April 26, 2022 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:23] okay should we get this night rolling it is six o'clock let me start with i don't know pass it back to you um can we have confirmation from ryan al buhari we are live on channel 8. memory

[1:00] all right good evening and welcome to tonight's study session of the boulder city council i'm council member tara winer thank you for joining us so we have on tonight's agenda two items our first work item will cover wildlife for wildfire protection and resiliency and our second item will be an overview of the draft 2022 boulder parks and rec master plan i know that both of these items are of great interest to our community i'm really looking forward to tonight but first we're going to start this evening with a few announcements we have the slides up great covid19 vaccinations for information and provider locations for free coven 19 testing go to www.boco.org cova testing and the address for our boulder testing site is 2445 stasio drive in boulder it's open seven days a week from 8 am to

[2:01] 6 pm and for vaccination for vaccination information and provider locations go to www.boco.org covenvaccine 2022 boards and recruitments annual recruitment has closed out but we are still recruiting for the following boards due to the low number of applications and in some cases no applications so please community consider applying to these boards and commissions we have the beverage licensing authority the boulder junction boulder junction at access district parking try saying that three times fast boulder junction access district travel demand management board of zoning adjustment cannabis licensing advisory board design advisory board downtown management commission library commission university hill commercial area management commission applications are being accepted until

[3:00] further notice find boarding commission descriptions and vacancies online at www.bouldercolorado.gov boards-commissions if you have any questions or need assistance please contact the city clerk's office at city clerk's office at boulder colorado.gov as we get closer to opening up our

[4:12] it is only regular meetings that we will be inviting and coming back in person please look for more information on these changes through our social media platforms and on our website soon thanks so much uh i just got a text from a community member that they're trying to get onto channel 8 and they're having trouble you think that's just him or is it a issue is there some way to know i have not heard there is an issue but we will check in the background awesome so before we go into our work items i would like to outline how this meeting is going to be conducted first we're going to review staff's presentations for each of the work items and then we're going to have time for questions so city council members please wait for staff to finish their

[5:00] presentation before we ask questions as we're going to have plenty of time for discussion after each item and now i'll ask city manager nuria rivera van der meyer to introduce our first work item thanks so much and the increasing impacts of climate change are felt on so many levels and the acceleration of extreme weather events and the proliferation on increased and the proliferation of increased natural disasters has certainly been felt by so many of us right here in our community over the past several months with the impact of the marshall and the end carr fire still being felt across the city tonight we're going to be focusing on what the city has been doing in anticipation and in response to wildfire protection and resiliency it's a deep and engaging conversation i know one that all of you have been asking to have uh together and so excited that we'll be starting and kicking that off today uh and one that i want to just say that we probably won't be able to finish tonight and so we hope that it will be a

[6:00] series of conversations that we will continue to have in the future and what i hope you'll see as i pass the reins over to our fire chief to kick this off is that the work doesn't just sit with one department but behind this there are multiple departments and external partners as well that really come together to address the critical complexity these type of events require for an effective response so i'm looking forward to this conversation and i'll ask chief caldorazo to get us started mike thanks neria good evening council for the record mike calderazo fire chief um i thought i'd uh echo what uh nuria just mentioned about uh the local disasters we've had and the fact that if you just look at the names on the list here tonight to help answer questions i don't think there's a department in the city that isn't called to action when a wildfire disaster doesn't occur in our area so

[7:00] really it is an all hands kind of effort and even though i'm leading the presentation tonight um though you'll hear from a few other speakers as well during the presentation but it really was and it is a true joint effort um among city departments and you'll see that as we talked about um the uh the presentation tonight so if we could queue up the presentation i don't know if it's up or not um i don't know that i can see it not yet but it's coming i'm sure all right and i'll say the purpose of our presentation is do our best to sort of give a broad overview of how wildfire response works today and what uh what prevention and mitigation related efforts have been happening what we what's already in process what's coming and then ultimately some of the areas we think we'll need some some more teasing out to move

[8:00] forward effectively so if we could move to that first slide on the end car fire itself that's the next slide um we thought this would highlight and obviously being the most recent larger fire that we had um i think it helps uh to illustrate a lot of what we're going to talk about tonight a lot of different agencies coming together a lot of work that came together to provide a successful outcome this time i think what i want to stress as we go through this presentation is no matter how much preparation planning and hardening we do that threat of of wildfire um may overtake us either way and uh the key message for all of us is to be prepared we are wildfire prone community and there are things that all of us can do to keep ourselves as safe as possible so on the 26th of march this the in-car fire started human caused

[9:00] um a lot of things came together pretty well that day starting with um something that i want to highlight um among our own staff so we have wildland uh specialists on the team that share with all of our on-duty resources sort of a situational awareness type message that basically hey we got a windy day coming a red flag day coming um you're gonna want to be prepared with the right gear right equipment and be able to staff wildland vehicles if necessary and to get out there and hit a fire fast so um there was some situational awareness provided fire began very quickly a lot of things went right into place most notably we had our emergency operations center stood up very very quickly we were able to contain this fire to 190 acres we used and you'll i'll talk about this in just a minute uh resources locally regionally and even at the state level and we're able to have uh really a

[10:02] successful outcome because there were no injuries to anyone and those structures lost in this blaze even though there was certainly a threat to the city limits um from from that and of course the weather did cooperate but let's talk a little bit about some of the things that play a role in the in the fire if we go to the next slide i'll give you an overview here of the different areas of preparation and planning that that um i hope gives us sort of a level base to talk about we're going to talk about resources i'll go into that next um the key um part of how we prep for wildfire response that's the training of our responders um how the city has tried to harden itself in terms of policy that's through code and ordinance and some of the plans that play a role in how we respond and prepare for wildfire so next slide please so obviously there are cities county and state resources that we rely on in the city most of you already fairly familiar with

[11:00] our our seven fire stations plus our eighth uh wildland cash which is out at the reservoir um we have on duty at any one time 25 structured firefighters six um wildland specialists and division chief in charge of them as well in terms of actual response uh besides the city trucks we do have some wildland specific engines but i think it's important uh to note that all of our wildland vehicles are what we call cross staffed so why that mattered at the end car fires if you know it's coming ahead of time uh then you jump rigs and you jump on the right rig we'll talk a little bit later i think about you know where we are in terms of resource uh resources particularly in south boulder but but that's how we basically do it in the city um the city's part of there's also city responders um in the open space and mountain parks our rangers uh provide uh response as well

[12:01] um they came uh to the uh to the table as well on the in-car fire helped us evacuate people off the trails and they were part of the wildfire response um county resources that are available to us uh come from uh basically departments around us so fire departments around us have wildland responders as well as the sheriff's office they have a wildland team as well and all of those we brought to bear on the fire um as well finally there's the state resources that we have available to us we are part of what they call the coal creek region i won't um go into all the details but this the some of the assets that we can call fairly quickly um we did on the end car fire we had a couple of air tankers who called in and they were able to lay lines of slurry on the eastern flank of the fire and helped the hand crews down there um keep that fire from spreading into the city limits and obviously the wind helped

[13:00] but having those air assets available to us from the state was a huge help the state has a couple of helicopters that could have been called in and they're actually getting um another helicopter their own and they bought one a fire hawk uh which is now looking for a home so they're searching the state uh where they're gonna put that that helicopter resource for wildfire fighting so that's what's generally available to us um when wildfire begins in terms of structure our wildland team forms usually the basis of our incident management team so those six responders that i have um they they were a key role in the marshall fire they immediately went into action um on the in-car fire as well and they help us get resources ordered fairly quickly if we can go to the next slide and talk a little bit about um stuff that i think you all see in adjustments to base and may have questions about but in order to keep um the the entire team trained up for wildland response that is every one

[14:00] of our firefighters um you know wildland team is the team that actually delivers the training not just to them but county wide so they're relied on for that and these are just some statistics about some of the hours that were delivered even during coved but more importantly you see this uh at least once a year in november as part of an adjustment to base why this why this matters and why we called it out here is that in order to maintain or improve the level of response of responders in the city we routinely deploy them both regionally and nationally and by deploying them it helps us get them the national credentials that allow us as a city to get reimbursed when they deploy on a wildland fire so if a wildland fire occurs in our city and and it passes that 12-hour mark we're looking to get reimbursed for some of the bigger fires the feds the state they reimburse based on those national certifications so to

[15:02] having our firefighters deploy and gain that critical experience is a big part it's humanitarian first obviously we go out and we help um but it's also selfish so by sending them out um it allows us to improve the level of qualifications that we have in town um at any given time and so it's critical that i'd be able to not only send folks out but also keep that highly qualified response force in town so that's why our training is a big part of how we get our folks um in a ready way and that was used on the in-car fire if you go to the next slide i'll talk a little bit about some other things that we've done as a community over the last 30 years um this is probably known to some of you um in 1994 probably a little bit before that actually it's a big push to remove wooden roofs from the city um obviously it's a it goes without saying

[16:01] that shake shingles um provide the kind of fire hazard propagation that we're trying to avoid and uh and and so back in the early 90s uh the city passed an ordinance that um and i'll explain here in a second why this this is really very different from what you usually see it essentially made the shake shingle a requirement a retroactive piece that is it didn't just wait to see if there was a renovation or um a new build but everyone in the city needed to if they were over 50 wood they needed to change their roof and they had 20 years to make that happen so by 2014 um all roofs in the city were no longer considered wooden if you will and so that was a huge huge thing a huge push um to harden our city against the threat of wildfire fast forward to 2013 and we adopted the international i'm

[17:01] sorry for the acronym campus the international wildland urban interface code that's what that stands for and it's part of the family of international codes so you got the international building code that you've approved um with amendments in this case the wildland urban interface code hardens uh it does something very similar basically requiring uh buildings to be um protected against the threat of wildfire the difference here though is that this is not a retroactive adoption of the code this one is about new builds and renovations and that includes the update that we did in 2018 so this is all about new builds and builds going forward with the exception of course of the shake shingle ordinance and then you all know and i get questions about this all the time and so i did want to explain some of the difference especially for the viewing public but within the city limits there is no open burning allowed and that is a huge help to avoiding a wildfire from taking

[18:00] hold open burning meaning no no um uh fires that can reduce embers that could spread um that is not so it doesn't matter if it's a red flag day or non red flag day it is simply outlawed period inside city limits same holds true for open space property it's not allowed can't have campfires out there um that's not true for the unincorporated areas of boulder county so there is a difference um on a red flag day the sheriff will declare open burning outlaw but on normal days that's not the case so there is a difference between what we require and what is generally out there um in the unincorporated areas if we could go to the next slide we'll talk about some of the plans that apply to a wildfire so these are the big ones the emergency operations plan is something that's been around for a really really long time and it basically is about all disasters and um highlights who is responsible

[19:01] primarily for what types of disaster and what is normally expected to happen the emergency operations plan itself is actually a small document and then there's lots of annexes depending on the different types of emergencies the next thing we have is a community wildfire protection plan and really the purpose on that is to identify our local hazards and risk from wildfire and the idea is uh to to that's the big plan for hardening our community what the different things that we can do uh to improve our approach to wildfire that one actually probably needs an update we'll talk about that in a little bit and then the structure protection plan actually played a big role in our end car response the structure protection plan actually grids the interface around the city and we use that to actually dictate how we respond to wildfire in certain areas of the city so it dictates what crews what we'll need where they'll lay lines and so on and we actually used it on the in-car fire to great effect when you

[20:00] could literally watch from the in-car site the crew's stretching lines a mile two miles in the interface to protect the homes there on the eastern flank of the fire that was all part of the plan and we actually trained in that plan as well so it played a big role in the in-car fire and helped us and helped us with that the last plan that's been approved by council um have been in place for some time is the forest ecosystem management plan that open space it's the it's their uh management tool for their um uh entire suite or um area and we use that plan for all of the risk mitigation that we do in wildfire so the the open our team um it works with the open space team to uh when you hear about prescribed burns we're typically following the forest ecosystem management plan if we're not talking about ag burns these kinds of burns that's what we're following and we'll talk a little bit more about how that plan

[21:01] played a role in the in-car fire in fact dan burke who's on with us tonight we'll we'll go into a little more detail and show you how that played a role in the in-car fire on to to our benefit so if we could go to the next slide we'll talk about what's actually in the pipeline that council will see later in the year these two plans the flood and storm water master plan and the drought plan both obviously have an impact on uh you know climate and the these types of uh risks to our community and you'll see those later this year and have an opportunity to talk uh about these two plans and their impact on wildfire resilience um so with that what i'll do is i'll hand it over to dan burke from open space and mountain parks to talk specifically about the things that osmp has done with um being the biggest landowner around the city of boulder the things they've done and and how that played a role as well in in the uh in car fire so dan if you're on

[22:02] i will yield thank you yes uh and good evening council uh dan berg director of open space and mountain parks and uh if we can go to the next slide please so i'm going to be spending a few minutes uh five or ten minutes on talking about uh basically land management land management actions land management strategies on how uh we manage land in the city uh and on our open space could actually help uh positively fire behavior and uh and fire prevention of catastrophic fire um i think it's very helpful to know especially when you look at the context of our open space system you can see just from the green shaded areas that surround the city of boulder that there is this big green belt of open space lands so how that land is managed uh obviously has a big part to play uh in this discussion tonight uh before we talk specifically about uh

[23:01] land management strategies and fire prevention uh mitigation strategies i first thought it would be good to spend one minute or so just giving you some high level context about the open space system because some of these uh uh facts and figures if you will uh do uh play a role in um in disaster management uh in particular so overall uh the city manages about 46 000 acres or protects about 46 000 acres of open space about 90 percent of our acreage is actually out in the county and outside of city limits of boulder um it's fairly small system compared to let's say the forest uh national forest systems around or even uh smaller than boulder county open space but yet we see 5.6 million annual visits to our system so it's a very popular uh uh uh a very well used system in terms of enjoyment and visitor use

[24:00] and with that comes the uh uh sort of access to our system we have 155 miles of designated trail in addition to that there's about 150 miles of what we call social trails or trails that work have been uh created by visitors but are not called for in an approved plan per se so really you're looking at about 300 miles of a trail network of some sort around our system and some of that has a role in fire in fact some of our trails are purposely maintained and hardened to provide access so they can provide vehicle access in times of disaster or maintenance access and they can also provide fire breaks so i just wanted to mention that aspect about the trail system uh we have we maintain and we recognize about 110 trail heads and x formal access points onto our system plus in addition to that 100 or so we have another 145 informal access points again those are access onto our systems

[25:01] that visitors use that are not sort of called for or recognized and maintained uh by the department so yet you're looking at 250 to 300 access points onto our system so really i think the takeaway here is that there's a large wildland urban interface uh to the system that is a 100 years old that sort of grew to surround the city of boulder um a couple of interesting facts we have about 65 percent of our system that's in a grassland ecosystem and about a quarter of our systems in a forest ecosystem and what's interesting and kind of a unique aspect about uh uh compared to nationwide open space agencies is about a third of our systems in active agriculture about 15 000 acres and over 13 000 of those acres uh have some sort of grazing uh cattle grazing on them so next slide please so we're going now and a little bit into the management toolkit if you will or

[26:01] our fire prevention toolkit and so these are all sort of uh touch points and strategies and program areas that all have a role in in trying to prevent and mitigate catastrophic or uh fire events if you will and i'll start with what i think is the bread and butter that most people would think of and that's our fuels and ecosystem management and when i talk about that area what i'm referring to if you open up that tool kit it's for spinning we have a very active force sitting i'll talk about that in just a bit prescribed grazing i mentioned grazing before we'll talk about it again in a future slide we have a very aggressive noxious and invasive weed suppression uh program and again not noxious and invasive weeds play a role in fine fuels and uh uh adding to fire risk we do prescribe burns as mike uh said in partnership with fire department uh and then there's some actually other tangential program areas that and for

