May 10, 2022 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[6:16] all right just i assume my audio is working give it a quick test [Music] thank you all right now we've got a lot of council members coming in let's make sure we promote [Music]

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[8:23] okay and did tara make it in oh she's coming in right now i got to show every technological prowess the snow well done tara okay with that are we ready to officially do i just declare it so i'm going to declare it so i've got a nod from truth

[9:00] i'm declaring it then hi uh i'm rachel friend i'm the mayor pro tem um and the council procedure rule one provides that the mayor or the mayor pro-tem in the mayor's absence shall serve as the chair of the council at all regular council meetings um but tonight the mayor mayor brockett will be attending the meeting but is not able to chair the meeting therefore i am looking for a motion to suspend the procedure and allow me as the mayor pro tem to chair the meeting second thank you uh would that be a show of hands elisha all in favor i think i count unanimous there okay great we will now move to the business of the meeting rachel do we need to roll call before we start any of that no i'm going to do announcements and then roll call i think okay i just didn't know if we had a roll call before vote sorry oh sorry did that's true that was an

[10:00] early vote do we need to go back and roll call since we just did a special motion there it's a good question by council member benjamin uh maybe i can just reconfirm that vote after we do roll call that would be fine all right i'm gonna get through the announcements here so we just uh one announcement tonight on covet 19 vaccinations and i think we have a slide thank you uh so for testing for information and provider locations for free covet 19 testing please go to www dot dot covidtesting and you can be tested right here in boulder at 24 45 stasio drive in boulder it's seven days a week eight am to six pm and uh please get tested if you are having any symptoms for vaccinations and vaccine information and providers please go to www.voco.org covid vaccine with that we are done with the announcements i believe and i will now uh call to order the

[11:00] special meeting of council on tuesday may 3rd 2022 and we will begin with a call and order call to order and roll call so i think i'll turn it over to elisha and you are on mute okay yep okay great and just for the record it's tuesday night 10. elisha you're a little loud am i okay let me do some adjustments i mean i should say not you your computer right you're always perfect thank you all right is that better now you're a little too soft but we'll work with it yeah and google google gave me some different settings so i'm trying to get

[12:01] all that reset so is that you're perfect now okay great thank you and again for the record it is tuesday may 10th all right thank you and good evening everyone we will start this roll call tonight with councilmember benjamin present rocket present concourse present mayor pro tem friend heir councilmember joseph is absent councilmember spear present wallach here weiner here and yates present mayor pro tem we have our quorum great thanks um okay i apologize for the uh messed up date there um so first i think we want to make a motion to amend the agenda i think there may be two separate ones there um first we need a motion to

[13:00] move the agenda to remove item 3a which was to accept the april 26 2022 study session summary on wildfire resilience and we're going to move that instead to may 17th and then bob i think also had an additional motion so bob maybe you'd like to make both yeah i'll make both before i make any motion i i'd like to maybe just throw this open for a little bit of a discussion to see what the will of counsel is so as i look at our agenda tonight we have five uh important items on the agenda first we're on in a few minutes we're gonna hear an important declaration read by our colleague nicole speer then second we move into a consent agenda which has some housekeeping and minute items but also has a probably a relatively lengthy discussion around gun violence prevention and our city attorney is looking for some direction of counsel perhaps we'll get to a first reading on that tonight perhaps we won't depend on where the direction goes so that's item two the third kind of big chunk is the continued public hearing on the east boulder sub community plan the fourth

[14:00] item is an update from staff and taxation of electronic smoking devices and some direction they're looking for there and the fifth and final uh big item is the discussion on the potential 2022 ballot items at a minimum i'd like to suggest to my colleagues that we further continue the public hearing on the east boulder subject community plan as council and the community know the planning board spent about seven hours with this last thursday night council received just a few hours ago a detailed memo from staff i took them the weekend and yesterday to put that together because there were a number of amendments proposed by the planning board i think council members have not had a good time to digest that and we do have some council members that are either absent tonight or are feeling under the weather so i'd like to suggest that we do one of two things depending on the will of council either we just plain old continue that until we have more time to review the staff memo and um and have a full

[15:03] complement of council members present or if it's the will of counsel to at least perhaps hear a presentation from staff uh brief presentation from staff and ask questions relating to the planning board deliberations but in either event we would not vote tonight on that so that's i guess proposition number one and kind of two choices there either for the whole thing or or mostly defer it um counsel depending on how people are feeling may also choose to defer uh the discussion on the taxation of electronic smoking devices um that i don't believe is time sensitive it's really direction of counsel to staff on that i think that's something that we could probably tackle in a few weeks cac can schedule that so i'd like to suggest that we maybe defer that as well if council members and staff would really like to tackle that tonight that's fine that's entirely up to folks at a minimum i like to suggest that we get through the consent agenda particularly the gun violence prevention legislation and then if people are still feeling

[16:00] up to it at the end of the evening i'd like to suggest that we start and perhaps complete the potential discussion discussion on potential 2022 ballot items so i'm gonna um maybe pause there and maybe rachel you could open up to just kind of a free-flowing discussion and then depending on where people seem to be sitting on on those couple of potential referrals i can then make a formal motion okay thanks bob and um maybe you should also make a motion um to suspend the rules that we voted on before we took a roll call sure um this is uh with respect to your leading meeting yeah so i'll just make that formality i move that that was extending the fact that uh mayor brockett is present that we uh uh permit uh mayor pro tem friend to lead the meeting second all in favor oh mayor brackett did you want to speak to that we just voted well but yes i just if i could just comment thanks so much for doing this my voice

[17:00] is just simply not up to leading a four plus hour meeting so rachel i really appreciate you taking the reins tonight and i'll just speak at the occasional sentence here and there but let's save my voice appreciate it take care of yourself you're welcome um okay so to bob's uh maybe i'll just split it into two-part discussion um and then matt i see your hand up so we could go one of two ways on east boulder sub community planning one we could just continue it all together and take it off the agenda now or two we could sort of shrink it and and hear just the staff update on what happened at planning board and sit with that and um come back and just continue the rest of it so maybe we could do a straw poll on first if we would like to continue it and then if we would like to do option one or two so i see some hands up though matt and then mark um might i suggest that since we just tackle one one piece because we still have on the consent um agenda the wildfire protection so do you mind if i just make a motion to pull that off of consent and then we can tackle uh wild

[18:02] uh uh uh shows you i'm still dealing with my my sickness as well um the east boulder sub community plan and then we just get that off the radar instead of holding that one hostage um it's fine with me i'd like to make a motion to uh remove uh item 2a from the consent agenda and reschedule it for the may 17th meeting on the wildfire protection resiliency regarding the study session we had about that second is that a show of hands alicia yes ma'am all in favor looks unanimous okay mark i was just going to speak in terms of um supporting moving the uh east boulder sub community plan conversation uh to next week or the week thereafter um unless we are under some legal

[19:00] uh time constraint to do that um i would i certainly would like to have a more considered uh look at what planning board did you know getting a memo at one o'clock in the afternoon when we're having a five o'clock uh meeting with bvsd um is uh not really adequate time for considerations if we need to act that's one thing if we don't need to act we have some very very big ticket items tonight and i'd like to give them the attention that they are due so i would support moving are you asking do you have a preference of uh kind of a versus b on move the whole thing or again i would move i would move the whole thing um and then and then deal with the whole thing uh as in itself a very very big ticket item um as opposed to chopping it into chunks okay um nicole i see your hand but i'm just gonna ask teresa real quick if you can let us know is there an issue with um continuing this hearing are we gonna

[20:02] need sort of time pressure to vote i'm not aware of any requirement um that you vote within a number certain number of days of planning excuse me of planning board acting um i would invite kathleen or charles to weigh in if i'm mistaken on that okay thank you very much there's nothing that would uh preclude council from continuing this this evening okay thanks nicole yes um regarding that i i also have not had a chance to um review the everything from planning board so i would appreciate um having a little more time to be able to do that and make a thoughtful decision um and then the other thing though that i'm noting is i believe we have staff here who are probably prepared to give a presentation tonight and so i am just wondering if to be respectful of staff and their time if they are ready and prepared uh to give a presentation tonight that we

[21:00] listen to their presentation and perhaps ask clarifying questions not um discussion questions and uh come back to the discussion on a later date you're kind of voting for option b maybe in this straw a straw poll not a vote sorry straw poby all right i think uh tara's next i wouldn't mind hearing the presentation so that i have a week at least to think about it so in that sense if we heard the clarifying explanations about the various things that happened in planning board from kathleen from staff's point of view that also could be helpful for me to understand where they're coming from and be able to study it better so either way i'm fine as with either option a or b but i'm leaning towards b but i'm whatever the middle of counsel thanks lauren did you have a hand up and disappeared it's back yeah i guess i was gonna vote

[22:01] i think a preference for option a but i would be interested to hear what staff has to say about whether they would prefer to give the presentation an hour later i can see pros and cons in my brain for like having it fresh or letting it saturate for a week um david gear interim planning director i think our preference would be just to bring the whole thing back at a subsequent meeting and um in the in the intervening time if council members have questions on what um was presented uh via the hotline earlier today we would be grateful for those questions and we will frankly it will help us prepare for hopefully an even better conversation when we come back to it that's super helpful david thank you um and i'll just weigh in then i see your hand up again bob uh i think that especially because we're missing one colleague and this is such a critical plan that it's in my opinion and we have

[23:01] a couple council members who are here who are under the weather it is probably better to get us out a little bit earlier and have it come back when when everybody's got um a fresh whatever whatever you're left with from covid lungs brain um so i i would vote or my inclination is is kind of column a and lauren i think maybe i'm moving you over to column a from the straw poll because you wanted to hear from staff so tentatively gonna do that and then um i will probably do a straw poll before bob makes a motion but bob i was just gonna make a motion light of what what david just said on behalf of staff and in light of junie's absence if that's okay with council so i move that we continue further continue um the public hearing on item four a until such time as cac reschedules second is this just a show of hands elicia yes think so okay on favor

[24:01] i think that's everyone bob and then we had a part two to your motion which was um possibly to defer the electronic smoking devices did you want to make a motion on that now or is that something you want to come back to later in the agenda after you see where we are we could do it either way um maybe why don't i make a motion i don't feel strongly about it one more another but let's just maybe a test council i'll just make a motion if it fails that's fine we can always make a motion later in the evening if people are feeling tired so i'll just move that we remove also remove item five a from the agenda for this evening and have it rescheduled by cac let's see how many votes that garners anyone want to oh is this going to give an offer it looks like lauren's got a hand up they may want to speak to that's my first question thanks rachel um i thought one of the reasons that we had this on the agenda was because there was a ballot potential ballot implication and so i'm

[25:01] concerned about if we move it will we still have the time to address that if we decide to um is kathy haddock or another staff member here who could speak to that or theresa i see kathy but you are on mute you are muted thank you i have to push two buttons um we uh we are looking at it for them but um we do have some time ideally we get first reading of ordinances to you by june so if you want to push it up there is time thanks nicole yeah i'm just gonna ask the same thing um since we asked planning board staff but not um the staff have been working on this ballot measure um do you have a preference on tonight versus in a week or two joel

[26:02] you are muted and i i should have said this at the outset of the meeting but if staff members could introduce themselves when they're first on apologies uh council i was again also on a google meeting that had my uh speakers different joel wagner texan special projects manager staff is ready for tonight but we can also be ready uh on the 17th or or the following week we'll be in front of you to discuss another item on the 17th as well so um we serve it your pleasure thank you it's joel and then are we doing straw poll no we're not doing straw pops bob has a motion so wait okay i see matt tanned up first and bob i don't know if you have a new hand up okay matt thanks rachel um well as one of those who um is battling um i'd rather tbd these last two items because if uh i'm at least speaking for

[27:00] myself if i'm if i'm running strong i i'd like to try to knock them out because i know how full our schedules are i mean we have business meetings basically all the way till recess with the exception of maybe one study session so we've already filled them out and so i appreciate the deference to want to slide some of these items for us some of us not feeling well but if we are marching through things rather well and i'm feeling all right i'd like to just tbd and and then decide to tackle it which one as we go whether it be the uh smoking stuff and then potential ballot measures so i i need to predetermine the outcome now because if i've got some energy and some vigor i'm gonna use it before i crash that's helpful thanks matt um okay so bob's there's a motion on the floor and um i i'll just speak briefly i'm kind of where matt is i'd rather wait and see how fast we move through stuff but to bob's motion um why don't i suggest why don't i withdraw the motion and um let's just do a check-in let me suggest we do a check-in at the end of consent and if people are feeling tired and

[28:00] and they'd rather that sounds great sorry you cut out there for a minute i didn't mean to talk over you uh anyone opposed to that plan of action all right great moving on so we are um still on the consent agenda and i imagine that we have a presentation for consent item 2c i will turn it over to teresa and nuria i think we actually have a the declaration first sorry sorry nicole i was right down on my consent i'm very excited i'm going to invite you now to do your uh declaration in honor of turquoise takeover week great thank you and i just wanted to know i have my grant my late grandfather present this is jack he's a world war ii veteran diesel mechanic and grower of the most amazing tomatoes in the northwest this is my mother-in-law brenda um who i

[29:00] carry with me in spirit since she passed away from lung cancer a couple years ago and i just want to invite anyone else who has loved ones who have passed away from lung cancer or who are battling lung cancer at the moment just please hold them in your hearts as we read this declaration about every two and a half minutes a person in the u.s is diagnosed with lung cancer and lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths for women and men lung cancer screening saves lives and advocacy and increased awareness will result in more high risk individuals getting screened public support for research funding can result in new treatments and better methods of early detection lung force is a national initiative to defeat lung cancer led by the american lung association utilizing the color turquoise to signify air breathing and healthy lungs we the city council of the city of boulder declare the second week in may

[30:01] as turquoise takeover week and encourage all community members of the city of boulder to learn more about lung cancer risk factors and early detection thank you thank you so much nicole do we have anyone here to receive the declaration hi good evening um council um mayor pro tem uh friend um i'm nick torres i'm advocacy director for the american lung association in colorado and also border resident um so i'm very grateful for for you council or spear for sharing your your loved ones memories um i'm just grateful for the for the declaration this week um as you heard lung cancer is the leading cause of death among cancers among both women and men turquoise takeover is all about raising awareness and really addressing some of the stigmas often attached with lung cancer

[31:01] we try to emphasize that anyone can get lung cancer if you have lungs you can get lung cancer about two-thirds of diagnoses in fact are among low-risk folks who never smoke tobacco or have quit and so we're just emphasizing that we're making progress and the lung cancer survival rates have actually risen about 33 percent in the last 10 years but we have a long way to go in colorado our 2021 state of lung cancer report found that colorado ranks uh 38 for screening and so we're really trying to do our best to raise awareness and encourage folks to uh to get screened and to be aware of access that they have to for screening in early detection because early detection really does translate higher survival rates so just very grateful for the recognition this evening thank you thanks so much for being here and for the work that you're doing to help save lives i want to say my i like nicole my grandfather my mom's dad also died of lung cancer so um hits home and and again appreciate

[32:00] you being here in the work anyone else oh tara might as well take this minute to think about my mom who died of lung cancer just a few years ago thanks tara okay with that oh lauren just an architectural plug um you know we often think of the in fact risk factors like smoking but we live in an area where radon our soils and the gases that they create um put us all at a higher risk and so making sure that people have their basement spaces tested is a really important part of making sure we keep stay healthy that's a great point thank you okay i'm going to turn this over to elisha now i think to take us into the consent agenda yes ma'am thank you we have on tonight's agenda item number

[33:01] two which is our consent agenda for the record item a was removed and we will be voting on items b through d thanks and now i'm going to try again um to turn this over to nuria um or theresa or it looks like i see louise up already so um staff please take us take it away thanks so much rachel and i believe uh luis is going to take us through unless theresa you want to say anything for framing if not luis take it away okay thank you i and i'm sharing the screen whoops that is not i'm supposed to be adept at this from doing evidentiary hearings on uh uh uh virtually so let's start let's try that again

[34:05] okay so is that the right screen it should be the um gun violence prevention slideshow we are seeing it it's not in slideshow mode but we do see it in front of us okay let me there we go that's what i wanted to have all right so there's six potential ordinances before council tonight i'm going to walk through them with this slideshow by way of background in 2018 after the parkland florida shooting the city passed the bans on assault weapons and large capacity magazines among other things we also banned bump stocks and raise the age to possess firearms to 21. there was litigation that followed that in state and federal court in the state court case that went first results in a ruling that our ordinances were preempted by colorado state law then the

[35:00] king super shooting happened and there was a movement in the legislature to repeal that preemption statute which has now happened so what we're attempting to do here is reinstate the ordinance that was previously preempted and then also to add on some new uh gun violence protection so we are going to go through these ordinances one at a time so the big one is 84.94 it's similar but not identical to the 2018 ordinances the biggest change is that the 2018 organs had some language that said that intent is not an element but the state law that governs what municipalities can do says that um the the the city has to we can only punish intentional violations and so we've took out the language that says intent is no longer an element

[36:00] in addition to the assault weapons ban it limits large capacity magazines to 10 rounds or fewer or in other words 11 rounds or more it's considered a large capacity magazine and band it bans not only bump stocks but all rapid fire trigger activators those are devices that effectively help make a semi-automatic rifle which fires one round at a time behave more like a machine gun and fire fire multiple rounds uh it reinstates the raising the age to possess firearms to 21. it adds a new severability clause in case there's more future litigation and any portion of the ordinance is declared unconstitutional or preempted or is otherwise unenforceable were this would allow the the remainder of the ordinance to stay intact and finally as britain it would allow legacy weapons owned as of july 1 uh 2022 to be

[37:02] certified a similar procedure was followed in 2018 and people who uh wanted to to keep their legacy assault weapon were allowed to obtain two certificates one to keep with the weapon and one to keep in a safe place the city didn't retain any copies of those certificates and that's to basically allow legacy firearms holders to continue to possess those weapons and whether to keep that in the ordinance is of course uh up to city council moving to ordinance 85 25 this relates to carrying of weapons and basically restricts the carrying of firearms it would prohibit carrying firearms in city properties also with demonstrations in near polling locations and then it would there's a list of private facilities that would carry would also be banned but in that sub-category were saying that

[38:00] firearms could be carried with explicit permission of the operating authority so there are some uh unfortunately facilities in our cities that feel we need to have armed guards and uh we want to respect the ability of those facilities to to have that and not um you know ban that and allow them to have that flexibility ordinance 85 26 is the ghost guns ordinance these are guns that are assembled either from kits that you buy on the internet or from 3d printers and they lack serial numbers which is a violation of federal law there is federal action forthcoming on ghost guns but in the meantime we do have this proposed ordinance that bans them and if it's a civil offense unless there's intent once again the knowledge requirement that there has to be knowledge in order to

[39:00] hold someone criminally liable that's the intent here that it's a criminal offense if the person has a ghost gun with intent to sell or distribute that weapon then ordinance 8527 generally prohibits open carrying of weapons in public in public places there's some exemptions to comply with state law most significantly we have to allow people to travel through the city in a motor vehicle or other private means of conveyance which could mean a bicycle but only if you're traveling through town you get to hunting or some other activity like that and that's required by state law it's a preemption statute that's still on the books then what's permitted is to carry unloaded firearms in a locked opaque case that's recognizable as a kind of case and then we have an exemption for private security guards who carry firearms in

[40:01] the course and scope of their duties and then the last two both relate to sales of firearms one requires signage at gun shops and i'll show the language in a moment and the second is a 10-day waiting period before taking delivery of a firearm this is designed to prevent impulsive suicide or impulsive crime if people want to do something bad and they don't have a gun we want to have a cooling off period rather than just going to the gun store and buying something and doing something impulsive so the 10 days begin with the initiation of the background checks sometimes the background check is takes a while usually no more than a couple of days but those if there's a delay in completing the background check that time counts as part of the ten days and so it's not um it doesn't

