April 18, 2024 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[4:12] hey everybody hi n just checking to see if you can hear me not that I need to speak today e

[5:11] yall quied down quick all right well good evening everyone and welcome to the April 18th 2024 meeting of the Boulder City Council and we are back in City cha uh council chambers after a few weeks off for renovations with some new audio and video equipment um and we may need adjustment time as we learn the new system so we'll be fine-tuning as we go along so please give us a little grace and patience but before we get into the meeting I want to give a huge thank you to the folks who are responsible for this renovation so the project was managed by Nick Joseph and was worked on by Ryan albaher Don muli Paco hyam Alexa Landis and Sam View cavic and our contractor was Ford AV so big thank you to everyone involved in that project

[6:00] and with that I will go ahead and call our meeting to order and ask Elish to do our roll call please let me remember where my button is all right we'll start tonight roll call as usual with council member Adams present Benjamin present mayor bronet present council member vrts present Maris here shoard here mayor protim spear president council member wallik is absent and council member Wier present mayor we have our Corel thanks so much Elicia and if we could start with a motion to amend the agenda to add item 1 c a public safety power shut off discussion with Excel Energy so moved second got a motion in second all in favor raise your hand that's unanimous the agenda is amended and so now we're going to go into our first agenda item which is item

[7:01] 1A an Earth Day declaration presented by council member Adams taish if you would please thank you mayor all right every year on April 22nd we celebrate our national environment our natural environment and bring awareness to the ongoing need to build more resilient systems that protect our community from the threats of climate change from the 2013 floods to the 2021 Marshal fire we have already felt climate change in Boulder communities across the world are forced to confront dangerous climate events the most severe damage is sustained in the least resilient places deepening disparities and weakening already vulnerable communities this hurt has been inflicted by human systems that extract degrade and harm our planet Humanity has a practical and ethical obligation to to

[8:00] redefine redesign and recover a healthy relationship with the natural world our community has a legacy of adaptive leadership and taking a holistic approach to climate action we were some of the we were some of the first in the nation to trailblaze efforts like curbside recycling and Municipal carbon taxes on electricity our ambitious Citywide climate goals are set pursued and period Aly updated in accordance with scientific consensus on the level of carbon reduction needed to stabilize the planet to meet these goals our climate initiatives department has evolved their work into three key action areas Energy Systems circular economy and the nature-based climate Solutions regionally we collaboratively launched and continued to co-lead a Vanguard group called Colorado communities for climate action this Coalition of 42 local government sets aggressive targets

[9:02] and networks with other judici uh jurisdictions to share best practices and Advance the field at the state level our city leaders collaborate year after year to advance policies that grow green jobs Empower local approaches improve how we handle materials and identify and build complimentary Solutions Beyond Colorado Boulder is an active member of several consortiums of City governments such as the urban sustainability director's Network the local governments for sustainability and the carbon neutral cities Alliance our threats have no boundaries and no borders nor does our commitment to Solutions we the city of the city of Boulder declare April 22nd 2024 as Earth Day and urge the community to celebrate the environments we call home and to share the city's efforts to slow climate

[10:00] change and build a more resilient and Equitable Community thank you thank you TAA all right our next item is 1B which is National volunteer Appreciation Week declaration to be presented by myself and if I could invite Brian wigner and Jay Bowser up to the Das to receive the Declaration please all the way up this the first time we've had a real microphone in uh in my 10 to eight years on Council so this is very exciting as well all right National volunteer appreciation week April 21st to 27 2024 in 2023 more than 4,000 volunteers contributed over 54,000 hours of service to the well-being of the Boulder Community the generosity and dedication of the city's volunteers make a significant impact in Boulder that

[11:01] cannot be overstated there are many worthy causes to which people can dedicate their time talents and energy and the Boulder City Council recognizes with gratitude the many volunteers that have chosen to give back to their community in this way volunteers provide incredible support to the city in many ways volunteers enhance Community connections have a profound impact on Mental Health build new trails support the health of our community and so much more including maintaining the beds in Admiral Burke Park you so ably do Jay thanks for that and time is one of the most valuable gifts that one can give and for that we are deeply grateful community members are encouraged to look around for the thank you banners and signs that have been posted in different spots around town the Boulder City Council hopes that every time volunteers see these signs they will feel seen and understand the depth of the community's appreciations for all that they do and so with that we the city council of the city of Boulder Colorado declare April 21st to the 27th 201 24 as National

[12:00] volunteer Appreciation Week very Round of Applause for that please and and Brian if we'll get to that Brian if only during declarations is actually our rules uh Brian would you like to say a couple words yeah yeah thank you mayor Brockett and thank you Council for this um this declaration um as one of the staff members that gets to work with volunteers day in and day out I share appreciation for their dedication uh since um the pandemic uh year-over-year we've seen volunteers come back and serve um we had more volunteers come back year-over-year and we've had more hours served year-over-year um that 54,000 hours equates to just about 2 million dollars in value to the city of Boulder um in addition to all of the social benefits that you mentioned in the Declaration so I just want to say thank you um to all of our volunteers and I'm going to share um pass the mic off to Jay um as mentioned Jay you can find him volunteering at Admiral a burke Park um

[13:01] taking care of some of the flower beds uh and the grounds there so thank you Brian Adam um I'm delighted to be here on behalf of the Military Officers Association of America that's a National Organization representing mostly retired Military Officers we're the boulder chapter named after Arley Burke a boulder native World War II hero um that is commemorated by the park named for him over by Frasier Meadow and we volunteer there year after year to maintain the flower beds in the spring we plant annuals in the fall we rip them out um we love doing it um we get about five or six

[14:00] members uh each year to do that uh they enjoy it time is not a issue we're mostly retired um I just want to mention the Admiral Arley ber Park was a project a partnership between our chapter here in Boulder and the city of Boulder 22 years ago we we worked with the city to create that interpretive display that memorial for Admiral Burke um and so our participation uh with the city goes Way Beyond just volunteering to maintain the flower bed and we're happy to do it thank you very much thank you Jay right

[15:06] run back to my spot here and now we'll go to item 1 C the public safety power shut off discussion with Excel Energy and I'd like to invite uh ify Jennings our Boulder area Excel representative to get this started for us if you could please iffy good evening yeah good evening Mr Mayor and members of council my name is iffy Jennings and and I serve as the community local government Affairs manager for Boulder County from Excel Energy um as you know our organization with the city operates on a a partnership and under that partnership is a governance structure that includes an executive committee and on that executive committee are um executive leaders from the organization tonight I have with me accompanied with me tonight is um two members from that executive committee Mr Andrew Holder who is the director of community relations and Mr Robert Kenny who is the PS president I would like to now um invite Mr Kenny

[16:01] to share his insights um on the recent win events and respond to any questions that Council has at the time thank you good evening can you hear me well ify thank you very much Andrew thanks for being here Mr Mayor and Madame mayor protm members of the council thank you for this opportunity to uh be here with you and allowing us to speak I'm Robert Kenny I'm the president of Public Service Company of Colorado and I have the privilege of leading Excel energies operations here in the state of Colorado just a very brief intro of myself not to give you my resume but just to give you some insight into who I am and what I stand for so I I joined Public Service Company at Colorado in June of 2022 um prior to that I was at Pacific Gas and Electric Company for seven years leading uh Regulatory and external affairs so federal state uh Regulatory

[17:01] Affairs and governmental Affairs at the local and state level and I was uh at pg& during much of the Wildfire experience in Northern California I am originally from St Louis Missouri and I've been a lawyer in private practice in the public sector and in the private sector and had the privilege of serving on the state Public Utilities Commission in Missouri as well and so my my experience here is informed by all of those experiences having been in the private the public sector and then having had some experience uh leading a utility during Wildfire uh circumstances in California so safety is the company's and my top priority and it's the safety of our customers as well as as well as the safety of our communities and our co-workers we know that Wildfire risk is rapidly evolving and changing primarily driven by climate change the risk today is greater than the the risk even a year

[18:00] two years three years ago winds are more intense conditions are drier driven by drought both in the atmosphere and on the ground and as that risk continues to evolve so too are the mitigations that we have to apply to mitigate that risk so first I want to just publicly acknowledge we know we have opportunities to strengthen and improve our Communications with our customers with our communities with critical facilities and First Responders we've heard that feedback loudly and clearly and I suspect we'll hear more of it tonight second I just want to maybe give a little bit more insight into the criteria that we applied I know Colorado Boulder are no strangers to high winds the high winds that we were experiencing on April 6th and leading up to the high wind events were in excess of what is even normally experienced and so we have um evidence that show that there were 96 97 98 m per per hour winds and in some places even

[19:01] in excess of 100 miles per hour but that's not the only criteria that we applied we also look at the atmospheric humidity and so the relative humidity in the air and then we look at the humidity and the fuel moisture and so that's the the dryness of the fuel on the ground the grasses the vegetation um and that those criteria taken together we're able to use uh Wildfire modeling software that is able to predict the prob probability of an ignition happening and then the potential consequence and spread of that ignition if one is to happen and so you can imagine with 100 m per hour winds you not only have uh the risk of your equipment snapping in half which we've seen but you also have the risk of vegetation and other items blowing into your equipment and causing that equipment to fail and drop to the ground ignite a fire and then the risk of that fire spreading rapidly because of the nature of that high wind the third item that I want to just

[20:01] really briefly touch on is the restoration process and because we've heard a lot about the estimated times of restoration and the inability to provide accurate restoration times part of the challenge with providing definitive times of restoration has to do with the fact that when we de-energize a line or when a line is damaged by virtue of high winds we can't re-energize that line until we've actually physically inspected the line either by one of our Frontline workers walking the line or through the use of drones and helicopters and we employ all of those but as you might imagine we can't fly drones and helicopters in the high wind and we can't have our line workers out inspecting the lines until the wind event has concluded and so what we saw on April 6th and 7th was that the expectation was that that wind event would begin at 3M on Saturday and would last until noon on Sunday so it was always the case that we weren't going to be able to begin inspecting the lines until the wind event passed and so it

[21:02] was never the case that power would be restored through a flip of the switch at noon on Sunday and as you might imagine the rationale behind that is if a line during the wind event had been damaged and had fallen to the ground if we were to re-energize that line without having inspected it then you create a wildfire risk and so that's why the restoration time takes as long as it takes we had over 600 miles of line that needed to be inspected visually either by drone helicopter or uh walking that line fourth I want to just talk about what we're going to do to go going forward I I did have the opportunity to listen to the public comment at the Colorado Public Utilities Commission didn't listen to all three hours yet but I will um but I had the opportunity to listen and I think we have significant opportunity to partner with other uh Community organizations particularly those that are working with uh vulnerable customers that rely on medical equipment and so we have an expectation that we will file an updated

[22:00] Wildfire mitigation plan with the commission that Wildfire mitigation plan will describe our efforts to bolster our Public Safety power shut off program it will describe our efforts to work closely with Community organizations to protect the most vulnerable customers the point that I really want to make is that we recognize that when you de energize a line you're potentially creating ancillary and additional risks we can't take this tool out of the toolbox for all the reasons that I just cited with the nature of evolving Wildfire risk but we can mitigate those ancillary risks and so we will be working closely with First Responders with our County Emergency Management personnel and with other organizations that we haven't even yet identified um to make sure that we're doing all that we can to protect those other customers um we are going to be announcing shortly here that we will be making a $50,000 donation to Community Food share um as an effort to really recognize the hardship that was caused to some of our food Banks and so we will be doing that um and again I was able to

[23:02] listen to some of the CPU and recognize that there are organizations like the center for inclusive design and engineers and C Colorado cross disability Coalition that we can partner with to potentially work more closely with to help our customers that are on durable medical equipment finally based on what we've seen and by that I mean what we've heard from our Frontline workers that have inspected the lines photo graphic evidence that we've seen of the damage of trees falling into our lines poles that were snapped by the high winds we do remain confident that we made the right decision to De energize the lines it's impossible to prove a negative but one can logically conclude from what we've seen that had we not deenergized the lines we could have seen a wildfire ignite and so Public Safety is our job one um and that's we're confident that we prevented a wildfire from happening with that I welcome your questions and and look forward for to hearing comments from the

[24:00] community Mr Kenny thanks so much for joining us today and for that explanation really appreciate you you taking the time to be with us here um and I'll look to to my colleagues to see if folks have any questions I have a few but I'll look to other people first here hey there hello I'm from the East Coast so I apologize ahead of time if I'm sarcastic or have any of that East Coast thing don't take it personally thanks okay you know Shanahan Ridge and the Wildland Urban interface had their power on but yet East Boulder and our business community in Pearl Street nowhere near the Wildland uh Urban interface had their power shut off the community wants to know why you would do that I personally live very close to the I had my power on the whole time and I live very close to the uh the wooi so that's question number one cuz if felt random to a lot of people so and we've heard that feedback

[25:02] that even you know customers that were on one side of the street saw their power deenergized and others did not so I'll say a couple things we had the 55,000 uh customers that we proactively deenergized we had in excess of 194,000 additional customers who lost power by virtue of trees blowing into their lines and so some outages may have been attributable to the proactive deenergization there may have been outages that were attributable to the Windstorm generally why why specific feeders may or may not have been turned off would have to do with the modeling software that we applied so I can't speak to your specific circumstance of why your power was not turned off and why others were what I can tell you is that we employ modeling software that told us where the highest risk was and that's where we attempted to drisk the most we also have well let me let me pause there you you seem not convinced by I'm totally not convinced because the people's power who was still on were on the that Wildland Urban interface that's

[26:03] where the were on or what feeder they were on and all across okay so starting from South Boulder all all where the O open space is those power that power was all left on and some of the highest winds are in Shanahan Ridge area and the power there was on and by high winds it's often 100 miles an hour up there so this was not the first time so it isn't just it was so odd I know there's a lot of wrestling in here it was so odd for the community to see that that people are finding it hard to believe that it was well thought through or that it was even thought through it felt very random well I I do appreciate that it felt that way but I can assure you that it wasn't random it was based upon the high winds coupled with the atmospheric humidity coupled with the ground humidity I I would like to look more into the specific circumstance that you're describing I don't know if they had a combination of overhead and underground line lines I don't know what the fuel moisture is up there so I I

[27:00] would like to do more research because I can't I can't speak intelligently to it specifically without knowing more about it um I will also tell you that separate and apart from Public Safety power shut off the the proactive folks if we could stay quiet please in the audience and also try to avoid the moving around and blocking people sight lines and such and I'll okay um so if you can please not talk Hey everybody please please no no speaking if we could have quiet in the chambers he call me an idiot quiet in the chambers please hey hey all right we need qu we're gonna have to clear Chambers if we don't have quiet in the room I'm ask I'm asking for quiet quiet um if you pick up where you were I left

[28:00] additional point that I wanted to make was that in addition to the proactive energization again this was the first time that we had applied that mitigation here in Colorado we've set our setting so we do wild fire safety settings which means we have reclosers on our power lines I'll try to explain this in a non I'm not a I'm a lawyer I'm not an engineer but I'll try to explain this as as in a non-engineering way we have what are called reclosers on our line and so typically what a recloser does if there is a something that touches the line it will cause the um the the circuit will open and the it will automatically reclose and that will typically happen three times to re-energize the line so that you only experience a momentary outage we have adjusted the settings on our lines so that they don't automatically reclose after that one touch so it's called a one-hot setting or disabling of automatic reclosing that's another setting that we apply that it's not doesn't require proactive

[29:01] deenergization but it also helps mitigate Wildfire risk and it could be that we've applied those Wildfire safety settings and um where we didn't do proactive deenergization I'm not sure what you said but I'll move on um my next question is is we knew that wind event was coming for days before nobody here that I knew knew that it took two to three days to turn that the power back on I don't know anybody that knew that not the city not the business owners a lot of people lost a whole lot of money so first of all in the business community and there local businesses that cannot afford to shut down for three days during their their big weekend in the spring so I'm wondering if first of all you would consider helping the small businesses that suffered so much never mind Co this was like you know the next thing that they have to deal with right now and then the other thing I have to ask is did you know did you really know that it would take two to three days for the

[30:00] power to go on and if you did why didn't we so I'll answer your your last question first you how did we know how long it was going to take I'll say this we began our notifications Friday night and and again this is not an excuse but an explanation it was the first time that we were applying this mitigation we wanted to be thoughtful we wanted to be deliberate and we wanted to make sure that we were making the right decision so we did spend a lot of time making sure that this was the right mitigation to apply I mentioned already that we had disabled automatically automatic reclosing based upon what we were seeing with all three of those criteria that I described we made the decision that proactive deenergization was going to be necessary in this limited circumstance in this limited part of our service territory so we knew that we were going to do this Saturday morning we that's when we made the decision the go noo decision Friday night we did notify customers that this was a possibility that we were contemplating Saturday morning we saw the wind

