May 24, 2022 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] day or maybe we shouldn't i was [Music]

[2:17] so [Music]

[8:30] special meeting portion of tonight and then turn it over to councilmember judy joseph to lead us through the study session of course we happen a little bit later but first we get in before we get into the business of the evening um i want to turn to uh councilmember matt benjamin and give him a chance to say a few words about the tragedy that our country experienced today thanks erin well many of us and hopefully you know everybody in the community has heard the

[9:00] tragic news of the mass shooting and murder of a bunch of elementary kids in uvalde texas and it hits particularly close for me because i got this news while i was outside at bear creek elementary cheering on two kindergarten classes as they got to graduate and moved to first grade their first year in elementary school and as a father and a parent to try to keep a straight face knowing that over a dozen parents in this community we're not gonna get to have the same joy as i was having watching my son graduate and move on to first grade and move on to their next grade and the rest of their lives i i couldn't keep the straight face

[10:00] um not just i didn't want to spoil my wife's fun only i knew that my tears were pride in my son my tears were anger and sadness for the lives lost and i couldn't communicate and differentiate those tears in that time um what are we doing as senator um chris murphy from connecticut said we'll talk about what we're doing later but that's not really the point right now the point is to sit in the grief and to recognize and acknowledge the rage that comes with yet another mass shooting senseless loss of life on the heels of buffalo our tragic shooting at king supers um it isn't it is it is a normal that cannot continue to be tolerated i'm working through my rage my tears my grief

[11:02] and i i have a hard time thinking about the kids in our community and the fact that they have to live in fear how do i explain this to a six-year-old how do the other parents in our community explain it to their kids i don't have good answers for that and i trust that parents will find the right way in the right tone to do that um i will i don't want to spend too much time on this we'll get to it later but i want to just acknowledge that i am a law-abiding gun owner in this community and my right my need my want to have guns cannot supersede the lives of people who have been killed by guns it can't and it won't i won't let it for myself and i hope that we can do the same in our community i hope that we can work with our sister communities and find a

[12:00] blanket of protection so that our kids don't have to find safe words in their own classroom to acknowledge their fear they don't have to hide in closets for five minutes as they practice having a shooter in their school i hope we can do that um i hope we can um and uh we have an opportunity to choose to take action and not sit on our hands and i'm proud of every single one of us that's choosing to take that action i'm proud of this community for supporting this action that we're gonna take but most importantly i think we should sit in the grief and the rage and not let it just blow by for the next one it's okay to feel that way and it's okay to talk to someone about it it's okay to cry it's okay to yell and scream and yell bad language it's okay i'm doing it um so

[13:01] anyway that's what i want to just say is we're with everybody in uvalde texas and get another senseless shooting and um i can't fathom losing my own child or children and yet there's over a dozen parents that are doing that right now so anyway thanks for the opportunity to to say that and to talk to our community thank you for those moving words matt on the hearts of all of us go out to those morning tonight and develop um did anyone else have a word here uh nicole if you'd like to yeah um i think you know i'm joining matt and uh my grief is just being just incredibly raw um tonight having just learned about this news a few hours ago and i just want to recognize that i know i'm not alone i know we have a lot of folks here who are feeling that and i just wanted to send out some gratitude to everybody for being here tonight

[14:00] especially to our staff many of whom are also parents who are making this meeting possible thank you for being here despite your heartbreak and thank you especially for being here tonight at this meeting to make this meeting possible thanks for helping our community fight back against what seems to be a plague of calculated cruelty and greed i really am grateful for your effort to be here tonight thanks for that nicole i'm seeing no other hands i will move this into the um the business portion of the meeting um but i will just remind anyone who's uh struggling with with grief and needs help that the boulder strong resource center continues to be open every single day on baseline road so please go there and take advantage of those resources if you need them okay we have a couple of announcements here at the beginning so i'll start with

[15:00] those the first one is about covet 19 vaccinations for testing to find information and provider locations for free code 19 testing go to www.foco.org testing the boulder site that is 2445 stazio drive open seven days a week from 8 am to 6 pm and for vaccine information and provider locations you can go to www.boco.com vaccine and our other announcement is about celebrating safely during graduation many young people in our community are graduating or have graduated recently with graduation parties to look forward to we wanted to remind you to remind you new grads to celebrate safely and never drink and drive choose a safe way to get home instead of getting behind the wheel when intoxicated get an uber or a lyft call a family or a friend um family member or friend to pick you up or take the bus you can

[16:00] download the transit app for real-time info and by celebrating safely you can help our community reach our vision zero goals of zero deaths and serious zero serious injuries on our streets and i'd just like to say uh thank you to councilmember rachel friend as well as a bbsd board member and the college paul for writing an editorial on the subject it was very well put together i appreciate you doing that um and congratulations to the class of 2022. okay um alicia can we do the roll call now and get the official question being started yes sir thank you and good evening everyone councilmember benjamin here mayor brockett president council member falcons present mayor pro tem friend councilmember joseph present spear present

[17:01] wallach president okay if i could get a motion to amend the agenda please we're hoping to add two items item 1b which is a declaration for a queer asterisk birthday presented by council member spear and item 3a a discussion on virtual versus hybrid council meetings during times of meet medium risk so motioned second motion segment um all in favor show hands okay that's unanimous the agenda is duly amended so we'll now go into um item 1a which is a pride month awareness declaration presented by council member speaker thanks erin i've been working on finding a little bit of joy to bring forward to this because this is a

[18:03] pride is a joyful month more than 50 years ago patrons and supporters of the stonewall inn in new york city resisted police harassment that had become all too common for members of the lesbian gay bisexual transgender and queer lgbtq plus community out of this resistance the lgbtq plus rights movement in america was born during lgbtq plus pride month we commemorate the events of june 1969 and commit to achieving equal justice under law for lgbtq plus americans boulder has a diverse lgbtq plus community that includes people of many ethnicities religions and professions and we consider diversity to be a societal asset that enhances and enriches the lives of all community members lgbtq plus americans have made and continue to make great and lasting contributions to strengthen the fabric

[19:01] of our community furthermore the fight for dignity and equality for lgbtq plus people is demonstrated in the tireless dedication of advocates and allies who strive to make this a more inclusive society despite ongoing efforts to support the health and safety of lgbtq plus community members just last year 375 people were murdered for being transgender lgbtq plus americans excuse me lgbtq plus americans are not legally protected from discrimination in 29 states and every day children and young adults are rejected by their families because of who they are or who they love moreover lgbtq plus people of color experience additional disparities in violence and discrimination data from the center for american progress shows lgbtq plus people of color reported experiencing some form of discrimination at a rate 12 percentage points higher than white lgbtq plus respondents

[20:00] since 2013 nearly two-thirds of fatal violence toward transgender and gender non-conforming people involved a gun and the overwhelming majority of those victims were black women under the age of 30. as our city celebrates pride this month we recognize we must do better to support our lgbtq plus community members as we continue to experience impacts from the kobit 19 pandemic we also recognize the resilience of our community members who came together and contributed to greater safety in this time of need these individuals led by practicing appropriate distancing and hygiene volunteering at testing and vaccine clinics donating to charitable causes working to transition events and operations to virtual formats to keep services going and our community connected absorbing unanticipated child care needs and so much more the city of boulder honors its commitment to the promotion and protection of the human rights of lgbtq plus community members and stands hand in hand with them in the continued fight

[21:00] for full equality we the city of council the city council of the city of boulder colorado declared june 2022 as pride month and urge all residents to respect and honor the diversity in our community to celebrate and continue building a current culture of inclusiveness and acceptance thank you for that nicole i believe we have uh marty moore from outboulder county here to receive the declaration welcome marty thank you uh my name is marty moore my pronouns are she her and hers and i have the great privilege of being the executive director at out boulder county uh nicole and council um uh council member spear i should say and the rest of the council uh thank you so much um for once again uh proclaiming june as pride month in the city of boulder i'm so appreciative so many people on this call um staff and council who every time we say maybe we ought to change this for better

[22:00] inclusion steps are taken i i couldn't think of a better better place to live and a better council no matter what political side we fall on we seem to all um agree on a few things and one of them is the health and safety of our community and i certainly appreciate that matt and nicole thanks for your words um i will say i wasn't planning on saying this but i um you know we moved into this beautiful new building and as soon as we signed the papers the next person who came in was the city of police uh city of boulder police person mitch to walk us through our safe rooms uh and to find out what locks to put on our doors um because we the lgbtq community as a new proclamation is a targeted population uh in today's in today's world and so we appreciate i personally appreciate the time and effort you're putting in the study session that's coming up and all the work you do to keep our community safer

[23:00] um while you two struggle with all we have to struggle with so thank you and i would also say i like to say happy birthday to queer astrix hi chris thank you thanks so much for that marty and uh we should mention that we have the rainbows over boulder flag raising that's uh i believe that's june 1st at noon do i have that right at on on the pearl street mall yes thank you mayor brockett we do and also city employees who are repainting the crosswalks and rainbow colors and redoing the thing on the west end the flag on the west end of pearl and also i understand they're rainbow colors and the flowers paints that are all over the mall so city of boulder staff from beginning to end have been fantastic um each june and thank you we hope you'll all attend um and i'm hoping i think council member spear and uh council member yates um will be there with us that day should be a great event okay thanks so much uh so we now have

[24:01] another declaration so nicole if you want to take us to queer astrix birthday thank you mayor queer asterisk is a local non-profit that provides mental health services and community programs in the city of boulder and june 4th marks their sixth birthday since their inception they've made numerous contributions and achievements incorporated as a colorado 501c3 nonprofit organization in 2016 by executive director soren thomas co-founder freda b brett adamic founding board member diane israel and co-director rp whitmore bard all graduates and faculty of naropa university's graduate school of psychology queer asterisk quickly expanded sharing a contemplative perspective on mental health care and a dedication to celebrating queer and transgender lives they had a vision a sense of time and an understanding of history and place

[25:01] in 2021 more than 400 boulder residents including 200 youth and their families received mental health counseling at queer asterisk donation-based programs like yoga creative writing and open art studio helped alleviate isolation during a long pandemic and supported meaningful connections in our local lgbtq plus community queer asterisk has also provided numerous staff trainings and consultation to local organizations like the sexual assault victim advocate center casa court appointed special advocates and boulder community health helping to create lasting change affecting leaders policies and practices in the communities they serve now queer asterisk continues to operate within a larger national environment that is unsafe and seemingly uncaring calling boulder home reaffirms a city resource to care and nurture its residents in 2022 and for years to come the city of boulder recognizes the value of queer

[26:01] asterisks work we envision a vibrant community that embraces authentic expression and transformation where individuals with dynamic and intersecting identities can thrive thanks so much nicole and we have someone from queer asterisk here to receive the declaration take it away hello uh yeah thank you councilmember spear thank you uh council and mayor for uh this declaration um very honored to be here um alongside marty moore uh an outbuilder who does so much for for all of our community um yeah as you shared uh nicole we've been our i'm sorry council member we are uh a colorado non-profit uh that was uh founded uh um and is now headquartered here in boulder we uh are consider ourselves a therapeutic services organization providing services in three areas which are counseling

[27:00] community programming and education um and yes just as the evidence of today and what you shared in the uh pride month proclamation just you know the um the needs of the uh lgbtq plus community um are um are very much um just a continued uh struggle within the progress that we've made and uh the current you know national political uh climate and environment um definitely looks like that's just going to unfortunately um continue to put the members of our community um in the crosshairs of a lot of hate um and discrimination and so the work that we do particularly around counseling is uh just a very important service that we are you know honored to be able to provide in particular in boulder um again we have been working 100 virtually and now you know can provide

[28:02] services across the state um but we were founded here in boulder as our home and we're very honored um you know to be headquartered and centered here in boulder um with the support of just of this community and this city and all that is done here so uh thank you all for uh recognizing um who we are and we're um you know carrying the torch to continue this important work that's ahead of us and to continue to provide uh as many people as we can um and as well i think for uh city council you uh have also supported us uh in the pa over the past three years through the uh uh health uh services fund through uh uh approving grant work for us that does uh also you know provide free um and low-cost care to folks who can't otherwise afford it so thank you as well for uh for helping us to continue that

[29:01] work thank you and uh happy birthday and congratulations again yes thank you take care okay well uh now we're moving on to bye marty have a good night great to have you here thank you thanks for your service bye bye okay uh elisha can you take us into our consent agenda please yes sir of course on tonight's agenda under the consent agenda we have item 2a the consideration of the following proposed ordinances related to firearm restrictions in the city of boulder we have the continued first reading and consideration of a motion to order published by title only ordinance 84-94 amending chapter 5 general offenses of the brc 1981 repealing ordinances 8245 and 8259 banning the sale and possession of assault weapons large capacity magazines

[30:02] and rapid fire trigger activators raising the age to purchase firearms amending section 5-2-26 matters of local and mixed concern brc 1981 and adding a new section 5-8-42 it's a variability brc 1981 and setting forth related details and alicia i apologize for interrupting but there are so many of them do you think we could just list the ordinance numbers for the rest of course sir yes right next we have and or the continued first reading and consideration of ordinance 85 25 and or the continued first reading and consideration of a motion to order published by title ordinance 85 26 and or continued first reading in consideration of a motion for 85 27

[31:01] and or the continued first reading and consideration of a motion for ordinance 85 28 and or the continued first reading and consideration of emotion for ordinance 85 29. thank you so much for that and just a reminder this is a continued uh hearing from first reading where we asked staff to make a few changes based on our feedback they did so and so just let us know if you have any questions or comments about those revisions that staff has made about us you got a hand yeah if my my colleagues don't have any questions i was gonna make a motion if that's okay please let me make sure to get all the um ordinance numbers right here i move the following uh six ordinances on first reading uh published by title only ordinance um eight four nine four eight five two five eight five two six eight five two seven eight five two

[32:01] eight and eight five two nine let's get a second second uh any comments before we vote on that motion it just you know it's obviously both painful and poignant that we're um passing this tonight um of all nights um but i'm proud that we are and i know we're doing the right thing for our community and for our families thank you i'll add in that um i'm also proud that we're moving this forward and doing what we can locally about the scourge of gun violence in our society so thanks for everybody's work on this this is a show of hands i believe felicia that is correct sir great all those in favor please raise your hand that is unanimous

[33:00] and that's passed great okay so now uh i'm we move on to item three at yes sir item three is matters from the city manager 3a is the discussion on virtual versus hybrid council meetings during time of medium covert risk great who's going to take us into this i think that will be me uh good evening council members uh i'm here uh on behalf of nuria rivera vanderbide our city manager uh tonight and i also get the pleasure of presenting this item and if emily if you can pull up slides for me here real quick we're gonna make this one fairly quick we wanted to have a discussion around uh council meetings and the times of medium cobit risk so if we can go to the next slide what we really want to cover quickly is um kind of current state data what that

[34:00] means in terms of city operations and then specifically two questions for council on uh the meeting approach uh and any updates that you'd like so if we go to the next slide uh this will show really the the covet 19 community levels chart that the cdc has published uh and based on our current county data um at roughly 350 cases per 100 000 that put us into the medium level of community risk or yellow uh uh also hospital admissions are kind of creeping up uh based on uh our current percentage of uh about 8.1 so if we go to the next slide and we share this in a hotline with with council for city operations we've put together a very simple chart kind of describing what do our operations look like at the various covid community risk levels and under this medium level uh our uh

[35:01] office-based workers move into a kind of hybrid optional um uh posture where our facilities will remain open to the public um all of our customer service centers are still open and available uh but we'll have less staff in the offices more morph staff working from home uh of course our field-based work continues in person we're gonna talk about council meetings here in a second and then recognizing that there is a slightly elevated risk of gathering lots of people our community engagement or public engagement would be either virtual or outdoor only and then masking is recommended indoors and required for any of our unvaccinated employees for council and board meetings uh under level green or low um the council meetings um would be hybrid meaning um in person and folks participating virtually with the public having that same opportunity in level yellow

[36:00] we anticipate that the public would be virtual but we'd like to understand what council's desire is related to council or staff being a hybrid in person so if we go to the next slide that'll get us really to our two questions for uh for council tonight the first one is how do you want to approach meetings in level yellow and we have kind of three options outlined which is option a council staff and the public are all virtual like we're doing tonight the second option would be council on staff or hybrid meaning a hybrid in the room like we were starting to work towards with the public virtual or the last would be an option where um council staff and public is all hybrid with then personal mitigation measures such as masking and courage for folks and then the second question we have for council tonight is just whether you would like a form more formal update from boulder county public health now that we've entered uh level yellow so

[37:01] with that we're happy to hear your discussion we'd like to kick us off well as at least five of us have experienced covert which is no guarantee that we won't experience covet again it seems to me to be most prudent to go um virtual for our meetings at least for the moment i don't think anybody finds that desirable or preferable um unless you just like wearing shorts to the meeting um but i think it's not prudent um for us to be coming back in person in enclosed space um a number of us also have families um and that would be my preference um hopefully we don't stay in that uh condition too long but i think it's it's the thing to do at

[38:01] the moment and with respect to number two yes i would very much appreciate a uh uh a more formal update from uh uh boulder county public health um just so that we have a better command of the facts with respect to our current condition thank you thanks mark bob is that an old hand or a new hand no okay uh matt and tara thanks aaron i'm gonna agree with mark um on this i mean you know before i mean we were witnessing the the rapid spread before the numbers indicated we were already in yellow so i i think you know we kind of have seen that firsthand and it's and it's still pretty run it's running rampant throughout our community still so so i think a is definitely the most prudent thing for us to do um and certainly you know be in green for quite a while before we consider going out of option a