[41:00] it's not ten days after you pass the background check and i wanted to show the signage this is the proposed signage that would be required at gun shops to be posted that includes the colorado uh crisis on the hotline number and as you can see it notifies consumers that actually having a firearm makes you less safe statistics show so that's the um so that's my presentation my brief presentation overview of the ordinances and i'm willing to entertain any questions council may have i know you all looked at this and they have many questions thanks so much louise while people are putting together their questions and i anticipate you're right we will get some um i wondered if nuria i think might be the right person

[42:00] to ask this if you could maybe go over sort of the process of of this suite of gun violence prevention ordinances that we're looking at such as i imagine members of the public who don't watch all of our meetings might not know you know what the vote tonight means versus what's coming up when they may have an opportunity to testify at a public hearing um and sort of how this will roll out over the coming months so if you could speak to that and sort of what we're doing tonight that might be helpful sure i'm happy to take a stab at it and i'm sure steph will correct me whenever i'm wrong because that's what happens but tonight really we're taking a look at it and seeing if there are any clarifications any questions you may have theresa and her team certainly are here to respond um to see that as we move forward on this um what is deemed a first reading if that changes and there are requests

[43:01] to alter in a substantive matter we have held may 24th i believe and that will come up in a subsequent vote as we talk about here we've held a day for a special meeting if we need to do it to really bring that back to council which might effectively make that a first reading and then on june 7th we plan to come back to hopefully have that second reading and have an opportunity then for a public hearing and hear from community as they now have the final language on what is to be voted on so we've got some opportunities to weigh in and to ask for clarification and if there are substantive changes from today we just wanted to make sure that we built in some extra time during that week but we will see at the end of this consent agenda teresa what in all of that have i mucked up horribly that was an excellent summary thank you thanks neria and theresa um so i just

[44:00] want to emphasize that members of the public will have an opportunity to speak and be heard on june 7th at the second reading the public hearing on this uh and and we uh look forward to receiving emails as well uh in the intervening weeks so um and and also the the more full language of each of these ordinances is available online for people to look at so i just know that sometimes uh people who who are not regulars at council meeting can come to a first reading and think that we at the end of it have voted on something that is is not actually yet a past ordinance so wanted to clarify that for for people who may be newcomers tonight and with that i will um turn over to mark and then bob just uh i guess about three fairly short questions um uh i note that we we ban uh weapons from theaters and groceries um first i assume theaters includes movie theaters yes okay um

[45:00] there are other facilities that tend to attract a lot of people such as gyms why did we include some but but not include those uh really the list is mostly places where these types of shootings have happened uh i'm not aware of one happening in the gym but you're right that could happen and there could be a more exhaustive list of those locations and we're trying to capture some of that in the prohibition on carrying in public places that would encompass places like gyms that are accessible to the public okay um mark do you mind if i colloquy on that sure you're moving on to the next one um louise is there anything that would stop a particular gym under what we're looking at or under current law from um prohibiting carry in their private facility oh no the private the property owner can always ban guns in their facility they don't

[46:02] need us to do that okay so like is it is it fair to say then that we're sort of flipping the default with with you know to mark's question of like we're going to prohibit at certain places anybody any private place can already prohibit right but we're sort of in these particular spots flipping the default of whether it's going to be prohibited or allowed i think that's a good way of looking at it okay thanks that was the perfect colloquy as that was my next question so thank you um we saved some time um my i guess my last question then uh is we have a prohibition on magazines uh greater than 10 rounds how did we come to that particular number um you know there are a number of i guess automatic pistols that carry rounds of you know a few rounds greater than that so i i guess i'm looking for the rationale to [Music]

[47:01] use 10 as the number as opposed to something else well 15 is the default in state law so to the extent we want to be stricter than that uh 10 was the target number in 2018 but but also it relates to the the need for self-defense and usually the evidence shows that usually there's only two or three shots necessary so this is to allow some cushion to uh preserve the right to self-defense which is in the colorado constitution i i don't disagree i just wanted to understand the rationale um so thank you and those are my questions thanks mark bob i don't have any questions at this time what i wanted to do if there are no other immediate questions is to invite louise to walk us through the five questions that the attorney's office had for us on page seven of the memo because i know there are some kind of binary a versus b type of decisions that you need us to make

[48:01] tonight louise and so i was going to offer you the opportunity to walk us through and maybe do some strong pulling on where council sits on those that's fine with me if that works for your i don't know what what your plan of attack here is luis yeah uh let me uh i have to pull up the memo but i know that the first issue was whether to uh whether you want to have the legacy assault weapons certified whether that because that's not required so the first point would be whether you want to allow the certification of legacy weapons that have been acquired since the 2018 ordinance went into effect and of course during the time period after it was declared invalid rachel it's okay with you i'll since i have the floor i'll go ahead and weigh in on and respond to luis on that point and maybe other council members have the same or different opinions sure so lisa i guess my preference would be uh obviously the will of council but my

[49:00] preference going into this would be to allow people to certify uh newly purchased weapons all the way up to the effective date of this ordinance july 1 2022. presumably those who owned these weapons before the last effective date which was sometime in 2018 had the opportunity at a window of opportunity to which get certification certified certificates i know that several hundred people did and those certificates would still be good and so i think what i'm suggesting is that we just um reopen that window if this legislation passes next month we reopen that window and allow anyone who is in possession of these weapons um before july 1 2022 to obtain certificates if they haven't already that is that they either didn't obtain certificates back in 2018 or if they purchase these weapons between 2018 and the effective date which is proposed to be july 1 2022 so that's that's where i would go on that thanks bob anyone else want to speak to that prior to a struggle

[50:00] matt um i i'll i'll agree with bob i i think you know i mean well i think i'm understanding that right you know anybody who was purchasing it since our last band was knowingly purchasing an illegal weapon so you know that that's a challenge that we have to reconcile in that sense because we and them so um so so i i i think to some extent i think you know allowing allowing that pre-2018 i think is helpful but i don't know if it makes sense to do so since the 2018 because they technically were we're illegal um because we passed it so um anyway so that that i don't know if that helps narrow the the scope or provide context but it that's where i think that you're coming out not in the same way that bob is that bob is saying and let me frame this a little bit um to make sure that we all understood luis

[51:01] the same way um i think the question here is we banned assault weapons in 2018 and we legacy we allowed people to get certificates for those at the time so those if you owned an assault weapon uh before i think it was december 1st 2018 31st something like that you could certify it and and then it was a legal assault weapon going forward for the city as long as you kept your certificate now the question is um are our assault weapons ban is being uh let go and readapted and and you know this was overruled a year ago so after 2018 through the effective date of this which i think we're calling july 1st 2022 do we want to allow weapons either that were here before 2018 and not certified for whatever reason and or ones that were required between then in 2022 to be um certified anew is that louise do i have the question right you have it exactly right okay so my

[52:02] understanding from what i've heard so far is bob is saying yes if you got a new weapon or if you had not certified it uh pre pre-december 2018 we're gonna let you do it now that is that accurate bob yeah and i i really look at three different periods there's there's that effective date in 2018 and so there may be some people who didn't get a certificate there's a second group of people who may have purchased an assault weapon as matt said um perhaps illegally in 2019 or 2020 um and then then remember that a judge struck that law down and in i believe it was february march of 2021 other people may have purchased in this third period which is in the in the year or so since then which would have been legal purchases i would also believe and luis you told me if i'm wrong that when the judge struck the 2018 law down it was probably struck down as the lawyers say ab initio in other words it was never a good law to start with because it violated preemption which is the judge's ruling so while the people who may have purchased in 2019 and 2020

[53:02] may have at the time of purchase theoretically been illegal their purchases became legal but the judge determined that the ban was not effective and so we have three groups of people pre-18 those in 19 and 20 and those since 21 what i'm proposing is that all three groups be allowed to obtain a certificate if they haven't already um by july 1 2022 we're showing that they have on the web as of july 1 2022. so we'd effectively push the reset button and that would be our new day going forward and i just want to say yes i agree with your interpretation of what the judge did thanks louise thanks bob um so matt i don't know if any of that changes which column you i've got you right now sort of in in column b of if you got a certificate before 20 before the or at the right time in 2018 then you're good after that not good i think i mean we're splitting out these little time frames i think is problematic just from an

[54:01] administrative perspective i think more of it was my point of um the idea that one purchases knowingly it's illegal only in the hopes that they get um allowance from a court later on i'm concerned about that so i don't think it changes my my perception going forward i think bob is right for simplicity we just take from the date and go backward i just think it's a little problematic that we are creating an allowance for people that knowingly bought or brought a gun illegally into the city in the hopes of a court reprieve they got it but doing so again after this date i think could be problematic so anyway just it doesn't feel right but i agree with bob okay thanks lauren yeah i i think that it's important to have laws that are relative you know make it clearly and make the rule clear and easy to follow and easier to administer and so in that sense i think setting

[55:00] a new date um if the effective delay date was july and just having one date that clearly covers everything thanks um i think i think i'm hearing uh kind of same column as bob and matt mark yeah i i want to um argue in support of what lauren said and bob um i think as a matter of ease of administration um we just set the date as the effective date of uh the ordinance and um and move forward um creating distinctions between uh the motivation of people who purchased in 2018 or 19 or 20 um i i don't think is is going to be a useful basis for making those kinds of distinctions um so i i think lauren is right i think bob is also correct on this one thanks mark um i'll call on myself

[56:00] seeing no other hands at this point i i agree with matt like it's it's a philosophically i don't like what we are going to do but um i think it's the right thing to do and i think we could be um in sort of exposed facto law territory if we didn't do it that way so um i'm i'm also supportive of just setting the new date and and then you are uh legacied in with a certificate so i'll do a straw poll in a second and and if anyone disagrees with that um feel free to raise your hand now um but louise i do have one question right now there are a couple dates in there about 2018 and 2022 can that just get to lauren's point kind of streamlined and take out the certificates and or just make that easier if you've got a certificate up you know before the state you're good uh yeah i mean i apologize is the language isn't perfectly clear because the intent is that if you got a certificate in the first round you don't

[57:01] need to get a new one that those are still valid so it's it's uh i'll work on making that clearer but it's it's supposed to be that the people who had their certificate from 2018 don't need to do anything and they they just proceed as they were great thanks okay anyone else before we do a straw poll here okay uh so all in favor of legacying in um assault weapons that that are sort of that obtain a certificate prior to july 1st 2022 chopin's i think that's unanimous okay thanks luis okay the next question is a little bit uh technical so i have to give a little bit of background but the the state law there's a there's still a state preemption law on the books i

[58:00] think i mentioned that before and that's that you can't prohibit people from traveling through your jurisdiction in a private vehicle or other private means of conveyance however in the in ordinance 8525 which is the carrying in sensitive areas uh the way i wrote it is that it's if you have the firearm in a private motor vehicle then that's an ex that's an exemption but it did not extend to other private means of conveyance and that's the bicycle concern uh you know we're in a city where a lot of people travel by bicycle and we don't want people cruising around with firearms on their bikes so the way it's written the exemption would apply only to carrying a private motor vehicle and not to bicycles or other private means of uh conveyance and so i just wanted to confirm that that's the will of counsel so the the question is do we want to

[59:00] limit to just motor vehicles with this exemption exactly or or do we want to expand it to all private means of conveyance which could you know the ways people get around this town you know could be a bicycle could be a scooter it could be any number of things thanks all right bob looks like you're ready to lead us off again yeah just um first of all i support um uh not having an exemption for convincing a bicycle because then you know we have to keep in mind what we're trying to do here which is which is to um uh avoid open carry is it can often be in a point of intimidation for for people who are doing that do not have guns and and so i think we are trying to avoid people walking down the streets with firearms that are uncased i think a bike would be basically very similar to that because it'd be very apparent and obvious to to someone that a person is carrying a gun strapped to their back going down in a bicycle so i would i would analogize that closer to a

[60:00] pedestrian than a car so that's where i would be on that point louise i do have a question however with respect to a vehicle would it be possible or permissible for us to say that you can carry a gun through town in a private motor vehicle but only if that gun was in the trunk or otherwise not visible in other words i i'm envisioning somebody putting a handgun on their on their dashboard for example it's in in a private vehicle but it still has the potential for that intimidation factor plus i think we've we've all seen stories of road rage where someone cut somebody off in a car the gun's right there it's handy a gun's grabbed and then somebody is shot or killed um and if if we could require that open carry gun be carried to trunk not only does that reduce the intimidation factor of visibility but also slows down that road rage action is that um is that would that be permissible

[61:00] i'd have to do further research on that but my initial take would be that that should be fine because the state preemption statute just says you have to allow people to travel through you know motor vehicle or other private means of conveyance and it doesn't specify um you know i don't read it as saying that you have to allow or you can't restrict how it's carried in the car so but i'll you know i i don't want to give that as a definitive answer i want to look into that as a little bit more but i that's my initial reaction that yes we could do that okay well after you research that if you when we come back for the what sounds like we'll be the first reading here in a few weeks if you let us know if that's permissible that's where i would be somebody to go to a council decision i'm just going to call upon that bob is that um something that someone else on the call could have an answer to already luis such as allison oh that's possible uh alison are you are you here allison anderman

[62:05] if so i would invite uh them to weigh in if they if they do have the answer handy mayor pro tem friend i'm not seeing allison on the call okay all right oh i see someone see the difference here we are sorry i hadn't been in gotten the link to join as a panelist um i and allison if you could introduce yourself for the record i'm sorry i'm allison anderman i'm senior counsel with giffords law center to prevent gun violence and um i i just want to say i agree with luis's interpretation thanks and thanks for being here sure thank you okay matt i see your hand up um so you know i think one of the things is we want to be very uh uh clear about those that are law abiding

[63:02] gun owners in our community that wish to transport their weapon to a gun range or to go recreate um and and the manners in which they do that and um as someone who uh owns uh owns some weapons and does that uh recreationally myself from time to time the best practices is you put it in the trunk you don't put it on the side of your seat you don't travel with it on the dashboard so so i think that you know the best practices is to say look like that's where most people who are responsible are putting it in their trunk and so if we relegate it to that then we're not making we're not infringing on people just doing what is already their normal best practices it's someone that maybe is not law abiding or who is does not have those best practices um in place that would try to do that and that would be the concern i would have and so i think it's fair to to limit that to the trump just based on what are normally best practices for those that recreate thanks matt and and any consideration on

[64:02] beyond the motor vehicle issue oh is that to me uh yeah no i agree oh sorry i agree with bob's assessment about how seeing where a bike and a person a pedestrian are more similar than uh to a car so i would i agree with the assessment yeah thanks anyone else wanna opine on this one okay so right now i'm just seeing support for um no exemption beyond a motor vehicle so so that's where you could have the exemption for open carry and it would not apply to bike scooters walking anything else so right and then i'll look into adding language about safe transport in the in the car meaning possibly just limiting that to the trunk yes okay so uh show of hands all in favor of that route i see eight okay thanks

[65:01] next yes the next one is very specific and it's about when we went through the sensitive areas there was a question about the places that are licensed to serve alcohol or the way it's written whether we have a kind of a division between city places and places where demonstrations or voting is happening where guns are not allowed and then other these private premises were as the mayor pro tem said the presumption is kind of flipped and and it's no guns without consent of the owner but there there's been some concerns raised about uh licensed alcohol premises and whether it's appropriate to allow them to elect to have firearms and so that's a question for council so the question is whether to um add licensed alcohol premises to the list that would flip the default to prohibited

[66:00] well it's it's currently it's in that list and the question is whether to move it into the absolutely prohibited category thanks okay mark to me guns and alcohol simply do not mix and presence of weapons in a place serving alcohol just increases to me the danger exponentially so i would i would vote for the prohibition any other takes on that i don't disagree with mark just said i just want maybe play devil's advocate here a little bit and see where this might take us so you know restaurants often serve alcohol so we would be prohibiting those

[67:00] restaurants with liquor licenses and then we and i think council will be soon taking up the question about whether um there should be social consumption of cannabis or effectively pot shop pot bars and so the question is is that also an intoxicating substance and the question is you know where do we um draw the line on that i i don't disagree with mark i just want us to be very clear from a kind of legal and drafting standpoint about what's in and what's out um i think i'd probably air a little bit on allowing the owner of an establishment to consent because that's the only type of establishment really other than the big ones like theaters that we're we're forcing them to to we're taking away the right to consent so we have lots of other establishments um that um have the right to consent or not consent and we're withholding that here i do agree with mark that often oftentimes alcohol and guns don't mix well the question is how far does

[68:00] that goes that include restaurants that include pot pot bars and what other intoxicating substances might come into play so i don't know the answer to that i just want to raise that as a pondery as written i just want to say as written it would apply to places that serve alcohol on the premises so that would include restaurants that serve alcohol but it would not include a liquor store because that's not an on-premise consumption but what if they're having a wine sampling which they sometimes do that gets into alcohol licensing law that i'm not 100 up on but uh i don't have a strong feeling opinion on this i just want us to be as clean and and clear as as possible and i again i think we're going to be taking up the pot bar issue here shortly and so then as we consider that um we'll have to decide are those things we're also going to withhold prevent the owner from granting consent or not thanks bob lauren

[69:00] thank you yeah um i think that the it just it adds definitely a level of complication and while i wholeheartedly agree with what mark said i think that there i do have a concern around um you know places that might have a temporary liquor license or you know there there might be overlapping in these categories in ways that we don't predict in terms of um maybe some of the businesses that we think should be able to have security if they want then having temporary liquor licenses and understanding which which category would be you know which one would apply um so i there is a level of clarity that i think should be added to ensure that

[70:02] that this is um there isn't aren't any open questions left by it and i could go either way on that but i do have a little bit of concern around this one nicole yeah um we looked to some data and thinking about the locations um of places that we would be considering um not allowing carry and i'm just wondering if anyone has any data on the incident incidences of deaths or injuries in places that serve alcohol allison do you have information on that because i don't i don't have any data but i just wanted to point out if it hasn't been said already that some states and municipalities limit a prohibition on guns and bars to locations where a certain percentage of revenue is derived solely from alcohol sales so that would not include a

[71:01] restaurant where alcohol is served thank you and and i think there's a another legal expert is it is it dustin dustin i don't know if you want to weigh in on that as well yeah hi i'm a counselor at every town for gun safety uh yeah there's research that shows that um you know like uh department justice found that 42 percent of convicted homicide offenders reported being under the influence of alcohol during the commission of their crime um there's also research that shows that alcohol use is associated with higher likelihoods of firearm victimization um so i mean there is a good bit of research out there and we could send that along if it would be useful thanks so much any other questions um so i'll go ahead and weigh in i'm i'm kind of with lauren on this i think i could go either way it's it seems a bit

[72:02] complicated and and the way it is now like the default is going to be that the restaurants and bars and places that have liquor licenses are are going to be default not places that you can bring a gun and so they'd have to opt out of that and i don't know how many really in this city will opt out of that um so i i i don't know if we're if we are um sort of uh you know splitting hairs here on this um but i i think it it it would be a a lot of places that that for us to be considering um and that would you know would probably uh i don't know draw a lot of criticism so i'm i guess i'm sort of leaning uh on on not switching its categories because i think it's already gonna be

[73:00] uh fairly safe where it is mark yeah i look i understand the the uh issue that uh this is not really a problem for a wine bar um [Music] serving shablee my concern is that the places that we would most want to protect against the the uh presence of firearms are the very places that might opt out and and so i those are the places i would want to focus on but rather than trying to create very very complex measures of distinction between one or the other i would still prefer simply to say if you're serving alcohol put the gun away and and keep it at home um as i said that the places uh i don't think karida is going to have a major problem with with people carrying guns into the place um

