To listen to the meeting alongside a transcript, please visit: https://otter.ai/s/X4zB_8QCSxCtbBv0M8i7HQ
0:06
Right, just a quick reminder, city council meetings are being held remotely due to the governor stay at home order went into effect on March 26 2020. And if you’re watching this, you obviously know how to find us. So let’s
0:18
go ahead have a roll call Miss kitana.
0:21
Good evening mayor. Mayor Bagley.
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councilmembers. Christiansen,
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here.
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fairing.
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Martin. Here. Here.
0:39
Waters here.
0:42
Mary, you have a quorum. All right, great. Harold, do we have any more actually city council Actually, let’s do pledge allegiance. We don’t have a flag here. But let’s say it preferably in unison so I’m not ahead of everyone this time. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic
0:59
for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible with
1:03
liberty and justice for all.
1:07
Waters you rocked it. You rocked it.
1:10
by that. I mean you didn’t really that’s okay.
1:14
All right. Let’s go ahead and do motions to direct the city manager to add agenda items, the
1:18
future anybody?
1:21
All right. I don’t see anybody. So let’s go ahead. Don, do we have any public comment tonight?
1:27
We do. Mayor, we have about seven comments that I’m going to read for you tonight.
1:33
The first one is from Dave larysa. Two three to nine Squires court. Dave says there was breaking news late last week that the University of Colorado has dismissed atmospherics researcher Dr. Detlef Helmick for unethical practice revolving around his public and private work. There’s a link to the article. The city of Longmont is paying home exoneration $150,000 annually for air quality sampling at Union rez and outlay spurred on by local environmental activists as a retired meteorologist miliar with Longmont atmospheric conditions. I’ve always questioned how makes air sampling conclusions. He cherry picks certain voc readings with no proof that the sources weld county oil and gas drilling. it amounts to a bias study similar to a push poll designed to get one good results for the benefactors agenda. I had a letter published in The Times call on November 30 2018, regarding how Meg’s flop work in light of the new revelations from the University of Colorado as well as large projected city budget shortfalls. I believe Dr. Detlef helmets contract should be terminated immediately by law Matsui counsel. The next is from Mark Laumann. And his address to 36 sugar been court Mark says golf is not essential. Opening up the golf courses sends a very bad message to the community. The pandemic is in full effect and our curve has not slowed. Do not encourage people that things are better or are fine. Opening up the golf courses sends a signal that things are normal again and children places not necessary, which will only cause an upswing in the number of people getting sick. Be, be careful with the message you send.
3:14
Next is a message from Chris fast wig 1609 19th Avenue.
3:19
This comment is regarding the lack of social distancing and overcrowding at some of our parks. I have been along that resident for over 20 years now and truly love it here. And one of the things that I’m most proud of is how much work and resources we have placed in our parks and open space system. Currently, there are many people enjoying the fruits of those labor’s the issue currently is that there are too many people traveling to specific areas that results in overcrowding at certain parks and open space areas while leaving many of them empty. I do firmly believe that these are valuable resources that we should be encouraging responsible use of our public areas during these times. Though it would seem that some restriction restrictions may have to be placed, placed in order to keep them having to resort to shutting down those resources everyone living near McIntosh Lake, I can tell you firsthand that there are constantly crowds and too many people traveling to the lake for it to remain the safe place to enjoy the outdoors. My suggestion is to close the parking lots and prohibit street parking for non neighborhood residents at some or all of our city parks and open spaces the next few weeks to encourage residents to spread out to the parks and open spaces that are closer to home. At the very least please consider changing the path that Macintosh to single direction traffic to cut down on how close people are to each other. We need to ensure that we keep the recovery on track as we preserve the safety of all residents of Longmont and helped to stop the spread of COVID-19 while still keeping our wonderful parks and open space areas open. Thank you. Next is a comment from Gail Allen on Twin Peaks circle. She says I strongly feel you should not reopen the public golf courses at this time. It seems reasonable Considering the influx of people from other areas, and is a recipe for increased viral transmission within our local neighborhoods and community, my specific concerns are as follows many homes directly back to our golf courses, my residence backs to the golf course and there’s no landscape buffer or significant distance between my backyard patio in the tea box. I am personally concerned about the constant flow of golfers meeting at the tee in close proximity that may increase my chances of contracting the bite virus. Particularly as an I’m in a high risk group. Will you require all golfers to wear masks? As the governor has asked us to all wear in public places? How will you enforce this rule? The golfers seldom play alone. How are you going to restrict size and enforce shows social distance of non family member groups? Are you going to require all Beaufort golfers walk the course or allow the use of golf carts? What are your procedures for sanitizing carts? How will you ensure that flags cups and ball cleaners are standardized after each offer? You feel confident all the offers will police themselves in antis golf equipment after us. How much money will it cost to keep sanitizing protocols in place with regards to staffing and cleaning? golfing really is not a solitary sport. Despite what the governor’s may decide we have right as a humble city to set our own rules. Our community is still not back to normal. We should not pretend that we are you need to protect ever and vulnerable citizens. Opening golf courses for the new golf for the few golfers who are impatient to play round of golf during this pandemic does not make sense to me. Please hold off opening the golf courses until we are confident we can do so safely. And when we are also ready to open our other recreational facilities such as pools, tennis courts, skate parks, and playgrounds. It’s the right thing to do. The next one is from Abby Driscoll 1304 lupine court.
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Abby says sustainable, resilient long might have to cancel this year’s long my birthday celebration. We are excited to be finding other ways to celebrate the 50th The anniversary of birthday. This event has always had Youth Environmental education as a central focus. Indeed it is our children’s and future generations lives at stake due to the threat of climate change. While this is a global issue in scope, I believe that there are things we can do locally to make an impact. Tomorrow on Wednesday, April 22, we are hosting a live webinar. That will be a panel discussion with St. Brain Valley High school students about the challenging opportunities we face with climate change in our community, and how to make a difference. We invite council members in the public to join us from noon to 130. Find out what local youth are thinking regarding climate change fossil fuels, local action and their vision for the future. The panel discussion will be moderated by Marlo Baynes, who is originally from Boulder and as co youth director at Earth Guardian has taken her passion for environmental causes all over the world. The four student panelists are Ashwini Shrestha of skyline High School, Maya boven Oh, when I was in high school, le hammer and Megan no new field of Silver Creek High School. We are extremely inspired by these youth When asked for a quote for a press release for the event, over Creek Junior, Allie Palmer, who’s also been an active volunteer on Earth Day planning committee said, I’m very excited and honored to be a part of this panel. In these uncertain times, we have such a unique opportunity for self reflection and contemplation, we can distinguish what is truly important to us and what we hold dear. As the earth begins to heal. Without our presence. Many are realizing the significance of our actions, and the necessity of the solution. This panel is an amazing way to express those feelings and give a platform to the voices that will be carrying the burdens of generation COVID-19 is blind to race, age and location, therefore has united the world in a way that has never been seen before. I hope that as we meet behind our screens, we can recognize this opportunity for togetherness and apply it to environmentalism. This is our world and we are all in it together. Thank you for your time and invite you to visit WWW dot OSR lamacq.org where you can find the details for the webinar link and join us to listen to what these numbers People have to say the future is in all of our hands. Happy Earth Day. And the next one is from Rachel Zelaya of sustainable resilient Longmont. 948 Rose Street. It’s actually a proclamation request. You’ll be to read it there. Cuz it looks like it’s to go to the proclamation pipeline.
9:26
I’m sorry, you’re muted.
9:31
Right now I expect everyone to be reading lips. It’s
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what many weeks.
9:37
Now the what I was going to say is that Maria and I, Rachel style and I discussed not doing any proclamations until the end of May. We were getting some proclamations about like, I mean, put in the pipeline, but like, we got a proclamation for you know, making April Bike Month and I was like, well, I just be what what’s it gonna look like? Meaning, the biking impacts are they going to be biking within six feet of each other? And so in other words, there are a lot of those types of announcements or proclamations that that just seems we could put it off until after the after.
10:16
I will read this one because it is actually the wording of a proclamation. Okay.
10:23
There’s one more. One
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last one.
10:28
Nope, it’s a repeat. That’s Abby again. So that’s all I have.
10:31
All right, cool. All right. If there’s no other presentations, Harold, let’s move on to the COVID-19 update.
10:39
All right, can everyone hear me?
10:45
Yep. All right.
10:47
So we’re gonna go through a few points in this. The first thing that I’m going to do is really talk about what we’re doing from a facility standpoint, as it relates to them. information that we thought we heard from the governor’s update yesterday. Zach is on the line from Boulder County Public Health. And so I will start with my general overview and what we’re going through as an organization in terms of preparing ourselves for various transition points, and how we’re going to look at that. In addition, what we’re also going to, we’re then going to move to Dan and he’ll cover a general EMC update what we have in play this week, and we will then shift to Joanie and Jessica, who will do the business assistance update, and then to Kathy and Karen on the individual assistance, and then we’ll go to Jeff on the Boulder County update. Jeff probably going to have more detail based on the governor’s press conference yesterday. And so I’m going to talk about a few points that we’re keen on as an organization. As you saw over the last couple of weeks, we’ve had a number of comments regarding golf courses. I would say that that’s not unique to our community. In once a week or multiple times a week, I have a conversation with our, with county administrators in Boulder County. And this has been something that we’ve all been talking about. One of the things that we look at and that we’re going to be looking at when we look at any of our facilities, is really the specific activities that we have in the various facilities that we operate on a daily basis. The one thing I will say is that not every facility and not every activity is created equal. And we have to keep in mind what the governor’s orders are. The advice that we give from the Colorado Department of Health, the advice we get from Boulder County Department of Health, in the guidelines that are also out there from the Centers for Disease Control, and we evaluate all of that information. We’re going to be looking at our facilities. And so I know that
13:07
all of our recreational components is
13:11
going to really take deep dives into those components and understand what that looks like. We’re going to base it on best practices and science and as I said, input from various agencies. And the one thing I’ll say is no matter what we do, safety’s always going to be paramount. And our staff, we would not make a recommendation to open a facility, we didn’t feel like we could ensure the safety of our folks that work at the facility, the safety of the public that utilizes the facility. So at that point, what I will say is that we do know that the Colorado Department of
13:44
Public Health and Boulder County Health
13:47
have both said that golf courses are allowed to be open. You may have seen recently that Denver has opened their golf courses. I know another number of public courses are Beginning to open private courses have never open. I want to tell Council and the community that I specifically had a conversation with Jeff, regarding the health and safety issues associated with golf courses, and specifically asked him the question and said, if you have an issue with this, let me know. And we will move forward. And Jeff can speak for himself. But he said, I’m good based on the level of risk. There is almost a page and a half of protocols that we have to undergo at golf courses in terms of everything that we have to comply with when we were not there yet, because one of the major components is that people have to register online and have to be able to pay prior to coming into golf walk ups will not be allowed and we’re still working on this technology is as we speak to try to get that done. In addition to that, because walk ups aren’t allowed, we’re actually going to have a check At the entrance, when we get to the point where we can open it, we’re going to have to check in actually at the entrance of the parking lot. So if you haven’t reserved a tee time and you haven’t paid for it, we’re not even going to allow you to come into the parking lot. And then they’re going to have requirements in terms of spacing in the parking lot and what that’s going to. So we have adequate distance in there. I know there is a question about what are we going to do with mask, we are going to require people to have mask and wear those masks where they can properly social distance from other people. And so, you know, generally they’re saying six to 10 feet. The analogy that we’re going to use on some of the videos is it’s like a driver and an arm’s length away and if you’re inside of that, and you need to wear the mask because of social distancing. And in those protocols. One of the things that we’re really starting to see is we have multiple people going out to golf courses on a daily basis because we have a lot of people getting on and it’s been a an ongoing challenge for us. The other issue that we’re starting to see is not only do we have people getting onto the golf course to play golf, we also have people getting onto the golf course to walk. I’ve heard people getting onto the golf course the picnic. And there’s another safety issue starting to come into play. Because when golf balls are, are fine and moving that fast, and you have people and they’re not expected, that is a very dangerous condition. In addition, I know there was a news story on Channel Nine actually really talking about the golf courses. And they show video that it was easier actually to manage and enforce proper social distancing on the golf course some of the other locations that have been talked about what are we going to do in order to share to ensure that all of the steps are being done and that folks are complying with them are actually going to repurpose staff. They can’t be in other operations, because we can achieve proper social distancing and they’re going to be out working to ensure that people are following all of the requirements. Again, those are things we’re working on. And once we can pull it together to ensure that it is a safe operation, that it is complying with the orders established by the Colorado Department of Health and border county health. We will then evaluate when we can pull the trigger on that. At that point I’ll stop with golf courses and answer any questions.
