September 8, 2022 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[4:44] of course thank you well good evening uh and welcome to the september 8 2022 study session of the boulder city council my name is bob yates and we thank you for joining us this evening for those of you who are regular viewers you know that council tends to have

[5:00] regular legislative meetings on the first and third thursdays of the month led by our mayor aaron brockett and on the second and fourth thursdays of the month we have study sessions with with our city staff and those are led by rotating members of city council and tonight is my turn we have in tonight's agenda just one item the 2023 recommended budget discussion and this is our first touch city council's first touch with the budget as you'll hear later this evening we'll have a public hearing on the budget on october 6th and then potentially a final vote on the budget on october 20th we'll be hearing from the from the city staff about the budget really for the first time tonight before we get um started on that study session and reviewing the budget we do have a few announcements and if you could put those on the screen whoever's running the slides that's great thank you so it's just two announcements one is um as we have in the past we do want to remind people that cover 19 vaccinations and testing are available for

[6:00] information on testing on provider locations for free copy 19 testing go to www.boco.org cova testing we do have a seven day week testing site at stasio ball field and for vaccination information and provider locations go to www.boco.org vaccine the second announcement tonight is um we're very excited to announce that we are reached we have returned to council chambers council has but we're excited to announce that we're welcoming the public back to council chambers uh this is a kind of a two-step process for council return to council chambers last week and we'll have another um session with just ourselves in the room next week and then on october 6 we will return to public participation with the option of public participating in in person with us in council chambers and we're working to ensure that all the pieces are in place to hold these hybrid meetings before inviting the public back to chamber so we have a couple dress rehearsals here the way it'll work is with the public being invited back

[7:00] for the october 6th meeting we want to remind folks that we'll be offering the opportunity to participate both virtually still and in person if that's what people prefer when you sign up you'll be asked to indicate in either the open comment sign up or the public hearing forum whichever you choose if you would like to speak virtually or in person we will the way we'll run things is both for open comment and public hearings we will invite the in-person speakers to speak first since they'll be in the room with us and then the virtual speakers to follow right after them and all speakers signing up for public hearings will be listed in the order in which they sign up which has always been our process if you change your mind after you sign up and you want to convert to either in person or a virtual different than what you signed up for you will have the option to change your location preference by contacting city clerk at city clerk's office at bouldercolorado.gov before the start of the meeting we have just one item on our agenda

[8:00] tonight and i want to walk through how we're going to handle that this will be again review the budget session um we're going to have a presentation by our outstanding finance staff it's a pretty long presentation but we're going to take breaks throughout the presentation uh the presentation's been broken into about four or five sections and it at the end of each section there'll be an opportunity for questions and so what i'd ask my colleagues to do is kind of hold your questions with respect to that particular area um to the end of that section and then we'll open it up to questions on that um topic and then when those questions are exhausted we'll go on to the next section so and so forth there's there's obviously a freedom to to go back if you forgot something earlier in the presentation that's perfectly fine and i think when we once gets started here going to preview for us all what those four or five sections are and then at the end of the entire presentation we'll kind of do a final wrap-up with council on any comments that council members have you'll see at the very end of the presentation that there is a proposal

[9:00] from staff for on providing further feedback in addition to what we provide tonight through hotline over the next two weeks that way staff is fully prepared to present the budget to both council and the community at the public hearing on october 6th so please if you have additional comments either supplemental to what you say tonight or we're just reiterating what you say tonight please do them on hotline over the next two weeks and we're scheduled for three hours tonight so we'll wrap to get this out at or before nine o'clock mark i'm going to take the under on your over under bet we'll see who prevails there no dilitory comments please and now we'll turn it over to our city manager nuria rivera landermide to make some opening comments and to introduce our first and only item maria thanks so much bob and before i start i just want to acknowledge that we and certainly all of you have been getting a lot of feedback pertaining to west pearl street and well it's not the topic of tonight's conversation we just want to acknowledge that and say that we appreciate all the

[10:00] feedback we've gotten from residents and businesses and we really do look forward to a robust conversation with all of you at next week's council meeting but for tonight we're really appreciate the opportunity to present our recommended budget for the coming year and excited really for you to hear the details for you to ask questions of our great and talented staff and to provide your feedback unlike last year if you'll recall which was largely focused on recovery we are now in a place where we can be more proactive and thoughtful about how we leverage our resources while unfortunately there are always more requests than there are dollars i am excited about our commitment to bolster core services amid continuing challenges with staffing and supply as well as many of the expansions and enhancements we're proposing this year or for next year i believe the focus for the 2023 budget is simple it's people as an organization a community and a society we have been through an incredibly challenging time the needs are acute and especially with

[11:00] our more vulnerable populations much more basic than we have seen in boulder in years past through innovative thinking collaboration on complex issues and our funding decisions we have an opportunity to address fundamental safety and security needs improve our communities resilience lean into data driven decision making and shore up the kind of programs and relationship building that connects those most in need with services the ability to have this kind of positive impact is why i'm in public service broadly and local government specifically and i suspect it's what motivates you as my partners on council as well so a few overview remarks the recommended budget we put forward to you today is 513.5 million overall with an operating budget of 354.2 million a general fund budget of 188 million and a capital budget of 159.3 million with these dollars we are proposing nearly 34 million be spent on enhancements that we believe will allow

[12:01] us to better serve our community i acknowledge transparently that this budget represents a significant increase in previous years part of this is because of a change in how we're structuring it by including affordable housing program dollars up front and the rest of the increase is largely due to improving sales and use tax revenue and the community approve extension of the community culture resilience and safety tax last november in creating it we built on the commitment we made last year to lean into tough conversations about racial equity and make decisions whenever possible that helped to address systemic oppression and lift the voices and experiences of communities of color and i'm especially proud of this concerted effort as always our primary focus is on the public we serve and much of the increased revenues will be allocated in outward facing ways and hope to highlight the priorities you all gave us at the start of your council term some of the areas of emphasis include wildfire risk mitigation and emergency response non-law enforcement response

[13:00] homelessness services and case management safe and managed public spaces and some key infrastructure investments i'll expect we'll get into the particulars this evening about the strategies programs and funding planned in these areas these priorities areas represent the passions and interests of our community in our areas where boulder has a chance to demonstrate its creativity and commitment to equity and leadership i'd be remiss if i didn't say that a city manager i want to highlight but i'm also prioritizing inward facing expenditures my recommendation today reflects a core philosophy of the city organization to invest in its employees through competitive wages total compensation strategies staffing additions to balance capacity and restorations of professional development and training opportunities there is nothing more fundamental to our ability to meet community goals and our than our commitment to our city employees and to that end we're considering adding approximately 48 new ftes to ensure that we are able to meet the expectations of our community and

[14:01] address council's top priorities so as i close out i'm profoundly grateful to all of our staff but in particular i want to call out our cfo cara skinner and our amazing budget team led by senior budget manager mark wolf as they speak today i think you'll see that they that they demonstrate an incredible level of expertise clear alignment with our shared values and an acute understanding of the power our budget has in positioning us for successful positive outcomes for boulder so with that i will pass it on to cara thank you maria i appreciate that and we are mark is going to pull up the presentation [Music] and let me get my things organized here um so good evening council cara skinner chief financial officer and thank you nuria i really appreciate your words but i'd also really like to join you in expressing my personal appreciation and gratitude

[15:00] to mark for his extraordinary leadership the finance budget team for i know their incredibly hard work and also leaders and staff across the organizations who i know work really hard throughout the year and really carefully consider council and community priorities and they examine and assess their operations and programs and in many cases realigned their budgets and then looked to propose new programs or services so we appreciate all the work that was done across the organization but tonight we are really excited to share the proposed 2023 recommended budget with council in the community to answer your questions and to get feedback i want to note that mark and i are here to answer questions but very importantly we have central budget staff and department staff on the meeting tonight so we have a vast cast as i would say here to support you and respond to questions um so we will definitely be calling on them to add where appropriate

[16:00] and how this will go is mark and i will bounce back and forth for different sections of the presentation and we're also really excited that charlotte husky one of our principal budget analysts is here to present the capital improvement program overview so on to the agenda we will begin with process and foundational budget concepts next mark will introduce us to the city's new online budget book and transparency portal and share with council in the community how to navigate around the site to learn about the 2023 recommended budget we have shared our enthusiasm for the new budget and transparency tool and we have heard from council and the community that they are excited as well but we also want to acknowledge it is a change and with change there's learning adjustment and improvements that we can make the good thing is because it's not a static document we can add clarifying content to the online budget book and we have done that since

[17:00] its release on august 26th so we will continue to do that so we appreciate your feedback and the community's feedback as well following that we will provide an overview of the 2023 recommended budget and importantly the core and newer enhanced programs services and projects the proposed budget will fund we'll do a high level overview and share key themes and investments by goal area last we will discuss some future budget and policy considerations next slide and then next slide so uh first the council budget approval process started with the city manager's preparation of the recommended 2023 budget that was released as i mentioned to city council and the community on august 26th as a reminder by charter the budget must be adopted by december 1st

[18:01] in october october 1st and october 22nd council will formally consider an ordinance adopting the 2023 budget an ordinance appropriating monies by fund this is what is known as the annual appropriations ordinance and this ordinance gives the city essentially the authority to expend funds it will consider a resolution setting the property tax mail levy we'll consider an ordinance setting fees that are established in city code if they are changing so those are the four formal actions for october we also note that appropriations lapse at the end of each year and the only exception to that is for capital projects and that is because of the nature of the projects and how long it takes to complete them and funds that are already encumbered by a contract so the appropriations are only good for one year except for those exceptions

[19:02] last as you have done twice this year annual budgets are adjusted during the budget year through the adjustment to base process the last thing that i'll note that's not highlighted on this slide is that in the 2023 online budget and in the presentation tonight you will see that the city develops a six-year capital improvement program however council only appropriates funding for the upcoming year or for 2023 so we just wanted to highlight that as well next slide so the city's budget is the total budget across all of its 43 funds and the annual appropriations ordinance that you'll consider in october appropriates or provides expenditure authority totals by fund and as you heard from professor gross last week when he presented the city's annual financial statement the city budgets and accounts bar or

[20:02] records revenues and expenditures by fund in accordance with government accounting standards board requirements there are three types of funds you'll see in the boxes across the top governmental funds are in blue and they are the they are most of the government's general activities and they're largely tax supported the general fund is the first fund listed on the left you'll see there and that is the fund that accounts for all activities of the general government not accounted for in another fund then you'll see that the city has 24 special revenue funds here's where you'll see the 25 sales tax fund the affordable housing fund open space fund recreation activity fund and the transportation fund to name a few and then we have the capital projects funds

[21:01] which the city has for the proprietary funds are in green and these are activities like those found in the private sector both enterprise funds and internal service funds and last you'll see fiduciary funds on the right in orange and these are where assets are held in trust on behalf of outside parties and for the city those are the two pension trust funds so next slide so this slide shows of all those funds um and the percent of the 2023 budget by fund so you will see that the general fund makes up 45 of the total so it is by far the largest fund and we always note that it is the fund over which the council has the most discretion as the other funds are dedicated to specific purposes next line

[22:00] so the next thing that we wanted to sort of foundationally cover are um revenue and expenditure types and we are going to be talking about these types quite a bit tonight so on gun ongoing revenue our taxes and some examples are sales and use tax property tax accommodations tax charges for services such as utilities charges recreation program charges development fees and permit fees and then intergovernmental revenue is federal and state revenue that's shared with local governments and these are largely formula driven and some examples are department of transportation grants housing and urban development grants state vehicle registration fee revenue gas tax revenue and lottery revenue and then one one-time revenues are clearly one-time grants for specific projects fund balance which is one thing we did

[23:01] want to draw attention to because you will see this as a one-time source used in the 2023 budget for one-time uses and then last taxes and fees if they are for a very short duration next one so there are also ongoing and one-time expenses as well and ongoing expenses require ongoing revenues to support them and one-time expenses could be funded with either ongoing or one-time revenue then we further break down expenses and i'm sure you're familiar with this by personnel operating in capital but we did just want to draw attention to under personnel we have ongoing expenses for both standard employees as well as the recurring seasonal and temporary staff particularly for some departments like parks and recreation

[24:00] and open space and mountain parks and then the other thing we want to draw your attention to is that we often think of capital as just one time in nature but there are some capital expenses that are ongoing and those that relate to facilities maintenance major maintenance and apparatus or equipment that needs to be replaced on a regular schedule so with that i'm now going to turn it over to mark all right good evening council again mark wolf senior budget manager um first going to discuss some of the uh process improvements that we've made in the lead up to the 2023 recommended budget the slide you see represents our current budget cycle centered on our sustainability equity and resilience framework the product you see this evening is the really the culmination of work that began in january with council's retreat and department work and budget planning

[25:01] through the spring that continues with an extensive internal review process which i'll detail in a moment our executive budget team or ebt is our internal team where executive city leadership and rotating department directors work with budget staff to evaluate draft budget proposals and help prioritize investments this process leads to the development of the recommended budget which is presented as car mentioned to council in late august and early september each year which is where we are now and then continuing on to the formal approval of the budget and we get to do it again starting uh in january so we we thought it was important to take a moment to highlight the sustainability equity and resilience framework since we are centering our budget around these goals the framework was originally developed in 2013 and was amended a couple times in 2016 and again in 2018

