January 11, 2022 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] [Music] [Music] [Music] this will be another good one i'm sure i'm excited [Music] we're just waiting on a couple people they may be waiting on me sorry yeah i will bring you over as soon as i

[1:02] have all of our council members in place so i appreciate your patience always do a great job brenda that was a bit of a juggle here at the very top let's see i am not seeing other council members aaron bliss and jenny [Music] early yeah i'm here too if that was one of the people yeah [Music] i will go ahead and hit record [Music]

[2:03] all right well good evening everyone and welcome to the january 11th 2022 study session the boulder city council let me get us started with a few announcements handed over to nicole for a declaration and then to heather bergman to lead us through the rest of the meeting so our announcements are the very first one is about covet 19 vaccinations so for more local information on getting your vaccine if you haven't already or a booster and sign up for a vaccination for notifications you can go to www.bouldercounty.org families slash disease slash covet-19 slash vaccines and i may have gotten a little ahead here do we have slides for these announcements as well great so there's that url up on your

[3:00] screen there and then we'll move to the second announcement which is about healthcare assistance boulder county housing and human services are working to encourage boulder county residents to sign up for health insurance during open enrollment which ends january 15th just four days from now they're close to 20 000 people living in boulder county who are uninsured including many latinx individuals and younger adults but there is still time to sign up for health insurance note that coverage is affordable and there are big discounts this year preventative care is free there are many plans to choose from and financial assistance may be available for more information and free confidential assistance visit oldercountyhealthcoverage.org and our third and last announcement is about boards and commissions recruitment so 2022 boards and commission recruitment is now open so if you've been looking for an opportunity to get involved with your community and your local government the recruitment period is now open started yesterday and runs through february 21st

[4:01] so you can find the descriptions of the boards and commissions and the vacancies online at boulder colorado.gov boards dash commissions if you have any questions about that or need assistance please contact the city clerk's office at city clerk's office at boulder colorado.gov or call us at that 303-441-4222 our announcements to a close and i'm now going to hand it over to nicole speer for a declaration acknowledging uh the efforts of everyone in the recovery from the marshall fire thanks aaron on december 30th 2021 the marshall fire burned over 6 000 acres and destroyed nearly 1 000 homes and businesses i think that's now over a thousand homes and businesses in superior louisville and unincorporated boulder county approximately 1800 acres of our city's

[5:01] open space burned and severe wind caused power outages and damages in boulder and in neighboring mountain communities in the face of these challenges our city's workers have tirelessly supported the initial response to these disasters and the ongoing recovery process we recognize staff in our police fire rescue open space and mountain parks housing and human services communications and engagement innovation and technology parks and recreation utilities transportation planning and development services community vitality departments and the city manager's office as well as workers with excel the community foundation the boulder chamber the county neighboring cities and the many boulder businesses and individuals that continue to help this work would be praiseworthy on its own but many workers who serve our city live in affected communities and have been supporting us while they their

[6:00] families and their neighbors are dealing with their own losses including the losses of their homes i apologize nicole i got a request from the translator for you to slow down oh i'm so sorry yep should i start again or just slow down maybe go back a few sentences okay this work would be praiseworthy on its own but many workers who serve our city live in affected communities and have been supporting us while they their families and their neighbors are dealing with their own losses including the losses of their homes we recognize the work they're doing for us while managing impacts to their own lives we the city council of the city of boulder extend our sincere appreciation to all the workers contributing to response and recovery efforts and extend our sincere condolences to those who experience the loss of their homes and businesses

[7:02] thank you for that nicole and um a huge thank you to all the staff who've been working incredibly hard in these difficult circumstances to assist our neighbors who've been so terribly affected by this tragic fire with that i'm going to hand it off to our facilitator heather bergman who's going to lead us through the rest of the agenda tonight heather thanks for being here and take it away thanks aaron good good afternoon good evening council um so delighted to be with you again this year um tonight's meeting is sort of the first of several conversations in lead up to our upcoming council retreat um we have a couple items specifically tonight um that are that are they're big ticket items so here in a gif we're going to hear from nuria and staff and a bunch of other folks about how um they are doing with regard to uh your existing priorities and other sort of the day-to-day work of of the city and so we'll hear about that um in quite some detail and that's important so we

[8:00] understand what's already underway and also what you know the weight of um the burden that staff is already carrying on your behalf so when we think about the future we are mindful of what they're already uh taking care of um for you and for the residents of boulder so we'll do that for probably about 90 minutes noria um depending on you know how things go uh we'll leave it to nuria to jump into that and then um council will look to you all to share your priorities which you have done writtenly already you did put them in your individual google sheets and then i aggregated those into a single sheet that i believe we put out for folks to review if they were so inclined and i did provide a very brief sort of integrated summary of those items mostly so that you could see where there were common themes common threads among in between your different priorities and i said this in my email to you but please please please do not

[9:00] feel obligated to you know do a big dog and pony show no need for interpretive dance or anything else you have about five minutes to say whatever you you'd like to say knowing that your colleagues do have access to that written information that you've already provided so you may take up to five minutes but no more than five minutes and fewer is okay there's no penalty for early completion of your task and then after that we'll just talk a little bit about the format of the retreat um given where we are with cove want to make sure that everyone is feeling safe as we get moving into that somewhere in there we'll take a break let you stretch your legs of course um but unless anyone has any questions for me i'd love to go ahead and hand it off to noria nicole just i just wanted to make a general declaration um i saw that we uh not sorry not an official declaration a note for all of us um i speak really quickly it seems that many of us likely speak really quickly given the interpretation that we have um i'm wondering if we could just have some

[10:01] kind of flag we could use to let each other know when we need to slow down a little bit since i know we all have a lot of ideas that we'll be trying to convey relatively quickly i love that idea and if we're if council and nurian myself i'll have our cameras on you know maybe we can just do you know kind of slow down slow it down and help each other you know what's sad nicole is that was me talking slowly um generally i'm about a mile a minute so uh y'all feel free to yank my chain as much as you need to to keep me slow and steady for our interpreters i thanks for doing that um all right council any other questions or comments before we get into the staff presentation nuria would you like to take questions from council along the way or would you like them to hold them until you get through i think we will have a pause when we get through the community connectors conversation which is actually the portion that we have interpretation for

[11:02] um so as we get into the rest of the work plan i do not believe and ryan can correct me if i'm wrong that we will have interpretation throughout the entire way um but ryan will tell us a little bit uh when that comes to uh the community connectors portion but we'll stop there and then we're gonna hold our breath while i try to get through all of staff work plan very quickly um and hold a moment there to see if we have questions on that side okay sounds great in that case take it away great thank you heather and i'll ask taylor to bring up um our thank you and why don't we go ahead and go to the second page so thank you council members so appreciate this moment as we uh really talk through what uh staff has on their minds for the coming years i'll say that these materials have been collected to really inform council's work plan

[12:01] proposals which will be discussed later this evening and i know we're trying to be thoughtful about how we spend our time this evening so we won't be going over the accomplishments of last year to allow more time to spend on staff's work plan presentations and to hear more from council on some of the issues that you're considering but i will note for community that those accomplishments are in both your packet that is online and on our website and i encourage everyone to take a look and while we're not diving into those accomplishments and just hearing that declaration and i thank all of council for that acknowledgement i'll say that when i myself looked at those accomplishments with the knowledge of the constraints and challenges the city has been dealing with over the past two years i can only tip my hat to staff and simply say thank you i know i sent staff a note of appreciation at the beginning of this year but it is always worth taking a moment to say out loud how thankful i am

[13:01] for their tireless support on the response and recovery efforts associated with this fire but also note that it is not the only tragedy staff has dealt with in the year as we're all aware considering the upcoming king super's anniversary all of this with the continuing strain and mental fatigue of dealing with the pandemic and ensuring staff and community are safe and had critical support during this ever-changing emergency and while also advancing key projects initiatives and frankly just the day-to-day service delivery so thank you to staff as we move forward but before we get to our work plan i want to pass it over to ryan hanshin who will take us through some of this updates from the community connectors in residence ryan thank you thank you nuria and good evening council and community my name is ryan hansen and i serve the people of boulder as an engagement specialist in our communication engagement department

[14:01] thank you for the opportunity for community connectors to join council tonight to elevate the lived experience of underrepresented community members community connectors are dedicated to building trust between community and city government and they each earn a stipend for their expertise commitment and time tonight you'll hear from a specific team community collectors and residents and i'm proud to partner with this team of community leaders as they work to strengthen our democracy and i'm eager to hand things over to adela to share more we can move to the next slide good at please uh city council members and fellow community members joining us tonight um as ryan said my name is alex i use her and aja pronouns i'm a community connector in residence i'm part of the latinx orchard

[15:05] um we do want to make sure that everyone is participating in interpretation channel you can choose that through your zoom menu and um go ahead adele i'll turn it back to you thank you so much yeah if anybody has questions make sure to put that in the chat um so yeah i i'm part of the latinx orchard grove low income and cu boulder communities um my passion of um and work of building bridges between community and city began as a freshman at boulder high as a member of the youth opportunities advisory board and now as a senior at ce boulder i've been really lucky to continue cating for members of the boulder community through programs like community connectors program so yeah the community connectors and residents program is made up of

[16:00] bicultural connectors that work closely with communities where we have established leadership roles for community and most importantly grown trust and throughout 2021 our team has served and represented the latinx nepali black or african american older adult lgbtq plus cu students adult with disabilities residents of manufactured home communities or low-income community members and our team focuses on building the power of underrepresented community members by elevating their voices and through reducing barriers um to inclusive public engagement um and our work inspires to create a channel for ideas concerns dreams of our community members um to city government and today we're here to present community input and um perspectives that you all may consider in deciding on cancel priorities for 2022 and 2023 and we've summarized and grouped these into

[17:01] themes through three main avenues so the first one is surface community issues and strengths which we have engaged approximately 1 642 underrepresented community members including families and children of direct contact in two-way dialogue throughout the year the second has been through building power and raising voices sessions we have engaged around 48 underrepresented community members which 61 reported household income under um 50 000 a year for um of the year a year from october to december of this year um and then we also did through a questionnaire hearing from under from about 18 underrepresented community members in december of 2021 and then i also want to highlight that our demographics for our session and questionnaire is about 93 bypoc or other um community

[18:00] members and this these pictures of our team right here now pass it on to my fellow community connector adriana to highlight some of our community's strengths is

[19:28] uh one moment we want to make sure we can pull up the bright slides i think our presenter has frozen um emily let me send you these slides if you oh taylor is that working now okay thank you adriana please continue um