I’m lost mayor and also Councilmember Christiansen
17:41
we had a constituent who wanted to know whether
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two questions she wanted to know they’re a private gyms we’d be open or our gyms would be open. But the other thing I wanted to ask about golf courses is is this gonna cost us more money than usual to run golf courses again, because, you know,
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anyway,
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actually, it’s I’m not hearing that actually it is. It’s actually the other case where it will actually generate revenue that we’re not generating Now, in order to do that. And the other option that it does tap into the gym question, when we say we look at each facility, and this story will bleed over into what we heard from the governor and I missed this, Jeff will correct me. But generally what I heard yesterday was, you’re still limiting any gathering. It’s got to be 10 or less. And so when you start getting into our other facilities, when we talk about things like and this is work that we have to do as we start looking into the future is how do you limit Amongst the gatherings and facilities like rec centers and libraries and places like that, it is actually easier because what we’re going to do is have a very streamlined process on dock where you come in, you need to be called to the tee, you hit the tee, you move off, we’re going to have longer intervals, you can’t have more than four people in a group in they’re going to be walking. And so you have to ensure that social distancing in that, so it’s easier to manage it in that world than it really is and some of the other locations. I have asked staff and I’ll get to that in a little bit. When I heard when I go back to what I heard from the governor, so what I heard is groups of 10 or more, we still need to be focused on teleworking, the 50% threshold until working is still in place. You know, I heard retail for pickup, there may be a different kind of arrangement after the first and so when we take some of those things, guidance. What we’re having to do when we look at our facilities is the same. What is the best way to stage that? And why are we trying to stage in? Why are we trying to open? So we have put together a team of staff to begin looking at three facilities, civic center, development, service building and service center. If council remember, those were the last three that we had open, and we close them when a stay at home order was implemented. Right now what we’re trying to do is to ensure that we can put everything in place that we need to again meet the best practices, and what we’re hearing in terms of the interaction. So one of the major challenges for us and all of these facilities right now is actually putting up glass or plexiglass at the counters, where people can interact. And we actually had to get plexiglass from the museum Because you can’t find plexiglass now, and believe it or not glasses, I think is cheaper than Plexiglas. And so we’re having to order all of this stuff. So we literally are using Plexiglas from the museum, I think they’re using, they may be using the little robot cutting machine at the museum to build the, the framing for it, and putting that in place. And so even if we were able to open, we don’t have the proper safety measures in place. I’m going to delay that until that occurs. And that’s what we’re really looking at a facility. So we started with those three. Council may remember, we never closed the public safety building because they already have the glass partitions in place there. So that’s continued to operate in this. And we’re also working on Municipal Court. Courts also having to take guidance from the Supreme Court in terms of what can occur. That’s our first video. next phase then moves into some of these other buildings where we have more people and you know right now, there is a lot of work really understand what we can do, how we can do it. But we’re not at the point now to say that we can do that in a safe manner.
22:21
One more question about that.
22:24
I’ve run into several people trying to get into pay the utility bills. I’ve said you know, they’re not going to cut you off, but and you can pay online but I can tell by the way they look at me, they don’t, they don’t have a way to pay online. So that’s what a lot of people are. And I think that’s especially a problem with people who lost their jobs and you know, they don’t have I just have a lot of them, but they they are very anxious about being able to get it get to pay their utility bills. With the person. So if we could just arrange something that that would be very helpful.
23:06
That’s part of what we’re looking at. To give you a sense every word group in the organization, we have tasked them with creating a plan and a very detailed plan in terms of how they’re going to open so I can talk to you about the utility billing component in terms of so we’re putting up all the glass at the counters where people interact. If they’re dealing with someone at the counter, even though there’s glass, they’re still going to be wearing a mass. And we’re going to have safety protocols in place. We’re trying to get hand washing stations in so that people can utilize them in utility billing, we used to have two lines or go into one line, very similar to grocery stores where you have adequate social distancing, and where people can stand we’re gonna have signage, talking to people about what they can do. Those are all the things We’re trying to put in place as we look at the future in terms of what we’re trying to accomplish. I will tell council this will not authorize anything to be pushed forward. That doesn’t meet the standards established by the city, PhD, Boulder, county, Hill, CDC and we’re taking all of those things into account. So it is highly likely that you will hear from me in the near future, unable to achieve the requirements established by the health department’s and we can open golf courses. That also means we can enforce and maintain that on an ongoing basis. And a lot of folks go low. Are you going to be using volunteers to do this? No, you’re not. We’re also going to repurpose staff that aren’t able to work in other facilities to come in and help us provide that service. I’ve also said we’re going to it’s going to be walking, we will not even entertain moving into cards unless we have the ability to sanitize those to the level that we need to, for people to use it. So if anybody ever sees cards going right, that means we’re getting the same sanitizing protocols that have been established. We’ve also created processes within the organization to say, if somebody tests positive, here is a set of protocols that we’re going to use to gain a facility in order to ensure that it’s sanitized when people come back into it. And we have a robust set of requirements that I’ve signed last week in terms of what we’re going to do. We also do health checks now in terms of anybody that’s coming into work. Even I have to get my temperature taken. There’s a series of questions and they’re moving this and so as things continue to evolve in the future, you will actually see an expansion of that for anyone. I mean in to work in any of our facilities. There is a lot of guessing right now. We’re trying to do is put enough plans in place, that once we get clarity, we’re able to adjust and go when we need to. But we will always have the safety of a workforce and the safety of the community in mind, we’ll make any decision.
26:15
Thank you, Harold waters.
26:22
I just things, Harold, if I think it might be worth taking the list of requirements or or parameters that the protocol or the restrictions that you you touched on it get that to all of us to all the council members. So when when we get incoming phone calls or emails we can specifically cite you know, what’s been in writing. I’ve seen it as one who volunteers with the golf courses and just a couple of observations just to reinforce one of your points. Right now I have no idea how many people are on the golf courses today. But I know that remember And in addition to what you said, there are people playing and people recreating in other ways in the golf courses today, there’s nobody out there supervising. Right? There’s nobody’s enforcing social distancing. There’s nobody to keep people away from somebody’s backyard. And the only way that’s going to happen is if you if you put people out there to supervise, which is what you’re talking about doing. You mentioned a different schedule for people taking off the normal route. The normal timeframe is eight minutes between tee times is going to be 15 minutes between normal practice areas are closed. So right more than 10 minutes before the time, Hey, get in the parking lot. Right? You go from your car right to the first tee, right? You’re wearing a mask you’re required to wear a mask until you get to the first tee and then you you know you described how you’re going. But people you can’t you can’t there’s no food or beverage available in the pro shop. You’ve got an order that before you get there. You pick it up curbside. You can’t get it Drink or something after the room, you can’t hang out, you have to leave. The matter is in it, you know, I volunteer, I’m on the golf board. But I believe actually safety is going to go up not down around the golf courses based on what’s going on now versus what’s gonna happen, right. And I understand the perception and the concerns about mixed messages. And you know, all the things we’ve heard from our residents, I get them. But at the end of the day, I do believe that residents and those who live around the golf courses will be on the golf course will be more safe, not less safe with the protocols that administer.
28:41
And to answer your point we have our public information team has built a lot of stuff that we will, as we get closer, we will we will get that out to Council and we want to make sure that we’re actually able to do what we were saying we’re going to do so I’ll make sure that they get at least that first sheet to you. And then as things Change we will mistake the council Councillor Martin or I don’t know Mary, you watching?
29:06
Yeah, I’m watching customer Martin, actually Councilmember Ito fairing. Did you have your hand up first? No, you’re up in the corner my screen. So just check it Kazmir Martin.
29:15
Okay. This is just a quick one. We talked earlier today about volunteer marshals, and I think I heard something just now that I didn’t hear before. Are you saying that you are going to use only city employees and no volunteer marshals during this hypothetical reopening?
29:33
We will have a number of city employees. I think they’re also trying to manage it with volunteer marshals. The primary enforcement mechanisms also going to be city employees. I know there’s a concern about volunteer marshals being able to do it if you’ve ever been there, the marshals.
29:50
They make you comply, even in the voluntary
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component, but we’re going to use both, potentially.
29:57
Yeah, I’m not worried about them, not having the authority I’m a little worried about the number of them that are young enough to do it because a lot of them are retirees and shouldn’t be there.
30:08
And we have to keep that in mind. If counsel remembers everything that we’re doing, we also have to keep in mind the guidance that the governor has given us. This is really beyond golf. This is everything that we’re going to be doing. We have to keep in mind the government the the advice, or the guidance of the governor in our Department of Health in Boulder County Public Health has given us regarding individuals that fall into certain categories. Obviously, you have the age category, but you also have those that are high risk, and we have to manage those at a different level. And I will tell counsel, we’re having those conversations annually. And we’re really asking people to bring that to our attention. So no matter what situation they’re in, we can make the appropriate decision that we need to based on their individual position. All right.
30:58
Ready to go to Dan for this
31:01
That’s what we’re looking at building wise and more will be coming. I just wanted you all to know all of the processes that we’re going through to try to figure it out. Dan, do you want to go with the general EEOC update?
