August 18, 2022 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[3:08] so [Music] the august 18th 2022 meeting of the boulder city council uh before i get into our regular announcements i did want to make a special one i wanted to extend a hearty congratulations to our colleague councilmember junie joseph who was just selected to be the nominee for the hd10 seat and the representatives the house of representatives congratulations we're very proud of you um although we will miss you when you have to resign early after what i'm sure will be a successful election in the fall so but congrats and uh let's see then can we move into a couple other announcements

[4:00] get on the screen here okay during the entire month of august rtd will offer zero fares across his system as part of the zero fare for better air initiative this collaborative statewide initiative made possible by colorado center bill 22 180 in partnership with the colorado energy office is designed to reduce ground level ozone by increasing use in public transit current rtd customers will also benefit as you will not have to use or purchase fair products from august 1st through the 31st during colorado's high housing season so by taking advantage of free transit in august you can save money on gas and parking avoid the frustration of driving in traffic help improve air quality by reducing single occupant vehicle traffic use your commute to catch up on work listen to music or read a book so for more information please visit our tds site at wwe denver dot com slash url i can't see because it's blocked

[5:02] um but go to their main site you'll find it from there oh this has got to turn notifications off sorry about that sir and no worries uh next coven 19 testing and vaccinations so for information provider locations for free kobe 19 testing you can go to www.voco.org testing the boulder site for that is 2445 stasio drive that's open seven days a week from 8 am to 6 pm and for vaccine information and provider locations you can go to www.boco.org covey the vaccine all right after those announcements i will go ahead and call us to order and release if we could do the roll call please yes sir thank you good evening everyone let's start with councilmember benjamin president mayor brockett president

[6:03] council member focus present mayor pro tem friend here council member joseph president spear present wallach here miner present and yates right here mayor we have our quorum thanks so much all right now let's talk about the agenda i actually want to bring up a couple of things here um so one is that the outdoor dining item has a bit of additional information to it so it's looking like that's going to take longer than 15 minutes just as an fyi it might be [Music] 30 minutes or so and also we had at cac this week we proposed to add under item 6b

[7:00] to add item 6b disposable bag feet and single use plastics option and an 8a living wage update from from councilmember volkerz there was also a hotline email from um our director and housing and human services about the discussion on day service and navigation center there is some concern though now with the meeting getting too long um so he did note that the next two upcoming provider meetings which um which are coming up soon will are open to the public um one second so those are open to the public so any member of the council can attend those but then there's the question of potentially setting up a process subcommittee for that so my proposal is that we talk about that at our study session next week to keep the meetings balanced and that if council is interested in forming that process subcommittee

[8:01] that we do so um probably on consent on september 1st so with all that so the proposal now is to then add to the agenda the item 6p for the disposable bag fee and 8a the living wage update if that has amenable council so that sounds good maybe somebody could make that motion don't move moved second okay motion second uh to mend the agenda all in favor hold your hand up that's everybody very good thanks the agenda is julie amended uh also now i want to uh turn it over to uh junie just for a quick announcement about her her evening so june if you want to speak to that please thank you so much and i just want to thank you mayor brackett for your kindness um thank you so much um also i am heading i'm part of the geographic naming board and the board is

[9:01] having a meeting so i might be have to step away from our council meeting for about 15 to 20 minutes but i'm here for the rest of the night thank you all right thanks for letting us know about that janine okay so now we can move forward with uh open comment so can we get explain our rules of decorum for that please yes thank you so much and we'll get the slides up um good evening everyone thank you my name is brenda richnauer i am from our communication and engagement department and your public participation facilitator on zoom this evening as some of you may know these slides well i appreciate your patience while we go through them for folks who have not joined us as often or might be joining us tonight for the very first time so um i'll just read through these quickly the city has engaged with community members to co-create a vision for productive meaningful and inclusive

[10:01] civic conversations this vision is designed to support the physical and emotional safety of community members staff and council as well as supporting democracy for people of all ages identities lived experiences and political perspectives we went through quite a process to design this vision and you can learn more about that um by going to our website bouldercolorado.gov and put in the search function productive atmospheres you can learn probably more than you'd ever want to know next slide next slide please there we go the following are examples of rules of our decor of our rules of decorum found in the boulder revised code and other guidelines that support our vision and these will be upheld during tonight's meeting all remarks and testimony shall be limited to matters related to city business no participant shall make threats or use

[11:00] other forms of intimidation against any person obscenity racial epithets and other speech and behavior that disrupts or otherwise impedes the ability to conduct the meeting are prohibited and participants are required to sign up to speak using the name they're commonly known by and individuals must display their whole name before being allowed to speak online currently only audio testimony is permitted and it does look like everyone is displaying their name at this point so thank you all so much for that if you think you need help with that please reach out to me in the q a box and we are ready to begin thanks so much brenda all right we've got 11 people signed up for open comment each one will get two minutes to speak our first three are ari all justin weiss and cass kyle castleberry should i start yes please okay i want to thank boulder city council for

[12:01] their time and consideration my name is dr arie all i am a physician and psychiatrist working in boulder colorado am here to talk about decriminalization of psychedelics in the past 10 years research has shown that psychedelics can have a profound effect on anxiety depression and trauma a single dose of psilocybin has much higher emission rates for depression than the traditional antidepressants we currently use in psychiatry in that same line mdma has been shown to have the highest efficacy for trauma and ptsd of any treatment tried so far as for safety studies have shown that in terms of harm to society and harm to the person taking the drug alcohol heroin and cocaine cause the most harm while mdma lsd and psilocybin cause the least harm of any illicit drug a recent study from the journal of psychopharmacology showed that those who use psychedelics are actually less likely to commit a crime than the general population

[13:01] denver has decriminalized psilocybin and a review panel by denver city council reported quote decriminalizing psilocybin mushrooms in the city and county of denver has not since created any significant public health or safety issue in the city as for addiction studies have shown that psychedelics have anti-addictive properties and can be used to treat diseases such as alcohol addiction furthermore due to the high tolerance that occurs immediately after taking psychedelics traditional psychedelics such as lsd and psilocybin are extremely hard if not impossible to use every day lowering the risk of abuse i ask that boulder city council make decriminalization of psychedelics a priority in order to end arrest and match our policy with the prevailing science thank you for your time thank you ari next we have justin weiss kyle castleberry and neil rasmussen hello everyone and thank you for taking the time to listen to me speak this evening my name is justin weiss and i'll

[14:00] also be speaking on the topic of decriminalizing visionary plants and fungi such as the psilocybin mushrooms dmt containing plants and preparations such as the ayahuasca brew and mescaline containing cacti so for the last seven years i've worked for the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies which is a non-profit dedicated to medicalizing and legalizing psychedelic drugs through the rescheduling and i've worked on the mdma ptsd trials therefore i've seen upfront the astounding power that these drugs have in addition to their surprising safety profiles while i envision legalization of these drugs the decriminalization approach is an incredible start so decriminalization would help destigmatize drugs that may have more dangerous legal ramifications than they do detriment to the body and brain so while there's a vast amount of scientific validation behind the benefits and safety of these substances i'm going to focus on the ramifications of these new findings themselves so the acceptance of psychedelic substances is becoming a mainstream happenstance with

[15:00] major names in science and journalism such as michael pollan openly advocating for reconsideration of drug laws more people are going to be curious about the current the current scheduling of these drugs which once again are right alongside life-threatening substances in their legal classifications so as cannabis legalization has become competent with progressivism i expect we'll see the same case with psychedelic plants and fungi there are a number of cities that have taken this approach as was just mentioned and as a consequence many non-violent drug users who no longer have the same risk of their lives being compromised by the legal ramifications so with increasing curiosity around the medical potential for so many of these substances we can only expect to see more people drawn to psychedelic alternatives for the ailments that they may help remedy decriminalization of psychedelic plants and fungi is a chance for boulder to continue being a safe and inclusive place to live thank y'all so much thank you justin we have kyle castleberry new rasmussen

[16:01] and laura musgrave hello council my name is kyle casselberry i'd like to take this opportunity to share a particular part of my personal story with you in 2017 at the age of 33 i found myself at the bitter end of my emotional and spiritual inaptitude up to this point i had struggled all my adult life to feel and relate to the experiences of my own life in a good and generative and connective way and so unable to relate to the experiences of others through connection and compassion like my brother mother her mother and a line of ancestors before them depression among us was configured in such a way as rendering us powerless in the face of inclement mental health to an unfortunate degree ayahuasca changed that for me and later

[17:02] other plants i'm also here today to voice my desire for boulder to decriminalize the use of entheogenic plants and fungi i don't use ayahuasca anymore i received the messages and the healing it defragmented and reconfigured me today i not only embrace my own life but truly create from it a fully engaged experience of joy pleasure co-creation and frankly happiness this allows me to actually touch the lives of others in a good way and it's a direct result of plant medicines my gifts in this life have since blossomed i share them frequently with my different communities three weeks ago i facilitated teaching children aged 7-13 at the boulder school of fine arts at artcam two days ago i facilitated teaching adults at a rich street over the course of five days i think plant medicines for these connections things growing from the earth should be sacrament not criminal

[18:02] thank you for your ear and for your time thank you god next we have neil rasmussen norma's grave and tammy brannon i am not seeing neil or noah at this point i do have some names on our participant list who are not on our registered list so if you are here neil or noah under a different name please reach out to me in the q a so we can get that changed and put you back in the line um so next we would go to tammy followed by patrick murphy tammy you should be able to unmute you may need to press star there you go you got it it looks like you sorry can you hear me yes okay thank you you can hear me okay yes

[19:01] okay thank you for this opportunity to speak to you all tonight my name is tammy brennan i'm a licensed clinical social worker in the state of colorado i've been practicing for over 23 years in health care primarily primarily in hospice palliative care and grief and loss over my years i've worked with hundreds of patients with major psychological needs that center around anxiety depression as well as emotional and existential distress today i'm hopeful with your support that soon psychedelics will become available to treat and help these patients and many more that you've heard from tonight we know now through research and in clinical trials at renowned institutions like john hopkins and many others across the u.s that psychedelics work and in some cases reports of 65 to 85 relief of the emotional existential distress of people who are at end of life not only are these treatments effective

[20:00] but the results can often be immediate following just one dose this is critically important for the people that i've worked with all these years who have often life limiting or terminal diagnoses they may have only weeks to months to live and traditional therapies and approaches that i've done over my 23 years often fall short of really being able to help relieve their suffering all of these patients i've mentioned and others especially the ones that have a life limiting diagnosis or a terminal diagnosis deserve to have access to psychedelics so that we as their providers and caregivers can help them live the remainder of their life with as much peace and comfort as possible i hope that you will see that boulder county could set a wonderful example take your time thank you very much for your testimony now we have patrick murphy sherry hack

[21:01] and lynn siegel my name is patrick murphy i've lived in boulder 53 years just like many of today's students i moved into the dorms but that was 53 years ago i've seen lots of changes in boulder but one consistently bad change has been boulder's failure to rationally attack climate change starting with the muni high aspirational narratives with lack of critical review and irrational goals that were filled with hype but ultimately hollowed out by lack of honest financial assessment the muni was the start and the current climate in action is the second act with many of the same actors slide two the current climate action leader spent

[22:00] more time on the muni than on his actual position slide 2 please as a supposedly separate climate and sustainability leader boulder seems to dwell in rhetoric such as more aggressive goals but little action slide two please this is sustained by a lack of real financial accountability and transparency for example it took a couple of years to get the muni to reveal their real budget to consume millions from other departments that included jonathan's department slide two please he and others just went along that muni obsession has tainted the thinking of bolder climate action to this day i watched last week's excel boulder advisory panel in true to form only a fraction of the panel attended and the session was more of a listing of good intentions lots of collaboration and very little action this bureaucratic heaven with lots of talk replaces a true cost-benefit analysis of any of the alternatives

[23:01] this is the opposite of what we need thanks for that slide accelerating goals is about the best thing they can do but based on the actual achievements i can almost guarantee failure since time and climate change are not slow but rather here now when we're asked for more climate action money in november be skeptical slide three uh patrick your time is up i'm great but thanks for your testimony well i had to say slide two over and over again uh to finish my last sentence yeah go ahead when we're asked for more climate action money in november be skeptical be very skeptical the planet burns floods and dies while boulder fiddles with climate change thanks patrick now we have sherry hack lynn siegel and darren o'connor i'm a 23-year resident of boulder i encourage all open comment speakers to identify their city of residence

[24:02] august 8th was just another normal monday in boulder here's a sampling of happenings from just that one day at southern hills middle school a man breaks windows and damages a police car with a 12-pound rock he also throws the rock at the police officer striking his knee and thigh seriously injuring him at a bus stop near whole foods a man holding a metal ray can hammer his menacing others and breaking glass 15 minutes prior police had just given him a summons for a theft at target the same suspect had been arrested for menacing on 7 23 he was also arrested on 5 6 for exposing his genitals to a father and his 13 year old daughter on the bike path this is a repeat offender who keeps getting released out to the community to do more harm on edison lane amanda scene convulsing either from drugs or a seizure he is violent towards the first responders and must be in restraints at the hospital he has issued a felony summons he was arrested again two days later this isn't even the tip of the iceberg of the multiple crimes that happen here daily city council majority

[25:02] are you paying attention recently one of you implied that we speakers were trying to make it seem like boulder was a scene out of the movie escape from new york in that movie they made manhattan into a place to incarcerate criminals however in boulder we mostly don't lock up criminals they say life imitates art there's a great movie called the town there's a scene in the movie where four criminals have just committed a crime a police officer sees them and they all lock eyes for a moment then the cop looks away and the criminals leave in a getaway car i'm not saying our boulder police ignore crime quite the opposite as they are getting injured and even killed to protect us but the majority of you on city council are looking away from the crime that is happening in boulder i invite city council members to join me in a field trip around boulder thank you for your kind attention thank you sharon next we have len siegel darren o'connor and steve comrades that line let's be real here the that wealth and equity is the problem here

[26:02] and we aren't going to inc improve any wealth inequity with all the subsidies that we're giving for development in this town we're just going to bring more people here first and more wealth and equity even more so you need to rethink your policy deeply and you know that on every corner you're seeing homeless people camping out everywhere it doesn't matter if you tell them oh in 48 hours you have to leave because another one and another one and another one's going to take their place and it it's just endless and the thought of sea south um and and the impact on water or water use you know this is this it's it's not just bad for the city of boulder it's bad for cu it's bad for everybody to just grow for the sake of growing

[27:00] it's just not feasible why don't you people have a video up for folks yet is this just a hick town in the middle of nowhere you know i'm not vaccinated i'm not gonna go out much you know i try to stay away i need zoom and yet i'm faceless to you why what's that about i see your faces why don't you want to see mine don't give me the same old excuse that it's bad actors come on get real there's no use blaming anything on the pandemic no it's that you don't want to see me well i want to be seen

[28:00] and i'm part of this community and i when i go out on the street i want you to know who i am why hide that just stop it with cu the millennium needs to be preserved stop already with all this growth thank you then for your testimony now we have darren o'connor and our last speaker steve comrades good evening boulder council members and staff my name is darren o'connor and i'm a local attorney that pays particular attention to police matters i'm also the criminal justice committee chair for the boulder naacp branch i come tonight to share concerns with policing and especially the ongoing calls for more and more funding for the boulder police department much of this is for new hires in support of this you

[29:01] are told by community members and by our police chief that crime is rising that a thicker thin blue line that is more police is what stands between a safe boulder and a boulder subject to terrorist attacks to white supremacist terrorism and to homeless individuals taking over the city sadly this narrative has landed with many in our community including many on council but taking homelessness as an example the police data on the impact of more police and city staff dedicated to this issue in boulder and let's not forget nearly three million extra dollars thrown at the problem is more people camping in public spaces policing cannot solve this problem it's been tried here before it's been tried countless other places the number one cause of homelessness is overwhelmingly the high cost of housing which boulder and the surrounding area has in spades criminalizing the poor souls who cannot afford a home is not the solution as for moore police it will not reduce

[30:00] the crime that the police chief recently presented to you via the chief's new data analyst i resent you a correlation study of the police's own data today that shows that hiring more police will not affect crime rates stop the insanity stop throwing money at the police budget and start funding the root causes of what too many in this town call crime being poor instead increase assistance hire peer navigators and place them in the library as just one alternative example council i call on you to love your neighbors and instead of hiring and seeking more police on them thank you thanks darren speaker steve pomerantz hi steve pomerance 335 17th street former council member i'm speaking about the uh failure of the ballot title for the referendum to repeal ordinance 8483 next slide please

[31:02] all right so i can see the slide system doesn't where we go okay problem with the proposed ballot title the ballot title sure ordinance 80 43 regarding the annexation of cu south be repealed is inadequate the problem is the word regarding is way too indefinite most voters do not want to know what ordinance 8483 does so this title does not provide the voter with necessary information as to the effect of a yes versus no vote next slide please the solution is very simple change the ballot title so it's specific should ordinance 8483 which annexes the land known as cu south and sets the terms thereof be repealed this language clearly distinguishes a yes from a no vote voters do not have to look up ordinance 8483 and it only adds seven words the charter and colorado statutes support making this change next slide please charter for section 48 which is the

[32:01] charter section that covers titles requires a clear concise statement descriptive of the substance of the measure which may be distinct from the legal title there's been an argument about that the the title was plucked from the uh initiative which by the way the uh sorry the petition which was written by the staff by the way uh next slide please the colorado statutes state consider public confusion that might be caused by misleading titles avoid titles for which the effect of a yes or no vote would be unclear and express the true intent of the meaning of the measure next slide please so to meet the charter requirements requirements of state law use the title that is i suggested this will clearly show the effect of a no yes versus no vote if you change it tonight finally but uh thank you for your time to get into the county clerk

[33:01] thank you so that that brings open comment to a close i'll turn to uh staff to see if there are any responses no responses on my end except just say for those interested in a conversation about homelessness we're having that on the annual homelessness update on september 1st and i believe that we have not yet rescheduled the munich and pd update which we usually talk about some stats there on crime and so as soon as we get that we will be sharing that with the public as well i'm sorry and i will note that uh neil rasmussen no muskrat did not join back in uh turn to council for any responses they might have nicole yeah i just had a question um first off i don't know if anyone from our police department is here tonight but one of the speakers um mentioned not sort of keeping people in

