March 1, 2022 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] [Music] the order is not conducive to your answer the first or last it's just going to be an unpleasant experience for a lot of people yeah i was always like please not me not me not me first that's what we see hey it's going pretty smooth um mark have you had any have you had it yet i start tomorrow morning okay i i have two sessions tomorrow and [Music] one or two more on thursday and one on friday because we're on we're on osb i think tomorrow and friday is that right i'm glad to come in and hear board and commission appointments are going well it seems yeah yeah all the selections have been made

[1:00] lovely we just got after it wow you guys are industrious we'll have to give you more to do works for me good evening everyone prepared good evening mayor [Music] [Music] everybody stop talking [Music]

[2:12] so [Music] so [Music]

[3:23] good ice breaking by committee you want to hear it real quick please [Music] let folks know that we are live on on channel 8. whenever we're ready to begin uh mr mayo

[4:02] i'll begin recording whenever we're ready thanks for that announcement ryan we are giving nicole a minute i understand she's having some technical difficulties so let's just give her one minute all right looks like nicole's coming in right now give her a minute to become a panelist apologies i had to restart my computer no worries nicole glad to have you here with us all right well looks like we got everybody here so i will go ahead and

[5:00] capitalize to a start here we're going to begin uh march we're beginning the march 1st 2022 meeting of the boulder city council i'm going to kick it off here with a few announcements so to start uh covet 19 for testing for information and provider locations for free code 19 testing you can go to www.boco.org covet testing and the boulder site for that open seven days a week 8 a.m to 6 p.m is at 24 45 stasio drive and for vaccine information and provider locations you can go to www.boco.org covid vaccine next let's talk about boards and commissions we have closed the annual recruitment period for most boards but there are still a few that have not received sufficient applications so we still are keeping those open so those boards are the boulder junction

[6:00] access district both parking and travel demand management as well as the board of zoning adjustment the design advisory board and the university hill commercial area management commission so those boards will have applications accepted until further notice you can find those descriptions online at oldercolorado.gov boards commissions if you have any questions or need any assistance please contact the city clerk's office at city clerk's office at boulder colorado.gov and finally an announcement about price gouging just wanted to make sure that everyone knows that 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 general's office at 800-222

[7:03] or stockfraud colorado.gov right and that is the end of the announcement so alicia can we do a roll call please all right thank you sir and good evening everyone we will start with councilmember benjamin president okay i see you but you need it and that's fine uh present i thought i said i'm sorry that was just muted you were good all right mayor brockett president councilmember falkarts present april tim friend here council member joseph present sphere

[8:01] present wallet here liner present i am here mayor we have our quorum thank you alicia so i would now uh request a motion to amend the agenda to add item 1a a statement of solidarity and support for the people of ukraine great we have a motion and a second is anyone opposed all right seeing no one then the motion is duly amended to add this item 1a and i will just go straight into that item 1a so i'm going to start with a statement here and then i'll give my colleagues an opportunity to add something as well if they would like

[9:00] so uh just wanted to say a few words tonight about the events unfolding in ukraine well the specifics are rapidly evolving what we know is that we're witnessing a humanitarian crisis that not only threatens european stability but the world order that we rely on to ensure peace russia's entirely unjustified invasion of the nation of ukraine and the horrors that such violence is inflicting on the ukrainian people should be vigorously and unequivocally condemned by all i personally am outraged by these actions and support the efforts of the international community to impose serious and significant sanctions on russia i hope they will cause them to revisit the rash decision and quickly withdraw their forces and show the international community that such aggression will not be tolerated in the ukraine or anywhere else in the world i also want to share in the heartbreak that i know so many in our community are experiencing as we watch videos and read stories of the suffering and dislocation experienced by millions of people in ukraine

[10:00] these people did not ask for war and they do not deserve war living here in colorado we're a long long way from the fighting and suffering in ukraine and yet i think that i can say today that today the people of boulder stand with the people of ukraine and offer solidarity to them in their time of crisis may the universal outrage from across the world cause the invading forces to swiftly retreat and may ukraine be at peace once again thank you for allowing me to time to speak about this and i would welcome if anyone else would like to add a few words as well i say we'll see rachel thanks erin um i won't eat up a lot of time adding to that that was well said i just want to say i support what you said and um the city of boulder supports what you have said and i'm hoping that we have um unanimity among our among our colleagues in supporting your statement thank you thanks nicole

[11:01] thank you um yeah aaron i just i want to support uh also everything that you said um and i want to also just acknowledge the weight of this war on all of us but particularly on the russians ukrainians and europeans in our community and on all those who fled war or lived under occupation in any area of the world we don't know how this war is going to end but we know its trauma will last for generations i want to also acknowledge the trauma some in our community are experiencing seeing racism even in war as humans we're capable of complex emotions so we can hold empathy and solidarity for those fighting occupation in ukraine while also holding sadness and frustration for continued racial inequities i hope everyone in the community recognizes the stress that we're all experiencing in this latest moment of global uncertainty and i hope we can give each other grace in the coming weeks and recognize that we're all doing the best we can given what the world is giving us right now thanks thank you nicole

[12:00] well it was all quite eloquent from from aaron and rachel and nicole so i can't top that um i completely agree with what's been said already and and while this council does not typically weigh in on foreign policy matters i think that we can all stand together in solidarity with the people of of ukraine and others that are suffering during this terrible time and hope and pray that um the conflict will end soon um and that lives will be spared and that peace will return um um all we can do from afar is um be sympathetic um to condemn it and to um hope for a better day thank you bob mark um aaron i thought your statement was absolutely uh spot on i thought you hit every issue it was very eloquently stated i stand in full support of it and i thank you for doing that in my lifetime this is probably the most

[13:01] serious event since the cuban missile crisis uh with the potential for horrible outcomes and uh i am pleased that this community is standing with the ukrainian people and opposing the kinds of oppression that is that are being visited upon them so thank you for that uh aaron i thought it was a beautiful statement thank you mark tara i assume that so many of us here in boulder wake up like i do we open up our phone and we hope against hope that things have changed that putin reverses course that things go back to peace and um my heart is with the people of ukraine as well as i know all of ours are and i i'm so glad that we're standing in solidarity as a city right now

[14:06] [Music] i appreciate everything that's yeah sorry there was a little crosstalk um go ahead well i think everything that's been said is um in exactly the right thing to be said in the moment we're in um i in interestingly reflecting i'm i was my son's age at six when i remember watching the berlin wall come down um so i just interesting that those are it's a generation and yet there's another massive event coming down um i will say that i want to make sure that we are prepared and going to be in a position to welcome any refugees that have been displaced from uh the war in ukraine and that we would be ready willing and able to welcome them with open arms with food with love into our community should the opportunity arise um i don't think we're there yet but i want to make sure that we are prepared for that should that time come and it might be coming sooner rather than later

[15:02] thank you man juni thank you mayor brockett i just wanted to thank you for giving us this opportunity to express ourselves on this situation i think similar to bob you know just seeing what's going on around the world it's it's just it's just very shocking it doesn't make us feel safe in the world and um again i think like my colleague bob said you know i just pray for peace as well so i think that was well said by bob thank you so much thank you looks like that's everyone who wants to speak so just thank you everyone for taking a moment in the middle of this international crisis to acknowledge what's going on and offer some thoughts and support so with that we'll move on to our next item i'll just note for people uh sign up for open comment we have two additional items before we're getting to that

[16:01] and the next one which we're looking forward to is a municipal court update from our fantastic judge cook judge cook if you'd like to take that away please thank you thank you mary mayor brockett and thank you city council members for the opportunity just as a housekeeping matter i'm wondering if one of the city staff is planning to run the powerpoint for me or if you'd like me to share my screen oh she's starting it okay perfect all right thank you emily and you can go to the next slide i'm going to do a brief very brief overview normally when it's the first session after a new city council has been seated i would devote my entire time to an overview of the boulder municipal court operations however given the level of interest in community court i'm going to keep this very brief and very high level but i'd be happy to meet with any of you individually if you want to delve deeper

[17:00] in the future next slide so this is just for context this is the trial court structure in colorado every judicial district has district courts which handle high level cases county courts and then also many of them have municipal courts the district courts and the county courts are funded by the state municipal courts are funded by their municipalities as you can see there is some overlap between county courts and municipal courts in terms of the types of cases that they adjudicate in the city of boulder the boulder police department and cupd are instructed to write cases into our court as opposed to the counter county court if we have a violation that covers that behavior next slide i'm not going to go through this slide in detail i just want to let you know that this slide illustrates the traditional long-standing role of municipal courts in their communities

[18:00] next slide and so this is the role of the boulder municipal court we do perform all of the traditional municipal court functions however we do a lot more than that we have some law violations that were crafted to address specific behaviors in our city for instance nuisance party and camping ordinances they may not be unique to boulder but they're not necessarily ordinances that you find in most other colorado municipalities not only do our laws reflect our local community values in terms of the types of cases we adjudicate our practices in court also reflect our local community values these values dictate that we take a problem-solving approach and that we try to get at the underlying issues that lead to a violation rather than a strictly punitive approach our community also values a process that is efficient fair respectful and gives participants the opportunity to be heard this is something that is also a best

[19:00] practice in judicial systems where it's known as procedural fairness people who experience the the criminal justice system is fair regardless of the outcome have a higher level of trust in the court and by extension the justice system as a whole and hopefully their broader city government we also pride ourselves on being innovative collaborative and evidence-based this is not a given in all courts so i i do like to um call that out we have many um collaborations that we have fostered and maintained over time just a couple of examples would be our stakeholders at cu as well as among homeless service providers i could go on but i think with that we'll move on to the next slide and this slide again i'm not going to go through this but just here's a quick summary of the types of cases that are filed in our court in the table that's in the kind of maroon colors and then the law enforcement

[20:00] agencies that file these cases i did include a pre-pandemic comparison from the year 2016 that i just happen to have that data really readily available um so it's not a perfect pre-covered um comparison to 2021 but it just it does give you a little bit of a sense and with that we can go to the next slide so now i'm going to talk a little bit about our community court initiative and if you'll go to the next slide these are the high level details of the community court grant award the grantor the target population and how we intend to use the funds as well as the period of the grant so under the current scenario the grant is due to expire at the end of september of this year next slide so if you look at the orange bubbles you can see that we're just one of seven sites nationally that was granted an

[21:01] implementation or continuation grant for the 2020 cycle and one of only 28 community courts in the united states specifically i have to tell you that we have so many partners helping us to uh implement but i have to call out one person in particular and that's devon kissing kelly our deputy court administrator whose efforts have been invaluable to me and our community partners in implementing this initiative next slide so these are the goals of the community court again i'll let you read those for yourselves and not give a lot of comment on those next slide and these are the types of cases so what i want to make clear is these are the violations we most commonly see among the unhoused population in the boulder municipal court and that are eligible for community court we do not handle more serious violations such as drug

[22:01] violations thefts and so forth and therefore those cases would not be handled in community court so i want to make it really clear the the um types of violations are very low level next slide and emily if you would just play about the first 20 seconds of this um video i just want to give the council a visual of what it looks like when we're out in the community conducting community court from remote sites i don't know if you can that link will work for you or not sometimes it takes a little moment so i'll see if okay we'll see if it will work if not this is something you all could go and observe later but sometimes a

[23:02] picture or a video is worth a thousand words when you're trying to convey to people what this looks like as we participate on an uh outreach basis or mobile pop-up basis but since it seems like it's not going to work why don't we just go on to the next slide oh there we go so one of the beautiful things about community court is that it really does involve the whole community community court is about addressing them problems of the community and in boulder municipal court one of those large issues that remains unsolved both locally and nationally is homelessness we got the idea of a community court when i attended the 2016 community justice summit which was hosted by the center for court innovation and i thought it would be great people for doing a better job

[24:01] thank you emily you can go to the next slide so what you're seeing there is um the prosecutor several court staff they are out in the community at places where the unhoused are gathering because there are resources at those sites and um they set up their um their surface and they have an internet connection i'm back in the courthouse and i'm on my computer and we're conducting court that way um and if um these are the strategies that we're using for community court um participants i've described the pop-up model um what we do is we use the fact that they received a citation for one of these types of violations that was in a previous slide as an opportunity to engage them most of the time people are able to earn dismissal of their charges by completing one of the sanctions and the the same sample sanctions are listed

[25:01] there but you can see they're really aimed at helping to resolve a person's unhoused status and those are pretty um generic options we can get very specific with people um especially if they have checked off a lot of those we can get much more creative and come up with other things that they can do in order to um to earn dismissal of their case next slide so here's some of our key accomplishments we have two slides here but this is the the first slide this shows uh that we started in january just a few months after the grant itself began um we had we began using our transitional housing for our community court clients in february um we began small case management forms with providers so we have a couple of different ones we aspire to have a large

[26:00] case management forum where all of the providers are participating but that really in other communities that are doing that they're doing it at a time when they're also attending community court as service providers and so we already have them gathered and we can do those that case management as part of a larger group um we began onboarding our substance use treatment provider in july and if you'll go to the next slide emily we can see what's um happened since then we have convened a homeless advisory council this was an idea from austin where they have a homeless advisory council having people with lived experience is really important in terms of helping us build out the model of the community court and understanding what is going to work for that population and what will not our substance use provider began delivering services um he's doing it on a pop-up basis as well he attends all of the pop-up community court sessions as

[27:00] well as our court session on tuesday mornings in the courthouse although he doesn't get a lot of business um at those sessions um but he also has um you know one of those easy ups i call them the the ten by tens that um he can set up with walls and he can set that up actually whenever he wants and have conducted his actual substance abuse treatment sessions with this population out there in the community wherever he has set up his tent so to speak which is really critical again to engagement is meeting people where they're at rather than requiring them to come to some place that they wouldn't normally spend time um we we added two more sessions per month back in october so we went from two to four sessions a month so right on average there once a week every once in a while we have a week with none in a week with two but um it was really nice that we had the that that need was identified and the

[28:01] prosecution and jen livovich from feet forward who runs that central park session asked if we would do that and just recently we identified our mental health treatment provider and so we'll be on boarding that in the very near future um in a very similar way to work the way we're doing substance use treatment and a very cool thing is that several of our court staff as well as the homeless outreach team and officers and their sergeant visited the community court in austin in early february and i have to tell you they set up austin set up an amazing agenda for them they were busy from eight to five for two straight days um they were told it was like drinking from a fire hose but they were also incredibly inspired by everything that austin's done over the last 20 years um basically it's transformed to the point where their community court is a homeless services agency first with the ability to resolve court cases as well

[29:00] we do hope that we'll have pete valdez the austin community court court administrator visit us later in the year and provide us some real hands-on additional technical assistance so any of you are interested when he's visiting we'd be happy to arrange um for you to be able to meet him as well next slide so these are some of the impacts of cobiad or the pandemic on our community court we did not envision our program as a mobile court i want to make it really clear but it was a blessing in disguise um some of our municipal court colleagues around the state are trying to take a similar approach in terms of having a a few service providers at court so they can link on house with those providers but their um their ability to connect with people is very very limited because people have to walk through that courthouse door which is a very high barrier for many of them and so for instance one of our other denver metro region cities um they generally get about 10 of the eligible

[30:01] people up here on their court date when they have those services next slide so the next slide is a really high level data about who we have served over the first five quarters so this takes us through december 31st um i have much more specific data so if you wanted to know things like how many people did we helped get ids or social security cards or whatever we could do that but i just kept it very high level one of the data sets i would like to highlight is 363 sanctions or tasks completed out of 400 assigned that's in excess of 90 as a completion rate and i've got to tell you our completion rate for community service which was really our only tool for the unhoused before we started treating people in a community court type way was i'm sure less than 10 and even the young adults that we see in fairly

[31:00] large numbers in our court with quality of life violations don't have a 90 completion rate certainly not on the first go around so um that is really due a lot to the fact that we have the ability to assist people in completing assignments on the day of court for a lot of the types of assignments but it's also about the relationships that we build and connections that we make because people then come you know are willing to come and meet with our homeless navigators on a different date to complete an assignment if necessary next slide so a couple of things that i want to just discuss is remaining challenges our court records management system is not developed to be a human services management case management system so it's not um it's pretty ill suited to that however we're hoping to reallocate or repurpose some grant funds to um to bring on board one of those types of

[32:00] systems so that we can have a really integrated uh database of the folks that we're serving um one of the big grant limitations that we've run up against more recently is that they prohibit providing grant funded services to participants with certain types of criminal charges in their past so um violent offenders and the there's a very specific definition that's used for that but it can preclude even somebody who is charged with a violent offense even if it doesn't result in a conviction and the only way to find out if the particular violation that the person had in their past qualifies under the grant or not is to actually get the police report and delve into the facts so that's it's very arduous to try to even figure that out um fortunately at least for substance use and mental health treatment this won't apply to the transitional housing but for substance use and mental health treatment if the person is

[33:00] medicaid eligible we can probably provide them that service accessing that benefit we also lack a physical site which we still hope to have at some point in the future where we can gather a large number of service providers there for people during the court sessions and that would be open to anybody experiencing homelessness not just the people who have court cases and that would then also allow us to have that large coordinating forum for coordinating case management among the different service providers and then um next slide i was hoping with this next slide to uh spend a little bit of time um sharing a few individual stories so if you'll indulge me i'll keep it really brief and one is a couple that um these are not their real names by the way for privacy reasons but ann and carl were referred to us by the homeless outreach team officers they've been living outdoors in

[34:01] a tent moving around um they were concerned about them because they were very vulnerable and is 68 and carl's 51 and they both had underlying health conditions um our court homeless navigators were the first ones to do the housing assessment so they put them into the list for housing in the denver metro region and help them collect the documentation that they would need once they were matched with the housing resource and because of their vulnerabilities they were matched pretty quickly we then put them in bridge housing or transitional housing once they were assigned to a housing resource so they could stay there until they were able to find an apartment where they could use their voucher they have now been in that home for a year we still check in on them periodically but they're doing really well a second gentleman who we're calling chris chris had many many infractions over 50 for charges like camping an open container

[35:02] in boulder over a course of about 15 years he agreed to work with us towards housing so again they got him into the uh onto the regional list for housing helped him get his documentation together and when he eventually was assigned a housing resource they helped move him in and are and we do provide follow-up uh check-ins with people that's not really part of our job but we do that because we know that people um can quickly destabilize in housing if we're not helping support them um after moving into his apartment chris got uh sober he's reconnected with his family he now participates in our advisory council and he enjoys spending his free time babysitting his grandkids and then um finally martha martha had recently gotten sober when we um encountered her which was an amazing

[36:00] thing for her to do on her own living on the streets and camping we also worked to help her get to get her documentation together and get her into housing she eventually did get a voucher and moved into an apartment she is uh spending a lot of her time um volunteering with feet forward and she's also a participant on our homeless advisory council so these are these are just some of the stories and helps you understand um kind of the our end game and and what we can hope to accomplish with the supports that we provide and next slide that's the end of my presentation the next slide actually just says questions thanks so much for that judge cook questions for the judge i see bob you've got your hand up thank you judge that was extremely helpful and always delighted to have you present to council on a quarterly basis and talk about all

[37:01] the very cool and innovative work that you're doing like it's a couple of questions judge cook one um you mentioned you had some amazing statistics about the completion rate for tasks and sanctions can you give us some examples of some of the um some of the sanctions or tasks that that are assigned to these individuals so some of the um some of the ones that are relatively um easy to complete are applying for a replacement id applying for a social security card applying for um snap or medicaid those are all things that can be done online thanks to covet that we used to have to send people to the local offices to do that so that's actually been a benefit for us but um once somebody is matched with the housing resource one of the things that we're doing is we're taking them to on different meetings that they need to go to so they need to do a voucher briefing before they actually get their voucher and that's with whoever the provider is oftentimes it's boulder housing partners but it could be

[38:00] somebody else they then need to find a place where they can use that voucher and sometimes they have supports from for instance mental health partners if they're involved but they don't always and even if they do lots of times they are more connected to and are more trusting of our homeless navigators so it's not unusual for them to help them fill out housing applications attend interviews that type of thing once they do find a landlord that will accept their voucher we're helping them we're there on moving day and helping them move in as is the homeless outreach team generally as well so um so those are some of the examples um we are i don't know to the extent to which the county court appreciates this but for instance it's not uncommon for us to say by the way your sanction in this case is to attend your county court date um at this time on this location at this location and then if they follow through they're getting credit for that so there's a wide variety of things we can do but

[39:01] our primary focus is on the various uh ways of getting people housed great thanks thanks judge cook and then a second and final question i think you mentioned that this was all stood up thanks to a grant that we received and um the only sad thing about grants is they tend to have a an end time with the money stops what what uh what is the long-term plan for potentially continuing this after the grant money is exhausted so first of all um it is possible with these grants to apply for a one-year extension if you're not going to expend the funds and we are not going to expend all our funds by the end of september and we've been told by the center for court innovation which plays a role in providing techno technical assistance to grantees that they expect these requests to be viewed very favorably and that every site that was awarded a grant this cycle will be requesting that so we are more or less planning that we're going to have the funds through 2020 uh september of 2023.