31:12
Sure, you did pretty good job. With that. I’ll give you a couple of quick other things. In general, from the EEOC, we’re really transitioning at this point, we’re trying to transitioning into supporting the recovery effort, and really out of really active response efforts. I think we’re doing what we can to support all of the economic structures that you’ll hear about next. And really try to think about these long term facility reopening plants that Aaron was talking about, because we’re operating under the assumption that there’s going to be some kind of a masking strategy until there’s a vaccine. And that could be a long time out, you know, 912 months from now. So we’re going to need to be thinking about PP needs for a long time and we’re still not able to really get them on, you know, through easily through the normal supply chain, we’re still trying to get them any way we possibly can. So we’re still kind of scraping for and 95 and surgical masks and those kind of things. So we’re making sure that if we are going to be putting up things like the, you know, the library and those kind of places, all those city employees are going to need the right PBE. So we need to be able to provide that for them. That’s a big focus of what we’re doing, supporting the economic recovery piece, and then just really making sure that we’re assisting all the departments with the facility reopening plans, because those things are not. They’re not easy. And we’re kind of back to where we were in the beginning, anticipating the governor’s orders and what those actually mean. You know, we’re not entirely sure what’s going to happen in a week, we got sort of a preview, but he did a lot of things that said, details are forthcoming, and we haven’t gotten those yet. So we’re really going to see what those are. We’re going to have to make legal interpretations on those and make sure that, you know, we’re complete line with those and they’re certainly going to change like we saw in the beginning. So I we’re kind of, we’re kind of back to that again, and we’re trying to make sure that we’re in a good position to respond to all that. But that’s really where we are for now. And I think you’ll get a lot more on the economic recovery piece here in just a second. Great, thanks, Carl.
33:21
muted Harold.
33:27
I wanted to say based on this is one of the things that’s been happening with dance group. You know, we talked about last week that we’re going to have other mass drives and so we have one tomorrow from 10 to two at the Rec Center. We have one then this Saturday, I think 10 to two at the Rec Center, same schedule the following week. They’ve really been working with a lot of community groups. And so one of the things I want to let you all know, and this is a really big shout out. I know, council member Christiansen talked about hidden treasures and the work that they’ve been doing The owners actually retired nurse and basically decided when this all started changing, that they would make masks for nursing homes, assisted living centers and then just others in town generally, that soon transformed very quickly into let’s get Longmont messed up. Since then, they’ve donated supplies to over 50 community groups. And as of this afternoon, they’ve handed out over 7200, free mass to the community. And so what I wanted to do to you all is to say, I want to make an amazing representation of the community coming together. And I want to give a big thank you because we actually received some of those masks, I think, and we’re using that for our crews that are in the field because if we’re out there and we’re in the public, we’re going to be wearing masks. And so I wanted to give a big thank you to hidden hidden treasures to hear in Longmont and I wanted to let you know the great work that they’re doing. Next, we will go to the business assistance update.
35:07
Yo, can I just say,
35:08
just real quick, just something to keep in mind and digest. They did not get a PPP loan. And they’ve got rent about I think it’s $6,000 a month. So just something to digest over the next seven days that they put everything on hold and really provided a service. I’ve never met the owners. I don’t know these people. But I do know that they’re a startup, that pretty heavy hit. So they stepped up without expecting anything. And so I think that is we anyway, I would not be opposed at some point to return the favor. It wasn’t expected but I think it would be appropriate. So just something to think about the next seven days, and then I’ll mention it at the regular session.
36:00
Transition because we now have Jessica and Joanie. They’re gonna talk about all of the work that we’ve been doing from the business assistant side. I’m gonna mute myself Jessica jelly, take it away.
36:12
Good evening Marin council members Jenny Marsh with the city manager’s office. So I noticed no surprise to council that the business response team that has come together with our public, private and nonprofit groups, has rapidly developed numerous strategies around the economic recovery that we’re looking to assist with. When advanced on month 2.0 was adopted last year as a collective impact model. I know all of our organizations really embraced that opportunity to really put us in a position where collectively we would be stronger than we were individually. I think we just didn’t anticipate that we would be putting that collective impact model to work in an event like the pandemic that we’re doing right now. Tonight, Jessica and I are are going to provide counsel with a high level overview of where we’re at so that both counsel in the community understand the strategies that we’re working towards to assist the business community. We’ve also included tonight in your packet, I believe dawn sent you a fairly detailed list that gave you information on timelines, actions taken to date, as well as the three different survey tools that have already gone out since March 13. And we’re going to keep it fairly high level tonight. And I’m going to turn it over to Jessica to talk a little bit about the three problems of the strategy we’ve been looking at.
37:45
Just do we can’t hear you like we can’t hear you. Hear me now.
37:50
Okay. Thanks, Joanie. Good evening, Mayor Bailey and council members as Dhoni mentioned on March 13. Group I’d be advancing what partner organizations did convene as a business response into address, help businesses address and connect them with resources to get through the public health crisis portion of what we’re going through now, as well as to start looking at how to bring resource to economic recovery going forward once we’re able to start reopening for business here in Longmont. I just want to mention that participating organizations in the business response team have been city of Longmont. EDP, certainly the Lamont downtown Development Authority at one one Area Chamber of Commerce, Boulder SBDC, visit online and workforce folder counting so really all of the organizations that are that currently are and will continue to play a critical role in helping us recover from this
38:47
from an economic perspective.
38:51
Next slide.
38:56
work that we’ve done so far. And as Jenny mentioned, the supporting documentation that we provides you provides a complete timeline of when we’ve convened and the work that we’ve done. But the work that we’ve done so far and will continue to do going forward focuses on really three areas of capital communication and education. We’re going to talk spend most of our time on this presentation talking about the capital portion of the work that we’ve done in the strategy that we have going forward. I just wanted to mention a couple of things that we’ve done relative to communication and education within the community to also support economic recovery.
39:30
So far, what we’ve done to address the capital needs of the business community has really been preparing ourselves for the next phase for businesses to be able to reopen and start to look at how they recover from this economically. And so we’ve done a number of surveys to help identify what the capital needs are and other needs of business community are relative to the situation that we find ourselves in today. As you know, the city is assessing no penalties. Interest your tax filings that are not paid, but does encourage businesses continue to file their taxes and those who are a holder counties allowing for delay of property tax payments until April 20. Without delinquent fee, or was until April 20. And the cheaper and DDA have really taken the lead in advocating for possible options for additional concessions on future property tax payments as well. All of our organizations are serving as a gateway to federal funding programs to the FDA and the cares act as well as possible and helping local businesses to connect to those resources that are available to them. In fact, the SP EC will be hosting an alternative funding sources webinar at igloo this week. For those businesses that weren’t able to take advantage or weren’t able to benefit from your I alone programs as of yet. We aren’t we did launch in our many maintaining an up to date inventory of all available running great resources on the COVID-19 business resource hub, which can be found@one.one.org slash COVID-19. And there are links to it on all of the partner organizations website as well. So it’s really a consolidated online resource hub for our business community. From a communication perspective, so far, and we’ve been reacting and pushing out information as quickly and as in as timely a manner as possible. As we have it. Going forward. We’re looking to be more strategic and more consultants.
41:40
Just if you can hear us we can’t hear you. Maybe it’s me.
41:50
You hear me now. Anyway,
41:55
you’re back. Yes, we can hear you.
41:57
Could you get my drift?
42:00
So talking about communication, how going forward we’ve taken a subgroup of business response team and really made them responsible for the consolidated communication strategy around economic recovery. So as we need to collect additional information from the business committee or push additional information out to the business community now have a team that’s made up of representatives from each chamber of commerce CDA and the city of Longmont. So all consolidated and coordinated going forward. And then from an education perspective, I really want to recognize especially the SBDC has really been creating on demand content, from an education perspective to inform and educate about everything from the different federal resources that have become available as they have become available to use of remote teleworking technologies. At one watt EDP just recently partnered with Colorado group, real estate brokerage to present session on an online session on tenant landlord Relations at the cheaper of Commerce has hosted a number of town halls with our state and elected state and federal delegations. And so really everybody’s just kind of pursued our where we have the greatest expertise and resource to identify content that we can bring to a table to educate our businesses not only on resources that are available to them, but helping them to adapt to a new normal as we start to understand what that normal is going to look like. That’s just a broad overview of our three areas of focus and a work that’s been done so far. That can get to the next slide will drill down on I think, what’s been top of mind for most, which is the capital piece of that overall strategy. So we have been surveying our businesses to get an understanding of what their needs are the results of this survey summary results of those surveys are also included in the supporting documentation that we provided. And so what we heard from our customers is that not that small grants of 2000 or 2500 would not be appreciated, but that they wouldn’t be that impactful in terms of helping businesses to reopen and potentially recover, recover once they’re able to reopen. And so, we’ve been working with DDA city of Longmont, so you manage office, Harold and Joanie to identify resources that we can bring to the table financial resources that we can you bring to the table to develop and deploy a meaningful grant program specifically focused on recovery and helping businesses to meet their needs and provide them with an infusion of cash to get reopened and up and running and ramp back up as quickly as possible once there’s opportunity to do so. And so, through financial resources provided by the city of long lines and downtown Development Authority, authority Are payments to make available grants that will provide that infusion of cash to help qualifying businesses reopen. We’re currently in conversations with a one month Community Foundation about administering that grant program. Obviously, that’s where their expertise are those details in terms of what that administrative relationship will look like, have yet to be finalized. But Eric has been very helpful and resourceful and trying to figure that out. And we expect that to be finalized within a matter of days or days. With this economic resilience grant program, qualifying businesses will be able to apply for a grant of up to $10,000 with proceeds being able to use for any legitimate business expense in accordance with state and federal law, including but not limited to rent, payroll inventory, meeting the public health and safety requirements. So buying Plexiglas and, and other things that will be required for them to get up and running under the restrictions as well as other operating expenses. We’re looking to financially support through this program. Not A home based businesses with a physical address within the city of Longmont that are preferably locally owned and operated and have been in operation since at least January of 2020.
46:11
They would have to have an active city of one month sales tax license would be in good standing with any city permits licenses, fees or taxes. As of March 120 20, I will mention in good standing because the there is a or the city is working with individuals on paying their sales needs tech license. So as long as they’ve been in that situation as long as they’ve been patient with the city, and the city considers them to be in good standing, whatever that looks like under the unique circumstances that we’re in today. And we’re really focused on supporting small businesses. Truly small businesses that are employing 50 FTP or fewer full tenants, employees or fewer, and have in some way been impacted by this crisis whether that’s temporary closure or dramatic reduction in operation loss of revenue due to public health orders related to the COVID-19 public health crisis.
47:07
Go to the next slide.
47:11
Where’s what are the funding sources for this program? We are redirecting. Look at my face. We are redirecting the $60,000 in grant funds that he typically administered for the city. They had been directed towards the innovate one one startup grant program. We’re redirecting those to find this resilience grant program, as well as your commitment to support a program with $30,000 from council contingency. The DDA is also pitching in at least $60,000. From their development incentives, incentive funds specifically available to downtown businesses can really has said that they are looking at potentially being able to contribute more to the fun but they will commit at least $1,000 to This one.