[74:00] but that's not the that's not the institution or the facility that we're most concerned with and those are the places that very well might opt out and those are the places that very well might have an incident so that's simply my thinking on it uh and i'm an advocate for simplicity on this and simply severing the serving of alcohol from the ability to to carry firearms uh and i do acknowledge bob that that you're right would at some point we're gonna have to grapple with um with other issues such as the social consumption of of marijuana but you know what that's that's a problem for a different day to me um i'm only trying to address the problem i see today thank you thanks mark okay anyone else on this before we straw pull it um okay so i'm gonna try and lauren lauren under the wire

[75:01] sorry um i guess i was thinking maybe there's some kind of if it's a facility that is open to the public and currently serving alcohol or some sort of like because places might hold a liquor license but not currently be using it or various i don't know maybe that there's some way to add a little bit of clarity to that that kind of makes it so that if there's alcohol present and being consumed that's specifically what we're going after and and maybe to allison's point because i don't know what the state lies here but that you know if it's not the the primary purpose of the place like i'm visualizing my my uh the the indoor soccer club you know like they're they do serve alcohol there but it you know i don't i don't think that that's the primary purpose of why people go to that

[76:01] spot um so maybe there are you know ways that we could get it sort of the temporary license issue you know if it's if it's just a the liquor store that has the wine tasting that they wouldn't be swept in because it's just a you know more temporary or something like that so maybe that's the third category that we can look at you know do people want to prohibit do they not want to prohibit or do they want a little more information and with a third option that's a little bit more nuanced so i'll raise it that way you know in a state like texas even they prohibit um guns in places that derive more than 51 of their proceeds from alcohol so it you know covers most bars doesn't cover restaurants that might serve it's created some issues where bars try and kind of create a loophole and become a restaurant but it you know that that is a standard that exists in even in a state like texas great thanks um

[77:00] louise anything you want to add before we straw poll uh no i think you've all covered the bases okay great so um a show of hands then for who would like to just uh straight prohibit as is kind of under i'm going to call it that the mark wallach lineage here show of hands for that i see mark and aaron and tara and nicole and matt so we're at majority there so uh the wallock lineage it is please if you could include that in there louise that would be great thank you okay then the the last two questions both relate to signage and i showed you the signage before but the there was a suggestion that instead of or as an alternative to requiring signage at the gun shops that instead we have the option to allow a purchaser to sign an acknowledgement that contains the

[78:00] same language and not post the sign in on the premises lise bob and then lauren yeah i'll weigh in on both that question and the collateral question which remains to uh language um i i would be in favors but only modestly so i'm happy to be i voted on this i'd be in favor of of an alternative so that the shop owner would have the choice of either posting a sign as you prescribed or alternatively anyone who purchases a gun would sign an acknowledgement that has effectively the same language in it at the time of purchase and then with respect to both the signage and the or the written acknowledgement as the shop owner prefers that they be both in english and in spanish which i think are the principal languages in this country bob can i call liqui on your point there sure um and it maybe it also funnels back to a legal question

[79:00] is there a difference on whether or not the purchaser signs a statement that acknowledges that versus passively reads that is there a difference in legality in what and holding them to some standard based on those yeah that's a great point that's probably a question for the lawyers but let me um you caused me to to supplement what i i propose i think just providing it to them i don't think because people may refuse to sign it and then and then what um so i guess i i would say either sign obviously if they did both that would be great but it's it's the shop owner's option either a sign that's prominently displayed or alternatively providing a written statement to a gun purchaser the purchaser doesn't have to sign it you're absolutely right thanks for that clarification matt and then i would would suggest that both the sign and the written statement that's provided be in english and in spanish lauren so my question is if we can apply this to private gun sales if it's

[80:01] a notification that were that's provided at the time of sales that's something we could require at private sales as well i believe so if we wanted to go that route it might be hard to enforce but we can put it on the books dustin or allison do you know if other places are doing that um and i i have not seen that in like in a state that doesn't require i haven't seen that i'm certainly not in a state that doesn't require a background check on all private firearm sales thanks sorry i was just gonna say i mean in colorado most firearm transactions have even those occurring between private parties have to be processed through a licensed firearms dealer so the um warning that is posted at a dealership should encompass most private sales

[81:01] thank you for that information lauren anything else no that's it thanks nicole um i i feel like i could be swayed either way on this i think my initial preference is for the um signage thanks um i just would like to understand a little bit better how it would work so i i can visualize where a sign would be posted with this um alternative receipt like when when would you encounter it i mean if it's after the sale that doesn't seem super helpful well i think it would be before the sale yes so well i guess i should uh defer to council member yates on this but what he's suggesting as far as what what i had thought was signing it as

[82:00] part of your purchase but if we're not going to have them sign in just receive it i guess that they would receive it before receiving the firearm yeah or at the time of the sale i mean there's a lot there's lots of papers going across i've bought guns before myself so i know there's lots of pieces of paper that go across the counter um and i think one of those pieces of paper could be simply a a notice provided by the shop owner to to the purchaser at the time of sale so um i would love to know um again from dustin or allison if other places are doing this my concern is you know if the point is to make sure that people are aware of the risks that that would be something that you kind of want you know visible before you check out so i'm i'm just not sure that this serves that purpose and so i'm just curious if it's done elsewhere or does it can it can and does it serve that purpose i personally am not aware of any other state that requires this type of warning

[83:01] um there are a number of states that require or i shouldn't say number but several states that require certain types of posted warnings and notices um by gun dealers but not this one specifically dustin are you do you have information i don't have well we're waiting no i don't i don't know other states that have that have this specific the specific warning but you know at the local level we've you know it's we've worked on uh certain ordinances that about providing information to people about the risks of owning firearms so just want to make sure i'm understanding if it were signage or a receipt no one else is doing either of those things or is it is is anyone else doing signage in the way that we're looking at or is this novel

[84:01] so um other states have signage requirements they're just not about the risks of gun ownership um but dustin i was wondering have any of the local jurisdictions pass those ordinances and do you know how they're doing them yeah so the ones i'm that i'm aware of are actually they're related to schools where schools are required to pass out this is not quite the same but are required to pass out information um about the risks of owning firearms um you know i i don't know that they're necessarily supposed to dissuade people from purchasing firearms but to make them just aware of the risks you know it's like cigarette like the warnings that go on cigarettes to say like you know you're still buying them right but you hope you know that they have been shown to have some effect on on cigarette sales so it's in that that realm okay that's helpful thanks mark and then aaron just just quickly i i i can't imagine somebody who's going to purchase a gun is unaware that it's a

[85:00] lethal weapon um i'm happy to have the signage to reinforce that concept um but i think going beyond that is is almost an exercise in in futility uh if somebody is determined to buy a gun for home protection or for hunting or for you know uh to to use at a uh a gun range um i'm pretty sure they they know what they're buying um and i don't know that we need to get more complex than having people post a sign just reminding them of that thanks mark um allison i see your hands up i just wanted to say that you know as one of the people who drafted these ordinance or the ordinances that these are based off of um i think that certainly people know that they are purchasing a firearm that's lethal i do not think people are well aware of the risks of keeping a gun in the home most people erroneously think that a gun is used more often for self-protection than

[86:01] it is to kill or injure a family member or household member and that is information that we want to get to people so just like dustin said people understand that they're buying cigarettes and cigarettes aren't good for you but do they have the full amount of information about the risks to their health if i can colloquy based on that comment um uh i acknowledge the utility of uh making buyers aware of that information thanks mark um aaron and then lauren yeah and to that point um it seems like a sign is the simplest and most effective way of acquainting people with that information you know they can see it as they're moving about the shop i don't know how many people would see that sign and then turn around because of that but it might happen it seems like it might be more effective than one of a series of pieces of paper passed to you at the time of sale and it also seems much simpler so i i would go with just the the signage only approach

[87:02] in in english and spanish thanks erin lauren thank you yeah i was originally a fan of moving to a piece of paper just because i was thinking that might more equally address both gun store sales and private sales but as you was mentioned because most private sales are done at a licensed [Music] realtor i think that i would move more towards signage both in english and spanish thanks thanks um okay so anyone else want to speak to will go first just through the sort of receipt alternative option um anyone want to speak to that before we do a struggle [Music] okay so um who would like to alter get rid of the signage and do a receipt instead

[88:00] so receipt not signage sorry about the dog show of hands please for receipt we're gonna go with signage i guess i'll do a formal show hands are just in case who would like to stick with signage i see it easy majority there okay um who would like to have the signage available in both english and spanish chopin's please that's an easy majority um okay back over to and i don't know if we need to discuss whether there were additional languages i personally think probably english and spanish is good anyone want to speak to that and anyone want it in more languages i guess i'll say if i'm a rachel i've just seen the draft version of our language access plan and spanish is the only language that has gotten over the five percent threshold

[89:00] that usually means we do translate but we are keeping an eye on chinese in the future it is not currently um what is what is um making that mark in our current language essex draft so i think certainly um where did it is find and we can certainly update that if that were to change in the future that sounds great thank you um louise any other um i think that was the last of the official questions that we needed to answer anything else that you wanted to um weigh in on before i open it up to additional questions uh nothing else for me teresa uh no a procedural piece um council may want to consider a vote to continue this to may 24th for first reading on that date so that you can have this language incorporated yep i think that's a great idea i'll probably wait and just see if there's any other questions or things that we

[90:00] might want to ask to be amended all your questions are answered on on all of the ordinances going once um and then i guess i will just ask um if giffords or every town has has um anything else that they think we we maybe uh should be looking at going once twice there okay great um well with that i think i will ask for a motion to continue this first reading matt are you doing a motion or do you have a question process um i i we i'm a little cute because uh we didn't pass the consent to be as far as i'm concerned

[91:01] and so my worries if we continue we end up not passing 2b which so i want i just want to make sure do we need to pass to b on consent but then continue items c through d process-wise i just want to clarify that so you could do this in in any order you could pass the consent agenda except for items a and forgive me i don't have it up in front of me um a and is this c luis uh i don't want to have it in front of me either i think this is now what i have is as a was boulder parks and rec master plan b is these proposed ordinances and c is calling a special meeting is that what others have oh yeah because we removed the original so that all slid up one you're right yep so you could you could do it in either order you could um propose to move to excuse me adopt the consent agenda items

[92:02] a and c and then make a separate motion to continue this item until may 24th or you can do them in the reverse order either is fine procedurally thanks for clarifying would you hear me i'll go ahead and make a motion to pass uh consent agenda a and c [Music] and continue or not pass item b and save for may 24th second thanks um any discussion on that hearing then elisha uh is this a roll call i think it would be best to have a roll call to have the official vote for each council member so a question from aaron first well i i just got a little nervous with the language you used there matt i just wonder if you might say on on item b to

[93:02] say move to continue it to a meeting on may 24th because i heard the words not passed and i got a little nervous thanks for clarifying mayor you're better at this than i uh especially when it's this mix mosh of things um so thank you for that i'll go ahead and redo my motion if that's appropriate um so i make a motion to pass the consent agenda a through c and continue item b until may 24th bob is that acceptable as the seconder it is okay great over to elisha and just as a correction that would be a and c not through c because c through c would be to include b we we wanted to to be clear it would be a motion to pass a and c and continue item b is that correct does that

[94:00] correct what we're doing that is the fog of coban my my bad it's the fog of everything these days so i just wanted to make sure i i document it in the minutes uh correctly as well so that's what we're doing okay okay perfect all right so made motion made by councilmember benjamin seconded by councilmember yates and we will start the vote with council member benjamin yes mayor brockett yes councilmember folkert yes mayor pro tem friend yes councilmember spear yes wallach yes weiner yes and yates yes mayor pro tem the kinsagen consent agenda items a and c are approved and item b is continued to 5

[95:01] 24 22. thanks elisha um and thanks to giffords in every town allison and dustin for being here for that that was very helpful to have you on hand to answer questions so we really appreciate it um and thank you to luis and teresa as well for all the work you're doing on this to date and answering our questions um and and just wanna again reiterate for members of the public that what we did tonight was uh continue this hearing uh it's still a first hearing we will look at it again on the 24th and then the public hearing uh will be held on june 7th and and there's no official new ordinance until this is voted on which would be the earliest of june 7th but nourie please correct me if i've said any of that inaccurately you're right the 24th we will have the continuation and the seventh will be our public hearing thanks okay uh and with that uh back over to elisha on the call up and

[96:02] check-in well we actually have no call-up and check-ins for tonight and we deferred the public hearing for item 4a so that will move us to 5a which is the update on taxation of electronic smoking devices designed for cannibal use and we were going to check time at this point to see if that item will be heard well said i i liked hannibal use instead of cannabis cannabis thank you it's been a day for me i apologize designed for cannabis shoes thank you no i i i enjoyed it it was a moment of lovity on a sort of heavy topic day um so i will uh propose that we check in with council members and and maybe before we do that because we all started at five does anybody want to suggest a restroom break or is there support for that before we do this check-in yeah okay

[97:00] yes uh can five minutes ten minutes i'm just gonna say five five okay see you back at 7 36. [Music] alicia i want you to know you have a hot mic don't think [Music]

[100:18] [Music]

[102:28] tara if you're here you just send up a signal okay i think we can maybe officially begin the discussion and and tara can join in when she gets back um so would love to check in with uh

[103:02] those of you who might love an early ending to this meeting in particular see how everyone's feeling and uh what your inclination is thanks tara we are officially back on if that needed to be said more formally i'm gaveling uh so again i don't want to highlight anyone who's not feeling well but if anyone who's not feeling well would like to chime in on whether we would like to delay the update matter five matters from the city manager update on taxation of electronic smoking devices or carry on mark can we flip the order and and sort of revisit this after we've discussed the the ballot measures which is kind of the big ticket item let's see what time we're at what our energy levels look like i call it on that mark based on what we decide may inform whether it is an added ballot measure

[104:04] so if we do balance measures before talking about this we'll have kind of got the cart before the horse more or less acknowledged thank you well i'll go ahead then i would love to just uh power through and proceed i i feel fine though so i'm not sure that my i'm the one we need to hear from matt erin i spoke up earlier you go for it mayor oh yeah i think if we can be efficient about it we can go through it's relevant about language so maybe we can just get on through it all right anyone opposed bob do we need to formally withdraw your motion or you already did that right so we i think already withdrew it it was as a courtesy to those who were not feeling well but if if those knocking involved are willing to go forth then i'm ready to go forward you're happy yeah i do thanks um okay well with that then i think i

[105:00] will uh do i need to turn it over to elise or can i give it right over to nuria for matters from her department right over to nuria and i'm going to hand it right over to joel who's become quite the expert on the topic well i wouldn't say that but i've definitely learned a lot in the last couple years so good evening again council joel wagner tax and special projects manager uh and i believe uh we're gonna someone is gonna run the presentation for me so we'll get that pulled up all right wonderful thank you uh so and i i'll do my best to keep this brief we're checking in on the taxation of electronic smoking devices designed for cannabis use and we can head to the next slide please so we have two questions or three questions for council if we count two part questions

[106:00] um so the first one is should staff prepare uh an ordinance to change the boulder revised code to clarify that the tax uh the 40 electronic smoking device tax applies only to electronic smoking devices intended for nicotine and or tobacco uh and if so uh we would appreciate council guidance on the breadth of the um exemption or uh narrowness of the tax uh and then the second question is should staff develop a potential ballot measure for the november 2022 election and we can move to the next slide um i thought it might be helpful just to do a little level setting for those of you who are um fortunate enough not to be as familiar with these as i am so electronic smoking devices or e-cigarettes or vaping devices come in several forms there are three kind of general categories uh so the first that we're looking at are disposables so these are pre-loaded with a liquid that is intended to be vaped

[107:00] and a small battery and they're intended to be used and then thrown away so here we have examples of ones intended for nicotine one's intended for hemp and one's intended for marijuana uh as we go up on the spectrum the next slide um the next part is devices that have a disposable pod that is designed to go into a battery and charging unit um the so the battery and charging unit itself is reusable uh the pod is intended to be consumed and then and then disposed of stuff again on the left we have a couple of examples that are a threaded one that are more of a universal type of fit and the two on the right are uh more proprietary so they go with only a specific unit base unit that's charged and reused again examples of nicotine and marijuana and then the final category are the refillable or reusable devices so these are the most expensive

[108:01] um they're the most versatile they have multiple temperature settings uh some of them such as the one in the middle can retail for upwards of six hundred dollars um and they're intended to be used over and over and over um with your your preferred device now again some are marketed towards marijuana use some are marketed towards nicotine use um and they take uh again several different forms so we can head to the next slide um so i won't go through the detail of this timeline you have this in your memos uh but this started back in july of 2019 where community groups parent groups public health folks were voicing concerns about uh the rise of teen vaping especially flavor devices at the time it was the jewels that were taking um taking real hold with popularity at the same time there were increased news articles and reports of a vaping-related lung injury uh lung

[109:00] illness that was pervasive among users of vaping products as it turns out after the cdc studied these they found a link between those severe vaping lung injury cases and black market marijuana products that used a very specific ingredient called vitamin e acetate so a type of oil a type of medium for that and i will stress that those were that they found that in black market marijuana products and really saw that as the the correlation to those severe uh evali cases that's what they called all them uh but in the context of that uh council uh asked staff to prepare two ordinances one that had regulatory um limitations on the use of tobacco and vaping and then one that was the tax ordinance that ordinance the tax ordinance was approved by voters um and implemented in 2020.

