Video Description:
City Council Regular Session – September 14, 2021
Note: The following is the output of transcribing from a video recording. Although the transcription, which was done with software, is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or [software] transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the meeting, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
Read along below or follow along here: PT 1: https://otter.ai/u/NbfFCHPesRrOhNRCwaIhA4FhKS4 PT 2: https://otter.ai/u/otCxo6F_fVDpJC_0HH7i0XXn3-Y
Unknown Speaker 4:17
Test One, two Can you hear me We’re still alright let’s go ahead and start from 703 according to my wall
Unknown Speaker 10:01
So let’s go ahead and start with getting where we are. Let’s go ahead and call this meeting to order. Welcome to the city council regular session of September 14 2021. We go ahead and start with let’s go ahead and start with roll call.
Unknown Speaker 10:23
Mayor Bagley here councilmembers Christiansen Councilmember, double fairing here. Councilmember Martin. Here. Councilmember Peck. Here. Councilmember Rodriguez, Councilmember waters. Mary have a quorum.
Unknown Speaker 10:36
All right. So the pledge. I pledge States of America, and to the republic for which it stands,
Unknown Speaker 10:48
one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right. Let’s go ahead and remind the public, there’s only five people that have signed up. But you’ve got three minutes to say pretty much whatever you want. So prepare your prepare your time and we’ll move on to that in just a second. Approval of minutes of motion to approve the August 24 2021. regular session minutes. Okay, it’s been moved by Councilmember waters seconded by Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. All right, thank you very much, Mayor Pro Tem and Tim. All right, gender revisions and submission of documents and motions to direct the city manager to add agenda items to future agendas. My understanding is there’s plenty of people here that have things to say. And before we do that, I just want to make an announcement of all the people if anybody follows the news, or you know me, I hate the mask. But I’m wearing it because it’s the law. It’s the Boulder County has asked us to wear them. And so I’m setting an example. And I would ask that anybody in the audience would would do that as well. There is an exemption for those people who are who cannot medically tolerate a face mask. Obviously, on your best behavior, or your it’s your it’s your it. I mean, we can’t check, we’re not gonna check, but I would ask the people comply with the with the order. All right, let’s go ahead and go with. Let’s start with you, Councilmember double fairing. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 12:24
Thank you, Mayor. So, um, I don’t know how many folks gotten a call from our superintendent of savoring Valley schools now. So you did. Okay. So, and I had spoke to Harold, briefly about this, and Joanie as well, about the quiet zones. And so in, you know, as far as the relationship with the school, well, you know, how it affects the school district is the elementary school. Columbine Elementary. And so, you know, I know, a lot of it is out of our jurisdiction, what, you know, belongs to railroad, you know, regulations that they have to follow. But I would like to add to a future agenda item and probably, you know, Harold had suggested, and I like that the, the tip to look at, to get an update on the quiet zones. And really, I’d like to see, you know, what the timeline is for projects in the future, which what we could be looking for. So, folks, you know, in those neighborhoods in that area, and the school, you know, when they can start preparing for for changes.
Unknown Speaker 13:29
So, so, Mayor, if I can address that I’ve had other calls from council members on this as well. If you recall, he presented the C IP that he didn’t have a lot of time to digest it. Yeah. And so we’re gonna put a follow up tip on the 21st. And then staff is ready to to specifically present on that issue, and talk through it. So that’ll be next week.
Unknown Speaker 13:52
Okay, are your eyes so I’m okay with withdrawing my motion, you know, knowing that it’s going to be up for for a deeper discussion. And then I guess, you know, if we get questions, should we submit them to you prior to the 21st? That would be great, actually. Okay. So I’m sure that we’re on top of all the questions. Okay. So I’ll ask around. Thank you. All right. Councilmember waters. Thanks, Mayor
Unknown Speaker 14:19
Begley, this is really not emotion. It’s just an announcement kind of as a point of personal privilege, or just go ahead. Next Wednesday, the 22nd night and I think there are some city staff members who the reason I’m doing it now is not everybody’s aware. Next Wednesday or early childhood coalition is going to host an event that starts with breakfast, the governor is going to be here and make some comments about his agenda for early for childcare and early childhood education. There is a there’s a way to register for this event, if people are interested. There’s it’s also going to be live streamed. So if people don’t want to show up for whatever reasons, there’s an opportunity to to watch it. Listen. It’s Tuesday. It’s Wednesday morning, September 22. There’s a breakfast that starts at 715. But one doesn’t have to do that at eight o’clock comments will start will be in the, in the steward auditorium. If you want to attend, you do need to register, or to log in virtually. But I know there were some questions earlier today with staff about this. It’s on the it’s on the calendar for the museum. And as far as I know, we’re which we’re rolling forward with it in the governor will be here next Wednesday morning. But Thanks, Dr. Waters. All right. Councillor pack.
Unknown Speaker 15:36
Thank you, Mayor Bagley. I am going to move to postpone the rental license and inspection discussion until the first quarter of 2022, which is probably around March. So that’s my motion. I move that we postpone that
Unknown Speaker 15:57
it’s been Moved by Councillor pack consent, seconded by Councilmember Christiansen is there debate on this issue? Raise your hands if you want to discuss. I would
Unknown Speaker 16:09
just like to explain why I’m doing this. If that’s okay. I have been talking to our bipoc and Latino population. And I’ve learned a lot, a lot about what’s going on with our rentals, both from both sides of the issue. And I think it’s worth a healthy discussion by council to make sure that we do it right or do we do it at all. And we need, I think to dive deeper into the subject. And cuz there are issues on both sides. And I was very happy to have this discussion with the different populations. So it’s too soon to make any kind of a motion on this or a decision on it now. So that’s why I would like to postpone it.
Unknown Speaker 17:00
All right. Anybody else? Yes. Councillor waters on second? I said yes. All right. Councilmember Christiansen has it has said anything yet? And then it will go over here. Go ahead.
Unknown Speaker 17:13
Yes, I firmly believe that this that we need both licensing and inspections. I have talked to people for the last. My renting of places for 20 years, and I have been on both sides of this issue. And I see both sides of this issue. But if we are to be a town of 97,000 people, we need to actually have some data. And so I do think that this is something that we very, very much need in this town. However, it’s only six weeks until we’ll have a new council. And I don’t think that there is enough time to do credit to that. And then I think this is best decided by the next Council, rather than us trying to do a hasty and not well considered reading of this, and so um, yes, I think and I think this should be put off until there’s a new council when they’ve got their legs under them, and then they can decide whether to do this. But I am very much in favor of anything having to do with health and safety such as restaurants, places that where people live and any other issue having to do with the health and safety of Longmont citizens needs to have licenses and inspections just like restaurants. Mayor Pro Tem did you want to say something on this issue or no? I will defer. All right. Dr. Waters, you first. Hold on. All right.
Unknown Speaker 18:54
Thanks, we’re back. And it’ll help me on to vote on when I vote on this to know what we’re delaying. When this came up on a Tuesday night, we had the way it unfolded. As I recall, a motion was made to direct staff to bring an ordinance back to the council. There was no discussion about the problem we were trying to solve the scope of the problem, the range of solutions, we ought to consider the unintended consequences of what those options are. The actual costs of implementation. We had, this was this was in a virtual conversation or virtual meeting. I remember asking Susan Spaulding for her perspective. We had zero input from staff other than her response to my question, in spite of that a majority of this council gave direction to staff to bring an ordinance back, which didn’t make sense, then. It doesn’t make any more sense tonight. So if we’re going to have a serious conversation about whatever problem we’re trying to solve the range of options, whether or not ordinances are needed, what they cost, what the implications are. What are the alternatives, we ought to be Considering that’s a conversation, I’d be all over. But if it’s just delaying bringing an ordinance back, I’m gonna vote no, because I don’t think it ought to be an ordinance until we decide we need an ordinance. Mayor Pro Tem.
Unknown Speaker 20:20
Thank you, Mary Bagley, I think I appreciate the comments from both sides on this concept. And I hear logic in both sides. I would say that for the clarification, staff has already asked for an extension in the sense that they did not feel that the survey was satisfactory, as far as bringing data to the council concerning the subject of rental licensing, as well as also having spoken to various council members and city manager Herald dimming is not possible alternatives. And so to me, it’s a bit of chicken today egg, chicken in the egg concept in the sense that we could bring an ordinance and then work it or we could do the study session, example of process where we talked about it before the ordinance is brought our way. I think it’s some serious sausage making, if you will. And I don’t see any reason that this will even come back to council based on the fact that staff has already requested a delay to gather more information until, you know, a date certain. And so I’d like to hear from staff as far as the proposed timeline, based on their request for delay. For further information gathering. Gold once once I once again vaguely Councilmember, is that mic on?
Unknown Speaker 22:07
So I guess the the other film on one second, let me refer to hold on one sec. One second. One. All right. Go ahead, sir.
Unknown Speaker 22:44
So mayor, I think I’ll jump in on this. And I think when the motion was made, there was some as part of that is to bring it back as quickly as possible. So at that point, that was the timeframe that we were working on in terms of trying to move through this very quickly to answer your question. And so that that’s sort of the pace we’ve been on recently, is trying to bring it back as quickly as we possibly possibly can to the council. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 23:11
I will go back to in just a second. Councillor pack. Councilman Martin. Well, sorry.
Unknown Speaker 23:17
I did ask for a concept of a timeline.
Unknown Speaker 23:21
Mayor Bagley, Vice Mayor Rodriguez, Glen vanderwagen. Planning director. So yes, we did go back out to get some additional research because we did hear from several folks that thought we cut it off kind of quickly. We extended it through almost to the end of this month. And we are on a timeline. We have a draft. We were looking at kind of the zero review in like mid October for first presentation to Council.
Unknown Speaker 23:52
And that would be at a study session. Is that correct? Okay, that helps inform how I will vote on the subject. Thank you. All right, Councilman Martin. Thank you, Mayor Begley.
Unknown Speaker 24:09
It seemed like until just now that we were more talking about the terms under which it would come back after a delay than whether there should be a delay. And I’ve also been talking to a number of stakeholders in this matter. I had two objectives in voting to consider an ordinance. And it’s been proposed to me that both of those objectives could be more cheaply and less contentiously met other ways than an ordinance ordinance. And so, I would like to make sure that it comes back in such a way that we’d that our debate is structured so that those alternatives could be considered.
Unknown Speaker 24:59
Alright, I guess that I’ve only seen this before you say what you’re gonna say counselor pack because I have a request. They always say that they, that great athletes and great players want the ball. I want to deal with the issue now, which is why I’m gonna push it off because I don’t want to deal with it before November. But the I guess my question, is it okay, so Councillor Christiansen will be gone. Right? I will be gone. Mayor Pro Tem, I hope you’re not gone. But it’s possible you’re gone. Councilmember waters and waters and Councilmember pack. One or neither of them might be your mayor. But you’ll but they’ll both be here. And Dr. Waters has expressed some concern about the issue in general. And then Councilmember devil fairing. She has two more years. She’ll be here, of course, as well as Marcia Martin, you’re running again, but have no, you know, opponent so to speak. So I guess what I’d ask is, can we can we just table it? And then which whoever’s here can bring it back the next council? Because I don’t think we have a majority of people who will be here to decide so to speak, we’re in favor of the motion anyway. But that way, it’s just we’re not setting the table for a new council. And if you’re here, Councilmember Pac, you can always bring it up, then that’s what I’d request. Okay, go ahead. customer.
Unknown Speaker 26:17
Thank you. So first of all, I have to answer Councilman waters, the original motion was for staff to find out the cost of inspectors, what would it cost the city to have enough inspectors to do this? That was the original motion. The motion I made tonight is not about an ordinance. It is about a discussion, I actually said to postpone the rental license and inspection discussion until the end of the first quarter. So that does answer what you are saying I did not ask for an ordinance. So we can do it a couple of ways we can do it in a special session, we can do it at a steady session. But I do think that the, for my from my perspective, it’s opened up a lot of questions from the people that I’ve been talking to that have issues on both sides. And I’ve been hearing it for for six years, though it isn’t this isn’t something new at all. It’s just the something. It’s just what has not been brought to council before. So that was my that was my motion to have a discussion council to have it. So how we do that, I think we should do it. We should leave it until the end of first quarter. Until we do have a new counsel until give staff time to figure it out. I think it’s fine. If If Glenn would like to bring back what he’s researched now, but not to make a decision upon that information. But Glenn, if you want to hold off, it’s fine with me too, or, and that that’s what the vote is for? Is to postpone this, but I do want to have that discussion. So with that I call the vote. All right.
Unknown Speaker 28:17
So the I guess, Mike, so they want to repeat the motion, you want to want to restate your motion.
Unknown Speaker 28:28
So my motion was moved to postpone the rental license and in special inspection discussion until the end of the first quarter of 2022.
Unknown Speaker 28:39
Would you say until at least the end of the first quarter?
Unknown Speaker 28:44
No, because I know what happens when you table things they they get lost in the ether and they never come back. So no, I want this emotion to stand.
Unknown Speaker 28:54
Alright, I’m gonna vote against that only because I think it’s inappropriate to be setting up things for the next Council. But let’s go ahead and vote. Alright. Or did somebody sneak in? Okay, nope. Let’s go ahead and vote. Let’s go ahead and get the get the voting tabulation up. Actually, I’ll go ahead and vote for it. We’ll
Unknown Speaker 29:19
get it on.
Unknown Speaker 29:21
All right. We’re still waiting on counselor Christiansen? I’d say it’s a nail biter here. All right. What’s the what’s the Voting Result here? Yeah, I don’t know. I think so. It’s all four. All right. The vote carries unanimously. All right. Good luck to the next council dealing with that issue. All right. Councilmember Rodriguez.
Unknown Speaker 29:50
Thank you, Mayor Bagley. My motion is to add an agenda item to direct staff to bring four The proposal to impose a historic overlay district over the historic East Side neighborhood in historic West Side neighborhoods in the city of Longmont.
Unknown Speaker 30:13
All right. It’s been moved and seconded. The motion was made by Councilman Rodriguez and seconded by Councillor pack. Councillor Martin,
Unknown Speaker 30:24
I would like to ask the mayor Pro Tem what the objective, the objective of doing so would be.
Unknown Speaker 30:38
In essence, the objective is that with the recent zoning changes, based on the land development code update, approximately three years ago, we removed some protections from the historic neighborhoods of Longmont that would allow for properties to be modified and or replaced by homes that do not contribute to the historic nature of each neighborhood both on the west side and East Side. The East Side neighborhood has a dearth of historic properties. The West Side also does, but has also experienced more change. And so I think it’s important that we maintain the current stock of historic properties, as well as making sure that any modifications fit the character of the neighborhood. Because as we celebrate the 100 and 50th anniversary of the city of Longmont, it becomes more and more important that we maintain the character of the orange nation of the city. And if we continue to allow for properties to be modified in such a way that we start to see, for instance, in certain neighborhoods in North Denver, you’ll see examples where these properties are being scraped, and very, very nice and expensive homes built but do not maintain the integrity or the spirit of how the city was built. And so that is the impetus of the motion. answer your question, Councillor Martin. All right. So Councillor Christiansen
Unknown Speaker 32:50
Thank you, Mayor Bagley. I would also like to point out that this is not something new, this is something that they had removed, they want to add. And it was removed when we change the land code. And they were told that it would be restored. But it hasn’t been. I mean, it’s I was told that it would be restored. And it has not been. So they’re only asking to have restored what they used to have. And they were told by our government that would be restored. And these houses on both sides of this. As Councilman Rodriguez pointed out, I have a friend who lives in North Denver where she has a beautiful Victorian there were several of them. But she’s surrounded by people who live in very expensive condos that are completely alien to the neighborhood and do not have enough parking. So it’s it affects the entire community, the entire neighborhood when you don’t protect classic homes that actually are very, I think very important to the character of long line and they will not be built again. And if we don’t protect them, they will be scraped because a regular person trying to buy a house can never compete with an investor who just wants to scrape it and put up something to maximize their income. And I don’t begrudge them that but they don’t get to destroy community to do so. dark waters.
Unknown Speaker 34:31
Thanks for Begley exit my, I think this favorite the idea of the production, but I’m just curious. I know, Glenn, if you’re the respondent to this or not, it would just help for me to know when I vote yes on this, what the implications are, what should we know from a planning perspective, just so we don’t get surprised by that later. We don’t get across purposes with other work that we’ve asked you to do because we’ve asked you to do a lot. I’m glad that we just delayed one of those things. There are other things. So what are the implications of this?