48:01
And the final piece that has funding
48:03
is going to be in the form of private contributions. So we will be fundraising to bolster leverage those public dollars to really identify private sector dollars that can support a grant fund and hopefully at least match the amount of public dollars that are going into the program. Part of how we’re going to do that is we will be designating this fun as an enterprise contribution project, which gives us the opportunity to offer a 25% discount, discount, sorry, tax credit, income tax credit to anyone who is contributing to that fun from the private sector, whether that be an individual or a business. And so we’re seeking to raise like I said, at least a match to those public dollars that are included. So that would really give us at least $300,000 in in that fund if we’re able to successfully do that. Again, we are really focused on helping businesses to reopen and recover. And so in terms of an actual launch date for the economic resilience program, we’re really waiting to hopefully within the next few days, get some additional guidance, or better understand the guidance from the governor’s office around when different types of businesses will be able to reopen. So we can start to make this available when it’s going to be most impactful for those businesses that are reopening and restarting our economy.
49:29
Go to the next slide.
49:34
I’m going to actually turn it over to Joanie now to talk about some of the other programs that we’re working on relative to the capital portion of our strategy for resilience and recovery.
49:45
Thanks, Jessica.
49:46
So as we mentioned, we did a series of surveys at the very beginning of the stay at home order and what we’ve looked at doing next is we’ve actually taken all of the contact information from the cities And use database and combines that with all of the databases and resources from the partner team and are going to send out a comprehensive needs assessment to all of those businesses, our vrt communications team will put together strategies as well as ways for businesses to opt in or out of those continued emails and assessments. But what we’re really trying to do is understand what the magnitude of the economic and financial needs are in our community right now. And then how do we look at not just this grant program, but how do we direct other recovery funds that might be coming from federal financial resources down the road, that are either sitting in the cares act and be looked up by our OEM team or additional funds that may come out of the Federal next federal federal funding package. We’ve also talked about our CDBG funds and the 2020 funds, potentially being repurposed for both individualized assistance and economic assistance. And I think Kathy will talk to you a little bit after this about what that’s looking like. We also received an additional allocation of CDBG dollars out of the cares act. So Kathy is doing some figures of how that money will be split out between individual assistance, economic assistance, as well as the COVID Recovery Center in Boulder. And then also there are additional resources that the DDA has, they’ve already applied and received a $10,000 grant from color Colorado creative industries. They’re looking at putting, as Jessica noted another $10,000 in funds out and then they’ll also be looking at another $200,000 in their 2020 budget that could go towards another program for him perhaps rent relief. And Kimberly is I believe, watching this evening, and if we have further questions for her, we can try to get her into answer some of those Or perhaps we can follow up with counsel specifically on DDA programs.
52:06
And Joanie. This is just
52:08
obviously this is just getting used to this. And I did just get a text from Kimberly, that she wanted me to clarify that at the additional funds, the other DDA funding for economic relief is going before their board for a vote tomorrow. So it hasn’t been approved yet. What they’re looking at in terms of putting additional resources in these efforts,
52:31
thanks for that correction.
52:33
And with that, I think that is the overview that Jessica and I had for this evening, we would be happy to answer questions or follow up and also would direct you to the additional detail and welcome any questions, emails that you might have beyond the CV into either of us.
52:51
I’ve got I don’t see any. I don’t see any. But I’ve got a question and that is of those hundred and 50,000 maybe 300,000 and it’s up to 10,000 each for each small business. Do we have any I mean that obviously 3000 divided by 10,000 leaves us with 30 businesses, but it’s up to do we do we do have a goal and how many small businesses we’d like to reach? How many we’d like to help?
53:21
Is it? what’s the what’s the criteria for getting the 10,000?
53:26
That’s a tough one with limited read.
53:29
Okay, that’s a tough one with limited resources, right. We’ve seen other communities that certainly have much deeper pockets, but I don’t think there are enough resources in the world to address the situation we’re in PPP went through $350 million in 10 days, so $4 billion in 10 days. And so we know I mean, it’s, it’s going to be tough. This is, you know, we’re trying to put dollars out there that are going to be as impactful possible. Could we have you know, put together a fund of 300,000 thousand dollars and put out $2,000 grants two or $3,000 grants to 100 businesses we could have but we what we heard from the business community was that would not be impactful. And so by looking at businesses that are that have the potential to reopen, that maybe have a barrier to be able to reopen or ramp back up business, bring back employees by focusing on those business businesses, we think with limited resources and a limited number of businesses that we’re going to be able to support through this program. That’s the best investment for taxpayer dollars with the highest potential long term return. And that’s one of the things that we’ll be looking at is, you know, initially, what is the reopen, ramp up increased revenue, bring back employee strategy for that company as part of our decision making process for them receiving a grant and then there has to be able to track that information over time. But I mean, it’s Tough we could, you know, I mean,
55:02
we could do
55:05
hyper micro grants or loans to hundreds of businesses. But what we understand from them is that’s not going to be impactful. That’s not going to get them to reopening hiring employees back up, ramping back up, getting the inventory and supply chain that they need to get this across
55:26
again. So then next, what can I
55:29
can I jump in on that one, too? So I think there’s two things to that one, obviously. We’ve talked about with counsel and Kathy will talk about this is the potential injective CDBG dollars in this total amount. So that’s an that’s another number that will come into play. Based on conversations that we have with you all. The thing that I did want to focus on on this too, is really this unmet needs analysis that we’re going to go through with these businesses. That’s incredibly important. As you start seeing, and for those of you that were here during the flood, you may remember we did an unmet needs assessment for the entire community. Information is going to be incredibly important because as this continues to evolve over time, and other sub funding sources become available, the more that we’re able to articulate what we’re really seeing within our community, the more that’s going to help us when other possibilities start developing in the future. So those are two components that are pretty important. A lot of cities just to be frank, a lot of cities have put money out there. We were really trying to take a bit data based approach in terms of what businesses needed, as we were valuating. This
56:47
and then last but not least one of the criteria, so I’m assuming based on actually I won’t even assume you said that the business businesses to apply and to be in compliance with the city sales and use tax permit. So what does that mean that we’re only going to be working with retail establishments and not service providers?
57:06
all businesses in the city of one line are required to have a sales tax license. But if they generate sales needs tax filer or generate sales use tax or not.
57:16
Suppose asking it doesn’t they don’t need to necessarily be paying sales and use tax in order to Alright,
57:22
other point I wanted to make
57:23
very clear is, you don’t have to be a member of LDP DDA Chamber of Commerce or any of these. This is community wide that we’re really looking at. And that’s something we’ve been very focused on
57:36
DDA dollars have to stay in the DDA. But outside of that, it’s citywide. And so what we’re really looking at because there’s that match of dollars for DDA, that we’ll be able to direct those dollars to the DDA, which would give us the opportunity to direct even more dollars than we would otherwise have outside of the DDA as well, so creating more equity program.
58:03
Awesome. That’s that’s really cool.
58:04
Because I’ve been on social media we’ve been asked constantly about, well, what are we
58:12
gonna do? So this is a great response. Thank you. Awesome.
58:16
One other thing I’ll just add, I’ll start to plug the fundraising for the private dollars or the philanthropic dollars into this one is there’s 90,000 people in his community, you know, everybody gives $10 and that becomes a lot more impactful than
58:32
a handful of
58:33
businesses or individuals giving a couple thousand dollars a piece.
58:40
Anybody else?
58:42
Harold, anything else?
58:46
No, we will go to Kathy and Karen for the individual assistance piece that will touch on some business.
58:55
I think Councilmember Dr. Waters
58:59
just died. Jessica’s last point,
59:02
she may have mentioned it, and I just missed it. If somebody had a question, Jessica, just to follow up, wanted to pony up $10 or you know, some amount of money? Who do they write a check to? And is it going to be the foundation, the Community Foundation? Where would they? Where would they make the donation? And how would they make the donation that’s most efficient for your for you or for those managing and fun?
59:27
Tomorrow is when we get together and really start to dig into those details, what the application looks like, finalize an administrative agreement with hopefully with affinity foundation. We it’s our goal to have to partner with the community foundation on this, they do this and they do this well. And so I don’t have the answer to that. But it likely will be the community foundation will be coming back to you with the final details and all of that information and marketing and communication strategies so that you can hopefully support that when we have that and hope and that will be Soon because we’re trying to get this up and running as businesses start to have the opportunity to real
1:00:08
long winded way of saying I don’t know.
1:00:12
All right, Harold athlete.
1:00:16
I’m Kathy Karen. Next.
1:00:21
Kathy, you’re going first.
1:00:24
Okay, I was hoping it was going to be first but
1:00:29
so Karen and I have been attending a lot of the different county focused meetings with city of Boulder some of the other communities to do Longmont and Boulder County folks regarding individual and household assistance, really looking at gaps and needs in those areas. And what we have found, I think, today is that the county has access to a lot a number of resources that are coming into immediately to help people with that individual assistance, things such as emergency Tanna funding that can be brought into cover any family with children that has an income of less than 50% of the area median income, housing stabilization funds and a number of other different resources. The other thing we found is our Family Resource Centers in the various communities have been doing a great job of raising funding and distributing that money quickly. So we have really out and then housing counseling and mediations both with the communities as well as the Boulder County housing counseling program that the city of Longmont uses CDBG funds to fund has really been stepping up and helping negotiate concessions with between tenants and landlords and mediating where needed and then also working with foreclosure prevention. And forbearances for folks with mortgages. So we’ve had been taking all of this into consideration and trying to figure out where the gaps and the needs that are going to be popping up, either here pretty soon or as we look further into the, into the future and trying to be strategic with where we place our community development block grant funds, as Joanie indicated, we are looking at repurposing some of our 2020 funding, which we’ll be bringing back to you on mate Well, hopefully, as well as the additional funding that we’re receiving from HUD and how to allocate that and even today, we got a new area that popped up, were a gap in need that we need to take a look at. So we’re trying to pull all this together really quickly, and have it ready to bring forward to you with our best recommendations. On May 12,
1:03:02
Karen, what else might you want to add?
1:03:09
Oh, good evening, mayor and council, Karen Ronnie here with services. So it’s Kathy mentioned, since mid March, we have been involved in daily conversations with the government funders, the Community Foundation, mile high United Way
1:03:29
to really talk about all the resources that we have available, how are we going to leverage the resources to really make the greatest difference to individuals who are struggling in in our community? twice weekly, we hold a community with our community partners conference call. And that’s where we’re bringing in all of the different providers and they’re talking about what are they doing? So so we hear from our health clinics vary from child care. This afternoon, we had a conversation with the Sacred Valley School District and boulder Valley School District. And so they talked about what they’re doing. But they’re also fails, we’ll talk about what some of the needs are of the students that and their and their families. And so that information really helps us as Kathy mentioned, to identify where do we have the greatest needs and what are the best reports we have available to apply to those, those. So in terms of what, what is happening locally, so fourth city block funding our human service agency funding. We don’t necessarily have additional money to allocate but we are doing is that we’re working with the nonprofit agencies so if they are wanting to repurpose their money for a different service than what they receive a grant for. We are entering Getting that we have reached out to every agency that we fund. And some of those agencies have requested an early release of those dollars. So rather than a quarterly payment, we might release two quarters. One Agency asked to have their entire year released and sound we’re really trying to be flexible with what they need to be able to provide the service that they are, that meet the demands that they are. Now, our llama Community Foundation has been a good partner they have raised over $100,000 and turn that around pretty quickly to agencies, that community foundation of Boulder County has raised over $1.2 million. And they’re using that same nice data that Kathy and I have access to, to help roll that money back out into the community.
