September 25, 2025 — City Council Study Session

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:02] Okay. Good evening, and welcome to tonight's study session of the Boulder City Council. I am Councilmember Wallach, and I thank you for joining us. We have two items on tonight's agenda. First, we will hear information on the Wildlife Ready City Wildlife Resilience… Wildfire Resilience Update. Our second item is the City Council Process Working Group follow-up discussion. Before we go into our work item, I would like to outline how the meeting will be conducted. We will review the staff's presentations. 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. We will now turn to our esteemed City Manager, Nuria Rivera-Vandermeide, to introduce our first item. Esteemed, even. Thank you, Councilmember Wallach. I will take that.

[1:03] Yay! Tonight's topic, the first one is, in fact, our wildfire resilience, a little update, and as I was looking at the memo, and actually, looking quickly at the City Council history, you will see that this topic comes up often, and there is no wonder, because in our community, this is a topic of great, great interest. And we came recently, earlier in the year, to talk about it. We have talked about wildfire in one way, shape, or form, several times during the year, and today, really talking about, what we've done in 2025, and a little bit looking at the horizon for next year. So with that, I pass it on to our equally esteemed Assistant City Manager, Pam Davis, to kick it off. Thank you, Nuria. And when… where there's wildfire, there is, an esteemy environment. So, there you go, Matt. That was my contribution to the humor tonight. Good evening, City Council. My name is Pam Davis. I serve as Assistant City Manager, use she, her pronouns, and part of my role as Assistant City Manager is the honor of being the Executive Sponsor for the Amazing Wildfire Ready team that you will hear from this evening.

[2:15] The purpose of this study session is largely informational. We want to provide you with greater detail related to the full breadth of 2025 completed and currently ongoing projects around wildfire resilience. That said, we will be wrapping up that presentation with a call to action to become even greater community champions of wildfire resilience work in our city, and the opportunity for you to ask questions and provide input on how we can continue to help you do so. The City of Boulder continues to make significant process… progress in advancing wildfire resilience. through the implementation of the Community Wildfire Protection Plan that was brought to you roughly a year ago for in presentation, as well as the great support from community through the funding of the climate tax approved by voters in 2022.

[3:06] Without completely stealing the team's theme… I'm stumbling today. Without completely stealing our team's thunder, I want to highlight that in 2025, year-to-date alone, the city has approved new building standards for the WUI, expanded financial support for homeowners, treated hundreds of acres of forest and grasslands. advanced prescribed fire projects, and strengthened our wildfire response capabilities. Together, these efforts are reducing risks to life, property, and critical infrastructure, while enhancing ecosystem resilience. And I have Lisa Cooper pulling up some slides for me, I believe. And Lisa, you can go right to slide 2. Thank you so much. Joining me tonight for the main presentation will be Open Space and Mountain Park's Paul Dennison, Boulder Fire Rescue Chief, Paul Durazzo, and our Public Information Officer, Jamie Barker.

[4:06] Along with that, as I think you're familiar with, we have a strong backstage cast tonight from 10 different departments that will be here to support your questions as needed. We'll go through a brief program overview, and then the meat of this presentation will be on the current and upcoming actions related to wildfire resilience. We'll also spend some time focusing in on our communications and resources for you to be champions of this work and discussion and questions. Next slide. Wildfire ready is a phrase you'll hear a lot this evening. This is our umbrella initiative for all the work that you will hear about tonight. It's also part of our strategic plan goal to advance efforts to enhance regional disaster prevention. Preparedness and response that leverage existing partnerships and prioritize city investments. The City of Boulder and Boulder County have always lived with the reality of wildfire. Fire has always been a part of the natural rhythm of our landscape, shaping the ecosystem, clearing undergrowth, and keeping the land healthy.

[5:11] This natural force has also become a threat to public safety, as more people live, work, and build in this fire-adapted community. In Boulder, wildfire is not a question of if another fire will occur, but when, meaning that becoming a fire-adapted community is all the more important. And because Boulder's landscape is adapted to fire, Boulder's community must adapt as well. This means becoming better prepared, more resilient. and more aware of the shared responsibility that wildfire-ready initiatives require. The City has made wildfire resilience a priority, investing in projects and programs that reduce risk while also working alongside community members. Community members play a critical role in this effort. Neighbors supporting neighbors, households taking action, and the city and property owners working together to prepare for the next fire.

[6:04] Next slide. As I mentioned, the work in front of you tonight brings together a cross-departmental team, including the 10 departments that you see here. But as described, it's truly taking the whole community to be successful. Next slide. All right, one more note, that we have organized our Wildfire Ready program around the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy Goals, so that this work can connect regionally in a really great way. And those three areas that you will hear more about tonight are fire-adapted communities, resilient landscapes, and safe and effective response. And so with that, I will turn over the presentation to Paul Dennison to share first about resilient landscapes. Thank you, Pam, and if whomever is controlling the slides could advance to the next slide, please.

[7:03] I just lost my presentation on the screen. I don't know if anybody else is still able to see the slide presentation. I apologize. I'm in the office, and the power just went out, so let me pull… It's hard to just go out. That's no problem, and if it's something that… You're able to return to the screen, that's good. If not, I can… Let's proceed with the presentation for the time being. Emily, are you able to bring it up? Yeah, I was just about to say, I have it at the ready. Thank you so much, I appreciate that. format. Okay, I'll go ahead and bring it up.

[8:00] Thank you, Emily, and thanks for your patience. Pam, thank you for the introduction. I'm Paul Dennison, I work for City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks. I'm the Wildland Fire Senior Program Manager, and I'm one of our departments and the City's many staff people who are involved in wildfire-resilient landscapes efforts, and I play a primary coordination role, working with Parks and Recreation, our Parks… Public Works and Utilities Department, Boulder Fire Rescue, and a number of other, county and regional partners on, work related to resilient landscapes. And Emily, if you could go forward, Two slides, please. One more after this. Okay, as this slide states, the resilient landscape strategy involves restoring and maintaining landscapes so that they are resilient to fire-related disturbance. And one of the three cohesive strategies in promoting our wildfire resilience goals. You can see here a variety of examples of resilient landscapes projects. Prescribed fire included forest thinning, grassland mowing, targeted grazing, and cross-boundary fuels management work.

[9:12] Advance to the next slide, please. And so, the city has a, a long legacy of… Projects and programs that support resilient landscapes, and in my view, as a leader in the nation in land stewardship and environmental preservation, and all of this resilient landscapes work related to wildfire has a strong nexus with our ecological and agricultural priorities, but for tonight, I want to focus on work that is, has been completed or is ongoing in 2025 that has, risk reduction to human life and residential communities as a primary objective. So this slide, and this map may look familiar. It shows the areas of concern as they were identified in our 2024 Community Wildfire Protection Plan.

[10:06] And, as I'm sure many of you are aware, the western portions of the city are known to be areas of elevated risk for wildfire. It's where our prevailing wind patterns that drive problematic fire behavior align with many densely populated residential neighborhoods, and the vegetation and terrain characteristics also render these portions of our community more Vulnerable to wildfire. So, these areas, the areas of concern that we established in the CWPP, those have been the geographic areas that we're prioritizing, and on the left, I have listed 3 priority action areas where we've been investing time and resources. So, fuel reduction, which is a pretty expansive, program area involving forest management and grassland management, including other vegetation management objectives. Prescribed fire, we're investing a lot of work to accelerate our use of prescribed fire as a risk reduction tool.

[11:04] And then, cross-boundary projects, engaging private landowners and neighboring land management jurisdictions to develop, wildfire mitigation projects that, move across various jurisdictional and ownership boundaries. Next slide, please. So, this map shows 18 projects that are represented. Representative. of these, yes. I'm sorry to interrupt. Council members, we have lost power at the Buni Building. We are able to record on Zoom. Our team is, moving… Pam is moving to a different building. We will, be able to put this up on YouTube, but know that we are not able to stream on Channel 8. Is that alright for us to continue? I see thumbs up from the majority of council, is that all right?

[12:03] Okay. We will continue, we will put, if you are contacted. Please let folks know we are going to put, some messaging on the website, and we will put, know that we will put this up on YouTube as soon as we're able after tonight's meeting. Maria, just a question, does this mean that the people who are currently tuned into Channel 8 are not seeing us? They are not seeing us right now. My big chance to be a star, look at this. I apologize, Councilmember. Alright. Sorry, Paul. Not a problem, I'm sorry there's… Thank you. All the trouble. And picking up where I left off, this map shows 18 projects that, are good representations of those three priority action areas, and you'll see that they're Primarily located in the areas of concern that I alluded to in the previous slides. So, generally on the… in the western portions of our community.

[13:03] And these projects are either examples of priority fuel treatment areas, prescribed burn planning areas, and also cross-boundary projects. And many of our resilient landscapes, projects and programs have elements that… of each of these action areas. So, for example, in the South Boulder area, we have an ongoing program of targeted grazing, forest management, and some cross-boundary initiatives. There are areas where we're implementing, Cycles of grass management routines, regimes, mowing, and targeted grazing in cycles to experiment with that work and to learn more about managing risk in our grassland-adjacent communities. So… That's just an introduction. I don't have time to provide a great amount of detail on all of these projects, but I wanted to show you where this work is taking place and some of the action areas in resilient landscapes, and I hope I have an opportunity later in the evening to answer questions you have about exactly what these

[14:11] Projects consist of, how the areas were chosen, and how we are, working with communities and across the city departments and other partners to implement resilient Landscapes initiatives. And thank you for your time. And, sorry, I, I believe it's Chief Calderaza who will be presenting after me. Thanks, Paul. I meant to jump in and couldn't get to my mic fast enough, sorry about that. Good evening, Council. Mike Calderazzo, extinguished Fire Chief, I think is the, That's what I should introduce myself as. Thank you, Matt. So we wanted to kick it over to the next part of a cohesive strategy, and that is the fire-adapted communities, and as Pam mentioned at the outset. A fire-adapted community basically accepts that wildfire is reality, we live with it, and we learn to adapt with it, and that involves all manner of organizations, both local.

[15:14] Private, residents and, the local governments themselves, departments of different types that you're going to see tonight. And learning how to do all these different things on these ribbons, and do them better. And we starred some of the ones that we'll talk about, in a little more detail, landscapes, mitigation. and the regulations and policy, which you are all very familiar with. But know that in all of these areas, we have been making progress in different ways, so I'm really just going to skim the surface in the next few slides. But I'd like to get into one of the more visible ones, and that's in our mitigation work, so if we could move over one slide. We can talk a little bit about, how we're working with residents. So, we, have, really…

[16:03] 2025 in particular, to complete detailed home assessments. Big part of that is just getting the word out to people to understand that this is an option for them. It is entirely voluntary, but to date, we've had 400… detailed home assessments completed. We've got 115 underway, or are in the pipeline, and of those, 85% of those are in the WUI. We'll talk a little bit about the expanded WUI in just… just a minute. Obviously, Council knows, with the expanded WUI, that's… we've got, quite a ways to go, but starting in 23, when we first began the program, we have over 874, and each of those is basically not only a, a look at somebody's property, but it's an opportunity to educate them as well. And that takes usually 2… anywhere from 2 to 4 hours for our team.

[17:00] To get out there and do that. Coupled with that, since this is voluntary, with the Wildfire Resilience Assistance Program, that's another thing. Getting the word out was a big deal. In 24, we got 58 total applications, and we're awarded 42 of those. You can see that, coupled with what was spent privately and as well as with the grant money, we're looking at about $110,000. We've done a lot more to date this year. We're at about $175,000 in money spent with 125 applications, and we also, this year, increased the amount from $1,000 to $2,000 for residents. and now are piloting an HOA program to help HOAs with their common areas, and so far we've got 9 applications with that. So a lot of work on detailed home assessments, and then with the grant money that's been made wisely available to help with that, we've got a lot of community

[18:00] Work on hardening properties in the interface, in particular. If we could go to the next slide. We'll talk a little more about, some of the other things that are happening. Chautauqua is very vulnerable. You can see, in these two maps in particular, obviously everybody knows where Chautauqua is down in the south. west corner there. Undergrounding is, is, is, underway. That is not entirely visible to folks, but it's definitely, a priority area for us to harden that. With the WUI code adoption, though, you can see in the right-hand side of, of the maps. We've more than doubled the number of parcels that actually we now consider, vulnerable to wildland fire. It recognizes that just the west of the city is not the only vulnerable space in the city, but really all around the edges of the city are vulnerable to the effects of wildfire. So, with that expanded WUI boundary.

