April 12, 2022 — City Council Study Session

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] [Music]

[2:08] dad jokes are a thing in my house they're uncle jokes though for us hi everyone i'm just testing my sound can you all hear me good thanks ryan is channel 8 ready to go let's give a check here um i know i'm a little early there um emily do you have an update on channel eight i do happy to check with them

[3:01] perfect thank you hey juni hey juni i was in the other room i thought you said is juni here so i ran again came and sit down good to see you genie you're not in the naughty chair that's funny i wonder what sounded like that as we're waiting for a confirmation friendly reminder we have interpretation this evening for our first uh piece and mr mayor i'm happy to bring up interpretation slides uh when we get there and i just heard from paco we are good to go on channel 8. okay and ryan since it's a steady session it's my turn to lead so when should i turn over for the interpretation um thank you um once we begin and before we get there let's make sure that we

[4:00] begin our recording okay we want to make sure to be recording in english and in spanish as well uh then well do you want to give me a thumbs up when that is recording on your end as well so i don't does its record i mean it i have to switch to spanish which i haven't right now which is why we can talk but um when i hit the record button it only gives me the pause or the stop recording button not the record locally sure let me stop recording on this end um and then

[5:00] hop in the spanish channel please begin that local recording and then i'll record to the cloud and hopefully that should clear it up okay thanks everyone for your patience as we get this underway all right so it looks like it is recording locally let me make sure we're also recording to the cloud okay thank you all so much and uh councilmember uh friend as you're ready to begin the meeting i'll bring up those interpretation slides all right thanks so much ryan hi everyone i'm rachel friend and i'm cheering tonight's tuesday april 12 2022 study session for the boulder city council which we are officially calling to order elisha can i confirm no roll call or

[6:00] quorum required here tonight that is correct mayor pro-tem all right thank you um ryan do you want to go through the interpretation announcements now your proton friend happy to do that uh emily please pull up those slides and uh we'll go over here so a reminder to everyone that this meeting is interpreted tonight uh you're available to participate in english or in spanish um every participant will need to choose their interpretation language using the icon below looks like a little globe a friendly reminder to click mute when not speaking to limit background noise next slide please and a few reminders um please keep in mind to speak slowly clearly pronouncing each word and taking a breath between sentences uh please don't interrupt one another or or a speaker

[7:00] um if you own a headset with a microphone it's helpful to to use it and selecting one language channel for the session is is most helpful for our interpreters and encourage us to avoid using any idioms that may be very difficult to interpret all right thank you so much we can pull those down and make your protein friend i'll turn it back to you thank you ryan um i am a notoriously fast talker so please you know give me any hand signal if you feel that i'm going too fast so tonight we will be discussing three items first is racial equity plan one year progress update second east boulder sub-community plan 90 um finish update and then third we will be adding an item on the library district process update and first we have three announcements

[8:01] and i believe we have slides for those thanks emily okay number one on covid 19 testing and vaccinations for anyone still not aware number one on testing for information and provider locations on free coveted testing please go to org www.boco.org covid testing and we are still doing testing at the stazio drive site seven days a week and for vaccination information you can go to www.boco.org covid vaccine next slide uh second announcement we are still doing recruitment um for boards and commissions for the following boards because we have um still openings due to low number of applications and the boards eligible are beverage licensing authority

[9:00] boulder junction access district for both parking and travel demand management board of zoning adjustment cannabis licensing board design advisory board downtown management commission library commission and university hill commercial area management commission and for the next slide i believe oh am i still going sorry applications are being accepted until further notice you can go to www.bouldercolorado.gov boards hyphen commissions and for next slide i'm going to turn it over to nuria our city manager thank you so much mayor pro tem and no slide today but really a reminder and an exciting um it's not really an announcement because we've said this a little bit but we are coming back to in-person meetings and we are excited um i want to remind the public that we have um we will be coming to in-person meetings

[10:01] starting april 19th that will really be just for council and staff frankly everyone wants us to test out this new technology to make sure we are where we are where we need to be before we invite the public back in we anticipate the first in-person meeting with the public on may 17th 2022 and remind the public or let the public know if they haven't been following that we will be coming back in person meetings when they are regular scheduled business meetings our study sessions will remain virtual and we will continue to hope that we have the same level of high engagement that we have in all our meetings so we will continue to repeat this we will put this on the web on our website and really excited to see everyone in person again thanks nuria i'm very excited to be going back next week myself um okay and now we will kick off the uh

[11:01] proper study session content here so first up i think i will turn it back over to nuria um and staff to uh dig into the racial equity plan one year progress update thanks so much mayor pro tem and frankly we have so much information i will not do any framing and send it right to uh amy kane for the phenomenal work uh that staff has been doing um on the racial equity plan so far so amy it is yours thank you for that nuria um emily would you mind putting up the slide deck please awesome thank you so if we could get the next slide that would be fabulous wonderful thank you so much and thank you city council for having us here this evening it is an honor to be able to be with you this evening to lift up just a little bit of the work

[12:00] that our colleagues have been doing across the organization since the adoption and prior to the adoption my name is amy kane and my pronouns are she her and hers i identify as a white middle-aged female and am currently able-bodied i'm joined tonight by my colleagues taylor ana sylvia and ryan who will also introduce themselves when they get to each section of the presentation this evening and so i intentionally asked my colleagues to support tonight's presentation because it's a representation of how this work is the responsibility of all of us not just a few of us and so the work to date that's outlined in the memo and the efforts upcoming represent the time and energy spent by a dedicated group of colleagues across the organization who have been organizing and operationalizing the city's racial equity work since we began in our

[13:02] journey in june of 2018. so next slide please as we mentioned we do have interpreters this evening so we are intentionally going slowly however we do know that you have a packed agenda and so we're just lifting up a few of our goals and some project examples that have supported those goals and tonight we're also going to talk about at high level a couple of the priorities that we have in 2022 and then time for um a discussion for all of us and with that being said i would like to go ahead and pass it to nope i'm still doing this one so if i could go ahead and have the next slide please so we can dye them now i will pass it over to my colleague ana sylvia and like i mentioned before we are just going to go over a few samples of this of support for the goals that we've um outlined in the racial

[14:01] equity plan the memo has a much more robust and extensive list of the actions to date so anna silvia do you want to take it away yeah thank you so much everyone good evening my name is anna silvia avenue i am the new equity policy advisor for the city um as of this year prior to that i've been with the city for seven years and deeply connected to to this work i identify as a cisgender female a first generation immigrant latina originally from mexico city and uh appreciate the space to be here with you all i'm in this goal number one everybody gets it just wanna highlight a couple of the things that we've been doing in regards to this goal this goal is really to operationalize and normalize understanding of how institutional and structural racism exists within our community and within our government body as well as it really the trainings that

[15:00] we carry out offer really practical tools for city employees supervisors and even boards and commissions and volunteers who serve for the city of boulder currently we have three trainings um three comprehensive trainings offered at the city all of these trainings are facilitated by staff members who have really made additional commitments to do this work and just a big shout out this would not be possible without them at all and of course without the support of leadership and their supervisors to be able to do this work and so we thank all of these colleagues who give of themselves to do this the following numbers are just some highlights of what we've done in this goal area um the first um training that will highlight the advancing racial equity the role of government this uh training specifically offers an overview history of racism and the government's role and the responsibility that it has in order to dismantle this all current um new incoming employees supervisors including council

[16:01] is a mandatory training and an example of leadership of all of council has actually taken this training the following training that we have is bias and microaggression training this takes us to a deeper level of understanding of how our own biases and microaggressions can show up in the workplace and around our community and so um this offers some tangible tools to really interrupt those dynamics and currently that is a mandatory training for all employees including leadership and council and soon in 202 it will actually be ready for our boards and commissions as well in our first cohort we had about 18 facilitators we had four facilitators of color within that cohort and the rest were white employees with new incoming facilitators we have about 16 and we're actually seeing more colleagues of color committing to bringing their own experiences to support and grow this work that can sometimes be painful and challenging um and at times um

[17:01] it could be really overwhelming but they are there to share their own experiences and support and grow this work and i want to personally thank these colleagues who bring so much value and essence to these trainings we're also seeing actually our colleagues having such a stronger foundation as they're coming on board as facilitators and so i believe this is such a strong reflection of the hard and hard work that our colleagues in the first cohort have really done to set up a foundation for the rest of our facilitators who are coming on board and it really offers sustainability one of the models that we use for this training is a model that we call a train the trainer model in which our first cohort is actually being served um or they're serving the new coming cohort as mentors to be able to really get them along into their journey and then the racial equity instrument tool is a tool to help us dig deeper at root causes of why inequities exist through a strategic and intentional framework uh this is available to all employees is not mandatory

[18:00] but we are seeing more colleagues interested in actually taking this training and really expand their knowledge with very tangible tools in order to drive change the numbers that you see here um they are a reflection of colleagues trained through 2021. another trend that i actually like to highlight is the desire from our employees being more action focused and really desiring to continue to build on their skill level for addressing inequities this is honestly quite exciting because as facilitators we are often examining the content and making sure that we not only remain relevant but that we remain supportive of everyone um and this is is a reflection of the growth that's happening within the trainings their input is super valuable and is necessary for us to really continue moving forward so with that if you could go to the next slide please and i will pass it over to ryan i think i have this one but

[19:00] thank you anna sylvia so goal number two is justly do it and the um the item i want to lift up that's in support of this goal is about our new justice equity diversity and inclusion team toolkit that we've developed for departments so early in 2020 a project team started to assemble a team to put this toolkit for departments so that we could put systems in place at the departmental level not just at the entire organizational level that really helps colleagues um lift up this work within their own department the jedi team toolkit or toolkit team should have thought of a better name consisted of colleagues from open space and mountain parks and the library who had already launched their own jedi teams to help as subject matter experts for this work we also had contributions from colleagues in housing and human

[20:00] services as well as a city manager's office the pandemic did slow us down a bit but i am thrilled to announce that in march we released the jedi team's tool kit and that is attached to the memo if you had a chance to look at that the racial equity plan calls for within the logic model for all departments to establish their own departmental jedi teams this is an opportunity to facilitate departmental assessments so we can understand where departments are in their own racial equity work build capacity among their team members definitely like that's in specific alignment with the service the business service that each department provides and then also helps departments in the development of their own departmental equity plans so it's really a guide for departmental leaders and for team members to develop and involve their

[21:01] jedi team in coordination with the larger organizational efforts by the end of 2020 it is anticipated that 18 more departments will have launched or started to launch their departmental jedi teams with part of that work when they're doing that analysis we'll talk about it a little bit more um about how that ties into the racial equity instrument that ana sylvia was just referring to so with that i'm going to pass it on back to ryan we're going to go a little bit out of order with our goals but if you could advance to the next slide i'm going to ask ryan to take it from here thank you thank you amy and thank you council for making the time this evening for this update uh my name is ryan hanson uh city's community engagement manager i identify as a white cisgender male currently able-bodied and within the city's racial equity plan this goal for is really to

[22:00] build and maintain trust expand the influence of community members of color through inclusive and responsive engagement and i'm really excited to share a progress in strategies under the school really through the city's work with the east boulder sub-community planning working group and two community connectors who served on this working group we give special thanks to city staff and comprehensive planning our language access program manager and especially community connectors anna karina casa zibara and leticia latti garcia both pictured here who supported this important work and i encourage everyone to view their full perspective as part of the planning board recording from march 31st they both go into great detail on the the barriers that were addressed in community engagement in in this work and it's it's really worth hearing from their mouths directly

[23:02] i'm also excited because we'll have more focus on east boulder sub-community plan later in this evening and here we'll just take a deep dive uh into the work of commute connectors and less on the plan itself um right as as you know this is a long range planning project is really shaping the the future of east boulder and the initial applications of the working group to support this work yielded no zero residents of east boulder sub-community area and it's not that surprising right this is a very industrial and commercial area with one residential neighborhood san lazaro a mobile home park with 213 homes we wanted to make sure that a resident of san lazaro was participating to elevate the voices of those community members we entered into agreement with asante amistad and two promotors anna natti

[24:01] served as community connectors in our first long-term pilot of this community connector model and a note that the zan lazaro community is within the areas of the within the boundaries of the planning area but is across the street uh from the city is outside city limits and is not served by city or water uh and has led to confusion of community members of you know what are what city services they are able to access or are not and these community connectors were specifically active participants in the working group and assisted with engagement design and implementation so materials activities were relevant for their neighborhood and that the perspective of underrepresented community members were elevated to working group staff planning board and city council and they received a stipend for their time expertise and co-designing

[25:01] a few things to mention here about language barriers uh let's use a monolingual spanish speaker and we're able to provide interpretation and translation of materials throughout this multi-year process and i'll note this is really a structural change to you know both dedicate the funding needed to cover interpretation and translation as well as to allow for deadlines to change to make sure that we could have equitable presentation of those materials you know another key challenge was complexity of information within this plan with some working group members serving decades and familiarizing herself with local government and others brand new to the process uh critical staff support was really necessary early on and throughout the process specifically meeting for homework sessions with our

[26:00] community connectors to share context and to make sure they were able to better anticipate what would be important for them to share with the full group um another key piece here is is really you know following anna and lenti's lead in designing engaged materials and tools that will work best for further queen members you know the the team found that um english-speaking working group members could really quickly share an online survey with an hoa next door um with a lister and that really did not work well for our san lazaro and spanish speaking community and lettian anna worked tirelessly to provide a lot more context to work directly with community members and share more information about how the decisions in this plan would affect them we had several in-person sessions paper copies were brought and i think this really led to another

[27:01] structural shift later in the process to really focus on designing uh engagement sessions for spanish speaking community first and then adapting that approach for english speaking sessions and you know another thing that was really important this process was really valuing lived experience and while this comprehend you know those those far out issues and when those recommendations may come into place it's also focusing on the lived experience today and ann and leti were really clear and sharing how difficult that was and getting people more used to being asked what they think um and that there were many barriers to uh community engagement that were in place and a lot of trust clear and others in the community about our lack potable water and drinking water cooking water and being very inconsistent in in their community and

[28:00] i want to specifically highlight their recommendations in the plan that would not have been included without participation of ivana latin really being clear about some cultural and spanish language programming belmont city park really with an emphasis on youth and after school activities and another quick example here that you know sometimes the long-term plan doesn't give a lot of room to address immediate issues but because dedicated staff were there and hearing the needs and had built that trust through community connectors um residents were able to share a lot of safety concerns and walking late at night and our terrific staff and comprehensive planning were able to write a grant secure external funding to bring solar lighting for for many in this neighborhood and um you know i think we were really able to deep more deeply understand some lazarus community issues

[29:01] and context uh and having latino participating in this process helped us to continually learn and i will note that after the success of new connectors within the east boulder working group we've seen adoptions of this model within reimagining policing the police department master plan boulder parks and rec master plan and comprehensive flood and stormwater master plan thank you and i'll pass it taylor awesome thanks so much ryan good evening council if we could just advance the next slide thank you so much my name is taylor ryman i identify as a white non-binary queer person with deep southwest roots and i'm going to tell a little bit about goal 3 and goal 5. again we want it a little bit out of order but for speaker flow this worked out so um goal three of the plan was is community commitment which intends to strengthen partnerships and collaborate with the community members

[30:01] and organizations that demonstrate a commitment to ending racism so in the last year we've advanced this goal in a few ways one of which being a dedication effort to rename the city's municipal building after penfield tate the second boulder's first and to date only african-american mayor tate was a prolific leader of civil rights and a strong supporter of the lgbtq plus community and the renaming brought recognition to his pioneering efforts to advance equity in boulder the dedication was also done in collaboration with local living relatives of tate including his son penfield tate iii and three of his daughters paula gale and chicago tate i can't speak enough about their enthusiasm and collaboration in this work it was so valuable to have their partnership because it helped us steward the dedication in a way that was meaningful and brought dignity to tate the second's history of service

[31:00] the effort consisted of a fundraising campaign building infrastructure improvements in a ceremony that was also attended by many of tate's living relatives from across the country who flew in for it as well as leaders from across colorado during the event tate iii his son remarked he had a love affair so deep and long-lasting with this city this is sort of the ultimate tribute to him so this example ties to a few of the goal three strategies including partner with the community seek opportunities to support and promote the value of diversity and recognize the history of institutional racism in boulder next slide please goal five of the plan is representation matters which aims to eliminate barriers and create opportunities to build a diverse workforce across the depth and breadth of local government one of the primary strategies outlined in the plan highlights working with boards commissions and working groups so

