February 15, 2022 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] [Music]

[1:45] do

[2:00] do [Music] do do [Music] except for the announcements in the beginning after all [Music]

[3:19] we're just waiting on a couple council members here did you see the note from [Music] nicole she may not be on the screen [Music]

[4:01] i'm out for a minute while we're waiting for the last couple of years [Music] hey judy how are you [Music] good evening genie okay and lauren's here already the camera turned off all right let's go ahead and get started and um i'm gonna do have channel 8 ready um and i will begin recording

[5:02] great so i will get us good evening everyone and welcome to the february 15 2022 meeting with the boulder city council uh we're expecting congressman joney goose here shortly but um while we're waiting for him i'm going to read through a couple of announcements so we could get those on the screen please great all right so covered 19 testing and vaccinations so for testing for information and provider locations for free covet 19 testing you can go to www.boco.org covid testing and the boulder site for that is it 2445 stasio drive in boulder it's open seven days a week from 8 am to 6 pm and for vaccinations for vaccine information and provider locations you

[6:01] can go to boco.org covid vaccine so if you still need to do that or maybe a booster that's your opportunity next if you're looking for an opportunity to get involved in city affairs a great way to do that is with our boards and commissions and the recruitment period is now open it closes on february 21st you still got a few days left you can find your board and commission's descriptions and vacancies online at boulder colorado.gov boards dash commissions there are 20 of them so there's one for every taste and interest so please check that out and apply if you have any questions on that or need assistance please contact the city clerk's office at city clerk's office at boulder colorado.gov next [Music]

[7:02] price gouging so colorado law prohibits charging excessive prices for certain essential products goods or services during a disaster period it makes clear that such price gouging is a deceptive trade practice under the colorado consumer protection act coloradans who witness price gouging or who think they might be a victim of price gouging should file a report with the attorney's general's office at 800-222-4444 or stopfraudcolorado.gov that's it for our announcements um and we just need another minute for junior goose so um alicia how about we call the roll all right sir thank you and good evening everyone councilmember benjamin

[8:01] she's present okay i couldn't hear you i'm sorry i'm sorry no worries mayor brockett president council member focus here mayor pro tem friend here council member joseph present sphere present present minor present present and yates happy to be here mayor we have our forum great thanks so much well why don't we go ahead and roll into our decla declaration for the evening

[9:00] uh we have a declaration honoring rare disease day to be read by council member mark wallach thank you mayor as a member in good standing of the rare disease club i am very happy to read the following declaration in support of rare disease day february 28 2022 there are over seven thousand diseases and conditions considered rare that is each affecting fewer than two thousand twenty two hundred thousand americans in the united states according to the national institute of health well each of these diseases may affect a small number of people rare diseases as a group affect almost 30 million or 1 in 10 americans many rare diseases are serious and debilitating conditions that have a significant impact on the lives of those affected living with a rare disease is made harder by the fact that there is often low profit potential for development of treatments for uncommon illnesses

[10:00] therefore very little research is done while more than 450 drugs and biologics have been approved for the treatment of rare diseases according to the food and drug administration 90 of the known rare diseases are still without fda approved treatments as such millions of americans still have rare diseases for which there is no approved treatment individuals and families affected by rare diseases often experience additional difficulties such as diagnosis delay difficulty finding a medical expert and lack of access to treatments or ancillary services while the public is familiar with some rare diseases many patients and families affected by less widely known rare diseases bear a large share of the burden of funding research and raising public awareness to support the search for treatments the national organization for rare disorders is organizing a nationwide observance of rare disease day on february 28 20 22.

[11:01] we the city council of the city of boulder colorado declare february 28 2022 as a rare disease day and urge all community members to take cognizance of this event and participate fittingly in its observance signed by mayor brockett thank you for doing so mayor thanks so much for that mark and do we have uh lindsay kane or someone else to receive the declaration here this evening lauren rosenberg yes thank you so much we appreciate it so much thank you city council members and mayor for recognizing february 28th as rare disease day in boulder it's extremely meaningful to my family and countless others in our shoes i'm actually stepping in tonight for lindsay kane who is supposed to address you but sadly had experienced a flare-up in her own rare condition and could not be here

[12:02] my husband and i are bolder community members and we also happen to be restaurant owners in town and in march of 2020 our whole world seemed to fall apart at the seams not only were we faced with great fear and sadness we had to lay off almost 100 of our own employees in a day in our jobs and live we had hung in the balance as we entered the pandemic but at the same time after a long and winding road of seeking answers for our daughter who was two and a half at the time so we we received her diagnosis she's actually right here waving we were told that she was among 30 to 50 people that's it in the whole world that had what she had a disease called mcto it's rare uh ultra rare and progressively crippling and okay and we were told her bones would continue to disappear over time and that she would experience kidney failure and other problems we were told that no one in the whole

[13:00] state had ever heard of this condition and there was no effective way to treat it we were in despair and i learned quickly that if my daughter had any chance of a brighter future outlook i had to become a scientist myself as a restaurant person and a marketing person that wasn't an easy task but we formed our non-profit sophie's neighborhood and over the last two years we've been working hard and there are now more than a dozen researchers and medical experts around the world dedicated to translational medicine for mcto we're making great progress the crucial factor in this hopeful journey is this very special boulder community ours is made up of the most compassionate and giving people who have contributed to our research efforts and also the high caliber cutting edge bioscience community that exists here which we're lucky for companies like artisan biosomologic arpeggio and of course cu right here in boulder helping us understand the disease um as we just heard there are seven thousand rare diseases

[14:02] that affect between 25 and 30 million americans yet only five percent have a treatment and we appreciate today's recognition so much as it gives us hope for what we can accomplish as a community and support for the health and well-being of our neighbors regardless of the rarity of their disease and so i speak for all of those who understand the isolation that comes with this hardship and i thank you for giving us the platform and recognition that is so deserved um so on february 28th we'll be at the courthouse and we'll see you there thank you so very much thank you so much ms rosenberg for that that moving speech and for turning your your family's challenges in into a way to help people uh around the world who are experiencing similar similar difficulties i know i've i've bought some cookies uh in front of one of your restaurants uh as part of one of your fundraisers for that cause well we'll be doing some zebra themed donut or um

[15:01] sorry brownies uh at our restaurants uh on february 28th as well so all supporting rare disease something to look forward to and um i'll note as well that the band shell will be lit up in pink green blue and purple the colors of rare disease day in honor of vacation thanks so much all right um well we did just get news that unfortunately uh congressman goose um had an important um other commitment come up and will not be able to join us tonight so we will reschedule and look for another time to hear about his important work in washington so with that um alicia shall we move to the next part of our agenda here with open comments yes sir okay and ryan do you want to start by going over the public participation guidelines

[16:01] yes mayor thank you i'll go ahead and do that thank you emily for pulling up these slides uh four community members here for open comment this evening welcome and thank you for being here to share your perspective and your experience the city has engaged with community members to co-create a vision for productive meaningful and inclusive civic conversations this vision supports physical and emotional safety for community members staff and council as well as democracy for people of all ages identities lived experiences and political perspectives next slide please the following are examples of rules of decorum found in the boulder revised code and other guidelines that support the same vision these will each be upheld during this meeting tonight all remarks and testimony shall be limited to matters related to city business no participants will make threats or use other forms of intimidation against any person

[17:01] obscenity racial epithets and other speech and behavior that disrupts or otherwise impedes the ability to conduct this meeting are prohibited and participants are required to sign up and speak using the name they are commonly known by individuals must display their whole name before being allowed to speak online and only audio testimony will be prevented this evening thank you and we'll turn to our first speaker which that ryan and uh all speakers will get two minutes to speak in open comments tonight our first three people are patrick murphy michelle rodriguez and lindsay losberg waiting for my slide thank you patrick we're pulling up slides and your timer will begin once the slide is up

[18:01] my name is patrick murphy i've lived in boulder 52 years this presentation is about using the boulder occupation tax a carbon tax in an equitable way my previous presentations proved that it is a carbon tax and that over time boulders collected over 88.2 million dollars in carbon taxes and more than half of that was never used for real carbon reduction and the four million dollars of carbon tax that is collected each year and not used for carbon reduction could enable all boulder residences and businesses to be 100 percent renewables today using wind source incentives solar incentives would provide value that lasted over 20 years renewable energy certificates also known as wrecks have been denigrated by boulder and that's ludicrous wrecks stimulate the renewables industry and we should be buying them directly now to meet our climate goals all of these options can be done equitably by providing larger incentives for low-income citizens and

[19:01] smaller incentives for large income residents this presentation is about energy use reduction combined with real community engagement that works instead of imagined engagement and endless propaganda i'm certain if you ask 100 random boulder residents what they know about boulder climate actions the vast majority would know nothing but many of them would know about the muni failure boulder residents especially the low and middle income community need something real and functional that demonstrates boulder is serious about climate change and knows that engagement works best when it provides something rather than just collecting a carbon tax that isn't used for carbon reduction leds use 1 7 of the electricity of an incandescent bulb provide free leds to all boulder residents now starting with the low-income community the planet burns floods and dies while boulder fiddles with climate change

[20:02] thank you patrick next we have michelle rodriguez lindsay lohberg and daniel glaser michelle your mike is open up just saw you i mean go ahead hi this is michelle rodriguez and um i wanted to first of all congratulate all the council members that just made it and i'm happy to see you guys and have the opportunity to speak i wanted to say about the sammy lawrence issue that um i felt that was kind of a little bit of a disgrace i'm horrified at the fact well i guess this should explain i'm in the middle of the lawsuit also against waylon lola tai and i'm horrified at the fact that he's been found to have 81 counts of use of force i was chemically sedated by for convenience i know you guys have brought some federal agents on there there's a lot of

[21:00] officers that still aren't safe those that haven't left i already have dropped the role since i filed my lawsuit and i just need to be able to be free in society to be able to speak and i'm not sure when when i'm able to speak and um what i'm able to relate to but i i know that will and lola ty did not quit because of social media he quit because of my lawsuit he quit as a matter of fact the day after my lawsuit and left with an amount a separation package that was equal to sammy lawrence's settlement i apologize forever being off i'll kill troop because i babble a lot but i have the utmost respect for you guys and i'm hopeful with the new the new council that has come in and as far as the federal agents they've brought in i need i had questions about whether or not they were going to be somebody from inside the department or somebody from the outside i kind of

[22:01] support the somebody from the outside it is completely dangerous to have anybody from the inside namely several officers keeps diamond for one but and i'll stop there but you guys stay safe please keep reviewing that federal the federal agent they've got there and i hope that it was cleared by all those who have the ability to to see see through things and that you guys brought somebody from the outside instead of somebody from the inside i have uh okay thank you testimony next we have uh lindsay lohberg daniel glaser and lynn siegel hello um thanks uh thanks for having me thanks for the time thanks um uh hi everyone hi council members um uh welcome those of you who are new

[23:01] my name's lindsay loberg they them i'm on the human relations commission and um i'm here um because i wanted to make um an invitation um because i was um really i'm um i'm here to follow up about uh the fbi mou that you all voted on in your last meeting and um heard some calls for input from our commission um and just wanted to express uh that we're open to that and i wanted to point out a pattern that i noticed where there were a couple calls for input and then emotion went through anyway and for those who are new i don't i don't want to be condescending i brought this up because i also had to learn this i'm serving on a commission but if emotion is moving forward and you're uncomfortable with it

[24:01] or you feel like you need more information you can make a motion to postpone until a certain thing happens so like you can make a motion to postpone until we at the hrc um can create a report for you for example and we'll be happy to provide that for you we're actually going to talk about the fbi mou at our next meeting i'm here speaking for myself because we haven't had a chance to discuss this yet our meeting is on our meeting is on monday so we'll be talking about it then and following up with you all but really glad to do that by invitation so thank you for having from me thank you for having me and um hope to hear from you all in the future thank you vincey next daniel glaser and i understand lindsey is not present and then ben bender

[25:04] daniel your mic is open you'll just need to unmute hi dan glazer and huay wang and family both my neighbors and iron boulders affordable housing program and have lost out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in counting we question why such a government program that is supposed to help the poor with home ownership has been so regressive the crux of the problem is that the city's program forces only the poor homeowners to pay for new low income owners to bind to this program boulder is favoring new owner interests while sacrificing ours also since affordable housing is a city-wide program shouldn't all city homeowners instead of just the disadvantaged minority pay we need the city's hope finding a solution for giving us market rate earnings on our mortgage which is still just a fraction of what our home is worth here are some suggestions number one the new homeowner proportionally gets the same deal we did this will make things fair can the city make this work with grants of them if needed number two require all homeowners in

[26:01] boulder to financially contribute a small percentage when selling three contributions from oversized companies in boulder like google and other sources four lastly allow us to bind to true home ownership to emancipate ourselves from the program as long as we are not getting near market rate appreciation on a mortgage you are sadly sinking us well beneath the fantastically rising housing market we are now financial prisoners in a program that the city still promotes just like warnings for guns it's imperative for the city to have explicitly warned potential buyers of long-term negative financial health mobility and other consequences fixing this problem will allow us to move on others to join improve working conditions get healthier add local jobs in spending and make us all feel good about boulder if housing is a party to this council i urge you to please prioritize and act on this critical issue that affects so many downtrodden but working and contributing boulder community members thank you

[27:01] thank you dan lynn siegel is not present we'll come back to her if she reappears next we have ben bender nishama abraham and margaret laconte good evening my name is ben bender and i live in south boulder i'm not going to waste my time trying to convince you to repeal the flawed cu south annexation agreement passed out of desperation during a meeting which was more of an infomercial to sell the agreement to the public than a serious deliberation of the pros and cons of the agreement but i am going to remind you in the public of the numerous shortcomings of the agreement which put more importance on cu's desire to intensively develop its flood flood-prone depleted gravel pit than on providing adequate flood protection for the lives and properties of thousands of boulder residents to meet cu's demands the size of the flood control utility was drastically reduced to only provide production for a 100-year flood which was deemed inadequate by a previous council the recent marshall fire has

[28:00] again demonstrated that is better to provide protection against extreme events caused by climate change than to deal with the aftermath the agreement allows cu to construct 750 000 square feet of non-residential buildings whose employees housing needs will far exceed the 1200 dwelling units planned for the property resulting in a net loss of housing for students and faculty traffic generated by the 1200 dwelling units 750 000 square feet of non-residential construction 3000 seats stadium and auxiliary uses will contradict create a traffic nightmare and already con congested table mesa drive and other roads in south boulder the agreement also provides for a new intersection was colorado 93 at a dangerous location on a curve on a hill which according to cu's traffic consultant will not have a traffic light until there are five accidents at the site and utility rate payers will have to pay millions to import a hundred and twenty thousand cubic yards of earth fill to

[29:01] replace sand and gravel mine from the site to provide cu with additional land above the level of a 500-year flood no wonder it was so easy to gather six thousand voter vote voters to sign the petition to put the agreement to a vote of the people thank you thank you ben next shaman abraham margaret lecompte and linda quigley thank you i believe that this landline number um it's a shama i'll just go ahead and mute to confirm if you could go ahead and confirm that this is you calling from the landline you can use star 6 to unmute yourself we can see that you've unmuted but cannot hear you

[30:00] okay how's that that works better thank you all right thank you sorry about that um good evening city council and city staff i'm here to speak about the need to take action around finding a solution for our unhoused population we have been talking about it for months and it's not a topic that requires more study it's time to take action um we had a very strong wonderful response to the marshall fire and that same criteria ought to be applied to people who are unhoused if they're unhealthy economic mental health reasons and i i would say to you all with all due respect that maybe it's time for those involved in this decision to consider sleeping outside during these below freezing days to know and understand firsthand the urgency to come up with a solution so here are a couple of ideas and these focus around the building at 2691 30th

[31:01] street i talked to may martin who is one of the owners um of madelife first she is actively looking for a new place to move to but in the interim she is open for two thirds of that building is vacant to have a solution right away um for our unhoused population to just physically be in that building that's one possibility a second is um to look at that inventory that um our city manager requested of available buildings because madelife is ready to move and wants to find a building to buy along with some other community art organizations i've provided that criteria that's another possible solution and would make um 2691 303 available the third is why are we even considering demolishing that building um you know it was designated for the for helping people are unhoused

[32:01] it worked unhoused people are still coming to the building because it was such a good experience it was safe and familiar and the only reason that i understand that building is set to be demolished is because it's to provide a turnaround space for fire trucks that firehouse that's been retrofitted has the wrong size door i apologize your time is up but thank you so much for your testimony and feel free to send us the rest of your comments via email or council submittal form thank you next we have margaret laconte linda quigley and gwen dooley good evening can you hear me yes okay thank you uh my name is margaret lecompte and i'm a 32-year resident of south boulder last fall and i'm also the co-chair of the organization safe south boulder last fall the save cu south coalition conducted a petition drive to put a referendum to repeal the cu south

[33:01] annexation ordinance on the ballot we did this because we believe that the annexation agreement is fatally flawed and highly disadvantaged disadvantageous to the city residents and after a six year campaign to get council to finally address our concerns we felt of a vote on this is mandated because of the high cost to boulder annexations of an ebola residence of annexation its devastating impact on the environment and especially the south boulder creek floodplain and on the quality of life in south boulder neighborhoods the the fact that cu's plans for the property also will make adequate protection against flooding not only very limited only to a 100-year flood event right now but impossible in the face of bigger floods that we know climate change will bring in the future

