September 1, 2022 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] oh he sent me you see I think you like waved the flag for me anyway even if it wasn't good you've said enough good things are you sure everybody and it is no worries I feel very prepared [Laughter]

[1:03] right we gotta work out all these things

[5:59] foreign

[8:30] bring the public to participate both virtually and in person so you will be asked to indicate on the open comment and public hearing forms if you'll be speaking virtually or in person in-person speakers will speak first and virtual speakers will follow all speakers will be listed in the order in which they signed up and all speakers will have the option to change their location preference if needed by contacting the city clerk's office at cityclerk's office at bouldercolorado.gov alright that's it for our announcements

[9:01] so I will now call us to order can we read the role please yes sir and good evening everyone and back councilmember Benjamin happy to be here in person mayor Brockett pleasure to be here councilmember folcrits present mayor Pro tem friend here councilmember Joseph president Speer present Wallach Winer president and Yates delighted to be back mayor we have our quorum thanks so much Alicia so our first item you may be wondering while we're why we're all wearing these antennae and it is because it is pollinator appreciation month and we have a declaration of about pollinator appreciation month that will be read Now by council member Tara weiner take away Tara Boulders 550 species of native bees

[10:02] butterflies hummingbirds beetles flies and other pollinators maintain the health and beauty of our grasslands forests Meadows and other natural areas pollinators are indispensable Partners in the production of our food supply and are essential for the diverse and thriving ecosystems that support all life insects including critical pollinators are declining precipitously throughout the world due to habitat loss pesticide use and climate change this is placing our food Security National natural environment and human well-being in Peril we honor the Legacy from those who came before us to protect the natural world and outstanding beauty of Boulder we acknowledge and thank Our Community Partners and residents who are building on this Legacy by joining together to heal our land and strengthen our connection with each other by creating Innovative and Equitable solutions that are Transforming Our Food system and rewilding our community's

[11:02] Landscaping as our community enjoys the Bountiful Autumn Harvest and as we witness the Regeneration of our natural lands from the tireless work of pollinators the city council of the city of Boulder Colorado declares September 2022 pollinator appreciation month and commits to taking action in partnership with our community As We join together to protect pollinators and all biodiversity for current and future Generations very good thanks so much for that Tara and I believe we have a video in celebration of the month as well no there shouldn't be I don't know why that's not

[12:07] um gotta have a technical grip hold on a second here I'm not sure why this one yeah okay you know

[13:00] it was working before we may need to do it minus sound it's not playing Thursdays should I have any questions let's get started [Music]

[14:06] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] we have even more to be excited about this year with the recently launched cup holder program that's building on many

[15:02] years of work that we've done as a community together to enhance natural climate Solutions a key part of co-boulder is pollinator Pathways which is rapidly expanding as more partners and community members are joining together to build high quality native plant Habitat to rewild the city to protect pollinators insects birds and all living things tonight we ask the community to join us as we congratulate and celebrate 18 of our fellow community members who are in the final stages of completing the requirements to be certified as pollinator advocates for the city's new program is a program that was developed in conjunction with the Horticultural team at the Butterfly Pavilion to develop a program that brings community members together to learn about how to build maintain and grow these beautiful pollinator habitats habitats that support all of our native insects and

[16:02] songbirds it's free you can join us anytime during the next session that will be starting sometime in the spring or early summer what this program offers is an in-depth view of how to build these habitats everything from what goes into the soil to how you maintain the core how you maintain your habitat how to grow the plants which plants to choose how to group them it seems intimidating at first and a lot of people come into it saying I have no idea what to do even though I've been a gardener for years but after weeks of being together sharing our group Knowledge Learning and studying what the Horticultural team from Butterfly Pavilion has brought to us and what we've learned on our own we bring it together and synthesize it to build a beautiful program of people working together achieving this goal of building not only habitat in our own yards but in our broader community

[17:05] kind of the first exciting you know bringing more expertise into the community so that hopefully this first round of pollinator Advocates will you know spread and multiply the the knowledge about why um we might want to replace some of our ornamentals with natives um yeah so and I'm on a big Journey with that with our tiny yard and then also with my kids school and yeah and now like everywhere I go I just see like oh you can have so many lamps right there in my love affair with native plants and pollinators of Boulder County when I volunteered at the Chautauqua native plant garden with Dave Sutherland many years ago so when I saw that this program was available I jumped at it as a way to get some formal training and something I've been informally dabbling

[18:01] in for many years and I'm excited to spread the word in my neighborhood I live in an HOA that's very close to open space and I would love to be able to turn our little HOA into a native plant two weeks and I really didn't know anything about native plants before I took this class but I'm really interested in how to improve the conditions for our pollinators and to improve the amount of biodiversity I'm really concerned about climate change and that's my main reason for being in the class and I've learned a tremendous amount and I'm very grateful I joined the pollinator Advocate training to help step into what I believe is our true role as a species which is a beneficial keystone species and we've created these problems of habitat loss and degradation and we can be the solution so this is an incredibly Rich

[19:02] training and a wonderful opportunity to provide some healing for biodiversity and life for pollinators here in the city the excitement about developing outward from their own yards and contributing to their communities and their neighborhoods and expanding their capacity for their their little space to do work and instead move outward into the community pretty pretty exciting to see that happen each pollinator Advocate spent a month in weekly two-hour classroom sessions and an additional eight weeks of Summer working in the field receiving specialized training thanks to our friends at harlequin's Gardens in the endangered species Coalition for providing each pollinator Advocate with a native plant garden congratulations to Boulder's inaugural class of pollinator Advocates thank you for your dedication to our community and our pollinators join us at the bee Boulder Festival on Saturday September 24th from 10 a.m to 2 p.m in Central

[20:01] Park and meet co-builder Partners in person and learn more about these programs and share your ideas with us there'll be pollinator and science-filled performances with Jeff and page and a whole range of activities for kids [Music] well that was lovely thanks to everyone who is involved in the making of that and for everyone for your support of our pollinators and with that and we'll move to item 1B yes sir thank you item 1B on tonight's agenda is the presentation and questions related to the annual comprehensive financial report and auditor selection thanks Alicia and we're joined here this evening by our outside Financial expert University of Colorado Professor Dr David Gross so David thanks so much for

[21:00] being here do we hand the right off to you will you lead us through this can you hear me yes we can okay I will go uh my name is Dr David Gross and I serve on the Boulder City Council audit subcommittee my PhD is in financial economics and I'm an associate teaching professor of Finance at CU Boulder separate from my academic activities I have done this type of accounting audit and financial oversight for many years for many local organizations uh this is my fourth year on the city's audit committee the audit committee consists of council council members Joseph Wallach and me and it's our job to assess and interpret the audit of the city's 2021 fiscal year financial statements it's not the job of this committee to in any way assess the stability or health of the city's financial position or to assess the priorities or efficacy of exponential activities that of course is the job of the council and really all Boulder

[22:00] residents but without the work done by the city's Auditors and the work of this committee people could not perform these assessments so the motion on the consent agenda for later this evening is to approve and accept the city of Boulder annual comprehensive financial report the AK firm uh and the audit of the akfer and I'll give a brief description of the four-part process that led us to this point so first the city staff records all of the thousands of financial transactions second the staff uses this information to prepare financial statements uh these financial statements are produced for each of the city's 44 funds including General and open space and transportation and Municipal property and they produce three types of financial statements for each of these funds like a p l or income statement the city produces the statement of Revenue expenses and change in net position all revenue transactions are summarized and categorized by Source all expense transactions are summarized and categorized by type and from these the

[23:02] staff computes the resulting net change in fund balance like a balance sheet the city also produces a statement of net position this is what the city owns its assets what the city owes its liabilities and of course the resulting net position and If This Were a business we'd call this the owner's equity the difference in this year's net position and last year's net position is the change in that position uh from the p l statement that we just talked about and then finally the city produces a statement of cash flows and this documents the sources and uses of all cash over the years if an entity has a lot of non-cash revenues or non-cash expenses I mean a lot of transactions on credit then an entity that appears healthy could run out of money waiting to get paid this is not the case with the city of Boulder the city does not have many non-cash credit transactions but it still produces these documents these financial statements are public and they can be used by anyone to understand how the city of Boulder operates and answer questions such as

[24:01] from where does the city get its rep its funds uh where does the city spend its funds and how stable and sustainable financially is the city of Boulder but these and other questions can only be answered if the city is accurately recording Financial transactions and accurately and correctly producing financial statements so the third step is a record of the transactions and the financial statements are given to the auditor Clifton Larson and Allen in addition the auditor works with the city staff to gain an understanding of the process used to record transactions and prepare these financial statements and the auditor ensures that the recording and preparation are done in accordance with the rules set by the government Accounting Standards Board uh gasb or gasby so the result of the audit the Auditors gave the city a clean opinion this is the best possible result for the city and summarizing the opinion on page 17 of the 317 page report the auditor wrote

[25:00] in our opinion the statements present fairly and in all material respects the respective financial position of the governmental activities the business type activities each major fund and the aggregate remaining fund information of the city uh again this is the best possible result for the city now the Auditors look for three things when writing their opinion they look for deficiencies significant deficiencies and material weaknesses and I'll describe those very briefly uh and we'll see that there actually was one significant deficiency in internal control over compliance uh that sounds so much worse than it actually was and I'll talk about it in a minute so again a deficiency is a flaw in a design or a design of a process which might allow for errors it doesn't mean there actually was an error but there have been zero deficiencies uh in the city for the last three years so zero deficiencies for 2019 2020 and 2021. a significant deficiency is a large

[26:01] deficiency or combination of smaller ones uh less severe than a material weakness but important enough to Merit attention and again there was one significant deficiency that I'll talk about in a minute no material weaknesses uh this is a large deficiency or combination such there's a reasonable possibility of recording errors and there were none so the significant deficiency it has nothing to do with money or a misrecorded transaction or an improper revenue or an improper payment the city is required to ensure that all vendors receiving over twenty five thousand dollars of Federal grant funds do not appear on a list of prohibited vendors and so the city must ensure that the vendor has not been suspended or debarred from receiving federal funds and the city must produce a document verifying that it is checked so in 2021 the city received funds from the American Rescue plan act arpa this of course was a new federal program requiring new vendors the city selected

[27:00] a software vendor to help with some data associated with vaccines my understanding is this is the same vendor that was used by Boulder County when asked by the auditor the city was not able to produce the documentation to demonstrate that it had checked that this particular vendor did not appear on the uh on the list this Rises to the level of a significant deficiency and was therefore reported as such but again this in no way LED to any errors uh in the financial statements or any payment to any entity that should not have been engaged uh there were approximately 25 other vendors for which the city must engage in this process and appears this is the only vendor uh for which the record was not kept and the auditor concluded that the city actually did check it just didn't have the record that it checked so again this Rises to the level of a uh significant deficiency but it was corrected so again overall clean opinion

[28:01] this is 32 years in a row and 39 years total the city received sorry I apologize that sounded wrong this is not 32 years of a clean opinion this is 32 years in a row that the city was awarded the certificate of achievement for excellence in financial reporting by the government Finance Officers Association and this certifies that the city went beyond the minimum requirements and prepared reports that evidence the spirit of transparency and full disclosure so the city has won this award 39 years total and 32 years in a row the fourth and final steps are the audit committee interprets and enacts on any recommendations from the auditor again for that one finding the auditor concluded the city did review the records it just couldn't produce a copy of the review so no official recommendations next the audit committee considers the audit findings and makes a recommendation to the Council on whether to accept the annual comprehensive financial report and the audit of the

[29:00] annual comprehensive financial report and it is the unanimous recommendation of the audit committee that the city council approve and accept this report and the audit of the report thank you thank you so much for that Dr Gross we just hugely appreciate your assistance with these complicated financial matters we're very lucky to have you uh junior Mark do you want to add anything to say no I think Dr gross's uh statements were very comprehensive thank you excellent any questions for Dr Gross seeing none I will thank you for your service uh David we really appreciate your time and your expert assistance thank you have a good night okay uh now we're ready for open comment so who's going to walk us through the participation guidelines for that

[30:08] thank you we appreciate members of the public who are here this evening uh this is Ryan henchen uh your City's community engagement manager and I want to share that the city you might speak up a little bit thank you the city has engaged with community members to co-create a vision for productive meaningful and inclusive Civic conversations this Vision does support physical and emotional safety for community members staff and Council as well as democracy for people of all ages identities lived experience and political perspectives for more information on this Vision please visit the following website and next slide please the following are examples of rules of decorum found in the boulder of is code and other guidelines that support this Vision these will be upheld during this meeting

[31:00] all remarks and testimony shall be limited to matters related to City business no participant shall make threats or use other forms of intimidation against any person obscenity racial epiphats and other speech and behavior that disrupts or otherwise impedes the ability to conduct the meeting are prohibited the participants are required to sign up to speak using the name they are commonly known by and individuals must display their whole name before being allowed to speak online currently only audio testimony is permitted online thanks so much Ryan right so we've got 20 people signed up for open comment each person gets two minutes to speak and the first three speakers are Emily Reynolds Catherine Howe and Christian Kerr

[32:10] Emily Reynolds your mic is open I don't see the timer visible to us can you see it now Emily oh yes uh thank you good evening Council cities free of Boulders drug induced crime have no camping in public spaces and legal consequences if you steal a downtown day Center spells disaster for business residence and tourism anyone who wants to get off of the streets has their choice of 60 to 70 services in Boulder don't pick on downtown and don't pick on a neighborhood our pro-development Council majority

[33:00] sites housing as culprit that fits their build baby build narrative but ignores the causes of homelessness drug addiction and mental health issues if they are here because of drugs or mental health the progressive argument has no impact but if they blame High housing prices that fits the narrative the trouble transients by the creek aren't due to housing prices and housing doesn't cure mental illness or addiction Millions now and huge ongoing expenses and how much for meth decontamination after visits to the day Center or their free housing I support the hard-working family whose Sole Provider gets ill is that even vaguely comparable to the person who decides to do meth and not work anymore these folks did not come to Boulder for work and then decide a dangerous encampment was a better option it cannot be a low barrier Country Club

[34:01] down by the creek where they can do drugs openly let's hope it does better than the 0.8 percent success rate of the Murphy Center in Fort Collins but wait how would this fare in an actual vote of the people with an impressive lack of public engagement this needs a vote feedback sessions are framed to limit feedback to location in services not whether or not we should do this thank you thank you Emily next we have Catherine Hogue and I understand Christian Kerr's not present so then Max Gould maisel and Kathleen Hancock hi can you hear me yes thank you Council first I just want to applaud those of you who have taken the time to walk our public spaces to see for yourself the drug paraphernalia the trash um that's going on uh in and around the encampments

[35:02] um it's it's urgent that we keep the camping pan it's urgent that we move people along from that it's absolutely deterring all of us families kids from being able to enjoy these public spaces um addiction is the number one thing mental health of course it's an issue but it's not on the rise like addiction addiction is massive and we need to have that discussion um I'd love to see as far as the budget 750 000 budgeted for the day Center I would so love to see all of that money um put towards the wonderful wonderful efforts happening at the bridge house we have to talk about that first and foremost right now in Boulder I believe there are 44 beds people commit to sobriety they have a shelter they have two meals a day six days a week they're showing responsibility to have Community

[36:00] Services they're huge like resources to a long-term you know success in um uh as after there are 12 it's a 12 month uh commitment that they have there 74 success after they leave and getting jobs and finding housing this is the kind of thing that we need to reward and support um I thank you so much for doing that the work you're doing and please please please do not allow encampments in our town thank you thank you Catherine next we have Max Gould maisel Kathleen Hancock and Celeste Landry hello can you hear me all right yes thank you I'm going to take my two full minutes to grieve and prepare the community for the potential trauma that could be caused by the development of the land colonized by the University known as the property called CU South we

[37:01] risk losing our rare wetlands and destroying our South Water Creek flood plain if the annexation of Cu South is not repealed as such every night I walk these Trails I wish I could say that I enjoy the outdoors but I can't all I can think about is this cottonwood tree will soon be a light pole this Pond will soon be an asphalt parking lot and this field will soon be porcelain toilets and bathtubs flushing away our most precious resource water Ebola deserves at least 500 year flood protection and this annexation agreement is not the flood protection we deserve it is inadequate as the climate crisis creates unpredictable conditions that development projects such as a third CU campus would worsen and exacerbate through their intense carbon Footprints and more so as Society blindly continues to create a more debt-ridden exhausting amygdala hijacked future of money and runaway growth influencing our politics then we at least deserve these next moments of Silence to grieve and prepare for the environmental spiritual and Community trauma I'm going to hold space in this digital realm for the natural realm as a pseudo Lorax who is speaking not only for the trees but for the two-legged the four-legged all those

[38:01] without legs the bees all those species that are deemed Expendable in the wake of endless maximized profit but we can prevent the aforementioned trauma by voting yes to repeals to use authent annexation this November 8th and now some moments of silence for the power and knowledge of nature if I am cut short with these remaining moments then we'll know exactly how the city handles the rights of Nature and the rights of citizens in closing remember Jonathan Swift falsehood flies and truth comes limping in after it so that when men become to be undeceived it is too late thank you Max next we have Kathleen Hancock Celeste Landry and Caitlin decas hello Council thank you so much for

[39:02] having me tonight I'm here to request that you not create a day Center in the downtown area it's heartbreaking to see people struggling with drug addiction and debilitating mental illnesses living on the streets my heart goes out to them I'm grateful we live in a city that focuses on bringing people into the city into the system and getting them housed these services are highly successful unfortunately the challenges faced in this country cannot be solved by Boulder we're a small City yes we're relatively wealthy but our money is not endless and we have many local low-income citizens we want to serve our small City cannot take on a huge portion of the nationally unhoused population I recently learned through the hotline along with all of you that 45 of the unhoused served by our city have been in Boulder a month or less of those 38 are not from Colorado this confirms my suspicions that having lacks enforcement of our laws attracts people far and wide if you build even

[40:01] better services like showers and hair salons in the downtown area you will attract more people encouraging people to congregate downtown makes it harder for our businesses many small and run by local families to thrive for high school students University students children the elderly visitors to feel safe and remember that tourists help fuel our tax base which in turn opens doors for supporting under-resourced residents and let's be clear Rising crime affects everyone it's not just going to affect the wealthy in fact it's harder for those who are under-resourced than the wealthy who can weather the storm it's a deeply challenging issue we know it's a national issue I wish Boulder could solve it but wishing for it won't make it a reality let's be pragmatic Let's help our people who are under resourced and those who are trying to get off the streets maybe you're repealing their aggressive tax on groceries that's a policy I think that councils should consider thank you so much for your time

[41:01] thank you Kathleen next we have Celeste Landry Caitlin dacus and uh Patrick I understand Michelle Rodriguez is not president so then Patrick Murphy foreign that you can see my slides before we start the timer we can I can barely hear you okay good evening Council I'm here to talk about two different Charter changes on the proposed ballot for this fall the first one is a repeal of Library commission and tax if Library District created I'd like to strongly suggest that you rename that repeal of Library commission and appropriation if Library District is created because the ballot question will not repeal any tax it will only repeal the appropriation to the library fund um next slide please the second one I'd like to talk about is Charter clarification of candidate issues which prohibits candidates from

[42:00] running for more than one office at an election next slide please here you can see seven mayoral elections going back to 2009 and I'll talk about them more but what I'd like to point out right now are the names that are in brown bold those are people who ran for Council and ran for mayor in the same election so if this passes those people would not have been able to run for both next slide please um I also want to point out that there was only one of those elections that had more than two candidates running which would trigger under the new method the instant runoff um and also the mayoral seat is a two-year term and why would people bother with the time and money of a campaign to run for a contested two-year week mayor's term if they can run for a four-year Council term so in conclusion even if Boulder has three candidates running for mayor in the future we probably won't have enough viable

[43:01] candidates to trigger the instant runoff and then we might as well be back at plurality by limiting people to run for only one municipal office were artificially depressing the number of candidates who can run for mayor and we have adopted instant runoff ranked voting but we're not going to let it use its Amazing Power next slide please I'm asking that you reject this proposed Charter change to limit the number of Music Celeste I'm afraid your time is up but I'd recommend you email that to us so we can take a look at it uh next we have Caitlin dacus Patrick Murphy and Nicole Forster hello Council mayor confirming you can hear me and see my slides yes on both wonderful thank you my name is Caitlin Davis I am a resident here in Boulder and a law student at the University of Colorado Boulder um I am presenting today about minimum wage and living wage next slide please um

[44:00] a minimum wage uh in Colorado is currently set at 12.56 uh per hour the minimum wage in Denver is set at 15.87 um effective next year to increase the 17 29 an hour in Boulder here our minimum wage is still set at 12.56 per hour um matching that of the state of Colorado but not matching the differences in cost of living next slide please um the minimum wage is the lowest wage an employer is uh supposed to pay um according to federal or local law a living wage by contrast is a rate that allows residents to meet the minimum standards of living where they are at next slide please so a living wage in Boulder according to mit's living wage calculator for one adult with no child is sitting at twenty one dollars and seven cents an hour if you are a single parent with two children that living wage increases to 52 dollars an hour and 97 cents you can visit mit's living wage calculator to see more data and more

[45:01] examples of what a living wage in Boulder looks like next slide please there is precedent in Boulder for the concept of living wage the city council has very conscientiously thought about living wage for the employees of the city of Boulder increasing that throughout the year since 2003 next slide please the positive impact of wage increases on our community could be very beneficial wage increases Inc increase mental health and physical health for workers predominantly low-wage workers are those who will benefit and be able to give back to the economy and stimulate the economy here in Boulder next slide please so I asked the the council consider extending living wage opportunities for all Boulder residents and act swiftly and and use the models available to us um thank you very much for your time thank you Caitlin next we have Patrick Murphy Nicole Forster and Jeremy Lewis the no plan B fallacy letters about and

