January 22, 2020 — Housing Advisory Board Regular Meeting

Transcript

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

[0:02] [Music] [Music] we are live I would like to call to order the city of Boulder housing advisory board regular meeting for January 22nd 2020 welcome everyone to

[1:00] the new year Mason Moyer if anybody else has anything for the agenda besides what I have doesn't look like it so if you notice I sent out an email this morning we have had the good fortune of having the opportunity for an update on the state legislative agenda what's going on for them and so we are adding it in at the last minute here so I would like to put forth emotion that we put forth

[2:06] emotion that we add a state legislative update to the agenda just after the report on key indicators and the home wanted campaign okay we're seconded by Mason any discussion we can vote all in favor aye aye unanimous okay do we have public participation I'm sorry the minutes no I was too fast I skipped the minutes let me open that up so we have the approval of the minutes from November 20 yeah from November 20th and you undo a motion

[3:04] or shall I again I'll make a motion to approve the minutes from November 20th second okay so the motions approved and a vote to approve the minutes all in favor so we have approved the minutes unanimous vote from November 20th 2019 all right and now on to public comment we have I'll give you a moment to get your jacket off Lynn we're rolling fast Lynn signal 538 do we I'm just interested in commentary about the meeting last night about code and tiny homes I mean at the risk of stating the obvious yes what everyone needs to

[4:01] not be homeless is to have a house you know but see we have this problem in Boulder we're building as fast as we can as high as we can in fact in discussion today with Harburg the former utility director Edward Stafford and a number of folks I mean he was saying yeah if you could build tiny homes and stack them up then you'd have a draw on the capacity of the utility system for water sewer and that was such but we don't but the value is sunk in the land and as I heard one of these lost meetings someone was complaining their rents going up three times for their lot on their mobile home cheapest housing in Boulder and now we're taking that away at Ponderosa so what are we gonna do here you got to go to the source you got to go to the core or else all you're gonna do is be fighting your way in circles chasing your tail we've got a

[5:02] balanced jobs housing and you are not in an illustrious position and I I don't envy your position as the housing Advisory Board because you can't do right okay you can't because there's not an integrated system operating here we need sub-area plants we need this housing crisis dealt with on a major scale Planning Board that's what I was told you have to rezone because they don't go into the present code so what are you gonna rezone and and sprinkler systems if they're relevant for me they're sure gonna be relevant for tiny homes that are in the same parameter and

[6:02] have the same fire danger and we've got a five-minute occurrence now you know we've got a 20-minute response now and a five-minute is what we're we need to do so that's what went through on the codes is we need you know we need to balance that in some way that we can protect for fire so these are issues just but you know don't strike that's my recommendation thanks for that okay so as we've added this next little level will try to be as effective as we can and matters from the board Chris actually Judy turn it to you so I asked if I could introduce this section this is the trends report it's put out

[7:00] every two years by the community datian serving Boulder County when I was working in nonprofits I couldn't wait for it to come out because that's how we validated the data that we use to apply for funding and now that I am retired I can enjoy much more of the reports and I really paid attention to before I loved it it has gorgeous pictures great stories and deals has separate chapters on all sorts of issues like the environment the arts all sorts of issues we have asked Chris to come tonight to talk just about housing issues in Boulder County and Chris is the vice president of strategic initiatives at the Community Foundation and really spearheaded putting this together I think so I'm very happy to have him here and this is Chris Berg thank you everyone thank you Judy I understand we have 30 minutes in the

[8:01] first half of that 15 minutes I'll be pointing out the highlights from our housing indicators and then we can spend 15 minutes just kind of Q&A informal conversation this will be a great lead-in to Danika talking about the home wanted campaign and also certainly hearing from the state level voice so let's dive right in what you've got in front of you is the as Judy said the trends magazine it comes out every two years we're also going year-round now there's a podcast in partnership with kgn you we have Boulder County's first bilingual reporter now at kgn you doing a trans podcast comes out every few weeks and first several podcasts have been really emphasizing housing issues so worth taking a look if you just go over to kg and use website or ours let's dive right in so the community foundation is able to do the trends report we've been now this is our 11th

[9:00] edition this is how we act like a non-profit and we do this with the support of the community and we hope you follow us on our blog and on social media join our sponsors and financially supporting this important work those of you out there and channel eight lien so let's dive into our economy and housing and start off with the chart that I call the most consequential indicator in our whole magazine this is what's been going on with home prices over the last 15 years as you know they've doubled everywhere in Boulder County the navy blue line on top is the price of an average Boulder home which we know is medium prices hovering right around a million dollars by now and all the other cities have followed the same pattern they started a lower price point in the end at a lower price point but they're also doubling and so really this last seven or eight years has been the hockey stick that has really drawn our

[10:01] attention and now more than 60% of residents don't earn enough to buy a house here the city and the county's housing crisis creates a system of haves and have-nots and in which they have is housing more than income those was stable affordable housing get to enjoy all the advantages of staying in a place and tales and those without struggle according to the Longmont housing affordability review of Boulder county wide real estate in 2017 there are quote no entry-level housing options left in fact they they they say costs have risen so high that there's a complete end to affordable housing so when we talk about what percent of the housing stock is affordable it just depends on what your cut point is the cut point used to be a hundred and fifty thousand dollars until just a couple of years ago for a condo or 250,000 for a single-family dwelling unit you can see

[11:00] on this chart they had to look at jumping from 250 to 360 to find three transactions in Boulder that qualified as affordable and all of those were in the affordable program out of a total units sold of 628 so in the eyes of the beholder whether we have just a little bit of affordable housing or zero affordable housing we caught up with Nicki and Noah Larson for this year's trends report Trends magazine the way we like to do it is we look at 150 ways to look at the social economic and environmental health of the community then we talk with experts about as David Letterman used to say is this a thing when we confirm that it is then we look for our neighbors who are in the middle of whatever this trend points to and then we tell the story from their point of view so this is Nicki and no Larson they spent 10 years in Boulder they were renting they felt like model citizens they helped out after the four-mile fire they stubbed

[12:00] for various candidates and issues and when it came time to buy a house they realized that their price point was in wheatridge and that's where they're pictured on the front stoop of their wheatridge home which they owned proudly now and so they according to Nicki how a community approaches housing is really the question of who it wants to live there the majority of Boulder residents rent that's fifty five percent of Boulder residents and they spend too much of their paychecks doing so you can see on this chart that in Boulder owner-occupied housing those who are spending more than 30% on their mortgage is one out of four people in Boulder and renters spending more than 30% of their income is 61 percent of the renters in Boulder that's the generally accepted benchmark as you know if you're spending

[13:00] more than 30% of your monthly take-home on rent then you're out of whack and you can see that we are higher than the US averages and both those metrics so Boulder is the sixth most expensive metro for home prices in the United States according to the National Association of Realtors people are constantly finding creative ways to live here and so there's a story in our magazine of roommate's hollyanne Giffen and Fiona peejoe they met on Craigslist looking for a place to rent and they ran into place together they got along great their platonic friends and they decided to co-invest one of them works at Twitter and that made it possible for them to create a strategy where the the roommate with the higher income would have more equity in the home because she was putting down more and they made that

[14:00] work and they're making the point that you know they acknowledge they couldn't have done it if Fiona didn't work at Twitter and in Boulder the reality is that you need two incomes and you need at least one that's higher than average that's been their experience so but that's where we're at and this is where home prices really are making it so that even current demographics no longer match current home prices this is an interesting statistic over the last ten years or so there have been three and a half jobs created in Boulder County for every housing new housing unit so if you believe that you need more than one housing unit for every three-and-a-half new jobs then that would be an out of whack pace that we're on when you think about the diagonal highway Arapahoe other arteries into Boulder and you

[15:00] think about the fact that four out of five Boulder County residents work in Boulder County where the jobs it's here in Boulder where there's two jobs for every adult that and then you think about whether we've added any lanes to any of those arteries it helps to start to explain the difference in traffic that those of us have been here more than 10 years have been experiencing child care costs rival housing it's really like paying college tuition almost for young families that are trying to make a go of Boulder that's why you on average see you know you're seeing less and less families with children here in Boulder they're living east of here and you'll cost of child care here is almost twice what it would be just down the road in Pueblo so when we talk about you know financial struggles of our of our neighbors it's

[16:00] important to understand that the federal poverty level is sort of not relevant to the cost of living the self sufficiency standard has been measured to be about three and a half times the federal poverty level so it's not really until you're making three hundred and fifty percent of the federal poverty level that you are really able to afford the bare minimum which includes housing transportation food health care taxes childcare of applicable and miscellaneous costs another thing worth noting and the reason one of many reasons for the recent equity push everywhere is that in Boulder County Anglo that's non-hispanic white households on average are earning the self-sufficiency standard you see that match between what Anglo households in Boulder County of eighty five thousand roughly matches to roughly eighty five thousand that you need for the self sufficiency standard however Latino households are in less here than

[17:01] elsewhere and they are earning here about half the self-sufficiency standard and that's less than Latino households are earning on average significantly than across the u.s. so put another way Latino households are earning fifty eight cents on the Anglo household dollar here in Boulder County compared to seventy six cents on the dollar on average across the United States Boulder County is home to the largest gender-based wage gap of any of its closest neighbors in laggs Colorado and the u.s. in gender pay equity this is something that we're partnering with the YWCA this year to dig deeper into to try to parse out and figure out what some of those drivers are women working full-time here in Boulder County earn on average 74 cents for every dollar a

[18:00] full-time working man does in Boulder County this chart is tracking wages according to education levels so you see it progressing from high school dropout on up to graduate or professional degree so the question would be here in the city of Boulder in particular where we have more per capita women with advanced degrees than anywhere in the United States why is the compensate the compensation for women so much less than for men a couple drivers I'd point to lots of kind of traditionally male-dominated dominated sectors of our local economy include you know tech stem type jobs and also I think that with the wealth that is in this town we actually have more old-fashioned conservative family structures then we may assume that we have here on average in Boulder

[19:00] with a wage earner out in the workforce and with their spouse at home but like I said best guesses aren't sufficient we're gonna spend some effort with the YWCA looking more deeply into this you may have seen Eva's recent thought paper about how ending child poverty in the city of Boulder could be done in fact for about three point five percent of the city of boulders budget they know that that 5.4 million dollars that if we distributed it out to the 600 families below the every level here in Boulder that would represent less than what we spend on municipal ization each year on average here in Boulder and you can see on this chart that families who are have

[20:02] children and are living under the poverty level that's 8 percent of our neighbors however you again need to look up to who's below 350 percent of the federal poverty level and you start catching lots and lots and lots more than just 8 percent of our community there's an article in here featuring what's been going on with housing first approach in Boulder it's a really promising story this is a photo of the 31 fully finished one-bedroom Apartments at 11 75 Lee Hill Road who house which houses chronically homeless residents with a housing first approach it costs about forty three thousand dollars a year to let someone remain on housed according to Jennifer blasts homeless services systems manager for Boulder County she says they're often using emergency medical response interacting with police and the justice system in addition to sheltering services permanently supportive housing