[34:00] in 30 days last fall more than 600 6 000 people signed our petition to repeal the annexation twice the number required to put the referendum to repeal on the ballot tonight city council must figure out how to act on this it has three choices number one it can pass the repeat the repeal referendum themselves right now second they can put it to the repeal referendum to vote in a special election this year or third they can put it on the november 8th ballot for the regular election we in the coalition request council to pass the referendum now that's a chance to step back i'm afraid your time is up but thank you so much for your testimony and feel free to email us with the rest next we have linda quigley gwen dooley and alan delamere

[35:03] good evening city council my name is linda quigley i have lived in south boulder since 1982. thanks for this opportunity to speak with you i signed up to speak because of my extreme concern regarding how cu south is and has been handled by city council it seems all we have done as a city is surrendered to see you for instance to stir up the fears of the residents of fraser meadows to speak in favor of the emergency annexation was actually reprehensible those residents have not been allowed to hear speakers at that facility unless they're in favor of the annexation frazier meadows since 2013 was an obvious farce done apparently out of concern about the ballot measure the voters were about to act on last november now more than six

[36:02] thousand signatures later we have months to educate the voter the boulder voters about how to vote now on the annexation by emergency cu has said it will mitigate the ponds at cu south this is boulder's last wetlands this reads bulldozers so when it develops another campus i guess my question is what is your vision for cu in the city of boulder um i'm quite curious it seems as if the council's perhaps not succeeded in educating it the public of boulder about what your vision is for cu south um i know it's difficult cu south has certainly not been a stellar neighbor holding us over a barrel until we surrendered but people in my neighborhood do not know what or how

[37:02] the council has taken any of these measures so i would ask you to open your meetings thank you for your time thank you linda next we have gwen dooley allen delamere diane curlett and then lynn siegel is back can you hear me yes good thank you first i'd like to remind council that the best things in boulder would have made us a great town and now a great city are those things that the citizens have sponsored and the citizens have voted for open space enchanted mesa etc i would also like to remind you that we collected more than 11 000 signatures on our petition and our referendum in very short periods of time i'd also like to remind you that our loss last year maybe you don't realize it was in part due to this

[38:00] previous city attorney's wording when many thought a yes vote was a vote in favor of open space and as you know it was the last thing on the ballot and a lot of people get confused when they go through a long ballot and another thing that contributed i think to our loss and i've managed quite a few campaigns in boulder uh was that the previous city council jumped the gun less than three weeks before the ballots were mailed out people felt like they had been cut off at the knees and they were told by the acting city attorney that their vote really didn't matter when they voted that fall because council had already acted so this council seems to want climate action to be a priority developing cu south is currently envisioned is far from that applies in the face of climate action

[39:00] please give the citizens of boulder a real chance to make their voices heard either repeal and give citizens a full airing of the complexities involved or put it on the november ballot for a good showing when everyone will be voting thank you thank you gwen next we have alan delemiere diane curlett and lynn siegel okay i'm unmuted alan delamere 525 mapleton avenue i'm going to talk about one slide that i'll send the full slide shot to you on the utilities bond issue for 2024 which is currently suggested being 91 million the 91 million is made of two numbers 25 million for goose creek 66 million for south boulder creek these are what's known as roms rough orders of magnitude so we can expect 50 percent increase in

[40:01] those numbers so the 91 million is just the initial guess now unfortunately there are 10 other drainages in boulder that need serious attention so the total amount of money we need to put into that bond issue is not the 91 million it needs to go up significantly for the two already mentioned plus the other 10 million other 10 drainages so i anticipate that'll be about 250 million now i firmly believe in peer review of estimates not something that just comes out of fresh air and i'd like to see the city council really demand analysis of these estimates because the south boulder creek one is a huge one and it could be very huge indeed so we really need to take other

[41:00] factors into account such as energy inflation is currently predicted at 25 per year and the projects require lots of energy concrete equipment transportation all energy things so the cost is going to go way up so once again i'll send you my thing that i sent to the water advisory board and you can digest it at length meanwhile let's limit the size of the university it's far too big and it's growing too much and we can't afford it thank you thank you alan next we have diane corlett and then lynn siegel uh yes can you hear me yes okay um good evening city council members and staff i'm diane corlett i live in south boulder i request you repeal the cu annexation

[42:02] agreement ordinance number 8483 climate change unstable weather and a ridification of our lands now pose new dangers that must be faced in making land use decisions these dangers were less apparent decades ago when cu bought land in flood prone south water creek valley it is now obvious that the south boulder creek valley a lush riparian area should be used for 500 year flood control basins and preserved as open space for public use ordinance number 8483 pastors emergency major with scant public examination allows the annexation of the cu land the city for dense development and supports an annexation agreement that was developed in secret the text of the agreement is riddled with inconsistencies and accurate assumptions and saddles boulder taxpayers with millions of dollars of costs over the coming decades

[43:02] the agreement also fails to realistically address and fund the numerous heavy negative impacts this dense mega development will place on south boulder i request you repeal this ordinance this evening and immediately proceed to negotiate an agreement with cu to swap this land for equivalent acreage in the city-owned planning reserve planning reserve land is set aside for development of projects of city-wide concern and offers large areas for affordable housing construction as well it is not it is not in a flood plain it does not imperil riparian wetlands it does not inhibit the proper flood control needed to protect older residents this ordinance and the agreement it supports represent major mistakes and leadership ignoring the needs of the citizens for protection and good planning while committing the city to

[44:00] pay for costs that should be borne by the university's construction budget please correct these mistakes and repeal this ordinance thank you thank you diane i'll finish up with lynn segal can you hear me yes okay good because the capitals on in the background because i'm testifying there too and it's impossible to get on with them can you hear me okay wow because i've got my volume way down so i don't have to listen to them at the same time and i can concentrate yes um so i also am opposed to see you self and boy it's that the capital it's climate and i'm opposed to modular nuclear reactors because of that and i'm opposed to see you south because of climate change and because of our water demands and because we can't afford cu south we can't afford it and we need

[45:02] it on in november um let's see um i've also got a big problem with private equity groups buying up housing throughout the united states we are coming to a renter's market renter for everybody no ownership for anyone anymore i'll tell you one way it's happening did you know what the new rent is property taxes that's the new rent in boulder you have no idea what i go through every year fighting it at the board of equalization and the board of assessment appeals and pretty soon i'm not gonna win because guess what it doesn't matter i'm fighting against impossible odds as every project at planning board that

[46:00] gets added on for for subsidies for a third story for higher and bigger and better just drives up the property value and drives up the demand for affordable housing which boulder will never keep up with especially with cu you're chasing your tail if you think you're going to keep up with housing in this community and you know i don't know about you but i can't afford aspen the homeless can't afford boulder but i sure as heck can't afford aspen at 16 million dollars average home price there so you know what are you gonna do thank you so much okay um do we have any staff responses to anything in open comment yep i'll just say i just wanted to note for the caller that called in from

[47:01] uh hrc is that actually we have just confirmed um wendy schwartz who's leading the reimagining public safety effort has confirmed that the chief has accepted an invitation to talk about the very issue at next week's hrc meeting and so i just wanted to share that that was happening and really appreciate the chief's willingness to change your schedule in order to do so that's great to hear glad that engagement will happen um let's see i've got some council members lined up here we've got matt and bob and rachel thanks aaron um i i just want to sort of maybe address a bunch of the speakers that um past current and and future that talking about see you south we're gonna embark on yet another season where this is on the ballot it'll be contentious there'll be passions on both sides and good arguments on both sides but i think what's really important is that we find a way to elevate the discourse

[48:00] and let facts not fear drive our conversation because it's really important for this community to find ways to move forward whether we don't do or don't like the outcomes and it has gotten a bit out of hand in past years with regards to some of these issues and so i'm really hoping before we embark on this next journey through this issue that we find a new way forward even if we can disagree we find a civil way to do it and i'm really hopeful that we can try to achieve that whether you're an opponent or a supporter of the referendum i think now is the time to set that course and i hope we can all do that as a community for that matt bob and then rachel um if rachel's going to speak to cu south he'll yield to her if she's got a different topic i'll take it up now i was going to do c south as well i just wanted to invite any staff responses um c south is not up tonight but um it's always a little bit difficult um when things are presented as factual that are not factual um and so wanted to see if i

[49:02] don't know if joe teddyuchi would have any reason to be on this call tonight maria yeah i'm checking i do not believe that he is but we do have an update coming up about see you self um that's being scheduled uh soon that is a staff update so okay i will clarify with him then but but just want to say to the community who's watching who may not you know some people are probably coming in cold to this there's um an allegation that that cu is sort of monstrous in its demands and that and that is what limited us to 100 year flood protection rather than 500 years um but that's not the case we um we're told time and again that even if we owned all the land and it was our land um to do with whatever we could the maximum flood protection that we could realistically build there is a hundred years so just um i want us to make sure as matt said you know to be civil and cordial i think part of that's

[50:00] going to be rooting our our discussions in common facts and and facts have to be facts so um but i will look forward to the the update uh where joe will be and dig in deeper thanks thanks rachel bob did you have something else and then mark i had a different subject uh thanks uh matt and rachel for that uh a good question for nuria murray i i one of the speakers i think the first speaker spoke to the um we actually have two taxes i think right now a climate action tax or cap tax that was passed i think back in 2006 maybe has been renewed a few times and then we have a slightly newer utilities occupation tax both of them are used for climate action and i think both of them are coming up for renewal the next few years seems to me i recall that sometime in the next week or two i know the utility occupation tax is a very confusing name but in the next week or two we're going to take that up and possibly talk about combining those in a single tax for voter approval am i remembering that scheduled correctly maria you are bob that actually is coming

[51:00] forward next study session next week is financial and revenue strategies for climate work uh and we're going to be having that very conversation so i invite those that are interested in that to tune in because i think it will be um a deep conversation and one really about what is the future of um funding for our climate action work thanks arya look forward to it mark then i'll call on myself okay um first i i do support what matt said about elevating the dialogue on this it's a very contentious issue and i think it's very important that we all treat each other with the respect that that we are due um i only have one substantive comment which is i have often heard the the comment that um somehow all of this was worked out in private um this is it's just not accurate to say that every draft every change in language everything was made public and

[52:02] the community got a chance to see it with the comment on it and having waded through almost innumerable emails on the subject i can say we had a very engaged conversation about that so it's just not it's not fair to say that somehow this was all done in the dark of night and nobody knew what it was going to be um we were very very public about this thank you hey and in chat mark just one comment that i'll uh add in here was i was i believe ms quickly was asking what our vision for the c south side is and i just would refer her and other interested parties to the um the comprehensive plan from 2015 we agreed um city council and county commissioners and see you on a set of guiding principles for what what could happen there at cu south and the eventual annexation agreement followed those principles i think that was where we set forward uh what we thought should go there in the broad outlines so just

[53:01] want to offer that one other comment anything else on opencomment seeing none then we can move to the consent agenda and alicia i wanted to break this up into the first three and the fourth one because we've got we need to have bob recuse himself for that fourth one all right so we have the consent agenda items and they do contain items a through d so i'll just start by saying does anybody have any comments or questions on a through c and they're all just meeting minutes so it's not super exciting uh seeing none um bob do you want to go ahead and say a word yeah so with that i'll recuse myself a member of my family owns um some a small amount of stock and ball aerospace so i thought it'd be appropriate for me to recuse myself from both this item and also later on in the meeting uh the call-up uh potential for the all-air response matters so i'm going to leave the meeting right now i'll come back after i'm signaled that you're done with the presentation on this matter and

[54:00] and vote at least a through c of the consent agenda goodbye thanks bob i understand we have a presentation on item d you do i think carl's gonna kick us off there thank you nuria good evening council members i'm gonna pull up the presentation can you all see that tonight we're gonna um just talk about the ball aerospace proposed expansion at 1600 commerce street and 5001 arapahoe avenue the two items before the council tonight are a vote on the ordinance 884.99 on first reading a second reading for that ordinance is scheduled for march 1st the second consideration is whether council wants to call up the planning board decision on the site review application uh that call-up period is 30 days after the planning board decision

[55:01] and if uh council does vote to call that up we would just suggest that the march first date also be considered if um if it's called up so just really briefly on the uh background on this particular project a concept plan was submitted by ball aerospace early 2021 it was heard by planning board in april of 2021 um i'll talk about what some of the comments were on that uh that concept plan was not uh called up by the council at that time since that time we've had two good neighbor meetings on this project we've met the public notice requirements the reason that it requires a site review application is because the properties are greater than five acres in size and the floor area is greater than a hundred thousand feet of what's proposed so the planning board review is required because of the hype modifications on the site so there's proposals to build additions onto their existing

[56:00] manufacturing buildings what we call the fisher building as well as some new administrative buildings b and c in the parking garage all proposed to be up to 55 feet in height setback modifications and parking reductions that were proposed as part of the project and as i noted the planning board decision on the site review is subject to call up within 30 days so this is a a slide that shows the properties it's roughly 27 acres it's just east of foothills parkway just north of arapahoe uh you can see the the boulder creek corridor to the northwest of the site and and the green space that's on that part of the property um it's in between 48th street and range street commerce street is kind of the central spine of the boulder of the ball aerospace campus so per the boulder valley converts of plan the bvcp the land use designation on the site is light industrial uh it is in the area that's being considered for

[57:01] the east boulder sub-community plan uh but just note obviously that has not yet been adopted there are no uh connections plans that apply to this particular site generally matches the land use its industrial general ig this is what they're proposing are permitted uses um the height limit in that zone is 40 feet so obviously going over that requires the height modification there is a 0.5 floor area ratio maximum this zone that would allow up to 577 thousand square feet as i'll talk about with the ordinance ball is requesting approval of an ordinance that would allow them to exceed that far i want to point out some of the um more historic buildings that are on the site there's a modernist architect who designed and and helped for the construction of some of these buildings albert wagner on the site they're

[58:00] they're all over 50 years of age so they do require administrative approval for demo and they do require landmark alteration certificates so if you look at the slide you can see one of the original aerials of the site that show the older buildings that were built in the 50s and 60s including the tech tower which fronts on arapahoe ball is basically um noting that a lot of these buildings are reaching the end of their useful life and is proposed to demolish most of the buildings through the course of the review this is something we talked about at concept plan we worked with them to try to preserve the original ball aerospace building on the site which is noted on that area as the ado building what they'd be demoing is the tech tower the t buildings as well as the addition to the ado building which is shown as the ad building so that original um diagonally oriented 1956 structure is what would be

[59:00] preserved on the site so the landmark alteration certificate that was required for that building was called up by the landmarks advisory board they did conditionally approve um the the preservation of that building and as they proposed it uh they would still need to look at the project again to set the landmark boundary for the site after site review so this is the um concept plan that was discussed there were a number of topics that were that were discussed at this time you can see some of the buildings are very close to one another in the center of the site and this is because of ball aerospace unique um needs on the site for the the manufacturing that they're doing they need to have close proximity of the administrative buildings to the manufacturing and testing buildings there's also uh security requirements that have to be met so this has greatly informed their site plan so as part of the of the concept plan we did talk about the demolition of the hobart wagner buildings we talked about

[60:00] connections through the site they were not wanting to extend the riverbend road public right-of-way which you can see on the on the left side of the picture from the boulder community health site onto the ball aerospace site for security reasons so we discussed that boulder community health also is opposed to that extension we support what they have proposed on the plan with the extension of the multi-use pass i'll talk a little bit about that later we also talked about the additional floor area request that's being considered by council tonight as well as offsetting impacts of the additional employees on the site so again the concept plan at that time was not called up uh by the city council so the applicant moved forward um with their site uh review application as well as um the city working on preparation of the ordinance so just getting into the components of the ordinance

[61:01] the ordinance would allow up to a 0.65 far on the site which exceeds that 0.5 far maximum and in turn with that additional floor area and consistent with bvcp policies on community benefit additional increased commercial linkage fees would apply to that space as well as any bonus floor area that's in upper stories of the building so the ordinance allows for that increased commercial linkage fee for that additional floor area since that portion of um the floor area is not actually in the land use code the language code really just talks about bonus floor area that's in an upper story this would include all additional floor area that is above the 0.5 far the ordinance also allows for the expiration extension of the landmark alteration certificate as well as the demolition permits uh the applicant is requesting greater than three years of vested rights with a phasing plan

[62:02] up to 15 years so given that duration they would have to keep reapplying for their extension of their landmark alteration certificate and demo permit so this would allow that those extensions to to spam the 15 years of their phasing plan these are some of the bvcp policies that apply in this case obviously when passing an ordinance we have to find that it's consistent with our comprehensive plan so planning board agreed with the staff analysis that there were a number of reasons why it made sense to have this ordinance pass if you look at the highlighted policies that apply to the light industrial areas and community benefit revitalizing commercial and industrial areas and supporting local business and business retention this would encourage revitalization and redevelopment and infill in boulder's industrial areas

[63:01] one of the statements talks about providing development incentives to encourage important businesses like primary employers like ball to stay and obviously considering the unique considerations for the floor area at ball where they need the massive amount of space within the buildings to construct their satellites and test their satellites in there it needs additional floor area so we found that all of these things combined to meet the comprehensive plan and planning board agreed with that and they provided this motion on the slide they they passed or recommended approval of the ordinance on a vote of six to zero um what they did add they added a secondary motion that's on the bottom of the slide basically just requesting that council consider using the additional funds that are from the commercial linkage fee uh focused more on the middle income housing as part of that

