January 14, 2025 — Downtown Management Commission Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] Recording. All right. Today is Tuesday, January 14, th 2025. Welcome to the downtown Management Commission meeting. I will call Roll Erica Dahl. She's here. Online thumbs up. Okay, great Justin, Calvin Andy. Nathan is not here. Don Poe and Stephanie treats here great. I will now hand the proceedings over to the chair. Don for Yeah. Okay. Great, thank you. do you have any members of the public? We do not at this. So we 1st have to do approval of the minutes. Would someone like to move anything of that? We're here a second great? Then I see. We moved one of our meetings in November to just before

[1:02] Halloween. So we can dress that. Sure. Yeah, I have not moved it yet. I wanted to make sure everyone was aware and get approval of it. But November 11th is Veterans Day. So we were looking at moving it to October 28, th is it still? Tuesday? It's yes. Still, Tuesday. Got any plans? Yeah. Okay. Great sounds like, that's all. Okay. I jumped the gun a little bit of public participation, just because I wanted to see if anyone's here. Has anyone joined since? Moving on to the consent agenda topics will not be discussed unless there are questions I missed last time. I do have a couple of minor questions. But does anyone else have questions? Other things on the agenda. Erica? I'll try to keep calling out to you, but feel free to go off mute at some point if you need

[2:00] go ahead after. Oh, you want me to reverse. Okay. the question about the commutify pilot, are we still in pilot phase? We are through 25 through 2025. Yeah. Okay. And then, when will we be hearing on another round of evaluation? I imagine. Probably mid year. We'll start doing some survey data and analysis. Present that to you all and talk about next steps. Okay? And then for the outdoor dining pilot. Is that also you? Okay? Says that you'll be making some recommendations to council in 2025. Will you be bringing those to us 1st to discuss? And when do you think that might be so? I'm going to give you all an update today on the outdoor dining program, and a lot of that will include our recommendations for program improvements, including what we're going to bring to council, which ultimately will be the code change is what we're recommending to make the program permanent. Okay.

[3:11] one of those water slides water science team. Yes. It helps. And then my 3rd question is about the Boulder Arts blueprint project. I can answer questions. Is there going to be a forum for Dmc. To participate in the say any phases. So we don't have that scheduled in. There's lots of public opportunities which we'll share. But I'll put forward that request. Let me be piggybacks on one of our priorities is kind of having summits with other groups, and we talked about it. But I didn't know, can we make any movement on that? And I think the 1st thing would be coming up with agenda points, and what we would want to cover and have other groups come up with agenda points.

[4:08] But I would love to do that, and have, like a bigger summit of missions, that kind of touch each other. Sure. So the city has done joint commission meetings before. It doesn't lead from individual departments, though it's something that comes from the city clerk's office, usually at the request of City Council, saying, Hey, would it be great if the Boulder Valley Comp plan had a joint meeting of all these commissions that had input to that particular topic. So it's not. It's not something that comes as a request of an individual commission. We, in community vitality could see some synergies between the commissions that we're as up to, particularly when it comes to general improvement district Manager. Not necessarily the Arts Commission. And again, so those typically come as a request from city manager's office, city clerk's office or council.

[5:04] So it's certainly been done before can be done. When that's the advice that Staff needs. It's more efficient to do it that way. Does that make sense? So do you? Maybe a second question is, do you think that the Dmc. Has any role in arts in the downtown? Or is that solely like a very separate process where we would legislatively no, legislatively, not although if there are, you know, opportunities for recommendations for leveraging Cajun capital dollars toward a subset of the community cultural plan, which is a citywide plan or blueprint. Then there could be some, you know, a subset component. But Dmc. As the advisors for cager to both influencer and include

[6:01] okay, well, if not influence, which is fine if we don't to be like, maybe informed, or might make sense when it just it intersects. And I was thinking of like the civic center like, we don't have any authority there influence, but we've been informed at key points. So if not, you know part of the process, then to be informed about it, because it's hopefully we'll have a big impact on the look and feel the downtown. That's 1 of our at least. I listed that as one of my priorities. Yeah. So like I said, I'll definitely share all the engagement opportunities. I'll bring this up with the team. One thing, though, I do want to say is in the future, when anything just like in the past, with anything directly related to your business, like the sculpture and spruce you'll you'll be involved. That's gonna continue for sure. So when we get specific, we'll be engaged. And so I'll find out the ways that

[7:10] the you know the general strategy there for changing properties in particular? Yeah, yeah. Sounds good. One of my questions was around the downtown maintenance process reviewed. And does that include the planning improvements that have been going on for speeding people through site reviews and code revisions and stuff like that. So same words being used. Process improvement completely different. framework and and set of of requests that we're getting from businesses related to just the overall look and feel of downtown in general

[8:02] and maintenance of infrastructure that's sometimes owned and maintained by transportation, mobility, sometimes parts of work, parts of rec sometimes community vitality for caged owned buildings, and the general public doesn't know where the boundaries are between individual ownership. And there are efficiencies that we're working across departments to identify ways to make sure that the any work that needs to be happening when it comes to downtown maintenance is getting to the right person as efficiently as possible and reasonable, so that things get taken care of to hopefully meet as many people's expectations as possible, knowing that it is impossible to meet the expectations of everyone. Christine, do you have anything to add on that? Christine has taken the leadership in that cross departmental conversation to identify the levels of service for all these different levels.

[9:02] It feels like the majority of it. We're still, in fact, finding moment, and we'll be communicating. I think I heard that the Chamber and Ddp. Are going to be helping to have conversations with business owners downtown. So yeah, we're setting up those meetings so similar in the sense that there are folks in the community who are wanting the city to move quicker on certain things, very different in the sense of what's in. Digital maybe one piece of feedback. I've heard anecdotally from our meetings that how planning has. I know I'm changing topics for maintenance from what you're doing, Christine. but as a business owner. Now I really appreciate my chair, my seat here being a business owner downtown and having to go through leasing, and I've got people who are interested in my properties, and I've lost one of them because they were intimidated by the site review process. And I've heard that's been approved, and

[10:07] I forgot I haven't seen it, because I haven't had to go through it. My leasing agent hasn't seen it with the improvements. can we? Maybe this is some feedback to the planning department, and I'm doing the best I can. You're making some noise, but this kind of gets to everything we need to do for downtown, for how we have so many vacancies. Can you do any case studies of like how it's better so. Everyone has an experience for the city. And we've all seen the newspaper articles about how it's been hard and long, and people have waited 18 months this time. Can we get some case studies on the website. So we popularize how easy it is now, and all the changes. So people are less intimidated to enter into the process. We can certainly elevate the question to our friends over in plan development services and see if they have any easy response. Because I guarantee you that's not the 1st time that they've heard the feedback.

[11:04] and so they might, but no one knows that. And so people are still scared to start. And I lost a lease because of it. Yeah. So moving, Erica, did you have anything else for consent? Agenda? No, I don't think so. But yeah, I think anytime they say something's better. It's always nice to find out exactly how who's defining how it's better. Now the current financials and sales tax report. That would be pages like 17. So right? Yep. what does? Page 17. Specifically, what does spending performance mean? We will pass that one over to Elliot. Did you hear the question, Elliot? Yes, I did. So you're talking about in regards to the bar that bar graph there on that front page of the report.

[12:06] Yeah, I just wanted to define the term. So I know what I'm looking at. Yeah, that's great. So one of the main reasons we do this is we wanna with the appropriation process, and how funds are allocated from kind of the the government public sector side of things. Part of our performance is measured on how much can we actually spend due to the fact that we need to make sure that when we're doing the budgeting process, we're doing it accurately. and it correctly reflects what the public should expect in terms of the level of service, and also the amount of spend that we can provide in terms of our capital efforts, but also in our operating projects. We kind of consider that a performance metric. And that's why we use the term spend performance. And so when you're looking at this graph in each of the the work areas of community vitality, our goal is to get to 100%.

[13:04] This includes both non personnel and personnel expenses. So if we have vacancies in a work group that's going to impact our ability to get to 100 spending performance for that work group in the downtown district. So this is how much you've met your budget, how much of our budget we have exactly. So our district management, we're at 50%. Yeah. So that goes back to our, I'm sorry. What was that. But normally, you'd want to be at a hundred percent for because that's what's your goal to do. Stuff like. Yep, and we've we've been working with Rtd, a lot of that is our Rtd ecopass contract for the businesses. and with the changes that they've implemented over the years. We've been pretty conservative in making sure that we have enough allocation there to appropriately fund that program. And each year we're just not seeing the ridership. Come in. So the cost has actually been a little bit lower. Than what we've been budgeting. So

[14:05] good news is is, we do have some capacity to look at those unspent dollars to program otherwise. But that's 1 of the main reasons why you see, our district management so low on the customer service side of things. A large portion of that is credit card fees. So we have not been charged. Those credit card fees for the end of the year, so that may go up a little bit, being, as it's just January 14th but the credit card fees also decreased substantially because of our transition to metropolis. So a huge portion of our expenses were those credit card fees in our garages. Cause we were paying those. And now, metropolis, of course, passes those on, so you'll see a little bit of a reflection of that in our revenues. well, I should say you should see it. It would be greater increase in revenues. Had we also separated the expenses of credit card fees, too. So that was something that happened in late 23 and the 24 budget was already solidified. So that's 1 of the reasons why there's a a decrease in expenses there in customer service.