[46:03] guest opinion by Bob Yates regarding the CU South flood mitigation project are titled no plan B that's not true and the kind of threat to dare to think critically there will be a vote on the 100-year flood mitigation plan and the agreement with CU this November respect to the long hard effort to create plan a but it's the fact that there either is a current plan B that's been rejected we're not fully assessed or the absence of wise planning for the inevitable Plan B after plan a fails a 100-year flood event is based on past data and unless you're dead you've noticed that climate has changed and all those old data are to be thrown out the window in 2013 Boulder had a 1 000 year reign event and a 100 year flood right through town Texas just had a 1 000 year flood event and floods all over the planet provide clear evidence at times of change there's always a plan B Because if there

[47:01] isn't then that's a clear example of poor planning here's the thought to consider what happens after the 100 year flood mitigation has been installed and the 500 year event happens I asked Bob about this and he said quote that's a risk we all took when we bought houses at the base of a mountain great views but some degree of danger the city can't protect us from everything end quote the city can't protect us from asteroids or fires during a 100 mile per hour Windstorm but when that 500-year event happens will the city say too bad so sad of course not we have a plan B that supposedly can't doesn't exist where will the damage occur how will we escape where will we go there's always a plan B it's not plan a is worthless worthless the muni tried to convince us there's no plan B guess what there's always a plan B

[48:05] thank you Patrick now we have Nicole Forster Jeremy Lewis and Nigel gorbolden hello my name is Nicole Forrester and I'm speaking tonight in support of the decriminalization of plant medicines such as psilocybin in Boulder and I also want to voice support for compassionate Solutions uh to issues of drug use um and ending the Total War on Drugs and urge Boulder to take action in these matters as a teenager I was diagnosed with a neurological disorder called cluster headaches and 20 of people diagnosed with cluster headaches attempt suicide due to the severity of pain caused by the disorder and the lack of effective pharmaceutical treatments it's anecdotally known that psychedelics have the ability to cure this disorder in 70 of cases at age 18 I tried psilocybin for the first time which set my cluster headaches into remission for the next three years plant medicine heals older

[49:00] should be on the Forefront of efforts to decriminalize Nature at this time 15 cities Across the Nation have made the decision to decriminalize plant medicines and a majority of these cities have achieved this by the action of their city council at this point in time it is urgent to address the this in Boulder so that Boulder remains on the Forefront of this change in Colorado there is currently a Statewide effort to legalize these medicines and that initiative is coming forward with a lot of corporate interest and um interest in commercializing this space I'm advocating that any policy change regarding psychedelics and plant medicines remains in the hands of the people who have always used these medicines rather than the rapidly emerging corporate interest I worked on i-301 to decriminalize psilocybin in Denver Colorado back in 2019 and they have shown no risks to public health and safety since decriminalization in 2020 I Incorporated the group decriminalized nature Boulder County which has shown up to advocate for the decriminalization of plant substances

[50:01] um at the last several City Council meetings um and I was also asked to draft a Statewide initiative to decriminalize these substances uh in 2022 which will not be on the ballot we urge you to urgently support this in Boulder um your time is up Nicole but thank you for your testimony sorry thanks now we have Jeremy Lewis and Nigel gorbold I understand Christian Kerr is now in the meeting so we can let Christian go after Nigel so Jeremy hello and good evening council members I am a boulder resident and I'm concerned about the potential of the license model on decriminalizing but also licensing and regulating and taxing and selling and theogenic medicines these plant and fungal medicines have come to us with Legacy they've come to us with ceremony tradition songs space holding and

[51:03] relationships and I find that there is a danger in taking these medicines out of that context and putting them into a transactional context and also into a corporate context because there is a lot of loss that happens when we do that and there may be dangers to that as well because we first of all the Legacy communities lose a lot they lose a lot of economic power and potential when corporations come in and monopolize the space um like what has happened with the legalization of cannabis in this state and I'm here to suggest that Boulder actually has an opportunity here to be a leader in listening to indigenous knowledge wisdom and history and allowing there to be a decriminalization of these medicines before there is regulation because what that does is it

[52:01] allows people to organize themselves the ones who are in Legacy communities to take part in whatever may happen with commercial space but also to teach and if we are to listen to the wisdom we really will have a longer more sustainable relationship with these medicines which as Nicole just told us can cure can help can really help in disease situations where other options other West Western Medical options have not helped I thank you for your time and I also thank you for your concern about the bees thank you Jeremy next we have Nigel gorbold and Christian Kerr and then Glenn Knott good evening council members a quick shout out to Bob Yates your Boulder bulletin is great read every month super informative and very concise so love it speaking to you tonight in support of

[53:00] the new Northern ordinance proposed and with specifical support from the impact we'll hopefully have on the University Hill area my name is Nigel warbold I live on 9th Street on University Hill with my family we have young children we have dogs and we have elderly Neighbors we like to be a part of this neighborhood and like to help our neighbors both young and old students as well as elderly couples you know we've we've lived here for a number of years and realized that it's it's better to be proactive with students in our neighborhood we initially go over and moving in day and we provide them with a little bit of a cheat sheet for living on the hill we help them understand you know there's bears in the neighborhood how you handle your trash we also give them ideas on how they can work with us you know within the community if they want to have parties how they can keep the noise down knowing that they have elderly people around and maybe they could help shovel their driveways I would say I would like to say that this is a positive interaction and always very fruitful sometimes it's like it meets

[54:01] deaf ears we have had a significant increase in events on the hill probably over the last two or three years we've had fireworks land on roofs we've had fires start on on wooden porches the danger and the noise is increasing significantly and it's making this this beautiful Town not as inclusive and a community event I would I propose you know the new Northern ordinance and I I believe it would bring accountability for both tenants CU students landlords and hopefully enforce more inclusive and healthy Community environment here in Boulder in closing I want to thank you for your service to your community and allowing me to speak this evening thank you Nigel I will actually be considering the noise ordinance a little bit later this evening but we will keep your comments in mind at that time now we have Christian Kerr Glenn Knott and valinda Jones

[55:19] Christian Courier mic is open you're able to unmute and speak Christian you're able to speak I'm afraid we'll have to come back to you so let's move on to uh Glenn Knott and valinda Jones and Carter Hilty foreign comes in

[56:06] can you hear us okay it's Christine Knott and we live at 3490 Catalpa way thank you for your time in reviewing the document that we sent earlier today we are here tonight to raise concerns with you regarding the lack of attention really by the city of Boulder for the flooding of our property at 3490 Catalpa way over the past eight years and we hope we can get some resolution to this ongoing and frustrating issue the flooding was due to the rerouting of water from the 2014 Pine View Park restoration project in response to the hundred year flood or Thousand-Year flood that occurred on September 15 2013. as we outlined the deck we said earlier today every time we experience more than 10 minutes of rain in front of our property including the front path the driveway Etc this all fills up with water which

[57:01] is damaging the front steps of our house eroding the landscape and making it impossible to walk out of our front door without stepping into four inches of standing water prior to 2014 we did not experience any flooding or any of these issues on our property and we've owned our property since August of 2010. our concern has been raised with the city on numerous occasions on each occasion representatives from the cities acknowledge the issue a case is open but only to have it quickly closed with the city denying any liability and refusing to assist us in resolving the problem in the most interaction with the city last month um August 2022 as the flooding of our property had become made worse by the road surfacing that was done on Catalpa way and Clover Circle that was completed in uh 2021 we noticed that when we returned after our extended stay in Australia after an 18-month sabbatical we noticed that the road surfacing that

[58:00] was done in 2021 by the city where they try to contain the water with a burn between the road and our home only caused the issue to worsen and now every time it rains standing water remains days after the rain event as noted we forwarded a PowerPoint presentation this afternoon outlining the details requesting the city of Boulder action or concerned the problem that the city time is up I I don't think I received anything from you this afternoon did anyone on Council so I would request that um you resend that um those materials so we can review them and we'll have somebody get back to you we have we have a confirmation email from the city acknowledging receipt of our email yeah so we'll send that again that'd be great we'll track it down okay thanks again next we have Belinda Jones Carter Hilty and Nancy Travis hi um Boulder City Council I am Belinda

[59:00] and it's an honor to speak here today in favor of decriminalizing psychedelics my background is in research and development and chemistry here in Boulder and I'm I'm honestly wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for my access to these psychedelics and I'm proud to be a black and Asian woman in stem who is continuously breaking glass ceilings with my research insights and discoveries in the name of Science and advocate for mental health before I moved to Colorado I lived in Texas where I have dealt with depression anxiety for almost 23 years and it wasn't until I was introduced to a few psychedelic substances such as LSD and psilocybin that allowed me to shift my Consciousness and heal myself from one of Team belief systems not only did this help help with my depression but I have not been depressed for over four years four years now and has allowed me to be more creative in my thought process when it came to my research and it was interesting to see that as I dive into the research that had so much Social stigma and it has harmed many communities of color including me the Warren drugs have harmful and they successfully attach the negative stigma

[60:01] to these molecules psychedelics are a quiz essential example of what happens to a topic when it becomes so politicized and it can no longer be discussed in an open and Fair Way despite the fact that in the 1950s psychedelics were already showing incredible promise as a mental health treatment they were banned from science for decades due to their association with the culture of radical expression that threatened the status queue politician thought there's an even American public were blinded by the symbolism of these drugs incapable of regarding them as a medicine if we don't allow the community here to be on the Forefront of these substance um I I believe that Boulder is able to and you guys can be the Forefront and Pioneer for it the mental health system reaches only a fraction of people suffering from these disorders most of whom are discouraged from seeking treatment by its cost and social stigma if you take into account of the community Boulder County can lead and be the Forefront on taking a radical approach and decriminalizing nature for our current and upcoming Generations um by listening to the community and and without these prejudices built into our

[61:00] current drug laws thank you thank you Belinda now we have Carter Hilty Nancy Travis and Evan ravitz can you hear me yes perfect hi Council my name is Carter Hilty I am a boulder native as well as a law student at the University of Colorado Boulder uh today I wanted to talk about adverse effects that your city ordinances and policies can have on underrepresented populations and people of color as well as college students um as an example Municipal Code section 985 occupancy of dwelling units is a recently passed ordinance that has been very contentious in the public opinion limiting the amount of family members and people who can reside in one dwelling at one time uh these ordinances as an issue of access or extremely inaccessible particularly to communities from other cultures who English is particularly not their uh not their

[62:01] language of choice for example the most accessible information on this ordinance is found on the boulder website where it is listed that a family as defined by the city's Municipal Code plus two unrelated people are allowed to live in the dwelling I realize that if you click the link to find where in the municipal code family is defined there is actually no definition of family rather there's a list of somewhat complicated factors that I assume the city would use to determine whether a dwelling was occupied legally or illegally in an enforcement proceeding if you are a member of an underrepresented population a person of low socioeconomic status or a non-english speaker this is an extremely difficult thing to navigate particularly when these ordinances are enforced irregularly by the city beyond that the municipal code itself is there's no option when looking at it to translate it out of English Boulder's two largest minority populations or three are a Hispanic descent population Asian populations including those from Nepal and um African Americans uh

[63:02] there's no option to translate the municipal code into Spanish or Nepali for use of accessibility so I would just encourage the council to take these factors into account when making policies and ensure that access is um or that these resources are freely accessible to the public thank you thank you Carter now we have Nancy Travis Evan ravitz and Michael crudel good evening council members as you're hopefully aware Boulder is experiencing a significant uptick in crime and safety issues can you hear me yes um safety issues that are impacting residents businesses and even tourists in our community I'm finding it very concerning that this is a topic that seldom if ever discussed in City Council meetings I'd like to share just a few comments from community members that have been

[64:00] posted on social media just within the past week my 94 Honda Accord was stolen last Wednesday in front of my house on 14th Street I was in the plaza where the Walnut Cafe is off of 30th this morning a person smashed the bus stop yelling and screaming he ran down the alley between Christie's and the plaza banging on business doors several businesses on the Pearl Street Mall had their Windows smashed last night for one of them it's the fifth time in the past few months I had a nice morning at the farmers market our daughters loved the water so we walked over to throw a stone or two into the creek where we found a needle and trash floating Downstream we were quickly reminded why we avoid downtown please stop telling us that this isn't your responsibility and provide the Boulder Police Department and other City staff the necessary necessary resources to protect our community thank you for your time thank you Nancy now we have Evan ravitz Michael crudel and Tyler hollenbach

[65:03] hi can you hear me yes we need to talk about the late great Gilbert white one of only five CU Boulder winners of the national medal of science ever CU also has five Nobel Prize winners ever according to cu's website Gilbert is known first as the father of floodplain planning and that is the heart of the CU South debate Sia's website says quote White's Landmark work beginning with his 1942 University of Chicago doctoral dissertation human adjustment to floods challenges the notion that natural hazards are best addressed by engineering Solutions instead he argued that the Havoc wrought by floods and other natural disasters may be better avoided by modifying human behavior to

[66:03] reduce potential harm white won that debate and now wise communities around the world follow his advice except here now in Boulder where he founded and directed The Natural hazards Institute at CU here now the misleaders of morally bankruptcu still invest student money in fossil fuels as fire flood and famine overtake the Earth and are planning complicated untested doubtful engineering solutions for a hundred year flood while white told the city three decades ago to plan for a 500-year flood since climate change has exploded since then we should plan for even worse everyone should learn about this wonderful man my friend in his twenties he was a close advisor to FDR I think

[67:03] the reason it took till he was 88 to get the national medal was because he was humble so he was a big supporter of direct even your time is up but thank you for your testimony now we have Michael crudell Tyler hollenbach and Lynn Siegel all right hello Boulder City Council it's an honor to speak on behalf of plant medicine and psychedelic substance decriminalization LSD was one of the most formative experiences of my life yes those 10 hours or so on a camping trip in the desert with good friends was fun and Goofy but the real changes in work and personal transformation happened over the following six months and the personal growth continues to this day they say you only need to do psychedelics once to see a major benefit and this is true in my case a year before my experience my dad passed away suddenly my serious girlfriend and I broke up in my career in social media advertising exposed

[68:00] itself as an unfulfilling jobs supporting manipulative addiction all three happened in one month so my role model my love and my career were gone throughout my life I never really deviated off the track that was laid out for me as an upper middle class well-socialized white male so I was unprepared for this Trifecta of trauma the conservative life approach was failing and I was stuck I was repressing what happened and avoiding the changes I needed to make LSD and the Psychedelic experience is a catalyst for personal change LST gave me the courage to quit my job to do something that mattered that was helping so I took an extreme pay cut to 12.50 an hour at the king supers on Arapahoe in the meat department imagine stocking shelves at minimum wage mid pandemic after making 80 grand and not having an existential crisis I later manage that department and leveraged that experience into a new career that I'm proud of LSD gave me the empathy to understand on my ex needed to live her life and do what was best for

[69:00] her and most importantly LSD gave me the courage to approach the death of my father I now have a personal philosophy that has been my Center rather than the rather than following the path that culture says we should my question for you is if LSD is a catalyst for personal change should personal change be illegal thank you thank you Michael now we have Tyler hollenbach Lynn Siegel and then we'll come back to Christian Kerr great thank you for having me it's a pleasure to be with you and to hear all the thoughtful comments from the other presenters my name is Tyler hollenbach I'm a C I'm a Colorado Native and a CU law student I first want to commend the city for its vision and work in sustainability and waste management the circular Boulder Vision including the research and strategic plans in particular the life cycle analysis of differing waste streams and pain points was informative I think more people should read it zero wastefuls are equally inspiring and the plans to

[70:00] achieve them seem to be well constructed I'm hoping they're being implemented I'm here to voice my support for continued action and focus on composting Recycling and circular economy initiatives in Boulder and Beyond in light of the producer responsibility legislation that was recently passed this year in the Colorado legislature I imagine there may be uncertainty regarding overlapping or conflicting mechanisms at the state and local level there may also be pressure on municipalities and yourselves to reduce their your budgetary allocations for similar programs so as not to duplicate work I want to say that while the producer responsibility act takes meaningful steps to provide a common standard for Statewide recycling it does not go far enough to encourage Innovation and leaves room for more immediate implementation of circular economy Concepts on a local level where I see the biggest opportunity for continued emphasis is in two areas education and facilitation for proper use of existing Recycling and composting infrastructure in the city and the Banning of use of non-compostable single serving items in certain key sectors

[71:02] when a boulder resident goes gets take out and has to make decisions on what to compost what to recycle and what to send to the landfill there is a high likelihood that waste will end up in the wrong place I'd like to ask you all to evaluate the low-hanging fruit and strongly push for local ordinances mandating that all retail and food businesses in the city use only compostable packaging and utensils packaging materials already exist to make this a reality an incremental cost to businesses and consumers would be manageable in addition the additive cost would maybe serve to drive businesses away from their unsustainable practices thank you thank you Tyler now we have Lynn Siegel and then Christian Kerr I have a story about food of an international student from Abu Dhabi that is a grad student in Aeronautical Engineering at CU and can't eat on the campus Because the

[72:02] CU the center for Community has food but big long lines for all the undergraduate students and the UMC has lousy food and a Subway so he orders food in a 50 pound box once a week and it comes with these gel Frozen gel cubes that keep the food preserved and do you know what those gel cubes are they're a toxic material they have to go in the landfill apparently there's unless you dry them out and how would you do that they can be reused but they have very little times you can reuse them um when you open them up and drain out the gel who knows where you put the gel then you have to take the plastic because it's a special kind of plastic to the Hazardous Waste Center now see you I thought is world class in the atmospheric sciences and in climate change and this

[73:02] is what they're doing to their grad school students the grad school students have to order this toxic material for their food because CU cannot provide food for them what's wrong with this picture and all the grad students at CU South what about them what about the services for them and what about the toxic materials coming from them he happens to be in the Aerospace industry well the Aerospace department at CU can't find the space for toxic material projects projects that require toxic materials in the city of Boulder they they can't do it on their campus and the people have to go to Broomfield to find space for toxic materials what's wrong with this great testimony Lynn your time is up and now Christian Kirk can we get Christian on the line can you hear me yes

[74:02] all right thanks for sticking with me uh you'd think I could figure out a zoom meeting by this time um I am uh calling in about the uh the homeless uh re coordination Center whatever uh the one that somebody called a a country club for transients um I think that in uh in many many places this could be a good idea um places that don't have resources uh places that don't have maybe don't have coordinated entry don't have um shelter options don't have um people out there ambassadors out there actually going to where these people in need of assistance are and trying to get them signed up I'm not sure what we're doing with it here in Boulder

[75:03] um I mean for the people that that are kind of like pushing this is it uh is it just checking a box um is it really going to um move the needle as it were uh it doesn't it doesn't seem to me that this is filling a need that we have in Boulder um there are uh other examples around the country of uh of similar um kind of low barrier assistance places and the record on those is not good uh bad in most cases and they're they're abandoned and shut down uh it just it seems to me like this is not a a wise place to divorce devote precious resources um I think Mental Health

[76:00] and making making some of our current options compulsory is where our efforts are needed thank you thanks Christian all right that brings open comment to close he'll first turn to staff if see if you have any responses uh no responses for me today just uh grateful for uh everyone who spoke and happy to answer any questions great I will just correct this this Teresa attorney I will correct one miss misstatement the boulder Revised Code does have a definition of family that can be found in 1-2-1 and it's quite expansive thanks for that uh Bob then Mark and Nicole Matt sorry just a question for for you Chris I know we'll have a presentation tonight um from um housing Human Services I imagine we'll probably touch for for a few minutes during that presentation on um the day shelter but I did we had some speakers um uh who are apparently in the impression

[77:01] that the decision has been made to locate a day shelter in downtown and could you maybe clarify that or correct that if that's not um if that's not accurate yeah I'd be happy to answer that question and um a location for the day Center has not been selected uh right now we are in the process of exploring what services a day Center could provide after that work is done then there'll be an entire process to talk about potential locations for a day Center and I know uh Kurt and his team are going to talk a little bit more about that in the presentation later tonight but you are correct thanks Chris thanks Aaron um so my question is really with regard to some of the testimony we've had regarding CU South in the annexation and so um I don't know if we want to ask our res one of our Council experts here uh mayor Pro tem friend or if we have someone on staff dancer but really was addressing two questions that we've heard uh why the city ended up not choosing the 500-year flood uh flood protection and then the second question

[78:01] is really around uh the idea that doesn't the city actually gain a lot of open space as a result of annexation more than we currently have at the site so those are sort of two questions I wanted to sort of make sure we could clarify for for the residents and those who are speaking and then I have a follow-up after that for a different issue Chris do you want to take that sure and I was just looking to see if uh anyone from our utilities team uh was here as well and I don't think they are uh logged into the meeting but I do know both of those are common questions that we've received and there's a pretty detailed FAQ on the city website um I I don't have it here in front of me but uh um I don't wanna I don't want to guess that the answer is until I pull them up so if somebody else knows them oh there's Joe Walking In Yo Teddy On Cue the Cavalry has arrived look at that I was gonna take a stab at it but Joe will Joe is the expert and Joe I don't know if you caught those questions before uh not the second one but

[79:01] I'm going to talk into the microphone I'm not sure if it's on I I didn't I didn't hear the second question by the way I'm Joe tadayuci the director of the utilities department I heard the first question which I think was sorry Joe we're getting complaints by the way folks that were hard to hear so if you can just get right into that microphone please I'm gonna get right in there all right um the question about the 500 year flood and why we didn't select it really came down to technical issues we were not able to match the existing conditions out there which is important to get the approvals that we need from regulating agencies like FEMA so um it had a lot of problems but that was the fundamental one that kept us from selecting it appreciate that Joe the second question had to do with um does the city have a lot to gain with regards to open space um as a result of the annexation agreement yeah so in the annexation agreement well

