June 21, 2022 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] [Music]

[1:10] all right great good evening everyone and well actually i'm not gaveling us in but good evening everyone and welcome to the june 21st 2022 meeting of the boulder city council and we're going to get started here with a few announcements before we officially begin the meeting and our first announcement is about code 19 testing and vaccinations for information about testing and provider locations for free kevin 19 testing go to www.boco.org testing the boulder site is a 2445 stazio drive that's open seven days a week from 8 am to 6 pm information information on vaccines and provider locations go to www.boco.org vaccine and next we have a council meeting day change this is our very last tuesday

[2:00] meeting for the boulder city council this year until something else changes so beginning on july 14th after our break on 2022 city council meetings and study sessions will change from tuesdays to thursdays start time remains at 6 pm so that will impact some boarding commission meeting times and some sign up timelines so the list of those are that planning board will have new meeting times on the first third and fourth tuesdays of the month at 6 pm board of zoning and adjustments has second tuesdays of the month at 4 pm design advisory board will be on the second wednesday of the month at 4 pm and the public comment sign up timeline will open friday before the meeting at 8 a.m and close wednesday before the meeting at 2 p.m and more information about this transition can be found at boulder colorado dot gov slash announcement slash council dash meeting dash day change and then one more announcement that we do not have a slide for is uh i wanted to let everybody know that the annual

[3:00] city food tax rebate program is open for applications it's been open since since march 1st but it does close on june 30th so applicants should get their applications in before june 30th and please for information on that program i won't go into all the details but you can find that at boulder colorado dot gov services slash food dash tax dash rebate dash program and thanks very much to council member speer for suggesting that announcement okay with that that gets us through our announcements so i can now gavel this uh open and get the roll call going so let's call the order and elisha please read the role all right sir thank you and good evening everyone councilmember benjamin president mayor brockett president council member focus president mayor pro tem friend here

[4:02] councilmember joseph will be arriving later councilmember spear here wallach here weiner present and yates right here mayor we have our quorum great thanks so much all right and now i'm requesting a motion to amend the agenda and i'm going to explain it a little bit as i propose it the proposal is to remove items 3h through 3k from the consent agenda and these are the first reading of our ballot ordinances and then add an item 8b which is a council discussion on those ballot ordinances and the reason for this proposal is that we wanted a little bit more time to finalize the verbiage and exactly what went in each of the ordinances so rather than pass them on first reading tonight we thought we would discuss at the end of the meeting exactly the next steps for them and then have them brought back on consent in july so if that's all right with folks if we could get a motion

[5:05] eye motion we amend the agenda attack it thanks very much we have a motion a second all in favor raise your physical hand okay the motion the amenda is the agenda is duly amended okay at least we have our consent agenda now no we have open comments i was gonna say that so um ryan are you going to read our guidelines this evening yes happy to do that and thank you emily for pulling up those slides and thanks to community members who have joined us this evening to share your perspective and your opinion and in participating in the city council meetings the city has engaged with me members to co-create the vision for productive meaningful and inclusive civic conversations

[6:00] and this vision does support physical and emotional safety for community members staff and council as well as democracy for people of all identities there's more information about this on the website shown here on the screen and the next slide please and i want to share a few examples of rules of decorum found in the boulder revised code another guidelines that will support this vision and our open comment in public hearing this evening these will be upheld during this time all remarks and testimony shall be limited to matters related to city business no participant shall make threats or use other forms of intimidation against any person obscenity racial epiphants and other speech and behavior that disrupts or otherwise impedes the ability to conduct the meeting prohibited participants have signed up to speak using the name they are commonly known by and individuals must display their whole

[7:01] name before i'll be speaking tonight and we're allowing audio testimony online this evening and so with that we'll turn to our first speaker thank you for that ryan we have four people signed up to speak and they are i'll read all of them lin siegel patrick murphy evan rabbits and sue prance then you have two minutes jeez you know four people two minutes what's wrong with this with this with this picture you know there's not enough people advising you so why do you have two minutes so you can you know sit there for eight minutes instead of 45 minutes and you can't give us three like what's with you i don't get it like is there something i'm missing here i don't see this

[8:01] it's very simple all you have to do is say if there's you know less than 20 people signed up you know then you get three minutes or what have you so that you get up to your 45 minutes what are you trying to pull off here what are you getting away with a lot that's a problem three minutes for four lousy people go for it you know like god too many subjects too little time you know i've got to talk about alpine balsam and how it should be marpa a bunch of marpas i've got to talk about the six million dollar rest restrooms next to the courthouse where the homeless people ripped out one of the toilets for ten thousand dollars and they can't keep the lines clean there so they have santa potties on the pearl street mall this is boulder what are we doing here six million dollars for a freaking restroom that doesn't even work

[9:00] that was 20 years ago we paid 6 million bucks for that restroom for christ's sake that's in six houses um i went on the transportation advisory the transportation department trip today on the bike to look at the co at the capital improvements projects it sounds like you're doing too much planning and too little action okay um john taylor he's talking about jobs housing imbalance then your time is up but we appreciate your testimony next we have patrick murphy evan rabbits and supreme my name is patrick murphy i've lived in boulder 52 years the planet burns floods and dies while boulder fiddles with climate change i repeat it because it's true and it's based on observation of boulder's past climate mitigation performance

[10:00] which is often the best indicator of future performance boulder climate change leaders are great at talking a good story but when will they be judged on results rather than smart narratives how about they publish their budget like the muni did thus revealing the true costs that included taking 80 to 60 of the budget from the existing so-called climate change efforts in other words not only were 10 years and 30 million dollars lost boulder city council and city manager just went along the council has changed the city manager has changed and the previous top leadership took their money and ran but the interim leaders left over from the failed muni now guide the climate action and surprise surprise still lots of talk and little cost benefit analysis about 50 percent of the current climate budget is spent just on wages not actual climate action tonight you'll talk about electric bikes they're great but what about the equity

[11:00] filter when you incentivize the purchase of e-bikes you better have an income-based incentive otherwise you support the wealthy and not lower-income groups remember that unless the electricity charging those bikes is linked to solar or wind it's still the carbon equivalent of burning 44 coal if you ask for more money for climate change in november and don't have precisely defined actions that have a real cost benefit analysis and a real equity filter i'll do everything i can to defeat it those who currently support it haven't thought about our past performance thanks patrick now we have evan ravitz in supreme good evening the city may have engaged with communities secretly to co-create the vision of community engagement but

[12:03] publicly council held a real public hearing in 2017 and in spite of unanimous testimony against it reduced our public comment time from three minutes to two minutes a city government that lies to itself has no future evan were you done yep okay thank you for your testimony we will wrap up with sue prance hi um i'd like to thank council for considering ebike violet in a larger program next year with climate tax community cycles is willing to do

[13:00] whatever it takes to make this program happen either the pilot or the larger program regardless of if we are contracted to work on it or not we believe e-bikes will be a game changer for boulder especially for those with longer road trips based on our experience working with the can-do e-bike pilot program and working in the community for 16 years and getting thousands of bikes out in the community including over 12 000 bikes given to low-income children and adults we feel this program of most successful vouchers are given to low-income people and the general public as we've written in our proposal and is being done in every similar program in the united states this will allow us to get more bikes out reduce overhead costs and most importantly achieve the greatest bmt reduction our can do pilot program awarded 50 e-bikes to low and middle-income essential workers that do in-person work we worked through employers which allowed us to better connect with the participants the funding required us to track trips for two years after the initial qualification we chose participants based on bmpt reduction the

[14:00] majority of participants worked in boulder but did not live in boulder they were also given a heavy duty lock and accessories a 250 dollar payment was required to get buy into the payment to the program we have found a payment of some level important to participate in all of our programs including the very low earn about low income burn burn a bike program 50 bikes were given out one was stolen two have been returned because the people didn't use them and wanted their deposit back one has gone missing presumably sold which was not permitted though we have been unable to track down that person the data which i've i share with transportation staff show people are replacing considerable number of car trips with e-bikes chips i can get into that date and more if this program develops i've also pulled boulder bike shop owners about participation support of the potential program i am happy to share those comments i look forward working with staff and council do whatever is needed to make this program a success in converting car trips to e-bike trips reducing bmt and carbon emissions thank you thank you

[15:00] thank you sue okay that closes our public comment period so we will now move to the consent agenda all right sir tonight's consent agenda which is item three on our agenda includes items a through g and you know actually i i jumped ahead to myself a little bit as well did staff or council have any comments or follow up on open comment then for me thanks okay seeing none uh now we've got um the consent agenda does anyone have any questions or comments on that and i think carl were we going to have a quick update on these tables thanks mayor and i would also note that uh john gerstel the planning board chair is with us this evening as well to quickly summarize the board's conversation but lisa hood

[16:02] planner in our office who's been case managing the use tables update has a short presentation for council so lisa thanks charles good evening mayor brockett and members of the city council i'm excited to give a very high level overview of this draft ordinance before you tonight this is the use table and standards project that some of you might be familiar with as it's been going on since 2018 um phase one of the project was adopted back in 2019 and we kicked off phase two of the project in 2020 unfortunately in the fall of 2020 we had to pause this project due to the staffing level issues around the pandemic but it's been reinitiated this year and so we are moving forward with the next or the second phase of the project so that's been divided into three different modules and what you're seeing tonight is the result of module one or the functional fixes

[17:00] and so these are really the technical structural updates to the youth standards chapter of the land use code kind of getting things ready for the more substantive updates in modules 2 and module 3 where we'll focus on industrial areas and also neighborhood serving uses so really focusing on increasing the user friendliness of this really important part of the land use code as we move forward towards the uh substantive updates [Music] just a brief reminder on what the initial goals are since you haven't heard about this project since august 2020 um but the initial goals were to simplify and streamline the youth standards and table making them more understandable and legible and really just creating some more predictability and certainty in uh the new standards chapter if you've ever dug into the use table or the standards you'll know it's a very complex complicated part of the code so trying to improve that for people and we'll dig into the other goals as we get uh later into the later modules of the project as well so really brief

[18:00] overview of what the changes are in the draft ordinance tonight kind of the overarching change is really improving the structure a use table is a really helpful tool it's definitely a best practice in a zoning code most modern land use codes or zoning codes have a use table ours has become increasingly complex with lots of little changes over time so anyone who's dealt with it knows that it's it's pretty difficult to interpret both from a public perspective and also from staff and council and planning board implementation so really the biggest goal is to improve the structure and the approach that we took with this draft ordinance was to take um all of the different standards that are related to the many different land uses and put them into one consolidated area so right now you'll know that our use table has many different qualifiers with each of these land uses so things like maximum square footage might be in the actual row of the table there's also our limited use standards which are the l with the superscript

[19:00] where that actually tells you that you need to go to a different table to find out the information that might apply so generally not a best practice to have to look to two different tables for the information that you need and then we have the conditional use and used review standards which are scattered in lots of different places of the land use code so overall it's pretty difficult and scattered to find the um standards that might apply to a different specific use um so the main approach is to get those all into one consolidated place the specific you standards that would follow the use table an example of this and it also gives us the opportunity in doing that to consolidate some of the rows and make the table less complicated and shorter so one of these examples one of our worst offenders is the restaurants there's actually eight different rows in the use table talking about restaurants maximum size things like that outdoor seating and all of the different characteristics that would create a different review process so by taking this approach we're able to consolidate that into just one row so

[20:00] one row per use and importantly i did want to emphasize that at this point in the project none of those actual regulations are changing they're just being moved so instead of being in the table they would be in the specific use standard so we'll dig in more as we get into the later modules to think through those whether there should be any substantive changes but at that at this time it's just moving those into a different location where it's easier to read and the language has been clarified a bit we also took a number of other strategies to try to improve the user friendliness based on both staff's work with the use table and difficulties with the use table the planning board subcommittee that worked from 2018 to 2020 to provide guidance and then we also had public engagement during 2019 2020 and then we had a short questionnaire open this spring really trying to get at what those changes what the changes are that we could make that would best improve the user friendliness so we updated the abbreviations that are

[21:01] used in the table to make those more clear and simple added some signals so that people know when there are standards that apply to a use we looked through all of the different uses and their definitions and got rid of some of the outdated terminology and outdated uses really took this opportunity to look at the definitions that kind of cause the most trouble and try to clarify those and make sure and also use those definitions as an opportunity to consolidate some of the different rows for very similar uses we made sure to incorporate use categories in the table so that that's done more consistently and everything's grouped within categories and then we also made some changes related to those consolidating different rows so and um fixing some errors and clarifying some interpretation that that changed the cells a bit and then finally the um seemingly minor things that can have a really major impact just formatting things related to the use tables adding colors and shading