[15:18] I would also note that district funds any unspent district funds just go back to the fund balance for that fund. So these are caged dollars. Those unspent dollars mean that they're just exactly in the future. It's not like there, we didn't spend them, and now they're gone and lost to other exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yep. Maybe one other question while I'm talking. Next page 18, basically, the bottom line make a material building and building equipment basically in the scheme of things. It's not a lot, but of everything that one doubled is that because of the flooding and all that stuff we had.

[16:01] The breeze. Yeah. Yep. So big portion of that. It's actually much greater than that. That's just one of those bottom lines happens to be at the bottom of the report numbers. If you were to filter that by percent used, you'd see a few other categories that were very overspent because of the freeze event. Fortunately we had enough in appropriation that we did not have to worry about trying to get an adjustment to base in that 24 fiscal year. And that's in part due to some of the savings we saw on some of the other programs. And then on page 20, right column next to bottom line 42, 0, 4, 7, 5. Miscellaneous Parking charge, No. Bottom, one very bottom. Miscellaneous revenues budgeted to have 65 k. In revenue, and we ended up with half a million dollars in revenue.

[17:05] That one was really nice We need. Yeah, what's your secret? No. So so this this kind of harkens to the limitations we have with in our old accounting system. We didn't really have anywhere to put basically what we're expense recoveries, government accounting. We have to apply them as revenues, even though they are expense recoveries. And that in particular is a lot of the Saint Julian. contributions back to our capital projects. So we paid in full all of the capital repairs of the Saint Julian and Saint Julian then reimbursed us. So really it's an expense recovery. But for government accounting purposes it shows up as revenue.

[18:01] If we could go back one page. There's also in the Budgets column on the right there is an unknown category, and it's not just things without a budget code associated with it. But it's a. Yeah, that's negative. A $149,000. So so that's again, a little bit of our accounting system. I'll spare you the the sausage being made here, but in a nutshell it's the encumbrances, and how they get calculated they get double counted, and if we don't pull in the unknown column. It artificially inflates the budget. So we want to make sure we always pull in all of those things. So it is predominantly caged that comes out of that. That picture I believe I showed you, and I'm trying to remember if I filtered. No, I did not. That's across all of our funds.

[19:00] So some of that is split elsewhere. But the the 2.8 million dollars that is available is an accurate number. If you include the unknowns which are just accounting bookkeeping records. So this is the last time you're going to see this report in this format. As of was it last week or this last week? Yeah. It's a. Do workday financials. So we will have a whole new reporting system. Once we get our workday reporting figured out. So did you change your chart of accounts in the process. We did but a lot of. So we were a little ahead of the game, the way we created our programs within our chart of accounts in our old financial system is really how we wanted it to look across programs and going forward. We really did a good job of making sure that they map well to the new. And it's they they don't use the word chart of accounts anymore. It's now called Fdm foundations data module.

[20:11] and it is still lined up via program. So we'll still be able to report on how much we spend for the administrative program or the customer service program or those types of things. So we'll still be have like, for like in terms of the narrative, and as as well as the budget numbers so that's good. So it's more on the back end. Things that you won't see. But the report will look different just because we don't have the integration with power bi anymore. So DVD, hoping to to produce a nice report for you all that gets you some high level, and I'd like to pull back in some of the fund financials as well. So you guys can kind of see what the Overall Fund health is year to date. So. hoping to get some of that included here in the next Commission meeting.

[21:04] Do you have any concerns in the budget? Is there anything you can really flag. No no, I To my own horn here. Oh, I'm gonna to community vitalities. Horn we we obviously, as Chris said, all of our district funds. We we really are conscious about the money we spend and how it gets spent. And you know, it's it's all for lack of a better term dedicated to the efforts that community vitality puts forth. That, said the general fund, is that pot of money that is kind of for everybody, and we ask for money from the general fund for those citywide efforts, and if we don't spend it, it goes back to the general fund. That means we don't ever get it again. It just means it goes back to the general fund. But we did a outstanding job this year. We spent 99.0 4% out of the general fund, which was a huge effort from our staff. And that's that's the only thing that I would say, that is a little outside of this report. That's very noteworthy.

[22:12] For multiple purpose. I have a question about the sales tax section on 23. Question, not about the numbers. But I was separately reading about the prime effect and the like estimated impact with like some examples from the downtown that Costa Jay thought their business got better, or something like that. It's just like it's just there seems to be. If I'm reading this correctly disconnect between the number cited in some of these reports by, I don't know if it's chamber and like what's seen in the sales tax number. So curious about. Maybe we just haven't seen it yet. It's just September or not really felt in the downtown. What do you think? Too early? There's such a latent well, so we'll learn more, and the games were put. There was a big gap between the 1st game and the second home game this year. So the schedule

[23:20] this year for for games was a bit different. So we're gonna see some impacts there. So it's too early to say, since this only goes through September hopefully. And October might also not look great because we had less games in October than we did last year. If I recall correctly. I don't know if that was last year's number. So maybe it's based on last year. Okay. 23 was a very strong year. Sales tax wise and we had coach prime here for that. So it's it was a tough year to compete with inflation, slowing down which one way we're happy about that. But when sales tax is a percentage based game when folks are

[24:09] not spending more than they were the previous year. Then you're going to see that play out in sales tax. Yeah. No. Oh, go ahead. Don. Well, it seems like we're close for pre pandemic, but still below, especially considering inflation overall. Yes, which the team, I'm sure you see. or Pasta. J is the signal. So We'll add a chart here for Pasta j's year over year. Performance. Anything else on finance, on financials.

[25:02] moving on to agent visitation reports. I love looking at all this, but I think I need specific questions I was gonna ask a more scheduled question, did that data is good? But like, what? What actionable insights as this produced? Yeah, what have we done with it as a tech company founder myself, who always has suggested by Roi. I'm curious about what the Roi is from the Placer AI work like. What can we? What has been acted upon, and what can be acted upon to answer that question? Sure, can't ask the question. Happy to speak to it, I mean, 1st of all, say, our base rate investment at this point is $20,000 a year between well, actually, the parks and row paid for it this past year. So this year. So 2025. Your plan is to split the expense with the city manager's office, and that $20,000 gets everyone at the city

[26:14] eligible for a login. So it's not just limited to this work group. It's it's the whole city. Anybody who wants to start using this tool. So we see it as pretty worthwhile. But as long as we're using it, and how's it translating into action? And so one element is looking at trends over time to understand. How do we better connect perception versus reality of the sky is falling, and doom and gloom? And where, where should we actually be focusing? I'd say that our analysis of the downtown, when we look at the West End, Pearl Street, Mall, and the East End footfalls that we have some some data that tells us where we should probably be focusing marketing campaigns, activation efforts, things to to.

[27:02] You know, when we're working with the downtown boulder partnership on how we want to prioritize campaign or special events. These, this has been very okay. Thank you. It's much more expensive for private operators. And they do. Yeah, provide this pretty affordably for the public sector. Cool. Okay. Any old time pleaser, moving on to the Quarterly Perks and rep update Denise. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for inviting me. I am Denise Dawson. I am the senior urban parks manager for parks and recreation, and Christine had asked me to. I think back in November it's gonna come and get like an

[28:08] like an overall like Pearl Street Ball Park Office Review. For last year. So it's gonna be short and sweet. 1st thing I wanted to touch on is just our staffing levels. Just so that, you know, people are aware some questions do come up about that. We have 4 full time staff positions for our Pearl Street park operations team. And currently, right now, 3 of them are built. We have a lead tech. And then we have 2 technicians. We have one vacancy. So if you get anybody knows or anybody that wants to work on Pearl Street and Park operations. And typically in the summer we hire anywhere from 4 to 7 seasonal staff to help out in summer, primarily doing trash duties and stuff like that this past summer. I believe we had 5. So that's really helpful for coverage on the weekends to help us keep the area nice and clean.

[29:03] Another thing I want to touch on very quick. It's just our operations. We have our normal routine operations, which is, you know, our daily trash removal, landscaping. And then we also have our more reactive stuff. But for our routine operations this year we kind of tracked our hours to try to be more accurate with how? You know, Staff are spending their time and what we are actually doing in our system and for that. For our irrigation. We spent approximately 715 h last year doing irrigation work, and this includes monitoring repairs, fixing stuff for just for the Pearl Street. Like All Street, can you see the number? 715 h hours there? Yes, and for the irrigation, for like the flower beds and stuff. And that's just the 4 blocks mall, not entire. Yeah. Yeah. And they run irrigation from 9th all the way to 18th along the Pearl Street Mall, along Pearl Street. So that's just on 4 blocks. And what's interesting to kind of touch back on that place your AI data.