1:06:00
There’s a state COVID relief Relief Fund for which Boulder County agencies can apply. The last figure I had is that they raised over $10 million to support nonprofit agencies that are serving their communities and and they are allocating $25,000 grants to those agencies and several Boulder County agencies did get in the queue for the first funding round.
1:06:29
So yeah, so just a couple of things. One thing Pappy did mention is that we are trying to reinforce anytime that we can get people that are may not even realize that they’re eligible for some of the Care Act assistance and resources. If that’s really we’re trying to encourage folks to access those services first at over $2 billion that has come into Boulder County. address some of the things that Kathy talked about. So not only the systems but health care with Medicaid and child health programs, additional rental assistance and Employment Assistance. So we’re really encouraging community members maybe have never had to apply for assistance before to really go after those dollars that are available to the Care Act, because those those dollars are going to make a huge difference in people’s lives, probably much more so than what we’re able to do locally. And just to put in a plug is that for folks that need health care that might apply for Medicaid and they haven’t been able to find a provider that that will take Medicaid. Just want to let you know that the luud Health Center here in Longmont, as well as clinica that serves the recipe or the county are they have capacity they need funding. And so they certainly can accept the Medicaid clients who again who maybe haven’t had access to health care through Medicaid before. The other, just the last thing that I will indicate is that there is on the Boulder County, Boulder county.gov website, they have that a great resource for those affected by COVID-19. They have rolled out what they call their housing helpline, the special number be 034411206. And folks can call that they have to they leave a voice message that they get a return call back.
1:08:46
Right away or at least within 24 hours. There are two people on a full time basis that are staffing that and they really are a match people who call in to that number With the most appropriate resource that they would be eligible for. So they’re kind of triage specialists, but ultimately, it’s to help them get the kind of resources that they need. Both of staff people who are
1:09:14
staffing that mine are bilingual. And again, they try to rank people who call to all benefits that they would be eligible for. So
1:09:28
I think that’s really the high level overview that we wanted to provide. Having a team of folks throughout the county, sometimes we have 20, upwards of 90 people on a call. But we’re all working together. We’re all trying to leverage the resources. Let people know about new resources that are available that maybe we hadn’t known about in the past, to really, really try to provide the kind of release that, that folks need to know, we won’t be able to meet every week, we really tried to maximize the resources that are out there. And so happy and I would be glad to answer any questions you might have.
1:10:17
I should tell some effect.
1:10:22
me badly. Karen, thank you for that report. I was wondering if you could let people know where they can donate money, per the list that Carmen came up with and you email to me and just know who who is going to manage those funds? Um, you mentioned the our center you mentioned Well, I’ll let you
1:10:50
because, um, I thank you, Councilmember pack. And you know, one of the other things that I think it’s important to mention is that we are working very closely with our So brokers throughout the throughout Longmont and over time community, because equity and access to resources and services is really important that we have we paid attention to and so so again, the the llama Community Foundation is is accepting donations the Community Foundation of Boulder County is accepting donations. And we’ll make sure we’ll put this on the website. I think Councilmember Peck to your point. There’s also a foundation called philanthropy. That is is also making, it’s also doing some basically at requesting donations really to help families that might not be eligible for some other kinds of governmental funding. So, again, they are all working together to try to raise funds for folks that particularly that might not be led For some of the other systems that is that is available there. And we are, we are doing our best to try to fund or instead of trying to stand up a new service or something like that we’re really trying to funnel dollars into existing service providers that are already they have the system set up and they already do this. This work will just ask them to do it on a much larger scale than they’ve ever seen before ever. So we will get that information on the website, Councilmember Peck, let people know where to go to.
1:12:43
Sorry, go ahead, john. Sorry, I didn’t
1:12:44
mean to interrupt. That’s okay. Um, so just for a little bit of clarification, because my initial interest was keeping people in their homes who were having difficulties. Either either negotiating With their landlords owners, property managers, whatever, and and also looking at the property managers side of it as well, they need that rent to pay their mortgages with. So, and this is what Susan Spaulding does very well is it and I was wondering, is there what is the method or that part of this effort to request the funding to help renters is that is that there from the from all of these? And is there a point of contact? I think that’s a great, that’s a great point. So counselor pegs, I would say the assessors if folks are looking for one place to go.
1:13:46
I think that would be the housing helpline. And, and again, that is 303-441-1206. I do believe we have that on the city’s website. We do have a link to that because what What’s the, what’s the housing specialist will do is they’ll they’ll, they’ll start with, you know, what can we do to help you know self resolve? So for example, they would link a caller to Susan Spaulding who runs the the mediation program for the city’s long line and and get it because they might have, they might determine that hey, maybe the best course of action here would be for Susan or some of our other volunteer mediators to work with the landlords and the tenants to try to work out work out a solution. So so so they kind of have a triage funnel they call it and really trying to work through how might a household be able to resolve a situation in the nation and and what folks really are going to need in the past to do that. And city of Boulder has a mediation program. The Bahama has a mediation plan. program and through this effort, llama is taking on more communities, as well as the city of Boulder, since not every community is is blessed with that resource that we have in my mind and Boulder. So between those two programs, we’re covering the entire county for that mediation server.
1:15:20
Thank you. That was exactly what I wanted to know. Thank you.
1:15:26
All right. Anybody else?
1:15:29
All right, Harold, do you have the character good. Harold, Karen. Dan, a
1:15:34
great hero.
1:15:39
Back to me. I think one of the things I wanted to before we transition to Jeff real quick is one of the things I wanted to say is, you know, this has really been an interesting situation for us because if you all remember, again, I can’t make analogies to the flood when the flood hit, we were able to go. Here’s what the need is for businesses. And here’s what the need is for homeowners. You could identify it and you could touch it. You could very specifically get into this, I think we’re This is much different is that the need for every individual and every business is different. And it’s really getting in and understanding and having that conversation and getting into the very specific issues and they have to deal with. And so we have a lot of folks doing really great work getting there. At this point, I will turn it over to Jeff. So as you all know, Jeff, Jeff is director of Boulder County Public Health, I want to say as he comes online and unmute and puts his video on, I’m just been great in terms of returning my phone calls. And when I go, Well, what does this mean? What does it need to do? And he’s really been a great partner for the city. And so I just wanted to let you all know that he’s been there when we needed him and in there to answer questions. And so Jeff, Susan’s going to be around in your presentation, so take it away.
1:17:00
All right. Thank you, Harold. Thanks Mayor Bagley council members, I appreciate being invited back. And one of the things that strikes me as I sat here for a little over an hour listening is how fortunate we are to be in Boulder County and how fortunate we are to have municipalities like this that can support our communities in such a drastic and significant time. So I think people are very lucky to be living where they are. And I appreciate all the work that you’re all doing day in and day
1:17:29
out. And if you can queue up the first slide.
1:17:34
And I’m going to be on
1:17:35
this slide for just a minute I want before I switch I want to just talk about a few things that are important to just remember as we move forward and really where I want to focus is on. I’m going to go fairly quickly through some of the data and not belabor it. But I do want to talk about what some of the things are that are going to be important as we move forward. And then I want to talk last about what I know at this point about the change in the order from the Governor when we might expect to see different things and how that might play out. So just I think I want to just take a second, again, to remind people that what we’re looking for as we move forward, especially as we consider loosening up some of these orders, is we want to continue to see decreasing cases, we track cases daily in Boulder County, I’ll show you some of that data. We want to make sure that our hospitals have the ability to handle a surge, and that they don’t have to use prices standards that care. I don’t believe any hospital at this point in Colorado has had to resort to that. Our hospitals certainly have not. We want to be able to test symptomatic people both now and as we move forward. And we want to make sure that we have the staffing to do isolation, quarantine and what you’ve probably heard so much about in the news contact tracing, which is just essentially making sure that when we have somebody who test positive, that we have enough staff to be able to do investigate With all the people who were near that positive person in that they are voluntary quarantining, in monitoring their symptoms, and that helps us assure that as we remove portions of orders and move forward, having those pieces in place helps us assure that we can hold that search down, and then it doesn’t go back up. And then the last thing is just making sure we have a good surveillance and monitoring system so we can evaluate changes as they occur with these changes in orders. And what we’re seeing right now is hospitalizations, I’ll tell you what, we’re going to switch to the slides. But I want to just maybe give you a few broad overviews. We are definitely seeing hospitalizations across the Front Range metro area, continuing to slow and stable so the orders absolutely are working. We know that we know that they’ve been effective. And I want to thank anybody who’s listening in our community who’s taking this seriously and they’re not going outside unless they have to and as Dan had mentioned earlier, No matter what scenario we’re in as we move forward until we have a vaccine or a treatment, we are going to be in a social distancing strategy. So social distancing is going to continue to be part of our lives for months and months and months in advance until we have a vaccine in place. One of the most important components of social distancing is the wearing of masks. And there’s been research that’s been looked at recently, mass definitely have the ability to reduce the spread of this disease. And when I’m talking about mass, I’m talking about general masking for the public. The governor after we learned that we have a symptomatic spread, which we’ve known for a little while and droplets could potentially travel further than we initially thought. The governor and CDC did the mask recommendation and it is really important that we continue to mask or cover our mouth, our nose and mouth as we move forward into the into the weeks ahead. Because the Those things do stop us from spreading that virus to somebody else. And that’s really important, especially where we can’t maintain that social distancing. So when we’re getting into tighter spaces, it’s harder to maintain six feet between each other, the mask is really an important tool for us. So if everybody could just keep that in mind as we move forward, that’s going to make a huge difference on how things how successful we are. As we move forward, I wanted to call your attention to an area that is a is a challenge for us at this point. And that’s our long term care facilities. When we look at our data, we are seeing slow growth in terms of new cases, but the growth that we are seeing is associated with our long term care facilities. And that’s a worst case scenario. It’s not just for us, it’s for the state. It’s for other states around us, unfortunately, that some of those those infections started weeks ago and once an infection gets into long term care facility or, or a nursing facility, it’s really difficult to control those outbreaks. And we are on the back end of that. And we are seeing some of those things happen right now. So we are doing a lot of work. And it has been for several weeks now, really working closely with those facilities to try to do our best to control the spread of disease in those facilities. And what we’re finding is that many of those facilities, or the spread occurred from asymptomatic people who are not showing symptoms, and it was it’s really important to again, think about that masking requirement as we’re out in the general public. So we want to make sure we continue to focus on that we are the most the most concerning thing. And the reason that we’re paying attention to this is because, in addition to the huge heartache and loss for people whose mothers and fathers This is, we also know that this can become another one of those search points on our hospitals and To see the kind of impacts and fatalities we have in these facilities is heartbreaking. So we want to spend as much time as we can trying to control this. These are our high risk, folks, as everybody knows. So we have been working closely with our hospitals, we stay in contact with them on a weekly basis, we are tracking data associated with them. And we do have a plan in place. So then if the hospitals start to see additional surges associated with long term care facilities, they will support each other. And, and so if one if one hospital has ICU beds that are starting to surge, another hospitals agreed to come in and support them so that there is some capacity in our own communities until our search facilities are getting built across the metro Front Range. And that is towards the end of next week and into the middle of May until those facilities are ready. So now we can shift to to the to the next slide and I’ll click through some of this data fairly quickly.