Unknown Speaker 35:05
Mayor Bagley council member waters, we actually are planning on making this change. It’s it’s in your proposed budget, we are asking for some funding to bring in a professional. And our idea is to include all the historic districts, and put some of those guidelines back in place, and maybe more appropriate guidelines as well. I’ve read the previous ones there. There’s a lot of room to move within there. So I think we could propose something better,
Unknown Speaker 35:35
without pinning you down on timeframes. What do you what would you with a lot of degrees of freedom? What are you envisioning it the likely timeframe for bringing something back so we don’t pester you I can put it in my tickler list and ask Glenn in orange or whatever?
Unknown Speaker 35:51
Well, actually, I would like to present all our ordinances that we’re proposing for change at your work session, that kind of looking at October 5, okay. In this case, because the funding has to come through with a budget, we’re talking about, you know, starting first quarter of next year. Alright. And Mayor Pro Tem, was that kind of consistent with your agenda. Thanks. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 36:16
So I want to be clear, we will present everything he’s planning to bring forward to you on the fifth, but then this will start in 2022, when the new budget.
Unknown Speaker 36:27
And I guess the one thing I’d also ask, is the mayor putting it on the agenda with this is the issue of ad use. How is the ad you how when we change the land code, how is that impacting historic district? So I mean, I’d like to revisit that if you don’t mind. All right. Sure. And that’ll be the fifth of October. Could can’t wait. Thank You bet. All right. There’s a motion on the on the floor. Let’s vote. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. All right, Motion carries unanimously. All right. Let’s go ahead. Anybody else? Councillor Christiansen?
Unknown Speaker 37:06
Yes. Just a minute I have to. Yes. And I have asked several times for us to consider looking at our rules of procedure, I’ve asked for us to look at that city charter that hasn’t happened. So I am suggesting that we add six sentences to clarify the rules of procedure. And each one of you has received this a copy of this today. And the newspaper has received a copy of this, but I’m going to read it aloud for the people here. And this is just to clarify our form of government and guide us in making our decisions are the rules of procedure. The city of Longmont has a council city manager form of government as chosen by the residents of Longmont many decades ago. Under this form of government, the elected city council sets the policies for the operation of the Longmont government. The administrative responsibility of the city rests with the city manager who is appointed by the City Council. The mayor is a voting member of council chair or city council meetings, ceremonial head of the city and has the authority to sign off on legal documents that previously have been approved for the majority of city council. The mayor may only act with the consent of the majority of city council after approval and a public meeting or an executive session. As for the city charter, no member of city council may interfere with the administrative authority of the city manager, the city attorney or the municipal judge. I think this is very simple. It’s six sentences. And all the little things that are scattered throughout the rules of procedure and the city charter are scattered and some of them are quite vague. This is just one cohesive statement saying this is our form of government. These are the rules we abide by. And I would move that we add this to the agenda to vote on first and second hearing. Because it’s an amendment to the rules of procedure. As for rule number 21, we have to bring it forth. I would like it to be since it’s a very simple thing to be brought forth as soon as possible. So we can vote for it either yay or nay.
Unknown Speaker 39:35
And I’m going to roll the motion out of order. We’ve actually had this discussion before and we voted it down. We didn’t know this exact discussion, but we made the we made the discussion, or we have the discussion about revisiting this exact topic. And we can we can it’s inappropriate to keep bringing back once you’ve either made a motion and died for lack of a second or has been voted down. So no chairs, chairs made a decision. But guess what, November 8 of next year, people can go nuts and do whatever they want. So let’s have an appeal. I don’t know, the court appeal this. Alright, we’re gonna move on, let’s go ahead and go on to city manager’s report update on COVID-19.
Unknown Speaker 40:24
Mayor Council, instead of the normal presentation, I know there were some data issues that were occurring between the state and the county system. And so I’m gonna actually utilize the website which had the most up to date information on this, as, as you normally see, this is really what it looks like in terms of the number of Boulder County residents were needed, nearly reporting is testing positive for COVID. And you can see we, we hit a peak peak, and we’re continuing looks like we’re trending down. But as we were earlier on in the COVID. world, I think we’re all waiting to see what’s coming in the next few days. This actually is a look at the positivity rate in terms of what we’re seeing. So that’s, you know, 4.5%. Again, if you look at where we were in June, I think that really kind of talks about or shows you what was happening within our all of our communities. And the good news about this graph, if you remember this graph, the last time we were in the council chambers, and I showed you this information, a lot of these things are still moving up. And you’re starting to see those come down. Now what’s interesting, if you remember, we were talking a lot about the cases that we were seeing in younger children. One of the things that they did talk about in the admin meeting today, and I got some additional information is, you know, really, when we look at the performance of Boulder Valley School District in the st. Green Valley School District, it’s doing really well compared to many of the school districts that that haven’t put in other restrictions. And so they are seen in some cases, outbreaks and other school districts. In the case numbers tend to be pretty low in Boulder County. And I think that’s attributable to the to how the both school districts approach this situation. Again, the seven day average, this is a good thing. As we continue to see this, this, as we see this trending down, we hope we stay in this direction. And then unfortunately, we have seen more deaths recently as we have been coming as moving forward when you look at the breakdown of the cases. You know, this is an interesting one to look at in terms of Longmont, so we were 24, upwards of 37. Now we’re 41% of the cases in the county. And this is a breakdown by city in terms of. And again, I really highlight this and every time I say this, I say this is a work of the cultural brokers, if you remember where we were in terms of the over representation of our Hispanic and Latin Latin x population in this. And where we are now that’s it. That’s a lot of work that has been done by a lot of people to really focus on conversations, and work with different population sets. At the end of the day, I think this is what everyone’s watching. And you can see that where we were from a hospital perspective. And what that looks like, the light pink line is the Denver Metro area. boulder is the red line. boulder always tends to perform better than the metro area and most of the counties. And but we can see where you know, there’s this uptick where it’s bouncing around. But if you remember when the governor said his orders, you know, this was the line that they established, where they said, if we crossed this will look at new orders. And let me do this again, just refresh. And what’s interesting is is how quickly the hospital usage was moving in the broader metro area. And so that’s what everybody’s been looking at in terms of taking actions. You know, what was interesting is, different counties are doing different things, obviously, the maskeen order in Boulder County, I know that Denver has been more aggressive in terms of requiring vaccines for other employers. And so you’re seeing different approaches by different counties as we move forward. I think there’s one other county in Colorado that has implemented the masking requirement and that was the question that I had earlier. And so we’ll continue to let you all know what’s happening in other counties. The other thing that we’re watching, and you may remember this, and I’ve yet to see how I drive this, this is our wastewater
Unknown Speaker 44:34
work that we’ve been doing in our wastewater system. And you can see where we were in June and then in terms of the numbers that we were starting to see, as we were moving forward, you can see how this continued to trend upward. And then you can see how the case is moving along with this. The data analysis that Roberto and his group and is really been doing on this is really starting to get pretty fine tuned and so we Talking about the leading net indicator. So you can obviously see at this point, this is where when we were seeing the case numbers, and what we were seeing in the wastewater data, it was really kind of concerning to us now it’s dropped. But when you look at this, it, you know, it’s looks like it may start trending upward again. And so we know that what when we see these high points here, what we’re going to see what we’re going to tend to see in terms of cases coming at us within a week or so. So we’re still paying a lot of attention to the wastewater data. The wastewater data is also confirming what we’re seeing in the testing results that most of the cases actually have COVID are now the Delta variant here. The other thing that I’m starting to pay attention to and I think our partners at the county health department is some is the and I don’t know if it’s mu, or emu, or whatever it is. But I know there’s a lot of attention placed on that in terms of what is that really going to mean, and what’s going to happen there, again, kind of talking about what we’re seeing, we are fortunate to be in Colorado in terms of our hospital capacity, I have seen and I have friends and relatives in other states that it is a much different experience in terms of if they need medical treatment. And so while our hospital usage is going up, it’s not they’re not seeing this, we’re not seeing the same thing here in Colorado that people I know are experiencing in other states. And I think that’s what’s our focus right now, you heard me say this manage hospital capacity is the big thing that I think everyone’s talking about that’s been at the forefront of the conversation from the beginning. Be happy to answer any questions. Dr. Waters?
Unknown Speaker 46:51
Yeah, just stay on that for just a moment here. When we first saw these slides, and I think probably slide, whatever, second or third from the end, the 14 day average for hospitalizations. The blue line, I think, was then in probably still is number of ICU beds, at least as one measure of capacity. There probably were some other there’s some other components in that correct. But with what’s what we think we understand about staffing, I’m not certain I mean, that’s how I mean it’s not irrelevant. But it’s it’s probably not the leading indicator or its subordinate to staff numbers and capacity. So, because you and I have this conversation I know not too long ago. And I know and I think it’s true in both of our hospitals, that it’s not just numbers of beds, it’s the numbers of people correct to treat. Would you have any, if what we saw was beds? Do you have any information on capacity on staffing and in staff capacity? Or
Unknown Speaker 47:51
no, I don’t have anything in a in a graphical format like this, what I can tell you is working with our public safety team, you know, a couple of weeks ago, you know, when I see things like emergency rooms, or going on diversion from or firing emails or spots, when we started seeing that asking questions that was actually probably driven by staffing issue. And so I mentioned this to council before, I think there’s two things now coming into play in all of these conversations, beds. But then staffing is a component for many of our medical systems. While nationwide everyone’s facing this crisis. But but we’re seeing it locally. And that’s when we tend to see folks go on diversion, because they just can’t absorb any input coming into their emergency rooms. And that is a staffing issue in most cases.
Unknown Speaker 48:40
So my concern is that whether it’s people in the room tonight, or you know, whoever’s watching the livestream, or watching this later, looks at that graph, it looks like numbers are going down. And you know, in Boulder County, we have plenty of capacity because of beds. That doesn’t really tell the story of where aware we are and I just think it’s important for all of us to understand what’s what’s that relationship between what we saw and the actual ability to treat people because of what’s happened or not with staff capacity or staffing numbers.
Unknown Speaker 49:17
Yeah, and I think we’ll so if you remember the slide deck that we normally get gets a little more granular in that it does not have the staffing component, but I can reach out to Tina and Lonnie and get a sense of what’s happening from staffing.
Unknown Speaker 49:31
I just think that’s a really important bit of additional information. Okay, we’ll have that. We’ll bring it back. council or Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez, thank you very rapidly.
Unknown Speaker 49:45
As as we know, the the Delta variant is more contagious and spreads faster than the original variant. So my question is kind of a critical mass question in the sense that as fast as the rate of spread is For the Delta variant, do we have any kind of projection that say, within a certain number of months, all the unvaccinated people will have contracted COVID at one point or another? As you know, there were certain countries that were kind of banking on that concept of herd immunity. And considering the variant is that much more, you know, spreadable, if you will, do, we actually see a timeframe where everybody’s either gonna get it or they’re vaccinated, or the breakthrough cases included, where there will be a sense of herd immunity in that concept, have any of the epidemiologists through either Boulder County public health or CDP he talked about that concept.
Unknown Speaker 50:52
I have not been made aware of that actually, at this point, I would be in the deep end of the pool on this one and way outside of my expertise. But what I can do is, is work with our county health department and see if they have anything or we also have some connections into some of the larger medical systems that they have.
Unknown Speaker 51:11
Because I’m just assuming that we probably reached a level where those who are willing to be vaccinated have been vaccinated and those who are unwilling to be vaccinated are not going to, unless forced, which I don’t think, you know, many people are really for regardless of what side of the argument you’re on. And so knowing that there’s a certain amount of immunity, possessed by those who have been infected and recovered, I just feel that we’re probably getting to a point where we might be able to get that information, where we see how many folks have or how close we are to herd immunity, if you will.
Unknown Speaker 51:52
Yeah, we’ll look into it. Bring have someone come back.
Unknown Speaker 51:55
Alright. Thanks for the update, Harold. All right. Let’s go on to special report. I’m sorry. Yeah, let’s go on to special reports and presentations and update on the on the evaluation of rewind, and community restorative justice.
Unknown Speaker 52:28
Let’s see here. Is that the PDF? PDF? Perfect. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think I can use the down. Good evening Mayor Bagley and members of Long Island City Council. I’m Christina Pacheco Children, Youth and Families division manager in the community service department. Tonight, we’re here to provide an overview of the key findings from of the rewind and CRJ evaluation cre completed by the Omni Institute. We have Tara Johnson, Chief of municipal probation, and john Garcia, school resource officer Sergeant from public safety. I’m going to cover the information for the presentation and we’ll all be available after to answer any questions about our collaborative work together.
Unknown Speaker 53:47
We want to provide an overview of omnis work, our response to the recommendations and provide a picture of our path forward. We’ll start with omnis approach, omnis researchers work to understand program design and identify the process flow for rewind and CRJ. They identified each of the respective programs, strengths and areas for improvement. The recommendations were based on review of documentation, available data, interviews with staff, and interviews with stakeholders. With regards to community restorative dust, Justice CRJ, some of the specific recommendations were around program policies and protocols and program data. program data and how it how it was collected. With regards to rewind, rebuilding expectations and walking into new directions, some of the program specific recommendations were to really look at closer collaboration collaboration with police officers with public safety. really look at it Examine the referral process and create a system for additional data tracking. With regards to how we address the recommendations in the report, we wanted to cover that as well. Over over the last six months, what we have been doing what courts and probation and children youth and families have been doing is working with Sergeant Garcia to really refine and create a process where youth can be referred into the program without without a municipal summons. In addition, we want to continue to refine that feedback loop and give officers the referring officers information about progress on those cases. We also have looked at our continuum of services, and really align them from prevention to intervention. So if we have a youth come in without a summons, that gives us really the opportunity to do some prevention work to to really create that speed bump, if you will. So they don’t, they don’t move forward in in the system, if they come into the program with a summons, that gives us the opportunity to do prevention. We also have done some alignment on our assessment, much in the same way from doing a quick screener, if somebody comes in for a prevention case, for example, and really look at that, look at the needs at that point to kind of a more involved or a longer assessment, if those needs necessitate that. We, as far as role identification, we want to we are a multidisciplinary team. And we really want to leverage that and make sure that it’s no one person making making a decision on on how a youth is going to move forward in the system. It’s not it’s not public safety, it’s not probation, it’s not children, youth and families, or CRJ. Making that making that decision. It really is a team approach, working with the family to really move that youth help them move in a in a positive direction. We also really want to leverage our technology resources, make the referrals automated, make them make them easy, make it easy for officers, even make it easy for community members to refer just generally into children, youth and families for our services. Just even apart from this. We have created a Smartsheet referral process where it’s one point of contact for the officer. And referrals follow. Follow that process, just so it’s not confusing, easy to do. And services get implemented, implemented quickly. The other the other recommendation made in the report was to have facilitated facilitated discussions between rewind and CRJ. Omni recognize that collaboration really opte collaboration really optimizes our resources, and ultimately meets the youths needs in a better way. Each program benefits the city of Longmont, offenders, victims and community in complimentary ways. So as when we work as a team, we make more of an impact. We have a strong commitment to addressing needs without really inadvertently placing the youth in the deep end of the system. We want to be able to
Unknown Speaker 59:06
really get them at that prevention level. That is really that’s really the goal here. And to continue with that. We want to continue facilitated discussions between city of Longmont staff CRJ staff in order to move forward. So for the future. We have a new leadership within CRJ with chalene young Onyango is our new executive director and has made the commitment to move forward in this collaboration with us and we’re very excited about that. We really want to continue to leverage the strengths of this multidisciplinary team. We will be having some facilitated discussions to move that forward in early early January 2022. And of course, continue to evaluate our data and our systems and then make adjustments along the way as we as we see, fit. And the goal is always to ensure equitable services to all of the youth and families that we that we serve. So with that, that concludes the presentation that we have the overview. And we’re all here to answer questions if there are any. Councilmember Naugle fairing Thank you, man.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:29
So thank you for the presentation, I appreciate the the work that you’re you’re doing with a, you know, just kind of taking that approach of de railing that school to prison pipeline trajectory for a lot of our kids. For several years, I’ve in the work that I’ve done with the Colorado Education Association, and the ethnic minority Advisory Council is we were trying to collect data on, you know, the, the different ethnic minority groups that were being referred to, to services, restorative justice, rewind or probation. And, you know, it was it was very difficult, because, you know, just a lot of, you know, personal rights, you know, we can that those are, that’s private information, but some, like, as far as numbers and looking at demographics, you know, we really wanted to, to make sure that, sir, you know, that, that there aren’t certain groups that are being targeted based on poverty or ethnicity. So, you know, I guess you’re Are you kind of seen throughout the board? Is it just kind of, kind of in relation to, to what our community demographics, is it very similar? Is that different? Is it skewed? And how has that been addressed?