[110:00] uh during that implementation staff identified some issues with the definitions which i'll go into in a couple slides um which we brought back to council in june of 21. and uh we were asked to consider an exemption for devices that cannot be used for tobacco or nicotine nicotine and to consult with the clap so we've done that work and the next few slides i'll kind of go into some more those more details and we can move to the next slide please so as i mentioned some of the challenges we found during implementation uh frankly we're mostly around the licensing and that's because there are many different retailers of these devices you can buy electronic cigarettes in grocery and convenience stores at bars at liquor stores in tobacco and spoke shops and then certain devices containing marijuana and now cbd or hemp in marijuana retailers um so defining those responsible for the tax as a tobacco retailer and the

[111:00] license um was confusing in relation to the definitions in the tobacco code so the next slide please um highlights some of those those definitions so um it's a bit of a waterfall on this but the way that the code is written a tobacco retailer means any person who sells any amount of tobacco tobacco products or tobacco paraphernalia the definition for tobacco products includes many categories but one of which is an electronic smoking device and then the electronic smoking device definition includes language that towards the end here said can be used by an individual to simulate smoking in the delivery of nicotine or any other substance so when we came back to council uh frankly in in staff's opinion it was a pretty simple cleanup to just clarify that if you're selling an electronic smoking device as it's written in the code that is a

[112:01] tobacco product but a tobacco someone who sells an electronic smoking device staff's proposal could be could have either a tobacco retailer license or a marijuana elite retailer license but there wouldn't be a need to have both and we'll go to the next slide please uh so during that conversation um there was actually a fair well the bulk of the conversation was about the tax and the applicability of the tax uh so some council members expressed the belief that um the intent was to back was to tax tobacco and nicotine and not cannabis the the tax itself does have an exemption for cannabis itself but staff's analysis was that the definition of electronic smoking device would extend to a device that was material agnostic or used for marijuana but that marijuana itself that was

[113:00] purchased at the time would not be subject to the 40 tax regardless council asked staff to consider some alternative language uh presented by uh by the marijuana industry that would exempt products that cannot be used for tobacco or nicotine delivery and council asked staff to also consult with the cannabis licensing advisory board or clab for their thoughts as more experts in this area on whether the proposed language by industry would be acceptable and we'll go to the next slide please so during that discussion with the cloud cloud came up with uh essentially three items to consider so first was exempting devices that exceeded certain temperatures or were based on a certain temperature range during that conversation and subsequent research we've determined that there's really not a specific range cut off that one could say this device can no longer be used

[114:02] with nicotine or tobacco uh the second area was exempting certain retailers that would be selling the same device so uh for example a marijuana dispensary would not have to collect a 40 tax um but a tobacco a retailer would and so staff doesn't recommend that because that clear that creates an unfair advantage um for one retailer selling the exact same product as as another and then the the third consideration was to prepare a new ballot item uh to ask the voters to really get clarity on which esds would be taxed so staff took that feedback and also reached out to industry public health in the boulder chamber and developed two additional options which are on the next slide and so the first option would be to exempt products based on the intended

[115:00] use so to move away from the cannot be used with nicotine language that was proposed by industry uh to more of an intent to design an intent there are some challenges with this um most of them stem from the fact that marijuana is legal on the state level but illegal on the federal level and so that forces manufacturers to kind of thread a needle on how they talk about their products and what claims they make um so you'll see that many of these products will specifically say this device is only to be intended with these five herbs which would you know i there's one that says times hop oregano things like that um and any other use will will you know is not allowed for this this device um plus just the basic science on on vaping liquids um is generally the same science and maybe there's a slightly different uh effectiveness um or optimal use for a device but that

[116:00] standard of you cannot use it would be a near impossible one to prove and so the the second option is to exempt all products that do not contain nicotine so essentially target the tax um to the actual nicotine product that is being sold so if it's uh in a disposable that entire disposable would be would be subject to the tax if it's just a jar of the nicotine juice that would be subject to tax and any device that does not come pre-loaded would would be exempt from the tax essentially so that's broadening the exemption and uh i will say i apologize for the uh control v error in the last bullet here on this slide i did not catch that when i sent that one um but uh in conversations with public health um professionals the this targeted tax would still tax the products that are most popular among

[117:01] youth um so i think we can move to the next slide so there's a much more detailed matrix in your memo but at a very high level this kind of shows staff's analysis of the difficulty to administer an exemption the proposed exemption the universe of taxable products and the clarity for customers uh so you know as we look at the top exempting certain temperature ranges or exempting based on unintended use um are much more difficult to administer they kind of thread a bit of a needle on the universe of taxable products but they provide the lowest amount of clarity for customers exempting products that do not contain nicotine would have the lowest administrative burden for staff it would result in the narrowest application of the tax but we also think it would it would have the highest clarity for for customers

[118:01] um and then of course a ballot item assuming the proposed ballot item was to tax all electronic smoking devices would have the broadest range and the highest amount of clarity because everything would be subject to the tax and we can move to the next slide so uh staff did reach out to industry representatives uh the boulder chamber and public health representatives and those responses are included in your your packet in the memorandum in your packet the both marijuana industry and public health were in alignment on their preference for the limiting the tax to disposable devices and liquids basically to the nicotine product itself but perhaps not surprisingly they were in had opposite positions for the ballot item the marijuana industry opposed the ballot item and public health was in favor of it

[119:02] next slide so with that um just representing the question so again the questions is or should we prepare uh an ordinance to refine the boulder revised code if so what is council's preference on the scope of that and should we continue or prepare language for potential ballot measure and with that next slide i'm happy to stop talking and answer any questions thanks so much joel um you know i think it it helps me if the questions actually stay up so if we can get the the two questions slide back while we're having this conversation um that would be awesome to me um okay so who has questions before we answer the questions nicole i have a question um it may be more of a question for all of us on council rather than joel so let me ask it and if it's good to table it let's table it until we get to discussion

[120:00] my question is really around sort of the intention of a ballot measure because it seems like there are multiple issues that we are kind of putting together here and i'm not sure what the intention is with the ballot measure that if we are interested in one and so i'm just asking us to think about how we frame this um there's the issue of tobacco and tobacco products there's the issue of vaping and there's the issue of high potency marijuana and i heard kind of and saw all those come up in in our memo and i think that if um i'm just yeah my question is just for all of us what are we interested in with the ballot measure because those are three related but not necessarily identical topics thanks nicole joel the staff have any um response to that sort of what what the intent intent is i'm gonna deflect i see that that council member yates raised his hand and i just want to see if that was in response

[121:01] to that question first good i was gonna respond to nicole's excellent question but joel if you have an answer go right ahead from your perspective well um respectfully i think it's more of a policy uh question which i would defer to to counsel so i'll let you go ahead and then i can provide some additional commentary if you'd like okay well and um bob uh you're up next i do just want to try and corral us a little bit for questions i do want to make sure that we're asking our questions for staff before we launch into discussion yeah i don't have any questions well i do have a question for staff so maybe i'll just take the floor but i do want to come back to nicole's question because i think it's it's really an important one uh joel what um let's say the council uh places a proposed all-encompassing tax on the ballot this time and obviously the ballot measure passes and that's easy we have our answer if that ballot measure fails what's your plan b like what would you

[122:02] then come back to us in december or january and ask us to do uh that's a great question i'll answer that and then i'll i'll answer also and so answer uh council member spears question at the same time so um the i think the the question will depend upon um what council was originally trying to um affect with with the ordinance um and frankly it's i think it's a complicated question because um i spoke to some public health experts who say that vaping definitely plays a role in the public health in the harm reduction spectrum um from the the studies that i've seen and it's being studied a lot more there are questions about the the health uh effects of vaping in general um vaping nicotine and vaping uh cannabis so um

[123:01] i think those those questions are really really going to depend on council you know what does council believe as far as uh what they what they want to be addressing was it just youth use of nicotine if so um you know that's one lane if it was vaping and and you know health effects that might be another lane and then marijuana a final one um but council member yates to your question um i think it's kind of a two-pronged approach so so question the plan b would really be in my mind almost the plan a is clarifying the tax based on where we are today and so we received that council direction last year that the intent was to tax nicotine so i think we can we can do that with either of the two

[124:00] proposals uh staff options either creating a program to look at the intended use or just tax the nicotine so then the question about the ballot is if the ballot doesn't pass i think you have your answer and we have already cleaned up the the tax code so that it's a clear code that we can administer fairly thanks joel answer your question it does it sounds like it sounds like your your alternatives for us are one or two but what you're saying is if we put if we go down the path of two and it fails at the ballot box we would we would we still have option option one is that right it's kind of one a or b and then do you want to take two which is the ballot but we don't foreclose one by going down the road or two is that right yeah candidly i think my thought was based on council's feedback on on question one we'll start that work

[125:00] regardless of the outcome of the ballot we would come back to council this year with proposed ordinance change for the the nicotine and then if the ballot um changes that and expands the tax um that's that's something you know that obviously the voters can decide thanks joel mark and lauren and tara yeah joe thanks for the presentation um what would be the impact on tax revenues uh by trying to more specifically limit um the application of the tax to devices intended um for nicotine use that's a great question um i don't know that i have a good answer for you because we've already seen a decline in the the tax revenues over the last um now that we have some comparative periods from july 2020 to july 2021

[126:03] and i think that is partially the the intent of the tax was to reduce use but from what we can tell from just looking at the receipts the vast majority of the revenues are coming from from retailers that are selling these disposable devices so i don't think it would be a material decrease in revenues if it was only applied to those disposable devices most of the revenues are coming from convenience stores liquor stores and they're they're mostly in the business of selling disposables okay thank you and with respect to the ballot measure um i thought we had actually expressed the view of council when we previously determined that the tax was applicable um to nicotine products and not to marijuana products and the ballot would seem to be going in the face of that and saying

[127:01] you know let's let's tax all products whether they're sold by uh uh you know marijuana dispensaries or not am i reading that incorrectly uh no i think you're correct in that and the reason this we brought this back is because council also asked us to consult with with the cloud and that was one of collab's recommendations that council may consider okay so i don't think staff is is recommending um a ballot ordinance but we're bringing that back because that was a recommendation of the cannabis advice report okay thank you lauren and tara thank you so to me it seems like just taxing um products containing nicotine would be sort of more similar to what's set up on the retail side of the marijuana industry could you maybe correct me if i'm wrong on this

[128:01] but on the retail side cannabis and cannabis products are taxed at a fairly high rate but the electronic smoking devices if they are separate if they don't contain cannabis are not taxed at that higher rate is that correct that's correct um while the tax the staff's interpretation of the the tax language was that it would apply to all during that conversation with council last year you know council expressed its reservations um so um under the current tax scheme um any any non-marijuana product that is sold from a dispensary is just taxed at the regular 3.86 and i see that kathy came on camera so i'm gonna make some space and see if she had anything she wanted to address

[129:05] okay the only thing i want to clarify for the discussion is that the tax is only on the devices themselves it's just whether the device is taxed if it's empty only if it has nicotine in it or also if it has marijuana in it so we're not taxing marijuana or tobacco we're not affecting high potency marijuana or other things we're just texting the device but determining which devices get taxed because devices are all basically the same but if we're only going to tax them based on what's in it is the question thank you so much for that clarification kathy uh lauren um lauren you're done tara one question joel um you talked about vaping and harm reduction can you clarify what you meant by that

[130:00] um sure so the the conversation that i had with this individual um basically the preference as far as the spectrum of harm reduction uh vaping is preferable to smoking um but then you know there's there is question about the health effects of vaping which frankly have not been studied as robustly as the health effects of smoking so vaping just to be clear sorry i'm not my usual up self vaping is not as bad as smoking although you haven't stud people haven't studied it enough to know so yeah in the view of this this individual um vaping could be a a valid way to reduce harm um if if the person is already smoking of course um and i think so the the

[131:00] an additional point just to make there is that um you know that would be the conversation that if council wanted to look at a ballot item that staff would engage in is start to actually engage with the public health community in a much more meaningful way when when this was discussed in june council mostly heard only from one side which was industry so staff's work if we go forward with preparing a ballot ordinance in addition to working with our brilliant attorneys to to get um clear ordinance language um would be to engage that all sides of of the the interests of the public health community the schools the parents and the industry and chamber of commerce thanks tara joel you said that you did not recommend a ballot measure after studying this or you did not see that uh no i did not i would i said uh the

[132:01] reason we brought that back is because clab made that recommendation okay done tara thanks um joel i want to make sure i'm like following what the central issue is here so when we passed the tax in 2019 or we passed the the ordinance in 2019 and then the attendant tax the um ordinance was passed to sort of get it teen vaping and the health effects around that is that is that part accurate frankly it would have to defer to the council members but i think that is the feedback that we received that's kind of my memory of as someone who was a bit of an activist on it would i recall aaron yeah well i would i would say as some one of the members of council of the past it was it was about team nicotine vaping right i think that was

[133:00] the focus is that you know that teen smoking use had gone down dramatically and we thought that team nicotine use was kind of over and then vaping became so prevalent and now many many kids were vaping nicotine and getting addicted to nicotine so my memory and understanding of our effort back then a few years ago was to pass the tax to strongly reduce teen nicotine vaping thanks and that's my memory too that it was you know kids were having dangerous health outcomes from vaping and what was happening was nicotine vaping so then the tax was passed and related to nicotine vaping is that that accurate or nicotine was in the tax right yes yeah thanks um and and so is is the problem now that people are sort of gaming the system in a bit because they're buying vaping products to smoke nicotine that aren't taxed because

[134:00] they're they're getting them from pot shops or what i guess i get confused what are we trying to solve um with some of this like is i think some of this is nicole's question but trying to understand the history of uh sort of what is where is the tax falling short right now and is it just that we don't know what to tax i mean i do recall the conversation from 2021 like anyhow trying to understand from staff's perspective right uh great question thank you uh so i would say from my perspective as a tax administrator the problem is we we have a code that is causing confusion um the the the language in the code that says an electronic smoking device is something that simulates smoking of nicotine or any other substance um opens that tax up to interpretation the council direction from last summer was to consider

[135:00] an industry exemption or some other exemption that clarifies that tax i think we've presented two options uh at least as far as breadth that we can come back and come you know come back to council with clear language that that um resolves that that point of confusion for businesses and for consumers the the second question is something that i you know i would say i am not qualified uh as a tax professional to answer um the public health questions uh that that you're asking and that would be a policy question for council or we could work to bring public health folks into the conversation to help inform that thanks mark this is more question for city attorney's office if we decided we wanted to tax all efds we actually need a ballot for that purpose or could we simply go back and reverse ourselves with respect to the interpretive issue

[136:01] uh that we decided i guess about a year or so ago in which we declined to use the or other devices as a means of taxing the marijuana industry if that's what we wanted to do could we simply say no we we've changed our mind any other devices means any other devices and and could we tax the marijuana industry without going to the the difficulty of a ballot and that was the interpretive issue back then if we changed our interpretation would we not change the results theoretically that's true my concern is that when you're construing tax cases it has to before a tax is due it has to be very clear that the tax is due so in that type of argument if a taxpayer were to challenge the city and say wait you made one interpretation one time another interpretation another time

[137:01] judge that means this tax is not clear enough for me to know whether i need to pay the tax and frankly i would rather have the taxpayers argument than the city's argument in that scenario because of the way case law is so that's why we're saying if you want to tax all esds that we do need a ballot question to do that okay thank you kathy very very useful thanks mark any other questions for staff okay who'd like to kick off discussion and then we will answer these questions bob and then nicole and aaron and then lauren i just wanted to try to focus our discussion around sort of the original questions of what is the what is the intention what problem are we trying to solve is it related to tobacco is it related to vaping is it related to high potency marijuana because it feels like to me that's a really essential question that we want to answer um in thinking about

[138:00] the ballot measure and um i i for one don't really feel that i have all the information that i would need to make a decision on a ballot measure especially in the absence of that so i think that's all i have to say for the moment thanks nicole bob and then aaron yes i just want to pick up nicole's thread because i think this is exactly the right policy discussion we should be having first of all i karen and i were the two remaining council members who served on the council when we took up these vaping laws in 2019 and i agree with aaron's recollection and as a matter of fact back last year when we and staff challenged us to recollect where we were back in 2019 i went back and looked at the materials and the legislative history and i even watched a few videos of council meetings and i think aaron's right i think that the primary focus of council and the community at that time was around teen vaping of nicotine products that's not to say that the law perhaps the ballot

[139:01] measure perhaps arguably is broad enough to include cannabis devices as well that's the obviously the legal debate that's happening right now in retrospect perhaps that wasn't drafted as clearly as it could have been or perhaps there was not a clear understanding of the technology about the differences or the lack of difference between nicotine devices and cannabis devices so but here we are so i think aaron's interpretation is correct i think that was the primary focus at the time as was was the crisis around teen vaping and nicotine products with that said that doesn't mean that this council in this community can't look at the possibility of of um also or clarifying depending on your perspective whether cannabis devices should also be taxed maybe they were meant to be included in the 2019 ballot measure maybe they were not intended to be that's that's something for lawyers and judges to fight about

[140:01] but one very clean way for us to put the issue to bed would be to ask the community hey listen we may not have been very clear in 2019 about what was included what wasn't included so we want to be really clear this time would you like um the cannabis devices all devices including cannabis do you include it if they say yes then we have our answer that's the community value and we we know what it is keep in mind that this was not about tax revenues this was not about filling the city's coffers this was about making it more expensive for people particularly youth who were purchasing these devices and using them and observers at the time noted that it'd be relatively easy for someone who didn't want to pay the tax on an electronic smoking device to simply jump in their car and go to lewisville lafayette and buy them cheaper and we said that's fine because we're really focused on kids and it's a lot harder for kids to jump in a car and go to the next town and avoid the tax

[141:01] and if we can make it more expensive for kids they maybe think twice about engaging this in this behavior kids of course are not supposed to be smoking cannabis so i'm not sure that we're probably tackling the kid problem with that tax but with that said i don't see a whole lot of downside in asking the community the tax question about cannabis community leaders say yes or no well you'd say no you asked this only a nicking question before i don't want to extend it to cannabis done talking about it okay that's fine and joel has a plan b for what happens in that case on the other hand the community may say you know i thought you asked us that question before but apparently you didn't ask it very clearly yeah we do want to tax both cannabis devices and nicotine devices in which case we'll have our answer and this confusion over what's included what's not included goes away so i don't see a whole lot of downside in asking the community this question i wish we didn't have to i wish we had been more clear in 2019 we weren't um and but we are where we

[142:02] are and i don't see why we would not go forward with this whether it's to clarify the 2019 position or whether it's to add an additional um disincentive from people um vaping whatever product they want to vape thank you so much bob aaron thanks for that bob i agree with your uh statements about uh the intent and what we were working on a few years ago but i'm going to go in a little bit of a different direction uh with that i think that that what was unclear in terms of what was put on the ballot in 2019 was not the intent i think the intent was clearly to tax nicotine vaping devices and i think there were some language imprecisions that opened that up for some interpretation but i think the intent that the about canvas vaping devices was pretty clear and that was what was implemented and and and i i feel like that this effort right here is is about

[143:00] finishing out that work that we did a few years ago so i i think that um the option e that staff put together seems like a pretty clean uh way of approaching the interpretation of how we approach things currently um and so it's relatively implementable and that that sounds good to me so that sounds like something to proceed with but i would say we could do that and then just put this to bed because i think we've been at this for a few years the intent was to tax nicotine vaping devices you know we'll clarify exactly how you do that and and then we can move on and um what because i i don't think that the intent was to go in the other direction to to put nicole's question i think it was not about vaping in general was not about cannabis it was about uh curbing the nicotine youth vaping epidemic and of course as you as paul pointed out teens do not have access to cannabis

[144:00] that we have really good um age restrictions on that so i would i would go with option e um not move forward with the ballot measure and uh you know say good job and move on to other issues thanks thanks erin lauren thank you i have one more clarifying question for joel um so currently how are we taxing these products currently are serious electronic smoking devices um well so i guess maybe just correct me if i'm wrong but currently we're taxing products that contain nicotine but not smoking devices that don't contain nicotine is that true so effectively yes um nicotine e-cigarettes are are taxed at the 40

[145:01] plus the 3.86 tax um part of the reason we we came to council with this uh is because of this disconnect and as we were looking at it we realized that the the reusable devices were were not being thought of as retailers as electronic smoking devices subject to the tax when we had the council conversation council asked us to to not enforce um on those those devices so there may be some some retailers who are are collecting and remitting that tax um on the reusable refillable devices but based on what i can see in the data most of the taxes coming the 40 taxes coming from retailers who are selling disposable devices okay so even though this tax has been implemented for a while we're still seeing the majority of the revenue coming and the product being sold being um

[146:01] these disposable devices correct thank you so i think um what it seems like the intent was sound what i remember watching these meetings was around teen usage and you know as a voter when i read the ballot language it also felt like it was trying to target specifically nicotine i also and this will come as a shock to no one really strongly support rules that are easier to understand and to implement and so for me that really strongly is um sort of the option 1b i think that just the products that contain nicotine is a much easier rule to both understand and as you guys have said that it would also be easier to implement so i am strongly in favor of that um and

[147:01] you know there are lots of ballot questions that we could ask and lots of things that we could potentially put on the ballot and i just don't feel like there has been sort of a strong enough um research or sort of reason for why we would look at electronic smoking devices um in general you know we haven't done any polling any outreach to me it just doesn't feel like we've at least to my knowledge gone far enough with this to really have a good argument for why we would put these separately on the ballot thanks lauren matt uh thanks rachel um i i'm gonna agree

[148:02] uh with with uh with aaron here um it's clear that the intent is for reducing team nickname i think we're all agreeing on that and um you know i want to sort of fall back on occam's razor which is the best solution is often the simplest um and and the fact that you know as as per the memo you know 75 percent of high schoolers were going to be using these disposable devices um anyway and so i think we don't need to go if if this if we had if this was if we were reviewing something that had been done 10 or 15 years ago i could see intent of coming back to the ballot on on this just to get re-clarification this was just a short time ago and i think we have a clear understanding what the voters want and so just you know clarifying this real easy and so i think you know that in the memo option e just exempting products that do not contain nicotine or tobacco is is is definitely a simpler way to go because it's narrow it's easy to understand and and it kind