[26:00] these goal areas have guided the work of master plans and internal strategic planning a process that is continuing today the goal areas of safe healthy and socially thriving livable accessible and connected environmentally sustainable responsibly governed and economically vital form the basis for how our budget is aligned today other previous important work included a report that the city commissioned back in 2019 called budgeting for community resilience this report highlighted the need for the city to improve the use of metrics in making budget decisions beginning last fall we began adapting some of these strategies to where the organization is at today this began with orienting our programs and projects around those goal areas something that you'll see throughout the presentation of the budget both in the online budget book and this evening

[27:00] i'll expand on our decision making framework in a moment but i just wanted to to point out that we feel really good about the improvements made and how that process led to ultimately the final package that you're seeing this evening this year we do a better job in articulating our intended outcomes throughout our budget our intended outcomes of our budget investments and we take a step towards measurement and last but not least we implemented a new tool opengov a new budgeting and transparency tool to make the budget more accessible to more people we have seen seen some early returns just in the process to date that we would like to point out with our new budgeting first we added a step reviewing department-based budgets this was important for a few reasons we were able to ensure the availability of resources for the core work that that those core operations that there was adequate

[28:01] investment in existing staff and physicians that we were able to address certain inflationary pressures as we've seen across the board and with our budget proposal process we were able to improve how we were looking at the budget so instead of looking at just those incremental requests right just the the ads we were able to consider certain realignments and reductions in certain cases to realign resources across programs that were more difficult than the previous process we have improved and enhanced our expenditure forecasting which we'll expand on in a moment specifically we've looked at how we budget personnel and overall how we budget to actuals over time this has allowed us to invest more of our resources across different different areas and again we'll touch on this in a bit and then we've looked at areas where the central delivery of services can create some of those economies of scale across the

[29:00] organization and with our budgeting approach in looking at programs across the organization we have seen some new and exciting collaborations across departments earlier in our budgeting process that has allowed some creativity and some of our approaches to our our toughest issues a little bit more on our process this year our budget officially kicks off in internally in march with the issue uh issuance of some overall guidance for departments some of that is based off of the initial financial projections that we're seeing some of that is based on council and community priorities that we know at that time then our budget team works closely with departments to align proposals to those goals look for those collaborative opportunities and potential funding strategies our executive budget team then takes all of these inputs prioritizes investments leading with

[30:00] equity in examining the impact of our investments across our community and from that process a recommended budget is produced at this stage our hope is that the recommended budget that you see and that you see on an annual basis is already a strong reflection of council and community goals because of this extensive process that we follow and we know with all of this change that we don't have a perfect budget and we don't have a perfect budget uh process what we're really looking at these these budget process enhancements as is a three-year three-year process to improve so starting this year it's really about that alignment to our goals articulating some of our outcomes improving our transparency through opengov and improving that decision-making process that i spoke to in year two we hope to move towards uh measurements associated with our outcomes you'll see some of that in the

[31:00] online budget book we'd like to standardize that across programs and begin to identify where we may be able to measure progress and hopefully by year three maybe it's ambitious but we'd really like to be at the at the point where we're utilizing data to determine whether or not our investments are meeting our goals and if not how we realign resources in order to better meet those goals so if you bear with me for a moment i'm going to pop into opengov i won't spend a ton of time but we thought it was important for community and council just to see the platform if they already haven't done that so i'm going to share [Music] another screen and hopefully now you have the budget page in front of you okay great so i'm starting on the city budget page uh just to say that this is how you can access our 2023 recommended budget homepage by

[32:02] getting to our our city budget page you can simply search for budget in the cities on the city's homepage and you'll get here where you can click on the 2023 recommended budget home page which takes you directly to opengov so opengov is where we display all of our budget information you'll hear budget pages budget stories online budget book when we're referring to those types of terms it is within this this online portal for our recommended budget there's a few links on the home page that we thought were helpful to review the budget the first is this budget in brief section this breaks down some of the overall sources and uses of the budget some of the staffing information across departments that is helpful that is information that we present every year within the budget over here are two different types of ways to present the

[33:01] information that we find really exciting starting with budget highlights these are a number of different areas that we'll cover this evening starting at the top you have a way to view our new investments by goal area and that you're able to toggle between our base budget and our total budget and then further down the page you're able to see some of the summary of the key investments with links to the specific program pages where you can get more information back on the home page the operating budget by goal area which will have a section of the presentation this evening shows the budget in a slightly different way that breaks down investments by goal area with a short explanation of each goal area some new investments and some continuing investments to give you a sense of how we are orienting those investments around those goal areas

[34:03] and last on the home page i'll touch on is at the bottom of the home page is a more traditional table of contents this is where you can access individual department pages in addition to our capital improvement program summary and department cip pages we do have our detailed appendix here including fund financials and other details that are always included within the presentation of our budget and the last thing i'll point out on the left we have added a link to our quote transparency portal which is where all the data lives that is behind this budget presentation so if you are interested in that level of detail there are some helpful tips on this transparency portal page where you'll have access to those more detailed reports so a number of different ways to interact with the budget at different levels of detail detail depending on your interest and as car acknowledged because it is new

[35:00] we are more than happy to not only receive feedback but help guide counsel or community members as you're reviewing the budget to help point out areas that you either need information or would like to see certain pieces of information okay now i'm going to go back to the presentation and always happy to go back into opengov if council does have questions but thought we would share most of our information this evening within powerpoint okay i'm assuming i'm back at powerpoint this is a good thing and i get to hand it back over to carl okay so next we're going to talk about major assumptions and drivers so next slide so as we prepared the 2023 recommended budget there were a number of key

[36:01] assumptions or what we're calling drivers that impacted what we could propose for funding and particularly how much ongoing and how much one-time revenue was available for proposed investments we'll go over each of these on subsequent slides but just to touch on them quickly we are recommending a less cautious retail sales tax forecast this then provided more ongoing dollars for programs and services than if we had stayed with the risk posture from the past few years this budget proposes to spend down anticipated 2022 fund balance after reserves which again provided one-time dollars for one-time priority projects and pilot programs this budget also achieves council's goal of 20 percent general fund emergency reserves and then as mark spoke to earlier in this budget

[37:00] process we first developed what you will see in opengov as a 2023 base budget and that base budget includes 2022 atvs those are adjustments to base that are ongoing and incorporates improved expenditure forecasting which he mentioned earlier as well particularly with respect to our workforce plan it also addresses known inflationary pressures and importantly includes our planned investments in city staff okay so sales and use tax that first assumption or major driver this is to sort of set the context for that discussion this slide shows 20 23 sources across all funds and you'll see that sales and use tax is 38.7

[38:00] of the total and the next largest piece of the pie is utilities revenue which is of course generated through utility service sales and dedicated to provide that service and then the next slice of the pie is property tax so sales and use tax is the most uh significant source of revenue for the organization next one then i'm handing it over to mark yeah we'll keep it fresh tonight we're moving back and forth so i'll talk a little bit about um our sales tax forecast because of that reliance on sales and use tax the assumptions we make around sales and use tax forecasting have significant implications on what we can fund in the budget each year as council is aware we contract with cu boulder leads school business to develop econometric models to guide our revenue projections the inputs of these models include national economic indicators through

[39:02] moody's analytics state and local economic indicators and local sales and use tax data the what we get in return the output every year and again this model is updated a couple typically two or three times each year is a range of possible uh outcomes and so what we get is a low uh possible outcome a high and a medium or what cu considers to be the most likely and what i'll do is touch a bit on our process to get to what we're recommending this year which is budgeting at the medium level what council will remember uh going back to early 2020 is that we utilize the average of the medium and low uh ranges again to be cautious in in coming out of or really during the pandemic and so as we've i won't say emerge on the other side but we've

[40:01] gotten to the point where we're in this endemic nature of of covid we have looked at revisiting this medium-low assumption the bottom line is that we've performed extremely well compared to the model over the past two and a half years we did detail that performance with the financial strategy committee and have those slides available if there's interest in time to to elaborate for this slide i'll point out that the second column is the that the 22 revised number that is our revised projection based off of the latest medium projection from cu so what you'll see is that that's a pretty significant jump over our 21 actuals however we're currently trending slightly above that medium threshold in 2022 the next three columns show the difference uh between the different projection levels in 2023 starting with medium low in the middle so again that

[41:00] was the what we used back in 2020 in 2021 if we used a slightly more uh or a slightly less conservative model an average of an average if you will that would be the middle bar there the fourth bar and then the last is the medium based on the caution that is built into cu's model the the moody's scenario that is within these assumptions uh assumes a mild recession in 22 continuing through 2023 we believe it's prudent to budget at that medium level that last bar on the right for 2023. there are risks that remain certainly inflation continues to be a concern and we will continue to monitor those sales tax collections but at this point we believe it's prudent so that we can invest those resources across the community to budget at that medium level in 2023 and i'm handing it back over to cara to talk about reserves

[42:01] thanks mark so emergency reserves uh general fund emergency reserves that is a key financial policy decision and it's really important to provide flexibility and that's noted here to buffer against shocks and other risks so the government finance officers association recommended best practice is that cities should hold a minimum of 16.7 percent which really represents two months of operating expenses and yet they should increase that uh reserve level goal beyond the minimum based upon the city's specific risk factors so the risk factors that the city considered when developing the 20 goal included that we are quite vulnerable to extreme events such as flood and fire both of which we have had um quite significant experiences in the last 10 years revenue source stability that is the dependence on volatile

[43:01] revenue sources and again i think it's clear that with our reliance on sales tax and our experience during covid that this is an example of how vulnerable vulnerable we can be [Music] and then another consideration is um with regard to reserve levels is that ratings agencies consider reserve levels when determining bond ratings and those bond ratings then in turn affect interest rates on debt that you might issue and then ultimately those debt service payments so the city does have plans to borrow for capital investments in the future so this is something of significance to consider last another consideration is other fed other funds dependency on the general fund and that can be essentially that the general fund provides some support or subsidy to other funds and examples here

[44:00] is support to the recreation activity fund and the planning and development services fund and then also often cities consider the general fund the backstop for all of its other funds and so that is something to consider given how many different special revenue funds we have so taking all of that into consideration the council has had a goal of 20 reserves or approximately 10 and a half weeks of operating expenses and that is included in the 2023 recommended budget so next as we presented in may in our discussion of general fund reserves we hold both emergency reserves uh that's in pink there but we also hold dedicated reserves which is in the red bar which are held for specific purposes uh per various agreements or different accounting requirements and then there are a portion of our fund balance

[45:02] it's called fund balance after reserves so the total fund balance is made up of emergency reserves dedicated reserves and then fund balance after reserves the 2023 budget plans to draw down the anticipated fund balance after reserves and use that as a source of one-time funding to fund priority pilot programs and projects and we will be talking more about that even throughout the night but so this is a one-time source of revenue to program those dollars into high priority uh pilot programs and projects next one all right now quickly touch on uh our base budget in 23 compared to the 22 approved this is really just a hammer on the point that we made many different

[46:01] mid-year adjustments in 22 more ongoing adjustments than we normally do in the mid-year cycle and again the reason for that is to address certain uh demand on our services and also continue the recovery as an organization our base personnel numbers are up about 7.3 percent over 2022 budget that reflects those new staffing investments and the investment in competitive wages in our existing staff there are other factors that drive the increase of the base budget including debt service and our property and general liability insurance premiums there's a million dollar increase in our annual premiums for property and general liability it's about split 50 50 and the increase across those two uh driven by both local and national factors i think uh climate change and some of the incidents that we've had in the region and on the general liability side some

[47:00] local factors were related to settlements and the the national atmosphere as it relates to primarily policing and when we're talking about uh general liability and lastly uh some other inflationary uh pressures both both on contractual obligations that we have and some of our capital planned capital expenses and i believe we are breaking for the first time well thanks cara and thanks mark that was really great foundational um information i know for some council members this would be your first budget cycle so i think it was real helpful for us to to get on the same page on foundational information in a few minutes after we we do this first round of questions we will be going into the overview of the budget some highlights in the budget and focus on some goal areas but i wanted to pause here and see if there's any questions from council members about the foundational information and the assumptions that cara and mark just laid out

[48:07] i'm not seeing any any hand raises electronically oops i'm sorry there they go uh mark and then matt okay thank you um just a couple of quick questions on on the slides you presented um what is the governmental capital fund can you define that for me the governmental capital fund is if you may recall a number of years ago it was one of the city's goals to start being able to fund some capital investments through the general fund so we started slowly by funding dedicating three or four million dollars towards capital and then we have increased that um and then when we did that we we created a capital fund so we have a transfer from the general fund to the governmental capital fund and

[49:00] then we budget the projects the capital projects out of that governmental capital fund and is that in addition to um capital funds that we get from ccrs that's in addition to that that's correct and does each department also have its own capital um fund or is that some is that a one fund for the entire city that's just the the fund that is a general fund supported capital fund uh like transportation funds its capital out of the transportation fund as well as it's operating so thank you um utility revenues and the pie chart that you showed where all of the money is coming from um are are those revenues uh available for any purpose no they're they're available to fund the operations of the utilities services so in effect it's like a

[50:00] restricted fund it is it's an enterprise fund which can there's limitations on the dollar amount of tax dollars that could support utilities the revenues could be used um potentially for other things but they are generally just used to support the enterprise okay and i'll be done in a moment in the um the the slide that showed reserves there was a very strong decline in the i it's restricted reserves between 2019 and 2023 is there anything that that was driving that well one one piece of that reserve that has declined is if you recall the city purchased um hogan pan cost land i can't remember the exact year but as part of the agreement with that there was a reserve that we had to hold um based upon the loan agreement i i