[32:00] in the last year we've considered evaluated and embarked on several changes to boards and commissions to meet this goal one of which council recently got to experience those changes were a little bit more on the administrative side working on the appointment process but kind of taking a step hey i want to a quick have i think we have a question for our interpreter um marina was there a question that you had terrific thank you sorry ryan i didn't hear that um uh just encouraging you to speak more slowly um and if you are not in an interpretation channel that might help to um select the interpretation icon and choose english then you'll be able to hear interpreters directly thanks appreciate that feedback

[33:01] selected interpretation um so as i was saying the the appointment process was one of those things that we changed recently a little bit more on the administrative side but we're also trying to really take a step back and we've convened a board and commission group of liaisons and secretaries to partner on a more strategic approach to integrating dei and aboard and commission work and operations we began this effort by administering a dei readiness assessment which helped establish a baseline for where boarding commissions may be at in their understanding and commitments of dei work as well as identify anything missing before we undertook the the great effort of integrating dei initiatives with these groups so some of those response themes i'm going to elevate here one of which being a question that asked

[34:02] respondents to best characterize the approach of city council as it relates to dei work and an overwhelming number of respondents actually said that they believe many members of city council strongly believe dei would help better meet their mission and that council has in fact raised issues related to race and ethnicity often when discussing things like programs policies suggesting training and the like so what this says to us is that leadership from council is being noticed on these uh commitments and that board and commission representatives also believe advancing this work supports their mission next while respondents reported general enthusiasm and commitment for dei work many also raised concerns about the lack of training skills and structure to

[35:00] integrate into their groups some boards note other structural challenges like current board relationships how groups interface with council the politicization of processes other regulatory or work plan needs and they believe those challenges may need to be addressed first another survey question asked for departments current focus and priorities many reported that their department is in the midst of reorganization in a transition at the leadership level or in the midst of or about to embark on a strategic or master plan these anticipated changes in new embarkments could serve as a good opportunity to support integrating dei early on in the process to guide the vision for these transitions in leadership strategy and organization so coming out of the dei assessments those are some of the

[36:01] takeaways that we had and now in collaboration with our facilitator angela davis not the educator but also a very incredible individual um we are in the middle of a six-part deep dive workshop series with these staff um the group that i mentioned to support their education training and development of a comprehensive boarding commission process improvement plan and a diversity equity and inclusion group blueprint you could go on to the next slide all right up next ana sylvia we'll talk a little bit about the work we have planned ahead thank you thank you taylor if you can go to the next slide please um so as we look into 2022 and beyond um these are just some of the many ongoing efforts or new initiatives that are going to be our focus for this year these efforts are really crucial crucial

[37:01] as part of as we continue to build our foundation one of the things we realize is that data has been one of our biggest gaps and challenges and this can serve as a huge source of information to drive decision making and really continue to identify the areas in which gaps exist in their services or in programs no for example if we're able to desegregate data by race or income age etc then we can have a clearer picture of who we're not serving who we're not reaching and how we can really tighten things up and be strategic in that outreach likely um in in the same manner through our partnerships the city is actually being sought out as a leader in this work to learn more about how we're operationalizing organizing and ultimately just implementing um very intentional specific strategies and so we understand that this work requires a multi-system

[38:00] approach across various sectors of our community and by creating strong partnerships we can really support one another and can ultimately continue to serve our community in a much better way um you saw you you heard taylor speak a little bit about the diversity inclusion blueprint and by taking an inventory and analysis of what um organizational policies are currently in place then we can it can really offer us an in-depth look at what's currently working what may need some form of change or modification and maybe um even determining or examining some policies that are actually creating some unintended consequences for our community and our and our colleagues currently these initiatives are very much tied to the logic model and outcomes and the organizational wide work that is happening across um the city and keying on the progress and work of these few initiatives will really assist in centering experiences

[39:01] and voices that are have been historically been excluded and be a driver for decision making across the organization so these are just a few of the the goals for this year you can go to the next slide and then we'll pass it on to 80. thank you honestly so i'm going to touch a little bit on the 2022 department work plans as i mentioned previously these were outlined in the racial equity plans logic model departments are expected to launch their jedi teams and we're working towards 18 departments launching or preparing their jedi teams by the end of 2022 as outlined in the jedi team process one element which we have been piloting with our colleagues in open space and mountain parks is a departmental assessment and this helps establish departments establish where people are in their own racial equity

[40:01] journeys so what trainings are necessary prioritation prioritization of policies and programs that can be utilized with utilizing the racial equity instrument to understand how those programs policies financial decisions are negatively impacting people based on race and ethnicity so all departments who have established a jedi team are being required by the end of 2022 to do an inventory of their departmental policies and practices and so they can determine which policies should be reviewed and updated utilizing the racial equity instrument so next slide please i'm just going to ask you to go ahead and read this quote to yourselves so you can see that much of the work that we've been focusing on this year

[41:00] and previously is to continue helping city staff understand the role government plays in creating and sustaining and perpetuating racial inequities and practices so while we are still in the normalization phase we're still normalizing language and understanding we also are leaning heavily into operationalizing many of the tools and practices we've been developing over the past year or so so you'll also see that our work continues to focus on the work that we all need to do including you as policy makers and stewards of democracy and so next slide please we do have some council questions for you i'm hoping that you had a moment to review these in the memo and just questions what do you perceive that is going well with the racial equity plan what excites you most about this work

[42:02] what are your perceived barriers to continuing moving this work forward as policy makers and then how do you see yourselves playing a role in mitigating those barriers so with that uh mayor pro tem friend i would pass it to you to open up the conversation thank you so much amy kane what a great presentation everyone thank you so much um to all who participated so uh what i think i'll do is just open it up for questions from council and then we can have um discussion and then sort of a summary and make sure that we answer amy's questions so if you have questions about the presentation let's kick off with those seeing no hands so far just for those who can't see thank you matt benjamin and then aaron rocket all right ice breaker someone's gotta go first uh so i for one a great presentation it

[43:02] is um having lived here almost 22 years it's a profound and marked evolution for our community to be focusing on this work and it's just it's great to see it and it's great to be a part of the city staff and see it on the inside and to see you know how people are taking to this across all departments so it just makes me proud to be a part of the community but also to be you know on city council and a part of the city staff in that capacity so great work and i'm just really proud to be a part of it um you know one question that does uh come up in one of the charts that was brought up in the memo is kind of thing about goals in terms of is there sort of a minimum percentage goal for racial equity ambassadors per department i know some departments are smaller and bigger but is there some sort of minimum that you want to set to see if a department is sort of falling off having that sort of minimum amount or is that just too fluid in which case to sort of have any sort of goal so i'm just sort of curious if there's something there with regards to that

[44:01] thank you for that question um we did not set that standard however when we presented an update to our city leadership the direct department directors back in december of 2021 we requested that each department provide at least one person who was interested in being an equity ambassador and as we're moving this work forward um start to have the conversation within departments of who is interested first in being members and starting up that jedi team so anna silvia myself and other members of our core team will be working with departments as they start their jedi teams using the tool kit and helping them work through that assessment we try to use the feed the hungry approach um in this work and we're finding that we've ample people um

[45:00] raising their hands saying i want to be a part of this so yeah thank you for that question matt any other questions sorry nope that's it for now thank you all right mayor brockett thank you main pro tim brennan and uh thank you for the wonderful presentation from every member of staff and for all the extraordinary work that you all are doing uh when we talk about operationalizing the racial equity plan it's kind of hard to understand what that means but you'll do a great job of laying out all the different steps that are being taken and that the east folder sub community plan as a case study was was really informative and a great example of how we're doing some new things that we haven't done before which is really inspiring to see and i think it's really informed the discussion we'll have in a little bit on that very plan which i'm looking forward to my question was one of the things particularly interested in in is how we

[46:01] are um using the the racial equity instrument and the rapid response racial equity assessment like those tools would which seem to be like a practical way of analyzing our decisions in our decision space and how they might be affected by these ideas so maybe i was hoping to talk a little bit more about what the next steps are in the utilization of those tools in the city organization absolutely thank you for that question mayor brockett ryan did you want to field that question since you've been working most directly with departments or did you want me to field that one i'm happy to take that and thank you for for the question um i think we are seeing the the work with racial equity instrument moving forward in a few different ways um one key way is is training more staff i want to say the the most recent numbers we've close to a 100 members of

[47:01] staff who are trained in the racial equity instrument um part of what we've heard from these staff members is more of their colleagues uh they're they're encouraging more their colleagues to participate in the training so everyone can be on the same page uh in implementing that racial equity instrument and so we've been offering four uh trainings a year for staff to be more familiar with that instrument and we did work really closely with a number of different projects and council priorities last year to to walk through uh parts of the racial equity instrument as as a cohort and we we saw some success with with that model and having a cohort of support uh for implementation of that instrument um we have not been using the rapid response racial equity assessment as much because it was really more put in place to address care's funding and some of the quick

[48:00] sorry coven federal coveted relief funding um as the city was making quick decisions to make sure that we had an input from communities of color in in those decisions um we are looking at a variation of the rapid response racial equity assessment uh for use with our community connectors and residents because we've heard a lot of requests for for feedback um and similar to the role that recovery equity connectors played in the end of 2022 um to have more of an ongoing focus for for that team to provide insight and an evaluation for proposals policies or decisions can i add to that a little bit ryan um part of also one of the things that we notice for example with the gap in data is that the racial equity instrument tool really requires our colleagues to dig in deep into numbers and collecting data on

[49:01] what we're seeing across the city and um because there is that gap hence one of our efforts for these years to really tighten that up and being able to now have a team of just incredible talent and awareness around how do we create this data source that's really accessible to everybody within the city where we can have one place to go to in order to see the numbers see how our city reflects that data in being able to actually put in practice the instrument tool because now we have the the the qualitative and the quantitative data with to go with that something's not right and i know it's really helpful to understand that's all i got thanks aaron uh nicole you're up thank you um and yeah thank you so much for the presentation um i just had a couple questions about the presentation and rachel am i understanding correctly we're asking questions about the presentation right now then we'll

[50:01] get to the questions that we were okay perfect um so one of the questions that i have is just around the trainings that are being done for staff um as well as for council and it's a question of um sort of if is there a plan or when will we move to having trainings that are um kind of bipark specific for folks to go to and sort of be in a kind of a safer place i know this is something that i've done in my work at the university and it's really kind of a critical part of these trainings because um putting people who've been victims of racism into a group with non-bipot people who are just learning about their racism um is sometimes really traumatic right and and so i'm just wondering you know if there's a plan for that or how that's evolving in terms of providing specific spaces for um for folks who could say opt-in to a training that's just for bypass folks

[51:00] because they're talking about different issues often yeah thank you for that question council member spear we are not specifically creating at this point trainings for our colleagues who identify as people of color however we are going to be working on building a policy for employee resource groups or for affinity spaces for um for marginalized staff members so they can have that space so we're hoping to have that started here in the next quarter when we get back from some of the travel with a gear member meeting next week and we're hoping to learn some more from our colleagues across the country about some of the best practices for that and do folks have i mean do they have the opportunity to sort of opt out of these trainings are they you know i'm just from some of the things i've observed in other spaces it's just kind of a concern that i have for um folks of color to be so i can i can speak to that a little

[52:00] bit um i really believe in the intentionality of creating affinity groups with the sensitivity that not everyone is going to be at a place where they want to join in that group right um i think everybody goes through this social justice journey including people of color right we have biases as well we um depending on our identities the sensitivity around it is we have to respect where people are at and it's not necessarily seeing ourselves as victims but really creating a space for everybody including white individuals who really want to explore what it means to have white privilege and examine even fragility that comes up during trainings to have a space to do that among other white colleagues that can really support the accountability but also for us at least you know for people of color to have a space to go gosh this happened and without being questioned or knowing that there's going to be a space to be validated how do you build resiliency with that

[53:00] because we have to and we do and we do a great job at it um but then how do we then support each other as colleagues within these spaces and so there's just their sensitivity around it but there's also intentionality and we don't want to just create groups just because it sounds like a good idea but rather because we know it's actually going to be of support so potentially the first thing that we do is actually evaluate what is the need what is the interest on having these groups what would sort of be the composition of these groups because we need to include our lgbtq community perhaps people with disabilities right that's a whole other topic so um i think there's gonna be a lot of intentionality behind it but i appreciate the thought you um i had uh just a couple of other questions um one is uh is there space for youth involvement or is that being worked on um as well and i'm just i'm thinking of a wonderful um project that uh my emotion healing and growing up boulder did together that was kind of getting some youth perspectives

[54:01] i think for um reimagining policing perhaps um so i'm just curious as to um you know where that's fitting into some of the current work if at all yet you know it's still yeah so um newer still definitely newer we do have a robust um relationship with growing up boulder um we are in conversation um last well pre-pandemic we did have a partnership with the i have a dream foundation where we ran an internship program for students i think it was i think it was like eight to ten students that we brought in for a six-week program and they were placed in different departments across um the organization we'd also bring them back together one day a week so they could do some type of career development or go on a tour and understand some of the work of the city like if you haven't gone to the i know it's not called the wastewater treatment center now but if you haven't

[55:00] been there go it's amazing um someone can correct me on what that is called to date um we did lose funding for that during the pandemic and so nuria that's one of the things i want to talk to you about about how we can bring that programming back but also really looking at in 2023 um working with cu partners and how we can build a internship program with our partners up at cu as well and that's something that council member joseph i know you have mentioned a couple of times and we're trying to get our feet under us with our human resources department um honest sylvia did you want to add anything into where your brain is going right now with youth okay thank you for that question council member spirit thank you um and just one other question around the uh toolkits and the goal of getting jedi teams in all of the different departments by the end of the year

[56:00] i'm just wondering are they kind of being given specific goals or outcomes or anything you know within the departments um sort of what is the what are they what's their shining star what are they heading towards like that appreciate that so it really depends on where the department is in their initial phases and so part of the work of that jedi team is to conduct that assessment that i was talking about and that will help shape where the prioritization is for some departments it'll be we need to just start having these conversations more broadly other departments have been having these conversations and they're at the phase where they are ready to take an inventory of their policies their programs their practices and really start um diving deep into the work and changing those at the departmental level you also asked about youth engagement and as i was talking about that it led me to believe to remember too that our um junior ranger program

[57:00] they have adapted our bias and microaggression workshop to have that for their onboarding process with not only their junior rangers but also their temporary and seasonal employees so that's an example of a department who's gone beyond where many of our departments are at this point in their journeys because they've built that jedi team and they've been going through that process of the assessment thank you okay nicole is at the end of your questions all right thanks junior your hand was up down up i think you're up and awesome earrings tonight assuming you're up your turn thank you so much um i think um council member spear raises a good question about what are we doing when it comes to people of color being in these biases and microaggression trainings

[58:02] and you know as someone who's been through it and having talked with people who's gone through the same training sometimes these trainings you leave not feeling better but feeling worse right and maybe part of it as well and i was looking at the um and i've talked with people who are considered bipark who's been through these trainings and they said well it just doesn't feel comfortable the way the training was set up and my experience as part of it but i my question to you actually i'm looking at the slides you said about 987 staff has participated in this training and my question to you after the training have you polled them to find out how was that experience yes honest sylvia did you wanna yeah i can speak to that so in every

[59:01] training we actually um wonderful colleague emily sandoval has created um a link for people to fill out a whole evaluation to actually be able to see engage the the the knowledge the impact um the understanding of each of the outcomes or the goals for each training um with that i also want you all to know that we do keep in mind those dynamics that are inevitable and that can happen and so with that facilitators were really we were very intentional from the beginning and even in the second cohort bringing in the various voices and identities uh within our facilitators there's we actually do a standard practice in the model where if we can pair up an individual who identifies as white with a person of color to facilitate then that um and same thing with another other identity so if it's somebody who identifies as male and female right

[60:00] keeping in mind those dynamics so that um there's those perspectives being abroad but that they're also heard in a much more open way um one of the things in terms of my approach and taking um more the the lead on the training curriculum and the content is really empowering our colleagues of color to really know that this can be the space for us to share the things that we have gone through it's not easy um but it was in the cohort we actually noticed most of the um facilitators in the first cohort were white and i think that was that's a testament of sometimes the dynamics that we face where well we just want to see if people are actually going to follow through we're actually going to see if our facility facilitators are our white colleagues are really going to talk walk the talk and actually going to offer support and so now with this new cohort we're actually having more facilitators of color jumping in and saying i want to be part of this movement i want to be part of this

[61:00] initiative because my story matters and so um that's the approach we take and of course it's always the respect again we always saying the um as we're prepping facilitators is it is totally up to you how much you end up sharing and not sharing because you are the one who come first you got to take care of self-care especially after those trainings that can be really triggering um but ultimately knowing that our colleagues really come to those trainings with so much willingness to learn and to be challenged by choice but i think it makes a difference and then with that with council member fear that's where you know those affinity groups can really be helpful just to find that supportive space part of um our other effort in these uh facilitators is we have monthly gatherings that are quite open very um not as structured as one would um imagine because we're trying to interrupt the the the spaces of how structure we are sometimes in meetings and so sometimes

