June 27, 2018 — Housing Advisory Board Regular Meeting

Transcript

[MM:SS] timestamps correspond to the YouTube recording.

[0:01] all right we're on there I'll call to order the June 27th housing advisory board meeting first thing on our agenda is a agenda review does anybody have any agenda changes that they want to make okay go on to the approval the minutes for the June 13 meeting does anybody have any changes they want to make to that I just have one question do we need to record who's here for any reason or not you know like the shock is I'm out of town or something or does that not matter we don't do roll call typically not like city council does okay because we don't make decisions so are there any change okay then I'll move to approve the minutes do I have a second Judy seconds it all in favor of approving the minutes as written aye

[1:01] it's unanimous the vote is for next is public participation for items not on our agenda by agenda I mean items that we're not having a public hearing on which basically means you can talk about anything that you would like to hopefully it'll be about housing so the first person will be rui Arango and you'll have three minutes if you can come up to the dice and just state your name where you live okay all right folks I'll go ahead and start my name is Rui Rango you may recognize me from your last meeting and the meeting before that so what's up it's good to see you again so I'm here tonight to talk to you folks about something that is rather intimately related to a discussion item later on in the evening that discussion

[2:01] item is of course is you know the ami and affordable housing rent increase before and as I begin I want to make sure that all of you know I'm sure you're aware of this that right now US affordable housing renters don't actually have any protections from that ami affordable housing increase on an annual basis we don't have any what we do have is the division of housing being willing to speak to landlords on an individual basis once a year and to have a conversation in which they ask landlords you know in this case not to increase the rent by ten and a half percent and so what's the result of that is this year in my building the depot square apartments we received written notice of a 7% rent hike other folks have gotten 5% some have gotten lower than that and the problem there is that this doesn't actually mean that us as

[3:00] tenants are gonna get to avoid paying this full ten and a half percent increase what it means is that we'll get to pay it over a longer period because unless the ami drops incredibly next year we'll still pay it it'll just be drawn out over a couple of years sort of like boiling a frog so instead of a ten and a half percent increase over one year you may get a five and a quarter percent increase over two years which is better but it's not much better and I really think that's good enough and I think this solution of relying on the division of housing in this way is pretty reactive and I don't think it's a good one and I think we're a city of very intelligent people and some intelligent people on the board and we can figure out a proactive solution to make sure we don't run into this problem again and it's especially easy because solution was already developed by the city and I'm gonna repeat myself but these are the renter protections that were active prior to 2012 and if he folks look at the document I gave you that's one page from a 2009 PHP property

[4:02] covenant with the city and I've highlighted the relevant part no increase on an annual basis more than three percent nada nothing we still had these renter protections this wouldn't be an issue I mean I wouldn't be here division of housing wouldn't be here talking about how to solve this problem and I guess I'll just close by asking a rhetorical question hope you excuse me you know whether or not you believe that the most vulnerable workers in your city folks like me working poor deserve to have the peace of mind knowing that their affordable housing rent is not going to fluctuate vastly from year to year I hope you think we do thank you yes please so I have one question I just don't know the place you live is it a hundred percent affordable housing or is it mixed some market rate some affordable so it's all affordable housing and I

[5:00] believe it's it's 60% ami units there are some section 8 voucher folks that I know of in the building I don't know if any of them are renewing their leases though yeah thank you Thanks all right thank you next up is Meghan okay Meghan Arango hi I'm Meghan Rango Ruiz my husband I'm a preschool teacher here in Boulder and like he said we live in Depot Square in the boulder junction neighborhood and I would just like to speak briefly in response to an argument that I've heard made by city staff in the past and which might be made again tonight which is that we residents of Depot square shouldn't be upset about this increase because our rent hasn't gone up yet in the last three years and I don't know why Iran hasn't gone up yet it might be because our building has changed ownership three times in the last three years but we really are grateful of course but the truth is that even though our Rin hasn't been increased our building owners and

[6:00] property managers have found other ways to charge us additional money without giving us additional amenities or support or services so first storage storage units in our building are designed to supplement the modest closet space that are available to us and they used to be $15 a month to rent and they went up to 35 second our utilities for the first two years that we lived in depot square our utilities never exceeded $35 a month which makes sense given the fact it's a small unit it's about 700 square feet and it's supposed to be a very energy-efficient building but our building made the decision to submit our units and our utilities have suddenly and mysteriously spiked some people have been getting bills that are double and triple that amount and sometimes our bill went up it spiked during one month when we were actually out of town for half the time and finally parking when my husband and I first got into Depot square we were told that parking would be a free amenity included with our rent now Depot

[7:03] square is attached above an RTD bus station and there most of the building is actually a parking garage which is very handy I love being above the bus station but when we moved in they told us it would no longer be free and there would be a rent associated with the parking space so since we moved in we've watched it go from $45 a month to $75 a month and now ruie and I are paying $90 a month just to park our car in this garage we managed to avoid this cost for two years by parking in the neighborhood and walking home but recently with all of development that's been going into the boulder Junction neighborhood almost all of the neighborhood parking has become metered and we've had no choice but to start paying this exorbitant amount of money it's it's more than a thousand dollars a year just to park our car to put that into context into perspective the city of boulders Boulder neighborhood parking permit program charges non-resident commuters $100 per quarter and it

[8:02] charges businesses $75 for the year for commuters who need to park and it charges people who are residents who need to park their car where they live a very reasonable $17 a year again we're being charged more than $1,000 a year and I don't know any other renters in Boulder who are paying that much I have a quick question please is the parking garage often at capacity you know does it seem to actually be not even half okay yeah just wanted to make sure yeah thank you next up is John Lamar so thank you for your comments so I don't live in affordable housing but I've dealt with the absolutely dystopian rental market

[9:00] here for life the last six years restrictions on residential development and runaway gentrification have caused a housing market that's dominated by scarcity with the skyrocketing property values that far outpaced the stagnant wages of the working-class affordable housing programs are intended to provide relief from this and as you know they use ami to calculate maximum rents with the logic being that as wages grow for everyone and inflation and productivity cause wages to rise people can afford to pay a higher rent but this just isn't true and it's not reality for the working-class and it hasn't been for several decades the increase in ami only reflects that we've gained a bunch of rich tech employees and we've seen no change in the number of households earning less than a hundred thousand and these are the households that comprise the rental market the ami based index has been unfair for as long as wages have been stagnant it's not a new phenomenon and this 10.5 percent increase is only a turn for the worse these hostile neoliberal policies have

[10:00] eroded nearly all protections for working-class renters in Boulder and in Colorado and while many of the affordable housing property owners will tell you that they won't raise rent by the maximum amount or that they'll phase it in over time the fact of the matter is they're motivated by profit and that's just what they're going to do with almost no laws on our side there's little that we can do to combat this rent hike but move away or make dire quality-of-life sacrifices the City Council has an obligation to its constituents to this issue and well within their power to choose a better index and I'm sure Rui has told you that they have the power to do that and why and where exactly it's chapter 4.14 in the parental compliance manual ami is not the only way to determine maximum rent it's basic algebra to calculate a better index you could use a lower decile for instance and those of us who are not fortunate enough to own homes or hold high-paying jobs we don't need any more burdens the City Council doesn't take

[11:01] initiative and protect the working class there soon won't be a working class left in Boulder please don't price us out we are your teachers your nurses and we literally build and maintain the infrastructure in this city who is going to do that when we can't afford to live here anymore yes so several of us are very interested in this whole discussion around ami and we I think we can all just say that we're very interested in this and you're looking at working class people I'm a hairstylist in this town so I've been here for 23 years I understand what we're talking about we've been trying to explore alternatives to the ami and how to include in the discussion so for anybody out there that's either listening or watching we're open to hearing that well I mean you have the incomes of people who live in affordable units so you could just take the median of that that rises at a lower rate than AMI

[12:00] so why not use it or if you want to use maybe the lowest quintile but take a higher percentage so that you get rents that are about the same that will also rise at a lower rate and median it's a skewed distribution so taking lower percentile rankings it's just better math thank you thank you that is all the people I have in the queue does anybody else want to speak all right I'll close the public participation component and now we're into the staff presentation on regional housing strategy good evening so I'll introduce Kristin Heiser who will be doing the the presentation on the Regional Housing Partnership Kristin as you may know is has been a staff member of the division of housing for some time and she has

[13:02] taken on sort of a new role in leading this partnership which represents all of the communities in Boulder County it's an initiative that started about 18 months ago and really was launched last August and Kristin is the first staff person to be monnaie to working on this plan throughout Boulder County thank you hi good evening thanks Kurt I am Kristin Heiser as Curt mentioned I do where to housing hats I'm the community investment manager with a division of housing I will be returning to speak to you in August about the work of the community investment team and furthering the city's goals around affordable housing but tonight I'm here to talk about the bowler County Regional Housing Partnership before I go on I'd like to introduce Pam Gibson who is while I'm the manager Pam is the coordinator who's

[14:01] working alongside me in furthering the work of the partnership and forgive me as I'm kind of handle figuring out the technical aspects here but so I don't think given what we just heard I don't think anybody would be surprised to hear that affordability is really the most pressing housing issue across the nation and being a how high cost high-growth community it is acutely felt here in Boulder I think we're all very aware of that but it's not just in Boulder we're experiencing this we're experiencing across the region in Longmont netherland superior all these communities have been struggling to meet the affordable housing needs that we have in our communities so we've had this opportunity to develop a partnership over this past year and that's what we're going to be talking there you go but before we get into the

[15:00] details about the partnership we want to take a look at what's going on across the region and I again I don't think this is gonna be news to anybody but just want to provide some context as to what we're working with and what we're what we've been experiencing for quite some time the Builder region is currently in an affordable housing crisis what does this look like we have increasing housing prices and rents that have outpaced growth and wages land construction of financing costs are on the rise making production affordable housing more financially challenging we're losing existing affordable housing the supply over the past twelve years due to price inflation we have lost over Stein thousand market rate rental units across the region as well as over 21,000 ownership opportunities due to price inflation the percentage of older and wealthier households is increasing across the country County while the number of family middle income and younger individuals is declining Boulder County is a regional employment center and employees are

[16:00] commuting longer distances between their homes and their jobs and this is adding pressures to our communities in terms of transportation and the environment towns and cities are becoming increasingly land constrained placing pressure on development potential and as we've heard tonight and as we hear across the communities this is a pressing concern for our communities across border collie so let's take a little bit closer look into some of these details so what we're finding is we'll start with home ownership since 2010 the median home price in the city of Boulder alone and we're just talking about Boulder now not the region has increased by 60% and in Longmont long thought to be the affordable community in the county has jumped 76% over the last seven years add to that 50% of housing stock located in Boulder municipalities this was crunched yesterday by our data and analytics staff member is our value at at above six hundred and twelve thousand

[17:00] dollars I mean that's 50% of our housing stock that's that's staggering and then if you look at our once all we've seen across the region is the trajectory of friends is following a same trajectory 38 percent of the county residents rent on the city of Boulder we do see a 52 percent rental rate but across the county we see 38 percent and we've seen the market rate friends jump 20 percent over the last four years that's market rate rents as they're not the deed restricted affordable rents but that's a 20 percent jump over the last four years and then taking a little bit closer look into what it's the experiences like for renters a home is concerned affordable I'm sure you guys have talked about this an affordable home is considered affordable if somebody's not paying more than 30% of their income on housing expenses that's rent utilities or mortgage and utilities the takeaway from this slide is that 54% of the renters are housing costs burden that means