[19:02] We've got a lot more, 16,000 plus, and opportunities to do a whole lot more detailed home assessments and help, involve the community in hardening homes in those areas. We go to the next slide. So… Another aspect of a fire-adaptive Community is involving the community heavily. Our Office of Disaster Management, has been involved in… I'm sorry, we went… yeah, there it is. With community preparedness workshops. We've got some folks on hands that can talk in more detail about what those involve. With Colorado State Forest Service grant support, we were able to begin the process of creating a homeowner retrofit video series we want to make available. And our wildfire preparedness guides, we've been able to allow the team to get those translated into five different languages, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and even Russian.

[20:03] And, through a partnership with Aftersight Radio, we've got preparedness information for blind and low vision residents as well, so we've been able to increase that outreach there. And lastly, we've launched the Wildfire Ready webpage, along with an Anchor Point quarterly newsletter that details some of the highlights of the community risk reduction work that's been going on. So that's a quick overview of some of the progress that's been made, on our fire adaptive communities aspect. And I'll kick… let me move, to the next slide here and talk a little bit about sorry, safe and effective emergency response. I'm behind my own slides here. So, the other aspect of a community preparing for wildfire is probably the most visible one, and that's, emergency response. Just for those who view this on the public, I know Council is pretty well aware of this, but all of our firefighters, not just in the city, but generally in the region, and even some of our cross-departmental staff from open space, are trained, and certified for wildland response.

[21:18] we call them colloquially as red-carted individuals, which just basically means they have some basic wildland training, and also have to pass, basically a physical fitness test in order to do this hard firefighting. But they also have continuing education hours that they have to be, that they continue to train with. We've changed our own posture. This is not obvious to the public, but it used to be red flag days were the big days, and then we'd add staff and so on. It's a little… we've loosened those restrictions a little bit, so higher risk days, any days that we consider higher than normal wildfire risk days, we will actually add units to the system regionally and in the city, and also conduct what we call severity patrols, that is, patrols that

[22:08] look for starts, although you'll see we've got some additional technology to help with that in a slide next. But before we get there, I do want to talk about another thing that most Council I know is familiar with, maybe not the public. Inside the city, we have year-round fire restrictions. It's a bit different from what the county is, but we work closely with our county partners, as well as inside the city. To, to ensure that even on property that is not within the city. We are increasing patrols. Good example of this would be Flagstaff Road around July 4th, closing that with the county sheriff's assistance. So things like that we're getting a little more active with to make sure, that we can keep a start, relatively small. And just for the sake of of emergency response itself, one of our department metrics around emergency response is to keep any wildland fire start to an acre and a half, or less, 90% of the time. That is something we're actually… the team has actually been pretty good with. But everything we build around is that metric. Next slide.

[23:21] I think this is my last slide, actually. So… In terms of technology, something pretty neat, anyone can see these. We, we have, partnered, of course, with the county and have wildfire cameras posted, in, three particular areas, that we can, use to quick spot, starts. includes thermal imaging in at least one case. You can go to alertwest.live yourself and see wildfire cameras all across the western United States, but you can also focus specifically on the ones here in Boulder, and you can see what we're seeing with those when we look for starts.

[24:02] We've also installed, RAWS, stations. Those are basically remote automated weather stations, locally in the city. The general idea with those, even though there's, I think 2,200 or 2,500 around the U.S, Is essentially to give very, very local weather data to the incident commanders and responders on the scene. So generally, we would rely on big forecasts and generalized areas. This gives them more focused response, and they'll be able to adjust resources accordingly, which is a huge help to those teams. We're also partnering with Xcel Energy to get access to their wildfire cameras. We can have their information as well, so we can see what they see as quickly as they see it. Lastly, for regional, response work. a lot of work into evacuation planning. We've got some folks here who can talk in more detail about that. The idea, generally, is to… is to make sure we have, big arterials and areas where we can get folks in and out of key areas, in the responders, out folks that… that need to be evacuated, good places for them to get to in timely ways, and then spots for our

[25:19] own teams to get to to help, with those, movements of people and machines. The other big piece that's very much behind the scenes, but got a lot of heavy lifting right after the Marshall Fire, and that was what we're calling our closest unit dispatching Project, which is basically a reprogramming of our computer-aided dispatching system. To better align our city and county 911 centers. So they can see regional responders and dispatch the closest unit, and get not only the closest unit to, say, a fire or even an EMS incident for that matter, but get larger amounts of resources moving and being able to track them from both

[26:09] the dispatch centers. So that's a… that's a key piece going forward. We hope to, move into, go-live state sometime in 26. There's a… sorry for the misspelling of Chautauqua here for those sticklers on spelling, but there is underground and utility work. I mentioned it earlier, but that is a big part of hardening that area of town. And then the last piece we kind of wanted to highlight was our first urban conflagration plan was put together by Office of Disaster Management. And back in May, they tested the plan with all kinds of players from around the city, and even regionally, to see how well we do with that, and then to get some lessons learned from that. Obviously, urban conflagration is something we as a community are now keenly familiar with, and unfortunately have to plan and prepare for, but the general idea is

[27:03] is keep a wildfire to a wildfire and not have another repeat of what we had just a few years ago. So that's safe and effective emergency response. I'll kick it over to our public information officer, Jamie Barker, and allow her to round us out with some of the outreach on the website. Thank you, Chief. If you would go to the next slide, please. Awesome. My name is Jamie Barker. I'm the Public Information Officer for our Boulder Fire Rescue. I'm also the Public Information Officer for our Wildfire Ready Initiative. One of the things that we're really excited to roll out This year is our website and resources page. This page is wildfire ready, and it's just boulderColorado.gov slash wildfire ready, and is a hub for all of our wildfire resilience work. So, the purpose of it is to deliver strategic information on city-led efforts, actionable steps for our residents, as well as links out to all the various projects and project pages that have, some sort of foothold within our wildfire resilience work.

[28:11] So, on this page, you can find fire restrictions for the city, which, as Chief mentioned, are year-round, as well as fire restrictions for the county, so that folks are aware, as well as alerts and information. You can find current projects and programs, things that are happening in your backyard right now, like the cows or, the mowing, or you can find information about upcoming and past projects grants, and any news that we might have related to our Wildfire Ready programs, projects, and actions. There's also some information built into this webpage on how to prepare for wildfires. It is very important for us as a group to have presented the community with a website that not only shows that the City of Boulder is doing a significant amount for wildfire resilience, but also encourages the community to be passionate

[29:06] about getting involved with wildfire resilience themselves. So everything we do, touches on preparation, as well as making efforts on your own property and in your own community. The last thing that we have on our website, is any information about regional resilience and partnerships. We are a heavily collaborative wildfire-ready initiative within the city, but also outside of the city, as you've heard, from many of the… many of the folks involved on the PowerPoint, on the present already. So we really, Prioritize highlighting on both this hub, as well as in the information that we push out, that wildfire resilience is a community responsibility, and it's something that we all need to put our all into, to get done in order to protect ourselves and the community at large.

[30:05] If you could go to the next slide, please. All right, so like Pam said, we like to end things related to wildfire with a call to action, get people, excited and movable about wildfire resilience, so we figured we'd do the same thing here tonight. So what do we normally tell folks to do? We say sign up for emergency alerts. I'm sure this is something you all know, very well, but you can do so at boulderODM.gov, or get informational emergency event texts by texting BOCOINFO to 888-777. You can visit the Wildfire Ready webpage to learn more about ongoing projects, as well as things that are upcoming. We have some very descriptive, pages within our website that talk about the projects that folks can see happening and not see happening within the City of Boulder right now.

[31:03] Share the active wildfire-ready work with the community. So, in order to get the community passionate about wildfire resilience, we need to be passionate too. So use the opportunities that you have to engage with them and get them excited. We have a variety of, like, stickers and swag and things to get people to constantly think about it, so that wildfire resilience is top of mind, because it is important. And then just our last reminder again, and kind of our tagline is, wildfire resilience is a shared responsibility. So, thank you all for prioritizing it, and we're grateful that, you know, you're a part of the Wildfire Ready team, and ultimately, so are the community members that we all serve. So, with that being said, I… I'd like to throw it back to Pam. I think she might be settled.

[32:08] I hear she is getting settled. Okay. I don't know if anybody can take her slides. I don't mind doing that if need be. Great. Why don't you do that? Sure, so really, if you want to go to the last slide there, it's our questions for Council. I could have done that. Yeah. Go ahead, go ahead, Mike. I know they can read it as well as I can, but our very first question is, do you have any questions on our Wildfire Ready initiative, specifically to those items that you just saw?

[33:03] Right? Councilmembers, if you have questions, Let us know. There we go. Tina, you're up first. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Fantastic. Thanks so much for all the information and the update. I had a couple questions. The first is… when we… and I was really glad to hear that we're increasing how we're staffing, how we're increasing staffing in general, not just on red flag days, to be thinking ahead. How did we fund that increase? Was that just through the existing budget, or did we pull money from a different budget? That one is entirely in… in the budget already, as part of our overtime staffing or repurposing staff from our wildland division that are working on their 40 hours, so we adjust their schedule.

[34:05] Okay, and then, so my question would be, do we feel that we have enough staffing out there, or do we feel like that's an opportunity for a budget increase in the next budget cycle? Is that something… I mean, would it be one of your priorities? That's a great question. Hard to say, actually, because, It's just… it's entirely discretionary when… when a red flag day occurs, how many we stand up. Generally, just to give you an idea, we have, these larger wildland 4x4 ready vehicles. We'll bring in overtimers, but we also are working, so part of the closest unit dispatching project is to also leverage what's in the county. So, we don't want it all to just be city responders only, especially since the wildfire is generally not going to start inside the city. So, I wish I could give you a plain-jane answer that says, oh, yes, I need… I'm a fire chief, right? I gotta ask for all kinds of extra people, but… but the reality is, if I did, I would want it to be part of a regional approach.

[35:11] And, and so I don't… I don't know that I can give a great answer at the moment until we've nailed down, hey, fellow chiefs. when these high-risk days, are we all in agreement that we want to stand up? You stand up one over here, I stand up one over here, and then I come back and say, well, maybe we do need an additional set of 3 or 4 firefighters. But at the moment, I can't really say that that's true. Okay. Thanks. And then another question I have is how… Are we connecting fire, evacuation, and the way we build in the WUI with the comp plan process? And will we anticipate some changes in how we do the comp plan, especially in the WUI? Thinking about how we're trying to minimize risk in that part of town?

[36:00] I may have to kick that to either P&DS or our ODM evacuation slash rep center. Working on that for us. What do we have available? Keith, I can jump in. Cool. Or Brad, go ahead if you'd like, I'll follow up. Please go ahead. All right, Mike Chard, Director of Office Disaster Management, good evening, Council. We have been brought into those discussions, looking at the future of how we build, and I think we're at the beginning phases of that, but it's definitely been elevated. Looking at density. of structures, how they're constructed, where they're constructed, the type of fuels that are around them, and then assessing how is that going to impact not just the evacuations, but also firefighting, how we're building the water distribution system. And, one of the conversations we recently had was. With Planning Department around this is, you know, if we're gonna build with higher density, closer buildings, and that sort of thing, then, you know, we have to really stress, then, the fuels and land management around it.

[37:07] Because that will determine, sort of, the… will determine, speed of fire moving into the city, the intensity, the ember cast, and then that has direct impacts to our fire department and police department's ability to contain the fire and also be able to safely evacuate and give us time to alert and move the community if we need to, so… The short answer is it's being elevated. It is definitely part of the conversation where I believe it wasn't as so prominent in the past, and I'm glad to be part of that, and thanks to Director Buehler there for making sure that we're included in those conversations. That's great, thank you. And then a different question I had is, if I'm a homeowner and I am not necessarily going to get a wildfire review of my house. But I am looking to rebuild a fence, and I want to find out how can I make a fireproof fence. Are there any easy resources? I actually tried googling a couple of things, and there are just so many, you know, hits. Is there any kind of display that we've set up at a local hardware store or anything like that, that can just help homeowners out?