[62:01] these are spaces where we get to say and talk as a as a facilitator of color this was a really hard experience and people can share and validate that other people can chime in and say what is it that i can do as another facilitator to really help you through that process um and really make it very relational i really believe in relational versus transactional work because that's how we get to transformation within our city um so that's something that's happening i don't know if that helps answer your question councilmember joseph no thank you for that thank you for that answer um i wanted to go back and ask you a question about the equity tools and and maybe i thinking maybe that's something amy could answer um i was a little bit confused as to how many tools we have and because you mentioned we have a lot um there are many many tools and it seems like we're still developing tools so i'm just

[63:00] i just don't understand how many equity tools we have yeah we have the racial equity instrument which is the longer process that can be applied to any program policy or budget decision that's the training that anna silvia mentioned at this point we have 177 colleagues who've gone through the process um we also have those that group of cohorts that's applying it to some of the council priorities from 2020 what year is it this year right 2021 um so we have that one during the pandemic we release the rapid response racial equity assessment and that's a very high level quick and dirty four questions that we apply to we were applying when we were thinking about okay we've got this funding we need to get it spent we have like zero time like here's how we're gonna go through that process we're utilizing that one less although we have had some departments and colleagues take that

[64:00] that rapid response racial equity assessment and utilize it and when we hear about it we're like please use the racial equity instrument there's far more community engagement that's involved as well as far more recommendations on data for disparities on race and ethnicity then we have the departmental assessment the departmental assessment is very internal so departments can assess where they are there's a work group assessment within that but then also an individual assessment so we can say okay the city manager's office will pick on us right because we haven't done the assessment yet we have about five people in our department and i'm making these numbers up totally because we haven't done the assessment we have about five people who really have taken all the workshops are committed to utilizing the racial equity instrument understand the goals outlined within the racial equity plan and how all the pieces fit together and

[65:01] what action steps we need to take moving forward so we can look at that department and say okay we need to get better on our training for this we need to make sure that everybody's normalized we're all speaking the same language and then we inventory those internal policies or their programs or the practices right and have that group then start to apply the racial equity instrument for that so really it's like three main tools um the the unfortunate thing is that we say instrument tool or instrument where people say tool we also have the tool kit which is really a framework for department i guess right we like process the toolkit which is really a handbook for departments as they start their jedi work their own departmental teams and it's a step-by-step process of utilize this instrument this assessment for this

[66:01] utilize this group of resources for x here's how you start to have the conversation with your colleagues here's how you build the coalition so those are really am i forgetting anything on a sylvia you i saw you when you yes one more if you can keep with all the tools with that one more thing that ryan mentioned is so if you can think of it all of that is for internal purposes right one of the things we are developing and i can speak to this i'm taking the lead on this with other people is in developing a um not a shorter but just a more condensed version of that instrument tool but for departments to fill out in order for community connectors and residents to give us their feedback so if they're thinking about you know let's say the library as this happened last year they're thinking about creating educational pods for the summer um how does the program manager fill all of this this um this format that is not necessarily the

[67:02] equity instrument tool for an internal process but more for outer how do how do community connectors and residents get a good sense of what they're thinking about the program who they're going to outreach what their strategy is and then being able to receive genuine and honest live feedback from those communities that are so connected to their outer networks to say this is a great idea yes this would serve our communities and these in these ways or for them to actually say no you're going to waste your time don't do that because it does no good and so that's part of then the active influence in that decision making process so it doesn't replace the equity instrument tool it's just another layer to to create programming that is very intentional um and holistic makes it more accessible for our connectors too so they don't have this 13-page document come through thank you so much rachel and thank you

[68:00] amy and anna that was uh thank you that was very helpful thanks juni okay i have um lauren up next and then i'll call myself and then we can roll into um answering staff's questions thank you rachel um i really appreciate you guys bringing all of this work forward it's it's a lot um one of the questions i have is how are we making sure do we have a process of checking in um internally or externally to see to get kind of feedback on overall how our implementation is going um with this important project awesome thank you for that question councilmember focus so one of the things that we outlined in um the logic model

[69:02] which is teeny tiny it's when you're reading the racial equity plan but it does lift up um some of that feedback that you're talking about and so one of the things um that we are hoping to do in 2023 is to embark on another community perception survey so we can kind of check that against the baseline from 2017 previously we also internally when we started this work we had done an employee engagement survey and so we're in conversation about is that the right approach to check in on this work or are we going to be implementing that through many surveys that we're doing um bringing back micro surveys that we were doing during the pandemic so that's part of that evaluation process it will tell you that some of the feedback that we have received internally has really come from the surveys that ana silvia and equity

[70:00] ambassadors have been putting out um after perf after the workshops so we've gotten some good feedback there but then there's the qualitative feedback opening from colleagues and i'll ask on a silvia to lift this up it was a conversation we were having the other day about the shift we're seeing in the participant conversations during some of these workshops yeah that has been a huge talent one of the things that i mentioned the presentation is just really being keen and listening to what are what the feedback of our colleagues is um and when i was facilitating a training with another facilitator it was very apparent that people want to really get to the yes we've heard all it's not that we've just heard all this but we know it now we've gotten various trainings we're really excited we are we want to be very intentional how do we then have more tools more things to go through and so

[71:00] that's how we end up then shifting a little bit more of well the history and the the um the resources and the terminology is important but as people are becoming more familiar with it what they're actually wanting us to provide is these very tangible steps to take action whether it's personally or professionally and so that's a little bit of a shift that we're seeing um and how we'll actually just accommodate some of our training content to be more um more driven towards those changes and ultimately um really continue to encourage our colleagues to keep asking the question why why do we do that this way why is it that how we has has it always been this way and um really getting to the root cause so that's really how we can then create and um fathom systems change one of the other thank you for that honor sylvia um one of the other things that we're also um going to be lifting up this year are case studies

[72:01] to help our colleagues understand and say okay i've been through the training i'm still having my pro my difficulty of really wrapping my brain about what i can do in my role as ex right and so seeing these case studies and getting more robust communication out to our colleagues across the organization is an opportunity to just provide people for more ideas more opportunities to connect and then we've heard from some of the connectors the impact externally on what this work is having for them as as a member of the community and i i believe we have some more um connectors coming on board soon who are people who've historically been very critical of the city rightfully so and are now saying feeling like they have an active role to play and that's really exciting is not to be not everybody across the organization

[73:00] internally is like this is awesome let's do more of this right we do have people as we're doing our evaluations as we're having conversations that we know we have more work to do and so that's some of that is one-on-one conversations meeting with people trying to meet them where they are and finding out what it is that motivates them to help bring them along and so some some of that hard work that we talk about is that hard work and that hard work that is such hard work so thank you for that thank you both 100 questions you're good um okay so if you could put the questions up that we need to answer while i'm asking my question that might move us along and then mine's i guess an extension of uh kind of lauren's question and your answer to that question amy um you know we're doing a lot of work internally and making decisions i think with with an

[74:01] eye towards um jedi principles and racial equity but it's it's going to be difficult to keep moving forward without community buy-in and this is a little bit of my answer to your second question as well so what are we doing externally or what are we going to gear up to do externally um to kind of help hopefully i mean you know i think racism and implicit biases kind of die hard and so how will we help help people along yeah thank you for that question mayor pro tem i did want to lift up that i copied and pasted the questions in the chat as well for folks if that's helpful for the hosts and panelists to see um hopefully i hit enter on that um in answer to your question like this is systemic change that we need to do across the community i spent a lot of time meeting um with some of the service groups across the community and talk to them

[75:00] about our work i'm going to do a church a presentation at a church in october who's very invested in this work and share the resources and the tools and the knowledge that we have we also do have some of our community partners who have asked um if we could you know host trainings for them and we're in a very government space so we you know give people resources or talk to them about partners who we've worked to advance this work um it's the the one-on-one relationships um with our partners across the community that helps advance this work and you all as policy makers and ambassadors have to be involved in those conversations we did host one of our pilot projects that we didn't have that we're short on funding now for is our community conversations about race and you saw that outlined

[76:01] in the memo where we had a partnership with cu university of colorado boulder and representatives from naropa and um also from boulder county and we put together a dinner series that we had groups of community members do a four part the first pilot was four part dinner series the second was a six-part dinner series where community members could come together and have conversations focused on the racial inequities in boulder and what they could do as individuals to help shift the systems and the the interactions that they have with people um so those are just some of the things but it's you know it's all of us and what is our role as government individuals right stewards of democracy and just helping support community how they

[77:00] can in these conversations thanks amy for that answer and it looks like tara is eager to answer your questions so i will call in tara first and then anyone else who's willing and able to answer the two questions please throw up your hand and i will call on you next i'm particularly interested in answering what's going well and what what excites you most so amy you know i'm a huge fan of yours and the team and this great work i'm also a huge fan of that jedi acronym i think it's fantastic you can never forget those words now there you go my one of my favorite things was when i was on parks and i did the bison microaggression workshop i think it's interesting we're talking about it for me it was actually life-changing things that i didn't think about ever before maybe conversations i had with people that thought differently than me um i still remember it was at least a year ago right amy and i still remember

[78:01] it to this day so but i ryan i also want to thank you um about mentioning that march 31st um planning board meeting i got to listen to that video it was excellent so thanks to whoever put that together i thought what i would do is mention the nine or two eleven most exciting things because first of all the community did probably didn't read the memo but also i think the team should know what great work they did and what's exciting to me so i'm going to go for it but tell me if i'm speaking too fast because i don't want people to get bored um i like when things happen in real time not just concepts but when things really do get done so most of the exciting things for me or about what got done that would be the hiring of a revenue agent fluent in spanish translating key sections of the sales tax website into spanish and spanish translation of the 2020

[79:01] covid business grants direct assistance to help small businesses fill out applications including translation assistance i know this to me is very exciting 2021 business license renewal outreach with messaging in nepali and spanish and also working with the bolder latino chamber i'm very i was very excited about some things that i learned for the first time equitable prioritization of water uses less reliance on price to incentivize behavior equity in the flood and stormwater master plan update now i know that stormwater is not a real thriller but i actually think it is and was very excited to hear that we were applying the equity um the equity plan to our master plans as well i'm excited about that and for my very last exciting points i'm

[80:01] going to say anfield tape municipal building renaming and the austin mural the land acknowledgement which is really special you know it's it's very deep and climate justice collaboration and the wonderful community connectors program these are the very exciting things for me and as far as council goes the fact that we were able to do something about the boards and commissions and we continue to and i'm really looking forward to chats and walks and office hours from community members that we do not hear from so much so i'm hoping that that would happen in a great way and lastly i want to thank anna silvia about your comment about it being relational as the most important because relationships are how we get change and how we actually change ourselves so thank you for everything you do

[81:00] thank you for that top ten thank you tara i'd like i'd like you to do more of those um anyone else want to answer the two questions i will say in about two minutes we will be at at time for this if we wanted to be on track for time so just throwing that out there mayor brockett well tara thank you for that that was such a great list i just i'll say ditto to your list you covered the highlights and um so we'll won't say them all over again um i will call out the unique connector program though because i've just found the their involvement to be so powerful the the people from the different walks of life that are not always as represented at open comment and city public hearings so getting that active outreach and hearing from them directly i've just found incredibly helpful uh in the initiatives that they've been involved with and i really appreciated hearing again about the how east boulder um sub-community plan about the the very

[82:02] active involvement from from those folks and um in some innovative ways and it sounded like it made a real difference which is just fantastic so then i'll just say on in terms of perceived barriers you know the one thing that that i still sometimes don't see is exactly how considerations of racial equity are being applied on a topic by topic decision by decision basis right because i think it is something that we should be working into everything that we do and while i i strive to keep it in my mind always on every issue and i think uh many many of us do and the city staff does as well it's not always uh as explicit in some of the analysis so that was part of why i was asking about the racial equity instrument because when we do those deep dives using those instruments then we get a really great sense of how racial equity issues are being

[83:01] dealt with on a particular topic in a particular decision so my um in terms of like what would be helpful to me is just the more of that that we can get on on a topic by topic basis i think the the better off we'll all be so i know it's not quick and simple but we're not in this work because it's quick and simple right like we're doing it because it's important so the the more that we can apply that tool or or the rapid one if it's suitable for some some other things i think the better off we are and then a request i would make is if it's possible to have a sense as we deal with each topic to what extent we've analyzed these issues is part of the process i think that would be helpful you know we have our economic and social and you know we have a three-legged stool thing that that comes in in each thing and uh you i i would welcome a a fourth one of saying you know how has racial equity been addressed

[84:00] in this particular topic so it's kind of a big ask but uh it would be really helpful to know how much we've been able to analyze it in each in each area or or if we weren't or to what extent we have so that that would be my request to the extent possible thank you mayor brockett thanks aaron nicole thank you um for the first one i'm just going to echo aaron uh the community connectors was kind of consistently where at least i as a policy maker um feel like i get the most helpful information in terms of thinking about making decisions and things like that so thank you for that program and thank you to all the community connectors who are working really hard um to make sure that we have have representation um in our engagement so thank you um i think uh in the interest of time i'm just gonna pick a couple of barriers um i i do feel like they're a lot they're they're significant um we are a majority white community we are a majority white

[85:00] decision-making body um we have all kind of had racism baked into us since we were i mean even before we were born honestly undoing that is hard so um i think there are a number of barriers but one of the things just around this engagement topic um that i've been thinking about is reading through the racial equity plan um reading through all the progress that's been made i don't really see where there's accountability for us as council people to take equity into account in our decision making um i just don't you know i'm not seeing accountability for us right i mean i guess maybe it kind of comes with the ballot box ultimately but um i i would really i would love that i feel like it's missing it's it's a critical piece of this how can we ensure that decision makers are prioritizing um this work and i think the other the other and you know there um you know i think as long uh as long as i'm here i will certainly continue to bring those up but you know i would i would really

[86:00] um just love for us to think about that how can we set future councils up for success in this work um by bringing in accountability and um the the other thing i will bring up is you know this this workout's really hard and it's difficult to have these conversations and um i think that sometimes as a uh city we um we run into contention with some of the groups that are working toward racial equity in our community and i i wonder how we um how we can sort of commit as a city as a council to working through that rather than backing away from it because that's challenging because it doesn't feel good how can we kind of dive into it and make sure that we are um you know if we're finding contention um if we are feeling uh attacked or something like that how do we dive into it how do we um work on uh understanding the situation

[87:01] rebuilding or maybe building for the first time some of the trust that needs to be there because as a city we just we don't we don't have a great history when it comes to racial equity and i really appreciate you know that we're talking about this now and focused on it and um what is our plan how are we working through some of those situations where things get hard so that we're not creating uh barriers between us and as a body and groups in the community um and there you know i think it's a lot of conversation it's a lot of listening it's a lot of sitting through hard spaces and you know that's certainly work that we can all do as council people and a staff i think yeah thank you for that thanks nicole matt thanks rachel um i i won't repeat the good stuff that's been said before me and i know we're sort of short on time so i'll touch on uh two two questions uh you know what really excites me about

[88:00] this work and you know speaking as a privileged white man it's the personal and community growth that comes from this it's the knowing and having experience that this is hard work um it's like working out i mean you're sore and that's a good thing because i think that means you're pushing your own personal envelope in new places rather than just being in a safe place where it doesn't try you it doesn't tax you doesn't move me and that's what i enjoy about the work is it expands me as a person and so i like to keep us going i hope others revel in that expansion of who they are as a person um as an individual as a parent as a as a spouse as a community member as an employee all those things this is expansive work and i think we all grow from it and that's what excites me the most is the growth we are already seeing across the the city department in that aspect um in terms of you know barriers i think you know one of them is really like getting city staff and council to what i would say is it's not quantifiable but but a

[89:00] saturation point at which our racial equity work becomes a foundation of our institutions uh i i think we're still building that but to me i think as we get closer we get to a place of diminishing returns where we put more and more work to get there but you're sort of at the tail end of the curve and so i think forging through that process to get to that saturation point where it is just foundational i think is going to be a big barrier and i know i'm committed to getting there i just know and really to kind of nicole's point it gets hard and we steer away from the complexity and the challenge of it but i think we need to sort of drive harder to do that um and that i think is is a barrier to get to that place where it's institutionalized thank you for that council member thanks matt juni and then lauren and then i will call on myself if uh there are no other hands rachel did you take down the questions by any chance or i just don't see i i would love to say that i had like the computer wherewithal to know how to do that juni nope but did you see normal chat they're in