[39:01] and moving into some other form so um i think as long as we're in this state we need to stay virtual and keep our community safe and keep each other safe as best we can with regards to number two i think certainly now that we're in yellow and there's some greater dynamics some of those you know uh data points that would trigger actions we might hit and others we won't for various reasons because of variants having different impacts on our communities so i think learning those subtleties from boulder county health would be helpful as we mitigate that and learn how we can sort of keep our communities safe so i would agree with mark on both fronts sarah rachel and i'll call myself did you say me yes oh you did okay i i wanna i agree with mark and with matt and i also want to add that uh for me it's better to see people's faces on council than it is for to be masked

[40:01] where we can't see each other's thoughts feelings and emotions except our eyes so i am going to say that i'd rather it be virtual i know it's hard on the public but it is definitely safer i probably would go be with masks but um won't push that because i i know that's not where the majority are um i do think there's value to being in person and making decisions not looking at the screen um and then i don't i don't i probably would not vote to have a formal update at this point thanks it's um was somebody who got coveted in this last round and has still not recovered from it almost three weeks later i definitely i'll go with a so that we can avoid any transmission there um and you know maybe hopefully we'll be out of the yellow by the time we come back from recess

[41:00] this summer and we can get back to in person by that time i'm i'm fine having boulder county public health come talk to us it's always interesting when they do so lauren and then we don't all need to talk if we're we're getting kind of towards the majority of a and and a and b but go ahead don't thank you um yeah i i feel a lot of those concerns as well my only i would like to check back in um maybe after break just to see how we're feeling um you know i i think that um it just sort of depends if the level's staying elevated then maybe it makes sense to stay virtual but it might also make sense if things are coming back down to have the option to go back into person in person i just think it's something we should keep checking in on

[42:04] um thank you aaron um i would support virtual um i've had a yeah it it it's i think that is the right thing to do it's the prudent thing to do at the moment and also another thought is checking back after break is fine if we're considering going back in person at that time i've seen some console out there where they have the plastic to separate between people that might be something we might want to consider as well instead of the masking i do find masking and being indoors is it's hard it's hard to see people's faces it's hard to understand their expressions and i find myself being louder than necessary when i'm wearing a mask anyway i would welcome the the update from

[43:02] boulder county public health i think getting uh information from the experts is always good to know exactly what's going on and also it it also helps the community as well to know that it's not just something that is coming from us on council who are not the real expert on public health so thank you i just wanted to build on lauren's excellence suggestions so let me just throw this out there subject to their availability what would you all think about having boulder county public health come in maybe on june 14th which is our second to last meeting before the break and then having this discussion again on june 21st which is our last meeting before the break so we'll be armed with whatever boulder county public health tells us and and and having to check in on the 21st which is about a month from now and and if things are still where they are right now or worse then obviously it becomes pretty obvious but if things are improving and we we can see the the horizon to the first meeting

[44:00] in july which is not until july 14th that will allow staff and us to prepare for a potentially a live meeting um and so rather than waiting until the after the break is over and and having a virtual meeting as our first meeting in in mid-july perhaps we could check in on the 21st of june just a suggestion i like what lawrence said there okay well it sounds like we're nearly a consensus on staying virtual for the time being i also like lauren and bob's suggestion about checking in as we're getting close to to break to think about what we do after breakthrough so maybe we can that can be sent for cac's consideration uh ginny maybe not well i suppose i can just add it um i like i like the suggestion lauren's suggestion but the thing is if we're going on break and things may change after break i just thought maybe it might be a good idea to just wait until after break then we have all the

[45:00] answers that we need to move forward because what if things change within that almost a month we're gonna be out for break so i suppose that's a question for cac but i really think maybe having um those medical professionals or these health experts come after break it's a good point i'll just uh i know there there's some preparation involved and the next cac won't be until the day before the next meeting but it's a well taken point so we'll talk it over um is that good enough on on this topic yeah i think that gives us what uh what we need we'll work with cac uh and go from there thank you so much good all right well i am now going to adjourn our special meeting and then hand it over to juni to run our study session so this special meeting on may 24 2022 is over at 6 30 p.m

[46:01] take it away ginny excellent thank you very much mayor brockett again good evening and welcome to the tuesday 24th study session of the bull city council all announcements have already been made by the mayor so let's get right into it today we have three items in our agenda the financial update and budget outlook for 90 minutes the guaranteed income pilot project for 90 minutes and also an update for of boulder museum of contemporary arts community culture and safety tax matching grant agreement for 30 minutes we will stop after each item for questions discussions and direction now we will turn the meeting over to christmas chuck to keep to kick off the financial update thanks juni and i'm going to turn things right over to cara skinner our interum

[47:00] cfo to introduce the team thanks chris i appreciate it good evening council uh cara skinner interim chief financial officer as you know we're here for the annual financial update in 2023 budget outlook and if we go to the next slide we'll see the agenda as mark's pulling up our presentation here so we're going to begin the evening with a macroeconomic update and a presentation of our sales tax forecast from our cu partners who are very grateful to have their assistance and experts fees um they've been with us for the last two years and i believe rich and robert are going to present tonight and then brian is also on the meeting uh to answer questions as needed and then i will present the city's financial uh update and then mark will conclude the evening with the budget outlook and some very exciting process and system improvements that we're excited to share

[48:00] and so with that agenda in mind i'm going to kick it right over to rich i believe and yes and thank you so much and before i start i want to give a shout out to the council members who said nice things that the cu graduation about me i appreciate that and especially in front of the people who pay my salary so thank you for those kind words and uh we enjoy working with you as well so thank you for saying those nice things so with that if we could move to the the next slide just as a reminder continued providing econometrically divide tax forecasts to the city it helps inform the decision of the finance office but they also do their own work and we very much have a very synergistic relationship with staff we look at the sales use and property

[49:00] tax collections in the short term one to two years and in the medium term which is five years and when my colleague robert gets up in a a little bit uh he will give you much more detail about that we always try to shape this in the context of looking at the the national economy and the state economy and how that fits in and of course as you all know from just you know from reading and being aware of everything that's going on the circumstances of the economy continue to be very uncertain even though the recovery has been quite strong the uh we certainly feel a lot of uncertainty so if you move to the next slide we can talk about just some of the background pieces here uh you've already you know this but uh we got back to the same level of gross domestic product in 2021 that we had

[50:00] prior to the recession so we saw the classic sort of v-shaped recovery and i just as a quick highlight or reminder the bottom box over there and that little breakout is consumption and consumption is you know roughly 70 percent of gdp so when you're looking at um i don't know the potential of going into a recession as we go forward from here of course you got to be focused on consumption and investment the two largest components of gdp the tan and then the sort of brownish sort of pieces of the bar on the left the most recent quarter as i'm sure you heard and made headline news was negative gdp growth and caused some to say are we going into a recession and frankly that kind of commentary was probably not as well informed as it could have been

[51:00] the two components that dragged down and made gdp go negative were state and local government spending and the inventory piece of of the gdp and i should say three pieces and the net exports swamped the growth in the period but consumption and other aspects of investment were very very strong so at this point to be saying is the economy on the precipice of recession at least in my mind seems to be a strong exaggeration but happy to talk about that in more detail when we get to the q a we're thinking for this year or looking at this year gdp being about three percent but i'm we're cautioning here gdp goes down in the two plus percent range next year so um we've seen some sort of rosy times with all of the um transfer payments that have occurred to households uh that

[52:02] of course is waning pretty significantly next slide please so while you see that v-shape recovery in gdp you don't see the same v-shape recovery you get the check mark recovery when you look at the employment number and still as of the april numbers we're down about 1.2 million from our previous peak in employment and this is nationally i'll come back to colorado here in just a second so yeah on the current sort of pace of of job recovery which appears to be still on pretty firm footing uh we think we'll get back to the same level of employment about three months out from now three or four months out from now so end of the summer beginning of the fall we're going to be getting to back to the same peak level of employment in the us next slide please so as we look at this it has been dramatic i i received

[53:02] a couple of pretty negative uh emails from people when i was quoted saying uh you know stimulus worked i mean you have to look at this and say it worked when you look at what happened in 2008 and you look at the other recessions i mean we've had a really dramatic recovery from a catastrophic event that doesn't mean there haven't been negative you know sort of sidebars the inflation and other things and i talk about those all the time or speak to those all the time but at this point nationally we're down eight tenths of a percent if you can sort of scan down on this graphic we were just uh at the lowest point in the 2008 recession at this far out and here we are you know two years out and we're looking to be back to the same level of employment in just a few months so recovery from this recession has been so much more dramatic than the 2008 and and

[54:02] even the 2001. both of those being sort of jobless in the sense that it took a long time to recover the jobs next slide please so in in terms of looking at the employment recovery we've talked about this in the past and i know you're well informed on this topic if the recession hit different groups of people very differently hit lower income and employer employees much more heavily than high income people who could telecommute to their jobs and so on it hit different regions of the country differently and we're fortunate in the sense that colorado is one of the states that has gotten back to pre-recession employment levels where 13th in employment growth year over year we were the 12th slash 13th state to get back to the same level of employment so at this point colorado you know we're not a top 10 state but we're

[55:01] a very very strong state you can see the dark brown states on this particular graphic uh montana idaho and utah with the strongest growth rates and then everybody that's in or every state that's in tan has gotten back and exceeded previous peak levels but you can also see a number of states struggling and are are below and significantly below in some cases previous levels of employment so really have a geographic uh lack of equity as well next slide please so this is of course the interesting piece um the the federal reserve and i think we talked about this the last time we presented to council but the federal reserve um believing that the inflation was going to be transitory uh um you know and not good sort of staying around for a long period of time

[56:02] and you know i don't want to say that inflation is permanent by any means but it's but it's certainly uh it lasted a lot longer than they thought in sort of the transitory phase so this particular graphic if you're not familiar with it is referred to as the dot plot and it is the um belief of the fed people voting people where they're going to be where interest rates are going to be over time and if you start at the very bottom back at the september 2021 meeting when they did their dot plot they were suggesting that in 2022 where we are now that rates would be somewhere around a half a percent of you to average all those dots out then by the time december rolled around and they realized it wasn't quite as transitory as they thought it was going to be

[57:00] that number had risen those are the red dots that you see for this year next year and 2024 but you can see that the uh the dots had risen to a little under one percent on average and then in the march meeting when things persisted quite a bit longer the numbers moved up to numbers that are suggesting that the rates this year are going to be somewhere around 1.75 uh you know by the end of the year just under 2 on average even though you see one outlier away at the top one of the people's suggesting that they could go up over three percent and of course you've heard a lot from um chairman powell uh and we've already seen you know big a big rate jump already because uh in my mind the reason for that is that not just inflation is high but they're worried that the inflation is going to turn into what they call a wage price spiral

[58:01] that if continued workers keep seeing continued high inflation you're going to be demanding higher and higher wages and then that high those higher wages translate into higher prices and become you know a continuing spiral in an upward direction so they're trying to get their arms around this and and slow this down they certainly can be effective in terms of slowing down demand in the economy but they can fix the supply chain issues which are continuing to persist although at a somewhat i'll be at a slower pace if you will next slide please so this is what consensus people including people like myself or have been saying every time they ask us where inflation rates are going to be in may we're saying oh they peaked and then in july we said oh they peaked and then in october oh they

[59:00] peaked december they peaked you can see each time the consensus comes out there's a higher and higher number but it does appear um that we've we're seeing significant signs of slowing in a couple of areas that would give you hope that we've actually um reached the peak of that you know inflationary spiral month over month numbers for the most recent month were actually not not all that bad we are lagging a little bit on the right hand side with the data because we don't get the data at the denver aurora lakewood level which is the colorado proxy uh every month so we kept to be consistent we kept this in the same monthly period i would like to highlight though when you look at the inflation in that right-hand table that the u.s at 8.5 the mountain region including utah and idaho and the some of the states you saw that are leading the

[60:01] recovery at 10.4 was the highest inflation region in the country in denver aurora lakewood again higher than the u.s average so we are feeling the inflationary pressure more in this part of the country and then you can see the areas where it's it's most pronounced um i will say it's a little striking and i don't have an answer don't ask this question because i don't know the answer but medical care u.s 2.9 percent mountain region four percent and in denver aurora lakewood 7.6 i don't know why we're so much higher uh in that particular category but but i hopefully this slide um provides you some insight uh i think you probably assess the uh uh housing piece and its contribution and it's a very heavy weight 42 and again the mountain region and denver

[61:01] uh aurora lakewood both with a higher number in terms of the inflation contribution and vis-a-vis housing next slide please so all that said colorado's doing well as i hopefully indicated in terms of the employment recovery but in lots of other areas as well maybe not a top 10 performing state depending on which category you're looking at but still a strong state gdp growth 12 employment growth 13th population growth 12th that's that's quite a bit different for colorado we have historically been a top 5-7 state in terms of uh employment in terms of population growth so this is uh definitely a relative slowdown in terms of the population piece but most of the other ones look pretty good and even though at the very bottom we're

[62:01] 20th for home price appreciation out of 51 including the district of columbia it's it's you know it's a it's a pretty high number one being the highest but it's actually not we have you know years gone by we were in the top five top ten you know almost every year so this is actually a little bit of slowing in in the relative position of housing in terms of colorado i would also highlight the line right above that we have the third highest labor force participation rate in the country uh and so we you know we have gone back and the workforce has come back up and and it is one of the reasons it's my mind the principal reason why in why uh in terms of unemployment rate we're sort of in the middle of the pack with with employment growth being above significantly above the middle of the pack

[63:00] we've actually had everybody go back into the workforce i would tell you both just as a quick sidebar uh both the u.s and uh uh colorado unemployment rates are under three percent i'm sorry under four percent um but if you adjusted for labor force participation the u.s unemployment rate would be about 6.6 so you know we're looking at the u.s unemployment rate under four percent and we're comparing comparing ourselves to that but it's because the uh labor force participation has come back much more strongly in colorado than it has as uh in the country as a whole next slide please so in closing out uh this first portion and getting ready to pass to baton to my colleague robert uh this is an intriguing piece and it's certainly a key element of vis-a-vis

[64:01] retail sales at the local level for boulder and for the state and so on and of course you know uh they're absolutely a key element of state and local finance retail sales in colorado so here you have the long-term trend in tan is the actual number and the red line is sort of a trend line drawn through that and you get this incredible plunge 22 percent when we had covet when the essential services and so on were shut down and then this dramatic jump up now again we've addressed this in prior presentations to council but a a chunk of that is certainly being driven by the three stimulus checks that were sent to households by the combination of state and federal unemployment benefits by child care credits and so on there was just a lot more

[65:00] liquidity or demand stimulus to drive more consumption there was also a significant movement from services to goods uh people couldn't you know go to restaurants and they couldn't go to health clubs so they spent their money on you know and they couldn't travel very importantly they couldn't travel so all of that money got was sitting there and people were using it on other things they were home improvements and they were using it on um new vehicles and other types of things well now that has you know changed and having heard the first the conversation that just occurred before ours um hopefully it's going to stay changed but we don't know obviously but we're seeing the consumption pattern now moving very much back to the way it was pre-covered in terms of being more services based going back to restaurant sales going back to health services going back to

[66:01] travel significantly so we're seeing the goods and services sort of break down of expenditures uh getting more back to normal and just a ballpark on that if you're not familiar with that typically services is at least 60 percent of consumption in the us including health services 60 65 goods are you know 30 35 kind of range so you're in you're you know in some sort of range like that um you know 60 to 70 percent services you know 30 to 40 percent uh in terms of goods in terms of the breakdown of that so it varies a little bit over time but it not tremendously and now we're going back to sort of uh pre-covert distribution in terms of those expenditures so what you see over on the far right-hand side is sort of the confusion that's there we have this dramatic increase in terms of retail sales

[67:00] is it a new trajectory like the red line that's much more upward sloping did we have a shift that occurred to the sort of green line uh meaning does you know did the ease of buying everything via amazon and you know e-commerce and so on did that make uh americans as a whole or u.s citizens as a u.s people as a whole more consumption oriented or is this something that's temporary and then after everything calms down we'll go back to the old you know trend line and we don't have an answer for that but of course that's an absolutely critical part of thinking about your financial projections uh next slide please so here's what we saw for the state of colorado year over year uh 17.5 percent through april tremendous increase and as you can see the same sort of upward trajectory that you saw on the previous

[68:01] slide you know very steep upward trajectory but we did see at the city and county level uh fairly different uh results based on the composition of industry and what do i mean by that whether people had to physically be there or whether they could do more telecommuting like they can in a lot of the industries in boulder uh the reliance on tourism is part of the retail sales mix so it sells uh tax collections commuters in and out uh if you're you know more people commuting or not commuting the retail mix big box versus main street the amount of actual physical development that was occurring in these different communities and the population growth so we're working with i don't know five entities at this point doing this work and it varies greatly in these different entities this these different pieces and also the

[69:02] other entities that we're looking at when we're trying to make these comparisons the next slide please so this shows the next the net taxable sales increases by county and you can see teller and douglas you know over on the left-hand side this is two years of growth so 40 plus at teller county over two years using the complete years of 2019 and the complete year data of 2021 so you're getting you know two years worth of data and you can see all the way on the right hand side denver which is had about two percent of increase over a two year period with people not returning to the offices in downtown or at a very rapid rate with the impact that the of the loss of the arts spending and so on um you know it's it's been a rough go

[70:01] in the downtown metro area and that's not unusual for metro areas in the us that they're under this sort of uh duress you can see boulder sort of in the middle and again based on uh the cr the comments i made earlier on what's been affecting this the most big box versus street level retail uh we were just eating in downtown boulder today and we saw the same sort of thing you know people aren't returning to the downtown office space who's or not fully who's supporting the downtown restaurants and so on so with that i think i'm coming up on passing the baton on this next slide to my colleague robert and he's going to talk about the city of boulder forecast thank you oh yes thanks rich so rich has provided the economic background both at the national and state levels and now um i want to start off by