[18:00] they're paying more than 30 percent of their annual income their to pay for housing that means they're having making very difficult choices of paying for housing and utilities and all those costs instead of health care or education and other things that add to their quality of life but we do see across the county that 54% of renters are cost burdened just real quick question be going back one slide okay 15,000 is an actual number of people that is there's 15,000 persons of renter households and then 10,000 so 15,000 are severely cost burdened paying more than 50% and tempered 10,000 renter households are paying more than 30% recognizing the connection between housing jobs and transportation we know that tens of thousand thousands of people commute to work in the region in every day which brings environmental and health impacts stressed individuals and families finding solutions to linked

[19:02] transit and housing can lead to providing access to wider job markets takers off the street and lead to decreased housing and transportation costs that will support self-sufficiency savings and spending more money in the local economy and then if we take a look at this obviously you know these are three studies that have been conducted over the last few years in long Maude the city of Boulder as well as part of the Boulder County vaunt Comprehensive Plan and obviously the community is very concerned about the lack of affordable housing options so each of those whether it's housing affordability is getting worse affordable housing options are few or affordable housing as a top priority we're hearing it from our communities that that it is a an issue that we have got to address when you have to address it quickly so just to clarify who we're talking about so let's start with Kate and Joe so Kate is works in retail and Joe is a new teacher combined they make over 58,000 to support their family of

[20:00] three according to the 2018 area median income King Joe earned 60% of area median income so 58,000 qualifies as 60% areum ami for a family of three Kate and Joe are earning the maximum amount eligible to qualify for the limited deed restricted units in the region and now if you look at Marcus and Maria Marcus is a warehouse manager Maria's works in childcare together they earn just over eighty six thousand or 80 percent of the area median income earning eighty percent of area median income they are overqualified or they're ineligible for the rental units that are available in our deed restricted properties in terms of their you know those are requiring 60% ami they earned too much of to achieve housing in Housing Authority property for for example but what they could they could be eligible to rent a deed restricted I mean they could be eligible for a homeownership opportunity but if you take that one step further and you look at round numbers market markets Maria could qualify to purchase

[21:01] a home about 300,000 so using a quick search of Zillow yesterday I was able to identify across the county there's 27 single-family homes for sale under 300,000 and none of those are located in the city of Boulder so they would not be able to find a single-family home in Boulder at this time and then you look at the townhomes or the condos for sale on Boulder 26 are listed not bad but 80% of those are less than a thousand square feet a thousand square for you for a family of four it's not the best option and then also only 30% of those offered two to three bedrooms the majority of them were studios or one bedrooms so there's just there's not the supply to meet the needs that are out there so now I'm going to shift to the partnership before we do that I do have a video I want to share in a second does anybody have any questions about those statistics okay Cory what do you mind showing the video

[22:01] so this is a video that the Builder how the Bolar county regional partnership put together to just to you know what are the initiatives that we want to pursue as a marketing campaign to change the perspective raise awareness advocate for affordable housing and so this PSA for lack of a better term was produced by the partnership this past year hello can you hear me okay you see it all I'm able to work live and play and shop all and everything area I feel like I'm connected to the people closest to me rather than being spread out all over

[23:01] the place teachers they can't afford to

[24:08] live in the community if I was to speak to community boards our city boards our mayor's along the Front Range I think I would tell them that our civil servants need to have affordable housing here nonprofits school teachers police officers city limits and the reason for that is to respond in a timely manner like in my past it was integral to be a part of the community we just don't have a place to live and if we don't have a place to live we're gonna lose those people who take care of our community [Music] thank you thanks Cory we have done no

[25:01] only many great things together we have responded to disasters like wildfires in the 2013 flood we have protected our incredible open space heritage together we have made our businesses in our homes more environmentally sustainable we are on the cutting edge of so many things working together and now it's our time to rise to meet this next great challenge and I'm sure a lot of you have the same experience that I have where you have constituents stop you on the street and say are you guys doing anything about affordable housing and is it even solvable and now we can say yes we are doing something about affordable housing and if it's not solvable at least it we can make a huge dent and make great progress together now Thank You Cory so to answer this call to really move the needle on affordability

[26:00] we must recognize that housing markets are regional and to make an impact in our communities we must work together across jurisdictional boundaries leveraging our commitment expertise and resources only through shared vision in action can we deliver the housing needed in our own backyards and we believe that Boulder County Regional Housing Partnership will take us there which you'll see in front of you is I did give you each strategies and for those and on TV or watching on TV or the public in the audience we do have this available on the website and I'll be providing that website in a minute so fortunately unlike a lot of communities Boulder County has a long history the jurisdictions and towns and municipalities have a long history of prioritizing and making strong investments in affordable housing we we live in a very compassionate community and so we're very fortunate because we have that on our side we also have a rich history and partnering in collaboration and that's what this group is really building on we're building on

[27:00] the foundation that we have where we've worked together to achieve a lot of great things and these are just some of the examples we have the 10-year plan to address homelessness that's now evolved into the Boulder County Regional homelessness strategy hopefully you've been seeing in the paper all the great stories that are coming out of the work that this collaborative effort is bringing to fruition we also have the land using inter government agreements between the county and municipalities that are managing regional concerns such as transportation open space urban and rural growth boundaries we have the home consortium was which facilitates the investment of federal home funds across the county including Broomfield and finally we had the flood recovery work following the 2013 floods and that's where we really saw the partnership korat of that the 2013 flood recovery efforts to us a lot and lay the foundation for the regional her Regional Housing Partnership following the flood a group was convened of housing professionals and development partners and advocates to assess the need and to

[28:02] determine how we were going to deploy the resources needed to address the housing need that resulted from the floods the group identified a goal committed to a regional focus making sure that development opportunities would be across the region and partnered to leverage resources whether those financial there are expertise opportunities and as a result of this intentional partnering the region we were able to leverage as a group 25 million dollars into the county that resulted in the creation or improvement to a thousand affordable homes over three to five years and from that we just saw the power of working together and how we can really move the needle on addressing affordable housing so that first group who it really it was comprised as a city of Boulder City of Longmont Boulder County along with our respective housing authorities Boulder Housing partners Longmont Housing Authority in the Boulder County Housing Authority and since then it's grown and we have developed partnerships that I'll be talking more about with the

[29:00] jurisdictions across the region over the last 18 months to two years we worked together to develop the strategy that she in front of you and that's available on the website and we identified five goals the first goal because learning from what we had seen from the flood we had to identify a number we want back when the flood happened a few of our leaders said we went a thousand units we want to have a thousand units result from this work and so from that we had decided that with this strategy we need to identify a goal and I'll talk about that a little bit more detail in a second we also one of the bolster financial resources to achieve that goal securely in a redevelopment opportunities for future housing preserve affordability of existing housing and align regulatory processes with our housing goals so the wind of the strategy is written it's really seen it's intended to be a menu of options we recognize that every community is very different the affordable housing needs and superior look very different from what you see in Jamestown from what you see a long one for once you see in the city of Boulder

[30:00] from what you see in the county and so the way that the strategy is developed is that under each of these items is there's a menu of options some of them some groups are already doing you know there might be an option under bolster financial resources and you have a community that already is in using a commercial linkage fee where another one isn't but then another group has aligned their regulatory processes to fill silt eight affordable housing development and so we really are using this as a tool for communities to assess their needs their concerns what their community wants and use this as a guide and then we're also going to be employing is advisory services where communities that have been successful in one tactic or another would be willing to provide services or technical assistance to other communities to say hey you want to you know you want to look at your regulatory processes this is what we did in our community and this is what you can do so it's not really one size fits all it's really intended to just be a resource that's gonna be

[31:00] applied as appropriate in each community for them to define so starting with the goal so there's already numerous examples again unlike most communities Boulder the region is unique and that allowed us already have a 10% coal the city of Boulder has a 10% goal word yet 7.5 percent towards our goal as well as Lyons has a 10 percent goal Longmont has a 10 percent goal and within each of those goals they have there's nuances you know some are 10% at 60% ami others might be 10% for this amount for ownership or this amount for rental it looks a little bit different in each community but every community has pretty much said said that this is a priority and we need to secure housing to support our community and our workers and the people that want to call this home and so according to the work that we did we

[32:00] first looked at 10% and then we even looked at 15% 10% seems like well that's what we're already doing we're about to accomplish that in Boulder and other places 15% seemed a little ambitious given the resources that are out there and the land that's available in our region and so we landed on 12% and so if you look at that right now we currently have 6,000 affordable housing units in the boulder across the region that includes ownership includes rental that includes tax credit properties it's a variety of options we believe by 2035 we need to bring 12,000 units online as deed restricted permanently affordable units to serve the needs and that and that's not going to even meet all the needs but it's going to make a difference but that 12% results we got 12,000 would lead to 18,000 and if you look at our build-out by 2035 we we calculate that to be about 12% of our housing stock would be secured as per Malia fordable is that pegged at a

[33:02] particular ami right now we're looking at it it's it's a low to moderate income so 60% for rental a little higher for ownership but then it also includes middle income so different communities are looking at it for so it may vary we didn't really land on specific numbers for each of the a.m. eyes but it is intended to go up to middle-income anything okay and within that mix of 12,000 units we see that as we want new construction as well as acquisition preservation so knowing that we are constrained land constrained we can't go up we can't go out in a lot of our communities that new construction opportunities are limited so we are looking at 300 a year ideally for to bring on 4500 new units and then using resources made available through our partnership and through financial capital that we'll be talking on a

[34:00] second to acquire and preserve existing units that are not already preserved as permantly affordable so it's intended to be a mix of rental and ownership new construction and preservation serve the public participation section of the meeting is over it's just a presentation okay thanks we normally do that at the beginning of the meeting I have a question unincorporated Boulder does that is that folded in through the county it is so our strongest recommendation kind of stepping back for a second you know we have the five strategies that we're pursuing the one strategy with the goal is we are asking that all the communities get behind a countywide goal 12% some communities are looking at

[35:00] adopting that goal for themselves for example Boulder we'll be talking about that at the end of the presentation about if that's something that we want to bring forward a Boulder but our strong a strategy that is going to be required to make this happen is bolstering our financial resources the creation of housing in general is expensive and the creation of affordable housing is even more expensive because it requires subsidy that's not always available so currently approximately 15 million dollars is available across the region to bring about housing opportunities we see that that is brings about 300 units across the region as right now but we if we want to hit the 12 by 35 goal that we're discussing the 12% 12,000 units by 2035 we need about 25 million dollars a year additional so I guess the question about that sir when you're talking about funds currently available or needed down the road this includes cash in lieu but it

[36:03] also includes in that unit count the IH on-site as well that's considered funds that's correct yes so yes that would include our affordable housing fund the Community Housing Assistance Program which is through property taxes worthy cause which is a funding source from the county federal funds that come in so that that is already current 15,000 15 million dollar I have a question maybe for you so I got lost when you said IH maybe other people out there too I don't know what and I was about to actually not clarify that so the inclusionary housing requirement aside the direct unit provision as opposed to cash in lieu with that for example be included in that 300 number now yes I would and that's one of those strategies that we're promoting that other communities look at adopting inclusionary housing programs so they can bring in units

[37:01] through the inclusionary housing regulation and not just through funding sources and just for folks who are watching or in the audience inclusionary housing is the requirement that when a residential development is built a certain percentage of that be permanently affordable and it's currently 20 percent plus an additional 5% for middle income okay so how are we gonna raise 25 million in addition to our 15 million that's a big question so the way that we would like to do is to structure our regional a region-wide affordable housing trust fund this would be something that you know while the mechanics of it and how it would be program have yet to be determined but essentially we would see this as a fund that would be available to communities and partners throughout the region to access to to bring about housing opportunities the way that we all fund