[21:02] meanwhile which includes the cost of subsidizing rent plus connections to services cost 20 thousand per year per person Boulder County's new coordinated entry approach is focused on getting those without housing into housing Danica's going to get much more into this just wanted to point out a couple of efforts on the affordable housing front that you're well aware of but for viewers at home the home wanted campaign stay tuned for more information on that and also Boulder together out of the Boulder chamber both are tackling workforce housing this is a photo here of Malik Johnston and his roommate over at the Ingram Ingram coop here in Boulder as you know you know that's that's one way to for people to find a way to live here in Boulder he's been working at a local non-profit originally from Iowa I believe and you know he says it's been a nice couple years here in my 20s but I don't see a

[22:02] future for myself being able to invest here build wealth and it's the way he puts it it's it's hard to do good for a living and make a living wage here so the boulder chamber as I mentioned launched Boulder together to tackle the root causes of the biggest challenges for companies in the city hiring Boulder County's boulders high housing costs forced workers into long commutes 50,000 people travel into the city each day again in that traffic we talked about and Boulder together has set an ambitious goal of doubling the number of rental units and homes for sale for low and middle income workers and Boulder County's leading home wanted campaign Danakil speak to that calls on communities businesses and agencies throughout Boulder County to address our region's escalating housing needs at the end of every chapter and certainly included in the housing and economy chapter there's just a box about what

[23:00] can you do I just wanted to point a few of the highlights about what we as individuals can do for one thing support government policies that create and preserve housing for all socio-economic demographics from working families to seniors for another thing if you own a business pay your employees a living wage check in regularly to make sure you're not paying women less if you are make adjustments there's a story in here about a company that did just that they weren't aware of the inequity and then when they sought to fix it they did be flexible with your hours if you can to accommodate working parents consider providing or compensating for childcare which is prohibitively expensive for most families as we pointed out earlier if you own property or have an extra room in your home consider renting it out at an affordable rate to aging seniors people with disabilities formerly unhoused residents families

[24:00] with children or lower wage workers and finally consider investing in Goose Creek community land Trust's an organization attempting to leverage resident money to provide housing for people across the socio-economic spectrum finally no trends presentation between now and April first would be complete without a plug for the census that's one thing that we're partnering with interested parties across the county on right now making sure that we are getting as complete and accurate account as possible this equates to about $2,300 per nose counted in the 55 different federal funding streams that land right here in our town multiply that by ten years until the next census and you're talking about missing out on $23,000 worth of federal funding for every person that goes uncounted so this is something that we're really promoting and when the census goes live on March

[25:03] 12 and extending for really two months until May 12th and even beyond that we encourage people to spend 10 minutes over at census org filling out the answers to nine questions that will affect representation and democracy as well as federal funds for the next ten years of all of our lives so that's it we can all take steps to answer the pressing needs outlined in this particular chapter and in the report we invite you to join the conversation by reading this report following along with the new trends podcast on kg nu that I mentioned and engage with your neighbors to build a more connected and inclusive community so with that I'll open it up for questions yeah I think so just anybody questions start out I'll start

[26:02] them I have one for you which is you mentioned the Latino kind of numbers versus Anglo as far as income wage gap the wage gap do you have a do we have numbers on the number of employees in Boulder that our Latino employees or the next employees versus Anglo or other so that breakdown of jobs or demographic just curious if you know that yeah you know about speaking of the census about two-thirds of our information is derived from the census in the community American Community Survey I believe I know where to find that information I could get back to you on it it's not in my brain right now okay yeah that'd be great just to make it so you're curious about the total number of Latinos in the workforce here in Boulder yeah the total number I think we can find that yeah yeah I mean just that breakdown in general would be great okay to understand a little bit better because

[27:01] then we can really see how that you know discontinuity in income and in wages is really affecting and impacting when you start you know looking at how our middle class is getting more hollowed out here in Boulder Elizabeth Garner our state demographer makes the point that for every six-figure job that is brought to a town that creates another twenty five thousand dollar job because people who are wealthy enough not to need to do their own laundry clean their own house make their own coffee bring their own lunch to work are relying on that part of the economy that employs people at about twenty five thousand dollars a year to provide those services to them thanks anybody else I think anybody has

[28:05] Julia I was curious about the university component when you talk about the rental population here I have two children in college children they're not quite children anymore but they were in living in our home and now they are renters they're at CU and they're in the same city so I'm curious about what percentage of that population is student driven versus other and I'm curious also about how that compares with similar towns of our size college towns that have are there similar issues or percentages as it relates to the rental population I think what you're keying in on is the stat says the majority here rent about 55 percent and so of course in a town of we're somewhere around 115 thousand

[29:01] right now in population then quick in the head math that means like you know about sixty thousand people are renting and when you think about the undergraduate student population who are not on campus and commuting from outside of Boulder or living at home yes certainly there's a slug of them you know in that that represents the fact that we're in a college town but it would not be the majority maybe harder than you think to break that down we would need to rely on ciues numbers and of course they may have statistics that get at it but are not dispositive they would be able to track you know the simple math of how many undergraduates do they have and then what did they see as far as who's in their housing I don't

[30:01] know that they have a survey giving the best guess on how many thousands of students are renting in the city of Boulder yes I see you might be getting ready to answer it because you guys have just had a meeting up there not too long ago I don't know if you were a part of it or not so with a why I was just gonna comment that we do have a team that is has looked at that issue and we actually have some data I'm not prepared tonight to share the numbers with you but I can definitely send it out share with your group yeah because we've kind of dissected of these types of numbers how many are represented through the student population so we can follow up with that I'm not sure what you were referencing yeah so kind of like Google I know a couple of people on campus who work in an administrative positions and for students to get certain things they have to say where they're living at and they are tracking all of that but the housing they're very tight-lipped about

[31:02] it and I know Kurt had met with them so I was curious if we had cracked into any of that data if there was going to be some type of mutual sharing in that in in those numbers so I'll be curious to see what you got but they they tracked like Google they know exactly where everybody's at and how far they're driving and because they based all their parking and everything else on on it and I would love to get new indicators particularly ones that are so relevant particularly in the city of Boulder that question about how is the undergraduate student population making us unique is a question that I get from different angles all the time and so any hard data that is at the population level for the city of Boulder or even better yet County but I'll take the city would be something I'd love to consider for future reports yeah I took the

[32:01] statistics on the housing for the homeless and you know the relative cost was two questions first of all those numbers from statewide or national average or is that specific to that so from memory I think what we were talking about I'm just in round numbers was the citation from the county level experts saying that they've they've estimated that it costs about forty three thousand dollars for someone to be on housed in Boulder County and then they estimate 20 thousand dollars for this housing that they're providing now you're asking is her source statewide or is it a local study and I I don't know I was the editor on that chapter not the reporter but I could get back to you on that now I was just interested because I mean that's you know pretty profound to have some of those numbers and tackling the issue that nobody ever wants to talk

[33:00] and I would just also add it is not a Boulder County specific where we know Boulder County's cost of living is higher that forty three thousand dollars would only be higher if you got more hyperlocal about it absolutely yeah and so the other question is do those statistics in any way talked about so if we have forty-three thousand safe for emergency services for the unhoused what kind of reduction do we see in that when we go to housing the homeless because I think that's part of the compelling argument you know to address that you know it cost this much and you save as much as well right you know that is the whole concept upon which the recent wave of social impact bonds you know I mean they do this with looking prisons they do it looking at education you can do it looking at housing it would be a very innovative strategy to explore and we don't have time to get into how that

[34:00] whole pricing structure works but as you may know basically you have some government provider of services who has just got a leak in the bottom of their budget that an intervention can close and you have to have an agreement between the provider of those services and the provider of the intervention that if it bears out that savings is realized by the service provider that service provider will pay the intervention some portion of their savings and then you get a virtuous cycle going to add along the lines of what you're saying but also from information from the retreat and council yesterday is we keep talking about the unhoused as if it's also a stagnant number and we have climate migration as

[35:00] well as massive drug addictions and then a growing gap in wealth and [Music] personally I believe that those numbers are going to continue to grow so even if we were seeing people placed over and you would think that we would start to see some of that kind of returned back or levelled out I personally think that we're just going to start to see those numbers really go if we continue to cut social programs that we're seeing and housing programs and running out of money left and right so to me that is our sense of urgency around coming up with a unique and innovative programs to deal with the gun house and I think I think I heard something in what you were saying Danny that that maybe I can provide some input on a little because Gregg harms was one of the people who who really worked hard on getting housing first started he runs the shelter and they did not expect but it did happen that when people first got

[36:01] housed the increase in their medical costs went sky-high because people had been living outside for a long time and had chronic health problems rather than emergent health problems but it calmed down after a while like once those issues were addressed and that is that is something they now take into consideration there's going to be that cost of people being homeless for a long time having chronic my checked really quick I just wanted to offer so that Housing and Human Services what the city has is a leader in the homelessness work across the county and I think it would probably be very beneficial to this board do you have our team that focuses a lot of their work is focused on this area to come and present to the housing advisory board so you can hear more about the type of statistics and the amount of data that we have it's it's all very real-time and very specific to our Boulder community as well as some of the work that's being done I do know at the city council retreat there is an

[37:00] interest there's an interest on City Council's board to kind of open up the conversation to look at you know out-of-the-box strategies to address the needs of our individuals who are experiencing homelessness all the things that Mason just mentioned and they will be reaching out to the housing advisory board to weigh in on that conversation so I might suggest that we work with your chair to schedule time for Kurt and Vicki Abner to come and speak to you just about this scope of our work I was gonna say is that the the one or the one point five that would be coming saying that they had we're talking about resources at the retreat and they said they had 1.5 people working on that anybody else from up here I have a question also if anybody in the audience do we have any extra copies of this of the trans report okay because if anybody

[38:02] out there wants it and then along with Judy's thing if just if you have a question out there that you want to throw to Chris our time is a little running short for his presentation but we could take it okay so we're good up here yeah Chris thanks a bunch good work you know that's really helpful oh I have one last little quick one actually the data that you use to put this together is that something that not myself but somebody who's very numbers intense could get access to couple years ago we created a three layer deep website just Google Boulder County Trends you'll see all of the indicators and more we don't publish all of them in the magazine we just follow what's new and persistent but yes for a data person or a non-profit or government person willing to go after a grant it's all open source their beautifully done charts please steal them for your purpose and there's a discussion of each

[39:01] statistic on the website as well beautiful okay swapping will switch now and Danica is Danica Powell's gonna speak to us about the home wanted campaign by the way Danica everybody else is smiling you started on those photos started letting

[40:01] everybody else smile wow thank you for having me here tonight and I'm so excited to follow Chris's presentation because I'm here to talk about solutions in a regional effort that is really solution driven and we want to activate the housing advisory board to be home team champions for us and get out in the community so I know I spoke with Jacque earlier just to understand what you've learned about the Regional Housing Partnership and so I'm gonna skip over a lot of the data and the partnership information because I think you may have a background on that and really focus on where we're at now and activating this campaign and initiative not just in Boulder but Boulder County so about in 26 2017 nine directions came together and started working together on regional housing which is really