[31:00] conditions persisting and we had more precise weather data and that's when we made the decision that it was going to be a go and so we notified all of our customers that we were actually going to do it we did not know at that time how long it was going to take and the reason we didn't know is because two things you got 600 miles of line that you have to patrol it's and we started pre-positioning cruise to be ready so that once the wind event was concluded we would be able to immediately begin the inspections and to begin the restoration but it was difficult to be able to predict an estimated time of restoration because you don't know what you have to repair until you're out there walking the lines and seeing it I will concede uh council member that we have an opportunity to have more accurate outage maps we've heard that very loudly and clearly um customers that weren't what they were seeing was not matching up with what they were seeing on the website so we do have an opportunity there um and an opportunity to be more frequent in our Communications throughout the event but it's very difficult to to estimate a

[32:00] time of restoration until you actually see the damage that has occurred and then um you know we do recognize that Robert I'm going to just interrupt you for a second I've heard from the Fire Marshall that we need to have no one in the aisles blocking potential movement so if you could either be in a seat or be up against the sidewalls please so that you're not blocking any potential movement of people who need to get in or out that's that's from the Fire Marshall fire chief all right thanks for complying with safety rules appreciate that uh if you could continue please so you recognizing that particularly given this is our first experience with applying this mitigation that's part of the reason we've made the $50,000 donation to the food bank uh we're not ruling

[33:00] anything else out and we'll give some consideration to other ways in which we can help our communities I think I'll okay um speak uh a lot of community members wanted to know why it was that those that had undergrounded fight uh undergrounded lines were the ones they felt that had their power out the longest um I don't know that to be the case and so I can't really I I don't know how to answer that question and speculate about it I I can tell you that you know about 40% of the lines in Boulder are underground so that means 50% of them are not 56% I think approximately and it could be the case that some folks had underground power lines one of the this is not explicitly in your question council member but it's implicit people that had underground power lines asking why did my power go out and it could be that they were on a circuit that was partially undergrounded and partially overhead overhead but without having specific service addresses I can't really answer the

[34:01] question that's that's fair and U the next thing I want to ask I think this is the final thing because I'm sure my colleagues have plenty of more questions is um where is that last question sorry sorry folks so you said you would consider a compensation fund for businesses is that correct no I did not say that I said we consider other ways in which we might be able to help our customers in our did you know about our water treatment Pro Center uh our water treatment issue our water treatment plant I I'm very familiar with this talking to Mike chard in in real time the night of the event and we're working very hard to make sure that we didn't cause a public safety incident we were able to get the uh water treatment plant re-energized right but I'm just going to throw this out there that you should have known that that was going to happen as a our utility I feel you should have known I

[35:00] mean you you were the ones that put those power lines in did you not yes okay so the question is is why didn't you know why should the city have to be the one that has to tell you that we're about to have raw sewage go into U Boulder Creek so I think there's two questions in there I I will say you know again we've conceded that we have opportunities to improve our Comm Communications both with our customers and critical facilities and you know we're aware of our infrastructure and how our infrastructure operates I'm not confident that I'm familiar with how water treatment facility functions and operates but once we were made aware of it we worked very quickly to make sure that we didn't cause a public safety incident do you mind if I follow up on that yeah just thanks for that and while we're just talking about the wastewater treatment plant um I'm hoping we can focus on you know this is probably going to happen again and so you know what protocols to for

[36:01] that for critical facilities and particularly the one top of mine right now is that plan can we apply differently to make sure you know we're not in the same situation in the future so I think that's a excellent question mayor and two things I'll say you you said it's you're certain this is going to happen again our goal is to make sure that this is as infrequent as possible and so we have a whole host of mitigations that we intend to apply system hardening and strengthening which can include replacing bare conductor with covered conductor looking at strengthening our poles by using different kinds of poles undergrounding more where it makes sense and so we have a whole host of mitigations that we want to apply and we want to make sure that PSPs Public Safety power shut offs when it does happen that it happens in frequently that we have better Communications on the front better in and earlier Communications more frequent and accurate outage maps um and we want to make sure that putting in mitigations to help mitigate those ancillary risks

[37:00] that we discussed so one of the things I think we have an opportunity to do is to make sure we have better communication protocols particularly and specifically with critical infrastructure and that is an opportunity that I suspect that you will see outlined in our next Wildfire mitigation plan thanks for that I heard you talk primarily just now about communication and Al also was wanted to talk about how we could avoid having both of those substations cut off again in the future like do you think that's something that we can avoid so here's here's what I'll say I know that we've got there there's you're talking about a very specific circumstance relative to the substation in the agreement that we made some years ago and we put in two substations and I think that was that that redundancy was required and I think there are other critical facilities that have redundancy as well like hospitals and I know Dia does as well I think um you know you have redundancy and then you have belt an suspenders so I I would not necessarily rule out the notion of having backup generation in addition to to to um being fed by two substations so

[38:01] I think that's a conversation we should have um I know that I'm I'm understanding and I've come to understand that there were certain expectations of the wastewater treatment facility based upon those two substations being fed um I would I would maybe think through whether and to what extent such a critical piece of infrastructure should have additional backup generation as well and so I think that's a conversation to have um and I think we can have that conversation starting now appreciate that we're certainly investigating the options uh I've got Tina up next hi um thank you for coming and for joining us um I just had a couple questions that really follows on what you were just talking about around mitigation and um My Hope Is that we can obviously avoid shutdowns and after this event do you feel that you'll be increasing efforts for mitigation whether it is having um more undergrounding of wires or other efforts is this something that we'll see a lot more focus on and we can start putting a

[39:01] timeline to where we get to something like 90% of our lines are resilient so I think the question is well let me just say yes I don't want to say there's G to be more focus on it because we're we're very focused on it already um and as I was indicating a you know significant 40 some odd percent of the power lines in Boulder are underground we have an approved Wildfire mitigation plan at the commission that we're operating against now and so we are doing and taking efforts currently to harden our system and make it more resilient so that effort will continue I think what we will see in our next iteration of our Wildfire perhaps an acceleration of that but I think that um I don't I don't want you to be left with the impression that we're not already focused on undergrounding on system hardening and strengthening um and if there are other opportunities to do more of that more quickly happy to have that conversation

[40:01] as well thank you one one thing to to keep in mind that I that I do want to just note is that you know undergrounding is three times more expensive than putting in overhead lines and so historically we've undergrounded for Aesthetics not for necessarily resiliency and Wildfire mitigation and so um it's it is a it's it's an evolving mechanism that that we use to avoid and mitigate Wildfire risk but it's not free and it's three times more expensive and it depends on the topography and the geography of where you're doing it it could be even more expensive than that and so that's that's something to keep in mind as well I've got Matt and then Taisha appreciate that Aon um so I got a couple questions thematically one kind of going how we got here and a couple in terms of how we're going forward um the first one is you know knowing you spent seven years at PG&E and I I guess really my question is after the Marshall fire I

[41:00] I'm wondering how was how did we get to a place or or when were we thinking that PSPs would be implemented we we we knew we're in a highwind environment Marshall fire was a lesson for all of us and so I'm just sort of wondering how how come like a California pg& model that they started in 2010 more or less how are we not accelerating the implementation of that and I think you probably have first you certainly have firsthand knowledge of how that was implemented and so that's really a question is how was that not done over the last two years and then certainly is that what we can expect going forward is that we're going to see kind of a that pg& model where they're at phase three right now in implementation can we expect that because I think hearing the things of like well we're working on this we're working on that we're trying to improve Communications but I think the community what does that look like because I look at the stuff that's happening with PG and it's a very clear communication process you know there there's regular calls with critical infrastructure sometimes weekly and so those are things where those gaps aren't lost and so I'm wondering one how is that not done up

[42:01] until this point and two can we expect to go to that model and how quickly so two things I'll say I think P gen's first PSPs was in 2018 not not 2010 so they one but nonetheless they've they've had a lot of experience doing it and that's true I think the goal there as is the goal here is to make that a tool of Last Resort so I do think it's a tool that will remain in the toolbox but I think your your other question is why aren't we further along and I'll say this I said that the the risk in Colorado was not the same as the risk in California and so I would that risk has evolved and I'd say even the risk in Northern California was not the same as the risk in Southern California I mean the Diablo winds in Northern California are really what spurred the uh increased Wildfire risk in Northern California the Santa Ana winds in Southern California had persisted since 2007 and they had in San Diego Gas and Electric and SE had a

[43:01] more advanced Wildfire mitigation plan than did pg& because the circumstances dictated it and so I would I would say that we this is a tool of Last Resort this was the first instance in which we had seen the risk being such that we needed to do it um I don't I don't want to and I just want to be clear our equipment Didn't Start The Marshall fire and that's I just wanted felt wasn't making that assump just in terms of a community l an event that that scared us all straight and then and then your last question is can we expect to evolve to that model I certainly want us to evolve to the model where we have earlier and more advanced not notifications I think 48 to 72 hours has become kind of the standard being able to uh make that shorter so that we can accelerate our estimated times of restoration that is what we want to work toward um but my my primary goal is to make sure that we do this in fre as possible and and I will tell you we will we are in a hurry to correct the and

[44:04] take advantage of the opportunities for improvement that we've identified from this last PSPs event and you will see the learning from that show up in our next Wildfire mitigation plan and we we're moving with all deliberate speed appreciate that and sort of my last question will be you know um you know spring and sort of you know fall into winter are kind of our bigger wind season and so I think you know the question is what can we reasonably expect to have implemented or modified come the sort of next big wind event obviously we're not expecting a massive change in a week or two but like come fall when our next big wind events show up and fuels are dry a roll out of a robust communication plan a municipal uh memorandum of understanding where we have those regular meetings we know the players involved we have proper polygons and mapping so that we know who what when where why so I I just kind of want to know what those expectations are so that one accountability is held held there

[45:00] but also so that we know what we're looking forward to and also can set up our own expectations about when the next event is and whether we're going to really be prepared and and and again if it's a tool of Last Resort what do we expect for the next roll out for this for this tool so I think there are opportunities so we're going to file out an updated waare mitigation plan in the next couple of months very soon and um that some of what you're describing will be outlined there but I think there are things that we can start doing today I think there are opportunities for us to reach out with to some of the organizations what what I let me back up a minute and say we recognize that there are opportunities to learn from and partner with other organizations that are working with vulnerable customers in particular and that's one of the areas that I definitely want to focus on immediately with urgency and in a hurry is protecting those vulnerable customers that have critical medical equipment and I think there's an opportunity we don't have to wait on the Wildfire mitigation plan to start partnering with those organizations um I learned listening to

[46:01] the CPC comments last night that there's an organization that's supplying uh batteries to customers with durable medical equipment There's an opportunity we don't have to wait we can work with those those those entities now and so I think listen I think there's an opportunity for me to be here with you to demonstrate to you my commitment to transparency and openness and willingness to listen I don't have to wait for a wildfire mitigation plan to do that um I think we are already talking with some of our our uh offices of disaster Emergency Management to put in place how we can communicate more appropriately throughout any kind of emergency preparedness event I candidly I know we have 64 counties in the state of Colorado and I want to understand how we can integrate ourselves into your emergency preparedness plans and so um my my answer to your question may not be as specific as you like because I I'm I'm hesitant to give specific timelines um but I can say that we will file a an updated Wildfire mitigation plan in the

[47:00] immediate future and there are steps that we're going to be taking immediately to work with other organizations to help protect some of our critical customers the $50,000 donation is also something we wanted to make sure that we did right away to demonstrate that we are U taking this urgently and we are acting with urgency and so those are some of the things that that we're working on council member I I appreciate that and thanks for that response and I appreciate you doing the the donation for the 50,000 and I I just will mention that you know a lot of our businesses had a lot of lost especially restaurants lost product and it didn't trigger their insurance because they lost maybe 20,000 but their insurance uh minimum was 50 and so they're hurting and already on slow margins so I'd love for you guys to consider ways in which there's ways to maybe help compensator or lessen uh the pain of some of certainly our restaurant industry who who took it on the chin for for a couple days so I know you can't make promises but would love to see if you can sort of consider uh their impacts um because they're pretty severe over the last those couple days so appreciate that good I got Taisha and then Lauren I got a quick one then maybe we can wrap up before too long you okay let's try to

[48:01] keep the questions quick because we still l in the queue sorry um thank you so much um I think I I echo my colleagues is can anybody hear me okay I'm still getting used to this thing and I feel like I can't hear myself so I can't I can't hear myself up okay thank you um so um we know that over the last five years there were 16 days on average between us billion doll disasters compared to 82 days in 1980 and so although I appreciate comments um or the expectation that you know we want to limit how often this happens I think the reality of where we are in the climate right now we can anticipate um that these kinds of things are going to continue to happen and potentially accelerate and so I appreciate um the the efforts that you're doing to um to both mitigate and adapt to our our to our adapting uh climate um no one

[49:00] disputes the escalating climate events um and so you know really for me and in our community the the the main issue for me and and what I've heard from Community is the preparedness aspect of it um and of course the response but I would love to hear a little bit more um about some of the strategies you're working on regarding preparedness um you mentioned some of them with the intergovernmental collaboration um but just would love to hear a little bit more about your thinking and potentially how affected Community Business Leaders and others are going to be engaged in that process to inform what that looks like so it's not something that's done in isolation with Excel um I also just wanted to to Echo or rather um empathize with the recovery um recognizing that it does take days to recover um those kinds of things to ensure that there's not additional harm like wildfires as you mentioned and at the same time was excited to hear um that there is is going to be um improvements made um in

[50:00] the technology in the communications Etc so I don't have any questions there um I do again thank you for the $50,000 to our food bank um but I would say that the response should be in proportion to the impact and the impact was rather significant across our community so I'm eager to see um how um in addition to the 50,000 um per uh my colleague Matt Benjamin and others um as we think about our business communities and others that were disproportionately impacted by this um and then again wanted to make sure and uh that there's a kind of a critical infrastructure analysis something that has already been discussed um and I again I also very much appreciate um the efforts around our individuals with medical um needs that these kinds of incidents can can be life-threatening for them um that's all I have so I actually had one question around the preparedness but uh in general and most importantly thank you for being here in person and being with us today um I think that it is very symbolic of the interest and desire to be uh more

[51:01] collaboratively as we more collaborative in in the work that we do together so I do want to thank you and your colleague for colleagues for showing up today thank you thank thank you for the the the acknowledgement and the questions and and I will say that we haven't fully baked a plan of how we intend to be more collaborative with our First Responders some of that's already happening there was the there's the Colorado Wildfire resiliency board that we participate in and that has First Responders and Fire Chiefs and that is uh was a a creature of statue designed to define the Wildland Urban interface and then Define measures to mitigate um wildfire ignition risk in the Wildland Urban interface and so we've been participating in in that since the creation of that board what we do expect to do is to work more closely with the emergency response agencies in particular as well as making sure that our critical infrastructure list is as comprehensive as possible we have a

[52:00] critical infrastructure list already um I think where we have an opportunity is to make sure that we have a greater and more particular understanding of the capabilities of that piece of critical infrastructure during an event so we don't have another event like what happened with the with the treatment center and so um most of what we're hearing in terms of critiques of our performance is around communication with customers with communities and with critical infrastructure and so that's where I think our focus is going to have to be to bolster that and whether that is um through the creation of advisory groups or through create through participation in the in the Wildfire resiliency board um we're we're we will continue to and and seek your input on what that should look like I definitely appreciate that again really want to emphasize though because I'm not hearing that Community the the um I'm hearing the uh preparedness groups and that's really critical but again it's the users the business community that and so we have visit Boulder we have the business

[53:01] chamber we have Boulder down downtown partners and so you know my my interest is not so much or rather in addition to those established boards I'm also very eager to see stronger Partnerships communication Etc with our existing organiz community-led organizations so thank you Lauren and then Nicole and then Ryan thank you uh I appreciate you being here this evening with us um and the donations to Community Food share and I look forward to hearing more about the ways in which um you help make our community members whole from this event um and I also hope this helps emphasize the need to um work with the city to mitigate and adapt to climate change and just continue to move those programs forward as fast as possible um in terms of the communication one of my

[54:00] main questions is around mapping so this is living in Boulder this is the first time I've lived in a community um that doesn't have a public electric utility and it's also the first time I've lived in a community where um the feeds aren't mapped or easily accessible where they can tell you that the blue line is not you know that they're turning that off and you can know what that means and I've seen in Excel literature um that this sort of lack of a publicly available map is said to be a security issue I will say that in communities that I have lived in that has been something that has been readily available although redacted for security reasons so is that something that you plan on bringing having for our community well we definitely want to have for thanks for the question and um we definitely want to have more accurate outage maps we heard during the event