[38:00] projects now is we we will bring in our you know local subsidy and then it's used to leverage tax credits our private activity bonds and so these funds would ideally be used to leverage outside resources into the communities so right now for example in the city of Boulder we're finding that every dollar that we put in leverage is about three to five dollars so if we are aiming to bring our financial sources increase it by 25 million you know that could eventually leveraged 75 to 100 million dollars across the region so that that's kind of the model that we're pursuing but the way that we would capitalize this fund is we do need the support of the public we need to pursue potential ballot initiatives that would be looking at increasing sales and property taxes to support the goals extend and increase the worthy cause program that the county currently has and have it so it's dedicating more of its funds to affordable housing looking at reviewing occupation how hotel tax and then the

[39:01] real estate transfer tax which does require some state action but it is something across the state that other jurisdictions are looking at if we were able to across the region build the support and along with our other partners across the Front Range be able to take some state action we might be able to generate funds as a result of enacting a real estate real estate transfer tax and then finally in some of our communities were already implementing local commercial linkage fees we would be looking at using that as well if commute shows - so those are really the big doozies of the goals is that 12% and bolstering resources but this is what we needs the money for I mean at the end the day we need money to do this but we would use it to secure land and redevelopment opportunities for future housing and preserve affordability of existing housing looking at securing land and redevelopment opportunities the way that we would do that is identify publicly owned vacant and underutilized land and designate them

[40:01] for affordable housing development we could secure new land through acquisitions and donations identify sites designated as business commercial industrial and public and rezone to allow or designate for affordable housing development we could prioritize deed restricted residential units and annexation agreements those are all tactics we've used across the region already and of to varying degrees of success but you could expand that an example you see a picture here of Lafayette that's the Lafayette Flatirons parcel the city of Lafayette partnered with Boulder County and the Boulder County Housing Authority to purchase 24 acres of land in East Lafayette from Flatirons church for the purpose of affordable housing and there was a interesting article in the paper this weekend about the work that they're doing with the community to define what the best programming and what the end uses will be at that site in terms of the number of housing the type of housing he'll be designed that sort of stuff so there's a real rich opportunities out there to work with communities to bring about bring

[41:01] additional units into to meet the need and then finally preserving not finally but preserving existing affordable and marketed paintable housing we can acquire indeed restrict existing housing units we can acquire existing unit it just wouldn't you do that it's a it's a very smart way to go about because you're it's a very green approach and that you're acquiring existing buildings you're not building new it's less it maintains the neighborhood balance and dynamic and character and sometimes not always it can be less expensive so to be able to buy existing units it's one way to go about that the other picture there is last year we had the opportunity to partner with Boulder housing partners to help purchase Tantra lakes it's 185 unit apartment complex in South Boulder we were able to go in and do some creative financing and we were able to secure setting 5% 75 units as permantly

[42:00] affordable the other 110 units are a market rate affordable because of the relationship of bhp and their ownership of the property and as time as the financing can lay out you know bhp is and we're in a relationship with them in a partnership and that we would be able to bring more unit says primarily affordable over time as the financing kind of evolves and then in our last strategy that we're proposing is to align our regulatory processes processes to ensure that we facilitate the creation and preservation of affordable housing rather than impeding affordable housing development this might look like adopting staff-level reviews fee reductions of waivers density increases requiring annexations to include affordable housing expediting entitlements for affordable housing units there's a whole menu of options that we see deployed across the country that we could look at our current regulatory practices to see there's ways for us to facilitate the creation of more units and in fact as Longmont last year kind of took the lead on this and

[43:01] they looked at their practices and they made some changes in their regulatory environment they adopted the 10% goal they were view they changed the regulations and policies - - that were hindering affordable housing creation they are now allowing affordable housing development by right so it's moves through quickly and they have expedited there were a few process they're also providing density height bonuses so not to say that that's something that we have to do here in Boulder or every other community but that there's just a lot of creative ways to get to this solution so those presents the strategy we had this opportunity to take this to our elected officials back in September we had the first affordable housing summit we convened a group of 75 elected officials from across Boulder County it also included staff members from planning Health and Human Services as well as members of the public they reviewed and discussed and informed the

[44:01] regional housing strategy there you see the quote from Commissioner Jones that she closed that video with just showing the importance of us working together to achieve this goal and since the summit nine of the jurisdictions have adopted resolutions supporting the partnership and the strategy so we have the city of Boulder city of Longmont Jamestown Boulder County Lafayette at Louisville superior Netherland have all adopted resolutions supporting this work so since September so September we had the summit then we you know the end of the year was communities adopting the resolution City Council's and boards and commissions we're looking at the adopting in so we were able to do some quick work and finished up the year with those nine resolutions now what we're at is we spent the first part this year

[45:00] figuring out the staffing and resourcing of this effort and then back in June we were able to bring myself and Pam on board to staff it we've actually also have several support members that are in kind different communities are providing in-kind support we have our data analytics person who's contributing a part of his time and so we now as of the second quarter we have now staffed we're relaunching the Boulder County Housing regional partnership we have a website that will have the website up in a second but we are releasing that it's meant to be a very interactive communicative way of reaching our communities and our partners to bring about affordable housing opportunities we are developing in an intergovernmental agreement to govern the work of the partnership we will be hosting a planner symposium one of the things that we've heard from planning staff is that they want more information about what is affordable housing how does it work how does affordable housing financing work and so we're gonna be hosting a planner

[46:00] symposium to could have dual affordable housing affordable housing finance 101 and then we'll be talking about all the committees in a second in the structure but we're currently seating the committee's we're also doing a lot of work across the community across the region and just ongoing collaboration we we have an existing pipeline meeting but we are now under the partnership we are hosting a biannual twice a year we meet all development partner cities staff chafa and joins us the state of Colorado Division of Housing joins us and we just talked about development opportunities and we try to make connections we've also brought in the homeless service providers and development community to pair up rental and housing options with the work that's occurring and with the homeless service providers will also be partnering with the chamber of commerce on their housing some of that they're gonna be hosting in the fall and then we'll be bringing about another second

[47:00] annual and hopefully a third annual housing summit I'm in the beginning of each of the net falling years and in addition to that you know you can see I can barely see but ongoing you know we do want to establish a marketing campaign you saw our first video that's been released we have a newsletter that will be going out monthly we have a website that is intended to be very resourceful we'll be working on our financing resource development that might be starting to nurture the idea of a ballot initiative and what that might look like we're competing our committees and groups we have the advisory services collaboration research on and on so there's a lot of stuff going on we also will be measuring our success here's a few of the indicators I will be using what you see in front of you there is also we've developed a dashboard they'll be tracking our progress and success across the county but then we'll also be providing this and preparing this for each of our jurisdictional partners and

[48:00] here's the structure so we have an Operations team which includes myself Pam as a coordinator we have communications staff that's been dedicated by the county we have a data analytics person as we develop and grow we'll be seeing other jurisdictions providing support to this group as in-kind contributions we are being guided by a steering committee that air parties to the IGA the as of right now those are include the city of Boulder Boulder County in Longmont because they are financial contributors to this effort we also will be having to advise it well we'll have an advisory committee and then two subcommittees I'll be doing the work of the strategies we also the developing a group of partner partnership champions which are our elected officials they'll help us further the goals of the strategy and partnership and then finally a housing interest group that is gonna be made up of local leaders advocates development partners in general public just in a little bit more didn't just briefly the stern committees gonna govern the

[49:01] strategic and operational direction the advisory committee will advise the strategic directions where we see sitting on that is each of the communities will have a representative and an alternate that I'd be sitting on that committee to advise the direction of the work we'll have subcommittees that are actually doing the research promoting and helping implement strategies the champions will be elected officials that are helping advocate and bringing their leadership to further the goals the strategy the interest group will inform and influence the work of the Builder County Regional Housing Partnership and then finally we have our operations team so before we get into this any questions about the direction of the partnership that was a lot of information I think it's amazing it's really great work and I love the structure of it so it's exciting any other yeah more of a comment actually so it seems when you chose the 12 percent number the piece that was missing there

[50:02] was we didn't actually look at the total types of jobs in our community the total wages that those people earn and then go from there as to how you know what percentage of our housing stock actually needs to be permanently affordable in order to support the types of jobs that we have in every community is there any reason why that sort of wasn't the focus well taken sir I think I'll take a stab I think hurt congestion but we did last year when we were doing this work we did hire a consultant that did a lot of the number crunching for us and she did look at population per spec projections she looked at kind of build-out projections and things of that sort she did have access to and reviewed you know all of us have done studies of varying kinds we recently hired consultants to do the commercial linkage fee and they did look at that job housing balance and some of that influenced the the goal-setting if we

[51:02] wanted to dive into that another time I'm not prepared to go into too much detail about that right now but we could come back and kind of dissect that number a little bit closer if that would be helpful to you yeah I'm just interested you know I think our whole purpose here is to support the broad range of wages within the community and make sure that over time we actually meet that need look even though that may take a very long time that's the ultimate end goal so yeah that's just what I'm getting at mm-hmm did you have any comments okay so III do have a couple of questions one is can even read my writing there was an article in The Economist a couple of months ago about a lot of states and local jurisdictions are going to be facing headwinds budgetary headwinds with regard to

[52:01] expected decline in sales tax and so as we look at revenue sources to fund this property the two options currently available to us are property tax and sales tax what kind of consideration has been paid to sort of the declining future of sales tax for budget support it's definitely been part of the conversation as we've discussed these strategies we are just at the beginning of these conversations so I think there'll be plenty of time where and you know we do intend to bring in different expertise to help inform those discussions and what is the most you know feasible way to pursue this and how to be bit forward so I think I think you're asking the right questions we're gonna start diving in to pretty quickly and so a related into that is of course right now you're

[53:02] looking at what's currently available to us but as the partnership also considering lobbying at the state level to change Tabor so there are other options that are available like a real estate transfer tax or even luxury home tax and things of that nature that is something we've discussed we haven't and we've we've actually had conversations with our regional partners we've engaged with across the metro area with denver westminster long months part of this too but there's a lot of momentum right now to organize in that direction and I think this is the perfect vehicle to help us kind of bring our local partners together to build up that momentum here in our county so here yes and then my last question is the twenty five million dollar we'll call it seed money that you're looking at that ostensibly a sales tax or the real estate tax would fund is that - is that debt service on a

[54:03] bond or is that just direct money in money out kind of financial maneuver and so if it's money in money out I was wonder if the partnership has discussed a more ambitious approach to actually sell instruments on the financial markets that then the taxes could support the debt service work I mean I think our current practices are money and money out but I think there's an opportunity with us collaborating and convening the expertise that's available across the county that we would be able to evolve and look at these more sophisticated tools I think the beauty of a housing trust fund is that it's it's it's designed to continue to generate funding mm-hmm so it's meant to be an investment that you would be kicking off proceeds from that you can continue to grow your funding source once it's capitalized and I wasn't suggesting a replacement but

[55:02] more to kind of make a bigger immediate impact with a larger pot of money and then the trust fund would consent it would and it would also satisfy the debt service on them so if I could just added the the structure actually works that way but in a slightly different approach so as Kristen mentioned earlier that 25 million would be leveraged by three to five times as much sort of bond money that comes in at you know very competitive rates because it is you know light tech funding so it's it's a very efficient way to bring large resources to the to the issue so it's not just a 25 million amount that right you shouldn't be looking at great is there a part - no I just have a couple questions