[27:02] ecosystem management maintaining soil health maintaining habitat and doing habitat restoration projects all to get our ecosystems more and balanced and a more balanced ecosystem are more resilient and give us a better chance when it comes to natural disasters if you will um and then i mentioned about the trail system and managing our trails and our roadways and keeping them well maintained because a lot of them do provide important access for staff and disaster access when needed and called upon fire breaks bringing up vehicles that sort of thing next in regulations mike mentioned a few of the uh code and things that apply to city limits and mention open space regulations no fireworks no fires on open space no smoking uh so a number of regulations that are designed for visitor safety and natural resource uh protection aspects and with regulations comes enforcement and so we have uh 25

[28:02] rangers uh and we have very active uh uh ranger patrols uh that are in in sort of in the business of enforcing regulations but also to educate and inform our visitors and in that vein of education and and and and and form when it comes to fire prevention uh know before you go visit open space and be prepared uh know where you are in an open space we have a number of education and outreach staff a number of volunteers that are at our trail heads that are out on our system that are there to help uh spread the word if you will in addition to the signs and uh and and the signage that we can do and and uh that sort of thing and other and other than uh staff from an education outreach perspective we have opportunities to press releases and psas and social media and our website presence to help get the

[29:00] word out and a big focus this year is sort of asking people and our visitors to know before you go know what our regulations are know what the conditions are uh know where you're on an open space unless in case there's an emergency or even a lightning storm or a fire event that you know where you're at and you know how to get off our system so sort of that visit awareness is really important so then go to our next slide because we're gonna dip a little our toes a little bit deeper into some of that fuel mitigation work and i'll start off with forest thinning um might mention the forest ecosystem management plan which sort of describes where in our system we feel like thinning operations have the biggest bang for their buck and over the past 10 years we've carried out over 2 000 acres of forest inning projects in our in our wooded uh areas forested areas as noted in red here and over about five or six hundred acres are right in south of in car in that in carb uh fire burn

[30:01] vicinity so a number of acres and i'll talk to you in just a little bit about how that impacted fire behavior so next slide please in addition to uh forest thinning cattle grazing is actually a very important component uh when it comes when it in terms of fuel mitigation a lot of people don't think of it in that regards but this uh illustrates it very well we have a fence that runs down the middle of this slide and the left hand slide is an ungrazed area and a lot of that brown tall grass area is the invasive tall tall oak grass which is a a noxious uh woody vegetation that uh uh overtakes uh uh areas if it's not if it's not managed and overtakes native vegetation and on the right hand side is a is a grazing unit that we put in to help suppress tall oak grass and you can see the visual difference between the presence of that noxious weed which tends to collect thatching and and fine fuels on

[31:01] the left versus the grazed area on the right next slide please so let's talk about those two particular strategies in particular and how it related to the end car fire so the end car fire burn area that 200 acres that mike referred to as shaded and pink here and the outline of of the burn area and we over shaded over we shaded over that burn area with our fire mitigation strategies so the brown area is those areas that have been thin uh over the past 10 years or so some of it very recently some of it a few years ago and the fat uh the cross-hatched area is the areas that where we have active tall oak grass uh grazing units uh installed in fact the cattle are on their way right now this week into these grazing units to help suppress that invasive tall oak grass and the story here is that these two mitigation strategies uh definitely impacted in a

[32:00] positive way fire behavior and so a lot of the fire began to hit these mitigated areas and it gave our firefighters a much better chance to get a quick containment of the fire and of course weather conditions always plays a role and we ended up having some favorable characteristics on that end too so next slide please so here's a look at the uh burn area when it hit a uh a previously treated uh thinned area and what you're looking at here is did the fire uh uh uh uh uh crown out if you will did it uh uh and torched the trees where the trees were sort of passing flames from one tree to another or did the fire stay low and in this case because it's well-spaced ponderosa forest which you want to see in a ponderosa stand the fire tended to stay low it burned with less intensity and you have we didn't have very much tree for uh mortality at all because of the fire tended to not get into the

[33:01] crowned areas of this treated area so it's a success in that regards next slide so when we take a look at the grazing and how the grazing impacted uh fire behavior what we we've installed research plots on on our tall oak breast suppression areas in order to help us over time get a sense of is this grazing effective against mitigating against tall oak grass and so we have these little circular areas and there's one right in the middle here and uh those poles are holding up a fence in which the cows cannot graze at and so you ended up getting you tend to get a bunch of higher uh tall oak grass that have accumulated fine fuels in it and you can see the difference in the colors you had a hotter burn and a taller burn in these ungrazed areas compared to the grazed areas out here which uh tended to have uh less burn uh intensity to them so um ungrazed research plots appear to

[34:02] have burned hotter than our grey and i think i have one more slide for you so just a an overview so what we have going on in terms of land management is not only ongoing but increasing mitigation of fuel reduction through grazing force thinning prescribed burns and invasive weed removal ongoing staff training might mention uh uh uh staff that are trained for a while wildland uh fire deployment open space on any given year we have between 25 and 40 staff that are trained and what we call red carded and so training is very important we also do training on how to close the system or close a trail we just had our new uh outreach staff and our new uh volunteers participate in a training on on closing closing a portion of the system when it's needed to be called for we have increasing staff presence out on the system focused ranger patrol

[35:00] and visitor safety education outreach and communications has been a big focus of ours over the last few months and we're also focusing on continuous improvement uh so as a department we're refining our own staff procedures for disaster preparedness and response and how we could better coordinate and feed into larger response efforts that we're going to talk about and and more in just a little bit and there's also a cross-departmental review that's been happening for the past year that will be wrapping up soon between the fire department and open space staff to identify ways that we can enhance our our cross-departmental collaboration and effectiveness in reducing catastrophic wildland fire risk so we actually call for that mike and i and city manager's office called for that uh review to take place about a year ago we're wrapping things up and we're really looking forward to uh what the staff came up with to help with that effectiveness and collaboration so i hope that gives you a feel for land management and how management can be an effective tool and uh impacting fire

[36:02] behavior and with that i'll turn things back over to mike thanks dan um and and i neglected to mention that this is all part of our our approach to the national strategy and it's called the national cohesive wildland fire management strategy which recognizes that there's three main areas of focus that converge to harden communities against the threat of wildfire that is resilient landscapes as you saw with open space that's a big part of what they do but fire adapted communities and safe and effective wildfire response are the other two areas that we're actively working to improve across the board and a good example of that is now with red flag days regionally even all of the regions responders we staff up wild land responders on red flag days and high wind days i'm just in preparation to dump a lot of

[37:00] resources as quickly as we can if there are starts if we go to the next slide the big uh mitigation on open space property into the city limits now so if we go to the next slide i kind of want to share with everyone in the community um some of the things that our wildland team does in addition to assisting open space on their property every individual homeowner they can help as well we've been working hard on the interface and you can see this is an example of our guys doing uh what we call a curbside assessment so they'll drive through an area and they will assess the the hardness if you will against wildfire a particular parcel and we color code that now what you're seeing here in this map is actually two years old we had to kind of put some of these on hold with with covid um but the attempt is to really color code and give homeowners an opportunity to see where they land since it's two years old obviously people could have done some things and we need to go out and reassess but it's

[38:00] intended also to drive people to some of the other services that our team provides and that's detailed home assessments so you can you can scan that qr code and it'll take you to the map for the city and you can see those those parcels um the detailed home assessment is different it's much more detailed the guys go out they will interface interface with the homeowner and even explain the things that might help them to mitigate their own property um that being said after the marshall fire we are now in the hole about 400 assessments so we're working on um how we're going to catch up um and move forward on that so that's an example of um taking it from the biggest landowner in the city to each individual landowner what we're doing for them so right now this is actually a master plan goal of the fire department is to get uh detailed home assessments 60 of the interface um and i think we're somewhere around 10 right now but it is part of our master plan to get out there and do as many voluntary these

[39:00] are all voluntary um assessments that people uh if they want that for their home uh let's go to the next slide and i want to take people to um alert morning and i've and i we brought with us um our 911 center director brad rigging to kind of explain how alert and warning goes and what what uh what types of alert warning are available before i go there let me just say this i know this has been a big issue um with a few of the last few fires uh especially with marshall fire the speed with which that happened i can tell you as a member of um the the senior city team and incident command it is it is scary to have a fire go that quickly out there and not have that you know given evacuation orders out there promptly we are in a perfect world we'd be able to notify folks um in a way that didn't clog the streets and we use we were able to tell them where to go um they're able to get out of areas

[40:01] quickly and we can do it in an orderly fashion that's a perfect world we have the resources to potentially convert streets from two way to one way but also allow responders to get in because they need to get in and while everyone is going out so those are things we know um we have to work on and talk about but in a perfect world that's what we want and not over notify which i know has happened and has been in the news a few times so i'll just say that up front um and then i'll hand it over if brad is on to let him kind of explain uh how alert warning works for the city specifically okay thank you chief i'm here uh good evening everyone uh thanks for allowing me some time here i do want to say that a number of staff have worked hard over the last year to implement new technology and improve our alert and warning program um and i think it's important that you're giving me the opportunity to explain how this program works

[41:00] the capabilities and also the limitations that we're trying to overcome so i'd like to start by just kind of going over the process that happens when an alert is sent out to the public um it obviously starts with an incident where there's a hazard that's threatening life safe life safety or property in the community an incident commander on scene we'll direct our dispatch center 911 dispatch center to send an alert or warning our dispatchers are trained to ask for specific information that fits into pre-drawn templates in our system we use templates so that messaging is consistent and accurate and dispatchers need to know the location usually this means street segments or radius around a certain area what kind of hazard it is a wildfire act of farmer flooding what action the public should take evacuation shelter in place climb to higher ground and the duration if it's known at the time once dispatchers have this information

[42:01] they can go into our system which is called everbridge enter the information in draw out the targeted area on a map and send the notification so all in all if things work correctly we can do this very accurately and quickly when things line up i do want to talk about the alerting options that we have basically they're broken out into two categories the first is kind of the traditional mass notification that we're used to the county in boulder county we've used it for a decade or more through the everbridge system there's two ways that citizens or the public can get notifications through this system the first is centurylink landline or a comcast voice over ipline so if you have those in your home those are automatically put into our system and refreshed on a monthly basis um the second is to create an opt-in account in the everbridge system and this is where a member of the public can go in create an account put in

[43:00] addresses that they want to be alerted to emergencies near or around and what kind of contact methods they want to be alerted to cell phones emails etc so that's kind of the traditional mass notification that we used for the better part of a decade recently [Music] with developments on wildfires and other incidents within the city and around the state we've started implementing integrated public alert and warning system also referred to as ipods this system is facilitated through fema and it's a technology that allows us to alert the public in a couple of different ways one is the emergency alert system which goes out through television radio another is national oceanic and atmospheric association or administration sorry weather radio so noaa weather radio those folks that have those radios can get these notifications as well and lastly and what we really liked was wireless

[44:00] emergency alerts also referred to as wia and these go out to cell phones regardless of if they've opted in in a targeted area through cell phones and cooperation with cell phone providers the reason that we wanted to integrate this capability was because it will hit people outside of their homes their businesses if they're out on trails enjoying the open space if they're unhoused and they're not in our system these notifications can still hit those folks that's the reason and the benefits that we saw and why we implemented it um during the end car fire the decision was made to use ipos notifications and wireless emergency alerts mainly because of the location we knew people were out on the trails we knew the public was out enjoying um the day the weather was nice and we need to notify those folks that were away from their homes or their businesses or an opt-in address that they put in um so while we we've seen the benefits of this alerting

[45:01] it is important to also point out the limitations and a couple of limitations lie with the wireless emergency alerts and the first is what the chief alluded to is over notification first it's important to state that wireless emergency alerts are under the authority of the fcc you know the fcc monitors and works with cell phone providers to offer this technology the technology kind of spans a vast array either you have the new technology in your phone if you have a newer handset with the wiia technology or if you have an older handset cellular handset with the older technology if you have an older an older handset there's a chance you're going to receive a wireless emergency alert well outside the targeted area at this time and that's just a limitation of the system the best the system can do at this point with a newer handset with the new technology is bleed over a tenth of a

[46:00] mile or less and fcc estimates about 35 percent of phones on the market right now have that newer technology so anytime we send this type of alert it's going to bleed over and it may bleed over far depending on the the age of your handset now the second limitation we're aware of is the character limit so if you have an older handset in technology we're limited to 90 characters on that alert so that's not a lot for us to detail the emergency and what you need to do and where it's at um so that's another limitation that we're trying to work around as well uh one limitation that we did find after the end car fire was through the noaa weather radio alerts and we discovered that there are several third-party apps that picked up the alert over the radio and re-broadcast it to their users so google alerts is a good example of this there were some people in other states that got these alerts and also

[47:00] the information wasn't consistent some of these alerts had the entire county as evacuated which was inaccurate so those are some of the limitations with the system uh we are working to overcome those um one of the things that we're doing is we're having after action reports debriefs after each each alert is sent and we've learned a lot after the end car fire we put a couple of improvements into place already we are no longer using the noaa weather radio um until that technology is improved um we're also adding a 360 character message to our alerts for those with newer handsets so they have a little more information and with the help of oem and director chart over there we've um we've set it up so any alert that we send will post on the oem website almost immediately with um with a

[48:00] picture of the map and the affected area so that's somewhere that the public can go to immediately see the alert and know if they're in the affected area beyond that we work on ongoing training continually we have monthly training scenarios and we just work to improve the alert program as we go along that's that's a very brief and general overview of our program um and that's all i have right now i can kick it back to microsoft's questions thanks brad um and so from this slide and the next one here i wanted to share a couple of post-end card changes because we know there were some issues with the boulder um odm website um and basically what we're what we've implemented since end car is uh we want to push folks to the boulder oem website we want folks to get their information from one source of information so as quickly as possible now we'll have our lead pios launching the emergency status and start posting on social media channels as much

[49:01] as possible to uh to make sure that we're getting information timely out there because we had some complaints last time um that people were going there and there wasn't any info for them to follow so that's something we definitely changed right away as a result of the in-car fire um only got a couple slides to go before we ask the council questions but i did want to push it over to if we go to the next slide it's not much on it just about recovery issues and i wanted to invite the city county uh officer of disaster management director mike charred speak to that just briefly um about recovery issues um in general uh and share that with with uh with the city council and community so i think mike's available i hope he's thank you thanks chief can you hear me okay yeah great thanks uh good evening council uh a lot of folks uh think that recovery begins after the response ends and really uh recovery begins in the early stages of a disaster and once the eoc is

[50:02] up and going we have uh 30 different emergency support functions that can be brought in through the eoc for coordination support one of them is called impact assessment the impact assessment team starts looking at the type of disaster we're having so in essence of wildfire start looking at if it's impacting homes businesses critical infrastructure and then starts feeding that into our overall situational awareness we will then lean forward and as the eoc grows and continues the recovery mission the response structure is actually starting to wind down and this is what we call a transition phase from response to recovery in the eoc uh working with these esfs uh fills that space and continues to manage until uh the city manager gets the recovery structure in place that she would want to have working with department directors the transition

[51:00] phase we continue to work on completing damage assessment usually disaster assistance center starts to get opened up law enforcement is dealing our police department is doing site access control to make sure that we're not letting people back into areas have been evacuated and then we put a lot of coordination structure down to help with messaging and we have a lot of volunteers organizations that may be coming in and just kind of wherever people seem to be struggling to connect share information and operationally uh you know force multiply our jobs to come in and help facilitate that uh we do have a recovery plan it's the framework for the city on how we establish a recovery structure that includes responsibilities for city departments and what roles and responsibilities they'll assume in this recovery uh structure obviously is not limited to the city and these large disasters recovery efforts will be cross jurisdictional and bring in other support resources from other municipalities

