May 9, 2024 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

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[5:04] all right Me In Charge that's questionable but all right uh good evening and welcome to tonight's study session of the Boulder City Council my name is Tina Maris and thank you for joining all of us we have on tonight's agenda two items our first item will be a financial forecast and budget update and our second item is related to the city's 2024 po Cal ballot items so just to start I'm going to outline how the meeting will be conducted we will review staff's presentation for the budget update and then we will have time for questions at the end of the presentation we will conduct our Council discussion with staff if you have questions please wait for staff to complete their presentation and for the ballot item staff will present their presentation in sections and we'll have questions for council at the end of each section Council will be given the opportunity to

[6:01] ask questions and provide input at the end of each section and at the end of the sections where it's pertinent we're also going to ask if the charter committee or the financial strategies committee wants to chime in at all before the council asks their questions so that's part of the timing there so um any questions on the process no okay I'm not seeing any hands so we'll turn to our um to Crest um m who's going to be filling in for Nua who's coming in just a little bit late to the meeting so that's it Chris do you want to kick us off happy to kick us off thanks Tina and good evening mayor members of council uh as Tina described we've got really two great topics for tonight um both that are really information filled too so uh this first item on our uh Financial forecast and budget update is uh really the first uh touch point for Council in the annual budget process and there's no decision to make tonight it's really a whole

[7:02] bunch of great information that we have to share on what we're seeing in our forecast and and the key assumptions that we'll be using to develop this coming Year's budget so we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts uh last week we did have a chance to discuss the presentation plan with council's financial strategy committee uh and they gave us some great feedback on some additional detail and some examples to include in the present T presentation tonight as well so um you'll see some of those we've we've got a great team here from our finance department as well as our partners from the University of Colorado so with that I'm going to turn it over to our uh Chief Financial Officer Cara Skinner to kick us off thanks Chris good evening mayor and Council Cara Skinner uh I am pleased to introduce this first item tonight uh we take this time each year as Chris mentioned to provide an update on our major Revenue sources our overall Outlook and our major assumptions really as we move into the next phase and then the Final Phase of budget development uh

[8:02] as uh Chris mentioned we're going to begin with our partners our great Partners from CU lead School of Business um rich wakand and hopefully I said his name right uh will provide an economic update on national state and local conditions and expectations and how those influence our financial forecast um and then as Chris mentioned I'm going to introduce our great budget team who will speak more specifically to the city's budget outl and we will end with a budget timeline sharing with the community and with you all again a reminder of when we will present the city managers recommended budget to council and the community and then when will when we will be back before Council for those budget discussions and decision Mak so with that I will hand it over to Rich I think you're ready to go all right so the question is I are you pulling the slides up yes okay okay great there we go so first and foremost

[9:03] thank you so much for inviting us to be here uh brevity has been stressed in terms of the presentation so we're respecting that there's not a very large number of slides uh U my colleagues Robert mcnown and Brian leowski are on uh the uh webinar as well and we're happy to answer questions because again this is sort of just a brief overview of where we are at the moment a couple of quick comments before advancing um the the backdrop for this without going through slides is that GDP nationally is uh slowing but positive uh so it's kind of trending down as many people anticipated it would a year ago but it's sort of a year behind schedule in that regard we're seeing employment slowing but positive uh still Positive Growth again without going too far into the weeds I would say a lot of the

[10:00] anticipated impacts of the higher interest rates have taken longer to filter their way through the economy we're also seeing slowing but still positive personal income so I guess the quick snapshot of the sort of the national economy which is the backdrop for our state and uh local Revenue projections relates to an economy that's still outperforming but we do see three significant challenges uh that are out there uh that we'll be talking about you might think of many more especially when you think down to the state or the local level next slide please so the first of these challenges is the labor shortage or labor weakness in the market and uh this is something that started before covid we we like to attribute a lot of it to covid uh but in fact we had a Labor uh shortage issue that was occurring before we had more job openings than we had unemployed

[11:02] people prior to co it co had certainly exacerbated that as you can see in terms of the uh leftand graphic uh when the kind of roses Rose Colored line is higher than the black line you have a gap uh in terms of the analysis in terms of supply and demand it's one of the reasons we really like this particular graphic by the way it's basically looking at supply and demand Supply of people who are available to work and the demand for people is being counted by job openings in the broader economy nationally in its peak it hit two uh available jobs for every single unemployed person uh Colorado was significantly higher than that uh it is clearly more in Balance now the nation's at 1.4 uh Colorado which you can look at on the right is uh at 1.7 we haven't seen the drop off in job openings uh nearly

[12:02] as significantly as the national economy has but still these markets are indicating being uh you know being more inbalance although Colorado is in worse shape and that's what I mean by that is we have even tighter labor markets than the nation as a whole I guess an interesting sort of sidebar uh you know as we would say cocktail party comment for people if you could match every single unemployed person to a job if we just pretended we could wave a wand and every unemployed person could take the jobs that are out there to fill right now at the in the state of Colorado we'd have over a 100,000 unfilled jobs with no workers in them at the national level that's millions and millions of jobs so that just gives you a little bit of quick background on that item number two on the next slide that we're paying a lot of attention to of course is inflation and I'm sure you are as well

[13:01] in your personal life and in your professional life we have seen that come down the March numbers were a little bit more encouraging as you can see and very encouraging of course for us locally was that the Denver Aurora Lakewood measure was actually below the national measure uh for the first time in quite a long time uh in fact if you keep track of these things which we tend to do given what we do 11 of the last 14 years years Colorado has had a higher inflation rate than the country and one of the other three years we were tied so only two of the last 14 years have we actually had slower price appreciation in Colorado than the nation has and again as as highlighted we were lower in March I I I think and if you looking for positive things or way to sort of interpret this it took us 16 months to go from where we were down in the 2% range or less all the way up to

[14:03] 9% that was from March of 21 to June of 22 then from uh you basically July of 22 to uh June of 23 so a 12 month period we went back down from nine to sort of the 3% range so that was encouraging it took us less months to get sort of back down to the 3% range but the big issue now as you well know is that for the last roughly 10 months this has been bouncing around and is close to horizontal you can sort of see that on the right hand side of the graph and that is what is perplexing the Federal Reserve in terms of monetary policy and certainly uh it's all a discussion that you hear about sticky prices and where are we seeing price appreciation and so on for a period of time was being attributed to Services unfortunately in the most recent data where actually starting to see Goods uh Goods inflation Rising as

[15:03] well and I would highlight if you just want to feel good about the Denver Aurora lakid numbers for March that are there a big reason uh related to the transportation component we had lower Fuel and energy costs uh and and and that really reflected very positively in terms of the overall index next slide please so the third of the three um you know the first one was Labor shortage is the second one was inflation and the third one of is interest rates and impact of interest rates and of course this is affecting everyone in terms of credit card interest rates or mortgage interest rates auto loan interest rates whatever it might be and so we had this you know significant amount of rate movements you see this sort of cap captured on the right hand side of the graphic uh sort of you know 11 movements up to 5 a half% and we entered the year with some optimism I wouldn't say we

[16:00] meaning the our research group particularly because we were calling for cuts much later in the year than everybody else was but that we went in the sort of General uh overall view was hey we're going to have these three interest rate cuts and life is going to get a whole lot better sooner and of course that tune has changed fairly dramatically um we've seen with the persistent inflation or uh that the Federal Reserve has been you know calling or moving these back further and further and especially in light of the labor market remaining strong uh so now the March numbers in both in terms of employment which were a little bit lower under 200,000 but also the inflation numbers which tempered a little bit are giving some people optimism that there will be a cut you know latter part of the year and and maybe even two cuts latter part of the year the FED is required to

[17:00] address their dual mandate inflation is a big part of their process so as long as the employment uh numbers and the unemployment rates stay at these very attractive levels they they are still able to continue to address the interest rate conundrum if you move to the next slide you'll see the relative rankings of Colorado and a large number of categories this is provided to you as sort of contextual framework you can excuse me you can see as of we just update we update these slides every month you can see in the most recent data how Colorado's fairing uh you know for a number of years we're a top 10 performing state in a large number of these categories we've sort of Fallen back uh to middle of the pack in a number of these categories but there are some clear highlights if you look at the second line down the employment growth number very strong n uh we're ninth in

[18:00] the country in terms of employment growth uh if you go a little further down you can see per capita personal income seventh highest per capital per personal income in the country State statewise and again most of those other states or Coastal states which generally speaking have higher costs of living uh you go a little bit further down it's all initials LR PR but labor force participation rate we have the fourth highest labor force participation rate in the country so we have a very engaged Workforce uh our job openings rate second from the bottom sixth in the country so we still have lots of job openings uh in the state and uh and I highlight the two lines above that which are the home price index for many years we're in the top five to 10 in terms of year-over-year home price appreciation in the more recent quarter and Year we're down in the 4 meaning we have we have slower price

[19:01] appreciation in terms of housing we still have high housing prices I'm not dismissing that I'm just saying in a positive tone at least their prices are rising at a slower rate than they are in other parts of the country next slide please so here's the overall picture if you'd like to sort of look at where we are uh in terms of the the big picture uh in terms of growth uh this particular slide en captures every Metropolitan statistical area in the country there are 290 of these in those black lines and in the red lines and you can see the seven Colorado metropolitan areas this is the Colorado 7 uh for those of you who are a little older uh and so this is the Colorado 7 and you can see Boulder is in the roughly in the top third of uh performing year-over-year job growth as of February uh 24 and you can see other um the other jurisdictions around the

[20:01] state only peblo and negative growth at this time but definitely slower growth in the Denver Aurora L with MSA next slide please so moving on to the work that we do with your staff and for the city um uh this is a single slide on this material so I'm going to make a couple of background comments just to make sure that uh everybody uh you know is on the same page or knows sort of the context of how this is done so we do a number of these projects uh for municipalities for RTD and others uh and and and and do forecast if you will sales and use Revenue types of forecasts if if you will excuse me the method in general is using a national macro forecast which we subscribe to and then creating statistical models for the state economy

[21:00] and for local Revenue uh forecasts or Revenue generations for the smaller jurisdictions and we do that by providing a baseline forecast you see in blue and with that Baseline forecast uh comes the quote confidence interval that you see in the dotted lines so this is the confidence interval this is the high end of the confidence interval is called high forecast and low forecast but that's the band of confidence around the Baseline forecast but in addition to doing that we also run two other forecast scenarios one that's more pessimistic meaning in more pessimistic National economy and National Economic conditions and one that has a little bit more optimistic uh scenario and we provide staff with descriptions of what those are actually we interact with staff on on picking some of those pessimistic and optimistic scenarios and have over time in this project so we'd like to provide

[22:01] a little bit more information on you know best and worst you're not getting confidence intervals with those on this graphic but there certainly are confidence intervals with those other uh optimistic and pessimistic forecasts as well I would really like to forecast to comment on two things related to the forecast one what you see on this graphic is sales and use but what we're doing and and we're doing this largely with the help huge help of your staff is we're forecasting by category in these different buckets for example I'm not being exhaustive here but with we're forecasting grocery sales and restaurant sales and e-commerce sales so we found that during the co piece and since then there's different patterns moving with these subcategories of of sales tax revenues so we're working very hard and the staff provides us excellent uh data and support in order to do that and and

[23:00] that's how we feel at least that we're we're providing more accurate forecast you know when you sum sum them up to the sales and use Tac forecast and another sort of just very quick comment I have to shout out to the STA about the staff is we use something that I think what we're referring to as normalized cash basis but this may sound trivial but uh when we first started doing this project we'd see lumpiness month to month in terms of the data and it was really not easily explainable and what we found out or the staff found out in in looking at the Micro Data uh was that sometimes sales were being reported or the money was being delivered to the city not in the month when it the sale actually occurred like in the next month or whatever the staff can correct me if I'm saying this incorrectly but the bottom line is when you're doing a forecasting model you need the money to show up in the month that it's actually occurring

[24:01] the sale has to show up so they've done a lot of work helping adjust that and we're very appreciative last slide please so of course with any sort of forecasting effort uh you know we are looking at the Tailwinds in the economy the headwinds in the economy and not inappropriately or inaccurately there are a lot more headwinds in our view things were not sure how they're going to play out uh so you can see them in the headwinds category uh and uh in the Tailwinds category we still have employment growth we're still seeing good productivity we are seeing decent construction numbers being driven in large part by some infrastructure spending we're still seeing income growth what why are we so focused on that well down to the micro level or the city of Boulder level um the employment growth and the income growth are absolutely critical when you're talking about retail sales so we're we're pay a lot of attention nationally and at the

[25:00] state level on those particular types of indicators and in the right hand side you will see we have uh consumption and retail sales in the unknowns it appears in this particular category that Colorado in general and you we see this in other jurisdictions as well but we're starting to see a Slowdown on this consumption and retail sales that we thought was coming but it seems to be coming on faster in Colorado than it doesn't that it is in the nation as a whole yet if you pick up any sort of I don't know macroanalysis business economics right up right now from any sort of major business forecasters they're totally focused on what's going to be able to support consumption and retail sales at the national level uh in in this High interest rate environment with interest rates not backing off uh with consumers in personal income not growing super rapidly with inflation

[26:02] still being there even at a lower rate you know how can we continue to have these kinds of uh growth rates and consumption and retail sales so it's something we're paying a lot of attention to and with that I'm concluding I may have gone a little over what I was intending to do but thank you so much for your time and if there are any questions my colleagues are here to help me Karen thank you Rich appreciate it always and Tina if it's fine I think it'd be good if we did questions for the CU team now and then could City staff questions later okay yeah let's start with Mark who has his hand up okay thank you um looking back over the last three or four years um how accurate have our forecast been um what what's the Delta of increase or decrease over our projected

[27:03] um sales and use tax for instance over what we actually achieved were we surprised or or did things shake out pretty much as uh as projected so um going to Brian or Robert to give you the specifics on that I hope yeah I know Brian has done this sort of analysis for um several of our clients other municipalities including Boulder and and I I suppose a quick summary statistic is is that our forecast erir has averaged about 1% um it's uh pretty well balanced between um being a little too optimistic and too pessimistic so I think in that sense it's it's a record that you can put some

[28:00] confidence in yeah 1% is impressive okay that was really all I had thank you okay uh Lauren thank you I um just was noticing that the Baseline projection was closer to the optimistic projection line than the pessimistic projection line and I was when wondering if you could maybe provide a little bit more you know it's not just halfway in between why is that is that the national economy does better that doesn't impact us that much but if it does worse there's more potential impact I'll lead in and Brian's more of a specialist on this um the actual each there's like seven scenarios you can choose several that are more optimistic and several that are less that are more pessimistic but each of those includes a certain set of assumptions and so

[29:02] they're not equally spaced if you will around that for example um Middle East tensions create more supply chain disruptions and problems and that you know makes the forecast more pessimistic than what they think is going to happen in in that part of the world so there's sort of pieces in there and there's no real um yeah no there the the flip side is the economy is running I would say stronger than most people thought it would and so the pessimistic scenario is I mean the optimistic scenario is not that much higher than we're at what we're actually at right now um and the pessimistic scenario tends to be more you know more things go wrong the federal deficit creates more problems interest rates have to stay long higher higher longer uh and and you get just more you know adverse

[30:05] effects thank you that was all I have for question if you take a look at the uh the high and the low that one is split because it's one standard deviation away from the the medium forecast um so so that one should be uh sort of even on the upside and the downside but Rich explained it very well so the the way Moody's explains their macro forecast their National forecast the the Baseline has um is the most likely path for the economy and and they deem it as you know there's a 50% chance that it could perform better or 50% chance that it could perform worse and then these alternative scenarios that rich described they they do have these other sort of little shocks to the economy and and they are all different but that downside is clearly sort of a recession scenario where GDP actually

[31:02] goes negative in the short term and so we we find that these little shocks that they work into alternative scenarios tend to impact really the the first three or four years of the of the um of the US economy and then they all sort of converged about seven or eight years out so I think the real value in looking at those alternative scenarios as taking a look at the very short term but what could happen and then our modeling shows what that would mean for the local economy thank you uh Nicole thank you and thanks so much for the presentation I'm always very informative and good to hear from you all um so we've kind of been doing better than expected at National level here in Colorado for a while does that impact at all which direction we may go for um the future to lean us more um pessimistic because things have kind of been going better and it's going to go down eventually um or or is it the sort

[32:02] of thing where it's been going well for a while and we can probably expect that to be a good predictor of where we're headed moving forward so my first answer to that is no it doesn't like just because we were more up you know it's been better it's going to be worse than you know might have anticipated but you just did trigger the fact that I um missed making one comment on the revenue slot which shows that the revenues are slower further out in time it's a 2% kind of range on that slide if you go go look at that slide which I was supposed to comment on sorry Brian um so um I I when I look at this my concerns going further out are much more related to Workforce availability and very much demographic change uh the Aging of the population the number of people who are going to be requiring Health Care