[40:02] after that you may see us requesting some assistance um for this in our budget depending on if you feel like there's been value in this that's why i mean one of the things about grants is that sometimes they can give you some funds to help prove the worth or not of a particular programming and so um if if we're finding that it's been efficacious you will probably uh see us asking for some additional funds as part of our budget well thanks and that's why i think this this type of presentation and the data that you're sharing is so super important because uh the fall of 2023 is not far away as a matter of fact we'll be working on the 2023 budget here over the next few months and so i think to the extent that you believe you need funding for the end of 2023 and into 2024 having this information this data to to prove up the efficacy as you say of the program is going to be super important so i look forward to hearing back from you in a

[41:00] couple two three months about that as we start to plan the 2023 budget thank you cook thank you thanks uh matt and rachel and jeannie well thank you update on that it's really helpful and it looks like the work is just going really well considering the those that are being impacted so thank you for that bob really asked my question with regards to the grant and knowing there's an extension so i appreciate that we can have an opportunity to fulfill that um long term um but i'll transition to a different one which is you know speaking of sort of spending our own money um you mentioned that there were some limitations with how to spend the grant i suspect that once we're liberated from the requirements of the grant and we're funding it ourselves we can then sort of expand those services and maybe cover some of the limitations that you mentioned we're currently present and so i i would just maybe encourage that in uh submitting a grant submitting a request for funding think about those limitations and and and go big and some of that and maybe just ask provide a comment of we're also looking at providing a day shelter with

[42:01] navigation services and so maybe that's a location to have a physical presence for some of this that was clearly a limitation that was was mentioned in there so i think there's some synergies to be had um but thank you so much for for what you're doing and and the work that the community court has for sure thank you thank you and we're already deep in conversation with people from hhs about uh co-locating services and even staff rachel and jimmy um it sounds like bob took matt's question and then matt took my question basically i just wanted to make sure that as we're looking at day services and and you mentioned that you needed a centralized spot for uh connections and case management but it sounds like there would be a it was even gonna use the word synergy there um so i wanted to make sure that as we uh set up that working group that you will be like you're you're on tap to participate in it and and well aware and

[43:00] doing whatever we need to do to hopefully have that synergistic sounds like yes yes absolutely thanks thanks juni thank you aaron i just have a quick question i think you may have answered that question but it's a bit of a clarification so i noticed some of the programming you mentioned pay for ids okay i mean helping someone with ids and birth certificate but i'm wondering is there funding for that or is the funding for bringing someone in the door having the staff to support them so that they can apply but is there funding for them to apply for id because an id do cost money as well yes so um it's not actually from the grant because we were already getting funding which is from um a very very small pot of hhs money that's available not just to people who

[44:00] are coming through the courtroom door but other people who might be walking into the door at the shelter and applying for an id but yes we have those funds thank you nicole just had a question um thank you judge cook and i was just wondering uh the completion rate of you know the tasks that folks are given and what they complete um being so high i was wondering if that's what other cities find as well or if we can commend you on doing a particularly good job here in boulder well all modesty aside i don't think that's what other cities are finding um and i think that's for a couple of reasons um number one we are meeting people where we're at we're going out into the community to conduct court and even though we want to have a physical location in the future um we will never give up the mobile aspect of this it will it will not be uh either or it will be an and um and secondly what you find in doing this work is it's

[45:01] so relationship based that um that's part of the reason that we have the success that we do is because our navigators our court clerks um the ones that are in court on a regular basis or out there in the community they have these relationships and um so without that i don't think that you could accomplish the same level of completion thank you that's all we've got uh thanks so much judge cook your quarterly updates are always illuminating and i know the new council really appreciated the chance to get some insight into the phenomenal work that you're doing so thanks as always thank you i really appreciate the opportunity absolutely all right so we're going to move now into item 1c which is a report from the police department with a crime update and i think we have chief harold here to talk to us about that good evening mayor brockett mayor pro

[46:01] tem friend and members of city council uh tonight i want to start this presentation differently than i usually do when discussing the quarterly crime update with council every day i review body worn camera footage of boulder police officers responding to community calls for service heroically the officers demonstrate patience and kindness when responding to complex and challenging community dynamics i want to share some of these heroic acts with the community and council so you too are aware i believe the police are in the best position to be our community ambassadors and in many instances they are the most visible representatives of our city and government often these stories go untold and thus mostly forgotten so tonight if you will indulge me i want to begin this presentation with a story if you could uh please go to the presentation and i'll start out

[47:00] emily if you don't mind switching that slide for me so on february 27 of 2022 this young man that's sitting in the car his friends called him for an emergency response because their friend had stopped breathing they knew their friend moments earlier had used fentanyl the police officers responded quickly assessed the problem and administered narcan within seconds their friend started breathing his friends were grateful for the quick response and the use of narcan and this young man will make a full recovery thanks to the quick response of our officers and responding medical personnel in 2021 boulder police department officers saved 17 people from drug overs overdoses not including cpr and aed measures

[48:00] over death overdose deaths will be higher without the quick response and training required to use narcan to save lives unfortunately like many other crimes in 2022 boulder's numbers will likely be higher because of the drugs like fentanyl flooding boulder county our first responders were dispatched to another apparent overdose incident and saved yet another life just yesterday so tonight uh dr reinhardt will discuss crime trends in boulder the state of colorado and the nation specific crime categories are trending upward the same as the state of colorado and some parts of this nation i wish i could tell you definitively the direct causation for these significant increases we can tell you that several factors are at play here and researchers across the country are reviewing numerous correlations

[49:00] we probably will not know the direct causation for years to come if at all one thing is for sure with every crime reported there is community harm and a member of our community suffers as a result the following list are correlation factors most often cited by criminalists across the country the unfortunate impacts of this pandemic causing great economic instability not only in boulder but across the state of colorado and the nation unfortunately officer staffing reductions are at play here as well the boulder police department are currently down 14 of its workforce approximately 27 out of the 180 police officers we have assigned unfortunately police legitimate legitimacy factors and police reform movements after the murder of george floyd are at play the criminal justice system faces challenges including trial interruptions

[50:02] and disruptions in social services referrals due to the pandemic pr bonds in low cash bonds on repeat offenders has been problematic in colorado for the last few years there is a tremendous lack of drug addiction services and behavioral health services in not only balder county but the state of colorado also at play are the recent legislative changes as it relates to crime and there are many in the last few years and unfortunately jail restructuring has jail restrictions have plagued us for the last couple years due to the covet 19 pandemic next slide thanks emily at this time i want to introduce our chief dana analyst um i am so happy he has decided to join boulder he had many opportunities to go elsewhere so i'm happy he's part of our team and this is uh dr daniel reinhardt he hails from the texas state university his

[51:02] focus was on environmental criminology or i think as we all know as crime science and he was born and raised in alaska and he is a very talented young man and from there daniel it's all yours emily next slide okay um thanks chief for the introduction yeah my name is dr reinhard i'm here to talk about uh public safety concerns in boulder today so the i wanna i wanna start by saying that the crime rate comparisons that we're going to talk about used publicly available data for the us and colorado through the colorado division of criminal justice these data also appear in the denver public safety executive summary report the fbi also provides publicly available crime data through their criminal justice information services after we compare the u.s state and boulder crime rates we'll turn to monthly boulder crime data so these

[52:00] monthly data are counts and we present a trend line on each of these slides that includes an average to help indicate whether counts are stable increasing or decreasing over time lastly we'll end with some discussion about recent successes that the boulder police department has experienced in targeting crime in boulder next slide please on this slide we present selected violent crime as a rate per 100 000 population violent crime includes aggravated assault murder robbery and sexual assault while boulder's violent crime rate has historically been lower than the national average the rate in boulder has been substantially increasing over the past nine years from 2013 to 2021. now this follows the colorado state trend which you'll see there is an orange line compared to the boulder's blue line next slide please here we present selected property crime

[53:00] as a rate per 100 000 population the property crime here includes burglary motor vehicle theft and all theft and larceny offenses the boulder crime rates the property crime rates of boulder and of colorado have been greater than the national average for the last several years the property crime rate in boulder increased steadily from 2015 to 2018 it dropped in 2019 and then sharply increased in 2020 with a modest decrease in 2021. next slide please the motor vehicle theft rate in colorado has been greater than the national average every year since at least 2013 and the bolder motor vehicle theft rate has been greater than the national average for the last few years as well now the boulder rate appears to mirror the colorado rate and both have been substantially increasing from 2013 to 2021. for example the boulder rate has approximately quadrupled from 100 motor vehicle thefts per 100 000 residents

[54:01] to just over 400 motor vehicle thefts per 100 000 residents next slide so now we're transitioning to local boulder data only now these are monthly counts of offenses so they don't consider the population these data represent assaults intimidation robbery and other crimes specifically targeting individuals boulders experienced an upward trend in person offenses on a monthly basis from 2017 to 2021 and greater fluctuations appeared in june of 2020 to october of 2020 and then again from august 2021 to november of 2021. the greatest peak in this graph in october of 2021 resulted from a surge of assaults and intimidation charges next slide please so on this slide we're going to talk about aggravated assaults

[55:00] aggravated assault and the next slide on robbery are both infrequent events in boulder and the boulder police department has been seeing a steady increase in these offenses over time so the aggravated assault rate has increased over this five-year period october of 2021 saw a surge in these they included numerous felony intimidation charges with a weapon such as with a knife or a handgun more more than half of these offenses seemed to occur from october 20th until the end of the month most of these offenses occurred in the late evening or early morning hours and they commonly occurred outside some of these assaults include assaults against law enforcement and first responders in the first two months of this year there have been assaults against nine police officers next slide please so keep in mind here that robbery is a relatively uncommon event in boulder and so you'll see the y-axis as a much lower

[56:00] number than some of the other slides we're talking about today so while it's an uncommon offense we saw a general increasing trend from 2017 to 2021 and while 2020 and 2021 experience a greater account of robberies this should be interpreted cautiously because it's an infrequent event in the city the greatest counter robberies in a month in june of 2020 didn't appear to be patterned in any way but the boulder police department has since begun extensive directed patrols and high crime areas where those robberies occurred next slide please the property crime property crime in boulder has steadily risen over time during this five-year period these property crimes include offenses such as motor vehicle theft burglary and vandalism among others in 2020 and 2021 we experienced a surge in these offenses in part due to hundreds of additional identity thefts and criminal impersonation charges than

[57:00] was experienced in previous years many of these identity theft and impersonation charges are linked to unemployment fraud government benefits fraud and tax refund fraud now this increase has been observed nationwide and there are multiple federal trade commission reports indicating that across the u.s 2020 experienced twice as much identity fraud as 2019. next slide please burglary has experienced an upward trend over time during this five-year during what we present is during this four year period of note there's a clear break before and after march of 2020 approximately at the midpoint of this graph burglaries in 2020 and 2021 fluctuated irregularly compared to what we would have expected given the counts in 2018 and 2019. next slide please

[58:03] here we disaggregate residential and commercial burglary accounts commercial burglary an orange line is more common than residential burglary the green line the third line above both orange and green presents the aggregated burglary count while commercial and residential burglary fluctuates slightly differently over time both kinds of burglary appear to have increased in march 2020 next slide please the downtown area in boulder has regularly been a problem place for burglaries burglaries this january continued to be a problem particularly commercial burglaries and particularly in downtown boulder near pearl street there were multiple arrests of cereal burglars in late january that we believe are responsible for reducing burglary after those arrests among the suspects arrested many of them in gate many of them admitted to engaging in multiple

[59:00] downtown burglaries the suspects had burglary tools and stolen property on their person and they also had ties to persons who fenced stolen goods the boulder police department has also experienced success with downtown directed patrol activities particularly along the pearl street mall next slide please boulders motor vehicle theft experience an upward trend in this five year period the colorado auto theft prevention authority task force presents information about motor vehicle theft in the denver metro area among their findings for 2021 vehicles appear not to be stolen randomly that is some kinds of vehicles appear more likely to be stolen older vehicles appear more likely to be stolen the newer vehicles similar information has been observed among our recovered vehicles in boulder in boulder last year 71 of recovered vehicles were made in 2015 or before

[60:00] next slide please theft from vehicles and theft of motor vehicle parts experienced an upward trend in this five-year period the month with the greatest count of these offenses occurred in december of 2021. these offenses include things like theft of catalytic converters license plate theft and theft of personal property inside of vehicles next slide please this slide presents heat maps known academically as single kernel density estimation maps of the three things thefts from vehicles out of motor vehicle parts uh motor vehicle thefts and then lastly of stolen vehicle recoveries each of these maps are for the entire year of 2021. from left to right thefts from vehicles and vehicle parts appeared to concentrate along the table mesa park and ride and also

[61:00] along 28th street running south to north and boulder the middle map thefts of motor vehicles while they appeared more dispersed throughout the city they occurred more frequently in the university hill area and near baseline road and 28th lastly stolen vehicle recoveries were similarly more often found in the university hill area and near baseline road 28th next slide please the boulder police department is proactively working with several interagency and multi-jurisdictional groups to address motor vehicle theft issues the groups that we are part of right now include the colorado auto theft prevention authority the beat auto theft through law enforcement task force and the colorado metropolitan auto theft task force next slide please the colorado auto theft prevention authority provides information on their website and they actively increase public awareness in several ways one of

[62:00] them is with educational materials that they put on social media and in flyers there are several crime prevention activities that you can do to reduce the likelihood of your vehicle being stolen or things being stolen from your vehicle things like locking your doors don't leave spare keys in your car and don't leave valuables in plain sight of your windows next slide please catalytic converter thefts is another prevalent issue in the city we try to help reduce this in part through public awareness the boulder police department has distributed educational materials on this topic and we have a crime prevention specialist that actively engages with community members to reduce these offenses when you can try to park in a garage or in a well-lit area and if you can install a car alarm next slide please bicycle thefts are on a decreasing trend from 2018 to the end of 2021 and have

[63:00] been the focus of several targeted boulder city and denver metro interventions bikes are often stolen because they're suitable targets for crime that is bicycles often are visible are valuable are accessible and they're easy to move especially when they're ridden away from where they're stolen next slide please the boulder police department was the lead on investigations with partners in the denver metropolitan area and recently brought charges against eight people for hundreds of counts of allegedly committing several dozen bike shop burglaries auto thefts and attempted burglaries and thefts the property damage carried out in 2019 and 2020 was approximately and a half million dollars according to the attorney general's office next slide please other bpd efforts and interventions have involved the distribution of information materials public awareness campaigns and consultations with individuals and

[64:01] businesses to instruct persons on crime prevention principles ultimately there are several empowering steps that each person can take to reduce the likelihood of bicycle theft next slide please so we preemptively received some questions about this presentation that i'd like to answer now some of my answers are complicated please email me if you'd like clarifications about any of the concepts i'm about to discuss in order to understand a full picture of measuring crime i'm going to be talking about things that require considerations about criminology demography geography and econometrics on the creation of charts and inferential statistics the charts presented here are for a general crime update and they are descriptive by comparison there are several kinds of inferential statistics that we're currently investigating and they're technical in ways that weren't more of a report based format because a presentation during a general crime

[65:00] update it just might be really confusing the trend lines presented in the offense charts present again descriptive attempts to demonstrate how counts of crime are changing over time they represent crime incidents while the boulder police department is currently engaged in research to understand causal claims and to measure effectiveness establishing causality scientifically is tricky it requires discussing criteria for causality it might require talking about grainger causality and related concepts like probabilistic and deterministic principles on the complications of population-based rates per month the first few charts present rates using residential population this was done with boulder data because it mirrors what was done with state and federal data elsewhere annual data for population estimates are more readily available than monthly population estimates within population estimates it's especially complicated because the most accurate approach would probably be to distinguish residential population from

[66:00] ambient population from populations served by the boulder police department so for understanding sake residential population is normally what's used with things like census data or other means ambient population estimates pertain to the population actively present in an area so like a commuter population that doesn't live in boulder but travels here for work or leisure activities and the population state the population served by bpd can include individuals outside of boulder when boulder assists other agencies like when we regularly assist the boulder county sheriff's office lastly a brief answer to a complicated problem establishing best practices for measuring pandemic relevant effects so we're currently looking into the most appropriate ways of measuring the effect of the pandemic on crime there are several criminology studies that have concluded differences in crime before and after march of 2020. many have found crime increased but they often measure this in many different ways within time series analysis i'm personally interested in looking into this with season a lot aggressive auto

[67:02] regressive integrated moving average models they're also known as arima and cerima models it depends on things like frequencies by unit of analysis stationary considerations and whether data transformations are necessary within structural equation modeling i'm also looking to see whether path analysis modeling provide a clearer picture of the direct and indirect effects the pandemic so understanding the pandemic effect is difficult for a bunch of reasons that i'll just talk briefly about one of them is that the pandemic has involved multiple strains of varying contagiousness and illness severity a second reason is that the pandemic seems to have changed things that in turn changed crime for example the pandemic affected people's routine activities different kinds of work policies quarantines university policy staffing issues with first responders and so forth next slide please

[68:04] so safety data can be complicated i put my email on this slide please let me know if i can help clarify anything about crime or criminology for example crime is often underreported but it's variably underreported and often requires victim surveys to understand that thank you for your time and i will respond to any questions thanks very much daniel appreciate the presentation and do we have any questions for daniel or ramirez rachel is first thanks for that presentation um and daniel welcome to boulder we met a couple weeks ago thanks for being here um so just wanted to get some clarification on a couple of the categories i think you said it but can you remind us what is the definition of a violent crime that fell into one of those earlier

[69:00] slides absolutely so the crime rates when i compare boulder to the state and the nation those violent crimes include aggravated assault murder robbery and sexual assault thanks um and for something like sexual assault i don't think i saw that in the slides or um in the packet it it doesn't it doesn't look like each of those categories got a slide so can you explain sort of what what that does show like if if all of them went up and and then we highlighted a couple um like aggravated assault did some of them go down or okay i guess can you just elaborate on that absolutely yeah so i aggregated the crimes in the way that i did um because of the other reports that were put out and so for space reasons we haven't talked about every kind of crime for example in neighbors there were over 30 kinds of crime and so we tried to be

[70:00] selective about it sexual assault from 2017 to 2021 has been relatively stable and it's also a relatively rare occurrence in boulder so similar to like robbery for example sex offenses don't tend to be more than uh like five to ten per month but it's obviously variable in that time frame okay so i guess i was just trying to figure out like why robbery and not sex assault when both are sort of low numbers and um any any way to shed light on that yeah um so i would say that generally they were done for space reasons um but upon request i'm more than happy to include sexual assault concerns um and the data during that five-year period okay um well i think that you know when we think about violent crimes especially as women that's one that is a top of mind concern for many people um okay and then um

[71:00] i i guess i'll just ask the same question um about the property crimes which like how many are total and how many were included or excluded from the chart yeah so uh the crime rate with property crime those include uh for the earlier slide burglary motor vehicle theft and all theft and larceny and i should say the boulder specific property crimes are broader with more categories included and it's for the similar reason the earlier ones that were considering rates i was trying to make the comparisons as equal as possible to the rates that are presented in the denver executive summary report and so that's why for the earlier rate for property crime we just list burglary motor vehicle theft and all theft as they did while the later property offenses we talk about more of them

[72:00] part of it comes down to an aggregation issue and so this is an example of how crime data are difficult when we're talking about comparisons and so when we think about the way that crimes are classified they're classified differently under a uniform crime report standard versus a neighbor standard the national incidence-based reporting system standard and those two classification standards are still different from colorado laws and so there might be seven kinds of burglary and then they're both aggregated in different ways to understand residential burglary and commercial burglary and so like these are absolutely good questions um and i i hope that i'm helping to answer them and also clarify that some of this requires more time than a 20-minute presentation yeah i appreciate that and i guess one thing i just i i want to be careful about is you know all the slides that we're showing or

[73:00] most of them are are crime rates that are going up and and i assume that there are you know we should i think i guess bicycles maybe we're going down but not a lot and so i don't want us to be um highlighting just the ones that are going up if there are some within those categories that are going down um you know i think that we could be um frightening people um you know or inflaming if if we're only highlighting that the upward trend so i just want to make sure to understand kind of how we're how we're picking which ones get get their own slides and what pieces we're pulling out um and and so i i guess just to finish up that thought person offense what what falls under that category and was there anything left out of that because that was another one that was going way up yeah so um person offenses um includes generally eight or nine kinds of offenses within those eight or nine kinds of offenses it includes things like murder non-negligent manslaughter assaults of different kinds so like simple assaults and aggravated assaults

[74:01] different kinds i said intimidation technically they're called menacing um different kinds of robbery and other crimes of that nature sort of specifically targeting individuals so sexual crimes would fall within that generally speaking okay so some of that then is yeah i guess kind of shown in two different ways because that would a lot of that would be included under violent crime as well yeah or at least the first couple categories that you mentioned okay um those are all my questions for now thanks for clarifying that if i could just jump into i um first first of all the majority of crimes are seen increases uh it's it's um the ones that have remained stable um are sexual assaults um and some of the uh disorderly crimes that we see quality of life crimes because of borrowed closures and so forth over the last couple years but our intention is not to frighten the

[75:00] community all with this presentation my intention is to be transparent and accountable to this community about crime and how it's impacting this community and um we are seeing significant community harm um because of crime and that is my intention is to be transparent so that's all i want to say i just wanted to clarify that i appreciate that thank you juni and tara thank you so much and i actually want to say that i do appreciate rachel's comment about you know ensuring that we're highlighting where you know either crimes have gone down or there's a reduction because um i think it's a bit alarming that you know uh police chief mayors you came to give a presentation and it's mostly about how crime is going up i'd love to hear about you know where crime has either gone down or how things

[76:02] have improved as well because i would imagine that's also part of the work that you do in the community um i just have a quick question about um you are talking about crimes and i wanted to know if that also encompassed uh cu properties meaning the cu campuses now thank you for the question uh councilmember juni um and again um i don't i do not want anybody here or the community to think that i am only reporting on bad things the the crimes that we've had significant impacts with um are were accounted for in this presentation and so um i um and so your second question was that about cu property and they have their own crime data they are their own jurisdiction and they have their own crime uh stats um the exciting part of that is is we've entered into an mou so we can share data back and forth because

[77:01] obviously these trends remain pretty consistent on cu's campus and sam daniel mentioned routine activities theory the some of the offenders obviously use both cu's property and boulder's property to commit crimes so it's important that we're both aware of our crime trends and we're talking regularly on that and our databases are set up to understand um these crime patterns and routine activity theories of these offenders does that answer your question council member joseph thank you very much thank you uh tara and then mark we did have some good news the bicycle crimes went down and um our police officers saved lives so there's some good news right there and so the first thing i want to do is thank the police officers really to my dream is my my big dream you know my big dream is for the police officers for

[78:00] the police department to work together and partner with the community so we can have a better place to live and i feel i want to thank you um police chief harold because i feel like that's really at the crux of what you want you want you want to make our police department better you are giving them dei um training and all the different things that are so important to so many of us and i think um i just want to say thank you we appreciate it and all how much you care so that's the first thing i want to say the second thing is i feel like it's always better to live in reality so if there is an increase in crime we need to know about it why because there's a lot of crimes of opportunity we need to lock our cars don't ever leave your car open ever i've gone on to next door and somebody always writes 30 seconds i left my card for 30 seconds don't ever you can be cold in your car so all these different um these different opportunities to make to to make ourselves safer are really

[79:00] important for the community and we need to know um how to be safer and that we need to make sure that we do what it need that we do what we can to be safer so i didn't want to mention that and i want to give you a special thanks because a year or so ago it seemed like all was lost for bicycles i was pretty depressed about it i know a lot of people were and we've come a long way so i'm excited to see what your plan is going to be for all the other trending upward crimes especially let's say catalytic converters and motor vehicle theft i do have one question actually believe it not just my little speech of yay the police and that is i was a little disturbed by the table mesa park and ride tell us what we can do what can you do what can we do how can we change that trend a lot of people especially in south boulder east boulder park there and if we're going to

[80:01] make a dent in our transportation goals that's an important place yeah first of all thank you very much councilmember weiner um i appreciate your comments and um yeah the park and ride uh in all locations in boulder are problematic and we're working with the management team out of denver you can tell if you look at the park and ride at table mesa it is completely structured differently than some of the other ones up along the 36 corridor mostly because they have taken great measures with crime prevention through environmental design tactics on those and they are slow to respond to the table mesa with additional lighting but we are working in close collaboration with them to improve some of these issues that we've identified i can tell you our officers have been down there putting out crime prevention leaflets putting crime pamphlets on people's cars to alert them that we do have serious

[81:00] issues especially at that one as it relates to motor vehicle theft and catalytic converter theft so we are hopeful that we continue to work and they have their own police department too so they can provide additional patrols as well but i'm confident that we continue to work with them and they start making improvements on that building to stop some of this motor vehicle theft and catalytic converter theft i hope that's helpful and then my last question is um i agree with rachel sexual assault is extremely scary i know it's one of the scariest things for me so tell me in the different park and rides and in the um parking garages how is it are is it not any worse there i think women probably want to know we we do not have um i cannot remember at any point that we had a sexual assault at one of the park and rides that was reported um but the lighting the lighting there needs to

[82:00] be improved and there needs to be some crime prevention um mechanisms in place that just need to be improved in the building and so we're confident within the year we'll get some of those improvements going in the right direction thanks mark then warren thank you mr reinhart and thank you chief um obviously i prefer other news but i appreciate the candor and transparency um that you showed in giving it to us directly and without any effort to to um escape the reality of where we are uh i actually only have two questions the first is is really very minor but i just need to know uh mr reiner why why are criminals targeting older cars but that does not you know it seems counterintuitive um so you know again causality is difficult i

[83:02] have two hypotheses that i've been talking to the command staff about at the boulder police department one of them is that older vehicles are less likely to have auto theft prevention devices installed a second hypothesis is that there are differences in how motor vehicle thefts are charged and so that in part is based on the value of vehicles and so it could like a hypothesis is that older vehicles are of less value and so they are charged differently when they are stolen those are two hypotheses that we've been talking about but we we don't really know definitively okay my other question uh is for the chief one of the elements that you listed as impeding our ability to get after some of the to lower some of these crime statistics is the large number of vacancies that you're currently experiencing on on staff