[64:02] moving on to the site review um one thing i wanted to point out is 15 years is obviously a long phasing plan considering other projects in boulder it's not unheard of when ball got approval for an expansion back in 2005 that was also for 15 years they did not act on all of the phases so it's since expired but in this case uh with their approval moving forward they would be moving towards completion by the year 2037. so the existing square footage on the 27 acre site is 440 000 square feet so it's at a 0.38 far they're proposing up to 309 000 additional square feet so that brings the total to 750 square feet so that's where the 0.65 far comes from i understand there's been some requests uh to maybe just round that up to point seven far um

[65:00] to provide just some flexibility this would require uh ball to eventually come back in if they were to exceed that 0.65 as a site review amendment um but we we certainly could change the ordinance to allow 0.7 if the council agreed it just would require a third reading these are some renderings of some of the additional buildings you can see the original ado building in the upper left that would be preserved it's basically returned to its original appearance you can see the additions to the fisher building the parking garage the solar panels there's a new entry to the fisher building on the lower left and then the administrative buildings which are closer to arapahoe uh buildings b and c so when planning board looked at the the site review project they largely agreed that the um the project met the site review criteria related to community benefit um basically the main focus relative to building design that was discussed was the east elevation of the

[66:02] parking garage where there was a concern raised about the amount of metal screening on that side um after discussion uh the applicant noted that a lot of the metal screening didn't need to be increased because of the landscaping and trees would block some of the visibility of the structure and that it wouldn't be necessary it's also not a very prominent elevation that's visible from the street uh so plain port agreed that they didn't need to make any changes to that elevation most of the discussion really focused on site design elements you can see the blue dotted line on the north side of the site ball has proposed to provide a new bicycle and pedestrian extension from peak avenue on the north side of the site with an eventual connection to that pathway you can see i'm sorry that your your volume cut out for a second i think it might have been my computer though sorry can you hear me now

[67:01] yeah you're fine carl okay so um the blue dotted path uh it was proposed by ball and they were basically trying to set up a condition where we could connect ultimately to the boulder creek pathway this did prove to be challenging since that area shown on the aerial is actually within a conservation easement and would require a disposal uh by the open space board of trustees so this is something that they're they're showing as a dotted line on their plan it's not a requirement of the plan but it's something that you know perhaps in the future the city could work towards some sort of solution that could make that connection happen uh in you know conjunction with working with open space where we focused getting a connection through the site is that that red line the east-west pathway so they would be extending the existing uh multi-use path from the boulder community health site from 48th street to range street through the site

[68:00] so that was all a main part of the of the discussion the second part really focused on just trying to encourage um modes to driving to the site based on the amount of parking that was proposed so planning board did act on the application adding a condition of approval that the applicant look at additional transportation demand management options for the site as part of the tech box stage so this is the motion that was added by planning board they approved the site review on a vote of five to zero the first bullet is really just a clerical change um it's it's just a mistake in the in the lettering um the second part you can see the tdm plan requirement that was added so that is as quickly as i could go through all that information tonight i'm happy to answer any question if there's any uh missing pieces thanks for that carl and what i would propose is that people ask any questions

[69:00] they have about the ordinance or the site review now but then we'll break up the voting on the consent agenda and whether to call up the site review into separate chunks after all questions are answered so with that questions uh mark you got one this perspective changed from 0.65 far 2.7 how did that come about has it been vetted by uh planning board has anybody looked at it or is it just sort of a there was a cac discussion that that talked about potentially rounding it just to you know avoid any any issues what what is yours sorry if you don't mind i'll respond because this came from me so if you don't mind this i'll explain here i was asking questions about this the the reason why i was bringing this up was because the allowed amount in the special ordinance is almost precisely the amount that's in the site review approval and over 15 years of development it's quite possible that

[70:00] they might want to make a minor modification somewhere along the line to you know increase the floor area by two percent or something like that if they asked for that they'd have to go through uh an internal or an administrative review process with the planning department and planning board but if we bumped the far allowed in the special ordinance up it wouldn't require coming back to council to update the special ordinance if they wanted to just change it by a percent or two so that was why i was asking about that okay thank you nicole i just had a question about the phasing of the surface parking and just because you know i know we're working on more and better transit solutions uh along that corridor and things like that um transit solutions that are not car focused and so i was just wondering if the surface parking is kind of phased in in an area where um it could be adapted as you know some of the the transportation options to that

[71:02] area um change over hopefully over the next decade or so i mean in general the parking that they're proposing is linked with their additions so obviously the parking requirement is based on how much floor area is on the site so when they do the additions to the fisher building that's going to require a certain amount of parking so that's when when they do those additions they would eventually demo the hobart wagner buildings and turn that into surface parking to meet that requirement but the phasing is also written in a way to allow some flexibility in the sequencing but it's all been reviewed in the different sequencing to make sure the parking works thank you um and i was just wondering if you could speak a little bit to why there was such a large reduction in bike parking requirements but not in car parking requirements yeah i mean the the the bike parking requirement is also based on the amount

[72:01] of floor area the issue here is that with with the amount of floor area that they're proposing and a lot of the flurry is not necessarily linked to the employment employees that would be in that space it's really large spaces that are meant to accommodate the satellites that it's not really indicative of what the real parking need is so if you look at that whole square footage of what's being proposed they would end up having to provide like almost 700 bike parking spaces which exceeds just the needs of the site so it made sense to allow a reduction okay um and then one one just clarification point um i just wanted to make sure that that it sounds like that north uh bikeway connection is still a possibility it's not kind of being written out in this correct it's not a requirement of the approval but it's a possibility so we we they have a note on their plans but it's something that if if you know an idea comes up on how to best make that

[73:00] connection and it might be something that has to be even added to the capital improvement projects of the city as well because it does cross over um a public right-of-way and there'd have to be a bridge so there there could be future discussions that that work towards making that connection thank you all right uh seeing another i'll just mention to folks that i will bring back that possibility of the 0.7 far when we have the public hearing but i'll wait until we have a full discussion on in a second reading and then theresa kind of just asked procedurally here do we need to vote on this with bob absent or can we bring him back vote on the entire consent agenda and have him recuse himself from item d so the rules in the code require that the council member absent themselves through the vote so you would need to vote with this um vote on this rather with him out of the room great so can we go ahead and do that

[74:00] alicia and do a vote on um the first reading of item d and then once we bring back bob will vote on a through c of course sir of course sir and we can also do it by show of hands all right so we'll this will be for item d the first reading of this uh special ordinance on the ball aerospace campus do we have does anyone want to vote against this we'll put it that way uh let's see junior you were nodding did you does that mean you want to vote against it no no okay all right so it looks like no objections so that that passes uh unanimously and i will ask bob to come back in oh yeah actually rachel points out we should probably have an actual motion right not just a call for a vote so maybe i would invite invite a motion on that i would like to uh still moved

[75:01] do you have a second second okay we have a motion a second and i'll just ask again anybody anybody object on this show of hands vote seeing none that passes actually unanimously okay great well i just asked bob to come back right bob we finished out item d so um i would now invite someone to make a motion on the consent agenda items a through c so move second okay we have a motion in a second i believe this is a show of hands so we'll say does anybody object to passing a through c i i have to recuse myself from a as i wasn't present for that meeting but do so approve of b and c i am the same as matt

[76:02] me as well okay well with that i think that means that they pass unanimously except with a few i think they're abstentions that is correct sir that is correct with the noted yes with denoted abstentions exactly okay um can we move to our call-up check-ins then all right that would be under item four of tonight's agenda for a is our landmark alteration certificate to construct a two car garage at 845 pine street in the mapleton hill historic district any interest in calling this up

[77:01] seeing no hands so we'll say no all right 4b is the landmark alteration certificate to modify exterior building adding a front porch flat roofs and a par pet front and rear at 705 mapleton avenue in the mapleton hill historic district anyone want to call this sir all right seeing none all right bob it's time for you to go away again okay alicia we have 4c which is the site review application number lur 2021-0019 associated with the ball aerospace campus which would amend prior approval number lur 2004-007 to expand existing manufacturing

[78:00] buildings at 1600 commerce street and 5001 arapahoe avenue by approximately 309 000 square feet and construct two new administrative buildings and a new parking garage structure the pedestrian bridge crossing commerce street height modifications for up to 55 feet and a 16.5 parking reduction are proposed thanks uh should we have any interest in calling this up or comments on the matter all right well i'm i'm not seeing any interest in calling it up i'm not interested in calling this up either i will just say uh having which i think seeing no one interested in calling it up i think that means it's approved i'll give a congratulations to ball aerospace um i do this is you know the project meets the site review criteria but i also just want to say that ball has been an important part of our local community for many many years and does

[79:01] extraordinary work um congratulations uh for example to the recent success of the james webb space telescope that they were instrumental so to speak in implementing um and so very glad that you're you're moving forward with additional um projects in our community glad to still have you here and matt i see you've got a hand up as well yeah i i largely just want to echo what you said you kind of beat me to the punch a little bit but um yeah i mean right now james james the mirrors and the optical assembly were built here in boulder and they're currently testing that on the spacecraft that's a 10 billion dollar spacecraft so hopefully all goes well and the engineering and great work done by the engineers in town we'll see that success through i just want to highlight that you know this is in such incredible work to see the evolution of ball because in many ways the legacy of this company is our shared legacy in our community and has built just a world-renowned space science aerospace and astronomy uh community here in boulder i've i've

[80:01] spent 12 years being a part of that community and so it's just awesome to see that they're expanding because ironically as technology here terrestrially seems to shrink as phones get smaller it's the opposite with space technology it just keeps getting bigger and bigger so a new facility to help accommodate that is definitely in line with keeping a ball competitive and being able to stay at the cutting edge so just congratulations to ball and all the work they've done and i look forward to future work that they do in our community thanks for that any other thoughts all right see none i'll ask bob to come back and there he is all right alicia we got one more yes sir last call of check-in items 4d which is the vacation of a 734 square foot portion of a utility easement at 2015 balsam drive that is referenced by

[81:00] adr 2021-00281 [Music] anyone want to call this one up all right c none and that brings us to the end of our call-ups i just want to thank everyone for their patience it was a little bit of a of a dance uh to make that all work but we got through it so appreciate it all right alicia all right so next on tonight's agenda we have item number six is the matters from the city manager six a is the opera spending progress report transient two spending recommendations guidance on planning for potential trends three projects great nourish we turn to you sure just quickly and i know that we've got a lot to talk about here so i'm going to keep my preamble short and mostly it's just to thank a huge tremendous cross-departmental team that assembled to really provide these recommendations and worked super hard um and mark

[82:00] certainly as the lead and the head of that team to put that together so with that bit of thanks ahead of time i'll send it over to mark good evening council i give me one second while i share my screen get this presentation up and running you thought i'd talk longer didn't you mark i did i did hey mark before mark real quick before you get started could you remind our listeners and and people watching what arpa is um because we've been using that acronym just remind folks what arp is please yeah absolutely thanks matt so so arpa is our american rescue plan act uh that and i'll get into a little bit of the background just so we all have the same base and knowledge um in a couple slides here thanks again council good to be talking to you again about arpa um i'm mark wolfe i'm our senior budget manager i'll be walking through a few slides today uh tonight we're gonna break it up a bit i have a bunch of friends uh here that

[83:01] will be covering uh various different slides and we'll be bouncing back and forth we'll try to keep the conversation um flowing i know that you're going to have specific questions on specific topics and so we anticipate that we can handle that mayor as you'd like if we want to dive in as we have a slide up uh we're comfortable with that um as we go through so we can play that by ear well actually mark can i just uh propose i think because we've got basically trash one two and three and maybe people can save their questions until the end of each tranche if i'm saying that word correctly you are that makes sense to me great thanks all right so uh we thought it'd be helpful to review uh the the purpose of of arpa the steps we've taken to date i'll then quickly review our methodology as background in developing all of these various recommendations recap the progress that we've made on the initial tranche what we're calling

[84:01] trench one just for kind of ease of framing that was appropriated back in september of last year and then we'll spend most of our time reviewing recommendations for tranche two which will be brought forward for appropriation in march and last we'll cover potential trans tranche 3 recommendations and potential next steps we have two questions for council this evening the first it will be around the trench two recommendations does council support the recommended tranche to arp initiatives and direct staff to bring forth a special adjustment to base in march to appropriate funds to set initiatives and the second will be around basically what's next what's after that does council support the approach in developing potential tranche 3 recommendations all right so quick overview as matt suggested let's make sure we're all on the same page here what is arpa

[85:00] american rescue plan act is a 1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package passed back in 2021 it included significant response and recovery resources including stimulus checks child care tax credits expanded rental assistance and many many many different programs those are we've had information and packets related to to that our last packet uh study session back in august we had a whole bunch of information on the various different programs associated with arpa so it was a major bill that continues to support our recovery a part of arpa was a provision called the state and local recovery funds arpa delivered funds directly to government state local and tribal to aid in organizational and community recovery efforts through this fund the city of boulder will receive a total of 20.15 million we've received half of

[86:01] that in july of uh 21 and we will we expect to receive the second half in july of this year there are funding restrictions as to how we can use those local recovery funds there are specific categories that we have to fall with under those are outlined in the attachment a of the memo provided this evening a few previous actions again just for your information we provided an overview of of this nature what arpa is and what it's intended uh used to the local recovery funds or our plans were for initial steps in planning in june of 21 and then we brought back our kind of initial uh tranche of recommendations which included uh service rest uh city service restorations and immediate needs that was in uh study session in august and then appropriation in september of 21. with that included an approach for

[87:02] to planning for additional spending uh that was in a number of different uh trying to categorize our plan for our areas of focus um and also how we were going to prioritize which we knew would be many requests um of our our funds so i want to spend a moment emphasizing uh the prioritization criteria that we've applied throughout this process so this is a part of council's review back in august of 21 the the full criteria are included in appendix b in your packets as well so just to read through these really quickly uh and these are in relative order of importance as we applied them uh through the through our um staff prioritization process starting with that the initiative would advance racial equity sustainability and resilience goals that

[88:00] it hit a demonstrated gap or need created or exacerbated by the pandemic it was also a key provision of the arpa criteria itself that it might leverage uh engagement opportunities to inform the proposal those could have been previous or current that it reflects an innovative approach to addressing the needs of our community and that it potentially leverages funds other funds uh through partnerships or other sources um i think it's important to call out how we approached him embedding racial equity specifically within this process um in addition to just calling it out as an important criteria we applied our rapid response racial equity assessment to each proposal this assessment is designed to allow us to consider the specific impact on different racial and ethnic groups a vulnerable vulnerable populations and help us account for and mitigate any unintentional impact

[89:02] a summary of this work is included for uh each tranche ii recommendation within the packet specifically only initiatives that were able to demonstrate an intended net positive impact on equity were advanced it led us to focus on recommendations that better target resources to underrepresented communities instead of broader more topical initiatives that spread resources too widely we focused that type of support earlier in the recovery i think that was needed at the time so we really intended to try and focus our efforts a little bit more surgically if you will those come out in some of our recommended approaches in guaranteed income manufacture housing community support and others that you'll hear throughout the presentation this evening

[90:01] all right i'll go through this a little bit quicker so we had a number of different partnerships and networks that we've already had established that helped us develop or identify potential gaps this is important because we obviously don't want to do this work in a vacuum these partnerships especially in the realms of housing human services and economic vitality have helped guide our response and recovery activities since the beginning of this pandemic and we have continued to lean on these partnerships to coordinate resources to help determine the best use of city dollars in these recommendations one of our most important and innovative programs is our community connectors program this has been bolstered with emergency response connectors throughout the pandemic

[91:01] this has helped us to ensure that resources are getting to those in the community who have the most need working with our community and emergency response connectors has strengthened these recommendations and highlighted any gaps in resources information and other recovery activities in addition to working with our connectors and partners to identify gaps we have also used available data and information to confirm or inform need the county commissioned a community survey related uh to gauge community priorities in the use of arpa spending for their dollars hundreds of city of boulder residents participated in that survey and the results of that survey aligned very nicely with some of our areas of focus that we've highlighted and last we've reviewed best practices from pure cities and other key industries all of this has kind of led to that funnel if you will in scoping

[92:01] each individual potential initiative using that prioritization criteria that i had on the screen to to lead us to two different sets of recommendations the trench two recommendations are those that are ready to go and the the trench three need a little bit more work or direction so as i mentioned for trench two we're ready for implementation uh so tonight uh that if council does support those trunch2 recommendations our intent is to bring that forward um to the special adjustment on march uh first and fifteenth for appropriation and for potential tranche 3 we need additional direction you'll see that our the list exceeds the the amount we have available some some prioritization is certainly necessary but it's a good opportunity to earmark quote earmark those funds just so that we know how to prioritize our time as staff and what to continue

[93:01] to move forward on all right quick overview of funding on the left side of your screen um that's kind of blurred or the trench one um approved spending already so that was just shy of four million that we've already appropriated what we're seeking appropriation in tranche two tonight are those uh trench two two different ones at the top in two different categories one we're calling continued recovery initiatives which i'll touch on in a moment and the second is our more transformative initiatives um all together about three and a half million dollars a little shy of that and then that leaves us if everything were to be approved about 11.8 million remaining in funding again the caveat that we don't receive that second installment that second 10 million until july of this year funds must be

