Longmont City Council Regular Session – June 2, 2020

https://otter.ai/s/o0n0xHInQOKWp_WeZ9t90A

0:06
Start then I’d like to now call the June 2 2000 or 2020, Longmont city council session. It’s a regular session to order Can we please start with a roll call?

0:15
Of course, Mayor Bagley, I’m

0:17
here.

0:19
council members, Christiansen

0:24
here. Thank you, Councilmember Duggal faring here. Councilmember Martin. Here. Councilmember Peck. Here. Councilmember Rodriguez

0:35
here. Councilmember waters here.

0:39
Mary, you have a quorum.

0:42
All right, great. Let’s go ahead and say the pledge. My favorite part of the online web meetings. Council Councilmember toggle fairing. You want to start us off please?

0:54
Sure. I’ll do it like with my, my class, right hand over your heart. All right. Good. Good ready begin. I pledge

1:02
allegiance to the

1:05
United

1:06
States of America America.

1:14
Already

1:16
justice for all my pauses

1:19
Well, well done well done. All right quick reminder by the chair anyone wishing to speak during first call public invited to be heard item seven will need to watch the livestream of the meeting. instructions for how to call in to provide comment will be given during the meeting, which I have now lost but anyway, and displayed on the screen at the appropriate times during the meeting. Comments are limited three minutes per person and each speaker will be asked to state their name and address for the record prior to proceeding with their comments. There are no approval of minutes Do we have any agenda revisions or submission of documents? All right, sign city manager report. Let’s move on to COVID-19 updating emergency items for consideration. Oh, sorry. Councilmember Duggal fairing

2:03
Trying to unmute myself. So I’m actually I had sent it I had, Maria sent an email and it was later this afternoon. So you may not have had an opportunity to see it. But I did want to bring forward a statement to to receive approval and adoption in regard to what has been, well, our nation events that have that have hit our our nation and our community as well. So I have a statement of solidarity in response to the killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed. So I would like to bring forward the statement for approval. Can I read it?

2:48
You could, what we’d like to do is put it on the next agenda, and then we’ll go ahead and vote on it.

2:55
Well, I would like to read it before we vote on it.

2:58
That’s fine. We can do that. Okay. So I will do that.

3:01
So the recent killings of George Floyd, Ahmad Armory and Brianna Taylor by police officers launching a nationwide movement of protests and sadly, riots have weighed heavily in our hearts and minds. We condemn the brutal death of George Floyd and the killings of so many more black Americans because of racial discrimination. By the very people sworn to protect us, we reject the actions of these officers of these particular officers, who took it upon themselves to be the judge, jury and executioner. We recognize the trauma communities of color historically experienced due to ongoing police police brutality, in effect, exacerbating continued fear distress of law enforcement. We are a nation of grief, grieving over the loss of such lives of lives such as George Floyd, Amman, Barbary and Breanna Taylor in just these last few weeks. As you your elected officials, it is our responsibility to address two instances of injustice, we must make a commitment to lead with compassion and the resiliency needed to build a more equitable community. Long on city council is committed in prioritizing racial equity and just man dismantling systematic, systemic racism that divides and destroys communities. We support our community members efforts to participate in peaceful protesting. We stand in solidarity with these protesters and encourage the community to remain focused on the purpose of these demonstrations, which is to advocate and fight for racial, social and economical justice. No.

4:39
So that’s, that’s the statement. I’m open to revisions. But um, I ask that we adopt this

4:46
right once we make a motion. Do I make a motion? Yes. All right, who just say alright, so she’s moved on second is mercury counselor Christiansen.

5:00
Besides, I second that. I think that’s a wonderful statement. I read it earlier. And I think, Well, it certainly reflects my view.

5:12
All right, Harold, can we put this on the agenda item for just the next meeting rather than regular meeting?

5:19
Okay,

5:20
we’ll get that done. It’ll be a week from

5:25
really eight weeks from today.

5:27
All right, as long as we get it on quick Councilmember waters.

5:34
Thanks, Mayor Begley. I didn’t know that we were going to get an email or a proposed council statement from any of our council colleagues. And I and I don’t want to have dueling statements. I think Councilmember dog was fearing statement is is very eloquent. But I but I do have my own statement. I’m going to make a wait to the end of the meeting. And I just want to say it now I don’t mean it to be duly mentioned. Just I just feel an obligation to not be a sock silent ally at this point in time. I’ll wait to the end of the meeting. And I’ve no doubt I’ll get behind the collective statement, but, but I feel an obligation to be clear with this community where I stand, and I’ll choose to do that at the end of the meeting, just so everybody can just be

6:23
Alright, thank you. Let’s go ahead and vote All in favor of placing counselor reliable fairings statement onto the next council meeting to be voted upon and accepted by council say aye.

6:34
Aye.

6:36
Opposed say nay. Right. The Motion carries unanimously. All right. Anybody else and by the way, Councilmember edano fairing. Thank you very much. Well stated, and I look forward to voting and supporting that. All right, Harold COVID-19 update.

6:57
Meet Harold. Harold. unmute.

7:01
Yep, Run button. The city manager’s comments are going to have three things tonight. First Council voted last week on changes regarding the Housing Authority. And I just wanted to let you know where we were on that. So the housing authority on Thursday did vote for me to be the executive board member. We’ve started working on that. Just to let you know, we placed chick Tracy defrancesco in the office, in the housing authority office to work with Kathy and Karen, you may have remembered Tracy from the work that she’s done on the mobile home program that we’ve had in the work that she did, and replacing mobile homes not only through federal fence, but working actually with Eric who’s on tonight in terms of undocumented individuals and making sure they have the same access to housing that others did who qualify for that. So we have a lot of I’ve worked directly with Tracy on that issue. Karen’s leading the residential organizational culture piece. She’s doing that in conjunction with Michelle Lee Arman and Ellie, Berto Cathy’s taking the lead on financial development in the programs there. Just so you know, Friday I was there and met with as many of the office staff as I could and then had to move back to the Civic Center to do or afternoon calls with the entire organization. I’m going to be spending more time there. Michelle, Carmen and Karen have they were at Aspen Meadows this afternoon. They’ve also been meeting with many of the managers are the facilities and having conversations as we continue digging into this situation. And we’re going to be touching base later this later this week. So I can get briefed, and we can move into the following steps. So I just wanted to let you know, we’ve been actively engaged in different areas of housing authority, since you all voted on on that last week. Second thing that I want to talk about is a short COVID-19 update today, because we also have Mike Butler here. I know, there’s been some questions that have come to council via emails and I wanted Mike to touch on those. And so Mike and Michael do most of the talking and I may jump in for some commentary. But at least where we are today, y’all may have know that may you all may know that the governor has extended the safer at home orders for until the end of June. I think they call it now safer at home in the wide open spaces, Colorado or something like that. Specifically, this had a lot to do with outdoor recreation and recreational activities. They are asking for feedback on guidance regarding swimming pools in team sports, and so I have staff working on that so we can send that into the state. Once those orders are issued, we’re going to really need to look To get the impacts to our facilities to determine what the next steps will look like, specifically, we’ve talked to you all about our budget issues. So we’re going to be evaluating really the numbers and what we’re allowed to bring into facilities and what that looks like from a financial component. Because we also have to be very mindful that we don’t increase the budget deficit that we have, once we have some of that once we understand those orders and what that means. So we’re going to be digging into it as we get more information. As you all know, the restaurant expansion process, we talked about what we were able to do internally, that seems to be going fairly well. I think we have nine applicants that have come into the system. We have around four or five that are through the process, which is in the process is going pretty quickly in terms of that action. And it’s really great to see you can design these processes and the test is how fast people go through them. I know Sandy was talking to me about some jurisdictions, they’ve been in there longer and haven’t turned anything out. Kudos to Don Michelle, Judge, legal everybody that’s in there in terms of pulling them in this in the process and pushing them out. So that seems to be going pretty well. We’re still trying to understand how all these orders potentially impact the Fourth of July fireworks. But we have gotten more clarity and we know we’re going to be canceling all other events through July, which does include rhythm on the river and the Fourth of July Longmont symphony concert just based on the amount of people that are coming into one location and the grouping. So I’m letting you all know that we’re going to be getting that out to the community via press releases. And then we’re also doing the same with other concerts that we have.

11:52
And now what I wanted to do is introduce Eric koza. From the Community Foundation. He has a presentation for the Council on strong bond fund. And when we talk about everything that’s going on, I think, no matter what it is, one of the things that always amazes me is how well Longmont can come together during times like this, and how well we work together. And what Eric’s gonna talk to you about is really a testament in terms of bringing folks from multiple organizations from throughout the community together to really work to benefit our business community and the grant processes that we were talking about. Eric, are you ready to go?