[90:00] the chat still though and i can read them for you if you'd like thank you well you're here remember okay and maybe you can read them so the community knows again what we're answering while you're at it yeah no i don't have them in front of me but i remember what we're talking about so here the stuff that are doing well i agree fully with tara the entire list um i i support and conquer with everything that she said and the two points or at least the things i put the asterisk around is the community connectors because again community engagement is so important to all of us council members we want the same access that is available for someone who is wealthy someone who has the time is the same access we want to be available to you know people who don't speak english or people who speaks only spanish or other languages and also it's a bridge it's a it's a bridge and it's not just for we also have african-american um community connectors

[91:01] as well so i really think it's a great program and i hope other cities will learn from us for best practice purposes and um another thing that i'm happy or how could i say that i'm proud that we undertake which was the municipal building um name change to honor uh mayor tate that was really great it was impactful people have reached out and told me how proud they were and they feel there was some type of a restoration because a lot of us know the history the work that he done was truly amazing in the community but at the same time there were pain and hurt so that was a real some form of restoration and we can call it restorative justice as well because he was such a uh unitarian someone who did great work in the community uh so now let's talk about the barriers i have to say my the barrier that i see

[92:02] it's similar to the question that i asked earlier there are a lot of tools a lot of them um i i'm sure you think they are very helpful my fear is when you have a tool for everything it might get to be too much and i'm wondering why do we have so many tools why isn't it consolidated to one or two tools because having a lot of tools you may think yeah because we're being specific when it comes to each issues but i wonder how effective is that having that many tools um [Music] i like the question or at least the comment made by nicole earlier about the engagements you mentioned a lot of the partners again that's part of our job to reach out to community and you're doing that um i don't have too many comments about that but hopefully you know there is deep deep engagement in bringing every group

[93:01] together uh groups that are frustrated with us because that happens there are quite a few groups that are frustrated with us but still bringing them as part of the conversation because that's part of the work as well and overall i think it's great um i would like to see i think who mentioned that there's a council member who mentioned something i think it was aaron uh mayor brockett he said something about concrete concrete actions that's what i get out of what he said i would like to see more concrete steps coming out from this racial equity uh whether it's the guiding coalition or just from your department when you come before council and you make statements and it's very highly theoretical and it's good we aspire to these wonderful things and tara mentioned 10. so that that's a lot right but i think coming with concrete actions and stuff that we've what we've taken to make people's

[94:01] lives better in the community to me that's what i want to see every time that you come here thank you thanks juni lauren thank you um i agree with a lot of what's been said around what's working well i have an additional um comment on that which is you know i i appreciate the city taking a really foundational approach and looking at what's within control of the city's organization itself really focusing in on the training the hiring you know things that start and end with the city and the city organization and i think that that's um helps build the foundation of trust as we move into other decisions and outreach in the community what i'm excited about is is sort of those next steps i have to

[95:01] admit i'm more excited about you know what those policies what once you've gone through the departments and done these assessments and start to look at the policies coming from the departments and what kinds of changes can be made there that's for me that's the work that i think sort of similar to the work that we're doing on climate change looking for these pieces that have ripples beyond um what we're doing and trying to have impacts um you know the biggest impacts we can um to create positive change in terms of what i see as our barriers i think there's kind of you know we've talked a little bit about accountability um there's you know our personal and growth as a

[96:01] community on these topics and celebrating success and for me i don't know why everything relates to climate change but that's like the recycling symbol like they're kind of these three pieces that all feed um together and so making sure that we're sort of reinforcing all of those and as council members i think we can help by having difficult conversations publicly and you know kind of helping show how we are working through these issues um and the struggle thank you for that thanks lauren um so i'll go next briefly and i think that um we are a little bit over time here so i will say i agree with the the positives about what's going well and i'm excited about a lot of the same things other people are excited about um the

[97:01] the barrier that i'm most concerned about i would say that hasn't been discussed much yet is just as i was getting at earlier the the bringing the community along with us because if if we're moving in a way that the community doesn't agree with our decisions can be undone by ballot measures or people get voted out i say that as someone who who does not intend to run for office again so it's not self-serving i'm saying like we have to bring the community along or else um you know it won't have long-term success and impact so um you know and the second part of that question is policy makers uh how do we mitigate those barriers um you know i think lauren was just getting at that with having the hard conversations and amy mentioned one-on-one so i think um we may need to dig deeper with you know our our constituents and constituencies and and really help to build those bridges because i think we all believe

[98:00] earnestly in this work and and want this to succeed and and want if we have um you know if we run an issue through the racial equity instrument and it you know it points strongly towards you know this is going to be helpful and the community's not with us on that then then it could get undone and i think that that's a heartbreaking result so that's the barrier and i hope that we we can dig deep as as leaders in helping create sticking solutions um so with that i think amy i will ask if we have answered your questions yes ryan honest sylvia taylor did you do you feel complete okay yay everybody feels complete that's wonderful um okay so we are going to wrap up um this is exciting uh to be one year into this work we got a lot of work left to do but thank you all for um sylvia and and amy and ryan and taylor uh for this great presentation and for all the work you're doing and nuria and teams with that i think um i does anybody want

[99:02] a break right now before we go into part two of this can i see a hand if anybody i see a couple we do want a break okay let's take a five minute and then we will come back and dig into oh um we'll dig into the east boulder sub community 90 for those still here we are now going to end interpretive services so thank you for being with us and thank you everyone for paying attention to speaking slowly and whatnot i'll see you at 7 41. thank you marina and elena we appreciate your interpretation tonight thank you so much [Music]

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[103:01] [Music] [Music] thanks for rejoining nicole bob we don't even need it for him i think i could just start hey we're even a little early i'm here as well i'm keeping my camera off for now thanks for letting us know i see lauren i see tara thanks mark looks like waiting for matt and erin

[104:04] send up a flare matt or aaron if you're here got a mayor i was just making sure my roof hadn't blown off it is yet again very windy out all right give i'll give matt a couple more seconds it's so windy i feel like we should be talking about fire mitigation tonight but i know it's not this week you're up in two weeks i think with that okay and we have matt so we will get going um with the second agenda item for tonight which is the east boulder sub community plan 90 point feedback discussion um and and before we get into this before i turn it over to nuria and staff

[105:01] just saying i think we will hold any clarifying questions that we have during the presentation until after both staff and the work group and i think a planning board member do their presentation so please just jot down and hold your questions thank you kathleen for that uh until the the end of all three of those okay with that i will turn over to nuria great thank you mayor pro tem and this is another one of those things that has been talked about and worked on for quite a few years now a lot of exciting work has gone into it and i will throw it to kathleen king and our planning and development services department to kick that work off great thank you so much for having us tonight um we have a presentation to go through so i'll ask emily to pull up the slides perfect i'm really excited to be here to share the latest draft of the east boulder sub community plan and hear council's feedback this is an important plan for the

[106:00] community and it's been a great project to work on with city council over the past three years so emily if you could go to the next slide and we will take a look at the agenda um i'm gonna uh we'll do a presentation first um we'll walk counsel through pieces of the east boulder plan and i'll be joined by my colleague jean sanson from transportation and um then we're going to hear a report out from the march 31st planning board session um from our outgoing planning for chair david ensign and then uh we'll also hear from erin bagnell who's a member of the east folder working group and she'll be speaking about the plan and and the working group process then we we have just a couple of questions for council and the questions are intended to help us make final changes to the plan um final edits and and really work on finalizing the project

[107:02] so next slide please so um the east boulder sub-community plan is only the second plan of this scale that the city has ever done the last sub-community plan was the north boulder plan which was completed in the 90s and we're still working on the implementation of recommendations from the north boulder sub community plan so you might think of things like the north boulder library or upgrades to north broadway we would expect a similar timeline for implementation of the east boulder plan and anticipate that change in this area will happen gradually over the next 20 years next please sub community plans are part of the city's suite of tools to help us implement the broad goals of the boulder valley comprehensive plan at the neighborhood level so once a sub-community plan is adopted it will help guide changes to development

[108:00] standards and zoning and inform planning and funding of our capital improvement program for years to come as an example one of the council member questions that was sent in advance of tonight's meeting was about how the sub-community plan and updates to the use tables would work together so the sub-community plan describes specific allowed and conditional uses for different areas of the sub-community these descriptions will inform future work on use tables as well as other potential zoning changes next please so um the project has been going on for three years uh we kicked off the planning process in 2019 and went through a series of tasks first conducting an inventory and analysis to really understand what the existing conditions of the sub-community are and then coming up with ideas for potential changes to the area testing the outcomes of those changes and developing strategies for future implementation we were last with city

[109:00] council in july to review and discuss the 60 draft plan and today we're nearing completion of the plan and looking for your feedback to help refine recommendations and complete the project next we've had excellent participation by the community throughout the process um over 23 different engagement events and opportunities i think um 24 if we count the the most recent community meeting and the process has also been guided by a working group of 21 community members who have met 30 times over the last three years to help shape recommendations of the plan and communicate the project out to the community and thank you to my colleagues in communications and engagement for the great presentation earlier tonight on our community connectors who had great impacts on the process and outcomes of the project next so during the 60 draft engagement window

[110:02] a couple major themes came up in in community feedback community members were interested in options for increasing the amount of housing and diversity of housing planned in the area there was also feedback indicating a need for greater detail describing the areas of change particularly building a neighborhood character and then finally feedback described a need for the plan to better describe support for local businesses particularly industrial and service businesses so as i walk through the plan this evening i'll describe how we've made revisions to align with this feedback next so just as a reminder before i go into the plan here are the key questions that we will pull up during the discussion next please okay so the draft plan um for those that are new to the project the east boulder sub community is located north of arapahoe and east of

[111:02] foothills parkway and includes some key community assets like belmont city park and boulder community health foothills campus along with a lot of light industrial businesses and office parks and we've seen some recent change in the area our charge with this project was to create a plan with the community to help manage that change and deliver outcomes that are important to boulder next please the vision for east boulder is to evolve into a thriving industrial area with interesting places to work live play and do business this will be achieved by integrating diverse housing and retail options into existing industrial areas next new connections enhancements to our current transportation network and other mobility improvements will make getting around without a car much easier next

[112:02] we've heard strong support from community members for 15 minute walkable neighborhoods the planet accomplished accomplishes this with key land use changes that will allow for a better mix of uses including housing we've heard some people are concerned about increased traffic congestion congestion the plan outlines different strategies to manage future demand on roadways in east boulder and we've heard that the plan should provide details about how all of this will happen the plan also includes an implementation section where policies projects and programs offer a path to realization of the plan's vision over the next several years next please so there's um four major components of the east boulder plan a land use plan a connections plan that recommendation section that i just mentioned and then finally the 55th and arapahoe stationaria plan this um this particular component offers more detailed recommendations for one of

[113:01] the key areas of change in east folder so i'm going to walk through these different sections and give you a sense of of what the plan covers next please so we'll start with the land use plan the recommendations for land use includes changes to the current bvcp land use map approximately 250 acres that are currently designated as light industrial are proposed to change to mixed-use neighborhoods this modification will bring new opportunities for integrating residential commercial and retail spaces and places with existing sub-community businesses in workplaces the plan also makes some modifications that will better align the bvcp land use map with existing conditions protects small business space through community industrial designations and identifies important natural assets and wetlands with environmental preservation designations the land use plan also provides updated

[114:00] definition for mixed-use industrial designation and creates a new use designation called mixed-use transit oriented development next please at the 60 draft council asked staff in the working group to consider additional locations for expansion of the mixed use industrial designation to a couple of locations including the area south of pearl street and an area north of flatirons golf course after carefully considering these changes and asking the community about these options and potential outcomes the plan extends the mixed use industrial land use category to the 55th street corridor envisioning a connective corridor between the station area at 55th and arapahoe and the flatiron business park other areas have maintained their industrial designations to retain business space avoid impacts to the floodplain and concentrate change in key areas next please

[115:00] this section of the plan also looks at each of the proposed areas of change to describe how these areas might evolve in the future and what some key features of each neighborhood might include you'll also see that this section describes conceptually how much of different types of space might redevelop in the future this def this defines how we think about the potential for new homes and changes in jobs numbers next please the land use map describes a lot of changes to mixed-use neighborhoods feedback from boards and many community members described a desire for more detailed guidance on what those neighborhoods should include and what they look like the place type section of the plan provides that additional guidance next please place type descriptions and performance standards will help inform any future zoning changes that we make to these areas of change since since the sixty percent draft

[116:00] council and community feedback informed the combination of some place type designations and how we work to further distinguish the differences between these types next please when we apply these place types to the sub-community and model out potential impacts we anticipate that the recommended land use changes and design guidance for place types could allow for approximately 5 000 homes in east boulder we would conservatively anticipate that about a quarter of these homes would be permanently affordable this is an increase of about a thousand units that were planned in the 60 draft this increase is a result of revising the place types map and performance standards and modeling out how those changes could potentially result in housing opportunities most of that change can be seen along the 55th street corridor where we've extended the innovation tod place type which is one of the more intense designations next

[117:02] this change increases the total number of housing units in the city by 11 and total number of affordable units by 32 next please there's a of course a lot of interest in how the new homes in the area is balanced with jobs so here's a breakdown of potential homes and additional jobs that could be created for these areas of change an important consideration when we talk about future jobs is that any job projection is actually a measurement of space we are not predicting the number of people but we use a ratio to understand how available space may support a certain number of jobs that's why what you see in the plan is a breakdown of space by use type and not necessarily jobs if there's um further questions about this i'm happy to walk through our methodology during the question and answer discussion period

[118:00] but for now um park west neighborhood we are anticipating 375 new jobs so that's not total but new jobs and then to compare that to new homes in the area we're looking at 1 300. in park east it's 125 new jobs along the 55th street corridor and flatiron business park the concept includes 200 new jobs and at the stamp or the stationary at 55th narapaho there is workspace for 2000 jobs but again these jobs numbers really represent space and as we continue to come out of the pandemic and different businesses retool how they accommodate people and employees these numbers will certainly change so next please the next major component is the connections plan so i'm going to turn it over to my colleague jean sanson to walk us through some of the key features of this section thank you kathleen and good evening

[119:00] council my name is gene sanson a principal transportation planner with the department of transportation and mobility um so i'm going to talk about the transportation mobility chapter of the east boulder sub community plan so today when we think about east boulder it's an area that as as you all know over the years has largely been designed for motor vehicles and options to travel by any mode other than a vehicle are fairly limited and dispersed patterns of development have grown up around the car and so street blocks are typically long and disconnected and as land uses change and infill and redevelopment bring a greater mix of jobs and housing to the area as kathleen just described the transportation network and the mobility options will also evolve to support this transformation so supporting the network of businesses and new residents that kathleen described includes some major recommendations that will contribute to our access and mobility goals this chapter of the plan supports the

[120:00] vision of the land use plan while also responding to the many many community comments we received about transportation needs and upgrades in the area so let's start with the connections plan the plan the connections that are shown here are intended to support new land uses by one improving access into and through these redevelopment areas to expanding the pedestrian and bicycle network throughout the sub community and then third creating opportunities for street activation and vibrancy in these evolving 15-minute neighborhoods so the major recommendations of the connections plan should look pretty consistent with with what was included in the 60 draft and in response to council feedback we updated our map to simplify the recommendations and show the full system of proposed improvements in a more readable way so in the map you see here the geographic extent of each new connection is shown as well as how the proposed connections are integrated into

[121:01] the existing network of roads and pedestrian and bicycle and transit facilities next slide accompanying the new connections map is a description of each new street connection as well as connections that are primarily primarily intended to serve pedestrians and bicyclists the purpose or intent of the new connection and the street type as identified in the city's design and construction standards for the new connections we're increasing the number of pedestrian and bicycle facilities and in particular based on council feedback we took another look at the stamp or the stationery itself to identify opportunities to better connect bicyclists from the boulder creek greenway to 55th street and the station area via more grade separated bicycle routes as shown on the map also in response to questions from council prior to this evening's meeting i'd like to point out that all the connections and the transportation

[122:00] network improvements in the plan will safely accommodate truck and goods movement along with safe and comfortable pipe bicycle and pedestrian travel to minimize conflicts between those users so as per our transportation master plan and our low stress walk and bike network we match up our bicycle and pedestrian treatments like buffered bike lanes or vertically separate separated bicycle facilities with the characteristic of the environment so for example on larger high volume streets our approach is to create greater separation and protection for bicyclists from vehicles and then on our local streets we use more of a shared approach a slow speed environment for vehicles and bicyclists to minimize conflicts so just to say the plan will be incorporated into the tmp and replace portions of earlier network plans that cover east boulder and transportation improvements included in the connections plan will be installed by property owners as part of redevelopment and through city projects