[84:00] is there any light at the end of the tunnel with respect to that is you know can you can you um uh give a projection as to whether or not you're going to be able to fill those vacancies uh or what the timetable might be for doing so and uh again right at the end of the tunnel um is there any thank you so much for that question and i'll be more than happy to provide a full staffing update um in the future if you want i do think there's light at the tunnel um i do think deputy chief weinheimer is on this call and he's been doing a remarkable job uh with our public information officer doing some innovation to attract people to boulder and so i think that by this time next year we'll be in in better shape we've got officers scheduled for academies we're running testing right now so to be brief right now yes there's light at the end of the tunnel but um i would

[85:01] i will just offer that i meet um weekly with chiefs from across the state of colorado it is extremely hard to recruit for police officers right now and um it is we are doing a lot of innovation around this issue um to get people uh to want to come here and we're offering lateral bonuses to people that come from other agencies in the state of colorado so we our numbers are going to improve um it's also retaining the officers that we have has been problematic and i don't know if deputy chief weinheimer is on here if he wants to add to that as well um but i think it's worthwhile a further discussion on this chief uh evening council carrie weinhammer deputy police chief i'll just add a couple of comments um chief's right it's extremely difficult to recruit new officers right now in our current process we have about 50 some applicants historically you know going back a few years we could have several hundred

[86:02] and that that's a it's a local trend it's a national trend our goal is to hire 24 to 25 officers a year uh in 2021 we hired 27. that said we're now sitting on 27 vacancies uh and don't forget that it takes almost a year from the time we post a process hire an officer with no experience and get them out on the street on their own so there is that lag time that we're always going to be facing we're trying to hire more lateral officers but so is every other agency so i think we're going to turn the corner if we slow down the attrition rate and are able to hit our targets of 24.25 a year i think in a couple years we'll be caught up thank you i appreciate it i just want to comment because um council member while i really brought up a great point that i follow

[87:02] um you brought up the price of cars in the older model cars and i think this speaks volumes to who's being harmed by these crimes and unfortunately the older model cars are not worth as much and therefore the colorado state law does not have the same consequences for those types of crimes so the offenders know that we've interviewed offenders they say that but unfortunately think about if you were a single mother driving a 1992 toyota corolla and your car gets stole stolen it has significant community harm to that and so it's a great point council member wallach it's something that i'm passionate about education on these issues because who are the real victims of this type of crime and it is not people that are driving expensive cars their bypass for these lower level type of cars so i just wanted to add that thanks for the question councilmember wallach thank you for the answer appreciate it lauren and nicole and bob

[88:03] thank you um as i appreciated having the presentation on this you know updated information i think um like a number of other people i some of the trend lines are clearly troubling i think there's also a question in my mind of given the same data if i were you know looking through it if i would come up with the same trend lines and so i think that's why i have a lot of questions sort of around um how we got there and you know what this shows so i think first of all i'm really interested to know you know when this more complex analysis you spoke of might be coming in front of us because i think that that um could be really enlightening yeah so

[89:00] um i'm sorry was that is that a question you'd like me to yeah it seems like when is that sorry when is that um report when should we expect to see that yeah so there's many things that i discussed throughout the presentation and so there's different kinds of analyses for different kinds of problem solving um we like to use sort of a situational crime prevention approach where we consider specific offenses in specific places because we're likely to find we're likely to measure appreciable differences when we do that it's hard to target all crime in the entire city because crime happens differently in different places to answer your question sort of more succinctly um it kind of depends on the problem um but it's something that we're interested in doing very quickly something we're interested in doing soon um and then sort of how the format for that develops we'll have to discuss going forward if it's a written report or you know something of that nature okay thank you

[90:00] um i think you know there is information that i'd like to see included here rachel asked a lot of great questions around sort of what categories each one of these slides includes in terms of types of crime and in the future is that something that you guys could include across the board for these types of slides yes yeah that going forward it's something that we could have it on the slide you know if that would be helpful that would be really helpful of course yeah and council member folkerts just uh just to let you know a lot of this information is readily available on our community dashboard it's just if you want to come in and we could have somebody give you a tutorial i think it's fascinating and same type of trend lines i mean there's a lot of a lot a lot of information on that community dashboard thank you

[91:00] one of the things that i think that i'd you know we have a lot of data around what kinds of crimes are happening i'd also be really interested to know sort of on the part that in my opinion we can control a little more you know in terms of the police department itself like do we have data on um response times like could we see response times across five years to see how that's um relating to some of these uh you know relating with these other numbers that we're seeing and then also time allocation you know like how much of the department time is being spent responding to particular kinds of crime i think that that would be interesting to know as well would it be possible to include data like that yes and as a matter of fact i'm glad you asked that we just got done doing a complete staffing and workload analysis for the police department that's going to be part of our master plan process

[92:00] what's interesting is calls for service have remained steady for the past 10 years but the complexity of the calls for service have changed dramatically and we most certainly will be sharing that data with you as part of another presentation i hope as part of the master plan process by dr troy payne who did that analysis for us and it's interesting especially if you have any historical perspective as it relates to boulder uh the findings are are really interesting so yes we can most certainly get you all of that information as well councilman reforkelsh thanks that would be great that's it for now for my questions thank you nicole and bob thank you i just want to echo everybody's thanks um for this presentation i also wanted to thank you for putting out information as to how we in the community can try to help you all and help prevent crime um and um

[93:00] yeah i'm just gonna echo some of those things for the community once again this is so important use u-locks on your bikes lock your car doors don't leave keys in your car as uh convenient as that sometimes seems to be a place for spare keys um all of these things will help us all lower crime um in our community so uh thank you for doing that i know um the the uh thefts and things that table mesa park and ride and my area of town uh have been particularly of concern for those of us that like to park there when we say um when we do travel not pandemic to go to the airport so thank you for all your efforts there um and i i really just want to um just thank you all for uh putting together so much of this data um i know that this has been a big area for you chief harold just trying to wrangle all of this information and get it into a way that we can um interpret it and understand it speaking of people taking questions lauren kind of took one of my questions but i just want to restate it here um understanding the statistical

[94:01] significance of those um trends that are potentially in the data i think is absolutely critical and you know when when i look at those graphs right there's a lot of variability and i know chief harold we've talked about this about how there's seasonal variability and the pandemic had an impact and all of this though the variability in those graphs is really large and that the sort of the trends that we're seeing are much smaller and so i think it really is critical for us um in thinking about what is happening in our community with regard to crime over time and where are we now in a broader uh context it's really important that we have those those those numbers and that information so dr reinhardt and and chief harold would be wonderful to have that as soon as possible um just to get you know what it what is the statistical significance of what we're seeing because i think in a while so i know we're not talking policy tonight but um i think it'll help us as

[95:02] council think about you know where where are places that we can um you know impact on crime more right if we know that certain things are statistically significant and others you know may just be natural variability um i think that that you know helps us get just a picture and an understanding of what's going on so you know for me just looking at some of those analyses of um the the trends would be incredibly valuable um for for really understanding what's going on here and i want to just for the benefit of the community i'm not questioning the data at all right what what i am just wanting us to be really sensitive to is that descriptive statistics don't actually um tell us whether things are kind of um the degree to which things are changing over time we can't draw you know these conclusions that you know wow crime is increasing so much in the city by looking at you know a few years worth of data without having some statistics and and i think that there it's likely that

[96:00] some of those trends are significant it would just be nice to to know that and i don't i mean significance in a statistical significant sense not in a impact of crime on people um everybody who is impacted by crime um it is significant you know for for them so i don't mean dismiss that i just think it's going to help us um as we're thinking about getting a picture in our city yeah i appreciate that dr spear and i i couldn't agree with you more and i'm hoping you come in and we we figure this out together um because um we all we all are in this together right and uh you know what what you said is so powerful to me that once you're a victim of a crime and this is so true with even property crime you are never the same and we do know that through research so the more that we work together on reducing community harm the better the the vitality and the livability of the city so i couldn't agree with you more dr spear

[97:04] thanks nicole uh bob and then matt wow what a great partnership we've got a super geeky uh police department and i say that in the most complimentary way we've got a super geeky city council so what what a wonderful marriage chief thanks so much to you and dr reinhardt and uh deputy g for bringing us all these great statistics um as has been said before some of the stories are not happy stories they're part of local and regional and national trends i know you're trying to get to the bottom of it but we appreciate very much the transparency that you bring to um to all of this and um and i know it's even more difficult with uh with being down 14 and i know you're all working super hard in a very competitive environment to uh to get staff up to full strength all the questions that i had have already been asked but i just have one uh question which i always ask a chief to you and to

[98:00] i've asked through the years for your predecessors um you know we're of course only a legislative body and so there's a limitation on what we can do but the two things we can do are um provide you with the laws that you need and provide you with the budget that you need no no last year you did come to us and ask for a law change on a particular matter and you asked for some uh budget relief and we gave you both of those and so my question tonight is the same question i always ask chief which is do you need any law changes and do you need any budget now and thank you so much councilmember yates i really appreciate the support i'll be just really honest um i i don't need neither i just need the support uh of this council moving forward these are very challenging times um and um you know we're gonna impact crime and disorder there there's no doubt about it but this is um very unusual times in this country and and boulder's not immune to those trends and so we're going to move forward we're

[99:01] going to impact crime and disorder and i just need your support and we are doing a lot of good work in the boulder police department and we're working with the city manager's office to increase our numbers because policing does matter it matters a lot and so i just look forward to working with you all about these very important issues to this community so thank you very much councilman member yates thank you chief and you do have my support thank you great matt and i'll wrap this up um well thanks chief for presenting this and and thanks daniel i we appreciate just the information and it's helpful to get this certainly as a new council member to get kind of this initial sort of review of where we're at and sort of hopefully we can go from there um to sort of follow up on bob's uh you know fellow the geekdom that is incumbent on this call i mean it seems like there's been this sort of vulcan mind meld

[100:00] because uh almost all the questions i had written down were answered by my colleagues um but it does leave sort of one piece that i want to follow up with nicole a little bit just speaking about the data because i think getting the initial data about these individual crimes over trend over time is really important i think the next evolution is starting to look at the causal relationships over other societal indicators as a function of those things i mean i think that's a great next step you know one thing that i'm interested of is like with regards to robbery or motor vehicle theft where are we in compared to comparable cities around the country are we higher are we lower are we just playing catch up to what is a nominal amount of that crime not acceptable but but what is considered nominal for a 100 000 person community with a college challenge like those are things like i just don't know the answer are we twice that rate or we have so those sorts of extra pieces i think really build the context around the data which i think builds on a little bit of what nicole was saying is it's hard to sort of see it individually but the context and the sphere of that causal relationships is really helpful so i'm hopeful we can build on that

[101:01] because that will give me a better understanding of where we can impact in policy that couples with some of the policing and law enforcement work you're doing to make those broader impacts in our community agreed sir all right well i think that that wraps us up so thanks again very much chief harold and dr reinhard welcome appreciate the analysis uh my colleagues did ask every possible question that i could have had the follow-up information was great so i'll echo the thanks of everyone and also uh looking forward to some of the additional information that was requested i thought those were some great requests from some of my colleagues uh to dive a little deeper into into these numbers and what we can infer from them so look forward to that additional information over time as well absolutely thank you mayor okay thanks so much again and it brings us to the end of item 1c and alicia i believe it's time for open comment and you are correct sir great uh ryan do you want to start us

[102:01] out by reading out our guidelines we'll do absolutely thank you emily for bringing up those slides um and thank you to all of the members of the community uh here joining us this evening um all right emily we're seeing okay now all the blocks are gone looks clear thank you um the city has engaged with crew members to co-create a vision for productive meaningful and inclusive specific conversations this vision does support 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 and the following are examples of rules of decorum found in the boulder revised code and these will be upheld during this meeting all remarks and testimony shall be

[103:00] limited to matters related to city business no participant shall make threats or use other forms of intimidation against any person obscenity racial epitaphs and other speech and behavior that disrupts or otherwise impedes the ability to conduct the meeting are prohibited and participants will sign up using their their full names and audio testimony is only allowed at this time thank you okay thanks for that ryan our first three speakers are sherry hack christopher centeno and patrick murphy we have two minutes each hi city council can you hear me yes great thank you hi my name is jerry hack i'm a 20-year plus resident of boulder i wanted to talk about a couple of things tonight first of all i would like

[104:00] to request that when people at open comment for city council that people identify themselves as to whether or not they're boulder residents and i would really prefer that only boulder residents can speak at open comment okay my next topic i want to talk about equity and i looked up equity in the in my dictionary in my two dictionaries means the quality of being fair or impartial it also require refers to law a system of jurisprudence or a body of doctrines and rules developed to supplement serving to supplement and remedy the limitations and inflexibility of common law an equitable right or claim equitable treatment of all citizens i.e law and the antonym means unfair unjust and unrequitable biased and prejudiced we all know this but i wanted to look it up because i feel there is a bias and prejudice in boulder when it comes to policies

[105:00] that do not ensure the right of boulder citizens to safety and security in our public spaces priority appears to be given to those who are who break the law and keep on committing repeat offenses in our in our city i also this is thank you chief harold for really and dr reinhart for an excellent presentation and um it was very interesting to me to hear the city council's reactions and there seemed to be a lot of cheering for the fact that bike theft has gone down well it went up before it went down maybe there's no more bikes to steal a little tongue and cheek there but also there seem to be a little bit of uh a lot of cheering for the fact that sexual assault is rather low and that's great but there's i what i heard was that there's five to ten of those a month and that's one of our lowest statistics and at five or ten a month that means there's one every three to six days

[106:02] and to me that doesn't seem acceptable either there was a lot of talk about what we can do to bring the crime rates down one thing we could do is open the jail another thing we could do is stop releasing criminals out on the street with tickets and keep stop re-releasing them into the community and also you know to be honest i heard a lot of i heard a lot of victim blaming when we when on a city council was talking about the um presentation by dr reinhard you know just because someone leaves their car unlocked or doesn't lock their bike with a u-lock doesn't mean that they're responsible for the crime happening or that or that they could have even prevented it i mean yeah you shouldn't leave your car unlocked but that doesn't mean you deserve to have your car stolen i mean

[107:01] um i see unlocked cars i see people leaving their purses in the car i see people leaving their purses in shopping carts in the grocery store but i don't steal so you know the chief spoke of community harm i have been a victim of crime panhandler threatened to shoot me when i wouldn't give him money back in 2020 he was released back out on the street i heard that he was again panhandling at mcguckin's parking lot fairly recently i did call the police and um i also posted about it on nextdoor and uh i'll never forget one person's reaction to me on nextdoor was well he seems like a really nice guy and i'm thinking yeah till till he threatens the next person i apologize our visible timer but i'm pretty sure you're you're over i can't see the timer i apologize thank you so

[108:01] much thank you thank you for listening um all right can we get that timer back up for the the next speaker please and that next speaker is christopher centeno followed by patrick murphy and julie mccabe okay uh can you hear me yes can you just give us a moment oh there's the timer okay christopher go ahead okay i'll start uh i'm a boulder homeowner uh but i'm witnessing a lot of long time neighbors selling their homes and moving elsewhere and i really think that's because boulder has not been able to control crime all policies towards criminal activity must first protect the public the problem with boulder's existing approach are policies that protect criminals

[109:01] over the public what i call the get out of jail free card that revolving door that's criminals harm the public and they get right back out to reoffend so who are the repeat offenders first we have the hardcore criminal element that's basically laughing all the way to the bank uh the thought that this crew can somehow be retrained to get a 25 an hour job is not tenable they can make big bucks boosting a few cars a week and flipping those to the local gangs then we have the petty theft crew where there are just zero consequences just read the police reports and you continuously see police stopping transients from somewhere else with multiple open warrants and stolen property in their possession they get a new ticket which they throw in the trash finally we have a seriously addicted encampment crowd they steal and support a habit or a high risk for being violent and unpredictable our local police reports are full of this group terrorizing boulder citizens

[110:01] assault and felony menacing have grown to be common and home invasions are now a thing what protects most voter rights from all of this the thankless job of the boulder police department and chief herald however their hands have been tied by jail reform being pushed by the city council the municipal judges and prosecutors and the county sheriff the solution stop the silly get a jail free card that concept only works when playing the game with monopoly it does not work in the real world as you just heard from chief hurled thank you thank you christopher we have patrick murphy julie mccabe and then sequel i'm waiting for the timer my name is patrick murphy i've lived in boulder 52 years this presentation is about boulder climate action continuing to ignore wind source and wrecks

[111:01] my previous presentations prove that the utility occupation tax is a carbon tax and that over time boulder has 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 is collected each year and not used for carbon reduction could enable all boulder residences and businesses to be 100 percent renewables today using one source incentives not once has anyone mentioned wind source incentives in any of the excel partnership meetings renewable energy certificates also known as rex 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 on january 10th carolyn elam made the following ludicrous statement quote a renewable energy certificate or attribute that doesn't come from emissions reduction or displacement of

[112:01] fossil fuel doesn't meet the criteria of our community end quote there is no such thing as a wreck that doesn't do both each wreck represents one megawatt of renewable electricity period the denigration of rex is an ongoing propaganda relic of the failed muni effort is the critical flaw of the climate tax for residential users missing the fact that all those with solar or wind source will pay nothing or a small fraction of the tax many users in the future could buy wind source and pay a fraction of the still regressive tax and the rest would have an ever increasing tax burden carolyn elam admitted that 50 of the cap tax was spent on personnel is this new tax mostly for paychecks or carbon reduction thanks thanks patrick julie mccabe lynn siegel and i believe michelle rodriguez is not in the meeting so darren o'connor after that

[113:05] can you hear me good uh greetings thank you for your attention i'm julie mccabe and i live on arapahoe avenue and i've emailed these questions to city council members state law directs police to issue misdemeanor summonses to persons in possession of less than four grams of schedule one and two drugs with diversion which means no jail via county drug court sentences for probation rehabilitation and community service are boulder police issuing these summonses in significant numbers if yes will the city publish data including number of summonses issued the incident location diversion entered by the county court and if the diversion was successfully completed if the answer is no police aren't writing a significant number of summonses for possession of less than four grams of drugs why not

[114:03] to be clear after my talking with police city bureaucrats and boulder county legislatures and looking at available records my concern is these summonses are not being written by the police and therefore no diversionary sentences for drug addicts are occurring as contemplated by state statute thank you for your time thank you julie lynn siegel darren o'connor and katie learn i went to testify at the capitol against modular new nuclear reactors and i got a window at the state capital i got a window it's been two years you know like what doesn't this community get about this

[115:00] and two minutes we have 45 minutes we have more people in boulder now than ever and three minutes each is just fine especially when you're less than 45 minutes so please i don't want to implore you or beg you you know but th this just makes practical sense um the costs in this community are going up medicare just went up 21.60 a month my water bill just went up 15 a month starting october um my utility bill has gone way up we do need to municipalize so far as boulder strong you know bold or strong boulder is not strong

[116:00] you know the fire we aren't strong against the fire we aren't strong against um a serial shooter that came here from syria when he was three years old in terrible conditions over there and you know now we've got a world war coming on us so i just wonder if people could be more curious like do you know anything about victoria newlin and how she did a coup in ukraine in 2014 like find out about these things because it's more than just another you know communist i apologize your time is up but thank you for your testimony um michelle rodriguez has sent it but i don't believe she's here we'll check back again at the end of the list so darren o'connor katie lear and you

[117:00] have mon jack hi council darren o'connor i'm speaking on behalf of the naacp boulder boulder police department recently publicly released data on officer use of force shortly before it was required to do so under the settlement agreement with mr lawrence this came due to mr lawrence's pain and suffering and shouldn't be called transparency tonight's crime data in conjunction with the data provided in the settlement with mr lawrence which included the number of officers on patrol each month provided a rare opportunity to assess whether the number of officers on patrol has an impact on rates of crime and the outcome council members for the email i shared in the graph i provided showing the data analysis is that there is essentially no correlation between the number of officers on patrol and crime rates the rate of crime is the same if 98 officers are on patrol or 122. that's a significant difference in

[118:00] number of officers of 25 percent it would be foolish to take my word for this based on only two years of data i believe it is your duty to look further into this and release more data from bpd it is apparent that we really may not need the 26 more officers the chief is attempting to hire i also want to share that shea castle wrote about the use of force data and shared that chief herald in selling icat council bemoaned the lack of a mechanism to red flag police officers engaged in patterns of behavior that are not desirable the chief's claim is on its face false with in with the information the city and police released under the settlement it's clear the data is there officer lolita in that data stood out like a sore thumb for using force nearly 10 times as often as the average officer it's time for real transparency and sharing of information about all of our officers and is clear it is clear that that's possible the mechanism chief herald is bemoaning

[119:01] a lack of is transparency thank you so much thank you darren next next we have katie lear you'll have montjac and shelby icardenas if your mic is now open you'll want to press star six to unmute yourself on the phone hi can you hear me yes i don't see my timer yeah so i have to open by saying i was pretty astounded at the comments on ukraine uh while i feel very sorry for the people of ukraine i feel a whole lot more sorry for the people of boulder who are living in a crime wave that as i listen to the presentation by

[120:01] chief harold and the phd reinhard you guys all seem to be in a state of disbelief at what you have created i mean it's really rather shocking i've written to most of you in the past i've only gotten a response from bob yates he's the only one who ever had the courtesy or decency to respond so what i've learned as a member of this community is that local government is supposed to be responsive you guys are not responsive you are not paying attention to how upset the people of boulder are you're sitting here quibbling with chief harold over the statistics and the data she's 14 down in police force i didn't hear one question from any of you about how you're going to replace her her police force i had an employee who had his truck stolen all his tools and then i have to see a presentation by judge cook telling about the great policies you've done to help the people some of whom are creating these crimes

[121:01] so what are you going to do for the citizens of boulder i i would like to hear a rigorous conversation about what your plan is to protect the people who live in boulder who pay your salaries some of whom voted for you i did not vote for you having said that i'd like to hear a rigorous conversation on what good the people in colorado have gotten from the law that reduced the holding of narcotics to a misdemeanor what good has this done i'll tell i'll answer it for you it has spiked the crime in colorado and in boulder you guys caused it you need to fix it you owe us that thank you thank you katie next we have you have mon jack and shelby picard dennis and edwin zoe can you hear me yes hi thank you so much for having me my name is uh you have manjak and i've been part of the hospitality uh community in

[122:00] boulder for the past 16 almost 17 years and today i'm speaking on behalf of the colorado restaurant association of the boulder chapter i know that uh we're jumping in ghana a little bit because you have a study session for the upcoming patio expansion but we figured might as well reach out to you a little bit ahead of time it is no secret that the restaurant industry has suffered greatly in the past two years due to covet pandemic not only through restrictions and regulations but also through an increase of cost of operations supply chain issues and labor shortages therefore the cra along with the boulder with the boulder restaurant community largely support the continuation of expanded outdoor dining and employs the city council to use and the arpa dollars uh to support the program we know that downtown specifically uh but the hospitality restaurant industry as a whole is a vibrant um