[149:00] of really gets at where the targeted work needs to be done to continue to reduce teen nicotine uh and then really you know nicole brings up a good point about high potency thc and i think it's important for us to not um uh mix our our tobacco conversations with our cannabis and really making sure that we have a clear understanding of high potency thc and our cannabis policies and have them separate um and i think we do need to have that dialogue but i'd hate to sort of muddy the waters between the two especially since we know what the clear intent of the voters were just a couple years ago on this so i'm going to support option e in the memo um which in this case to your question is um just making that that clear exemption on um products that did not contain nicotine or tobacco thanks matt nicole uh um i i'm going to um kind of follow that uh supporting option e in the memo um i would like to say i mean i've heard from a lot of folks in the community that there are real

[150:00] concerns around high potency marijuana but there are real concerns around vaping and when i see real concerns very very real health um health concerns and what i would love to see us do is maybe not try to kind of force a ballot measure that feels a little um that were sort of missing some awareness and context on for this november but i would really deeply love to hear from public health and some of those folks on thinking around about measure i know we received some information from public health in the memo you know i know that cloud has looked at this a little bit um or probably not a little bit for those of you on club but i i would just really love for us to have a deeper discussion around these issues i think this is another one um yeah i would just like to have some more information on it i think before recommending something for the ballot for november thanks nicole mark yeah yeah first i think matt's correct

[151:01] that i we should not confuse the conversations uh relating to tobacco and marijuana i would very much like to have the high potency marijuana conversation it's a major issue but it's a separate issue i also don't think we have developed enough background and data to really support a new ballot measure now when we're very um we're all pretty clear i was clear as a when i campaigned that this was an ordinance to uh address teen vaping of tobacco i don't know why we need to what the impetus is to go back and and redo that again or we in effect relitigate it again because we we had made that decision and then when we were asked to interpret the ordinance council reaffirmed that it was a

[152:00] intended to address uh tobacco use and not marijuana use so um i'm just not sure we've established the background and the predicate for going uh for another ballot measure now maybe at a later point um but i don't think i don't think that's something we ought to be doing at the moment um i'm okay with with choice e um but i'm also okay if we simply continue the statute as as it is um with the interpretations that we've put on it um and and move forward and i don't know that a lot more work is is required on this but again if it's the will of counsel to go with with choice e i'm okay with that thank you thanks mark um so my talent here is i see for option e nicole matt aaron strongly there lauren i didn't know what you meant by 1b in that i think you were looking maybe at a different matrix

[153:01] yeah it's the same as e thank you so it's one two three four and sort of a half for mark so i think bob came out bob are you you're still not for option e is that right i'm not opposed to option e i don't think option e and option c are mutually exclusive but um but if it's if it's not the will of counsel to go forward on a ballot measure because it's not ready for prime time i'm fine with that okay all right so just um a couple people myself included haven't weighed in yet so just want to see if anyone else wants to chime in otherwise i think we're probably good direction with e so i guess i'll i will do a quick straw poll is sort of option e the will of counsel on that matrix please raise your hand if you're with e i got matt lauren bob nicole marks ish tara i think aaron already said that so

[154:00] poor guys got his camera off so that seems to be the will of council does that erin thank you i mean you know you're sick it was okay to keep it off i i read into your previous um okay so does that i i can pull it up but staff is that sufficient direction for the questions that are so nicely left up yes i think we have what we need thank you okay any closing thoughts on that one great okay we are over i think i think i've been misnumbering where it did i think matters from city attorney maybe became number five when we took something off earlier so whatever number it is i believe we are up to my thing says 6b potential 2022 ballot items but there's not even a 6a so let's i'm going to go with 5a matters from city attorney let's try that we'll go to matters from the city attorney um and if staff could take down those slides that would be great

[155:00] i believe kathy is going to be leading us in this i am and if emily could put up um my slide that would be great um i'm kathy haddock with the city attorney's office and also kara skinner and jonathan cohen are both here to answer any questions you may have about the climate tax um you can go to the next slide when we get it up but i'll just keep talking um we are at the start of the ballot issue preparation season for lack of a better way to put it what we do is bring to you the um potential ballot items that have been brought to us for your direction on whether we should go ahead and drop ordinances and ballot language for any of them ideally we would introduce the ones that you give us direction tonight to go forward on that we would introduce those ordinances on june 21st and then have continued first reading and any amendments on august 4th for final adoption on august 18th

[156:03] there is a possibility that you could go till september first and still meet the deadline of september 6th for these things being on the ballot but we hope we don't cut it that close this year so next slide the questions for you all tonight are when are we going to replace the expiring climate action plan tax and utility occupation tax with a new five million dollar climate tax with debt authority clarification on tax on electronic smoking devices you've already said no to that one change candidate elections to even numbered years change swearing-in of candidates in december or january after certification of election results and if the library district petition gets on the county ballot by petition and is successful remove the charter provisions about the library so at the end of this those will be the questions that we will be asking you about with respect to the client mixed license

[157:01] with respect to the climate action plan tax you talked about that on february 22nd of this year and we can go to the next slide and we came back with um what we understood your the recommendation was for the research that you asked for um that we would replace sorry that the ballot item that you're looking for would provide for replacing the existing utility occupation tax that expires in 1231 of 25 and revoking the climate action plan that expires on march 31 to 23 and replacing both of those with a 5 million climate tax that would start on january 1st of 2023 be levied the same way that the utility occupation taxes which is 5 million on excel that they pass on to customers that the tax fee for 15 years until december 31st of 2037

[158:01] and that it included debt authority with general fund backup and using no more of than 3.5 million dollars annually of the 5 million tax so that there's plenty of buffer to make sure that we're not pulling from the general fund to um pay that debt the other item is electronic smoking devices which you just decided on next slide please and then the charter committee has been meeting and made recommendations for items to come to you first one is even your candidate elections and i'm going to let the committee members talk about the pros and cons for that because they don't have unanimous recommendation on whether it should go on to the voters and i don't know if bob and matt if you want to talk about that now or you want me to go through the process and options for how we would implement that before we talk about

[159:02] how to whether to do it or not um i mean i guess you could do it uh talk about it here bob are you ready to are you prepared to say anything i think it's fair for context that this was a work plan item that i believe council elevated so it did have the will of council to make this uh a work plan item so even though perhaps bob and i disagree on the charter committee it did have the will of council for us to elevate the work to be done on it to polish it and get it to a place where we could turn around around and bring it back to uh council as a whole does that sound uh fair to you bobby bob yeah yeah the stepmom on this was a little bit unclear it said that the committee was recommending this um i think matt you know matt and i do disagree on this and matt can give you the pro statement i'll agree with khan's statement

[160:00] on on even your elections and whether it should go on the ballot um uh but um but regardless of our respective positions matt and i dutifully together as the charter committee put together the process and the mechanism by which on an even year election would be implemented if that was the will of counseling the voters so we we worked on this last two or three months and so we can either give you the pro and con now and the cathy can walk you through the process or or maybe helpful to walk through the process too because it's a little a little confusing which was one of my arguments um and then matt and i can give you the pronunciations as you should that to me to me okay i can go either way on which way you want to go so i would defer to you rachel legal meeting if you want it to be mechanisms mechanics process then pros and cons or vice versa i think the uh process is going to be a big part of the con convolutedness here so i think let's start with process and

[161:00] mechanics okay so the parameters that we worked within can i can i just uh give mark a chance to ask a question question oh i'm sorry yes yeah my it's a procedural question are we going into this before discussing the climate action tax if you have questions about the climate action attacks please yes go ahead and do that to ask them i don't have anything more for the presentation but jonathan and cara are both here to answer questions yeah i do have a couple questions um first one of the the options that was not presented were the proceeds that would be available um for a 20-year bond without our general fund backup do we have that i believe that that was in the in the memo showing that what you could do with that i i i may have misread it i saw a 20-year bond with backup yeah you're right the um

[162:00] [Music] the in the memo is 20 year with the backup so that you have the aaa rating to do it without backup there'd only be the a rating and you need 1.5 coverage and i don't know cara if we have that number okay well i that would be a useful number for us to to see um and my second question is what portion of our dedicated uh taxes uh are bondable with general fund uh backup for instance was that is that the case for the for any bonds issued under the infrastructure tax oh you know cara was having trouble with her computer and was rebooting it looked like she we might have lost faster okay because i think that that's an important thing to know to what extent is this concept of general fund

[163:01] guarantee or backstop uh a common practice in the city of boulder and to what extent is it not um is it something that's being designed specifically for this tax um and my next question would be how would such a backstop impact our remaining bonding capacity would it not i i don't know the answer to that because it was it was not discussed and my last comment which is it's a comment not a question is i do think we're going to need to identify specific projects to be funded by this tax as we did with the infrastructure i i think that's an important component of what we're looking to do here but let's focus at the moment on the questions that i asked because i i really like to see the answers and i can partially answer your questions and we can wait for cara for the other ones yes we have used it on

[164:01] other items before where we had the backup of the general fund um it's not a geo pledge in that um it's not a pledge of the full faith and credit it's just saying it for some reason excel doesn't pay the tax that the general fund would back it up so as for the aaa rating that rather than an a rating um cara probably knows the specific places that that has been done before with respect to specific projects i see jonathan to answer that question and maybe um why the staff recommendation is 15 years other than 20 years too before you we move on to that i i'd like to understand the difference between a general fund in fact a guarantee um but you're saying it's not a guarantee there's no access to general funds i'm not understanding yeah and i'm i'm sorry that is it is confusing and i apologize for that the difference between a geo pledge and

[165:01] a just the general fund backup is that a geo pledge means that the city agrees to increase property taxes whatever they need to do take money away from other things to back it up it's a full faith in credit pledge of the government um this does not go to that level um but we still get the aaa rating so we're not expecting as many other funds but still get the assuming doing this has some meaning i guess my question is uh you're the bondholder and we don't pay um right is it simply that that you wave at us and say gee it would be nice if you if you could uh uh give us the money out of the general fund but of course we don't we don't believe there's anything enforceable here i i can't imagine that to be the case yeah no it's not a um i forget what they call that kind of promise just a moral promise rather than a legal promise it still is a legal

[166:01] promise it's just that you don't have to raise other revenues to pay it you just have to pay what's already available in the general fund okay but it still means you have to if assuming your other funds are committed you still have to cut something in order to pay this obligation i mean it may not have it may not be technically a full faith and credit obligation but it's an obligation that we would have to if if we default in year five of a 20-year bond um we're going to have 15 years of obligation that's correct that if you if you default um you it would come out of the general fund definitely would affect other things and the the reason for defaulting would be if for some reason the tax that was the primary pledge which would be utility occupation tax on excel if that wasn't paid or wasn't valid for some reason one of the reasons that the

[167:01] utility occupation tax is the one that we're recommending going forward with is because we have a lot of legal support for that and we have a history of excel paying that okay i i that but to me this is still to some extent it's a full faith and credit in everything but perhaps the technical legal technicalities of it because if the tax is not if the funds are not available for payment to the bondholders we are still going to have to either raise funds elsewhere or cut programs elsewhere right okay that that's that's the answer but it's not quite the answer i was hoping for um just a quick note too that kara's trying to come on tonight um as that is moving forward uh and don't know if uh chris or mark have additional questions but we'll try to get you that question as we move forward okay and and also whether this

[168:01] this pledge would have any impact on our remaining bonding capacity does it impact it at all does it reduce it at all happy all right those are my uh key questions thank you thanks mark i might um back us up just a little bit um before we get into the evening year just to make sure others like mark might not have questions if we're not going to circle back so um can we get questions teed up for the the previous slides if that's a does that is that one nicole yeah i just wanted to um echo one of the points that mark was getting at because i'm also curious about this it's just how um if we sort of have this bonding capacity from the general fund how does that then affect our ability to kind of do that

[169:00] for others right i'm imagining we can't sort of have the same pocket of money right and that's sort of cutting out of our ability to do that but i don't actually know so it's just a question that i have is that to us a particular staff member nicole i think it may be one of the finance staff and i i think that that was we're not able to get on right now so i i it was more just me naming that i wanted to echo mark's question because i had that question as well as well okay and i'm also getting a message that jonathan can't get off mute to answer mark's question so we're having technical i'm good now i'm good now all right okay welcome can you make sure you're good jonathan i'm just i think

[170:01] it's the first time we've heard from you tonight yeah yeah yes good evening mayor pro tem members council jonathan cohen um acting director of climate initiatives mark i appreciated all of your questions and i was struggling to try to um fumble with my mute as well so i don't know that i can answer um all of the questions that you asked but a couple of clarifying points that i really wanted to make i think one of the things that you've asked is whether or not this is common or something that we've done backstopping with the general fund it is and in fact one of the other funds that that our department uses the trash tax is set up in a very similar way on the other thing i wanted to just point out with respect to the risk tolerance i guess the uot and i think kathy answered this question the eot is is much less risky it is it's a it's not default we don't we're on the risk of default because it's a solid revenue source and that's something that i think is really important um we do have the

[171:00] other question i think was one of the other options that was listed in the table um i think we do have that we're looking for those numbers now and we can get you that as well but i think the big question that you asked um uh with respect to kind of um that overall issue of impact on on other funding or other bonding i don't know the answer to that and i would ask for for either cara or mark to chime in on that if they can and jonathan just refresh my recollection the uot is funded so yeah so the uot remember is is also on utility bills but it's a different mechanism it's not a kilowatt hour charge it's a revenue based model where we essentially uh tell excel the amount that needs to be collected on an annual basis and that's that was the mechanism that was used for municipalization through the duration it was originally voted in in 2010 or 2011 excuse me now in our settlement agreement with excel we had several off-ramp possibilities

[172:01] uh with respect to municipalization if we found xl to be an entirely unsatisfactory partner and wanted to take one of those off ramps i assume we would no longer be collecting the uott if we were in a dispute uh no because i think if we took an off-ramp that doesn't mean that we have been uh we've created a municipal utility to replace that service and so would excel would still be our service provider they would still be issuing bills uh to boulder customers and this would still be um collected through the utility well but if things got really bad and we were back in litigation and i hope not um but if we were in that kind of legal dispute with them would they still be collecting for us over a 15-year period well that's a good question i'm sorry you know or at some point would we find ourselves in that dispute and they would simply say collect your own uot

[173:00] um we're not doing it for you and then we have bonds today no understood and i can't answer the likelihood of that what i would say mark is that if we found ourselves um in in a position uh where we would be moving back into a municipalization scenario we would obviously we would we would levy it on ourselves at that point okay thank you um and i look forward to the other answers and i will just add to that is that excel never refute never even threatened to refuse to pay the tax during the 10 years of municipalization they paid the uot through that that whole period since we've had the cap taxes nothing 11 and the cap tax right that is good to know thank you thanks mark um i think nicole you're up but are you done with see your camera's off so i'm gonna assume yes matt i feel like maybe your hand was up but it's down am i making that up

[174:01] i'm good all right so any other questions on this topic before we move forward again to even your candidate elections all right and cara is still trying to get on so that we will be able to answer your questions but if we can parking lot them we'll probably do the other things okay yeah let's keep moving um so who's gonna lead in with sort of the the process procedure nuts and bolts that you met well well it could i you know as i think about it it makes sense to start with the why um you know um as i think about it a bit more i mean why are we doing this why is this a consideration i know we touched on that a little bit at the retreat um but i think the why is a little bit clearer um to some and and i think it's maybe a worth starting there so i see

[175:00] bob's camera's off but i wanted to check in and see if given that council wanted to put this on the work plan if bob wanted to started start with why he doesn't want to pursue this and then i can follow that but i can go either way i just figured since council wanted to do it it might be a good place for you to say maybe why not no i think it'd be helpful to hear you articulate the the reason perhaps on behalf of some of your colleagues um for for doing this this is the status quo is obviously odd um some people including you have proposed that we change that we amend the charter and change that so i think it'd be helpful for you to state the reason for the change um and i i would i'll offer my counter proposal okay i can do that um so even your election really the why um and i think you know for one like

[176:00] i could go on for probably a good hour for all the positive reasons why this is a why why we should do this and all the benefits the community gains from it but i'll try to summarize on the most important ones and and and perhaps also leave it open for some of my other colleagues that that that support this and want to add in case i miss something that that they feel is really important you know one of the most important things right off the bat is voters in even your elections simply better represent the population of that community um i mean if we have a hundred thousand people and seventy thousand people vote that's a much better cross-section of our community than a city of a hundred and seven thousand and only thirty four thousand people vote so from a pure standpoint of representation even year cuts at a much greater cross-section and represents a broader diversity of the community and therefore the ballot measures or the people they elect therefore represent that community in the greatest means possible more voters equals a stronger community and what we have seen in the past is

[177:00] that there is a quite a large difference between the amount of the number of voters who participate in our odd year elections and i'll say odd because when we hear the positive uh uh means for going even year it's more than just odd in the number it's odd as in it's also strange that we still have um and we hold on to that type of uh year of voting system we have roughly about twenty thousand people who part more twenty thousand more people who participate in our local issues on even year elections be it municipalization armor our choice the sugary beverage tax the list goes on and on on local ballot measures that were run in even years and we even see that electorate participate and 20 000 more people participate than they do in odd years so so we clearly know that people are interested in those local issues and they're willing to participate and one of the lessons we've learned and certainly we've seen this in colorado

[178:00] and we can credit um our our secretary of state and jenna griswold for this and and and really thinking about go mail and voting like one of the biggest issues with with getting voter turnout is go to the voters well no better way than to send them a ballot no better way than to put more drop boxes in more communities well the same is true here we know where the voters are those were actions in space we we put those ballots in a particular place to go to them well the other argument is we also need to go to them in time and in odd years is not when they're participating we go to them in the time of even year and we can then have the same effect that mail-in ballots and more drop boxes have done in our community across the state to enfranchise and bring more people in to the voting population and at the heart it's lifting up those that are disenfranchised and don't vote in odd years these are renters younger voters people of color lower income individuals and families in our community and and in particular the

[179:01] the racial turnout gaps are quite shocking um in in in boulder in particular you know for example precinct 808 which is in north boulder is one of the most racially diverse precincts in boulder but has a 48 um turnout gap between the year of 2020 and 2021. i mean that's shocking that we have a system that clearly separates along racial lines in our community and so that's something that that for a community that really values inclusivity and diversity we can't be then underpinning our very democratic structures on something that has that type of divergence along racial lines and so there's just so such a litany of positive reasons that even year aligns with so many of our values and really at the last point and and this is one of the things i've heard from people that don't want to support this is that you know we want people who we want people to vote in elections that are actually engaged and and that's and and there's no

[180:00] evidence that people are going to just not vote down ballot and or it's a lesser of the electorate we trust the same boulder rights to decide who represents us for governor who represents us for state legislature who represents us for congress and an array of local issues we should trust them to also elect our mayor and our council if we trust them to also make those decisions and so there's just a lot of this that aligns with our values and it's really about bringing more of our community into the fold to really decide and help us understand not just who should represent the community but really the input on the issues that that decide not just what boulder is but what boulder can be in the future so so that that's i think just a really high level sense of all the motives and the good reasons and the why that we should embark on this because it really fulfills so many of our community values and builds a community that we can depend on in the future