[52:01] special districts and even other county departments to be successful as we get into recovery some of the challenges we've learned we've had a lot of opportunity to uh which is always getting people back into their homes and getting businesses open uh another big one is insurance gaps people start getting into that world of now how do i file my claim they start discovering whether or not they're insured properly they start getting into also the process of how to make claims these can be challenges for folks who try to provide non-profit groups to help people navigate the insurance land escape we get a disaster assistance center open this is the first point of case management where folks now are kind of taking assessment into what impacts they have in their personal life for their business the disaster assistance center starts to get people connected to safety nets and resources that may help them

[53:01] in their recovery efforts personally or even professionally and then the other big challenges we get is then debris management and for folks that are well insured this is less of a struggle for folks that are underinsured or have gaps in their insurance then debris programs become a challenge and if we have a federal disaster there are federal programs that help fill some of that void but if not and this falls back into a local program and uh that is an area where we can see things kind of slow down a bit in the recovery effort uh and then the real big couple two remaining pieces there is the long-term recovery after we get out of the eoc we get into our city recovery structure that's usually the short medium range but then there's a sort of longer term piece response is a shorter duration of the total disaster continuum and we measure response sometimes in hours days and weeks but recovery gets measured in weeks months and years so getting into

[54:00] that longer term structure becomes also a challenge because it starts speaking to what capacity do we have in government to be able to support that and things that can help with it is looking at bringing contractors expanding staff or bringing folks in as uh you know term employees to help with specific recovery missions so the things we have that are going pretty well for us we have good multi-jurisdictional cooperation through our multi-agency coordination group uh especially in our damage assessment teams we can handle a lot as we have in multiple disasters here in recent years we have very strong local voad that stands for volunteer organizations active in disasters we have a local voad organization that helps with interfacing when we're bringing in federal boad organizations but we can get a disaster assistance center up and going right away we have plans around site access control debris management and good strong community engagement even with all these capabilities in place recovery is always a challenge and

[55:00] each disaster is unique and will create unique challenges and each one will expose vulnerabilities and our capabilities and our structure so the mantra there is it's strong to have a lot of adaptive capacity so we can anchor in develop and deliver services to the community and ahead for us in this space is we have a recovery plan that does need to be updated this year it's due uh this year and then uh one of the things we're working on is a extensive cross-departmental tabletop uh that will focus on recovery not the response side to help make sure that the planning effort that we are using to update our plan is at least calibrated and confirmed through a tabletop scenario and we can be confident at least that our capabilities are holding up through that planning phase that's all i have chief back to you thanks mike if we can just go to the last slide um i'll just sum it up here um this is by no means comprehensive but this is just a list of some of the opportunities that we've identified going forward that will probably need a

[56:01] lot more work on just a couple of examples as you can read outreach and how we help citizens help themselves and harden themselves not just their homes but you know having go bags things like that how do we leverage what's in the community and all the volunteerism and the expertise that's out there and and how they can help all of us because it's a community effort um to make this community harden against wildfire so those are just examples um all of these plan updates and even climate initiatives will require probably some resource needs or resource reallocations we know um but we'll need more conversations internally around that so we go to the last slide i'll just sum up the questions that um we thought might be uh useful at least to start to chew on and that is whether uh council is interested in quarterly updates um on the topic of resilience and whether um you know you want to focus specifically on climate resilience and emergency response

[57:01] any other other areas of concern that you heard about today i mean i like to use the pond and we you know we had you drinking from a firehouse tonight there's a million things um are there areas that you like us to explore that weren't mentioned or even were mentioned but you don't think we're doing enough we should think about and then um i did have a thing in the chat about what is a wildland urban interface and that is by definition um really a certain um we'll call it distance from the edge of the city that borders wildland um land you also have grassland it all really boils down to um open space around and then how far in the city based on the marshall fire we even have to probably rethink what a wildland urban interface actually means um because of how that spread but those are the big questions and um i if we could just i will bring these back up but i just wanted to bring that end car story map qr code up there for members of the

[58:01] viewing public who may be interested in looking at the uh story map that we put together for the end car fire so that's only a couple of slides down but um that might be of interest to folks if they want we we couldn't go into detail there and as you can see i apologize you went a little over but um we'll we'll turn it back to nuria for any questions that might be out there i think we're good on our end and i'll turn it back to tara but i'll just say that i'm glad we were wrapping up because i know that we have another big presentation today and miss ali rhodes may be kicking you under the virtual table to finish up so we can get to park so tara well mike that was a fantastic presentation and it was very detailed and i'm sure that it has started lowering the anxiety of a lot of our community members to know we're in such great hands and so organized and also i have a new respect for cattle i just want to say that um i am going to say ask the city council do does anybody have any

[59:02] clarifying questions so before we discuss let's let's talk about questions first see any hands raised for clarifying questions for staff this is my first time looking at what that looks like so nuri you can help me if you see it and i don't i see and i don't know what order but i see rachel aaron and mark and lauren okay thank you rachel i think that was the right order that they came up in so my first question is for noria while you're unmuted um i hate to sound like a broken record but this was something that a couple of us lifted up at the retreat wanting to have added to the work plan and now we're talking about um revisiting this quarterly is this something that we could or should add to the work plan well i appreciate the question i i would say that generally we consider this as part of our work plan i think the question perhaps more aptly is whether council wants to lift this up as one of

[60:01] the council priorities because we do have this contemplated in the work that we're doing that would of course generate what we think would be those quarterly uh updates we would then have to work on what is the action item that you'd like to see as part of that council priority but i hope that we share today that this uh is something that we are continuing to work on and so the choice is yours in terms of um how you want to lift that up and if there is a particular action item you want to highlight but i i hope you're hearing today from staff we are on it we are moving forward we have this we we don't necessarily depending on what that particular ask if there is one believe that um that that would require additional resource because we're already working on some of that right now so we defer to council um on whether you want us to lift that up out of the joint work plan and lift that up as a council priority okay um

[61:01] thanks for that i'll uh go back to that as part of the discussion and then my second clarifying question is um you know fire and floods i would say similarly terrifying for communities and i know after some bigger floods we hired um outside um consultants and experts to to help us you know map out the best way to proceed on certain creeks and things like that um are we doing anything like that with with fire planning like i'm thinking about evacuation routes as an example i know that those have been um a concern for people that we get jammed up so is that something that like uh we already are outsourcing or we could outsource so the the simple answer is we could outsource that that is so the community wildfire protection plan is up for an update even our structure protection plan which details how we'll fight fire and how we'll designate areas of the city which involves how we would evaluate

[62:00] getting folks out or protecting structures those are up for refresh so we have a conversation internally about um resources we'll need to get that done that needs to happen so that is in process and we're trying to figure out whether that's going to be outside help or we we've got the expertise we just need some additional support to do it okay all right that's all i have for now thanks so much thanks erin yeah well first of all thanks for the extremely informative presentation and for putting this together on pretty short notice and for the coordination between the different departments i really appreciate the partnerships we have in the accounting with the oem and mike chard thanks for being here huge appreciations all the way around i just have one question um so the the alerting system that was a great explanation of how that works and it was great that we were able to do the alerts and make having to go to a few extra people is preferable to not getting to enough people one question i did have from some community

[63:00] members was um in what circumstances our siren system get gets used because i had some people say well why weren't the sirens turned on and so i wonder if somebody could address when we do or do not use the the siren system in in the town i can kick it off and then who wants to jump in gladly go there um the so the siren system itself um we've we've used it in the past but we've had limited success for with it um and we we use them during the floods um they don't quite uh work as well as we thought in fact in some cases they actually had people go towards the danger rather than away from um and and so we do need a way to notify people who don't have all the electronics bells and whistles and the twitter and stuff like that and there's no substitute obviously for like in the end car fire we had people on the trail we had to get them

[64:00] off the trail we're sending people up in the trail to get them off you can obviously see the wildfire um but that doesn't mean people are going to get off the mountain quickly so um being able to actually tell people what's going on um is is ideal the sirens were supposed to kind of do that and they get it we would test them and they were muffled um you couldn't quite hear what it was saying what was the message um and in some cases it was just oh that means the flood's coming let's all go check out the creek and it and it didn't really work the way we wanted it to um it's also very old technology so fixing them um and even replacing them could be substantially expensive if there are better alternatives that's what we're kind of talking about internally and more interested in and i think mike you you might have a better insight into some of the other technologies that are out there that we're looking at but that's one of the reasons why sirens were not i think as enthusiastic about them as an alternative

[65:00] notification system as some might think i hope that part helps yeah mike i'll uh chief you add on to that one of the things there's an alternative technology is looking what's called lrads it's a it's a long-range acoustic healing device um specifically designed to be if you can't put a tone with it but really designed around giving voice direction and making that clear and being able then to communicate protective measures as opposed to with the sirens which is more of a an awareness type device it gives general message and uh says the wildfires in the area be prepared to evacuate not very directive so there might be a better way to do that outdoor warning system with modern technology than something that's been around and many of our sirens are getting to service life um or past it so it's it's looking at that time of uh what's the best way to achieve that outdoor warning system

[66:01] okay explanation that's all ahead thank you okay we're going to move on to mark thank you that was a great presentation appreciate it um we've thinned uh if i recall correctly you said we've thinned about 2 000 acres out of 46 000 obviously not all acres are going to be eligible for thinning how many are and under what time schedule will be getting to the rest you made it dan over the past 10 years we've accomplished about 2 200 acres of thinning that represent represents about 80 percent of what was called for in the forest ecosystem management plan so we still have a little bit to go uh with that uh two years ago uh we uh in talking with our forest uh ecosystem staff uh we have decided to put the majority of our attention right along sort of the shanahan ridge the uh

[67:01] urban interface area we did some thinning up in the red rocks area so uh uh adjusting a little bit in terms of what was initially called for in terms of uh our sequencing and concentrating a little bit more on the urban interface uh direct area um only about 25 of our 46 thousand acres is in a forest habitat area so um uh there's there's also strategic reasons why you wouldn't necessarily uh thinning all of that is a priority uh for instance there may be some cool north uh facing shaded areas that due to the topography of the such just uh uh presents a lot less risk for catastrophic wildfire than certain other areas so there's actually very strategic reasons of why a a particular forest stand might rise to the level of priority for a thinning project or not

[68:02] thank you and are there any um man-made alterations that we ought to be looking at and at the interface between uh the residential communities and the open space fire breaks for instance to create a greater resilience in the event of a fire like moving into our communities well um right now i mentioned the fact that there's an active uh program at the staff level that's going on between fire department and open space and one of the things that we're doing is identifying potential strategies that we haven't considered before and throwing them up in a spreadsheet and then doing some prioritization out of that is this realistic can this be done is it achievable do we have the capacity to do it and so some ideas that maybe we weren't considering before uh might be on the table for us for us to look at

[69:00] and certainly that could be one of them mark um obviously there are some areas where that already exists exists i'm thinking of blue bell road running up chautauqua a very good access road uh that happens to be right along the urban interface uh there's other uh sort of uh i guess you would call it still some uh low-level intensity projects for instance what is the material of our fencing made off of where is our grazing units uh is there a way to shift grazing in a way that we can hit more fuel mitigation in areas that uh that we view may be higher priority that we haven't gotten to yet some of our properties are unleased should we put them in active agricultural leasing of course everything comes up with a little bit of a trade-off for instance if you put cows right up against a backyard you get a little pushback at times i think cows are more appreciated right now than they've ever been so i like to hear that uh but there has been some uh a little

[70:01] bit of resistance in the past of having grazing too close to the urban interface but your initial uh remark mark is is is likely to end up on this spreadsheet spreadsheet of ideas that will be sucked out and sorted out well i look forward to hearing your thinking on that my last question and this may be for our police department as opposed to any other department under current conditions fireworks have gone from being a nuisance an unpleasant nuisance to something a lot more dangerous and as anybody on uni hill can tell you or even in my neighborhood of lower chautauqua fireworks are going on all the time is there anything to be done about that just from a fire suppression point of view because know everybody can live through a little noise but

[71:00] it's becoming a dangerous activity i don't know if anybody can respond to it yeah i'm happy we're not not quite sure what what to say in terms of the fire um suppression i'll leave that to chief caldorazo but as you know we we do our best to enforce the fireworks ordinances it's often difficult to catch the perpetrators because by the time that the boom has gone off and we're trying to find them they've scurried away and it's dark and it's often difficult to uh to apprehend people but we do the best we can especially during the summer we increase patrols around the fourth of july because we know that's a high period for fireworks use and it it remains a municipal offense as a unclassified misdemeanor and that you've colorado you haven't had on the the fire suppression side no they're obviously illegal um but uh

[72:00] it we'd need more i suppose i don't know if if that's enough of a deterrent um what's in what's on the books today all right thank you thank you yeah and i'll just add one thing that i think some people don't realize it in boulder it's not just merely lighting off fireworks it's illegal to possess them period which is a pretty strong stance that we have compared to a lot of other jurisdictions thank you thank you so much carrie next we have matt matt benjamin uh lauren's up let's let lauren go ahead lauren sorry about that it's all good it's all good um thank you thank you all so much i really appreciate that you've already addressed so many of my questions and concerns so good job i really appreciate that um but i did still have a couple of other outstanding ones um

[73:01] i'm not sure if this is our police department or boulder oem that this or maybe nuria you can help me direct this properly but um so other than the future resource plan or response plan have we evaluated and come up with any modifications that we would be enacting in terms of closure and traffic direction after the marshall fire i was just wondering if there was more detail on what what the thinking is there yeah i'll ask whether i know that there have been some learnings and i know that there are a variety of factors that go into that so maybe i'll ask carrie if you wanted to start and then mike or uh well i guess the mics if you all have something to add that'd be great sure so um i just had a couple things uh

[74:01] chief calderazo mentioned the very beginning that we there were some fortunate circumstances on the day of the in-car fire and one was that this fire kicked off at a time that we had two overlapping shifts so our staffing was better than usual that said we were still challenged between taking care of other emergency calls in the city doing door-to-door evacuation notices at the very western edge of the city along extonian brook road and also trying to troll control traffic as we talked about earlier in the ideal world we have this neat orderly staged evacuation where we move out the people on harm's way first followed by sort of the second wave and the third wave and it would all go nice and orderly but that works against the idea of having mass notifications like a wear that often get beyond our initial control and our initial intent right so mass notification and orderly evacuations i think are at odds with each other

[75:00] that said about 90 minutes into the in-car fire we had you know 18 officers about 10 state troopers and we were beginning to get control of broadway and table mesa broadway and greenbrier was two major exit points if we needed to try to go four lanes of traffic out to do that we had to shut down broadway for a period of time we also had the state patrol shut down northbound highway 93 at highway 128 to lessen the traffic impact on the city but anytime you're trying to move 15 20 000 people all at once it's going to be a big challenge and our roadways really are not designed for that right they're designed for traffic calming and slowing people down not always allowing full access and full flow out um that said and mike can probably go into some detail but we've been looking at a product that would help us sort of pre-map and pre-plan for traffic control points it's a mapping system we're looking at um i think that will help us going forward to better sort of pre-game these situations

[76:01] of course we never know exactly where the next fire is going to kick off but unfortunately we've had some experiences of years ago we evacuated all of north dakota ridge subdivision we ended up vacuuming a good portion of south boulder on the in-car fire we were prepared to evacuate a good portion of central boulder during the dome fire in 2013 or 14. so unfortunately we've had some practice um but anytime we're trying to remove an entire section of the city out through choke points there's going to be problems and it's going to take time for us to ramp up enough resources to control major intersections but it's obviously something that we are looking to improve comments i would have related to that for council to here to the chief's point looking at technology to help us not just with our response planning but also be able to tilt that towards community preparedness increase people's knowledge of uh you