[123:00] part of our city and what really attracts tourism here and what um support retail in downtown so um we're the cra we'd like to advocate for a long-term version of vision with the understanding that the restaurant and hospitality industry aren't looking for a handout but rather a partnership to steer our industry back to healthy business practices we would like for you to consider as you are entering your study session on march 8th that expanding the patio uh serves as a lifeline for restaurants during the worst two years uh in living memory providing extra revenues and a way to keep our staff employed we need this program available for restaurant community without incurring new additional costs through at least october of 2022 in order for us to use uh these revenues and as an effective economy to recover um the idea in general is that what we are advocating for is to allow us to continue the current program while you keep on debating on a

[124:00] long-term solution so we can actually plan ahead for the expenditures for the expenditures are bound to come and please consider using federal funds in order to support this program and make it affordable and accessible i'm afraid your time is out but thank you for your testimony i appreciate it i know shelby picard dennis edwin zoe and jay lowsky hi can you hear me yes hi my name is shelby and i'm a resident of boulder and a student at the university of colorado law school i'm commenting in support of resolution 1301 which concerns a site i had an opportunity to visit along with all other affordable housing efforts there's a clear need for affordable housing in boulder where the cost of living is already high and covett has exacerbated the issue state and national actions to increase affordable housing options in light of these recent events further demonstrate

[125:00] the magnitude of this crisis for instance the state of colorado has proposed to dedicate 400 million dollars of federal relief funds to affordable housing thus this development should be a priority and more economically feasible the existable affordable the existing affordable housing developments in boulder are high quality residences that beautify the community and enhance the livelihoods of lower income citizens in boulder in fact they're hardly distinguishable from neighboring non-affordable housing developments that being said the value in ensuring that each and every one of our citizens feels important to the community rather than marginalized cannot be understated this value is codified in the inclusionary housing provisions providing that inclusionary housing is necessary to preserve diverse housing opportunities for the city's residents and working people as well as promoting the health safety and welfare of the community from a practical standpoint doing so will ensure that boulder can maintain a robust workforce and reduce the

[126:01] detrimental environmental effects of transportation for those who remain employed in boulder and are forced to live elsewhere as a final note i hope the city considers constructing the new development with upcycled materials as it did in the nearby spark neighborhood making boulder more accessible and not cost prohibitive is crucial to uphold our community's values and i urge city council to adopt resolution 1301 thank you thank you shelby now edwin zoe and then jay alaski hi everybody can you hear me yes wonderful hi everybody i'm edwin toe owner of zomama restaurant in kamea ramen located on tinden pearl i am proud to be a part of the west pearl business community for over a decade and i am proud to be one of very few minority owned businesses in downtown today i and other merchants including pasta jace western

[127:01] west end tavern jack central wonder press and other retail merchants are asking the city council to restore west pearl accessibility we understand and appreciate the city's action to provide extra seating capacity for restaurants when indoor dining was severely limited during the pica covid however indoor dining limitations no longer our challenge instead it is a lack of accessibility and recovering from our losses personally on the day of the street closure two years ago zoma suffered more than 50 percent of client revenue due to the street closure and we still have not returned to normal levels despite restoring an indoor seating and increase in outdoor seating in addition the street closure has made wet west pearl that used to be vibrant at night to be ghostly vacant so much so that both soma hawaii and chimera ramen have closed as early as 8pm

[128:00] westpro is a special and distinct business district different from the pedestrian mall in east pearl we invest our time and money into our businesses in west pearl because of the accessibility it provided which pearl street mall lacked we respectfully request the city to restore west pearl accessibility as soon as possible speaking for myself i am opposed to implementation of outdoor dining pots for west pearl because one street pods will further limit west pearl accessibility two it does not make economic sense to invest in hundreds of thousands of dollars to increase seeding capacity when we can't even fill the seeds that we do have and lastly they are unfair to retail merchants in small restaurants like mine as pods are only for for the benefit of restaurants with deep pockets at the expense of accessibility to our community thank you thank you mr zoe apologies for mispronouncing your name now final speaker is jay lasky

[129:04] hi you guys hear me yes everybody asks that don't they hi city council my name is jay oluski and i own pasta jays and have been in business in downtown boulder for almost 34 years uh thank you guys for your continued support the outdoor dining program was a great solution to get customers to come downtown to support restaurants when there was limited inside dining available during the pandemic with the pandemic over and restrictions lifted this is solving a problem that doesn't exist anymore furthermore is creating a perception that westperl is not accessible and has a perception emphasis on perception of no parking which has become a reality basically the most important point we want the most important point we want to create an environment that brings locals to downtown through accessibility or a perception thereof they are the ones who support downtown year round

[130:00] parklet seating doesn't get more people downtown the tourists will always be there during the summer and the weekends we have leased our spaces on west pearl based on our understanding by the city of not only pedestrian traffic but also drive by traffic and parking it is not fair to change the rules of the game absent of the pandemic we put our investment into west pearl based on there would be parking and traffic if we wanted to be on the bricks we would be with all the vacancies furthermore our kitchen and our restaurant is designed for what we built it as pasta days we see 120 people any additional seeding doesn't help our food sales only increases our food ticket times and angry customers in addition traffic counts are suffering during weekdays monday through thursdays lunches and dinners with office closures and a perception of inaccessibility and no parking west pearl is becoming a ghost town thank you guys for your continued

[131:00] support and thank you for your time this evening and look forward to working with you on this program thank you jane right that's everybody as i understand that michelle rodriguez is still not present so uh do we have any staff responses nory entries it's anything you know in common they see none any council responses see we've got one from nicole and then rachel thank you um thanks everybody for uh speaking to us so late um always appreciate that um i just wanted to address a couple of things that were mentioned during open comment one was a statement that the jail has closed the jail is open uh daily bookings are actually published online i think the report from yesterday showed that about a dozen people were booked into the jail yesterday so i just wanted to make sure folks are clear on that the other thing i wanted to address was the types of um

[132:00] issues that community court deals with just so that folks know what this program is going toward which just feels important as we're kind of talking about this program and its successes it really doesn't involve people who engage in crimes like vehicle thefts vehicle thefts would not be prosecuted in a municipal court i think that would be more of a district court or state court um even in cases where you know people are just hot wiring cars and enjoy writing in them that is not something that the community court uh would would be addressing um the community court as judge cook was mentioning was really addressing things like smoking where it's prohibited or urinating in public or things things like that that aren't really kind of property crimes where people are stealing things so again not to you know dismiss any of the impacts of the crimes i just wanted to make sure that we're all clear on what the community what types of crimes the community court is dealing with

[133:02] thanks nicole and actually yeah jeannie had her hand up next and then rachel i just have a question uh from everything that i've heard from i guess some of the members of the business community about the pandemic being over and i'm not sure if that's a sound statement but i think my question relates to the pearl street mall and i understand now these businesses want you know the unrestricted access so my question is has there been some type of a survey to ensure um businesses either want this or don't want it i know the last time we talked about this particular issue we were considering making it permanent so i think maybe this you know these few people coming forward and having voicing their opinion might you know

[134:00] might be something that we might have to think about more much thoroughly i'm happy to respond real quick if you'd like mayor um and i know that chris jones is watching and unable to be with us for the moment but i'll just say briefly that we're going to be talking about that next week there was in fact a survey um sent out and the topic is going to be revisited at the study session so there will be a lot of conversation about this very topic i just want to say thank you aaron i just want to say thank you to these community members who came forward because a lot of times on council we have ideas and we have ideas that have worked but until we hear from you we don't know if things are not working so uh it's it's very enlightening for me to hear that not everyone in the west pearl not every business is in the west pearl in in and on pearl street actually um find this particular uh arrangement beneficial so thank you

[135:02] rachel yeah that's well said juni i appreciate the perspective as well um i wanted to ask nuria um maybe or maris if she's still on um julie mccabe has reached out a number of times and and i know asked the same question to a lot of us so just wondered if somebody could commit to to you know sort of responding you know are those tickets being written i'm i'm curious if there's a reason to that you know whether whether we are or not writing tickets and um i don't believe maris is on anymore but i'm certainly happy to take a look and uh make sure that somebody gets back thank you and and also just wanted to flag um you know i think it's been a a difficult week as we said at the beginning of the meeting on on ukraine and um you know uh a war that we never thought would happen um on you know a ground war on europe in soil during our lifetimes and

[136:01] i would just encourage us to to um shy away from false equivalencies that what's happening in boulder might be similar to what's happening in ukraine because that's that's some troubling to hear and we're not nothing that's happening in boulder is like what the people are suffering um through in ukraine so i would just uh for my part um hope that that we can um just stay away from from that because there are people who are truly deeply suffering thanks thanks that rachel okay i think that's it in terms of our responses so alicia you take us into our next item please duly noted sir thank you we are now moving into item number three on tonight's agenda which is our consent agenda which includes items a through f does anybody have any comments or questions on the consent agenda

[137:02] or would someone like to make a motion i move to improve the agenda second thanks for the motion for the consent agenda in a second rachel did you have something to offer i did i'm sorry i was a little slow pulling up my notes here um but i think um on item 3b is a motion to amend the transit village area plan and this is one of two spots where i was confused about you know tab may be weighing in it was heavily transportation the next one will be under a call-up check-in item or b both of them can just mention transportation a lot so i don't know if there's a mechanism at this point that we can ask tab to weigh in on um and also going forward again i would just hope even for things that were maybe you know caught in that in the

[138:00] you know middle time before we switched to flagging things that might want to go over to tab which may or may not be relevant for this particular um item but is going to be under the call-up check-ins both i think one's concept and one is site and and in either spot do i see like that that flashing light that i was hoping for we would get for like don't forget you might want tab to weigh in on something so um i guess relevant to 3b and and to 4b like just can tab win when's the right time nasa so i think erica's in the meeting might weigh in mark did you want to throw in something before erica speaks are you saying mark i mean i was going to call a queen on that just because i had asked that i'd asked that via email and um similar question and it was it was conveyed to me that um at least through transportation that there was at least no conflicts with regards to our planned can proposal which was a cons concern i had and that seemed to be well vetted that this would impede on those uh plans that we've embarked on so i don't know

[139:00] if that addresses your question but but i i felt confident that the answer i got from staff at least addressed that issue so i just wanted to convey that if that was some of where your concern was but i'll let erica uh speak to the rest thanks man um erica you want to chair me thank you very much so um i guess just as point of clarity the planning and development services department is responsible for not only you know for reviewing the plans and making and proposing changes to them the transportation mobility department just as the utilities department we act as internal consultants and so for this particular case um i see that edward is on so thank you the plan at tvapp actually has a process in place in which to update um the plan itself and so that process was followed by my colleagues in development services planning and development

[140:00] services but with the input from the transportation department and one of the things is that at the last tab meeting alex weinhammer a tab member had identified that the issue was coming before the planning board but had chosen not independently to comment um at that point but what i did do is to go back and ensure that nothing in the um in the cat and in the can network would be impacted negatively by the changes being proposed so just wanted to assure council about that and edward did you have anything further to say from your standpoint edward we can't hear you apparently i have two mute buttons tonight my apologies edward stafford senior manager civil engineering and planning development services erica covered it well we did look at it for those reasons this has actually been an item of discussions that related development projects long before the can

[141:02] proposal had been made and in fact has been this particular one has been under review for some time during while the application for the fire station was present and has had internal discussions and prior development which shows this opportunity as allowed for in tvap to bring a plan along with a site review which is the call up item you'll see tonight so that's how we've looked at it and to ensure that it still has options for the future and in fact we felt it was important to bring forward this current one to support the needs otherwise the project would have to implement what's in the current plan which includes an area of on-street parking that could cause challenges with future desires on 30th street so that was part of our justification to bringing this forward um i appreciate that and it may be that no one else is interested in it i just think that um tab generally has you know sort of thinks through things and in a way that that i find helpful um alongside transportation staff so it you

[142:00] know it's not a it's not a dig on anyone or planning or transportation departments um i just i think that they that they often have a perspective that i value and i don't know if we were to um if there even is a path to kicking this over to them just for uh last set of eyes before we act on it if that causes delays or you know to edward's point like is that then kind of baked in in a way that we don't want it to if we were to do that and again that's that's even assuming that there were other people that wanted to do it so i wonder charles maybe this is something that you could address if we added that in as an extra step in this process what that would look like in terms of timelines and staff capacity sure i'd be happy to thanks for the question aaron um it certainly will add some time to the process we have a condition of approval in the site review document that requires um amendment to the tbap plan in advance of the submittal of the tech doc review

[143:02] so if this goes to tab and tab wants to see additional changes and there's changes that need to be made to the site plan we then need to go back to planning board prior to coming back to council um for final decision if the if tab um you know affirmed the planning board's position um and found that the amendment to the tbat plan was suitable then we'd be able to go back directly to council for final action but it would add some time to the process it just depends on you know really how it pans out mattis had a new hand it is just it's a process kind of just question really is um it would be really helpful for memos that come to us that are impacting clearly impacting transportation that effectively you know the commentary that that erica just

[144:00] provided be provided in that memo because that might quell a bunch of questions up front in terms of we got planning weighing in on transportation where did transportation staff or tab so that clarity up front i think would be really helpful as we talk as planning does does talk about transportation related things um so just maybe a future reference that i think that might help clean up a bunch of stuff on the front end um if that doesn't add too much extra work but but just a little bit of clarity could help can go a long way um so well maybe i'll just call him on myself here i really appreciate uh rachel you and matt both uh raising these questions in advance and tonight so we want to make sure the transportation issues are looked at carefully i appreciate that that eric and the transportation department did sign off on this i guess i'll just say that i i worry about the potential for significant delays on the ability to move forward with the fire station um it sounds like we might have to take a whole another turn through planning board um and then i worry a little bit about staff time as well uh their

[145:03] planning department as we know is very very busy these days um has a limited capacity so i just i i personally wouldn't take that extra step um but i think we need to keep raising these questions about you know how do we get assistance from from tab um and and and include them on more of the concept plans and such you got your hand up yeah just quickly and say i appreciate that i know that we had talked about this previously about um involving tab at the concept plan stage um and what does that look like and to have that mechanism by which staff would put that in a memo and say hey council here's an opportunity for you to send to tab and so just want to be thoughtful as we continue to think through that in our own uh work because some of these did get caught in that change that we're more rigorous as we move forward and we share that and matt i take your point as well i want to say that it's uh i i saw your email about it

[146:01] and i think it's a really thoughtful comment about making sure that we voice when we have consulted with our respective boards whoever they are right and so building that into some of our future memos i think will be an improvement that we can um certainly factor in so just wanted to say that out loud um thanks for that noria i and i don't know like this isn't coming to us as a concept or site so like i don't know how this would get folded into that i think that's another piece that isn't covered right this would be sort of outside the scope of what we've it would be and maybe what we really need to do is just again clarify the process i know we had a conversation about this last year i know that there is additional thought about this with the new council coming on board and so maybe we just need to spend some more time and come with a clear with a clear process as we move forward taking into account as well what the general scope is of each of the boards at play but certainly um i think it's a conversation to be

[147:00] had well you didn't have to go through this process of what grows or what doesn't go right i think under charter they're they can't look unless invited and planning board's always going to look and that's not going to have the same transportation um you know planning staff we'll look at we also get planning board i think with it's so heavy in transportation we want that mechanism to work so aaron i appreciate your point i will not uh push this uh further uh to cause delay but would love if if the system starts working to make sure that we're getting that look thanks i appreciate the flexibility rachel and i'll just add the there that it's a good point that this is the kind of thing that in the future uh we should consider you know adding a check in with tab to our process so i think that's a good flag for a conversation to have in the future any other comments or questions on the consent agenda seeing none we have a motion and a second in front of us alicia what kind of a vote do we have here for us we are having a required roll call

[148:01] tonight on this consent agenda so i will go ahead and proceed with the roll call and we will start with council member spear yes wallach weiner yes yates yes benjamin yes mayor brockett yes councilmember falkarts yes mayor pro tem friend yes and council member joseph yes mayor the consent agenda passed items a through f unanimously thanks very much alicia everyone okay so now we have our call of check-ins yes sir item 4a on tonight's agenda is

[149:01] the consideration of a concept plan review and comment for a proposal to develop a multi-family residential project at 3300 penrose place the existing three-story building on the site is proposed to be retrofitted for apartments with four new buildings proposed and a total of 114 permanently affordable dwelling units the residential units are planned to include efficiency living units and one and two bedroom apartments this is reviewed under case number lur 2021-0044 great any interest in calling this up for questions i'm not seeing any so i'll just say that this looks like it's really going in a positive direction and i appreciate where housing partners bring forward an innovative commercial to residential conversion program with affordable housing so it looks very promising

[150:00] all right i think that's all we got on that so our next one all right our next one is item 4b on tonight's agenda is a consideration site review application for a new city of boulder fire station number three located at 2751 and 2875 30th street the fire station is proposed to include four apparatus bays administration offices exercise meeting dining and living room spaces along with bunk rooms for firefighters and administrative offices site improvements include landscaping parking with a 55 parking reduction along with a planned new buff street connection this is reviewed under case number lur 2021-0017 very good and i believe we have a presentation on this since i think the new fire station of it is of interest to the council on the community so elaine you gonna take us through this

[151:00] you bet great thanks very much mayor and council members good evening everyone i'm gonna just share the screen so um bear with me for a moment uh so as we've talked about a little bit this particular case um went before the planning board um just a couple weeks ago and so in terms of um process and um where we are this evening it's important to note that um the concept plan was reviewed um in 2020 end of the year 2020 and then council did not call it up um the site review is required because the proposal for a greater than 50 parking reduction does necessitate uh planning board determination so um it was february 17th last month the board reviewed the application unanimously approved it along with the change to the tvap streetscape

[152:01] guidelines that we've talked about um and then the board's decisions subject to call up by council within 30 days and that ends on march 21st of this month so as a quick recap of the information planning board reviewed starting with the site location for the new fire station it's located on 30th near belmont and it is intended to replace the existing fire station that's located at the southwest corner of arapahoe 30th so really just a few miles to the south fire stations are considered critical facilities under the city's code and because the current location is in a high hazard you'll see that in pink um high hazard flood zone it could make access a bit more challenging in a flood event and so in addition it's acknowledged that the current fire stations uh outdated and inefficient undersized and partial funding for the replacement of

[153:01] the station was actually included in the 2017 community culture and safety tax and then regarding the planning context the 1.85 acre site has a comprehensive plan land use designation of mixed use business anticipated uses are defined as business or residential and warehousing and public uses supporting housing will be encouraged and may be required zoning is a business transition defined as business areas which generally buffer a residential area from a major street site is part of that phase two of tvapp that you see on the left transit village area plan that was adopted in 2007 to guide redevelopment for this area surrounding the transit and essentially to transform what was an underutilized industrial and auto oriented area into a more urban and higher density

[154:02] pedestrian oriented environment with a mix of uses and as part of tvap a land use map was adopted shown to the right and uh phase two of pvap was initiated with the 2020 midterm update to the bvcpn uh what prompted initiation of that phase two is that phase one essentially built out of the past 15 years and it was guided by the vision and goals and guidelines of tvapp to develop this new neighborhood that we all are aware of and are familiar with um and approximately 1400 new residential units were built just under 300 of those are permanently affordable this image shows the neighborhood of spark on the north boulder commons and in the center 30 pearl in depot square with the regional rtd bus facility at the center and then rev on the south and the buildout of phase one also included construction of a number of

[155:01] streets for the tvap connections plan that was also adopted and you can see junction place from prairie on the south was built all the way through to belmont on the north with two bridges constructed there are new streets that include 31st and spruce street there's the extension of bluff street and a number of alleys and paseos and in the 10 to 15 years of building out these connections there have been various amendments to the connections planned that were approved as part of and as provided in the area plan the overall intent in the connections plan really was to create a more pedestrian oriented [Music] connectivity and essentially break up superblocks that once existed there and as you'll note the site itself on the left there has several connections that are required to be built out and are included as part of the proposed project

[156:01] so on to the existing site the applicant's proposing about a 28 000 square foot two-story fire station with administration offices and then the four large operate apparatus bays on the first floor there's also training and fitness meeting rooms second floor living quarters with bunk rooms and kitchen facilities and an outdoor deck and as approved by planning board there's a 55 parking reduction there's also landscaping streetscaping rooftop photovoltaic and the buildings intended to be net zero and then as you can see on the diagram on the right the site plan and building are configured such that emergency vehicle access and circulation is in a one-way configuration into the site and that's from that new uh planned bluff street extension and then exiting directly onto 30th and what that does is essentially avoid having to back fire apparatus onto

[157:00] 30th street and so it's important to note that public works will be responsible for designing and constructing the new vehicle uh traffic signal for bluff and 30th street intersection and so when we look at the perspectives the building itself is contemporary and style materials there's a nod to that traditional red fire house the plans illustrate a floating roof form over the south open to the sky above the green roof broad overhang supported by wood columns and concrete pileasters planning board concluded that the proposed project meets the site review criteria and findings consistent with bvcp policies and tdap design guidelines and among the policies that project would fulfill is policy 807 safety that notes that the city will respond to changing community needs including those resulting from demographic changes and redeveloping and urbanizing areas to support safe livable

[158:00] neighborhoods and vibrant business districts and in that regard staff points out the goals of tvapp on the left also support the placement of a fire station near the transit village then touching on other review criteria related to design for human scale and there's transparency and activity at the street level with the administration office planned and then um there's uh public art and landscape and deep design details that will add pedestrian interest consistent with tbap guidelines and then there's things like durable materials that include a brick that has an extruded brick pattern the site review criteria also asks if the building's architecture is compatible with the area or those with the established design guidelines and then in that regard of course planning board made findings that the project's consistent with the tvap design guidelines a few of which are

[159:00] shown here uh that also speak to designing to a pedestrian scale and orientation so with that the board concluded with unanimous approval of the site review application as well as unanimous approval that changed the tvap streetscape guideline that was considered under consent this evening so with that i'm happy to answer any questions that council may have thanks so much for that ellen that's very helpful questions for elaine we've got mark um the structure is beautiful can you tell me what it's going to cost cannot but i see adam goldstone is on the call and maybe he has some thoughts on that adam yeah hi there thank you thank you for uh the question um we are in the in between some estimates right now as you know the uh the economic climate with construction is very difficult but our our latest number is at 18

[160:02] million dollars okay um that's kind of where i was hoping it would come in uh because when we when we looked at this that the um we were doing the infrastructure tax we had estimates of up to 35 million dollars for a facility and that would have simply sucked all the air out of the room with respect to other unfunded capital needs so i'm very happy to hear that you're looking at something closer to 18 and even if it goes over to something like hopefully not more than 20 um i think it's a number we can reasonably bear great that yeah that's what we're shooting for thank you okay thank you rachel and lauren well i sure feel like a broken record here but um we've got bus route ramifications parking reductions uh prize transit corridor you

[161:03] know uh just uh every every type of transit consideration here did tabway in did we invite tab to win i'm just gonna we asked the question and so in this particular case the concept plan was reviewed prior to emphasis on tab in concept plans and so the transportation staff took a good look at it i know that tab looked at tvapp um and the connections plan as it was being developed so they had that input as well um and i don't know if edward has anything else to add to that but um i guess the answer is no tab did not look at it that's what i thought but i i just wanted to clarify and then if um if we wanted to invite tab to weigh in at this stage what would that look like

[162:01] you know i i again i would defer to edward on that or maybe erica but i assume that if it if they did take a look at it it might be refinements to the circulation pattern but edward do you have any other thoughts and certainly speak amp up and then i know hello i was also here from the attorney's office and can help with the process but i presume if you were looking for that you would likely need to call it up and provide specifics of what you were looking for tab to weigh in on that then the council could consider in order to review it based upon the criteria for site review it's important to point out that this is a land use quadratic judicial application and so it is a site review based decision or a criteria based decision sorry mixing my words up tonight it's been a long day criteria based decision uh staff did not refer to tab generally these types of applications is not a part of the purview currently listed for tab that is an opportunity for council if you believe there's something that they should