[181:00] thanks matt i think that the way that this is working from charter committees bob's going to give a con concave next yeah yeah and i and i i know i know how the vote will turn out here so i'm not i'm going to i'm not really speaking to council because i'm pretty sure that people already know how they're going to come out on this one but i am speaking to the community because i know there are a number of people in the community and maybe even a few council members who have a different view first of all you know matt was very passionate about what he said and i actually agreed with a lot what he said i just want to make a couple of points though um first of all um it's probably really important for the community i know council knows this but community to understand that we have municipal matters that is ballot measures on all of our batteries all of our ballots both odd and even so so we're not talking about measures like the ones we are talking about tonight those go on even your ballots those go on your ballots the only thing we're really talking about is city council elections that's the only thing that we're talking about shifting from uh odd which is where we've been for many many decades to even um

[182:03] and probably the most compelling for me reason i've heard from many many people in the community about concerns about shifting to um from odd year which is what it's been for many many years is that an even year we have lots and lots of other elections going on that's probably why they're so highly voted on and the concern is is that the city council campaigns and the city council of elections will get swamped by the state and federal elections happening in years of divisible by two or by fours we've got presidential elections obviously in years divisible by four we have senate elections we have u.s house representatives we have the gubernatorial elections we have the state legislature both houses we have the county commissioners and all the other county offices all of those are in odd years and they take a lot of air out of the room and the concern that many people have is is that um the council races will get lost in the shuffle that will be will be um not front center and people will not be

[183:00] paying attention to that and adding a city council election to all those other races won't make those other elections better nor will they make the city council election better it'll just be one more thing you know in a big pile of things and that's probably why a vast majority very significant majority of cities and towns in colorado don't do it almost all of them there's a there's a small handful of exceptions at the list that do do even year elections but a vast vast majority of cities and towns of colorado have audio elections for just that reason they want to make sure the community is paying attention to who they elect a city council and not be distracted by the senate race and the president race and the governor's race there's only four home rule cities in colorado that have even your elections and the largest of those is cherry hills village which is a population of about 6 000 people there's a few home rule towns that have even your elections like parker and castle rock and a few statutory towns do like

[184:00] loch bowie and monument but more than 90 percent of the colorado cities and towns have odd year elections and the reason is of course is so they don't compete with the state or federal attention um as we're about to hear from kathy were we to go down this path and were the voters to support it the conversion would be quite complex it would require us to perform some unnatural acts i think we can hear two options and nicole suggested a third one none of those are going to be simple um all of them all three of them would require an extension of existing council terms that is people that are serving on council now would have to number one agree that their terms would be extended and of course we'd have to go to the voters and ask them for permission to extend those terms um and i'm not sure exactly where the county clerk or the secretary of state would be on those especially if we're trying to also in parallel introduce ranked choice voting and have a presidential election kathy may have more information on that and i also not sure what extending people's terms would do to term limits does that extra

[185:01] year count as a term or is that part of the person's first or second term i just don't know the answer that question um i do want to acknowledge what matt said he was absolutely right that there are there there's greater voter turnout in even your elections um than on your elections and that's not surprising because people care about presidential elections that care about house and senate and and all the other elections that happen i wish that wasn't true i wish we had higher voter turnout regardless of whether it was out or evening but that's just the fact of the matter people pay attention to things that are interesting and sexy and pay less attention to council which apparently is not as interesting or sexy but um but those are those are decisions that voters are making making voters in a much higher number decide that they want to participate in even your elections because they are things that they really care about who's president who's you know in the house and who's the county commissioners and so on and so forth we don't disenfranchise people who who who want to vote in odd years elections the same people are enfranchised in both

[186:00] types of elections it's just some people choose not to vote for city council elections it's just not interesting to them or maybe they don't want to inform themselves who knows why people some people choose to opt out of city council elections in those odd years but they do and we've made voting very very easy as matt said um we have mail-in voting so all people have to do to participate in the city council election is to is to fill out a valid drop in the mail but even even as simple as we've made it um a large number of people simply choose not to they may they're not interested in city council they don't care they don't want to inform themselves they just can't be bothered to vote in the city council elections that's a shame i'm not sure that those people will suddenly become more informed if we move to even your elections they some of them may very well fill out the bottom after their ballot after they vote for president they may fill it out they may not be as informed um or or maybe maybe there's a laziness factor that i don't really know but um we undoubtedly will have more people voting in city council elections and even years

[187:00] but it's not going to necessarily improve quality of information at the bottom half and finally i just i do want to come back to i thought there were some interesting comments made when we were talking about um electronic smoking devices and several of my colleagues said that that question was not ready for prime time there'd been no polling there'd been a little community engagement so they weren't really keen on putting on the ballot this year attacks um on cannabis smoking devices and i think that was probably a good decision i think the same can be said here there really hasn't been any polling matt made some good compelling arguments for this but we haven't really have much in community engagement there hasn't certainly hasn't been any polling and we really don't know if this one's ready for prime time either so i think if if you felt the the last one was not ready for prime time i think you'd have to be honest and acknowledge that this one is it sounds like a great idea and maybe it is a great idea but we really haven't spent a whole lot of time talking to the community about this one either

[188:01] so those are the reasons that i would will when we vote on this in july and august we'll be voting to not put this on the ballot obviously if a majority does put on the ballot it'll be up to the voters to decide and if that's the will of the voters then that's i guess we'll join those handful of other cities that have you in your elections that's it thanks bob i i'm a little confused about how this um portion of the meetings uh rolling out here so i don't know if there are questions after the pros and cons for staff or or where we're going from here if we want to invite other council members to weigh in on pros and cons so maybe over to the charter committee on yeah thanks thanks rachel um i would just maybe recommend if there's you know perhaps other thoughts on why to do this or why not that's probably helpful now since bob and i just laid that out and then i do think it's important to then jump into the mechanics because at the end of the day we're gonna we we need to elevate a

[189:00] decision to staff on one are we doing this and two which option are we going to ask them to embark on so um i think we can we can spend a little bit more on the why or why not but then getting into that direction is probably helpful on which of those mechanics and probably spending some time talking about them um because they are a little different and they have different consequences um in in how we would evaluate making that evolution to to even here thanks okay yes thank you teresa sure so i would recommend it seems like the threshold question here is whether to engage in even your elections or not and so it seems like that's the right starting place right and then if you find through your uh if you find that it is the will of council to engage in even your elections then um kathy haddock will walk through what the different options are for that

[190:02] thanks um and and i guess just one point of clarification theresa for you um what did what is like what did we decide at the retreat versus what do we have to decide right now so at the retreat the city council decided that um it was of interest to explore even your elections so this is the this is the product of that exploration now with this information in mind council can decide if they want to continue down that path or whether this exploration has fulfilled the will of council and and um council does not now desire even your elections great okay i see mark stand up and and the the question before us again is the threshold do we want to move forward with even your election going to the ballot if so we'll get to the nuts and bolts with staff

[191:00] mark i am inclined not to go forward but if it is the will of counsel to do so i would say that that the fact that we've had no community outreach we've done no polling we have no idea whether this is something that is desired by the community at large um unlike what we did with the infrastructure tax when we had a very clear idea of what the community at large wanted um the exploration of this topic is fine but to jump from this exploration to say now we have a policy and we need to move forward and we have no concept of what the larger community desires or wants to me it is all i have to use that expression not ready for prime time doesn't mean we would never do it it doesn't mean that it that it's intrinsically a poor idea um but before we tee this up for for a community argument it would be nice to know where the community stands at least in general

[192:01] terms i don't start suggesting that every policy uh requires you know 51.2 percent consent in order to move forward but it would be nice to know if there's at least 51 percent that wants to move forward um and we don't have that and the mechanics of this are obviously quite complex um and i'm not quite sure uh what the concept is about lengthening terms by a year but there's there is certainly a prohibition against involuntary servitude um so if this were to apply to me i would have some comments of a very uh strong nature about it um and lastly and since we're doing pros and cons um i do want to reiterate something that bob said this is our one opportunity and in an odd year election to have a community conversation about local representatives who aren't in washington they're there

[193:02] but they're in boulder only to serve the interests of the people of boulder and in an odd year we have that conversation can you imagine trying to get people to go to a forum for city council candidates when they're being bombarded with opportunities to go to events for president senate governor represent house of representatives i mean that's simply um i think ultimately this is a case where the voters will decide if they want it then it'll pass if they don't want it then it's not going to pass i want to just remind folks what i called out last week after we heard the news about roe versus wade we are in a time of rising authoritarianism and declining democracy and this particular topic of moving to even-year elections no other places in colorado have done it because the research on it is really relatively new within the last five to ten years or so um places like

[194:00] california that are pretty forward thinking on on these issues of representation and in government they've actually set laws at the state level governing when cities need to switch to even your elections if turnout between even and odd-year elections is um if there's too big of a gap between that um so i i think that there there is precedent and i think colorado maybe just hasn't caught up to to where folks are going yet for me this is a huge issue around representation and that becomes even more important in the context of what we saw last week with the roe vs wade news it is those of us who are kind of the most vulnerable the most marginalized and as a white woman i don't want to put myself away at the top of that pile um but there we the ones who are going to get hit by this rising authoritarianism first it's all the people who are already vulnerable and for me what this does is um what the research has shown around places that have um

[195:02] that have uh done this change is that there is a big difference and yeah there's some down ballot fallout but there's still a bigger difference between the um the folks who are voting in even years and voting in odd years it increases participation in the voting process across the board and it does that especially for groups that have always been marginalized by local communities as more and more of people's lives become dictated by local communities i think it's really essential that that we give more voters um a voice in in what is happening and you know i think we need to as matt said um you know recognize that we're perfectly happy for uh renters for low-income people for people of color to vote in even-year elections when we're doing a presidential election that honestly doesn't affect people's lives the way that local elections do

[196:01] how can we get more people engaged in um in local elections where we're really making the decisions that affect people's lives and landmarking but also the decisions that are affecting people's everyday lives i think it's important that we have representation there for voters thanks nicole matt and then tara and then mark thanks rachel um we've all run campaigns to get elected we know exactly which neighborhoods to go to we know which ones vote we know which ones don't vote imagine the freedom and the liberation that that gives existing or future candidates to walk into neighborhoods who would otherwise tell you no one running for city council has ever knocked on my door

[197:00] that precinct 808 no one knocks on those doors because they know that no one votes in that in that precinct on odd years so it is really important that we think about how it unleashes a new wave of democracy in our community of community engagement of how we go about campaigning the empowerment of people saying oh my gosh you're the first person to knock on my door ever as a candidate and in all honesty you know no one running for city council is doing tv ads the tv stuff's still going to run the national and state stuff but the daily camera and the boulder weekly and the boulder beat and build a reporting lab they're going to still focus on the local stuff whether it's 2024 2026 or like they're still gonna focus our community's still gonna get a heavy dose of that stuff so so i i'm just not sold there's just no evidence that people are going to get overwhelmed with the national stuff and ignore it and so i think i want to i want to focus on instead of perception and and and loose

[198:01] conjecture does evidence really show it's the case or not and and that should really drive our decision at the end of the day is it ready for prime time this is a binary decision you either want it or you don't and and there's you don't need to pull and spend a big community this isn't a tax this isn't anything that requires all that deep community engagement it's a simple question do you want to go even near or do you not and if you do is this way going to work for you and so i think you can go to the voters with something that's really at the simplest level a binary decision of do you want to have more people voting or do you not and so so i i don't buy the the prime time argument i think any time is prime time to ask people if they want more engagement in our democracy tell me it's my turn i'm ready to talk i was great i was quiet all night good job yeah i want to first say matt that i did not know when i went door to door and you know that was my favorite thing how many times i've mentioned it people

[199:00] don't want to hear i didn't have any idea which communities did or didn't vote i did pick the community purely by which houses were the closest so i wouldn't have to walk so far so that was my number one and i do not and i learned a lot when i went door to door one of them was it was very special to have five to 15 minute conversations only about local issues because really not as much was happening nationally so to the point where i truly understand what bob is saying i i lived that where it was fascinating to hear from each and every person of every different type because like i said i picked the neighborhoods that were probably very um diverse for the reason that the houses were closer together so that's the first thing i want to say but i also hope and that goes for the whole community this conversation doesn't go to if you don't agree with me then you're bad or you're wrong or you're not you know um you don't like democracy

[200:02] because frankly i hear both sides and i like a lot of opinions on both sides i can every time i hear one side they say yeah that and every time i hear the other side i say oh yeah that but i hope and i'm asking for all of us to not put each other down for looking at local elections in a different way that being said when i went door-to-door a lot of people said this to me they said is there an election this year they also said what day is it what day is the election they said those are some of the things and um i don't blame them because a lot of people don't really know what's happening on the off years they don't and one person said to me that he he never ever ever votes on off years ever that's his policy i still remember that and that was like six months ago so it stuck out in my mind and so i'm going to say that i'm very torn on this issue because i also do want to get as many people to the ballot box as possible

[201:01] on the other and so and that's the great thing about doing it on even years but on the other hand i really do believe we are going to be especially with all that's happening nationally there is no way that not that local issues are going to take precedence over what is happening right now nationally and i do think we're going to lose a lot of what was special about local elections and i agreed with what someone said people are not going to be running to our forums that's for sure so they're going to be too busy trying to save the country for instance so i'm torn if it goes to the ballot i'll be i'll be good with it because i can definitely see both sides but um i just want to say to the community when i got a lot of phone calls this weeks and emails when people disagreed with me it was the most special because every time somebody gave another thought it gave me another way of looking at things and so i'm going to ask that the community does get

[202:00] involved and keep giving their thoughts and opinions about this issue with respect for differing opinions as i try to make my decision about how i'm going to land um i just want to say that we all on this council deeply care about democracy i know each one of us well i care about you all so much every one of you is my friend and i respect all of your thoughts and so that's why how i'm hoping this goes right now for me to get every time i wake up and i feel differently by the way so for everybody that's taking the time to spend time with me on the phone including the community members i want to thank you all for that keep doing it i just wanted to say my piece about how i'm hoping that we can do uh this next um section uh we can discuss this topic with with uh love and respect for each other that's what i wanted to say here here tara mark then lauren then aaron

[203:00] yeah i i just want to respond to a couple of comments i started in politics a little more than 50 years ago my first experience was in voter registration and it seems to me that that the issue here is how do we promote off-year participation not squander the one opportunity we have to have a real community conversation with our local elected leaders and that's that's the fact of it we have the council candidates have the attention of the community in in odd years they will not be a blip on the radar screen in even years and that's simply the fact of it uh and so i think people will be less informed about their representatives they'll be less connection with their representatives and they'll be less discussion with their representatives secondly i give weight to the fact that no other communities of size in colorado have elected to

[204:00] move to an even year election with respect to california i tend to be very reluctant to hold them up as uh as my role model in many many things they've got their own issues to deal with and lastly and then i will pass it on um i know matt you don't think engagement on this question is necessary but you know we tend to be very focused on engagement except when we don't want to engage and i i think that's not a consistent policy and it's not a policy we ought to be implementing at this at this time we value engage we like to talk to the community we like the community to talk to us and i think there is something lost by simply saying you don't need to do it here's the question just answer it yay or nay i i don't think that's an optimal result um and so for those reasons i uh i maintain that this is not a ready for prime time uh proposition and

[205:00] you know of course i'm going to not support it as it goes forward thank you thanks mark lauren then aaron then tara is your hand up again um so as people have mentioned council may be the primary focus for some residents in odd years but other people have busy lives and may not even realize as tara pointed out that the election is happening this year or what day it is while some people may be invited to events where governors senators and presidents are speaking i'm not sure that that represents the majority of our residents um and it is true that we don't have polling on this issue but in we do have a clear issue that we are trying to solve which is how many people vote in our local elections

[206:02] we have evidence from other communities that if we were to implement even year elections we most likely would see higher turnout and if smaller communities in colorado can make even year elections work i'm certain that a community the size of boulder has enough pull to you know create enough attention to get people interested in our local politics even during national elections while we don't know for certain if this would pass or not i think it's really important that we give this opportunity to the voters to make this decision thanks lauren aaron and tara and then i'll call myself so people have spoken eloquently on this i won't go into depth i i will be

[207:00] supporting moving the sport on to the ballot and i'll just make a couple highlights from other people's points one is that when we have more more of our community voting we get representation you know from our entire community and that gives us elected leaders who are um elected with the will of a more representative instead of our committee uh community and when you make structural changes to make voting accessible to more people you get that more representative electorate so we all love our mail-in ballots that was a structural change that has increased turnout enormously if we shift to even your elections when 20 000 more people vote then we'll get maybe not exactly 20 000 more votes for for city council candidates but but somewhere close to it and we'll have a more representative electorate so i think that'll be amazing and then just to the point about the attention on the local races as you go into you know the the city council campaigns are short we're just about three months long and as you're hitting that point in the the presidential cycle the airwaves and the

[208:02] television ads are saturated with national issues but the local campaigns don't run in those sectors they don't go on the radio they don't go on the television and um frankly in a very blue city such as boulder most people have made up their minds on the large state national races by the time you get to those last three months so i think that the local uh elec electors will have plenty of attention to devote to city council races um in those last three months leading up to the election and i actually would probably love the distraction from the national races where they've long since made up their minds so just a couple of points looking forward to moving this forward thanks thanks erin lauren is that a new hand tara did you change your mind no i forgot to say everything i was going to say of course no i spoke for a long time

[209:00] uh i just wanted to say that i do believe you know whenever i can't decide on something which is sometimes i usually pick putting it on the ballot because i feel like it's up to the people to decide not necessarily us you know only on such a very important topic so no matter how i feel about it which i haven't decided yet for such an important topic i would think that putting it on the ballot is the most important thing so i did forget to mention that and also again i just have a lot of respect for all of you and i love listening to your wonderful thoughts i mean that thanks tara um i will i think close this out here i'm i'm going to be in support of putting this on the ballot um i i might be the only person in the history of city council boulder who doesn't like going to 20 forums so like everybody's like maybe people won't run

[210:01] to our forums like that's a-okay to me like if there were three forums and and people turned out for those three who are interested all the better like i think it's absurd to be honest that we are you know running for office in a race that lasts so few weeks and we are expected to turn out to so many places to be honest so i think we overdo it and if we throttle back a little bit that that's fine to me i think that um i'm gonna vote in every election even odd year and there are a lot of people probably everybody that i'm looking at on the screen is the same so i don't think we're going to lose most the people that are already voting in these elections i think that we we can only stand to gain people who aren't yet being being hit with the information so to me it's just a win um you know if we have those three forms god willing like i said i'm never running again but for the poor people after me if they can go to a fewer number and we can really focus i think that's going to be you

[211:00] know possibly even like just just reduce some of the tension in local politics like we are overheated so i think that there may be some benefits to to mixing in with the national politics to be honest um so i'm i'm very much not worried about that um in terms of engagement i you know we do things differently like if you look at the first thing we looked at tonight gun violence prevention how many um be heard boulders or community forums do we have on that it's zero we're gonna have a public hearing we're gonna hear from people and we're gonna vote the way we're doing it here is we're gonna have a vote like that is the the public giving us the information so um i don't think there's anything out of the ordinary with with just putting it on the ballot we've we've gotten feedback that it is more democratic that it's going to be um better in terms of our racial equity plan goals and inclusivity so i think we put on the ballot and and see what the voters think

[212:00] so with that i think it's time to ask for a straw poll of do we want to put even your elections on the ballot in 2022. does that sound right theresa so i think matt's already raising his hand is that that's a yes so i got one two three four five five yes tear your hands up it's like a tarzan so we got five and a half yes i think and two and a half notes so that's going to be a we're putting on the s column um and with that i will turn it back over to either the charter subcommittee or kathy to talk us through how that will work thanks thanks everyone for the great feedback there unless this the um the subcommittee has anything to go forward i'll jump into the options okay um emily or alicia whoever's running the program now we can go back to the slide that we were on and in in putting um the options