[56:00] for you guys so it sounds like that boulders driving this are we the drive are we the no we're not actually it's been a really amazing collaborative experience as a result of the floods we had all gun pretty used to working together and enjoying and seeing the power of working together and so every meeting has had you know between 10 to 15 people from jurisdictions across the region working together so it it did so happen that it kind of fit with some of the work that I was already doing so it was kind of a natural fit for myself and Pam to step into this role because we had been a part of it all along as well as just we also have a regional reach at this point because of our work with the home consortium so it just was kind of a natural fit so I wouldn't say we're driving it we're definitely excited be a part of it but when we're out in the cup today we went and visited superior we're very clear like today we're here as regional partnership we are now it's the city of Boulder and so we really want to

[57:00] make sure that we are looking at this as regional efforts and not driven by one jurisdiction over another so is there than a pool for operational expenses that you guys are okay yeah so it's set aside and I wouldn't everybody's working on got it fantastic that's all I had so I have two quick questions for you I think you might know that answer the first one already for whatever so we do have we would like to ask the housing advisory board to identify a member to serve on the housing interest group essentially that's gonna be working with a working with us to inform and influence the partnership and the implementation of the strategy we expect it to me by annually or as needed and we're looking at those as local leaders elected officials who or agency representative housing partners whether it's our development providers our development partners service providers advocates members of the public and

[58:00] event essentially what they'll be doing is reviewing the ideas vetting the ideas really helping guide the direction of the work so we actually have a subcommittee that we have formed okay but housing meghna that's what I contacted you too about a few weeks ago and unless other members want to be on that subcommittee I would expect that it would be one or the other of us that would attend these meetings does that make sense to folks yeah I mean originally I wasn't interested in it but like now watching all of this I'm interested in it so I I personally would like to you know as we kind of flesh out the community of the committee's and really look at what we're when we sign kind of roles on all those other things that we were talking about initiatives as well but it's really hard because I get interested in all this and how do

[59:01] you divide it up and really pay attention but yes I'm interested too okay great thank you unless I just want to introduce an idea I we're not really in a position to discuss this at much depth but one of the things we wanted to bring to the housing advisory board that we would like to explore over the next few months before possibly making a recommendation to City Council is the consideration of adopting a 12% goal for the city of Boulder last year City Council did adopt a resolution supporting the 12% of goal countywide you know but as I mentioned earlier we currently have the 10% coal where we're pretty close to meeting that goal we were at 7.5 we expect with our current pipeline and development opportunities that were aware of that we're gonna hit the 10% goal in three to five years which is wonderful but it's not enough there's still a great need so what we would like to explore with you over the next few months is if there's an opportunity to increase the goal to 12% for the city of Boulder and so

[60:01] essentially that would take us look at these numbers really quick um we would need an additional two thousand six hundred and seven affordable units to hit 12% by 2035 so I just want to throw that idea out there I think there's more work that needs to be done to really understand the numbers and understand the impact that that would have on Boulder and how we would do that but you know looking at the pace of production that we have right now and the partners we have very sophisticated very successful partners and so I think to raise it to 12% by 2035 is very doable for our community so and with that and here's the website for everybody its www housing our community org and there you'll find all sorts of information its evolving we're currently kind of redesigning it and relaunching it and there we do have some extra copies of the strategy the strategy is online so if you don't want to take the

[61:01] paper you can just check it out online but it is Pam has copies of the strategy with her right now any other questions thank you okay so now we'll have our ami discussion I guess so what new and exciting news do you have for us on that front so I think we'll take a couple seconds here are you - looks like Cory's anybody want efficient here it really looks at me because I always good I'm good so far okay thank you thank thank you thank you so some of the numbers from the from Depot Square mentioned this has been a topic for a

[62:01] couple of months now and at our have meeting I think to have meetings ago you asked that we you receive an update on this so this is basically what it is it's it's not a deep dive into the issue it is an update to give you further information as I mentioned to Leonard you know prior to the meeting today City Council is also asked for a memo or informational packet which I sent a draft of this afternoon we will be sending that to City Council tomorrow so that the timing of this is actually quite good and we will take you know any feedback or input that you have this evening and you know summarize that into the into the IP which goes out to them

[63:02] tomorrow it doesn't actually go to them tomorrow but gets into the process to go to them so I'm just gonna give a summary and presentation all this information is also in the in the IP and I'll see if I can drive this thing here I said tunics blood it's this top one right oh I think you turned off I'm sorry oh the middle and got you thank you okay so the I'm going to talk a little bit about the the purpose I'll

[64:01] talk a little bit about how these the the rent structure works currently and also talk a little bit how it worked in the past so the current process is determine the affordable rents is based on the industry standards which as you know is the is the ami with two primary objectives one is to create affordable housing for residents in the city and the other is to ensure that the properties are maintained that they're financially sustainable so a little bit about the area median income so again just reminding people what the median is it's the middle so if if the median income is $100,000 since someone makes a hundred thousand dollars and

[65:01] four hundred thousand and five dollars if someone moves in that makes three million dollars a year you meaning income would go up to that one hundred and thousand and five it just goes up you know the next the next person there in the middle so the meeting is much different than the average so just wanted to clarify that so that wasn't confusing for people this is set by by HUD it's based on the the survey that's done every five years and then they adjust it annually and they use things like the Consumer Price Index but it's focused on because it's based on a survey it's focused it's different throughout the country and so our ami is based on that for Boulder County so this is what the ami

[66:01] has looked like and we started here in 2000 because that's when we started our rih program and really get serious about affordable housing in the city of Boulder so you can see how there has been certainly an upward trend in that it's over that period of time it's averaged 1.8% per year so these are the chafa this is the chat for rent table or a portion of the chaff a rent table for for this for 2018 so you can see the the 60% rents in there for different sized units and then you can see the 30% rents there's also categories at at 40 and 50% and the other thing that's worth noting is we have we've created different ami

[67:04] units within our within the whole portfolio within this city so we often talk about the 60% ami and that's sort of the definition but actually everything that fits underneath the 60% ami is considered affordable some of some of our some of the units in the city through the covenants are actually designated at lower AM eyes than 60% many of the properties we'll have some of the units at 60 some at 50 some at 30 and then they're required then they could even be the same size unit they could all be you know 650 square foot one-bedroom you it's but they're at different a.m. eyes and so then they're required to rent to

[68:02] people who fit you know those categories so there's a there's a diversity there the other thing which I don't have a slide on but about 48 percent of our households that live in affordable units within this city make 30 percent of the ami or less so there's there certainly is a focus on varied incomes so I'll talk a little bit about the the old process and for for this evening I hope we don't dive too deeply into this because this was before my time and some of the people that know more about this are on vacation right now but it would take us a little more time to sort of dig back into that history as

[69:01] well but I'll just describe some of the challenges so in 2005 it was identified by the city and city council that this was that the how affordable housing units were the rents were priced was simply not working it took it took six years to fix that problem and as was mentioned earlier there was a there was a 3% cap but it was based on the household size and not the the type of unit that it is so household sizes change during the year it also had a it was also related to their income incomes change during the year and so it became an individual is essentially an individual calculation

[70:00] for for every household who lives in informal housing projects at the time that this was initiated it start with one project that had I can't remember it was like 24 units or something so it wasn't at that at the time that it was designed it wasn't really designed for scale there was high administrative burdens both on the city to kind of oversee that and ensure that they're doing it according to the the policies and then there was a high burden on all the property owners they don't ease affordable units the other thing that came along shortly after that within the city of Boulder was low-income housing tax credit funds which essentially fund almost well a high majority of the affordable housing

[71:01] rental units across the United States and lytec is actually connected to ami [Music] so the the low-income housing tax credits so in the way they they start off so that's the financing for the low-income property and one and it's all the rules of lytec are based in the IRS regulations and that's required to be set to the ami of the units and so that's why broadly you know across the country rental pricing has sort of aligned with that or one of the reasons so the current calculation as you all

[72:00] know is based on ami which is based on the this the the type of units which is the number of bedrooms and we also have there's there's also sort of an efficiency or zero bedroom type units as well Kirk can I ask a question yep am i well it's tied like a lie Tech is tied to am i is it tied to where in the ami spectrum the funding might go toward yes so it depends on the type of funding you're getting the type of project that you're doing if most projects like tech projects are tied to 60% ami as the city sometimes we will put additional funds into a property to try to buy down some of the units into lower am ice when we

[73:01] have the resources to do that and where it makes sense a different example I could give would be attention homes where they got a different type of light tech funding they got a 9% light tech funding and that enables them and and the covenants will reflect this a very low those are below 30% am eyes and that will be in perpetuity so most of the time they are sixty percent and there's depending on the type of project you can get others as well yep okay thanks so this is just sort of a summary of Depot Square and this represents both the rents and the maximum rents so the maximum rents represent the the the the

[74:04] chafa or am you know as used to compare to the ami so those are the chat for rents so you can see that percent in chafa the first year it went down then it went up by 3.5 and then you know this year is where the concern is that 10.5 the far right column shows the percentage change in the actual rents that the tenants were charged or will be charged in this case occurred in that with the when in 2016 then tenants actually see it discount and rent they did not and the reason for that again is it's because it's funded through lytec and it's a little bit like if you have a mortgage on your house and your income comes goes down you can't call up your bank and say for the next year can you lower my mortgage so they have a set

[75:02] mortgage so they could have done it maybe ten years from now if they had the same situation if they wanted to do that typically what we've seen with our with all of our affordable housing owners is that they they try to do a more of a a gradual increase so if it goes down they keep it at zero if it goes up they do it less so it's not a hard knock in any particular year but in this particular situation it was the first year in and so when you when you sign a lytec financing deal the ami that you that is in place at the time that the financing is is signed off you can't go below that ami so that's part of the rules of that and again you

[76:01] can see the conflict with the sort of the old way in this and how they would those different regulations would conflict so but but ten years from now if Jeff came with something similar to this the owner could decide to lower their rents because the building and stuff would be paid off is that what we're talking about we're talking about the financing of the property and right now being no because the reason I'm saying that is because chaffeur Ensco right they gradually go up but you can go below the floor of the point when you started yeah okay so this slide was was was written by our City Attorney's Office what we can and what we can't do so what we can do is which is what was done in 2011 is

[77:02] they basically got all the owners around you know the table or theoretically around the table and they got everyone to change their covenants and the reason they did it at that time is because the administrative burdens were you know we're so high and so the covenants can only change through mutual agreements the other thing is we can do is we can explore options which may be acceptable more acceptable to tenants and more acceptable to the owners of the property what we can do is change the covenants for only one group so we couldn't change the covenants for all the all the private owners of affordable housing as an example and is this the area where we

[78:01] would want to talk about the 30 day notice were you there that we're talking about the 30 notice I believe so potentially looking at a longer notification instead of it because I mean that's correct putting people in yep that's correct we could that would be a place to have that discussion yeah the other thing we can so the first bullet point we can't change the covenants for only one group and that's that's sort of a rent control a state rent controlled challenge and the second one is as well so we can't the City Council can't pass an ordinance that says this is how you're gonna do your this is how you're gonna do rents so the the only path is through a change in the covenants so the there could be an approach

[79:00] potentially where that could happen as time goes on it becomes more more difficult because you have more and more properties and more and more owners back in 2011 there were there were still quite a few I think there was a little over 2000 units at that time so these are potential next steps that we we've thought about first of all this would have to be designated by the City Council to put on our work plan it's not currently on our work plan for this year and if you remember last year at the I'm sorry this year the retreats in January they theoretically did a two-year work plan saying that they're not going to have a retreat this year we'll see if that happens or not but I'm sure they'll be here to give input to the work plans