[38:14] I'm happy to take that and invite colleagues. Brad Miller with Planning and Development Services. One of the things that I think has been the beauty of this strengthening Coordination between departments and, and disciplines and such. Is, the combination of regulation and incentives and education, and we know that there is more to be done in Making those messages, simplified, unified. a variety of things. So the short answer, Councilmember, is not… not in a coordinated way right now. Certainly, FHIRE has a long history of doing good education and outreach in that context, but we certainly collectively envision doing more over time.

[39:03] And I'll maybe turn to the Chief to see if he wants to elaborate. I don't have anything to add, thank you, Brad. Thanks. Mark, you're muted. Commanded. The question was, Tina, do you have anything else? And then I noticed that she seems to have disappeared. Well, in the interim, Matt, do you have some questions? I do, I have a few, although I'll just do a quick comment. It's on brand for Mike Chart, he's got flashing lights over his shoulder, so, I think that that's, that's awesome, it's a good look. Anyway, yeah, a few questions. Let me see where to begin. Maybe starting back in the presentation, I'm curious why one of our areas of concern is the eastern side of Nederland. Could you explain the context and maybe why that's a part of city responsibility or concern? I just think that that'd be helpful context, because people might look at that and wonder why.

[40:17] Yes, good question, Councilmember. This is Paul Dennison, and I had the areas of concern mapped during my presentation, and those are, areas of city-managed land that are adjacent to source water that are part of critical infrastructure for the city. So that was included as an area of concern. I appreciate that, thanks for clarifying that. Another one has to do with, you know, I see that we've sort of laid out some things that we're actively working on. At what point could we expect to see what our clear, measurable goals are in terms of You know, an amount of acres per year of grazing, or of mitigation, or prescribed burn, or…

[41:01] goals to say, how many homes are we going to do DHAs in? So just sort of, as we move on this, measuring success is going to be key in knowing, hey, do we need to throttle that up, and then therefore, what resources do we need to apply to that? So, I'm kind of wondering at what stage would we expect to see those goals and KPIs so that we can really sink our teeth into how well we're doing, and then how to move resources accordingly. Okay. Paul Dennison here again, and I'll start, with the question about acreage as a key performance indicator, and… sorry, my screen's just… Catching up with my mouse. Can you hear me, Councilmember? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Okay, sorry, I'm still off-screen here. Great question, and I would say that we have in place, good goals for forest management. You asked about acreage of fuels treated. So, we have, I think it's about a 20-year-old forest. Plan, and we've completed about 80% of the recommendations, and the projects that were outlined

[42:08] in that plan. And I'm sorry, I'm getting… not responding, from Zoom. Could you let me know if you can still hear me? We can still hear you. Okay, thanks. And grasslands are more difficult. They're more dynamic ecosystems. Grass is very responsive to weather, and the fuel and risk conditions change, depending on the season. So, I would say that we are being very aggressive and innovative in grass management, and we're treating these pilot projects, targeted grazing, perimeter mowing, not just as what we expect to be very effective risk management projects, but also opportunities to learn more and help to inform Key performance indicators, like those that are included. in the forest management plan. So, I wish there was a simpler way of describing targets for acres treated across all vegetation types, and I expect that we'll make more progress and have more specific answers to that, but I guess to simply summarize, it really does depend on the type of vegetation and balancing our risk management goals with ecological and

[43:21] Land stewardship in general. Yeah, I see the chief popped his hand up, but you got something to add? Yes, sir, and Councilmember, I don't know if you were headed this way, but in terms of goals around DHAs, or detailed home assessments. Originally, we had in our own strategic plan around 60% of the interface, this would have been the original interface before this year's, that we would have done some type of assessment, whether it's detailed or otherwise. We have to reassess that one, especially in light of how many additional parcels have been added, and then I've tasked the team with really, really exploring, which is where we came up with also working with HOAs, is to use some force multipliers out there to work on

[44:07] educating more and more folks, as opposed to using just the very small cadre I have to get out there with detailed home assessments, even if they're basic home assessments. So, we have some work to do there, for sure, if we want to catch up to assessing as many properties as possible. Obviously, for the grant money, a detailed home assessment is what qualifies for getting that, so our goal would be to try to spend every last dime of public money to make that happen, coupled with the private money being spent. Okay. I see my chart, we're going round robin on this one. I think you're muted. You're still muted. Thank you, sir, there we go. All right. On the preparedness side, we have done some metrics in that space. So, Monica Weber is our Community Engagement Coordinator, and through workshop attendees and outreach events that we've been doing over the last year plus.

[45:06] We were able to collect 500 different, points of information related to The preparedness programs that we're, engaging the community with. We had 6 different categories, but the big ones were, of the people that did give us data, confident they have a good idea of what to do and know what actual steps to take and to prepare in a disaster. They started pre-workshop at 4%, They walked out the door at 82%, feeling that they were confident. And the ability to identify two or more tangible steps to take to become more prepared, they would pre-workshop, be at 61% walking out the door at 89%. What this is doing for us is telling us the money that we took from the Climate Initiative tax and applied that to making investments in our preparedness work. the program, the information, the way we're engaging the community, we're seeing sizable proof that it's connecting and it's doing what it needs to do. So, that's just another way of how we're measuring that. We're continuing to do that with our existing programs.

[46:08] I appreciate that. I got a couple more, so I'll try to be brief with them. and sort of, you know, Chief, it's sort of tied into a question that sort of, Tina had about expecting more, and ask for more resources. And in terms of sort of evaluating that now the scale of having to evaluate 16,000 homes is a, you know, right, it's always the question of cheap, fast, good, pick two. We would love this fast, and we want it done well, which means it won't be cheap. And so. you know, I hope that if we're gonna… as you look at that, that you come to us with an ask that, hey, I need to scale those resources up for curbside and DHAs. So I don't need an answer, I just… we hope that you would then come to us rather quickly to say, yeah, to do this at scale, so it doesn't take 10 years, we really need to see resources come up. We would appreciate that ask. My next question sort of centers, and then I got two more after that, real quick. Specifically around prescribed burns. I see that there's a prescribed burn down by Flatiron Vista, which is two and a half miles south of the city limits, and…

[47:08] I come back to sort of where at least community seems to be really focused. on the highest risk area, and that seems to be west side of town, and so I'm kind of wondering why we, in our… with a limited resource environment, why we don't seem to be almost purely focused on the mitigation of fuel reduction and everything that needs to happen on the west side of town so that fire doesn't work through our community to the east. So I'm just sort of curious why we're worried about two and a half miles south of town and not focusing everything we got from Shanahan Ridge to Dakota Ridge, and that west side sector. Paul, you… you want to speak to that? Yeah, I'm gonna have to pinch hit for Paul for a second, because it's quite the night. His computer had to restart, and so he got booted off his computer. He'll join us in a second if we want to follow back based on my probably not as technical as a response to Councilmember Benjamin's

[48:09] question. Dan Burke, Director, Open Space and Mountain Parks, that's a great question, Council, Councilmember. So it has been, laying down a landscape-level burn is quite a complex project. It sort of requires all hands on decks. You gotta have the right weather windows, especially at lower elevations. We're under a lot of restrictions of when we can even have a window that allows us to put something down. It also, we need the right kind of certifications and all of that, which Boulder Fire Rescue and our regional partners brings to the table. But getting back to your question, we've been partnering over the last year or two of training up staff on, prescribed burn, using agricultural burns primarily in the past couple of years. Ditch burns, some low complexity, type of burns. This year, our goal is to put a more aggressive landscape-level burn on the ground. We chose the Flatiron Vista because, one, it's already got a burn plan written for it, which is one of the requirements for prescribed fire. It has to have a, sort of a regional burn plan associated with it.

[49:18] It also allows us to sort of put all those resources together for more complex burn for the first time in, really, 5 or 6 years. And Chief, you can correct me if that's wrong… if I'm wrong on that. So, you're right, Councilmember, our goal is to move into More complex areas, where we need to probably be more nimble. But the goal for this year was to put a large landscape level one that's just a little bit less complex, so we could, work out, all the coordination that needs to be done And and to kind of put prescribed fire back on the map again in terms of how the city wants to position itself for prescribed fire over the next few years. So there was a number of factors of why we selected that site, but we hear you, and that is our goal, too, is to

[50:09] Is to move into much more complex areas, as we, start to bring that program much more online and much more aggressively. I appreciate it, and again, I'll just sort of follow up the same thing I said with the Chief, is… If it's really complex and it requires more resources, please let us know as soon as possible, because it's our job to liberate and create the resources to protect our community. So, if there's some bottlenecks that resources can liberate, please, please raise the hand as fast as possible. Last question will be really quick, it's around, sort of, EVAC and emergency preparedness, and we brought this up a little bit when we had, we were doing a leasing with regards to, I think, AT&T and Cell Tower. Have we done an assessment of cell service from the major providers to really see, are there any holes, gaps, or poor coverage within and around the city, so that when we use the WEA and other cell-based notification systems.

[51:02] we have either guarantees that everybody will get reached, or that we can start working on partnerships with those providers to make sure we don't have gaps. And I'll just use an example. Near Bear Creek Elementary, cell service is… goes almost non-existent in an area, and that was an area that obviously is up against the WUI, up against the area, and that's just one example, but I'm just wondering if we're doing that assessment so we know how our newer announcement and notification systems can actually reach everybody that's in an area of danger. Councilman Benjamin, I will, definitely check in with our 911 centers on that. I don't believe that we've done a current one. The cell density will change, depending on what's up and down, but I will check with our communications folks, and we'll get an assessment done and report back to you. Wonderful. Thanks a lot. That's it for me. I appreciate me asking a bunch of questions. Thank you guys for everything. Okay, next up is Mayor Brockett.

[52:00] You're on. Great, appreciate all the excellent questions by Matt and Tina. I've just got one quick one. Thanks for the amazing presentation, all the work y'all are doing. My one question was, you mentioned having information on wildfire preparedness in multiple languages. I was just curious if Nepalese is one of the languages that we have that. translate into. Unfortunately, at the moment, no, Mayor, we do not have that in that police, not yet. Okay, good to know. Well, if that's something that's possible, I think it'd be awesome, because that is one of our largest non-English speaking populations. Thanks for considering. That's all I got. Thanks. Okay. Councilmember? Suchard, you're… it is your turn. Thank you, and thanks, team. I just have one question, and it's about ignition reduction, and I'm just wondering if you could Talk about, the… issue of… of trying to reduce ignitions from happening, and maybe where that… well, I'll put it this way. Does that… does that feature as a theme in our overall work here? And if so, like, where would you locate it in the various categories? And maybe could you speak to just… is it becoming…

[53:17] More of a theme if it's not a theme now, or just sort of… how are you thinking about this item today and in the future? I could start that one, Councilmember. So, ignition prevention is definitely something that's top of mind. In fact, it is one of the spotlight areas for the citywide wildfire Ready Team for 2025. We highlighted it as one of those action areas that we wanted to accelerate. So we are… we're starting, obviously, we have ordinances in place, you know, you think of the open space ordinances, no fire on open space. We already talked about fire within the city and the restrictions that go with on, so we're… we're set up pretty well in terms of ordinances and open space ordinances.

[54:06] on the, on the fire front, of ignitions. But we know we can do a lot more in terms of communication, awareness. And so, Open Space and Mountain Parks, piloted an ignition prevention, project this summer. And, in which we, highlighted everything. We inventoried what we are doing around ignition prevention, and then we did a rapid assessment of those areas where we can improve upon. And that resulted in a number of strategies that we put in place over the summer. One was BMS language boards going up to Flagstaff and on fire days in order to get some rapid messages out, especially on elevated risk days. We're looking at special actions we're doing on Flagstaff Road in terms of securing gates at nighttime closure areas to prevent ignitions that could take place after hours. when rangers are off patrol, for instance. We also work closely with Boulder County Sheriff's Office, Boulder PD, and our rangers to do enhanced patrol along the Flakestaff corridor on ignition prevention.

[55:13] Prevention, efforts over the summertime, especially on weekend nights, and especially after hours of, of the 9 o'clock, no parking restrictions hours. And then we have a lot of education and outreach strategies that have been put in place in order to educate open space visitors on ignition prevention. So that just kind of wets the whistle on some of the things. I believe we came up with over a dozen different type of strategies on the ignition prevention, side of things. And that's just from, the open space managed land. Again, this was one of those areas we wanted to spotlight as a city to kind of enhance, and, so we did that rapid assessment this summer. We're hoping to take lessons learned and expand that beyond just open space lands.