[163:00] weigh in on and i didn't emphasize um i would emphasize and thanks for that i would emphasize that tab did have a lot of involvement when we did put the initial uh connections plan together for tab um and you know per the call up are the um the consent agenda conversation we had it definitely will um tack on some time to the process it's certainly something that council has the authority um you know to refer to tab but we'll have to take another crank uh turn at the crank just depending on the direction that we get okay thanks uh lauren thank you mine's also going to be process related so given that this is a public project you know and i see that you noted two um 2.4 from the older comp plan about public projects bearing a special responsibility to

[164:00] exhibit design excellence i really i like the design of this building i think it's great but my question is has um design advisory board had a chance to review it it does seem like that to me for a public project especially you know a standalone new building that we would be having design advisory board review that for a city project and so in this particular case it's not a requirement and staff felt pretty confident from comments we received a concept plan that the design direction was going to meet the criteria and the tvap design guidelines and i would also note that there wasn't a referral um from the planning board to dab either in the concept plan or the site review i think they felt that the design was pretty strong and

[165:00] i i agree that the design is strong i just think that in the case where the city is the like commonly the city is one of the other mechanisms through which projects are referred to dab and when the city is the applicant i think that there's probably um there is isn't that sort of secondary check that we would typically have and so i would push that in instances like this it maybe should be common practice that we refer these projects to dab theresa uh yes thank you so i did just want to point out that dab's authority is limited here in that it can only involve itself in review of um items under the land use code which is title ix

[166:00] if if that opinion is requested by the city manager the planning board or the city council and so as i think i think it was charles who was speaking um sad planning board didn't refer it but certainly city council has the authority to do so that's the way the code is laid out so we could do that at this point without calling it up ourselves you would have to call it up to referred at this point in time because at this point we we have an approval already so right to to make it be under review again you would have to call it up thank you mark yeah i'm sorry to go to have to go back for a couple of questions i just didn't ask um how many bids you're getting on this so last summer based on what we were seeing in the construction community uh we we

[167:01] transitioned this project as well as the noble library project to a cmgc delivery method a construction manager general contractor and so we went through a interview and rfp process and selected a construction firm that we brought on board at that point who has been advising us on value engineering and material selection and cost to keep you know keep our numbers in line so they will be providing us a gmp a guaranteed maximum price at the time we submit for building permit and we anticipate uh proceeding with them for construction okay that's great just one last question if if the gmp price that's redundant if the gmp comes in let's say it 24 million dollars are you going to value engineer it down or simply just build it at 24. we would certainly look at all options but at that point i think without discrepancy some value engineering would be in order okay

[168:00] all right i think you're on the right track so thank you thank you okay so it looks like that's it for questions so um would anyone like to advocate for calling this up hm i'll go ahead and make a pitch to call it up and and invite dab and tab to weigh in um i i think i really appreciated lauren's point about this as a as a public space and sort of um a little bit of almost a lack of a a level of review because we are the applicant and the reviewers so i appreciate the extra eyes on and i just think um again my experiences is tabs these things with a little bit of um fresh eyes with sort of especially pedestrian and bike considerations so i would um i would love to have their input before we um finalize this so that's my that's what i'd call it up and uh direct for

[169:02] uh any takers on rachel's proposal here uh nicole and mark did you want to speak or just say thumbs up mark um i i just want to make a quick comment i'm kind of agnostic on it but i would be happy to defer to rachel's concerns and call it up if she believes it to be important yes i'll just call on myself that like i i totally appreciate rachel where you're coming from the point you're making the concern i would have would be some number of months delay on an already expensive project with a city staff that's already over taxed with the projects that they're working on so that's my concern because i feel like this is there would come some negative consequences for the organization by by calling it out would be my concern

[170:02] nicole yeah i would be interested just in hearing a little bit more about what you know staff kind of thinks about that i just unfortunately don't know enough about what kind of delays that we put in place but given this is a pretty significant new public building in a really kind of prominent heavily trafficked and growing area of town um i i would really be interested in having a little bit more feedback so and i think just some of the discussions and questions we were having um kind of felt like they felt like we might um you know benefit from a larger conversation too but just uh curious how much time we're talking about and and what the negative consequences might be thanks very much for the question i think it really depends on what design advisory board's feedback would be if there are significant um adjustments to the building that need to be made then the um you know cities architect you

[171:00] know would need to make some pretty significant changes and we would need to take it back through the planning board to ensure it's consistent with the intent of the initial approval so we're definitely looking at i would say at least 90 days and i'm just aware that we have uh the former three-year chair of design advisory board um here who can perhaps let us know you know if you think it's something that they would have significant changes on or anything like that i mean it's always hard to to guess what people are gonna comment on but i mean like i said i think that this building is generally seems to me really strong so i personally wouldn't anticipate large changes but you know design advisory board does look at things differently

[172:00] than planning board does so things around the articulation of the windows and you know some cladding details and things about that what around those kinds of concerns are typically things that design advisory board would review and so it's it to me it seems like if that could happen in a 90-day period that feels like not a i mean it is a delay but in the scale of a building like this not a huge one right matt and adam goldstone rachel and elaine well i may defer to adam or elaine if they're going to provide feedback on the questions previously asked if that's the if if that's the case go for it otherwise i'll i'll take my question but i just i saw your hands up didn't know if you're responding to a question already raised great point adam and then you want to go in then elaine yeah i think thank you i i certainly

[173:00] appreciate and understand uh council's concerns but advocating here for uh the project and the fire department um you know we we have been working on this for several years um we are hoping to start construction uh towards the end of summer and uh further delays push us into winter which is a rough time to come out of the ground um the fire administration is currently somewhat homeless and on borrowed time in their current facilities where they're located and the existing station being in the flood plain you know is subject to you know further damage and delays um you know the further we go on so i i just you know i'm obligated to point out um those concerns that we have for the project but i do appreciate you know your thoughts on it i do i do also see that the fire chief is is here if there are any other questions on that thanks um i mean mike did you want to chime in and then we can hear from elaine good evening council um i can't my

[174:01] colorado fire chief i appreciate all the dialogue i can't speak to the process other than i can confirm with what adam had just been talking about where we're we're borrowing space for our headquarters staff once we vacated center green to save on the lease out there um and so delays on getting in um [Music] it it's on the good graces really of the county and county chiefs for us to be out there taking up space that's just impact on the organization but then in terms of our master plan as well you know this is a this this station is a key part of the infrastructure that moves us forward on advancing our ems goals around advanced life support and so that will just push us back we planned we were hoping anyway to start uh moving into that station for those units um in 2024 if if things all go wonderfully um if if they don't then that just pushes us down a little farther we lost

[175:00] a year with covid and so this will this is just another delay we'll have to reassess with our master plan goals thanks elaine sure i i just wanted to remind everybody too that this has been through concept plan review in 2020 and at that time there was no suggestion by either planning board or council to have that level of review and so you know in fact it's it's followed a pretty significant process for a couple of years now all right matt back to you and then rachel um so just a couple comments on the motion that rachel made and some of the comments that have been mentioned first i i think this is acutely critical infrastructure for our city for community safety and so i think process delays that won't necessarily deliver substantive outcomes and not to prejudge too much but i do think that that is a concern i have to want to make

[176:00] sure that we get this done expeditiously uh as the chief pointed out certainly as we evolve into providing als i think that's a fantastic and necessary evolution of fire and rescue here in boulder um but you know given that i i agree with lauren we should future projects that are done by the city where we are the applicant i think dab needs to take a role but especially given that our resident design expert and planning said this has great design elements i'm not sure this is the bite at the apple that we need to expend that on um and and i think with regards to transportation i want us to again going forward have tab review um but not at the cost of expense expedience as aaron brought out and plus this is a great chance for us to now trust staff now that we have the core arterial network plan in place we have tab staff and council all aligned in a very um common direction with regards to some of our major transportation work and i think this is a great time for us to then coalesce around trusting staff that we're going in the right direction and given erica's comments i want to make sure that we trust that so i think now

[177:01] is the time for us to just move forward but going forward on future projects that we interject those those nice steps in the process for tab and dab as well thanks rachel nicole ontario yep um i'll be brief um you know i imagine that we could send it to dab and tab and say you know if you can look at this in the next 30 days please do and if you can't then um you know don't but i don't know that we have to build in some sort of heinous delay for this to be looked at i think what i'm hearing is the only way it's going to create you know a substantial delay is if some of the feedback required you know significant alterations to the current plans and if if that were to be the case then i would imagine maybe significant alterations are needed and it's sort of full hearty to move forward without implementing them so you know i don't know that a 30 or 90 day delay is um

[178:01] a big thing in the scheme of things but if we you know fail to line up an important quarter or um crossing or something well then then we regret it and we have seen that on on a couple of occasions during my tenure where tab gave feedback kind of late or we had to go back and make some changes so i just think it makes sense to to try and get some expeditious feedback and maybe make you know maybe i would amend the motion to say let's kick it over to tab and ask that it be you know and dab um given to them and offer to them within the next week if they can fit in their schedule within the next month and we'd love the feedback and hopefully it's nothing and we move forward but if they do catch something that we're that they haven't we haven't had our experts look at i think it's kind of it just doesn't make sense to me and with that i won't say anymore that's rachel nicole and tara i just wanted to um thank staff and uh chief calderazo just for giving us a little more uh context on kind of the the importance of you know having this

[179:01] um right now i think um i i'm feeling a little torn at the moment i would really love to you know use our boards and commissions um in this way and also recognize that you know elaine as you said this has been in process for um years right it wasn't sort of brought up by you know previous council and i think there's um there are times when um you know it's worth inserting a delay and perhaps times when it's not and i'm just thinking about all that we're approaching in the climate crisis and the fire that just happened and those sorts of things i'm thinking about the span of a few months may may actually make a difference but um anyway so i don't really have any clarity there just right now i'm torn and i feel like i could go either way slight change in position so i wanted to share it it's so taryn and bob i'm going to agree with matt that i agree with you because i really

[180:02] do want to see the tab and dab make more uh have be part of this uh conversation part of the solution but i feel like if they've been doing this for years and now we as the new council come in and say well it's the last minute but you know that's really hard to do for city process i think or any business actually um so i'm going to agree with matt that we should proceed but i want to start including them on the future projects lauren i'm glad you think this building is strong that that means a lot to me and that's my thought sarah problem i'm gonna agree with um aaron and matt and tara and i think kind of nicole um in that um i i'm not gonna support a call up here um i know that we've got new rules or new guidelines around evolving tab and dab and i think that's great um but i'm not sure that we can

[181:00] apply them retroactively here um you know this did go through concept review and and back counsel which some of us served on chose not to refer uh this to those parties then and i think it's a little late in the game for us to to do that now and to delay this and i appreciate your your offer rachel of 30 days or something short like that but these things tend to slip a little bit so you know maybe maybe when the mistake was made by those of us who served on the council when this came through on concept but i think it's a little late in the game for us to uh to be going back so i would not support a cola all right um and what we got theresa i apologize for the delay um in getting to you about this but i do have some legal concerns in that site review is a quasi-judicial process that means of course there are a set of criteria it's not clear what tab's role would be in

[182:01] in advising with respect to that set of criteria and so my advice would be that if we want to see these kinds of items sent to tab at the site review stage or at a quasi-judicial stage that we would need to build something into the code for that to happen okay thanks for that that perspective teresa that's helpful okay um we've had people speak about this um rachel i think you know to call it up it requires a motion i believe an affirmative motion to call something up which i think would be the next step um i will withdraw because i i'm counting um heads here so that uh i i will not make us uh go through that fetal motion okay well appreciate your your flexibility yet again tonight um and i think the fundamental point is i think we do want to use our boards

[183:01] more often earlier in the process at least that's my takeaway from it and i continue to appreciate the focus on that and let's keep working on that early on in these processes so we can really get that great feedback okay uh well with that i think that means no call up on that and i'm seeing nine o'clock and just might want to suggest a an eight minute break what do you all think i've seen some thumbs up and then bob i think you would just wait to come back right you do want to speak to your recusal yeah i'll speak right now i i as i did on a similar ball matter a few weeks ago i'm going to recuse myself because a member of my family owns some stock and ball and so i'll take the break along with you but i won't return at the end of break go ahead and start without me and aaron i think you're going to send me a text when that matter is over all right let's come back at 908.

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[192:00] don't have anybody back yet i was trying to grab that last bite i'm back i'm back we're back we just got our cameras off as well i i grabbed a little chips and salsa and managed to spill salsa on my blue shirt but fortunately just below the camera line so it's oh man you may not have that grace anymore moving forward as we'll talk about later tonight it takes a new meaning to uh business on top party on the bottom sustains going on there thanks all right i think we're waiting for rachel there's rachel with the banana all right

[193:00] very healthy snack okay alicia you want to take us into our first public hearing yes sir that is item 5a the second reading and consideration of a motion to adopt ordinance 84 99 granting authority to the approving authority under title ix land use code brc 1981 to approve a development at the ball aerospace campus that exceeds the floor area ratio standards in the industrial dash general zoning district granting a 15-year vesting period for the approved site-specific development plan extending the expiration date of a landmark alteration certificate and historic preservation demolition approval related to the development and authorizing the city manager to execute documents that will secure payment of an increased linkage fee

[194:00] for additional floor area and setting for related details carl you lead us through this one i guess i will uh thank you alicia good evening council members uh tonight we're talking about the second reading of ordinance 8499 uh my presentation is going to be brief since we covered this material on february 15th city council did pass the ordinance on first reading on february 15th so the purpose of tonight is to hold a public hearing on ordinance 84 99 and for council to make a decision on the ordinance so i'm just going to cover a little bit of the context really quickly we're talking about a roughly 27 acre site for the ball aerospace campus along arapahoe at the two addresses on the slide our boulder valley conference of plan land use designation for that site is light industrial so the the use that they're proposing there is consistent with the land use uh it's consistent

[195:02] with the zoning as well which is industrial general as we talked about on the 15th uh the ig zone uh has a 40-foot height limit a 0.5 floor area ratio maximum so that would allow up to 577 000 square feet based on how the zone is is drafted so we talked about the site review on february 15th uh city council did not call up the site review at that meeting um the existing square footage out there just to summarize is about 441 000 square feet uh they're proposing to add 309 000 square feet bringing it to a total of 750 000 square feet so that's a 0.65 far which is over the 0.5 maximum for the ig zone they're looking to develop this over a 15-year timeline as we stated before this is consistent with a prior approval for that site that they do the four phases with the

[196:00] completion in this case being 2037. so ball aerospace is an important primary employer with roots in boulder obviously what they're producing at the site is is unique with large we're actually pretty massive uh spacecraft that require uh crane operations and very large vaulted spaces and large uh spaces for tests for testing so ball has unique needs that are different than other locations they have security requirements that they have to meet uh related to the federal government so you know based on these special needs and considering the importance of ball to the boulder community we did present the option of doing an ordinance that would allow that additional square footage for their unique needs so this ordinance also includes an allowance to convey the increased commercial linkage fee for the affordable housing fund so

[197:01] we have this mechanism in the code but it really focuses on square footage that's just above that height limit in this case they'd be going above the 0.5 far so the ordinance would say that that all that additional square footage would they would have to pay a higher rate into that affordable housing fund um the ordinance also would extend the validity period of the landmark alteration certificate and the demolition permits for the um hobart wagner buildings that are proposed for demolition these types of permits and the certificate have a 180-day timeline that has has to be renewed if they don't uh submit a permit and considering uh how long the the 15 years would go on they'd have to keep uh reapplying for that so that's worked into the ordinance uh they're also asking for vested rights greater than three years which requires approval of an ordinance so any ordinance obviously has to have a recommendation by planning

[198:01] board and council would act on it so as we stated in the memo and as i talked about last time staff has found that the uh proposal is consistent with bvc policies a number of policies that are up on the slide and talked about in detail within the memo um some key areas that i just wanted to touch on were bvcp policy 2.21 where it talks about the city will encourage redevelopment and infill to contribute to place making and better achieve sustainable urban form i also want to obviously highlight the the community benefit uh criterion which or the policy that would be met by the additional monies going into the affordable housing fund but there are also there's also some policies that are in section 5 of the bvcp that talk about revitalizing commercial and industrial areas and support for local business and business retention so a couple quotes from

[199:01] policy 5.01 where it says incentivizing business retention through changes to zoning or development standards and incentives this would be consistent with that policy 5.05 says the city and county value the diverse mix of existing businesses including primary and secondary employers of different sizes in the local economy nurturing supporting and maintaining a positive climate for the retention of existing businesses and jobs is a priority so we again feel that this ordinance is consistent with that and that's why we recommended approval of it uh and planning board uh also as recommending approval of the ordinance they they voted um six to zero uh to uh recommend to council to uh approve it they also added an additional recommendation on a vote of six to zero that given that the increase of employment that would go to ball aerospace would largely be in the middle income category that

[200:01] council maybe direct the housing department to consider uh some of those funds for middle-income housing so that's included in the motion from planning board so we're recommending approval planning board's recommending approval and that uh concludes my presentation happy answering questions thanks so much carl for that concise and informative presentation uh questions for carl i am not seeing any so that means we can move to the public hearing which alicia i understand no one is signed up for the public hearing is that correct that is correct sarah was a little concerned about that and so i tested the form and made sure everything was working correctly and everything was working correctly so no one decided to sign up for this item wow all right i don't remember the last time we had a public hearing with no one signed up

[201:00] uh okay so we'll bring this back to council for discussion and if people will indulge me i'm gonna start off um if you don't mind um because i have this uh idea that i've mentioned in passing before but just want to explain it to folks um i do support this ordinance i think ball is a key local primary employer that i think this is a great move forward for them so i support it fundamentally but i did notice that the uh allowed square footage and the 0.65 far was exactly the square footage that they're requesting or that has already been approved in the site review my thought was for this ordinance to include allowance of 0.7 far this wouldn't allow them today to build anything more but it means that in the 15 years that they're contemplating this project that if they wanted to do a minor modification say add a thousand or two square feet as their needs developed that they could do so just running through staff and playing board without having to come back to city council to revise this special ordinance so it seemed like that

[202:00] could that could make things smoother for just minor changes that they might need in the 15-year period of this process so just want to put that out there see if anybody thinks that's the worst idea ever or any comments on that on that concept uh matt i i 100 support that um you know having worked sort of peripherally in this in this field and seeing a number of spacecraft built um they continue to get bigger and bigger and so you know the needs of today versus the needs of 15 years from now i think change in the in the game of astronomy astrophysics defense and and certainly our space science stuff and how we design spacecraft so i think that's great flexibility whether they use that that's for them to decide but building that in i think is a great idea because we certainly don't know the demands of science and defense 15 years from now thanks matt anyone else have comments on that concept or anything else about the ordinance seeing that if people don't mind if i go

[203:01] ahead and make a motion since i've got this idea that i'm moving forward here myself um so and i do do notice carl that the the ordinance uh does contain a square footage as well as an far in it and so i i did the the math on that and i believe the uh 0.7 far would equate to 809 000 square feet so should i include in the amendment both of those those numbers yes i mean if we uh change that 0.7 we would certainly change that square footage figure to to match accordingly maybe i'll just put it in that language just in case i screwed up my math so i'll go ahead and move that we adopt ordinance 84 99 to approve development of all aerospace campus that exceeds floor area ratio standards in the industrial general zoning district we'll read all the other words but with the amendment of changing

[204:02] the 0.65 far allowance 2.7 and then the accompanying square footage to to match accordingly a second thanks any comments all right well thanks for letting me take the reins on that one folks i usually fade back because the mayor and let other people comment but i had this idea so i appreciate your indulgence um seeing no other comments we'll take a vote and alicia you got a roll call i believe that is correct sir and we will start this roll call with councilmember wallach yes weiner yes benjamin yes mayor brockett yes council member faulkers yes mayor pro tem friend yes

[205:00] councilmember joseph yes and council member spear yes bear ordinance 84-99 was adopted as amended with a vote of eight to zero great well thanks so much everyone and uh congratulations to the folks at ball aerospace and we look forward to a continued long-term and productive partnership with your organization in our city all right let me text bob that we're done as alicia you can take us on to the next measure all right next on tonight agenda under public hearings item 5b is the update on state legislation and consideration of revisions to the policy statement on regional state and federal issues good evening city council thank you so much for your time tonight

[206:00] as alicia has said the purpose of this agenda item is to provide you an update on state policies that the city has been advocating for we are joined by our lobbyists from headwater strategies will coin and adam eichberg and they can speak more broadly after my presentation about the general political climate at the state house and and issues that maybe are not very specific to the city but probably still of interest to you we're also joined tonight by assistant city attorney laura witt who has been helping me out with quite a bit of things related to legislation providing an analysis and she will be available to help field some of the questions um in terms of the update i guess one way of looking at this is boulder officials are out there routinely communicating to political leaders making requests of them and conveying the city's positions so we think it's very important that we get it right that you know what we are conveying and why and that you provide us any

[207:00] course direction if necessary so today is certainly an opportunity to do just that we're also going to ask you to consider revising the policy statement um it's actually not something that you need to do we don't have any recommendations there's no legislation that has come up that has needed clarification of the policy statement but what's particularly unique about this year is this is part of our first time where we had the policy statement approved by the old council and we wanted to make sure that the new council members had an opportunity to put their imprint on it you certainly don't have to do that as of today you will have other opportunities the next opportunity as a matter of course would be probably october but nonetheless it's important if there's anything that the majority of this council feels is just incongruent with your philosophy this is certainly an opportunity to do that so i want to start off with the state

[208:01] policy priorities i've identified the five of them that council has approved in its policy statement in the memo and i don't want to go through them all because it's it's you've already read that i'm sure you've understood it you can ask any questions if you have any i do want to touch on a few three different topics and some of the bills that i have some unique issues that have come up that i wanted to bring to your attention the first is garnering the secretary of state's support for rank choice voting that's basically implementing hp 21 1071 which gave the secretary of state the direction to provide us guidance and support for cities like boulder and now broomfield to use rank choice voting in the election of our in our case it's in the election of the mayor so the good news is that we recently learned

[209:00] that the budget it all gets rolled into a general budget bill that's considered in later march or early april it's called the long bill which is basically the overall budget for the state the portion of it that has to do with funding the secretary of state's office has now included funding for the secretary of state to do the implementation that's necessary so we're thrilled to hear that um i've been working with council member benjamin um i know that he's been a champion of this issue and uh and we've been we've been lobbying this hard because frankly it actually had some resistance at the jvc at first they they were hesitant to fund it of course because it's the result always the possibility that the secretary of state's office could do it through raising business fees and there was there was a challenge about who was going to pay for what the second thing i wanted to talk about is one of council's priorities was to modernize building energy codes and representative burnett is expected

[210:00] to introduce the bills here soon that will do that uh by modernizing energy codes that will reduce climate emissions and it'll save colorado one's money under energy bills it has a few different elements to it the first part is that cities that have building codes would have to adopt the 2021 international energy conservation code immediately and then by 2030 they would have to adopt a near zero energy code and the colorado energy office would be working on developing that model and of course cities like boulder that have adopted uh codes that are more stringent uh need not comply with the uh the state's code but that would be exempted the news on this front is that as you've heard i think it was in today's paper there is a lot of challenges that were seen by particularly people who've lost their homes in the marshall fire concerned that stronger energy codes