[33:01] housing assistance all of those kinds of things sort of the broader social stuff I think that you know just weighs the economy down and just in terms of performance I don't mean it's in too negative a way but but that's what's driving sort of more the longer term forecast not the fact that we overshot this year so we're going to undershoot you know two three four years out thank you um and one sort of followup if uh if I had to ask you whether you wanted to go more toward the optimistic side or the pessimistic side for 2025 where would you go oh you're asking the wrong person um or any of you okay you can ask my colleagues uh I don't I don't see the optimistic side right now just because of the debt and the federal debt and the interest rate kinds of situations that are on I just think there's a lot of the the monetary systems being put under a lot of stress right now and that of course is

[34:01] impacting the banking system it's impacting you and I as Citizens so um I I wouldn't go to the pessimistic scenario because I don't think we're going into recession but I I wouldn't be saying oh I think it's going to grow a whole lot faster that that's my reaction to that the only thing I'd like to add to that is on on the revenue front uh Rich called this out where Colorado retail activity appears to be slowing a little ahead of the nation and um and he talked about inflation uh and how Colorado has tended to run higher than the nation for many years if we take a look at the cost of living index Colorado is higher than average nationally um we have somewhat of a unique uh property tax situation in Colorado that's adding uh costs for households we also have um uh some some insurance sticker shock and so I I think

[35:00] there are some unique headwinds here that uh causes me to look at things a little bit more pessimistically so I I'm a little bit conservative when I take a look at um the short-term uh Outlook um but you know we we have uh we the the economy in general and revenue in general has outperformed expectations over the last couple of years we've been pleasantly surprised red uh on the upside at how um the economy employment consumption retail has performed thank you okay and uh Ryan thank you professors I have a couple questions about your very rich head uh headwinds and Tailwind slide on the headwinds climate and water are listed could you impact those a little bit what what are you seeing

[36:04] there oh waiting to see if Robert was going to jump in on this we've we've had this discussion elsewhere um well first of all it's it's in way more people's businesses and others governments decision making and it's being part of a decision-making process both in terms of climate and in terms of water and and and in the process of doing that and addressing issues it certainly impacts you know cost availability of resources and so on I'm not saying inappropriately I'm just saying factually so when you see those in place um that's that's one level one level is sort of the financial level of how how do we address these issues and and continue to be competitive and and so on the other issue Colorado clearly relates to just enough water for the types of

[37:02] things we're trying to do and how we're going to address that or or do we add you know when do we address that or how's that going to happen and so just it's a you know it's a limiting factor you don't hear this discussion in sort of say the eastern part of the us that water is a limiting factor but it's a clearly I think limiting factor for the Colorado economy and for Housing Development and all all of those types of things business development but housing in particular so the way that whole part comes about so those limitations going back to Brian's comment and enhancing it more detail uh you know since the Marshall fire and other fires the cost of insurance and other things I mean these things are playing back they're they're not irrelevant concerns anymore even if you were trying to be agnostic about this whole thing it's coming back

[38:00] directly into play you have no choice your insurance policies are going up your business is being challenged your house is being challenged our lives are being challenged around this and we we do a lot of work with you know businesses at the school and it's in everybody's discussion right now so uh I would say you know my view that's a welcome thing but that part aside it certainly provides you know more challenges to the overall growth of the economy uh you know and especially when we talk about sort of Colorado economy in terms of the impacts it's had on Colorado thank you and as a as a follow to my my first question if I could um are you seeing examples in other other cities towns of of managing these headwinds examples of innovation or policy that that you would advise CI

[39:00] should really be thinking about catching up with I I can't say I'm seeing a lot I mean comparing you know Boulder to sort of some of the other parts of the state is a difficult thing but certainly the smart Transportation efforts that are being done in the South Metro area or seem at least to be pretty Progressive in terms of how they're thinking about you know managing that but I think their challenges are frankly greater they're they have a more car-based and Economy based car-based economy if you will um so the challenges are much larger there whether or not that's transferable or applicable um uh so I can't really say that I think I've seen a lot in other places that's um that that there yet okay thanks and my second question is on

[40:00] the unknowns the unknowns bubble um this is kind of a scary bubble what what and I know the whole idea is this is you're you're listing some unknowns so I guess these are you know known to an extent um what what is you know just using your Intuition or subjective thinking or whatever what are you the most worried about concerned about um that you know you you'd think gosh this this is the kind of thing I if I was on city council I'd really be the I'd really be worried about um you know what what sort of things just kind of come up is like intuitively um could be big problems Robert or Brian are you g to jump in on any of these you gonna vote on this um so so for me for example AI let's just start with AI which is in that area it's uncertain to me because I think if has a lot of positive potential

[41:00] and it could enhance a lot of things we do and it certainly could enhance I don't know provision of Health Care and you can think of a lot of things that could be game changers and you can think of a lot of things that are just almost a nightmare related to AI so for me it's in the uncertain category because I think it's going to depend a lot on implementation regulation what companies or governments do with with this kind of thing so that's why for me this is in in the unknown category if I was going to say the thing that's sort of there I think we call it human behavior I think the whole return to office thing is probably the most troubling for a few reasons positively it's helped us retain Workforce it's great for people to be able to do that for a few days a week or I get the positives I'm living with the positives I'm also seeing the fact that

[42:02] people are not as social as they used to be they're not interacting they're not growing they're not developing at the same and how do you replace that or change that sidebar two how do you supplant you know I was walking through downtown Denver last night after the Rockies game don't ask why I would go to a Rockies game that's a side that's another question my my grandkids I love them but storefront after storefront a vacant vacant vacant I mean scary impacts to downtown from that whole transition and Boulder is a much smaller scale and not in anywhere in that category but the issues are the same in a in a lot of cities that H how do you rehab that effectively I think that's a huge challenge for communities for for you folks for the broader real estate Economic Development people and so on how do you

[43:01] do this productively with the society's better off at the end of the day and you know you continue to get your retail sales from restaurants and and shopping and all of those kinds of things so that's probably the one at least short term that's the most scary but I mentioned in the presentation the scariest one by far from me is demographic change and how this country addresses it thanks professor and thanks for all that time okay uh Taisha o thank you very much thank you for that presentation um holding the wrong sticky okay um so thank you uh Ryan for bringing up the question about um climate and water and energy um as my colleagues will recall I included in the city council priorities a desire to actually do a study or an investigation on the intersection of water and energy

[44:00] um because of the issues around um The increased prices so we know that there's going to be an increase of 25% for water um because of just the things that we have coming down the pike in conversations that we've had previously and to your point about uh generative artificial intelligence I actually am writing a Blog on that and working with a ton of people on continuing to explore um again the benefits which there are and can be significant but there is significant water and energy that is used for that and so actually one of the questions that I had was around just some of those projections in forecasts and if there were any kind of scenario forecasting on different types of you know drought points or something and then similarly around Wildfire um I noticed the breakdowns um by um you know some of the the breakdowns of um of of employment and and things like that and and I was just kind of curious

[45:01] like what did that what does that look like at a from a quarterly perspective like when the wildfires were happening right like I'm just kind of curious how do we learn from some of the more recent things that have happened and some of the disruptions um more recently there was the wind event with Excel um that you know our Boulder chamber downtown partners and many others came with quantitative losses around that um and so again if I I was curious if those kind of forecasting were happening so um primarily have questions around just forecasting scenarios um whether or not we can use do some um maybe case studies from some acute um disruptions that have had uh significant impacts to our financial um health and then um just being able to um get more information about climate and water thank you um let me try to respond to that it's a really difficult called challenging questions that you raised and um the biggest challenge of course

[46:02] is is that these evany shocks are unpredictable and we can we can look back and say well this we can we can measure the impact of some of these shocks historically but to anticipate something happening again it's uh that that's really uh beyond the scope of our statistical methodology so I I don't think I can give you a very satisfying answer I I'm sorry about that but uh certainly U we we've been Liv living through one shock after another from the pandemic the recovery of the pandemic which is its own anomaly one set of anomalies and some of these specific environmental crises okay well thank you so much I I do know that there is evidence and studies around just some of the you know for example the days between billion dollars disas is you know increasing or

[47:00] reducing significantly in some of those impacts to be able to do some of that so again I I completely understand the scope of what was being requested but I think you know as as the council just updated those priorities and and climate resilience was one of them I I I am eager for for more fiscal impacts and information from uh um a climate and and specifically water and energy perspective thank you looks like my colleague Brian wants to jump in with I hope on the answer side here the only um uh thing I wanted to add to that uh response that that Robert shared is the the Moody's macro model that we use does incorporate climate change but they're really Global scenarios and in the long run it cuts um it cuts I I think about 5% from GDP over the Long Haul so it doesn't it's not specific to a shock to B old economy I guess I guess what I'm asking Brian sorry to cut you off but like we

[48:02] have a Colorado water plan so I mean I appreciate these National things but we actually have significant amount of data and a natural resources department and a water G and so I'm just you know I'm wondering how we can potentially have more intergovernmental cooperation and collaboration to better assess and inform these forecasts so I again I appreciate and totally understand the limitations I work in in environment and climate and so I can acutely empathize with what you were going on and experiencing um but again I want to honor that there is significant extent data that we could be using in addition to the rigorous work that you've all provided today thank you okay uh and Matt thanks Tina um Richard I wanted to follow up with a inquiry you were sort of going on and um I think you were sort of touching on what your the vacancies that you're see that you were seeing in Denver we're seeing here it's one of the big motivators why we're uh trying to lift up an economic development strategy

[49:01] here in the city to try to uh intentionally kind of curb some of those Trends um and I'm wondering you know on a more detail though how do you see the roughly trillion dollars nationally of commercial real estate um basically those loans coming due at the end of this year and I'm wondering do you see that as opportunity to reset the market or do you see Troubled Waters before that reset occurs because I'm I'm trying to get a sense of how futile might our efforts be on that front until that that um process or those changes Shake through the system Brian may be able to jump in on this I I'm we speak to a lot of Realtors and a lot of you know nationally and in Colorado as just we try to get a lot of GRA you know on the ground kind of information people keep assuring me that

[50:02] this Market's going to reset that there's plenty of capital out there that we're not going to see you know catastrophic but then I say well what's what's going to happen to the space what's going into these spaces I mean what what are we doing with it and they don't have quick answers for that which is TR I mean we know some of them you could put housing in but most of them you can't really put housing in I mean we know this from right you know this so um so it's um so that part you know doesn't give me 100% confidence that they say the Market's going to reset everything is going to go back in in a different scenario you would say you're going to grow more businesses and even you know three businesses are going to fit in the space that one business was in before but the amount of shrinkage that we're seeing that you see in some of these businesses they had five floors of a building they have one I mean we're seeing really collapsing office space demands and needs and and

[51:04] if it's not you know I'm gonna this sounds like a so box I apologize if it's not driven by better employee interaction productivity growth I don't know what's going to drive that I mean if you're just going to say well people can do just as well sitting in their home uh then why are you going to pay for an office space right so uh we are we just had our board meeting for leads a couple of weeks ago and there were a number of national firms there that said we've got people back in four days a week we've got people back in even five days a week because we just didn't see the growth and development of our young Workforce and we think that's a long-term disaster so they were you know pushing in that direction but I don't know that that's going to be the norm and I'm sure you hear plenty of people saying we're not ever going back to an office or you know so Brian did you want to

[52:05] comment when we when we look at Boulder's office vacancy rate it's actually a little bit better than downtown Denver um which may be sort of little Solace that that you're out competing Denver because they're still much higher than they were um two years ago and I I think what we're all living now and what these businesses are living is the multiplier effect that we often talk about in economics and and what I mean by that is when um when fewer people are going to the office it has a ripple effect through our local economies because um we're not getting the benefit of that foot traffic visiting restaurants and and Retail that we used to get so it it doesn't only Impact Office Space it has Ripple effects uh for o other uh other businesses and other types of real estate in the community

[53:00] are you set Matt all right um I'm not seeing any other questions and uh just wanted to take a moment to thank uh Brian and Robert and Richard for joining us we obviously are um always thankful for our partners of Cu sort of the extended team Boulder uh and just uh thank you so much for taking the time to be with us and I'm sure we'll reach back out as we have further questions through the budget Journey um all right so Cara do you want to resume and we'll move on to the staff piece yes thank you Tina yes thank you to the whole so youth leads team we appreciate it um so next I'm gonna introduce Charla Husky and she is gonna do the Deep dive into the city budget uh more specific Outlook and and we also are cognizant of time and we recognize that generally we're trying to limit presentations but we do also recognize this is this is detail oriented um so this might be a little bit of an exception

[54:00] so we're going to do our best to keep it tight anyway with that I'll hand it over to Charlotte thanks Cara good evening council member Charlotte husky budget officer for the city I we'll share my screen making sure everybody can see that okay um so good evening everybody Charlotte husky again but officer for the city I'm joined by uh our team members here principal budget analysts Rafael Tingley and Scott Carpenter who will help walk through some of the slides that we have today for our financial forecast and budget update for the 2025 budget so we will be walking through uh as Cara mentioned economic conditions our major Revenue sources and current projections our 2025 budget Direction and development process and then summarizing and ending the presentation with a summary of our key

[55:00] budget assumptions we'll first start the per first part of the presentation focused on economic conditions a summary of our major Revenue sources and current projections so uh CU Boulder just did a a great job summarizing our national and local economic Trends we've been working with them since the pandemic period to provide data to us related to national and local economic uh conditions when we look at our 2023 revenues um for the sales and use tax that are forecast aligns with the information submitted by CU Boulder we saw evidence of economic slowdown and this was in line with our forecast from 2023 we anticipate these slowing growth patterns continuing through 2024 a lot of this was mentioned uh with um cu's presentation but some of the factors

[56:00] that implicate that include local retail activi slowing uh our aging populations Trends across the state and locally remote work practices the high commercial vacancy rates that we're seeing about 15 to 30% uh across Boulder in the downtown area and of course housing affordability uh has an implication on this and so while conditions suggest General caution our forecast still uh continue to point to economic resiliency and with that I will toss it off to our principal budget analyst Rafael Tingley to uh provide an overview of our major Revenue Source sales and use tax thank you Charlotte uh good evening Council Rafael Tingley principal budget analyst I'll be walking through a few slides on our sales and use tax forecasts sales and use taxes are the city C's primary source of Revenue they make up about 40% of the city's total

[57:00] revenues and if you exclude utilities revenues they comprise about 50% of the city's Revenue sources and are of course one of the main sources of revenue for the general fund along with property tax revenue the city levies and collects its own sales taxes separate from the state and so when a Community member completes a transaction with sales tax applied within the city limits about 43 cents of every dollar paid in sales tax is remitted to the city of Boulder with the remainder being remitted to the state the county and other special taxing entities of that portion that goes to the city uh it is currently distributed among five funds uh at the city uh as that py graph in the slide shows about half goes to the city's general fund about a fifth goes to the open space fund a fifth goes to the uh Transportation fund and a smaller portion goes towards the 0.25 sales tax fund which funds some parks and rec recation programming and lastly a portion goes to the community culture resilience and safety tax fund or ccrs

[58:03] which was recently extended by voters a few years ago and as funding high priority capital projects throughout the city uh next year with the establishment of the dedicated Arts culture and heritage tax a portion of sales and use tax revenue going towards the general fund currently will be dedicated to this new fund uh which was previously unrestricted for General government purposes and just to point out uh what that would look like on that P graph on the on the lower right there that 20 cents portion of the pie graph going to the going to the general fund will decrease slightly in 2025 and there'll be a new slice of that high represented with the new Arts culture and heritage tax fund and this shift does align to the budgeting assumptions that the budget office used during 2024 budget development and subsequent adoption next slide so uh what did sales and use tax revenues look like last year well first looking at the at the first line in this table we did see a modest slowdown in

[59:01] economic activity and Boulder in our retail sales tax collections we revised our 2023 approved revenues down about halfway through 2023 by a few percentage points by the end of 2023 the city collected 137.5 million in retail sales taxes which was about 97% of what uh of what had was originally uh budgeted that included a year-over-year decline in December revenues between 2022 and 2023 which is typically the most significant Revenue generating month for the city and maybe signaling a recent flattening here in the retail sector um however the city was able to make up for that shortfall shortfall through very strong construction use Revenue which is something the city has budgeted historically very conservatively on because it is a a very volatile source of Revenue that depends heavily on the development environment in the city which continued to be very strong

[60:00] throughout 2023 the city also received about 3 million in audit Revenue uh in 2023 which is uh also exceeded budgeted assumptions in that category and so in that Total Line in the bottom you can see that across the board the city received 175. n million in sales and use tax revenues against 173.000 million approved uh approved Revenue budget um which is about 10.5% of budget however without those increased construction use tax revenues and audit revenues which are two very highly volatile sources the city would have fallen short in its sales and use tax collections um as as opposed to budget so one other source of sales and use tax revenue uh worth mentioning the recreational marijuana sales tax that's a three and a half% sales tax on recreational marijuana that goes towards the general fund that we've seen uh continues to have a substantial decrease over the past few years primarily uh

[61:02] stemming from a decrease in demand as well as an over Supply in the market and we do anticipate this downward Trend to continue in 2024 and so when we look at our oute projections that we're leveraging for our budget development we are seeing a flattening in our projected sales and used tax revenues over the next six years from 2025 through 2030 which this chart shows we we we do show the new Arts culture and Heritage fund at the bottom in Orange there starting in 2025 and mostly flat over the six-year window just about 2% growth in the out years uh we have at the top there uh general fund sales and use tax revenues in blue transportation in open space and light blue and green kind of overlapping there uh ccrs and gray and 0.25 sales tax for Parks and Recreation and yellow there um you will see in 2030 a shift at the end there uh that's because in 2030

