October 8, 2025 — Design Advisory Board Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:03] Alright, we'll, call this design review, Board meeting to order, 4.04 on… Oh, October 8th. Hopefully we have a… A good, kind of, productive meeting today of more, sort of, procedures and… Our own internal organization. And before we get too far, I'm gonna go ahead and read the rules of decorum, if I can… Shoot me screened. Please! Okay. Can everyone see this PowerPoint? Yeah. Great. Okay,

[1:00] So, the City has engaged with community members to co-create a vision for productive, meaningful, and inclusive civic conversations. This vision supports physical and emotional safety for community members, staff, and board and commission members, as well as democracy for people of all ages. Identities, lived experiences, and political perspectives. For more information about this vision and about the community engagement processes, you can visit our website. The following are examples of rules of decorum found in the Boulder Revised Code and other guidelines that support this vision. These will be upheld during this meeting. All remarks and testimony shall be limited to matters related to city business. No participant shall make threats or use other forms of intimidation against any person. Obscenity, racial epithets, and other speech and behavior that disrupts or otherwise impedes the ability to conduct the meeting are prohibited.

[2:00] Participants are required to identify themselves using the name that they are commonly known by, and individuals must display their whole name before being allowed to speak online. Currently, only audio testimony is permitted online. And if you, need me to change your name in the Zoom meeting, just let me know in the Q&A box, and I'm happy to do that for you. So this is a Zoom webinar format, so if anyone wants to have public participation during the appropriate time, go ahead and you can click the raise hand button. I don't think anyone's joining on the phone today. So, I will skip that part. You can also find it in the reactions button, And I think that's it.

[3:01] And then I will… Hand it back over to Brendan. Okay, Maybe we can pull up the agenda, or do you, do you have that available, or we can… Or do you need me to do that? I was gonna put it in the chat, but I can share my screen. If that, is easier, let me just make this a little bit larger. Yeah, there's the… well, there's the agenda notes, and then there's just getting through, like, the meeting minutes, approval, and all that, right? No. Right. The agenda notes, or you were talking about the regular agenda, Brendan? Just, well, the… I think, today's agenda has. those… the agenda. to prove it. on it. Okay.

[4:00] Let me see if this is the one you're looking at. We've shared… Is this what you wanted to see here? Can you see the, the DAB meeting notes, the, the discussion? Yes. Okay. And then we also… we also have, like, the dad packet, I guess. Yep, that's what it is. Like, just the general agenda. I can share that, if that's… Yeah, we… I will need another screen to do that. We don't have the capability to show those. Same. I can do that. And I'm pulling it up, too, it's just being… very slow. I got it here. How's that? You're seeing all this? Yeah, and so if anybody's wondering where all the screens are on the…

[5:03] Top of the ribbon, there's several tabs, so you can go back and forth between the different ones. Between the regular agenda and the agenda notes. Approval of meeting minutes is next. Yes. And we're gonna dig into this a little bit later, but does anybody have any, comments, or can we approve The meeting minutes from… September's meeting. I'm generally ready to make a motion to approve. I think that I was just… We, towards the end, we were pretty stern, or I guess direct, as far as the building needing to sort of calm down in its use of materiality, the number of moves in the building, and then also not just… having the existing building be in the shadow, that it needs to be a part of the celebration of this paseo and all that.

[6:04] Does that come through enough? Like, implement more refinement and restraint in the use of the proposed building materials, increase consistency of the design of materials on all four elevations with more wrapping and integration between all four sides? improved design integration and cohesion between the pre-existing building and the new building? Yeah, I think, I mean, all of the talking points are there. She doesn't quite capture the drama that we… Well, I would ask, too, is… Amelia, these are directly from that section, right? Verbatim? As best as possible, yeah. from that. Yeah. So… And then there was some, it includes my revisions. So… I think it's good. I'll make a motion to approve. Anybody want to second that? Can I second that?

[7:01] Yes, you can. Okay, yes, I second that question. All in favor? And I think you and I were the only ones there. Were you there, Harry? I wasn't there, so I don't know if I'm allowed to… That's true. I introduced myself, so I don't know. Steven had to recuse himself, yes. Yeah, so I… Aye. Alright. Here's the rest of your agenda here. And then, we wanted to remove the calendar checkup. We do. There's no public participation today, is that right? Well, let's see, we have a few folks tuned in today, So, this would be a chance if you have anything that you want to comment on. We're not reviewing any projects today, but anything that's not on the agenda, that you would like to comment on, just raise your hand. Okay.

[8:00] Not seeing any hands at this time. So I think… We can, move on. Great, so I think we can just move to Board Matters, which, if you go to the tab at the top of your screen, that Kalani has pulled up. So we had our Dab appreciation, coffee, which was really lovely, thank you for that. A couple of weeks ago, and we discussed Needing the opportunity to come together as a board and, streamline our procedures and… kind of our role as DAB members, and then also our deliverables. And so, you know, we've come up with a few items that we feel like we need to discuss, but I'm hoping that it will be an open conversation, and…

[9:04] Sort of thoughts on… Basically, how, you know, Rory and I and Kalani and Amelia have Have thought that this is how we want to structure our meetings going forward. So, and it is based partly on how we ran the meeting for September. Then, when there were only three of us there, I think it was a good time to test some of this out. Because, you know, it is… has been difficult for us to go… to fall within the time, guidelines. And so, we just wanted to, See if we can streamline this as much as we can, and still have all of the board members' voices heard.

[10:00] for, the design review. So… We've broken. Aluna has her ham up right now, right now. Oh. I wanted to check on the moving the calendar checkup, if we're gonna… I have a hard stop at 5.30 for some kids' stuff, so if there's… If we could do the calendar check, that way, if we run late. We're not struggling to find our next date. Oh, yes. Good morning. Nope. Thank you for reminding me. Oh, so… I just need to confirm that, everybody's available for the November and December meetings. We have, the letter to Council if the board would like to, participate in that. That, that's a kind of a group activity during one of the meetings. In November, and then in December, you guys will read the draft. version and approve it and send it off to Council. It's due, I believe, December 19th, 18th or 19th. So, just checking on that, making sure that everyone's available for that, that we have a quorum, and…

[11:07] And is that… that's… that would be November 12th? Let me see… Second Wednesday, yeah, November 12th, same time as normal. And then December 10th. November 12th, unfortunately, is the AIA Western Regional Conference, and so I will not be attending DAB. I will not be available to attend DAB that day. We'll be available for the December meeting, though, to finalize the draft of the letter. Cleanor Portals. December 10th, yes. Yes. Okay. And Kalani, maybe you can explain a little bit about the… the process of… Yeah. Seems a little different this year of how we're writing this letter. The… so, City Council, sent a prompt. I'll send it in an email, you'll see it come through an email, and it's asking the board if they would like to participate in sending a letter to Council on their recommendations.

[12:09] Part of, that will influence the work plan, part of it requires a bit of homework, so going over what the city's strategic plan is. And then the department work plan, which we will attach some information there so you can look at that. But they're asking specifically for information and, you know, the board's input related to those things. And so there's not, further kind of detailed prompts, but… that's an opportunity for the board to sit down in November, and what typically has happened before is the board gets together during their meeting, and they usually elect a person that is the scribe, and You go over what the… what wants… what the rough draft of the letter is, and then the scribe then crafts the letter.

[13:00] from the… to the next meeting, and then at that next meeting, you guys can look at the letter and approve it, or make some fine-tune, you know, fine-tune the letter at that point. And then… It'll be in time for us to send the memo off to City Council for their January, early spring, like, Q1 retreat. They do work planning retreat items at that time. So, that is the kind of order of how that usually happens, and they're moving it to a two-year cycle, so when they do work planning. So it, it's not every year. Now it's every kind of work planning cycle. So hopefully they… I mean, it seems… my understanding is that the City Council reads them individually, but because they can't discuss them unless they're in a… in a meeting, they… they're generally not discussed, and so I'm not even sure of how widely read they are. So maybe this, with this work planning session, maybe they can be,

[14:08] Acknowledged a little bit better. And that's, in the cover letter, you'll see that that's the intention, is to pull this into their work planning. They have a retreat where they plan the two-year work plan, and to pull in the input from the boards and commissions at that time, and hopefully influence some of the work plan items. Craig. I can make the November one, I'll be in New Zealand, but I can call in from there, and then… but I can't make the December one. I'm at a conference that day, but I can… yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's just the calendar check. We wanted to make sure that we kind of let folks know, and then when you see the email coming in, that you know what's going to be on the, what that is in that process, so… That's it. Okay. Great.

[15:00] Great. So now, now, should we move on to the procedures? I keep jumping the gun, I don't want to… That's okay, we're good, we've… those… we're done with the kind of housekeeping items. Okay, great. So… I guess we can kind of… the three items that we want to discuss are… procedures of DABs, the… and then breaking that… and then basically the pre-planning of the meetings, the prioritization of the order of the criteria. Which should be happening on the… on the Tuesday pre-meeting. before the DAB Wednesday meetings, and then, what is the deliverable, which should be happening, you know, post-meeting, and is more critical for our meeting minutes, which are used To, convey our, you know, big topic items and our suggestions.

[16:06] That can be implemented, through a planning board and through planning staff. So, going back to procedures of DAB, we, would like to start our meetings with sort of a general introduction of what DAB is. I think that a lot of our applicants don't necessarily know or have a full understanding of what our role is. And then, at the same time, giving them an understanding of what their role… what our expectations of their role is in that meeting. And when I first started, when Lauren was the chair. She did a brief… had everybody introduce themselves, and at the same time, give, sort of. One nugget of positive feedback for the project.

[17:01] Just to kind of start the meeting off on a… on a positive note, and, you know, And con… sort of starting this… this… atmosphere of conversation. So that's something that we could, you know, throw into this list, of item 8, whatever. You know, I want our meetings to be… to be somewhat regimented in the sense that we are getting to all of our discussion items and not running over time. But at the same time, I don't want it to be so regimented that we're not, having, you know, open and good conversations about these design elements and discussions, because I think a lot of solutions that we have to the, items that are partially meta or Not met through the criteria. can be solved and approached in, you know, several different ways. And so I want that conversation to be open and, but at the same time.

[18:11] You know, it's been a little frustrating having the… You know, applicant kind of interjecting pretty consistently, and it just sort of feels like we're losing control of the time that we have allotted for these. projects. So, we thought we would start the meeting with, again, introduction of what what DAB is. The procedure and the format being that we will be, you know, we'll ask the applicant to present. The staff presents, then the applicant presents. We, will get public feedback. And then we will be addressing, you know. These items on the criteria, and we'll be starting, and this will be the roll call for how we'll be addressing our comments.