[51:01] believe and so that was a larger reserve and that it decreased each year and my last question is that the debt service level of 33.8 million um that we're projecting uh is that inclusive of utilities department debt or exclusive [Music] yeah i can pull that up i believe it is inclusive um but we'll double check uh behind the scenes here no problems let me know at some point that's what i've got thanks thanks mark uh good questions uh math and tara then nicole sorry i was muted tara go ahead your hand was up before me so i won't let you get a crack at that then i'll follow up

[52:00] after you you are so nice really sweet of you but i never mind going last uh my internet froze doing during the discussion i think it was mark of drawing down funds do you mind explaining that are we doing it any are we is the whole concept of what we're doing with drawing down funds different than previous years in regards to pilot programs etc uh i i would say it's standard practice to fund one-time expenses from that fund balance after reserve because of the uncertainty in our uh projections over the last couple years we have seen a pretty substantial fund balance after reserve compared to pre-covet and we have invested those in one time needs we did that pre-covet as well especially in capital related expenses i think what is a bit unique this year is trying to fund some of the pilot programs that we'll talk about with those one-time funds knowing that

[53:00] there's ongoing funding implications good tara right matt then nicole please so that's what i get for deferring to tara because then she goes ahead and asks my questions uh it works out for all of us appreciate it okay nicole thank you and thanks everybody for the presentation um i just had a couple of questions one um and this is just related to a little more of the forward thinking uh presentation part of the presentation where you're talking about what we can look forward to in a few years with this new system in the key performance indicators and um and having outcomes associated with um each of the expenditures so that we can figure out whether the money is being spent in a way that is having the intentions that we or the out the intended outcomes that we want to see so um how how will we get to what those outcomes are can you talk a little bit about what that um what that's going to look like in terms

[54:01] of getting those indicators yeah it's a really good question nicole i i would say that we we know we have a good idea of how we'd like to approach that i wouldn't say that we know to the detail of the steps we'll take but i will say that one of the key areas is to identify some of the city-wide kpis that we would like to focus on in measuring our goals and so one of the things that uh is in the proposed budget uh is an update to the community survey as one example of of a data point that we can get won't be everything and then as we've discussed with council before related to our equity goals we know that data can be a challenge we are lucky to have an entire data team uh in the city that thinks about this and so we're excited to partner to to really try to try to identify what those city-wide kpis may be and hopefully over the course of the next i'd say maybe 18 to 24 months we begin to see

[55:00] some of those meaningful measurements that can inform progress uh across all of the different programs that you see within the budget so it'll be iterative and it won't be perfect but hopefully by next year you start to see some of those indicators alongside of our intended outcomes for for all of our programs awesome i think that's gonna it's gonna be so incredibly valuable um to me as a decision maker i imagine for the entire community so thank you for that uh my other question was just around so sometimes i see the um the revenues shown without utilities in there and one of the points that i think is just so important for all of us and i think for the community to understand is how big of an impact sales tax has on our budget and that that's where most of our revenues are coming from and so i was wondering if you could just talk through what are the three um biggest contributors to our revenues um and what the percentages are without the utility there just because utilities kind of feels like its own

[56:01] beast off to the side generating its own revenue and everything mark do you even have that i think i don't have a back pocket but i think we actually have it in opengov so i'm just scrolling through it really quick and i'll find it again showing the benefit of opengov as well so nice nice work there all right uh pulling it up now okay so sales and use tax is about half excluding utilities uh property taxes at 15 and then there's a number of different charges for services development and impact fee license permit and fines that make up the balance there's some miscellaneous grant revenues etc but i think to your point uh sales and use tax half property tax 15 percent um that's really the significant portion of our revenues

[57:02] excluding utilities great thank you so much thanks nicole yeah since my question got asked i'm going to make just a quick comment that i just want to um sort of echo where bob was but um i just want to compliment staff on migrating to open.gov going from a resident trying to follow the city budget on a pdf to now having a more interactive tool is a massive improvement so i just you know wearing both of those hats within uh two budget cycles great job and i know that you guys are going to continuously modify and improve that portal but it just it's it's awesome to be able to fall down the rabbit hole so to speak if you so choose to go down that depth but also have the high level at your fingertips so i just want to say thank you for for having it um good for any any level of interest in in our city budget and making it interactive i think you guys i know the hard work that went into it but but thanks and i appreciate seeing the the

[58:00] product in this in this fashion so thank you guys great job thanks for matt and after that uh we had a financial strategy committee meeting for members of council with the staff a couple weeks ago and we we talked about geeking out on the budget and uh i think i think everybody on this council is to some extent a budget geek and we like to drill into the numbers and have the data so i think we all appreciative of all that background and uh thanks for your thanks to staff for doing a great job any other questions on on this foundational work before we actually move into the substance of the budget just to confirm bob that uh that was all inclusive on the debt service related to mark's question uh with utilities great thanks mark thanks for the question mark and thanks for the question answer mark uh let's go into the uh section of our four sections tonight this is the actual budget overview

[59:02] thank okay we can go on to the first slide so this is the recommended budget overview and we always start with revenues because when we develop the budget we look at our revenue first and prepare a revenue forecast and then develop programs and services that those revenues could support so for 2023 total revenue is 491 million and this again is across all funds and all sources and this is a 3.6 increase um sales and use tax revenue again to follow on to the point earlier is the top blue bar and it's the largest and it is substantially up over 20 22 adopted as mark indicated earlier the other thing i'll just draw your attention to is the fourth bar down here the light gold bar is investment earnings and bonds and this is where we show

[60:00] anticipated bond proceeds um as well as interest and earnings on our investments but as you'll see that for 2023 that bar is going down as the amount that is included in anticipated bond proceeds for the utilities operations for 2023 is nearly half what it was in 2022 so that decline tempered the overall growth rate next slide so here we have the expenditure overview or the expenditure total is typically what we refer to as the total budget because this is the total um amount that we're going to be spending and this is the 513.5 million dollar package and it again is across all funds um and this is up 11 over the adopted 2022 budget now you might be thinking this revenues were not up that high

[61:00] how can the expenditures be up that high and the difference is what we have been talking about with regard to one-time revenues and one of those one-time revenues is a draw from fund balance and that net draw is 22.5 million dollars so what are we drawing from we're drawing from the general fund which we've talked about earlier and we we do have that planned draw of around 8.7 million from fund balance after reserves and again we're doing that to advance some priority projects and pilot programs and the other one of the other significant draws is for ccrs or community culture resilience and safety tax and the reason there's a budgeted draw for 2023 is when this was voter approved last november in march we did an initial appropriation for some 2022 revenue and then we did a little bit more in the in the first adjustment to base in may

[62:02] but we did not appropriate all anticipated 2022 revenue so that revenue has been um accumulating and will fall to fund balance at the end of 2022 and then we are we are planning to appropriate all of that in 2023 so that is considered a draw from fund balance since it was generated in 2022 we'll fall to fund balance and then we are going to appropriate that for 2023 and then another final example of draws is in the governmental capital fund which we talked about earlier is the general fund supported capital fund we are budgeting a draw from fund balance from that fund because we have been accumulating some dollars in that fund as well for large projects so we're drawing down some of those dollars we've been accumulating so again overall a

[63:00] 513.5 million dollar package it does include those base budget increases that my mark spoke about and of this increase 6.3 was in the base budget next slide so this slide i acknowledge is has a lot on it but um hopefully you can bear with us um we we do acknowledge that the dollars because they are to the exact dollar create a lot but but we wanted to be efficient and pull these right out of our open gut system so this slide shows total uses across all funds again and by department and the left side is total uses and then the right side is total uses excluding utilities and again as we've talked about since utilities is such a large piece of the pie when we remove

[64:00] utilities on the right side that gives us the opportunity to sort of view the departments with more granularity so you can see there that overall the largest is utilities and that is followed by transportation and mobility police housing and human services fire rescue parks and recreation and then open space in mountain parks so this slide we were asked how does the 2023 recommended budget compare to a pre-pandemic budget and and we considered 2019 the pre-pandemic budget as uh the pandemic began in early 2020 and then how does it compare to a pre-pandemic budget when adjusted for inflation so this chart is is trying to demonstrate that um and we'll note that this is uh this

[65:00] is a comparison for just the operating budget since capital budgets can go up and down quite significantly depending upon large projects so the purple bars in this chart are the annual approved budget however with 2023 being the recommended budget and then starting with 2019 annual budget on the left we then grew that 2019 operating budget by inflation each year and that is captured in the light blue bar so the light blue bar is the 2019 approved budget escalated by inflation so who you see if you get to 2023 [Music] uh that even with the large increases that some may perceive for the 2023 budget our 2023 budget is still not keeping up with inflation because the purple bar is below the light blue

[66:00] bar um so then our next slide as we've talked about general fund is the um largest fund and the one over which council has the most discretion uh the proposed budget is 108 188 million which is a 14.1 percent increase over 2022 again this budget includes one-time spending and one-time revenue from fund balance the increase in ongoing expenditures is only 7.2 percent so the large pieces of the pie are public safety police and fire housing and human services and then general government which people might often say what what is general government um but it includes some quite large things including what we talked about a little bit earlier also good prep for these following slides

[67:01] transfers to other funds and the transfers to other funds includes that transfer to the governmental capital fund it also includes the transfer to the recreation activity fund we transfer some dollars to the affordable housing fund and the planning and development services fund general government also includes some city-wide contracts including the convention and visitors bureau contract which is two million dollars it includes all of our city-wide insurance charges and it also includes debt service that is general fund funded next slide so here we're showing staffing by department in alphabetical order um and we'll just note that starting with the first column on the left this is 2021 revised

[68:00] and we're showing revised because um as you recall we added vex staff mid-year in 2021 as revenues allowed that mid-year adjustment to restore capacity and services the next column is the 2022 approved and then again we are showing a 2022 revised because this year again as revenues um are are allowing um we thought it was really important to again restore capacity and to enhance capacity for council priorities so then in the fourth column you'll see the 2023 editions so we are adding 40 over just over 46 positions and i'll draw your attention to or we would highlight library with the total edition of 11 which includes staffing for the north

[69:00] boulder library we'd highlight fire rescue which has an addition of four positions including three firefighter positions and then we'd also highlight planning and development services with an addition of 6.75 positions and parks and recreation with an addition of five positions [Music] that is the end of the budget overview section thanks cara thanks mark again um so that was just an overview and mark and cara and others i think um charlotte are going to get into some some deep deeper dives into some highlights and also into the capital investment program in part three of this presentation but we thought it would be a good idea because that was a lot of information just at the high level to see if there's any questions about high levels before we dig in to the details and so let's pause there and see if there's there's questions on what we just heard uh so

[70:00] we'll start with aaron and then and then mark carl thanks for all that it's extremely helpful and well organized love the graphs coming out of opengov looking looking really great and easy to understand just one thing i wanted to see if i caught this correctly um i think you did i hear that you said that the general fund operating changed 7.3 from last year to this year did i catch that number yes the ongoing 7.3 okay so for ongoing said it excludes some of the one time one time okay great i just want to confirm that because i was going to ask that question and you answered it but i wanted to make sure i got it right thank you thanks aaron uh mark then nicole just two questions i think um are arpa funds included in our revenue count they are not where do we account for them a lot of money it is we account for it separately

[71:01] the way we have dealt with arpa with council is to do that through a special adjustment or adjustment to base so we have appropriated some of those funds i do believe that they show up and i will confirm in the the 22 um our 22 projected numbers as expenditures and then we show the offsetting revenue so once we make an expenditure we show the offsetting revenue but we don't show the revenue at the outset just to keep things equal in how we're displaying the budget but we do need to appropriate separately for any additional expenditures that we haven't already done so um with arpa and are the the opera expenditures going to be for one time only projects that's right they can be for projects that meet federal criteria uh through 2026. okay and my only other question and before i

[72:00] give you that question i want to thank you for the presentation this is really you know very clear and and uh very informative um the the draw from fund balance is that number about 22 million did i get that right or if i uh uh the net draw from fund balance across all funds it's about 22 million okay um is that only going to be for one-time uses yes okay um all right then that's all i've got thank you thanks mark nicole you're out thank you and thanks again this is a really clear presentation i i appreciate it very much it's a lot of complicated information i just had a quick question feel free to punt this one to um later if it feels better placed later um after some more information but i was a little curious just to see that there was not any staffing addition in the climate initiatives section just because you know we

[73:01] recently identified that as an area that's of um a huge concern the number one priority to more than a third of people in our community so i think i was just expecting to maybe see a little bit there and i was wondering what the reason for that was and if that maybe relates to the climate initiatives ballot measure or anything like that yeah it's a good question nicole it does in that the climate action plan tax the existing tax is currently expiring march 2023 so our standard practice is to not show an expiring tax in the subsequent budget year in the upcoming budget year if there's a ballot initiative we wait for voters to weigh in on the ballot initiative and then do a special adjustment at the beginning of the following year if approved so with that uh climate initiatives had to budget as if that tax was going away and so that is likely the reflection of no additional staff for 2023 in the recommended budget thank you for that