[62:00] a portion of sales and use tax revenues currently going towards the transportation fund will shift over to the general fund that was part of voter action in 2013 when that portion of the sales tax was extended at that point um I will now hand it over to my colleague Scott Carpenter who will speak about property tax projections thank you Rafael good evening council members uh I'm going to start with a summary of our property tax revenues U talk about our 2024 projection and then some of the uncertainties surrounding uh the future year the future year property tax revenues um so property tax makes up roughly 133% of our city-wide revenues uh 177% when excluding utilities and 25% of our general fund revenues uh the city of Boulder uh receives 133% uh or the city of Boulder counts for 133% of the total Mill Levy and what that means is for every $1 of

[63:00] property tax collected in Boulder the city receives 133% um of that um so or sorry for every1 doll the city receives 13 cents uh of those 13 cents nine cents goes towards General City operations two cents goes towards Public Safety one cents goes towards Parkland ACC acquisition Park improvements or recreation facility improvements and 1 cent goes to fund affordable housing uh property values are reassessed every odd year so the 2025 property reassessments will inform our 2026 budget property tax is calculated by multiplying the market value of a property by the assessment rate by the mill Levy uh so $100,000 of market value equates roughly to $78 in property tax next slide please uh so for 20 23 we collected roughly $ 48.7 million in property tax

[64:01] uh for for the general government um 20 for 2024 budget we forecast uh 58.7 million so that's a 20 uh% increase however our revised projection projection we've revised it down 580,000 to 58.2 million so that would be a 19% increase from 2023 um the 2024 budget was based on staff's May 2023 estimated impacts of proposition HH and while proposition HH did not pass special session legislation did which led to a slightly lower uh assessment value which reduces re or which is reducing revenues further um for but one thing to note um is that we did not uh budget for the the one-time property tax backfill So currently uh there is a lot of

[65:00] uncertainty uh for the future uh revenues of property tax and this is due to the the ballot measures and the past legislation uh from this week um initiative 50 has sign has enough signatures or is currently on the ballot uh and it would constrain property tax revenue growth uh initiative 108 is currently collecting signatures uh it would reduce assessment rates and result in city property tax revenues declining uh the legislation passed by the general assembly this week um we are currently reviewing it um we believe uh in our preliminary estimates it would constrain the growth of Revenue um but not expected to result in pretty property tax is declining uh in later years but potentially there could be an impact to 2025 um we still do not know uh whether these two initiatives will be on the ballot but we will plan for the impacts of s sp24 233 which is the general

[66:00] assembly legislation and with that I will turn it back over to Charlotte thanks Scott so considering our major Revenue sources and the forecast just shared from Rafael and Scott um we recognize that we're stepping into a constrained environment and so what that means as we look at our major Revenue Source sales and use tax and see this projection flattening there is a lot of uncertainty as uh Scott just spoke to around our property tax and considerations around that and so for the 2025 budget what that uh signals to us is that there's limited room for ongoing increases for existing programs or new programs to the city budget the 2024 budget development process uh we estimated at the time approximately 500,000 in ongoing funding within the general fund over the next years and this assumption included the 2025 dedication of previously

[67:00] unrestricted General Government funding to arts and culture and the associated operating funding and programming being funded by that newly dedicated sales and use tax so focusing on our 2025 budget Direction in development I'll Focus the next few slides talking about our budget process uh within the city and so our uh budget process for the 2025 budget is focusing on uh budgeting for resilience and Equity we are focused on year three of implementation of this effort I wouldn't really want to recognize and lift up all of the efforts in the organization across the organization that that has occurred over these past three years in year one for the 2023 budget we created a comprehensive program inventory across the organization and programs within

[68:00] departments and so what that meant was establishing uh program areas by department and aligning those programs and budgets to the greater sustainability equity and resilience framework goal areas this enabled us to uh heighten transparency and visibility around our framework and we also uh implemented a new budgeting platform called open go and a transparency tool associated with open goov which heightened transparency uh for the community and across the city in year two for our budgeting for resilience and Equity efforts we added specificity in uh the 24 budget development process and so what this meant was we identified how those programs that we established in the 2023 budget uh aligned to outcomes and and the objectives within the sustainability equity and resilience framework we also

[69:00] added data points where applicable where feasible um and performance measures data points and performance measures and metrics as associated with those outcomes we also uh performed data collection plans and discussed this with departments across the organization for year three for our final year of implementation as part of the 2025 budget we are performing standard ization and refinement of these program areas that were established in the 2023 budget um we are refining our outcomes and identifying and refining performance measures uh across the organization um and across 19 departments across the organization and so what this effort of budgeting for resilience and Equity enables us to do as an organization is shift from focusing on increment based budgeting or additive budgeting and focusing on are outcomes associated with resource allocation across the organization and perform enhanced

[70:02] strategic city-wide decision-making to utilize these outcomes to help inform our budget decisions speaking more specifically about all of the effort and work that has occurred across the organization I mentioned that this was a significant shift in the way that we had been budgeting previously this could not have been done without partnersh ship from our it uh our Innovation and Technology Enterprise data team I really want to uh lift up the partnership that they have helped with us in establishing outcomes and measures across the organization this year we are currently in this process uh through June for the development the budget development process we are working with 19 departments individual and hosting individual workshops that are tailored to each City Department to understand the outcome and measures as associated with the Department programs that then align to the Citywide strategic plan

[71:01] strategies and then greater sustainability equity and resilience goal areas we're focused on REI refining and standardizing Department program outcome outcomes and outcome measures we're identifying targets or benchmarks for each outcome and we're also uh incorporating this into the 2025 budget and so all of this information will be publicly available on our open budgeting platform just to provide an example of a program outcome so what do we look at and what are we focused on when we are what what does budgeting for resilience mean and and how does our uh program outcomes uh look like across the organization this is an example if we look at the afford the affordable housing policy and planning Department program um we can see that this program

[72:00] within the uh housing and Human Services Department aligns to the sustainability equity and resilience goal area of liable underneath the department program there's an established outcome of Greater availability of affordable homes in Boulder that is the goal that we are looking to achieve uh within this particular Department program The Measure that is established and linked linked to that outcome is the percentage of all housing units in Boulder that are permanently affordable and then the target Benchmark or goal associated with this outcome measure is 15% by 2035 so as part of budget development for 2025 we have looked at the growth that uh the city has performed form Med over the past several years this chart in particular speaks to our plan

[73:00] spending between 2019 and 2024 we can see this dip in 2021 um uh and that was reflective of the pandemic period cuts that the organization made and the building back up after 2021 um and you can see this increased growth rate both in the Citywide budget which is the top line here the Citywide operating budget uh which is this yellow line the general fund total budget and the general fund ongoing budget and so what we recognize when we look at these increase in Investments um the this includes our uh additional FTE additional standard position and enhancements of new positions across the organization since 2021 we've invested in new programming in Wildfire resilience in homelessness Solutions and Behavioral Health programming over the past several years and so when we look at this growth and the amount of enhancements that we have performed across the organization what

[74:00] we recognize with the flattening of our sales and use tax revenue and the uncertainty of our uh major Revenue source of property tax is that this same growth level can't be sustained for 2025 um and so what we're really focused on in our 2025 budget direction is focusing on realignments what realignments means is looking at our existing dollars within our budget to uh transition and realign our existing dollars from one location to another to help fund top priorities that support our program outcomes we are focused on that for this year and we are utilizing the city-wide strategic plan alignment um to help inform decision- making as well and so the city-wide strategic plan that was unveiled a few months ago helps to inform resource allocation over the next 3 years there are some strategies within the city-wide

[75:00] strategic plan that we recognize that are funded there are some that are underfunded and there are some that are unfunded and so during the 2025 budget development process we will uh be able to help lift those up and identify those and utilize that as additional uh budget decision making we also recognize the amount of growth in uh standard positions that we seen across the past several years I mentioned that uh that we uh have performed since 2021 significant investments in added standard uh positions uh 200 positions since 2021 and so there's limited opportunity for additional positions in 2025 really the key opportunity for change here will be looking at realignments of existing dollars to help uh support increases another uh core piece of our budget

[76:02] development process is community engagement we have built upon Community engagement over the past year in 20124 is really our first year um that the city engaged the the community connectors and and residents and asked and received their input as part of the 2024 uh budget development process we are continuing to build Upon Our partnership with Community connectors and residents and Performing budget engagement and receiving input from Community connectors again this year some examples of that include budget sessions for new city of Boulder programs to help understand funding priorities of these programs such as arts and culture and Wildfire resilience from Community connectors we've also expanded our community engagement efforts this year to boards and commissions we are uh um attending boards and commission meetings and really the goal here is to enhance

[77:01] awareness and alignment of our current boards and commission processes to the annual budget cycle and finally we are performing a 20125 budget questionnaire this is open through May 17th where we're inviting Boulder Community members to provide input on budget priorities as aign to the seven sustainability equity and resilience goal areas that are uh demonstrated in this image on the right as part of our uh elements associated with our engagement for the 2025 budget questionnaire we're performing virtual and in-person engagement efforts we've uh released a press release social media post next door and inside Boulder news we're engaging the community connectors and they are uh providing their input during an upcoming building power and raising voices session in May we've reached out to all boards and commission members for

[78:01] their uh input as part of this questionnaire and reached out to our economic Vitality Partners including the downtown Boulder partnership Latino chamber Small Business Development Center and Boulder chamber and have reached out to approximately 7600 local licensed businesses across Boulder and this will be open through May May 17th and we're looking forward to uh receiv receiving feedback from community members looking at our uh six-year development of the capital Improvement program one of the things that we are focused on for the 2025 development and within the sixe CIP from 2025 to 2030 is focusing on sustainable Capital maintenance funding when we look over the past uh few years and recent years in in terms of the emergency repair and facility repairs and maintenance that the city has had to fund um we recognize

[79:00] that we must make additional future Investments for ongoing Capital maintenance and that this additional investment is needed to help support appropriate service levels for City facilities to help maintain our buildings well into the future our six-year CIP will also continue to be focused on the goals as aign to the greater sah framework the Boulder Valley comprehensive plan and subc commmunity and area plans as a reminder of our investments and planned investments in the 2024 to 2029 CIP we performed significant Investments uh in Citywide infrastructure uh and to that total is 94 million across the six-year CIP for plan spending that includes Water Maintenance and Rehabilitation infrastructure projects such as the Barker water system uh Renovations at the East Boulder Community Center um developments of the Civic area Phase 2

[80:01] and Replacements of fire stations two and four and I will hand it over back to Scott to uh review living wage and minimum wage assumptions thank you Charlotte uh so in 2024 uh the city increased the living wage for standard positions to $22.44 an hour this led to an increase in 400 or approximately $441 ,000 in Personnel expense across multiple funds for 105 employees and we're going to be monitoring the ongoing imployment implications of potential wage compression around that uh and wage compression is when the difference in Pay between employees at a company or organization uh decreases regardless of uh ability experience position um and before I get into minimum wage I just want to recognize

[81:00] that there is a regional study that's currently on going and that Council will ultimately make the decision in the fall um so we're tracking this project as it relates to our employees and and planning for different scenarios of of implementation uh we'll be continuing to monitor it in over the next few months um in these projections we just wanted to acknowledge that there could be a potential fiscal impact uh of the um this Topline scenario is if we just had Direct rate increases uh and that rate would start at 1657 in 2025 increasing to $25 an hour in 2030 this is following Boulder County's implementation plan for their minimum wage um and then the bottomline scenario is uh the minimum wage increase from the direct from the from the increase in rates but also if if we chose to address and alleviate uh some of the potential wage compression uh we

[82:01] conducted this analysis in partnership with HR Parkson Rec and osnp um and so we have used a lot of varying assumptions and recognized that our Council Partners or our regional partners and Council might make some different assumptions uh in the actual implementation I'll turn it back over to Charlotte thanks Scott so in additional in addition to thinking and considering the living wage impacts and as well as the minimum wage considerations we want to recognize that we have additional funding needs across the organization we have uh some examples listed here of unfunded or underfunded needs um that includes as mentioned uh on when speaking about our our Capital Improvement program facilities Capital Maintenance and Facilities emergency repairs the build out of our uh Advanced life support and EM EMS implementation for the fire rescue Department our safe and managed spaces pilot program uh that currently remains um uh underfunded in

[83:03] that it doesn't have uh ongoing um about 820 of ongoing support um that is needed to uh continue that program that's been funded with that portion of the programs been funded with onetime dollars we recognize that arpa funding is sunsetting in 2026 and there are specific programs and supplemental uh Human Services dollars associated with them some examples here listed are the guaranteed income pilot program and the building home program Transportation Capital maintenance needs uh to support the core arterial Network um the high utilizers program identified as a council priority um it ranges between two and five million for our early estimates while we are continuing to work in partnership with Boulder County and Mental Health Partners to build out this program we've also submitted uh three million in earmark requests um we recognize that this is this is still an

[84:01] unfunded uh uh unfunded priority and then finally listed here are the core operations to address current service level demands um examples of this include Park maintenance Fleet replacement and it systems and infrastructure so when we look at our flexibility across funds uh for the 2025 development process we are looking to continue to build upon our efforts uh performed last year in looking at a dedicated funding analysis where we identifi that approximately 68% of all city funding is dedicated or restricted for a specific purpose what this uh means is that this reduces the flexibility for us to be able to address the needs of the moment community needs and Council priorities um and so we're looking to continue to build Upon Our dedicated funding

[85:00] analysis that was performed in 20123 to compare current limitations to current practices perform analysis on fund financials that are impacted by dedicated revenues and determine short-term and long-term Financial strategies and all of this information will help to inform the city's long-term Financial strategy that's a recent Council priority identified as a Council priority for the next two years to explore and address City revenues and future spending to help meet Citywide and Community goals and so just to provide a summary of our key budget assumptions and this informs our approach to the 2025 development I'll walk through each of these seven that we have we recognize that there's slowing growth and funding constraints that significant ly limit budget flexibility for new ongoing costs there is a lot of uncertainty is

[86:01] mentioned around potential legislation of uh future property tax revenues and revenue growth a major Revenue source for the city our Capital Improvement program will continue to focus on investing in sustainable ongoing Capital maintenance recognizing that we have underfunded this for um for several years and this will help to fund City facilities and infrastructure will continue to explore the flexibility across all City funds this includes dedicated funds and existing budget allocations to support Key Community Investments and needs the 2025 dedication of the sales and use tax and the creation of the new Arts culture and Heritage fund assumes the inclusion of current art operating programs we're continuing to look at recent living wage increases and potential changes to the minimum wage ordinance that's impacting city

[87:01] employees within the organization and this will be continue to be a factor when considering flexibility across funds and finally additional ongoing funding needs uh as uh shown a slice of the examples of unfunded and underfunded needs are significant and Beyond funding availability really pointing to a long-term Financial strategy identified as a key Council priority across all funds and City functions and so finally in terms of our uh budget development process and the calendar of our 2025 budget we performed budget kickoff early March um and our performing currently budget development through late June will be performing decision making uh in mid year between July and August and submitting uh the decisions to and the recommended budget the 2025 recommended budget to Council on August 30th um will perform a council

[88:03] study session for the 2025 Budget on September 12th and then have our budget readings and adoption on October 3rd and 17th and at the study session we will outline a process for uh requested changes from Council um at that uh September 12th session and so with that I will uh can leave this slide up or take it down we can put it in the yeah let's let's leave it up for just a a minute so I have something to read and so just um so council members and we don't have a whole lot of time we allotted 90 minutes for this section we have about seven minutes left but I don't think we need to restrict ourselves exactly to that um but just recognizing that this isn't our first conversation about the budget and we're focusing on the assumptions um

[89:01] that have been presented to us and any feedback or questions on the development process or key budget assumptions so um let's start with the first uh and would everyone be should we combine the two bullets for this purpose is everyone okay with that since we did a lot of questions about the economic Outlook with our friends from CU any nodding heads couple okay all right so we'll start with uh Matt and then go to Mark thanks Tina and uh Charlotte thanks for presenting this that you know it's good to sort of get this laid out um in this way you know my question is just I think how are we living so outside our means I think that's really the question I have because I see where we're going our budget our revenues are flat and yet I see us way overextended and so I'm trying to understand what are we what are we

[90:01] trimming what are we cutting in order to do this and how does that process come in because when I look at the memo I look at all these needs but I'm not understanding where are we trimming because like we ask every like everybody assumes in our community we all have to live within our means and I and I have a feeling that we're living way outside our means and we've just over over um committed ourselves financially and I'm just trying to understand how did we how did we get to that place without that checkin of okay stop we're we're we we we you know we don't have anymore so I'm that I'm just trying to understand that from a basic sense because that this is a lot of zeros of unfunded underfunded things and I'm just wondering how did we get here so quickly yeah um happy to answer that appreciate the question uh one of the uh pieces that I pointed to on the earlier slide is really the buildup of the city's budget after the pandemic period so we really ramped back up um we made