[55:00] that what people were experiencing in real time didn't match up with what they were seeing on our outage maps I I will say you know what we will or will not be showing like substation locations and critical infrastructure it is it's a genuine security risk you don't want to put all your critical infrastructure on maps online for everybody to see we are thinking through how we might be able to supply um greater VIs visibility into infrastructure without violating and and adding security risk I don't know what that's going to look like I mean we will work closely with the engineers and our security and cyber our physical and cyber security department to determine what we can and can't provide but I I I don't want to I don't want to unreasonably set expectations that we're going to start putting a bunch of critical infrastructure online because it is a security risk I I um uh and you know if there's an opportunity to learn from what other Municipal Utilities have shown I'm I'm glad to learn it um but you know our first priority is making sure that we don't create additional

[56:01] security cyber or physical security risks thank you ni thank you for being here tonight um and Fielding so many of our questions um and thank you also just for recognizing some of the hurt that our community experienced to being the first of of the communities in Colorado to experience one of these bps's um my question is just really around um the engagement process for the Wildfire um mitigation plan that you'll be editing and and submitting and it's just to ask can we um can we get kind of an outline of your plan uh when you have it for how you're going to be engaging communities how you're going to be um checking in with disability Community uh hospitals um city managers and cities uh in our communities as well think this is something that we often get um when our staff are working on a big project as a

[57:02] plan for engagement so we can even just offer some feedback on the engagement um and talking to people so I think that that's what I'm hearing most in the community is they they they want answers but they also want to know how they can share their stories how they can tell um what went wrong so that we can try to avoid that from happening again so um I'm curious if you have some thoughts on when you might have this type of Engagement plan in place and if there will be an opportunity for us to um talk through it with you or at least provide some feedback I think at least our city manager in her office I I think that's a reasonable request and what I'm what I'm really hearing I'll say two things our customers and our communities want an opportunity to share their frustration with us and I fully recognize that I as I said I wasn't able to listen to the CPC comments in real time but I'm committed to listening to all three hours of what because it's it's available on YouTube and I am committed to listening to that um I'm going to sit here tonight and listen to the citizens that want to share their feedback um

[58:02] more specific to your question is there an opportunity to provide feedback on the plan before we file it we typically do have an opportunity where we will um work with stakeholders on major filings before we actually file it at the commission I I can't give you the specifics of what that's going to look like but I will make sure that I talk with the team and we'll figure out a way to have some type of stakeholder process before we make that that finally so I just said it out loud so no we're going to do it your folks are taking notes right there okay I was too um so thank you for the question Ryan thank you Mr Kenny and team for being here um we clearly need this capability and I appreciate you saying um that we you'd like to make it infrequent uh it will of course continue to need to happen and I would agree with council member Adams that we need be ready for scenarios that involve it happening more frequently than we we

[59:00] expect now um and I heard you say that there's a plan in development and so I have several questions and I'm G to I'm going to State the questions but I they're they're not I'm not going to ask you to answer them now but I hope that those working on the plan can consider the questions um so there's sort of four broad questions um the first is I I would like an assessment of how Excel will come up to best practices so as we've discussed the the three large investor IUS investor in Utilities in California have quite a bit of experience with this I think we would like I would like to see a an assessment of good good known practices like those from PG and others and excel's a plan on each of those whether to adopt them or not with some kind of notes so something like that would be the first thing the second one is just there's a number of specific um activity areas that I'd like i' hope were in the plan so there's a few here um one um what are the Community Partnerships that that we need that Excel needs to ensure to protect order minimize loss and disruption and

[60:01] Safeguard vulnerable populations you have talked about that um another one is uh what what can we expect as the procedures in the sequence when we know the shutdowns are going to start to happen a run of Show starting with Communications but more broadly in the week or whatever coming up to it third um not just at the event itself but the the yearround what is the year round plan of work with the city with the community to make sure that that that plans are in place another one is reducing um what what can we do to reduce the scope of the impacts uh of the event and improve the Precision of the shutdown my understanding is um there is a learning curve with these things for utilities and those like PG who have done it have reduced the scope and minimize impacts and improveed precision over time so that's another one um another one is what is the level of investment that we can expect from the investors not the rate pairs but from the investors to ensure that there's an orderly costeffective experience for rent payers that avoids disproportionate impacts in a future

[61:01] regime we're going to be probably having more of these again my question would this corresponds to what is a good practice maybe from P gen or others but what is a level of investment that we can expect and then the the the final one on that list of specific measures is um aside from these direct things that we're planning for what will excel do to to demonstrate that it's being more proactive about managing known stat statistical issues in one sense we don't know much more now than we knew two weeks ago from a long-term statistical perspective I think there's a case that Excel could have been more proactive I don't want to dwell on that but just to say would would love to see some confidence or be given some confidence that there's a there's a plan to be uh proactive so those are that was kind of a list of specific things I would love to see in a plan and then there were just two more kind of general questions for the for the planners one one of those is what do you need from us from the city clearly this is an all handson deck Community exercise when we're doing shutdowns needs a lot of players including the city the city's here and ready but we need excel's direction to

[62:01] us uh to get things started um and then my the final one is what what help do you need from us with respect to asking for permission from Regulators legislators or whatever to be successful what do you need from us to be successful um so those are my questions they're not for now you're welcome to respond but I know we're we're over time a bit so I'll just leave those and say thank you I council member thank you for all four of the questions with the Great Parts on number two I took notes and I'm sure we've we've captured all of that um assessment of of best practices I can say we've already started some of that we've actually been out to pg& to visit and we're in contact with them uh we've been physically out there to visit and we're in contact with them relatively regularly we will and um learning from other utilities through our trade Association eii and so that is underway but we're not done um assessment of good known practices and what we might adopt that's infinitely reasonable your specific activities I appreciate that um

[63:02] some of that will be described in the plan that we file in our wildare mitigation plan the others about um investment and yearr round work plans some of that is done in general rate cases but there's opportunities I think we can share some of that as well uh we do intend to reduce the scope and uh using sectionalizing devices will get us there some of that will be outlined in our Wildfire mitigation plan as well I think one one thing that's implicit in the question that you're asking is that and I've said this before the PSPs is a tool it's not the sole tool and it's the last tool and there are other tools like SE sectionalizing devices and the system hardening efforts and so um being able to share those plans with you I think is what I'm hearing in in the question I like the uh number three so give us time to think about what we need from you all uh right now just ask for a little grace and patience which you're demonstrating so thank you and then um what help do we need from you as we talk to the legislator legislature in the

[64:02] CPU that's a great offer I'm hearing an offer in there and um um thank you for the offer and I will Reserve that for a time after this meeting but thank you for that okay well I'll I'll wrap us up here um between your remarks and my Council colleagues excellent questions that got almost everything I wanted to ask about in but just one one last piece really appreciate your commitment to additional Communications going forward um one thing I haven't heard yet is about multilingual Communications so I think the the this last time was only in English and just wondering about certainly in Spanish at a minimum possibly other languages for future communications that's that's a no-brainer and we should do that I yes great nice and quick and easy I appreciate that yes ma'am um you also made me think about uh people with disabilities and so I would imagine there would be another a differentiated layer both from the cognitive and physical perspective so would love to just add that as well sorry thank you

[65:00] for it thank you thank you okay well um and I'll I'll just say reiterate what my colleagues have said Thanks so much for being here uh for your responsiveness um and willingness to listen and heard a lot of openness to improving how this might happen again in the future which I also really appreciate about those additional Communications with us and with vulnerable residents uh as well which is so important people medical devices and such really appreciate the donation for the Community Food share that's a great measure to do and I'll um second my Council colleagues and the request for some other business assistance for those who lost um revenue or uh product as well and then just say um I did uh give pu testimony yesterday and listed a number of things that we're interested in for next steps we'll send that to you in writing as well but want to reiterate Ryan's point that we do stand ready to work with you on the next steps and would like to hear how we can could assist to make sure that all of this works better in the future for our own residents and everybody else here in

[66:01] Colorado thank you for your time thank you sir all right and with that we will go to open comment so Elicia if you could go over the public participation guidelines please yes sir give me just a second all right thank you Emily good evening everyone and thank you for joining us I am now going to go over our public participation guidelines at City Council meetings please note that the city has engaged with community members to co-create a vision for productive meaningful and inclusive Civic conversations this Vision supports physical and emotional safety for community members staff and councel as well as democracy for people of all ages identities lived experiences and political

[67:00] perspectives for more information about this vision and the community engagement processes please visit our website at bouldercolorado.gov servicesresume and other guidelines that support this Vision these will be up upheld during this meeting our remarks and testimonies shall be limited to matters related to City business no participant shall make threats or use other forms of intimidation against any person obscenities racial epithets and other speech and behavior that disrupts or otherwise impedes the ability to conduct the meeting are prohibited participants are required to sign up to speak using the name they are commonly known by and individuals must display their whole name before being

[68:01] allowed to speak online currently only audio testimony is permitted online inperson participants are asked to refrain from expressing support or disagreement verbally or with Applause with the exception of declarations traditionally support is shown silently through American Sign Language Applause or jazz hands thank you so very much for listening and again thank you for joining us thanks for that Elicia uh so each person will have two minutes to speak and I will be enforcing that pretty uh rigorously so that it's fair to everyone involved everybody gets the same amount of time our first three speakers are Emily Zin Evan buan and arum Bingham

[69:04] 250th anniversary is coming up which as the Centennial state means that the nation's 250th is also I'm here at the request of the America 250 Colorado 150 commission which I serve as the regional adviser representing Boulder and Broomfield counties the commission has been appointed by Governor polus to lead commem ation inclusive of all Coloradoan stories you may be wondering shouldn't we all be concerned with today not yesterday so join me for a moment well we go back in time to 1973 and 74 the lead up to the Centennial Bicentennial what were Americans thinking about 50 years ago well democracy seemed on the brink of collapse with Watergate hearings there were protests over roie Wade and there remained the backdrop of global tensions with Russia I condensed that list but it goes on and I noticed some similarities

[70:03] to today 1976 brought a huge enthusiasm for examining our shared history and coming together as cadens here in Boulder mayor Penfield Tate II LED the boulder Centennial by Centennial commission at history Colorado where the America 250 Colorado 150 commission is housed Penfield Tate thei chairs the board of directors today in my region we are soon to have two of the only sister city relationships with our displaced treaty granted tribes the commission is hoping our proclaiming Colorado's black history exhibit will TR travel around the state I invite you to join us in building relationships through our shared history and the opportunity to showcase hopeful stories Across the Nation and I'd like to pass something around with your blessing thank you our next speakers are Evan buan arum Bingham and Lindsay

[71:05] lerg um my last name is Buckman but thank you for trying sorry about that okay uh back in 2020 Boulder voters passed no eviction without representation this measure allowed people facing eviction to have legal representation paid for by an excise tax of $75 per rental unit hey Evan I'm apologized for interrupting you but we've got a Chief codee issue again here we've got somebody in the aisle um person in the aisle if you if you wouldn't mind uh moving up here with me is that okay the challenge is that all the people behind you now can't see as well and so screen up there if if folks would like to step off to the side uh they can do that as well is that does that work uh is it looks like you're not blocking can you see the screen screen f okay would it be fine if I restarted that yeah we'll let you restart

[72:01] was so we just I'm going to I'm going to keep it hey everybody if we can keep it quiet out there I'm just going to want to make sure that the aisles are clear I'll leave it at that so he just called me a this guy right here hey if we can have quiet from everyone because I will everybody me id later and every everybody needs to be quiet everybody needs to be quiet everyone everyone needs to be quiet all right we're going to call a recess if I don't get quiet here in the next couple of seconds all right quiet thank you appreciate that uh Evan if you would like to restart your remarks okay as I was saying back in 2020 Boulder voters passed no eviction without representation I'm sure everyone here is familiar with that in some way the measure allowed people facing eviction to have legal representation paid for by an excise tax of $75 per rental unit the

[73:02] revenue from this task tax is designated for the administrative cost of representation mediation and funding for rental assistance and Associated services for persons who are vulnerable to eviction and Boulder friends neighbors and acquaintances of both me and you in 2023 this excise tax raised almost $2 million the measure also authorized the Boulder City Council to raise the annual excise tax rate in line with the inflation rates in the state for 2021 to 2023 a consumer price index published by the state declared the cumulative inflation rate has been 13.6% this would raise the fee to a little more than $86 and raise about $238,000 more for the community in 2023 the program facilitated $365,000 to almost 200 unique clients with the average receival amount being approximately $2,100 with this 11 raise as with this $11 raise the program could help 100 more unique clients please use your

[74:01] Authority as the Boulder City Council to raise the fee to between 86 and $88 and help the people who voted for you additionally I'm also here supporting a ceasefire in Palestine as a Jew who grew up goes to school and had my bar mitzvah in Boulder just a few years ago about five years ago seeing Boulder City council's in action on this topic has really hurt me and many others in the Jewish Community we are disillusioned with Boulder City Council and the statements and lack thereof on Israeli war crimes in the name of Jewish people instead of being complicit in silence as most of you have been please make your voices heard such as I making mine and pass a permanent lasting ceasefire resolution thank you thank you our next three speakers are arum Bingham Lindsay lerg and Liz Collins do we have arum

[75:12] all right before I begin I just want to say I think it's Rich that um youall are happy to spend an hour on our loss of electricity for less than 24 hours here and uh some of you seem to be annoyed that we continue to show up for two minutes to talk about Gaza where folks have not had electricity for nearly seven months I live in Boulder as we know this Boulder City Council has made ceasefire resolutions in the past as in the case of the Iraq War what hasn't yet been said is that at the time this Council took action in June of 2006 three years into the war over 2400 American Service members and 600,000 Iraqis had been killed has this Council not learned any lesson since now as then we are being sold a pack of lies about the goal's conduct and reasons for a war that we are paying for and that serves none of our

[76:00] interests 600,000 is the approximate number of Palestinians in Gaza that are enduring catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation according to the UN so I want to know if you really need all of them to be added to the body count before you will finally act as Israel prepares to retaliate against the Iranian attack which it provoked attempting to prolong and expand this war dragging the United States further into it do you not see that this is where we are headed do you not see that our complicity in this genocide and your in action in the face of it will come to haunt all of us do you not see that anything other than an immediate and permanent ceasefire makes all of us Palestinians Israelis and Americans less safe we need you to send a message from the people of this city to our federal officials that they need to stop funding this genocide rather than condemning war crimes and Collective punishment or stopping the transfer of arms Joe neus and the rest of Congress have instead moved to condemn a phrase that calls for the uplifting and liberation of a people from The River To The Sea pal pal will be free calls for the dignity and Humanity of Palestinians for the end of occupation and the end of apar from The

[77:01] River To The Sea Palestine will be free does not call for the ethnic cleansing and oppression of Jews from The River To The Sea Palestine will be free does not call for the bombing of hospitals schools and children playing in the street from the river to the Sea Palestine will be free does not call for the massacre of hungry people trying to get flour from a truck from The River To The Sea pal but thank for your testimony our next three speakers are Lindsay lerg Liz Collins and Paula Johansson this uh this piece of art that I have here I um I received it today in the mail I have a an art CSA it's like it's like the CSA you might get um for

[78:00] your fruits and vegetables but it's art and um and this one for people who cannot see it um it is a background of a cloudy Sky a light blue um cloudy Sky there are blue birds I know one of them is a Sunbird I don't know the others and there's red text that says Viva palacina Libre which of course um free Palestine um and um I'm here in solidarity with Palestine today and of course to talk about the threat to our civil liberties um and rights to practice solidarity and of course I'm talking about the ban of the phrase from The River To The Sea Palestine will be free in the house um and I'm here because it's you know it's in solidarity that the global Community has long used that phrase and it's so concerning um the redefining and the Banning of it because for me it's so

[79:00] close to Banning our right to practice solidarity with one another and as many of you know it's it's in solidarity that vulnerable people show up for one another protect one another make sure that one another's needs are met especially when they're so vulnerable the government can or won't do that for them and um and I I wanted to talk about this piece of art because also today I went to an event where Palestinians living in occupied Palestine imagine what it might look like when Palestine is free and they imagined freedom of movement they imagined restoring their ancestral food ways that have been destroyed and ecocide which is part of genocide and um I wanted to share those vid visions of freedom because it's what I hear when I hear that phrase and I think of being free and what those people think of being free thank you thank you now we have LZ Collins Paulo Johansson and batina

[80:14] Swicker hi thank you for hearing my statement every summer hundreds of businesses increase Boulders carbon footprint and global warming contribution by propping open the doors to entice Shoppers inside this practice is widespread and antithetical to the values of the city residents and the County's stated mission of mitigating global warming fortunately it presents the city with an opportunity of lwh hanging fruit in reducing its total emissions in the early 2000s New York City's con utility Con Edison researched this practice and determined that an additional 2.5 tons of carbon were emitted per season for each business that ran their AC while propping a door open for scale one

[81:01] ton of carbon dioxide is 27 ft by 27 ft by 27 ft the mass of 400 bricks or one roundtrip flight from Denver to Europe stores and restaurants typically do this during the hottest times of the year when energy utilization and brown or blackout risks are highest our local utility excels typically sources 25% of its energy from coal but during Peak usage times this increases resulting in more pollution when I have asked business owners managers and employees to close their doors while running heating or cooling they say that customers won't come in or that their manager requires it as global warming is driving record high temperatures and low snow levels forest fires weather disasters respiratory disease and even migration this this is a time when the larger vision of government needs to intervene to protect resources and citizens I ask that city council seize