[41:00] exciting I started working on this project about six months ago to initiate this home wanted a campaign but the idea is that we're all working together towards affordable housing as we know the there's our data is 5% of existing housing in Boulder County is affordable I think we could argue about the numbers all day long but the goal of the partnership is to increase that to 12% and that means 18,000 units why'd again reiterate some of the data about how many cost burden families there are in this county and what we want to do to solve that as many of you know up here that housing high housing cost impact everything in people's lives and stable homes impact that and Chris went over that in great detail what's important about this Boulder county regional housing plan is it's a multi-faceted and each jurisdiction so we're talking Longmont Louisville Ward Jamestown Boulder Boulder County Lafayette Superior and we're hoping to

[42:00] get Erie on board there the last one out in the county and what we are every group every jurisdiction within the partnership has different priorities for some its home preservation some it's deed restriction some it's ad use in tiny homes some its construction of new units so this is really custom tailored and there's there is a hard copy of the plan if you're interested online just to really see what each jurisdiction is committed to individually because each of them has said we're going to do this a different way but we're all working together and I think that's what's really exciting about this we're not it's not one size fits all and so what I have been doing is really meeting with all the different jurisdictions and really understanding what they're working on how we can build advocacy and so that's why I'm here tonight is to continue the advocacy work in Boulder I was at actually somebody from my team was it Boulder our city of Longmont and City Council last night speaking at open comment and doing this similar presentation so we're on a pretty big road show trying to get to as many people as we can to really share the initiative I think one of the big

[43:02] components of this is storytelling and so we have made this video from an event we did with C you called squeezed out and we did this is a video showing some of the initial storytelling work that we've been working on and you will recognize at least one of the faces in this video crying it's playing on this is there any way you could minimize the PowerPoint kid could you maybe pop over and see -

[44:11] voices and stories narratives that we don't typically hear around to the affordable what I felt really different about this workshop that I was in but that it's

[45:00] centered voices and stories narratives that we don't typically here around the affordable housing crisis oftentimes is centered on just price and people are being moved out there's all these other stories that make certain folks have an even harder time we need to elevate those stories

[46:28] [Music] issues

[47:13] [Music] coming back to and so that video is is really what we're doing here is storytelling we heard from Chris barge that that's one of the key things that the community trends report did is presentations and supports for people with intellectual and there's more videos if you're interested on the Boulder County Housing and Human Services website so I think what we're really trying to do is elevate the stories of our community and make them connect them to solutions and so on home

[48:02] wanna org we really encourage you to join our home team there's an onboarding survey to really identify what your talents are what your skills are obviously everybody's sitting here is very interested in housing and understands it deeply but we're looking for people who are artists or creators or you know bakers and who wants to be part of this movement I think what else is really unique and wonderful about this is that we are working with our partners so we're working with the chamber and the boulder county the boulder together initiative we're working with the East County Housing Coalition which has just formed in the East County to really advocate around affordable housing we're working in the faith-based community and we really want to work with you tonight so if we got a hashtag home wanted boko we have the home wanted signs you'll see a lot of those in pictures you can see our survey really getting people to think about their story and what is unique everybody has a housing story and so we want

[49:02] people to connect that to solutions so what we would love to ask for you tonight is to get those signs put them up in your workplace or your community carry them around with you take pictures hashtag continue the conversation that I know you're already having advocate for policies that affect change and participate in upcoming events and a couple that are coming up that we're really excited about is making a place for all its the faith communities creating housing justice this is is focused on mobile home parks in and preservation in Lafayette but it's being held in Boulder and I know that the city is very involved in this but it's at the Unitarian Universalist Church we invite all of you to join that conversation it's really about how the faith-based community is making change throughout the region we're gonna do some really fun I think grassroots events at Boulder arts week we're working very closely with Arts Commission they've taken up housing as a priority as well so it's

[50:02] not just the housing Advisory Board who's thinking about housing we're gonna do a summit of Latin ex leaders in April and we'll share that with you so we've been doing a lot of outreach in the Latin lap t next community and I think that will be a really wonderful event it will be a Spanish first event and I think will be probably held in Longmont and it'll probably the third week in April so I'm happy to share that date but we're really excited about that and what I was just hoping to leave a few minutes just to talk about how you've seen some of the activation we're doing we rely on your your networking your ideas where we should be in the community how we partner we don't want to compete with all of the other good people in this community doing housing and so we're really working on that funding is a huge priority as well as policy so what funding ideas might there be that we can take to the Regional Housing Partnership and our partners what can we bring back from our regional partners what is Longmont doing around a

[51:02] to use what is lines doing around tiny homes we can bring and bridge all of that informational gap with resources and speakers and events and who else should we be partnering with I mentioned the arts community the Latin X community the faith community who else do you think we should be talking to and how can you be an advocate for this movement this is really to me very exciting because of the regional nature of it it's not just boulders problem to solve but it's all of ours and so I just want to open up the conversation for ideas or questions I'll admit I am NOT a data-driven person so I can get back to you but I'm really looking for where can we do storytelling how do we connect these two solutions and any ideas about who we should be working with in our community yeah thanks for that and I mean to that question I think one of the things that I thought of earlier also is just

[52:01] looking towards our teacher community we talked about artists teachers the city employees there are all these groups that we know are you know really heavily burdened by this housing issue and to get those voices on board so I just throw those ideas out right off the top the other piece that I think is so critical is this narrative component as I feel like we all have this sense there's this kind of general discussion around it but I feel like we don't talk to each other about it very much in other words do I talk to people does Mason talk to people do who talks to each other about how they're in being impacted by this in the community because it's a much larger percentage of

[53:00] the community obviously as we've seen here tonight and so those discussions Danika and and you tried to create those discussions and have that storytelling I think is critically important to the mission of addressing this so thank you so much and I know that I for one on have I'm super excited to have your help in finding being the Nexus for what we can do here in Boulder I think we want to make it easy so for example I sat down at a restaurant and I was picking up it to go and someone who's picking up to go and I just sparked up a conversation and that woman's like I have to hurry because I am painting the condo that my tenants just purchased from me and my husband because we kept the rent down for 20 years and we allowed them to buy it and in that story came out just in a two-minute conversation and I wanted to capture it I wanted you know so I think that's what we want to do because out of that story is a solution

[54:00] what if we got landlords together to talk about what it could look like if we kept rents down and empowered people to save money and not be cost burdened that's a that's a group of folks that we could convene around a solution without a policy change or perhaps there's a tax change I don't know but I think that two-second we hope that you'll be encouraged to take a video take an audio take a picture and hashtag it and just and because to me there was a solution in that quick conversation yeah so I think a couple enough about teachers I think schools and and the children in schools because what you see more and more as this housing issue grows are the impacts on the children who ostensibly would be growing up here but you know there are a lot of kids you see it more and more every year my sons in in middle school and kids who were moving further and further away from bowlers still going to school over here you know they used to live here they don't live here

[55:00] anymore and it's that's a very much growing issue it's a very much initiative that reflects towards our future and you know how are we gonna address this from a long term perspective and the effects that it has on you know it's always compelling to hear from children you know there there are a lot of kids that are coming in with their parents 30 minutes every morning and then hanging around until they get done with work and then going back out to they just there's one kid and my son's class that lives in Thornton it's pretty far right and so I think that's another part of that where there's a lot of stories to be told and just when you're answering or anything Danica I don't know if your mics on or if you're up close to it I'm just for our audience that's listening thank you not used to sitting up here you know I've been doing a lot of thinking around this subject as well as rent keeps going up etc because I've

[56:00] owned a couple of houses here and at a certain point I choose to rent you guys know my story about wanting to live tiny and and reducing all my stuff but I think there's something interesting too when we talk about our stories which we were talking about in the back just before this which is shame that feeling of like as rents are going up as the costs of things are going up we're not talking about the fact of how hard it gets and like there's got to be something wrong with me that even though I'm like I said own a hair salon and I'm working X amount of hours but I'm being outpaced so much by the rent that what am I doing wrong why am I not staying ahead and it's hard to talk about that or when you have to leave the school systems or you know I've been here for 26 years and how come everybody else around me is like throwing down solid cash to buy these houses and do these

[57:00] things and and I think having honest conversations about that is also really important and like Malik was saying for you at the community a lot of my friends live in coops and that's their most discouraging part of their story is we can't build wealth it's hard enough to build wealth anywhere in the country right now outside of smaller more rural regions but building wealth and the way the the wealth gap is widening and people are being left behind so it's just an interesting story to be talking about and I know I don't often share the shame piece thank you Judy go ahead you've probably already got this on your list but the Area Agency on Aging has a housing group that might be good and

[58:00] there's sort of marriage potential between I meet a lot of older adults who bought a house in Boulder when it was affordable in the 50 60 70 s whatever and now they're alone kids are grown spouses gone and are really afraid that they're not going to be able to pay their property taxes anymore as as costs keep escalating and have rooms in their house and that's that's perhaps another marriage between people looking for places and people who have places but don't know what to do and then one other question I want to I have question I want to ask you is maybe after you're done with your question is could you talk a little bit about what the fundraising where you are in fundraising like what that looks like what are some of your thoughts on that and I don't

[59:02] know if this is appropriate or not from a partnership standpoint but to tie back to Chris's statistic that we have 3.5 jobs for every adult that live in Boulder that lives in Boulder who are those employers and you know I think about all the hospitality based businesses that's the industry that I'm in that employ low-wage workers that serve the community there that $25,000 employee that serves the the higher paid worker and engaging the business community to talk about their stories about how their employees are impacted and what ideas they might have to help offset the housing burden because we do have a jobs housing imbalance here and that's a big part of why we have these problems to begin with Julia I would add to that I don't know if you guys saw or if you follow her on Twitter but I posted noodles and company was closed

[60:00] the other day because they literally didn't have staff yeah and and I know three restaurants downtown that have $1,000 signing bonuses for Busboys that's how hard it is to get those those individuals you know at some of those lower paid wage paying jobs the noodles and company on Alpine where my son worked for his last year of high school was staffed almost entirely with high students almost entirely well thank you and to get back to your question the fun the fundraising component is look it's being looked at at a regional scale and it's being looked at by the County Commissioners and the leaders in our community and they're really evaluating how to tie housing and transportation and looking at the regional housing so from a very large scale it's being looked at again that's I think the benefit of the partnership is it's it's all of us and it's Longmont they have a very different housing problem but it

[61:02] may not be as related to jobs is here but it's certainly they are all related so that that has been looked at at by big decision makers in our community and you may hear more about that in months to come certainly you know one of the examples that Karen Ronnie works who is in the city of Longmont talks about is after the flood 28 million dollars was infused into the community in flood recovery and a thousand units were built and so there is a direct correlation with money and being able to build units the goal of the housing partner shows 18,000 units and now that's preservation and new units it's not all new units but and then but alongside that comes policy and advocacy around different projects one success story that I think is really interesting is in Lafayette Willoughby corners is a portable housing project the faith community not very involved in that project and brought a lot of people out and support and that really changed the discussion around a housing project in Lafayette and so I think that there's