[91:01] significant funding decisions associated with investments in Wildfire resilience and Behavioral Health response programs and um safe and managed spaces programs and and those uh additional Investments made um over the past several years uh um attributed to that growth we also uh grew by 200 FTE since 2021 um and so that is a significant increase um in ongoing costs associated with the city um we've had other uh significant increases in uh in costs since since 2021 in particular [Music] um I see n's hand I'm sure she wants I have a follow-up question but but go ahead n yeah I I appreciate the question right I don't think it's one thing and and uh I just want to thank the team for um letting me be both mom and staff uh as I slide back in um uh and I'm sure

[92:03] that they did a great job at presenting um but I'll say this right I don't think it's one thing and I appreciate the question um Matt right like as as budgets build over time and really as the appetite for and the demand for services build um I I think it is um a variety of things that get us to this point um I think historically uh what we have seen is uh in addition to some of the things that Charlotte shows right um and we have had these conversations certainly in the three years uh tomorrow that I have been in the city we have seen uh a lot of unfunded basic foundational things that we need to pay attention to right a lot of maintenance issues that we have not taken care of and now we have to take care of right we're going to see that in the rec centers we saw that in other areas as as we move move forward we've seen that in our buildings that we have not maintained as well as we need to and now we're paying the price of that as

[93:00] we're moving forward um we continue to see that we have stretched ourselves a bit too thin as we have um had demands for services and needed to really put Personnel to that and as we came out of the pandemic and continue to add Services we have needed to bring people on to meet the demands of the services we have what you're seeing now and in fact that is why we keep saying that we are constrained is that we cannot continue in that trajectory it is why I really have come to appreciate not just staff but frankly councel your support as we think about the long-term Financial strategy because it is not sustainable and I just appreciate the support you have given us to really think about hard these decisions that we need to do we cannot continue in this manner and we need to put some stops and some hard conversations on what we have to stop doing in order to really think about what we need to do moving forward and those are the hard conversations we

[94:00] have going into it in the times in which we had all the sales revenue and we were in um the greatest times we don't have those conversations we are in leaner times right now and we are feeling it and we are in leaner times when we are actually being really candid about all those unfunded things and all those unsexy things like maintenance and what it takes to actually do total cost of ownership of software systems and um HR systems that have to keep going and so it is that place that brings us to this reality where thankfully we are not laying people off where we are not cutting services at the moment where we are stable but we have a limited ability to add enhancements and to add more without taking a hard look at what we stop doing to then add or change course I I appreciate that n i I'll just say that there's some sobriety in this um and I think from a Cadence and just

[95:01] process I know we're we have our systems in the way they are this sober conversation would have not that we should have done not that we could have done it different Lely would have dramatically informed Council priorities I think and so the fact that we've laid out Council priorities and some of which have these new the new things we want to do shiny objects and now having this sober conversation about what we really may not have the capability to do I I would swap that order and figure out a way in which we can get that detail net earlier to inform maybe in more detail I knew where we were but I don't think I knew some of the details that this presentation is laid out in that great uh specificity so not that we I don't know if we have to change it but I just feel that that could have been a maybe more detailed conversation to have to help inform our Council Retreat priorities and some of that going in I I appreciate that and I take it although I believe that we were saying this last year I believe that as we are moving forward we have been sharing this for a while and I think that we what I

[96:02] appreciate about this year's Council priorities actually is that I think it falls in line with some of the work that we're doing because if not we would have and I think we have talked about tradeoffs so I actually think that um we we're in a good place as we move forward in the budget process so I I take that but I do believe that as we we feel certainly a that we never stop talking about budget um and so as we move forward we will continue to bring that for uh to your attention and certainly do that with FSC appreciate that thanks all right uh Mark um yeah going back to that um slide and this is in furtherance of what Matt has said going back to the slide indicating the U low and high estimates of what has been unfunded um my math is always suspect U but am I correct that the range there is between 20 and $35 million of unfunded or potentially

[97:00] unfunded uh programs that's correct is that the order of magnitude that we're looking at the the slide presented is an example of the unfunded and underfunded needs in the city and so correct okay so that that's the actual range that we're looking at that is a that is a slice of the range that we're looking at correct I'm not sure I understand what you mean by a slice of the range one one was depicted as low one was depicted as high is there something that's higher and something that's lower the the list within the slide is a list of examples and so we know we have other unfunded and underfunded needs the ones that were brought forward are simply examples of um some some one-time funded pilot programs for example um the supplemental funding that uh arpa has afforded us to um invest in over the past couple of years the uh the facilities um Capital

[98:02] maintenance needs that we've uh spoken to and that Nua was just mentioning um and so that is an example of the maintenance needs and underfunded needs that we have so apparently there there's even more there there um and if that is the case may I request some kind of chart that shows not a slice of what our needs are our unfunded needs are but all of them so that we can get a full picture of what is out there and and the full scope of what we're going to have to deal with as a city and as a council um to move forward yeah um I'd like to see the full picture yeah and and as the budget progresses and as um staff comes to its initial conclusions as to how they want to reallocate money I would like a clear depiction of where the money came from and where it was moved

[99:02] to um and uh you know so that we understand both the consequences of um what we're doing to save programs and what we're doing uh when we don't save programs but I mean this seems to me to be fairly Draconian and um I I think we need a much clearer picture of exactly how substantial the scope of this is um so that we can start to come to grips with it because it looks uh if what we saw in that slide is not the full picture then then we have a problem um that's not something we're going to be able to paper over uh so we'll move on to Tara thanks I just kept putting my hand up and down and up and down I don't know if you notic um I think I'm very interested in

[100:03] the slide that shows the big jump to $515 million for our budget you know that slide and now we're keeping it the same so I guess my first question is is should we be keeping it the same I mean that was a huge jump and can we afford to keep it that high I guess if I had my dream world my dream it would be every time we say let's do a study let's do this let's do that especially let's do another study how much does it cost to do that study because one thing we don't usually do and that I can remember or maybe I haven't been paying attention which is totally possible that we don't usually talk about what is entailed with all the things we as a council want so we say we study this and then nor says okay but that's going to be like $350,000 then the consultant is going to be this $100,000 these are things that we should be thinking about I think before we go and pull the plug and say yes let's do

[101:02] this study let's do this let's do that but we don't do that as far as I can tell so I would like us to have that more and I think we've been talking about it as a council so I just want to say I'm obviously not the first person to say this but I would like to say that that is also what I do want so that we make the right decision but that we also don't make new decisions for instance can we afford social streets you know not that I'm complaining about social streets but every $100,000 or whatever does make a difference when you're in a constrainted budget so that's what I'm looking for is those types of that type of information along with my list of pros and cons adding what is this going to cost and should we do it is it worth it do we get enough actually do we even have the money for it forget about if we even get uh enough um for the money do we even

[102:00] have the money okay um now let's hear from Nicole thank you um yeah I just had just one question um and then just kind of a more more General comment um the big jump that we saw that terara was just um talking about was that partly due to kind of getting some arpa funds and like more Grant success because I feel like staff have been much more successful recently um in getting grants and other things that are bringing in more money for programs and things so yeah uh it's a good question that the the big jump actually does not include uh arpa funds um and so when we include our arpa funds It's actually an addition to that um so so it doesn't include uh arpa funding when we look at that got it um so okay so it's not not sort of like new revenues coming in or anything like that it's not new revenues

[103:02] from Grant revenues no okay no not a reflection yep um yeah and I I just wanted to respond to something that was said earlier um and just make it clear I heard you tell us that this was GNA be the situation multiple times last year um I feel like for the last year really um you've been telling us this again and again and one thing that I find so impressive about that what you're presenting tonight is that you told us last summer and fall that if on continuing on our current track we would have about $500,000 of wiggle room to look at for the next four to five years and that still seems to be the same number that you're coming up with so I just kind of want to to lift that up because that to me um is really a testament to how skilled you all are in looking at this whole picture taking into account the economic for to really get us to that point where you can be that consistent over a really pretty turbulent time um so just thank

[104:00] you for that and um thanks just for kind of setting this up so that um it hopefully it's it's not a total total surprise to to folks um but it really I think we've had this conversation a number of times now so thank you okay Tia you're still on mute taasa sorry I was trying to print a document for our discussion later and I have a paper JB now alas um I just wanted to plus one Mark's comments around getting the full picture of our unfunded and and really just getting that in a a spreadsheet format would be wonderful I also want to plus one on Tara's comments about the financial impacts and just lift up the excitement on revisiting some of our Council priorities and processes related to our um agenda memos and things because we talked about revisiting the finance environment and economy section and I

[105:00] feel like that's a place where we could have um some more ongoing information about the budget implications to whatever is being proposed um and and and look forward to having that conversation um as far as the assumptions um again just lifting up the conversation from the CU um Team about the climate component and really wanting to do some more analysis around that and then I just had a couple of questions about whether the boards and commissions had been engaged the relevant boards and commissions in any way had been engaged although it's wonderful um to expand the um and I'm very excited to know that the community connectors were engaged in the budgeting process um and then residents um but we also have a variety of other mechanisms for Meaningful Community engagement in our boards and commissions are one is one of those ways so I would love to know if there was any um engagement and if there's any um opportunities to or what the expectations for their engagement um in

[106:00] this process um another question I have is around the survey again surveys are great U but unfortunately I haven't seen a survey that hadn't resulted in some kind of Gap and so I'm just curious how the team is going to address any kind of gaps in response rates um to ensure that we are getting that Fuller picture uh especially um given the concerns that have been raised about the community survey process and then then lastly the outcomes um report and just getting you know there seems to be a lot of pilots in that unfunded section list and I was just curious if there were any kind of outcomes reports that we can look to that can help to inform um the September convers in uh prior to the September conversation so that we have more uh performance data um related both qualitative and quantitatively okay let's start with the first question on boards and commission thanks for thanks for the question council member Adams um so we are including boards and commissions as part

[107:01] of the uh Community engagement efforts this year it's uh actually expanded from last year last year we focused on um Community connectors uh and and utilize their input in the the budget engagement process for 2024 this year we've expanded it so we are inviting their input and shared the questionnaire directly with all boards and Commissioners and we are also uh partnering with our uh departments and Performing presentations to boards and commissions as part of the um budget development process um for the second question on the budget questionnaire this is the first year that we're performing this uh Citywide um input and inviting this into uh uh helping to inform the budget and so we're looking forward to understanding um the areas that we can improve upon

[108:01] moving forward um this is the first year that we're doing this and we're excited to be able to invite all community members um and uh continue to build upon that after the 2025 um budget process so point of clarification is there an expectation based on the lessons that we've learned from the community survey that sometimes there are gaps so we know that there are gaps and so is there whoever is conducting this is there also going to be a followup for any kind of a gaps that have been identified so people with disabilities uh low wealth um you know again people who may not be able to fill out the the form or the survey and so again just um really curious specifically to that question and if you don't have the answer now that's fine but I am curious to know what that answer will be eventually yeah um and we can certainly take that back we've been working in partnership with the communications and engagement department and so they've been really um helping to

[109:00] support us along in this process and so we can take that back um and and and see how to evaluate that moving forward okay and I think the last question Taisha had was about the outcomes for the pilots and the unfunded section yeah so this final year of budgeting for resilience in equity is our final year of implementing outcomes and measures and so we've been working really hard as an organization over the past three years to focus on the distinction between inputs outputs outcomes and um we are looking forward to having an Iden identified full set of outcomes and measures across the organization that will be publicly available and so we'll have an inventory to share uh as part of the budget package that's released on August 30th awesome thank you so much all right Aon all right thank you for all the great presentation and great information

[110:01] um I wanted to follow up a little bit on what Nicole was asking about grants and understand that that budget uh line item did not include grants in that total but I wonder in terms of meeting our uh projected gaps if you think that grant funding has the opportunity to close some of those gaps even if they are with onetime funds I think about like I think that um that our vision zero action plan was an unfunded uh number a couple of years ago and then we got a $23 million Federal Grant and now it's paid for so do you see opportunities for for some substantial grants to maybe close some of these gaps yes I I do one of the things that uh the organization has has uh invested in is a a development of a grants office and so uh the team um is focused on building up our uh Grant seeking opportunities and so the earmark requests that were mentioned um previously in our slide are are some that are recent for the spring of 2024

[111:01] we've also submitted uh $5 million earmark request for Utilities main uh sanitary uh We've also uh sanitary sewer line improvements um we've recently submitted a $200 million uh Grant Dr Cog grant for climate action efforts and so I think um to uh to building upon the efforts of uh Grant seeking and and Grant uh um funding that is coming into the city we've seen um uh uh the uh rewards come in already in terms of the applications that have been submitted um and movement on that um since uh developing that office last year that's great to hear thank you okay uh Ryan thank you I just would um like to say as a member of the financial strategies committee so it's uh Mark um Nicole and

[112:02] me I just want to compliment Cara and Charlotte and Team every time we've met to prepare for this I've just been so impressed by the conscientiousness um that's gone into the presentation the analysis um things we've given our Council has given them to look at to come back with um and I have a lot of confidence in what we're being presented with so I just wanted to say that um I also want to say something I've learned on the committee is that there is a effort underneath all of this an area is leading to better associate our costs or allocate our costs um the services and impacts and we've heard something about that but um I guess I'll just kind of wrap this up by saying there's there's a there's a lot of improvement we have to do that but is and what makes that exciting is we have a financial strategies work plan item to to put put it into um I would say um some of the

[113:00] things we heard from the CU team earlier about headwinds and uncertainties I am very excited to get um plugged in more to understand the the kinds of chronic conditions that we don't see but are affecting us and also the risks of shocks that we're carrying I mean that that's for our work in that in that area I think and I also think um you know one of the stories is Financial efficiency and productivity through through this costing um exercise that that Nur is working on so I guess I'm just saying I'm um I know there's a lot to do here and I'm just looking forward to rolling out my sleeves in our uh our work plan item on subject so thanks Team all right uh Lauren thank you um I also appreciated the presentation and sort of the overall trend and strategies to try and um you know make smart upfront choices that might limit our long-term costs so that we're in a better Financial place

[114:00] in the future um I wanted to plus one sort of making sure that our survey information um strategy will reduce or ideally eliminate those gaps that we've been seeing you know just it's hard to hold in your mind that when we're getting sort of statistical information that it's not complete and trying to like guess at how that might play out if we actually had a fuller picture is just um really challenging so appreciate you guys working on that and um I would also be interested I mean I always love infographics so the more um graphs we can get not only sort of for the overall budget that was included but you know how what does our budget look like with all the grant information or with all the grants that we're getting and things like that because I think you

[115:01] know especially if we think about arpa funding and all of that there probably is an overall reduction actually in the money that we have as a city potentially that you know we're able to utilize so I think while that might not make sense for all the discussions it does kind of help frame like why we're in the tight place that we're at right now um and I understand the constrained environment but I am really interested in some in funding some of the programs that currently don't have long-term funding so I hope that we will be taking a really hard look also at ongoing programs because just because we're already doing something or have been doing it for a long time doesn't mean that it's probably the the best thing that we could be doing so um I know that's challenging and I appreciate and Advance um the hard work that will go into weighing those options thank

[116:00] you thanks and if it's okay I'll call it myself um and uh just thinking about the survey um the question I have is whether when we go to the community or when we're working with the connectors um how how comprehensive is the question in that do we include questions like like um retaining all staff or maintaining an aggressive salary schedule uh infrastructure or do we limit it to sort of the programs that are more the priorities or unfunded programs um you know because you always have these these decisions and we as a council can dedicate a certain part of the of the budget but I just want us to be aware of what we're dedicating and what's really something that we're willing to shift around cut or expand so I'm just wondering how that goes back to the community yeah I appreciate the question we in terms of the work that

[117:00] we've been uh performing with Community connectors last year and this year we've started out with a uh sharing of the financial landscape so it was a very a shortened version of what we provided here tonight um and uh have aligned their feedback with the sustainability equity and resilience framework and so it could capture um a number of program prrams and services across the organization and we filter that up um in the input that's received from uh Community connectors as well as the questionnaire um that we're performing that is focused on those seven goal areas um uh uh for um the 2025 budget questionnaire okay um so thank you for that and I don't have any further questions are there any part thoughts otherwise I recommend we move on to our next um item everyone okay to uh Sarah Huntley

[118:01] from Communications good evening Council I'm the director Sarah Huntley the director of communication and engagement I've been listening in as an attendee so thanks for making me a panelist um I've heard a lot of questions tonight about the survey and I just want to really manage expectations about what this is this is not a randomized survey it is not the equivalent of our Community survey that we did with a survey firm this is a feedback form we're using the communication sorry Community engagement features of open gov for the first time so you know we are going to be limited in the responses to people who choose to take the survey and find it and recognize we've done a lot of publicity around it we have more than 750 responses which is pretty good um for this kind of a questionnaire but it is self- selected people who are taking the questionnaire I think it's going to be a little bit hard for us to determine the gaps because I'm not sure how detailed the demographic information is but I do

