August 10, 2021 — City Council Special Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[3:32] [Music]

[6:10] whenever you're ready i don't i can give you lessons okay i will get back to you on that okay all right within the day you're ready to take a ball when you dance in class i'm kind of excited about that all right and we are waiting for mary and aaron i believe both plan to be here so we'll give them a few minutes to jump in and when we start the special meeting i won't be doing any announcements i'm going to leave those to erin once we start the stepping sessions [Music]

[7:10] [Music] thank you all right mary's made it we are waiting on aaron [Music] mary is that a virtual background or real [Music] mary looks frozen there's aaron [Music] yeah she may have to do with that video yeah

[8:11] mary can you hear us okay she can hear us it looks like let me do a final count one two three 4 5 6 7. here we are and by my watch excellent ryan is channel 8 good to go yes channel 8 is good all right thank you emily okay welcome everyone to the tuesday august 10th 2021 special meeting of the boulder city council alicia would you please call the roll yes sir and good evening everyone councilmember bronkett president

[9:01] friend here joseph is absent councilman yates is absent and council member young present you should call my name too i didn't call your name mayor weaver my problem she's looking at a different list thank you let's try something different today we won't do that again this next week all right so we have a quorum excellent thank you alicia all right the meeting tonight the special meeting only has consent agenda items it's really one big item which has two major parts to it um the two council members who are not with us tonight council member joseph

[10:00] and councilmember yates have recused themselves from the item we'll be considering tonight so they will not be here tonight for this special meeting nor do we expect them to be at either the september 14th or september 21st meeting due to their recusal and those meetings we expect to have the same subject as tonight which is annexation of cu south so the two items that we will be considering tonight the first one is technically the first one item to a one is a resolution and two a two is a first reading of an ordinance and alicia would you like to formally take us to the consent agenda please yes sir thank you item 2a is the consideration of the following items related to the annexation an initial zoning of a 308.1

[11:00] acre parcel generally known as cu south at 4886 and 5278 table mesa drive 718 marshall road zero highway 36 two parcels and 4745 west moorhead with an initial zoning designation of public that is lur 2019-0010 item 2a1 is resolution 1289 finding the annexation petition to annex approximately 308.15 acres of land in compliance with state statutes and establishing september 14 2021 as the date for public hearing item two a two is the introduction first reading and consideration of emotion to order published by title only ordinance 8483 annexing to the city of boulder

[12:00] approximately 308.15 acres of land with an initial zoning designation of public very good thank you alicia and uh the two items tonight um the ordinance 8483 which is the first reading of the annexation ordinance um that uh item has had a hotline come across which made a minor change the original version of that ordinance was an emergency measure and the current version which we have in front of us is a non-emergency first reading of the annexation i will be calling for a roll call vote on on these items and i will do that ordinance first because if that passes then the resolution 1289 is a resolution which is required by state law which finds the annexation petition to be complete and in compliance with state statutes and

[13:01] establishing a public hearing date that public hearing date would be september 14 2021 if the resolution passes and that resolution does nothing except find the annexation to meet state statute and schedule a hearing date and so with that um i do know uh that there is a question about keeping these on consent and so nearby i will turn to you and see if you'd like to say a few words thanks sam yeah i would just like to pull item a off of the consent agenda i feel that one overarchingly um that this is something that should go to the people and be put on the ballot um for the people of boulder to vote on i believe that this is an issue that is so much larger than any of us and though yes we are uh elected as council members to represent the city um this is a huge issue and it really deserves to be in the people's hands for

[14:00] a vote so that's one reason and the other reason is i don't believe it is correct to be voting on something that doesn't technically exist so that annexation agreement isn't a draft form but it is not an actual agreed-upon document and so therefore i do not believe that it should be something we should be voted on i don't expect this to um be passed but i need to put it out there um for sake of mine and peace of mind and there you have it very good thank you miraby and so uh i will take that as a motion to pull item 2a off of the consent agenda so in keeping with the way i would like to run things tonight i would like to do a roll call on the motion to lift from the consent agenda alicia would you mind taking us through a roll call vote on nearby's motion please yes sir we'll start with council member wallach all right that may

[15:03] yay is absent yeah let me show you you missed me again i'm sorry in the alpha and get back to you okay that's okay we'll go back to mayor weaver no councilmember young no rocket name friend no nego yes sweat lake yeah the motion did not carry so very good thank you very much and with that i will turn to council um if anyone would like to make any um comments or discussion beyond what nearby has already done i would welcome that or i would welcome a motion um adam

[16:00] yeah sam uh i do have a few questions i don't expect answers immediately but i think they're worth bringing up while we're in discussion mode um just to you know there's some community input that i want to make sure it gets addressed and uh i figured this is one of the best moments to do it so um [Music] do we have anyone here tonight i think i saw um joe who i'm probably gonna direct these questions to you so joe if you want to pop in here that would be appreciated and um what we often do on first reading is refer questions to staff so if it's not a simple answer and it requires a lot of explanation would it be okay if uh hotline came back with answers to your questions yeah that's like i said you don't have to answer right now just want to get the questions out there publicly to make sure they're part of the record perfect sounds great thanks sam uh so my first question was there's this

[17:00] analysis going around that represents that um the flooding that happened um that sort of set this off this project off only 30 percent of it would be um essentially allayed by the flood mitigations that we're planning whereas 70 came from other sources and i want to see what staff's take on that analysis was just so we had a full sort of interpretation of that from staff um just because that's a big talking point in the community and i think it's worth addressing um just so you know we can make sure we're having the best flood protection possible um whether that means including other things that we need to be doing as well or just looking along those lines um not saying that this project isn't important i think it is but i wanted to throw that out there to see if we can sort of answer those questions that are out there in the community

[18:00] um the second point that i think is important is uh there's some talk in the trip cap um about having only allowing additional uh building to happen if the trip cap is met at certain uh intervals so say you know 25 percent of the build out happens then the trip cap should be around 25 of what the total cap should be before the next segment is built i think that's probably worth having a discussion about at some point um just to make sure we don't allow 100 of the trips when only 25 percent of the build-out is happening um and the last point is just ensuring that um there's some questions about the language as to whether or not uh if one of the governing bodies doesn't allow the flood mitigation to be built

[19:00] do we in fact have the full rights to de-annex you know without you sort of saying yes to that dean annexation so is it truly our choice and i just wanted to spell and make sure that those questions are answered along the way here again doesn't have to happen tonight but those are three topics that i thought were pretty important um that i'd like to hear a little bit more from staff about when we have the opportunity next time we talk or over hotline would be even better just to get it done faster super so i captured three questions for staff it looks like one's for public works one is for our transportation department and the last one is for planning so what i captured for public works is there's a report uh i believe it's the 2014 report on 2013 flood damage which reports that 30 percent of the property damage um which occurred uh was related to

[20:00] flooding uh and not others so that's one question of response from public works on that the second question that i heard had to do with trip gaps so how will the trip cap scale with development which occurs on the property and then the third one was what happens if we don't get our permits and de-annex is the annexation to complete the annexation or what are the terms if we don't get our permits did i get the third one right you did and i realized there's language in there that says three years and um we may ask i guess the word may is part of the reason that i'm asking about it because the word may doesn't necessarily signify we have the power to do it it's um with with cu's input we may be allowed to dnx i guess is where i'm having to hang up so it's got yes so the certainty about what happens on the annexation how can we be sure that we are allowed to the annex if we do not get our permits yep those are those are the three thank

[21:01] you for summing it up sam okay great i will assume that staff is going to follow up on those with a hotline i got a thumbs up from phil so we will end from joe so staff will get back to you on those adam thanks for the questions thank you you bet next i've got nearby and then mary nearby thanks sam um so yeah adam actually hit on the first two questions were exactly what i wanted to bring up and i think it'd be great to have those answered for the community um my third question uh is more it goes to section 42b and i guess i it kind of hits on adams but i just want to clarify because i think he's asking it slightly differently than how i was thinking about it i would like to know if there's so in 42b basically it references that cu will be allowed to offer or to to have parks and rec as well as renewables built

[22:02] but if the city does not receive the permits that we are hoping to receive for the flood mitigation would they still have those sewer and water resources available to them if we do not get the permits thank you mayor by any other questions nearby i think that covers my three that i had so thanks okay super and so staff i think you probably got that but the question really relates to disconnection if there's any connection and what would cu be allowed to do um in that area uh if they've developed before the annexation so with that i'll go we've got mary mark and aaron mary thanks sam i just wanted to comment on the um the reason why i voted nay to carry this forward i have been involved with the

[23:00] cu the flood mitigation and therefore this new south potential for annexation since um since being on planning board goes way back to 2009 when the south boulder creek study was approved by flying board this has been something that has been on the books since the 1990s and contrary to a lot of what is out there in terms of comments is that um this has been a long long long long process um it isn't something that is moving quickly um the other thing that i wanted to just comment is that there was actually some consideration of um putting the annexation to the ballot but that was not possible for precisely the reason that this is a draft agreement

[24:00] and the reason that there's a draft agreement is because there's a real conservative effort to um incorporate community comments and input and so i i value adams and mariby's questions um to get those answered and address those and hopefully um if appropriate to make some changes to the draft agreement but um the other thing is um there will be a vote per the ballot initiative that was put on um by uh the community so that will be one vote um if this were to pass there will be the potential for another vote um should there be a referendum so um i i just wanted to comment on that that um i feel that this has not been um moving quickly i feel that this has

[25:01] been on the book since the at least about 30 years and um and moving through in terms of process since at least i've been on planning board so um i just wanted to comment on why i wrote it um no thank you thank you mary um next mark and then aaron mark well as we are asking questions as everyone knows i i posted on hotline on sunday a number of questions and i hope staff will be able to respond to those as well in whatever time they think appropriate and i also want to say that adam's questions are also well taken and deserve a good response thank you mark aaron so uh if it's all right i'll just go ahead and move the consent agenda and specifically the version of ordinance 8483 that was sent out on hotline this afternoon okay very good we have a motion and a

[26:02] second and alicia if it's okay with you given how important this issue is to counsel on the community um if you could take a roll call vote please on the first part of the motion which is 2a2 which is the ordinance 8483 the version that was sent out on hotline so the motion and the second were to pass that ordinance and if you would please take a roll call vote yes sir thank you councilmember young yes yes wally hi and weaver mayor that motion for the item two a two

[27:02] is approved six two seven to one i believe that would be six to one correct we have seven fifty one six storm okay very thank good and so that was the first reading of the uh ordinance annexing the cu south property into the city and the second part of the consent agenda tonight is resolution 1289. um which finds the annexation petition in compliance with state statutes and sets the date for the public hearing on september 14 2021 so that has been moved and seconded so alicia if you would please do a roll call vote on resolution 1289. yes sir councilmember brockett all right friend

[28:00] yes go sweat nick yes wally hi weaver yes danielle yes mayor resolution 1289 was approved six to one very good thank you for that alicia and thank you council that concludes our consent agenda and so with that i will gavel this special meeting to a close at 6 21 and with that i will turn the meeting over uh sorry not the meeting meeting's over the study session will begin and aaron will lead the study session aaron would you like to take it away please thanks sam appreciate you handing off the baton there uh good evening everyone and welcome to the august 10th uh study session of the boulder city council where we'll be talking about a few different items including the facilities

[29:00] master plan and some items related to our boards so uh we do have a couple of announcements to kick things off uh first of all um kova on covet 19 vaccinations you can find local information on how to get your vaccine sign up for notifications and you can do that at the website boulder county dot org slash families slash disease slash covet dash 19 slash vaccines hopefully you can go out and get that vaccine if you haven't already uh and the other item is about our mid-year boards and commissions recruitment so we are currently seeking volunteers to serve on the following boards and commissions with current vacancies the beverage licensing authority the boulder junction access district parking commission the boulder junction access district travel demand management commission and downtown management commission and the housing advisory board volunteers appointed to serve on a border commission help city council examine issues and in turn work with elected officials and staff to shape the

[30:01] future of boulder applications are now open and applicants must be at least 18 years of age so for more information about these boards and commissions and to complete an application hop on over to boulder colorado dot gov slash government slash boards dash and dash commissions and now before we get started um sandra would you like to or sorry alicia would you like to call the role for our study session which i understand it's necessary my apologies we never called roll call for a study session it was a bit of a surprise to me as well but i got a text saying that it was required and alicia sorry to interrupt um i just let emily know that we do have a couple council members looking to get in so all right there you go alicia all right thanks sir councilmember rocket

[31:01] president friend here maker here sweat lick present wallet presents here and yeah and uh i'm sorry go ahead mary i didn't hear mary i believe mary has left she she was uh because of her connectivity issues she could make the meeting but not the study session back to you aaron uh but we do need to welcome council members yates and joseph here to this study session so at least you want to check in with them please oh thank you councilmember joseph president good evening everyone and councilmember yates present hello right well with that over with uh let's