[82:02] this opportunity to reduce Boulder's total carbon footprint by enacting legislation that prevents this harmful practice and shut the damn door thank you thank you now we have Paulo Johansson batina swiger and Jonathan singer um can you hear me why don't you lower the mic down to you can you hear me now that's um basically I just wanted to thank every single one of you like to thank you for coming in um but no matter what I still am not going to understand why my business was shut down for three days um East End did not have any electricity West End had electricity um for a small business like myself three days of shutdown is a is disaster um I I know everybody's trying to work on making sure that this doesn't happen again um the lack of communication I

[83:00] didn't get one text I didn't get one email I had my neighbors coming in asking me if we were shutting down my employees were back at work when we were told that we could open and we did not get open um comes Monday it's like are we going to open are we not going to open so I really appreciate everybody's doing their hard work in making sure that this doesn't happen again um but I want to everybody to so remember small business like myself not just the restaurants or the hotels um I only have one store I open in 2019 hit Co and I'm still open so I do not want um a three-day shutdown over electricity um to be the reason that I lose my employees lose my business um and I really do appreciate that all the hard work the city council and Excel even though you can give me all the answers you can I still am not going to understand why one side of town has electricity the other one doesn't um but

[84:01] I do appreciate that um although hard work and I know that some people probably suffered more than what my business did but that's not something that I can afford um and please keep the small business in mind when asking questions when making demands and not just you know your hotels and your and your restaurants thank you thank you now we have patina Jonathan singer and Patrick oror good evening uh batina swiger CEO downtown Boulder partnership and downtown resident first um we want to just be clear that our business Community is familiar with the devastation caused by wildfires and we really appreciate excel's attention to preventative measures and we're committed to working in partnership with the city and our partner organizations and our utility to cultivate an environment which we are prepared for emergencies and we support public safety measures but like the people who spoke before me I want to paint a picture of the chaotic environment in downtown Boulder that was caused by the short notice and unclear communication many

[85:01] members of our business Community suffered economic hardship and these impacts were significant not just for those who lost powers and had to scramble to call off staff and try to to save product but also for those who are not part of the planned outage but lost business and or unnecessarily took emergency actions because they thought they would lose power and then they didn't so in case you weren't downtown that weekend here's what things looked like the East End of Pearl Street was without power the West End was energized one side of the mall was dark and the other was not so the shut offs appeared arbitrary you've heard that already before on Saturday night with traffic lights out and street lights out downtown felt desolate and Eerie it was definitely a security risk and we're really grateful that there were no major public safety issues now we we left into action and we partnered with the chamber and our other Business Leaders and we opened a survey which to date has uh gathered more than 96 responses so some head lines from that survey businesses reported an estimated $1.3 million in Lost Revenue an estimated quarter of a

[86:01] million doll in unpaid wages and an estimated $125,000 in inventory and product losses so we ask city council and our staff and City staff to work with us and our coalition to work with us to take action and some ideas include things like establishing an emergency protocol response so that we can notify businesses in a timely manner of planned outages and unplanned outages exploring um establishing a small business impact fund and to learn from cities and other states that have experienced these planned outages we look forward to working with you thank you thank you now we have Jonathan singer Patrick oror and Evan rabitz thank you mayor members city council and staff I'm Jonathan singer senior director of policy programs with the boulder Chamber of Commerce I want to first of all thank not just uh City Council and Excel Energy for being here but I also want to recognize the hurt

[87:00] and distress felt not only by residents uh but also businesses of all sizes during the shutdown and I want to express deep thanks to our emergency service workers and Frontline workers that work to restore energy as quickly as they possibly could that said we're working closely with downtown Boulder partnership and others to ensure that in the short-term medium-term and long term we can take the right steps to ensure that these kinds of shutdowns in the future as climate related disasters continue to occur don't EXA exacerbate the same level of distress that we've seen before what does that mean um one I want to point out that even at your own city council Retreat you pointed out at Economic Development as one of your top priorities let's use that opportunity to talk about emergency response and disaster resilience for our businesses of all sizes yesterday I want to thank mayor Brockett for being there at the Pu as long as well as other business members we were

[88:00] also there and we encourage folks to respond to that pu survey so we can get the best data possible to provide the best response in that medium and long term we look forward to the resilience group relaunch that we are working together with businesses and as we think about our climate action plan tax our cap tax is paid disproportionately more by businesses than than it is homeowners now that's not to say we take from one to the other but let's leverage that to work with our businesses to talk about what we can do to create things like a small business Disaster Assistance fund businesses weren't just uh unable to but they were afraid to utilize their insurance let's find ways within our own resources to make those Solutions happen thank you now we have Patrick oror Evan ravitz and Joseph Stein

[89:00] thank you m uh mayor bracket my name is Patrick oror I'm not speaking on behalf of historic Boulder but as a private citizen last week uh before this board we bought a Civic historic district application to you we thought we were going to be hearing or presenting in a quas judicial hearing but what broke out is the legislation hearing um several City Council Members B their personal bias to the the hearing and even to the point where at one point uh during the deliberations um during the deliberations uh Ryan shuhart mentioned bought up during that conversation five topics that were not on the agenda and if you read the the the items there Transportation was not part of it Canyon Road was not part of it as a

[90:01] matter of fact one of the comments you said at the end is let's give the historic or the Civic District Alley Road I don't know where that came from and I thought that was inappropriate the second part of the observation I had was that three days before the hearing I was notified that this proposal was not going to pass it was predetermined that was unfortunate and I can't explain how we heard that but we did but I kind of question that when you have a a hearing and that the first city council person speaks with a pre-written 30 or 40 paragraph or sentence comments which was councilman falkers that you had already made up your mind before the hearing so unfortunately I just felt that that was an unfair hearing thank you thank you next we have Evan rabitz

[91:02] Joseph Stein and khed alali Dante in The Inferno said the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in a time of moral crisis my mom my Jewish mom her sisters and their mom fled Nazi Germany in 1932 to London then a farm during the bombing then Toronto and then Mexico City before finally allowed into the US in 1940 Israel and its pet American politicians have turned never again into again and again and again now risking nuclear Andor World War everyone should see the documentary The Gatekeepers which interviews all six

[92:02] former directors of the isra Israeli FBI called shinb the world experts on fighting terrorism they all say Israel is causing terrorism The Gatekeepers is free at the website dearu documentary area our representative Joon nus is the son of refugees from Colonial Eritrea yet votes repeatedly to fund Israel making millions more refugees he and his predecessor Jared polus are tools of apek Joe's biggest contributor this year giving him $33,500 Joe's Facebook post says I've often wondered how different my life would have been had my parents been unable to

[93:02] immigrate to the US Joe ask the 2 million dying Palestinians who can't leave Gaza this is the first time the US has been on trial for genocide time is up to make it the last all right next we have and please quiet in the audience next we have Joseph Stein Ked alali and David Cooper hi can you all hear me great um thank you for having us my name is Joseph Stein um I live in South Boulder I've lived there almost all of my life um I would be remiss of course if I did not call on you all once again to do all that you can to put as much pressure on possible and all of our elected officials for an immediate and Lasting cease fight arms embargo against Israel um but I'm actually not here to speak about that I'm here to talk about the newer excise tax um and to make two related requests

[94:02] of city council first I'm asking that city council raise the rental the rental license excise ta tax to $86 a year to keep up with inflation as Allowed by newer and second um that future increases to the excise tax concordant with inflation be included in the city's financial planning work and assessment of fees I bring these requests for two related reasons first newer has been remarkably successful at keeping people in stable housing since it was passed in 2020 um but second despite newer successes there is still an extreme need for housing assistance in Boulder in 2023 the excise tax raised $1.75 million of which 365,000 went to rental assistance assuming that the revenue would otherwise remain constant raising the tax by $11 tracking inflation could raise an additional

[95:00] $238,000 potentially helping hundreds of Boulder rites remained housed through the rental assistance fund despite these successes the needs in Boulder remain dire as of last summer homelessness is increasing in Boulder County and bbsd reported a record number of homeless students the cost of housing continues to rise which we know is correlated and likely positive of homelessness and eviction both I do not think that raising the excise tax is going to be some kind of Silver Bullet but it is a common sense First Step that I hope Council will pursue thank you for your time thank you next we have Kal alali David Cooper and laara Gonzalez can you hear me yes okay hey my name is C delali I had a speech ready but I have to first address the white supremacist and capitalistic uh privilege for you all to take one hour to address not having

[96:00] electricity for 24 hours when Gaza has not had any for the last six to seven months and intermitted electricity for decades controlled by the Zionist regime I am here to help pass a ceasefire resolution for Palestine but it's sad that despite many attempts this Council has failed us to pass a resolution which is the bare minimum we asking the city of Gaza was wiped because of Silent council members like you uh so thanks for your so-called support for this cause also yesterday the USA uh House of Representative Representatives passed a resolution that whoever says open quote from The River To The Sea Palestine will be free uh end quote are considered anti-semitic and um let me explain what from the river to the Sea means from the river of Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea Palestine will be free means giving Palestinians the right to return to

[97:01] their lands that were stolen from them the right for the indigenous people to exist uh not elimination of the Israel as they are claiming we are appreciate the ceasefire resolution to be passed for the sake of humanity lastly yesterday April 17th is a national day for Palestinian prisoners over 10,000 prisoners most of them without charges and hundreds have lost their lives from torture from the Zionist regime I would like to take a moment of silence for all those prisoners who are mistreated under international law thank you thank you our last two in-person speakers are David Cooper and Lara Gonzalez then we'll go to the virtual

[98:01] ones hello my name is David Cooper I live at 2680 Lafayette drive I've lived there for more than 30 years and uh for most of the time we've had a really small neighborhood Trail at the end of Lafayette where it meets uh Lehi Street however over the last couple of years this little neighborhood Trail has turned into a regional destination Trail H with people people coming from Denver and Longmont and just the whole region of Northern Colorado uh our neighborhood has discussed with quite a few City people uh the use of this Trail for three or four years three years ago I asked the city open space to put a trail caner on there so we could actually get some data on trail use so we can have an objective discussion so just for the record uh in 2023 last year there were 98,0 48 users on this Trail those are one-way users they go both ways doesn't include small children or dogs which is a lot of extra people so far in 2024 we've had over

[99:01] 25,000 users on this Trail last weekend alone there were 1,200 users on this Trail that's in one weekend it's the same level of use as we're seeing on Mount cenitas and every weekday is just crowded with cars so the problem is not the use we all love open space we love using open space glad to have everybody enjoying it the problem is almost all these people comeing cars uh days with 600 users we're facing probably 250 to 400 cars trying to park on Lehigh and Lafayette Street and I mean really where do we put these cars we have no place to put them on our little neighborhood there constant traffic there's a lot of u-turns in my certainly in my driveway the congestion is just too much for our neighborhood and it was really never designed for this kind of use and we were really just overburdened accommodating Trail users who are coming from all over the region as you know there's lots of trails in South Boulder there's Mesa Trail dowy draw Marshall Mesa Bobble Link all of them have

[100:00] parking lots okay they all accommodate users off highways and Roads and all I'm asking is that we get the same treatment of some sort of off street parking thank you thank you uh L Gonzales is our last inperson speaker hello good afternoon I am here to speak on behalf of only myself as a descendant and Survivor of one of many or Colonial genocidal projects which is now the USA my demands are one pass an immediate and permanent ceasefire resolution to the fund our 1.6 million city tax dollars to Israel and number three assure that our freedom of speech is protected in our city I am here today to share some history and true meaning of the phrase from The River To The Sea Palestine will be free due to the recent suppressive and fascist resolution that was passed in the house conflating this liberatory phrase to anti-Semitism let me say it loud and clear this phrase does not intend to say that Israel is must be eliminated we indigenous people value life on Mother Earth why do you think we haven't taken arms against

[101:00] settlers here because we value life coexistence and the land we know the land is not property and can hold all of us I'm urging you to pass legislation and resolutions align with these values to benefit all of us and not just those who are proximal to whiteness either by skin color or mindset from The River To The Sea Palestine will be free intents to show or desire for Palestinian Liberation and dignity from the 76e illegal occupation land theft aperte and Palestinian ethnic cleansing by the ca settler Colonial project this phrase shares the vision for all Palestinians to have equal rights in Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea which includes the right to return for all the Palestinian diaspora it is concerning how Israelis continue to victimize themselves and say this phrase is anti-Semitic when the liquids original party Manifesto in 1977 it stated that between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be isra iseli sovereignty it also argue that the establishment of a Palestinian State jeopardizes the security of the Jewish population and endangers the existence

[102:00] of the state of Israel thus denying the existence and human dignity of Palestinians living in their indigenous lands stating that from The River To The Sea Palestine will be free anti-semitic is not just wrong because we love our Jewish siblings it's discriminatory because it privileges the feelings of one group over others it also demonizes and silences prop palestino voices in the US I would say it from the river to the seatin will be free all right let's avoid the Clapping please folks that's it for iners we have uh six remote testifiers the first three are Barat Tata David gustavson and Sven steinmo by this is Baro can you guys hear me yes okay thank you um so the newer

[103:00] ballot initiative in 2020 was passed by a margin of around 20 points and created the eviction prevention and rental assistance Services Program evictions Destro communities uh it's time that we adjust the excise tax that funds EAS to catch up with the times a 13.6% increase to match with inflation will allow the program to accomplish more critical work in preventing evictions this would raise an additional $238,000 for the program our rents have consistently increased by double digits and landlords who make thousands of dollars each month off a single unit can definitely afford the $11 increase per unit let's make this excise tax inflation adjustment automatic every year so we don't have to continually revisit this issue the voters made our position clear when we voted for newer with a strong mandate Council should ensure the program continues as intended we can't pretend to care about the crisis of homelessness about public Health about Children's Health about diversity in Boulder uh if we allow our eviction prevention program to stay underfunded for our most vulnerable and

[104:01] for our most vulnerable neighbors to continue to face housing insecurity we can't pretend to care about housing insecurity if we don't speak out for Palestinians Gaza is mainly composed of people who were ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948 they can often see their stolen homes from the militarized fence that separates them from the snipers and drones that guard their exit and and speaking of housing insecurity 70% of homes in Gaza have now been destroyed in just a few months thanks to our own taxpayer dollars cease fire in Palestine now Council don't make excuses let's do something and pass a ceasefire resolution it's the very first step to any kind of lasting peace thanks thank you just make sure if we can have quiet in the audience please next we have David Gustafson fin Stein and Flanders Len hello uh my name is David guson uh

[105:02] can you hear me yes yes uh I live a block away from David Cooper and also from St Sven steinmo I want to uh Echo Mr Cooper's uh comments uh there's a massive influx of people into the uh um the neighborhood by the uh the trail head it's no longer just Saturdays and Sundays it's every day it's making the uh the neighborhood um uh dangerous you've got uh a lot of cars going on Lehi and and cragmore uh and Lafayette you've got people wandering around the the streets loading and unloading um uh things for their trail head use the uh the city needs to build a parking lot further to the South somewhere uh where there's a lot of open space um uh uh as it is now the neighborhood is being destroyed so I EO his comments uh and I

[106:02] also wanted to um say that the city needs to uh to get serious about um banning all gasoline powered landscaping equipment um the environmental health safety and um uh uh other problems associated with um uh gasoline powered Landscaping equipment have been well document well documented for for years and years and years many towns have already gone to to ban uh uh the use of such equipment um and I'm not talking about an ineffective di Minimus ban on government owned gas powerered equipment um uh the uh um uh uh landscaping companies are harming their own low paid workers yet they're arguing that uh uh uh they can't switch well but they're happy to um to expose their their workers to all of the health consequences that use of such equipment

[107:02] um uh entails uh there's no point whatsoever your time is up thank you for your testimony next we have Sven steinmo fanders Lorton and midium de Santiago I not see been online if you are here please let me know by using the race hand function or reaching out to me in the Q&A box right we'll then go to Flanders Lorton hi good evening um I'm here to talk to you today as many others have about urging you to call for a ceasefire in Gaza as City officials you might think that you don't have any influence over International politics but that is not true uh as we saw during today the protest at Columbia University in New York where over 100 people were arrested for peacefully protesting in an alwn that was declared as a free speech Zone um we see fascism increasing in this

[108:00] country we see police militarism increasing in this country and that protest came um after a few like 30 years after the previous protest on that same lawn in Colombia which was protesting against segregation on campus um the the people fighting for free Palestine you see it's an echo of the same movement of the people who were fighting for women's rights to vote um American rights in this country an end to segregation this is the second human the second civil rights movement in this country I see you rolling your eyes but it's the truth and yeah I you that's right um let me read you a quote from the Israeli Army we were not interested in killing Hamas operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in military activity on the contrary the IDF bombed them in their homes without hesitation as a first option it is much easier to bomb a family's home this system is built to look for them in these situations this is in reference to a new AI system that the Israeli military has used to intentionally Target civilians uh targets were marked within 20 seconds without any uh with barely any human