[21:09] foreign is going to bring up the next slides um emily would you mind presenting i think yep yes hi uh this is emily i'm happy to bring up this slice just from thank you emily okay

[23:18] is

[24:02] is

[25:10] is thank you adriana

[26:00] and then um only we can play that video thank you namaste

[27:18] [Music]

[28:09] foreign

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[30:05] is foreign

[31:00] [Music] foreign foreign

[33:04] thank you and emily if you could pull those slides down please um but just want to mention dinesh is joining uh by video because he works an evening shift and wanted to be here tonight uh but was not able to and we insisted he was here uh by video so thank you and adriana over to you guys ryan we will

[35:41] foreign

[36:49] uh thank you elliana and thank you to dinesh as well for sharing um now um touch on healthcare access and covet

[37:02] 19 issues so i just wanted to share a little bit of what our community had to say in regards to access the needs of affordable health care and mental health resources um so one said it's very expensive to get sick need to access to health care and dental care too another said more specialized drug services in addiction training doctors further for understanding as well as police for withdrawal not enough research resources for survivors of sexual assault and care for mental health for teenagers when i spoke with my immediate community when seeking medical attention many had to leave hospitals to seek another location with less weight or had to go home as an alternative because they weren't unable to afford it or get financial aid um other issues have included access to covet vaccines boosters and rapid testing vaccine hesitancy there's been

[38:02] fear around tracking and system process um just lack of trust really um i'm sure that it's free um some are still experiencing barriers having access to vaccine clinics uh barriers with only a few rapid test sites and repeated question of whether or not there are more places in boulder county and if there's a possibility to increase rapid test resources um and then lastly community members are concerned about more concern about their children um with all this said it's important to keep in mind that these issues have been brought up since january when we first came to you all so these coven 19 concerns and issues have been changing um throughout 2021 rapidly changing as our community's needs also change so yeah to and i'll pass it back to adriana thank you

[39:25] is

[40:47] thank you thank you so much adriana and adella and for bringing perspective of community into this space and we can pull down the slides please and open it up for

[41:00] any questions of counsel out first to junie please thank you i just have a quick question i didn't understand the context i think it was adriana when she mentioned people of color feeling rejected from certain services such as child care i just did not fully understand that

[42:13] is okay thank you i think my follow-up question would be for nuria based on what i just heard tonight is there a process whereas people can i suppose complain to the city if let's say whether it's an organization or i know i think from the city there is a process but i'm wondering in the community if there's another process where you know if a community member go to a business and they feel discriminated is there um a complaint mechanism you know that's a really great question juni and in most cities there are offices of civil rights and sometimes

[43:01] that is to a state which i'm sure exists here city of boulder doesn't have that per se but certainly they can share with us what that looks like and we can pass that on it is something i think to think about in the future and um as we as staff think about what does a potential sort of a 3-1-1 or a new crm system where we can uh figure out how best to put complaints forward even if they're not ours if we had a better uh system by which we could capture them we can then forward those on to appropriate people so i think it's something for us to think about as we continue to make our systems more robust yeah no thank you for that and i really appreciate that comment that you make of course i think if we're working hard at making boulder welcoming community and certainly there might be community members who are not um how do i put it as on board and

[44:01] sometimes as well it's probably due to either you know just lack of education or whatever it may be but having some type of robust processes in place to educate people in community might be helpful in the form of a complete mechanism thank you that's all well not seen other hands um thank you so much and thank you community uh for sharing your lived experience thank you to our co-presenters this evening adriana adala and dinesh community connectors here please don't hesitate to send any follow-up questions to to me and we can pass those along to communicators so again thank you and uh over to aaron

[45:00] well i just wanted to echo the thank you just that testimony and the the information that you gave us with your lived experience and unique experiences that you bring to the table it's just so incredibly valuable and uh so important for us on the council to hear as we go into our retreats i'm just very grateful for all the work that you do and the incredibly important perspective you brought to us tonight so thank you i think do we go back and so we'll we'll say goodnight and i think we'll to you and then heather i think we'll come back to you i think we go back to nuria thank you very much um uh nuria you're gonna pick it up from here and talk about uh work plan things as i recall i am i'm gonna pick it up from slide 14 and i'll just say that we are ending our interpretation here um which is probably good because i'm about to try to launch and make up some time so that we can uh have a more robust conversation at the end but you need to your previous question i'll say

[46:01] that staff has tagged me and reminded me that we are we also have our our uh human rights commission and the human rights ordinance by which we can do that but i still i appreciate that there are uh places where people can file discrimination complaints there and thinking ahead about how to make resources and that process easier to people will continue to be something that we look upon as we think about the implementation of the racial equity plan so i can go to slide 14 if you would and a staff is bringing that up i'll say i was remiss as we were talking about it just to remind us all of where we are in the timeline so today we're going to talk a little bit about the 22 uh priorities uh that staff has been thinking of what they are working on and having and have projected into the future and hopefully we'll be hearing from you uh council and and finding ourselves aligned we hope and if not learning a little bit more about where um you want to

[47:02] um what what are your thoughts as you look into 2022 and for the term we will be listening actively uh as we move forward and we will on january 18th respond to those proposals that we hear from you council and scope those out as best we can and if there are any questions today that you may have that we can't answer we will certainly get back to you in short order the other thing i'll say is that the retreat will take place on january 21st from 4 to 8 pm and on january 22nd from 8 to noon and we're hoping to have confirmed all our work plan by the end of q1 of this year you're seeing on the screen right now sort of our council priority action accomplishments as we uh look back to that and you'll see that we have of the 14 council priority actions from last year we had 70 or from last term i should say 79 were completed and 21 of them or 79

[48:02] were completed and 21 are carrying over into the next term the bodies of work associated with those actions are continuing or have entered into an implementation phase next slide as we think about the work that we have ahead of us i will say that this is one that i want to spend a little bit of time on because we have framed this year um and really thoughtfully thought about this as both a recovery year and a place to really at the retreat give council an opportunity to re-evaluate the priorities and leave space for important recovery work as the city emerges emerges from the challenges of a pandemic for our community listening in i'll note that as always that the priorities set by council make up a small percent of the city's business the vast majority of our city's work plan is dedicated to ongoing operations that do things like keep streets clean parks open and water

[49:00] running but the work plan builds on basic operations and foundational systems to make progress against community goals so what does it mean to say we're in a recovery year it means that we're seeing sales revenue pick up but still not at our previous year's level increasing and we feel like we're slowly but surely coming out of the most devastating part of the pandemic it means instead of furloughing folks and limiting non-essential services in the midst of the pandemic we'll be focusing on restoring services for our community they've come to expect for the services that community has come to expect from us and focusing on the hiring and retention of talent to alleviate the strain of employees who have picked up the slack for many of those employees previously furloughed as you saw in the departments in brief forwarded by staff every department is feeling this strain of lack of capacity when you furlough over 700 people it leaves a gigantic hole in an organization and while we're grateful this year to focus on hiring folks back we are doing

[50:02] so in a time when we're all battling national staff shortages what we have heard through the news as the great resignation and a competitive marketplace that has almost more to do with location than with salary though we know making sure that we're offering salary and perhaps other benefits is going to be important to re to remain an employer of choice and it means that for the most part instead of bringing forward a lot of new initiatives we're trying to prioritize the restoration of services focusing on ongoing capital projects that can pick up again and honing in on foundational systems and initiatives critical to ensuring efficient operations by extension this meant that we are focusing on making sure workloads are sustainable for staff recognizing that our teams have been incredibly stretched and taxed by two years of varying challenging conditions examples of this core work include implementing core human resource systems and practices to better retain and recruit staff

[51:01] implementing budgeting for resilience practices and performing key cost allocation analysis strengthening rit infrastructure a move towards more intuitive and better interfacing programs that will enable us to enhance reporting and dashboarding which will enhance data driven decision making increase transparency and more quickly serve community needs as we move forward and then refocusing on ongoing capital infrastructure projects addressing the city's repair and maintenance backlog as well as the ongoing work staff will be doing as we focus on for example next steps on cu south as with all year staff does this by balancing ongoing work with existing constraints and as we're able to hire back staff and learn from counsel what matters you'd like to prioritize we are prepared to make workload exchanges between current and new priorities next slide and as a backdrop we've endeavored to

[52:01] categorize each priority into the now sustainability equity and resilience framework so that we are continuing to align the city's work priorities with larger goals of the boulder valley comprehensive plan and other strategic plans we wanted to make sure equity was part of the frameworks itself and note that the acronym said means to be or being in spanish which was fitting as the framework reminds us of how we want to be as a city we hope to engage all our staff in identifying how their work rolls into this revised framework that really places equity at its center next slide so we're going to move through each priority area in the work plan and i promise not to read every letter on every slide as we do that but i just wanted to share that we have color coded some of those so our green will indicate an ongoing item already in flight our yellow indicates an item that is sort of in the early initiation of the phase and our

[53:01] blue indicators an item that is about to start or is in the process of starting there's also an estimation of the level of resource intensiveness or how council can expect to see the items come to them at different check-in or decision points and whether an item or not has been carried over from the last term and you'll see that marked by an asterisk i'll add here that we have a lot that we've had a lot of questions about perhaps limiting capacity about the limited capacity staff may have at the moment it will be different for each department but i'll say that this indicator of capacity for additional work is a moment in time so as we hire more people and are able to expand our currently constrained staffing levels we will be able to work more quickly on existing uh work and be able to more rapidly take on new challenges in the future so i don't want folks to think that just because we are limiting capacity right now that we will always be in that limited capacity mode so i'll start with safe our safe

[54:00] indicator and i won't go through all of these in detail again for the sake of time but i'm going to note that the true subject matter experts our department heads and staff are here to respond to any query you may have here or in any of the slides as we move forward forward i'll briefly say here that for police this year we see continued focus on reform efforts to ensure we're meeting the expectations of the community and the existing and the exciting collaboration with cu that could allow us to pilot an academy that meets basic post or peace officer standards training but enhances it to ensure that academ that the academy incorporates reform-minded principles and national best practices as well fire is also focusing on reform of sorts as they strengthen their approach to advanced life support and enhancing the emergency services they now offer you'll note too that we continue to have interdisciplinary teams across the multiple departments focused on issues like coveted recovery and ensuring our public spaces are accessible to all