[32:00] dive on into our first item which is the facilities master plan uh nuria do you want to get that started for us sure uh thank you erin and uh you know right before this meeting i was commenting how geekily and happy i am that we're going to be talking about facilities i really think it's so important and i know it's not as exciting as some other things that we see here but i think it does two really important things it really helps us the city meet our climate goals in many ways because that is a lever that we have but to me perhaps almost more importantly is that it really allows us to better recruit and retain staff because having great workplaces is a tremendous way to show staff how much we value them and to be able to recruit more in so without more of my geeky giddiness i will pass it over to joanna and michelle to talk through it thanks so much and good evening and and we share the geeky excitement um i'm joanna crean i'm the director of facilitating fleet and i'm joined here

[33:01] tonight by an exceptional group of colleagues who have been contributing to the work that we're going to present this evening specifically i'd like to introduce michelle crane who's our facilities architect and she'll be presenting and then we have a number of other team members that are here to help answer some questions and they include our financial analyst rafael tingley and mark simon our engineering manager as well as one of our consultants tim dutloff from mrasco and as nuria said we're really excited to be talking about this uh for a number of reasons but one of those is because this is our first ever facilities master plan and it's truly a culmination of work that's been progressing for several years some of you are probably more familiar than others but facilities as a department only recently was created in march 2020 which turned out to be quite a time and honestly it was set up to serve city-wide but this was a recommendation

[34:00] that came from our public works and planning assessment and originally facilities existed as a small work group within public works called fam or facilities and asset management and fam was created in 94 to manage about a dozen general fund facilities so originally the fan master plan that was done in 2005 focused on just those buildings so tonight the master plan is a fundamental shift in that it's comprehensive includes all 75 of our city buildings we're obviously excited and anxious to get your feedback and address questions about the plan as a whole but also specifically on two proposed key initiatives one is to maintain all city buildings well and the other is to consolidate uses and then we also have a recommendation to further explore a financial strategy to move to consolidation and obviously with like similar to other master plans the cip and annual budget process are informed by the master plan

[35:01] and the comp plan and we realized tonight we have a lot of information to share and we realize that as a result there may need to be some clarifying questions so so please stop us but we will stop specifically at the end of our first question about maintain well as a key initiative to get your feedback and i'll acknowledge that the data we're sharing tonight seems scary it currently demonstrates that we're not maintaining our buildings well and that we're not on track to meet our climate goals but the thing we're excited about is the fact that we're also here to present solutions to those problems and with that cliffhanger i will turn it over to michelle crane to kick us off thanks joanna um good evening council it's good to be back here and um i am michelle crane your facilities architect and as joanna said we are very excited to share this master plan and a lot of material that went into the making of this um and

[36:00] and it is going to be a lot of information around our current facilities and some challenges but as joanna just mentioned we we do have a lot of um solutions that we bring here tonight that we're excited to share and really get your feedback on and so we're we're excited to be uh presenting to you now so with that i'm gonna pull up our presentation there we go so to start our journey i want to start with sharing really the scope of this plan is mentioned at 75 buildings but it's in total just under 2 million square feet and just under 600 million dollars in current replacement value this portfolio represents really all of our city buildings with the exception of our three utilities plants um simply because their scale their size and their energy

[37:01] consumption really kind of make the rest of our analysis in a pale in comparison and so the principles of this plan the methodologies and what we use to assess buildings they all pertain to those plants and so it is suggested that we um do a separate analysis on those to bring strategic actions and recommendations there but they are the three that are excluded from the data set and we've broken our 75 buildings really into two key categories and we're starting here with what we're calling our decentralized buildings these buildings were strategically placed in our community to serve really specific geographic areas and the types of those are listed here on the slide in total it's about 55 55 buildings the other category of buildings that we have are dispersed throughout the city but it was not so much by design they actually serve our community at large and their current specific location isn't necessarily critical to the service they deliver at times it's

[38:00] actually can be a disservice to our community and our staff being so spread out across the city this category makes up roughly a quarter of our city buildings collectively all 75 buildings provide a wide array of services to our community and the needs of each of these buildings to deliver those services is equally widely varying while we have such an eclectic mix of buildings there are core commonalities across all these buildings core elements that are shared and common goals that we look to achieve as a city and so it really is the overarching goal of this facility's master plan to bring all these buildings under one roof their shared attributes and impacts collectively together to see them more as a comprehensive system when we consider them and manage them as a network we can be more efficient we can be more equitable across our buildings to achieve our common city-wide goals and so our master plan is really meant to take this bird's eye view of our building portfolio as a whole

[39:01] the key initiatives that we're recommending and the actions and the subsequent polis or policies are really meant to address all of our buildings rather than just discrete subsets we want to use these um high-level standards to help support individual departments carrying out their goals and balance those discrete needs within those departments against the context of our whole building system this master plan has been informed by kind of years now of of independent studies and work and analysis and a lot of this we will be including in the final um appendix of our final master plan we've also had a multi-faceted kind of engagement approach with this plan so our department specifically has led several uh engagement activities over the past five years really focused more towards those services now that could be brought together in a centralized way to serve our community these engagements with both community

[40:01] and staff have provided a pretty clear indication that both those groups would be better served through centralization of a lot of our services we also rely entirely on the engagement of our other master plans as it relates to very specific department and building needs kind of like what you heard i know a couple weeks ago from parks and rec we would not look to replicate those assessments or that engagement with the community but rather we're really working to collaborate with them to realize their common community goals in buildings so the purpose of this master plan is to provide a data-driven strategic investment and implementation framework across our city-wide portfolio to ensure our environmental sustainability our social responsibility and our financial stewardship these three pillars are a lens for our framework which will guide how we replace our aging infrastructure how we adapt to a changing environment and how

[41:00] we transform our buildings to meet these citywide goals so looking first at that pillar of environmental sustainability specifically our buildings and buildings have been key to our survival since the moment we crawled out of caves and they're really key to our ability to thrive by offering shelter from harsh extremes in our physical world they really were one of our first resiliency strategies and long ago we built better in harmony with our natural world looking to our future buildings continue to be essential to our resiliency as we take refuge inside buildings against increasingly poor air quality that we've been experiencing in just the past couple days and heat extremes we also want to return our building approach to supporting our natural ecology rather than fighting against it and our public buildings really offer opportunities to decrease disparity in who has access to these healthy vibrant indoor environments that will protect us

[42:01] now and even more so into our future so the list on this slide and the others are the key indicators that we looked at to assess our buildings today against these values of our master plan and as we look toward our future buildings we want to keep in court incorporating these sound principles of resiliency and sustainability when we think about our financial stewardship and good governance in buildings we are focused on the economical but we're also looking at that strict functionality of buildings how our buildings support the needs of those using them and how easy they are to operate and maintain directly impacts bottom line costs good buildings are smart they're connected they serve discrete needs of various groups and they're also adaptable and flexible to evolving uses from a pure cost per perspective buildings are major costly pieces of infrastructure upfront design and construction costs are only 10 of the total cost of ownership of a building lasting more than 50 years so making really good upfront design

[43:01] decisions that play to a building's longevity can save tens or hundreds of million dollars over that building's lifetime as we look at our last pillar of social responsibility north americans spend 90 percent of their lives inside buildings i think we're under that average here in boulder but still we live our lives inside buildings so our experience in them is really not trivial but it's vital it has measurable impacts on our mental and our physical health our experience inside buildings shapes our social interactions for better or worse depending on the environment we create and we can include or exclude people simply by the layout of a space we can make people feel welcomed safe and at ease and a part of our community through thoughtful crafting our environment and we can make sure services are accessible and equitably delivered just by where we place buildings in our community so we've assessed our current buildings

[44:00] through this lens and we do want to improve on these aspects of our future municipal buildings so now kind of moving into more concretely of our analysis of our 75 buildings and where we are today so just to start for our analysis we did employ a robust asset planning and management tool all 75 of these buildings have gone through a condition assessment and are now dynamically loaded into this database moving forward we can provide real-time data transparent information on our buildings we can look at the building level we can look across departments and as we do in this master plan here we look at the portfolio across the entire system and so again we will include more data and information from this tool in our final master plan document but diving into our first environmental pillar we were really focused on carbon we assessed our buildings portfolios energy performance and our carbon footprint and we basically found and

[45:01] concluded that 75 of our emissions come from 25 of our portfolio half of those worst offenders are part of our consolidation strategy and could be addressed through that key initiative that we'll talk about in a little bit the remaining of buildings would be a focus for deep energy retrofits or other actions that could help meet our climate commitment goals we've completed a lot of projects like the brenton building renovation some other work through our energy performance contracting that have really provided a lot of learning and some key conclusions as we've looked at how we solve this problem of meeting our climate goals in our buildings what it boils down to is across our building portfolio we need to reduce our energy consumption by greatly improving our building envelopes and then driving down building energy no loads once we do that and reduce the loads we can convert those systems to all electric so we can eliminate the gas-fired equipment that we have

[46:00] predominantly in our buildings today and minimize that carbon footprint those first two efforts will drive down our overall consumption towards zero but it won't get us all the way there so that's that last step we will need to invest in some renewable energy to help close the gap to get us to zero we do want to make that gap as small as possible because there really only so many rooftops to go around so those first two steps are really key before we look to solar or other renewables it will take deep energy retrofits or new high performing buildings in order to meet these climate goals but if we do take these measures deep retrofits or new buildings we can expect significant progress so measuring from our 2008 baseline we have made good progress through our energy performance contracts but since then we've stagnated and we've actually kind of turned it a little bit in the opposite direction through consolidation we've looked at measuring from our baseline we could drive down to 65 percent towards our

[47:00] goal and then those deep retrofits and those other key buildings could get us 80 of the way there leaving that last bit of renewables to help drive us to a hundred percent so now i want to shift to our more of our financial analysis of buildings and big pictures i've mentioned we spend a lot of money on buildings it feels like it's an awful lot of money up front when we do a major renovation or we do a new build but again in a 30-year building that's 20 and the type of buildings that we own and operate that upfront investment is really only 10 of the total cost of ownership the real costs are in operations and maintenance over that building's lifetime and we currently spend two times the industry standard on our o m expenses and i'll describe that a little bit more in just a few slides so our key initiative and really our first key initiative looks to cut those o m costs in half and come more in line with industry benchmarks

[48:01] so i'm going to break this financial analysis down though over the next couple slides by looking at our forecasted capital needs our facility condition our unfunded liability and then revisit this idea of total cost of ownership so again having completed the assessment of all of our buildings we have identified our current renewal and replacement needs so far in these 75 buildings that's a cumulative need today in 2021 of 55 million dollars this pictures on the left show some of these systems that are in need of replacement and renewal by 2030 that cumulative funding need will grow to 175 million dollars so those capital needs those pieces of equipment in buildings they come at a cost to the building and so when we look at the cost of renewal or deferred maintenance as we call it sometimes over the total value of the building this provides us with a facility

[49:00] condition index or score or fci for short this fci is measured in these four bands so good being green fair poor and critical a good building is one that has components in it less than five percent of the building is in need of replacement or renewal compared to the total replacement value a critical building is one that has more than 30 percent of the building needing repair or renewal this black line here shows the trajectory of our current building portfolio measured across the whole building portfolio as that fci increases our facilities will experience an increased risk of failure of components increased operating and maintenance costs and then negative impacts on our building occupants this blue line shows our current annual funding so we put 2.3 million dollars annually towards our facility renewal

[50:02] by 2030 our annual funding need will be 10 and a half million dollars and our current fund link succeeds in delaying when we cross essentially that critical line by just a few years so the industry standard we look to maintain in buildings is a 10 fci which is that red dashed line going along the bottom it acknowledges that you know we're never going to repair a building such that it's at zero that there's a certain amount of repair that's always needed in a building but this is the target across the industry for a good building today as you can see we are actually on the border between fair and poor our building portfolio has been kept in a pretty good range for a couple of key reasons over the years we have had sporadic injections of investments in buildings through bonds or other just specific targeted buildings we've made improvements this has led to uneven investment in buildings so some get fixed while others kind of remain in neglected uh position but the portfolio as a whole when we

[51:00] look at here benefits from that the other big thing that's masking where our critical needs are in infrastructure is that we essentially subsidize our capital renewal needs with our operations and maintenance budget so we keep patching and repairing systems that are long overdue for renewal so here's another way to see our fci in our buildings so on the left we have a structural failure that we experienced last year so these are the kind of critical conditions we see and we have a lot of mechanical systems that are in severe decline so pumps belts motors they commonly break and when they do we have to shut down effective areas divert maintenance stamp staff to now a critical condition we have to order replacement parts with these long overdue systems they're really hard to find those replacement parts commonly we have to have them custom made and then expedited in because you can't find them on the market anymore and so all of this ends up delaying repairs and then areas that