[62:02] also that piece of really activating people even if it's not in your community maybe we go speak a tad in a different jurisdiction about how this worked in our community maybe somebody's tackling a housing first project or something like that so it's it's policy advocacy storytelling and funding they all I just want to add one come on around the funding piece so Kurt and myself both stood on the steering committee of the Regional Housing Partnership and work very closely with Danica and the team on this and one of the things I just want to clarify is when we're looking at funding resources to support the creation and preservation of housing we're looking at a variety of resources so I think people are quick to talk about taxes and ballot measures and things that's where we're really kind of blowing it wide open to try to look at its many creative options as we can to create the resources we need to leverage the dollars that are needed that Danica was speaking to of bringing up federal resources state level resources things that's sort so just know that it's there's a lot of different avenues

[63:00] that we're pursuing on that front I had a question I'm sorry um in terms of the hospitality I know that the chamber is really working with probably larger employers and so do you have any ideas on on working with more of the hospitality important for these for the more the wage earners service workers in our community I think we're working closely with the chamber but I want to make sure that they're reaching those folks as well well if it's for storytelling I mean if you talk to waitstaff or cooks at any of the restaurants in town a lot of them are commuting from pretty far away places and they work non-traditional hours so the impacts of commuting are often less than the traditional nine-to-five commuter so they have that but it is a struggle and so I don't know how you get access to those employees through you know through the chamber if they can help facilitate that but that would be

[64:00] an you know an interesting place for at least the storytelling piece and then to understand you know what the management challenges are how do you attract and retain talent to serve in these establishments which boulders known for means become a hub for people to come and dine and and and recreative dad staff this is a challenge one thing that kind of strikes me with this and you may have implicitly mentioned this at some point but it seems like there's opportunities to tap into folks whose voices aren't often heard in community dialogues that we have about things like area plans sub community planning all the kinds of things that kind of affect the housing landscape in Boulder and I just wonder if he's thought about using these connections to help bring additional voices into the converse community conversation as we work on an effective coming out rage and getting everybody at the table yeah I think

[65:01] that's one of our primary goals is to both reach out to communities that aren't particularly involved in housing discussion and also empower people to have their voice amplified in this discussion and so that again we'll be looking for ways to do that but I think one idea I think we discussed was working with modus theater and really doing this storytelling where you allow people to juxtaposition their experience with maybe a policymaker or or a decision maker and so I think there's a lot of really powerful ways that we can do that the Arts Commission as I mentioned is very very interested and being creative around this and that was really exciting to me I've met with their - - of their commissioners and Matt - zan ski and David Farnham and so you know housing they've been very specific about what the artistic community needs from housing from a housing perspective they've actually done their own studies and date and pulled their own data and I don't know if you've seen any of those reports but it might be very interesting to you

[66:00] because it's very specific about the type of housing the artists in this community are craving or would need for creative work and for housing and that that sharing that with as many people as possible is really I think important and so I'm happy to share some of that additional information with you because I think to me that's you know the artists are talking about it but how do we create that voice and maybe we'll do something really fun around Boulder arts week Danika can you talk a little bit about what you're gonna do with all this information when you're done well this is a long-term strategy I will I've working on it for at least three years and so the goal is to continue to keep the partnership engaged so the regional partners so bringing this information to them sharing the information out and you know continuing to tell the story and and be and help the decision-makers and the steering committee which are members

[67:01] of all of the different jurisdictions continue to make decisions and advocate in their own communities I think one of the key goals is just building that partnership right now and like I've mentioned law Longmont and Boulder are very active in the partnership we're really a meeting with several new City Council members and Louisville and Lafayette and really trying to build that that alliance so that's a big part of it as well I guess I would just add so one of the great things about having Danica and Russell joining our team working on this is we have for the past three years it's been representatives from the various jurisdictions that have been leading this work and we we are so mired down in that like technical and financial work of this that it's really hard to get out and to get the voices of the community and to raise that awareness and to learn those stories and so to have Danica and her team and their talents bringing that to it it's really just widening the conversation so we're really elevating

[68:01] it so it's to a wider audience and really really making it so it's very impactful so it's actually a perfect matching of skills because we were able to do work on the policies and the financial resources and investments and things that's or while they're really engaging the public in a very positive way and furthering this work I mean we hope there's some long format goals you've seen some of the shorter format more from pivot is here she's helping us with the videos and some of the social media but we also want to work with Kay GNU and we actually have a really good really one of the persons on our team marina log Rob has a good relationship with Telemundo so we're really working towards a larger format segment on television and radio and podcast and so again any ideas you have on who we should be talking to who wants who we can feed stories to and create information that's that's relevant and compelling that's that's what we're

[69:01] trying to do so I think that there's some also really exciting things in the works that I hope you'll be hearing about there's also some really simple things we'll have a post card and I have some home wanted signs for you tonight but we have a postcard with home on it and when we meet with people we're gonna really just encourage them to jot a letter to their elected official and pop it in male you know so while we're doing larger storytelling we want to just make it easy for people to reach some of their own decision-making makers in their community yeah thanks so much for this update and again I love the fact that we're looking at representing the narrative of boulders story in a holistic manner and not just having the narrative of boulder be the perception I think that exists so I think that's really powerful and yeah thanks for coming and presenting to us and I know that we will be in touch and I will probably send you a link to

[70:00] our website and the follow-up materials that I talked about so thank you so much for allowing me to come here tonight thanks Danika Elena yeah if that sounds ok to everybody I think after Elena gives her presentation to us we can ask you some questions then we'll take a break and get into the rest of the agenda and Elena you'll have to excuse me I'm gonna ask you to introduce yourself because this is such a rush to engagement thank you for having me here this evening my name is Elena Wilkin I'm the executive director of a statewide membership organization called housing Colorado and we represent the vast diversity of organizations and

[71:01] industries that are engaged in the development construction siting development construction maintenance and rehabilitation of affordable housing we've about 300 organizational members a number of them are here in Boulder we have - we do - things like any good membership organization we advocate on behalf of our interest at the state and federal level and then we do a lot of professional development otherwise known as parties so we throw a lot of really good parties the affordable housing community because really it's all about building relationships so we facilitate that but tonight I'm here to talk to you about state policy and I'm a little sad to come after Danica cuz I do not have fun videos I don't have people smiling I just have a lot of really heavy policy so I'm gonna go pretty quick I'll give you a very brief overview of the session itself so far and then the housing specific bills that we've seen actually drop and then ones that we think might be coming so I can either go each bill

[72:02] singly or I can kind of do them all as clumps and then we can talk about them afterwards if you guys have questions and then at the very end I want to just give a real quick update on anti-growth way to anti-growth ballot initiative that we might be looking at November so first let me talk about funding because we always need to know about money so anyone who is paying attention last you know we had incredible success we secured two new sources of funding for affordable housing that we're going to run through the division of housing general grant program I know Builders gotten bolder and bolder County we've gotten money through that program before one was unclaimed property one was vendor fees we can go into the technical details I'll give you the punchline it doesn't look like we're going to get either one of those funding sources because we are again in a Tabor cap here so any new money that comes into the budget just gets refunded out the back so it's kind of a tube of toothpaste with a hole in it so all that hard work

[73:00] that we did last year looks like it may not result in anything nonetheless we're gonna proceed with building policy work with division of housing to make sure that money gets out into the communities with transparency and efficacy so that's kind of the funding front and I can go back and touch on that if there's questions about it so housing colorado sits in a really unique position because we represent both of those who are seeking affordable housing and i should back up just one step we do housing the spectrum so we go from homelessness to homeownership right so we're kind of covering all the housing pieces all the way across Colorado so since we represent those who are seeking housing and those are advocated seeking housing and those who manage property we run into some landlord tenant issues so last year there was a whole like four or five bills that kind of directly addressed landlord tenant issues both in rental and mobile home parks some of which we supported some of which we monitored because the tricky

[74:01] situation that we were in we're back again this this year we have an interesting bill that would suppress eviction records so that people who have been not all the way fully evicted but all the way up until the filing of the court documents that kind of ends up as a red-letter and it's really hard to get housing once this is on your record and so the the legislation would suppress that that particular piece of your record so we would no longer show up when you're trying to apply for housing there's a source of income bill Denver did this a couple years ago so currently landlords can exclude tenants who use vouchers Social Security Social Security disability alimony payments those can all be excluded when you're trying to apply for a house rental housing so this legislation would prohibit that so all sources of income would be considered eligible there's one on late fees so there's a some really lovely national

[75:00] property managers who have come into Colorado and have instigated a system called churning where if you're late on your rental fee they are allowed to charge up to 90 percent of your rent for being late and they can continue to charge that month over month so we have tenants who are getting really far behind really really fast so this bill would cap those late fees and a cap it on a per month basis so we're watching that one there's one that would prohibit landlords from asking about immigration status of people who are applying for housing this is real sticky for us because all of the federal any housing that's built with federal dollars has to ask so we're working with the bill sponsor we totally support the intention of this bill it just puts my housing authorities and and my other affordable housing properties in a sticky situation so we're working on that one and then finally there's a really interesting one that will prohibit discrimination based on traits that are indicative of particular races

[76:01] this is really more geared toward the school systems but housing does get swept up in it those are already protected status protected classes it just kind of refines further you know prohibiting discrimination on specific race traits so those are kind of the the package of landlord-tenant bills that we're looking at I know I wouldn't super fast if there's any questions on any of those hopefully this is what you guys wanted from me I have a whole list of kind of odd bag stuff and I'm gonna say I came into housing this is my second session before this I was working on transit and transportation issues so this is a really interesting policy field to play in because there's so many pieces come at you from all different I'm sure you guys know because you're just dealing with that nexus between economics and housing and real estate and labor and you know all those different pieces coming together so again kind of a quick rundown of just

[77:01] some of the smaller bills and then I'll hit the really big ones at the end so you can save your applause for the end we had this last year incentivizing job developments in rural areas this is a Republican bill so it has already been assigned to the kill committee we actually really like it because housing is listed as one of the eligible recipients I don't think it's gonna go very far this year we still really like it though there is a proposal to the senior property tax exemption to allow people who have had to move because of a medical condition to still be eligible for that exemption so this is a little tiny piece of a much much bigger conversation that we're having around that senior property tax exemption I know this is on record I probably shouldn't say this it's a really well intentioned policy with really horrible consequences so we're all trying to look at it and figure out is this the best way is there a way we can means-test is there way that why 10 years where did

[78:01] that come from what is it actually doing to the real estate market there's some people who contend that seniors aren't downsizing because of this and other people say that's not that's ridiculous that's not why so anyway this is the very first I think nibble at that much larger conversation around that particular unique a Colorado Paul I've asked my other state partners no one else has a policy that looks quite like this so I love to be special 09 which we really really like this has to do with expanding the ability to access supportive services most specifically in rural areas but I think a lot of suburban areas also right now we're running into really so with all this new money that was supposedly coming into the division of housing what we heard over and over and over again this summer was that's great we have we don't have the capacity we can build the housing we can't take care of the people who are in it wraparound services supportive services permanent supportive housing all those things are pretty incredibly intensive in terms of resources either