[71:03] talking about how we use that kind of information in our econometric model to produce the forecasts for boulder for the city of boulder and in older tax revenues so this all starts out with what's going on at the national level and we take data from a variety of sources as you see listed here and most importantly from moody's analytics which provides not just historical data in great detail but also forecasts out some of them fairly fairly long far out into the future and those national economic indicators then drive in part what's happening to the colorado economy there is however as you'll see when i present some numbers that there is some degree of independence uh and of course you've seen that already in uh rich's presentation showing how colorado

[72:00] ranks across these different indicators compared to other um well or relative to the nation as a whole and so we've developed a model for the colorado economy which incorporates the interdependence between the key economic variables such as employment and personal income retail sales and so on and that model then drives a model for the boulder economy and equations for bolder use tax and sales tax revenues and also property taxes as well so next slide and uh i should mention that moody's provides several alternative forecasts or scenarios and when we prepared the forecast for the city of boulder uh although we normally just go with the the middle range or um

[73:00] baseline forecast that moody's presents in in this case uh we thought that was a little too optimistic uh at the time that moody's provided those scenarios and we decided to use a somewhat more conservative projection at the national level to drive what's going on in the state and so the forecast that you see here to begin with the the us economic assumptions here are based on this slightly conservative uh projections coming from from moody's so uh just to highlight a couple of things if you look in the last column personal income and you can see that in the current year that's projected to drop actually a negative growth in personal income seems pretty unusual but of course that follows the really high growth and personal income that came because of the

[74:01] tremendous subsidies from the federal government both the trump and biden administrations in the the various uh huge rescue packages and so that of course has has now passed and it's consequently uh personal income at the national level is actually expected to decline a little and the only other indicator that i really want to highlight here is inflation in the consumer prices column here uh so 6.1 percent is is what was projected at that time in this movie scenario a little bit lower than uh the figure that rich presented as as the rate of inflation year to year up to this point in time and so um but but we'll see actually things will differ a little bit in colorado let's go ahead and look at the next slide because

[75:00] here you see again looking at the consumer prices column here our projection for inflation in colorado and this of course is really the in the front range about nine percent uh so one illustration of the independence uh to some extent of the colorado economy from the national economy and this this higher figure then something to keep in mind as we go forward here and look at revenues soon um and uh notice also the personal income in 2022 is expected to uh be to be growing positively uh at 2.7 percent so again uh an important difference there because personal income is part of what is driving uh retail sales and the various component of retail sales uh that that are so key to the forecasts of sales tax revenues

[76:00] um so you can see that um there's uh some some modest uh slackening in 2023 with uh i mean uh well with with um retail trade actually i i mean in comparison to what was happening in 2021 so um retail trade is is growing modestly over these two years but what we'll see is we've been focusing not on total retail trade as a key driver of our revenue forecast but rather particular components and you'll see that that's going to make quite a difference let's go to the next slide so here for example these this shows the various components of retail sales that we model separately and forecast and

[77:00] these are our forecasted changes percent changes for 2022 for the current year and of course you can see a really strong recovery in restaurant sales um growing by by uh over 20 remarkably grocery sales are still expected to be very strong now of course a good portion of that could simply be uh the increase in food prices now remember that uh nine percent inflation rate that we're expecting for the area here in the front range and and so um we're we're all aware when we visit the grocery store that uh we're paying considerably higher prices for for groceries so a good part of that is actually inflation and so another strong component is building materials that's that's pretty remarkable and that's been strong throughout the pandemic

[78:00] um another item that i think is really interesting of uh growing importance is uh this marketplace facilitator ordnance sales so these are online sales often through amazon but by third party providers and you can see that's that's grown pretty substantially as well and it's going to become an increasingly important uh piece of municipal sales tax revenues going forward let's go on to the next one um so here's our um forecast uh on a quarterly basis for the current year and also for 2023 and so the blue line uh presents the the baseline or the medium forecast so this

[79:00] we could say would be our most likely projection for what's to happen over these two years and then we present a high and a low forecast and these are statistically based um upper and lower bounds uh constructed so that there's approximately a 33 probability that the actual outcome could be higher than the high forecast or lower than the low forecast so this gives you some idea of the uncertainty that's involved in forecasting and particularly these days when uh the economy is so volatile and uh so you can see for example that that the low forecast is is considerably lower in fact let's see if we can trace back to um um let's say uh the jump off point here at

[80:01] the end of uh 2021 so you can see that the low forecast which is not out of the question is actually lower at the end of 2023 than it was at the beginning of our forecast period the beginning of 2022 the current year uh so how could that come about well that could happen if um there's a severe recession or a downturn that's more serious than what is embodied in uh the assumptions behind moody's somewhat conservative projection so um i always want to emphasize the uh the importance of uh keeping amount keeping in mind the uncertainty behind these forecasts i know that um often uh our clients in various municipalities want to be conservative in their budgeting taking

[81:00] into account what could possibly happen here so uh we also project out five years or so here out to 2026 and here again the same range of forecasts a high medium and a low focusing on this this medium or our baseline forecast you can see the the flattening that has occurred here from 2022 to 20 23 so the growth in in total revenues is expected to be a little uh a little more modesty here than what it has been over the past year with a strong recovery and then the growth in total revenues accelerates a bit and returns to a more normal pattern so this uh this five-year projection

[82:02] out to 2026 um this this amounts to a 37 total increase in total revenues over this five-year period which amounts to about a 6.4 annual rate of growth so it's it's um it's quite strong in the projection um and um it's uh but again with the caution that uh some some negative indicators could arise leading us to a lower outcome and uh next next slide please so i want to emphasize that uh our forecasts are our model based that is uh we don't bring in ad factors as some forecasters will do adjusting the forecast to sort of satisfy their intuition about what they

[83:00] might expect um we uh i've been emphasizing the uncertainty in the forecast that forecasts our median forecasts could be too high or too low but the forecast is certainly grounded on sound economic relations both back both by economic theory and statistical criteria and finally our forecasts are updated to reflect the most current data that's available to us on these various economic indicators and and next so i guess another way of expressing the uncertainty in the forecast is more qualitative but just to point to uh all the different factors that could lead the actual outcome to be higher or lower than what is projected in our medium forecast

[84:00] and we're we're all aware of these these pretty much so the on the on the positive side the green stuff is uh i think mostly um positive that um there's uh you know all strong wage growth and uh uh the advent of the the vaccines that are uh protecting us from another outbreak we hope and so on uh but at the same time uh we're well aware of many of these negative aspects of the economy and these could get worse uh the conflict in ukraine uh flight supply chain issues and so on and then finally just completely unknown in terms of how to incorporate the onset of another covet variant we would have no idea as economists what the possible

[85:00] nature of that new outbreak could be so uh just to emphasize again we're dealing in an era of great uncertainty here and next okay so uh that's the end of our presentation here but rich and brian and i would be happy to answer any questions that you have thank you so much for this wonderful presentation and actually i see only one hands up as of right now which is council member taraweiner hi thank you so much for this really interesting presentation i have about four or five questions i'm gonna mention them all in one shot and then you can answer any all some one whatever you want okay here we go okay so my first question is how do you these are mostly questions about your opinion how and we're really happy to have such

[86:01] expert opinion here tonight it's pretty um exciting for me to hear um to have this um to have this information first question how has our labor shortage affected things economically here in colorado and the fact that the labor market is so tight and a b to that would be i don't hear that much about how the tragic copic deaths have affected our labor market have you heard about that and if so do you want to elaborate on that and my next question is is we saw a big drop in inflation in 2023 on your chart why do you think that is um you know your upcoming you know what you're projecting in 2023 the next question is is we have a nine percent inflation rate why do you think that is so much higher than rest of the country would you say it's housing the housing market or our um really uh

[87:00] our expensive you know business uh our supply our construction costs or why do you think that is the next question is is um why um the 6.4 annual rate of growth that you had on one of your slides why is that and lastly of course can i get this powerpoint can we get this powerpoint presentation those are all my questions answer any that you wish i just want to make sure that um is it robert you'll be the one answering the questions um i think all of us yeah i'll begin to answer some of them and then uh call on on brian and rich to help with some of the others um so uh one question those are all really great questions uh and uh we can answer them with some more or less degrees of certainty but one thing

[88:00] i feel comfortable about was is answering your question of why 2023 is expected to be weaker economically and i think that this is a result of uh conditions that are being uh that are in place today this year that uh the the restrictions on monetary policy uh imposed by the the federal reserve uh the raising of interest rates they're cut back and and uh uh ceasing to engage in what we previously called quantitative easing so not so much uh uh halting their purchases of of assets which i think contributed substantially to the boom in the stock market and now of course what we're seeing is with the cessation of uh that lacks monetary policy the stock market is really suffering uh that has negative consequences for business expectations uh which could cause them to cut back an

[89:02] investment activity and that that would contribute to the likelihood of a slump and uh there's also sometimes argued to be a wealth effect that now households that were uh heavily in the stock market don't feel as as rich as they did um well six months ago let's say um of course in addition we have now the cessation of these expansionary fiscal policies the huge rescue packages that were uh brought about in 20 and 20 2020 and 2021 uh and of course that's that we see has has resulted in the much lower or even at the national level decline in personal income and that's in the current year but there i think there's likely to be a lag in the impact that that has on consumption expenditures because households had accumulated um

[90:01] pretty high savings on average where they were able to set aside some of these um subsidies that were passed on by the federal government uh so that's that's no longer in play i mean there's their savings is still there and that's going to sustain consumption activity through the current year but probably not into 2023 and then on top of that we have the the war in the ukraine with the impact that's having on all sorts of supply chain issues so i think that's really all together resulting in a likely weakness in the economy but with some lag so really impacting us in 2023. um yeah that's let me uh stop with that one i guess

[91:00] another one i i could talk about a bit is why higher inflation um and uh um for so so so far uh when you looked at um housing price increases that rich showed it didn't look like colorado was experiencing really high house price inflation but of course that's colorado as an average what's happening in boulder we know is considerably different um and what's happening in the front range i think in general is also so different and so um so i think housing could be contributing to the relatively higher inflation in colorado i also think that our forecast of colorado inflation coming out of our model is more accurate than the moody's forecast of national inflation i think

[92:01] the moody's forecast the national inflation inflation is too low um so um it's uh and and i suppose another thing that's um that's driving our higher inflation here in colorado is uh the really tight labor market that uh we we have really high labor force participation as rich mentioned and so there's not much opportunity for drawing more people into the workforce and uh you know we so the consequence is going to be higher wages which seems like a good thing unless we get that feeding into higher prices as well so those are a few of the things that i think can account for that so let me ask either brian or rich to talk about your other two questions i don't know if there were two or three so let me start with the easy one yes you can have a copy of the presentation so we could just check that one off of course you can

[93:01] um and we're happy to share that with you um the 6.4 question i didn't quite get that was number four and maybe robert you might want to look at your slide of what was being referred to there uh the housing inflation um in the the inflation question you already addressed i definitely think it's some of its housing but some of it's like things like the medical and it's being driven by services so the the hot growth areas and the western part of the us it's just such a tight labor force and that seems to be driving up some people want to attribute it to minimum wage um we're i'm not in that vote yet uh yes we do have a minimum wage and yes in certain categories it's driving it up wages as you know in the vast majority of the front range there's lots of places that are paying above minimum wage even lower quote

[94:02] lower wage jobs that you would think would be minimum wage or not minimum wage so i i don't really think it's the minimum wage thing that's driving it up i think it's just a tightness of demand on a lot of things that that's really driving it up uh robert did a i think a really nice job of describing the drop in 2023 it's basically saying that the fed policy works and that the economy really slows down the question is does the economy really slow down or is the economy going a recession next year i mean that's the part we could be debating if we want to debate uh going to your first question which i really liked the labor shortage so um there's a a myriad of reasons here and i don't know that we've isolated not just we but people who study this i've isolated this uh we we have not seen a return to the labor force uh at the same level in terms of labor

[95:02] force participation in 2008 we did people's you know retirement accounts and and financial assets got hit hard their housing prices were decimated and many in a number of cases they lost their homes this time around their housing prices escalated their portfolios escalated for a period of time so they didn't need to come back into the workforce and kovid set off a mental thing at least in my mind i heard heard this from my colleagues who retired like life's too short i'm not going to live through this again i'm gonna i'm gonna enjoy my life while i can enjoy my life but that said the more recent downturn in the stock market i'm in retirement accounts may trigger a number of those people to come back in at first it was also it was significantly female participation in

[96:00] the workforce but that has really reversed the last five or six months we've seen a lot of female return to the workforce um so now it's mostly the 55 and above people that we're not we are focusing on are they coming back are they not coming back the other interesting thing that brian um has put together a nice slide on is people working two jobs and going i know this doesn't make any sense to people listening but i'm going to tell you anyway one person working two jobs is two jobs even though it's one person and we've seen a dramatic drop in people working two jobs like 700 000 people who used to work two jobs are only working one job now so that's part of that 1.2 million is people not working the second job now if that's because the first job is

[97:01] giving them more hours or better pay or whatever that's a good thing it's a good thing for the person you know right so but in terms of the restaurant the person that used to work at one restaurant at lunch in another restaurant at dinner not happening right so that's where we're you know we've seen uh sort of a lot of change in that piece i don't know if brian wants to embellish it all i i know he's on but i also don't see him oh now he's coming on actually going to see his face this is i don't have anything to add to that rich i think that was perfect [Music] [Laughter] yeah we've worked together too long okay thank you brian so i i could return to this uh 6.4 question uh so uh that that number was uh mentioned as um the average rate of growth in total tax revenues over the five-year period apple okay 26.

[98:02] and um i'm not sure exactly what the question is but i i can i can break that down somewhat in terms of of what's what are the components going into that so what's happening in the current year total sales tax revenues are expected to increase by almost 11 and that's really strong uh sales tax revenues after that grow much more modestly and so in fact towards the end of the period growing a little less than four percent per year but boulder makes up for that in the years in which um there's reassessment of property values and that shows up then as really strong growth in property taxes uh in the in the collection years of 2024 and 2026

[99:01] and so uh i i don't know if that's sufficient explanation but but that's uh that's kind of the breakdown that contributes to that average 6.4 and robert to be clear those are not inflation-adjusted numbers right that's true that's true so in the out years four percent you know if inflation gets back down to two percent which is built into sort of the forecast that we're using is inflation getting back down to a relatively normal level in the out years then you're talking about two percent real growth which is not horrible but you know right that's a good point i'm glad you you raised that rich because uh that's about where we are right now too i mean even though sales tax revenues in 2022 are projected to grow by over uh 10 but if inflation is is 9 well let's say make it simple

[100:00] uh sales tax revenues are going to grow about 11 inflation's about 9 so again it's only 2 percent growth in real terms yeah i i i know we have other questions so i don't want to belabor this but you made a point of highlighting that that you know it's nice on the revenue side but it's also on the expenditure side you got to just have that you know the finance folks and the council needs to be remembering that it's on both sides of the coin unfortunately [Music] all right well thank you for that um i see that frozen on my screen um thank you for these wonderful answers and thank you for these questions tara and next we have mark wallach and then nicole spear i think for community just so that they're clear please take it one question at the time so that community members know what is being answered thank you i was going to ask all of mine in a row

[101:01] but i will ask him now in series so that everybody can understand the first question and hopefully these can be answered fairly briefly in one of the slides we showed a colorado was number one in terms of average hourly wage growth on a percentage basis but only 28 in terms of the average annual growth in terms of i guess annual pay what accounts for that i'll take that one uh so those are two different series the the monthly number uh where we're number one that is based on a survey of businesses and that data just came out representing april for colorado the other for average annual pay is a much more detailed series that comes out from the colorado department of labor and

[102:00] employment and it represents the census of employers meaning that every employer has to submit their employment and wages to the state so it's a much more accurate number the downside is that it lags by six months so we we track both because one is more timely the other one is a little bit more accurate so we look at that number one ranking as a a leading indicator of the other series out legs by about six months okay thank you my second question is um in terms of sales tax growth we did all right i think it was around 15 or so over the past two years but a couple of counties had explosive sales tax growth were there any particular factors for you know teller or el paso counties that would explain that that and why they were so much greater than than boulder so el paso has just they were the first one back to the same level of employment now they're number two in terms of their

[103:00] percentage growth in the state but they've had the strongest economic growth in the state uh you know they've employment growth they've been very strong but there's also um you know douglas county you know castle rock a lot of outdoor big boxes and outdoor types of uh facilities so they were able to draw especially early on they were able to keep a lot of their sales tax revenues flowing uh well while that was going on so they benefited from the difference those places different structure and also different growth um douglas county continued to have you know housing growth the teller area uh teller county area continued to have you know physical growth of housing and population uh related to continued development during that time so brian knows more about this he can jump in

[104:00] um yeah wasn't showing you live brian thank you so brian do you want to expand on that at all or or uh nothing down there okay okay i i'm satisfied with your answer rich okay thanks my last question is in one of the slides showed that in 2020 in boulder employment declined 5.8 percent but personal income rose 6.5 how does that happen transfer payments so that's the reason you know that our forecast and what robert was showing was you know personal income declining in the state in in 2022 and in our models uh the huge drop off in you know we had all of these transfer payment checks that were going out to everybody and and paychecks protection program and so on other things but all in the transfer category so

[105:03] the numbers are accurate it's not a mistake uh the employment fell and you know brian can do a better job describing this but you know we track the income by where people live but employment is also by where people work you know so they may have they may be have been working here but they live in a different place so the employment dropped even but their income is being reported in broomfield county or uh you know northern colorado somewhere um with the uh transfer payments it's it's where you're residing is where the money is showing okay thank you and and and thank you for the presentation you're most welcome take it over nicole yeah um so the data that you've been showing us is really all focused on how much revenue we're going to get and i have an economic question that's you know