[19:08] the order of who will be speaking, and that will be consistent for the entire meeting. Maybe not every meeting You know, we sort of threw Matthew to the wolves last time. We did. And he's not here to defend himself. So, sort of a quick sort of check-in here, though, with… or, Kalani, is your hand still up, or is it up again? It's up again. I just wanted to double check and make sure everybody knew what a roll call kind of input is, if there's familiarity from the board. We're gonna break this open a little bit. I think, real quick, though, just so, like, everyone's benefit, I mean. the… managing the meeting is to what objective? And that's sort of what I'm… I just want to understand that conceptually before we start discussing strategies. And my understanding is… The tone and the amount of resources required

[20:03] to operate a DAB board, that we're sort of… it's a shifting amount of resources and time, and that's why we're trying to manage it, right? 8 years ago, I remember if we had a big project come in, we mentioned that it may take two different review sessions, and we just, like, planned for it. Or… staff or Kalani would come to us and say, hey, you guys, we'll bring pizza in, are you guys down to stay for 4 to 6 hours? Like, this may be a marathon. And we would sometimes say, like, yeah, and sometimes we'd vote to say, no, no, we're breaking this up over 2, this is crazy. Like, there's no way we can do that. So then… We can't do two meetings, though, from legal, from our city attorney's office, so it needs to be done in a single visit, so that's one thing that's not a possibility. Is that an anymore thing? Because it used to be a… No, they had… they had to be re-referred, so it was… There's no continuation. There's no continuation. The way that DAB is set up, it should be a one visit.

[21:04] And done within that time frame, so that's why our scheduling is, even though we schedule projects as they come in. If there's too many for one night, we need to break that off. The ones that come back around are the ones that have been re-referred after the approval, based on some conditions. So, I don't want the board to think that the continuation is a possibility when it's not a possibility. Okay, so I just want to make that clear for everybody, right? So one… and then if there's more than one project. that we're trying to fit them both in. And again, is there flexibility there, where we can say, hey, reviewing the… this, you know, the week? Like, how quickly you get us the… Deficiency list, or whatever, and can, you know, can we raise our hand via email and say, hey, there's no way we're gonna get to two of these projects, given how many criteria need to be reviewed on each one, or one of them? I think that really has to do… we would have to have a larger discussion with the planning director, because there is expectations from the applicant to, you know.

[22:09] Beyond. them out, and extend them into the process longer, so. I think it's just for the board to hear is, right, like, all of this effort we're about to crack open is in an attempt to manage time to get through these things efficiently. So, like, another lens associated with it. And then I… Quite a bit from the, from the… from the business community about the length of time that applications take, and getting through the process, so having a timely, efficient review is important there, too, for applicants. Understood, so, just to be clear, staff, you, or Kalani, you're basically… preparing us and training us, like young Jedi here, To potentially see two projects max in a meeting, and therefore we need each project, with all the accoutrements of introduction, meeting minutes, public participation, etc, to essentially be under an hour.

[23:10] I would say that all the, you know, front load of the meeting, the meeting minutes, the housekeeping at the end of the meeting, don't count that as part of your review. Count as part of your review that single project for an hour. So, right now, we're slated for 2 hours. There has been an increase in applications being referred, and so we're not quite sure what the timing is, but the expectation from applicants is it could be that they all want to go at the same month, and so… getting the board into a rigor that is, they're able to see at least two. And if it's more than that in one night, we would ask you guys, if you're available, to go beyond the 6, you know, 6, 6.30 cutoff. time. So that is what we're preparing for, seeing the increase in… in…

[24:01] So I think part of the challenge that I see there is… two projects, every… you know, and I think, Steven, you helped us really understand this, like, a walkthrough awning project versus a big project with a bunch of deficient criteria. We're never gonna put an hour onto each of those, right? There's gonna be potentially a project that has a ton of deficient items, it's gonna spur a ton of discussion, that may… be more than an hour, versus one that may have a checkbox just… it's required to go to dad because of a budget or whatever, and then we're gonna walk it through. I guess before, again, before we get into how to manage, because this detailed agenda is going to be strategies and discussion about how to manage time, how do we allocate time? Like, what process do we have when we receive it? you know, receive the packet, or, you know, start to understand, like, at what point can we raise our hand and say, hey, you know, Brennan and I have the meeting the day before. where we go, and we meet with Carlani and Amelia, and we discuss how much time we imagine our board will spend on any given topic. So that's really, I guess, our one chance.

[25:08] And we never have any input from DAB members, because I don't know if anyone's done their homework ahead of time, or we just haven't prompted anybody That, hey, ahead of our pre-agenda meeting. we should be getting feedback on if people think the time allocation is adequate or not. When I… when I first started, we were getting our dad packets on… Monday, and we're, you know, and then meeting again on Wednesday, and that has since changed, and we are getting the DAP packets significantly earlier. And the objective there is that, you know, we have we have, you know, criteria that's well outlined in our packet, and that the DAB members Should they, you know, should be reviewing the packet as early as possible.

[26:04] And if they are going through the criteria, and they say, you know, that… yeah, I think that, you know, that this seems fine, and I think that we can, you know, review this in the allotted time for our meetings. Or, raise your hand on, like, Monday afternoon at the latest and say, you know, this is… this is a big sore spot for me, and I… or, you know, I'm noticing in the project that the materials are… ugly, and do not match the, you know, the neighborhood, or they don't meet, human scale, or whatever, whatever you feel like you can attach that to a design criteria. that you bring that to Kalani or, Amelia or, you know, my attention early, maybe Monday afternoon, it would be the deadline, to say, I think that we also need to address XYZ,

[27:03] And then on… and then we can incorporate that into our pre-planning meeting on Tuesday. And that's why the packets have been coming to us earlier. So I think it's really important that, you know, DAB understands you know, unless they have significant input that we really need to be sticking to the prioritization of, you know, what comes out of those Tuesday planning meetings. And then also, we get those Tuesday planning meeting agenda updates. Well, that's what I wanted to ask you, Brennan. Like, it almost feels like we're putting a lot of onus on people to sort of self-initiate unprompted. I guess they're prompted with the… Packet, and then need to, like, feedback to us. And then we have that meeting, and then we give them, like, 12 hours notice before the actual… DAB review with all of our prioritization, and then if you guys notice, we're scheduling time.

[28:00] Which you may or may not agree with, how much time we're allocating to each division item. I guess, is there a version where we actually have our meeting earlier, and the agenda meeting, so that we identify, at least… Brendan, you and I at least have a chance to outline how many minutes we're going to spend on everything, and that goes out much earlier, 2-3 days before, and that's really when Steven and Harriet and Matt can say, hey, wait, I'm gonna take issue with this awning in a way that you can't allocate 10 minutes as a walkthrough, like, I want to talk about this. Is that even appropriate, Kailani, to, like, have… because that's… we're starting to, like, have a discussion at that point. That's what I wanted to talk about, is, any of your input to the chair or the vice chair on the agenda and the scheduling of the review needs to be done individually, privately through email, so you're not replying all, because then it's triggering a… a meeting, essentially. And so, if you do have something that you want to add to the review there, like, that you felt like a criteria wasn't addressed,

[29:05] That could be done through email to you, Rory, or… or to you, Brendan. I… there's also… we can always host the meeting if you want to have the agenda meeting Friday. And… or Monday instead of Tuesday. It's just getting that input and just making sure that you're not having a discussion about the merits of the project. You're actually just trying to make sure you get something on the agenda as far as a relevant topic area that you think might have been missed in the staff packet. And then that'll go into the kind of scheduling, the time scheduling. I remember that. meeting around, if it's… I wonder… I don't want to sort of create a whole other topic of discussion. I just wonder, Brendan, maybe we do jump into these, and then we can hold that, you know, in the back of our minds, that if that would be useful, given how we want to start running meetings more… sort of organized, that that's available to us to move that agenda meeting, pre-agenda meeting.

[30:06] Yeah, so I mean… If we're sort of continuing down the path of that, of number 2, We've been making an effort to… to triage, if we have multiple projects in one night, to kind of triage the, The projects that are, you know, going to be a quicker review, maybe they only have one or two criteria items to be discussed. Or, like, the, parking garage on, on… 11th and… Spruce. Or whatever. That, you know, we have an understanding of that this is gonna be we'll do this one first, and it… with the intention of it being a quicker review. And then we can still have allocated… so the… the… The quick review team doesn't have to stay through the entire

[31:00] meeting, I think would be fair to them to get that out of the way. And then, once we get into a meatier meat… a review with more meat on it. That we start prioritizing and shifting, like, the design criteria, not necessarily in the order that they're presented in the packet, but, in the order that we think is going to take more time. And a lot of the time, we get to certain criteria items, and we've kind of… You know, we've discussed it, and we… we… we can just… it becomes a lot faster. Like, they kind of build and feed off of each other as they go. Can I say something, Brian? Of course. Yeah, please. Yeah, I mean, what I see is, like, because we have, let's say there's 5 or 6 criteria, right, that we're going over. I think we all feel… I know I do, I feel like, oh, we go through each one, and I have to comment.

[32:02] But really, it's almost like… Staff goes through, here's the 5 things. Here's why it means… here's why we don't think they've met it, or we need some help with it. And then… We look at them all together, like, all five things, because there might be a few that are sort of, like. not that… not as big a deal for me, and I might just focus on… when I get to my turn, like, talking about it, I'm gonna talk about X, Y, and Z. But I don't care about those other things. But then we all have a consensus, sort of at the end. And, I'm just saying maybe we group it all together. Oh, you're saying, like, instead of each person round-robining. I'm insane. Each person is project-wide, gives, like, an entire… Because there's a… Because I feel like we feel obligated to talk on each thing, and that's where I don't know that we need to, and maybe it's just…

[33:01] board. No, that's fascinating, dude. That's fascinating, I… concept. I think… Two thoughts on that. One, the summary gets a little more challenging, right? Because, like, we're potentially having a discourse on a topic, and then we can actually write a summary on that topic. Before moving on to the next topic, potentially. But then, that doesn't necessarily mean we can't affect a previous summary by the time we get through 3 more frickin' topics. Right. The other piece, though, that I think, planning board mentioned, Mark mentioned to me, is that they've gotten really good at training themselves to not reiterate what other people said. Even if you have the same opinion, that they just say, hey. Steven's comments about the exterior facade and the entry location, I completely echo and agree with. Moving on. Right. Yeah, I think that's… that's good, too, and… Or I don't have anything further to say on topic. Right. two, three, you know what I mean? Like, that's another version of self-editing, I think.

[34:02] The hard thing with… I find, is that a lot of the stuff is so overlapping, right? Like, one criteria comes up sort of as part of another, so it's not, like, that linear, always, you know? So that's where I start to think, like, well, we group them together. So, how do you feel, though? Because Brennan and I, we do group topics together. So, like, if they're, like, on the last presentation… We'll show an example. the grouping? Yeah, so we try to do that, Steven, in a way that One, to your point, that they're all related from a conversational and design perspective, and two, that a summary will capture, you know, all of them. So we are trying to do that. Yeah, it was lovely. It may not be the whole project. It was, like, site, and then, design. Yeah. real, and… I mean, I trust you guys to figure out the grouping, you know, or again, if it's, like, we have comments, you know, if we figure out, like, a deadline to get back to you guys, then, well, we think this is gonna take a long time or not.

[35:03] We could also say that, say, hey, can we talk about the… facade with the… You know, the materials, because they're related, or something. Yes. I mean, like, so this is a great one. This one makes sense, right? Like, we took the site design criteria for landscaping and screening, and the building and site design criteria, because those were, in some ways, completely related. Right. And we gave that 20 minutes. And we gave all of those one summary. Right. And it worked really well. Yep, and then building… Roll call for each of these things. No, so yeah, you would roll call for each minute allocation. So, like, that 20 minutes has two, you know, building design and building materials below it. So that would be, in theory, if we go the roll call, you would talk about that chunk.