[79:00] from your nonprofit community or your faith-based community so this would be a capacity building within those communities to be able to access these funds so we really like that one there is some talk about messing around with a private activity bond process in Colorado which is a way that we fund a large chunk of our housing most people in Colorado really like the way it's done now it's split between equally between chafa the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority and our local governments and then if local governments have excess bond they can give it back to the state and it's kind of allocated you know sort of money in a informal way so this would change the allocation process I know the Colorado Municipal League is watching this really really closely so if those of you who are engaged in private acted beyond activity those are our partners that we're working with on that particular piece and finally this is a fascinating piece of legislation I just got off the phone with the bill sponsor on this would require the state to spend 10% of all that money that we hope to get on

[80:00] home ownership programs instead of rental so the idea is to kind of we've been really heavily focused in Colorado certainly from the state level on the neediest the lowest income and the neediest people with disabilities seniors people transitioning how the justice system foster care new children transitioning out of foster care and this would request the state to kind of shift their focus more toward home ownership and I wouldn't say leave behind that other population but maybe allocate more of the money toward ownership programs rather than rental programs so that's an interesting bill it's gonna put housing Colorado kind of a sticky situation just because we represent such a wide spectrum so we'll see where that one goes the one that I promised Jacque that we would hit on with you guys there was a proposal to back up like what are we at now 19 years ago when the Telluride Supreme Court case came down that said that local authorities I'm getting some nods this

[81:01] is awesome could not use inclusionary zoning in their sort of toolkit to incentivize affordable housing so CML is running a bill this came out of the whole rent control conversation from last year which speaker Becker has completely squashed and I think we're really all really happy that she has done that but this would be to carve out inclusionary zoning from the rent control conversation and say in point of fact inclusionary zoning is not rent control it just allows cities and counties to set aside developments that they've approved and a certain percentage would have to be affordable so she is still resistant I think you guys are sort of victims of were the victims of your success because your cash in lieu program is so successful her contention is we don't need this because look at what Boulder has done and how great they are and why can't everybody do this and you know I don't know any of you very well yet so I won't go down those paths but that's the kind of conversation

[82:00] we're having around inclusionary zoning a lot interestingly enough a lot of my County partners are super excited because they are now being asked to play in housing and Boulder Boulder County has been playing a long time in this area but a lot of other counties this is brand brand new to them and they don't have any tools they have no authority we have no taxing ability like they're just kind of stuck and yet they're being asked by developers to make big decisions and by their constituencies why can't I live in Laramie County anymore why can't I live in Weld County why can't I live in you know wherever so that's gonna be a really interesting conversation it may not come out this year as an actual bill it may be one of those bills that takes two to three years to bake so that is that's that one and I think that is my short list of specifically housing related bills at the state level any questions so far I was hearing some

[83:07] group I'm not sure where I even heard this from some discussion around the state picking up occupancy limits are you saying about like short-term rental no I feel like Adam was talking about it and it got moved to this the state conversation but that's because we were home rolled or something that it needed to I don't even know I mean if you're not hearing anything about it then maybe it's just something that's being kicked around here it's you know and we still have two more weeks until bills can drop so it's totally possible that things will or we have late bills too so it's totally possible that things could develop for sure I have a quick comment and then a question it's really interesting to me that a few of the bills coming up are things that have already happened in Boulder like we already have an ordinance was passed a year ago maybe about no discrimination

[84:01] for sources of income so section 8 housing you can't be discriminated against or for immigration status and so that's cool yeah but the question I had is what I didn't understand and what you said is the status of all these right now they're being presented and so it's changing day by day I mean so this session so I don't know if you guys those of you who follow politics the last session the the beginning if I had been here last year at this time I would have had like two bills to talk about like they just got this super slow start and then they got completely mired in vaccinations and death penalty and there was like an education I mean it just got sticky right out of the gate so we didn't hit our peak until gosh it was like april so this year wednesday january 6 or 8th 200 bills dropped and usually we hit about five hundred through the whole session so the DEM the democrats have committed firmly to keeping the calendar and pushing things

[85:00] through and so we've had this huge push of bills and it's starting to level off a little bit so just a totally different feel of the session and we'll see how the republicans do I mean last year you remember we got into the speed reading of the bills and the Supreme Court to suit I mean it just got so ugly so we're hoping we don't go there this year I'm the Planning Board we we don't have enough tools in our tool chest so please we need to get to 15 percent by 2035 and we need every control may be difficult is that is there still a conversation to be had on rent control as an as there's

[86:00] something in the mix I would say politically no I think the speaker with her experience in development has that has found that to be unhelpful and it's really mixed across the board some people think it's the best piece of policy ever a lot of people who work on regional housing fear that it just pushes the problem farther out you know because if you're just drawing lines you're just gonna go across the border and my developers tell me I will just find a piece of land that doesn't have rent control on it right and so you know embedded in our housing conversation is the transportation conversation so anything you're pushing out is going to increase congestion and increase interest you know so I think as a policy tool it is to be wielded with great discretion and I am concerned I think I can say that here that there are communities in Colorado that less sophisticated than Boulder and would you know might do some damage if

[87:00] they tried to wield something like that without about thoughtfulness I know it's difficult the Normans are very easy but ya know I have one more question I'm just curious you said there was a particular going to the place for the committee where bills died yeah and I think you said it was about incentivizing rural areas and and I'm just curious to me that seems to make good sense for cities to incentivize rural areas because it takes some of the building some of the pressure of the building crises off of urban areas if rural areas were incentivize so why do why is that going to the place what am I not getting about because it's a

[88:00] Republican bill it's been up twice now last year we really liked it - yeah okay see I haven't voted Republican since Ronnie does anyone ever talk about progressive property taxation mechanisms because it seems to me that that's an area of rich for exploration to try to take the burden off the lower end on property taxes but for both rehna land ownership properties you know the only conversation I've heard around that is to equalize mill levies across the state not conversation as you can imagine died early early on not quite what you're talking about but

[89:00] no that's a that's a sacred cow on its next yeah yeah thank you is there any initial discussion about what might be coming down the pike for in terms of referendums or so there has been a ballot initiative filed and it went through title board so the proponent is out gathering signatures now it's a statewide ballot but it would impose a 1% growth cap on 11 Front Range counties and all the municipalities within those counties so Larimer down to El Paso and it includes wealth which i think is interesting so it's it is one of the worst pieces of policies I've ever seen written I'm just gonna say it like it's poorly written it does have a carve out for affordable and senior housing which would be allowed to grow at 1.15 percent in each year and you

[90:01] know honestly 1 percent it sounds like a pretty draconian level Denver's only grown at 1.6 percent over the last couple years I mean it's not it's not the amount it's how it would get measured and it's strictly in residential building permits is how they measure it right and so you guys sit on boards and planning boards I mean to impose that and to measure it and figure out who's responsible and how does that get measured and we watched Lakewood just tie themselves up into knots trying to figure out this policy so that's the first problem the second problem is it scares away everybody you know like what's already had several projects pull out because they passed their ballot initiative and then a third is that border problem right so we it's somehow imagining that we're this you know sort of standalone island and I can just see people just jumping across the border and just finding the next piece of land that doesn't have a growth restriction on it and I mean you want to talk about sprawl I think that you know that just horrifies me so

[91:01] so housing Colorado is involved in the anti anti entity growth coalition and we're having a lot of interesting conversations about like what does growth mean to people and what is it what do they mean when they think about it and coming from my transportation background I'm actually firmly convinced this is an anti traffic bill ballot measure like I think people just measure it by as Chris said you know my my commute has got it and longer that makes me cranky err I don't want anymore people to move to Colorado not completely ignoring the fact that we are putting somewhere between 25 and 30 thousand new new graduates onto the housing market every single year just internally I mean we're growing internally not just importing people so the whole thing is kind of weird but it is moving forward so we are we are actively engaged in it because after Lakewood passed this suddenly became very real and very scary so who's behind it really behind it is a gentleman named

[92:01] Dan Hayes out of Goldin who has a lot of real estate his wealth comes from real estate he inherited it he's second or third generation Colorado and he has been bad he's been doing this for a couple of years now this is kind of his third crack at it I think and then who's behind him we we haven't seen anything for his particular initiative but Lakewood we know it was this breaks along demographic lines not surprisingly so wealthy homeowners in general support these kind of measures and younger people do not support them but they also don't vote there's also a weird insertion we have not gone down this path yet in Colorado but I think this is where it's gonna show up of populism you know like kick the bastards out you know anti-government they don't know what they're doing we need to rein them in you know so there's definitely some of that national fervor

[93:01] I think leaking into our local conversations and it's kind of showing up in a in a fairly ugly way frankly so it's a loose affiliation of sort of as is the anti group I mean I'm sitting down people I don't think I ever have sat down with before yeah yeah thank you thank you so much you are so welcome my pleasure so let's go ahead and take a 5-minute break and we'll come back and we'll get into Madison Board I'm sorry new business

[94:17] you

[100:39] so we're good yes to continue we have committee and project liaison reports still on the agenda but I think in our discussion we feel that there's nothing there really to be had so we're gonna move on new business Judi is gonna

[101:01] update us on a listening session in February and I think we need to talk about look at the letter and such things so the letter had been sent out to everyone and nobody gave us any feedback so I hope we can just zip through and have somebody move to vote for the letter and second and vote in that case is there any discussion around that or we're gonna go straight to a vote okay I'm all those in favor of accepting the letter for the February listening session it looks like we are unanimous okay and Jane wanted me to bring up that

[102:01] process that the engagement committee follows is one that's already been vetted and approved by the board before so this letter not only will I submit and ask them to put it on the Sunday before which they can't guarantee it'll be on that Sunday but some time before but I will use that you know cuts from it to do emails to places to groups in Boulder like the Chamber of Commerce or better Boulder planned Boulder and any particular groups I can think that would like it as well as the publicity that Zak from City communications is going to be doing it's also be heard Boulder is going to do page where they just asked an open question about tiny homes and we'll see if we get any info from that J also had wanted me to run through the program just how the program is going to be and

[103:00] if anyone has any input on that and that's it would start with the brief video then it would start with J talking about what's going on in Boulder right now and I don't really know the details but I'll certainly watch the city council meeting or maybe you can give us an update and I'm done with this about there was a discussion about tiny homes at City Council there was part of the last night they were looking at updating the building code and so it was a part of that conversation in his brief knows when he returns from Japan we're gonna have him watch that video and then we're gonna have two different speakers Jan Burton and I have a phone meeting with her on Friday to discuss what she's going to be talking about which will just be I think an overview of different types of tiny homes in town and then

[104:00] we're going to have one or two people from the tiny homes project in Lima which is specific to housing first sort of situation for veterans in Longmont where they're gonna have I don't know about 25 houses and a main building that will have case management and washer/dryer that sort of thing and then the public input the only thing I'd like to know I mean the thing I'd especially like to know how you feel about is we had that circle seating before down there and it worked well for another listening session do you want to try that again how are you feeling about that again and then the feedback part and then after the sessions over I write up notes of what people said the different input people gave us and I summarized it and send it around to all if you'd edit anyway you want and then we put that in our minutes in our information packet the following month

[105:00] so I wasn't here for that snow the circle see let's see other people can help me with that I felt when we did that there were the circle yeah the circle was big enough for about 12 people to sit but then there were people sitting in the back and people sort of came in and out of the circle and we were all there and I think Mason led the discussion pretty much did you my son or Adam one of the two of you did and I was just letting people talk and is more conversational about people saying how they felt my only question that I always come back to you with our listening sessions is what what do we have a defined purpose what is the reason we're doing this what do we expect people to get out of it and on