1:24:07
Next slide if you can. Can you Oh, sorry,
1:24:18
I wasn’t I didn’t see it switch on. Apologize. So this is our we collect data on a daily basis. So this represents our total cases, as well as our new cases. And that bottom line is the one that I told you was important to track, because we’re going to expect that cases grow over time. We want them obviously to eventually plateau. But we want to track that bottom line to see what our new cases look like. And this was case counts as of yesterday, I had to send this presentation out in the evening. So I did not update these as of today. But this represents yesterday’s cake case counts. And you can see that we still have large number of cases in long term care facilities. We’ll talk a little bit more about total case, total case counts in
1:25:03
a second. But next slide.
1:25:07
So this breaks out on the the rate of cases per jurisdiction based on a population of 100,000 people. And what I want to make sure that people remember again, when they’re looking at data like this, our testing is inadequate at this point. And we know it. We there is a statewide group that the governor’s innovation Task Force has put together that’s been working on this. It’s being formed by Metro Public Health Directors and their staff that have formed a task force to feed information into that. So what you’re seeing here is just based on the number of cases that we have identified as positive in each of the cities, but it doesn’t, by any means represent comprehensive testing and all of our communities.
1:25:48
Next slide.
1:25:51
This is just a reminder that this impacts ages across the age spectrum are number one largest number of people People who test positive are in that 20 to 29 year old group, and then secondarily 50 to 59 year olds. And we still though are seeing our highest death rate in the ages above 60. And we know that’s because it does definitely have an effect on on folks who are older and it definitely has an effect on people who have underlying conditions. There is more concerning data that the experts are looking at in terms of potentially longer term impacts associated with even younger people who might get the disease and end up hospitalized because of some of the scarring. That can happen with a long so there’s there’s more to be told on that as we move forward. But the disease definitely is impacting people across
1:26:45
our age groups. Next slide.
1:26:49
What this shows is just the distribution of where the cases have come from and what you would expect early on before the orders were in place. Travel was a big piece of How cases got to Colorado and how cases got to Boulder County. And that has shifted over time. The orange represents community transition. So community transition went up and it is now peaked and is starting to decline in the blue bars represent cases that are we there to spread based on close contacts. So this would represent where you would see the long term care facility cases as an example. So we can see that the community spread has gone down and more of the individual individual case spread is happening. Next slide.
1:27:35
This is our data on on
1:27:38
our race and ethnicity and what we’re seeing is not different than what we’re seeing at the state level and what we have known to be the truth for a while. We know that we have impacts in our in some of our some of our populations that are marginalized and it is this disease is not discriminating against anybody. else that we see in the normal data that we look at. So it’s unfortunate as an example that we see 28% of our cases almost, of COVID in in 13% of our population. We know that that is a disparity that needs to be righted. What we see when we look at some of this data is that a lot of these folks are on the frontline. They’re not people who can work from home. And they’re out there every single day. And so we’ve been working with the state health department. We’ve been working with our our folks here in Boulder County, that have been working with these populations to really look at how do we actually make changes in what we’re seeing in these populations. As we move forward? What kind of policies do we need to be thinking about? It’s again, another area where we know we’re going to have to focus and think about what shifts Do we need to make in order to write some of these equities that we’re seeing.
1:28:52
Next slide.
1:28:55
This is the three day average growth in number of Boulder County residents with confirmed Probably COVID-19 cases. And you can see that there’s a general downward trend. That’s really what I wanted to illustrate here. And what we know is that if we remove long term care facility cases, which in the last two weeks have really been the primary sources of new cases, that this graph would even decline more quickly. So again, from a community spread standpoint, those orders are working. We are seeing improvement in Boulder County. And we really need to focus now on making sure that our long term care facilities are supported in the way that they need to be in order to reduce spread their
1:29:33
next slide.
1:29:36
I won’t spend too much time here just to say that on the bottom of this graph in red is the Boulder County rate. So our rate is lower than or are almost exactly the same as one other candidate, but we are lower than counties. So what we’re doing here is working.
1:29:52
Next slide.
1:29:55
This is the hospitalization data that I mentioned. So this is not this has it? delayed response because of the reporting system. So this doesn’t have current number of cases. But what’s important to pick up here is to see that there’s an initial surge. And then there’s a slowing of cases that are being hospitalized. And we meet with our hospitals week by week. So we can treat this and what we’re hearing from them is that in fact, this is what they’re seeing as well. So we know that this graph graph is representative of what we’re actually hearing on the ground. next graph. This is just our death rate, again, illustrates that in any f obviously is too much. But we have one of the lowest death rates in the metro County area and it represents some of the things that you saw from those earlier graphs. Again, unfortunately, what we see is the majority of these deaths are associated with long term care facilities. And it is a sad situation for sure. Next slide, please. This is syndromic surveillance, which is just the data that we get from our Hospitals it’s real time data. And I haven’t updated the graph, I’m sorry. But we get data day to day on this. And what it does is it allows us to look at another indicator that demonstrates COVID-19 like symptoms that are getting reported at the hospital on a day by day basis. And we’ve continued to see this decline. That’s again, just another indicator that we’re doing well here in Boulder County. And the things that we’re dealing people are following and it’s making a difference.
1:31:28
Next slide.
1:31:31
This is just an example of the the data dashboard that we track so that we track multiple hospital information across all of our hospitals. And then we have a dashboard that indicates so we can see pretty quickly where we are with some of these things. But it’s I know you can’t read these, these letters, but it’s med surg, medical and surge bed capacity. It’s our ICU bed capacity. It’s the number of events that are currently in use in Boulder County, things like that, as well as P PE for hospitals that we can track on on a daily and weekly basis, some of this data is reported daily, some of this data is reported weekly. It’s again, just another indicator of the things that we’re looking at closely to make sure that we’re not getting to a point where we’re having a problem with surge, relative to our hospitals. Next slide. So some of the next steps and then I’m going to move right into what the difference between where we are now and what it looks like with a governor’s change in orders. And one of the things that I think is important to point out is you heard me talk about those key components that need to be in place as we move forward. And those key components include testing and workforce to to do containment. We are working hard on both of those things. The one challenge that we have right now at a statewide level that I’m sure you’re all have been hearing about and are aware of, is testing. And we know that we don’t have the number of tests available in order to meet all the tests. Testing needs across the state of Colorado. And we especially know that’s true of as we move forward with releasing portions of orders to be able to have the amount of testing that’s needed to test everybody that we would need to. We’re just not there yet. So the governor’s Task Force presented to us a couple days ago, the biggest issues associated with that are supplies supplies, specifically associated with swabs and some reagents. And there the governor’s Task Force is working hard. They’re looking at how can they work with other businesses in the state to find other supplies people are even considering for 3d printing kind of thing that I bet you’ve heard about on the news as well. So there’s a lot of work being done around bringing more testing into the state. And we’ll just have to keep tracking that and see how we’re doing as we move forward. And then that that really does push forward the importance of the social distancing and the masking. So whether we’re successful and how this moves forward is going to is going to depend so much on how we all individually take responsibility for these two things. Because we don’t we all know we don’t have enough staff to make sure that every single place is following social distancing that as people are outside and more that they’re maintaining the the six foot Diskin distance or they’re wearing masks, but we know it’s going to be critically important. So what we don’t want to do is move into opening up more businesses or, or loosening the orders, and then have people ignore these things or think it’s not important because what will happen is we’ll see resurgence is as has happened in other countries and other states. So we really want to take it seriously. Make sure that we are doing everything that we can to take personal responsibility for the social distancing and for the masking because those two things will be part of our future as as again, Dan mentioned, until we really have a vaccine or a treatment Place. We’re going to talk
1:35:02
about development of social distancing guy guidelines in a second when we get into the governor’s order. And the other thing that we are doing, knowing that we don’t have quite the testing that we’re going to need as we start to move forward is we’re developing an enhanced surveillance system here in Boulder County. And we’re also working with the surveillance grip at the state to look at the same kind of measures. There is some self reporting that’s been launched at the statewide level, where we can actually people have the ability to to report their symptoms online, and they get linked up to a testing facility and would have some electronic follow up as well as some in person follow up. We want to be able to use that that reporting system to be able to find out if we’re starting to see more cases, pop up or more symptoms pop up that way in Boulder County. We also are working with our Office of Emergency Management and working within our 911 system. We can look at some of the data that’s in there and we have a way to be able to collect that that will give us an indication if we start to see things. We are working with our long term care facilities to collect information. We’ve been reaching out to our hospitals to get data before it’s just reported as a hospitalization. And there’s several other components that we are working on, as well, as on the administrators call today. One of the things that came up was even using our, our police departments who Thanks so much to every single one of them, because they are, they are the boots on the ground or the eyes on the street. And they can help us tell if some of these social distancing pieces that are working or not. So some of those kinds of things are the kinds of things that we focused on here in Boulder County to assure that we’re doing everything that we can to make sure we’re successful as we move into some of these next phases. Next slide. So the the next three slides here are going to be the difference between where we are now and the difference between where we’re moving to after the governor’s order expires. In the the box on the left hand side right here that says stay at home is where we are now. What we know is that we are in a 75 to 80% social distancing scenario now. So what that means is that the orders that we’ve had in place have achieved a 75 to 80% control on the spread of the disease, based on what we’ve had in place. And with the governor’s order and change, he is moving to the 60 to 65%, which is safer at home. So after April 26, we move from stay at home to safer at home. And then the differences are what you’re going to see in these two boxes. So stay at home now. The first one that you see is, is different is when we get down to retail at the bottom. And you see it’s only open to critical businesses right now. And after seyfert homecoming comes into play. It’s open to to more businesses than critical with curbside delivery and phased in public opening was strict precautions What I can tell you is that we don’t know, anywhere it says with strict precautions or guidelines in here. The state has told us that they will take a lead to help us make sure we’re developing statewide guidance that applies to everybody across the state. We have not seen that guidance yet. We understand that there will be work this week and into the weekend on this, but we have not seen what any of these things look like at this point. And that’s been probably one of the biggest questions on all of your minds. And it’s one of the biggest questions on all the Public Health Directors minds as well. We have done some of our own work and and provided that to the state so that they have some things to start from but we are still awaiting that guidance.
1:38:41
Next slide.