[52:00] we serve customers with on the other hand we do have some good condition buildings and over here some brand new variable refrigerant flow systems that we've recently installed these types of systems actually employ something we call predictive maintenance and that they're self-protecting it means if something goes wrong they actually shut themselves down and they send a proactive message to us before malfunction actually causes collateral damage so they um they actually kind of call for help if you will long before we actually see a lot of issues going on in the rest of the building so now all this translates into an unfunded liability or compounding cumulative funding needs in our in our buildings which is also again kind of equivalent to our risk of failure this light blue area is our growing total unfunded liability our current 2.3 million dollars a year reduces this slightly

[53:00] but again by 2030 we will still have a 95 million dollar unfunded liability gap as measured against that 10 percent fci target so now kind of coming back to this idea of a total cost of ownership the average age of our building portfolio is 47 years and so we have a lot of systems and equipment that are now long overdue for renewal if we maintain these current practices and kind of status quo and what we're doing right now we can expect to continue to see our operations and maintenance costs increasing we can see more and more systems coming due for renewal and the gap growing between what we fund and what the renewal needs actually are and this essentially results in our increasing risk in our systems and components failing so we are starting to head up this pretty steep curve of total cost of ownership and then we looked at our current buildings so all those really basic kind

[54:00] of fundamental infrastructure repairs and looked at them against also what our buildings provide from a qualitative standpoint to our community and its staff what we find is that they're by a lot of them they are not accessible they're not welcoming and they don't overall provide that good experience that we talked about this and being important so and our level of investment in our buildings again has been a bit unequitable so bringing all of our buildings to similar standards would likely be pretty cost prohibitive so the current state or summary of our where we find our buildings today is we have increasing funding needs to operate and maintain them as they are and yet keeping them as they are will not meet our climate and our social values so i know that what i just presented kind of feels dire in our building portfolio but we actually believe that this presents an opportunity to turn these risks into reward and leverage our funding deficits to help build new we are recommending two key initiatives

[55:01] in this master plan that make the most significant impact really portfolio-wide to help turn us and in a different direction so the first initiative is the maintain well initiative or the boulder valley comp plan puts it taking care of what we own and then the second is to consolidate services and so i'm going to go through just to maintain well one briefly here and then i will pause for our first council question so the primary goal of this key initiative is to phase all of our buildings towards a model of good governance and operational excellence we make very large investments in brand new buildings or heavily renovated ones and we want to ensure at that point that we hold that value of what we just invested in over time we are currently highly reactive we're running to stay ahead of system failure in our buildings and our operations and maintenance budgets as i've stated are two times the industry standard because we're patching up systems that should have been renewed

[56:01] or replaced a long time ago so we want to phase in this model of ownership that reduces our risk in buildings by providing reliable planned capital renewal to extend systems and building life and this lowers our total cost of owning our assets but we will need to make capital investments in order to get onto this path however again once we do that we don't want to afford or we can't afford to let them slip away from us again so i'm just going to illustrate this point and use the example of the brenton building where we recently made a major renovation we spent eight million dollars renovating that building we achieved a lot of great things it's our first all-electric building it's near net zero and it now provides a really great experience for our staff and our community we completely replaced the mechanical system so we removed all of the existing systems that were gas-fired equipment and we replaced them with these vrf units that you now see here on the roof these are currently brand new and they require very little maintenance right now and they also employ that predictive

[57:01] maintenance so that call for help i talked about earlier but this asset will decline over time roughly in 15 years we can expect to need to replace these units and as that asset declines the maintenance costs to keep it kind of going as little parts and pieces start to fail will start to increase there is this inflection point which is an opportune time to inject capital and replace systems before they become really troublesome and that capital expense that we spend to replace the system drives those maintenance costs back down towards zero and we kind of put this on a new good path towards building renewal right now we have a lot of equipment past this inflection point and so there are the mechanical systems in the units that you see here now are really causing a lot of time and demand on our staff and on just repairing and placing replacing these and this is where we are experiencing

[58:01] increased and ever going um maintenance costs to avoid total system failures so then just briefly again revisiting this graph and just showing how this smart technology actually when we employ this extends even more that total cost of ownership when we can get ahead and use proactive maintenance in buildings we can push out that capital renewal cost and we can consequently keep those maintenance costs low for longer so over the total lifespan of a building we're looking at less capital renewal by enacting those more proactive and predictive measures in our maintenance so it is the recommendation the first one of this master plan um to phase in the strategies that i just described and work to maintain a 10 fci on all of our buildings by setting aside two percent of the current replacement value annually to fund our future renewal needs we propose phasing this in by first

[59:02] funding our most recent significant investments there are four buildings that fall into this category with a combined funding request of 370 million dollars excuse me 370 000 um based on that two percent crv moving forward following any new construction or major renovations an ongoing budget request would be made to help maintain that asset at that 10 fci through the sort of dedicated annual funding it is unavoidable that we do need to make um invest in capital and in our buildings to address our currently failing systems our next key initiative is aimed at a more strategic way to address that investment that initial investment as a whole this initiative is again really aimed at making sure that we don't repeat the past and taking care of those large investments once we made them to lower our o m and our total cost of ownership so this brings us to our first council

[60:00] question for the evening does council agree with the draft recommendation to prioritize the maintain well strategic initiative and with that again funding requests in support of this would be brought forward as part of our annual budgeting process um and with that i will turn it over to councilman brockett and i can take this slide down for discussion yeah thanks so much michelle and joanna why don't we start and see if any council members have questions about what we've heard so far and mark is the first one out of the gate followed by adam okay in terms of resilience isn't there a flip side to this if you know if we do a lot of consolidation um in a couple of buildings you know if the heating and cooling systems go down the building becomes uninhabitable instead of putting one department out of business you're putting a number of departments

[61:00] out of business um is there an element of that in in your calculations well as we get to that strategy too and we talk about it more um we can address that more discreetly but really just like we talked about proactive and predictive a lot of what's best practices in building today is to employ really redundant um features and so by building in redundancy we can help avoid a lot of that you know if one area goes down you know taking out another really in many ways with these current buildings we're struggling to meet resiliency goals um by the fact that they're they're kind of failing even before we have an event if you will um but a redundancy is really probably the key that would actually take care of and help address that um 577 million dollars of crv um is that that doesn't include lease

[62:01] properties i assume it does and the 75 buildings does include our lease property so you know when we um we're in our appendix we'll break down all of those sets and exactly what buildings are included but they this 75 buildings does include the buildings that we lease out yeah lisa and i guess my last question for the moment i'll have more later um in the engagement that was done on this subject um was the engagement being done in the context of actual projected numbers in terms of new buildings the cost of new buildings etc no the engagement that we've done so far with the community was really asking more of those qualitative questions around you know how people access services how easy it is to access services at that time when we were doing those engagements we didn't have a lot of numbers but we've had you know council meetings really focused on alpine balsam

[63:00] in the western campus up to this point so i think you know as we lean into more consolidation we can look at um engagement around these numbers okay thank you [Music] great adam thanks aaron i have a little bit of a history question and this may have been better when um our old city manager was here but i feel like um not only for facilities but for a number of our departments uh speaking of inflection points we as a city have gone past an inflection point where all of this deferred maintenance all of these capital costs have just really really compounded and you know i think we as a council over the last two years have heard from just about every single department about how big these costs are and how um now is the time to address them my my question is um

[64:00] why are we taking stock now uh compared to you know and this may be for people who have been around a little longer than me even why is now the time i totally agree that these are important things but it just you know hasn't happened until now and now we're hearing about all of these so i'm happy to jump in unless somebody else would like to address that but um part of that honestly has to do with as we've learned more over time related to some of the conversations that we've had and some of the opportunities that that's created but from strictly from a facility's perspective a lot of at least around the infrastructure as i was mentioning earlier it was brought forward in looking at a very one piece of the pie as opposed to an entirety so some of that has been a fundamental and i and i really want to

[65:00] emphasize a fundamental shift in how we thought about it um and how we've approached it but you're right there is some of what you're seeing is that a lot of things have maybe not been addressed for a long time and so now they're all is this an inflection point that seems to be kind of across the board yeah they have something to add as well sorry yeah please do nuria thank you yeah i might jump in uh here just a little bit and i think joanna captured it really well and maybe the the other piece that i had to add is kind of related to what we've been talking about for renewal of the community culture safety tax in that since 2009 we've been working to implement the recommendations of the blue ribbon commission and part of that was a recognition that we were not investing in city capital infrastructure the way that we should um it was 2008 or 2009 our entire cip was like 20 million

[66:01] dollars and if you look at it today it looks very different than that and part of that is the recognition that it's the responsibility of us as a as a local government to invest in the infrastructure to support our community and so we've been slowly working on those and prioritizing those and i think this is the next strategic step in that of now let's look at our entire building portfolio as a whole and how do we start to invest in that as a true portfolio and enterprise rather than as joanna said a little piece here and a little piece there so um i think that's why you're kind of seeing it now it is it's big numbers um but but i think it's it's just the next step in what has been really uh uh oh you know decades-long uh strategy of investing better in our capital infrastructure thank you both for those answers i'll have a little feedback long when sam asks us the question for real yeah uh sam you have comment or question

[67:01] i don't have questions i've got to comment when we're ready okay so uh council members if you want to switch over to feedback on the uh proposed maintain well uh objective great sam and then super so i'll start by answering the question yes i think maintain well is a very good idea um i just want to provide my perspective on the answer to adam's question um and um when i got on council we were made aware that the buildings across just to the south of the municipal building the new britain building and the one i always forget those two major facilities were in the 100 year flood plain in the high hazard zone and we're going to have to be removed and so one thing that's become clear is that those buildings had to go away and we couldn't do much in the way of renovation because of our own rules about renovating buildings in the flood plain and then alpine balsam came along right

[68:00] and in alpine balsam we got the new brenton building we did the renovation there i think that's been a pretty significant shift in perspective two very old core buildings have to be taken down and can't be maintained anymore and we bought this property for many reasons one of which was to be able to do this kind of centralized facility and consolidation so i think you know we just happen to be having this conversation not only at a time when the focus on maintenance has gotten better and the understanding of what we have to do for building energy consumption has gotten better as you've heard but i also think it just happens to be at this time that we need to make a major transition in our facilities so that's just one point i just want to make a few more comments um having to do with maintenance um i love the new uh heat pumps or refrigeration units the air conditioning units that you've got and you know those are going to be key parts

[69:02] of how we hit our climate goals building efficiency is going to be one huge thing that has to play hand in hand with renewables and i think if you don't maintain well even if you do buy good new equipment and you don't put the money into maintaining it then you end up not only paying more money later but not having hit your climate goals on the way and so the whole reason that you did it in the first place can be sabotaged if you don't do the maintenance that's required and so generally speaking um i think it is a key element that we've been missing a little bit and so i think i'm glad we're doing a facilities master plan because you have to address all these questions so um i i love hearing that we've got a all-electric building because that's a direction that we need to pilot and lead on because we're going to be asking all the other businesses in our community who own big buildings to do the same thing and if we can't do it and we don't understand the

[70:01] problems there's very little way that we can you know with the straight face required of others so i think it's great that we are going to all electric buildings it's a key strategy and being able to hit our climate goals and i love the analysis that's been done on climate i think it's a clear point on why we need to do this if we are going to hit our climate goals um and then i just had a suggestion i thought i'd throw it out here um which is we're developing a lot of expertise i mean we have incredible expertise in our climate initiatives department and some of it focuses right on building energy efficiency and large buildings and large industrial users are some of the most important folks we have to address so my idea is as we learn this kind of all the lessons that we're learning and make our plans we're going to be doing it in in many cases for large buildings i wonder if there's the possibility of convening other major building operators in town

[71:01] and sharing best practices with them it's only a half dozen or a dozen you know other institutions that have the scale that we do in the city of boulder it seems to me like there's a great possibility for bringing everyone up um to what each other is learning as we do it and that's all i've got thanks aaron thanks sam adam rachel then i'll call myself thanks aaron and sorry i forgot your leading meeting not sam um so my feedback is definitely yes um and the feedback i'd want to give to both staff and future council is at the start of this council we kind of made this decision to have a fundamental shift as to open space acquisition and switch to maintenance and i think that is just as important in an area like facilities so um you know it's pretty clear we're having trouble maintaining even what we have at this point so when we're going forward with new

[72:00] projects um you know we shouldn't be frivolous in what we're trying to accomplish and even if um we may be providing a new community asset every asset we build ends up being a liability in the long term so it's time to really make that same fundamental shift in our thinking about facility acquisition obviously if we're just building something new to consolidate that makes a whole lot of sense but um really reigning in where we spend uh to make sure that everything we have now is continually viable in the future i just really want to make that same shift in thought like we did with open space thanks adam rachel um thanks aaron and agree with what sam and adam have said before uh and i would agree yes to maintain well and i appreciate adam's focus on maintenance and maintaining uh organizationally