[106:00] that note I do want to mention I had a conversation with Kurt briefly he was he expressed concern and I think this is really relevant considering last night's council meeting and what was discussed there and I think that was really helpful to to kind of clarify this piece but his concern was that were teeing people up for an expectation that which I think is okay but that tiny homes are gonna be sprouting about in Boulder and we're just trying to figure out where and how and we're still a long way from that so I think he was concerned about the expectation of that and I do think Kirsten I don't know if you watched the meeting last night or if you were with it I did and some of us may but I think it's worth touching into a little bit just because of the thing that Mason's saying which is what's our what's our goal with the listening session besides

[107:01] simply taking the input I think it would be valuable also in this to make sure that we are guiding sufficiently and jay is gonna be there he's gonna give us good input on it but just the recognition what counsel was talking about last night or just changes that have been accepted into the ICC into the building code and and they're all foundation based so once you go to wheels it becomes it becomes a mobile home and the building and there's there's no there is no building code that addresses that you know so that brings up so many and that's what I was trying to impart to Judy when we were having this original discussion is that and you know as well is that with the whole tiny house discussion there's there's about four or five big steps that have to occur and

[108:00] when we started first talking about this listening session we were in a very different spot than where we're at right now and where we're at right now for the next step to occur is a different conversation and it's being brought into the being brought into the conversation because a working groups going to be happening in April around potentially a transitional tiny house village for the homeless which would put them back on trailers so they're to me with the PERTs suggestion of managing expectations is that we're now in a tricky spot and what I expressed to Judy was that although I adore Jan Jan is an investor in storage containers and is very limited in her knowledge on tiny houses and kind of the legal ramifications of where we're at for tiny houses right now so I'm concerned that the route we're going

[109:01] with our listening session isn't going to serve our needs moving forward depending on what our goal is and having adequate individuals with experience at the table for anybody that's coming in to help manage those expectations of questions have no horse in the race as far as what the subject matter is it's something we all voted on and I am good with branching out I've already invited some other people who have backgrounds and I noticed that you're on a webpage for having gone to a housing fair for tiny houses fair and juniors are liars I make that maybe you know actually what I told you was that for three years I toured and spoke about tiny houses in the tiny house community um so yeah yeah so I think the thing is and going again it comes back to relevancy based on what's

[110:01] happening at council level right now and you know one of my desires is not to be behind the try to be the horse and not the mule being dragged behind it always tied up to the back of the cart but there are a couple of I mean I still think this is a really valuable listening session to have and I wanted you know I want us to bring it to a place of relevancy I think pretty much what we have structured is great but I didn't want to look at and I think just over the next month we can work with this and and just that it's like are there other really good people I looked into Lions a little bit the reality of what Lions has done is that they're allowing ten tiny houses within the entire town but they have allowed them to be tie-downs and not on foundations so there's some interesting stuff they've done it's a very limited

[111:00] scope and reading through it you know it's like okay there's something there but as an opportunity to still get some public input and my thought is like well where and how it really comes down I think to zoning - to a large point right land use and zoning and that's one thing that I wanted to ask of you tonight David it's like where do you see or the points where you know we should maybe put some focus in that from from the Planning Board perspective if you guys have had any discussions about it what's going on in your side we you know we've certainly communicated to the council that we would like to see it be a priority I think that we've we've suggested that there be a trial you know like a trial a place where we could have a pilot Pro palette program and but we haven't seen a lot of traction on actually a place where we

[112:01] have targeted to look at the land you send the zoning and and that would have to happen and you know honestly I don't have a schedule from staff at this point as to when we might see that it is encouraging that they're looking at the building codes because I think that means that there's enough energy thinking about it you know so I just don't have a timeline at this point yeah so yeah I'm from a Planning Board perspective I would be you know I could do a little bit more research to before next month to and see if there's anything in addition but I think it would be good to set expectations that this is this is a kind of just to get people thinking I think it would be interesting for people to see how other communities have done it and what the different options are and how they look so I like I said I would think that the goal would be more of an education and then maybe there are some things from

[113:00] the community that would get this group thinking as well and if we are going to have an educational type of listening session which I think can be really great the question is should we have from both because they're very different right have some sort of conversation about those three because I mean they all seem to be also to tack on to that is that were you ahead Terry after last night Oh

[114:03] Sam from the other camera headline did saying tiny house is legal so I was in like four different groups this morning everybody's like calm down nothing's changed you know and so I think that that's one of my concerns - about managing expectations that everybody's gonna come here and be like who's got land where am I putting this um so yeah I might offer so staff could take this sometime over the next month to scope out looking at all the different aspects of this current regulations how the update last night will affect this type of housing option as well as at City Council they're looking one of the City Council members are a few the exceed council members are looking at this as an option to address individuals experiencing homelessness so I think it's a it's a very rounded conversation that if you allow us to take a step back

[115:02] and scope out what the conversation and what those parameters are and then bring that back to your chair just to see if that's a good way to facilitate that conversation including maybe examples from liens maybe even Denver who's pursuing this type of work as well there might be some opportunity so that's okay with a group that would be a good conversation for us to have internally I think that'd be great Terry did you have something okay so my only concern with that is the same concern that Adam brought up at the retreat which is yes and in the past staff is limited itself like last night when staff told city council that tiny houses on trailers are considered vehicles and they're not and so my concern is that in the interest that we're getting all the information and that it's not being driven by a perspective does that make sense hmm okay I think there might be an

[116:01] opportunity for staff to work with somebody like yourself or other expertise in the community just to round out the conversation so maybe that's something that we could have probably what's happening here is in the world of tiny houses you're like way up here and the rest of us are maybe down here at least I am anyway so be great from an educational perspective just just to hear about it it's a potential solution I feel like we spend a lot of time and it's great I love people coming in and telling us our issues we know the problems to me I'd like to spend some time focusing on solutions we know the burdens we know you know what can we do about it now and I think there's a great opportunity to hear about some potential solutions and I'm excited about it I think this is great I think alternative and can be done in so many ways and it's flexible so I'm pumped up I also wanted

[117:05] to say that that all sounds great and also we have to keep in mind that when we're inviting the public in and part of the reason is a listening session to hear what they think we may get no matter how much we focus in some way or another try and give diverse perspectives we're gonna be hearing possibly all perspectives yeah and I think I think I mean that that is the value of this of this space that we're getting into with the listening sessions as they are a mix of an educational space and we can help to manage those expectations and the understandings as long as we're on our game and we bring the right people in who really understand those things and can provide clarity on it and then the other piece that a lot of those question marks I

[118:00] think are on the code side of things and then on the land use and zoning side I think that's actually a space Judy to where it would be interesting to really garner ideas from the public about well how would you like to see it what's your vision of how these would be used and that really I think is material that we can take in and say okay we kind of take the temperature of people's ideas about how these are going to be so I like that and it's somebody who builds houses you know like you can take somebody's I really want to have this kind of house and you're like well your Lots only this big so you can only do this so I think what would be interesting is if when you guys scope this I don't think the general public really understands land use codes and zoning so if like with the

[119:00] ATU discussion I keep hating that I'm putting my back to you but remember how they had a an example of this is what a garage looks like when it's got something built on it and this is what so that there's literally a visual because most people think when you say tiny houses tiny houses are gonna be allowed as a to use but there's a difference in a tiny house on a trailer with equitable ownership for each individual and something that's honest lab that is cost burden to the owner to buy and that is a different zoning different codes so if there's a elemental way of breaking that down that would show the discussion and frame it in an educational way and that to me is the whole thing about breaking it down is there is if you're just talking houses there's how you're gonna build it there's all the different types of houses you could build what's actually allowed where it's allowed because we've it still adheres to the ATU laws and

[120:01] then where we want to go where we would use it as a possible tool and what is possible that's out there because we've never really looked at it before because it's always been illegal next next meeting it's happening we should be talking about right and that's why I kind of want to have this bring in to talk if we're gonna frame all this that's what the reason why we're trying to make sure we're on the same page if we have questions or something for the public input part of the listen session this is what we don't have and so if we just say you know and I was

[121:08] thinking one thing I was thinking also based on what you had said about doing some kind of scoping work on this is I do think it would be beneficial probably Judy and Mason if you want to jump back in on it but I'm also kind of getting a little bit more sane in my life I could do it to where we sit with you or J prior to this and we craft our our program and our meeting carefully so that we're we're walking in with a good you know solid program and and then what Jay is presenting can address some of these things that we've just talked about and he can present it you know I had a question with him for his knowledge of the actual building code aspect but he seemed to be comfortable with that so he is very possibly just

[122:01] capable of presenting all of that and that'd be great but just so that we've really done our due diligence on what it is we're presenting to the public how we're presenting it and then as you said what we're asking back from them it might be kind of interesting when they sign up for public you know when they want to talk if there were the four questions on that so when they sign up they could check a box that said I'm more interested in land use I'm more interested in design I'm more interested and the coding piece of it so that at least we've collected some information that might funnel down where the majority of these questions are gonna be coming from does that make sense and then we're collecting something for the report that Judy would be doing afterwards as well so if I could just make sure I'm understanding so it sounds like I mean we do me monthly - with a chair and vice chair to kind of think through the next meeting so what I'm hearing is that we're going to have Cori can reach out we can schedule time outside of that meeting just kind of scope this and it sounds like what we'll

[123:01] be doing is involving Judy and possibly Mason if you're interested in helping us kind of round this out that'd be great so we will reach out in the next day or so to find its University which a fine was having coming up with four questions and shaping the program I don't need to participate in that part we're still going to have I'm not obviously I'm not gonna know but thinks I should disinvite the people I've already arranged this with and worked with so if you guys want to add other elements to it and come up with four questions I'm fine with whatever the questions I know I know little bit nothing about tiny-home so I'm happy and since we can't have more than two people two board members without having to be a public meeting or whatever maybe you guys can do it or something and I can work on the publicity okay you were pumped up okay

[124:03] that's a teri and I'll work with you Kristin J to get that kind of put together the other piece the other piece that was brought up was the format again do you want to talk to that speak to that a little bit about the I wanted to say Siberia and it's not Siberian it yes okay you probably know about as much about that it's me Brenda written our has this great idea for a listening session that she would like to come next time for just a little bit to discuss this idea and see if we might be interested in incorporating it in one of our listening sessions in the future so Brenda who's part of the city's Community Engagement Team is offering to

[125:02] come and facilitate well she's she's actually available to attend the next meeting to describe kind of how we facilitate this type of discussion I believe you were anticipating that she would be coming in April to help facilitate that listening session is that I thought the tiny homes was gonna be me not April March I think I'm losing a month so in February it's tiny homes and then the next listening session that's something we're gonna discuss tonight right so when are you anticipating that she come depends on how the board feels after she comes and presents her idea okay well she's on the schedule to come next month but essentially the community engagement tools it's actually very similar to something that Mason just paid it in as part of the the video that you saw where you you have a group of individuals who are experiencing whatever the topic is and bring different perspectives to it and you're listening in to their conversation about how they've experienced this whatever the topic