12:35
Hi, I’m here. Oh, thanks so much. And thank you to mayor and council for allowing me to present. I Yep. Thank you very much, Don or Susan, for putting that up. I appreciate it very much. I just wanted to give a special acknowledgement to Susan to Don for actually helping get these meetings set up and helping me look a little bit better as far as getting the presentation out there. So regarding strong bond fund. This is just a brief update that I want to provide you. And of course you can ask any questions you want at any time because that’s our wall alumni community foundation. So if we go to the next slide

13:16
I don’t think I can go to the next slide, but

13:20
one moment my mouse is being bad.

13:23
Big Susan.

13:33
Thank you very much. So just a brief recap about the strong bond fund the city’s economic partners formed the COVID-19 business response fund with the goals of capital communication and education and really where the llama community fits it fits in is the capital piece if you will, we are the partner to hold the grant funds, any private donations and facilitate the strong bond fund granting process. The funds are comprised of city funds DDA funds and donations from the broader community. And I’m proud to say that currently we have about $275,000 in grant funds available. That will cover quite a bit of I should say, cover quite a bit of need, because there’s a ton of need out there. But I’m really thrilled with the amount that we’ve seen already in the generosity in our community so far. We go to the next slide.

14:31
Is that not the next slide? No, I’m sorry, I just talked about this. Forgive me.

14:43
That should be slide three.

14:48
Well, let’s go to the next one. Sorry.

14:59
Is the Screen not changing for you. Oh,

15:01
it’s changing.

15:03
Yeah, well, I’m on pause for some reason.

15:13
One more time.

15:18
I can keep talking to so the eligibility. We’re getting back to the slide three there. But eligibility for the grant process was that you had to complete a business assessment. There you go. The B had had to be a non home based business with a physical address within the city of Longmont, locally owned and operated 25 or fewer full time equipment, FTP employees and an operation since January 1 2020. Or before. Next slide please. You need to possess an active city of Longmont sales and use tax license and be in good standing with city permits licenses fees as of March 1 First 2020 experienced closure dramatic reduction on operation or loss of revenue due due to public orders related to the COVID-19 public health crisis. Grant reporting is required of all entities that receive funding and in fact, I’ll talk about two cycles of reporting that we will be throwing out to the community later on this year. Next slide, please. So just a brief application summary we had 179 applications submitted $1.6 million in requests is just phenomenal the amount of money that people have requested, and the average request is about 9001 35. You might say that we were allowing people to apply for $10,000. But there are some people or businesses in the community that actually did not request the full amount. So hence, that’s why the average request is $9,000. Next slide. Apologize for the vibrant colors here, but essentially, you get a sense Have who applied for the strong loan fund. The This is kind of our before survey, if you will, this this information was collected during the application process itself and our hope is is that we would be able to match this with the post survey information. So, once we get those reports, we can kind of link up and see, you know what their estimated customers are, post kind of safer at home, if you will, number of full time employees and gross revenue etc. You can move on forward, Susan, thank you. And then we did also ask the applicants to identify if their minority owned veteran owned women owned or locally owned and operated obviously they have to be locally owned and operated if they are to be applicable. But of course we had some that did apply for that but they did not follow that locally owned and operated. For that green slicer segment. We also asked within the mighty or minority owned if you can go to the next slide season. What identifying minority they identify with. And you’ll see here a pie chart of 47% or 48%, Hispanic Latina, Latin x, Asian American, African American, a nice diversity as far as the applicants that we received from the strong bond fund application. Next slide, please. And just briefly, the committee of eight members made up of the community. We were able to corral and hurt them and get them to do a really quick review. The deadline for the applications was May 20. And we were able to review applications within a couple of days. They each got a segment of 179. They didn’t review all 179 themselves, we actually parse them into cohorts. And they made recommendations for the first round of 23 recommendations are roughly $230,000 six were non compliant with city regulations that eligibility rules requirement that I told you about earlier. But they do have until Wednesday at five to fix their issues. We anticipate the law, my community foundation anticipates the checks for the first round go out later this week. A second round will follow shortly and to progress reports that I alluded to earlier due August 31, and December 31. And we hope to get some, some data to share with you as well as the rest of the community.

19:26
And that is it for my brief report.

19:31
Thank you very much, Eric. Do we have any other than just a hearty thank you for asking so quickly to help our local businesses very impressive. 23 is a big number given given the time and the resources available, so thank you. You did great. Thanks. All right. If there’s nothing else, then make it make sure that we get on record that Councillor pet give you two thumbs up. So

19:56
we’re good. All right, Mayor.

19:59
Yep. I just wanted to also say I know anytime we’ve hit one of these situations, Eric is always there to jump right beside us and work through it. So I wanted to give a personal thank you to Eric and, and the work he does. He’s always there to help us fight through the sticky situation. So thanks, Eric. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate it too.

20:16
Thank you for the comment. All right. Do we have chief butler here is the history now.

20:21
It’s cheaper. It was turned out right.

20:23
And let me just preface I think I speak on behalf of everybody that this is this is about most concern right now. Given Councilmember Iago fairings, comments and proposed motion, the emails and the concerns. And right now I know there’s a group of citizens on Main Street. I’m actively protesting, etc. So I’m, we’re we’re all anxious to hear what you have to say public safety chief butler.

20:48
All right. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, city council. I’m Mike Butler. I’m the public safety chief. You know what happened in Minneapolis. Last week, you know, I haven’t been able to come up with good words, to try to figure out how to describe it, how it makes me feel. I can tell you that people within our police department are just kind of shaking and hanging their heads. Those who goes who are

21:23
hired to protect and serve the community.

21:27
Something like this to happen is it’s beyond some level comprehension. We all saw the video it’s incredibly hard to watch.

21:38
I’m not sure what else to say about it. It’s it’s just moved all of us.

21:43
And,

21:45
and none of us I can tell you in my conversations within the police department, none of us can figure out how that how could somebody do that? And you know, you got to understand to folks that this Is my profession, the profession I’ve been in for 40 plus years, we work with a lot of people within a police department that have been doing the service of providing police services to our community for decades. And it’s kind of it’s a black mark for us. And, and it’s again, I’ve said for years that the actions of one police officer can upset the equilibrium of an entire community. Well, seems like yeah, these actions upset the equilibrium of an entire country. And so here we are. And I know there’s a way out of it. I know that we’re going to be able to work through it. But I also wanted to come tonight to talk a little bit about what’s going on in Longmont and this is I don’t know what kind of time I have here. I could, I could talk for hours in terms of what We have going on in terms of what we’ve done around hiring practices, how we train, how we supervise the culture, how we’ve, what kind of culture we’ve developed, the expectations our officers have, in terms of what they do and don’t do. The architecture of the organization is a piece of this as well, in terms of ensuring that our officers feel good about their position within the organization. So and then the other part of this, of course, are certain policies use of force policies, and what we do with with that. And so, I’m just going to start and I’m just going to spend a little time on each of those areas. And then I welcome questions. I welcome comments. any concerns you might have, some of you have written along with our police officers. So I’ll just I’ll just Start with recruitment and hiring practices. So we we, we reformulated our what we call it our profile that we look for in a police officer A while back and we’re always refining it, it’s always something where and I’ve tried to up the ante in terms of the kind of people we’re looking for. But long mine has the reputation perhaps more than any other police department, the state of Colorado of the difficulty it is for anybody to become a police officer in Longmont because of our screening and and the serve and the screening criteria that we use. And so and the other thing I want to say about that is, you know, we have a lot of police officers who want to move into Longmont from other cities, not only around the state from around the country, and I will tell you that about one out of seven hours. have eight of those what we call lateral entries. People are currently police officers don’t fit our profile. Because it is so different than than in many other places. We really place a tremendous amount of emphasis on people who want to be a police officer and their capacity to connect and their capacity to develop relationships. This job is all about that. We don’t hire lone cowboys lone Cowgirls. We do not hire people who just want to kind of be by themselves and work by themselves. We want to we want to hire and who don’t want to connect with the community. We we hire people who do want to connect who can develop relationships. We’re very predisposed to doing that. Our motto is policing in partnership with the people. And so those people we hire

26:00
We want them to be able to work in partnership with the people. And the kind of the way they do their work. The way a police officer does their work is that they are assigned specific areas of the community and that and that assignment lasts for a while. And their responsibility is to develop relationships with whatever exists in our community, whether it’s businesses, whether it’s neighborhoods, whether churches, schools, whatever that might look like. And so they are that is their, that is their role, and that’s somewhat of their assignment. And so we’re very, very particular about who we bring on. And by the way, we have citizens who participate in our hiring processes. We even have high school students that sit on our hiring panels to determine whether or not the person that they see as a high school person, if they want, that person is a police officer. And so, the other part of this that is Some of you might know about is that just about everything that we do within the police department, there’s community, people from the community involved, whether it’s strategic planning, whether it’s hiring promotions, transfers to other assignments, all kinds of different kinds of work that they’re doing. They’ve been involved in our strategic planning process. Our strategic one of our strategic planning processes included over 1000 people, the vast, vast majority of them were from our community, and, and it took about 18 months to do that process. And so we wanted who we were, how we were are and what we do and how and what we do and how we do it. To be a reflection of the voice of people in this community, and so we spent a considerable amount of time making sure that people’s voices were within this community count in terms of who we are, and what we do and how we do it. And they’re constantly working right next to us on an ongoing basis. I know I’ve, I’ve talked to counsel before about about that level of transparency. They’re always walking, the hallways are always working with us in some form or fashion. And so that’s a big, big, big piece for us. The other thing that in terms of their involvement, and I think you’re all aware is that we have a citizen review panel. Any allegation of misconduct that comes through that is investigated by professionals standards unit is reviewed by five community members, and those community members are selected by the city manager. I have nothing to do with that. And And so, those five community members make recommendations regarding the fairness, the objectivity, thoroughness, completeness of information. allegation, then they also make recommendations in terms of should the case be sustained? is there is there enough evidence to show that the officer is responsible for that misconduct? Or should it be not sustained or unfounded or exonerated? And so our citizens have quite a bit of input into who we are, again, what we do, but our hiring practices are critically important. The other thing I want to say about that is that we do a tremendous amount of research and background investigation, determine if any of our applicants have ever used violence, an ounce of violence to try to solve a problem. And if they have, they’re rejected, they’re immediately rejected. The other thing that I want to say is that we the average age of the person we hire is somewhere between 30 and 32 years of age.