[77:01] know the zones they're in uh the routes out would be one way um part of the after action reports we've been doing on these fires is also making sure that we're operationally updating our plans and procedures and sops to make sure that they're current i think there was a lot of emphasis on door-to-door searches we haven't talked about that but that is also a very effective way to move people because even with all the great technology that that uh brad was talking about still putting people in neighborhoods knocking on doors making sure people are clear is a is a priority and also controlling uh traffic control points so we're starting to see that especially with we as coming in play it's kind of changed that dynamic now where they're both equally as important and then policy wise to speak to the i like the way that she put it was ordering evacuations and mass notifications kind of work against one another um we are part of a four county effort right now the fcc has got an open period of time for comments related to

[78:00] how to improve the wireless emergency technology and see how we can make that policy shift at the federal level through this ipaws capability because really to make the wheels really effective for us long term has to find a way to be uh much more geo fenced and and and surgical as opposed to being this butter knife and trying to slice through this stuff and it's not very clean uh and i think we'll get there but a couple of pieces will be getting the policy change at the federal level some sec requirement and then over time this technology the older technology that that our director of the 911 center is talking about will eventually be out of the system there is a regulation that says all new phones from february 2022 have to comply with the newer standard for wireless emergency alerts we'll eventually get that narrowed down a bit and will help with some of those challenges that our first responders face when they're out there in that evacuation environment and i'll just add real quick um we know there's a ways to go

[79:00] these ideas of of planning zones um educating the community there are there are areas in california where you know they help residents know your zone um and and so they even know what evacuation zone they're in and where they're expected to go um we're nowhere near there and we've got a ways to go and we know those are things we can do in terms of outreach that's kind of what we're referring to in the slide on the opportunities piece okay great thank you so much we're going to go to matt and then oh wait tara i had a couple of fun i mean it was those were great answers we're trying to stay on schedule but do your thing we want to hear from you um so my next one um was and i'm not sure who this is too but there was a discussion about updating potentially updating the wui zones and also building codes are those i know the building code piece we're already

[80:01] looking at updating building codes is are we looking at um fire more intense regulations around combustibility as part of that update um and then also do we have it are are we going to schedule um time to to dive into the buoy zones and look at um increasing those or not or adjusting them so i'll just say real quick we are required by ordnance to evaluate the buoy designation every three years i think it is so we have to look at this anyway and that's if we did nothing about adopting a new updated version of the wildland urban interface code we have to look at that that of course carries with it all the extra regulations but again that is not retroactive that is just for new construction and renovations

[81:01] thank you and then a last quick one um dan i think this is for you so you were mentioning thinning and kind of where the thinning is happening and i noticed on the maps that in the canyons that i didn't see thinning and things and you were talking about not doing cooler areas is that kind of because does that relate we're not thinning north sides and in sort of deep ravines and things like that because of this microclimates that are there yeah i mean i think generally that's correct lauren i mean it's it's not to say you would never see any thinning prescriptions on a north-facing slope but certainly our our uh vegetation and forestry health professionals are looking at those type of things is is what is what what is what is the risk factor what is the health forced health so just overall forced health is uh the umbrella for all this because you have a healthy force you tend to have more resilient

[82:00] force and then you tend to have less fire catastrophic fire risk so yes you you do tend to see some of those other depressed risk factors are uh involved in such things as steep uh northern cool facing slopes and some of those microclimates in general but that's not to say that you would never see a prescription carried out in and something that might be north facing thank you great questions lauren and thank you and again i apologize for cutting you off before okay we go to matt uh thank you um yeah as it's been said before a big thanks to you know dan and the chief and and mike at oem of just all the work and certainly you know boulder sheriff boulder police all our partners to get us where we are but not to be lost that we got lucky with the end car fire uh so as much as we got lucky it presented such a great learning opportunity without the devastation of

[83:00] life or or property and so thinking about how how do we go how do we push the envelope on on our resiliency is something that's been sort of focused for me and so i want to circle back to a question that that um uh mark brought up with regards to you know fire barrier and stuff and so i guess it's a general question for dan you know um our open space charter very specifically defines the allowable uses for our open space and and so i'm curious if any potential or or new ways in which we can use our open space to protect our community runs into or perhaps runs against perhaps some of those allowable uses um in in how we're thinking and so i'm sort of just curious um in that regards um because i want to sort of be thinking real broadly with regards to how maybe the open space can be can be leveraged as a means of protecting our community so that's really like a question like is bleeding west of homes you know uh going

[84:02] to be an allowable use and i would just want to make sure are we baking those things in so that future generations are are largely able to you know be stewards of our community and environment without thinking about our open space becoming a vehicle from which natural disasters um can sweep through our community yeah that's a great question matt i would say in general high level terms that the open space charter purposes would uh could come into play on certain specific um ideas that might come to bear um but i would also say that the charter purposes allows for the management of lands and so for instance we place um prairie dog barriers fence barriers on our property uh for prairie dog management and then and so you know a structure on open space but used for management purposes we certainly have uh access roads and trails and that sort of

[85:00] things that could be viewed as a structure even though the charter says no no structures on open space but you know because it's for the management purpose uh it is allowable on under the charter so i would say that um many ideas that we could consider uh probably wouldn't run afoul with the charter purposes but it's certainly but there could be examples that definitely might in which we might have a conflict there more importantly i think the question for us would be us meaning all of us is is the trade-offs um you know you do one thing and you might have a trade-off on another um for instance so we let's get rid of every shrub within a half mile of of the urban interface well it so happens that shrub habitats tends to be the most important habitat for our songbirds it happens to be a very important habitat for uh threatened threatened species so you know there's i think the trade-off implication is probably the more important component of how to evaluate

[86:02] these things than whether or not it can be done under the charter purposes but i would say charter purposes could come into play depending on the idea i appreciate that dan um yeah i i've sort of thought about those potentials too and wondered where that what would come into play so i appreciate that um the other and i've got just sort of two questions there's a slurry more but i want to keep respectful some time here um uh one of them has to do with um going back to the 1994 shake shingle ordinance um i ironically a a couple of us uh were on a bike ride um and and ran ran across some apartments that had wood shingling on their siding and so i i'm curious about whether or not that ordinance was purely designated for roofing and whether siting was not included um because again i i think of you know there's a lot of people we've seen sadly that maybe some of our apartments are not necessarily prepared even for local fire and we're displacing families

[87:01] so i'm kind of curious about where that ordinance's boundaries are and how we can maybe tighten it up so so that we can really start to you know gain some results see certainly with apartments um and considering you know 53 percent of our community rents um so just sort of thinking about some of those equity issues as a part of those ordinances i can at least say that it was roofs um it was about the roofs the we would cover the siding or the the wildland urban interface code would cover the siding but only for that one is not retroactive so it would have to be enacted retroactively um and probably with the same kind of provisions to give people time to comply for that to have the same effect that's that's very helpful um thank you and my my last uh question um as i come to it centers around um resident and sort of community education um i grew up in southern california and and

[88:01] wildfires were a frequent uh issue for me um i had my house partially burned by a wildfire in late 80s been evacuated numerous times and one of the things that we always had though was very clear understanding of and i think you know chief you mentioned this when a fire comes because they tend to come from generally one direction where you go when you get like it gave you very clear sense of that it gave you a clear you always had a list of what you needed to pack it told you how to prepare your house when to leave you know close your windows do not run ventilation you know i mean all those things you know clearance you name it i mean you had that list you knew what you were doing and you were empowered to protect your home long before um and prop and and people long before the fire came how are we building that capacity and and how long might that take to sort of build that into what we're doing in our community so that uh even if the wui now covers all of boulder in our re in new definition you know i just want to get your thoughts on on the process in which

[89:00] we can build that sort of education throughout our community it's a fantastic question um we got to do better there there's no question about that um and i would say that it is a it's a conversation we're going to have internally about needs around that um what can we do to improve not just the outreach but what is the message and how do we get it out there um and do that through our normal budget allocation process as well as what can we do today um i do have resources available today so that that's a conversation i want us as a team having especially now that we're a little postcovid we struggled certainly with doing detailed home assessments we even put them on hold we certainly didn't want to be vectors ourselves um but i know that we can we can really push this forward and need to so i'll just say that that as the fire chief of a very wildfire um risky community we must do better around those areas and we we will be working on that

[90:00] thanks chief and you know you've got a partner in me here to help out having been through that enough in my childhood and i'll lastly i'll just part with something that the chief mentioned earlier um uh we have our senator fenberg to thank for securing funding for this firehawk helicopter carries a thousand gallons of water it's a workhorse but we should be at the top of the pecking order um to maybe secure that to our region so hopefully that's something we can do and work with our partners to get that done um but that would be a great opportunity for our community um and our resiliency so i'll be done there thanks matt great questions and great comments and thanks mike how rachel do you have another question real quick yep um just there was a slide that mentioned volunteering opportunities and um i've had some community members ask like do we need people to volunteer to help clean debris from the last fire so just wondering are there current volunteer opportunities and where would we direct people to if so

[91:01] so we're working on that i've had a lot of folks reach out to me as well we're trying to figure out um you know we have um a volunteer guiding coalition we have that capacity but i don't think we've we've had an opportunity to to huddle and talk about um how we utilize all the volunteer um all the people that want to volunteer not not just for this event but for different for different areas or even in preparation for i've had people say look i do this for a living you know i work with insurance and i can i can help you guys with some of these so those are the things i want to i want to coordinate city-wide i don't want to just do one-offs or a single department so we're trying to figure out how we can sort of utilize that and do it in a coordinated way across the city so admittedly we haven't been very good at it yet but we're going to work on that thanks great well i want to move it along to maybe we can put up the staff's

[92:01] questions and let's just nicole has your hands up sorry just wanted to be first for answering staff questions ah okay good you snuck that hand in there i didn't see it okay you can be first so we're gonna answer staff's questions and any other discussion uh nicole take it away thank you and this is assuming that i'm remembering them correctly so stop please let me know if i'm not i want to put the questions up on the slide on the screen yeah that may be helpful but yes i i mean i think you know our questions here tonight sort of show you you know this is an area of interest for us as residents as well as in our role as policy makers um so i think quarterly updates in my opinion would um would be really helpful and i think informative and valuable for the community if i'm remembering correctly the next one was around areas to elevate in those updates and i think some of my colleagues here have hit on some of the things that i was interested in hearing

[93:01] elevated rachel you just mentioned one around how people can help i think you know the more more we get information out to the community about what they can do um to help with these efforts uh the better you know all of us will feel it always feels better to be acting than you know just hearing about these problems um i think kind of along those lines um i'm curious about uh private resources that may be available so um chief you mentioned having um a program that kind of goes around and uh tells people how their homes are doing in terms of kind of being fire or being i think you talked about it as hardness um to fire and i'm just curious you know if people were interested in doing that on their own um are there resources that you would recommend they go to right so that we don't have kind of people um just picking anybody out there you know who says oh yeah we can completely help you with that but you know they may or may not be uh reputable

[94:00] so what what are those resources that you might have available or recommend for individual homeowners or people who would want to start doing some of this work on their own i think matt you were kind of alluding to policy changes i'd be very interested in hearing about policy changes that you would recommend that we consider as a council that would help us and the other thing that i kind of think about is around um methods for kind of strengthening our neighborhoods and communities and the connections that we have to each other i was talking with curtis johnson in the county sheriff's office and he was talking about a program out of new zealand where there's kind of a group that comes in and they they work with neighborhoods to um help people understand you know who are your neighbors and what skills do they have and how might you you know come together um in a a time of crisis to kind of help each other and and pick up um slack especially in the case of uh

[95:02] when services may be um gone for a couple of days so i think those kinds of things um and the other thing that is on my mind i think especially after the horrific news we received last week that one of our community members died in washington d.c protesting the climate crisis is just thinking about mental health resources as well what's out there what's available none of this stuff is easy to deal with i think that's true for all of you who are on the front lines and and those of us in the community who are watching all this happen and what resources do we have as a community to help people who are really struggling with the times that we're living in and these dangers and the ways that our climate is changing thank you and and i just i really want to extend my thanks um it's very clear in your presentation tonight that you're doing a lot to protect our community and all of us who live and work here so thank you very much nicole that was great

[96:00] i really appreciated that list and i'm going to take a few minutes to answer the question now i would definitely like quarterly reports that would be great i think it makes the community feel more secure as well as brings us together and i want to agree with nicole on mental health i'm concerned about the how it's affecting our kids especially those that have already had to evacuate three times so i was talking to some community members about that and if we could come together as a community for mental health and especially for our children when it comes to uh stress and wildfire i think that would be a great thing i am wondering mike this might not be for you i know that in the marshall fire the grasslands were a big problem and i'm thinking about our non-cow oriented grasslands so one community member mentioned the

[97:02] the grass i guess it could be on the median it goes from and car all the way down to broadway and what do you think about uh what can we do about that to make sure that if the fire jumps it doesn't jump to the grasslands that are that are in the city limits let's just say we've had a few problems with that already so should we be have mitigation for that should we what should we do like do we have a plan so that's another thing i'd like to mention another thing is uh in terms of south boulder i would personally love to see a pilot program because i'm really loving this whole discussion on volunteers and south boulder i know western broadway and even easter brother is raring to go so i would love to see some sort of a pilot program um maybe starting there where we could get black captains and organize so that people don't feel alone especially um thinking about people's pets that happened in the

[98:00] marshall fire and a lot of people were out of their houses and their pets didn't live so what can can we have some sort of a neighborhood organization in terms of uh past and just knowing your neighbors so we everybody knows when something is happening and there might be a block captain to call i'm very excited that there is going to be a website up where people will know to go because that was a big problem and i'm really happy that you're already um handling that one i do know that when i was watching the fire start um that was the marshall fire from south boulder um i did notice i i wasn't sure was that one of the end cars i was standing at a condominium area and the sprinklers went on on the urban wildflower into right on the perimeter but they went up in the air so they were back for so the water was evaporating it certainly wasn't going to do anything and so another thing i'd like to see is can we have a plan for the many stakeholders the the condominiums the businesses the homes

[99:00] that are right on the edge right on the perimeter i think that would be helpful i am on the board of chautauqua and they are super organized when it comes to um their plans that they've been working on um for the for quite a while but especially in the last three months and so i learned a lot from them as well so thank you chautauqua for teaching me all you did and let me just see if i have any more questions or comments before i let the next person go okay let me go on to my little word document take one second um everybody oh yes my last my last was postcards and you know the good old days in the mail and some of the uh older of some of our seniors might not be as savvy tech wise i know i'm not you know and so postcards would be great perhaps every quarter or every six months like you what to put in your to-go bag what what website should you

[100:01] go to um these types of things that are constant reminders to the community who might not go on the city website or might not go onto a website but will be in a big panic and they could mike i know you talked about magnets they can go right to their refrigerator and look and see what they need to do immediately and i think that'll relieve a lot of the anxiety so that's all i have and i see a bunch of other hands matt rachel and aaron so now it's just rachel and aaron thanks sarah appreciate that um yeah so to answer that first question yet quarterly is is kind of exactly what i would like to see um certainly uh given that i i envision that there are likely being some action certainly loving to would love to when it's available see that report that both the chief and dan have been working on in their respective departments i think that'll trigger a lot of conversation and perhaps some action so i think until we get to that place where we settle on actions and then have a a plan quarterly makes a lot of sense to