Unknown Speaker 1:01:49
Mayor Bagley, Councilmember Dalgo fairing I know, Sergeant Garcia has some data to share as well. We do. Also just overall track information on racial and ethnic disparities. And you want to talk about the data that you have weakened? Okay, answered your question. Okay. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:14
All right. I guess the I guess my my question is, do you have a presentation as well, Officer, or just go ahead, sorry. So we just
Unknown Speaker 1:02:24
created a new data collection system. Based off kind of the the presentation that I gave earlier in the year. You know, I recognize that the way we were collecting data at that current time, because I just came into the unit in January, just wasn’t, wasn’t sufficient. And so we just created a new data collection system that we’ve implemented at the start of the school year. So we’re very early into it. With that, it, it’s going to track all the contacts, pretty much that we’re having with with students on a daily basis. So positive contacts, native contacts, but again, also a lot of the data that you were questioning there as far as just the demographic so that I get that data on a daily basis. And so I can provide that to you all, at any time that you really want. Okay. And so but yes, but kind of, like Christina was talking about here is, one thing we’re trying to do, that we’re moving forward with, with the program that she mentioned, is to create a pre file system and a one point of entry. And so that every kid gets the same opportunity. I mean, obviously, there’s certain laws where we’re mandated to make arrests or that type of thing. But for the most part, trying to simplify it to where every kid gets the same opportunity towards pre file, and there’s one point of entry and the assessment team will will kind of figure out work together. So working in silos kind of like we were before, but working together as a unit. That includes RJ that includes public safety that includes child Youth and Family Services, and probation throughout what’s what’s best for this kid.
Unknown Speaker 1:04:03
That’s great. I’m glad to hear that you’re looking more at the holistic the whole view of the child. We know one of the other things, too, you know, we think about children from different ethnicities, different cultures, backgrounds, there’s a whole different sense of justice. So how they view what is just a lot of the kids, you know, that I’ve had in years, you know, now 20 years in the profession, that he so a lot of conflicts that would happen in the classroom, it was because of the child felt, you know, the action wasn’t just or the the consequence wasn’t just into what their mindset was. So, you know, just having folks that are, you know, looking at the child holistically, culturally responsive to, you know, to the individual as well as students with disabilities, you know, who are of high functioning but seem to kind of get in trouble a lot. Sure. I have some first connection with that one. But so, you know, are you finding that that is a challenge? Are you? Do you feel like with the recommendations or with how you’ve streamlined the system that that is addressing some of those conflicts that have happened in the past with maybe students with children with disabilities who are in the program that are kind of struggling? Sure through?
Unknown Speaker 1:05:22
Yeah, and we hope so we haven’t implemented this program quite yet. Okay, so we’re aiming for the start of January. At least that’s my, my hope. And so, that’s our goal. But at this point, the program hasn’t been implemented yet, because we’re going to, it’s not just going to be for school resource officers, this would be department wide,
Unknown Speaker 1:05:42
department wide, okay. And, and primarily, primarily 18. And younger.
Unknown Speaker 1:05:48
If I can jump in, I think one of the things that. And so we went through this evaluation to peers were we’re going learn from what we’re doing, and then what do we need to do to improve on that move forward? And the thing that I’ll draw your attention to is one of the first things is data collection? Because I think that was one of the biggest challenges in this. And that was, what are you collecting? How are you collecting it? And what does it mean? In in some cases, you could see, it was hard to tell where we’ve seen over representation where we’re seeing underrepresentation and what I was going to say to you, in this case, what it’s almost a flipping of that of we want everybody regardless of their socio economic, ethnic, whatever it is to have access to the service. And so we actually want more people engaged in it. It is we’re looking forward to the future. But it’s also understanding when a case comes in, where does the case go? How do they, you know, and who takes it and what’s the result, because you almost have to understand the front end of the cases. And then where they go to evaluate. And I think that was part of the problem and the data collection is get a lot of cases, and then a few went here, and if you went here, but what does that mean to the whole. And I think that’s what we’re hoping to refine as we continue moving to the floor. And it’s
Unknown Speaker 1:07:14
I’m sorry, go ahead in time before we implement this program, again, with the new data collection system that dsos are doing, we are tracking that data specifically for school resource officer. So who gets referred Where? So you have that data? Okay,
Unknown Speaker 1:07:30
the other piece that I would add is part of the, you know, program design that, you know, that Tara and I have been working on for several years now also includes a staff training component, to make sure that assessments are being conducted in a way that maintains fidelity that to the model and ensures equitable services. And I think that speaks to some of what you were talking about, as far as working with youth that may have historically been over represented in the system just even nationwide, we know that youth with mental health issues, youth of color tend to be over represented in the system. And so we want to make sure that that we have training that addresses that. The other part that I will add is that the staff that work as providing doing the service provision in this in this program, are bilingual, bicultural, and or have been our from Longmont born and raised in Longmont. So I think that makes a big difference in the connection with youth and families and really creates a successful successful framework. And then where so once they leave the program, so once the woods, they’ve wrapped up, are there any services or opportunities where there’s they still like follow up with the families or connect or connect them with other services? You know, I know that they’re, you know, as far as family therapy, and yes, we continue to do that through children, youth and families will have opportunities and we actually have a grant through the Colorado Health Foundation that has a group of advisors that that help us and figure out how we can best support youth in the program and kind of that aftercare piece of things is a piece of that. And we do have many youth that say I don’t want this to to end and we say well, this can end but these are the other ways that you can, you can continue to be involved. Okay, great. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:45
I guess I guess I just have a few comments to make. And then First of all, thank you for your work. And I guess the I guess the I don’t know, I know you Christina but I don’t know you to find folks and it sounds like you’re doing great work. I was the one who originally shared a concern about how well probation and restorative justice were working together. And my request came as a result of many discussions with then chief butler. This this political things a hobby, but I work with a lot of juvenile youth who are in the system, I am of the opinion that no child pretty much regardless of the crime should be given up on and thrown in jail, I think 100% of our children, the fact that their children, even if it seems like it’s horrendous crime, need to be loved and rehabilitated, you know, and so, um, my concern, my concern, then was that probation was kind of just running the show. And restorative justice is a very specific type of treatment. Right? You can say restorative justice, but at the end of the day, if you’re not doing what is the meaning of restorative justice, even if we do other things and call it restorative justice, it’s not restorative justice. And I’ve only got two months left. And I know that. But I’m concerned that, for example, I’m still concerned, I still have the same concerns. And so I mean, I’m not going to make a motion. I’m not going to yell I’m not going to accuse. But it concerns me that restorative justice isn’t here. Now. What I mean by that is that, Mike, when I am concerned that probation is calling the shots, incriminate, the criminal justice system is not designed to rehabilitate children. I see it time and time again. They take children, they take drugs, they take adults. And at the end of the day, once the judge in once that child is out of the system, there’s no ongoing rehabilitation, they tend to relapse, they tend to get lost. And so and so I’m just pointing out that when I asked for this report, it was a hope that probation restorative justice would be able to come together. But when I say CRJ commitment to move forward in collaboration with new leadership, when I don’t see him here, when I hear a report from probation in the city, Mike, my concerns this was a great political answer. Right? My concern is still there. Our children are stunning. I know that there’s no such you said there’s no summons. But at the end of the day, it’s the police department, and they get the decision whether or not they can issue a summons. Right, you don’t have to issue a summons, unless it’s domestic violence.
Unknown Speaker 1:12:33
So the the way, sorry, the the way the way this would go. And I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds on it. But even for even for felony charges, we could use this program. And so if we had probable cause that wasn’t mandatory arrest, and the officer still have the discretion for a warning, obviously, as always, because we don’t want to inadvertently throw people into the system. But how this would work is they have probable cause for a crime. They would give the the referral into the program. And then the assessment team, which includes RJ law enforcement, rewind and probation together would collectively decide what’s what what the what interventions or diversions of this does this juvenile need. I can’t imagine anybody if RJ said, Hey, we want to see this case, for this reasons. Anybody on the board would absolutely say no to that. So we’re huge believer, RJ was invited to this chalene had some already scheduled confliction with it. And so she wasn’t able to make it. I’m not sure if they were trying to send something from their staff or not. But they were invited to this. And so this again, this is a talk. I came in after the fact after the Omni stuff. And so and that was kind of my thing is alright, how do we move this? How do we start moving forward from from this and I wasn’t together. And
Unknown Speaker 1:13:56
I’m not accusing anybody. I’m just saying that probation operates with coercive power, do this or else restorative justice is referent power. We love you. We’re gonna get are your friends and community together and love on you. Right. And so I just want to make sure that as you’re moving forward, that at least I expressed my hope that it sounds like it, that that’s the way it’s going. But that’s all that’s all I’m saying.
Unknown Speaker 1:14:21
Absolutely. And, and I can appreciate that. I’ve been with the city for 25 years now, in my role as chief for five years. And when I took over as chief for our department, that was the main goal is how do we change how we are addressing individuals in the system, youth and adults? How are we going to change and become more of an agency that not only has accountability and public safety at the forefront, but also how can we provide services so that our community is better as a whole. And I think we’ve done a good job of that. I would invite any of you to come down anytime. I have especially invite you to come down and see our room. Wind orientations and how that work. We’ve been doing rewind for three plus years now, I can count on one hand, how many juveniles have opted out and did not want to do it. Probably on the other hand, I could count the number of kiddos that have ended up on probation. So they’re definitely going a different route, they’re not going that traditional predation route. It’s a very different feel. I know that a lot of people have experienced on that kind of deeper end, with the 20th, judicial, and that level of predation, what that looks like, municipal predation is a whole different beast. And I say that in a good way, we are able to do things differently. And we’re able to provide a lot more mentoring and partnership, and trying to be a place that people can come and get help and services. And I think we’re I think we’re doing that. And so like I said, I would invite any of you to come down to some of the realigned orientations see what they look like, see for yourself, the reception that we’re getting, I’ve been here long enough now to see generations of families. And that is unfortunate, we’re trying to stop that. And to see families come in, that are no parents. And they come in and they’re not happy to be there. And they’ve had bad experiences, and to have them leave. And they’re hugging and saying thank you so much. And they’re coming back to see us with they have no reason to come back and they’re coming back, just to say hi, and to say, hey, look, I graduated. Or, Hey, I got into college. And that, to me, that’s a good sign of, of people feeling that they matter. And that they want to show us that they are being successful. And so, on that note, I don’t have any other questions. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 1:16:44
I would say also, in addition to just add a piece of this through this process and this framework, we anticipate that more individuals will actually receive restorative justice. Absolutely.
Unknown Speaker 1:16:56
So I guess my question is, I mean, the real concern for me is in a kid who gets some municipal infraction. Right, Mike? And so my concern is there a county or district court level, is municipal probation and the way that restorative justice is working. You’re saying, which I’d love to hear, the police department has the option to divert those kids from prosecution with the DA and get them into restorative.
Unknown Speaker 1:17:23
That’s what this process is going to allow us to do good. Be able to see a larger, a larger amount of summonses, that would have been been a juvenile court referral, or an arrest, it’s going to be able to come through us through a simple paper referral.
Unknown Speaker 1:17:39
Cool. And I think, to your point on this, and hold yourself on this, if we do it right in rewind goes where we want it to, you don’t have a probation department, you have a rewind department, right. And so you’re completely moved. So the goal is, anytime we do this, is to move from here to here. Okay,
Unknown Speaker 1:17:59
cool. Good. Sounds like we’re all on the same page, then. Councilmember waters?
Unknown Speaker 1:18:06
Well, hold on.
Unknown Speaker 1:18:09
Because her waters thanks, me, we I just did the NAT about the substance, but about the process. It’s fun to hear what what you’re sharing. And I assume that some of what you’ve described as process and protocol going forward reporting formats and, and data collection protocols, and the kind of data you’re collecting is a result of bringing in the evaluation team that you brought in? How much of what you’ve just described, would you be proceeding with into 2022, we’re not for the external evaluator to come in, take a look, provide the kind of insights and feedback that you received?
Unknown Speaker 1:18:48
Well, I can speak for us, Christina, and I, and john, we all have a very healthy respect for restorative justice, and the effects that it can have. And so even if this hadn’t have come through, we were all exploring how can we then train our own staff to provide restorative justice in the right way? Not just a restorative conversation, but true restorative justice. So we were moving forward towards that goal. I think that the Omni report, though, did just kind of give that, that support of like, together, you guys are better. It’s it’s a much more productive process. If we’re all working together.
Unknown Speaker 1:19:29
If I can sync from a high level seen on the report and seeing the conversations, I think it was likely but if we would have gotten there, we wouldn’t have got there as quickly, right? I mean, the what that analysis gives you is it gives you a very clear path where you can move very quickly. And so instead of kind of meandering through it, they point you and they say here’s what you need to do, and you can go fast versus learning through it, which takes longer
Unknown Speaker 1:19:54
for just two observations. One is, I think what you’re describing is the value of bringing in an external evaluator from time to time, right? fresh eyes, no investments other than they try to get to, you know, whatever your truth, the truth, the experience is, number one second observation would be, I hope, when we go through the rest of the budget, we’re going to see where you’ve identified both budget lines in the programs, whether it’s in public safety or someplace else in the poker community services or in the in the city, where you’d like to use those dollars to engage external evaluation or evaluators to do the same thing. I think, given the variety of things that go on in this city, that we need to be disciplined about that, and I’m just going to be really anxious to hear about that when we get into more budget presentation.
Unknown Speaker 1:20:42
All right, thank you very much. Great report. Thank you for your work and community. It’s It’s awesome. What school you I supervise. Oh, well, we’re short. I know how that goes. Yeah, I’m in the schools too much right now. All right. Well, well, thank you. Thank you. And I apologize in advance for my three teenage boys. Good luck with that. All right. Let’s go ahead like let’s take a look. Let’s just take a five minute break before we go on to first call public invited to be heard. And then we’ll go on with this call public divide to be heard.
Unknown Speaker 1:32:47
Alright let’s go ahead and get going again. Let’s go ahead with first call public invited to be heard we’ve got a short list but let’s go ahead and start with Steven Altschuler. Oh yes. Oh, big one up. Yep, go ahead make sure that red lights on.
Unknown Speaker 1:33:13
Okay. Thank you. I want to start by saying that I really love and respect the police department. However, a few weeks ago, there was an article in the paper about a police officer using someone else’s license plates and running up 16 $100 in toll fees. If this is true, there’s no reason that the Longmont city council should have spent 16 $100 to pay his toll bill. I may have some facts wrong and correct me if I do. But I was gonna say that when any of you have spent your own money to pay the officers toll tax bill. And if it’s true, you spent our money. I think that’s absolutely wrong. Another police matter. Please support our police in their goal to keep hardworking citizens safe and have our courts prosecute criminals have criminals serve time. Stop the no male no sorry, no bail mentality that is ruining our country. The main reason for having a long Man City Council is to protect citizens and to promote and to promote business and to protect our constitutional rights. My understanding is that a few years ago, this is a different matter. I apologize. A few years ago the city council approved long lat becoming a sanctuary city. And again, please correct me if I have this wrong. This is beyond stupid. If it’s true. There’s absolutely no reason that anyone, especially in illegal, who then commits another crime should be allowed to walk away from this crime scot free Now I do agree in the concept of a sanctuary city. I am suggesting that the Longmont city council endorsed long month to become a sanctuary city in defense of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This would mean that if any bill is passed by local state or federal government that restricts or cancels any of our constitutional rights, that bill or law would be invalid and unenforceable in Longmont. Those are my little notes here. But I would like to add when you were talking about COVID, before, back in May, from my understanding, again, they stopped talking about the deaths from the Delta variant because they were so low, they talk about cases. Again, my understanding is that the test for the COVID is 80% false positive, and there is no actual test for the Delta variant. So all we should be looking at is either hospital cases or deaths. And both of those are incredibly low, any deaths are too high. But those are incredibly low. And this whole mass mandate is government overreach. And I’ve got other words for it. I think you get the general idea. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 1:36:18
Insert I got a an actually, the press just texted me saying please don’t forget to ask these these people, their names and addresses. So he’s going to probably want to follow up with your comments. Okay, you see your address and your name, please.
Unknown Speaker 1:36:30
My name is Steve Altschuler, and my address is 1555. Taylor drive.