[80:00] the the flood project will impact about five acres of open space property adjacent to us-36 between Boulder Creek and cu's property and in the annexation agreement there is 119 Acres that is designated as open space other and the annexation agreement is allowing us to acquire that once we get all the approvals that we need for the flood project thanks Joe I appreciate that um are we just going to add as as someone who voted on the Wood versus your flood design there were a couple more aspects that I thought were relevant in addition to what Joe has said which is that technically we couldn't do it because of like the tie-in at us-36 and the need to get water to vacate that property within 72 hours 48 hours some some magic number of hours you can't withhold water there and then there was also though a much higher environmental impact on protected

[81:00] species and habitat and then a third reason was it was going to be some 30 to 40 million dollars more which would inhibit us from doing other properties so given that uh 100 years sort of the gold standard um and and 500 was aspirational we just couldn't get there even if we owned all the property as I asked Joe tadiucci a number of times we still couldn't get there and just confirming I agree with all of that the 72 hour evacuation of the of the water that accumulates during the flood in the reservoir is is a different thing but we it's really the existing conditions of the water flowing under the U.S 36 bridge if we were to have built the our best version of the 500 year flood project it would have made the flow conditions under that bridge worse than they are without the project and that's a show stopper thanks Joe the other one was a clarifying with uh we had a resident talk about sort of the elections

[82:02] um in one of our Charter Amendment changes that's coming to the ballot with regards to whether someone can run for multiple offices at the same time and I think it's just worth clarifying because there was a slide that talked about how we've had multiple mayoral elections over the past few years and I think it's just worth clarifying we haven't had a mayoral election by the residents in over 100 years and starting next year will be the first election of a mayor and so I just it's worth clarifying for anybody listening that uh We've upped to this point appointed the mayor among nine people on Council but this will be the first election next year where the people actually have a say in who our mayor is so just want to clarify so we're not confusing people out there so Nicole thank you and thanks Bob for asking my first question for me um my next question and this this maybe we can come back to this um during the homelessness discussion somebody mentioned Bridge house which is is certainly an amazing model um for uh for folks who are kind of exiting homelessness

[83:01] um my understanding though is that the those 44 beds that bridge house has there's a very specific criteria on who is able to be in those beds and that there are a lot of contracts with the Department of Corrections for example that govern that and a lot of those folks are actually not kind of Boulder's population of people experiencing homelessness so I was wondering if there's anybody who could speak to that if you know if not maybe I can just re Repose that question later but my understanding is that it's not necessarily one that we can we as the city can just put people into yeah Nicole thank you for the question and let's see if uh when we get to the presentation tonight uh if somebody's able to answer that question Lauren oh one more one more sorry this was somebody mentioned occupancy and I know that that's on our Council work plan because we decided on that in January but what I couldn't remember is when it's coming up for an update on our Council agenda and I was just wondering

[84:00] um Chris if you could fill us in on that so the community can stay tuned at least have an idea of when that's coming let me uh go look that up and I will let you know in just a second all right thank you Aaron um I just wanted to address one of the presentations that Caitlyn made around minimum wage so um right now we are working through the Consortium of cities minimum wage working group to look at a regional a regional minimum wage with representatives from Boulder County the county the city and county of Broomfield Longmont Lewisville Nederland Erie and a growing list of communities around us and our hope is to bring a large number of communities together um in this effort to look at a higher Regional minimum wage on September 21st our working group will host a presentation on the current state

[85:00] legislation research and information about the minimum wage effort that we've undergone thus far yeah thanks for your work on that Lord and also mentioned that we did just authorize City staff recently to spend some some City staff time on supporting that effort looking forward to seeing that come forward Chris and uh to answer your question right now uh the council priority around occupancy is scheduled for this fall uh as the first initial scoping conversation tentatively October November right now great and then I would just as it sounds like um the the Glenn and not and and his wife whose name I'm sorry I didn't catch where it had sent in something about their property can we just track down if maybe somebody received that yep we were able to track down that presentation and I just forwarded it to all of the council members uh in addition I've connected them with uh Joe tatayuchi's team uh via email uh so that

[86:01] they can take a further look as well great so we'll get back to them before too long wonderful appreciate that follow-up all right seeing nothing else on open comments we can move to our consent agenda all right sir thank you are tonight's consent agenda includes items a through k and I'm just going to make a couple quick comments and then I'll look to my colleagues one is that I wanted to give a huge congratulation and thank you to the city's finance department for yet another successful audit report as Dr Gross mentioned earlier so I don't think they're in the room anymore but phenomenal work everybody in the finance team really appreciate all that you do keep the city on track financially um and the other one was I just wanted to make a note to we've been getting some emails from folks regarding ordinance 8534 that's about um the ballot measure question of whether to repeal the earlier ordinance 8482 regarding the

[87:01] annexation of Cu South and there have been some requests to change the ballot language I did just want to mention that uh we had advice earlier advice from our city attorney's office that our current ballot language that's proposed is appropriate and legal and just note that we did consult expert outside opinion a legal expert in the area of Colorado election law and they corroborated our city staff's legal opinion so just wanted to mention that before we pass that that consent agenda item any um comments or questions on the agenda I got Mark and then Rachel I I have no question about that hour uh the wording of the ordinance with respect to the repeal of Cu South is legal but I'm not sure it's the best way to go um and again I'm saying this is someone who does not favor um that referendum and will not vote for that referendum but I do like uh or

[88:00] prefer to have parties have a clear understanding of what they are voting for or against and I think some of that language would have been um usefully uh exchange for what the the petitioners are requesting I know that's not the will of counsel and um uh I know that's not the will of counsel but I think it would have been a practical um uh thing to do that would not have impacted the vote in any way but would have um simply made it clearer for all citizens thanks yep follow-up so I just want to follow up with your point there mark and raises a question for Teresa um if if all things were equal and this is purely discretionary we'd right we could change the language but wasn't there some a concern that by changing the language we could then open ourselves up to some legal uh fuzziness more or less and so I just want to make

[89:01] sure that it isn't just a game of wordsmithing there are actual potential consequences of actually modifying the language um outside of just what words to choose is that correct yes I'd invite Kathy haddock into this conversation as well at this time Kathy's joining us remotely this evening um that's right and and I'll remind Council that we did use the language uh on the petition and um while it may be in Artful uh you know we are doing our best to to be responsive to to that language and to put forward a referendum that people approved by their petition and signatures thanks Kathy do you want to take that thank you and um also I apologize for not being there but very much appreciate being able to keep my cold germs at home so thank you for that um and I agree with everything that Teresa said and um you know as we do these we did do

[90:01] several different ways of trying to write the language right now so help yourself um the um and and then you know had other people poke holes in the language and um so do feel that this is the best thing to do a lot of the reason for what Teresa said that that is what was on the um petition and that this is too complex of an ordinance to try to start summarizing and determining which items are important and which are not so um that this is the best that we can do in view of trying that this the ballot title is a summary of something that's very complex so the best thing is the ordinance itself it's very helpful thanks for that Kathy and we appreciate you um not sharing your germs with us but just sharing your expert opinion yeah I

[91:03] I right Theresa do you have a follow-up I do I just wanted to add you know we understand the need for um understanding and really want voters to to understand what they're voting on and to that end our city clerk Alicia Johnson um is going to be linking 84.83 on the ballot measure page so that people can easily access that ordinance and and see an entirety the many complex pieces that's great thank you Alicia that'll be helpful mark uh thank you for for doing that I think that helps remedy the the problem and I made my comments uh with um no expectation that Council was going to change its mind but I thought they were appropriate to make thank you appreciate it right uh seeing no other hands oh sorry good Rachel um well I want to say thank you as an attorney to Matt for using the word fuzziness to describe a legal situation

[92:00] that that's that's dead on in a lot of situations um and and I appreciate Mark raising the point I think that for the reasons that City attorneys have laid out it would be uh legally risky for us to change the language I also don't know that the proposed language actually makes it any more clear so um I'm very comfortable staying with the language as it is um and but I had raised my hand actually just to thank Mark and Juni for doing that audit work uh for the rest of us that would not be my top choice of a committee so thank you for digging deep and uh keeping our City's finances safe it was very exciting we are in your debts right seeing nothing else I believe we have a roll call on this except first we need a motion move to pass the consent agenda second now we have something to vote on all right sir thank you very much we'll start this roll call this evening with councilmember Benjamin

[93:01] yes mayor Brockett yes council member fogerts yes mayor Pro tem friend yes councilmember Joseph yes spear I will abstain from G but otherwise yes thank you Wallach yes with the exception of Jay thank you sir weiner yes with the exception of Jay as well thank you and Yates uh yes um uh on all of them except for item J uh the even year election development measure which I vote no one all right thank you sir the consent agenda sir is passed unanimously with the noted abstain with the noted Nays

[94:01] thanks so much all right so now we move to our call-up check-ins and we have one gotta get used to using paper again foreign agenda item 4A is the call-up check-in for a three-year extension of development approval for the site review lur 2017-00081 for redevelopment of the site located at 5505 Central Avenue with an approximately 53 630 square foot two and a half story office building within the Flatiron industrial Business Park in industrial General IG zoning District The Proposal also includes improving internal connectivity between four commonly owned properties along with the addition of bicycle parking adjustments to parking layout and improvements to walkways drainage Water Quality Lighting and Landscaping

[95:01] great any interest in calling us up or any comments questions right I'm seeing lots of shaking heads so it doesn't look like there's any interest there so I think we can go into our public hearing all right sir thank you tonight item 5A under public hearings is our second reading and consideration of emotion to adopt by emergency measure ordinance 8531 amending sections 5-9-6 unreasonable noise prohibited between the hours of 11 pm through 7 A.M and 5-3-11 nuisance party prohibited BRC 1981 to prohibit unreasonable Amplified noise during the daytime as well as nighttime hours and setting forth those related details Chris I'll turn to you to get us started great thank you and I'm happy to introduce uh several folks from our city team as well as our partners that are going to help present this item uh sander yanis from the city attorney's

[96:01] office is going to begin as well as Brenda rittenauer from our Communications and engagement department is here on the diocese as long as as well as some remote members so with that I will turn it over to Sandra to take it away can you all hear me yeah but do speak really directly and please give me just one moment to set up good evening mayor and Council my name is Sandra Yanez Deputy City attorney and tonight we will be discussing the proposed ordinance 8531 for unreasonable noise next slide please

[97:05] there we go so the item presented tonight is part of council's work plan to address quality of life issues in residential neighborhoods this ordinance is one piece of a bigger plan intended to address these these issues as you may recall from the recent presentation to Council in July noise was identified as one of the top issues in terms of negatively impacting quality of life Citywide City staff have been working collaboratively Sandra could ask you to lean into the mic how about now it's not working can you hear me it doesn't seem like it's working because I'm almost eating it

[98:03] or if this one's better right all right hello can you hear me now hello hello about this one is this one better hello hello okay can you hear me now is it me hello I I guess yeah I really really go close apparently hello hello

[99:01] we're getting feedback that Zoom is loud and clear I guess I would be interested to hear whether Channel 8 can hear and then whether council members are able to hear if we project a little bit I'm certainly able to hear I was relaying it from the the clerk staff over here that we're holding up behind the mic sign well I will do my best all right fantastic thank you all thank you for your patience um why don't I start again uh for this slide and so the item presented tonight is part of council's work plan to address quality of life issues in residential neighborhoods this ordinance is one piece of a bigger plan intended to address these issues as you may recall from the recent presentation to Council in July noise was identified as one of the top issues in terms of negatively impacting quality of life Citywide

[100:05] City staff have been working collaboratively with the hill revitalization working group to look for ways to address the noise issue the hill revitalization working group is made up of representatives from the University Hill neighborhood association bar High which is Boulder area rental Housing Authority CU representatives from local government and community relations student affairs student conduct restorative justice student government off-campus housing and neighborhood relations fraternity and sorority life CU police department and City staff they provided a lot of great feedback that was used to create the final version of the proposed ordinance that you see tonight it was vetted and is supported by this group

[101:05] this work includes the efforts of many different city departments and City partners as you can see from this long list we have a lot of folks that were involved in this work we have wonderful Representatives here tonight who are available to answer questions you might have at the conclusion of this presentation current noise ordinance prohibits unreasonable Amplified noise at night from 11 PM to 7 A.M the proposed ordinance adds daytime hour restrictions in residential areas only from 7 A.M to 11 pm Amplified noise is defined as Noise by means of any electronic amplifier this ordinance is meant to address egregious daytime noise resulting from Amplified sound in residential

[102:00] neighborhoods throughout the city the Amplified noise must be heard from 200 or more feet beyond the property line of the property upon which the loudspeakers are located that is approximately one city block I think that most would agree that hearing noise from that far away would be considered egregious the proposed ordinance does not impact other types of noise violations found in other parts of the city code daytime noise is already a violation under the current code and it sets the maximum decibel level at 55 in residential areas the proposed ordinance simply provides an alternative path for determining a noise violation without the use of a sound meter or a complainant and as I mentioned before it is um it applies city-wide next slide so why are we uh why did we choose 200

[103:02] feet so um unreasonable noise and unreasonable Amplified noise is prohibited at night with a measurement of 100 or more feet beyond the property line of the property upon which the loudspeakers are located the proposed new ordinance prohibits unreasonable Amplified noise during the day with a measurement of 200 or more feet beyond the property line the reason for the different distances is that there is a higher expectation of noise during the day additionally when we researched other cities it was common to have different degrees of noises during the day than at night including in Boulder's own code related to decibel readings an average city block is between 250 and 300 feet in terms of measuring from the property line that would be the property line of

[104:01] a single family dwelling in the case of an apartment complex the property line would not be from the apartment where the noise is emanating but rather the property line of the apartment building the same is true for uh manufactured home parks the property line is at the edge of the park and not individual manufactured homes so let's talk about the proposed ordinance um tonight and what it doesn't do it does not apply to unamplified noise the current code prohibits unreasonable unamplified noise at night the standard is no yelling screaming shouting louder than that which is reasonably necessary for normal conversational speech on public property there's also a whole chapter on noise in the code that addresses anything from leapflo excuse me leaf blowers to loud

[105:01] mufflers construction noise Etc the proposed ordinance is specific to Amplified noise during the day we took the approach that the main noise disturbances were related to parties which would usually have Amplified music if there was a large party and no music then other provisions of the codes such as nuisance party could still apply this proposed ordinance does not require a decibel reader or specialized training for officers and it does not apply to commercial areas next slide why is there a need for this ordinance it's an objective way to enforce a noise violation it's measured by distance it doesn't require a decibel sound meter or special officer training it doesn't require a complainant an officer can observe the violation and lastly it provides another tool for

[106:01] police to intervene prior to 11 pm before a party may get out of control later in the evening next slide the proposed ordinance not only amends the noise ordinance but it also amends the nuisance party ordinance by adding daytime unreasonable Amplified noise to the list of violations that Define when a social Gathering becomes a public nuisance if an officer determines that the daytime Amplified noise is egregious and that it constitutes a nuisance party violation the officer May order participants to Cease the social Gathering and disperse immediately refusal to obey and abide by such an order is a separate violation next slide there are several affirmative defenses or exceptions to this rule including sound coming from a vehicle's horn as a

[107:01] danger warning signal sound made by a police alarm device fire alarm device car alarm and sound coming from a city issued event permit there is a permit requirement for Amplified sound in public places where the Amplified sound must be turned off by 11 pm and meet legal decibel levels variances may be approved next slide the proposed ordinance tonight is by emergency what that means is that if it's adopted and passed it's effective immediately there will not be a 30-day waiting period the basis for the Emergency is the need to implement the new law at the beginning of the university school year when there is a propensity for increased noise impacting public health and safety next slide

[108:00] and I'm going to hand it off to Brenda rittenauer thank you all right thank you can you hear me and I can be loud so let me know if you can't so my name is Brenda rittenauer I am the neighborhood engagement and services manager for this city and have been the staff liaison for the hill revitalization working group for some time um I also conducted the community engagement for this proposed noise ordinance change the as we mentioned this change has been recommended and endorsed by the hill revitalization working group Sandra already read the long list of Partners who participate on that group including student leaders we also had specific conversations with the community connectors in Residence and with the Goss Grove neighborhood association in addition to the University Hill neighborhood association executive board um we also gathered feedback on be heard Boulder which is our engagement platform um and we reported that out to you in

[109:03] the memo through August 16th and then yesterday on hotline you received an updated report um through yesterday um so that you could see each and every response that was provided on be heard Boulder in summary 160 feedback participants 102 who saw no negative impacts 37 participants shared concerns including some respondents who live on the hill sorry to push all the buttons um we wanted to share with you some themes of the positive impacts and negative impacts found in those responses as well as in the conversations that we had we assure that people felt that this would assure peaceful enjoyment of the home and private outdoor space that it would allow for sleep before 11 pm that it would pivot enforcement responsibility from Neighbors to police because no phone call is needed that it would create a more peaceful and

[110:01] welcoming environment for everyone that it would provide a clear standard of expectation for neighbors and that it could improve relations between students and Neighbors in the University Hill Neighborhood we also heard negative impacts shared both by our community connectors and residents and on be heard Boulder I also are consultant Amanda Nagel with unlocking government who works with the working group had a conversation with a student leader who is part of a fraternity that lives on the hill and he shared many of the same concerns that are on this slide as well um they include potential for increased calls to police motivated by racial bias increase in us against them mentality between neighbors and students on the hill as well as between neighbors and other parts of town as this is city-wide an increase in police presence in neighborhoods where that can be stressful to community members it limits the ability to gather with others to play live music or enjoy

[111:00] recorded music it could be overreaching or results in Boulder becoming creating Nanny State legislation and it compromises the spirit of Boulder as a college town we wanted to share some of the ways that we got the word out also with property managers with our partners at the boulder Area Rental Housing Association they did proactive Outreach to their members and the city realizing that not every property manager or rental licensee is a member of barha also reached out with notification to over 7 500 rental license holders in the city our entire current list both we and barha are committed to reaching back out to those lists if this does pass tonight to make sure that those property managers and license holders are aware of this new ordinance we also had similar partnership from CU to get the word out and we would invite

[112:00] Devin Kramer if he has joined us on Zoom to um pop his camera on and share with you um cu's collaboration in this effort is thank you available yep I'm here and I believe my colleague Lori call is going to make a few comments first thanks Devin um good evening I'm Lori call assistant Vice Chancellor for local government and Community engagement at the University of Colorado Boulder I'm here with Devin Kramer our dean of students this evening as members of the Hill revitalization working group we have been part of the discussions over many months that led to the recommended ordinance you will discuss this evening we believe that this ordinance will be an important investment and we strongly support it this was also supported by the students who have participated in the hill revitalization working group we recognize that we all have a role in addressing quality of life issues for

[113:01] the community and we are taking additional steps to be mindful of C's impact as CU Chancellor de Stefano recently announced we are planning for a modest half percent enrollment increase in the coming years most of that will occur through increased focus on the retention of existing students in increased graduate student enrollment rather than the enrollment of additional first-year students we will also increase our on-campus housing inventory to help alleviate housing pressures in the broader community and we will continue working with our partners at the city to address quality of life and public safety concerns off campus on that one invite Devin to share more information about the steps that his team will be taking to help our students understand their role in our broader Boulder Community and to help educate them on being good neighbors Devin thanks Lori as Lori stated my name is Devin Kramer and I'm the acting dean of

[114:00] students at CU Boulder I appreciate you having me tonight one of the primary mechanisms CU has to address the concerns on the hill and throughout the Boulder Community is our student conduct process which I'll talk about briefly before I do that I do want to acknowledge that the vast majority of our students are exceptional citizens of Boulder that help shape this wonderful Community with their activism and support for the local economy Boulder is an Innovative Hub of knowledge and Technology thanks in part to our students impressive and unique ideas those impacts are what it means to be a buff a very small percentage of those students are also of our students are causing some of the harm that we're talking about today and we recognize that harm can also have a very large impact um first I want to say in an effort to be more transparent with the community on August 15th we posted annual off-campus conduct status statistics for the first time which can be found on the CU student conduct webpage and this covers our last Academic Year

[115:00] um our partnership with Boulder Police and and Boulder PD records is I think one of the primary strengths that I want to highlight thus far since August 1st of this year we've received 58 citations from the Boulder Police Department 43 of those are minor in possession and 15 public consumption of alcohol of those we've already been able to contact 21 students and the other 37 will be contacted in the coming days these numbers don't include our off our on-campus violations and so we're a little slower in the very beginning of the year because of that large number of on-campus incidents as well this is important because through our student conduct process when a student is found responsible for violating a university policy including the municipal code that we're talking about today we're able to strike a balance between education and accountability our educational practices are modeled off of National best standards and are in alignment with what the boulder Municipal Court is doing in their approach our interventions are

[116:01] effective when we see that a student causes harm to their Community our interventions help them not only repair that harm but reflect in a responsible manner on their use of substances such as alcohol and create future plans to minimize or eliminate that harm as I've said Boulder police are a wonderful partner and we also know their work Must Fall within the law despite BPD records having a very timely process for sending us reports which we greatly appreciate an issue we face is simply a lack of referrals compared to the harm that we know is being caused this Municipal Code change could increase those referrals thus increasing our early the interventions and changing behavior and creating a more cohesive Hill environment finally I want to share that as the university we are prepared to educate our students if this is passed we are set to quickly disseminate information starting tomorrow through numerous channels including social media we use a CU Boulder today articles door hangers on residence homes communication