[213:00] together we had a few parameters that we were considering to get to the two options and those are that the charter right now provides for direct election of the mayor to start in 2023 and the um that in order to get that even number terms you either have to shorten the term of future uh board members for one term or for your council members for one term or lengthen the term of existing council members um we wanted to avoid making any changes in the 2024 election be at that county clerk's request because of that being a presidential year and concern about all the um challenges that potentially could happen um and so not wanting to add any more confusion to that election or staff time um and um i think we had one other parameter in

[214:00] here i apologize i lost my program so if you can advance it to the um option one chart the chart thank you very much so we tried to put it in chart form to to make it easy so the option one doesn't extend anybody's terms so no indentured servitude but um does i'm sorry no extension of any terms of existing elected officials so everybody in the future will have to run for their seat rather than just get an extra term um we go ahead with the direct elected mayor in 2023 kathy kathy kathy hold on so it's not getting an extra term uh it's just i just want to be clear yeah yeah right because i want to not confuse term limits and any of that stuff it's not an extra term just an additional year to their existing or subtract traction thank you good clarification and actually that reminds me of bob's question too um good question about the

[215:00] term limit issue i think that when we draft the question we want to make sure that we make it clear um that the extra year added if that's the direction you go does not um is not an extra term just does matt saying for purposes of um term limits so in 2023 the mayor would be elected for a three-year term instead of the two-year term that's currently in the charter and then be up again in 2026 and for two years thereafter another option you could do in that is have the first strictly elected mayor go to 2025 and then that one elected in 2295 just have one year term if you didn't want to give the first directly elected mayor three-year term then going to the orange ones um the the current council members that have terms that go to 2025 would be up an election again in 2025 the council seats that will be up in

[216:01] 2023 would get three-year terms so their terms would end in 2026 and then um at the 2025 election the council members in that group in the orange would get three-year terms and then thereafter we are back to even years four council members up for four year terms each year so we maintain the rotation of four council members so that's option number one going to option two which is the next slide so this one is where i i love marks indentured searching so um the the orange ones show the existing council members would go and get an extra year to their term we'd skip the 2025 election so that in the the orange folks would not um be up for election again until 2026. the mayor that was elected in 2023 would

[217:02] have a three-year term the council members that were the green ones that that are elected in 2023 would have a five-year term until 2028 and then we're back on every uh other year even year the top four vote getters get four year terms and two years later the second group gets four year terms so does anybody have questions about the rotation okay next slide please the other thing that the charter committee talked about is currently the charter requires the swearing-in of newly elected council members on the third tuesday of november that was time because council meetings were in november and there was a change within the past few decades to change it from january to november um but now as it

[218:00] takes longer and longer to certify election results you know there was an issue with onboarding and um knowing when the election results would be we think that problem's probably gonna get worse rather than better so the option to change the swearing-in of council candidates to either the first business meeting in december or the first one in january so we'll have certified election results and can onboard the newly elected officials and by calling it the first business meeting we accommodate you changing the meetings to thursday and matt has his hands on that thanks kathy i was just curious because we had an option to choose from did we are we still trying to go through them all or did we want to make that decision point on one option uh one or two and and give the will of counsellors which one to pursue i've just sort of from a process question when did we want to i have all the questions at the end so we'll make sure we get them all thanks guys as we go that's

[219:00] fine let's do them at the end i think okay okay okay great and then next slide this one is addressing the library issue it's expected that the um that there potentially will be a petition circulated that gets enough signatures that it will be on the county ballot whether or not to form a library district and have a tax for it and if there is there are provisions of the charter that directly affect library issues and the the most important one that may affect you guys is section 134 that says that you are required so even if there was a tax that started in 2023 for the library district the city council would be required to appropriate at least a third of a mill assessed within the city to be used only for the benefit of the library and that use can never change and it also applies to the proceeds from sale of any library property

[220:01] so that provision will be in effect even if there is a library district assessing a tax until the voters remove that provision from the charter so that's why we were bringing up this issue now expecting the library issue to be on the ballot this time next slide now we're addressing the issues that will be on the ballot regardless of what you do one of them is the initial the referendum on the ordinance and saying the cu south property and then for the overlapping entities next slide please boulder county expects that they will have um something about can we go to the next life something about extending either the transportation tax or the alternative sentencing and they expect a library petition they have the same schedule for getting things on the ballot as you do so there may be more they may come up with more things but this is all that michelle had for me at this point

[221:00] the boulder valley school district is talking about revenue increases being um discussed they're in the middle of their engagement sessions right now two slides ahead please um and the state next slide has um there is initiative for reduction of the state income tax rate right and there's other initiatives pending for the title setting board but none of them have been set yet and i couldn't find any information what rtd plans so next slide here's all the questions um whether we do the put draft the ordinance and ballot language with climate tax with five million dollars in bonding authority you've already said no to the second question and to matt's question you've said yes to the first part of the third bullet of changing candidate elections so we need you to choose option one or two and select whether you um are interested in changing the swearing-in of council members and if so

[222:01] to the first meeting in december or the first one in january the reason for the options is because of the holidays and you're not having two meetings in december and all that kind of thing and then the last one is whether to remove the library provisions from the charter with that only to become effective if the uh library district mill levy passes and that's all i have we're here to answer questions thanks kathy can we leave the um slide questions up and first um to nuria i think we maybe have answers on the first topic the 5 million bonding authority that we were waiting on yeah i was just going to say however uh whichever way you want to do it if you want to go to all the answers and then hold off on the climate tax but i know that cara is back with us on the phone not in person gremlins are out to get us but know that there were some she was listening and there are some questions that maybe cara

[223:00] you can respond now about um some of the questions that mark posed before you were rudely booted off it's been a glitchy day thanks for hanging with us cara okay thank you can you hear me now if we can okay i apologize and i i also apologize i don't know if i heard all the questions but um what i think i heard were what are some examples of some debt or authority to issue debt where we had a specific revenue source essentially as the pledge but that also pledged essentially the general fund or full faith and credit of the city except for um pledging the ability to increase taxes and examples of those are our trash tax bonding authority our osmp debt has the general fund backing

[224:01] and our capital improvement bond is also a general fund pledge but without the pledge to increase taxes so we have we have um asked that question of the voters and had that construct in the past i think another question i heard was the difference oh can we run the numbers for 20 years with and without general fund backing yes we can get that from our financial advisors quickly so we can provide that to you um and i think i also just wanted to copy out that um i think the financial advisors were probably being conservative about what the rating might be if it was just the climate tax pledge and did not have that general fund support as a pledge um just because we don't know what the rating would be and and it's a new territory and it would

[225:00] it would be something different um so it may be that rating as suggested in the memo there's a chance it might be slightly higher rating we just don't know that right now um and let's see oh i think there was a path there was a question about would would this count against our capacity and i mean yes anytime we issue debt that would count against our capacity and all of our outstanding debt is always a consideration by bond rating agencies so could impact future issuances but um i think these amounts are small relative to our capacity but it definitely is just a factor um and i'm sorry i'm trying to remember all the questions maybe mark you could if there are additional questions that i'm not answering right now i'm happy to no i think you've answered most of them uh other than identifying specific

[226:00] projects that we would want to apply these revenues towards um but i do have one technical question which is um can we move forward with the tax does the bonding capacity issue the the um the backstop issue have to be included in the ballot or that's something that that council can make a subsequent decision on uh depending upon factors of the time um i think that is a legal question but my understanding is yes it has to be part of the ballot language okay and i agree with cara i think it'd have to be part of the ballot language but i think that the council could still make the decision not to use it if they didn't want you for some reason so you want the voters to approve your top limit um you can not use it if you don't want to when you're actually issuing the bonds understood and the only remaining i

[227:00] agree with that my only remaining questions would be what what the 20-year bond without backstop would look like in terms of proceeds and do we have specific projects in mind uh because that's what we did with the infrastructure we identified things we were going to spend the money on uh are we there with respect to um to this tax and if not will we be there there in terms of identifying specific projects i think there's going to be something yes we can get you the 20-year numbers for sure and then i would defer to jonathan on the timing of the project identification but we can definitely get you to get the 20-year numbers first okay thank you thank you um cara thank you i appreciate that and mark i apologize i missed that question earlier and i'm i'm i appreciate you asking it um it's something i think our community really wants to know more about beyond just how we would spend money um with the existing tax and how um and how we think about evolving our

[228:01] programs this obviously opens up and unlocks a large amount of money in the early years and so we talked a lot about the scale that we need to be moving on in the next decade or so so obviously there's a little bit of balance there we want to make sure that we're communicating and doing engagement with our community to understand the types of projects that they would like to see but to give you some specific examples of things that we have been thinking about really deeply first of all really scaling up our electrification efforts um in our buildings we are going to be going to the public utilities commission next month in fact around looking at buying in as equity partners in large-scale renewable generation so that conversation with the puc is to begin laying out the design of that new program that would allow cities to actually become actual owners and scale renewables giving us access to the potential revenues and all the attributes of that power we you hear a lot and we talk a lot about uh technology related to resilience being able to microgrid for

[229:01] example how you would look at storage and on-site generation and islanding capabilities for critical facilities sheltering sites emergency operation centers so we'd be looking at deploying those types of microgrids and those types of technologies and you know often i think we forget that we need money to leverage money so a lot of the grants that are available for infrastructure projects particularly in the energy space um uh ev electrification and charging infrastructure being able to have access to those dollars up front i think unlock additional revenues that we could deploy here locally and the last thing that i want to say is you know this ability of bonding doesn't mean that we actually have to issue that debt anything we would do we would come back to council uh we would talk about the very specific projects that we would be uh issuing that debt for um and so there's a little bit of a balance between identifying the projects today uh and being able to talk to our

[230:00] community about the things that they would like to see that's all built into our engagement plan over the next couple of months so hopefully that gives you a little bit of the flavor i can keep going there's a lot more that i think we could talk about i'm i'm less frankly concerned with specific projects than the fact that we're starting to get the inquiries from people who will only approve the tax if they have some understanding of of what the proceeds are going to be used for i defer to you as the actually what you want to do but i'm really trying to communicate that there's interest in the community uh as to um how we're going to use the money and it's important that we be responsive to that we want to make sure that this thing gets passed understood thanks mark and jonathan and cara and kathy next aaron i just want to echo what mark was saying um jonathan thanks for those great answers that i think maybe we could approach

[231:00] this a little bit like we did with the community culture safe safety and resilience i think i got the words in the wrong order but in terms of saying like here here's a starter list of things that we would like to use this money for as an example set of projects and so we want to use it for projects like these and then that gives the community some idea of where we're going to start see where they're going to see early impacts from that new tax to the revised tax and then still leave us with the latitude to um spend it on other similar kinds of projects going forward or attacked so something to think about as we approach because i think so a little bit more certainly would help the community as we move with this thanks aaron um i'm going to try and sort of i think maybe recalibrate the traffic on here so i think we asked all our questions on climate tax we finished electronic smoking devices all together

[232:00] um i don't know if there were questions um to staff on the uh election options one two and i would say there's actually an option three that nicole had hotlined earlier so i don't want to lose track of that which is not up on our side um so i think we should do questions on that and then uh questions on the swearing-in and library and then give our feedback on them so nicole do you wanna real quick though just state what what the third option is yeah thank you and i apologize i think i missed a little our internet's being really flaky tonight um but um the yes so the third option um that you know i wanted to raise for us because of some concerns i had with one and two um was uh basically just shifting everything starting in 2024 we would just start holding uh even year elections other communities that have done this that is basically how they have gone with it colorado state law actually

[233:00] prevents us from shortening our terms so that is not an option so extending basically by one year um every everybody everybody currently on council um extending by one year only one year not not an extra term just one year um to get us to even years that would basically do it so we would skip over 2023 entirely we would begin in 2024 with those who would have been up for election 2023 they're now up in 2024 um those of us who would have been up in 2025 now up in 2026. um that's it just a relatively simple we're there relatively quickly um again just uh from from what uh other other places have done this is uh um it's typical for it to not take more than a year or so um to do that so that and i understand they're there there are concerns at the county level i have concerns at the city level and i'm happy to talk about those at whatever

[234:00] point we get to discuss okay thanks nicole so um does anyone have questions on the um the three options for staff staff go ahead nicole um yeah this this kind of relates to my wanting to put out a different option i am really curious about the burden on our staff and let me in a couple of ways um so we know that the voters in even in odd years are slightly different groups there's a lot more people who are showing up in even your elections i know that our staff are hard at work thinking about how we are going to do the engagement that's necessary to explain ranked choice voting um to our voters so you know in my mind if we go with one of these first two options we are educating people about ranked choice voting uh spending a lot of time doing that in an

[235:00] odd year and then as we switch into even years we have to do that process again because we've got 15 to 20 000 new voters who are there and are going to be looking at this saying what is this that i'm supposed to be doing um so i'm curious about the um the education of voters peace and sort of that re-education of voters that may be necessary if we do odd years and even years the burden that we have on staff and then i'm also curious about the burden on staff for option one which has us doing three elections in four years um so i understand that there are concerns at the county clerk um level my concerns are really i think a question for staff of what's what is the energy and time and resources you are expending um for these different options you know i can answer part of those questions and i'll look to alicia and john morris to ask answer the other questions about doing

[236:01] the the voter information piece we do elections every year as a practical matter of staff so you know whether candidates are included in this year or that year is not a big deal as far as for the work that we need to do it's a different question with respect to budget and how much it's going to cost to be part of an even year election with a much longer ballot than a shorter ballot um so at least for the internal staff work it's about the same um for the cost and other things that the city clerk's office has to deal with it's different we'll let them address that if they're ready and i'm just i'm thinking about all the questions that i was constantly asking elisha during the election so um you know i think maybe there's a unique challenge of candidates being on the ballot well at this particular point i think

[237:00] like kathy said i think that the costs and the actual staff time is about the same but what we want to look at what's happening at the same time because like bob mentioned earlier we always have valid um measures on the the you know initiatives and referendums and those sort of things on the ballot so it's all according to what's happening at that year i think cost like kathy also designated is what our main concern will be because we're still going to have to initiate ranked choice voting whether that is going to be done in 2023 or if it's going to be done in 2024 that's going to be the the actual question if regardless when we do that that's going to be a heavy lift in itself initiating ranked choice voting and so if we initiate the ranked choice voting first and then go into the even year elections for our candidates that of course will take some of the lift and kind of i would say rebalance it but we're a small staff we'll have to of course get more help as we always do

[238:02] each year with the initiatives the referendums the candidates and we have to just pull in our resources we won't know until we know it's this that type of situation but it cost is our primary concern and again it when we will initiate the ranked choice voting because that's going to put in a whole nother different piece of our responsibilities and how we work with the county and the county has also said that they did not want to have the ranked choice voting initiated the same year as if we decided to go into even elections even your elections because of what that strain would put on them but we have to also associate that what that strain will put on us so again i don't think we know until we know but right now even the ranked choice voting from the information that we got back from the county clerk's office on the estimate cost for that alone is around 250 000 just to initiate that process if we are the only municipality in the county to be utilizing ranked choice voting

[239:01] because we would have to take on that whole entire cost does that answer most of your questions nicole because again it's it's sort of like a catch-22 you know we we're still going to have to take in the petitions we're still going to have to do the validations we're still going to have to do the signing parties and we're still going to have to meet the deadlines that the county has set so i don't think it's more of a more work it's just maybe more volume and i apologize for my voice because i'm i'm feeling a little weird today too so i do apologize for that and i'll be happy to answer any questions that you or any other council members may have that might be specific questions thanks elisha feel better um thank you john wanted to weigh in or nicole did you have any other questions um i think i'm good for now thank you uh and alicia did a great job answering

[240:00] that if i could just add one more thing to your question nicole specifically on advertising and outreach we've been working with the county closely just to get a ballpark of you know what we are going to expect with ranked choice voting alone and they say that the bare minimum that we should expect to spend on just advertising and outreach is going to be 15 000 but there's a range that they say could go all the way up to a million spent in some cases so there's a very large range of what we could do but they gave us that minimum fifty thousand dollar uh to expect so that's kind of where we're at we plan to work very closely with them to make sure we're on the same page okay and that was just sorry no i was going to say nicole just to elaborate on what john said when the county gave us that it didn't account for you know inflation of course and that 15 000 is just a basic what they will require us to pay for their outreach that doesn't include what outreach the city may want to do to our specific voters this is the

[241:00] county's overall cost for what their part in outreach will be so if we as a city say okay yes we want to do more robust like john said we could see the numbers climb rather rapidly because of course we're talking about you know production of printing and we're also talking about mailing we're also talking about training you know because the ranked choice ballot will be a separate ballot uh page and we'll have to pay for that separate page because we don't want to mix it up like you know with all the other items that may be on the ballot so the county has suggested that that particular ballot issue for ranked choice voting be a separate ballot so again we'll have to work all those semantics out and right now we're working and looking at budgeting like john said they gave us the bare minimum of their requirements for payment to hold the coordinated election but that doesn't at any in any way include what we want to do as a municipality as far as outreach and education

[242:00] yep okay thank you and just um two two really quick follow-up questions those numbers that were quoted were just for one-time um education efforts correct so if we were needing to do that in multiple years that would be sort of ensuing so the other question i think this relates to one of the options said something about having um two mayoral elections before we get to 2026 and i'm assuming that that means it would be 250 000 each time that we would do that is that correct or is it is it 250 000 just to do the setup in one election and then we've sort of paid for that in future elections but so if we were to do a mayoral election in 2023 and 2025 we would pay 250 000 both times or is that just a one time that is a possibility um the the issue is the setup of of the actual process because right now the state is only requiring um the state law and the bill that was passed is only requiring the secretary of state to have everything in

[243:01] place by 2025. so if we initiate it and we do it before the state is ready that is why we have to incur those costs right okay right and so and again other municipalities in boulder county may take on rank choice val voting and if they take on that that particular issue then we would split the cost but the reason that the cost is so pertinent for us is because we're the only ones only municipality in boulder county that will be initiating rank choice voting so it could be the same but it also could decrease as we go forward because someone one fee is of course the ranked choice voting setup and of course the ranked choice voting um uh software and training and and that sort of thing so those those costs will decrease but right now we're looking at the 250 000 to just implement and as time goes on some of those costs will will already be some of those functions will already be in place and those costs won't be necessary okay thank you that

[244:01] helps thanks tara then lauren and matt i have a quick question quick question option one that said three years nicole just said that we aren't even allowed to do that right so how would we do that if that was a choice and we can't we can't shorten a term of a council member that is currently in office you can only when people are elected new you can do a shorter term so three option one is legal it would not be legal to change anybody in the orange category i believe it was in the chart it would not be legal to reduce the terms of those people in office so then those people in office would have how many years well under option one

[245:00] they would maintain their existing terms and then in 2025 the people that were elected would get three-year terms and that's legal because that they're newly elected people hey uh lauren and matt so i'm trying to kind of understand the full cost picture there's been a couple mentions of how changing a council election to an even year might impact the cost of putting things on the ballot can someone explain or add more detail to that wouldn't it be i mean isn't because what we're paying for is this to go out you know a portion of what goes out in the mail to everyone wouldn't that portion be similar whether

[246:01] it was an even year or an odd year yes that that cost would be similar but what what i was trying to just get across is once we initiate rank choice voting that's an additional cost because that's going to include an additional page and that's going to include additional information and additional instructions so that's the additional cost and again once we initiated that cost would decrease but once it's initiated in in every year after that they the county is suggesting because we are the only ones in the county the only municipality in the county that will be doing ranked choice the ranked choice information in that particular vote will be on a separate page so that's going to increase our cost in itself because we'll have to have a separate pay a separate page printed whereas normally things are just all part of their whole entire ballot and so we get a a divided cost as far as the ballot printing but we will have to take