[119:01] want to point out that we're asking very similar questions to what we've been asking our community connectors for two years so again you should never look at one piece of data so we've got people filling out this questionnaire along our s framework we've got the community connectors talking to us about the S framework we've got departments looking at the S frame framework that's our unifying source and if you look at it holistically you're getting a sense of what the community wants but this is not representative of our our whole entire community and I just want to be really clear about that and Nia did you want to jump in before Taisha has a question no Taisha thank you uh Sarah for letting us know a little bit more about the limitations and the scope for the questionnaire um I think it will depend on what graphic information that we're going to be asking and requesting but again you know we know that best practice is not waiting for those who have the time means interest to come and

[120:02] fill out the survey but really doing some push push in with our trusted partners and others so again um I don't expect the level of of of of of rigor uh uneven for the community survey but I do um expect that if we're going to get a questionnaire that it's going to that we're doing everything we can to make sure that it is inclusive of as many Community stakeholder perspective perspectives as possible to the comment of looking at multiple touch points I've actually raised this issue in previous conversations around again the community survey was delivered and we had an hour and a half conversation about it and the Community Connector report was sent in a hut line and there was no council conversation about it and so I agree that we should not ever look at one data point um but look at a variety of data points and I would request moving forward that we actually have a collection of all the data points

[121:00] available um in one setting so that we can actually make the that uh be able to see that Fuller picture so I I definitely appreciate and understand but I'm hopeful that we can learn from the lessons of of of the areas that we know we need to grow in and um most importantly U make sure that all of the effort is going to result in information that is valid and reliable for us to inform decision making thank you n did you want to jump in as your I actually just wanted to end up I think Sarah had a response I would just quickly say um yes and yes to what you said council member Adams we do need to look at all of the feedback we've gotten one thing I want to say is the community connectors are not just telling us it's not 15 people telling us what they think they're going out into their Community they're pushing in the same questions that are being asked in the open gov questionnaire so that will round out any some gaps in that space the other thing

[122:01] I want to say is based on your suggestions we actually did an outward push of this information and this Ser questionnaire opportunity to the business Community which we've never done before so we really did work with our economic Vitality Partners as was presented earlier this evening we sent it to our B business license holders that was your suggestion so we are hopefully going to be getting a business and sort of commercial perspective that we have typically not gotten we typically have really only heard from residents and so that's part of our community that we also want to hear from so we are making incremental improvements in terms of reaching a broader audience fantastic thank you so much Sarah for that clar additional information all right well with that I think we might want to wrap it up and uh move over to the ballot issues so n and I promise I'll be super quick thank you so much much and I just wanted to say I appreciate this conversation more than you know we have been working on this and I know that at FSC um I had raised

[123:00] that that this is an opportunity I think to have a really conversation not just with you all but with our community uh about our priorities right about how we spend our money and um a demand for services and programs that at the moment exceeds where we are financially and those are hard conversations to have please know that we have asked out to do that as well that the conversation and the ass this year and budget is to think about realignments and realignments is is that think about how how do we Sunset some programs that perhaps we have done in the past and this is the time that we have seen better outcomes in other ways and just because we've as somebody has said just be I think uh council member foler just because we've been doing them for 10 years 15 years 20 years doesn't mean that we don't have new ways of reaching folks that takes a while that is the budgeting for resilience and Equity data outcomes performance taking a look at that data work that we are in and we just appreciate that you are hanging in there with us as we are doing

[124:02] this really critical foundational work because you can't do it without putting in that work and our team has really um done and moved mountains to get us to where we are so just thank you for that and um appreciate that you were on this journey with us to really think about how to address the many many needs in our Community um and the many expectations they have of their government in an environment where right now we are not swimming in financial riches um and so we have to make some choices so thank you so much for the for the conversation all right so let's move on to ballot so who wants to introduce and uh kick off the ballot presentation and your best speed I will be I will immediately turn it over to our extraord AR city clerk Miss Alicia Johnson I got the mute button first good evening mayor and members of council

[125:01] Elicia Johnson serving you and the community as your city clerk and Records manager I'm happy to be here tonight to present the 2024 potential ballot measures we have a dynamic team um that put your information together and of course working on this as it progresses and our goal tonight is to provide you with outlines of the potential ballot measures as discussed by the charter Review Committee which consists of council members fulker and wallik we will review as council member marus stated each section as outlined in our agenda and ask for council's input on those sections questions now certain items discussed were deferred to the financial strategy committee and we will highlight those items for you we also received a request from the boards and commissions committee to bring specific

[126:01] items of the recent assessment for for your consideration now the information on those requests are included in our presentation as well now Emily if you would bring up the slides please thank you next slide please now tonight's agenda we're going to try to keep it as tight as possible and and leave you more time to have your discussions we will first review the charter Comm I'm sorry the charter Review Committee recommendations and then we'll go through the financial strategy committee recommendations next we'll review the boards and commissions committee recommendations and then move into the city petitions that the citizens have initiated we'll give you an update on that and then we'll wrap up with the ba potential ballot measures for the state and region and we will go through the next steps as it pertains to what we

[127:01] need to do going forward to get items you request on the ballot next slide Emily now first we want to go ahead and review the charter Review Committee recommendation and issues for discussion next Emily so we had several proposals submitted to the ch committee from their fellow council members and these are the five proposals that resulted in a split or agreed vote from the committee to bring forth for council's consideration there are also recommendations submitted that were not recommended by the committee for this election year and we have information on those at the end of this section so the first will'll review this first proposal we'll review is the limited executive sessions availability for sensitive actions now this would affect Charter section nine I do want to note that from 2024 to 2017 council did

[128:03] have limited Authority for executive sessions related to the municipalization legal strategy so it's not an unfamiliar territory now our potential goals or the committee's potential goals with this particular proposal is to utilize The Authority for the capacity to call Executive sessions as line outlined in the state statute and just for your note executive sessions can be called for the seven reasons that are listed but to give you a couple of examples executive s executive sessions can be called for matters required to be kept confidential by federal or state law or rules or regulations and also can be called for personnel matters identifying the personal position to be discussed next the second proposal is the increase of council pay now this would affect

[129:00] Charter section 7 now the city council members are currently con compensated per meeting up to 52 meetings per year for a maximum possible pay of $1,695 28 cents and the potential goals with this recommendation is to increase council members Council comp compens ation based on a percentage of the area medium income for a single person household in the Boulder County Metropolitan statistical area now by comparison Boulder's current Council compensation is less than 15% of the single person Ami and the proposed compensation increase would be similar to a change approved in 2022 by the voters in Fort Collins for their City Council in Fort Collins the compensation is now 75 % of the Ami for the mayor 60% of the Ami for the mayor protim and 50% of the Ami for other council

[130:02] members next please and our third proposal to present it that we are presenting to you is not allowing a council member to hold more than one public office this would affect Charter section four and this outlines the qualifications of council members and mayor it does not prohibit a council member from holding more than one elected office at this time the potential goal would be to have the charter change to add to the Charter a prohibit a Prohibition on a city council member also holding any other elected office next Emily our fourth proposal is to add rank Choice voting for council member elections now this would affect Charter section five this potential ballot measure would be to amend the charter to use rank Choice voting for The at large city council

[131:00] seats our potential goals with this recommendation is it would amend article two possible Charter section five of course to add rank Choice voting for council members in their terms in office now I do want to bring um to council's note that in 2022 we all know that the voters approved a ballot measure to elect the mayor only through rank Choice voting and the first election was held in 2023 and we during our preliminary research we could not find any cities in Colorado that use rank Choice voting for at large seats in doing some again initial research we did find cities of similar size across the country that do use rank Choice voting for at large seats and they are noted in in your memo if you'd like to do um some side research the type of rank Choice voting to be used with at large seats would

[132:00] also need to be determined and it is staff's thought that the earliest possible year that this could be brought forward for the ballot would be 2025 and that is due to the complexity of this particular proposal and the parties that would need to be involved and that is again just for your information next Emily our last proposal for Council to consider is the increase petition signatures for mayoral and Council candidates this would amend Charter section 26 and the potential change would be to increase the required number of signatures from its current 25 to a range of 50 to 85 and the potential goals that we have here is to to again amended increase the number of signatures required to be certified for the ballot for the position of both mayor and Council now

[133:01] in 2023 the voters did approve a charter change to allow mayor and Council candidates to obtain signatures outside the presence of the city clerk and we thought that that amendment is beneficial because it does allow candidates to take the ballot out to the community and have you know more interaction with the community and again they would have to have in the past people come into the municipal building have the actual signing parties in the presence of the clerk and of course we wanted to provide better customer service to the candidates and also give them another opportunity to engage with their Community next Emily so our next slide consists of the chter Review Committee recommendations that were not recommended to be brought forth this election cycle first we want to just touch on the eliminating meetings in July to extend the council break and we are addressing that

[134:00] particular request um within the revi boulder revised code to accommodate it and you will have an ordinance coming before you on the first reading on May 16 and our next item is to whether to increase the signature requirements for dedicated I'm sorry Emily if you would go back one more please our next item to review is whether to increase the signature requirements for dedicated tax measures referencing section 38a next is the remove requirement for Public Works directors to be an engineer that would be located in section 66 and lastly to simplify the language on publications of ordinances which would affect section 18 and 18a thank you next l so our question in this section for council tonight is what ballot items related to Charter changes would Council wish to proceed and direct staff to

[135:01] research and draft all right um so council members should we just take uh each of the five one at a time and uh and then at the end we can just recap what we have and how we move forward with that does that sound okay with everyone and is this a out of five process just procedurally yes ma'am okay great so the first is limited executive session and are there any clarifying questions or concerns about this item are you ready to do a Noto five now or a not Noto five I'm not making a here Nicole go ahead yeah I think um one of the things that I'm thinking about is sort of is there a saturation for how many issues that people can have and I'm just I'm wondering if as facilitator for the meeting you have a suggestion about um whether that's kind of a when we

[136:02] should have that question is it now is it after we talk through all these is it like when these come back to us and we're having the discussion about it which seems like extra work for staff we're not going to follow through but just curious on how you'd like us to go with that right I think I ideally I'd have some red sticker notes uh and we could prioritize our Council items um maybe we should gauge interest first and um because I have a feeling that one of them we we wouldn't vote on in this one necessarily but um does that sound okay to just gauge interest and then go because I'm not sure that we I think we need to discuss as a group if we think there is saturation or whether we think we do have the capacity to put multiple items on Teresa just wanted to clarify that you can't take official action during this meeting and so rather than a not of five I would suggest a straw

[137:01] pole okay a distinction perhaps without a difference but maybe a difference in the law I think that's a great suggestion Lauren did you want to talk about the process yeah just real quick I like the direction that you're headed and maybe we straw poll to see what people's interest are and all of these in these five and then go back and have like you know given what gets to that level of Interest maybe we do a second round of straw polling I I like that idea so should we start with the straw pole of the executive session but I want to give people an opportunity and also the chartered committee to make any comments they um if they wanted to make comments about the five items Mark yeah um you know we had good conversation about all of these I'm also concerned about saturation and I I would say for me as a member of the charter

[138:01] committee um I think the first one is very important um I think the Optics on the second one are poor in a an environment where we're going to be cutting uh programs and services but if the council I don't have a dog in the hunt Okay I this I will not benefit from from this and if other members of council uh wish to take a shot at it I'm I'm fine with that um three I think closes a a loophole in our uh in our existing Charter but it can be closed this Council or next Council it's not going to be a something that happens frequently I would hope not anyway um I think number four um is probably not right for this year um and number five I I think is appropriate but it's not the end of the world if we don't do it so if people want to do um

[139:04] Council pay I'd say also do a limited executive session availability which is critical to me and and basically leave it there um well not the Clutter of the ballot Lauren do you want to add some thoughts to that sure yeah I think um proposals one and two are both proposals that have um been brought to the bo voters before and failed um so I personally think that it's somewhat unwise to bring them both together um my strong preference would be for Council pay because I think that really has um a significant impact on who can serve on Council um but I agree generally that I'm not interested in

[140:01] bringing very many items to the voters my recommendation would be for Council pay and um for number five the a small a modest increase in um number of signatures required okay and and just a process reminder I I don't believe we're uh moving forward with these but just asking directing staff to research and draft um and we still have an option to not move forward in the next meeting um Tara are you're on mute Tera that's probably good I never like the first two sentences of whatever I'm saying anyway I'm trying to G my train of thought um um I think we should consider that this is not an election year so this would be a good time to let's just

[141:01] say I don't want some of these politicized for instance I like one and two and three I don't I feel like this is a good year for them uh because it won't be a political year where people have to worry about uh getting votes getting endorsements and such and you can just uh vote with your heart so to speak um so I like those three for that reason um personally okay Mark I just want to add um on the executive session availability um you know I've I've spoken to a number of um members of other Front Range governing bodies and I will tell you frankly they think we are out of our minds not to have have some executive session availability um it it it just requires us to go through such Hoops to discuss

[142:00] certain matters and it doesn't make any sense as I said I don't have a dog in the hunt with respect to to council pay and if we want to go forward you know via conos um but to to not try and can only try um to reinstitute something that so many other Front Range government governments have um and it makes their lives so much easier um you know to not do that seems like um just promoting self-punishment I just you know I it doesn't make sense to me um and as far as number three uh I would I agree but it's not the end of the world with teror I but it's not the end of the world if if it's in a different year it's just um and it's not an attack on on the individual who did it there was nothing illegal or uh improper because the the the charter permitted it um but

[143:02] the charter has a hole in it and it's not inappropriate to try to fill that hole whether it's this year or another year okay and I think thank you Mark are you done okay so I think it feels like we want to talk about these as a group because they seem to be pretty um so let's let's do our comments as a group and then we'll go through one by one with the straw pole so um next is Aaron okay well I'll change what I was going to say following your new directive Tina thanks for that direction um I'll just say then uh really quickly um I think having executive sessions would be very useful to an organization and uh and also I think this is a great year to try to increase Council pay to increase availability to to more members of the community I thought tera's point about doing this not in a local election year was a good one um I'm not interested in number three um on number

[144:01] four I have a question on this one so uh I think Elicia uh acknowledged that this is not something we could put on the ballot in 2025 2024 it would need at least a year kind to for research to flush that out I had advocated for this as a retreat priority you all didn't there wasn't a majority of council agreed with that is is there space to kind of put this on a to-do list for sometime in the next two years or I don't want to be trying to cheat and get something that that didn't get support of the council Retreat back on here but it's coming up here again so I maybe if somebody could address whether there's a an opportunity to start a lengthier process that wouldn't take a lot of time here on this one Teresa I see your hands up can I cqu off of errands real quick and is it possible to know how how what the cost is of doing number four as well since we've been talking about a constrained budget okay Teresa yeah thanks for the

[145:01] question um I think Direction tonight would be direction to start to begin some research and then come back to you with preliminary research um I don't I don't know I don't know that we could even get that done before the election ction this year but is there the ability to start performing that research during this two this next two-year period um certainly certainly there would be the ability to to begin the research thanks for that Tres then I would just make a pitch to you know get a a slight start on this for eventual consideration and then on number five I'm not against this but I would not load the ballot down with this one uh given the other higher and priority ones that i''d be intered thanks all right Taisha awesome thank you everybody for the comments there's a lot of alignment so I strongly support number one um

[146:02] serving in four years for the commission for Colorado Parks and Wildlife executive summer executive sessions save so much time and energy' been going two to two to two to two and um and there's just so many um legal issues that um are confidential and it would just be wonderful to have that ability so I strongly support that I strongly support Council pay I had the opportunity to participate in the Coalition for manufactured home owners in Boulder meeting on Monday or Tuesday earlier this week and um you know there were conversations around our priorities and um and the interest in in having more of a pres presence and a voice around decision making as a community um and having Council pay um really alleviates significant barrier um to ensure socioeconomic stretch in perspective I think our our Council has been plagued by not having a strong socieconomic

[147:01] representation um and I think our current um climate uh not our well climate and climate um reflects those to some of those um more monochronic decisions and um and so again I strongly support Council pay um and then lastly for number three I do not support uh although I appreciate and understand um I actually feel like one of the gaps is having a policy that um would have somebody would would allow a vacancy for that long so that is my my larger concern with our current policies um and I would love to explore something that addresses that Gap because um number three wouldn't exist if if that Gap was closed um in my opinion and then I agree with um who have requested although an interest in rank choice I I would defer if this is the year for it um and you know I I almost would and I would agree

[148:01] with the petition signatures especially when I looked it seemed like there's some that are around our size that do have 25 and then there are others that have 50 so I didn't feel like there was so much leaning in One Direction or the other and if anything I'm most excited that we could actually get those um signatures not and the tape building on a certain time on a certain day in the middle of the week but like have opportunities to take it out and get it verified later so I'm I'm very pleased with that change and um perhaps increasing uh petition signatures is something that could be Revisited down the line thank you very much all right Matt thank you Tina um let's see I think uh executive session is critical um I think Mark laid out good points all I add is you know for Community we we're having all these discussion we're just doing it in the least efficient way possible um and I think at the end of the day like we want to be more effective we could be spending those many hours a week doing this this