[94:01] committed by the end of 24 and expended by the end of 26. all right so just to be clear again these are um trench ones one initiatives these have already been approved but i'm going to give you a quick update on where we stand with some of these so i'll just say it at the outset we've done a pretty good job in committing following through in our commitments uh from september we have spent or are imminently about to spend about 2.9 out of this 3.97 uh million dollars and i'll get into the reason why we haven't spent 100 percent um city service restoration so those are pretty straightforward uh we did agree to provide a grant to boulder housing partners to help bridge the digital divide at their sites as you might imagine with two

[95:00] organizations there's been a lot of paperwork and going back and forth that is in process to be signed at grant agreements that is good news they'll be well underway in q1 we had a number of different economic recovery programs associated with trench one in here um included extending our delivery fee subsidy which was the program um started all the way back under cares 150 000 was provided the cvb to encourage uh safe visitation a hundred thousand dollars has been held back um we'll touch on this as a part of the outdoor dining pilot so that has not been spent yet for utility bill assistance council that was here at the time may recall that we were first focused on water customers with this support and due to a restriction in our charter we're not able to provide free service directly so we had to find kind of a work around

[96:00] we have no program so we had to work across departments and with regional partners to explore a viable solution thanks to a partnership with boulder county letters to water customers will be sent out this month asking to opt into the assistance program i can get into details but basically this allows us to tap into some county dollars that they have available so it frees up some of those 400 000 for us to to use in general utility bill assistance what we can do is directly credit customers in need that are eligible through this process so this is good news it has taken longer than ideal but those letters are expected to go out shortly we did extend some critical human service needs that were either started under cares or

[97:00] tranche one including emergency rental assistance before before our e-pers program was up and running our workplace transformation uh continues i think is almost complete which is great news to allow us to transition fully to hybrid work and continue to deliver services and then we established a million dollar public health reserve we have not tapped 100 of this money so that's another big chunk of why we haven't spent the full 4 million here we did spend about 250k towards the city employee vaccine incentive and some dollars to help support businesses and purchasing masks okay deep breath that's trench one uh mayor brockett did you want to see if there were questions um about anything so far yeah that means we could pause and see if anybody had any questions at this point before we proceed to trash too

[98:03] and we got one for matt mark you've mentioned and i just want to be clear there was you mentioned that that 100k was being held out for outdoor dining were you going to answer that in the tranche 2 discussion or was that sort of for the end as just a caveat to touch on i just didn't know where you were gonna come back to that maybe i didn't quite understand why that was held out i've got a a whole slide and all that stuff available so we can chat about it then awesome thanks all right let's dive into trump student okay fun stuff let's talk about spen spending the money now uh new money uh so trent's two recommendations um what i'm going to do is highlight some of them that we don't have a full slide on again we can we we have information we have staff available to get in the details of all of these but we try to be a little bit respectful of time tonight

[99:02] these are organized by area focus again this is some of the work pre-work we did back in august that we've tried to focus our work as a staff team on public health and safety affordability and service access and community and economic resilience what you see in the slight highlighted areas are two continued recovery programs one in the housing and human services and one in economic recovery the others that i'll just touch on emergency response connectors i talked about how important that program is so there is a recommendation to extend and expand that program over the next three years to continue to help to inform our where our resources are going we will touch at length on guaranteed income and the building home project fiber smart city phase 2 design so our scoping work for

[100:00] fiber phase 2 is underway council will have a discussion in q2 i believe about the scope of that work and looking for some policy direction we're anticipating that there will be some design work to get shovel ready for potential other federal resources so 50k is being suggested out of our to make sure we have the money available to do that design work quickly for economic recovery planning we have a economic sustainability strategy but it is dated i believe last time it was updated was 2013. we need to do this for a couple reasons one is the economic environments a lot different than 2013 and so it seems like a good use of funds to to inform how we might look at our existing programs recovery efforts and potential additional arpa spending in the future

[101:01] and it is a requirement uh to have an updated strategy a regional strategy for the economic development agency for some potential grant opportunities um so suggestion is a hundred thousand there we will talk in depth about the rest so for continued uh recovery programming just to touch on these briefly continued housing and human services recovery program extensions up to 500 000 uh over 22 and 23 in several areas including direct financial assistance through the left behind workers fund and uh through our partners uh food assistance transportation assistance digital divide assistance again just acknowledging that we're still in this thing and there's still that need to be responsive through some existing programs continued economic recovery uh programs

[102:01] some of these are extensions are of existing some address and gaps uh newer gaps that we have identified including looking at impacted industry and underserved business grants and programming uh year-round uh visitor promotion so again trying to support our tourism industry 100 000 cbb for that and holding 50 000 for potential participation with boulder county for workforce training again a big need in the community i didn't say outdoor dining pilot because we do have a full slide on this so i'm not going to go through the details of this because we you've received the memo and you have a full study session item on this on march 8th but i did want to at least tee this up for any questions that you might have we do have staff available from community vitality and transportation and many others

[103:01] this evening so the use of arpa dollars would essentially offset some of the costs of purchasing parklet infrastructure and so the structure of the program i'm not going to get into i'm not the expert on but i can tell you that's the intent of the arpa dollars is to offset some of that that cost the rest of those funds where it comes from again others can speak to but the proposal this evening is to use the 150 from tranche 2 so that would be a new appropriation and then the hundred thousand that matt that was mentioned earlier uh would be funds that we have not yet spent out of tranche one that have already been appropriated but we would just need council support on in order to to access be 250 total out of arpa to support the outdoor dining pilot and that's the end of that kind of continued recovery before we get into the next set of

[104:01] tranche two initiatives mayor brockett did you want to take questions on that now or do you want me to go ahead and go through the rest i might say finish out true entirely and then we can ask questions about it all of it you got it all right so i'm going to take a break from uh talking now the first uh tranche ii transformative initiative that we'll discuss is the exploration potential exploration of a guaranteed income pilot i'm joined this evening by elizabeth crowe she's our human services investment senior project manager and she's going to talk to you all about guaranteed income thank you mark and good evening council as mark said my name is elizabeth crowe and i serve as a human services investments manager in hhs and i'm very pleased to share this proposal for guaranteed income pilot project

[105:01] this proposal definitely meets the criteria the arpa criteria of being innovative and transformative however the city would not be first in this space there are roughly 15 cities right now with guaranteed income programs in place and the mayors for guaranteed income network estimates around 60 or more will launch this year in fact louisville kentucky just announced launch of its guaranteed income pilot program this past weekend first i'd like to just briefly note that there are a lot of terms used to describe this kind of program for example guaranteed income basic income and there are a lot of different perceptions about what's involved guaranteed income generally describes programs that provide a cash transfer on a regular basis two community members experiencing low income for a set period of time not forever the cash transfer income is generally provided to people who are determined to be eligible based on whatever

[106:01] the city or partner organizations determine and is provided unconditionally what exactly that eligibility would be as i was just saying um any other detailed uh details of a pilot project would be determined collaboratively by city staff and partners based on the needs in our community and so this with this request we're not um saying that we have figured out every detail in fact intentionally quite the opposite so if you want to go to the next slide fortunately there are some robust networks in place that connect city and state governments research institutions economic advisory agencies and others to share these resources and best practices and one of those primary networks is called mayors for guaranteed income i mentioned it just a moment ago it was founded by mayor michael tubbs of

[107:00] stockton california a city that first implemented such a guaranteed income project in the u.s back in 2019 and it really does provide a wealth of resources that the city could tap into to create a successful and sustainable project we're lucky and that we've already been able to access some of their information and resources and in fact back in fall 2020 several of our hhs staff participated in a sprint training that was sponsored by what work cities in collaboration with mayors for guaranteed income which is what got us really excited about this possibility we believe this project could be very highly impacting for community members in part because we see how effective programs are here in boulder that we already have been supporting through hhs that includes the keep families house program we've made prior covet investments in programs like the left behind workers

[108:01] fund which provide direct assistance to people who need it we've also done some inter initial information and input sessions with some non-profit partners who work with community members in need and their response has been overwhelmingly positive so in terms of the the next steps potential next steps listed on this slide um with this upper request one of the first next steps would be or could be for the city to formally join the mayors for guaranteed income network that just gets us greater access to resources lots of best practices from these 60 plus cities that are already in this space one of those consistent best practices to ensure quality management is to hire a project coordinator who would help recruit those other project partners including of those who may want to contribute funding and another best practice is early

[109:01] formation of a task force that really represents varied community interests and diverse populations and that's what again like really um puts the details um to this to this type of proposal um the last block there really kind of talks about uh what some of those details would be who might be eligible what kind of target populations um what might that cash transfer amount be 500 per month is a very common amount for a duration of a year 18 months two years we would have to figure out with our partners what that would look like for us in the city um and then lastly you know that this consultant putting together a task force would definitely be able to address sustainability issues one of the other key questions about a project like this is what happens after the arba dollars are gone how are we going to ensure

[110:01] that if it's successful and if we want to we keep it going and again there are a lot of best practices that are already in development from mayors for guaranteed income cities that we would be able to take advantage of in discussing the pilot project planning and launch time frames based on what other cities are doing including some that i've been communicating very closely with in the last couple of months it seems realistic that the city if we pursue this option would be able to quite potentially have a project launched by the end of the year some are really taking about eight to nine months from from a council or mayor decision um to actually starting to release payments to community members so um have a lot more we could say about this but i think i'll just uh stop there and i think we're taking questions at the end

[111:01] all right thank you elizabeth thanks elizabeth and next we're going to talk about homeless solutions building home project and i'm handing it over to kurt fernhauber our director of housing and human services thank you mark and good evening council so i have mentioned this project um a couple of times previously once was at the retreat so this uh initiative is um really meant to focus on the the hundreds of people that have been housed who were previously homeless um over the last four years as well as those who are in the process of being housed and um addressing issues particularly of isolation in the past programs um [Music] housing first programs have typically measured um [Music] how successful people stay are are in

[112:02] housing but we really want to bring that uh that bar up to address a number of different things so there's a couple of main components to this the one is the peer support program so it would be an organization um in our community that would work with and recruit peers who would be paid some sort of stipend um to assist others that have been housed and also to assist them in getting into services the other is day programming which would include support groups and different programming activities and learning that could assist them assist them with things like substance use mental health uh you know emotional and physical health and

[113:00] things like job job preparedness and it's really both of these programs would be linked together to provide connections to services um both medical uh behavioral health um uh case management and what we've realized is that the the number of individuals that we've housed have really [Music] gone beyond the capacity of our ability to simply support them through case management many of our affordable housing developments where these individuals call home now have uh community spaces and so the approach that we've taken to to reduce the cost of of the program but to be to run these types of programs in these community spaces um throughout the community so they're

[114:00] not coming to one central location it's actually making the the programs closer to where they live and um this would increase our our sort of our case management success as well um so if if uh we get direction from council on this this is sort of the the timeline or or next steps we would be putting together an rfp for organizations to do this type of work at the end of last year we actually put out an rfi to get information from organizations working with this population for them to provide us input into forming this program um and so developing um um or understanding what how we would measure the program um working with um

[115:03] coordinated entry and homeless solutions for boulder county um and um ensuring that this work would be um integrated with uh the programs and systems we have in place um and then um contracting uh for this work this would this work would be done by um organizations um in the community and um i think that's it for this slide great thank you kurt and we're going to shift gears just a little bit to talk more about the economic recovery efforts as associated with tranche 2 specifically looking at our arts industry support one of our hardest hit industries and for that we have matt schezansky arts manager tonight all right thanks a lot mark and greetings council um we have two sets of

[116:01] proposals for you addressing um the arts industry the first um as you see on this slide is a specific response to the economic conditions the second i'll talk about in a second reestablishes some targeted programs that can have specific um outcomes that enhance our recovery so the workforce incentives you see here is divided up into two different grant programs uh the first is a hiring incentive for non-profits to employ uh bolder area artists to create new work to perform to exhibit their work and uh the second is gap funding to hire back administrative support positions for arts non-profits that were lost during the pandemic uh what we know is that statewide there was a low point in 2020 where the arts industry retracted by about 50 percent of its workforce and while the recovery has um shown really good signs in um you know the the

[117:00] recent uh sets of data uh the fact is that the recovery the arts recovery is behind the rest of the economy and um we're still tracking at uh uh only about 15 uh we're below 15 of 2019 numbers in workforce and so these two are designed uh to uh specifically target um this part of the economy this gap in recovery for the arts sector built on top of that is the additional challenge that for the artists in our community uh with about 5000 artists in our community third highest concentration in the country according to the nea they are gig economy workers and are additionally vulnerable and have fewer protections and so we're going to work with the arts commission and the community on how to build a program around these concepts also matching that up with the other local arts agencies in the county to create these types of incentives to bridge non-profits and arts businesses

[118:02] into this type of hiring and move those positions into something more resilient on the other side of the recovery next slide please so given the uneven recovery um this first part of this proposal to reestablish programs is around bringing back a professional to work on programs for artists and all of the work in the community cultural plan around the work the workforce of individual artists in our community and that includes not only hiring a professional but also taking back up convening professional development addressing issues for our venues that are having a particularly challenging time as the restrictions kind of ebb away um and then um looking at the venue ladder and how young artists can segue into an arts job in this community in addition to that

[119:01] we're building on the very successful coven 19 work projects which bring commissions from artists for their neighbors around social resiliency and experiments in public art to commission large-scale city-wide uh temporary and interactive civic practice projects the idea of those being that not only is this funding going to artists and in the case of public art the teams of contractors from the community that they deploy to build these projects but all of the social infrastructure outcomes that we can expect by profound arts activity at a neighborhood scale so we're looking at measuring how these type of projects can lead to things like improved um improved measures of equity of social cohesion of community efficacy and of social resiliency um yeah so i'll hand it back to you mark that summarizes it great thank you matt and that is the

[120:02] last uh tranche two item uh this evening so i think i will pause and maybe stop sharing so that uh you all can ask some questions all right that's a lot of great stuff and some complicated programs and such so i'm sure people have some questions i see bob out of the gate uh thanks mark thanks everyone that was a great presentation that was very understandable uh mark um we have a little bit of awkwardness as far as timing this is no one's fault this is just the way that calendar lined up around outdoor dining where um we're being asked to approve um some funding for outdoor dining but we haven't yet approved the program and i think that uh that that discussion outdoor dining is is march 8th and then the adjustment to base to approve formally approve this crunch funding will be the following week if it turns out that um when we have that discussion in a few weeks in outdoor dining there is less of a need for the subsidy than what

[121:00] you're showing here today could we reallocate that money kind of on the fly uh in early march and towards other economic uh recovery things i think there are some other categories in that that are similar to that you know around uh economic recovery small business development convention visitors bureau those types of things could we kind of juggle that money around if it turns out that we don't need as much for outdoor dining yes from a budget standpoint once you appropriate that money we're just appropriating the dollars to spend if we're going to change the the use that would be that council's discretion and um i would yield to chris jones who i see uh uh as to you know what process he'd like to follow if they want to have uh alternatives in case it goes that way or however they'd like to handle it from the actual programmatic perspective yeah thank you mark chris jones interim director of community vitality um thank you bob for that question and yeah i would say that

[122:02] we're exploring all opportunities to bring the proposed pilot costs down for participating businesses and arpa is one of those strategies in the event that we're able to identify a different approach to standing that pilot program up similarly to the 100 000 that's currently allocated in trench one we could presume administratively say that actually we want to focus these resources on another program great thanks guys i i won't have any comments about the outdoor dining until then but i just wanted to know that we'd have a little bit of flexibility to maybe do that on the fly if it looks like we can uh juggle numbers around thanks guys thanks matt uh yeah thanks aaron and i appreciate the yeah i mean this is a deep dive into into how we sort of help our community and i just want to piggyback a little bit on bob because i'm sure going the other direction i know we'll talk on the eighth which is um right now it's

[123:00] budgeted seems to be um light in my book in order to bring that cost barrier down for restaurants i'd like to see that number at 15 a square foot not the 26 which would have required full arpa subsidy of roughly around 550 000 and so i'm looking to see if we go the other direction and commit a lot can we throttle back the other direction um and so my worry is if we over allocate and then there's not arpa there i'd much rather err on the side of caution but it's one time use and allocate more money and then if subsequent conversations say we don't need it throttle back then then not have enough to get to where we need to be to get that price point for businesses to say hell yes i want to be a part of outdoor dining because i think that's the reaction we want um the other generally speaking about tranche 2 is about just overall economic recovery and my only real concern is it kind of touches on what bob was saying is we have this weird time frame that right before we're about to enter the busy spring summer and fall where our

[124:00] businesses need to flourish how are we front loading our expenditures to prime the pump because their success in turn is our success budgetarily with our general funds from which we can then take care of some of these other things so i want to know why maybe there's some held and maybe it's a conversation for trons3 but it would be trying to bring some of that into tronch two in order to really prime the pump to support our local businesses i see 1.2 million in other stuff for transformative business support in tranche iii but i am curious about you know what is looking like only about 520 000 between tranche one and two supporting local business recovery and supporting the cvb like marketing to get to get the word out for tourists and people to come here i mean this is the year that we we make our comeback assuming another variant doesn't come in so that's kind of what i'm trying to wonder is how do we really focus on that front loading to give ourselves the best chance of economic success yeah that's a good question matt and i'll just note that our proposal for