[30:17] Pearl Street. That little section that park operations takes care of is our highest post visited site in our system with 1.6 million visitors last year. And on average, if I if I read it right, they people typically stay around an hour like 60 min when they're down there. So it's a lot of people in a small spot. It's like, how would you spend that much time? Well, there's lines. There's irrigation lines, there's back loads. There's the irrigation clocks that need pre-programmed. There's a lot of stuff that goes into the irrigation and the horticulture. So the planting, the pruning, the weeding. It takes up even way. More time. That's a thousand 788 h that our staff is down there, and that's not including the outside yet.

[31:05] and that's great. Another another big thing that we spend time on down there is obviously trash. This back down there spend approximately 1,580 h last year. Trash! So that's doing the trash cans picking up ground trash. It also includes, like blowing up the sidewalk and throwing out the sun bricks as well. And then that's just our normal daily, weekly annual stuff that we do. And then we have our more reactive stuff, which is like our the inquire Holder request. So you know, we'll get the Crm. That come in for the removal vandalism. And how does your team work organized with the baskets. That's what I was gonna ask. We do work with the ambassadors. I've only personally been with the city for 6 months. I do know that we work with the ambassadors. We work with rangers as well, and try to help coordinate together our our downtown park, offer our downtown parks supervisor as quarterly meetings with their

[32:07] coordinate more and talk and like, let each other know about upcoming projects are but like it sounds like there's a lot of graffiti that everyone's working on it. Yes, okay, yeah. Yep. And last year we had a hundred 15 inquire builder requests, and that does not include all the forestry requests. Those go through our forestry group and so separately. So we had 150 requests on stuff like the graffiti, the vandalism and safety hazards, you know, like one that we had come in recently, was a bold on a bench, and somebody noticed they're like, Oh, this is a snake, somebody, and we truly appreciate when that stuff comes in, because sometimes we don't see it, there's a lot of benches. And then I just want to get some of these statistics just because I think they're they're fun and unique to our system, unique to Pearl Street. Our team, you know, they had 70 hanging flower baskets that they watered and maintained. Last year they installed 2. Well, they replaced 2 drinking fountains.

[33:08] They standed, and we finished at 53 benches along the wall. which I mean, when you think of just that small spot. That's a lot of stuff, a lot of work, and a lot of people that go into making it look like a great place. And then also, when I was prepping for this, I reached out to our volunteer Services Supervisor with Parks and Rec. Because we do get quite a few volunteers which are usually appreciated, and they help with our flower planting. So last year we had 50 volunteers. That did our flower planting and tulip planting, which is nice, and then that totaled about 150 volunteer hours. And then another thing that I want to touch base on as well, because, you know. it's not all just about flowers on Pearl Street. We do get snow. So we had 23 snowshots last year, which is way less than what we had the previous year in 2023, I think there was like 50, something

[34:03] for snow. Yeah. And we're getting snow later this week. So our crews are getting ready for that. And then this is just A picture that actually got from our volunteer supervisor of our great, some of our great volunteers, and planting flowers on pearl streets. question about the snow like on the like a lot of other side streets. It's the property owner, Shovel. I assume. The Mall itself is handled by the city. Not there. Yup! Yup, we have a crew that's down there. Usually, you know, this year we haven't. But yeah, we're gonna do that very different question that maybe maybe someone can answer just boulder. I know we have trouble with enforcing

[35:04] punishment of petty crimes. Do we have any community service volunteer programs that support this? There's like a lot of picture, a lot of volunteers who didn't do anything wrong. Also. they're just volunteering their time. But like curious, if there's any community active like community service programs that help with some of these manual labor tasks that are typically part of service program. We do have some groups that we work with to get. You know, some help in those areas. They help them out with the trash pickup as well. So we do work with some organizations, but not like people locally. I can offer a little bit of insight if it's helpful. The person that has a partnership with ready to work. and they come out, I believe, 3 to 4 days a week, so they'll come out. They'll help remove trash. They'll help with snow mitigation, mitigation, and they're part of our quarterly operations meeting with parks and recs Christine, city parks and Rec staff and transportation. And it's part of a team effort is that what's what's ready to work like mission or like.

[36:20] I think, like work, release. I think, technically, yes, people coming out of homelessness and like stabilizing. So okay. he has to help grow. Okay, which is also great. I was curious about the course community service part. If we do that. Yeah, I feel like there's only one volunteer Coordinator, Boulder parks and Rec. And I don't know. Coordinate all volunteer at that level. That's that's a big level. But I was just curious about

[37:03] weather. We do know there other ways. That putting jail is not an option and isn't a good option. I think it's brand new question. You know it. And thank you guys for giving me the opportunity to kind of talk about our cool. Thank you. Big deal. Wait. I have a I have a question. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Okay, so I I feel like I bring this up on every board. So I'm on the 1,100 block. and I know we have bears a bear situation. But the trash cans I'm always customers are like, it's crazy. You guys don't have trash cans here like, I would think you guys would have trash cans here. I keep going over to these black things, and they're not trash cans. And I've kind of talked to some people about it. And I think ultimately we've concluded that they're too pretty, that they're too nice. And people will. They kind of look like newspaper stands because we spent all this money to use these like 19 hundreds images. So I feel like sometimes just people. Customers will be like, I've been carrying this ice cream container for 3 blocks looking for trash.

[38:25] and I know it used to say landfill, and I think maybe they went back and started saying trash, because that was a confusion, too. But I am. It is just something that I'm always trying to bring up, because I'm like when customers come into my store I'm like. Is that trash? Do you want me to throw that away for you because you're never going to find the trash can. So I'm just wondering if you ever get that kind of feedback from anybody. Have not gotten that yet. That doesn't mean that that has not been given to somebody else like downtown.

[39:01] I I have. I have heard that feedback. I think you know, one data metric is that we do have to empty those trash cans on a very consistent basis. So some people are finding their way to them. I do do agree that the black and white sometimes can fade off into the background. And we could have a whole graduate level seminar on trash can signage, and I would be happy to leave it because one of my pretty, because my kids are always touching them. Maybe we need to do like a vinyl wrap that looks like it's trashine. Do you want to speak to Big Valley trash can replacement. So we are working on district vitality and the maintenance team and partnering to put all new big belly trash cans up on the hill. So this does not impact this group. Yet it's not an inexpensive endeavor. So we're going to start with the hill, test it out. Make sure that we then they are sturdy enough

[40:13] to survive what goes on on the hill, and if they aren't sturdy enough there, they should be sturdy enough here, and then we can work that into future budgets for trash. And these trash cans are they're resistant. Yeah, they also. So they meet those requirements. Yes, so that you don't have to touch anything with your. Yeah, cause it's so. Nasty. They look like trash cans. And so we're hopeful that because we do hear that feedback. So we're working with, they're going to be delivered on Friday for the hill. Check out the hill trash cans, and let us know your thoughts, and they should be installed over the next 3 weeks. So the other, the challenge with the hill trash cans is, we don't have parks and recreation, we do. They have the ambassadors, but those trash cans on the hill get used, so they are not.

[41:14] They won't like touching very much, so we're glad to be able to offer offer the foot pedal opening, so people don't have to touch the trash can in order to throw their trash out. Okay. Cool. Yeah, I was gonna say, on my personal Instagram account, I have a featured stories that's called trash trash cans of Planet Earth, where I take pictures of trash cans everywhere I go, so. Oh, cool Hi, guys. Have a new follower anyway. Great to be here. Happy New Year! Everybody started our year off strong, and I did send over a presentation.

[42:02] Bring that up for us. Thank you. Thank you, Julie. I'm so glad I got to follow that, because, you know, one of the things that we've really been working on over the last quarter and and really, I think since I got here, it's trend since Christine got in her role is trying to just figure out and catalog who is responsible for all of the different aspects of maintaining our downtown. And it's incredibly complicated and layered as and, as you can see, it just requires countless hours that you then try to count and tabulate. And so, you know, she we also kind of share the credit for all of the activities in a lot of different ways. You know, there's a slide about giving away the tulip bowls. Well, they couldn't do that tulip giveaway without us coordinating through the businesses. So it really is truly a partnership, and we're grateful for all of the work that everybody does. So my report I will just share with you. A little bit on our pedestrian accounts. The next slide.

[43:05] These are just for October. -Oh! Oh, that's prettier than my slide. So it's it's super interesting for us to see. The pedestrian counts alongside the voice of data, and I think we'll continue as we sort of dive in and figure out they are indeed we have. We have cameras, and they they're not taking pictures of your face. They're just taking a football count of when you walk. So it's actually a pedestrian impression. So it's a little bit disingenuous because Tina Swigger, for example, walks up and down like 60 times a day pretty much. Just yeah. Looking at all the trash cans. No. I bet that it is inclusive of people who are walking multiple times. So the placer AI has a little bit more depth and detail. And that's why we think it's important to be able to see both.