[34:01] jails who've had kind of repeat offenses and things like that my understanding was that it's the county that is responsible for that rather than the city and i was just wondering if staff could clarify that because my understanding is that we don't really have a say in that and it's the counties we do not i believe have anyone from pd here today but i will affirm that the jail system is not within our purview we do not control that um that is up to um the county uh as that moves forward so in the courts so that is not us okay thank you and so if people have concerns about um jailing and who who would be the correct person at the county to bring that to would that be the district attorney's office or someone else the sheriff i'm certain that they could bring it to both um and certainly if they're uh is someone specific i wouldn't know right now exactly who they are but the sheriff certainly would be um someone to speak to i think that would be the right

[35:00] person teresa i think you're nodding your head with me yes that's right the the jail falls under the authority of the of the county sheriff and so that would be the appropriate place to address concerns and and voice um uh feedback and opinions great thank you so much for that clarification is rachel interior yeah i just wondered um we've had a number of speakers over the last few months on like psychedelics and psilocybin mushrooms um and as someone who has been a community activist in the past uh it's i think it's helpful to get a little response from the people that you're advocating to so i didn't know if it was worth like a straw poll or brief discussion amongst ourselves is that something that that there are five people that do want to add that to the work plan or is there some feedback that we can give to petitioners on on ways that they may move forward with their goals from our perspective is that

[36:00] it's like a little discussion or anything we can have yeah and i'll just say that richardson thanks for for responding to those points but um i think without putting something in the agenda i wouldn't do a straw poll but i would welcome people to to speak to their interest in moving something like this forward uh tonight if they're assuming and uh but but uh also you know not i my goal would not be to try to inhibit anyone's first amendment rights to speak to us i just think it's helpful if we give give some um feedback i'll turn to teresa you may have something relevant to say here um i do and i want to correct some earlier uh advice that i gave and it is appropriate under matters from council for you all to take up items that were brought up under public comment and so that's certainly something that you could do tonight in my apologies for not having that information at my fingertips fingertips last time we discussed it

[37:02] okay um thanks thanks teresa the meeting may get a little long tonight so i think we could come back to if we have time but um and um rachel did you want to offer anything else just i guess my perspective is i i think we've got a pretty uh full work plan so i'm not personally uh probably going to advocate for us to add this to our work plan um but i think it's it's helpful um to again just just give some feedback whatever that me may be from colleagues for how people could move this forward whether that's a getting signatures for a ballot initiative or a county measure things like that so i don't know when the appropriate time to discuss it is but i feel like people are doing a lot of work and and um it's respectful of us to respond to that yeah i think it's a great point so we can see if we have

[38:01] 10 minutes to maybe talk about it tonight or perhaps in another business meeting at times sometimes if we do not and people have quick thoughts for the moment feel free to offer them um but we probably don't want to take 10 or 15 minutes plus right now on top of mark and then tear uh yeah i mean we have a pretty full agenda i'm not sure that that i want to veer off and and get heavily into the area of psychedelics but what i would like to understand is what the state of um sciences you know we have references from speakers that some studies have shown i don't know which studies those are i don't know how many there are are there countervailing studies it would be helpful to me if somebody could uh tell us a little bit more about uh where the state of the medical profession is with respect to this and is this a uh does this represent uh you know the majority opinion among

[39:01] uh physicians and scientists or is it simply a a fringe opinion i have no way of knowing but it would be nice if we did know um my second comment um is [Music] what is the appropriate time to discuss mr pomeranz's comments about the referendum or the language of the referendum so uh what i might say is so right after the consent agenda we'll be doing the continued um public hearing on that topic so how about we have the full discussion matter at that time rather than the response to open comment if that's right that'll be great thanks thanks here about one i was going to ask the same thing that mark just asked in regards to steve pomeran so thanks for that mark i do want to say that if we are going to ask i don't think it i think we need council

[40:00] approval to ask for staff to do anything about um the whole what's the word silas help me here yeah issue i agree with her that i just don't think we have time or resources to to deal with at this time so i don't know mark if we should even get into it i think we have to decide that first personally thanks bob lauren i was just gonna make a request if if and when we get to it i agree we don't have time tonight and and we may not have time on this um this council's uh we're planning this year but if even when we have that discussion two two pieces of information that would be helpful for me i i have a dim recollection that may be incorrect that there's um some state ballot measures on the subject it'd be nice to know from the state attorney's office what those are um and maybe some of the requests that are being made of us might be made moved by whatever that um result of that voting might be the

[41:00] second is is i know there's there's been some requests for decriminalization if we again if we ever get to this discussion it would be helpful to understand from our police department what type of criminal enforcement there has been around these substances yeah i'd support bringing up this under council matters either tonight or in another meeting i think similarly to what rachel said i would really appreciate sort of understanding what kind of lift this would be from staff and what sort of the options are so you know if it's not taken as a council priority what options the um petition you know what other options there might be for this to be brought forward by the community mary and then i'll call him myself to that end i was just thinking and reminded that um this would require the kind of research that you're asking both

[42:01] from the decriminalization aspect and what the state of medical research is what it is nationally would likely require a nod of three to pursue this kind of uh research for your handbook so as you are thinking about it whenever the topic comes up just know that we will likely need um to know that there are folks in agreement that we actually invest some time and resources into this yeah and i'll call myself because i think um there's probably the threshold question about whether resources should be devoted to getting some of these answers and and i will note as bob brought out about about the ballot measure my understanding is that there is a ballot measure that is qualified for the statewide ballot that would set up kind of healing centers that would be allowed to dis dispense psilocybin but also my understanding is it would also decriminalize um those substances statewide so it feels like in just um three months here we're going to see whether this is effectively done right at the state level so i think that's very relevant personally

[43:03] all right if that's good enough for that topic or the any others from open comment we can move on on that and we'll we'll see when we can squeeze in a another touch on a short touch on this and um under matters tonight or another businessman okay um that brings us to our consent agenda i believe all right sir our consent agenda on tonight's agenda is item number three and it includes items three a through three i would any questions or comments on the consent agenda lauren yeah so as i i sent out a hotline um and i would like to recommend adopting the alternative language that i emailed out for option i

[44:00] um in regards to our in-person hybrid meeting setup i think it's a short amendment so do you mind just uh reading out what that change would be so everybody's familiar with what you're talking about yes let me put it in front of my face real quick um sorry and i mean you could even let us know about it in the form of emotion okay i would like to motion and do you want me to read the whole thing or just the change i think you can say the whole consented agenda but with this particular change okay or i'd like to motion that we change

[45:02] um or the brc212 to add the clarifying language the council or city managers ability to exclude or limit public from in-person attendance shall be limited to meetings where public health or safety concern exists and similarly for 231 i would like to add the clarifying language the city board or commission's ability to exclude or limit public participation from in-person attendance shall be limited to meetings where a public health or safety concern exists and this is for item i the second reading and consideration of a motion to adopt by emergency measure ordinance eight five four five um amending sections two 212

[46:02] and 2-2.5-11-231 allowing for boards and commissions and the city council members to attend meetings virtually or in person and setting forth related details thanks do you mind just changing your initial language to i move the consent agenda with the amendment i move the consent agenda with the aforementioned amendment great and sandra did you want to add something there um thank you mayor yes uh and lorne did a great job reading that off um the only thing i would ask is that um if we could also include in that motion that the alternate ordinance 85 45 is passed just to be clear where that language falls within the ordinance okay i notion that we passed the consent

[47:01] agenda including ordinance 85 45 but with the aforementioned amendments to section two one two and two three one of the boulder revised code dude sandra the alternate ordinance 85-45 okay i motion so there was a uh there was an alternate ordinance 8545 that was attached to the hotline that includes this new language and that's the one i think that you want to pass yes indeed i would like to move forward the consent agenda including the alternate ordinance 8545. online as sent out on hotline

[48:02] okay good i do have a second then we'll go to mark second okay motion a second uh mark did you want to speak to this yeah a quick question with respect to the boards and commissions who will be making that determination as to a public health concern that permits a virtual meeting will it be the boarding commission itself will it be you're muted sandra is trying to answer you i think she just didn't realize i'm so sorry i was muted thank you for your question mark um it it is in fact the boards and commissions that would make that determination okay thank you thank you all right any further discussion

[49:02] seeing none let's uh do a roll call vote here on the consent agenda is amended all right sir we'll start tonight's roll call vote with councilmember yates yes benjamin yes mayor brockett yes councilmember fokkers yes mayor pro tim friend yes councilmember joseph i will abstain because i didn't hear the full conversation thank you council member spear yes wallach aye and weiner yes mayor the consent agenda items a through i is hereby approved

[50:01] with the noted amendments to adopt the alternate ordinance 85 45 8 to 1. thanks although i believe in extension technically counts as a yes i was gonna add and i just realized it was the concept agenda and yes i think it's fine i think it technically counts as a yes great can we move on to our continued public hearing adam now please all right sir we have item number five on tonight's agenda which is our public hearings 5a is the continued second reading of the following ballot items we have ordinance 8534 which is related to the annexation referendum of cu south 8539 which is related to the library district formation and

[51:01] changes to our charter if that district is formed 8540 is related to council candidates and how candidates can run in the election 8546 is related to changing our elections the municipal elections to even years and 85 42 is related to the climate action tax thanks kathy are you going to speak to where we are here yes i am thank you mayor and good evening council um i do have slides that sometimes makes this easier and you can go ahead the second slide thank you um here's a list of the ordinances that you had public hearing on last week and some discussion and all of the ordinances were continued until tonight ordinance 8534 about the

[52:00] referendum on cu south in the hotline packet you received section five the safety clause was changed as you requested 8539 is a repeal of the charter library provisions that does not have any change and um so we'll just continue it tonight so that all the ballot measures will be finally adopted or finally considered and and potentially adopted on september 1st 8540 is clarifying the candidate provisions of the charter and that again has no changes 8546 is even near candidate elections and i have a slide for that and 8542 is the climate tax and debt authorization next slide please um the with respect to 8534 is a referendum on cu south um august 11 council requested that section 5 the safety clause be

[53:00] changed to say that the that this was adopted pursuant to the constitution and the charter rather than as necessary for the safety of the city and for ordinance five four six about even year elections the um language that we added um that council requested be added the to the ballot language that the november election date in 2026 and thereafter should be the same date as the state ballot issue election um nicole raised a good point that we have ballot issue elections every year and a better phrasing of that would be to say the same date as the general state election so i'd recommend that change to what was hotline and then the other change to that one was that the term of the mayor extends until a successor is served that the person is

[54:00] not required to next slide please this is amendments to the climate tax that are recommended by staff after we looked at it more carefully went through thought that there were some easier more clear ways that things could have been worded so um and there was a mistake in that admissions was not plural we want to consistently use the term incentives rather than use alternate synonyms that could have different definitions eliminate the limitation on undergrounding to high risk areas a limitation a limitation on financial assistance for low-income utility customers so that it's just it can be financial assistance to them and clarify the final language of methods to participate with public or private financing in the code language um we eliminated the restriction on spending for greenhouse gas emission

[55:00] targets to to make it as broad as all the climate goals of the city we added two new categories in the list of use of funds that are consistent with the ballot issue that were not in the um original ordinances drafted and gave the complete definition of cpi rather than the abbreviation in the code next slide please so i'm happy to have answer any questions that you have and if it's helpful the motions since you have to do motions for each of these separately do have a slide for those motions when you get to the point of making the motions on them thanks so much for that kathy i'll just get us started there was some interest i think from multiple council members in addressing um the the questions that were raised by steve pomerance and the open comment testimony and uh and i'll just add to that i think um because you all sent an email

[56:01] over to him or some other folks who had similar concerns recently that mentioned that there are charter requirements that lead us to the existing language and so if maybe you could elaborate what those charter how what what it is in the charter that we're complying with with that particular language sure he's happy to the requirements of the charter are that the um that the charter language be clear and concise and not use arguments for against and we have interpreted that as also being complete which it's hard to be clear and concise when you're abbreviating you know i forget how long the cu south annexation ordinance is but one of the problems with the change to the language that was recommended by the committee is it says that the ordinance just annexes the cu south property when the ordinance does a whole lot more than just annex the property and so why that we went with the staff recommended language that it's regarding

[57:00] the annexation of that property the main reason we went with the language that's in the ordinance is because that's the language that was on each page of the referendum petition that was signed by the people that endorsed the petition the other thing i think is important to know is that um when mr pomerance was referring to this he was talking about the staff that it was staff's wording for the initiative there was an earlier initiative but what's on the ballot now is a referendum and staff does not drop that they can make comments but they the committee does not have to pay attention to the comments and i frankly don't know if there were comments even given to the committee on that one um the other thing is in the language originally requested which is different than what mr promise requested tonight there was a summary of what would happen if the ordinance was repealed that is

[58:01] different than what section 50 of the charter says if the ordinance is repealed so mainly because it's the um language that's in the referendum petition itself that is in the ordinance is the reason that we're recommending that that the council keep it that way and also to make sure that we aren't misleading the voters into thinking that the ordinance only annexes the property um it does more than just annex the property thanks kathy that's very helpful does anyone have any follow-up questions on that matter mark yeah kathy are we legally precluded from changing the language to something along the lines that mr pomerantz uh suggests the ballot titles are set by council so if you want it's not like you're legally recruited

[59:01] from doing anything since it's up to council to do but you the charter does give you direction on how to do it okay of course but that's risky okay mayor brockett is this a good time to comment or or just questions uh we'll just finish our questions and then get the comments here okay any other questions rachel i guess just want to make sure i'm following um kathy's advice here or feedback would you say that um you know to to mark's point that we can change language you just said something about i think risky is is the least risky route to keep the language that the petitioners had on their on their petition um and i'm i guess i'm wondering like if i signed a petition and that language is in there and then we change it that's maybe um an an odd thing for us to do and not in keeping with what people thought they were signing

[60:02] yes to your question and the only reason i'm being hesitant is because there are several ways for people to challenge a ballot title after it is set um and so that's only one way i would say that's one of the prime ways so yes you're making it far less risky to use that same language so if we stick with what we have already in the packet tonight that is that does not increase risk if we change it it might increase risk yes okay thanks but isn't what steve's saying that he wants that's more important to him than risk changing about language so i i would think that and i guess this is a comment i don't know if it's a question or comment but if i can't understand a ballot question that's really frustrating for me when i'm as a voter so i think that is super important is that not

[61:01] true that that's a bigger risk um it is your question is it a bigger risk that voters won't understand well i'm not i don't believe that what has been proposed by the committee is more clear that's what's in the ordinance that we've given you in fact i think it's misleading one two if you think that the ordinance language is i'm sorry the ballot language is unclear you absolutely can change that i would recommend changing it in a way that's clear and concise and accurately reflects the ordinance rather than just takes pieces of it bob thanks cathy that's a great segue into my follow my question um so if we if we were to go down the path which sounds like you're recommending we don't but if if a majority in council wanted to go down this path of changing the language different from what was on the petition pages

[62:02] it sounds like you're recommending that if we're going to go down that path we would need to kind of enumerate invalid title not only um the annexation but all the other things that that ordinance did that ordinance did a lot of things and so we'd have to kind of go through and say if you repeal this ordinance you're also going to do this and this and this and this and this and this it would be a pretty long title right i mean it did a lot of things on origins am i correct yes if you want to be as precise as saying it it just annexes the proper you know the specifics rather than just regarding annexation say it specifically annexes i think you have to start going through the other things that it does and yes thanks kathy okay looks like that's it for questions people want to jump in with comments before we get started on the motion making uh mark you had one i know um this is coming from somebody who does not support repealing the ordinance and i do not support the

[63:00] referendum and will certainly vote against it in november but i do think there is a certain lack of clarity uh to the language that we're using um i think uh the language proposed by mr pomerantz gets more to the heart of the matter um and i don't know that we need to go down each and every provision i wouldn't have a problem with that as well if we want to uh show the community all the things that they will be um repealing if if they uh if they pass this referendum um but as again coming from somebody who does not favor this referendum or the repeal of what we have done i am also not afraid of clarity um and of you know being upfront and transparent to our community i don't think that the more we are transparent the the greater

[64:02] our risks are of of defeat with respect to this so i i would actually urge that we be a little more uh detailed and transparent than we are because i think the more that we do that uh the greater our chances are of being successful in uh november um as opposed to this rather vague uh you know regarding uh language which i just don't think gets to the heart of the matter um and that's just you know my two cents on it so thank you thanks mark rachel matt tara i guess my concern is um you know the the petitioners chose that language and as i understand it put it on every page of you know the the petition that they had people sign and if we change that and they um you know aren't successful in their referendum then then i think anybody who signed that petition can say city council put something on that's

[65:00] different than what we signed it was changed it wasn't what we wanted um so i i think if there's if if there's risk to us changing the language i would not want to do anything that that could could result in in problems for saving lives through flood mitigation being accomplished so that's my concern so i would you know i understand the petitioners maybe i don't know have buyers remorse about their language but i think that we we go with their language because they put it on their petition and that's what sounds like the safest route for us to do so that's that's what i would like us to do thanks rachel matt and tara i'll call myself thanks aaron um i guess a couple things uh one i think it's a little concerning that if this was the language that was on uh each of the signature pages uh that went out to people to sign it and yet the people that put this together are saying that that itself is ambiguous language it

[66:00] maybe calls into question what was being signed by the residents themselves and the ambiguity of that language at the heart of it so that sort of throws a lot up in the air um in that capacity begs a lot to question um the but i would say in terms of where to go over here i would either stick with the language we have or or really if we're gonna go down the full path of transparency then we need to you know go down that laundry list like bob said of stating everything that's gonna be repealed um that's full transparency and if that's what they want then i don't think we can sort of get some transparency or clarity let's just go full throttle so i'd say keep it the way it is or give the whole whole laundry list sure yep i agree with mark that i wish it was uh i agree that it should be more transparent but i am concerned about timing because it takes us an awful long time to find the right language here on this council never mind agreeing to new language i can't imagine that's going to take a short time so that is my biggest concern