[211:01] means more money and there is a wide disparity between what the estimates are we think that a lot of the estimates are being thrown out there just wildly disproportionate and really frankly a way to avoid stronger energy codes but there's also a legitimate issue there is a cost a cost that would probably be more than offset by the energy efficiency savings that the homes would receive but that's an issue that has to be wrestled with so um this is something that we continue to work with but i wouldn't be surprised if we have to make some changes in the bill and so i wanted to just give you a heads up that it's it's facing some head ones the third topic is air pollution restoring clean air to colorado and on that front there are two bills that we've been working on both that are kind of in conflict one of them hp 22 1026 simply takes an existing

[212:01] tax deduction for alternative transportation options that employers provide their employees and makes it into a tax credit um the challenge with that um actually there is no challenge with that well i get i guess i should say in somewhat opposition to that is hb 22 1138 that said sure employers you can have this tax credit but you have to do a few things to get it you need to adopt a clean commuting plan which would include specific requirements for employee outreach or survey specific kinds of education we just learned that yesterday hb 1138 died so now we only have the hb 1026 which is the alternative transportation options tax credit bill um so that's good news and that we have that as a greater incentive for employers to provide these options to

[213:01] employees it's bad news that it doesn't come with a greater level of conditions on what we would like to see in employers provide to their employees um finally there is a per there is an effort that the governor included the governor included in his budget funding for a program that would encourage free transit passes during the high ozone season and um this would establish a program where um cdot department of transportation would issue grants to different transit agencies including rtd to fund a um from their their ability to provide free transit uh during let's say may through september where here in the front range or ozone tends to be fairly high um we're running into some challenges partly because rtd right now is a little

[214:01] concerned about providing free transit they have some concerns about how that might affect operations so that's an issue that we're wrestling with and again this is facing some headwinds so i wanted you to know about those bills uh one of them that's good the other uh three are kind of um you know questionable how things are gonna evolve but i want you to know where we stood i also wanted to give you some information on some other bills that are not state uh council priorities but that were nonetheless actively involved with or or soon will be the first one is um probably the um one that we feel is maybe the strongest most likely to to move forward which is the strong communities bill and this would establish a program that that over five years would have i believe it's about 150 million dollars made available the funding will be available to local governments through

[215:01] dola and grants the colorado energy office and the department of transportation will be part of the decision makers it would incentivize compact development so if cities were to adopt plans zoning other other policies that would encourage compact development the state who's trying to encourage cities to do that would give you would give the local government money at the front end when those plans were adopted and at the tailwind after it demonstrated success in terms of actually achieving that that kind of development that's a that's a bill that i believe boulder should support and would support unless you tell me otherwise because plain and simple it's it's funding that would be we would be eligible to apply for so um i think anything the grant program is introduced that local governments are eligible for we would seek to support it and i think this is something that's consistent with council's interest

[216:00] another bill that we're working on is additional protections for mobile homeowners this is i believe the third year in a row where we've worked on bills that would help the residents of mobile home parks we're working closely with representative basenecker from fort collins uh fantastic legislator who's come in with great energy great ideas and an an amazing commitment to really dive into the issues and help mobile homeowners the two main things that it does is it expands the build the ability for residents to avail themselves of the opportunity to purchase their park we consider it the holy grail in terms of aligning the interest so that there is no longer a necessary a split interest between the owner of the mobile home and the owner of the mobile home park who may have uh interests focus primarily on profit rather than the livelihood of the residents the second thing that it would do is it

[217:01] would create limits on rent increases for mobile home pads one of the things that balder has supported on a speaker the council member of focus about this earlier this afternoon is we have a position in support of repeal of the rent control limitation but we also have a position in support of the more surgical repeal of rent control limitations when they apply to mobile homes there's a uniquely um compelling argument that those who own a mobile home when it's really not that mobile or could be in a really challenging spot if they're subject to frequent and and very high rent increases um so that bill is going to be introduced here soon uh we've been working closely with the representative and the coalition including a lot of our mobile home park residents and we're excited about that and i think those two bills

[218:00] stand a good chance of passing then there is sb 22 131 titled protect health pollinators and people we are working with senator sandia jacques lewis and kevin pariola kevin parrell is republican huckas lewis is a democrat so we do have bipartisan support here as introduced it would require and create very broad policy change that affects the protection of pollinators and people our main focus is that it would repeal the local preemption that prevents local governments and boulders specific to regulate pesticides it's scheduled for a hearing this thursday before the senate agriculture and natural resource committee at 1 30 in case anybody's interested working with councilmember benjamin we were able to secure the colorado municipal league's support for this bill they are a champion for all things local

[219:01] and that includes a repeal of state preemption um however this one is facing a lot of resistance um there's a lot of entities industries that are opposed to it and it's kind of surprising us and um we're we don't have um necessarily the votes to the court of success on this so i wanted to give you a heads up that we might need to narrow the scope of the bill um and we'll see how narrow we need to do it and what kind of exemptions from the preemption we might have to provide but the goal is to make some forward progress and give our city council greater authority to regulate pesticides um the last bill that i wanted to touch on is the extended producer responsibility bill that has not been introduced but will be introduced by representative cutter and senator priola again this is bipartisan it would create fees on all companies that provide packaging

[220:01] whether that be primary secondary or tertiary packages it would provide funding for local governments for recycling and waste disposal services and it may also support and use producers that will provide new products that industry can rely on um this one again it's challenging we're hoping it goes forward right now there's still a lot of negotiations specifically with industries that are making some arguments that they need to be exempted for one reason or another so that's both a recognition that some industries really should be exempted and some just politically in order to get this bill passed need to be so those are the bills that i wanted to bring to your attention um i wanted to turn it over to adam eichberg and will coyne our state lobbyist i don't know if some of our new council members have met them but hopefully they've been giving

[221:00] panelists um privileges and if one of them is is available i'd love for them to provide an update on things more general including the political strategic issues that have that we've been engaged in great uh thanks carl all right nice to see everyone i'm adam the other one's will sometimes people confuse us i'm the one with hair he's the one without in case anyone's wondering um we are on day 50 of the legislative session so we are about 40 in there's 120 days so 70 days left um there have been to date 423 bills already introduced which i was doing the math while we were talking which seems like a lot but also kind of a scary number because typically in a session we see between six and hundred builds so there could be up to 200 250 more things coming

[222:01] leadership has mostly said that they're going to stop the late build train this year they say that every year so i would be surprised if they do so i think we should expect to see a lot more coming i think the most exciting news for the city of boulder is the ascension of steve fenberg to become senate president i think we should really acknowledge that you know leadership from boulder is something that seems to be almost every session at the capitol steve was the majority leader now he's the president leroy garcia took a job he was turned out and took a early leave to become an assistant i don't actually know what he's doing he's the assistant to the assistant for something at the pentagon but i think steve's move literally across the hall from the majority leader's office to the president's office bodes well for the city's priorities um and we're excited to

[223:00] continue to get to work with him i want to mention a couple things that carl didn't directly address in his talk about what we still see coming and some of the big issues of the session the biggest issue of the session as we count it really has to do with money as you all know during the pandemic the state cut you know something like three billion dollars from the state budget the state's economy has recovered and then some with the addition of the federal dollars and there still is close to 1.5 billion dollars of arpa funds to be allocated this legislative session there were three special task force one on workforce one on housing and one on mental health that's giving up the remainder of the dollars those task force issued reports about a month ago maybe three weeks ago

[224:00] and the legislature is now starting to draft bills to do the implementation um uh i know we talked about within the legislative group the collective bargaining bill that uh some folks in the union community have been advocating for it's still taking up a lot of oxygen at the capitol a lot of discussion as i think you all probably know from following it the governor has said he wouldn't sign it and the form that was presented to him the advocates are still working out uh what they want to do and what that bill might look like moving forward so it's definitely a hot topic the other hot topic of the day has to do with ketamine if you would recall three years ago i think three years ago a bipartisan bill that was both bipartisanly sponsored and received almost majority votes in both chambers decriminalize the possession of ketamine

[225:00] um as you've seen in the newspaper there have been uh multiple stories about death uh i'm sorry i mean will just texted me fentanyl that's a different bill fentanyl um uh fentanyl deaths uh recently and the legislature is now talking about how to best address the fentanyl problem particularly in light of what just happened in adams county with those five adults who thought they were using cocaine and ended up using fentanyl and just dying on the spot there are a couple bills dealing with with health care and trying to reduce costs you know governor polis has been really really hot on his four years about trying to reduce the cost of health care and i think we'll see several additional build and then maybe the last thing i'll mention is the the frame generally at the capitol coming from the majority party the democrats and the governor's office has been about how to make things

[226:02] less expensive for everyday folks and so whether that's lowering the fees on driver's licenses by just a couple bucks or um postponing the implementation of uh of certain fee increases that were in the transportation bill or any of the other things that they've been doing um they really believe that those dollars and cents are going to add up and uh and folks will actually feel it in their pocketbook so maybe i'll stop there now that i uh give a little bit of a ramble i don't know if will you have anything to add or if not carl we're happy to answer questions on specific bills good summary you get well all right yeah i'm good all right um so the only thing i'll add is i actually again was speaking with councilmember phil griffiths this afternoon and one of the things she asked me about is um the policy statement language with

[227:02] regards to health care reform um and at the time i said you know i don't think there's any action and so i actually have since learned and you just heard that there might be action what i told her and it's important for you all to know is that last year the inner government affairs committee was tasked with looking into this very issue and you know what our position should be and one of the things we recognize is that there were different approaches to health care reform both at the federal level and at the state level and that reasonable minds were different and so what we did is we recommended language that council eventually approved that is fairly high level and doesn't provide specific direction of what kind of health care bill to support there was a recognition that there was a lot of stakeholders that we would have to take into account including our own community boulder community hospital so um that's where things stand um the

[228:02] policy statement will will the very least alert me to track it and bring it to your attention i'd bring it to the intergovernmental affairs committee but it wouldn't be actionable like many other positions i i would i would need counsel or at least the committees further direction uh before being able to convey support for any bill that comes out related to health care reform so that's all i have um eager to hear what questions you might have all right thanks for the update carl and will and adam always good to hear from you appreciate the update we've got junie and then nicole then i'll call myself thank you aaron i have a few questions for whether it's carl or adam but i'll start with carl first so you mention the specific bill that you mentioned is that are you looking for support from us

[229:00] for these specifically tonight no so i mean i just learned about the fact that there is going to be healthcare bills introduced i know absolutely nothing about them and i think it's premature for any conversation to take place i was merely pointing out that um knowing that this council may be interested in these topics in fact that's that's why we put this position in there i wanted to let you know that unlike every other position that is actionable and it basically allows me to move forward and take a position this is one that is not so what i will do is when we know more information i know that you care i will bring it to the intergovernmental affairs committee they'll advise me on how best to proceed whether they think they can make a decision or whether they think it requires full council consideration or it could also be the case that they decide that they they should stand down or stay neutral so that was the only purpose of that

[230:00] okay i have a question for adam and i don't know if you have any information on this is there any i am under the impression that there might be a bill coming forward for flavored marijuana to bend flavored marijuana do you have any information on that bill it's not to ban flavored marijuana it's uh there is a bill it's been introduced i think that carl correct me if i'm wrong the city has taken a position in support of the bill to ban flavored tobacco products and it is similar to the ban that was pushed in boulder in denver recently that the mayor vetoed it includes all flavored products including menthol and both for vaping and combustible tobacco okay and it has a hearing scheduled for

[231:00] next tuesday i want to say and um i think that they are uh still desperately counting the votes okay that bill is 1064. i was just going to tell you that bill was 1064. if you wanted to look it up thank you for that um and also i am i think maybe for me and also maybe my fellow council members and people in the community i was under the impression that the collective bargaining bill was moving forward or at least had a lot of momentum and something was happening with that is is this not something that is going forward at this moment so to date the bill has not yet been introduced i think that advocates are still looking for a path through the legislature and one that the governor will sign i i hate to look into a crystal ball and guess whether or not it's going to even be introduced or passed but i know that you

[232:01] know we talk with advocates they're friends of ours and they are they are plowing full steam ahead and they are trying to get to a place where they've got a bill that they can get through and get the governor to find okay i would just add there was a post article maybe two weekends ago by alex fernandes that was it was really pretty spot-on sometimes you know we read the press on legislative stuff like that really what's up really really nailed it you know the governor's outlined um some portions that he's willing to entertain in negotiation around particularly counties in higher ed and you know i think that the union world has a pretty broad coalition and they've not yet decided whether you know they can go down that road of entertaining that negotiation so um this is one of those ones as adam said we're only 40 of the way through and we may be still talking about this in the last couple weeks this session

[233:00] thank you i have a question for maybe call on this one i mean i'm in full support and i'm wondering how can i or other council members who are in support of collective bargain how can they either support this bill and maybe that's a question for adam as well i just don't know which one of the two of you how can we support this bill and support um you know president fenberg yeah um good question councilmember joseph um well first of all the city um through the intergovernmental affairs committee as you know had this conversation about this bill and they made it very clear that they are strongly supportive they also indicated that they had some concerns with some issues they felt that those issues would most likely be addressed in the negotiations that are going to occur basically anything that the governor is going to request is going to require meeting our issues and probably several others so at this point

[234:02] it seemed best to allow the powers that are really shaping this bill to kind kind of have their conversations and we would certainly engage when a bill is introduced and uh ideally that would meet our our our concerns and um this the city could um waive the flag and go testify in committee and things of that nature so that's what we're hoping for thank you very much thank you thanks thank you and nicole mead and matt thank you um thanks for this presentation uh i just i had um kind of a question and i thought uh carl related to your initial question for us about revisions and thinking about how to revise the policy statement um at the next opportunity um adam kind of noted that the state economy has recovered and been some and i think that

[235:01] that is true for some people and not all people um i think kind of like we saw after 2008 seems like the pandemic has exacerbated some inequities that existed potentially is growing our income inequality and so one of the questions i had is are there are there any bills that are kind of focused on this aspect of it sort of in line with our city's racial equity goals and um just thinking about you know how we can support things that are really focused on addressing some of the growing income inequality um i know you know you said there were some bills about saving folks you know few dollars here and there um all wonderful while some folks are you know getting a few more dollars um other folks are getting thousands or hundred thousands of more dollars right so um we're really seeing this income inequality grow so that's one of my questions and um the second question sorry the question specifically is are there any bills that are trying to address some of the growing um income

[236:00] inequality within our state the second question is around potential revisions i think one of the things i would be interested in is whether this is a place where the racial equity tool could be applied um to thinking about our policy statement and the kinds of legislation that we will be promoting and looking forward to so i don't know if that's there's somebody who could speak to whether or not it could be applied to to this process but the feedback that i would have that i'd like to see thank you so um one of council's state priorities is mental behavioral health and that specifically includes among other things not just removing the barriers to to care but funding for mental and behavioral health unfortunately as adam mentioned the ta the big things that are occurring at the general assembly assembly are considerations of a large amount of money i think it's like 450 million for mental and behavioral health about the

[237:01] same for affordable housing and then there's also a significant amount of money for economic support all of those really are targeted to those who have been left behind during the pandemic and the recovery so um we are very eager to not only apply for that funding because because local governments are going to be eligible for it but the shape the programs that are made available we have been meeting with representative mobley for example and all of our legislators as they were on the committee as the committees were making the initial recommendations that will now be translated into bills so we're kind of in that stage between a task force has recommended that the money be used for these purposes and they gave some ideas um we now need to see specific bills and you can bet that we're going to be actively involved in supporting those bills and making sure that our community members and frankly

[238:01] those throughout colorado who have left behind are made eligible for these funds so that's my answer to your your first question the second question um it's a great one i actually as part of my performance review i said that one of the things that i like to propose for 2022 is a more systematic approach to including the equity tool and if not development the policy statement then at least use of it or perhaps both so i would hope that next time i come before you and ask you for the provisions that it has those it has information about that so you can take into account you know who are the winners who are the losers if these policies move forward and how does that play out so that's my commitment to you thanks carl i appreciate that oh myself then matt uh carl that was great that's great to hear nicole that's a really excellent question and i'm really excited to hear carl that you're

[239:01] diving into that that work going forward i look forward to seeing the results of that i just want to follow when you said about the the health care the current health care policy not being actionable in and of itself i thought the language in there said that we would support anything that made healthcare more affordable and i think more accessible as well would we not support a bill that clearly made health care more affordable just based on that policy statement so the situation we found ourselves in last year when there were some residents were asking us to support medicare for all or health care for all was a recognition that there was a competing approach that was out there and we basically met with the committee and discussed the pros and cons and recognized that there were there were stakeholders in our own community that might be affected by one approach versus the other so the

[240:00] committee said you know we really need more facts this is kind of operating in the theoretical realm we're not ready to give staff or older officials direction on on what to support but we want to make sure that we engage on this when it comes so the policy statement position and i'm not pulling it up immediately has language that basically says may or something to the extent of bring it to our attention we occasionally do that um uh when we when we want to make sure that an item is flagged for for your attention but we feel like counsel will need to weigh competing political um interest um and that's that's how this current position is is worded so i wouldn't feel comfortable um taking that position and applying it to a specific bill nor do i recommend that you make it more specific right now because the same considerations that occurred last year i think are still out there my recommendation would be let me bring to you what is it being

[241:01] proposed and if um if all of you think that it is um in support of what you believe should happen the city can can actively support it okay well i i was on that committee last year and so thanks for the reminder i just i thought we had landed in a slightly different place so maybe it's something that we can talk over further on the intergovernmental affairs committee because i do want to make sure that our that our city can can be fully in support of of measures that bring make health care more affordable to to people and i think if you bring it to us we absolutely will be um but it might be good to be a little more nimble on it going forward as well thanks that was all i had matt uh thanks aaron and uh carl will uh adam thank you guys for the work you're doing uh the advocacy the lobbying you're doing is certainly in service of the values in our community really appreciate it these policy positions are fantastic and have a

[242:00] diverse suite of ways that we can help our community and the state as a whole um question i have is transportation related um it's about um the idaho stop bill hb 22 1028 and so i was kind of curious i didn't see that in the list uh i didn't hear about it so i want to know where do we have an official position on that because i think that's about to go to the senate if i'm not not mistaken or maybe just already has so it's right in that phase i just want to get your thoughts on where we are with that um and if there's any position we need to take or action that we or the intergovernmental affairs committee needs to do ahead of it uh ascending to the the senate as it continues to move through the chambers yeah um so councilmember benjamin thank you for the question it is on the list it has a title that doesn't say um what is it the um safety stops it has some idaho stop yeah old intersections um and i i can't pull it up right now and maintain a conversation with you but it's there we are supportive um what

[243:00] happened was i took it to the government affairs committee and i said on the one hand you've given me direction through your policy statement to protect local control which would include the ability of our own council and transportation and police department to decide what should and should not occur at our intersections on the other hand you've also given me direction that you want to facilitate the use of bicycles and of safety and even there is a question about whether this does or doesn't further safety i said so i don't have enough direction and so what the committee said is why don't you bring it to the transportation advisory board they uh are certainly familiar with these issues we uh we did a memo for them and took it to them and they decided unanimously that we should support it i brought that back to the committee the committee said okay with that we support it as well and we think that's within the realm of what the committee a decision the committee can make so i believe i'm hoping that that's something that the full council is embracing um in terms of where it stands uh if adam or will have any any

[244:01] intel on that that would be great to hear period um uh it did pass out of the house it's uh waiting its first hearing in the senate i think it was assigned to senate transportation the some of the committees with the changes got a little change so some members switched out and i think the bill is scheduled for hearing next week i can look but you know they're into the senate and they're optimistic great thank you for the update i mean i the continuity i know we want local control but having a state thing especially as we're trying to connect to our sister communities through biking having continuity with those rules i think is really really important um and this sort of plays into allowing us to maintain some of that continuity and focusing on vision zero so i hope that's something that we can keep moving forward on and get it fast right yeah in fact that was the argument that won the day at tab was among all other arguments the importance of

[245:00] uniformity and preventing confusion for bicyclists who don't always know what city they're in when they're biking right but do you remember that the bill doesn't approve it in all communities it allows local communities to prove it themselves well actually no i think that was the last bill right this one actually makes it throughout the state yes so the previous bill had basically given local government options and so now this bill says okay we've done that and we're concerned about the patchwork um and so we want to have a uniform requirement yeah yeah that's okay 100 debate the truth unless there was a radical change made in the last 24 hours i am i am looking now to make sure that i that i i'm making sure that i have it wrong yeah yeah you know part of their confusion may be adam is that the summary um first goes into explaining the history including the fact that it

[246:00] includes the local option and then it goes on to say this bill will take it further and make it a statewide mandate thanks and i'll just note that rachel this is a great example of us starting to send things to tab and it went really well so it was it was awesome example that jenny did you i heard from you that you wanted to you had a colloquy on this one yes it's a quick one i just wanted maybe call to just like mention to us what is really what is the incongruity between local control and some of the bill that are being proposed just because i feel like some of us don't fully understand what is local control and what is the why do we say that when it comes to certain bills that seem to be a good idea but you brought up forward local control right um great question a fundamental question in fact um so the way i look at it is unless council has said otherwise through their master plans through their statements through other policy

[247:01] statement positions the default position is protect local control because of course we wouldn't want a state law that says this is how much you have to pay your employees for example um we wouldn't want them to say you know you can't have red light camera there's there's a lot of areas that almost all of us agree we would not want to yield our local control um we wouldn't want to be made state employees or have the state collect our local taxes um however i always look at that as as a backstop so for example collective bargaining it used to be that i would just look at that as well that's local control i learned last year that that is an issue that this council and the previous council actually supported and just like in the issue of the environment there are many times where the city feels yes we'll gladly yield our local control because we think it the the public's

[248:01] interest is served better by addressing it at the state or even the federal level um so i'm i'm definitely aware of that but i also realize that there's a need for a backstop you know you could imagine the array of intrusions that the state perhaps not this particular general general assembly but others might uh uh interfere with our local uh decisions that would basically make your council your your posit your uh your positions irrelevant and of course we don't want that thank you aaron thank you very much all right we got mark and then lauren uh carl adam will thank you as always um great efforts on behalf of the city um it was recently reported that i think it was only 2 out of 48 maybe it was 2 out of 46 uh sales of manufactured home communities took place in which the residents were able to actually

[249:00] exercise their right to acquire the um the facility can you be a little more specific as to how the bill that is currently on offer would improve that process sure um so that's that's absolutely right on the one hand there's been successes on the other hand there's been way too few there's a few ways that it would improve it first of all if the if the summer of the park announces that they are selling they need to give notice to the residents this bill would expand the kind of notice and the kind of collaboration and information they would have to share the kind of um good faith negotiation that they would have to engage in it would also say that if the residents decided to assign that opportunity to purchase to a government that it then would become a writer first refusal which is substantively different

[250:01] in that the local government could then say you asked for three million we offer three million end of story we've met your conditions so that's a pretty significant uh change it also would um have uh i mentioned 450 million dollars for affordable housing that the task force is recommended part of that money would go towards helping to make it more achievable for communities to work together to buy their parks so those are some of the examples thank you and my other question is can you can any of you speak to the um actual prospects for passage both of that bill and the bill to establish limitations on increases in pad rents so those are both the same bill and you know um i can tell you that the homework that's been done in terms of outreach um this the coalition is very strong