[109:01] intervention and then were bombed at 5 in the morning uh every single day for the past six months this is the reason that so many residences have been destroyed 70% of them last week we had the Israeli military bomb a playground killing 11 children yeah we also had um the Israeli military using drones that were playing sounds of women crying and calling for for help so that when people went out of their houses to help them them last week uh the AL shifa Massacre which killed over 1500 or killed and injured over 1500 Palestinians was the worst Palestinian Massacre one of the worst in history and yet no um Western media coverage ceasefire now free Palestine thank you quiet in the audience please all right our last two speakers are medium to Santiago and Ava weok medium will be speaking in Spanish uh with the translation afterwards and is an accommodation for that translation need we'll have some additional Time medium

[110:51] El

[111:21] for for

[112:03] and this is the Spanish interpreter fell certified Spanish interpreter hello my name is midiam de Santiago I am an emergency response connector for the city of Boulder and also have been working as a community organizer for over four years and that is the reason that I am here representing the community thank you very much for being here and for listening to what the community has to say I live in North Boulder in a mobile home Community the concern that our community has is if every time there is wind or bad weather there will be these energy shutdowns how will these outages be controlled since there was very little time for the notification or they did not notify us at all and we were not prepared to be without electricity for 28 hours the majority of our homes run only on electricity also the warnings were not as efficient as they had said they had said that there would be outages for certain hours and then it would return and that was not what happened the

[113:02] majority of the people who live in these homes are working class they were not able to salvage the food in their refrigerators or the medications that are of vital importance for people with illnesses we the community would like to know what protocols will be used from now on for when these outages will be established due to climate conditions what will be the protocols that will guarant guantee that these outages will be for the benefit and safeguarding of the most vulnerable communities what will be the preventive measures used to compensate for the material losses and damages during the outages when will these protocols come into play I am available here in case you would like more stories from the people affected by this thank you and of course thank you for the money but it just isn't enough to pay for the damages caused just from my own home there was $700 loss from our refrigerator and so we are asking for more empathy thank you very much thank you and gracias all right our

[114:02] final uh person tonight is Ava weok hello can you hear me yes hi I am speaking uh my name's Eva and I am speaking about the medical vulnerability that I experienced during the power shut off um my mother I take care of my mother and my mother is on hospice care and we did not receive any warnings or anything I started hearing about it on Facebook and the next door app um we're we were surrounded by communities ke Wen and Martin Acres they started shutting down our neighborhood never shut down Frasier Meadows but everybody around us shut down for almost 30 hours Martin rers I believe was about 30 hours um so of course we are always aware of an emergency so I IM immediately began to figure out how we were going to shelter in place if we lost power um I had to

[115:02] make sure we had ice and batteries and things like that but really if we had to evacuate how do you evacuate a dying person can you guys answer that I don't know how to evacuate my mother and I was terrified and I just want you to know that you guys need to have a protocol or a sit or procedure to set up so that I can call my hos the hospice people and say hey how we how are we going to take care of my mother the next on the Monday the hospice workers were stressed out because they were trying to replace oxygen uh they were trying to get medications that refrigerated and this is just so unacceptable I I just can't believe that there wasn't any prior warning um thank goodness my mom is still here but this was very very stressful and I do not think that it is

[116:01] fair to to let our vulnerable people suffer and and be afraid and there's many people with with medical vulnerabilities as you know and I just wish you guys would get a protocol together quickly thank you thank you all right that was our last speaker I'll close the open comment portion and turn to City staff for any uh responses uh yes thank you and just appreciation to everyone who spoke tonight I did want to uh respond to one item that came up from several folks related to the eviction prevention uh which is the rental license excise tax uh staff and the Tenant advisory committee which is the advisory committee for that program I know they've been talking about that issue if council's interested we're happy to bring some follow-up information to you I imagine that would be valuable thanks Erin did you have anything no thank you mayor any council

[117:02] members have any Fallout y Lauren thank you I took a list so I'm sorry I usually am not very responsive but I wanted to thank Lindsay lerg for sharing that wonderful piece of art um Lisa Collins um with the energy code requirements for the when doors or Windows and open are open we do require a shut off for new buildings but I see Jonathan in the audience hopefully we can look at some things around existing buildings related to that um for Patrick oor's comments about me having pre-written comments I do often pre-write notes but that does not limit I always listen to public comment and evaluate based on what is heard during a presentation um and from the public the uh yeah and then finally Miriam and

[118:03] Eva I wanted to thank you for bringing forward those concerns from the community and that your lived experiences it's much appreciated got Tera there was a business Community member back there are you still there I think that's her yes what business were you um that's right so I went to visit her during the uh Taste of Pearl and I'm thank you so much for coming down and speaking to us it was very meaningful and I'm sure that Exel was interested in your story because that's a lot of our small businesses had the same story as she did so thank you great anything else I got Ryan thanks I also wanted to acknowledge Patrick oror and thank you for the the feedback uh and just to assure you that my intent certainly was on the uh landmarking decision to be quasa

[119:00] judicial I I made comments uh additionally so in any case um just please be assured that my um intent was was quite as judicial in that that what I did so thanks for the feedback I'll um appreciate it TAA thank you mayor um thank you to all those who spoke um thank you for our community members who continue to voice um their interest and support for a ceasefire um again we don't have the nods to have that conversation but just know um that your voices are heard they do matter um and historically they have mattered and continue to do so so thank you so much um I also wanted to just lift all this energy thing so I'm happy to know that we've got something but again you know it really is to me goes back to that Seventh Generation principle which is to say um are we making decisions now that will allow for Seven Generations um and the current policy apparently that we have is a policy that sounds like it's for maybe one one or two generations um of of of

[120:02] insured so I I would love to revisit and see what our authorities are um and how we can better incentivize and support our businesses um and then I also wanted to lift up I just came back from the partners in the outdoors conference which is sponsored by the Colorado Parks and Wildlife and there was significant conversations around the increase of our public land um and the Not only um is it impacting the communities that are around those Trail heads but it is also impacting our wildlife and all of our natural resources and so um thank you so much for continuing to raise these issue um I'm very supportive of the parkto park transportation systems and um other mechanisms to um not only decrease our carbon footprint and cars but also um again just to be very mindful that we are all sharing on the stolen land that we get to privilege to call home um and it is our responsibility to identify Pathways that AR not only good for

[121:01] residents versus those who may be coming from different neighborhoods and communities let us also remember that we've had very exclusionary housing um policies as a community since its founding of the first settlement in 1851 so it is absolutely critical that we remember um that some of these exclusionary policies have resulted in people living in Longmont in other places when they used to live here um and so My Philosophy is always finding Pathways that we can share and I'm eager to continue to work with our incredible City staff um volunteers and others who are working on this issue so thank you so much um for all of your comments they are heard and valued um thank you again also uh patina for that incredible um survey that and the information and results from that survey um again I'm assuming that has been sent to excel as well um and eager um and again just thank you for um all of the community members organizations that are working so hard to make sure that um the city of Boulder is a place where everybody is

[122:01] seen valued and heard thank you thanks I'll just call on myself and thank folks for coming out and testifying tonight want to thank people for their uh stories about the power outage and how that affected them uh batina downtown Boulder partnership I know you all sprung into action really helped the downtown businesses thank you for that uh Jonathan from I know the chamber also really stepped up in that way appreci apprciate that and really appreciated um hearing some of the heartfelt testimony uh from vulnerable about vulnerable populations uh Ava with your mother and medium um about the mobile home parks and gracias testimon so thanks everybody and um with that I think that's I'm not seeing any other hands so we will close that out for open comments and sorry there's we're done with open comment okay okay we got we're moving on to our consent agenda now if we could please Elicia thank you sir tonight's consent

[123:01] agend is item number three and it consists of items 3 a through 3H do you have any uh questions or comments on the consent agenda no no we need we need quiet we need quiet all right I'm going to I'm going to recess the meeting let's step out

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[131:00] all right we're going to come out of recess here and uh if we can come back to the we were just considering the consent agenda and tera's got crumbs so any uh questions or comments on the consent agenda seeing none uh per perhaps someone might be interested in a motion yeah Taisha oh sorry sorry I just uh wanted to speak in um um council member uh Tina I wasn't sure if you were planning on saying anything about the library district um appointees and just so if you already have something prepared I certainly don't want to steal the Thunder I just want to wanted to make sure we had talked about it but we didn't coordinate so I just wanted to open the floor thank you why don't you go ahead and uh talk about what we were some of

[132:02] our thoughts with the appointments no absolutely happy to and and feel free to chime in um so both Tina and I had the opportunity to join um County Commissioners lman and Levy um in addition to um representatives from the current Library District board um to review applications um to have rigorous discussions um and have identified or recommended to very strong candidates um you know lots of experience in community engagement which we know will be absolutely critical in this next stage of the library district work um in addition to the uh Information Technology expertise um that Andy has already been offering as a volunteer um and now we be hopefully with the approval of this um Council and and the board and the county um to be able to to serve in the board role um and so we are very excited about the two candidates

[133:01] that um we are recommending uh we will also we something else came up in the review process and that is um the applications um lean significantly for city of Boulder residents and so as we know this Library District is much bigger than the city of Boulder and so um the board is aware of that in working on recruitment efforts but I think it is something that you know we all need to um more support and and consideration on and actually Tina you had a really great recommendation that in the interim because we do not have that representation on the Library District board right now um that there be alternative mechanisms whether it be through an advisory Council or or something else that would allow those community members that are not currently rep represented sorry uh represented geographically on the library district to still be engaged in active participants and involved in um in ideation implementation and evaluation did I miss anything else

[134:01] Tina all right thank you uh thanks for that Taisha and thanks to you and Tina for your service on that committee it's an important role and I'm uh excited to be appointing Andy sailor and Tom Cosgrove to the commission this evening with that perhaps a motion so moved okay the consent agenda has been moved with a second roll call please Elicia yes sir thank you mayor we'll start the rad call for the consent agenda items 3A through 3H with you mayor Brockett yes council member VTS yes Marquis yes shoard yes mayor protim spear yes council member Wier yes Adams yes and Benjamin yes the consent agenda is hereby approved unanimously with the vote of a to zero thank you for that if

[135:00] we can go to the call up check in please oh and actually I'll just want to acknowledge we've got some amazing uh housing folks who work on housing our community present thanks for all the phenomenal work EA and our city departments are doing on providing affordable housing to the community and with that if we could go to our call check-in all right sir thank you our callup check-ins are item number four on tonight's agenda 4A is the call up consideration of a site review to redevelop 1501 and 1509 arapo Avenue with eight attached residential dwelling units with underground parking and two at grade parking spaces behind the building the development is proposed to be three stories in height that will not exceed the by height limit of 38 ft this is reviewed under case number lur 2023 00002 any inter in calling this item

[136:01] up not seeing any uh so I don't think we're going to call this one up so if we can go to our next matter from the city manager please yes sir our next item on tonight's agenda is item number six Matters from the city manager 6A is the boulder social streets update and Next Step recommendations all right we're going to go ahead and kick this item off and we've got uh some staff coming up we also have some Consultants that will be online as well and uh I'm gonna toss it over to Mark wolf to introduce this thanks Chris uh good evening Council I'm Mark wolf assistant city manager uh really excited to introduce the boulder social streets item for this evening uh I thought it would be helpful to provide a little context and insight uh before handing it off to our project Consultants from gal uh our efforts to rethink the use of public rightaway and activate all public spaces are embedded in and across many departments and activities throughout

[137:01] the organization from special events to parks in open space to outdoor dining this work took sharp F Focus during the early stages of the pandemic especially as it related to Safe Gathering in public streets while much of the early discussion focused on West Pearl the the city leaned into reimagining the use of public rightaway city assets parks in open space for for Community Gathering after working with council's process subcommittee on downtown streets for public spaces to help guide additional engagement with businesses and community in 2022 the focus turned towards experimenting with 13th Street between Canyon and Aro in 2023 with a Rebrand as Boulder social streets we acknowledge know that there is community desire to leverage more of our public Assets in this way and to attract even more diverse audiences through inclusive community-led events tonight you will

[138:02] hear a report out of those 2023 activities including some compelling recommendations from our project Consultants we learned a lot through our experiments and this year represents an opportunity to review and improve our internal processes and continue our partnership with community to build a better program across the entire city in operating in a limited resource environment I didn't say constraint the vision you will hear tonight is an is an ideal State however we believe 2024 represents a meaningful opportunity to take some of these recommendations to heart to get out of the way as the city to make it easier for Community to use public spaces in different and exciting ways I want to thank the project team uh some of which you'll hear from tonight including commun Communications and engagement transportation and Mobility planning and development services and Community vitality and especially our Consultants

[139:01] from G for the work in getting us to this point you'll hear from uh our uh from Natalie Stiffler our director of uh Transportation mobility in a bit on next steps but first I am happy to hand it over to Brett Miriam project manager from G who is joining us tonight virtually thank you great thank you um yes so my name is Brett miam project manager with gel um gel is a global Urban Design planning and strategy firm uh and we've been working with the city of Boulder since late 2022 to help them think through how to transform the city streets into more people centered spaces um so as what was stated our presentation this evening is going to focus on the evaluation of the summer 2023 social streets program and will include a series of recommendations for how we might Envision the evolution of this program moving forward um one small logistical thing before I dive into the presentation is from our vantage point is it possible for us to be able to see the

[140:00] presentation um screen so that we can know what slides uh are advancing thank you that's great um so I'll be just calling for a slide to advance so um you can move to the next one so thank you um so before we dive into the recommendations and the evaluation and all of that I do want to set a little bit of context uh for why we are working uh with the city to reimagine Boulder streets um so really what are we working to solve and why is that next slide so we first started working with the city at um what I'll call a conflicted moment um this was uh following uh the moment in which West Pearl was reopened to car traffic and we know in that moment um that Boulder residents had called on the city to uh rethink that decision and to consider how to continue to close streets for pedestrian use um but we also learned at that time that there was no uniform

[141:00] consensus among both residents and other key stakeholders on how and where to best repurpose streets downtown for that pedestrian activity essentially different groups wanted different things and uh we were brought on to help kind of think of a holistic manner to address um this demand coming from residents next slide so the city with our help um developed a strategy to help meet this demand um for more pedestrianized streets so what we did was we conducted a comprehensive site analysis and public engagement effort to determine feasible sites in downtown for street closures in 2023 um and what this turned into was the summer 2023 action plan that was the deliverable from that phase of this work um and in that action plan we proposed a number of near-term recommended interventions um not all of these interventions ended up being implemented uh but notably the one of the recommendations which was the routine closure of 13th Street for community

[142:01] events that ultimately was pursued by the city in collaboration with downtown Boulder partnership um and I should mention that a key aspect of our recommendations uh in this uh summer 2023 action plan was that street closures should be paired with activation to ensure that we're not just closing streets and hoping that they're filled with activity of people using them but actually providing a programmatic intent along with the design intent of closing the street to really ensure that there's um a successful uh public Life as we call it in our industry uh successful public life being fostered in these spaces and so this is what led ultimately to The Summer Event series next slide so once this event series was up and running um we conducted more public and stakeholder engagement and we did a program evaluation which we'll share more about with uh with all of you and that informed our recommendations that you'll hear about at the end of this presentation um but one thing I do want to note is that the summer 2023 program

[143:01] really reflects the urgency of the moment in which it was born um you know in 2023 the city had to move relatively quickly in order to address that desire for repurpose streets and it was in this tight time frame that essentially the uh the scope of what social streets as a program could be was also necessarily some more limited based off of that time frame um so with this evaluation the approach that we took uh in this phase of work was to conduct this evaluation as also a time or an opportunity to imagine what could the transformation of social streets be moving forward um so that it is better serving the city in its goals long term next slide so the evolution of this program can really be more than just reacting to resident demand for these types of transform streets streets um it's really about the role that streets and public spaces broadly play in addressing larger systemic issues like the ones that you see on the screen of economic Vitality

[144:00] well-being and connectedness inclusivity social mixing um we know that streets are where people meet it's where they Foster Community grow their businesses play exercise um and it's in rethinking this relationship with streets where they're typically seen as uh primarily spaces for cars by rethinking this we can create better people centered plac um that can help support local businesses we can bring people together to kind of Vanquish social isolation we can inspire people to live out their civic ideals by sharing space together um and really celebrating uh Boulders diversity in the public realm and I think originally that these are the values that were on display with the closing of West Pearl um when it was closed to car traffic in the depths of the pandemic um and so now uh what we're motivated by with our series of recommendations is how do we take those social streets program and kind of evolve it morph it so that it can broaden these same types of impacts throughout all of Boulder and help enable local residents to really steer