[117:00] to landlords property managers Etc that's not an exhaustive list but I want you to know that we have a plan thank you for your time and I greatly appreciate it foreign thank you Devin and Lori thank you so much for your partnership and all the work that you put into this um next we're going to talk about the next slide yep okay great so if Council adopts the proposed ordinance tonight we will be tracking the impacts of the ordinance in various ways one of the concerns we heard from our community engagement is the potential for increased calls to at least motivated by racial bias the data on current noise enforcement does not support any racial bias however we will continue to monitor this in the use of the new noise ordinance by working with the police department and the municipal court to ensure we are not inadvertently creating racial disparities with our approach

[118:01] secondly our team is looking into measuring success in terms of metrics associated with the proposed ordinance the data evaluation will likely include analysis related to location frequency of complaints and tickets acknowledging that there may be an uptick in the number of tickets issued if the ordinance passes and then hopefully more compliance and less tickets as time goes on furthermore we will continue to engage our community to receive anecdotal feedback our goal with this ordinance is to increase the quality of life in neighborhoods and not create unintended consequences next slide and with that I would like to thank you all for your attention and uh invite any questions that you might have thank you thanks so much for that Sandra and Brenda and also really big appreciation to our partners at the University uh

[119:00] Lori and Devin thank you for being here and we greatly appreciate how we work so well together on these issues so any questions for City staff Judy thank you I'm not sure if this is really a question for City staff but I'm just trying to understand better the presentation and the context as to why we are here today um if there are my understanding if there is already noise ordinance and I did not hear when the CEO representative spoke I did not hear any citation about noise from the 58 citations so I'm just not sure how this new ordinance well makes you more effective I'm happy to answer that thank you um councilman Josephs I I believe that the current ordinance does allow for um flexibility and it's an ability to enforce easier so the current noise

[120:00] ordinance is based on decibel readings and would require a sound meter or and our officers are not trained on that and so um because of this new ordinance they would be able to just Pace off the 200 feet in order to determine whether there was a violation or not so it makes it very simple and in addition to that um because it is now regulating daytime it's covering that time that normally wouldn't be addressed before 11 pm and a lot of the parties as we've seen start earlier and then they grow and grow and unfortunately by the time we're allowed to enforce at 11 they've grown to a size that it's difficult to manage so this will give us an opportunity to to address them earlier thank you yes Nicole

[121:01] I just have a few questions and um thanks for the presentation and thank you to everybody who's been serving on this working group um truly an amazing amount of work that's gone on over the last year and a half um one of the questions that I have is um just around the amount of time that it takes to respond to noise complaints in terms of our staff time and um not just sort of showing up to the house and dealing with and complaint but I need paperwork or anything that kind of may come after that and I was just wondering if somebody could speak to the amount of time it's going to be taking this may be a question for our wonderful place they're sitting in the audience there um but I I'm just curious about that good evening Council Steve Redford and Deputy Chief of Police um so it's a great question typically it's not going to be an extended amount of time the proposed ordinance will not change the actual response other than as we

[122:00] talked we currently don't have some of the tools that we need under the current ordinance in the in the um such as a decimal meter and things like that so this will actually make it potentially quicker for officers if it meets the criteria under the new ordinance to to be able to issue that citation in those cases where it is excessive uh really all it is is trying to figure out when we get there who the responsible person is for the party for the house for the apartment um doing you know some initial just checking to verify who's who what's what issuing that ticket doesn't take long it's a it's a small piece of paperwork and then there might be some ancillary things that we may have to address if there's underage people there they're intoxicated getting responsible adults all of those things but normally when we're doing these things we're looking at 20 to 30 minutes maximum one of the things that the new ordinance will help with is currently before 11 o'clock we need a reporting party to call dispatch and say they'd like a police officer to come out to deal with this noise now we don't need that the officers can see this on their own measure it as as

[123:00] sander described and be able to take action on those really loud excessive noise so actually might make it a little quicker when we when we are not having to go contact that person that and and they need to sign a complaints and do you have a sense if there's going to be a need for other work to not happen or other complaints and things to not be responded to because I know that all of our all of our staff are really um kind of crunched for time right now so I'm just wondering if there's a trade-off involved here sure so normally as tonight um being back to school our neighborhood impact team our Hill team is up on the hill they're in the neighborhood they're out on foot they've had decent success in the last couple weeks with dealing with some firework issues noise complaints all of those things so normally they're up on the hill out on foot interacting with students granted if we have a major emergency in another part of the city they would get pulled off for that if it's a big a big call so yes if it's a very busy night summer night whatever the case may be where we have emergencies or higher priority calls where there's you know life or

[124:00] limb threat these noise complaints could potentially not be addressed in a timely manner normally our response times are are fairly quick we're talking under under 10 minutes or so and it's a big party because we tend to get a lot of call on the same party thank you and so you're mentioning kind of some of the night time calls then and my understanding is that this is for a daytime ordinance as well so do you expect us to detract from work that you're doing during the day because it sounds like those patrols are largely happening at night sure and the way the ordinance the way I understand the ordinance and Center can correct me if I'm wrong this will allow us to take that enforcement action prior to 11 pm so I'm thinking evening hours sometimes when it gets busy but during the day we have historically seen issues on the hill if you look back to some of the issues with some civil unrest we had in March of 21 some of those parties started very early in the day and continued as described uh just prior so that will allow us during the day to be able to get up there early whether it's to initially give a warning or say hey right you know we can now cite you for this without a complaint and it just

[125:00] gives us another tool we know it's not going to solve every every issue daytime our calls for service are fairly steady but I think quite frankly during the day we don't have the same number of in-progress calls that we do in the evening so I we'd have have to get you know we could look at data on calls for service and we've done that I don't think it's going to make a a significant difference okay great thank you um and then I think that's all the questions that I have for PD thank you thank you um the other question that I had was just around the engagement it really seems like this was developed a lot with the um Hill with folks in and around the hill and I was just wondering if you could give an estimate of um how how of sort of the the universe of Engagement that we did on this what percentage would would you say was specific to the hill versus other areas yeah um so certainly this was this idea was generated by the hill working group so it started um and originated on the hill um I looked to the Goss Grove

[126:01] neighborhood association because when I looked at a map of existing noise calls that was our next most populous area our our next hot spot on the heat map and we know that it's also a heavily student populated neighborhood um so I wanted to check in with those folks as well I did go to the community connectors and residence because I wanted to make sure to get both the equity lens and more of a whole city lens and then we advertised the be heard Boulder site we ran a spot on Channel 8 news last week previous to that we had run a couple different spots on Nextdoor that were city-wide I know that at least 23 different neighborhoods that were not the hill participated on be her Boulder that was from the August 16th report I can can't say how many added I forgot to look up that before I came but we could look it up together so we did hear from other neighborhoods certainly not in the concentration that

[127:00] we heard from the hill the vast majority even on be her Boulder of who we heard back from was on the hill um and I imagine that's because it is more of a relevant issue to that Community than to other parts of the city okay thank you so maybe like 80 to 90 percent Hill okay thank you any other questions or thank you um Sandra you were mentioning that you looked at looking at other municipalities that there are sort of similar ordinances that involve distance in terms of you know whether you can hear something at a particular distance um how is the distance that we're proposing compared to sort of what you are seeing in other municipalities thank you for the question um so there were some similarities I'm

[128:01] thinking of Fort Collins and um so the distance and there were several factors that they take into consideration distance being one of them um so in terms of the the actual number I don't know if we ever if we found any that were necessarily the same or comparable but they certainly had you know daytime The Zone whether it's residents commercial those kinds of factors in place okay thank you I was and this might not be something that you have the answer for but I was also wondering how this curing something at this distance might compare to the decibel level that we currently um look to like is it 50 decibels at the property line and you know it is that something that at 200 feet is about the same or you know something that you can hear that's a great

[129:01] question too uh so it's 55 in a residential area and I don't we have not done that analysis it's it would be very interesting to find out I think that the challenge with um decibel readings a lot of times is that there's ambient noise and it makes it really challenging to figure out where the noise is coming from and so I I think this is a much more objective way of determining a violation thank you Rachel thanks for the presentation and all the work you have both done on this um for years really um I just wanted to know what impact if any would this have on things like uh modified cars or motorcycles with like that exhaust or muffler or whatever makes that I'm getting a nod from Theresa there ahead and or leaf blowers or and and if it doesn't have any impacts uh will we look at that separately

[130:01] thanks for the question um so our Focus was related to the work plan that was presented to us from Council and um so the focus was really related to the to the parties and the noise generated from from those activities um the proposed ordinance does not address those types of noises that you've mentioned they are in the current code so we do regulate that if that's something that Council would like us to take another look at that could certainly be another work plan item but the proposed ordinance does not make any changes to that thank you thanks for the clear presentation and uh the many years of work that have led to where we are today my question concerns around what we hear a lot in email and other concerns about fireworks um so those aren't nuisance parties

[131:01] that's not a regular sound you can track it's a one-off and then you know trying to track it down my question has to really go around I know we banned fireworks at uh at any level here in the city but we have a fireworks tent that pops up you know right there at Eldorado Canyon right around 4th of July and other sales and so how is the city reconciling the proximity of the sale of what is otherwise fully illegal in this city right along the boundary of our senior and is there efforts to sort of work with the county and or County Sheriff to try to reconcile some of those differences because the Swiss Cheese model then sort of falls apart pretty quickly if you have to take a three mile bike ride down to El Dorado to get the fireworks you need okay I was told not to hold the microphone so I will not do that um thank you for the question um and it's I'm really glad you asked it because I I do know that fireworks is a big issue and um unfortunately this particular ordinance doesn't address it but there is work in that area uh we

[132:02] have abandoned Nagel who is available um can provide some more detail about the work that's being done in this area but I also want to mention before I hand it off to her is that the city attorney's office and the city prosecutors take firework cases very seriously we know the fire danger and not just that but the fact that it's it's a huge issue in terms of quality of life for neighborhoods and so we do not offer plea offers on those types of charges and um you know I think the court is also very much aware of the severity of the violation in terms of the potential for fire and those sorts of health and safety issues and so um that's the approach that we're taking and um as I mentioned we have Amanda available hopefully she's odd she's a

[133:00] virtual who can provide some more detail details about the other work that we're doing in this area absolutely thank you thank you so much for the question um we are working as a subcommittee of the Hill revitalization working group Amanda do you mind introducing yourself please oh I apologize my name is Amanda Nagel I'm an outside facilitator who has been working with the hill revitalization working group and also a group of City staff on short medium and long-term projects related to improving quality of life on University Hill one of the topics that we have worked on and how we do work in this group is we create subcommittees that work on specific issues that oftentimes either work in tandem with the city on their projects and or in addition to those projects the fireworks subcommittee has had two meetings thus far and really is still in the storming phase of identifying what their agenda will be and how they will do it our next meeting is on October 19th we've had the

[134:01] privilege of working with Carl Castillo to help do some research on any kind of loopholes that might exist in the state law that might be creating the opportunity to buy or access fireworks illegally in or around Boulder County we've been told that those loopholes have been filled at the state level we are going to be meeting on the 19th to decide if with the group will reach out to incoming Sheriff elect Curtis Johnson to talk about potentially working with fireworks underneath the fire ban proposal we'll also be putting in front of that subcommittee decisions about perhaps working with I believe it's the Symposium of cities uh correct me if I'm wrong there um for the county Consortium I'm sorry Boulder County Consortium of cities to determine if there's an opportunity to work at the regional level I think it's safe to say that this group is very open to any direction or any additional interest from the community or Council to give direction on how this

[135:01] group might best support your efforts in trying to keep the community safe from fireworks thank you for that appreciate it thanks so much Amanda anything else all right got another one from Nicole sorry last question I realized I forgot one on my list and I'm just this is going back to kind of the tracking of success one of the things that I'm wondering about is what can residents reasonably expect so in a year from now right I understand there may be a little bit of up and down for a while but in a year you know what can they expect I mean are we looking at like a 10 reduction in noise issues um 20 I mean is there anything from other cities that have done similar things I just want to make sure that folks have reasonable expectations of what we will see here thank you for your question and um what I can tell you is that we're still developing those metrics I think that any movement would be great

[136:04] um obviously the more the better and so while I can't quantify it at the moment I think that if we're seeing Improvement in that area I think that that's success and we we can continue down that road and continue to seek more success and um we'll we'll just do our best to make sure that we track it okay seeing no other questions we can move to public comments and I think we we read our guidelines earlier Ryan is that good enough very good so uh we have enough speakers that there will be two minutes for each speaker and our first three are Lynn Siegel Lisa Nelson and Marion Wilner I emphasize the highest rigidity we have more than 15 people signed up are you ready for me or not

[137:00] uh we are Lynn but you're a little quiet it's better I suggest the highest rigidity of this High stopping these kind of issues on the hill um this university has we've got to be leveraging with them the city of Boulder does to reduce their population certainly not increase it with CU South certainly not increase it and for a 100 year flood plain instead of a 500 and Ted and Joe tadiuchi is wrong about the underflow of I-36 he is wrong we need to get our staff doing the right thing and and this is a bribe and we need to leverage ourselves now this university has grown way out of proportion with undergrads the serious grad students

[138:02] aren't even being helped they can't even get food on the campus and they're not going to get food on the south campus unless those all those service workers increase the jobs housing imbalance and that is the direct threat that we have to Boulder um so everything that you can do to stop anything on the hill because this university has very negative impact on this town my dad complained when it was 25 000 the city of Boulder population in the early 50s so do something do a lot um this is ridiculous that we've been putting up with all this all these years um even with Andrew Shoemaker up there fighting it like what what's that about why how why have you allowed all of you and past councils allowed the kind of transgressions up on the hill that's utterly ridiculous

[139:01] um it's just unacceptable it's as unacceptable as the trash from the homeless in this town and the and and you know I can't put my feet in the creek because it's probably E coli and everything else also we might say with leverage at the University but there was E coli coming out into the creek from the campus and those are issues for our community and for Downstream it's too much Demand on water it's too much Demand on our Resources with the city it's too much demand for maintenance and operations with open space it's we've already got a huge 30th it's a wall a literal wall of compartments for people to live in you think they're going to want to live in there they want to go West to the open space they have no open space at 30th and Pearl and that's the

[140:01] same thing at CU they haven't got enough food at CU good food for their grad students they haven't got enough Aerospace project space for their students they have no business and your time is up but thank you for your time causing trouble and we have Lisa Nelson then Marianne Wilner is absent so Stuart Walker and Deanne Fuji So Lisa let's see can you hear me now yes just wanted to let you know we were told we had three minutes um when we received the communication from the city for tonight um so I'll try to go really fast um again my name is Lisa Nelson I serve on the hill reinvestment working group representing the University Hill neighborhood association and I'm speaking tonight to ask you to adopt the noise ordinance um I have a story to help you understand why this is so important

[141:00] picture a beautiful spring day you're at home but you can't sit on your porch or be in your yard because it's too loud there's music blasting from a block away you can't have your friends over it's too loud to have a conversation outside you can't have your doors or windows open in fact your windows are rattling in their frames you can't watch TV because it's too loud in your living room you decide to take a shower and even in your shower with a running water running you hear the pounding sound of the music you decide to walk down and talk to your neighbors about it and ask them to please turn their music down because it's so loud inside your house the response you typically get is a Blank Stare accompanied by the statement that we can do anything we want until 11 pm there's nothing you can do about it unfortunately under existing ordinances that's essentially correct because in practice the city rarely if ever uses the decimal meters and this is often accompanied by a statement along the lines of if you don't belong here anyway the hell is for us not for you the intense stress this brings on people has caused neighbors to flee the neighborhood which is accelerated the decline because those houses have been

[142:01] purchased by investors who fill them full of more students um Hill neighbors get a bad rap in saying we're anti-students but honestly I would tell you that they are some of the most caring generous and resilient people who care a lot about our student neighbors and we know that it's a very unsafe place for many residents and the excessive noise is just one part of that students will argue that the outdoor social Gatherings with Amplified music are Central to their college of experience but I believe it's just important for them to understand they're part of a larger community so please pass this ordinance tonight thank you Thank you Lisa and I apologize for the confusion we did double check it's the rules are two minutes if there are 15 or more people signed up and we do have 19 minutes but I will give people a few seconds leeway if um if you're running a little bit over because of the confusion all right uh now we have Stuart Walker Deanne Fuji and Daniel harberger

[143:07] hello can you hear me yes great hi my name is Stuart walker uh and I'll be brief as I'm sure there are others who will speak on the topic who are more knowledgeable and articulate than I am our family has lived on the hill for over 30 years uh we do from the outset that we weren't moving into a quiet suburb uh in fact the vibrant neighborhood was one of the reasons that we located here we enjoy the diversity we enjoy the students and we enjoy the activity that said managing the balance between the hill lifestyle and peaceful enjoyment can be a channel challenge it's the proposed no noise ordinance is one small yet important step toward improving that balance our family stands in support of this

[144:00] ordinance and asks the council to give it their support thank you very much thank you Stuart now we have Dean Fuji Daniel Herberger and Kel Darnell hi can you hear me yes hi good evening Council and Council committee members I have been a resident on the hill since 1997 a neighbor of Stu Stuart Walker who just spoke the lack of consequences for noise noise ordinance infractions is ongoing my young infants were once Disturbed and woken by the noise are now themselves graduating from college recently in the Daily Camera Jan Burton spoke of an overflow fraternity house Annex which is in my neighborhood she discussed the lack of citations for property with multiple noise complaints to law enforcement imagine a deafening Rock concert every

[145:02] evening starting in the afternoon that you aren't able to mute my first call to the non-emergent line for this location on Tuesday August 23rd resulted in even higher decibels necessitating another call our police force has more important things to do than police students who have no respect for their neighbors we need clear and concrete consequences for violators landlords and from CU for student offenders as well as a good tracking system and effective fines giving law enforcement the ability to ticket offenders or shut down parties will hopefully decrease the waste of multiple recurrent visits to these properties and send a direct message from the community I do have a question about what are the proposed fines for infractions um and please pass this ordinance thank you for your work and time thank you Dean next we have Daniel harberger Kell

[146:01] Darnell and Rishi Raj hi there can you guys hear me yes sorry I tried a few times um all right so I'll jump right into it um my name is Daniel harberger I formally resided at 848 10th Street in Boulder um but after four years of dealing with constant noise pollution in my neighborhood I actually chose to move out of this city uh this city where I was born this city where I was raised this city where all of my family still lives lives constant noise pollution was the number one reason for me to me

[147:00] and my spouse to leave and truthfully like so many other families the severity of the noise made us feel forced to move out of our home so with that context I want to submit three questions for your consideration one what was the context around Boulder's original noise ordinance and doesn't need to be updated it seems very clear that massive amplifiers were not so common as they are now which makes noise pollution today much larger and a much growing issue question two could it actually be beneficial to students to be held to a more respectful noise standard as as a former student myself and a manager of properties with student tenants I can tell you that students will always find a way to have a great time in college enacting a reasonable noise ordinances could benefit these students by helping them cultivate greater self-awareness and teaching them to collaborate with their neighbors as a student landlord I fully and wholeheartedly support this policy and this massive growth opportunity for Boulder Zoo finally question number three in this

[148:01] hearing should the opinion of long-term residents be weighed the same as students passing through for a year or two it seems rational that families who are investing into building an enduring Community should receive especially great consideration we want to build a town that prospers for the long run not one that focuses on a year-by-year party mentality please pass this ordinance to ensure Boulder will be a lovely place now and for years to come thank you thank you Daniel thank you now we have Kel Darnell rishiraj and Joseph Hughes my name is Kel Darnell I'm a hill landlord and the president of the boulder Area Rental Housing Association and I am testifying on behalf of baraha which represents over 14 000 rental housing units in Boulder barha recognizes the need for the proposed noise ordinance to expand the hours of unreasonable noise violations to daytime hours Amplified daytime noise

[149:00] has been the number one complaint from the hill neighbors for years it's our understanding that this ordinance will allow an officer to issue a ticket if they can hear daytime Noise Within 200 feet and does not require a neighbor complaint which I think is a great upgrade this will make it easier for officers to ticket offenders especially on the hill which will help housing providers curb unwanted tenant Behavior this is a good first step but as the city continues to look at curbing nuisance Behavior we ask that you prioritize the communication dashboard project to notify housing providers of calls to service it's imperative that a communication system be rolled out hand in hand with these other changes currently as a housing a housing provider can receive a weekly email from the courts identifying tickets issued if the landlord has signed up for the distribution list this imperfect system only notifies a select few about tickets issued on properties and not until a week after the citation an effective communication system that informs the rental license holder and both calls for service and tickets in

[150:02] real time is necessary so housing providers can proactively address the problems earlier or ask the city for help as a member of the Hill revitalization work group barha collaborates with CU Boulder the neighbors and other Community Partners to come up with viable solutions for all parties without improved communication is difficult to resolve the recurring issues that we all face we appreciate being a part of this process and thanks staff and stakeholders for the time and effort that has been put into this proposal thank you Kell now we have rishiraj Joseph Hughes and Margot kriml so can you hear me now yes okay yeah so you know there are two three points I would like to make the first is you know we need really need to recognize the

[151:00] significance of our neighborhoods in the totality of the lifestyle in Boulder you know we have businesses which are very Innovative we have the open space and we have our neighborhoods and we must act proactively to protect them and have them flourish in the future for future Generations now second point I want to make is that you know there is an unusual convergence of opinion on this issue from many different directions and that is really very heartening to see that and uh you know we have laws but the uh the effect of the laws depends upon how it is perceived so all of these groups who have come together to propose this ordinance need to work continue to work together to make themselves heard that this is a new ordinance which will be enforced so that