[55:02] next slide so as we think about healthy and socially thriving there's certainly more work being done across the departments under this framework category of note though are some ongoing efforts hhs has planned to serve our unhoused community hopefully leveraging arpa funds in support of new strategies and increased resources we hope to have a more robust conversation with the financial strategies committee in the future and the council body as a whole later this spring and parks and recreation will be continuing the work started with their master plan and plan to come back to you for additional direction as well in the second quarter noria i think i'm sorry to interrupt but i think we may be one slide behind ah saw it i'm about to put my notes up at the same time as i see the other you are one slide behind i

[56:02] i'm going to move yep this is the one i was just talking about hang on let me get back to my notes and again you'll see that staff is prepared to talk a little bit to you and you'll see some of those completion rates as we move forward so i will now go to the following slide and we'll try to make sure that we're there yep so here we're talking about livable and while not on here i'll tell you a priority for me in particular is the hiring of a new pnds director an additional staff there is you'll see many of the priorities on these next two slides depend very much on staff resourcing for pnds we're carrying over some items left from our previous work plan like the east boulder sub community plan and use tables and standards as well as continuing to focus on achieving our affordable housing goals next slide

[57:04] you'll certainly hear more about the ccrs tax in the future as we're working to leverage leveraging this with arpa funds and any additional federal funds that may come our way but of note here i'll highlight the last two items at the last meeting i mentioned the continuing work we're doing on the hill some may know nuisance abatement and code compliance is how i first started out in minneapolis and it's something i have a great amount of interest and a particular expertise in as we recruit our next pnds director i'll be looking for this particular expertise as well but for now i'll say that this continues to be a priority and we're hoping the lessons learned here will help us in other parts of the city as well our city attorney's office who is part of this multi-disciplinary team looking working on this issue has been looking at best practices in the nation and we're looking to bring some initial ordinance changes to you soon while we continue to build out dashboards and reports that will help us

[58:00] create more targeted accountability for properties that are causing the most community concern and taking up valuable staff time in conversations with our previous director he had shared that pnds was already looking at zoning code amendments the last item on this slide with occupancy standards certainly being part of those while staff in this particular department has perhaps been the most constrained of all given the furloughs that happened over the pandemic this work will continue and we are hoping to bring forward some peer research for conversation and direction sometime this spring next slide it's nice when i'm actually aligned with the slides right there's always a lot going on with anything that touches on accessibility and transportation as micro mobility options continue to grow transportation and mobility staff plan to continue monitoring how to enhance these options across the city as well as continuing the work that supports our vision zero goals

[59:00] this work will also be critical to community vitality's lead work on curbside management as part of the approved access management and parking strategy or amps we know too that there is a parking code review and update that remains on hold due to staffing constraints and certainly something that you can ask staff about or that we can pick up as part of the retreat conversations next slide so under the environmentally sustainable category we know that all our departments are working hard to address climate change throughout their work but certainly there are some critical priorities our climate initiatives department will be working on to bring to council including updates on our continued oversight and partnership with excel as well as thoughts and directions needed to achieve the city's new and ambitious emissions reductions goals open space in martin parks another great champion and leader in our climate work will be working alongside climate initiatives to focus on climate

[60:00] resilience and climate justice efforts in partnership with many of our local equity partners next slide and i'll say that the responsibly governed is perhaps my own favorite category usually not as flashy as other initiatives but critically focused on good governance good governance customer service and ensuring that the city is representing all of those in our community with a particular emphasis on those voices that historically not heard it is why we will be focusing on deepening and accelerating the implementation of our racial equity plan across the many departments osmp will continue to lead us on continued and important tribal relations work and of course staff will be coming back to council to discuss the next steps on the potential for the creation of a library district focusing on the workplace will continue will continue to be a priority for the coming year as it impacts both recruitment and retention

[61:00] it will be looking at increasing system tools and ensuring fast and reliable access to systems that allow staff to more easily and readily access and analyze data for their work as this is something we hear a lot about from our staff at the same time facilities and fleet will be focusing on our physical workplaces as competing in this market requires more modern updated and adaptable spaces that accommodate our changing modality of hybrid work while also ensuring that our newer workplaces are more sustainable longer lasting and more efficient in the process next slide certainly we cannot do much of this work if we're not financially stable and much of the focus of our finance department and other critical department stakeholders will be insurance ensuring we are just that as mentioned before we will be working throughout the year to see how best to leverage both federal funds arpa infrastructure bill funds and any others that could come our way as well as the newly approved ccrs funds

[62:02] we hope that these funds will enable us to address programs and initiatives that span from critically needed technology and physical infrastructure projects to increasing housing initiatives and support for our unsheltered community to supporting our vibrant arts community that not only helps drive our economy but helps to lift our collective spirits foster places and programs that bring community together at a time when social distancing has never been more important bridges gaps with government that helps us heal in times of stress and tragedy as so many of our community have have felt both recently and in the past year next slide so with that i'll say that there is a lot on our plates you'll see some of those areas and we've tried to be thoughtful with what we've provided in the packet and with the presentation of percent completion here of where we are in that but frankly i really want to turn it over to you council because we

[63:01] have staff much better suited than i to respond to any questions that you may have um on some of the work plan priorities that staff envisions for the future fantastic thanks nuria looks like we've got questions already rachel go ahead thanks heather and thanks nuria um i just wanted to clarify on like the first slide you started with this time around nuria um it said like which for the carryover items and some had check boxes so um i think there were check boxes next to racial equity in c south but i would say that neither of those are complete i just want to understand what that check mark means because i did not include cu south or racial equity in my top five because i believe that they are continuing and also i'm not sure that gun violence prevention which we just gave and not a five on was in here but um also did not include that because it was already given an out of five so just wanted to kind of understand those better certainly and and certainly welcome other folks as we move forward

[64:01] initially when we did these priorities we were looking at the particular action of that council had agreed so while some of the things will be ongoing which was at least to get uh cu south voted on for example there's more work to be done obviously as we move forward or the fact that we actually adopted a racial action plan is a check mark but obviously that work is ongoing and is indicated in the um racial equity as part of the actual work plan we have placed cu south and i think i mentioned that as we're talking about some of the core work that we're moving forward because we're also needing to scope that depending on whatever outcome a potential referendum may have right and and needs to you know be moving along with permitting and things so just want to make sure for ourselves and for the community that that the check mark doesn't mean we look no further at those things and then for gun violence prevention uh where does that need to fall in i honestly believe that we had done these slides before the last council meeting and so we will make sure to incorporate

[65:01] that as we move forward all right thanks hey matt go ahead matt you're still muted muted all right still back there we go so um i just want to thank you nuria and staff and really just start with a high level just gratitude because i'm not sure many of us would fault the city past council or staff from doing a fraction of what they've set out to achieve and have gotten done in these very difficult times so you know i just want to say thank you and keeping the ball rolling in these difficult times and so i do look forward to the opportunity and hopefully gaining prosperity for our cis city and community going forward and allow us to do more that we want to do so uh it's amazing that we've gotten to this place given all that we've gone through um one the one question i have as i sort of sift through some maybe more details but a higher level one really kind of comes down to the percent completion which is really helpful but to me i i don't have context as to really what that means because something

[66:01] that is 90 complete versus 50 are we talking about the remaining 10 taking two weeks or or two years and so for me that would be really helpful to evaluate like on a critical path um or just expected completion date so i kind of know where that fits into things in a cadence um especially when i think of you know things like our upcoming you know boulder valley comp plan revision where that where things fit into that is helpful when i work backwards in time and so that would be really helpful perhaps if it's possible to get some of those filled in prior to the retreat because that'll help us get on the same page as staff about where we're at and resource allocation um in that sense i'd be really helpful no i appreciate that and we uh i think we're really trying to be in the future more strategic about getting all of those plans together and putting those on a timeline so that all of us are aware and i'll say that not because staff and individual departments may not know where there's landing but for me i'll say as a city manager there is work

[67:02] that a department may be doing but that in impacts other departments particularly internal services department so where they're having a big lift i want to make sure that we all know to your point when those dates are happening so that if finance or hr or it needs to be involved that's going to shift their work plan all of a sudden if we have not actually charted those out i will say that depending on which of the priorities you have and as you have particular questions with staff please feel free to ask them directly on those things but we will also think about what does that look like there are in the packet and i forget which attachment it is but it is the one that has it might be attachment d the work plan priorities based on the very same framework the more expanded one that has some critical q2 or q3 when we expect to bring those back to council and some of those rachel will be some of the sort of um

[68:00] we will use some of those when when we have uh work that is coming back to council on an update those are the things that we're trying to put in the cac agenda so that council kind of knows what's coming up down the pike so we'll try to figure that out and give you a better um sort of notion holistically of what that looks like but if there is one that you're particularly interested in please reach out to that department so that you can have a better um gauge of where they are in that work yeah i appreciate that and i think it's just a recognition that not all work is linear right so you know that first 50 could go really quick and then that last 50 could take two years right so i think just understanding how that plays out is not just good for us in helping with work planner it's really helpful for the community to kind of be like oh it's 90 so get ready for it to be done and meanwhile like that's the last big hurdle um and so i think there's just some clarity there but thank you for that and i'll intend to reach out individually on some of those things but that might be helpful holistically like you were mentioning so thank you thanks matt bob question comment

[69:02] not a question just a comment uh first of all thank you nurian thank you staff for a great presentation i just wanted to um maybe highlight for the community and underline something that rachel um said just a few minutes ago um a little later in the evening you're going to hear the community's going to hear from council um some of our priorities for 2022 and 2023. um but i think it's important for folks to understand that what we just heard from nuria and the team um council already had we had that we received that a week or two ago and we factored that in and putting together our priorities and so for most of us we didn't reiterate um uh things that we already knew were in in flight or on the work plan many of the things that the staff is working on are very very important we would we would hardly endorse them um but we didn't we didn't repeat those because we knew they're already being worked on so what we're going to hear a little bit later this evening are really new initiatives things that are not already being worked on but things that council members are suggesting to staff that we take on board in addition to what nuria just talked about so i want to make sure that people understand

[70:00] that just because they don't hear it from us later on doesn't mean it's not important it's just because we already knew was in the works that's a good reminder thanks bob aaron did you have a question or comment i did thank you um echoed the thanks to nuria and and staff for putting this together in such a coherent and understandable fashion that's really helpful for this discussion so thank you for that just one specific thing was in the planning area there was an initiative about zoning code updates and about zoning code updates to get more housing in the community and you mentioned that occupancy kind of fell in that category but just wondering if there are any others that really specific ideas that the planning department has already teed up because some of my suggestions are in this area so just want to see if you're you're already working at some of those and i see david has popped up except i can't hear you david you're unmuted but for some reason we can't hear you yep david do you see next to your mute