[145:00] both where and how these Transformations take place next slide um so with that I'm going to hand it over to my colleague Helena wolf who's also on the line here um and she'll share a bit about our uh evaluation findings thank you Brett um yeah I'll just walk us through our evaluation here next slide please great um so yeah this as Brett was saying this past summer um social streets transformed 13th Street into this temporary event space that hosted eight unique events through the summer um Brett and I were on site and observed the dancing in the street event in July we also did observations of the area during non-event hours as a benchmark um our local community engagement partner lead line was on the ground doing community engagement at each event and then our other partner Fox Tuttle did a transportation analysis for the area so our insights are based on those inputs next slide please um so now I'll take you through

[146:02] our findings um there's a lot of richness on these slides so for the sake of time I won't go through everything but I'll cover the key points um so firstly the main point of this program was to create a poll into downtown uh Boulder and a gathering place for people to connect and um that's what this program did most people we surveyed would not have been in the area but for the event um and a huge majority of them felt more connected to Boulder's Community after attending an event like this next slide please um event goers felt both welcomed and included especially women and children um this is reflected in the fact that we observe 12 times more children under the age of 15 um and four times more women women present during the events compared to the non-event periods next slide please um and overall people felt safe

[147:00] um but of course there's always nuance and room for improvement with this type of perception um we found that more than two-thirds of people that we surveyed agreed that events like these make Boulders public spaces feel safe which is especially relevant given the location of this event site within pafic area next slide um so despite few adjacent businesses social streets did modestly boost Economic Opportunity um one of the initial compromises in choosing 13th Street for this Summer Event series was that it doesn't have a great number of businesses close by or along the street um but nonetheless the businesses that were a part of the events themselves um benefited from being a part of this program um we also found that three out of four people that came to these events visited a nearby business either um before or after the event so just suggesting that you know the area of

[148:00] influence for an event like this is wider than the immediate surroundings of the street next slide so close collaboration with Community Partners spelled event success throughout the summer um we observed that events um were particularly successful when community and partners were empowered um to really be in the driving seat and when the city facilitated them um there were two pretty distinct events that happened this Summer that um illustrate this fact um the soccer the street soccer classic um was relatively light touch it was an all day event it took over the entire Street um the melanin funk festival on the other hand was relatively complex with a lot of Partners it was an evening event um and was mostly concentrated in the plaza um but despite these differences they had shared success factors they both involved really close

[149:00] collaboration with a community partner um they benefited from a kind of organic event promotion through that Community partner and those two things combined ultimately created events that felt inclusive to communities of color that maybe don't have that explicit invitation to spend time in downtown Boulder otherwise um so the involvement of community organizations here was key both for inclusivity and for the event success um so people overall hope that social streets can better empower the public to lead Street Transformations um the people we talk to both people that were attending these events and people that understand the inner workings of putting on on public events like this were really aligned around um empowering the public to lead um I'll also call out that there was alignment around creating places for the everyday as well as the

[150:01] occasional so finding that balance between being able to attend an event but also just have um a place to hang out in the day-to-day um and then the transportation analysis that was done um from that we saw there was a minimal impact to driving um and actually increase in both bike and foot traffic during the events and then as another part of our engagement we asked people about the kind of investment they want to see um based on this visual engagement survey and the results of that show a pretty strong appetite for kind of bigger and Bolder Street interventions so ones that are more transformative larger scale um over ones that are um more tactical in nature next slide great and then lastly here just in summary it was um a successful though imperfect season um overall

[151:01] there's enthusiasm and a lot of momentum for continuing to evolve the social Street program thanks and Helen do you mind just introducing yourself in your role please yes um I'm Helena wolf and I'm a designer with Gil and was working under Brett for this project thanks great thank you Helena um so you know with these insights from this evaluation in mind um we have a number of recommendations for how the social streets program might be able to evolve moving forward next slide uh so the big idea uh and we've been saying this maybe throughout the presentation already is that the the next evolution of social streets should Empower Boulder residents to transform their streets so we know that the summer 2023 social streets event series uh successfully sparked positive experiences for the people that did attend these events um it inspired people to want more from their streets um and so what we see as the next step is to morph it into something that's

[152:00] more community-led sustainable um and Equitable uh letting city government really do what it does best which is supporting its community members to shape Bolder themselves next slide um so we have a number of actions that we recommend which you'll see kind of on the right hand side of these slides which are each informed by a number of current conditions or observations or um takeaways that we got from uh our engagement with folks and that's on the left hand side of these slides um so looking at this slide here first um in our evaluation we found that all stakeholders we spoke to they really agree that the activations again should be community-led and that city government should act as a facilitator rather than as the event planner um the recommendation then is to evolve social streets into an application-based program program where local groups can apply for City support in transforming streets that they nominate um these groups could be things like or uh folks like residents businesses uh business

[153:02] Improvement districts nonprofits and other advocacy groups they would come up with a concept um and apply to the city program to potentially be awarded the resources to make that project a reality um and we should note that there are pro programs like this that exist in cities all across the US um the full report that came that we created as the final deliverable of this process has a number of precedents to review we won't go through them here but just to note that this is a successful model that we're drawing inspiration from next slide um currently uh there are actually already many ways to transform streets in Boulder um there's things like the block party trailer the outdoor dining pilot uh special events permits and street closures for those uh but it's our observation that programs uh all these programs are housed in different departments uh within city government and the public may not really understand or see this as a coordinated simple program for them to make use of um so what we recommend then is that social

[154:01] streets itself becomes this One-Stop shop that bundles many different project types Under One Roof um and so what this program would do is it would have the different elements that I mentioned that Boulder already offers potentially with another uh some other options for how folks might be able to transform their streets um but they read it as one program under the social streets brand um and this program would then be led by an inter agency City team much like how uh the special review team functions already um and would have a dedicated program manager to administer the program as well next slide um so we know that there's a desire also to bring these same type of Transformations Beyond just downtown um this is something that we heard consistently from uh engagement with folks who attended these events saying that they enjoyed being able to have a reason to come downtown they would love to see something like this closer to home perhaps um so we envision social streets being able to evolve past

[155:00] downtown and really cover all of Boulder um but we also know that certain different types of Street changes or Transformations might be more appropriate in one part of the city than another um and so for that reason the city We Believe should set its own set of priorities as to what types of Street Transformations it would like to prioritize where Bas on its own policy goals um and what this could mean then is that the city takes a proactive role in geographically mapping these priority areas to help you know set the agenda and to create a bit of order to this process of uh an application based program next slide we also heard from people that they want to see this continued investment that leads to more lasting spaces for Gathering um so the social streets program could trigger what we call this quote Pathway to permanency where once a temporary installation might be set because an application is put in it's awarded it's implemented um once that happens and the installation is there the city could then

[156:00] consistently evaluate the pilot um to gauge its success based off a number of factors uh relative to the policy goals uh that you know drove to the actual implementation of that intervention um and so from that analysis from that evaluation if deemed successful it could then kick off a capital redesign process that makes the trans inform permanent um and so that's this idea of really letting a pilot project grow and mature into something that really informs uh long-term change uh that becomes permanent and Lasting in the city next slide and lastly um we also know that not all stakeholders are currently aligned on how or where it's best to repurpose streets um however uh most are open to this idea and we've heard from a number of collaborators from this original 2023 program that many are eager to stay involved in this type of program um so while we are recommending that the city uh changes its role from again more as the event planner in 2023

[157:00] we're saying that they now would shift to more of a facilitator role um it would still require the city to proactively consult with uh potential applicants to both inform them of the program and also to collaboratively come up with inspiring and feasible ideas together to then kind of keep the liveliness of the program uh going and so next slide yeah so really the big idea here is it's something like this umbrella where um you know the umbrella itself is bolder social streets and so externally to the public it's one single program but underneath that umbrella there are these different project types that people could um be inspired by the idea of and want to try to implement in their neighborhoods or in other neighborhoods of Boulder um and so like I said some of these programs uh the ones in blue there are already things that fit under this umbrella like the block party trailer um the uh street closures related to special events uh but then there's also other types of Transformations that um could be added to this umbrella one example here is the um pavement to Plaza where a street

[158:01] segment might be completely closed to car traffic and is converted to a plaza this is essentially what happened in West Pearl during the pandemic um next slide and so if social streets was uh structured in this way uh we could imagine a user Journey um for how someone would go through the process and so for example we have here Alex who is a fake person just for illustrative purposes um who for this example is a community uh she comes from a Community Housing partnership in Boulder and she has the idea where she wants to convert a relatively lesser used residential side street into a plaza where people can gather um so first what she would do is meet with her neighbors um to gather support for the idea and then she'd submit to an online application that tells her concept under the pavement to Plaza uh project type um an inter agency team uh in the city government would then review this application and approve

[159:01] it based on its feasibility uh its alignment with policy goals and priorities that the city has set as well as local support for the project um and so then the city would provide Urban Design solutions to help temporarily convert that street into a plaza and then it would be up to the local community uh to program it with the activities and the uses that they would want to um you know take part in in this Plaza and then after a while with this um installation installed um the city would then conduct traffic and experiential analyses to determine the impact of what this project had and if that impact is deemed to be good the city could then integrate this um Plaza design into a more permanent uh position and it would go into the capital Improvement plans for this neighborhood next slide and so lastly um you know if a program like this was to be developed um we've outlined here uh a high level timeline and I should say that this is mostly illustrative um can be totally flexible

[160:01] to um you know real world realities and what the city needs um but you know you could expect a program development like this to take about a year to to Define and this would include the uh identification of funding uh determining both the governance and Staffing of the program as well as setting the technical specifications for what types of projects live within the program what are the parameters what are the considerations how does this team go about awarding one project versus another that would all be part of this program development stage um and during that time too there would need to be internal cross departmental coordination to help set those priorities um as well as external stakeholder engagement to solicit input into the development of the program and to inspire people to apply to it and so all in all uh it could be something like a full year of developing the program and then following the launch of the program for inaugural season it could take about give or take a year to uh you know have people apply select and then implement

[161:00] the first round of projects from this so with that I believe I'll pass it back over to uh the fine folks at the city thanks Brett um Natalie suppler Transportation Mobility director I'm going to cover next steps so um hopefully you you you've kind of taken the the big takeaway here is that we're we're really looking for a community-led program that um Community comes to us with a desire to activate our streets um and we make that very easy for them um so this year we have staff dedicated and resource dedicated in our work plan to continue to develop this idea um we'll continue some engagement with Community about what the level of Interest interest is in activating streets where across the community um like areas where we already know um on the hill and Boulder Junction and and other places

[162:00] that Community is interested in and um then we will continue to think about how can we create this umbrella that Brett talked about with the services that we currently provide um and make that easier for people to navigate and and what other things potentially should live under that umbrella um and that also would be based on what we're hearing from Community around their interest um to activate space and then thirdly we'll be looking at um just some of the the goals and the program characteristics that Brett described in that timeline of um how do we kind of develop a Citywide program that could be viable for um this One-Stop shop so that's the plan for this year's work plan um I think if if there's continued interest in us moving forward with this type of program then we would in 2025 and Beyond look to Resource something that Brett's described in that timeline

[163:01] um before so then that kind of wraps up next steps and just moving on to the next slide we have some questions I know this looks like a lot here so um we can focus in on really just questions or feedback on um the technical analysis and um and then moving forward uh the interest in the program yeah thank you for that Natalie and uh for our other speakers appreciate the presentation and I just want like to make it a little simpler than these questions maybe we could say first what questions do we have of staff and then after that we could have comments that could roll up into both some feedback on how the social streets went this last year as well as what the next steps might be how does that sound that sounds great yeah so then Council I'd ask for any questions for University staff first and then after those are done we could move into General comments Nicole first I have my first question is

[164:03] the word successful that you guys used in this presentation Brett and Helena I know you I was at the dance event and I would say that it was not successful I don't know if you read the there were hardly any people there and if you read the 300 Page report it kept saying that the vendors and contractors weren't unhappy with the way it went so I'm curious why you used the word suc you know it was successful melanin Funk that was truly successful there and I would say soccer might have been well I didn't go to that one but a lot of them were not so my question is is why did you think they were and I mean it I'm not being sarcastic even though I I can be sarcastic now I'm not being sarcas no I mean I I think that's a fair question I um we would agree that there are certainly kind of es and flows in the

[165:02] quality I think of experience between the different um events that were produced for the program uh of the the the summer season um our read of success is based on the basically the feedback that received from folks who did attend the events the quality of experience that they enjoyed participating in it um that to us read as successful in terms of sheer numbers of attendance these were definitely much lower than one could expect from other say like similarly produced events that happen from downtown Boulder partnership in other parts of downtown they're definitely not hitting that same level of attendance um a lot of that has to do with the newness of a program like this which often we would um for a program like this to truly take off and succeed it really does take generally years um of repeated attempts with the same kind of uh programs being offered or different experimentations but in the

[166:01] same locations it takes time for these types of um activations to really gain their footing in terms of attendance um but again the reason that we ended up feeling that this was successful was because in our engagement on the ground with the folks who did attend these events again relatively fewer than other attending you know other attendance counts at other events people really provided positive feedback about the experience that they had when they were at the few events that took place okay second and last question is that right is Matt and I were on the subcommittee I don't know if you remember way back when and we did question that 13th Street was a place you would ever want to have an event because it certainly isn't anything like West Pearl I mean you know and the so many problems over over there mostly that it's so far from the center from Pearl Street you have to cross Canyon can you remind me why you decided you decided that was the best location I know I'm being mean I'm no no no well

[167:02] and as I think Helena mentioned it's a compromise it was having to balance multiple inputs um as we mentioned in the presentation uh one of the more challenging aspects of 13th is as you said it's it's a little further from the core of downtown it's also not um it doesn't have immediately a full double loaded facade of businesses as say West Pearl does however um one of the main considerations there was uh impact to traffic that was the the highest rated location for having the least projected uh impact on traffic and so that led part of the reasoning other parts of the reasoning were its potential inputs that could help uh Drive um findings for the Civic area plan knowing that that street in particular is designed as at least proposed to my understanding for the Civic area uh master plan to become a shared Festival Street this felt like an opportunity to prototype some ideas

[168:00] there and understand the limitations or the success factors there um and then finally truthfully there are um stakeholder considerations that need to be truthfully considered and and and valued as part of the input process with who are the impacted parties um along certain Street segments and if there's not um enthusiastic interest in participating in a street closure program like this it can actually um get in the way of success for certain streets or damage relationships and so we were being cautious around that as well yeah and I think I'll just add that was um I think Brett you were being very kind with listing all the other reasons but that last reason was a big driver for us and um and that ultimately we we wanted there there to be success and there was a big learning from gel in their work across the world that if you don't have adjacent business support around an activation then it makes um it

[169:00] very challenging to be successful and so that was a compromise and kind of a balance that we were striking with 13th Street got a followup from Lauren so in the if we did choose to continue this would it be focused on 13th Street like is that or would would we allow other options no and I can take that one and Brett feel free to jump in um no this would be so as we move forward we certainly imagine a city-wide program that would be our expectation is that Community you know like the melan and Funk Fest and the soccer um activation those were really community-led Partnerships that um drove the success and so that was the big learning for us to to have a program Citywide that's successful is that part those types of Community Partnerships are coming to us and wanting to get the word out and do the work and activate the space and we just kind of get out of the way and make it easy for them so it would be it would

[170:01] be a CommunityWide program that we'd eventually get to Nicole yeah thanks so much for uh the presentation and all the time and effort that went into uh evaluating the program um I think this this may be a question for Chris out in the audience give you a chance to stand up um does this uh type of activation fit into our economic Vitality work plan priority um as that's sort of coming out and being scoped sorry first time on the new technology uh good evening Council I'm Chris Jones the director of the community Vitality Department thank you for the question um absolutely as indicated in the presentation a big component of the reason for doing this work is related to economic Vitality activation of space um to generate uh activity that brings more folks to downtown so whether it's on

[171:02] 13th Street uh the event Street on the hill Boulder Junction we do seek to work with our office of special events to make the activation of those spaces a bit more streamlined than folks are currently experiencing and so we already have that in the works we have folks who are wanting have been activating spaces in our uh key commercial centers and we do seek to to improve that process thank you then that sort of leads into my second question thank you for doing that um this is just thinking about kind of trade-offs especially budget trade-offs as we're thinking about this program um do you see it as being something that kind of fits into already planned budget I mean given we've got a constraint budget do you see there being tradeoffs that may need to be made to continue this so yes uh when it comes to the ongoing operations we do have an office of special events it's an army of one person Justin Greenstein who works

[172:00] really hard on everything from the Boulder Boulder to the Boulder Creek Fest Taco Fest to the event Street activations and really trying to facilitate a a smooth uh process we do have some resources on that facilitation side when we're looking at the recommendations that are talking about infrastructure change changes making changes toes to make more streets easier to activate on that level that's not the realm that we have resources for currently and if we wanted to pursue that as a priority we need to look at trade-offs and and future budgets to help make that happen thank you any other questions yep Ryan and then Taisha uh thanks everybody so we don't um without council member Wallock here I'm going to try to channel and ask a couple of cost benefit questions um now that we have you up here too Chris so my first is um can you just summarize what if anything did we see in terms of New Economic Vitality new New Economic um