1:38:44
The next thing that we see as the major differences in offices, I heard reference to this already earlier in the presentation tonight, but we are going from a place where offices are currently closed to a 50% open and what I want to what I want to emphasize here is that And I can tell you we’re doing this in Boulder County, we really look closely at who actually needs to be providing direct services and where that needs to happen. How do we assure through the structuring of how we set that up the wearing of masks that we can assure that we’re maintaining that distance or protecting each other from spreading the disease. So telecommuting will be maximized. Again, I think, as we move forward into these next phases, that this is going to be really important, we’re going to have to continue to think about the maximum ways that we can social distance, it’s going to be really important until we get to a place again, where we have a vaccine. So some of these things will stay with us. And we’ll need to be keep thinking about those for months to come. The next one is elective medical services. And we know that that people have held off on electric medical services, and there is a need. I’ve heard this from our hospitals, that people really do need to get in for elective services and unfortunately, the other thing I’m hearing from us Hospitals as well as that, that people haven’t come in for critical care when they actually needed critical care. And we’ve seen some impacts in our community associated with that. So even for this next week, if somebody needs critical care, they definitely should go to the hospital. And hospitals have their, their places where they are paying maximum attention to controlling the prevention and spread of this disease. So we don’t want people to delay on getting care that they need to they should call the hospital that they’re going to, to let them know that they’re coming or they should talk to their doctor or Urgent Care whoever it is, before they go in, but people should see care thing. The next one is restaurants and bars. And that stays pretty consistent. For now, there is a group, although I don’t know exactly when that will happen or what that will look like. But it’s going to start to explore what does it look like to have a phased opening associated with capacity in some of these places. So I’m not sure the timing of that who will Be involved and how it gets how it gets facilitated. But as soon as I know that I’ll make sure that that the administrators group gets that information. And then the last slide. And then this the there’s not a ton of difference here, except for under the personal services. And I know that this means this is a huge, this is huge for these for these businesses who have not been able to function at this point. And I know we’ve got people who are bankrupt associated with this, they haven’t been able to continue to make a living. It’s had serious and significant detrimental impacts on all of us, not just from an economic standpoint, but from a personal standpoint, from a mental health standpoint, from a community standpoint, it’s going to have lasting scars on all of us for some time to come. So I know that this is something that people are looking very much forward to figuring out how to deal with and again, what we’ll what we expect to see from the state is some more guidance around how does that actually happen? As we move into these next weeks, and then the last one is real estate and the showings, the showings can start, again a social distancing. But there is a limitation at this point on open houses. So my last closing point is that is that we can make this work if we take those social distancing. And those and the masking seriously, we will be focusing on more messaging around masking and the importance of masking one of the probably the biggest question I continue to get is if I’m exercising, do I really need to be wearing a mask? And the answer to that is yes. And some of the latest research that we’ve seen, actually demonstrates that when you’re when you’re exercising, you’re expelling more of the particle, more of the droplets from your mouth, and that they can spread further, especially if you’re running and that they can travel behind you and impact a person behind you. So we definitely even though it’s it seems counterintuitive to people, it’s important to be wearing masks as well. If we cannot maintain that social distance, so I will continue to be telling you that as we move forward, let’s make this successful together. And let’s focus on that social distancing. And on that masking, and I and I think we can be, and I think we can move forward.
1:43:17
I’ll stop there. That’s a lot. Sorry.
1:43:20
Mayor. Well, Jeff’s taking a break in a breath. I do want to say that the, you know, again, talk about the partnerships, just so council knows, we obviously know we have different facilities with different issues. I have. Jeff knows this. We talked about it earlier, said what do we need on the surveillance side? And how can we be there to help support that effort and the work that he’s doing to fill gaps if they need it from our staff that helps me figure out some issues where we have folks that aren’t able to come into facility so that’s a that’s a big piece of it, I think, on the surveillance side, the you know, the other side Is, Jeff suggestion is, you know, we’re going to be working to encourage more of
1:44:05
that compliance with
1:44:07
masking the community. And then the last thing I want to say is, and I’ve said this before, and we’ll keep saying it is we each have responsibilities. We have responsibilities, discover once and we have responsibilities as individuals. And at the end of the day, what I’m going to say is we really need individuals to be, you know, to wear the mask when they’re coming in, and they can’t manage that social distancing, because it’s up to each and every one of us as an individual in terms of how successful we’re going to be in this in the next month. And so you will see that drumroll really start coming out in the IT group.
1:44:46
All right, thanks. And Jeff, that was that was awesome. You can tell that just thank you so much for all the effort and work that you’ve put in. Over the last couple of months. Harold and staff have nothing To nothing but glowing things to say about you, you really, really, really appreciate you on the county’s efforts. Thank you. Thanks, man.
1:45:08
Anybody have any questions for Jeff?
1:45:12
All right. Well, thank you please keep doing what you’re doing.
1:45:16
council members, I appreciate it.
1:45:20
Anything else? Hey, Jeff. Sorry.
1:45:21
We went longer than we thought.
1:45:24
That’s okay. Appreciate you, man.
1:45:28
All right. With that the Is there anything else from city staff tonight, Harold?
1:45:33
No, I do have one question. And this was something that we emailed you all about. And this is also part of what we’re trying to do in terms of some of the work that we’re doing with storytelling and other things. But I want to ask each and every one of you as council members, when we’re trying to grab this video
1:45:56
for many reasons.
1:45:58
What would you like? The community to know at this point and Mayor, I’ll let you figure out how you want to go through that. But we want to know what you would like
1:46:05
the community to know.
1:46:07
What do you what do you mean on COVID? On what you’re doing on
1:46:11
COVID? What do you want the community to know about COVID? And what we’re going through?
1:46:17
I think, I don’t know if we can we can go through it. But I think that we just want complete and total and utter transparency and sharing of data so that everybody knows exactly what what the threat is what we’re doing to counteract it. Both the health impacts of the virus and the health impacts that come along with the economic challenges we face. And I think there’s a constant presence on our website that shares complete and full disclosure to the extent possible would be would be welcome.
1:46:51
I don’t know about specifics. Anybody else have any specifics that you want shared? Councilmember Christiansen
1:47:01
Well a lot of people have a lot of people on City Council have already done some videos. I haven’t seen them all I saw Tim waters which was very good. I shot one today but I guess what I would like people to understand to know is that this is not some kind of money my opinion this is not a curse from God. This is something that pandemics have happened since the beginning of time, and they will always happen. And we just need to follow the rules because we know what works, we know what doesn’t work. And I would like people to stop using the term lock down which is a prison term and it is means you’re locked in your six by eight cell and you get fed food through a hole in the door. That is not what we’re in. We are in voluntary or you know we are in diminished, social distancing. We can still buy groceries, we can still go to the liquor store. We can still go to the hardware store in order to see and get gasoline and we can walk outside. We can order things online we can get takeout. We are really not in anything like a prison situation. The city is still providing services with roads, water, sewage, electricity, forestry, police fire. We’re still having Susy doggo firing is still teaching. People need to not feel like they are being put upon. We’re all in an uncomfortable situation, but it won’t last for
1:48:50
you hit your mute button. Paulie, you hit your mute button.
1:48:56
I muted myself will sound right
1:49:00
But, you know, this will not last forever. Most people in town have responded with kindness and compassion and understanding. And that really encourages me. It’s a great, you know, where most people in town are really creative and money and dealing with it well, don’t listen to the ones who are not because
1:49:27
they’re never going to be happy.
1:49:39
Thank you, Mayor Bagley.
1:49:40
I’d like to tell everybody because I’ve been talking to a lot of people at all across the political spectrum, and if they support the governor, they’re saying, Oh, this is too soon. We need to we need to really keep our social media. distancing and we need really need to stay at home. And everybody’s going to be out. And if people are worried about their freedom, and then they’re interpreting the change of the end of the governor’s stay at home order as a get out of jail free card, right there, they’re interpreting it as, as, Oh, well, you know, the restrictions have been lifted. What I’d like to do is to urge everyone to look at that last slide that we have from the governor’s office and really understand how very little has changed. This is mostly about putting people back to work, because what it really does is allows the reopening businesses that are not high contact in terms of, of how they interact with the public. That’s going to put a lot of people back to work. But what everybody needs to understand is, yep,
1:51:15
do what you’ve been doing. And look for the places that can be relaxed. But don’t assume they’re relaxed. Just do what you’ve been doing. If you’re, if you’re older, like I am, and know if you’re in and then keep doing what you’re doing. Because for us, nothing changes. And we’re going to get through this if we do that. Pay attention to the specifics as they come out. And only when you see a specific change in the order, and change your behavior, and otherwise,
1:51:55
just be safe everybody.
1:51:57
Please be safe.
1:51:59
Remember, Level feeling.
1:52:04
So, yeah, I think I would just kind of want to echo the same sentiments that I’m hearing so far. I mean, we all have a part to play, we all have a responsibility in being safe, you know, utilizing a mask when we’re out in public. You know, and it’s more about protecting the people around you and out of respect and courtesy, and of public health and the people in your surroundings. That peace, and I mean it really Yes. I was thinking about the slides. As Councilmember Martin had stated, not a lot has changed. I mean, schools are still closed. And a lot you know, all of us teachers, I mean, I’ve been in this spot since 730. This morning, doing lessons with the kids. So, you know, we we’ve had to all make adjustments. And I’m and I’ve had to be really inconvenienced tremendously. We all have a part to play and we all have a responsibility and due diligence to be safe, stay at home and you don’t have to be out. So the sooner we can get out there, um, you know, I want to also keep something popped up on my computer, sorry. Um, you know, I just lost my train of thought. Um, like I said, I’ve been here since
1:53:36
working students.
1:53:40
But yeah, just take care of each other. And be kind to one another. I think that’s the strongest message I want to give. give out to everybody.
1:53:52
Freshwater’s your next job.
1:53:56
Thanks. Thanks, Carol. as well for Asking or inviting opportunity to reflect. Councilmember Christiansen mentioned this video I did post a video in in trying to be trying to articulate the four kind of hours for me to get through this responsibility being the first of those. I don’t want to come back to that he’ll mentioned reliability as well. Because we all need to depend on one another right? That we all get it right, because if one of us doesn’t, everybody suffers. resilience, that no matter how hard harder than how hard it is, to comply, and I know it’s easy. People might look at this and say it’s easy for you. You’re retired. You’re not living with some of the pressures of young kids at home and the economics of this. It’s easy to say we’re all in it together. When it’s when not everybody’s making the same sacrifice but sacrifice is required here. Yeah. The last of the four hours for me was resourcefulness. And that is, we heard we have heard so much tonight from the staff about just how resourceful this community can be, and is in in mobilizing to support those who need it most from our business community. The folks who are housing insecure folks who are food insecure. Go back just for a minute. The concept of responsibility. I wish I could own this definition I can somebody else defined freedom as the will to be responsible for ourselves. Across the country, we are seeing people in the in the in the in the name of freedom, wanting to return to normal activities, and to and to look past or disregard the kind of guidance we’ve had from our own governor, a public health officer and former city manager. And I just want to say myself, I think it’s truthful For all of us, that we need to exercise our freedoms, to the will to be responsible to one another. Because we, there’s no doubt that we’re in it together. If one of us is sick, we’re all at risk of being sick. And it’s gonna require support. And it’s going to require the kind of personal discipline and the kind of will to exercise the freedom to maintain the responsibility and the obligations that we have to those designs and the public health officer. So I appreciate the opportunity. I hope we get a chance to keep talking about what we need from one another to get from where we are to the other side of this endemic. Thanks.