[80:03] and then you know additional analysis that we can if that's if that is put on our work plan these are some of the things that we would look at and you know giving a deeper dive into the previous approach to setting rents digging up a little more of that history looking at more of the trends between market and affordable units doing community engagement around this both with residents of affordable housing as well as owners of affordable housing and then looking at what from a legal standpoint you know what's what options would we have so that's the the close of my update may as well start at the end

[81:02] to the right all right I don't have any particular specific question but it's pretty clear that this is income inequality driven issue that people who you know clearly aren't getting wage increases the ami increases but they are caught at the bottom of the system and their rents continue to go up so we either as a community have to figure out some way to decrease the income inequality issue or find a new targeting system here because doing nothing is only gonna you know we're gonna continue the same way we're going right now I don't have a solution for that right now but it you know we've talked about maybe pegging affordability on the ami scale lower you know what

[82:00] what's sort of the options around that maybe I realize it's a national system but clearly the national system itself is broken yeah so I think part of yeah and I'll just throw out some responses but I think in and I don't want to pretend that this is a study session yeah but I think some of the challenges that we would have to look at is what the impacts on actually if we we would have to be careful in any policy that we pass like that or Avenue or any new covenants that we put in place that it wouldn't prevent funding of new projects if we went too far the developer wouldn't be able to go ahead and get funding for the project so we need to we just need to balance that as well so Adam I'd like to suggest that maybe for all of us cuz I think we're probably on

[83:00] the same place that we we get where the break is occurring and and in agreement that there's there's possibilities to be explored here maybe this might be a great opportunity to kind of utilize that planning outline that we had talked about and maybe to explore some options and really not here right now deep dive into those and possibly come up with some ideas because the City Council's going to be addressing this it might just be a perfect opportunity for us to have a United maybe single page item of something we've come up with it as we explore it sure and I think one thing we can probably already include is increasing that amount of time that 30 days yeah because we were pretty much all in agreeance that that is a very short amount of time it doesn't make it doesn't give people the opportunity to try and find anything else especially if you're already in a financial pinch okay

[84:00] so first of all thank you all of you for coming tonight because I'm guessing by your signs that this is your big topic of interest of our meeting tonight and thank you Curt for all the work you do on affordable housing I know you really are devoted to it I I'm a person it never dawned on me till this came up a few months ago that people would have to leave affordable housing because they could no longer pay for it looks like that just is just appalling to me and it's something that we in Boulder can figure out how to do something about it like I really think we can do something about this and so I just have a bunch of questions that may sound really naive and dopey but I'm just gonna try can there be any way that there can be more nonprofit capacity built up to be doing these you you would mention or maybe what Jay sent out mentioned I don't remember which that that developers

[85:00] since they're for-profit have to pay taxes but nonprofits don't so so that's an extra reason why the developers need to raise the rent so I'm presuming so is there a way that that you can either say I pass on that for right now or you could try and answer because I have a little list so yeah I can answer that so up until a handful of years ago virtually all of the affordable housing in the city of Boulder was owned by either the Housing Authority or nonprofits and partly through the you know called success of the IH program and through the pressure of the community and pressure I think of city council as well there's been a it's hard not to notice that the community in City Council wants private developers to do

[86:01] affordable housing it's being played out right now you know at 311 the idea of creating affordable housing as part of their development has been kind of a almost a core value over the last few years that has pushed private developers to own affordable housing and I think it would be fair to say that first of all the expenses as you've just highlighted are different for for-profit developers as they are for the Housing Authority some people could argue that their motivations might be slightly different as well so one example I can give of sort of success of all of those things is the the seek low project which is in the it's just east of 30th Street which will they're getting permits now they'll

[87:02] be starting construction on that soon it's part of the SPARC area so that that Sigler project was brought through by a private developer and it's part of a bigger project and they created one building integrated with the project as affordable housing and they're now working with bhp they're gonna build it and bhp is going to then own it and manage it so there it's it's it's nice to create those partnerships because I think that they're a better solution and it's it's sort of that that's a new thing for Boulder and I think it's great to see the private developers working in that with the housing authority and I think there's a lot of advantages to

[88:01] that in in most of those are in many of those at least is it a mix of the developer having some market rate housing and some affordable or is it all affordable it's all affordable but they built market sort of across the street and the reason it works by doing that one building is 100% affordable housing it's because then you can bring in the light tech funding to leverage the financing of the project but if there's something you still get the benefits of a housing authority I'm owning that in perpetuity the developer themself is still having an opportunity for the market rate which just for me makes me think can't they make their profit off the market rate and not off the affordable house well they're not making any profit off the affordable units but they're raising the rent but other private developers so Depot Square is owned by a private developer they've raised the rent seven percent and

[89:02] through our conversations with them I believe that they've taken both things into consideration one is the right residence and one is their expenses as you saw in the memo you know their their property taxes as one example have has gone up at camera probably fifty percent over the last three years but if that was owned by housing authority that would look a little bit differently right so it's a good point that you've brought up and it's something that we certainly need to try to have more of those types of situations okay my next question can I'm pretty sure that whenever you apply for low-income housing or for affordable housing you obviously have to turn in some verifiable proof that you indeed qualify at 60% or whatever it is right so isn't there some that's something like that like since

[90:01] that information has to come in every year again but that can be used as a criteria and if people's wages are stagnant then they don't have to have an increase that is that too dreamy yeah so that's kind of how it was before it's it was similar to that and that that's where it became administrative ly incredibly burdensome and we can do a comparison I don't have it for you here but we can do a comparison between kind of the old way and then and if I can call it a new way and you know they're not that much difference because as you've seen over time or since 2000 the rents have gone up an average of 1.8% it doesn't mean you're not gonna have years like this year worse it spiked in a way that's not great but if you compare that to the 3% maximum you know it falls within that

[91:02] but I know I mean I've I've spent a little bit of time at Boulder housing partners and I just know a little bit about section 8 housing because that's where I spent my time but they they do do that already every year like they'll check people's income and then they'll set how much you know by that by the increase in wages or their the stagnant you know so I mean it's not it's a combination of their income and so based on the the rents are still based on the ami it's just a matter of the proportion of amount pure pain okay - again I just wanted to say because that was sort of in there earlier but this the way it's set up now is actually aligned with section 8 housing what yes yeah could there be any negotiations between the

[92:01] developers and maybe between the county between the city and the county so that if developers were being taxed rather than having the rates of the residents be increased they could get some tax break for having affordable housing that sounds like a David Gere question but if you if you we can send a reply for that question and then the next question is somebody talked about all the different increases just at this place and I assume there may be other increases and things like having each unit pay individually for their utilities instead of a flat rate in the parking and all those things that alarmed me a lot because that's a lot of money for someone at that income and so although that's not directly housing I hope that's something that we get to take a look at and comment on and then

[93:03] can you pause right there I want to tack on to that back to the things that we can and can't do when we're talking about the 30-day I'm I'm also really curious about it because it seems with then the developers are doing or in gaming it and and by were like what Megan was talking about with the parking and the utilities and the storage units is there any control over that for individuals who are in affordable housing and if not why not yeah there is for the utilities and there's a can't remember the term right now but there's like a standard amount for utilities for each unit type so it needs to fit sort of fit within that in the case of Depot Square they individually individually metered so if you go over that set amount that you get each month and you pay above that that's how I understand that so the other other properties that

[94:03] don't meter individually they still have a set amount for utilities that plays into that is there anybody who reviews that because it does seem interesting that they'd be gone for a month and have a double bill on the month that they were gone so and I know that that there's been some weird things that have happened with my metered system as well so I'm just curious if there's anybody monitoring that or taking a look at it or an auditing system okay so I don't know if someone's auditing that at Depot Square however we do an annual audit of all of the properties where we look at their their procedures for how they're doing the the rents how they're doing the utilities and all those things to make sure that they're in line with or rental compliance manual I the other thing that's worth mentioning is Depot Square is sort of a unique project to

[95:01] our other projects in the city it's it's it's part of Boulder Junction as such it they also have I could say additional taxes that other properties don't have called the pilot fees and that's used to support the you know sort of the transportation district and so part of what if you if you live in Depot Square it was a sort of a direction that was set by City Council and Planning Board as that whole area was developed that that everything would be according to some principles which is basically what you know the residents described there and so that goes for that whole area even xxx and Pearl well will need to be set up according to some principles as

[96:00] well where and the idea of that is that parking will always be paid for and so in in in in exchange for that they will receive you know they all everyone in that area receives a bus pass as well and so that's sort of the concept of the of that area so it is it is unique in that way so that are you good with me next - yes okay I'm just finding all of these yes anything I do think that there's got to be a way to to look into them a little bit more looking at the faces on a couple of people and yeah curious if the communication of the bus passes and and those principals in that area I've gone gone through and what that looks like but yes keep going so okay so just two more things so when you communicate what we've all said you know I think it's pretty clear that we're all very interested in this topic and and would like for it to be revisited yeah you know but I just have my own personal

[97:01] spiel that's just tangentially related and that is actually about parking and I feel that the city in its interest and excitement about decreasing driving and helping with transportation and all that it feels to me in just what I'm finding out talking to people that it's starting to unfairly burden those who can least accept the burden and by even limiting parking spaces in low-income housing or affordable housing and also charging its people in affordable housing are more likely to be working shifts perhaps than other people when eco passes aren't especially helpful they're not always near or the Eco passes are the car sharing you know someone eagerly told me all about car sharing ideas and I and it's like I just don't feel good about that you know that and people actually say things to me

[98:00] like well they can just take uber it's like seriously you're talking about a lot of people who probably might be driving uber to increase their income and they need their cars and they need them where they can see them and they can't walk six blocks anyway that's my spiel I just think the city should start looking at the real ramifications on real people of some of the cool ideas about transportation yeah I don't have much dad just want to restate a point that that question I had earlier about the where in the spectrum of am I you can focus on and that's tied to a lot of the financing and so I think it's going to be important for counseling us to have a understanding of really what the limitations are to kind of shift were the focus with an ami spectrum can be without basically undermining or funding for those same projects yeah I mean

[99:01] basically if you want to lower the ami as it takes money yeah and then the other part of what these folks are here about which is the increases I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable to presume there will be other years where there will be big spikes and so to the extent that things can be graduated as they have been somewhat in some years while the costs went or the ami went down rinsed it and go up ultimately what people are looking for is predictability and maybe even in those downturn ami downturn years maybe modest increases that offset future larger increases might be a good strategy just so people have a more predictable progression in rent increases yeah so when I look back I found one other year that had a 10%

[100:02] increase so it was a slightly lower than this year what I don't know is what the what the rents increased over at that time that's something that we would have to find out and I don't I didn't have that information this week one of the things I'm looking back though that we did see so there was a when this previous policy was in place and previous covenants there was a period of about I think it was about five or six years where the ami didn't go up at all the rents didn't go up at all and some of the affordable housing projects became a little less financially stable and then as at that time you know CPI's started

[101:00] going up slightly so it was more based on on that at that point and they could they couldn't raise the rents any more than three percent but they had fallen behind you know the market had gone up you know fifteen twenty percent and they had been stagnant for five years and so it created a challenge in getting some of those properties so this year work Medina about I think it's about three and a half million dollars into some of those properties in actually renovating them and getting them more energy-efficient and operated partly as a result because they weren't they over that period retirees they sort of lost ground on their financial sustainability yeah one more thing it seems really interesting to me especially when we just talked about the regional housing plan that we build this permanently affordable housing and then