[173:01] impacts in a positive way that you know in some way or another we could measure and if any are there things we can show that we the drivers of that did we learn anything about what what contributed to that thank you for the question I would you know turn to Brett and the consultant team and some of their measures we did see that um the events and the activations in partnership with the downtown Boulder partnership are key partners and the folks who who actually did a majority of the actual lifting in this work um it brought people to downtown that might not have otherwise spent time downtown and they did have an a more safe or perception of safe experience in a place that we all know and we've been hearing a lot about um the Civic area challenges and so these are the types of things things that we're thinking about in the activation of any of our spaces is how do we program resources in a way that uh make sure that people have a positive experience and you heard from Brett saying you know the measure of success

[174:01] for the folks that did show up um overall we were hearing positive things about uh their use of that space in those windows of time we do know that uh we've been hearing from the community particularly in the Civic area that that's not always been the experience that people are having and so it's something we're thinking about not just in the 13th Street space where we tried this this program in 2023 but also other spaces that uh we have these types of challenges so again thinking about activations in Boulder Junction where we do hear about challenges in this area how do we help the businesses and the folks who are in those spaces have a better experience and want to spend more time in those spaces to deter maybe some of the the more negative experiences that we're hearing about got it so just to clarify I'm hearing there's there was a sense that that users had a good experience but as far as measurable economic Improvement you know business receipts anything do we have anything like that or is that not in Scope when it comes to uh one-off events it is very

[175:03] challenging to measure uh a major economic shift um we do have some tools that can dive into that but I would not say that I would uh see any measured uh uh economic uh boom from uh these events understood thanks okay can I go to the and then I assing on the cost side can I is that okay if I move yeah it's question cost set um I think this might be for Natalie um can you so as far as the recommendations to go forward just trying to make sense of the the cost overall and both um in terms of Staff time like for example how many how many new can corridors is this like if we you know what I mean if we don't do this is that like we can do fome into you know in a year quicker or some some way order of magnitude to think about how expensive this is in in terms of opportunity cost for other things we could do but then also the direct costs like what it sounds like there's a big

[176:01] idea about what we could do in new programming is there any thoughts to direct cost like in the budget what that looks like so I think we're the and I don't mean to like pick the can or punt on this but I think through 2024 is really going to be the opportunity for us to flush that out a little bit more um you know I think through Brett's presentation he they did provide some high level guidelines of what resourcing would look like with a program manager I think that's probably a pretty obvious um need and but but as Chris has kind of talked about I mean we have some things like the event Street and the Boulder Junction event Street and um and various kind of Permitting and application processes to do other types of Street activations within the city already and so there's some level of kind of like process Improvement that we're going to be looking at this year to help us understand like what then is some additional need from a resourcing

[177:01] standpoint um so I don't think we have a firm answer yet on that but certainly there will be trade-offs thank you Mark do you have a thought on yeah just to just to add Natalie did a great job I I think there was a couple questions on the the numbers um in particular so for this year is 150,000 yes yeah of onetime dollars to help support the continued engagement with Community learn some lessons look at the process Improvement type of stuff so I think we're really focused on um within our means how we can uh realize some of the recommendations again realizing that the full set of recommendations are really an ideal State um in terms of resourcing beyond what we currently have uh that will be a 2025 budget conversation but I think we're really focused on the the internal processes how can we get out of the way and help support some of these activities um within the within the capacity that we currently

[178:00] have do you mind if I ask follow up on that just in terms of on on cost there so I've got in the memo that last year the the cost of the program was $173,500 and do you have a sense of how many hours of Staff time were were also spent on the program does anybody have a sense of that I can tell you there was a lot of Staff time I mean I think we had it was a multi-department project right so we had staff from four departments working on this weekly because it was such a tight turnaround to build these Partnerships and um just figure out how we were going to activate the space over the entire summer and obviously gel was a great resource in that but there was a lot of Staff time over the last year to activate the space and that's part of why we also some of the learning was that the the best way to do this is probably not a top- down approach that's why um in addition to just the success of the events it really needs to be

[179:01] community-led it it probably doesn't make sense for um you know five departments or four departments to be Staffing a 20 person team and trying to activate the space top down great Point thanks um I've got Taisha you have follow-ups I got a okay and then I got a couple few people in the queue too sorry this is related to budget so for the budget allocation for this year um what sort of Vis visible product um will be Pro produced like are we going to activate the space again this summer I'll punt an that someday I'll pick the budget thing but uh I think Natalie can give you a better idea of the the 2024 activities for for this year yeah we do not plan to activate space with the existing budget our um hope for that budget is to really be able to do more engagement with community and understand what it is that we need to change within our existing

[180:01] process to um just make it easier we may also do some analysis around like what zones we should be considering beyond our existing infrastructure around event streets um but those would be kind of the two focuses right now and then obviously looking internally at our processes all right I got TAA Tina and Matt hello everybody thank you so much I have lots of questions so I'm just going to go boom boom boom on all of them and then whoever needs to jockey for responses we can do that so um I'm gonna start with research and evaluation um okay so I thought that we had discussed the importance of disaggregating demographic information and I have to say it was hard to see once again myself erased from a report as an African-American black person in our city um I just I I I need to understand

[181:02] why we didn't disaggregate by all Races per best Equitable research practices that we had already previously discussed so that's one on on Research evaluation I also would love to see an actual breakdown of those 10 active participants because again um the current way that the information is presented is actually a way that masks and shadows who actually was represented so um just for note of transparency I'm just curious um why we you know is is there more information available or can we get that um okay so that's evaluation research and evaluation light um the next piece is on just in general our arts and culture um portfolio so I was very curious after reading 300 and something Pages um how does this work fit into the larger efforts that we're already doing in this area in the ways that we engage community in events and and culture and all of these kinds of things basically

[182:01] is this a value add to the portfolio that we already have and in what ways like how does this fill existing gaps in our current services around arts and culture so that it's not a standalone project but rather integrated into a larger portfolio um so just curious about that relationship between this project and the larger arts and culture portfolio um next question was the Arts commission engaged in this process and in what way and if so in what ways next question um TAA do you want to get answers as we go along here no I'm just going to give the whole list and we may not have time for all of them so I just want to kind of get out the big bucket ones um and also and I also want to hold space for other um members who may have questions appreciate that what why informed and consult is there oh I noticed in your um in the engagement framework there was only inform and consult when actually based

[183:01] on what you just shared on the melan and Funkfest and the other one that was very community-led Community Driven we actually are in the collaboration section so I feel like we should get credit for when we're actually in a collaborative place with our community members this is actually an example of meaningful collaboration on that framework and I just would love to make sure that we are actually acknowledging um that alignment so I'm just kind of curious why the decision was made to have those ratings and not that larger rating so I I will give a pause um and and I will end with the racial diversity I noticed that there was a whole section on racial diversity and then the next section was on stakeholder and business engagement so my question is was the Latino chamber and the equity ampli ification program which is black businesses in our area engaged in this work around the econ economic Vitality Etc so those are all my questions feel free to answer what you can thank you so much so so maybe we can have the answers

[184:01] you have right on hand and maybe get get back to her and us with some of the others that require more detail that sounds good yeah and I'll look to Brett maybe if you want to um speak to some of the data and engagement questions and then um Chris and Matt will take the arts and culture ones yeah definitely I think points well taken and thank you for for raising them I will say intentionally the presentation that we as gel are providing today intentionally brought together a lot of different inputs including the stakeholder and public engagement that occurred at the events um as one input to be then um kind of told in this more impressionistic manner that also took into account um other types of observation and Analysis that we as Urban designers on site um as well as the transportation analysis so this is to say that I do know that there is a separate engagement report that was a part of the final product um that came out of this work that completed in I believe October of last year so while

[185:01] the presentation today does not disaggregate um across all those different demographic factors I believe there's a more fullsome uh engagement packet that does go into this um I will say the engagement itself that occurred um at these sites uh did skew more white and affluent um this had to do with the nature of just on-site engagement of asking folks who are attending an event to take time out of their experience of the event to share their feelings of the event as well so we recognize that it's not a perfect um engagement method in order to get a fully representative sample so I do want to just name that that is a true reality of this um engagement that did take place uh thank you council member Adams for the question related to arts and culture um so it's really timely actually in the sense of the three

[186:01] strategic pillars of the community Vitality Department are cultural vibrancy District vitality and access for all and we really see that this social streets um interdepartmental um project really did touch on all three of those things and we've gone through a recent restructure in the department where our office of special events moved into our cultural vibrancy arm led by Matt shansi I would note that a majority of the activations that we experienced last year were funded through CID funds the Central Area General improvement district and so those funds are actually administered through our downtown management commission so we did spend a lot of time with that commission um on this particular project moving forward now that we have done this restructure I would see of course uh especially with new funding um possibly being available and and maybe spent on activations depending on uh Community desires that the Arts commission would be very much involved happy to invite uh Matt up to

[187:00] provide more information on that but uh thanks for the question aome thank you thanks Chris um I'm mat zanski and I uh work with the community Vitality Department in the office of arts and culture and uh to answer your first question about um how this fits in with the cultural plan and uh the the environment there's really four ways um the first is there are existing Arts programs Arts nonprofits that program in the public realm and we've heard from them that there needs to be um a a path cleared for that to be easier and uh better for their organizations and I think that a lot of the information we received and the the plans for this can do that work uh the second is that our cultural plan calls for the community to have more um ability to both um affect the environment with their creativity but also to encounter the Arts and so this does that as well um and then there was the experiments and public art program that was part of the the um the um programming mix for this and that can be something that in the future can be a

[188:01] a really great way to deploy the arts for all sorts of different things but then also back to the economic Vitality questions when we focus that in on the Arts that um hosting Arts events in the public realm in programs like Boulder social streets can have a rip effect out to cultural tourism and the uh engagement of residents and community members with uh um arts and culture nonprofits and arts businesses and so we see like all of those aspects coming uh together in a program like this could could be benefits awesome thank you so much and I'm hopeful in future reports that there is a stronger alignment to our existing strategies um and priorities so that you know that could be you know seen and and I would have appreciated having that in the report so that I understood the alignment to our larger priorities so thank you for that additional information also it is it possible to turn up the sound I'm on The Struggle Bus hearing and I I I would

[189:00] just love to have a little bit more not you know of my voice but like I'm struggling to hear them thank you okay I got Tina and then Matt and then hopefully we can move to comments here soon yeah um thank you for all this information and uh uh like Tara I also went to an event this summer I went to the roller paloa and it was a great idea but it was definitely poorly attended so I am you know I have some similar concerns about how we're going to measure success in the future but um with that being said one of my concerns is when we just think about how to cost out what the cost might be um if we're going to switch to a format that is community-led I think that and we think about the cost for the city to put on these um these events was $170,000 I I would like to make this accessible to different types of people in the community and realize that there

[190:00] might be a financial subsidy that the city gives to some groups when they do their when they present their idea so um whether we choose to pursue that um I don't think we're there yet I'm not hearing that this is on our agenda for you know even next year yet however I would like to have a an option where we can choose to add money so that a whole different groups of the of the community can participate because my my gut feeling is that it's going to be expensive to activate a street whether it's downtown or whether it's up in North Boulder and there are costs that come out of this so I don't want it to favor just certain groups so that would be my only thought as we move forward did you have a question there no okay that's fine oh then thanks for that team Matt appreciate I thought we were on comments I'm sorry we're still still in questions appreciate it um one of the things I'm hearing which really leads to

[191:00] a question is is where does where does social Boulder Sol streets fit into a larger cohesive plan um we've got the Downtown Vision plan we got Hill downtown connection we've got the caned downtown Corridor study we've got the cult arts and culture plan coming we've got overall Hill revitalization with two hotels starting and what I don't know is where does this fit in in a larger plan because I think to some extent maybe social streets is siloed into its own thing so I'm just I'm wondering that if there's a larger cohesive plan that touches on this in all areas I think it might be easier for us to coales around what the strategy is and then what the necessary investment is um so I'm just sort of wondering H how is this threaded into the array of plans that all touch um uh or or where social streets has has a role um potentially I'm happy to take this one and let my colleagues jump in um so I think social streets and and Brett can even I'm sure speak to this in just his

[192:00] experience in cities the the idea is really I mean through Civic area Phase 2 you know I think we're going to see opportunities where like Street activation could really make sense and so if we develop a soci social streets program that really makes makes it easy for Community to activate space then and and not super expensive like Tina you know spoke to then um things like Civic area like you start to see that tie together where we've created a space through Civic area Phase 2 that you know enhances that space and and Ally could talk to that better but that space would be enhanced and then people would want to activate it and then we've created a a city process that makes it easier for that to occur um same with let's take get can right if if we make the downtown streets a more multimodal and accessible and safe space then that will lead potentially to people wanting to activate that in a way

[193:01] that we haven't thought of before to transform those streets on some temporary or somewhat permanent basis and that would happen through a program that we've created to make it easy for them to do that so that's where I think you see those things start to tie together it's not like Boulder social streets lives in Civic area or lives in can it's an overall City framework that as we make improvements across the city things start to tie into that if there's an opportunity for it I appreciate that and maybe I can ask a specific thing to sort of your lane in transportation along those lines and maybe like where the down where the the can down the corridor study comes in is does social would social would the desire and Community uh request at a pretty large fraction wanting to socialize our streets play a role in how um aggressively or how imaginative that Corridor study looks at say for instance like unlocking the oneway loop downtown as a means of

[194:00] freeing up the space to achieve that socializing of of of public space and streets and so I'm just wondering H how how does having that being a thread or a goal liberate these other plans to really think imaginatively versus them maybe being s social streets being sort of siloed and kind of somewhat awkward stepchild to to all of those pieces yeah I think it gets back to our s framework goal around accessible and connected and if that's the you know goal for everything that we're doing when it comes to our streets right then um then I think when we are doing downtown can Mobility study work in a year or two that will be top of mind and that then makes it you know easier when somebody wants to do something through social streets thanks Matt and did you have a followup Lauren well not a followup just a question um so I I get that the information in there

[195:00] was not statistically valid but I was still struck by um that sort of the pavement to Plaza option was the top way that people thought streets could improve moving forward um and I was wondering and of course I would want more dat better data on that before we um did anything but I was wondering if this program allowed for what sounds like people are interested in more permanent street closures Brett do you want to take that one yeah absolutely I mean that that input um is why we felt compelled as part of that umbrella to include pavement to Plaza as a recommended um project type Within this uh social streets framework um and and somewhat also to speak to the previous question too I mean I think the value of a program like this um from a transportation planning standpoint but also from a a sort of public life

[196:01] experience standpoint too is the role in which you can experiment with Pilots that then ideally and this is the pathway to permanency piece that ideally start to give Clues um to the city or to decision makers in a public sector role about where to invest and by getting um folks interested in say we're getting a lot of response from the the residents of Boulder for a pavement deposit type program in this area of the city that's actually perhaps a clue uh to continue down that path and to temporarily test a pilot of that type of typology um and based off of you know the evaluation of its success which of course is needing to be defined um as we've talked about I think today um that could then lead to this Pathway to permanency in which the pavement to Plaza program uh takes it from a temporary Plaza to maybe something even more permanent or some type of renewed uh street that is maybe

[197:00] not fully a plaza but incorporates greater public space for pedestrians and others so all to say um yes pavement to Plaza is intentionally included in this program based off of those responses and I think the potential to uh temporarily try out that type of uh treatment to streets as a way to then imagine more permanent transformation thank you okay great so uh why don't we move to comments here if people want to give some feedback on the program from last year you're welcome to but also uh how we might see this going forward is the proposal that's kind of in front of us something that people are interested in or perhaps a different version of it would love to hear council's thoughts in hopefully fairly succinct because it's it's getting late I have thoughts but who else would like to you want to all right I I'll go ahead and call on myself um anyway so I want to I want to thank uh all the city staff who were

[198:01] involved in this program in the last year it was as you mentioned it was a huge amount of work right and it was very creative the different ideas were super cool um and so really appreciate the the thought and the effort that went into it and also from our consultant team as well I I will say I went to several of them I thought Echo what ter said the melan and Funkfest was hugely successful but the other couple that I went to were were pretty dead you know there just wasn't a lot of activity I didn't I think some of the people who came I think had a decent time but like if you look at an attendance of 200 um SC scattered throughout 5 hours for a a day that's costing on average $20,000 I I feel like the cost benefit wasn't really there in terms of the effectiveness of the program and to Ryan's point about opportunity costs you know this was this was a cool idea we tried it I don't know that it it did work out um and also there there was the evolution of like this was the next step after the West Pearl closure with which people just loved but wasn't working for the businesses so okay fine we won't do that but I don't think this kind of got