[56:03] Great, thank you. So maybe I do have a quick follow-up. A lot going on there. Is there an easy place to think about where it sits in the… I'm looking at the categories of the action areas for CDWPB implementation, so fire-adapted communities, resilient landscapes, safe and effective wildfire response. Does it neatly fit under one of those, or something else? Yeah, we, we put that one under the Safe and Effective Wildfire Response, the ignition prevention, and we have 12 projects underneath Ignition Prevention that sits under that Safe and Effective Wildfire response area. Super. Okay, thanks, thanks for all that. Let it run. Any other questions? If not, I've got a couple myself. First. I know we're ramping up the home assessments. Have we ever tracked the extent to which those assessments have actually led to remedial action on the part of the individuals that we've served?

[57:07] Is there a nexus between the assessment and actually getting something done? Great question, Councilmember. I would, I would tell you that the easiest metric that we're following is those who are actually asking for the grants, obviously, because that's… we know who's done it. And that's the best way we're able to do that, but we do go back, and so I can… I can get with the team and get you an idea of what the… that percentage that we know actually is. We don't typically go back as a follow-up unless requested. So… so I don't know how good my metrics are around those, if it's not around the grants. It would just be interesting to know if the home assessment project is actually working for us, and leading to changes in behavior. My second question. At the current rate of thinning and perimeter mowing.

[58:02] How many years would it take to cover Our western perimeter. I'll start off generally, and then have Paul jump in. So, our goal this year on that Western Front was to put down treatment on 665 acres of land. Last year, we managed to put it down on around 800 acres of land. And and we'll see where we end up in 2025, but I would venture to say that we exceeded our goal For where we wanted to put treatments on the western side of town, already on. As you may know, our WUI projects, so that lands that are within, like, 30 feet of backyards, we created a, perimeter mowing program last year as a pilot. Our goal was to expand that to about 4 mile, a 4-mile area. At, at our most highly, vulnerable areas. And so, that kind of gives you a sense of those annual goals that we put in place. We assess how we did each year, and then, of course, we'll put goals in front of us for 2026, 2027. But as far as treated lands for wildfire resilience, around 700 acres is our goal.

[59:18] And, for WUI workers, about 4 miles of, wildland, interface right close to, residence, and… And Paul, if you're there and you want to correct any of that, feel free to hop on. Well, that, that… Can you tell me how many miles are involved in our western perimeter, so we get a sense of… what… what kind of progress we're actually making when we treat 4 miles. Is it 4 out of 400, or 4 out of 40? And… Thanks, Dan. I'm happy to join the conversation. I missed a portion of the question, but heard that follow-up question. So, Councilmember, I'm not actually certain how many miles of our western portion of the city,

[60:06] there are on face value. The 4 miles that we're treating, as Dan mentioned, these are the areas where city-managed lands are within the home ignition zone of residential boulder, and so where the city has an opportunity or has the authority to manage vegetation within that direct interface. There are portions of the city where the lots are of such a size that the The home ignition zone is entirely on private lands, but then that's also not to say that our opportunities to managed fuels don't extend outside of the home ignition zone. So I'm sorry if I'm giving a confusing answer. The answer just really depends on what the objective is of the treatment. It's not as though The risk to residential boulder is constant all throughout the western portions, or that we have the authority, to manage the fuel hazards.

[61:03] Mark, can I colloqui real quick on that? Absolutely not. Where'd it go? Can you just tell me, I know this is a detailed question, but you know the Shanahan Ridge area that faces the ranch? Yes. Is that… was that mode? Yes. because I noticed it. And I just wanted to make sure I was really happy about that. That was a dangerous area. Thank you for doing that. Yeah, I would suggest… We're noticing. also say that we've, we have prescribed targeted grazing with wildfire in mind on about 500 acres of the Shanahan. Ridge area. We have 5 different enclosures where we rotate cattle in for 2 or 3 weeks at a time, all with the goal of reducing grassland height of the invasive tall oak grass, plant. So we have a… in that area, we have a combination of forest thinning, targeted grazing, and mowing, all happening at one… all happening in the same year. My last two questions,

[62:02] Is staff contemplating bringing forward any additional ordinances in the area of Wildfire resilience and homeowners and what they can do and what they can't do. You don't want to leave that to us. Anybody? I'm looking to kick this over to P&DS if, May have an answer on that. Brad with PNDS, Planning and Development Services. it's a little difficult to answer that, because there's many different approaches that could be had. We're definitely committed to monitoring the, implementation that is taking place, currently with the WUI adoption this summer, and what we would anticipate as the landscaping Code update adoptions here in a month or so.

[63:02] That will bring a wide variety of opportunities to understand, what is operationally possible and working and how. We know that this is… as we presented, I think, in the past with the WUI ordinance, we know that this is not a once and done, so I think We can certainly say that in the coming years, there will be opportunities to bring other things forward, but I wouldn't want to speculate on what that looks like, necessarily. Okay, and my last question is mostly a request. The staff memo indicates that both open space at $3.8 million and fire rescue at $2.6 million have identified additional expenditures in support of fire resilience. Can we get a breakdown of what those amounts represent? Because they actually dwarf what's in the budget. For fire resilience this year. Yeah, so, Dan Burke, again, part of our, our goal in, in…

[64:05] We're doing a number of things of putting everything under one umbrella, and one of the goals for us this year was to get a sense of citywide, department-wide, looking under the hood of each department of how much investments are taking place on the wildfire resilience front, and so we are getting close to finishing that assessment. And I could tell you that the range that we're probably looking at from the various departments on more direct costs, not including, like, administrative costs, is anywhere in the ballpark from $11 to $15 million. is our, would be probably the total wildfire resilience investment that, that we're, we're getting back from individual departments. You know, for example, open space and mountain parks, we're at about $3.5 million. The same holds true. for Boulder Fire Rescue. And in terms of what makes up those numbers, we're talking about, staffing positions. Some are 100% focused on wildfire resilience, such as Paul Denison's.

[65:04] And others might have a percentage of them, and we've broken down each staff person to a percentage of its relationship to wildfire resilience. It also includes non-personnel expenses, it includes CIP investments, and of course, it also includes the climate fund investments. So, yeah, we're getting pretty close to kind of putting the full picture together from an investment standpoint of where we're at with wildfire resilience efforts. May I request that you provide us with that information when you have it? Absolutely. Okay, I think that does it for questions, so now we're moving on to comments. Are there any comments from Council members on The Fire Resilience Project. Mark, did staff have some questions for us? Some additional ones? We did, and we put some of those in chat, and maybe you were going to get to that, Pam, but those could be also in the form of comments of what… what could we provide to you that you think might be, good for community, or what resonated with you, and those could come in the form of comments as well.

[66:13] All right, does anybody want to address any of those? Of the successes highlighted in 2025, which resonate most with Council members? And what additional information or resources can we provide Council That would help you be prepared to answer community questions about the city's wildfire work in order to champion it. Alright, tara, you are up first. And Nicole? That's exciting. I might as well start. I was on the part, I think it's called Shanahan Ridge, by Fairview High School. There's these condos, and there's this path, and then there's the ranch. And I was there when the Marshall Fire started, by the way, so I got to see the Marshall Fire start somehow.

[67:10] From that vantage point, and because the Marshall Fire had so much to do with tall grasses. as fuel. For me, the most exciting part is the perimeter mowing, the forest thinning, and the targeted grazing right there in South Boulder. Where people live, like, right there. So, I am very excited about it, and also, I don't know if everybody there realizes it was mowed, but I sure would like to tell them, so now I'm excited to go door-to-door, literally tell them. Nicole, you're up next, and I just want to advise everybody, that we're going to be running a little bit Past our allotted time with comments, so let us be brief. Thank you, and thanks so much for the presentation, putting all this information together for us. For me, the Wildfire Ready website, kind of having a central portal to go to for all kinds of information, that was a really,

[68:13] meaningful success, and one I think that the community will be really interested to know about. And then the, only other thing that I would add in that same vein around information and resources. going through that information, there are so many layers to click. Like, you kind of click to go to one place, and you read about one thing, and then sometimes there are other things to click in there, and it… I don't know if it's just, like, me showing my age. But being, growing up in a world where we didn't have the internet, we didn't have to do all this clicking to get through things, but we had everything in, like, in a book, or, you know, a magazine, or something like that. I still find myself wanting that type of, information. I don't know how we do that. If at some point it's sort of taking some of the information and putting it into maybe a PDF document or something like that, that distills the information from the website, but in a way that's more compatible with people's brains that didn't grow up with websites. It feels like something that could be additionally helpful. So, just an additional thought on how to do it, but I think the information is wonderful.

[69:20] It's a great central resource to have for community, and I just really appreciate having one place that I can send people to, to find out about a lot of this information. So, great work. I really… you are doing an amazing job of educating our community very quickly on a lot of these topics, and I really appreciate it. Thank you. Councilmember Spear, real briefly, I do want you to know our team is hard at work at making iterative improvements to what we call our Wildfire story map. It's one component within that broader wildfire-ready space. And so, still virtual, not quite the book, but it is sort of a, truly a storytelling of wildfire, and a bit more of kind of that linear path that you're describing, so do look out for that. We're seeing and experiencing the same things.

[70:06] Okay, cool, thank you. And is that already there, or it's coming? There is an early version of that that was associated with specifically the Community Wildfire Protection Plan that was recently updated. that one. So there is kind of focused components of it, but as I understand it, the team's hard at work at really building it out to be much more robust. Cool. Awesome, thank you. Paul, that is so 20th century. I'm with you. Tina, you're up next. Yeah, thanks, and sorry I dropped off before, my other computer decided to do a long update. I am just curious, or I really like the part that we're getting the… some of the ideas into the comp plan process, and it would be helpful for me just to flag that when that… when it's… when there's a fire consideration that's impacting comp plan, just to understand that that's a very specific outcome that we're looking for. I think it's helpful when we talk about increasing density near the,

[71:05] the WUI for a community to understand why and how we can do that, when we're also at the same time looking for bigger defensible perimeters for each property. So, just making sense of that would be helpful. And as I had mentioned before, just… again, helping community connect with the types of materials they can build with for small projects, like fencing, or understanding how to get a filter for their HVAC and things like that. So it's just a little bit easier for people to make those small changes at their homes. So this is all great, and along with everyone else's comments as well, I'm sure. Matt, you're next. All right, thanks, Mark. In terms of highlights, I think, the curbside assessment DHAs are probably the biggest highlight, because it's the simplest work we can do to get people understanding what they… their risk and how they're contributing to the risk of the community. So… and so expanding on that.

[72:04] that just needs to be expanded to the 16,000 homes as fast as possible, and so I think, as I said before, the additional information is what's it gonna cost and I'll just be clear to say, what can… what's it gonna cost to do a curbside assessment for all 16,000 homes in Class 1 WUI, In 2 years. Or less. Like, what's it gonna cost? And I think that's a thing for… I'd like to know, just so that we can make that decision, and we can move resources around to make that happen. And then similarly, by expanding DHAs. I think the other highlight is building training capacity and expertise for prescribed burning, so that it can be a regular and constant part of our portfolio. As Dan Burke mentioned, that is… we only get one or two cracks of that a year when conditions are just right, and so I don't want to squander them because we don't have a burn plan, or we don't have the training, and we miss those opportunities. Because they come so seldomly, so I think that's a highlight, but also a call to action that we've got some work to do, and that's a focus area for us with resources. Additional information, as I mentioned earlier, goals, KPIs, I think we really need that, and I don't know if we were going to talk about the same thing here. Pam, you were referencing a storyboard to Nicole's questions, but I'm also aware that there might be a dashboard, like we do with HHS, and what we're doing with PD,

[73:17] And so I'm wondering, is that also something that's in the hopper? Because I think that would be a great resource to make public. So are we talking about the same thing there, or is that sort of a different educational community resource? Matt, I'd like to invite Jamie Barker back on screen, as our communications specialist. We are working in that direction, and I think she has some great information. Hi, yes, yeah, we, We've had a lot of significant work happen in early 2025 in terms of creating, an inventory of all of the variety of projects that we're doing, projects, programs, and actions from the CWPP, as well as the other plans that indicate wildfire resilience actions.