[74:01] let me ask a kind of a follow-on question to nicole's uh mark um when um when we have uh uh ballot measures that do affect uh the budget um and and revenue like the climate uh taxes could just refer to do we typically do our adjustment debates pretty early in the year kind of in the january february time frame is that do i remember that correctly i believe so but cara can correct me if i'm wrong i think we try to get it done by uh february i think this last this year for scheduling reasons i think it was the first meeting in march maybe okay great thanks any other questions we're going to deep dive into a couple things in a second here but i want to make sure that people got all their questions answered with respect to the high level overview i don't see any other hands so cara and mark and charlotte i think we're ready to go into the highlights in the capital investment program sounds good okay

[75:00] so now we'll cover some of the key budget highlights first thing i wanted to do and bob mentioned this at the outset i'll show this slide again but as we get into the specifics i wanted to draw your attention to our recommended process for the next few weeks our main goal is to get a budget that you all feel comfortable approving on october 20th so backing up from there in this timeline what we're suggesting is a deadline for proposed changes to be put out on hotline the reason for that is to try to organize ourselves on that october 6 meeting date which i'm sure we'll discuss in more detail with cac as we approach that date but again the idea is to try and give you all some additional time to consider the recommended budget and any possible changes and then to be able to work with you all to help with the structure of what those changes might be the budget is presented in a way that any addition from what is presented will

[76:01] require a trade-off in some way and because we have been in it for many many months we can facilitate those conversations so happy to receive feedback later in the presentation but wanted to have this in the back your minds as we start talking about the specifics okay 2023 budget highlights uh we'll touch on a number of these areas and nuria touched on them starting with our our core services and investments in city staff wildfire resilience emergency response behavioral health response and homelessness services safe and managed spaces infrastructure investments and then we'll get into a couple more sections after another break for questions so starting with core operations and investments in city staff as nuria mentioned the investment in our city employees is foundational to our ability to deliver services to the community cost of living the job market job

[77:00] demands have increased pressure on employee wages over the last two years the 2023 recommended budget continues these investments in competitive pay practices and other city-wide retention and recruitment strategies there are restorations in professional development and training and travel within this recommended budget and staff is continuing to develop additional strategies to address these issues into the future we do tend to talk about the new in our budget process but we thought it was really important to touch on the continued core operations that are funded within this budget our base budget includes investments such as water resources and treatment resources and and stewardship in our open space and mountain parks homelessness services eviction protection and resolution through our epress fund patrol services recreation and parks operations library public services older adult and family services risk management and many many others

[78:00] including the maintenance of our facilities these are all we won't talk a lot about many of these areas but we know that they are important areas to the community that are funded and continue to be funded in the 23 budget starting with one of our highlight areas in boulder we have always been aware of the threat of natural disasters and have experienced loss more recently our friends and neighbors endured one of the worst fire disasters in history the threat of the climate emergency necessitates the investments in the areas of resilience preparedness and emergency response this budget proposes just over two million dollars in enhancements including 1.1 million dollars to support emergency operations hiring three new fire fighter positions and the continued inflammation implementation of advanced life services additional funds will support

[79:01] fire and efforts such as recruitment training and wellness an additional investment in this area is in open space and mountain parks to support enhanced urban wildland interface management we did want to touch on this in particular departments submitted over four and a half million dollars in request through our budgeting process these were in areas related to resilience preparedness response efforts we also saw many in the areas of community outreach and education land and property mitigation and other response related efforts simply put the general fund is not in position to support all of these requests in one year and many aren't appropriate for the one-time use of funding as we've touched on earlier the council recommended the new climate

[80:01] tax we've mentioned the expiration of the current climate action plan tax in march of 2023 the new climate tax would replace that tax and the utility occupation tax that is on the ballot in november that tax if supported by the community would support at least 1.5 million dollars in additional wildfire resilience efforts and that continued uh prioritization of those types of efforts will continue after november if that tax is approved we have discussed the 2023 budget as a people-centered budget and one of the areas of focus is in trying new approaches in reaching areas of our community this budget proposes 1.7 million dollars in enhancements in homelessness solutions behavioral health response and takes some innovative new approaches in these areas

[81:01] starting with homelessness solutions for 750 000 to begin operations at a day service center capital costs are not currently included in the 2023 budget that is not because we we don't anticipate those costs uh it is simply too early at least at this stage to understand what that facility might be in terms of a lease or own or rehabilitate an existing facility and once those costs become clear we'll be coming forth with a recommended funding plan for behavioral health response there's 965 000 to fund a non-law enforcement response program uh in 2023 uh dubbed the community alternative response program this will focus on dispatching ems and clinicians to certain types of calls for service which is a new approach for 2023 in the area of community court and case

[82:00] management through our municipal court boulder municipal court started the community court program in early 2020 the department of justice provided a four hundred thousand dollar grant in october of 2020 that expires in september of 2023 uh what is proposed in this budget uh is the extension of this program and the permanent funding of certain positions to continue the uh the community court program which focuses on a combination of alternative sanctions connections to supportive housing and other services that seek to reduce quality of life violations and other barriers to the successful interaction with court i also want to recognize that judge cook is with us this evening and would be happy to entertain questions that council may have in the area of safe and managed spaces the total enhancements in the recommended budget is 1.3 million

[83:00] dollars in three particular areas of this program one in encampment management two in urban parks in the urban parks ranger program and last in the downtown ambassador program i know that council had a discussion in more detail about this particular program a few weeks ago i thought it would be helpful to break down the budget detail dating back to may of 2021 when the pilot originally was approved for safe and managed spaces that 18-month pilot the funding for that 18-month pilot approved a number of different areas starting with encampment management this was 530 000 within the stormwater fund to fund an encampment management team there were 568 000 provided to begin the ambassador program that represented 18 months worth of funding for that the urban parks ranger program that 186 represents a prorated amount

[84:01] understanding that that program would not be able to start right away and then the pilot also authorized a dedicated police unit to support this work that pro-rated amount in at that time was 384 860. a couple things that are important to note here that in the 22 budget so now included in the 2023 base budget is the dedicated police unit for this work that was the understanding at the time in may of 2021 that that police unit would be a an ongoing expense and then about three hundred thousand dollars for that encampment management team within stormwater those two expenses continue within the 2023 base budget the proposed funding in 2023 beyond that base funding includes one-time funding to extend the pilot in the area of the ambassador program that 372 again represents an annual the annual cost of that

[85:02] program and then the urban parks ranger program at 305 is larger again 186 was prorated originally this is the full cost of the program now we did add a supervisor in late of uh late 2021 that increases the cost of that pilot um that that portion of the pilot and lastly the proposed budget enhancement in this area is to add an additional encampment management team and the associated equipment would be just shy of five hundred thousand dollars in ongoing costs to support the personnel and uh some one-time funding uh this would be this is proposed to be funded out of the general fund because those activities would be beyond uh storm water property and i get to hand it over to charlotte who's going to cover the capital improvement program thanks mark hi i'm charlotte husky a principal budget analyst with the budget

[86:00] office i'm here to provide an overview of the capital improvement program included in the 23 budget so included in our cip for 23 through 28 is a 745.2 million in planned spending over the six-year period for 2023 specifically we have included 159.3 million in new appropriation noted before that the voters approved the renewal of the community culture resilience and safety tax and this is included this year in the capital improvement program with 28.1 million in 2023 for capital project investments as well as community nonprofit grant appropriation and 47.1 million and plan spending for 14 projects over the six year period i'll walk through a couple slides breaking down the cip over the six-year

[87:00] period through two charts this first chart is splitting up the cip by department we have a total of eight departments that support and manage the cip in this 23-28 six-year period you'll note that utilities and transportation projects comprise over 70 percent of the cip and this is standard in the annual cip that we bring forward to council this slide breaks down our cip by project type so within the city we have five capital project types including new facility infrastructure land acquisition capital planning studies capital maintenance and capital enhancement here we really want to highlight that over 85 percent of planned spending within the six-year cip goes towards supporting capital enhancements and capital maintenance supporting our existing city

[88:02] assets that we have in the city providing some project highlights here included within our 23 capital improvement program fire station 3 we will support this within the 23 budget through continued investment and relocation and replacement of fire station 3. you'll note that this is listed as 13 million and 23. after conversations with uh with the fire department and facilities in fleet we will increase this to 14.5 million primarily due to inflationary measure measures and we'll be bringing that forward to council on october 6th construction for fire station 3 is planned to be complete in quarter 1 of 2024 we also want to highlight the project at alpine balsam and implementation of the facilities master

[89:01] plan and alpine balsam area plan including the alpine balsam site and western city hub development this includes uh 7.3 million in 2023 for continued planning flood mitigation and maintenance um and we have included in the in the six-year planned uh cip 70 million in 2025 and stop will be coming forward in late 2022 early 23 to talk with council about financing options for that project we also wanted to highlight key capital planning initiatives we have several ccrs planning investments where we will be investing in capital planning studies for east boulder community center the civic area phase 2 as well as boulder creek path which we'll point to at a upcoming slide as well as multi-modal transportation

[90:00] enhancements we'll be investing in 30th street corridor improvements 28th street and colorado avenue improvements in east arapahoe multi-use path and transit and these primarily are bike protected bike lanes creating new bus bus paths or bus lanes and other multimodal transportation enhancements there and uh cara mentioned this before in the presentation but with our governmental capital fund we wanted to provide a breakdown of this for you uh since this is primarily or wholly funded through the general fund you'll note here that the main project that we have included in the governmental capital fund is the software replacement for our financial system replacement uh this was highlighted before the the funding is actually

[91:01] pulled from our software replacement reserve within this fund also included is alpine balsam implementation for western cub planning and flood mitigation will also include appropriation for av system and tech upgrades at council chambers as well as public art signage and replacement for one of the police robots that that has exceeded its useful life we also wanted to highlight here the community culture resilience and safety uh tax projects that includes 13 projects within 2023 included in the matrix fire station 3 as we mentioned before xl energy street light acquisition to acquire our street lights from excel you also noted here the funding included for the 10 community nonprofit program

[92:01] as well as capital planning studies for boulder creek civic area phase 2 east boulder community center as mentioned before as well as the multimodal enhancements that will be supported through ccrs and i believe we'll turn it over to questions and i'll hand it back to mark thanks charlotte and thanks mark for for for that deep dive and uh some of the highlights in cip uh so council this is a good time for us to but we'll obviously hear hear a shorter version of this at the october 6th public hearing but this is a good time for folks to dig into what they heard in the highlights or other things from the budget that you all saw in the memo in on open gov you have questions about either things you think are funded and adequately or over-funded and uh as mark mentioned we'll have an opportunity all of us will have an opportunity to to post our comments and questions on um

[93:02] hotline over the next two weeks and then we'll have an opportunity to to drill into the budget once again at the public hearing but uh this is a good chance to uh to to ask questions about what you just heard on highlights so we'll start with aaron and then followed by rachel so is there another segment to the presentation or is that it yeah there's one more segment uh aaron we'll go over goal areas and we'll touch briefly on on library reallocation although that will be really focused on in two weeks and then we'll recap the highlight but but this is where that was part three of a four part presentation great thanks for letting me know that so uh a few questions here one was i saw the um capital project for the council av uh renovation so we're going to get like new microphones and such as part of that i'm going to stall a little bit i believe that is a part of the project um but looking for some friends to help specify

[94:00] it's a detailed question but i see sarah and jennifer popping up and i would imagine chris too if he's been involved but i'll let you all talk about it because this has been talked about for a while i believe now yes new mics and cameras are on the plans for that fantastic uh i will just say from being back in chambers last week which was really wonderful in so many ways except for the microphones and i know our community had trouble hearing us too so um hopefully we can get state-of-the-art um microphones that do not involve you having to lean all the way over every time that you speak so that's fantastic uh other on the capital uh projects there was a 750 000 i think for payment management um and is that or who knows in the ccrs funding my question was is that additional operations funding to improve our capacity in there is there capital there

[95:00] like what what changes are coming to the payment management project so i i can add and then i can defer to transportation for additional contacts or details but that is additional supplemental funding that is supporting their um they're operating in capital budget within the transportation fund so it's it's helping to augment uh their pavement management program through the 750 through the uh ccrs dollars that was spotlight yeah thanks charlotte great and natalie if you wouldn't mind maybe following up no rush on this but kind of maybe uh if there's any quantification available for how that increases capacity in that area that'd be really interesting to know we do have that information and we can definitely follow up with that fantastic uh is this is one of the things you hear about the most occasional is about those potholes so it's great to see that we're in the road conditions in general so

[96:00] great to see we'll be making some progress on that last question that i wanted to ask was in the area of the arts um so i know we've got some additional funding for uh public art coming up in this proposed budget was the the funding enhancement art section sector was in i think specifically in the public arts area which is exciting to see but i just mad i see you popped up just um was there any thought to kind of some bolstering of some of the operating support because i know some of our arts organizations locally are still really struggling as they're coming out of pandemic conditions yeah thank you uh match zansky with the office of arts and culture and um when we were taking a look at uh the cultural plan recommendations and uh what that meant for the grants program uh the the existing grants programs and general operatings including the general operating support that you mentioned um plus the um arpa funds for general

[97:01] for operating support as well as support for artists over the next three years uh we felt um fully met cultural plan recommendations and so the um proposals that you see for public art were about filling in those gaps so that's why that attention went there it because can you remind us how much arpa funding we have in this area for 2023 um so i believe the total arpa funding is about 913 000 and the um majority of that is in the uh the grants to support rehiring of arts administration positions that were lost during the pandemic and so that's what stretches out over the next three years so in the 2023 cycle i believe about 300 000 of that gets spent um plus about 30 000 on artist uh workforce grants hey that's really helpful to understand