30:00
As a police officer,

30:03
and so they’re not people just right out of college, they have life experience. They’ve had other jobs. We’ve hired school teachers. We’ve hired ministers, we’ve hired social workers. And so those are the kinds of folks that we tend to kind of gravitate towards the application process in long run. And so but if there is any kind of violence in your background, we reject them. And so that is very, very clear for us. So, maybe I’ll just stop there real quickly and ask if there’s any there any questions around what I’ve said so far?

30:43
The only comments,

30:45
first of all, Chief, the the question had you not said What you said was going to be one What are we going to do to assure that what changes will we make to make sure that the George Floyd situation does not happen here, too? If the answer is nothing, what if We done to make sure it doesn’t happen so thank you very much. But I did get some we got some emails today asking where can they find the information on the citizens review panel? Is that online somewhere?

31:13
Well, I I don’t know if I’m online but if you want to refer those folks to me I can make sure they get a copy of that information.

31:23
You can refer them to dawn and Michelle because I know when when we did the recruiting the last time they put that notice out

31:31
and you could you email it to me because rather than I just didn’t have

31:36
dogs when I’ve done and Michelle seen it well email to the entire council

31:40
great Dr. Waters.

31:46
No, I was just signaling we would all like that and

31:50
we all want it. We all want it. Yeah. Tell us remember dog fairing.

31:55
Have this summary of your the diversion program Summary. And one of the things and I did respond to a constituent who asked what are we doing? I know in our own personal experience, the core team had actually helped with an incident with my son who’s diagnosed autism. And it was, it was it was a game changer for him. And I had the opportunity to share that I do not throw comments out lightly in regards to justice and racial equity, unless I truly believe in the work that that they’re doing. And I truly believe in the work and the that you’re doing with grip with our students who are at risk for gang with our students who are at risk with mental health disabilities and how the police interact with them. We’ve had even though they’ve been very strained, in you know, instances with my son. We’ve had very positive interactions with law enforcement and helping talk him off the ledge and help and help us get the resources we need. So I truly thank you and I would really like if you could delve more. explain more about those.

33:13
Sure. I will. Those are programs you know, they go ahead. Polly has a

33:27
Go ahead, Polly. Sorry.

33:30
Okay, um,

33:32
I know she Thank you for coming tonight, Keith Butler and talking. It’s very, very timely. Of course, we’re all in a state of rage and disgust and anger. So it’s very good. I have lived many different places, and I’ve experienced a few different police officers at mean police departments and I know that We’d have a good police department in contrast to some that I’ve experienced. And I just wanted to I know you could talk about this forever. But I just wanted to point out that Longmont is really unique in that we have. The police department has started the angel initiative, which helps get people off of drugs. It started the restorative justice, which works with the court system to make sure that people who are teenagers and make a mistake don’t get stuck in the justice system and just going to jail and ruining their lives. They get a chance to rethink it and make things right. I know that you have people who come around with you who when you realize there’s a mental health issue, you have somebody there who comes with you. That’s incredibly helpful. You have a homeless team who works with people who are homeless who try to get them to the right resources. And you really, I know you’ve worked on opioids since I mentioned that to you years ago, and you were already on it. And you’ve done work with not hiring people, as you say, who already have problems and making the part of the police force. And you really, I think this is a really excellent example of community policing that really you will. There’s a commitment to

35:31
serve and protect. And I want to thank you for that.

35:37
All right, so

35:39
yeah, a couple of things there that I think are important. The programs are kind of results of some of our philosophy and policy.

35:49
You know, it’s,

35:51
for a while I’ve always felt that our criminal justice system is way too prominent in our society in our community. In terms of trying to, in terms of its responsibility for solving social and health issues. And, and so, you know, for those of you who have spoken with me in the past at length, you know, I’m not necessarily a fan of trying to pass ordinances to fix health or social issues, whether it’s at the city level, the state level, national level, whatever that might look like. I don’t think we can pass laws and stiff and penalties and, and think it’s going to be an insurance policy that’s going to protect us from the human condition. It just doesn’t, it’s never happened. And and it won’t happen in the future. And so what we have to get good at is having great conversations around these social issues, and get out of the one size fits all. Quick Fix kind of way of saying here’s how we fixed this particular social issue, because we can fill up the jails. Are we can we can arrest people and we know we’re not going to be able to rescue ourselves out of these issues. So we did our best. And we’re still doing this to try to minimize the enforcement role, or in the invoking of the criminal justice system, within our community by putting programs in place like restorative justice, like the angel initiative, like lead the addiction, the heart Do the, the the model that we work with for folks struggling with addiction as well. And like the core program, the CO responder program, of course, there’s a program called rewind for kids that operates as well out of out of the city. And so, we’re not done yet. But we’ve put a lot of programs in place that we believe are more effective than, than the enforcement aspect of things. And so and so there’s a lot of a lot more I can say about that. But if you have questions, but I just brought all those up, Colleen, that’s fine. But that’s why we’re doing those things is because we do not believe the criminal justice system is the answer. And so when you look at this country, and you look at what’s going on with police departments around the country, and I’m familiar with a lot of police departments, I’ve been asked to do a lot of speaking around the country over the last few years around this, the vast majority of police departments are still stuck in the enforcement mode. They’re kind of designed and geared for enforcement. And so so when an officer goes into a neighborhood and, and I will say this, that oftentimes when, when we encounter these social or health issues, which by the way, are is a significant part of any police department’s business. Unfortunately, the communities the economically disadvantaged, socially marginalized are disrupted. franchise communities don’t have as many options. And so they don’t have options for treatment for addiction, they don’t have options for treatment for mental health. And so when they call the police, the police come, and their role is enforcement. And they and a lot of police departments around the country if you want to talk about police reform, how to figure out how to get out of that how to how to move forward in terms of just their role being only in enforcement. And and so because these are the very communities, these are the very neighborhoods and communities that really need police in a different kind of way, not just to enforce and so so when we walk when we go into a neighborhood or a family or a certain part of the community, many people know already, that we’re not necessarily there to just enforce the law, that we’re there to figure out how we can bring different kinds of solutions to the table. And so that’s there. that’s out there. In our community already, not everybody knows about that, and sometimes Longmont by people who don’t know get lumped in to the whole police phenomenon. So I know that Joe has a question. Go ahead, Joe.

40:13
You got to hit the mute button.

40:14
There you go. Thank you. Thank you, Mike, for showing up tonight. This is really informative. But I, I do have a question as to how what the disciplinary action is for police officers in Longmont, for example, the accused officer who actually strangled Floyd, it seems like he had a lot of disciplinary actions along the way. And at some point, the question is, why is he still on the police force? What is Longmont protocol for disciplinary action? And would that policeman have been almost The street if he were

41:03
without, without, without hesitation, absolutely not. And we do have several checks and balance systems in place for that, and so if if there is an officer that has a propensity for committing allegations of misconduct, they don’t last long. They just don’t. And and by the way, I know that some things have come out about unions being a detractor for police administrators to be able to discipline. We don’t have that problem in long run and I won’t go through all the circumstances. But over the last couple of years, Harold knows about these cases. We’ve been able to terminate five police officers

41:57
not for anywhere thing anywhere near What happened in Minneapolis, of course,

42:03
and essentially with the blessing of our F our internal Border Police Organization, so our relationship is good with them. And you will find, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to a police chief and other parts of the country and they will they will say something like, I fired the same guy three times. And and because of the either Civil Service Commission, or because of the appeal process, they’re able to come back and get their jobs back. That’s never happened here in Longmont. And so, it’s kind of a it’s kind of a it’s a real, it’s a real powerful and a real dynamic in a lot of police departments around the country in terms of kind of the Union protection they have. And I’m not saying that’s what happened in Minneapolis because I don’t know for sure, but I do know that Minneapolis has a pretty strong police union and the officer that was involved in This at 17 or 18, prior allegations of misconduct. That’s unheard of. And I know that that’s something that Minneapolis is gonna have to try to figure out how to answer in terms of what happened. But in terms of our just, yeah, go ahead.