[101:01] me um in terms of uh what additional areas of concern um we'd like to incorporate you know i i did mention that community education stuff um i think there's a lot of work that can be done there i think that that's pretty for the most part i mean the sad part is we haven't even entered what is traditional the fire season um so uh it does seem like it's been a battle of attrition up to this point um but i do think that that's one of those things that i think we could probably get going on sooner rather than later just because of the positive impacts that it has as we do enter perhaps a worse part of the fire season as la nina looks to set in and exacerbate current conditions um and then really around some policy things i know lauren brought up some policies among others i'd be really curious about that um i want to say boundary because we're using that a bunch but really that interface we use that word a lot too uh really the connection between our regular building codes and that of the we building codes and really trying to define those differences and as we've

[102:00] said that you know we might be expanding uh the the where the we is and then what and then at some point it just becomes a city-wide code um and so i kind of want to look at you know where those pieces fit in because i think a larger city-wide code might be necessary if we're looking to really encompass the whole community within the louie and so those are some things i'd like to sort of get up to get up to stuff there also thinking about mandatory brush clearance um having grown up in the santa monica mountains this was essential i remember firefighters would literally triage a home and would just point to a home of saying nope can't save it yep can save it and they would literally just evaluate it in 10 seconds flat largely based on on surrounding brush clearance and so i really think that there's an opportunity for us here and i do remember the chief um maybe and it might have been uh i think you mentioned something that once the once that first home goes the potential for other homes to burn exponentially goes up um and so i think looking at brush clearances is pretty important um and then also thinking about um home sale requirements and documentation um i think they do this

[103:01] again in california they require proof of mandatory fire or flood insurance upon sale um so i think that's one way because at the end of the day we're going to pay for this no matter what um and so making sure everyone's adequately insured i think is a great way to make to to sort of help save that off um and then also building in perhaps renter protections again given more than half our community rents they might not have the same luxuries of the information and knowledge that they have moved in or live in a wildfire zone or a flood zone so i really think that that not only should we think about their information but also renter protections with regards to insurance from these national disasters as well i'm also curious about um easements uh for emergency access um into and out of the louis in various places and whether or not that needs to be established do we have sufficient access might we need some more um and then um the uh let's see where's the other one and then lastly is really i i guess a hope to think big um as maybe some of

[104:02] these solutions projects and policies you know infrastructure and assets um may cost a lot of money um and i think and i'd love to sort of hear some ideas that uh you don't really look at money as a as a barrier because um i think you know everybody's starting to look at wildfire and climate resiliency from the state the federals in new ways and a lot of monies are coming available so i'd really love to sort of see the grand thought on where all those pieces are and that hopefully might help us prioritize um things as we go forward um so that was kind of the the big dive into some of those things that i'd love to see us incorporate into our resiliency work uh going forward there's other small ones but i think that's a good start thank you thanks matt we have rachel then aaron and lauren and then we are trying to wrap it up to go on to our next subject so let's see if we can do it nothing on the second point to the first yes to the quarterly updates um again it's been my experience that like if council is adding time for council to hear things we're currently like we did with covid where

[105:01] there wasn't even a code change anticipated that just goes on our work planet it creates accountability for the public it creates a mechanism for the public to weigh in you know at times and it says we we prioritize this above you know other things in the city as as part of what we care about so it still doesn't make sense to me that we would not have uh flood fire and climate resiliency on our work plan uh after all that's happened in this year so i would just add it to the work plan um and and ask colleagues to consider doing that doesn't sound like it's going to increase much staff work but we are going to be getting quarterly uh updates and that's that's kind of like to me what defines a work plan item it's something council prioritizes it's coming to us and it's likely to lead to something that we vote on so that's all i'm going to pitch thanks thanks rachel okay aaron yeah yes to number one and my guess is that that's going to be unanimous or close to it for council i think we're going to want to hear more about this um i agree with rachel's point we may think

[106:00] it would be useful to elevate this into our list of council priorities officially um but clearly it is a priority for council so i look forward to hearing about this more regularly and on the second item i'll just say people have already made some really great points i just appreciate all the council members who brought other points already up and i'll just mention one i know we've already talked about a little bit but the the code revision that we've got coming up later this year if we can look carefully at how we might you know push that a little further like for example mike you talked about the like the shingles on the wood shingles on the side of the house isn't included currently well maybe we should add that that might be something to look at so and um so just to encourage us when we hit that code revision to look at making some potentially some pretty aggressive changes to keep our houses and communities safe from future fires that's all i got thanks so much thank you aaron okay we have lauren and then bob thank you so

[107:01] yes on number one and in terms of i don't know that these are all additional concerns but sort of the big buckets the volunteer like looking at ways to increase volunteering and incorporate that energy education communication mitigation evacuation planning um building codes and particularly with building codes i'm interested in things that might be retroactive because i think you know not only do we have the issue of in the interface zones houses that catch on fire cause you know are gonna make it it much more likely to stop the spread but also um you know we have a lot of older multi-family homes that we've seen pose you know a potentially fairly substantial risk to people in our community and so making sure that we're looking at that as well

[108:03] thank you lauren that was excellent bob i want to thank the team for an excellent presentation and i hope this is the first of of many many that will receive on a quarterly basis however often you think we should receive these i agree with my colleagues that uh regular reporting to the community on the good work you're doing is very helpful i agree with everything that's been said by my colleagues so i won't repeat it i didn't want to highlight one thing that i did here tonight that i thought was a really great idea you know we we hear a lot from our community when when these disasters happen and one i think criticism was was probably repeated by several community members was confusion confusion over um what was happening and and where to go should i evacuate should i not evacuate and if i do evacuate where do i go i i think chief calderazo made an outstanding suggestion that that we follow the lead of california some other other places that have identified very specifically neighborhoods you know whether it's neighborhood abc or however they're identified and tell them where to go um because we

[109:01] can't always control the message and it spins out of our control but if we say uh evacuation for zone a and those people should move to zone p or whatever it is um people will understand people will remember what zone they're in and where they're meant to go and and that way even if the the message um gets broadly broadcast beyond our control we're being very clear about who's who's subject to evacuation where they're meant to go and i think that will help the fire department i think they'll help the police department and i think that's something i would like to to implement as quickly as possible others have done this and so we don't need to reinvent the wheel here thanks thanks bob that was excellent okay staff did you get all your questions answered do you need anything more to go forward with the next steps however yes we we definitely did thank you very much for all that thoughtful feedback um and we'll definitely huddle together and talk about what we can do quickly and and what might take a little longer

[110:02] fantastic thank you again for everything okay we're going on to our next subject the draft of the 2022 boulder parks and rec master plan muria you want to take you from here sure thanks so much and again thanks everybody for all those questions we got what we needed and then some as always and so that's really great and for this one i'll keep it short and really pass it to ali but this is another topic that frankly has been worked on for years and exciting to have at this point of almost completion as we think about what's left i'm really thankful for ali and her entire team for all that they have done in getting us here and really teeing up a candid conversation that perhaps is overdue about the resources we need to make sure that we're moving forward and providing um the recreation parks and recreation services that community is asking for with the course what we uh

[111:01] uh have in terms of resources at our disposal so i'll just let ali sort of move us forward in that conversation but i'll also say that to get us here we had a lot of community engagement and i'm always so thankful for community who lends their voice to the process so ally i'll let you take it away from here and thanks for being patient yeah that was a um a great discussion and we were listening carefully so thank you nuria for the introduction and uh thank you members of council for having us here tonight we are very uh much looking forward to an evening talking just about parks and recreation um i recently read that great leaders have bifocal vision and i think great strategies do as well they have the far-sightedness that we need to plan and dream for the future well also the ability to focus on the near term and the realities right in front of us and we think this master plan does that it outlines our community's hopes and dreams for its parks recreation system it's really exciting y'all um it also acknowledges that with

[112:00] current funding we have some choices to make and we are eager for your input on our priorities and investments for the next five to seven years we have an incredible team working on this project not all of them are presenting tonight but i want to appreciate folks from across our department and the organization who contributed to this draft master plan among others i want to specifically thank our colleagues in communications and engagement who've helped us ensure we get feedback from across the community presenting tonight our interim planning manager and master plan project manager regina elsner we also have our senior city planner tina briggs who has been leading the engagement strategies for this project our lead consultants on our master plan are the award-winning firm design workshop and our principal on the project has been recently named their ceo we're so honored to have becky zimmerman here and eric krohngold is our project manager he's also here to share information and support your discussion finally i also want to note that our vice chair for the parks and recreation advisory board chuck brock is here

[113:00] tonight the prabh has been engaged throughout this project providing valuable input to inform the plan's progress and strategies and while chuck can't speak on behalf of the board he certainly can answer general questions about the prab's involvement or discussions so tonight we have put this discussion into two parts if you want to move there you go thank you so in the first we're going to give an overview of the project's engagement and the blended approach for developing the plan we're going to do that briefly because council has seen this project several times and then we'll pause for the first chunk of your questions and discussion and then we'll follow that with an overview of our plan alternatives and a discussion on prioritization i'll note that this study session is scheduled for two hours we are intending to be as brief as possible in our presentations and if you choose to be more concise and short we had our prab meeting last night and we would support that choice of yours so with that i am going to turn it over to our project manager regina elsner

[114:13] regina's getting her microphone situated there you go all right i apologize with all my screens up technology got the better of me so i apologize this evening um so just here we have been working on this master plan update since approximately 2020 we had some initial delays due to the onset of the coven 19 pandemic throughout this process we have followed the city's standard approach to master planning and the information that we've gathered the deliverables as they've been presented as well as our engagement with the community the process that's outlined here on this slide was reviewed with council in december of 2020 and we refined that based on council's feedback to ensure that there was a focus on our engagement

[115:01] with the community the parks and recreation advisory board has been heavily involved throughout the process to provide their input and guidance on our process and outcomes and we are now in the final phase of the project and eager to talk to council the prab and planning board over the next several months as we finalize the plan during the first phase of the project research and trends the project team gathered general information and data about the boulder parks and recreation system as well as national indus and industry trends this created the foundation of information for the rest of the process the first window of engagement with the community focused on understanding their values and hopes as it relates to bpr and parks and recreation in boulder the project team hosted virtual stakeholder workshops to understand the unique perspective of our partners within the community and we also kicked off a semester-long project with both growing up boulder and the youth opportunities advisory board to hear the

[116:02] voices of the youth within our community there was an intense focus during the needs assessment phase of the project in gathering data and zeroing in on the needs of the community this was done through intense community engagement with a statistically valid survey that was accompanied by an open community survey as well as polling activities on behard boulder the timing of this phase was during some relaxed public health orders that allowed the project team to do some in-person outreach with low-income individuals people experiencing homelessness and other under underrepresented communities as well as hosting a public open house at the end of this phase city council reviewed our information and provided us feedback again to guide to the next phase of our project we have just wrapped up the implementation plan phase of our project where the project team along with input

[117:00] from staff stakeholders the community the prabh have developed the policies goals and initiatives that are the foundation of bpr's work for the next five years just prior to another heightening of public health measure measures the project team was able to host in-person workshops for staff and department stakeholders to develop to develop the goals and initiatives based on the needs previously identified by the community to engage with the larger community the project team hosted a virtual open house with two options an on-demand option with accompanying virtual exercises as well as a staff hosted virtual open house and all of the materials for this engagement window were translated to spanish including the on-demand open house video the project team also hosted bpr's first bilingual open house to hear directly from spanish-speaking members of our community in their own words this master plan update relies on the

[118:01] same three-pronged approach to planning the department's previous master plan successfully used this approach blends input from research policy and the community to form the master plan recommendations all these inputs are balanced and synthesized considering the others this input also includes coordination with other city departments to ensure that our work supports those larger city-wide initiatives and specifically all of our master plan recommendations are considered through the lenses of equity and resilience to ensure that they are furthering these city-wide priorities since 2014 bpr has focused our work around six key themes developed in collaboration with the community the 2022 master plan continues to utilize these key themes to organize our work the key themes are community health and wellness keeping bolder emotionally and physically healthy through its parks facilities and programs taking care of what we have

[119:01] through prioritizing investments in our existing parks and facilities and data-driven asset management financial sustainability balancing the many needs with existing resources focusing on core services and the priorities of the community building community and relationships recognizing that communities are stronger when people are connected and neighborhoods are strong and supporting social and cultural equity youth engagement and activity prioritizing our youngest community members and engaging youth with services that connect them with nature and opportunities to close the achievement gap and finally organizational readiness focusing on our workforce recognizing that we cannot achieve anything without that we cannot achieve anything without a talented and engaged team this also outlines developing the strong systems and enabling the department to adjust to evolving needs of the community

[120:02] when we spoke with cancer last july we discussed how to ensure maintaining levels of service for parks and playgrounds with growing populations this mapping shown here shows the accessibility to boulder parks and recreation parks and playgrounds specifically the lightest green shows areas within a half mile walk to neighborhood parks larger than five acres and the mid colored green shows areas within approximately a quarter of a mile walk to playgrounds this analysis was focused primarily on the bpr system but we we recognize that this is only part of the story there are boulder valley school district and open space properties that provide similar services and recreational opportunities but are not included in this particular analysis but this mapping does help the department as we start to identify gaps within the system where we need to look in more detail about where to focus our resources and our efforts as i mentioned previously we know that

[121:00] equity is an important issue that we wanted to start addressing through our plan to that end we worked with our consultant design workshop to begin to identify areas of need throughout the city to identify those areas we sought data that could be reliably analyzed across the city but still protect the privacy of individuals two index maps were developed one for environmental need that identifies areas of lower tree canopy and higher average temperatures and one for income need that incorporates data on affordable housing and city financial aid recipients when combined the resulting maps show these hot spots throughout the city where the need for services including parks and recreation services may be higher this mapping when combined with the previous mapping again helps the department prioritize areas where investments and services can have the most impact and at this point i am going to hand the presentation over to eric chromegold with design workshop to talk with you a

[122:01] little bit more about our financial thank you regina so while bpr has done a good job developing data-driven asset management program and prioritizing funding for capital maintenance and improvement our analysis has shown that additional funds are needed in order to meet his industry best practices for asset management these investment recommendations are based upon the system's current replacement value or crb since 2016 uh the current replacement value of bpr's assets has increased due to the construction of new facilities cost inflation within the construction industry material cost increases and a better overall understanding of assets within the department's portfolio using bpr's updated 2021 current replacement value and the current maintenance backlog of approximately 25 20.5 million dollars the department's current facility condition index rating is 0.07

[123:01] which places bpr in the good to excellent range of the fci scoring criteria now it should be noted that this does not include the development of any new parks or facilities such as replacing the south boulder rec center bpr's updated 2021 crb numbers also enabled the department to set new goals around uh asset management investment using the industry benchmark of two to three percent uh of current asset value for cip and four percent for operations and maintenance these asset targets are best practice recommendation by the national academies of science engineering and medicine and are also the targets established in the city's facilities master plan using these recommended percentages bpr will need to spend an additional 5.2 million dollars per year to maintain a system in its current condition next slide please so switching over to the recreation side of the department this graphic was created using responses collected during our statistically valid

[124:00] survey it should be noted that while the community thinks it's essential or very important for bpr to serve almost every demographic of community member those with disabilities those with lower incomes older adults and youth were identified as priority populations next slide please with regards to how programs should be funded responses collected through the statistically valid survey indicate the taxes should pay for a significant portion of programs for those with low incomes those with disabilities and those from underrepresented communities and this is represented in the heavy dark green rose at the top of the graphic areas where fees could pay more are advanced level programming for adults and older adults and general adult activities this is represented by the purple at the bottom end of the graphic generally though for a wide mix of programs the community expressed an interest in an even mix of tax and user fee funding for services and this is