[22:00] that will make it a lot easier for most people who are navigating our code in the online version it'll make it a lot easier for people to understand and navigate that and understand where uses are allowed so those are all the strategies that we employed in the draft ordinance we took the ordinance to planning board on june 2nd and they voted unanimously to recommend approval of the ordinance as charles said uh the chair of the planning board john gerstel is here as well if you have questions for him um but that concludes my very brief overview of a long ordinance change thank you thanks so much for that lisa john would you like to add a few words about playing words thoughts on this sure uh i can be brief uh i can just say that we had a pretty long session uh on this matter and planning board and uh you know unusually for planning board we unanimously concluded that staff did a terrific job on this

[23:02] and has succeeded in in their objective in terms of changing and simplifying the process that people have to use and uh keeping keeping the objectives in place and so i think there was no hesitation on planning board's side to unanimously recommend adoption of this great thanks for that john and i will say i you know reviewed these changes they are multitudinous they're very detailed and i was very glad to be able to trust the excellent work of staff and the careful reviewing i have planning board and the unanimous recommendation in order and allow this to move forward great any uh questions or comments on this item all right i would entertain a motion if someone would be so moved

[24:01] move to pass the consent agenda as revised great motion a second alicia what kind of vote we got here we have a role called tonight sir all right we'll start the roll call vote for the consent agenda with council member spear yes wallach hi weiner yes yates yes benjamin yes mayor brockett yes councilmember faulker yes and mayor pro tim friend yes mayor the consent agenda items a through g is approved unanimously as amended fantastic and thanks again to planning staff for all the hard work on these tables and look forward to the next

[25:01] phases of that project all right we have a public hearing one public hearing item tonight so um chris do you want to introduce yep i'll uh uh alicia do you want to introduce the item first or do you want me to go ahead and kick it off i'll go ahead and read it into the record first sir thank you thank you our public hearing is item 5a on tonight's agenda it is the second reading and consideration of a motion to adopt by emergency measure ordinance 8517 amending chapter 8-6 public right-of-way and easement encroachments revocable permits lease and vacations brc 1981 by adding a new section 8-6-12 outdoor seating in public right of way and private property brc 1981 allowing for a five-year pilot program that waives certain coat requirements and allows outdoor seating through

[26:01] issuance of city revocable permits and amending chapter 20 fees brc 1981 by mending section 4-20-20 revocable right-of-way permit lease application fee and adding a new section 4-20-76 outdoor seating pilot program infrastructure fees setting for applicable fees associated with the five-year pilot program and setting forth related details great thanks alicia and it's my pleasure to introduce chris jones our interim director of community vitality who's going to walk us through this presentation thank you chris thank you alicia good evening council um hopefully you are about to see my screen is everyone seeing a presentation yep great uh well if the length of elisha's introduction is any indication

[27:00] of the amount of work that's been going on um since the last time i was here to provide an update on outdoor dining program i think you have an idea of how busy um we have all been in getting ready for you all this evening um i'm delighted to be here and uh while again be doing most of the talking we have a number of folks on the call at the ready to help answer questions um while you are here for your second reading of the proposed ordinance change i will also want to use this opportunity to to give you an update on our outdoor dining pilot program but first we'll provide a background on how we got to where we are today we have a couple of questions for council for your discussion as well i'll provide an overview of the pilot program we're anticipating that there are business owners that are listening in this evening and they're wanting as early a preview as possible of what we've been cooking up we of course then have the proposed ordinance 8517

[28:00] for your consideration and we'll talk a little bit about what that um how that relates um then we have some next steps contingent on your approval of the ordinance change and then question time for questions and discussions so as a quick review this work began back in may of 2020 in the early days of the pandemic when the city created our business boulder business recovery program that enabled businesses to expand outside to help offset their indoor capacity limits with that we pursued the closure of the west end to vehicle traffic we rerouted the hop on pearl street in the downtown we also implemented a number of curbside pickup zones for restaurants that were taking advantage of more pickup takeout delivery operations in october of 2020 we extended the program with some modifications to include winter provisions then the following year september of

[29:01] 2021 we presented an agenda item to council that explored the extension of emergency orders through april of this year and some considerations around the future of the program uh beyond emergency orders those ex those orders were extended and council communicated support for a downtown pilot program in february of this year we provided an information item to city council that explored a downtown-based outdoor dining proposal and that led to a number of questions and concerns from many stakeholders on the topic then in march we brought to you a proposal for a 250 250 000 um arpa budget item in the atb um as part of a business recovery proposal um the council approved and in march we also extended the emergency orders uh through august of this year um

[30:00] knowing that we're still having uh impacts from covid and it did help provide us more time to prepare this pilot program for you in april we came to council and sought direction on moving forward with a city-wide pilot program and also got direction from council on pursuing these ordinance changes that you're considering this evening now we're in june you've done your first reading we're at our second reading of the proposed ordinance changes that will establish our pilot program so the questions that we have for you tonight um other than uh hopefully approving the the ordinance changes is do you have any questions about the pilot program rules that were included as uh right now they're called the draft pilot program guidelines but those will be used to generate a city manager rule and do you have any questions about our next steps moving forward for folks listening in tonight an overview of the pilot program

[31:00] i'm going to touch base on a number of things including the considerations that we included in the creation of the program the scope of the program the businesses that are eligible to participate i'll describe some requirements around our approved infrastructure associated fees subsidies that we have available for participating businesses what the application process will look like for businesses and then again regulatory considerations related to the ordinance changes i'm not going to read through all these but again the four areas of consideration for the creation of the pilot program are safety accessibility equity and operations the scope of our program is city-wide we're proposing a five-year program that would begin on september 1st or whenever the emergency orders end and would expire on october 31st of 2027. the eligibility for the program is in the public right-of-way primarily on street parking spaces

[32:01] some areas of the pearl street mall bricks as well as other sidewalks and available open spaces the price the program will also apply to private property including parking spaces on private property and other open spaces the businesses that are eligible for uh participate in the program are restaurants brew pubs taverns wineries and distilleries they need to have available public right-of-way on private property or a public right-of-way within 150 feet of their entrances or directly fronting the building that they are located within some of the requirements of the approved infrastructure that we've been pursuing is on the size front the businesses would be allowed to participate at no more than 500 square feet and 100 square feet minimum for any participating business we are also requiring steer steel planter boxes that are filled um to be surrounding any of the outdoor

[33:01] extensions that are adjacent to travel lanes um there needs to be a minimum three foot height surrounding barrier that can also be no more than four foot high high maximum and then no vertical elements will be allowed to extend beyond that barrier except for things like umbrellas propane heaters or other support elements for shading and planters we are requiring that the infrastructure be modular so that it can be quickly removed in the event of an emergency or another use of the public right-of-way the infrastructure obviously if needs to be alcohol licensing compliant if uh restaurants or establishments are wanting to to serve alcoholic beverages we are not proposing to allow any closed-in structures or roofs and also no tie-ins to electrical service in the extensions in parking spaces and beyond

[34:00] and of course all of the facilities need to be ada accessible we did we used these guidelines to do a request for proposal process to solicit possible vendors that could be a part of our pre-reviewed or pre-review approved vendors that businesses could choose on choose from to expedite the permitting process we have identified mod street out of durango as our vendor for our citywide bulk purchase proposal and we'll talk more about that shortly we've also identified western precision manufacturing out of grand junction and architrak out of montana as additional vendors that restaurants can choose from to expedite their permitting process those second two vendors do not offer up the city approved planter boxes and so we would still need to work with businesses who want to pursue those options to make sure that they have the

[35:01] city approved planter boxes if they're adjacent to vehicle traffic the fee for participation in the pilot program there's the initial application fee that's consistent with our pre-existing revocable permit fees once the fee has been signed and approved there's an annual fee this is consistent again with our existing revocable permit fee on the mall the the on the bricks it is 18.76 per square foot and extensions off the mall in the public right-of-way is 13 and 13 cents per square foot if businesses also want to participate in the bulk city purchase program there's an additional infrastructure fee on the mall of 16 and 25 cents per square foot and off the mall 21.87 per square foot if businesses want to serve alcoholic beverages there still of course would be

[36:00] the liquor licensing fees that apply as usual we also have three subsidy options available to participating businesses option a is for businesses that are extending into the public right-of-way but do not want to participate in the city's bulk purchase program we are we will reimburse up to 2500 of their infrastructure costs if they're able to demonstrate that they've invested private dollars in outdoor dining infrastructure prior to the creation of this pilot program option b is for businesses again that are extending in the public right-of-way but they want to participate in the pilot program and the fees that we have associated with that are reflective of up to a 50 discount in their total infrastructure costs option c is for extensions on private property those businesses are not eligible to participate in the the bulk purchase program but they will still be eligible for the

[37:00] 2500 uh grant they can demonstrate that they've invested their own dollars in infrastructure prior uh real quick i'm not going to read through all these steps but the application process for businesses first thing they need to be doing is preparing their materials and so we've listed that and we've been working on communications of all the different elements that will be required as part of the application once they've gotten those materials together they'll submit their application online upload their documents and once that's fully processed they'll receive a confirmation email that their revocable permit is in process they'll need to then watch for email updates to let them know if there's any additional information that's required to complete their application and then they'll get updates on on when it's ready for different steps for payment and eventually when the permit's ready for signature once the permit's prepared and ready for signature and it is fully uh signed and recorded that is when businesses will

[38:02] able to use that documentation to apply for their liquor license moving forward with the program so this all relates back to the proposed ordinance 85 17 that really provides the framework for the pilot program by temporarily waiving certain code requirements to allow for outdoor seating and it sets forth the associated fees elisha did a much better job of explaining all the different elements that the ordinances are touching so we'll refer back to that when you're ready um but the detailed requirements of the program are included in the pilot program guidelines that were attached to the memo and those are being proposed for implementation as part of a city manager rule the ordinance automatically expires at the end of the five-year term unless council extends extends it by another ordinance we were recommending that the ordinance be adopted by emergency tonight to ensure that the pilot program is up and running prior to the expiration of the current emergency order at the end of august

[39:00] um contingent on council's approval this evening we will then pursue our communication strategy we'll do a press release to let the community know that this is moving forward we've already developed a website that we will we've been drafting and it's it'll be ready to go live very shortly um we are preparing an email notification to all businesses that are currently participating in the extensions program and then we'll include information in city newsletters and work with our partners at the boulder chamber and the downtown boulder partnership to make sure that we're able to notify all eligible businesses of this opportunity for the pilot program as far as next steps go beyond the emergency order this evening sorry the adoption by emergency this evening we are proposing that the application period begin next monday and would continue through july 15th beyond that businesses that are participating will have two phases for transition of their

[40:01] outdoor dining infrastructure phase one would be for any businesses that are participating and they have submitted and received their revocable permit they will need to reduce the extension of their the extension of the footprint of their extensions to the space that is detailed in their permit if businesses do not want to participate in the pilot program they have until the end of the emergency orders to remove any extensions that they have in the public right-of-way phase two for businesses that are participating in the program they will have until the end of october to transition into the city approved modular infrastructure um or if they don't want to have outdoor dining during the winter even if they have their permit they have we'll have until the spring or whenever they would like to transition into their infrastructure as long as uh there's nothing out in the public right-of-way that's not

[41:00] compliant over the winter of course if businesses are no longer participating in the program they will have fully returned to their pre-pandemic operations by august 31st after that we will have an annual application period for any new businesses that want to participate in the pilot program and that will take place from february 1st through march 1st every year and that is our really quick overview of our proposed pilot program and now want to ask council if they have any questions of staff before discussion thanks so much for that chris really appreciate all the work that you and the other departments have done on this and that great presentation so we'll do counsel questions from councilman and go to our public hearing matt oh perfect let me get my notes in order there we go uh well thank you chris uh i i it is herding cats and an immense amount of work to get all these pieces in a line so thank you for all the work to get us