[102:00] we charge property tax on it we have a place that is permanently affordable and you were saying that the reason why there was going up was because they saw a 50% increase in their property taxes why are they facing the same taxes that why are they not getting a greater discount because it's an affordable property I don't understand where that I think that's in law but I will get David gear to give you a response to that okay I'd like to just comment though at the end of the day that money has to come from somewhere so if the property owner isn't paying the property tax the public is paying the property tax but that money still has to go into the coffers from some source I get it I take it from the people house right from the affordable house right if we're gonna set it up then yeah so I'm on that um I just want to kind of wrap up the discussion by saying that I find this

[103:00] the ami fascinating it's happening on a national level there's a lot of people I'm reading articles and I participate in several all groups across the country that are all trying to address this right now so I think as a board the exciting opportunity is that we can look at this in a bigger way and maybe maybe cause some change in here that I think we're all interested in and then we possibly have some short-term items that we could affect as well so I'm excited about this being an opportunity to really kind of dig dig our teeth into and and see what's possible just to explore it for opportunities and and see what we can come up with so I appreciate your time too because I know you have so much of 00 or 7:44 you have one minute left thank you very much

[104:03] thank you how about we take a three or four minute break and then come back to our next item

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[111:03] agenda item is she's never you're not ready yet okay we get to our agenda item 6a talking about our strategy for our televised meetings and how we might do public engagement through those meetings so who wants to kick that off okay to have some notes and I have to switch to my reason no it's yours okay mine's I do too so I think what we had talked about in the past let me know if this was this is correct or not yes okay that we want to try a couple

[112:01] things that were right now we're calling housing ignite but we want to have a couple meetings maybe this first year where we try experiments to do something in a little different way and what has interested me the most and I think I had discussed this with you Kurt is that when I sit out in the audience at a Planning Board meeting or City Council meeting I hear if there's an issue of which there's division two different opinions or several different opinions one side I'll get up and give their speech and they'll give it very intensely and they may disparage the other side a little bit and then the other side will get up and say their thing and people it's sort of like listening to Congress on c-span where people are making passionate speeches and they're all making good points but there's no those things just float out into the ethers and go nowhere so I'd like to try some kind of engagement

[113:00] we're almost like a good old-fashioned debate where people could debate the topic and then rebut a little bit for a brief time and then we ask questions and then we see if we can find common ground and Kurt even said that there is the possibility if we wanted to go that direction did you say this for facilitator you know we have you on tape so I just yeah I wasn't saying anything necessarily about the idea but I was saying that at times boards will bring in a facilitator which we can do to facilitate process so if that would be helpful and the two I had with the public yes working with the public and I

[114:01] had two ideas and the first is if part of our task from Council is to really work on public engagement then before we go too far along we really ought to hear what the public thinks about housing issues in general rather than just us we certainly don't want to be in a position of deciding what we think the public thinks about housing issues so I thought we could do one meeting where we would have to really publicize it well and and just ask the public to come in and say they're a couple of concern or two and a solution or two and also at the same time invite people to email us and we can at least that that won't help the dialogue in a way in many ways but it will at least give us a good idea of some of the ideas that are out there so we can start choosing then the other idea I heard I thought of is to pick a

[115:01] really tense one in Boulder one of the elephants in the housing room you mean like 311 Mapleton not a specific project we don't get to do we don't get to do projects but a more more broad one like density and neighborhood character or occupancy or something like that and that would and have something like that where it's an old-fashioned debate I even thought as specifically as we could have four people speak for four minutes each we could have better bolder pick one person plan plan plan bolder pick one person and then in the audience we could say how many of you want to talk about density how many want to talk about neighborhoods okay density people over here you have two minutes to pick your person neighborhood people you have two minutes to pick yours and those are the four people who do the debate they speak for four minutes each they were but four to two minutes each we ask questions and

[116:00] then we all work perhaps with a facilitator to try and find common ground and we can just as an experiment see if that works and I'll also add to that by saying I've been trying to talk to a lot of people many of whom I suspect I would agree with and I found out I do agree with many whom I don't agree with at all but really liked them and I really believe that we can find common ground and that that's the way we can start solving some of the problems so those are my thoughts so I want to just make a comment in 2012 Planning Board had a three-day long hearing on Hogan pan cos and it was really interesting you that's before your time because the applicant had their hydrologist come in testify the

[117:01] neighborhood had better hydrologists come and testify and the city hired a third party and it actually ended up in a very collegial discussion between the three experts and they actually came to common agreement that in fact there wasn't all the information that was needed to substantiate the application and I think that was a good model so I really like generally the idea that you're proposing it's amazing when you get those parties together in a room especially in a public forum and you're just talking about the technical merits how much overlap that there can be and they probably went off the reservation to some extent relative to what they're paying clients would have preferred but actually it was very productive I think

[118:01] the the first version is pretty simple right these the debate one is where we run into problems of how do we choose the people exactly what is fair representation you know yeah because we want like we discussed we want someone who has enough background knowledge and a position to defend it but we don't want to you know if we're trying for public engagement selecting only for people to engage with is kind of not ideally there so yeah I love the idea it's just I don't know if it's representative enough I suppose what we could do is that same night have the public comment have people talk individually for their you know anyone can sign up for a public come in any way they could in that way you could hear from more people and we could get any meals so really it's just adding a group of people who are designated speakers

[119:00] that we would like to actually engage in a back-and-forth yeah yeah it's partly to get solutions it's also partly to reset the civility level that our nation might need we could start here and bother what's the problem again yeah I like where you're going I'm curious I mean you said three days that's lengthy the hearing was three days but that particular collegial discussion was a matter of a couple of hours on one night and it might be kind of interesting to see if we could come up with a format that every time like you know when I'm trying to put together this poll on all those initiatives that we wrote down that that's how we launched the discussion is maybe it's you know whether it's around the job housing imbalance and then we open for you know an hour to of discussion around

[120:00] it and then we go into something it's I mean I'm intrigued I think there's I'd be curious if we could talk to the facilitator to see if they would have an idea how best to bring something to encourage the public to come in in maybe a fun way you know one of the things that I really like about trestle is their ability to take opposing you know positions and have and funnel everybody down into a certain and it's through the dots you know using dots and and so if we're talking about density and we say okay you know let's come up with how many or let's let's talk about occupancy so the for all the pros all the cons let's put up the dots let's start having discussions around it and also you know Brenda written our in that group building bridges do something very similar on this so maybe it's something along the lines of a component of what she's been learning with

[121:00] building bridges in the first part of whatever discussion we start with each one of the initiatives I think it's I think it's interesting so there's a something that the Cu Planning Department has done in the past called the community cafe where they use graduate students as facilitators among group of the attendees she does that as well and because it's with the planning department there's sort of a dividend paid with that in that a we're engaging the notthis City Planning Department but the university's urban planning department we're engaging with university students which is a plus and also you know they're getting some direct value educationally and interacting with their community that they live in at a level that they normally don't engage with so that might

[122:02] be a facilitation avenue to pursue yeah the building bridges one is that it's C its you facilitators yes dude is it with the urban planning see you talk and they're the ones who did the the city's engagement site hmm so it sort of sounds like the oh I was just um I think if people have said I think you're headed in the right direction and the right spirit is asking the public I had the same comment that Mason started out with his asks of facilitators how you get to what's the best way to hear a lot of voices I like the part where you started out with concerns and solutions because

[123:00] I I always think that that's really productive and can inform a lot of your work and then the through the comp plan process there were some really good meetings where people discuss the issue at various tables you know the tables were all self selecting board members council members sat at tables also the people that were there so I think maybe debrief with some of the cuts too bad we lost Leslie Ellis so she wouldn't be available for a debrief but there are enough people around that we're involved in the comp plan that might be able to say this is what what really worked or that we got good feedback in the public on I think gene yeah this might also be a really great time to invite in all the other applicants for this board oh yeah it's interesting good yeah I I went through all the applications recently and I wrote down

[124:01] all their ideas and put it on a spreadsheet not sure if everyone later yeah it's interesting it's very interesting to do it sounded to me that from what you said that there's some sense that the first idea is pretty easy like that's pretty doable to start with of having a meeting where we do a lot of publicity and say during the public comment we really want to hear your housing concern and your solution you know your suggestion of what might help us we're looking for solutions and ask for emails - that seems pretty easy and then it sounds like we need to put your address pardon - my address to my notes at the housing advisory board to my post office box and and then the other it sounds like we need to talk about continued a so I think Mason mentioned this right after you make your comments which is when we identify our goals that might be

[125:03] a way to tee up that first that that session what you're just talking about is a little bit different which is getting deciding what our goals are based on what kind of feedback you get from the public is remind us construing that not not fully but while we're in this phase right now of deciding what our goals are I think it would be really good now in the next month or two - to give the public an opportunity to give their feedback on what they consider solutions how about two things here then how about one he's called ignites housing which is the first instead of just calling it open comment will be we can reframe it a little bit that we want you to come really push the idea that we're looking

[126:00] for a one in one or two in one combo and we really help us help you kind of thing could you explain in a tank so we're reframing the public comment in to ignite boulders housing and we say it's a one in one one complaint or problem to every one solution and really push for the public to come in and and really share their ideas so that we can have active participation and then the second piece being that we're building the framework for when we do the initiatives that we get with a facilitator and say how can we facilitate taking these initiatives and having the public be able to participate in helping us funnel down the opposing sides to a common civil process or direction I think that sounds good so does that mean that we

[127:01] would want to start in yeah we're in June now at the end of July at our fourth meeting our fourth Wednesday meeting in July try to before then get a lot of information out about public comment and email if you can't come that sort of thing and if we do do that and everyone agrees is it okay if Adam and I work on publicity approaches and then present it to the full board I'm still not quite to the mic I'm still quite not following what you're proposing in terms of the initial solicitation of input from the public is that to guide us in establishing our goals because inform in in in addition to what we're already

[128:00] getting ourselves and what we've already learned by talking to people just an additional layer of input okay all right mini feedback loop that in case we're really off the base right side they're gonna affirm a show that we're really off the bat and we might get some big sweeping ideas and we might get some little teeny things that we go that's so easy to do you know that's so easy all City Council has to do is just ask you one yeah wave on one so do we want to develop our initiatives a little bit further before we this out or these are going to be on entirely parallel paths the reason the reason I ask is because it's always good to I find frame issues somewhat for people if it's entirely open-ended sometimes the information you

[129:00] get back is not terribly useful because it lacks context well like what do you think is the problem somebody comes back well people drive SUVs too much or something that's entirely you know out of our right and it's entirely out of our our area so right I said specifically related to housing right that's what I'm saying do we want to frame it a little bit when we write the letter what we can say or when you write the announcement what we say and that is we would reference a couple of the initiatives we're we're liking some ideas we're open to all ideas we're particularly interested in exploring am i job housing density what we could say we're looking for ideas big and small but with a couple suggestions so that they know the general direction mm-hmm okay I still think it needs

[130:03] let me yes sir I still think it needs a little bit more framework to it because you want to manage expectations okay and so if we're going to try to take on things that we think we have a reasonable chance of getting on a council work plan for next year and something for two years and something for three years we should inform people when we put out this solicitation that aspect of it so they're not sort of defeated or become disengaged because we've ignored so many of them we need to explain that there's a finite amount that we can take on in any given work period sure I agree and I'm curious if we could manage the expectations by saying what we're doing is scoping yeah and creating instead of limiting the actual ideas that come in maybe what

[131:01] we're doing is I'm creating the container just saying this these are all just possibilities it doesn't let anything get strained the table we're just are throwing it all out there right so it's a spaghetti at the wall opportunity we can frame the letter to be fun and 22 sep 2015 10