[152:02] people follow it and I think there's already a perception that this ordinance is going to have an effect on the quality of life in our neighborhoods finally I want to say that you know and we had this uh presentation in July which was really excellent and which pointed out the only few handful of properties on the hill maybe a dozen at the most maybe 10 where these parties nucleate and grow out of control so I think that is a that is kind of a fundamental issue that we need to address that people who own these properties be held responsible for allowing this kind of egregious Behavior to uh to start and grow that you know that is not good for anybody thank you thank you Rishi and actually I'm going to ask you a question I've got

[153:00] you here because we've got you signed up here twice but I was wondering if the other sign up might be for your wife jotes now do you know if she's handy if she could answer that question because that is a mistake that didn't stay because I signed up for open comment through the open comment uh link and also through the public hearing link so I've got enrolled twice okay thank you for clarifying right now we have Joseph Hughes and then I hear Margo criminals not present and then Haydn Christopher and David radissoner So Joseph good evening everyone this is Joseph Hughes I live at 941 Crescent Drive which is in the Park East neighborhood and I've lived out here in Boulder for over 37 years and 23 years at my present

[154:03] address and I also have uh um some relationship as a board member with a property on the hill that is about 20 feet from the commercial District and so I'm going to speak about three things that concern me about the um proposal um one I think it would be better if it started at sundown two I think that there should be a permanent decibel reader um at each property that's located anywhere within uh 20 blocks of the hill and um I also think that any property that is uh located within one block of the commercial District probably should be treated Just a Touch differently because those properties already are having to deal uh with with Noah's at all times of of and that's 24 hours a day and therefore um are are

[155:01] somehow or other uh bothered themselves all the time and consequently ought to have a little bit more treatment like all the commercial buildings in that area um the area that I live in in the Park East neighborhood if this passes um I'm 60 years old if this passes um I would have been able to call on my neighbors uh four times within the last month because there was a wedding party in the backyard there was another party in a backyard and these are all within they're all over 200 feet away from my property and I could hear plenty of noise um and so consequently I I disagree I do not believe uh that just hearing something 200 feet away is the same as a decimal reader I believe a decibel reader is actually the objective thing where it's just saying that you can hear noise 200 feet away is subjective

[156:00] um and as I get older believe me I know my hearings your time is up I clearly forget it but thank you for your testimony appreciate it okay we've got several people not president David radissoner Luke Krakowski and Jake Borges if they come back we'll get to them but meanwhile we have Hayden Christopher Mitch Mitchell and Lawrence Ferguson hey can you guys hear me okay yes awesome uh my name is Hayden Christopher uh as said before thank you for introducing me uh I'm the undergraduate student here at the University of Colorado Boulder I'm a junior majoring in finance I also happen to be the president-elect for Phi Capital fraternity on the hill located at 1150 College we take a lot of responsibility and a lot of effort to make sure that we're good neighbors to everybody else on the hill we do a lot of community service on the hill we do Hill cleanups every year we shovel driveways for elderly neighbors and just do a lot to

[157:01] make sure that we're following all the guidelines set forth by the city we register all of our events with the local police department and have good relations with them as well and I think it was pointed out by the dean of student acting Dean students earlier that most of these misconduct charges that are happening especially this year none of them have been related to uh noise issues all of them have been you know either underage drinking or issues of that sort so I don't really see the need particularly to expand the current noise ordinance where especially it could be disproportionately affecting students and also raising the concern of it disproportionately affecting people of color as well as brought it up earlier uh in this interview uh yeah I think that there's a lot of good things about the current noise ordinance but I think kind of expanding it to a term or to a place where you know it allows for a lot more leeway in terms of what you write a ticket for there's no warning for anyone

[158:02] at the event before you get anything a citation issue towards you so there's kind of a lot of variables that are applied there like we don't don't necessarily know how the like one block standard is going to be enforced the quantifiableness of the effectiveness of this new ordinance has not been demonstrated so far so I would kind of urge everyone to rethink in stating a new ordinance and rather uh look at the one we have now and I'd also like to bring up that it seems the main issue tonight with noise has been fireworks uh not particularly students so thank you for letting me speak thank you Hayden right several other people aren't present Lawrence Ferguson Evan Humphrey and Mike Smith so we have one person left which is Mitch Mitchell how's it going can you guys hear me okay yes the other people who are missing are all with me currently

[159:00] um but anyways good evening and thank you guys for your time my name is Mitch Christ current president of Phi Gamma Delta at CU Boulder another fraternity on the hill we currently reside in two properties on the hill our first in primary location being on the corner of 12th and college which sleeps 11 and our other being on 11th and University sleeping 36. our property at 12th and college is a central location for our Brotherhood and has been for the past five years our property leased by four star and privately owned has no level of accessibility which is something we aim to improve upon this semester we reached out to a non-profit the home builders Foundation to help install an accessibility ramp for one of our brothers Jake who struggles with muscular dystrophy and severe Aspergers we were recently featured on the Boulder Daily Camera Camera and commended for our efforts to improve our accessibility on the hill accessibility for Jake is still minimal in the house itself and he can only gain access to the main room in the front despite us having had a ramp built for him for this reason as well as the potential fire hazard risk of having our

[160:01] events indoors we have moved our large social Gatherings to our backyard when our Brotherhood comes together to bond with Jake it is important to him that we are able to be outside and have them included in our activities due to the fact that he cannot access the whole house and our group is too large to safely congregate in our main rooms not being able to have our events outside would force us to have dangerous gatherings in terms of fire hazards and have more trouble trying to include our brother Jake from what I understand from serving on the IFC president's board this is an issue that would extend to a lot of other groups on the hill thank you guys for your time thanks Mitch and I hear Mike Smith is in the meeting but if Lawrence and Evan are with you you could pass the mic over to them if they would like to testify separately yeah so hello can you guys hear me yes all right my name is uh Jake Borges I'd like to thank you guys for having me tonight I'm the president of Pi capify here at the University of Colorado Boulder

[161:00] uh we currently reside on 1441 Broadway Street in between the blocks of Grandview and University and our house sleeps 18 people uh since our founding in 1991 we have swap properties multiple times our first house is now the current gamma Phi Beta sorority house we used to have the old Sigma Chi House which is now Saint Thomas's Aquinas Center uh we used to have 1150 College Avenue which is now the Phi capital for fraternity house and our chapter is a large one of the larger chapters we've made up of 165 members and as I said before our current property only sleeps 18. so in order for us to have events with our whole brotherhood we have to have those vents outside and being that we have one of those larger chapters we are not able to do that with this new new noise ordinance um

[162:00] 55 decibels can be reached merely by people and I know that we're discussing Amplified speakers but we could reach that with just our members and this is a Brotherhood that has been around for 31 years now it is shaped over 1300 men's college careers and later their lives it's something that people respect and want to continue the tradition of and I don't see it being very possible with this new noise ordinance being passed like thank you guys have a good night thanks Jake was there someone else present at that location that was signed up yeah got Lawrence here as well go ahead hello um good afternoon or evening sorry uh my name is Lawrence Ferguson and I am the President of Alpha Tau Omega here at Boulder currently our colony is located on 1122 12th Street and the house sleeps 13 individuals uh we just moved into the

[163:01] property in this last month um and we do love it but the biggest thing we've noticed is that we have a space problem um the house is laid out as an apartment complex essentially it's five different units each with its own private kitchen bathroom and a living room but the living rooms only are about 14 by 14. uh we have to Outsource where our chapters are and our chapter is only 40 brothers because we don't have the space inside the house to hold meetings our backyard is in a very similar situation it's absolutely tiny a group of 20 people back there the cons a very crowded issue uh there's some garages back there that unfortunately we cannot use they've been in service for a while and while we would like to inevitably be able to use that space it's just not on our radar right now it's not something that we with our Personnel account can actually achieve this leaves the only space that we can use being the front yard it has a lot of

[164:01] room it's surrounded by Hedges it's very beautiful and we value it very much but it's the only area where we can gather with more than say 40 people we of course do understand curbside appeal something that the IFC hearts on pretty heavily and ATO nationally is considered both the leadership fraternity and the gentleman fraternity so it's something that our brothers really aspire to continue up that curbside appeal and we do ensure that our property is looking good sounding good but ultimately the only area we do have is that front yard area thank you for your time thanks Lawrence next we have sorry who's that hi this is Evan Humphrey go ahead you're signed up yes we can all right sounds good so I'm Evan Humphrey I'm a junior at the University of Colorado and I'm president of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity uh our chapter has been here since 1922 and currently resides on 1010 12th

[165:00] Street in March of 2022 we welcome the fire department into our house for an inspection to ensure our house passed fire code do the negligence or property management company the house failed nearly every test in five months no work has been done by the management company to remedy these issues and as a result our basement has been labeled off limits by fire department because of this problem we have been forced to hold our events outside our front yard through our own hard work however we've remained free of any noise complaints for a calendar year we register every event we have with the Boulder Police and are sure to shut it down if we ever receive a noise complaint in 20 minutes or less and we also have a complete liaison that we work with through the ISD that I'm in constant contact with for every event as I believe has already been stated by others today the police have better things to do than deal with noise ordinances I propose we are able to handle these issues by ourselves and are more than happy to listen to the police that we work with but if we place a new noise ordinance

[166:00] it'll give them more work than they have to do and will cause issues for the rest of us thank you very much for your time thank you Evan anybody else there yeah we got Mike Smith can you hear me sorry who's that oh Mike Smith yes go ahead we can't quite hear you oh yeah it's through the computer so sorry yep I'm sorry in the Tomb right now all right I've been advising in Boulder since 1988 and I'm the only person left on the ground from the formation the IFC on the hill happens I can tell you that the eye of the on the hill and its member chapters are not your problem you have a noise ordinance that deals with daytime noise ordinance it does require that someone call in and complain but the police have better things to do than derive the hill with their noise meters outside their windows the hill team has been cut back from 12 cops to four cops even though on four separate weekends last year we had

[167:01] gunshots fired at fraternity houses when people were turned away because they were not on the guest list and they were not CU students we had this same issue two weeks ago there are bigger issues in Boulder to deal with than the fact that some people may not be able to nap during the daytime I realize that sounds harsh but I have 2 300 kids who are extraordinary citizens of the city who work closely with the police department and regard your police fire and Emergency Services people as their best friends we have not had a death injury or insurance claims since the IFC Hill on the hill was formed we were not consulted even though we're members of the hill hill neighborhood association about any of this none of our students participated we disagree with the University's position that their educational programs and support programs are going to be effective and we don't support either of those groups positions we believe that the hill is a problem but the hill is a problem because it's

[168:00] an outdated zoning concept the hill needs to be looked at as a commercial District a student housing district and a high-end residential district until we can look at that that way we're not going to accomplish anything thank you thank you Mike all right I think that's everybody so I will bring um the public hearings who close come back to city council we'll start any follow-up questions Mr Mayor yes we do have two individuals who have since joined uh who were not part of the group call number 13 David and number 14 Luke well let's give him an opportunity then so we've got David ratazziner and then Luke Krakowski okay hello this is David ratazziner can you hear me yes okay great thank you

[169:00] apologies for uh being late into the meeting uh I'm a resident at uh 765 14th Street with my wife 24-year resident we have seen uh many changes on the hill in those years I was also a member of a fraternity on the hill at 11th and college in the early 80s and I'm very familiar with uh with that whole lifestyle that by the way has changed dramatically over the last uh 30 and 40 years we're in a situation on the hill where uh we we have a very difficult time simply living a uh a regular life relative to noise fireworks loud music uh and so forth this ordinance is an excellent initial step in bringing the hill around

[170:00] and making it the fabulous neighborhood that it can be uh it's in the interest of the city the University and the residents and the majority of students who live on the hill to pass this ordinance I encourage you to do so thank you thank you David now we have Luke Krakowski hello can you hear me yes sorry for being late to the meeting I was just um getting back from class but I am um the vice president of external Affairs for the IFC on the hill um so I thought it would be good to come today and and just um uh point a student's perspective especially as an executive on the IFC on the hill um I just wanted to start by saying I understand all of the concerns of members and you know residents on the

[171:00] hill who are who are not students um we we obviously understand that it's a unique circumstance um I just wanted to lay out to for you guys some of the judicial processes and stuff that I'm in charge of on the IFC on the hill we take noise complaints and this the noise ordinance extremely seriously um we really believe that for this community as a whole to advance forward it has to be a give and take on both sides um and that is something that I since I've taken over I was also a president of a chapter on 14th Street and my goal was to make sure that we we struck that balance so the processes are extremely rigorous and if there is a violation by one of our member chapters we make sure to Nick that in the head immediately and do everything we can to make sure that there aren't any repeat offenders now we know that it's not a perfect science um but we really do do our best and it's my belief that um if we are given a chance to prove

[172:02] continually that this this noise ordinance during the night is all that is needed then we would be really um grateful to be able to prove that too guys um but I understand and I am empathetic to everyone's Viewpoint so I just want to thank you guys thank you Luke all right Ryan does that bring us too close that does Mr Mayor thank you okay great thanks to everyone for their testimony tonight so uh bring it back to council I have a follow-up question I can get started on so we've heard some testimony tonight from folks who are concerned that they would not be able to have outside Gatherings uh in the afternoon say but as I understand the ordinance that so long as any accompanied Amplified music or other Amplified sound is at a reasonable enough level to not be heard a block away that they can still have a gathering and socialize is that correct that is correct okay great because I'm sympathetic to some of the testimony I've heard you you want folks to be able

[173:01] to hang out with their friends in an afternoon and maybe have a group of people there it's just making sure that the noise from it is not so loud as to really disrupt the neighborhood uh Lauren and then Tara foreign thanks for bringing that up Erin I do have a concern just with the way noise travels it doesn't reduce it follows an inverse Square law for the reduction of noise over distance and it doesn't reduce very quickly so at 200 feet you're looking at a 16 decibel reduction in noise which is like rustling leaves so just from the amount of fall off that you would have from the point source to where you're hearing it so I think that you know in a noisy area of town where you're a ambient noise is high that might be sufficient but in when you look at

[174:01] quieter areas of town this is going to have a bigger impact yeah just colically on that Lauren for a second so I I I can't say yes or no on the 16 decibel decrease but my understanding is that decibels do work logarithmically so that's not that it would be the the volume of wrestling leaves that would decrease it would it would be a I would be um I don't know exactly the math but I think that's still a substantial decibel noise fall off 16 decibels as I understand it but I know none of us are sound Engineers but Tara and then Mark I just wanted to call a queen oh go ahead and get that comment uh I I suspect this is going to be kind of a rule of Reason ordinance and if you're can you speak right into that if you walk off 200 feet and uh you hear wrestling leaves uh I suspect that the police will let it go it's going to be a function of what you're hearing at

[175:00] 200 feet and how aggressive and how loud the uh the Amplified music is um so I don't think it's necessarily that if you hear every anything at all at 200 feet uh police are going to be issuing citations again a rule of reason thank you thanks Tara before I make my comment I do live close to the hill and sometimes it's so loud and I find out it's five blocks away so I wish that it was a stronger ordinance but I get that that's what you want to do but that's not my question so I see that uh police chief is here and a few of the students I said the police have better things to do than deal with noise and I was just wondering if you'd like to comment on that how do you feel about it foreign Council mayor Harold police chief um well I'll tell you since I've been here

[176:01] um the community harm that is caused by large parties and loud noise is real and um I don't think to be honest with you there's better use of police officers time to ensure that the community is not harmed by what I see is excessive part large parties that I have never seen before Steve and I just walked the hill and we've been doing so at night and I'm telling you this is a serious serious problem on the hill Friday Saturday and Sunday it it gets to the point where we have hundreds and hundreds of people inside of a house that should not have 50 people in it so not only is it a safety concern for the students but the community harm is real on the University Hill I hope that answers your question right so not seeing any other follow oh yes good Genie and then Nicole

[177:03] thank you I just have a question about the um Community engagement there was a comment made earlier about not lack of participation from some Community groups and I wonder what happened why were they not invited or were they invited it's just the process is very different so can you respond to that a little bit thank you yeah we um did have two student leaders on the hill revitalization working group all this year who were members of fraternities and living on the hill we also had a sorority member the previous year who worked with the group so we did have a sense that we that we understood that perspective um we had not engaged as much with IFC on the hill not through lack of trying over the years um and certainly Amanda and I had lunch with Mike Smith a couple about six weeks

[178:01] ago he mentioned that he was upset about the Norris ordinance we offered follow-up meetings subsequently but um did not hear back from him so we were not able to get more details about that frustration thank you thank you I just had a couple of follow-up questions um one is I wonder if you could speak a little bit to why why this isn't just focused on the hill because what I heard tonight were all people from the hill um and I'm just curious as to why this is city-wide versus just focused on the hill especially because the community connectors suggest that as well as kind of doing a pilot on the hill as a way to get some information about how this is working and who it's impacting um before we move forward with Citywide thank you for the question I think that um based on the data that we had

[179:00] received um while University Hill was probably the most impacted area there were certainly other areas within the city that were impacted as well and they tended to be more student populated areas and so um for that reason we decided that we wanted to make it Citywide in addition to that it would be really difficult to try to carve out what area on the hill would be included and what would not and so for those two reasons we went with the Citywide thank you and then my other question this is just around the some of the comments chief that you made about just what you're seeing at night with parties being so large larger than you've ever seen before and and it's not clear to me how this kind of noise ordinance and moving things toward the day is going to help with that is it that they're starting during the day and then kind of exploding getting larger at night but I guess that

[180:03] that's sort of one question is how that how they're related and then my second question is um what are the kind of follow-up steps that are going to be taking because I think what I'm hearing here is that this is not going to single-handedly solve the issue that we're seeing and so what are some of the other kind of next steps that that the community might look to as we're moving forward yeah thanks for that and I'll let Sandra offer the holistic approach that I think we're heading down um but if we go back um a little over a year when we had the riots on the hill these parties start during the day and we have another big one that we're preparing for Halloween but these parties start during early morning hours and they escalate through social media um and so what we hope is that this gives the police officers a fighting chance to stop some of these parties from

[181:01] continuing and when I say that there's hundreds uh that's no exaggeration I mean uh you know in the past we've had floors break out of houses because there were so many people in them um so we are hoping that the police officers if they have this tool and it's not going to solve everything but at least it gives the police officers a fighting chance to stop some of this behavior before it gets so out of control that then we're calling in swat Personnel then we're calling in other agencies to assist and that's something I do not want to see because other agencies like the state that we've had to rely on for extra resources do not police the way that Boulder police officers police and so to me if we have a chance to get in there and stop this behavior before it escalates that is what I would prefer to do before I have to start calling different agencies into our community and that never is a good thing

[182:00] and I'm going to turn it over to Sandra to address I think next steps from a holistic city-wide approach with uh hopefully uh chronic nuisance and so forth thank you thank you Chief and I'm actually going to defer to Brenda writtenauer um just um and I just wanted to point you all back to the IP and the presentation that you received several weeks ago that laid out sort of our short-term medium term and long-term plan so this is really step one of that full plan we certainly will continue to be looking at nuisance abatement as a holistic process and what improvements can be done there there are strategies toward landlord education that are being worked on so that we are sure that our landlords are being the best Partners they can to us in the community and we are being the best Partners we can to them um and um in addition to a number of other things that you saw on those on

[183:01] those presentations foreign to move into deliberations would anyone like to start off comments some work um well I want to speak in an extremely strong support uh for this ordinance um we we haven't been asked by the community to do this we've been begged by the hill Community to try to address conditions that are simply unbearable or normal residential uh citizens and we've been kicking the can this particular can down the road for far longer than I've been on Council and in fact longer than I've lived in the city of Boulder and after the March 2021 Riot the recent near Riot on July

[184:05] 4th it's just not appropriate for us not to address this and to um find a way to help residents who are living in awful awful conditions and so I am very supportive of this there are a couple of points I'd want to make the first is this is going to impact a very very small number of Cu students most of whom are good neighbors good people and don't measure their enjoyment by how many firecrackers they can set off in the in the middle of the street this is a small minority of the student body that is persistently caused difficulties for those around them and have really have not respected the the concept of being a neighbor um we've heard from some of the fraternity uh fraternity members tonight that they are good neighbors and I

[185:00] accept that but others are not and and they are creating conditions that we are really called upon to address and and it's not as if we are um not permitting students to be students we're not expecting every student who lives on the hill to go to bed at 8 30 after reading a couple of chapters of Chaucer um they're students they they will gather there will be times when they play music it will be times when they play music outside we're simply asking them to respect certain limits that are necessary for the larger community and finally I want to say I've been very impressed with the work of the Hill revitalization working group mayor Pro tem friend and I have participated in a number of those meetings they have been careful they have been deliberative at times they have been careful and deliberative in ways that that left me frustrated because I wanted to get it

[186:00] done immediately but they they took a different path they were they were much more judicious than I would have been they were much more careful and I think they have come up with an ordinance that will not solve every problem but it hopefully will make a difference and if we look at the holistic package of ordinances that we ultimately hope to pass to address the conditions on the hill I I think they will help um and again you know the work of that committee um has been very careful very organized and very thoughtful and I want to commend them for the work that they've done even when they have frustrated me because I wanted to get it done tomorrow their path was the better path um and so I am in great support of what they have produced and I I think it I just don't think we can go back to that community and say sorry uh we're not going to help you even with step one um we're just not prepared to help you

[187:01] so thank you sorry to be long-winded that's right Rachel yeah uh thanks again for the presentation and thanks to everyone who testified um like Mark I am supportive of and have been involved with this hill revitalization work group since I got on Council and one of the things that I think is often overlooked that was um sort of omnipresent and feedback that I would get in that group from students who participated including one who was like the president of a sorority at the time and was very outspoken and doing a lot of Engagement with her peers was that the the people who suffer most from sort of the the um the few houses that refuse to manage noise during the daytime and that bleed into the evening are in fact the other students so it's not something that we're trying to not get students it's mostly students who live there and um I think we hear more from long-term residents but the the primary impact is