[71:00] button there's a little drop up arrow a little arrow pointing up click on that and see if that doesn't give you an option to use your computer microphone can you hear me now yeah all right it's great to have technical support um um just in anticipation of the retreat we can put together a list of what what projects we were anticipating um and and there's all you know there's the existing projects which you know the community benefit which will be coming up um as well as um the use tables work um but they're you know the the the planners always have a list of what they would like to do just in terms of um creating more efficient you know a more efficient regulatory set um and then frankly those tend to be the ones that when um issues come up we tend to put back on the back burner

[72:02] wish that david i look forward to learning a little bit more about that appreciate the answer yeah thank you and thank you for the technical support and when we hear from council a little bit later i have a visual for that so david you might just you know focus in um on some of those planning items as they're coming up and you can let us know if those are already on the list or those would be new initiatives nicole go ahead thank you um so i just had one question maria in some of the slides there was a note about using arpa funds to you know fund some of the initiatives this is something that i am thinking a lot about for the things that we're proposing is where is the money going to come from and so i'm wondering um with the the arpa designations on those items um is that from the approximately 20 million or so we're getting is that coming from other arpa sources where where is that coming from just to get a sense of what it is we're working with yep i see mark is popping up so i'll

[73:01] start and he can correct how wrong i am in it but we have allocated previously or gotten approval from council to move forward with 4 million of that 20 million that we had gotten we've got about 16 million left as we move forward on those and i would say that for arpa specifically we're hoping to bring that for you in a february 8th i believe study session as we move on um but i'll say that we're also being mindful that those aren't the only funds that may be available to us right we've got this big infrastructure bill coming down the pikes there may be other grant opportunities and monies coming from the feds and as we put some of that into the equation we then want to maybe reconfigure which one of those pools of money we want to use for x or y initiative mark how have i killed your entire financial framework that was perfect the only thing i'd add to that is uh under previous council direction we're working through an internal process to prioritize those initiatives that

[74:01] we've looked at for potential arpa funding tenurious point some of those might be appropriate with other sources of federal funds some of those may be appropriate in our 23 budget process and so we're working through those at the moment but we do plan to bring that to uh council on february 8th and give you an update some suggestions for an additional appropriation out of that first tranche of funding that we do have which is approximately 10 million and then some suggestions where we'll we'll be seeking some council feedback on a number of items potentially for that second tranche which is the second 10 million dollars which we'll receive sometime in july of this year great thank you okay mark question or comment um not a question just a comment and it's something i've said properly i'd like to as a member of council in 2021 i i knew we had actually done quite a bit and

[75:01] covered a lot of work planned items but it wasn't really until i read the staff memo on what we had done in 2021 that i got a a the full flavor of what had been achieved during covet and i i just think it was a remarkable performance under the most difficult conditions imaginable reduced staff budget crises layoffs so i the amount of work that was actually completed successfully during this last year i just think is was incredible um and i'd like to congratulate all of staff for what they did this was a terrific performance so thank you thanks so much appreciate that and i'll just if you don't mind heather just saying that you know it's one of the reasons i i i know staff is hearing and i know we're so

[76:00] thankful for it but it's one of the reasons we're so focused on recruitment at the beginning of this year because staff has done so much and frankly they dig in like with the fire response and do more but they're tired and they're overworked and overstretched and we need to give them some relief so my priority for the year will really be about recruitment and helping us to continue that great performance mark as you said so i appreciate that acknowledgement fantastic counsel any other questions or comments on uh the work plan things that projects that are already underway in flight or coming up before we jump into what you'd like to consider um doing in addition well all right it was a thorough presentation and a very fine memo i guess you crushed it noria um that did um in that case council would you like to take a break stretch your legs freshen your drink and then we can come

[77:00] back and hear from you all on your respective priorities nicole is nodding thank you i appreciate the visual um i have us at 7 16. what do you say we take 15 ish come back at 7 30 and jump back into those priorities when we come back we'll start with aaron and then we'll go alphabetically by last name thereafter um so go do the things that need doing and uh we'll see you here in a hot minute uh go ahead i was just heather i give people five minutes after three hours so everybody's gonna want you to facilitate all the meetings i'm sucking up to them you know that you know how i am aaron i'm gonna go for a hike [Laughter] go for a hike and take your five minutes whatever works for you see in a few thanks friends

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[89:07] just been doing like support snaps while nuria was talking yes i should have done this i wasn't i was in a meeting recently and someone actually did it it was wonderful i was like oh stamps of support [Music] i didn't understand it until today all good support for the things that are happening is always good that's right [Music] with your generous uh leave time heather i i got over 10 000 steps so that was that was very exciting longer breaks do it for your health man i kind of got 10 000 steps in that short

[90:00] amount of time well no just put me over the top for the day over the day that would have been a very active 15 minutes yeah let me get started i kind of wanted 15 minutes yeah right yes harassing me yeah right we should do it more often aaron you've been shortchanging us this whole time now we know what it could really be like aaron i know although then we're all up till like 11 45 until 11 30. i do have a complaint my husband usually makes gourmet meals put two scrambled eggs in front of me that was not really exciting oh that's a sadness that's a sadness but i can't say anything i need to be appreciative [Music] except you you just did on tv so you just it's straight up 7 30. let's go ahead and get started um a couple of quick things before we jump in i put this in

[91:00] the chat but i'll say it out loud a couple of you have just asked for a little bit of support in managing your time um so i'll have a timer going here i'll give you a couple of two fingers there when you're at two minutes and then one minute um and then as i said as i said in the chat if you're still talking after five minutes you are going to get my judgy eyes and some of you have been on the business end by judging wise looking at you bob yates and so you know that's gonna hurt um if if you are concerned about not being able to see me um and that's troubling for you you might consider just pinning my video while you're talking to you and then you'll see me um otherwise if it doesn't look like you're processing that i'll be doing this and then it'll be really hard not to see me and it'll be really uncomfortable well can you just call it out i'm going to be reading from a piece of paper i won't be looking at you for you i can anybody else want me to be verbal about it i'm happy to have the verbal prompt and and just wanted to note that bob yates

[92:01] at cac yesterday did commit to just saying ditto so you heard that give him any eyes the advantage of going last is like you're all going to have all the good ideas i'll have nothing to add but then you can take credit for all of them as if they were yours i always do i always do it's a stroke of genius um so i'm on the other side where i have to be original as benjamin and it's like i hate going first but you get to go second after after aaron good point thanks for helping me out heather i appreciate it i'm here for a second he goes second yeah aaron's gonna go first a cause he's mayor and this is not his first rio and so he will model what we hope will be good behavior and it'll be really uncomfortable if what he models is not good behavior um and then we'll go alphabetically this is chart no this is my chart just sound cara i'm not displaying it to you take a breath all right so what i have here in front of you is a much bright more brightly colored version of what i emailed to you where you all had what sounded to me

[93:02] like some common themes i grouped those in the table they were grouped with a combined line here i have them in these handy dandy little boxes and so mostly just wanted to be able to have this here first of all for anyone who might be watching who didn't want to read that whole thing i can zoom in so we can see the things like this i can pop up any of those if you need them to be bigger um so just let me know um but part of it was just to give you a visual sense first of all how many ideas you had let me just give me a minute here how many ideas you had so that's a lot just a little visual impact there and then again how many of them sort of overlapped in shared categories so i'll move around from this as as we go so for example um aaron when you talk if you're going to say something about elections i will just zoop us into this little box here like that and then you all can see the

[94:00] um things on elections and if you want me to annotate your stickies i can um but someone suggested that having a little visual anger for this conversation might be helpful um juni do you have a question or comment yes um do the the colors have any meaning at all nope okay thank you i told i asked my staff to make it and make sure that all all the stickies in one box were the same color um otherwise it gets real busy as you can see that can happen pretty quickly rachel question comment i just wondered what's the bottom right the very very bottom right that has nothing in it is a parking lot in case other super fun and exciting ideas come up that in the course of your discussion but again just want to make sure we're tracking there's already a lot of things and so you know maybe the parking lot will stay a little empty tonight i take my cues from you my lovelies all right if there's no more questions i would love to start my handy-dandy

[95:02] timer aaron would you like me to give you um visual or verbal cues at two minutes in one minute uh whatever i'll keep an eye on the clock okay cool you got yourself covered away okay well so first of all let me just say that um i'm very excited about all five of these ideas but i did try to pick ones that i thought other folks were less likely to bring up so some ideas that maybe weren't going to be on three or four people's list um with that in mind my first one is a mental health slash emt first responder program so currently we have a fantastic co-responder program the cirt team that sends mental health and social workers along on calls with the police on certain types of calls that have mental health aspects to them but a number of other communities have implemented programs like the star program in denver or cahoots in eugene oregon where the only responders to some calls are a mental health and emt team and

[96:01] what they found is that they get improved community outcomes from those while taking burdens off of our very busy police and fire departments and also saving some money uh in the long run so it's a great win-win-win and i know the city is already looking at least a little bit of this idea and so my hope is that we can get started on implementing this sooner rather than later asap in fact okay so there's number one i just go straight in heather you just keep on the next one okay the next one um that brought bringing up is uh planning for the fort chambers site uh this is the site that the open space department purchased a few years ago uh an east boulder um it is uh unique in that it was um a staging ground uh mustering area for the militias that were then involved in the appalling and horrible sand creek massacre in the 1800s and so it's a very solemn site for native american tribes who have a deep

[97:00] personal connection with that the open space department is already planning on doing a management plan for that site in the next two years i would like for council to have a significant role in that management plan process with an eye towards returning some level of some amount of ownership back to associated tribes who have the connections to that area and involving them permanently in the ownership and management of this site so looking for that council involvement in that process with that as a desired outcome uh next one is east boulder sub-community plan implementation as we heard from nuria we are completing the east boulder subcommittee plan in the next few months which is very exciting we're looking forward to an adoption on that before too long and uh my ask here is just that we dive immediately into implementation of plan so there we're gonna need some zoning changes and land use changes to go along with the implementation that plan and i would like to see us

[98:00] jump on that sooner rather than later because we have enormous opportunities for mixed use housing affordable housing and a more sustainable mixed use community out there in east boulder the next one is removing barriers to formation of adus and co-ops heather will remember a few years ago we worked on both of those initiatives and we made some great progress and i'm proud of that work but there is further to go avs in particular we left a few significant barriers up to the formation of those like saturation limits about how many people could have an adu in a certain area and the co-op licensing process is onerous enough that there have only been a few of them that have been created since that ordinance was passed so love to see us take some targeted uh changes at these two things wouldn't have to take very long as a work plan item and make them easier to do as a way to create some more attainable housing in our community last one is encourage smaller less