[125:00] tranche 2 is an additional 620 000 total to support economic recovery so that's kind of what we're calling continued economic recovery within that is the 150 of the of the 250 for the outdoor dining pilot um and in terms of kind of what that goes towards i saw that pop up briefly between her and chris i'm sure they could if they'd like to add any any thoughts on that but that is new new funding new spending in addition to the trench one i don't have anything else to add but uh i i imagine a vet might um happy to tag team with you chris um yeah you're raising great points and the last thing we want to do is put the brakes on a recovering economy but our economy is complex and there are a lot of needs so we want to make sure that we're being thoughtful about that matt yes there are things that we could move forward a little faster but we we want

[126:00] to benefit from your conversation tonight to help us appreciate the best way to move forward with our alliance partners good um madison cover your question for now i might come back to some others but i'll let some others uh ask questions nicole and mark thank you um erin is it okay if i offer just a couple of comments at this point or are you wanting this to just be questions then we'll do comments just trying to bunch questions together and a bunch of comments together if you don't mind okay yep thank you um then my my questions were again around the outdoor dining um i i think you know mark we we talked about this a little bit briefly over email but you know for me this is the one where i'm just not understanding how it kind of taps into that racial equity um priority um and the sustainability that sort of first or highest priority item um and i was just wondering if could

[127:01] maybe um clarify that a little bit more and then the other question that i was wondering about is kind of how how this facilitates recovery and the questions that i'm sort of thinking about are that you know right now we are in a place where just last night that the county board of health decided you know that some of these coveted restrictions are going away you know so presumably this kind of opens up some more space inside restaurants i'm just given some of the staffing struggles that some of these businesses are having i guess my question is around you know is it useful right what is the kind of problem that's trying to be solved in some of this outdoor dining space i say this as somebody who has very much enjoyed having more outdoor dining space and you know i'm just i'm curious about how this i guess what the problem is that it's trying to solve with regard to the economic recovery i'll i'll let chris take that one

[128:01] uh thank you nicole for the question um this is something that we could certainly and we would intend to dive in deeper on march 8th of the reason why we are looking to stand up a pilot we have restaurants who have spent a significant amount of resources and time putting out temporary structures that probably would not have otherwise been allowed outside of emergency conditions not necessarily to our safety design standards again i don't know that we want to dive into that now but we're trying to do is stand up a pilot program that leverages resources where we're able to find them to allow participating restaurants to get to a pathway to compliance so they can continue to take advantage of maybe some of the silver linings from the covid experience and take advantage of outdoor dining without a significant additional expense and so given the the impacts that we know that the restaurant and hospitality

[129:01] industry has had with kovid it seemed like as far as a capital expenditure goes arpa is a place that could look to support this pilot program to reduce the burden on individual businesses thank you and just the first part of my question sorry i did a long and rambling one you know i was just um just speaking a little bit more to some of the racial equity uh how it kind of hits on that that player so i know that all of the proposals went through the the racial equity tool on a high level i don't know that we're suggesting that this pilot specifically um balances something other than making sure that that we're trying to level the playing field for um any business regardless of who um they are and then also one key element of the

[130:00] current conditions is ada accessibility so it's not necessarily targeted at racial minorities but differently abled minorities currently are not able to access a lot of these temporary structures that have been put out in the right-of-way and that's one of the proposed solutions of our our proposed pilot great thank you for that nicole and uh i'll just say amy kane if you had any thoughts on that feel free to pop in but don't feel required to um i don't have anything to add thanks okay thanks uh mark yeah i have a couple of questions regarding the 250 000 request for guaranteed income we've been given very little background as to these programs

[131:00] and how we ought to analyze this issue um you know at 500 a month we're talking about a program that will serve 152 people and i would have appreciated the reason why we haven't been given an analysis of why that is a preferable outcome to distributing that money to the many other groups that we have in this town that actually target people in in need for various services um and my other concern is that the request itself um seems to assume the conclusion um that this is a program we want to enter into and i would have you know appreciated um phrase it as a question if you want why weren't we given more background um so that we can do that analysis um i don't know that we can justifiably assume that conclusion and and why didn't we at least get some analysis of what other cities are doing

[132:00] so that we can have a better background to maybe make that leap and and get to the conclusion that we want to spend 250 000 on this project yeah thanks for that mark and i'll let elizabeth get into the details i just want to say that it was not our intention for council to feel like you're supporting the creation of a guaranteed income program tonight uh that it was very much our intention that to bring you back the parameters of such a program and analysis of what oh such a program based on certain variables would cost and allow you to look at that before appropriating any additional dollars towards a pilot so is that yeah are we sure that that's something that requires a quarter of a million dollars for consultant fees when we have a highly talented staff that can do a survey of what other cities are doing and then tell us why this is a great idea yeah i'll let uh elizabeth speak a little bit to what the plan would be for

[133:02] the use of those dollars thanks mark and thank you councilmember for the question um just as mark said definitely didn't want to put the cart before the horse so much um and i'll also allow that um i think we struggled i don't think i know we struggled with how much detail to provide at this point when there's so much information um from other cities that are already have pilots engaged and some that are actually complete like the stockton california example where they put their pilot in place in 2019 there's actually a lot of data and great examples of that give the amount kind of a total amount of funding ranging from tens of millions of dollars in cities like chicago and los angeles which i don't think would apply as much to our situation in boulder but also

[134:02] cities like st paul newark cambridge many other cities that are a little closer either in population demographics etc that have made allocations from arpa or total allocations that are around that 3 million total for a pilot so we're kind of provided a dollar amount uh as a total and an amount that we think is a is reasonable to get approved um if council chooses um so that we can go ahead and do that planning we don't know that um setup and kind of the front end administrative costs um you know getting on a coordinator uh determining a task force bringing on a research partner if we need to if we need to allocate funding for that would actually equal 250 000 and it may well be that it comes in far less than that and then if we choose to move ahead

[135:01] um then again that would that would be those dollars could roll over there are a number of different scenarios there but essentially there there are some quite detailed um evaluations and on outcomes from projects so far and lots of details about how cities other cities have already made decisions about what populations what eligibility etc um i'll also just say really very quickly that with this pilot program we wouldn't be replacing the financial assistance that we already provide to a number of different nonprofits we're still planning on funding effa for keep families housed shelter and basic needs we support a wide range of other nonprofits that provide financial assistance and economic assistance to our community members and all that stays this would be value added on to that well i i acknowledge that the only issue is should they get more

[136:02] and and it's a question of an analysis that shows why this is a better path than giving effort more money giving community foundation more money giving boulder housing partners more money i mean i i'll get into this more with the comments but those those are i was perplexed at this because we are being asked to move forward with surprisingly little information but the rest of my comments will hold thanks tara and then lauren you know what mark just reminded me that this is supposed to be questions and not comments so i'm gonna wait for the comments i'll let lauren go thank you lauren and mark again yeah um i really appreciate you guys bringing forward a bunch of innovative things i think like mark i'm struggling a little bit with um understanding

[137:00] how many people for me it's wider than just you know this one category it's really a number of the categories you know trying to sort of assess how many people are being assisted with these versus the overhead costs associated with creating a new program or a service it's probably not information you have that you could give me right now but if it was handily available somewhere behind the scenes that would be wonderful yeah and warren we can certainly provide that in detail we do have that information i mean obviously we our staff made every attempt to try to limit the quote administrative uh part of any uh program uh to make sure that the dollars were freed up for direct support um i'm just kind of glancing through i know that the vast majority of the homeless

[138:01] solutions building home dollars are those will go direct out to the services that kurt described the infrastructures in place for the art industry support there is a part-time position that will help support the commissions that you know that's a part of it but that certainly is a and add value to the the programs themselves so there are some examples there where couldn't do it without it and it helps get the resources out but we can provide you a little bit more detailed breakdown on that yeah and it's not that overhead is necessarily a big problem i mean if you're going to create something new that has you know that is a bigger lift but maybe it's worth it for the thing that we're creating it just it would just be interesting to have thanks matt i've got you up again yeah i i'm i'm still i'm kind of stuck on a philosophical aspect of of arpa

[139:00] and um and maybe you know it's not a question for staff but maybe my council colleagues as well the philosophical question i'm struggling with is is the expeditious nature that in which these funds were received by the city or given out by the federal government and i see a pacing of this and i know some of it is it takes a while to initiate a plan and or there's some staffing limitations to implement and so i'm aware of some of those tensions but what i also see is i see that we we've we've really pushed on what is the thought of transformational stuff which i i think are great but i also understand that we're missing some of that expeditiousness to to have immediate impact now and and i come i just i come back to business and my question is like how many more businesses are we gonna lose and then in hindsight go yeah but we held on to money too long and and i worry that the same maybe mistake we made about not spending our reserves to hold on to our staff and now paying the consequences of

[140:01] planning and other things costing businesses money slowing other things down i just want to make sure we're learning the lesson a little bit so i'm kind of wondering why why is it that the process we're in and not the spend money get it now get it to the help it needs as fast as possible um and so i'm just i'm struggling with the philosophy of it and that and understanding that might help me understand why the plan is the plan yeah i appreciate that question matt i i would say that we we tried to strike that balance um so i think take that as as you will um we did have um a number of expenditures in trench one that were about immediate need and so i think that was a little over 2 million that we identified as immediate need and those dollars you know we tried to get out the door as quickly as possible and we're successful in that in a lot of ways we have identified a little over a million one i think it's about 1.1

[141:01] million in this tranche and trench two that again support that kind of continued recovery those are more immediate merging needs as we've seen them over the last several months so those are they wouldn't really fall into that kind of new or transformational or whatever you want to call it and then i'd say that we were challenged with the last council to try to come up with those innovative approaches to some of our most challenging issues and so that's where you see kind of a different or a new approach reflected is that we took some care in trying to plan and scope what it would take uh to actually do some of these things and so that's where you get some of these others that you know may require some additional planning even to get to that type of initiative but hopefully it supports that sustained longer-term recovery but both community and economic recovery and so again it's a balance i

[142:00] mean the longer we take to plan and make sure we're doing that we're you know potentially missing something in the shorter term but we've tried to really make sure that we're listening to those gaps that exist today and make sure that we we are funding initiatives that that address those uh gaps and then the last thing and i was going to touch on this for tranche 3 is that we don't have 10 million yet until july so that's one caveat and we are excited about the prospect of partnering and planning with the county as they make decisions as you know that process has not completed itself yet so we're hopeful that we can be aligned so there's a few areas where we know there's a city role to play city arpa dollars perhaps but we may not be the primary responsible governmental agency to to look at some of these things and so who leads and especially

[143:00] with the county in some areas i mean we just want to be very intentional so there's that's a long answer to your question but certainly hear you and i think we're trying to strike that balance i i appreciate that mark and i i know how hard and all this is in in the moment of all the chaos and the complexity and and the struggle for so many in all this how hard it is sometimes to to it's easy to sort of in hindsight have different view and so and not that we're totally in hindsight but i do think that and i can appreciate that i know that that might be a position i'm coming but i just want to thank you for all the great ideas that have come out of this i'm just trying to understand philosophy to action and sort of navigating that path through so so i appreciate you walking me through it thanks so mark should we roll on into feedback on trunch2 before we move on to tree what do you think uh it's up to you i have the questions again at the end i think it for feedback on two i know that they're

[144:00] um we had some conversation with a couple council members about potentially looking at some that were in tranche three and asking about could we move them up and and stuff like that so it might be good to hear the trench three yeah let's do let's do trench three and then we'll get all comments at the end and tara do you is that an old hand or you did you want to say something it's a new hand but i keep pushing my comments so it's okay if you want to do charge three and then i just have a whole list but nobody's allowed to complain that i'm talking too much since i haven't sent anything yet that's right nobody's complaining at all okay thanks we'll wait to hear from you for uh until we get to comments all right am i back up and running here looks like it okay great so i'll we'll try to move a little bit quicker through the tranche 3 presentation but we do have as much information as you need again to recap the intent of this it's to seek edition of policy direction um

[145:02] you know you do hear a lot about staff capacity continues to be a thing so we are asking for your help and prioritization that will help us focus efforts as we continue to plan towards the spending the rest of the dollars that we have available um there's some here that we've said it's really important we know it's a top priority we should hold funds but there's some coordination that's necessary i mentioned especially with the county i mean it's not just to call them out i mean they they have over 60 million in our dollars on themselves they're they're going through a process to determine their funding efforts and so again we've we've enjoyed a very close relationship that with them and especially in the human services realm closely aligned on funding and so we just want to make sure that our dollars are not duplicative uh and so i think it'll be great to hold funds but kind of wait for those final decisions to play out in their process um and

[146:01] yes feedback if there's any gaps anything missing that you feel here again will be good to know so quick summary of what we're looking at in tranche 3 again organized by area focus we'll talk about strengthening behavioral health now that's a big one digital divide improvements i don't think we touch on specifically it's an area that we know we need to continue to address outside of the phase two work we've had several conversations in in this area it's a difficult one i can get into the details of that but we would still like to hold funding and address digital divide issues as they arise this is more on the infrastructure side than i think providing direct assistance which we are doing through housing human services in some ways child care capacity and industry support continues to be an issue within the community we

[147:02] are doing some smaller initiatives this would be to coordinate some larger work we have talked about a guaranteed income so again this would be in our tranche 3 bucket we wouldn't be seeking appropriation in march for for the bulk of the dollars for that potential pilot um i'll speak very briefly on san lazaro and we will talk about manufacture housing community support and again with trans transformative economic recovery um that 1.2 million would be held subject to the completion of the the strategy the economic sustainability strategy update that we talked about earlier in total this would be um a little shy of 15 and a half million uh we'll just flag here that if everything was um funded then it would exceed our current remaining of about 11.8 million so just keep that in mind there's a caveat with what we're

[148:00] actually talking about with the san lazaro annexation so that'll become a little bit more apparent with numbers and we'll talk about that specifically so i believe for this one i'm handing back over to elizabeth to talk about how we're looking at this particular issue yeah thanks mark um i'm sure council is well aware that our community members are really experiencing quite a wide range of mental behavioral health needs and these have been exacerbated by covid and then compounded by other disasters our communities faced including uh shootings and fires etc at the same time our local and regional mental health agencies which include large agencies that you're familiar with like mental health partners but also smaller agencies that provide services to specific populations including youth and latino lgbtq older adult community members they're

[149:00] all experiencing severe staffing shortages due to covid and that is a nationwide crisis while hhs already provides annual funding to many nonprofit agencies for their mental behavioral health services we do believe opera offers an opportunity to address some of these systemic capacity gaps we know the needs are very urgent and we also need some clarification as mark mentioned from our government partners like boulder county and more info input from a range of non-profits to really land on exact kind of supports we want to be able to provide and make sure we're leveraging these opera dollars to the greatest extent possible a lot of the non-profits that serve our boulder county community actually do work county-wide which is great opportunity for collaboration and again just acknowledging that we believe we still have some work to do to really clarify what the needs are and

[150:01] make sure that we don't unintentionally create a boom and bust situation or provide support in a way that our nonprofits actually are not able to sustain um after urban dollars are are gone i think i'll stop there great i think are you continuing on with the next one yeah i'm child care why don't you go there you're right and actually these a lot of these situations are very similar for child care as they are for mental behavioral health and that this industry is really quite critical to making sure that families in our community have what they need to re-enter the workforce and do so sustainably address these issues with affordability and also just address the very kind of business industry of child care providers which our colleagues yvette um and others in community vitality can address as well and hhs and community vitality have been working really collaboratively to

[151:01] identify this initial set of outcomes and possible investment areas again that add value to the ongoing services that we already provide either directly through hhs or community vitality and through investments and other child care and nonprofit partners and we also made a sizable investment using cares act or coronavirus relief funding in 2020 for this industry in short we really want our arpa investments to be able to address the needs both for the industry and for families and here too the needs are quite urgent we've already got some support going out the door from tranche one through hhs and have identified several possible investment areas another area where collaboration with the county being able to continue to work with our colleagues in the city of longmont for example to

[152:00] with all of our nonprofit partners to be able to land on you know what we really believe is the right allocations in detail so we can leverage this opportunity well thanks elizabeth and we're going to talk now a little bit about manufactured housing community support i'm going to turn over to kurt for that and you're on mute kurt thank you mark so the um uh the previous council approved the um the ponderosa community project and um it's a it's a multi-year project um which um [Music] initially created a lot of planning with the community turned into an annexation a new site plan uh whoops there we go and um

[153:02] [Music] as well as a commitment and one of the one of the [Music] outcomes that the community desired and city council desired at that time was to ensure that residents of the ponderosa community at the time that it was purchased by the city but we would do everything we can for them to be able to stay in that community through this redevelopment as well as sort of a commitment that they could we could help them get into home ownership opportunities and so what we've identified is that many of the households particularly original owners at ponderosa at the time that we purchased some of them have very low incomes and would require a second mortgage in order to afford the homes the second mortgage would be

[154:01] paid back within at 30 years or time of refinancing or or selling the property and that allows it to be sort of a revolving fund to help other households in the future so it's really addressing a um sort of a long-term city uh project that's that's gone over several councils but also it's worth noting that these households have certainly been significantly impacted from an economic standpoint through this covered uh the last couple years as well and i will stop there thank you okay i think i'm covering uh briefly uh this slide so um a long-standing uh conversation has

[155:00] surrounded the san lazaro community uh and the potential annexation into the city i want to be clear with this that we're not suggesting the use of city arpa dollars yet at this time but we believe that arpa could be used to support the potential annexation in some way through the coordination of resources and other partners the four million dollar comes from an estimation of what it would cost to connect utilities to city water and wastewater there's a a few reasons we're putting this on there i think it comes at a good moment we we do have um staff available from both utilities and hhs to help answer questions here comes at a good moment where there's been some progress with negotiations i think it's important for us as a as a city to secure adequate community benefit apart as a part of any annexation