Unknown Speaker 1:36:35
All right, great. Thank you and john fryer you’re watching but I’ll go ahead and screenshot the list. And I’ll take a picture and text it to you. I’ll be glad to
Unknown Speaker 1:36:43
talk to anyone anytime. All right, great. Thank you. All right. I’m Greg Harris. Alright, couldn’t read that first verse name for a second.
Unknown Speaker 1:36:59
Good evening. My name is Greg Harris. Mr. Mayor, city council members, staff and guests. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 1:37:11
Dr. pretty loud. Thank you for the opportunity to the rest address the council today and it’s open forum. I reviewed the recent city council study session. The presentation by Kathy fetlar. Housing and Community Investment division manager was quite informative. I especially I was especially pleased by the council member Marshall Martin’s motion seconded by Tim waters to require an annual public report by the City Council on uncompleted projects. I believe the council should have passed the motion as initially proposed, and the amendment which appears to have limited the report to affordable housing should not have been adopted. Now this may just be a matter of whether word affordable in the final motion was used to mean include incomplete attainable, that is middle class housing projects. If that’s the case, perhaps a clarification is all that’s needed, since affordable generally just refers to those below the 30% adjustable mean income of Longmont residents. These reports are extremely important so that the mayor, the council stakeholders and public can be made aware of what’s holding up these projects. But as it is been pointed out, this is not an adopted ordinance. It’s just an expression of the will of the city council and can be changed easily as it was adopted. I asked the city to reconsider the finally adopted motion clarify or remove the limitations added by the amendment and set its policy to be that incompleted housing projects be reported annually to the city council. Thank you. All right, Sharon O’Leary.
Unknown Speaker 1:38:53
Good evening Mayor Bagley and city council members channel Larry 534 Emery Street, co chair of the historic Eastside neighborhood. First of all, I want to thank you very, very much for making a motion to move overlay zones into historic neighborhoods forward. What a grand birthday gift to Longmont and future generations. Second, the great thing about overlay districts is it doesn’t change the underlying zoning, but it offers guidelines for additions, garages, and ad use in the rear. I just want to leave you with to think about first, the length of time to complete an overlay process. The longer it takes the more potential for remodels or exploitation. So we’re already out into next year. Second, if consensus can’t be reached between the three neighborhoods, the east side, the west side and downtown. I see them all. I’m having varying points of view. Well, the historic East Side neighborhood get back their previous protections. The Historic Eastside neighborhood is unique. We have 30 years of zoning that has protected the cultural and historic heritage of our neighborhood. And I appreciate very much, you making the motion to move it forward. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 1:40:16
All right, Paul tiger. Greetings, members of council. Paul Tiger 350 kimbark. I’ve come to you tonight, about 10 years ago, I was here and had a petition of 470 signatures of people who live in my neighborhood to have the Alpine and third intersection changed rectified, we actually, were asking for a traffic signal. traffic engineering knows traffic engineering, I know electronics, they made a really nice change at this intersection. And it’s really reduced the number of deaths are as nil. And so that’s great. But what we also have there is still so 119 used to be Third Avenue, but it hasn’t been in a really long time. Why do we have 355 mile an hour speed limit signs on this road? I have a few years ago, send some photographs to the city management to ask about that. Nothing has been done. It doesn’t seem to be moving forward with traffic engineering, they seem to want to justify this. And so when you leave 119 and come onto Third Avenue, when you get to the top of the overpass there’s a 55 mile an hour speed limit. you accelerate and start coming down and there’s pace. On the other side of pace. There’s another 55 mile an hour speed limit sign what’s going on here. When you’re leaving town, as you’re going past the Ford dealership, you can see up ahead a 55 mile an hour speed limit sign. This is a theater and there’s industrial businesses and residential. I’m asking that we reduce the speed. I think it should be 45. We have another issue there. And that is is that since all the lines were painted on the rug, we’ve been waiting for a decade before a crosswalk. We have jobs and workforce crossing this street coming from a residential area and going into Weaver Park. I’ve seen people there I’ve been one of the people who tries to cross I saw made a little movie I’d love to send that stuff to you of some kids with a bicycle and a dog crossing there. Now I’ve been told that they should go down to lashley and then and turn around Well, that’s really not very practical. People aren’t going to do that but if they’re going to sell lewd, okay, but if they’re going to the Ford dealership, my wife took our car to the Ford dealership and then had to walk back across the road. That’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for a crosswalk and I’m looking for reduction in speed limit. That’s it. Thank you very much. Alright, straighter Benson. Hey,
Unknown Speaker 1:43:39
I’m straighter. Ben stern 951 West 17th Avenue. like to mention my church, Longmont, United Church, Christ is having a gun buyback and meltdown a week from Saturday at night then presses in the morning. So if you got guns you don’t need or don’t want to good way to recycle them. I want to mention the Texas law Texas has now after 160 years becomes South Carolina, South Carolina started the Civil War 160 years ago, and Texas is now passed the raping, incest law, which basically is abrogating the concept of civil law in our country. And Benjamin Franklin was asked in 1789 what kind of government you have is said a republic if you can keep it. This is vigilante justice. The Fugitive Slave law in 1850 was one of the reasons why We wound up having a civil war. And they’d had the same thing they had a bounty for up private anyone who could capture any black person in the north. And if they won their case in court, they would get a $10 bounty. Now, it Texas has raised that to $10,000. If you can get anyone who might drive a woman or advise her a counselor her about her reproductive health. This is serious. All fascist movements in the history of the world have several Cardinal principles. One the worship of violence to the dominance over women, three, the worship of a great legacy later to do our thinking for us. They had some minor things that are always the same hate cities hate those who live there, hate all minorities hate all immigrants hate cosmopolitan culture, hate science, hate objective knowledge, hate, critical thinking and education. But the laws do not apply to the great later, which our former president claimed to be. There are personal threats of violence against our Secretary of State Jenna Griswold and her family. This kind of things are going on all over the place. And if they get this through and keep it in, they’re going to be private people assaulting the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And certainly the Voting Rights Act.
Unknown Speaker 1:46:51
Thank you straighter wait. Alright, let’s move on. That’ll conclude our first call public invited to be heard. If you weren’t on the list, you can always wait till the end and there will be another opportunity. Let’s go on with the consent agenda. Councilmember content or sorry, Cal spheric has the city clerk cantana can you go ahead and give you a promotion? Just a promotion. All right, go ahead. Thank you. The motion
Unknown Speaker 1:47:14
ordinance 2021 dash 43 is a bill for an ordinance making additional appropriations for expenses and liabilities of the city of Longmont for the fiscal year beginning January 1 2021. public hearing and second reading scheduled for September 28 2021. Nine B is ordinance 2021 dash 44. A bill for an ordinance amending title 14.32 of the Longmont municipal code on rates and regulations governing electric service, public hearing and second reading scheduled for October 26 2021. Nine C is ordinance 2021 dash 45. A bill for an ordinance authorizing a farmland lease agreement between the city of Longmont and Scott Schlegel, on the Sherwood open space property, public hearing and second reading scheduled for September 28 2021. Items nine D are three items action items in furtherance of the public private partnership agreement among diamond g concrete company, Costco, wholesale Corporation, and the city of Longmont for development of a Costco membership warehouse facility, affordable housing and additional commercial retail uses ordinance 2021 dash 46 is a bill for an ordinance authorizing a temporary mining water supply agreement between the city of Longmont acting by and through its water utility enterprise, golden farm lllp and aggregate industries, WC AR Inc for the urban Thomas reclamation project, public hearing and second reading scheduled for September 28 2021. ordinance 2021 dash 47 is a bill for an ordinance authorizing the long term water supply agreement between the city of Longmont acting by and through its water utility enterprise golden farm lllp and aggregate industries WC AR Inc for the Irwin Thomas reclamation project, public hearing and second reading scheduled for September 28 2021. And the third item is resolution 2021 dash 98 a resolution of the Longmont city council authorizing an agreement between the city and diamond g concrete company for the purchase of real property for a future affordable housing project.
Unknown Speaker 1:49:12
All right, nobody’s chimed in to remove anything. Do we have a motion for the consent agenda? council member? Martin. I move the consent agenda. All right. It’s been moved by Councilmember Martin seconded by Councilmember pack. Let’s go ahead and vote officially with the little machine here. Then register your vote.
Unknown Speaker 1:49:52
All in favor? All in favor the consent agenda say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. All right, count the consent agenda. passes unanimously. Let’s go ahead and move on to ordinances on second reading and public hearings on any matter. mayor, Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez, you asked for a moment until after the public is allowed to say their piece. I mean, like, yes, the I mean, unless we the unless we move the whole thing, at which point, there’s no point of having a discussion, I’d go I asked you go ahead and say what you were gonna say now we can determine determine it. Alright, Council, Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez.
Unknown Speaker 1:50:36
Thank you very much Mayor Bagley. So there’s been much contention about this specific item, both in the media and I’m sure all the council members have received a lot of correspondence on the item. I feel that at this point, okay, I’ll preface it this way. I am not against this motion, and I don’t want to see it die on the floor. And so I would like to make a motion to table the item until no later than the first quarter of 2022. based on the fact that I feel we’ve run past our headlights on this one. It’s moved very quickly, outside of the delay because of the pandemic. After we’ve brought it back to this this floor. It’s been very quickly with very little discussion. And I think that’s a disservice to the public, because most people don’t necessarily know where we stand on the item. I don’t think that the survey that was conducted by the city is at all useful. The amount of respondents based as I say, consumers, the residents of Longmont were a slim majority against the very small number of respondents as restaurant tours was a slim majority for. And again, I don’t think this is very useful information. So I contend that a this mostly affects restaurant tours, versus consumers. And so I think that we need to reach out and do a more robust data collection of how many restaurants we have that this will truly affect and what that cost is. Also, I think it’s it’s a failing on both our part as the city and the City Council specifically, as well as as a small setback for the advocates for this item, that there’s so much misinformation out there, that we can do a better job of education, as well as selling the item to folks and making sure folks truly understand the ramifications, as well as like I said, the the data collection as far as the restaurant tours are concerned. And so that’s why I’m making the motion to table the item until the date certain that I put as in no later than quarter one of 2022 and so that is my motion.
Unknown Speaker 1:53:13
Thank you. There was a motion we have a second Councilmember Christiansen No, I’m not saying it. I say that against that motion. It dies for fail a second. Okay. All right. Let’s go ahead and move on to the ordinance the ordinance 2021 dash 42 bill for an ordinance amending title nine and title two of the Longmont municipal code unhealthy beverages for children’s meals. The report on this Herald Okay. Let’s go ahead and Councilmember Christiansen
Unknown Speaker 1:53:56
I was not seconding Aaron’s motion I was it died.
Unknown Speaker 1:54:02
So now we’re talking. You’re in the queue. And we’re just talking about we need a motion or a debate or you want to make a comment. floors yours. Your
Unknown Speaker 1:54:14
I would move that we adopt this bill.
Unknown Speaker 1:54:18
It’s been who seconded. Alright. ordinance 2021 42 was moved by Councilmember pack was seconded by Councilmember I’m sorry, moved by Kazmir Christiansen and seconded by Councilmember pack. We do you know we’ll get there. But are there any questions or comments from council? Councilmember, Councilmember Peck.
Unknown Speaker 1:54:41
Thank you very badly. I would just like to address the the comment about overreach by government. It is our position that we are here to protect the health and safety of our residents. And we’ve been doing this for a long time in our country. We do it with seatbelts. We’ve done it with no no smoking. restaurants, we do it with the missions, stop signs, speed limits, all kinds of things that the government has put into effect, to protect people to make sure that there is a reason that one person’s actions does not hurt another person’s actions. So, for me, it is not overreach at all. And we’re not saying that you can’t give your child anything they want on the menu, that’s your choice. And nobody’s going to watch that or monitor it or get data on it. We’re just saying that put in two more choices on the menu. Waters already given. So it’s only one more choice, which is milk. I think this is reasonable. It, we’re not telling parents what to do at all. And I would never do that. So I will definitely vote for this. council member in offering.
Unknown Speaker 1:56:12
Thank you, Mayor. So I noticed I have a comment. So no question. You know, I feel like we’ve an a, you know, could be because I’m the liaison to the youth council. So I’ve, we’ve had four, I believe it was four of our youth on the youth council who were part of this. This action they had collected the data they were they followed the legislative process, democracy, you know, democracy and action. And so I support this, because, you know, I do believe, you know, this is an action that shows the, you know, bringing health to the forefront, so sorry. But the other piece is, you know, watching our youth take a leadership role in our community. So that is something I do I do support and you know, so I was really disappointed that a lot of the misconception, and a lot of the kind of highlight that came for it was primarily from the press and newspaper. And, you know, they really weren’t looking at the whole, the whole piece it was it almost felt like as I’m reading the articles, it was just like a clickbait without really looking at what the ordinance said, what the impact would be, you know, hearing that the restaurant association is not opposed to this, they they are fine with this. restaurants that I’ve been in contact with. Have you know that? Well, we change our menus our children’s menu regularly, and it’s, you know, and we will just update it when the next cycle comes out. And so it’s not as impactful, as you know, what many of what I’ve seen, what I’m hearing that they say that, oh, it’s going to impact it’s going to impact what I I really believe that. You know, it’s it’s taken a step in the right direction. I mean, we have the seat belts, we have our calorie intake on the menus. So there’s all these things that, you know, we’ve changed and progressed over time. I don’t, you know, I don’t feel like this is the you know, it’s such a debatable issue, as as what it’s, it’s made, been made out to be. So, so I will I will support this as well. Councilmember Martin?
Unknown Speaker 1:58:32
Thank you, Mayor Bagley, I would just quickly like to say that the reason that I didn’t Second, the mayor pro tems motion was because I don’t think that this ordinance has enough of an effect to justify a lot more data collection, it doesn’t make very big changes for anybody, and it doesn’t cause expense for anybody. Because it’s built into stuff that’s already happening. So you know, what, the way to think about it is, is it’s kind of like saying, don’t print your kids menus with a great foaming bubbling picture of great kneehigh next to them. You know, that’s about all it is. It’s a it’s it’s saying, don’t promote these things. That’s it. You’re not changing the menu, you’re not changing the prices and you’re not changing the choices. So, I mean, I’m gonna vote for it. Jasper Christiansen?
Unknown Speaker 1:59:36
Yes. I like what all my fellow council members have said. I particularly like the way Councilman Martin phrased it is that all of us, you know, we see a picture of big soda on a hot day anything. Yes. And that’s particularly irresistible to children. And there’s
Unknown Speaker 0:00
Nothing wrong with a soda once in a while, as far as I’m concerned, especially, you know, if you hardly ever go out and hardly ever drink a soda, it’s a nice little treat. But, you know, the problem is that there are some parents who give their child sodas every day all day long. And that is, it is a public health issue. It is also an economic issue when it causes all sorts of health problems that cause this, this country billions of dollars, both short term and long term. And so it is our business, there’s nothing more important, I think, to all of us from the city council, then the health and welfare of children. And so this is a very, very modest thing. Many of the thing, the letters that I’ve gotten, are, once again, can, turning a public health issue into a political issue. It is not a political issue. It is not a matter of government overreach and as dictating things, and, you know, we this is not our initiative, these are the good people who have worked very hard to bring this initiative forward to us, we are preparing it forward. And we the people who as as Councilman Rodriguez said, the restaurant tours who did fill out the survey, and there were very few of them, but they were very small minority in favor of this. They said it doesn’t cause them a problem, they already doing it, or it doesn’t really cause them a problem. We would never do anything that adversely affects our businesses. If this were a problem, I know these people who brought this ordinance forth don’t want to do that. They just want children to, as Councilman Martin said, not have these things promoted. Because it we’re all very susceptible to visual images and to suggestions. So this just takes that out of the mix. If you want to get it, you can still get it. It’s it’s not an issue of anyone dictating or overreaching or doing anything. We are doing our job by being concerned about public health. And that’s what this is about. So yes, I’m going to vote for Dr. Waters. Thanks for him.