[36:00] Right. that group. Right, so then you have… and did you guys do it, like… I mean, there were only 3 of you, but, like, everybody goes through… And then it's like… you know, if you… Rory, if you said something like, oh yeah, then… but then you get, like, a… Does anyone have anything else to add or something at the end? Is there some. It's a great question, because that's always been the fear with the roll call, is that if you go first. then after 4 other people go after you, you may want to change your mind, because that's the beauty of the… when we have a discussion, is that we're having a dialogue, and that everyone's sort of coming to it with an open mind. So here you are, like, we made Matt go first on all of them. But it's just like, if, you know, you say something with, you have a lot of, conviction in something you say, and then by the time, Steven, you convince me otherwise. So, like, do I get an opportunity to say, hey, I actually changed my mind, thank you. Like, how do we reconcile that?

[37:02] I think you should have something at the end that's like… because something could come up, for sure, like… and it's not like you roll call everybody again, but you say, you know, is anything… And I think there's some opportunity for that when we do the summary, and I think we did that a lot more with Todd last year. You know, like, there was some language that we were using that… that didn't… Make as much sense to a landscape architect. Right. It was pretty specific to architecture. So when he's trying to summarize, I think there was opportunity for us to kind of. remind or emphasize points that we had made, or if you made a point and you're like, yeah, we don't need to include that in the summary, I totally changed my mind, or, you know, like, I think that there's some opportunity in the… and I really look to you guys to… to help with the summary. I find myself often needing some wordsmithing and also just some thought organization.

[38:00] So I think it would be helpful to have… That'd be good to have a wrap-up. Can I ask another question? If you scroll up on the… what you guys laid out for that last meeting. Because one of the things I see. you know, and I got to see Bob, actually, you know, like, in my office, preparing for the meeting, right? Which is good. And, And I'm thinking to myself, Jesus, like, it shouldn't take them… Shouldn't be this hard. Like, how much time did he have to present? He's supposed to have 10 minutes, and he took… he took closer to 20. Oh, really? Because the developer also wanted to talk. Yeah, the owner. So that's… Because I really think that we should be… I think they should have… like, I really don't want to hear about how great the project is for the community and stuff. Like, this isn't the place for that, honestly, like, let's just get down to business, like, give us… here's the 5 criteria, here's how you've achieved it.

[39:05] And, you know, we don't need all the… like, really, I just want to see plan section elevation, and they have the 3D model available, so if we can say, hey, can you cruise around? Like the one that was over by… Like, can we… can you go. 100%. I think keeping them at 10 minutes is something that we are absolutely… and that's part of Brendan's approach here, where, like, at the beginning of every meeting, she's actually going to just quickly outline DAB's role, the applicant's role in this meeting, and the fact that we're not a quasi-judicial board, so that everyone… Like, is not trying to argue us into some corner to make a decision in favor of their project or whatever, because what we say is advisory in nature anyways. Right. Can I… about the presentation, too, because you can make it 10 minutes, you can make it 5 minutes. We used to tell them that they needed to come with a part T diagram, and a statement, and a concept statement. That was one era of a board that we used to.

[40:00] So, that would be one thing I would ask, too, because, I've heard several times from the board now that You get more of the development pitch rather than the design intent. Right. In this board, in that if that's something that you'd like them to focus on, we can communicate that back to the applicant to really focus their presentation more on, you know, the design concept. I don't even think the concept… I really think it's… And, and nuts. by the criteria that they're deficient in, or whatever it is, like… Wow. Like, I mean, personally, I… Yeah. If that's what we're talking about, like. I mean, that is an interesting approach, is that… but I think where they would, like, go through each of the criteria before we do, and essentially defend or acknowledge Where they're lacking… Yeah, that is in the packet, though, too, so they actually make that, justification. in that table. They have their… they have their explanation. So they preamble that.

[41:03] So I think it'd be redundant, and… and really, that could take a long time. Like, if you think about it, if there's 10 deficient criteria. That could take a long time for them to, like, walk around the model and explain what they've done and all that. I think we're supposed to come having read through that, having looked at their drawings, and I think, to your point, Steven, we don't need much of a presentation at all. In theory, we're very familiar with the project. Right. I think… And I know that the staff will do… staff does what we… staff has given them about, like, a 3-minute deadline to really give a synopsis, a project description, location, project, you know, facts. Prior to the applicant presenting, so there's that basic intro that comes at the very beginning of this, too, so… Right. And I think it's important for the applicant to recognize that this is not the chance for them to defend their… to… back to the planning board or planning staff, that this is a different… Review, and that their presentation really needs to, orient us on the site plan, the floor plan, and the general elevations and material choices and massing.

[42:12] That we're not neces… we're not, here to listen to them arguing why they wanted to… keep that parapet, whatever, da-da-da, like, because planning board won't let them now, that… it's not relevant to us. Like, we really need them to come at this, through a different lens. I think there was one project that we reviewed on Arapaho. Last year, that the architect didn't… show up, it was, like, the developer's rep or something like that, and it just sort of wasn't even a great discussion, because the architect wasn't there, we couldn't really have a good discussion about design, and I'm not sure any of our comments were… Yeah, I'm in favor…

[43:00] They also… the applicants often contact me wondering what's their… what's expected of them for their presentation, and so if I can relay to them that the board wants to speak to the design professional. You know, that person needs to be on staff. The presentation really needs to be a primary presentation just from that person. That… I don't know if you're… you want to… because, you know, sometimes we have… Some of the presentations are the owner, the design team, the landscape team, and sometimes engineering, if there's flood issues that You know, sometimes those folks are in the team there to speak, so it's really up to you to craft how you want that primary introduction presentation, and it can be limited. Those other folks are welcome to be at the meeting for questions. But we… if I can relay that to the… to the applicant, I think that that would help a lot for them to frame their conversation for you, make it maybe less intrusive as you're trying to do your design review.

[44:03] What do you guys do about that? I like that. Oh, go ahead, sorry. No, I was just gonna say, I like the idea of saying we really want to hear from the design professional. I feel like the owner can be in attendance and listen in, but oftentimes it's, like, arguing why we don't want to spend money or on… Yeah, it just doesn't make sense economically, which is not in any of the review criteria. I think where we're heading, just so if I'm understanding this correctly, is brevity in the project presentation, and honestly, I would appreciate having more time to ask questions to them, because here they are, they use all 10 minutes to present, and then if you've got 2 or 3 questions, now we're at 15 to 20 minutes of their presentation. Do you… Yeah, maybe it's 5 minutes and 5 minutes. I agree. I think it should be… I… I was wondering if the fact that we call it a presentation could be better worded and just say project introduction, because then.

[45:04] I love that, yeah. They just come in, they bring up the model, they orient us around, fly it around, and then we get a chance to, like, just see, basically, from the model. That's usually what we end up. Needing the most. And then we can kind of take it from there. And also maybe just letting them know that's not the last opportunity they have to provide additional information. They don't have to squeeze it all into that, like. intro, they get to discuss things further, so maybe it's more like, hey, intro the project to us again, we can ask some questions, and then let's start diving into the issues again, and you can talk to that as we move through them. Well, let's be very careful with that, Harriet, because I think that's part of what we're trying to nip in the bud, too, is we are finding that applicants, like our last meeting, it was a great example. We were just asking if they could point us down a different area of the model, and then they used it as an opportunity to start talking about, like, presenting what they did in that area, and… And we were like, well, wait a second, no, no, we don't need a presentation on the area, we just want to see it. So can you please just park the camera in front of that facade? I don't need to hear your spiel on that facade, because we're in the middle of having a conversation about whether or not we think it meets the glazing requirement, you know what I mean?

[46:13] Right. where I kind of nipped that right in the bud, it was… I think that's generally… I think what we're beating around here that feels really relevant is that, like, we have an entire packet, we have all the review criteria already outlined to us that say where they're deficient or partially deficient, we have the defense or revisions made from the applicant already in our packet, if… so we're so well-oriented to these projects that, to Harriet's point, if they come in, show us how good the model is, and how we can, you know, we get a quick glimpse at, like, what sort of tool are we working with tonight, and they orient us north-south, here you are, relative to what you looked at in the packet. And then they're done. And we get to ask a few clarifying questions if things were unclear between the packet. I think that'll cut those 20-minute…

[47:00] applicant introductions down to town, I really… that would be my. And I don't think it's bad for us to say, hey, you have one more minute. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I think that's fine. Now, one thing I had, you know, I'm just thinking back to projects, like. What comes to mind is the one that was… sort of controversial with the St. Julian edition, right? Yeah. Right. And that one, you know, had some public, You know, and it wasn't so much us, but they got into, like, defending the project, right? Well, I think the issue there, Todd defended them, and we were all, as the design professionals, like, dude, that's not how this works. They all signed affidavits when they bought the property. Well, and it turned out one of the… quote-unquote public was actually Tebow's. Ex-wife or wife, you know, lived in the penthouse, which is kind of… not so great. But,

[48:00] Yeah, I mean, it just seemed like… we spent… yeah, I'm not one we spent too much time, you know, getting into, like. Yeah, the politics of it. Well, I can… Provide some… so there's, generally speaking, on the… on the… both the public participation at the beginning of the meeting that's not tied to, not tied to a particular project, but also the public comment in relationship to the actual item at hand. it's… it's a 3-minute per person, but if you have a long list, too, of folks, and you… you're… you can… you can, as a group, vote to bring that time down to, I think, 2 minutes a person? Yeah, that would be good. There's… that's an option, and we can, ask the city attorney to come back in and help if that's… If that's something you guys want to, have a skill set around, just to… in case there's anticipated a lot of public comment.

[49:03] People can also bundle time. That's a way for folks to… you can ask if anybody wants to bundle their time, and so they get, multiple people under a shorter time… or a longer time period, but it ends up being shorter. So that's one way to do that, too. Yeah, Steven, that was exactly that item G, 1G, is from exactly that meeting of… how much time should we… should we be allocating any time to public comment? I mean, sometimes I think that, like, in last month's review, there was some public comment that was pertinent, and I thought needed to be acknowledged. But then there's sometimes, and I have asked, Kalani if she would help us during the meeting to say, you know… Like, directly to say that that public comment is a legal issue, and that has been resolved.

[50:03] you know, already, and we don't even need to address it or, comment on… comment it on it. Kind of reining in the DAB members, to not allocate any time to it, because it's not in our… Perfect. Well, one of the things that came up on… Oh, sorry. Sorry, I was gonna say a couple of things that are helpful is knowing, and we can also do more training on this, is what are the topics that you might hear in public comment that are planning board related rather than DAB-related? So, issues of use. Yeah, I don't want a 3-story building. Yeah, height modifications, affordable housing, all of the kind of particulars around that, those things are planning board related, so we can definitely work with, with the DAB members, so you feel like that there's a… relative familiarity with those topics, so when someone does come up… because I don't think that the public knows that you don't do that either. I think that they… they see a board meeting.