[106:01] related to the other um side of that so more toward the expenses that we're going to have uh there's because there's another part of our budgeting process that involves anticipating the needs of our community and i apologize my dogs are going to start working but i'm going to keep going let me know if you need me to repeat anything so seeing who tends to benefit from our economic recoveries over the past couple of decades it seems like it's largely the people who are already doing well folks who are are wealthy income inequality seems to grow coming out of these economic downturns and already i'm hearing from people who are seeing 200 to 300 increases in the cost of their medication people living on fixed incomes we've got folks in our community who are experiencing 20 plus increases in rent people who are trying to stretch a gallon of milk to make it just one more week and these folks don't really have stocks or investments or savings to fall back on so these are the people that i'm worried about as we're thinking about

[107:01] entering into this budgeting process so what can you tell us about how the people who are already struggling are doing and how they're going to do over the next few years because that's information that i think is really critical for us to think about as we're considering how to spend the revenue that we're getting well i'll weight in first and then um we had a slide that we've shown in previous presentations but you're absolutely accurate in terms of you know the transfer payments should have gone to those people uh and and did go to those people but went to in my opinion a lot of people who really didn't need the transfer payments but that said that that group the lower wage group of the population that was just getting by was hit the hardest and doesn't necessarily happen every recession that you get that kind of extreme like the high-wage workers were able to continue to work from home this time some of those people got laid off in the 2008 recession and the 2001

[108:02] recession but it didn't really happen this time so it didn't you know widen inequality you're absolutely correct about that um that group is very much in demand at this particular point wage demand and we have raised the minimum wage in the state and i think what's crimping this the most is the fact that groceries and housing and medical care have just gone up so dramatically with this inflation that even as these people regain employment and and regain you know even a decent income a decent income is not making it anymore uh in terms of affordability so when when i look at that do i do i think they're not going to have opportunities no i think they're going to have economic opportunities i think the issues on the other side what what can we do that can help at least in a more comprehensive way look at the

[109:01] expenses that they're facing the affordability types of issues that they're facing so i don't think it's going to be because they're unemployed or can't get a decent wage i think they can get a decent wage i think this the cost issue is the big issue so when i'm thinking about this is you know how can you support them it's you know for me it's not like we need to give them unemployment insurance we need to how to make sure we can get them child care or whatever piece is missing from their affordability package thank you and just sort of one one follow-up question um what i'm hearing um from some folks is that um some of the the larger corporations and and people are still seeing really high record profits um and and so you know is it really that the costs of providing services are going up um is it that you know people are just kind of using this opportunity to um increase wages or sorry not not wages

[110:00] but um increase the cost of things right because they can um i mean because i i would expect you know we would see um generally prices kind of going up at a rate that would that we wouldn't be seeing some of the profit margins that that seem like are existing right now and i'm just sorry some some of this may not may be a little off topic but i'm just curious and thinking about how we can help our community yeah i could yeah so that may be true for some bigger businesses i mean we have this debate all the time i certainly don't think it's true for small businesses right now they're struggling just like the people you're talking about are struggling because wages are going up all of their cost of doing business is going up frankly you know it may not have seen this but we we left slides out of the deck if you look at business optimism it is much more positive amongst big business than it is among small business small businesses is actually

[111:01] pessimistic right now about the economy and it has to deal with the cost of doing business and can't find workers and they can you know can't you know they can't they can't they're they're struggling just like households are struggling like the people you're talking about are struggling so i don't think it's a uniform statement yes there are companies you know there are companies that are doing extremely well some of them are in certain industries that have really done well like you know pharmaceuticals or whatever but um you know i'm not i'm not dropping it all on that doorstep but but i i hear you i mean i i hear what you're saying uh i don't i don't know what the easy answer is to that question yeah no i appreciate that because that sort of highlights another area for us to think about is um providing support to our small businesses and making sure you know as as we're thinking about this budget that it's not just the lower income households and the people who are kind of living month to month who are going to be

[112:01] needing support but also some of these smaller businesses that are keeping folks employed in our community yeah well not sounding like an economic development person when i say this but i i would support that 100 percent uh if you're trying to refill main street and as i was suggesting you know the restaurants and the small businesses that were used to more foot traffic during the middle of the day and now aren't seeing that during the middle of the day and you're trying to get all this stuff back to the way it was before all of this um you know to the extent that you know rents are going up in that area in those areas and so on even with the current environment uh and i i do think that area needs a lot of care and we talk to a lot of those people the smaller businesses all all the time and and your staff does too and so they're in touch with the kinds of needs those people have yeah thank you i appreciate your um

[113:01] entertainingness with me this flip side of uh how we spend our money thank you sure thank you very much nicole are there any other questions from council now all right well um i think moving forward we still have another 15 minutes presentation coming from staff so this will put everything into context because this is more like the higher looking at the issue at the higher level and then we're gonna particularize the discussion and you know put it in the sense of what's going on in our own community so we're moving forward here with um the cd of boulder's financial update and then you can have your questions and then discussion a little bit later and i just want to take this opportunity to also thank richard robert and brian for this really wonderful discussion and thank you for coming by and we look forward to seeing you next time actually thank you so much oh thank you

[114:00] very pleasure thank you please take it from here okay thank you juni and thank you yes rich robert and brian we appreciate all that you share so now we are going to move to the city's financial update this is where we update council in the community on the city's actual financial results from the previous year i do want to just quick caution that these are preliminary results our financial audit is not complete until next month so there's potential that numbers could change slightly and when we do this we typically compare uh the previous year so that would be 2020 to the one before it 2020. um but because 2020 was a pandemic year um we're also going to compare to 2019 as a pre-pandemic reference point and in this update we also are going to really intentionally revisit 2020 and that's really just to provide the

[115:00] context for the decisions that were made with regard to the 2021 budget as that budget was developed in the summer of 2020 really on the heels of all of our 2020 budget reductions so next slide so revisiting that 2020 year as you all recall in late march and early april there were the stay-at-home orders and businesses and many city services were closed and with that uh city revenue sources fell significantly as noted by rich and robert sales tax was one of them but we also saw a tremendous decline in a number of the number of other revenue sources including accommodations tax as travel and tourism came to basically a halt admissions tax parking revenues as people were not visiting downtown as they usually had and also charges for programs and services for the city's

[116:01] programs that were not being provided [Music] as we know in may we hired to see you as a partner to build an econometric forecast to help us develop some informed sales and use tax forecasts but early in the pandemic there was so much uncertainty and we did conservatively look and think that revenue could be down across all funds by as much as 30 to 40 million dollars and for the general fund down from 16 to 21 million dollars and with that we made significant budget cuts we made reductions in expenditures of over 18 million and because of our service organization many of those cuts related to our staff so through layoffs furloughs and vacancy holds we do want to note that the largest number of impacted staff were furloughs of what we call non-standard staff and those are our temporary or seasonal

[117:00] staff that are most often brought in in the spring to help us with parks and recreation and open space and mountain parks programs that run through the summer and so those programs were not being provided so many of those staff were either furloughed or frankly never hired so that's where a lot of those numbers came in we do want to just note that that as the year transpired actual revenue came in better than expected so that the general fund was only down about 15 million and that was in part due to a strong use tax performance we talked about that this time last year that construction use tax and business use tax were actually up during the pandemic so that was a surprise and and those taxes actually fell back down in 2021 um and then the other thing to note is uh in late 2020 we did have that

[118:01] marketplace facilitator ordinance change that was mentioned by robert in the last presentation and so with that ordinance change there was additional revenue that came in as a result so next slide so moving on to 2021 again the budget was developed that summer of 2020 really as i mentioned before on the heels of the 2020 budget reductions during a time of really if you step back in time and recall it was it was a time of great uncertainty although i i hear that um rich and robert and brian are also cautioning continued uncertainty but there was certainly tremendous uncertainty at that point in time um and we had a very conservative mindset so with that the 2021 budget was developed um it was a 342 million dollar budget which was a 7.6 decrease

[119:00] over the originally adopted 2021 2020 budget so the the original 2020 budget before we made those budget cuts but as we mentioned revenue began to recover mid late year 2020 and it continued into 2021 that trajectory of revenue recovery so for 2021 sales tax revenue increased nearly 20 million or 19 compared to 2020 and remembering we were coming off that sort of trough year so those large growth rates are not unanticipated if revenue is going to be recovering apparel stores eating places in general retail all showed strong recovery um other revenues that started to recover in 21 are parking revenues which were up nearly 18 but again still down when compared to pre-pandemic levels

[120:02] accommodations tax revenue started to recover with tourism um bouncing back some in 2021 um i think we hear from our uh convention and visitor bureau partners that you know business travel is still lagging in terms of recovery but tourism has shown some signs of recovery so that was a 3.1 million um from 2020 but again still down from pre-pandemic levels and then again we've received federal support uh first in 2020 for through the cares act and then uh in 2021 through arba and we did appropriate that four million dollars so with revenue recovering um we wanted to make sure that while the original budget was 342 million we wanted to restore services and programs and budgets to provide

[121:00] those programs and services as we believed revenue would be sufficient for such and so in the first adjustment to base in may of 2021 we did add 37 million dollars to the budget and much more of that was ongoing to to really restore ongoing services and programs then is typically found in a first adjustment uh to base and then again we had a special adjustment in august and september of nearly 8 million which was some general fund appropriation as well as the first tranche of our arpa dollars appropriation and then we did another second adjustment in november of nearly 19 million so again trying to restore program budgets for programs and services as that revenue was improving so now we're going to take some time to

[122:00] walk through the actual revenues and expenditures and we're going to start with that base pre-pandemic year and uh in 2019 our revenue was just under 160 million and our expenditures were actually 172 million so in order to support those expenditures we did have a draw of over 13 million dollars from our fund balances and that was an intentional draw for priority strategic projects including the deconstruction of the hospital at alpine balsam as well as some additional dollars for fire station number three project in 2020 the actual results were that expenditures exceeded revenues by nearly 10 million dollars so in order to cover those expenditures we again had to draw down on fund balances of approximately 9.6 million

[123:03] in 2021 as we mentioned before revenue was really recovering so with that revenue recovery and also combined with expenditure savings we contributed just over 16 million and i'll note that the reason why we had expenditure savings largely in 2021 goes to some of the discussion in the prior session and that is this tight labor market the the organization has really struggled to recruit and retain talent and with that we've had a high level of vacancies and and while we were restoring budgets to restore services and programs we really struggled to restore the staff needed to provide those and so with that we have had vacancy savings that generated some of that expenditure savings that led to that fund balance contribution in 2021

[124:01] [Music] and then last for 2022 this is a revised projection that we do think based upon our adjustments to budget first the special and earlier this year and then the adjustment to base that was just approved earlier this month we are expecting some draw on fund balance for some high priority one-time uses i'll also note though we are continuing to struggle to to recruit and retain and so we do anticipate there will be vacancy savings this year so to the extent that that continues to happen that draw but may be minimized in 2022 so next we um wanted to talk about fund balances and dive deeper into those draws from fund balances and the contributions to fund balance that we showed on the previous slides

[125:00] and so we're going to start that with revisiting definitions and some terminology so first um in terms of fund balance definitions is emergency reserves and this has really been the policy focus of council has been uh the emergency reserves and what is our target or our policy goal target in terms of what percent of ongoing expenditures we want to hold in emergency reserves in order to meet the needs should we encounter an emergency um that goal has been 20 and and there have been questions about how did we arrive at that goal of 20 and we just want to remind that the government finance officers association recommends a best practice of a minimum of two months

[126:00] ongoing expenditures so two months translates to 16.7 so that would be a minimum um but they also recommend that each jurisdiction uh considers its particular risks and increase that target accordingly so some of the risks that the city of boulder considers when um when it recommended that policy goal was potential revenue volatility and and we saw that through the pandemic our reliance on sales and use tax um is makes us susceptible to quite a lot of great volatility vulnerability to extreme events or disasters such as flood and fire of which we have seen in recent years and reliance upon a major industry or employer and i think we also saw that during the pandemic in terms of our reliance upon the university as a major employer and also tourism as a major

[127:02] industry so those are some of the factors that have influenced that policy target of 20 percent the other categories of reserve fund balance are restricted reserves and those are reserves that we uh we keep uh based upon a specific restriction and need to use that revenue for for a specific purpose and then fund balance after reserves are really those uh undesignated funds that can be used for any general purpose we also want to always remind that while they can be used for any purpose they are one-time dollars so they should be used for one-time purposes so next slide so again we're going to walk through year by year on fun balance history as well so starting with 2019 as the pre-pandemic reference point emergency reserves are in blue restricted in green and fun balance after reserves in pink

[128:01] we ended 2019 with emergency reserves at 19 or 25.6 million we held restricted reserves and our fund balance after reserves was just over 10 million and i will note that that 10 million is after that 13.4 million dollar draw as i mentioned before 2020 revised this is what we expected um in the middle of 2020 early in the pandemic when we were making budget reductions and what we expected was that we would exhaust all of our fund balance after reserves that that would get entirely spent down in order to help us meet our expenditures and that we would tap in to our emergency reserves and bring that down to uh 16.7 um i will say that at the time the finance staff didn't recommend drawing down too far into emergency reserves

[129:03] to fill that revenue trough and that is because the city you know remains vulnerable to other risks particularly the flood and fire risks so this is what we expected this next uh bar is what actually happened and as we noted earlier because revenue began to recover in 2020 and because those use taxes came in unexpectedly high we did not draw down all of our fund balance after reserves but we did draw into that and we did not end up needing to tap into our emergency reserves so those remained at the level as originally budgeted at 19.5 percent or 27 million dollars then for 2021 again with the revenue exceeding expenditures

[130:00] we were able to maintain emergency reserves at 19.5 percent and we did build up again fund balance after reserves to nearly 20 million dollars and then for 2022 uh we are again looking to keep our emergency reserves at the 19.5 level and as uh shown on the previous slide we do anticipate we may be drawing down some of that fund balance after reserves but that will be of course influenced by if we have expenditure savings that may be minimized and the last thing we wanted to just sort of share for um discussion point with regard to fund balances um is the emergency reserve level as i mentioned earlier it has been a policy goal to achieve the 20 of ongoing expenditure level if we were to move to that um there's a one-time sort of expense of

[131:02] setting that those dollars aside into those emergency reserves of approximately nine hundred thousand and then once we got to that twenty percent level if we wanted to maintain that there's always an incremental um cost of doing so based upon how our ongoing expenditure budget increases so just wanted to mention that and then also that use of the fund balance after reserves again reiterating that the best practice is to use that for one-time uses that we did appropriate some in atv one and then as we consider uh the 2023 budget and building the recommended budget we will consider that availability in terms of high priority uh strategic needs and how that might best be used and next slide this is now where i turn it

[132:00] over to mark and he will take it from here thanks cara good evening council mark wolf senior budget manager uh we're better in budget projections than we are in presentation time projections so i'm gonna try to make up uh make up some time i'll talk a little bit about our major revenue sources outlook to start you got a lot about retail sales tax from our friends at cu our revised 2022 retail sales tax revenues are projected to exceed budget but anywhere from uh three and a half to about eight million uh and projected in 23 anywhere from eight and a half to almost 14. that depends on how well one it plays out actually our projections are based off of cu's model and so we'll talk a little bit about the implications of looking at a more aggressive uh somewhere closer to that medium bar and just for reference if you remember the the high

[133:00] bar and the low bar that were showed earlier we have been budgeting at the average of the medium and low for retail sales tax and so i think it and we've been performing well so we'll talk about that in a moment in looking ahead to property tax 22 and 22 property tax collections are on track to budget there are some things to note senate bill 21-293 temporary temporarily reduced residential assessments or assessment rates but our projections in a non-assessment year so going into 23 would be a non-assessment year we typically forecast about a 2 increase in property tax collections we're anticipating that to be closer to 0.5 percent year-over-year because of that reduction in residential assessment rates that impact will extend out an additional year into 2024. we'll feel that impact less due to the reassessment year

[134:00] looking ahead we are doing some additional analysis on senate bill 22-238 which was recently signed into law and it will impact those residential assessment rates going forward so we'll have some revisions as we get into the 23 budget development some other major revenue categories to note cara spent a moment talking about accommodations tax the cbb is doing an updated model this summer that we'll be looking at with them currently we're looking at about a seven million dollar projection for 2022 which is up about nine percent over 21 actuals occupancy is currently up 13 uh year-over-year um which is good but that is still down from pre-pandemic levels um obviously some of the headwinds with um consumer pessimism as it relates to inflation and travel expenditures is something that we're watching there and so we'll be watching occupancy closely over the summer

[135:00] and then other taxes just to note business use tax marijuana attacks are down from our original projections those will be reflected as we go into 22 and 23 projections and construction use taxes up a million dollars uh year over year but just to note that is a very volatile we don't can't predict well when construction use tax will come in a deeper dive into retail sales tax for a moment again just trying to break it down here's the dip that we're well aware of i just want to point out what this chart does show so we've talked talked a lot about the general fund and i'll talk a little bit more about the general fund that is the biggest bar there but other funds do rely heavily on retail sales tax including open space transportation our ccrs renewal is in there and yellow and then our 25 cent parks and rec fund as well

[136:00] and then as we've talked about our actuals and 21 were very strong and we'll note that the 21 actuals that actually came in above our original 22 budget projections so in looking ahead our revisions for 2022 is that we expect to to realize that kind of medium level of projection growth in retail sales tax in 22 and then in 23 our current projection that we've provided our departments in budget development which we're currently in the middle of is that average of the medium and low it's likely overly cautious from what we're seeing just year to date in 2022 but that's something those one of the assumptions that we'll want to revisit with councils who will walk into the 23 budget development and so just to put a pin on that while we have seen revenues consistently perform above our original projections we do budget with the degree of caution

[137:00] as was mentioned earlier that's typically a good posture for municipal budgeting we want to be in the black at the end of the year but we don't want to be responsible we want to make sure that we're able to invest the dollars that we reasonably think are coming in and so our risk tolerance will will impact uh our budget development and how much one-time funds we believe are available going into both adjustments further adjustments this year if needed and then the 23 budget we do want to point out that we have made adjustments this year some ongoing some one-time costs that will impact our 23 budget flexibility we did add more ongoing costs in this atb as well than we normally do again to continue to restore service and then as kara mentioned we'll be considering the use of that fund balance after reserve for those strategic one-time uses and for the 23 budget process uh new or continued investments we'd really love to consider in the proper context