[42:00] to this place and certainly transition out of the temporary emergency orders into something that is a little more wholesome and with more um deliberate intent going forward so i really appreciate that um i have a couple questions about some of the pieces that were sort of brought up um one has to do with sort of the a question about the no electrical um in in sort of that modular area and the reason i ask is in regards to outdoor dining at night you know some current establishments have strong lights and that allows there to want for safety but also for for the enjoyment of the space and so i'm wondering what how do we reconcile outdoor dining at night in order to maintain an actual safe environment but also one that people can sort of enjoy and view so that was a question i and i had two more after that so i don't know if you want to tackle them one at a time or or if i give you all three at once i'm writing them down so if you want to give me all three at once then i will text them one at a time or or call on others to help answer awesome appreciate it chris um the other question i have is you know based on that timeline um i

[43:01] think it certainly seems very reasonable for those that want to participate in the process that you know come on august 31st if they're committed they're looking to go forward they can sort of hold it they can transition i'm curious about the restaurants that currently have an outdoor dining set up um sort of within the emergency orders are probably not going to embark on submitting for a permit but then being reforced are they forced to remove all of their outdoor dining on by august 31st is really my question and if so that's what it seemed to be that seems like an odd time to pull the rug out when there's still another month and a half of really good time for them to still utilize the space and infrastructure they've invested in to make that money before outdoor dining wanes and then make a clean break when outdoor dining is sort of you know at its perhaps lowest point so i'm curious about the timing of that transition and then my third question um it's maybe less of a question and more of a recommendation so i think i'll save that until after public comment so

[44:01] really just two questions sure thank you uh matt for those questions so first on the electrical um i'll speak first and i'll i wonder if folks from planning and development services might want to chime in a little bit more in the in the guidelines more explicitly we're saying no above ground electrical extensions right now we have got people who've put conduit that is within arm's reach um of uh anybody who's walking by any time of day it's quite um it's not not best practices when it comes to a safety perspective and then we have other folks that have tied into uh outlets that are they're not paying for the the power but they happen to have an outlet coming out of a tree well um adjacent to their parkland so they're tapping into power that the city's probably paying for um and so uh in light of that

[45:00] acknowledging that that yes there certainly are considerations once it gets dark there are other ways to create some ambient lighting that other communities have demonstrated an ability to still create an ambiance without actually having power from the adjacent property into the space and so i don't know that we've prohibited that outright whether it's through some sort of battery solar powered infrastructure but as far as above ground uh uh power lines into these spaces we are currently recommending that it not be allowed and i see edward turned his camera on and i'm not sure if he wants to provide any more context you did well on that one i don't have anything else to add and so then uh thank you edward related to the next question matt on the august 31st it's the end of the emergency orders and as we're transitioning into um if we're not under emergency order um the use of the public right-of-way comes

[46:00] at a cost for anybody um and so the the question would be is would we would we want to turn a blind eye to folks who are out of compliance right so even if they don't pick up their infrastructure by the end of the emergency orders and they have not pursued a revocable permit for the use of the public right-of-way are we um not going to enforce our standard rules that everybody they're asking everybody else to abide by when it comes to the use of of the public right-of-way and i see sandra did you turn your your camera on to opine on that as well you did great chris i don't think i really have anything to add matt does that answer your questions yeah i'll have more follow-up when we get to discussion on the back end but thanks for that i appreciate it chris great we have mark nicole and lauren good evening chris thank you for the

[47:00] presentation uh a couple of questions um one there there's a large community conversation that's going on with respect to the ultimate use of west pearl i assume this is separate and apart from any determination as to what we do with less pearl yes that is correct all right my next question is um we have different rates of charges for facilities on the bricks and off the bricks does the data support in terms of gross sales per square foot um does it support a higher rental on the mall than elsewhere are they doing that well that that's an appropriate thing to do thanks for the question mark i'm not sure that that is the the consideration that uh we went through whenever those rates were established which was um long before this current uh pilot

[48:00] program where there's a different rate for on the bricks than off the bricks i don't know that it's that that is the consideration i don't know if anybody else knows maybe edward you know the consideration for why um i have some ideas but i don't want to make assumptions i can certainly chime in for a moment here so those rates are based upon what has been set in ordnance in chapter 4-20 for many years and it was presumed that there was a higher value for that land on the brics than for other places throughout boulder in terms of what the lease rate could be theoretically that number is set based upon market lease rates it has been a number of years since it's had a thorough evaluation probably should be up in the next few years to look at to see if that number should be adjusted further but that was the premise behind it is that the lease rates on the bricks in that particular portion of boulder are higher than in other areas throughout the city well i'm and i'm raising the issue because lease rates are one thing

[49:01] uh profitability is another thing and i'm just curious as to whether um the higher lease rate the higher rates um for the facilities on the bricks are really warranted uh in light of the performance of people who've engaged in those higher leases and let me roll that into another question which is um there there's almost an arbitrariness it seems to some of these rates i mean why are we at 113 dollars for a um i guess for a re-application i mean what's the magic of 113 or 18.76 for the right-of-way it just seems where does it all come from so those particular fees which actually come from what we have in the existing revocable program are based on the least piece in terms of the recovery of the potential value the application fees the reapplication fees are based upon the

[50:02] estimate of staff time necessary to process the applications and to be able to have cost recovery to what had been previously agreed to and leave the revocable program is generally a 50-50 although i'd have to look back on the cost recovery which is based upon policy that was set in 1994 i think was where that document starts with the definitions it's been some time but so we have just continued that recommendation in this program for wherever the revocable program has been for some time if we were to want to look further into that we would have to suggest that as part of a larger fee study we will in planning and development services in the next couple of years be taking on a more comprehensive review of fees to ensure that we are doing the the proper cost recovery and this would be one that would be considered in a future date and just so that i understand resubmittal of the application is that if the original application is somehow deficient correct if for some reason uh the information they submit is insufficient um it's missing items in revocables it

[51:02] is very rare for us to actually charge that fee but it is in there in case there's more significant work and a second round of review to be done okay and my last question is if an option is taken in which we the city installs and stores the infrastructure are we also responsible for its condition yes okay all right thank you thanks mark cole and lauren thank y'all thanks thanks for the presentation and bringing us bringing us to a conclusion here um my question is around the storage of the infrastructure if we were to choose that option um i mean that seems like a really large amount of stuff to store so i'm just curious about practically where does that go um you know who's involved in in that setup take down storage process and um

[52:01] what kind of stuff time are we talking about there because that that feels like a really intense thing depending on how many people are signed up sure thank you for that question it's a really good question so we actually have a continuing services agreement with a moving company that is already on board to manage all of the the pickup and removal of any of the infrastructure that that is under our responsibility um so we are gonna we need to wait and see what businesses come out of the woodwork and want to participate in the bulk purchase program to understand the total scale of it for sure but the great thing about the modular infrastructure is designed to be picked up and stored in a very uh relatively smaller amount of space and so uh we do have space available to city we again we don't know it's the exact scale until we have applications come in to know just how much space we're gonna be looking for um but we have been thinking very uh

[53:00] diligently about that and and are going to be covering those bases once we know uh more from businesses okay thanks so it sounds like it would be a kind of an outside company that's responsible for doing some of the movement and we do have space available for storing within the city okay thank you correct thanks nicole lauren thank you um so my first question is about the length of the lease or sorry the length of the approval for the revocable permit it looks like it's three years first and the lease for the equipment is five and so i was just wondering why those things don't match and what someone would do if they're signed into a five-year lease and lose their revocable permit that's a good question sandra i'm not sure if you want to take the three-year yeah i'm happy to answer that question

[54:01] so um the the lease of the infrastructure is going to be aligned with the revocable permit term so the initial permit term would be three years less one day and then any subsequent lease would also mirror those same term dates so um the the idea is that um it gives the city an opportunity to look and see how things are going and if there are conditions that need to be added to the permit if there are issues that arise as a result of the use then we can try and address them at that point rather than doing a full five-year term and the other reason is that it is a three-year term is uh

[55:00] under the authority of the city manager so they wouldn't have to go through council as well so anything over or three years and and greater needs to go through council and just to add real just real quickly so while it's a five-year pilot program we'll still be um doing the leases in the two-year 364-day terms but folks will be able to renew at the standard renewal rate as long as the program's in effect and so presumably by the time we're getting to three years in the into the program we'll know more and we'll continue to work with council to to possibly extend great thank you um i was also wondering about and also like after looking at sort of the preferred provider one of the things that came that i noticed is that

[56:01] an opaque fence at four feet tall is pretty tall if you're seated in an area and so i was just wondering how you guys came up with you know it's like people are pretty hidden behind it and one of the things that appeals to me is having you know bringing life to the street with this program and so i'm a little curious i know that for the liquor license we need a three-foot barrier um and why we're allowing up to four so you're exactly right um in the sense that our alcohol licenses require the three foot barrier and so instead of prescribing specifically three foot for everyone um that's why we proposed a maximum because we there there are examples in other places where folks go higher than four feet and so wanting to put a limit on that for the very reason that she described we certainly still have time to revise that downward if that's the

[57:01] will of counsel we just wanted to provide some level of flexibility on that front for participating businesses thank you um i just had a couple more um this one's probably for edward stafford and i was just wondering if you could summarize maybe if there are any areas where the parklet is more restrictive than our current outdoor dining program um or if basically everything that we're proposing right now is essentially in line with what we is at least as permissive as our current outdoor dining program thinking through the all the things we put together i would say there's nothing in this that comes to mind that is more restrictive than the current program i mean for most aspects this is certainly less restrictive number of different provisions everywhere from land use code to process that have been modified or loosened in this but can't think of any

[58:01] specific one that would be more onerous the existing program is still an option and in fact for all the rest of the year when the application window for this isn't open people could still do the existing program with the types of patios that they had also thank you um and then my last question is you know you you mentioned that after three years we might want to that we didn't want to lease space for more than three years because there might be things that we notice things we want to adjust is there currently a plan for um evaluating this program at any interval as we go forward um or sort of collecting data around issues that we think might arise or success you know like what do we have in terms of um what kind

[59:01] of information we might collect from this to base decisions on moving forward thank you for the question lauren we have not specifically written in any requirements around evaluation into the ordinance language i have no doubt that we are going to be talking about outdoor dining um i i mean let's let's how many decades anyhow um so it's a great question we have not proposed writing any evaluation rules in but it's something that we can certainly consider for the city manager rules and be more explicit in our next update with you all on this topic that's it for my questions thank you guys so much for all the work you've put into this thanks lauren uh not seeing any other council questions let's go ahead and open the public hearing and we have one person signed up who was participating in the open comments so

[60:01] ryan maybe we can skip re-reading the guidelines sounds like a plan very good so our one person signed up is lynn siegel so if we could bring lynn on and lynn you will have three minutes to speak three whole minutes oh my gosh that would be good for public comment wouldn't it so if you're going to do a deal with the city manager on annexation at 390 arapaho and that they can do cash and loop if she decides that's okay outside of the annexation agreement that is helping a developer you are helping a lot of developers by this keeping these hours in this pilot program downtown so i'd say yeah the the pandemic let's let's say just this is stating the obvious taught

[61:02] us a lot of things that we should have done decades ago you know like work at home when you can stuff like that um and this is one of them opening them all and stuff up but i'd say i want to leverage it because the city manager has far too much power if they are allowed to to violate our affordable housing on site and say cash in lieu just because they decide to they feel like it that is unacceptable that is stunning to me and that is something i certainly wonder about what happened with brewhouse the affordable housing there with nine parking spaces for car share and trade for 300 parking spaces plus at 311 mapleton as a subsidy at 311. so when you know when you a city council allow these kind

[62:01] of things to happen you erode the trust of the public and you know what makes me want to say no on on things that should be done like the west pearl area for opening it up on this pilot program um so think about that just think about that a little bit because i think you'd rather that i'm up here singing your praises and and and being real optimistic than negative but i'm saying there's kind of some reasons for me being negative and i've been around here you know for 30 years doing this and yet these new people that are with on staff you know today on this on this um capital improvements uh bike tour with transportation you know one person knew me by my voice but she didn't know

[63:01] what i look like interesting isn't it isn't it so interesting that i know i don't know who's at this meeting i don't have a clue i don't know my community anymore because of the pandemic come on people let's get off of it get off your high horses put on the videos you know grow up time is up thank you for your testimony okay that closes the public hearing so who would like to kick off council discussion of the matter before us everybody's a little slow to be the first today on our items there we go tara then matt i want to say chris thank you so much i want to thank you for the in-depth work that you and your department have done for all the options you've given the businesses and for that reimbursement program so that's all i really want to say is thank you