[51:10] And when they come, they're not sure if this board is voting on the project, and so sometimes it's just helpful to reiterate that the board… what the purpose of DAB is, and it's really looking at very specific design-related criteria. You do not approve a project. that the approval goes through Planning Board and City Council, and that folks in the room, that tends to let folks know what you'll be looking at, so maybe that they'll… They might tailor their comments to. Yeah, Brandon, I think your strategy of sort of using what may feel redundant to us, because we're going to hear it every meeting, but for the benefit of the public and the applicant. That you give the sort of dab spiel, and have it, like, at your little elevator pitch as far as what we do. That could help nip a bunch of that, too.

[52:02] Yeah, I think, maybe Kalani, you and I could… Yeah. come up as a wordsmith that a little bit, because I… Cause I don't want to also get that wrong. Yeah. Also, on that particular project, on the, St. Julian, I mean, one of the things we're often… You know, we're, we're, Saying, how can they make the criteria work, right? Or how can they get it in line? But on that project, some things came up that, that, for instance, the way the flood plan administrator, which is administered by the city and in relationship with FEMA, the city actually has a lot of control over how that how they do that, and one of the questions I brought up on that project was like, wait a minute, you're not allowed to put park bench out front? And I want to make sure when there's things that we identify that the city is doing that's sort of

[53:01] ridiculous that we could push back on, that that gets put out there, and then we hear back. Like, I wouldn't know why the flood administrator is interpreting the FEMA rules that draconianly, if that's a word, in such a draconian way. Because it was clearly, like, we should… we should have park benches that aren't gonna wash away. in front of that. And so, like, I don't know, that… that was probably the only time I think that, for me, came up, where it's like, wait a minute. Here's where we really need the city to defend itself. you know, what they're making Apple can do or not do. Well, that's a very Yeah, that's very… I think what that plays into, Steven, because, again, it's hard to… like, what is our deliverable? And so, like, this third talking point here, and to what point, right? And I think that's one thing that's really important. And before we get exactly to that, because again, to that park bench comment, one thing could be to make note of it and have it in some actionable form for a planning board to follow up on. Like, Dab actually supports site furniture and believes that

[54:07] you know, given the flexibility in FEMA with the city jurisdiction involved, should have, you know, access to it. And, you know, put that in a way that becomes actionable by the people who can make things condition to the permit. My question to you guys, before we get to the deliverable piece, is… I, I struggle with this personally. Are we being asked to, and do we comment only on the monkey see, monkey do? Meaning, staff and says, here's five things, and I need you to just put your blinders on and give me… give us feedback with your… in your professional opinion on, does the following item meet the… this exact criteria? I mean, that's more of a, like, professional sort of paralegal exercise, right? Versus… and Lauren used to be really in favor of, like, well, we're design professionals, and, like, this is what…

[55:03] somewhat similar to your attitude, Steven, the other day, like, this is why DAB exists, like, Rob, talking about this. awning, then this thing shouldn't be, you know, we gotta save the awning t-shirts, you know what I mean? Still killing me. I'm just trying to wrap my head around it. I don't want to… I don't know how I feel about it. I guess I'm torn. On the one hand, we have this, like, very keen objective from staff to, like, make our time efficient, because there's a lot of people on board, there's a lot of city staff getting paid, getting asked to stay late at night, there's a lot of applicants that are charging their clients dollars, that then become the cost of the project, that become the rents we pass on to people, that become our taxes. So there's all this money and time involved. and let's just be efficient and do what they asked us to do. Just put on our blinders and say, yep. This criteria feels adequate or not. Alternatively, we are design professionals, and this is an opportunity to make our community better, and we get to have a dialogue about it, and we volunteer our time to do this, and we want to have an impact on our community. How do you guys feel about managing that?

[56:01] I think it's a balance, because… so… Something that comes up very consistently in all of our meetings is, is massing and height variance, which is not necessarily in our purview, that's planning board, but our job is to be able to say, yeah, you're allowed to build a fourth story, however. we would like to see that done in a way that has step backs, and is not as offensive to, you know, one elevation where you're addressing it better in one elevation, but not carrying it through to the other elevation. So, you know, while they're asking for some variances, or or they, by right, can build to, 3 stories, 4 stories, whatever it is. I think our job is to be able to say, well, let's break down the masting a little bit to make it fit within the neighborhood, or fit within You know, to make… it still fits the design criteria, but let's come up with a solution that also

[57:03] doesn't… you know, I think the planning board is, like, trying to get to that objective, but maybe because they don't have architects, they don't… maybe don't have as many solutions or suggestions or ideas. That can kind of come out of that. Well, the planning board's hands are much more tied legally than ours. So, I mean, in some ways. they like to get in a lot of those discussions, and often probably shouldn't, because it's a pretty straightforward process, honestly. But we have that flexibility, and I sort of agree with Lauren. I'm not saying that we do that all the time, but certain things, I think it's appropriate for us to say, hey, how can we make this a little better, like you're getting at, Brendan. Or things like the park benches, right? Like, I mean, there was clearly things that they… that architect wanted to do a long… you know. canyon in the floodplain that were being interpreted in a silly way, and I think that's okay for us to

[58:05] Point that out. But what about the awning one? I think that's a really good example, because here we have… a project that, again, like, it's… the only reason it came to us is because of a budget criteria, and so, like, nothing they… like, even if they did put the Skittle rainbow color on all the awnings, like. Oh, well, like, I guess we looked at that as a walkthrough box check, and that was something you felt passionate about that you wanted to chat about, Steven. And not to say that that's a bad thing, I'm just… we didn't allocate enough time to it. And so then here we are, and are we… did we, like… I guess at no point in that discussion did it seem like it was on the table, because we don't have any review… like, what would we even say to planning board? Like, don't approve the removal of that awning? I'm not even sure we can say that. Well, honestly, I actually talked with, Thor, The original designer, from Downey, Thorpe, and James.

[59:02] And he's like, really? I mean, he was, like, freaked out, and he was like, wow, you know, we had a bunch of criteria. Thank you. that was written in that, that we had to do, and that was our solution, and everyone was happy. And he's like. Now they're not following the rules that they made us follow? So he was pretty shocked, honestly. You know, I was hoping they all ran with it, and… You know, fought for it. That wasn't mine. But… I don't know, I mean… Because that was a money thing. The reason they weren't saving them was because of money. There was not a technical issue involved. And. Yeah, I guess my point is, there's not, like, review criteria that weren't being met, so now we're, like… and that's the discerning nature of this particular question I'm asking the board here, is… I would say, especially with the past project. We get a lot of projects in that might have had a PUD that's 10, 20 years old.

[60:04] Right. And their design criteria are going to be different, and it does change over time. We've had a site review change in the last couple of years that changed the criteria, so applicants do come in and ask why, hey, why do the other projects have a different… why do they look different than, you know, the new ones coming in? So there is gonna be some evolution in those criteria. One of the things, I think. for the board… for DAB to know is there's kind of two paths to… kind of policy recommendations and, like, code changes. Disagreements on the design regulations. Is this… what's coming up on your, with the letter to Council, is if there's kind of these, ideological differences, one pathway is to parking lot these, these ideas that the board comes across during the year.

[61:03] And then, at the period of time where you do the letter to counsel. you can bundle those all together as part of a, you know, a grouping of, code changes. I will say that there's also, stipulation as far as what the board has purview over and what it doesn't. And so, very specifically, the Design Advisory Board is, is exempt from weighing in on issues of transportation, utilities. Flood. and infrastructure. So… Those are the kinds of discussions that we… we would not be following up on with those. That's something that needs to come, as a… Steven, if you're, you know, you get involved in… another, you know, you go to another board and you're talking, or you present to city council. I do mean technical issues with the flood, not design it? Because that's a design issue, not a.

[62:02] But it's all under the flood code. It's not under the design code. So, your… the… this board specifically is regulated to the design… downtown design guidelines. And design criteria within other design, area plans? And specifically, the design criteria in the site review. So, there's no, there's no expansion of the language. As far as that other input, so… Technically, the board should not be weighing in on whether they like a street section, whether they like, you know, utility placement, whether the… Floodplain, you know, issues, how that's resolved in the site and the grading. I mean, we can't, you know, you can… like, it's with the… the same thing with this new… the rain garden requirements, for example, and the floodplain. Like, you have… you know, the necessary evil is that you have to have a massive wall here, but let's try and add some detailing or materiality to make that massive wall

[63:04] you know, function as it's supposed to, but also look good and integrate that into the design. And same with the rain gardens. Like, you know, these rain gardens are necessary. Do we have to have it exactly in that location that's blocking access from whatever? Like, I just think we can encourage you know. Design. design. Yeah. But I would say that there's the policy portion of, like, these good ideas around design and… Having a parking lot of these ideas, and that's what the board has not done up until this point, is really collected and started to record some of the ones that they're finding that is really impacting the overall design quality on projects. Yeah, I think that's a great idea, you know. Me too. Having something like that, and… you know, then we… yeah, and even in the parking lot, that might be where I say, hey, we, you know, we as a collective design community should push back a little bit on

[64:02] some of the flood issues, even though it's not part of DAB, but we can look at that separately. Somebody could. And so, as part of the meeting, I would suggest, then, Someone needs to be the identifier of parking lot issues. So that the meeting doesn't get off track in a way, that you're not able to complete the design review, but still giving yourself some allocated time in there, that one of electing someone from the board to be the keeper, the recorder of these. So that at the end of the year, you guys could, where you don't have a design review meeting like tonight, you could go through and say, okay, let's go through all of our parking lot and refine those, or… take a look at those in preparation for the letter to Council. I also think that, like, we should be… we shouldn't be sidetracked with any of that before we've actually dealt with the issues. Like, if we want to have a discussion on things that are outside scope.

[65:04] it should be, like, at the end. It's like, right, was there anything else we want to comment on, on this project? And that's the time to raise it, because otherwise, yeah, it can completely derail the thing that we actually need to do, or, like, we've been asked to do. Well, that… that… St. Julian one's super interesting, because one of the criteria they weren't meeting was at their front along Canyon was to… Like, you know, they have this big wall, and it was. Articulation. So it was like… Wait a minute, the floodplain people are… directly… Not letting them do their job, you know? And so, that was a tricky one, it really is a tricky one there. So I don't know, you know, it was like… I know it's not something… You know, we talk about the flood, but it was still, like, solvable, With elements that… the flood administrator could waive. Like, that's the… it's in their jurisdiction to allow… a bolted

[66:04] you know, park bench in front of the wall, right? So… Well, and that's the challenge, is, like, spending time on discussing the merit of the rules themselves, or discussing if we think the rules have been met. And that's where I've always struggled with where to keep comments during these reviews. Because that one could be, like, a hardship. You'd be like, well, We don't think you're meeting the criteria, but because the flood administrator is not letting you do these elements. They have given you a hardship, and so we think you are meeting it. Yeah, totally. And we've had other projects like that, like the, Millennium. Right. Hotel. They had some flood restrictions, and they… they had, you know. elevated above the base flood elevation to their… what they could, and so that was deemed, you know, the hardship, and that's the best that they could do in that situation.