[125:01] represented by that pink section that bisects the graphic next slide please so to frame some of the financial analysis both ourselves and our sub-consultant ballard king assess the fiscal performance of agencies across the country and here in colorado the analysis found that the bpr is a well-run agency it's really one of the topic in the country in terms of financial practices and using data and defined methodologies to inform decision making what this means for boulder is that number one you have an agency to be proud of number two though is that there isn't a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of addressing the department's financial gap so walking through this chart with regards to staffing you can see that bpr's fte per capita is in line with the colorado benchmarks and locally uh agencies have more staffing than those across the country this reflects that parks and recreation agencies in colorado are typically full

[126:02] service departments with a higher level of service while bpr spending per fte is in line with colorado benchmarks it is below national comparisons for a typical agency staffing costs make up about 54 of an operating budget but for bpr that number is 64 as we noted bpr's fde per capita is in line with colorado agencies with a difference in expenditures reflecting bpr's higher minimum and living wages as well as recent wage increases across the workforce and the impact of all this is that the department has less funding available for non-personnel expenditures such as materials with regards to funding agencies typically derive about 60 percent of their operating expenditures from general fund tax support well bpr only derives 19 percent it should be noted though that bpr does have a diverse set of funding sources and does have a higher percentage of dedicated levies than other agencies

[127:00] also notable is that earned income is 24 for most agencies funding well bpr is 45. looking at the bottom of the table bpr's tax expenditures per capita are significantly higher than national benchmarks but less of a difference exists when compared with colorado agencies this is because bpr system is largely built out which reflects the community's long time prioritization of parks and recreation the result though is a system that is expensive to operate when you consider the department's commitment to paying a living wage its environmental initiatives and other factors looking forward bpr's continue to build ability to generate additional dollars from earned income will be difficult with fees for many services that are already perceived as high for the market and contributing to reduced participation from some segments of the community additionally bpr already has a very high cost recovery rate compared to most other agencies

[128:00] it is likely unrealistic to expect to expect much of any increase in the current cost recovery rate in the future due primarily to higher staffing and operations costs if raising user fees is considered it must be accompanied by a conversation around equity and who is disproportionately affected by these decisions you know fees can be raised associate funding for a sliding scale model of financial aid or other access initiatives next slide please so this graphic ties together the total financial picture for bpr the column on the left represents bpr's current funding level current funding levels as determined by the 2016 and 2019 averages with 2020 and 2021 being intentionally excluded because of variable levels of funding due to the pandemic the column on the right is the recommended funding level to its to achieve asset management investment levels recommended spending on urban forestry based on the urban forestry strategic plan

[129:00] recommended investment per capita and per public tree and investment required to address the recreation funding gap as costs and wages continue to rise bpr continues to fall behind on basic operations maintenance and capital repair and refurbishment maintaining only the current funding level uh will require difficult conversations with the community about rice sizing core services and expectations from the community all right so we're at our first break where we can just take any general questions from council and then we'll move into the questions that we have um from staff questions from council questions oh looks like mark mister look you're wrong mark had to happen um when you calculate crv

[130:03] are you looking only at the asset value of buildings or are you including land values in there as well the north the north boulder uh soccer fields it's a large expanse of land that has great value and on it is a very small playground uh and restrooms so how was that utilized in the calculation of crv the crv calculation is the cost of the built improvements on the land but not the land itself what it does exclude is the value of the urban canopy our one asset that actually appreciates and so that excluded that's excluded modeled differently for how we should invest in it okay good that that's that clarifies it nicely thank you that was my only question that's great okay now we have matt thanks tara and uh mark that was that

[131:00] was a great question um and just thanks for staff for for such a great presentation on parks and and i really love that slide that equity slide i thought that was just primo especially in a master planning process my question is we hear these backlogs from various departments uh 100 million here 50 million here 20 million there and that number is daunting but it is usually only daunting in the context of what that backlock is compared to how much you're chipping away at it each year and so i'm kind of curious based on the resources that are currently available in the budget how long would that take to work through that backlog well jackson height our business services manager is here but i think the answer is that that we won't because it happened i mean just like driving a vehicle you're continually accruing new backlog right and so with the current four to six million a year will will continue to decline in that facility condition index because we're not achieving the recommended investment i see jackson's here so he can add to that correct um we're currently contributing

[132:00] about four and a half million a year to the crb replacement um the ideal funding would be about seven seven and a half million a year at the two and a half percent so we do have a three million dollar delta that we need to um fund in order to get the full amount so we're going backwards okay that's good to know thank you okay it looks like there's no other questions ali do you want to continue i would love to continue awesome uh so this the first questions that we have for council first is really um there's a lot of words here so i'll just summarize what we're asking is if that is council supports while certainly we are going to explore measures to generate revenue to garner revenue in other ways we want to ask that council supports us exploring our service levels so that in some areas we might reduce them to fund continuation of others that are higher priorities

[133:03] so are you asking council to discuss this right now and what they think about this very first question is that what you want yes ma'am okay anybody want to okay we have nicole jump in um and allie i just wanted to thank you and um your team i think what what you all have been doing um reading through the master plan just really made it clear um you all are going way above and beyond um with fewer resources than you need to try to address some of the needs that you know our community has and some of the desires right now and um it's it's just it's incredibly inspiring and commendable so i just wanted to thank you for that um i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about um your decision-making process and thinking about you know how to balance um some of these uh needs desires of the communities with the realities of kind of staffing and funding sure we have two great models to inform

[134:00] decision making both for what we provide for recreation and how we invest in assets and i think that probably regina is the best to quickly summarize both of those yeah so as ali mentioned we have two different um models that we utilize to prioritize our investments so we have first is what we call our recreation priority index and what we do in that index is we look at our recreation programming and we sort of we identify through a series of questions and analysis who benefits from that programming is it a community benefit is it a recreational benefit or is it an individual benefit and that really determines sort of the priority and the cost recovery rate for that particular program and it sort of helps us dictate how much tax funding we provide to those programs and how much cost recovery we're looking at for those programs similarly we have our asset management program where we look at two different

[135:01] scores as it relates to all of our assets within our system and we look at the condition of those assets so are they in good condition fair condition poor condition and we also look at the criticality or the consequence of failure so how bad is it if that thing fails and when we look at those two things we come up with a prioritization to identify where we need to focus first as it relates to maintaining or repairing and refurbishing specific assets thank you i appreciate that um and the other question that i have um is just surrounded in this mate feel free to punt it to the next part of the discussion um you know but you showed that the chart um the community doesn't really seem to want new taxes necessarily to pay for this um so you know what what can you all do what can we do to sort of help you get the resources you need and make sure

[136:00] that you have the capacity to continue maintaining our wonderful parks and recreation services um with with what exists nicole if you don't mind holding that i do think that goes into the next part of the question with where we talk about just recreation fee setting and how we do that so i think we'll get there perfect thank you okay then we have bob well if i understood that's the first question ali it sounded like you were asking us um whether you should engage in prioritization is that right between competing needs is that is that the essence of the question that is the essence of the question bob uh well of course the answer is yes that's what we do every department does that and and boulder parks and rec of course has done that for as long as i've been around i was i joined the park sport in 2009 remember we put together the last master plan in 2014 it was all about prioritization right and and community um appetites uh change over time i remember back 10 or 12 years ago it was all about handball and now it's about pickleball and um people have uh

[137:02] desires to do different things some things are pretty uh persistent like swimming and other things kind of come and go so obviously you're gonna have to do the best you can to prioritize and recognizing that we can't be all things ever all members of the community given our limited resources as nicole said that it sounds like there's probably not an appetite for increased taxes and so you've got a pie that's only so big and you'll have to prioritize that how you do that is a tough one because obviously there's you know you could do a majority rule who uses the most stuff but that then runs a follow some of our equity principles and so we have to be sensitive to the fact that some community members use different recreation facilities or different programs more than others and i like the fact that over the last 10 or 15 years the parks department has outsourced a number of its recreation programs uh giving you the opportunity to really have the market determine what is a value and what is so we've outsourced tennis we've outsourced pottery lab we've outsourced um a few of the other recreation programs and i think that's a

[138:00] good way with scholarships to back it up scholarships for for those members of the community who can't afford necessarily the fees um but but let some of these programs uh fly on their own and if there is a sufficient demand in the community then the market will will support it and if there's not uh then then there'll either be no takers from an outsourcing standpoint or um or or the business will falter i mean i think like everything else the city does we do have to operate this as a business and recognize the fact that um we are serving customers our community members and with some equity exceptions to that we need to recognize that if we have a lot of community members who are demanding a particular service that's a service we'll probably continue to provide and if there's not many that are looking for a particular service that's one that we either may stop providing or may outsource thanks for bob i want to add just one thing because i know it seems like a pretty obvious question do we prioritize and just point out how much this community values parks and recreation and so anything we stop doing can feel

[139:00] like a tanking and so council support really is critical and the out loud conversation here is really valuable for us so thank you the other thing i would add to what you just said you said that you know it can depend on numbers but it really is about the equity lens and who benefits and who's impacted by a service and that helps both inform our service level but how we pay for it anything else bob you done okay he seems to be um aaron well just say yes and i thought bob and nicole's comments were both very good so the just the one thing i'll add is i mean we know how important these services are to our community members and as we see with the challenges and staffing the pools right and and how anxious people are in getting those those full staff back up so i just ali appreciate everything you and your team do to provide the utmost highest level of service with whatever funding staffing levels you have available you all are amazing so let's leave it

[140:00] there thank you aaron mark yeah i also want to thank ali um and i want to say yes to the first question um uh ingenuity uh is going to be very important in the coming years because we're not going to have the resources to fill every need in the last few months we've had conversations with fleet and facilities who wanted us to up our percentage of current replacement value to a tune of several million dollars we know we have a big open space maintenance backlog we've had the arts community looking for a performance facility that would be very desirable in this community and if we do not have a library district come november we still have a library system that has its needs uh and that's just a few of them so i think um we're in a position where to the extent that you can be ingenious and practical

[141:00] that's going to be required i don't interview that you know the prospect of saying we cannot perform a particular service going forward because the cries of anguish will be heard far and wide but this is where we are our desires are insatiable and our finances are limited and um i support you in in doing the best that you can and i know you you have and will to provide as many services as possible to as many people and you know and deal with it as you can and i'm very supportive of your efforts thank you thanks mark lauren yeah i agree um with what's been said and um you know if we want to talk about implementing anything it seems clear that you know we may have to talk about reducing something so um based on the wonderful work you guys

[142:01] have done in that master plan i trust that you guys will be making smart decisions based on equity and um in our community and you know i think my only request would be if if we are eliminating things i think we do need to be really um forward thinking in how we're communicating with the public about why and what benefit um we're trying to create that's true lauren and i'm gonna just stick myself right in between you and rachel to say ally um something that lauren said is very very true is communicating with the public i don't know if the public knows everything that is under the purview of the parks and rec department so i was wondering if you can either put a slide up or just name them so this very long list that parks and rec is in charge of so the public can see how difficult it is

[143:00] to figure out where to put the monies and uh of course i was on the parks and rec board and that's when i first heard the phrase taking care of what we have which is a perfect phrase for how we can't let the maintenance part of everything uh deteriorates so ally you want to do that i will take the opportunity to celebrate our system sure so we don't have a slide prepared right but what the community should know is that parks and recreation um operates a system that the community's been investing in for over 100 years we have 1800 acres of urban park land we have three recreation centers a flat irons golf course belmont city park and bike park the boulder reservoir we operate the pearl street mall the heart of boulder we operate columbia cemetery where some of our most famous and infamous community members are buried we operate the lawn at chautauqua we have 12 historic and cultural assets that are some of our best living history that you'll learn about in the coming months

[144:01] um i'm gonna forget we have um we care for over 50 000 of the city's public trees and provide a lot of advice to help the community care for even more private trees we have natural lands we care for incredible vegetation and species on the north shore of the boulder reservoir how many parks we have over 100 sites some of them are as small as the little postage stamp park you might walk through on your way down to our three biggest which are our community parks on um east north and south parts of town in the boulder reservoir thanks ali for doing that i appreciate it okay rachel um hi allie rhodes thanks for being here good to see you uh you asked us to sort of um as i understood it chime in and and uh give you cover for the hard decisions that are gonna have to be made so i'm here to give cover and say i support you i have your back on and and any any

[145:00] community discontent really should come my way in my colleague's way where we are giving this direction and um ali's doing what we will be um giving direction on so thank you for making those hard decisions that's not easy given how much you love to the point of tears parks and recreation right so i'm just i don't envy you um and i just wanna i might say more than once tonight if you are a teenager watching this or you're a parent of a teenager like and you want to swim this summer we need lifeguards so get like maybe you could have a slide with the lifeguard application later ally but um we we also need our community to to show up sometimes and so sometimes it's not a matter of money we need we need um people to to work some of these jobs so please lifeguard for us can i just i'm going to jump in there i know council is supposed to be discussing it is not just it is not just high school students lifeguarding is such a fun job you meet community you connect with people um there are a lot of people for whom lifeguarding could be a really fun opportunity i will i also feel the need to comment um one of the ways that i

[146:01] know uh the hardship of the last two shows up for me is i am more emotional than i have ever been in my life and it shows up most when i am talking about our incredible team um several of you have commented and already and i'll just try and keep it together when you look at our team and what they have been through in the past two years thanks thanks for sticking with us yeah i've watched it's been a lot anything else rachel thank you so much matt thanks tara um oh you're passing that on there ali um boulder's been known as being one of the fittest communities yeah in the us if not on the planet for quite a long time and it's no mistake that we also commensurately have been traditionally investing in our parks the same amount and i rhetorically ask is it

[147:01] a coincidence um and so i think you know as it as it stands not in the uh way that it could be nefarious nefariously nefariously nefariously used but in many ways this is a pay to play and i think our community needs to pay to play to stay that healthy and maintain that investment in ourselves it's not just the parts it's a reinvestment in our own health um so so to really answer the question yes we have to be creative um and i really love the entrepreneurialism um that parks and rec is looking to do you know not to dig up an old issue but this was exactly part of the plan with driftwood and the amazing events at boulder res that were going to be planned for that was to build that community and build that support so i hope to see that we can do this at flatirons golf course and i hope that we can really build that entrepreneurialism i i think it's it's unfortunate that we have to be entrepreneurial um in this form to this

[148:00] extent to just cover our bases when we're moving backwards with regards to supporting our basic infrastructure i think and i hope that our community can do more and i hope that we can make the investment not just in ourselves but in our future generations for their health be it mental and physical and for the health of our community so i i know those are large statements but they really feed to the values of our community and i hope that um those listening in our community can can match that investment with what our aspirations are for ourselves and future generations so i hope we can do that um so yeah i appreciate the entrepreneurialism and being very clever in these hard times and i hope that we can acquire the resources in order to make our parks the thriving entity and assets that they are and should be in our community that was great matt and i agree with you nicole i see you have your hand up yes sorry i realized i forgot to actually answer the question i just asked a question earlier but um yes ali you know i i do support um in in the answer to that to number one there and

[149:00] you know what what i would ask as well um for you know you ali as well as all my colleagues here on council um is you know help sort of holding each other accountable to um cases where you know we are really wanting to expand in some way right versus taking the strategy of taking care of what we have um just you know letting us know um or nuria or somebody letting us know when when we're at risk of kind of adding things rather than you know supporting these decisions of um cutting back in some places so that we can maintain um and move forward with what we have um for you know example as we're thinking about like the west end closure or downtown and those kinds of things you know if there are places where it's going to add work um take away from some of these other things that that you're involved in um i would just really love to know that right and have a bit of that um accountability there and just somebody putting up that flag saying hey slow down watch out um this is something that that uh could could take us over um a