Unknown Speaker 2:22
I was gonna wait until we had our public hearing. But I think maybe that will be shut out of that conversation. Or maybe we can interact with the public. Is that the case? Mayor Bagley if people Yeah, yeah. So so I’ll make some comments and then look forward to interacting with folks if they if they there’s a testimony. I just want to I want to we’ve all received the same kind of correspondence and I every every kind of occasion I’ve had in recent weeks with the public, this comes up. And it always comes up this sugary drink that sugary drink ordinance. And somebody who made reference to I believe it was a council member, Hidalgo fairing to the way this has been reported. I do think that reporting, and I hope John’s listening, and I hope the Longmont leaders listening, I do think that reporting, has sent a message that distorts the understanding here. I refer to this as the Healthy Choice menu. And the reason being, it was presented to us as a as a way to package the menu to make it easier for parents to make healthy choices. Now people can laugh at that or not. But that’s the whole point. But I do want to acknowledge there’s a you know, there’s a there’s a view here. And I think we need to I think we ought to understand for a whole bunch of reasons it there is this political dynamic, not that that ought to hold the day or you know that, you know, guide that is but but that’s the environment in which we’re living right now. And and so I don’t want to those who see that see this that way, I don’t want to be disrespectful to them. But I do want to say this. When we when we consider ordinances, and I commented on this earlier tonight, when we were talking about rental licensing, I want to go back to that ordinance. But I think it is incumbent upon us to ask questions. What are we trying to solve? Is there a problem here? And there’s you can’t argue there’s no problem here, right? There’s decades of data. And I had a correspondent earlier today write to me to say, I don’t care what the studies are. And I don’t care what the data is, right? I don’t want to say I do care what the studies are and what the data are. There’s decades of data, that that make it clear that we’ve been for a long trajectory in a pattern that contributes to childhood obesity and type two diabetes. And Councilmember Christiansen is correct. The healthcare implications and the cost are staggering. Two decades ago, it was the next it was the next tsunami coming at us in terms of both care in in costs. So is there a problem to solve? Yeah, it does. This solve the problem. I don’t think it solves the problem. It’s not going to solve anything. The other question is it does it do harm. In Clearly, this does no harm, there’s no economic harm to a restaurant because that those restaurant the menus are going to be the cost of menu changes are going to be covered. Not that it’s free, somebody’s going to pay for it, but not the restaurant. There is no harm that’s done to children. There’s no harm that’s done to families, parents get to order what they want. What are the unanticipated consequences? I can’t imagine there any negative, unanticipated consequences with this particular ordinance, in terms of if you think about cost benefit, since there are virtually no costs on the front end, it’s all benefit, right? And the benefit, even if it’s a slight benefit to children, why would we not want to do that would produce at no cost, even a slight benefit to the health and welfare of our children? And finally, we’ve heard a lot about distractions. And I have to say, personally, and I’ve responded to folks who have corresponded with me, I have not I’ve seen this council state, we don’t always agree on things, right? We haven’t agreed on everything tonight. But that doesn’t mean we’ve been distracted from the work we have to do because of this. roads have been paved utilities operate, law enforcement occurs, we’ve done studies about rewind, I mean, nothing, nothing has stopped in the city. Because we’ve been able to do this. And the other work that has to be done, and this is part of the work that has to be that has to be done, in my opinion. So I’m gonna vote for it. And I understand that Mirko Tim’s motion, I think that voting yes, on this potentially becomes an election issue. Right? There are people going to run for office, they’re not going to be up here tonight and cast a vote and then they get to point a finger. Right? Why would you do that. And I will look forward to engaging in that discussion when it comes in the public square. But I don’t think that’s the reason to not to take a step back, and not do what we can. Now we should have done this a year and a half ago, when it first came to us, we delayed for a year and a half. The time before that we should have done it is 20 years ago. And the next best time is tonight. So I’m gonna vote for this tonight.
Unknown Speaker 7:21
All right. And before we have our The reason I called this first, so everybody knows, we’re counsels kind of stand in before we have our public hearing, I figured you guys would it’s like giving the answers to a test before you take the test. So just again, by way of by way of history, the person who really spearheaded this, you know, with all I mean, just by being completely transparent as Christina hedstrom, who I consider a good friend, along with her family. And I would see her at these public events at this little table, handing out flyers, begging people, to please pay attention to the sugar and the sugary drinks that you’re giving your children and I just got sick of seeing how sad she looked by herself. and said, hey, look, I’ll do you a solid, and I’ll put this on and I’ll put this on an agenda. And we can discuss it my point in doing so was to make sure that we started talking as a community about, you know, this this type of issue. And so, um, so that said, I’m not going to vote for the ordinance, I’m in the minority night. You know, I believe that I believe that. The problem goes so far beyond this. The as a community, we don’t understand nutrition, we don’t understand the balance of protein, carbohydrates, fats, fibers, etc, that we need. We don’t understand how weightlifting and cardio work we don’t know we are, we are basically, you know, clueless when it comes to our food. And, and I think that our society needs to, I mean, we’re gonna get healthy and not be obese, we’re gonna have to do a hell of a lot more as parents, not as a government as parents and families. That’s what I think. But I don’t think that this is gonna I mean, I do believe that if I come from a world where unless a court is adjudicated, apparent, unfit, whatever you do is determined to be in the best interest of your child is the assumption. So one person could come in and order a coke and they might be feeding their kid 20 of those a day, another person might come in and give their kid a coke. And it’s the only coke they’re going to see for the month and it’s a treat for getting straight A’s or goes into their diet. I don’t know. But I don’t I don’t think we should. We should be involved in that. But I do think that this is worthwhile. The discussion is worthwhile. I will not criticize or I don’t I don’t believe that it’s a futile endeavor. On behalf of Miss Ed strim and the kids. I also do not I can understand why my colleagues would vote for it. It’s just an ongoing issue that we’re going to have to keep talking about, or else just get fatter as a society and one healthy. So that said, let’s go ahead and open it for the public hearing on this matter. So we’ve got quite a lengthy group, or a lengthy list and the group, we’re going to start with you, Christina hedstrom. And if everybody, whoever wants to come up, you have three minutes. And we’ll go from there. Hello, good
Unknown Speaker 10:27
evening, Mayor Bagley and city council. First, I just really wanted to sincerely thank each and every one of you for voting unanimously to move this ordinance forward. And for all of this listening, and all the time we’ve taken from city council to come and talk to you really appreciate each and one of you, each and every one of you. So after four years of public engagement, which is included, you know, going to the fair and Cinco de Mayo and so much public outreach, having having sessions where we would talk to the community and show movies, documentaries, public education, coalition building, bridging community engagement with nonprofits and restaurant tours and parents. We are just thrilled to be here at the final reading of the health teachings in kids meals ordinance tonight. You know, we’ve we’ve heard a lot from the public. I know you have all too. But a lot of really positive feedback from parents specifically about how this ordinance would make dining a not only more healthy experience for the families, but also a less contentious experience as well, just not having to argue with their kids about what they’re drinking with their meal, making sure that it’s a healthy one. We’ve also heard from people saying that they are just so proud to be a part of a community that cares about the health of its youngest residents, and is taking concrete steps to stem the really alarming trend of childhood obesity and diabetes. This evening, you’ll be hearing from Camille Rodriguez, who is the executive director at Boulder County Public Health gretta Waddell, who is a longtime high school student as well as a Longmont city, Walmart youth council member, Dr. Megan Mueller, who is a public health researcher at Colorado State University, Tessa hail of Boulder County Public Health, as well as finally Rebecca dubroff, who is the governmental relations director at the American Heart Association. And we’re very happy to take any questions you have as well. Thank you, Camilla Rodriguez. That means you’re up.
Unknown Speaker 12:52
Good evening, Mayor. long months, the council members and also to city manager. Thank you for having us. Again, I’m Camille Rodriguez. I’m the executive director of Boulder County Public Health. I’ve only been a part of this community for about three months. But I quickly was acclimated to the work done by this group. I mean, you know, you’ve heard from the healthy Longmont coalition. We are facing a challenge here not just in the United States regarding obesity, but right here in Boulder County. While Boulder County does have a reputation for being one of the healthiest counties in the nation and in Colorado as the healthiest state. Our childhood obesity rates have almost doubled since 2003. And nearly one in four children between the ages of two and 14 in the county are overweight or obese. And I just appreciate your leadership tonight in listening to us and considering a healthy drinks in children’s meals ordinance to promote, protect and promote the health of our children. Evidence tells us that sugary drinks are a major culprit in contributing to obesity and chronic disease. And in fact, we know that reducing sugary drink consumption is one of the definitive approaches to reducing childhood obesity. sugary drinks are the number one source of added sugars in the American diet. And children who drink at least one sugary beverage a day are 55% more likely to be overweight or obese. In addition to this, we know that the beverage industry’s focused marketing on kids, especially children of color, causes our Latinx children to be inequitably impacted by sugary drinks. In Colorado 19% of children drink one or more sugary drinks per day compared to 30% of lateen x children 28.2% of Boulder County Latina x high school students experience obesity compared to 9.7% have white high school students. children’s health is important to all of us. And we encourage you to make healthy choices and easy choice for children and parents. This policy is ultimately an incremental change that supports our local efforts to promote children’s health, such as long months healthy eating and active living cities and towns designation and our state policy prohibiting sugary drinks at commercial daycare centers. This policy protects the health of children, like seatbelt laws do and establishes parents as decision makers. You’ve talked about this, and educators for their children, when ordering food in restaurants as you’ve so well talked about tonight. Ultimately, we want to support parents who are striving to promote the health of their children. And for all of these reasons, I represent Boulder County Public Health tonight to encourage you to support a healthy drinks in children’s meals ordinance as an effective policy to promote children’s health now and for their long term growth and success in this community. Thank you for your thoughtful consideration of this policy. All right. gretta, Weddell
Unknown Speaker 16:22
Hello, Mayor Bagley and Councilman My name is Greta wheedle, I am a junior at Longmont high school here in Longmont, Colorado, and I am a Longmont City Youth Council member. Now, obviously, when we are talking about this ordinance, some people have posed the question why do we need an ordinance like this in Longmont? And now as a community, we’re stereotypically Colorado obsessed with biking, hiking and healthy eating right? Not quite well, Boulder County has a reputation for being one of the nation’s healthiest counties and one of the healthiest states, Colorado simultaneously ranks 11th in the nation for childhood obesity rates, and Boulder County comes 13th out of all counties in Colorado for this statistic. Those numbers are precisely why Boulder County declared childhood obesity a health emergency in 2019. And so now you’re probably thinking why Longmont now first of all, this policy has been created and advocated for by members of the Longmont community for members of the long lock community. And second, and most importantly, longer as the city has always bolstered a family friendly environment that values the well being of its youngest residents. You can see this actively demonstrated through Longmont sunshine for fun through the by bright eyes coalition through City Council’s commitment to early childhood education, and the existence of the city’s Longmont Youth Council. And now we’ve all read the TC line comments about how parents need the ability to make beverage choices for their children. But here’s the thing, this ordinance does not take away that choice. Parents still have full authority to decide what their child orders and when they order it. However, this ordinance does make healthy drinks the default. It nudges kids and parents to make health conscious choices and sets up youth to live a healthier childhood. And furthermore, we know that defaults work, whether it’s for retirement savings, or organ donation programs. Providing a default provides both a mental short cut with less decision making, as well as a nudge in the right direction or in this case, the healthy direction restaurants, parents and kids all like healthier options. National Survey data shows that more than 80% of eight to 12 year old children would like to drink milk water or flavored water instead of soda. And that 70% of parents want easy and accessible access to healthy choices for beverage options when it comes to their child’s meals. Furthermore, according to the National Restaurant Association, healthy meals for kids has been a top trend since 2015 and continues to be today. This is a policy that at its roots values, the well being of long months youth and considering the intertwined nature of childhood human development and health. It becomes clear that this ordinance values both this legislation is practical, it’s multifunctional, and it leaves parents with the full ability to make whatever choices they want for their children, while also inspiring for the discussion about the impact of lacking health consciousness and directly valuing the livelihood of kids by encouraging healthy options. The bottom line is it’s a common sense effective policy and it addresses a growing health threat. The benefits are high and there are really no downsides. And therefore, I urge you to do the right thing and vote yes for the healthy drinks and kids meals ordinance tonight. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 19:35
Thank you. All right. We can’t we can’t clap. Let’s Let’s not clap. All right, Megan Mueller.
Unknown Speaker 19:45
Good evening, Mayor esteemed council men and women. Thank you so much for having me here today. It’s a privilege to stand before the city council. As Longmont considers this important ordinance aimed at promoting healthier beverages for children and restaurants. I’m currently a system Professor nutrition at Colorado State University and I have spent the last decade of my life working on policy systems and environmental approaches to addressing childhood obesity prevention. My motivation for focusing on large scale change is rooted in the scientific evidence base. Well, education efforts are incredibly important. Time and time again, what we see in the literature is that knowledge and education alone do not predict behavior. When it comes to food and health, where we and our families live, work and play matters, the environments we interact with can promote or inhibit healthy choices for us and for our children by shaping the over 200 food choices we make every day. restaurants in particular are an important environment for promoting healthy behaviors. On a typical day, over 25 million kids in the US go out to eat at fast food restaurants. It’s about a third of kids, and then top earning us restaurants most beverages offered on kids menus are the sugary beverages. Nationwide, about half of restaurant meal purchases consumed by children include a sugary beverage, with higher intakes among bipoc children compared to non Hispanic white children. The benefit of policies that require restaurants to offer only healthy drinks on menus is, is that it still allows the freedom of choice, while also promoting the selection of healthier beverages. In my own research with the silver diner, a regional restaurant chain that serves over 4 million customers annually. We have found a five percentage point reduction in children sugary beverage orders after the restaurant remove soda from their menu. And these changes were maintained over a two year period after this healthy menu change was implemented. Additionally, our restaurant partners reported a 5.3% increase in annual revenue growth, which exceeded the growth of other similar family dining chains during that same time period. These types of menu changes have been shown to be effective in promoting healthier beverage selection and other types of restaurants as well. We’ve seen in the scientific evidence and Disneyland for example, where customers ordered healthy beverages 66% of the time after only healthier beverages were offered on the menu, and McDonald’s taking sodas off the Happy Meal menus resulted in 21 million more low fat and fat free milk jugs being ordered. And since McDonald’s removed soda from its children’s menus, the percentage of happy mail sold with soda has decreased from 62% to 48% from 2013 to 2018. In summary, the menu changes proposed by this ordinance are effective in promoting healthier beverage selection for children in a variety of restaurant settings, while also preserving choice and not negatively affecting the restaurants bottom line. As parents have become more time constrained, and American families eat more and more of their food away from home. The health of our next generation depends on having more nutritious foods and beverages. Thanks for your appreciate it. All right, Tessa Hale.
Unknown Speaker 23:12
Good evening, Mayor badly, Mayor Pro Tem and city council. I first want to thank you so much for your leadership on this. This has been a very long road. We’ve been at this for a long time. And thank you for sticking with us and continuing this conversation and continuing forward with this. I am here tonight on behalf of restaurants. Unfortunately, we did not have restaurants who are free to be here tonight. But we have two statements. And I also want to share about how much we are in partnership with restaurants. The last thing we want to do is be at opposition with anyone in the community. And we have done a significant amount of outreach. We’ve had three events, we’ve had outreach to every single restaurant in addition to the city effort to contact every restaurant to get feedback. So I just want to let you know that all of this is really created to be done in partnership with restaurants and the implementation plan we have is that we would do technical assistance and support every single restaurant impacted by this policy. So I have two brief statements to read tonight. One is from Bobby bajillion, who’s from eats and sweets and Lafayette that passed this policy in 2017. And he just wanted to share what the experience was like for him. And Ethan sweets, by the way has the best banana bread Ice Cream Sandwich ever recommend that? He says eats and sweets supported this initiative because it promoted healthier habits. As a parent we know it’s often a battle with your children to eat and drink the healthier options. So when a restaurant is offers the healthy choice, it makes it easier for everyone. The kids eat healthier and you gain parents as fans. There is no negative impact on our business whatsoever. I hope Longmont makes the right choice. And the second statement is from Sean Gaffney, who’s been here before to talk about this, and he owns the wrist cafes and smoking bowls. And he says, years ago, I started to see the statistics about sugary beverages and the effects on kids health. And we wondered, how could we be more responsible for what we do inside our restaurants, we have four children. So we changed our children’s menus to just say it includes water and milk. We communicate to our staff and our servers that it isn’t ever wanting to shame parents if they ask for soda, or even tell them how to parent but really, rather, it’s us partnering with parents. As a parent myself, I noticed like when you go to a restaurant and children’s meal includes a soda 20 years ago, when it was a lot more rare, and a more of a special occasion to go out. It was fairly harmless. Let your kid have a soda because it’s special. Now I see the same families between our much multiple restaurants, it five to 10 meals a week. So for us, this just feels like how can we be responsible? this family’s eating out so frequently? I know people say what about the costs, because that is really inexpensive. What we found is since we offer water and milk 70% of the time people say they want water. So if anything, we’re spending less money on beverage costs for kids. So those are the restaurant statements. And finally, I will say we had a conversation with the corridor Restaurant Association who said you know what? We reached out to our constituents in Boulder County. Nobody cared enough for us to follow up on this. So thank you so much for your time. All right. Thank you. Rebecca, Deborah.