[74:02] And so right now, one of the things that we are dedicating quite a bit of time on is trying to figure out what format, that speaks to the community the best in. So, I definitely think that this story map, when fully updated, is going to include information along the lines of numbers of projects and acreage and that kind of more intense data. I think that we are going to consider for sure what a dashboard could look like, and how that might express the information that we have for wildfire projects, but we also want to make sure that our community is, digesting that information with as much context as possible, because all the wildfire… a lot of the wildfire work we do depends on resources and time and weather. So we certainly do not want to, you know, say that we're going to get a certain amount of things done, and then resources and weather, impact us in a certain way, and create variables in those… in that data. So this is absolutely something that we are considering, but really with the.

[75:10] lens of everything that we're going to be developing for folks, what… in what ways are they going to be consuming them, and how is that going to help them get on board with our wildfire resilience planning? That sounds great. The only added is just, you know, is that something we could expect to see in the next 6 months? I just think community would like to certainly know how they can start to digest it, even if it's not perfect, but at least for us to evangelize the work, to say, hey. early 2020 to mid-2036, you're going to have a way to really see this, digest it, and interact with this information, and so that's just for us, if that's something that we can sort of get a rough time frame. I don't want to hold you to an exact date, but that helps us sort of set some people's minds that information's out there. Last one will be, in terms of additional information, will be the last one. ordinances. There's more work here. There's stuff like… we talked about banning junipers. I mean, there's some things that are very specific concrete.

[76:01] in terms of planting them, I also think that we need to be still considering retroactive work, and so I think that there's still more in the hopper for us to be considering, as we look at that stuff, because the community is clamoring for it, and so I think we at least owe them that dialogue and continued pursuit of those things, and the information necessary. So that's what I got. Appreciate it. Thank you. Hey, Ryan? Thank you. I have, for question number 2 on successes, I am really drawn to the partnership work with Excel, and I'm just really glad to see how this is emerging. And, clearly the… the partnership between the two organizations of the City of Boulder and Excel, these are two large organizations with a lot of their own critical systems, and I can just imagine that this is a very resource-intensive effort to work and to collaborate together, and it is just so important that we build a new ecosystem and collaboration around these power safety shutoffs and, responding, as things happen. So I'm,

[77:17] I'm glad to see that. That is something that I think we should, we should celebr… well, celebrate and showcase and continue to build on and talk about, and make sure the community understands. So that's… that's for question two. For question three, on what more information, to provide to Councilmembers, I think I have two thoughts. One is to pick up, well, to agree with what Nicole said about just… like a PDF that, that fo- or some version of, like, kind of just a linear way to just sort of flip through and scroll through the basics. And I think as part of that, one of the chapters, that, I don't know if it's a chapter, but, you know, some component of this, I think, would be really important, is some guidance, some situational guidance for residents as an emergency or a concern is unfolding. So, I see a plume of smoke, I think, maybe over the hill?

[78:19] Or, I definitely see a plume of smoke a half a mile away. What do I do? Should I call somebody? Should I be tuning in? Where should I be tuning in? Should I be refreshing this at some regular interval? if I'm driving away, does it matter where I drive to? What if a lot of people are leaving at the same time? Should I be thoughtful about my route? If I don't have a car, how should I think about this? If I have, you know, some critical medical device that requires electricity, also how to think about this. So I know a lot of folks are already, you know, well-tuned in, especially in some of those settings. or I should say, some of those, situations that they're already in. But, some form of this, like, okay, for people with different issues and needs and situations, how to think about decision-making in the moment,

[79:10] there's a lot of things that might seem intuitive to folks who spend time with this that I just don't think it is for others, not to mention that our information ecosystem is changing all of the time, and what, you know, people might expect to be used… being used, or not being used. And then… I guess related to this is, there's not an emergency, per se, but it is… it is hot, and it is windy, it's a red flag day. how should I comport myself? Is there anything I should be thinking about or doing differently? Maybe call it demand management? I don't know yet, but some advice for people to think about, what do I do on a day like that? Thanks a lot. Okay. I'm going to comment very briefly. I would like to see, more measurables and more context. When you tell me you have mowed 500 acres, I don't know what that means. I don't know if it's good or bad, I don't know what percentage of

[80:09] overall mowing it represents, and so I want to be able to face the community and say, this is what we're doing, and this is the progress that we're making. And simply saying, well, we mowed, you know, last year we mowed 600 acres, does not give me a real feeling for what we have achieved, and so that's something I would like. And now, I think we're going to move on to Council comments, and given the time, I'm going to suggest that they all be monosyllabic. So if anybody has a comment to make on the presentation tonight, Raise your hand for the briefest of comments. Anyone? Okay, in which case we will close this portion of the proceedings. and move on to our next topic, City Council Process Working Group Follow-Up. And once again, I'm going to turn to our City Manager, Nuria Rivera-Vandermeide, who will make the proper introductions for this item.

[81:12] Thanks so much, Councilmember, again, and as luck would have it, we continue to have our esteemed Assistant City Manager here with us as we move on to one of your Council priorities. We had the benefit of working with many of your Council colleagues. on, the Council Process Working Group. And so, Pam, I'm going to pass it on to you, as you take us to the next item. Today is a lovely Pam Davis day. Thanks, Nuria. And you're getting Pam Davis around the world, because I'm now tuning in live from Fire Station 3, who has plenty of power, I am happy to report. So, Lisa, I would invite you to bring the slides up, please. So again, Pam Davis, still Assistant City Manager, still using she, her pronouns. The purpose of our second item this evening is providing you an update related to the Council Process Working Group, which was a Council priority project for 2024 through 2025.

[82:14] And to gain specific Council feedback on 3 process items that have been prioritized for improvements this year. Those items include council declarations, CAC scheduling requests, as well as submission guidelines for hotline emails. We are going to be providing several recommendations in each of those three areas, and our intention is going to be to actually pause for questions item by item, to make for kind of a cleaner flow this evening. I want to also send out a big thanks to our Council Priority Process Working Group. Councilmembers Adams, Marquis, Spears, and Weiner, were selected by all of you to be the four representatives on that working group, and you have been doing great work with us for the past year, while we've collected process improvement ideas

[83:08] prioritize them and ultimately created this work plan of ideas. And so, today's study session and the subsequent implementation of items over the next, couple of months is going to bring that particular Council priority to a conclusion. Next slide, please. So I am joined this evening by Megan Valier, our City Council Program Manager, to help me walk through, our items this evening. And, throughout the evening, we're gonna go through the, first, some progress updates on the full body of Process Working Group. work, as well as then the feedback on the three items that I mentioned before, and we'll wrap it up with some next steps for you, because many of these items will be coming back in the form of consent agenda items for Council action in the coming month.

[84:03] And so with that, I will turn it over to you, Megs, for our first two sections. Good evening, Council. My name is Megan Valier, I go by Megs. She, her, also joining you from Fire Station 3, beautiful facility, so that's really wonderful and exciting. I do serve as the City Council Program Manager for the City of Boulder, and I will start us off by reviewing the progress that has been made on the 12 process improvement items prioritized by the working group that are not the subject of tonight's larger discussion. So, Lisa, if you could take us to the next slide. Then we will jump into those other 3 items that Pam described. So first, Council had identified the lack of an annual board evaluation for the body as an area for improvement. This item was referred to the Council Employee Evaluation Committee, CEEC, by the full Council at our March 13th study session related to the Process Improvement Working Group priority project. The CEEC determined that this item falls outside of their scope, as their annual work plan includes evaluations only for Council employees, not for the Council itself.

[85:09] So as a result, the members of that committee recommended discussing this item at the upcoming 2026 Council Retreat for reconsideration at that time, and for that reason, staff are considering this item as in progress. Our next item, well, the next few, actually, are items related to Council research requests not always being clear, and council members not consistently following Rule of 3, not a 5, and other rules of procedure. And we are considering this item complete at this time. These are ongoing issues and do require ongoing implementation, and staff are committed to reminding Council members of these rules. as applicable and necessary in the course of regular council business. Next, the working group identified that council members could potentially benefit from access to the Right Use of Power training that has been made available to city staff and is offered by the Right Use of Power Institute. This item is also in progress, as staff are currently working with the Institute on developing a condensed

[86:06] write use of power training for Council as part of the upcoming onboarding and orientation process that will take place after the November election. And the training will be available to all nine members of Council at that time. Next slide, please. The item related to Mayor Pro Tem selection criteria is in progress following Council direction at the March 13th study session, and it will be brought forward to Council for action on an upcoming consent agenda before the end of this Council term. Next, the working group identified the lack of council committee charters for Council's eight internal committees as an area for improvement. This item is also in progress and will be brought to Council for review and discussion under matters from the City Manager at the October 16th regular meeting, so I hope you're very excited to see our faces again at that time. Staff consider the item related to videos and presentations during open comment to be complete as well, as Council decided early in 2025 to adhere to existing procedures that do not allow videos and presentations during open comment.

[87:09] And next, staff consider the item related to landmark reviews complete also due to guidance received at the March 13 study session, to not pursue options for reducing the number of landmark items requiring council review. Next slide, please. For our next item, related to Council members fully participating in Council Employee Review Questionnaires, staff similarly consider this item complete At the March 13th study session, Council referred the item to the Council Employee Evaluation Committee, which chose to pursue informal reminders that encourage Council participation, rather than a formal procedure change or formal system. For the item related to concern about improper use of information council members gain in their official capacity as elected leaders, and specifically community member email addresses, staff consider this item in progress as well. We did receive guidance from you all at the March 13th study session, and we will have a consent item forthcoming for your review before the end of this term.

[88:12] Regarding public speaking opportunities at city events and CAC fill-in opportunities not being equitably available to all council members, staff considered this item complete at the March 13 study session, Council did not support developing or administering a new formal process, but council members did agree at that time to share the types of events that they're interested in representing the City Council at with the Mayor, so that he can coordinate those opportunities as they arise. And finally, the working group prioritized improvements related to council member meeting facilitation skills and comfort, and this item is in progress as staff are currently developing a study session-specific facilitation training as part of Council onboarding and orientation after this November's election. As with the Right Use of Power training, this training will also be available to all nine members of Council at that time.

[89:02] And next slide, please. We will pause now for the first time, asking Council members if you all have any questions for us, on these progress updates on those, 12 items. I am seeing none at the moment. Going once, going twice. There are no questions. Fabulous. Lisa, if you want to take us to the next slide, we will just keep listening to me talk. All right, next, we are going to move into those three items that we are asking you to review in detail this evening, including declaration procedures, CAC scheduling requests, and hotline submission guidelines. Next slide, please, Lisa. All right, I will kick us off for the declarations portion of the presentation as well. Declarations were prioritized for process improvement for several reasons, that were identified by council members through the process working group, through council handbook reviews, and, actually through council meetings themselves.

[90:04] First, staff heard from Council members that declarations were taking up a not insignificant amount of meeting time, potentially delaying other important council business. Moreover, a lack of clarity about council member involvement in the drafting of declarations, does pose concerns related to open meetings laws and some logistical challenges that could arise for community, for council, for staff, from amending declaration language on the dais. Council also noted general concerns that existing declaration procedures do not fully align with the rules described in Council procedures today. And then finally, Council members have expressed a need to ensure that declarations are meaningful experiences for our community members, both those that attend as declaration recipients and also for the broader community. Staff and community members have periodically identified some social and racial equity concerns with the Declarations program, mostly related to potential harm that can be caused by declarations that are issued without, consultation with the communities that are the subject of those declarations, and, so the recommendations that staff are providing tonight are intended to address all of the concerns, that have just been outlined on this slide.

[91:17] Next slide, please. I'm going to quickly review some areas of alignment with, and also deviation from existing council procedure within the Declarations program. So current practice does partially align with Council Procedure in the following ways. First, the mayor does screen all declaration requests as enumerated in the existing procedure. Second, as of April of this year, council members must submit CAC requests for any declaration that they would like to be read aloud during call-to-order and roll call at a regular meeting. CAC must agree to a request and make a scheduling recommendation before a declaration is scheduled for reading. And finally, as required by Council procedure, all declarations are currently posted online in the City's Records Archive Laserfiche.