[98:01] thanks very much that's all i got thanks erin a rachel than the cold and matt all right thanks bob thanks everyone for the presentation tonight my question is on i believe we're calling it sam's safe and managed outdoor spaces pilot program um there was a slide in there that showed sort of last year's for the first 18 months expenditures and included 384 000 police expenses and then a line item is that if i'm following it correctly and i apologize because i am sort of struggling to get fluent in opengov and be able to search for the things that i want to find but i think it said ongoing expenses for policing for 1.3 million for the year and i just wanted to understand because my recollection from when we approved it was some of the police money was for like new cars for the people for the police officers who were going to be patrolling or doing that the outreach there and and maybe

[99:00] some one-time expenses so just wanted to understand what that 384 000 was was that um was any of that the new cars i saw separately in the police budget there are two new police cars so i assume that's separate and not the um the stamps budget so can anyone speak to that what we spent 384 000 on i think in the pilot period and then what the ongoing 1.3 is yeah thanks for your question rachel um i'll stall a little bit on the 384 i know that was specified in the uh adjustment to base memo so maybe we can pull that up i think you're right it was for a combination of getting the staff in place so some i'm sure training dollars and some one-time needs for for new staffing that 1.3 million dollar figure is a combination of ongoing and one time i think it was um it may and the memo been incorrectly referred to as all um ongoing about nine

[100:01] hundred thousand dollars of that is the ongoing cost of the six dedicated uh police officers for that unit and the rest from the best we can tell is related to those one-time expenses the two vehicles that you reference this year is separate from the numbers that that are on that slide okay thanks for that clarification thanks rachel uh nicole matt and mark thanks i think um matt may have been first if matt if you want to go before me uh either way i i've got a couple questions go for it all right um and bob we're just asking questions now is that right yeah i think so i think what we'll do is we'll ask questions we'll do the fourth section we'll ask questions on that and then we'll do kind of a wrap up at the end how does that sound

[101:00] okay sounds good um so i think that one of the questions that i had um i know what the we're going to be talking about the library district in a couple of weeks um but i know one thing within the library district ballot measure is some um money set aside for the steep capital maintenance backlog that the libraries have and i was just curious if the budget has that included since we don't really know what the outcome is going to be are we addressing some of these um capital maintenance con or not capital ongoing maintenance costs of the libraries as well as the um the extensive backlog because i think right now it's budgeted for like 1.3 million over 15 years 1.3 million a year over 15 years so that's pretty substantial just wondering if that's in there um what i can answer is that there are some additional operational maintenance costs included in the budget overall for our entire portfolio so that would address some we are not currently funded in the 23

[102:00] recommended budget at that recommended level called for in the facilities master plan we point that out later that cost incrementally would be about 700 000 and ongoing expenses to get to that level that would be inclusive of the library facilities at this point there are some one-time dollars to support uh maintenance needs at the north boulder branch uh but those are limited since we expect that facility won't be open until late in the fiscal year all right thank you thanks nicole i'm matt and mark and then i'll have questions myself thanks bob uh appreciate those questions that came before it certainly allows me to trim my list down um since there was a slide about the wildfire and resiliency stuff so i have a question that might be for chief colorado or jonathan cullen as was mentioned we obviously have money that's set aside and and for obviously critical work that our community is clearly asking for for

[103:00] us to boost those efforts with wildfire resiliency uh knock wood we haven't suffered the same fate as our friends in california or idaho or oregon this summer so hopefully we can keep that trend going um the rest of this year um but it was mentioned about that with the climate tax being a way to sort of augment and or or enhance the work that's already being done and maybe do some new stuff to the tune of 1.5 million can you speak to whether that money is one-time use in the climate tax or more thought of as an ongoing sort of dedicated pot sort of in the perpetuity of the climate tax as a whole and our i'm sorry matt are you speaking about that one 1.5 million dollars that was alluded to correct yeah i would say generally um if voters approve that tax that is something that we would work with the community on prioritizing those needs because they far exceed that number but generally yes because of the length of time of that tax we were hoping that there would be some ongoing expenses that we'd be able to cover with

[104:02] the tax wonderful well then i'll take this moment to plug that for the sake of climate resiliency and helping the safety of our community with regards to the wildfire risks that we have i implore everybody to vote yes on the climate tax because of the immense positive gains that those revenues will will give the city in terms of protection so a question turns to a plug necessarily so my other question has to do um a bit with um is a is a a follow-up with the arts um and it was sort of a follow-up on aaron's question a bit is you know in thinking i understand that we've got the you know public art in there but one of the needs that i've been hearing from the arts community aside from some of the grants and other parts and i don't know if the grants will meet this so it's really maybe a question for you matt is venue rental assistance you know one of

[105:01] the challenges we have with artists and organizations is that our the cost of just getting into the venues is going up and and some of our artists in performing arts groups are actually performing out of boulder as a result of the increased expenses and so to not lose them uh permanently is there ways in which we can maybe think about that public art money or are the existing grants going to be a way in which we can help them uh until we have a longer more larger vision of supporting the arts which i hope we can get to in the next year or so can we help keep them in our community and use the the venues that we have um so that was really maybe a question how do we do that because i think that's a huge need and i'd like to see us make sure we can get that in there for 2023 budget um yes great so i could tell you a little bit about how we have been doing that and can plan to continue um uh one way is that we have a rental assistance fund we call it a a venue an online event fund now um

[106:00] but we try and help supplement some of the costs uh through small grants and i also want to point out that the ccrs tax and the conversations with the nonprofit community around um the process for the the the nonprofit portion of the funds that affordability was an important part of that so i think that'll continue to be a conversation that happens um as those funds come online um but ultimately it's a big problem and it's one that um since the cultural plan was written it has really expanded and so the other thing that we're thinking about is how do the funds including the 2023 budget bridge us to the next cultural plan which are actually going to start work on next year so this will also be a conversation for the 2025 budget cycle and after great matt i appreciate that uh my my last question um i think i said one more and then i saw it on my list um has to do with one of the things we've been getting asked about and i know council discussed this a little ways back with is with regards to funding an e-bike

[107:00] program and i just wanted to maybe get some thoughts um maybe you know just from whether it's natalie or others i know that we we're going to try to move forward with that and it looks like some of that funding might come from uh colorado energy office and those ceo grants um as well as certainly maybe something from the climate tax and so um i i just wanted to get some thoughts with regards to is there a way for the city through our budget to put some skin in the game for that in the 2023 cycle because again counting on attacks to get past i think we feel good about it but i also don't want to then put all my eggs in a basket where we don't have some skin in the game and so i'm wondering if there's a way for us to think about allocating some baseline numbers so we have something going and when the ceo grant or the climate tax kick in then we can just expand that program like gangbusters but at least starting off with some skin in the game um in the 2023 budget and when that money comes in maybe just offset it completely and move that money to some other need you know in the city so so i'm just sort of thinking about how we can make sure we

[108:00] have a baseline of some skin in the game with regards to an e-bike program that hopefully we can lift up next year and have as a multi-year program i can take this one that's that's helpful okay um yes thanks matt so we're definitely thinking about this and the kind of our initial thoughts right now we certainly need to continue to kind of just think through a program um but our initial thoughts right now is we're thinking we would start with probably about a 500 000 program just and that's based on you know what denver did what longmont's done um and just research we've done across the country so um and we're talking to climate initiatives about how we can run that together i think at this point we actually have identified some funds this year that we could potentially start to use to build a program i know jonathan is thinking about some dollars within climate initiatives budget for next year so we feel pretty confident we can probably get a program off the ground if

[109:02] if needed what we'll do is we'll come back at an atb in early 2023 for additional dollars to if we feel like we need to get additional dollars out allocated for it to get the program off the ground um but i think we're in a good spot as far as our current budget goes um and and we'll certainly come back if we need to hopefully that kind of answers your question it totally does and uh just i just want to highlight your rock star for doing this meeting with with the kiddo in front of you so kudo kudos to you that's just that's awesome work uh thanks natalie and your daughter for um being available tonight matt thanks for your questions and the plug for the ballot measure uh mark and then i'll have a quick questions myself i really only have one area of questioning at the moment if i have others i'll put them on hotline um i'm thinking a little bit about 2024. um in the memo

[110:00] from staff we have identified somewhere between 13 million and more than in excess of 20 million dollars of things that we might want to fund but we currently have no way to fund them and that doesn't even include matt's e-bike program so there's a lot of things we were not able to address this year and i'm wondering how are they going to be addressed going forward we're not going to do all of them but there might be some that that are actually quite important um we've zeroed out our fund balances and are we operating under the the strategy that god will provide or uh do we have a more concrete way of getting that 13 to plus 20 million dollars of revenue that we're going to need to handle all of those priorities and some of them are

[111:00] very important priorities including continued enhancements for staff um these investments in city staff you call it and you identify it as between one and five million dollars where do we get it um have we had any thoughts about that yeah thanks mark we do have a more sophisticated budgeting strategy than but and we do touch on this a little um a few more slides uh this evening but i will say just to answer your question uh in part is that we have what we believe set up a better framework to make some of these decisions and you're right there are trade-offs and we can't possibly fund everything we need in one budget year that's why we're highlighting that is that we we want to work and are excited to work with this council on that prioritization exercise as we move towards the 2024 budget so we'll expand a bit on that but what you point out is correct we are

[112:01] highlighting the the many things that we we know are our needs going into next year and we want to get out in front of that conversation to the best that we can well i look forward to having that conversation with you i think the entire community looks forward to having that conversation with you thank you thanks mark um mark and kara and charlotte i have just two questions uh one um i saw that that highlights that you have budgeted 750 000 for the operation of the homelessness day services center that we've talked about you haven't been able to budget the actual capital cost the one-time capital cost of setting that up because we simply don't know what it's going to look like or where it's going to be and i get that entirely once we identify that probably i would guess around early next year and we figure out what those capital costs would be would they be eligible for um free use as one cost with corporate funds

[113:01] uh we believe they would um i think we'd like to do a little bit more confirmation of that um depending on the scope but yes i think based on the information we have it would be an eligible one-time expense under arpa great thanks a slightly different question i know that you have proposed rolling forward the the pilot on the ambassador program which we heard about a few weeks ago which i think the budget for 2023 was 372 000 i remember from when we put the pilot in place a year and a bit ago that this was actually a jointly funded program between the city and downtown boulder partnership for 2023 for the ambassador program will downtown boulder partnership be um funding import portion of that in other words the 372 from the city and there's there's some money coming from the from the downtown boulder partnership is that a fair assumption yes you're correct bob 372 is the city portion there's an additional amount from downtown boulder partnership can i see

[114:01] chris if he'd like to add anything sure yes thanks for the question bob um yes there is a continued contribution they're paying for one-third of the cost of the program um in the downtown area great thanks chris uh that's all the questions i have any other questions i don't see any hands if not we're ready to roll into the fourth and final segment around goal areas i think we're going to touch briefly on library reallocation although that'll be more deeply drilled into in a couple of weeks i think we'll recap the timeline we'll answer some questions uh in that last section and then as nicole indicated we should just roll into a general discussion about other things that people will like to see again um keeping in mind that we'll all have an opportunity to post things on hotline over the next two weeks as well so with that cara and mark it's back to you all right we're going to talk about the rest of the budget or budgeting by goal area so again we'll be framing this in terms of our sustainability equity and

[115:00] resilience framework around these goals and we'll highlight a few things that we haven't touched on yet some new investments some continued investments in our base budget starting in the livable goal area 24.5 million base budget 18.5 million dollars in new investments i'll point out that the bulk of those quote new investments relate to the budget process change that we have alluded to reflecting uh the expected expenditures especially in affordable housing projects in the annual budget cycle instead of mid-year but it is to point out that we have almost 30 million dollars in in our base budget related to our affordable housing investments housing assistance human services fund related grants amongst others in livable are where you see the new investments related to the day services center and the behavioral health response program

[116:01] in healthy and socially thriving 40.5 million dollar base budget and 3.6 million dollars in new investments this includes funding for the opening of the north boulder library branch expected in late 2023 this also includes one-time funding for the experiments in public art program and to bolster public art maintenance activities there are other investments that we've talked about related to public art signage and public art installations in the capital improvement program there's a fairly substantial increase to our recreation and parks operations this includes new investments to restore swimming lessons at recreation centers staffing to meet the demand of sport and recreation programming and maintenance activities in our parks including belmont city park in our base budget is the is our older adult and family services program which includes a new investment to restore

[117:01] the hours at the east agewell center which began this year in the goal area of accessible and connected 57.3 million dollar base budget 3 million in new investments including restoration to hop transit service community engagement program enhancements to expand uh stipends for our community connectors program in library uh community literacy and outreach expanding the community literacy program including our bilingual outreach and then base investments include media and external communications and video services such as channel aid in environmentally sustainable we have a 53.4 million dollar base budget and two and a half million dollars in new investments this includes the wildfire resilience efforts open space talked

[118:00] about earlier it also includes the extension of the urban parks ranger program and some enhanced forestry maintenance operations environmentally sustainable also includes our water resources and treatment programs our wastewater best practices and resources and stewardship in our trail maintenance and capital projects on city open space in the area of safe 80.3 million base budget 3.7 million dollars in new investments these include our base operations our base operations of emergency operations and patrol services and fire and police respectively within emergency operations and fire that includes the 1.1 million new investments that we talked about earlier the uh quote distribution and collection system maintenance is the technical program where the new encampment management team is proposed to be operated out of stormwater but