[126:01] might be and then it kind of fuels a different way of communicating and sharing information so I'm not gonna be able to do it justice spread it's gonna be a much better at explaining but it's just a really unique opportunity for us to figure out new ways of engaging our community members in this conversation so Brenda is scheduled to come next month and she'll be able to present in we can see if it's a tool you're interested in using in the future okay thanks for that I wasn't clear myself if that was something that we were considering for this February session but it sounds like we'll stay with the format that we used last time then okay all right anybody else anything else on that do you want to add in no Jude are you good okay so now we move on to that April listening session and the topic question is still to be decided so

[127:03] I think there's just some discussion we can have around what the topic for that April listening session is if anybody has anything I know we brought up the renter's at one point I thought that's kind of where we were positioning from the past meetings but curious to anybody else has other ideas or thoughts unique so I went back and looked at when we discussed that and there are a number of ideas that people had but we did give heavy weight to talking about renters and even after listening to what Chris said tonight about 65% of the people in Boulder are renters and we wanted to make sure we did it when school was in session and if we waited till May they'd already be in finals so April seems good but the topics that people also broke up brought up were contractors accessibility and middle income people but there's one other thing I want to

[128:00] mention that I talked about you with you tonight the City Council talked about the letters from the board at their January I think six meeting or ninth meeting or something like that and meri Jung summarized our letter and she did a really great job of doing it and then there was only one comment about it afterwards and that was my Adam who said that he who said that the Arts Committee as was already mentioned tonight is very interested in housing and he thought it would be a great idea if some time we had a listening session and invited them to participate and bring artists and talk about artists housing needs and so I just wanted to throw that in I I hope we do renters in April I think still be here exactly how

[129:11] we tackle that long because it could get pretty unruly is maybe it would be best see how things shake out next month and then that could give us what we can do in terms of like to see how many houses which is probably and maybe it's even one do you want to then move forward with making a motion maybe at this point

[130:00] in time to say that the topic will be renters but moving forward ice as Danny's mentioning kind of formalized what the goals of that topic actually are and how we're gonna structure it or is that the cart before the horse I really like that is because as the engagement committee it I shouldn't be the one deciding those things so to have that discussion ahead of time and I basically I'm just doing the publicity part for it but I hope we put that on the February agenda because to do it in April it needs it needs that focus right away so we can go I can go on with the programming and letters and publicity so that's great so I'd therefore move that for the April listening session

[131:00] the topic is renters second anybody else have any further discussion around that shall we go Terry yes for this but I just wanna caution the the idea of just having a lot of people come in here and say Oh renting in Boulder is really hard and you know expensive and I just really think about how we want to scope this out and how we want to focus the conversation that's all I'm saying but I do like the idea I think it's a good idea and I yes I think it's gonna be

[132:03] important to have somebody in the room who knows a lot about renters rights in Colorado because they're gonna be a lot of questions about this happened and someone would need to be able to say well there's no there's nothing that protects you or from that kind of thing or there is you know and so be important to have someone who with that kind of that depth of knowledge yeah I mean I think what you're saying for renters is exactly what I'm saying for tiny homes are any of these sessions we need to have grown-ups in the room that can answer the questions that are framing out these discussions so that the same thing we are listening to people coming in but that we're managing expectations so this is why I was putting back out to the board that it's important to sit here and at the table that we have the experts that we've got the scoped information that if people do come in we

[133:00] can answer the questions yeah one thing along the lines of the scheduling so our next is a listening session there's not a lot of time and space in that event for a further discussion so it may be necessary that we between now and then put something together to start fleshing out what this is going to look like we're trying to capture the students but do we really are we trying to focus on students are we trying to focus on families that rent you know like yeah you know I'm saying so so maybe there's a number - no I don't know that because students may be in finals would be a bad time to talk to renters I don't know if that's a good reason so if we need to bump it another month to really flush it

[134:01] out it's probably not the worst idea to me there's a vote on the floor right so we vote so we think we're in the discussion phase of that so and I think these are all really valid points as we consider it so I think first of all I think your ideas are really good and I think to have it focused and I think one could do it by having it focused on solutions and we can stress that it's just solutions I mean I could even in the letter to the editor put something sort of funny like you know we don't want to hear that you're garbage you know we want to hear what your ideas are for solutions to to renters issues we also want to hear the the large issues but we want we want to look at solutions and I think two of us can get together

[135:02] and come up with idea that we can bring up to the board at the February meeting afterwards I mean we're going to discuss something after the listening session and that might as well be the thing especially if two people have thought it out you know beforehand here's where I would ask a question about procedure so we have a motion on the table there was some interest in potentially moving this to May how can we handle this could we do a friendly amendment on this and see if that flies for me I think that doesn't that would work that is correct you can anybody can propose a friendly amendment still in

[136:00] the realm of discussion because I don't think we've closed that down right we discussed a couple of times taking this off site and maybe May with students Pizza up on campus makes sense at that time just putting it out there so by our meeting in May they're gone so finals week is the first week in May students to stay summer 30,000 people showing up first week in May a chance there's gonna be students coming on student focused

[137:07] friendly amendment to listening session for tenants to me I'm not going to so you can just vote down you could just vote down mine and bring it up again everyone but I think April could still get students I don't think it's that close to finals and I think with them being 50 with renters being 55% of the population I just think it's I think we can pull it together in three months it's I mean I interject and I I hesitate ly interject with us but I feel like I'd be remiss if I did not mention so while the student population and their housing needs it's a concern of the community and definitely adds pressure to the community I just want to be really clear that our our housing

[138:01] portfolio are permanently affordable housing portfolio is not available to the traditional college student so as you're looking at scoping this project or this type of listening session I think we just need real clarity in the outcomes that way we'd be hoping to achieve because one of those outcomes I would venture to say would not likely be that we would be opening up a permanently affordable housing portfolio to serve that particular population so when you brought up the family dynamic of this conversation I think that could be an interesting angle not saying don't attract students but I just think we need to be really clear as to what the actual outcomes of receiving that feedback could be within our rules and regulations of our programs good point so our mission isn't permanently affordable housing its housing in general and I think there's a lot of neighborhoods like Martin acres and the hill that have real issues because of renters and those are people who live in those neighborhoods who aren't students

[139:01] as well and so although obviously affordable permanently affordable housing is my biggest interest I have a real feeling for for all for all renters students and non-students and you know I'm behind vote it down and pick another time pick another topic it's fine but I I feel April is is the most fair to the people that's a wide range of people we want to be at a listening session that's all really I'm gonna get really procedural here the motion was specifically for the April listening session correct yes so we tagged it to April I'm kind of I do think that this further discussion this is my perspective on the discussion is valuable and that getting the goals and objectives clear is really important

[140:01] and also being clear that we can do that by April so I think there's two questions that are laid on the table here one is what's the focus and is it students and if it's not necessarily specifically students are we hurting ourselves by moving to May and the second one is you know do we think we can put it together for April with a good cohesive focus in order to do that we can either vote on Judy's motion and that will say that we are doing this in April and will move forward with that or we could vote on that and depending where that goes we could further discuss how we're going to how we're going to do it but we I guess what I'm trying to do is disconnect the May the date from the topic of from the topic because we have

[141:00] those two pieces that were fighting with kind of a big deal you know two months after that how many do we want to have this year and if we're not seems like we'd be front-loading them a little bit versus giving us a little time in between that's the other thing I just want people to think about and I think we should really good question I looked up the only thing that the board voted on was for 2019 we don't have to have another listening session at all ever if we don't want we haven't actually we haven't actually decided that so that's a factor Mayson I also think we need to kind of keep in mind that once the work plan for City Council hits we could fill up dramatically and not even know so there is an argument to potentially wait and see when that when it wouldn't really

[142:00] let kick out that will have a solid work plan when do you guys like do your magic and decide what we have to look at for the next year I don't know the exact date but it was pretty firmly discussed this past weekend at the retreat and so I think it's pretty much defined okay we have a sense of what our priorities are gonna be and what we could do is share that with the hat you know as soon as possible to inform what might be good topics to conduct a listening session I guess my thought is I think this is a really important listening session I know that we didn't commit to any particular ones but I really would like to make sure that we do it right I'm very open to moving it back to make sure that we do it right and that we're not getting too hasty because our own presupposed schedule previously and really try to try to nail it so I'm very open to do I just my concern would be

[143:07] you know we had something and then all right let's try to be like since you second it if you're agreeable I'll just withdraw my motion completely and it can also be done in September I I want I mean my interest in renter's is renters which would be both students and non-students so if we did it at the end of August or the end of September that's another possibility so and we but we do have to discuss if we won't have listening sessions at all and and when we want them and all that and I'm more than happy with draw it I

[144:00] appreciate that and I think there's you know we part of this could be discussed and what is the ideal date for you know because we were talking about this in November very kind of figuratively and all the things we've discussed here today really kind underscore that for me that you know it's gonna be a really challenging one I there's no question it's gonna resonate a lot more and you can expect a lot more public turnout than you would with other ones and including what's the best forum for it so I'm more than happy to say every table the discussion as to when to do that one maybe that's not even the next listening session and maybe avert a discussion of listening sessions but I'm wearing happy withdraw my second thing just because everything we talked about here okay I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say right now but it appears that Judy's motion has been withdrawn we still have a question from

[145:11] a procedural perspective we don't have to make a motion to miss a question we don't have to make a motion to say we want to have a student listening session at some point in the future you know the next six months let's say or sometime this year we don't have to make a motion for that we can just say let's talk about it next time right you are correct okay now why don't we just talk about it next time or maybe the time after that because next time is gonna be busy with tiny homes and by then we'll have our work all right retreat we need to we've just withdrawn that I I might throw a little French in this some confirmation via attack so students I think it would

[146:01] be valuable for the hub to consider that at the retreat this past weekend City Council has asked housing and Human Services to do a presentation April 14th to them regarding our homeless services initiatives and having a community conversation about other approaches or strategies that we should be using or could be using our exploring they do intend to reach out to the housing advisory board as well as HR C and other community boards to get feedback and so the timing is a little bit awkward and so that's why I was hesitant to bring it up and I wanted to just get confirmation from Kurt that if you were to do some sort of listening session around the topic of homelessness and that would probably need a lot of scoping and queuing up the same way we're talking about timing homes there could be an opportunity to do a listening session in March that would then inform the

[147:01] conversation that's happening with City Council on April 14th so sorry I wasn't able to insert that earlier but just needed to you see that would be palatable to the arc yeah Mason no that feels really fast to some the I was I was scoping out something else with the with a different organization and some of these things just come flying at your face it was kind of like when Joe got on council and we did gun gun laws right away is that sometimes these things happen kind of fast and it's a great point because the working group and they're gonna come for suggestions so adamant Rachael proposed a suite of services to be offered for the gaps that are being either created or left behind by coordinated entry and they wanted to put it on the work plan they whittled it down to a working group sesh to happen April 14th asked council