[138:01] with prioritization and so this gets at uh the some of the we'd call it a challenge that council issued to us i think at the end of the last budget process which was hey you did a great job but we'd love a little bit more strategic process we'd love a little bit more transparency and involvement with the community and so what we've really worked on since that time is this what we're calling an outcome-based approach how do we reflect our investments in terms of our intended outcomes and how what might we measure that so that's a segue into talking about some of these process improvements and we'll introduce a new budgeting tool this year called opengov brief history for those that don't know the city did receive a grant from dola in 2018 to improve resilience through budgeting long story short for time we had a report we didn't implement all the elements because of kovid it was a really comprehensive report that gave us a lot of good information

[139:01] the focus was really about outcomes and key performance indicators and how we might embed that into our budgeting process so we spent some time figuring out where where are we at today and how can we adapt this model to to where we want to go so just starting with our current state as many of you know we're a very department-based budgeting it's traditional budgeting we have typically had our capital improvement plan or cip on a slightly different track than our operating budget we have oriented talked about citywide goals but we tend to orient at the department level especially around our master plans we have made decisions at the margins and that's what i mean by that is that as we've considered the budget we've considered the budget at the request level so we've just seen that increment of extra dollars we need to do something right without considering the the big picture at all times uh and outcomes in in budgeting are mutually

[140:01] exclusive in in the current state i would say previous state now because it feels like we're so far into this process already we had some data to support our decisions and certainly that came up in certain conversations but it wasn't consistent right and so what does the future look like in in this new budgeting environment uh that will be oriented around programs and i'll clarify that a little bit what i mean by programs is making sure that our investments are aligned to categories or service categories or projects that can be easily understood by the community so we know where our dollars are going but but that we're able to to articulate these programs in terms of how we intend to meet our citywide goals and that eventually we're able to embed indicators and outcomes within within the budgeting process so why now i think it's apparent as we've talked about we needed to solidify one of these foundational processes

[141:01] budgeting is the biggest policy document that we adopt every year we also had a number of budget policies and just simple standards that we wanted to improve we believe there's a better way to make strategic decisions both internally and and with you as council in bringing forth a recommended budget for your consideration a greater focus on outcomes greater alignment across our organization around those city-wide goals and improve transparency and accessibility with the budget for both our departments and the community so there's four main recommended implementation elements here i'll talk very briefly about orienting around those programs and then i'll talk about how we've looked at this budget process and and where we're going especially with the implementation of the new tool so with program budgeting we simply aligned our existing activities our 2022 budget to programs uh that are aligned with um citywide

[142:01] goals with an emphasis um a continued emphasis on equity within our program goals and that we're setting the stage for being able to to apply city-wide key performance indicators to our outcomes and have that be a part of our measurement going forward and so what you'll see that's different in in this program alignment is that budget proposal so the deadline for departments was last friday to submit to central finance uh so we're already in the middle of the 23 budget process internally those proposals are coming in at that at that program level so we're getting a higher level view of what an increased investment or a realignment might look like and what those intended outcomes are within that proposal that's the type of information that council will see in the recommended budget that's in a little bit different terms than we've seen before and that we hope that we're moving towards that that bigger picture of of how we intend to not only use our investments but how we might measure

[143:00] them in the future this is not a one-year project we'd love to be at the point where this year we're saying hey this this kpi this measurement tells us that we need to invest x uh in order to get to where we want to go um that that's going to be about a three year process we think so starting with this change starting with a new tool implementation and beginning to articulate our outcomes will be a major step forward then we can begin to refine make sure we're establishing those city-wide kpis and eventually using those to drive budget decisions in the future all right last slide and then i will show a very quick just i won't call it a demo i'll call it a view of opengov our previous budget software extremely manual spreadsheet analysis at the staff level opaque we'd have to produce a report in order to produce a spreadsheet in

[144:00] order to share it publicly we put all of our information into a pdf at the end of the year that pdf is 400 pages it's hard to navigate even for us and we don't necessarily have performance data without manual report reduction so budget to actuals and language accessibility is very limited in that environment so what we've done to facilitate a lot of these process improvements is engaged with opengov opengov is a cloud-based 21st century solution i like to call it they have many municipal clients they have been awesome to work with over the last several months budgeting within opengov does a few things for us it's much more approachable at the staff level provides us with a lot better information or at least more real-time information to build our budgets actuals reporting is a lot easier both internally and publicly and i think some of the most exciting things for the community is we'll be producing the

[145:00] budget book entirely online in a much easier environment to navigate there's a transparency portal that's opengov's term basically we're able to produce real-time financial information and budget information into one report portal that you're able to go in and navigate and then there is language accessibility within the website embedded within the website so i'm gonna just pull out of this if you bear with me for one second and i will pull up um open gov just so you have a chance to see that and then i promise we're done with the presentation okay you seeing that all right okay great so this is a report environment this is going to be very similar to the transparency portal that the community will eventually have access to what you're seeing in this environment is

[146:00] an example of our 2021 revised budget in this column against our 21 actuals what you're seeing is our operating program information so this is our program orientation organized by our sustainability equity resilience goal area so what you'll be able to do is click in let's say you wanted a little bit more information about what programs are within this particular program area and you were interested in one of these programs specifically you could click in and get more information that drills down to that level and then you have more specific budget information below right if you wanted to break that down in a different way and see this instead of at the program level and see it more traditionally at a department level you can navigate that way as well so i think there will be some learning we're happy to put out a little tutorial or something to help with navigation once this transparency portal is available but as you can see

[147:00] it's a lot better more useful information than we currently have access to and then in terms of the online budget book so how you'll be seeing the recommended budget once it is developed is a page that will have a lot more content but is similar to this where you'll have a department page we'll also have specific program pages where you'll be able to navigate some of that information that we always share every year but then embedded within the online budget book are these reports that you're able to click into and get more information and we'll have both cip and operating information within there so it's going to look a lot different but we think it's a huge step forward some of the apples to apples comparisons we'll work on to make sure that nothing is missing in terms of information that you all need to make decisions but we think this will be a great tool to tee up some of a better strategic conversation with you as we get into august and september and that is the end of our presentation

[148:04] thank you so much for this really great presentation and we have many hints that are up and i just want to uh acknowledge that we have gone over time a little bit so please keep your questions tight so that we can get done by 10 o'clock hopefully tonight thank you and i think our first hands up is bob yates uh thanks carl thanks mark that was really great presentation we appreciate that mark you may have mentioned this you went really fast there and so i may have missed something on the outcome based a budgeting i know that in year two you're planning to um to identify key performance and indicators or kpis what's the plan for um community engagement around that because like different community members are probably going to prioritize different um performance indicators and have opinions about that what's the community engagement element of that kpi identifier yeah that's a really good question bob i didn't mention community engagement i

[149:01] don't think it's something that we have mapped out for year two specifically some of it relates to uh updating our sustainability equity and resilience framework i know that is something that we're in the final stages of and chris messchuck may want to expand on that um in terms of citywide kpis i think sometimes for that the perfect can be the enemy the good and so i think it's um we're getting a good indication where we're at right now which is all over the place in terms of how we measure some of these programs which is expected and so it'll help us develop how we support our departments moving over the next year in in the best way to to to move towards either developing city-wide kpis developing them at the program level whatever we think makes sense from a performance standpoint i appreciate your point on the community engagement element of that and when or what that right moment might be is something that we can discuss

[150:00] great thanks mark thank you bob our next speaker or questionnaire is aaron yeah mark and carl thanks so much for all that great information and all the amazing work you do to keep our city finances in great shape um my question is is not for tonight but a request to get back to us with some information mark you talked about how uh property tax assessments were going down slightly because of the house bill it was 21 293 that was passed last year and then i know that the governor just recently signed into law 22 238 which also reduced assessed values but my understanding is that one also includes a backfill to organize to entities that are they're collecting fewer taxes and the state's been compensating for some or all of it and so my request would be some time before too long to get back to us with an analysis of exactly how those two bills are going to affect property tax collections for the

[151:01] city over the next um i think maybe two to three years and then also how it affects will affect residents because i know this is of course something of great interest to our residents is how their property taxes will be changing so if we could get like a one pager on what this will do to city collections and also what it will do to a typical small business and uh homeowner that would be much appreciated i know that's not a trivial thing to put together but i think it'd be really informative so if you're able to do that in the next few weeks they'll be really really helpful is that is it doable do you think yeah i think so um we've just glanced at the impact and some of the analysis that have come out from the state but i think we'd be able to put something like that together fantastic thanks so much and then just my one other comment uh is i really appreciated the detailed analysis of how the fund balance was um changing and how it was being used

[152:00] my memory from our first few years on council is that we did not get that level of transparency on fund balance and how it was shifting and how it was being used bob correct me if i'm wrong but i don't remember this kind of analysis and it's really welcome to see exactly how that's changing and how it's being deployed to to assist people in the community so huge thanks for that and appreciate it and please keep it up and and then also looking forward to that open gov platform that looks like an extremely promising development so thanks for pursuing that as well that's all we got thank you aaron uh mark you're on yeah just a couple of questions and and it's related to terminology which may be obscure to the community but it's certainly a little obscure to me um and the staff memo there was reference to the general funds budget the all funds budget the capital budget the operating budget when we refer to the budget which budget are we referring to

[153:00] and as a follow-up to that question we have a general fund budget of about 166 million in an operating budget of 300 million how do those relate and and what's the difference between the two mark i don't know i can go ahead um that all funds budget you know because we are a government and we have fund accounting we have i think 42 different funds and so the all funds budget is the budget of all of those different funds summed in total and then of that total budget we have um operating budgets which are you know programs and services it's largely personnel with some operating expenses to support them and then we have capital budgets which are our you know capital infrastructure investments that are done over a six-year planning horizon and each of those different 42 funds um has a different funding source uh the general fund is what is focused

[154:00] on the most because that is the one over which council has the most discretion with regard to the use of the dollars so those many of those um other 42 funds are special revenue funds or enterprise funds and so the the revenues must be used for specific purposes so for example open space and mountain parks fund is supported by a sales tax but it is dedicated to that purpose so it can only be used for that purpose and the utilities fund is an enterprise fund and it's it generates its revenue through its rates and charges that can only be used to support the operations of the utilities and so we typically talk about the all funds budget and then the general fund budget is really a focus because that's what you can use for general fund purposes any purpose and then we do talk you know to a lesser degree we focus on those special revenue funds but they are important and clearly at the city particularly we have many

[155:01] designated funds for specific purposes including open space parks transportation you know really core city services so effectively council is dealing with about one-third of the all funds budget when you focus when you focus on the general fund it is about a third a huge part of it is the utilities um so that's a large part of the all funds budget is the utilities function my second question is also sort of definitional the concept of fund balance after reserves i can you explain that a little more clearly for so your fund balances at the end of the year basically all of your over time your how your revenues have exceeded your expenses so it's like your savings account and then of that savings we have some specifically set aside for emergencies in the emergency reserve we have some specifically set aside for

[156:02] other restricted purposes and then the ending fund balance after reserves is that amount that's left over it can be used for any purpose okay thank you and i really appreciate the report tonight it was as always terrific thank you thank you mark uh just a reminder gentle reminder fellow council members please keep your questions short and tight we only have about 90 minutes for about a hund 120 minutes worth of presentation and uh in question so our next person is matt matt benjamin thanks junie um kara mark i really appreciate the detail um it's nice sort of as a new council person to get that that that depth and certainly that open gov platform is really going to open things up and allow us to dive in a little better and gain better understanding so i appreciate the hard work to get us to that place my question centers around the conversation of reserves and

[157:00] always hindsight is 2020 but we can use that hindsight to better inform future decisions and one thing that that really stood out to me is how we effectively didn't really tap our reserves given how we sort of set that policy of using it in an emergency and the pandemic i could only define as the ultimate emergency for our community so if not that emergency what emergency were we waiting on maybe floods maybe fire but i guess my policy concern and then how we affected in budgeting is is it the second emergency that we really tap into the reserves or the third emergency because the first emergency came and we didn't tap it and my and we're reaping some of the consequences of that with still get slow to the uptick of hiring back staff holding on to those staff i think of some of our local businesses many of those communities that disproportionately suffered during the pandemic we could have used those reserves to really lift up and support our community and and we were holding on to them and

[158:00] so i guess my my real question is can we is there is there policy tweaks we can do to our financial strategy so that when we're in this situation our policy demands more that we tap those reserves for the emergency we're in and address the current emergency rather than holding on to them for perhaps a secondary or tertiary emergency i can start by chris you're looking like you want to jump in do you want to jump in first you no you go ahead and go first okay um i guess i would just reiterate that um we did believe we were going to tap into emergency reserves so um you know we were making decisions quickly on the heels of where our revenue was falling significantly and something that was really unprecedented and we didn't have a lot of history to rely upon them in terms of the length and the

[159:00] breadth of the impact and so we we did believe we were going to tap into reserves um and and there's a lag to revenue collection and so it's just sort of one of the realities of public finance i think is that you are making decisions based upon some expectations that aren't very uncertain and so um i think i also i would say from from a budget standpoint having been part of those decisions we felt like it was better to make some reductions it's really hard on an organization to have to be continually cuttings like cut and then realize we didn't cut enough and then cut again i think that that is that's tough emotionally on the organization and i definitely felt that in the role that i was in at the time in cara if i can add just a little bit more to that because i i 100 agree and i

[160:00] think if we if we think back to 2020 and the world kind of shut down in in march uh and for that first month we we tried to kind of keep operations as normal uh and then realize that isn't going to work when uh so much of our our services were completely closed and so that's when we moved into uh kind of furloughs and then uh another month went by and we were in may and and beginning into june and it was very clear that uh what we weren't sure what was going to happen and how long this was going to last it became very clear that this isn't going away anytime soon and so that was in june when we made the significant budget cuts uh to the to the city's budget and and when uh cara presented that uh the 2020 revised that's where we thought we would be uh even after those significant budget cuts that we made uh and if you think of the

[161:01] chart from rich and and robert's presentations of how steep those declines were happening uh we really responded recognizing that this wasn't going to be a shock uh to the system and then a quick recovery it was going to be sustained for a while um and then as as we presented the the year turned out better um the economy started to you know people figured out ways to still get food you know pick up from restaurants that sort of thing so we were able to see some of that i think matt to your question about reserves and when do you use it what kind of emergency i really do think about emergency reserves as those significant shocks uh to to our system so fires and floods and um those ones where you you it happens so fast and then you're quickly into recovery i think about our neighboring communities in the 2013 flood even

[162:01] ourselves we spent significant millions of dollars in a matter of months and some of our neighboring communities were literally transferring money between funds to make payroll and so it's really important that we have appropriate reserves for those kind of shock emergencies uh and i think covid was both a shock and then very quickly turned into something that was much longer than a shock and that's why we made um kind of long-term budget adjustments uh in that way so hopefully maybe that's uh helpful as uh some thoughts on that well i appreciate that kara and chris and i don't spend too much time i think it's it's a conversation for us to probably keep having on on how we do that i just you know we we barely touched three percent of our reserves in that time in our emergency reserve so you know if it's a you know 10-year event at three percent right it's still only 30 of your total reserves you tap at that rate so i think

[163:00] in in general i i yeah we don't need to dive too deep but i do think that that was a good lesson learned and i would say cove it was a shock to the system it's as an emergency as we've ever seen and so i just hope that that's a good lesson that going forward we can dip into that to really help our community and on the recovery side which we're at now we're still paying for that a little bit so i hope we can we can take that forward so but thanks for the detail on that i really appreciate that in the context thank you matt uh mark has a quick follow-up to matt's comment or question yeah yeah thank you um juni will remember this because she sat in the financial strategies committee meetings at the time um we were in terra incognita we had no idea what we were dealing with how severe it was going to be how long it was going to last what the ultimate impacts were going to be for this community so we were hanging on to our reserves in the possible anticipation that we were going to be in a situation far worse than we actually experienced

[164:02] it was a very frightening time and we were making very very difficult decisions that we brought to council but it was it was a a scary moment in time and that's why we were very reluctant to deploy reserves without knowing where the contours of this this pandemic were going to lead us um i guess the short answer is you had to be there it was it was very difficult do you mind if i call it way that was what my hands up for too juni true rachel go ahead just want to sort of agree with that and be cautious about kind of monday morning quarterbacking um jane our former city manager's decisions um about the reserves i think we all anticipated that that they would likely be tapped more than they were and when we were you know when she was doing furloughs and such i think there was any idea that we were going to get so much federal funds and and sort of a cavalry arriving so that did arrive and and it was um

[165:01] crucial and so i just think that that it was um it was a huge unknown and you know we didn't know people were gonna start you know just dropping like flies health-wise and so i mean it was it was just a pretty terrifying time and so i want to just be gentle with the decisions that staff made and that and maybe be cautious about reading into that that we wouldn't want robust reserves in the future because i personally think that's very important thanks can i say one more thing about that juni sure tara all right real quick is we have two things that people didn't mention first of all how important it is for our city to have you know the bond um the bond rating and the second thing is is what if we would have had a trifecta meaning not only covid but also could you imagine floods and fire and being what it's like these days today that's not so hard to imagine so i really understand what chris and um

[166:00] cara are saying about uh just realizing however bad it was it could be so much worse and it has been so that's my opinion on that thank you really quickly not minimize the people did drop like flies like we lost so many community members and i don't want to um be cavalier about how many people were impacted by covet so i just want to clarify that thanks nicole sorry about that you are next nah that's okay thank you um i have what i hope are two quick questions but first i just want to say kara and mark thank you so much i am so excited about opengov and all the work that you all are doing um it's it's just really really remarkable and i know how much has gone into this and i know how much you have left so thank you um one question i have is it you know it looks like except for the pandemic years um which were a little odd uh that we maybe have a pattern of underestimating our revenue and overestimating um our