[156:02] into the city there's also other entities that have an interest here including boulder county this is not currently within uh city limit limits uh inherent with an annexation so again and really trying to see the road map to the future and the use of any potential arpa dollars would include other entities at the table it is a rare opportunity to look at the use of these funds to help especially if we can maintain affordability within the area and provide a certain minimum service level that we're interested in doing amongst others so there's a lot of different things at play with this one but thought it would be worthy to to have on our list of potential tranche three and i think this is the last one just to touch on briefly potential

[157:00] transformative economic opportunities looking at different ways we provide technical assistance and grant programs would be a big one a greater aware awareness of and access to contracting opportunities offered by the city increased availability of goods and services especially those that are more inclusive or affordable those are some elements that are potentially a part of this again would be informed by the update of the economic sustainability strategy and then uh just quickly to touch on potential ongoing funding impact just so that we can get into the heart of the questions here we're just pointing out here and this information is in your packets that some of these are not necessarily one-time expenditures inherently i know there's a lot of information on this slide we're just pointing out that any consideration of arpa funding may

[158:00] implicate future funding and so especially from you know the budget hat perspective here is that we'll just want to be thinking ahead so that if we are intentionally funding something because it's important now to aid in recovery that has ongoing implications that we need to consider that as we go into future budget cycles and just lastly that as you think about moving things up and back it would really help us to prioritize so if there's something that's less of a priority in the current trench two recommendations and like to move something up and out of tree i think generally you'll hear support for that from staff as we've gone through that process over the last couple months is try to figure out what is council's priority um obviously we will be responsive but we do have only so much capacity to make that happen so that's just the reality and if you can give us an indication of what those

[159:00] priorities are over others that that is helpful um i mentioned the ongoing funding implications and prof process for trans three i think it depends on the progress of the various different initiatives some of these like the guaranteed income pilot if that does move forward that would have maybe a different track than others a couple might be in that boat coordination with others including boulder county will be a part of these um potential trench three initiatives and then some may be requested through our our budget process um utilizing arp as a source of money again it depends um if it's council's will we could certainly just do something similar like this and just have a trans3 conversation separately so a number of different ways to structure that as well you have the questions already but i'll stop and let you ask questions specifically about the traunch 3 initiatives well thanks for that mark and just just

[160:00] a big overall thank you it's clear an enormous amount of work and thought went into preparing these recommendations they're very detailed they're very well thought through so thanks to and everyone on staff who collaborated and put in that together all right questions um terry you still have a hand up do you do you have questions now or do you want to wait until comments yeah i definitely have a lot of comments and no questions special take it down okay uh mark and then nicole yeah just one question um wouldn't the san luis arrow annexation cost be something that would be appropriate for upcoming infrastructure funds it definitely could i think it depends on the the type of infrastructure we're looking at um i believe there is at least one program and this is off the top of my head based on a webinar i attended a little while back but yeah i think there there definitely are opportunities there

[161:00] um i think we'd want to define what our what our interest is in investment first and obviously uh a discussion of san jose was out of the uh out of our purview tonight but i will have many comments and questions when that comes to us so um be forewarned thank you that's that's all i got right now nicole thanks um yeah i just had a couple of questions about um the uh child care um funding as well as the behavioral health funding and i was just wondering if there what was or is a conversation around um using some of that funding for workforce um because that's a major issue in both of those areas right now and um anyway just curious about um the workforce component of that yeah i'll let elizabeth start with that sure the short answer is yes um that is

[162:02] exactly what we want to be able to do with those funds maybe not exclusively there may be some system other types of system support or both for mental behavioral health professionals and um and child care but it's really about addressing this huge gap between people who need the services many quite desperately and the amount of people and as i said and i think you know this is a nationwide issue um and the that extends beyond just the dollars um but hopefully in our our desire is that with some really strategic investments we can truly make some um which may or may not be innovative right in kind of the true sense of the word but certainly transformative and that we want them to be long lasting and that just takes a lot of care as they you know thank you

[163:02] you are acknowledging um to get right because if we just say hey we're going to address salary shortfalls you know that that could actually set organizations up for um a negative consequence in a short period of time so but but again the short answer is even though i'm talking longer is that yes a lot of it is about really trying to make those investments in in workforce thank you um and then the other question that i had was related to the second mortgage idea around funding some of the upgrades and things on the manufactured homes and my question there was whether there are any other thoughts on kind of how to sustain that program in the future and just thinking back to for example the public commenter you know tonight who is noting um how much those uh kind of solutions can strain

[164:00] the amount of money that folks are able to get when they sell their home and i think sometimes with manufactured homes that's an especially hard thing to do um so i'm just i'm just wondering um if you could provide just a little more background on alternative ideas there or if that's a discussion that's kind of still in progress then we would hear more about as we learn more about this yeah i see kurt and i'll just say that the that item wasn't all of that money wasn't for the second mortgage program but a good chunk of it was and i'll let kurt speak to the specifics yeah thank you nicole um so i think to um address the comments of the the speak there was two speakers at open comment um that would probably take um its own study session um and um i would actually be glad to address a lot of those things in fact we received an email in that regard today as well that i'll

[165:00] be responding to but the if you look at it currently [Music] those a lot of the residents at ponderosa have lived in those manufactured mobile homes for many years we had those um sort of appraised about three years ago for market appraisal they ranged in they ranged in value according to market appraisals uh between i think the lowest was about fourteen thousand dollars and the highest was um i think forty five or fifty thousand and what we don't really see appreciation um of of those types of of homes and through this program they would actually be getting into a fix foundation home where they would have a home that would be worth you know

[166:00] you know 250 000 or upwards of 300 000 that would be growing so it's a significant step for the for those individuals however depending on their um financial capacity it would be a shared appreciation so um you know depending on on which household they would have sort of a different amount of value um uh from that home is however it's it's a significant it's a significant step upwards in something that's actually going to appreciate um year after year whereas in many cases these homes have actually depreciated um and and the quality of the homes is substantially different thank you those are all my questions lauren thank you um

[167:00] so first i just have a basic one which is the deadline for spending this money is there one of those and when is that yes there is uh we must commit the funds so i we could read that a couple of different ways but i take that as be under contract to spend funds by the end of 2024 and actually expend funds by the end of 26. there might be some flexibility there as we get closer but those are the deadlines right now okay and just because you know hearing some of these things about child care and i also think about it with some of the arts funding things that have a built component to them and might require some time for our planning and development services people and making sure that we're also sort of allocating time so that we have can meet these um goals within the timelines that we have

[168:02] um i was also wondering about something that feels sort of like it's not there that i was um anticipating more of which is um sort of the day sheltering and expanded night sheltering that the community's been you know bringing up i heard a lot about that both campaigning and then also you know we're always getting um emails about those kinds of things and i i don't know why i was expecting that but i was kind of expecting something along those lines um to be part of what might be proposed here and i was just wondering if you could speak to um maybe why that isn't something that we're looking at more sure and i'll i'll tap kurt again and i think our approach was a recommended

[169:00] approach is within the the building home program proposal and i'll let him speak a little bit more to your question um so lauren just to make sure i have your question correct you're asking um why we didn't bring forward um proposals around day sheltering yeah because weren't you talking about the sort of the services were going to be a part of i mean i saw a day programming but to me that's not quite the same you know you're talking about doing that in residential facilities for people who already have housing um as opposed to yeah that's helpful thank you so the um uh the day services um uh we don't quite understand um what the scope of that will be and i i think council will be discussing that a little bit later

[170:00] this evening as well um however at the time we've been putting these we've been working on these proposals since i don't know probably july last year and [Music] when we look we were looking at what the resources we had to work with and not with not understanding what a day shelter might look like um if you're if we're talking about a building um a building um that could do day services is probably anywhere from uh um five to six million dollars for a used building if we wanted to purchase it and um so in order to to get the the most out of this approach we wanted to use resources and and venues that we knew already existed that we didn't have to pay for that could be better utilized and those are community spaces that already exist um throughout our community

[171:01] and we're also wanting to make the approach is to actually create connections between people so individuals going to a class or a group or connecting with their peers that often works best in the neighborhood that they live in and so that's the approach that we we took we thought it would be the um the most outcome for the amount of resource being put into it and have a significant impact on the individuals we're trying to serve lauren does that answer your question yes thank you okay well we seem to be done with questions so there's a whole lot here to give feedback on and i got to give first uh first spot to terry here who's been waiting patiently with her comments i don't know about patiently but

[172:01] apparent patients i want to go back to what matt was talking about and i would have said yes matt i agree with you except that wasn't a question the question would have been do i agree with you but that wasn't it it was more of a comment so here i am saying matt i agree with you and what i want to bring up and i appreciate all staff did tonight and the comment that was made maybe by mark was really true that in 2021 things were one way and now in 2022 things are another way and there was no way when uh council was working on this package in 2021 that you would have known about 2022 which is to me what's a trifecta but with two extra factors like a quintifecta so we have the pandemic this labor shortage the supply chain shortages pushing up the prices causing inflation and pushing up the prices some more so i've never and i'm old you know

[173:01] seeing so much instability so much changing in not just business but our entire society with these all things these things all happening at once so i agree with matt that what is going on now with the small business community with the restaurants with the whole small with the hotels the hospitality is an emergency because we don't know what's going to happen at the next tranche i mean we don't we don't know what's going to be in 2023 we'd like to save the businesses so that they're still here so i just wanted to say that and i wanted to also say one thing about the outdoor dining the question and i asked this to yvette was if the businesses want outdoor dining but they're very worried the restaurants are spending any more money then how can we help them survive and not suffer some more so the question is is do we really need these

[174:00] yes i understand the point and it's a good point about those that are disabled being able to get to these places but we really i think we should reconsider how much money we're going to spend this year on all these new things and somebody brought up so many great things are brought up by my council members and some and i think maybe it was lauren or maybe not that brought up is this a time for innovation when we just need to get through till the end of 2022. it's good to have innovative thought but i think there's like an emergency and i'm not a big one from using the word emergency you know i'm not so but i think that there is somewhat of an emergency and really just doubling down on making sure that our businesses who are made up of people who who hire late people who are in the labor force need to get to the end of 2022 and we need to help them do it and so that's what i was thinking for the past 45 minutes in a nutshell

[175:00] however since i just said it all pretty quickly i want to deserve the right to comment again later just in case i have one more thing to say which i forgot about julie noted and uh thanks for this and that was that was succinct thanks tara great great points uh mark then bob and matt okay um my first comment is also a question i am i'm actually quite shocked that in all of these proposals i do not detect any that are really intended to enhance community resilience against climate change um i know it's it's you know it's been a few weeks maybe our memory is short but the marshall fire should teach us that it is important to enhance our community in terms of its ability to deal with that kind of uh occasion and i i'm really quite surprised that no portion of these funds seems to be directed

[176:00] in that direction my other comment is i guess directed more towards the guaranteed income proposal which my suggestion on that would be to put both of the uh both the consultant phase and the disbursement phase in the third tranche to give staff time to get us a little bit more up to speed give us some education let us understand why this is a good proposal in contrast to other possible uses for the money because if it were simply up to me i'd be happy to reallocate those funds to effort community foundation um bridge house you know bhp could take 2.75 million dollars and leverage it into more than 20 million that's how they operate um and leverage i thought was one of the objectives of the use of arpa funds and i i don't

[177:02] see as much leverage in the guaranteed income portion of this um as i would like um so if we pushed all this into the third tranche and give staff an opportunity to get us more up to speed maybe we can make a better and more educated judgment as to whether this is a priority we ought to be pursuing um you know i'd be more than happy to strengthen the safety net uh the behavioral safety net uh above 2.5 million i think it's potentially great um i don't know the answer to this but um does every child in boulder have a home computer does every family have a home computer if not i'd be happy to spend funds to rectify that um that addresses a very particular need um and i think will benefit underserved communities on a grander scale than taking 150 or

[178:00] 125 or even 200 people and giving them guaranteed income and we have so many larger issues to address so uh i'm not saying i can't ever support guaranteed income but i don't have anywhere near the data to be able to do that now and to suggest that we ought to spend a quarter of a million dollars to hire consultants for a program that might not be an appropriate program for us i'd certainly like to know um what other cities between 100 000 and 125 000 population are doing we don't have that data i don't want to belabor it too much i i have a lot of questions and i do suggest that we take a different look at it um especially in in terms of the quarter of a million dollars for consultants thank you bob and then matt then i'll call him myself thanks erin i want to agree with some of the things that have already been said um i have three three points to make

[179:00] first of all on outdoor dining as i mentioned before it's a little awkward for us to comment on this um my sense is the allocation is either too much or too little i'm not really too sure which one things i don't like about the program at least is i understand it right now the outdoor dining program right now is there a lot of built-in city fees and it feels to me a little like we're using our positi our subsidy for outdoor dining which i'm generally in favor of but some of that money is going to go back to the city so it's really just an economic transfer of the money to the city's general fund and i would not be happy about that but i i really can't ascertain that now because we haven't really drilled into the outdoor running program and it is still very much in flux so i guess i'll just put a placeholder there to say i'd like to use um arpa fun funding to truly subsidize outdoor dining um but i don't know exactly what that means yet so i think we'll just have to wait till march 8th to figure it out and then i have to dial the number up or down second related to that echo the points that tara and matt and

[180:00] others have made about business recovery i think that we are under funding our business recovery segment and i don't know if that means goosing up the numbers in tronch 2 or bringing numbers forward from tranche 3 but i think timing is super critical here because as tara said we have a lot of businesses that are on the cusp of either recovering or failing and time is of the essence and if we don't fully recov fund that business recovery now um we're going to lose businesses and some of these are businesses that um actually support our lowest um paid workers in our community i'm thinking particularly about hospitality some of our lowest earning workers work in hotels and they work in the restaurant service business and those industries are really really struggling right now and if we don't help them get back visitors and diners they will they will simply close and those employees will be the beneficiaries

[181:00] unfortunately of our guaranteed income program if we have one and that's not what we want we want them to earn wages and be successful so i would really strongly recommend staff take a harder look at our business recovery funding particularly for the convention visitors bureau which in turn supports our hospitality industry which is so critical and so fragile right now i think the cvb asks for 420 000 to support those industries and they're they're being the proposals to give them one hundred thousand so less than a quarter of what they ask for and then finally um i'm still struggling with the guaranteed income program first of all i i'm fully supportive of um disbursing some of this money to our lowest income and struggling families in the community i have no problem with a grant program along those lines this is this is effectively money that we've received that the us government printed off its printing press and if we can get that into the hands of of uh poor families in our community as quickly as possible that would be just great so i'm fully supportive of that but i sure mark's concern about spending

[182:03] 250 000 in the next i think i heard eight to nine months trying to figure out how to do that and it seems to me it could be done cheaper and faster because the um the the r in in arpa stands for rescue and it doesn't feel like much of a rescue if we don't start distributing money until 2023 which sounds like what we're going to be talking about doing so i would i would disburse that money as quickly as possible to the neediest families and then of course i am worried about sustainability i was a little troubled by the was the second last or third last slide that mark showed and i think it was candid but i i'm concerned that we're gonna slip into a long-term and permanent welfare program and i guess while it is our job to disperse funds that we got from the federal government to help families and businesses be rescued i'm not sure it's the role of municipal government to provide long-term social welfare that is historically and traditionally the realm

[183:02] of counties and states and to some extent the federal government and not cities and so i wouldn't want us to to set up expectations in our community that because we're disbursing called two or three million dollars of arpa money uh to low-income families to help them rescue that suddenly becomes a line item a permanent lie down in the city budget because that would be a little bit troublesome so i think we need to be very thoughtful about dispersing funds but without expectation necessarily that there are further funds coming in behind those so those are my three comments thanks bob matt myself nicole and rachel thanks erin um and i think i sort of hinted at where i i was sort of leaning here and and now i think i'll try to be a little more specific um given that we're gonna talk outdoor dining on the eighth and we're having this conversation as bob says it seems like we're a little slightly out of a we're temporarily out of out of uh sync a little bit i i'd like to make sure i i'd like us to

[184:01] dedicate perhaps more than we need to outdoor dining because if we get to that place and turn out we need the money and it's been allocated somewhere i i think that would be that i would not want to be in that position so i i'd like to see us allocate at least 600 000 to cover a full outdoor dining set and if we can find ways to get out those fees down in other ways and not need the arpa i'd much rather um you know focus on one in the hand rather than two in the bush so that we can then move it somewhere else if we need to but i'd hate to need it and not have it in that capacity with regards to outdoor dining and i'll echo bob's point with the cdb uh there's such a lead time that is required for our tourism industry to plant the seed to get people here to book their hotels and really go and now that mask mandates are starting to wane this is the time that people are gonna go oh there's some freedom and when they come to colorado the first place they should see is come to boulder and and we need our cvb to put a leading edge on that so that our businesses can get back

[185:00] in the game um and then support our general fund so i'd love to see the cbb get the money they need in order to do the best campaign they can uh for the spring summer and fall and lastly i want to touch on mark's comment about climate in this as a whole um but also with regards to an equity component and that is with regards to some some mobility efforts um i i'd like to see how we could always think of maybe working with community cycles a little bit on a voucher program they reached out to us on this this is a way to help get um lower income individuals that work at some of our larger employers a voucher to get e-bikes and so it's a way to sort of meet them where they are but also find a way to address some of our climate action to get people out of cars and increase some of that mobility it also directly aligns with our you know boulder can yes we can proposal which is to try to build more protected bike lanes so these are i think very synergistic things we can think of that address climate address mobility and address some more lower income individuals that work in our community um so those are the three things i'd really like to see us uh maybe pivot to