[251:02] i i don't have a good way to predict the ability for that bill to pass and i don't know if will or adam do um i feel like we're doing all the right things we have support of a lot of important legislators but yeah i don't know i can't really say more than that will adam do you have any intel on that my crystal ball is pretty fuzzy on that one yeah we are definitely an active member and part of being an active member doesn't just mean like we've certainly been active in drafting the bill and but we're we're also very active in i mean will and adam are among the best in the game and so we are lending our our lobbying resources at the capitol to make sure that the uh the people that need to be spoken to and the uh you know the the um the lobbying that needs to occur uh occurs and i i personally feel

[252:02] very fairly confident more like more likely than not that it'll pass i think it's a very important bill so i wish you the best of luck in bringing it across the finish line thank you lauren um and then i just had a quick question sort of about our policy document on the first sheet we have sort of state and federal priorities where they're just a couple of the items that are within our larger policy document and i'm wondering how how are those items treated differently from the other items that are in the packet like what does it mean to be pulled out as one of those five in terms of the work you guys are doing on our behalf so we initially had a policy statement that was much shorter it was uh three or four

[253:00] pages and over the years it grew uh much to the chagrin of some council members um to the point that you now have what you know when you have area of uh 43 pages with uh 71 positions and many of them have sub positions and so you know some people were saying well this is a wish list you can't possibly be actively working on all these issues so it's a twofold balance on one hand we want to have positions there so if the opportunity arises if the bill gets introduced they don't have to go running back to council and say we need a decision yesterday because that's how fast things move the general assembly but other hand we wanted to make sure that we we knew the ones that you felt were most important and that should be prioritized the ones that we have to be the most proactive on and the ones that we frankly are going to be measured on so to the extent that we succeed um or don't succeed or partly succeed we'll be reporting back that to you so that's that's the difference um the

[254:02] list of state and federal priorities is intentionally kept short um i am the only fte that's full-time dedicated at this city for this uh others like for example the county that have numerous people that work full-time on lobbying issues so it's you know it's a question of being realistic you know we don't want to create a false pretense that we're actively working on a lot of things that we can't sometimes like the mobile home bill it's not listed as a priority but we know it matters a lot that accounts for it previously was the priority we were given the opportunity so we're actually working on it much like it was a priority thank you that helps a lot thanks all right well i'm uh it's interesting i've gotten like four texts in the last five minutes about the time as we are well past 10 o'clock here but this has been a really helpful set of questions and discussion uh teresa do you want to pop in and educate us on the appropriate next step

[255:00] to take on the time i'm happy to do that mayor um in addition i want to remind you that this is a this is a public hearing so it is important to open and close the public hearing on this matter but before you take up any new matters because it is after nine o'clock um if you were to want to take up any new matters uh that will extend beyond 10 30 that requires a vote of the council in a two-thirds agreement in addition i would recommend to you at that time that you go ahead and and take up the matter of whether to extend beyond 11 p.m if necessary as that also requires a two-thirds majority thank you for that so um rachel i would just like to make the motion that we need to um open new matters as necessary and and continue beyond 11 if needed having been to the cac meetings i would like to second that given

[256:00] what's coming up as well yeah we do have sometimes sensitive matters remaining that we will try to move through expeditiously so we have motion a second bob there's two matters of our time sensitive is the um the employee review time sensitive it's only the first of march do we have to do that tonight yes it is um quite time sensitive as we are already delayed all right i thought we usually do that in the the summer or early fall i can move through it really quickly when when when we get there but um yeah okay so let's let we've got a motion in a second maybe we can express an intention after we prove this motion if we do to move swiftly and expeditiously through the remaining matters let's see i guess this will be a does anyone object to the motion on the table bob i keep waiting for you to cast the george carrickian honorary no vote on these but you know i don't i don't want to offend my friend my friend nicole

[257:01] because she uh she promised a very speedy resolution so i'm gonna i'm looking forward to that so i'm not gonna object this time very good okay so that's uh thanks for that rachel so that passes and now we'll come back to the matter at hand it seems like we're done with questions so i will go ahead and open a public hearing uh on this matter um alicia do we have no one sign up for this one as well that is correct sir all right well i will duly close the public hearing then and return it back to council for consideration although i will start that by saying carl is it correct that we don't have to take any affirmative action here is that right we already have an approved policy statement so the only reason we need to take an action as if somebody wanted to alter it is that correct correct great so then let me frame it this way um would anyone like to suggest any

[258:00] alterations to the policy statement and rachel you've got a handout but i'm not sure if that's a new one okay all right i am oh there's lauren so and this is more of like a long-range thought rather than one that i think needs to be addressed right in this moment but i was um thinking that it i would love it if the intergovernmental affairs committee um might look into a couple of the things that have been brought up you know around and maybe it makes sense that these should come back when we do a deeper dive in october i leave that up to that committee if that makes sense um but looking at you know our stances on

[259:00] how we can better support racial equity reduce income inequality i would also love to see a statement about supporting compact development i know that boulder itself is relatively compact compared to a number of other communities and i think that sort of similarly to our energy codes supporting that kind of development throughout the state would help support our community at large and then also just a discussion around um healthcare and if there are any updates to that that would make sense with our new council those are just the things that i flagged as potent as areas where i see potential that maybe this council has moved from where the past council might have made suggestions

[260:01] not that i think that we absolutely need to make changes on that tonight but just something again that perhaps the intergovernmental mental affairs committee could consider so carl would you be amenable to putting those items on the agenda for our next iga committee meeting to start talking over those absolutely and i think it may be appropriate to convene the committee before the session is over since there's still quite a bit to be introduced great lauren does that cover your um common concern all right thanks for that all right well seeing no proposals for changes then i think we can take this item to a close carl do you need anything else from us i don't just want to thank you very much for uh some great questions and look forward to continuing the update on this appreciate your help as always and

[261:01] likewise will and adam for your able assistance on these matters all right that brings our public hearings to close alicia what do we got next next we have sir under item six a the under matters from city manager the covet update check-in on return to in-person meetings and we will try to make that as expeditious as possible we had just previously put out to you council where we stood with coming back to uh coming back to the workplace for uh some of our staff that was in hybrid mode and offering to you sort of our thoughts on when should council and the public come back when the cdc came out with new guidelines and has switched that around and put it on its head so i'm going to put pass it over to pam davis our assistant city manager to share with you what that looks like and what new thoughts are as we think about inviting everybody back pam

[262:01] thank you mayor and members of council and muria it's great to be back with you tonight um we did go ahead and prepare just a couple of visual slides for you as we work through this item so i'd request emily to pull those up now thank you again my name is pam davis assistant city manager and my pronouns are she her i'm returning to present this update on some of the changes that had just alluded to that have occurred at the cdc level as it relates to boulder county's covid status and then ask you to consider some parameters and timing for implementing hybrid council meetings so next slide please and i think we have a little bar blocking the top of that screen i'm not sure if that can be dealt with or not it goes away okay cool thank you so um

[263:03] as you recall as maria stated about two weeks ago we had shared with you a framework for city operations in terms of what transmission levels would dictate a change in when city offices would be open versus virtual etc and then friday afternoon the 25th so just last friday we received news that the cdc has shifted its thinking a little bit in terms of how community risk is measured and so they're still measuring transmission the way that we had included in our thinking before but there's a new cdc metric that is referred to as your community covid 19 community level and this is a new tool that is designed to help local communities determine what preventative measures to take to protect themselves so along with this new

[264:00] framework is also a greater shift toward local control and local public health agencies making the right decisions for themselves on what kind of public health policies to implement um so this this new framework you see the broad framework here on the slide and in case you haven't been familiar with it i thought it would just take a few seconds to orient you to it so the way that this tool works now is that there are just three levels called low medium high or green yellow and orange and they're really determined by um still case numbers so you'll see in the left-hand column that the the current threshold the cdc is really concerned with is um if your rolling case seven day average is fewer than 200 per 100 000 or greater than 200 per 100 000 and once you have that answer you then cross the chart to the right and look at the secondary indicators of

[265:02] hospital admissions specifically for covid19 and percent of beds occupied with patients with copin 19. and based on your numbers in those two categories that's how the cdc now classifies those measures the transmission metric that we had been more focused on previously dealt with case numbers and positivity rates so this is a different calculation with sort of different thresholds um to to measure risk so with that at the same time if any of you saw any of the news releases the map that used to be the entire united states was just bright red now you'll see that the united states is a big patchwork of green yellow and orange and boulder county falls squarely in that green community level when it comes to how our risk is measured per the cdc under these new guidelines

[266:00] in addition to that when we just talk about transmission case counts do continue to decline in boulder county um in particular and we think a lot of that does have to do with our great vaccination rate and the measures that have been implemented the the length of time we kept our indoor masking order in place and things like that and so we anticipate as those trends decline our transmission rate will start to look greener and greener just like this new community level measurement we were able to get in touch with boulder county public health very briefly before this evening just to sort of corroborate our understanding of how this structure works and validate our staff recommendation that we're about to present to you related to hybrid meetings so they're supportive of where we are now they received the new information at the same time we did so their teams are currently in the midst of digesting this information as well as collaborating with neighboring local public health agencies so we expect to hear a little

[267:00] bit more from them and how some of the this new information will shift their thinking but they don't anticipate anything um that's significantly out of la alignment from what you hear tonight and again they're looking forward to this shift toward greater local control over how we regulate public health at this time so as we continue internally to make adjustments based on this information we can go to the next slide emily and just talk a little bit about council meetings proper and then other meetings that council members are involved with so to put it out there because we want you to have plenty of time for conversation we recommend that with boulder county in the green level according to cdc's community level and the ongoing downward trend of cases that we're confident from a public health standpoint that council meetings may go hybrid as soon as a majority of council determines that you all are ready to do so from a public process perspective we do

[268:02] recommend the earliest hybrid meeting with council take place april 5th at the earliest so that first regular meeting in april that will just give us a couple weeks to get the facility clean back up again and ready and give time for some of those minor process adjustments that take place when we go hybrid versus exclusively virtual and then our recommendation would be we would have about a month so two regular meetings of just staff and council back in chambers um so that we can ensure everything's working smoothly and then at the earliest welcome the public back in may that will also give us ample time to communicate to the public how a new hybrid public comment process would work because now we'll be in the situation where when community members show up to provide testimony we may have some coming in on zoom some standing at the podium with the microphone and so we just want to ensure those workflows are

[269:01] well communicated and that websites are updated and we're ready to provide a smooth experience for our community members um and then the i think the final point on this recommendation is just that as an ongoing practice indefinitely we have a couple staff members and my colleague james brown our risk manager is also on this call here today he and i working with the kova team we'll just do a daily check of where we are on the cdc framework and if it appears the city's headed back into orange or red levels of of community risk or transmission that we would recommend in that situation we would make a recommendation to council to resume back with a virtual only environment while we are in those higher risk time periods so that would just be our longer term opportunity to ensure that we're keeping an eye on our current state okay so that's the recommendation and

[270:01] then the next slide i believe we have uh great so we have a little chart we just created to help aid the discussion mayor if this is helpful um there are a couple of details we'd like to hear from council in order to be able to implement whatever your will is when it comes to hybrid meetings so the first question we have is when would you like to implement implement hybrid council meetings overall again staff recommendation would be the first meeting april 5th for council and staff and may 3rd at the earliest certainly you can tell us no you need to do it faster you can tell us that sounds great but let's wait three more months you can tell us to move forward we welcome any of that feedback and then the chart you see below are some of the specifics some of these things we have talked about through past conversation so when we go across the chart from left to right we've discussed that regular and speed

[271:01] and special meetings because of having public participation in those that there is a strong interest in going hybrid when it is safe study sessions and the past council has expressed an interest of maintaining those virtual since they are conversations among council members but we welcome your feedback to validate or change that decision also past conversations have determined that cac and council committees would be virtual because of the nature of them occurring during the work day again if there are particular cases in which a committee wants to meet in person or that sort of thing we can always accommodate exceptions but we'd love to hear from you on that and then finally boards and commissions our recommendation for you is that boards and commissions at their discretion can determine whether they be virtual or hybrid based on the makeup of those boards and commissions and we just ask from a staff perspective if we could

[272:01] again give us a grace period of about a month after the council meeting shift so that we could just ensure that we're organized and supporting boards and commissions in adequate meeting spaces hybrid technology um that sort of thing and then finally um following those decisions is whether council would like to direct us to work with the city attorney's office related to establishing a council rule or procedure around attendance in these hybrid settings so for example counsel want to determine that as a body members individual members you know can opt no more than twice per year to attend a hybrid meeting virtually or that perhaps any hybrid meeting must have at least five members in person um that sort of thing so with that those are the questions before you and i turn it back over to you mayor thank you thanks so much for that pam really appreciate those recommendations i'm

[273:01] going to make just make one process suggestion here um in our for our discussion tonight it is quite late i would recommend that that last question is not something we try to pin down tonight i think we should come back to that at another time when when we're a little fresher but i do want us to talk about when we would like to start doing in person so people can say what they think about the staff recommendation that would be great i've got bob mark and nicole uh you know thanks thanks aaron thanks pam i appreciate that i'm not going to weigh in the recommendations um but i did ask a question for pam am i if we did go back to in-person meetings on april 5th i believe that one is scheduled to be a joint public meeting with the county commissioners have we checked with the commissioners about whether they're comfortable meeting in person we have not not specifically on that meeting but we would do that quickly and we can okay because i i think i think that meeting is pretty much a sole purpose single purpose meeting it's a little housekeeping but i think like 80 90 of that meeting is just pretty much us sitting with commissioners talking

[274:01] about the library district so the only thing i would throw out there is the commissioners are cool with that that's fine if they're not cool with that then that kind of makes that pretty much a mood question thanks for that bob great point i'm sorry just to weigh in bob would you then suggest if that's not true that we then think about it for the next regularly scheduled april meeting sure sure that'd be fine i'm kind of neutral on when we meet in person i'm just you know before we decide tonight we're gonna meet on april 5th we probably should absolutely respectfully ask the commissioner since they're pretty much our meeting and uh so it would be either the fifth or they're cool with it in the 19th or even may 3rd if they're not cool with it great uh mark nicole matt lauren okay uh pam a question one of the slides was a little confusing to me are you suggesting that we go back uh to virtual if we've established an in-presence uh meeting only if we hit the high level or if we hit the more moderate level so our recommendation is the high level

[275:02] um that's based on the and i didn't put every single thing on the slide because there's a lot on that new cdc page um the both the low and the medium level carry almost the exact same uh suggested precautions it's once you hit the high level that the cdc starts recommending mandatory indoor masking and things like that and so by our our staff and and in talking with boulder county public health we find it's a it's a much stronger distinction between medium and high rather than low in medium that said ultimately when it comes to these meetings in particular it's about you and your comfort level to carry out your business so we can um adjust as needed okay i i like your your proposal and probably a little more uh reticent about sort of the middle ground and if we're trending in the wrong direction i'm not sure i want to wait till we hit red

[276:02] um before we make a different decision um you know caution to me and this subject is is always warranted uh in terms of timing i i'm fine with it and um uh obviously we will have further conversation about rules regarding uh hybrid participation at a different time so that covers the waterfront for me right now well matt and lauren um thanks pam and thank you staff for thinking so carefully um about all of this um generally yes this is my my short answer um one of the things that i'm just wondering about because i'm still just really sensitive to the fact that there are folks in our community we're dealing with autoimmune issues who are compromised in some way right and have we gotten any input you know from them on the kinds of things that we might be able to put in place like one of the things i've been thinking about is um you know we often ask if folks

[277:02] need accommodations or you know translation or something like that if we know that somebody really wants to come in and speak to us in person and they are immunocompromised can we agree to our masks you know for that meeting or something like that i'm just you know i'm just i'm curious about what um ideas folks may have in the community for how we can make it as a space that feels comfortable um i like mark's point about not waiting till red i would also like to do that you know i think um it does feel like our country sort of decided that we can just move on from this pandemic the rates are still not zero right we still have people getting really sick in the hospital and you know we still don't really have a good understanding of who gets the longer term um covid and why but it's pretty disabling for folks that do and so you know i i just want to very eager to see you all again and be in person again um and i just want to make sure that we're being sensitive to

[278:01] folks in our community who um may be at particular risk thanks for that oh would you like to respond to that yeah right go ahead please okay i i was just simply say nicole to the question about um accommodations we can think about that for if someone really wants to come in person most of our thinking at this point really is we intend to be hybrid in depth like into the future and so there will always be as far as we're concerned options for the public to persist participate virtually so i think that's really our our first level of protection um but balancing participation with safety um we have an ada accommodation process and we can think through if there's a good way to make that a smooth process as it arises okay thank you yeah i just i just want to make sure it's it's a choice that everybody has access to matt oh well thanks for the the presentation

[279:01] and the thoughtfulness on how to sort of phase us back into you know two years of not doing this and i think back to december third that was our only chance to go into council chambers and then we went right back to hybrid so i'm gonna have to relearn uh muting and i'm muting a microphone and everything else but um i think directly one of the things that i didn't see presented that is a concern for me is vaccination status um i i do think that you know we all had to present our vaccination status to have that meeting in december granted coveted was a little different but it's also still not right it is still highly transmissible i still have a daughter that is unvaccinated there's a population completely under five that still doesn't have any level of protection even though the masks have been lifted so i think that if we're con for bringing a bunch of people together not just counsel but packing a lot of people into the audience um i i think that we need to strongly consider how vaccination is part of our protective level in order to make sure that that is a safe environment for all

[280:01] especially to be unvaccinated in that type of close proximity because you don't have a choice to social distance um in that environment in a meaningful way especially for the audience so um that that's something that i would really like us to consider um in order for the public i'm good with council and staff hybrid no public for a bit i think that's a safer environment but as soon as we get the public i think vaccination status needs to be something we strongly consider well yes i apologize if if you'd rather take comments i can respond all at once too mayor go ahead um so matt just on that point we have had some conversation internally where it stands now we have our city vaccination policies so from a staff perspective and a council perspective we're well aware of status and or individuals who have have approved exemptions and are taking precautions the county did discontinue the vaccine verification program that provided the framework and enforcement component

[281:02] for the public so i think that's a conversation i would want to collaborate with teresa on as it relates to public access to public business um and whether or not enforcing restrictions related to vaccinations is advisable thanks nicole yeah apologies i forgot that i have one more question um and pam this was just uh wanting to me wanting to clarify um i think for the public as well why we're having a gap between when council comes back and when we're gonna allow the public to come back the way that i am understanding it please correct me if this is not right is that it really is kind of giving us a chance to get back there make sure everything's working make sure all the procedures and everything are in place again and give you some time to get set up for this hybrid public comment and participation

[282:00] set up and and to do all of that at once have us come back deal with with that situation and and uh the public back in the room with this hybrid participation at once would be a little too much and we would likely spend a lot of time um at that meeting dealing with issues that may be arising is that a correct interpretation that's certainly the primary factor i think a little bit the secondary factor is allowing a little more time to pass of this downward case trend um kind of to matt's point before um inviting the public back into the room predominantly though it's we want to be good at this when we make this shift and particularly our engagement team is adapting quite a bit the way that they work in this environment and so we want to ensure that they're well prepared to make that thank you for clarifying shoot me and then i'll call myself i just have a quick question as far as

[283:02] the april timeline and the may timeline why was that chosen as opposed to well into summer time and i'm not a scientist when it comes to medicine but my understanding was well during the summer time um how do i put it the transmission rate for covid is much lower so i'm trying to figure out what's the calculus instead of going on into the summer time thanks for that council member um so really it was our recommendation is based on what's the earliest we think is reasonable and possible and so that's where that april date came from you are certainly correct that from what we've seen cyclically of how kovid behaves kind of continuing into the summer we'll continue to see that dip and then through the fall and winter months we often see it at peak again so as far as we're concerned we think it is doable

[284:02] ultimately though the your discussion is what will determine what you're comfortable with okay i'll call myself and then rachel uh i think you've got a good plan uh i think april sounds like the right time to come back based on the the lowering transmission levels and the cdc guidance um assuming as bob says that the county commissioners are okay with that because if they're not we should wait another couple weeks um so let's definitely consult with them on that but i look forward to it uh anything to be able to lead a meeting without my parking dog being a major problem every single night oh my gosh i'm so desperate uh so that's that's my feedback thanks for the work you're doing on this uh rachel yeah um i'm also uh i think it's a good plan i think april is fine checking in with the commissioners they i don't know if they're still virtual um or not so this this

[285:00] they are but more for technology issues um so yeah i think that's um that's a good thing to check in and so either doing it april 5th or would it be 19th as as the start um makes sense and i appreciate us having um some some concrete data trigger points rather than kind of going with our guts because that was concerning me for a while and i i guess i would only you know a little bit push back on um the notion that that um i think it was mentioned earlier by someone you know that this is about our comfort level and getting back i think it's it's largely about you know getting back to the best way to do this job for the community this i don't believe has been the best way to to conduct council business so we do need to be comfortable we do need to follow um medical guidelines but i think that i'm not so worried about my own um

[286:00] comfort and as i am about the community um having us be able to do this job the best for for what we're trying to do so i appreciate all the work thanks can i just ask oh just if we have an affirmation of uh having our cac and our study sessions remain virtual is that the continued will of this council body i am so excited about that thumbs up continued thumbs up very good can i just say one more thing like i um sorry i forgot i do think i understand pushing off the rest of this conversation mayor bracket but you know april is right around the corner so i don't know that we want to you know it'll be quickly that we have to figure out who's if everybody's got to be there or not so i just wouldn't for cac i wouldn't delay that yeah you and i should send a message to the cac folks rachel and make sure that they take this up because i agree we need to talk about it so

[287:01] juni i just have a point of clarification between you and rachel uh mayor brockett are you saying that cac will decide whether all of us have to be there or is that going to be put on the calendar agenda so that at the next meeting we talk about how many people has to be in chambers yeah that we would put it on the calendar for council as a whole to talk about you know what the rules are for um for hybrid meetings and council attendance thank you we would discuss it as a thank you okay so what i'm what i'm hearing is general general comfort with um staff's proposal subject to checking with the county commissioners is that uh are people good with that okay i'm seeing lots of nodding heads uh looking forward to seeing all of your bright shining faces in person again so thanks very much for that bam really appreciate all your hard work and everybody else on that and or if i may just clarify real quickly i heard from a couple of you as well a desire that

[288:00] really that medium or yellow category become the threshold that we look at for council business um is that something that you'd like us to proceed with or is that something that you'd like to wrap into this ongoing rules discussion let's wrap it into the ongoing world's discussion it's late i'd rather not have to make a final decision tonight sounds great thank you that's all right can i just ask for one data point for when that comes back and i will be brief just i think it would be helpful for the discussion for us to know like what that would look like historically so when would it have been yellow uh you know during covid when would it have been green one would have been red thanks we can do that we can do that and i know that james who was on earlier was working on that so we'll figure that out all right and you got everything you need i do thanks very much great all right alicia what do we got next

[289:01] we have next the matters from the mayor and members of council item eight on tonight's agenda 8a is the council employee evaluation committee to discuss the performance evaluation process and timeline great we've been promised a quick update on this nicole are you going to take this yes i am i am wondering if um you could pull up the slides that'll help me thank you um okay so um so far it's juni and myself and amy and hr who've been working on talking on this let me go to the next slide uh the the short the short story is that we're very behind the process changed to align council employees with other staff and so evaluations kind of should have been completed now and we haven't even started in previous years the evaluation process has taken um four to five months