[149:00] telephone teams pingpong to do this anyway and that's time we're not spending in community that's time we're not spending with groups hearing their concerns so we're doing this just least efficient so I think it's a pretty straightforward thing for us to do and and we are mocked by other communities I know that from CML when they hear that we don't do executive session they go oh Boulder so I think we can join everybody in being somewhat normal in that capacity increased ccil pay is another top one for me um for all the reasons mentioned I don't care about number three really um it's kind of a one-off um and then rank Choice voting I I'll just add that there's probably no greater Champion for changing our voting methods um than myself and so I want this to happen but there's needs to be a right way to do that and the biggest one is engaging our state legislatures and the Secretary of State's office and and that the engagement that needs to happen um and that's going to take some time um so so we'll get there and I agree with Aaron I think we can start some of those conversations I think we can start those

[150:00] conversations and hearing what those concerns are and start to think about that um and maybe set up a policy statement later this year that maybe directly starts to advocate for those changes that need to happen in the Colorado revised statutes um to enable that stuff um and then five I I agree with the Taisha we just Unleashed taking petitions home I don't know why we need need to then change it again before we've even seen what taking petitions home with us delivers it may not deliver any extra candidates than we see otherwise so then what are we changing I I think we're sort of just making changes for the sake of it let's see if all of a sudden 40 people show up on our ballot all right let's change our signature numbers but until then I think we just let it be and uh and adjust accordingly down the road all right M cool thank you um so to number one executive sessions um yes I would love to see this uh go through um it's really valuable um I I understand the perception of being a little sneaky and um this do it just it's a cost-saving and timesaving measure it takes so much time from staff to have to do these um

[151:02] repetitive meetings with us in groups of one or two um and I think it's also time-saving for Council which is something that I'm sensitive of related to number two which I support um I really uh would like us to to think about the numbers a little bit in my ideal World we're not just increasing Council pay we're also decre increasing the the workload and requirement to be on councel because if you have a full-time job and kids and you're trying to be on counsel we need to try to get the work down to 10 to 15 hours a week and if we're able to do that successfully as I think we can over with some of the process improvements and we could do executive sessions some of those things um I think we'll get there where it can be lower so yes and I think I'd like to see that number a little bit lower um just because um if if we're lowering the time um that it takes I I think we could do that doesn't need to be a 20 hour week job I think if if we can clean it up um and then I'm a no on number three um for rank Choice voting

[152:01] um not not not quite now since we're still waiting on the state to make those changes as others said um and then I actually feel I'm trying to sit here and figure out why I feel so strongly about number five but I'm very emphatically know the number five and I feel very strongly about it because it we just made it easier for um workers and people with disabilities and folks that it wasn't an easy thing to get those um petition signatures in place uh we made it easier well voters did last November and the idea of trying to make it harder again it's going to impact those same people all over again um so I'm not really excited about that one thank you okay Ryan thank you number one and two are the ones I'd like to work on doing um I think Lauren made a good point that they might not work together though um so I would I

[153:02] would say between the two for this year increased Council pay is Far and Away the most important this is at the level well this is about who is able to serve on this body and of all of these this is the one that was a campaign issue I mean people big this is a big thing for the community so I would Advocate we do Council pay this year and um do plan to probably do the exact session next year I know right now we're determining research needs so I would say let's research it um going forward and then let's research and talk about the idea that we do Council pay this year and exact session next next year maybe there's more nuances i' for that um I don't think number three makes sense I don't know why we're limit we would be limiting people's other jobs that they might have and I think um there's a lot of jobs that could have nuances or potential conflicts of interest we have a process to go through that so I I

[154:01] don't number three doesn't make sense to me uh number four um I used to be more Well I this used to be something I thought we should be doing but as I've come to understand it more I think this is it's a little more complex and we just got done with this with with the mayor's race I don't think this I don't think we're any yet um and then increase petition signatures no I agree with me thank you yeah and I'll just call it myself and then on terara um I support one and two and hope that we can accommodate um both of them for this round and I really want to um support what Nicole said about focusing on reducing the time uh because I agree with her that this isn't full-time job and um that people who need a full-time job need a full-time job and that we need to find a way for people to participate and a big one is to reduce the amount of time we spend on the job and then um I think for number three the voters will decide if they

[155:00] want their elected officials to hold more than one office and I'll leave it up to them um and then for rank choice I would like to continue researching that but I don't think it has the sense of urgency of one and two and finally I um I don't support number five I feel that there's some other barriers that are actually quite a bit more significant than signatures like opening up a bank account finding the bank in the first place um and finally I'm just hoping I think it's too much to ask but I loved the the little party that we had with Alicia and everything it was so fun so maybe it could still be an option and I appreciated that when I started my candidacy uh Tara I just want to say uh in terms of increasing Council pay that besides the fact that we will give other people more opportunities um if we increase counsel pay I strongly believe that we are worth what we do and the way you know what that you're worth what you do is by the amount you know by your salary so I feel

[156:02] strongly that it isn't fair that we work such very long hours and make so little and so aside from all the other reasons each one of us on Council works so hard and I feel it is just too little of a salary for the amount of work that we do simple as that so I feel strongly about that one I didn't get a chance to really give my heart on that one so I wanted to say that okay uh Nicole and um as I know we're heading into this next discussion maybe this is more of a when we get to how many can we handle and all that um just keeping open that maybe there's possibility of some next year um that was something that we had talked about we did this two years ago as well so just wanted to lift that up okay so what I'm hearing right now is that number um three and five uh probably in a straw poll will not be moving forward to this specific round is there someone who heard something different or would you like to take a

[157:00] straw pull Aon maybe you could just straw pull all of them so just we can get clarity because it should it should be quick each time that would be my request but also to take down the presentation so we can see each other that process okay should we take down the presentation I'm put the question I mean put the list and questions in chat so Emily you can take the presentation down Okay so let's first straw pull the limited uh executive session so all those who are interested in moving forward to Drafting and researching that please raise your hand so I see at least six I can't someone's hand just went down okay I think that moves forward right wait I'm sorry we're on number one right we're on number one awesome thank you okay did I get that right the county

[158:02] Teresa I wanted some clarity around what a limited executive session would mean um I my suggestion as your City attorney as the person who would lead an executive session would be that we follow the state law with respect to Executive sessions um but if you have a more limited idea of that we would need to know what that is so we could draft it I I think it just means what the state sorry I think that was on the uh slide so the state one should we R straw pull it are you good to go okay so the second is Council pay to research draft okay that looks good uh number number three is uh keeping a elect a council person from holding more than one public office who would like to see that be drafted and move

[159:01] forward okay I'm not seeing any support for that uh number four A ranked choice for this election cycle hey who's interested in sort of moving this forward in a different way Aaron yeah yeah I I I thought what was on the table was the starting the evaluation for a future year okay so starting evaluation for a future year I've been forgetting to raise my hand so that looks good and then finally um increasing the number of signatures for petitions who's interested in moving that forward okay um nothing there and at this point in time I don't think we need to decide whether executive uh session and Council pay need to be on the ballot at the same time is that accurate can we do that at the next meeting great so with that I think we've

[160:02] concluded the ballot M Nicole yeah I just have one question about that and just um kind of thinking about the workload as well and I'm just uh I'm curious if our City attorney has preference about us giving some guidance on whether we're talking about this year versus next year right now and so what what I heard was um executive sessions and increase Council pay and then begin the inquiry into rank Choice voting um as I said I don't know that we would be able to begin that inquiry even before the elections started um but if we were limited to the executive sessions and Council pay we have the capability to move forward with both of those for this election cycle does that sound okay with everybody oh good great all right um and does anyone have any questions about the

[161:01] ballot initiative ideas that were not recommended before on the slide does everyone feel good about that great okay so let's move on to the next item Alicia is that Alicia yes uh I'm just GNA ask Emily to pull the slides up and then I'm going to turn it over to Cara who will go over the financial strategy strategy committee recommendations thank you Alicia um so this next portion of the agenda is to review and consider um potential tax ballot item proposals that were brought to and considered by the financial strategy committee so next slide so there were four proposals brought forward and considered uh the first was a vacancy tax on Residential Properties which is sometimes referred to as a second hes tax and or commercial properties the second one would be a tax on owners who have more than four

[162:01] dwelling units and the third is an exemption to sales tax on food for home consumption um and the person I think that brought this forward realized that there would probably need to be an identified Revenue offset and what that was is still to be determined and then the last is an additional sales taxt on the sale of tobacco alcohol and marijuana to be used to fund Behavioral Health Services this is an item that Council discussed last year next slide so uh FSC had a robust conversation about these proposals and through that conversation a lot of questions were raised um those questions I won't read them all here but they're related to outcomes and impacts um what are what behaviors are we incentivizing or disincentivizing questions related to implementation and administration um the need for some

[163:00] further research in other jurisdictions and the potential racial Equity impacts next slide so in some of the financial strategy recommendations were that there are a lot of questions that remain and more researches needed so so the strategy committee did rem recommend that no tax measures uh beyond the 2024 ballot but rather uh they wanted to come to you all and seek full Council input on whether each proposal should be considered as part of the long-term Financial strategy that is now part of um council's priorities and as part of that long-term Financial strategy the idea is to develop a multi-year ballot strategy so next slide so just running through the four proposals in a little bit more detail and this information is contained in your agenda memo uh the vacancy tax um

[164:02] or again sometimes considered a second home tax when it's for residential it would be for property that's held vacant more for more than a specified period of time we did do some preliminary research and there are various goals that might be associated with this type of tax including um reducing blight um for Residential Properties potentially to increase the housing Supply and then also to uh raise revenue recognizing that vacant properties particularly residential maybe don't have uh the potential to generate uh economic activity and sales tax and other types of Revenue in the city um we did do some research as I noted uh on the different types of St tax structure that are out there um if this type of tax is in place it's usually a flat fee based upon the type of property or some square footage the taxes range from a th000 to 7,000 a unit

[165:02] um we did some estimating based upon a couple different methodologies of how many units might this apply particularly with regard to residential in the city and and this is a broad range but we think it might impact between 1,000 and 4,000 units um and and clearly Revenue estimates would depend upon the structure of the tax how many units and then also the the um decisions around enforcement and compliance next slide uh the next one is ATT tax on property owners with more than four dwelling units and again we we have seen this in other jurisdictions and sometimes it can be um clarified that it could be all four plus units could be in on one property or could be more than one or all across four different properties um the goals of this type of tax would be would be to

[166:00] reduce or discourage investor owned property and to increase housing Supply Andor affordability um we did not um see an example of this exact type of tax with like a where they picked a specific unit number of units but rather some jurisdiction have lower tax rates or tax credits for owner occupied properties and I'll just note that that last bullet point could also be a strategy to address the previous um tax proposal um for vacant homes if you had some sort of SK um scheme or mechanism to identify owner occupied homes that could red that could receive some reduced tax next slide uh this one is a proposal to consider exempting sales tax on food for home consumption and again within the identified Revenue offset uh food for

[167:00] home consumption has a real technical definition in the State uh code but just in general that sort of any food that's not you know really prepared and ready to be immediately consumed so it's pretty much most of the grocery items that you would see in a store um meat produce products U that you would bring home at f um the potential goals for this type of tax would be to Exempted basic need from taxation uh there was a pretty recent survey about what Front Range cities and towns actually do tax food for home consumption and and from that survey 75% of the 67 uh surveyed uh do tax food for home consumption um we note that we did some preliminary estimates of tax revenue loss If This Were to be approved and we think it would be in the 12 to13 million range uh

[168:01] so that would it would take a big Revenue offset identified to plug that hole I'll just note that uh Loveland voters recently last November approved uh exempting sales tax on food for home consumption after a few months of Revenue uh results this year they they are thinking they need to plug a $13 million hole and so they're in the middle of midyear budget cuts right now um just other considerations with regard to this the city does have a food tax rebate program that's been in place since 1967 um and also just to note that eligible food purchased through the snap program the federal assistance program is exempt from sales tax at the time of sale next slide and last um this is the item that Council discussed and considered last

[169:00] year and this is the idea of a an additional increment of sales tax on the sale of tobacco alcohol and recreational marijuana noting for recreational marijuana there already is an additional incremented sales tax on that sale and that current rate is an additional 3.5% um and this idea was put forward specific uh potential goal of raising revenue to fund growing Behavioral Health Service needs and potentially to provide a price signal to reduce consumption of the tax next slide and uh last year we did do some uh preliminary Revenue estimates with regard to this proposal we did not update those estimates so they are just repeated here um you will see that if the increment of tax was one additional percent it would be approximately $3 million was our estimate and that more than $2 million of that would be related

[170:01] to the sale of alcohol at liquor stores restaurants and groceries next slide and this is the questions for Council okay and I just wanted to uh before I call on eron can should can I is it okay if I ask if the financial committee wants to make any comments the long-term Financial strategy committee Mark is that you go ahead um well it's also Nicole and I would defer to her first okay Nicole I put my my hand up second Mark okay whatever uh yeah I I I think we want to our thought was to look at all of this in in

[171:00] Greater detail um and try to answer the many questions that have to be answered um with a little more time to do so and and that they just these things whether they are worthy or not worthy uh just weren't ripe for this year and um uh certainly with respect to the tax on food for home consumption as tempting as that looks um we are as we've heard tonight um it would be extraordinarily difficult to take a 12 to13 million hit to our budget with all of the other um issues we're going to have to deal with uh with the budget and so these things may all be appropriate at a point in time uh but it our thought that that this was not the year for them although we can certainly take a look at one or more of them um from a research point of view but um uh n none of these were were ripe for

[172:03] moving forward at this point thanks okay and Nicole did you want to add on to that yeah thank you um and and I would just say you know I think one of the things we're really interested in is there anything here you're not interested in um because what one of the things that we're hoping um we don't do and Mark or Ryan please correct me if I'm just speaking for myself and not you do as well is that um we're not kind of closing the door on the world of possibilities that's out there and in the work that we're doing be doing as part of financial strategies and so if there's anything that you know majority of folks are not interested in that's fine um the rest if if we do want to look at them in FSC as part of this work um can we kind of have your blessing to throw it into the hopper with other stuff that may come up and it may be that some of these then would come back as our recommendation and it may be that they may not and so just to have a little bit of um blessing for

[173:00] flexibility I think is the other thing that we're looking for okay and I'll just yeah that's perfect and um we do have the questions here that are to First just concur that we're not going to look at any tax measures for 2024 and then allow the long-term Financial strategy to be looking at it it does ask for direction of which ones which is a little different than what Nicole just said um and then uh and then the second question is do we support the recommendation to create a multi-year schedule of planed tax measures so um so those are the two questions and I think we should answer them together it's just in the interest of time uh so I'm going to go to Aron thanks Tina and thanks to the financial strategies committee for your previous work on this and for car on your team as well in the presentation um and I'll say certainly on number two I absolutely support the approach that you're taking about a multi-year schedule and and on number one I would go more in Nicole's Direction rather

[174:02] than have us argue out the the pros and cons of these particular items I'd ask first to say hey Financial strategies committee can you keep doing the work on these and other possibilities and come back to us with recommendations um ra rather than debate the specific merits of the these ones that we just heard about tonight the they're these they're I'm sure plenty of other ideas so would be interested in FC's recommendations on this okay Matt muted um I think for a starter question there's a couple on here that I have no idea where they came from and so I I would love to know where they came from like was it a staff recommendation was it did did one or more of our colleagues come up with it I think with the with the ballot stuff those those had all been daylighted before we had all we had all riffed on those in one form or another so it wasn't a surprise there were two on here I had never heard of before and they and somehow they're they're on here and so I'm just sort of

[175:00] curious where they came from in particular the tax on four plus dwelling units and the exempt sales tax on home food and consumption I just have no idea where they came from so there's there's that and maybe in future of these we kind of identify where they came from um that would be helpful for for those not on those committees to just know so whether we answer that now just just putting that out there um I'm a little different than Aaron on this because I think we can just get rid of some of these and not waste time um and so I I would like to just say like but no to a couple of them right off the bat and and and I would might disagree a little bit on number four on on on the um not having any of these for 2024 and the only reason I say that is we're kind of in a holding pattern with the county on whether or not they're their survey is going to come back and they should know I think the data is in so we should know soon whether or not they feel that there is Will in the county to do a countywide behavioral health tax and if the answer

[176:00] is yes this is moot right we we want them to lead on that but if the answer is no and they realize that they're not going to create new funding for this need that last night we all agreed was was a critical need for our County and our community then I think this behavioral health tax becomes an urgent thing for us to consider because that needs there and if the County's not going to P come out and and figure out a way to to fund it then we have to do that ourselves so that thing is mostly done in the hopper I think we've cooked it now obviously we have to create the language um but I wouldn't just write that one off completely for for the reason of let's wait and see um and we may want to put that on the ballot this year if the county says uh no um to doing that now or into the future okay Lauren yeah so I wanted to start by kind of answering the question question that Matt had of where did these come from so um the charter committee solicited ideas for the ballot from all of council members and so these um Financial

[177:02] related ones we recommended the financial strategies committee look at but basically they all came through the same process was which was just council members recommended them to us on the charter committee um in ter let's see I um really want to Echo what Aaron said I think that um I would leave you know I want Financial strategies committee to really be open in what they consider um I think we have some great challenges in front of us and um I trust them to make smart choices um I also would like um yeah strong yes to number two in terms of creating a multi-year