[188:01] felt by students who do want to be studying and are there for a serious education so just want to make that point point so slightly disagree with Mark's statement that few students would be impacted because I think there will be a lot of students who have a positive impact from this um and again would just Echo what Mark said that this is this um sort of came into sharper Focus after we had a riot in March of 2021 and Mark and I met and toured the hill and it was I don't know if anyone else was out there but it was scandalously uh bad situation the next morning there was a lot of broken glass I think a car tipped over like it was you know we had a SWAT vehicle that was I think pretty seriously damaged this isn't um trying to crack down on you know people who are having fun you can still go out in your backyard and you know commune with your friends and the people that you live with you just can't

[189:01] have Amplified noise to the point where it can be heard a block away so um I I think it's great to give our code enforcement a a tool that they can use to hopefully nip some of these parties in the bud and help our community and especially the people who are living nearby including students thanks thanks man thanks Aaron um to Mark's point this is certainly long overdue so it's great to see this in here but I do want to sort of mention that this is not the culmination of the work it is rather just the start of restoring the balance for everyone to have the enjoyment um and safety on the hill for students and residents and those that are visiting from out of town I will say as someone who used to live on the hill for five years while I was a student shortly after I certainly understand those conditions but also want to know that this is not simply a penalty for students this is also we're going to be looking again this is early phase make sure landlords are

[190:00] accountable too and so I want to make sure that everyone listening that this even though this phase sounds like it's hard on students there's balance that's going to come subsequently as we do landlord education and really to be frank all it takes is pulling one rental license from a landlord and everybody else is going to fall in line I hope we don't get there but I think that we have an opportunity to create that balance and restore some order um and so I just want to make sure that we understand that there is more to this than than just this ordinance that's coming down the line um so I hope that everyone sort of takes that and that this is the start of many things and also keeping in mind it's easier for us to loosen the reins and we have to kind of come down and really tighten it up now but as things improve and the conditions get better we can loosen the reins and make sure that um things find more balance later on as things adjust so this is just the first of many steps Tara really appreciated hearing all the public testimony from all sides tonight it was very interesting I think for me

[191:01] when I hear what I heard tonight was in the past two or three years it got worse and I feel like according to the police chief that the game changer might have been social media where a party just grows exponentially over time starting from the day and so I think that was how we got our major um riots or should I say large parties that grew out of control because the social media is over that reason I feel like having this noise ordinance start in the day could really be could make the difference that we need to at least get this going in the right direction Lauren thank you um in general I appreciate this modification to the way we're measuring noise and noise violations um I do have concerns about how it impacts the city as a whole noise

[192:01] like temperature is something that is hard to get two people to agree on to what is the appropriate level clearly we have areas of town where it's far far beyond what is an appropriate level but I think setting a universal standard is difficult and I would like to have a check-in in a year to see how something like this like what we've learned in that time period right I'll yeah go ahead and call them now I'll call in myself yeah I like the idea of a check-in and I also just kind of want to lift up again the community connectors suggestion that we think about having a pilot just restricted to the hill um the nice thing about a pilot is that it's a test we can try something right we could just say it's from Baseline to Arapahoe West to Broadway and see how how that ends up working out for us um I kind of like that approach more than trying something city-wide so I

[193:03] don't you know as I say this I don't want to minimize the harm that is being done to folks on the hill because as some of my colleagues have mentioned it is largely students who are suffering it is a minority of students who are engaging in these harmful behaviors and they are disrupting their peers lives as well it is not just homeowners who who are dealing with this so you know I I don't want to suggest that I'm not supportive of solutions to address this issue I would like to see this as a pilot though rather than something city-wide and um the other thing I just want to kind of get at while I have the mic for a moment is that you know because this is a minority of students who are causing stress and harm to our community and affecting other students I really do see this as an issue for the University and something that they need to really step

[194:00] up with and I say that as somebody who works at the University and recognizes that too A lot of the disrespect that folks in the community see in their neighborhoods actually shows up on campus too we see it in the ways that marginalized staff students and faculty are treated on campus and I'd like to take this opportunity just to really encourage the university to think about our goals to shape tomorrow's leaders to positively impact humanity and to be the top university for Innovation I think we can really think about some interesting ways to innovate and really work on helping students grow into those leaders and build the skills that they need to show up in community in a way that's respectful and that shows their relationship to community and I know that the university is working on this I know that folks are thinking about it what I would encourage is for us to think about working with some of the Dei leaders on campus on this issue because when we solve some of the disrespect

[195:00] that we're seeing on campus we'll also have solved the disrespect that we're seeing off campus thanks Nicole so I'll call in myself here and just start by thanking the members of the Hill revitalization working group for all their hard work including our colleagues Rachel friend and Mark Wallach over here and I think you've done excellent work and there will be more excellent work to come out of that group so thanks to everyone who's been doing that and all the community members that have been engaged with that process as well so I do feel like that this is a good next step forward in terms of resolving some of the conflict issues that we see in our community uh you know we have been focused on student problems on on the hill but these can be quality of life issues in in other areas and and with other people as well but just want to come back to what I was saying earlier that uh this should in no way reduce people's ability to have social Gatherings and have a good time together you know the it base it if if you've got the the music turned up a little bit too loud and people tell you that if you

[196:01] turn it down you're no longer in violation of this ordinance so it gives I think the RM enforcement folks a tool to prevent large parties from getting out of hand but fundamentally I think it'll it'll stay quite easy to stay within the parameters of the rules and have a good time with your friends after the passage of this ordinance and just so long as you're not impacting your neighbors overly much so I think this is a good step forward and I appreciate everyone who's worked to get it to this point I do like the idea of the the one-year check-in that Lauren mentioned I think that kind of thing is always a good idea but definitely getting a report on what the results of this change have been would be really helpful as we consider you know next steps that we take in dealing with these issues and I got let me just say did you okay so Rachel two things wanted to um mention that Bobby Yates did Sub in for me on that work group so thanks to him as well um and also wanted to check in with Chris Mess check to see if we could um sort of solidify a plan for a year from

[197:00] now and maybe with Brenda could we also do ongoing engagement on what what the community's experience on both sides is with this and so when we come back in a year we have that information as well is that feasible um I I I'm not sure what scope of ongoing engagement you're looking at but certainly we can do some check-ins with the community um both through the working group itself through Yuna through the partners that are represented and um as well as with Greek and sorority life on the hill yeah I I think that's good and definitely including the people who who testified against the ordinance to see what what they're experiencing as a result of it you know are there unintended consequences that we're not visualizing absolutely other comments or we could entertain a motion don't be shy folks I'll make a motion but I didn't I didn't hear back from Chris

[198:00] happy to chime in Rachel in terms of especially follow-up like your follow-up we can definitely um put that down as something for us to work on for next year I will I'm looking um to see if I have the language in front of me you do great um I would like to make a motion to adopt by emergency measure ordinance 8531 amending sections 5-9-6 which is unreasonable noise prohibited between the hours of 11 pm and 7 A.M and ordinance our section 5-3-11 nuisance party prohibited BRC 1981 to prohibit unreasonable Amplified noise during the daytime as well as nighttime hours and setting forth related details second right any further comment before vote seeing none Alicia we have a roll call yes sir we do we'll start this roll call with you mayor Brockett yes

[199:03] council member fogerts yes mayor Pro tem friend yes councilmember Joseph yes spear no Wallach absolutely yes Winer yes Yates yes M Benjamin yes ordinance 8531 is hereby adopted would vote of eight to one thanks everyone for your work on this now in a remote meeting I would call for a break but I feel should we just go with rolling breaks like we've been doing um very good so I won't call for an actual break but then let me do a Time check-in so we're about 20 30 minutes behind schedule but we have one

[200:00] remaining item about our homelessness update our people game to get into that yeah I got like two yeses and a bunch of ambiguous looks I my concern is that we're going to be doing this at 11 30 at night most of the community is not going to see it not going to hear it and I think we do a disservice to them to be taking on something of this consequence that's going to last if we're lucky two hours and maybe longer and and once again we're going to be pontificating at midnight and I just don't see the benefit of that to the community good Rachel I would at least get started we have staff here we are ready to go we're all here it's not 11 yet so if we need to continue at some point then um I think we can but I I would get us started and um maybe we get through it maybe we don't fair enough yeah I'll I'll agree with that and let me just say

[201:01] let's keep an eye on it we can we could continue with the discussion right so if we feel like it's getting late we're getting tired but there's still more to talk about we can always defer the remainder of the discussion to another date right okay who gets tired at 11. the light is Young great so let's get started 50 years old closely okay yes you're all set for their presentations yes

[202:04] okay I love her dress it is so pretty I don't know polka dots anyway yeah once you get set up okay I think we are ready and set up so I'll go ahead and quickly introduce uh our first presenter for today which is Kurt fernhober our director of Housing and Human Services uh and he is going to introduce Megan as well so uh Kurt I'll turn it over to you good evening Council and it's great to be back in person with you after a very long time so good evening Council I'm Kurt fernhober and I support the work and Personnel of Housing and Human Services

[203:01] our presentation tonight will be led by Megan Newton she's a new member to our team but not new to the city or homelessness we are also joined by Vicki Ebner who continues to support this work tonight is our annual update to city council and our community on the programs and approaches that assist individuals out of homelessness this is likely to be one of the more challenging Council conversations in your first year we are working to assist some of our most vulnerable individuals while also addressing the wider Community impacts we know that our community has very strong opinions and emotions on this topic there is great division in our community and I'm looking forward to a healthy dialogue tonight centered on both helping people out of homelessness while not forgetting the overall wider Community needs I'd like to start by setting the stage

[204:00] for this conversation the city of Boulder and Homeless Solutions for Boulder County supports some amazing capable local Partners who have had significant success over this last year and helping a high number of individuals out of homelessness but there are several challenges that we currently face in addressing this National societal issue over the last four years our housing first approach has enabled 1630 individuals out of homelessness countywide and of that 1 391 have exited homelessness from the city of Boulder some individuals have exited into wrap around Services some have exited treatment programs others have reunified with roommates or family some have entered the ready to work program which we heard about earlier and some have simply received rental

[205:00] assistance to help them back into housing many ask how many people are homeless in Boulder over the last few years the point in time count account that happens one day in January every year indicates that about 340 single adults are experiencing homelessness in the city of Boulder on that particular night this oh sorry thank you um this uh this three these 340 uh single adults this includes individuals staying outside but also those at shelters such as the boulder shelter the lodge and together's Youth Shelter in the city of Boulder we assist on average 24 individuals a month a month out of homelessness and into Housing Solutions um this equates to the city solving homelessness every 14 months which is

[206:02] amazing however the community doesn't witness this solving of homelessness in part because over the last four and a half years six thousand four hundred Unique Individuals have gone through coordinated entry and entered our system at some points we also believe that roughly 15 to 20 percent of individuals don't go through coordinated entry so likely seven to eight thousand individuals have experienced homelessness in Boulder in the last four and a half years while the number of individuals who have found Solutions is extremely high for a community of Boulder size we have likely housed more individuals than our current system has the capacity to fully support this challenge shows up in increased emergency service calls to affordable housing and increased conflict with residents as we continue to house more individuals locally we will need to also increase Behavioral Health Services

[207:00] substance use disorder treatment counseling and other Supportive Services in light of these challenges staff staff is working on implementing the arpa supported building home program to help address the loneliness and difficult transition for individuals entering housing we also know that housing first only works with intensive Supportive Services and we are investing further in these programs with peer navigation and housing stability with a housing stability team substance use among the unhoused population is also shown to be extremely challenging and has likely increased over the last two years the use of inexpensive substances such as Fentanyl and methamphetamines is preventing individuals from accessing housing if they do access how Access housing these substances often lead to them losing that housing as a result we are investing in a new

[208:01] program anticipated to be launched in the next three months called project recovery a partnership with tribe recovery in Boulder County to establish two residential recovery homes in an outpatient action center that is opening at Broadway in Iris while this program will fill a gap in services and significantly assist some individuals out of meth and other substances it will likely not be able to meet the needs of the unsheltered individuals facing these challenges enclosing unsheltered homelessness is rising nationally and our communities addressing a national challenge at a local level moreover roughly half of all individuals who are experiencing homelessness in the U.S are in only 50 cities the majority of these individuals are moving to limited a limited number of cities with robust Services the greater Denver area is ranked as the 13th highest

[209:00] community in total number of people experiencing homelessness we have seen our numbers grow significantly in Boulder this year as well as a community we have limited resources limited housing limited mental health and tonight we will be discussing how we can best use our local resources to provide foundational impacts to help people out of homelessness I won't answer uh there we go all right so um in this first slide um just looking at the national landscape um so the the uh the red line on the top um indicates uh sheltered individuals those who are staying in shelters you'll notice that that's actually been relatively flat and it's actually gone down a bit and we believe that that's a result of communities across the country

[210:01] really investing in housing first approaches and getting people into housing and putting their investments into housing instead of additional shelters but we also see that it seen that unsheltered homelessness is steadily Rising along with individuals going to to cities with services so on the left are some of the challenges which I've already mentioned in my opening but I'll also just lastly mention a lot of our service providers particularly over the last couple of years have struggled just in Staffing the programs um uh that the community requires and with that I will hand it over to Megan hi good evening my name is Megan Newton and I'm the policy advisor on homelessness for housing and Human Services um I'd like to start with our Outreach efforts so be there is a street outreach program targeted folks experiencing unsheltered homelessness it started in

[211:00] 2020 as a response to covid and at the time the main goals was education information and referral earlier this year with a partnership with Boulder shelter we expanded into a more traditional homeless Outreach team and it's able to provide most of the services that folks get inside the shelter in the field so as you can see on the screen those are some of the different things they've been able to do and we just started collecting data in May so that's why the numbers are what they are but they can do coordinated entry screenings in the field they can do diversion in the field they can do VI spadats which is the tool that we use to add people to the buy name list to match folks to housing resources they can help people apply for benefits oftentimes those are like Snap and Medicaid benefits and other social security kind of depends on what they are eligible for they can also help folks get their ID documents needed for both employment and housing and then connect folks to Medical resources as well as Behavioral Health Resources they meet weekly with

[212:01] other providers in the community who are serving the same population hot Behavioral Health assistance program the muni court Navigators Focus re-entry they meet weekly to coordinate services and make sure they're not duplicating services for these folks coordinated entry is the front door for single Adult Services in Boulder County is the basic assessment that's trying to get basically what folks what their needs are and then match them to the appropriate resource um we've expanded access to that resource in the last year or so folks can now access it via phone they can go on site in person at the age well Center on West and then be there can also provide the services in the field what you can see on the screen is that the that's the folks going through coordinated entry and it goes up and down as you can see but over time has remained barely stable

[213:05] the homeless system in Boulder is housing focused and I also want to reiterate that these things can happen in the field and in the shelters so folks are doing this in all in all areas but basically you're doing basic assessments to just see what resources will best fit with the individual so folks who are maybe newer to homelessness or have lower Acuity may just need a rental deposit or connection to Rapid re-housing whereas those who have a medium or high Acuity often get connected to permanent Supportive Housing or just rental subsidies housing Choice vouchers and then those with the highest security who are oftentimes High system utilizers may need something like a Skilled Nursing Facility or assisted living facility and we can help connect them with those Services as well

[214:04] these are our exits to exits from homelessness over the last year so there were 245 um and what's contained in the um housed bar there is permanent housing so like I said that housing Choice vouchers or permanent Supportive Housing um then there's also some transitional housing treatment and then diversion reunification and again I just want to point out um that people can access these services and Access housing without going through CE and without going to the shelter so this graph shows the the green on the top shows um that same 245 folks that exited homelessness but then the blue shows the the 945 that we screened through CE over the same period of time so previous to

[215:00] this position I did a lot of direct service and I can tell you the impact on individuals is a great you know seeing somebody go from the street into their apartment is why I do this work but when you look at it on a systems level it's harder to see um this graph is showing some of the high utilizers of the overnight shelter some of our local resources we've targeted this population um and as you can see over time I don't know if you can see it really well but the bottom goes the fiscal year starting in 2018 and then through 2021 and it shows the steady reduction of the long stairs in the shelter down to 14 currently that are staying 300 plus days in the shelter and when I talk to the shelter about those 14 individuals some are folks that come in and out of the shelter and don't stay long enough at any one period of time to get connected to services and some have significant barriers that they've been able to engage in long-term Housing Solutions foreign

[216:02] so these are some of the vouchers that we use to connect people to housing the Continuum of Care HUD vouchers and the Colorado Doh vouchers all go through the binding list and so folks are prioritized on that list and then connected to those vouchers um the locally funded vouchers are the ones I just spoke about that are targeted to the high utilizers of the shelter as well as kind of filling gaps in some of the other systems the Housing Authority also has set aside vouchers which is 20 of their vacancy will be targeted to folks experiencing homelessness and in this last um Lottery they also had a preference for folks experiencing homelessness this year this one time was the emergency housing vouchers Fuller Community got 69 of those vouchers and they were from HUD as a response to the pandemic but they did not come with Supportive Services so we chose to use them and um move up move

[217:00] on fashion and what that means is folks who are already in permanent Supportive Housing Programs or rapid rehousing programs who may not need that level of support but do need the housing subsidy we're able to transition in place and their their rent was still subsidized but they were able to make room in the permanent support of housing or rapid rehousing program for folks who needed who need those Support Services well let me I kind of and we also the the new units in the local the affordable housing developments also include um permanent Supportive Housing and these are some of those projects that are coming online in the next couple years um Boulder shelters purchasing 10 of their own units to um focus on folks who have lengthy criminal histories who we haven't been able to house um due to that Mount Calvary will include 15 units of psh um for elderly folks there are two Bluebird properties that are coming online one in Boulder and one in

[218:00] Longmont but they will both serve the greater older area and those are similar to the Lee Hill property where they'll all be psh um and have more intensive Services the shelter will provide and then Rally Sport will have five units of psh oops sorry no thanks um Family homeless is is growing in nationally and locally and it's harder to see typically families don't find themselves literally on the streets um they oftentimes are doubled up with family or using reaching out and using the prevention resources and those kinds of things but we have seen a growing number of literally homeless families in the area um but we don't Focus as much funding towards them so of the 10.4 million dollars in local funding that we dedicate towards homelessness 700 000 is

[219:01] allocated to family homelessness currently Boulder chooses to use the hoteling option as an intervention in an effort to keep children out of Emergency Shelters and so they connect effa and other service providers connect folks with hotel rooms and then also provide the case management and navigation but as the need has grown they have they're needing they're trying to find funding to increase that support they're currently trying to access State and County funds but at some point may ask the city for some additional funding towards this program um this is just some information around the Sheltering programs and some of the changes that have occurred in the last year the covert recovery coveted Recovery Center closed in April and those Boulder County Public Health took over those working with those folks who are experiencing covid

[220:00] um and staying in the shelter or not staying in the shelter Boulder shelter has returned to pre-covered capacity of 160 beds and then we've also been able to get data from some of the other shelters that we previously haven't gotten data from the lodge and the source in an effort to get a more a full picture of the Sheltering services available in the community this is just over the past summer and I wanted just to put this on this slide to highlight you'll see the green bar in June and July and we don't have um August numbers yet but you'll see the increased shelter usage over the summer that's not normal normally in the winter the shelter stays full but in the summer it does not this summer has proved to be different and there's been more shelter stays over this summer this shows the shelter usage over time so over the last year and a half so each of those bars show the number of um bed nights the shelters have been uh

[221:01] utilization and then the line that you see going across is turnaways due to capacity so in January I believe there was close to 50 500 bed nights and I believe that when I rolled over earlier was 24 turnaways due to capacity that month so this is what we uh the plan for the winter season so you'll see in the First Column that's what we did last year the shelter was not they had to reduce capacity due to covid so they only had 145 beds so we had 30 hotel rooms and then we increased that to 40 hotel rooms on critical weather nights so throughout the season we had 170 about five beds but on critical weather nights we had 185 beds um our plan initially for this winter is that the shelter will be back up to 160 beds they've agreed to add additional overflow of 10 beds on critical weather

[222:00] nights and then we would have 25 hotel rooms throughout the entire season um the feedback we got from the shelter on the critical weather beds was in the hotels was that it was very challenging to move people quickly back and forth and so they would prefer that if we were going to do hotel rooms that we maintain the hotel rooms throughout the season so so that would mean this season we would have 185 throughout the entire season with 195 on critical weather nights at the boulder shelter we added a proposed plan this is not currently in the budget but with seeing the numbers that are currently happening over the summer it's hard to tell if that's going to remain or if that will go down it's somewhat unpredictable but we thought we should maybe that we should have a plan in place and so again 160 beds at the shelter with 10 on credit overflow on critical weather nights but then have 40 hotel rooms throughout the season so that would make 200 beds throughout the

[223:00] season and then 210 on critical weather night this is just a graphic that kind of shows that you'll see the last two winter seasons the purple lines are the capacity um and then how it would go up for this winter and the green being the usage uh or the previous two Winters this this list is not all of everyone it was just kind of show all the coordinating work um that's done on a very regular basis at both the system level and the client level um Partners meet twice a month to go through by name lists which is individuals and they match to resources right off off of that list we also have started a high systems utilizer group again to focus on those folks who are using Police Services shelter Services Hospital Services all emergency services

[224:00] at a high level it's it's supposed there are folks looking at it a system level and then folks that'll look at it a very individual level and try to connect folks with services um the Outreach group meets monthly as a committee to do um coordination of the work and then also the same the staffings where you know they're running into the same people so in an effort to coordinate the work um and Not Duplicate services and be most efficient um built for zero I think most of you um have heard about but it's a national movement that uses data to end homelessness and recently uh Boulder was the first in the metro area to to get a quality by name or quality scorecard on the data first it was originally just focused on Veterans but just this week they've expanded our quality scorecard to single adults