[167:01] expenses so that we're kind of consistently ending a little higher than we um expect and i was just wondering if you look out over the last decade or two do we have any significant trends um um and i know you you won't have the answers to that right now but um it's just a question that i have as you know we think about our risk level and things and i know i mentioned that to you in the strategies committee meeting as well um and then my other question and this is just a clarification question about opengov and what it's going to allow us to do and the work that you all are doing as i understand it you're working toward a place where we'll be able to budget by programs that cross multiple departments so that people from the community can kind of say they want to know how much money we spend on homelessness services or something like that they'll be able to put that in and find that out i just want to clarify that and make sure i'm understanding it and see if you have a sense of when we might start getting to that information because i think that's going to be a really powerful tool for a lot of folks in the community

[168:01] and us yeah thanks nicole so to answer that question i we are moving towards i think programs across departments i think for this first year we'll still be oriented at the program level by department for the most part there will be exceptions to that however there's capability in opengov to have what are called stories essentially it'll look like a web page that will be able to highlight certain whether they're council priorities or community goals or certain areas of importance we could call them budget highlights some of that we still need to create but i think for to your example if we wanted to say hey what are all what are all our investments in the area of homelessness i think we could do that and pull in multiple programs just to show the whole portfolio if you will so there is that capability and then to your question on kind of our risk tolerance and looking back at projections i think at least in the short term we have been out performing we've been very cautious we talked a lot about the

[169:00] uncertainty um we're pulling together that information and it will be one of those key assumptions that we revisit with council hopefully with the information that you're asking for when we present the 23 recommended budget great thank you and just one one quick follow-up when do you anticipate having um open gov at sort of the level of functionality you want to move toward um where we have budgeting by programs and that sort of thing yeah i would put that's not to rush you it's just just just so we have some understanding yeah i've been saying that it's a three-year project to really get the measurement piece of it and i think to have more of those cross departmental programs in terms of the information availability though because that's more of like how we organize and are able to do some deeper analysis across departments the information will be there this year and so we anticipate when we release the recommended budget which will be in that beginning of august window-ish that information will be available to council and the public both on that transparency side the portal and

[170:01] the open the online budget book wonderful thank you thank you nicole lauren i just wanted to give a quick shout out um i really appreciate this um updated budget process improvements i think it's one of the best things our city could do to help build trust with the community just making it so the community has access to detailed information about where their tax dollars are going and you know as someone who's followed the budget conversation in the past and had to try to look up specific information in our you know fairly thorough but not as thorough as you would like sometimes document i just i can't say enough how excited i am for this project to move forward thank you for all the time you're putting into it thank you thank you lauren i just want to make a quick question a quick comment i am very proud of

[171:00] being on council with all of you i really thank the city manager for the work that she's doing on transparency and sustainability and resiliency through this open gov portal and thank you for all the work that you know the financial strategy team at the city is doing so thank you for all the great work that you're doing so now is there any other questions from comments anything else or forever hold your peace from council okay nothing else this is great thank you and i just want to make a comment before we move to the next step uh we definitely will go over 10 10 30 and my my hope is that around 10 30 we can revisit and maybe take a vote to see if we all want to keep pushing through tonight uh so the next part of our conversation will be the guaranteed income section which i'm sure will uh rally a lot of discussion from council members but please just keep it brief but i enjoy your conversation and so probably the rest of the community so please take it over from here uh chris

[172:02] great thanks juni and as we transition um thanks again to cara and mark for their leadership and uh our entire budget team too across the city so uh with that i'm gonna hand it over first to kurt uh and he'll uh introduce the team as well so kurt take it away uh thank you and good evening council uh kirk fernhower director of housing and human services and uh the guaranteed income uh discussion that you're going to have tonight actually started probably three or four years ago um as a topic which within housing and human services and something that we were uh exploring it became um more of a possibility when arpa funds became available and um it's well elizabeth crowe has been uh spearheading that it's a real it's a real team uh approach uh both from individuals within our department and also other departments as well

[173:00] and um so um i'd also like to introduce for for the first time uh elizabeth crowe in her position as deputy director of housing human services thank you thanks so much kurt and good evening city council members in mayor brockett it's really great to see everyone here again tonight i'm going to go ahead and start sharing slides and hopefully these will right are we good great thank you so um also uh very happy to let you all know that we have another guest here this evening cameron burns who's deputy director for the national mayors for a guaranteed income network is available online and able to take questions after the presentation

[174:01] as curt said we're presenting here tonight with an update in a little more detail on the boulder guaranteed income pilot project concept and since our last time presenting to council on this topic we do have a team of city staff from several different departments who are also getting up to speed on the pilot project concepts and how they're working in other cities and i just want to let you know who these folks are because they're going to be working really hard over the next several months and year they include jay allen tiffany baller rosine babuda ingrid castro campos vicki ebner nicolia eldridge skemp tip arpar karasuti markeisha key hagan ryan hansen sam mcqueen and penny monica richmeyer and richard todd so just to kurt's point this is definitely has been and will be a good team effort and i hope you'll join me in

[175:00] appreciating their interest and work on this issue so just to cover what we want to cover tonight during this session the memo that you received in the council packet contains a lot of details on what we'll be presenting tonight so we'll just really highlight some of the information i can definitely give some more examples if council is interested in in the interest of time we'll try to keep things a little short and the agenda will generally follow the topics as they were presented in the memo just to pose here again the three questions that we have for council tonight to consider about the guaranteed income pilot project about the draft outcomes which we presented in the memo and we'll share again this evening as what we want to achieve through a project like this what the criteria could be for us as we consider the project structure and partnerships

[176:01] and then whether council has any suggestions on our approach to community engagement and we'll go through the each of these questions i'll kind of bring them up again as we touch on the content around outcomes criteria and community engagement and then we'll have discussion at the end just to provide a little context as we like to do for any of our human services housing and human services projects is to really focus on our mission which is to strive for all people in this community to thrive and important in this mission statement isn't only about meeting people's needs on a daily basis but focusing on that third bullet point down where we're addressing systemic inequities about any and all areas in which our own processes and practices are perpetuating the barriers that community members have to truly being able to live here and thrive

[177:02] so that's just the context for everything we do in hhs including moving ahead with this project so just a little background on what we mean by guaranteed income pilot project just for a review guaranteed income is a term that describes a monthly cash payment that is given directly to individuals in a manner that is unconditional with no strings attached and payments in guaranteed income pilot projects are not actually meant to be a guarantee for life but typically for a period of time between one and two years and guaranteed income really is a term of art it's one of many that can describe this type of project but it really is to distinguish the regular and reliable cash transfer again over a short period of time uh from those other types of financial assistance that are very situational uh

[178:01] might only be one time or only available for one kind of one type of use and city staff have used this term guaranteed income just really for the sake of consistency because organizations like mirrors for a guaranteed income other pilots tend to use the term there are many other terms that can be used to describe this type of project some of them include basic income cash transfer and the like and for a little bit more background again there are some examples of this project in the memo but the seed is project is one of really the first in the united states that was a mayor-led guaranteed income project started off in stockton and in it 125 community members who are

[179:00] experiencing low income receive 500 a month for two years and here again there were no strings attached no work requirements associated with them receiving these funds and as kurt mentioned um some of our housing human services staff have really been looking at the seed project since it launched in 19 in 2019 excuse me and we're really interested in the some of the results that they achieved the slide kind of describes them very briefly some of them for example are the people participating in the project who receive the basic income or guaranteed income experience less income volatility and more financial security so for example uh the rate of participants who could pay for an unexpected expense went from 25 before the pilot to 52 once they had been receiving this monthly cash transfer

[180:00] there was also a 10 increase among participants who were able to make consistent payments on debts and the rate of full-time employment among people who are participating in the project went from an average of 28 before the pilot to 40 that was not true in each of these situations for the um the control group the people who were involved in the project for research but did not receive the income and that's just a very short description of some of the outcomes um the link for the stockton demonstration project on the slide goes to a very dynamic web page that has white papers and lots of research details and of course we're happy to share um what el what other information from the project we have cleaned so from that stockton uh demonstration the mayors for guaranteed income network was was birthed

[181:00] and this was founded in part by uh stockton mayor michael tubbs who was really the driving force behind the stockton program and this map just shows where we are today for the mayor's for guaranteed income network just showing how widespread the interest is in projects like this the membership in mayors for guaranteed income which mayor brockett has joined recently on behalf of city of boulder are to advocate for a guaranteed income at the local state and federal level to invest in narrative change to highlight the lived experience of people with economic experiencing economic insecurity so we really understand what that means in our community and then to invite other cities to join us in this effort so it really is about creating and sustaining a national movement for this type of work and just to say on the map the different

[182:00] colored boxes and the numbers in the boxes are really only there because you can zoom in um and see exactly which cities are participating and how concentrated they are in any particular area so while not everyone who's a part of the mayors for guaranteed income network has a pilot program uh the pilot projects have been expanding throughout the u.s in the past couple of years and the logos on this slide really just refer to a small sampling of the projects that are currently taking place in communities as diverse as new orleans jackson mississippi columbia south carolina virginia massachusetts new york new jersey minnesota saint paul or st paul minnesota rather california and also just up down the road in denver and each pilot project

[183:00] is a little different from the other um focus is the same and collectively they offer a solid blueprint and some best practices on which we here in boulder can really draw ideas for how to successfully implement a pilot here in addition to that there are organizations like the center for guaranteed income research out of the university of pennsylvania the stanford university basic income lab and of course mayors for guaranteed income who provide a lot of experience and strategic guidance and a lot of hands-on device and just to say uh really quickly um this just among the the projects that are represented on this slide is a very wide range of approaches that cities have taken so for example the magnolia mothers trust is a project in jackson mississippi that's focused on black single mothers at a thousand dollars a month for a year

[184:02] contrast that with columbia south carolina where their assistance program focuses on fathers at five hundred dollars a month for for one year uh the project in new orleans uh 4.0 kind of the logo in the upper left there provides 50 a week to youth who are ages 16 through 25. and so you know this just resembles the diversity of approaches um based on what that community feels like their community members can um can need the most and can use best to thrive so when thinking about this guaranteed income project for city of boulder and using our arba funds for it american rescue plan act we definitely feel like this project really meets all of our city of boulder arpa criteria and and really uniquely so um while we don't have a currently kind

[185:01] of named partners reflecting on that last bullet point among the city of boulder's arpa criteria we do anticipate and believe there will be interest from other funding agencies and donors and just to note that the 250 000 that city council approved as part of our tranche to our recommendations back in march will likely include things like funding for a project manager consultant funding associated with a community task force to help us make the detailed decisions on how we want to design the project communication possibly a small stipend for people participating in a community task force and the like so there's a lot that goes into what might seem like a large number can seem relatively small considering what we hope to pack into this design so shift a little bit now to talking

[186:00] about how a guaranteed income can really help accomplish some of our community needs so the council memo details some of the ways in which the city housing human services staff already provide a lot of financial assistance to households either directly through our older adult service or family services through our epress program the eviction prevention and other examples but also through grants that we make to non-profit partners who also provide these services and these are a lot of investments that we also make in programs that include job training academic support all of the building blocks that people really need in order to um to do well and look better in this community and what makes guaranteed income um really value added to all of that is the level of flexibility and empowerment that could come with just enabling people to make their own decisions based on their

[187:01] needs our hhs department serves an estimated four to five thousand low-income community members a year either directly through the services i mentioned or indirectly through the grants that we provide to our nonprofit partners and what we continue to hear throughout the pandemic as council has heard as well about the disproportionate impacts that this pandemic has had just coming off the heels of the previous two presentations um it really does take what the previous presenter described as a as an affordability package um to help people do well and truly recover from this pandemic and the evidence we have shows that we're really still very much in responding when it comes to community members experiencing low income and we have some additional evidence of course for how projects like a guaranteed income

[188:01] can really help add value and meet the needs of our community members thinking about 2020 when we used some of our coronavirus relief funds to provide through the left behind workers fund to help community members that didn't have access to unemployment benefits and maybe not getting any stimulus funds like many of the rest of us did it was a huge benefit in them receiving just a one-time thousand dollar payment we also have seen in the high winds that came through boulder at the marsh associated with the marshall fire that our community members living in our mobile home parks have very little ability often to just pay for even the most basic repairs that came from damage associated with those wins so all of this can beg the question um what is it that people really need the funding for and uh earlier when we were talking

[189:01] about or the slide i showed up about the stockton demonstration project there was a note in there that most participants in that project spent money on food on rent on utilities all of the things that most of us just maybe take for granted when we go about our daily lives but remain those areas of great need and to compare the results from the stockton program with some of what we've seen in our support through the left behind workers fund through other grants that we've made available to nonprofit organizations including outboulder county we heard from marty earlier tonight are that community members similarly when they receive these benefits they spend them on food on rent on transportation on utilities after that it's health care it's other household goods and needs the stockton program showed that only one percent of

[190:01] the funds that were allocated to participants were spent on tobacco or alcohol so it's a good reminder to us that people who are experiencing low income with cash do what all of us do we take care of we take care of ourselves and our families and lastly um just wanted to note that one of the other benefits of a guaranteed income project and the kinds of guidance and blueprints that we can use from other communities is that they can be structured to avoid this benefits cliff or what can happen when a community member um who's experiencing low income makes just enough money that they may be ineligible then for the benefits that they really have needed and relied upon um so again there's lots of details about how how other cities have found ways to avoid this cliff and i'm sure cameron can can mention other examples

[191:00] as well if council is interested so it's also interesting um and really exciting um for staff thinking about this project is this transformative elements and this is again a term that we use um when we're thinking about our arpa investments for what what additional we want right it's it's not just about helping people now but how can how can we use these dollars to really transform um our community as a whole and in this area we really feel as though a guaranteed income project can really change the social contract that we have as a government agency with our community members who are experiencing low income and that can really start when we take the step and really trust people to make their own financial decisions based on what they know they need in turn it can you know put in motion a cycle that then you know involves us removing these barriers or

[192:02] conditions for financial assistance and then we hope that community members themselves will increasingly trust and feel accepted um and the quote on this slide is is one that came from a community member who received some support um last year uh through the or now i should say 2020 through the left behind workers fund and that's the kind of transformation i think we all really want that people in our community do feel seen they feel understood and they feel as though they matter and they belong here and just also to note here that this is the kind of transformation or the transformative opportunity that we also see in our racial equity plan in which we feel like this project fits hand in glove so before presenting the uh the next section just want to remind council the the first question that we posed in the memo and here tonight

[193:00] what if any additional outcomes might council want to achieve through a guaranteed income pilot project i have a comment um elizabeth is it possible to just do your presentation because i don't think it would be hard for all of us to answer all of these questions at once just to buy us sometimes uh let me make sure i understand what you're saying do you want uh pausing for each of the questions or wait till the end wait till the end yes gotcha that's why i'm planning yes good thank you so what the outcomes that we've shared in the memo and which are here on the slide again are were generated from city staff with input from some of our non-profit partners who we've engaged with starting back in december and earlier in january and also we're informed on the kinds of outcomes that other pilot projects have experienced

[194:01] and these include reduced poverty you know for people participating and possibly community-wide increased housing and food security we want to see outcomes in terms of levels of employment potentially higher wages whether people decide with this support that they want to advance their education um and to um and to withstand again the ability to sorry the ability to withstand financial hardship in crisis etc so next uh question is what criteria might council suggest regarding the project structure in partnerships and for here it's fairly detailed slides so i'll actually just click through

[195:00] and again the details are in the memo the reason why we want to present this information or get counsel's input on this criteria is because we're not coming as city staff saying exactly how we think this project should be we're not coming to you saying here's the target population we've already determined the amount the duration of the payments we feel as though that really those require input from our community members who really understand uh these challenges and opportunities and so what we are presenting is a set of criteria which we think should be held forward as we design a project whatever those detailed decisions might be and maybe some of these would seem obvious um but just wanting to call out and and kind of better articulate what our approach is so that includes um applying and finding applying any findings from our own city

[196:00] equity assessments and instruments council is well familiar with our racial equity plan our racial equity instrument and our rapid response assessment we want to follow realistic timelines and milestones rather than you know go too fast or take too much time when we have information when we have the information we need we want to be able to utilize things like a cash transfer system that's already been proven in other places to be efficient and effective and as i mentioned earlier structure this in such a way that we're really limiting if not avoiding any financial impacts as a result of a cash transfer to that point some pilot projects actually set up what they call a no harm fund so that if a community member who participates ends up having an adverse situation like you know they've been told they kind of make too much money

[197:00] to be eligible for a benefit they've been relying on is there a little bit of a safety net to provide them with some assistance if that happens we want to be sure we're really making use of a robust data collection and lastly uh really include some planning for project sustainability and i'll touch on this a little bit later when we talk about timeline the nature of a pilot is that you don't know what the results are but you want to know how it's going before you decide whether to advance in some other way but we definitely there again want to plan for sustainability assuming that it is that it may be successful so those are the criterion again as uh council member joseph said we'll we'll hold discussion until the end on these as well the third question that we've posed is what suggestions does council have on the proposed approach to community

[198:01] engagement and for this we're fortunate of course that we already have an engagement strategic framework which staff believe will work very well for this guaranteed income pilot and we've already received as i mentioned earlier some positive feedback so far from nonprofit partners who we've engaged with and it's been overwhelmingly positive we have believed that if we can set up a community task force to help make some recommendations and provide input then we don't have to know right at the onset that staff don't have to know exactly what it would look like and rather we will use this engagement strategic framework for our next steps and our engagement staff have been involved in the pilot project guaranteed income pilot project city staff team as i mentioned earlier and we're really recommending that we