[178:00] schedule um one question I had was related to the tax exemption and I guess I think given our financial situation it probably would still be infeasible for us but I was just wondering if it's if we have any idea what percentage produce would be like if we were to just do a tax exemption for produce as opposed to all things or if that's even possible thank you for the question Lauren that's an interesting question um I would have to ask around about that um what are some different methodologies we might be able to use to try to nail narrow in on this I don't know the answer to that apprach tonight it is something that's interesting to me in the long term and perhaps it's not a step that we could take to tax exempt everything all at

[179:01] once so maybe there's a way that we could phase that in over time it's just an idea as we start looking at a long-term Financial strategy for all of these thank you all right Taisha you um I am very much interested in a study or advancing the vacancy tax on Residential Properties I'm not interested in moving forward with a vacancy tax on Commercial properties considering just the current state of our commercial inventory um versus second homes I think again just um from um um where where resources are um a second home is an indicator of excess of excess um you know resources to to be able to do that versus the current state of our commercial properties um I'm not interested in the tax on property owners with more than

[180:00] four it's more so just because I'm concerned on that getting out of hand because I don't know how we got to the number four and so it's like is it five it's I'm just not sure the bang for the buck is worth it but perhap I'm I'm willing to be persuaded um I am not interested in the exempt on sales tax um especially since there's already an exemption for those who are receiving snap um and um I would be interested in knowing a little bit more about that rebate program from 1967 and just what some of the outcomes are on that um and I'm just thinking also from a a few a food uh yeah put that there and then for number four um I I think it's you know all all vices are not the same and so as as was indicated by the recreational marijuana that already has a progressive so having it in here with the others just you know something that I would rather prioritize the ones that don't have something like that um and I agree that it is crystal clear that funds for

[181:00] Behavioral Health are absolutely a need not just for the conversation that we had yesterday but also the one that we had on the downtown Town Hall um where Michael dhy or somebody on stage mentioned that for every 100,000 there should be was it 10 facilities or something I think we have like one or or No it should be 100 facilities and I think we have 10 or whatever it was it was like very very low for what what it was supposed to be and so I very open to exploring anything that could serve as a dedication to a behavioral health tax thank you okay uh Tara dit um to everything Taisha said I do have one question um the person who brought forth the Comm like it's not intuitive for me to want to see uh the vacancy tax for commercial property so I'm very interested to hear from the person who brought it forth um if they wanted to talk about being that

[182:01] it seems like it would be a strain for businesses small businesses Etc why this would be a good idea what were you thinking when you um proposed it I can take that since I think that was my recommendation if you don't mind Tina um yeah so you know the goal of this taxes is is is really blight oriented and is also intended for properties that remain vacant and are under lease and people are not submitting permits to do anything right so they're really just sitting on it um and to me that that's the piece and there's a number of those around the community that have sat for years where there's just someone just cutting 20 $30,000 checks a month to sit on the property and they're not submitting permits not trying to do anything they're just sitting on it and to me that that's the slice that we're trying to nudge them into a state of activity and so idealistically if if we if we

[183:02] incentivize people or disincentivize the stagnation of property no one will ever get hit by the tax because they're moving the properties they're trying to do something with it so we don't want to penalize people who are actively engaging trying to do something with it or or you know because a tenant is in there and their lease is not up they can't do something with the other property we're we're not trying to mess with that there's a lot of complex Dynamics it's really just there there's a there there's maybe a dozen properties around the community that they just need a nudge and perhaps a financial tax is a nudge they need to kind of go okay I get the picture we can't just sit here and and and and take the cash and do nothing we got to be more engaged or more impactful that's a very narrow slice and so it's very tailored for those two properties and they're visible right we have some in South we have one in South Boulder that still that way um so so they're there um and I think that's the goal so um just want to clear up that it's targeted it's not everybody if they're doing the right thing no one's getting taxed so we don't get a dollar from it but but if they're doing not right we'll get a cut and incentivize

[184:01] them to do right okay and um Taisha did you want to cqu on that one or I did just to clean up now that I know the scope is really narrow and specific I would be good with allowing the commercial for chronically underused or just some mechanism of 10 years or yes so I would be interested in a limited scope thank you all right Nicole thank you um and I'm not speaking in my financial strategies hat now this is Nicole in Council World um I really I so I'm interested in thinking about many of these but one thing I am not interested in at all is s taxes just not interested in that as a source of Revenue um but just in in general with all of these I think there's so much to explore and it feels really rush to try to think about putting any of this on the ballot um aside from allowing Financial

[185:00] strategies to do their work um you know we need to understand what the equity impacts uh are um typically by now I think we would have had some polling to see what what the community is feeling about it they could help inform a decision um to see what the voters think and we often have C programs and goals identified that would kind of benefit from the revenue that would be generated or at least the types of things that we could tell to voters um what might be coming and I feel like especially with the budget work that's going to be going on we're going to be doing some kind of cleanup realignment of programs and things like that so I think it'd be really hard for us to try to tell voters for this fall um what what exactly we're going to be using this money for other than just saying it's going to our general fund or something like that um it feels like we've got some ingredients here but nothing that's kind of mixed or at any stage of baked yet um though I I hope that we get this out of the financial strategies

[186:01] work great and I'll call on myself um I absolutely think I would love to see the financial strategies take this on and continue to explore I think these are just four examples of taxes that um might meet our needs and they may not um and the other piece is I don't want to just tax for taxing sake so I want to make sure that we are looking at what our needs are after the realignment looking at the outcomes and then making sure we're taxing smart we have a lot of tax burden right now among our community with property taxes that have increased and still recovering some from some pretty significant inflation um so I I definitely wouldn't support a tax right now um and would love to just ask the financial committee to keep doing their work and come up with a longer term um solution for the group so Ryan thank you um so for my end um Nicole and Mark did a great job of representing the the financial strategy committee so I don't have anything to add beyond what they said thank you both for that um H just for

[187:04] me I mean I guess I would say we should flipping number two we should move forward on items one two one and two for for research those the ones that be most interested but again I would agree uh this coming this coming fall would be too soon to try to plan for thank you so at this point I'm wondering if um the financial department and the financial committee it so first of all I'm not hearing that we want to put anything on the ballot for this year is that uh I didn't hear that from anybody is that appro accurate and then the second pieces I'm wondering if the fin the long-term financials committee and the financial team have enough information to keep working on this given the input we gave without doing a straw pull Cara unless you heard something differently I didn't hear a clear um

[188:02] majority knock any of these out and so I think it's just continuing to um research these and any others that come forward and we'll have to come back to Council in the future that's I heard as well thank you does council uh Ryan thanks I yeah I just wanted to make sure I got what nura said right because I think I I like it which is um we are agreeing both to move forward the items that we discussed with research but then also there's an openness to more ideas that the committee comes up with perhaps we hear from other council members to try things but I'm hearing that there's an openness for us to be creative and come back with other ideas Nicole did you want to comment on that I was just gonna thank staff for the really um quick and thorough turnaround on Research that let us give these um give this information to everybody in these recommendations so just thank you it was a lot of work and

[189:00] you got it done really quickly Matt there's one I I'm a little confused about I I'm confused about the third one I didn't hear us say that we were really stoked on that especially given the financial hit and that we had no Revenue offset so I I don't know I don't know what we I don't know what we resuscitate here um so so that's where I'm kind of conf I thought that was pretty clean in the memo so I don't know why we would hold on to it for the sake of it if I thought it looked like it was kind of not not going anywhere so that that I'm just I don't want to put in work for the sake of work it seems I'm confused Nicole yeah no I see that I think um and I think this is I'm gonna deflect this question to Cara after asking it a slightly different way one of the things that we've talked about in fin cial strategies is that our um Revenue sources are um are out of alignment so they're um kind of two- weighted on sales and use tax and so I think that in the context of this bigger

[190:00] conversation um that I I mean maybe that that kind of thing you know we might be looking at hey are there you know sales and use taxes we could get rid of and replace with other things I don't know but but I don't I don't know that we have to kind of throw out the idea yet because it's it's still feels like it fits in within that how are we balancing out our different sources of revenue and making sure that we've got a more um we're not just overly dependent on sales tax so but car I will defer to you if it feels like that's just not not in question I I agree and and I do think I heard that there's a lot of um skepticism that that alone is yeah an easy idea to tackle and not a lot of interest in that but that combined with some other strategies might be able to be thought about in the long term maybe years down the line with different other strategies put in place but um I think we heard clearly that it that would be

[191:00] too difficult to just take head off um but I also heard this interest from Lauren to explore could we even estimate what maybe some Slimmer version of that so I think that Financial strategy could contemp that in staff okay I mean because I heard a separate question from Nicole actually posed a different question which is what is our revenue balance and and how do we make money different than where are we providing exemptions so I think those are two separate things to sort of pose but um anyway I just don't want to put on extra work for the sake of it you got a lot on your plate and we're talking about resource allocations overall so I just want to make sure we're we're really making sure that if things are not viable we're not spending time on it we're going on on on forward because time is limited all around so want to be crystal clear for everybody on that Aon yeah just to that point car thanks for that response there I mean I think it it would be very hard to imagine just implementing what was in the memo there it's too much money but without some

[192:02] enormous Revenue offset I'm not sure where we come from but just a couple years ago we uh lifted sales tax on hygiene products um and that was an affordable cost and I think was beneficial for the community so I just you know continue to Le things kind of open for folks because if you came back and said well we're you doing this that and the other thing and we found this one exemption that we think would really benefit the community and is Affordable so just look forward to seeing what you all come up with in your due dive okay uh great so it sounds like just to recap we're not going to put taxes on for this year and we're hoping for the and thankful for the financial strategies team to continuing look at our Revenue um opportunities in the future and what our costs are so do everyone feel comfortable with where we are on this discussion okay um so then let's go on to our next item all right next slide Emily we're g

[193:00] to go ahead and turn it over to Mark to go over the board's and commission's recommendations thank you Alicia good evening Council Mark wolf assistant city manager I'm going to very briefly talk to you about recommendations uh related to the board boards and commissions work next slide uh Council received an overview of initial recommendations based on an assessment of our boards and commission structure in November of last year the assessment included extensive interviews and engagement with current and former board members community and other stakeholders uh these initial recommendations focused on addressing key themes including improving the Clarity and purpose and results of boards and commissions uh efficiency Effectiveness and experience uh for for board members and for staff representation on boards

[194:01] and commissions and the overall program model and Service delivery staff shared an implementation strategy with the boards and commissions committee which includes council members fartz and Wier which focused on short-term internal process improvements to address some some of the clarity of purpose and efficiency issues while working on a new program model in advance of a future ballot item uh to change relevant Charter Provisions in 2025 the the charter defines several elements related to boards and commissions including term length age and residency requirements meeting frequency and a Prohibition on compensation for board and and commission members the assessment identified these Charter Provisions as significant barriers to addressing under representation especially amongst Youth and younger age groups and Hispanic Latino and Asian populations based on

[195:00] the assessment and overall accessibility to to the service on boards and commissions such as the overall time commitment and opening the door for discussions on compensation the the boards and commissions committee asked staff to review our options for potentially EXP Ting those Charter changes given the significance of barriers as currently constructed presented tonight is an opportunity to consider Charter changes to relevant Provisions in this upcoming cycle staff believes that we would be able to continue implementation On a par on Parallel tracks addressing the internal process improvements and designing a future program while posing a threshold question to voters in 2024 this question could take a few different forms from addressing all boards and commissions related Charter sections to more narrowly revising certain Provisions uh given the amount of effort to prepare these options and and since we have not had a chance to to discuss uh this change of scope with the

[196:02] full Council we're posing this question uh tonight to gauge general interest in uh being presented options for consideration for 2024 next slide and that is where we uh stop and pause for the question which is simply does council wish to explore any Charter changes based on the boards and commission's assessment in 2024 okay so that is a pretty clear question and um I would like to invite the boards and commissions committee to comment first so is that Tara and Lauren Tara you had your hand up first Laur go first Lauren okay okay I don't know you put your hand up first I'm pretty sure that means you have to go first uh well why don't I go first and you go second and then I go third just because I have only one thing on my mind there are a few things that we can

[197:04] do I think we because we have hired Consultants so we do want to hear what they have to say but it's taking a little bit and okay maybe long longer than a little bit and uh there are certain things that I feel and Lauren I think you agree could really benefit us seeing more people apply for boards and one of them is changing the the amount of years that you say for to be on a board for instance five years is a lot of years so there are certain small things that I feel we should do if we can and this is one of them I'll probably think of more but so that's my initial is can we do some small things that being one of them Lauren yeah I think that you know particularly the length of the service of five years feels like a major hurdle

[198:00] for people even applying um as well as the recruitment period itself happening you know through the winter holidays which I think also is a challenge um to capture people's attention during that time period in general I'm not sure that those kinds of restrictions around our boards and committees are things that we would want in the charter because they seem like areas where we might want more flexibility and so I think my the the idea that we sort of talked about was trying to create more flexibility not that we would you know turn every board and commission into a one-year appointment period right away or anything like that but basically just um taking some of those pieces out of the charter so that we would have flexibility in updating them we could start with a more narrow

[199:02] scope and depending on that go how that goes have the flexibility to increase the scope to other boards and commissions does it make sense okay are and any other comments from the committee all right and so now I'll just open it up uh what do what are people looking for to do possibly in 2024 Matt I I support I support where the committee wants to go with this I just had a question just mat to scope of I mean where where like what are we looking to fix in the charter we'll get the specific ually but like I see like osbt and planning board having very specific welldefined carved out high value things given their quas junal nature and and such I don't know how mess I don't know messing with those might be a little different than many of the other boards we have and so are we trying to just sort of across the board do those changes because I think

[200:00] it would be a little uhh hard to pluck those out um out of the charter and some of those Necessities just given the nature of those two so and I just I'm curious we'll get there but there's a lot of scope questions that I uh want to sort of know up front um to some extent because there's a lot to mess with in there um and some stuff to perhaps leave alone okay um Nicole yeah um I would be interested in this and I would be interested in a narrow scope um kind of like what Tara was talking about and I would kind of defer to Lauren and Tara and the committee to come back to us with some recommendations about what those lwh hanging fruits are um in this process but this one feels important to me um just given how low our um application numbers were this year um it is clear that something needs to change and sooner than later so I would be

[201:00] interested in this one but I would defer to Lauren and Tera to to you know let us know what are options that could be there um for this year and then I as as second question around that is um I mean without maybe knowing exactly what that narrow scope is Teresa I'm curious about um executive session and Council pay and uh having a boarding commission and whether that feels like it's possible even with the Naros scope thanks for the question Nicole um it it it's May and all of our um ballot items uh have to be drafted in in a form for Council decision by summer um August if I'm remembering correctly uh and I'm not hearing a lot of definition around this and so it's

[202:01] it's really hard for me to say if it's changing a couple of term limits or terms you know that's that's a pretty straightforward change um but my understanding is that we're looking to do a bigger kind of whole fail um change no well okay maybe I maybe I H um so if it's as simple as changing some term some terms then that doesn't sound like such a heavy lift I think there was interest um it we have a lot of different things about different boards and commissions and different places and there was interest in streamlining and um you know we probably need something different for quasi judicial versus other boards and commissions but um having maybe one

[203:02] place where that all kind of lives together um and so it could I think we could either look at a small ballot change now but we the charter boards the boards and commissions committee would probably then want additional an additional ballot item on another ballot later where we're taking a bigger swing um or we could try and do it all together I me are two different options just oh am I to cqu is that okay Tina it's okay yep right I I agree with Lauren that if we could just do one little thing for which is actually a big thing because I think that the whole five years is just hard for people if we could just do that then we could work on the second part uh in maybe next year especially then we'll have our

[204:01] information back from the um consultant do you agree Lauren I think we know that we want to streamline and do um have more flexibility in termine lengths um and recruitment time and so I would be interested in moving all of that forward if we have the capacity to so to me it's more of a staff capacity question rather than a do we or don't we want to do that in the long term so I guess my question is is I agree with you that we do want to do those three things and streamline and remove some boards but would you be satisfied with just doing one for the sake of stf capacity and doing the rest in next year or do you think we should I'm just curious I know a lot of people have raised hands and sorry for taking over Tina it it's okay um Lauren do you want to respond and then I'm gonna make a comment I would be interested in seeing

[205:02] what staff brings back in terms of what they can do with the capacity that they have okay so and I just want to remind Council that our our question here is pretty broad um whether we want to explore any Charter change changes for 2024 I I don't think in this point we have to describe what they are and we could um defer to our Charter group to work out what changes feel feasible alongside staff for 2024 if there are any at all um so that might be one consideration as we U make our comments so uh Taisha yes thank you um thank you for reiterating the question um I would be interested in um exploring the first of all I prefer I recommend the phased approach like there's certain low hanging fruit that the year thing is one that I would like to see um move for forward and and be

[206:02] investigated sooner rather than later um as far as you know the actual re restructuring of any kind of boards and commissions I do think that that's a broader conversation um and and um so I wouldn't be as as interested for 2024 but I would be interested for future so for for the specific question of of what for 2024 I'm going to go with the limited scope and i' defer to your uh tetin the recommendation of allowing the charter Charter and staff to help to identify what those different um tiers can be for the different years but I do I I would prefer to not just say and we'll do it next year but but actually like this year we're going to do this next year we can do this but you obviously it depends on you know what gets the votes but I would prefer to actually have like a tiered approach than just looking at this one year and then we revisit the topic again next year fresh all right um