43:18
I wanted to kind of jump in and help with this too. So obviously, we have processes that we have to go through. And in many cases, I’m the final appeal. But there have been cases where I get involved earlier, just based on what Mike’s challenged with and dealing with, in these processes. And, and so, yeah, to Mike’s point, what he didn’t say is, yeah, this individual wouldn’t have lasted that long. I know there’s been cases that we’ve dealt with where it’s been swift when we’ve seen issues with the thing I wanted to add to everything that Mike is saying is, I think I’ve had the advantage of being part of three different organizations, three different police departments, multiple chiefs. And the thing that I learned early on, and I had the ability to cut my teeth on some bad events. Departments don’t get this way, overnight. This occurs over long periods of time. And it’s really embedded within the culture of the department and how they approach and deal with people. And there are things that Mike and I talk about on a regular basis. One of those things is use of force. And the reason why Mike knows this, the reason why I’m always asking him about those questions, is because what I’ve learned is that is a good early warning system based on the experience that I’ve had in terms of are you seeing shifts and are you seeing departments approach things in different ways and I will tell you What I see based on our numbers versus what I’ve seen in other places, and what my colleagues have seen, it’s drastically different in terms of use of force. But we pay particular attention to that. And it’s embedded in things that you may think or something that people may think are simple. But it’s when do you have a high speed chase? You know, we have rules about when and how we do that. And it’s as simple as some of those directives that really start setting the base of the culture in terms of how you deal with this. And those are the things that I try to watch out for in our conversations. And it’s different here. I said it. I’ve said many times, the way we approach things is it’s different. Do we always hit a home run and knock it out of the park? No, we, we obviously know, from a couple of years ago, we make mistakes, but I think the difference is, we own those mistakes, and we try to make improvements as we’re moving Going forward, but I wanted to give some perspectives to Mike’s answers in the sense that we do have ongoing conversations about this so that we can see if things are changing.

46:15
So we we monitor or just add an adding building onto that we monitor every single one of our officers. use of force if someone uses force within our department, there’s multiple layers of review, including my office. And every officer knows that that is going to be reviewed and now you throw in every one of our officers now wears a body worn camera. It’s so easy to go back that camera to see what happened. And does the report that the officer right kind of line up with what we see in the video. While we didn’t necessarily need those, that body worn camera does serve as another A check and balance and for other purposes as well in terms of use of force. I know Marsha has a question. Yes.

47:14
Okay.

47:15
I’m just gonna ask it.

47:20
chief butler, I think you have absolutely been talking about the wrong the right things here. I’ve gotten a lot of amps of letters that I think have been.

47:31
Well, I think they’ve been written off as a checklist of bad things that police departments do, because a lot of them

47:41
in my experience don’t have anything to do with this police department.

47:47
But the demand I keep hearing is we need to demilitarize our police department. And my response to that is flat. You know, I’ve seen militarized police departments But could you speak to that just a little about the role of of heavy gear and, and stuff we inherited from the army and all that stuff is this police department?

48:12
Yeah, of course. So sometimes you see these off er officers wear these vests with all their equipment on their upper torso versus their belt. And one of the things that people don’t know is that they do that to save their backs, that it’s actually easier on their body to carry 20 to 25 pounds of where their handcuffs, their their firearms, whatever it’s going to be, that they see in their bulletproof vest By the way, that it’s easier to carry on our upper torso and so it kind of looks bigger, but it’s actually something that we use for ergonomic in terms of people being able to saved their backs. And so just so you know that that when you see that that’s, that’s the case. And so for police officers who are in uniform on a regular day in day out basis, carrying that on their hips in their back can be. For many of them, it can be debilitating. And so we went to that form of carrying our equipment. We don’t have we have very little military equipment in Longmont. We do have a mobile command center that we use. That’s a big, big RV looking vehicle, but it’s not a military vehicle. And so, I understand that sense of demilitarization the look that it might have. At one point years ago, our our officers were all wearing kind of fatigued, the army fatigues are not wearing those uniforms anymore. We’ve changed a lot of that up, you know, and so While sometimes the look of a police officer in a uniform can make them look like someone who’s in the military, well, we don’t act like the military. And what we do in the community is much different than what a course military would do. So we’ve done what we think we need to do to sort of demilitarize. And in fact, we never got that in a military orientation, to a great degree anyway. And so that’s not who we are. That’s not what we do or how we do it. And so but occasionally, I have to, I have to talk about SWAT. And I know that that’s something that people see as, as an aggressive kind of police tactic. Well, our team, what it’s about is it’s a safety measure. We have a team that works well together. And what I can’t discount what none of us can discount or the circumstances that police encounter. with people who are carrying weapons and sometimes very powerful weapons, and and and so and and are very aggressive with us in that regard and so our goal when we do activate our SWAT team is doing sure the safety of everybody, the safety of our officers, the safety of the person that might being aggressive towards us the safety of any hostage, the safety of people in the community. And, and I will tell you in the years I’ve been here are our special weapons and tactical team have never had to shoot anybody. And so even though they have these kinds of, they have this equipment and tools they have, they’ve never used any kind of lethal force. And I think that’s a testament to the great teamwork and the great skills that they have. And so, this is this is a tough area, and especially In today’s environment to talk about because sometimes people want your police departments to be, you know, they want them to be, they want to look the other way sometimes and and sometimes we can’t, and what we can’t ever look the other way. But so we have to activate certain kinds of tools and equipment in order to get the job done as safely as possible. So, that’s the best answer I have for you, Marsha on that one.

52:28
I think that’s a good answer. Thank you.

52:33
Okay,

52:35
Tim, go ahead, Tim. Thanks for making my case. I had my thanks to you for spending your time with us this evening. And more importantly, the thanks to you for a literally a lifetime of service in this field into this community. And I hope the whole world is listening to this conversation actually. And and what policing should look like communities across the country. So it would be helpful for me and maybe others to have. I have two questions. The first one is helpful for me and others to have some idea of the variety and the number of complaints that you are Herald in the review board deal with during the course of the year. Right? Is that a big number, small number? What does that look like? First question. Second question. Since you’re about to turn the page and move into the next chapter of your life, it would be helpful to know for council members I think, at least for me, what’s the what are you going to leave in the letter to your successor? What are the areas for greatest potential for growth or improvement given all the good work that’s going on in a perfect and if I know you I there’s not a doubt in my mind. You have you’re going to leave some recommendations in the areas where we need to focus and where we have the greatest potential to improve. I’d be curious what those are. Yeah, first question, Tim. numbers of cases, I’m happy to say that we don’t get a lot of citizen complaints. We just don’t. And by the way, we set up a process years ago, it’s called so most. And so most means we are in in Spanish.

54:20
And

54:21
Latino leaders and staff from please set this up so that people could actually go to people like if they wanted to file a complaint against anyone to please, they could go to someone like Carmen Ramirez, or they could go to El calm attack. Or they could go to the Art Center, or they could go to St. John’s Church. So they don’t, it can be rather intimidating to come to the police department and say I want to file a complaint against one of your officers. So we made it easy for people if they want to file a complaint to do that. I wanted to say that because the number of complaints we get are few we averaged maybe six to Seven allegations of misconduct a year. And I want to say maybe two or three of those are typically car accidents. We’ve had one excessive or too excessive force complaints in the last three years, and both of those run founded by the Citizens Committee. And so, I think that’s a testament to the culture. It’s a testament to the people that we have in our force. It’s a testament to the training. And but mainly, it’s a testament to our staff. It’s a testament to our officers and the people and the kind of people they are. So I would encourage anyone in the community if anyone’s watching this to write along with us, and and to and to get a first hand view, it’s not like TV. And it may not be what you see on the news, and I and I know you’re going to be pleasantly surprised. And so there’s a lot of ways of being in able to interact with us engaged with us. We welcome that on a regular basis. And anyone’s welcome for the next month to call me. And I will figure out how to get you involved. So that’s the answer your first question, Tim.

56:18
So, here’s,

56:21
I have this, I have expressed this to some folks, you know, here that our police profession in the eyes of many singers seems broken. And I’m not going to say it’s not unbroken it there is a brokenness about and and in these latest incidents have kind of highlighted that brokenness and in terms of what’s going on, and there’s a part of me, that says, You know what, I don’t want to leave this because I think I can help with that. But there’s also a part of me, the bigger part of me says, Good luck to the next person, so to speak. So that’s kind of what That’s where I’m landing. But you know, the person that is going to be overseeing this, actually that person, he’s an internal person and how much we have put anything out there publicly about that. Harold, do you want to talk about that? Fine.

57:15
So based on COVID, we have an interim person right now, just because of travel and everything else. And so that inner person is Rob Spindler. And then we’ll move through the processes once we actually can have conversations and get feedback.