[123:00] next thanks another component of the transportation chapter is what we refer to as system enhancements these are transportation network improvements that are recommended for consideration in the next tmp update to improve existing facilities for all modes of travel the enhancements ranges scale from completing missing sidewalks to initiating design of the 55th street corridor to incorporate protected bicycle facilities you'll also notice that in response to to board feedback we did build out recommendations for mobility hubs throughout the sub community and these hubs are places where people can connect to multiple modes of transportation with focus on really improving their travel experience with high quality infrastructure and amenities like secure bicycle and micro mobility parking or car share vehicles and way finding and real-time transit information and while these hubs should provide context-sensitive solutions that are

[124:00] adaptable to a variety of locations an important recommendation of the plan is for the city to establish standards for the design and operation of these mobility hubs next slide please this next set of projects for future study may be located outside the areas of change in east boulder but have been identified by community members throughout the sub-community engagement process and city staff as potential projects warranting further study for future consideration or investment so following adoption of the subcommittee plan these projects should be tracked to determine when and how they're incorporated into future city departments work plans for example preliminary engineering for the east arapahoe corridor is a project that cdot is initiating this year while the potential for a fast tracks northwest rail station at 55th street is something we've heard as a desire from our community and which we will continue to examine as rail discussions with rtd proceed

[125:01] so with that i'll hand this back over to kathleen thanks gene um if you could advance the next slide so the next piece of the plan outlines recommendations for policies programs and projects that will help implement each of our plans goals for access and mobility arts and culture design quality and place making housing affordability and diversity resilience and climate commitment and local business this is a new section that has been added since the 60 draft many of the initial ideas for this section came directly from our community members through the engagement process next please recommended programs and projects are identified along with key steps towards implementation and guidance on prioritization this tool will be used by city staff to develop future work plans capital improvement planning and develop partnerships throughout the community to

[126:01] implement these recommendations next slide please so the final major component is the 55th and arapahoe stationaria plan this document provides greater detail for recommendations in this area of change a regional mobility hub planned at 55th and arapahoe will be served by high quality high frequency bus rapid transit in the future as part of the state highway 7 brt project that the city has been working on in collaboration with cdot rtd and our neighboring communities the station area plan provides site-specific guidance next slide please site-specific guidance on issues like redevelopment strategies design characteristics and building performance next provides a greater level of detail for new and enhanced connections within the station area

[127:00] next and that includes recommendations for street design specific to each of those revised connections that gene was highlighting in the station area next please the document similarly offers an implementation matrix to help prioritize projects and realize the vision for this catalytic site next slide so those are really the major components of the sub-community plan after collecting your feedback tonight we'll be working on making final changes to the plan and completing the documents we're scheduled for a joint public hearing with planning board in may and both bodies will need to approve the plan for adoption following adoption we can be we can begin working on implementation of the plan which will begin with making the land use changes to the bbcp land use map and kicking off studies for code

[128:00] changes next please so that wraps up my presentation i would like to turn it over to our planning board chair um who's been involved i think throughout the life of the project uh david ensign and then we'll hear from our working group member erin bagnell so i invite you david to um say hello and speak and great to have you great i should be unmuted and hopefully you can hear me uh good evening city council members i appreciate the invitation to have one last duty as a planning board member and meet with you to give you a brief summary of the march 31st review of the 90 plan that you see in front of you tonight and to address any questions you might have that i can answer on behalf of the entire board from planning board's perspective it's rewarding to be able to work on strategic planning for comprehensively envisioning the

[129:00] future of targeted air areas in boulder and planning board has been quite unified in support of sub-community planning when it can be incorporated into the city's work plan since it not only gives us the opportunity to find new criteria that will help us achieve our preferred outcomes in targeted areas but also allows for extensive community engagement um i did want to mention that on that march 31st meeting uh we were able to hear from several other working group members uh erin bagnall's going to be here tonight but we also heard uh from uh community connectors anna cronin casa siberia and lady garcia uh who provided unique perspectives on their contributions to the working group and we also heard from peter owaida and laura kaplan so it was really great to hear from this diverse group uh what resonated with them during the process uh throughout the life of the working group we've also had john gerstell a planning board member who served as our liaison so we've benefited from his extensive knowledge of the work and we

[130:00] really appreciated john's uh commitment to attending all of those working group meetings uh planning board's feedback on the 90 draft of the plan was generally supportive and there was appreciation expressed for how feedback on the 60 plan from last year were addressed uh the walking tours that staff organized for council members and boards really helped people visualize the proposed changes members expressed enthusiasm about uh introducing transit oriented development into our land you said designations and uh the place types are really useful to inform what potential zoning might look like a good example of that is the parkside residential which describes how open space areas can be taken advantage of for adjacent housing so um some general concerns that planning board members have expressed in the past and also articulated in this last review include generally whether there will be mechanisms in the plan

[131:02] uh land use and zoning to assure that there will be a positive effect on reducing the jobs housing and balance in boulder the second big one is whether we will be able to make progress in missing middle and affordable housing ownership with the plan the third whether there will be ways to assure a good mix of housing types and the fourth whether we can keep the industrial and commercial spaces affordable as these uh areas become more and more attractive for development so all that each member of course has a different perspective on these concerns uh they get to the ongoing recognition of the tension between market forces and our desired outcomes uh so while rezoning will be able to put tighter controls on these types of concerns there may also be citywide initiatives that have to be also that we have to continue to look at to

[132:00] address concerns that are beyond the scope of the specific plan um the concerns though that i enumerated led to a couple of the areas kathleen mentioned in the memorandum that some board members asked for further analysis on uh the first being the maximum build out area calculations and job projections for flat iron business part and the second being a list of uh local uh mixed use industrial neighborhoods uh that are comparable to what could be expected for proposed mixed uses uh industrial and of east boulder so being able to kind of see what uh an equivalent uh type of neighborhood is either within the boulder area or another colorado community uh kathleen also summarized uh uh recommended revisions to the draft plan which is that second key issue that you'll be discussing tonight um i won't repeat them all since they're in your packet but i wanted to mention that i did see council member wallach's concern about

[133:02] referencing the airport i think when that came up one board member was interested in trying to make some strategic analysis of the airport and i think most of the other board members kind of said oh no we should you know potentially it should be addressed as just a placeholder or uh acknowledging that it's within the boundaries but it would be out of scope to do any kind of strategic uh commentary so i think that was it was just like like we do with the power plant which is also mentioned in there just mention that it's in the boundaries but uh that it isn't being addressed in this version of the plan so um with that i'll just say that i appreciate uh that kathleen captured all the recommendations that we had i think all the board members expressed a lot of appreciation of staff kathleen gene gatza gene sansom and uh working so hard over the last three years to fuse the plan and i'll leave it at that

[134:00] [Music] thank you so much david uh real quick bob i see your hand up but we were hoping to hold questions till the end of all but all three presentations i just take this moment to thank dave ensign for his five years of service on our planning board he's been a wonderful member of the community and a wonderful leader of our planning board and i just want to thank him so much for all his service thank you bob i i echo that as well and i just say you have did a good job keeping all those people on the bus quiet during your presentation well these are the actually the people from the first bus tour uh that the um working group did i think um i i i used that picture like in a review we did way back about two three years ago so it's kind of cool oh and by the way i'll just say that i did do that last meeting from iceland because i didn't realize i would be in a third meeting in march so

[135:00] uh the meeting ended at somewhere close to four in the morning you're a champion david ensign um okay back to kathleen david you're not going to go anywhere right now right you're going to stay and answer questions i'll be here for the questions great so now i'm very happy to introduce aaron bagnall who has been on the working group um also for the for the life of the project so erin i'll turn it over to you thanks kathleen and good evening to you guys council members um thanks for hearing from me my name is aaron vagnell and i've had the pleasure of working with kathleen and gene godzilla and gene sanson and so many other great wonderful city of boulder employees throughout this last three-year working group process it's been a really long but very valuable experience um i think everyone felt that feels that way and we're excited to see this

[136:00] some come to some sort of culmination soon and get to the rest of the good work that needs to be done here um it's been great to participate in this working group i'm a longtime boulder resident and a member of the design community and an avid biker so all of these things are good once they're realized they're going to be so exciting for myself and um honestly what an amazing opportunity that we have here with the east boulder to plan for the future of boulder what i wanted my main message really is and i said this to the planning board um last week or two weeks ago what you're seeing tonight in front of you is about balance um there's there's been a lot of many different conversations with people of many differing views as i'm sure you know there are people in boulder that would prefer things remain exactly the same and an equal amount of people that would like them to change more so in planning for the future boulder we

[137:00] have to entertain a lot of different options but most importantly make good educated decisions as as leaders so um what i did for the planning board and i think i'm going to do for you here tonight is walk through the areas of change with the on the plan and just go through how we came about um deciding where to put the areas of change because they are strategic so um kathleen i don't know who would be able to put up that map if for me so you'll go to number 37. emily so i'll just keep talking while while you're bringing this up in my um uh as i said these areas were strategically chosen by the working group through a lot of varying a lot of meetings and discussions and city staff did a great job selecting a variety of working group

[138:01] members from a lot of different areas of the community and had a lot of different perspectives so as a group the main goal of the plan is to increase areas of walkable diversified neighborhoods and communities in the areas most appropriate and preserve areas of affordable industrial where they are most appropriate so analysis of the existing east builder area plan boundary that you're looking at right here in the red dot um there's no residential within the city limits so there is san jose community but that is currently not within city limits hopefully will be at some point um and there's a poor really poorly connected multimodal transportation network they um none of these communities are currently connected to one another so this process is going to change that and and make a better east boulder in the future so um we have in planning for the future we decided

[139:00] that strategic densification made the most benefit for everyone um so i'll start with belmont park west north a city park to the east multi-use greenway connection to the south and a major transit corridor to the west so allowing for mid-density development of homes here in this desirable location would not only create more opportunities for people to live in boulder but it would create more opportunities for the existing neighborhood to the north and together they could be a community um walkable uh same is true for belmont park east this is a there's an established neighborhood to the northeast san lazaro a city park to the west multi-use greenway connections to the south um it's within the elbow of these transit corridors belmont pearl parkway 55th and so again allowing for a mid-density development of homes here creates a lot of opportunities for people and adds

[140:01] community benefits to the neighborhood um then we have flatirons business park so this is where we thought is a great opportunity within this existing business and officerian boulder that's already starting to kind of show its own little funky personality um there's an adjacent bike path to the east and the north it's bounded by the 55th so and this provides an opportunity to allow for what boulder needs transit connection improvements housing and community innovation sorry i messed up housing and community innovation helps it's hard to read and and look at this slide at the same time i apologize um so lastly there is the 55th and arapahoe station area what we commonly refer to as stamp um the transit oriented development part of the area plan is quite appropriately at the intersection of arapaho and 55th arapa being the transit quarter that will connect our community of boulder to

[141:01] all our communities to the east one of them at least um you've heard from gene sanson so there's a lot planned for this area when we imagine the future boulder and an appropriate growth and smart density this is where it makes the most sense the stamp area presents great opportunities to allow for east boulder to celebrate its own identity and create a community hub so um thanks for allowing me to go walk through with that i i look forward to hearing your discussion tonight and i'm happy to answer any questions that you have about the working group great thank you so much erin um that really concludes our our presentation for the evening so um we'd love to answer questions and um go through the discussion thanks so much kathleen and david and aaron for the presentations um so we'll

[142:01] do the same thing sort of this time we'll start with questions to the three presenters and then we can have some discussion and then we'll make sure that we answer kathleen's two questions i think there are two at the end so kicking us off again matt benjamin um i wasn't gonna dive into a question to me i just wanted to thank aaron having been a part of two working groups over the last four years it is an immense amount of work it's hard work and it's the epitome of community dedication so i just want to thank you aaron and the rest of the working group it's a vital part of how we do our work on council and certainly how many of the boards and commissions get the informed uh stuff they need to make their decision so just thank you and to the rest of the working group for a lot of that what sends to be thankless work so thank you sure don't have a question or two matt i saw a hotline post i'll get there but i'll let others take bites at the apple all right tara okay so i have four questions possibly three depending on if i could read my

[143:00] handwriting or not the first one is going to be um as far as community feedback goes some community members have written to me that outside of the east boulder sub community plan area for instance uh south of arapahoe that they didn't feel like they were a part of the discussion and they have a lot of um what happens to them at 55th and arapahoe is going to be very important to them especially what kind of retail they want and traffic etc but mostly i would say retail so is there going to be an opportunity for um those neighborhoods south of arapahoe to be able to weigh in on um what's going to happen uh at 55th and arapahoe with the stamp area that's my first question should i do all the questions at once or wait um i can go one by one or let's answer them one by one so we're all sure

[144:00] so um we are nearing the end of engagement for this project um we have done um you know a lot of outreach to the neighborhood south of arapahoe there have been multiple postcard mailings information about the project was included on i think it was the march utility bill that went to all um utility customers throughout the city um and we've had representatives from neighborhoods south of arapaho participate on the working group as well so there's um we really are at the end of this process um but as changes come through future projects um you know certainly there will be continued engagement for discussions on i think the regional mobility hub and stations along east arapaho

[145:02] we will continue to have have community conversations about those items so kathleen just uh just because i was on the parks board during the res restaurant experience there's it's best uh not a small amount of community members said they knew nothing about this and so i'm just throwing it out there that maybe there is some more it's all for positive i i i think most of it so maybe there's some other way for those that feel like they've been missed to reach out to them and in terms of what they'd like to see specifically um in the uh areas that affect them most which would be you know retail i would think so i'm just suggesting that but i appreciate all that you and i'm just reading emails so i don't i'm not saying you didn't do it okay the second thing is i have a question on middle income housing which is very difficult to put in our city right now so how do peop how do you expect

[146:00] this to happen middle income meaning live 80 above lower income yeah i actually um jay sugnet is here from housing so i'd love to invite him to talk a little bit about the middle income housing strategy and how that plays with the east boulder sub-community plan good evening so jay sugnet with housing and human services uh and i was a part of the development of the 2016 middle income housing strategy and um yeah and this was definitely discussed extensively with the community and the working group as well definitely a citywide concern and sort of this missing middle and middle income so the way that we are we're trying to approach the um the sub community plan is to focus on that diversity of housing so we have an opportunity to create additional housing in 250 other

[147:00] additional acres um and in that is you know how do we provide a diversity of housing types we've done really well with the single family we've done really well with the medium to high density right it's that stuff in between it's the duplexes triplexes fourplexes townhomes so that's the missing middle type and unfortunately the missing middle has separated itself from middle income right so our middle income we typically think of 80 to 120 percent that missing middle is is not necessarily affordable particularly new to middle income so that's been our big challenge citywide um i can talk more about you know all the things that we've done to try to address middle income and all the initiatives um but i think the the bottom line that we're trying to get across um is that we're we have an opportunity to create a lot more diverse housing types things that we don't typically depart the market doesn't necessarily provide

[148:01] um and that the future implementation piece is the rezoning the form is code um the community benefit piece those are all opportunities to really hone in on how do we actually achieve that that middle income and missing middle so hopefully that isn't too long-winded and somewhat helpful i'm not sure if it's helpful but thank you for that answer um i'm just gonna throw out there well this isn't a time for comments right rachel it's just a time for questions that is correct i was trying to give a thumbs up it apparently did not transmit okay so then my uh i guess my last question is going to be in terms of transit and depending on rtd lol we have this thing called the transit village which actually doesn't have transit does it so i'm wondering how we can ensure that we actually do have

[149:00] transit from rtd or we do we have another plan because it would be sad if we made a whole transit hub with no transit yet again yeah i'll i'll ask gene sanson to speak to um planning for transit with then potentially without rtd and and how that's playing out locally tara that is such a great question right um particularly given um the lack of transit at the um at boulder junction which we're hoping to see come back um over the coming years but you know in terms of planning a new tod area we certainly need the t in there um and we are working with rtd to restore and enhance the jump service that's there today and think about extending it further east but but more than that we're working really closely with our regional partners like boulder county and our communities to the east to think about other ways to deliver transit service and particularly transit service on colorado 7. so for example right now we have a an application in

[150:01] for federal funding to begin express service between i-25 and boulder on colorado 7. this could be operated by rtd although i don't believe they have the drivers to do so now they could they could bid on that project it could be operated by cdot or another provider like fia so um you know at this point in time we're really getting creative about how to continue to move this project as well as others forward to provide the transit service that we expect yeah thanks thanks tara and thanks gene and i forgot to thank you earlier for your presentation portion two um and and then we are up with mayor brockett for questions thanks well uh thanks to everyone who's been involved for so long um dave echo uh bob's appreciation for all the work that you've done on playing board over the years and good to have you back in the states but we sure are gonna miss you on planning board here coming up um and aaron the extraordinary work you've