[290:01] we are thinking we can probably tighten that up a little bit and get it to be done a little faster but um with a four to five month process probably should have started back in october and november um we did not so we're behind so we have a plan though so go to the next slide we'll share the plan um so the plan is to move the council employee evaluations back to spring summer and 2022. um i think there are some good reasons for doing that moving forward but at least for this year we think we really need to do that some of those reasons are listed there i'm not going to read them all um so for this year the 2021 evaluations we would get started uh this month amy has reached out to some excuse me consultants so we should be able to get started in april um the performance period would still be from january 1st 2021 to december 31st 2021 um for this year and we're thinking we can just kind of see how the timeline goes this year to determine the

[291:01] future cadence now what this brings up for um especially uh judge cook who has you know been with the city for quite a number of years is that we really need to be conscious of the fact that we're delaying people's raises and so we would uh back date any raises that council employees would get as a result of this process to january 1st 2022 which would enable them to kind of get like a lump sum catch up payment by the time we we get there um so uh the council employees um are okay with this change um you know we just want to make sure pay is backdated and as i say they're okay with this change i also just want to recognize that we really don't have an alternative right now and i just want to apologize to maria teresa i'm sure judge cook is is long gone on this meeting but um i'm i'm sorry that you know we weren't more on top of it

[292:00] and recognized that this needed to happen um quickly so i think i can speak for juni and amy and myself we we will be working to put in place some really firm processes this year to make sure that this doesn't happen again okay next slide um so proposed timeline basically this this month trying to get make sure that we have a group that can conduct these evaluations um we're thinking and this is sort of the worst case scenario timeline with as much time as as we may need april creating evaluation surveys for each council employee list of people to help fill those out in may we would be sending out the surveys and creating evaluation instructions for council june we would be compiling the responses from the evaluation surveys sending them to all of us and getting the council evaluations done july we would be compiling the responses

[293:00] and giving evaluations to the council employees um august uh approving pay any pay increases backdated for 2022 um and then in september debrief document the process improve on it save it for next year um and again i just want to point out amy said the consultant thinks we may be able to go faster through this process so that is all we can field questions but um i may uh defer to juni as my brain is starting to fail to function i think you did a great job there's nothing further to add excellent well i appreciate your working hard on a revised timeline goodness i'll just say i think this sounds great um does any council member object to this or or want to throw in an extra comment on this i'm seeing none so we'll just say great great job and and apologies uh to as

[294:01] well to teresa and nuria and judge cook um for the lengthy or the delay on this appreciate your tolerance appreciate that and none needed on my end okay that was in fact quick thanks junior nicole uh i think we got one more item yes sir item 5b is the boards and commissions recruitment slash interview process check-in we're going to be awake for this one really exciting stuff get up everyone get up so as you guys know we are currently working through the application process sorry the interview process we have we just want to do a quick update so that we can talk through kind of some of the upcoming things um videos are currently being updated every day as we do the interviews um the big picture is on march 8th we're going to have a study a study session

[295:02] where we will have our discussion of candidates where people can um bring forth candidates they're excited about for each of the positions and sort of say why and then on march 15th at our regularly scheduled meeting we would have our um official nominations and a vote on the appointments we kind of have a list to go through it that gives more detailed summary of why we're doing it that way um so yeah applications are being provided are being compiled and provided to council as well as board and commission secretaries and liaisons and posted to the public website on february 23rd interviews are proceeding throughout this week as you all know and will conclude on friday council members are being provided with access to interview recordings daily

[296:02] so that you have as much time as possible to review so i've been to quite a few interviews already and many candidates like this new form and it's going really smoothly i also listened to a few of the interview recordings already it's been so convenient however i suggest that we don't wait until the last minute to listen to all of them because there are a lot so just fyi when taylor sends that email listen up hopefully you will okay lauren so hopefully everyone will have watched that all of them by the march 8 study session where council will have the opportunity to discuss the candidates and interviews and express their candidate preferences but no formal action can be taken during the study session staff will be taking notes on which applicants camp council members intend to nominate and appoint but um on the following march 15th um but the

[297:00] it's just an intention and that's in order to help ensure that we can having a smooth appointment process on the 15th so on march 8th the city clerk will present slides of each board to support uh council discussion and slides will include details on the open seats applicants names if the applicant is currently serving already and wants to be reappointed and slides will note applicants that applied for more than one board and what other boards they apply to based on the preferences expressed during the march 8th meeting staff will prepare and submit a council memo summarizing the discussion and updated slides highlighting favored candidates for the march 15th meeting packet okay so as far as march 15th goes we are not going to talk about the details tonight we're too tired plus we're not exactly sure no i'm kidding

[298:00] um but i will say that a brief presentation by the city clerk will remind council of the boards and commission seats being filled that is going to happen on march 15th and the list of candidates we express an interest in nominating during the march 8th study prior to any formal nominations or votes a public hearing will be held and that also gives us the opportunity to take into account any feedback we have you know anything we hear during that um public hearing we can add those to our list of nominations and vote on them in that meeting and council will begin making formal motions to nominate candidates one board or commission at a time on march 15th as well we're done we're going to call you especially very soon to discuss we also want to hear your feedback council members on

[299:01] how the um what's the word um interviews are going all right nice tag team presentation we got a few comments and i would just encourage us to not go too deep down a rabbit hole on this uh no rabbit halls okay bob matt rachel two things i have to complement the synchronized swimming between lauren and tara oh my god that's how a two-member committee needs to operate thank you so much can you imagine the dress rehearsals you guys went through second mayor brockton i'd like to make a motion my motion is this taylor ryman rocks he has worked so hard to make this so successful and we are so indebted to her so if once someone wants a second that motion you should vote on that tonight that's it and pam okay yes absolutely i second that much for sure matt and rachel

[300:02] um yes i couldn't agree more with bob's comments um so a couple things one uh just a little quick work i've had a number of no-shows um at my interviews i've done two uh four out of 13 have no show so if people are listening show up to your interviews cause you're just making more work for taylor and pam to reschedule us the last minute show up it's just 15 minutes like let's get her done um so um anyway so that that's something that i just from my experience um one thing with with process when we last spoke about this we talked about not doing hotline posts ahead of the meeting because we didn't want to put it out in the ether and then have it settle and have all that back and forth between people and community before we made a decision and yet we've now somehow found a way to extend that time by a whole week and so i i'm now really confused why we've gone kind of the other direction from what it seemed to be some general i don't know if it was total but general counsel consensus of of trying to just

[301:00] in one fail swoop make the nominations make the vote and then move forward and not allow all that out in the ether and public and and ltes and all the nonsense cloud and and make people move back and forth rather than just get to it get it done nominate vote and move on so i'm curious as to why we extend it rather than that so that's my main question and i'd prefer to just get it done in one night to be honest yeah i'm not sure how that happened lauren we didn't extend it this is what we proposed before that it would be it was just that the march 8th meeting we were trying i think to limit the time by doing a hotline post instead of doing it in the meeting but and in the and i'm sorry if i may and that march 8th is a study session so we're not having votes there and we wanted to have the public hearing so that you could really hear some feedback from community fair but feedback on the nominations that have been sort of out in the ether

[302:00] for a week is not how it's ever been done as far as i'm concerned so i'm wondering why because if so so i know you have public feedback but that should be done all in one fail swoop at least that's how i've experienced it in the past and like it going forward so that's just me but i'd want to throw that out there too can certainly enlighten us more if you want to jump in yeah tell us why so matt you're right we used to spend about two hours in a regular meeting doing everything all at once early on in the process the decision was made because and this is a little bit of the pendulum swinging both directions right the decision was how do we not spend two hours all at once doing um all of the discussion nomination and approval so the idea was well we can set aside some time at a study session to have a lot of the conversation and then and then the regular meeting itself for the appointments can be a quicker process again this is a council and subcommittee discretion item so it's sort of

[303:00] where do you want to put your long night and and how much do you want kind of the public and others to sort of know what's in your heads for however long before you make your decisions and part of the intention was also that um if say someone someone hadn't watched all of the videos on a particular board or commission and they wanted to make sure that they had the opportunity to watch all of the ones that were nominated so that they could ensure they're making an informed decision because that's what was being put out there that would make sure that people are as prepared as possible for what they are voting on it doesn't matter to me and that you're right lauren that's why we did it i momentarily forgot why but um should we hear from others

[304:02] rachel's in the list in the line uh you meet it thanks aaron um and i i will second bob's motion to to have some kind of a declaration for taylor's awesomeness and and pam you've been great too and elisha i just learned how to correctly pronounce your name today i'm so sorry for the last several years um so anyhow i i worry that we're setting ourselves up for uh failure on this i think that in my experience you nominate someone that person makes or doesn't make make a board and then you nominate you know based on who's already been appointed and whoever we nominate on the 8th is not going to be you know a fullest anyway we're going to make more nominations on the 15th we're going to have the public hearing after we've made most of the nominations but i think the public hearing should be before we make any nominations if we're actually listening to members of the public i would probably um you know have the eighth

[305:01] just convert from a study session and and if we need one big meeting um have it on the 8th i'm also worried that if we make our pitches for the candidates that we want to vote for or nominate on the 8th we're going to remake those pitches on the 15th because we're going to want to refresh people's memories for why we why we love candidates and we're going to ignite in that interim so it's going to be it's not it's not going to be one two hour meetings it's going to be two meetings because we're going to do the same price um and and again like who i know nominate for rab is going to you know depend on who's already been appointed to arts or whatever because several people apply to three and we've got confusing recusals this time so i i would that part um i i would not um i would not follow the recommendation of the subcommittee on that i think that we are hey so we're doing it for everybody because we didn't think they'd have enough time we want to do whatever you guys want to do well hold on a second the the um

[306:02] my understanding what you're proposing is that the nominations would happen after the public hearing isn't that right like the formal like we can advocate on the eighth but the actual nominations happen after the public hearing on the 15th and and they they can be based on previous appointments as well like even if you didn't talk somebody up on the eighth if your favorite person you know for some board got a point of the arts already you could nominate somebody else when you get to wrap or whatever it is so i i think those parts are all taken care of from from from what they were proposing lauren and tara do it to understand that correctly yes yes i mean we really just did it to give people more time if you don't want more time then oh i finished my sentence yeah well and and i can be done too i think we will also you know it will it will be a

[307:00] rather than having a public hearing and hearing from the public on sort of you know concerns and and um positives about all the candidates we will get lobbied really hard for a week um on on the candidates that we have nominated on the eighth or those that we have not nominated on the eighth so it's just it's gonna be a week of intense lobbying we can't vote until the 15th because the eighth is a study session i think you are going to get nominated hard regardless of what gets discussed in the meeting on the eighth we don't have to have the study session have this in it we can just do the 15th as our um two-hour session and maybe we can move something cac from the 15th to the 8th i don't know and we often convert study sessions i don't know if it's too late to do that for that one but anyhow that's my feedback thanks mark and then genie i just wanted to ask something of rachel

[308:00] so what are you suggesting that that we compress everything into the and the eight yeah i'm just suggesting do it do it on one night i think that it's going to be hard to put the puzzle pieces together on two different nights and we will have a lot of extra time involved um i think matt's right we're going to get we're going to get lobbied one way or the other uh it doesn't really matter how we do this if we do it on the 8th and the 15th we'll get lobby in between if we do it on the 15th we're going to get lobbied anyway so i'm not sure there's going to i'm i'm sympathetic to not being lobbied um but that's simply part of what we do um but i'd be very happy to to do it all at once um you know admit i don't know that we're going to get it done in two hours perhaps a more realistic allocation of time uh might be appropriate for that conversation but i think it could make good sense to

[309:01] do it on the 15th it gives people extra time to watch videos if they haven't already done so and [Music] i think that could work okay uh let's see i got junior and then i'm gonna i'm gonna try to move us in a direction yes i just have a thought in a comment for the 15th um i don't know how many council members will be participating in the national league of cities um i wasn't sure if i was going to go this year because of the pandemic and also whether it was going to be online um as of right now i will be attending and i don't know how many other council members will be attending as well if that would make a difference on whether you undo it on the 8th on the 8th or the 15th so i'm sorry judy you said you will

[310:00] be absent on the 15th because you'll be doing the cml yes okay uh it's another another wrinkle there okay so um all right so we're i'm hearing some some different opinions here i i personally i'm i'm agnostic i you know i would support the recommendation of the subcommittee um but i'm also fine doing it on one night um so i i think we just need to figure out will of counsel here the complication is in terms of amount of time uh right now we've got we have 90 minutes for this on march 8th we only have 45 minutes for it on the 15th and we have other meaty items on the 15th so we would have to like probably move the library district discussion to the eighth if we did it all on one night on the 15th i don't know if that's feasible from a staff perspective doing that a week earlier is but there's also the question

[311:00] that we would be really good to have all of council here um didn't realize junior was gone on the 15th so another if we if we want to do it in one night maybe would be on the eighth and we would convert it to and add a special meeting um to have a public hearing on it so i i kind of need to to assess out a will of counsel here so maybe we could have a threshold question of would people prefer to do it in two nights um in some form well i guess let's say two nights roughly in the form that's been outlined by the subcommittee or they prefer to do it in one night uh before jenny did you want to say something before i post that question no okay um so i if we get tara i'm not as the subcommittee member i'm not saying i want to have it on two nights that's not even my recommendation i'm now agnostic with you all okay so let's put it this way and i i'm going to look for a physical show of

[312:01] hands who would really prefer that it be on uh one night okay i got a strong majority there so um and and tara and i are both fine with that hopefully nicole i didn't see your hand can you live with that that approach and lauren um okay so then we're talking about doing it in one night um could we do it on the eighth could we convert that to a special meeting and do it on the 8th narrative oh go ahead marie i'll ask theresa to weigh in on what kind of notice we need to give it seems like we probably could fit that in i'll note that likely we've got a four hour meeting there 90 of which is this and we've got outdoor dining which i assume you don't want to move and and the other items so we could move the safe streets boulder if we needed more time i i would i would probably propose swapping safe streets uh to the 15th if

[313:02] transportation could support that um bob yeah i was going to make a slightly different suggestion first of all i do agree that we can't do all three things on the eighth um i think the eighth is great um i'd actually suggest we move outdoor dining because i think that is still a little flux and i think it could use a little bit more marinating so i'm just gonna throw that on safe street we've already postponed a couple times i bet you erica is keen to present that to us and i'm keen to hear it and i'd like to suggest that we move outdoor dining because i'm not sure that's ready for prime time yet go ahead well what i just might would say is that point taken and cac could get feedback from staff on what would be the best thing to move um amongst those lauren i did just want to point out that we have that this voting on the 12th and having the public or sorry on the i don't even remember what day anymore 15th um has been part of the communication that

[314:00] has been happening both in the interviews and in the email communication that has gone out to all of the applicants that is a good point um i would not all the applicants in that i know the ones i was in today we were like we're not sure exactly when we're going to vote because i was confused from cac yesterday so some have heard something a little different but i think we still would vote on the 15th as well wouldn't we on consent we're talking about no we're talking about making a special meeting so that we could have a public hearing if we're grabbing a public hearing then we do it all in one night okay we had to finalize on the 15th all right thanks yeah you wouldn't need to i you know i will say that this is a compressed timeline you you signing up for a very busy week of reading the packets and watching all the interviews um to to do this uh mark yeah look whatever council wants is fine with me but i i think doing it on the

[315:00] 15th is a little cleaner um gives us more opportunity to reflect upon who we want and why we want them and how we're going to express that um at a council meeting uh yeah it opens us up for a week of lobbying but that's you know that's part of our job description um and i i just think it it unfolds a little cleaner uh doing it that way but again whatever council wants to do is is fine i think i think the eighth is a very compressed time frame it is i'll just say that um missing juni would be really unfortunate um both because june's voices is a very important one and also because uh having an even number of people in this kind of thing is tough what about this why don't we do everything but nominate on the eighth we say who we're going to nominate we

[316:00] don't actually do the nominating until the 15th and just make that fast that was the proposal y'all walked in with at the beginning of the evening yeah but we we were saying that if at last minute you wanted to change it or whatever i mean we can but maybe we just should mostly decide and then just finish it off on the 15th and not really have any changes what do you well but then junior still isn't there all right i i'm not seeing a perfect option here i think we have we have issues any way we we do it let's get it um junior and nicole let's try to make a decision here yeah uh since i will be part of the interviews tomorrow i'd like the opportunity to be there and i'm wondering since if we were to do them early my understanding based on what i've heard

[317:00] if we were to do them early somehow if that would discriminate against some people is that what we're thinking then can we push it for later the nomination for the end of the month the council meeting at the end of the month would that be okay we don't have another council meeting in march and people's board terms end at the end of march okay but can we can could we if we were we intended to turn the uh study session in march the first one right to a special meeting could we do the same thing for the one later on at the end of the month well we just don't have a meeting at all at the end of the month our last meeting is the 15th because there's spring break and then the fifth tuesday okay unfortunately so no don't don't have that option sadly good idea though nicole i support just having one meeting on the eighth where where we just get this done i mean i know i had sort of set a lot of

[318:01] time aside this this week too review everything interviews all that stuff um you know i feel like i'll be in a good place by the eighth i'd really love to have tuning there for the reasons you said aaron so um if we can move that to a special meeting i think that would be my preference [Music] so i'm getting there i agree with nicole i think just let's just get this done on the eighth and uh so judy can participate and i'd like to suggest that we move off outdoor dining for a couple more weeks uh just because i think there's still some stuff in motion and we could do um uh well if we need to but but anyway let's do it let's do it on the 8th and be done with it if we need to move some stuff from the 8th to the 15th to make that work that that would be my preference thanks teresa mayor our esteemed city clerk rightly pointed out that the code requires um the code states at a regular meeting before april

[319:02] awards and commissions shall be appointed so terribly sorry to have let you go down this rabbit hole um it has to be at a regular meeting but could i ask what's what's the definition of regular meeting can we can we call a regular meeting or or is is anything we call a special meeting anything you call is a special meaning a regular meaning is is defined as i recall in the code well that was um that was a lot of discussion um terribly sorry no a regular uh i appreciate you you letting us know bef uh so that we're not doing something illegal so it's important i was trying to jump in there but you guys were kind of going pretty fast so but a regular meeting is a meeting that is on the first or the third tuesday of the month anything outside of that is considered a special meeting could i ask

[320:00] aaron if um if um junior i know you're going to be in washington for the national league of cities it'll be a two-hour time difference if we if we stack that up so that we took advantage of that of the time difference do you do you know if you have meetings uh eight nine ten o'clock at night in washington that night would it be possible for you to join us for an hour or two yes i can definitely work on that and and look at the schedule of things and pick that and i i can i can i will try thank you it would be really valuable to have you there and it sounds like we're doing this on the 15th um okay rachel well i'm just going to ask um for junior's sake could we have the public hearing though still on the 8th could we convert to a special meeting or does the public hearing have to be on the 15th i understand the vote has to be but could you know could that portion be um knocked out so that she can you know because you have to watch the public hearing before you can vote so she's just coming

[321:00] you know for a portion of the meeting that's already covered sounds like a legal question i i i am consulting the code as as we speak i mean if you convert it to a special meeting in in in my opinion teresa if we convert it to a special meeting yeah we can have the public hearing but we'd have to frame it to um be able to know the public to know what we're actually doing you know what i mean um so they'll know what they're commenting on mm-hmm so i don't know if i'm sorry go ahead no i was gonna say so i'm not sure if if if if us discussing if you're going to make the nominations on the 8th i think we can actually say nominations of board um you know appointments and official vote

[322:00] to be taken on the 15th on consent right but i think we would have to be very clear on what we're doing with that public hearing in order for the public to comment and mostly it's a question on whether we have enough time to notice and that's the question and we do have enough time to notice we have sufficient time for that notice is required in the newspaper over the weekend um alicia has already told us that that's possible as to the question about whether we could hold the public hearing there's no prohibition of that in the code it's only the appointment has to happen at a regular meeting it doesn't say anything about the nomination nor about the public hearing um i'm gonna lauren are you there lauren speak up no no i'm i'm good one thing i also want to note just for progress um and for just clarity there's a lot of boards that only have one seat

[323:00] open and there's only four boards that have multiple over five applicants or so it could go a lot smoother because we don't have a lot of seats available if that makes sense so if we do the nominations and we do it at a public hearing and make that clean then we can take it and possibly put the appointments on consent on the 15th versus going through another whole process of voting and and and that sort of thing but we can vote we can vote but it would have to be it would it might have to be off consent now that i think about that because if we have to vote on the nomination we'll still have to go through the each board process right okay so disregard well well let me let me just ask about that though so like can we go back to the thing we were almost settled on which was the public hearing on the 8th and nominations on the 8th but a vote on the but a vote on the 15th at a regular meeting on consent

[324:03] because that seems like it would comply with the requirement to approve them at a regular meeting aaron are you saying though the nominations would be like we would have the thorough discussions and and pick on the eighth who we are going to vote on on the 15th and that would just be on consent correct that that we would we would go to the basically the do it all in one night approach on the 8th you know make our nominations take straw polls um but and then have a list of potential candidates that would then get put on the consent agenda for unofficial votes on the 15th so isn't that back to what we said no no because it's doing it all in one night and just having just having a vote on consent on the 15th are we gonna have one candidate each then on the eighth or more than one

[325:00] we would have one we would have one candidate nominated per position on the 8th we would go through the nomination process on the 8th pull up the slides make the nominations discussion and then we would compile the list put it in the memo for the 15th and you would make the vote for the nominations that were made on the 8th and go ahead and solidify those nominations on the 15th under under consent which would be a little bit cleaner teresa i just want to make sure everybody has time to watch all the videos though i mean because junie did say she would do it if she had to on the 15th so i just want to make sure everybody's comfortable with watching those videos all week first let me just ask teresa are we legally okay with that approach yes mayor with the approach of having the nominations public hearing on the eighth and then a formal vote for appointment on the 15th that is that's legally sufficient okay great then we don't have to make juni attempt to dial

[326:00] in from the middle of her conference the next week which might or might not work um and it complies with our legal requirements it does give us a more abbreviated timetable to take care of all of this but we do have the whole weekend so would is council willing to go with this approach i'm getting some thumbs up and some dubious looks but i it seems to me like the best of imperfect options at this point so if people are willing okay the only thing uh teresa i think we would have to just actually call the special meeting tonight if we were going to convert it would have to be called tonight because we don't have another meeting before the 8th and it has to be voted to be converted yes ma'am thank you for that catch so what what the council could do is the council could suspend its rules of procedure

[327:00] um which is in the council procedure rules could suspend its rules of procedure and take a vote right now to convene a special meeting on march 8th well bob i make a motion to suspend our rules and procedure with respect to um i think i think this is two motions i'll still do one motions first a motion to suspend our rules with respect to um [Music] call me out teresa what are we moving out here yes um council member yates i believe you may want to make a motion to suspend our rules of procedure so that you can consider a matter and vote on it under council items right without a public counsel without a public hearing so moved okay all right we have a motion a second i uh

[328:00] i realized this is not an ideal option but i don't see a better one at this point we're in kind of a tough situation here so um i guess does anyone give a thumbs down to this does anyone object to the motion on on the table i'm not seeing anybody with a thumbs down so i'll make a second motion i move that we we convert the study session on the 8th of march to a special meeting very good and uh do we have any objections to that motion seeing none okay then i think we have called the special meeting for the eighth where we will consider our board appointments make nominations and then put something together for the consent agenda on the 15th it sounds like we will comply with all of our legal requirements with this approach

[329:00] okay well that was fun we did go down a rabbit hole but hopefully we've emerged on the other side um and i wish everyone enjoyable interview watching this weekend okay uh i think that's it elisha do i have that right you have that right sir gosh done so soon um all right well i will gavel us to a close at 11 26 p.m and thanks everyone for your patience and contributions tonight good night everyone [Music] [Music]

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