[44:03] But the pedestrian also isn't counting people who might be getting on their bikes. They're they're literally on foot at 3 different camera locations in the downtown so we can capture the West End, the center of the Mall and exiting the extension. It's been really helpful for us to look at year over year traffic and it's also super helpful when we're trying to invite sponsors to come in and help us with our events, because we can say, Hey, you're gonna have 15,000 people downtown when it's the Pearl Street Arts fest, or you're gonna have, you know, 30,000 people when it's the lunchbox, or what have you? So we did see a little bit of a decrease October November to November. December was up a little bit, because no December was down a little bit but year to date. We were up. I think that's in part due to some weather stuff that we're talking about, where they didn't have as many snow clearings. We didn't have those terrible snowstorms in late November early December that just kind of shut down downtown. So we keep track of that, and we love to see how it works with our partners who are gathering data for placer

[45:10] on the next slide. We wrapped up our 2024. So Holder marketing brand campaign and we tied it this year at the last quarter to a lot of holiday marketing. So we had. You know, winter winter wonderland puffer jackets. That's so bold. Winter campaign, the Commercial. I think I showed that to you at the last meeting that we had. And we've had some really good traction. Our click through rate on all of our digital advertising has been really strong. We also did a bunch of TV advertising, and that, yeah, I'm responsible for all the success. No, this is just from our our media agency. They they show us all the different metrics. We push out our marketing materials primarily to the local community and to Metro Denver. And then we rely on our partnership with visit folders to reach the rest of the State. And then to do beyond that

[46:16] you can go to the next one. This is again, just some more information about our website and the click through rates on our program, specifically looking at Denver and Boulder. So our fall creative did really well. And our winter creative also did really. Well, we're just leveraging our dollars and using our organic social media to push that message out as much as we can. You can go to the next slide. I'm gonna go through this pretty quick here. This is again about outdoor campaigns and events, and then on the next one, I sent all this out with your packet. This is more about the brand new hot off the presses 2025 Pearl Street Mall downtown boulder Guide. So this just got delivered on Monday morning. We have 25,000 copies distributed. This is a mix of promoting businesses in downtown. And also there's a little bit of paid advertising in here for people who want to be showcased above and beyond.

[47:25] We distribute these at the Visitor Center, at hotels, around the front range, in Boulder and in Denver, and then we also have a partnership with the Colorado Tourism Office, and we get about 100 inquiries a week for people who want to get a copy of this, and we send it in the mail to them, so I'm super excited about it. It's great. I am. And we also want to just call out specifically, there's a little choose your own adventure kind of scavenger hunt that you can do. And thanks to the city for offering a little promotion. So we want, we'd like to encourage people to, even if they're not. Tourists. Take a copy of this, and maybe put it in your business. Give it to your local people. Give it to your friends who might be visiting. We found in our intercept survey that the number one reason people come here

[48:17] on vacation is word of mouth to visit a friend or family. So it's always good to just have one of these in the back or on your person. so you can spread the propaganda everywhere. You go on the next slide. Just a little bit more about how we we do this work. Already said that. Then we can go into the next slide our social media continues to perform really, really well. We've got 33,000 followers on Instagram, 32,000 followers on Facebook. And like, I said, we have a lot of paid meta ad placement that we work with our branding campaign and on our events.

[49:04] We are admired by other cities. I will. I will put it that way. Yeah, we we do pretty well. I think there's room to grow particularly on Instagram, because that seems to be sort of the the site is growing the fastest right now. We launched a Tiktok channel, and that has about 1,500 subscribers. That'll now be canceled, so I don't know if we're going to be moving over to the Communist right now version, but not a good thing to talk about. Probably not. But we really are always trying to be in touch with the latest trends and and we know we just have great. We have people get really excited about it. There's a lot of see you boulder alumni especially, who engage with our social media kind of as like a nostalgia for wanting to come back. even if they don't live in boulder necessarily good because it's modern. not intentionally. But, baby, what do you mean?

[50:03] Do you remember wins. And here's that Paul Danish article with I don't know. That's awesome for that engagement stuff posting pictures of like. Here's a remember went back in 84. And here's pictures from that day and throwback throwbacks. Yeah, you know, it was this way. Now then, here it is now. totally. I'm sure we do I think we partner with the museum folder, too, like sometimes they are in the store folder. They'll they'll post poster. They'll post old photos right here. Oh, there you go on. The Berger, page 14 and 15. Pedestrian stops then. And now. yeah, I'm just thinking of ideas to totally help them engage in totally appreciate that.

[51:01] I will share that with our with our social media coordinator. We also have really good traction with our newsletters, or click through rates on our newsletters. We send a lot of them forward, facing to customers, and also internally to communicate with our businesses, so takes a lot of time and a lot of energy. Any questions I have. What about the gift cards like? Why, there's what was with the October. Huge, massive increase. The gift cards. Yes. Okay. So the gift cards basically always start to ramp up in October, and then in November and December they go up November. It was actually a little bit lower year over year, and then in December it went way up. We sold $88,000 worth of gift cards in December. and so that's a lot of fulfillment. We at hand process every single one, either at the visitor center at our front desk. Interestingly, on the gift card tip. We asked our gift card vendor what the outstanding amount of gift card balances is out there in the community

[52:09] who wants to guess. Oh, a lot. $485,000. So I see that as as a person, people need to look in their wallets. Yeah. And come downtown and spend that because that is literally half a million dollars that we could be pumping into the local economy. No, it's just sitting. It's just sitting. It's just sitting. No, it's a credit card supplier. We work with a vendor. So that's yeah. Are you going to do a campaign to like. Spend your gift cards. We did. We did. We did a little social media post last week, and we're talking about. Yeah, I saw that.

[53:00] But it's it's wild, and I mean I have a couple that I haven't spent so. And. Thank you. Yeah. Maybe businesses would also put up signs. You know, he's like I have gift cards, and they're like sitting in my house because I can't fit in my phone wallet. And then I like never. Maybe I only have this problem I like never forget. I always forget to bring them. All the companies out there love gift cards because people buy them and never use them. Yeah. It's a no need. Yeah, I'm sure they're not sitting in interest bearing accounts. We are going to be making a change to our gift card program in the summertime. We're going to wait till we get through the graduation season, because that's another time where a lot of people buy gift cards as gifts for their teachers or graduates. And then we're going to be changing vendors to a gift card vendor that is able to provide the digital version, and it'll also work with apple pay, and it'll do some more. 21st century kind of things that we're.

[54:04] Oh, that would be really nice! Yeah, we're excited. You can load it in your wallet. Exactly, so you won't have to worry about leaving it at home. Yeah, or losing it. And then selfishly, on our team. It means we won't have to be fulfilling the cards anymore. We will have an in person option, but the company will actually be printing those cards and mailing them instead of our staff doing it. So. Cool. Able to spend things on our time on other things like beautifying and enhancing the downtown. Let's go on to the next slide here. I wanted to just make you aware that we partnered with visit Boulder on a survey of the restaurants in Boulder, and this is a citywide survey, not just downtown boulder. But we wanted to do this because we were hearing from our restaurant community that they're feeling feeling the pinch. I'm sure this is going to be a surprise to anybody, but especially with

[55:00] minimum wage increase in the tip change, the tip credit being unchanged in the State of Colorado and the cost of inventory going up and people just dining out less. There are some concerns from the restaurant community, and we wanted to see how much of this is reality. What's the signal? What's the noise, and how we can come together to try to maybe help do some cross promotion and some marketing. So we did get 109 responses, which is pretty amazing for a survey. I'm not sure exactly how many businesses how many restaurants there are in Boulder, but this is a pretty significant chunk of them, I would imagine. The majority of the ones that responded are casual. Think so? Is it? Gonna little bit swap. This is an interesting sort of bell curve that you can see. How is your restaurants? Income changed year to date from 2023. Most of the people said stayed about the same, or decreased by less than 10%. So that's, you know, not a terrible margin. But it's also not like anybody's really ringing the bells about having a grand success. Now, on the next slide, you can see. We asked about the expenses, and this the expenses have increased by

[56:18] just over nobody's saying, oh, things cost less. So. That's a pretty clear signal to us that we We want to be really helpful for these businesses and encourage people to use their gift cards and go downtown. Even if they're doing a dry January, you can go out and have a mocktail. You can. Really, you're going to help support these local businesses that support that that employ neighbors. And all of this. And we have some data now to show it. The next slide. we can see there's the minimum wage increase and rising operational costs are the main concerns as well as an economic downturn and recession, and we want to acknowledge that there are always macroeconomic forces that we cannot be held responsible for as downtown boulder partnership, or even the city of Boulder. So that's a little bit out of our realm of control.