[67:01] that we would even be able to figure this out language-wise in enough time calling myself um so i find particularly persuasive that it's the the language that was in the petition itself so it feels fundamentally like we should stick with that and then i also although secondarily find persuasive that that it is not fully accurate to say that it is reversing the annexation because of all the other things that that ordinance does so um we appreciate the chance to talk this through um but i feel like we really should put on the ballot what was in what people were citing during the petition signing process so i'd like to stick with our current language personally and maybe i'll call our first draw poll here in a second before we move on but rachel just real quick want to add you know in terms of going into the laundry list i mean had that been included in the petitioner's language i i also wish it were you know more ideal language but uh in that it wasn't you know if there's

[68:01] risk to changing it that also seems like an additional layer of risk for we're massively changing it at that point so if we're if we're worried about like clarifying with three words uh i would think 300 words would be even more risky so um if people are all right for how about a quick straw poll on who would prefer to stick with the existing language let's just phrase it that way and see how the answer get there all right we gotta we got a strong majority on that one nicole did sorry did you hop in there no i'm gonna um stay out of this one just given my employment let's see thanks for clarifying that okay so it looks like we we've got a majority who want to stick with the existing language uh thanks for that discussion are there any other questions or comments on any of the other [Music] items that we're going to move forward here with that thanks aaron um

[69:01] with regards to 8546 i had sent a sent an email to kathy about um just a switching of words since we're already gonna be modifying uh that it was with regards to um really being again for talking about clarity um separating the true ask of are we moving to even your elections and separating the mechanics in the language and and really the easiest way to do that is to just take um at the very end to implement the transition and just move that up to where we actually talk about what that transition is um and so it would basically just read um you know uh shallow sections 5 14 22 the voter home rule charter be amended to change the regular municipal election date to even number years on the same date as the uh well as we said general state ballot election or at least language that was recommended by kaffi beginning november 2026 election date and to implement the

[70:00] transition reduce the term of the council members so it allows the implementation to break that from what the ask is of even year versus the mechanics of how we get there so i think it's the cleaner way for the reader and voters to understand exactly what part is even year the ask versus the mechanics of how we get there so i just wanted to recommend that since we're already modifying this ordinance i think it cleans it up a little bit better captain did you want to respond to that or i'm absolutely fine with that change matt did um send the the the request earlier which i very much appreciate um since it's not a legal issue it's totally up to you guys it's it's moving a phrase from the beginning of what it's modifying rather than afterwards which makes sense thanks nicole yeah i think it's a nice change just for clarity in terms of reading through the measure um and my my only question was

[71:00] legally is it okay sounds like yes it is um so i i would be in support of that change um as well as just the uh the change that i mentioned via hotline great all right well noted and so how about we go ahead and move into the passing of these ordinances and some motions here so could we get that language up on the screen please kathy you said you had slides for that sure it's a slide right after questions i believe is where it starts we can do that i don't know if it's emily or lisa who's doing slides so we perfect so this is the these are laid out in the order that we've been presenting them is that okay or do you want to go to that image first and when you have here in the motion to amend and pass that amendment means the ones that were included and

[72:01] sent out a few days ago to online writer yesterday exactly and that amendment refers to changing um the safety clause in section five of this ordinance that you're putting it on the ballot not for the health wealth or health safety and welfare but because it's required by the constitution and the charter all right someone want to jump in rachel um okay i make a motion to amend i i mean do i just need to read this slide that we're wearing i make a motion to amend and pass ordinance 8534 submitting to the registered electors of the city of boulder at the special municipal coordinated election to be held on tuesday november 8 2022 the question of whether to repeal ordinance 84 83 regarding the annexation of cu south specifying the form of the ballot and other election procedures and setting forth related details second

[73:01] the motion in a second any further discussion seeing none elise are these all roll call votes yes they are sir all right we'll start this roll call with councilmember benjamin yes mayor brockett yes councilmember falcons yes mayor pro tem friend obligatory yes council member joseph yes spear i will abstain given my employment with cu truly noted thank you ma'am councilmember wallach while i remain disappointed in the language we have used i will vote yes whiner i did owe mark and i will vote

[74:01] yes in the aids yes ordinance 8534 is hereby approved this is one of the the um motions or the ballot issues that you did not have any change to um the motion was to last week on august 11th was to continue everything to keep these on the same date we're asking you to approve this one and the next one just as a continuation to september first or to the second reading very good and i think we can just leave these slides up while we're going through this process just to make a little quicker all right someone jump on this one

[75:07] i motioned to continue ordinance 8539 submitting to the registered electors of the city of boulder at the special municipal coordinated election to be held tuesday november 8th 2022 a question of whether to amend section 65 102 and 130 and repeal sections 69 132 133 and 134 from the boulder home rule charter if the initiative to create the lib create a library district on the boulder county ballot is approved at this election specifying the form of the ballot and other election procedures and setting forth related details you have a second second thanks alicia since this is a continuance can we just do a show of

[76:00] hands yes sir all right all in favor of continuing this one that looks like that's unanimous by counting correctly very good next this is another one just to continue it who wants this one genie motion to continue ordinance 8540 submitting to the registered electors of the city of boulder at the special municipal coordinated election to be held on tuesday november 8 2022 the question of whether to amend section 5 and 9 of the boulder home rule charter to prohibit running for more than one office at an election allow a council member whose term does not expire

[77:00] at the election to run for mayor in the election fill a vacancy for the expired term and change the swearing-in date of newly elected officials specifying the form of the ballot and other election procedures and setting forth related details second second great and this one can also be a show of hands we've got a motion in a second all in favor all right that looks unanimous great next this one is one that will be a little bit we have two amendments to this um so we have the motion with the amendments to move the language to implement the transition

[78:00] up in the ballot issue and to change the language from the general state or the state general election to i'm sorry to change the language from the state ballot issue election to the state general election i would love to make this motion if i can awesome just just one moment nicole and kathy is it is it possible to kind of get those changes on screen at all because we've had a couple changes that have come fairly recently i think it'd just be helpful to have some clarity on exactly the language um i am on vacation and so working from my uh personal computer and my home computer so i will try to figure out a way to do that um i don't know how quick i think i'll be able to read it that way with the changes um if that works aaron while we wait for it to kind of come up on on screen that that's great nicole if you're

[79:00] prepared to enumerate those those changes i'll do my best okay motion to amend and pass ordinance 8546 submitting to the registered electors of the city of boulder at the special municipal coordinated election to be held on tuesday november 8 2022 the question of whether to amend sections 5 14 and 22 of the boulder home rule charter to change the regular municipal elections of candidates to even numbered years beginning in 2026. oh um beginner sorry i already messed it up okay two even-numbered years on the same date as the state general election beginning with the november 2026 election date and to implement the transition reduce the term of the council members elected in 2023 and 2025 to three years

[80:02] and increase the term of the mayor elected in 2023 to three years specifying the form of the ballot and other election procedures and setting forth related details and i'll check back in with kathy you enumerated that well nicole i was just wondering if that if it's doable to get that exact language and if it's not it's not um i do have it up if somebody can give me um permission to share my screen and what i did is just the amendment which i believe that um nicole covered i want to say thanks to kathy while she's working on that for doing this from afar on vacation

[81:00] absolutely thanks i'm um yeah oh okay i'm sorry i needed to push another button otherwise you're gonna see my stuff from all the work the workshop i'm doing um so i think you see that language this is just the amendment and i think that um nicole mentioned these both but is that accurate for your motion yes and i just want to just confirm with matt that that is correct in terms of your change matt yep that works for me perfect okay great so we've got a motion in a second and as clarified by kathy showing us the details this is a roll call yes sir and we'll start this roll call with you mayor brockett yes council member philip kurtz yes mayor pro tem friend

[82:00] yes councilmember joseph yes spear yes wallach emphatically no whiner um no yates no and benjamin well i'll close it with a yes all right ordinance 8546 is hereby approved with a vote of six to three alicia and we'll get that last slide out please all right you want us to take this one aaron i haven't done one i'll do this one all right i move that we amend and pass ordinance

[83:01] number eight five four two submitting to the registered electors of the city of boulder at the special municipal coordinated election to be held on tuesday november 8 2022 the questions of authorizing the city council to replace the existing utility occupation tax and climate action plan excise tax with a new climate tax beginning january 1 2023 expiring december 31 2040 and authorizing debt to be repaid from such tax up to a principal amount of 52 million 900 000 to meet the city's climate goals specifying the form of the ballot and other election procedures and setting forth related details second all right we got a motion in a second one more roll call yes sir thank you we'll start with councilmember folkerts yes mayor pro tem friend yes councilmember joseph yes

[84:00] spear yes wallach yes weiner yes yates yes benjamin yes and mayor brockett yes ordinance 8542 is hereby approved unanimously wonderful okay thanks everyone kathy a huge thank you for joining us from your uh vacation and helping us get through this really appreciate it thank you i appreciate you putting it at the beginning of the agenda have a good evening all right me too all right uh elisha can we move to our other public hearing please yes sir thank you item 5b on tonight's agenda is the public hearing and consideration of the following items related to a petition to annex a 1.087 acre property generally known at 302 arapahoe avenue and 334 rapido

[85:00] avenue that is referenced under lur 2021-0003 so a consideration of a motion to adopt resolution 1314 is our first item and that is setting fourth findings of facts and conclusions regarding the annexation of a 1.087 acre property and we have the second reading and consideration of a motion to adopt ordinance 8522 annexing to the city of boulder a 1.087 acre property with an initial zoning designation of residential medium dash 3 rm3 as described in chapter 9-5 modular zone systems brc 1981 amending the zoning district map forming a part of said chapter to include the property in the above mentioned zoning district and select setting for related details that was a mouthful sloan we're going to send it to you

[86:00] oh yes thank you alicia let me pull up my presentation okay i'm hoping you're seeing the presentation all right um so as alicia described tonight i'm presenting an application for the annexation of an approximately one acre site located at 302 and 334 arapaho avenue with an initial zoning designation of residential medium three the application i apologize could you introduce yourself to i'm sorry i failed too um so i am sloan walbert i'm in the planning department and i'm the case manager on this application um so the applicant has requested annexation in order to develop the site within the city

[87:00] so just to provide some history on june 21st council considered the annexation petition for the annexation and also first reading of ordinance 8522 tonight council is considering second reading of the annexation ordinance and a public hearing is required for this type of annexation in response to the public notice staff received some inquiries from neighboring property owners but all of the formal feedback was sent directly to council you may hear from some of those members of the public tonight planning board reviewed the proposed annexation and the initial zoning on may 26th the board voted to recommend council approval of the request and the annexation agreement that was sent to council as part of the meeting packet was modified based on the planning board recommendations so in terms of review processing criteria for this annexation request the state statutes limit the type of

[88:00] land that may be annexed the applicant is requesting annexation by petition the annexation must also meet the policies of the boulder valley comprehensive plan and other ordinances of the city and most notably in order to reduce the negative impact of new development the comprehensive plan states that the city will annex land with significant development or redevelopment potential only if the annexation provides a special opportunity to the city or a community benefit and then um lastly when is it when a property is annexed zoning is established according to the land use designation on the land use map of the comprehensive plan and it's also needs to be consistent with existing development patterns and just as a note the property is not required to complete concept plan or site review because it doesn't meet the minimum thresholds however they could request a voluntary site review

[89:01] so moving on to the project site the annexation area is located in west boulder south of arapahoe the site is bordered by the city limits on both the north and east the surrounding area is eclectic with a mix of commercial office buildings different housing types developed in both the city and county and public lands even g fine park is located across arapahoe and city open space lands are located directly to the south the site is located in area two on the planning areas map of the comprehensive plan area 2 is the service area of the city where annexation can be considered the site is designated as medium density residential on the land use map with a planned density range of 6 to 14 dwelling units per acre the land use is characterized by a variety of housing types the applicant is requesting residential

[90:00] medium 3 zoning staff estimates that the zoning would allow up to 13 units on the site and as you can see in this bird's eye view the site sits on the northern flank of flagstaff mountain the site is constrained by some steep slopes the ditch buffer and a number of mature trees on the south end of the site the parcel fronting on arapahoe contains three single-family homes constructed in the 1960s these homes are connected to city water and sewer services through an out-of-city permit and the southern parcel at 302 arapahoe contains a single-family home originally constructed in circa 1900 with some additions that have been made since then this property is accessed from an unimproved access road that is considered boulder county right of way this home is connected to city water services but my understanding is that it has a septic system a historic survey was submitted by the

[91:00] applicant which found that this structure lacks architectural integrity and that there's no evidence that it was associated with any important historic event so the annexation agreement is written to anticipate future development of the property some of those provisions include conveyance of a ditch easement for the anderson ditch dedication of right-of-way along arapahoe avenue construction of a six foot wide detached sidewalk also along arapahoe payment of plant investment fees closure of that access point i just described on what's referred to as starak road and then requirement that all trees that are removed as part of the construction are replaced on a one-to-one basis um so as i mentioned development potential exists under the proposed zoning in order to meet that requirement to provide a special opportunity or benefit to the city the applicant is proposing to construct affordable

[92:00] housing on site the agreement requires that all units constructed are for sale units 50 percent of the new units are deed restricted affordable units i would just note that the applicant receives a credit for the four existing homes 50 of the units would be priced to be affordable to households earning between 100 and 120 ami 50 of the affordable units would be priced um between 120 and 150 ami each affordable unit would be a town home or detached single-family home with a garage and each affordable unit has a defined minimum size and likewise each market rate unit has a defined maximum size to ensure some degree of long-term affordability as described in the memo staff finds that the annexation is consistent with the statutory and constitutional requirements the site meets the required continuity

[93:00] to the city there's also a community interest to annex the property and the area is capable of being integrated into the city in terms of policies on annexation the site may be considered due to its designation as an area 2 property and staff finds that the proposed affordable housing provided at time of redevelopment satisfies that requirement for community benefit the annexation is consistent with overall housing policies in the comprehensive plan it would development would add to the housing base of the city and result in more for sale permanently affordable residential units which would address the need for more ownership opportunities in line with the adopted middle-income housing strategy in terms of zoning as i described the property is designated as medium density residential which typically has a range of 6 to 14 dwelling units per acre

[94:00] all of the medium density residential medium districts are appropriate in this density range and interestingly enough all three rm districts are also found in the vicinity thus the proposed rm3 zoning is appropriate based on this analysis staff recommends approval and action in the form of the motion shown on the screen and as always happy to answer any questions thanks so much for that slo do we have questions rachel and bob that's a lovely flower picture sorry i'm trying to bring it down there we go thank you rachel you're asking you don't want bob to go now you had your i thought you had your hand up first but yeah i didn't have number two okay bob sorry um either way um thanks for this one that was very helpful so i um i understand that um the

[95:03] zoning that we designate here will um have some impact on what can be built here i also understand that the zoning that we designate must be consistent with the comp plan the boulder valley comprehensive plan and i also understand that we cannot amend the bullet comprehensive plan i think i heard you mention at the very end there of your presentation that there's actually three choices of zoning rm3 is what's being recommended i think was unanimously approved by the by the planning board could you mention briefly the two other um zoning district possibilities and why staff recommends the rm3 as opposed to the other two sure i actually have a slide for that so let me bring that up um so i think one of the reasons that i was supportive of rm3 is that it's deter the dens the allowable density or intensity of development is determined

[96:00] by a minimum lot area versus an open space requirement the rm1 district it's an open space requirement so without a very detailed well-developed site plan it's it would be very hard for us to anticipate how many dwelling units they would be able to develop and also unless you go through a site review you're limited in including steep slope areas in an open space calculation so it would just be more restrained which is why i estimated about 10 units in that case when comparing rm2 and rm3 there's really just more allowances for different types of residential development in the rm3 as you can see they'd be allowed to do congregate care residential care custodial care i i don't think that that's their plan at this point but it felt appropriate to allow for greater flexibility considering that there's quite a diversity of uses in the

[97:01] surrounding area thanks so much just to play back to you sounds like rm1 would be problematic for a bunch of reasons and so rm2 and rm3 would be the logical ones and but under either rm2 or rm3 the number of units that could be placed there would be up to 13 in either instance um and so you're recommending rm3 is that right that's correct thanks rachel and then then we've got mark thanks erin thanks sloane i just wanted to make sure i understood what happened with the access road issue the planning board unanimously recommended that we um kind of see to and make sure that there was uh i think a safe public access in perpetuity um so that was a motion that looks like it was unanimous and then the staff notes say that uh

[98:00] it's gonna be sort of unrelated to this annexation so i don't know how we respond to planning boards motion or if we have to go back to them and say it doesn't work or how that works and if it's if i'm reading that correctly that we can't do what they best um yeah i think the intent was just that there was a lot of concern about maintaining public access there particularly because um you know there's a pretty popular trail and open space so it is currently used by the public um but we tried to include a lot of detail about what the current status is and how um you know the city is limited and what we could do at this point um but i don't think there's a requirement to communicate anything back to planning board i think they just had a strong desire to bring that up as a concern okay i mean because the the language of the motion was like ensure that public access remains and i don't so it seemed like more than uh have a look at it

[99:00] but it sounds like we can't do more so to make sure that we search tied that up with a bow well first thank you sloan that was a very helpful um and clear presentation and i appreciate it um in reading the the staff memo and i don't mean to put you on the spot but there was one thing that was making my head explode on on page 16 it says the proposed agreement would limit newly constructed market rate units to 3 300 square feet of floor area and require those units to be for sale in furtherance of the goals of the middle income housing strategy as 3 300 square foot townhouses are likely to be selling in well in excess of two million dollars what's the nexus between that limitation

[100:00] and our middle income housing strategy or was that simply something that slipped in and is simply an accurate wording um well i'm not sure i'm able to speak to the history of the middle income housing strategy i think michelle allen may be on the call and be able to provide that background hello michelle allen housing and human services i'm the inclusionary housing program manager and i also do the negotiations for affordable housing and annexations so mark i think you're right i think that um that's a bit of a um i think it kind of slipped in there the the the size restriction on the home is intended to make sure that very very large homes are not built on the market um market homes um so that's the size that we have been using as a reasonable size to restrict market homes um which otherwise might be