57:35
So here’s my, here’s my main you would be my main advice, or my thought, when you have people who are have this incredible, anomalous authority to take people’s freedom away and we live in a society where individual rights are paramount, and then they give police departments this authority to take people’s freedom away, or justifiably, justifiably used. force that does something to the psyche of a human being. And and sometimes that sense of I can do this and I have this badge and I have this authority no matter how, what you who you are and what you’ve what your background is, sometimes that that can begin that can be a powerful force inside of people. And so my, my, my best advice to someone is to figure out how to counter that, with ensuring that each one of those folks have have our kid engage and relate and integrate with the good things that are going on in our community so that they see what’s good about our community. In fact, I’m writing a letter right now that I’m just I’m letting are my goodbye letter at some level. I’m saying one of the things I’m saying is, is do your best to become ambassadors for what is good in our community. And So that’s the part that I think all police needs to work on. We’re pretty good at the enforcement thing we can, we can do that well, but what we’re not really good at is not we’re faceless. Oftentimes, police departments are faceless entities. We live in this fortress. Like, we’re not we don’t personalize ourselves. And that would be the advice that and you have to constantly work on that. Because the psyche of a person doing this job can be it can be, it can be harmed. The psyche can be harmed by the nature of the work. And so you have to set it up in a way so that our police officers are have access and can see the good what’s going on in our community. Now that’s that’s a kind of a philosophical approach. But that can look like 1000 different things too. And so and to constantly be monitoring Now. And the other thing, of course, I think the big deal and policing are is found in the people that become police officers, your recruitment, hiring has to be as tight and as good as it can be in terms of ensuring that you have the right people doing doing their job. And so I’ll leave I’ll leave it at that, Tim, there’s probably, actually I’m Rob spello. and I are gonna have a two hour conversation tomorrow, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna let him know a lot of things as well. And part of that is just what I said. So,

1:00:34
in to Mike’s point, I asked the same question. And I’ve got several pages of things. Because he did do that for me. One of the things I wanted to point out, right, and this is always a testament and again, something I learned in other communities is how does police chief respond to when you want to see certain things? Last community I was in an elected police chief. So that was an interesting situation. I’ve shown up at multiple SWAT incidents, Mike’s called say this is going on I go, I want to go look at it. He’s never attempted to stop me. I’ve routinely called in and said, Hey, I’m free this afternoon, can I do a ride around, they pick somebody who’s available. They don’t place me with someone. I just go with someone. The openness is also a very clear indication to me when they don’t try to match you with certain individuals. And so you get a certain story. You know, that’s huge in terms of how you approach this. In a lot of cases, it’s not what you do when you’re being watched. It’s what you do when you’re not being watched. And and those guys know and Mike knows. As I’m driving around, I see stuff. I will stop and talk to him. In the example, I will give you a sense of what really happens. One day one Sunday morning I was going to get breakfast. And one of my favorite places is just down the street from where I live in they are the old Kmart used to be. And there was an individual in the parking lot that was creating havoc. And police officers showed up, watched it picked up my breakfast, drove around, came back watched it and other officers showed up. They were there 45 minutes, just talking to the individual. They didn’t have a clue that I was sitting there watching it. They didn’t know anyone else was watching it in for me, I think I called Mike and said I just wanted to let you know what I just saw. Again, it’s it’s not what you do when you know the city managers with you or he’s there. It’s what you do when I’m in the parking lot. You don’t know that. And that was for me one of those moments where you just go They get it. And and it was neat to see them just having the conversation. And at the end of the day everyone walked away. I don’t think they got within two feet of the individual. And that was good to see because that’s the culture that he’s trying to build, or that he’s been working to build. We’ve got to continue. Again, we both said, We don’t do it right all the time. And I will tell you, Mike Jones it.

1:03:27
Can I just kind of reinforce what you said here. At the beginning of that. You received a couple of pages of thoughts from Mike. Mike’s going to spend time with the successor or at least the memorial. I think part of what the reason for my question that at that I’m not curious about the direct answer. But the community I think also needs to know that Mike, Mike Butler recognize it. It’s not perfect. There’s growth to do there’s work still be has to be done. As far as this departments come. There’s always going to be opportunities for improvement and that’s what it sounds like. Mike suggests To us, that’s what’s important to me. Yep.

1:04:03
counsel, Mr. Peck.

1:04:05
Now, I just want to say that, um, the fact that we don’t have very many resident complaints is a testament to Mike Butler and the way you manage the organization and the standard that you set. So I don’t think you’re replaceable, but we can try. Can we clone you? Thank you very much for all of your effort.

1:04:29
In Chief, I want to echo those thoughts. Thank you very much for your your thoughtful comments tonight and for what you’re doing. And it’s there’s so many scenarios in situations right now. We live in a very different world, and we appreciate your effort to keep us safe. We really do.

1:04:48
You’re welcome. Thank you.

1:04:49
All right.

1:04:50
All right. Thank you, everybody.

1:04:52
All right. Let me

1:04:55
I just wanted to say something on top of that, I wanted to thank Mike for giving me more time You know, his his retirement date was one a month ago. And, and with everything going on, he hung on. And I think, you know, that’s a piece of this. But what I wanted to say to you all is just generally I think what we expected the entire organization. This is as much for the community as it is for the organization. And, you know, when I saw this, I was horrified,

1:05:31
physically sick,

1:05:34
it was criminal, the other officers were complicit. And those are pretty direct words. But for me, it was different because I don’t talk about what’s happened in my life before. But it brought back me brought back memories of when I’ve had to deal with issues. But the hardest part was having to explain to my kids and it was the hardest conversation I’ve ever had to have. And I had A 16 year old and a 17 year old, and you know how many hard conversations you have with them. And then trying to talk to them about what is different here than what they’re seeing on the TV. And getting them to understand that because what they see is once all over the place, and really having to talk to them about what goes on here and my two are fortunate because they have interacted with many folks, they bowled with Mike at the employee get together and so they have a different perspective. organizations and departments don’t get here overnight. They don’t get into that position. And there were things that you’ve heard about Minneapolis, simple fact, a few years ago, 50% of the time their body worn cameras were turned off. And they said it’s gotten better. It’s at 85%. Now I mean, that’s a an interesting fact for me. Mike spent a lot of time before organizational culture. We’ve spent a lot of time with organizational culture, hundreds of hours, where Mike and I’ve jointly taught classes, I’ve taught classes with every director I have. But what I wanted to let the council know. In those conversations, we talked about what we expect in terms of how we deal with each other. What we expected when individuals deal with the community. And now we’ve added equity into the conversation. That’s the new ad that we’re bringing forward. This want you all to know, from my perspective, zero tolerance for this and I know Mike’s the same way. And to Councilmember pecks comment, we deal with these issues quickly. And I will tell you in my career, I’ve had a situation where someone put a swastika on a board or a minority employee and I dealt with it that day. I’ve had Members of my organization had to deal with.

1:08:06
I don’t even know how to describe it.

1:08:11
Racist groups that were part of the organization, they dealt with it that day. I have zero tolerance for it. And what we said our organization, treat people like you want to be treated. And, and we will deal with it if you know. That’s my commitment to you all. That’s my commitment to the organization. But then it’s also our collective commitment to the community. And if people have issues they can call Mike anytime they can call me. When I can tell us we’ll deal with it.

1:08:47
All right. That’s a great exclamation point to conclude the discussion. Thanks, Carol. Thanks, Chief. Wave on let’s move on to first call public invited to be heard.

1:08:55
Don, I don’t know

1:08:57
how many. We got the queue.

1:09:00
May or will need to put that slide up and then take a break for four minutes. All right,

1:09:05
let’s let’s go. Let’s be back and forth, please. All right.

1:09:08
Thank you.

1:13:32
Thanks, Doc that everybody can hear me. Let’s get back to our computers and move on to first call public invited me heard Don, how many? How many? How many? How many folks are in the queue?

1:13:41
Man, it looks like we have two in the queue and I just want to make sure Susan is ready. She had a computer issue just a second ago.

1:13:49
Susie, you read Oh Susan.

1:13:51
Susan. Yes, sorry. Thank you.

1:13:53
We still want Susie also. Both.

1:13:57
Hey, Don, my other computer is coming. Back

1:14:00
up, but I am on another computer.

1:14:01
And I do see that we have two callers. Can you hear me? Okay?

1:14:08
Yes, I can.

1:14:09
Okay. So I’ll go ahead and admit them.

1:14:13
Let’s go ahead. The timer is

1:14:15
on and going. I mean, not going but ready to go.

1:14:19
Very good mayor.

1:14:21
So for the first caller, your phone number ends in 637. I’m going to unmute you if you could please state your name and your address for the record. Can you hear?

1:14:33
Me? Yeah, I also last time I listed my address. I had somebody show up at my house unexpected because they heard me on City Council.

1:14:41
You don’t need to say it.

1:14:42
I mean, ask for it. But don’t don’t worry about it.

1:14:47
Okay, thank you.