[99:00] expensive housing currently we have zoning regulations that incentivize fewer larger units on the site and we have to do things like the special ordinance at diagonal plaza to reduce those requirements so that we can get more affordable and attainable housing and developments so what i would love to see is changing our zoning and code regulations such that the metrics in our code that require few fewer units on the site are changed to other forms of restrict or other other forms of limiting development so that we can get incentivize more and smaller units in a lot of cases rather than bigger larger larger fewer of them and there we go how did i do perfect 30 seconds left well done sir thank you all right um and so just a quick reminder aaron's done a great job in his presentation of focusing on what we're trying to accomplish what the outcome is at the end of the council and staff effort that's pretty helpful um just for

[100:01] staff to understand what what are you driving toward um so the more specific you can be if we're talking again ordinance plans studies um implementation other such things that will help tremendously um all right uh we had erin so matt you are the lucky duck who gets to go next are you ready sir ready to go i got a timer so i can uh save your fingers from okay you got it covered great um so thanks aaron for setting that uh now i gotta stick to being concise which is not usually my forte um so first up in no particular order is um an elect establishing an election commission um you know i was fortunate enough to be a part of the 2018 campaign finance and election reform working group um and even though the work we did i think was good it was established in a reactionary manner to issues that were perceived to have occurred in the previous election and given that we have a 2023 mayoral election using instant runoff ranked

[101:01] choice voting um it makes sense to establish a commission to be more forward thinking and proactive in establishing guiding principles helping with community communication and also setting us up for future ways to strengthen our democratic principles here in town whether it be even year elections fair pay for council proportional representation um campaign finance tweaks these are things that are forward thinking i think this commission could help be a great arm to leverage in terms of policy proposals in helping us make sure we strengthen our democratic process i'd also like to see us move on from there into establishing a clear path for making protected bike lanes in this community our vision zero program is making some inroads but is also behind on a number of issues that are stated in vision zero but also in the transportation master plan and one of those is how do we get people out of their vehicles it's providing the actual necessary infrastructure to give people a clear alternative um and what we saw is a lot of people turn to their bikes during

[102:00] covid because they didn't have a necessity to drive and yet the infrastructure was just not there to harness them and maybe capture them for long-term bike ride use and so i see a setting a clear priority of what are we doing how many road miles are we going to transition to protected bike lanes what's our budget and what's our expected time frame of getting that done i see as perhaps leveraging monies perhaps saved from library district if we should choose to go there to increase some funding to make this happen it's for our climate goals it's for our transportation goals and it's to make it a certainly more livable and certainly more functional community in that aspect i also like to see us move towards um studying and then perhaps implementing allowing for duplexes and triplexes in single-family zoning particularly rl1 and rl2 i envision this kind of also in a phased approach thinking about starting this in corner lots we i really want to see us bake in some greater affordability into single-family neighborhoods that are already really unaffordable um i take my neighborhood

[103:00] in particular you really can't find a home for for you know less than you know one and a half million dollars and that's just not helpful for creating a nice economic ladder and good diversity of folks in our community certainly with the elementary schools in my vicinity so i think that's a helpful way to start and really to build that socio-economic diversity in a lot of communities that have otherwise been priced out because of the standard price of single-family zoning um um and then uh let's see i'd love to also make sure that we focus on a day shelter and a pure navigation center we've talked about this last week we're working really well with our um um uh now i'm losing my train of thought here uh coordinated entry system getting people into permanently supportive housing but what we're missing is that intermediate step beforehand people who aren't quite ready to integrate into the shelter and coordinated entry this is a stepping stone to provide them some general services and support to either get them ready or get them that direct support they need and a diversity of services and really thinking of it as a hub for how we service and help our

[104:01] unhoused residents in this community and so i think having a day shelter navigation this really fits well with the arpa money that we'll likely receive so one time use can be used to buy or do the facility and leaving us to cover some of the ongoing costs so i think this the timing is right to do this and do this quickly because of the rapid use requirements on these arpa phones um last but not least i want to see us really focus in on on really putting to bed the occupancy conversation we've had in our community for the last two years um after this last election it's really time that you know it was heated right we had a close vote and it's time that we solve if not at least seriously address reforming occupancy while providing the necessary guard rails and because we've been debating this in the community for the last two years i don't see us starting at zero i think this is actually going to be a pretty easy lift in comparison to other things because we know really what the community has been saying i mean having been on the campaign trail for two years we we've heard what we need to be done

[105:00] and i think we can come up with a pretty good set of ordinance changes in order to accommodate both residents who already live there while providing some greater affordability and opportunity for people um to live in these homes and use and leverage the bedrooms and housing that already exists in our community um so those are my five and uh i hope my colleagues are interested in supporting some are all of them fantastic thanks matt all right lauren are you ready so ready and would you like verbal cues or visual cues verbal please all right take it away so when coming up with my five council work priorities i concentrated on work that would match the platform i ran on take advantage of my unique skills and understanding and meet the urgent needs of our community my top two priorities are addressing our middle income and our affordable housing crisis these are not issues that are easy to solve so even though there are aspects of them that are in the existing work plan i think making progress on these

[106:01] issues will be difficult but is also incredibly important um there are a couple of things i think that would help make a big difference um to help address our middle income housing i think we should hire a cold a code consultant to produce a list of recommendations regarding simple code and zoning requirements in order that would help encourage more affordable market rate new units i would also like to see the city create a deed restricted middle income housing program and we could encourage the creation of those units with density incentives and allow pilot projects to create both market rate and deed restricted units and then in order to increase the number of affordable units built every year and simultaneously remove incentives that encourage large new market rate units i would like to suggest that we change the way our inclusionary housing fees are

[107:00] assessed currently our housing fees are assessed on a square footage basis not on the number of units and i would like to see um and i'd like to see us change that we might have to do a new cost capture report but again that's an outside consultant so trying to be sensitive to the the abilities or the amount of work that our department can take on i would also like to see more options to avoid or shorten the expensive and time-cons consuming discretionary review process and reduce the fees developments where more than half of the units are permanently affordable are assessed and then for my third priority i would like to see our our city continue to improve the services we provide to those living unhoused in our community in my mind an important part of this is collecting more data so we can better

[108:00] assess what is and isn't working similar to our vision zero plan for transportation i would like to see us collect data about rates of injury hospitalization and death related to exposure and create a plan to implement or expand existing programs to reduce the rates of these things on the transportation and sustainability side we all know single occupancy vehicles are a significant source of air pollution i would like to see the city implement a city-wide free bus service to make the transition to mass transit easier one of the biggest hurdles to this is creating a revenue source i'd like to see the city do a feasibility study where of a city-wide parking permit system to create this dedicated revenue service this would also allow us to address the conflict that can occur between adding the density needed to make mass transit effective and concerns over parking access finally we need to make it easier for small businesses to get started and make

[109:01] the modifications and adjustments they need to keep up with our changing world opening a new business particularly an atypical or innovative one is extremely difficult in our strict regulatory environment to address this issue i think we should consolidate and simplify our use tables to allow for more flexibility we should make meeting the comp plan goals a criterion for allowing zoning modifications and we should have a simplified use review process for small projects that present low risk to the community these are my five priorities and i was happy to see that many of my top priorities are reflected in other members lists along with a number of other unique items i have to say i'm impressed by the work that the city has been doing and the list of priorities that this group generated it makes me really proud to be a part of it that's fantastic thanks lauren all right next up rachel

[110:01] thanks heather um and i'm going to time myself too so hopefully you won't have to give me any prompts at all um and it's so nice to have an architect on council now so thanks lauren for bringing that perspective all right my five number one reduce vehicle miles traveled that is what tab asked for a transportation advisory board um and i would see it's just picking a target reduction goal having our experts tell us how to best achieve it and funding it will not belabor that point i think we should just be simple and clear there uh number two attainable housing i'm gonna let heather catch up there on the yellow when i started running or looking into running for city council about three years ago the average home sale price in boulder was around 650 000 and now it's up around a million so it's so much worse from when i thought it was already atrocious when we were discussing it a couple years ago on the campaign trail lots of our workforce and community

[111:00] members don't qualify for affordable housing and couldn't afford market rate even when it was three to four hundred thousand dollars lower so we need to do something um i think radically different around attainable housing so i will highlight one possibility which would be that the city could purchase homes and i would visualize homes kind of like where i live which are older like 1950s 60s homes perhaps getting to the end of their life span and so if the city could purchase them we could then convert them into permanently attainable housing and maybe scrape them and rebuild them as duplexes or triplexes number three homelessness as the broad category and i would like us to bolster ways in which people who do not qualify for housing are supported as they make their way towards housing and so the broad way that i would like to get at that is to create a city not a county-wide but a city city of boulder stakeholder work group

[112:02] that includes one to two council representatives folks with lived experience and a diverse group of city-based providers and then empower that group to identify gaps and solutions and to implement and fund their suggestions pardon the whatever noise is coming from uh my son's room next door and slowly didn't notice something just crashed um okay number four resiliency um to put it bluntly we obviously did not avert the climate crisis and so now we need to ensure that community members are protected from the worst ravages of it obviously cu south and flood mitigation for south boulder creek is part of that that's ongoing so i'm not including that here an example of what i'm looking for is updating ordinances around building codes so um this would be in relation to fire looking and extending to all the city not just to urban wildlife interface

[113:01] the the building that will withstand fires so as as an example there are some houses that that survived in superior and louisville even though all the houses around them burnt and that was because they sort of had similar exterior materials and i think that we should be looking at things like that i would look to chief calderazzo for the best changes that we should implement to ensure resiliency and protection to the maximum extent feasible and then also as part of that i would want to make sure that we have shored up our early warning warning systems for fires and floods uh last but not least number five covid um i i i think that we should be looking for um firming up some city responses on going to covid and also deciding whether to lock in some of the silver linings that we have sort of derived from covid so as part of that i would like some clearly communicated data informed

[114:02] triggers for when we will return to in real life meetings versus zoom meetings and that would include boards and commissions and also determining some crisp guidelines and when public can come to meetings and press members of the public so it feels like we are sort of going with our gut or individual preferences right now around this and i think we need we just need some some really clean and clear guidance um also as part of that i would like us to evaluate whether to implement vaccine passports for some indoor spaces um such as restaurants and gyms places where people often take off their masks to accomplish what they're there to do and then also to evaluate and make decisions around whether to retain some of the changes that we implemented that have been i think great uh in response to covid examples would be street dining and pedestrian expansions um we we can now get liquor to go so i know that that sort of depends on state as well but i'm just kind of locking in the