[150:01] little bit but thank you and just to echo rachel's comment um but it's not just about lifeguards you have all kinds of positions within parks and rec that are open that need people um you know i think if everybody can go out and try to recruit uh one or two um teenagers or others in the community who may be looking to kind of give back that's a really helpful way that we can all band together to support our wonderful parks thank you nicole that was great uh allie do you want to go on with your next uh series of questions i would be happy to so these are are really about so council doesn't necessarily see the fee setting policy for parks and recreation so this is our chance and i'll take rachel's q we want to make sure you support the way we charge fees as we move forward right because just as certainly there's community benefit programs that we think merit tax funding there are programs where the users should pay um since 2014 we have carefully and methodically been addressing fees and charging them appropriately and we want

[151:01] to make sure that council supports us continuing to charge adults who have the ability to pay full cost or cost plus for their services so i'll just stop there and you can give thumbs ups or maybe raise a hand if you have a question can you explain what cost plus means in this regard sure so we know um the last robust i'll give an example um the last robust analysis we did on cost of physical visitation to the recreation set center says it costs us about ten dollars a visit and so we've been carefully increasing the cost of the adult drop in to get closer to that we're not there yet we're at nine dollars we're talking with the prab right now about what drop-in fees for should be adults all of our other fees are a discount off of that but our intent is that the adult drop-in fee is pays full cost for visitation and similar with our registered program so if you register for a pilates class you're going to pay per class for the cost of that class looks like sorry so what's cost plus

[152:00] about it then it's the uh if the mark sometimes the market is higher than cost and so i'll make it up let's say that you know the cost for the visit is ten dollars um and the market for a drop in visit to a recreation facility is 15 when let's charge 15 and maybe we have a chance to generate some interfund subsidy for adults with an ability to pay i want to be clear that's what we're talking about okay so we have some hands now nicole and rachel bingini i just have a question are these mutually exclusive are we choosing just one to give a thumbs up to or any of these that that we're on board with give a thumbs up it's comprehensive it's yeah they build upon each other my question is just is this for older adults too who get discounts right now that's next this is just so we classify as adult as someone 18 to 59. i'll hold my my question for that then thanks

[153:00] okay juni thanks tara i just wonder what does it mean for in a what does it mean an adult who can pay or an adult who can fully pay uh it means someone who doesn't qualify for our current financial aid programs so we have a financial aid program anyone who qualifies gets actually 100 free access to the recreation centers that's funded in part by the general fund transfer to the recreation activity fund as well as the grants we receive from the health equity fund okay any other questions juni thank you okay so i have a question ally um i'm thinking about the uh the people that are missing out by let's say a few dollars on getting um getting you know on um what's the word i want to use i'm getting important yes thank you thank you

[154:01] getting support and i remember eric talking about a sliding scale model of financial aid which i've always been interested and tell us is that going to be possible because i'm concerned about let's say a family of four or five or six that is barely making it but can't uh doesn't can't really apply for financial aid so that's my question i'm also gonna ask you to talk about the lewisville rec center and how much do they we get a lot of people writing to us why don't you what i'm going to the lewisville rec center it's too expensive here so explain to us uh how those models are the same or different and why lewisville is able to sure first i think all your sliding scale question i'll give to um eric with design workshop yeah absolutely thank you ali so uh as part of the the next steps for this master plan this has been identified for some goals and initiatives um uh investigating the implementation of a

[155:02] sliding scale financial aid model is certainly something the department is interested in uh to your point there are cases that we've heard of where families may not qualify but may have a significant have may have a number of children and the uh financial burden of trying to participate in certain recreation programs is too much for them so uh investigating this sliding scale model where they may qualify for a certain percentage of aid is certainly something the department is looking to pursue and then as far as um louisville and how they are funded i don't know the numbers off the top of my head but i know that when that community passed the bond to renovate their existing recreation center they simultaneously passed an ongoing tax dedicated to supporting the operations of it so that they were able to provide subsidy to um across many different age groups and programs so they're just funded differently so of course i want more money to go to parks and rec you know i do

[156:01] um so i'm going to suggest that whatever points and some new on council i'm able to is how can we get more money to parks and rec since they have so much that they're responsible for i think the community is i think combined with inflation and construction costs and supply chain issues and labor shortages that i hope the community understands the kind of pressure that ali is under trying to please everybody and her entire department thank you to the rest of the department and hi chuck by the way and um so i'm going to be also wondering if there are some creative ways to increase that budget but this is not the time for that so i will move on let's see we don't have any questions do you have any comments about that ali um no i just wanted to add that that it is in the master plan to explore a sliding scale model and to develop costing for that and then council would see that in a future budget proposal it is not funded to actually implement such

[157:01] such a program right that would require additional funding um i don't see any other questions so the next part of this question is is about that community benefit programming and if you think back to the slideshow we talked about who the community thinks it is most important that we serve and how we use our taxes that's what this question is about so we just want to make sure it's clear to both council and the community that those services are going to continue to be very constrained without additional funding the enhancements might be possible with alternate and one-time funding one thing council will see in the 2023 budget that you can discuss holistically with the other city proposals is a position for us to have a um a partnerships in philanthropy manager we've been successful with that in the past the pandemic slowed it down a little bit but it's something we'd like to build going to uh rachel's question about age-based discounts so the community has expressed support for subsidies for youth and older adult programs we currently offer seniors a 25 percent discount off of that adult uh base rate

[158:00] there are not senior discounts for registered programs and we also offer a youth discount of 40 percent off of that base rate and then youth programs uh the pricing varies based upon the market and and our role in the program so really what we're saying here and i appreciate rachel's candor is we just want to make sure that folks know we're not going to be able to do more for these priority populations without additional funding um and and tatara's comment where this would show up next is as we develop the budget you would see proposals from us where we might be able to continue to enhance these priority programs that council would then have to explore holistic holistically also as a next step we didn't get a chance to necessarily talk through our funding and the strategies with the financial strategy committee of council and that is something that we would love to continue your love to begin i guess thank you ali rachel since i'm being candid tonight ali and i hope none of it's offensive this part probably will be um not to you but

[159:01] to the whole community when i look at my family um i've got a daughter who's a new nurse and she would need the subsidy in her young 20s more than my mom who's a retired nurse um and so the the age-based with no you know qualifying income threshold is a little bit strange to me given how hard it is to afford boulder at the current prices to buy in and how um much our you know are the millennials and the generation below them but that also wouldn't get discounts are struggling here so i have a little problem if there's a an adult who doesn't need a discount you just automatically get 25 and then um there's a 27 year old who who needs it more doesn't get one so i'm just putting that out there that's a little strange result to me i don't see any other hand so i'm going to say that i agree with rachel and i'm wondering allie if we could take that discount down

[160:00] now don't forget um those that are qualifying for those that are 60 plus that there are opportunities like silver sneakers it's not like we're saying to people who can't afford it to seniors who can't afford it you have to pay more but for those that can i would like to see that discount go down to 20 or maybe even 15 percent just throwing that out there and i'm wondering uh what does the rest of council think what do you think ali what does your team think about lowering um the discount for the seniors when it's applicable before council discusses i do think some data would help because it's something our team's been analyzing and so jackson height is our business services manager and i see him popping on camera to share some information with you about senior participation and how fees are paid sure so 91 of all visitation to the recreation centers are by silver sneakers renew active and our third party memberships um the additional two percent are eligible for financial aid and are accessing via financial aid and then the last seven percent are actually paying

[161:01] the full senior rate so we do have a very small percentage of overall users that are paying the senior rate and getting subsidized in that way so just long story short adjusting the senior discount wouldn't necessarily have a lot of bang for our buck what we've heard from those third-party providers is that the rate we charge is about the top of what they're willing to pay so certainly we'll continue to lean into those negotiations and relationships that's where we probably have some leverage but it's not really in the senior the drop-in fee for seniors anybody else want to reply so what you're saying is is you need to increase the um regular adult fee is that what you're saying uh we're saying that the adult drop-in fee will increase and then all of the fees will cascade off of that the senior fees youth fees and then we have

[162:00] multi-visit discounted passes so you can get a monthly pass or an annual pass they're all based off of that adult drop-in fee well it looks like there's no more questions you want to continue oh wait lauren i see lauren i'm sorry i am just one quick one you mentioned that currently like at the rec centers the day use fee isn't a full cost recovery um [Music] do you have a sort of timeline for implementation or would you know if we say yes we can go forward with a higher cost recovery does that spike things right away or what is yeah how do you plan that yeah i'll let jackson take that question sure so we've been going through an exercise with the prab prabh starting in march of this year looking at what it costs to operate each of the recreation centers and what full cost recovery would be

[163:00] so as we're developing our 2023 operating budget we are proposing a modest fee increase to get closer to cost recovery um and our historic practice has been to update the fee structure every two years um so that there's a gradual increase over time um so 2023 would be the beginning of a new fee increase to get closer to the full cost recovery thank you juni yeah ali i just have a question because i think part of your comments or statements are slightly confusing to me you mentioned the drop-in fees and you said well if someone can pay the full drop-in fee um they're likely to pay that but i'm wondering if someone is dropping in which i have done before because somehow my gym has expired and i just want to exercise somewhere i just don't understand how would you incorporate someone who's

[164:01] just dropping it into a process where you somehow have some eligibility criteria for them to get a discount yeah so the way that our financial aid program works is that if you qualify you qualify for support for any way that you access our system um the way that we qualify has we've tried to make it easier and easier over the years so for example if someone is a resident in low income housing in boulder they automatically qualify they don't have to fill out any of our paperwork they get a voucher we enter them into our system and it notes in their account that they've qualified and so if they walk in and they just want to pay the drop in or they just want to drop in for the day they give their name they're in for free if they want to buy they want to get an annual pass and swipe a card then great there's a card to swipe every visit but however they choose to access our system it's set up thank you for that all right that looks like we can go on then go ahead next question

[165:00] all right so the last one in this looking for council support um we talked to you last summer about how we might um support achieving our own goals through revenue generation and we just wanted to confirm council support for opportunities to do that such as but not limited to increasing our non-resident fee opportunities for social entrepreneurship matt mentioned the work we're doing to really build great public-private partnerships specifically in our regional parks but there are other opportunities for sure and then also commercial use in our parks is an opportunity so i'll pause there and look for your input on that specific item to generate this goes to nicole's question earlier right like how can we just there's no magic money tree that council has we know that we're eager to capture opportunities where we can to support these community benefit programs so did you want us to weigh in on a b and c or i think we've heard your input on a and b unless folks have missed it i'm now

[166:00] specifically asking about c okay we have rachel and then we have aaron i will be brief i support uh and i assume you will here's elmer uh be creative with this so yeah i support that's all aaron yeah i agree and you all are very creative and i look forward to seeing your creative ideas and my guess is that council probably supports this this is a good step forward mark i am also supportive although i would you know ask you to be careful about how you commercialize our parks i mean i wouldn't like to see a taco bell uh in the uh north boulder soccer fields i just don't know that that would be an appropriate uh way of generating uh revenue um but with that caveat yes like that for i am supportive of uh you're exercising as much ingenuity as you can

[167:00] juni i agree i'm fully in support as well and but i just have a quick question you mentioned people who live outside is it outside of boulder city is it boulder county how far outside are we talking about yeah our current definition of a resident is anyone who lives or works in the city of boulder um the worker part of the definition was added in the 2000s as a way to promote economic vitality and during the recession and so currently if you live or work in the city of boulder you benefit from the resident rate so something that we're exploring with the prab and specifically at our regional draw facilities like the boulder reservoir and even the scott carpenter pool has been an attraction um could we really look at some healthy increases for those facilities that we know people are willing to pay we saw during the pandemic when there weren't a lot of opportunities we um so historically the non-resident fee is a 25 surcharge over the resident fee and the

[168:01] pandemic to visit the pools it was a 50 surcharge and we didn't see any change in the split and visitation it's about 75 25 at most facilities 75 residents and 25 non so juni that probably was more than than you were asking but hopefully i got there no that's fine thank you for that um so does that mean if you live in in the unincorporated areas you are not included you do not benefit from resident rates at our facilities the justification for that is that i mean obviously sales tax can come from anyone who comes into the city but our facilities really are in many ways um built and maintained by property taxes and people who live in the community and are benefiting from the full set of services and the full set of city property taxes okay okay well thank you for that and yeah i'm fully in support thank you thanks juni and matt

[169:02] yeah i i fully support with the direction that we're looking to go um you know one added thing with regards to that entrepreneurial part an added thing is thinking about i know mark doesn't want taco bells but we do have a successful event called taco fest that's happened in numerous years in north boulder park um so you know i do think thinking about events in that capacity is is a way in which instead of waiting for them to come to us maybe we try to go to some events to try to create those spaces uh for for community engagement and leveraging our parks for revenue generation in that capacity so yeah it's no taco bell but it might be a one-day taco fest or something like that um um anyway i think mark got his thumbs up so he can do a one-day taco fest i think pretty well i think the rest of us could anyway that that's the kind of stuff that i'd like to see us hopefully uh leverage um and maybe lower the barrier of entry for some of those things so that we can get them off the ground and running uh rachel do you have your hand up you

[170:00] want to say something else i want to ask a clarifying question about the taco bell scenario as i recall about a year ago we did some ordnance you know revisions that that would uh you know you couldn't put a restaurant anywhere other than a couple of of finite spots and it wasn't going to be a taco bell so before we read a headline tomorrow about taco bells at soccer fields get a little clarification on that i would love to clarify and i'm biting my tongue from commenting on the taco bell specific scenario and i'm not i just vomit on taco bell like among us hasn't but just just yeah thank you here's what i'd like to remind council one is that yes while restaurants are allowed by wright in our three regional parks council has purview over any lease of parkland that exceeds three years any lease that exceeds one year between one and three has the approval of the parks and recreation advisory board um it is my experience that investment in a restaurant is a long-term game and someone's not going to do a one-year lease and so i would predict that any restaurant lease

[171:01] or any long-term partnership council is going to see the agreement because it's going to be you know an agreement involving real property interest that's longer than three years so you'll get the chance to weigh in and it was only at the reservoir at the golf course maybe and valmont city you can't go at the soccer field so just believe that that's it i mean taco fest is a whole other story i mean one thing i'll just note on that is the city has hired um for the first time we're creating an office of special events in our community vitality department our events manager is parks and recreation's own justin greenstein we know he's going to do great work there and one of his goals is one of the one of the goals for the work is to keep building on um the city special events review team citywide has been building great practices and one of the goals is to look at how could we look at events as more of a cost recovery effort so we're with you well i'm going to weigh in for a second that i 100 agree with this and stand by you and hope that i think this is a

[172:01] great way to pay for our backlog of maintenance and to for cost recovery so i stand with you ali i think it's a great idea very excited about the golf course and the new restaurant that's going to be there as well does any do you have all your questions answered it looks like everybody is standing with you here does anybody did i not give you everything you need no read did i do everything i need to do on this so far let me check with our project team and just regina if you want to chime in if you think you heard anything or have any specific questions you'd like us to double click on i think i've heard everything that i needed um eric becky for everything i need to hear thank you thank you yeah really good discussion thank you anything else ali you want you have to say you have more slides we do so next we're gonna fly through our plan alternatives and then ask you another set of questions

[173:00] really well i'll stop regina's going to explain this to you yeah so we're going to quickly go through our plan alternatives so this is really thinking about the different fiscal scenarios so based upon the city's financial planning scenarios and building upon the information that we have about bpr system the master plan includes three scenarios um for the three service areas of our department our parks our facilities and our programs the vision scenario that's presented in these tables represents the full set of services that the community would like to see and are outlined in various plans and studies that we've conducted over the years but as we've just been discussing funding is not available to realize that vision plan and so we want to be clear about how we would invest in our system based upon this master plan the fiscally constrained scenario is really our promise to the community about where we will focus our limited resources for the next five years