[57:14] But these other options are maybe specific to our area. One question on this slide, was it? I just didn't know. What other questions were these the only questions and they had to raise these? Or was that when I just think about the electrification process. It's going to be coming. Do they know about it? Were they concerned about it? We didn't. We didn't specifically put that on there because not yet. It's not yet. Yeah. So we're kind of trying to take like one problem at a time. We did not. I did not include all of the answers to the survey. These are just some select ones to give you all a sense of what am I at the time. And and I typically try not to do this but on this slide it would be interesting to know the percentage, because these are these are averages. Right? So it would be nice to know

[58:04] if the percentage of respondents who said Staffings is a 1 versus in one. It's it's just a little, and one is most concerning. So does that mean that the shorter bars are the more concerning things it one is more concerning 5 is least concerning right. So the most concerning things on here, then, are staffing and seasonal fluctuations. Right. It's a it's a little hard to understand what this slide is. Actually. oh, fine is the least I am going okay. Maybe I can follow up with you about that later. I don't have that on the top of my head, but that's a really good point. So the most concerning is staffing. Or maybe not, that's exactly.

[59:01] Or it could be that the yeah, I'm not sure. So that would be really helpful. Yep, noted, thank you, Chris. is there another slide? I'm gonna finish 3. So this one, we're saying, Okay, well, we know that we've identified some problems. What would you be interested in. How can we help? What's very cool is that people are interested in some kind of citywide restaurant work with restaurant, week or other dining promotion? We know that 1st bite didn't happen in 2024. I'm going to be meeting with the saver productions people in the next couple of weeks to see if there's any appetite of unintended to bring that back. We're not sure what that would obviously probably wouldn't be in the 1st quarter or anything. But if there is some kind of way to have that program come back, that would be great. What's rhyme with the taste to curl like the difference between a program like that. And

[60:01] so taste of pearl is it's actually a fundraising event for our organization. And that's 1 afternoon where you buy a wristband and you go into set, select locations and you get a taste of something, and a sip of something. 1st bite was to my understanding it was more of a like a restaurant week promotion, where each restaurant would offer a different menu at it like a prefix kind of a thing. And it was just a way to build enthusiasm of the restaurant is that, has anyone done 1st fight? Bring it correctly, sounds cool. Yeah, yeah, it's been around. It was around for a really long time. But yeah, it was basically. restaurants would pick a prefix menu and then, and I guess the idea is kind of you're showcasing what dishes you think best represent your restaurant, and usually I think the idea behind is it's supposed to be a better deal than if you just came in and ordered an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert. And so it's and it's a limited time period. So it encourages people. If there's a restaurant that they've been wanting to try.

[61:12] then you're kind of getting a little bit of of a deal, and it's like it's encouraging you to to come down and eat, because it's a limited amount of time. And it is a special menu, and it's kind of like this reintroduction to things that maybe you never thought you were interested in. But you're willing to give it a try for like $49 a person, or something like that. Awesome. Yeah. And there's many, many communities have this Denver cities to it. But we just haven't had the coordinated promotion before. Let's go on to the next slide. It's not the ratio. But I am trying to find time tonight so totally all right, so just a little commercial. Our student banner program that we showcase local artists is ongoing. So those banners are up on the Mall now, and you can go, darling and wonderful and cute. I just talked a little bit about taste of pearl, but please save the date for that. It's going to be Sunday, April 6.th

[62:15] Tickets are going to go on sale in mid-february, and then, of course, we'll have our iconic tool of variant art festival. April 27.th Another commercial. I would really love to have the whole Dmc. Come to our annual awards luncheon, which is going to be on Friday, February 21st at the St. Julian Hotel. I'm super excited about that. And this year, in addition to getting 5 awards, 3 to businesses, and 2 to individuals. we are adding an award for an ambassador of the year to highlight our human save program, and we'll be giving that award to James Mayfield, who is a team, lead for block by block, and he works up on the hill and in downtown. So we're really trying to highlight the connections between downtown and university. We typically purchase a couple of tables and invite everybody if you haven't done before.

[63:03] so I don't know if that's on your to-do list. I was going to go tomorrow morning when I was doing meeting minutes. Yeah. I made a mental note great. And then I included this with your report. But just because sometimes people like to look at paper. We have officially transitioned to our new operations manager for block by block. His name is Zach. He came to us from the pulpits, made their bid. And he's actually was. He got a start when the Boulder Ambassador program 1st started. So he's doing a great job. He's brought on some new recruits. We've got some lovely new friendly bases down there, and we are working in the new smart system. Which not quite as complicated as your new financial system. It sounds like, but. And. There are always a little bit of a hurdle when you adopt a new system, and I know we are on a little bit of a time, Crunch, but I wanted to show you just one super cool tool that we have in the smart.

[64:00] But the system. So this is our kind of behind the scenes. This is, oh, Gotcha, okay, what do you need to click? Sorry this already locked off? So every ambassador who goes out and works a shift, has an RFID chip in their uniform, and it's collecting data on where they're going. So we can actually track exactly where they thought they they walk. We can find out whether they've walked in front of a certain block in front of the building, how many times when they went. And so I'm just kind of showing you this. This sped up. this is from yesterday from 6 Am. To 1159. You can see zooming out. All of those little colored lines are our ambassadors, and where they're going. So our team lead, then will go out, and if if I were him, I would say, yeah. Why, nobody made it like on this street yesterday, and maybe that zone that was assigned to that zone. We can say you make sure to make a stop on 13th Street and make sure to lock up on 12th

[65:03] each. Each of those colored areas is a different zone, and 2 ambassadors are assigned to each zone on a 2 week rotating basis, and then they're switched so that they don't develop that kind of confirmation bias. Don't see it. Blinder situation where you're just going through the motions. So this is super cool and a little bit. But it's it's a helpful tool for tool for us to really make sure that we're hitting the areas that we need to and there's a lot of other cool features that I can show you, but maybe we'll save that for another time. When we're not on the time. Crunch and I haven't been babbling at you for 30 min, so just wanted to give you a little preview. Mr. Brown is a stumbled in my life. but if there is stuff you want to highlight, please do. I think that's fine. You can see the report. If you have any questions about it, we're continuing to refine it, and we're always working to do better and make sure that we're communicating out to people the work that we are doing, because so much of it is invisible.

[66:12] That would be huge. I think every that's what I see. Make sure it's a lot less efficient. So especially if they're doing some grossing matters and staff improvement district. Thank you. Improvement district analysis. Update right? Or Matt. So it has my name on it. But I can take it just excited that we're kicking this off after so much talking. Thanks, Matt. Just want to make sure our consultants are online. Hi, Amanda and Brad. So I'll just give you all a brief refresher. This project will provide guidance on financial and governance tools to support healthy commercial areas throughout our city. Better meet the needs of our community. And this analysis will include reviewing existing conditions

[67:12] within our existing general improvement districts and offer recommendations focusing on near term improvements and long term sustainability for our commercial areas. So we have selected puma, Progressive Urban management associates based out of Denver. For this work. They have a ton of experience in district analysis, efforts helping establish new districts, etc, so I will let you all introduce yourselves. Brad and Amanda. Great thanks, Regan, can you guys hear us? Okay. Yes. Okay, great. Well, thanks for making time on your agenda today we are coming to you from the beautiful basement of the Brighton City hall. So

[68:00] we have a meeting with their city council tonight. So we appreciate you accommodating us remotely. Today. What we want to do was was simply to give you an introduction to who we are and what we're going to be up to. and then to, as time permits. See if you have any general questions. So, and also is, is Bettina still in the room? Yeah, of course. Yeah, Bettina, I wanna thank you. We've been wondering what to call a new blog that we want to post on our website. And we're gonna call it trash cans and planet Earth. So. Tm, I expect royalties. For any. You you will get. You have earned them. You have earned them in a big way. So so I'm so Brad and Amanda, we are one quarter of puma progressive urban management associates. We are based in Denver. We're downtown focused. And we're real estate economists and planners. We've worked nationally, we've worked in 40 States more than 300 clients.

[69:03] and that's over the last 30 plus years. Myself. I am from Denver. I got my start in this business in Denver. So I worked with the downtown Denver Partnership back in the late eighties. Early nineties did economic development work and worked with the business Improvement district there and then. The last 31 years. Have had the great run of running around the country, working with great people like Bettina and Regan and others throughout the country that do this kind of stuff. I also go back in time with Boulder. So I've had a series of of engagements with both downtown boulder and the hill. Going back to the late nineties, I was part of the team that helped form the business Improvement district in downtown boulder. And then, more recently, we helped put together a retail study. I think in 17 was that one, and then worked with Dbi on a business plan for the foundation during the pandemic.

[70:07] And then we've had also some some light therapy with the hill in between all of that. So we know Boulder extremely well. We're really thrilled to be part of this project. And our project manager is Amanda. Yeah. Hi, everyone nice to see those of you I've met before, and meet those of you. I have not so Amanda Kennard. I have been with Puma for coming up on 8 years here in March. So during that time, like Brad, I've had the opportunity to work on various different types of improvement district projects, both in the front range and nationally. So I've done a lot of strategic planning. I've helped to form bids and downtown development authorities in Colorado and elsewhere. And then I've also done downtown planning work in the front range as well. So thrilled to be here like, Brad said. I'll be the project manager and look forward to working with you all throughout this process.