[186:01] and and move on and really lastly the real concern sorry i said three but there's fourth i'm a little still unsure about um what to do with the annexation um at we're talking about annexation holding up to four million dollars on something that might happen that could also be applicable with infrastructure money i i'm worried about holding that money up when there's such an immediate need other places i think we should still support that annexation i think it's a great thing for us to do i'm just not sure holding arpa um until we know that annexation comes through is necessarily the right way to do it with regards to arpa uh but i would like to say you still make sure that that annexation of the san larso or san lazaro area gets taken care of just maybe not totally through or not completely through um uh our money thanks thanks matt i'll call myself the nicole and rachel so again huge thank you for all the great work that you've done on these proposals i

[187:01] appreciate how it's been responsive to requests from a number of groups in the community the restaurant tours the hotel motel folks the creative groups the arts groups uh child care providers you know business groups looking for the updated economic strategy etc so um appreciate you listening to some of those voices and coming up with some great ideas for them i'll agree with my colleagues who've said that i think it would be beneficial to have some additional business support in the shorter term in the trench two section um including support for the convention visitor bureau know i think those are industries where um if they have to lay folks off that often hits you know some some of the you know folks who are least able to sustain being laid off right so um it's in addition to assisting you know the businesses themselves i think the the employees um need need that help as well so i'd love to see us do a little bit more in the shorter term

[188:00] and another another thing that struck me about a shorter term possibility i know your capacity is limited but i was really glad to see the child care support um in this in this list um because there are so many people in in our society in our community who can't take on employment unless they have good child care where they know their their kids are safe um and if that child care isn't available then there you lose a whole section of the workforce and then and then our the staffing shortages continue and and folks don't have the income they need for their family so really glad to see that and then my question is is can we can we accelerate some of that support into tranche2 um so because i think it was currently in trench three but i believe that a lot of those providers are struggling now so if that's if that's something we could move some of the funding in earlier i think that would be fantastic uh just i'll add in on the guaranteed income pilot i think it is a it's a very promising idea so and i know a lot of

[189:00] other cities are working on it so i support continuing to investigate it um but clearly i think we'll need to to learn more about how that will work who's eligible who we'll go to and then some real information about how this then helps some of the most vulnerable members of our community in uh in both the short medium and long term and and the there's that question i know you mentioned it that part of that analysis would be about the sustainability or the long-term future but those were some pretty big numbers that we're talking about in that in that later phase and you know do we have the does that just end when the arpa funds expended or and does that leak people out on you know without those additional funds or are we expected to include those in the city budget so you know all these are questions i think we'd need to get answered so i i look forward to exploring it further i think it's a very promising idea just need to to get some more information about that

[190:00] on the the building home uh proposal i think that is very promising i understand that we've housed a lot of people who now need additional support in order to stay in housing and be successful but to lauren's question i think it's important to to balance those investments with support for people who do not yet have housing um and so the the day shelter i idea and the other services that we'll be talking about later this evening we'll also need financial support so just want to make sure that we don't you know 100 allocate funds in this area to people who already have housing because i think we need a balance there to making sure the housing is sustainable but also getting services to folks who are who are not yet housed and leading them into housing um a couple more points of behavioral health really glad to see that in there that's such a critical gap in our society overall of support for mental health and substance abuse issues

[191:00] um i do uh very much hope we can partner with the county on this i know we're working on that i think it'll be critical to leverage county-wide funding and services with what we provide here in the city and i know of course all sectors of the economy are suffering from staffing shortages but i understand that they're particularly acute in the behavioral health area so that seems like it would need to be part of the focus of our funding is making sure that there is funds to hire and to to maintain the existing workforce to provide those services and maybe that's more where a lot of the need is in the shorter term um but but then in the medium to longer term hopefully we can stand up some additional services to meet some critical gaps in in this area that where our society really just fails people who are struggling with behavioral health challenges last one um lazaro i i'm very supportive of

[192:03] having some funds um available to support that annexation but with and now to say on that that this is one of those transformative things that we talked about um last year is it what are what are some long-term needs in our community that we may be able to make progress on with these um these once-in-a-lifetime funds and so san lazaro has some deep infrastructure needs that may be hard to fund otherwise that being said there are all the infrastructure funds coming available and so i know you all are looking at that but we should absolutely see if we can get those uh infrastructure needs met with with other grant sources um so that potentially the the arpa funding can be used uh for some of the many other needs in our community but i very much want us to continue to work on this project with the hope of of bringing those folks into the city and and improving and upgrading their infrastructure infrastructure with the caveat that um

[193:01] we want to make sure that the funds are going to primarily to support the current and the future residents um you know it shouldn't shouldn't just be a check written to the owner to offset costs that they would otherwise have to to bear themselves so i just want to make sure that we keep a focus on on the how is this benefiting primarily the residents as we work on that annexation in those infrastructure improvements and that's what i got so thanks again uh for some great work and now we got nicole rachel and lauren thank you um and i just first wanted to give kudos to staff for all this hard work as my um comment as my first comment um and also just to really call out the uh the value of this racial equity tool um it really did kind of infuse that idea of equity into all of these ideas in a way that i've not seen before and so i just i greatly appreciate that you all you know spent the time getting trained how to use it and implemented it here

[194:01] this is a really big decision on how to spend all this money and it seems really critical that um this tool is used here so thank you for that um i also just wanted to know my appreciation with collaboration with community connectors i think that's super important as well as with some of the really impacted groups like the arts commission and some of the arts community and i also this was another new thing for me seeing this in here i really appreciate your noting that the arts contribute to social cohesion and community resilience and the critical role that they play in our ongoing response to covid and the trauma that all of us are experiencing from this i you know this this was another area where it was very clear that this idea of resilience was really throughout all of these of how can we make our community stronger and better able to weather these kinds of challenges right now as well as as we move forward um so to answer your original questions mark there are two of them if i remember correctly um yes i agree with the general direction for uh true funding

[195:01] would love to see you bring this before us to implement these funding plans um i had a couple of just comments about some of the specific things that were brought up um as far as that the guaranteed income pilot program i really really really love this idea and i also wanted to ask ask slash put for consideration um some of what mark and lauren and others have talked about about whether there are groups in the community that are kind of further along in being ready to launch something like this whether you know we need to kind of reinvent this i think a few years ago for example effa did a pilot program of this i think they had great success um you know really helping their families i think there was a community foundation um report about it that talked about how you know for five million dollars a year we could basically end uh child poverty in our city um which which seems really huge so anyway i was just um wanting to

[196:00] put that out there if there are other groups that are are able would be able to take the money and run with it and get it out to people faster like we've been talking about with businesses and other folks i think that would be wonderful and be so supportive of something like that if that doesn't exist by all means please start please continue investigating and look at this because i think it really is critically important for us to think about how we can fill um some of these gaps while we um or while the county and others are working on filling some of them like with a living wage and some of those kinds of things that could also address these issues um i wanted to come back to the timing of the behavioral health and child care for me this feels like if we have capacity trying to do this sooner in charge two rather than turns three would be great especially around the workforce development because training people takes time and you know the earlier we can get started on that the better uh but to your question about the tranche iii and

[197:02] knowing that there are trade-offs i don't really know what i would prioritize from you know moving from trance 2 to tranche 3 in order to get some of that trench three-step to happen earlier um so just sort of a general comment i'm i'm with you all i'm just being stuck a little bit and thinking about how to order these between tree and trench because they're all they are all really important um other than perhaps the outdoor dining pilot funds that that may be something that to me just feels like something that could wait a little bit um the let's see other things sorry i took notes all over the place i'm trying to find them um oh yeah the other thing that i just wanted to note because i know that the total spending was higher than the money that we have um i believe that we haven't really touched our reserve funds throughout this entire pandemic and the

[198:00] kind of catastrophic impacts that it's had on our community um and so i just wanted to know that i personally would be open to the idea of dipping into that not for everything that's wrong but for kind of filling some of those gaps between some of the work that you all have identified as critically important some of the things that folks are needing right now and and the money that we have from these arpa funds um and the final comment was just sort of a meta a meta comment about the process i would be really interested in hearing at some point people's feedback about using the racial equity tool in particular some of the community connectors i would just be really curious to hear what they thought of the process and its outcomes and things like that so it's not for right now but just to flag for later thanks uh rachel lauren and tara thanks aaron thanks everyone um i i

[199:01] don't remember which all questions we were supposed to answer so i wonder if others might be in that same boat and if it would be worth a slide going up to make sure that we've given you the feedback that you requested and while that's happening um just a couple quick comments um on the guaranteed income i'm pretty supportive of that pilot and getting information on it um and it's nice to see elizabeth crowe you're not here often enough so hi and thanks for being here especially um and i and i appreciated your enthusiasm and in the in coming up with that creative concept and all the the background work that's gone into it oh good questions are these all the questions or is this like yep that's everything great um and then overall i guess um you know we have a huge budget and this is in some ways a drop in that budget um and so i want

[200:01] to acknowledge that um stat this has been i think a little bit of a funky situation for staff uh crossing over two councils with these three um different phases of the money allocation and i think you all have done a good job of cobbling together a reasonable proposal that that you know meets what what you were told under a previous council's guidelines as well as trying to i think be responsive to um some some newer directions um and and and i i'm trying to be cautious to not relitigate sort of the the um sort of the feedback that we gave you back in september and previously um as an example uh looking at um you know the amount of money that we're going to put into some homelessness help um you know when we were looking at

[201:00] that day shelter was not on the table and not approved by council so i don't consider this to be sort of the end-all repository for where our values are going to be reflected in how we spend money um and so appreciate that this is is one chunk of money and it's a goodly chunk of money but it's not all and and we don't have to sort of try and accomplish all of our goals through this through this series of expenditures so um now i'm going to look at the questions and see if if we've or if i've given feedback um yes generally support the initiatives would like to see a special adjustment to base in march to appropriate funds to said initiatives great uh and number two is does council support the approach in developing french three yeah um and i'm with nicole like i i don't know that i can um that i really have the uh the expertise or information yet to really say which we should emphasize so it seems like we were what um

[202:02] are you asking like of the 15 million that needs to be shrunk down to 11 million do you want us to give you some direction on on where to cut and shave is that the yeah and i think generally is fine i mean there has been comments already about um child care mental health is being you know certain areas that if we can do that even sooner than trans3 that's great i mean that it's just helpful to to know um with this council uh understanding those priorities will help us uh prioritize our time all right um so and and do you need that tonight or will there be another check in where we can give you some more feedback on on that specific bucket and where we yeah well we'll be right back with uh with an adjustment for the tranche too that's another opportunity and and we will have to schedule additional time with this council so maybe when when you come back to us with the adjustment to base it would be helpful to to see that list again and have had some more time in

[203:00] light of this conversation to reflect on on those areas and um receive feedback from the community on on where we might um look at prioritizing so if you could if it's possible i don't know may or brockett if that's acceptable request or not um but just to have that tweet up again as part of that discussion i think might be helpful thanks that's a great point let's get through the last comments and then we'll we'll turn to staff for for some feedback so lauren and then tara thank you um so i'm gonna echo what a lot of people have said i really appreciate the balance between sort of well i don't know that people have said this exactly i think you've done a good job of the balancing trying to keep businesses afloat and also trying to come up with some innovative ideas and really focusing on the people who have been hardest hit in our community um by covid

[204:01] um i want to agree with nicole and matt about sort of how urgent this is and the more we can partner with groups in our community that are already doing this work and already have sort of the network set up to kind of help get these funds out to people i think we should do that um but in general i really support this i think um you know the arts funding the guaranteed income day care i really appreciate how all of those things while they might not directly support businesses one of the things i've seen in our community downtown is that you know during the work week town kind of empties out but on the weekends downtown is pretty packed and so to me that says like our tourism is actually doing fairly well but we're not

[205:00] we need more than that to support our local businesses we need the people who work here who are here every day to also have sort of the income and the means to go out to our restaurants and to do all of that so i think that and and the draw of the um of innovative arts and all of that i think will help support our community in a really holistic way and i appreciate that you guys have you know done some research to try and figure out some innovative solutions there um i also really appreciated um what rachel just said i think prior to being able to really pick you know what i think is the most important from these things i would need a little bit more information but generally um both the tranche2 and the trench three recommendations seem um like really good directions for our community

[206:02] thanks tara and then um rachel and also jenny if you want to jump in here please feel free i just got i don't really have that much to say except i'm feeling like i should do a summary like we're all doing our summaries now you know we're in court and here's my summary um anyway just get i never did talk about guaranteed income but i want who's that really nice person that spoke today what's your name glad to meet you this is the first time you were here i think since i've been on council somebody thank you yeah elizabeth that was awesome so i want you to know elizabeth that today i spent an hour looking up on a google search guaranteed income because i didn't know enough about it and if you asked my husband he would say i am the worst google searcher so i google searched where has it worked and then i google search where has it not worked and one thing i don't want to do is to be the one to find my own information because

[207:01] it's really not my strong point so i am looking forward to hearing more about what you have to say about that i just don't feel that i know enough about the pros the cons and like others said can we do it faster that would be more helpful and then also is it worth the money for the 250 000 when we have so many other needs and whether or not this is the time to look into that although i so appreciate all you've done and how excited you are about it your excitement is in fact infectious so i thank you for that and i also wanted to say that i thank every single person on staff i really do i didn't i hope i didn't sound unappreciative because you guys have done just an amazing job and it's a new council and i'm sure it's just really hard to figure out what to do with the money that we have and so i want to give you my appreciation also i wanted to say how excited i am that the arts is going to be getting

[208:01] money i'm going to agree with lauren on the arts and not only that but the arts if i remember from all the things that we learned when we were running for office is so important in terms of how much money the city actually gets income wise and and from tourism because of the arts and now that we're going forward and hopefully upward and it's going to be uh things are just going to be getting better i'm really looking forward to having the arts getting some of this funding so that we can once again become the art city that we were but even more so i'm thinking about the convention and visitors bureau to really get them that money so that we can i agree that we do have some tourists but i don't know that we have enough tourists from out of town and as people start traveling by plane again it would be great to get them to come here because it's all connected the jobs the arts community we all need people tourists to to buy things and to watch performances and it's all really

[209:01] connected and so we need people whatever it takes to get them here and lastly i'm very excited about all the money we're going to have for behavioral health and i'm hoping job training and the different ways that we can help people succeed in the new economy whatever that actually turns out to be in 2023 so thanks to everybody and on council you guys are amazing and thank you for telling me when i wasn't on nude i also appreciate that the love appreciate the love thanks tara juni and then we'll wrap up thank you aaron you're so kind um well i've seen a lot of this presentation before as part of the financial strategy committee and i just think staff really put a lot of thoughts to this and they've done an amazing work work to really

[210:01] actually bring forward issues that this council would support the progressive ideas and i fully support them so my answer to question one is yes i support the recommendation for trench one i support the guaranteed income i i think it's a good idea 250 000 is it a lot of money yes is it a lot of money to be putting toward figuring out how to spend money or how to help people in the community it is still a lot of money but it seems it's a it's a good idea so because of that i i support it but i understand that 250 000 could have been put into other things but um this is one thing staff has identified and they want to do it i think it's really good to think about people who are struggling right now and to

[211:02] help them with giving them some extra funding to help them i think that's a good idea um i support the annexation of san lazaro um but with the caveat i would want to know from some kind of guarantee that once we annex this property into the city that the owner is not gonna turn around and hike rent on the people um and in colorado we don't have rent control so what does that really mean once we annexed and we give uh we give them all the utility services you know what guarantee do we have as a council to still protect people and ensure that now the ranking the rent is so high they cannot pay it thanks to council members because hey we we somehow contribute to that uh i i think again that's something that we really have to think through um this council support

[212:00] the approach in the developing potential trends three recommendations i support them i just think staff is doing a great job at bringing again ideas that will really help the community so i'm i'm grateful and thankful for all the discussion tonight and i've been quiet yes but i just think my fellow council members did a great job at really uh teeing up the questions and asking all the right questions so thank you thanks for that jenny so uh okay so what what uh what i've heard um mark and staff is that i think generally people are supportive of the direction you're going in but with all kinds of detailed comments added on top of it so um i know that was a lot um i wanted to see if you needed any clarification from us or if you feel like you're kind of able to get a sense of where counselors were feeling in different areas so i'll jump in and start and certainly

[213:01] um if they're staff who really want something more appointed uh certainly invite them to to ask but i'll say this that the conversation has been really illuminating and helpful so i appreciate the thoughtfulness um that council has given us conversation now i think others have noted when we started this initial work uh perhaps there was more of a direction to focus on people specifically um and use our racial equity lens in that way and i'll also say that this does this conversation does not necessarily divert from that um but we do have announced that a new council body so it is really great to get the feedback from you as we move forward um i'll just say staff really did in situations like this when there is money to be had transformational money but not unlimited money right staff really tried to balance the things on how do we support people in our industries right particularly our um small business interest industry and we have some monies go to