[174:01] and for our parks in particular we'll be focusing on operations and maintenance as well as our capital investments and on ensuring that our existing amenities are maintained well we will prioritize projects that reduce our maintenance backlog and improve operational efficiencies that either maintain or reduce the burdens on our operations and maintenance additional infusions of funding will prioritize adding amenities in areas that are currently underserved or implementing projects that improve the resilience of existing resources such as increasing our rotational pruning and planting of new trees that support the urban tree canopy and the other benefits that trees provide to our community and again within our existing funding levels for our facilities we'll focus on the continued operation and maintenance of our facilities to ensure that they

[175:02] continue to be a resource for the community current cip plans include projects to maintain well both the east boulder community center and the north boulder recreation center south boulder recreation center is quickly approaching the end of its useful life and is at the point where repairs will make less and less sense given the building's age and facility condition index the existing south boulder recreation center also does not meet the city goals of welcoming all members of our community giving given the challenges related to the accessibility of this aging structure replacing this building is not funded in the fiscally constrained scenario and something we anticipate exploring through citywide budgeting and funding opportunities additional funding for our facilities could provide for improvements at existing facilities to recognize the ever-changing needs of our community two previous points about needing to have spaces that are flexible and meet the

[176:01] needs the current needs of the community or also making improvements to the resilience of existing amenities that can include things like replacing our quartz with post-tension concrete that stands up to increased usage and has a longer life span or converting some of our natural grass fields to artificial turf that provides more playability with less maintenance and for our recreation services within the fiscally constrained scenario fees will continue to increase across the board to keep up with expenses and financial aid will be dependent upon grants and philanthropy services for our priority populations will also be dependent upon grants and philanthropy as the general fund subsidy is stretched to support age based discounts and the current level of financial aid

[177:02] so i walked through those alternatives quickly and we have two questions the first one does council have any input on our plan alternatives as they've been presented here and support the initiatives of the fiscally constrained scenario i see bob's hand up um i am fine with um the plan having a fiscally constrained set of uh descriptions and also with it having the second tier of action i think a good example of an action alternative is what you just mentioned as far as the south boulder rec center where we're going to have to try to find funding to develop and replace that as it reaches the end of its economic useful life but i'd like to make a really really strong pitch and i'm going to say this on every master plan as long as i'm on council for getting rid of the vision category it just gets us into trouble we put it in every master plan

[178:01] we you know the chapter starts if money was no object dot dot dot here's what we would do and we money's always an object i don't know why we have vision plans they only get us into trouble because what people do is they skip over the chapter one physically constrain and skip over chapter two in action they go right to the vision and they say it says right here on page 47 that we're going to do these things and we can't do these things we never can do these things and we have a really big problem right now with the library because people are pointing to the vision plan for the library and saying why aren't we doing these things we need to go out and create a library district what i don't want to do is adopt this master plan this year and then five years from now or 10 years from now have a group of residents come to us and say we need to create a parks district because we're not doing the vision plan so let's stop doing the vision plan because we'll never ever do the vision plan take it out keep in the other two chapters and let's focus on what we can do to fund action

[179:03] okay looks like aaron's next yes so uh i do support you moving forward starting with that fiscally constrained um start and then with this idea of maybe having some targeted uh possibilities for implementing action items you know that's subject to you know the department's thoughts and discretion but run past the your analysis i'll just say i was really impressed by the mapping exercise that was done of the investment need prioritization that overlaid the environmental needs uh with the income-based needs i thought that was really powerful and compelling and so i uh i'm really glad to see equity-based mapping like that allow us to make more data-driven decisions about where we need to make investments so maybe if you can use that in similar analyses to think about where our targeted opportunities are to

[180:01] to make some additional investments i think that would be fantastic i'll just mention uh tree canopy as is one of those things you know you talk about star one appreciating asset um and it is in investments in our urban tree canopy are a long-term investment in our uh cities kind of resilient and climate sensitive future so and it's also one of those areas where uh can benefit you know lower income communities who often don't have as good of a tree cover so that's an area that i think is definitely worth looking at in particular but i think you all are absolutely on the right track and taking care of what we have needs to be the priority and a limited amount of additional initiatives make sense so keep at the magnificent work super appreciative of everything you've done also of the parks and rec advisory board i know uh chuck brock is here tonight we haven't heard from him but chuck appreciate your your efforts really appreciate everybody else on

[181:00] prab's efforts and i know you'll steward this master plan to a successful conclusion um and the implementation of it as well and there chuck popped up high check thanks for being here that's all again track is a huge visionary just just a shout out to chuck okay uh we have nicole next i just had a clarifying question um first and you talked about the the potential kind of alternative methods of getting some additional funding um for parks and rec is that to sort of meet that fiscally constrained um uh option does my question make sense so like we talked about some other you know and i know you've been thinking about other ways to generate revenue is that just to meet the fiscally constrained or is that for some of the um other ones um regina do you want to take a crack at this sure i'll start um

[182:00] so primarily those revenue generating and the conversations that we just had with council initially is to really get us to that recommended funding level for fiscally constrained so that we can fully realize the asset management the operations and maintenance to maintain the system in the way that it is right now um and and kind of make some um necessary improvements as far as being able to take additional steps into that action sort of level that would be require additional funding things like the ccrs tax um grants specific donations things like that that can actually bump us up in into that action level uh of funding i i think there's a really good example that at the scott carpenter pool where we built a capital stack to achieve community means that aligned with the various funding sources so the replacement of the aging lap pool and the bath house was funded with parks and recreation capital dollars the

[183:02] expansion of the lap pool was built with impact fee money that is dedicated to parks and recreation development the whole new family fund was funded in the last round of the community culture and safety tax so what we try to do is dedicate parks and recreation money sending money to taking care of what we have and then if in a project there's a way to do a little bit plus it's with other sources of funding so that so that the base funding is always going to base needs thank you thank you ellie yeah lauren wait oh nicole did you ever i wasn't quite done i'm sorry i just wanted to um i wanted to now answer um your question um for us and and yes i mean i i do support um the um the sort of fiscally constrained and the steps to try to get us there um and the general philosophy of um taking care of of what we have and you know i think what's um a little the library district was mentioned um you know what's a little bit different here is that you

[184:00] know you're not putting into the master plan um saying that we're going to have a parks and rec district so i think you know just just keeping the master plan to the things that that we can achieve um is is really good and um i think that that was the difference with the libraries master plan is that the library district was actually in the master plan as something that we were going to um try to achieve and so um i just i really want to uh be very vocal and and clarify that in our giving you this guidance that you know we want this uh take care of what we have philosophy we're really um holding ourselves this current council as well as future councils to supporting um what's going to be in there and to supporting that philosophy and so i think that's just important for us to carry forward in our decision making that being the council that's working on this master plan that will you know prove it um we're really holding ourselves and future councils to what's in here

[185:00] well said um we have lauren thank you um so i kind of wanted to touch on a point that aaron brought up about the urban tree canopy um just reading through the fiscally conservative option um it mentions um philanthropy and partnership is you know some of the ways that we'll be funding this and i just wanted to know if we have a way to you know because one of my concerns is that when we look at the city as a whole it's um typically underrepresented you know neighborhoods that um are lower income and things like that that don't have the same kind of urban tree canopy as the rest of um the city and so through those mechanisms would we still be able to focus on um in uh

[186:00] improving our urban tree canopy specifically in those areas what i think i hear you asking lauren is is if we base building canopy growth on philanthromy partnerships is it pay to play or pay to grow or how do you make sure that those decisions are also equity based and i know regina and the team are having wonderful conversations doing a lot of really great work and she can answer that for you thank you yeah so um especially as it relates to the work that our parks and recreation department does related to our tree canopy our our forestry team is already starting to think about how they can operationalize that equity mapping that i touched on briefly and looking at especially the environmental need index about where do we have low low tree canopy where do we have public spaces that can handle additional tree plantings things that are irrigated where there is space for those trees to grow and really mature and thrive

[187:00] and then also thinking about if there aren't areas for public tree plantings within those kind of darkest areas of need are there ways that we can work with other departments whether it's transportation or planning and development services to really build partnerships through like the cool boulder initiative and others that support planting in those areas so it's really trying to look holistically across across that canopy and how we can work to improve that canopy thank you um and then i guess so in general i support this i think you know and the only areas that i have any concern over are sort of you know the tree canopy because like we said that's something that's value increases over time and also you know trying to look for opportunities like you know youth volunteering especially if those opportunities can provide

[188:03] you know um like free labor seems like i get that you know there's a management aspect to that and all of that but if there is any way that that can be close to cost recovery um or help with anything else i would love to see that looked at thanks lauren i want to insert myself right here before met sorry but that's a good thing about leaving a meeting you can do that so um i just want to say a community member ally and regina had a a really good thought and it was about the east boulder community um east bulldog community sub community plan and he talked about putting parklets in versus just one giant belmont park and when i was driving around with the folks from the city around east boulder there was a real lack of parklets trees

[189:01] everything so does um i really like that idea for the reason that that you know the 50 walking right walking to a park is super important to me i know to a lot of people so i don't know if the master plan is a place for something like this and he thought it was but i wanted to since we were talking about heat islands and tree canopies lauren was i just wanted to put in um a little two cents that that would be an awesome thing because i am concerned about east boulder being a heat island arnold regina to talk specifically about park development and as it relates to the east boulder sub community plan because um parks and recreation was involved and consulted on that project but i want to respond to the comment about belmont city park um to remind the community and council parks and recreation owns um 100 or so acres on the south side of belmont across from the developed bike park and um east of what is currently just a playing field

[190:00] there's a concept plan for that park that includes the development of several multi-use fields a soft surface running track and many other um facilities that that we do need in the community and so we would not advocate for breaking that park up um we think it's amenities are going to be required especially if um you know one of our hopes is at mapleton if you can picture that park there are currently three ball fields um with an incredible amount of density happening around it just to the east at boulder junction so our plan is to re-design that park to two inward-facing fields but it's really could be a park most of the time to serve that population growing there which means taking away a field that we hope to build at belmont so did you think i wanted to take away the park no i didn't want to make belmont smaller i wanted to add parklets to east boulder i heard you say not develop the big park and i got very nervous now you know sometimes could you talk to the east boulder sub community plan in just the comments about parks and and how

[191:00] important they'll be in that area yeah absolutely um and so with the recommendations within the east boulder sub-community plan there is definitely an increase in residential development potentially in the east boulder sub-community area and we recognize that currently within that sub-community there are no neighborhood parks and so that is part of why within the plan alternatives that we've identified in this master plan is to develop the um at least the community benefit amenities within belmont city park so those are things like playgrounds and the multi-use fields that really are more similar to the amenities that you would find in the neighborhood park to be able to provide services for the increased residential development that is suggested or planned for really the park flanks so that those eastern and western edges of belmont city park and really being able to to provide some park services to those communities

[192:01] as far as the idea of you know additional parklets we all know that the value of land in boulder is extremely high and so acquiring new park property was not highly um favored by a lot of our community within our statistically valid survey so that would acquiring additional land for those types of park amenities would be a challenge if we were thinking about thing i think the sub-community plan also calls out for public paseos and public public park like spaces and i think that that is definitely supported within um that sub-community plan and making sure that the increased residential in the east boulder is served by park services in some way or another thanks regina and ali for speaking to that and that community member i hope you're listening

[193:01] matt thank you much um let's see i'll uh answer i think i've kind of already touched on question one a bit already in some previous comments um and i do support um you know that more intense focus on taking care of what we have given the sort of limited tax subsidies i think where we're headed is what we've got to do and and so i appreciate the thoughtfulness to limit the negative impacts while trying to boost as much service and certainly those alternatives are a good way to go um since it was talking about sort of urban forestry i do want to mention that osmp also has a forestry plan and so i think at some point it's helpful to maybe unify the parks and rec and open space plans for that more holistic view which i think will then suss out some greater details about where there's either shared resources or opportunities um with regards to a larger forestry conversation we talked about with wildfire and other things and so i think that that that's an opportunity that we have um to go forward um and i'm also

[194:00] curious who won council bingo by mention a mention of the library district tonight um so that was unexpected and you know without vision we wouldn't have landed on the moon without vision we would not have open space and without vision we would be doing nothing more than walking the trail while staring at our feet so i do think that that vision is essential for us to have the aspirations to uh think big and to go places we may not otherwise go so i think that's a real important thing to keep in there um and not be too worried about what people are interpreting when maybe they're not reading the whole document thank you we're going to stay off the library district tonight we're going to focus on parks and rec so uh ali you have more uh it seems like we heard from everybody do you have more you want to say um i think we heard answers from everything and so i owe aaron brockett

[195:00] like some dessert or ice cream or something because he asked us multiple times at cac you've requested two hours do you need two hours um and he gave it to us but you all have been very effective and efficient in your conversation i i appreciate it i want to just check with both our design workshop team in regina and see if there was anything specifically we wanted to ask about and and i did just think of one and i'll come back to it but regina becky eric nothing else from us i just wanted to um double check with council that you didn't there wasn't any additional um conversation around question two on the slide that i have shared um on the screen about and the more intense focus on taking care of what we have i think we've covered a lot of that ground in all the conversation that we've done had this evening but if there was any other input that we hadn't gotten related to

[196:01] question number two on the slide here okay it seems like everybody says this means that new services will be very limited is understood and we support you in that okay is that it people i'm looking up i see aaron bracket with a hand up well after ali uh did that uh comment i just have to say ali the this was a shorter discussion because you all laid out the material so extremely well so you gave us a lot to talk about but in a way that was easy to address on a relatively quick basis and anyway once again you've done an extraordinary job thanks again am i not getting any credit for pushing this meeting along what is happening here and tara who is organized this very efficiently sorry jarrah okay well with no more i'm there's oh look we have rachel real quick um i did want to remind ally that you know matt benjamin and i are

[197:00] also on cac so if ice cream is going out like i don't call my air bracket um but also you know it was it was so nice to have uh chuck from prab here and and we didn't hear a lot from him so i just wanted to invite if there was anything he he wanted to make sure we considered that that he had the opportunity to um share or you know chime in and wanted to say thanks for taking the time to be here with us it's generally very helpful and i think that ally and team and you all at crab did teed up so well we didn't have a lot of questions but duck says uh yeah i guess i'd like to make a one one comment um you've seen how great ali's team is and ally is herself at presenting at running the parks department and presenting these materials she's really fantastic um one of the concerns i'd like to bring the council's attention is sort of a broader question of stovepiping of different departments and for example you're talking about urban tree canopies in the area of 30th

[198:00] street where there's a lack that largely is involves transportation where they need to rebuild the street and provide space for an open tree canopy and similarly boulder housing partners in that area is going to be developing a new low-income housing complex next to the mobile home park but there's no multi-use path that would allow connection between the mobile home park through that facility to the adjacent park which is very close as a result it shows as a service desert in the parks and recreation picture so i think that there needs to be more discussion about interdepartmental communication and co-aligning of master plans um to sort of reach these broader community goals and parking is another one right we have a city-wide parking strategy not just one at parks and recreation facilities but something that's comprehensive that drives our transportation goals and our climate goals thanks

[199:01] i'm so glad i asked you to chime in thank you for all that it's really helpful perspective you're really great comment about 30th street i agree let me let us know what we can do allie to get that interdepartmental cooperation happening especially along the boulder housing partner area and 30th street i don't know what can be done but we want to know anybody else i don't see any hands anybody else going once going twice nobody okay so with no more items on tonight's agenda i'm going to close this meeting at 9 29 p.m on tuesday april 26th thank you all so very much thank you ali and all your team they're amazing

[201:19] you