1:14:50
So Good evening City Council. I’m calling again this evening about short term rentals. Last week, I called in about the house behind us and since then we have had to call the police about them. ordinates and Airbnb guests being up in partying past midnight in our residential neighborhoods. Also, since I last called a house on my street, one house over has begun operating as an Airbnb. This house is a stone’s throw away from the house behind me. And I’m so upset that my neighborhood is being infiltrated by these Airbnb ease. My neighbors own another home in Longmont that they live in full time so they are legally able to rent out the house on our street year round. Please reconsider your Airbnb rules and regulations. They are ruining our neighborhood and affecting the housing crisis and upsetting peaceful neighborhood communities. What can you do to support homeowners in Longmont?

1:15:48
We need real change now. Thank you.

1:15:54
Mayor could state her name I did not catch her name. Could you state your name please?

1:15:59
Now Yeah, sorry. Yes. My name is pearl spin Harney.

1:16:04
Thank you, Pearl.

1:16:05
Thank you. Thank you.

1:16:11
Alright, let’s go on to the second

1:16:19
one moment.

1:16:24
Our next caller, your phone number ends in eight to zero

1:16:31
you’re unmuted

1:16:34
Hello Can you hear me? Yes we can. Okay great. Hi again my name is Catherine Bay log and I live at 19th what 1920 spruce as of last week I called in about the house behind me 1883 Arapahoe which is the short term rental Airbnb. It sits in my backyard. I informed you last week of what we had been dealing with Just a couple of hours after I called last week into you all I had to call the police because the people that were renting the Airbnb were outside partying in the hot tub, loud smoking pot at 10:30pm. I also texted the owner of the house at that, at that time to ask him to please ask his guests to not be out there. The noise ordinance starts at 10pm and to inform future guests to please stop using the hot tub and be out after 10pm as well and I got no response from him. I again had to call the police at midnight on the same night because the loud partying in the hot tub and smoking pot did not stop even after the police were called and they came to the first time they had to come a second time against the city council. I would like for you all to revisit the Airbnb short term rental laws in the city of Longmont, my neighbors and I do not think it’s fair that we have have to put up with a hotel with different guests every single week partying on vacation in our backyards. What can you do to help us with this situation? Do we have to have different partiers on vacation every week in our backyards? Please help us by revisiting the Airbnb short term rental laws in the city. Thank you.

1:18:24
Thank you.

1:18:25
All right. Thank you. Is there anyone else in the queue?

1:18:28
No, Mayor, there is not.

1:18:29
Alright. Then let’s move on to the consent agenda and introduction and reading by title first reading of ordinances. Could you please read those on

1:18:40
your back Mayor item eight a is appoint and reappoint affordable housing technical technical review group members for 2020 and eight V is authorized Mayor to sign a letter to the Regional Transportation district regarding the retention of fast tracks internal savings account dollars to unfinished fast tracks quarters

1:19:02
All right, we have motion.

1:19:05
All right, can SmartPak

1:19:09
actually I would like to pull the letter was that B.

1:19:13
But that’s fine. I’ll go ahead and move Item A appointing reappoint fordable housing technical review group I have a second. Okay. Is it all right? It’s been moved by me and seconded by Councilmember Peck All in favor of a say aye.

1:19:27
Aye. Hi. Opposed say nay.

1:19:30
All right, passes by majority vote. Councilmember Peck?

1:19:35
Um,

1:19:36
yes. First of all, thank you, Mayor Bagley and Phil Greenwald for drafting that letter to to Paul Paul beggared. Um, I want to explain that the fast tracks internal savings account has been used as a slush fund for anytime that rpv gets out of trouble over the years and it is the consensus of civility. It officials who’ve been doing this far longer than I have that had that face account not been touched, we would have ambit invested, we would have enough money to finish all the unfinished corridors, and we wouldn’t have to constantly be having this fight. So that is the reason for this. But I would like to make a suggestion and perhaps an amendment on the letter. The content is great, thank you so much. But the reason that I asked for the mayor to endorse this letter or to come up with a letter is because this Thursday is our key board is meeting to actually start discussing the budget and the Pfizer is going to be on that meeting right away. So even though Paul Ballard is the interim interim director, he is not really the one who is going to be making the decision as to what to do with that price account. It will be the board of doing Directors add their consensus and their motion as to whether to use it for operating income or, or to leave it as is untouched. So I would like to move that item eight, was it eight or nine? I can’t see it on my screen. It’s aibee aibee. With the amendment that we address it also to all the board of directors, all the RTD Board of Directors, and Paul Ballard as just respectfully because he is the director.

1:21:35
I’ll second that. Thank you. All right. I’ll post say aye. Aye. Any debate or discussion? All right.

1:21:46
Pose. Oh, no. All in

1:21:48
favor, say aye.

1:21:49
Aye. Aye.

1:21:51
Hey, it’s passed unanimously. All right. Sorry about that. The It’s been a long day. And we’re on web And anyway, all right. Let’s go ahead and move on to a we had one more report, I thought a sustainability evaluation system. There we are. Let’s move on to that.

1:22:24
Good evening, Mayor. Can you hear me?

1:22:29
members of council My name is Don Virtua with planning development services. And I have a short presentation for you tonight with an update on the ESEA sustainability system. And I wanted to go over that really quick. And while that’s being put off, I also wanted to let you know that in attendance tonight, we have Lisa Knobloch, the sustainability Program Manager, as well as David Bell, the director of parks and natural resources in case there’s any additional questions related to To the to the MCs

1:23:04
So next slide.

1:23:08
As noted in your council communication staff has been working on the council with Council on a number of these items that have all culminated in an SDS evaluation system. This system will be applied to any variants to a setback from the right period areas, streams and creeks, and wetlands. And today, we have completed the following tasks. We’ve updated the land development code to require council review of variances to the setbacks. We’ve updated the development code to require that an SDS evaluation be completed. We have created an SDS evaluation process for our development Review Committee, which includes staff from natural resources and from sustainability. And we have also finalized the SGS checklist. With the completion of the FCS checklist that’s yes has been fully implemented and is ready for use on any variance requests that we receive moving forward.

1:24:11
Next slide.

1:24:15
So what remains to be completed based on Council’s past direction, we have a third set of code revisions that we need to process and bring forward. They will generally do the following things. First is that they will add some water bodies that to the to the right period setback requirements for 150 foot setback from those. The areas that we are looking at would include portions of what’s called the slew which is spring Gulch, number one, spring Gulch, number two, dry creek number one, and lichens golf. The second amendment that we’re seeking is to with the code revisions is to implement the recommendations in Appendix A of the watch Management Plan update. As you may recall, Appendix A of the wildlife management plan recommended that the development code be updated and have updates completed to sections 15.050 to zero, and 030. And those are related to the protection of rivers and streams, and habitat and species protection. Next slide. So finally, what are our next steps? Currently, staff is finalizing the revisions of land development code. Specifically, those that were referenced on the previous slide related to adding those water bodies and making the revisions to the land development code that were recommended in Appendix A that’s currently undergoing a staff and legal final review that we hope to have completed here relatively soon. With that in mind, our goal for counsel direction as we understand it, is that you You would then look at any proposed revisions to the development code at a study session, and we are currently trying to make a July meeting for that discussion. That’s where city council would be updated on the changes that we’re proposing to make and be able to give us any additional direction that you may need in order for us to achieve your goal. If the direction that we get from council does not require many changes or revisions to the document, we are currently shooting for an August 1 reading then of the ordinance for those amendments. And mayor, that concludes my presentation. And if the council has any questions or things that they’d like to ask us or direction we would take that time.

1:26:46
I don’t have any questions other than saying thank you, Dr. Waters.

1:26:51
Thanks, Mayor Begley. Thanks done.

1:26:55
JOHN, what you didn’t in the materials we got from dawn a few hours before the meeting. We basically we got we received from done this slide presentation the deck you just did. But the last slide in that deck, you didn’t even present in your presentation. It lays out ss 1.0 2.0 3.0. That slide.

1:27:27
Councilman waters is that the slide that we presented to the council? I believe back in November that has, yeah, the it’s small on my sheet I’m sorry. three columns. Yeah,

1:27:40
yeah. Is that still or is this this does this still represent kind of the phasing or staging of the work if it does?

1:27:51
I’m trying to I’m trying to track

1:27:54
it looks to me like we would be in July or August if the first part of three points No, maybe not. But that’s where we’re talking about code updates.

1:28:07
So the,

1:28:10
the, let me get to the larger vision so I can read it, I apologize.

1:28:14
Here’s what I was really after. I’m not trying to pin you on on that fit just, you know, necessarily on anything, but just to understand where we are, in terms of what was laid out in the kind of bigger picture in the flow of the work. So I could make mental notes or drop it into my calendar, what I might expect to see regarding the CES at key times, July, obviously, assuming well, regardless what the format is, that we’ll get an update and a chance to act on an ordinance in August.

1:28:45
Which would, which would partially update, it sounds like a land code. Yes, that’s correct. And then and then what’s the next phase and the next phase out over the course of the rest of this year in the next year? I just, you know, we’ve been talking about this For a while, I just would like to make certain we get this demo. I’m still on the council. And I’m certain they’re super similar to the council as well. So being able to think about how this applies to a calendar would be real help.