[73:00] and um obviously we have to do it within the financial realities of the whole organization so i guess i just wondered um or wanted to put out there when we did the fire master plan i thought that was really helpful that we had like the tiered options and sort of uh trade-offs of what we might get or give for different like i don't know gold silver bronze tiers or something like that so when it comes back to us and i don't know what what form that will be within the maintained well um and taking into account organizational financial realities can we maybe see some it presented in that sort of format again that's all i got thank you thanks rachel i'll call on myself and then nearby um so yes i agree as well i really appreciate the analysis and spot on um and this seems like the uh approach that we need to take but um to adam's point about the other

[74:00] community systems that are facing similar challenges you know i think about the pavement in town for example which i think has a very similar um kind of inflection point right that if you if you put money into it at that whatever 10 or 15 year point then you can keep it in good shape um without spending as much money over time and if you let it degrade you're in much worse shape right and and those are not the only areas you know that have a similar issue so just as rachel said in terms of our overall financial resources you know yes we should take this approach with our buildings but but we also need to be taking it with our other systems as well and so that's just a careful financial balancing act over the years to to make sure we can apply a similar approach to all of our different departments and areas and hopefully our community will pass the community culture safety and resilience tax which will help enormously with staying on top of these things um and then i'll just say that it seems like generally people agree with your uh proposal so um counsel uh give us your

[75:01] other thoughts but it sounds like we're heading towards agreement uh nearby thanks aaron um yeah i'll just keep it very brief i do agree with this moving forward and it's something i said when we had our update a few weeks ago or last week i believe that taking care of what we have is one of the most important things and people do it far too infrequently these days and that's why you can go and buy five dollar cheap plastic crap that is clogging up our environment in our world so by taking care of our big assets uh and maintaining them hopefully not only will it help the environment but help the longevity in the budget in the long run so strongly um support what you're doing and thanks for putting the effort in thanks mayor bye i don't see any other council member hands so if there's nobody else we can turn it back over to michelle or join there for the next day great thank you i will um go ahead and put up our consolidate services initiative um

[76:01] and again just to address um a lot of your questions around uh you know how we've gotten to the state and moving forward and the solutions that we're trying to present in this master plan it really is the strategic advantage of bringing all of our buildings under one roof as i talked about really early in the presentation and i think it's going to come out in this consolidate services how doing this sort of initiative and looking across all of our building portfolio actually provides financial opportunities that we have not had when we looked at things discreetly and so i think just that to underpin that that is one of the benefits that i think we have here today looking across all of our facilities that we've not had in the past and so that's really what's been exciting for us to be able to do that and with that i'll go ahead and share this initiative but i think it gets at some of the questions that were just brought up so this is our second key initiative is to look at consolidating services um we have over the past several years with the community and staff as i talked

[77:01] about earlier completed a number of discrete planning studies and building projects we've we've talked with the community and they have informed this initiative we have developed some conceptual plans on both sites to test the possibilities and by both sides i mean alpine balsam or that western city campus as we're calling it and we've been looking out at the property we own at the current msc and now what we're calling the um eastern city campus because again we've grown both of these these existing sites and we've looked far enough just so we really understood the possibilities that they present but also the challenges we know there's complexities with both of these sites um it's allowed us to put just at least some high level costs together and really have at least a high level understanding of these sites so that we can compare them and we can balance them against the cost inherent in just maintaining our buildings as they currently are kind of in place so what we have found is that consolidating services from more than 20

[78:00] buildings which would be part of this to these two sites can address many of those challenges that i presented earlier and make a significant positive impact across our entire building portfolio we can greatly reduce our carbon emissions and we can greatly reduce our unfilled unfunded liability portfolio-wide and better serve our community um through consolidation we can vacate space in both the civic area and out around belmont park allowing council and the community to revisit those master plan goals and objectives for those two areas in this approach we also hold the possibility to create net positive sites we could put energy back into the system we can employ practices of ecological restoration and encourage bio biodiversity on these sites and we can be a one stop shop for our community providing essential services inside buildings that can provide clean indoor air and a cool place to be as we protect again against these future heat

[79:00] extremes we can think towards our future now and ensure equitable access to a healthy built environment and so these very real funding needs that we have in our current buildings presently to avoid more system failures the expenses we have today in our operations and maintenance can be leveraged to transform our risks into these possibilities and so that's what i really want to present and demonstrate over the next couple slides okay so just boiling it down really simply with consolidation when we consolidate we can be more efficient with how we use space so we replicate lots of spaces lobbies and bathrooms when they're dispersed all over these many buildings throughout the city we could likely reduce our square footage needs by roughly a third which is space that we don't need to heat cool and maintain this helps us drive our carbon use down to zero and we can also reduce the operations

[80:00] and maintenance costs in half by building smart buildings and really using that maintain well initiative as we now employ in new high-performing buildings so coming back to this concept of cumulative liability for our entire building portfolio i shared that that by 2030 that cumulative unfunded liability would be 175 million dollars again when we put our current funding in that would reduce it to 152 million dollars when we consolidate to the western campus so over at alpine balsam we would remove roughly six buildings it could be more or less but roughly six buildings from our portfolio and we replaced it with one new high-performing building which is now on a new better path with future renewal needs so we get to reduce our unfunded liability to 145 million or less but we also get to leverage the operational savings that we get from

[81:01] taking those highly reactive maintained buildings and equipment offline and so put another way we are no longer subsidizing our capital renewal needs by patching that failing equipment with our own m budget and so this becomes part of the key to some financing strategies so in total the western city campus gives us a 40 reduction across our entire building portfolio so now we look at doing the same thing out at the eastern campus and so we've brought that aligned by roughly 2030 and here we remove again another 15 buildings that are kind of sinking our portfolio and we replace those with a high performing campus and we reduce our unfunded liability across the portfolio to roughly 110 million dollars and again we get to now leverage those operational savings by taking these really poor kind of draining buildings offline and this gets us to roughly 75 million dollars in a

[82:00] cumulative unfunded liability and a 60 reduction across the entire portfolio but the lasting benefit of something like this in an approach like this is the legacy of consolidation because that purple line that just came across is that we actually stabilize the risk moving forward so that line that we started out with that's steep and ever increasing because of these new practices and what we're employing in these buildings in these campuses we actually keep that risk level far more stable as we move into the future and when we put that now that 10 percent fci target into this gap the gap that was 95 million dollars across our entire portfolio is probably less than 20 million dollars and so this is how it really affects our entire building portfolio and is an advantage across the whole system so stepping back and looking at all the benefits this initiative it affects every

[83:01] department because we're talking about a consolidation that would bring every department and aspects of those departments to these two campuses and it by extension it's the customers they serve and our community at large the initiative does drive us towards meeting our climate goals and it allows us to improve our resiliency it is a significant opportunity to address our social responsibility because so much potential really exists in how we can develop these campuses and of course we would then be able to transition to a much better model of financial stewardship in our buildings so at our master plan it's our recommendation to pursue a consolidation strategy specifically this means divesting in buildings that would go towards consolidation so no longer um looking at long-term strategies but trying to pull ourselves out of those buildings seizing real estate opportunities that were timely and strategic both acquisitions and disposal of properties and then pursue creation of high-performing buildings and high-performing sites to achieve our city-wide goals

[84:01] so we have this council question that's going to be coming up in a minute if council agrees with our draft recommendation to prioritize consolidating services in the strategic initiative but i do want to first talk about some of the ways we've looked at funding approaches before um to pursue this initiative before we get to our council questions so revisiting this total cluster of ownership curve this red line is again what our current trajectory of our portfolio is and that purple is these increasing operations and maintenance costs that we will see as our portfolio ages so this graph on the left shows an approach of consolidating by 2030 which is kind of what we call our act now approach it's it's you know um a likely time frame if we really moved quickly and looking to move to achieve our climate goals the steps in that graph are the upfront construction costs for the west campus

[85:01] and then those costs that would be relative to the east campus and then our current uh total cost of ownership path is superimposed on there where these lines cross is where we would expect to see a return on investment and in this scenario it's within 30 years and we've run this a number of ways but it comes out to roughly within 30 years and this is key as we look at the next approach and we think about different ways that this is becomes financial so in this scenario um we looked at a more staggered approach so what is the option to you know kind of consolidate over more time and sort of not um invest all at once up front and so we do still show consolidation alpine balsam as planned by 2025 but here we've pushed out development to an eastern campus more by 2050 but it could be any kind of incremental approach up to there for just for our analysis here

[86:01] with this approach we do risk high impacts of construction escalations i think everybody knows how our construction markets are escalating and so when we delay that is a big risk and that's why one of the reasons you see that really steep curve or that steep jump when we push our construction out is we have to assume the costs of construction escalation but we also risk that our current buildings aren't going to last that long and so we will essentially have to spend money twice we will have to make systems renewal in those existing buildings while they're waiting for replacement so when we look at a return on investment where those lines cross here it is at best 55 years and it doesn't include what we would have to invest in those current buildings that would need renewal during this time span so kind of boiling these two down we have these two ways to look at funding consolidation in this consolidation approach if we

[87:01] move quickly and we strive to meet our climate goals and our social values by 2030. the real opportunity that we see here is in that return on investment potential this type of roi opens doors to more financing options than the prolonged approach would so packaging consolidation more is one project it would be phased out even in that scenario but still packaged as one project is more enticing to outside investors and programs like epc there are programs beyond that like infrastructure as a service and just others who actually would help come and leverage funding towards this sort of model with this type of roi and so this could help us realize our goal when we look at the prolonged consolidation those choices start to diminish and our areas of savings potential in this faster approach actually become our liability or our risk with this more prolonged approach we risk spending money twice we risk also that construction escalation cost and it

[88:01] just it may be a little less enticing to actually find investors in this type of project so our second question to council is really about if you support staff further exploring a financial strategy if council supports the first recommendation to consolidate services we would proceed with planning work that takes a more holistic view of consolidation across these two sites rather than just looking at the western campus in isolation and this master programming approach would help lay the foundation for us to overlay a financial analysis a more detailed financial analysis and so then we could explore in detail the financial tools available to develop by 2030 and contrast that with staggering out consolidation over more years or decades so our first question to council around consolidation is does council agree with the draft recommendation to prioritize consolidate services that strategic

[89:00] initiative and then the second question is does council support an action item to further explore a financial strategy to achieve that consolidation initiative we would look to do that after master plan adoption but would want to prioritize looking at that financial strategy then and so with that i will turn that back over to councilman rocket and i can take this down if we don't need the questions up sure all right let's start with uh questions for staff i've got bob then mark then sam great thanks thanks aaron thanks michelle joanna that was great really two questions one michelle you touched on this briefly but i'd like to hear you talk a little bit more about consolidation as it relates to use of office space i realize that we have a lot of city facilities that are location specific rec centers and libraries and some are geographically dispersed by necessity like fire stations we do have a lot of we do have a lot of office space and as

[90:00] you're looking to consolidate into these two areas will you also be looking to reduce the amount of office space based upon the learnings that we've had over the last year and a half yeah um absolutely so i feel like as challenging as the pandemic has been for facilities it's been some serendipitous timing for us to really leverage really what we're learning around hybrid work uh towards that further consolidation and because we're all still working actually remote and we haven't really come back in a hybrid model it's hard to know exactly what that space savings would be but i can almost guarantee that there will be space savings it's a big thing that actually detracted us last year in facilities is to work on how we come back and how we maintain our buildings and do new things and so we are doing some new things in buildings today to help support a hybrid work model and it's really with the idea that we can

[91:00] learn into that and program buildings for our future and well into our future that use that hybrid model so when we come to the office we're coming for the things we need to do we need to be with each other we need to collaborate we really do our best work in person and together but we also learned that people are pretty efficient and effective in their focused work when they can be allowed to do that in different environments like home or other places and so i absolutely think that that will further contribute to our being able to be really efficient with our space and actually provide better amenity in our space but reduced square footage great thanks michelle i look forward to hearing more about that and then the second question really relates to your second question of us about the the financial funding or strategy around this so i i get the physical consolidation and the advantages of that and the advantages of moving more quickly rather than more slowly but then there's going to be like a price tag right there's going to be a amount of money that we're going to have to spend and

