean search is still a work in progress but search is hard i'm not gonna search is hard google makes it google makes everybody look bad but we're gonna keep working on it to

[184:00] make it better so i definitely want to spend some time thinking about the feedback you gave sam about archival data because i agree that having to have a date of a meeting but there is some search functionality in laserfiche that has improved so i'd love to get with alicia johnson offline because she's the expert in laserfiche and see if there's improvements there or if what you're calling for really requires us to look at a new way of doing things so we'll take that under advisement and the only other thing i guess i would add to fill in is that sam you mentioned the dashboards i think are an incredibly valuable resource and we will be transitioning those over to the website the goal is um while we're trying to consolidate content is not to take away the functionality or high quality contents on our current website but bring it over and hopefully organize it in a way that makes it a little easier for people to get to super i have mary next and then i'm going to call myself mary

[185:01] thank you bob and thank you all for the work that you're doing this is as um sam said a very important project and something that is indeed the face of the city um i wanted to just start by um just reiterating the archival the challenges around our accessing archival material and i'm glad to hear that um that's something that we'll be looking into um i also think the idea of adding external links to non-city resources is an important and valuable piece of information and that's probably something that you can do as time goes on and as you enhance it moving forward um and the calendar i that could be also really really valuable i know um just what even what you have right now in the current website is helpful so calendars are

[186:00] helpful i have a question about a comment that you made about page generation and how what you are going to do moving forward is to add process and management to page creation and i'm wondering how you are going to balance those processes with being able to stand up a page in a timely manner um i know that when things get going sometimes um you know comment will be made oh we'll we'll get right on that and create a page and boom the next day there's a page created so um how will you balance those processes with um timely page creation yeah that's an outstanding question i appreciate you asking it i think we're our hope is to strike the right balance where there's some processes in place both supported by the content management

[187:01] system so the technology itself um as well as through uh training and through providing best practices and so staff are trained on kind of the um here's here is the kind of the steps to go through and creating a new page and trying to avoid some of the things the problems that occur with our current website where we have duplicate content or how to date content but i think we can get that quite right i think every every department will have at least one in most cases several kind of quote power users who have the ability to create new pages and have more functionality and they'll be kind of a few super admins that could approve requests from staff and departments if there was something that was really timely so i think we'll have a numerous labels levels of kind of redundancy to approve those requests in a timely manner if that situation arises because we we recognize that that is often the case that there's something that's really um emerging that we need to get up on our website immediately and the last thing we want to do is create a process that's so onerous that can occur

[188:01] right thank you very much um and then i was curious um on your title up at the top where you say locations and i was curious as to how you came to use the word locations as opposed to the word places which wasn't i found it interesting that you said locations means places and so i just i'm curious on how you landed on locations the excellent question that came out of the user testing that we did in the prior scope of work through the card sorting and so we basically gave this was all done online so there was no physical cards and we gave people content and so we had information we said how would you organize this and that's the way people lumped rec centers libraries trails together and they said well these are all locations um i think that we'll learn very quickly if those terms are intuitive and resonating with our audience or if they need to be tweaked and so

[189:01] we'll be doing some usability testing where we actually have people go through and try to accomplish tasks so one of those would be you know find the chautauqua trailhead we did that testing on our previous website we would do it again on this website to see if it's as an easy or easier um if we find that people are having trouble with location that's not working first of all you think no no one has trouble finding chautauqua in our community but the page receives a lot of traffic of course um and so um making sure that that term resonates and so if we find out that's not the case then we'll certainly revisit those categories based on what we learned from our users do you remember offhand brian whether places was an alternative card people could choose or would they just sort of grouping with what we gave them it was an open-ended card so they could call it anything they wanted oh it was okay and i know places was one of the other terms that was commonly used but locations was used more often um so whether that sample is representative of our entire community and our users of our website i don't know and that's where

[190:01] we have to validate these decisions and make sure that they're the right ones and that's why it's so important to be iterative in terms of changing the website as needed okay thank you um and then um the i really appreciate it on the projects um page where you showed us that there's a there's a gauge i guess as to where we're at in the project and i'm wondering if there's been any consideration given to lining that gauge up with what we asked for at the retreat in the memos so that what you see in the memo kind of matches what you're seeing here just sort of for some consistency so i'm just wondering how you might incorporate something like this in what we talked about at the retreat yeah that's an excellent question and i know um i think sam mentioned that the council action

[191:01] guide and the priorities are set following the retreat and it's something we would like to more meaningfully integrate into our website i would say these terms can be customized and changed so we certainly could evaluate that the goal was to come up with some really simple plain language terms that could apply to a lot of projects recognizing there'll be specific projects that will need some unique terms inevitably so that users get used to seeing some common words that they can quickly understand as well as to simplify the processes into kind of the biggest high-level steps possible that's certainly something we could explore i think the suggestion earlier of trying to note somewhere in the project list council priority projects or coming up with some other way to surface those to the community and then to make sure those pages reflect that information that you're talking about the council retreat back at thank you um and then um just one little comment i noticed on your trails i really appreciated the the trails um