1:56:48
Thank you, Mary Bagley. Um, I just want to thank the residents who have reached out to me with their concerns with their questions. To let the public know that we are your conduit, you you elected us, if you have questions, if you have issues, if we don’t know the answer, we can at least find it out for you. So, for that, I, I feel that we are I’m honored to be able to be in that position to help people and and I want to put out the message again that you can contact your elected officials to help you get through some of this. I know that the paperwork going through the website, it can be overwhelming. It can really be overwhelming for people who are under stress or anxiety, but we can help you work through that. I also want to remind you that just because we are on city council that we cannot solve this problem. It is not up to us to figure out how How to get through all of this alone. And we need your help. And I thank everyone who is out there helping and doing what is responsible. We’re very, very fortunate to live in this community. We all have our differences. We all have our ideologies, our philosophies, but when it comes down to it, we have to work together. And I think we’re doing a great job. So keep it up. And don’t be afraid to reach out to your council people. We can find the answers for you or help work through the issues. Thank you very much.
1:58:41
Great, thanks. I guess I’d like to
1:58:43
take a human moment for a second the the I was scared to
1:58:48
death to be put in my home.
1:58:50
So you know, I’m totally divorced. I live with a dog. And I suffer from depression. I take nobody I’ve never I think you’ve ever told You guys, but I take Lexapro, I’ve suffered from depression since about 2006. And, and part of my frustration in this whole process, and it continues to get worse as the political divide is being showcased full spectrum on this issue. the far left says stay in your homes forever the far right says, you know, let’s just leave now. And, and I look at it and all I’m thinking is it is hard. It’s hard. isolation. The loneliness is tough. And I and so anybody out there who
1:59:43
kind of shares the shares the same anxieties?
1:59:48
A lot of the count, a lot of my fellow council members have stated that Yeah, they’re there, right. The governor’s order has changed a little bit, but we still have to stay in our homes. And I don’t know, there will be a lot of debate into the future about why we have been lucky enough to see least locally. Not a an overflow in ICU beds and hospital stays. It doesn’t really matter other than we took precautions. Harold the staff, county state the governor regardless of what was necessary, not they took action and accomplished what they wanted to accomplish. Our hospitals are not overflowing with our parents, grandparents, etc. Part of my frustration, I was one of the lucky ones my small business you know, I got a PPP long, you know, most everybody else did not. Thank you. I want to put a shout out to independent bank or independent financial formerly guarantee. They had 45 applicants here locally, all the four were approved. Those four that were not approved was a result of the small businesses dragging their feet. I can’t say the same for my colleagues who went through some of the larger banks. And and that just added additional stress to small business owners, at least in my situation, even those who don’t take depression meds, who are just worried not about themselves, but about their about their employees. And there’s just a lot of people all the concerns that I’m hearing about freedoms, about you know, loss of income about, you know, the potential of spreading the disease. It is just a crappy situation to be in. And I don’t care if you pick the left or you pick the right it’s just all bad right now. And I’m not saying that because oh my gosh, we need to panic or oh my gosh, this sucks take action. It’s just we are in one way or another. There is someone in this community just know your mayor is dealing with a lot of same issue as you are. And we need to buckle down, it’s not going to last forever. And the next step is opening up our businesses getting people back to work. And but we do need to be careful. And so I ask everybody just to do what the governor says, and we’ll get through this, and in the end will be stronger for it. And so that might be in a week might be in 12 months. But regardless, just hang in there and, and it will end. So that’s my comment. So all right. Anybody else before we go on to council comments, but we’ve all had some comments. Oh, there he is. Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez.
2:02:39
Yes.
2:02:42
Thank you very badly. Just a thank you to all my fellow colleagues here on Council for keeping calm and putting out good information to folks I think that’s very important in this day and age and thank you very much for the staff are also keeping us informed on a daily basis on everything that the city is Do it. You know, I think the city with the strapped resources to the food has is providing great resources for our businesses and for folks out there in the community. I think as we all know, there’s a lot of anxiety and fear and frustration in the community on both sides, as Ryan touched upon. And I think that, you know, exposes some frayed nerves. And I just want to urge people to be very patient with each other, as we’re out and about in public, you know, the limited time we are out there, because I don’t think anybody’s really used to social distancing, or wearing masks. And sometimes you could be at the grocery store and somebody gets a bit closer to you, then you might like, let’s be patient, knowing that they probably aren’t doing this with ill intent, per se, but that it’s just a you know, slip of the mind maybe a little bit because, again, we’re just not used to living in this manner. So be patient with people that are out there as well as the people that are working out there. You know, our grocery store workers and our clerks are in All the folks that you see out and about, I am lucky enough that I, my business is still working, but I still have to be out there in the public. And it’s it’s very scary to people, you know, having to go into their homes, and scary for me, it’s scary for them. And it’s just all about remaining calm, being patient and trying to work through this the best we can. So, you know, let’s just be good neighbors to each other because this is a community. And we’ll only get through it if we can really kind of rely on each other to, to pull through. So that’s all I got.
2:04:34
Amen. All right. Anybody else?
2:04:37
Does anybody have additional counsel comments at all on any other topic? Although I can’t imagine, yes. Oh, there go. Joe. Kazmir
2:04:44
Peck. You win.
2:04:49
Win. So actually, maybe Actually, this is a question for you. Um, I had heard anecdotally, the natural marriage coalition has set up a fund to help small businesses. And I don’t have any way to see if that is a true statement if that actually happened,
2:05:16
that they have donors that are contributing to this fund. And if that is true, is that available to Longmont small businesses?
2:05:26
Let me check I have not heard anything. But
2:05:28
then again,
2:05:29
you’re gonna get them they did call yesterday or two days ago and said that for some reason the emails are getting locked up through the city email. So my the recent one so Harold, I’ll talk tomorrow with with the tech folks and figure that out a good question. I’ll get back to you.
2:05:46
Great, thank you very much, because I’m missing them to them because I didn’t get it either.
2:05:52
A tough customer waters.
2:05:58
The Senate passed code package number three today. Does anybody know? It’s my understanding there was a fair amount of money multiple, therefore state and municipal revenues to offset shortages.
2:06:13
I haven’t seen that at least what they’re putting out right now is more related to business. And so the for what I’m reading it, the Senate came to agreement, order an $84 billion bill would inject the 320 billion into the PPP program. 60 billion would be set aside for community based lenders, smaller breaks and credit unions to assist smaller businesses. And then I also know that there’s some funding in it for hospitals. That’s sort of a high level view that I’ve received thus far.
2:06:51
I was for some reason I know that was part of the negotiation. I thought it had good been squeezed in apparently not so much. They’re just covering right now the big pieces of it. Nice.
2:07:06
House, remember goggle fairing.
2:07:08
So then this new this bill that passed, would it then allow for credit unions? So before we had smaller, you know, the banks didn’t allow credit unions, is that correct? And so this one would
2:07:30
be credit union.
2:07:32
It looks like of the 320,000,000,060 billion is going to be set aside for that group. Okay, we’ve got staff that will be digesting this in detail once it starts coming out.
2:07:45
Okay, and
2:07:48
Okay. And then, yeah, several, I think even the llama public media had asked about video. I’m working on it. I’ll get it to you. I promise.
2:08:01
way. All right, anybody else?
2:08:06
Martin, I see your eyes. I see you thinking anything you want to say?
2:08:15
No comments, Mayor.
2:08:18
All right, Harold, do you have anything?
2:08:21
No. Well, I have a quick thing. I just want to thank Council for taking my calls when I’m calling you or any who knows what time I’m calling. And then just your patience as we move through this and, and I also want to publicly think staff. What I wanted to say is, I did an interview the other day and they go, what inspires you and I really need to say this about my staff is every day I see something amazing, and something that they do to benefit the community or benefit individuals that really inspire me and I wanted them to hear that no one in the community to hear that. Because they’re doing great work, and they’re moving at breakneck speed and Councilmember Rodriguez this point, if we could all be patient with each other, that would really help us. But I also wanted to thank you all for being patient with us. And, you know, understanding of just the amount of work that’s going on right now. So I also want to thank you for that. I really appreciate it.
2:09:27
Thank you, Harold. Anything else with that? No. All right, Eugene, anything. No comments tonight, Mayor.
2:09:35
All right, guys. Well, thank you all for doing Oh, actually, you know what, I do have one more thing. And that is something that Harold brought up. As we move forward. I’m assuming that we all want to continue doing the WebEx
2:09:47
because
2:09:50
is there i don’t i personally don’t think we should get together in person. Should be until maybe a little bit later. Does everyone feel comfortable continuing to do this? That was my response, considering that some of our our council members are more golden than others.
2:10:08
Councillor Martin?
2:10:15
And I’m no spring chicken.
2:10:18
Well, I feel very much golden and I think we should continue to do this remotely. I really hope that we get back to participatory democracy soon and, and get into a state where we can have more public participation than we’re having now. But that will come in good time. I want everybody to know that I’ve got a list because I think a lot of of issues are being revealed by this stressful situation. That you know, it’s, it’s showing the the it’s showing up the point It’s where the fabric is, is weakest. And that’s where the council needs to get together with staff and we need to work on strengthening the weave for the next time. But Now’s not the time to do that, now’s the time to hold the line. And when we can get back together and get the public participating, then there are going to be a lot of things to be taken up and a lot of lessons learned.
2:11:31
All right, Councilmember Christiansen
2:11:37
I share counseling Martin’s
2:11:41
feeling about letting this go for a while and I think it sets a good example for the community. And, you know, it’s been such a it’s been a mess already, because we’re meeting in the library where we can’t have the public really come not Many people and so it’s all kind of a mess, we’ll just we’ll it’ll sort out just like the flooded, it’s, you know, we’re still trying to fix the stuff from the flood. We’ll be fixing this for a while, but it will all come round. However, you know, we’ve been putting off on many, many things that are more controversial and we have a big backlog. So I don’t want to hear any of those things without the public being able to participate. So when we get back to semi normal, whatever that may be in terms of this city council on
2:12:38
I think we’ll all be very grateful. So looking, let that go for what.
2:12:44
In the meantime, they can always call
2:12:45
Mayor Bagley aniela.
2:12:48
All right, the Anybody else? Councilmember pack, I saw your hand go up? No, anybody? All right, then if there’s nothing else, it’s that time to adjourn. Do we have a motion Councilmember
2:12:57
Peck
2:13:02
Do I move to adjourn? Second? Second. All right, all in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay.
2:13:11
All right. All right. Motion passes unanimously, tell SmartPak we are adjourned.
2:13:15
All right. Thank you guys. See you next week.