[214:01] that in trench one but really try to support existing efforts while also trying to figure out how are we coming out of this post pandemic right because the economy is shifting and people are shifting and the needs of individuals have shifted as we have heard back from our community connectors and some of our community organizations so all of that to say that i think that we purge you on some of the suggestions and where you'd like us to reevaluate i also will say that it is a big re-evaluation as we move forward and really appreciate the things that you've identified you'd like to see more of or expand it will take us more than march 15th to come back to you in a thoughtful way and so we're going to go back and look at calendaring and make sure that we can bring back additional recommendations as we move forward on the variety of things that we have heard as as we move in that direction

[215:03] uh mark i i want to make sure you get a chance to make sure that you know what's happening and kurt i just saw your hand go up uh thank you and i i also want to echo uh maria this was great feedback um i i certainly appreciated it um in in listening to council i i had five points that i wanted to make um i think the the first point is is uh last fall there was a lot of listening we did to the from the community and um we really reached out to um community members particularly those who were most impacted by um by covet and that's where these things came from i think at least from my perspective it feels like we're moving uh really fast um and we're trying to implement things that can be impactful

[216:00] as as soon as uh as soon as possible um as far as the um uh the guaranteed income um uh proposal that's been put forward um i was chatting with elizabeth over the last few minutes and i i think we we could potentially put a a study session together in the next you know three or four months depending on of course i always say this staff capacity and um and then as well as how we could schedule it in um but there's been a lot of work done on this um and i think what elizabeth was uh the direction she was going is we need to really engage further with the community to look at how this would work specifically for the for the city of boulder um but the organizations that i think mark listed uh he he listed effa the the community foundation i think the

[217:01] community connectors in other organizations those are all the organizations that actually motivated us and pushed us for this guaranteed income initiative um and um [Music] uh also responding to mark's comment about climate change and i don't disagree with that at all um the one small component i could raise the flag on is the second mortgages those are individuals that are living in homes with that have insulation values of like r4 and 5 and their walls they're gonna be moving into like net zero homes i think that's significant and i'm quite proud of that um the uh um the child care services some of those things are already being supported in the in the trench one

[218:01] funding and those funds are already um uh going out and i really appreciated how council talked about the the interface with the um with the economy related to that as well and how that impacts workers um and um as far as san lazaro um uh really appreciated junie's comments um i totally agree with that as as we go through the process around their annexation we're really going to want to figure out how we get community benefit out of that and and more so than just you know clean water it needs to really have a financial impact on on the residents that are there we did a similar project um to this with um the mapleton um mobile home community several years ago and the outcome of that was a lot of permanently affordable um lots which has

[219:00] had a huge impact for many years now and i'd want to go in a similar direction to that and then the last thing i'll say um about um elizabeth is she currently oversees the health equity fund and the human services fund she works with um 60 different organizations um in the city of boulder so while you may not know or a lot of other folks do and um those are the people that we've been listening to um in a big way um for these proposals and um i i think very highly ever as well so thank you i'll just add a mayor really quickly we have a lot of notes i think we can take some of our other responses offline or provide a package to council we did hear a couple specific pieces of feedback that may impact the numbers for the tranche too just because the way the calendar has worked with some adjustments that that special

[220:01] adjustment we're putting together that package now that would be due for us on thursday so what we're talking about is potentially just moving that back two weeks keeping the public hearing on march 15th moving the second reading two weeks after that if that we can bring that up at cic on tuesday if that works and just buy us a little bit of time to make sure that the tranche to spending amount matches this conversation but really appreciative of council's comments this evening and um we'll do our best to refine these proposals going forward i'm sure a slight delay is worth it to to get it right so no no problem there at all um and we'll talk about the details at cac and then nicole you've got your hand up yes i just had one really quick thing um which is to ask if if it's possible because there there may be things that don't need as much discussion as others

[221:01] and just you know given the urgency that um i think many of us are feeling if there are things that could be kind of pulled out and approved sooner rather than later um i elise would be open to that i don't know you know can't speak for others of course but um just given the urgency we talked about i wanted to pose that as something if it doesn't make your jobs staff harder we certainly um can look at that we do have the public health reserve appropriated so i'll check with staff and see if there's anywhere um that we essentially have funding ready to go out the door or an initiative ready to be funded before that appropriation happens um and we might be able to tap into existing appropriation to do so okay thanks i just want to make sure that this council transition and what we talked about tonight doesn't slow things down for you know everything you're trying to do thank you good all right uh any last words on this

[222:00] or should we move on all right very good so i would say the way that we move on is to have a break um i could use a leg stretch so um how about we go for should we go for six minutes 9 45 and nicole you get an extra long break because you're recused from the next one so i'll text you once we finish the next item thank you see you back at 9 45. [Music]

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[228:00] matt i didn't have any exciting things to eat i only had super bowl leftovers tonight [Music] well that's not bad you're human after all [Music] let's see any idea we're taking uh votes when we think this is gonna end by or should i not say that what was our over under on this one uh i already blew it i said 9 25 of the game the meeting i missed that white by a long shot rules closest without going over i'll probably win i love to win don't i recall that you bet 100 bucks on that or a beer for everyone i think it was some one of those two things i'm waiting for the

[229:00] beer delivery to make up for the lost bed did i miss something about beard delivery cause i went in uh the problem with betting on what time the meeting ends is that we all have an influence on it right so you can go late you can just grandstand and talk for half an hour i forgot you know what the problems with with betting on the meeting is i always forget what exactly i said at the very beginning what time did i even have is it me or or are we making teresa blush with all this concept of betting on times in a public forum so i'm just curious oh that would be wrong it's fine if you bet on something that you have influence over the outcome ask pete rose good one

[230:00] well played all right let's see i think uh we're just missing juni juni let us know if you're if you're back there she is okay because uh nicole is recused from this next item so um at least maybe you can take it away i'm going to turn my camera up for a minute because i'm just eating something get us started please all right thank you our next item in one tonight's agenda is item number seven matters from the city attorney and that 7a item is the discussion on next steps regarding the cu south referendum great so good evening council members um i do have just a brief a small power point to help guide us through this conversation and um looking for direction from you this evening we can't take a final action in under matters but what i can

[231:02] do is get some direction from you for something to put on the consent agenda in the future so uh we're talking about the referendum of ordinance 8483 um which involves the cu south annexation next slide please you'll recall that on september 21st 2021 council adopted ordinance 8430 or 8483 by emergency um and that effectuated the cu self annexation shortly thereafter a referendum petition was submitted by the people and that was received by the city in october council um [Music] accepted the city clerk's certification of sufficiency on november 16th of 2021 and so um i did go back and watch that meeting what wasn't clear to me was direction

[232:00] given as to next steps so i thought let's let's get some clarity on that next slide please and so what what i'm asking for you from you tonight is to give direction with respect to one of three mutually exclusive options you can either repeal ordinance 8483 or you can submit the referendum to a special election and then there are some time frames around that if you're interested in exploring that or the third alternative would be to place a referendum on the ballot in november of 2022 so that would be our regular election ballot so at this point just looking for some direction great thanks can i do you all mind if i frame the discussion here i'd just like to see if we can eliminate options um so first of all i'm going to ask would anyone like to speak up in favor of

[233:01] repealing the annexation arguments and mark i see you've got your hand up but i think you had it on before okay so i'm not seeing anybody interested in speaking up for that option so with that off the table then that means putting the referendum on the ballot either for special election at some time to be determined or in november of 2022 would anyone like to speak up for doing it in a special election may i ask a question please what would be the incremental cost to putting it on for a special election so we have done um historical research on that but not any current research it's a pretty significant amount of staff time to figure that out um so it's a pretty big window but we estimate somewhere between 75 and 150 000. okay thank you

[234:00] great question mark um given that would anyone like to advocate for a special election i'm seeing no hands so then that seems to leave us with a november 2022 election is that generally the will of council that we would want to put it on the ballot for november of 2022 i'm seeing lots of heads up and thumb nodding and whatever you call it so trace is that good enough direction that we could then put something together for formal approval at a future meeting uh yes mayor and what i would um what i would propose we do is put a motion on a consent agenda simply that that's the action to move forward and then bring back that referendum language as per proposed in that entire uh packet of language that you all are going to consider in august for the ballot sounds good to me does anyone object to that approach

[235:00] all right theresa good enough on that great thank you very much for your clear direction i appreciate it welcome one question about when it comes back to us in august um is that okay please so there was some um commentary tonight at um open comment about the the presentation the language of the ballot title and and i think some some blame was placed on a previous city attorney and so i'm just wondering i thought that like uh people who put together ballot measures put together the title is that how it comes sorry about the cat she's very angry um so just wanted to get clarification on on how that title will be chosen and maybe clarification on how the last title was chosen as well i'm afraid i don't know um specifically what um what the color was which which item they were referring to or any of the history of that what i can tell you is with the citizen

[236:02] initiated referendum uh we are we are pretty well bound by the language that they put in that petition we could make slight corrections for clarity um but really the language that they put forward is is what goes on the ballot okay anything else all right i'm gonna ask nicole to come back and alicia shall we tee up the next item while we're waiting for nicole to pop up of course thank you sir we have uh our next item is item eight for tonight's agenda matters from the mayor and members of council 8a is the discussion to clarify the homelessness topic work plan from the retreat so rachel do you want to take this this is your request sure um so at the

[237:02] retreat we had um agreed to a homelessness related work plan item um and it was i can't remember the exact language that we voted on but there was a some conversation on friday night and then um it was sort of uh language was was condensed and clarified for us to vote on saturday and in conversations subsequent to the retreat um it became clear to me that amongst council members we had different understandings of what we had sort of greenlit for the work plan so i thought it would be helpful to clarify what what staff heard and what we all understood so that we are teeing up staff and the community for success so maybe i would ask nuria what what the what staff's understanding of the work plan item is and then we can have a brief conversation if it's not what we thought uh sure i'll attempt to do that and then ask kurt if i've gotten anything wrong

[238:00] in his understanding we actually have a slide from uh what was um the language that was approved and i wonder if staff could bring that up as i'm talking about it and my recollection of that to your point rachel is that the question was really about the hiring of a facilitator um and what that convening would entail uh there was some conversation about really focusing just on the day shelter itself and i believe it is that piece of it that perhaps caused confusion i think as we came out of it there was um some understanding that the data that it was just about convening and having a facilitator and convening stakeholders to provide recommendations on what a day shelter could look like and what services and programs could be there versus maybe that is the first part of it but that we would also be employing that facilitator and those stakeholder conversations to

[239:00] think of what other perhaps services or programs or gaps for our unsheltered specifically unsheltered community could exist so i think that's where we left off kurt am i getting it i don't know if kurt is still with us am i agreed and that is what we understood from it but then it's really up to council to let us know if there are clarifications yeah i think that was that was good maria the the only thing that i would add is there was there was some conversation um in the retreat about a facilitator that could also um have more broader um communications with the with the community around um homelessness as far as sort of the direction that um they would like to go or um you know there's a lot of um uh you know disagreement within the community and i think there would they would

[240:00] benefit from um constructive conversations and um i think i heard some of that at the retreat and a facilitator may be able to assist with that i i wouldn't foresee this statement here says a two-year process i hope it's not a two-year process if we're going to do something like this i would hope that it would um move much quicker than that and i think that we would be able to work pretty effectively and getting feedback from communities and particularly service providers on the type of services that would be helpful but i think hearing from council tonight about their ideas would be would be very helpful and if i may just before we do that i posit that for staff if we're uh moving which we are to hire

[241:01] a facilitator and think about that it we would benefit greatly from that alignment and the hearing in the broader spectrum while wanting to prioritize the day shelter but hear from us at least and i think i'm echoing a little bit of conversations with uh kurt is is that it really would be useful for us to have that facilitator um bring us all into alignment as we focus about this in the future do you mean an alignment on broader issues out beyond dave shelter is a is that am i hearing that yeah um that i support that i guess i would just say so i don't know what what um all we need to say i also want to um appreciate kurt's point that it would be hopefully less and significantly less than two years of a timeline so i didn't want the impression to be that that it was a two-year you know just investigation um and i guess the other it it said in the the

[242:02] language that you put on the slide that part of the goal was to um purchase or you know to have a building a separate building so i think there was some confusion um from what i was hearing among us about whether uh an an existing you know service provider might be called upon to host day shelter but it sounds like part of what we teed up is specific to a building and and i guess the other piece of it that there was maybe some confusion on is is that building some um would part of the discussions be whether the building itself could be used for things beyond a shelter so with that i would invite colleagues to share what they thought great i've got um matt and nicole and i'll chime in here afterwards thanks erin and rachel i appreciate you bringing this up for some clarity because i too was feeling a little bit sort of stuck in the ether after the retreat and and kurt i

[243:01] appreciate what you're saying in terms of being open that the facilitator would sort of be able to handle a broader swath of conversations because i think some of the larger aspects outside of that perhaps specificity around the day shelter impact day shelter overflow and thus supported services and so i think there's obvious synergy there and i appreciate you seeing that so so i support those efforts it sort of makes me feel better about some of that that was left hanging at the retreat that this could be wrapped into this conversation with this group and and hopefully that the timing of this being done in a year uh is helpful um so you know i i think there's a lot of adjustments kurt as we all are working through this it's always hitting a moving target here and so having more people that can stay attuned and help us adjust is all the merrier so i appreciate the common openness for that um i think we're gonna be better off because of it so so thank you i support it nicole yeah i think um the one thing i just wanted to make sure

[244:00] we're all really aligned on is kind of those two-year timeline and what exactly that means um for me kind of the key word and there was not just planning but implementation um so you know that when we get to two years right we have a building we have programs ready to go into it right it's not like we're kind of talking kind of like rachel said for two years and then you know we we start at that point right um which which is why for me this two-year process seemed very ambitious um but hopefully potentially doable um and then um you know i absolutely support the idea of kind of this group um the facilitator being open to helping the community come together and get aligned um on on some of these other steps and i think that we're clear on this but just sort of with the focus being this day shelter just because it seems like a really timely time to have that um that we're working toward for a number of reasons that we talked about at the retreat but you know certainly not to say that

[245:01] we can only talk about uh navigation services and this facility during the course of these conversations because i think there are other things that are likely to come up like we talked about the retreat you know the idea of using we could find a building that had a parking lot could be used for safe parking for example or you know a building that we could um renovate uh to meet the standards for overnight sheltering should that be necessary like some of those other things so for me it was it it's not sort of limiting the conversation but more focusing the conversation on navigation uh on having a navigation center up and operational in two years instant call call myself and bob and just all agree with with what's been said and like what nicole just said that i think you know there's a clear desire to create a navigation center you know day shelter and focus on that but not to the exclusion of saying well if we have a great facility you know whether some other potential services we could offer

[246:02] to the community so just i look forward to that facilitated conversation so we we can talk those things through and um and then move forward into uh planning and implementation bob yeah i think i'm i'm going to agree with nicole and aaron just now um i think that i think the the the prize here really is a day center a day a day center and navigation services that would be provided um i think there there seems to be kind of an interesting and in my hearing the first time convergence of not only council but also community members around today's shelter and i'd want to take advantage of that and not lose sight of the prize it undoubtedly will will spill into other service discussions i don't doubt that but i but i want to make sure that we don't um we don't um throw that away uh there's i think there's an opportunity here to really focus on on a day center and a day shelter and um and other discussions may happen and

[247:01] that's perfectly fine they will invariably happen but let's not uh let's not start throwing a whole lot of things on the discussion and lose sight of of the day shelter uh the second thing is um it's just a small pedantic point um there was a parenthetical i appreciate neri um calling up the exact language we underdone there was a parenthetical that kind of listed some of the things that might happen when i voted in favor this and this was a unanimous vote at the retreat all nine of us supported this i saw those as more exemplary than than um uh prescriptive so for example one of them says buy a building well we may not buy a building we may rent a building there may be a facility out there that's appropriate for us and so i wouldn't want to wouldn't want staff to take that away as a you must buy a building i think that's an example of of the type of thing that we might do but we might find other facilities that don't involve city purchasing real estate so i just want to

[248:00] be clear on on that point that those were examples of things that would happen in this effort to setting up a a day shelter thanks tara i think focusing the most on a day shelter i agree with you that other things might come up but to me the most important thing is the success of the day shelter and it's not that easy to have success in a new thing right i mean me and lauren are trying to do that with the boards and commissions you know so to ensure success i feel like if we focus on it and give it uh the time that it needs in two years is really not a lot of time to work on a new business or a day shelter or anything i that's why i kind of want to focus on that because i feel like the success of that will help the community stay with us so that's why i want to focus on that the most

[249:03] thanks for that tara well i'm hearing general agreement um from council uh as far as i can tell so kurt does does it sound like you're getting some clarity on how to move forward yeah i think so at some point and maybe it's part of the community conversation i think we want it'd be nice to get sort of alignment on the goals of of such a center as well and um so we know that we're we're we're uh working towards um a common goal uh in in developing this approach and um and so we know it we can also measure what success looks like with that great point so we'll look forward to the further discussions okay well i think that takes care of that alicia do we have and well let me just thank rachel for asking for that clarification because i think this was

[250:00] really helpful i think there was not clarity right afterwards and i think we're in a better place now so thanks for the suggestion uh alicia what else we got that is the end of our agenda for tonight sir all right did somebody predict 10 10 for an ending i have 10 or 15. all right it's very close all right well thanks everybody for a good meeting uh the arpa discussion was a full one that that's it's a big deal it deserves some time and i appreciate all of your thoughtful comments tonight and have a good night and i'll gavel this meeting close at 10 07 pm [Music] so [Music]

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