[247:01] on that cost for that extra page and that's only because of ranked choice five voting so that had really nothing to do with the other even years it was just strictly for ranked choice voting thank you for that clarification of course mayor pro chris turned his camera on and wondered if he had something to add yeah i think maybe just real quick chris messchuck deputy city manager to add to what alicia and john have covered and nicole your question and lauren your question i think part of it is really if you think right now we we budget uh and we plan staff time to conduct a city council election every two years and depending on which option you select we'll need to do that we'll need to do more of those than every two years and so there'll be that additional cost to uh for campaign finance uh and for for the match and for um the ballot space as alicia was kind

[248:00] of describing that's coupled with then the implementation of ranked choice voting which is which will make our local elections more expensive to be able to support that on the ballot so that's really where the cost comes in so if that's helpful to to kind of add some clarity yeah thanks so much chris um i see nicole's hand and i will just um point out that it is after 10 now and we still have a couple miles to go here so nicole you're up thank you um my question uh was just around whether it's possible to split up the ranked choice voting and even your election stuff literally can we do right choice voting for mayor in 2023 as initially planned um and sort of move regular council elections to 24.4 then kind of getting to um to even years from there right so then we would have 2026 we do ranked choice voting for mayor and um all council members right so we're just sort of splitting that up a little bit right

[249:01] um where you know when they are in 2023 it's a blending i guess of one and two we elect mayor in 2023 gets a three year term um getting them to 2026 in 2024 or then we're basically extending um everyone's terms one year we get to 2024 um for some of us and we get to 2026 for the rest of us i'm just wondering if that makes it easier to split that that might be to elisha or kathy it's certainly doable and it splits things better than doing them all in the same year um the cost is i don't know about alicia may have know more about that well from what our interactions with the county is that's what they would prefer um and again i think for budget purposes

[250:00] it would be an easier um i think request to ask for um one pot of money that will handle one specific thing and then another pot of money that would handle another thing but again like chris said we have to keep in mind what we're paying for um the council election and and what that looks like every other year and when this will be implemented if we go ahead and do the ranked choice voting next year that'll be taken care of right and then we can assess the cost after that first year but with the council election we'll have to look at those costs see how that plays into um what we'll need for that particular election year and then add it to what we're already paying for our elections and and i'm not sure if that's clear but i think it would be doable like kathy said and i think it would be easier to fit both of those requirements and both those needs into two separate budgets

[251:01] and just so i'm clear on what you're asking for how how is what you're suggesting different than option two did i miss something yeah so the difference is so option two and um this is just my concern with it is that only some of us are getting our terms extended by a year that is my concern um and um it doesn't seem totally fair especially i think for tara the one person who would uh have to be running again uh next year already which feels far too close um so i i think it's mainly that right it's that everybody's terms will be extended a year but we would still hold a ranked choice um um mayor elect election in 2023 but um everybody who would normally be up in 2033 is now up in 2024 okay everybody yeah who would be up in 2025 up in 2026. it just it distributes that it feels fairer to me than just some of us

[252:02] moving forward thank you thanks nicole matt i i appreciate this conversation and um it's certainly been helpful to see what the impacts are from our secretary of state's guidance um coming out of hb 1071 and what those implications are but also knowing you know broomfield is going to be doing this they approve ranked choice voting for for their folks and they're doing it in 2023 so so we aren't alone and there's other communities looking to to do it as well i know denver it's on denver's docket and fort collins is looking to do it so it's going to start spreading now that it's been allowed at the state level to do so and i think there's going to be an of course amortization of a lot of that software cost sort of to what alicia was pointing out um so it will spread the cost out quite substantially across the state as more embark on it beyond just that of what happens in our county um i guess my question is interesting to

[253:02] nicole's suggestion of still trying to achieve the first even year in 2024 but i want to come back to perhaps some of the guidance from our county clerk in not wanting to do things in the presidential year and i'm curious is that more aligned with not having ranked choice voting in that even year or is it trying not to just have local elections in that even year or the third is it trying not to do both or for the first time in that presidential year because i think i want to make sure whatever we do is doing it in a way that is not only gonna have support from our own clerk and office with you alicia and staff but also that of molly and so i want to make sure what if we parse out what is really that concern there which version maybe works against the grain for our county clerk and which one maybe doesn't so maybe that's for those that have had

[254:01] those more detailed conversations with molly i'm curious where you see those uh settling out i'm not sure if kathy or john want to weigh in but when we met with molly molly was supportive of course of what the voters and councils will will be what they were anticipating the same thing that nicole brought up is how it would impact the staff that she currently has they had this particular specialized um person that was very knowledgeable about ranked choice voting leave their municipality so they're also scrambling to try to find that specialty information and that specialty person to help because they don't have anybody that can help them kind of gauge what's needed and what's not needed they're also looking to get more guidance and direction from the secretary of state on funding because at this particular point they're not sure how much funding will trickle down

[255:00] to the counties and because again we are the first ones in boulder county that's where that high cost for this first year comes in to play i think at some point molly and stephanie again have been amazing as far as providing us with information but they're still trying to figure it out too so as we work together i think the more questions we take to them and the more answers we get back it'll be a good partnership like you said broomfield is going to be doing and there's other municipalities that's going to be doing it but we're the first and us being the first puts us in the precarious spot of having to look at what those costs will be for being the first um and again very supportive very responsive to our needs very good at answering our questions but i think they're concerned with the same things that like nicole and the rest of council are concerned with how will that affect our staff at this particular level and just to follow up for clarity you know with the guidance that secretary state's office just put out was draft

[256:00] guidance and that she's statutorily required to put out her full guidance this november and so all of that that we will know from the secretary of state's office will be effectively known and it's also more to know that um money was just put in the long bill um the long bill for the budget in the state uh for the state legislature that would that would put a lot of money into the secretary of state's office to cover those expenses and to alicia's point uh one of that trickles down to the county so just for added context of those state mechanisms and where it impacts us just for those that aren't aware i thought it would be important just to add some of that color and context um that that november is the key date of all that guidance and that money will be coming in and and we'll see just how much trickles down from this particular legislative session and matt just to make one more point about that the sec at the secretary of state's level their main concern is making sure the machinery and the voting machines are capable of handling this

[257:00] particular function and so they've hired their contractor that contractor would be the contractor that they would recommend for us in 2023 and anyone else that is going to be um initiating ranked choice voting in 2023 but they don't have a um solid time they have 20 25 in their sites not 2023. so anything that happens before 2025 those municipalities would have to incur that cost and i just wanted to make that clear that they do have things in place you're right but again with us being the first and us being on a different timeline that makes us special thanks elisha thanks matt we're uh definitely special um okay so i i want to point out that it is after 10 i don't know if we need a motion to extend the meeting in this situation or not um but we we also have a number of people who are recovering or currently ill and uh we've had some people had to drop off so i want to kind of uh encourage us to

[258:00] move it along pretty well so toward the end i'm just gonna do before we get into a discussion or more questions just sort of do a a a test here to see where people are thinking of options one two three and perhaps option four now so just uh we will we will have discussion here um but just want to see if there's a strong inclination before we get into that so option one is just the three year council terms to get to even years um may or three year or one year to get to even years is anybody just pretty convinced that that's what they want to do how about option two five year term can i just say something real quick i don't i don't need three and four are not down here it was quite a long discussion i'll have somebody recap those two when we get there i just kind of want to get a feel for maybe that's hoping for our discussion yeah okay um so

[259:00] it sounds like we don't really need to discuss option one so that's good so for option two are there people who are you know inclined i'm i'm like i'd put my hand half up i'm definitely considering that one aaron's a half up too okay um option three nicole i think three and four are kind of both your babies at this point so do you can you give a one-liner for each of those sure yeah so um option three basically just has so both options take everybody's terms and extend them by one year only uh to move us to an even year election and get us on track um the difference as i see it is whether uh ranked choice voting moves as well so do we do the mayor election in 2023 and then um everybody else's terms is shifting one year or do we do everything try to do everything in 2024 recognizing um you know that that we need to probably figure out what the county clerk how to um how how we would

[260:01] potentially make that a reality so option number three i'm gonna say is everything it's like option two but everything's 2024 instead i think instead of 2026. lauren's got her hand raised maybe has cleared lauren yeah oh that's you okay you're option three thank you option four is uh the cabinet i'd want to talk to molly but yeah okay option four would also be 2024 for uh the council elections i think there would be a one-year addition everybody's term but the mayor would stay 20 23. i'd say i'm kind of is that right yeah that's that's right and i think it just um sort of gets to a question around um can't is it legal to do that because i think we're sort of supposed to have the um all the elections together and i don't know it sounds like if the voters are approving it

[261:00] um then we could do that as a way of getting to even your elections um but yeah so i i personally rachel i'm somewhere in three or four okay thanks um all right so there were a lot of hands that didn't go up anywhere there so i'm just gonna open it for this rather than going through questions on the other ones now let's just um plow through this because i think this is gonna meet the meatiest one so open to discussion now taking hands and we need to pick one two three or four lauren so i'm gonna give my plug for three as i've been bringing up simplicity i think is really good when we're trying to explain these things and just the idea of explaining that it's we're extending everyone's term one year so that we can get on even years in 2024 and have the rank choice election for mayor i think that we by pushing the ranked choice election

[262:01] for mayor back a year we also have time for potential other cities to join we have time to watch superior and see how much difficulty they have implementing in 2023 um we have an extra year to prepare for it so i just for me it seems both these most straightforward and has some potential upsides in terms of cost and preparedness i understand that there are concerns regarding implementation staff time at both the city and the county level and if those are insurmountable i would go with something else but that is you know my preference would certainly be for option three thanks lauren um elisha has some commentary i'm guessing i just wanted to make it uh known that

[263:00] the next presidential election is in 2024. yep thank you and understood um okay matt um all right so we started with two options and it expanded to four and now we got a call down to one so um i think we've made it a little harder on ourselves tonight but it's a good discussion nonetheless um so option one for me is not viable only because it has us doing three elections in four years it reduces continuity by shortening two different terms of councils uh and look it takes a while to get momentum going and i just think that that that just doesn't seem to work on a whole lot of levels um so so option one's off the table and i'll sort of take off but sort of whittle down um option three i i i struggle with only because it has been met with clear resistance from our clerks because of not wanting to embark on

[264:01] ranked choice voting on a presidential year and having all of that you know in in what is such an impactful and mind you it's largely expected that that there's going to be what we thought were lots of challenges in 2020 or challenges and lawsuits it looks to be exponentially more in 2024's presidential election cycle of challenging results and we would be just waving the flag um by introducing a new voting system on a presidential year where we know challenges are going to come so i think there's a lot of concern about the scrutiny and having a really clean ballot and so option three to me has has has a lot of perhaps issues with it so it really comes down to option two which is the skipping of the 2025 you extend the term um and then uh you you extend uh or extend the term one more year for the existing council and then those that get elected in 2023 get five-year terms and we get on cycle that way um i'm intrigued by option four

[265:00] which is that hybrid but um i would want to clarify with the with molly that she would be okay running an even year election in 2024 for council um knowing we had just done ranked choice voting in 2023. if that's okay then i i would be inclined to move towards uh that option four um so for me it's two and with the caveat four maybe being possible if if both elisha staff and molly's office would would not see big barriers of of entry to to option four hope that clarifies that's great thanks matt bob yeah well i'm you know as you guys know i'm not very even your elections but i'm trying to help you guys come up to the best solution here and so i agree with what matt just said um also a little bit worried about option three i don't understand option four but i don't need e2 option three though i'm still struggling with because um option three is egalitarian as it is

[266:00] it would um subject to the approval of the voters would add a year to everyone who sits on this council and so i think no one needs to declare this tonight but there may be some among the nine of us who don't want another year um and so i think it would be a little bit weird to go to the votes and say hey can the nine of us all have an extra year and then and only to find out that there may be one or two or three people who actually don't want to do that so i the the elegance of options one or two and i agree with matt two is better than one between those two um is it doesn't affect anybody um who is anybody's current term um it it option one and two both affect terms that you're yet to be elected for i think it's a little bit awkward to ask voters to extend terms of people who have already been elected and to assume that they want that so i think i think if you're going to go down the path of option three you probably should have private conversations with all nine people to see where they're at in that

[267:02] thanks bob i'm i'm not sure if option two doesn't increase the terms of half this council though i think it does who would be off and 25 have to say to 26. right that's a good point it's four people as opposed to nine but you're right sorry double talk okay tara this is one of those nights where i can't decide but i'm leaning towards four that's all i have to say that's awesome thank you um so i've got three two two or maybe four if okay one for anyone else i'll go if no one else wants to so i'm kind of where matt and bob are i think that four is intriguing i'd like to know if that's workable i appreciate bob's concern that not everyone's going to want to stay on an extra year i think that's going to be equally true of people in the in the first you know who would be up in 23 and up in 25 so i think that

[268:01] no matter what there's probably got to be a way to make clear what the off-ramp is for people who are very ready to be done with a four-year term um so i think four is better if it works and two if not would be me anyone else aaron yeah this has gotten kind of sticky um well and nicole's option three i think is um is worth considering with the except for the issue with the county club like i i'm really unwilling to throw the county clerk uh a ball that they can't catch and not to say that they're not competent or anything but but you know if the workload is is not doable or um or represents complications that could somehow cloud the results of the election or you know so i'm very hesitant to

[269:00] to ask that counterpart to do something they really don't want to or don't feel that they have the capacity to do so that that's just my major concern with the option three um i don't think anybody likes option one you know option two i think um can work it's a little bit further out um it does extend poor people's terms i will say that in terms of an off ramp rachel like you were talking about when there is another election coming up you know that that's a relatively doable offer right like if you can uh resign at the uh maybe part way through your term but only at an election then there's not a vacancy there's never a council seat bacon right so if there were we took that option too and somebody didn't want to do a five-year term they could uh resign at the interim election in between uh option four is kind of intriguing um but i don't know where the off-ramp comes for those people who don't want

[270:00] the extra year i don't know if it's kind of is legal to work in both at the same time and then you do have that one thing i did like about option one was uh local elections in multiple um consecutive years because i think it's kind of exhausting for for council in the community and what have you so i'm a little concerned about that with option four about the consecutive elections in 2023 and 2024 so anyway i don't know if we're if we're going to quite get there tonight we may need to learn a little bit more um but i'll i'll see what other people think i i think that's probably right we're not probably going to get to just one nicole and tara yeah i was just gonna say you know to me this sort of feels like a problem-solving session right we've all identified um some various constraints and i i personally would love it if we could um try to get the county clerk to one of our meetings so that we can all have this conversation together i think you know this is sort of one of the hard things is that we don't fully

[271:00] understand um the constraints as individuals because we haven't been able to have this conversation but you know i think i think if if rank choice voting is really sort of a the issue then i think option four is is my um preference there um for folks so it does uh leave some of us with without an earlier off-ramp and i'm sensitive to that thanks nicole tara and lauren i wanted to thank you nicole for option three and four and trying to be fair about that so this is my props to you i appreciate that that's it lauren bring us home that's not going to be what this is i'm sorry um so i just did want to point out that with option four if we're trying to elect the mayor in 2023 we're not that's not the end of any

[272:00] council member's term and we would end up with 10 people serving on council um as opposed to you gotta or or it could be whoever randomly doesn't want their term extended i hear mark you might be um opting to be replaced and now i don't know anyway that was all i wanted to bring up that issue good hunger games like i volunteer okay um so i think what we can do we've had some good straw polls here um it sounds like there's a lot of interest in four uh before lauren just gave that possible death knell um indefinite option two and two were intrigued by three so one's off the table um i would ask staff is is that like good enough direction for tonight we'd like a little bit more information on if four is uh no good if there's something if there are pieces of two

[273:02] three and four that are cobbled together and then maybe kick it back to charter committee for further um working on yeah i think it's i mean we've eliminated one which is great um yeah so yeah but some good conversations around some of those so why don't we we have good direction it's clear that we're going to need some additional information um and we will come back to you with um some additional options aces nicole this is not about what we just discussed um this is just a a request to sort of us on council hopefully modeling for the community i just want to note that when we are talking about why people may not vote in odd years um talking about things like laziness or not being bothered or those kinds of things i think really does a disservice to the tens of thousands of people who are working two or three jobs um who have

[274:00] young kids for whom it's really hard it just is hard to get out and make that effort um to attend forums and things like that and so i i it we are a diverse community and we need to have different perspectives on things for the well-being of our community i just really want to ask us to not sort of make judgment calls about the people who are choosing to vote in even years but may not be able to get there for whatever reason um particularly when we know that the people who are turning out in odd years are categorically different um in terms of uh demographics than the people who turn out in even years i think um we really risk doing some harm to the community um if we are making those kinds of comments and so i would just really encourage us to not head in those directions as we're having this conversation thanks what's that nicole um okay so we have uh two more hopefully much shorter

[275:00] uh topics i think to get through here one is do we want to change the date to swear in newly elected officials from third november third tuesday in november if so do we want it to be the first business meeting in december or the first business meeting in january erin i'll just do a quick pitch for uh december just so there's not a long lame duck session and allow people to be seated relatively quickly okay thanks anyone want to make a pitch for january lauren um and i guess maybe this goes with what we're talking about with elections but if we're concerned about how long ballot counting might take and things like that in future years it seems good to have a solid buffer in there yep thanks nicole i think that the elections get more and more exhausting um as well and harder

[276:00] and everything giving people a little bit of rest before they jump on council is a nice thing as well so january is where i'm leaning tara and matt um i'm leading in december because lame doc situation thanks matt um yeah i i agree a little bit with tara on the lame duck but also think about onboarding council goes on recess and everybody goes on recess and then you're trying to schedule all the necessary onboarding and then that's a problem to try to do over recess and then get sworn in um and so i i think that presents its issues so i think there's plenty of time and i'd be curious to hear what what elisha or john have to say about what's sort of a standard you know runway and buffer for for certifying elections but it feels like december is reasonable to to you know get do your onboarding get sworn in go on break and use that break

[277:00] time if you choose to to build those relationships have those communications and and settle into the work that you're about to embark on and certainly if you're a new council member so um i would uh i would definitely prefer december okay mark and then i'll call myself uh yeah i'll also go with december uh both for the reasons matt articulated and uh and aaron i think it makes more sense and i don't think a long lame duck uh session is useful to the community okay um i'll go and then calm bob um i'm actually uh january i think that you can probably um do your training you know starting in in november still and so you've got plenty of time to get through it and work through it and it would be sort of a a nice reprieve and you know get to know staff and people and and learn the job it felt very compressed to jump right into the job so

[278:00] i think a longer run-up to that would be good i appreciate lauren's point that um we may not know the results of elections for longer and longer um periods and so the buffer seems good um you know a couple of extra weeks and hopefully it gives staff a bit more of a reprieve and i would like to think that uh maybe the previous council can can conclude some some things during those weeks and and it wouldn't be a complete name it would be lame duck but maybe not lame bob uh december for the reasons stated by the december people all right i think the decembers have it right nobody from december wants to change their vote okay um so the next one is remove library provisions from charter if library district tax is approved anyone like to kick off discussion there

[279:04] i will go ahead and go ahead bob i i think this is a no-brainer obviously we went on to double tax people so if the um if a library district tax passes we don't need a library district tax on the city side of things so seems pretty obvious to me i'd like to hear if there's a kind of argument to that anyone want to keep a defunct provision in the charter see no takers i'm just going to call that a yes by acclimation to remove great okay um i think that is the end of our agenda but let me look here up a little that's correct i'm adam well i do you know i i does anyone have matters from the mayor or members of council

[280:00] i hate to skip that over aaron mayer i'd just like to thank mayor pertam friend for a very excellently run meeting thanks so much you're you're kind thank you um okay discussion items debrief nothing so adjournment um thanks all for sticking with us have good nights hope everyone feels better we're adjourned [Music] you