[92:01] and i'm not looking for that amount of money because i know you don't know yet um but but i'm really looking for kind of a source of funding in other words um you know one source of funding could be to dip into the infrastructure tax that we're about to present to the voters that may not be appropriate maybe it's not the right amount of money or maybe the timing doesn't work but what do you see as as the you know because i assume this is talking tens of millions of dollars maybe even maybe even maybe even slow hundreds of millions of dollars um and so i guess i'm i'm kind of curious about as you guys think about this and why this makes sense financially where that money is going to come from you see a bond issue backed up by a tax or what what's the kind of early thinking about where the money is going to come from so i'm going to answer that and then i also want to invite my colleague tim to provide anything more he may see on that but what we actually are looking at is you know a bond is sort of the thing you can go to but what we see here and what i

[93:00] presented in the savings that we see is much like we leverage energy performance contracting where the future anticipated savings is able to be quantified in such a way that you can fund the upfront project and so beyond energy savings there are new programs like infrastructure as a service which i brought up and so it's only one tool in the toolbox but it's things like that that's what we see when we see a 30-year a rough 30-year roi when we look at the numbers is that it's within a period of time that there are a lot of companies like the eskos that we worked with but then others who would look at this project in the guaranteed savings that we could achieve through o m because of frankly how much we're paying today in o m there is just savings there that would help us bring that project to fruition and then be able to pay that back through those anticipated savings in the future so that's one tool in the toolbox that we see

[94:00] and what we look at when i look at that gap then that last slide that 18 million across the entire portfolio i think that that or that 20 million that that's probably more a place where you look at the current ccs that could start to come in and bring the rest of the portfolio in line but the consolidation just seems to present these financial tools and that's really what we want to dig into more um and really start to bring out i think it's going to be a number of different types of things we haven't accounted for um rebates energy rebates and with a development like this and the kind of conversion we're talking about in our energy the types of rebates could be really significant as we look to make this sort of investment we started because we were geeking out on this to try to go down those paths and there were far too many assumptions before we brought this key question to council we needed to understand if council supported this approach before we really felt like we could start to pin down these assumptions to dig into those

[95:01] financial tools more so our financial analysis is actually very conservative because there were so many avenues to take but those are just a couple if that hopefully helps that we see that we could leverage towards this before we have to look at anything like a bond measure great well thanks i look forward to hearing more about that michelle thank you thanks bob uh mark vincent yeah uh like new year i'm a bit of a an infrastructure geek so i'm very happy with the way that you've looked at it i would be delighted to be supportive of this approach but it is very hard to do that in the absence of any idea what kinds of dollar amounts we're talking about you know there's a difference in um trying to deal with a 50 million dollar number or an 800 million dollar number and we we really don't have any clear idea of the magnitude of this project over what time period

[96:01] and and what total so it it's hard to treat this as other than an aspirational um approach until we understand whether this is something we can actually get our heads around and our financial capabilities around to make it real um so i i am warning the absence of that kind of information because it would have helped us a great deal um and the i'm hoping in its next iteration you you know we can learn more of that kind of data because as i said that you know there's a wide range of um consequences from one number to another number and we need to understand that we need to know that um before we can really throw up our hands and say yay let's go um

[97:00] i i like the approach i'd like to do this i'd certainly like to achieve the energy savings and the greater workplace environment that could come with this but we'll we need to know this so i hope when you come back you will have more information as to what we're looking at and um you know and how we get from point a to point b uh financially thank you thanks mark um i'm hoping for uh questions for staff at this round um sam junior and rachel thanks aaron um yeah my questions are uh on slide 46 um slide 46 is the one that has the um act now approach and the prolonged approach so it's comparing can we bring that up yeah that'd be great i think it would would help as i asked the questions okay

[98:00] let me go ahead and share that so this side here looking on one moment see yep that's like there so um my question was really about the orders of magnitude that you show for the jumps um because the i'm just gonna look at the east campus jump here because that's the most pronounced one on both sides it's about 300 million dollars in the left slide and about 500 million in the right slide um that's an enormous amount of money are these just illustrative or are you thinking that we're going to have a 300 million dollar expenditure for an east campus consolidation our east campus consolidation is is in the hundreds of millions it's in the scale of our unfunded liability um and so we presented you know we've got that 175 unfunded liability

[99:00] the east campus is more than 100 million dollars when we look at the rough numbers that's exactly what we want to continue to dig into to show that but again when we look at our unfunded liability and the types of money that we will spend um we want to compare it against that because that is the type of scale of dollars that are needed as we move into the future but you're no these are these are accurate reflections of our analysis right now and so i think to mark's point as well what we are asking as part of the master plan and this high level is does council support the approach recognizing that there is a lot to dig into and look at to ground these but these these are the magnitudes that we're talking about both with spend on our current portfolio as we move into the future as well as what it takes to develop a new campus and then reduce that spend in the future super i'll keep my comments for the

[100:01] comment section and ask a follow-up though on the same slide you showed these dollars you know 20 30 in the act now approach for the east campus 300 million expenditure-ish and then the other one is 20 50 500 million dollar expenditure because of construction escalation are those all expressed in today's dollars or in the dollars of that year so because we come back and force this and it's so hard we across the portfolio looked at everything in today's dollars with the exception of this one piece you could not neglect understanding what construction escalation would do so it is taking today's dollars but escalating what that is for construction escalation sure relative to everything else we've tried to keep everything apples to apples because you can go down rabbit holes really quickly sure but your construction escalation um when it's applied it's applied to

[101:02] today's dollars but then flowed down in 2050 instead of 20 30. is that right it is but i'd like to confirm that and get back to you i i can jump in there and confirm that that's indeed the case okay super um yeah um i'll make a comment about it but those are my two questions thanks sam uh junior and i'll have a question thank you aaron i have a question about slide 42 and you mentioned the gap is about would be about 20 million dollars with all the consolidation so i'm wondering if also i i see in the slide as well that you're mentioning the um online services so i'm wondering is also that includes online services as part of

[102:00] that consolidation in looking at the number as 20 million dollars so when you mean online services you mean the kind of transition that we've seen through the pandemic last year to being able to provide more yes it's baked into this analysis that there's we've we've taken some conservative credit um we know that there's space consolidation or space efficiency if we didn't look at hybrid work and online work we know there's efficiency when we just put things in one building and we don't replicate services and things core building services we have taken a little extra credit in this model for hybrid work not knowing exactly where we're going to land but that but it is included in this model yes okay thank you and also i think it was mentioned earlier i was wondering with the saving or at least the gap between the different unfunded needs and i'm wondering as far as um

[103:02] what will happen to the buildings that are currently being used and is the saving based on i suppose the building that we are renting now as opposed to when things are consolidated so that's a great question um it's another um kind of easy rabbit hole to go down and so we've actually chosen for this analysis not to take any credit for how we may get some monetary value out of properties that we vacate when we looked at all those properties that are considered for consolidation what we really find is just like our three pillars there is social value there's environmental value and then there's financial value in those properties and some of them have more environmental value like the two that sam talked about when we take them out of the high hazard flood zone that provides more environmental benefit or as we sell a property we can get financial

[104:00] benefit but also through its redevelopment by somebody else they will likely be meeting our energy codes when they renovate or transition that property so all those things are possibilities that are not included in our financial analysis because they're so time sensitive it's very hard to say that this property would sell at this time and bring financial benefit of x and so again we've excluded them but we know that they could be included in there so there would be a case-by-case analysis um and one last kind of example is you know when i first joined the city there was a lot of discussion around the civic area we had just completed the park and there was a lot of talk about the east book end in the civic area and up until now we've we've not really been able to move that forward because there's a number of city services there and so when we um vacate through consolidation that is one of the one of the communities that opens up for us to look at that and

[105:00] it's hard to put a price tag on that but we know something will be associated but that's one of the social values that we can start to look at and essentially allow to be back up for discussion thank you thank you aaron okay thanks juni actually uh while you can bring that presentation back up my first question was slide 34 if you don't mind yeah just taking a moment there yeah there we go okay um i'm i may be mistaken but that western city campus circle looks like it's around the north boulder rec center instead of alpine balsam oh gosh yes i think you may be right now that we look at it we'll check that it should be around alpine balsam right okay thank you for that um and my

[106:02] other question was um just on the consolidation to the eastern city campus i understand many values of that but one thing that concerns me about that is the lack of transit to that area so you know what i get that we want to accelerate this for climate change purposes in terms of reducing the energy usage of our buildings very important but how will we address uh transportation um energy use at that site yeah that's a great question we have been working um in talking with um planning about with in conjunction with the east boulder sub-community plan and transportation as well and so we've talked with them about this potential and so some of the things i know that they have brought up um are additional bus lines that would actually go down here but then i think that is part of the collaboration that we do across departments is to start to address those types of issues but i um

[107:03] kind of close coordination with uh that effort to address those kinds of needs when we looked at the master plan and you think about the potential build out in the master plan for valmont park i know that they were starting to look at transportation was looking at just increased need and access to those sites and so we would want to look at it in that context and address that and bring more access to the site thanks for that i guess just one quick request would be that in the final version of the master plan if that could be addressed uh explicitly in the plan i'd appreciate it absolutely great uh so now we we're not seeing any other questions from council we have questions for council about the uh consolidation initiative and the investigation of funding strategies and michelle you can probably take the presentation down now um council can answer these questions who would like to go first

[108:00] before we jump in can i just um respond to one comment that was a question that was just raised so i know mark had mentioned um wanting to the absence i guess of environment before being able to move forward i just wanted to clarify in case perhaps it was missed that that as michelle mentioned we aren't planning to come back with that level of detail until we have heard from council this evening so i just wanted to set expectations we didn't get confused and and we weren't going to be bringing that level of cost detail into the master plan in its final form okay thanks for that join up uh okay comments i got sam and mark super um i guess i'll start by saying three cheers for systems thinking i think this is a really um good example of kind of integrative thinking across not only we got lots of

[109:01] buildings we have to think about can we you know reduce number of buildings and bring people together but then what savings do we get when we do those kinds of consolidations and how do those savings play out over time so i think it's a nice job that you've done and kind of teeing this up in a way that that looks at many angles of the problem all at once so i'll say thank you for that and so generally speaking i i think you should pursue the kind of framework that you're talking about for like when you do each campus how much it costs what the savings are what that looks like for payback and you know we think very differently we think like school systems about our buildings and our systems which are intended to last decades and so returns that are also in the scale of one or two decades are to be expected when we're doing things like that so i think it looks to me like it's really well set

[110:00] up as a way to have a conversation about what to do next and i think consolidation makes a ton of sense um you know just to kind of raise aaron's point about the east campus i think it's a complicated question he asked but an important one because it could be shorter for many people who are traveling to get to the east campus than to the west campus so another thing to think about is like what services that are in person would be better duplicated like we'll get a lot of traffic and if a service gets a lot of traffic you might want to have one instance on each campus or something like that specifically for what aaron was talking about with the east campus so i think that's an element to add in i know it's complicated but you're already doing some pretty complicated system torque here um and the only other comment is kind of the one i asked about the big jumps 300 million seems like a lot like a lot a lot like you know if you if i recall the number you had for our total

[111:00] replacement value it was something in the order of 570 million and so that that year 2050 east campus cost of 500 million expressed in today's dollars seems like an incredible amount that's like replacing the entire building fleet and 2050 i know you put an escalator for construction inflation in there but if those are mostly in today's dollars i think both of those numbers seem out of scale a little bit to me um you know i could believe 100 million 300 million in 2030 is going to be a huge impact and 500 million in 2050 will be a huge impact so however you could think of the phasing that could go around that and the financing that you talked about like whether tesco financing or some other financing i think that kind of financing softens those cliffs because there's no way we're going to be able to to climb a cliff like that you know those those dollar amounts are too much so i like the framework it seems like the

[112:01] next step in the framework is going to be bringing in another level of resolution that we can see what that's really going to look like as far as how we're going to have to budget to get to it you know is it going to be bonding like bob asked or are we going to pay for it out of savings like how to do that at those big cliffs is going to have really important financial ramifications so i think you're on the right track i thought the plan looked really good graphics are great and the points are laid out in a way you can understand but i think to mark and bob and others points about the dollar amounts we need to figure out how we're going to soften those because we couldn't possibly take 500 million over five years that's it thank you very much thanks for that sam if folks wouldn't mind i'll call a queen on one of sam's last points there it seems like part of that issue is that um you're using today's dollars and it seems like incorporating the time value of money would be important to this analysis because you're you're using inflation to to increase the

[113:00] amount of dollars that moved out but not then taking down the amount uh that so you're using construction inflation which is higher than regular inflation but then you're not using taking it down by the amount of inflation to show that it's um those dollars will become worth less at that time so that seemed like maybe a way that those numbers might make a little bit more sense and might i think might be a really useful part of that analysis great thanks for letting me get that in uh mark and then gene yeah as i said before i i am supportive of the approach i like the approach you're thinking in terms of systems analysis rather than one-offs and i think it's great um but as sam said you know the component that we really need to see is how we get from point a to point b um and you know we need a lot more on that but uh in terms of you know the questions that you've posed i like the consolidation i think it makes sense if we can do it um and now we have to figure out a way