[64:00] how do you like that that's it thank you tara nice man well terry you sort of set me up on that one um anyway um so i just wanted to follow up on on a question i had um but but uh actually i'll switch order um lauren brought up an interesting point about whether or not there were some plans to sort of check in um and and i'd like to maybe go a step further because one thing that i'm i'm still somewhat uncomfortable with although i i'm i'm i'm gonna be okay to some extent is that we're still caught it's a five-year program yet we're still calling it a pilot and that's a pretty long runway and also that it automatically sunsets i i i i'm uncomfortable with the idea that a program that we're investing in business services are investing in can just sort of um evaporate by council ignoring it it just sunsets on itself i'd like there to be a more

[65:00] deliberate action to to choose to end it um and so in light of not messing with that overall cadence i'd like to recommend that in two years we actually do have a check-in where we actually more formally evaluate its pilot status i think in two years we would know sufficiently well whether this is successful or it's not and at that point we can just make it permanent and and finish off that any anything that's out there i don't know if we need five years to totally determine its pilot status and if it's successful or not so i would just just see if we can check in a little sooner in that sense that'd be something i'd love to recommend um and see if any of my counsel colleagues are interested in adding that the the other piece really is um kind of back in line to that that that cadence with people out with outdoor dining but not looking to permit a part of the permanent program and being sort of told to clear house while outdoor dining is still in the in in peak for probably another month or so i know that there's a compliance issue

[66:00] but i'd be interested in seeing since we're passing this on emergency and if it passes it becomes law tonight that anybody who has outdoor dining as of today is just given that ability to extend out to august 31st and not have to clean up we can continue all the permitting process all the things to get people into the program i just think it's an odds time to tell people to pull the rug out when they've already established their business practices to leverage the outdoor dining um and leverage the amount of people that are enjoying the good weather and make money and make themselves continue to make themselves more whole on the backside of the pandemic so i just think from a timing i'd love to just kick it a little bit so that it's on the natural lane of outdoor dining the weather is more crummy um and and that's a natural time to clear up and then get ready for winter and then make your decisions from there so those are two things i'd like to sort of see if my council colleagues are interested in and if there's any certainly concerns from staff on on either of those pieces so matt thanks chef point of clarity um i think i heard you say extend it to august 31st but

[67:01] i think you meant past maybe i think i meant to say october 31st because that was a date in the slide as sort of a transition period and again i'd love to see people who are not looking to go to the permanent program and make get rid of all their outdoor dining and return it to pre-pandemic when outdoor dining is no longer that popular and it's naturally waning and they're not going to be losing a lot of business as a result of pulling it out when the weather is still perfect and awesome for outdoor dining as we expect at the end of august got it well if you don't mind me picking up on that again um chris could you address a mechanism do you know by which we might be able to do that tonight is that something that is doable as part of this work we're doing tonight um that's a good question i might defer back to sandra if she has any thoughts on available paths forward i would also indicate that the intention would be that once emergency orders um end uh that's the date that we had set with

[68:01] um alcohol uh uh permits alcohol licenses so there's there's a number of considerations that would then trigger um and i'm seeing that yeah sandra and michonne uh pick you know turn their cameras on so while it i totally understand and appreciate the the thinking there are a number of things that would still make this very challenging um not just by an order of the the city if we were to extend emergency orders through the end of october businesses would still need to go through a whole new renewal process um to get compliant with the state i'm glad michonne is on so she can address the alcohol issues but i do think that there are a lot of administrative issues here that um would be really um a big hurdle to overcome and i think you know chris mentioned this before i i think that there is an equity issue here as well because we have all these folks that are doing a

[69:01] lot of work to get into compliance with our code and followed the procedures that and regulations that we have put in place and then you'll have a group of folks that will just continue doing what they're doing and basically get a free pass and so i think there's some issues there but i think also just from a practical perspective it's going to be an administrative um burden a very a big large one to overcome and i think michonne probably has some more specific information related to alcohol licensing yeah so for city licensing a two-month extension if that were all it was of current outdoor dining areas where they're serving alcohol what that would mean is that we essentially would need to take 32 applications again post them again

[70:00] approve them for only two months and then we would need to take additional applications for a longer period of time it also strikes me that there are some outdoor locations which overlap block faces for other liquor licensees which are larger than the size that they eventually will be allowed to be and that could inhibit their next-door neighbors um from proceeding coming into compliance because those locations are still there and they don't intend to participate in the in the pilot program so um so at least for city licensing we've done four freights or four bulks of um postings processing sending them down to the state getting them back from the state what this would mean is instead of getting you know everybody into compliance for

[71:01] people that wanted to participate in the pilot program we would need to do a temporary one and immediately on its heels we would need to do a permanent one in addition so that would be very difficult for my office and michonne could you introduce yourself please oh i apologize i'm michonne cook i'm the licensing manager with the city and we do the liquor licensing thank you thanks so much okay uh thanks for following that up that information and i think we can now go to mark and then bob you know with our summer break looming i will be extremely brief um i agree with matt on the two-year check-in and i agree with tara in terms of being uh very grateful for the work that you've done and and your folks have done chris um this is really excellent so thank you that's all i got okay um well first of all i'll start off with my queen mark i i'm i'm grateful to you

[72:02] chris for the tremendous work that you've done with chip and with the downtown merchants and with so many other constituents and of course your colleagues on in the very cities department so great presentation great product here i think we're going to prove this tonight uh i do agree with matt that i think a two-year check-in makes makes some sense and if we get somebody could just calendar that that would be be great i do have one um kind of question that i probably should ask before during question time chris um i know we're not talking about west pearl tonight and we won't but i'm just trying to understand just mechanically how things are gonna work so we're gonna have some presumably some restaurants that are located on west pearl who may opt into this program and some that may opt out um those who opt in their their um their module units whether they bring their own or rent or buy them from or rent them from the city those will be in in the parking spaces or where would they actually go because they are we're not scheduled to have a west pearl traffic discussion until september 8th but this

[73:00] goal goes into effect on august 31 so i'm just trying to figure out how the timing of that works that's a really good question bob um so the restaurants on west pearl will be subject to the same design guidelines as any other business other than restaurants on the bricks who do have a little bit of a different rule because of just the nature of the infrastructure there and so by the end of august 31st any restaurants on the west end that want to participate in the pilot program will need to have edited their footprint down to their revocable permit footprint so that so that's that's they don't have to have their infrastructure in place yet their modular infrastructure we will have a window available through the end of the to the end of october for them to upgrade their infrastructure or wait till next spring to put in the upgraded infrastructure but as far as their revocable permit goes they'll need

[74:00] to edit their existing outdoor dining footprint to whatever they've proposed in their longer term uh revocable permit that's great chris that's real helpful and for those that are on west pearl as opposed to maybe 10th street where there's maybe a little bit more space i know the sidewalks are pretty narrow on west pearl between uh 11th and 9th will those if you could foreshadow for us that participate tend to put their infrastructure in the in the parking spaces is that kind of what you're thinking of along there because i know the sidewalks aren't all that wide correct yes okay that's great and so i it sounds like the timing this is gonna work out really nice because you're gonna know presumably by the end of august or maybe even by mid july sounds like the application deadlines mid july you're going to know going into that september 8th council discussion how many restaurants opted in and what the footprints are going to look like and what the map's going to look like and that'll that'll help you kind of inform

[75:00] us and maybe advise us on what to do in west pearl is that a fair assumption yes great good good plan good timing although we weren't supposed to talk about the west's uh pearl culture we did not we did not talk about west parole i was just asking some questions if i were a better singer i'd sing we don't talk about wes pearl to the the tune of the encanto uh song thanks bob nicole yeah i just have a question um i just wanted to thank you all for attempting to use the racial equity tool uh in in this decision making process and i i just want to name that it feels a little uncomfortable for me that we're kind of taking these steps while admitting that we didn't quite get enough input from people of color in our community to really understand what potential impact it has and i guess i sort of come from the default perspective that if we're not actively

[76:01] making a positive difference for racial equity we are risking um going in the other direction and i guess i just i i'm wondering you know as we move forward with this where are those other check-in points where we can communicate with communities of color and figure out um where that component fits into this um this plan is it in sort of the people who are benefiting from um outdoor dining i mean where how how do we try to get a sense of that because i just i don't know it's just it's it's not sitting well with me but i i do appreciate the attempt to use it just want to thank you for that thank you nicole if you don't mind i will speak to the question there we do have a number of other processes that are going on that are much more in tune with with getting uh broad community input there's the downtown vision plan being led uh by chip and the downtown

[77:01] boulder partnership and so we have shared with them the racial equity instrument and our communication and engagement guidelines with an expectation that they are followed and i know on the economic vitality front we are getting ready to update our economic sustainability strategy and that too will have opportunity and and i dare say expectation that we have um broader community input and some of those more policy uh driving efforts to make sure that that diverse voices are heard and that i just say in the nature of trying to you know stand up a program in a pretty short order it does make it challenging to to have a broad widely inclusive community engagement process um that we that that we've done in earnest we could have we could have reached out to more people and we can still do that as part of our ongoing conversations that's why it's a pilot um

[78:00] is that there is uh presumption that we are going to need to make adjustments to respond to different community needs um in the years ahead and so we can still continue to listen we just haven't in using the tool right now in this uh rapid uh format it just did not provide us with that thank you for that and you know i think if we are um to make the decision to move forward with a check-in place this is something that would be wonderful to check in on at that interim stage nicole i'll just call myself briefly and say again echo the thanks for everyone done a great deal of really high quality work i really appreciate everything that's it's taken to get us here um i'm certainly supportive i like the idea of the two-year check-in so we might include that in a motion to give direction to that effect um and matt i appreciate matt's point about hey can we can we extend things uh for a little while but um i heard the

[79:01] complexities from chris and sandra and michonne and so i don't want to create a great deal of work for staff for something so short so i appreciate that raising the issue but doesn't sound like necessarily the way to move forward right anybody else have any comments or emotions i'll give it a shot all right all right um so um i'd like to make a motion to adopt by emergency measure ordinance 8517 amending charter or chapter 8-6 a public right-of-way in easement encroachments revocable permits lease and vacations of the boulder revised code of 1981 by adding a new section 8-6-12 outdoor seating and public rights

[80:02] of way and private property for boulder revised code 1981 allowing for a five-year pilot program that waves certain code requirements and allows outdoor seating through issuance of city revocable permits and amending truck chapter 20 fees of voter revised code 1981 by amending section 4-20-20 revocable right-of-way permit lease application fee of the boulder revised code 1981 and adding a new section 4-20 outdoor seating pilot infrastructure fee for boulder revised code 1981 setting forth applicable fees associated with the five-year pilot program and setting forth related details with the amendment to add a two-year check-in um from the date of uh the passage of this motion one second okay motion a second any additional discussion

[81:02] already none let's go to a vote and this is a roll call that is correct sir we'll start this vote for ordinance 85 17 with council member wallach hi weiner yes yates yes benjamin yes mayor brockett yes councilmember folkerts yes mayor pro tem friend yes and council member spear yes mayor the ordinance 8517 as read into the record and amended is hereby approved unanimously great thanks so much alicia and we

[82:00] didn't mention this before but as an emergency ordinance it did require two-thirds passage but we left right past that into into unanimous so chris and team thanks again thanks so much for all your outstanding work on this thank you very much onward and alicia can you take us to our next item please yes sir of course tonight's next item which is item number six on the agenda matters from the city manager 6a is the boulder fire rescue department's 2020 master plan progress report great it's my pleasure to introduce uh chief calderazzo who is here to present this item i think both of our deputy chiefs are here from our fire rescue department as well so uh mike feel free to take it away great thank you chris i'm hoping you can hear me all right good evening mayor council mike calderon fire chief um i'm hoping that we can get the slideshow up we've got a little brief slideshow to

[83:01] share um what we wanted to do for kevin um a requirement of accreditation but more importantly to uh to share progress on our master plan and uh and then if if uh need be get feedback and direction on our areas focus you may recall that right before covet hit and shut us down um we had come in front of council to get the master plan um accepted um and right before that we had gotten our accreditation um recommendations from the group that came to visit us and one of them was uh the recommendation to get in front of our elected officials and facilitate further planning and discussion efforts on an annual basis i realize um it hasn't quite been annual but um what we're sharing with you tonight is really the culmination of a lot of hard work and a lot of folks in the department