[119:00] funded through the general fund within alternative police response program this includes enhancements to the animal protection unit and expands the city's red light camera program in responsibly governed 85.4 million dollar base budget and 2 million dollars in new investments this includes the implementation of ranked choice voting city clerk's office other base enhancements include excuse me basic investments include it infrastructure services so all the stuff that allow us to meet virtually this evening in addition to many many other services risk management our insurance coverage is within risk management program this also includes an enhancement in our ada compliance efforts for 2023 and i mentioned our facility operational maintenance program and a slight increase in that budget for 2023 and last but certainly not least is our goal area of an economically vital 17.2

[120:02] million dollar base budget a little over 500 thousand dollars in new investments including a new citywide position i suppose this is self-promoting and technically is within the budget program at the moment though this is a city-wide resource to help obtain and manage federal and state grants also within economically vital is our core programming and economic vitality and district management all right that was a lot very quickly but to try to recap and close out some of our enhancements as we have said we're really excited about the budget process improvements it's a major first step we know that more improvements will come as we receive feedback from this go around and look forward again to the next time we we develop the budget which will come up sooner than we know

[121:00] this budget advances our commitment to equity in a number of different ways continues to make crucial investments in our city staff and addresses top community and council priorities while maintaining our commitment to core services all right i'm going to take us home with this last section so a few future budget and policy considerations starting with ongoing funding implications and then we'll touch on some of our unfunded needs related to that as our master plan process alignment some expiring taxes that we want to note and last we'll touch just briefly basically foreshadow our conversation in two weeks so to start with ongoing funding implications mark you've touched on this a little bit earlier we do make significant investments across key priority areas we have used one-time funding to advance several priorities in 2023 some of which do have ongoing funding

[122:01] implications such as the day services center our non-law enforcement behavioral health response program recreation services there's a one-time increase to the subsidy of the recreation activity fund to continue those services in 23 and this and part of the safe and managed spaces program uh we also have made investments in arpa many of which most of which are one time in nature we have um invested at councils direction in a number of different transformative areas to help support the community and the recovery from covid those investments are allowed to continue to be committed through 24 and expended through 26 so we do have some time flexibility however there are certain areas that we've invested in that may have ongoing funding implications such as strengthening our mental and behavioral health non-profit partners the guaranteed income program although early in in its stages and the an economic

[123:02] vitality programming is a few examples of that in addition to those we know that there's other areas that we will again expand upon in two weeks as we talk about unfunded needs related to the potential library reallocation to point out a few that we haven't touched on there are core operation demands going forward think about um anywhere from snow removal to median maintenance to recreation services there's a number of core operations core activities that the community expects the maintenance of our facilities um that um there's a probably a large dollar price tag there that we um are currently doing an inventory of to refine those numbers there's a number of master plans that point out um investments that we have made some commitments to including advanced life support and other related fire master plan goals i mentioned facilities

[124:01] recreation services and the sustainability not just of the fund but our facilities our recreation facilities overall and the services that we provide through the recreation activity fund our continued investments in city staff that's a big range but those strategies are continuing to be developed a permanent safe and managed spaces program the elements that are currently funded as one time cap out at about a million dollars and then these other arp related initiatives which are hard to quantify but we know may be a future need and then related to those unfunded needs is looking at our master plan process we have started this conversation with our financial strategy committee again there are 12 active or soon to be active master plans these master plans vary approaches to identifying funding requirements typically though not standard across the board master plans identify three different

[125:01] tiers of potential funding constrained action and vision there's a bit of inconsistency in what the definition of those different levels are across plans we do address many recommendations across our 12 master plans in the recommended budget and have had addressed many of those recommendations in previous budgets an analysis is currently being conducted to determine not only how much we funded to date but what some of those remaining unfunded needs are according to approved master plan accepted master plans after budget adoption our suggested process is to continue that work with fsc to better align uh our budget strategy and master plans as we continue to use that as a tool to guide our work on expiring taxes council is aware of the expiring climate action plan tax in 23 and the associated utility occupation tax in 2025 we do

[126:01] want to point out that at the end of 2024 there's a 0.15 percent general fund sales tax that is currently not dedicated to any particular use and this is a really critical tax to support general operations we would like to start the conversation with this council early perhaps targeting a november 23 ballot initiatives on that related to that 0.15 general fund sales tax so that we're not up against the deadline in december of 2024 and lastly briefly on potential library budget reallocation we do now have a study session item scheduled for september 22nd the availability of library related budget for reallocation depends on the november ballot initiative which would create a library district and the process that we're suggesting would focus on our needs inventory first and prioritization in advance of that of

[127:01] the next budget cycle we'll discuss this at more length but again just to give you a little preview what we're looking at is conducting that inventory to try to quantify a need in a in a number of different areas review these needs with council and fsc and have some type of prioritization prior to the 2024 budget [Music] process and what are those areas of need and again we'll elaborate in two weeks those core operational needs programs are services that are aligned with established policy new investments that are aligned with policy kind of new new new that are meeting emerging needs that may not be aligned and then the area of potential tax relief or rebate considerations as well so we'll cover those again in greater detail next week and lastly i'll put a side up that i've already touched on and alluded to in the

[128:00] answer to mark's question this may seem overwhelming when considering some of our needs but i put us this slide back up to try to provide an optimistic perspective on where we're going we're building uh these we're building on these tools to provide a framework that centers on equity and allows us a chance to make data and form decisions in pursuit of our goals i do want to just take a quick moment to recognize the leadership of nuria chris and cara this is our first budget process together as a team who have really driven the vision to allow for a better foundation for tackling these challenges ahead and and certainly to recognize you counsel uh going through all this change first and to champion it uh we know it's a lot but your leadership will have a lasting impact on our future budget decisions and this is my last slide tonight so the key question was related to identifying if there are any substantive changes to the budget we are more than happy to receive that feedback tonight and again

[129:01] knowing that you may need a little bit of time to digest we are suggesting that process to give you a couple more weeks and again be able to help you with the structure of any proposed changes so that we have a clear idea of what those discussions would be on october 6th with the hope fingers crossed to get a clean appropriation ordinance on october 6 so you have an opportunity to consider a budget final on october 20th i know we have six weeks to go here but just wanted to recognize the incredible work of the budget team and department budget staff many late nights and a lot of patients went into what you were reviewing today and i'm very proud to present their work so thank you for listening to what is a lengthy presentation and now i will yield for questions on that section and discussion bob thanks so much mark just an outstanding presentation and and i know it's the first time that your budget team uh at least that group of

[130:01] people has worked together it's the first time uh first budget for many members of council it's the first time for opengov so we got a lot of firsts here and uh aaron i think this is our seventh budget and i think you'd probably join me in saying this is the best presentation and the best organized budget that i've seen in my years on council so great job guys just a fantastic job and i'm sure it'll be even even better even better next year um so let's to try to be efficient here we're at 805 so we're um we still have got another 55 minutes to meet our self-imposed deadline um but let's um let me suggest that we kind of take turns the nine of us going through and if you have any um final questions relating to that last section or any general questions um go ahead and ask them and then and then roll right into any comments you'd like to ask as well so let's just do questions and comments combined um and let's try to all nine of us maybe lay in here um and um you know if we can kind of

[131:01] keep it to two or three or four minutes each that that should give us enough time to get all the way through and still get out by by nine o'clock keeping in mind that we all have a few more bites of the apple by the 23rd of september staff has asked us to post on hotline any other changes or questions we have and then of course we'll have an opportunity on october 6th but the idea is to try to give staff as much as possible either tonight or by the 23rd of september so that we're not doing a lot of uh changes on the fly during the public hearing on the 6th so who would like to go first with either final questions or um or comments i see rachel i have a maybe a um threshold question as we get into questions um and and i asked um sarah huntley about this earlier but it sounds like we did not have community connectors involved in reviewing this budget is that accurate movie tenuria am i hey sarah holly yeah i know that there's um folks joining here no that is correct rachel

[132:01] and i'll just say that um establishing opengov while it does not solve everything um the this year um it does provide a platform for much greater transparency which was a huge area of focus for us for the 2023 budget it is not good enough at least from my perspective and so it is something that we will continue um to work on and i know that for many of our individual investments that are covered in the 23 budget there has been significant community engagement related to some of those so it's not completely absent but certainly in the budget itself we know that there's continued improvement along those lines um thanks for that and i didn't mean it as a criticism directly because i don't think we've done it in the past i just don't think that um that's something we haven't had community connectors involved in the organization with the organization for a long time so wonderful like that and also if there are sort of key things that that are asked um by my

[133:00] colleagues coming up is there is there any chance that there is time to involve community connectors in the next couple weeks on on some of these issues or is that that just take way too long i will yield to sarah um on the mechanics of that good evening council this is sarah huntley i'm the director of communication and engagement thank you for your question rachel um i agree with mark that this would be a great um addition to our upcoming processes and one of the things that's really nice about um the open gov is we really could zero in on proposed enhancements instead of handing community connectors a big fat budget book and saying figure it out we really could target our questions to them in that vein i would say that if there were a couple of areas specific enhancements or specific proposed expenditures that you would like to get feedback on we could endeavor to get that just want to point out that we really only have a few weeks until this

[134:00] comes back to council so it could be a little bit challenging and i would really want to limit them to maybe just a few if we really feel like that perspective would be particularly valuable but the continuing conversation and take some notes if there are a few that council is really interested in getting feedback on i will then confer with ryan hansen who runs that program and see what we can do that sounds great so again just wanted to flag it if we find ourselves sort of um embroiled here in the next few minutes maybe i'm sorry luna really wants the food i have in my hand here um maybe that would be good to take a couple things out to community connectors and get that input because it's so valuable i find it from my perspective thanks i just wanted to add to that that i i really like the question and i certainly have seen that in other cities as well and i think it's a really good practice so i appreciate it and want to make sure that we're thinking about that for next year as well i also want to highlight that for some departments that have perhaps newer strategic plans community connectors

[135:00] have been a part of it and i think mark was lifting that up a little bit in terms of helping to get those recommendations and um thinking about what that looks like but i just really think that that's um i think it's a great idea to think about and how do we move towards that and and be more inclusive as we continue to put a ratio equity focus on our budget is terrific so thank you for highlighting that rachel thanks for that process suggestion do you want since you have the floor rachel do you want to launch into any final questions or substantive comments or would you want to yield to the next person who would be mark i would like to yield so that luna stops harassing me for the food in my hand i'm going to eat and then hopefully people ask me questions and i'm sorry my mouth is full thanks fine mark you're up for both questions and comments i'm i i'm going to reserve any particular comments about line items for the hotline i i would like a little more time to look at it and and and make those determinations

[136:01] but i do have a question and it's with respect to the 34 million dollars of enhancements 14 million of those are something called budget realignments um and the largest is 11 million dollar budget realignment for affordable housing um a my my first question is what is that and my second question is does this mean we we don't have 34 million dollars of real increased expenses and 14 million represent some kind of bookkeeping entry or do we actually have 34 million dollars of enhanced programs and expenditures yeah that's a good question mark um so you do have 34 million dollars of investment so those are real dollars that are invested in community um the 14 million that we reference is not new meaning that those are typical annual

[137:00] investments that we make we just don't typically make them in the annual budget the largest of which is the 11 million dollars for affordable housing so i'll walk you through that process because we don't know exactly what that revenue will be because some of that is dependent on development for instance we tend to wait until later in the year when we have a better idea of when those are coming in or when other grants are coming in and then we we go to the adjustment to base we book that revenue and then we appropriate the expenditure based on the investments that we're anticipating in that year what we did is we looked at the the history of those investments over time and it averaged at about i think 11 or so million and charlotte can correct me if i'm wrong and so what that does is it's not only more transparent about the investments that we're making on an annual basis it does provide hhs a bit more flexibility early in the year if there's an affordable housing investment opportunity without having to worry

[138:00] about that extra appropriation mid-year okay so so this is an actual appropriation of 11 million dollars to towards affordable housing to hhs correct is that correct that is okay i'm good thank you mark you're gonna save any any other comments you have to your holiday post is that right that is correct great thank you um i don't see hands up surely people have uh questions or comments i'd like to raise matt thank you oh yeah we got to see we i want to at least make this uh nerve wracking for the over and under on whether or not we're going to reach our our time limit so you know i got to play the game here um well so i i similarly to mark i still there's still some more to chew on i think i asked the questions that sort of rose to the surface pretty quickly but i think any others i'll probably reserve for hotline um but i do want to make a couple comments um and and one is i think for one as i said just you know to complement staff

[139:00] on where they had so you know i think that the gushing is is present and will continue with regards to how they got us to where they are um but really just to sort of acknowledge that this is really a recovery budget and and that was i think sort of part of the lens that i viewed it um because we are we're starting to recover out of covet and so seeing it as such it sort of tampered my thoughts on is this really a budget to really be yanking money from one place to the other and really shaking the the tree around or is it really trying to get things whole and then subsequently maybe think about that down the road so just sort of from a lens from me but but i really thank staff and i think they've done a great job balancing the recovery while also investing in the clear priorities that this council set earlier in the retreat um and so i really compliment them for for making those adaptations i want to maybe in particular call out um transportation because the canned proposal was quite a pivot from where transportation was currently going and