1:29:12
So hey, Dawn, Councilmember Walker, I want to share the screen just because he brought it up for the public, Councilmember waters is is this the

1:29:26
Is this the one you’re hearing? Yeah,

1:29:28
yes, yes.

1:29:30
This is the graphic.

1:29:32
Okay. So I would say that everything in this FCS 1.0 is completed. The cs 2.0 will finalize the recommendations in the wildlife management plan. So that would come with this last set of land development code. revisions that we would be bringing to you hopefully in an ordinance in August assuming the July study session goes well, and as counsel expressed at one of the meetings and I do not remember which one that the wreck the motion was made, but council chose to push off the 3.0, the one for public private partnerships and for the riparian adjacent discussion expanding its impacts or onto other development to a future time. And that as I as I read the minutes and looked at that meeting, it looked like we would need you to make a motion for us to start working on those next portions that would cover 3.0

1:30:49
so on just so it’s somewhere in 2.0. What you’re bringing is in July and August shows up in is it in the last is it in the additional standards because we’ve already prove the standards.

1:31:03
So I don’t know if Harold could put that back up again these

1:31:10
Hold on.

1:31:17
Because we went through the additional waterways that are in discussion. Step two is I think what you’re referring to down when we looked at the red, green and red, yellow and green areas, and how this applies and when it applies and in and I think that was in number two in 2.0. And, and that’s what we decided to wait on. And maybe if maybe this is just old enough that it doesn’t represent what the kind of current flow is. That’s what I was just trying to track.

1:31:49
Yeah, so so the only thing that is still to be done our is step four under 2.0 the additional standards so the additional standard Are dinner the items that were recommended in Appendix A of the wildlife management plan update specific code revisions to those two sections that I talked about? Okay. That’s the last step. And we’ve been working on those since November. And with everything that’s happened, this is just where we’re at. Yeah. Okay. But we’re finalizing those to get those up to you here in July the study session.

1:32:25
So we can wrap that up. And then and then the right time talk about the broader implications. The other legs of the stool, the other. How to think about the yellow in red areas in the waterways, all the rest of it.

1:32:40
Yes. All right. Thanks. That’s good.

1:32:47
All right. Thank you, Don. We appreciate that. And we look forward to the next step.

1:32:53
All right. Thank you, counsel.

1:32:55
All right. Let’s move on to final call public invited to be heard. Let’s take two minutes and put that up on the screen and see if anybody calls in. We won’t take a break because if we just sit here patiently for two minutes, I suspect dawn will call and we’ll be done. Whereas, take a break, we’ll take 10 minutes and we’ll be here longer.

1:34:24
Is that Is there anybody in the queue?

1:34:29
Gone, Susan? No mayor, not

1:34:31
yet. It just started showing up on the screen. It’s been about a minute.

1:34:35
All right, we’ll give it another 60 seconds or so.

1:35:22
All right, is everybody in the queue?

1:35:27
No mayor, not at this time.

1:35:28
All right, let’s go ahead and move on to your mayor and council comments. I’m not seeing all council but let’s start with Councillor Christiansen. She hasn’t. Wait. We haven’t heard from you much tonight.

1:35:38
Councilman waters wanted to speak though, earlier. So

1:35:43
Councilmember waters, why don’t you go ahead.

1:35:47
Okay, I appreciate the difference.

1:35:51
Before I do have a statement I’m gonna read before I do. I’ve had honestly I’ve had on my kind of list of items that I think we ought to add To review is our ordinance on Airbnb as we continue to hear about it, we get correspondence about it. I know it’s an issue. You know, one more thing that we would be adding to an already

1:36:11
tough agenda. I just I think we owe it to our residents to review

1:36:16
that ordinance and not just, you know, what we’re doing with it, but how we’re monitoring and and enforcing the ordinance number one, number two, I know we delayed the discussions about RVs

1:36:30
because of safe lots and what was going to happen with this, but in my notes on August 6,

1:36:37
or I’m sorry, yeah, August 6 2019. Almost a year ago, 10 months ago, we voted gave direction to staff to bring back the RV ordinance for review and potential revision. Lots has happened since I understand the reasons for the delays. But I don’t know where we stand with safe lots. We heard that the presentation in February Your March, it’s my impression that Arby’s we’re not going to be part of any safe law proposal. And so that still hangs out there after having given direction. We haven’t done anything with it. And I think we owe it again, to residents, whether you’re in an RV or not in a home, I think we owe it to folks to take another look at what we ought to be doing with that ordinance as well. So I’m not I’m not making motions on either of those. If somebody wants to pick it up and make a motion, we already gave direction on the on the on the RV, it would be giving direction a second time. So I’m gonna just I’m gonna make a statement and if you’ll just indulge me.

1:37:42
I just like so many other people. I’ve been at a loss for words, to express my reactions and reflections on what has been transpiring today across the country. Because the feelings I have a hard to express, because it’s felt like this is a time when people like me should do more listening than talking or speaking. I’ve made any public statements about what we’ve been witnessing and and how repulsive it is the said, I just don’t feel like I’m like I can let this public meeting come to closure. Without without making a statement, it just seems now is not the time for silent allies. So with that said, words like horrified, appalled, outraged, heartbroken, sad or shocked, feel less than adequate to express my reactions to the murder of George Floyd. So rather than trying to express those feelings, I just want to be on the record with where I stand on a number of issues or a number of points. Number one, I stand with all who seek justice for George Floyd, George Floyd, Mike Brown, Rianna Taylor, Ahmed, ivory, and so many others whose lives were ended by racial hatred and the people who perpetuated

1:38:57
on this country. I stay With all who are committed to disrupting systems, and dismantling structures that continue the stain of racism and social injustice in this country. I stand with those committed to creating a more just society in a nation through hard work, collective action, compassionate action, and perseverance. I stand with those seeking a post pandemic future is more equitable, distributed, balanced, sustainable, generous, healthy, and fair.

1:39:31
I stand with long months public safety team, all of our first responders and the city’s policies and approaches to policing that value prevention, service, health, safety and the respect of our residents. I also stand against abuse of power, the misuse of force by police, the dehumanizing of people and disregarding of the rights of anyone, especially citizens. or non citizens of color in this country to their life, liberty, equity, justice, decency, respect, health, safety and security. by those we entrust with protecting these rights in this country. I stand against those who have attempted to hijack, pervert and corrupt a peaceful and principled mission to change the system and hold the people in it accountable. I condemn the lawless, senseless destructive violence some people have perpetrated on Americans in their communities. I understand my words tonight will change nothing. But how I spend my days and my night as a council member might make a difference. Well, I can’t do anything about what happens in Minneapolis, Louisville, Ferguson, Washington, DC or any other city in this country. What I can do and what I’m going to do tonight is reiterate my commitment to working with others on this council, with members of the city staff and all Longmont community members to make this city More just equitable, fair, inclusive, transparent, healthy, sustainable and accountable. If every Council in every city in the United States does the same, it’s my best hope that we never find ourselves again, where we are tonight in this country. Thanks. All right, thanks, Doc

1:41:19
Kazmir. Councilmember Christiansen and Councilmember Martin.

1:41:30
Sorry.

1:41:33
Thank you, Councilman waters. That was a good statement. And I also agree that we need to

1:41:40
re examine the short term rentals and see how they’re growing and update and we need to reconsider whether some of the things that we allowed are still a good idea. I do think that I thank Councilman Hidalgo foreing for her Wonderful statement. I, I think it’s incumbent upon everyone to speak up about this everywhere they can. And I think most of us know that policemen have a difficult job. They see and deal with things that would make most of us that would cripple most of us, but they do it anyway. We know it’s hard, but you still have to be a good man. You still are and a good woman. As Chief chief of Sheriff Swanson said from Genesee, California who marched with the with the things with the protesters and threw down his baton. He said, When this happens, it makes all the hard work that we have done absolutely useless. We have spent so much time trying to get trying to build trust with the community. You can’t have a police system or anything, any kind of civilization without trust. And so then when you spread the seeds of just trust like this, not just distrust but they murdered this man they murdered him. And chief butler has spent many many years building trust in this community Remember to Latino men in the 70s were killed on Main Street was shot to death by a police officer. And instead of exploding the Latino community came together with the help of Navarro, Mr. Navarro and Martin Marino and Dan Ben, Adidas and a number of other leaders in the community, to build something to fight back and give people a way to complain But all that could get undermined when you have people who so shockingly abused their power that they consider it their privilege to have life and death control over other people. We can’t condone this. We can’t allow this to happen. The first time I ever saw hatred. I was a little girl and I saw a little girl, maybe a few older years older than me walking up steps to go to school.

1:44:33
And she was black. She was very nicely dressed much better than I am.