[92:02] That said, next slide, please. current practice does deviate from Council procedure, and one… pretty major way, and that declarations are currently issued on behalf of the full City Council by default, rather than by the mayor alone. And in practice, this means that each declaration closes with a sentence saying that we, the City Council of the City of Boulder, declare X date as X commemoration. But the Council procedures clearly state that all declarations are mayoral by default. And would thus finish with a sentence saying that I, Mayor Aaron Brockett, for example, declare X date as X commemoration, and so on. And so the practice of issuing declarations on behalf of the full council grew out of a desire from council members to alternate reading declarations in a regular rotation. Presumably, declarations that are issued on behalf of the mayor alone would be read only by the mayor.

[93:00] So staff heard feedback that council members were interested in distributing those reading opportunities equally among council members, hence the deviation from that procedure over the last few years. Additionally, the current procedure also just doesn't contemplate a wide range of dynamics that come along with declaration requests. These include who drafts declarations, who reads them when a reading is requested. How community members, are invited as recipients, and by whom, length restrictions, and formal limitations on how many declarations can be read aloud at a given meeting. Next slide, please. At the March 13th study session earlier this year, council members signaled support for a full declaration program redesign based on staff analysis. And so based on the feedback that we received from the process working group, the mayor, Council writ large, community members who have served as Declaration recipients, and other city staff, we propose the following package of recommendations that you can see on this slide. First, we recommend maintaining current practice in a number of areas.

[94:06] First, diverting controversial declaration requests to council resolution requests. When a council member proposes a declaration about a matter that could invoke debate over the language that's used, over the ideas that are expressed, these statements are most appropriately conveyed per existing Council procedure in resolution form. So staff do recommend that Council consider the resolution format as appropriate, so that declarations continue to be used for non-controversial, purely ceremonial statements. We would also recommend the practice of, continuing mayoral screening of all council declarations, excuse me, and maintaining the existing process for requesting declaration readings via CAC. Staff would recommend implementing procedure changes in the following areas. First, eliminating the distinction between mayoral and council declarations altogether, and issuing all declarations on behalf of the full city council by default. This would cut down on administrative complexity, and it does signal full Council support for non-controversial ceremonial recognitions.

[95:14] Next, we would recommend requiring that declaration requesters are the folks who would identify a community recipient if one is desired. Currently, staff do a lot of that work in supporting identifying recipients, but we know it's very meaningful for community when our elected leaders are involved in that process and recommending community recipients. We would recommend that if the community recipient recommended by the requester declines or is unavailable, that staff would not proactively search for substitutes. Next, we recommend codifying the existing alphabetical reader rotation for declaration readings in the council procedure. We do recommend including language that allows for some exceptions and flexibility to the reader rotation for meeting absences, virtual attendance, or even by council member requests. So, specifically, if a council member would like to read a declaration that has been assigned to another member by the reader rotation, staff would recommend enabling flexibility that would allow the mayor to coordinate among those two individuals.

[96:17] To switch that reader order in those cases of all parties. agree. Next, we would recommend formally restricting declaration length to no more than 250 words, and that would correspond to roughly one page in our new template. And finally, codifying the informal practice of reading no more than two declarations allowed per meeting. And lastly, we plan to, on the staff side, implement or, in one case, continue two administrative processes and improvements. Including maintaining our annual calendar, to support the mayor and Council with maintaining awareness of some of the items that the body might want to consider for declaration issuances and readings. Staff in the past, have and will continue to put together an annual calendar of significant heritage celebrations, anniversaries, holidays, commemorations, etc. The mayor will screen this list at the beginning of the year to approve a

[97:11] list of issue-only declarations for the year, and then that list will be shared with City Council members so that members can request readings of declarations from that list if they desire to do so. And then we do plan to create an intake form. This really is for administrative ease and organization. We would be asking community members who are requesting declarations to share necessary details about that request. with staff at least 3 weeks in advance of the requested issuance date. That helps us stay organized, and meet community members' needs in a timely way. And as with all of our other procedural recommendations this evening, we are recommending, kind of as a general rule, allowing for exceptions to any timeline restrictions, word limitations, number of readings per meeting, etc, in cases of time-sensitive issues and matters.

[98:01] Next slide, please. We will pause here for questions. I'm happy to move us back to the recommendation slide for that, but the two questions are if you all have any questions about these recommendations, and second, if you all support our procedure recommendations for improving the declarations program. Let's start with questions, and that would be… Peanut. Yeah, thank you, this is, great. The first question I have is. If someone does want to pursue something controversial, where is the resolution process described? Yes, that is also described in the Council procedures. I'm not sure the exact section. I can… we can find it and follow up with that. Okay, because I think it would be good just to understand that as we move out of this. And then, is there a place where it's very clearly stated that declarations are largely ceremonial, that they don't have any policy?

[99:05] Impact when we take on a declaration. I am trying to remember the exact language, and I… I'm… it's… not fully in my brain at this moment. I believe we do, and if we do not, I know that the recommendation coming out of this process improvement situation is for that to be the case. It's historically been the case that declarations are purely ceremonial, and we certainly recommend continuing that. Yeah, and just to be clear, it doesn't mean they're not meaningful, but they are… Correct. They're not… they're just ceremonial. Yep, no binding policy action or anything like that, just recognition for community. Perfect, thank you. Any other questions? Okay? Comments? Expressions of support for this, revised policy?

[100:02] Tina, again. I think this is terrific, and I appreciate all the work that went into this, really looking at the details. I appreciate the word limit. I think that's a great help so that we have more structure on how we do this, and also, hopefully this makes it easier for staff. and for Council as we approach declaration. So I just… I strongly support all of this work. Also, understanding we could change it if there are some tweaks we need to make in the future. Mayor? Yeah, well, as the person who's been screening these for the last few years, I really, really appreciate these changes. I think they'll make the whole process much smoother, much more functional. So, Megs, a huge thanks to you and Pam and the team for putting this set of changes together. I look forward to seeing them get implemented. And Matt. I'll echo the praise, you know, as a self-governing body.

[101:03] It's something we have to do from time to time, and this is sort of cleaning house, and so it's important for us to keep doing that, and, you know, we don't have to do it in perpetuity, but there may be times to come back and doing this. But this is just a good example of good governance and our ability to self-govern, which is good. All right, and I will comment that I think it's a great piece of work, job well done, and I am entirely supportive. Thank you. Any other comments? Can we give indications of support? Is anybody… This is Taisha. I just wanted to make sure that folks knew that I was able to join the call after the climate justice panel that I was on at CU. Hello, everybody. Aisha, welcome. Thank you. Thumbs up? Thumbs down? I support the declaration. I mean, I support the amendments to this declaration and appreciate the clarity and effort by staff and the process team. Thank you.

[102:00] It looks unanimous to me. Okay, let's proceed. Wonderful. Well, thank you all so much for saving the hard questions and comments for the next two items, which I am not presenting. So, Lisa, if you want to pull the slides back up, we will, switch over to Pam. Thanks, Megs, and thanks for the well wishes on the next portion of the presentation. I do want to just take a minute, though, and acknowledge Megs is an office of one when it comes to supporting that entire declaration process that we, just overviewed, and that includes everything from direct community engagement with organizations, writing, drafting, presenting, she's found herself in all kinds of amazing situations and commemorations over the years, so just… as the face of that program, I just really want to celebrate that, and thank you, Megs. Okay. Lisa, next slide, please.

[103:01] Okay, so our next topic here this evening relates to, kind of strengthening and codifying how we handle CAC scheduling requests. We truly don't have a lot of standard guidance for council members when engaging with CAC, and so we want to change that by making some additions to Council procedure. Specifically, the challenges with CAC requests, have largely had to do with, kind of the timing of when we receive requests and being able to respond and prepare for the CAC discussion, as well as content of CAC requests and supporting CAC, understanding the will of Council in terms of how to kind of filter those requests, how to gauge Priority items, when assigning valuable meeting time to those items. Next slide. So in this regard, we have several recommendations to add a bit of council procedure around this. The first recommendation is to explicitly, create

[104:06] an expectation that CAC requests to be considered by the committee on that standing Monday morning meeting be received by email to the CAC group by close of business the Thursday prior to the meeting. That any CAC requests received after Thursday that are standard in nature, those would be held over to the following Monday. One of the big reasonings for this particular recommendation really has to do with the cadence of staff and how we prepare for the CAC agenda to be produced. It gives enough notice to Council over the course of the weekend what those requests are. So that they can be considered. And it also, cuts back the need for staff to be monitoring CAC messaging over the weekend in order to anticipate CAC's needs the following Monday. I will note, we acknowledge there are emergency circumstances at times that may warrant a pretty last-minute CAC conversation on one of those emergency items.

[105:11] And so we recognize that there may be exceptions that need to occur from time to time, but by codifying this, we would really encourage the standard practice to create that time and space. Our second recommendation relates to establishing a little bit of a criteria to support CAC as they're making decisions about whether or not to schedule an item to help make a more objective structure for those conversations. And we would encourage that we make a statement about CAC prioritizing council meeting time specifically for items that are a combination of alignment with Council priorities and or time sensitivity, with the idea that if there is a pressing matter or a decision upcoming related to your priorities, that those would take

[106:02] Precedent to, be scheduled for meeting time. And then our third recommendation to add to Council procedure is to formalize a mechanism that would allow CAC to refer a scheduling request to be dealt with in a way other than… direct council meeting time. And so, we would work on some procedural language that if CAC receives a particular issue that's requested to be scheduled, and CAC deems, this could be handed more as a training format, or a site visit, or a tour, that CAC would have the prerogative to respond to that scheduling request in a way that says. You know, we value action on this item, but it does not necessarily warrant taking up time that would be otherwise spent in a council meeting on making decisions. Next slide, please. Okay, so this is our next round of questions. I think this one was a little bit simpler, but we can pull back that previous slide as needed. We'd love to hear from you. Any questions around this issue of CAC scheduling, process improvements.

[107:13] Followed by, it would be great to have another signal of support if you appreciate these changes. Ryan is first, followed by Nicole. Thank you, just, it's a question, but it sort of has a suggestion with it, which is, is this a, I heard Thursday close of business day, I heard Thursday, and forgive me if I missed something more specific in the memo, but I guess I would offer, can we just call it 11.59 PM on Thursday? Would that be acceptable? We're doing business, as far as I'm concerned, Thursday night, but… and if we're specific, I think it will, you know, avoid hurt feelings later. So, I guess that's a comment slash question. Feel free to respond. Ryan, clarity is kind, and I really appreciate that question, frankly. So, 11.59 PM, I think, can work for us. For us, the big milestone is we have a Friday morning staff meeting that we prepare and finalize the CAC agenda, and so it's important to us that

[108:07] at the time that we do that, we are not worried about, sort of, additional requests, over the weekend. So, happy to take that note, and happy to make that clear. Nicole? Yeah, thanks so much for, the presentation. My question was around a detail that was in the memo, and it was about how we're dealing with requests that CAC decides not to schedule. And what I was wondering is, what if the requester disagrees with CAC's decision not to schedule a requested issue? Is there a way that the requester can bring an item to the full council in that case if there was a CIC denial of their request? Yeah, I appreciate the question, Councilmember Spear, and this is something, I think, that has come up a handful of times through the CAC cycle these last few months.

[109:05] That issue is not currently codified in Council procedure. We would certainly be open to, incorporating something of that nature into these procedural changes if the rest of Council supports that. I think… generally speaking, what we might recommend is a process by which, we would sort of codify a practice where if an individual's CAC request is denied and they wish to appeal to the whole council. We'd create a mechanism by which they could ask for a maybe up to 15-minute matters item, to be put on matters from City Council at an upcoming meeting so that they could make that appeal to the full Council for consideration of moving that forward. As we do think about that, we certainly would want to stay clear of, kind of, issues of relitigation, and so we might recommend placing some kind of boundary on, sort of, how many times a particular issue could be appealed in any one council term.