[225:02] and I just want a caveat and I should have put a star on there that does not include everyone who comes to all those meetings I was just trying to get it all in one slide um so that is a fair amount of folks that come together on a on a very regular basis to coordinate this work uh Boulder Municipal Court um has their Community Court that's what I previously did before this position for the last um I guess three years that and the code Recovery Center but I was a navigator in the community court and we worked with a lot or we worked they work with a lot of folks that have high barriers to housing to services and see this is a lot of the work they do is that how to do a lot of that pre-housing work and then follow up with them once they're in housing so that is this is a just a culmination of all the tasks that they help folks with and then you'll see in the bottom right they've had 42 of their clients matched or housed and 16 matched to housing

[226:01] which is pretty impressive considering some of the barriers that folks have that are working with the muni court um I sat with some providers that are providing both Behavioral Health and Medical Health Services this is MHP bch in Clinica and these four things were identified by all of three of those Partners as gaps in the system not enough treatment beds um insufficient clinical Outreach Services which basically saying that folks who are experiencing homelessness have a hard time navigating outpatient systems and so things they typically fall through the cracks and so services that are able to come to them would be much needed also last lack of respite care folks who are ready to be discharged from the hospital but need a place to rest and recover um is is deeply needed and then housing that was the bottom line on all of them

[227:01] where they need more housing resources bch and Boulder shelter have had a partnership for the past year where bch refers their idealizers of their emergency department and their hospital in General to Boulder shelter to work with the case manager towards housing and just the other day um they they were able to provide some statistics from that from that partnership and so they've housed 13 high utilizers of the emergency department in the last year in those High utilizers accounted for 35 percent of homeless emergency department visits and 11 of homeless inpatient hospitalizations in the last year um and then following those folks being housed they had a 83 percent decrease in the emergency department utilization and a 70 decrease in the inpatient encounters so housing was the clearly the factor that would indicate

[228:01] will that would help folks from using Emergency Services as much so we often get questions about the Investments of the city towards homelessness services so we went back to 2015 and um you'll uh you'll see on the left um uh our the lines are uh various millions of dollars on the right are the year or the bottom are the years um you'll see that in 2016 and 2017 um in 2017 city council actually approved the homeless strategy and so through that strategy there was um more significant investments in this work and you can see how that occurred in 2017 I think we were in 2016 I think we were spending about 160 000 a year on

[229:02] supporting services for the homeless um you'll see significant increases in 2021 into 2022 you'll see a very significant increase up to about I think it's about 8.4 8.3 million dollars uh in this year and the significant uh investment in that is really housing which is that green bar and as Megan mentioned earlier some of it uh is projects that are being developed and investing in those projects the the bluebird project on 30th and Mapleton uh is probably the biggest portion of that but some of the other projects as well the city of Boulder um I'm quite proud of that has its own local voucher program to really sort of fill in the gaps where other federal and state regulations around those vouchers can

[230:00] can create barriers so our our vouchers would be in the in there as well and we we also heard a question the last couple weeks of the investments from Boulder County so they're spending about um 11 million dollars this year and you'll notice the two biggest categories to that are also housing um the rental assistance which is essentially vouchers and property acquisition which is investment in new affordable housing and then the uh um the racial Equity approach and look at this is something that we do with with all the initiatives in Boulder and so we wanted to reflect on this as well so in the table in front of you um the the first uh column is the the County's overall population uh Broken

[231:00] Out by self-reported race and I'll just give an example um uh obviously we're a very white population here it's 90 percent uh in Boulder County um 60 67 percent of those who go to Diversion services are white and um 80 of those going to navigation and 78 to housing Focus shelter if you look at uh the African-American population it's just over one percent um in Boulder County um for the diversion Services um that's 12 for navigation it's nine percent and for housing Focus shelter it's 13 percent and this data represents um this year from January uh through the first six months um of 2022. um you'll also notice for uh Native Americans that the number of individuals

[232:01] both experiencing homelessness as well as being referred into Services is also much higher um than the County population foreign and then new initiatives and next steps so these are things that ourselves and other partners have been working on and things that will be activating over the next few months uh and into next year so project recovery is the one that I mentioned with uh with tribe and we've spent some time with them down in Denver looking at their programs there and we're very excited with the experience that they bring in this work and um their their staff predominantly have lived experience in these challenges as well um and we also are excited that they're going to have day services for this starting fairly soon so individuals who

[233:04] are challenged with meth and other similar substances will have a place to go as an entry point into their residential program um bulge shelter for the homeless Megan mentioned our purchasing units where they're both the landlord and the service provider which really is sort of a key for individuals with lengthy criminal records finding landlords for those individuals has been very challenging but we know they're going to be more successfully as housed three of those units have already been been purchased um the building home program if you can remember back to your arpa presentation um we described that program that has two components one is programming um for housing retention it's a team of individuals that will help individuals

[234:02] who sometimes lose their housing because of lease violations and then peer support something that we a program that we don't currently have where uh individuals who have been successful in housing can be hired to to be peers or others that are going through the housing process or recently been housed so that first program we just completed the RFP process and are awarding that currently the first uh the housing retention uh is being awarded the boulder shelter and the peer support is being awarded to focus re-entry with a partnership of feet forward the day service center city council priority from January I think you've heard that we've started the community engagement on that so we're listening to

[235:00] what the community has to say as well as the service providers we're really targeting those who will be providing or could be providing some of those services in this Center to understand what services will be helpful what are the goals of such a center and also input about when citing such a a center what are things that we should look for things that we shouldn't look for and just criteria that would help us understand where that should be best placed in the community and lastly we're we've also started Outreach to individuals with lived experience and before we leave the slide there's one thing that's not on here that's hot off the press is uh Bulger shelter for the homeless over the last few months um has acquired two properties in South Boulder where they will they will be they will be able to house somewhere

[236:01] between 12 and 24 uh individuals who have a lot of challenges that we've described but also who are more who are 60 years older or older and um uh there I know that I I spoke with their CEO and I know that the board is excited to move forward with this new initiative this fall and I think they'll be asking you as council members um to empty your pockets to help them uh fund this as well but that's also just sort of a general statement that I'll make to really support our organizations um our Citizens need to support these organizations to help make them successful as well foreign that ends the presentation and um I'd like to give a round of applause to

[237:00] Megan for finishing your first presentation [Applause] but any questions and we look forward to the conversation thank you thanks so much for that Kurt and Megan Megan so good to have you on board a fantastic presentation and we're very fortunate to have someone with your experience joining the team so welcome I'm guessing there are questions Judy Rachel thank you and good job Megan I just have a quick question about the recovery outpatient and one of the comments so from what I'm hearing I'm wondering who would be the beneficiaries of that particular project so um it will primarily be individuals who are experiencing homelessness who have had challenges with methamphetamines but often there's other Associated drugs that are that are occurring with those individuals so this

[238:02] is a an organization that has 10 homes in Denver and Aurora where they're currently running these programs very structured um and um uh methamphetamines are one of the most challenging substances to treat and I'm really intensive approaches are required and and this organization is really shown to have the most success in that well thank you so much and I welcome the work that you do in in this front and it's needed as someone who has seen the work done in this field as a family law attorney so thank you for taking on this challenge through the city so thank you official thanks Aaron and Kurt and welcome Megan hope you're enjoying your first night back in in Real Life Council too

[239:02] um I as I have been doing recently I'm gonna sort of hammer the county um expenses and expenditures and and hope that you can dig in and I really appreciate you having this information um in the slide but it looks like the county is spending not quite 11 million and we are spending almost 9 million is that right did I read that and then sorry I'll ask one at a time is that is that about right so we're we're spending about um I think it's 8.3 or 8.4 um however if you also include the Sam's work um that's what brings it up to about 10. okay yeah and it's like a part A Part three question there you're jumping ahead um so if we add in Sam's work so you're talking about like policing and parks and library and cleanups and the other sort of attendant um expenditures around homelessness we

[240:01] are paying less than a million less than the county is that about accurate that's correct okay is the county I was looking at the the slide and the information in the packet I see that they're at like 1.5 on operations and administration so that's not directly Services related and then Supportive Services is a couple million and then rental assistance and property acquisition is the bulk of their expenditures is any of their money going towards people who are currently unhoused what what where does that fall Within so people who don't don't get housing don't get rental assistance people who are still living outside and unsheltered what is the county doing for that population so I'm going to start off by saying I don't know and this is the information that we we got from the county and I might be able to give some educated answers um as more of a guess but I'd prefer

[241:00] that maybe we could um document your questions and ask the ask the county to reply on that that would be great and I've been asking for more than two years I'm trying to get that information because my my guess is it's not much and that we're doing a lot more than the county um you know we often hear that like our property taxes have gone up and and why aren't we doing more to with services and to help people and most of our property taxes go to the county not the city so the funding you know HHS tends to be a county umbrella and it's frustrating to me that um I'm glad that we're spending what we are but it's frustrating to me that the county doesn't appear to be spending much on unsheltered people who I think are in the most Harm's Way and I think that is their bailiwick so I would love to get follow-up information on that and also so to know sort of what leverage might we have to ask the county to step up and and do what I suspect they ought to be doing more here

[242:01] so I don't know if that that sounds like that's a TBD um okay so I think um I will I know that a lot of people will probably have questions so I will stop there for now thank you uh I just wanted to call the Queen on uh Rachel's point about the county um for one I agree we need the we need to definitely talk with the county in Greater detail I would like to ask that we try to schedule a joint meeting between ourselves and the county specifically on the topic of homelessness I think we need to just get in the same room and start to really hash this out meaningfully if we're really going to get some Regional solutions that work for everybody including our sister cities so I hope staff can start to work on that and I hope hopefully that's something that's agreeable with my Council colleagues but you know when you think about just proportionality you know the county has a population of about 330 000 people or a third of that and so if you want to think about proportional investment to meet the needs of the most vulnerable in our communities it means the county

[243:01] should be spending nearly 30 million dollars compared to roughly 10 million or if you go the other direction we should cut our budget down to 3 million now I don't want to do that I don't think anybody does and so I think the obvious answer in The Logical one is we need the county to Triple their budget in order to be on parity with the work that we're doing to to not even meet the needs we're we're doing our best but we're still having harder issue as you've pointed out so I I think this is beyond the time in which we need to really get after the county and I hope that we can pull some leverage to to make that happen and bring them to the table yeah yeah go ahead and then I'll if I'm reading these numbers correctly almost half of the county budget is go is dedicated towards rental assistance which by definition is helping people who are housed so the actual money that they're spending on homelessness and Mark sorry if you just get right into that microphone okay I half of the money that they're spending on uh at the county level is going

[244:03] towards people who are actually still housed it's rental assistance and that's important but it's not exactly the same thing as spending money on those who are unhoused so their actual contribution seems to be paltry and so I agree with Matt's suggestion you good Kirk go ahead can I just respond to that um so I think that um you'll find that our numbers are somewhat similar to that as well um so um with a with a homeless first approach we need to get people into housing and those are they're almost like uh their investments in perpetuity for those individuals that's why it's called permanent Supportive Housing and that's why there's that rental assistance is is uh so critical to that strategy um

[245:00] the other connection that I'll make is that we're fortunate in the city Boulder to have a strong affordable housing program and so we actually have a lot of opportunities to invest in new affordable housing um you know a portion of which supports those who are homeless as far as the interacting with the county or having a collective meeting what might be helpful for us is to understand what that meeting might look like and what and who it might include as far as including the Commissioners or County staff or if you could give us Direction on that that would also be helpful I'll Inspire myself since I brought it up that would be both all of the above thanks so I'll follow up on that if you don't mind is I think that suggestion has a lot of Merit and so maybe uh Elisha if we could kind of treat this idea of meeting with the county as a CAC request so if we could add that to our agenda to start talking about how we

[246:00] might look into getting something like that scheduled if I'll just kind of look I've seen a lot of nodding heads I'm doing like a lot of council seems to be interested in this so I'll add it to next week's agenda sir thank you so much Rachel you and chairman Celeste um follow-up to something that Kurt said on housing first in the philosophy and I'm not digging that as a philosophy it's just that a lot of people don't get the vouchers and we don't have enough housing so there are a lot of people who are unsheltered and and um so I just think it's a missing piece and it is again within the County's bailiwick I believe more than ours and funding mechanisms so that's the piece I'm not saying we shouldn't focus on housing first but that I want the county to step up its supports and services for people who are unhoused in our community and when we're looking at things like the day shelter I think the county should be funding it we're looking at things like sanctioned encampments I would like the county to have them I understand that we don't have the Staffing and resources to look Beyond a day shelter for this uh you know current cycle but I think the county should be thanks

[247:02] set it okay yep other yeah I'll go ahead and call in myself soon see in any other hands right this second so I wanted to to go to talk about the the number of beds um that we've got coming up for this next season and I just clicked away from it here we go so um I was encouraged to see a significant increase in the number of beds that we're planning for this coming season so if I read it correctly like the last year's winter number at the base shelter capacity was 140 and then there were 30 hotel rooms and then 10 critical weather hotel rooms right because it says 145 but that was only after April April right so um and so then so we're going to a base capacity of 160 plus 40 hotel rooms so that's that's going from like 170 to 200 which is a good 15 increase which is it's great to see I'm I'm encouraged to

[248:00] see that I also want to I appreciate you including in these totals the uh the source and the lodge uh these are critical local Partners you know the source from together in the lodge from the mother house and they're doing great work in the community so I appreciate you including their totals as they're doing they're doing great work in helping to support people experiencing homelessness in our community so we've got more numbers that's fantastic so the question I'm going to ask I ask this pretty much every year card which is so let's see let's say that we see a surge in demand at a time when we have uh really horrible weather coming in so what if for whatever reason we've got a few more people that need some assistance and that's the week when the big blizzard hits and it's zero degrees and such like that how do we set up some kind of you know backup contingency plan for kind of if there's The Perfect Storm the worst storm literal storm with some additional needs so the um uh we don't first of all we don't have

[249:00] City staff to set up that that type of service particularly in an emergency basis um the the only approach that I can um think of would be through the EOC the Emergency Operations Center you know um defining um an emergency that would get other agencies involved like the Red Cross and would open up a facility like um uh like one of the rec centers those are often used during an EOC event um with that said I haven't seen that occur um but you know possibly we could explore that I'm not sure how that fix fits in the definition um as they've defined for emergencies yeah I appreciate you bringing that up because we do sometimes get questions from community members who see like the extraordinary response that you get to an event like the Marshall fire which everyone is very supportive of and impressed by and then I had some

[250:01] community members say like well why couldn't we do something like that you know when there's an emergency of kind of a less extraordinary one but where we have unsheltered people and the conditions are really bad so I wonder maybe this is I'm going to turn to Chris here maybe this is something that we as a city could investigate with our Emergency Management Partners to see like is there the potential for you know some in an extreme weather event tapping those kinds of emergency resources to keep people from freezing to death on an in a really terrible weather situation yeah we can look into that okay that's great to hear thank you thanks for mentioning that crew this is a good idea that that's what I got um you the presentation in the memo were very detailed and yeah I guess just while I have the floor I'll just say uh some of these other newer initiatives um like finding individual housing units for people with criminal records right who otherwise can't easily get housed

[251:01] it's an impressive thing that I think most communities aren't looking at but can help with some of our deepest need folks who are high utilizers and the addiction recovery facilities that you're looking at setting up there's such a deep need for that and so I'm really glad to see that we're we're adding those capacities and good to see that we're partnering with the county on those as well so looking forward to some really good new work that you all are standing up um so a couple questions um uh one starts with um rapid re-entry and I'm sort of curious um about where what is sort of our what is these sort of aggregate totals of availability for Rapid re-entry for people in our in this community here and or sort of what becomes monthly availability um the reason I ask is when I was out with the notice team and cleanup team I I uh interacted with an individual who had only been unhoused for about maybe

[252:00] three four weeks um and uh by all intents and purposes shoes ready to go um to to get something but nothing was available to her and that's sort of what I had heard from the team and so she was sort of left out of the system more or less not from a lack effort but there just wasn't availability and I got the impression that there were only just a handful of these that come online every so often and so I'm wondering you know if it's just a few doubling a few is doubling and still can have an effect and so I'm just sort of wondering where that where there might be wiggle room with regards to getting those folks that are just touching into homelessness and getting them right back on their feet hi Vicki of nurse senior operations manager for HHS um rapid re-housing is pretty targeted we work through the one home system this is primarily funded through the county and we go through the same kind of

[253:01] matching and prioritization but just obviously at different prioritization levels so the idea is of course to track and you're absolutely right somebody who is a pretty low Acuity is somebody that would need these Services I would also argue that a lot of these Services tend to go to Families versus individuals because they did tend to have that less of a need the other thing to mention is that there are also programs in addition to Rapid rehousing that can be beneficial such as the ready to work program um I can't speak to anecdotal I don't know who the person was um you are right that those resources are somewhat limited um they are offended generally through these sorry the Continuum of Care Grants and so we are subject to Regional allocations applications and all of that I hope that answered something it does Vicky I appreciate that it just it lets me know that you know just like other things that will sometimes supplement or create our own to fill

[254:01] gaps it seems like maybe we haven't done that yet in this instance so it sort of maybe Flags something that this is an area that we could uh supplement perhaps is kind of where I'm thinking we might want to go at some point and I would say that's where we get we try to be a little bit more creative and so when we're talking about for example there was a request for the hotels for the family homelessness that is another workaround that if they can get a family for a week into a hotel get them stabilized work with case manager and then move to some sort of short-term programming then they can accomplish that goal um I will also say that typically a lot of our people who are living unhoused and unsheltered tend to have way more barriers than you would expect to be successful in a limited term program rapidly housing runs for two years Maxwell what we have instituted Megan refer to the move up and move on program

[255:00] um there are cases where people get into rapid re-housing they actually are more have a more acute need and can then transfer into a emergency housing voucher or something like that to give them more of a longer term we're seeing this a lot with people who are experiencing who are newer to homelessness but happen to be of a certain age and since I'm now in that demographic um so that they're they're not going to be likely to increase in income and be able to self-stabilize and so they do need that resource but they may not need the Intensive case management I appreciate that thank you um the only other question I had was with regards to maybe and I don't think I saw it in there and if I missed it my apologies was maybe I know that we had maybe missed a point in time a redo of a point in time count because of covid so is there another one planned on the books and infos in there my apologies I just wanted so sorry if I didn't catch that wait so in 2021 we were only able to do a

[256:01] sheltered count and not an unsheltered account so it's like a partial number but we did do it in January 2022 um but it's done at a regional level and so we're waiting for those numbers to come back okay thank you um I know this is an area that Rachel's been interested in through the years as well we've talked several times as you know Kurt about the possibility of doing our own sense it's not just the January HUD census any further discussion about doing you know a summertime census doing it here in Boulder um yes so um when uh Rachel brought that up I think that was about a month ago um that was discussed at the next HSBC meeting and um so there is um I wasn't at the meeting so hopefully I'm not speaking out of turn but I believe that there was um support for doing that and looking at doing that at a regional level at a county level

[257:00] um so that's a discussion we're having now um uh to see how we could do that mid-summer next year and there's there's typically organizations that are they're set up and they go through training and they have volunteers um it takes a lot of planning um to do that count and we would want to do it consistently with um the the point in time count that happens under a HUD requirements so a Nicole had her hand up before Rachel Quaid at least semi-related which is in the memo it talks about um coordinating work and that there's a group that meets to discuss um by name lists which I know isn't quite the same but it sort of gets at the same information right so just as trying to figure out how how much that's happening how how concrete that list and data is for the city Boulder um so the meetings that we have on the by name list are twice a month and they're they're broken up into single adults have one meeting families have

[258:02] another youth have another and Veterans have a fourth meeting but all of them happen twice a month um and so we are looking at client level information and matching them to resources on a very regular basis the point in time that's more of a trend analysis that would be the difference right but this says a comprehensive list of every person in a community experiencing homelessness updated in real time using information collected and shared so it seems like if we have that by nameless then we would also sort of have a de facto every day point in time count the only I guess my only caveat I would give to that is that it's hard to do everyone involved in a by name list if they're not well if they're not wanting us to engage with them on a buy nameless level whereas when we're counting it's very low it's like you're there we're counting you whereas the by name list they have to actually Express that they want us to help house them understood I mean I'm assuming there's some like you know

[259:00] Joe or like we're giving people names maybe who are not engaging and still sort of counting so maybe based on that do we have a rough number of of summertime so there's currently I think it was a lot they just got pulled this week I feel like there were 323 individuals on the single um by name list and that's in city or county I'd be County okay and I'm sorry can you tell me again how that compares to the point in time for the county and that includes both sheltered and unsheltered right the 300 okay yes it would and then the last point in time I feel like was 689 okay but that includes folks in transitional house so the definition of homelessness gets a little bit broader on the point in time count and includes folks in transitional housing that we wouldn't be seeing on a by name list all right thanks Kurt did you have I did I'll just add one other thing um just because they're on the unnamed list doesn't mean they're actually in the city um and so people come and go and it's

[260:01] the point in time is to say okay who's all in the city today um because that that num those that name list is very fluid um and so it makes it very challenging to actually understand um who's in the city at any particular point so they are sort of two different things but all right thanks and thanks for letting me colloquate with my possibly not perfectly aligned Nicole thanks for the presentation and thank you so much for answering all of my questions that I sent in advance um it definitely uh shrunk my list a little bit and I still have some kind of follow-up questions that I wanted to ask um and the first one actually is more of just a comment rather than a question um I think in you know in in talking about the successes that we're having in the community with getting people housed especially with programs like Community Court that are getting their successes by using spaces that providers are creating I think that's really important for our community to hear I know we had a few