[192:02] little um icons showing the kinds of activities that you can do on that particular trail um but i did notice that the mount sanita's trail had a bike on it and so if you know if you're using that at all for beta testing or whatever i would suggest that you remove the bike from mount sinitas or else there'll be a lot of bikes on mount sinitas and that would not probably um yeah they're not allowed so just just a little note of caution and um that's all i have thank you great job yeah thanks yeah this looks like just um a labor of love for sure thank you yeah thank you so much for the kind words it's been a a real team effort there's so many people in the city that have helped with this and it's been really cross-departmental uh but just to note that design that was a design mock-up we showed you so i think the designer just applied those labels kind of um haphazardly so

[193:00] we'll certainly be sure to coordinate very closely with osmp and ensure that we have all the correct trail information once we're able to bait beta test this as well as launch the actual site that's what i figured i just um yeah so anyway thank you very much um there's no other hands up i'll just make one comment that really underlines something that both mary and sam said and that's links to external sources i know that there's that can be a little fraught and you want to make sure that it's a source that is um a valid one and a reliable one one i i particularly would call out you mentioned um earlier in your presentation about two-thirds of the visitors to our website are actually not people from boulder i suspect a lot of them are prospective visitors and having links to our trail sites is great because a lot of our visitors do go to trails one site that i would would strongly recommend that you link to on the home page is the convention visitors bureau um they have an award-winning site they get about a million hits a year

[194:01] um when i google um just the word boulder the city of boulder comes up as number five number one and the convention visitors bureau comes up at number five and i think for those who are looking to visit boulder from out of town um linking directly to the convention the visitors bureau you know maybe the tab says you know the zoom boulder or want to know more about you know a visit to boulder or something like that in in in in popping people right over there because i know that um a lot of times visitors will end up on the on on the city government side and that's actually not what they're really looking for so i put in a plug for convention visitors bureau as a link yeah that's a really great point we know that there are so many people come to visit boulder um and if they do end up on our website looking for that information at times we see it in the traffic we do have a couple pages on our current website on visiting boulder that are pretty much a high level summary of kind of the many um wonderful things about our community with links off to um different community resources and um locations and of course we link heavily

[195:01] conventional visitors bureau and we'll continue to do that and we do have a city links policy that defines the type of links we share in our website and it's it's pretty permissive in terms of linking to partner organizations or resources or uh nonprofits organizations that collaborate with the city and so we'll continue to to drive people off to valuable related content on our next website and i think that's a great point that we want to make sure that visitor information is very prominent and we can get people over that convention visitors bureau site as efficiently as possible great thank you i don't see any other hands of any other comments from council and we've got a kind of a final next step slide um brian and leslie why don't you take us to the next steps great well hopefully um let's pull up here in just a second here um we're obviously getting pretty close to the goal line here for cutting over to the next website there's a lot of work going on behind the scenes

[196:01] it's been more than a year in the making of going through all the content on the current website auditing in a meticulous manner looking at what's getting traffic what's not what's up to date and what isn't what needs to be consolidated continuing that work our hope is to bring over to consolidate as much content as possible we only want to bring over as much content as we can realistically keep up to date um this is kind of timing out so i'll just stick with this for now so we're of course going to take all the feedback we heard today here um and integrate into our broader feedback talk to it with the team that we're working with the consultant that developed this website um work through iterations for these final content types there's some like we mentioned the trails the trailheads pages are still being finalized um so get all that work done and so we're um we have kind of our minimum viable product we're ready for launch um so we can move into getting additional public feedback and user testing uh the trails and trailheads pages when we identified for that um a great point race today thinking

[197:01] about the council page and signing up for council participation that's really something important that we get right we want to make as intuitive as possible um so we'll add that new content to the beta website is it's um those content types are quality controlled and we're ready to share those with the public and then solicit feedback on them and we want to keep our community informed as this project moves forward i know not everyone is as invested in this as we are but we do want to provide those community members who are really engaged and as noted earlier we have a very tech savvy community and we know a lot of people have expertise and opinions and so letting them know the work we're doing how they can plug into it and provide their expertise and guidance recognizing that we will need to look at the plurality of feedback from our users to really identify changes but welcoming those people who really this is their their area where they really excel at transition content to the new website is a really major focus area right now we'll be working diligently on that up until may when we hope to launch over and then our next step not noted on here

[198:00] but very important is that this updated sort of city brand that we're seeing with the website the colors the typography the logo we really want to echo to other city communication channels to really bring more consistency across the organization we know some departments have very specific brand identities think like osmp or parks and rec and we certainly want this to be something that those can map onto um but to bring some more unifying look and feel to city newsletters publications e-newsletters um so when people see something it's very clear this is a city a boulder product and so that work is already underway now and really exciting to to see that grow with time well great um i don't see any other hands up from council members um leslie and brian and sarah thank you so much for the presentation you got a lot of feedback tonight hopefully um it was it was mostly helpful um we obviously have a lot of council members who um have a passion interest in this that spend a

[199:00] lot of time on our website and actually have web designers on our council so um we obviously this was a presentation of keen interest to to all of us and hopefully um you got a lot of value out of tonight's discussion so thank you very much thanks so much thank you now hugely we appreciate the feedback and council members i i think we have no other business for tonight i think this is the end chris unless there's anything else that you'd like to bring up i think this is the end of our study session so at 9 20 10 minutes early we stand adjourned see you all next tuesday have a good week thanks everybody have a great night good night thanks bob thanks for a good meeting bob [Music] all society organizations have condemned

[200:02] what they say