[132:05] I wasn't able to see Kristen's presentation but I'm going to watch it now that this taped which is really wonderful so maybe some of the background presentations you can kind of segment them out and I like the idea the big and small ideas because we went we've gone through this whole ad you Odate oau and one issue that's been coming up lately has been the minimum size or minimum sizes are so big and that was never discussed and I'm sure we'll hear here's some discussion on that if we have an open forum and then if it fits in with the goals this group can be an advocate for that or whatever comes up I just use that as an example and like how do we proceed do we want to

[133:04] decide that we want to do it in July July Minard we want to do the August meeting and do you want us to proceed with putting out a publicity plan so Jeff did send at our request a highlighted draft work plan and so maybe we jump into this real quick and then come back to that to see how it might fit in the let's say anything that we would send out to the public we probably want to have ready for the board to agree to no eating in two weeks right and then there would be two weeks to get notification out to the public but if we don't get it done in two weeks then the board can't really meet to say yes is that we all agree so that would that

[134:01] would be our timeline so if actually holy do you have Jeff's I have it on my computer do you have Jeff's draft work plan on yours just for clarification are we not just talking about taking the comment area drinking yes you don't have to just a longer public comment yeah I mean hopefully it'll do we need to rework so the plan or are we just reworking them well let's see that would be July 25th and so we're we have the community benefit ordinance provisionally on here and our standing goals and scoping and so in a say three to four hour period I could see this community engagement piece easily taking two hours so first part you thinking

[135:00] that's gonna take two hours I would think one but I didn't I'm just guest waiting I have no idea if you're successful in your solicitations there could be a fair number of people showing up I mean if you recall our ad you hearing we we had 25 or 30 speakers and it took almost the entire three hours we have no lack of things to add to the schedule if we over scheduled time so like if we did two hours didn't need it all right that would be great so my point in just looking at the provisional work plan is do we want to build in time to make sure that we're not here at eleven o'clock by just taking something out of the agenda for July 25th is that it personally I do think August is the

[136:04] better of the choices though just because that'll give us time to actually that's that's the old one that's not the one that's not the one Jeff just if you have a dongle I can just plug in here when did he send it out the 27th I'm sorry on the 11th it says 2018 have work plan draft 6-14 yeah that's the one I have or that I just downloaded from a female look similar okay yep at the end that's different too

[137:07] so what do you think you want to keep everything on there or from a marketing perspective I'm just saying having a little bit more time to prepare the publicity side of things I would prefer August okay so look at that so how I see it let's look at August August let me scroll up the yellow highlight the community benefit ordinance if I recall correctly Jeff was highlighting things that are on a council driven timeline so I think I'm with Adam that maybe August is when we're looking at this because we don't have and if we decide we want a bump

[138:00] community investment from August agenda fine and if we feel we can keep it all on there we'll we'll do that but we don't have to decide that until July ok and but and we should you think it's best if we allocate two hours in case it goes long and then I do yeah yeah I think be smart okay so Leonard from the recording standpoint might be helpful of each of you spoken to the microphone because I I know as it's recording I can hear you but the recording I'm not sure is going to be the two of you at the end are doing great but yeah probably the best thing to do okay so do we have anything more to talk about on this Oh Adam and Judy are going to develop the

[139:02] idea a little bit more and then in our next meeting in two weeks from now you'll make a yeah well the drafts have a draft what the basic messaging is that we want to send no thing okay but I just want to check one thing out why we're all here is it okay if in our draft we go as far as contact older weekly and builder daily camera and say would you be interested in doing a story about this that sort of thing are you okay with that preliminarily or do you want that to be part of our draft that we want to do that well I think the more publicity the better yeah I wish she was still here yeah I'm glad you so you so what does that mean so are you okay with us talking to approaching those places never okay one thing I mean the city has a whole Public Information Department I think you'd want to work

[140:01] with them well and I I just met with Sarah yesterday okay yeah that's in contact okay shall we go on to goals and committees and all that so let me bring up I'm gonna unplug for a second bring up the image of the whiteboard the whiteboard image I was surprised to learn that within the city there's no whiteboard for general use [Music] well I can update my piece since yeah

[141:00] why don't you go ahead one so the two things that have happened over the last couple of weeks is when remember how we left it that I was going to pull that we were gonna hold priority as am I not registering that you are that we were gonna pull up right I feel like I'm cutting you off there we were gonna pull priority like importance for each one of us on each one of these and then we were also going to line them up in the air so mm 18 19 20 and two really big things happened is that the polling software that's out there and how I started to structure this I started running into issues and and I think I finally found a polling app that it's called a planning

[142:00] app and that will help me be able to go through and figure out how to do both of those because it's kind of a star rating you know like one through five what's your priority on alternative housing and then which year do you want to see it in but if you start to get closer on it I started thinking okay well alternative housing I mean we'd want to start having that discussion soon correct I mean we'd want to start to possibly have that discussion and then job housing and balance the balance and the middle income and affordability right we're talking about right they see where I'm going with this so each one of them started to become all kind of priority so like I said I had the tiny house convention this weekend and was slammed from last Wednesday to this week and I finally found some an app and I can lay it out in that that manner which is a star's one through five

[143:00] so that you can rate each one of these on importance and then you can choose which year to put them in just know that when I put the pose the question it's literally going to say I am interested in an ami and then you rate your five and then you'll put it in a year so it doesn't mean we're not deep diving on any one of them because it could be 50 questions on the backside of each one of them but it'll just be a survey that goes out and it'll just rank those so that we can start to put them into stronger goal-setting format does it have the capacity if there's an item say see you housing that say doesn't get a lot of priority we don't delete it delete it and I added a box at the bottom of each one of them for additional comments so like if for some reason something pops up for you that you want me to take into consideration while we're compiling the end information that we can go from there

[144:01] because as I was looking at each one of them I was like well scopes really big on each one of these and you know yeah so I think it's a jumping-off point let's just put it that way yeah I think what'll happen is we may end up with say half a dozen high-priority things for 2019 which is fine and then that's that'll be the basis for our discussion and from that we'll Whittle it down to five things or you know two to a reasonable amount of things and there may then be another iteration where we Whittle it down further and this is what you know we realistically can expect to do but it's I think it's a good starting point okay great well that's what I needed to hear because as I was sitting there putting it together before the convention and after the convention it was giving me a headache so with that do

[145:04] we so we we have the things up on the board from last time do we want to bounce around ideas for some of these just for sort of general education purposes because that will inform us when we rank things with the poll we'll have a little bit more insight to it for instance whoever say occupancy might care to spend two or three minutes expanding a little bit on what they have in mind why this is important and that way we all have a better understanding of it so we we have some time what else is on our agenda we have a briefing from you and Adam on communications and the

[146:01] website stuff you wanted to talk about I don't think anybody else has any matters that occurred are there matters from staff there are no manners or no matter so we have a little bit of time keeping in mind that Cory is a little bit under the weather tonight so we don't want to prolong her torture so does that sound like something people want to do is I think the community communication thing probably should be talked about just because we've put it off about I just want to talk about since we haven't yet essentially oh yeah your piece is that what you guys yeah let's spend some time on that because I know JT sent us something as well so I'm okay with skipping this because again there'll be a box for comments after each one of them so if maybe when you rank them you can say this is what I think this is like so in occupancy when you rank it

[147:02] you can put a brief a couple sentences that say I think you know exploring or reviewing how many people are in a house is important and and that doesn't preclude you from writing a multi-page treatise and emailing it to everybody on the subject also okay so we're gonna jump to all the engagement stuff and then the website stuff okay well luckily probably the biggest thing of all is you know we got on Channel eight so that is an awesome accomplishment in a very short amount of time and Judy was solely responsible for it so thank you very much for doing that that begs the question of do we still want to try to move meetings around in the community at all or should this just suffice for that

[148:00] purpose because our whole idea was try to you know engage with people who we might not be able to by ourselves moving to a different part of the community and having a meeting there is this enough that's just sort of a general question of the board is so you're asking about our interim meeting or even our regular monthly meeting yeah we had defined a possibility that we'd have like three different meetings by the end of the year that were not you know but at that time when we came up with that goal we did not have channel eight covering our be needs so we want to reevaluate that right now okay I'd like the idea of moving about in person in the community so we can do this televised and maybe [Music] sometimes move it into the community and then depending on where we end up with

[149:02] our interim meeting if it persists you know beyond this summer when our lease runs out on the church we might do periods of time in some other venue and kind of move it around the city but I see no reason why we have to anchor ourselves necessarily to the council chambers for a regular monthly meeting so how I feel probably how I smell if the price is right you Leonard how I feel is the fourth Wednesday of each month I want to brand it as our time when we're here and the city can't channel 8 can't accommodate us other places I still like the idea of going out into the community but I now feel that would be on occasion by whatever it comes up like say there's a community say there's

[150:01] a few something rather and they could really use they have a spot where we could go and have a meeting there let's see you or something that would be Purpose Driven rather than just we have to go out somewhere and so I would rather do it that if somebody comes into meeting with people go they would really like us to come out and all have a meeting there but then we set it up just for that purpose that's that's my feeling I kind of agree that we have this awesome resource now and I don't want to divert away from it because not only do we have the live aspect of it but also it's recorded and recorded well so people get to consume it whenever they have the opportunity I love the idea of getting out in the community in general but I think that onus should just be on us trying to attend events within the community itself I agree

[151:00] like where you guys are both cool okay all right so so for now we'll continue on regardless of what our decision about secondary meetings are and just all of us actively try to be out in the community as much as possible that brings us to sort of another item there's all these planned project related things that come up like you went to the the most recent one was that spark West ok well with something yeah so we kind of wanted to make sure we have a designated person that most of those and to make sure we're just communicating that so since you seem to be the most interested in those types of events and the most able with your scheduling we

[152:03] wanted to sort of see if you were comfortable sort of taking the lead role met and then being the person to say to one of us I can't make this one so can you please one of you yeah I mean I have no life so I enjoy attending all of those events Kurt and I seem to everything so yeah absolutely okay so then would you keep the board apprised of events and your intention or availability to go just on a regular yeah I think that we also receive the invites on a regular basis and just assume I'll be there unless otherwise okay perfect and that doesn't keep us from any of us from attending as well as long as we don't talk to each other which is great I tend to not introduce myself or say anything because honestly

[153:01] that's when honest conversations happen so yeah I you know now that we're being televised it's a little bit different but it's one of the reasons why I attend a lot of the chats and stuff with council is because I like to just hear what people are saying that might not necessarily come here and say it gotcha what else we were supposed to talk about sort of the guidelines for public speaking for us I think we all did a brief overview on that and sort of understood that if we ever do speak in public it's important that we state who we are speaking for and in almost every case we should only be speaking for ourselves so just a quick reminder on that that's sort of our established principle and you know if there's any reason that

[154:00] you're speaking for the board please inform us that you're doing so I think we'd go one step further and ask not just form us absolutely but it should be something we all agree to yep yeah I mean basically if somebody's gonna speak for the board it should be the subject of a board discussion that precedes that so that whatever the statement is it's reflective of the board let me ask one more question then - like when Shay was here I definitely know that when you have City Council when there's a break or something she'll come up for a quote so how do we want to be responding to that is that something that only one of us should be doing like I felt like if I got cornered with it I was going to say you too since your engagement side that's a great question actually yeah I think anybody's free to talk to anybody just as long as you make it clear that you're okay I think that's good yeah I