[114:02] that we can do it um so there's going to be a lot of financial analysis that's required to get us off the dime on this one because those numbers as sam said are huge and almost unimaginable in terms of our resources go to work thanks mark uh junie and then adam i would have to say i support both question one and two uh the presentation was great i appreciate the three pillars environmental sustainability social responsibility and fiscal responsibility i think all three of these are very important and they're interrelated but i do find that today we did spend more time talking about the first and third pillar which is the environment and also the finances

[115:00] and not as much about the social responsibility part i think it goes back to what aaron the question aaron talked about you know when he asked about transportation which is also part about part of access and equity so i think maybe moving forward is also putting in emphasis on on that pillar as well or give it as much weight or importance because i think the first i mean the climate pillar or the environmental sustainability pillar i think we all can see it we can think of the concrete results in the financial stewardship as well but i think um having some concrete output of what what aspect of access and what do we mean by access and equity and what does that really mean for even our staff i think having um a little bit more deliberate discussion on that would be important as well but i think overall that was a really great presentation

[116:00] again these three things we can't you know we can't separate them and i i really think that was a great presentation thank you thanks juni adam and then i'll call myself thanks aaron i also agree with the approach for sure i'll put in another plug as far as funding goes that we look into alternative sources of funding in the future considering there are what are seemingly insurmountable dollar amount needs that we have to face here so if we need to look into things that tie our funding needs with sort of where those expenses are coming from so for example we're an incommuting town and if we can maybe look at that large corporation or publicly traded company type head tax to fund some of these infrastructure needs that are long term that may be a good viable option for

[117:00] raising some of these funds that we clearly don't have the ability to do right now so for future councils please keep the options on the table for funding thanks for that adam and i agree with what's been said i think y'all are doing a great job i look forward to the next iterations and um that the funding will be a challenge of course uh but that idea of say for example bonding against future savings something like that sounds very interesting as ways to give interesting toolkits to having tools in our toolkit so it seems like generally people agree with where you're going um i don't know if anybody else wants to put any other words in but uh people seem in favor so thanks so much for all of your work on this as phenomenal presentations and quality of work and uh look forward to seeing the final product and did you get anything everything you need from us or do you have anything else you need this is fantastic yeah no this is very helpful and thank you for the feedback um to be uh i think clear on on joanna's

[118:01] point earlier this was really what we were looking for was you know council agreeing that we're on the right path with looking at consolidation so in bringing our final master plan our timeline and goal is to bring that for adoption in october and so we will bring the strategies forward and what we will continue to do and prioritize is the financial analysis so the deep dive that you're all speaking of it's exactly the blessing we were sort of looking for is to go down a bunch of rabbit holes but we really wanted to ensure you all felt we were on the right path before we did that but just understanding that timeline that we're looking at we'll bring this plan forward as these initiatives and then follow up with that deeper financial analysis and look forward to to bringing that back to all of you um and incorporate of course the comments that have been made around the master plan um i appreciate the ones around social responsibility and the others we'll make sure to incorporate those as we go forward with the master

[119:00] plan but thank you so much i think this is exactly um we've got what we were looking for our marching orders so appreciate this fantastic thanks so much michelle all right well have a good night uh but we've got another thing to move on to uh so which is discussion of concept playing process coordination amongst multiple boards uh neuro and the server for you yep and just on that previous presentation want to also thank you and thanks staff an enormous amount of work went into that and while we need to continue digging in on the financial strategies it was good to hear that we're on the right path and that's really what we were looking for so thank you for that i'll say that the next item is one that came up at your last retreat before my arrival here in the city but it was really about exploring the possibility of incorporating some of our other advisory boards into joint sort of a concept plan review and i know that jacob and charles and perhaps others on the team uh have come

[120:00] back just to give you some updates and some recommendations so i will pass it to jacob maria thank you so much and good evening uh councilmember brockhead mayor weaver members of council um to begin this presentation uh i'd first like to acknowledge the work of charles farrow uh whose tremendous knowledge of the process um has helped create the presentation that you'll see this evening as well as the work of philip hanowig who's given legal oversight to our recommendations so before getting into those details and getting into our slides i'd also like to um just briefly add that i think it's important for you all to know that we have not invited this work with the boards with the design advisory board or transportation advisor and the reason is that we wanted to seek your input first because this request came from you and if we're going to go to them we'd like to get uh your thoughts before we do that so with that said um i would like to go ahead and bring up our presentation and i believe that we have emily richardson here there

[121:02] we go thank you emily and i appreciate you running our slides this evening so first of all um this is a presentation that was requested by you by council for us to look into the coordination of concept plan reviews not just by the planning board who currently have the sole power to review concept plans with a call up by council but also by the transportation advisory board and the design advisory board who i will refer to liberally throughout this presentation as tab and dab so that's that's what you'll be hearing a lot uh during the course of this presentation this evening now let's go to our next slide emily thank you so much so for background here during your annual retreat back in january you asked us to explore the possibility of a joint concept plan review process with the planning board

[122:00] the design advisory board and transportation classroom and within our current regulatory structure we have the planning board who are the sole reviewing authority for concept plans then we have the dav and tab who are precluded from title ix review processes now i think that among you are many experts to clarify some of this terminology first and foremost the concept plan review process is a process that occurs at the beginning of a development's life when you all have the ability planning board first and counsel with a call to give general comments into the overall direction of a project its site plan its overall layout its transportation connections even the design of this buildings at the very beginning title ix of course is the land use component of our ordinances and to add to this um

[123:00] to this background i would say that as an outside observer and a relative newcomer to the city of boulder what you have here is a process that's been fairly elegantly designed to give tremendous discretion to the planning board and council at the very earliest phases of a developments process and this is really unique and quite powerful so we'll go to our next slide in terms of the role and authority of the planning board in concept plan review this role of the planning board was established under section 74 the city charter and the board was granted quasi-judicial authority to perform all functions in title ix land use code and that includes concept plan review applications and specifically as it relates to concept plan review the board can solicit comments from staff the public the concept plan process solicits comments from us from the public from

[124:00] the planning board early in the process those comments are advisory no votes are taken when concept plans are reviewed and they're typically used to inform the further site review application which happens later and is a somewhat more concrete process the planning boards is the sole authority and it of course is subject to call up by city council i'll also add that to those of you who have served on the planning board um you're familiar with the many duties that are assigned to that board and again i think that this process um of concept plan review is unique to bolton and it's actually a fairly sophisticated process because it gives you so much discretion to comment on site design and architecture early on this is somewhat unique among communities and i think it's a powerful tool look at our next slide in terms of so now we'll shift into the the two boards the design advisory board and the transportation advisory board in terms of dab their role in authority is grant under section two and the purpose of the board is to encourage thoughtful well-designed

[125:00] development projects that are sensitive to the existing character of an area or a character established by adoptive design guidelines for plans for the area and they of course make recommendations on amendments to the downtown urban design guidelines and discretionary projects downtown which is the site review process they are again precluded from discussing land use matters unless it is requested by either the city manager the planning board or council and the city manager in this term of course refers to staff generally so three bodies three entities may refer to dab for their input concept plans and site reviews of course are often referred to them and some great examples of projects recently that have received the impressive and helpful input from the design advisory board and include the rev project which was significantly improved

[126:00] the the first presbyterian site which was significantly improved and consistently i have seen since my approval my arrival here in boulder that this board improves the design of projects and we'll uh go to the next thought second in regards to the transportation advisory board their role as an authority um they of course are granted authority intersection two once again and their job is different their their role is to advise the city manager of the planning board and you all city council concerning any transportation matter except it steps forward in the section it goes on to enumerate those things and what they do what the tab does are transportation related cip projects they advise on amendments to the tmp and they advise on policy issues operating programs traffic engineering parking and alternative transportation and programs that track the modal shift goal what does that mean that means i'm shifting away from moving in cars to other modes of transportation

[127:00] walking biking in transit they also are precluded in the code from discussing land use matters unless it is requested by you by city council in essence the transportation advisory board is a policy making board they review and advise on policy and make recommendations to you all that policy is then implemented by the planning board as they go through quasi-judicial processes of site review that's the way the system has been built and we'll go to our next slide in our review of this request we have looked thoroughly throughout the ordinances as you see in your memo and we have really investigated various ways that these boards can give input to the concept planning process and these are some of the options that are before you the first is this is what we'll be recommending is to utilize the existing review and referral authority of city council the second is to

[128:00] require that all concept plans go to the to dab and tab the third is to require that select concept lab plans go to dab and dab the fourth option is to require the dab and tab informally review some or all of the console plans and the last one of these is to require that joint planning a joint planning board dab and tab meeting to hear concept plans and this was discussed to some level by a council member young in her message to hotline earlier today among these options and analyses there are some key things to keep in mind and we enumerated these in our memo but to restate them they are the additional staff or staff time maybe needed to administer additional processes changes to review processes that would include changes to ordinances or board procedures changes of course to these processes would create time and cost that then flow through to applicants

[129:00] and generally we think that any of these potential changes would potentially um achieve an end result that's actually already available to you to counsel upon your request so we'll go to uh our next slide so this is our staff recommendation we think that it's best to utilize your current existing review and referral authority in the way that the system has been constructed today council planning board and staff would retain our ability to refer concept plans to dab and you council can refer to tab for review any concept plan that power exists presently if we do that no revisions of the code are necessary no additional staff resources are necessary no additional time project budget impacts would flow through to applicants and no additional training for board members would be necessary in order to implement this but what we would do if this is the option the council suggests that we take and again this is why we

[130:00] recommend it is that as staff as we review concept plans we could flag components of concept plans or concept plans generally that would benefit from additional review by the transportation advisory board or the design advisory board and notify the planning board or notify you council when those conditions exist so that you can be aware when you need to use that referral authority this system of concept plan review is really elegantly built the way that it is today and it grants this broad latitude to council to solicit input from your members as well as those other boards and today the staff of our department pnds and the city attorney's office are properly resourced to administer that system now that i said our goal is to maximize the effectiveness of the concept plan review process and we think that can be done by fully fully utilizing that discretion which is afforded to council with our current ordinances and uh we'll go to our next slide

[131:04] so i'd like to add a few comments in conclusion to this presentation the the first is that both with dab and tab these boards do excellent work their goal is to improve our city and we want from a staff standpoint we want to empower and enable them to do that great work so in addition to the recommendations uh that i've given tonight i'd also like to bring attention to two separate efforts that can empower these boards and i mentioned these to you just for your consideration because they came up in our research into this topic first our design advisory board adds tremendous value and again the first presbyterian site is an excellent example of their ability to increase the quality of the built environment 30 pearls another one this board does a great job and their input is framed by a set of guidelines that ultimately date to 2013

[132:02] these guidelines were written specifically for pearl street and the downtown core which is why this board was initially called the downtown design advisory board and are highly prescriptive and specific and even though the board reviews and gives input on projects from a variety of locations today improving these guidelines would be a major step forward and could enable better design in the whole city of boulder so in summary this board needs a comprehensive flexible and smart set of guidelines that empower the members rather than constrain them so this this work to update those guidelines is not something that's currently planned or budgeted but it has been acknowledged both by the board's members and by my own staff as something that's important work to consider for the future and i'd like to offer that to you as something that could be done as a major improvement to the design advisory board's work the second thing um and this is regarding the transportation advisory board um personally i'd like to thank the members of tab for the thoughtful work that they've done on the east folder sub community plan the draft

[133:01] connections plan specifically we're going to continue to engage them as we refine our recommendations similarly this board was also very helpful with the alpine balsam plan and again in the way that our system is constructed you as council have solicited their input and that input is then implemented by the planning board they've benefited and we've benefited the city boulder generally by this policy work that's been done by tab on those projects and for this board i'd like to draw attention to another opportunity which exists outside the concept plan process which is very important um which is the upcoming updates to the design and construction standards or the dcs now for those of you who are familiar with this you probably understand the power of the dcs for those of you who aren't this is a set of standards that govern everything related to the design of the built environment for all projects that go through discretionary review processes every development over three dwelling units anything in commercial nature any subdivision that occurs within the city

[134:00] of boulder is required to abide by the recommendations that are written into the dcs and they include standards that relate to the design of streets sidewalks the treatment of landscapes this is a key guiding document that helps to shape our built environment most importantly the dcs is under update now and for our transportation advisory board their input into the update of the dcs is critical it is a way for the board to exert a level of influence and improvement to our growth environment which applies to every project that goes through every review for the indefinite future so i want to draw attention to that um because this is a very important way for this board to improve our bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure that will affect the entire city not just single projects that are going through review and that's something that's happening now and will continue to happen and i hope that the tabs engagement in the dcs updates will prove to be a fruitful way