Unknown Speaker 26:47
Hi, good evening, mayor and city council. My name is Rebecca dubroff. And I’m here on behalf of the American Heart Association, who advocates for policies that support the health of all children and enable them to grow up to be healthy adults. The average American family spends over half of its food dollars on eating out, dining out four to five times a week. This is why it’s so important to offer healthy drink options with kids meals. sugary drinks affect the body in a uniquely harmful way. For one thing, they provide loads of extra calories without decreasing your appetite like food does. In fact, sugary drinks are the number one source of calories and sugar in the American diet. The amount of sugar consumed if a child orders a sugary drink at a restaurant four times a week leads to nine pounds of excess weight gain over the course of a year. Since families eat out at restaurants more regularly now the regular drink at restaurants are the norm. And if the norm is set at a young age for a sugary drink to be the go to beverage at a meal, there’s normal continue into adulthood. If we are to ensure that this generation of kids grows up with healthy norms that lead to healthy bodies, we need to act now. Because the situation is urgent and dire. A new study in the Journal of American Medical of the American Medical Association just reported that American kids have gained a significant amount of excess weight during the pandemic. The largest increase was among children aged five to 11, who saw an average gain of five pounds. Overall, the percentage of kids in this age group considered overweight or obese jumped significantly from 36% before the pandemic to almost 40% 46%. Now, another study that came out recently found that among black and Hispanic children and teens, type two diabetes has skyrocketed in recent years. between 2001 and 2017. The number of youth younger than age 20 living with type two diabetes increased by a staggering 95%. We know that drinking one sugary drink a day increases the risk of developing diabetes by 33%. And it increases the risk of heart disease by 25%. Addressing sugary beverage consumption in kids is one of the most effective ways we can curb this disturbing trend and ensure that kids grow up to be healthy adults. So I thank you for considering this and I urge you to vote in favor of the health of our kids. Thank you. All right, Geoffrey justice
Unknown Speaker 29:52
Jeffrey Justice 1400 block of Emory. I urge you to vote no I don’t drink sugary drinks. I don’t think anyone should drink sugary drinks. I don’t think kids should drink sugary drinks. But I don’t think it’s up to you. Or Boulder County Health to mandate any sort of ordinance. It should be the parents choice. And if freedom of choice and the parents choice is so easy to do on this, why do the ordinance? And why stuff there? What about salt? What about the fat in these kids meals? What about the meat? that’s taken from horrid situations and fed to kids? why stop there? Let’s just salt fat. Let’s do everything. Instead of just the sugary drink. I just don’t think this is any business of government to do an official ordinance. How about education? Put it in the schools. It’s true. sugared drinks are not good. Why don’t the restaurants do it on their own? If I would gladly go to a restaurant that offered more healthy meals for adults, for kids. This is freedom of choice. All these Google studies that I heard here, I question some of that I’m sure I could Google and find something different. I don’t think anything justifies sugary drinks. But there’s a lot more to obesity, gaining weight for children and adults, other than just the sugary drink. What about exercise? So we start mandating making ordinance that kids have to exercise, cardiovascular weight training certain amount a day to burn these excess calories off? I don’t know. Why don’t we make an ordinance that you have to have ID when you go to 711 to buy a Slurpee. Kids can go in there and do it. I think it’s just never ending where does it all end? And I virgin, no vote. Seems like I’m kind of wasting my time and coming late to the party. But thank you. All right. Susan Bergstrom.
Unknown Speaker 32:37
Isn’t Bergstrom at 19/20 have long law. And I just want to say it does not take a village. Seems to me that most of you believe it does. It takes two parents and city council does not fit the bill. This is gross overreach. Furthermore, many of you that I’m seeing speaking on this, I’m not a health nut. Okay, I don’t claim to be, but many of you don’t appear to be either. You appear to enjoy your share of sugary drinks and fatty foods, rendering you to be some of the least qualified people to be making dietary recommendations for anybody. Leave it to the parents. All right, Greg Harris.
Unknown Speaker 33:37
Good evening. My name is still Greg Harris. Mr. Mayor, council members, staff and guests. Thank you for the opportunity to address this council again, on the second reading of the proposed healthy beverages for children’s meals ordinance. While it’s great to encourage healthy eating, it is not the responsibility of the city council. I oppose this ordinance it infringes on the right of citizens and businesses to make decisions for themselves. There’s no logical OR sensible reason for the City Council to attempt to abuse its power like this. Good Intentions do not justify government overreach. regulating restaurant menus is far outside the proper scope of municipal government. Why not? city council does not need to be involved in this expenditure of my tax monies on frivolous, frivolous nonsense. Don’t micromanage restaurants. This is just a ridiculous ordinance to make restaurant owners do one more thing. When asked more restaurant owners who have managed to keep their businesses despite the pandemic. The city council should be supporting small businesses, not enacting inappropriate ordinances. restaurants have had a very rough time recently do they they do not need more restrictions on how they operate trust parents to make decisions for their kids. This is a parental issue, not a government issue. It is the role of parents to guide their children to make healthy choices. In summary, good and Tensions do not justify government overreach, do not micromanage restaurants and trust parents to make decisions for their kids. I oppose this ordinance. It is a waste of time and energy. There are so many more important things for our local government to be spending their time on infrastructure, attainable housing means supporting the police in economic development. Let parents choose what to give their children allow people to make their own choices. let them choose to be better. I ask that you vote no on the proposed ordinance. Thank you. All right, straighter Benson.
Unknown Speaker 35:49
Greetings council Strider menston 951 was seven teeth. I A lot of people don’t know it. But I’m instinctively on the libertarian individualists side of looking at the public thing. Not in the Rand Paul mode. But in the Henry David Thoreau bowed march to a different drummer. But when I was a kid, um, I, if you biked to another town of they didn’t have water baskets on on your bike, then you try to find where it’s the worst gas station where you can get a coke out of those out of those containers that kept them cold. And thinking you needed to have sugar for energy. And I didn’t know any better, and there wasn’t any education and corporate agriculture and marketing makes everything sugary, that overload shoe and candy bars and stuff. And I was always hungry, I didn’t get enough protein that didn’t get enough. And so even in track meats, I would drink a half a bottle of honey, so I was running on insulin, instead of fun, on on, you know, your your body functioning. And I set a record in the half mile that lasted in my county for 10 years. But I lost half of my track season with the series saw heart attacks, too much salt, too much sugar, not enough training, and running too hard during races. And if I’ve known and this looks like, you know, I, it was an impulse thing, I would tend to agree with Jeffrey but it’s like a first stop option. And it needs to be shown there. And the parents or whoever still has the option of choosing what they want anyway. So although I have five instinctive modes on the individual aside, I think, basically as an educational tool, and that it really, it fits. And, you know, maybe I would have set a record that would last you for 60 years instead of 10 years. So if I hadn’t I had the heart attacks, but they were relevant to having too much sugar, too much salt, and not enough real food. Anyway, thank you.
Unknown Speaker 38:39
All right, that concludes our actually, is there anybody else here who would like to speak on this issue?
Unknown Speaker 38:47
All right, so nobody, we’re gonna go ahead and close the public hearing. We’ve got a motion on the floor. I’m just gonna I just want to point out again, I’m the only no vote but it’s because of this right? question. How many calories in 12 ounces of coke? 139 how many carbs does it have? 35. Each card has four calories in it? How many calories in 12 ounces a 12 ounces a whole milk 101 198.67. It has 16 carbs, but it has 10.6 grams of fat. There’s nine calories and each gram of fat. How many calories in 12 ounces of apple juice 147 how many carbs does it have 37.3 carbs, which is more than coke. So again, I’m voting against it. But we hope my point was to get it out there and talk about children’s health. So unless we’re giving them water and unless we’re going to watch What they eat as well. I just it just can get messy. So let’s go out and vote. We have the motion is to vote in, who made it. Polly, Polly, Polly move that we pass ordinance 2021 does 40 to one second reading and john Peck seconded it. So let’s just go ahead and vote.
Unknown Speaker 40:29
All right in the motion carries five to two with myself and Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez voting against. Alright. Okay, let’s go on. It’s 930 do we need another short break? Alright, let’s go and take a five minute break. Then we’re going to come back. Let’s have a break budget presentation. And we’ll also be talking about ordinance 2021. That’s 48. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 51:14
Okay, let’s go on and finish up this thing. All right. 2022 budget presentation actually let’s do the ordinance 2021 days 48. First if we could get people home that don’t have to be here. Yes or is 2021 48 which is general business and number 12 b on our on our on our agenda, a bill for an ordinance amending chapter 14.04 the Longmont municipal code on the windy gap surcharge and the public. Anyway, that’s it.
Unknown Speaker 51:45
Good evening, Mayor Bagley members of council and Becky Doyle, Assistant Director of Business Services, here to talk about an update to the windy gap surcharge. So the windy gap surcharge is a fee that we charge for new connections to the water system. Currently, it’s a 1320 for residential tap. And it’s been set there since 2017. it expires at the end of this year. So we need to update it one way or another. And it generates between a half million and about a million dollars annually, which goes toward paying expenses related to the wind gap parent project as well as the firming project. So the change condition at the moment is that the construction is underway on the chimney hollow reservoir, which is the project for the wind the gap firming project. So we have final costs for that. And accordingly, we’ve updated the calculation for the fee. So here are numbers associated with that including existing infrastructure associated with the parent project, the planned improvements of the reservoir, and the outstanding bond principles. So we don’t count the bond principal as part of that calculation, we divide that across the capacity units within the system to come up with a fee. So it’s been that same methodology for many years. And so now we just have new costs information associated with that. So in short, increasing this fee, from 1320 to 1622, a count for the finalized costs of windy gap infrastructure. So if that makes sense, we would ask that you pass this ordinance on first reading.
Unknown Speaker 53:36
Do we have motion? All right. It’s been moved by Dr. Waters, and is seconded by it was seconded by Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez. So let’s go ahead and vote on ordinance 2021 days 48. On actually is there any additional debate, Dr. Waters, I see that you’re in a queue?
Unknown Speaker 53:55
Well, the only the reason I’m in the queue is I’ve moved to Google, I’m going to vote for approval. But I just wanted to make the observation this this, this will translate pretty directly into likely a $300 increase in this is all new construction. This is an example of growth, paying its own way. Right. So that’s all good. But we also acknowledge that it’s going to likely increase the cost of a home by that amount of money. So I want to connect that back to the last time we talked. In fact, the motion that was made to bring housing for any was any proposed project development. That was residential, as I think I heard earlier, some reference to affordable housing. As I recall the motion it was projects that were residential development. But I didn’t have those minutes in front of me. But in that conversation, I know I kind of went on a rant about our timelines, adding costs to housing units to get paid for by home purchasers. Right. So we’re gonna do that tonight. We’ve already done it. And while we haven’t done the cost of housing, just the cost of living with our rates, but this, this is directly going to lead to the increased cost of a house. So let’s put this in the column of one more reason to get really good and smart and efficient in the permitting process not to make, not to make sloppy decisions or poor decisions, good decisions, but in a much more timely way. That’s the way to mitigate some of these costs, right? By reducing time, which translates into cost of homes to homebuyers when it drags out. That’s the only point I want to make. And I’m gonna keep hammering that until we get it fixed.
Unknown Speaker 55:37
All right, let’s go ahead and vote. All in favor of ordinance. 2021 dash 48. Hit Yay. On your screen. Yes. All right. Let’s go ahead and just do an oral vote real quick. All in favor of ordinance 2021. That’s 48 say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. All right, the ordinance carries unanimously. Thank you, Becky. Alright, we’re gonna go ahead and turn the time over to Jim golden for the 2022 budget presentation.
Unknown Speaker 56:15
May Bagley members of council I’m Jim golden Chief Financial Officer. with me tonight. Joanne z is the Chief Human Resources officer and Teresa Malloy, the budget manager. And I think we’ll be probably handling most of this item here tonight. I’m going to just take you through our summary what we’ll be covering First we’ll go through the proposed pay plan, retirement plans and the health benefit fund as budget applies to them. And then we’ll be jumping into the budget itself. Looking at the overall budget by fund, and then getting into revenue projections and aspects of the general fund budget, including looking at its reserves and the use of fund balance. And then finally, we’ll look at the public safety fund budget. So with that, I’m going to turn this over to Joanne who’s going to cover the pay plan.
Unknown Speaker 57:10
Good evening, Mayor, members of council Joanne z is Chief Human, Chief Human Resources officer, I always like to start out our pay plan information with our compensation philosophy. This is a philosophy that we did review and have approved through counsel, what we’re looking to do is pay competitive market rates. We’ve been we’ve had this philosophy since 2017. And what we’ve been aiming to do is pay 102% of market we have not yet gotten there, we got to 101%, we hit some challenges, we brought it back down to 100. We’re back up at 101 as we currently speak. And what we’re looking to do at this point is try to maintain this. In 2020, we weren’t quite sure where things were going in terms of compensation. So we kept things flat at the beginning of 2020. And you may recall, in 2021, we had a mid year increase that we did across the board, we did not adjust individual rates at that time, we were looking to try to get some survey data and make sure that we did individual adjustments in 2022. So moving forward, looking into 2022, we were able to go ahead and get some good benchmarks. And we do have a 2022 compensation and pay plan that’s individualized and match to those benchmarks. The market has continued to increase for most positions, I’m sure that’s not a surprise, just looking at the cost of living and everything that’s going on in the environment. So because of that continued salary increases are anticipated. And those increases are built into this plan just to continue to pay at 101% of market at this point. Just taking a look at the survey right now, where we stand, we do look like we’re getting pretty close to that 101 when we’re matching today to today. So what we’re aiming to do with the 2021 plan is really just match tomorrow to tomorrow. So as we move into 2022 increases are going to continue. We want to increase our salaries to try to match those. So in order to do that, what we did is we just took a look at projections for 2022. Employers counsel was the one that we went with, we feel that the projection of two and a half percent for pay ranges is probably the closest that we’re going to get to the market. And so we translated that over into the pay plan and we’re proposing a two and a half pay range movement for that reason. There is adjustments to market midpoint beyond two and a half percent for 118 positions. Those are the positions that because we hadn’t done individual benchmarks are falling behind that benchmark. We also have exceptional pay budget continuing in this pay plan. And we also implemented bilingual pay for both temporary and part time non benefited employees. That is a new change. We’ve been providing bilingual pay for our regular employees. We have not done that for temporary and part time even though they’re doing very similar work. And they’re really probably in many cases having a direct impact for our residents because they’re in areas such as recreation where they’re interacting with our residents very directly. Some special position recommendations, outside of the two and a half percent we did collective bargaining. So the collective bargaining contract has already come to council already been passed. So that is separate, but it is included in this pay plan. We also have LPC on a step plan. Still, the reason that we do that is because we want to make sure that we’re matching the benchmarks for other utilities where we’re seeing that step plans still being used. In terms of future direction, we have have not let go of that 102%, we’re really looking at that continuing to be the target for salaries, as budget and as conditions allow. And we’re always going to continue to refine those benchmarks, we do try to refine them as much as we can, we find that as things change, we either can find new benchmarks or our positions will change and other individual positions may become available. Just switching a little bit over to benefits for 2022, we will continue to use kezar we got a flat rate renewal for Kaiser, so there is no increase in our cost this year. We also were able to negotiate for 2023 and 2020 for a rate cap of 5%. So that really puts us in good positions, that does not necessarily mean we’re going to pay a 5% increase, it just means that that’s the maximum increase, we could pay. Without that rate cap, we could be paying up to a 15% increase depending on what our usage was. We also have a 2% increase built in for our dental plan. And that probably is the biggest increase we have for 2022 for our benefits.
Unknown Speaker 1:01:47
We are in the process. And I bring this up just because employee assistance is a really important topic right now with everything that is needed for mental health and people being able to stay well and care for themselves. We’re in the process of making sure we have an RFP go forward to ensure we have the best comprehensive services for employee assistance plans. We have a number of things outside of our EAP that we do for mental health and for wellness for our employees. So we have an uncooperative peer support. We’ve have both a fire a police and a general employee peer support team. We have clue classes that we’re doing a lot to make sure that we’re focusing on making sure people are taking care of themselves as best they can. And then Kaiser has also helped us a lot with mental health health additions. So they have an online app that they’re allowing people to be able to utilize, they have care that you can utilize 24 seven, just by text messaging, they have online appointments that are available that have not been having a copay this year, even though by contract, they really could. And all of those are available for employees. It’s just been a really challenging year for everybody across the board. So we just want to make sure we have those comprehensive services available. like to turn it over to Jim for comprehensive benefits.