[155:04] agree okay I actually had a question for Corey did the auto reply email yet I'm still waiting to hear back from our IT department on that since they're the administrator of the outgoing email group it's a little bit complicated apparently on the backend of things but I am working on that and I do have your message saved so as soon as we can get that up and running I will let you know perfect my sole responsibility has been taking care of them and what else [Music] oh yeah so one of the main things that came up when we were talking with Brenda was as we try to start engaging specific

[156:00] groups who we think are under heard some quick examples renters students homeless population we need to sort of you know choose one to start with and work off of that we had some discussion about since fall is quickly approaching and that's probably the best time to engage students when they come back to school that that might be the first group we try to target we haven't exactly suss out what that's going to look like exactly but we wanted to see if you guys are okay with that being the sort of first underrepresented group that we can try to make some specific plans and again we'll decide on what all the language is and everything like that when we're trying to do outreach but that was sort of the first group we were thinking about yes plus won't it be around that all right well that's August because we'll also start talking about

[157:03] adding to the committee around the fall to correct after the after right yes and we had suggested that a BSc used to earned a student in a renter that was a suggestion for sure but this was also gonna help establish just sort of the I wanted to get a little bit kind of a Student Advisory Group to our own and I did tell you that Sarah Dawn had no category I think she said she spoke to you this I definitely know she didn't speak specifically about that but three applicants that we're interested on the board she said at least one of them for sure is still very interested in participating in a cocoa sation then I think that's a great starting place but this would just be sort of the thing that says hey if you have a housing issue we're here we want to know about it and that's specifically going out to

[158:01] students so and they have a housing board too don't they I don't know if they have a specific housing board within C USG but I just wanted to establish not only a sort of small advisory group to our own from them but also a connection with C us G since that is their student government body make sure we're getting feedback directly from them so those are the broad strokes of what we plan in the next couple months at least my list so I met with Sarah Holly yesterday and she showed me so many things about be heard Boulder and it's fabulous like the tools she showed me behind the scenes sort of it of how it's put together in the tools and this and that and it's fabulous and she's just so good at what she does the way she's already had so much experience

[159:01] with be heard Boulder that she has ideas about what might work and what might not work and I felt so comfortable that I believe her ideas are probably the best way forward and she said there's different things will have to decide a little later on like you can have people when they go on to be heard Boulder Register and so you can contact them back because you have their email and their contact their email information but fewer people do it that way then if you turn that off and people don't have to register and they can just make their comments and so there's pros and cons that she said we have to weigh heavily she thought that we didn't need we need to pick a topic rather than putting something out open-ended like we may want to have for our meeting in August she said wouldn't work on be her he heard Boulder it'd be way too diffused and she said that the tool of

[160:01] people telling their stories probably wouldn't work for that but she thought she said we don't need to pick anything for B her Boulder for our group to do that's coming up on the city agenda because it's most likely the city staff will put that up anyway and what we should do is pick topics that are not on the work plan for City Council right now and we should pick one first to try it out and see what we learn and it would be on for about three months and then it would go to inactive and we could reactivate it again in a different year if we wanted it was a topic we liked and so she suggested that what we should do right now is pick a topic that we wanted to ask people about about housing a specific topic that's not on the occupancy occupancy could be a good one because it's not on the work

[161:00] plan right now and it's a it's a big issue and I don't care what it is then she said that I would meet with her and we would develop a plan and she's she just started spouting off what the wording should be for something and is like she's just so good at it and and and then I would come back at another meeting to everyone and get approval on on that but she said it would be best if the firt our first step is for us to pick a topic that we'd like to have on be a builder so I think the topic should come out of our goals and I are these discussion and whatever that shortlist is we can choose I do have a question though so be heard is one avenue to solicit feedback from people but that's for certain demographics that use that

[162:01] tool and so I just want to make sure you're thinking about other mechanisms to reach different demographics like senior citizens yeah absolutely non-english-speaking yeah so I so what I will tell her is that when we have proceeded further with our goals we will pick we will pick with the list and the poll may be the results of the poll either number one or number two from the poll that not on the city work plan already we will select that sounds great I'll be fine okay so the next thing is I met with a group called the area aging Advisory Council the housing subcommittee and they were great and their biggest interests of course are more housing for seniors but also accessibility and I I'm pretty sure that Lafayette already has in their housing

[163:00] ordinances accessibility as a factor and that and and by accessibility they mean they sometimes call it Universal is another term they use work but that houses in the future are made that are wide enough for wheelchairs and that where you can get in the front door without having to go up steps and all those things so they would like to know if sometime they could come and give us a brief presentation like 15 20 minute presentation so we would be more aware of the issues in housing they're great and I would think given agendas like tonight where we don't have a lot of public participation we could schedule that kind of thing for any meeting absolutely great ok and then um I also met with John terre who's headed the

[164:01] Chamber of Commerce and they're very interested in housing and they would be willing if we want it if the board so wanted to partner with us on some sort of public event to promote positive discourse about housing so I just wanted to put that out there there's nothing that comes to mind I mean there's nothing he there wasn't a specific plan or anything that we came up with it I just wanted to put that out there so I'm a little leery of a city body doing things with what's an interest group I think more open-ended things are fine but do you know joint events I think could be problematic it doesn't have the best optics makes you look like you're co-opted other people think I think it

[165:05] would be great to invite them to around tables and start having them participate in that when we start doing the discussions that would be a great way to facilitate the public interest groups that hmm are all circling around I like the term roundtable okay then also I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing his name right Nikki Manik are how you pronounce Anna Kiel me sorry thank you the chair of the Human Relations Commission and he and I were just talking a little bit at that event that the City Council put on that we're at and we both thought it would be nice it's both boards we're willing to sometimes have to one time have a joint

[166:00] study session because they know things about they know more things about the people and what's going on than we do and we we know more or at least some of you about the actual housing issues so I thought it would be a great idea and I just want to know what everyone else thought about that I just thought it was a good idea because we might not hear the human impact as much as they do and that could give since we're a little bit more data and you know project driven it'd be interesting to just actually hear some true stories and what's going on in the community a little bit more agree I'm open you have any idea when you want to do that no and he would have to get his board agreement to so that my next would be to say our board likes that idea and could you check with your board and see how they feel and then we can worry about scheduling our board wants a

[167:01] play date with their board yes it's that's really maybe we could have a social gathering just posted to the public okay then I wanted to know I suppose the topic of the increase in rents spurred me to this point but I'm not necessarily thinking of any of the people who spoke tonight or anything like that but I would like if it's okay with you for me to start like you're doing the one with students I would like to start a committee of people who live in affordable housing and not necessarily about rent increases just a committee that would maybe meet where I would go to different places and try and find people it's not like I have people in mind I'd go I'd get the list of different places and try and get something and just maybe meet quarterly to just hear what's up you know like what's what's going on housing wise with them and just I don't know if I find

[168:00] anything out or not I don't know if there are problems in some of these places or not I just thought it would be good to do that that's a part of the population that's very important to Boulder and that doesn't often have a forum for being heard so I know at one point most of the there was a council of renters or occupants or do they still have that or it's centered around Boulder housing partners projects yeah I think bhp probably has that I would have to ask them about that though that would be great if they already do then then maybe they just let me go and sit in and listen absolutely so you're just talking about gathering periodic information

[169:01] about what's good you're putting your ear to the ground yeah once a quarter we're having them yeah just me sort of listening and one other person on the board could do it too if they wanted because there could be two of us I would add to that that Brenda does coffee hours and the coffee shops around and she calls them listening sessions so maybe getting on her agenda with her and going to a couple of them and saying there's a housing person she would love that it's just saying there's a housing person with and and then that way it kind of a built-in audience and her PR cuz she sends it out on her email list as well to everybody I'm not sure it needs to be a committee but I think it's a great idea okay yeah and in fact any two of you want to do it it doesn't have to be sanctioned by the board I just

[170:01] like the idea of that simply because I learned something tonight that I never would have learned otherwise specific to the issue of them being able to raise parking fees or you know just the the amenities thing I didn't even think about so having someone who is living in that environment could inform us of those types of things I think that's pretty important actually okay they might even be able to get a list from bhp well when we do our tour to you'll be able to identify the properties the larger properties and be able to maybe put a flier up yes yeah I'd say I'll be out here for coffee with Brenda or by myself on such-and-such yeah great idea thank you then the last one is the web page so I looked at our web page and then I looked

[171:01] at other web pages for other city boards and there's a format for all of them that's the same that works really well I have no concerns at all about the general format and I think they all look great and interact really well but the content at the beginning that says what we're about I actually brought both things but it doesn't list it doesn't list all of our all the things we do as cited in our ordinance it only lists a few of them and it leaves out some some big ones that leaves out affordability accessibility and diversity and it leaves out I think it leaves out the regional working regional regionally on housing issues and so I just wanted to get the way to proceed it seems to be incurred you can help me with this is for us to agree that I can go ahead and talk to Zack about we'd

[172:00] like that first part just reformatted and then send him the goals where he can find the goals of course there in the ordinance but that they'd be reformatted to more accurately or more closely reflect all of our goals as defined in the ordinance and then the other thing I wanted was and I don't know if this can be done or not is I was told that the way if you look at the alphabetical listing and you put in housing advisory board we're not there and the reason why we're not there I was told we because that goes on the number of hits that you get and if you get a lot of hits on it then it starts going into the alphabetical listing and to me since we're a new board I just want to do everything we can to make it easy for people to find us so I just want to find out how that decision was made who makes it and if there's anything that can be done about it you know you know either can or it can't and just find out more

[173:01] about so those are the two things about the website well I would say we should go ahead and complete the list of our admission on the website yeah and the other part of it is a technical issue and I think that doesn't require a board decision that's just Judy finding out if it can be done to get us a higher ranking in the list thing or not and I think it's going to be a binary answer right they can do it or they can write or if they can't who is that allies that somebody's policy how could it be change you know like what you know it's the same you know yeah just to find out just to get information right but we but to the notion I think we probably all want to see whatever staff can do to make our website easier to find to go ahead and

[174:02] do that if that means changing a technical setting and how they website operates and they can do that and that's something we would support right mmm sounds like me like we just need to get more popular should go on the website 25 times a day that's all SEO coding which is a full-time job yeah I'm for the matching of our mandates because I think mission statement is different than our man our mandate and our mandate should match and in both spots and then yes feel free and then as we establish what our goals are we can put that up there too as additional information these are our goals for this year for next year etc great okay I'm done thank you thank you all No thank you all all right is there

[175:03] anything else anybody wants to discuss no Corey oh the picture is there anything else anyone okay so let's do the agenda real quick let me bring that back up does anybody see anything for the next two meetings that they're inclined to change oh I didn't look at the end put my glasses it's up on the board okay I didn't look at the mid-month yeah I felt like it looked good you know I thought it looked good too okay and then just looking further down the road at this point is there anything anybody would change going into we just member

[176:03] talked about the twenty second much full right right so Cory that'll be important one just to note for Jeff's benefit on the twenty second that we're looking at allocating two hours for a public participation on an event that Judy and Adam will be working out over the course of the next two weeks right because you'll come back with the draft and then we'll have tons of time because we'll have a month and a half so you're looking at this for August 22nd so potentially we might when we take this up in two weeks strike community investment from that agenda okay though actually that's a light agenda that night that's that's two and a half

[177:01] hours so we may not have to bump it we might be fine okay debrief we did our calendar to check just now anything to talk about on debrief I think we're getting better and better I wanna say it feels really good and I really look forward to doing the gut like when you send out the poll and then we start really talking about it I'm really looking forward to I think it's going well we're in the groove okay also then if it's okay with everyone I will adjourn meeting is a girl did you run that tight or what [Music]

[178:05] - Parris I felt like that [Music]