[101:00] six or seven thousand square feet um and it is a little bit to keep the price down but also just to ensure that very very large homes aren't being built through annexations all right can we then agree that this really has very little to do with furthering middle income housing strategy because that's really the affordable affordable prices that are mentioned are middle-income pricing i understand for the smaller units but but the the the limitation to 3 300 feet really has no nexus to enhancing middle income housing it's whether whether the houses are 3 300 or 4 500 that all that's pretty expensive um that's not what's going to enhance middle-income housing it will be the the few units that we get uh as a result of this annexation you know up to 350 square feet

[102:00] or no less than 350 square feet but not these the big ones are have nothing to do with middle income housing well i i just think that that's language that could require some clarification or deletion that's all i got okay thanks mark uh seeing no other questions then we can move to the public hearing and i believe we have uh one person signed up who is familiar with our rules and procedures so i don't think we need to redo the quorum language so i've got lynn siegel as speaker number one and then you get three minutes yeah um this is on the annexation

[103:07] geez no interaction nothing i guess i can't even ask that oh well i'll just use up my time that way maybe you can meditate and think about what you're doing with the so city this is in regards to the annexation that's what this public hearing is about thank you you know i'm just a hard worker that can't listen to every thing that goes on in city council i i have what things going on in my life too i don't know what this annexation is about exactly but if it's something to provide more wealth and equity

[104:01] in boulder no thank you because the more higher end that we have the more wealth and equity we have and the more homeless people in every corner which is heartbreaking to see move along and the new one comes in move along and it's a revolving door and then you approve the olive and you approve a hill hotel the the cu has a hill hotel with 15 000 square feet ballroom they're gonna put the homeless in there bringing so much to this community

[105:03] such hypocrisy i don't know specifically what this annexation's about but like i say it has anything to do with more jobs housing imbalance with more wealth inequity with more short-term thinking oh this is good for now i don't know what you're all thinking about this another annexation i don't know maybe

[106:00] it's a good annexation i didn't hear the whole thing you talked about tonight but after this counsel and after understanding what what the bottom line is that comes down here after no one ever ever responds to anything that i say and i speak truth to power it's very sad for the boulder of my father who was here in 1948 and thought boulder was too big or should i say new boulder was too big back then think about wealth on inequity before you make your decision on this annexation

[107:04] the real long-term wealth inequity of this decision your time is out thank you for your testimony take care um that brings the public hearing to close so i'll open it up for council comments everybody's moving a little slow tonight i will just uh make a motion to annex 302 and 334 arapaho second second i would just point out i think that applicant is here as well if if we were planning on having them

[108:01] address council thanks for the reminders then with the with the applicant like an opportunity to address council you know i think that stone did a wonderful job of explaining the situation um i'll just add that you know the comp plan and and our policies are to try to acquire some of these frames bring some of these friends properties in i think this is a good opportunity to do that we had a worked very well with staff worked very well with uh michelle to reach agreements on this we had a um [Music] pretty you know fairly we had a very good meeting with planning board and walked through the details so um unless you have any specific questions i can answer i don't think i have any more to add thanks to that mr young i'm sorry i skipped over you before but i appreciate your words

[109:03] will you guys be able to see me okay yeah okay i had a big sign that came up on the screen that said the video wasn't working it was working just fine okay and so um and i believe we've got um so rachel if you want to come back to that i think there are two pieces to the motion um that we could get up i'm happy to read a better version of the motion i just didn't have the right page up um okay so i will make a motion to adapt resolution 1314 setting forth findings of fact and conclusions regarding the annexation of a 1.087 acres of land generally located at 302 and 334 arapahoe avenue and make a motion to adopt ordinance 8522 annexing approximately 1080 no 1.087 that's a period another comma 1.087 acres of land generally located at 302

[110:02] and 334 arapahoe avenue with an initial zoning designation of residential medium 3 or rm3 as described in chapter 9-5 modular zone system of brc 1981 amending the zoning district map forming a part of said chapter to include the property in the above mentioned zoning district and setting forth related details thanks do we have a second for those two motions second very good mark did you want to i actually you had i had a question for the applicant and you sort of failed to see my hand up um is that still possible yeah yeah please and then we'll do discussion on the motion okay um uh the annexation agreement provides that the affordable units or middle income units will be no less than 1350 square feet are you intending to

[111:02] adhere to that minimum standard or will any of the units be a little more um uh a little larger a little more comfortable well um i don't think we're that far along okay and i'm planning on this the uh but i would like to say that that um you know the affordable housing group has a fairly detailed chart that says you know if you get two bathrooms you can charge this you get three bathrooms you can charge this um you know so we would tailor the units to be cost effective and efficient um [Music] and you know 1350 square feet might be the number it might be 1400 and uh but you know that just sets a minimum threshold so you know whatever the market seems to need and you know we'll look around and see what what other people have provided and

[112:02] see what makes the most sense okay thank you i look forward to seeing what you come up with rachel do you want to speak to your motion uh sure i will speak briefly to it um as set forth in the comp plan there are economic and environmental and social benefits when we annex uh properties into the city um so all of those i will let speak for themselves as uh laid out in the staff memo um and we also have a a couple of of homes that are sort of at the end of their natural lifespan in this area that where we can add uh probably i think five units of affordable housing which is always to the good so it's a it's a lovely area that i'm sure that up to 14 families will get to enjoy here in boulder

[113:00] okay i will i'll go ahead and call on myself uh here and just say that uh appreciate the work that the applicant did with the staff and the planning board to kind of get to this point and call it a couple things like the um staying away from some of the steeper slopes higher up the hill and um also avoiding impinging on the the road there as well as the planning board's idea to replace all of the trees you know that they're impacted by the construction so appreciate all that and then planting board i thought i appreciated them bringing up the question of the access to the road and it does sound like per the answer to rachel's questions and what was in the memo that that will continue to be a public right-of-way and the access to the popular trail up there will not be impeded so that's good to hear as well and then we get some some much-needed um housing of affordable different kinds including middle-income housing which we really really need so i'm definitely in favor of this and i appreciate how public employees help shoot this in better direction any other comments before we get a vote

[114:04] all right seeing none um alicia what kind of a vote do we have here a roll call vote sir all right and we'll start this vote with council member friend i'm sorry mayor pro tem friend felicia i'm a yes thank you councilmember joseph yes spear yes wallach yes indeed weiner yes yates yes benjamin yes mayor brockett yes and council member focus yes resolution excuse me 1314 and ordinance

[115:00] 8522 are hereby approved unanimously thank you everybody i really appreciate it welcome mark congratulations and grab did you want to add in here yes just real briefly unless i'm mistaken i believe this might be sloan's last presentation and her role as planning manager and i just wanted to take the opportunity to thank her for all the work that she's done within planning and development services we're really excited that she remains a colleague in hhs but she has been a steady force for us in planning and we wish her well in that capacity thanks brad okay so sloan i've i've seen i don't know how many dozens of presentations from you dating back to my years on on cleaning board uh so i would just thank you for just years of extraordinary service in this role um you've done a remarkable job but i'm also thrilled that you're staying with

[116:00] the city and moving on to a different role we'll look forward to working with you there so much i'm excited i'm sure i'll see you in a upcoming meeting okay let's bring that item to close and then uh teresa i'm gonna turn to you i've been seeing some um some information maybe about our previous item that needs to be addressed before we move on here and you're muted thank you i said yes mayor my apologies um i i would like to invite the council to revisit item 5 a 4 which is the ballot issue with respect to even numbered year elections it it appears that there was some language inadvertently left off the slide um and so the motion that we provided you did not contain all of the language i do believe that we have some council members prepared to to correct that

[117:01] so um thanks for that teresa and i i will say i don't think i've led a meeting where we've needed to do this so what would be the kind of formal roberts rules thing necessary to go back to a previously passed motion and alter it mayor i believe that it would require a motion to reconsider from someone who was on the winning side of the motion i'll make a motion to reconsider ordinance 8546 again great all in favor of the motion to reconsider we can raise our hands here got a majority there so um thanks so much if you could lay out what uh what language needs to be reconsidered please thanks aaron um yeah so the uh language that was read in uh that that um nicole read was different than what was in the memo and so just for the sake of

[118:00] consistency and making sure we're actually reading the language that we're all is just for consistency that we all have agreed upon that carries forth a lot of the other changes that have happened up to this point and we sort of need to eject what was on the ballot language in the presentation and go back to the memo and then make those and then add the two amendments that we had approved so that the language is then self-consistent um and i just want to check with teresa if that's an appropriate description of the situation and if so then i can go ahead and maybe make a new motion with the amendments and then we can go forth from there if that's the right process yes mayor council member benjamin i believe that that would be the appropriate process and thanks for clarifying that teresa matt can you be explicit about exactly what language needs to be different from the previous one i know nicole read what was what was on the screen right so there's what what needs to be different to match what's in the memo um so i'm gonna sort of read from three different versions so um what we had in the memo made mention of um i've gotta

[119:03] figure out i didn't redline it so now i'm gonna have to do this ad hoc um matt i can help if that's helpful uh if you have a redline of it i was just gonna read the one that has got the full amendment in it but if you've got some uh edits go for it i think it would be helpful to know what the edit is and not just read the new language if we can do that okay um let's see if i can pull it over i do yeah um so it's basically in the section this is the part that was on the screen that was different from what was in the memo um it said um shell sections 5 14 and 22 of the boulder homeworld charter be amended to change the regular municipal elections of candidates to even numbered years what was in the memo was shall sections 5 14 and 22 of the boulder homeworld charter be amended to change the regular municipal election date to even numbered years

[120:00] so it's just three words so removing the words of the candidates from from the bowel language and just because i think that's i think that's that's um captured within the regular municipal election maybe where we got to with that one last time thank you for clarifying that so i think matt you had the floor so would you would you like to make that motion that revised motion uh yes and thanks nicole for clarifying that piece um so i'll make a motion uh see if i can go back and get the right language so we know what we're saying on emotion to amend and then i'll get the right language up let's see if we can put this together all right um so i'll make a motion to amend and pass ordinance 8546 submitting to the registered electors of the city of boulder at the special municipal coordinated election to be held on tuesday november 8 2022 the question of whether to amend sections 5 14 and 22 of the boulder home

[121:03] rule charter be amended to change the regular municipal election date to even number years on the same date as the state general election beginning with november uh the november 2026 election date and to implement the transition reduce the term of council members elected in 2023 and in 2025 to three-year terms or to three years and increase the term of the mayor elected in 2023 to three years all as more specifically provided in ordinance 8546 and setting forth related details i think we got it great we have a second second hey thanks for clarifying and just to be clear that this is you know essentially the same thing as we did before but getting the language such that it matches exactly what is in the ordinance uh to remove the words of the candidate

[122:00] from of the candidates from the motion language all right um if there's no further discussion alicia can we do a roll call on this please of course sir excuse me thank you we'll start this roll call with councilmember joseph yes spear yes wallach still no whiner no yates you're on mute there bob no sorry thank you benjamin yes mayor brockett yes councilmember falkertz

[123:01] yes and mayor pro tem friend still yes all right sir the motion to can reconsider ordinance 8546 is hereby approved six to three again thanks uh theresa matt and nicole for guiding us through that to make sure that we're doing the precisely correct thing to move that forward with that i think we're going to our first uh matter from city staff yes sir that's item six on tonight's agenda under the matters from the city manager we have 6a which is the outdoor dining update thanks so much and well i see already chris jones is ready to take us through it i'll just often comment that uh he has been really a convening lead and such terrific leadership on this but is one of many departments who are really working hard for this work

[124:00] from folks in pnds folks in transportation folks in finance in our licensing division folks in the city attorney's office really a group effort to move a lot of this forward and with that i'll ask chris to take us through this quick update or perhaps not so quick thank you so much nuria i'm just working to share my screen hopefully everyone sees that now thank you nuria good evening council chris jones here interim director of community vitality um as nuria mentioned a lot of folks are um in the background i will be the talking head for the presentation that will be brief but we have a number of folks here who are to help answer questions um at the end so i first want to start out with a timeline review of all of the the actions that have led us to this point in the development of this pilot program you all will likely recall back in may of 2020 the city stood up the boulder business

[125:00] recovery program that led to the west end closure we rerouted the hop route in the downtown area we implemented curbside pickup zones and implemented the temporary extensions for businesses that were interested in that opportunity that fall we amended the rules to allow for uh some winter provisions for businesses that wanted to operate through the winter of 2020 to 2021 um businesses then needed to reapply for their liquor licenses at that time until the spring of 2021 we extended the emergency orders again um and through the fall of 2021 and then in september 2021 we extended the emergency orders again businesses then again had to reapply for liquor license extensions at that time um again consistent with the emergency orders that went through until spring of this year so back in september of last

[126:00] year council supported staff exploration of a downtown-based pilot program for outdoor dining staff prepared an information item that we presented to council earlier this year in february that led to some desire for a city-wide program and so in march of this year at our adjustment to base conversation we approved some resources to help stand up a citywide program and the emergency orders were again extended through august 31st of this year businesses again had to reapply for their liquor ex their liquor permit extensions early license extensions under the city's emergency order in the state emergency order back in april council approved the framework that staff put together for the creation of the citywide pilot program in june we presented in first and second reading the ordinance change is required to stand up that program

[127:00] immediately after that our application period opened up on june 27th and originally that went through july 15th that deadline was then extended to august 1st just because we had a number of folks who had incomplete applications and were struggling with getting all their materials in and again our existing emergency orders for outdoor dining are scheduled to end on august 31st so a quick review of the program we do have a citywide pilot program that will last for five years until 2027 it applies to outdoor dining extensions in the public right-of-way in on-street parking spaces certain areas of the pearl street mall and sidewalks and other available open spaces in the public right-of-way we also are allowing private property expansions into existing parking spaces and other available open spaces as far as the city or arpa subsidies go

[128:01] we have three options that businesses could pursue in their application process option a is an expansion into the public right-of-way with infrastructure that was purchased that would be purchased by the individual business those businesses are still eligible for reimbursement of up to 2500 of their infrastructure any any dollars that they spent on on infrastructure that's no longer compliant option b was uh expansions into the public right-of-way um but participating in a city bulk purchase where the city would take the lead in purchasing standard infrastructure and there was a lease rate associated with that for businesses who wanted to take that route and that we estimate is about a 50 uh discount on the cost of of the compliant infrastructure option c is expansions on private property um so that would not be folks would not

[129:00] participate in a revocable lease or anything like that with the city but they'd still be eligible for up to 2 500 in a rebate uh reimbursement for expenses that they had previously incurred for non-compliant infrastructure so since the application period has closed we've had 31 applicants in a mix of those options we have 13 and option a 10 in option b participating in the city's bulk purchase and eight applicants for expansions on private property this is just a quick preview of the number the businesses that have applied for each of those different options i'm not going to go through all of them but wanted to give folks an idea of the mix and i'm sure you see you recognize some names of restaurants that you like just want to reiterate so we had 31 applicants of those 18 applications are complete and in review one of those applications is actually fully through the process and

[130:01] they are fully ready to pursue their liquor licensing the remaining 17 that have complete applications they're still in review five of those are near completion and also about ready to pursue liquor licensing the remaining 13 applications are still incomplete um through this application process we've gotten a number of questions from applicants and it's led to some adjustments to our city manager rules associated with the pilot program so we now have included images of compliant infrastructure to give folks an idea of what type of infrastructure we're looking for in the program we've also detailed required compliance with the city's downtown urban design guidelines for outdoor dining we've detailed our traffic engineer approved planter boxes to protect spaces that are next to live travel lanes we are specifically

[131:00] prohibiting rope fences and jersey barriers as part of the pilot program we've detailed the six foot required clearance from these outdoor dining areas and other obstructions to make sure that we have space for pedestrians we've clarified the thousand square foot maximum per block face rules to let folks know how we would manage that i mean in the event that new applicants come in to the program on a specific block that's already reached a thousand square feet and we've also done some clarification around the permission permissible expansion areas on the pearl street mall to be really specific with where folks can expand onto the bricks of the mall real quickly taking a look at maps of the mall on the 1100 block you can see here in green the areas where staff is identified where we might allow restaurants to expand and the areas in red are where they are allowed and we actually do have applications in so we have four applications in for these red indicated

[132:00] spots on the 1100 block of the pearl street mall on the 1200 block we have a number of locations where we've identified where folks could expand but we've had no applications for any of those spaces same thing goes for the 1300 block those are the spaces that we would allow no applications currently and for those spaces and on the 1400 block avanti has applied for the three spaces that you see in red here on this block so just wanted to give council an idea of some of the detail that we've now included in the city manager rules for pearl street we've also done some work now that we have a better idea of the number of folks who are applying for the different options available we've been doing some [Music] projections and estimates on the program revenue and expenses over time we still have some more work to do here to get this in a good spot to present to council at the next adjustment to base to make sure that we can account for how we're going to cover the expenses

[133:01] and revenues for the program for the five-year duration for next steps for the program again emergency orders we know are ending on august 31st september 1st is when the pilot program begins at that time participating restaurants will need to reduce their operating footprint down to the approved areas we are communicating a one-week race period for folks to get into compliance whether to their approved area or if they're not participating in the program they have that one week to remove their encroachments from the public right-of-way on september 15th we'll come back to council to talk about the west pearl update and i just wanted to note that six of the program applicants are located are located in the west pearl area we are anticipating uh receiving the the infrastructure through the bulk purchase by the end of october um in october we'll also be preparing our information for the sec the second adjustment to base and by october 31st we anticipate uh

[134:02] full pilot program implementation over the fall and winter we'll continue to monitor the program and make modifications to the rules as needed as we learn more about how the pilot program is going and then in february of next year we'll have our next application window for new businesses that want to participate in the program so with that we can move to questions and discussion from council i know that we have a number of folks here to help answer questions and i will stop sharing my screen thanks so much chris uh questions from bob and matt mark um thanks chris i'll just start with a few questions i might have some later so i'll reserve the right to ask those but i wanted to make sure first i understood your presentation um i don't know if you have to put the slide back out but i saw in a couple of blocks there was kind of the red rectangles and the and the green ones and the green ones i think were permissible and the what red ones were applied does does that mean that