[115:00] silver linings and i think that's my five and hopefully i'm just under time thanks by my account you had 11 seconds left well done all right um juni that makes you next and how can i help you and support you with time visual cues verbal cues uh visual cues will do but i doubt that i will take the entire five minutes okay you go when you're ready thank you i have five priorities and they're not in specific orders and some have already been mentioned by some of my fellow council members my priority number one is the homelessness tax to help prioritize homelessness services some council members mentioned programming for the homeless the money has to come from somewhere so it would be to me if prioritizing homelessness services is really something that we want to do i think having some type of attacks would be important to do

[116:00] and also i know that i've mentioned in my in my priorities list the the amount how much it should be actually i think that could be left to either staff or also i think rachel just mentioned a subcommittee maybe that could also be something that the subcommittee take on as well because i think we also do have a meal levy that has you know um a cap so i don't want to you know just bring this forward without considering that so maybe staff looking into this and also that subcommittee mentioned by rachel that could be a possibility as well um my priority number two is an election commission and i think um matt benjamin already mentioned the same thing i i think part of my thought process as well is to help bring the community together and get broader

[117:00] support on various issues so there's processes but there's also the opportunity for people to um to engage in a process that is much cleaner much friendlier and much more inclusive and environmental sustainability is my third priority and i think for me i thought about what do i want to champion i want to champion issues brought forward by council members or city staff or community members that will ensure uh that contribute to environmental sustainability so to me that was more of a broad um commitment to myself to counsel an open commitment to myself to counsel into the community as well my fourth priority which is the housing and urban studies we had that as part of our priorities on council back in 2020 that was on a war plan but it was removed because of kovid and i would

[118:00] like to see that back as part of our priorities because i think this is important to all of us a lot of us are thinking how do we make boulder more vibrant and i think this is an opportunity to study the area to see what could be placed in the area and so that we can move forward and as far as my fifth priority the livable rate wage this is not necessarily a council item or a council position um but i just wanted to make that commitment that i will champion a livable wage and see if we can get um that process going and also involve other community members community leaders and maybe people outside of uh community leaders outside of boulder as well thank you wow well done and i didn't have a sticky for your broader comment on environmental sustainability so i'll add that here while we're um transitioning to nicole

[119:02] nicole how can i support you with time i am going to set up my own timer um so that i can keep track so uh maybe just hit me with those judgy eyes if i just so i decide to ignore my timer fantastic i'm ready um okay so i wanted to use this time for everybody to start just by explaining my the thinking that underlie my priorities so that everybody has that information um first of all as others have mentioned i was really focused on looking at realistic goals so the staffing and funding challenges that we and every organization in the country is having right now make it harder and harder to get bigger and longer term projects done so i tried to create priorities that rely on departments that have some relative stability that aren't quite as overburdened as others or are places where i think we could lean on boards and commissions community support or consultants the second thing that underlays all of my priorities is thinking about flexible funding

[120:00] we need more funds to do the things that we staff and the community want to do to address the climate crisis and all the other challenges that we're facing so my priorities rely on new revenue streams or could be supplemented by federal or state funds or they're seeming relatively cheap until staff tells me otherwise um finally addressing inequity is another lens that um i'm just kind of looking at everything through really trying to create more equity in our community which is going to require a conscious effort from all of us on council it's really critical for us to address the needs of groups that have always been and continue to be underrepresented in our decision making for example although renters now make up over half of our residents almost all of us on council or homeowners so i tried to identify priorities that would address some of the needs of communities that aren't sufficiently represented on council so first up moving city council elections to even years voter turnout is much much higher in even your elections than boulder it's 25 to 30 000 votes higher and the

[121:01] demographics of voters and even your elections are much more representative of our city's residents than our odd year elections other cities around the country have recently moved local elections to even years and they've seen big increases in the number of people voting in local elections especially among voters in marginalized groups i'd like to see us put a measure on the 2022 ballot to move city council elections to even years beginning in 2024 similarly paying council and board members a living wage for their work would help change who is represented here on zoom right now many people are left out of our city's governance because we ask people to do council work for five to seven dollars an hour by my estimates or to do board work for free we can put in place restrictions so it doesn't look like we're trying to pay ourselves but we really need to fix this issue for future councils so our city leaders are more representative of our residents next up big topic uh funding community resilience um we clearly need more money

[122:00] to pay for more staff and to pay current staff more we need to generate new revenue to pay for emerging needs especially needs that help us adapt and respond to the climate crisis as some others have talked about we can't take money from people who are already struggling to live here but we have a lot of large for-profit organizations who are benefiting from the beautiful and desirable community we've created it's wonderful that our incredible city helps our large businesses recruit and retain workers and we've seen some unintended consequences higher rents for small businesses and higher housing costs for renters and homeowners alike just to name a couple i'd like to see us put a fee on large employers to offset these unintended consequences that we can use to fund initiatives that make our community more resilient everything from fire and flood mitigation to public transportation and bikeways to housing assistance to the arts to some of the programs that the community connectors told us about tonight um the kind of second third bucket of things are housing and homelessness concerns

[123:00] in the campaign as all of you know there were no two issues that were more on the minds of a majority of our community than homelessness and renter landlord neighborhood issues so my other two priorities address housing and homelessness with homelessness we have a once in a generation opportunity to take advantage of hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding for cities and counties to address housing and related issues like homelessness we have to be ready so i want to make sure we're working with other cities the county regional service providers and people with lived experience to bring as much of the state funding to boulder as possible so that we can address homelessness i'm not going to repeat some of the ideas that my colleagues have already thrown out tonight finally i'm really sensitive to the fact that even though more than 50 percent of our residents are renters like i said before almost everyone on this council is a homeowner so as a council that represents a minority of boulder residents we really need to address issues that renters are telling us are important occupancy reform tenants rights and runner protections that build

[124:00] on things like no eviction without representation we can use this opportunity to also address the issues that homeowners are concerned about noise and trash and fireworks and icy sidewalks which are also issues that affect renters too boom hopefully that wasn't too fast i get excited and i talk fast when no idea we're up all good it might have been tricky if we were still translating but i think we're holding up all right um mark that makes you next how can i support you on your time management mark you're still muted mark muted now i'm unmuted uh you can just wave at me or scream i've got a phone to do it okay okay um in setting my priorities um for this retreat i was trying to be cognizant of

[125:00] the limitations of staff and i tried to avoid projects that i thought would be unduly burdensome the first thing i want to do is really a research project to take a look at the process and the mechanisms for decommissioning or municipal airport it's 179 acres it could provide at a modest density 3 500 units and because we own the land we have the opportunity of dictating the kinds of housing and the prices that we would like to see there uh this is not a land use decision it is far far too preliminary for that it is simply some research uh at one point uh council member friend and i sent some questions to uh the city manager we'd like to get answers to those questions uh we probably have a few more and it's not a very heavy lift in terms of time it's a

[126:02] basic research project san jose has done this they have voted to decommission their airport i'd like to know how they did it i'd like to know the timing on which they did it not knowing to me is a form of governmental malpractice um my second priorities is one that the staff is working on so i won't go into any detail it's it's um an assault weapons ban which i'd like to see as accompanying a suite of other um regulations and ordinances to fully express boulder's values with respect to these kinds of weapons and the requirements for owning a gun third for me is i'd like to see an acceleration i know staff is working on this as well of the university hill ordinances this has been going on for decades it's really high time that we get a few ordinances in front of us that we can look at to abate nuisance conditions i

[127:03] know our city manager is an expert in this field i would like to leverage that expertise and get this cranked up sooner rather than later um fourth for me um is i'd like to revise the current um i guess would be the community benefit statute or the cash and lose statute um we have had the experience in the past that we probably will again where we negotiate with a developer for certain benefits and we don't receive them because they change their mind at the last second and go to a cash and loop program as opposed to what we have bargained for that's not an acceptable outcome to me and i you know again it's this is primary primarily work for the legal department um but it shouldn't be that heavy left it just requires some creativity i cannot believe that we cannot get what we bargained for when we do a transaction with a developer and lastly um

[128:00] and that's really one a to my comments on the airport we ought to do the um uh the plan the planning study for the planning reserve in north boulder um the urban studies urban services study so that we can see what we've got out there and determine whether that is going to be a useful piece of property for um urban development and again since we own much of the land we can probably achieve a high level of affordability and middle income housing there um so i think those are all of mine yep that that covers the waterfront and that's all i got fantastic thank you mark all right chera that makes you next how can i support you you said verbal cues well i'm gonna put on my okay yeah verbal cues if you don't hear me

[129:01] listening to you nuria already mentioned most of what's on my list and some of the community are going to hear uh they're going to hear some of the words that are on their list because i did cut and paste some things and i hope that's not plagiarism but i did really like a lot of what people said and i also want to thank fire chief calderazzo jonathan cohen ali rhodes and the many other people you know who you are who helped me in this project and i learned a lot from you so first thing i want to say is with a robust with a robust city staff without a robust city staff we're not going to be able to implement any of these awesome ideas so for me the most important thing is going to be recruitment and retention for a city of boulder staff and for our police department so as you might know we have this national labor shortage problem and in my field i've never seen anything like this in my 30-something years of business it's a pretty big deal and i would say it's almost like a different world where we have to look at recruitment and retention a little differently than in

[130:00] the past we need to be competitive and match or exceed salaries from other cities like our own and give retention bonuses and so i feel we should set aside budget to pay for this important initiative um for instance and then a lot of things play into this role like why middle-income housing became one of the most important things to me is now that people can decide where they want to work according to how close their job is to their home it's even more important for us to have middle-income housing also culture plays a really important role in people who want to work here or not and that's for another discussion but for this place to be a great place to work is really important to me as far as police recruitment goes you know we're 23 officers down now which has a huge impact on deployment and second we're also getting outbid as a city specifically in the area of bonuses and retention bonuses for police officers other cities offer their police officers more and we are having trouble

[131:01] competing right now um as far as crime goes and i'm moving on to crime we our city is not we're not seeing stabilization of crime our crime stats are up including aggravated assault and robbery and burglary and vandalism and theft and motor vehicle theft and catalytic burners but we also have a new one that's on the up and that's arson in the last 28 days we've had five arson incidences and 44 incidences of burglary specifically on pearl street and pearl parkway so why i'm bringing that up is is we should always as a council i hope have the reduction of crime in the back of our minds and of course we can do things like increasing street lighting better biking better lights in the bike underpasses and mandatory bike registration mandatory point of sale so moving out to middle income everybody said also great things the only things i want to add to that from middle-income housing is i'd like to see more opportunities for home ownership i'd