[140:00] so in short order to not just take that policy but then rework our investments i think is a great job to transportation and staff in that capacity so i i think you know i just want to lay a particular shout out there but other departments did the same work um also you know i i think we're gonna find opportunity and adjustments to base and so i'm hopeful that as much as we like to be a little conservative here i do think that as mark pointed out some of these things that are on our list that are maybe hanging outside of the current budget i'm really optimistic that a lot of those things will get folded into either the first or second atv um and so just for the community listening that this budget isn't the be all end-all that atb's do offer a chance for us to enhance those investments in our community so i think it's just an important reminder um given historical context that we tend to do that and we tend to have a decent amount of money from which to go there um so in any event those are just some of the things i just sort of want to lay out and comment but but really appreciate how we've pivoted to the priorities that this council set and the adaptability that that council that staff has shown

[141:00] financially to to meet those demands so thank you all very much appreciate it thanks matt we have uh up next um aaron and then tara yeah we'll just first off just to reiterate you know huge thank yous for all the incredible work that's gone into this document and the the new portal and it's so much more transparent and readable and all that kind of stuff so just amazing amazing work that you all done i'll call out two that finally getting to the 20 reserve mark which has been a city goal uh for longer than i've been on council and um and we got delayed by the pandemic but here we are which is great and then going along with that i really appreciate the way that you're treating fund balance and and taking advantage of funds they've built up from the previous year and using them to fund community priorities more or less right away and this is a change from how the city organization worked five and ten years ago and i know when i was i've said this before some variant of it like when i first got on council the even existence

[142:00] of fund balance was kind of a mystery and it wasn't well documented and and you know fortunately when we went into pandemic there was a lot of extra money sitting around that we were able to tap to to prevent further cuts from happening but at the same time that money could have been used for community priorities in the meantime so i appreciate you using fund balance as you go along i think that results in better services for our community including to folks who really need to help now and don't benefit as much from having a few million dollars in the bank but we've already got the 20 reserve goal so really appreciate that approach that that you're taking there and to matt's point like i see so many of our council priorities highlighted in this budget and i really want to call that out and appreciate that i see a direct line from our retreat work into this budget and so uh for example the the community what is it called the community alternative response program uh which i'm really excited about is being stood up with funding this year uh we've got the day services center uh

[143:01] with a good chunk of change in this budget and i i liked bob's idea about potentially tapping our funds for capital once we get to that point so that can can maybe stretch the our ability to implement that you know the what more wildfire resiliency new firefighters you moving forward on our als implementation huge continued investments in affordable housing you know the transport presentation safety work division zero implementation and the can network um so just all these all these priorities that i'm seeing getting substantial funding which i really appreciate and i'm glad to see and we'll call out also similar to what matt said but it's specific there that if the cap tax consolidation extension passes which i'm certainly hopeful that it will and we'll also put in a plug for people voting for that that will give us some substantial additional resources to work on wildfire resiliency which is of course an incredible priority for all of us right now as well as um

[144:00] for climate work for climate mitigation and resilience work which of course is the existential crisis of our time so um i i think it generally it's in a really good place the the one thing i wanted to mention and and uh i talked to joe teddyci about this um yesterday and and brought this up when we had our safe and managed spaces discussion uh a few weeks ago was uh the possibility of you know helping folks out kind of on in the trash situation right and nobody wants lots of trash in our creeks and waterways or human waste or needles all these kinds of things and and we're spending money on cleaning that up but if we can also maybe make some investments into providing ways for people to you know get keep that trash from getting out there in the first place you know things like additional trash containers additional bathrooms additional sharps containers and i hear we're doing some some new work in that area which which is great we're getting a lot of sharps out of the system with

[145:00] some of the new stuff that we're doing as well you know also we've heard um about the concept that some other cities have successfully implemented which is uh providing um some money to people experiencing homelessness to help out with some of these issues themselves right and some other programs like i know i believe it was albuquerque had a really successful program they started a few years ago with that so you know maybe you know which could help give some folks a leg up and then assist us with some of these trash difficulties and some community organizers have mentioned that so i'm not gonna give you a list and say please fund this but those are some of the concepts about you know how can we provide kind of additional options for all folks in our community um you know in in our parks and in our creeks and things like that um to to help with these um give people you know additional services and options and prevent trash from entering the system so when joe and rachel and i talked about this um you know we didn't come up with the as i say the exact answers but joe said that this was something potentially that their department could think about and

[146:01] maybe come up with some ideas so just wanted to put that put a plug out there for thinking more about that and maybe coming up with you know some some amount of um some program that we could have right there for some options and that that's what i got for starters okay on that um is the question for tara i know you love the word may i cut you in colloquy and just just plus one no right ahead of me you go girl just real quick get a plus one erin suggestion for uh increased um sort of trash solutions along the creek from joe's team would be great i'll do a plus one to your plus one and we'll turn over to tara lauren do you want to go ahead of me by one i'm still thinking for nicole yeah we have learned nicole who would like to go first what tara's wrapping up her thoughts ready whoever wants to go just jump right in

[147:00] and start talking lauren you haven't talked yet so you should go first but i also had to jump out for a minute so i want to make sure all my things i'm asking are well informed um okay so um i had a question about and i'm sorry if this has already been covered but mark i know we talked about this a little bit could you kind of refresh me on what currently the process is for reallocating unspent funds within a department and um if there are proposed changes to how that might be modified yeah happy to answer that lauren so we mentioned at the outset and it was probably about 80 slides ago so i'm happy to recap um that we this year we looked at our budget to actuals over the last several years we looked at our personnel cost of the last several years and what we did was make some structural adjustments uh to so

[148:00] budgeting at less than 100 of our total personnel costs knowing that we're going to do that on an annual basis every year right vacancy savings etc and so we're able to then reinvest those dollars if you will in ongoing other ongoing costs so that helped us make some of these investments that are proposed so that structurally we think we've we've made some changes that will help with that to your point there's always salary savings across departments and hopefully in excess of how we're budgeting we we want to be on the plus side of that that will go that excess those excess dollars will go into fund balance at the end of the year so in the general fund it won't be designated for a particular department um that goes to our fund balance after reserve and in like this year's budget we're proposing to invest some of those in one time needs so those would be one-time dollars available and then there are some cases in the in the middle of the year where a department may identify certain other non-personnel related

[149:02] expenses that they'd like to tap into some of those vacancy savings that's a standard practice but that is something that is scrutinized and reviewed by central budget and depending on the scale all the way up to the city manager's office so there's a number of different fronts there but big picture we're trying to do a better job budgeting to actuals and in the event that we do have vacancy savings we do try to invest those in in one time uses uh during the the annual budget cycle thank you mark um and i'm just gonna you know reiterate a lot of what people have already said you know i really appreciate this new format the ability to for everyone to get much more detailed information online about the budgeting process um and all you know using the city's values as a lens for reviewing these budget enhancements and the future um strategic evaluating for how

[150:00] spending is achieving our goals um i'm on a second aaron's or i guess fifth or whatever we're at now aaron's suggestion on doubling down on the trash and sharps collection and you know public restrooms are also a big one for me and like to see just making sure that we're um investing in those things so that we're not having to spend as much money on cleanup um there's also a couple of like in terms of personnel um i see that there's still a lot of overtime and fire and i know that um pdns is still seeing really long permit times and so i just want to put in a plug to make sure that we're really staffing those departments at the level that we need to to make sure that you know our core work can be done effectively thank you thanks lauren tara i see you're still writing notes dude you want to know

[151:01] called go next and give you a little bit more time to finish that out only if she's okay with it call you i think you're up sure i can do that for you tara um i just had one question um and then a list of comments um that i'll make a little bit here and then uh fill out a bit in hotline if needed and it's basically coming back to this question of how to fund some of the one-time costs like the cost of the navigation center facility whenever we decide what that is after these conversations with providers in the community you know the state just passed all this arpa funding for homelessness for substance use for all those cut for housing and so i'm just wondering if that's something that we're kind of looking toward as a way to fund this facility yes in general nicole we would look at other sources uh first

[152:01] um then we would look internally if there's not enough external sources um our local arpa was mentioned so that would be one the council would need to look at that because we already do have trench three our third round of recommendations that council has already made and then if none of those avenues could work out we would look to fund balance after reserve you'll notice that that structurally we don't have any left as the 23 budget is proposed however we do anticipate vacancy savings for 22 and as we approach the end of the year that's another source where we could potentially look at depending on those projections and timing so um i i think based on once we have a little bit better idea on the rough order of magnitude we can begin to pursue some of those avenues awesome thank you yeah i would very much be in favor of using state money rather than city money for that as much as we can um okay moving on to just sort of some general comments then um on the proposed budget and just want to echo everybody's

[153:01] thanks this really is wonderful it is a little challenging to make the transition in this year and you've made it a lot easier for us in this presentation so thank you um i noticed that one of the things in the enhancements was 49 000 to continue the community connectors program which i thought was wonderful and i really just want to emphasize for myself as well as all of us on council let's make sure we're using that feedback because it is a really great investment and a way to get feedback that we normally don't have between the nine of us so just as we're moving forward um the one thing that i wanted to mention i've talked to some staff about this um in the past so this will be a repeat for some of you but as far as the the 373 thousand dollars that's going into community court and creating um some permanence there um i just want to highlight that this is a really kind of staff intensive program um i think it's been you know

[154:00] beneficial in the the degree to which it's been able to connect people to services but um kind of beyond even beyond the navigators it's intensive because the police are going out and giving tickets to people and then people are taking these tickets to community court to get them waived by connecting the service providers and i would really love for us to think about how we can eliminate some of the middlemen in that process because incentivizing people to come to these services in the first place is sort of a faster route and i think it would be a cheaper route to getting people into services than having this ticket and then go and try to get your ticket waived and then connect to services model just eliminating some of that first part and taking people directly to services with the housing and human services i saw there was a 200 000 enhancement going to basic needs i would like us to consider making this a lot more especially around things like rental

[155:00] assistance child care assistance some of the data from service providers like i talked about last week such as effa it's really concerning to me how much greater need people are having and this is a place where an ounce of prevention is really worth a pound of cure investing and the well-being of families and others who are struggling right now will pay dividends for future councils um they won't have quite as much to deal with if we are trying to um keep some families and and folks who are really struggling afloat right now so just something to consider as we um are thinking about this um i was really interested in the um investment and more uh traffic cameras um this seems like a really great thing to me and especially because as i was looking at the budget one of the big sources of um spending for the police department uh looked like traffic violations and patrols were part of that and um to me it seems like if we're putting in place

[156:00] things that will prevent police from needing to do um some of that traffic work then we're getting to a place where more time is freed up for investigating the things like bicycle thefts and catalytic converter thefts that we know are kind of big in our community right now and that are affecting a lot of people um so that was great and i just want to say please more more of that that would be wonderful um i also just wanted to call out folks who've heard me talk about the importance of social infrastructure the arts how important all that is we talk about how wonderful the arts are for our community and how it makes our our city such a wonderful place to be culturally and yet we won't really fund it to a very high level this is a place where a little more funding can go a long way because we're not funding um the arts at very high level so just um something that to think about there um and i just want to kind of echo people's comments about the encampment

[157:01] uh cleanup team um and just know that i've mentioned this to some of you in one-on-one conversations i'm not really excited about getting another encampment team um for five hundred thousand dollars um this was a pilot that we did over the course of about one and a half years the intention was as i understand it to decrease encampments um that doesn't seem to have worked and so i guess my my sort of question for us is why are we investing almost half a million dollars in a program that um has not uh kind of had the success that we were looking for and can we think about some new and innovative ideas to if we're investing in a pilot let's try a pilot but putting in place another team [Music] doesn't feel quite right to me [Music] and then finally just to mark's point uh mark wallach's point looking five to ten councils out um

[158:01] we've got a lot that we're gonna that we're dealing with now that we're gonna have to deal with in the future um air pollution drought extended heat events like we're seeing um a little farther west right now floods fire supply chain issues food supply economic social climate refugees we're going to need a lot more money or we're going to need to prioritize some of the things that we're focused on and as we're thinking about what these key performance indicators may be in the coming years i just want to put in a plug for focusing on things that are going to keep us alive and keep our community safe for as long as possible given what we have ahead of us and i think i would be interested in performance indicators that are helping the community understand that we need to be better at prioritizing the things that are going to keep our community safe and well in the midst of the climate crisis or we really need to think about how we're going to get more money to fund a lot of these things that we're going to need thank you

[159:01] thanks nicole uh tara you're ready i am ready let me pull my hand down oh i'm glad i waited you know nicole because you know i want to comment to your comments first of all i just want to say that i think this budget is amazing and the reason why i think it's amazing and i don't usually get excited about budgets i've never had a budget i'm not good at but living on a budget let's just say but i think this budget is amazing because you captured all the council priorities pretty much all of them it's like a miracle budget but you also capture the community priorities and what i mean by that is we all have different priorities and the thing about priorities is we all think our priorities are the best priorities and everybody should have our priorities but in reality we all have different priorities so what's great about this is if there was a big pizza pie with like 10 toppings on it somehow all the toppings got on there and that was my stab at a metaphor which as you can see i'm obviously really bad

[160:02] at so i'm never gonna do one again um i am gonna say that i would normally give a top five favorites but everything is my favorite so i'm not gonna do that tonight um i will say that what i you know i'm a big fan of sam's because i went and that is the safety and managed spaces because when i did my walk around with them it was an incredible two hours how compassionate and caring but also how much better the grounds look litter-wise when i rode my bike today i saw a lot of cans in the water i don't did people stop putting cans in the garbage i don't understand do they but that's a whole nother story for another day and there was a fair amount of garbage everywhere so for me litter used to be one of our big priorities here in boulder and i would like it to become one again what is great about sam's is that they can keep all that