[135:00] that and for the red ones that somebody applied to put tables there but we're going to deny it because it's not under persistent i didn't track what difference between permissible indictment or permissible and allowed sure whatever the language you used was um so all of the spaces that you see color we will allow um expansions the colors in red mean that we actually have applicants for that space so um i don't see any color any red or green that means that we are not that even if somebody applied to use that space that that would not be permitted an example would be right now we have hapa has encroached into all the space around the weeping rock um and you can see we've not indicated that that space will any longer be available for restaurants uh to encroach in the of way so that that amenity can be enjoyed um more by the public the weeping rock as an example has been turned off for the duration of the pandemic because it does uh lead to some splashback and and

[136:00] that's interfered with people's ability to dine near it okay so um the language was just confusing to me so everywhere there's red someone has applied to have tables and you're going to give a green light to it and anywhere there's green uh rectangles um it's just vacant space that someone could apply but but didn't didn't apply is that right that is correct okay and um did any restaurant apply for space there may have been other reasons why you've you you're still working with them as far as the completion of their application i want to get into that right now but um did anyone apply for more space um than you will allow in other words anybody applied for x space and you said you can't have x you can have only have y or you can't be here or is there any denials of space that was sought um that is a good question i think originally when folks were applying so hapa for example i think originally applied for

[137:01] all of the space that they had previously been using um and so staff did have to go back to hapa and communicate that that all that space is no longer available to use and that's why we've clarified these diagrams in the city manager rules dude i'm just a matter of opinion is your sense that they're okay with that reduced space or they're not i haven't heard from them so i'm just wondering if you've heard from that i have not heard from them and i i don't know if anybody else is on the call that has heard from them um but no we have not we have not gotten pushed back from them as far as i know okay um and then kind of a related question i know that there was some one of the reasons why we were even having this checking was i think there was a rule that limited um square foot per block and i know there was some concern because there's a lot of restaurants in the i think it's the 1100 block the one you're showing there um and they had to kind of divvy it up among themselves which kind of made some of the spaces pretty small did that issue get resolved

[138:01] to my understanding at this point well while we only have one applicant that is fully entitled and that's chapango uh to my knowledge that that particular uh uh conflict has been resolved okay great thanks chris um and then one more question just on your presentation then i'll ask some more questions later on the very end of your your presentation you talked about the um those who are purchasing the this infrastructure we'll get that towards the end of october so if folks are approved the restaurants are approved are but they're going to use the city provided infrastructure are they meant to continue to use their infrastructure during like uh september and october until the to the bold purchase happens is that right they're supposed to keep in using their platforms and tables and whatever they've got until until the city purchases happen in a few months is that right yes that's correct and that would include the role i know that you're a sense of a rope you mentioned that um but they they would use the rope to use whatever they have until you provide

[139:01] what it is that you promised to provide them is that right correct okay great thank you i'll have some questions later but that's good enough for now thanks thanks uh yeah i see edward's popped in do you want to provide some more i just want to provide one clarification to one of bob's questions and and the response in terms of the green and the red on the pearl street and if they would be approved i would just clarify they would be approved as long as they're also in compliance with all the other rules that are in place so the type of infrastructure the location specific details in terms of accessibility those types of things so it's not an automatic approval it does require that all the other components are but that particular space is available and therefore they you know meeting all those other pieces would be approved edward you should have gone to law school you are so good at clarifying those things thank you very good matt mark rachel thanks aaron and thanks for your questions bob that you asked a couple i

[140:00] was going to ask but certainly what you launched into i think it still requires maybe a little bit more clarity even though restaurants will be able to keep what they have for transition until the infrastructure comes did i what i heard from edward is that that infrastructure they have to keep now has to get maybe reworked and retooled to then be in compliance outside of the emergency ordinances so there's the stuff that they've got but then it has to be then they have to fix it all up to get it right to meet ordinances then before they get their stuff is there this weird i gotta comply with what i've got or spend more money on infrastructure temporarily to meet those guidelines did i hear that right not quite so we won't uh and then chris jump in feel free but uh they don't need to modify all of their existing to meet all the regulations during that transition period i think the only one that we're asking them to look at is the size restriction to ensure that they're in that but the other pieces we're not going to require them to retool that infrastructure to meet accessibility or to meet certain fencing

[141:02] requirements that will be in that transition period okay thanks for clarifying that um the other one kind of has to do with um so based on those numbers we've got it looks like we've got six that have kind of green lit they're going through and there's some that are in process and others that have applied but haven't really gotten everything all their ducks in a row for it to be under consideration by the departments is that is that a good understanding sort of three categories yes um of the ones that um obviously the green lit ones they seem like they're good and then of the ones that are applied and in process for review um are are they how are we gonna what's the time frame to get them approved ahead of the end of august deadline are i mean is it are you confident that we'll get them approved or are we gonna have some that have applied and they're gonna maybe caught on the other end of the emergency order is being rescinded and then be sort of hung out for a little bit waiting for approval

[142:01] edward do you want to take that one i certainly try so you know we are we have prioritized these applications through the review process beyond anything else in pnds to go to the review it's really going to depend on whether everything is found to be ultimately in in compliance there are usually several back and forth on some of them some are more complicated we're working to try as hard as we can if they aren't by that point it doesn't mean that they're going to be cut off and that we won't finish working with them now that being said the issue of liquor licensing is a separate issue i'm sure there'll be some questions on that but uh we'll we we are working as rapidly as we can through those the goal of trying some of it depends also really on their ability to reply back if we need further clarification any additional information that was not present in our application all right that's helpful you brought up the elephant in the room with uh liquor licensing uh i've asked a couple questions i'd certainly love to hear what um mark and rachel had to say and hopefully we can wrap back to the liquor

[143:01] license stuff uh assuming that's an appropriate time to talk about it thanks edward thanks chris i appreciate those responses rachel all right mike thank you for the presentation um you know one thing that struck me as you did the charts was that there seemed to be a fairly low level of participation in terms of the the areas that are available versus the people who have applied um any thoughts as to why that that is the case is it simply too expensive for people or they are they're not interested um i would have thought there might be a higher level of participation thanks mark for the question um we haven't gotten any specific feedback one way or the other on that relative to the number of folks who um haven't applied who have been taking advantage of the free space up till now so there might be a number i think it's a variable it's just depends on their business interests and just

[144:00] because they aren't applying this winter does not mean um that they might not choose to apply you know apply to to participate next year um so we haven't gotten any feedback as to why or specific reasons or that that folks are saying why they don't want to participate okay fair enough um just go through the numbers with me again am i correct that there was one complete app an approved application or is that the wrong number there is one uh application that has gone it's been notarized and signed and so they are fully entitled um there are five others that have gone there at their final stages of review so we anticipate that they you know it's just it's it's at the you know city attorney um uh lease language review level so there's nothing that's really standing in the way um the remainder are either incomplete or still in review they have all their materials in but

[145:01] they they need to make adjustments to what they're proposing and i i will address the elephant in the room as matt pointed out am i correct that to get a liquor license takes about 30 days plus minus from the date that they are approved so i'd like to jump in and invite laurel witt and sandrianas from my office to address this issue okay thank you theresa and we also have kristin changaris here as well who is the new licensing manager and i bite her as well she's the expert in liquor licensing um but it does take a significant amount of time um at least 30 days typically okay um so effectively on september 1 of this year um and assuming the one complete applicant

[146:01] has not already applied for its liquor license our outdoor dining program comes to a complete stop is that correct or not correct they would only they would not be able to serve liquor if their temporary modification wasn't approved they could still serve as long as they had a an approved plan through the city they would still be able to serve um their clients and and and folks uh food but they would not be able to serve alcohol in that new approved location they could continue to serve alcohol within their premises just not in the outdoor dining area i i'm not sure that's a distinction with a difference but i'm not sure that too many people are going to want to dine without the ability to have a drink so effectively it seems to me that that our program grinds to a if not a complete halt

[147:00] and almost complete halt in 13 days would you would you have a different view of that i don't know the details about where the applications are they all have different um deadlines but if the information isn't sent to the state within a certain amount of time they're not going to have their liquor license approved for that temporary modification okay i mean i i think that's a more detailed way of saying no we're not going to have much of a program on september 1 um on the present circumstances uh would there be any impact on the ability to continue to operate if we extended our emergency ordinance while all of this catches up it wouldn't make it a difference because the state still has to approve and so

[148:00] they're they're looking it's a dual licensing process just to take us a step back during the pandemic the state had an emergency order in place that allowed for temporary use of outdoor spaces for liquor service it was an expedited process it allowed for concurrent dual processing of the state and local license so usually the local licensing has to approve first and then it goes to the state for approval that's why it takes so long um the state's emergency order expired on may 31st so even if we were to extend our emergency order it would not change the fact that the state is on its own schedule and would need to approve it as well all right i i'm going to let my colleagues jump in but i will leave with the comment that i am troubled by where we are and how we got here um the timing on this is is clearly not

[149:00] ideal and [Music] i i don't think we've served the interest of our restaurant constituents very well might i not to interrupt you council member wallach but i want to offer that our business licensing group has been first of all working very hard and and also been very communicative with the businesses who have been participating in this program in the emergency orders they were informed that of the timeline when the june's 27th application window opened of all the steps needed to be accomplished in order to get these applications across the finish line so that they would not be facing this delay um i do know that that you know when we're talking about a five-year more permanent program it's a lot different than temporary modifications um associated with the emergency orders of the pandemic and so certainly the application process has been more onerous for folks than they had

[150:01] experienced in the previous iterations of our temporary expansions but certainly a lot less onerous than our pre-existing outdoor dining patio program which we know businesses that have taken years to get their outdoor dining patios established at their places of business in the past all right chris i acknowledge and accept what you're saying but we are where we are and i'm concerned about where we are um so again let me allow my colleagues to jump in and uh and comment thanks uh regional chair and lauren all right um thanks chris and certainly do appreciate all the work that your team is doing on this and so obviously everybody's concerned about the the liquor you know becoming a dry outdoor dining town it's going to be upsetting to the the servers there's a lot of um money made from from serving alcohol and a lot of us like to go to those spots

[151:00] and and drink that alcohol so i think there's you know it's not a criticism of the hard work i think it's just sort of something that's cropped up that we didn't realize was an issue so hopefully you're taking us with a a a bit of grace and where we're going with this but i wanted to ask about the august 31st date like i don't quite understand i can't imagine or maybe it did happen that way that all of these restaurants were licensed on the same day such that they're all expiring at august 31st at the state level or is that because of a may date is i guess is august 31st date relevant to the city versus the state who's whose deadline is that who controls august 31st this year sandra do you want to take that one yeah i'm happy to um so the august 31st date becomes important because in order for the state to approve the liquor license they

[152:00] have the applicant has to show proof um that they have possession of the area so permission to use the city um property and so that's why it becomes an issue i apologize i think to get to your question rachel we control the august 31st date we said this in the spring it is a public health order it is not intended for to support businesses that it really is an emergency health order based on covet at the time the state ended their orders in may we actually took a risk and extended that ourselves because we found our county still in red we are currently actually i think we were in yellow and i believe we've just gone down to green so there is no public health reason for which these orders move forward and to end to devil's advocate like all of us had coveted in the last couple months during which time people would

[153:01] have been expected to be applying for these permits and whatnot like i mean not all of us but a lot of us that i'm looking at on the screen so perhaps the public health um issue prevented you know people from reading those emails timely or they were you know busy trying to catch up and recover like it's so i guess i just wonder is is there no valid reason that we couldn't say now that we understand and we're all you know getting back on our feet from older being in such a heinous situation there we could go to uh september 30th and uh with our order and then hope that that extra month gave people time to to follow through so that's one question i don't know if anybody wants to answer it right andrew correct me if i'm wrong but that wouldn't actually solve anything because if we extended it um they still have to sort of go to the state to seek an extension of or i don't know if it's a separate liquor license or an extension of that liquor license

[154:00] kristin if you wouldn't mind answering that question because i just don't know the details of each license applicant sure so in order to operate a business needs both a city liquor license and a state liquor license so even if we acted to extend their city liquor license under an emergency rule they would still need to apply at the state level to ex to extend their state license in order to continue operating and that's really where the biggest time delay is is happening is under um is when these applications go to the state for final review and approval well but i guess what i'm wondering is we gave them an extra month like does everybody's liquor license expire august 31st maybe back to my first question like if that's if the state's expiring august 31st chris is not in yes then there's nothing we can do so then maybe really the state controls that day so i'm going to jump in here um it's

[155:01] possible that some businesses are operating outside of their state liquor licenses currently that's not a situation that we want to perpetuate that's that's certainly a choice they can make but that's not something that would be it would not be appropriate for the city to endorse violations of state law which i'm not suggesting either i assume everybody's got a electoral license i'm just surprised that they would all end on on august 31st so okay i think many of them were operating under the emergency quarters yeah and if that were extended that wouldn't somehow extend their liquor license i just can't understand emergency orders okay that have expired back in may okay that helps thanks um my next question is i think i heard um chris you say that 30 restaurants had applied for outdoor dining did i get that number right 31 31 18 are in review one done five near done

[156:01] and 13 are incomplete what happened to the other 11 like when you say they applied but they're not part of the 18 in review 31 applied 18 in review where they were are they red or green or something different so yeah but and i'm trying to do math in my head right now but um and somebody help me if i'm missing something but there's yeah i think that tackles everybody 13 uh an incomplete 18 oh okay i got it i thought it was 13 of the 18 were incomplete not 13 of the 30. 13 of the 31. okay so 18 are in review okay well so if i'm understanding another part of this conversation i've been confused a lot of of kind of where we are because it feels

[157:01] like it's not i thought this is going to be like a five-minute discussion of you know just everything's going along happy and so i've been trying to keep up but um if if people aren't gonna have structures in place until october say like why can't we just approve them or extend it and tell those like it just seems like we're putting more arbitrary deadlines on that may impact liquor licensing although it may be that we don't have any power now that the state controls august 31st but just want to understand like are we being overly burdensome in terms of like what we're what we're doing right now in this planning review stage could we approve and could we approve provisionally as one question that i asked nuri i believe is ready to be answered um and then you know can we approve you know for shorter than five years you know for six months and then you know just to help people kind of bridge this i i could try and answer the provisional

[158:01] question um so um i guess theoretically we could provisionally approve some of the applications um it would have to be in very limited circumstances because we wanted we would need to know that if there's a very high likelihood that they would be approved but secondly um i'm not sure that the state would accept that as um as proof of um possession of uh the city property and that's what they're really looking for um and in addition to that i would be concerned that it would actually create additional delays if for some reason they flag it it's provisional it's not approved for sure that it would actually create additional delays for them we can't thank for that sorry i was

[159:01] muted um so provisional is not a go like is there is there a way we can say you know we're just going to prove everybody who's applied for six months more and then we'll we'll get back to this and then everybody can apply and hopefully you know if everybody can apply for their liquor license tomorrow that's just such a much shorter time that we have to be to be dry outdoor dining because i agree with whoever said like realistically there's a lot of people are going to not go eat there if they can't drink there i think i think my concern from that approach would be that the city is essentially saying you qualify based on all our regulations that we have in place in our city manager rule when that is not exactly the situation and i think that it puts the city in a a liability risk situation um um if something were to happen we were essentially saying you check all the

[160:00] boxes because we've addressed all these safety issues but really we don't know that to be true and so my concern would be from a liability perspective for the city i don't think that's uh an approach that we would want to take that makes sense i guess also though like for two years people have been out in in this form you know in this formation so could we just say like you know you can continue as is well while we vet this for three six whatever more months so those are all my questions i appreciate it and might i offer thank you for the questions and i think that the city and based on council direction we have been trying to be as flexible as reasonable in trying to develop a five-year program the old program under emergency orders we were very very flexible and and permissive um the state is not in that space and we don't have a relationship with them where we can we can

[161:00] pull strings and have them be uh be permissive now that we are not they don't have the emergency orders in place anymore for us to to operate under so even if we were to figure out a way to to temporarily um have folks reapply for another couple months they'd still have to pay their i think it's a 300 license you know liquor license fee to the state they'd still have to wait for it and uh and then and then we're doing a bunch of work on the city side to do this temporary thing when really we're trying to get to this five-year program and yes it's not ideal none of us are happy that that it's taken this long for folks to get their materials in and processed through all the work that we've all been trying to do to get this set up but once we get over this this blip we will not have to ask restaurants to again be reapplying for liquor licenses over and over again as they have been throughout this entire

[162:01] emergency order all right tara and then matt wait are you sure you're done rachel no i'm just kidding it's super long anyway um i remember tell me if i'm wrong so i don't remember a lot that we had a long discussion about this and was it may or june and we decided we didn't want to give staff this very big burden of pushing it past august 31st and we voted on it except for i think a few people the majority said let's end it on august 31st so i'm thinking about the tremendous amount of work that staff has been doing and is going to have to do if we do anything different than our current trajectory which we've discussed in detail so i'm going to say that you know i'm a huge fan of restaurants and also i don't like pesky rules everybody who knows me knows that but i don't feel like we have a choice now we the staff tried pretty hard paperwork is

[163:00] hard it's tough and the staff has been trying so hard to get people to um to send in their paperwork and i'm not saying that they weren't hiccups but maybe there are other reasons too i mean if you think about why restaurants are not jumping in on this program first of all oddly the timing is that people are going to have to spend money on infrastructure right before the winter and certainly they might say maybe i should wait until the spring why would i spend money now when i'm going to have slow months so if i was a restaurant i might pull back and just wait until next year there's lots of reasons we don't know besides you know why somebody why a restaurant would decide not to take this next step or why most wouldn't i think once you anybody gets used to not having rules it's really hard to start having them again so that could be it as well but you know there's a i'm just going to say that i think we should just stick with what we said and not ask staff to redo this

[164:01] put in all the more time for a few months i i feel just as bad as everyone else and i love eating outside but i think it's a big it's a big burden right now when so many other things are happening and so that is my two cents only if you agree with me mark not if you don't oh dear uh that could be a problem i i just want to point out that back when covid was raging we tasked a community vitality with getting this program up and running in record time and they did it was it was remarkable restaurants were getting approved in a few days and you know they did an extraordinary job of getting the getting the program up moving and i i'm just feeling that there wasn't quite the same urgency in this go-round work pretty hard we can agree to