[84:00] in presenting this update and we we hope that you'll see that um despite covid we've actually been able to do quite a few things um since the acceptance of the master plan in 2020. so we can go to the next slide um share with you uh some items of note in the interim since the master plan was approved um this gives on the left here a little overview of the call volume which has been relatively um about the same amount that's a breakdown of the different types of calls but you can see that the ems definitely dominates and has always dominated our call volume but in the interim space i think kovitz speaks for itself we had a number of incidents of note um there's there's been things like uh you know the the uh people's we called the sellers park pirate fire at the time but the people's crossing fire is actually small fire that that uh could have quickly become something quite big they jumped on it fast had

[85:00] some other incidents of notes such as the pearl street fire um and then most uh the latest um fire of node at 190 acres was the end car fire um but all of this our team uh weathered it's been doing a pretty good um job i think and uh and and the community as well as that to endure all of these things i think that should be noted as well if we could go to the next slide i'll talk a little bit about the four areas so there were really four different areas that our master plan um asked us to focus on two of those the first two i'll go into are actually outward facing or community facing i would call them and then the the latter two are more about uh giving the tools to the team and taking care of the team so you'll see that as we go through it um and that's really what we wanted to share with you is progress in those four different areas and and you will note um some areas that that have we've given extra attention to particularly around this first commitment so if we could go to the next slide i'll share with you um

[86:00] some of the the information that we have on that the first commitment was really about speeding up response and i know um that it's basically saying better and faster all hazards response what we the the conversations we've had around emergency metal medical care in particular are about improving the response times of advanced level uh medical care responders and that's part of the advanced life support but basically doing that in all hazards so it's not just about ems but in every aspect as we'll talk about a little bit so we can go to the next slide i'll i'll share with you details on each of these areas so the two on the left the two graphics on the left speak to the ems piece um particularly advanced life support what we've been able to do um in the in the last years as a matter of fact this year um we've been able to bring on board um someone who can really move our advanced life support capabilities forward and what that basically means is we're looking to

[87:03] upskill is probably a terrible word but but upgrade the skills of the responders on all of the fire apparatus so that they turn into um basically you what we equate um the skill level um from from ambulances they'd be on the fire trucks as well so we'd have way more of those in the system and by doing so reduce the response time for that advanced level care and so we currently have seven paramedics on the job and we've put three this year in paramedic school and our new um supervisor and that in that realm our ems program person uh their job is to help us move that forward our goal is to at least improve the response level of one if not two of our um fire apparatus early next year once we get these other folks out of paramedic school um cardiac survival is also a master playing goal so the advanced life support was about reducing response times for advanced life support and

[88:00] bringing it down to what we see for all hazards so the first unit that gets to your side um as close to six minutes as we can needs to have those advanced level responders that's the master plan goal the other piece is cardiac survival so if in the unfortunate event of a cardiac event we want somebody to walk out of the hospital um almost as if that had never happened that's kind of the goal it's certainly the gold standard and the survival rates across the country are not very high but our master plan wants to get us at or better than that and that's all part of our plan and the job of our new ems program advisor is to help us find out all the ways that we can start improving cardiac survival not just about extra responders but how we can even utilize what's in the community as well to improve what's out there like community cpr and things like that the other two graphics on this web are on this page are about how we're leveraging regional resources and that is part of our master plan that is you know what what regional

[89:02] partnerships can we forge improve uh because there are fire departments around us with those same skills or more or the same kind of skills whether that's wild land or technical rescue things like that things that we we as a smaller agency couldn't do just on our own um to be able to use them better than we have in the past and so we've been working hard to do that and i think that the most visible is that right graphic there um probably not visible to the community but i can tell you that now with red flag days um after the marshall fire we we certainly got together and decided there needs to be a better approach for all of us to make sure that we're using any and all resources and can dump those very very fast um when things like that are happening and i think we you call we call an indices based up staffing but that's a that's a concerted effort on all the regional chiefs down here in the flats to improve the ability to respond quickly to any kind of red flag day or fire starts so those are

[90:02] some of the things that are happening under commitment number one if we can go over to commitment number two this is also outward facing but this one is more about um being proactive so if we could just flip the next slide or at least online it's not changed yet there it is so the the commitment itself is about um being prepared and being resilient which is a big big thing um that we're trying hard uh to explore all the different ways um to make that happen in our community it's not just about um the responders but how the community itself can be resilient if you go to the next slide i'll share some of the thoughts on what we're doing the first bullet there probably doesn't make a lot of sense to most people but i can tell you that this nfpa 1300 is the actual best practices standard um around community risk reduction and that craig 1300 stands for a new tool that we've been using with our own data to help

[91:00] assess our own community and and how we can address that and we'll at the end of this presentation we have a little link that people can go to to actually look uh look up this information for boulder in particular around community risk reduction so that's been a huge um pilot for us to work with um nfpa folks and get that off the ground we've also improved our social media presence which is um how a lot of people get their information and we recognize the need to do that and you know facebook twitter um things like that that we've we've been trying hard to to uh do more of um and then the biggie uh that we have that we've been doing is curbside and detailed home assessments on the heels of the marshall fire we did get um quite a bit behind we're working hard to catch up on those um we no longer consider the interface to just be a small portion of the city if anybody wants a detailed home assessment we provide those all across the city our goal in the master plan is sixty 60 of the interface we'll probably have to

[92:00] rework that at our next update but we've made a lot of progress not just on the curbside assessments but even getting through detailed home assessments which is a far more um comprehensive home assessment that people can have done for their home we've added administrative fte specifically to help with the home assessment scheduling them not just that there are other things that that person is helping us do but to give you an idea we were we were well caught up and we fell behind around 400 almost overnight that's how quickly some of those came in so we're working through those and trying to get those done as quickly as possible um the other things in this part of our master plan are around trying to reduce the call volume to 9-1-1 that doesn't involve an actual emergency or it's a what we call a low-acuity type call so we've been trying to look at opportunities to divert calls out of the 9-1-1 system to get people the care or the attention they need but doesn't need an emergency responder and there's one program we're looking into

[93:01] with amr called nurse navigator where the call would just get kicked over to a nurse who can actually connect folks with clinical resources or other resources so that's something we are working hard to achieve this year um we did make a shift of multi-family inspections is uh is more about connecting the actual risk in in the community with targeted work of our inspectors so rather than i'm doing a blanket inspection of everything they are actually focusing on some of our higher risk places that's usually the multi-family um occupancies and we've done that with a lot of success so we've been we've been uh getting those knocked out a lot i don't have the actual numbers but i certainly can get those um that's been a big big push for our team um and the last area is uh is work with osmp who has rangers who um also are red target employees that do wildland work and trying to better identify from a city-wide perspective what our wildland response

[94:02] team and prevention team and training team should look like and how that would integrate best also with the greater community the greater boulder area as well so so there's more to be done on that this year but that's a big part of of how we leverage all the regional resources to get the best response we can from what's um what's already in place let's move on to commitment three which actually shifts our focus away from the community and more towards the the people delivering the services so commitment three was really about getting our people the technology and the tools to do the job that we asked them to do in the community if you go to the next slide i've got just uh some some bullets or pictorial bullets of different things that we've invested in and are about to invest in substantially i think everybody knows about station three our plan on station three is to break ground um later in the summer probably the fall and hopefully be able to finish that station in 18 months time and move in uh around

[95:01] 2024 um that's the goal there the other areas though are all areas we've invested in heavily to improve technology that are things that that are already in place so um and a good example on a technology front as you may recall a few years ago with the ccrs tax the radio system for all the public safety responders was something we identified as needing huge improvement because there were so many dead spots people would go firefighters police officers would be in different areas they couldn't even transmit out um and we just finally got that system completely in place and cut over this year within the last couple months and it is loads better than what the team had before that's one example but we've invested in other areas in technology we needed to upgrade our records management system on the fire side um just to improve not just our data collection and our ability to analyze it but also our old system was actually had reached

[96:01] end of life and so we needed to invest in that um but we've also put money towards our wildland capabilities so we've invested in giving every responder in the city a set of wildland gear so they can quickly respond to wildland fires and we've also added to our stock of wildland equipment so that the changeover is quick so if they respond to a fire and they need to put the equipment up and grab new we have some of that available as well um that's been a big addition to to investments and uh and unfortunately the last piece that tactical gear i just my third that i'd be saying this but tactical gear is something we have given now to every um responder as well in the in the hopefully completely unlikely event we have to undergo what we did in the last couple years but it's out there and available to our team um for for their response so i i would say that of of the million dollars or so spent not including station three we have spent at least

[97:01] half of that towards our wildland capabilities among other things and the last area of commitment if you will turn the slide is about how we treat our employees and i think the city of boulder does a fantastic job already but there are needs unique to our responders i want to flip that slide over one we can at least look at the commitment and this is really about investing in the people who are serving our community happy healthy folks are going to do a far better job out in the field so we'll flip the slide over one more we'll talk about these last couple of points um you can see on the left some pictures of uh think the slide above is is the big talking point besides the one below our newest firefighters you can see the team there but but above they they were part of a much bigger training academy that was all regional so we had

[98:01] a bunch of regional um academy instructors and it was all right here um done in boulder and i think that speaks volumes to the level of cooperation that we're seeing with all of the local departments and responders but we've also invested in peer support for our team um you know mental health and wellness is big for the community but it's also big for for our own team and making sure they're taken care of um it's unfortunate that that are the highest cause of death among firefighters is actually self-inflicted as opposed to the job itself and that's something we don't want to see here but also we've had some issues with um with retirement and hiring one of our goals in the master plan is about improving the diversity of the workforce particularly around gender um in the fire service nationally i think we're under four percent females and uh and boulder is probably tracking close to that and our our goal is actually to be

[99:00] far above that um over the next 10 years um the real challenge of course is that the pool it's just not there the candidate pool isn't there so we we've set up a workplace workforce development committee to help us with our recruitment our testing we want to lower barriers certainly to lower income folks because they in some cases they're paying to take the test to get on the list there's things like that that we want to explore improving access to get on a list to be hired for all the regional departments if need be or if we can influence that and then i mentioned paramedic school already but one of the other big goals in our master plan is to improve the standardized level of response that we have especially team and advanced certifications so if we're going to get resources regionally we want to be able to provide those as well and trade and that's something we're doing and looking forward to doing for the team as part of our master plan and i think the most important thing i did want to share on on the slide

[100:00] well i guess they're all pretty important but a big one here at the end is this quality assurance piece it is really really important for us especially as we improve our level of advanced life support all the paramedics we have that our patient care be excellent are none and that anyone who calls 9-1-1 and is treated by our team all the way through to the hospital gets top quality care and we've set up a quality improvement committee with our medical director and our new our ems program administrator to make sure that we're looking carefully at those types of calls and with it with the goal that all of our patients or as many of them as possible report having had a good experience and a good outcome which is most important to us at the end of the day that's what it's all about so so those are those are in a very brief um presentation um our update um from the master plan to date um if you could pull up i think it's two slides from here

[101:00] because i think the next one is just questions go one more one more there's the qr code there are two uh websites uh we are part of the city's open data piece so on the right is a link to the open data that we have out there that comes straight out of our community computer aided dispatching system it's not cleaned data but it's good data and you'll be able to see a lot of that tied into community risk reduction stuff and then on the right side are on the left side um the craig 1300 is a fairly new we've run into some bumps with our new um records management system so that one is not as updated as the one on the right but it's certainly a little cleaner than the one on the right so i hope that makes sense but that's our presentation for this evening um we were open now to leave it up for council questions or discussion so i'll turn it back over to you mr mayor thanks so much chief that was really informative it's great to see all the progress that's been made in the last two years since the master plan adoption

[102:01] and in particular congratulations on the accreditation that's a big step and read through the report there are lots of glowing reviews and comments on the department uh so questions for chief calvarozzo nicole thank you so much for this um report this was really helpful just in getting a better understanding of what you all do and all the many many ways that you care for our community so thank you for that um i just had a couple of questions um oh and sorry first i just wanted to say how much i appreciate this focus on wellness um it feels like to me that's also another wonderful way to aid with retention of employees but particularly for those who are in kind of these caretaking sorts of professions and i imagine especially with the stressors that you all are involved in i'm just really really appreciate that you you all are focused on that for your employees um so i was just having a question around and thinking about some of the