[135:00] for them to improve the design of the entire built environment of our city so with that said i will uh conclude my remarks after my two editorial comments on both words thank you all for humoring me in that regard um and i'll also mention that i'm joined here by charles ferro who i mentioned before as well as hella pandawig to help answer any questions or comments that you all may have so uh with that i'll end presentation and welcome discussion thanks so much jacob uh do we have any questions for staff about this before we offer comments i'm seeing rachel thanks erin thanks jacob um just one question i understand that we have the the power right now to invite dab and tab as as necessary i'm just wondering do you know how often that's been exercised in say the past five years and i'm asking because it was it was my impression that until we invited tab to weigh in on something maybe see you south within the last year there had been

[136:00] virtually no invitations for tab at least to weigh in on on land use so just wondering that the history of how it's been playing out well it's great question rachel um those things predate me so i'll have to defer to charles historical knowledge as well as to tell us the degree that she's able to offer i will also say that that is one of the reasons that we make this recommendation because that power is in fact granted to you and an awareness of when projects should be referred may enable you all to exercise that power more judiciously and engage tab uh and dab in those processes so i don't believe that it has been used that often and it could be used to greater effect in the future which is why we make that recommendation so with that i'll ask charles or hello if you can add some historical knowledge yeah jacob i think that's well said i can't think of a time other than cu software we've where councils uh deferred to uh tab for comments on an individual application thanks charles that's my my memory as well um adam and

[137:00] then bob yeah thank you for the presentation um since we're talking about dab and tab weighing in did they weigh in on how they would like to weigh in uh compared to what the current process is that's a great question thank you adam um so my understanding if i if my memory serves correctly is that this request initially came to you from the design advisory board as a part of their letters to council back in december and then that was heard in january and you have made that request i think that the addition of tab to that was provided through uh through direct comment by tab members not through their letter but again i would defer to other staff if you have knowledge that's what my memory serves and then you all as council directed us to investigate the potential engagement of both of those boards in the concept plan review process and since then we didn't get any further feedback so like you gave us five options kind of they didn't look at those options themselves and then come back with their input correct that's correct we're uh so listening

[138:01] input from you you all are the first to have heard this research and our recommendation and then again if you see fit we'd be happy to talk with the boards uh going forward okay uh that's all i need to know for right now thank you bob yeah just kind of building on the last two comments i'm just trying to understand how this is gonna work mechanically jacob because um oftentimes the first the council appears of a concept plan is when it's presented to us for a call in other words but we're not tracking the the uh applications at least most of us don't um and so the first we often hear of a project is when it pops up on our calendar for a call of consideration um and so i think if if we are going to more frequently than once every five years um ask tab or dab to weigh in on something we're going to have to know about that thing or we're going to have to send it back to them before we do the call up so i just maybe you've thought of this and if you haven't maybe you should think about it but like mechanically how is it that you know cu south was easy because we've known that's coming for a while but how how is council going to know the concept plan is coming down the path

[139:01] and then it should be sent to um tab or dab for uh opinions uh in parallel with or right after or maybe in advance of plenty more hope just mechanically how we're gonna know that great question bob thank you so the concept plan process by default occurs at the very earliest age in a development's life it is the very first thing that occurs in terms of a submittal to the city full review and that's advantageous right because it is putting uh the general concept of the development on the table for discussion and feedback at the very beginning of its life so by default when you all see it for for call up that means that it has just begun its review processes right its potential site review and then as it goes through all of the other reviews for conformity to regulations will occur much later in the process so when you all see the option for call-up to review a concept plan it is in fact at the very beginning of the developments review

[140:00] processes and what i would advise is what i mentioned before which is that should council see fit to pursue something like this we could look into ways for staff to flag either a whole concept plan or components of it that you all may want to be aware of so that you could review that and then defer or refer it to tab or dab so for example some concept plans are quite small in scope others however are quite large or located at key locations which may have transportation impacts to the city positive or negative if you also see fit to do this we could look at criteria that the staff could evaluate that concept plan right at the beginning and say to you all council to notify you to say this concept plan has an aspect which may in fact benefit from additional reviews so we could flag it and review and refer it to you but the details of that are something that we need to work out again if you all see fit but i think the best thing to do would be to allow us to flag something for more in-depth reviews so that you all could review that and see if you'd like to

[141:00] refer to one of the other boards and i would also uh open comment from my other staff members as well okay that's fine um so we can rely on you to flag it to us before um it reaches us and call up could we also and this is maybe a question for the legal staff could we call something up look at it and realize that we want some more input in addition to what we've already heard from planning board we want input from transportation and dab and so basically send it to them after our call up or as part of our call-up is that possible that's a great question bob and that's typically how for example planning board would utilize dab in a concept plan review so for example planning board will complete its review of a planning board and say geez this would be a great application for design advisory board to weigh in on why don't you make a stop at design advisory board before you file for your site review because to jacob's point concept plan is the earliest stages of a development

[142:01] and it really is meant to take all of the feedback from staff the public planning board and or city council if a concept plan is called up and synthesize that to help inform a site review uh submittal so um i i think it would be fine procedurally if council wanted to either call up a concept plan application and ask that the applicant make a stop at a transportation advisory board prior to the middle of the site review okay thanks thanks bob i'll uh call on myself with a couple questions um just in terms of involving um dab with concept reviews just my um understanding really is that when we get a concept plan generally the architecture is not that far along right like we we get kind of white boxes mostly a concept plan right so i'm just wondering like is it really the concept plan that dab would look at or is it more that we

[143:01] would say hey this is a project that's of significant importance in the city um once you've gotten further along in your architecture go talk to dab at that point would it work out more like that or what's your opinion on that uh well thank you aaron uh agree with the general direction of your comments that um the design advisory board does tremendous work to improve the quality of architecture projects i have seen that during my time here and that's one of the reasons that i think their skill sets are best utilized during the site review process when the architecture is fully developed they can give comments not over on not only the overall massing but also down to detail material texture uh even down to things such as joinery these kinds of comments are very productive and helpful and they can only occur when the architecture has been developed to a certain level once again what's been provided for to you all and the way that this system has been constructed which i think is fairly elegant is that should you all see a concept plan through call up and

[144:00] identify that there is some aspect of its design which could benefit from the detailed i o dab you can refer it but again i think that would be relatively unusual because at the concept plan level usually projects are just at their very beginning so um again the option exists for you to refer to to dab should you see fit right but i'm just trying to figure out where that goes in the process because i think as i recall the letter from dab they were asking to be involved earlier in the in project development which i which i think i understood to me not after a full site review application has been submitted but somewhat before that but i'm just thinking that maybe that time is not right at concept review but somewhere in between you know like halfway in between concept and site review perhaps does that make sense as maybe where they they might get involved it does and that's typically when we'll see dabs involvement it's after planning board has reviewed an initial concept

[145:00] they'll make a recommendation for a particular application to stop that dab uh prior to the submit of the site review thanks for clarifying that the other ones in terms of options that that were given did we think at all about maybe like for tab the concept of an ex officio number uh they could either participate either all the time or only some of the time for larger projects as another option for getting tab more involved darren that's not something we looked at uh but it's a good suggestion and we'd be happy to evaluate it going forward okay thanks uh that's it for my questions so i think we're ready to give staff comments who's got some comments i see sam and then rachel thank you all for bringing this forward um it's a really interesting topic and i think it's timely um i generally think that um dab and tab have really different functions but both of

[146:00] them do intersect with planning a lot um i think the way that it works right now for referral to dab from planning board is the right way to go i think it's too detailed for council um generally speaking to be to be asking for that um my experience and the level of review that we do a council of either concept plan or site plan is higher level than a planning board at planning board you do get into some nitty gritty details particularly in site plan review so i thought the way it's teed up right now where planning board has the option knows they have the option and uses it some time of seeing a concept plan and saying to the applicant you should pass this by dab on the way to site plan review i think that's great and i think if that's working good and if it's not working um i think planning board should be encouraged to think about that because i think planning board has by far better visibility into that than council will so i think that is a good way to go for

[147:02] dab on the dab subject i i couldn't agree more about um improving the guidelines and making them more general you're exactly right jacob the scope has grown from a downtown advisory group trying to keep things kind of um hanging together near the historic district and you know a theme of boulder's kind of building downtown into the entire city so i think of form-based codes you know and the conversation we're having around form based codes both at alpine balsam and and what's there at 38 pearl so i think um along with this referral question which i don't know that there's much broken or not working right now with planning board and dab i do think that expanding those guidelines to cover the whole city um you know a place i think could really use another look is um what we do in the boulder valley regional center for example you know i think what we have there's probably pretty

[148:01] dated and could use some work so i i like that part on the other hand moving to tab [Music] tab is a policy board um and you know they push us on important land use policies that link to transportation policies and that push is really important it's a ongoing urban conversation about how you link your land use and your transportation that's important for climate it's important for social reasons for people's mobility and everything and we are an incoming town so it is a big deal to hear from transportation aligned with development but i think that's more at the policy level um when it comes to most project review there's just not a whole lot for tab to do um however the the exception to that statement is when it's something like diagonal plaza or alpine balsam anything where a big site might be bisected multiply by connections or sites that are large and

[149:02] maybe they're not super blocks but they need better connection to the streets around them i think there are times when it would be helpful to have tab um look at concept plans and most especially for those big projects so i would say i i would like council to know that that's something council can do at concept plan review is to ask tab to weigh in and then it'd be something that we adopt as an option when we see it because i really do think um you know and i'm not it doesn't matter to me so much whether tab touches it right before we see the content plan or right after because it'll be folded in either way before it gets to a site plan review so i'm i'm ambivalent about exactly when relative to council's concept plan but i think council should be aware of and ask tab to weigh in on the larger scale concept plans and that can be at the discretion with council

[150:01] so that's what i think about the referrals but i thought you made another excellent point as far as you know taba's policy board should be informing our design and construction standards especially when it comes to transportation things like separating pads and bikes from autos and you know where we want autos less and where we want them more and so on so i thought that was a great suggestion so i think your two editorial comments about new dab guidelines and tab taking a close look at designing construction standards i thought those were both good i don't think we need to do much at the council level in my opinion with dab and concept plans because then planning board has a good handle on that but i think we should remember and use the referral possibility to tab for large-scale concept plans some things i would not support at all are everything going to dab and tab all the time or joint meetings um because

[151:02] joint meetings like i've had two i think maybe three planning board council joint meetings and with too many people you just no one gets a chance to contribute and everything's super diluted so i don't think those big mega meetings really help i think if we want better communication between dab and planning or tab and planning i think aaron's point about ex officio makes a lot of sense and i think it really makes a lot of sense to have tab have an ex-officio member who attends planning board meetings and that's all i've got thanks this was a really good way to tee up this conversation thanks sam rachel yep um thanks erin thanks again jacob so i would say that i don't feel i know enough about dab and when things would be appropriate and what exactly would be appropriate for them to review to really weigh in super knowledgeably so i'm going to defer on dab

[152:00] for tab it was actually one of my recommendations that we take this up and look at it and it was partly because i noticed that community members like community cycles were emailing us at i want to say site review maybe and saying you all are missing like this key transportation connection on a project and if you like you know rerouted something here and there you know you'd connect several different bikeways and things like that and it it um has seemed apparent to me during my um time on council so far that we're missing that that input so um i'm i'm not sure that as is it's working very well to get tabs input timely and everywhere it would be helpful um i'm a little bit leery of like having having certain projects flagged for us and then it's discretionary because i feel like right now it's already discretionary and we're not doing it so i prefer that there was something a little bit more automated about getting tabs input where we think it's going to

[153:01] be appropriate and i don't know if it's more automatically going to tab and we opt out perhaps or you know just sort of restructuring the system so that we're sure that we're getting that lens put on projects and not missing until it's a little bit late in the game tabs expertise swinging on projects so i would prefer that we do something that that makes it a bit more likely that we're going to get tabs input up front and everywhere that we need it thanks thanks rachel um i'll go ahead and weigh in i said i don't see any other hands at the moment um so yeah thanks for being responsive and and bringing this back to us on dab i think if dab looks at more projects we'll be better off so i i think having them come in you know at that kind of midway point between a concept plan and a site review plan for substantial projects would be fantastic uh so i i i don't know that that

[154:00] council is the way to make that happen because i don't think it's probably too detail-oriented for us and also we're getting white boxes pictures of white boxes and we don't really have necessarily a great sense of which ones need the more work and which ones don't so if we could maybe really strongly encourage planning board to send major projects to dab at their discretion but also maybe have staff really make that recommendation um say for you know projects over a certain size something like that so if you if you all kept a real close eye on it and then made the recommendation and then let planning board move it over to dab hopefully pretty frequently um i think we'd all benefit uh from that um and uh agree uh jacob about the creating more design guidelines i think that would be very helpful and a fantastic thing that is not a small project right i mean that would take a lot of work i the downtown design guidelines i think the update on that