[132:01] like to see us fix this defect rule that is presenting or that is preventing and disincentivizing developers from building for cell units because we definitely need for sale units um i agree with everything everybody else said and of course bob is going to talk about the middle income down payment assistance program so i'm going to move on to what mark spoke about and that was the hill and martin acres as well as gas grove revitalization i want to definitely look at our chronic nuisance ordinances i wish that we can change from a complaint base um based system to a patrol based system enforcing the law because it's too much pressure on the community to have to complain i would like to see police walk around patrol hear noise and go able to do something about it and then lesser offenses we could have enforcement officers like trash and broken windows and such i also want landlords to be held to greater accountability for trash and noise infractions of their tenants

[133:00] while not adversely affecting tenant rights so i would also like to see landlords take responsibility for their rental properties to be safer and cleaner i agree that we need to think about tenant rights as well and i think we can consider evoking rental licenses for those negligent landlords most landlords are awesome so i'm definitely not saying they're not but i'd say that we do need to get better at that um as far as wildfire resiliency this is a big one for me i met i had a good talk with michael calderazo via email and jonathan cohen and they have a great big list my biggest things are fixing the building codes updating our wildlife protection plan gosh i'm running out of time updating our structure protection plan uh work on our brush maintenance and our tree maintenance and enforce laws for propane tanks but most of all fireworks we have to do something about those fireworks bury those power lines and lastly i'm taking up five more extra

[134:00] seconds we need to reassess our evacuation plans and improve our public warning system and prove our regional 911 system and most of all look at this whole fire thing through an equity lens where we make sure things are multilingual that we work with our community connectors and be sure that each and every community member knows what to do every single one when there's a fire that's it okay i went 27 seconds too late that's all right you can pay us back don't think we're not coming for you though all right bobby yates last but not least you need to manage your own time can i help you what do you need heather you learned long ago that your judgey eyes have no impact on me whatsoever i know it's really distressing like if i if i hit five minutes just cut off my mic okay oh i like it i'm on it okay here we go well as as um rachel said the advantage of going last is um all my brilliant and uh dare say

[135:03] dare i say uh good looking colleagues have captured at least four of my five uh categories so i i'll just say ditto ditto ditto and ditto um my number one was uh area three planning reserve i agree with mark and juni that we need to uh get that baseline urban studies launched and completed in the next couple of years my number two was affordable housing specifically launching the middle income down payment assistance program which we crafted a couple of years ago in which the voters overwhelmingly approved in 2019 but which was set aside for covid my number three was i joined nicole and matt and calling for reform over occupancy rules my number four was um and i joined nicole and tara in at least recognizing the fact that we have a um a challenge with respect to retention recruitment of staff this may be a little bit outside of council's purview but i want to signal to nuria and the rest of staff that um

[136:00] we will do whatever it's necessary including budgetary adjustments to ensure that our staff is adequately compensated and that we get good people on board and so i can save my last four minutes for my number five which none of you have touched on which is broadband a little history here back in 2014 the voters by 85 to 15 margin approved the city providing broadband services in 2015 to 2017 the city looked at a number of providers that could build out a fiber optic broadband system throughout boulder similar to what longmont already enjoys we issued an rfp we identified four finalists um they they indicated to us that the cost of building out our broadband network ubiquitous one to all homes and businesses would cost about 140 million dollars uh in 2018 we realized that um the limitations on the city's bonding capacity were um taken up by what was then our municipalization effort and so we could not go forward with that 140 million dollar project and so in in 2019 what we did is we

[137:01] funded about 20 million dollars which i think since been bumped up to about 30 million dollars to build what's called a backbone which is just kind of like the first 15 or 20 of a broadband network and we've been working on building that over the last two or three years we're more than halfway done right now that project will be wrapped up this year and we will connect critical um places in our town but we simply don't have fiber for our homes into our businesses as i mentioned before long one has a wonderful award-winning nationally recognized fiber optic network system broadband system to every single home and business in longmont fort collins is building one centennial has a wonderful one we are far far behind our peers and so now that the muni is behind us which was really the obstacle to our ability to bond and build out the rest of the network um i i would like us to at least investigate the possibility of building out a broadband or finishing the build of our broadband network to every home and business in our community so that we can enjoy uh high-speed uh internet access just like longmont and

[138:00] other communities do and also most importantly bridge the digital divide specifically i would suggest that we engage the consultant that helped us a few years ago to update the cost estimate to um update the revenue assumptions and examine our bonding capacity so that we can decide in the next couple of years whether this is something we'd like to do that's it 90 minutes to spare i'll have to deploy my judgy eyes somewhere else all right so zooming back out just nuria if i could start with you just gut check on what you heard can staff do all the things on all my stickies it sounds like many members of council specifically chose things that were easy and maybe small lifts well easy's always in the eye of the beholder right as we move forward but i'll say that a i appreciate that a lot of these initiatives some version or uh has been thought of

[139:02] or were in the process of looking at it so i think will be interesting and when you see staff scope it there will be some that are easier to do than others uh there are others that require a little bit more time and perhaps some additional thoughts on sort of the engagement process with stakeholders as we move forward and the one thing that i will also ask staff if it's all right with you is just to make sure that as we go out to scope if there's anybody on the team that needs to clarify any of these so that we can accurately scope it that'd be great to hear council are you comfortable with having staff reach out to you individually to get further clarification on your thinking on these things seeing some thumbs up um not seeing any thumbs down so that's super helpful okay thank you um all right council we have a whole retreat

[140:00] where we're going to spend a lot of time diving in on these but wondering if any of you have any clarifying questions for your colleagues and just as a quick reminder a clarifying question is a question to which you need an answer in order to understand what your colleagues are thinking it is not an expository question a debatatory question or outrage or whatever in the form of a question rachel do you have a question for one of your colleagues just real quick on bob's um single lift definition or description on broadband tonight is there any um urgency to that under either previous decisions or under new funding like i think there was some arpa money that was specifically available to cities for you know bridgetting the digital divide because covid made us so much more reliant on home internet access or other federal or state funding kind of expected to come down the pikes that's for bob or nuria or anyone else sort of are there new considerations for funding

[141:01] on that i'm going to defer to staff on that i believe there's both harper money available and also potentially some infrastructure money available we of course are members of the national league of cities and i'm in the infrastructure committee on on that organization and we get almost daily bulletins on money that's available in the city so i think we are leaving money on the table i'll just add to that we certainly have been looking at a potential variety of sources including arpa but perhaps others and that the broadband consideration as i've heard it from um bob tonight seems to actually fit nicely with our smart cities initiatives that our i.t department is thinking about so um we will certainly as we scope that out share with you uh some of the thoughts that we have around funding okay thanks great aaron question or comment i'm sorry i said i said questions so i guess question only dang i was going to go on for 20 minutes comments um so my question is for rachel

[142:01] rachel you mentioned in your covid item about like silver linings and you went through that a little quickly does it making the the west pearl street closure permanent is that one of the things you're proposing in there it is yep um it's precisely what i'm thinking of with with the silver linings great not only but it's a def it's a perfect example awesome well i just i wanted to maybe call that out uh so you get a lot of great stuff in there but hopefully that specific one is one that we can can visit in in detail in our continuing discussion next years thanks aaron bobby had a question i did but i'm going to make a comment uh first um just to pile on with aaron and supporting rachel's suggestion around west pearl want to remind us that part of the ballot measure that was just past november overwhelmingly with regard to community culture resilience and safety tax included four million dollars to be

[143:00] allocated towards pearl street so it seems to me that if we do do something on west pearl we do have the funding for that my question is actually directed to junie junior i was intrigued by your uh proposed uh tax to support homelessness services i wanted to make sure i understood the amount of the tax i think you said um 25 cents per 10 so this would be a 0.25 sales tax increase is that right jenny i think thank you bob for this question i had the opportunity to speak with some of my council members about that as well and actually my conclusion is actually to leave it as i mentioned to you earlier to leave that to staff and maybe the subcommittee that rachel is considering to actually work on that even us from the financial strategy committee as well to look into what would that look like and what would be a better proposal as far as the percentage great thank you junia of course we would certainly want staff to let us know what incremental funding that they might need

[144:00] so that we can kind of back into whatever incremental tax might be thank you ginny thanks bob any other clarifying questions nicole go ahead oh this is really a question um and tara knows that i love her dearly so um i'm hoping that this won't be taken my question is just uh you know you mentioned a lot of kind of crime statistics tara and the most recent email that i'm thinking about reading from chief harold um had said something about how you know some crimes are down not up um and so my question for you is um where where were you getting the data from because i would guess what i actually read the data and i'm so proud of myself i met with um chief uh chief harold today and um another person and um they went over the data with me and i made them go over it

[145:02] carefully so i know that it's true and i can even send it to you after this meeting i would love that thank you thanks tara did her homework and she's got pregnancies and all the things hold on i just want to find out the person hold up don't be mad person who i met with let me look it up right now okay if you find it put in the chat all right counsel any other clarifying questions for your colleagues nuria do you have any clarifying questions for counsel at this time based on what you've heard so far i actually do not and i appreciate the the clarity uh of council initiatives as they move forward there may be staff that want to just reach back to council and ask some clarifying questions but it seems fairly straightforward the question now will be how do we prioritize okay um so as you've mentioned a couple of times the next step for staff on these items is to do some scoping um can you just

[146:01] manage our expectations a little bit what kind of information can we expect to come back from staff when we talk about scoping what does that mean uh well i'll invite chris too to see if he has some additional information based on the last councils but my experience is generally sort of uh an understanding of what could be accomplished in the next uh in this term with some estimations on when we could possibly get started what staff resources that would take what kind of lift that would um envision as we move forward and when we could uh potentially get started on that work given each department is so different on where their current staffing constraints and workload is so i imagine that will come forward as we see it and hopefully that will help inform at the retreat whether that is then a priority that is lifted up or perhaps placed in a parking lot later on or a discussion to have with trade-offs with existing work that if this is such a heavy lift then we may