[103:00] um evacuation planning notice planning that sort of thing is there work um in trying to understand how we evacuate people as we're trying to reduce the number of cars in our community so i think this is something right we're talking about this a little bit later um some different tools to get people to drive less but you know how how are you all thinking about that or how does that fold into the evacuation plans as we start adapting our city so the the uh the short answer is at the moment what we're doing with um all of the regions around us louisville lafayette um us i believe in even longmont's involved some of the other smaller communities and the county is we're gritting this gridding what we've done in the interface all the way through um in terms of um alternate routes it's i think i mentioned this sometime back when i was in front of council about um you know areas of focus for

[104:03] people to evacuate from so it's sort of the know your zone kind of thing and so we're working on trying to create those zones um that will make sense to people and be able to get out there now as far as um you know the the traffic flows and all of that we're still working that piece out how do we and and trying to get granular in the sense that we struggle with the um there's the in a perfect world i'd be able to say i want to evacuate one first then two and then three so that the people are not stacked up like cord wood trying to get out and they're stuck and they become you know victims or just there and they can't go anywhere um i don't i can't make any promises we're gonna get that right perfectly but it is definitely consideration for us in terms of being able to notify appropriately um but more importantly first thing we have to do is figure out what those zones need to look like and that's

[105:00] actually being done regionally right now as i speak um i'm not the smart one in the room to get that done but i know there's a lot of really smart people working on that right now and we'll be coming together in the next month or two to see some of that work and to see how we're going to then turn around not only translate that into useful evacuation routes and then and and how we're going to be able to notify people appropriately but also help people the easy button version for them you know you instead of trying to do you know trying to figure out what this means you just notified me but i don't know what it means we want to be able to set it up to where people know exactly what they need to do well that's going to take some outreach that's going to take some time so our first step right now is just getting those zones identified proper routes out and then realistically we turn to our law enforcement partners and go okay do you even have the staff to be able to close intersections turn these two ways into one you know one ways and and if you don't what do we need to identify to make that happen i mean does everybody

[106:01] become a responder we start closing streets and make it work so those are some of the conversations that we're really working hard to put together i don't know yep yeah no i think um and one of the things that i was wondering is for folks who don't have cars right because we're trying to kind of push people more toward you know don't have a car if you can avoid it take the bus ride your bike uh walk use some alternative modes of transportation are there are there conversations that are happening as well about how we start moving more people um in a relatively short period of time when you know we are kind of leaning on people to not have cars to not drive as much right that's a great point and um i'd be surprised if they're not talking about it but i will be sure to insert myself in that part of the conversation make sure we're talking considering it thanks i appreciate that my other question was just around uh this was on um the uh number of personnel dedicated to

[107:01] fire training on page 14 of the memo that we had um said that there were three and i was just wondering if that if that feels sufficient to you know if that's enough to meet the need um it seems to me like we have a pretty significant need right now to educate folks about how to mitigate fire danger that's that's the training for the troops and that's um uh so i have additional trainers for wildland in particular so it's a little more i guess the answers a little more nuanced those are my dedicated team to training for almost all hazards and i think we still need to work through because there's actually regional training assets as well so before i say oh we probably need five well if we did need five or seven um what can i also use from say the mountain view fire protection district that has trainers as well so we're actually working with them that's also why that one slide had all those firefighters graduate there that's a brand new class and that was from all of

[108:01] the region's responders and the trainers actually weren't just boulder fire trainers there were trainers from louisville and they were from mountain view so the short answer is no i probably need more people training but i don't know that necessarily because of all the good work we're doing regionally it all has to just be city boulder employees do and i think we're we're demonstrating that through some of these things yep and that and i think i'm in in hearing your response i may have misunderstood what that was it sounds like that's training for your staff and what i was thinking around was how many um i i thought initially it was people dedicated to training the community or you know going out and doing these home assessments and things like that and so i guess similar question but applying to folks in the community now um that seems i mean you've got you know over a hundred thousand people educate about this uh just wondering about how you're feeling about that kind of staffing oh for sure i think we're working with uh

[109:01] with the team to figure out what what what's the right size um to achieve some of that that outreach and that goal and of course the city has lots of resources there too so we are working with with the city manager's office to figure out the right way to do that through the budget process and other you know other ways great thank you i really appreciate all you all are doing and thinking about to keep our community safe thank you thanks nicole matt uh well uh thanks chief for the update and and i also uh would definitely love to express gratitude for how quickly you and your teams have pounced on those two small wildfires over the past week over by wonderland and violet and you guys continue to just be hammered with with where we're at with fires around our community so thank you a lot of gratitude for the work you guys continue to do on that front um i had a couple of questions um one surrounding als work and i know that that's that's a you know a large part i think in the

[110:00] master plan it says that by by either bringing on paramedics and and taking on some actual in-house ambulance duties you could in you could reduce response times by up to 25 and so i'm wondering you know with pandemic and where where are we in that particular process of evolution for boulder fire rescue and and when might you be coming to us to start thinking about the resources needed to make those sorts of large transitions a great question um so the the first part of that is improving the level of response from the existing uh trucks that are out there in service now so that means um upgrading the skill level from emt emergency medical technician to paramedic um on all of the trucks in the city and our plan is to do that in the core of the city first for the bulk of uh of the ems responses are and then build that out across time so that um hopefully in a few years all of

[111:00] those units will be als along with the ambulances and that the the response times overall will mirror what we're getting with our basic life support times today which is actually far lower than the advanced life support so so that was the plan was to turn um three to four advanced life support units into 13 or 14 and thus reduce response times down to about six minutes for that advanced care so that should take a few years but starting next year we'll be able to hopefully upgrade at least two units and council will likely see over time um some of that through um through requests to improve the training level um so that's that's kind of the plan going forward if that makes any sense uh it does i appreciate uh hearing the time i think that when you hear 25 reduction over a period of time that's sort of an exciting opportunity so i appreciate you laying out the timing um the last one was really more about actually i don't mind if i if i follow up on that

[112:01] question because uh so because i was going to ask the same question but i have one additional follow-up on that mike which is you're you're talking about a training question here are there additional kind of significant infrastructure investments that are also necessary in the next few years to bring that that uh als in-house so so the short answer is yes and no so the the station three once it's built will help because it will allow us to uh if we needed to put put additional responders in there by ups by up staffing or upskilling the the existing units the quick answer is i don't need to do anything other than train the responders and make sure they have the equipment on the trucks that's that's key to expanding the capability there um i do need infrastructure but it's not just for als it's really across the board good example is our you know south boulder

[113:00] huge wildfire risk i don't have a wildland truck there i don't even have any i can barely fit the truck that's there in the station that's there um and it would be great if we had the ability to allow those responders to don their wildland gear jump in that in the wild and truck and actually go because they can't use the truck they have so it's those kinds of limitations i have for all hazards it's not just als but i'll tell you that als i could stand up just through training and the training basically costs overtime money plus the plus the cost of training the people we can start up staffing those trucks um and do that over the next few years and be able to make it you know improve response times um with not a huge capital investment beyond the plan that's already in place but i really need that capital investment for the all hazards approach particularly wildland i would good to say thanks matt thanks for indulging me back to you i appreciate the follow-up um aaron i see the other

[114:00] one has to kind of do with just you know that community engagement aspect and um you know one of the things obviously i i'm glad that you guys are chipping away at that 400 400 or 400 request backlog on those individual home assessments but but in the interim there's that wonderful curbside assessment tool on the city's website and i'm just hoping that between boulder fire rescue and our city's communication staff that we can really pepper the community so that they're empowered to know even at a baseline curb assessment certainly for those in the wild wild urban interface whether they're green yellow or red and that may entice them to be like oh i'm a red i need that i need that assessment or if i'm green maybe i don't need to fill in that and add to the backlog just a little bit more of personal empowerment so i'd love to see that get out a lot more certainly as people are thinking that we're quote-unquote in a fire season when we know it's 365 but i think maybe now people are thinking about it more so anyway that that's something i just i'd love to see us and how can we help on council to really help get that word out so residents

[115:00] homeowners and renters are empowered to know what risk that they have we'll work on that for sure mark i want to go back to the concept of resilience i recently was given a tour of the wild land urban interface areas and i was actually quite stunned at the number of homes that not only were not following best practices they were literally kindling awaiting a spark and have you given any thought to to either policies or ordinances we might look to to address some of that obviously we're not going to tell people they have to redo their home but we might do a policy for instance of um you know banning future installation of junipers west of broadway which i have now learned are considered gasoline on a stick

[116:01] um and which was stunning to me since i put seven junipers in when i reached in my backyard um but that's not good practice and we need to make people aware of good practice and perhaps we need to go a little further in terms of ordinances or policies you know going forward to create that resilience or what about using arpa funds to help subsidize people who need to take out their um sort of offending vegetation or who need who can make changes to their home to make them more fire resilient because as i said there are so many homes that i saw that are just waiting for a spark and [Music] if there's something we can do about it we ought to and i wonder if you've given any thought to what those things might be so um yes we we uh we definitely need to talk about um alternatives to what we've

[117:00] already adopted so so council has already adopted the wild urban interfaith wildland urban interface code so the international code has been adopted it is of course um only it's not applicable retroactively so so if the homes are already there um and the property is already there it doesn't apply it's for the new construction kind of things the way usual adoption works um but some of your other ideas definitely um we can definitely look at um and potentially uh bring forth to council as a policy adoption but um i you know i hadn't i hadn't considered the juniper idea but that's definitely a good thought yeah and by the way thank you for the presentation it was as always informative i appreciate it thanks thanks for that mark so i'll call on myself and mike this isn't i i'm going to go to a comment here but uh appreciate again all the phenomenal work the department is doing and we're we're entering into a period where we're going to be considering the

[118:01] uses of the community culture resilience and safety tax and we also if the the library district initiative is successful may have some additional funds to spend and for me personally i would uh definitely look at fire resilience and a faster path to full als and shorter response time to be things very much worthy of uh consideration for spending um some of those additional dollars so my ask to you would be to think about in the next few months about how you could move some of these initiatives forward more quickly if you had additional funding available to you uh because i'd love to hear about what we might be able to accomplish as we move into the discussions about those sources of funds we'll do that thank you mayor thanks so much any final comments uh nicole yeah i just had a follow-up on that question erin um i would be particularly interested in knowing if there are things that more more sort of wellness focused

[119:00] um uses for uh some of those funds as well it just strikes me that that is a um wellness for your staff i mean chief yeah great point tara uh thank you chief for sharing with us about that wildland truck and have you or are you going to tell us how we can go forward and try to accomplish that or have you done that already that seems to be important especially in regards to south boulder i was going to ask are you referring to the one in south polar so yes um actually the ccrs tax includes um at least provisionally um funding for that station down there in south boulder um so we're we're trying to explore options as to whether that could be and where and obviously that property is not big enough to do anything with at the moment

[120:00] so we're trying to figure out how we're how we're going to make that work so that we can have that asset down in south boulder and available to the community so we are exploring it it's it's all about um where do we get the land the space to to put the the apparatus the two of them in in service so but it is in the ccrs tax listed as one of our stations in need work matt thanks aaron mike my question is kind of a um a question of keeping the conversation alive i think earlier this spring we had that sort of initial update on you know post marshall and end car fire we kind of got the baseline of the work that's been done i know that obviously there's some work that we might be talking about maybe later this summer but i'm kind of wondering now that we've talked a little bit about the master plan and some of that specific work that boulder fire and rescue is doing you know thinking about

[121:00] when's that next check-in that we get to dive a little bit deeper and start to really parse out perhaps policies other investments to make our community more safe with regards to wildfire resilience and so just as we're talking about this i always like to in the midst of one dialogue know that we can already be sort of thinking about where the next one is coming from not just for us on council but really for the community because i know we're getting more and more questions and concerns about um the fire season and what that entails and what we're doing to keep the community safe so knowing that those conversations are on the horizon i think the sooner we can have that next piece of dialogue i think all the happier for everybody noted thank you okay well seeing no other hands then i'll just give a final enormous thank you chief to to you and to your incredible department and all the amazing work that you do to keep us safe keep those fires out we're very grateful

[122:01] okay i think that finishes this item out um we are very nicely ahead of schedule let's see if we can maintain that we got two smaller uh final items who do we turn to for for the next one i think our next item uh is under uh matters for mayor and members of council which is a discussion on uh a request for a knot of five so natalie stifler is here uh to uh help talk about that but it was a request uh that uh council member benjamin brought forward uh and uh so with that i'm happy to turn it over to natalie thanks chris good evening council i'm natalie stifler i'm the interim director of transportation and mobility um thanks for having us to have this