[199:01] look at this consult level of community engagement as the one most appropriate for this pilot project and that's a level at where we're really obtaining public feedback on public analysis and alternatives and decisions and the promise to the public that's associated with this engagement level is that we will keep the public informed listen to and acknowledge concerns and aspirations and share feedback on how public input influenced the decision and so we believe again looking at some of the examples from other cities and how they have put task force like this to good use that this is going to be an effective way for us to move forward and next a brief timeline it's a little

[200:00] tricky uh to say exactly what this timeline might be um before we really have a project manager in place to help um move things forward at at a face that a pace that would be faster than what we can with our current staff capacity etc but this again is based on um on some of the average time frames from other guaranteed income pilots um i mentioned in the memo that some pilots have been launched in less than a couple of months where it's been very simple and uh structure and where city staff we're taking a lead and really making a lot of the decisions that we believe a community input is is really optimal and going all the way up to several years that some pilots have actually done a lot of data collection and analysis on community needs well before they decided to move ahead but you know if we are to start in june

[201:01] and issuing an rfp for and selecting a project manager based on some of the other experiences from pilot projects in other cities it's possible that we could begin an actual cash transfer by the end of the first quarter 2023 of course it is arpa funds and so we have through 2026 to expend those resources and if at the end of the pilot there is interested in moving ahead with something more sustainable this is a cycle that could repeat itself with a different you know potentially lessons learned potentially new partners um again really kind of incorporating what we know from the pilot to keep it to keep it moving ahead so the last slide i have is again just kind of reposing these questions for council again we have cameron burns available to

[202:02] help uh answer questions if council have any questions for him and i will stop there and be happy to answer questions as well thank you very much thank you so much for this presentation are there any council questions or comments to the questions that are on the screen first we have nicole go ahead thanks so much for this presentation um and for all the work that's kind of gone into this so far um i think regarding that uh first question um what i and honestly the second one as well what i'm really most interested in is what the people who will benefit from this program see as the outcomes i really feel like as a as a boulder homeowner i am not the right person to be providing a lot of feedback on outcomes um nor should i be trying to dictate what um what benefits other people might expect

[203:00] to get when i'm coming from a very different place um so i would just be very interested in hearing more about what the community members and the folks who who will benefit have to say um in response to that question so i know i'm not totally answering the question but it's more that i don't feel like i'm the right person to answer um some of these questions and as far as the approach to community engagement i would really like to see most of the engagement for this project coming from the folks who are going to benefit um from it i think elizabeth some of the things that you were mentioning in your comments really got at the the point that sometimes those of us who are not experiencing poverty have some different opinions about why folks may be experiencing poverty um and so it really just feels to me like it's a place where we want to lean pretty heavily on the community to know what what they need um and then the other thing that i have around the engagement

[204:01] process um is whether it's going to include some sort of marketing or advertising to particip potential um applicants to this program right so can can we also use it as a way to spread the word about this program so that we can get um you know the um the most people participating uh as we can and that's all thank you thank you for that nicole mark um i must have been under a mis apprehension i thought that when we approved uh funds to study this program that we're actually going to study it before implementing it and it seems like we have assumed the conclusion uh here um but let's let's start with a premise that none of this money is going to be used for any of any purpose other than social services so it's not a question of of paving the roads with this money it's a question of what gives us the best return on a three

[205:00] million dollar investment uh page three of the of the memo states that there's been an exponential increase for financial and rental assistance food assistance and health care access is there any analysis of as to why we are better off using this money in this fashion as opposed to giving it to hhs and saying increase your programs for those purposes help more people um are we doing that at all are we simply assuming that this is the only way to go well i would just say that um we're not in hhs planning on pulling back on our other investments either directly that we provide through our department or through uh the kinds of investments we provide to other nonprofits and that this is really a way to add to the services that we already have to really try to kind of push

[206:00] help help push families they're individuals over over a limit over a barrier that they still have not been able to achieve but but that's not really my question my question is if we're going to spend three million dollars is this the best way to spend it and what's the basis for assuming that it's the best way to spend it as opposed to putting another million dollars into uh a rental assistance or another million dollars into um food assistance which would help more people if you do the math here this this program is going to help 459 people um or 229 people 158 people or 229 if we run it over two years and my question is if your individual number 460 are your needs any less and what happens if 700 people qualify under whatever terms of qualification we establish they get nothing um so

[207:01] my question is how is this the best way of proceeding and why is there no analysis to tell us that why this is the bad thing i just want to there are a lot of possibilities please tell me why this is the best outcome of all well i think we what we've seen from other existing pilots is that this kind of cash transfer program is transformational for people who participate and the purpose of running a pilot is so that we can see whether or not it really is and the fact that we in boulder if you know we if we do move ahead right so this funds were the initial 250 000 were to begin design um for implementation and we'll come back um later on this year with a request for tranche three for the remainder of the the three million that staff [Music] are suggesting be allocated to this

[208:00] project um and and that's been where the success is um some of the stories and the experiences that are coming from people who have heard have participated and benefited from a cash transfer guaranteed income project are that the value add is quite significant um and the statistics i mentioned earlier from stockton there are other details coming out from other pilots in place boulder's not first in this we would be probably among the 30th perhaps by the time we launch assuming for the moment that we do and so there are a lot of research and details um from all the other pilots that are pointing toward this kind of project to be truly transformational is that going to be included in your report or again are we just assuming the conclusion think staff are looking at the results that have come from other pilots and we don't know with certainty um how it's going to work in boulder but the other

[209:00] pilots give us a pr a pretty good indication of the kind of positive change that can result from this kind of project okay so we're assuming the conclusion okay thank you thank you mark erin we're next so uh elizabeth thank you so much for this i really appreciate the detailed work you did the the research shines through and the presentation and your approach to it um i had thought uh that we'd be like evaluating criteria for selecting people and such like that but i think you're absolutely on target with uh let's reach out um to the community to get guidance on on those kinds of things and i thought nicole was right on target when when she said that hey you know we're not the experts here on what would be the most helpful in a poverty reduction program like this talk to the people who are experiencing it although i would just add to that not not just to the people who are currently eligible but also people with

[210:00] lived experience in this area who might be in better shape now and might not be maybe eligible now but you know who have um have experienced some real hard times can also add insight into it so you know definitely do some broader outreach i would say but i think we do want to focus in on for people who are struggling in our community what would be a program that would be the most helpful you know to them um in within the parameters that we started talking about but i think you're right on target i don't have any major things to suggestions to offer about different ways to do it um so thanks for your work i'm looking forward to coming back to it and uh proud to be the the public face of the mayor's for guaranteed income and however i can be helpful in that role just please do let me know and kim good to have you here tonight and i look forward to interacting more as we move forward thank you thank you for that tara you're next next okay um i want to say that at first

[211:00] the first time you talked about it elizabeth i can't say i was incredibly excited but after i have studied this and the packet was excellent and it really just showed it to me in a different light i got way more excited about it i think the the especially the increased level of employment in higher wages the academic advancement and the ability to withstand financial hardship and crisis really stood out to me so within that i do have some questions as far as hard data how can you give us details can you get us detailed how how it helped people specifically and in what cities and so in other words the cities that were most like us how did it help them stockton i don't believe is it was a great i actually went into the details of the stockton report i was so interested but we're not exactly like stockton so i would like to see how i would like to know more information in the details of other cities that were

[212:02] most like us how it specifically helped percentages of human health and i'm also very interested in where it didn't help and or is there any instance where the program actually didn't work so it's always good to look at the positives but also the negative so you know we can assess properly um my next question is um it's only going you know arpa funds ends in 2026 and then what happens it ends and in your studies have other cities have the people who have been getting the funds been okay when it ended or has there been disappointment and has it kind of like uh what's the word wear it back back what's the word elizabeth back i'm not sure somebody help me everybody knows me where it actually had the opposite effect whatever that word oh okay you know what i'm saying

[213:00] um and so the fact that it's a one to two year program and then it's over because arpa funds are over where does that go um those are my two thoughts backlash thanks nicole thank clash um and so those are my questions and then backfires i'm getting a lot of backfire backlash you know what i'm saying backfire i think it's backfire anyway um so those are my two thoughts right now and i would be really interested in your your answers to that or if you need to think about it and then you know write us at a different uh you know at a different time that would also be okay well i'll answer very briefly and then i think this is um certainly a good question for cameron burns to weigh in on i think he's much more familiar with some of the other pilot projects just last thing first so the nature of the pilot projects as

[214:00] they've been rolled out in other places is they're they're it's it's well known when people apply they've they fully understand at the front end that the if they're identified or chosen for the program for the project that they are that the the assistance is time stamped it's a year it's 18 months it's two years and and that's it so um there's no surprises that that come with that and um some pilots have and perhaps perhaps at this point it's all but at least those that i've looked at most closely and spoken with the staff members for other pilots have shared that they're very upfront with community members that um the projects are designed uh to help them avoid um that that backlash the backfire um if something were to happen again and they run into a problem with some benefits that they're currently receiving

[215:00] and they can choose right there may be a small amount of risk that comes with that maybe you do there is an impact to to ssi and they can choose not to participate but again most of their pilot projects also have a built-in kind of no harm fund or some other mechanism so that if that happens that participant is is kind of not you know kind of not left out in the cold so to speak um some of the feedback that we've had just in terms of the the duration of the project um in terms of sustainability um one of our local non-profit leaders said you know understanding that you know it's a pilot project it's not forever we don't know you know exactly what's to come in terms of the state sustainability long term for something like this but that if you are able to or if we are able to really truly invest um you know on on that even

[216:01] a month for that short period of time in that individual in that family it can be life-changing for that period of time in a way that could transform for in the long term some of the examples from stockton for example are that community members receiving the benefit couldn't even take any time off from work to explore what other jobs might be available to them they couldn't pay for child care for that amount of time they just had a different sense of what it was like to be able to take a risk to have an internship that led to something far greater and it's not that those kinds of opportunities can't possibly come from other places they do however the kind of security they had knowing that there was this payment that was coming month after month after month for a period of time provided more of that confidence and inspired them to be able to goal set in

[217:01] a different way and again like those are on the experiences of people as they have reported who participated in the pilot in stockton and other places so that i thought that was interesting right because i have had some of these same questions and concerns as well we all we all do you know why would you start something if you don't know um it's going to succeed or be able to continue and part of it is that is the nature of a pilot and all of them as they're rolling out and having heard some from community members that even that could be really really transformational um i thought was very inspiring but i'm going to ask actually ask cam cameron if he would mind weighing in and probably has some other specific examples to share from pilots other than stockton and there are other communities that are more similar to to boulder like cambridge for example um comes to mind but cameron would you mind weighing in

[218:00] yes um and i think to reiterate what you had mentioned of you know stockton's preliminary results the first year findings were released last year um all of our studies that you know are under the umbrella of marriage for guaranteed income um go forward in uh evaluating through a randomized control trial um that is approved by you know in uh institutional review board and so it's a short way of saying all of those findings in cambridge other you know cities that that look and feel like um like boulder those have not been released yet that are another year plus out however again we are pushing forward the national learning agenda we imagine largely that the findings that we experience in stockton um will look fairly similar in in other cities you know that the anecdotes are that are coming out of cambridge again in their storytelling cohort um are you know

[219:02] a young lady was able to take time out of her job um to take a a test to get certified um as a phlebotomist um failed the first time that takes that takes uh you know good amount of time you gotta take public transportation feel the first time had to go back the next month um do it again past um so there's there's anecdotes like that we don't have yet um the data from the 40 plus cities to lean on um but we will certainly have that um and i guess to to not shoot myself in the foot and answer the what didn't go well in guaranteed income pilots i i actually i'm answering truthfully and honestly i i do not have anything to point to that didn't go well um again the main questions um the fundamental questions that we uh were kind of looking to to learn um were how does a guaranteed income impact

[220:01] volatility so when you're looking at a typical american family they experience anywhere between a 30 percent um you know high or low uh uh take home income um and you can imagine that if a family is on the you know low income receiving month and they get a flat tire or experience either some other kind of shock um that could that could send them into a financial tailspin um so the first question what does an income floor kind of mean to our recipients um and it dramatically reduced their in their income volatility um the second question to what degree do changes in income volatility alter financial well-being but also psychological distress and physical functioning um so you know our researchers administered what is called the the kessler scale and a few other instruments that like when you go to the doctor's office it's literally the the same questionnaire that they use to kind of understand where you're at mentally um

[221:00] many of the recipients experience mild to moderate depression um and it is strictly tied to their experience with poverty when the guaranteed income came through you can see the graph literally just precipitates downwards um so that is the second question and the third one is how does guaranteed income generate agency over one's future um so again the framing of our national learning agenda that is working in lockstep with dozens of other cities in our view are asking the right questions whereas 20 30 years ago the agenda of kind of welfare reform was specifically to reduce the roles of folks you know welfare to work for the end of welfare as we know it um the research back then asked different questions we are now asking these questions um so yeah i don't know if i missed uh some part of your your question threads but um no bad things to report out thank you guys i'm excited and intrigued

[222:03] thank you um next we have lauren and then bob thank you i strongly agree with nicole's statements regarding outreach engagement and program design but as the engagement moves forward it would be good to see what additional aggregate data can be gleaned from sort of the information coming out of communities who've used programs like this i'm thinking about things like you know do we have information regarding selection criteria that suggests who experiences the greatest transformational effect what duration is required to see that kind of benefit and if there's any fall off regarding the amount of time that the program has you know if the program exceeds a

[223:00] certain duration that you're not seeing as much transformational benefit um that might be hard to glean but if we can get pull any information like that i think it would be really helpful to have that as the engagement process moves forward um and in terms of the collection of data i would support anything that helps bring in additional future funding for instance if we can show the reduced reliance on particular programs or organizations perhaps we could use that information in the future to help secure additional funding partners thank you for that next we have bob well elizabeth and cam thanks so much for the um the presentation and elizabeth i'm going to follow the pattern of my colleagues and that actually not answer your questions either um but i do have some some suggestions i'm going to volunteer

[224:01] you're having a lot of help tonight um i think that actually um in a way nicole and mark were kind of asking the same question or making the same suggestion they kind of approached it a little bit differently but it really came down to program design right and so i'm going to maybe state it slightly different than they did um you know right now we have programs that aggregate assistance programs that aggregate to about two million dollars according to the staff member you provided us and we now find ourselves with potentially another three million dollars in our money that we might want to provide to to assistance programs and so i guess i i kind of challenge you to to think about this holistically and say listen if we had 5 million that is the 2 million that we already spend every year and another 3 million from arpa would we spend it in the allocation that we're looking at right now which is the two million for the programs that we already have plus three million dollars for this guaranteed income or is there some different mix maybe it's two and a half and two and a half or maybe it's more towards guaranteed income and less towards these existing programs or maybe

[225:00] as mark suggested maybe it's more for the existing programs i i don't know what the answer is but i guess i encourage you as you investigate this to look at this holistically not just to sarah these programs are what they are and we have to leave them alone we can't increase or decrease them and and the only thing we can do with the three million dollars is guaranteed income i realize that arpa has some strings attached and you may have some um constraints on your flexibility but but i encourage you you think about this over the next couple of months to look at this in partnership with the other programs it may turn out that the answer is keep the two million dollars in programs and have this three million go to guaranteed income that may be the right answer but as mark suggested maybe we shouldn't presume that going in that's just i think what what's being suggested here on program design the second thing completely unrelated is um i would i would urge you to um consider um a name other than guaranteed income um i noticed on the um the slide you had with all the various logos and whatnot from various cities that looked like about half the cities um didn't call it

[226:01] guaranteed income and i know that it's a term of art and there's a there's a an organization that calls itself you know guaranteed income so and so forth i thought it was kind of interesting that stockton referred to it as the seeds program and the reason i'd like to steer us away from guaranteed income is twofold one is um i worry a little bit about um expectation setting i i realized you did a great job of saying that we're going to set people's expectations about this is a pilot and it's going to have a beginning and it might have an end um and you know it's not necessarily guaranteed and it's not necessarily income but i worry a little bit about um setting people's ex beneficiaries expectations and so my guess is we could probably come up with a name a descriptor that that maybe lowers those expectations a little bit on the other side of the coin um there are undoubtedly people in the community some have already written to us who equate this um incorrectly with universal basic income which of course is a different concept um and but that unfortunately triggers some people and i think if we use the word term

[227:00] guaranteed income that could um could cause some community um backlash um that um is uh unintended uh in confusion so um i'm just gonna leave you with a suggestion that maybe we can put on our thinking caps and come up with a a term that is a little bit different than guarantee nico that's all i have thank you i believe our next speaker is matt matt you're next thanks juni and uh elizabeth and cam i really appreciate the work on this i mean this is this is what a pilot should be it's it's well studied up front and we have a good sense of where we want to go and some guardrails of what this program will look like and and some criteria in which you want to evaluate success so so i just in general love the process in which we've arrived at wanting to institute this pilot um i can't add much more than my colleagues i just want to say this is great and what i saw in the memo

[228:00] it really didn't lead to really a lot of extra questions and what nicole and and some other colleagues have brought up are some of the similar questions i would have asked as well so i just want to say great job and and i think we're headed in a really good direction on this so so thank you so much thank you matt nicole you're on thank you um just uh one follow-up that i forgot to ask earlier um which is around outcome measures um one of the things that i think is especially valuable in pilot programs is thinking about kind of leading indicators so that we don't get to the end of the project to find out whether it worked or not but you know what are those things so i think it would just be something wonderful for the community group to be thinking about um those kind of indicators we're seeing along the way as well as whatever the sort of final outcomes of success are um and i just wanted to to clarify um i'm not sure that mark and i were were quite saying the same thing because you know i really believe the data coming out of the other cities that