[110:12] But I think that we could… I think that given the scope of the procedural changes we're undertaking the next few weeks, if you all wish to proceed with something like that, we could add that in. Mark, may I just respond to that? Yes, certainly. Is that okay? I personally would feel a little bit more comfortable, with that option. just to have some sort of mechanism for people to, you know, to bring it back to the full body and ask about that. I mean, I assume it wouldn't happen all that often. I know that CAC really works to schedule things. At the same time, it does It feels like it's more in line with, with our typical governing process, where we're really governing as a body, like, meeting agenda topics feels like

[111:01] kind of an issue that we… we just… we want to have that option available. So, I… I would be interested with, incorporating some of that into, into these changes. It seems like this is the right time. We're here, we're thinking about it, you know, we're talking about it, you're working on this section anyway, so… Can I colloquy? Yes, you may. Awesome. I also think that what Pam said, Pam, what you said about re-litigating, can you add that into your, scope for this item? Because I feel like that's… to have those boundaries is going to be important. Yeah, absolutely. So, to go a step further, just because this is kind of our one chance to talk about this issue, I think the way I would think about it would be essentially to add into the procedure that sort of one council member per issue, per term, would be kind of the… the guardrail on that CAC appeal, so that,

[112:06] if CAC… essentially, if CAC denies a request, a council member wishes to then schedule that matters item to appeal to the full council. Whatever that outcome of that full council discussion at that point is, would stand for that issue. And then certainly if there were material changes of law or fact, as we've talked about, as we've wrestled with relitigation issues, you know, certainly other council members would have the opportunity to… to raise that again, but we would try to constrain, not having just perpetual appeals. On any one issue by any one person. Can I colloquy on that point? Yes. So, I know that, you know, I… You mentioned, sort of, the material law or fact. What maybe is missing from there is context. In how we review that, because sometimes the reason why something is denied is…

[113:05] It isn't a material law or fact that changes, it's that the staff capacity opens up. Right? It doesn't get done because we have too much on our plate, and then towards an end of a cycle of stuff and staff time gets liberated. then the reconsideration is more of about there's staff time considerations that then are in play. Would that still be considered material law or fact? Because that doesn't seem like it, it just seems like it's more process liberation, and so I'm just sort of curious where that plays in. Because there's some things that the law or the fact doesn't change, but now we have actually capacity to address it, whereas maybe before we didn't, and that was reason for denial. So I think having the context for why it wasn't done is helpful, because then that's the key criteria from which it may then be allowed later on. Yeah, I appreciate that point, Matt. I think, I'll pause for a second in case.

[114:02] So, maybe you want, I can jump. Do you want to jump in? Okay. I mean, I… I think… I think you bring up a really good point, Councilmember Benjamin. I think sometimes it depends on the context. If… if an issue, is unable to move forward, because of staff capacity, it could be… bring… that when staff is liberated, staff brings it forward. And it… and it could be that at that point, let's say there was a work plan item and a consideration for Council to think of. it doesn't move forward on a particular day, particular time, because staff doesn't have a conversation… staff doesn't have conver- capacity, and there has been a trade-off conversation, and at that point, Council has chosen that the particular trade-off is not worth it, then that goes away. let's fast forward to 6 months forward, or a year forward, and now staff has capacity, but perhaps circumstances have changed, and there is a different kind of trade-off to be had. I would say that that perhaps could be a new item, and when does that come forward? So, circumstances…

[115:10] do change, and I would say that that would be a different kind of conversation, to be had. So, I do think that context could change, but we wouldn't know that, until a particular issue would arise, and maybe staff would bring that forward in a different way. True, I just think that material art fact is extraordinarily, narrow, and so I just think that if there's a way for us to evaluate why we do or don't something with the context. And then that reason is then the evaluated criteria. So anyway, I don't know if we're going to solve it here, but I do think that there are situations that maybe warrant that, that you could never pass the test of change in material law or fact. And therefore, it's stuck regardless if the circumstances actually fundamentally changed. So, I pose that out there.

[116:05] No, Councilmember Benjamin, thanks for the feedback. The other thing I would say is, within council procedure, how we think about relitigation actually is its own… section that applies to multiple circumstances, not just CAC requests. So, as I'm processing this, I think that is a little bit of a bigger conversation that we'd, need to roll around. I think in the short term, when it comes to, sort of, CAC appeals specifically, You know, the idea would be to… try this procedure, sort of create this structure that has not previously existed. And certainly, as you well know, we do procedural reviews pretty regularly, and so if we were to find that this particular model that we've been thinking about was too restrictive, you know, we would welcome that feedback and be able to adapt. Ryan, I think you're next. Thanks, it's a bit of a follow-up on this discussion, and I hope this question isn't too basic so that it's hard, but, what do we have written down on what are the grounds for CAC to deny a discussion item? I understand there's the re-litigation matter, but…

[117:18] Is there anything else? Do we have written down? At this time, the procedure's pretty silent on how CAC makes any of their decisions, so we were wanting to step into this by starting to build that framework. again, with you all being a self-governing body and CAC being a subset of that body, these procedural guidelines live with you, and so, if there were additional constraints or encouragements that you wanted to add to that criteria, we'd be happy to consider that. And I would only add, Pam, that while there was nothing written down, there was previously some informal discussion to perhaps ask, is it a council priority? Is it time sensitive? So there was some discussion a year or so ago about asking that question at CAC and having that kind of,

[118:13] Triage, but there was nothing written down, and this is that leaning into, would you like to codify those questions, as you're thinking about it? Okay, and… So, is tonight a time for, I guess, input on that? And… okay, you're nodding already. Okay, and is that… and is that right now, or is that at the con… because we're doing questions now, so should we wait for the comments for that one? Right? I think we're doing… Amber Wallach, I'd defer to you whether you want folks to package their terms or do a second round. Let's, do the comments during the comment section. Okay, thanks, that's all I have. Tina, Mayor, you had your hand up before, is it no longer… Up!

[119:00] It's no longer up. Okay. Tina, you are… on the stage. Yeah, quick question, really following up with what Nicole and Ryan were speaking to. If the CAC is looking at a request. There have been times in the past year where they didn't make a decision, or their decision was to suggest that it go to Matters, and then have the whole council weigh in. Does that process still exist? Thanks for the question. This would essentially codify that process that we have started to do informally. Okay, and so then, going to the appeal piece, we wouldn't have an appeal if Council weighed in on the the matters item, we would only have an appeal if, for some reason, the way the CAC group decided to handle a request was not favorable to that council member. Correct. Okay, great, thanks. Okay.

[120:00] Aisha, did you have a question? Okay. I have one very quick question. If a CAC request comes in and it's late. Does it automatically kick over to the next meeting, or does it hit the circular file? Yes, so our intention would be to automatically populate the following CAC meeting with that request. We would not expect a resubmission or anything of that nature. Late question from Nicole. Sorry, it's really just a double dip on my first question. It sounded like people were okay with the having an appeal to the full council option, but I wasn't sure if that was what folks were thinking, so I just wanted to check that before we move on, because that feels like This feels like the time to, you know, stick it in. And if you want that, we would need, like, a show of hands, a knot of… a knot of 5 or a show of hands for that. I'll just note we're still in questions, though, so we might do that in the comments.

[121:03] Wait, so can I ask a question? Based on what Nicole just said? Yes? So, Nicole, when you're thinking of appeal, it would be the council in matters decides not to pursue a topic? Azure. killed. peel. No, no, no, no, it's specifically for CAC, so… Okay, that's… I had it right, okay. CAC says, we don't want to do it, and, you know, whoever it is that requested it says, no, but I feel like this is really important, I want to ask everybody, that's… that's what I'm talking about. That's how I understood it at first. I just wanted to make sure. Thank you. Okay. Aisha, good evening and welcome. You're up. Awesome, thank you. I'm loving this conversation. So… Question. Because the urgent is also a part of the criteria. So let's just say something happens on… Friday. Right? And we want to put something… you know what I mean? I'm just… the urgency piece, like, we might not be able to kick it, so I just want to honor, to the earlier flexibility, like, there are emergencies that happen. I appreciate rules, but I think we all understand that something could happen or transpire that would require us to really have it on the agenda on Monday, so I'm not sure if there has to be some

[122:18] other thing that supersedes that, but I… I certainly would love to… I would… I would imagine we would do that, but I just want to honor, especially in these, in these dynamic times in a variety of different ways. Thank you. You're exactly right, Councilmember Adams, and it's possible that, when we were introducing this session, you hadn't quite yet joined us, but we would intend to have kind of an emergency exception clause. Oh, yeah, I missed that. Thank you. Nope, all good. So, we are contemplating that. Okay. We are now in the section of comments and expressions of support for this proposal.

[123:01] Cole, you're first in line. I was just gonna, ask if we could do a straw poll on, this idea of having a… CAC appeal process. All right. All in favor of that? Can I be in favor of it, except as long as we have that piece about the re-litigation involved with it, or how does that work? I think that's already part of it, or would… at least the way Pam was talking about it sounded like it would be. Okay. One more time on the hands? I count… Everyone. Well, yes, everyone. No, it's unanimous. Okay, any comments? Mayor Brockett. I mostly had my hand up to just echo Nicole's desire for moving that forward, but that's taken care of, so I'll just say I'm in full support, and thanks for bringing this forward.

[124:06] All right, I think that, completes that topic, unless anybody has a further comment on it. Right? Pam? Great, thank you. And thank you, Council, for that conversation. Lisa, could I please get… I see Ryan's hand. Cool. Oh, Ryan? Yeah, sorry, that happened really… that happened really quickly. I thought… I thought we were gonna have more discussion on that. So, yeah, I just… I did have a couple comments. Taisha made a… I thought an important point about if there's a… If there's an emergency, it seems, you know, like a bona fide emergency, it seems like there should be some space to, come in on Friday. I suppose maybe that would be implied, and staff might lead, but . No, they agreed on that. We should have some… sorry? They agreed on that. So sorry, your kids. No worries. No worries. Appreciate you, though. Appreciate you.

[125:03] Thank you. Sorry, sorry, sorry, Mark. Sorry, I didn't… Since I was talking about… that I dumped in on that one, but I defer to our facilitator. Sorry, I lost about 30 seconds of life there for a minute, so… worse. The only other one, and hopefully this… maybe this has been resolved, but Yeah, just thinking about the, the, the issue of, of, CAC not having a completely, objective standard for being able to deny, yeah, just to deny moving forward. I realize we'll have an appeal process, but nevertheless, in terms of the original decision goes, Yeah, I feel like this isn't really very well resolved, that we don't have an… unless I'm missing something, an objective basis for a CAC member to deny something. So… Did I have that right? We're just sort of gonna let that go for now. Yeah, to a degree, Councilmember Schuard, we are recommending that we start to build out criteria that has been informally followed, as Nuria was describing, kind of related to alignment with Council priority and work plan, time sensitivity, etc. We,

[126:16] one thing I would caution, too, that goes into, right, the CAC conversation is quite literally time. And so, often, you know, when we look at a calendar look-ahead, if we've got 6 meetings filled to the brim, you know, a CAC may also make decisions off that. So I think there's my understanding of the purpose of CAC is that there should be some flexibility there, for the three members at any one time to deliberate. And so our recommendation would be build out that General framework and see how we do. Sounds great. Then if I could… I would just offer two things to consider as you go forward. One of them is, I… like, I think in general, those two criteria related to council priority and timeliness, those are certainly very important.