[207:05] Lauren okay Mark hit the unmute um I I would also be very concerned about sort of ballot fatigue at this point with the other things that we're we're putting on the ballot um and none of these seem to have uh the benefit of Simplicity um which leads me to ask a question of Teresa would would um would it make any sense if we did a charter amendment that simply returned authority to set the terms and conditions of service on our boards and commissions to the city council as opposed to doing a multitude of Charter amendments and you know this one is going to be one year this is going to be three years sort of an

[208:00] Omnibus um terms and conditions of of how one serves on on uh boards and commissions shall be uh set by uh the city council uh yes I do I think that's that's possible um mark there would still need to be some code changes because throughout our code it has language that sets those terms as well so um uh we would we would have ordinance changes but um I do think you're right that the starting place the Genesis of it all is is a change in the charter but yeah my my thought on that was simply that if you do that then then you can get to the code changes in whatever timely fashion you want and and um we don't have to race for an election um to do it because we don't require further code changes we simply go you know do a couple in the winter couple in the fall what whatever it is we want to

[209:01] do in whatever period of time we want to do it but if you had the Omnibus Authority first of all people will understand um the the charter change uh whether they afford or against it um it'll be comprehensible and and won't crowd out the other items we're putting on the ballot I would I would like to invite Deputy City attorney Aon Poe to the hot seat um she she has been working on this project and is more familiar and more versed than I I don't mind saying when I don't know something and I think that there are some things here I don't know that she may yes thank you good evening mayor and members of council Erin po Deputy City attorney uh the charter section one30 would cover those advisory councils and Fort Collins has a model that's similar

[210:01] to what council member wallik has described where the fort Colin city council has the authority to establish boards and commissions by ordinance and then their Charter requires that that enabling ordinance set forth the term terms and requirements for each board so we could follow that route um it would also involve as Teresa Tate mentioned changing individual ordinances that we have that currently save fiveyear terms okay Mark do you have any follow-ups on that are are you asking me yes do do you have a follow-up question on that no I mean it seems like an interesting model and a simple model to follow and um and and get us out of um legislating you know minua uh or changing the charter uh through minua that you know once you have the Omnibus

[211:00] Authority then you do what you need to do on a board by board basis uh as we want to do it one year here three years there 10 years there I mean you know we do it as we wish in a on the timeline that we wish and again I I would think it's something people could understand okay uh Ryan I agree with Mark on this um I think aon's hand up again I'm sorry to interrupt you Ryan but um it probably is timely sorry if they you just to clarify one point there are special boards and commissions such as the osbt and planning board that would not be impacted by changing 130 Charter section so um that would involve other ballot items specifically directed toward those boards so 130 could create change in many boards but not them thank

[212:03] you all right back to Ryan thanks I I agree with Mark I I think there's a there's just so many changes we do need to make the boards of commissions which we're not ready to to talk about with this coming up ballot year um and there's things that we might want to do strategically that wouldn't naturally um go to a charter uh or sorry yeah go go to the Charter um so I like the idea of just establishing that that this current structure is causing us a lot of limitations and we need the freedom to be able to make these boards and commissions be more be more flexible and strategic thanks Mark all right Nicole yeah I just want to Echo um I think that's an excellent idea Mark and I think that would be a wonderful way to go um and and I had another question I think for Teresa and that if if we if we were GNA do something like that maybe

[213:02] possibly considering planning board obbt 2 um is that something where it would still be better for you just to have kind of two measures to work on as the scope of that larger so for example um maybe we wait on Executive session until 2025 for example to clear out more space to do this this year so just um curious on how that tradeoff may work yeah so thanks for that question the boarding commission change though it seems small um is still a heavy lift as is the council pay a heavy lift the executive sessions is not a particularly heavy lift but I'll tell you if you all are interested in both Council pay and the board and commission's work that that gets us pretty close to capacity on elections issues okay that's helpful to know uh

[214:03] Lauren I just wanted to thank Mark for explaining what I was trying to say much more clearly thank you okay uh eron so um Mark thanks for the the idea and I I think it's a practical idea for sure I I would have to say having been at this for a little while I would be concerned that voters might view it as an overreach on our part that we would be saying okay you know this has been you know in the charter but now Council wants to take it over kind of entirely on her own without um any checks you know from Charter provision so I would I would worry about um that um potential potential perception of it although I think it would break the Log Jam but I'm not sure whether it would go over well um with some members of the community so I'm concerned about that I I'm more interested certainly in Council pay and probably um uh executive

[215:03] sessions but if we could I might go for more the if we could do the phase thing where we could just maybe just do the one change of flexibility on number of years on the term um and if that's easy enough then great or Teresa says it's too much I'm I'm letting it go but I would probably focus on some of the other things okay so um I guess what we could do so the the question was a little bit broad about whether we want to explore these changes and then have the committee come back and recommend something for this ballot so I guess we could do a straw pull um just saying how many people want to do that very specific piece not necessarily whether it's Mark's idea or uh anything else um Nicole did you want to say something oh I just I had a clarifying question before we get to where where you're going okay it's Q all right um so I think we could try that if procedurally

[216:00] that seems okay with everyone I would hesitate to say that we're going to go into a specific Direction because I think that's going to be a second discussion about uh to eron's point you know we'll have to talk to the community this is a brand new idea um so anyway yeah Nicole does that feel okay if we just do a straw poll about whether we want to ask the boards and commissions um Charter to look at changes for a POS possibly for 2024 so does that work for everyone ask a clarifying question first so I think what I heard Teresa say is that even if we were going to be doing something relatively simple on boards and commissions that would still be potentially too much work to have all three going to to do the work for all three together and bring that back so that that's what I wanted to clarify and I misunderstanding that Teresa I hate to be equivocal about this but

[217:00] um it depends a lot on the scope of the changes we're talking about if we're talking about a change to 130 to make it more of an enabling ordinance where we could then phase in the work that changes the individual terms that is doable beyond that I don't I don't know what the scope is and so it's hard for me to answer okay Mark yeah I I would I would look to the committee to make the determinations a of what's feasible and B whether they want to do it this year or next year I I don't think there's any particular magic about putting it on the ballot in you in in a particular year um but I would I would let the community look at it um and whether it's something along the the lines of my suggestion or not or something else U you know let them come

[218:01] back and and recommend to us uh um you know they have a deeper knowledge and and uh have spent much more time on this so that that's the way I would want to go including a recommendation on timing so um let's should we do a straw pull on um whether we think that the charter should look at recommendations that are possible for 2024 or make a recommendation that we move to 20 to a different year does that seem like something we can straw poll on all right so um can I see who supports the commission the board the board Charter um looking into possible changes for for 24 or a recommendation to move it for 25 hands up or notor is it so we saying what's question I'm sorry yes okay sorry well basically we're asking the charter to make a recommendation the charter

[219:02] Charter the not the charter the um the committee ah the charter committee the boards of commission committee the boards of commissions committee yeah okay to make a recommendation presumably with staff so that it can fit but oh am that I fit but I think we were under the a are we under the assumption that we're doing so without creating such work that it boots Fair pay for councel and executive session is that the prerequisite for any work to be done for 2024 or do we come back and we have to renegotiate all three of those items again based on the scope so I would like to precondition that it's executive session Fair pay for counsel and if something can get squeezed in great but not at the cost of those two or it goes to 2025 I I just otherwise we're gonna have this conversation over again I worry well I wonder if we want to have it over so I think one of the issues is

[220:01] we don't know exactly what is being proposed for 2024 and I've heard some different thoughts about what should be if there are three options and we pick two there H I haven't heard a consensus on that um and so all of these are going to come back to us in any case um because I don't we have not given direction we have just I we've given some Direction but we haven't made a decision that we are definitely moving forward with anything because we're taking the time to to do the draft and have the next discussion that's the way I understand what we're doing um so I'm wondering if we're at a point where we can say we don't want to hear about 2024 because we've already decided to prioritize Council pay executive session or if we want to have all three as part of a discussion depending on what the committee that's looking into boards and commission come back comes back with uh Nicole yes and I was just gonna offer a

[221:00] path forward so that we get out of here by 10 please do and I so I wonder if it sounds like the boards and commissions committee um kind of needs to go convene think about what the scope may be if that's possible I wonder if we would be comfortable without asking the charter committee to give us some recommendations on how to um with that information that comes back from boards and commissions how can we put them all in together in 2024 do we need to split something send something to 2025 sort of what is the timeline but it feels like that part of the work is within Charter committee and they could probably give us some guidance without us having to Hash it all out tonight with so many unknowns still Mark I'm not sure we need need that extra step um to have it come back to the Charter committee if we're doing it on the basis of Matt's um suggestions that uh we we want to preserve the viability of

[222:03] moving forward with the two Charter amendments that we've all approved um and if that's the precondition uh I would assume that the boards and commissions in their recommendation would take that seriously and would come to us basically with the finished product uh that they believe achieves that goal I don't know that it has to come back to um the charter committee I'm I'm I'm sure Len and I are happy to to do it if if that's the will of council but I think we could probably streamline that process a little bit and let boards and commissions simply look at it keep those parameters in mind that it it can't push the other two off the off the ballot and you know make a recommendation as to what they think is appropriate Nicole yeah okay so and and that's fine as well so um I actually have a different perspective though my top two

[223:01] choices would be um Council pay and boards and commissions and so uh whatever it is that we can get done this year so I wonder if what we could do um is maybe do a straw poll where we can vote for two of the three and we'll see where that gets us or I don't know if we just feel like it's not no one no one has no one else feels that but me that's fine too Laura I heard Teresa say that we could look specifically at the POR at the portion of the charter it doesn't deal with open space or planning board but it deals with most of the other boards and create flexibility there and that that's something that could um fit within the capacity of um her department

[224:00] and I would be fine with identifying that as the portion that we go you know look at for this year can I cqu and say the boards and commissions Committee just had their meeting and she and I decided that that's we want to do done and maybe that simplifies it for what we could vote on right now or not vote on but we could straw pole right yes let's do that and my understanding again is that we can ask the the recently convened uh boards and committee boards and whatever commission committee to come back with a recommendation understanding that they're on a compressed timeline and so um back with our pres with our recommendation just now yeah uh and then we can revisit I and I haven't called on myself I'm a little concerned about the timeline with the boards and commissions committee and uh making sure we get the right work done for 2024 but um so

[225:02] that's my only hesitation there but I I really like the idea of getting some change there to make it a little more accessible Teresa I see your hand up yes I just I just want to clarify for our um studious viewing public that no impromptu meeting happened here um because of course any meeting of the subcommittee would have been noticed and open to the public and so that's um we're you know here we are in Jess that was a joke everybody out in listening land okay so going back this is this is the problem when you have a new moderator we would have been done already if it were Aeron or Nicole um so on this particular topic do we feel like the committee on boards and commission should go do some more work and comeback with something that we may or may not add to to other um things on the ballot that we

[226:01] may or may not even move forward with I mean just reminding that we haven't given we haven't made decisions tonight we're giving directions so do should we do a straw pull on that that that the that the the board and commissions move forward with a possible recommendation in 2024 and then we move forward after that after we hear what it is Nicole can I just clarify because I think what what I've been hearing is this um the change that Lauren mentioned that Mark clarified that one the what is it 130 the and and and so I'm just wondering if that's if that's the one because I thought I heard people say that that was the thing we were potentially looking at and apologies if I'm missing it Erin what I wonder if maybe we could straw a poll on is to ask the boards and commissions committee to look at bringing back a targeted enough change that it could be accommodated within the

[227:01] work schedule this year and ask them to bring that recommendation back recommend a recommendation back that would fit within the constraints of the the time budget I I personally would um like to do that but not to Define what that is yet so that they can look at it and get advice from staff so that it I don't think we need to make a decision of what it is even though we have an idea of where it might be going that sounds great thanks okay so um taking uh that as an inspiration uh can we get an idea of who is uh supporting the boards and commissions committee moving forward at looking at a narrow change for the 2024 ballot okay I think we've settled that uh does everyone feel good with where we

[228:01] are there despite how long it took me to get us there all right what else do we have what's next alrighty what's next is our update on community sponsored City petitions and we're going to turn to John to give you an update on that all right good evening city council John Morse elections administrator here uh to present an update on our petitions that are currently in circulation uh next slide please Emily so we have two uh petitions that are currently in circulation the first is titled repurpose our runways it's seeking to amend uh the BRC 11-4 uh to add decommissioning and short uh what this petition is asking uh the uh registered voters in the city of Boulder is about decommissioning the airport while also taking into consideration emergency uses and also the funding and management of the site if it were to be decommissioned um this

[229:02] petition uh went live for circulation on March 21st 2024 sorry about the typo there uh they're utilizing both our online and paper systems and the threshold that changed this year is now uh 3,41 signatures to be deemed certified and they have a deadline to submit that to the city clerk uh for review on May 29th so right around the corner next slide please Emily uh the second petition that's currently in circulation uh is contingent upon the passage of the first petition this petition is titled runways to neighborhoods and again seeking to amend the BRC 11-4 to add d commissioning uh in brevity this petition is asking registered voters in the city of Boulder if the airport were to be decommissioned what would the uses be for that and they've listed uh a variety of uses in the petition language as you see uh the same as the last

[230:00] petition uh it went live on March 21st utilizing both our online and paper systems and has a threshold of 3,41 signatures to be deemed certified and the same deadline of May 2 4 excuse me May 29th 2024 I'm going to pass it off to Cara to talk about some other uh ballot measures in the region but we are going to take questions on the current petitions once she's finished up thank you thank you John next slide so next just to sort of round out uh the potential ballot landscape a quick update on region and state next slide uh for the region I think you all are well familiar that Boulder County is not yet decided and that they are polling and uh then we did hear from Boulder Valley School District that they have no current plans for a ballot measure next slide and for the State uh we do realize

[231:00] that there may be a number of State ballot issues on the ballot uh currently there's 17 I think initiatives circulating for signatures but we are uh focused here on those that would directly impact uh city property tax revenue these were talked about in the previous presentation um tonight uh and this first uh Senate Bill 24233 clearly is legislation and not a ballot measure but uh the passing of that legislation we anticipated might impact whether uh these two initiatives will ultimately be on the ballot that is still to be determined um and then the two property tax initiatives that may be on the ballot is initiative 50 and again this was highlighted earlier but just wanted to share that this is a constitutional change so it will require 55% of the voters to pass um and then 108 is still

[232:00] collecting signatures if that in fact gets on the ballot um and the Deadlight deadline to collect sufficient signatures is that August 5th date so we will know more after that and we may know more before that uh whether the proponents of these plans put them on the B that's my quick summary trying to get you out before 10 there's question oh sorry sorry all right um any questions on the city petitions or other ballot items within the region Matt uh John do uh do you know how many uh electronics I know you won't know paper until they submit do you know how many electronic signatures have been returned on the two City ballots uh I did check that before the meeting and it looks like we have 87 uh for the first petition to decommission the airport and then 82 uh for repurposing the

[233:02] airport okay thank you any other questions about these items all right uh Ryan thank you um I guess the question is if you look at the first City ballot on decommissioning the airport is it would it be correct to think about this question as the same question that is scheduled to come to city council to vote on or to address when way or another as part of the airport Community conversations bbcp up update is that not so then does this not become the question of whether City council's addressing that directly or the vot the voters are addressing it or or am I not thinking about that the right way it's for staff I guess I'm happy to

[234:02] jump in here um so to the extent that the conversation is about whether to pursue closing the airport um then yes they are essentially this question okay thank you all right any other questions okay I think that was our last item is that correct it is and I just wanted to review uh next steps with Council as it relates to the ballot items being you know getting ready and prepared and being placed on the ballot but first I want to just thank the team of Mark Cara John and give a shout out to Chris and Aaron who supported us through this whole process you guys were great to work with and I so appreciate your support so thank you um so with that being said our next steps June 20th we've slotted for any follow-up discussion with Council if it is needed

[235:01] and requested July 18th we will present to you hopefully the first reading of ballot measures pending any other conversations August 1st is our Target for a second reading and the a public hearing on all the ballot measures and this is potentially the night that we could uh adopt all the ballot measures if continued second readings or third readings because of amendments to that were given in direction from Council on the second reading night um we would have to hold a sec continued second reading in public hearing and or a third reading in public hearing on ballot measures and again final adoption potential on that night and the council's approval of the ballot order we have that slotted for August the 15 now we do want to note be um for council's awareness that September 5th is the last meeting of council before the ballot has to be certified to the county and September 6 is our deadline

[236:02] to um submit the approved ballot order to the county so with that we are finished unless there are any follow-up questions or comments I'm not seeing hands up thank you Alicia for all of your work on this this is wonderful we appreciate you so much and for all of the staff and the Committees for their dedication to this work um and also thank you for bearing with me as I just uh finally moderated my first study session I have a little work to do I will be on it and um thank you for being patient so have a good night this meeting's adjured thanks and good job Tina thank you J for