[71:07] So just a a quick comment just in terms of the work ahead, it's gonna be fast and furious. So you know, maybe fast and furious. 10 or whatever those movies are. we've got a lot to do in a relatively short period of time. This is not as much a planning exercise, as it is an evaluation of past plans in terms of what's charted for the future for downtown and the other districts. And then it's looking under the hood at the Improvement District infrastructure that you have there. So the General Improvement district here the bid goes back, you know, 25 years. These were all created in a in a different time, and in many respects for a different downtown. So we'll be evaluating improvement districts in downtown the Hill Boulder Junction, we'll be making some near term recommendations. We'll also be looking at maybe longer term perspective. We'll also be looking at the whole tool chest of of the types of districts that work in in downtowns.

[72:12] So certainly the bid the Gid also downtown development authority. Amanda mentioned that in in her intro we know this is something that Boulder has been contemplating. And it's something where we have deep knowledge, including just recently in Denver, we were the consultant team that advised Denver on expanding their Dda from Union Station throughout all of downtown. And you may have read, that's gonna create a minimum of 500 million dollars of of funds for investment over the next 1415 years. So anything else? No, so that we can let me know if there's anything else, we should add, but that's that's our intro. And again we've got. We got some minutes in this lovely basement of the City Hall Building in Brighton to to spend with you.

[73:04] Thank you both. I got the yeah, I'm on the the. And so I'll be seeing you guys in a month. When we have our meeting a couple of links that came through in that big packet of stuff of like. Here's 18 things to know before you go. 3 of them didn't go anywhere. They were broken links. There was a few of them that just didn't work. But with that in mind I do have a lot of materials that I need to that I've been given to prep. How can I be most prepared? What do you need from me when I'm there? You're asking us. Yeah, well, I don't. I don't know if you need to go through 18 different reports. That's number one. So number 2, I'm assuming you're participating, representing downtown in. Yes. I'm the representative.

[74:00] Yeah. So I mean, you're there as a champion for downtown, as one who understands downtown. I mean, certainly having an understanding of the gid the bid. Dbi how it works. I I just looking at your agenda package for this meeting. You know, kudos to the city team. It's it's very. You've got a lot of data. You got a lot of information at your fingertips. And even just looking at today's agenda packet. There's a lot there. So I mean, number 2 is a general knowledge of of all the different tools that you participate in. And then 3, you know, active. We want you to be active voices around the table. We want you to. Give us a reality check. I think when we start analyzing and coming up with ideas. I would assume an advocate for downtown and I don't know, Regan, if if you would add anything to that, anything else. I don't think so, Roberta. I'll check those links. Thanks for bringing that up.

[75:03] Great. Well, thank you, Brad and Amanda, so like Brad mentioned. This is a really fast timeline. We have to kick off meetings coming up, which you'll be part of don and then in March. The goal is to have some preliminary recommendations, and have puma come in person to have a more meaningful, thoughtful, engaging conversation with you all, to share those recommendations before going to council on April 24.th Thank you. Good luck at your Brighton meeting. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you. Sure. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of your meeting, and we'll see you guys soon. Bye. Thank you. All right. Now, over to Matt. He has a couple of slides on our 2025 work plan. You'll recall. Back in November we gave you kind of a draft preview of what we were anticipating. There hasn't really been a ton of changes, but Matt's done some work to relate our work plan to the draft goals that we're talking about for the Commission in the year ahead. So, Matt Great.

[76:13] we'll pull the slide. If you just want to hit number 2, it's all we want. You. The second slide. Let's be clear. So I just wanted to give you this as a demonstration. We went through in some detail about all the different work groups in community vitality and a lot of things that were coming up when at the last meeting. But we wanted to show you that your conversation about your priorities for does help us in order to galvanize our thinking and organize the work that we're doing and any gaps that we have. And so this is a comprehensive, it's more just to demonstrate how we do this and so what I did is is just took the 5 sort of top priorities that were in in conversation. So far, I know that you're gonna have this conversation in a second this may change. This is involved, which is great, because, as we listen to those conversations, we'll take that in and kind of work with that. But we sorted some of the projects in some of the different work groups into how they fit into those priorities, and how we're working to advance some of the same things.

[77:22] And so we can kind of go through this a little bit, perhaps. If you want to pull this back up after you have your conversation, and we can talk about that as well. But I just want to hit a few highlights, and I'm actually going to start at the bottom. Because look at that big gap space and consider annual summit with different stakeholders. That you're talking about already. As you talk about that. If that becomes a priority, we do have some things coming up, including our Emmy, our communication specialist. She kind of works with all our groups. I threw in with your group, Elliot, just because we needed a good place for her. But she's starting conversations about, how do we better communicate? What

[78:06] community vitality does? What Cajun is about what the Dnc. Does to make sure that all of our efforts are clear in the community, and especially as Bettina mentioned, there's so many groups overlapping different type of work, and so we need to do a better job of celebrating and talking about what we do. And so that's what that is about. As well. Regan's working on business outreach, and how the city joins with all of our other partners that communicate directly with businesses. and making sure that everyone understands that when you pay your taxes and you pay for parking that money goes to really great things. So that's an example of how we're sort of starting to hit that the rest of them will be more direct and so, moving up a little bit, we just talked about the Improvement district analysis. I wanted to also point out something that may not have been on your radar, which the Will Streetscapes project. That's not downtown. It's up on the hill, but we're going to be collaborating with transportation on not only some Median work along Broadway, but also how people?

[79:08] The experience people have in the pedestrian experience from the hill which is going to tie into how we move visitors from downtown to the hill and back. And so that's going to be a big investment for them to make the transportation this year. and then I'm gonna talk at last. I think, so that we could save some time. I just want to point out mobility hubs which Christine's product team is working on. It's very exciting. That the prospect of how to transform parking garages into full mobility hubs where biking, walking. driving, all become part of a place where you land, and your 1st footfalls in boulder, no matter what transportation method you use are really centralized and exciting as they spread out downtown.

[80:04] And that's something that now has the endorsement of Dr. Cog right? They did award us with that grant that I told you guys about. So we're going to find out more about the details and we'll share that information. But moving forward, this evaluations, yeah. so really transformative and plays into the return to work downtown and a lot of your other environments, the list as well. So I won't go into any detail. But if you have questions about this, we can answer it like I said, as you have the conversation about your priorities. This is the type of work we're going to do to make sure that we're aligned questions about your priorities versus our work. Other things? Not oh, good question!

[81:01] I'll say that there are things that we must do that I'm not sure that they bubble up to your priorities right? I won't say they're misaligned, but I'll you know, for instance, the customer service team is a a real critical part of what we do. And you know the interaction with the community making sure that everything in, you know, parking permits in the garages to neighborhood parking. And, you know, delivering parking closures like all of that is really frontline stuff. That christine's team makes a lot of investment in and wants to get right? And that's something that we're real keen on making sure happens that you know I'm not sure that is in exactly in the list. But you know. So I I think it's a lot of that. It's there's there's the regular business cycle that we pay a lot of attention to. That may not be on your radar every day. Execution? Yeah, yeah. Okay.

[82:00] It's not the sizes. You need a full time, Reddit. Oh, we don't already have one. Thank you. Other questions. All right. Moving forward back over to Regan for an update on the outdoor dining pilot program with anybody. Sorry I didn't have anything fun to say. All right, I'll try to keep it fairly brief. But we are about halfway through the pilot program, which runs till 2027. So just wanted to give a few updates on how it's going and our next steps. So it is just a overview of the program. It's citywide. It's a 5 year pilot currently expires in October of 2027. However, we are planning to go to council later this year to recommend code changes to make it a more permanent offering for the community.

[83:15] It is available to businesses in the public right of way. In on street parking spots or on the Pearl Street mall, as well as on private property parking, or other open spaces. And another, no, I'll add, is that business? Do have a couple of options. If they're in the public right of way, so they can either lease the infrastructure through the city. We have a vendor called MoD Street. They're based out of Durango, their Parklet manufacturer. or businesses can build or purchase privately their own compliant infrastructure. So there's a couple of different options there. so to help inform the future of the program and get a sense of how it's going. We conducted a survey to existing participants. 12 out of 21 current participants responded.

[84:08] We saw some pretty positive responses. Almost all of the respondents that did respond agreed. The program increases boulders, vibrancy. They all reported a positive impact on business revenue, 7.3% average increase in business revenue and those that responded indicated they were able to hire 14 new employees as well as offer additional hours to existing staff. Some suggestions for program improvements that came up in the surveys so ensuring clear program guidelines. The guidelines, as they stand now, are in the form of a very lengthy document, and businesses indicated a little bit of confusion or lack of clarity around some areas like lighting, heating, maintenance, cleaning, etc. So we're working on simplifying the guidelines, but also making them more digestible and clear for the business community.