[127:08] But I would be squeamish if we didn't have a way to recognize that there are emerging issues that come up throughout the year. Not emergencies, but, like, an emerging understanding of an issue that becomes important, and that might not be represented in either of those two factors very well. And I also think, like, I would want to give some deference to… Council members who have expertise, knowledge of a topic that, you know, might not be evident or seemingly important to, like, 2 out of 3 CAC members voting. So on the one hand, I would want to give… make sure there's definitely some space to… for that. On the other hand, I can see… that we have to manage our time overall on this, and so, I suppose one way to govern,

[128:01] or I guess to constrain the time that that might take, if we say, look, this does need to be somewhat open-ended, is to consider a limit on the number of times of CSC requests folks can provide. And I'm not ready to say, like, I stand for a certain number, but, you know, maybe it's a number per quarter. Once per quarter, you know, you don't bank them after a quarter. Maybe it's more, maybe it's not that. But, I'm just… I guess I'm just offering, I do think there's a… there's a tension here between keeping it open-ended enough, but then having a way to… to… to, like, constrain that time spent. So, I'll leave it at that. Thanks. Yeah, Councilmember Schuhard, the first part of what you were just describing, I think, is some of the logic behind this idea of having an appeal process. So, to your point, there may be criteria that we're not anticipating right now, but if a council member has a strong drive and maybe information that staff or CAC members don't have, that's when that appeal to say, I'd love just that

[129:00] 5-10 minute council conversation under matters to really make the case for why I think we need to do this. That mechanism, I think, would account for probably a majority of scenarios you might be thinking of, and I think that would be our way to balance that tension. All right, our very last comment is from Taisha. Awesome, thank you. Thank you, councilmember Shuhar for, the, the question and, you know, around or just raising this issue of… again, we can't self-govern if we don't have policies that are written down to govern off of. And, having some more parameters around denials, and if nothing else. to the comment of if staff has space and time, it would be helpful if the request was denied because of time or, you know, capacity. Then we know it kind of goes into a separate pile versus

[130:00] denied for, you know, content or on issue. So I would be open to having, having not a conversation now, but if there was interest in a council priority over a continued, council process, I would be open for that, to continue on. But what I actually wanted to say here was around the different types of requests. I feel like we're… I know it's in the agenda, planner thing, but I would love to have just, like, a form that has, like, what kind of thing. Is it an information item? Is it a, you know, a matters? Is it a, you know, a lunch and learn? A meeting with one of the, boards or commissions, so that's where I feel like I would love to just get a little bit more around, the types of requests that we can make and keeping track of that. And then I also just had some concerns around, like, you know, we've talked about,

[131:01] or rather, we haven't talked about agriculture at all. I got cut to the Lunch and Learn, I'm still waiting, it's fine. But my larger point is, is we have oversight over a vast portfolio, and to have so many conversations around particular issues, and then none on others. is something that I find, challenging around. So, you know, in those requests, I'm wondering… consideration is, have we talked about this before? And is it something that we have oversight around? You know, again, if people are raising, raising these, it's, it's often because, you know, there is no other space or place to talk about it, so… I just wanted to lift those up as… as general comments, and… and certainly, I don't… feel like we have enough information and… and, to have that conversation now, but I am hopeful that there is interest in the next seated council, to continue the council process committee, to continue to… to do this, and other, governance, because I… I too love good governance, but again, I'm noticing there's a lot of custom that we rely on, and very little in writing. Thank you.

[132:12] All right, Pam, I think, we're ready to move on. Okay, great. Lisa, could I get the deck back up on slide 16, please? Oh, it's Emily doing that. Thank you, Emily. Okay, so our last… topic to dig into the details on this evening relates to Hotline. And, this mechanism that we have for council members to be able to communicate with staff in a public forum. So we have heard some feedback from Council, in a couple of areas related to Hotline, as well as have some staff-driven recommendations in updating some Council procedure around Hotline. The first piece of it is related to, just timing of hotline posts, particularly in relation to an upcoming council meeting, and ensuring that we balance council members having time to review meeting materials, but staff having time to digest hotline questions and respond to them.

[133:15] The second, piece that we have heard from, that's largely kind of on the staff side, our own observations, has to do with, how we can coordinate best internally to get you the information that you need in a timely manner that results from a hotline request. So we have some recommendations for how Council engages with Hotline to help ease that. And then finally, at times we've had misalignment between colleagues on what is the purpose and function of Hotline, and so we have some recommendations related to that. Next slide, please. So, to address the timing issue, we recognized we actually had what we would consider a procedure cleanup issue, when we went through all of the nuts and bolts of changing council meetings from Tuesdays to Thursdays.

[134:07] We recognized this detail around hotline posts had not updated within our procedural calendar as well. And so the first. procedure cleanup. Currently, our procedure asks that hotline submissions regarding an upcoming council meeting be submitted no later than the Sunday before. We recognize that with council meetings being later in the week, with you only receiving your packets on Thursdays, it would be helpful to split that difference a little bit more evenly, and so we Would recommend, and frankly, this is not something that has been enforced incredibly strongly in the past, that we would update that timing to be Tuesday before the council meeting is when we would request that we would hear from Council members over a hotline on an item related to a council meeting. On the kind of administrative side of the house, we would just ask that council members limit any one hotline they would send to one issue, one topic. So often when we have a bulkier meeting agenda coming up on a Thursday, we'll receive hotlines from you all that

[135:14] start with, you know, on agenda item A, here are all my thoughts and questions. Agenda item B, here are my thoughts and questions. Our thought might be to keep the cleanliness of matching responses to requests that we would just request. You could still send us 3 hotlines in a meeting, you don't have to, let me be clear, but you could send us, you know, on item A, I have these questions. That allows the staff working on that item to address those questions independently and not feel, kind of what we currently do, which is behind the scenes. this, we feel compelled to respond in totality, coordinate across multiple departments, try to get responses out at the exact same time. I think it would just help us with clarity of roles amongst staff.

[136:02] The third piece is, as we were doing research around Hotline, and some of you may be very well aware of this, our Council Handbook, which is a larger set of materials that is not just council procedure, there's more in there. There's actually an appendix in that handbook that is a guidebook for hotline that is not codified in procedure, and it answers some of the questions that come up pretty frequently. And so, we would recommend that we codify some of the components right now that are in the Council Handbook more formally in procedure to highlight the importance of them. For those of you who have not memorized your council handbook, I'll just share a little bit of, kind of, the content of what those those concepts are. The current handbook describes, that the intent of Hotline is to make prompt replies available to Council, to share questions that Council members intend to raise about upcoming agenda items.

[137:02] Or to let other council members know about motives or suggestions that may… sorry, motions or suggestions that might be made at an upcoming meeting. This sort of falls within, kind of, the no surprises rule, so the hotline would be the place that you would, try not to surprise your colleagues in a meeting, but signal that you're considering something. And then, separate from Council meetings, specifically, council members can use Hotline to request specific information from staff regarding policies or services. It goes on to talk a little bit about Hotline requests that will take a significant amount of action would, staff would pause and actually request that not of 3 for research or not of 5 for further work. We have times when a single hotline request does end up taking many hours of quick work, and we would want to, sort of bring back and reinforce that staff do have some guardrails to be able to come back and say.

[138:01] hey, to properly respond to this hotline, it's really a work item, and we need to hear from the full council before we respond. So, we would really just recommend pulling some of the great details that are in that, making sure that it's more clearly documented within Hotline Council procedures. Okay. I think that summarizes all of our recommendations, so we can go back to question and answer on our recommendations around hotline submissions. Right? Questions? Tina, then the mayor. Yeah, so, thanks for this, and one of the questions I have is. The one reason I understood Hotline to be valuable was that if you had really specific questions that you needed answered in order to make a decision when we actually were at the council meeting, but you suspected they would require additional staff time.

[139:03] That the idea was to do it in hotlines so people had the time. But let's say someone does, but then if staff says they don't have the time, but then you're not able to make the decision, is that something we would just kind of work out, and maybe do a phone call, or how do we… how do we manage that? Because I thought… I thought part of the advantage of Hotline was so that a councilperson doesn't come to the meeting with a lot of questions that can't be answered, or that information isn't readily available, that it was partly a… To help staff, actually, not to create this huge burden on staff prior to the meeting. Yeah, so, Tina, you're… you're describing perfectly kind of why some of this is going to be art, not science, I think. You know, what… what we look at… so, first of all, yes, having advance notice of those key policy questions is very helpful to staff, and so that is very much something we appreciate about Hotline. Some of what we're describing is.

[140:03] we will sometimes get questions that are adjacent to an upcoming topic, so not… not material to a specific decision, but I'm also curious about three other things that we might do at some point. And so we would sort of want in procedure to describe the way in which staff would be very much trying to be responsive to material, decision-dependent questions. but then have the ability to not feel compelled to also answer the additional hypothetical questions we might receive in a given post. So I hope that helps a little bit. Now, if we're headed for second reading on an item, and there's a really substantive new shift that Council's contemplating. that is where we would recommend picking up the phone and having a conversation with Nuria about, do we need to delay an item, do we need to continue something to a third reading? So… so there are some other mechanisms that would start to come into play in the situation that you're describing.

[141:06] And then, how do we… So one of the things that I don't like about hotline sometimes is that it feels like there's a portion of the meeting that's on hotline. And then the bulk of the meeting is during the City Council meeting, and I think, as a community member, it's difficult to tie those two pieces together, because we don't read the hotline in the council meeting. So even if you were to create a transcription of the council meeting, you're missing information that we've all kind of read with the The hotline readers, but not with the… in the council thing. Is there… A way to think about, connecting that a little bit more tightly, or is there any mechanism for that? Because sometimes hotline is really just questions you would ask during a meeting. Or is there even a pathway where a council member would ask questions of a staff member, but say, these are the questions I'm going to ask, be prepared, but I don't need a public response, because that is more appropriately done in the meeting at the time of the meeting?

[142:06] Yeah, I think there are a couple ways to answer that, Tina, thanks for the question. So, the first is, A, we would always welcome from you all, if you're trying to signal a question but don't need a written response before the meeting and just want us to be prepared, please tell us that, because that gives staff a great opportunity to not spend time on a written response, and instead ensure that we're just prepared to answer the question. So, if you signal that for us, that's a gift. There was one other thing I wanted to say on that same topic. Oh, sometimes the reverse is true, where if we receive questions, you know, allowing us to have that… that wiggle room to sort of come back and say, we can prepare answers for the meeting, but taking the time to orchestrate a document response is not possible.

[143:00] The third piece I might recommend, and these are kind of all more informal practices, although if any of you are interested in trying to codify these concepts, let me know. The third opportunity is if something has been asked and answered in hotline, but you want to ensure that it's also seen in the public record of the meeting. It's totally okay to ask the same question out loud in the meeting, and staff's that much more prepared to answer the question. Okay, great, thank you. May rocket. My, one question is about the, single subject rule that, that you're proposing there. Are you, suggesting that specifically for questions or for, opinions as well as questions? I would say certainly if a hotline was… if no one was asking a response of staff about a hotline, and it was truly a council member wanting to use that platform to share something with colleagues publicly, A, I think making that clear that we're not expecting a response, but to avoid surprises, I want to share the following with my colleagues.

[144:06] Again, that signal's helpful, and then I think at that point, that single-issue situation is less crucial from our perspective. So I would defer to you all on, kind of, your take on that, but that would be my take. Thanks, that makes sense. I'm thinking specifically of, like, when council members are not able to attend a meeting, and they say, here are my thoughts on the three things on the agenda, and seems like that probably doesn't need to be broken up, so, I'll just leave that as a quick comment, that maybe we be explicit with this change, that it be about questions. That's great, thanks for that feedback. Thanks. Okay, in the absence of further questions, we're at the, Point of comments and expressions of support for staff submissions on hotline. Let's take a straw poll. Is there no comments?

[145:01] How many, of us are in favor? I'm counting 2, 4, 5… 6, 7… 8, I think. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8! It is unanimous. In support. Any further comments on this… this subject? Right? I think that's the answer. I just wanted to, say thank you to, starting with the process, the council folks. This is a lot of work you all undertook, and mostly thankless, except maybe a couple things here and there, like this one, but that was a lot of work, and really important work, so thank you for that. And then Meg's, just a wonderful, body of work you put together, presented, and I'm so grateful for it. And then, of course, to the staff, and, helping to do this in a way that is, you're really investing in, and also, being gentle with us, and helping us to, you know, just, get it right in collaboration with you. So, just really appreciate all this work from everyone.

[146:03] And… Nicole? Just wanted to pile on a little more gratitude. I wanted to thank you all, colleagues, for supporting this as a work plan priority. I know that process improvements are not the most sexy things that we could be spending our time on, but they're really important, and I just am grateful to you all for supporting the establishment of this working group, and everybody on the working group. I think we've caught up on a number of things that we've been talking about for a few years. And, you know, hopefully can move forward with just making periodic process improvements at our retreats and things, but this really is going to make us more effective and efficient, and, I appreciate how much we're adding to our transparency and predictability as well with a lot of these changes, so… Thank you. Thank you for geeking out with me on some of this stuff. All right, as there are no further comments, and no further matters on the agenda. I'm going to, declare this meeting adjourned at 8.27.

[147:05] Thank you all. Thank you, all the presenters. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks, Megs and Sam, too. Great job, Mark. Thanks, Mark. Smart. Alright, everybody.