[155:00] took two plus years and i think like over a dozen meetings i you know i remember tracking charles you would remember that as with sam asefa and it was it was a big project and that was just for downtown so um if you can get to it fantastic but um i think that is probably a longer term project and then in terms of tab i think rachel and sam both had good things to say there i i would love to get more of tabs input on uh substantial projects you know it probably doesn't make sense when it's like you know one building downtown that's like 30 feet wide street frontage well i mean there's not really much of anything to talk about for for tab there but if they could get again some of these more substantial projects like diagonal pauses a great example of one where you have internal connections that you would want the transportation experts to look at carefully you know or or maybe

[156:00] something that's along uh you know like arapahoe avenue where we're working on the bus rapid transit and how it might integrate with that so um as i understand it right right now it really requires council's active referral to have tab look at something so um if that could maybe be presented to us as when we get concept plan reviews if that could be flagged as uh you know as a question you know let us know if you think tab should review this and uh with a recommendation maybe hey this is a substantial in a project the tab should look at this um that would be helpful and i don't think we should have to call up a concept plan and go through the whole thing in order to refer something to tab um we should be able to just do it when we discuss a call up and if it were part of every memo about concept plans then it could be front of mind for us and if we feel like it's necessary we could do it to rachel's point i think it should be

[157:00] it sounds like we can't really do it automatically right now but it should be more friend of mine and done i think on a regular basis and not you know once every five years it and and i would be interested in in the exploration of that idea of a tab ex-officio member on planning board either all the time or maybe as needed um so if that would be a request for me if you could dive into that a little bit and come back and see if you think that that could work out from a procedural standpoint because i think we benefit from their expertise getting it a lot more often so that's what i got um any other council members want to weigh in here all right um seeing none uh staff what what does this give you what what do you think next steps are well aaron first of all i'd say that um this gives us a lot to work with and i'd like to say thank thanks to all of you for your thoughtful feedback um maybe in response to some of the good

[158:00] ideas that we've heard we're definitely going to look into the idea of the exit the seo number from tab sitting in the planning board great idea and we have not explored it so we'll do the same and uh come back to you second thing uh in terms of getting a project in front of the transportation advisory board only you have the power to do that by the way the ordinances are written but in order to maybe reduce the staff discretion i would just uh would remind everyone that many of our adopted plans identify significant sites and they identify where major connections need to occur so in fact this a lot of this works already done for us staff can simply identify where plans have already located major projects or major connections and we can flag that for you for your awareness so that if you see fit to refer to tab you can do that and again reduce some of staff's discretion and simply go by all of our adopted plans so we'll look uh further into that as well and i think overall we've gotten some great feedback tonight and we can uh pursue what we've heard from you and uh come back with uh further recommendations

[159:00] great thanks so much i appreciate that jacob um any other final comments from anybody on this item okay see none call it good on that item thanks again folks for doing that for us and uh the very last item is the council racial equity training discussion and this is actually i'm the one who's responsible for wait amy is on the on the call amy do you want to um do you want to see this up if you don't want to that's fine i can take it happy to do either i was planning on you doing it but okay yeah i'll do it um so yeah so the um the racial equity the guiding coalition uh has been talking for months actually about um how we hold ourselves accountable to the community for the racial equity work that we have committed to do as a council and and have been doing so and specifically the

[160:01] trainings that that we've been assigned the bias microaggression training and we talked a long time about how we might do that how we might let people know what we've done as council members and what the coalition came up with as a as a recommendation is that um rather than just simply post like hey council members names and like date of attendance that showed that we completed that commitment that uh that instead we do something where each of us wrote a few sentences on um on you know what that training meant to us so a little bit of a homework assignment where we had a little bit more of a personal take on um on this work on this racial equity work that we could then communicate out to the broader community and have it be you know more than just a checklist so i know we're all super busy but it would just be really the request

[161:01] would just be two or three sentences something on that level and that um then those would get posted to uh a council webpage where interested community members could take a look at the work we've been doing and some of our thoughts on that as a way of fulfilling our commitment that we've made as council to engage in that work and then um that's that would be over maybe the next couple of weeks and um as i understand it from amy is a time frame and then with the new council that this would just be something that was communicated to candidates and newly elected council members to say hey you know part of this position is a commitment to engage in the um the government alliance on race and equity trainings and the bias and microaggression trainings and then new council members could participate in those as they come online so that that's the recommendation out there and uh happy to uh take any comments or questions or discussion

[162:02] and there's lots of it rachel i'll start with a question i just want to make sure i understand what are we what is the purpose of us writing these sentences is it to demonstrate that we attended these sessions or to demonstrate that we learned something in these sessions or what what is the impetus for for this homework assignment yeah i think the idea is to kind of show um have some accountability and show that we have engaged in this work that we've committed to do to the community so it's a kind of an accountability and showing folks in the community that we've been engaging this work but not not just checking a box but also a little bit about um you know the meaning that it had for us um so like in my own example i uh i think sam and i were in one of the very early sessions maybe is that january i mean it was it's been a bit

[163:00] so like i feel like i would have been better and i think maybe we did have to to hand in some assignment at the end of that but i um i mean i have lingering impressions but it would have been easier to write up a few sentences in the weeks after so i just wonder for those of us who are a bit remote from it rather than recreating something that feels a little inauthentic may we just commit to a check mark that we attended that and learned from it and um absorbed or asked amy if she's got our write up or i'm just a little bit worried that um i will you know not remember the distinction between the the one i took this january and the one i took last february and i don't know yeah so i can happy to kind of respond to that if you don't mind me stepping in here please okay thanks rachel i appreciate your question um so really this is to demonstrate not just how one workshop has really impacted you all but the question the prompt that i would email is really how

[164:01] have the workshops helped you in your role as a council member um and so i'm happy to in that email put in a refresher description of the advancing racial equity role of government the by bias microaggression workshop just to help prompt with anything that would be helpful thank you and and one more question um if someone does not submit these sentences is it an indication that they didn't attend the workshop like if we don't get you three sentences or is that sort of a yes and it doesn't have to be like three sentences or two sentences just a really short paragraph something short you know it was you know aaron's point really just you know how has this role helped you as a council member and then um if we don't collect anything then that would be an indication that we did not attend okay thank you yep my pleasure uh mark yeah i would prefer if this were prospective instead of retrospective we

[165:00] knew that this was going to be a requirement you know we could have done it at the moment and i think at the moment would have provided a better um sense of what we actually derived from it i've been to two of these and i would be hard-pressed to make the distinction and i would be hard-pressed to fulfill that requirement now many months later and there's a little bit of artifice to this and you know it would be nice if we had known that going in and we could have taken the appropriate notes or made the appropriate comments at the time i'm just not sure that this is a very useful exercise many many months later you know if we do this again i think it would be much easier to be responsive to this request thank you for that mark sam

[166:01] thanks mark sam yeah i i kind of agree with rachel and mark's hesitation here i attended the sessions and i actually found them interesting and informative and and thought provoking so i i think there's an incredible value to doing them but you know it also blends with me as a council member on all the thinking we've been doing about racial equity and kind of all the work we've been doing on police reform and and many of the other ways it intersects with the work we do so it would be awfully hard for me to tease out you know how my thinking has evolved just on from those those sessions as opposed to kind of uh more holistically how the thinking and the conversation nationally has got me thinking about these issues so um i i agree with rachel and mark's hesitation about trying to link you know the

[167:00] attendance to some change in thinking when the evolution has been affected by many more things for me and for this cycle i kind of think check boxes or you know acknowledgement that we did it in the context of larger scale thinking might make more sense because i would have you know welcomed writing it shortly after those sessions but it like rachel said it's going to be awfully hard to put it back together from now so i don't mind the attendance piece of it it's just i'm not quite sure what the writing part gives us right yes thanks for that sam and uh if i can uh respond a little bit before we go back to rachel um there there were there was one or maybe two people on the coalition who were concerned that just a checkbox of attendance was to start um and so they were concerned that that might i don't know not feel good for some people it was not

[168:01] my primary concern personally so i personally i'm fine with just checkbox if that's council as well but i just want to pass that along because there was that sentiment from somebody rachel could we do a combination of you get a check mark if you attended and invite us to share and especially amy if you're able to send back i do think that at least after one of them we were invited to email you thoughts or observations or feedback and um so i i mean i i i can probably cobble together uh something if you're giving me the prompts but um maybe a couple people could and so there could be check marks and then like some featured commentary to make it less stark just an idea okay thanks rachel adam thanks aaron yeah i just want to give a little bit of background since i was in the committee that made the recommendation um

[169:00] you know we we take all this racial equity work pretty seriously and the the check box felt like it really wasn't living up to the work i guess is what it comes down to um and i totally understand that you know recalling very specific things that change your opinions or from months and months ago not super easy so i get where it sounds like the majority of council is going here um it's just we so rarely get a chance to discuss things especially harder topics like racial equity um in public and we don't have a whole lot of you know public interaction around the topic itself aside from when we talk about it based on another topic so you know it's very rare that we sit here in this room and talk racial equity um so we were just trying to find a way where on an individual level you could say how you've

[170:01] you know thought about this work and what what it means to you and what we've done and where we're going with it so um that's all i think the committee was trying to get at and you know as we've talked about on council we just don't have those opportunities for discussion that we might like so we're trying to portray that in a in a different way on an individual basis thanks rachel denmark triple dip in here i apologize um so i do think it's really important that we um that we have the accountability and get something out to the public again for people like sam and i we attended you know practically in 2020 so um i think it's it's probably overdue that we that we do get something up on the website so just want to encourage or give that feedback and then i appreciate what you're saying adam and i guess that um i certainly hope that racial equity

[171:00] is inherent in in all my votes and all that i'm doing on council so well i appreciate that we have the opportunity to write something succinct on it i think that um it's it's also something that we should be living and breathing and um if if it doesn't feel right to distill something from the better part of a year ago that doesn't feel as authentic as as we'd want it to then then hopefully there's some space for that too mark yeah i just want to respond to adam i don't i think it's a it's a fine suggestion um my sense that it ought to be prospective is because of the lapse of time and going forward uh if we know that we're going to be asked for that kind of sense of of how the training has contributed to our thinking we'll be alert for it and we'll be looking to you know understand that better in ourselves i just think that at this point going back this

[172:02] year um it's going to be a little bit artificial just because of the passage of time and all of the things we've had to deal with since then and you know this to me it's not valuable to just kind of try to make it up um but on a going forward basis i think it's a perfectly you know useful and worthy suggestion and we could institute that on that basis thanks bob yeah i have the same concern i did my preliminary racial equity training last year and then the micro aggression and bias training on february 9th and february 23rd i had to like look that up i knew sometime in january february but i just looked it up in my calendar and i'm struggling with the same thing that some of my colleagues are which is how to recreate some of the things that i learned at that moment in time more than six months ago as compared to other things that we've learned along the way or built on that and so let me make a suggestion that maybe builds on mark's recommendation about prospective um

[173:02] there will be either four or five of us that will continue into the next council and i assume i hope um that there's some refresher training for those of us even though some of us have been through a few rounds of training already i hope that there's some refresher training that is made available to us and then of course we'll have new colleagues that will be joining us in november and certainly we'll want to welcome them to participate in training as well so i might suggest that while the idea is good um it's a little bit late for us to try to recreate what what we learned six or nine or 12 months ago and so we might just do this on a prospective basis as existing council members go through i'm using the word refresher that may not be the right word but uh additional training uh that is made available to us in the coming months and then for new council members the preliminary training is made available to and and have that a as a kind of homework assignment that's done pretty pretty concurrently with the training as it occurs um so that it's posted within a couple weeks after the

[174:02] the training happens and we just go forward go forward as opposed to trying to look back and have people try to recreate what they learned quite a while ago thanks for that bob um yeah so i'm hearing similar sentiments from it sounds like a majority of council that writing something up be more of a perspective thing as people take the courses um are we comfortable with like starting up a web page here with more to start off with just kind of attendance information and then as we phase into next year in a new council on new trainings that that's the point which people would add some thoughts that they have upon taking the trainings but i'm seeing general agreement is that all right i've junior mayor but i haven't heard from you do you have any objections to that okay great um let's do that then amy does that work

[175:00] sure this was something that was brought up by members of the guiding coalition so i'll just let the guiding coalition know when we meet with them next month or i guess later this month great all right well that's it on that topic which then brings us to the end of all of our topics for this evening so uh unless anyone has any final comments so anybody anything anything a joke or something okay seeing none um i will virtually gavel the study session to a close thanks everyone and have a good night all right thanks erin good job thank you sir

[176:07] [Music] you