[67:02] But we definitely encouraged you know, further, and we've done this in several. fine-tuned. further design of landscape. Landscaping, just planting and hardscaping, and just sort of to minimize that, whatever, whatever hardship they have, let's make the best of it. And that's within the landscape design criteria. Right. That's in there. So… So… Like, into… so, like, all of this is… you know, this process that Brennan's helping us sort of organize. from presenting what we do to actually figuring out how we're gonna do what we do. I think, but it all, and this is what Mark came back from Planning Board, was just like. you guys are gonna have all these discussions, and you're gonna, you know, if you can't start, you know, if you don't start imposing some sort of more rigor to your process, your meetings are gonna get long… gonna be just as long or get longer, you're not gonna get through what you've been asked to get through, et cetera, et cetera. And then all of that could potentially be for naught.

[68:05] Because the way in which we deliver this whatever to planning board, which is actually the only way that any of our discussion has implementation effect. gets lost. And that's what his point was just, like, you guys on Dev need to figure out how to give us an actionable summary list so we can condition your commentary into the approval. Otherwise, it's just, hey, if you want to read a nice discussion on a sidebar topic. for this presentation, please visit the DAB meeting minutes. Well, and I think it's also focusing on what's achievable. I mean, that's the way I kind of look at it. You know, it's like, these people come in, they… we're giving them some advice, and I know how much many thousands of hours and dollars are happening, and it's like… hey, you know, there was one project, I think, I remember I was like, well, what if you just change the brick to a slightly different color? Like, that's not gonna cost them any money, and it's easily doable.

[69:09] Money's not one of the review criteria, believe it or not. - What's ahead. Money's not one of the review… design review criteria. No, but I mean, just practically, like, if… You know, we're giving them ideas that are going to help them, and it is related to the criteria. Well, you know, because color can make things look more massive or not, and… All kinds of things, but… I don't know, I just feel like that… I don't think we should be hand-tying because a developer could make more money, or it's more feasible to build this project out of cheap, shitty materials, and so we're gonna give them a pass. I think if we think that it should be a masonry building because it's consistent with the… the neighborhood fabric in that area of town, and that's what makes Boulder a beautiful place to live and build, and why rents are so expensive, and everyone wants to move and live here, then we're gonna make you spend some frickin' money to do a project in our town.

[70:00] We didn't hold that, we didn't hold the city to that, on that awning. I mean, that's… Hi! That's why they were changing the design, because they couldn't afford it. There was no… Well, I think that's an oversimplification, because, you know, that's like a technology that was invented for that one-time awning. There was no review criteria that said we needed to… that they… like, they didn't… they weren't breaking any rules by removing that awning. That's what's different. And so that was us… that was a debate on… there should be a rule to not remove that, and it's not historic. Not that they were breaking a rule and we allowed them to. That's where this job gets tricky. Right. So, I… I would like to nominate Steven to be the, record keeper of the parking lot. Alright, I'll be here. For sure. No question. And we can just, in the meeting. No objection. It's gonna be our code word, and just be like, parking lot. No way! That's on the parking lot. We're looking for the parking lot to be rough draft, too. It's not like it's going out in the minutes.

[71:01] Right, right. Every month, so if you… if it was just, hey, we should parking lot that, just scribe that into some record, and we can… we can either do, like, a biannually one, where you go over it, and… Yeah, how does that work if I have, like, a Google… I can't share a Google Doc. No, you can't share anything with the whole group, because it'll… in email, because it'll qualify as a meeting. You can share it with me. And I can send it to everybody, and every time you update it, if you want me to send it out, just send it directly to me and Amelia, and then we'll send it to everyone. Okay, and then people can send them to me. And then, yeah, and then when we don't have a design review, we can… we can slot time for, hey, let's go over the record. Let's go over our parking lot and refine those and clean up, you know, let's make it the rough draft, a, you know, final draft or something. And that'll help our City Council meeting. I think… so we only have 13 minutes left of Rory's time, so I… I know, you've been…

[72:05] passionate and vocal about item 3, the deliverables, and I… so I'd like to maybe jump, while we have the rest of your time, to jump to that. Because I'm… I'm just… I am curious what our… our collective thoughts on… How to make our recommendations more actionable. Maybe… I mean, I don't know how much flexibility we have in this, Kalani, but maybe the meeting minutes… maybe there needs to be an additional document or some… I don't know. Like, somehow, if the meeting minutes aren't conveying to the planning board what our recommendations are. Can I ask a question, then, Rory, on your feedback? Did… Was… did Mark say that they were looking for, like, kind of a outline of what a condition could be?

[73:01] Is that what he was hoping for? That it was that direct? I'm not sure that our conversation was descriptive enough to get to that level of refinement. I think it's just… and he's not the first, like, even when, I forget who it was from CADIS that used to be on the planning board. Ryan? Brian. Yeah, he… same thing. He was like, guys, I'm here, I'm an architect, you have an architect on planning board, like, let's organize your feedback, and I will figure out how to work it into a condition. Mmm. So you could… I would say, you have latitude, Brendan, then. Like, your latitude could be, as light as having more specificity to things, like, for example. you don't recommend siding, but you do recommend a masonry. Like, you could say that in that recommendation summary. Or you could get… go so far as to say, hey, there's a… You know, you do not think that this building should move forward without a step back in the massing.

[74:06] It can… I think if we use… That'll help frame up, I think, as planning boards looking at it, instead… it's nice to have some… some wiggle room, but if… I think if the… you… if Deb feels strongly about something. put it in the recommendations and, you know, the specificity. We all… it's still a recommendation, you know, the board is, It's advisory, so it's… it's not like you're voting and it's a. Correct. This is where it's tough, right? Like, the one on 28th and Colorado, where, like, where it's like, you need to study that corner, that northwest corner a little bit more, and, like, so, from Planning Board's perspective, where they're not trained architects, although I think there may be one, but ML, but, like. They see something different, even if it's not any better, and they're like, well, it's been studied, you know, like, check off the dab box. Whereas I'm looking at our recommendation from, Cadis the last… from last month, where we say, you know, relative to them ignoring the existing building that this entire Paseo concept was built around, that is the other half the Paseo.

[75:12] our… we had a lot of commentary, and a lot of people… all three of us chimed in on how that's not appropriate. Like, if you're gonna save that building, and it's gonna drive your site plan strategy, and it's gonna drive this Paseo concept, it can't be this ignored gray scale item in the background. all of that sort of, I guess. opinion and advisement got captured in one bullet point, which I think is great for brevity, by the way, Brendan. improved design integration and cohesion between the pre-existing building and the new building along the Paseo, as well as near the outdoor gathering space. could we… if we wanted to make that more of a condition, it could be like, Deb does not support further design developments or approval of this building until the existing adjacent building has been brought into… has design elements that directly tie to it. Something that they can, like, actionably identify.

[76:07] I could check… I don't know if there's certain language… let me check with the city attorney on if… what is the… is it appropriate for Deb to kind of initially craft a condition? I will say this about preliminary drafting of conditions on the fly. is that the wordsmithing takes time. So, at a board meeting, whether it's planning board or others, it… it really is something that you could use a lot of your design review or your summary time doing. So… I don't think we want to draft, like, legit condition language. I guess… I think they're… I think we're getting better with… I think these recommendations are better. Yeah, they're definitely more direct, and… very clear guidance, is the most helpful, is clear of a guidance and very, If you can… if you can summarize it in a way that design professionals, or non-design professionals, just your…

[77:06] average, you know, person walking down the street can understand, that will be even more helpful. That's the key, because we're talking to an architect who presented, and then we're using architect lingo, and then our board recommendations sometimes are just pretty broadly using architect lexicon, which planning board may not fully understand or appreciate. Well, I don't think… Come on, that might be… On the example that you gave about the, you know, the Colorado on 28th Street. You know, we said this needs to be studied, but in our recommendations, it also specifically said some suggestions, to encourage. the… Translation of materials from one facade to the other would be. Good. Yeah, yeah, totally. administration and awnings and, you know, metal projections or just massing and scaling. I mean, I think that that's what I was saying yesterday, that it's really

[78:03] So, two things. It's really critical that… that we, as a board, review the meeting minutes, because they are actionable, you know, they are… You know, the ultimate… It's a work product. It's the work product of the whole meeting. Right. And then… but secondly, a really good point that, Kalani and Amelia brought up yesterday was that, like, the meeting minutes really have to be Only what's written down is are… is the language and the words that we said in the meeting. That we can't, like, post-justify or add on to our comment design review, in the meeting minutes. So we have to be really careful about. like, oh, well, I came up with a great idea after the meeting. I can't put that in the meeting minutes, because it's not actionable, because we didn't talk about it in the meeting.

[79:00] Yeah. Right. But the specificity is really helpful, and the examples. So, I would say don't shy away from examples if you feel like it's justified. Because that will help planning board craft some of those conditions, and I will check with the attorney's office on what's the… what's the kind of line in the language that you can use as far as your recommendations? How far can you go where you say, this… this is a do-over, or… I designed a whole facade. Right, or what… Yeah, I was gonna say that… the Paseo example, like, you know, like. what… what… like, what you guys wrote, I think, is good. It gives a good direction. If you take it to the next step, like, you should do a condition that you actually have to update the old building. I'm not sure that that's legally tenable. Like, we might think that that's what they should do, but is the developer required to put new siding and repaint the old building to make it match the new? I don't know, right?

[80:04] I don't know either. Well, the board is advisory, and so you could say it, and then… It's weighed when it's at planning board, as far as how it weighs against meeting the condition… all of the site review criteria. And I wonder if maybe we can include in the project summary, once we've gone through all of these, and we can say in the project summary that, you know, DAB, Highly recommends, that, that the, these three items are… Changed, or… You know, that, you know, it has to be, massing, on the south elevation, the scale of the windows, and whatever, you know? furniture layout, whatever. Maybe a few more stronger words, like improved design integration, maybe there's a way to make that sound a little stronger. What I was most interested in getting to the deliverable portion

[81:05] And I apologize that I have to jump, but, was because I think it… it reverse-informs all of the, like, how to run the meeting. If we understand that what, at the end, what is the objective? How are we going to package up our feedback? I do think it helps us understand what sort of feedback should we give. Back to the awning question, back to the, are we commenting on the rules? themselves, or on whether or not the applicant meets the rules. Like, all of that sort of plays into then, well, and what's this tidy package, and what do we do with it at the end of a meeting? Right. So the way that it's set up right now is just… here's one section of work based on the last agenda, was here's some of the criteria that was bundled together, then there's a recommendation summary, but then there's another 10 minutes at the end with some, you know, overarching concluding remarks. So there's several sections of this, so I don't know if that helps, Rory, as far as…

[82:05] But what we didn't talk about is, you know, if you have a project and you, Maybe you're able to hit all of these fairly, efficiently and quickly, that you have time where there's a… more. That was the goal, is that free time. Loose design, like a free skate design time. I think Harriet brought that up. Where she was like, let's hit everything we've been asked to do, and then if there's more time for parking lot items, or just out-of-bounds discussion. Let's at least get through what you've asked us to get through, as sort of a respect of the time that staff has put into it, a respect of, you know, the focus that the applicant has… their attention's been focused on. That would sort of be our baseline due diligence, to address what we've been asked to address before going haywire. Yeah, and if we've got something we really want to talk about it, well, then the owner

[83:02] Like, it's ownership on us to be concise in our feedback, not repeat what other people have said, so that we can get to the thing if we think that's more important. I mean, nowhere in the design packet did it say, for the CADIS project that there needed to be a better integration of the existing buildings. It's true. It's… oftentimes, these issues do come up in our discussions, and it is our way of addressing and also coming up with potential solutions for the issues that have been identified. So, I think we've been able to kind of work some… Things in that still… Fall within the boundaries of The disc… you know, the discussion items. I would say, Brennan, I think you're doing a great job. I just want to make sure that that's noted here. We're sort of nitpicking. We're just… we're putting awareness to how we're delivering these meetings, which is really good. And I… honestly, when I was reading through this recommendation, I was kind of like, this is pretty good, this is great. It's brief.