[199:00] to what people loved about the West Pearl closure so again hugely appreciate all the effort that went into it so what I'm wondering in terms of next steps great point about the pavement to Plaza being I think what stood out to people because I think that does get at what people loved about the West Pearl closure you know we do already have ways to have block parties we do already have ways to close a street for 6 hours you know we have permits for these things existing but if we could create something maybe that was kind of quick and Nimble about having people propose that a section of Street in their neighborhood could either be closed or altered and you could try it for a couple days and if it's working out it could maybe move into something more permanent but if we could do it in kind of a simple way like not an FTE and a year of putting together criteria IA but some something more straightforward where we could evaluate it on a simpler basis and you know not spend $150,000 on it that would be my thought can we do something quick and Nimble that gets at that essence of what people loved

[200:01] without some of the complexities that we introduced and all and I would really love to see it stop impacting so much staff time too because you all have so much to do and we have so many priorities so that's kind of my thinking and I welcome other council members input TAA thank you um I I really appreciated the um the grants component and the efforts to reduce the bureaucratic burden of that and I think that that's something that can be applicable to all of the work that we do so thank you for lifting that up um I am interested in um not necessarily the program as it exists right now but just you know I went to high school in Brooklyn um block parties are awesome and usually neighborhoods just put together with the lawn chair I mean you I mean um and so I'm just I would love to see that kind of thing um happen in other parts of the community um but I understand why this particular location was um selected I will say I

[201:01] attended a few of them including arts and the melan and Funk Fest and to one of the goals uh or objectives of this project was to test programs and so we tested them some of them worked and so I just don't understand why we wouldn't continue those that were hugely successful and I'll again speak to the melanin Funk Fest of as an African-American black person who lives here um for on coming on 13 years that is the first night activity that I have ever experienced and participated that was outside of the month of February right right um and so I'm hopeful that we actually can consider because I'm so tired of us having something it be amazing and then we don't do it again so that's not how we build public Trust and in my opinion if there are that and I'm also uh grew up a soccer player um if the soccer event was also successful why why should they be penalized you know I don't know what their specific price points were it also would have been helpful to see the budget of each of the projects and not

[202:01] just this one big number I don't know if it was in there I didn't see it I I really did read all the pages um but just again to understand you know of the 100,000 or so how much did it cost for each of those vent and I anticipate I suspect that that Mullan Funkfest was quite expensive just based on what it was but of all the events that one felt like oh this is a good place to have this right like you actually did need that space it also was nice to have night events you know I was at the visit Boulder uh I participated in the visit Boulder board meeting yesterday and we're talking about getting folks downtown and all the things at night and so this was actually an event that got people back in at night and so I would encourage us to reconsider eliminating program that actually were successful in this project thank you thanks for that Taisha and just to add to what I I totally agree when I said the melan and Funkfest was was successful I would love to see another event of that type happen again for sure I've got Tina

[203:02] Matt yeah I just I really like this idea of making it easy for some events so it could be that the melan and Funk P um Fest is a good way for us to create that pathway where if a group is interested they can do something on an existing open Street um but maybe without staff time and then I'll just point out that the farmers market is really active every Saturday and Wednesday it's a street closure um there's huge Community interest so um just thinking also about how that has been a real success with our street activation and how can we carry that forward into other neighborhoods or that same concept um that's just a different example and then the final thing is there are other communities that do really good projects um when one is of course the you know the Sidewalk Chalk Festival in Denver which is an amazing event um so I wouldn't want to close the options so this idea that we can do things that are simple I think is great and I'd love to see that but without doing the FTE that

[204:00] we spent last year thanks Ryan then Matt okay I'm uh also very appreciative all the work Brad Helena Natalie Chris the for Department staff and others who worked on this um an absent costs and opportunity costs feels positive and I appreciate that when something's new it takes time to to get going um but I think on the question of of what now we we should really look at the big picture and um I would like to think about that first slide that discussed the the West Pearl origin and I thought that was a really good kind of beginning Point um and if you'll permit me a metaphor I I kind of think of this there was a little bit of a settlement agreement um in that West Pearl exercise in which there was so much Community enthusiasm to try to meaningfully transfer space from Cars to people on a on a permanent basis um and that I I recall there was sort of a a response um that was like well we could but but the conditions aren't right just

[205:01] quite right here so let's take it somewhere else and to me that's kind of the the origin story of this and um so I think you know when I when I imagine at that point whatever that's a couple years ago um the the the a big idea idea was like let's look for permanent changes we can make that will fundamentally reallocate space and I feel like there's a a gap between that kind of intent and there may have been other intents but that was one of them in my mind and um between that and some of the discussion I heard about kind of like trying to be unobtrusive to to drivers and in this exercise and I think maybe that's because the exercise was was simply scoped that way and that's fine um so what what did we learn and what to go for it I few points one um this was a very events Focus initiative and I think one thing it showed us is that we should have confidence that people want this that they that they want to come out and come out downtown and use space um that are currently

[206:00] currently used for cars um and the sky doesn't fall so that's first thing second thing I I like the the pathway to permanence thinking in a way um but given where we started it feels like doing it's doing a lot of gymnastics to get to a point of just making direct changes to um to to create infrastructure which I think we have the power um to do a lot more quickly um so that leads me to the third thing and I'll pick up on something council member Benjamin said which is you know we have so many initiatives in the dtown area Civic area study all things downtown this um the hill connection which is now priority for work plan the activities with the Limelight and other activities around CU downtown can study Arboretum comments we heard today about parking issues on the trail head that interconnect with some of our our Transit opportunities in all that space and so um I I'm usually not somebody who says we need to do more planning but I I do think this is a case where we would benefit from a more integrated plan to

[207:01] regarding what we're trying to do with in this geographic area of something like downtown to the hill with trail head access or you could amend that if you debate the boundaries of that but something like that space that would give us a map of what the public spaces we're going to build where are the bikeways what is the what does the redesigned Transit look like do we want that that um oneway Loop going around town um where will we have public spaces and and Plaza and a park um in order to create an infrastructure that we that we could then build from I think that's to me the the most obvious thing we should be focusing on I know that would take some additional effort but um that's where I would like to see us go and then just the final thing is there was a question regarding Beyond down Town how to think about this and I just think um clearly we need to build a polycentric you know City with different different geographies um but I feel like that at this point the task one of our tasks is

[208:00] is to focus on this getting this area right um and then let's treat other geographies as we go um and I'm excited about the potential for this kind of a program but I do think our some kind of an integrated plan holistic plan for our downtown area bringing everything together trying to do is something um it's probably our biggest opportunity thanks Matt appreciate that and um you know having been on this committee I just want to express a lot of gratitude for having mean big lift for a lot of folks um we had a lot of meetings about trying to figure out where to go with this Chris and and uh and same with Brett and Natalie and and others so I'm grateful for the work and not everything we embark on as a city has to be a smashing success and sometimes when it's not is actually where we learn the most um and I think this is kind of the the case of that and so I don't think there's any reason for anybody uh on this Das or IT staff or in the community to hang their head low and and and think of this as a failure or or anything like that I I actually don't think that's the case I

[209:00] think this was a necessary Evolution for us to go through this exercise to understand what the limits are and but also what the potential is going forward um so so I I'm so I'm grateful for those efforts for for staff and everybody and with that being said I I think you know one of the lessons we learned is we can't activate in a vacuum and that's I think what 13th taught us is it is not an active space unless we pour heavy resources to activate it whereas places like West Pearl the hill and Boulder Junction can be immensely activated with a light lift because the areas are already active by infrastructure they're they're social by nature and I think that's maybe the theme of what we want to go forward is streets should be social in nature not by activation and I think that's where we want to focus our efforts and I think you know the way we kind of touch on that is um process improvements I think we take the spaces we have and we streamline it I keep coming back to a wedding venue the hill space b Boulder Junction get there on

[210:01] West Pearl but these should all just be like a wedding venue where it is literally like how many people 100 here's how many trash cans here's how many csos here's how many tents you need here's how much water you need go I need 500 people check check check it should be that streamlined that simple should already be pre-measured um we don't need to have people running out with tapes we know the spaces so these are things that I think can simplify it to Aaron's point and lower the barrier of Entry but in doing so I think we run into a staff challenge uh Justin is already maxed and if we're going to lower the barrier of entry and make it easier for people to do things Justin alone won't be able to manage those projects and so I think we still need to keep in mind the FTE because I don't think we can have our cake and eat it in this instance of making it streamlined but not have the staff to support that added work that will come to them so I think we need to be realistic with what we're asking is if we want more activation from Community there will still need to be staff time to support that not everyone's going to be a professional event planner and if we have a

[211:01] streamlined process we need someone in staff to walk them through and grease those tracks so so I think we need to still think about what that FTE is because if the goal is to have streets that are social by Nature um staff needs to walk them through that um and and lastly I I again I want to come back to that because I think it's a theme streets should be social in nature I'm a little worried about Community driving some of these events because I think those Concepts again are are are siloed into their own concept not feeding into a larger cohesive vision for that space so I just want to be mindful for that it might be a really cool idea but it may not fit the larger Vision that we have for that space um and and at the end of the day end of the day um we should be building streets socially um that are focused on people not cars so I'll leave it at that but thanks again for for everybody's work we appreciate working with you on that and hopefully more work to come Nicole Lauren

[212:00] Tara thanks um I want to also just thank everybody for all the work and time that went into this and thanks thanks to the Consultants too um I would really like to figure out how we can make it easier for Community groups to do fun things um and I think to you know your point Matt I feel like Community groups generally know what it is that they're looking for things that are not there um that really should be there more frequently um so I would support anything we can do to make the pering or just the process easier for Community groups especially within the economic Vitality work plan priority um so that's where we'll already be directing some staff time and effort we'll be engaging our racial Equity tool I think well all the right things will be happening in that space so it feels like a good space to explore this to me um I'm really not interested in kind of spending a lot of extra money or staff time that's going to take away from um other priority areas as we move forward so as we can fold this into existing things I think that's in our constrained

[213:00] environment it's likely a good place to be um I really appreciated tesa's question about um will whether this would fill uh existing arts and culture gaps um to me I think that's one of the crucial questions to be uh thinking about as we move this forward love the idea um um Taisha you brought it up Matt and Chris you both talked to it um about uh involving the Arts commission and you know thinking about how we can use that as a way to really drive any gaps that that may be there um and and I think just promoting this idea of encouraging people to use existing spaces in new ways um and as we move forward I trust uh staff will be doing all this within our uh sustainability equity and resilience framework work and thinking about how we can use programs like this um to work on creating healthy and thriving communities so um I I know that's part of our budget so we'll see that when it comes back um but I think there's some really good information that's coming out of this and ways that

[214:01] we can bring our community uh together and Empower our community to do more of this bringing um people together kind of work but um thank you for all the work that went into it and yeah just echoing the comments about the melan and Funk Fest I did not go to the soccer one but um that one's one one of my favorite groups was there it was wonderful evening so um I hope we can do more of those things as we move forward thanks thanks Lauren and then Tera yeah I'm gonna ech Echo quickly what some of my other colleagues have said so I heard nothing but positive things about the melanin funk festival and I would fully support trying to um make that continuing happen again in the future um and making maybe that a yearly thing um I would also really like to see um an integrated plan for making easy cost effective event planning sort of street closure um because our current street closure program is not either of those

[215:01] things having utilized it before um I have a hard time in this constrained budget environment committing significant funds but I fully support um what Nicole was speaking to with finding overlap um with existing processes in boards I did quickly want to touch base on something that it was probably needs a follow-up email for but I have a lot of internal conflict with us talking about trying to make these events permits easier and things on 13th Street while I've been hearing from Community around the difficulty that they're having getting um permits for uh services for the unhoused at the Bandshell and so I would be interested in hearing more from a staff perspective of what is going on there and why um I know that doesn't directly relate

[216:06] but thank so thank you for that first I want to apologize if I was mean that's number one no it was I don't think I agree with Matt there's nothing wrong with saying these two events are great and the rest were not really great there's nothing wrong with that it's perfectly fine I think I I think at the at the retreat I said I wish we had more pros and cons there's nothing wrong with saying this is good this didn't work out you know what I mean so I don't want you to take offense um Brett and where's the other person hello please don't take offense I was just trying to be real because then we could you know we could solve problems easier when we do that so thanks that's the first thing but I did I do appreciate what you said somebody said that social the problem with social streets was that

[217:00] isn't a social Street at this point um I read almost that entire very long packet and one of my favorite lines was from pet what was her name Peta PETA she said another ch um she said when of events are created in places where people do not go there seems to be a major lack of attendance so I right so I think that we should keep that in mind for the future really it's true I mean you can't activate spaces that people don't go to I mean you can and something as successful as melan and Funk is because the community was involved and it's a great band Etc so I did want to say that and I also want to say this is not relevant at all but I spent a lot of time with chalk drawing on the side walk in Brooklyn we could have an entire Festival be free just take out your chalk and right on your sidewalk I forget it um I agree with my colleagues about everything else process easier time and money um we don't want to do a lot of that we don't the staff spent so

[218:02] much time doing this job it was incredible and so I think I feel so guilty how much time we spent compared to how much we got in return so to speak and how little little the low the attendance was when you read some of the stuff in this packet the I felt bad for the vendors they spent hours there with very few people coming to their trucks so I mean having an unsuccessful event does have a big impact on a lot of people um you know including the people who trying to get involved and also it's kind of a bummer to go somewhere and there's like not a lot of people there it's kind of a downer and we want not a downer here so that's pretty much we want ERS not not literally but anyway um that's what I have to say so kudos to staff and I hope you didn't take my words in the wrong way but I meant it for good I did thanks terara followup from Nicole yes I just had one one

[219:00] really quick thing that I forgot to say um I just wanted to uh uh I'm wondering if we can get a thanks to the Community Partners who helped us put these on so for example Evette Rollins um helped put on the melon and Funk vest which we have all been raving about tonight so um I I expect that you all have some way of getting getting through to some of those organizers but it would be really awesome just to let them know that we greatly appreciate everything they did to put on these events great Point all right I think that's everybody um so I'll I'll look to you all and our feedback was a little bit mixed but do you have a sense of what next steps based on this feedback might be uh we were listening closely uh a mix of uh Fe back but I I think we we heard some some consensus around leaning into the process Improvement and really focusing on that uh maybe less on intensive new resources to support the broader program at least at this stage uh we'll review all of the feedback uh

[220:01] that we heard tonight um I I think there's opportunities for us to look at the successes of some of the events that we did conduct in 2023 and just appreciating some of the comments around the realities of Staff capacity to to to do programming and I I think that's where some of the resource intensity comes into play so um appreciate a little bit of Grace as we uh try to respond to that I I think that the the thoughts around process Improvement um are what we can take back and really focus in on some of those elements of the recommendations and then um I'm I'm presuming we'll continue to have this conversation with City Council in the coming months that sounds great and I will just add um I I was remiss in not introducing Ben manibog he was our senior project manager on this project project after we had somebody leave the city early on so he's been our fearless leader facilitating the process so thank you Ben thanks for your work Ben thanks for coming tonight all right that is the end of our agenda wait what about um isn't there a

[221:02] something from the council or something at the end you know there's like that list of just like random there's nothing in particular I guess what I'm saying is not I'm still not sure when to bring these things up because obviously we have this CAC and that's great but things happen between the CAC meeting and now um so I thought there was like a Matters from Council or something in there at the bottom end I'm not really sure yeah so there there's Matters from the mayor and members of council and and um generally you that would be where something got scheduled in from CC but at the end of the meeting if there's something that you want to bring up that's separate from the agenda you're welcome to say a few words to which is right now awesome chance thank you kindly um I just wanted to lift up the incredible work of Toof for um Downham and Mark Davidson who co-presented at the Colorado Parks and Wildlife partner in the outdoors conference about um our City's efforts around accessibility in our parks and open space and I just again want to thank them for a spark

[222:02] that is literally going across our entire State um but I also want to lift up that they continue to raise issues and barriers for our disabled communities um not only accessing our open space and Park but also just our public spaces in general um like having the bathroom um you know how they have the baby change tables um but unfortunately for our communities that um you know have adults that need to use those types of um uh equipment um those are only 70 pounds or less and so again that's just one example and of course in our historic districts we have unfortunately a scenario where our wheelchair bound residents and visitors have to go into the back to enter a restaurant um as opposed to having a ramp that gives them dignity in entering the front door and so again I want to both commend um the efforts that we are making and the impact that we are having not only in our community but around the

[223:00] state and the country but I also want to lift up that there's still significant work that needs to be done in our for our disabled Community as well as our um senior community thank you so much for this time thanks TAA any other final thoughts um well I will just say uh welcome members of our fire department who've stayed with us here for the whole meeting um and so I encourage council members to go over and say hi once the meeting is adjourned uh thanks for joining us and with that I will go ahead 38 p.m. thanks everybody e