Unknown Speaker 1:03:03
While they’re changing, the one thing I wanted to draw Council’s attention to was the health care piece. To come into a year obviously, we had good performance but to come in with with no increase and then be able to negotiate no more than a 5% increase in the next two years. That’s a pretty significant step that I’m not sure how common how common that is right now in a lot of organizations.
Unknown Speaker 1:03:31
So I’m gonna remain seated here. Since I think I got a lot larger presentation, it’s a little bit more easier for me to spread out here. So I’m going to start with the defined benefit pension plans we usually we bring the pension plans of the council once a year during the budget process is going to spend a little bit more time on it this year because we do have some significant changes to retirement plans and then they are having an impact in our budget as well. So I wanted to make sure I brought that to everyone’s attention. And they approached him Rodriguez has been sitting with a defined benefit pension boards during these changes. So he’s aware of that, but I want to make sure the whole Council is aware as well of, of what is going on. So we have three defined benefit plans. The two two old hire plans police and fire. They are closed plans, there’s only eight in one plan and nine and another they’re made up of a mix of retirees and beneficiaries. So that number is is gradually reducing. And so it’s had an impact on those plans and their funded status as those numbers have changed recently. The general Employees Retirement Plan though is for all employees other than that the police and fire employees And that, in fact we’ve had in place for a long time. And as you may have known in recent budget processes, we’ve had to made some, some funding decisions in in that regard. So we get an actuarial study for these three plans every year. And what we’ve been advised by our auditors, you might recall a couple of months ago that the auditors pointed out that we were using an outdated mortality assumption. So our actuary did recommend that we update the mortality assumption. And then, more importantly, our discount rate, what we were using as an assumption for our return on investments has traditionally been 7.5%. And over time, that’s become a high percentage for a retirement plan for an expectation on investment. So that was a decision that we’ve been considering or talking about, I should say, for a number of years now. And finally, we decided this year, just this past month in August, that retirement boards did decide to not just make the mortality assumption change, but also to change the discount rate. So when you lower that discount rate, and assume that you’re only going to make 7%, on your investments for 7.5, that has a big impact on on your overall actuarial calculations, and then increases your liability. I provided two actuarial presentations that we receive last month as attachments in your packet, I’m not going through them, I just wanted to make them available to the council so that they can all see that the same information that the board was looking at and considering our plans are, I’ll talk about their funding in a couple of minutes. But jump right in maybe and say that the old higher plans, which have not been fully funded for a while now are fully funded, we’ve had a couple of good years of investment returns in 2019, and 2020. And although we do smooth our investment returns, and over five years, that both of these plans between the investment returns and in the fact that we’ve had some we’ve lost some members of those plans have brought these to a fully funded status. So the old higher police plan has a negative unfunded liability. So it’s a surplus of $91,000. It’s 100 and almost 108% funded, the fire plan has a surplus of $494,000 and almost 120% funded those amounts are f the after the assumptions that were that we change for these plans. So we actually were
Unknown Speaker 1:08:10
higher amount. When we first got our study before we made the decision to change the two assumptions. So we they were even stronger funded, they were 114% for the police fare plan. And 127% for the for the fire plan. And so the result of changing those assumptions was a drop about 70% for each one of those in a funded status. So you’re both we’re making recommendations for benefit increases for those remaining participants in these two plans. For the old hire fire plan, the last benefit increase was in 2019, we so we’re recommending a 3% increase there, which would be 1% per year since the last increase, you’ll hire police plan hasn’t had an increase in 2014. Reason for the difference there is because the fire plan had reached full funding in 19. So we made that increase at that point in time. We’re just recommending a 5% increase right now for please, we want to whatever we do, we want to make sure that we maintain these at full funding. So it’s not going to cost us additional contributions. We’re not contributing to these plans any longer, unless they were to go to below 100% funding again. But we are able to afford the increases for these individuals that we’re recommending and still keep these two plans at above 100% funding. So now the general Employees Retirement Plan, we’ve had a history of being fully funded all the way through 2008. And when that economic downturn took place, then is when We started to really struggle with trying to get back to full funding. We’ve we’ve not had benefit increases in that plan since 2009. They’re not built into the plan. And so therefore, we can only do a benefit increase when it is fully funded. That’s a table requirement. So our plan has always been to be moving more aggressively towards reaching full funding for these these plans. Couple years, five years back, the board proposed a change in the funding policy. We amortize the unfunded liability over 30 years. It’s now a closed 30 year period. And so any subsequent gains and losses are amortized over a closed 20 year period. What this is doing is moving us towards full funding. But it’s still over a significant period of time. So, we’re are, we’re amortizing over 26 years, from 2019, which is basically going to put us in full funding and 45. I mentioned already that we smooth our gains and losses over five years. So in this study, this year, the group reached an unfunded liability of $19.7 million and a 90% funding, versus last year, the unfunded liability was 22.6 and 87.9% funding. Now 90% funding is pretty strong for a public plan, you don’t see many public plans that that are fully funded, it’s certainly not active plans. The old higher plans are certainly a different animal compared to this. But again, we did make those same assumption changes to these two plans last month. So that was also going to change the numbers again here. That they’re restating the unfunded liability now to 37 point 2 million, and the plan drops to 82.7% funding. With this, we are increasing, we have an increasing contribution contribution requirement for overall for the whole plan from 14.2% 15.85% of compensation. So in this proposed 20 of the proposed 22 budget, I should say, including an increase in the city contribution, then that’s not the first time you will see an incorrect number in our presentations, I should say last time, but you probably may have already seen some already in what we put out over the weekend. But
Unknown Speaker 1:12:52
we will increase the city’s contribution requirement from 8.4% to 9%. This year, so it’s increasing point 6%. And we’re doing the same on the employee contribution side as well, increasing that by point 6% to 6.6. For for tier one employees, and 5.6% for tier two employees. And tier two employees are those that have been hired since 2012. When we made changes to the plan benefits. We talked in the last couple of budgets about the fact this actuary study is always done in arrears we receive it in pretty much during our budget process in July, June or July is when we’ll get the data from the actuary. And that’s draft data at that point. And we finalize the data that we bring to the boards every August. So what we’re receiving at that point is what should have been the contributions for the current year, which is kind of hard for us from a budget standpoint to to plan for that when we’re not finding out until eight months into the year what the requirement is. last couple of years, we made some lump sum contributions from the health benefit fund of $400,000 to kind of get us to where those those contribution requirements were for that current year. And we did talk about last year that in 2021, we would recommend for that year, a $200,000 contribution as well. telling you that now because we will be bringing that to you next month as a resolution for y’all to approve a transfer from the health benefit fund to general Employees Retirement Plan. And we will be bringing a number of retirement plan amendments to you next month as well some of them related to what we’re talking about here. As well as some others that are just required to maintain do some maintenance on the planet. Now we’ll talk about the police and fire retirement plans. As we just mentioned, you did approve the 22 CBAS, in July of this year, and within the CBA is for both police and fire, the city agreed to offer the fppc, a retirement plan Retirement System, to the employees in the fire and police departments. So that is an individual choice. We’re actually going through that process currently. And there has been disclosure process and information has been shared and projections made for each individual. We’ve had a PPA and to do that, as well as our current plan provider. For the existing city plans, which is mission square, I have provided information on if they were to stay within the current existing plan. And all the participants are needing to vote on that by the end of this month. So that is underway. Currently, what we did in this budget process is we don’t know where they’re going and know where they could certainly couldn’t know when we were putting the budget together. We don’t know until after September 30. And so what we did is we budgeted at the most expensive case scenario. So that would be if they were to go all go to the PA plan and go into its hybrid system, that would require a contribution of 13.7%. If if the employees go into the FPGA defined benefit plan, the contribution requirement in in 2022 is only 10.9%. So that’s kind of like the low end scenario. If they stay it within the city’s Retirement System, what we’re doing is increasing our contributions in that system, from 10 to 12%. In the intent there is to try to be competitive, to make sure in fares and equity issues that if you’re choosing to stay with the city plan, we’re going to put the same amount of money towards that plan, which is a defined contribution plan, as if you were to go into the IPAs defined contribution system as well. So anyhow, the total cost increase, to budget them at 13.7%. Going up from 10 to 13.7. Is 721,000 and change for the general fund, and 221,000 and change from the public safety fund.
Unknown Speaker 1:17:58
That’s all I had on return plans, I’m going to jump quickly into the health benefit Fund. The one of the things that that we’ve included is as an attachment in in your packet, as well as the attachment C is a performer for the health benefit fund, showing you its status after last year and in 2020, what our projections are for 21. And what the budget would then take it to in in 22. So some of the costs that are included from the health benefit fund include $33,000 for wellness incentive costs $50,000 for police and fire physicals. We don’t have $1 amount attached to this yet. And in fact apply didn’t make it into the pro forma but we are going to be expanding public safety supplemental mental health program from this fund as well. And then the health benefit fund fund balance we’re projecting end to end this year with a balance of over 9.2 6 million. And that we’re projecting that to increase. And in 22.
Unknown Speaker 1:19:12
Jim connect on the public safety supplemental mental health program that was actually that came at us a little bit late because we had a grant from the state and they reduced the grant amount. And part of what we were doing with the grant is funding 20 hours and then had a pool of dollars where folks could go get mental health treatment and then ask for reimbursement. We weren’t able to do that. Because the reduction in the grant and so this is how we’re approaching it to continue that same approach as we move forward.
Unknown Speaker 1:19:49
Actually don’t do a budget for the health benefit fund itself. We budget transfers to go into the fund to to fund the benefits and the cost that I was referring to, in their largest cost added this fun are the premiums for the employee health and dental coverage. So, as Joanne mentioned, there’s no cost increase from Kaiser for the health benefit. And we’ve kept track of Kaiser over the years since we’ve been with them in 2007, our cost increases have averaged 4.29%, which is a pretty good history for us. And then what we’re able to do, because of the fact that there’s no increase from Kaiser, and also because of we’ve been, we have increases in pay that we’ve budgeted for for 2022. And since the contributions are based on a percentage of pay, there is going to be still an increase in revenue going into the funds. So what we did is drop the contribution percentage from 16 and a half percent to 16%. It’s been an add 16 and a half percent for probably the last three or so years. So that’s it on the health benefit plan. I will find, and I will now get into the total budget presentation. Start out here, the overall proposed budget is almost $390 million. It’s 4.46% and $16.6 million more than last year’s adopted budget. If you look again, in the attachments in the council communication, attachment D is showing you each of the 44 funds that are budgeted within this proposed budget, and a comparison of last year’s budget for that fund to 22. So the 21 and 22 budget comparison for those those, each of those 44 funds, the largest percentage increases or decreases in the individual funds are due mostly to capital expenses. It’s not necessarily the case in the general fund. But then in most of the other funds, those large increases are mostly based on capital expenses. CRP projects, for 22 actually decreased from what we budgeted for 21 and went from 84 point 7 million down to 78 and a half million. And with the C IP, you’ll notice that there are another attachment we have in there is again a budget summary by each of those 44 funds again, but we worked in the C IP as a separate column in there so you can can see how much impact the C IP has from one year to the to the next as well. And so what we’ve what I want to bring out is some of the comparisons on that that attachment. Those major changes in individual funds based on that on the tip amounts. The decreases the major decreases are $17.7 million in the water construction farm $9.8 million in the water fund and $1.1 million in the electric see if the major increases in the tip amounts are seven and a half million in the streets fund 4.6 in the public improvement fund 3.6 in the park improvement fund, and 2.1 million in sewer construction as well as 2.1 million in the sewer fund itself. 2 million in the Conservation Trust Fund, and 1.1 million in the sanitation fund. So in building the budget, you know, it’s important obviously, what what are our revenue projections are and so some of those key revenue projections and certainly for the general fund are the property tax and the sales tax. And then for the general fund as well as a number of other funds are the development activity projections as well. So we’re going to take you through the assumptions that we’ve we’ve made in this budget. So this here is showing you our sales and use tax revenue projections.
Unknown Speaker 1:24:35
You’ll be getting the July update from me probably tomorrow but the performance through July is that we have an overall growth of 14.1% and sales and use tax. Most of it is sales tax 16.8% we’re only up point 6% in US tax and July wasn’t a good month for us. With the use tax use tax, in looking in, in trying to make projections this year, it was is a totally different process for us than we have gone through in the past. We typically will look at each of the categories and do some trending and make some projection based on categories. And we’ll come out with a mixed percentage of of what our overall increases are. That that didn’t look like it was going to be productive for us this year. Because as we started doing this in the second quarter of the year, as you’re aware that the growth in the sales tax compared to the previous year, was skyrocketing. The numbers from 2020 were were so low, in some cases, it was wasn’t gonna make a lot of sense to do any trending off of those numbers. So what we did do at that point was we had five months of sales tax that we were working with. We started this after that, the May projections, or mean, the May results were already M. And at that point, we were doing pretty much similar amount of growth to what we’re looking at here through July, we, we know that we were going to have a strong month in July, because of what July of 2020 look like, which was not a good month, June of 2020 was was it was a strong month actually strong performance. And so we kind of flattened out in June, if you’ll remember the last report I gave you showed that there’s kind of a slowdown in the sales tax growth, it was almost close to flat. So what we ended up doing is projecting that we would have 3% growth for the rest of the year. From that end of May, I thought that that would be a conservative approach. Because we do think we do know, the last five months of 2021, I mean of 2020 really performed very well had strong growth last year. And so we would expect that we might see similar results compared to what we just saw in June. And we might be closer to flat to a low amount of growth. So so we use 3% as a projection for the rest of the year and all the way through 22 as well off of that. So what that does by using that 3% for 2021. It gave us 8.6% overall sales tax growth, the US tax growth and don’t even ask me why how we got this because we did this after May when when our US tax was like like up 15%. And that’s dropped quite a bit since we did that. So 8.3% use tax growth, which I’m not feeling confident about. But our combined overall growth of 8.6%. I think with this, with these July results, we’re probably in a good position. Certainly if we can get 3% a month for the rest of the year we’ll we’ll meet this projection I’ll do better than it may be. So that was what we using for 21 as well. 3% on top of them for 22.
Unknown Speaker 1:28:27
So property tax. So based on the assessed valuations, we got some early information from the county about the girls that they were seeing. We use that to build the budget, and it was given us $2.7 million of new property tax revenues for tax year 21, which would be the revenue in 22. So preliminary assessed valuations that they have to give us by law just arrived at the last week of August when we were obviously just kind of putting this final together to give to the council. And it reduced that by $151,000. And that’s not been taken out of the budget yet. So that’s kind of an adjustment that we’re using in some of our assumptions here as we are going to give you some unbalanced projections and things tonight. But that was one thing will will that will probably have a number of the changes between proposed and final that will we’ll have to adjust to the final. And we will receive final assess of certifications in November. And they could go down further. This would probably be based on appeals is why we’re seeing the numbers go down. So we haven’t budgeted to utilize all these monies so we are will be good if it does go down. prepared, let’s say. So anyhow, overall, this this 2.7 or $7 million increase, or I guess net of the 150,000, that it’s going down is 2.5 million or so it’s about a 9.6% growth over what we were budgeted to receive for, for 2021. So a couple of things about property tax that we’ll be looking at in the coming years. So the legislative did pass a bill in June, that will reduce some of the assessment rates in 22, and 23. And that will impact our base property tax by about, I estimate about $460,000. That’s just using the last numbers that we have for our breakdown of properties. So that that will be really just again, just an estimate for now, it will be depend on what those property values are moving ahead. That it doesn’t impact us until 2023. So it’s assessment rates in 2022, which will mean for the revenue year 2023. It’s a two year two year adjustment and reduction for multifamily residential from 7.15% assessment ratio to 6.6%. And then agricultural from 29% to 26.4. So what we did is we made sure that we’re going to at least take at least $460,000 and make sure we were to treat that as as one time revenue and not use it on an ongoing basis, since we will expect for that to to go away and 23. Now, then, since then, last month, there was another initiative that will that was approved, signatures were approved, I should say, to go on the 2022 ballot. And that is again, to reduce assessment rates. But this would be a more permanent reduction in assessment rates. And it also is a little bit more widespread. And a lower rate so multifamily multifamily residential there would drop to 6.5%. And in all commercial would drop to 26%. So overall, we’re estimating that based again, on the same current data that we have to have a $2.2 million impact that’s not on top of the 460,000. So it would be the difference between those two is what we would lose. And that would beginning be beginning and 20 for any growth over and above since then or between now and then would also be impacted as well. So that’s something that we’re going to need to be prepared to deal with in our 24 budget process.