[84:07] it's open-ended enough that we're not designing the building for them, but we're being clear on, sort of, direction of where it needs attention, and hopefully planning more could take… I think we are slowly… I think we are making all of… the growth mechanism… we're implementing growth in the board, and we've sort of… there's been some new members that have joined, you know, between even just Stephen and Harriet, and… It's good to have these touch-based meetings, you just sort of… everyone can get on the same page of what the objectives of this board are, particularly under the new, leadership. And I think I'm… I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm encouraging all of us to like, we are well prepared, we have this packet, we understand what planning staff, where they're coming from. Let's approach these questions as designers and, you know, design professionals, and we're gonna come at this at a different angle, and I think I'm incur… I just am encouraging us to

[85:06] to… to be thoughtful, but also kind of creative, and come from a different… different angle, in our responses. And I'm… I'm psyched about how, things have been turning out. And one example of that is, like. Whoa, you know, we need to move the trash. whatever, you know? I think we just are coming at this from a really cool perspective and a different angle that, needs to be celebrated in our discussion and in our summaries and comments. So, I think… I think it's… evolving, I think it's been good. Thanks, Rory. Yeah, thank you guys. Thank you, Brendan. Thanks. I won'. ask a question? Yeah. What happens… so after… They go to the meeting. Yeah. You send them… Like, the applicant…

[86:04] the information… like, then they go to planning board? Like, have they… would they have made tweaks at that point, or not? So, you… like, on a site review project, not, like, on the awning one, that was kind of a… that was an administrative approval. Sure. So on an entitlement like this one, they came in. Before they came to DAB, we made sure that any of the, kind of, site, geotech issues that might change the building design are resolved to, you know, you know, pretty, pretty high… you know, that they're not gonna have to break the building up or do anything on flood or trans… So, once they get that nailed down in the building design, then it comes to DAB. And… From there, you guys do your review. We… we get the recommendations out of the minutes that… those summaries. the… the applicant gets those. What we… and it depends on what the applicant gives us in response to those. Sometimes it's very detailed, like the… the applicant on the 28th Street project took every single one of your bullets in a… in their… this next submittal.

[87:17] And addressed, or didn't, you know, addressed the ones that they are gonna… they're wanting to, incorporate. And so what'll happen is that gets… and this, I think, is their last submittal before they go to Planning Board. Okay, so… So that gets wrapped up, that packet portion will be wrapped up into the planning board packet that goes to them with the DAB criteria, how they're responding to it, and so they can see visually and through a summary on how they, you know, responded or not responded to what. I don't know if they didn't respond, it's still used in your staff report, say, well, they didn't respond, or how does that work? The staff report, if it's, ew… If it's what's…

[88:04] you know, a meat very glaring that they didn't respond. They usually have a justification to it. Sure. or not, and it's really up to the board. Well, staff will look at it, see if they still meet the criteria. If they meet the criteria still. but they're not meeting DAB's recommendation. That is put into the staff report, but it's not… highlighted because the board is advisory, so it's really incumbent on planning board at that point. Or your planning board liaison that was part of the review while they're in here. You know, usually you have a planning board liaison during this, that they'll flag some of that, too, as the project's brought up. So, and so the planning board, they're not… it's not, like, incumbent upon them to seek out our meeting minutes and recommendations. They actually… you give that to them, because it… you know, when I was talking to those several planning board meetings, they were like, what's DAB? So…

[89:06] And I'm not sure why, because I feel like they are the ones that have been referring to… referring the projects over. Like, that's great. And so, like, on the… in this, you can see here, this was a city council referral, but after it's gone to, To… during the concept plan. So we… you have received both Planning Board and Council referrals, so I'm not sure… was it a new per… maybe it was a new member? I don't know. But I, yeah, they… But I guess I'd just sort of… One's credence to us being pretty straightforward with what we're recommending, so it's not convoluted, and it can… understand it. I would say if you want the board… if you want the applicant to have flexibility in how they solve the problem. you can write your recommendation looser. If it's… if you feel like it's not critical. It can be… it can be loose.

[90:01] But if you feel like it's something that, for example, on that last project, the recommendation was to, attend to both the north and south facades for the massing. Like, that was very specific, that example. So, you can go both ways. If you feel like it's a critical one, you can be more specific on whether you want that… that massing should have some step, you know, step back at the fourth floor, or… Yeah, and a couple of times we've had the comment of. material changes need to happen on inside corners, and I'm not gonna… I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that. I just, like, they need to remember that rule and keep that in mind. And staff checks for that, so the planning board, or the staff planner will go through and they'll check for You know, screening on the equipment, the roof equipment. That the materials wrap back to, you know, whatever plane, you know. or there's transitions, in the in-plane transitions have the appropriate detailing element that needs to be there. So they go through and do that. You don't have to itemize all of these. But I would say, so one example of maybe…

[91:13] As you're trying to get some… gain some efficiencies in your review and prioritizing the most important criteria versus ones You'll recall Shannon had, not put every criteria in the memo that was partially satisfied, because some of them were… Things like, hey, did it wrap back? All the materials wrap back? What… is there rooftop screening? And some of it was partially satisfied, but she didn't want you to spend time on You know, the 12 partially satisfied, when there was 4 big, not satisfied criteria that really needed a lot of attention. So, I'd say that, you know, we can try that again, if you want to try that again, where, you're welcome to add things that are important in, but if… if you want staff to provide in the memo, really, the big

[92:08] The big moves that are the most important in there, they can do that and summarize those, and then you can pick and add the partially satisfied if you'd like. Yeah, so I, so that, that specific example, just so Stephen and Harriet, you understand, like. when we got the DAB packet, it had 6 criteria that were partially met, and then, in our meeting minutes, there was only, like, 2 criteria that were up for a suggestion, or one criteria. And so in that pre-planning meeting, I was like, no, I think it's important that, that we should… again, because we're coming at it from a different perspective. I think that we should be able to lead the conversation, and so it would be nice if… If you guys didn't, sort of, select what items should be discussed, and then… but we can prioritize or eliminate in our pre-planning meeting, because I… there was… there was some important… obviously, the mechanical screening was something we even discussed, but we can eliminate that. But, you know, there are other…

[93:12] They're, like, rote checklist ones. Maybe there's rote… as we start to get… do this, with the new checklist, is maybe there's. What is that? don't need to be on the list anymore. Maybe the rooftop screening is not one that needs to be part of the review, because it is part of the, you know, code section. It's a parking lot, Steven. That's a parking lot issue. I haven't started my parking lot yet. We're still grainy. So, yeah, we can still bring them to the meeting, and then, Brendan, you can, you and Rory or whoever is the chair and the vice chair can then prioritize and say, hey, we don't need to talk about that one or talk about this one. Yeah, and then Steven can be like, why isn't this on here? What about… like, I'm thinking back… I'm just thinking back to some of the things that came up on… like, the…

[94:00] the St. Julian one, I remember we had a really great discussion. And the architect was open to it. That, like, the… Path, you know, from… from Pearl all the way down to Canyon was really important, and they had, like, the garbage there, and they'd sort of… you know, and I just wonder, like, what happened with that, and did, you know, was that… idea and comment did we stress it enough so that Planning Board, like. looked at that or not, you know? Or, another example, I remember the one… a couple months ago on, you know, the one over by… off of Colorado by CU, like. I remember we looked at… the north facade was, like, kind of funny, because it was, like, two stories of brick or something, but then the… And I was like, oh, just make this a little higher. Like, simple things that the designer's like, oh yeah. You're right. And I don't know, like… How that's… if that stuff ever ends up happening, or…

[95:00] One of the biggest examples that, I think maybe one of the biggest dab mishaps was for the, like, the Harvest House. Our meeting minutes were not very specific, and I don't think they captured the… the… Heart of our discussion and conversation, in such a way that there were… there were not good actionable items. And then when I was asked to attend the planning board meeting, you know, I really had to go back and listen to the… listen to the conversation, because And sort of familiarize myself with what we talked about, because I think, you know, we had big discussions about this being the gateway to Boulder, and the entry, and this elevation really needs to be changed, and the massing of it, and the landscape, and it's too tall, and it's too straight, and it's too flat. And then when I read the meeting minutes, it was like, none of that was in there, and so I think that that was… was…

[96:06] hard for Planning Board, because they can't… They were… they agreed that that was not a good elevation, but they couldn't… they didn't have our support or our meeting minutes to kind of back that up. Right. So, I think that… yeah, I think, you know, it can… it's… it is important, I think, to… to have these… Conversations, but also to document them and prioritize them. Well, and I wondered… Oh. on the minutes. Yup. Especially the… on the summary, because that's what gets into the action minutes. And while the… the record is… the official record is the video. Relying on whether the board members are going to. able to… go back and watch the more detailed discussion. So if you feel like there's a very salient idea that needs to get into those recommendations.

[97:07] internet. Put it in there, in some way, shape, or form. Yeah. And it sounds like. If you're giving yourself enough time during that period of those recommendations that you'll have, some time to get some feedback and kind of words and the things, too. Yep. Kalani, and I know I brought this up, and I'm sure I'm not the first one, about getting our hands on this stuff early, like. You know, a project like the… You know, the student housing one on 28th. Okay, it's fairly straightforward, like, what's gonna happen there. But the Harvest House… You know, oh my god, like, that one… Came in like that. I wasn't at that… I could imagine that… Brennan, when you guys got it, you're like, you know. you know, what the hell, like, ugh, you know, I mean, right? Like, if you could have seen it way before they had that solution…

[98:02] Yeah. Right. That one's so important, and it's such a big move, and it's, you know, tied together so many different factors. It's not just… you know, infill. Right. I wouldn't say… How do we get our hands on earlier on that kind of stuff? So, I would say that's a policy parking lot, kind of, like, matching DAB submittals to the kind of design delivery, right, that you would see in private, you know, practice, that… how things evolve. But, sometimes we get projects that are very… Well developed, way more than… For a concept plan that, you know, it has floor plans. Right. And so, it… there's not, and concept plan, not every project gets a concept plan. And so sometimes you get a concept plan that the applicant, like, that particular developer was fairly well developed when it came in originally.

[99:03] there wasn't a lot of moves. They were doing quite a bit of, flood and, like, revisions to the floodplain, and so they were trying to get ahead of that schedule. But sometimes we do occasionally get ones that are maybe not as well developed, so it's… it's just a… we don't always… Dab does not always get a chance to see Concept Plan, because it's not always a referral that you will receive. Sold up. planning board would have to refer… how would… how would we see it? It would be a. So you… it would come from Planning Board. If it's not in the design guidelines where it comes to you automatically. Right. During a concept plan, that is referred… after the concept plan submittal, it's referred to… The design advisory board at that point. And so that… usually at that point, they're in their site review submittal. Yeah, so unless it's kind of downtown, or… and above the price point, we're not going to really see it early on, because it doesn't have to come to DAB.