[165:01] disagree we're still friends i can't have to agree and sarah oh got mad and then i'll call myself aaron i mean this is going to be my second crack if you want to go for it since you haven't spoke go for it and then i can follow up after you okay i appreciate it um so um i i i've heard some great things from my colleagues on this i think what we're missing here is really understanding how razor thin of a margin our restaurants are surviving on right now i i i mean i think we have to really recognize just how one bad holiday weekend underwater so like i think we need to let that sink in a bit and certainly for any restaurants or people or or people in our service industry listening to this or or hearing the conversation we're having we're talking at the 50 000 foot level

[166:00] but where the rubber meets the road we have restaurants that are literally at a razer's edge so i i think you know we have to own this as a city and we have to find the most expeditious path forward to reconcile this and to the idea of us taking on risk i would take on more legal risk as a city to not watch more restaurants and small businesses go under especially for something that we've had a hand in creating so so i i think we have to be really really quick thinking here and and really be be bold in terms of how we're going to solve this for our restaurant community and small businesses we're just coming out of kobe now is not the time to cut them off at the knees so so let i don't know how else to say that but um i i think there's really some creative things approve them now like we just got to approve them start the clock on the approvals for liquor licenses i even think that since many of these are managed by parks and rec why can't we consider doing like you can

[167:01] at any of our parks by having a temporary liquor license that a non-profit establishes why couldn't we think of creating some a patchwork of non-profit liquor licenses that allow the service of alcohol on pearl street mall as a whole to cover them like let's get creative and think of ways in which we can make this work so um i i i don't i don't have all the answers but i'm really hopeful that we can set aside some of the other guard rails that we normally are attached to and find a way to solve this because there's going to be restaurants that aren't going to make it if we get through labor day and another month of great weather and students and families being here and they can't serve liquor outside i think that's going to be devastating right well i don't have any questions per se i think all the questions have been asked i appreciate everybody um getting those voiced and so i just want to start by saying i know uh staff this has been a really heavy lift getting this move forward because this is a five-year program right that i think that's the distinction here is like not

[168:00] not the beginning of the pandemic or like you know whatever just put something together with you know uh with the clothes pins and some bailing wires fine uh you know we're we're setting up a much longer term program here so it takes a lot more work so i appreciate all the all the great work that's been done while also acknowledging that the the timing on um on the these approvals and in particular the liquor licenses is really problematic for some of these businesses that are caught up in this in this timing problem where it looks like there are a number of them that will not be able to serve alcohol in their outdoor spaces for at least a few weeks and that is going to be hardship for them uh it sounds like you all have explored the different um options and you're doing what you can um and so what i would just say is that like just to the the point of flexibility that if there are uh if there's if there's any way like you know hopefully we can get these move through pretty quickly but if they're if there's some minor issues that aren't safety related where we could give a stamp of like okay approved just make

[169:00] sure you resolve these three things within 60 days you know or something like that and and maybe that's the provisional approval that you were saying doesn't work but i just say if there is some version of that that's that's uh it's a like a punch list for minor items um i'd encourage you to see if there's possibilities there um but i'll leave it in your hands to determine you know the best way to balance um you know the needs of public safety and what will actually get folks into the approval process uh the most quickly um but that's that's my only comment just for us to can you continue to do we can to help these folks uh hopefully get things approved quickly so that there can be the least disruption to their business possible which i know is also what you're trying to do mary you've raised and lower your hand like about five times i'm very interested to hear what you're you're gonna say i have my hair i appreciate that right i i struggle right because i am so sympathetic right we don't want this to be happening to businesses we depend frankly on businesses doing well in our

[170:00] community and have worked so incredibly hard behind the scenes to follow up with businesses we extended the deadline because they frankly a lot of businesses didn't meet the july deadline we made that broader staff has been following up pinging folks we've been very clear and businesses know how long it takes a liquor license so i'm not unsympathetic and staff is not unsympathetic to what is happening in our business community and we are doing so much to make sure that we can do our part to accelerate it we have prioritized and taken staff off particularly in pnds from other projects so that we could really move this permitting and this approval process as fast as possible our commitment continues to move forward and say if we can look at whatever is close to it how do we move that forward i i don't know how to get around the liquor license issue because we need complete applications and of all those numbers that have been saved i'll also

[171:00] say that not all of them are in a place that we can even provide a provisional license for they're not there are some that are simply are that far away from complete and we also have to assure for the safeguards of um safety that we have insured now we're trying hard to break down the barriers this is not a situation where i believe staff is doing business as usual and it is not a situation we're happy to be in so we will continue and commit to doing as much as we can in support of our business community um but i i just don't see right now we we can't do some of the back end of getting their documentation in for them we just cannot points well taken we know that that the city organization cares about doing this the doing this well and supporting our business community community for sure uh and okay we've been at this a long time uh bob you got something else and maybe we can move on here yeah i just have a question and a

[172:00] comment because i haven't made a comment yet um with respect to my question um chris i i know that the original deadline was july 15 and then you extended it uh because some of you some apparently some some restaurants wanted to apply after that and extended it to august 1 we have a total of 31 applications what's the breakdown of the 31 how many apply before july 15 and how many apply between july 15 and august 1. it's a good question i don't know i don't have that number at my fingertips and i don't know that edward would either um any takers unfortunately i don't either part of that date extension was always also related to getting to complete applications i'm just talking about the application file yeah i'm just talking about i don't have that specific data i think the vast majority had an initial application in by july 15th but some of those were truly what i would describe as just a placeholder very much you know we're interested we filed the first piece of

[173:00] paper but nothing further i don't but i don't have the specific numbers we can get those for you and that would be great so i actually i'm getting some communication that all of the 31 applicants were what i'm being told in before the 15th we gave them until august 1st to get all of their documentation in and and still again we have a number that that we're not able to do that got it so so it's it's so at least of the initial applications maybe i'm not as complete as staff would like to see we're all in by july 15. so we're now at august 18th we're 34 days into it we've approved one out of 31 and i get the fact that you guys have been chasing people for documentation but it sounds to me like odds are that we're not going to have um anywhere close to all 31 approved by august 31 let alone the time that they're going to need for state liquor license which sounds like it takes another 30 days is that a fair assumption that we're not going to have 31 approvals by august 31 yes okay so that's my question it's

[174:02] obviously self-evident and i would like to see those numbers by the way um with respect to a comment i guess i mean there's a lot of things i could say that i won't say but you can imagine how i'm feeling right now which is a huge level of disappointment um there's a lot of things that should have been said at that june 21 council meeting that were not said and that's to us or the community so that's a huge huge disappointment to me and perhaps others but we are where we are i do want to echo looking forward constructively what aaron said let's pull out the stops and get these done i'll give you a couple of examples these are anecdotal and they may not even be true but this is what i've heard one restaurant i heard was told that they didn't quite apply yet because they had a four inch wide flower pot that was hanging off a railing and that was the reason why they're being held up now maybe there's more but that's what they were told and so that's an example

[175:00] of something that's pretty pretty small and probably pretty curable and that's probably a phone call and and you take the flower pot often problem solved and then i heard another restaurant um say with respect to the documentation it was quite burdensome in addition to this was a restaurant that was leasing its face and um they provided their lease they showed proof that they had right of occupancy there from their landlord but then they were told their landlord had to go back and find a deed to show that the landlord actually owned the real estate and that's a you know i'm a lawyer i'm just kind of under trying to understand why that would be relevant to proof that the the tenant had the right to be in this space and so i'm not looking for a response to that i just would ask us to go back and look at our requirements to see if they're reasonable and then as we apply whatever reasonable uh requirements we have that we are in fact reasonable in our implementation if it's a small thing let's either not hold things up or if it's a small thing that could be cured let's make sure we sit down with

[176:01] the restaurant in real time and get those things cured because you know we're talking flower pots and deeds this is not the type of stuff that is going to make people happy and we are going to get a lot of emails and uh they're all going to be directed right to staff so i hope you have some good answers there okay lauren and then mark yeah so along with being reasonable and sort of trying to help get this going to the extent that we can i think that we also need to be reasonable in terms of our enforcement and understanding the situation that where these businesses are in i know that in some things we might not have a lot of leeway but where we do i think that um you know as long as the restaurants are putting in a good faith effort um we should pay attention to that and try and work with them

[177:03] lauren gets the conciseness award for this item mark i do not um i share bob's disappointment in where we are and i very much agree with matt's comments uh as to the jeopardy in which we're placing some of our restaurant operators because of the thin margins under which they work i this is where we are and there's not much that can be done about it now so i simply urge staff to do what bob is suggesting be expeditious be reasonable if there's a defect call them don't send them a letter and wait for you know have a seven-day turnaround call an operator and say move your flower pot do this whatever it is and and let's try to achieve the same sense of urgency in this approval process that we had when we initiated this program um back in the height of the pandemic

[178:00] thank you that's mark uh nicole and then rachel and then maybe we can wrap this up yeah i just wanted to say i'm i'm not you know this this idea that um staff could go and kind of address some of these issues while they're also trying to process some of the other applications and things i think this was one of my concerns that i had about this is just the amount of staff time and effort um that it's taking and it feels like we're seeing a little bit of that play out here and um i guess you know one one question that i would have for at some point not tonight um to have it answered is what portion of restaurants revenue is is coming from outdoor dining at this point um for for the folks who are there i've heard it said you know this is really essential for them to stay profitable um and i'm just i'm wondering if it just it would be nice to have some data along those lines too but um i do recognize all the work that staff is doing to try to get this brand new thing up and running with all these different options

[179:00] that restaurants have while providing support while also addressing concerns about applications that are coming in this feels like a big ask so i just just wanted to ask us to have a little bit of grace there as well with our own staff as well as with the restaurants that are working on this thanks nicole rachel just something mark said about like how fast we were in 2020 just made me wonder like can the fate can the state be faster like do we have any any levers there or anything that we can do like if if it's going to be the state that's a bigger slow down here eventually or ultimately can we help at all with that i think that's a fair question and i know we've thought about it is how much we can ask the state to accelerate or not accelerate and figure out what they're doing and so we can certainly um have that conversation and again i just want to reassure council and our

[180:00] community that staff really is focusing on the bigger issues the important issue it is not the hanging flower pot issue that is keeping us from approving or not a license and so we will continue to do that i know steph is so committed to continuing to do that expeditiously um and so we will also talk to the state and see if there's anything that we can accelerate on that end thanks and then just to the community like please patronize these businesses as they're going to be suffering a little bit when when the liquor license is missing so please be kind thanks genie i just have a quick question based on the conversation that i'm hearing chris are there rules on all websites um as far as the rules for the program i think everything is posted on the project website and i'm seeing edward nodding his head that is correct

[181:00] okay and you do follow these rules right as far as okay okay thank you i just wanted to ask about that thank you so much i appreciate that and on behalf of pnds i can say we are certainly understanding of the concern and are working to rapidly approve these in ways that we don't treat most applications and and looking for areas where we can and even in that proof of ownership we have actually looked at and provided much simpler ways than we've allowed any other applicant and pnds to do that with recognizing the importance here we'll go back and continue to make sure we're doing that and process things as rapidly as we can recognize that we want to be careful about of course how that impacts applications of other times which have experienced additional delay because we did prioritize the incoming of the first 31 of these over top of incoming other building permit applications for example so it's a balancing act but we hear you and we will continue as our staff to work

[182:00] through ensuring that we're addressing the significant issues to keep these moving rapidly and i was just going to say just to speak to council member spears question i believe on the portion of sales while we don't uh break down sales tax revenue to analyze that internally it would need to be self-reported but i would point out these extensions are anywhere between 100 to 500 square feet so depending on the size of the total restaurant we're only talking about this area when it comes to whether or not they're able to serve alcohol for a period of time um relative to their their total footprint and operating area so you know if it's if we're talking 100 square feet of a thousand square foot um dining area um and then we're talking you know uh ten percent thanks okay well let's wrap up here i really appreciate the detailed answers and all the probing questions from council i think we all share a common intention and hope that this wall the

[183:01] all these will get processed quickly and the businesses will get back to the or into the new program as quickly as possible and i'll just say to to everybody out there in the community that if there is a few week gap in the service of alcohol on a patio go on down and raise a glass of iced tea to the success of our local businesses uh we're an older arnold palmer whatever your non-alcoholic drink of choice is great um good enough thanks again everybody on this one and i would say how about a five minute break before we hit the next item okay let's go let's go for um 9 0 9 10. we'll come back in nine times we'll give ourselves [Music]

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[193:02] alicia you're very quiet at least for me is that better there we go okay great thank you sir we have on next on tonight's agenda item 6b under matters from the city manager it is the disposable bag fee changes and single use plastics options thanks so much alicia and i'll send it over to jonathan to get us started but i'll also just thank him and his team because this is an item that we've rescheduled a couple times for agenda purposes and they have been so patient to bring this forward and just appreciate how accommodating that team is so thank you jonathan no problem area thanks good evening mayor and council i'm jonathan cohen with the climate initiatives department so i i'm just going to offer a few brief comments before handing the presentation over to my very capable colleague jimmy harkins so tonight we're seeking council feedback on staff's proposed changes to boulder's 10 year old disposable bag fee

[194:01] and direction related to single-use plastics more generally based on nuria's comment i did want to mention that the staff memo followed a study session format because again the item was originally scheduled for next week so hopefully that didn't create any confusion for council so as the staff memo explains this discussion was really triggered by last year's passage of house bill 1162 known as the plastic pollution reduction act i know jamie's planning on mentioning the bill sponsors and important stakeholders responsible for the bill's passage but knowing she won't do it i wanted to acknowledge the hard work specifically by jamie and our zero waste team in the legislative process which led to colorado becoming the first interior state to enact comprehensive plastic pollution legislation so i think that's pretty exciting and and bears some recognition so because our local policy is allowed to be as strict or stricter than the state law which takes effect next year staff has been reviewing the state law

[195:01] speaking with community partners about implementation and potential approaches so i'm gonna hand it directly over to jamie and she's gonna walk through those options and staff's recommendation thank you uh let me just go ahead and share my screen give me one second can everyone see that okay great all right thank you so much jonathan and good evening mayor and members of city council so the goals for tonight's meeting are first to obtain council direction on necessary changes to boulder's disposable bag feed program and second to obtain input at a very high level on future regulations to reduce single-use plastics for the agenda tonight i will begin with some background information about boulder's bag feed program and then the state's new plastic pollution reduction act which i will shorthand and call the ppra

[196:00] i will then highlight the inconsistencies between these two that we must address and present uh two options for moving forward including the staff recommendation finally i'll briefly touch on the potential for future additional single-use plastic recommendations but before we get started as jonathan mentioned i did want to just take a moment to highlight that the reason we're discussing this item tonight is due to the large success in something our department talks about a lot which sounds really hard and messy which is a really big larger systems changes outside of our city boundaries so we did indeed work for many years with our partners like recycle colorado and eco cycle and our absolute zero waste champion in the legislature representative lisa cutter who was the bill sponsor on the sun to support the passage of components of this bill over the years this has been like four different bills uh one bill and then back to four and and finally back to one so um it's very very excited exciting and it has made colorado a leader in a very short time

[197:03] so boulder's bag feed program this took effect in july of 2013 yes almost 10 years ago it is a 10 cent fee on all disposable plastic and paper checkout bags and it is charged at all food stores in the city regardless of size so this is everywhere from our small international markets to our large chains like king supers and safeway right now about 33 stores uh collect and remit the fee to the city they retain four cents of that fee 40 and remit the rest of it to the city and because this is a fee and not a tax uh the uses of fb revenue are very narrowly defined um in the ordinance to directly address the impacts of of bags so we've been very careful over the years this money is earmarked separately and we have very limited uses for that money so the ppra

[198:00] which we're i'm very excited about was adopted by the legislature in 2021 and it has four main components the first and most relevant for our discussion tonight is the statewide bag fee so this begins january 1st 2023 and it is what we call a policy floor or minimum so cities can go above and beyond this the provisions in this bag fee if they choose to it did model our language so it is a 10 cent minimum fee on all plastic and paper the same split between stores and the city or the county but these last two pieces are where it differs um one very exciting provision is that the uses of the revenue are broader than in our boulder ordinance so we can actually use this fee revenue for all sorts of waste reduction compost recycling programs incentives and education so it does broad it's still waste reduction but it does broaden that out a little bit which is really great and then this final note um the state

[199:01] law did include this small store exemption this is an exemption that was added at the very last minute of the legislative process to get it over the finish line and i'm going to go into a little bit of detail here about how a store would qualify for this exemption so to be a small store in the ppra you have to meet all three of these criteria so you have to operate solely in colorado have three or fewer locations and not part of a franchise or corporation or partnership that has a physical location outside of colorado i will highlight how this exemption is a little bit problematic when we go over the pros and cons of the two different options later in the presentation so the second and third components of the ppra are bands on both plastic checkout bags and polystyrene food containers and both of those are set to begin a year from that fee start date of january 1st 2024

[200:02] and then the fourth and final provision of this bill which we worked here in boulder specifically on for many years was repealing this local government preemption up until now local governments were prevented from regulating plastic materials however with this preemption repeal those policy options will broaden for us but it doesn't begin until july 1st 2024 so with that summary of the ppra i want to go back to the bag fee since that is mainly why we are here tonight and highlight the inconsistencies between it and boulder's feed program so as i mentioned earlier the boulder fee is at all food stores regardless of size and the ppra requires we implement it at all stores who are not that fall into that small store exemption so those are two different universes of stores some overlap but some do not and due to this inconsistency we do have to make changes

[201:01] to our ordinance to be in compliance with state law so staff has made the assumption that council does not want to remove food stores small food stores that have been already collecting the fee for nine years now um they are participants in the program a lot of them really like participating so with that assumption there are two options for moving forward the first one is adding the state required large retail stores to our program this would add only the stores that do not meet that small store exemption and it would still apply to those smaller food stores in boulder that have been part of our program for a long time the second option is to expand the program to all grocery and retail stores in the city regardless of size this would include those small stores that are exempt in the ppra under option 2 we did discuss