[147:01] have to then stop doing something or um not do something or shift doing something chris am i right in that expectation that uh staff has had about that scoping yep that's what our plan is and uh the team will be meeting starting tomorrow to kind of go through each of these and start to put that together and uh i think as as nuria touched on understanding or or providing our perspective on uh you know what's the lift how big is it how small is it um and when could it start what are the trade-offs uh uh to other work plan items the departments that are engaged in that work so um our hope is to be able to provide all of that on the 18th to really help tee up the conversation at the retreat to be as productive as possible okay matt you have a question or thought on that um yeah i just uh while while staff is

[148:01] sort of looking at scoping you know and the traditional sense of using obviously capable staff we have being staff limited but perhaps financial having more financial resources than necessarily we might have staff to implement my question is maybe leveraging consultants to to add capacity in ways that we probably otherwise might not do in normal years and so i'm wondering if there's openness to really thinking outside the box a little more than usual about leveraging consultants to still allow the work to get done even though we're short staffed but maybe have the resources to apply to hiring consultants on an array of projects i appreciate that question matt and i'll say that um we've actually had that conversation with staff as a leadership team and where there are projects that are discreet you know the so a i'll say this that i love the use of consultants when they can really take something and run with it with minimal need and additional

[149:02] um work from staff there are other projects as you may know that you hire someone but then they have to actually sit down with staff really get kind of versed into what that is and it it really is no help because we've taken all the staff time to get a consultant up to speed and they still need to check in so for staff what we said is certainly come forward and ask us or move forward yourself and contract where a consultant actually adds value to the work and it is appropriate or discreet enough or contained enough that you can move forward but if it is something that is actually going to take more work from you to actually get somebody set up then that's not going to be a good solution for us all but please know that we have shared that information and that direction with staff and we encourage folks to augment the resources as they need in this moment okay okay um so staff you're gonna start working on the scoping effort and we will hear back we'll council hear back from you

[150:00] writtenly before um we talk again just eta on that work product well i i won't want to make that promise because i want to keep expectations there because now we have a week to scope a variety of um of different considerations and so as soon as we get it we will share with you but i cannot promise that it will happen by friday fantastic um so council will be patient and look forward to that information and maybe hope that with a couple of extra days to do that work we'll get some more of that in-depth uh detail that will be useful to you and your conversation um nuria do you need anything else from council at this time related to priorities to support your work i am all set chris anything i'm not thinking of i think we're good all right um before we move on to our last uh little agenda item i want to make sure that everyone saw that tara again did her homework and did give a shout out um to danielle reinhardt in the chat for

[151:01] being the other person who visited with her so double shout out to daniel with that bob am i coming to you to visit a little bit about format for the retreat in terms of um in-person or virtual well no i think i think this is just a more of a general conversation around that i think that staff was going to prepare something from boulder county public health with um some advice from them on that and maybe and turn it over to nuria or pam uh for that and then it was gonna be an open-ended discussion about how people want to do this okay great thank you maria and i'll let yep and i'll ask pam to sort of take the lead on this uh she has been really in communication directly with boulder county public health and i'll also say and i apologize we well i don't apologize really i'll just say that boulder county public health was expected to come with us on the 18th and they have asked not to come because they are so overwhelmed with the current response

[152:00] both to fire and to covet and so we are working with them to provide those updates directly to you so that we still have some information for you into our community um but just wanted to make a note that they're just they're doing terrific work in community and that means that they are unable to meet with us uh next week pam thanks maria and good evening council i'm pam davis i'm one of our assistant city managers as well as i've been serving as the covid response and recovery manager um for the last almost two years now um so i do have a great deal of information provided by boulder county public health what i thought i would do is start with just sort of some key messaging and then as you discuss your preferences if you have specific questions digging into more of the details of our current situation i'm happy to pull up answers to those questions um so as nora and as nuria mentioned they will be back with us in person virtually in february

[153:00] um so what we've heard from public health is um probably not going to be a surprise to you unfortunately the omicron surge does continue to be very significant both locally and globally as we've seen our current case rates and positivity rates are the highest they have ever been by a significant magnitude peak cases have not been reached they are anticipated for late january early february which really lands sort of squarely during your retreat timeline unfortunately city staff and supported by conversations with boulder county public health leadership we recommend maintaining a virtual setting for this retreat given the spread of cases and given the severe level of contagiousness that the omicron variant does have as we've talked with them the current public health guidance although the public health orders have not changed and are not expressly

[154:01] prohibiting in-person indoor gatherings the guidance from public health truly is to avoid any non-essential in-person contact at this time the city for your awareness just this week has adopted um a standard for our own employee base to uh eliminate all non-essential in-person meetings as well so this recommendation does follow suit with what we are hoping that our team members at the city can also abide by in addition i think it will be important for you to know the county vaccine verification program which if you'll recall we did approve county uh city council meetings for this vaccine verification program so that you all could do sort of swearing in and your first meeting together in person while that still is in place um they are now recommending that even those who have been approved for vaccine verification still continue

[155:02] to wear masks indoors so the strong recommendation would be if you were to choose to move indoors that you would keep your masks on even while talking which i know in past conversations with council really kind of limits some of the attractiveness of doing it in person in addition we may hear in the next couple of weeks that boosters are a requirement to remain in the vaccine verified program if that were to be the case we would have to quickly ensure that all participants within the council retreat setting would be boosted so finally that again some high-level key messaging if you're interested in me trying to pull up some numbers um or details that we received in a slide deck today from bcph i'm happy to uh otherwise i think uh generally speaking the message is at this time you know anything that can be virtual should remain virtual for everyone's safety thank you

[156:02] thanks pam so council we have a recommendation from staff um it sounds like following up on county recommendations and guidance would love to hear your thoughts and preferences matt please go ahead i mean i i think this is a pretty much no-brainer to stay virtual um it would seem rather it would just seem crazy to for like a better words to try to go in person when we're experiencing the worst surge of code we've yet to experience um so i i think we can hopefully keep this rather short and just say let's just go virtual i don't think we need much more information than already present the public public eye and uh move on to another subject and just know we're going virtual thanks matt aaron yeah heather can we just say does anyone object to it being virtual because i was going to say that's not except for thumbs up anyone anyone want to make the case for in person all right mark did you want to add anything nope you're good great so

[157:00] sounds like council we will see each other here in the brady bunch zone um for uh our remaining retreat time um acknowledging that of course it's it's no one's preference for how to spend our time together but um safety first and heather if if i may just add one final piece which is given this direction to remain virtual which we thank you for we do have experience with a virtual retreat we did experience that last year and behind the scenes um we as saphis have talked about a couple ways to make you feel a little more connected even in a virtual setting so we'll follow with some information about how since you'll be up late together on zoom on a friday night and up early together again the following saturday morning how the city might uh make your experience a little bit more worthwhile so i know that sounds mysterious but we'll follow up with some information regarding how we can share a meal virtually and some things like that thank you the mystery is what makes it exciting nicole

[158:01] yeah this is just echoing a similar conversation i uh had with my work this evening um one of the things i'm wondering about is do we have contingency plans given that we are going to be hitting peak right around the time we're having a retreat um some of us have kids some of us you know are kind of working in person like there there are varying degrees of ways we can try to protect ourselves and i imagine the same is true for staff um so i i'm just i'm not asking for us to have this discussion right now um i'm just kind of posing it maybe for um bob rachel heather um nuria just what what's sort of our you know do we have alternates in place to pick up um if if people get sick and really aren't able to um join in for um i think probably all of us like council will load up as much as we can with um fed whatever it is we need to get through um but you know i'm thinking about staff and you know if kids are getting sick just there's all kinds of things that could

[159:00] potentially go awry bob rachel we did not discuss that do you have any thoughts you want to share rachel i represent the person who had a covet at our last retreat and went directly from the end of the saturday retreat session to the hospital i would say this is not an implausible thing nicole um i think we should probably all check in maybe a day or two before the retreat see how people are feeling and um if we're all healthy god god willing um we'll go forward and and if one or two people can't join then we can have a discussion about uh reconvening what do you think about that rachel well i was i was just gonna you know say kudos to bobby yates for hanging in there in the last retreat and a really bad case of covid um and also i remember another colleague leaving the retreat early the year before aaron's nodding didn't want to out you there um so i think that it's that's probably the benefit of being on zoom is that we can still be here even if we're feeling a little crummy so hopefully it can work out that way um but i think that's something that

[160:01] that you know does arise and yeah i would think like if i if if something really serious changes but fingers crossed that we're all we're all going to be safe in 10 days and yeah i would i would agree with bob to keep us posted i would argue last year we did not get the best of bob yates um and his wisdom for uh the council retreat on account of he was it looked like honestly 98 dead um so thanks for rallying but it's i think also the case for uh if a bunch of you are sick maybe we make some other choices junie thank you heather i first i thought nicole was referring to a substitute council member so first i wasn't sure so i was gonna say i don't think i come in a substitute but um i am unlike i am gonna be late at this coming uh retreat meeting so um i will do my best to be on time but i just wanted to give everybody a heads up that i'm i'm likely to be late do you mean

[161:02] next tuesday or you mean at the actual retreat on friday on friday great thank you all right um so pam sounds like we have a plan and um i guess my question would be to the retreat committee do we want to circle up again and um talk about anything in light of this decision i think we anticipated this decision um aaron had previewed it for us at uh council agenda committee meeting yesterday morning i think well i think we're all disappointed that we can't meet in person i think we need to follow the recommendation of staff and boulder county public health um we'll all be together next tuesday and that'll be a kind of a final check-in for all of council both on how people are feeling um but also on whether we need to make any adjustments to our protocol for the retreat which we'll just follow three days later okay nuria you came off mute did you want to add something there i'll only just uh respond briefly to the question on about staff and i'll say

[162:01] that well we have talked a lot about the constraints staff has recently i'll also say that staff is phenomenal and we are many bench deep into what we do so if unfortunately we find ourselves with a with someone who is sick or can't make it there are other folks in line who can certainly pick up that slack or we can get back to you but we have great staff and great folks that really go deep into the organization and always want to lift them up excellent thanks maria all right council i think we've done our retreat related work for the evening um erin i'm not sure do you all have additional work to do into the wee hours or do you actually get to go home early and by go home i mean stand up this is the first half of the seven hour meeting so if we can begin the second half now in area no i believe we're done only after a 15-minute break and walk fantastic then um aaron i hand that meeting back to you to do whatever um pleasantries and important things you

[163:01] need to do to end officially and the council meeting okay well thanks as always heather for leading us through a fantastic and productive meeting and uh no no gambling because it's a study session so we'll just say good night everybody take care and we'll see you again soon goodnight everyone stay safe all right thank you heather thank you [Music] thank you heather you're awesome [Music]

[164:19] [Music] you