[85:13] Moving the application window. So the current application window, as it stands now, runs from February 1st to March 1st annually. That has proven to not really allow enough time for businesses to receive their infrastructure if they are leasing from the city. So they go through the application process. Sometimes there are missing documents, so there's a lot of back and forth there late summer, we've seen, because even after approvals, they. We then face this manufacturing timeline with MoD Street, which can range from 6 to 12 weeks. Depending on kind of their project load. So moving the application window was a big point of feedback. The leases are 3 years, so they renew every 3 years.

[86:11] and they don't have to fully reapply. They just pay every bill. Okay. so good news. We are going to transition to a rolling application window to allow for more flexibility. For businesses that actually also helped city staff to not have this influx of applications. Each year we can really provide a more hands on. Bless you, one on one assistance. And this will go into effect sometime in February. So we'll move forward with launching the application on February 1st standard application launch date and then it'll just gradually. It'll actually transition to a rolling application. Already mentioned. We're updating the program guidelines. And then

[87:01] another kind of win is that MoD Street is now outsourcing all of their standard products instead of manufacturing them in house. So it significantly decreases lead times, and they promised us a 6 week turnaround for every approved application. So we're gonna write that into the agreement original with them. And then, lastly, I already mentioned that we're preparing ordinance language and planning to go to council later this year, working with the attorney's office to make this program more permanent. I don't know what it'd be like without it. So that's a good thing for a program. Great. Thank you. All right. Last item real quick. There was some question at the Commission meetings back in November whether or not City Council is going to be requesting letters from commissioners in preparation for their midterm retreat, which is coming up next month. There was some debate that the

[88:13] Retreat Committee about whether or not they were going to be asking for letters, and they are not so. Seth has not prepared anything for you to that end. Certainly does not forbid the commission from doing its own work and and writing a letter if it sees fit. But Staff has not been asked to to lead that for you all just wanted to pass that you guys want to write a letter. I think one of the things we've been trying to do is communicate more with counseling and so on. Do you? What we write it about? Well. like, what is the learning platform for a letter? I don't think in some years I feel like we've had to talk about issues that weren't being addressed now with. It's Council's plans being fairly aligned with what we're looking for.

[89:07] That's good news. We could continue to support them in that, although it's just noise and the phone. what they're doing, you know, they're not asking. But that's that's my question. You know, we? Just because they asked. we're trying to do more outreach to others. Much of a bubble do we feel compelled to write the letter in support of kind of what we're about to talk about with our priorities. We could just tell them our priorities are this time, you know, maybe just a summary of what we come up with in the next 20 min. It's really push that back, do that, and then talk about it. It is it fine language, all right. That concludes matters for staff matters from traditional aren't the priorities.

[90:02] And so I missed the last meeting. So we have to resubmit our priorities. Too many priorities, we thought we should narrow them down. And I thanks Erica for sending your snare down. I wrote my computer was shy. but could we like do that exercise now is that the goal? So we have time. So Erica had those. I kind of I didn't understand the goal, so I didn't change them. But I do. Erica had number one. Can we bring up the agenda thing? This will be easier for us all to look at it.

[91:09] Yeah. yeah, if you go to Eric's, I think that's a good starting place, because here you click it a couple more times cool. Thank you. So Eric had support for police and other intervention interventions regarding safety in and around downtown to support the downtown ambassador program. 3. Return to work for increase accessibility and foot traffic to the hill, and vice versa. Consider annual summit. I summarize them similarly, it's not up there, so I have to kind of save this up loud. My number one is similar safety policing and ambassadors. So I consolidated them to kind of

[92:00] similar topics, but stately policing and ambassadors. My number 2 is economic vitality. Colon. Return to work, you know, underused spaces, planning updates that has nothing to do with this being withdrawn. My number 3 connections to the hell of purple. and my number 4 was the summit to other board. So I kind of consolidated things, but also expanded them by kind of adding a couple of words to it. So my number one was similar to hers, safety policing ambassadors. So I put 2 or 2 into number one kind of my number 2 is just a broad sense of economic vitality. With some points of return to work supporting return to work and helping with underutilized spaces. Whether that's planning or other things we need to do.

[93:01] -Oh! My number 3 that was connecting the hill. and my number 4 was this summit with the other boards. Oh, I think, don't necessarily have too much too many. Yes, that just but I think that we should have that are at a higher priority than without losing sight of some of the other things that we have on like economic vitality, for example, is like the big picture. But there are probably 6 or 7 up here that contribute to that particular product. And that's why I kind of did the subsequent slide. Right? So yeah, let's just my name.

[94:06] You know so much of what our. what we have listed as priorities from years past. And now I think a lot of this can be accomplished with any pressure, or our commission is able to put on anyone to increase the portability just across the board cool. so I don't know how to exactly incorporate that, but just prioritize supportability both for commercial and residential. So we could in our area. So we could. You know, for example. I wasn't at the last meeting. So I don't know what where we stand with that affordable commercial program is, but we could put that under economic vitality and have that assumption.

[95:03] But yeah, I think I think, addressing things like that and incorporating more programs like that affordable commercial. Oh, Grant. those would those would kind of interlace into a lot of these priorities that we have just increasing football, you know decreasing use of cars. increasing revenues for businesses in the downtown area. I think all those things are interconnected to overall portability. So the opportunity we have to make things more affordable for businesses and residents, and down any way that the Downtown Management Commission is able to put pressures on. I think we should take that focus on that. Let me explore that affordability of what you're talking about for that, you know. We talked about the portable commercial. That was where I went to it with them. Sure. But when we're also looking at the stats from the restaurants, and like minimum wage and expenses increasing and stuff. You know, I don't think we have much impact or say or anything we can do with those things right?

[96:14] Well, emotions make eating out more. Yeah. And then I was thinking, like the the restaurant program with like doing like food, weeks and stuff like that. That's marketing. But it's that's all part of so yes, yeah, I I like, I think, the combination of you know work. It seems like we're at ideal pretty much idea of police staffing, which has just been a topic for like many years about being understaffed, and that just it doesn't seem like as much of an issue now. So that's good. And then the ambassadors, I've I

[97:03] I think, like the if you are. We're advocating for like more funding from I don't know where we're at with that like long term funding. That would be something specifically that I think it would make sense for us to advocate, for like a place for them to call home just like part of parks, has an annual budget, you know for that team like this kind of pilot stage, if that's what it's still at like. Hopefully, we can move out of that. So I'd be interested in moving out of the pilot stage for that, and for obviously for the outdoor dining, too. It's become like these 2 things in particular, become things in the city that it would be strange if they went away now, like they're very poor, I think, to the downtown the the bigger projects that I'm most interested in is like, I don't think I haven't heard of like really. a large amount of creative pilot options, of really moving their return to work. Granted, like no one in the country has figured this out. But, like I,

[98:08] it does feel like that. You could try more things. I don't know if we should try more things. But it just seems like, Hey, we have a pretty innovative through here in space, like, what can we try to get more businesses to come here. I mean, I think I I don't. I don't know how much like direct outreach the Chambers doing to like actually recruit businesses and all that type of stuff, but I've heard that they haven't ever had to do that. So that would be like a big shift. No. in the way that the city thinks about getting businesses to come here just assumed who wouldn't want to live here? And that. So I I think that the effort seems still really reactive there from what I've heard. So I'd be curious to like be a part of I don't know what we could do again, but

[99:06] I'd be interested in that. And then, similarly, with the hill like. these are big multi room projects. But like the Civic center redo and the hill stuff like there's just so much underutilized land. Sadly, I'm I'm just actually very sad about it, like people don't use the creek path as much like they don't go to the Civic Center Park, and it's just underutilized city space around the downtown, whereas obviously, like the Pearl Street Mall block, like so many people are on there, but like we're more than just Pearl Street, Mall, the city and I that those corridors could be. could really change how people see the park and like. And so I'm I'm definitely interested in. How do we expand the downtown to creating these quarters? And it gives people a reason to come to boulder like there's new stuff happening here. So

[100:05] just Pearl Street Mall, you know. and the same activities which are fine. But like, I do think if we're talking about a big year commitment like, that's what I'm interested in. So these like corridors and those in the economic development. So those are my, and I think it aligns with what we're doing. I'm less interested in summits unless I think it's gonna do something. It's an outcome of how we do these things. They're not a goal on and of themselves. True. But we. you know, do a lot of meetings, and I would want to make sure that meetings are, you know. purposeful, purposeful, like we have to. We come out with an output that is really aligned with our priorities. Yeah, almost like, do our own work to make it like worthwhile for all the planning right? Like

[101:02] to make it happen. And I don't think we should do it just to do it. Not? Yeah. So so I think it'll, I think we're all like aligned on these bigger projects. but our role in them is that's my big question, like. what is our role with that? Because we have a small piece, and and I don't want that. I don't think it makes sense for priorities to be misaligned with, like the day to day of community vitality like, because my other answer would be, I really would love to rename and paint the parking garages and make them woodland animal theme. and then love a cute owl. Oh, I'm fixing on this owl because I had that baby owl in like the raptor program that they had wanted to keep us on focus. Erica, I want to make sure that you get a chance to speak to you had your list that you submitted. But do you want to talk to it and react to kind of any of the we've heard.