[202:02] amongst staff that given that these small stores are not required by the state to be in a bag fee program we could phase them in at a later date so recognizing that you know there's not a lot of time between now and january 1st we could give them until halfway through next year or even later next year to put a collection system in place and we can phase them in later so that is also an option i know that there's a lot of text on the screen but i did want to make sure all the pros and cons of these two options are there for everyone to see so with option one it would add about um 100 to 150 stores to our current 33 and these estimates are based on a combing throw of a very very long spreadsheet that finance was so kind enough to send me over so these are rough estimates but um that's about what we're looking at the pros of this approach are that you know it does

[203:00] comply with the state law and it actually goes beyond it because it does include those small food stores i estimate it would capture about 80 to 90 percent of bag use in the city and it does recognize a potential hardship for small businesses the cons to this approach is are that the city would need to develop a process to see what stores meet that criteria and which do not because that is not information we have right now we don't know how many locations a corporation has around the country things like that so we'd have to develop and implement that system it's also inconsistent and hard for consumers to understand and for us to communicate to the community where they'll find a bag fee and where they won't we can do it of course it's just a little long here and then finally it would exempt a large number of small stores including ones that are perceived as large and i did add this from the memo so i wanted to put in an example to clarify so

[204:00] take for example mcguckin's hardware i know we all love to do our shopping there they actually would qualify i believe for this small store exemption because they are solely in colorado they have one location and they're not a part of a larger corporation even though they are a large store that goes through a lot of bags and then on the flip side i believe that a store like pharmica who is part of a corporation that's based outside of colorado and they have california stores would not qualify for the exemption so it's just a little counterintuitive that some large stores in the city would be exempt and some smaller ones would not so i just wanted to highlight that that's kind of the difficulty that we're dealing with here in communicating it so for option two we are roughly estimating again that this would add a lot more stores to the bag feed program of course but it is a consistent application across the city that is easier for consumers to understand and anticipate

[205:00] obviously it results in the greatest reduction in values and it is consistent with louisville one of our neighboring jurisdictions who just this year put in a 25 cent bag tax everywhere in the city and then it we can use that phase in approach would reduce the administrative burden on both city staff to get you know the systems up and running for that many accounts and also on the small stores and i did want to highlight this piece as well a pro to this approach is i know it's really easy to see that the collecting the fee is a burden on small business but it is actually also a revenue source so um they get to keep forty percent of whatever the fee level we set and that is it can be a significant revenue source for a small business who has to buy those bags um recycle content paper bags or you know whatever they're giving out to their consumers that can help offset that cost for them so we wouldn't be

[206:00] including them in that revenue generation but the cons of this approach of course are that burden and then a substantial increase in bag fee accounts which will require resources in the city to administer and enforce um i will note with this one though as i said in the memo that we have over five hundred thousand dollars in the existing bag fee account that money can be used to help with these resources and so whatever we need we are ahead of the game many many cities across colorado do not have a system in place they don't have the tax forms we have that all in place already so we are ahead of the game it's just a matter of scaling it um to all those stores and so whatever our finance department would need to help do that we can help provide for that with the existing bag if you money all right so in addition to what stores charges the fee council can also choose to increase the fee level so back in 2012 we conducted a v-nexus

[207:00] study and it justified a fee at that time of up to 20 cents and then council cut it back to 10. but in discussing it internally given that current labor costs and other costs associated with recycling have all gone up as well as the continued externalities on ecosystems and the climate we really do feel that an updated analysis if we were to redo it today would justify a fee higher than that 20 cents per bag and so putting it at that level we do see as being totally of that 20 cent level from 2012 would recognize some of the externalities that were justified in that original study and it would be in line with regional bag fees that we already see across colorado ranging from 5 to 25 cents so in recognition of the city's climate and circular economy goals staff does recommend implementing an increased disposable bag fee of 20 cents at all retail stores with a phase-in of small

[208:01] stores not currently in the program this will create a fee that is easier to anticipate and communicate to residents and visitors as well while also allowing some additional time for small stores to implement that system uh as i mentioned the increased fee level of 20 cents is a level initially recommended back in 2012 so we'd be catching up with that and does incorporate you know as i said some of those externality costs that we're not capturing now we did talk to the environmental advisory board last night a doubleheader here and they were overall very supportive of the staff recommendation one board member was not supportive of including the small stores that are exempt under the ppra though all right i will now transition to a i want to emphasize a very high level discussion of additional actions the city can explore to reduce other

[209:00] single-use plastics so as we think about our circular economy goals and the role that a city can play in accelerating that transition it's really critical to have a longer term plan for phasing out disposable plastics that are not of high value the next few slides are really meant to just briefly highlight some of the options we could begin to explore should you approve of that this evening so reducing disposable plastics remains a community priority we continue to get emails and petitions occasionally to ban certain plastic items as the realities of their production and disposal become more apparent every year just this week actually the group beyond plastics released a new report they kind of they looked at the life cycle of producing these items and they estimated that 130 plastic manufacturing facilities in the nation emit at least 114 million tons of co2 equivalent annually which is about 57 coal-fired

[210:01] power plants so this is an incredibly toxic industry that i think every city plays a role in trying to phase out another issue i know you're aware of from various emails you have been on is the high level contamination right now in our compost stream and one of the most problematic items are these single-use plastics including disposable food wear sometimes i'm sure it is a matter of folks in our community who think they are composable but they're not but this is um really prolific in our compost stream so reducing their use throughout the community would greatly assist and excuse me our goals for producing a really high quality compost product we need to get that stream cleaned up in order to achieve some of our other natural climate solutions and things we want to do with that compost and then finally as i mentioned in the beginning we now have more policy options available to us which is very exciting well not quite yet 2024 but that gives us plenty of time to really

[211:01] explore what's right for boulder if if you all decide that we should start doing that so typically cities start with the most prolific plastics in their community that are used for a very short amount of time if at all i know we all have those drawers at home uh which are disposable food wear items and so previously what we saw over the years were like item by item policies you'll remember straw bans or policies that go over after other items and now we're really seeing a shift um where some cities like berkeley and others in california as well as other places are looking at these in a much more comprehensive approach and they're putting ordinances in place that look at plastics you know in totality and not just one by one so on this slide i have the most common components of these comprehensive ordinances that i have found they usually start with a ask a provision that makes restaurants ask

[212:02] if folks want disposable food wear and not just provide them by default and then they typically move into bands on plastic food wear and requirements for that those items to be composable or recyclable and that would really depend on the local community infrastructure and what works for them and i have seen requirements to use reusable food wear for eating dining so if you go out to eat it's fast casual you have to actually use dishes and silverware and not um take out items however i did want to note that i have not found a city that has implemented a requirement around providing an option for you reusable takeout container so i think that's a really exciting thing we could explore um this photo on the right is one from our partner repeater soon to be called deliver xero which is a reusable takeout container program the city has been supporting for over a year now so if you all aren't signed up yet i hope you will go to the website and and try

[213:00] it out it's a really cool program and i think we're in 15-ish i haven't checked the the latest latest numbers restaurants across the city but um so this is something that i think boulder could really innovate around and we could incorporate you know more reusables into a comprehensive ordinance i totally understand why this won't be a solution for every person in boulder we have tourists we have visitors but transitioning to reusable containers is really critical for a majority of what we are doing in our economy if we want to achieve our climate goals all right so oh i'm sorry hold on all right next steps so obviously once we hear your thoughts we have to bring an ordinance back to you for adoption to make the actual changes to the bag fee ordinance we are ready to immediately start talking to businesses and communicating on how to remit the fee and when as well as back in 2012

[214:00] and i was the person who did this in 2012 i've been here that long we have lots of resources on our website of signs they could print out um one-page training materials for employees little postcards we anticipate having all that available again so we'll communicate to them they don't have to create anything for this we have everything they'll need and then we're also going to do additional stakeholder engagement and application of the racial equity instrument we did talk about this in the memo and we are continuing to look at the strategies we used in 2012 and 2013 to address the impacts of the fee on both the business and the consumer side and work to make those strategies even more effective this is a fee that no one needs to pay provided they have the information they need and the free access to reusable bags we have a big order coming in soon so we are ready to make sure that what we did back 10 years ago is even more effective today and reduces those burdens and then finally additional broader-based community education so

[215:01] that everyone knows what to expect next year and no one is surprised and then with single-use plastics if you all just give us a go ahead this evening we will start working on developing a work plan and an engagement process to really just start exploring those options what i highlighted tonight was what other cities have done but certainly not what we have to do so we will be looking very broadly at what we could bring into our community and this will dovetail really really nicely with efforts we will be taking on to educate businesses about those other provisions of the ppra as well um the styrofoam ban the plastic bag phase out so we want them we want to educate around that too and we can dovetail in engagement around these other plastics as well so with that here are my questions for you all this evening so does council support applying the disposable bag fee city-wide to include small stores that are exempt from the state's ppra discounts will support increasing the bag fee to 20 cents

[216:01] and finally should staff begin exploring options for a dish additional single-use plastic regulations to come later late 2023 early 2024 um whenever we can get it scheduled so that concludes my presentation i'm happy to take questions and i'm assuming i should stop sharing my screen thanks jamie is comprehensive very informative and an interesting presentation and i can't believe you've been at this for 10 whole years i know this was actually my first policy project all right so let's start with questions for staff and then we'll answer the questions that staff has for us so questions for staff we've got bob jenny rachel bob gene hey uh jamie thanks i like your comment there at the end no surprises so let's make sure we don't surprise anybody on this one um so um question for you i i like in the fact in the memo you kind of laid out what the

[217:00] bag purchase purchase rates were from year by year going all the way back to 2013. what was a little distressing to me was the fact that the number doesn't seem to be dropping off other than 2020 which was anomaly we seem to be kind of hovering in that 4.5 to 4.7 million bags a year going back many many years so so 10 cents doesn't seem to be doing the trick are there any studies with other cities that have had bigger bag fees let's say 15 or 20 or 25 cents that shows that there's a pain point where people stop buying bags and they bring them in thank you for that question um i have not seen any we a lot of us are watching louisville to see but theirs has only been implemented a few months so i have not seen anything i have been asked that question very very many times over the years of why we just seem to be consistently at a certain level and it was interesting when we we did the original fee we saw when we studied other cities and countries back then they saw about four

[218:01] or five years of decline and then they plateaued where we kind of like plateaued or we declined right away a larger amount and i just stayed there and so it's always been interesting to relay our experience in boulder to other cities if i was asked my personal opinion of why that's the case i do think um there's just a certain part of the population that's willing to pay 10 cents of course we can't set a fee based on behavior change but that is the case and then i also think the new students every year that come in we do try to educate them we work with cu but i do think if they're coming from a community without a bag fee you know they're maybe not registering or when they're buying their groceries but what you're seeing in the numbers is absolutely our experience and i'm not aware of any studies that i've identified a pain point there are countries that have i believe as high as like a dollar a bag um but i haven't seen anything recent about what um that has done thanksgiving just second question i'll say my my answers to your questions till

[219:01] later um i assume that one way we could a girl go about this let's say there was an inclination to go from 10 cents to 20 cents that could be phased in overtime maybe 15 cents for a few years and 20 cents are some cities doing that or is that just too much of a pain in the butt and we should just bite the bullet and go to wherever we're going to go i'm not aware of any cities doing that um we could go either way we're happy to do whatever council's preferences thank you jamie hey genie rachel matt mark myself thank you aaron i have a question about you mentioned i'm looking at both the presentation and also the mail you mentioned the 100 to 150 stores that would be included did you have a projected revenue amount so my wonderful colleagues in finance have

[220:00] been working on some revenue modeling i can't say i have time i have had time given that we moved this up a week to dig in they they approached it a few different ways based on partly what lewisville is experiencing but um so i don't at this point but i'm happy to look at that and follow up with council afterwards i'm so sorry that we don't have that prepared for this evening no that's all right i think part of the question i wanted to ask as well because i'm looking at the phase in later for the smaller uh smaller businesses and you mentioned maybe possibly july 1st 2023 and i'm trying to understand you know would it cost the city a lot to include those smaller uh stores and also would the revenue balance the fact that we would have to need extra staffing to be able to do that yeah it's really hard to anticipate the

[221:00] level of revenue that will come in um i anticipate in 2023 it will be pretty high now what that high level is it's just so hard to predict and then i do think it will drop off in 2024. i i do feel that the new fee revenue in addition to what we have already like in the bank from the existing fee is enough to cover what finance needs i have talked to them about that and i know joel is on the call if we have any further questions about it but it would they've communicated to me that it wouldn't be a full-time person um but we certainly could maybe add it to some other duties that might be needed and the bag fee could help provide for that additional resources so there weren't concerns that we couldn't do it thank you so much rachel mcmark it's great to see you jamie harkins thanks for being here tonight um so i am one of those people that has like 700

[222:00] bags because i forget them a lot and then i buy new ones so i just wonder like you know with coffee shops where you can like you know rent the coffee cup basically take it home bring it back they wash it is there anything like that for bags in other cities like is there a program where i could you know pay 25 cents but get it back if i return the bag so not like uh i have seen bag banks that are free not where you would have to pay 25 cents but um one of our partners is the city of fort collins and they did put something on the ballot last year and i have been talking to them a ton because they are in the thick of it right now theirs just took effect recently and they are um trying to figure that piece out of creating some sort of bag banks you have to look at sanitation um just because you don't know if what you're taking in is sanitary but they are really trying to figure out so i'm excited to work with them that is an idea because you're right we all have a lot of bags at home and so uh i think that we can absolutely pilot something

[223:00] like that in boulder um and have them available to the community whenever they want them and and i agree that's why i use the coffee cup as the example like if we can drink out of it like it can be cleaned so i think we could probably you know clean the bags hopefully all right glad that you're looking at it thanks yeah but i'm just jumping really quickly and i really appreciate jimmy bringing up the fort collins example because we did have a discussion with them rachel about what their option was is a reusable bag deposit system where customers pay a deposit for you reusable bags that they will get back when they return the bags to save the store or the coffee shop i don't know where they are on that but that was one of the ideas that they were exploring that's something we could think about as well see they didn't even tell me that part so between the two of us jonathan and i we will have all the ideas uh man mark and myself thank you jamie and uh jonathan when you introduce yourself it's you should submit yourself as the director of

[224:01] climate initiative so again congratulations you don't need to shy away from that jonathan um so yeah my and you you may have said this jamie and i may have been percolating on something you said earlier and then missed a later point um as as such with good content um given that there's uh the plastic checkout bag ban that begins in what 16 months are we just trying to bridge the gap to that point and then with the ban we're kind of good and we're just dealing with disposable bag fee on the paper side and some small scale stuff and i'm just wondering like how how do we ramp up to a ban which is you know obviously all all-encompassing and so do we want i mean so i'm just sort of wondering what that sort of scaling to the band looks like um and do we want to be more aggressive early on to get to that point so that it's not just cold turkey band right off the right off the bat and so i'm sort of curious about how you reconcile that 16 month difference from where we're at to being a complete band

[225:00] uh excellent question thank you uh it is a little tricky and actually reading the bill it's very confusing language so starting january 1st you are correct that the it transitions to just a fee on paper and the plastic bags are phased out they do have like a provision in there that stores could continue to give out some plastic bags after january i think until like june 30th if they were purchased in part of their inventory before january 1st so it isn't quite as hard of a date like it is in the bill but they do allow for like a phasing out of existing inventory so stores aren't just throwing away cartons and cartons of bags but um you are correct that it does transition to that fee on paper now if we exempt the small stores that are exempt in the ppra they don't have a fee and they don't have a ban so they can continue handing out plastic bags and paper bags without that fee under just the state law so we would really you know if we do

[226:00] include them in the program we could honestly we could allow them to keep a plastic option if you all if the council would like to um or we could have them also phase out you know i would think it'd be easier and more consistent to have them phase out plastic along with the rest of the community but um that's sort of how it's designed to sort of like transition but it is going to be tricky and i think it's our job to really make sure folks understand the dates um in the bill because you read the bill it is very confusing so we'll make sure they know that they have to start phasing them out in january so they can plan ahead and hopefully not be have more than like five six months to uh to phase out when 2024 starts so it just made it fall up so what it does it does it make some sense to then maybe work on a stiffer fee early on to not incentivize the hoarding of bags that you have that six-month back end so that they kind of take that sticker

[227:00] shock is a little harder up front so you're not pooling does that does that will or or is it so cheap and both purchasing that's really irrelevant and they're going to hang on to them regardless yeah i i don't really think it would really matter to be honest um a lot of the bigger stores you know the fee is already at kingsupers they're working to transition plastic out totally on their own um i don't i don't really think it would result in that but i like your line of thinking mark thank you that was a great presentation i i have a few questions back in 2012 when you were there um council walked back from a 20 cent a bag fee to a 10 cent a bag fee out of concern for the economically disadvantaged what has changed with respect to the economically disadvantaged that that argues for a higher fee yes that's an excellent question uh i

[228:00] think we back in 2012 we were one of the first cities to try this and so there was a lot of concern for how folks in the community who are of lower means would react and um participate or not in the program um i can say that so we do have an exemption in there to exempt folks on food assistance programs and i will say anecdotally over the years i've heard folks um like store managers report to me that they they don't want to be exempt like they want to participate in waste reduction in the community i would by no means assume that that is universal that is just anecdotally what a few stories i've heard but to answer your question i don't think much has changed but i do think the culture around disposability has changed a little and we have spent the last 10 years getting bags out to the community so every single year we are giving away bags at events we are providing thousands to every food bank in boulder um we have really kind of flooded the community along with everyone else with the reusable bag

[229:01] shwag and so um it's not that their means have changed and to be argued a lot of folks have rougher economic means now maybe than in 2012 but i do think we're in a different place culturally where we can make sure they have the bags they need available we actually mailed them out back in 2012 which is something we can do as well we did a little bit of canvassing door-to-door um in certain neighborhoods so i think council back then was just unsure of how it would work in the community and wanting to just test the waters and then we we have sort of let it ride since then so um i absolutely would understand um uh opinion to keep it at 10 cents out of that concern um so thank you um have you done much outreach to the business community on on this and gotten much feedback i mean has there been i guess i'm asking are you formulating these proposals simply from the environmental perspective or you're