[123:00] conversation tonight uh um just for a little bit of background i think most folks are aware uh this idea came up from our tab one of our tab members and um they've been talking about it and then introduced i believe introduced the idea to council member benjamin and so we've had some conversations offline about a potential pilot program for an e-bike rebate that we would potentially try to do this year and we're certainly looking to counsel for that not a five if that's something that is council's wish we can accommodate it i do want to just talk a little bit about what that would look like for us um i know so community cycles submitted a proposal that they could administer a pilot program for us and that's um something that staff has been reviewing over the last week and it certainly is interested in pursuing if that's something that council would want us to do they have the experience in

[124:00] administering an e-bike program they did so this year for the can-do colorado grant program through the state and so they're certainly fit to be able to do that for us we would definitely want to make some refinements to the proposal and that would occur through the procurement process so we would need to go through a procurement process to be able to contract with community cycles to do this work and so that would take some staff time to refine the proposal and go through that procurement process um so a little bit about the staff time i think you know we've over the last week kind of mulled over this and thought okay what could what kind of impact this will have on our work program we believe we can accommodate it i think we will need to shift some things which could cause a delay um on some of the community engagement work for the can corridor on baseline um it you know it's it wouldn't be a huge dramatic shift but it certainly will delay just some of the staff time that

[125:00] we can dedicate to that project um while we while we shift to focus on this a little bit um and then as far as timeline what we're thinking is it would probably take us maybe the next couple months just to refine the proposal work with community cycles and and go through a procurement process um but we think we could launch a pilot by september so that is still within kind of um the our staff did a little bit of research around like the height of peak sales for bike stores and september's still within that window so it would still we think it would still be successful in in kind of reaching kind of consumers and their interest for biking um so that's our our thinking on timeline um and you know the the benefit of doing a pilot program i think is that it can inform a future program we're staff is definitely interested in a future program and the state of colorado

[126:01] is um they'll be releasing a competitive process for 12 million dollars for e-bike programs across the state and that's something that we would be interested in competing for and then that funding would potentially be available in 2023 for us to launch a broader you know more robust program so the pilot would certainly um help us kind of learn and shape a future program if that's something that council desires i think that kind of sums up what my initial thoughts on it and our team's research over the last week and i'm happy to answer questions thanks for that and i really appreciate the the background info matt you brought this forward do you want to say a few words i appreciate that aaron and natalie i appreciate all the the time and effort you've given into working with myself and and ryan and sue and others to one just understand but to really be be graceful within the work that you've been given as a new interim

[127:00] director with can the big pivot and and also you know looking at some of our desires to be agile to sort of the current timing of things this year so i appreciate you working with us on this a lot um i think uh without overstating i think it speaks to the quality of your leadership in this department to work with us in this fashion so so i i greatly appreciate that i wanted to just maybe set up a little bit of added context to where what natalie was saying is um you know for one the idea of this e-bike program really sort of i think came from a successful program that denver launched right they put nine million dollars over three years to an e-bike rebate program and got like 3 200 applications 40 of which went to low-income income qualified individuals and they exhausted nearly three million dollars in like two and a half weeks that's how popular the program was now obviously they need to refine it and make some tweaks for good and the bad but just in terms of the potential success that we could have in a community like ours i think kind of

[128:00] speaks for itself so i think that was really a leading catalyst for this um and the pilot really came out of one you know this is the you know we have an opportunity this year gas prices are nearing all-time high you know can we you know nimbly meet some of our communities needs and use the economic strain that high gas prices are having to get people out of their cars and perhaps reduce their vmt and really start to you know take some bites out of our vmt reductions and meet some of our climate goals so that's why a pilot was really thought of and that it could be a great way as natalie said to leverage lessons learned to inform for a perhaps larger program to launch in 2023. um so i just wanted to set that up from motives for why that wasn't and just appreciate natalie really working hard to try to understand what was going on and and try to make this work so i will be quiet unless there's questions i can answer about the proposal perhaps since i had worked with community cycles to help set that up so i will step aside thanks man thoughts from council members tara

[129:01] well i guess natalie my first question is is when you say it's going to take time away we did ask staff to switch from what they were currently doing to can when uh during when we talked about it so are you being truthful when you're saying that it's just going to be a little bit of work because i know it's very difficult for staff to switch to something and then switch to something else so that's my first question to you how yeah i can definitely be more clear about that i think we certainly will it will take significant staff time over the next couple months and so we will need to shift away from the community what we were planning to do with baseline was to begin our community engagement for the baseline corridor as part of can so that is certainly going to be delayed um to do this work so i'm just going to say that i would not like to delay the baseline corridor

[130:00] so i do love my e-bike so much but i don't know that i want to do that to you i don't know that we want to do this so i'm just going to say i probably don't but i want to move on to my number one subject which i've told you before and that is lighting in our underpasses because many of our bikers especially women and children tell me that the uh underpasses are dark some of the lights don't work some of the bulbs are out even the ones where the bulbs are not out some of them are quite dark and they feel not they don't feel safe so i'm wondering if we what about that as a proposal can we fit that in to the next year or two does that have to do with your department and what do you think about that does that affect the e-bikes because to me the two issues about biking besides yes i want everybody to be on a bike is is it safe everywhere

[131:00] and also i'm thinking about also i'm thinking about you know bike theft which is a whole other subject but just leaving it for transportation right now and lighting what do you feel about adding that on to your work program and when or is that not even you no so lighting in the underpasses is transportation um and yeah thank you for that question we we that's something that we can certainly look at as we go into 2023 and 2024 work planning um we've talked about kind of updating our standards around lighting and underpasses and if that would be something that would be necessary um kind of looking industry-wide if that's something that is something that we just need to do and that would be something that we could look at in the next couple years in our workplace yeah yeah i was thinking about some sort of a study and i want to apologize to matt for changing the subject for just a bit okay we can go back to math subject now

[132:02] thanks matt all right thanks for the question tara uh we've got lauren rachel nicole thank you yeah i was wondering if there are any like is there a level at which this is easier to implement you know if the if the pilot program is under a certain size does that make it easier to run and not take staff time away or you know i'm also i'd be open to other ideas as well you know because i do think that the high gas prices and things like that is you know a real burden for people in our community and looking at you know b-cycle passes or enhanced you know bus passes things like that are there any other programs that we might look at that might be easier to implement

[133:03] so i think with the with this the e-bike rebate idea we've kind of minimized it to the as least impactful as it could be on our work program i don't know that we could make it so that it's still effective and make it any smaller i don't know that that could be done um that was kind of the intent with the pilot was that it would it would be pretty minimal and that still has a significant impact on our work plan thank you rachel nicole and matt thanks natalie and thanks for raising this matt it's a great idea um i have a couple questions for well first i don't want to disturb the can flow so i'm i'm not gonna i don't know vote or have any preference in favor of that outcome i think we we need to

[134:00] you know sort of finish the the race that we started already on that one um and understand that you're saying staff can't balance both so appreciate that when it does come back just a couple of things that i would hope to see um i think everybody's pretty impressed with the denver program and there are some other places i am curious um how much of that was sort of from the county versus the city when it comes back to us like what pot of money did they use is this something that a county would ordinarily um lift up i think that boulder county is looking at it so is that something that we can partner on so just flagging that for when it comes back it sounds like an early 23 if it goes according to that schedule and then also if if our goal is truly to reduce vehicle miles traveled um what is the price point at which someone who's on the fence about buying an e-bike can then buy it i assume that if i'm a billionaire this program's not for me i assume that um you know if i if i have no disposable income it's really good for me but then

[135:01] there must also be a middle category of people who would like an e-bike and can't quite afford it may not be um lower even middle income qualified but just can't get there so i would i would love some some research and study on what is that like sweet spot for the city to to plug in at yeah we'll definitely be thinking about that thank you nicole thank you um i have a sort of process question that i think may it may not be you and natalie i think this may be a narrative question or a fellow council question um what's the process for responding to things like this that come up from our boards or from um outside groups in the community how how do we sort of um do we have a process for you know evaluating and responding to these kinds of requests um i guess you know one of the questions that i'm thinking of is is just the trade-offs right uh what are what are we

[136:00] not um investing in and you know matt you you referenced high gas prices right that is absolutely hitting people right now um so are high rent prices so her high food prices and so i'm thinking about all the folks who are struggling um even just to make rent or put food on their table right now and so when i think about having a hundred thousand dollars to give toward a program that's going to help people um i i'm just wondering how how do we even begin to kind of evaluate that space of where when we're choosing to do things that are going to take us off of our work plan that aren't on staff's immediate work plan how do we make that choice i don't even know nicole i think i'll jump in and uh and take your question first and i think it's a really good one and and maybe this is actually something i should have done when we started this item is just to tee up a little bit how does this process work because i think this is the first time we've maybe had a discussion like this um

[137:00] which is after the retreat we really try and settle in what what's the year's work program look like um and for the council priorities that's for the next two years and then you know there's always a little bit of slack that we try and try and program into the the work plan i'll be honest we're not very good at it um we if anything kind of over commit ourselves um but if there's something that comes up during the year um from uh a council member where it would maybe require a reshuffle of the work plan we may have to put something on hold to be able to now put this onto the stack that's where we'll come to council um and have a conversation in what what's in the council handbook and rules is this concept of a nod of five essentially five council members nodding yes reshuffle things because we want this item to now move forward um and and that's really what the request is here today is we would put the can on hold for a few months uh at the baseline

[138:03] work to be able to now put this program in uh and and i think then to your your broader question which is uh how do i compare this to maybe other things that are priorities out in the community um i think that's something for each of you to kind of consider when you're evaluating that um it's a little hard obviously outside of kind of a budget conversation and uh obviously with with all of the various funds that the city has certain monies can only be used for certain things um but i think that's something to always think about especially during uh uh conversations like this so that's really what's what's on the table today isn't necessarily the merits or the details of what an e-bike uh rebate would look like and more of uh are you interested and are you willing to kind of uh make that trade-off to add something here to the work plan uh and i

[139:02] think natalie has kind of laid out what what that would mean from a work plan standpoint is that helpful yes yeah it's basically just i need to make up my own mind this is what you're saying totally fine i just i love it when there are processes that help me figure out what to do um so just uh oh sorry aaron well just nicole i was just gonna follow up from chris where you said what's the process i'm afraid you're looking at it okay right yeah right it's good to know how how things work okay thank you um then i i am going to kind of echo tara and rachel um and just feel like i i don't want to um change course from what we decided just a few months ago especially since that was a relatively uh big course um and i just want to mention for for the next time this comes up because i hear you know folks saying that there's some interest in it as well um you know one of the things that i want to think about is who's benefiting from a program like this is it the folks who um kind of are most in need the

[140:00] people who are most hurting in our community are we going to be you know meeting a need that um that is addressing some of the inequities uh in our city and the thing that i think about especially with a program like this that's a rebate right right now we had the announcement at the beginning of the meeting about the food sales tax rebate which is um there's been a lot of outreach um kind of done there are still a lot of folks living in lower income communities that have still not heard about this program and the fact that the deadline is nine days away so you know how do we how do we think about doing the um outreach and engagement for a program like this to make sure that um that the folks who are most in need will have some benefit from it and then the other thing that lauren mentioned very briefly was around eco passes and you know thinking about driving folks to using [Music] i other other alternatives right that they may take to driving their cars i think that's something that i'd be

[141:01] really interested in as well um and natalie i know you and i talked about this um at one point as well just um this idea of kind of wallets for mobility that people could use for for different types of non-single occupancy vehicles that would help them get around yeah thank you for that we're definitely thinking about it matt mark i'll then i'll call it myself thanks aaron and i appreciate all of uh my colleagues weighing in on this and you know it's it's interesting having uh lifted this up for conversation you know i too share the same concern as tara and nicole and rachel um having you know shared time with rachel to lift up can a few months ago the last thing i'd want to do is undercut uh you know a programmed child of mine if you will um so so so that's a hard place to be in to want to see success have my cake and eat it too um but but i will say that

[142:03] you know in light of of what are clearly the the parameters and constraints around staff trying to lift up a pilot you know i i too don't want to see can delayed to achieve that in light of that though it it does um it does frustrate me a bit of that there's a gen that that it is not not not any individual not any department that just our institution as a whole may lack the agility be needed to tackle and take on things like this when the moment is what needs to be seized the conditions are right for it now um so so that's maybe something reflective we think about in our process and and what we are as an institution um so and and so yeah i just i don't want to see it delayed so um yes i lifted it up but if the sacrifice is to delay i would choose um not to do