[151:01] done on the working group and i know that's been it's been a lot of work for you and and your colleagues so huge huge appreciation for all of that and the staff work as well um i'll just mention is the first time i had first chance i had to work with gene godzilla and gene samson at the same time and they called themselves the pair of jeans which i thought was super cute so that was a lot of fun too uh okay so a couple questions um one is uh so once we adopt the plan uh we need to change some land use designations to kind of match the the plan's vision what's the schedule for that like what's the process for getting that done and when could we expect that to come forward yeah so um changes to the land use map resulting from a sub-community plan can happen at any time so we would expect to following adoption of the plan um work on that over the summer and really that would be the first

[152:00] piece of implementation that we would need to do great so it really is scheduled for first thing in terms of implementation and we could see that like late summer kind of time frame what do you think yeah i imagine we would get started in um june and um we have sort of the the framework and process lined out so um yeah by the end of the summer i would anticipate if everything goes well that we'd have those the land use map updated okay that's great to hear i'll look forward to that i'm coming forward once we get there and my other question was um we got a letter from at least the the owners of 5150 valmont um and kind of i i dove into the the points that they were making and it was interesting because right we have the whole area of belmont city park and all the city parcels are marked park for good reason right and then there's this seems like the one last parcel of private land in there is

[153:00] this 5150 belmont and they were saying hey we're still uh proposed for community business but that like parkside um uh place type seems like that could work really well for our parcel and that seemed interesting to me so just want to see if if that seems like a reasonable idea to to you all or what you're thinking for that one specific parcel in the middle there yeah so um we had certainly looked at that parcel and the area surrounding the park and really tried to think about how uses for that site might pair with the future redevelopment and programming at belmont city park and so the thought was that that would be a community business use that could support park users and and the idea of small market space between these um kind of growing neighborhoods on either side of the park was one idea that was um floated in in community vitality

[154:00] um but i think you know one of the challenges to really thinking about that space um as maybe just residential um is that it would be pretty isolated and it wouldn't foster the um creation of these 15-minute neighborhoods that we're really striving to create in east boulder um so that was some of the the background and thought about um that land use designation okay thanks for that uh those are the questions i have on that i'll have some comments when we get to them okay sorry mark wallach okay thank you and thanks for the presentation um my first question um if anyone can answer this is what portion of the east boulder sub-community plan that we're looking at tonight is in the opportunity zone

[155:02] and the reason i ask is as it goes to the the issue that was raised in the written presentation about um creating incentives for developers who do certain things and uh as as the opportunity zone is itself the granddaddy of all incentives and inducements i'm just not sure why we would want to do more but that depends on whether the opportunity zone covers this area is there anyone who can respond to that so there is a portion of east boulder that is within the opportunity zone and i don't um i don't know off the top of my head what the acreage is i'm getting a that doesn't you don't have to answer it today you know if you could perhaps provide that information at your convenience that would be useful

[156:01] yes i definitely can provide it and someone just sent me the the map so it's everything um west of 55th street um north of arapahoe and west of 55th street can you venture a percentage guess as to how much of this area is i'm not holding it half-ish okay um my my next question is um we're going to create a good number of units of which 25 are affordable isn't that sort of the minimum standard and and my question is could we not do a little better in terms of providing affordable housing then that which we would expect in any development yeah so in our in our calculations we did um uh anticipate that 25 at least would be affordable but for

[157:00] a lot of the redevelopment we are anticipating um that is particularly for the 55th and arapahoe station area that will be employing the community benefit to get additional affordable housing units in exchange for building heights and if you go up pearl parkway and turn left on 47th street there's a whole enclave of i guess light industrial users commercial users um is that neighborhood uh in the belmont east parcel so valmont east is just north of pearl street so that if you're talking about the area between pearl street and pearl parkway that is not proposed for change okay and my last question is is going back to

[158:00] something that tara said i i um i am interested in understanding how we will get middle income housing when the market seems to be incapable of providing middle-income housing to date and i assume we're going to rely primarily upon market related uh levers to to get housing um how are we going to miraculously provide the middle income housing that we don't it's like an extinct species at this point we don't see it anywhere how is it going to happen miraculously in the east boulder community and i'm just trying to get an understanding of the substance of how we get to that not the aspirational aspect of it yeah i think you're right you know um middle income is the most challenging housing to provide

[159:00] in the current market because we don't have a dedicated source of funding federal state or local for that type of housing that type of development what is included in the sub community plan that um i think makes some strides towards creating that type of housing is we really describe in that place type section the formats for housing that we would like to see in that area and that guidance will be part of what we use to craft form-based code for these different areas of change and um the form based it's like you know i'm kind of walking along the line of logic here but the form based code will help us regulate and create these different formats for

[160:01] housing that we want to see and so it's it's a little bit further down the process than what's really in the scope of this plan but i think that's what we've tried to describe in the east boulder sub-community plan is we really want to see these formats for housing um and that um that that you know future steps will help to implement that okay thank you that's all i got right now lauren matt did i see your hand are you up ahead lauren lauren oh lauren can go for it and i'll go after the world all right lauren and then matt right getting bumped up in the queue um okay so my um first question i noticed so for the stamp area there was a really fine-grained plan that sort

[161:00] of looked at what buildings might may be maintained it looked like a lot of things around floodplain had been taken into account with looking at that was really great are we going to see a higher level of detail put towards some of these other areas um in the 100 plan or was that just going to be the stamp area that gets that yeah so the the stamp area has that level of detail and actually has an area plan applied to it um because it's been identified sort of in a historic series of of work on the east arapaho project and um the area plan and consulting for that area plan was funded by a grant that we received from dr cogg so if there's interest in creating area plans for other parts of east boulder

[162:02] we would look at that and figure out ways to include it on our work plan but it's not in the work plan currently and we would not have that level of detail um in the 100 draft thank you um i was also curious around at the beginning you talked about i think your first line sort of started with the whole plan and initially you had done an assessment of sort of what's existing and when i i was just wondering as you looked through some of these areas and particularly the arapaho and or sorry the valmont and foothills area the west belmont park area

[163:03] i was wondering if you had looked in detail sort of at what's existing with mapping sort of the place types used there or maybe you could explain how you got to where the place types are on that particular parcel because that one seemed less matching of sort of some of the underlying underlying existing buildings as some of the other areas sorry i'm having a hard time spitting everything out right now that's okay um yeah so for the first part of your question yes we completed um an inventory analysis uh and there's a a report out there that we completed in 2019 that mapped and looked at a really wide range of factors and really informed how we selected these different areas of change and what we proposed for the different areas so i can send that report around

[164:01] if you haven't gotten a chance to look at that yet um but for the place types and and how we created those for belmont park west in particular um i do think we did try to really be sensitive to the context of that area but also really worked hard to get new connections through there because there that access and mobility through that area is very limited and so when we started to work through those new connections and began creating more walkable blocks and thinking about adjacencies of the park adjacencies of the trail some of the existing businesses and space spaces used along sterling court the adjacency of that

[165:00] established residential neighborhood to the north all of that really did go into the place types that were proposing for that area and then when we tested and modeled out those place types we did assume adaptive reuse for a number of buildings in that area so i don't know i think kalani hoa is here um who's our urban designer and i don't know kalani if you wanted to speak at all to um just how we tested the place types for that neighborhood in particular oh you're on mute it's been way too long kalani hi um so i have a little bit of a delay and as my lighting adjusts so we did some um based on some of the feedback that came out of the working group and some of the place type definition

[166:02] and um residential typologies that they'd like to see adjacent to the park versus what parts in that area maintain um some of the businesses at the ground floor and possibly add some mixed use areas to it that's how was some of the methodology so without looking at some of the models you know piece by piece and parcel by parcel i'd say we looked at about eight or ten parcels throughout that area that kind of just on a cursory level would would fit and be a good a good rehab and a use and possibly the structure could support you know residential above but that obviously is without us going in and doing an investigation and really looking at how a retrofit on this would work so we had to make a few assumptions but we did assume i'd say

[167:00] want to save maybe 40 of the parcels through there as an adaptive reuse with some mixed use above and then the rest of the new portion in there um because there were some businesses and some buildings that are you know possibly ending the you know their um they're aging out in that sense so we did take a look at some of those buildings but um i'd say it was feedback from the working group as far as what types of housing methodologies and then also with um with the importance of trying to maintain and keep some of the businesses that are there but also introducing some opportunities for retail to provide a 15-minute neighborhood in there as we start to add housing and some of those other business thank you no problem um [Music] i also had a question sort of as we were looking at streetscape um

[168:01] a lot of this area is really not out west um belmont park but more of the heart of the industrial area is really heavily impacted by flood and as we talk about streetscape design i was wondering if there's been any attention put towards stormwater retention and infiltration um in the streetscape design you know a lot of other cities do a lot more of that in their right of ways than we typically do as a community and then i was also wondering if that might be something we might look at through as um there was a private parks um piece that in piece of this plan and so i'm kind of thinking about like how we strategize where those parks are

[169:00] to be most beneficial not only sort of as social spaces but also how they can help us um from an infrastructure point of view yeah so for the first part of your question um i think the street sections that are included really are intended to describe the different mobility facilities that are being provided in each of those roadways but we do the city does have a guiding document about green infrastructure for transportation facilities in particular and that plan or strategy document does identify a number of roadways that would be great candidates for green infrastructure and so 55th street is one of those um so we've we've called that out in the plan um for remind me the second part of your question is about um pops the

[170:02] privately owned publicly accessible spaces so um this is a program that um we've talked a lot about with um community members and are trying to figure out a way that we can create more of these social and gathering spaces but they may be located in or owned by private property and private property owners and so as redevelopment happens how do we create these spaces in in properties and parcels that the city doesn't own today and so that's that's a program that we've identified as part of this project and how we manage it and implement it and identify that the prime locations for some of those um i think will uncover as redevelopment occurs but it's

[171:01] it's certainly a future step so the plan is to have that be something that is examined as development proposals come up as opposed to trying to have um a long-term a long-range vision for where we might want to encourage those to happen so i think the first step that we've been talking about is just inventorying the the spaces that are out there today that we that we know about that are publicly accessible gathering spaces but they're privately owned so that's i think step one um and then you know we have to kind of work with our our partners in parks and recreation and community vitality to really build out what the rest of that program looks like so i think i'm i'm not totally prepared to describe what our our future plan for

[172:00] that would be but what's included in in the sub-community plan is um identifying that that type of program has great potential for east boulder and could be applied to the ui thank you thanks lauren matt and then um i will call in myself terry your hand disappeared so i assume you're waiting to do comments all right um so i have a few questions and and one of them's a follow-up or a couple of follow-ups but uh two some previous ones asked where i'm looking more clarity but one the question i want to start with sort of just about housing in general and you know the slide 21 that was shown in the presentation kind of laid out that you know estimate of you know new jobs versus new homes and as we all know that when we get down into actual zoning there's an array of zones that fit a particular land use and so we obviously have a spectrum of the density of housing that can be on any parcel and so i guess i'm trying to ask

[173:02] is where does these where do these estimates lie within that spectrum is it maxed out in terms of density is this sort of a high water mark for housing we could expect is it low is it in the middle so you may have answered that but maybe it wasn't totally explicit for me i'm just trying to gauge where we have uh room uh for for thinking about housing as you know we get closer to implementing and redeveloping these areas as it pertains to perhaps this estimate that's on this slide yeah so for the estimate that's on that slide um we actually went through these different areas of change and kind of conceptually developed them under our rules in our model and so that's where those numbers come from um i might ask kalani to speak to whether that's at the high end or low end since you did a lot of that modeling i so i think that there's a range depending on the the type the housing

[174:01] type so if you notice in the packet the parkside residential has everything from flats the townhomes in there so you could have a range in the town home on a parcel that might be anywhere from 12 to 20 units per acre versus in the flats if you have on a mixed use building and you have a mix that has a higher percentage of um efficiency living units you're going to have a higher density count in there so i'd say for apartments in general if we were just to generalize the density the proposed kind of count for something like that it would maybe range from 25 to um 40 or so that's just kind of a rough average on a few of those park

[175:00] park west properties but of course it's gonna it's gonna depend on the developer what their program is what the mix is there too as far as the density and um you also have like commercial density fars in there so what we were trying to do as we looked at some of these is how do we maintain good public spaces how do we maintain good environmental quality through that area what what helps in that respect and how do we create better um housing opportunities and maintain some of the businesses through that area um well i appreciate that response and maybe i didn't quite maybe ask my question maybe i wanted to you know i i want to see us really focus on a lot of housing and yes my question with the the plan here is if if these estimates are kind of maxing it out then perhaps my aspirations for more housing require a different type of prescriptive

[176:00] application of land use and zoning zoning to increase housing if these estimates are perhaps on the more conservative side then i might feel more comfortable with the land-use designations as they are to allow us to increase housing in those areas so that so maybe that's maybe what i'm trying to ask is was this in the middle of the road where if we want to add more housing these numbers are in the middle and we can of course do so but if there if the estimates that you had were at the high end then i'm feeling like we don't have much wiggle room and we have to maybe think uh a bit more broadly about how to increase the housing so maybe that's that maybe is more specifically what my question was um obviously kathleen will have more information on some of the housing the variation between the two but if there's any specifics i can follow up on that okay yeah and then if you look in the in the neighborhood descriptions in the plan it conceptually lays out in this neighborhood we would have

[177:00] x number of town homes x number of flats x number of and so that mix that is described in there is conceptual and um it is responding to the place types but i think you know on um something that we calculated as a mid-sized apartment i think the the square footage for that was like 11 11 to 1500 was what we considered middle um and that's pretty large so those units might be smaller um or could be smaller or could be closer to the 1100 square foot size and that would increase the number so i think there's um wiggle room either way that's helpful i appreciate that that's sort of knowing their wiggle room is helpful for me um so thank you for for

[178:00] answering that um my next question um kind of dovetails on a question that um mayor brockett brought up with regards to approving the plan and the subsequent land use map and and i know that it's scheduled to kind of be done later this summer but from uh just and i'm not a planner um and this is certainly our first area plan for this council serving myself i'm wondering why why aren't they done in unison because i look at this and i go well look it looks like the land use is kind of very well laid out and per our input and planning it looks like we'll have a land use map ready to go so i'm wondering why there's a delay between that getting approved and not just being a part of the plan when we go to approve it perhaps in may so i'm just wondering why they're decoupled um if you if if council wanted to adopt the land use changes at the same time as the plan um that is an option that's allowed under our comp plan um just process wise and and um

[179:01] i think maybe based on some past experiences we've decoupled it but it's not it doesn't have to be that way we can try to do those up on the same night if if council supports that and wants to do it thanks for that answer i i don't know what the will of council will be but i like to know that at least that's an option so i appreciate that um the other question uh i have centers around and i think it asks us in the hotline and so harden if i didn't pick up an answer because you answered a bunch of the questions i had and others had an outline but it regards sort of the open space properties and in particular open space other is a is a flag for me it's a very problematic land use as we've seen with with cu south right it's designated open space it's owned by another entity and there's an assumption that it's public and it's open space and it just muddies a lot of assumptions about what the land actually is used for and owned by it so i was kind of wondering if there's some understanding about that open space other um that's within this area and if it runs into

[180:01] that kind of complexity of is it owned by a third party designated as open space other so i'm just wondering if you could shed some light on that um going forth because that carries a rather decent corridor along the the creek there out away from the hospital to the northeast yep um so the open space other designation can apply to public or privately owned land um and the way that the the complicated history of of how open space other came to be is the land was designated as open space prior to 1981. so anything that was designated as open space after 1981 falls under open space acquired which means the city or county has purchased the property and it's used for open space purposes or open space development rights which

[181:01] open space development rights applies to privately owned land that may have an existing conservation easement or or another development restriction but the open space other is problematic because i think when some of the earlier maps were drawn people just people were using fat markers and then we digitized those maps and um that that's kind of what happened so um what's been great about the east boulder process um is that we've worked really closely with osmp and have gone through all of the oso designated land in east boulder and tried to redesignate areas as either osa or osdr where appropriate

[182:00] or have made um changes you know particularly in that belmont um park west neighborhood where there's a large oso swath in the existing bbcp land use map um changes to that um so that it reflects um future planned uses and also what's on the ground today so um we worked with osmp over the last i think two years and the open space board of trustees has reviewed all of those recommended changes and so what you see in the east boulder sub-community plan land use map remaining as oso are pieces or slivers that the osbt and staff in osmp wanted to maintain that that oso designation moving forward so it's a little