[230:01] looking at all at the impact on businesses uh in the community yes i did anticipate that question uh we did discuss internally um in outreach to business and we are meeting with the chamber and our other economic development partners in a few weeks and this is one of the items but i will say these recommendations are crafted um on our climate and circular economy goals with uh with obviously a recognition of the burden on business because of the phase in and trying to provide them resources um should we have surveyed or if we would have surveyed businesses i guarantee you no one like voluntarily wants to create a system to collect a bag fee so i don't think the feedback would have been like yes include us in this in this program and so we do intend to like i said meet with business partners reach out to a lot of other

[231:00] businesses and make sure any concerns they have are addressed both in the ordinance as well as what we do to implement it in the next handful of months and the next year um and so we will absolutely be listening to their concerns and but the but the recommendation is shaped on our goals around climate and waste reduction and i ask because you might well have been surprised by the the response of the business community but i i would urge you to when you speak to the chamber get a full sense of what their concerns are and try to deal with them um in this ordinance as it's finally presented um in the memo there's discussion about the revenues that have been uh generated by our program when you stake those revenues is that is that net of the cost of administration

[232:00] that's simply gross do we have any sense of what the cost of administration is if we're collecting 200 000 a year what is it costing us to get that 200 000 a year that may i'll see joel's turning his camera on the bag fee i can say that the bag fee has not been to date transferring money over to cover personnel expenses in the finance department so we've been using the bag fee revenue for other things like the reusable bag giveaways in the community the food banks we've purchased very large equipment purchases as i put in the memo but joel can speak to i believe the administration of this program was folded in with some others and so while we can use this money directly to support them in the future we haven't up until now needed to do that so it would be interesting to know that i mean money being fungible you're generating it here but you're spending it there it would be nice to know whether there's a a net benefit to the community

[233:02] in doing all of this um joel did you have any thoughts on that um yeah i just uh council member while it seemed like he was maybe obviously thought so i wanted to provide you that space joel we can't really hear you i'm afraid at least i can i can't either all right how about now it's a little better all right thanks um the precautions you you you take to make sure that the eight-year-old doesn't disrupt a council meeting sometimes uh thank you when you get called up and apologies uh so joel wagner uh deputy director of finance um so currently we're we're absorbing the the costs of administration just based on other uh departmental functions our tax system has a disposable bag fee return that's already built into the system so

[234:01] the cost of administering a couple of dozen accounts is pretty minimal as jamie mentioned if we do expand this significantly there may be increased costs in the interim as we ramp that up provide education follow up with taxpayers who forget to file their first few returns and things like that but based on council's feedback we would do some modeling and let you know what that would look like yeah and my last question is how many cities actually have a 20 20 cent or greater bag fee are we joining a multitude or are we sort of out on our own i in colorado a majority i i don't know off the top of my head and exactly and i'm not suggesting you you need to know offhand it would be nice however to take a look at it and when you come back to us um okay tell us whether we're doing something that that's entirely unique or

[235:02] whether there's a lot of precedent for a 20 bag fee as opposed to a 10 cent back fee it may not change how we approach it but it would be a good piece of information for us to have um councilmember just one quick comment there i appreciate um the question it's completely reasonable and going back to something jimmy said i would just point out that um i think there are we are ahead of a lot of the cities that really have no system set up yet and so i think we're just looking at a handful of communities that had already enacted some kind of plastic bag fee and so i think we can come back to you and talk about more of a global view to see what's going on not only in colorado but in other states um and that might be helpful to kind of get to the point that you're raising but but again i think a point that jimmy made that just bears repeating kind of to your earlier question you know we have to bring our ordinance in compliance with the state uh requirements and so our choices are

[236:01] somewhat limited we can keep at the same level we can increase the level and we can look at how we expand or not um the the program to all businesses or not so we have a few few toggles that we can pull here but otherwise i just want to say for those listening at home that again our purpose here is to bring our ordinance in compliance with the state law and we can do that in in a few different ways but certainly we can bring back some of those details to you okay and i i just want to make sure that that um that we're getting a benefit from this and that the the major impact of it is not simply to make the cost of living in boulder even higher than it already is um because it's as we all know it is pretty steep um and that's really all i'm i'm trying to get at here all right that's my questions miss mark junior and then i'll call myself thank you and i appreciate the comments

[237:00] made by mark about small businesses and i was looking at the memo the part that talks about racial equity instruments and how that has been used or applied and it talks about small businesses and minority-owned businesses and the implementation side how that could negatively impact them so my question to you and i look quickly i didn't see um and i do see the part that hey we'll continuously look at this but i'm wondering what are some of the mechanism that maybe your office is looking into to i i don't know maybe protect these um small businesses to lessen the impact of this new policy that we're looking into thank you council member um i think uh a few a few answers to that the first is many of you know we have an annual contract with the pace business advising team that we revisit and we do a new scope of work every year and they

[238:00] have a current equity program that is restaurant focus and that those advisors who are fluent in a few different languages are so amazing in getting out to some of our businesses and getting them involved in our programs and so we were looking at maybe transitioning on that contract next year to include um outreach to some of the retail businesses who will need to comply with or not depending on the direction you all would like to go in so that's one avenue and then uh the other is that um sorry i'm having a little bit of a mind blowing here um you know back when we did the fee in 2012 we really invited them personally into like a stakeholder group and made sure that they had the resources they needed and that is where um i received the anecdotal information that um a lot of these international markets we discussed this back in 2012 wanted to participate in the program because you know back where in their

[239:00] country of origin for example we don't they never use plastic bags and they and so just it was super interesting for me to learn culturally um the thoughts around waste and what we're producing and so i think we would replicate some of the approaches we did in 2012 to really outreach one-on-one to those businesses we know may have language and technology barriers and really make sure they have the resources they need um and then i i do know we've outreached or i've emailed the latino chamber as well to set up a meeting to talk to them and hopefully through our partners which we have a lot more partners than we did back in 2012 uh we can um really work to make sure that there aren't barriers to understanding the program and what they need to do so um we didn't have any issues in 2012 and so i shouldn't say that of course there were there were issues um but we really worked really hard to mitigate them and so uh i anticipate in adding a lot more businesses to the program we would take all of these contracts we have existing in our

[240:00] department and really focus them on making that as easy as possible thank you so much okay so um great questions i've got one speaking of making things easier for small businesses um have we thought about adding more of a share back to businesses with the 20 cent fee uh because right now it's four and six are we thinking about passing along some of that additional fee to the businesses yes the current ordinance the way it is drafted i double checked this earlier it's 40 so if we kept that they would receive eight of it back we can certainly adjust that though if if council would like to do 50 to each we could do that um we really can it's our ordinance so we can as long as we meet that state criteria of at least the the four out of ten so 40 going back to them we would be in compliance

[241:01] great well i'll just make a comment on that particular one since i just brought it up just that i think that's a great thing to do outreach on and also kind of with the sharp and pencils and the revenue projections is to see you know because as you mentioned this can be a revenue source for small for small businesses so we're going to be what's like 850 businesses that have to do this that didn't before and if they actually are getting something significant out of this i think it'll be much more appealing to them so i think that's a great thing to analyze i'm not going to say what the numbers should be tonight but to analyze about how we could implement that as we move forward if council of course is supported so why don't we move to that i think we've gotten through our questions so if we can if you can put your questions to us back up and y'all it's 10 o'clock in the interest of some efficiency i'm going to start from a baseline of how to you know are we okay with the staff recommendations on each one and then you can you know disagree if you want to but i'm going to start start with this

[242:02] so [Music] i'm going to say um can we say that we do we support applying the disposable bags citywide to include small stores per the staff recommendation you know unfortunately actually i can't see people's thumbs or nods or anything like that so maybe i'll ask you to take that back off that okay sorry there you go sir are people comfortable with that staff recommendation generally fairly good okay and feel free if you if you need to add a comment or disagree feel free um but it's looking like we got support for that how about increasing the fee to 20 cents are people comfortable with that it's mark's going to start off with a comment but yeah i would prefer actually to ramp up on this i i don't really have a problem ultimately with the 20 cent um although i'd like to have a little more data about it with respect to the questions i've

[243:00] already asked but if that's the direction we want to head i i prefer to have instead of doubling it overnight i prefer to see it ramped up over a couple of years and let it sink in and people adjust here we go bob and then lauren yeah i'm not ready to stroll pull tonight and turn it to a binary yes or no uh i i i'd like to get the answers to questions i asked before i would probably support it but i'd like to see information about ramp up i'd like to see information about what the the point is where people stop buying bags so i'd like to have a little more information if staff could just bring forward maybe two or three proposals with some more data that would be great lauren yeah i really like the point that you brought up aaron about looking at um how the fee how much of it is given back to the businesses versus how much the city takes in especially um trying to keep in mind small you know the needs of small businesses and trying to help support minority owned businesses as well

[244:00] great cool yeah i've been trying to figure out where to fit in this comment i think it sort of overlaps with the second and third questions so i'm just gonna say it here and this will kind of count towards the single-use plastics discussion too um you know that recent climate tax poll that we did of uh voters right show that climate is a top issue for more than a third of our community i think it was 36 percent of people and you know i think about the benefit to the community of getting rid of plastic bags just completely as well as single-use plastics not necessarily being in terms of the revenue that we're getting but really in terms of meeting our community health and climate goals um so you know in this in this case where we're charging for plastic bag use we're penalizing use but incentivizing behavior is a much more effective tool for individual behavior change than penalties and so one of the things that i'm curious about

[245:00] and maybe this would come back when we kind of revisit the um the plastic bag fee what would it cost to pay shoppers to stop using plastic bags so for example what if we paid people 25 cents per bag that they bring in um i mean what are some ways that we can think about incentivizing this behavior rather than penalizing it because i think our community you know at least for that poll really showed that we care a lot about climate and you know i think that if if our community is caring about it this much let's start investing in it and to me this comes down to single-use plastics as well they're terrible terrible for a community for the environment for the communities where um where these things are generated how do we start incentivizing people for massive changes in their behavior and how do we start providing the support to businesses and other folks to help them make that transition but for me it it's just it's hard to think about

[246:00] penalizing behavior as being a way of driving kind of large-scale community change and i know we've seen some right but we've plateaued and to me it seems like it's because we're not taking advantage of of how susceptible all of our brains are to incentives oh anyway i think there's there's lots of creative ways of thinking about um doing that but that's just just in general like yes i'm supportive and um i think there are better better options that we haven't thought about yet and i would just like to encourage us if we were gonna try incentivizing and investing in climate solutions what would that look like how much would it cost us to do something like that yes nicole mark i just want to say i agree entirely with nicole's point um not that we're not going to raise the bag fee but that we need to put in a component of incentivization not just

[247:00] putting the hammer on people and saying you know we're going to hit you in the wallet um and there are probably a bunch of clever ideas we can use to to encourage people not to use bags and that ought to go hand in hand with whatever we're doing in terms of raising fees to me it's always been a little simplistic to simply say you know we we're going to change behavior um by making it more expensive um for people who are well to do uh it's a rounding error um for people who are not uh it becomes a little more burdensome so i i think nicole's on to something and i'd like to see you come back with some aspects that go beyond simply raising the fee but how do we create some incentives um for better behavior i'm smart i'm sorry mayor can i just can i can i

[248:01] respond would that be okay i can't help myself i apologize i know there was no i know there was no question there but i just wanted to remark that i really appreciate those comments i think with respect to the overall um single-use plastics issue that area has a lot of margin for creativity and i just wanted to point out um jimmy talked about the repeater program for example um i think we can absolutely start talking about how we create incentives and opportunities for people to really start shifting their behavior in terms of overall plastics use we may be a little bit more limited just on the bag piece but i think we can go back and put our heads together and figure out what type of incentives could parallel or complement what we do on any of the bag fee so i just wanted to remark i really appreciated those comments thanks juni thank you uh i just want to say thank you nicole for

[249:00] bringing this idea of incentivizing uh the use of maybe reusable bags or also i think there's something in the memo about educating people i welcome that as well i think that's great um you know everyone you know are different some people need a little bit more education around how they use um plastic in the community so that would be great um and i'm actually in the same position as some of my other colleagues as well what i really would like to see is i know you mentioned the other program within the um equity as part of equity but i wanted to know what are some of the concrete steps especially for small businesses because 20 cents is a lot right and not only that around the implementation if it's a small business of let's say it's one person right and it's a business that is frequented a lot by the community how do they you know how do they keep on top of this

[250:02] new requirement so i think knowing what it is and how the city intend to build their capacity because again a big corporation they'll be able to figure it out they've already have the system on lockdown but now you're bringing in brand new small businesses you have to build their capacity in order for them to stay you know to be able to um to engage in this process and still be sustainable so i think that's very important to keep that in mind but overall i think i i i really appreciate all the work i appreciate the memo i just think it's it's full of information that i find very um important and useful and i think your you know your answers around equity was was very um well thought of so in the education piece to me was that again that's another equity piece as well uh so thank you so much

[251:01] thanks so uh can you say the folks who haven't spoken out are you kind of broadly okay with going to 20 cents subject to some of the comments that people have made okay generally seeing some thumbs up so i'll just add in you know the comment here that i think people have made some excellent comments and suggestions here um so i think the you know jamie i think the direction we're going is yes but subject to some creative thinking about you know how it faces in uh for small businesses in particular how either from a time perspective or a dollar perspective like is it easier or harder like would and this is a great place to talk to the chambers in the community would you rather have it phase into 15 before it goes to 20 or or not you know and if there's a clear message there then that's a message we can follow and uh you know great great points on incentives and um avoiding disparate impacts and so

[252:00] i know you all are very very good at this stuff so is is that direction that you can work with it is indeed i always love a creative thinking challenge so and so does jonathan so uh we will put our brains together and answer your questions and have some ideas great i love it and then the questions about then the last one is about proceeding with some form of single-use plastics regulations and can i just ask a clarifying question process here i assume that the next step would be a study session where we talk over options right it's not like you're going to bring us back an ordinance with all these details all right now so just to be clear if we give the thumbs up to this you know in some number of months you'll come back and be like here here's our ideas what do you think so with that framing are people uh do people want to see this move forward um with ideas to come back to us some some months from now let's see i'm seeing nodding heads i'm not seeing any thumbs down so it feels like good but nicole you also have your hand up

[253:01] yes i just wanted to ask i know you all are going to be thinking about the racial equity instrument and applying it here it would also be amazing to talk with the center for people with disabilities um just because i know that there's been a lot of issues within the disability community um with some of those straw transitions and i would just love to have their perspective um understanding what some of the concerns may be that would disproportionately impact them so whenever you come back with ideas i would love their input as well thank you so much and yes mayor brockett uh similar to what we did for the bag fee council gave us general direction we brought back about four or five options at a study session and then we went on to develop an ordinance um for the bag fee from there so i would anticipate like late late 2023 um likely for something this comprehensive to do the process properly okay great great well it looks like

[254:00] we're very interested in i think i'll speak from uh for my colleagues to say this is an exciting opportunity that the legislature has granted us one that our community has been really interested in for a long time i'll just one quick anecdote i was i spoke to an elementary school class a couple years ago and one of their couple big asks was can we can we regulate plastics and we ban plastic straws or a couple other things as and my answer was no but the legislature is working on this and hopefully they'll give us the opportunity and so they're excited to hear that maybe we would be able to before too long and now we can go back to that group of elementary school students and get guess what we can do it now and we're working on it so thank you all right good enough need anything else no i think that is wonderful thank you so much for your time yeah that's terrific i appreciate it you're very welcome thanks for all your hard work and very high quality work okay alicia i think we got one last item

[255:00] is that correct that is correct sir and that is our uh item number eight tonight matters from the mayor and members of council eight a is the living wage update to be presented by council member folkerts take it away thank you thanks for adding this to the meeting so i just kind of wanted to update you on some of the work i've been working on through the consortium of city's minimum wage working group so we currently include members from broomfield lewisville longmont erie netherland and netherland and we have identified partners and have sort of a preliminary outreach and engagement plan that we're looking forward to starting so we have our first information session that we're hoping to hold at the end of september our current strategy is to do a couple rounds of outreach each round starts

[256:02] with a session hosted by the working group that's focused on providing information to our fellow electeds and then the working group would help support offering help to all our fellow communities to help host those meetings in their own communities so that you know each forum is tailored to that community and hosted by one of their own electeds so our goal with this strategy is to ensure that we are engaging and participating in all communities robustly and creating for a timeline that allows for the incorporation of feedback from our various surrounding communities without any one community's feedback being prioritized over another or being out of step in the process so that's kind of an outline of where we're at right now tonight i'm asking for an out of five

[257:02] um to support to get some staff support um to continue exploring all options for regional collaboration developing a draft work plan and timeline for a local wage ordinance for a community conducting necessary outreach within our own community working on a multilingual engagement strategy to determine the most effective means for engaging our community members with limited english proficiency and beginning preliminary research on legal and policy issues that we would need to address um in order to adopt this ordinance did i touch on all the things that we chatted about i think you did that's that's great lauren well i'm really very appreciative to you the work

[258:00] that you're doing uh in this regional collaboration and i'll just mention as well that i'm doing some outreach to mayors and other council members in some of the other cities that are engaged in this effort to kind of try to do some you know cross support for the initiative and so i think we're got a group of us working on this hard nerd you want to say something we'll go to mark yeah just real quick that i wanted to say in support of this as as you're thinking about it one of the questions may be does staff have time for this and the way that we have been working with lauren and just appreciate her leadership in this the current outlying staff has capacity 4 to assist in this in this work as that ramps up potentially we will think about that again next year but right now we were comfortable moving forward and supporting um council member focus and this moving forward so just know that staff is supportive thank you thanks mark

[259:00] but there you just answered my question which was you know do we have the uh the staff support and can we handle it answer given so end of my comment great so i guess this then i'll ask for a knot of five but maybe we'll call it a show of hands do we have uh five hands to say support staff working on this that looks unanimous excellence thank you guys lauren thanks again for all your work on this and i'm excited to see this move forward let us know how we can help all right elise are we done we are done sir that's a wrap all right very good any uh final comments everybody no we'll just circle back under matters another night probably to chat about the thanks i was going to mention that and i

[260:00] forgot um yeah so back to the the psilocybin uh question i think it's a little late for that tonight would be my thought and so let's let's look to check in under matters a subsequent meeting possibly the first one in september to check in on that that's a brief temperature check thanks rachel all right so you know their hands uh gamble meeting close at 10 18 pm thanks everyone have a good night [Music] you