[229:01] are talking about how transformative um this money is and how it's categorically different from providing rental assistance or food assistance or something like that um it's really there does seem to be something that is different from those other programs um and maybe maybe this is kind of what um what we were all getting at was that it would be interesting to see how it's different from those types of assistance programs you know the outcomes that that we're seeing but in my mind this is just really about empowering people to make their own decisions as to how what it is that they need and how they can best meet those needs with the available funds and that's just it's different right it's not quite the same thing and i'm um i think this is the the scientist of me is kind of curious you know what is the nature of that difference right what is it that this is giving it to people that leads to some of these outcomes that seem different from from these other programs thank you nicole

[230:01] lauren um and just in terms of criteria or um information that we might collect one of the things that popped into my mind also was that i would be interested in knowing is how kind of the overhead compared to the outcomes of this program um relates to some of the other um assistance programs that we offer because i think that is in my mind that's also you know we're giving people choice but it's also there's not as many moving parts for the city to administer and i see that as being you know an interesting part of what we learn about this as well you lauren is there any other comments questions coming from council no nothing else i want to make a comment and then i can just overall

[231:00] a quick summary based on everything that i heard um i think part of it who do we who do you intend to reach out to um that's something that i thought about as you were going through the presentation and i think i have heard the same thing my other council members how many people how many people do you intend to serve through this program um and then i think again another echo is boulder is pretty wealthy which is our community and so i hope my hope is that you will be very specific and reach out to the exact community you believe you will be serving um and who will be the beneficiary of this particular program as opposed to just general members of the population and asking questions and i think it goes back to um what nicole and aaron said as council members we we are different we fall under a different demographic hopefully you're not just reaching out

[232:00] to you know the usual suspects but you all go into these communities and trying to find them i welcome the idea of the task force i think it's a great idea again you have to be very thoughtful on who you put in this task force hopefully it's part of the community who you will be serving so what i hear i think just a minute ago so now i can just summarize a little bit of what i heard i think multiple council members said the same thing but in different ways you need to look at the overhead versus outcome so what that really means to me is that is it going to be more costly to put this program together and is it truly at the end of the day are more people being served through this program as opposed just putting the money through hhs and then there's questions about the program design which we just talked about meaning community outreach what does that look like and also i welcome the idea of the

[233:01] name change as well um you don't want to give the false impression to community members that we intend to serve people for indefinitely so it's it's good to come up with a good name um and i think as council member bob was thinking about that this is not the first time he's brought this up tonight he's brought it up before maybe bob you should think about a name actually um that you can bring a name jenny but i'm not going to share tonight i'm going to keep a secret but i've got a really clever name okay all right thank you and uh now i'm going back to you elizabeth and just wanting to know have we answered all your questions do you have any anything you want to ask us before um we move to the next section of our meeting today well yeah just one quick comment and then i'll um i think kurt wants to make a couple of of comments as well first of all thank you so much um for your attention um and the great questions they are the questions um

[234:01] whether or not this is what difference is this going to make you know what how will this work and and again the the thing that has really spurred us forward as as city staff and our our non-profit partners who have weighed in on this already as well is that there is a difference that poverty being poor is expensive poverty is hard hard work um and by the nature of the the financial assistance in a program like this is so different um from the kinds of services we have and and that's really that transformative piece that we want to that we want to test it's our connectors who have said this is the kind of project we really need here this is what our community members really can benefit from so that's what has kind of spurred us forward and inspired us we're going to be really pleased to be in a large national

[235:00] learning cohort through mayors for a guaranteed income and others so we'll be in very good company with a wide range of communities including some that that look a lot like boulder and have our same struggles so with that thank you so much for the input it's all been very helpful we will take that back and be happy to report again moving forward thank you thank you go ahead kurt yeah so so thank you elizabeth for for that and thank you council for your uh your great questions um i appreciated lauren you bringing up the uh you know how we measure these outcomes and that's helpful the community engagement that we heard about and i appreciate mark your your questions about the approach and possibly some skepticism which uh can also be helpful um but i also wanted to

[236:02] make an observation that i made again about a year ago about a lot of the individuals and households in our community that are served through many of the nonprofit organizations that we help support and i know you help support as well personally and you mentioned some of them mark and others you know there's there's rent support housing supports um food health care um dentistry all sorts of all sorts of things and um what's challenging about being low income is for each one of those programs have to continually uh prove that you're that you're poor and it takes a lot of time it takes paperwork it takes efforts um that we don't have to go through um to uh to experience those those uh benefits which they're trying to get just to make

[237:01] things you know just to get by for that month and um uh about uh just over a year ago at the beginning of 2021 i put a challenge out to hhs to see how we could start addressing that as well and looking at every single program and how we could reduce the barriers uh to assisting people and that whole uh you know process of all the paperwork you need to continually create uh to prove um uh your your uh you're the right person for that benefit and um i think they get this uh this guaranteed income or um the new name that we'll give it um is is really meant to um take a different approach and one where we don't decide how people need to be assisted and make decisions for people and i appreciate how nicole uh kind of completed that that that uh that idea at the end as well

[238:00] and um um creating an opportunity for people to um as was mentioned through the presentation really um pick up the pieces when pieces fall apart um in a particular month and make real advances in goals over a period of a year or two when they didn't have that opportunity before and um and as we listen to the the individuals in our community need this assistance as you've um asked us to do i think we're going to hear more of that so i'm hoping that this program can be a different way of engaging with our community and them being successful to strive um which is where we we started this conversation at the beginning so thank you very much and um this has been a great study session for for us for elizabeth and the whole team um that's working on this and thank you juni for for guiding that conversation

[239:01] thank you very much uh kurt and elizabeth for the presentation it was very thoughtful and uh i did see another staff member on the presentations or if i don't remember your name but thank you for your contribution as well um now next stop is the an update of boulder museum of contemporary arts community culture and safety tax matching grant agreement so this is a 30 minutes presentation and i know we all are very outgoing and friendly and love to talk so hopefully we'll be done by 10 30. that sounds good junie and i will turn it straight over to joel wagner to kick us off good evening council joe wagner texas special projects manager i have only a couple slides but i do know that a couple of our partners from bomoca have uh been patiently waiting as well so i'll go through this as quickly as possible to open up to council's

[240:02] questions um so as this is loading uh as council member joseph mentioned we're here with an update and some questions for council on the boldham boulder museum of contemporary arts i'm going to refer to them as bamoka uh because at this late hour i can't get that out every single time without stumbling on it so uh bamoka came to staff with a request to utilize the funds that they received through the 2017 community culture safety tax renewal for a new location in north boulder and we can go to the next slide please so just for a little bit of background during the council conversations staff recommended four hundred thousand dollars for uh the facility that bamoka is currently in for electrical and lighting repairs brick repairs and catering kitchen upgrades this was primarily based on the

[241:02] fact that the east bookend planning process was still underway and the outcome of that funding planning process was unknown during council conversations council recommended one million dollar matching grant for bomoka for phase one renovations and uh we'll just go to the next slide please which resulted in ballot language that included approximately one million dollars for the bamoca museum renovation uh upon receiving the request from bomoca staff uh touched base with our city attorney's office and we determined that uh because of the language that was in the ballot that wasn't a decision that staff could make so it was more of a policy decision for council so we're coming back to you today so i think we can move just to the

[242:00] questions um so the first question for council tonight is should staff come back with prepared motion to allow bamoka to utilize the 2017 ccs funds for a new facility in north boulder and as we discussed in the memo um one consideration this brings is that um that would mean that there are funds that were originally anticipated for a city asset that would no longer be uh left for that asset so does council wish to approve the full million dollars or some different amount and then also um the timeline for the project has changed partially because of the east bookend planning process that was underway and pomoka's patience with uh with us as we worked through that but also as we heard earlier today because of a global pandemic that affected not only bamoka but other of our non-profit partners abilities to fundraise for large capital projects um in the city

[243:01] so the second question for council tonight is should staff prepare motion language to delegate authority to the city manager to approve extensions for the ccs agreements uh staff recommended 12 to 24 months being the term of that delegation and so we'd appreciate council's preference on the amount of additional time and uh with that i'm actually done and i i saw a hand go up thank you so much uh bob you're first uh thanks thanks jill that's that's great i'll i'll answer your questions in reverse or actually your second question i have a question on your first question and your second question uh yes i think we should do an extension you know the i know that we're still in covet and um we're not through it yet but i always think of the covet period as roughly two years from march of 2020 to spring of this year god willing um and so it seems to me there's some logic to extending the deadline i know vamok

[244:00] is not the only organization that hasn't quite met its match there's a couple others out there as well that are working on it so my suggestion would be to go to the um upper limit of the 12 to 24 months that staff recommended and just make it uh two years and just take that deadline out two years with respect to your first question i do have a question um i know that there was um there was some deferred maintenance on what's referred to as the cold storage building which is where bamok is now and um if if vamoka takes the the full million dollar match to its new location in nobo which i think is great i'm i'm supportive of that and it's not critical of that idea but it's really more of a question for for you joel or somebody on staff we still have some deferred maintenance on the cold storage building and my guess is we'll put it to some other good use at some point in time after pomoka leaves in 2021 we did another community culture safety and resilience tax or resilience and safety tax that allocated i think four million dollars of the 200 million and that tax

[245:01] to an area around that i don't know if it was exactly the east bookend or maybe central park but that zone could we could we use some of that four million for that deferred maintenance on the um the cold storage building um if mocha doesn't use it and takes it up to north boulder thank you bob excuse me thank you for those questions um let's see i know allie was here before i'm not sure if uh allie rhodes is still on i don't believe so um so i'll do my best to answer that and i'll ask car or others to chime in so i believe that the um the money and project that was anticipated with the 2021 renewal was for the civic area phase two so mainly park and hardscape improvements and connections improvements um it was a representative project so beyond that i don't think there's more detail but i'll pause and provide space if anybody else

[246:00] from staff who was more intimately involved with the infrastructure portion of the renewal was is available i'm happy to jump in if you want joel uh and i would just uh i would agree yes that that was what we um specifically flagged in um ccrs but i think bob to your question um that's something probably a few years here in the future and we have unallocated ccrs money there's also going to be a very extensive community conversation on kind of what the east booking should be now as we start to kind of pick that back up here in the next few years so i think there are options and opportunities for us to look at funding sources um for any of the work that needs to be done on uh on the building uh in the future that's great guys i really appreciate that so and answer your question joel yes i support uh allowing vamoka to take the million dollars up to their new project inobo i support a two-year

[247:01] extension and i just don't want us to lose sight of the deferred maintenance on the cold storage building as we think about what that might be in the future thanks thank you bob we have matt you're next thanks juni and joel i appreciate the the work on this and i also want to say thank you to uh david and all the staff at bimoka for for their work and also their creative thinking and starting to think about a new way to reimagine and an evolution for for b moca and really taking um what has been a sort of a crown jewel of sort of our arts community to the next level so i'm really quite proud of that imagination and the steps to go there um to answer these two questions i support the transferring of that million dollars i think that's just a good investment um for for a critical part of our community in terms of arts um and i and i agree with bob that extending out to 24 months is the prudent decision just because we're still sort of in some uncertain times and want to provide some maximum flexibility for everyone to reach their match um so but but i will also note and

[248:02] just sort of mark for you know staff and council colleagues uh mark and i serve on on the uh as a council reps for for b moca on their board there are a couple things that i would just sort of flag that that we should be thinking about maybe sooner rather than later as they get a little bit into their design processes there's going to be maybe some zoning quirks that we might need to tackle particularly regarding liquor license and proximity to a school ceiling heights on one or two floors and how that's going to be allowed given where they're at and so i know that we can do those things but i think it's important for us especially when we're dealing with a big capital improvement that we tackle those things ahead of time so that we don't have money or resources spent or wasted um waiting for us to make clear decisions on what they can and can't do so so i think those are just some things i'd like to raise you know just going forward and hopefully we can tackle them sooner rather than later before they get too far down the path of design and or

[249:00] capital um fundraising for for a specific kind of project and that's yourself but anyway this is all great stuff so thanks for your work on it all righty next we have aaron and so thanks for bringing this forward i really appreciate the staff's work on analyzing this you know before this year i was the council representative on the bemunkus board for several years and uh they're such a great organization and group to work with i see uh the director and deputy director here tonight david de donai and gwyneth barrack thanks for being here tonight um and i you know i watched how the board was trying to work to accommodate momoka's expansion and improvement plans within the context of the east book end and you know for for no one's particular fault the eastbook and planning process is taking much much longer than it had been initially uh thought but they were a patient partner but at a certain point they realized it was going to take us probably another five or ten more years

[250:00] to figure out the whole thing and came up with this really creative um relocation plan uh which i'm really excited about in in nobo right in the nobel arts district across the street from our new branch library that's getting constructed so i think it'll have a really impressive catalytic effect on that burgeoning art district up in the north part of boulder but it's also in a great location in that it's uh right next to the city's largest mobile home park uh across the street or right down the street from another mobile home park and then within a walking distance of hundreds and hundreds of additional affordable housing units so it'll bring art and into the the neighborhoods and homes of a lot of people who don't regularly have the opportunity to access that kind of cutting-edge art currently so i'm very excited about it i uh absolutely support transferring the one million dollars uh to the location and also the 24 month uh extra time and i look forward to

[251:01] bomoko's continued success and new plans thanks junior muted thank you mark you're on juni you can't be muted you're the boss um a couple things i agree with matt uh we're going to need to tackle a few issues and it's probably better to get around to it as early as we can um such as the liquor license issue um you know those art lovers are pretty dangerous when they get loaded um uh i am i am supportive of transferring the funds um but i want to at least raise the question of whether there ought to be any uh effort on the part of um bimocha to do some of the fundraising

[252:02] that they have committed to do and for the um for the original grant they were going to have to do it on a matching fun basis uh i want to at least raise the issue of whether it's appropriate for them to be putting some skin in the game now as well um i'm also concerned are we going to have any community outreach with respect to this transfer i assume it will be widely approved but it may be useful to you know get some other opinions on it um and with respect to the extension of the ccs agreements that's an easy one i would uh empower the city manager to go up to two years and i think that's great and i assume that there's nothing in the original grant that creates a legal impediment for us to do the transfer in terms of the specificity of the grant in its original form um

[253:02] teresa can you confirm that there's no issue there good evening council teresa taylor tate city attorney it's my understanding that our office did analyze this and that the restriction really is about receiving council approval at this time so i wasn't made aware of anything in the agreement that would bear on this i do understand the matching requirement to still be applicable though okay um perhaps we should ask uh our representatives from bmoka whether that's something that they would be prepared to to live with uh hi everyone this is davito done executive director and chief curator and thank you for bringing um b marcus request to the conversation so mark to answer your question yes we are embarked we have embarked in a in a capital campaign and and we expect to

[254:01] match the million dollars and actually raise um all the funds to um to be able to to build the new facility north boulder so um and you will be a hero good terrific thank you i'm done thank you mark nix tara well hello everybody i remember when uh back in 2017 i was actually on that community culture and safety tax working group and i remember bimoka making the presentation and how excited we all were so in the spirit of that and i'm only speaking for myself obviously there were other people on that working group on this in the spirit of that 2017 working group from my standpoint i agree that they should be able to move uh to north boulder and transfer those funds and so i'm really excited about that

[255:02] north boulder is the our designated arts district with such a large population of artists but i also think that it's going to really add give us that anchor that we need and make it even more vibrant than it is now and increase the tourism in that area you also think the current building is not sustainable for current growth it's just too small and plus david david just said that he already has um people someone willing to donate land and he's work he already has the funding or is on his way to the funding so in that i'm very excited and i say yes to one until thank you for that tara lauren yeah i am i agree i support both of these i think you know in terms of the question of the tax the language in the on the ballot i think that the community probably

[256:00] intended to support bimocca rather than like the renovation of a city-owned building so i think that um that all of this sounds like it's in line with what the community intended and i fully support it thanks thank you lauren rachel yep um hi david and thanks for the presentation to staff to me the question is sort of um should that million dollars attach to be mocha or to the property and i think it's perfectly consistent with the voter intent and the ballot language to let it follow be moka the organization to north boulder so i'm supportive of the million dollars going north and i'm supportive of the two-year extension to make sure that um we line everything up that we need to so i think it's a question of authorizing nuria to approve extension so that's also a yes thanks all righty thank you is there

[257:00] well i can make a comment as well um i'd say yes to everything i don't need to add any more than what council has already said and thank you for all the work that you're doing in the community david thank you so much um do you have any follow-up comments you want to make yeah i just want to thank everyone and for their support both council and staff and we are excited about the next 50 years just as a reminder be mocking celebrating 50 years in 2022 and and you know we want an ambition with the community and what the next 50 years for bimoca look like and in that extent we have embarked in community outreach and we need your feedback we need the community's feedback and council feedback would be also fantastic so we're working with a couple of consultants that are going to be reaching out to the community and particularly the community

[258:01] in north boulder so engaging everyone and gathering their thoughts about how can we better serve the community would be fantastic thank you everyone all righty well thank you this was the last item on the agenda for tonight are there any last thought or business from council members uh aaron just a question to staff on uh this matter that we just discussed about the moca reallocation when would we see a formal motion to approve that change thank you mayor uh so thank you for the the clear guidance we'll work with city clerk's office to get this scheduled as quickly as we can and uh to answer a question that was left unanswered for council member wallach this will come back because it's a motion as a public hearing so there will be some opportunity for public input at that point

[259:03] do you have a sense of a rough time frame i'm sorry i don't but i will uh i'll chat with our city clerk in the morning and we'll get back to you as soon as we can sounds good thank you thanks thank you aaron is there any other comments question go ahead mark yeah junior i just wanted to thank you for your efficient herding of the cats this evening um well done thank you thank you so much is there any comment from staff chris do you have any comment no well done you made it before 10 30. awesome no you did it council did it so thank you so much for this wonderful meeting thank you staff and everyone have a wonderful rest of your night this concludes our our study session thank you good night everyone just for a great meeting thank you [Music]

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