[183:01] complex but um it certainly was looked at really closely throughout this process and we tried to really clean that up within the east boulder sub community boundary thank you for the very detailed explanation i mean that that really does help me i said no no okay actually that detail was exactly where where i was hoping we'd go on that sorry for everyone that may not have been interested in that question but it helped me certainly understand the details of why they're why it's there and where maybe it's future evolution resides and the work certainly done by osbt and osmp on that so so thanks kathleen i appreciate that um that basically dovetails my questions until we get to the comments thank you thanks matt um lauren did you have another question i did there's no shame in it i'm sorry um one of the things that i noticed in this was the minimum far

[184:01] requirements um and i don't think i've seen that in this zone before so i was just wondering um what inspired that and you know especially as we talk about residential and not being so important to the community um was there any thought towards a minimum number of dwelling units per acre or sort of why was this the chosen um mechanism yes so that that language of minimum far was flagged also by our working group and came up at planning board as well and we are meeting with that consultant team i think later this week to relook at some of that and make sure that we have um the right language for those place types that are within the station area

[185:01] plan um at one point in the process we did consider um whether we should um describe each of the place types and the residential component of those in as as allowed or maximum or minimum dwelling unit per acre and in general i think the feedback from boards and staff and development review was that that wasn't a great tool to get the types of buildings and the types of outcomes that we wanted to see so i think it was it may have been in the 60 draft and we've removed that okay thank you and then if we recombine the area plan approval and the land use plan approval

[186:01] will that affect the timeline or would that be able to be accomplished in i think the early may timeline that was released at this um it's certainly more work for our team i would have to check in with the planning director and we'll look at our work plan to see how that might roll out thank you is that it for round two lauren yes all right i'm gonna call on myself i see your hand up tear i don't know if that's uh for comments or questions but i'm gonna i'm gonna try and do like lightning round questions here kathleen so let's see how we do i know we're over already um so on page 10 of the plan there's acknowledgments can you add staff such as yourself and the pair of jeans in there and everyone else has worked harder than most of us who are looking

[187:00] at this just for a couple hours we certainly can the list is long it really is a comprehensive plan every i think every department has touched it at some point so um but check it out check out the racial equity one there's like three pages of thank yous including staff so there's precedent um and this is a lightning round so you're only allowed to say yes you can add that um question number two i'm kidding i'm glad you can add it uh question two overall like that we've had a lot of questions on jobs housing balance i appreciated that there were some concrete numbers in the conceptual slide i wanted to ask dave ensign am i understanding that planning board has basically asked for something to be sort of codified that will make sure that we have more housing than jobs and and really preserve or move in a good direction on the jobs housing imbalance i think that um really the uh the planning board just wants to keep the focus on that as much as possible so um i think that uh there's

[188:03] been a lot put into the plan but as we go to the zoning there could be uh some specific language uh in the news you know if there's rezoning to new zones that could say uh they could really make sure that uh the the housing mix is higher uh than if than if they're you know so the percentages and things like that would be of interest so i'm a lot of those may apply to the next steps beyond the land use changes as well but we just don't want to lose side of that and i think the other complication around that too is that a lot of the numbers are like these max max build out numbers which uh probably won't ever actually happen so it it's hard to to have uh concrete answers to everything but we just want to make sure that we always have our eye on that thanks and and kathleen is that doable you know sort of building that into the the subsequent stages

[189:01] building in regulation that would that will make sure that we're sort of favoring housing over jobs in that balance yeah i think um the challenge of tracking that and i guess prioritizing um how that happens would be challenging um but let me uh let me write that down as as kind of a a thing to be followed up on you know certainly it would be controlled by zoe zoning and we can limit uses to help get at that um but we we have to i think go back and do a little more analysis on how that would really be implemented maybe we can do a straw poll at the end to see if that if that is the will of counsel to to look at something like that um my next question again lightning round um

[190:01] for i saw that there were you know things for rooftop gardens and accessible rooftops and i understand that the height limit really impacts what people do on roofs would that require a charter change to achieve that vision or is that a possible code change that could help yeah i think a code change would help um right now rooftop opens pieces are permitted but um for spaces that are not at ground level i think we're limited to no more than 25 percent of the required open space can be um on a rooftop so access to rooftop open spaces is is challenging i think primarily for any buildings that are at or near that 55 foot city charter height limit because the charter does not permit a habitable space above 55 feet so you know an elevator or a stairwell

[191:02] opening necessary to access space above 55 feet is not permitted um so rooftop spaces that are at that height are rare um but below 55 feet it's not a problem as long as that building receives approval through height modification to build above um the zoning district height which for a lot of these industrial zones is 40 feet okay that's helpful thank you um and then last this is not i'm sorry it's not even going to be close to lightning round i wish but when when we've gotten some feedback on making sure that this plan will be adaptable for future sort of improvements and transit and land use you know ideas and we don't want to lock ourselves into a 2022 notion of what's best and we're looking at a 40-year plan kind of thing how do we build in that adaptability yeah so um to amend the plan or or make changes in the future

[192:01] um amendments to sub-community plans and and what that process is is outlined in our comprehensive plan and would require um approval by both planning board and city council and if there's any major change to something like the land use map or any of the major policies of this plan we would certainly want to do a community engagement process to make sure that those changes in the future would be in line with with how the community would um envision east boulder evolving for connections and and the connections plan there is a amendment procedures section at the very end of the document that describes um how we would make any changes to the connections plan um and those those types of changes typically come up through

[193:00] redevelopment and there's some precedent for that from the north boulder sub community plan and things like tvap as well okay um that sounds more complicated than i wish it did but uh understood okay next i think we are over to um feedback and discussion and since we are behind let's just make sure that we in the in this discussion if you would like to answer the staff questions that have been presented and if if we could put those a slide up so everybody remembers what those are and the community can see that would be great tara you're up i'll just combine my question with comments there you have it so my first questions last comment is i'm thinking about our climate goals and the fact and i was thinking about equity and climate goals since that's what we talked about earlier and i'm thinking about that we're going to have thankfully 25 affordable housing hopefully at least so how can we ensure that we have a a good robust urban tree canopy and not

[194:03] heat islands because you know when we read about equity often it is um the neighborhoods the neighborhoods that have um low the lower income neighbors that don't have as much uh that that are hotter that's what i've read and i think that's what we've i've learned in the four months so that's a kind of a question and a begging that we please have a tree canopy because in the some of the pictures when i went on that sub community tour really didn't have a lot of trees it looked kind of hot so that's my first comment my second anybody can answer that if they want my second um comment is along the lines of what i've learned from lauren thank you lauren for all you've taught me is i'm hoping that we're gonna have a whole lot of different roof lines and that we're going to and we're going to include the design and arc the wonderful designers and architects in our city to make sure that we don't just

[195:01] have massive square buildings that's my dream that's my dream for um east boulder so i don't know if you guys want to speak into that or if i just leave it as it is as comments yeah i'm happy to respond um for the urban tree canopy yes um definitely east boulder has less than five percent canopy today so that's well below our our goals for for um canopy coverage in the city and um you know as properties redevelop we can um certainly request some of that um in in right of way but i think we'll be working with folks in urban forestry to look at other tree planting programs that might be appropriate for east boulder in some of these areas that are not changing as well as areas that that we are planning for change and a lot of the city-owned properties the city owns a good deal of property

[196:02] here as well and then roof lines yes are addressed in our urban design section in i think chapter 5. tara is that were there um is that all of your feedback or did you have other comments is my video off or on i can't even keep track you're on now well i think it was off no i'm good i'm great thanks so much all right thanks tara are your bracket well thanks again for all the the great work i'm going to start with just a quick clarifying question do you understand correctly the time horizon for the plan is 20 years and that we'd imagine a revised plan in about that 20-year time frame yes the the planning horizon for sub-community plans is 20 years so that's what we've done our projections for

[197:02] great so if we stay on schedule we can get through all of our sub community plans about every couple years and then once we the 20-year mark runs around yeah it's i don't know it's like painting the golden gate bridge once you get to the end of it you start over again i know i'm going to be so old right it's long past my time i'm sure well just on your first question um about whether you addressed the key feedback themes i thought you absolutely did um i think every iteration of this has gotten better and it's been very responsive really appreciate the refinements and everything i was just a little disappointed to see the area south of goose creek on the west side not being marked for change but i but i understand the reasons for it there's lots of other great things going on here so that's that's fine um and then um yeah so then just some i have a few comments i'll try to get through this quickly i know we're getting late um coming back to the 5150 valmont uh question that i asked it seems like

[198:01] that's worth looking at one more time because the um like that parkside uh place type does allow uh retails and shops uh on the bottom floors and you know it seems like that might make a a nice integration in the middle of the park some residential with a few shops on the bond so it just seems uh worth looking at again on that one um lauren asked about the minimum far i really like that concept i don't think i've seen that anywhere in anything that we've ever done but i think it's a good idea so if somebody says hey you know what i really want to do is like a little building in the middle of a huge parking lot we'd say actually no that's that's not what we're contemplating for our transit oriented development area so i thought that idea was great i think lauren's question was a good one about whether that's the exact perfect mechanism to accomplish that and so it would be interesting to look to see if there's a slightly different way of doing it to her point about minimum drilling units or something else but i think the concept is is a really good one and i'm glad to to see that

[199:02] i'll agree with kind of the direction that some of my colleagues were going in about a desire to focus on housing um in in the area plans uh so that i think there's a lot of that right we we're adding a lot of housing potential with this which is fantastic it seems like it could still maybe tilt a little bit more towards housing over jobs from where we are right now like the stamp um i forget the exact numbers you put on there but they were close to even numbers of jobs and housing contemplated in the master plan area and so i think it's i think it's worth looking at tweaking the parameters a little bit to move somewhat more towards housing like one thing that occurred to me was um the innovation transitory development non-residential uh as i understand it doesn't allow housing at all in it and um and it seemed like you know maybe we could still allow housing on the upper levels um and i know we're trying to balance the preservation of industrial space but if

[200:01] you give people choices you know if the demand is there for the industrial space it can still be created but if we also allow housing as a choice we might get a little bit more of that so i'd suggest looking looking at that and you know there are a couple that don't allow well i think there are several that didn't allow housing on the ground floor um which i think is generally good for uh street activation but maybe it could be allowed on the ground for for the use review and a couple of those so just encourage uh looking um at continuing uh to move it a little bit more towards housing rather than jobs um one little thing that the east side eats uh idea i thought was super cool about having like a parking lot area where food trucks could gather um you know for the the businesses in those areas now i thought it was in the kind of a secondary priority list and just a thought to maybe maybe that could be done next couple of years because if it's if it's just designated a parking lot where food trucks can gather might

[201:01] not be that heavy of a list but could be really useful for those businesses that are there currently before much redevelopment happens um on the on the transportation side um i thought we got a a couple of really good comments from the public on the transportation connections i think we had one of our newer newest tab members uh mentioned the the concept of um that maybe all the new street connections don't have to be fully uh oriented towards vehicular access i mean i know all of them would be multimodal but we have the one type that's like emergency access only that's i think only used in a little bit and maybe could be used for some of the others or if not that one um you know something like a vulnerable style street which i don't see in this plan maybe that you know something where um cars are allowed but very much as secondary participants so uh i think somebody mentioned the plan for uh the streets that you know the the multimodal uses you

[202:01] want to have in 10 or 20 years rather than exactly what you have today and then similar to that community cycles made a great point about uh the plans or desires change transportation ideas change over the years and in in 10 or 20 years by the time we get around to this again um the the most current transportation thinking might be a little bit different in terms of multimodal streets uh and while the i love how the stationary master plan is really specific i think that's a strength of it it's also the it's very specific in terms of what would be allowed or required in terms of the streetscapes so i don't know if there's a way to build in a little bit more flexibility on those with uh maybe like this is the currently uh you know conceived typology but there'd be a maybe a modification process pretty simple that could improve it if uh thinking changes a little bit over the years so i thought those ideas were really valuable to consider and potentially integrate

[203:00] um and then the last thing i will say um i think if schedule allows doing the land use changes at the same time as the plan adoption would be fantastic uh so i i don't know if that's too much work and if it is that we could stagger it but uh you've got seems like almost all the ingredients right here baked into it so i think that'd be fantastic if that could be possible and i will stop there and just say another huge thank you for some extraordinary work and really looking forward to the adoption of this here next month thanks erin nicole then matt lauren junie mark thank you um and before i forget i just want to echo aaron's point happy to support also the changing of the land use at the same time um as we're moving the plan forward um so to just to the first question um yes this is the short answer um yes i i thought that you all did a wonderful job of incorporating a lot of different

[204:02] feedback and you know i think one of the things that um always tells me that people have done a good job on a collaborative project is that nobody is 100 happy so i really do you know i echo some of the comments that were throughout um the feedback that this is just strikes a nice balance um so thank you for that i also just want to um give you a commendation for paying attention to the arts community and maintaining some of the spaces over there and incorporating arts into that area to number two you know i think this this process for um engagement was was really well done um it was you know thorough there was lots of outreach to um folks who worked there who live in neighboring communities who live in the manufactured home community that's hopefully going to be annexed um it was just it was a really thoughtful and

[205:01] inclusive project and i know that the group that's been working on this for three years during a pandemic has put a lot of time and effort and thought and intention into what's what's being proposed here and so my question is really around that last section on page 61 of the first of the attack attachments um there's just a little tiny bit for amendments and you know process about amendments and i think what i would like to see change is just um a little more kind of intention put into what is that process for making amendments where there are major changes if say um you know future boulder rights do need a lot more housing if they're proposing a change what is the process for making sure that whatever leads to that change is as inclusive as this engagement process has been or more so right that this is sort of the benchmark are there things that can be included um

[206:01] as we're thinking about amendments and i think rachel and aaron both both touched on this too right we want to have a little bit of flexibility or give give future s's flexibility um and at the same time make sure that this process is as thoughtful and as intentional i think um you know sometimes we uh as a city and us staff and the community goes through years of work on a project involving lots of engagement and things and then um kind of get sidelined uh at the last minute outside of kind of the city's engagement process and so i i would just like to see i guess maybe some some sort of protections in place um for that um and you know to that point i i also um i haven't seen the emails tara that you're talking about but just for folks you know who are concerned about a lot of change in this area um i i just really want to emphasize that the north boulder sub-community plan was

[207:01] started in the 90s and it's still going on um by the time that the east boulder plan is fully implemented you know if i'm still alive i will likely be retired and probably um someone one of our wonderful retirement communities um you know so it really is is a long long process and um change doesn't really happen that that quickly um we're really planning for people decades in the future and i think that that's important for us to keep in mind as we're considering these types of changes um and that brings me to my last point which is just a shout out to everybody who worked on this because you have spent three years of your life working for something that many of you may not see right um and i just really i appreciate that i appreciate all the folks from the surrounding communities the workers everybody who uh contributed to this effort because you

[208:01] this was true service um there's not a lot that you know those of us who are kind of working in that area or living in that area now are going to see right away um and that it's just it's really inspiring to see you all working for the future like that so i just wanted to thank you nicole if i could just say that the people that wrote to me was actually a marginalized community and their community connector they were the ones that felt like they were left out it wasn't who everybody thinks i'm just throwing out to the community that i just was told to just keep it anonymous but maybe some more outreach to the uh marginalized communities south of arapaho would not be a bad idea just i think we'd have a better outcome and more people would be happy and i'm thinking especially for what kind of retail we put there nicole was that it for you thank you if so and we're up with matt

[209:00] and lauren thanks rachel and um i just uh couldn't state just how uh important and how great the work is that has gone on to make this plan work over three years uh tremendous community engagement i won't say nicole said it just perfectly um so so i'll leave her statements on on the record and not try to over overdue that um aaron's points are also spot on um so so i think those are key pieces i will just because it probably requires some sense of a nod of fiber straw and to some extent is i would like to see uh us pair the passing of the area plan with the land use map if it's not insurmountable in in the next month i'd love to see them done at the same time so that's something that's helpful um and and then really to aaron's point about the uh 5150 your relook on that is quite helpful and you know i to mark's point about with the um opportunity zone i mean those incentives are largely

[210:00] financial and there's certainly a lot of parameters that i'm not totally familiar with with regards to that but i do think that there's opportunities for us to actually build in some non-financial incentives like density bonuses shorter permitting process for enhanced affordability perhaps things with regards to other community benefits for height modifications i i think we can work some of that stuff in whether that's now or down the road but i want to make sure those are kept in mind as we think about that maximum flexibility and an adaptation and that really sort of leads me to the last point about adaptation um i'm i would really like us to be more descriptive and less prescriptive on a lot of this because i'm really s i don't have i'm not really that comfortable laying out a plan that bakes in obsolescence because it's shooting on beyond the horizon 20 30 years from now i i that that makes me really uncomfortable and i think that's why i've struggled with providing so much detail but also not wanting to provide