[143:00] that but the silver lining is that and i give natalie a lot of credit here is that there's a lot of excitement at least scenes from natalie and staff to to think about this program and not just transportation there seems to be excitement from uh climate and jonathan cohen's team and and the city managers there seems to be a lot of excitement that this program could be good for our community in the long run with a little bit more runway to think about it and procure it and so that really excites me that a tab member can can can toss this idea out there can be a little bit of momentum and here we might have a program that comes to fruition next year that could really benefit our community so um i don't think all is lost because we didn't get a pilot but uh because i think and i'm hopeful that 2023 might deliver a successful program for our community that might last a long time and benefit our community for years to come so um a long way of saying yep with the impact and stated timing of september that that's not something i'm willing to support even though it was my idea um to bring to council so strange way to bring it up and shoot myself down but nonetheless here we are so thanks

[144:00] natalie matt thanks for that flexibility do you mind if i just ask you formally withdraw your request for another five if that makes it simpler i'm happy to to do that here i get reading i'm reading the tea leaves pretty well uh but it was more just waiting for that assessment from natalie and her office and and so i think that that kind of makes it pretty clear but i'm excited to see what we have in 2023. very good uh so i'll call and mark and i'll say just a couple quick words and just a question for natalie and chris there seems to be interest in the idea but little interest in upsetting the work plan at this time is there any kind of lower level inquiry that we can make that will not impact the work plan that might move us a little bit forward on this maybe clearly um clear some of the underbrush out and and be in a better position when we do have the opportunity to look at it in a uh in a more substantive way or is that simply

[145:02] not not available to us so if i think if i understand your question correctly so we'll be over the next you know several months just as part of our normal work program when we look at grant opportunities there's a grant opportunity that will be coming available later this year that's competitive and our staff will be paying attention to that and we'll be looking at that opportunity to go after funding that could lead to an eventual program in the future um i don't know if that answers your question no it does i mean it's just sort of making some substantive progress on the issue uh even if we're not getting an out of five today to move it forward um because it you know they're there i sense that there's interest in the substance of the program but not the timing of the program yes and i'll just call myself there and then tara the that i agree mark and matt thanks so much for for raising this up

[146:00] because i think a program like this would be really beneficial to the community and i love how community cycles and their their last program they did with separate funding really measured the impact of the program so i'd love to see something like that so natalie really thrilled to see you're considering this for 2023 that grant program sounds really promising and then hopefully we'll also have an extension of the cap tax that i would say we we should consider this as a possibility as well not that we need to talk about that right now but i just because we should finish up but just mention that real quick tara and matt well i'm just reminding people that there is a labor shortage and uh we don't know when it's going to change and we also love natalie so i'm hoping that we as a city council could be flexible about our most beloved programs as well because between the supply chain the labor shortage and inflation we really don't know when everything is going to turn around so i'm hoping for flexibility on our part um in terms of what year even though you

[147:00] know i think it's a great idea very good man i just it it's just more of a general thanks and gratitude as i've said to natalie and her team but also the community cycles and to to the members of tad and tab and ryan shoeshard and just how this all came together and people quickly trying to find the best way to make it work and so even though it's not going to happen in short order it just i want to commend the the collaborative nature which everyone brought ideas to together to try to figure out a way to make this work and sometimes they don't in people's best intent and in this case it didn't and that's okay but i think something greater may come out of it on the back end but i just want to make sure good thanks is given to community cycles and sue and folks there and ryan um over at tab and a bunch of his colleagues so and then of course right back to you natalie and your team so thanks a lot thank you absolutely yeah thanks natalie okay well i think that brings us to close on this item we have one more uh matter about the ballot measures and teresa should i hand this over to you

[148:00] sure mayor um i have kathy haddock on with us and what we wanted to do was have a quick process conversation um to talk about whether we want to separate out the items that are for even your voting from the other process changes and i'll let kathy get into the details of that thank you theresa and i'm kathy havoc in the attorney's office and right now we have three ballot questions that deal with the um issues related to council members and the even year election we first put in a separate ordinance about the swearing-in date being in december rather than in november in one ordinance and then in the second ordinance deals with the um the even year election and then the third one deals with the extending um i'm sorry i'm looking at the wrong list

[149:00] um that you can't run for any more one i'm sorry more than one office at an election but a council member whose term doesn't expire can apply for mayor so there's the three different concepts that are all in the same part of the charter and nicole's suggestion on hot line as i understand it and obviously she can speak to it but um is to separate all the things related to changing elections to even year to one ballot question and everything else to a separate ballot question and that is something that we can do i think what we'd really like to get out of this hopefully a quick discussion not asking you to go into any substance is um what it is you'd like to see on july 21st when we've moved the first reading things to and some of those things hopefully you can let us know tonight about how you want those divided up there's a couple of other things that we think you'll have to let us know later but first um

[150:01] if you want to talk about the first one first nicole's suggestion i'll be quiet so you can are you asking nicole to speak to her earlier suggestion or are all of you were looking for direction on how you would like to see the um ballot questions come to you with respect to those that aren't for even your election changes and those that have to do more cleanup type things they're both in the same part of the charter is why they're mixed differently than i think nicole was thinking would be ideal great thanks to tee up nicole matt and then mark thanks kathy for that the quick overview um and just to give you all uh the background on where my hotline questions were coming from um what i was concerned about is what happens if voters don't want even your elections right they don't want to do that switch then does all the cleanup stuff go down with it

[151:00] so that's always thinking it would be helpful to have them as two separate um issues so that voters can hopefully approve some of the needed cleanup stuff and then decide what they want to do about even your elections great matt mark thanks aaron and i appreciate you bringing this up nicole um helpful to have i think this conversation uh you know i would absolutely agree the cleanup language needs to be absolutely separated um certainly because some of this cleanup actually impacts the direct election of the mayor with rcv so if this if this were to go down we wouldn't we would lose the cleanup that's needed for something that's already law so so i think we have to separate them uh almost intrinsically so um for for that nature so i think that that's a helpful piece um to definitely do and then certainly you know the

[152:00] going to even year in concept is actually rather simple um it's the mechanics that we've chosen that make it a little more complicated so the ballot measure itself we need to think about as being as precise and concise as possible um and so stripping out anything that's extemporaneous and not solely focused on that issue at hand to me i think can only add confusion and we know how reading ballot measures are um it tends to not be layman it tends to be legal speak for those of us that aren't attorneys it can be a tough time to wade through them so that that's sort of my direction is to really parse them out so even year is focused on itself and then cleanup is a separate package mark bob now calling myself yeah i would agree with that i i think that the cleanup is necessary um clarifying that you can only run for one office unless you have a term that that has not expired is is not necessarily tied into whether we go to evening year or not and so that should be

[153:00] separate and apart going to even year is its own um subject and should be a separate ballot measure so i would i would separate um the evening year question from clean up questions and um uh you know i i would i would keep them segregated and have separate uh resolutions for for each of them actually bomb yeah i i agree also i i think the even your election is a as a whole there's a whole package in itself which does have multiple parts and i think that needs to stand on its own it may or may not pass i think there's there's two other questions one truly is clean up and then one is a relatively minor point so i guess i'm agnostic about whether the clean up in the minor point are combined or they're or it's a third ballot measure it doesn't really matter because i think it would pass anyway and that's just the deferral of swearing in until december i'm not sure that that's gonna be too controversial so if if people want to combine that with with the cleanup

[154:00] that's perfectly fine or if they want three ballot measures that's perfectly fine too i did have a question however um for the lawyers um there were there were two issues back when matt and i and so that others were working on the direct election mayor back in 2020 there were two issues that we wanted to make sure were captured and one i think was captured back in 2020 and one wasn't and that's the origin of the cleanup the one that wasn't was this this point about um a person can't run for mayor and council seat at the same time so that truly is clean up that was just a miss quite frankly from 2020. one thing that i do think that was gotten correctly and i'm so i'm puzzled why we're putting it back in again is in i'm looking in the draft language trees that you sent out under section five that says um if a council member whose term is not ending uh the november of the election wins election to office of mayor then council candidate receiving the fifth highest vote that same election shall complete the council member's term that's logical i think that's already in it didn't we put that in the 2020 ballot

[155:01] measure if if we did why are we doing it again if if we didn't then i guess there were two misses in 2020 it's actually just relocated in um in five to put all of those types of issues together because it kind of went back and forth as you go through charter section five so you're absolutely right it was already in there it's just being moved so it's not a new concept it's just a shifting within the charter exactly great that's the only question i have i fully support separating these out into at least two ballot measures or three as as council wishes thanks that bob so uh where it seems like we're coming to consensus i agree with what's been said so does anyone object to separating them out into two bout measures the cleanup measure and even your election measure no nobody objects okay very good and then are people okay with combining the two kind of cleanup things the swearing-in date change and the um and the

[156:00] other one about the mayoral election are people okay with that all right i'm seeing generally thumbs up no thumbs down so very good it sounds like direction is to go for one cleanup that includes both of them they're a little different from each other but i think they're both really clean up things and then um the other one for even your elections very good kathy traces that give you what you need to put together things for next month it gives us everything that we need for you to talk about right now but to give you a heads up for what we're asking for next is another issue that has come up is that by extending council members four terms for a year to get to the even year rotation also the the way that i wrote the ballot language it would extend the mayor's term for another year just because we put the um the same language that was in the charter before but that wasn't that was a specific direction from you guys so there's

[157:00] different direction that you want or you want to do some different selection of the mayor part from 2023 to 2026 however you would do it for that time period you need to know that and then some other council members have mentioned that there's other language that they wanted so ideally if you could get that to us by um july 8th we would have time to present options to you in the packet next time so that we're not doing too much drafting during the meeting i mean probably there's always going to be some drafting but i'd really like the opportunity to think through specific com concepts to make sure that we have it well drafted for you to consider at the july 21st meeting very good so i'll just say um on the mayor question i'm i'm happy with the will of counsel regardless i feel like i should recuse myself from the discussion since i'm the currently sitting mayor but first i'll just do a thing do we

[158:00] want to talk about that tonight or do we want to identify it as a topic to discuss at the next meeting in in july uh i think i have matt and nicole real quick on this process thing yeah i mean it makes total sense to have the mayor included in that because the language already in the charter for the direct election of the mayor already states the mayoral term being two years so by only doing an extension here we don't have to mess up what the term is it's just it gets an extension puts us on cycle and then the term as it's currently defined in the charter just carries on from there so so from a simplistic manner we get to then because it's already in the charter that it's a two-year term so if we just extend we can get on cycle the easiest way that way versus having to do a bunch of other steps of changing the term so i i agree that that is this from what kathy was saying it's the simplest way to achieve the outcome of bringing the mayor along with council to get on cycle very good i was actually asking if we should talk about it tonight as a kind of a threshold question but i appreciate

[159:00] the con nicole go ahead yes um i just i appreciate the comment that i was going to advocate for waiting until our next meeting to talk about it just because this is something that's relatively new for me i like having a little bit of time to think about things i personally would prefer a later conversation knowing that this is a question that we're going to be addressing okay i'll just say any objections to waiting until next month since we got that put on the table but mark shakespeare said rachel [Music] not an objection just that it would be nice to hear from the community as well like we're all just thinking about it for the first time and i think that another pretty simple option is just we have a one-year mayor vote internally like we always do so i think that that is an option and um i want to put that on the table if community members are weighing in very good okay are people comfortable with waiting to have the discussion until next month understanding that there is a conversation we had okay i'm seeing thumbs up or shaking it so that's good and then a point taken from kathy about

[160:02] if you're thinking about any other kinds of language changes or subject changes to please submit those in advance so that we're doing the least amount of editing on the fly possible does that cover everything kathy yes it does thank you very much all right i think that's it i think that's we're actually running an hour and 50 minutes ahead of schedule uh so i'm very grateful to everyone for an efficient uh meeting and discussion has been some great discussions tonight and quick i feel bad that juni was not able to join us but i feel good about the fact that we're on a journey before nine o'clock so juni sorry yes 8 39 i'm going to go outside and look for haley's comment i mean this is this is unbelievable i think it's solstice right yes yep go enjoy

[161:00] yeah still got some light left okay well thanks again everyone for a great meeting and wish junie luck and her campaign for the cml board we'll be rooting for and voting for in a couple days and at 8 40 p.m we'll gavel this meeting to a close good work bye everyone you