[102:13] Yeah, I feel so for me. The hill thing is. you know, it's hard as an as a visitor. I think it's really hard to get the scope of the boundaries of downtown. And so now, with the Conference Center and the Moxie. and you know just even the amount of people that we had coming to see you games, and you know that's kind of where they pour out of and come down the hill and then come down to Pearl. I just want to make sure that we're able to kind of support the hill, because I think, whether we think it or not, they are being lumped in as downtown boulder and as boulder. And as people's experience. So I just. And you know my mom has had a store on the hill, for it'll be 52 years in March.

[103:02] so I think the hill finally is getting some traction as far as not. Just sort of being this like the red headed stepchild, or whatever but I do think that there, I want to make sure that when people are on the hill they have as good of an impression of Boulder as they are downtown. I think we just separate them, but I do think anybody spending time there, if they have a bad experience up there. It's going to reflect negatively on all of the work that we're doing downtown. And then, yeah, even just talking about the Civic Center park, like all of a sudden, I'm just sort of thinking, yeah, why don't people play Frisbee down there and like, could we have like a disc golf tournament. And you know certain things because it's such a really beautiful underused lawn area. and I, and I think, yeah, trying to get people to not focus on downtown always just being like Pearl Street.

[104:07] But yeah, and then getting people back to work. I'm curious, I know. I mean, you know, we've had a few of these. like like work, share places that like have come and kind of gone and but even if there's any grant money towards getting like, I know, we're trying to rent spaces for retail and other things, you know, and but just anytime we can get more bodies that, like their job is to be downtown. then that automatically, like they're more likely to eat and shop down there because they already have to be there. But I agree that is a huge like, you know, nationwide, probably even worldwide issue right now that they're that we're all dealing with. But like downtown Denver, I'd be like no way sorry like. but downtown boulder. I'm like, I don't know. There, there's just so much

[105:01] going on down there that I think there's a lot of appeal to. Just maybe you don't. Even if you work down there, you don't feel the pressure to go down there regularly because you spend money and you shop already. But yeah, so my priorities were just, you know, and safety being like you know, cause I just had 2 police officers come in check in, and they were just sort of doing the rounds, and they're the Mall cops. And I really didn't have anything to say, you know. Negative. I mean. The cold weather always cleans up the Mall a little bit but really wanting people to feel safe being down there, and that they aren't like, I feel like we should get going. It's getting a little bit weird down here, you know. So yeah, I feel like I do agree the priorities could be, but I guess I didn't know as an option to combine. So but yeah, I think we could probably combine some of those into, you know longer

[106:00] bullet points, because they do sort of fall into subcategories of each other. So I'm trying to write this up so we could react to it. Ellie, can I send this to you so you can get it up on the screen. So I've got it written up here. and that'll come to you. The moment's actually all go that we can react to what I've kind of written up based on kind of just whatever you say. Maybe you want to put this like in your own word document, so you can copy and paste and edit it. because that's maybe my goal is, I tried to do like a 1st pass here, and then we can kind of beat it up a little bit more.

[107:04] Okay? And can I make just a quick comment? And I'm not a Commissioner, but I'm hearing you say you talk about the return to work conundrum, and one of the conversations that we've been having in the industry is moving away from saying, return to work and starting to say in tenant vacant office and space. because that feels like maybe something that's a little more approachable than trying to control. Yeah, I don't know that it necessarily has to be that many places but workers could be going places with people that they've already utilized. And that's what I did. It's better because people aren't, you know, remote work is here to stay, but something else or other non remote businesses. The bullets didn't come through super. Well. if you indent the ones with dashes.

[108:05] Isn't it great to watch people like type together? Yeah. So that's how I kind of organize it. We can change the con. But like so what we were talking, I put support employees return to the office. But then the next one was activate on utilization. Slash code changes to make it so. People could live, or or you know, one of the ways wanted to do an event space I think we should get rid of, I mean, what can we do to get place to return to the office. Well, what I did think about that is like Bbp. Has had like employee appreciation week. I think it's great fun, and it does bring my staff to work and employee appreciation year. It doesn't work. But if we make it so like.

[109:02] and could we have ideations around what else we could do could we do instead of doing it all in one day? Could we do it like once a month, and do one part of that event? You know every month. 1 1 day a month, and we kind of break it up into smaller things, or could we, in a akin to the the restaurant thing, you know, we're right now. We've got like one big event, so like the taste of boulder and stuff. What if we like? Had Chinese month, Chinese restaurant week, visit a Chinese restaurant, or, you know, kind of Is it all the Moroccan Arabic places in town, week or day, or, you know, just there's ways we can kind of tie these things together. So this is Madison Commissioner. So I don't want to chime in too much, and we we can stay as long as you all agree to stay. We did offer, and maybe even you weren't here at the last meeting.

[110:01] If there isn't, you know, there seems like there wants to be more discussion around a lot of priorities and narrowing in one of the services that Staff does provide is A is a retreat. And we haven't had one with this commission for a while. Yeah, so is it. I would maybe pose the question to the commission, and unless you feel like you are getting really close and we are selling it, and great or a goal for 2025 could be to have a permanent retreat. Generic. Let me just do first.st How do you guys do about this? Are we close? Do we need to spend more time? I mean, I think we're close. And I think that does consolidate a lot of stuff. I think we're close. Because we could take. But I know a retreat takes a lot of effort. So you know, Stephanie, do you feel differently? Or do we want to email this out. And you know we do the, it's tough for us to do an email because we have to email it to Ellie. And then she has to send it out, and we can't talk to each other.

[111:13] I think that the top 3, if the bullet points are in the same verb phrase, I will for that. Yeah, I think, like. I think we're, we're close. This covers a lot of what we do day to day, plus some a little bit more efficient thing. Yeah, the last one I don't. I don't yet have a vision for, but I'm supportive of being on there. We'll develop that further. The rest we're already involved in something. So things not on the list, meaning engagement and collaboration

[112:02] one of them is called urban redevelopment and collaboration. So maybe that's the one about code changes we call urban redevelopment potentially. I just think like activating underutilized spaces whatever that repurposing that we just want to broaden that, not try and be close to everything possible. We're just talking about how there's vacant office spaces, a lot of them. and the city. You're not getting anything from them like, forgive me. sales tax. We're not getting people there, so it's just wasted space. So I think the theme is, just how do we do more to fill that space? We don't even have to say with what? Well, it says, urban redevelopment is one of the things on our. I'm looking at our awareness. Yeah, I don't know what that we even meant by that. So these are so broad that they're not. These are 2024 this this year's.

[113:03] I'd ask for more specific, rather adventure or other copy changes, because if we're closer I would just get rid of more words. I wouldn't try and just list everything out. Just try and make mutually exclusive categories that are broad. Yes. So we know what they mean. Yeah. So like I would get rid of support employees return to the office. I think it's nonspecific. probably, but that's just the thing. Yeah, but I I don't really, I don't really care if you want to, wordsmith, and make them mutually exclusive and collectively exhausting. That's what I would do in my normal work.

[114:04] It'll be a yeah. I like the simplicity of this rather than getting lost in this. I think if we can, even with the sub bullet points, I think if we just have these 4 and summit with other boards, I mean back to you. I think that'll just be a product. Yeah, that'll just be a byproduct of when there's right. Oh, I think I like those as our 3 main priorities. Would you like to? Co-writing in a group is very hard? Do you want to, Stephanie? Do you want us? I would not like to. Okay. Justin and Dustin. Sure. Do you want to take a chance of smoothing that out a little bit and sending it to Ellie, and do that.

[115:02] Awesome interesting this? Well, hearing that, then Hal will take care of that and report back, get it there and then that'll get to everybody, including Andy. That's not here. We can. Yes, guess we can have the final one and vote next time, but it'll be tweaked and ready for update that works for everybody that works Our next mission meeting is March 11.th Do I hear? Can I move. I well, I want to apologize. There was not on the agenda an update from Commissioner trees on the bid meetings that you are an was like. She covered it all.

[116:09] She's so thorough. That's that's her problem. I just wanted to create space for that. So apologies on there for future reference. But yeah, like. I think, that the bike. The only thing the only thing I remember that was unusual is that they were like bike thefts are up. But like I'm like is that seasonal. We didn't really get to it. And people like got worried about it. But fabulous. And your laptop is yeah. So I just it's hard to know if these are like seasonal things. There's they talked about fax a lot. So that was, I guess that's the main takeaway that there's a lot of business theft recently. and they're like they have safety meetings and stuff about it. So the line is our priorities. Keep it up there.

[117:04] Okay, do I hear a little bit? So I've been detected. Alright, hmm! Technically, under Robert's rules. The chair gets to end the meeting whenever you want without you don't even need approval from your other. Thanks, Erica, for joining. Thank you. I'm sorry, you guys, I'm going to Casa Bonita. So I had to leave. Have fun. So you're in the car. But I couldn't, you know. I couldn't say no like waited 2 years. Have fun.