[100:06] And oftentimes, the way that I look at it, too, is, like. There are some architects that were just, you know, they have this You know, fully baked idea, and they're… they're pretty. In the program. They want it in the program, what they want to change in the design. And I think planning board, you know, once… if they're coming up against some real roadblocks and seeing, like. This architect does not… will not change the massing, or they're, you know, they're being really, resistant to… to incorporating any of our comments. I feel like that's sometimes when they're like, okay, Dad, let's… we need some… we need some backup here, and so I think that… Did the Harvest House? Because that's… Not downtown? Nope. Not… that was a referral. I wasn't refer. But was that a referral? Student housing had been referrals. It wasn't a referral in concept, it was already…

[101:00] So, I would say the only projects you've seen that were mandatory review were the, the St. Julian? project, and then the awnings, that was an automatic review. Within the non-historic interface areas. So you saw those two projects, and those came in at that level. Right. What about… there's the couple on… the Navy building on Pearl Street, and then the, DTJ, those were in. Yeah, those were within the design guidelines, too. So those came in at that level. And not every project requires a concept plan, too, so there's not… sometimes there's not even an early warning for projects within the downtown area, if it's not meeting a certain threshold for concept plan. You know, applicants don't typically elect to have another review kind of track. Right? So, they don't always have… if they don't have to do a concept plan, they don't, you know, they usually don't. So, the Harvest House… We saw that, not in concept.

[102:04] and site review. At the beginning of the site review, once they resolved, kind of landscape flood and… Right, no. That's when you guys. Civil issues, yeah. Okay. And we'd like to send You know, it's… we… It's… there's a… kind of a s… If we… because Dab… per the regulations, is only allowed to see something one time, right? And there's been special cases where they've had a re-referral condition that it's kind of come back around. But it's very, very limited in that, in those cases. So, in the… in, the code, it's… you go to the design for applicant's sake, the… your design advisory visit is one… is a one-time deal, and so we want to make sure that… what they're getting as far as a design review is going to be somewhat of the same project that they will see at planning board. So, if they come too early, and they haven't resolved the engineering, and they haven't resolved the flood, and the transportation, and you see one

[103:14] building, and the form, and the massing, and is one of one type, and then they start to resolve those issues, and all of a sudden you have three buildings instead of one building, and one building has got a big plinth because of the flood. That's hard to rectify of what planning board gets to see versus what you saw. So we're trying to make sure that there's some level of consistency between what the board… DAB sees and what goes to Planning Board as far as a similar project. That they can see, evolution in the design. So, but it's… it is, it's… we've wrestled with this back and forth over the years, Steven, as far as what's a good time, you know. Excellent. That makes sense. I mean, I still… I brought up that Milwaukee thing before, like, I think that could be a cool model, like, where you have a voluntary

[104:03] So you would see it twice, but they would, you know, way early on, you know, if they wanted advice. And, you know, it has to… you have to prove yourselves as… I wonder, too, though, because, like, other boards have, what I would call… Enrichment activities. You know, like, the landscape… or the Landmarks Board has their, historic tours, and they do Month of Modern. Where… I don't know if… if, DAB, because this would be a… led project where the board, you know, works with the local chapter of the AIA on something. You know, you look at where you can partner Maybe you have an AIA, charrette, a pre-Charette, thing before a project's ever submitted. Similar to what ULI does on some projects, so… You know, there's… there's a role for non-municipal services to look at projects, like, as a… maybe a precursor in the good design review and getting a, you know, some of those other design issues you're looking to tackle.

[105:15] But couldn't we be a resource in, like, a pre-app meeting? You know, I mean… on the… I, you know, and I'm not sure… the pre-up meetings are typically just questions. No, I know. But… Right now, the board is, is relegated to this… the design… The meeting time and that one visit to that meeting, so they don't have a secondary design kind of input path. Well, it's interesting, because both Aaron and Lauren have You know, expressed to me some. you know, like, oh, you know, how can we get Dab more involved and stuff? So, it's not like they're not thinking about, especially Lauren, right? I mean, she was with Dab, and she's on City Council. So, you know, it's something we could think about in our letter, like.

[106:06] Definitely. You know, like, how can we… be more useful, and… You know, how… and, like… How can we, you know, help elevate design in the city? Yeah. I think that that's a great. Right. those design policy ones, you know, for a while. We had the Design Excellence Initiative that had several, kind of. enrichment, design enrichment activities associated with it as part of the work plan. It's no longer on the work plan. Right. Yeah, and I think we've written that same letter to some people every year that I've been on the board, so… We want to be more involved, how can we encourage good design? Right. No, but it does, you know, maybe it's a matter of just getting the right ears. Yeah. Listening to it, but… And maybe it's ident… you know, I always think, too, giving examples, you know, like.

[107:05] client's gonna laugh. The one that always kills… just kills me recently is the one on, you know, the old People's Clinic site, right? Like… That's. buy-write project. It was a buy right, but… Yeah. If there was a… Simple process, that they could have put the… The alley behind that building, which meant the setback needed to move. Everyone… they would have done it, but there wasn't a simple process. They… they had an opportunity to do a site review, and they elected not to. Well, who would elect to do. Yeah. Okay. So that's where… that… I mean… That's… No, I know, I'm just saying, like. there's… I'm still… I'm still shocked that we allow 7-foot fences and front yard setbacks, so… Oh, yeah, I mean, Broadway is crazy, like, there shouldn't be any fences on Broadway, or IRA.

[108:02] But, yeah, I mean, these are, like, those overarching design policy. As soon as everything can… For the, for the parking lot, too, because they help shape some of that, so… Sure. I have 4 parking lot issues, Stephen. Alright, stop. I'll email those to you. The only thing I ask is if you're emailing parking lot issues, make sure you're emailing one person to one person, so… Right. Then, like, just you to Brendan, not, Wrapping in a meeting. Well, I can include you, Colonel. You can include me, yes. And one board member. Yeah. Right, that's correct. And don't afford a chain of other… discussion point, so it'll mean you'll have to do a bit of, like, copy and pasting, Steven, so… Yeah, that's fine. Okay. Well, and another parking lot thing would be how, like. Maybe it sounds like, if it's a policy thing, like.

[109:02] whenever that discussion is happening, you know, amongst the city staff, or you guys, you know, like, how could DAB be involved in that, you know, as a… Getting designers, sort of. I will tell you, that we are driven by a Council's work plan, so if Council has a work plan of revising, say, site review criteria. There's usually an engagement, schedule that goes out, and it's, like, the Chamber of Commerce, it might be Design Professionals, got other folks. But sometimes, some years, there's not a lot of design work, so… or that it wasn't picked up as part of the work plan. Sure. Oh, you know, maybe this year they'll have some of that that they'll integrate and fold into something that you're work… you know, they're working on, or, They get recommendations from another department on what they're working on. Right. So, I will send you guys, kind of, the background on that. That'd be great. Okay.

[110:02] More in here that you wanted me to take notes of? No, I mean, I think that that, too, the prioritization, I think it's just something that we would like to… That we kind of have? Adopted and implement… we'll just… we want to implement that and… but kind of get the blessing of… Okay. Rest of the board. This is what we're doing, and is that okay? Brandon, can you… just, like, give us, like, like, how would this… just a pretend, like, example, all right, you know, Project X comes in. Here's what happened. Like, just walk us through, like, the meeting as you see it right now. You want me to make this larger, the white? The white page? But, I mean, I know this, but I think you can, like, summarize it, like, so it would be… because we were kind of saying maybe it's 5 minutes of… I mean, it's just a summarize our meeting tonight, like, they present for 5 minutes, and then we have 5 minutes of questions…

[111:02] You know, like, what… then we each get a minute or something to respond, we do a roll call. Let me go and grab this. Yeah, so we have, I mean… We were trying to pack a lot in… that… the first 5 minutes, and, like, the meeting often takes 5 minutes even to get going, you know? I was gonna ask about that, because there's a quicker way for us to really get the meeting going, and one of them is… Brendan, you call the meeting to order, and then Amelia, as the board secretary, reads every board member? And you say, here. That starts the attendance, kicks it off very quickly, and then you move, so you're not waiting for folks to come in. Right, and yeah, and waiting for people to, like, hit unmute and introduce. Yes. That would be… that might be great. Okay, let me, and, you know, so I'll call the meeting… well, you can hit record, and then I'll call the meeting to order, and then…

[112:08] Yeah, roll call would be nice, like, in… just… I'll do… so it'll be chairperson, intro, open the meeting. Yeah. And then we'll do a roll call. And that usually is just the board members, so she'll… she will just call out the board members and the planning board liaison, and that is it, not the applicants. The applicants can introduce themselves when they come up. Yeah, and same with staff, that's… Working on the project, yeah. Yeah, we should be doing that. Okay, so then, we'll have a roll call attendance. Attendance… . And then we can jump right into the… Approval of the minutes. Yep. And then public participation.

[113:02] Let me do something here… Let's see… And you were gonna check if we can cut that down to 2 minutes instead of 3. the… public participation. Well, it's… it's… you do it on a case-by-case basis. like, there's so many applicants that you want, or so many members of the community that are asking to provide input, you can say, since we have, you know, X number of people waiting, we'd like to make the time 2 minutes instead of 3 minutes. You need a motion and a second, and you have to vote on it, though. Okay. I mean, for this one, the general comments, I… I don't know if we've ever had anybody participate. Okay, yeah. Once or twice, it's… it's very rare. But it's usually they're participating, and specifically talking about the project we're reviewing.

[114:04] Yeah, or they, we've had a couple where folks show up, and they're, they were meant to be in another meeting. They didn't really… they were about transportation, and they wanted to come talk about that, and it wasn't… It happens. There's so much going on in the city, so… I haven't seen Lynn Siegel in a while, so… Return. Sorry. True. So public partition… roll call attendance… And then you have your public participation. 3 minutes each. Then… Is that, like, a… I don't know, it seems to me if there's… Five or more people You know, waiting to talk, that… I don't know. Is there some kind of standard that… because that's, like, 15. Let me ask… let me ask and see what the standard is. I don't think that there's, like, a threshold. I think it's just on a case-by-case basis.

[115:05] Yeah. And this isn't the big one. We had 15, you know, if we had 5 people, that'd be 15 minutes, that's when we should start to be like, okay, let's do 2 minutes, but… So the next one is the procedural introduction. This is what FAB does, the… the just… just letting folks know what the board has, you know, purview over. And the items in front of you tonight, or any night, is, you know, letting folks know that it's, advisory. And that you're not, you know, approving or denying a project? That might help set the tone, and you could, and that's right before the… But we also need… I forgot something here… the approval of the minutes. Roll call attendance. And then when… so the role of the applicant, when… when do we want input for them… from them, or do we?

[116:02] So when you do this portion, when you have the actual discussion item, I'm just gonna put this here. And I just want to acknowledge it's 6 o'clock for anybody that has to leave. discussion items. You have, you do have a… Right here, you could introduce what your expectations are, or we could jump straight into what staff, you know, the staff introduction, which is 3 minutes. I think the staff, because I'm… I'm hoping you guys tell the applicant the expectation ahead of time. Of the structure of the meeting. Yeah, or just what we want them to present on, like, you know. Yeah, we will tell them ahead of time, If there's any other guidance that you want to give them, you know, before the… You know, applicant gives their introduction.