[148:02] to come forward with scoping some of these things out and then Rachel asked if the boards could take a look at from our perspectives on the same issues and bring to council our thoughts on it and I have a copy of what Adam had proposed as well so you're right it would be March would it's tight and it would be a possibly a tight way to try and suss it out but it's timely and we should figure out how it is on their work plan and it is something they've asked us to help with so Kristen would your program or your plan your presentation be prepared by then by March on that subject because I think

[149:01] the presentation that you prepare for council is going to be informing them but it would probably be helpful for us to have that background information as well and maybe have incorporate some of that into those sort of not just the listening part but the informational part of our of our listening session I think we could do what's needed to prepare for that conversation and to have you be informed and the public to be informed during that listening session it would be a different presentation than one so city council on January received a presentation about what we're already doing and the successes and traction we have made and so this next one is kind of looking at additional services additional strategies that could be come into play so we're going to be doing this work in preparation for that April session with City Council so if I'm understanding your question I think I think we could easily package some sort of information so it would be an informing and well-rounded conversation for this group

[150:03] so my question is would the purpose and maybe Mason you can answer this too would the purpose of what Rachel wanted to be to hear the public's ideas for solutions like my interpretation and you you were sitting there - my interpretation was that when Sam had suggested making it over into a working group she was they've got obligations so the earliest they could touch it was April so Rachel said why don't we have the housing Advisory Board and I think she suggested one other board take the Human Rights Commission I think great take a look at these and weigh in on it so that we have these recommendations all packaged together when April hit so ideas so then then what I just wanted to say is thus far every listening session and we

[151:00] basically had three we had the two about the affordable housing experience funding affordable housing but then we had one the year before on just people's issues about housing and they were all really good and successful and I think although this is short timing this is really an opportunity for us to really provide some input to to counsel and and so my inclination would be to go for it and maybe it doesn't have to be a full listening session maybe it's just something we announced to the public that if you have thoughts on this and you want to contribute in some fashion you know I guess it would be wonks that are really paying attention to it and then a few people who just want to be heard major part of the meeting it's not an official listening session we don't bump it to that category it's almost a

[152:05] working session or a study session yes for us because I think this thing of engaging we could have it in a sense maybe split where we have a study session we can work on this concept of a suite of services and filling those gaps that exist and but have a significant component of that which again we could put a ladder out to say that this is what's happening at this meeting we're looking for public input in these areas and you know this is what the format of meeting will be there will be a public in from X hour to Y hour and just have a little Planning Board get from staff key questions that get put up at the end of

[153:02] the presentation those key questions are often really useful to drive how we then disseminate information from our board to the City Council on what we deliberate on but also for the public comments so so that might be a good way to kind of set up those questions to not just ask the board but also some that kind of stimulate the public to provide some of their thoughts as well great thought I have one wrinkle to put in this during the calendar section I was going to mention that I believe our next meeting is scheduled during spring I mean our March meeting is scheduled during spring break and we might have to pick a different time it's up to you to decide but if we do then that would be a different place and so we'd have to give Cory enough time to make sure it's a place where people could come so those

[154:02] of you with kids are you e the suggestion is to change the date or just I'm just saying if we end up at the end of the we decide to do this which is a great idea and I hope we do we might be doing it earlier in March and we might not be doing it in this room so if we move need a place where the public you know could gather Cory do you think that's feasible to find a space and then right so it just depends on whether or not you guys agree to it it depends on when in March a lot of retreats happen March April so if we're pushing it either later earlier space could be a challenge and you know I always try to consider parking public transit for folks to get to these spots and so right now it's

[155:02] just a busy time it could be a challenge but it's not impossible I could find something that could potentially work but that's only if you guys decide to vote to move the meeting the dates on the spring break is the last Wednesday which is during spring break the 18th which is the week Wednesday before it's not spring break it's the 23rd through the 27th it's the last week of March our meeting is on the 25th to the 18th it's all gonna be gone first before we start I don't know yet for sure I don't have plans but peace the

[156:08] concern is just that besides us that we're going to be missing the public I think maybe we should look to move that date yeah Terry again you got the calendar up over there Kalyn March 18th is the Wednesday before the currently scheduled have meeting

[157:04] is that an option to have in this room Cory no it's very small and we had that listening session in their last three just sitting around the table with the staff and board members is very tight I think it's just got bad vibes from that last one anyway we don't want to go back there I'm happy to work with Cory to see if we can find a place that will hold some people april 1st so we still have to talk about the have retreat which is on the next main item and from the doodle poll April 6 looked to be the date that worked to the best for everyone's schedules so there's a really

[158:12] nice room that planning board is used in the Benton building over at Alpine balsam area and it's bigger than any of the conference rooms here and Cindy's set it up with all the recording and everything to come and go yeah there's Park you know there's parking over there and yeah I think that's a really good suggestion that we can click into and what I suggest is for the board to make a decision if you want to change the day and then we will work to find a place okay since Mason's coming back all set up I'll make a motion to move our March meeting from

[159:03] the 25th to Wednesday the 18th okay seconded by Judy do we want to have a vote on that all in favor okay so unanimous so we'll move that meeting to the 18th and I think we'll be able to find somewhere to to have that and it might be a good option to go somewhere outside of City space too I mean maybe one of the churches or some some space where we could have that discussion somewhere we're gonna do that so um safe feeds the unhoused but it's

[160:01] on Saturdays that's usually not on Wednesday evenings but inside of a church that would be interesting there's that church that we do the sleep out in front of intention homes yeah it'd probably be open to it they they seat quite a few people in their cafeteria if we're it sounds like we've just the board has decided to move to March 18th maybe we pursue two of you to work together with staff to kind of scope this out and we're not gonna solve the details of it now but it does sound like it would be something that we can do which would be interesting maybe we can move it out into the community maybe we can do an event of sorts also to support the homeless and then we're the unhoused and then will we will who would like to work on that if we can't get two of us

[161:00] to I mean absolutely Terry Mason okay great all right so in just structuring that I guess we're looking at our March meeting I don't know that we'll need to make any specific decisions of the February meeting around this but we would want to have something maybe kind of formulated by then if you guys think you can pull that off so we can hear about it I was just gonna suggest that you do want to do that otherwise we can't do publicity for it especially since it's the meeting is a whole week earlier than usual but also do we need to then vote that we want to have a homeless idea session or public public input or whatever it's called yeah I think we've left the fullest I guess that's something to discuss the way I feel like we'd left the full

[162:00] listening session topic item that was on the agenda I don't know do we need to make a motion to focus on that for our March meeting does that require motion determined early unless you don't care unless you all vote that you don't care what the letter is and I could just work it out with somebody from the committee's maybe what we can do is Mason and Terry and put together the the particulars that you'd like to see go out in a letter and then Judi can draft it and put it together and get it out there but if we can have it all that to Judi and I don't know do I do want to answer that this is a very quick turnaround and while we are in support would be supporting AB in pulling off

[163:02] such an event we are also working very hard to pull the content together for this and that that's a big lift as well so I just I just mentioned that like I think these are all beautiful ideas but we just we have to kind of calibrate with the content versus event planning so I just asked that that be considered we'll take care of the event side I already just sent out three I think that's a I think putting this together and you just you can focus on what you're gonna do and we'll do this okay well let's definitely if we can to have that meeting and conversation sooner rather than later with Mason and very Airy is gonna be working on it just so we're all on the same page as to what the expectations are from staff and our next agenda setting meeting is on or the one for the March meeting I should say Cory do you know what that date looks

[164:01] like because we'll need to have the info by then ideally at least so right now you're next how chair meeting is scheduled for March 17th which is a Tuesday morning okay do you want to do it the week before on you want to keep the Tuesday yeah let's keep the Tuesday and move it up a week okay okay cool okay so I think we're good on that for now we'll go to March will focus on homeless for that meeting all right try to get back on have retreat planning just briefly I think we said April 6th is what's looking like it works for

[165:01] everybody David I think you said you could make that and we if you yeah if you think it would be useful to help me there I'd i think that's been done in the past with expo this year so i'm checking when gar is if anybody else knows where i'm gaara's can't remember when it's oh no just a sec Judy you're poised to go well I was just wanting to save time yeah and could it just be that you and I is board chair and vice chair plan the retreat but ask everyone to give their ideas about the retreat to us in the next week and then we'll come up with the format just to make it easy we can do it a different way if you want but I just wanted to move along yeah no I agree I think the one question that I had is if we have in quarry a budget

[166:00] have we talked about facilitator and bringing a facilitator in for this retreat and if that is something I think that's something we probably put too emotion quickly here and get everybody's take on having a facilitator at the retreat or not and if that's what we're gonna do so I'm just gonna put a motion out real quickly that we do have a facilitator for our retreat and on April 6th can we do this all in one motion then we'll have our retreat on April 6th and that we will have it facilitated facilitator TBD okay teri second at any discussion or thoughts on it you want to put out okay so in that case all the A's for that okay again unanimous for April 6th retreat date and a facilitator to be determined

[167:02] thank you can I just clarify really quick so there are a variety of facilitators that the city has traditionally used Heather Bergman being he was at the city council retreat this past weekend do you want to play a role in the selection of the facilitator and if so who would would that be the chair and vice chair okay the person to that also did it last year was great yeah yeah so whoever I mean we we had that piggy backed together last year I can't remember what their names were at the yeah I mean I'm Kristin would you just share those names sure with Judy and I or with the whole board as it is and then if there are any thoughts from anybody on the board send them to us otherwise Judy and I'll take a look at those and and make a choice the next chair this last item real quick was we

[168:07] had had some discussion Judy brought it up again at the agenda meeting about in one of our last meetings around just kind of how we engage with public comment and an input from the public and I know we got into kind of mired into this well we're not really any type of a quasi-judicial thing and I just wanted to we put it on here just to make a quick review of that because it was Terry yeah we talked a bunch about it and I just want to revisit it if there's something that we need to impress your memories I think it was the two the two of you had a really good idea about possibly starting a committee to when people bring issues to us that we can try and define them and then the idea for a committee either fizzled or we ran

[169:00] out of time it was sort of left hanging and it was something that both of you were interested in and is it something you care you know I just didn't want to leave something dangling that the two of you yeah my recollection was we kind of talked through it and it it fizzled because the feeling was it was going to okay so unless there's somebody else okay so we'll leave that one behind matters from staff so the staff the final letter to council was posted so that it's available to the public and I think that was the only item that was it it great so Calendar check we've kind of already gone through a fair chunk of that Judy can you have a turkey airforce

[170:07] teenies anyone so the November meeting falls on 25th which is the day before Thanksgiving you could jump out of the cake I'm gonna suggest we put that in our in our pipes and then at a further future meeting we can decide on that we got a little bit of lead time on it maybe the week before I have a comment about that and that will have more insight into the work plan that City Council has and we may I think yeah

[171:03] that'll impact exactly what our schedule looks like for the rest of the year I think that's a good call for Spring Break I'm gonna say that we will keep that in mind and we'll look to that as we move forward quick debrief anybody have any debrief comments well I I want to say I think there was the quick pivot on April or April listening session although I think somewhat painful for all of us I think at the end it probably is this is a good thing I appreciate it how everybody was willing to kind of walk around and talk through that one and

[172:00] work it out so good deal any other with that said we will close our April 22nd hab meeting