Unknown Speaker 1:33:30
So development. projections are from planning development services. The 22 budget is based on single family dwelling units of 205 permits, multifamily of 627 units, and accessory dwelling dwellings of 15. So a total of 847 are what we’ve used in making our projections in general fine as well as in our our any of our funds that have Community Investment fees. So the general fund proposed budget 2021 adopted general fund budget ongoing revenues and expenses were 86,800,000 and change here. The 22 proposed general fund budget has ongoing revenues and expenses of $93,589,000. So a difference of $6,778,000 greater in 20 to over 21. And this is showing you that breakout and in total is there was some reduction in revenues of 212,000. And then there were increases of almost 7 million the attachment F in your packet is a comparison of changes in ongoing revenues and expenses. So if you’re interested in seeing the detail on all of those amounts, you can look on attachment F, I’m just going to show you some of the major highlights off of that attachment here. The major decreases in ongoing revenue are from plan review fees of $43,000. And then interest income of 50,000. The major increases in ongoing revenue is in sales and use tax, it’s $5.16 million. So now this is the total amount of sales and use tax that we have budgeted for 22 compared to what we budgeted for 21. So it’s not necessarily the difference between the actual since as you know last year, or this year, we’re exceeding what we projected by quite a bit. And then property tax is increasing by 225. So that’s an ongoing number. So I told you a little while ago, that we had $2.7 million of additional property tax in this budget, we are only using $225,000 of that for ongoing expenses. And we’ll talk about the difference here in a little bit. Other increases in ongoing revenues, Longmont Housing Authority reimbursing the city for positions at 474,000 building permit revenue of 305,000, utility franchise revenue increasing 302,000 recreation fees, which as you may recall, we did reduce those last year quite a bit. So we’re we’re having a slight increase of 120,000, here in 22. And then ministry transfer fees, increasing 118,000 and change. And then the changes in ongoing expenses, which again, you can find on that same attachment, they’re going from 86 point 8 million as well to 93.5 8 million. The increases in ongoing expenses are are $7.67 million dollars, the reductions are 891,000. And again, we’ll look at some of the big ones, they’re the big decreases or utility billing expense with Platte River Power Authority who operates rcis for us, are we decreasing by $383,000? It has to do with the fact that for Collins is back in that arrangement. And so sharing that cost with us versus we’ve been budgeted to carry the load in full over the last year or more. And then workers comp insurance. We’ve it’s both This is both a impact of our we’ve had some pretty good experience in the workers comp area. And we’ve really built up our the strength of a worker’s comp fund to a point where we don’t really need to continue to put the same level of funding into it. So we dropped, dropping that overall in the impact on the general fund was 314,000.
Unknown Speaker 1:38:28
museum service fund transfer, decrease of 90,000 and development services incremental development revenue, so there’s development service expenses that been dropped by $65,000. And then the $5,000 video services public access is tracking with the decrease in the excuse me in the cable franchise tax. So the major increases in ongoing expenses are and you can see, for the first two items here, the ongoing level one and two, those are on attachment g of the packet. And we actually detail each one of those ongoing level one and two expenses. Ongoing level one are expenses that that we we have to find. We’re going to incur them whether we fund them or not. They’re contractual things like that, or we’re already spending that level of money. Ongoing level two are kind of like somewhat increasing service levels. We have nine almost 10 new FTP in the general fund. We’ll be going through those with you next week. They’re just a little over a million dollars to the general fund. The pension plan contributions I talked about for not just fire employees but also for the general employees increase for the general fund is 879,000 Other pay and related benefits are over $3.1 million. We have an increase in human service agency funding, we are bringing the Human Services Agency funding up to 3%, as has been the goal over the last few years. So that increase with the significant tax level, tax revenue increase this year is an increase of $560,000. Other major increases, I talked about the Housing Authority reimbursed positions, we have an increase in fcpa. death and disability costs that they pass on to us almost 60,000. Fleet lease increases for the general fund at 275,000 are mostly due to depreciation tied to new vehicles that were added last year for public safety. And then ongoing associated with one time expense. This is also on that attachment ci that I referenced is $70,000 here, and our library library liability insurance increased $45,000 here, because now I’m going to talk a little bit about our general fund reserve, which you see here first on top is what is our current situation in 2021. Our reserve policy is based on the Mount of ongoing expenses in our budget in our general fund budget each year. And so based on 2021, these are reserved policy targets are our policies that we will maintain the table reserve, which happens to this year, calculate out to $4.9 million. We do that during our audit closing process, we figure that out. So that gets updated every April, the emergency reserve at 8% was $6.9 million. And then we would have a stabilization reserve on top of that of from three to 8%, which has been our goal over time for a number of years now I’m probably close to 10 years, I believe. And we’ve funded that whole 8% emergency reserve. And now we’re working to fund that stabilization reserve somewhere between the three and 8%. So our total reserve target is 16.7% to 21.7%. Or 14 and a half million to 18 point 8 million. And so then below it you see what we have actually funded this year is 17.2% and 14, just below $15 million of funding reserves under the policy, which is means that our stabilization reserve is funded at 3.58%.
Unknown Speaker 1:42:57
So now based on the proposed budget, and the amount of ongoing expenses in that budget, some of these numbers change, I’ve got the same table reserved, but it’s less of a percentage since it’s a greater amount expenses now that we’re calculated calculating it off of, you get your emergency reserve again of 8%, the new total reserved target is between 15 point 2 million to 19, almost $19.9 million. What we were really proposing in this budget process is to add $1.6 million. At least, that’s what’s included currently in our proposed budget being added to the reserve. And what that would do is take us to a stabilization reserve of 4.45% and total funded reserve of 17.7% $16.56 million. next April, that table Reserve will change and we’ll probably shake those numbers up a little bit, but the bottom line would still be 16,000,005 63. So So we’ve we had a quite a strong amount of money available in this budget for one time expenses from the general fund and wanted to give you a little bit of an idea of where that’s all come from. So first off, we are taking the results of operations from 2020 that are over revenue over what we were projecting in the budget process last year versus expenses under what we were projecting. We came we basically did 5.6 million better than what we were projecting at that point. And as you know, we were projecting quite a bit of decline in our sales tax and didn’t see it. So a lot of that is from revenue. And some from expenditure savings. We do the same projection here for what we’re doing in 21. And how we might do compared to budget and we are projecting that we will conceivably have $1.67 million from this year’s operations. And then we have received dollars this year from the government for a Coronavirus, Coronavirus relief funding of two and a half million dollars that’s reimbursing the general fund for expenses that were COVID related, last year that it made during 2020. So there, we it’s just going back to the general fund fund balance in a sense. And so that’s available again, for one time expense. And then as I mentioned before, we we did not commit most of our property tax towards ongoing expenses. So instead, what we have here is $2.36 million of property tax that we will be receiving in in 2022, that we’re saying we think we should use for one time expenses, and not necessarily commit to an ongoing expense. And that’s how we we, we built this budget, we thought we should we had a good amount of new revenue in the general fund. Ongoing revenue, I should say. And we do know that next year is not a property tax assessment year. We don’t know what to expect. And we also thought we’d be good idea to to bring some ongoing revenue from one year into the next to help us in next year’s budgeting process on what you can do with that and revenue during 2022 is then use it for for one time expenses. So the general fund fund use of fund balance is including one time expenses of $8.3 million. And we will be bringing that list of expenses to you next week. And going through that with you. And as I mentioned, we put $1.6 million towards emergency reserve.
Unknown Speaker 1:47:16
We had city manager hasn’t even seen this number because this is like it’s been like a puzzle for us to try to figure out how much money we had leftover. And we’ve been going back and forth. Because we found that oh, we didn’t put some money aside for something that we needed to do, we set some money aside for so this kept changing the budget message I gave a gave you is already outdated in reference to any of these amounts. This is what we have calculated, we have $1.27 million of general fund fund balance remaining, we knew we were going to have a certain amount available in the communication I made reference to it being $850,000. We, we thought we were setting aside 460,000 or so for property tax. Can’t remember what that was. But anyhow, we didn’t need to set it aside. And so that that amount goes went into the fund balance gave us $1.27 million that is not committed at this point. So it could go towards the emergency reserve, it could go towards other one time expenses. There we did, I did indicate in the council communication that there were planning corrections. And they were they amounted to just less than $40,000. And so those amounts have have already been pretty much deducted from that property tax number that that I referred to already before, because those need to be funded with ongoing expenses. So some of the things that that I was trying to refer to that that we came up we realized is we have a rebate for smuckers. We have an arrangement with them that we will rebate on business personal property tax, and we hadn’t fully budgeted for that in the process. We only budgeted for the incremental amount and didn’t realize we need it didn’t dawn on us till just recently that we needed to set that aside. We did have the money that we received last year from Platte River Power Authority at the end of the year was $265,000. And we realized that we had not set that aside. And so that was the amount that we had to pull back and set aside in the fund balance because our intention was not to just let that become part of the fund balance to be used for anything. So that was a part of the adjustments that we’ve made since we put the proposed budget together. Which I hate to bring you but adjustments after the fact. And I’m sorry to do that. But I do want to let you know what’s truly going on here. And, and it’s been a little bit of a task for us to get this under control this is go around. So that’s the general fun. I’m going to jump into the last part here is the public safety. Policy define, we have $14.8 million of sales tax funding this fund for 2022, we have a million dollars of grants. And then $102,000, from firing range operations. You knew that the public safety tax been in place for 15 years, it was originally three point point three to five, it’s now point five, eight over the last five years, we have proposed expenditures of $16.2 million includes 103.38, FTP from the public safety fund. five of those are new FTP proposed in this budget from the police department. And again, we’ll go through those next week. That one time expenses in this fund are $733,000 to support police and fire, and then the firing range operations, they’re funded at $1,000 in their 21% offset by user fees from public and other governments.
Unknown Speaker 1:51:35
So looking ahead with the with the public safety fund, I think that’s the final attachment that you have in your packet is a pro forma for the public safety fund a little better than what we were looking at. Last year at this time, we were showing you a performance that couldn’t sustain its ongoing expenditures, over let’s say, a 10 year period, which is about the length of that pro forma. But in fact, at least assuming that our projections are reasonable, it does look like we can sustain the level of expenditures that we have in here. One time expenses, we’ll we’ll just like the general fund will always be contingent on on how much dollars are coming in from operations from the previous year, or, you know, whatever is in the fund balance that might be available. So savings with it from from expenses or sales tax exceeding budget. That’s the extent my presentation tonight. So I think what we wanted to just, we have a number of things that we’ll be bringing you next week, I wanted to just ask you, if you have questions that you’d like to see answered, I encourage you to email us those questions in advance so that we can address them for you and maybe have the answers at the meeting versus if we get the questions at the meeting. It’s not always that easy to to answer them all. It’s a 630 or 60 page budget that I had to print today for this meeting. So I’m sure there’s a lot of data in there, it’s hard for us to pull that stuff out that quickly. The net, we next week is probably the heaviest week that we will have scheduled. And in this budget process after that, the following week, we’ll probably have our first public hearing. And we’ll go through financial policies and such, we will talk about priority based budgeting. There are we gave you a list of of topics that will be on each of those nights. And we are adding to that list. So next week, we will also include, as I mentioned before the new FTA in this budget, because there are overall about 30 FTA being added in this 22 budget. We will cover topics of equity and incremental development revenue. And also we’ll be doing some q&a on tip. But let us know what those cues will be so we can give you the A
Unknown Speaker 1:54:24
Yeah, so I know that obviously the quiet zones was one that came up. And so anything you have on this tip, that would be good if you can get it to us so we can make sure that those folks are ready. All right, Councillor Martin?
Unknown Speaker 1:54:45
Thank you, Mayor Bagley. I hate to ask a question out of the middle of all of that go ahead. But it’s the only figure that’s not expressed in dollars. So it should be easy to find. You had projections for the number of dwelling units that we would expect to add in 2022. Can you explain the basis for that projection?
Unknown Speaker 1:55:11
I personally can’t. But I will. I will see if God wants to address that tonight or next week, or
Unknown Speaker 1:55:26
Mayor Begley and Councilmember Martin. So the Planning and Development Services Department does a building permit projection every spring, which a lot of the departments use, including ourselves to look at permit and plan review revenue estimates. So those estimates are based on looking at every planted lot and project in the system, looking at where each phase of development is, and estimating, you know, what phases will finish out what might pull permits, what’s in the system and what process they’re in, and how long it will take them to get through the system. So it’s based on kind of our unique knowledge of what’s planted and exists and can be built on and what’s kind of to come. And I would say, we’re fairly conservative, most of the time on our projections, even though I would say this year, we’re not seeing quite as many single family homes as we had projected at this time, which I think was also in one of Jim’s slides. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 1:56:27
I may email you some questions for next week.
Unknown Speaker 1:56:33
All right, Jim, thank you very much for that presentation. I’m, yeah, you’ve done a great job for how many years now? You’ve been here. What are you 242? No, no way that long. I knew when I was eight, the
Unknown Speaker 1:56:50
no but that Thank you. I’ve just it might seem that we’re not paying attention and a lot of times we’re not but because we have complete faith in you. Thank you. Looking forward to next week.
Unknown Speaker 1:57:00
All right. Let’s
Unknown Speaker 1:57:01
go on to final call. Bob will come by to be heard. I don’t see any members of the public but does anybody from staff want to come over Sergeant at Arms? Would you like to come up and No. All right. Let’s go ahead and close public for final call public invited be heard then Marin council comments anybody? council member pack.
Unknown Speaker 1:57:20
Thank you, Mayor Bagley. This actually repairs a little bit too quiet zones. I did have a call with DJ Mitchell from BNSF, about the freight lines that they are working on rerouting around Boulder County, to the east. I just called to give him our support for the project. And he was very happy to get the support and said that they have a lot of statutes to work through. So it’s going to be a while But my hope is that they can do that before we have to spend a lot of money on quiet zones. But that probably isn’t gonna happen.
Unknown Speaker 1:58:05
Next year is the big there’s a big push in 2022. So yeah. Councilmember Martin, thank you, Mayor
Unknown Speaker 1:58:17
Bagley. I would just sadly like to acknowledge the passing of airport manager David Slater, from COVID-19. I think that he was sometimes a low profile figure and unappreciated, but he was holding it together all by himself. And he was a good man and will be missed. Councilmember Christiansen
Unknown Speaker 1:58:48
I thank you, Councilmember Martin for mentioning David Slater. He wasn’t indeed a very good man trying to do the best he could, but he will be missed by all of us. I’m sure. I did have a little bit of good news. Because I’m on a visit port Longmont board. And since we’re talking about the budget, our lodgers Well, our hotels are up by twice the amount they were last year. So that’s really good news. Despite the competition from single short term rentals, like Airbnb and vrbo, things like that. I also, I know there’s no but you know, very few of us here. But if anyone listening or anyone here knows anything about sadly, the man who disappeared the other night, please, please contact the police, please. We can’t just let people disappear. And there’s a member of our community and it’s just shocking to see somebody disappear like that, and hopefully we can find out something hopefully he’s okay. But, you know, anyway, please contact the police. Just remember waters.
Unknown Speaker 2:00:21
There was the date earlier in the evening wondering about, oh, we’re going to keep meeting in person with masks on.
Unknown Speaker 2:00:26
So the only way that would happen is if somebody who if somebody made a motion at some point to change it. That’d be different, but we’ve already technically voted on it. So we’re gonna keep meeting with Matt as we can, the people who voted for it can decide that. Okay, meaning so. All right. Oh, technically, we can’t take a week make motions during this portion of the meeting. But next week, if somebody who voted for it wants to bring it up again, we can discuss it during the start of our meeting. So all right, if Alright, I think that is I don’t see what else in the queue. Harold anything.
Unknown Speaker 2:01:18
Just next week is gonna be a long meeting with a lot of budgets. So just get ready for that one. Just wanted to put that out there right now.
Unknown Speaker 2:01:34
Well, it’s just budget on it. So it’s not like we were because we didn’t have the meeting last week. It’s just budget, but it’s a lot of budget.
Unknown Speaker 2:01:43
Eugene, no comments, Mayor. All right, that said, Can we have a motion to adjourn?
Unknown Speaker 2:01:51
It’s been moved by everybody and seconded by everybody. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Post in a pass unanimously. We’re adjourned.