[117:00] Yeah, can we move… Don't forget to take out the opportunities. This one? move that one up to… under procedures and format. So, what does DAB do? What is our expectation of the applicant? Oh, where I am. Nope. This is me doing one. staff… Intro… okay, follow that memory here. Alright… Because, yeah, Steven, we were talking about, like, that… the meeting that we had, for the 28th and Colorado Student Housing Project, it was like… the, the… Danica, who's, like, planning… consultant and… Right. You know, like, the owner and the architect, and, you know, there was, like, way too many people participating in this conversation. Yeah.

[118:00] need. That much input from… Right. them. It just felt out of… a little out of con… out of control. Yeah. I just wanna do something right here. And then the question and answer with the applicant, I mean, I really think we should, Internally, like, we should put our hand up. You know, and… So that Rory and I don't just jump in, start blapping, You know, we put our hand up, and then… you know, Brendan, you call on us, and… And, you know, we have to keep our question brief, not… it's not a statement from us, it's a question. It's not like, whoa… And I think sometimes questions arise in the discussion. Yeah, exactly, that's the only… You know? I'm curious about how we deal with it. It's… it's… that… I would consider this,

[119:00] 5 minutes, the same way other boards consider it clarifying questions. Okay. it's… a lot of it is to help inform when you have… because you're going to have a little break in here that is, public comment. And so, if you feel like there's certain questions that whoever's there for public comment needs to hear to influence their comment, you should also this is a good chance for it. You can always ask more questions later, so, you know, but these are the burning kind of questions. Public comment there. And then we go through each criteria? Is that where this happens? Well, I think you… you need to establish the order of the board member input, so that kind of role, like, how… because everybody speaks once before they speak again, or if you're going to… have someone, one, establish that order, but then… I don't know if you guys landed on if you're doing it criteria section by criteria, or…

[120:02] I mean, I think I would just inter… I would just introduce, say we have 6 criteria items that we're covering today. We're gonna… some of them will be grouped, and… but we'll be responding to each item in this order, and I can… Yeah, that sounds good. And then we decided it worked well last time that, The vice chair and the chair go last, and then my review kind of Turns into the summary, which helps me organize The thoughts a little bit better, too. That sounds good. And then how much time do we get on each of the… or each person get? Is that… you guys are gonna decide that? Yeah. It's gonna depend on how many criteria that are broken out, so… But it's anywhere from, like, 1 to 2 minutes, I'm assuming, or something? Right, so 5 members arrive, and we have. So on this. If it's allocated 5 minutes, then it would be 1 minute per person.

[121:01] Okay. So, like, on this one, there was 20 minutes allocated for 2, and you have 5 minutes, or 5 people, so you have about 4 minutes each. So I think in terms of questions of the applicant, like, if I had 4 minutes. and I want to ask a question, that eats up my time. Yes. That's one way to do it, like… Kalani, tell me why you're picking that brick, or whatever, real quick, because I've got 4 minutes, you know, but… I've still got 4 minutes. Also. It's also kind of loose, because, like, I might say, you know, I think it meets… I think it meets the design criteria, and I have nothing to say. Yeah, that's fine too. Yep. Then do you seed your… 3 minutes to somebody else, or no, it just goes away. I mean, I think what we've decided is that, that I have limited… brainpower during the meeting, and so I cannot keep track of the time.

[122:03] And also I'm having a hard time seeing when people have their hands raised, or when people are chatting, so, I think we're… we just are kind of kind of rely on each other to… Yeah, I think that's bad. Rain it in. We have Amelia do that? Who… I think we need someone to be the police officer and be like. you know, Brandon, you've got one minute left. Like, I think that'd be helpful to keep us I… It's difficult because we don't want to interrupt your train of thought. Yeah, I get it. So, we can put a time… we can look to try to put a timer up. If we can find one. Right now, we only have a 3-minute timer, but I don't know if it's something, if we can look to find and adjust. Yeah. Huh? I have a 2, a 3, and a 5. There we go. And not every board likes to see a timer, so we just didn't want to pop a timer up there, and all of a sudden you feel like…

[123:02] You're under the, you know, a lot of pressure to finish. So, one of the timers is… I think Landmarks uses a backwards timer. Countdown. Or… They use a one where you're not doing the countdown, and you're doing that, so it's not… it doesn't. Oh. as, what, negative influence? As far as… but we can put one up if that is okay with… if you're seeing that on the screen. That might be helpful. Also, maybe, Kalani, if you could… if you make in the… If we have, like, a, A chat that goes to the… Just the panelists. I wish I could… here's my… I wish I could just chat make a group of the board members, but once we allow an applicant to present, they are a panelist. And so if I say, all panelists, any of the chat goes to everybody. Right. And so,

[124:03] I'm happy to… if we wanna… if you want to delegate a person that's a timekeeper on the board for that meeting, I can chat them. instead of chatting you, Brendan, because I know it's hard to juggle all that. Like, before, I was chatting Rory to remind you. Yeah. Of the time. That's an option we could also do. I mean, maybe we'll be… maybe it'll be fine, maybe it's a non-issue. Yeah. I have no problem with somebody saying, Steven, shut up, it's like, you've… Got 30 seconds left. But some people do. Some people are, like, really offended by that. I'm not, like, just… Harriet, you need to jump as well. Yeah, I need to jump, sorry. All right. Thank you, we'll see you in December. Sounds good, bye. Have a good trip. Thanks. So… You know, and maybe the way to handle that is, just at the… before you start the discussion, let us know if you want the timer, or, you know, but you can let me know during our agenda meeting, too. We could do it differently.

[125:07] So we've lost our quorum. Yeah. We didn't need a quorum for a matters item, but I will… I've got this in here as the roll call of the DAB members, intro to the number, and then what would just be as the review… Would be going over the review criteria. review criteria, and then you have the… you have the criteria review, breakdown, kind of, And then you have the summary recommendation. Recommendation? And then you have the, At the end, what did you call the one last time was? Like, just… Concluding remarks. 30 remarks, yeah. And then you have concluding remarks. And… And I like that.

[126:00] And that's done by who? That's, like, whoever wants to… We went… we went person by person. So that's a roll call, again. And then, we just need the thing on, I don't know if you need to formally recognize your parking lot or not, or just… it's just the board knows and just say, hey, that's a parking lot item. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fine. You can do that during matters. You could do the parking lot, just as a note. We don't want to review everything, but you might want to say, hey, I've got 3 parking lot items that I'm adding to our list. Hindo. People put parking lot items in the chat. they can't… like, you guys can chat each other, just know that all of the chat is, is Quora-able. So whatever chat you're chatting through there that you can pull in, that's a record, that's a meeting, official meeting record. But also… someone's gonna need to pull those out of the chat, so… from your group. So, Steven, if they want to just send you one through the chat…

[127:02] what's it, what's easy. That works. Yeah. You can let folks know, to send them to you in the chat at the beginning of the meeting. Yeah, I'll think about… Okay. Easiest way. I'm bad at typing while I'm thinking. Yeah, no, it's a thing. It's real. It's a lot of multitasking happening. So, I think that that's… that's what we have here, is concluding remarks here, summary recommendation. I'll send this out, just as a note for the meeting. Tonight, just to have, because it's just this first section is the structure. And. Yeah, maybe the concluding remarks could be… you know, each DAB member's, like. priority issue, or what… you know, if there's… if there's one issue, like, I really think this south elevation

[128:05] Needs to be studied, or whatever, but… And then that would help. Sort of, really drill in the actionable items that we would like to see. I would say, too, for the concluding remarks, is one of the ways to control this portion of time is just, when you get here, is to mark that time. Like, you could let folks know. Both at the beginning, saying, hey, we've got these here, if we want to make an open design discussion, you know, format at the end to carve out some time. We've only been allocating, really, 10 minutes, so if folks need, you know, this needs to be more. But when you get to this portion, just going over the timestamp and go, okay, how much time do we actually have if we have another project coming up?

[129:01] Because we send, we send the time schedule to the applicant. So, okay, we think that you're gonna start at 5'10 type of thing. Give them a, like, we give them a ballpark. if they show up at 5, you know, thinking they're gonna start around that time, and they don't start till 5.30 or 6, and we're running over. Right. Yeah, that's not fair on them. So that's one thing I would do, is right at the end, and it's good to have the reminder at the beginning, because it's an eyes on the prize, like, if people really want to do that. To make this discussion period very, you know, concise. Yeah. Or maybe it's… maybe it's really just that, like. A quick concluding remark and, you know, a design discussion item that you think is priority. Yeah. It's burning a hole in someone's pocket the whole… Right. old projects, right?

[130:02] Well, and if we do our homework, you know, it might be like, I don't really care about those four criteria, that fifth one's my… thing that I'm gonna comment mostly on, or something. Yeah. Thanks. Exactly, and that's the benefit of, like, a kind of a… that's why you get the packet a week early now. Yeah. Instead of the week of? Is to really see if there's… do you have a lot of input, or is it something that you feel, you know, doesn't need a lot of input? So, plenty of prep time for it. I don't know if there was anything else in here, I feel like… Yeah, and then it was just, like, board matters, calendar check, and… Oh, yeah. Okay, Okay, and this one is… Wait, hold on… Discussion board matters… So this is the parking lot stuff, too. Parking lot, no?

[131:03] And then, calendar check and conclude. That's it? Awesome. Cool. I think that looks good. This was helpful. I'm glad of that. Yeah. Good use of time, since you didn't have a design review. Yeah. What I'll do is… On board. Okay, great. I will send this out as, meeting notes for this tonight, because there's no… there's no minutes. It's just the matters item. But this is kind of the notes for the structure, and you'll get it in an email, along with a secondary email on the… The council letter, and then the homework portion to prep yourself for the letter, how to have that discussion. Then I will… I'll probably talk to you, Brendan, before then, because I don't know how many projects we're also juggling November. So, we might have a dual discussion of… Projects and council stuff.

[132:00] Yeah, I mean, in count… I mean, in my mind, if the council letter needs to be individual homework, and the, you know, need of the discussion happens in December, then we just need to be disciplined to do that. Yeah, that's… I think that's fine. And I'm happy to send out, you know, past letters or, you know, as an example of what we talked about, but… Yeah, we can bundle that up with the homework stuff that they have, is the. Yeah, that would be… that would be awesome. Okay. Yep. Alright, I will send this to you. maybe we gotta figure out a way to send it in a unique way to the council, like… Harry Potter Owl or something, so they really get it. Oh, God. It came on a memo this time, it's like an actual official memo kind of format, so… We'll attach their memo to your letter. I don't know.

[133:00] That's part of that whole thing, so… I mean, and I suggested a coffee. You would be… maybe… It would be better to write to the planning board, or somebody that is a little… more related to what we do, you know? I don't know. Bye. Damn. Parking lot, I'll just parking lot that. parking lot that way. I appreciate you guys' time tonight. Thanks for letting us go over this. Do we still officially adjourn? Is that… Yeah, I think this meeting… It's a wrap. I second that. Okay, awesome. Alright, thank you. Thanks, everybody. Hi. Have a good night. Bye.