[161:01] under control and i'm not even saying who's making the litter i just think it is something that is not a great community let's what's the word i want to use somebody give me a word matt it's not a great okay nobody well you know what i'm saying i do want to say one thing that if i did have something that we would spend more money on it would probably be parks because parks has always been you know when you had the three things mark it was like constrained and then what were the other two constrained action and vision right well parks has lately just been under constrained all the time as an example and i know we're all talking about toilets but i would like if ali is actually here for her to explain how much money it actually costs to do one toilet and how vandalized they get and how almost impo possible it is to actually

[162:01] fix said toilet so when it comes to budgeting um ali can you explain i am actually here i'm ali rhodes i'm the director of parks and recreation um tara your question was about a restroom so our recent costing the installation fully loaded of a restroom if it's a prefab unit whether it's one of the typical ones like we just installed at ninth and canyon or east boulder community park or if we were to explore some of the newer models that stand up better to more urban uses we're looking at about a half a million dollars and then as cara showed my favorite slide tonight was one the one where they talked about ongoing and and one time costs for a capital expenditure there are ongoing costs to operate a restroom our average right now without vandalism is about 40 000 a year um what tara is referencing is what we're seeing in boulder is what my colleagues across the country are seeing the world is angry

[163:00] and they are taking it out on their parks and their bathrooms and we are spending a significant amount of money on vandalism you'll see it likely in atb 2 unless we find money elsewhere and so these results in a loss of the service for the entire community the supply and chain issues are making it even more challenging as our friends downtown are aware um yeah so it's pretty complicated the 10 the 10-year fully loaded cost of a restroom in a park is about a million dollars i'm not saying we shouldn't have them i just i'm saying that we should we need to budget in for all that um wasn't there recently vandalism at north boulder park didn't somebody bash the entire bathroom in for some reason or am i wrong um at foothills community park the toilet i don't know what they did but they were in thousands of pieces the toilets so so you know just so we keep that in mind for our budget and i just want to end with thanks ali director of parks i just want to end

[164:01] with saying that i would hope that we would keep this budget as it is or close because i really do think that it satisfies everybody a little bit and there's no such thing as everybody being completely happy but there's a lot to be said for most people being pretty happy that's what i'm going to say is that it tara wait let me just think hold on hold on hold on and if i said anything offensive tonight i'd definitely take it back and i didn't mean it ahead of time so um i think that all this nicole's left i think in terms of safe and managed spaces that all people all people likes to be feel safe and to have clean spaces so i feel like this is a community um value for everyone now i'm done thank you tara uh juni thank you so much um

[165:00] i think uh tara i have the same fear as you uh having this discussion because uh community members care deeply about the budget and how we spend money um so they may not always agree with uh what we say but um so i have a question can we go back and make some of these changes and for reallocation because i think a few of us mentioned increases and i'm wondering where is that money going to come yeah that's a good question uh juni so the process that we're proposing is essentially offering us up as assistance for council for those potential changes so that structurally we can help provide some options because you're right it's not as straightforward as okay we can add x and that that'll be the change it will have to come with some degree a trade-off um that's not to

[166:01] say there's no flexibility but we do want to be able to provide those options and then once we have that that option for you that's what we're suggesting to be posted out there so that we know um so everybody knows what we're preparing to possibly change on october 6 when we consider the first reading okay thank you and i think we only have one actually which is the one on the 20th and then we have one after that um well here's my thought i agree with aaron increasing uh funds for cleaning up also increasing the funds for enhancement for housing so i agree with nicole on that one as well um there was a comment made about the community engagement in the community connectors i do agree that having more community engagement with and everything that we do is extremely

[167:00] important but i'm wondering if i'm a little bit concerned that at this late stage having community connectors involved in the process right now feel a bit superficial because again we want community members to be involved in the things that we do at the beginning stage as opposed to at the end because i think a lot of times community members especially if you're from a marginalized community a lot of times you're invited to the table after everything has been set and you only essentially just doing a check mark so i feel like that might be a little bit inappropriate so i think think in the future how do we embed these community connectors into more like departmental processes so before the budget came before the committee or before council they are already part of that process as opposed to waiting to the very end when it's essentially an approval process and we're bringing community connectors in

[168:01] um also i want to say i appreciate the level of transparency the city staff has shown us which will be possible through opengov so great job to that and also i think i want to reiterate what nicole said about the arts um i've talked with community members i think it's so important that we fund arts programming and also that we ensure that people in the community have a place to express themselves and my understanding here in boulder there's a lot of small organizations and non-profits that are doing a great job and also there are places on cu campus where people can rent but nonetheless it's just we don't have a really a community center or an arts center where people can go so that is something you know eventually as a city that we have to really work hard at closing this gap and finding ensuring that you know people who are artists have a place to express themselves because the arts

[169:01] community is so important to all of us and we also will have the opportunity to get some funding hopefully the ballot library ballot measure pass and maybe that's one place we can take a look and see whether that's where we can put that money toward ensuring that there is that building that you know artists can go where they can express themselves so thank you for a great job i really think as a cd we're doing a we're doing we're doing great i just think i'm just so happy and pleased with the budget and where it's going thank you thanks judy rachel and then um i'll make my final comments i just wanted to call out one line item that i don't know um if anyone called it out previously but i think it's the first year that we're going to dedicate some money to providing legal aid for immigrants and i'm really as as someone who has provided pro bono legal aid service um

[170:00] to immigrants in need i was really delighted to see that i think that might be something that nuria championed i don't know who else to thank for that but kudos to staff for adding that in um and then you know in terms of where we might include in community connectors who i agree it would have been great to have input earlier on is the only place that that i heard some division here um is probably on the the encampment cleanups so if there is time in the next few weeks just to get their impression and feedback on that that might be useful um for us to hear before we make our decision um and i don't think it's like a an invite it's a specific here's a spot where we could use input specific from uh community members whose input we deeply value so i would be interested in that in terms of just the encampment team doubling um of the budget there so thanks for a great presentation and thanks bob for knocking it out of the

[171:00] park we might yet get out at 9. i take more than 14 minutes we won't but i won't take more than 14 minutes uh first of all um it's nice it's nice to go at the end because um with eight brilliant colleagues um you all have said great things and many of the things that i would have said so thank you all for your comments and and i think we've all thanked staff and i will reiterate that thanks on behalf of all of us that uh we wonderful presentation you really made life easy for us we still have tough decisions as tara said we all have different uh toppings we'd like to see on our pizza and the pizza is only so big um like like some of you i'll probably reserve any specific comments to hotline over the next week or two um but i also recognize what mark said which is this is zero sum so we can all say what these we'd like to see more money for a or b or c which means that x or y or z needs to have less money and so um i think it's a little dangerous i'll just express my opinion i think it's a little dangerous for us to go too far down that

[172:00] path because there are literally thousands probably tens of thousands of hours of staff work not just the budget staff but all these departments who have negotiated amongst themselves and come up with a with a package that they all seemingly can live with and then for us to come through and say we need to have more of this and less of that um seems to maybe be somewhat disrespectful of the work that's gone through so while i think we all can share our opinions and we all hear from constituents in the community i i for one i'm going to be very careful about what i suggest we add because um uh you know whatever i throw out there's gonna is gonna be damaging to some other uh other other appropriate budget um i will um say that i completely agree with aaron on our success in an area congratulations this is something that jane wanted for years and years to get 20 reserve and as you all heard not only is that the right thing to do from a financial stability and security standpoint it

[173:00] also saves us money we get a aaa bond rating and we can borrow money at the cheapest cheapest level and that saves us money which allows us then to invest in some of these other things that we heard about tonight so let's not whatever we do let's not dip into our reserve and never fall below that 20 threshold it took us a long time to get here and kova tripped us up a little bit and now that we've achieved it let's never let's never backslide um i agree with matt that um to the extent that that staff does hear from council members on some additional priorities that folks would like to see and if it's if it is zero sum and you just can't really um increase you know you can't pay peter without robin paul you know one thing that you guys might think about in the budget group and i'm sure you've already thought of this already is is trying to prioritize some of the things that you'd like to do or your colleagues on staff would like to do work or the things you hear from council that we'd like to do really prioritizing them as you look to the next couple of adjustments to base as matt suggested so we won't be able to

[174:00] necessarily stuff everything into this budget but um we invariably conservatively estimate and i appreciate that and my guess is we'll have some pleasant surprises as we close out this year and we didn't spend necessarily all the salaries that we had budgeted and then um and then revenues tend to be a little bit better than we forecast i hope that continues and so as we um as we find money so to speak in the first and second quarter i hope that um as matt suggested we do some adjustments to base and maybe pick up some of these things at least mid-year um then i'll just make a close my comments with a kind of a philosophical statement one thing that really has troubled me for as long as i've been on council long before that is how dependent the city is on sales tax um when you hear that that 50 of our effect of our budget comes from sales tax only 15 percent comes from property tax i think that's a very very dangerous situation to be in and we went through a very tough recession in 2003 we went through a tough recession in 2008 we went through actually a surprisingly mild recession

[175:00] during the pandemic but every time we have an economic downturn i mean it's just lived by the sword die by the sword and when times are good they're really really good and when times are bad they're really really bad and we have communities around us both in this state and across the country that have a a more healthy mix of property tax and sales tax of course property tax tends to be very stable um it's less regressive um and when things turn down property taxes tend not to turn down or if they do turn down you have lots and lots of advanced notes usually a year or two sales tax they turn off like that and and then you're hurt as we were back in 2020 and 2021 and in prior recessions so this is a very global comment this is not something that any of us will fix what during our terms on council this is a 5 10 20 year consideration but i hope we've had a number of blue ribbon commissions who have helped us think through what a big picture philosophically the city should be doing um and i hope the next blue ribbon commission whenever that is seated

[176:01] really helps us figure out how do we shift our balance um away from sales tax and towards property tax which is much more stable which is much less regressive and and and puts us in a much safer situation so that we don't have to cut services as we did a couple of years ago and in the past when sales tax dries up especially in a town like boulder where something like a third to forty percent of our sales tax is paid by visitors uh i mean not only are we dependent on sales tax we're dependent on sales tax by people who come to see us when you have a big economic downturn or pandemic people just don't stop coming and that really really hurts and i don't think that's a sustainable model so i'd like to again we're not gonna fix this problem next year or three years from now or five years from now but i would really uh urge uh future councils to take a close look at that and figure out how we can be in a more stable and sustainable fashion uh that's all i have aaron i see if you had want to bring us home well just it was one little tiny thing i just all of you said uh eloquent and

[177:02] valuable things about the budget i just wanted to give the quick plus one to lauren's statement about making sure pnds has the staff they need to deal with the proposals and applications coming in because we do hear a lot of it from the community about challenges with timeline just that one plus one and then uh just fantastic work everybody and looking forward to getting this done great thanks for that closing comment erin any anybody else have any final things to say i know we're all gonna have an opportunity hotline post um and hopefully someone on staff will will uh uh bug us once or twice between now on the 23rd so we don't wake up on the morning 24th and realize we didn't put something in there nuria do you have a comment to wrap us up hopefully a closing comment right and i just you know i can't speak enough uh great things as you know about the finance team and and under the leadership of kara and mark and all the team that's behind them doing this work and behind them are departments that are being really thoughtful about what they're trying to bring forward and doing some really hard work as well um but a i wanted to say this is really

[178:01] great feedback for us as we move forward and i'm just so appreciative of your thoughtfulness as we move forward and um i really encourage you all to let us know with your hotline post so that we can then respond and um provide those consistent responses in writing to all of you and so really encourage that is the place to do that and i know that marcus put out a deadline of september 23rd so just want to lift that up again and then my final comment so um i don't run afoul of your nine o'clock timetable is um a i'm i'm so glad you brought that bob about what you're thinking about in terms of thinking i mean that may be my challenge where the um so appreciative of past leaders uh and jane specifically about looking at reserves but certainly taking a look at where our funding comes from is an important part and then the other thing to mark's question and it's sort of tied to that is when we think about all our unmet needs and all our wish lists and all our desires and every year new things come up that are great ideas

[179:01] that cost money and what i'm hoping and i know the budget team will be working on as we eventually mature in our budgeting process and get those kpis in not only will be able to sort of tie what we're spending to are we actually doing the right things are we seeing the um the outcomes that we want to see but i also hope that it will help us not just with prioritization but help us tell what we can stop doing and i say that really deliberately because cities don't do that enough right cities don't look at what they're doing because they just carry over a lot of what they've done in the past and and then it becomes additive and budgets can't always be additive when we have all these unmet needs that are piling up as well but that's hard to do when you don't have metrics and so i'm really excited that as we have metrics we'll be able to come to you and have a different kind of conversation in a few years about let's actually now get real about where do you really want us to spend those dollars where's the best appropriate place to use those because there could be things

[180:00] that we aren't getting enough um positive outcomes on anymore that we can think about differently so that to me is really the importance of kpis and data driven decisions and i really look forward to that future conversation with you all as well well thank you neri and if there's nothing else from from council colleagues i think we stand adjourned at 8 55 and mark you owe me a beer you know i was going to offer 17 comments and questions to get a 901 but i'm gonna i'll do this the right way i owe you a beer everyone have a good accomplish that in one question mark just fresh now for six minutes i've heard you go everyone have a great night we'll we'll see everyone uh a week thank you thank you so much [Music] do

[181:03] [Music] you