[211:00] detail but not being totally sure that there's adaptability so i kind of want to bake in the detail now so we get what we want i i've struggled with where to reside on that and so i'm wondering if we need to really rethink um how we define our revisions in within the boulder valley comp plan um and think about requiring you know every 10 years we just check in and make sure we on is this on track if it's yes thumbs up we move on if not it forces us because i don't think unless we bake in those sort of required check-ins we're gonna just get busy with other stuff and then it's gonna be 20-25 years and we go well yeah some of that worked but some of it became obsolete because times have changed so i i'd like to consider that i don't know if that can be done between now and may but to me i'm just uncomfortable with baking in a lot of these changes and not adapting to changing times and community needs uh and being totally responsive so that's something i'd love for us to look at whether it can happen sooner uh that would be great but i understand that might be a little bit of a delay there um so on that those are my those are my

[212:01] pieces and again great job thank you so much thanks matt i'm going to run out and get a tattoo that says baked in obsolescence obsolescence please since it's a great term lauren thank you rachel so i strongly agree with all of erin's comments there were a bunch of things he little details he pulled out that i thought were really great um also matt um with the types of incentives i totally agree with that and trying to have a better pathway for adaptability in the future um really my main the only point of contention i have with this plan is that the west of belmont um i am a little concerned that some of the businesses we have there you know so one

[213:01] of the areas we have is the hands-on industrial you know we're talking about trying to create you know largely fairly affordable industrial space and um some of the space that's there right now that meets that doesn't look like it's mapped in as that type and i worry about how effectively we can build that type of development new it sort of seems like to have the level of affordability we'd be looking for it really needs to be probably existing space so and then also the businesses that are occupying that space um i think our businesses that if they lose their space will probably not be in boulder and i know that we're talking about 20-year time frames but we

[214:02] have things like boulder lumber i mean if we as a community lose boulder lumber we are now talking about buying all of our lumber from home depot you know there's just that's not the kind of business that's going to come back to our community once we lose it so i do think that i want to make sure that um whether it's through the types of designations we have in that area or um a really robust process on you know ensuring that we're keeping the businesses especially important local businesses from being displaced i'd like to see a lot of attention put towards that and really the delivering equity options or outcomes there was a section that had three of those and i think that for me

[215:00] that really summarizes sort of the three most important things um that this area plan can provide for us the housing affordability and expanded housing options access to services and protecting residents and businesses from um involuntary displacement i think that those are really core to me and what we need to deliver here and then i would love to see sort of an overall layout for um a preferred parks open space plan we often was you know we often have open space requirements and typically in developments those are not coordinated between the developments and we end up with weird not very usable not very publicly accessible spaces and so i would love to

[216:00] see um sort of an overarching idea for how we could do that a little bit better in this plan thanks lauren next up we have junie then mark juni you if you're talking you're a mute i thought you said lauren first thank you it was the thanks lauren junie's up oh thank you got it i would say yes for question one and i heard the discussion i just wanted to make the comment when we talked about the housing and job balance in that area and i thought to myself based on my experience driving in the area and being in the area as well it's heavily industrial there's not a

[217:01] lot of services in that area so that might that's something that we really have to think about so if we're going to limit jobs what does that mean does that mean we're not going to have the same level of services that we would have in other parts of town so that's something to consider so maybe the issue should not be well let's have more housing and less jobs which the good idea but at the same time consider okay if we take away the jobs well people still have access to the same level of services especially if we're trying to create 15 minutes neighborhoods which is part of a climate goals so consider that um i agree with aaron i like his comment about the land use change come with the plan at the same time i think that would be great and also i think from just looking at this

[218:00] overall you know memo it feels like this area is going to be very vibrant it's going to be vibrant it feels like it's and i just look forward to see it as it progresses um i think another question that i had it's a comment it's a comment similar to um again knowing the area knowing the type of services when it comes to transportation that's something that we really have to make sure we honed in on the level of access for uh for that area and the role of rtd actually moving forward i don't know what that looks like because again that's a long-term plan so that's something that we also have to keep in mind that's the only questions i wanted to make for today so thank you rachel thank you juni mark okay um first i want to uh second or third or fourth uh aaron's

[219:00] comment uh with respect to the focus on housing i think that's an important element and lauren's concern with the displacement of core businesses in this community i'm not buying lumber at the moment but i wouldn't want to have to go to longmont to do it and i think we need to be very very attentive to that with respect to the plan itself i've already said but i'm going to elaborate a little bit i the the emphasis on middle-income housing and diversity of housing types is really central to this plan and as i read it i am still looking for more detail as to how we get from here to there um you know the current trends in in boulder are almost exclusively to produce high-end rental housing and with the occasional very high-end townhouse

[220:01] so that's where the market is going to want to go matt may be correct that we can find some incentives um that will deter that um and and guide the development process in a different direction but i'd like to hear some articulation of what those might be and how they would work um simply saying that we want middle-income housing when i don't believe uh a unit of it has been developed in this city in the last few years is is important it's that it's important to know how we're going to get there otherwise this entire component of the plan has no substance the plan itself speaks to sort of the the park mosaic as a default uh housing type that that occurs simply through market forces in 20 years if we've developed 4 000 units of park mosaic housing and 500 to a thousand townhouses

[221:01] that are ultra luxury we will not have succeeded and i would like us to succeed so i would like to the final draft of the plan to address how we are in fact going to get to that middle income housing in a way that that i can understand because at the moment i i see the goal i see the aspiration i don't see the methodology to get there i would like that to be addressed thank you thanks mark okay um tara and then i will call on myself and then try and wrap us up and we still have one more agenda item let's wow i actually forgot to take my take my hand down but i have one more short comment i feel like i've talked too much and i apologize to everybody for that but i will say that um if we are trying to we've talked a lot especially on the campaign trail about nurses and firefighters and our police and um many uh people who serve our community

[222:00] moving back here let's say from um some of the outlying communities so that we have less commuting in we definitely have to have the kind of houses that they would move from their house in the suburbs here so i'm going to agree with mark and really hope with all my heart that we consider what kind of housing we're putting in this really special area that it will attract back uh some of the people that serve our community um with so much care thanks tara um so i will say yes uh to answer number question number one definitely um adequately and appropriately address the feedback that we gave at the 60 percent draft review um and in terms of suggestions for finalizing the plan i just want to say that um this is an outstanding uh work product i was so impressed with the memo and the the detail and um it's hard i think to work across multiple councils

[223:01] i think uh one person who's worked on it hard on this plan if i'm remembering correctly has had two kids born over the time that we've been working on this so like this is this is um taking a lot of feedback from again different councils different planning boards a lot of community members so um i think that that we do well as a council to to remember that we can't solve all of our problems in any one project and um this is this is beyond good enough this is excellent so i just want to cheerlead the plan and and thank you all for the hard work and david ensign for your leadership on planning board and we will miss you um and and the you know all the community members and the work group members so i don't have any other specific feedback um it sounds to me in wrapping it up like there is interest in in sort of nudging the jobs housing balance more towards making sure that we're increasing the housing component although i did hear one

[224:00] one person say otherwise and then it sounded like there was a lot of support for uh matt and aaron's idea to to do a unified land use change and um adoption of this plan if possible i don't know if that's possible um i know you're all finishing a marathon with this project so i i would imagine you heard the feedback and will tell us whether it's possible but are there any staff questions do you feel like we got you what you needed um no no no further questions um really helpful feedback and we'll look into all of the recommended edits and um the plan is as we will um track all of the suggestions and describe um when we get to the 100 where you can see those edits in the plan looking forward to seeing the hundred okay with that i think we're we're done with the 90 review thanks again and um

[225:02] moving on to the third agenda item which is an update on the library district because it's in a little different spot than when we last looked at it so i think over to nuria yeah and i'm going to turn it really quickly to chris must check and note that david farnand is also on the line chris yeah thanks nuria good evening council members uh chris mastcheck deputy city manager um we're here tonight real quick to talk about next steps on the work that has been done related to the library district as council will recall we held a joint public hearing with the boulder county commissioners and then on april 5th last week council took action and adopted a resolution to form a library district the county commissioners then held their deliberations on thursday april 7th and the county commissioners chose to table their agenda item and not adopt a resolution uh uh in the direction of forming a library

[226:00] district by resolution and um the commissioners expressed interest in really exploring what would really be a hybrid model of funding for library services that would not be purely a district model but would also include continued funding by the city through sales taxes and so we're here tonight to really talk about what's next um and uh city and county staff met friday of last week and talked through really three approaches and so we're really um here tonight to see if there is council interest in any of these three approaches the first approach is to really give us some guidance to go do some work on exploring a hybrid funding model we brainstormed all kinds of uh interesting ideas and uh quickly on friday um there's probably a lot more work to do on those but that would be the first is kind of say okay we're

[227:00] we're interested in exploring the ideas that the commissioners raise the the second approach would be before we go do any analysis let's let's see if we just need to have a council member or two and a commissioner sit down and understand uh based on the current approach um and the actions of the the council and the commissioners um they were pretty far apart in terms of the the actions and is there is there further conversation that would be helpful between the city and the county and and maybe understand that from the the council and commissioner's perspective so that's approach number two the third approach would be to really take the action of the commissioners uh as not an interest in adopting a resolution and give guidance to us the staff to stop doing work on uh the library district and kind of go from go from here and see if uh if the community is interested in maybe

[228:00] submitting a petition or something like that so those are the three approaches uh and we're we're open and interested in hearing uh any thoughts that council members have let's open it up for discussion bobby yates thanks for that chris that was really helpful are um your options one and two mutually exclusive i'm not sure i understood um a real distinction there that sounds like there's some work that staff could do but also council members and commissioners could also be talking in parallel could those both happen um theoretically they could i think what would be helpful is uh i think the real distinction between those is option one we would take as really or approach one we would take as direction to begin in earnest um some some pretty significant analysis of of approaches option two really is before we go do any more major work as staff let's understand if there's a middle

[229:01] ground or uh approaches that the council and the commissioners or at least some representatives or or individual council members and the commissioner are even interested in and maybe thinking might be viable so it's a little bit of uh direct staff is to go do work is is number one and let let the elected officials have a little bit of conversation israel before we go do any more work is is number two does that help it does chris thank you very much nicole and then matt and then aaron i like the idea of um having one of us one of the commissioners just kind of come together and talk through um that feels like a better use of everyone's time than um having staff try to come up with something that you know may may just not go anywhere so that seems to me like a good next step thanks nicole matt

[230:00] uh yeah i'm gonna echo what nicole said option three is a non-starter for me we've done too much work and had too much input to just throw in the towel now um we need to forge ahead and try to make it work and idea option two is probably definitely the best way to go in hopes i wish we had had this negotiated conversation when we had our public hearing to me that would have been the time for us to hash out guard rails and non-starters we missed that train uh now we can hopefully pick it up and resurrect a library district out of this or at least some agreeable solution thanks matt erin then mark yeah i'll just agree with nicole and matt thanks thanks mark them bob as we are all professional talkers uh you will not be surprised that uh i share the view that some conversations is better than no conversation and if there's a ground on which everybody can coalesce that would be good and if not we need to know that so before we put staff to a lot of

[231:00] theoretical work um we got to at least get a better picture of the lay of the land and that's through conversation thanks mark bob then i'll call myself yeah i'm going to agree with everyone um i think conversation is good it is regrettable that we didn't have this um sooner but we we are where we are i do agree with matt completely that thrown in the towel is not a good option um i do see a little bit of a hybrid between two and one i could see some conversations happening between council members and commissioners that might require some additional staff work but let's get the conversations going and then if staff is on standby is ready to do work that might be needed as a result of those conversations let's not foreclose that thanks bob um i have a question is it is the concept chris one or two council members uh i think i think we'd be interested in hearing from council but i think the idea that maybe we were thinking was was maybe just one council member and one

[232:00] commissioner to really join us as staff in some conversations and to you know we as city and county staff can can kind of talk through and and have some ideas uh having having the voices of uh our elected officials is always helpful as well okay i was just asking because i think that we strive to have sort of balance represented in conversations so if we could have two that that might be a good way to go i see junie's hand my question is similar to yours rachel about the process who how would that go what is the nomination process for this one for this particular council member or two council members uh i'll uh i'll look to the rest of our team but what we really talked about was um i thought that uh that if if council is interested in in this approach of maybe having a council

[233:01] member join us in some conversation is really uh that if if there's anyone who's interested maybe let us know that but uh if uh then it would really be staff i think inviting that individual council member to join us uh recognizing that they uh are not they are not delegating council's not delegating authority to an individual council member uh it's really just one one individual council member representing themself um but just to be able to bring that perspective uh into the room as well as then uh having a commissioner there with us as well so does that help answer your question juni it did and i think maybe what i would like to add is that i would feel more comfortable if the entire council body get to pick who that person is as opposed to staff member reaching out to one council member that we didn't pick as a group to

[234:01] make that decision or work on that process with the commissioners um and you could take that approach um that what that does if you do take that approach as it creates a much more formal process um that's what i'm going to ask david is there and if if we wanted to have something less formal would it just be people would email you and you would pick or would we need to say like i'm i'm willing to do it or how does that work yeah people are interested and i i guess as well um really you know from the city side of it it's going to be a city manager-led conversation and the city manager would invite somebody so as long as you amongst yourselves can agree that nobody's going to feel offended if they did you know if they

[235:01] expressed an interest and weren't invited because there are also open meetings laws that need to be complied with as well depending on how things get structured um i'm going to call on aaron and just say i am disinterested so you don't have to worry about me yeah well i was going to say i mean i'm i'm happy to do it if it would be helpful like maybe have it you know i don't generally try to elevate myself but if having the mayor is the point person is helpful i'm certainly willing to do that um and i just might ask uh teresa david like do you feel like um are we better off with two council members one council member i mean and in both cases understanding that this these people would have no um authority designated to them by the council right this would just be for conversation their decisions would be made but so this is a value judgment on my part but i've been involved in many of these kind of conversations over the year

[236:02] and um just as a staff member i certainly appreciate having the perspective of a couple of council members to help guide me but of course that would that would be a call that nuria would make okay does that answer your question if so i'm gonna invite tara i think too councilman that was fast lauren you were up and disappeared one time tonight i think you jumped ahead but it looks like you got demoted but i'm going to call on you anyways if your hand is up i would take it back don't want your hand up okay nicole i was just gonna advocate for just having one of us and not having it be that that formal um we're kind of as i see this and maybe somebody can correct me if my understanding is not right um that we're really just

[237:00] uh having a conversation or two to see if there is some common ground that could potentially be found we're not going to be making decisions we're not sort of whatever if something is agreed on it would come back to all of us right ultimately so um for me it just seems like a faster and more efficient process to just have one city council person one commissioner thanks nicole juni then matt oh wait i'm gonna ask teresa first thanks uh rachel members of council teresa taylor tate city attorney my recommendation would be one council member i think we have some open meetings laws issues that we need to be observant about and some charter provisions that we need to be careful about as well and so i i would urge you to to designate in a very informal sort of way one

[238:02] person who can go have an informal conversation at the invitation of the city manager thanks so much for that clarification that's helpful junior matt i was gonna say that i fully support aaron's position to be that person because he's currently the mayor and he's privy to you know conversations and i just think he would represent us well i have no um i have full confidence that he would bring back whatever he learned back to us transparently without any issue thank you thanks jenny a question for teresa before i call matt is it um helpful for us to designate someone or just to say submit your names and and staff can invite should we be discussing who that is or what's the advice there uh yeah mayor protem

[239:02] i i think it's perfectly fine to discuss who could represent um an opinion that would be that would be balanced and be a representative who could bring back an unbiased opinion uh i do think it it is potentially problematic for there to be a sort of formal designation process so i invite you to walk that razor thin line that was half helpful thank you we like to get far away from the razor then matt see if i can uh walk walk the knife's edge on that um i i i trust our mayor to uh one have the deep knowledge base and the experience and the relationships with those that he'd be working with to uh work on the best possible outcomes to bring back to us thanks matt i'll call myself after nuria i i i may not have to comment depending on where you all are but it sounds like

[240:00] a reasonable solution to a i either know who didn't want to do it but it seems like there is some um perhaps acclimation to allow the mayor and his role to move forward in that stead so i will stand back stand back you're welcome to stand forward uh i was just gonna suggest that i haven't heard anyone else uh even indicate interest so maybe by default if no one else raises their hand then we could also be done with this conversation and that's maybe a little bit farther away from the razer thin line aaron that's that's fine and i just want to say that i know that anyone else in this virtual meeting could also do a fantastic job but i appreciate the kind words that people said anyone else and if not nuria do you have what you need you do indeed great if i had a gavel i would swing it hard down on a desk right now so thank you all we are concluding this

[241:00] study session see really next week all right great meeting rachel everyone guys bye [Music] do [Music] [Music]

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