1:44:40
But there were all these adults screaming at her and screaming hatred. It was unbelievable to me and my parents. Explain that to me, but she was protected by police officers. The police what police officers in a lot of these towns now are not perfect. correcting them and our president doesn’t want them to protect them. He wants them to attack the protesters. This is not going to make things better. When you have chief people, people like Sheriff Swanson from Genesee, and the Denver police officer and many other police, sheriff’s walk with and talk with protesters. That’s the beginning of changing things and making things better. When you have an attitude that people must be dominated and must be put down and must. That’s exactly the problem. So I applaud all the people, all the police officers and all the peaceful protesters who are working hard to change things. We must change things in this country or we cannot go forward.

1:45:52
That’s my Martin.

1:45:54
Thank you Mayor Begley. I’ll be brief because it’s been my night to have my thunder stolen by Other council members, but first up to take a load off your conscience.

1:46:06
Council Member waters I have been in communication with Joni and Aaron. And in fact we are revisiting labor this summer the ordinances on short term rentals and ad use because of the new insights that we have been gathering over over time and so we are getting our chance very soon Now to do that and I want the public to know that that it’s that watch for it. I don’t have an exact date yet but we are we are rather our planners are excuse me ready to come back to that.

1:46:46
The same with safe lots I heard from Joseph stanovich of hope that

1:46:54
that the first safe slot is is set to open it. No more Have RV facilities, but we will gain some experience with that.

1:47:08
Everybody’s terrified of coughs I just want to say there’s nobody else around here.

1:47:14
So

1:47:17
the last thing is that

1:47:21
just to add a little bit to Polly’s story, because it’s an incredibly moving story in a story of possibility. I knew before going into the weekend, that Longmont has a different kind of police force from most cities, and I wanted to do some research on just exactly how it got that way. I mean, I’ve one of the first conversations, the first conversation I had with Mike Butler was when I was running for

1:47:56
running for office. Somebody shot somebody in my house. I don’t know there was a loud noise. I hope you couldn’t hear it. I think it was.

1:48:05
Anyway.

1:48:08
How long month got to be the kind of city with the kind of police force that it has. And I learned the story of the very unjust shooting of two young Latino men and it was actually 1980. So appropriately, 40 years ago, this August, that will have happened.

1:48:33
And I asked Mike Butler, the first conversation I had how you hire a police force and train a police force that doesn’t act like that. And I was very happy that he told us, but I wanted to give a shout out and Polly’s already done it to El Comandante because they came together with incredible speed and understanding and wisdom. To know that they were protecting the whole community by giving themselves a voice and averting the violent reaction that could have happened because of that event. And I was just astounded that that could be done could be done by a bunch of ordinary people who got together because the community, the Latino community, which was only about 8000 people at the time, thought they were level headed. So they got this group of people together. And, and that was the beginning of elco, mutate, and the beginning of a long month as a sane and inclusive community. So I was just so proud and happy to learn that story. Thanks.

1:49:53
Let’s go with Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez.

1:49:58
Thank you very badly appreciate all things that have been said so far by my colleagues here on Council. I just want to say one thing, as far as a lot of what I’ve seen in my network of folks who’ve been involved in protests all around the country, in the deep south, in the Midwest, out in the Pacific West,

1:50:18
that

1:50:20
for people like us, it’s easy to be able to make statements, we’re elected officials, we have a little bit more of a platform that we can speak from. But I think it’s really important that with some of these folks, we make sure that they know that it’s their voice that needs to be heard. It’s the people’s voice that really needs to be heard right now. Not so much our voices that need to be heard. It’s more that we need to sit here and acknowledge that we are listening and we are receptive to what they’re all saying and that

1:50:50
I stand behind them. And I will listen.

1:50:54
And I plan to hopefully,

1:50:57
along with my fellow colleagues here, maybe The substantive change that people want to see as we go forward, like

1:51:07
Councilmember Lago Farah.

1:51:11
And so really, I want to add to just from my own experience, I’ve spent the last 30 years studying and presenting cultural proficiency, implicit bias, systematic racism, institutional racism and looking at how to break barriers. And a lot of the work that I do is working with individuals in changing that mindset and just shift from and I think this goes back to when I heard chief butler talk about feeling, you know, guilty and just like this, I sensed a sense of guilt. And it’s really moving away from that, from that sense of guilt and resentment to end reacting that way, too. More of a reflection and using that opportunity for growth. And I see that he utilizes that philosophy of of the growth, reflection and growth in improving. I it’s always disturbed me when I’ve heard people say, I don’t have biases, I took that implicit bias training. Well, I’ve taken implicit bias for the last 30 years and I train, but I still have biases and I still continue my education and grow and change and the person I was 10 years ago is very different from the person I am today. And what I’ll be 10 years from now will look a lot different as well. And just just knowing knowing that and really wanting to move our from shifting that mindset from a tolerance towards diversity to really looking at and being committed to a transformation to equity. So that was kind of in reaction to there. I do have some advice for people who are wanting to protest against Get involved. You know, over the years, I’ve done a lot of community organizing and working with organizations, Black Lives Matter movement. And, you know, there there are steps, it’s keeping with the same message of who you’re with who you’re rallying with. And stay with that cause. Make sure you have permission to be there in some places you need permits to be to rally in those spaces. So make sure you’re adhering to those those norms and and regulations in being out there. And, and also to keep your wrist keep focused on the message, keep a unifying message and make sure that you’re not getting riled up by instigators. You know, there’s a lot of people out there who are just looking to make trouble and causing mischief and causing trouble. We see it with the riots and a lot of the people who started the protests were not The individuals who are engaging in criminal activity. So if you’re out there and you see this criminal activity, do not engage with them, call the police, you know, report those instances, because it deters from the message that we’re trying to bring forward. And this was something so I marched with the Chicano movement in the late 80s and early 90s, in Southern California and Chicano Park, near the Coronado Bay Bridge. And even back then it was, you know, don’t get involved with the insert going to be instigators, there’s going to be people who are going to call you names and try to get you riled up to create problems. don’t engage. And, you know, it’s just because we, after all these years, we’re still I think when when we look back in history, you know, or 100 years from now, when people look back in history, they’re going to view this time from the civil rights movement through here in a span that I think will last probably more than 100 years as the civil rights movement, it’s gonna it’s going to expand for a long period of time. We’re in it for the long haul. And you know my messages, raise your children well raise them to see justice in our, and compassion and empathy with our, with our neighbors and friends. So that was all I had to say.

1:55:23
All right, I just I was just very short and briefly I saw the video of George Floyd, I was disgusted and appalled. And the one thing that I keep I keep thinking to myself is, as a society, I What do you do to change the hearts of evil men, people who hate and, and Martin Luther King. I mean, the vote, equality, anti discrimination, he knew what he wanted to achieve legally. And I think a lot of the frustration we have now is what do you do to really Change the hearts of evil men. And so I think the best thing right now, I mean, one thing I know we can do is condemn it and be quite vocal. So I join all of you and condemning that. It’s just terrible as we look at the world we’re in right now. And I still believe that there are more good hearts than evil hearts. And so I prove that I’m wrong. I just pray that I’m right. So that said, I don’t see any other comments. City Manager, I’m sorry, Counselor Peck.

1:56:32
Thank you. I wasn’t going to say anything because I agree with all of you. But in in remembering what that video was that the murder was horrible. But what I really was frightened by was the look on the police officers face when he had his knee on the throat of Floyd. There was no empathy. There was no sympathy. There was no recognition in his face at all, that this was a human being no consciousness. That is the part that scares me about what is going on in our society. So I think that talking, talking talking about this, and educating is what we constantly need to do. And, you know, to Aaron’s point or mere mere pro Tim’s point, is that, yes, we do have a platform. I agree. But people need to hear what the leaders of the city think. Do we accept this? Do we not or whatever, which, which is not the message that we are getting from the national level? And I think for me, that is part of the biggest problem is that we we have more power on the local level, to actually talk to people rather than just giving statements. So thank all of you. I’m very proud of the statements we’ve made and I think that we will go out and hopefully bring some sense consciousness This awareness to this horrible problem we’ve got in our country.

1:58:04
Thanks, john. All right, Harold, you have anything to say? unmute Harold.

1:58:12
Two updates. Councilmember Martin gave one of them Johnny is working on that to bring the the

1:58:19
that item back

1:58:21
on short term rentals. Also, I know Karen and the group Matt are self and welcoming places group Matt. And particular focus was RVs. And that’s been prepared to bring back to you all have just so you know, we are seeing more issues and more significant issues. And so they wanted to bring, get that together. So that’ll probably be hitting. I’m going to say maybe late June, July. Karen’s also in her groups also working on stuff. So we’re trying to balance those two things, but it is on our radar and there’s I’ve got to get brief from the last slide.

1:59:02
Eugene,

1:59:05
no comments, man. Awesome.

1:59:08
Do we have a consensus motion to adjourn? Anyone opposed to a journey? Whoo. All right. I’m gonna I’m gonna go ahead and assume that’s the consensus vote unless I hear objection. All right, we are. We are adjourned. Thank you, everybody.

1:59:23
See you soon.