[261:01] folks in open comment tonight who were raising some concerns about the navigation Center and you know whether there's actually data that navigation centers and places that collect people actually lead to housing outcomes and I think programs like Community Court are really showing that they do because Community Court is you know showing up out in the community at feet forward at Deacon's closet at these spaces where providers have created trust among the unsheltered unhoused community and I just I just wanted to to note that that it's that having spaces in the community where people can make connections and build trust that's part of how we get people housed and connected to services so I think it's just a good thing for our community to hear because that's really the goal of the navigation Center is to create that space where we can connect people to services and I think we've seen tonight in the community data that it works right we got what was it 42 people I think housed and another 16 or so on the way

[262:00] um so so this really does make a difference right here in our community to have these spaces um and then I'll move into a question which is you mentioned that there were 245 exits from homelessness and my understanding is that single adult unsheltered folks that doesn't include families is that right there's a lot more folks doesn't include families it does include shelter yes okay yep okay great thank you um and I just wanted to follow up a little bit on the success rate of kind of retaining people in housing as they're housed it sounds like we had about an 80 success rate for folks who are housed which means that about out of that 245 maybe 50 or so people were re-entering homelessness and I was just wondering if this differs by the type of program that you know they're sort of going into housing with does does that make sense like um I imagine that people are exiting homelessness through a couple of different programs and

[263:00] strategies we saw a slide about that and I was just wondering if we have any data on you know are some more effective than others you know are there places to Target more than others I think so the 80 percent was folks the in permanent supportive permanent Supportive Housing rapid re-housing is a little bit lower but I'll also add to that that we typically even with rapid rehousing folks a lot of times they have a hard time being able to pay rent in Boulder and so we'd match them with mainstream resources after the fact like the emergency housing vouchers or the hcvs so it's kind of um not necessarily a fair comparison because they're all getting a pretty uh long-term subsidy um I think the the permanent Supportive Housing comes with more resources but it also targets folks who have a lot of barriers okay thank you and I was just wondering do we have any information on how um how our sort of churn rate compares to other communities and programs I mean

[264:02] where do we sit are we like in the middle are we high are we low 80 is a pretty what you hear for permanent Supportive Housing as a success rate pretty nationally um I try to look for that data to try to compare it to other communities but what we're counting um HUD doesn't require that we get that granular so I couldn't get it from a lot of other communities but in typical the the permanent Supportive Housing intervention is about it's we're probably right there with it okay and it even varies in the community right that there are some programs that have a higher that's pretty much the average there are some programs that are a little bit higher and typically have lower case loads whereas um others in the in the community might be a little bit lower lower success rate but have larger case loads it really does come down to the support of services okay thank you yeah and I did you have a color clear oh okay oh okay I'm not quite done yet Mark but I'm getting there um and I I just wanted to say I really

[265:00] um appreciate the focus on the building home program um and I think that's this really needed service to provide people with support that's a big transition especially since a lot of times the folks for housing are the highest need um people in the community who have a lot of Criminal Justice interactions and mental health needs and things like that so I just really want to say I appreciate those programs very much um and I'm glad we're trying that uh to see if we can get our maybe get our rate higher than other communities um let's see the okay um one thing that I'm a little bit concerned about though is that I've heard some some folks are um because of some of the eviction prevention that we put in place um landlords may be using uh non-renewals of leases in order to kind of evict people without evicting and so do you expect that rate of people re-entering homelessness to go up a bit as we get to the end of sort of eviction covet eviction projections and things

[266:00] like that so to answer that um more correctly I'm going to ask Karen Armstrong who isn't on the call tonight who runs the empress program for us um I'll I'll document that question and have her to respond to you on hotline okay thank you I appreciate that um and then another one thing that I just wanted to follow up on and this kind of relates to some of my comments a couple weeks ago um so I so you said that about 46 percent of the people who are going through coordinated entry which are really our single adult and sheltered homelessness right um they are coming from outside of Boulder County and of those I think it was 36 are coming from outside of Colorado so about 16 percent of the people who are here coming from um outside of Colorado and and of the ones who are coming from even outside of Boulder County do we have information on how long they're staying in our community and the reason I ask is because um when when I so I mean you all know

[267:02] I'm at feed forward every Tuesday afternoon working working with folks in the community doing Street Outreach and a lot of the folks there that we see who are coming in who are new to the community they're only there for that one one week and then they're gone right they've moved on um and and I asked um Dan livoba to the executive director if she has some data on that she suggested that that was also the case that a lot of the folks who are coming from outside really are not here very long so I'm just wondering do we have data on how long people are staying who are kind of based in our community versus coming in from outside of our community so that's um that's a really good question that we've had for a while that we haven't been able to answer and the problem is is we don't survey people as they're leaving the city um and um the the other thing that I'll just mention is we also know that well the biggest number of individuals actually

[268:00] come from Denver but we also know that people come from somewhere else to Denver so it's hard to track a lot of that and we don't ask we ask the question of were you where you were most recently um Houser unhoused um we don't ask you know where you first started experiencing homelessness that would help answer sort of the first part of that question but we don't actually know how to collect the data um it's very difficult on how long people are here but I I agree that that would be helpful yeah thank you and um yeah I'm I think the main the main reason I think it becomes useful is if it has an impact on outcomes or something like that right um but I think you know it's just important for us to understand that most people are like across the country they are falling into homelessness in the communities where they are right and we do have some movement along the Front Range which is why I really love the idea of talking to the county um so finally I just I just have it's

[269:01] mostly a comment and then sort of a question that I'm not sure any of us can answer here tonight um I I'm sort of at a moment of panic when I think about homelessness in our community and the reason is because all signs point to homelessness rising and quickly in our community right now and I know that we're doing a lot and it doesn't feel like we're going to get to a place where we can prevent everybody who's about to fall into homelessness from falling into homelessness as well as help all the folks who are out there right now the shelter is that capacity has been at capacity City a few nights this summer which you know you informed us on hotline that's not happened before in the summer it's typically a lower use time I can you know report down a feed forward we're seeing record numbers of people every week around 150 it's been growing for the last couple of months um we've got effa and span who are seeing increases and families needing temporary housing due to economic needs or domestic violence and a lot of the

[270:02] family homelessness prevention funding is running out at the end of December so we don't seem to have enough resources to prevent the folks from entering homelessness in the coming year we don't seem to have enough resources to meet the needs that are out there right now and it sort of feels like we're on a cliff um and I'm wondering what are we gonna do because this is causing a lot of harm in our community in many different ways I'm not sure how to answer that um what I what I feel strongly about though is um as a nation we've fallen behind on this with with mental health as a priority um with not having a health system for everyone in our country those are two big factors communities are not investing in affordable housing I feel strongly that people need to as best

[271:00] they can um have solved their theirs their their challenges and and issues in the community um where they're most closely connected and um because of the inequities between communities we're we're seeing people in in our cities um and um it's not that we're providing too many services it's that other communities are not providing any services and um I I think I've mentioned to a couple of you I picked up a gentleman um a few months ago from the hospital to drive him to the CRC and he had just derived from Ohio because he heard about you know the housing in Boulder um it touches that he heard about housing Bowlers but he didn't have a housing in Ohio and I think that's a national challenge that um is very difficult for us to figure out here and I I think like Joe nagoos is

[272:01] something that another person that we need to put pressure on to figure out how we have more of a national strategy around you know policy as well as funding yeah yeah and I you know I as we're heading into our budget discussions and things for this year too I would just like us to really think about this because all signs are pointing to this being a rising problem and and I think we really do need to figure out how we can um reduce the harm that's coming to our community and we talk about single adult homelessness a lot right um but there's a lot of families in our community that are in some really dire situations right now Mexico I had Mark and then we've got Rachel well first I want to apologize Nicole I didn't mean to interrupt you um that was a great presentation thank you um you admonish me to be brief and so I will I just have a couple of quick questions first of the count of the estimate of

[273:01] how many homeless we have in Boulder Can you estimate what percentage of those do not want to engage with services and we assume that most people would like to be housed most people would like to to have experienced Services Marcus you really got right into the microwave there are some who do not and we know what what percentage of our homeless population is in that category thank you I don't know that we know an exact number that are not I can speak from my like personal experience and that sometimes we don't have the resource they want um and so that can be a challenge right is is I've experienced where you know my entire career that phenomenon where it's like I have an apartment why don't you want it it's not what they want right um so I don't have um a number to put to that though but there it's not a huge percentage I think typically when you ask people if they

[274:01] want housing the answer is most mostly yes um but we run into barriers on getting there sometimes my second question is it is it still the case that Colorado is one of the worst states in the nation in terms of the amounts of money they provide for mental health and Addiction Services has there been any major change in that that's correct um there are some changes at the state level where I think they'll be addressing that and we're very hopeful about that um and I think the the advocacy from Council um and Carl Castillo's work has been helpful in supporting that as well and if I could just call out our representative Judy immoblay who has been a great Champion for increased mental and Behavioral Health funding and services and the the state is devoting uh hundreds of millions of dollars in this area from arpa funding and general fund funding so they're getting better I'll just say that my very last question um I'm very happy to see project

[275:00] recovery what is the what is the effectiveness of of programs to treat meth addiction what percentage of people actually emerge from those programs uh without relapsing uh immediately or in the short term so in in spending time down in Denver and talking uh to Tomas who who leads that program um I'll answer that with a few caveats um so he indicated that um he believed it was somewhere between 65 and 70 percent however there are relapses in that 65 or 70 percent um and um uh he also indicated that um for those who aren't committed to being in the program it's a into getting off meth um the numbers are closer to zero

[276:00] and um so that that commitment is really needed up front and so individuals who don't have that commitment they won't be in the program and so obviously I'm really excited about this program um and it's going to impact a number of people but it's it's not going to change um significantly what that looks like in our community for for many so as you requested that's all I got okay Rachel okay I'll try and be quick we talked about being out by 11 right um so following up on a point I think Aaron just made I think that the state of Colorado designated some 650 million dollars in in new money through I want to say maybe HB 21 1329 and HP 22 1304 what is the city or county gone after or received or are we applying for something additional yet

[277:06] I'm not sure I have actual numbers for you um but I will tell you that the um county is working through a pretty significant mental and Behavioral Health mapping and and determining what are what our best needs are and so the idea would be that's a combination of their arpa funding opioid recovery restitution money and potential resources like these new bills that have come out um the city is working in partnership with the county and one thing that kind of gets lost in those charts of who spends what is how we sort of divide and conquer on certain topics and so that really does primarily fall on the county um around mental health and Behavioral Health that being said I know that um our department is working through what

[278:00] our proposals are for uh tranche 3 of our Opera funding and that's led to other conversations about what are other Revenue sources where the city has an actual Lane in that and where does that make sense so the shorter answer is we're working on it thank you I mean I assume that that that money's gone when it's gone and if we don't apply for it other counties and cities are going to get it so um I think it's been available for a bit and I would love to see us and especially the county going after it um and again that the needs are big and getting bigger so um I I don't I don't know if there's a specific ass there but it seems like with 650 million possibly sitting out there and us not having resources and I don't know if that's something that we can call on Partners at dollar or elsewhere to help us come up with the applications I know we have limited Staffing and resources and the county maybe in some of that situation too but hope we are maximizing that

[279:01] um my next question is I I believe according to a State website you can call 2-1-1 in a lot of places and and get a human on the phone who can help you find shelter and food and resources well if I call I picked up my phone and called two on one and Boulder would I get that I believe so but they'd be in Denver okay um and do they know our like can they tell us whether severe weather shelter is full on a given night here in Boulder probably not okay so it seems like that may be something that we could uh Shore up I don't know uh how we would do that but it would be great if on a given night somebody who needs resources especially given that we have people who are moving through City pretty quickly can call the same number Statewide and get older resources sorry they'd be able to get the resource they just wouldn't have live like if you know the shelter was full of that like in real and and again in that they're here for a short time and I would imagine a lot of it is uh you know sort

[280:01] of emergency Sheltering needs it's going to be crucial to know is there a Bed there tonight and what time do I need to be there and like the specific real-time data so our information um so I don't know how big of a lift that is but um that would be great and then um I think we talked about this when we were on stamps recently and I know I'm I'm crossing my streams and wire here but you know Joe Tattoo's been sitting there all night let's give them something right I wanted to just remember if we are looking at additional um like restrooms or hygiene stations or trash cans or anything if you think that would be helpful I know that we get a lot of um people writing in about trash along the creek and things like that is that are we looking at any more resources there come on down and that's it and thanks for waiting here patiently and as you're walking up here I was actually going to bring that up at our budget discussion next week so that that may be part of where that discussion happens

[281:00] thanks for giving me another shot at this microphone um so yeah we had the uh August 4th meeting on Sams and we heard quite a few things there from the council members and we have an executive team of the directors involved that gets together monthly we're also doing tours and ride-alongs with the council members and getting your feedback there so we're taking that back and and looking at things um like the restroom suggestion I think there was another one around Lighting in the underpasses and processing all of that so at some point in the future I think we could report out on the hotline or under matters if that would work that would be great maybe we could just put like a date on that and then we a deadline a date like some when we'll get that back so sounds like a good uh discussion for CAC Maybe

[282:01] great thanks Joe is that it yep Tara and then Lauren so I had a question that was based on a comment we received from the community um around demographics of the various programs that are offered sort of the difference between diversion and then more housing focused programs and how we see um a higher percentage of um people in minority populations being served by the diversion program as opposed to buy housing focused programs and so I was wondering if you could maybe respond to why you believe that we might be seeing

[283:01] that and what if anything we're doing to try and address that so I'm going to try to address that Vicky might have something to um to add in on this as well um so this this uh this data that you're referring to in which I showed comes out of the the county system um that's something that I think was added about a year ago in collecting that data so I'm very thankful that we are able to look at that and kind of see what's going on um uh so the one of the things that's um uh that's changed over the last year as well previously those Services were more Standalone services and so you know if you go through coordinated entry and it makes sense to go to Diversion you were sent to someone who did diversion and now um it's it's more meeting with that

[284:01] individual and figuring out what their needs are and and having uh someone who can support them in any one of those various directions so we're trying to take an approach um that's not so um uh sort of ring fence between Services I think that will uh that could have some impact on that individuals well first of all the starting point is we have a very white community so um and we know that a large number of individuals who are experiencing homelessness come into our community they're all they're going to almost by definition be a lot more diverse than what our current Community is and we also know that individuals of color have other barriers and homelessness is like the last thing and so a lot of inequities within our society generally lead to more

[285:01] homelessness for individuals of color and um uh I think in the past um and um people who have come from from out of town or haven't been here for um a long period um sometimes they have different solutions and diversions sometimes is the best solution for someone who's here for a shorter period of time um I was I'm somewhat anticipating this question and one of the things I I looked at the other day was our housing data that we have for the city of Boulder um I wish I would have pulled that up but if you go on the dashboard you can actually see that um so I think it's about um five percent well for African Americans I think about five percent [Music] um of those who live in our affordable housing throughout the city um are African-Americans and so it's sort of five times the rate of of what

[286:01] we see in the county um for the Latino population it's also much higher in our affordable housing so I think what we can see generally as well as in those the population of those experiencing homelessness is that there's a a significantly higher percentage of individuals who are getting into into housing I would just give a couple little caveats on that um as Kurt mentioned diversion is a kind of a separate thing and it's a um and I think maybe the person who provided that information may have been looking at old data um because as you can see from the chart housing focused uh shelter for people of color referrals is not three times less than diversion um but one thing I will add is that diversion is open to everyone and so that is a little bit different

[287:01] from the way the referrals are made in that at that first time that we're working with somebody they um get the opportunity to divert no matter what their what their particular need is if they actually have the need where they can be helped with a car repair or a reunification with a support system then that's what happens and the rest of them are based on screening criteria as to what program that they are um referred to the other thing I would add is that yes people of color are over represented in homelessness nationally one of the things we also have to consider is really sort of what Kurt was talking about and that is that usually homelessness is sort of a symptom of Upstream issues that create somebody's homelessness and so a lot of the

[288:01] inequities and the reason homelessness in itself is not necessarily racist or or inequitable um I I imagine there are some Services somewhere that are um but it's all of those safety nets and all of those are wrap around services that happen before somebody and life experiences that happen before somebody becomes unhoused that lead to those inequities um the other thing that I would add too is that when we are looking at that what we are looking for is making sure that our programs are providing people with what they need um to that end when we talked a lot about the binomialist and how people are prioritized we actually hide that information so we don't look at somebody's gender we don't look at their sexual orientation we don't look at their race for their ethnicity um we also very strictly follow our fair housing

[289:01] rules even to the extent of we're not allowed to have any kind of racial consideration when we were placing somebody into housing thank you yeah actually and go ahead on your mic time check okay um one of the programs that you talked about first of all thank you for all these new programs they sent wonderful really great Megan you were awesome and plus your smiling face really great um talk to I think community members might be interested to hear about those uh people that have are hard to house because of criminal history and then you mentioned that um you're having they have success when

[290:01] they get into housing can you elaborate both data wise and anecdotally so the community can hear what you mean by that um I think the criminal history um I don't have the data we'd have to look at that exactly but generally you know landlords do background checks BHP does background checks and so if you have certain um extensive a lot of little crimes that you've got a lot of um that's a big ding against you and then other crimes are absolute no-go's um and so some of the folks that we're working with this is a true situation and so it it may not even be recent that's the other piece of it right um is that some of that criminal background can be in their history and at this point they've made a change but they can't move forward because they can't get into housing um we saw that as a big gap for our high

[291:02] utilizers is that even if we were they were willing to work with us ready to take that step we had nowhere to help them to take it um so that was the the driving force on having the shelter the shelter brought it to us a plan to purchase these units and it's supported by both us and the county um and I will say one of the gentlemen that was one of the first ones uh known him well and for a long time and it's a significant change since he's been housed that was I think last Christmas it's great for people that need second and third chances so my next question is is can you tell us why families the budget for families experiencing homelessness is less is it just because there are less families experiencing homelessness or is there another reason yeah that's that's a great question um uh I I think I think the start of it is

[292:04] um is I think Megan mentioned earlier but we we see um single adult homelessness in our community where we don't see it for families so there's a lot more emphasis on it as as a community um and as previous city councils um and we don't really have dedicated sources um for family homelessness like we like we have for single adults um and um I I would say we've got some great organizations throughout the county that support a lot of this work do tremendous work as most of those applications for family home assists would come out of the Human Services fund which I think is about two two and a

[293:01] half million for the all the all the needs throughout the whole community so it's it's competing with a lot of other community needs and um so that's sort of the you know the bucket that it would come from and um but what we have seen and what we didn't talk about tonight is um and Vicki has sat on these um uh family homelessness committees where this work is coordinated as well and um so we have seen recently that um in like Rachel mentioned some of this some of these federal dollars will be um potentially depleting at times as well and so we do see this as a potential um need that that needs to be filled um over the next year I mean I'm pretty sure I read it that course I'm not the most well read in this subject but isn't it true that when

[294:00] you're young and you're experiencing homeless that you just it can it just stays with you so to me it would seem like family homelessness is one of the most important things to solve for that reason absolutely I mean a lot of homelessness comes from children who have been homeless and so if we can prevent that through supporting families um you know that has a lifelong effect so do you think the organizations like effin those that do this work have enough money or you don't okay the short answer is no um they work with a complex network of state federal funding County funding city funding their own donations and private fundraising the need as we mentioned earlier is increasing tenfold and anytime we have any kind of natural disaster that also puts a crimp into the system and data shows I believe it was in the memo that

[295:02] those are also on the rise um and so one thing I will say is historically family homelessness has been cheaper as an intervention because you need more prevention money you need short-term assistance and you rarely needed that longer term supported housing and what we're seeing is a little bit of a shift so we have this huge need for prevention and a quick stabilization but we are also starting to see families that have some really entrenched need and that of course is a very expensive intervention and so that's really why the Family Resource Network and then subsequently the uh almost a subcommittee for families um is really trying to set up a system that is coordinated is getting the voice of their clients I'm looking at centralized intake all of those things that can go to really getting down and deep into what that Trend looks like and

[296:00] what to expect before they're really asking for money but yes for every dollar that is allocated to family homelessness they could probably spend five to ten more and if I could just real quick jump in thank you for that and that's so true but just to highlight we do give a substantial amount of money it's the keeping families House program right do you have that number offhand for which week we give 313 000 toward the keep Family House program we give another I believe somewhere around 160 000 through the Human Services grant for effa and then there are some other fa programs and some of the other different organizations band for example gets funding um that are outside of homelessness thank you I just want to be clear we do there are some Investments yeah Nicole please my understanding though was that they keep families housed funding is the one that's ending at the end of December is that right or am I thinking of a

[297:00] different batch of fun I think you might be thinking of um some of the county resources okay yeah the keep families House program is a partnership between effa and the city of Boulder we have dedicated HHS staff that work at our schools with that program okay thank you sounds like something the county should help us with now who was the spirit okay so it's 10 52 we're getting close to needing a motion to continue but are there other questions or comments that people want to make I am not seeing any so um Kurt and Megan and Vicki thank you so much um for all of your efforts for the presentation for the continuing work that you do to support the folks most in need in our community I appreciate so much everything that you do and as well as the other folks you know Joe from utilities and our Police Department folks who are here as well so it's it's a it's a team effort uh of course the need is far greater will continue to do

[298:01] everything that we can locally to deal with these massive societal problems so appreciate all the insightful questions and comments from my colleagues here tonight hey Brad thank you for being here with that any final thoughts Rachel I I don't know what Christmas check was going to be doing tonight but I want to thank him for Pinch hitting and I'm sure we all want to send a big get well to Nuria absolutely well Maria you're well yeah thanks thanks all right seeing none I'll gavel is closed at 10 53 pm thanks everyone